or its an amazing design choice (that in true blender fashion isnt explained at all) so you dont accidentally remove an animation or material you didnt intend to remove. could easily be fixed by adding buttons to the datablock widgets, or having a pop up menu appear when you click that X. completely agree that its the funniest yet though.
Just to make things clear, Blender is still an amazing program, and I recommend it as the "go-to" software for anyone wanting to get into 3D software. That being said, I believe well designed software explains itself, and allows totally new users to use common sense to figure out what they don't know with proper use of symbols, icons, and expected outcome of commands. I understand the developers at Blender are good hard working people, but the fact that this has been a problem for years, despite many people having this issue even today is the reason I'm finally pushing it in this video. - Blender's competitors are not sleeping. Maya is getting cheaper, Houdini is now free, and this kind of nonsense system that forces people to waste their time looking for answers online is going to be Blender's down fall if it doesn't start smoothing out it's user experience. I really don't want to see Blender lose the upper hand because of things like this, so hopefully this video was useful - Hope you all have a fantastic day, and stay safe everyone :)
Seriously though, Blender's user experience before 2.8 made me want to put someone into an actual blender. It was unintutive and backwards as these examples in this video.
I should mention for your sake and everyone else's MIND that there is a function called "purge all" in the blender file menu. First click on the file menu, go to cleanup and then purge all, (you're done) what this does is remove all unused data blocks, I haven't done any animations so I don't know if it affects that but its what I use to remove materials. You might still need to shift click X to make sure the data has no users though so keep that in mind. BTW I agree with everything said in this video and sadly I learned how to this(the stuff in the video for older versions of blender) the hard way.
@@antoniowilmot2637 Purge does also work with animations. What this video misses here is that multiple different objects can share materials, animations, literally any data can be linked so that it's referenced multiple times. If click on X actually truly deleted, you'd have WAAAAAAY more problems than unused data taking up space. and that's OBJECTIVELY correct
I've used Blender for an entire year, made animations, renders, many scenes, and am proficient at shaders...yet never found out how on earth to delete materials
Quick note: You can actually Shift+Click (multi-select) or Ctrl+Click (single select) in the list with your Animation ("action") in the "Blender File" menu. Then right click and delete, and presto, all done. So, one-by-one, not totally necessary. Still not much excuse for delete key not working on a menu that almost nobody ever uses (i.e. almost no chance of deleting by accident by hitting delete key in error). I'm in favor of changing the X icon's function to an actual delete, but instead of the Shift+Click non-sense, a separate button with a broken chain icon specifically for "un-linking" would be appreciated. Also the tool-tip "set users to zero" itself is counter-intuitive and if you have to restart the program to take effect, is also non-standard.
@@JohnSmith-rn3vl Yeah, considering you can multi-select to delete, so there is no need to spam the delete key, a pop-up confirmation should be fine. That said... there should also be an option to disable such confirmation windows to save time.
Bro you can delete multiple actions in 1 right click... All you have to do is hold ctrl while you left click on the items, and then rightclick any highlighted item to delete all the ones selected. Also I'd say you're better off staying in "blendfile" in the outliner. You can see all the objects in collections and all scenes in a tree. Very useful for stripping data out. Also good for organizing data across scenes and collections. Also great for naming stuff (though personally I'd reccomend tea's naming assistant or simple renaming addon). For those who are new to blender: the reason blender doesn't "delete" the data is to avoid accidentally deleting a shader instead of removing a slot or deassigning the data. It's what "fake user" is for. It tells blender when saving the blend file, "hey this data isn't being used by an object or thing, but it needs to be saved in the file". It's very useful for sharing node setups, brushes, ref images, textures, alt meshes, and scripts/text in the blend so you don't commit the sin of not packing the file with everything it needs. You're supposed to pack EVERYTHING in the blend file when you distribute. It keeps libraries tidy and prevents the dreaded "where the fuck are the textures, now i have to relink them one by one." Great video BTW. Keep up the good work!
This is useful and all but has nothing to do with a simple need to just quickly delete the action. There's always a room for two separate buttons: "delete" and "unlink". Easy as that. And no need to refer to third party videos on youtube or looking through the manuals to find out that: "My oh my, I was supposed to hold SHIFT all along! Who would have known, silly me! Oh, wait a minute, it's still there..."
Time travel was the worst ass-pull. It hardly ever works in a sensible way, especially when it's written by amateurs. i.e. They establish they have limited "fuel" to time travel so they travel to go get more... but why do that just once? Why not do that 500 times? 10,000? Why just grab one copy of an Infinity Stone when they still exist in the past, when they can jump back enough times (with effectively infinite fuel) to get _everyone_ an Infinity Gauntlet? (And if only one copy of the stones could exist at any one time across multiple timelines, then they wouldn't exist in the past they jump to...)
