How can I create a twisted pole? I'm looking to make a pole shape similar to this excluding the piece on the top

Play with the Screw modifier.

Create a circle.
Hit R X 90 Enter.
CNTL-A > Rotation and Scale.
Edit mode. Select the circle. G X 2 Enter.
In the Modifiers palette, select Screw. By default, you will have generated a torus.
Screw: 1.5 (play with this value).
Iterations: 3 (play with this value).

That gets you your barberpole pillar. From there, experiment :)


How could I fix artifacts caused by the armature modifier "Preserve volume" option When I'm rigging a character I usually activate the preserve volume option on the rig modifier, but today I'm getting some really weird artifacts with a particular part of the rig
Example video: https://youtu.be/gfcIU6VaMmM
note that:
-for the rig I used rigify, with a tentacle module for the ears
-I tried normalizing  the weights but it only made things worse
-I need the rig to be one chain of bones so I can use dynamic bones with it
-disabling the preserve volume is not an option since that its bad for other parts of the body

Once I weight paint again I can get rid of what you show in your video so I think it's all a quetion of good weight painting.
See the bones that are on this bone layer, they are the ones that deform your mesh:

Select your armature, shift select the mesh, switch to Weight Paint mode, then select one bone after the other and look at their influence on the mesh, for each of those bones the influence goes too far, you need to correct this:

Make sure that you are in Subtract mode and that you can paint through (the good settings below):

Once done it seems to work fine:


How do I make my displacements go out of the mesh rather than inside the mesh? I'm creating a star destroyer from an older youtube tutorial, and I've gotten to the point of doing displacements on my mesh. My issue is that it seems the UV editor selects the mesh from the inside (when I select a line of faces from right to left, it shows it from left to right in UV editor). This results in the mesh extruding inwards like shown on the pictures. I would rather it extruded outwards. I hope someone can help :)

This can be caused either because your normals are flipped (which is not the case I suppose) or because you auto-unwrapped the model and now you need to change the scale on your UVs (specifically on the face which looks wrong) and on the proper axis (like scaling on X by -1).
Now for the displacement map, usually a displacement map has one channel (grayscale) which means that if you invert it (add -1 or introduce invert node or remap it with ramp) it should look towards the opposite direction.
Hope that these were helpful!

PS: and as you found out and mentioned on your comment "midlevel" property should do the job if you set it on a negative value (like -0.5 or -1)


How to preserve UVs when using Decimate? I have a few meshes in which I load into Three.js using the JSONLoader. The problem is, the huge JSON files take up too much memory so I need to reduce the amount of polys in my meshes. Currently, they are sitting at ~84,000, ~103,000, and ~178,200 vertices.

I tried using the Decimate modifer to un-subdivide, but have had no luck as the UVs become ruined, and thus my textures are also ruined. I don't have time to fully retopologize or make a lower poly mesh. I searched and found the poly-reducer script, but it was removed in 2.49. What other options do I have to reduce the poly count and allow my mesh to work with Three.js?

To keep UVs with Decimate Modifier you need to use Planar dissolve and enable UVs in Delimit section of Decimate modifier


Wireframe shader with gradient colors I am trying to land a project similar to the one in this image. Any ideas how I could get a similar render for any type of figure, for example a Torus or an octagon? I don't care about the mesh, but about the render type (wireframe, colors, and maybe shader).

I don't really know what could help to nail this. Maybe by using some kind of freestyle set? All ideas are welcome.

Here is a try:

Create your profile shape (here an extruded triangle) and a curve, give your shape an Array and a Curve modifier so that it follows the curve, then a Wireframe modifier so that it thickens the edges. Disable the Replace Original option of the Wireframe modifier so that you can still see the original faces.

Create 2 materials, one for the faces, one for the edges. The first material is a mix between a Transparent shader and an Emission shader, with a Layer Weight as factor.

The second material is a basically a mix between Emission shaders and a Transparent shader, with a Noise shaders as factors, in order to create a blend of colors and transparency.

In the material list of your object (Material panel), put the first material (faces material) above the second one (edges material). In the Wireframe modifier, choose Material Offset > 1 so that the edges will have the second material of your material list.

Here is what it gives:


How to learn to move objects by means of a script in python? I'm learning how to handle the blender program. I do not know anything at all. I would like to know how to draw the panel and most importantly, how to control objects using a python script, and the video game engine blender game logic; Where can I get the information?

i like to do this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVtZPQGt5PM

if you don't know anything at all as you say, i suggest you that search tutorials on YouTube (there's a lot) and you can found information about Blender game Engine in the Python API documentation Python API bge.KX_GameObject where you would see the functions that handles and object like:

move object:

from bge import logic
logic.getCurrentController().owner.localLinearVelocity.y = 0.5
## also localLinearVelocity = (0,0.5,0) or setLinearVelocity(vector, local=True)

rotate object:

from bge import logic
logic.getCurrentController().owner.applyRotation((0,0,0.02))

where owner is the object who has the Python controller (currentController) linked in it logic editor like this image:


Change the "major dimension" that Orthographic Scale affects? I have an orthographic camera to capture a plane of width 1. When I set Orthographic Scale to 1,  the camera captures 1 unit of the space in the height dimension.

Can I change the "major dimension" that Orthographic Scale affects?

A bit confusingly worded question, but what I'm gathering is you want to know how to exclusively scale along the X, Y, and Z axes? (X and Y are horizontal, Z is vertical). All you have to do is after pressing S to scale, simply press X, Y, or Z. This will restrict your scale to whatever dimension you chose. Also, if you press Shift+X, Y, or Z after pressing S, this will restrict scaling to every axis except the axis you selected. For example, S then Shift+Z will make your scaling only scale along the X and Y axes.


How can I smooth the top side of this ring? I want to smooth the top side of this ring:

This is how it looks like after rendering:

The mesh of the top side of the ring is very obvious in the rendered image and basically this is my problem.

I am a beginner in Blender but I have tried everything I know. First off, I have made the selection of the top side of the ring manually in edit mode because couldn't find an easier way. Then, I have tried to subdevide the selection but it won't subdevide anything except for some faces. I have tried ctrl+R to make cuts but it doesn't work.

The ring is the result of an extruded 2D vector and then sliced vertically using Knife project tool and then bent 360 degrees using simple deform modifier

My question is how can I smooth just the top side of the ring without the edges?

I guess you have these 2 solutions:

Smooth your object in the Tools panel, and in the Properties panel > Data > Normals, enable Auto-Smooth, set the value under which the angles smooth.

Create a bevel all along the angles, thin enough to keep them sharp, it may need a bit of knife work if you have triangles or ngons. After that, smooth your object in the Tools panel, and give it a Subdivision Surface modifier. If you're supposed to 3D print the object, I guess you just need to apply the Subsurf.


Pasting Flipped Animation Dope Sheet I am following a tutorial on how to make a walking animation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=548&v=gFf5eGCjUUg&feature=emb_logo) and at 8:52, it says in the dope sheet to press shift-control-V to paste the animation flipped. Whenever I do this it only does it for the spine and head and not the arms or legs. I named all the bones appropriately (RightHand and LeftHand or RightArmIK and LeftArmIK) but still whenever I try to paste the flipped animation it doesn't work. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Doesn't paste anything that says left and right

So I went and renamed all the bones to .R or .L and it worked then so I guess right and left don't work in the dope sheet.


Blender GreasePencil fill problems I finally decided to explore Blender 2.8 Beta (I still keep the 2.79) - in particular as I wanted to explore the GreasePencil object.

So far I suffer and struggle to get the workflow. In particular with the fill color function.

I draw a face outline and when I try to fill it, the color covers only portion of the surface.

I tried to check if the points are all located on the same surface (i.e. one axis is locked) - I didn't find the lock option. I work with Front X-Z, camera view.
I repeated the sketch without touching the view to ensure that all points stay on the same plan, I still get erratic fill color.

I tried to go the Edit and Sculpt modes. Yet, it takes couple of hours to place every point at place.

I then created a new layer and wanted to use its alpha feature but it crashes constantly. I can only feel color if the strokes are on the same layers.

Thanks in advance for any input, advice to tackle the issue

As per Antonio Vazquez, Blender Developpers, the issue was the leak size.

It should be defined as 3px, in my case it was 35.

I was also advised to download the new version of yesterday.

It works now.

FYI, the architecture was slightly modified, the brushes and specifications don't appear anymore on the top but on Active Tool and Workspace settings tab, under Brush.


Make the original mirrored object invisible The top object is the original object, and the bottom is that which is mirrored.  Is there a way to make the top object invisible while keeping the mirrored object there?

Don't know how to do this properly, but here is what I came up with:

You could create another object that envelops the object you want to hide and use a boolean modifier with difference set as the operation. Then just hide the enveloping object as shown in the image :-

You could offset the mirrored object's UVs (see image) by (1, 1), then in the shader substract (1, 1) from UV coordinates - the mirrored object will have original UVs and the original object will have negative coordinates. Enable alpha clipping in the material, make transparent everything that has UV coordinates less than 0 and the original object should be invisible. Similar results could achieved by comparing the coordinates of axis the object was mirrored along. The original object would still cast shadows though so beware


Extruding along an edge without creating new faces So I am working on a fun little project. It's been months since I last created something in blender and even that was my first time. First up: here is the file.

I cannot for the life of me figure out how to make all the edges "extrude" (maybe it's the wrong word) so that this shuriken gets blades.

I've been googling for hours, but I cannot seem to describe what I want in a simple search query. I hope someone knows what I mean, any help is greatly appreciated!

P.S. After making the blades I would like them to kind of "inverse bevel". I couldn't find any info on that either, so if anyone could point me into a direction I'd be quite happy.

It was scaling along normals als Mr Zak pointed out


Cloth Sim-Same value but different results, why? I am an amateur to Cloth Sim. These 2 results under the same values. Why are they different?
Which setting controls the size and quantities of the wrinkles? Somehow, the more I try the more confusing.

Thanks for your time. :D

There is the mash and one testing above. How could I achieve big folds and higher quantity?

