Particle Effect Hair - Grows randomly during animation I have put together a basic human rig. I'm still new to this and this is one of the first, however it is my first attempt at making hair. I decided to try doing it with partcles after watching a video of how nicely it seemed to work with its own physics and all. It all seemed to work beautifully until I tried animating the rig with a completely basic head turn to see how the hair reacted. Instead of bouncing a bit, or even bouncing a bit much it did something a bit more extreme that I don't know how to explain... and so... I provided pictures.

My files for particles:

This only happens when he is in motion. Still shots render nicely as such

You can use a lower Stiffness value in the hair dynamics settings (less than 2) for short hair.


How to apply same keyframes properties on mupltiple strips in VSE? I do video editing in blender for youtube, and I find my self repeating same stuff again and again because I don't know how do I apply same keyframe properties to multiple strips and it became very time consuming. It takes me an entire day to just finish a video.

for example.

I want to provide subtitle using images which I make in inkscape.
now for every single subtitle strip I have to apply keyframes separately, like multiply. stretching etc. same goes for title and transition for the foreground images, because my video consist of mostly images (ken burns effect)

I know I can Apply same properties to multiple strips by selecting multiple strip and setting value and then right mouse click and select "apply to selected". can I do same with keyframes because those strips shares same keyframe value (except for the position of the strip)

is it possible to apply keyframes to multiple strip?

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/animation/keyframes/keying_sets.html

Keying sets might have what you are looking for, although I do not know how to apply them to vse strips as its not stated how or if you can. Sorry if that's not helpful.


Prevent splash screen from being shown when using a script? I'm writing a Python script that creates a Blender scene; I'm running it from the command line with blender -P script.py. However, the splash screen always appears and it's really annoying. Is there something I can do from the script that prevents the splash screen from showing up for just that invocation of Blender? Note that I do not want to change the global preference.

The tooltip over the user preferences splash screen setting recommends bpy.types.UserPreferencesView.show_splash, but changing this from my script doesn't seem to do anything.

The attribute to change is not in UserPreferencesView type, but in that class' instance. The right instance to modify, currently used viewing data preferences, is the view attribute of bpy.context.user_preferences:

import bpy

bpy.context.user_preferences.view.show_splash = False


Uneven colour on mesh I am making a low-poly fox and wanted to make it very bright orange like this one

But I couldn't get this colour from just from shaders, so I tried to brighten it up. The effect was quite good but I also get a lot of red colour on some of my mesh.

How can I get a bright orange colour and get rid of that red parts?

The problem stems from the high contrast value.

You will find using the Principled BSDF shader instead of using separate nodes, but if you are just learning how to use nodes, then I would suggest avoiding the color correction nodes (i.e Brightness/Contrast) and instead use the RGB color node from the input nodes.


Materials not rendering I have been searching online for the answer to this for a few hours now and I just can't get this resolved on my own.

The materials are not showing up in the final render, they show as gray scale but show up colored in everything else. I have made sure the materials are made in Cycles render and that there are no over riding of materials in the renderlayers tab.

You are filtering color channels in the Image Viewer, currently only the red channel is being displayed.

Return to Color and Alpha mode, your image is fine, no need to re-render.


Screen Space Clipping I was making a test render of one of my models that I've made to look good in Eevee with Screen Space Reflections and Contact Shadows, but I saw that both of them clip near the edges of the camera. I know screen space effects only apply to objects visible, but is there a way to fix this clipping without having to completely ditch the screen space effects or resort to Cycles?

Screen Space effects such as Shadows are a technique (borrowed from game rendering) to improve the visual look of a render without having to spend too much additional time considering features that are not visible. As such, it is a trade-off between realism and fast renders. Only 'visible' components are considered and so there can be noticeable issues with elements towards the edges of the visible frame.
One way to resolve this is to render an additional border around your frame by increasing the camera Sensor Size. This will have the effect of rendering additional area around the frame without affecting the perspective of the camera. The additional space will be used for rendering screen space reflections, etc. and you can then use the Compositor to clip the unwanted section from the final render.


Texture in render does not appear the same as it is in 3D view I got the UV sphere texture and all that, following this tutorial.

It looks good in in 3D view but is not similar at all when I render it.

Viewport texture coordinates

The texture in the 3D view while using cycles are currently (2.77a) placed on the object's surface using the info from the selected UVmap, not from the node tree.

In your case the image you see in the 3D view in texured mode (UV) is probably placed in a different way than how it would with the material's coordintes for the texture /Generated).

Nodes just don't work (yet) "live" whith the material's node setup.

I personally think it will be improved and work the way you tried, there are already some signals around (e.g. it works already for the world background, it is one of the target of the viewport redesign project...), but at the moment, in order to get the result of your node setup, you must use the rendered view.


Bones messes up my model? I just made a 3D model of a humanoid Darkrai from Pokémon, just for fun, and I wanted to make a little animation with it.

So what I did was;

I made the half of the model and applied the mirror modifier to create the other half.
Everything went well, untill I added the bones to it + with automatic weights.
It just completely messed up the model and I'm quite sad about it.

I'm only a student so I don't know all tricks.
I hope someone can help me!!

I think your problem is that the weights are automatic.... They mess up the model!

I found a good tutorial about rigging and animating in Blender and at the 11 minute he starts to show how to weight paint correctly.

Link of the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhQY2_gVoVg

I hope that helps!

Bye!


How can I add a second layer to a video? I want to add an object to a video. I tried to set transparent background, but it doesn't work. In VSE preview is want I want, and render result is what I get.

Make sure you have the sequencer enabled in the Post Processing section of your scene.


Import sequence of obj files to multiple frames I have a problem importing my files into blender. First of all, here it is what I have, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GltBwX6kSgY

My system is more complex, but works in the same way. Every frame has been calculated using molecular dynamics programs. I can save every frame as an "obj" file. The problem is that when I try to import them, I have all the frames in the same scene and same frame. Is it any way to load every frame of my simulation as a frame in blender?

Thanks

Ferchu

As you are importing an object for each frame, you want to keyframe the visibility of each object so that it is only visible on the frame that it is made for.

You can use the following script to import each obj and keyframe it's visibility.

import bpy
scn = bpy.context.scene
for f in range(scn.frame_start, scn.frame_end):
    fpath = bpy.path.abspath('//sim_data_{}.obj'.format(f))
    bpy.ops.import_scene.obj(filepath=fpath)
    obj = bpy.context.selected_objects[0]
    # key as visible on the current frame
    obj.keyframe_insert('hide',frame=f)
    obj.keyframe_insert('hide_render',frame=f)
    # hide it
    obj.hide = True
    obj.hide_render = True
    # key as hidden on the previous frame
    obj.keyframe_insert('hide',frame=f-1)
    obj.keyframe_insert('hide_render',frame=f-1)
    # key as hidden on the next frame
    obj.keyframe_insert('hide',frame=f+1)
    obj.keyframe_insert('hide_render',frame=f+1)

If you have the option to export in .mdd or .pc2 format, you could look at using the mesh cache modifier.

Depending on how much the "particles" in the simulation deform, you may also want to look at exporting a location and size of each item per frame. This way you could just use the exported data to keyframe the location of each object.


Cannot link group to a scene My scene file is a group of buildings, all linked in from separate files, no problem. but on the new building I am working on, I have selected all objects and grouped them,as before, but when I go to link the group into the main scene, I have no group option. (In the building file the group is shown in outliner). Can anybody help please?

I think I have cracked it! The file I was trying to link in to had some existing objects selected, so I pressed A to deselect, and my grouped file showed up. Magic.


Use Blender Cuda Build to use GPU in Simulations: Ok, my current situation is this:
I have a very slow CPU (AMD Athlon 750X (2 Cores 4 Threads))
But I have a pretty fast GPU (NVIDIA GeForce 1080)
The GPU actually supports CUDA 6.1

I need to bake some physics simulations, and I tried with the default settings.
It is very very slow Baking, (like 4 hours for a 92 divisions 1 Smoke High Res for 600 frames). I tried looking for a way to use GPU in baking online but I have found nothing except for this:

http://graphicall.org/444

This is the Modified build of Blender 2.78.5 that uses CUDA for most of the things. It says that it sopports both Smoke and Fluid Simulations. (It says Elbeem Modifier (Fluid Simulation), Smoke Modifier (Smoke Simulation) and Tile based nodal compositor in the section Features enabled in compilation). And the file is also called 12348_blender-2.78---6e90294---cuda-and-osl---fastest.7z so I assume it make osl work with GPU rendering. I tried installing it and nothing. I could not get any performance boost in any feature. I also could not enable OSL in GPU COmpute options in Cycle (The Open Shading Language checkbox is greyed out).

I tried searching online for a fix but I could not find anything. I could not even contact the author cause there is no way I could find to contact him.

Is there any fix?

Am I doing something wrong?

Should I uninstall previous Blender Version?

I think you've misunderstood the description for that build. It is merely stating what features were enabled at compile time. It's possible to build Blender without some things, such as the smoke simulator, or without CUDA. The description merely says that CUDA Cycles and the smoke simulator are both enabled, and that the build is speed optimized. It does not mean that the smoke simulator uses CUDA. Or anything else that doesn't normally support CUDA.

Compiler settings cannot add GPU compute support to existing code. If someone says they "compiled with GPU support enabled" that means the code already supported it, they just compiled without disabling it.


What is the combination of cameras that will a create side-by-side virtual reality view? Some render engines that blender might use do NOT directly support virtual reality.  As such, it seems you'll have to set up some cameras manually.  Blender has various options for this; what are they?

What mathematics are actually being performed on the camera so that I can duplicate this manually?

The math used is in blender's source code. I think it is all contained within camera.c

Depending on your 3d camera settings, if you don't need the re-creation to be exact, you can do a visual duplication in blender. By enabling the visual display of the 3d camera (in the properties region N) you can see where they are positioned and where they are aimed.

You can use this visual display to position another camera to match the 3D settings.

By taking the settings to the extreme you can clearly see that there can be a distortion, this can be matched by adjusting the x-shift of the camera settings. You may want to check if this value is supported by the external render engine.