@@DisemboweII Because then all those timelines would lose their gauntlets, and the stones. Which are needed to save the world/universe(s). The Avengers would essentially be committing mass multiversal genocide. This is what the conversation with the Ancient One was about.
Thank god for this video. I spent probably half a damn hour looking up guides that said words without actually explaining what or where any of the things were as I ended up sifting around in directories trying to find... whatever the hell it was I was looking for. Ended up just saying 'screw it' and now I have about thirty unused empty actions in my list. Thank you for succinctly and yet thoroughly explaining the solution. I've been watching blender screw this kind of stuff up for like two decades now and they still manage to impress me every time I have to open their software.
OMFG thankyou! I couldnt find this information anywhere. It was cathartic to have you vent on my behalf. The blender team must need UI developers badly - it took them forever to give up on the left/right mouse button BS. I dont reclal the delete key even working - i've been using 'x' for so long because i swear 'delete' never used to work. The developers probably still have keyboards from the 80s with F1 right through to 24
No matter how good the other tutorials are, I always die inside when Ive gotta look elsewhere for blender info. If you are taking suggestions please do one on the NLA editor. So much wtf there.
@@slamm600 I'll find the link to the NLA tutorial I know when I get to my PC. Its really better to use the addon. One of the reasons I like the ability to use python in Blender is so that I can change anything I dont like!
This has helped me immeasurably! My character rig had 600 unused "action" files auto-generated by Blender because every single new mesh/curve/object would generate a new action when it was created. Deleting those unused, empty actions alone reduced my filesize by 30% (not to mention has massively cleaned up my animation editor).
THANK GOD I FOUND THIS i just recently started to learn how to do animation and it has now taken me 2 weeks to figure this out now i have faith again thank u so much and thanks for making it understandable u deserved my sub and like
You can also completely delete an action using a Python command in the text editor (I know this because I needed to customize an animation addon). Basically the command will delete the action fully in a single execution. I believe the same exists for materials too! I agree though. it shouldn't take a long series of steps or a Python command.
Thank you, I have been forced to switch to Blender from Maya, it's a process that so far consists mostly of screaming at my monitors, tearing out my hair in frustration and crying myself to sleep, but your guides are helping me stay just a little bit sane.
One thing I like to do when my collections (materials, objects or anything that you have to search for in a list) is to add some symbol type character at the start of the name (such as # $ % etc) and make it consistent between all your projects. For example, I use empties for many things (mirrors, arrays, etc) and I use the # character on my empties' names for mirrors and % for arrays, so the name of an empty that is used to mirror a table would be #TABLE and an empty for a chair array would be %CHAIR (making words all caps also helps on searching for objects that won't be rendered). Hope this hint can help a bit.
02/11/2023: I still had to look up this video when I wanted to clean up my Blender projects and make my animation poses all neat so when I exported stuff it wouldn't frequently add crap to the game engine, yes, they still haven't changed this awful design choice, thank you for making this video, yes, nobody on this earth would have been able to work this out by themselves unless they scoured the documentation. By the way, it does seem at least that you don't need to restart blender in order for the deleted animations to stay deleted now so that's something.
apart from the awesome humor...its impresive that someone out there without guidance figured it out, meaning some dude sat there for a few days just randomly clicking shit until he found WTF he was supposed to do. SO thanks to people like you man, you make our learning process so easy, thank you so much for this video i was going insane...imagine dealing with a whole market enviroment with all sorts of things moving and having this issue at the global level ....250 used materias+63 unused i finally got to delete from te fakin dropdown, the 120used animations with 380 unused animations....the deeper i got into the scene the worse the problem got. AGAIN THANK YOU SO MUCH... now 30 minutes of click>>right click>>delete and then i will save endless scroll time. THANK YOU
Nice man, I had some weird files that weren't even animations, I guess it was me posing the model to test the rig, all the files are now gone and it feels so satisfying, I'm sure those unnecessary files made my blender file heavy too.
main menu - file - clean up - unused data-blocks, and some more choices. maybe not the same result as from this video, but i learned, the hard way, this manual deleting is not for blender beginners - unless already used to good (personal) naming convention, one can quickly delete wrong 'files' - a killer for learning. under same menu, as shown in video, under 'blender files', there is 'orphaned data' = data with no users. those are, imho, safe to delete, if they are not needed i adore the length of your videos thx for sharing have fun aum s love nia
I love Blender's User and Fake User system. As well as the fact stuff don't get deleted when unlinked like in the vid. You can also use File > Cleanup to delete unused data blocks. It's great stuff.
Yeahhh! That format should be made a default for bug reports. Because when you just post a suggestion to the developer, like "it would be nice to have an "X" delete things", he's like "well, yeah...maybe some time later". But when it comes in the format "whaddafuk is this nonsesical sheet is about!??" - I think he would understand the urgency of an issue.