Check the scale of your model. For realistic simulations you really need to fit to real-world scales - so it should be, say, 1m top to bottom. Don't forget to 'Apply Scale' on your mesh (otherwise it will still behave at its old size). I'm not familiar with the 2.8x cloth settings (I'm more used to 2.79) but 5kg vertex mass would seem way too high. If my assumptions are correct that is the effective weight of each vertex in the mesh. So if the whole garment would normally weigh 500g, if there are 500 vertices each should be 1g, not 5kg! Set the scale and mass correct for ‘real world’ physics and re-run the simulation.


Newly added part of mesh won't move with Armature I'm just learning how to create my own textures and materials so I can add tears and other emotions to my models face, only the tears are something I made separately and then added at the end. I tried weight painting, joining the meshes together, adding the tears to my Head vertex group with 1 weight, and parenting with automatic weights but still the tears will not move with the head or anything for that matter. Also I'm still super new to all of this.

Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

In your Armature modifier, the effect is limited to the vertex group named Armature (not sure why).

Either :

remove the vertex group restriction in the armature modifier
add your tears to the Armature vertex group (seems safer)


How can I get rid of this weird barrier? I appended the Utopia kit from Kitbash, and with it came this weird fog-like barrier. If I zoom out at all, I can no longer see the plane or any objects, even if I undo or hide everything. Why is this happening, and how do I fix it? It is EXTREMELY obstructive.

Your clipping end distance is set too low;


programmatically generate road with moving car I am a Direct2D/C++ programmer and I want to experiment the procedural 3D animation of a street based on a text file. In the text file, I would be having something like this,

Length (in meters)  Curvature(Angle)     Uphill (Angle)       Downhill(Angle)

1000                     -                   -                      20°

300                      20° (left)          -                       -

500                      5° (right)          30°                     -

This means, for 1 kilometre the street is straight with 20° downhill. The next 300 meters the street has 20° curve (no uphill and no downhill). After that for the next 500 meters the street has 5° towards right direction with 30° uphill. So, programmatically I need to generate road details (terrain).

As for beginning, the street does not have any landscape (no trees, no buildings, no traffic signs, etc.) and only one car is moving inside the lane in a variable speed. I need to see the car movement using chase cam view.

Is it possible to implement my requirement using Blender (if needed, with some add-ons)? Or, am I better off with some other tool?

This is definitely possible with Blender, and not at all outside the scope of Blender (which is a scriptable animation tool) But you do have to learn the Python API since I don't think any existing addons do this.

Example of Blender generating scenes: http://cgchan.com/suicidator/


How can I make a texture follow the edges of my model? I have a cylinder with a rounded tip, I have tried to rotate a checker texture by plugging texture coordinate generated into a mapping vector and then into the texture vector but still I have the texture make these arches across the sides of my cylinder, I would like the texture to wrap around in a circle around my model

Blender use “Checker texture” as 3D texture, that is the reason for curvature on non-cubic shapes (like your).

You can imagine 3D texture like a volume of black and white cubes glued together in real world. If you shape this volume into your cylinder shape you get exactly that curvature on surface.

To wrap object by checker texture you should use UV socket in "Texture Coordinates" node (instead Generated). To make it works you have to unwrap your object firts (if it’s not already unwrapped automatically).

In your case try to unwrap existing object by “Cylinder Projection” see tutorial here ...

... or even better by “Follow Active Quad” type. See details in Blender’s Manual how to use it. Don't skip “Note” paragraph that is essential to get correct result (90°grid). Or here - nicely explained

Alternatively

You can start from scratch ... add Cylinder object (that's unwrapped automaticaly). Since you choose UV (in Texture Coordinate node output) you get something like this.

If you go to "UV Editor" blender's layout, switch your object to edit mode and select all vertices. Grid appears in an UV Editor, so you can see how the mesh faces are unwrapped.

Add more loops (Ctrl+R)

Scale them to your shape. Go back to UV Editor and rearrange vertices to get more even grid for texture.


How to give an object alpha material? I'm currently using a plane to conceal a few meshes in my scene (i'm using Cycles). This plane has a white emission surface, the same color as the background.

Is it possible to, instead of using a white material, give this plane an alpha material? Anything hidden behind this plane should thus not render.
It's worth mentioning that some objects are only partially concealed by the plane, thus I can not simply remove it from the scene.

For example:

In the image, I have a scene with two cubes, a plane and a monkey. The plane currently has an "alpha" shader/setting (this is the thing I want) assigned to it.

When rendered, the scene will look something like this:

Anything behind the plane will disappear from the render, whilst anything in front of it will not be affected.

It's worth mentioning that some objects are only partially concealed by the plane, thus I can not simply remove it from the scene.

Instead of an emission shader just add a "Holdout" shader and anything behind it will be left out.


Clipping timeline at certain frame It it possible to prevent timeline cursor going further than the end frame? For example, I have only 100 frames, but the cursor can go to 105.

In the Playback panel, enable the Limit Playhead to Frame Range option:


Addons don't install I've installed addons before, but recently when I upload the addon into blender, and I search for the addon, nothing shows. I'm not unzipping the file, so I'm not sure what's wrong? In the bottom right, when it shows the file you install, it just shows this. Is that supposed to be happening?

Under the add-ons look for your category to the left, such as rigging, select it, and look for your add-on. If its still not there, then maybe you could try moving the file around on your laptop or desktop.


Can symmetrize by used with the multires modifier? I was sculpting a hand on a character with a multires modifier, and I hid the rest of the character (including the other hand). Because the other hand was hidden it didn't get effected by the sculpting symmetry. So my question is, can the sculpting that I did on that hand somehow be mirrored to the other hand while still keeping the multires modifier? Something similar to the Symmetrize feature of Dyntpo?

Yes, you can use the edit-mode Symmetrize tool.

  EditMode -> Mesh (Menu) -> Symmetrize

Note, there was a bug with Multi-res modifier which is now fixed in daily builds and will be included in the 2.77 release (commit).


How do you snap lines to a grid? Can you snap lines to a grid for precise drawing, for example in autocad you can put snap to grid on and the polyline will snap to intersections on the grid for precise drawing. If blender can do this can I please have an explanation on how. I'm new to the blender community so please help. Thank you.

Snapping can be activated using the little magnet icon.  Next to this is a menu for setting the snap type.  What you can't see in the image is that after I activated the tool, I pressed g to move the object and then x to constrain the movement to the x-axis.

If you have the menu set to Increment as shown above, then you can also disable the magnet icon and hold down Ctrl to use the snapping feature.

Conversely, if you do still have the magnet icon activated, holding Ctrl will disable snapping so long as Ctrl is held.

Holding Shift will allow you to move the object in smaller increments.  This is true with or without snapping enabled.

I feel I should mention that snapping can also snap the vertices of one object to  another object by changing the menu selection to Face.  Even though it's unrelated to what you mention, I wanted to point out that the tool has more functionality than just for what you asked here since it's also very useful for re-topology, aligning model components to one another, etc...


Face edges angle - python How can I find angles between the edges in a face,
and then make a loop for all faces in an object.
I know I can set it up in a blender and just read it, but I'd like to send these angles to a text file. How to do it with Python

Project into 2D
The verts and edges are wound in order. Knowing the face normal can walk around the edges in a face, using the vector of the "incoming" edge, and vector of "outgoing" edge can calculate the internal angle as as outlined in Finding Internal Angles of a Polygon  Blender winds its faces in a counter-clockwise direction.
IMO other answers  fail to take this into account, see below
Blender has an angle_signed method for 2d vectors.  To use here may require having an arbitrary "Greenwich" point as a reference.

If not colinear, The three verts of the 2 edges form a plane

The corner of 2 edges is the middle vert (b) Subtract
this from other vert of each edge (new origin)

The cross product of the two edges is the axis of rotation (normal to
plane)

Change the space to project (rotate) corner plane into XY plane to represent the corner edges as 2D xy vectors.

Test script. By way of point of difference have used an edit mode bmesh. In edit mode, select the faces you wish to see the internal angles of, then run script.
import bpy
from mathutils import Matrix, Vector
from bpy import context
from math import degrees, atan2, pi
import bmesh
# project into XY plane,
up = Vector((0, 0, 1))

ob = context.object
me = ob.data
bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)
def edge_angle(e1, e2, face_normal):
    b = set(e1.verts).intersection(e2.verts).pop()
    a = e1.other_vert(b).co - b.co
    c = e2.other_vert(b).co - b.co
    a.negate()
    axis = a.cross(c).normalized()
    if axis.length < 1e-5:
        return pi # inline vert

    if axis.dot(face_normal) < 0:
        axis.negate()
    M = axis.rotation_difference(up).to_matrix().to_4x4()

    a = (M @ a).xy.normalized()
    c = (M @ c).xy.normalized()

    return pi - atan2(a.cross(c), a.dot(c))

selected_faces = [f for f in bm.faces if f.select]
for f in selected_faces:
    edges = f.edges[:]
    print("Face", f.index, "Edges:", [e.index for e in edges])
    edges.append(f.edges[0])

    for e1, e2 in zip(edges, edges[1:]):

        angle = edge_angle(e1, e2, f.normal)
        print("Edge Corner", e1.index, e2.index, "Angle:", degrees(angle))

Test run on concave ngon

2x2 grid center vert dissolved. Bottom vert moved to origin making a 270 degree internal angle between edges 5 and 1
Face 0 Edges: [1, 6, 2, 7, 3, 4, 0, 5]
Edge Corner 1 6 Angle: 45.0
Edge Corner 6 2 Angle: 180.0
Edge Corner 2 7 Angle: 90.0
Edge Corner 7 3 Angle: 180.0
Edge Corner 3 4 Angle: 90.0
Edge Corner 4 0 Angle: 180.0
Edge Corner 0 5 Angle: 45.0
Edge Corner 5 1 Angle: 270.0

For file IO consult the python docs. (Or see other answers).
Re other answers, angles when run on ngon above
@lemon
[135.00000034162267, 0.0, 90.00000250447816, 0.0, 90.00000250447816, 0.0, 135.00000034162267, 90.00000250447816]

@MohammadHosseinJamshidi
[45.00000125223908, 90.00000250447816, 180.00000500895632, 90.00000250447816, 180.00000500895632, 90.00000250447816, 180.00000500895632, 45.00000125223908]


Object is not visible against the background of another object I have two basic object in the scene

When I choose orthogonal view (X) the smaller cube is not visible against the background of the bigger one.