How do I reset sculpting tools to default? Each click destroys the mesh I was following a tutorial. When I got to the Sculpting Tab, every time I tried to sculpt, each click would devastate the mesh.
The sculpting tools were fine yesterday. Really don't know what I've done to ruin it.
This is what happens with one click on the model's face...

In the Tool panel > Brushes, click on the down arrow button and Reset Brush:


Why can't I change/delete the world background image? I just want a normal Material and use a Spotlight as lighting, but I cant seem to find a way to delete this background texture image thing? Can somebody help me? The Screenshot was taken in the "Shading" tab.

You can adjust the material preview world shading by clicking the drop-down to the right of the shading icons.

Enable 'Scene Lights' and 'Scene World' to use your scene's illumination instead of the material preview presets. You can select different HDRI worlds by clicking the sphere or adjust the other settings. Clicking the 'cog' takes you to the preferences window to allow you to set up custom lighting with your own HDRIs.


Blender 2.9 Smoke Sim noise bugged? I was testing the Fluid/Smoke Simulation in 2.9, but everytime I enabled Noise and baked it the smoke would disappear. However with noise off it works fine. I did a search and the only thing I could find is a bug report from the 2.9 beta which was closed without being resolved due to inactivity. Went back to 2.82 and the noise is working fine there.
Is anyone else able to use the Noise feature?
No Blend file as its just a default cube with a domain and more or less default smoke sim settings

You need to check "Is Resumable" in the Cache section of the smoke domain physics properties. Then when you bake data and bake noise, the simulation should appear in your viewport.
For some background, I was having this same issue. After doing some digging, I found this answer here: https://developer.blender.org/T80372
"This was a usability issue: Baking noise in the modular cache mode is only possible when also enabling the resumable option."
I wanted to make sure I knew what I was turning on by checking that option, so I will share this from the Blender manual as well:
"Use Resumable Cache: Extra data will be saved so that you can resumed baking after pausing. Since more data will be written to drive it is recommended to avoid enabling this option when baking at high resolutions."


How to make plane tracked video start compositing from a certain frame? Thanks to your help, I can now plane track a video and nicely add a video on top of the plane.
However, I have a problem..
So, I only need to track a small part of a large video. I set the range to "Start: 1910, End: 2374" so I could only track the plane for those few hundred frames. And it works!
However, when I use the nodes to add the video in, the video starts playing, on the plane, from frame 0, effectively ending before it even reaches 200 frames.
How can I make it so that the superimposed video starts playing at the frame range I tracked the plane in (starting at frame 1910)? And also, is it possible to loop the video? If so, how?
Here are the nodes I used:

I found it out:
I fixed it by looking at this post (How can I make a "Movie Clip" node start at a certain frame of the scene?). I replaced the "movie clip' nodes for "image" nodes, and put the background video at "Start from 1910, and Offset 1910". Then I offset the composited video to 1910 frames. Voila!
I had to scrub through the timeline to check that it was precisely matched. I rendered a smaller sequence once to check through it, and then returned to the project to "finely" adjust it down to each frame.
Stackexchange is a wonder, really :O


Blender adding double forward slash (`//`) to image file paths on Mac TL;DR: Blender seems to be prepending spurious // before filepaths when loading images from script.

Steps to reproduce: Save the following minimal script in a filename of your choice (e.g. blender_test.py)

import bpy
D = bpy.data
D.images.load('/Users/path/to/image.jpg')  # A JPG image in a different folder. You'll need to change this.
D.images[0].use_fake_user = True
bpy.ops.wm.save_as_mainfile(filepath="./fromscript.blend")

Execute using:

blender -b -P blender_test.py

Now open fromscript.blend in blender GUI, fire up the Python console and  print the path of the just-loaded image.

print(D.images[0].filepath)

I see the following in my console (part of the path has been redacted). Notice the two forward slashes in the path. When I load the image from the Python Console in the GUI, or using the dislog box, those slashes are not there. These two forward slashes are preventing my downstream commands (e.g. textured material creation) from seeing the loaded images. Why are there additional slashes when blender is executed as a script?

EDIT If I understand correctly, this is asking a different question, about linking images from a different machine using relative paths. My question asks about blender prepending slashes to an absolute path.

Turns out that the double forward slash is Blender's way of expressing relative file paths. E.g. ./file.jpg in a Unix filesystem is //file.jpg in Blender. So I needed to save my .blend file by turning off the default interpretation of filepaths as relative.

Turns out that this modified question is already answered here: Absolute path of files in Blender (with Python).


Is the blender smoke engine able to do this? I love Andreas Barden's work and his been playing with TurbulenceFD with some amazing results. I'm wondering if we can do something similar with Blender. Is Blender's smoke engine able to do something like this? And if so, how?

I don't see why not. I'm not seeing anything particularly fancy going on in that sim. It appears to just be a spinning block emitting smoke that rises into a sphere.


Can I have Wireframe view + material preview At the Same Time I am currently watching a tutorial where the author goes in the wireframe view,but he is still in the materail preview.He uses a key f3 for wireframe which is by default in blender ,but when i do the same it shifts me to wireframe view but not in the material preview.Below i have attached the pics where the other guys mesh is in the wireframe preview but also in the material preview

In material preview you can show an object's wireframe:

Or you can show all object's wireframes:


What is the math for the B-spline interpolation of a color ramp with two color stops? I often use a color ramp with only two color stops as a way to modify the output of a texture parameter as in this example.

I would like to be able to do something similar in a node group where the positions of the two color stops are input parameters. Such a group might look like this

There is a solution for a linear color ramp in this answer.

A similar solution would work for the other interpolation types, provided I knew the interpolation equation.

What is the equation for b-spline?

Implementing B-Spline is quite a bit beyond my maths capabilities but a simple 'ease' is certainly feasible. To achieve this you can calculate the 'influence' of each of the control points and combine these to produce the overall influence. Varying the parameters controls the shape of the curve.

I've created a Desmos example which can be accessed here : https://www.desmos.com/calculator/orfi1cybkc and is as shown in the following image :

Breaking this down a bit, we start with two points along the x-axis defined as p1 and p2 along with associated values v1 and v2 so each point is defined as (p,v). These can be adjusted and positioned as desired.

To determine the 'height' (y) at each point along the x-axis we need to determine the relative influence of each point. For this we first determine the distance as d = abs(x - p) for each 'point' (p1, p2).

The variables w and E (exponent) control the shape of the curve. w is present to avoid divide by zero errors by ensuring there is always a small offset from zero, while E controls how the influence of each point drops off over distance. Each influence is determined with :

i = 1 / (w + pow(d,E))

Once we have the 'influence' of each point (i1, i2) we can combine them with :

y = (v1*i1 + v2*i2) / (i1 + i2)

To build the nodes I opted to use the Dynamic Maths Expression add-on developed for this answer which can be downloaded from here. The add-on allows you to simply type an equation and the corresponding nodes are automatically built within a node group hidden behind the node. This allows complicated expressions to be very easily constructed.

For instance, for the 'influence' calculation I used the following equation :

Influence=1/(w+Distance**Exponent)

This produces the following node :

Within the node are the following generated nodes to implement the specified expression :

Similar can be done with 'Distance' and 'Output' as shown in the following (all wrapped within a Group for convenience) :

This node group can now be used to produce the required 'easing' curve as demonstrated with this example :

Using an exponent of 1.0 will produce a straight line :

Exponents greater than 1.0 will produce increasing curve :

1.5

2.5

4.0

Exponents less than 1.0 will produce the opposite curve :

0.5

Two blend files are included - one that requires the Dynamic Expression add-on and one that does not require the Dynamic Expression add-on (the 'internal' node groups have been transferred into standard node groups) :

Using Dynamic Expression add-on :

Stand-alone (without Dynamic Expression add-on) :

EDIT
Note : Rather than using multiple Dynamic Expression nodes within the group you can actually combine the maths into a single expression (by substitution) and use this in a single Dynamic Expression node :

Output=((1/(0.001+abs(x-Point1)**Exponent))*Value1+(1/(0.001+abs(x-Point2)**Exponent))*Value2)/((1/(0.001+abs(x-Point1)**Exponent))+(1/(0.001+abs(x-Point2)**Exponent)))

This avoids the complexity of the additional level of node groups but will be slightly less efficient (due to the 'influence' needing to be effectively calculated twice for each 'point'). Note also that the add-on creates the node with the input variables in the order they are presented in the equation and this results in 'x', 'Point1', 'Exponent', 'Value1', etc. - rather than a more intuitive sequence. Being able to specify the order of the input sockets would be a useful addition to the add-on.


Dirty Neon, I'd like to add grime and age to a neon sign Mixing the emission with a texture or putting a decal on the emission is what I originally thought but I'd like a real look with dark spots and dirt.  Any thoughts?

You're on the right track. Using a texture to mix emission with diffuse would do something like that. A decal (image texture) would offer you more control, but you'd have to create it yourself (I only say "but" because I've never been very good at painting textures, and find it very intimidating, though others don't feel that way).

Another slightly different option is to use a texture to modify the emission color, or the emission strength of the emission shader itself (rather than mixing in a diffuse). I've tried this before with mixed results. The main problem I ran into was that the texture had to be very high contrast in order to make the change visible when the emission was as bright as it needed to be: as I set the emission brighter, the texture would just get washed out and became unnoticeable. When the contrast was high enough, I just got splotches of black instead of subtle, detailed cloudy texture.

I suspect that you would have much better results if you were able to use a true HDRI image as the texture input for the strength value.

Incidentally, if you don't know already, it's very important for anyone using textures to understand the difference between the HDRI look and the HDRI format. The HDRI look looks neat, but the HDRI format actually contains orders of magnitude more data than conventional image formats. More info here. Yeah, this is kind of a pet campaign of mine ;-)


How to link a text object body to the edge length of another object with Python? I would like to create a tool to measure object length dynamically.

Something like a group of 2 objects:

1 unique edge object
1 text object (children of the previous)

How to link edge length to the text object body?