Go to Edit > Preferences > Keymap, scroll down to the Outliner section, click on the button that says new, expand the arrow next to it, type in outliner.id_operation, set id data operation to Delete, set the Value to Release, and hotkey to X. You're done! Now you don't have to manually delete one by one via right clicking! Making it somewhat easier.
Reminds me of spending hours on texture painting in Blender. Saving Blender. Watching the little asterisk in the Blender tab go away, letting me know I saved Blender. Then. Opening Blender, and finding that it did not save my texture. FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF----
I can't say if I'm laughing this much because you showed me things I wanted to know for 8 years ( IN MY FACE! ) or by the amount of jokes a fun you've put into it!
Thank you so much for this video. I hate Blender's UX choices with the fiery intensity of a thousand suns going nova, so it's nice to see other people complaining about the same thing.
Weeks ago, I asked the question of how to delete unused materials so it didn't clog up my imports in unity on a popular blender discord server and nobody knew lmao. Amazing. Now I can finally get rid of those AND my crap animations? My OCD applauds you...
You can also click on File->Clean Up->Purge All: imgur.com/cM2Y4gT The fake user must be removed and the action must be closed. The NLA editor also creates a user sometimes. This is still all messed up.
Another brilliant tutorial! Well done, I reference your stuff again and again, as it is so compact and to the point. An invaluable reference. Apart from some of the utterly meaningless naming of functions, like 'multiple importance' and 'cryptomate', deleting unwanted stuff is one of the most frustrating and time wasting things in Blender!
Unbelievable... Thank you, once again!!! I started with blender around march of 2020 and tried ever since to delete some animations... you finally made it possible. But, just to say, it is THAT weird with shift and closing and reopening that I will remember it pretty well frm now on x'D
Amusing video, explains the problem in detail and how to fix it in several ways. Curses at the makers for making it so abstract and weird - like all of us would. Great job on the video, and thanks for helping a fellow out learning animation!
Just want to let you know that if you simply press the X button to "unlink" your files that you no longer want to use, you can then go to File > Clean Up > Purge All. The reason for the unlinking and linking in Blender is because objects have data associated to them and that data can be moved around from object to object inside Blender (in laymans terms).
Thank you for confirming that the pose library and the animation library both being considered "actions" is horrible. Can you make a video on the NLA editor. It's actually worse than everything you mentioned in this video, in terms of intuition, which is... impressive. But, the NLA editor is still pretty dope in my opinion. If you could go over different work flows with the NLA editor (tips/tricks for taking advantage of combining "actions") that would be awesome. Love ur videos and can't wait for the rest of the animation videos.
OH MY GOD! THANK YOU I had an animation that just WOULD NOT DELETE, no matter how many times I shift clicked it. This finally worked. Thanks Royal Skies for being my guide to the blender universe lol
This is hands down the funniest fucking tutorial for anything I have ever needed a tutorial for. Your sense of comedy about this makes it entirely more memorable and it'll stick with me from now on. Class A Content and teaching 😂 Thank you so much.
now we have something like clean data menu command, but even before this one can open outliner orphan data panel, save, release orphans and save and revert several times. This eliminates quickly all chain-linked data which prevents themself to free at once.
I use unlinking so I can work on the model/armature without something disappearing or changing beyond repair every time I click on spacebar. It's really useful, not 'half-deleting' something. It's like closing a web browser, instead of deleting google chrome every time you click the x
That process which deletes all unused items when restarting blender can also be called manually: "File < Clean Up < Purge All" No restart required there
Good to know, thanks. Someday someone will make a great comprehensive community guide to all things Blender doesn't tell you. Will make lots of lives easier.
And here we are 3.0 and 3.1 and 3.2 almost here and they haven't fixed this yet, Awesome, this is the reason why I don't completely change from Maya to Blender, simple things sometimes are too complex in Blender.
Man, I Love your videos! Keep Rockin' 'em Out!!! This one absolutely had me in tears! I haven't tried Blender yet. Downloaded it, but still workin' my usual workflow. I'm so glad that you're here with info like this to save me when I finally do commit! Have a nice day, Teach!
If something is there by design, it won't be "fixed". I am with you, but don't have high hopes, cause some other things in Blender that make people crazy have already been discussed with the developers, and they stood their ground refusing to make changes.
You DON'T have to navigate the raw data of your Blender file to delete animations. Switch to an outliner view and click the Display Mode button (the one that looks like "an MS Paint logo from 1995") and change it over to Orphan Data. This lists ALL the stuff in your file that exists but isn't actually in use. There's a big PURGE button at the top. Click it to remove those data blocks. You may fine NEW stuff pops up as things follow back up the resource tree (you delete mesh data that wasn't in use, now the materials that were assigned to it aren't technically in use either, so you need to hit PURGE again). The stuff that persists after a purge is either in use or you've specifically assigned a "fake user", which you do by clicking that little shield button next to a data block's name. It basically tells Blender "If you detect this isn't in use at some point then keep it anyway."
