Bright pixels appear on my model in material preview with Cycles on Blender 2.82 I am currently following Blender Guru's donut tutorial for 2.8, but I've had an issue with the material preview in the viewport. This seems to come from the donut, where the entire object simply pixelates with bright and blinding white pixels along with a few other rainbow colors. When moving my view around, the pixels leave a trail too. I don't know if this is an issue with switching from Eevee then to Cycles, or if it is something else. Here is how my issue looks like:

If I add back the icing and sprinkles:

When I zoom in and out:

Edit: Here are my computer specs:

Name: ALIENWARE13R3
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60 GHz
RAM: 32 Gb
System: x64
OS: Windows 10
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060

Here is the blender file to download on MediaFire:
Donut Tutorial.blend download

So I opened your file on my machine and have to inform you that the glitches only occur on your end.

The doughnut looks just fine in my Viewport:

And renders beautifully (this render was done with only 8 samples in about 7 seconds):

Since you are using a laptop I suspect the switch between IntelHD-Graphics and your dedicated chip my be the cause of this problem. Since I'm not a Windows user I can only give you limited advice on this issue:

Make sure all your hardware drivers are up to date.
Start Blender with your GTX enabled (right-click on the application, then choose something like "run with NVIDIA")
If that doesn't solve your issues and you're positive that neither your OS nor your hardware are at fault here, try filing a Blender bug-report.


Newbie question: Where is my rendered PNG saved to? macOS Mojave 10.14.4

I set /Users/username/Documents/BLENDER/rendering as output path.

Is the filename from the .blend files used?

If you render only a single frame, you have to save your image manually, by going to menu Image > Save as..
The output path is only for rendering animations or video sequences. This is relatively standard in other 3d packages too.


In Blender 2.8, 3D Viewport shading render mode is missing. How do I get it back? I've gotten to a state where my render option in the 3D Viewport is missing. I can render just fine using EEVEE. The screenshot is missing the camera and light, but I've added those and it makes no difference.

I've been able to use the render mode by creating a new file, and appending the old blend into that new file, but I'd really like to know how to fix it when it happens. Does anyone know what might cause this, and how to correct it?

Same thing happen to me. Try switching to LookDev and under the Lighting (drop down menu next to the Viewport Shading Button), tick Scene Lights and Scene World.


How can I make a mesh glow over time with keyframes? I'm working on a project for a friend and I am trying to get something to glow over time with simple keyframes. At the moment I am placing a keyframe of nothing different, then I'm moving the timeline cursor to the place I want it, then adding an Emission Material to it and placing a keyframe down. I don't understand what the problem is so if someone can help me that would be greatly appreciated.

Only properties can be keyframed

The action of "adding an emission shader" cannot be keyframed. That in not being recorded on the timeline.

When you add a node to a nodetree, that would be there for the whole scene. You can instead keyframe the factor of a mix shader ruling the shading of an object, for example between a transparent shader (so the object will be invisible) and an emission:

An alternative could be to animate the renderability of your glowing object by keyframing the little icon in the outliner. It depends on your project needs.


Drawing in 2D using a reference image, strokes keep appearing behind the reference image I'm using Blender 2.82, I'm drawing using a reference image but the strokes keep appearing behind the image, how do I solve that?

The option to solve your problem can be found in the Object Data Properties of the reference image object like in the picture below:

to get there you need to switch in object mode and select the image reference object

There is also an option to set the reference image to be in the front, BUT using transparency.

Happy Blending


Principled BSDF node not shading right I'm trying to texture and shade this archway I have but its not rendering correctly. I added a basic cube mesh and set up BSDF nodes exactly how I have them on my archway and it comes out perfect.

Why isnt it working on the object I created? I've used blendergurus video on the subject to set up the nodes so you know the exact steps I have taken.

Here is the Basic cube(how I want it to show up) and then  the archway I want shaded. notice the color is one solid shade of grey with no brown specs?

Can anyone help me find the problem here?

You need to unwrap your model. In edit mode select all vertexes and press U -> Smart UV project. It will creates very basic UV for you, if you want go farther, study UV unwraping.


vertices run wild during bevel As near as I can tell, there is only one vertex in this corner, but when I try to bevel the edge it seems to let go and run wild.  What can I do to make it stay put during the bevel?

You have overlapping vertices and edges in your example.
The easiest way to fix this would be to select every vertex in your mesh, press m, and then select merge by distance.


Look through 2 different cameras in 2 different viewport? I want one viewport viewing through one camera and another viewport viewing my scene through another camera. How can I do that?

Right now Blender will switch both viewports to active cameras.

I need to do it this way since I'm tweaking my lighting and I want to make sure my object will look good from different angles as I'm rendering it through both cameras.

Turns out you do it by toggling this Local Camera function ON.


.mesh to OBJ converter? I have a problem that is quite tricky to solve. I have a lot of cool models, but I can't export them into Blender because they're .mesh. I need to convert it to OBJ so Blender can read it, but to no avail.
In case you may wonder:
-XNALara doesn't work
-Any Windows program is useless to me as I have GNU/Linux and WINE does nothing.
So, please, if you have any suggestions on what to do, please tell me! I am pulling my hair out.

I installed that program, and even though it does provide for the conversion, it requires a registered version of it (ie. paid version). So far, I've only found ogre converter and a website that does mesh conversion (http://www.meshconvert.com/) to be reliable.


Why My Hair Strand Render Doesn't Reflect On The Water? [Internal Render] I'm trying to make a model of the pond terrain with hair particle as a grass, and I enabled the strand render setting... But when I render it, the hair particle (Grass) doesn't reflect on the water

Does anybody have a solution for this? Or is it a bug from Blender?

With Strand Render:

Without Strand Render:

More limitation than bug. The strand primitive in Blender Internal does not support raytracing, thus doesn't show up in reflections. If you need that, it's best to just not use the strand option, or use Cycles.


The width and height of the plane does not correlate with the displayed units I cannot figure out how the blender unit is working. The width and height of the plane does not correlate with the displayed units. How is this possible ?
Here is a screenshot of my work.

I finnaly found the solution : this is due to an icorrect scaling of the object. I did not act on the vertices of the mesh, but i scaled the object in edit mode.


PyNodes, the bare basics I know it's a very new thing (post 2.4 era anyways) but there seems to be very little documentation and examples for PyNodes in general, and the little there is doesn't seem to work in latest SVN (currently r57165).

My idea is to make a Cycles material node that has a vector output socket for each of the object(s) UV Maps, so that I don't need to look up what the name of the UV Map is in the Object Data Properties and copy-paste that into the Attribute node each time. This seems like a reasonably easy node to code, failing that even just a node like the Attribute one that can fetch an objects Custom Property to be used in the material.

Either way, I'd like some help in setting up a simple PyNode like that. Is it possible? Can someone provide example code of simple working PyNodes?

PyNodes do not make it possible to extend Blender Internal, Cycles or the compositor with new nodes.

They are designed to make user interfaces for new node systems. For example developers of external render engines can use them to make their own shader node systems, or an addon could make a new geometry node system.

It would of course be very useful if they did, but that would be a much bigger project, as it requires each node system to expose an API with access to its inner workings. For Cycles the closest you can get is Open Shading Language nodes.


Advanced OptiX denoiser settings missing in 2.91 Where are the advanced OptiX denoiser settings like radius, strength, feature strength, etc. in 2.91? They were in the view layer settings in 2.83, but I can't find them any more.

Figured it out. These settings are only for the NLM denoiser, not for OptiX (nor OpenImageDenoise). I somehow misread the docs at https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/layers/denoising.html.


why solidify increase beyound the height I have made a normal circle and cut into half. Then with single vertex selected i just pull it out and added the solidify. As u can see my .gif file. After adding the solidify modifier the circle has got the solidify but where the point i pull there its not been perfect solidify it has been increase the height from the circle edges. Its not in the same height.

That's the way the Soldify modifier works. It basically adds thickness to faces in the direction of their normals. As you can see on the animation below, the face is extruded in the direction of its normal (the cyan line).


Particle Hair Not Rendering in Cycles? I'm making a character in Blender based off of Darrin Lile's character modeling series. However, instead of making an object for hair like he did, I decided to try using particle hair. However, when I try to render my hair, it does not show up. Can anyone help tell me what to fix? I'll include the blend file below.

Did you try the convert button?  That is the answer I keep seeing, Convert Cycles Hair Particle System to Mesh Object. Hope this helps I am new to blender so just reading through.... :)


making tiny edge and gaps I wanted to make this edges that defining the gaps between the screen and the phone body or even the body from the side of it. Should I make them 2 objects or can I make it in other way?

If you want to stay with only one object:

Use bevel tool and extrusion

In Edit mode, after selecting all the edge where your tiny gap will apear, press Ctrl+B you will separate your edge in two edges, you can set the distance between them by moving your mouse or after that using the Amout value in the Bevel menu on the Left of the 3D view.

After that simply extrude the newly created face with E inside your mesh.

If you want to separate your mesh to work withtwo objects :

Separate

Select all the upper part of the phone and press P and select 'Selection'. You will need to do some scale modification to your object.


Grease Pencil has pixelated strokes. Anti-aliasing issue? New Blender user. Using for 2D animation.

Grease Pencil strokes have pixelated edges both in program and when rendered.

Previous searches indicate that anti-aliasing for grease pencil has been removed to be updated at present.

Can anyone confirm, report similar or solve?

Thanks.

Confirmed. I made a report about it -> https://developer.blender.org/T74938. It seems to be due to the fact that the actual antialiasing system isn't sensitive enough to detect all edges, and therefore antialias some strokes.


Why eevee renders reflective objects in black and cycles does not? Eevee renders objects in black, while Cycles renders as expected. HDR is present and lights are in the scene. I'm not using any textures. Thanks for any ideas.

Q: Why my reflective object is pitch black in eevee?

I have discovered that the problem discussed here, as well as other recent rendering posts, may be linked to a video issue related to recent updates.
After duplicating the issues on three computers, all of which meet the video requirements as stated by Blender documentation, I began trying several recent Blender versions. All exhibited rendering issues except Bv2.81.
Thanks to all who helped.