Dolf Veenvliet already dit it several years ago!
Thank you to Duarte who provided the link.

The Caliper Blender Addon

The script


Molecular particles keep sinking down using the Molecular script with a particle emitter to form a pile of spheres. The behavior so far is great however the particles keep sinking in to touch the floor (collier) like this.

How to make them clot and form a hill ?

If your particle spheres are sinking through the floor to the center of the particle Sphere, it would indicate that you forgot to check the 'Size Deflect' check box in the Particle's Physics panel.

Also, you need to check the  'Activate Self Collision' check box in the Collision panel and adjust the friction and damping settings for the Molecular add-on to take the individual particle spheres into account when they collide against one another.

Here's a blend file in case you need it:


Straightening the sides of this mesh I'm having difficulty straightening up this mesh in Blender - see here for the object:

I'm trying to follow the accepted answer here but I can't quite get all the vertices I need in order to straighten up the side. When I scale the object along the z index, in 3JS, the arc of the sides is exacerbated which is undesirable.

Any ideas on this?

EDIT

An example of what happens when it gets scaled in 3JS

Go into Edit mode.  Click the vertex-select icon.

Press C for circle select.
Color in a couple vertices you want to align, then right-click.

Tap S to scale, then X, Y, or Z to limit along one axis.
You have to decide which axis is best.
Then press 0 to zero out that axis.

If you notice movement along the wrong axis, no worries,
just click X, Y, or Z at this point to affect another axis instead.
Tap Enter to finalize command.

Repeat with each pair of vertices 'till complete.


Hairs of particle system on wrong places I try to model a city. I have a group of buildings that act as the hairs of a particle system. The hairs should grow on the faces of a plane. Now this works for the buildings that were initially added to a Group. But later I added two more buildings to this group and these buildings are not "neatly" positioned on the faces of the plane. Either on two faces instead of one face and also on another plane. So it seems that there is something wrong with those buildings

The origin point of these buildings are not at the center of the building's base.

Place the 3D cursor at this base, for instance snapping it to the selected base
Then in object mode, choose 'object/transform/origin to 3D cursor'

To say it another way, objects as particle instances are moved/placed so that their origins are following the particle.


Can i open and edit reStructedText (.RST) files with Blender? I write my own documentation for personal use in learning Blender. I use reStructedText and Sphinx. This is plain text in RST files.
I used to work in a Blender text editor (and i like it). Is it possible to open and edit RST files in a Blender text editor? At the moment, RST files are not open (but TXT open), and renaming to TXT is inconvenient (sorry for my English).

Blender can open any text file in its text editor. The file browser will not show the .rst files if you have filtering turned on, click the little funnel icon to turn filtering on/off.


How do I get a list of nodes in the currently active group? context.space_data.node_tree.nodes always returns a list of the nodes at the base level of the tree (not inside any group), even if the user is actually editing the nodes inside a group.

My Material  <-- context.spacedata.node_tree (always)
  └ Group
    └ Group in a group  <-- user is editing this

How can I get a list of the nodes in whatever group the user is busy with, no matter how far down the rabbit hole they've gone?

context.active_node.id_data.nodes is one solution, but it does not work if there is no active node (e.g. if the user just deleted it and hasn't selected anything since).

There doesn't seem to be any obvious solution, so I've come up with a bit of a hack:

The trick is, context.active_node is always the actual active node in the tree the user is currently editing. context.space_data.node_tree.nodes.active (let's call it tree_active for short) is the active node for the base level (outside all groups). If the user is editing a group, tree_active will be a group node (because it was first selected+made active before the user hit Tab to edit it).

So if context.active_node is not the same as tree_active, then we know the user is inside a group. We don't know how deep they are though, so we need to recursively check if tree_active is the same as context.active_node - if it's not, then we use tree_active's node tree as the new base tree we're checking against.

If we are in a group, tree_active will always be a group node (unless it is the same as context.active_node).

Here's the code I eventually came up with:

tree = context.space_data.node_tree  # Base level tree
if tree.nodes.active:
    while tree.nodes.active != context.active_node:
        # We are in a group, check next level
        tree = tree.nodes.active.node_tree

tree will be whatever node tree the user is currently editing.


Artifacts appear when I use the subsurf modifier I'm (almost) a complete newbie in Blender. I thought that modelling a greek column would be a great exercise for me. My mesh doesn't look so bad, but when I subdivide everything, some strange artifacts appear :(

Here is an example:

Also, here is a link to my .blend file, so you can see the mesh:
.blend file
Could you give me some advice how to remove those strange things? :/

Your problem is that along the object you have large and ugly ngons (polygons with more than 4 vertices). Ngons don't work so well with the subsurf modifier.

Use quads instead to connect all of the other vertices, that will give you a nicer edge flow:


Blender is not rendering my animation in Cycles, even though it is set to that, why? I try rendering my animation in cycles, and I have it set to PNG sequence, and it is set to cycles in the sidebar tab. It renders out very quickly though and I know that shouldn't happen, it should take a few hours. It does look good though, however, I bring the sequence photos into the video sequencer but the video is very slow and makes it hard to edit or add sound. Anyone know why?

If there are image strips in the Video Sequencer editor, Blender ignores the scene and the cameras, rendering the image strip instead. Deleting the image strip or unchecking the "Sequencer" checkbox should solve your issue.

Generally, however, I'd recommend that you process the image strips in a different file from the one you used for rendering.


How to wrap paper around an object? I'm new in Blender and I'm making a jar bottle to start and want to close the top wraping with paper like these ones:

I tried using cloth modifier with a colision object + pressure but I can't find a way to make those folds in the paper like you can see in the picture. I already checked a lot of tutorials and questions but didn't find anything useful to get those folds.
That's the best I get out of it:

Q: Any other idea how to achieve that kind of folds as realistic as possible?

Cloth Sim

Add Circle 16 sides, Extrude, Scale, Grid Fill
Extrude, Scale outer loop, select vertices for each side and Scale on (X/Y) to zero to get square shape, add extra loops Ctrl+R+3

Add cloth simulation (physics)
Add ShrinkWrap modifier, select one vertex loop next to perfect circles and assign vertex group to these, and use this group for modifier
The illusion that brings cloth more to paper feeling is under Data Properties > Normal > Auto Smooth

To add detail to the lowpoly simulated mesh just add a Normal Map texture of smashed paper

Notes:

Select outer loop and with Proportional editing (O) rotate (R) a bit, twisted topology results in nicer sim

With a few extra loops close to existing folding is a bit closer to your reference.

To let border of paper stick closer to glass you can create another vertex group and use second Shrink-wrap modifier with a subtle Ofset value.


Effective modelling of polar array What would be the best way to achieve a quad mesh model of this kind of surface:

The object has 12 circular arrays, with 6 holes on the innermost ring, then 12, 18, 24 ... plus 6 per each ring. Please note that the hole diameter is constant.

Modeling each ring with an polar array is possible, but this results in a heavy workload of retopo. I also tried the tissue addon, but could not manage to get clean meshes at a glance.

If you run this baby script:

import bpy

idx = 1
vtx = 6
rad = 0.25
inc = 0.25

while (idx < 14):
    bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_circle_add(vertices=vtx, radius=rad)
    rad += inc
    vtx += 6
    idx += 1

It will create a series of concentric circles with the right number of vertices. (I'm sure a proper Pythonista could do it in one line, and automate some of the steps which follow...)

CtrlJ Join the circles into one object
CtrlE > Bridge Edge Loops each pair of loops in turn, and F..AltP, fan-fill the center.
You wind up with a mesh with one or two diagonals out of place. I'm not sure it would matter, but I cut 1/6 out as shown, corrected the edges, and arrayed it back to a full circle)
Select all vertices except those on the perimeter, and CtrlShiftB bevel them, and switch to Face mode. The future holes should be selected.
Loop-Tools or Space-Bar > 'Circle' with a radius setting, on the selected hole-faces.
Delete the faces
Extrude or add a Solidify modifier, and throw on a Subdivision modifier.

The holes aren't perfectly circular but maybe good enough?


Cycles OpenEXR output way too dark when imported into After Effects When I render to OpenEXR (multilayer) in Blender 2.80 (Cycles) and then import it back into After Effects (2019) the image looks way too dark.

What it looks like in Blender 2.80:

What it looks like in After Effects:

I've tried playing around with the color management settings in Blender but it doesn't seem to make a difference. I've tried opening the EXR in other applications like IrfanView and Photoshop but that doesn't work at all (either an error or a black image).

When you export as EXR you are creating an image that is in in a linear scale. In other words you are bypassing the transformations set by the color management in blender. You would need to interpret the exr image in after effects so they it understands that is dealing with linear data.

As an alternative, do the compositing in blender directly. Import your EXR files and background and composite them together, blender's compositor always works using linear data.


Why is this Mesh broken up? I'm practicing with a mesh body from a game. I'm using XPS to import it into Blender, but the body mesh appears to be separated and not one uniform object. I can't find the mesh listed as an object in the layer tab either- am I uploading it incorrectly?

Sometimes Importers will separate things into multiple meshes, or even multiple separate objects. It looks like the mesh in the picture is still one object, but the mesh has been "cut" along various seams. First thing to try, in Edit mode, select the entire mesh, open the space-bar search, and and find the "Remove Doubles" tool. You may have to adjust the merge distance option, depending on the size of your mesh.


Problems generating a rig with Rigify I used Rigify to create a rig for a character that I want to animate. I added in a human meta-rig and formed it to fit the human model. The problem occurs when I click generate under the Rigify buttons category. It does not create points for me to manipulate for the fingers, elbows or knees or a full skeleton for the character. Any ideas why?

Make sure 'Auto Run Python Scripts' is ticked in the File -> User Preferences Menu. I had the same problem and that fixed it.


List boolean object names Is it possible to list, in Python, all the subtracted objects?
I've got a big wall (Wall) with 3 holes (Cube, Cube.001, Cube.002). I made the holes with a boolean difference and I wish to list the names of these objects.
In this case I want to list:
list = ['Cube', 'Cube.001', 'Cube.002']

Thanks in advance!