Out of all the youtube channels, your tutorials are the best, can you please consider doing a video on making hair? I've watched countless videos on it, and never get anywhere with it.
I can't believe they thought it was a good idea in the first place to create a separate action for every component in an animation. You spend time creating a rig and rationalising it down to as few controllers as possible, and this just forces you to deal with everything separately again, especially if you have to export to Unity or Unreal. Thanks for explaining this unintuitive nonsense.
3:55, Thanks. I feel like when I research how to do something in blender, I'm stuck trying to understand dinosaurs that fully accepted and endorse these strange as fuck systems.
0:49 That “X” in the window only means “close the window”, it doesn’t mean “delete what’s in the window”. You would likely be very unhappy if it did mean that.
Shift delete is the command to really delete a file in windows. Delete just sends it to the recycle bin. The default is consistent with windows file management
Blender saves poses as animations. When you go to the outliner and say "show me the structure of the file" of course they'll be together. That's why they're in different lists when you're not looking at the break-down of the file structure. You specifically asked to see what's in the file, regardless of what the UI shows elsewhere. Also, blender doesn't delete things. It just fails to save them. That's why you have to reload it. It's actually very handy because you can recover from accidentally removing all references to something as long as you don't exit Blender.
To delete more than one at once, click one and ctrl click another or shift click to set a range of the ones you want to delete, then right click and delete to wipe them all out, just worked for me.
Very good, it worked for me! I almost broke the computer out of rage, I don't know why it's so hidden and having to do a spell to delete the broken animations!
This is so funny, and true. I have a saying, 'Anyone who designs something should be forced to actually use it themselves.' ps the Actions in my list are appended with an F or an O. Anyone know what they mean?
After I had searched on Google 499 times for "how do I delete animations in Blender" I had had enough and on the 500th time I typed "how the f*ck do I delete animations in Blender shit" into the search bar and I came across your perfect instructions, thank you. I haven't been using Blender for very long and as a beginner the interface sometimes makes 0000% sense.
You can shift click X on the materials and/or actions you don't want, then go to orphan data instead of blender file and just mash that purge all button, it will get rid of unlinked materials, actions and textures that were attached to the removed materials. Just click that purge all until everything is gone
I think this has to be your funniest video yet. Quite an awful design choice they did there, but hey, at least we got some laughs out of it XD
or its an amazing design choice (that in true blender fashion isnt explained at all) so you dont accidentally remove an animation or material you didnt intend to remove.
could easily be fixed by adding buttons to the datablock widgets, or having a pop up menu appear when you click that X.
completely agree that its the funniest yet though.
second that
omg so funny XD
Just to make things clear, Blender is still an amazing program, and I recommend it as the "go-to" software for anyone wanting to get into 3D software. That being said, I believe well designed software explains itself, and allows totally new users to use common sense to figure out what they don't know with proper use of symbols, icons, and expected outcome of commands.
I understand the developers at Blender are good hard working people, but the fact that this has been a problem for years, despite many people having this issue even today is the reason I'm finally pushing it in this video.
-
Blender's competitors are not sleeping. Maya is getting cheaper, Houdini is now free, and this kind of nonsense system that forces people to waste their time looking for answers online is going to be Blender's down fall if it doesn't start smoothing out it's user experience. I really don't want to see Blender lose the upper hand because of things like this, so hopefully this video was useful -
Hope you all have a fantastic day, and stay safe everyone :)
Please talk more about the NLA editor So much wtf there.
Seriously though, Blender's user experience before 2.8 made me want to put someone into an actual blender. It was unintutive and backwards as these examples in this video.
I should mention for your sake and everyone else's MIND that there is a function called "purge all" in the blender file menu.
First click on the file menu, go to cleanup and then purge all, (you're done) what this does is remove all unused data blocks, I haven't done any animations so I don't know if it affects that but its what I use to remove materials. You might still need to shift click X to make sure the data has no users though so keep that in mind.
BTW I agree with everything said in this video and sadly I learned how to this(the stuff in the video for older versions of blender) the hard way.
@@antoniowilmot2637 Purge does also work with animations. What this video misses here is that multiple different objects can share materials, animations, literally any data can be linked so that it's referenced multiple times. If click on X actually truly deleted, you'd have WAAAAAAY more problems than unused data taking up space. and that's OBJECTIVELY correct
We shall flood the devs to fix it as soon as possible!
Perfect! Now I can hide all my mistakes that should NEVER NEVER see the light of day!
I've used Blender for an entire year, made animations, renders, many scenes, and am proficient at shaders...yet never found out how on earth to delete materials
2 years in the future. It has not been fixed, and you are still the only one who has made a video about it.
Quick note: You can actually Shift+Click (multi-select) or Ctrl+Click (single select) in the list with your Animation ("action") in the "Blender File" menu. Then right click and delete, and presto, all done. So, one-by-one, not totally necessary. Still not much excuse for delete key not working on a menu that almost nobody ever uses (i.e. almost no chance of deleting by accident by hitting delete key in error).