Volumetric Scatter affected (Same file, different computers) CPU vs GPU I've worked on a scene on my 2015 MacBook Pro and it looks great, but takes too long to render.

I bought an RTX 2080 for my PC and the volumetric scatter is barely visible.

Why is my RTX 2080 performing worse than my 4+ year old laptop and how can I get the volumetric scatter to show correctly?

EDIT 1

So I found one problem. For some reason all the light sources are reset to default values at 100w.

Changing the values to the values I initially had set them to does not make a difference.

HOWEVER

Now when I switch to CPU rendering the image is displayed correctly.
But GPU rendering still renders incorrectly.

EDIT 2

I've narrowed it down to CPU vs GPU.
When rendered on the CPU it looks exactly as I expect, but on the GPU it doesn't look right.

Problem solved by changing sampling integrator to Branched Path Tracing.

This is not needed when rendering on the CPU, but apparently required when rendering on the CPU.

I found the solution here: Volumetric scatter shader does not show light focused through lens correctly


Place objects on the center of the ground plane and maintain structure via python script I am trying to do what more or less is described in this thread How to place objects on the center of the ground plane via python? the accepted solution seems to work fine if you have only one object in the scene. However, in my case my scene is structured from individual objects thus this leads to the result all the objects to be scrambled together in the center of the plane as you can see below:

Initially my scene is like this:

By using the GUI I was able to center all the objects and maintaining the mesh structure by following these https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/26452 instructions.

Thus, I would like to know how I can achieve that in a python script.
Thanks.

A way to do it:

Loops overs selected meshes to get each individual center in world coordinates
Then calculates overall center
Loops again over them to shift their vertices considering the overall center

The script:
import bpy
from mathutils import Vector

# Choose the axis you want to center on
center_x = True
center_y = True
center_z = False

# Get objects
objects = bpy.context.selected_objects

centers = []

# Loop over meshes to get their centers
for obj in [o for o in objects if o.type == 'MESH']:
    world_matrix = obj.matrix_world
    vertices = obj.data.vertices
    # Get object center in world coordinates
    center = sum([world_matrix @ Vector(v.co) for v in vertices], Vector()) / len(vertices)
    centers.append(center)

# Calculate overall center
center = sum([c for c in centers], Vector()) / len(centers)

# Keep axis you want
center.x = center.x if center_x else 0
center.y = center.y if center_y else 0
center.z = center.z if center_z else 0

# Loop over meshes to shift them
for obj in [o for o in objects if o.type == 'MESH']:
    vertices = obj.data.vertices
    world_matrix_inv = obj.matrix_world.inverted()
    # Calculate the shift in object coordinates
    delta = world_matrix_inv @ center
    # Shift vertices
    for v in obj.data.vertices:
        v.co = v.co - delta


How to round sharp edges of iregular mesh I have an irregular mesh created with Boolean modifier of a 3D scan and two icospheres. The mesh has two sharp edges which I would like to round out:

I can smooth out the top edge using Smooth Vertex to something I could accept but the bottom edge does not get smoothed out enough to be called rounding.

My clumsy attempt to show what my aim could be is this - the red arrow points to what is only a part of what I'd like to get (it should be similar but all around the sharp edge):

I have tried using Bevel, Multiresolution, Subdivision Surface modifiers but cannot get enough of beveling (when I get any).
I also used Bevel in Edit mode but it creates ugly artifacts because the mesh is irregular.

I cannot do this by sculpting because this is only a part of a workflow aimed to process many of similar shapes.

I've read about 15 other question with similar subject but none of them offered a solution I could use.

The question is this: Is there a way to bevel the sharp edges that is not manual?

Info: I have cleaned up the mesh with Triangulate, Remove Doubles and have removed zero faces with Edge Collapse. The mesh passes the "Check all" test in 3D Printing addon with all tests 0 (except the Overhang Face, of course).

The file with the above sample is here:

You need first to simplify the mesh using Decimate modifier, here are the steps:

1- Use Decimate Modifier, set Ratio to a low value I used 0.042 for this example.

2- Apply the Decimate modifier, then go to Edit Mode, select the edges you want to Bevel.

3- Ctrl + B to bevel the edges, don't use Clamp, but keep an eye on those adjacent edges, a little overlapping will be correct next step.
4- Ctrl + V and select Remove Doubles, fiddle with the amount until you weld very close together vertices, in this example, I used 0.5.

5- Now add a Subdivision Surface Modifier, if you haven't set the shading to smooth yet, it's time to do. This is the final result, of course you can choose the parameters you need for the previous steps, I put the values according to what I think you're looking for.
Hope this helped, Happy Blending!


Assign an object to 2 parents with offset for each I have a game character who uses a shield. Her armature has 2 bones for the shield: the "stowed" position and the "using" position - i.e.: the shield is stowed on an extended back bone, and is used on an extended hand bone.

I can parent the shield to both bones by using the ChildOf constraint, but it only gives the ability to use the parent's position verbatim. I need to position it at the parent, but with an offset. Like, hand bone but rotated on X by 30, and back bone but rotated X by 15.

Is there any way to do this? Something like a ChildOf-plus-Offset?

I've figured this out.

I created an Empty for each target bone, parented each empty to the respective bone, positioned it as desired, then used the empties as targets for the ChildOf constraints.


Hard to catch a vertex because of the gizmo Edit: Ok so it has been fixed by RJG, thanks to him, I had the same shortcut for select vertices and select gizmo, which seems the case by default? and I had to came back to right click for selecting vertices, which is perfectly fine to me.

I meet this very bad problem with 2.8. when the gizmo is displayed.

In Object mode it causes less problems, but when I switch to Edit mode and try to select a vertex close or even not so close to the gizmo, as if it seems like it's the same shortcut, Blender thinks I want to select and move the gizmo instead of the vertex, as if the gizmo was on a layer over the mesh, and not the opposite, which messes up a lot the work with the mesh, it makes you often move inadvertently some vertices.

In 2.7 it didn't work that way, because it was not the same keying for selecting vertex and selecting gizmo.

This doesn't seem logic nor convenient at all to me, it's even very bad   :/  Am I missing something like an option to activate?

In advance thanks for your answers...

Credit for the following answer goes to Yegor Smirnov who tweeted about this.

The solution for this problem is to set the Activate Gizmo to Drag in Keymap > Preferences.

The tooltip explains what it does:

  Drag allows click events to pass through to the tool, adding a small
  delay.


Can I blur the Eevee shadows? I checked on the Soft Shadows, but it looks as if there are multiple overlapping shadows. I know the Eevee shadows cannot be accurate, and that is fine, but can I at least blur or smooth the shadows so that it would look like 1 shadow instead of multiple shadows?

Cycles

Eevee

Eevee soft shadodws

Soft shadows are obtained by means of sampling. To eliminate the banding, set Render > Sampling to a higher value


Can't unhide grayed out objects After some searching on stack / google I decided to ask this here, this is the second time I'm facing this issue this time with blender 2.8, previously with 2.7 and without a clue to how I got here.

Some of my objects appear hidden(10/12), and I can't seem to find a way to unhide them.

Solutions to the most common rookie mistakes seems to be

In local-view solved by pressing numpad /
hidden by pressing H or Shift + H, unhiding with Alt + H

I'm not in local view, I can toggle visibility for 2/12 objects with Shift + H & Alt + H, but the rest stays gray in the collection.

Last time I solved this by exporting the whole model as STL and importing it back again, I then had to re-group all the pieces but there must be a more simple solution.

Here's the .blend if someone wants to have a go at it:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qdrsg9u0p11b995/v5.blend?dl=0

You need to go to the filter >>> Globally disable in viewports and turn it on.

Hope that helps

Good Luck


Fixing disconnected vertex I have a planes mesh of which I thought it was connected.
But when I drag the one edge around, I can see that it is not connected.

I tried just everything I could image, but I have not been able to fix it.

Can anybody show me how that could be done?

I have uploaded my blender file here:

http://www.pasteall.org/blend/36943

Thank you very much for the help!

In edit mode RMB the vertex labeled 1 then Shift-RMB the 2nd vertex.

Alt-M (merge) select At last.


What are the parameters event and full_event of UILayout are for? can someone help me to understand the function of the parameters event and full_event of UILayout, please? The only description i can find ist this from the documentation (https://www.blender.org/api/blender_python_api_2_77_release/bpy.types.UILayout.html#bpy.types.UILayout.prop):

event (boolean, (optional)) – Use button to input key events
full_event (boolean, (optional)) – Use button to input full events including modifiers

But what buttons can/should be used to input key events? I can't find an difference to the version without event=True. And i can't find an example, too.

Thanks

'event' and 'full_event' parameters allow to get a keystroke value.

'event': a key with no modifier
'full_event': a key with modifiers

Here is a sample code:

import bpy

class HelloWorldPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    bl_label = "Hello World Panel"
    bl_idname = "OBJECT_PT_hello"
    bl_space_type = 'PROPERTIES'
    bl_region_type = 'WINDOW'
    bl_context = "object"

    keymaps = []
    keymapitem = None

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout

        obj = context.object

        #Allow to get a key on a locally defined property
        layout.row().prop( obj, "myProperty", event = True )
        #Allow to get a key: no, does not work
        layout.row().prop( obj, "myProperty", full_event=True )

        #Allow to get a key on an existing property
        layout.row().prop( context.scene.game_settings, "exit_key", event=True )

        #Allow to get a full event key on a keymap item
        layout.row().prop( HelloWorldPanel.keymapitem, "type", full_event=True )

def register():
    #Enum property to define the allowed keys for this property
    bpy.types.Object.myProperty = bpy.props.EnumProperty( items=[('A','A',''),('LEFT_CTRL','LEFT_CTRL',''),('LEFT_ALT','LEFT_ALT','')] )
    bpy.utils.register_class(HelloWorldPanel)

    #Create a keymap and a key
    wm = bpy.context.window_manager
    km = wm.keyconfigs.addon.keymaps.new(name='Test', space_type='EMPTY')
    kmi = km.keymap_items.new(HelloWorldPanel.bl_idname, 'LEFT_SHIFT', 'PRESS')
    #Store them here
    HelloWorldPanel.keymaps.append(km)
    HelloWorldPanel.keymapitem = kmi

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(HelloWorldPanel)
    del bpy.types.Object.myProperty
    wm = bpy.context.window_manager
    for km in HelloWorldPanel.keymaps:
        wm.keyconfigs.addon.keymaps.remove(km)
    del HelloWorldPanel.keymaps[:]

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

Some explanations and remarks:

For a locally defined property (myProperty in the code above): the property is an enum which defines the scope of the possible values. But it seems that the user will not be warned if she/he choose a not wanted value.
You can use it for built in properties, like 'context.scene.game_settings' above.

