duplicating an object and keyframing without affecting the original object So I duplicate an object and start animating the duplicate object. The original object then inherits the same keyframes from the duplicate object. When deleting the keyframes from the original object, the duplicate object also looses it's keyframes.
Any idea what it could be? I tried un-linking the object but that deletes it.
I want the duplicate object to have keyframes but the original object to remain static.

No worries I managed to find a solution with trial and error. within relations, picking object and animation. This singles the object and allows you to animate the duplicate object with out affecting the original object. Sorry all ^^


How to round specific face with modifier(non-destructively)? I want to round only top/bottom corners with a modifier. But I can't do it with bevel modifier.
Here are the gif processes:
https://imgur.com/a/s4rYBE8
Is there a way?

If I understand correctly what you want, you can select the edges you want to bevel, give them Bevel Weight in the N panel, then in the Bevel modifier, choose Limit Method > Weight and play with Offset and Segments values:


Lofting between Splines I’ve seen some C4D users use a tool called Loft-NURBS it seemed like a good way to speed up my workflow.

Is there a tool in Blender to create a surface from multiple splines, but still have the ability to change their shape?

Loft-NURBS in Cinema4D

In blender this is called Skinning:

Add a NURBS surface circle Shift+a, s, c.
Tab into edit mode.
Shift+d to duplicate your the segment a few times.
Select you segments, aa for all of them.
Press f to skin selection.

You'll probably also want to unable Endpoint U in the Active Spline panel under "Object data" in the Properties window.

The image included in the question shows a shape with a differing number of segment points. This is currently not possible.

Note. There's work being done to give Blenders limited NURBS a overhaul (but progress has been slow).


Exporting cycles rendered models to be used in opengl The cube in top left corner is the default cube with change in view port color. I added checker texture to it using nodes and got it rendered using cycles render. When I exported them to be used via opengl API, the cube in top left corner,i.e. without texture, gets displayed.For any model, the only effect I observed is the change in viewport color in the model, which gets displayed via opengl. Is there a way to use rendered model or models with texture and other details added to it?
P.S I have Open Asset Import Library to load scene and GLSL for implementing shader source.

The main problem is that baking with Cycles is still fairly new, less than one year at the time of writing.  Blender's various exporters were designed before this and they are built upon the older Blender Render(Internal) Material system.  Here is a print-screen of the main Blender Render Material System.  Although BI has nodes as well, I'm not so sure they will work well with exporting either.

So let's go back to Cycles for a moment.  Here is a setup that has a texture which was baked using Cycles bake.  The baked texture is chosen by a node as seen in the node editor but the current problem is that this node will not be recognized by the various exporters as being a texture that should be exported along with the model.

Here is an example of one difficulty that can make upgrading the various exporters to work with Cycles a bit complicated.  There are three textures in the following node setup.  One bake-to texture, one texture for the diffuse color input and one normal map.

Now it could be decided that the texture which is not attached to anything should be the texture to be exported as the main color texture, however, Cycles nodes allow for more than one node group as shown in the following image.  The setup shown would make consistent and reliable exporting very difficult but it makes the Cycles material system very flexible.  These two ideas conflict.  It's not at all clear for this situation which baked texture(s) should be exported.

So for now what you can do is switch to Blender Render and deactivate the Nodes as shown in the following image.

Now click the tabbed icon for textures that is to the right of the Material tab icon and add a texture slot.  Next, assign the baked texture to this slot.  (Now you should be able to export without too many problems.)*

*as I mentioned in the comment earlier, leaving the Cycles nodes intact but deactivated can still cause the exporter problems.  For simple scenes it doesn't always happen but with a complex scene that has 100 models and hundreds of textures all linked into the Cycles nodes system, things can get hairy for the exporter.

The textures may be detected but the exporter may not know what they mean and it could fail because of this.
The SketchFab exporter was doing this to me this past spring.  It's probably better to save the .blend and create a duplicate of it and then just delete all the Cycles materials and build them up again using Blender Render(Internal) from the start.

It's a nuisance but until someone with coding skill finds the time to deal with it, this is what we are stuck with. (unless someone knows something I don't and they would like to share.) :)


How to get to the Render Output Panel I want to export my mesh as a transparent PNG. I found this page that shows how to do that.