The problem appears in 2.83 and higher. Why can it be?
How it looked in 2.82a:

Most likely this is due to outlines settings or around that:


Is it possible to use the startup.blend UI layout in older files? Is there a way to open files without changing the UI layout?

Sometimes in older files the layout will be in the old 2.4x style, which can be annoying.

One way would seem to be appending everything in, but that gets tedious with having to do it over again and again for objects, materials, textures, etc.

When loading the file from the blender file browser uncheck the Load UI checkbox, which is on the left hand side in the toolbar, to ignore the layout in the file to be loaded:

Note: that this will keep the UI of the current file. It may help to reopen the startup file (Ctrl+N) to restore your default layout, and then open the file without loading the UI.

You can also go to File> User Preferences> File and uncheck the Load UI checkbox in the Save & Load section and save your user settings so that this is the default behaviour for blender when opening files:

In newer versions you need to click on the gear on the top right of the window to see the LoadUI option.


How to pass color value from input to output in custom python node I want to make custom node that can be used in compositing nodes. I stuck in part when I need to pass color value (and do some operation on that) from input to output socket.

def init(self, context):
    inp = self.inputs.new('NodeSocketColor', "Input 1")
    inp2 = self.inputs.new('NodeSocketColor', "Input 2")

    out = self.outputs.new('NodeSocketColor', "Out")
    out2 = self.outputs.new('NodeSocketColor', "Out 2")

I don't know how to set up links (inp -> out, inp2 -> out2). Outputs are always connected to the first input socket.
How to change value before outputting.

From the code above I'm not exactly sure how to give a contextually direct solution, but in an attempt to help move along the issue...

Set up a node tree reference:

tree = bpy.context.scene.node_tree
Set up a link reference:

your_links = tree.links
Make your links:

your_link = your_links.new(your_node.outputs[0],another_node.inputs[0])

To change the values you could do something like:

your_node.inputs[0].default_value = 0.3


Can I play my animation in full screen without rendering? I made an animation and I want to see it playing without all these menus, lines etc. Is it possible?

You can start playing the animation and then, in the screen layout menu, you can simply choose "3D View Full" for remove all the menus and display it.


Animation: Creating random pulses (not noise) on a F-Curve with a noise modifier on a F-curve I can "shake" something randomly and continuously.

But I need a couple of single "pulses" randomly spread over a sequence of frames with a random amplitude.

How can I do this, when I don't want to animate any single pulse manually?

You can add some different noise modifiers, and restrict their frame range.


how to combine two Maximo animation without repeating from origin im trying to combine two animation (to make it simple i duplicate the same animation three times). However, when the second and third animation started , it reset the position of the armature to the original position where the first animation started.
here is a video to explain :

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TH4uucxAoxsmUTQiNhzZG6HIR5F1ozhH/view
any help please ?

Modifying via the graph editor
If you open the graph editor, you'll probably see something like this:

where the crenelated parts are the character translation along time.
You can select it and translate it along the Y axis of the editor windows GY:

Shifting the armature (or a parent of it)
You can also keyframe the armature (or a parent of it) position and set its curve to "constant".
But this is a bit harder to adjust because curves scales and orientation are not necessarily the same.

Repeat with offset
You can also use a "cycles" modifier. Though, as there are probably many curves, you'll need to set it a lot of times. And practically, this may be painful.


Why Ctrl+P menu would be different, and no "Bone" option On an empty project, when I select mesh and bone, then hit Ctrl+P, I will see "Bone" in the menu.

Download a rig from online
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/284185/MinecraftPlayer.blend

And try to attach a weapon onto the rig
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/284185/Bow.fbx

However when try to attach the weapon to bone (extrude right hand with extra bone), menu is now different. Any idea how to have the bone option show up?

That is referred to as a context menu, the available options vary depending on the active item that the action will be performed on. The active object is the one that will become the parent of the remaining selection, it can usually be identified by being highlighted in a lighter colour that the other selected objects.

In your first example you are parenting to an armature.

In the second example you are parenting to a mesh object (that is why you get the vertex parent options).

If you are parenting to a curve object you get curve options.

Parenting to a lattice you get lattice options.

While if you parent to an empty or metaball object you only get simple object parenting options.


Audio playback timing is inconsistent I'm still quite new to Blender and video editing but I'll do my best to provide as detailed of info as I can.

The issue I'm dealing with is I used a screen recorder to record audio for the voiceover for a video I'm making. I then went to edit out the cuts and add in still images I'd created for this video. As soon as I start adding in any images and making any cuts in the audio, the audio gets very random and will sometimes play back faster then normal, and when I pause and hit play, it will start playing several frames back, causing the audio to go out of sync with the current frame. Let's say I'm on frame 580 when I pause. When I hit play again, the sound will start playing from, say, frame 560. Another time it may start playing from frame 555 when I pause on the exact same frame, so it's very inconsistent.

I have had video-audio sync issues in the past but that was when using both the video and audio from a screen recording, and I was able to find a solution to that issue, but this time, what's baffling is that this is so inconsistent, other then that I can guarantee the sync issue will eventually start happening as soon as I start doing any edits. It does not seem to happen as long as I leave the video+audio in a single, raw, unedited cut. This also does not seem to be quite the same issue as I ran into before as the fix for that is not possible for this issue, the option for fixing that other sync issue was a setting in the video strip, which I'm not even using for this video, I just delete that part, and that setting isn't even an option in the audio properties.

I'm using Blender 2.8a and I know there is a 2.8c out now, but am not sure if this is a known bug or if it's been fixed or not, couldn't find any dev notes on the Bender.org site to see what bugs have been fixed or are waiting to be fixed.

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions I'd love to hear them.

So I was able to get the video edited without any problems this time. Turns out my original issue was indeed the Sync Mode setting, which needed to be in AV Sync for the audio playback timing to work. The later issue was also causes by the Rendering options being set to the wrong FPS. It was set to 30 fps when the files I was importing were recorded in 15 fps. Once I got those sorted out everything worked and I was able to create and upload the video with no further problems. Thanks for your help @bertmoog.


High poly in object mode, low poly in edit mode When I apply the subdivision modifier and smoothing, the object does get a ton more faces, but when I go into edit mode, it shows it as if those faces aren't there, and it's bugging the heck out of me.

Wireframe shading:

Edit mode:

Highly likely you just did not apply the Subdivision Surface modifier. Simply go to the modifier tab and hit "apply" under the Subdivision Modifier, then all the correct vertices will appear in edit mode.


Automate adding a Surface on a cut Mesh I am completely new and following some tutorials. I am preparing a Abyss Walker from DS3 for a 3D printer and splitting up the figure. I wonder is there any tool or option to automatically add a surface to a split Mesh?

As you can See I split it to reduce the amount of supporting structures. It would be nice to avoid the hollow (pun not intended). Would be cool if there is an option to add surfaces where I cut it.

Try the Bisect Function

3D View > Mesh > Bisect, requires a Face Selection

This allows you to split the mesh along a plane you can define by dragging, or numerically. If your Operator Panel is not open, hit F6 to show it.
It come with a bunch of useful options, like

Fill, which fills the cut edges with faces
Clear Inner/Outer which remove one or both sides of the cut
Axis Threshold that gives the cut adge some fuzzines in where the cut-off happens.


How do I make and apply a Normal Map? I'm having problems trying to make a Normal map. Essentially I want the High Res model detail to go on to the Lower Res one. And that's done trough Normal Maps correct?

Here is the blend file:

https://mega.nz/#!EQ11RYgR!kwZ57m9rj-nQx7dTKSlOfLcM_4eOlhTOR1GBoLvCmDQ

I managed to go this far, but the texture doesn't look quite there. It looks pixalated in some places, and the effect ain't showing on the Low Res model either.

What do I need to do?

Ray distance

You should increase your baking ray distance in order to capture the whole highpoly surface. Here's a comparison between different values (0 on the left, 0.1 on the right),

As said in the manual's page, the parameter controls

  [...] how far a point on another object can be away from the point on the active object. Only needed for Selected to Active.

Low margin settings helps us to see how some parts are missing in the image on the left. Once naked correctly dont' forget to set "non color data" and to connect to the vector socket in the shader.

Notice how the wrinkles and other detais are correctly transferred upon the low-poly mesh.


Can you Cut Copy and Paste like this in Blender? I want to know if there's a quick and easy way to copy and paste faces or geo in general like I could in modo. I literally would press control C, Control v and paste or copy to my hearts content quickly. Is that possible in blender?

Yes you can.

Select an object while in object mode
Switch to edit mode Tab
Switch to face select (3 in 2.80)
Select faces that you want to duplicate. Use left click to select in Blender 2.80, right click in Blender 2.79b and earlier (hold SHIFT to select more than one face)
Duplicate selection SHIFT+D
(Optional) Separate the selection into a new object using P > Selection

In object mode you can also duplicate entire objects using SHIFT+D or copy and paste using CTRL+C and CTRL+V.


Subdividing cubes at different intervals I'm trying to subdivide a cube at different intervals depending on the length, for example, if I make a 1x1x2 cube and subdivide it, it becomes 8 sections vertically (which is what I want) but also 8 horizontally (bad) I would like it to be 8 vertically and 4 horizontally. Now I can get around this by taking a 1x1x1 cube and subdividing it to have 4x4 segments, and copy pasting another one above to get the desired result, but I'm wondering if there is a better way to do it so I don't have to copy and past each correct block? So I could take a 1x1x2 block and say divide it by 8 on the z axis but only 4 on the x and y? Thank you for your help

The incorrect amount of subdivisions, requires much more clicking to do what I want, but doesn't require copy pasting

The correct amount of subdivisions, but requires copy pasting and seems inefficient

Use Loop Cuts (Ctrl+R)

Position the mouse to select the axis,

Using the Mouse Wheel you can control how many subdivisions you want on each axis.


How to import materials to a downloaded model? Beginner question here. I just downloaded this pokemon model from models resource https://www.models-resource.com/3ds/pokemonxy/model/9320/ and used Blender Source Tools to import it into Blender. When I imported the model however and switched from solid to textured mode, the model is just pure white. No texture at all.