But in both previous cases, I've found no solution to use 'full_event'.

Last example using a keymap item. Here choosing its type as attribute allows the usage of 'full_event'.

I don't know why some are working with 'full_event' and not others, as the enum described in the documentation seems to be the same. See the documentation here.


Video rotated after importing it for motion tracking I'm importing a video file for motion tracking, that has been shot on a phone. If I open it with Windows Media Player or After Effects it's not rotated, but it is when I import it to Blender. Any help?

Phones typically provide the rotation orientation via a hint in the wrapper metadata. Given it is a hint tag, many pieces of software will ignore it.


If I open a Blender file and the UI looks weird, can I move/close the UI elements to make it look like the default? I downloaded a Blender file and opened it, and the UI looks very weird as the screen capture below. If it were other applications, like Visual Studio or something, most applications support intuitive drag-moving or closing of UI elements (like panels), but Blender works in so confusing way.

I have discovered that it has "Load UI" option in the Open dialogue, but what if I opened the file by double-clicking it. Is there a way to move/close the UI elements once it is opened, or is unchecking "Load UI" the only way?

I mean, for example, in the screen below, how can I move the Outliner from the top-left to top-right? Or How can I move the Properties from bottom to bottom-right? You know like the default Blender 2.81 UI.

At the top of the screen next to the layout tabs, you can click the + sign to add the layouts you are more familiar with. The default workspace is Layout which can be found by going to General > Layout.

To move around the existing workspaces, right-click a tab, and select Reorder to Front or Reorder to Back.


How do I export a mesh then import it in to another blender file while keeping the original textures? What sort of exporting format should I be using? Or will I have to re-assign all of the textures again? Thanks.

As atek said, just press A to select all of the objects in your blender scene that you want to be copied over. press Ctrl C to copy and then just simply open up a new blender file and press Ctrl V to paste those objects into your new scene. this will bring all of your textures with it.


Sound real-time spectral analysis frequency peaks Is there a way to analyze a sound file in blender (preferably in real-time) to identify the peak frequencies so that I can map certain frequencies to certain object attributes (e.g. material color)?

I know that the animation nodes addon provide nodes that analyzes sound and can bake frequencies to frequency ranges (EQ) which can be used to create "spectrum analyzers", and even blender itself provides a way to bake sounds to f-curves, but I am rather interested in being able to do some sort of Fourier transform analysis of a sound and extract the first N higher amplitude frequencies.

For my project I have a sound file that has a certain, discreet set of frequencies (f1, f2.. fn), and some of them sweep from one frequency f1 to frequency f1' over time. I want to be able to identify the EXACT frequencies f1, f2,...fn in the sound file at any given time.

These frequencies are to be mapped to specific colors in my scene based on a pre-selected frequency-to-color map.

Note: I know the Animation Nodes audio analyzer node allows to bake frequencies into EQ bins of arbitrary sizes, though in order to identify precise frequencies in the sound at any given frame these bins would have to be made extremely small in order to detect variations in the frequencies as they sweep through the spectrum. However, the smaller the bins, the larger the baking time. Because of this I am not sure if the NA are the proper tool for the task in question.

If you are familiar with python, i suggest you have a look to the scipy.fft module.

To use the scipy module inside blender you need to install python3.x on your computer and then pip3 install scipy. Then in a terminal, lunch python and type import scipy; scipy. If everything went well, you have the path to the scipy module.

Then in blender, type:

import bpy
import sys
sys.path.append(PATH_TOSCIPY')
import scipy
from scipy.fftpack

Then you'll need to compute the fft and do you stuff (see more details for this here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23377665/python-scipy-fft-wav-files)

Cheers


how do I get the 'tool' back to my selection? I can't figure out how on earth I get the tool back to normal mode..... right now it's stuck at whereever my cursor-thing is located.

I can switch between 4 modes, but none of them get's me back at how it was.

I tried deleting the program and reinstalling because I can't figure it out and it seems like such a small thing, probably some hotkey I miss-clicked. Anyways, after deleting and reinstalling it just starts up with the same UI :(

such a small thing can be so god damn annoying!

Hit , (Comma), it will set it back to the center

Circled in green are the options that will return your manipulator widget to the correct location. The one in red is where you have it set now, which is why it is at the 3d cursor.

You can also change it at the bottom of the 3d view.


Where can the angle for Select Sharp Edges operation be set in Blender 2.80? Angle value for function "Select Sharp Edges" in Blender 2.79 is here:

Select sharp edges what's the angle value

Where is it in Blender 2.80?

I found it, the panel to edit options of the last used operator in 2.8 is in the bottom of 3D viewport, by default it's minimized. Default shortcut to open it was also changed and now it is F9.


Part of mesh goes outside Hello Blender community :)

So this is a shark model, and one of the side fins and upper fin gets separated from the main mesh of the shark. Same thing goes for the teeth of the shark. This model was made in 3DS and then exported to Blender. When I look at the contents menu on the right, I see that the mesh model is one object, so why does it get separated? I've uploaded the blender file here:

Thank you all again for all your help! :)

The issue is your topology. In Blender, everything must be one piece, and your fin and teeth are separate from the body even though they appear to be together. To prove this, select one vertex of the body mesh, key Ctrl + L, then G and move your cursor. Watch as it separates.

Normally, W > Remove Doubles would help, but your mesh is too fragmented.

A noticeable seam that is too big for Remove Doubles:

What I have done is deleted several faces around the pieces in question and joined manually using F to create faces. I have also used Alt + M > At Center to join some suspicious vertices. Lastly, I touched up the weight painting. It's not perfect, especially in the mouth area, but it's a lot better.


How to mirror a walk cycle? How can we mirror a walk cycle, to make the bones do the same transformations but flipped, and offset in time?

Say I have keyframed the bones on the left side, and they're labeled as such (bone_L for example), and now I want to make the right side of the armature step in that same way on its side, half-way through the walk cycle. What's the most efficient way to do this?

I've been copy/pasting location and rotation values from the left bones over to the right bones and typing a minus sign in front of the values that need it, but it's a tedious process and easy to make mistakes.

Thanks

You may use the Paste mirrored keyframes from buffer button.

In 3D View window select all bones with A (or select only the ones you want to mirror). Do the same in the Dope Sheet Editor. Press the Copy selected keyframes to the buffer button (or Ctrl+C, while being in the Dope Sheet Editor), go to the frame where your half-side animation ends and press the Paste mirrored keyframes from buffer (or Shift+Ctrl+V).


why can't blender read a movie which blender has itself rendered? please excuse my ignorance. i'm starting to use blender 2.72 for its Video Editor.
i'm slowly making progress, but ran into a problem
when i tried to re-import a rendered movie.
blender seems to think it has no dimensions...could that be the problem?
to be clear - i rendered an animation (movie)as avi, from a Blender Session, and then imported it again, into the same session, as a fresh source file for further processing. but the sequencer doesn't read it....
i tried various rendering output options, but none seem to correct this.

thanks, Roland

okay i figured out the problem.  must make sure proxy view preferences match proxies which have been built or re-built.  i hadn't built the 50 percent proxy but was viewing that proxy in the viewer.....hence the lack of result.


How do I rotate a mesh object's vertices along an axis with a degree of rotation that increases along a linear gradient? I want to rotate one end of the mesh object (the vertex a with the object's smallest x-coordinate value) 0 degrees around the x-axis, and the other end of the object (the vertex b with the largest x-coordinate) r degrees.

Any other vertex v of this object inbetween the aforementioned two should automatically be rotated around the x-axis by an angle of:

r * (x_v - x_a) / (x_b - x_a)

In other words, the extent of the rotation should be proportional to the position of the vertex on the axis of rotation. What's the most straightforward way to accomplish this?

If you'll accept speed and on-the-fly adjustability in exchange for some precision, then perhaps proportional editing is what you are looking for:


Relative path to script folder using text view I'm completely new to scripting, just started watching my first tutorial on this matter and the tutor in the video uses the built-in python scripting view, but has to copy and paste lines of code into the console to add the folder, that contains both the script and all associated files, and another line of code every time he updates the script outside of blender and also every time he restarts blender.
I've found it more convenient to load the script into Text View, where I can even edit and update it more easily, but I can't seem to get Blender to load and save files, that are in the same folder as the script itself just by specifying their name, it only seems to work, when I specify the whole path.
The instructor uses the command bpy.data.filepath to specify the filepath, but every time I try this, I get an error both in Intellij and in blender's text view, telling me, that bpy couldn't be found, in blender's python console, the command works just fine.

Any help or pointers in the right direction will be much appreciated.

If you are editing a script in the text editor and clicking the Run Script button then you need to have import bpy at the top of your script to use anything in the bpy module.

Blender's python console automatically imports the bpy module for you, it also gives you some shortcuts like D = bpy.data so you can simply use D.filepath in the python console. The console also imports math and mathutils items so you can simply use radians() in the console but will need to import it if you use it in a script.

  Convenience Imports: from mathutils import *; from math import *
  Convenience Variables: C = bpy.context, D = bpy.data

It is also possible to run text from the text editor in the console. I use the addon mentioned in the previous link to run scripts in the console to make debugging easier.


Transparent material turns black when unselected When I select eyebrows it looks good, the material is transparent.
But when I deselect eyebrows it turns dark.
Why?