But first I need to get to the Render Output panel.  How do I get there?

I am using version 2.72b on Ubuntu.

It's on the right in the big section called the Properties Editor:


Does the FPS of the playback matter? I'm trying to edit a video to post on to Youtube and i need the FPS to be 30 so that the audio syncs with the video. In order for me to achieve 30 fps in some parts of the video I have to turn the quality way down. (10% of 720p).

My question is, even if the playback FPS is low, will the render be OK?

Yes, the render will be fine.  Make sure however that you bump up the quality back up to 100%, otherwise it will (just a guess) render an animation 72x128 pixels.  Playback FPS is just the realtime playback speed.  Do keep in mind that your computer may not progress through the render very quickly though.


How to read Auto Keyframing state in Python? I want to create keyframes with Python, when a custom control changes. How do I check the state of the Auto Keyframing button?

Tip turn on developer extras and tooltips in Edit > Preferences > Interface > Display
Then mouse over the button and will see that it is boolean property to turn on off.  https://docs.blender.org/api/current/bpy.types.ToolSettings.html#bpy.types.ToolSettings.use_keyframe_insert_auto
scene.tool_settings.use_keyframe_insert_auto

Use in conjunction with the enum  https://docs.blender.org/api/current/bpy.types.ToolSettings.html#bpy.types.ToolSettings.auto_keying_mode
scene.tool_settings.auto_keying_mode


Operator Panel options grayed out Yesterday I started to learn blender. Now I want to model a spiral for my hammer.

When adding a spiral, how can I access the associated options in the Tool Shelf?

spiral options greyed out

Try choosing File > Load Factory Settings. This will discard any customizations you've made to your settings. Your file will close and be replaced with the default scene, so any unsaved work will be lost. For this reason you should save your project before loading factory settings, and re-open it after doing so. If this solves your problem you can then save the reset (fixed) settings from the "Save User Settings" button at the bottom of the Preferences window so that you won't run into the problem again.

This solution was suggested on Blender Artists by user "mib2berlin" to a user experiencing the same issue. The issue is apparently not specific to the spiral options, but can happen with other tools that use the Operator Panel.


IK Legs Mess Up in Render I have created an animation with this robot, and everything looks fine and normal in the viewport, but once I render it out in any render engine it does this weird thing that you see in the first image. The second image is what it is supposed to look like, and the third is what it ends up doing towards the end. It looks like the IK controls just forget to move forward and instead move up...? Would appreciate any thoughts on what is going on.

Here is my file if that is helpful:

I figured it out, sorry for the long delay. I was using a constraint on the foot bone (I think it was limit distance) to keep it from detaching, but that messed with the rest of the rig so it freaked out. I just deleted that constraint and it fixed itself.


Why does Blender warp UV pelt when unwrapping tight geometry? Often when I am modeling something I need to add some very fine detail to certain areas of the mesh so I add some very tight loop cuts in that area.  However when I go to unwrap it, even if it is very simple square geometry Blender will severely warp the pelt.

For example, if I have a simple cube and unwrap it it looks fine:

But if I add a few very close loop cuts the pelt is horribly distorted:

Here is another example:

In both these cases the geometry is very simple and box-like, all quads.  But it becomes distorted when I unwrap it and I have to waste time manually aligning all the edges in the UV editor.  This also sometimes happens when I have many proximity cuts for use with a subsurf modifier.

Why does Blender do this and is there a way of preventing/fixing it?

As mentioned in the comments, Blender supports two algorithms for making a 2d projection of the mesh, Angle Based and Conformal. Angle based is the default and generally handle complex and organic shapes better, but runs into problems for some cases (e.g. the tight loop cuts you are using). In these cases it is best to try the Conformal algorithm.

The conformal term comes from the mathematical term conformal map, a function/projection that aims to minimise the difference in angles between the source and destination.
More details on the particular method used can be found here if you are mathematically inclined.


Rotation of rotated element im new to Blender and i have a big problem with rotation. I am building something in the same style as the Game of Thrones intro, so a lot of buildings fitting inside a sphere.

