This is something we already have. This is why we are able to elaborate with any Blender user across the planet - each of them is ready for collaboration.
This is getting sidetracked into discussion about how collaboration should or should not work.
The proposed feature is an option. It is up to you, and your organization, to decide how you wish for you and your collaborators to use the preference or not.
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It is not technically possible to switch a person who learned software from using autofake for several years to turn it off - he will immediately start losing data since uncheking it assumes different behavior and mindset than he has learned.
Datamanagement options are not like turning off facedots or something)
Nobody expects you to use that feature. Seems its just useful for the rest of us.
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I find it difficult to believe that it is not technically possible to open the preference window, click a few check boxes, close that window, and continue to work as you always did.
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He’s always stalling patches with his comments and never provides solutions, just problems. I think he’s still using 2.79…
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Imagine a person who downloaded Blender, learned using it from scratch with autofake option, doing his local projects, then was hired into team and forced to turn it off to be compatible with collaboration…
Imagine a brilliant video editor, who has spent the past two years learning to work in video software that I do not use.
They can use the video software I use, or work somewhere else.
They can label all of their video tracks appropriately instead of
- layer
- layer
- layer
or they can work somewhere else.
Unless you have to edit those video projects in the same environment it is not a collaboration.
You have written extensively in the past about how you require your artists to use specific modeling methods, specific topology, specific layering, specific grouping, or other such things.
Add the preference checkbox policy to the training checklist.
There is nothing about my preferences or me personally, it is about the entire Blender ecosystem.
The ecosystem is filled with users who don’t enjoy blender burning all of the assets they neglected to mark Fake, with no warning.
And as most (all?) of your points relate to how this would affect your company and your collaborators, it does not sound like your main concern is the blender ecosystem.
While I understand that adding this as a preference causes concern for you, it is not reasonable that this means NO ONE ELSE should have the option either. Just as it would not be reasonable to say “our company forbids using AGX, for reasons. Therefore, please do not add this to 4.0 as it would destroy our collaborations.”
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Indeed… I think @1D_Inc 's input on this thread, and many others, can be dismissed wholesale, as they have very specific requirements and visions for Blender that don’t match up with anyone else. The volume of their comments leads to a false impression of shared vision, when in this case, they are in a massive (and possibly single-person) minority
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I just share our experience of a higher production level, when you start facing such kind of a problems.
Every company face that, otherwise they would not evolve a nasty and expensive supervizing departments which goal is to force users to adjust their data very similar to the way it is done in Blender and punish them for not making so.
After all, it was not for nothing that we preferred to switch to Blender after all these games with Max and Maya system design. It worked in practice.
(Not sure which way we are supposed to be against Agx, taking into account all those efforts we put to initialize its development by describing Filmic issues)
You know, we can just as easily talk about autosaving.
Ultimately, you just need a storage file from which nothing will ever disappear and it will remain in your disk.
And of course, in the end it will be a landfill, like any of our archives, into which we always put something aside and think about doing it later.
Your company’s difficulties in managing your staff’s work practices were not due to a failure of Max not deleting unassigned materials. It was a failure of your staff to keep their files clean. Your staff’s past inability to maintain a clean workflow isn’t something that the rest of the userbase should have to work around.
If a company were to have a design mandate of “no mesh over 100,000 faces”, then it is up to that company to hold production to that standard… not demand that the software delete extra geometry when the file is saved.
If you don’t want your files to contain 4,000 unassigned shaders - then tell your staff to clean up their files. Or leave the auto-fake preference off, and Blender will still do this for you.
If your staff ever upgrades beyond 2.79, tell them that use of Auto-Fake is forbidden. If it’s still a major problem, dock a paycheck or put an employee on unpaid leave. If outside collaborators don’t follow your guidelines, then have a discussion; they can meet your requirements, or end the collaboration. People generally follow policy when they have a solid financial incentive to do so.
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Sounds extremely oppressive. You probably have a nice supervizor talent…
All of this is something we actually tried to avoid.
4k materials is not made by our people, it is usually obtained during working with imported data (stocks, BIM, file format converters, etc). This is why there is a certain difference between vanilla and imported data management. The industry is a messy place.
you just need a storage file from which nothing will ever disappear
@modmoderVAAAA That could be incredibly hard to manage I guess. I would probably prefer to pack everything, rather than dig through such kind of sewers.
Okay … Stopy it. You’re getting personal. Both of you.
On the topic I also do agree that Blende rshould …
a) … not call the datablocks ‘Fake User’ but more descriptive to the outside.
b) … turn on autosave for most users depending on data. Set Presets in the options (‘strict’, ‘gefault’, ‘save all (not recommended)’)
c) … implements an auto-purge manager at some point
If we get a more solid rework: Cool. Long overdue and appreciated. Until then or maybe even never not deleting attributional data is just necessary.
I actually can see that the datamanagement aspect of it is important and that autopurging does make a difference. And despite vehemently disagreeing with @1D_Inc I will actually make a point for his usual reasoning.
When unassigning data that is not needed any more it needs to get marked as “not used” because there is no easy way to access it afterwards. So it would stay in the file unnoticed to most because they never learned about the fake user system. And from there on out it will bloat the file. That is just true and we all know it.
It still leads to a false solution. Important data is perceived as unnecessary because it is not treated that way. The data is inaccessible and difficult to manage because Blender evolved that way and this is one of the areas that got dragged through over the last 15+ years without many improvements.
Neither does Blender have a material library/editor that works independent of models in the scene nor does it have a real and dedicated central place for all the other Datablocks in the file to be managed and sifted through. And I mean - a workspace that is meant for management. Not just observation with minor managing functionality like the Blender file browser currently is.
Some Data simply is still important data even though it may be invisible at the moment. There is a distinction. Why are meshes preceived as gone after deleting from the scene? Because the file managment browser is the prominant and direct way to work with them. BEcause we assume them to be gone from the root of the scene. They are the star of the show and when they are gone we want them gone. We see them in the outliner and even if they are hidden or temporaily disabled as a collection we still know they are there because they are logically treated as such.
Consequently as soon as we delete an object from the outliner we also percieve it gone. We intuitively accept that data as gone. And it should be. Despite Blender still keeping the datablock in memory for now. It’s a dead mesh walking unless the user seriously wants it otherwise.
With other data there is a dissonance. My two favorite examples are animations and Materials. Neither of these has a true dedicated editor yet to most people working with 3D software of any kind both of these are logically percieved as “something I create as an attribute or a library for later to apply and mix and match” because they are. Animations can be used as clips for characters even if not currently needed. They can be exported to game engines - despite not being used on any mesh in the scene. They are f’in important!! (yes - I lost data like this). Materials are attributes. They are libraries that can be applied to objects later on. Even if there are no objects currently in the scene. They are fuctional blocks.
Deleting this kind of Data is simply not right. No matter how you turn it. The most important aspect of this whole discussion is the definition of which data should be treated as important. And I think the most important thread in this regard is this one:
because this is the discussion of what data is actually currently percieved less important than it should be.
As a sencondary step if the devs or anyone fro the community wants to there should be a discussion about better Library management for this data as well. But maybe the asset browser will evolve to get this functionality or become a deidacted separate workspace for the current file. This is a different discussion. Important - but not right here or now.
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Not sure about the need for grade of shades.
Datamanagement policy has to be simple to work properly.
Its personal use or collaboration, so you save all or nothing.
Grade of shades, especially customizable, could bring just more confusion.
I disagree for all above mentioned reasons but I am sure at this point I cannot change your mind about the subject, anyways. 
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