Since you are using an older version (2.78) of Blender and there are screenshots only this is a little bit of an guesswork.
Try the setup of the attached nodes. Instead of the "Principled BSDF" node use the Material node of Blender 2.78.
Additionally check the alpha channel settings of the viewport and the material.


Mesh seems to still be proportionally editing even though it is turned off I was following a tutorial that was talking about using proportional editing. I have proportional editing set to disable currently but whenever I try to drag a vertice or extrude an edge it keeps moving other parts of the drawing. Is there another setting or parameter I may have tweaked on accident that is doing this. Would love some help. Am completely stumped.

You have the Subsurf modifier on your object, that is why your model appears so smooth and you have set it to show the cage or its active effect while editing. The modifier might have been accidentally added as the shortcut is simply Ctrl 0 - 5 for each smoothing level (higher number being more subdivisions). If you want to disable this, delete it from the object or if you want to stop the "proportional editing effect", untick the triangle icon on the modifier.

When doing organic modeling, having the cage on is often useful to see the changes in realtime when tweaking loops or filling faces as opposed to tabbing in and out of edit mode and object mode to the the updates.

Since you have the cage enabled, it will show how the subsurf modifier is deforming the mesh as you work with it, if you are in the early stages of modeling and inexperienced, it's probably a good idea to keep this off until you have the general shape of your model in place and work with the flat "boxy" mesh. Reason being the modifier can produce exaggerated results that differ from when you look at the smoothed and unsmoothed model. The subsurf modifier will effectively "shrink/round" the mesh as it tries to create smoothed surfaces.

To see what I mean, add a cube and press Ctrl1 to add a subsurf modifier with 1 subdivison level. Play with the object with the cage on and then disable the modifier to see how it has changed the underlying structure of your object.


How can I display a FloatVector without it being editable by the user? I am writing a python script that takes some user input in the operator and does a calculation. The result is three floats, which I would like to display in a nice form like FloatVector but I don’t want them to be editable. This would produce unexpected results. I passed in only a get() function to the parameter constructor to make a read-only result, but now I can’t set the values via code.
What is the ‘blender way’ of showing data to the user in a ui panel, and if there is none, how can I make this work?

Read only property

I passed in only a get() function to the parameter constructor to make
a read-only result, but now I can’t set the values via code.

Confused as to why you think cannot just set the value of a read only property in the get method.
Silly example, in the main thread sets the value of _booble_gooble to (1, 2, 3)  This  value is used by the float property getter.
This way you have a truly read only property, not one that is being masked in the UI, but possibly available to alter in the custom properties.
import bpy
from bpy.props import FloatVectorProperty
from random import random

_booble_gooble = (random(), random(), random())

class HelloWorldPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    """Creates a Panel in the Object properties window"""
    bl_label = "Hello World Panel"
    bl_idname = "OBJECT_PT_hello"
    bl_space_type = 'PROPERTIES'
    bl_region_type = 'WINDOW'
    bl_context = "object"

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout

        scene = context.scene

        col = layout.column()
        col.prop(scene, "read_only_float")

def random_value(self):
    # self is scene
    return _booble_gooble

def register():
    bpy.types.Scene.read_only_float = FloatVectorProperty(get=random_value)
    bpy.utils.register_class(HelloWorldPanel)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(HelloWorldPanel)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    _booble_gooble = (1, 2, 3) # set it
    register()


Adding background to the landscape and mixing with mist In order to create clouds in the background of landscape I followed instructions of the lesson and used the Image node to add image needed in the result. Then I mixed that image with color (by using AlphaOver node) added by the RGB node to make environment look more realistic.
So, we have clouds created.
Then Mist socket from the RenderLayers is used to give infromation to ColorRamp node about the mist we want to get. ColorRamp's Image output socket is connected to Fac socket of the Mix node. Our clouds are added to the first Image socket, and the main Image from RenderLayers - to the next one.
I would like to ask about this way of mist creating. How is it possible to avoid of translucence of clouds through the island and at the same time leave mist? I tried a lot and didn't found any ways to combine these 2 images without getting problem when clouds can be seen through the front image (in this case, island).

Screenshot of the nodes set up.

To point out your attention at the problem, screenshot of the rendered image if ColorRamp node settings are changed (mist managing).

UPD.

I'd like to say that I think my island wasn't behind the clouds but rather the island lost transparency according to the principles mist settings are processed in Blender. You might want to look for references - http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/World/Mist#Transparency,  this one - http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Mist_-_Make_Objects_Opaque. I'd like to use the last one as a manual but I was unable to reach everything I wanted.

The problem is that your clouds should not be in front of the island, but behind!

EDIT: (after messing with this for a while...)
You need one more mix node.
In other words you need one to key the clouds behind the island.
And another one mix node to mix the mist over the island and the background.

I disabled mist again, according with your comment.
The hardest part is controlling how the horizon meets the sky since the mist pass takes care of the island but not of the ocean in the distance, so I added a mask to affect the alpha channel at the horizon line of the render layers node. Then I used that new mask to control the alpha over that mixes the Island and the sky.

The modified file I placed here:
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/28181

It's been a lot of fun playing with your file!


Why my texture is not the same in blender and when i export collada? I don't know why, i try everything after a bake to put my texture instead of the old one. The only way i see my old texture is in the outliner but i don't know why it's there because in my shader the only texture i have is the baked one...

I'm trying to get a baked texture to export in collada for playing with webgl after but this is really hard to get.

The reason is that you're using cycles. Save the texture you baked to a file and use it as a texture in a Blender Internal material, and the export should work. I export from BI to Collada for use in web and game engines all the time and it works nicely.

Related to this question: Why does the collada exporter not export texture references?


Why does my Mesh disapear when using Softbody physics? So I have been working on a character in Cycles using Softbody physics and everytime I press ALT+A to check it out the mesh disappears and only the Bones stay playing the animation.

Why? I used Softbody physics in the past in older versions of Blender and I never had this. Is there something new in the latest version I need to toggle? Why does my mesh keep disappearing?

Check that your mesh is parented to the armature in the mesh-objects modifier stack. Seems to work ok in latest version 2.76b


Losing detail when retopologizing After the retopo is done a lot of detial is lost and if I use subsurf or multires and increase it it over 2 times it has double the amount of faces than the high res mesh and still not all the detail is back...any idea?

Use the shrinkwrap-modifier in combination with a subsurf- or multires-modifier.
Make sure that the shrinkwrap is stacked lower than the subsurf- or multires-modifier to gain detail.

When using the multires-modifier, you can apply the shrinkwrap-modifier and the gained detail will be 'absorbed' by the multires. You can then enter sculpt mode to add and or smooth the desired detail while keeping your relatively low poly retopologized mesh.


Assign weight to specific vertices with normalization on I am having a quite simple cylinder like shape which is to be deformed by some bones.
The start and end should be undeformed by all other bones and the rest should be distributed evenly.
So after I parented with automatic weights, I select the top and bottom rows with the according bones and assign a weight of 1.0 to them (with either Shift+K or the assign button in the vertex groups).
I would now expect, that those vertices are not weighted in any other bone. But they are.
I know there is "Auto normalize" in the tools (which is checked) but that only seems to work for weight painting and not assigning in the way above.
Am I missing something or is that not possible currently?
Thanks, Alex

You can use 3D View > Side Bar > Item > Vertex Weights in edit mode.
Rewrite the group value of active vertex to one and
delete other group values with delete buttons.
Then use the copy button to copy the state of the active vertex to the other selected vertices.


Overal dimensions of objects I've made the model of a table, actually it consists of 3 objects (i need to keep them as separate) is there any way how I can see the overal dimensions (actually I  need to get the height) of all objects that the table consists of ? After selecting objects the panel on the right shows the dimensions of the bigest object one.

Thx.

You could enable edge or face infos in Edit Mode it would display the measures for the selected edges/faces since only one object is active in Edit Mode you can only pick one.

Although you can set Viewport Shading to bounding box there is no option to display the length.

Related:

How to model effectively using exact measurements?
Display bounding box around objects


Boolean modifier (difference) not staying with part Hello I'm new to Blender and the community.
I created a cube then another cube inside and used Boolean + Difference and it works great.
However when I go to move the main part with the cube modifier the modifier doesn't move with the main part.
Please help
Thanks

You have to options:

You can parent the cubes. Select the child cube first, then the parent cube last. The parent is the one with the boolean modifier. (Selection color should be orange, the child's selection color should be red. Then you have the correct order.). The press Ctrl+P and select Object to parent them. With Alt+P you can clear the parent relationship again.

Note: In the outliner, the child cube will be attached to the parent cube. You need to expand the hierarchy nodes to see and select the child cube. If you move a cube to another collection, the other cube will not be moved automatically but must be moved manually to the new collection.

Or you can apply the Boolean modifier in the modifier's tab. Then the changes of the mesh become permanent (destructive). The apply button is hidden in the drop-down menu for the modifier in Blender 2.9, it's right next to the modifier's name.


Can I use the OptiX AI-Accelerated Denoiser for rendering animations? Can I use the OptiX AI-Accelerated Denoiser for rendering? I can only find it for viewport denoising, not for denoising a render. How do I enable the OptiX AI-Accelerated Denoiser for rendering, and can I use it for rendering character animations?

Yep. Click on the layers tab and its down at the bottom


Wrong door behavior in an BGE game I’m trying to make a simple psychological horror game at BGE, but I found a problem that I couldn’t find a solution anywhere i.e. interaction with doors. It may seem simple, but a system that comes to mind is a door that only opens in one direction (as in most houses), that is, there are differences when interacting with the same door on two sides (the side that pushes and the pulling side). However, when I try to do this by animating the door, the side that the player is supposed to pull the door on, the object ends up going through the character or pushing the player away. The solution I found, would be for the door to pause its animation of opening when it collides towards the player, causing the player to move away from the door so that it opens fully, giving way to the character. Avoiding clipping or collision bug. However, I can’t seem to find a way to do that.
I would be more thanked if anyone can help me with this problem via logic bricks. I’m using UPBGE v0.2.5 (Blender 2.79.7) to build the game. However I will provide a .blend with a simple FPS setup character and a door on the wall, for anyone who can build, I would be very grateful. Thanks for your presence.
blend file

I made it!
DoorSetup-Fixed.blend
Red Box - Player collision + “E” key (opens the door)
Green Box - Prevents the door from pushing the player (pauses the animation)
Blue Box - Distance for the door to remain open


Make parts of body mesh go through clothing mesh during simulation? I have a walk cycle set up on my model but when her hands pass her body they also affect the skirt she's wearing which messes the skirt physics up in ways that would be better if I just had her hands and lower arms pass through the mesh.

