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Comment by iamcreasy | Hacker News Reader

Could you please explain what Blender is not good at animation? What major features are missing?

Not OP, but before 2.8 and the depsgraph refactor the viewport was really slow on not so complex scenes. The NLA system (Non Linear Animation) needed some love, since it wasn't so smooth to mix animations (can't recall the details at the moment). The animation library/database, like all of Blender's object system, was a little confusing and was easy to lose your work (e.g. if an animation/datablock was not assign to an object, you would lose it when you restart Blender. The refactor in Collections was a great start in the right direction.

> if an animation/datablock was not assign to an object, you would lose it when you restart Blender

That's what the little "F" button on datablocks is for. It adds a "fake user" to the datablock, which means that it won't be garbage-collected away if nothing is using it when you close Blender.

...yes, but you have to remember to use it.

I’ve lost work this way as well; sure, it’s avoidable, but it’s most certainly a pain point.

> e.g. if an animation/datablock was not assign to an object, you would lose it when you restart Blender

Really? Did not know about it. Thanks! The number of users of a certain entity has always confused to me. I've used Maya a lot, and I can't but wonder why Blender just don't copy the got bits of other software when it comes to usability improvement.

I was wondering that too; Sintel, Big Buck Bunny, and Operation Barbershop all have pretty-decent animation, so it's clearly capable of doing some good stuff.

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