I rotate the whole thing so it will fit on the side of the sphere.

And then i want to rotate the gears in an animation, choose local transform orientation and the rotate handles look fine, and i rotate it it looks fine. But when i play the animation the gear rotates all around.

i tried to click Objekt -> Apply -> Rotation, and then i see the rotate handles aren't fine at all:

So, all look fine (alså the rotate handles) until I rotate, the already rotated object. when i play an animation it rotates all around. When i click Objekt -> Apply -> Rotation, I see why. The rotate handles are (secretly) messed up. Why and how do i solve it.

I want to rotate the whole thing, and then be able to rotate every single gear while still fitting in.

The object that you want to rotate should first be parented to an 'empty'.

In Object Mode, hit Shift-A, then select 'Empty', then 'Circle'.
Clear all rotations on your gear object (set all to zero)
Move your object to the center of the Circle Empty.
Select your rotating gear object FIRST, then hold shift and select the Empty, then hit 'Ctrl+P', then 'Object'

You can now place your Empty (along with the gear) anywhere you want, at any angle. When you tell the gear object to rotate it will rotate around the X,Y,Z orientation local to the empty.


Why is this curve automatic closed? Why is this curve closed? I can't find out, where I can stop this behaviour.
import bpy
from mathutils import Euler, Matrix, Quaternion, Vector

if 'LIGHTNING' not in bpy.context.collection.children:

    col = bpy.data.collections.new('LIGHTNING')
    bpy.context.collection.children.link(col)

def create_lightning_Curve():
    # Create a curve-container
    lightning_curve = bpy.data.curves.new('lightning','CURVE')
    # make some settings to the container
    lightning_curve.dimensions = '3D'
    lightning_curve.resolution_u = 1
    lightning_curve.use_fill_caps = True
    lightning_curve.fill_mode = 'FULL'
    lightning_curve.bevel_depth = 0.1
    lightning_curve.bevel_resolution = 0
    # create splines (or multiple curves (= splines) in a curve-container)
    coords = [(0,0,0), (1,-1,3), (2,1,6), (3,-1,10.8592 )] ##### Point coordinates
    Bezline = lightning_curve.splines.new('BEZIER')
    Bezline.bezier_points.add(len(coords))
    for i, coord in enumerate(coords):
        x,y,z = coord
        Bezline.bezier_points[i].co = (x, y, z)

    #Create object
    obj = bpy.data.objects.new('lightning', lightning_curve)
    # Link object
    bpy.context.collection.children['LIGHTNING'].objects.link(obj)
    return obj

create_lightning_Curve()

A spline created by lightning_curve.splines.new('BEZIER') already has 1 vertex.
So when you add Bezline.bezier_points.add(len(coords)), the spline now has 5 vertices.
When looping:
for i, coord in enumerate(coords):
        x,y,z = coord
        Bezline.bezier_points[i].co = (x, y, z)

you're setting the coordinates of the 4 first and the last stays at (0, 0, 0), which makes the spline appear as closed.


How would I track a face turning around? I want to track someone turning around in a scene and apply a 3D helmet to the track. How can this be done? when I tried to do it using some handy dot stickers, I did not know how to track what was on the front of my face after I turned around.

I want to take a 3d soldier helmet and mask it on my actors head.

2D Tracking is quite simple and easy to do, just take advantage of the dots and use them as a guideline in your 3d scene to make the rotation of your helmet.

once you set up your tracking scene correctly and you turn your trackers into empties, you can extract transform information from the empties and apply them on your helmet object, by using a Constraint , a hook or even keyframe and rotate the helmet manually if it's a simple mesh.


Baking regular lights in eevee? I just finished lighting a scene and was wondering if there was any options to bake the lighting? Not the indirect lighting but actual stuff like lamps,sun,point and spotlight lights I can't seem to find any button other then indirect or cubemap baking I'm using blender release canditate 2

I assume what you meant for bake lighting was like a common bake procedure which being used in game. As far as I know, currently there is no option to bake lighting to textures in Eevee, the options just exists in Cycles.