Is there any way to do that without separating and creating new arm and hand objects? I'd like to keep my model all as one object.

What I've done: delete all vertex groups attached to her fingers, hands, lower, and upper arms. Although this did help, it seems the skirt mesh still responds to her hands.

Edit: Pics of my cloth physics settings:

I figured it out. What you gotta do is separate the mesh into parts that you want to keep as collision objects and those you don't. So, in my case, it was simply separating the lower arms from the rest of the body but still having them work together as part of the same armature. After that I removed the collision modifier and hid (H key) the lower arms which hides them from 3D view but not render view. So, the animation render looks the same but the arms pass through the skirt mesh the way I want.


Re-start animation if message is sent again? REWRITTEN: Lets just say I have it where my animation plays when I press the space bar. How can I have it where the animation plays from start every time I press the space bar rather than continuing?

Disable the continue option on the action actuator and put the script between the sensor and the action actuator :

when the sensor send a pulse the script will be triggered
if there is action being played on layer 0 the script will stop stop it
the script passes the pulse to the actuator

cont = bge.logic.getCurrentController()
own = cont.owner

if own.isPlayingAction(0):
    own.stopAction(0)
cont.activate("Action")


How to get elbow IK constraints to work properly? So far I have 4 IKs on my rig: 2 arm and 2 elbow. The arm IKs work fine but the eblow IKs are wonky. When translated, the elbow IK is hinged by the arm IK. If I set the elbow IK to chain length > 0, they simply stop working entirely. Any idea what I am doing wrong?

File:

If you set the bicept Ik chain to one, it works pretty well, but generally this kind of rig is constructed with only one IK: the forearm pointing to the arm IK, then you can use the elbow IK bone as the pole target of the single IK constraint.
Don't forget to set the right pole angle (in my example 180 degrees).


How to checker deselect edge and vertex rings I know there's a way to checker deselect a ring of edges, but is there a way to do the same on multiple rings of edges or vertices? Every time I've tried it, Blender deselects only the active ring.

I'd like it to look something like this, but doing it manually for larger objects is extremely annoying.

Thanks.

Since my answer this similar question is somewhat outdated, here's a new answer.
Edge loops

Ensure you're in edge select mode (⎈ Ctrl↹ Tab)

Select an edge ring by pressing ⎈ Ctrl⎇ Alt RMB over an edge

Run checker deselect (the Space search is useful here)

Run multi select loops

Note that this selects edge loops as shown in your example. To do the same for edge rings, do the inverse:
Edge rings

Ensure you're still in edge select mode
Select an edge loop this time (⎇ Alt RMB)
Run checker deselect
Run multi select loops, then enable rings in the redo menu (F6 or 3D view > Toolshelf)


How can I queue different blender actions to be rendered? I'm designing a character with different animations (idle, eating, walking, etc) that are separated in different blender actions in the same .blend file.

I would like to queue the actions to be rendered, so I could leave the computer rendering over night. Is there any way to do that??

There is nothing built into Blender that will batch or queue renders, at the moment.

The simplest, most portable way is to make an animation that consists of those actions one after the other. Render the whole thing to frames, then take the first set of frames for one sequence and render it into a video. Then the next sequence, and so on. Depending on how sophisticated you want to be, you could even make a new Blender file, link (or append, but link would be better) the actions into a new file, and set them up to play one after the other. Then render that one, instead of modifying your original file.

Another way, for things that aren't or can't be in the same .blend file, is to launch Blender from the command line using some kind of command-line script like a batch file on Windows, or a bash script on Nix or Mac. E.g.

cd c:/<blender folder>
echo Rendering the first one...
blender -b filename_one.blend -a
echo Rendering the second one...
blender -b filename_two.blend -a
echo Rendering the third one...
blender -b filename_thr.blend -a
echo Done rendering.

The most robust, but most complicated, way would be to write a Python script that launches Blender with certain command-line arguments. A Python script could be programmed to choose certain arguments based on certain criteria. It could check to see if there are as many frames as there should be in the results, and if there aren't maybe run the render again with overwrite turned off. Interesting things like that.

I hope that helps!


Human meta rig not spreading hand bones When I add rigify's human meta rig to a project that has a model imported from SFM, the hand bones to not get added correctly. Instead of being spread out flat, like a hand, they all come in on top of eachother, as depicted below. Loading the meta rig in a new project has the same problem.
I can click the bones individually to pose them but it's time consuming and as I see every tutorial online has the hand bones spread out properly, I guess that it is not meant to happen and would like it to stop.

This originally happened on blender 2.83 and I have updated to the latest version 2.91 where it continues to happen.

Probably this file has been accidentally overwritten:

You can delete it and copy an original file from another PC.


Object appears bright even when there is no light I was trying to integrate a dragon model from blendswap into my model, but the problem is that no matter what I do the dragon appears bright and is fully visible. Can someone help me understand what is the source of light which is causing the dragon to appear rather than look similar to objects on the map (for instance the building)

Here is the blend file

This is because the dragon's texture is influencing the Emit property of the material. If you disable it in Properties > Textures > Influence (with the dragon selected), it works as expected:


Active camera have a short view distance,how do I increase it? For some reason when I render or turn into active camera mode the mesh obj disappear as I move farther. I need help on how to increase that view range.

Select the camera, then increase the Clipping End value in the Camera's properties panel.


How to unwrap a specific part of an object with correct size proportions? I've created my model, and I've unwrapped it entirely (using smart UV project). I've spent countless hours creating my UV map, and in the middle of my work, I've noticed a bug with the model so I edited it. Now, I have a new part of a model. If I unwrap it in any way the sizing will not be in the correct proportion as the rest. How can I fix this?

Step 1: Have a model with a well-thought-out unwrap.

Step 2: Make changes to one are of the model, breaking the texture coordinates in that area.

Step 3: Select the changed area and re-unwrap it to ensure that all parts have texture coordinates, even if the topology has changed. (I used regular old Unwrap with the Conformal algorithm.) Don't worry too much that it's huge.

Step 4: enable Area distortion display in the UV editor N panel to make it really, really easy to scale the island to the right size. Areas at the right size are displayed with blue.

Step 5: move the re-unwrapped island off to the side. Select the entire model and find any areas that should be directly sewn to the re-unwrapped island. Select these areas and pin those islands. (If you don't have seams because you used Auto Unwrap, use Seams from Islands to get seams.) Select one area (old unwrap + new unwrap) that needs new texture coords and unwrap it with Unwrap. The pinned area will stay in place, while the re-unwrapped area will integrate with the part of the island that already existed.

If you need the UVs to fit into a specific part of a texture, use pinning, live unwrap, snapping, and scaling to 0 along an axis to get them into the right place.

If the areas that changed aren't attached to any existing UV islands, all you need to do is use Area distortion display mode to rescale them until they're blue, then find a spot on the UV map for them.


How to pull up tool menu for vertices? I'm very new to Blender and am having a bit of trouble.
After I Shift + A > Mesh > Cylinder, I want to pull up this menu:

How would I do this, please? It doesn't just pop up after I add in the cylinder. Thanks.

T will toggle open/close the Toolshelf, and that menu is at the bottom of the Toolshelf.

Alternately, you may see a plus at the bottom of the Toolshelf. Click on it.


How do I mirror across anything other than X, Y, or Z axis? I'm trying to mirror an object on the X-axis, Y-axis, and X+Y-axis. Unfortunately, there's no check mark for that last one. How do I mirror along it?

Use two mirror modifiers, both one along the X+Y axis.
Once you have the Y and X mirrored once, then you can add an empty and use it as a mirror object to mirror it along the x+y for your second modifier.

Simply position the empty to where you want to objects to be mirrored. The empty will essentially replace the object's origin for the mirror modifier.


Specify target files from command line Short question:

blender -b knob.blend -s 1 -e 2 -a -o //__targets/knob_#.png

Does not write to the desired files, but 0001.png, and 0002.png. I want the files __targets/knob_1.png and __targets/knob_2.png. It appears that blender ignores the target option in this case. What should I do to make it work?

Blender executes the command line options in the over they are given, so Blender sees the command to render (-a) and then sets the command to set the output path (-o). This means the output path gets set after the render has happened.

You just need to swap the order of the commands so you have:

blender -b knob.blend -s 1 -e 2 -o //__targets/knob_#.png -a


How can I combine two images with the Principled BSDF SHader? I want to get a tiles wall with a graffiti on it, i try alot. I try to do the graffiti only in black color with a transperent background, white graffiti with black background and also black graffiti with white back ground and it was allways a white graffiti.
How can I combine a Black graffiti Texture with a Tile Texture?

Think about your image is a mask. Then connect it to the Fac of the Color Mix node.

Now your texture represent how to use 2 colors from Color Mix node. Where pixels are black Color1 will used. Where white - Color2.

So Color2 now it is Graffti color, you can just set it to black. Color1 - color of background, you can connect texture of tiles wall here.


How to bend a part of sphere or cylinder the incremental way? I am trying to bend a part of a modified sphere that is transformed into an elongated piece of pipe. As you can see in the picture, I have done it by using R + Y and then G + X in order to arrange the bends. But, this is not the best of the way as you can see the rings of vertices are fairly random and do not give any symmetrical increment.

Is there a better way of creating this bend:

a. without getting into modifiers,
b. without any empty object approach?

CtrlE Edge Menu > Bridge Edge Loops does more than you might think.

Just the two loops at the ends were selected to be bridged, here. You could also use the tool to join the tube and the surface its rising from.