I'm in favor of changing the X icon's function to an actual delete, but instead of the Shift+Click non-sense, a separate button with a broken chain icon specifically for "un-linking" would be appreciated. Also the tool-tip "set users to zero" itself is counter-intuitive and if you have to restart the program to take effect, is also non-standard.
Hitting that delete key should throw up a confirmation window.
@@JohnSmith-rn3vl Yeah, considering you can multi-select to delete, so there is no need to spam the delete key, a pop-up confirmation should be fine. That said... there should also be an option to disable such confirmation windows to save time.
Blender Devs> A "unlinking" button for UNLINKING ANIMATIONS?! OMG!!!! THIS IS TOP TIER NEXT LEVEL SHIT!!!! GENIOUS! AWESOME!! ... Nope.
Imagine remember 5 GB library of shortcuts in your head. fk yeah! Been always dreaming of that
Bro you can delete multiple actions in 1 right click...
All you have to do is hold ctrl while you left click on the items, and then rightclick any highlighted item to delete all the ones selected.
Also I'd say you're better off staying in "blendfile" in the outliner. You can see all the objects in collections and all scenes in a tree. Very useful for stripping data out. Also good for organizing data across scenes and collections. Also great for naming stuff (though personally I'd reccomend tea's naming assistant or simple renaming addon).
For those who are new to blender: the reason blender doesn't "delete" the data is to avoid accidentally deleting a shader instead of removing a slot or deassigning the data. It's what "fake user" is for. It tells blender when saving the blend file, "hey this data isn't being used by an object or thing, but it needs to be saved in the file". It's very useful for sharing node setups, brushes, ref images, textures, alt meshes, and scripts/text in the blend so you don't commit the sin of not packing the file with everything it needs. You're supposed to pack EVERYTHING in the blend file when you distribute. It keeps libraries tidy and prevents the dreaded "where the fuck are the textures, now i have to relink them one by one."
Great video BTW. Keep up the good work!
I agree. I like the data-block idea. They could just make it more intuitive
This is useful and all but has nothing to do with a simple need to just quickly delete the action. There's always a room for two separate buttons: "delete" and "unlink". Easy as that. And no need to refer to third party videos on youtube or looking through the manuals to find out that: "My oh my, I was supposed to hold SHIFT all along! Who would have known, silly me! Oh, wait a minute, it's still there..."
Same happened with my gauntlet, i thought i deleted it completely but..it seems Hollywood is using blender
Time travel was the worst ass-pull. It hardly ever works in a sensible way, especially when it's written by amateurs.
i.e. They establish they have limited "fuel" to time travel so they travel to go get more... but why do that just once? Why not do that 500 times? 10,000? Why just grab one copy of an Infinity Stone when they still exist in the past, when they can jump back enough times (with effectively infinite fuel) to get _everyone_ an Infinity Gauntlet?
(And if only one copy of the stones could exist at any one time across multiple timelines, then they wouldn't exist in the past they jump to...)
holi shet xD
Yeah, as much as I loved Endgame, the whole time traveling thing felt like a total cop out.
@@DisemboweII Because then all those timelines would lose their gauntlets, and the stones. Which are needed to save the world/universe(s).
The Avengers would essentially be committing mass multiversal genocide. This is what the conversation with the Ancient One was about.
Thank god for this video. I spent probably half a damn hour looking up guides that said words without actually explaining what or where any of the things were as I ended up sifting around in directories trying to find... whatever the hell it was I was looking for. Ended up just saying 'screw it' and now I have about thirty unused empty actions in my list. Thank you for succinctly and yet thoroughly explaining the solution. I've been watching blender screw this kind of stuff up for like two decades now and they still manage to impress me every time I have to open their software.
OMFG thankyou! I couldnt find this information anywhere.
It was cathartic to have you vent on my behalf.
The blender team must need UI developers badly - it took them forever to give up on the left/right mouse button BS.
I dont reclal the delete key even working - i've been using 'x' for so long because i swear 'delete' never used to work.
The developers probably still have keyboards from the 80s with F1 right through to 24
No matter how good the other tutorials are, I always die inside when Ive gotta look elsewhere for blender info. If you are taking suggestions please do one on the NLA editor. So much wtf there.
I hate having to go into the NLA editor to move the audio clips around for speakers.
What is NLA editor?😆😆😆
Try the "animation layers" addon for blender. NLA editor cant beat that tool!
@@scottlee38 its on my radar but I want to understand base functionality before I start adding stuff.
@@slamm600 I'll find the link to the NLA tutorial I know when I get to my PC. Its really better to use the addon.
One of the reasons I like the ability to use python in Blender is so that I can change anything I dont like!