I know about having to unwrap and deal with the whole uv map shenanigans, which is something I really don't want to do, especially considering the 70+ models that I want to edit to add some extras to them so they could be even better for animations in Source Filmmakeer.

I've searched all over Youtube and every video I've seen where the person imported an smd file didn't have the textures applied, but when I watched someone's video where they imported an obj file, the textures were automatically applied. (Though that was in Blender 2.66a, so I'm not sure if that has anything to do with it) I could use a little help with figuring out how to do that.

These guys actually have UVmaps. Just import the DAE file, go to Material view instead of Texture view and check in Shadeless for every material.


Copy light location in relation to object I am just starting out with blender and could use some help.
I imported an .fbx from Revit and it works great. I have some streetlights in this project and when i change one of them in blender then all of them change.
Exactly like I want. But now I want to add a lightsource to all of the streetlights, and blender won't add them to all streetlights. I set the lightsource as a child of the streetlight. So when I duplicate the streetlight the lightsource will also copy with it's parrent. However I allready have all the streetlights placed (in original model). So this doesn't help me.
Is there some way to copy the location of the lightsource in relation to the streetlight, and then paste a new lightsource to a different streetlight using those coordinates? Or is there a different way to add the lightsources to all the streetlights?

Something along these lines may work. This version assumes that your lamp-posts are instances, and the only transforms responsible for putting them where they are, are their own, without the interference of parenting or constraints. You may need to arrange that, by, for instance, clearing their parenting, keeping their transforms.

Make a backup of your file
Alt D create an instance of one of your lamp-posts
(Probably, you'll want to isolate it / hide everything else, so you can see what you're doing)
Ctrl A, or via the Header > Object menu, > Clear all its transforms
Position your light where you would like it, relative to the lamp-post
M Add the light and the lamp-post to a new collection, called, say, 'Practical'
With Shift C the 3D cursor at World 0, Shift A add a new Collection Instance to the scene, based on the new collection.
Unhide your original lamp-posts, select them, and then your
'Practical' Collection Instance, so it is the active object.

Now we want to make a copy of the Collection Instance in the place of all the existing lamp-posts. I'm surprised there isn't an operator / add-on to do this without scripting, but unless someone finds one for us, here goes.. run this script:
import bpy

C = bpy.context
D = bpy.data

src = C.active_object
src.select_set(False)
sel = C.selected_objects

cp_col  = D.collections.new('Practicals')
C.scene.collection.children.link(cp_col)

for ob in sel:
    cp = src.copy()
    cp.matrix_world = ob.matrix_world
    cp_col.objects.link(cp)

it should create the copies in place, and put them in a new collection called 'Practicals'. (plural)
Hopefully, you should now be able to hide the original lamp-posts, and see them replaced with practical, light-bearing instances. And be left in a state from which you can change all the lights / do whatever you like, by editing the objects in the 'Practical' collection from which the Collection Instance is derived.


How to show collections in blender 2.8 I was creating a project in blender 2.8. I unintentionally pressed the 1 button, and now only one of the objects (each object is inside a collection) appears on the screen. All other objects are hidden.

How can I see the collections again? I don't want to loose all the work of the previous hours.

Besides, something as basic as that should have documentation. One hour of search in google, stackoverflow, and the blender 2.8 documentation for terms like "unhide collections" or "show all collections" or "unhide objects" do not return any working solution. This was a basic feature of blender 2.7. What happened?

Obs: Alt+H does nothing.

TL;DR: AltH in the Outliner (thanks @aliasguru).

There are a few ways to hide/show collections in 2.8:

In the Outliner area (by default there's one in the top right), clicking the eye icon toggles visibility of the corresponding collection.
Pressing number-row numbers (123 etc.) will switch to the nth collection (according to the order in the outliner), hiding the others.
Pressing Shift + number will toggle visibility for the nth collection.
There is a collections section in the 3D view > N panel > View tab. This one seems to be the most convenient for toggling visibility on lots of collections quickly, using the click+drag toggle behavior.

Pressing CtrlH in the 3D view brings up a "hide collection" dialog which behaves like like pressing numbers (switches to the clicked collection hiding the others).
As noted previously, pressing AltH in the Outliner unhides all collections.

Also important to note, that the old hide in viewport/hide in render properties still exist on collections and are completely separate from the visibility set by the controls describe above. Controls for those can be found in the right click menu in the outliner, under Visibility:

I'm not really sure why it works this way currently, I wouldn't be surprised if it changes in subsequent releases.


How to make an object appear/visible along a path I want to animate a logo.
I have this hexagon following a path and want the elllipse to appear after the hexagon passed this specific point of the path (making it look like the hexagon leaves a tail).

I tried several ways with the build modifier (including sorting elements).

I got it done with the upper right part of the ellipse, by seperating the ellipse in two parts. I am not sure if I should continue splitting the whole ellipse or if there is a better way to achieve what I want.
I did not find any solution to my problem on the internet.

I think another approach would be: Creating an invisible box around the hexagon and make the ellipse appear after it passed through the invisible box. Comparable to this: How to make one object gradually disappear as it passes through another object
But I am not sure, because the ellipse would enter the box on one side and leave it through anoter side.

Could somebody please help?

Thanks

To keep it simple, you might consider just using the native properties of Blender curves.

Note that in this example, the path-curve is not cyclic. It's made by converting a mesh ( a circle, scaled in Edit Mode in Y ) with one of its vertices V ripped, then converted to a curve with two ends at the same place.

A curve can have a renderable bevel profile .. either its own, (a circle with variable resolution) or another curve you assign for the purpose, which will be swept along its local Z.
The profile can be tapered along its length, using another curve
The start and end points of the bevel along the curve can be set, and animated. So the curve can be made to 'grow' along its length.
The taper can be mapped either to the entire curve, or just the part which is beveled.

The illustration shows a curve, its taper, and its profile.

Your hexagon can be given a Follow Path constraint along the main curve, with its 'Offset' animated in sync with the curve's Bevel End setting.

..or maybe with the taper mapped to the beveled section:


Is it possible for individual faces to have separate materials from the rest of a mesh? I've only got maybe a week's worth of total experience with Blender and I figured it would be fun to attempt something that isn't overly complex, i.e. something cube-like, so I decided to recreate the Companion Cube from Portal 1.    In modeling and figuring out the center circle pieces I noticed something I missed earlier though. See how to the top of the center circle the pink actually continues into the base of the circle?

I thought I could use loop cuts aligned with the cut out parts of the cube core

which I would then separate from the rest of the mesh in order to have separate materials but I learned that with a subdivision surface modifier involved the results are not that great.

Is there a way for only the two faces resulting from loop cutting to have the pink material and also not go wacky or am I going about this in a way that won't work?
Thanks in advance for any and all help, assistance, and advice given and shared.

You can assign multiple materials to the same mesh, and then in edit mode select faces and in the material tab assign those faces to whichever material you want.


How can I obtain an even vertex density base mesh? I modeled a simple wall with a window using a cube and loop cuts. I also set the crease of each edge to 1.0. I intend to sculpt it now to get a rougher look. The problem is that when I add a subdivision level with the multiresolution modifier,  I get a mesh with a highly varying vertex density.

Is there any way I can subdivide it to get a base mesh with an even vertex density?

Add loop cuts to the larger parts of the wall ctrl R, so that the size in between the loops is about the same as the thickness of your wall. Then subdivide, if the base mesh has about the same size topology, then subdividing will yield same size topology.


Error while exporting preset in sapling:add tree I've created a tree on Blender but when it comes to export preset it gives me this error:

I can't understand what the problem is. Do I have to change some paths in the user settings?

Ok, I've solved this problem and it was simply a permission problem.
Blender needs to have administrator rights to write in the "presets" folder, so it won't export anything in there if you don't give the permissions.
What you have to do is to right click on the folder "presets" -> Properties -> Security and give to user the permissions to write.


H.264 encoding settings for High Quality HD (1080p) and High Quality UHD (4K) Producing animations/video is quite new for me. I want to create Quicktime/H.264 videos and I have difficulties to find out what H.264 encoding settings to use for 1080p (25 fps) and 4K (25 fps). By the way is 25 fps the best choice for 1080p and 4K?

When I want to create a high quality H.264 video, what settings are relevant?

I guess high quality means "lossless output"?
I have seen this post about bitrate but what values to set in Blender for Bitrate and Minimum and Maximum rate? It is my understanding that the recommended bitrate is 8 Mbps for 1080p and 35-45 Mbps for 4K. But what does this mean for Blender? What values to set for Bitrate and Minimum and Maximum rate? What values to use for Buffer Size? How to determine Buffer Size?
Should I change the values for GOP size? How to determine GOP size?
What "Mux" settings?

Could you maybe explain those concepts a bit?

I really appreciate the discussion but my question is: what values should I enter in the encoding panel? Can someone maybe upload a screenshot of the panel with the recommended values for 1080p and 4k?

Based on the answer I got below it is my understanding that for High Quality HD these would be the Quicktime / H.264 settings:

Unfortunately H264 is never going to give you brilliant quality video. It was designed to be efficient on storage and network bandwidth. Take a look at mjpeg or similar for higher quality video.

GOP stands for Group of pictures. And basically means how many frames between I frames. Generally you would have 1 I frame to 24 p frames so the GOP would be 25. The more I frames you have the higher quality picture but the higher storage and network cost too.

I frame is an interframe and is a complete picture. P frames are predicted frames and made up of the predicted changes between the last I frame and the next frame.

Limiting the max bitrate will cause Blender to over compress the image and movement or dark areas will look worse.  I can't see any benefit in setting the minimum bitrate


How to weight paint complicated meshes? I'm trying to make wings. I want to animate them later so I have to rig and weight paint it.

Does anyone know if there is a simple way to weight paint the space between the layers of feathers? Or ho to make it simpler in another way

I found a solution. I read that you have to turn of Front faces only and activate 2d falloff.
Then all of the sides of the mech will be painted.