This script will loop through the modifiers on the specified object, check if they are boolean modifiers, check if the modifier has an object specified, and if it does it will print the name of the object being used:

import bpy

#Object with modifiers
object = bpy.data.objects['Cube']

for modifier in object.modifiers:
    #Check if modifier is boolean AND has a boolean object selected
    if modifier.type == "BOOLEAN" and modifier.object:
        print (modifier.object.name)

You could of course .append object names into a list instead of printing.

Alternatively, you can use a list comprehension version which does exactly the same, except this adds all object names to a list before printing:

objects = [mod.object.name for mod in object.modifiers if mod.type=="BOOLEAN" and mod.object]
print (objects)


How can I seperate objects within objects (which are not touching each other) into independent ones? ^
I've got those beautiful cubes to run a physiks simulation, but obviously they are one object so I they can't move independently.
I want each of them to be a single object.
Is it possible to split all of them simultaneously?

Go to edit mode, press 'A' to select every cube, then Press 'P', And select "separate by loose parts. This will take a little time to calculate, but it will work.


How to wait for an operation - to another operator - to complete within an operator (import_scene) Besides the point but why is this not working as a default stack is expected to work?

I'm trying to get an operator to call another operator and wait for the operator's response before proceeding.

Doing so with sub-process doesn't work - apparently it needs to be fed "INVOKE_REGION_WIN" and that only works when calling it directly.

Doing so natively doesn't work. can't even loop like you would do for any File/IO transaction of a dialog
(str = dialog(), if str!="" > move on else wait )

what's the proper way to do this for the Blender API?

NOTE: This is not a common "dialog" issue, we need to wait for the additional operator to completely finish and return {'FINISHED'}

same as it would if you stack 2 functions within one another ...

Edit. Adding in a code sample that doesn't work but it's closer then I got out of anything else.

def modal(self, context, event):
    if self.fileimport == {'FINISHED'}:
        bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')
        print("finished")
        return {'FINISHED'}
    else:
        print(self.fileimport,context,event)
        return {'PASS_THROUGH'}

def invoke(self, context, event):
    self.fileimport = bpy.ops.import_scene.fbx("INVOKE_REGION_WIN")
    context.window_manager.modal_handler_add(self)
    return {'RUNNING_MODAL'}

The problem with that is that the result copyed to file import is really only passed once at the start.
Getting the modal function update it means locking up blender in a loop...

Path of least resistance. this works but it's hardly programmatically sound. if anyone has nay other functioning solutions i'm all ears :)

sceneobjects = 0
currentobjects = 0

def modal(self, context, event):
    if self.currentobjects > self.sceneobjects:
        bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')
        print("finished")
        return {'FINISHED'}
    else:
        self.currentobjects = len(bpy.data.objects)
        print(context.window_manager)
        return {'PASS_THROUGH'}

def invoke(self, context, event):
    #save current number of objects on scene
    self.sceneobjects = len(bpy.data.objects)
    #start the import
    bpy.ops.import_scene.fbx("INVOKE_REGION_WIN")
    context.window_manager.modal_handler_add(self)
    return {'RUNNING_MODAL'}


horizontal fluid troubles I'm trying to do a steady stream of liquid in a horizontal line. The idea is squirting out a straight stream of honey out of a nozzle. I've got gravity turned off so it never falls.
I can't seem to find any decent tutorials on 2.91, and the documentation basically states you need an inflow, domain, and any possible collisions, but I find it vague otherwise. I sometimes get it sorta working, and sometimes it does nothing. Not quite sure where I'm going wrong.
File attached, hopefully.
link to file

The manta flow integration isn't working that well.
It seems to be out of focus of current development goals, not sure why.
It has various issues, for example there is no world scale.
So essential a teacup can behave alike an ocean.
in 2.92 there is setting narrowband that might improve the rendering, for beams.
Another bug is that once the cache is made, its not refreshed on each setting change.
If you change some domain settings, you probaply dont see its effect.
What so far worked for me is to change the domain resolution, this forces a new cach rebuild, and new settings get effective. its a pain in the a** to do it like that but i dont know of other options.
Positive about this cache as compared tot he past you dont have to bake all frames before you see the result, and a needle preview option (unmeshed).

Updated answer
Though read the above parts as well.

Note some versions seem to have delete bake option now.
So you can quickly rebake the domain of the fluid. I used an alpha 2.92

For these kind of flows use a planar inflow it's an option which you can enable.
And when you do you can remove the surfaces pointing to unwanted directions (ea sides and the back surface).

Use liquid (not smoke)

Set the grid maybe a bit smaller

There is no need to put it surrounded by a fluid blocking object (if you use surface option), when you still want such an object have at least some surfaces stick out of the blocking object.

An extra trick is to set the object of the domain to smooth shading.
The're often highly detailed and smoothing really finishes it off to get that wet look.

I personally always use the latest alpha versions (its a choice), so i'm not sure if the other verrsions with manta have the free bake and bake buttons on the domain, i never kept track of it, though i think its new ??.
Freebake has the same effect of the altered fluid domain trik, to enforce new cache.
Result with workbench render, (higher cell size in domain) and more sub sampeling, to deal with high speed flows, result :
https://youtu.be/6Ic_pe8W8bY


Why are some faces in my mesh darker? While rendering a mesh with smooth shading on, I get a dark region/shadow on certain faces.
The effect is more evident when smooth shading is applied to a mesh containing ngons, with the ngons turning black when rendered.

The blackening effect is visible in the viewport too.

How can I solve this problem?

Check your normals. If some of the facess are turned inside out, pointing inward into the inside of the mesh, they can be seen as dark areas.
Before recalculate normals (in the toolbar (N) in the 3D View, or CtrlN):

After recalculate normals.

Note that normals will only be recalculated for selected faces, so you probably want to select all (A) before recalculating.


How can I change a sphere's radius with a Python script? I have been trying to write a script that generates pictures of sphere packing's given positions and radii's that are publication quality.  The most helpful post I found was here:
https://gskielian.wordpress.com/2012/11/29/creating-a-red-sphere-in-blender-with-python/  .

From this post I have been able to generate multiple spheres in blender with different coordinates for their centers.  What I haven't been able to do from this code is adjust their radii.  I thought that setting the radii for a sphere would be found in this portion of the code:

red = makeMaterial(‘Red’,(1,0,0),(1,1,1),1)
origin = (0,0,0)
bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_uv_sphere_add(location=origin)
bpy.ops.transform.translate(value=(1,0,0))
setMaterial(bpy.context.object, red)

But I've tried to adjust almost everything in that line of code with no use.  I'm hoping that someone can help me make adjustments to the linked code such that it generates a sphere of a specific radii, thanks!

There are many ways to do this, the least complicated approach is probably this:

import bpy

properties = [
   [[-2, 0, 0], 0.2],
   [[-1, 0, 0], 0.3],
   [[+0, 0, 0], 0.4],
   [[+1, 0, 0], 0.5],
   [[+2, 0, 0], 0.6]
]

# [co]ordinate, and [r]adius
for co, r in properties:
    bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_uv_sphere_add(segments=34, size=r, location=co)

See the documentation for UV Sphere

Depending on scene complexity other approaches will make more sense.


How to use the stereoscopic 3D Side-By-Side view? When working with Render Layers/Views turned on for stereoscopic 3D mode, I can preview the 3D in the OpenGL viewport's camera view numpad 0 in anaglyph (red/cyan glasses etc). That works fine.

But I'd like to also be able to use the Side-By-Side (cross-eyed) mode for previewing in the OpenGL viewport.

When I go to Window/Set Stereo 3D I can change to side-by-side cross-eyed, and I get a message saying Stereo 3D mode requires that the window be fullscreen.

But no matter how I switch to fullscreen I never see a Side-By-Side image. I've tried ctrlup arrow, shiftspace, and altF10, all inside and outside of the camera view, but I never see any side-by-side view.

Is it possible to see a cross-eyed side-by-side view in the OpenGL viewport?

If it's not possible in the OpenGL viewport, is it at least possible to see a rendered image in cross-eyed side-by-side in the UV/Image Editor? Not even that works.

I AM able to save a PNG in side-by-side cross-eyed format. The option from the save menu work fine and will produce a side-by-side cross eyed PNG file. But I don't know how to use the option in either OpenGL preview or in render preview in the UV/Image editor.

I am using Blender 2.78a on Xubuntu Linux. Thanks to anyone for any help.

Related questions:

3D render - requested side-by-side but got anaglyphic - how to fix
This question just talks about how to use the Save Image options to get a side-by-side PNG file. That is not my problem; saving a PNG works fine.

How do I use Blender's built-in stereoscopic features? Again, just talking about saving a PNG.

To launch fullscreen mode press AltF11.

In the Info Area, go to Window > Toggle Fullscreen.

A search in the Blender Documentation also display the menu location and keyboard shortcut.


How to define states for window/operator base class? Is it possible to create any type of non-property variables for operator window types? I'm trying to define a base class for all operator windows, and would like to define some common states in the base class. I believe the typical Python workflow would be to define some normal variables in the base class, but this doesn't seem possible with Blender.

Anyone tried this before?

Since the instances of the operators only exist for the duration of their execution, instance attributes aren't a suitable solution for storing the state. Once the execution is finished the operator is destroyed and subsequent calls to execute() or invoke() will not have access to the previous state. Class attributes, also known as static variable in other programming languages, could be used since all instances of the class access the very same variable. Therefore the state remains, even when one particular object ceased to exist.