This has helped me immeasurably! My character rig had 600 unused "action" files auto-generated by Blender because every single new mesh/curve/object would generate a new action when it was created. Deleting those unused, empty actions alone reduced my filesize by 30% (not to mention has massively cleaned up my animation editor).
THANK GOD I FOUND THIS i just recently started to learn how to do animation and it has now taken me 2 weeks to figure this out now i have faith again thank u so much and thanks for making it understandable u deserved my sub and like
You can also completely delete an action using a Python command in the text editor (I know this because I needed to customize an animation addon). Basically the command will delete the action fully in a single execution. I believe the same exists for materials too!
I agree though. it shouldn't take a long series of steps or a Python command.
Thank you, I have been forced to switch to Blender from Maya, it's a process that so far consists mostly of screaming at my monitors, tearing out my hair in frustration and crying myself to sleep, but your guides are helping me stay just a little bit sane.
thank you.
thank you thank you thank you.
been blendering for .. ever since blender came out... didn't even know this was possible.
One thing I like to do when my collections (materials, objects or anything that you have to search for in a list) is to add some symbol type character at the start of the name (such as # $ % etc) and make it consistent between all your projects.
For example, I use empties for many things (mirrors, arrays, etc) and I use the # character on my empties' names for mirrors and % for arrays, so the name of an empty that is used to mirror a table would be #TABLE and an empty for a chair array would be %CHAIR (making words all caps also helps on searching for objects that won't be rendered).
Hope this hint can help a bit.
02/11/2023: I still had to look up this video when I wanted to clean up my Blender projects and make my animation poses all neat so when I exported stuff it wouldn't frequently add crap to the game engine, yes, they still haven't changed this awful design choice, thank you for making this video, yes, nobody on this earth would have been able to work this out by themselves unless they scoured the documentation. By the way, it does seem at least that you don't need to restart blender in order for the deleted animations to stay deleted now so that's something.
Somehow you always post the EXACT tutorial I need when I need it. Thank you!!!
apart from the awesome humor...its impresive that someone out there without guidance figured it out, meaning some dude sat there for a few days just randomly clicking shit until he found WTF he was supposed to do. SO thanks to people like you man, you make our learning process so easy, thank you so much for this video i was going insane...imagine dealing with a whole market enviroment with all sorts of things moving and having this issue at the global level ....250 used materias+63 unused i finally got to delete from te fakin dropdown, the 120used animations with 380 unused animations....the deeper i got into the scene the worse the problem got. AGAIN THANK YOU SO MUCH... now 30 minutes of click>>right click>>delete and then i will save endless scroll time. THANK YOU
Thanks, just wasted an hour of work trying to find how to do this ...
You just saved me and gave me a big smile in the process :)
This was EXACTLY the video I've been needing, thank you!
Nice man, I had some weird files that weren't even animations, I guess it was me posing the model to test the rig, all the files are now gone and it feels so satisfying, I'm sure those unnecessary files made my blender file heavy too.
Love hwo this guy explains useful information from Blender while also making a great comedic skit out of it.
dude, you are 100% my favorite tutorials, keep being you bro!
main menu - file - clean up - unused data-blocks, and some more choices. maybe not the same result as from this video, but i learned, the hard way, this manual deleting is not for blender beginners - unless already used to good (personal) naming convention, one can quickly delete wrong 'files' - a killer for learning.
under same menu, as shown in video, under 'blender files', there is 'orphaned data' = data with no users. those are, imho, safe to delete, if they are not needed
i adore the length of your videos
thx for sharing
have fun
aum
s love nia
I love Blender's User and Fake User system. As well as the fact stuff don't get deleted when unlinked like in the vid. You can also use File > Cleanup to delete unused data blocks. It's great stuff.
Yeahhh! That format should be made a default for bug reports. Because when you just post a suggestion to the developer, like "it would be nice to have an "X" delete things", he's like "well, yeah...maybe some time later". But when it comes in the format "whaddafuk is this nonsesical sheet is about!??" - I think he would understand the urgency of an issue.
You saved me SEVERAL HOURS of my life trying resolving it. Thank you sooooooooooooooooooo much
Deleting Animation & Materials in Blender: The Default Cube's Revenge
Imagine you press delete the default cube only to find out hours or even days later that it still lingers in your blendfile. Creepy!
@@Lingvar what, you mean it doesn't for you? O_o
thank you so much, i was prepared to decompile blender's source code and painstakingly code in a delete button by hand
i love how this video is longer than all the others, and by far the purest representation of his true comedic form.
Been screwing around with blender since 2.49. I had no god damn clue. Thank you.
Go to Edit > Preferences > Keymap, scroll down to the Outliner section, click on the button that says new, expand the arrow next to it, type in outliner.id_operation, set id data operation to Delete, set the Value to Release, and hotkey to X.
You're done! Now you don't have to manually delete one by one via right clicking! Making it somewhat easier.