What is the differance between "Texture View" and "Material View" in BGE or BI? I use BGE a lot and when I play games, I find it's useful to be in texture view or material view versus solid view, because otherwise you can't see anything. What is the difference between these two settings? sometimes they seem different, but sometimes they look the exact same. In texture view, occasionally everything looks "shadeless" This happens when there are no lamps in the scene. But when there are lamps, both views are identical.

Material
  A fast approximation of the applied material. Some effects, such as procedural textures may not be shown.
  Textured
  Shows meshes with an image applied using the mesh’s active UV Map. The UV Map’s applied face texture will be shown.

Quoted from the manual.

The BGE does not support procedural textures, so in many cases Material and Textured view will look the same.

The difference comes when you have a texture on the object.
Material will only show the color for the object's material, never any textures.

Textured shows the active texture (even if you have turned off the texture in the texture tab of the properties window.)

(the Viewport Shading names make a lot of sense)


unable to switch to edit mode I'm an absolute Blender newbie and just taking my first steps.
I've created some shape and want to apply coloring and texture now, after placing lamps all around my object to see it, I now can't switch to Edit Mode and I'm not sure why, can anybody help me please?

I only have Object Modein the mode selector:

I'm using version 2.79 on Windows

I just had the same isuue (and I'm a COMPLETE newbie to Blender). I just closed the program and opened it again, and then clicked "General" when the program opened again/ the window popped up. Now I've got all the options in the top left-hand corner.


Rotate object's mesh so it matches another object's rotation Suppose we have two cube objects: Obj1 and Obj2. Let's say Obj1's Euler rotation is Vector((0,0,0)) and Obj2's rotation is Vector((0,0,45)) How can I rotate Obj1's mesh so that it matches Obj2's rotation? I know that BMesh lets me rotate vertices of an object but I don't know how to implement it properly. I tried this and it didn't work:

import bpy
import mathutils
from mathutils import  Quaternion, Vector, Matrix
import bmesh
import math
from math import radians

context = bpy.context
data = bpy.data

obj1 = data.objects['Obj1']
obj2 = data.objects['Obj2']

from_quat_rot = obj1.rotation_quaternion
to_quat_rot = obj2.rotation_quaternion

difference_quat = from_quat_rot.rotation_difference(to_quat_rot)
difference_angle = difference_quat.angle

print(f"difference quaternion: {difference_quat}")
print(f"difference angle: {difference_angle}")

vector_zero = Vector((0, 0, 0))
bm = bmesh.new()
bm.from_mesh(obj1.data)
#bmesh.ops.rotate(bm, cent=vector_zero, verts=bm.verts, matrix=Matrix.Rotation(radians(difference_angle), 4, 'Z'))
bmesh.ops.rotate(bm, cent=vector_zero, verts=bm.verts, matrix=difference_quat.to_matrix())
bm.to_mesh(obj1.data)
bm.free()

Unfortunately I don't know linear algebra so I probably won't understand if you provide me with an equation, I'd rather prefer a bit of python code. Thanks.

If your objects are in Euler rotation mode, then the quaternion wont be set. For any mode using

ob.matrix_world.to_euler()
ob.matrix_world.to_quaternion()

will give the global euler and quaternion rotation respectively.

import bpy
import mathutils
from mathutils import  Quaternion, Vector, Matrix
import bmesh
import math
from math import radians

context = bpy.context
data = bpy.data

obj1 = data.objects['Cube']
obj2 = data.objects['Cube.001']

from_quat_rot = obj1.matrix_world.to_quaternion()
to_quat_rot = obj2.matrix_world.to_quaternion()
from_euler_rot = obj1.rotation_euler
to_euler_rot = obj2.rotation_euler

difference_quat = from_quat_rot.rotation_difference(to_quat_rot)
difference_angle = difference_quat.angle

print(f"difference angle: {difference_angle}")

vector_zero = Vector((0, 0, 0))
bm = bmesh.new()
bm.from_mesh(obj1.data)
bmesh.ops.rotate(bm,
        cent=vector_zero,
        verts=bm.verts,
        matrix=Matrix.Rotation(difference_angle, 4, difference_quat.axis))
bm.to_mesh(obj1.data)
bm.free()

This rotates the mesh as expected.  Running again will have an accumulative effect.

could also

M = difference_quat.to_matrix()
obj1.data.transform(M)
obj1.data.update()


How To Convert Imported Identical Meshes to Instances (Duplicate Linked)? I was wondering if there is a way (or python script) to convert multiple identical meshes into instances? - where all other identical meshes are referring (instanced) to the first identical mesh e.g., BALUSTER.001.

The file was imported from ArchiCAD via FBX

As long as the origins of the various objects are in correct relation to each object, there is a simple way to do this. Select all objects that are supposed to share the same mesh data, then - in the 3D View - hit Ctrl + L to open the link menu. From there, choose Object Data:

This will re-use the mesh data from the last selected object on all other instances. You can tell that they are instances in the mesh data tab of the outliner. The user count (number next to the data name) should have appeared and increased to reflect the number of meshes that re-use the data:


Can I make a software inside Blender? I want to make a software for 3D geological modelling (it's a PhD project) and I'm researching the best way to achieve this. Below it's a GIF I've made with Blender to illustrate how it would work.

The user would create differente soil or rock layers by interpolating between lines drawed in 2D planes. By interpolating between planes, the software would create volumes.

The example above is very simple and such is my description, the goal would be to make possible to achieve very complex geometry like this one:

Being a Blender user for almost 10 years (but I've never used the API), I've initially tought Blender would be a good idea to start with.

After talking to some researchers who deal with both geosciences and programming, I was advised to try Qt. Qt really looks very good, and it also has a 3D specific module.

Anyway, the question is:

Is it possible to modify Blender so much trough it's API that it
can become a different software? One reduced in size, with only the
functions I want? For example, with just the basics of modelling and the functions I would create, like interpolations. Also, the software would have a completely different interface, specific for it's use.
It would not be a different Blender distribution, it would be a different software, using Blender modelling and tools underneath. I don't want to say to a potential user "go download Blender, and this add-on, and this other one". The goal is to have a ready to use software.
If it's possible, is it worth it (to modify Blender that much)?

License would not be a problem, because I plan to release the software as free and open source.

Thanks in advance.

Looks like you'd need to experiment.
Pick a small task, give yourself a week to solve it, reflect, iterate (cf. PDIA, Cynefin-complex, Fail faster).

Here's some ideas for you to test:

Making a different software out of Blender might require changing the source code, so try to build Blender from source. See if the build cycle is fast enough.
You'll likely need to remove the unnecesary tools from the user interface, so see if you can.
You'll likely need to add new tools or behaviours to the user interface, so see if you can.


How to generate final texture image for complete designed scene I designed a house interior, i used wooden texture and some other texture for walls and windows. How can i generate a final texture image so that i can use that image in open gles ? I added a example image with question. I have to generate image like this for my scene.

I'll start from the very beginning even though you said that you have texture painted some of the models since most of these steps will apply to everything you do when making assets for games or accelerated rendering.

1.) Select seams that will help to represent your model as a 2D image.  Try to imagine this step as if you are making a real model and wrapping paper around that model.  Paper does not stretch well so you'd have to cut the paper in such a way that it naturally fits to the contour of your model. Try to apply this idea to building your UV coordinates since this will help to eliminate texture stretching for 3D models.  It will also help to keep the texture resolution consistent across the model.  There are situations where you can ignore this but for now this should work well for you.

Step 1)  Select the edges that will form the seams for the UV island coordinates.

Step 2) With the edges select, press Ctrl-E then find Mark Seams, now those edges will be highlighted in red.

Step 3 and 4)  Select all the faces of your model,

then press the u and select UV Unwrap.  If I had added an extra vertical seam across from the one that I did add, then the UV islands would be able to take up more of the texture space.  That would be more efficient since less of the texture would be wasted on empty space.  You could also add another model's UV Islands to that empty space so that they both share the same texture.

Now in the UV Image Editor, add a new texture.  This will be the texture that you will bake your materials to.

Next, for models that have been texture painted, you will also want to do the following since this will help to eliminate the seams that are left from painting a model since Texture Paint does not have overdraw.  Baking does, so baking a texture after you have painted it will fix this issue.

So add a material and set it to be shadeless as shown in the following image.

Next, add the texture that you painted in as a material texture and be sure to set the mapping coordinates to UV as shown in the image.

Now go to the baking panel and set the render type to Full Render, this will work since the Material is already set to Shadeless.  (Full Render also allows you to bake multiple materials that are connected together in the Node Editor so when you are more comfortable with all this then you may want to use that as well.)

For comparison, here is the Texture Painted model that will show seams when it's displayed on a model.

Now press Bake and save your texture.  Be sure to set the Margin to whatever you feel is best.  I use 64. Now the color along the seams will be extended out past the edges of the UV coords.  For this to work, the UV islands should be at least a few pixels apart from one another.

This is basically the procedure for baking any materials using Blender Internal and this pretty much all applies to baking other types of passes such as Ambient Occlusion, Vertex Colors, etc...


Is Texture Paint While In Viewport Render Possible With Cycles? Is it possible to texture paint while rendering with Cycles?
I've done it with EEVEE but can't seem to find anyway to have cycles viewport update while texture painting.

No, render view in Cycles will not update as you paint, no fix for this.
I have spent a lot of time painting in blender, and in the newer post 2.8 builds I find that either Solid View or Material Preview are the best to paint in regardless of which renderer I have set up, and for preview of the paint I swap to the Shading workspace to see it or just set up a duplicate editor in a small view and set that one to render view.


The bevel tool is beveling too steeply As the picture shows, the bevel is doing it very steeply. What should I do?

You need to apply scale to the object before beveling to get a nice result. Go to object mode, select the object you want to bevel, then go to Object > Apply > Scale.

In edit mode, select the edge not face or vertex that you want to bevel, then press B.


How do you add a custom label to a vertex? I would simply like to put an arbitrary, non-mesh/curve text label next to any vertex that sticks there in a manner similar to the 3D cursor itself. I have not found a way to do this so far, but I would imagine Blender would not be so careless is to exclude the basic capacity for displaying text that even notepad and MS paint are capable of.