The example below demonstrates the lifetime of an operator and the difference in using a class or instance attribute. Since the operator instance gets destroyed once it's finished executing, the instance attribute always remains "1" no matter how often the operator is called.

bl_info = {
    "name": "Class vs Instance Attribute",
    "author": "Robert Guetzkow",
    "version": (1, 0),
    "blender": (2, 80, 0),
    "location": "",
    "description": "Demonstrates the lifetime of the operator.",
    "warning": "",
    "wiki_url": "",
    "category": "3D View"}

import bpy

class EXAMPLE_OT_class_attribute(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "example.class_attribute"
    bl_label = "Increment and print class attribute"
    bl_description = "Increment and print instance attribute"

    x = 0

    def execute(self, context):
        EXAMPLE_OT_class_attribute.x += 1
        print(f"EXAMPLE_OT_class_attribute: {EXAMPLE_OT_class_attribute.x}")
        return {"FINISHED"}

class EXAMPLE_OT_instance_attribute(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "example.instance_attribute"
    bl_label = "Increment and print instance attribute"
    bl_description = "Increment and print instance attribute"

    def __init__(self):
        self.x = 0

    def execute(self, context):
        self.x += 1
        print(f"self.x: {self.x}")
        return {"FINISHED"}

classes = (EXAMPLE_OT_class_attribute, EXAMPLE_OT_instance_attribute)

def register():
    for cls in classes:
        bpy.utils.register_class(cls)

def unregister():
    for cls in classes:
        bpy.utils.unregister_class(cls)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

    for i in range(5):
        bpy.ops.example.class_attribute()

    for i in range(5):
        bpy.ops.example.instance_attribute()


How do I adjust for overexposure using physically based lighting? I am trying to get my head around physically based lighting in Blender.

I read somewhere the Cycles Sun Lamp is measured in W/m² so
assuming that bright sunlight is measured at 120000 lux (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight) my intensitiy for the blender sun will be (given that 1lux = 0.0079 W/m2 for sunlight) around 980 W/m². This matches more or less with the readings from wikipedia, that states that the max sun intensity depending on its distance from the earth is 1050 W/m² (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight).

Using the filmic Blender add-on I am now way overexposed.
Here comes my first question: where do I compensate for that? I found two exposure sliders within Blender. One directly in the color management tab, which I assume doesn't affect the final rendering, but only the viewport lut. Or do I use the exposure slider under the render tab/film?

Second: How does cycles handle the light contribution from environment maps? In what relation do they stand to the sun intensity as they have a seperate intensity slider. Is there a rule of thumb to get them in the right ballpark?

Use the false colour look in combination with a CDL node (What is the the ASC-CDL node?) to bring your values within the range of the color transform.

See also this related post: How to scale properly HDRI image, to be used in ASC-CDL HDR render?

and this one (somehow outadted, but should give you an idea): Using the False Color look in combination with the CDL Node to work on Wide Dynamic Range scenes


How to add a Object to a bone I Need to attach a Mask to a Bone
The mask is a Object but it also has a Bone to it.
It makes me wonder if i can Merge The Head Control bone and The Mask bone
to have the mask move with the head.

Can somebody please explain how to do this?

Example picture

Wait. Nobody reply I Just answered myself. I Won't delete for if people still want to know how to do this. All i had to do was Go into the Object (The mask's) Edit mode Select the bone and delete it. Then i selected the Object and i hit the bone i wanted to connect it to, Then i hit Crtl P And hit Bone. Then it worked!


Math in Texture Nodes I’m having trouble figuring out how a math node influences a texture node. Say you have the Musgrave Texture node and put the output into an add node. Does the node add all the values within the texture node such as Scale, Detail, Dimension, etc?

The output of a Musgrave texture is, for each pixel of the texture, a value between 0 (black) and 1 (white). If you plug that into a Add node, you add that value with the second value of the Add node :


Problem motion capture Blender I’ve a problem with Blender, I have to make a feet and animate it using a .c3d file with the motion capture of the movements.

But when I try to make the armature and assign the marker to the armature and I press the play, it’s like if the joint of the bones is not connected and they move free but they follow the markers and if I connect the joint and the bones not move.

Also I have tried to make an armature with the bones connected with the key E and they didn’t move. So I need to make a joint that let the bones follow the markers with an anatomical movement.

Could someone please tell me how I can find a solution for my problem?

My .blend file can be found here:

To me you will only need to Bones, one connecting the ankle with the heel and another connecting the heel with the toes.

First you need to construct the armature properly:

Shift+A add armature, then add a bone
Select the two markers 01, 04 to position in between, and align 3D cursor with Shift+S then Cursor to Selected, this will position the bone between the two markers.
Then enter edit-mode of armature and select the bone and Shift+S then Selection to Cursor
Select the markers 05, and align 3D cursor with Shift+S then Cursor to Selected
Then enter edit-mode of armature and select the second bone and Shift+S then Selection to Cursor

The second step is adding bone constraints:

For the first (root) bone use two Copy Location constraint with second on 50% influence to get in between position of two markers 01 and 04. Then add Damped Track to track marker 05
For the second bone use two Damped Track constraints with second on 50% influence to get in between position of two markers 02 and 03.

Result is shown as below:

The updated .blend file can be found here:


Plane in Render not visible in Object Mode Thanks in advance for any help. I am following Andrew's Donut/Cup tut on youtube using 2.8.1 and had a render problem.  Here is a snap of my Object Mode

And here is the same view in render mode.  The 'pink' plane/table is not visible, instead I have a gray plane intersecting my cup which I cannot find in Object Mode.

Why do I have this plane and why is my cup, in Object Mode (Principled BSDF, Transmiission=1, Roughness=0) have what looks like an HDRI country scene in LookDev mode?

You do have another plane in your scene, it's just not showing in the viewport.

In your outliner check these options and look at all the collections you have, there is a plane there not visible but renderable. You can disable by object or entire collections.

Nice donut btw!

More about it at: Blender Docs


Sudden crash after render finished - no image, no logs In 2.8 I have a project which suddenly does not render single frames at full resolution. The set evolved over a few weeks with no problems.

Now if I render a still at target resolution it will finish the render and than totally crash out. No log nor message nor image is written, render window and main window just disappear.

No system overload, 50 % memory, I already reduced threads. Also checked temp file path, permissions, everything. I compared all render settings with an older file version and disabled composing flag. Updated to 2.81a.

Render at 80% works. I tried to hide everything in the scene at full resolution: crash. The task manager shows a spike in GPU 3d at the moment of crash.

Is there a hidden process between rendering and writing the final image?

And no, I can't share the project but will try to answer any question.

Thanks,
Carolo

The solution:

My own question (process between rendering and writing) led to the solution. Actually, there was a "SurfaceDrawing-Something" in the scene. Must have been a mistyped sculpting action. Whatever it is, it invokes a postprocessing which obviously is very hungry at some 30k resolution.

So watch out for strange elements in the outliner!


Strange results when using the Cycles renderer Using Blender 2.91.2
I have a 'simple' two object model of a plastic go-cart wheel - an inner wheel and an outer 'tyre'. I have two different procedural shaders to simulate scuff marks on the wheel. The outer is more scuffed and gouged than the wheel inner.
Within Blender the two objects are correctly aligned, and look right in the Wireframe, Solid and Material preview.
When I Render using the Evee rendered the tyre and wheel stay together and it looks correct.

When I render using cycles and with either GPU computed or CPU Computed; it breaks completely :

No other settings change between the two renders apart from the choice of renderer.
Have I done something stupid ?
PS. My previous models rendered fine with cycles, so I don't think it is my copy of blender or my GPU.

It looks like you enabled the Displacement and Bump setting, but unfortunately forgot to include a Displacement node before the Material Output.

When you connect a color directly it's interpreted as Vector Displacement which largely translates your mesh.


How to change file export numeration? I'm exporting each frame of my animation as an obj with the animation export option.

Blender automatically outputs all the numerated files however it adds 0s before the numbers.

Example:
run_000001.obj
run_000002.obj
...
run_000522.obj

I cannot find any setting to remove the 0s, I'd like for it to export them:
run_1.obj
run_2.obj
...
run_522.obj

use # to define how many decimals you want.
I think you have to export them in steps to avoid the padding  with zeros

from frame 1 to frame 9 use #.obj
frame 10 to 99 use ##.obj
frame 100 to 999 use ###.obj


No lenses for the camera My version of blender has no lenses. Does anyone know why they might be missing? Here's a screenshot. Thanks.

In your image you are in the scene context.

The Perspective, Orthographic, and Panoramic lens options are located in the Camera context.

Note that this is only available when the camera is selected.


Where is the "Virtual Pixel Mode" option? I'm searching for an option to make shown wireframe thicker. I found one solution there What is the setting that changes wire frame thickness?, but I can't find that Virtual Pixel Mode switch in my System options.

Upd: Another option (Line width) seems do something similar , but it changes some GUI parameters and vertex sizes too.

How to change edge widths only or is there a way to change back the GUI lines and Vertex sizes without changing edge widths? Thank you.

This setting has been renamed in the most recent builds (also Blender 2.80 series) to Line Width. You can find it in the Interface section. Possible settings are Thick, Thin or Auto:


Detect if any edge/edges are selected in a mesh How do I detect if any edges are selected in the mesh in context ?
Im trying to enable or disable a class by this polling method which detects the object type and mode of the object but Im trying add detection of any selected edges to the polling
@classmethod
def poll( self, context ):
    return context.object and context.object.type == 'MESH' and context.active_object.mode == 'EDIT'

@classmethod
def poll( self, context ):

    #Get active object
    act_obj = context.active_object

    #Check for edit mode and mesh type
    if act_obj.mode == 'EDIT' and act_obj.type == 'MESH':

        #Get selected edges from bmesh
        me = act_obj.data
        bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)

        edges_selected = [e for e in bm.edges if e.select]

        return edges_selected


Any chance anyone looking into evolutionary algorithms for Blender? Something similar to Galapagos plugin in Grasshopper shown in link below:
https://yazdanistudioresearch.wordpress.com/2011/08/04/evolutionary-form-finding-with-grasshopper-galapagoes/

some good codes (K-d tree) and similar topic found, showcasing computational Blender possible through python or programming approach :)

How would one go about creating a genetic algorithm and/or neural network for blender?

https://www.blender.org/conference/2017/presentations/352

https://salzis.wordpress.com/2014/06/28/kd-tree-and-nearest-neighbor-nn-search-2d-case/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc9Mp4TdS2k (K-d Tree for animation! Can it be spatial planning!?)