Reminds me of spending hours on texture painting in Blender. Saving Blender. Watching the little asterisk in the Blender tab go away, letting me know I saved Blender.
Then.
Opening Blender, and finding that it did not save my texture.
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF----
I can't say if I'm laughing this much because you showed me things I wanted to know for 8 years ( IN MY FACE! ) or by the amount of jokes a fun you've put into it!
Thank you so much for this video. I hate Blender's UX choices with the fiery intensity of a thousand suns going nova, so it's nice to see other people complaining about the same thing.
Weeks ago, I asked the question of how to delete unused materials so it didn't clog up my imports in unity on a popular blender discord server and nobody knew lmao. Amazing. Now I can finally get rid of those AND my crap animations? My OCD applauds you...
You can also click on File->Clean Up->Purge All: imgur.com/cM2Y4gT
The fake user must be removed and the action must be closed.
The NLA editor also creates a user sometimes. This is still all messed up.
Another brilliant tutorial! Well done, I reference your stuff again and again, as it is so compact and to the point. An invaluable reference. Apart from some of the utterly meaningless naming of functions, like 'multiple importance' and 'cryptomate', deleting unwanted stuff is one of the most frustrating and time wasting things in Blender!
Dude this saved me I can't believe how unintuitive it is to delete an animation, thank you
Unbelievable... Thank you, once again!!!
I started with blender around march of 2020 and tried ever since to delete some animations... you finally made it possible.
But, just to say, it is THAT weird with shift and closing and reopening that I will remember it pretty well frm now on x'D
Amusing video, explains the problem in detail and how to fix it in several ways. Curses at the makers for making it so abstract and weird - like all of us would. Great job on the video, and thanks for helping a fellow out learning animation!
for some reason I think this is one of my favourite video and they haven't change it 3 years later.
Just want to let you know that if you simply press the X button to "unlink" your files that you no longer want to use, you can then go to File > Clean Up > Purge All. The reason for the unlinking and linking in Blender is because objects have data associated to them and that data can be moved around from object to object inside Blender (in laymans terms).
This is the first time in my life I’ve ever enjoyed watching a tutorial video, thank you good sir, subscribed
if I had any money, I'd legit donate to you, because these videos are life saving. what on earth did the blender devs think fr?!?!?!?!??!
Thank you for confirming that the pose library and the animation library both being considered "actions" is horrible. Can you make a video on the NLA editor. It's actually worse than everything you mentioned in this video, in terms of intuition, which is... impressive. But, the NLA editor is still pretty dope in my opinion. If you could go over different work flows with the NLA editor (tips/tricks for taking advantage of combining "actions") that would be awesome. Love ur videos and can't wait for the rest of the animation videos.
OH MY GOD! THANK YOU
I had an animation that just WOULD NOT DELETE, no matter how many times I shift clicked it. This finally worked. Thanks Royal Skies for being my guide to the blender universe lol
Thank you so much bro :D that hidden animation killed me years before🥲
I started to become really angry why the Internet could not answer why the hell I could not delete my ugly actions. This video made my day!
This is hands down the funniest fucking tutorial for anything I have ever needed a tutorial for. Your sense of comedy about this makes it entirely more memorable and it'll stick with me from now on. Class A Content and teaching 😂 Thank you so much.
Things like this is why I stopped using blender 7 years ago, but now I’m back and at least it’s a little smoother workflow.
You can delete all unused data blocks at once by selecting orphan data from the same drop-down menu and pressing the purge button.
now we have something like clean data menu command, but even before this one can open outliner orphan data panel, save, release orphans and save and revert several times. This eliminates quickly all chain-linked data which prevents themself to free at once.
I use unlinking so I can work on the model/armature without something disappearing or changing beyond repair every time I click on spacebar. It's really useful, not 'half-deleting' something.
It's like closing a web browser, instead of deleting google chrome every time you click the x
Sec-Shoe-ally made comment for the TYalgo. Good stuff, good stuff.
Thank you for giving voice to all the insults in my head. Sometimes it looks like a joke on people, seriously.
That process which deletes all unused items when restarting blender can also be called manually: "File < Clean Up < Purge All" No restart required there
Good to know, thanks. Someday someone will make a great comprehensive community guide to all things Blender doesn't tell you. Will make lots of lives easier.
THANK YOU FOR DOING THIS! been searching through god knows how many communities for this answer
(also thank youtube autoplay for finding the vid)
And here we are 3.0 and 3.1 and 3.2 almost here and they haven't fixed this yet, Awesome, this is the reason why I don't completely change from Maya to Blender, simple things sometimes are too complex in Blender.
Man, I Love your videos! Keep Rockin' 'em Out!!!
This one absolutely had me in tears! I haven't tried Blender yet. Downloaded it, but still workin' my usual workflow. I'm so glad that you're here with info like this to save me when I finally do commit!
Have a nice day, Teach!