After installation ( Header > Edit > Preferences > Add-Ons tab ) the shipped '3D View: MeasureIt' add-on can be used to label vertices, just using the 'Label' option:

They can be rendered, too, but I don't think you can suppress the line between the text and the vertex..


How to add carbon fiber to cars? I am modeling Koenigsegg One and want to texture it like shown below:

Right now I am clueless on how I should approach this. Should I model the carbon fiber parts separately and stick it on top of the base mesh? Or should I UV Unwrap those parts and assign the carbon material to it?

What is the ideal way to texture something like this?

You might look at the cycles material car thread on Blenderartists and see if you can adapt soe of the materials from there - then you could just assign as needed to parts of the mesh directly, or use a black and white image uv mapped to the mesh as a stencil between node trees, combining materials into one tree. https://blenderartists.org/t/car-paint-materials-iridescent-layers-carbon-fiber-leather/536803/108?u=craig_jones


Is there a method to align 3D cursor's axes with selected vertecies? Is there an option to first line up an axis of the 3D cursor to be parallel to an imaginary line passing through two selected vertices, then without losing that relationship to line up a second 3D cursor axis with another set of selected vertices.
I want to find a method to setup an arbitrary coordinate system quickly at any moment.  Take the picture below for example.  I snapped the 3D cursor to the vertex I wish to move.  Is there a way to set the cursor's rotation so that one axis is parallel to an imaginary line that passes through the vertex closest to the 3D cursor and the last selected vertex while another 3D cursor axis is set parallel to an imaginary line that passes through the other two vertecies?
[

This sounds needlessly complex. This problem can be solved with moving a point on the line and selecting it when it is needed.
You want the cursor on any point P on given line L.

in vertex select mode , select line
right click > subdivide line, you will have point P now.
move point P by pressing g twice , this will move it along the line (And make the line yellow), place this on the line where you need the cursor to go. If you need exact number you can use .5 and -.5 to go 1/4 or 3/4 of the way on the line from the middle.
Shift +S snap cursor to selected
(optional) select point P , then one of your line vertices, F3> Merge > at Last , this will merge your vertex in when you are done with it.

If you need other "imaginary lines" you can use this method , build temporary (2 verts then f ) lines, and then delete the temporary lines when you are done lining up things.


How to project plane with image to another model I imported a plane and a openstreetmap model to coordinates and want the image of the plane projected to the osm model.

I know it can be done with simple uvmapping by hand but it is hard to align the image with te osm model. I think it is possible to project the image from the plane to the osm model, does somebody know how?

Thanks in advance!

Use the DataTransfer modifier to transfer the UVs of the plane to your meshes.


How do I make an object in my scene into an object I can instance using python? I'm in the process of writing an addon that generates buildings based on a group of assets such as bits of wall and roofing.

My current plan is to somehow dynamically save custom assets, including UV coordinate, textures, etc. to an object that I can create using python. (Much in the same way objects are typically created in python, only they would be defined by an object in the scene, rather than pre-defined by another piece of code)

For instance, when I want to create a Monkey with python, (and who wouldn't?) I can just call bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_monkey_add() and viola, I have a monkey. Is there a way to take my active object and dynamically create a function that is able to recreate it?

Feel free to ask further questions on my dilemma, as I feel I may not be explaining it very well!

Thanks!

You could select you own object and create a Group

Select your object(s)
Ctrl-G to create a group
After that you can create instances of this group by calling:

bpy.ops.object.group_instance_add(group='GroupName', view_align=False, location=(0,0,0))


How to avoid weird artifacts which only appear with ray-tracing enabled with Blender Render? What's the cause of the weird, checkerboarding on the purple spheres and how do I remove it?

This is caused by z-fighting in overlaping surfaces. Remove double geometry to resolve it.


UV, Modify UV island when modifying mesh I saw somewhere that there was an option in Blender that allows you to modify the UV map at the same time you modify the topology of the object.
I remember seeing a video where a box working as a wall had some faces extended to make the wall larger. In that video, the UV islands for those walls extended at the same time so the texture proportion wasn't affected.
I can't find how to do it?
Apologies if I have just dreamed it but I remember clearly and it is really frustrating I cant find how to do it after googling for a while.

Maybe you're talking about the Correct Face Attributes option which will change the UV as soon as you change the topology:

Also, when you slide an edge, make sure you have the Correct UVs option enabled in the Operator box:


Animating 2 Charetors at once (fight sene) Is it possible to animate 2 characters in the same scene at the same time? If so is there a tutorial for it?

Animation is done with key frames, move both characters a set amount as desired, then apply a new key frame at the desired time line.  It is quite a bit of work so take your time to do it properly, as the timing is what counts a lot.  Use Ctrl+A, in object mode, and make sure you use "location,rotation, scale" every movement and keyframe you change (or appropriate /scale/rotation/location etc). Tutorials someone else might know? Hope this helps.


How do I go from BVH to a working F-Curve? I found a BVH I want to use by first checking the motion in BVH Hacker, I import it into Blender, delete the rig the importing generated, select my character, then choose the BVH from the F-Curves list to apply it to my character, only the hip translates.

My character, I renamed all the bones to the corresponding bone names in the BVH file, I imagined that would make it work, but no. As I select my character's bones it corresponds in the action editor highlighting Location and Euler so why is it not animating my character?

Also, my character does not have any IK or any kind of bone controls or contstraints.

blend and bvh zip

Your biggest issue is, the bvh rig uses ZXY euler rotations, your martha rig is in quaternions.

Here is a script to set martha's pose bones to ZXY eulers.  Select martha in pose mode and run script.

import bpy

martha = bpy.context.object
for pb in martha.pose.bones:
    pb.rotation_mode = 'ZXY'

or import the bvh file with quaternion rotation.

nextly, you will need to do a better job of renaming martha's bones to match bvh rig.

An alternative approach.  Here is code to add a copy rotation constraint to each bone on martha, to a matching bone on bvh rig.  Note: I imported the bvh file and have a rig from that import named "Beer chug", change name in code to suit name of bvh rig.

It simply looks for bone names in martha that match bvh rig and adds a copy rotation constraint from one to other.

import bpy
context = bpy.context
scene = context.scene
rig_to = scene.objects.get("Martha")
rig_bvh = scene.objects.get("Beer chug")
martha = rig_to
# remove action from martha
martha.animation_data.action = None

for bvhpb  in rig_bvh.pose.bones:
    pb = martha.pose.bones.get(bvhpb.name)
    if pb is None:
        print(rig_to.name, " has no bone ", bvhpb.name)
        continue
    c = pb.constraints.get("bvhrot") or pb.constraints.new('COPY_ROTATION')
    c.name = "bvhrot"
    c.target = rig_bvh
    c.subtarget = bvhpb.name
    c.owner_space = c.target_space = 'WORLD'

Once you have a "driving rig" set up for a certain mocap, it's simply a matter of importing bvh, changing animation on driver rig and martha will follow.  For CMU for instance each bvh file in subject has the same rig.  In differing subjects the bone naming convention is the same but may have differing proportions (Depending on the actor(s) used I suppose).  This mainly only effects locations.

Note also you don't need to have same bone names, just a way of matching bone to bone.  There are some tools in "Motion Capture Tools" addon to do this.


Modelling in separate pieces VS one object Starting situation: Creating (nearly) Photorealistic renders.

Question: How do I correctly model for photorealistic renders (for applying shaders)?

My Approach: Using a Primitive and model it by extruding/insetting etc.
Another idea of mine: separate all entities like they are in reality.

Does applying Materials to a single Object via Selection photorealistic?
Or is separating my mesh into several different meshes (eg. sword: blade:metal; hand guard:ceramic; Hilt:Wood) the more professional way to go about it?

The best way to go about it is to keep it all as one mesh, that the way most pros do it and it prevents your scene from getting to cluttered
If you like to be able to have all your objects separate Keep them all together in one object and then separate them inside edit mode. However Do not have one object for your scene. a good scene can have anywhere from 3(for a object display) or 1000(for a simulation)

Also if you want to learn a bit about photo realism, go check out Andrew Prices blenderguru.com them website is really heavy but they have a lot of good tips as to how you can make something realistic


How to apply texture to one face of an object in cycles render? I can find dozen of tutorials on how to apply texture to one face of an object in Blender Render, but nothing for Cycles Render!
 I selected the faces I wanted, added material, chose an image texture, brought up the uv editing screen, did the smart uv project, made sure the correct texture was selected.

Didn't work; the object is still 100% the first texture I had applied.

Any tips?

You need to assign the material to selected faces in the materials tab.


OpenGl 3.3 Error resurfaced with Blender 2.8 Final release On my Windows10-64bit laptop (IntelHd 3000 Gpu - Opengl3.1 support) ,I was initially not able to run Blender 2.8 beta(zip) , but could run it on using this Opengl32.dll file found here

But now with 2.8 final version the Opengl error resurfaces , also when used with the above mentioned "Opengl32.dll "file .(All Gpu drivers are up to date).

Also, tried using this command line option but the error persists-

 .\blender.exe --debug -gpu

Any suggestion would be really help full.

Opengl3.3 Error

Blender 2.8 requires OpenGL 3.3 or above. Your computer does not meet the requirements and as such, Blender 2.8 will not run on it.

Using random DLLs from the internet is generally not a good idea, especially with programs as demanding as Blender.


Help figure out unexpected arm rotation I made some characters in blender, and armature deform with automatic weights.
everything goes fine, except the arms. Import them in unity3d as humanoid,
and play an idle animation, the arms should be straight, but all of the arms are rotated backwardly.

I spent hours, tried to paint different weights, moved bones. But problems remain.

Thanks for any insight.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/yl3div22tf8gkuv/seaman.blend?dl=0

It's possible that mechanim's humanoid system prefers the bones to have a particular orientation to them, and it's automatically trying to fit your bones to that orientation, which causes the arms to rotate backwards.
In blender, go to edit mode of the armature and enable Object Data > Display > Axis. This allows you to see the current roll of each of your bones. Then in the properties panel > Transform with a bone selected, you can change the roll of that bone. If the arms are rotating 180 degrees in unity, then I would suggest rolling each of the arm bones by 180 degrees to see if this fixes the problem.

