Too many objects with too many actions, help me organize this? (And how I think actions should work)

Support Animation and Rigging
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I have hundreds of objects that crumble like rubble, and I’ve applied the physics, baked them and adjusted the resulting actions.

Now I have hundreds of actions named 'Action.001, Action.002 etc) and there’s no option to batch rename them to something rational, without doing it one by one. Repulsive.

I need a way to simplify this, and reduce the resulting clutter. My understanding of this is that I might be able to bake this into a geometry cache frame by frame animation, which could nuke the gross Action.### count in my file. However, then I won’t be able to edit the actions, which is lame because I can’t edit it on the fly to adjust for subtle interaction in the file I append to.

I’m sure there are better options and I’d love to hear them, I hope they are not too abstract so as to make it harder to convince people over to Blender… But I’m open to ideas.

If you also want to know how I think this aught to be handled, read on, otherwise that’s it.

My opinion is that actions should have an option to operate based on object data because it’s impractical to make a bone rig just to handle this kind of mess. It’s just not flexible to enforce actions to work only per object, that’s just another way you can’t complete work without checking a tutorial and changing a standard workflow in the process. There’s no good reason to generate so many actions that I don’t know the purpose for, that I could accidentally delete or overwrite, and that cause problems of further confusion when appending to other files.

Thoughts?

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Interesting question, I’d like to hear some thoughts on this as well.

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off the top of my head, something like

for object in bpy.data.objects:
    if object.animation_data: object.animation_data.action.name = ob.name

is enough to rename every action to the animated objects name.

through coding you could also bake the scene into a single mesh and a single action. through use of shapekeys, one key per frame. one baked model and action for export/appending/linking or what have you, and keeping the original mess locked up somewhere else for tweaking if the results arent satisfactory or you want an alternate version.

so your option is already there: diving into python.
or you could ask somebody else to do it pwreatty pwease.

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I apreciate the time you’ve put into this, and I could see myself using this.

Though, fundementally this seems like a sign that they should add actions to the batch renaming tool, because most people won’t feel comfortable with touching code/scripts.

Anyone know if this is on the road map?