This is one of the most tedious things about Blender, I really wished they fixed this for 2.9 or beyond
If something is there by design, it won't be "fixed". I am with you, but don't have high hopes, cause some other things in Blender that make people crazy have already been discussed with the developers, and they stood their ground refusing to make changes.
on blender 4 you can shift select all the action and with only 1 delete you delete them all. thanks,you saved me a lot of time.
You DON'T have to navigate the raw data of your Blender file to delete animations.
Switch to an outliner view and click the Display Mode button (the one that looks like "an MS Paint logo from 1995") and change it over to Orphan Data. This lists ALL the stuff in your file that exists but isn't actually in use. There's a big PURGE button at the top. Click it to remove those data blocks. You may fine NEW stuff pops up as things follow back up the resource tree (you delete mesh data that wasn't in use, now the materials that were assigned to it aren't technically in use either, so you need to hit PURGE again).
The stuff that persists after a purge is either in use or you've specifically assigned a "fake user", which you do by clicking that little shield button next to a data block's name. It basically tells Blender "If you detect this isn't in use at some point then keep it anyway."
Out of all the youtube channels, your tutorials are the best, can you please consider doing a video on making hair? I've watched countless videos on it, and never get anywhere with it.
I can't believe they thought it was a good idea in the first place to create a separate action for every component in an animation. You spend time creating a rig and rationalising it down to as few controllers as possible, and this just forces you to deal with everything separately again, especially if you have to export to Unity or Unreal. Thanks for explaining this unintuitive nonsense.
You just saved my hours of work from disappearing in the abyss.
Man, the way you explain is epic, I am subscribing for sure!!! Blender please hear this gentleman's plea!!!
Lmao this was the funniest video you ever made. I didn’t even need to learn how to delete an animation, but kept watching cause it was too hilarious.
Learning something new is pain, i hope i just know all stuff what left is just working on it
You don't have to close the software, just save and click "open recent"
oh thank god this helped my character was moving with no keyframes visible, and deleting all of the poses fixed it
3:55,
Thanks. I feel like when I research how to do something in blender, I'm stuck trying to understand dinosaurs that fully accepted and endorse these strange as fuck systems.
0:49 That “X” in the window only means “close the window”, it doesn’t mean “delete what’s in the window”. You would likely be very unhappy if it did mean that.
You are sec-shoe-ally wrong! God bless Royal skies LLC hahahahahaha
Just came from blender animatiom and rigging meeting. It is being worked on.
This was probably the funniest blender video i've ever seen... And very useful too! Thanks!
Shift delete is the command to really delete a file in windows. Delete just sends it to the recycle bin. The default is consistent with windows file management
They need to fix this! thanks for the shift+click tip.
You don't need to close and re open, go to file and click purge, you do need however to do that multiple times
YES! Thank you man, thank you. This video should be seen by blender devs :D
the most educational, comedic tutorial video i have ever seen lmao... xD
That ALMOST made me go back to 3DS Max. Thank you for this video.
Blender saves poses as animations. When you go to the outliner and say "show me the structure of the file" of course they'll be together. That's why they're in different lists when you're not looking at the break-down of the file structure. You specifically asked to see what's in the file, regardless of what the UI shows elsewhere.
Also, blender doesn't delete things. It just fails to save them. That's why you have to reload it. It's actually very handy because you can recover from accidentally removing all references to something as long as you don't exit Blender.
thanks for that, have a great week!!
Finally!!!!!!!
All hail Royal Skies the new Blender Guru !!!
Oh boy. That's ridiculous. Thanks again!
Super helpful! I forgot record mode was on and ended up with 250 extra head animations, haha. Thank you, sir! Finally I can get rid of them :D
To delete more than one at once, click one and ctrl click another or shift click to set a range of the ones you want to delete, then right click and delete to wipe them all out, just worked for me.
You can now shift select multiple animations and select deleat, it works
I know this already but, I love to hear you cursing blender
Very good, it worked for me! I almost broke the computer out of rage, I don't know why it's so hidden and having to do a spell to delete the broken animations!
love you man
we are on 4.2 and its still not solved
This is so funny, and true. I have a saying, 'Anyone who designs something should be forced to actually use it themselves.'
ps the Actions in my list are appended with an F or an O. Anyone know what they mean?
Thank you for saving my time once again.
THANK YOU! This is always such a headache...
After I had searched on Google 499 times for "how do I delete animations in Blender" I had had enough and on the 500th time I typed "how the f*ck do I delete animations in Blender shit" into the search bar and I came across your perfect instructions, thank you. I haven't been using Blender for very long and as a beginner the interface sometimes makes 0000% sense.
Fantastic! Thank You Sir! Oh man the frustration!
You can shift click X on the materials and/or actions you don't want, then go to orphan data instead of blender file and just mash that purge all button, it will get rid of unlinked materials, actions and textures that were attached to the removed materials. Just click that purge all until everything is gone