How rotate the 3D view irrespective to the global Z axis using keyboard? I have set the "orbit style" setting to "trackball" but it only works when I use the middle mouse button to rotate the view.

The keyboard shortcut does not seems to honor the "orbit style=trackball" setting as numpad 4 / numpad 6 still uses the "turntable" style rotation, and rotate about the global Z axis.

I need to use the keyboard for rotation because I would like to constrain my 3D view rotation to one axis (vertical/horizontal only).

For example, if I

set orbit style to trackball
hit numpad 7 to align the 3D view to Top View
drag middle mouse button left/right

The 3D view will rotate horizontally as desired, however if I hit numpad 4 / numpad 6 instead, it "roll" along the global Z axis

I want to have the same behavior as mouse using keyboard.

I am using Blender 2.76a.

You can roll the view with Shift + Numpad 4 and Shift + Numpad 6.

Edit: Oops. This only works in turntable mode. I misunderstood the question. (Still investigating.)

Edit 2: Sorry. I couldn't figure it out. The best I can offer is this workaround:

Make the model a child of an empty, then rotate the empty 90º on the X axis. From there, you can view the top with Numpad 1 and orbit latitudinally with respect to the object with Numpad 4 and Numpad 6. Once you're done, you can delete the empty and the object will return to its pre-parented orientation.

This is not ideal because it might mess with the mechanics of an armature or other constraints or modifiers.


How to disable or enable a constraint of a bone, by a rotation of another bone? I want bone A when starts to rotate, disables a constraint on bone B. (The eye symbol)
My guess is by using a driver.
BUT, I don't have any clue to do it.
Added info:
Start to rotate means, when I manually rotate the bone (bone A). What's the constraint doesn't matter. All I need to know is how to disable/enable a constraint of another bone, when I start manually rotate the bone A. If it were possible. If the driver is the way, I don't have any idea how to set it up, because the default, doens't give any effect

That can be this kind of setting:

Here three bones: one parent and two children.
Bone.002 has a constraint: track to an empty.
The constraint activation has de driver:
var is based on Bone.001 and its "W" rotation in quaternion mode and local space.
The driver expression is to test if "W" is below 1. In this case that mutes the constraint.
The eye corresponds to a "mute" property, so a True value to mute.

Complement
If you want the constraint to be "mute forever", you can use a little script.
Add a custom prop to the constraint target (the empty here), named "prop" and set to 0 by default.

Then execute this script:
import bpy

def lock_constraint(self,rotation):

    self.target["prop"] += abs(1 - rotation)

    return self.target["prop"] > 0

bpy.app.driver_namespace["lock_constraint"] = lock_constraint

"lock_constraint" will be known in driver space, so that you can use it in the driver:

As "prop" can only grow, once the other bone is rotated the constraint will stay mute.


Rendering a dark scene in Blender 2.8 Cycles + glass shader with lettering After putting way too many hours into this scene, I'm finally ready to render. The problem is I get a ton of noise, no matter how many samples I choose, and denoising just makes the image look like garbage. I've searched and searched and searched for a good solution, but I can't seem to get it right. The image attached was rendered with 512 samples without denoising and took about 45 minutes. Please somebody help! Also, if someone has a better way to set up a glass shader with lettering on it that will allow light to pass through the glass and not the lettering (see the signage on the desk for example, the lettering should cast a shadow), I would be greatly appreciative!

[EDIT]: Added an updated render and a screenshot of my settings
[EDIT2]: I'm only seeing the updated render, but none of my other pictures are showing up for me. I hope you all can see them.

I increased my render output resolution to 4K and got rid of about half the amount of light sources and nearly all the noise disappeared! Also, I managed to solve my glass shader issue with a few extra hours playing with the shader editor and came up with a great solution for casting the shadows I was looking for. I've attached a screenshot of the shader node tree, I hope someone else can make some use of it as well.


How to unwrap model so its perfectly proportioned? I can tell this is a simple question but all the tutorials have not worked for my particular task.

I have some walls that Id like to apply a seamless texture to. the walls go in the x and y, some taller than others.

I want the model to unwrap in a way so it looks like it was flattened, with every wall right after the next, so when I apply a texture in an outside program, the uv will be perfectly proportioned.
Iv'e tried marking seams but every way I try, it doesn't work right.

Is there something Im missing here?

My Model:

How Id like the Uv to look:

There must be an easy way to do this I just cant find anything or I dont know what to look for Thank you very much.

1:  Mark one vertical edge as Seam. In my example I added a seam on a very visible edge but ideally this seam should be placed somewhere less obvious.

2: Select all of the mesh, open the UV mapping menu and choose the Unwrap option.

3: Open the  UV/image editor window. The unwrap should look similar to the image below. This now needs to be scaled up.

4: UV Editor window, Make sure the Cursor is at the X=0 Y=0 position of the UV space. The lower left hand corner of the UV unwrap should also be at this position.

5: Change the Scaling Pivot point to be the 2D Cursor.

6: Scale up the UV’s until the highest edges are approximately at the same level as the top of the UV space.

7: To check seams, scale etc  Add a test texture/image in the UV editor  and see how it looks on the mesh.

8: With the 2D cursor still at the lower left hand corner of the UV space scale up or down until the test texture looks correct at the seam.


Delete file in blender python script does anyone know how to delete a file from inside blender script?
i tried to use os.remove, but it gives me an error:

  TypeError: unlink: illegal type for path parameter

the path i put into the os.remove is the same path i use to load the file, where i save it into a variable.
i tried changing the string variable to subtype = "FILE_PATH" but no effect.
the loading goes fine, but if i input the same path to remove it doesn't work

is there any other way to do this?

That's right os.remove() is the way to go, on Unix (Linux and OSX too) and Windows. See this answer on stackoverflow

That error likely occurs because you are calling os.remove(some_file_path) where:

some_file_path isn't set at that moment in time
or the filepath can't be resolved by os.remove().

Try printing the value of some_file_path just ahead of calling os.remove(), most likely you'll either get an empty string or some modified path.

See this working example.

This will add a panel to properties called Hello World Panel,
it has a file selector and stores the filepath as a scene variable called some_identifier.
The button 'Remove File' removes the file identified by scene property

code:

bl_info = {
    "name": "FILL ME IN",
    "author": "",
    "version": (0, 1),
    "blender": (2, 7, 6),
    "category": "3D View"
}

import os
import bpy
from bpy_extras.io_utils import ExportHelper

class WMFileRemover(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "wm.remove_file"
    bl_label = "Remove File"

    def execute(self, context):
        fp = context.scene.some_identifier
        if fp:
            print('os.remove(', fp, ')')
            os.remove(fp)
        else:
            self.report({'ERROR'}, 'filepath is an empty string')
        return {'FINISHED'}

class WMFileSelector(bpy.types.Operator, ExportHelper):
    bl_idname = "something.identifier_selector"
    bl_label = "some folder"

    filename_ext = ""

    def execute(self, context):
        fdir = self.properties.filepath
        context.scene.some_identifier = fdir
        return{'FINISHED'}

class WMFilePanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    """Creates a Panel in the Object properties window"""
    bl_label = "Hello World Panel"
    bl_idname = "OBJECT_PT_hello"
    bl_space_type = 'PROPERTIES'
    bl_region_type = 'WINDOW'

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        scn = context.scene

        # ui
        col = layout.column()
        row = col.row(align=True)
        row.prop(scn, 'some_identifier', text='directory:')
        row.operator("something.identifier_selector", icon="FILE_FOLDER", text="")

        col = layout.column()
        col.label(scn.some_identifier)
        col.operator("wm.remove_file")

def register():
    bpy.types.Scene.some_identifier = bpy.props.StringProperty()
    bpy.utils.register_module(__name__)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_module(__name__)
    del bpy.types.Scene.some_identifier


How to disable shadows in Eevee - Blender 2.8 How to disable shadows in Eevee (completely or of certain objects)?

Shadows can be disabled for each light in the Object Data section of the settings of the respective light:

(This is only a partial answer, as it doesn't state how to disable for certain objects only.)


Particles not showing up in cycles render I know that this is a common issue from the questions already asked around, but I've checked every setting and I am at my wit's end. The particles are supposed to be there, but I have looked through every render setting and they will not show, if I do a quick render or a full render.

Here's the download link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/eq9jg9npgjpiqjy/AAAXSED5dfQLWs99Mve86NxQa?dl=0

The object named "fountain particle water" (a sphere) has its ray visibility disabled for camera rays, so enable that, as shown in the image below, and the problem should be gone.


Selecting Face selects entire object! Hi everyone i am a novice to blender and have been watching tutorial by Chic Areon on youtube
I am doing just as she says by choosing select face in edit mode but when i click on my cube it still hightlights the whole thing. I have even tried pressing P  but that doesn't look right either.
Can anyone give me some pointers on what to do from here.

make sure everything is deselected (alt + a) in edit mode. Press the number 3 for face selection and make sure you have the selection tool enabled. Click on the centre of the face.


Rigid Connection of Bones This crank linkage works, except I need to constrain the larger bone to the bone labeled "crank" so they behave as a solid link. When I add rigging to the tail of the larger bone, the larger bone is able to pivot at the juncture of the three bones. Parenting (Ctrl-P) doesn't seem to help...

I figured out a solution and it's really simple. Since the big bone has the same movement as the bone labeled "crank", I really don't need it. I made a link object the length of both "crank" and the big bone and made that a child of "crank". Then I made the origin of the link object at the top of where the big bone was and I built the second armature (not shown) off that point. Then I made the connecting bone copy the location of the link object.


How to create reflective puddles from noise texture? i have a problem with creating reflective puddles from noise texture.

So i have a large plane where i wanted to add reflective puddles made from noise texture, and make it look something like this  i didn't add normal texture from google because i know if you stretch texture on big plane it will be all blurry and ugly, and so instead i used noise texture, problem is, where its "dark areas" which are suppose to be puddles, they don't reflect at all, and i don't know how to change their reflection or how to control them in general! i wanted to add glass shader to noise texture but it doesn't have "base color" or anything like that where i could connect glass shader or any shader.