Also, it is helpful for ik solvers (like what mechanim uses) if the resting pose of the appendages are slightly bent indicating which way the appendage should bend toward. For example, you could change the t-pose of your character to have slightly bent elbows which would indicate to the solver the the arms should bend in that particular way, and this could help Unity set up the orientations correctly.


Hair Sticking Through Face I can't figure out why, but my hair is sticking through my character's face weirdly.

As you can see, it's sticking out around the eyes, but if you look in particle edit mode...

There's no obvious hair strands sticking through the mesh... I tried many times to comb it up, and then back down, but it always does the same thing. I set the collision settings to 0.5 for inner and outer... Does anyone know how to fix this?

Thanks in advance.

You are using interpolated children. Those try to place children between hair strands. Simplest case: The hair closest to the current hair has a deformation slightly different than the original, if a child is placed half way between them, it will have a 50:50 mix between both positions and deformations. That can easily cause bad results, especially when 2 hairs are fairly close together, but combed in the opposite direction, the interpolation can look like what you're seeing. For longer hair simple children are usually the better option.


How to add a torus to another shape So I've tried everything I can think of (which isn't much, still pretty new to this), get figure out a way to get a loop shape on the top of this figure.

This is for the top of an earring that is going to be 3D printed, so I'm having trouble with a few different things (non-manifold and keeping it big enough are 2 of them).

I cut a torus in half, shaped it and merged it with a bunch of the axes at the top of the figure. When I subsurf it, the shape gets a little wonky. And when I try to remove non-manifold geometry, it just completely removes the torus from my other shape.

Is there another way to do this type of thing (add loops onto tops of earrings and such). Particularly if you are going to be subsurfing and making a lot of curved figures. Any insight appreciated, thanks!

Select Non-Manifold Ctrl-Shift-Alt-M and delete vertices X.

Add two loop cuts Ctrl-R to ear-ring
Add an additional edge F (selected in the image)
Subdivide the new added edge W subdivide

This should look like:

Remove some loop cuts from half torus Alt-RMB , X loop-cut until the number of edges matches the other part.

Select two open ends and search for Bridge/Loft Space


Script for loop issue So I should be missing something simple. (Amateur here...) I am testing snippets of code to create an addon.

The idea is to create markers on the timeline from a list.

The code below works in the python console but not in the text editor

scene = bpy.data.scenes['Scene']
for j in range(len(markerLIST)):
    scene.timeline_markers.new(markerLIST[j], frame=j)

Can someone explain to me why that is? And how it fix it?

Thanks

If you read the python console start message you will notice that some modules and some variables are builtin or have been imported for our convenience. eg bpy and C = bpy.context.

PYTHON INTERACTIVE CONSOLE 3.7.3 (default, Apr  3 2019, 19:16:38)  [GCC 8.0.1 20180414 (experimental) [trunk revision 259383]]

Command History:     Up/Down Arrow
Cursor:              Left/Right Home/End
Remove:              Backspace/Delete
Execute:             Enter
Autocomplete:        Ctrl-Space
Zoom:                Ctrl +/-, Ctrl-Wheel
Builtin Modules:     bpy, bpy.data, bpy.ops, bpy.props, bpy.types, bpy.context, bpy.utils, bgl, blf, mathutils
Convenience Imports: from mathutils import *; from math import *
Convenience Variables: C = bpy.context, D = bpy.data

You need to include your imports in the text editor. To see errors Where does console output go

also consider using for j, name in enumerate(markerlist): to enumerate without using range and length methods. And using scene = bpy.context.scene will use the current (context) scene no matter its name.

import bpy # NEED THIS

scene = bpy.context.scene # < the context scene

markerLIST = ["foo", "bar"]

for j, name in enumerate(markerLIST):
    scene.timeline_markers.new(name, frame=j)

Consider giving the list both the name and frame

import bpy # NEED THIS

scene = bpy.context.scene # < the context scene

markerLIST = [(1, "foo"),
              (20, "bar"),
        ]

for j, name in markerLIST:
    scene.timeline_markers.new(name, frame=j)


make array of objects follow path via curves modifier Im trying to follow the blender guru tunnel tutorial.

I have have a tunnel using 4 objects and added array modifiter to then to make the tunnel effect.

I add a path object and add the curve modidifer to the "arch" object, but as soon as i do that the arch object gets rotated.. i have tried all 6 angles and none of them gives the result i want as in the tutorial.

Here is the result after adding the curves modifier

The answer was to apply my scaling and rotation of my objects.. still learning.. thx alot for helping out


Cycles bake normal image is distorted I'm trying to bake this mesh as a normal, but the bake is no where near the image of the mesh. I've tried changing the Max Ray Distance but the result is still distorting. Here's the file if someone would like to have a look.

You're currently baking the high-poly object to itself, which will give weird result as the surface that will scan the high-poly is the high-poly itself, you'd better bake the high-poly to the low-poly:

Select the high-poly, shift select the low-poly
Enable Selected to Active
As the high-poly is a bit bigger give it a bit of Extrusion and Ray Distance, not too much, the value is in scene units

What it gives:


Blender render doesn't display skybox while opengl render does I have used a skybox image that I find on a website and wrapped a cube to make a skybox. The final blender file is here.

When I render image using F12, the result is blank. However, if I make OpenGL render image, the result is as expected. What is wrong with the normal rendering, what am I doing wrong?

The problem resides in your material; You just need to check 'Face Textures', under the options tab of your cube material.


Can`t Subtract Weight Paint in 2.8? Somehow i can`t find anywhere, nor by pressing CTRL, a way to Subtract the weight paint.

You can find the brush options in the N panel (on the right of your 3D view) > Tool tab > Brush > Blend, or in the Properties editor > Active Tool tab (the second one) > Brush > Blend. In Weight Paint mode I don't think you can invert the function with any shortcut, ctrl is for sculpting, it would be a nice idea though.


Clamping Color Ramp Values This is my first time asking anything on here, but I have been using Blender for many years now. I am currently working on a specific type of toon shader. I want it to be able to automate any image and texture into its definite toon values.

Currently, I am stuck. I have a Color Ramp set up on constant to give a toon effect, but whenever I use Color Ramps it always replaces the values of the original with whatever values are set in the ramp. I know that is what it is supposed to do, but I just want the constant part from the ramp and not the values that come from it. I know I could just change the values of the ramp to work for it, but I don't want to have to change them every time. My final project that this is meant for has many different values and I don't want to have to manually do each one.

If I understandyour question, as you are getting from  the color ramp a shading information, you can use it as a color multiplyer before the actual shader.


Creating a Video for DVD Sorry if there is an obvious answer to this question; I haven't done any video editing ever so I'm struggling with something; How should I set up my output and encoding preferences?

I was tasked with cutting and merging different video files for my brother; he wants to create a DVD with some old family footage. I've already have all the audio and video strips set up the way I want them to playback. I'm just having issues figuring out what file format will work on a writable DVD disc.

Also, I want the quality to remain relatively high (as high as possible since the footage is already sorta bad from being a bit old).

Thanks!

The two standards for DVDs are NSTC or PAL. Both are a rather low quality format by today's HD standards. You said that you are coming from old media, so going to DVD there will be no loss in quality.

Blender makes it quite easy with presets. Here I'm assuming NSTC.
Everything you need to set is in the Render tab of the properties window.
There is a preset for the dimensions: TV NTSC. The preset for the output is split among two headings Output and Encoding. Choose MPEG for the file type, and make sure it is set to RGB. Then the default DVD preset for the encoding works well.


avoiding a tiled looking ocean simulation I want to make a scene of a missile flying over the ocean. Because I want the missile to be relatively high up, the ocean looks very repetitive.

How can I make the ocean not look tiled without scaling up the object and making the waves smaller?

If you aren't going to see the ocean very close up, I wouldn't use the ocean modifier for this at all.

Instead you can probably get a reasonable result using a simple plane and some bump-mapping:

See How can I create a convincing sea material in Cycles without using the ocean modifier? for more details.

That said, if you still want to use the ocean modifier, you could try adding multiple displace ocean modifiers with different settings after the initial modifier.

Try varying settings like the time  and spatial size between modifiers.

Here's an example with three displace ocean modifiers after a generate ocean modifier, each with different a time and spatial size:


How can I uniformly modify a pipe with coding? I have a plain pipe with a center-line. I need to gradually decrease its diameter towards the end (to create a taper). I've been told that I should use some codes to scale the bones automatically. I would be grateful if anyone could kindly help me with this question.

This is actually a practice. The main task is to modify a 3D model of a vessel (which is more complex) using blender.

Thank you very much.

Mohammadreza

It may be that you need nothing more than a proportional edit, set to 'Linear' profile, and in 'Connected' mode.

With Median Point as your pivot, select an edge loop at one end of your pipe. The extent of the scaling along normals (AltS) will depend not on the geometric distance from your selection, but on the topological distance (the total edge-length from your selection).. so it works round corners, linearly tapering as you go.

The circle in the 3D view may no longer be a visual indicator of extent - just keep growing it until you begin to see the influence at the other end of your pipe.


How do I convert my linked group objects to be local objects? I linked a bunch of objects into my scene, via groups and populated it. I now need to make all the linked groups into actual objects, but I can't find a workable solution. What is the workflow to convert linked groups into actual mesh objects with no further connection to the original linked object?

What is the workflow to convert all the objects in a scene at one time when I have hundreds of objects that need to be converted?

Backup your scene.
Go to Object Mode.
Select all the objects in the scene (A)
Go to Object>Apply>Make Duplicates Real (Shift+Ctrl+A)
With everything still selected, press L and Make Local>Selected
Objects, Data and Materials or choose All.
Set the Outliner to Groups.
Press A to select all the groups in the Outliner.
RMB and choose Unlink Group.
Set the Outliner to Same Types
Select all in the Outliner, RMB and choose Delete to remove all the
extraneous empties.