Normal map baking does not reflect details I have unwrapped the hi poly model:

And I have unwrapped the lo poly model:

Then I select the hi poly and the lo poly and bake the normal map.
However, there are no details in the normal map:

Does anybody see any obvious mistakes I might have made?

Thank you very much for the help!

Here is a close-up of the difference between the hi and lo poly model:

When baking a normal map from highpoly mesh to lowpoly, several conditions have to be taken into account (assuming lowpoly is already unwrapped):

Highpoly must be selected first, lowpoly - last. So lowpoly should be active, i.e. selected last. Also they have to be in the same place in 3D space.
Lowpoly must have image to be baked to. If Blender Internal, It's simply a matter of assigning image in UV/Image Editor while mesh in Edit mode (or by using a material). If Cycles, Image node with this image should be selected in Node Editor.
In Render Bake settings, Selected To Active has to be checked.

This will make Blender to bake the normals from the secondary selection to the primary selection in 3D Viewport.

Also read:

Baking normal maps from highpoly to lowpoly
Bake normal maps
Baking Normal maps in Blender Internal | Baking Normal maps in Cycles


Shape information lost after scuplting I currently experiment on an eagle. The eagle from the beginning had a shape of feathers. After sculpting its body (which also changed a bit his original form), I lost the shape of the feathers at some parts of its body, as seen in the picture below. Is there a way to "multiply" the feathers that remained, to the rest of its body?

I managed to fix this, so in case anyone runs in this question, here is what I did:
I used an image (in my case an image of scales) as the texture of the Clay brush in Sculpt Mode.
For more information and further understanding of the process, here is the tutorial video that helped me.


make vertices have the same number of weights In my scene the model only has three bones attached to it.  Most of the vertices have weights for these three bones, but a few of them only have weights for one or two of the bones. For some reasons, I'd like to let all of them have weights for "at least" three bones, and "no more than" three bones, because for now a few of the vertices only have weights from one or two bones.

Bones deform vertices that belong to a vertex group of the same name as the bone. You can manually assign and adjust the weight a vertex has for each group.

While in edit mode the vertex groups panel looks like this -

The assign button will assign the selected vertices to the selected group with the current weight setting. The remove button will remove the selected vertices from the selected group.

In the properties sidebar there is a Vertex Weights panel that can help, it can be elusive as it only shows if a single selected vertex is assigned to one or more vertex groups or multiple selected vertices that belong to the same group (only the one common group will show).

There is also the show vertex groups weight addon which you can download from here.


All Objects suddenly invisible in 3D Viewer I was editing my model in edit mode when suddenly everything disappeared.

Things I tried:

Alt + H in case I accidentally hid anything, no effect
Creating a new object, e.g. a cube, also invisible
Restarting Blender, no effect
Opening another scene, everything works fine
Opening the faulty scene on another PC, same error (clean Blender installation)
Switching to rendered view, here the objects are visible

I also noticed that if you look closely you can see a faint line along the X-axis where the objects are visible. If I move my objects around, I can notice that this line displays every object as normal where the object is intersecting it (it's hard to describe). This can be seen in the screenshot:

Is there any way I can recover my scene?

I finally figured out: I accidentally pressed Alt+B instead of B for box select, which enabled view clipping.
This way only the small portion I selected stayed visible.

To disable this, just press Alt+B again and the whole scene is visible again.


black areas in ao map, but normal map looks ok? I'm pretty new to baking maps for game assets, so I need some advice.

My settings are : Cycles, selected to active (with cage).
The normal map seems ok to me, but the ao map has really dark areas that I can't explain.

Am I doing something wrong during baking, or is it my mesh (cubes with bevel) ?

Ambient occlusion focuses darkness on the crevices of the model that's why you have those dark areas. If you didn't already know, the ambient occlusion map is usually used to isolate the edges of a model for wear/tear and (if i remember correctly) it is a linear type of map (black and white image)


Blender Fracture Build Bake to Animation for Alembic export I am using the custom Fracture Blender build for a tree shatter simulation: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Scorpion81/Fracture_Documentation

Haven't used the physics system in Blender at all, but wanted to see if it was possible to have a physics simulation of a tree shattering and export that as an .abc for import into Unreal Engine.  I can run the simulation just fine, but can't figure out how to correctly bake it so that the results are preserved and can be edited in animation/or exported to Alembic.

Does anyone know of a tutorial on how to do this?

Check out the blend file here:

You should just try to export the set up FM simulation via "File->Export->Alembic". Then set your desired frame range and while exporting, the FM simulation is being run in the background and the mesh is dumped out once per frame. That's why the resulting .abc file becomes rather big, 145 MB in this case. And note you will have to re-map the materials manually... only the material assignments are exported / imported, but the values of the material settings AFAIK not (they differ between different programs, this might be the reason.)

I have set up an example blend with a tree fracture scene, derived from your initial blend. In blender you should just need to export this to Alembic. But in case you also want to edit something, it becomes much more tricky IMHO.
You could also convert to keyframed objects, but this will mess up the "fixed" normals again (only FM supports this).

Edit: I did not use fixed normals here, because they work better with more regularly divided base geometry, and best with autohide / automerge. But when the simulation runs and the mesh gets hit, you might get temporary artifacts at the splinters. Instead i tried to mimic the behavior with an Edgesplit modifier. The result is not as smooth as the other approach, but is visually "stable".

Here is the example blend:


Adjusting plane thickness based on amplitude of mapped UV image I have a subdivided plane with a number of cells removed. The final product, after removing cells, is shown below:

Even though the contrast is low, is there a way for me to add a thickness to the plane based on the value of the existing pixels? For example, I'd like the brighter pixels to be taller than the dark pixels.

I feel like I've seen a method of doing this before when making grass, but I cannot find it again. So far, I've played around with the "Solidify" modifier on the plane, to no avail. I am using Blender 2.79.0

Apparently, this is done with the Displacement modifier. Selecting all of the pixels and assigning them to a group, I can complete the Displacement modifier  inputs:

Resulting in this:


Why does my texture bake come out as completely black? (The age-old question.) As many people before me, I'm trying to bake a terrain texture from a Blender material for Unity, and hence not illuminated by light in the scene.
I noticed a ton of forum posts by people with similar issues, but not one of the proposed solutions worked for me. I tried piping the colour output through an emissions shader instead of the principled bdsf shader and baking as the "emit" type, but to no avail... still black. I tried a glossy bake type... black. I recalculated normals, double-checked UV map, duplicated and replaced original mesh for good measure... stubbornly black. I'm trying to do it the emission shader way, so obstruction by other objects isn't the problem.
I'm stuck, and all the internet fixes are failing.
My file:

Edit:

It looks like the emission shader doesn't emit anything in the render view, which I imagine would make the bake always black. Time to investigate that!

Ok, it turns out that a node group that I appended from Poliigon ("Poliigon Colour Variation") somehow breaks the baking process. I'm not really sure how, since I thought the group was meant to be a black box that takes colour in and pipes colour back out, but it might be useful for others to know. Here's a screenshot of the meddling node group:


Understanding light power values On Blender 2.80, lights (other than the sun) have various options for their strength. By default there is Power, measured in Watts, and a color option. If you enable "Use Nodes" you also get a generic Strenght value and another (seemingly ignored?) color option.
I know that the Size option doesn't affect how much light is emitted, but just from where and also the shadow penumbra/softness.

But which value should I use when I set the power of my lights? For example, I have a simple scene with two area lights (30m in size), at the default power they were too weak to light the objects I have placed in the scene (it's a smoke simulation). I had to increase the Watts to 100000 to get the a good lightning. The lights weren't very close to the object, but not too far either.

1000W with 1 in Strength is quite a faint light.
10W with 1000 in Strength is very strong instead.

Is Strength basically just a multiplier? Which means that the light emits 10.000W?

Which one should be used? Or how should I use both to get a "correct" (as in physically correct) result? Also does scale impact the amout of light? I usually set blender to centimeters instead of meters, because I use it with UE4 and UE4 uses centimeters as the unit.

Here is my blend file: https://we.tl/t-n4dS51e9AP

According to the documentation the strength value of the node should be in Watts, but this doesn't seem to be correct from experimentation.  The empirical behaviour of this seems to be as a multiplier.  So if you have a 1000W light and the strength set to 0.5 then you should have the effect of a 500W light.

Regarding color it is important that you set your light color to white if you intend to set the color of the node, this works in much the same way.

Concretely, it appears that nodes filter/amplify the light itself.  You can check this by setting you light power to 0W, no matter what you set the node values to, do you'll not produce any light.

I'm not sure what the intended behaviour is, but playing around with it suggests that a white emission shader of strength 1.0 will produce light exactly as it is configured in the light properties panel.

So the answer to your question is both can be used, it is up to you to decide if it is necessary to use nodes at all for this and just set the properties on the area light as you would expect.

Scale will matter as this defines the falloff of the light, however if you change the scale, blender will automatically compensate by changing the power level of the light.  So if you set everything up and then change the scale you shouldn't notice any difference unless you look at the power property of the light.


Blender 2.9 won't open anymore Blender 2.9 opened the first time I click on it I installed so older addons. It shut while I was installing addons, and would not open anymore, so I uninstalled and reinstalled blender many times, it still won't open. I reverted to a less recent version that still works.

Locate and delete the preferences files for 2.9.
The files you need to delete are startup.blend, userpref.blend, bookmarks.txt, recent-files.txt.
Read this link to find them on your system.
Where is the startup file stored?
Re-install blender and disable all adons.  If the program runs, only then start adding addons one by one, until you find the one that is creating the problem.
Once you find the problem you can report the bug to the developer of that particular addon.
If none of this works, then run blender in debug mode and file a bug report with the info from the console.
Best place to put bug reports?


How to batch remove zero-weight vertices from vgroup? It seems that vertices with zero weight will remain in the vgroup by default, and there appears to be no straightforward way to batch remove all zero-weight vertices from it except having to manually delete one by one from Vertex Paint panel from N sidebar.

So I wonder if there are some possible ways to batch remove them from the group. Since it does lead to unexpected results when using some modifiers.