So my question how do i control them or how can i build nodes that way so i can change how they look ?

Here is how i built nodes for the plane. I'am using cycles render, blender Version 2.8

I would use a Principles BSDF shader in combination with a texture such that:

Low intensity of the texture corresponds to high specularity and low roughness (puddles)
High intensity of the texture corresponds to low specularity and high roughness (ground)
The color is not affected by the texture (i.e. the puddles are very shallow)

This is my setup:


Can Krita and Blender be linked? I have tried to look for myself but have not found the information I'm looking for.

I've seen that one can use the digital painting software Krita in connection with Blender.  But I do not remember how to do so.  Is this possible?

You could set the path to Krita or any other external image procesing application in Blender's User Preferences accessible from the file menu.

From the image editor you can launch Krita with the image loaded by chosing Edit Externally. When returned to Blender refresh the image with Reload Image or Alt-R.


I messed up with my transform manipulation tool settings I didn't have any problems earlier, until I noticed that when I drag some vertices, with the Transformation Manipulators, it doesn't look aligned anymore.

So, instead of dragging the vertices to a straight in front it goes the other side.

I'm new to Blender and I didn't know what I accidentally clicked to cause this.

Set the orientation back to global and you should be fine. I rarely ever use widgets, though.


Why doesn't Blender render the the geometry I've created properly I have a model that consists of the following:

A tire tread: A polygon plane with an array modifer and a curve modifier to bend it into the shape of a wheel and a mirror modifier to mirror it from one side of the tire to the other
A wheel hub (a rim): A polygon plane with a mirror modifier on it and an array modifier set to object with a null rotated to create the other parts of the wheel.
1 & 2 are grouped and instanced 3x to create the other wheels
A simple polygonal box cut in half and mirrored for the body of the car

The model is obviously not done, but why isn't it rendering properly?

Well this is an interesting one. It seams blender displays DupliGrouped objects incorrectly, and renders them correctly.

You made one wheel, using a Curve modifier and a BezierCircle to form the tread of the wheel. Then you distributed the wheel group to the other three places using DupliGroups.

The trouble is you did not group the BezierCircle (you had three and the one being used in the modifier is not in the group), so when you distribute the
wheel around the Curve modifier on the tread is still pointing to the first BezierCircle. Which because the origin of the curve is now in a very different spot then the wheel object, the curve modifier is making a mess instead of a tire.

Simply add the BezierCircle.001 object to your group named "Group" and all the wheels will render correctly.
To add it to the group select the BezierCircle.001, then in  the object tab of the properties panel scroll down to the Groups section and press the large Add to Group button. Choose your group named "Group" from the list.


Delete components script crashes I wrote an addon that removes components (using BMesh) depending on the context of the selection. The problem is that he crashes a Blender. I cannot establish a pattern, but most often this happens after several operations in the Edit mode and an attempt to delete all the polygons or n-gon. If I try to repeat the same operations, everything can go well.

since the polygon delete causes the problem, I think in this part of the code:

import bpy
import bmesh

def delete_components():  # for components selection mode

    obj = bpy.context.edit_object       # prepearing BMesh variables
    me = obj.data
    bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)

    sel_faces = [s for s in bm.faces if s.select]   # get the list of selected polygons

    if bpy.context.edit_object.type == 'MESH':      # if mesh is selected

        sel_mode = bpy.context.tool_settings.mesh_select_mode[:] # define active selection modes

        if sel_mode[2] == True:                     # if polygon selection mode is on
            for f in sel_faces:                     # unselect all edges belonging to these polygons
                for e in f.edges:
                    e.select = False
            bmesh.ops.delete(bm, geom=sel_faces, context = "FACES")    # delete polygons

        bmesh.update_edit_mesh(me, True)            #update BMesh mesh

delete_components()

link to the full code:
https://github.com/Borschberry/smart_delete

p.s. This is my first addon and I just started working in Blender. Correct me if I incorrectly described the problem.

Based on your script you appear to be using Blender 2.80. The following may help to address some issues. Blender 2.80 allows for multiple objects to be in edit mode at the same time which is not strictly addressed in the below but the script only acts on the active object in the event multiple objects are selected in edit mode. previously your script could break if run in object mode causing obj = bpy.context.edit_object to be None type and me = obj.data to fail check was added prior to function call.

import bpy
import bmesh

def delete_faces():
    obj = bpy.context.active_object
    me = obj.data
    bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)
    sel_faces = [s for s in bm.faces if s.select]

    sel_mode = bpy.context.tool_settings.mesh_select_mode[:] # define active selection modes

    if sel_mode[2] == True:  # if polygon selection mode is on
#        bmesh.ops.delete(bm, geom=sel_faces, context=5)  # bl 2.79
        bmesh.ops.delete(bm, geom=sel_faces, context='FACES')  # bl 2.80
        # deselecting edges is not needed use FACES_ONLY if that is the desired effect
        # ('VERTS', 'EDGES', 'FACES_ONLY', 'EDGES_FACES', 'FACES', 'FACES_KEEP_BOUNDARY', 'TAGGED_ONLY')
        bmesh.update_edit_mesh(me, True, True)

if bpy.context.mode == 'EDIT_MESH':  # ensures both edit mode and mesh type before call
    delete_faces()


Blender Python revert view pan and rotate for vertex I want to bring a vertex to the zero position for a certain axis (x or Y), the vertex is on a special plane (not an object, a stored viewplane) so I tried to use the stored view matrix, set it to 0 for an axis and then tried to rotate it back.
rot_mat = self._view_context._view_mat # This is stored from Region3d.view_matrix.

v = rot_mat @ vec_center

if axis == "X":
 v = Vector((-v[0],0,0)) # Difference in X location
elif axis == "Y":
 v = Vector((0,-v[1],0)) # Difference in Y location

vec_center += rot_mat.inverted() @ v

It works, but not, if the view is panned. How can I take the translation of the viewport into acount as well?

Found it, the view_matrix contains the translation as well, have to get the 3x3 matrix only:
rot_mat = self._view_context._view_mat.to_3x3()


How Can I Instance an Animated Cycles Gradient Material? I am attempting to create lightning storm from a particle system that instances an object. For the material, I the base object has an animated color gradient, animated using the mapping node.

I have successfully instanced the base object on to the particles using the Animation Nodes addon. Now I want to offset the texture animation based on the birth time of the particles. At first I thought I could use the "Cycles Material Output" node, but I can't seem to do anything to the vector mapping node in the material with it.

Try the setVertexColor Node.

It seems not so intuitive at first, but it's the per object iterator way to assign the color to instanced geometry. You need to set the value to 'Col' and then back in the Material Node editor use the Attribute node and put 'Col' (for Name field) or what-have-you there too.

Hope I understood your problem. Seems I ended up here so maybe others will find that useful.

I was actually looking for a color ramp node in animation nodes, but I suppose you could take a different single value in this way and pass it through a ramp too.


What's the fastest and / or craziest way to model an arrow in Blender? I'm curious about all the ways you can come up with a solution. I'm searching for the way with the least clicks and maybe the two runner ups. I made up some rules on how to count them:

A default installation should be used.
Changes in the UI don't count, so you can zoom or pan without adding steps. Changing the pivot point or similar actions count.
Every press of a mouse button or key counts.
Combos like ctrlLMB or shiftD count as one.
The arrow has to be symmetrical. Proportions don't matter, right angles do. The backside of the arrowhead has to be parallel.
to broaden the field a bit: extra verts are OK as long as they don't distort the shape.
Addons belong in the realm of the second question.
In case two answers have the same score, the one posted first gets the checkbox.

The second and more creative question: what's the craziest, least practical and goldbergish way to do it? Feel free to contribute. Any fun solution in between the extremes is probably interesting, too.

So, who manages the least clicks and how?

So I thought to myself: These answers are so amazing, but they're hard. Even I have trouble recreating them. I have to do something. I need to provide a simple and effortless answer and after a while, I found it.

Step 1: Create a seven sided Cylinder.

Step 2: Build this ordinary and straightforward armature (shouldn't take long) and connect it to the circle.

Step 3: Push the Bone that has the shape of a modeled arrow (khm) up a bit.

I mean, it doesn't get much easier than pushing a bone up a bit.

To explain:

The orange and red ones are simple 2 bone IK-chains pointing to the mover arrow.

The green ones are parented to the orange ones and move with them. They are not necessary but it's a bit clearer that way. You could parent dark blue directly to orange with offset.

Dark blue is parented to green.

The blue ones are again simple 2 bone IK chains pointing to the light blue targets.

The yellow circle bones sit in the middle of the dark blue bones and are the only ones having deform enabled.

The tricky bit is to find the right lengths for red and orange so that a single bone moves all the green bones just the right amount.

James Watt has discovered this green/dark blue/light blue lever for his steam engines. It's called Watt's linkage. It enables the yellow circles to move pretty much in a straight line. It's still used in trains to keep the wheels from moving back and forth.

The orientation and length of the blue bones isn't just random. I simply put the tips on the arrow verts and the roots on the circle verts. Then I duplicated and rotated them 90 degrees to get the linkage with it's required right angles. Yes, simple rotation of a bone with start and end on a circle would have been enough, but meh...


Incorrect/triangulated texture when importing .obj file I was importing some Wavefront Object files with bpy and noticed that the textures/materials were going berserk. I know the .obj files are good as they come from a large dataset used for research.

I wondered if it was just the Python interface, but sure enough, it still happens when I import it though the UI.

My best guess is that the surface normals are incorrect since it seems to happen both in solid object view and textured view. It may also be the UV coordinates being registered from top-left instead of bottom-left or something though. Any ideas?

Solid View:

Textured View:

The Windows 3D Builder app renders it just fine though:

The issues you find here are a combination of three distinct problems all related to the quality of the original models, and most likely not caused by Blender or import method.

You model has bad topology - Most likely caused by being apparently made by some sort of NURBS or Solid modeling application, or maybe abuse of Boolean operations. Not really easily fixed unless you remake it from scratch
Your model has overlapping geometry - Particularly on the rifle handle there seem to be some duplicate or overlapping almost coplannar surfaces. You may try to clean that up by hand
Your model has inconsistent normals - Easily fixed by selecting all your faces in Edit Mode and pressing Ctrl+N.