How to blur in blender First of all I am a beginner trying to make animations on my free time.
So now I want to make an that have to focus on a distant object first and blur the object that is closer how can do that. Any rendering engine would work.
Any help will be appreciated
(Blender version: 2.91.2)

I think you are looking for Depth Of Field settings. Select your camera, and enter camera perspective (Numpad 0) to see what it's doing. The options are in the camera settings. You can even pick a focus object:


Blender only renders with 20% of CPU I introduce myself, my name is Kepa and it's my first message in the forum, I wanted to ask for help with a problem that I have when it comes to rendering via CPU. I attached image, of what I comment.
As I commented the problem arises when I render through CPU, I have a workstation with a Dual Xeon 2699 V3-72 Processing threads, when I shoot render in Blender does not use more than 20%, as you will see in the attached image I had to correct it inside Of the performance section of the render tab, the auto threads detected by default puts me 36, that is half of them, I put 72 and nothing, is useless. I do not know if it is due to a Blender problem or that, I work under Max and with the rendering engine works 100% CPU I understand that it is Blender problem.
Any help would be appreciated.

From your screenshot, you can see that you are only rendering 12 tiles. If you have 72 hyperthreads, then 12 tiles / 72 threads ~= 16% utilisation. Options:

Render the full image, instead of small fraction that you are.

Reduce the render tile size so that you have more tiles rendering at once.


What is the reason for partially allowing visibility control of linked objects in the outliner? When I link an object from another file, the visibility, selectability and renderability icons in the outliner are greyed out and inoperable.  Yet I can control these functions by right-clicking in the outliner or by using hotkeys.

This behavior is different from linking groups where the outliner buttons are fully functional.

Is there some rationale for this partial functionality in the outliner for linked objects (as opposed to linked groups)?  I.e. bug or feature?

(Blender 2.77a, Windows 10 64-bit)

When you link objects the linked object reflects the object in another .blend file. It wouldn't make sense for user to seem to be able to make changes to it.

When you link groups you are not really linking the objects themselves, but a new instance of the collection of objects. Its the same as when operating within the same .blend: new instance of object can be manipulated without affecting the original copies as long as you don't manipulate the data ie. mesh itself for mesh objects.


Redirect output of bpy.ops.render.render() to variable I thought that the following code (which I found here) would save all the terminal output from the function bpy.ops.render.render() into the variable output:

import bpy, sys, io

old_stdout = sys.stdout
render_output = io.StringIO()
sys.stdout = render_output
bpy.ops.render.render( write_still=True )
sys.stdout = old_stdout

But I still get output to the terminal (Saved: /tmp/a.png Time: 00:00.99 (Saving: 00:00.01)) and render_output.getvalue() returns an empty string.  Why is that?

I also tested this method with bpy.ops.mesh.remove_doubles() and it successfully redirects the output.

It might have worked, if the bpy.ops.render.render() operator was outputting that information through Python. However, since that code is written in C (blender\source\blender\editors\render\render_internal.c), it doesn't care that you've reassigned sys.out in Python.


Add different materials to different parts of a mesh? How do you add more than one material to a mesh?

I have tried adding two materials to the object, and then assigning one of the materials to a vertex-group, but I could not find a place to assign it.

I am making a striped bouncy ball that I want to deform, so adding a different material by separating the mesh into different objects would not be ideal.

You need to be in edit mode.

Select the part of the mesh you want to add the material to:

Click the "+" icon on the right side of "material" shown in the image below to create a new material.

Let's give the new material a green color.

Click the Assign button in the Materials tab under the list of materials:

(for older versions)

And you're done!

*_Note that when using this method there can be a sharp contrast between the two materials._


Low frame rate in video editor preview Apologies if this is a duplicate post, but nothing I've read on any of the others has worked. I've imported various video (recorded at 30 fps) and audio strips into Blender's video editor and when trying to preview the result, the fps drops to 5-10 fps, making aligning the video and audio impossible.

I've tried:

Playing the videos through a few times
Installing the latest graphics drivers (already installed)
Increasing the memory cache limit in system preferences
Giving Blender high priority in task manager
Lowering the output resolution (helps but is unusable)
Changing the sync mode to frame dropping and AV-sync
Trying different output video codecs

I'm using Blender v2.79 on Windows 10 x64 and importing .mov video files and .wav audio files.

Thanks.

First, make sure Blender is using the same resolution as your input video in the timeline.

If you're still slow, then it's probably time to generate proxy files. You're probably trying to edit a compressed video type instead of a RAW video type. By making proxy files, you get around this issue.

Here's a video tutorial on how to generate proxy files.


How to unwrap long mesh This is a quick question (I guess) : how can I efficiently uv unwrap long mesh like this beam :

I would avoid to waste most of the uv space like it does right now :

The obvious solution is to merge the mesh with other to make a "bigger" asset, but it doesn't really make sense with the scene.

What's the best practice here ? Should I add artificial seams to "cut" the geometry ? Would it create artifacts on the render ?

Thanks ! :)

Edit : I am making an asset for a game engine so :

I cannot have overlapping textures
I can use only square textures (power of 2 sizes)

I performed a few experiments and I have the following suggestions:

mark a seam on one of the super-long edges.
when unwrapping unselect the two ends.  This will give you the long faces.
after unwrapping the long faces, scale them in the UV/image editor to fill the available space.  If you want to use the entire UV space only scale along the skinny axis ( s x ).
You will probably need to use a tall texture, or the texture pixels will look stretched in the 3D view.
If you are not using a tall texture, you should probably scale uniformly and let the texture wrap on the long axis.
you can unwrap the ends separately.
If you do not want to unwrap the ends separately, mark all the edges on the end as seams.
It is possible to have the end polygons overlap the texture coordinates of the long polygons, or just be a different material.  If they are going to be the same material, the texture coordinates should probably have the same scaling applied to them or things might look funny.


Is there a standard set of benchmark files to compare Blender installations? It would seem a reasonable proposition that there should be a standard set of Blender files that could be downloaded by a user for the purpose of benchmarking a Blender installation. I'm not aware of such a suite of files, but that does not mean that I just don't know were to look. If there is such a suite, where can I download it?

The benchmarking file often used is the 'BMW Benchmark' file by Mike Pan, available on the blender.org site under 'demo files':

https://www.blender.org/download/demo-files/

There are other files on that page which are sometimes used by developers to test Cycles improvements, called 'Production benchmark'.

If you then want to compare your 'BMW Benchmark' results with other blender users you can use the 'Blender Cycles Benchmark' spreadsheet:

The Blender Artist's thread for that spreadsheet is here, just in case the link gets changed at some point.


How can I control bone roll animation amidst an IK? What I have:

The four bones inside the arm (DEF_Arm_01 to DEF_Arm_04) are being controlled by an IK constraint. The IK targets Hand (selected) and goes up to the DEF_Shoulder (not including it). The pole angle is controlled by Elbow, floating behind the arm. The IK works as desired.

What I need:
I need DEF_Arm_01 to DEF_Arm_04 to gradually follow/copy/otherwise propagate the roll of DEF_Shoulder to Hand.

How far did I get:
I added a Copy Rotation Constraint, Y only, from local space to local space on DEF_Arm_04, having Hand as target. It worked like a charm!
I realized I should do something similar to the other bones, adding two of these constraints to them (with Hand and DEF_Shoulder as targets) and changing the influence of the second constraint accordingly, for each bone.

I tried this. I added a Copy Rotation to DEF_Arm_01 having DEF_Shoulder as target. No go.

It seems that, as the DEF_Arm_04 has an IK constraint, it works as a stack and solves things in order, and the other ones are controlled by the IK and simply ignore other controls over their rotation and who knows what else. Also, I've tried to use an avulse bone as target, still no go.

So...
What is one supposed to do to solve this?

How did I end up solving this, in case anyone else wants to do something similar:

Four bone chains.

The first one is the IK, and it pretty much follows the rotation of the entire chain pole angle, but you can add a second bone chain to the arm (four bones) then apply a constraint to copy the rotation of the shoulder bone and then a damped track to the first, IK chain bone target onto it. In this very order. This way, you'll have a chain that follows the IK chain, but has the same up of the shoulder bone. Let's call this the "shoulder chain".

Then, add a third chain, and on each bone, add a constraint copying the rotation of the hand bone (the one that acts as a target for the IK chain), then the same damped track constraint to the IK chain bones' targets. This way, you'll have a chain that follows the IK controls, but each individual bone up direction follows the hand. Let's call this the "hand chain".

Then, the fourth, deforming chain: each bone will have two copy rotation constraints, each pointing to the correspondent bone of the shoulder chain and hand chain. But the later constraint will have proportionally less influence over the bone as you go down on the chain. As I have a four-bones long chain, I put it's influence in 0.125, 0.375, 0.625 and 0.875.

This way I have a chain that both follows the IK control and I can control it's twist along the chain using the shoulder roll and the hand roll as well.


Print all bpy.data.objects information how can I print all the information regarding a specific object inside a scene in 2.8? I need to check the size, texture, color, everything, all the properties.

You can type dir(C.active_object) in python console to print all properties of currently active object.


Create a surface within bounding curves? EDIT: My example was misleading. I don't want to use polys/faces. Please see the example of how this is done in Maya:

My first example didn't make it clear that I want to influence the way the "bridge" is formed by the other bounding curves. Is there not a way to do this? Curves can be used to define a bevel (which creates a surface) but it seems there is not a way to model like this. Please let me know if you know of a way to model like this using surfaces or something other than polygon faces. Thanks!

Original:
I am trying to make a car using curves. How do I create an interpolated surface between them? (How to I patch them together?)
Here's a simple example. I have these two curves:

Here's a mockup of what I mean:

I've done this in Maya, and here's the user-guide page on how to do exactly this. (click here) There has to be a way to do this in Blender. I just have to believe! ;)
Thanks for your help!
-Ben

Add a Curve (Shift+A-->Curve-->Bezier) and model the first profile being in Edit Mode. When finished, select it (A), duplicate (Shift+D) and place as far from the first one as you want. Model the duplicated second profile as you like.

Go to Object Mode, change the curve's resolution (Preview U and Render U) to 3, then select it and press Alt+C-->Convert to Mesh.

Go to User Preferences (Ctrl+Alt+U) and enable the F2 add-on.

Select two vertices as pictured below and press F continuously to fill the gaps.

Add a Subsurf Modifier to the mesh to make it look smoother. Enable a Smooth Shading in the Edit panel of a Tool Shelf (T).