(Or is there any operators can do something like "Select by Weight"?)

It turns out that one of the existing weight tools named Clean does all I want, which offers several nice options.

In Edit Mode or Weight Paint Mode, you can find the Weight Tools panel on the Toolshelf in 3D Viewport by pressing T.


Blender skin modifier error? I'm following a tutorial and not getting the result I'm supposed to after applying the skin modifier.
Before applying the skin and mirror modifier:

After:

i get these bounding boxes around the mesh and cant select faces like i want to.

What I want:

This is what its supposed to look like according to the tutorial (You can select the smaller faces and there are no bounding boxes around the mesh)
I just started learning blender. If you want any details, do ask.
(I did read the docs on skin modifiers and also tried google.)
Thank you.

There was nothing wrong with the application of the Skin modifier, to get the result you want you need to apply the Subdivision surface modifier too:

Subdivision Surface (Subserf) is a Modifier, meaning that it operates on your base mesh without actually affecting it. From the wiki:

  Modifiers are automatic operations that affect an object in a non-destructive way. With modifiers, you can perform many effects automatically that would otherwise be tedious to do manually (such as subdivision surfaces) and without affecting the base topology of your object. Modifiers work by changing how an object is displayed and rendered, but not the actual object geometry. You can add several modifiers to a single object to form a Modifier Stack and you can Apply a modifier if you wish to make its changes permanent.

Those "Bounding boxes" is your base mesh without any effects of the modifiers.
This can be demonstrated by either removing the subserf modifier or disabling it in the 3D view by toggling the eye icon:

Note that you can shrink the base mesh to the subserfed result with the Edit cage button for a better view of the topology while editing. See the wiki:

  Edit Cage Mode
   To view and edit the results of the subdivision (“isolines”) while you’re editing the mesh, you must enable the Editing Cage mode by
  clicking in the inverted triangle button in the modifier panel header
  (next to the arrows for moving the modifier up and down the stack).
  This lets you grab the points as they lie in their new subdivided
  locations, rather than on the original mesh.

  (source: blender.org)

  (source: blender.org)
  Notice the comparison of screenshots to the right. With the edit cage off, some vertices are buried under the subsurfed mesh. With
  dense vertex configurations, you might have to even click the "Eye"
  icon so that you can see these vertices. The "edit cage on" version
  does not suffer from this problem. It does, however, have its own
  disadvantage---it can look too nice. Notice the three quads running in
  the middle of Suzanne's ear. You can only tell how crooked they are in
  the "edit cage off" version. When you are modeling, you will more
  often want to see your mesh deformities in their full ugliness---so
  you can apply your skills until it is sheer prettiness.


How do I add a shortcut to add a modifier to an object? Is there a way to assign key-binding for add some modifier to selected object? For example boolean modifier? In the Input preferences setting I can not find any appropriate item.

As with a lot of things in blender, you do this by right-clicking on a menu item and choosing Add Shortcut. In this instance, open the Add Modifier menu (the menu found on objects where you choose which modifier to add), right-click on the modifier you want to add a shortcut to, choose Add Shortcut and then press the keys you want to assign to the modifier:

Alternatively, if you want to do this via the User Preferences you can go to the Input tab of the preferences, open the 3D View> Object Mode category and click Add New.

In the operator id box you put object.modifier_add as this is the command that is triggered when adding a modifier. You can then select the type of modifier you want to add from the Type dropdown box and then of course specify the keys you want for this shortcut:


What is the physical foundation of Force Fields? I would like to know the physical foundation of the force fields in blender.

For instance: what are "Wind", "force strength", "flow"?

The "practical" definition of these parameters is here:

  Force Fields in the manual

I don't think there is much documentation about their workings under the hood.

Anyway, each Force type implements one particular type of force in Newton physics.

Forces, the $\mathbf{F}$ in the second law of motion $\mathbf{F}=m\cdot\mathbf{a}$, are the entities that cause an acceleration $\mathbf{a}$ on a object of mass $m$. Different kind of forces can be described as a function that depends on several features of the object being acted on, or of the space in which the force acts:

$$\mathbf{F} = \mathbf{F}(\mathbf{r}, \mathbf{u}, m, q; \mathbf{r_0}, \eta, \ldots)$$

($\mathbf{r}, \mathbf{u}$ = position and velocity vectors of the test object, $m, q$ = mass and charge of the test object, $\mathbf{r_0}$ = position of the effector object, $\eta$ = viscosity of the medium, ...).

Each force can or cannot depend on each of these variables, and it may depend on them in different ways.

Wind is an acceleration field with a total translational symmetry, if the falloff is 0 and there is no min/max distance, or a 2D translational symmetry otherwise. It doesn't depend on anything except its own force parameters and, if falloff is enabled, on $\mathbf{r_0}$
Force and Charge are (typically spherically symmetric) central force fields (they are aligned along the $\mathbf{r}-\mathbf{r_0}$ direction), the latter depending on $q$
Harmonic is a Hookean field. Same variables as Force, but a different equation.
Drag is a force depending on the object's velocity $\mathbf{u}$ according to Stoke's or Rayleigh's law

and so on.

Within each type of force, there are options that control the overall strength (Force Strength, a parameter that basically appears the $\mathbf{F}$ functions above as a multiplying factor); allow to tweak the dependence of the strength on the distance from the emitter (Falloff, ...); convert part of the dependence on $\mathbf{r}$ to dependence on $\mathbf{u}$ (Flow); ...


Game object disappears after a dozen seconds. Game object disappears after a dozen seconds.

Well, OK, now I know why but I'll ask the question and answer it anyway; maybe it'll help someone save some time.

Process:  Start with the default startup file.  Switch to game engine.  Switch to Game Logic.  Select the cube.  On physics menu pick any of: dynamic, rigid body, soft body, or character.  Press play.  Cube object disappears after a dozen seconds.  Can't figure why.  My searches tuned up nothing relevant. I've tried using Blender 2.77 64bit and 2.76b 32bit. Same results in both. I'm running WINDOWS 10.

Answer: The default game engine 3D view places the cube in top view, looking down the z-axis.  Because it's an orthographic view there is no perspective and you cannot tell that the cube is FALLING ( down the z-axis ). After about 10-12 seconds it reaches the clipping distance and vanishes. DOH!

Ensure to have a ground within the cameras viewing frustum. Or better look from the side to see the cube falling


Baked normal map from high poly bad corners I'm trying to bake a normal map from a high polygon model to a low polygon one.

It's a very simple domino shape. When I use the normal on the blender render, I get this strange shape at the border of the shape

I'm not really sure what I'm doing wrong. Is the low poly shape not detailed enough? Is it too big or too small?

Here is the link to the .blend.

Edit:

OK, after Mr Zak's answer I managed to understand why the baking was not creating a normal in the correct size. It was because both objects didn't have the same scale. I've applied the scale for both objects and now the normal and diffuse bake seemingly correctly.

Unfortunately, I still have the issue with the result not being as I expected

As you can see, it goes all the way to the borders now, but it has a weird shape.

For the record, this is my high poly

As you can see, the UVs are well inside the normal map, and for the diffuse it's a simple blue diffuse.

I really don't understand what I'm doing wrong with the way I bake the high poly to the low poly. could it be that my low poly is too low poly?

Here's an updated .blend.

Let's start with vertext normals of smooth and solid shaded mesh:

Now see this diagram how baking works and projects the high-poly to lowpoly:

In each corner of your domino piece you see 3 corners baked, because of Repeated details. You can fix this by making the lowpoly domino shade smooth - that way there will be only 1 vertex normal in each corner, so you won't get overlaps and multiple projections:

If you want your domino silhouette to look better, you will have to add mode polygons. See: How can a Normal Map affect the look of a model?

There is also very comprehensive wiki about normals which might help: Polycount Normal map (the pictures are from there).


Change image levels quickly I have an image with a few shades of grey in it. I need to change some of those shades into white. Is there anything more efficient than going through each pixel one by one and check its RGB values? Is it perhaps possible to somehow posterize the image with some built-in function?

Blender is a bit limited as an image editor, you may find using an external image editor easier. One option is to use the compositor were masking nodes can be used to select a colour to use as a mask for other nodes.

As your asking with the tag of python, you can access the raw image data through bpy.data.images['img_name'].pixels[x]. This is a list of floats that makeup the pixel data, there are 4 per image pixel (red,green,blue,alpha). You can get the width and height through bpy.data.images['img_name'].size.

for p in bpy.data.images['img_name'].pixels:
    if p < 0.45 and p > 0.48:
        p = 0.2


"Etching" onto a cube Probably an elementary question, but could anyone give me a step-by-step method of taking a 2D map (representing carvings)and then "etching" or "engraving" the 2D picture onto the cube faces? Not just a simple map-wrap, but actually making it textured/bumped into the cube surface? Thank you!

Steps for creating the below image:

take the default cube
add a subdivision surface modifier set to simple, with 7 levels
add a displacement modifier and choose your image texture, adjust strength so it doesnt displace it too much.

The actual engraving gets done with the displace, where you select Image Texture, and then use whatever image you want. However, displacement acts only on the existing geometry, so you need to make sure your mesh has enough detail to apply the texture to. To solve this, I have a subdivision surface set to simple (so it doesnt change the geometry) added before the displace:

I hope this is what you're looking for.


Execute a python function whenever the user interacts with the program Is it possible to execute a function every time the user does something? I want the function to check what the last user interaction was and then, if the interaction was to rename something, to give me the previous name and the new name.