Also have in mind that this has nothing to do with materials or textures, as OBJ doesn't really support proper material importing or exporting


Fixing normals after separating mesh into new objects I have small problem, let say I have this mesh:

At the end it needs to be split into separate chunks/objects (in this example it's split in five chunks) like this:

The problem is that normals are wrong as opposed to original mesh which makes shading go wrong (visible seams between objects). I've tried to use Auto Smooth and it's quite better, but still worse than original mesh.

This mesh is just an example of my original mesh which at the end will be exported in order to be used in external game engine with OpenGL as a backend renderer, so for OpenGL it doesn't matter whether it's rendered as one object or not (I'm NOT using triangle strips) as long as normals are the same as were before. Is there a possibility to separate mesh into objects while maintaining original normals?

Thank you in advance.

Unfortunately Blender has no method to adjust vertex normals by hand, so the only way to fix this (well, sorta...) is to separate your mesh in a way that the vertex normals don't change their direction at the cuts.

In a nutshell this means cutting up your mesh in the areas where you have a more even geometry. Depending on your geometry this might not entirely fix your problem but it reduces the amount of difference in the shading significantly. Keep in mind that this also might increase the loopcuts, which results in more vertices/faces.

In the image below I marked the areas where I put the loopcuts with green arrows.


Keyframed object jumps instantly from one keyframe to next or not at all The body.001 is the object I'd like to animate but it moves suddenly from one keyframe to next, and sometimes doesn't even move at all when scrolling the timeline.

You can clearly see the timeline cursor at the beginning of animation:

And end:

But the object won't budge.

I've checked everything I can think of including:

Making sure all the keys are not straight lines in graph editor
Parenting to armature then animating
Deleting NLA tracks and again adding one
Not using NLA tracks at all and just using Action Editor

The body.001 can be appended to other blend files and animated without any issues

Your plane is a rigid body.

You need to check this button to allow it to be animated :

Edit : when you append it into another file, this file does not contains a rigid body world (see in the 'scene' panel). That's why the animation works in that case.


what is the hotkey to change noise distortion types in the displace modifier? Is there a way to quickly toggle between the different types of noise distortions and Basis' ?

Id like a faster way to switch between them, ideally scrolling through each one for 1s, to see result of modifier. Like a 'next' key for the selection list.

Hold Ctrl + Scrolling over the button will do what you want.


Extend Video Strip in VSE In older versions of Blender I was able to extend a video strip in VSE using the triangle at the right end. In this case the last image stayed visible. But in the current Version, this is no longer the case. But for me, that was a nice feature. Can someone help me?

The freeze frame at either the start or end of a strip only occurs when you reach the limit of the source media. You can fake this by adding a Hard Cut using shift-k. Then drag the strip end as usual but now it will be shaded grey and show only a still frame. If it flickers then click the Refresh Sequencer button at the bottom of the timeline.


Strange lighting on model So as you can see there is some very weird lighting on the body of my model. My initial thought was that it was the normals, however after recalcualting and checking manually that they were facing the correct direction, still nothing changed.

Thoughts? Also, sorry if it's an obvious answer, i'm new to blender

It looks like you have smooth shading enabled. To switch to flat shading, select the mesh and on the left side menu, go to the tools panel and choose flat shading.


Applying a Simple Cylindrical Projection onto a Object Question: I have a wavefront object that I have imported into blender, and a simple cylindrical projection that I am trying to apply to it. The cylindrical projection is mapped around the prime meridian with longitude 0 on the left & right edges.

How do I apply this mapping to the 3D model in Blender?

My Attempted Solution: I tried 2 approaches: UV mapping and texture nodes. Both of them have run into problems so far.

(1) I unwrapped the model onto my texture with the following settings, but I wasn't able to get the model to map "properly" onto the texture. Here is an example of what I ended up with:  - this is with the settings:

Directions: View on Equator
Align: ZX
Radius: 1.000
Correct Aspect: Check
Clip to Bounds: Unchecked
Scale to Bounds: Checked

(2) I also tried adding an image texture node to my model (with the texture coordinate node). However, all the settings I chose have given me stretched lines. Here is an album of my "best" attempts:

Background: I am attempting to create a textured model of an asteroid in Blender using data from NASA's PDS SBN. Specifically, I am looking to replicate the version of Eros from the 3D Asteroid Catalogue (click "Grayscale" on the website to see the texture), but with Blender instead of ThreeJS.

For reference, the wavefront file I'm using is located here, and the simple cylindrical projection I'm using is located here (warning, large image file).

You can use an environment texture in order to project on the mesh surface.

The environment texture is generally used for scene environment lightning, but it performs an equirectangular projection that seems to meet our need here.

Take the object output from the texture coordinates node.

Plug it into a vector mapping.

And plug its result into the env texture node.

Now we just have to handle what needs to be rotated in the mapping (it's a guess): here a rotation of 180 around X and a -1 scale for Z seem to correspond perfectly to the mesh.

They are little distortions on the left part, but all craters have found the good place, it seems.

The texture from the link in the question is not included as too large to be uploaded with the blend file:

Note: 'equirectangular projection' is also called 'equidistant cylindrical projection'


Low poly hair animation with hair bones So I've been trying to get the hair bones to work with the whole body. I got bones to deform some parts of the polygonal hair and these bones belong to the same body armature. However the problem is when I move the head bone, it deforms the mesh where the hair bones are. So I cannot move the head up and down without the hair going off the rails because of the hair bones.

I understand this is because the hair bones have deform, but I am not bending those hair bones, why is the hair deforming? Btw the hair is a separate mesh.  I want to be able to animate the hair, along with keeping the rotation/location same when the head is moving up and down. Please help.

Probably you have a wrong Parent/Child relationship: hair bones should be child of the head bone (keep offset), so that when you move the head the hair follows. Then hair mesh should have no parent, except that of its bones (if some part of the hair should remain still you can weight thoose vertices to the head bone, or create a new hair bone that you'll not move in animation data).


Get number of frames in scene from the command line? I'd like to know if there is a command-line option (or combination, or a way!) to get the number of frames that are included in a specified blender scene; for example I'd like to use is like this:

$ blender <option> file.blend
$ Number of frames in blender scene: xxxx

This information is stored in the blend files header, so you can find out without having to load Blender at all.

This has the advantage you can scan a directory of 100's (or 1000's) of blend files in a very short time (a few seconds even if the files are large).

Blender comes with a script in scripts/modules/blend_render_info.py which can extract this data from a blend file (you don't even need Blender to be installed just a copy of this file and Python is enough).

You can load the script as a module or execute it directly.

command line example:

# python blend_render_info.py /path/to/my_test.blend
1 250 Scene

python example:
This can run inside blender,
otherwise blend_render_info.py will have to be in Python's sys.path

import blend_render_info

filepath = "/path/to/my_test.blend"
frame_start, frame_end, scene = blend_render_info.read_blend_rend_chunk(filepath)

print("total frames:", (frame_end - frame_start) + 1)

As you can see the frame range and active scene is stored, if you want more info you'll have to use a script and load the file into Blender.


Speed of physics simulation Can I slow down the speed at which things happen, without lowering the frame rate?
I want to make this happen slowly without decreasing the fps.

You can set the speed of the physics simulation by simply changing the Speed setting in the Rigid Body World settings in the Scene tab :

Smaller values will reduce the speed (ie, 0.5 will slow it down to half-speed).


Objects in outliner out of order when importing? Why does blender import files into the outliner in the following pattern: object1, object11, object2, object3, ...

Instead of object1, object2, object3, ... object10, object11?

Objects seem to be out of order when they are imported in the outliner. Is there any way to fix the order to follow the numbers?

Short answer: They are not out of order/it is not supported in Blender.

Long answer: they are sorted, just not in the way you would expect.

They are sorted in purely alphabetical order, from a cold computer perspective 1comes before 2 so Object11 alphabetically speaking comes before Object2

What you are expecting is Natural Sort Order, which is not widely supported in software, and must be explicitly coded to do so, which is apparently not the case in Blender Outliner.

That is why using leading zeros in your digital names (files, objects, data values, etc.) like Object.001 is always a good idea.

How to work around it :
Make sure in the outliner View Menu > Sort Alphabetically is ticked.

If you really want them to be sorted use a third party addon like Name Panel to manually rename the objects and add leading zeros.


Axis of bmesh.ops.rotation() Does bmesh.ops.rotation() rotate the mesh about the current Local axis or the Global axis?
Likewise is the center of rotation coordinates in the local or global axis position?

bmesh.ops.rotation() by default rotates the mesh about objects the local axis and the default center of rotation is the object local axis origin.

Bmesh.ops.rotation() has five inputs bm, cent, matrix, verts and space. bm corresponds to the the mesh to rotate, the center of rotation  which is a vector, matrix corresponds to the 3x3 rotation matrix by which you want the mesh to be rotated by and verts corresponds to the vertices in the mesh bm you want to apply the rotation.
The space corresponds to the space in which the object is to be rotated in and is represented by the rotation matrix of that object with respect to the global. By default the space is set to local space or correspondingly the object's rotation matrix.

One can select an object, say a cube, and go to blender interactive console. Go to edit mode and then type in the console

mesh = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(bpy.context.active_object.data)

Which will store mesh data to 'mesh'. You can then go ahead and vary the parameters say if one types

bmesh.ops.rotate(mesh,matrix=M,verts=mesh.verts)

for some rotation matrix M, then you can see the entire mesh rotated by the matrix M  about the objects local axis after the view port updates. If you type in this code

bmesh.ops.rotate(
    mesh,
    verts=mesh.verts,
    cent=(0.0, 1.0, 0.0),
    matrix=mathutils.Matrix.Rotation(math.radians(90.0), 3, 'Z'))

Then it will rotate the vertices about the point (0,1,0) in local space and about the current local axis Z by 90 degree.

Other mesh operators and information can be found in BMesh Operators Documentation