Blender doesn't have a way to explicitly catch user events, but there is a workaround if the user interaction causes the scene to update (which renaming an object does).
You can do this:

import bpy

class Watcher:
    def __init__(self, object, property, function):
        #if the property object needs deep copy
        try :
            self.oldValue = getattr(object, property).copy()
            self.newValue = getattr(object, property).copy()
        #if the property object doesn't need it (and don't have a copy method)
        except AttributeError:
            self.oldValue = getattr(object, property)
            self.newValue = getattr(object, property)

        self.object = object
        self.property = property
        self.function = function

    #Call the function if the object property changed
    def update(self):
        try :
            self.oldValue = self.newValue.copy()
            self.newValue = getattr(self.object, self.property).copy()
        except AttributeError:
            self.oldValue = self.newValue
            self.newValue = getattr(self.object, self.property)

        if self.oldValue != self.newValue:
            self.function(object=self.object, new=self.newValue, old=self.oldValue)

# this holds all the watchers
watchers = []
def add_watcher(object, property, function):
    watchers.append(Watcher(object,property,function))

# create the function to be called when name changes
# it can change scene property or whatever
def name_change(object, new, old):
    print("old value: " + str(old))
    print("new value: " + str(new))
    return

# lets watch your_object_name's name
add_watcher(bpy.data.objects["YOUR OBJECT NAME"], "name", name_change)

def watcher(scene):
    """This function will be run everytime after scene updates"""
    global watchers
    for watcher in watchers:
        watcher.update()
    return

# add handler if not in app.handlers
if watcher not in bpy.app.handlers.scene_update_post:
    bpy.app.handlers.scene_update_post.append(watcher)


How would I discover an operator's name? Simply stated, I'm looking for the python operator for what the P key does to selected objects in edit mode.

So I'm looping through edges like so:

import bpy

obj = bpy.context.active_object

for e in obj.data.edges:
    print(dir(e))

I'm attempting to find the e.magically_separate_from_object :D but cannot find it.

Usually I'd find out how to do it through the window interface,but I can't find the window interface for P either.

If you right click on nearly any button, tool, or menu item in blender there will be a link to the blender python API for that button.

Link to blender python API for bpy.ops.mesh.separate


Blender Game Engine FPS slows down when encounters a specific object I am a blender newbie and I am learning how to use BGE.

I've created a landscape with a castle,

put a character in the middle.

Done all the camera settings and started a BGE player.

everything ran completely smooth.

FPS was all ok from the certain distance, facing camera to the character.

but whenever the camera gets close to the character to the close distance

( probably 1,2m away) the FPS drops dramatically and it took me few seconds to

escape from the freeze.

I even lower the polygon count and the texture quality of the character, but

nothing changed.

My computer spec is quite new and it must have no issue running some low

quality background with mid quality single character.

if anyone knows whats wrong with this problem, please enlighten me.

Switch on Menu/Game/Show Frame Rate and Profile.

It will show you what part of the BGE eats most of the time.

With that information you can do further investigations and focus on the problematic area.


Armature Deformations 'Squishing' Solid Objects I have a door mesh that I am working on that needs to be able to swing open and closed (because it's a door...). I have finished modeling it, texturing it, etc. and now I am on to adding the armature and animations, but after adding an armature to the mesh, I'm getting some strange deformations.

Here is the door mesh:

Wireframe:

And here are heatmaps for each of the two "bones".

Right:

and Left:

So, as you can see, the bone on the left should move the entire left door with full weight, and vice versa for the door on the right. However, when I rotate the bones, this happens:

The door does not move completely with the movements of the bone. I want the door to move to the exact same position as the bone, but it appears to be lagging behind it and getting "squished" a bit. The effect gets worse as I turn the door even further.

How can I make sure that the door moves entirely with the bone and does not get "squished" like this?

Steps to recreate:

Create door mesh
Add armature
Move root bone to top of door.
Duplicate root bone twice and place duplicates on either side of door
Move bone joints as shown in the picture, so that the base of the bone is at the hinge of the door and the tip of the bone is at the center of the two doors.
Parent the duplicates to the root bone, keeping the offset.
Select door, then select armature.
Ctrl+P to parent, as Armature Deform with empty groups.
Select all vertices for the left door and assign to the Door.L bone VG (vertex group).
Select all vertices for the right door and assign to the Door.R bone VG.
Select all vertices and assign to the root bone VG.

Nothing too fancy. I just set up a basic armature.

This is caused by the non-zero weighting of the root bone.

Select the root bone while in weight paint mode to check.

You can get rid of it by selecting the door, and remove the 'root' vertex group in the properties panel, object data tab.


Armature issue Importing an FBX file from Unreal Engine to Blender So i need to make a custom animation using the Conan Exiles(game made with Unreal Engine) Armature. I tried importing the sk_human_male.FBX into blender, and got this mess Rather than a working Skeletal mesh & Armature.. any Idea how i can fix it?

This is not a mess, but an ordinary FK rig, based on "joints" instead of "bones". You can think of joints as the same entity of the Head of a Blender bone. As the location of the tail is not taken into account, the "bones" are oriented in the most useful way for editing (like best alignement with world coordinates and main rotation on the X axis).

If FK animation is enough, you can do your animation directly.

If you need a more advanced rig, you should build it using the exact location of the joints, then set a serie of copy rotation constaints from the advanced rig to the UE rig, so that the UE rig become your deforming bones, while the advanced will be control bones only.

At the end you will be able to bake your action using visual keying, only selected bones, and clear constraints options, so that the baked action will perfectly work with the UE rig only.

If this procedure sounds scary, start with an experiment with a simple animation of one body part only (i.e. one leg), and see if you can get it work.


Can I cut out the texture part of an object? Hello to all members of this forum

Project:

I am currently working on the clothes of my character model. The cloth object is just a duplication of the body object with a transparent material (armor). For the modifier I used a Subsurf and Solidify modifier, so I don't get any vertices errors. At the end I combined these 2 objects via armature and generally I don't have a problem, but...

To my Problem:

the armor object in the way, when I am working on the material. As an example, if I want to add a few shaders like a Glass Shader, my transparent shader starts to bug around. An idea that occurred to me would be to just cut out the textured part of the object. Is this in any way possible?

If you are using armature for both objects you can just hide one of them in the Outliner. If you joined objects together and didn't connect any of their vertices then you can easily assign different materials to them from edit mode. Go to edit mode, mouse over one of the objects, press L (it should select only connected vertices, 1 object in your case), assign other material to faces from material tab (Assign button under list of object materials).


Anyone knows the correct way of parenting the mesh to the rig? So, I got myself a robot and rigged it a bit, but when I parent the mesh to the rig with "automatic weights" it goes all laggy, so I think that automatic weights isn't the correct way of parenting this kind of robot, but what is?

Your mesh is set to flat shaded and then smoothed by subdivision modifier that cranks the model to 4 million faces and that is way it is getting laggy. This is not a proper way to make smooth models.

Select the mesh, find "Shading" in the left panel and click "Smooth". This provides smoothing that makes the subsurface modifier unnecessary. If you need some edges sharp, add an edge split modifier. You can further teak which edges are sharp and which smooth if you untick "edge angle" and go into edit mode, select the sharp edges and CTRL-E -> mark sharp and only those edges will be sharp.

The mesh seems to deform well with the amount of faces without subsurface modifier although the resolution still seems little high at certain places depending on the intended use.


Unlinking particle system datablocks from python I have a problem which has been solved on this site before, right here:

Duplicate particle system (not linked)

Except for the fact that I am setting up my whole scene from python, and having to manually go to every object with a particle effect, click on the users icon, and set the start and end frames by hand, is becoming very tedious, when everything else in the scene has been accomplished by script.

My situation: I have a helicopter from which I am shooting rockets. I am creating the scene by reading an xml file output from another application. I start with a blend file that has one helicopter and one rocket, and then make a duplicate of the helicopter and as many duplicates of the rocket as are called for in the xml file.

The problem: I have a particle system attached to my sample rocket. I need to set the start and end frames of each rocket's particle system according to the time it was fired and the time it hit something and exploded. When I make a duplicate of the rocket, it makes a linked copy of the same particle system, so when I set the start and end frames, all the rockets end up with the same start and end frame.

I have tried every permutation of make_single_user that I can think of, but actually it doesn't even do what I want when I call it through the interface, so I'm not sure if it affects particle systems. In any event it does nothing for me in python.

Anybody know how to do this?

Copy the particle system settings

Here is a simple test script on what I believe you want to achieve.  Select object with at least one particle system.  Copies the context object, copies the settings of particle system 0, changes the start frame on copy to 22 and sets this to particle system 0 on copy.

import bpy

context = bpy.context
scene = context.scene
ob = context.object
# copy object
obcopy = ob.copy()
# copy particle settings
ps = ob.particle_systems[0].settings.copy()
ps.frame_start = 22
# new settings on copy
obcopy.particle_systems[0].settings = ps
# link to scene
scene.objects.link(obcopy)


My Camera view and renders blank After modifying an object I deleted the camera, and after that I add a new camera to the scene but in the end I couldn't see anything with my new camera view with Numpad 0 and rendering, it just shows blank.

Can anyone help me? Thank you.

Blender File

That's because the scene camera was set to the mesh itself, instead of the Camera:

Just imagine: Can you see your own face without a mirror in real world? :P

Solution is simple: Go to Scene tab (located in Property Editor), use the actual camera object instead of the default one. Or select the camera object then press Ctrl Numpad 0 to set it as the active Camera to the scene.

Another issue in this case is that the Aperture type of the camera was set to Radius, which makes everything blurry with current parameters. Or you can simply switch to F-Stop to solve the blank render issue:


Using rigify, Automatic weights parenting fails I'm doing a basic human rig for practice. All of my bones are set up and the rig generates just fine, however, when I try to parent to the rig with auto weights, a majority of my mesh disappears (See pictures)

Any ideas on what's happening?

To make Rigify work properly you need to enable running python scripts or scripted expressions. When opening your file click on Reload Trusted button on the top of blender screen.


Weird lines in Cylinder I am trying to make a cake stand. Here is what it looks like:

And here is it in wireframe:

The thing is, when I use a reflective material, I can see these lines running along the face of the cylinder and I can't seem to get rid of them (I've tried adding additional edge loops to no avail):

To be specific, I'm talking about the lines that kind of look like the old Japanese flag:

What are these and how do I get rid of them?

This is called pinching. This happens because you have single vertex with a lot of edges.

You can improve it by deleting the vertex and adding a n-gon in the middle.

This is not ideal solution in every case because there is the n-gon in the middle but for rendering it works quite well.