How to fill in spaces between voronoi holes? I'm trying to model a scene with bone tissue, like in this pic:

I've gotten this far, but I need those nice, rounded holes like in the pic above.

I've ALMOST achieved this effect by going into edit mode, selecting the whole thing, and hitting "Smooth" in the Transform toolbar on the left a few times. But it deforms the part where the bones meet up with a space, as shown here:

How do I get rid of those spaces and make the bones join up smoothly?

Edit: Also, here's the blend file for the first screen shot:

Check this blend here:

For geometry like this, I often use the Skin Modifier, because it can create these smooth branches automatically. But to use it, you need a mesh as a base, not a bunch of curves. So first, remove the curve profile from your geometry:

Next, use Alt + C to convert the lines to a mesh geometry:

In Edit mode, remove doubles, using a high threshold value, to merge as many vertices as possible while still maintaining the shape you created initially. I was using a merge distance of 0.1 for your scene:

next, add the skin modifier (can take a while until it is on there, and save your scene before):

Finally, go to Edit Mode, and select all vertices, then hit Ctrl + A. This activates a modal operator, when you now drag the mouse you can scale the profile up and down. Scale down until the branch thickness is what you like, and then add a Subsurf Modifier to smooth out the skinned mesh:

You can scale each point individually using the shortcut I mentioned before, so variation can be created easily. You might however get some areas with artifacts. Sometimes, marking a different vertex as the root can resolve or at least improve it:

Now play with the thickness:


Where to start dissecting this racing track? I quite new to blender; i wand to make the following kind of track for a racing game i am working on. I am overwhelmed by the many things to stard; for this case is it better to start with the road or with the landscape ?
I was thinking to use spline and extrude the road to be able to adapt the road; is it the proper way of doing it ?
For the landscape i should start with a plane that i subdivide a lot but then how to get this random moving vertices ?
Thanks !

You can use a bezier curve for the track.

Create the track as a bezier curve
Create a track segment with an Array modifier > Fit Curve and target the track
Add a Curve modifier to the segment and target the track


How to paint a texture on top of a repeated texture? I would like to create a ground that has grass and a road in the middle using textures. For the grass, I downloaded an image and set it as a texture with repetition. For the road, I have another texture. Today, I learned how to use Texture Paint mode. It seems that I can paint the road if the grass texture was not repeated. But how can I paint the road texture on this repeated texture? Thank you,

you can mix both textures with a MixRGB, create a new image in the image editor and then paint a black and white mask in texture paint mode to be used in in the fac input, you can set everything and go into the LookDev or Material Preview to see the efect while painting.


Part of object disappears when viewed through a transparent material When using the Blender Game Engine, the parts of the model viewed through the windows becomes transparent and it's not a clipping problem. If I select a glass object the model viewed through the glass object shows up properly.

I have tried both solidify and double sided and it doesn't help. If I select a transparent object, the object then shows the model through the object. When I press play, then everything works right. In the image I have selected the 'glass door' on the left and the object can now been seen, but not through the other windows. I hope this is alright to answer like this, as I don't see away to include an image in  my comments.

My guess their normals are pointing to the opposite direction. One solution is to add a solidify modifier to it, or check in double sided in object data. The second option is maybe better for performance.


Help figure out where this phantom rust is coming from I have an object with two non intersecting UV Maps.  One UV Map (round.red.light.decal) is to place a red light decal (round.red.light.png).  The other UV Map (rust.map) was used to draw an image mask (cabin.rust.mask.png).

I have my nodes as such...

But I have some phantom rust that I did not draw in my mask.  The face the red light is on isn't even in the rust UV map.

Thanks for any insight.  Here is my blend file https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8ZnFrE6fxi_ZDNIanAyQ001RlE

When vertices touch on UV map, you might get stray color effects like that.
You want a little bit of space between each UV "island"

Edit mode > Mesh > UV Unwrap > Smart UV Project
Island Margin > something small, like 0.05


Cut object into two objects with a plane is there a way to cut an object into two objects with a plane without duplicate that object and extruding the plane in both direction applying a boolean operation?

My mesh is complicated because it is generated by a 3d scanning so the knife project isn't enought.

The knife project gives me the line where the two object should be separated, but i need to separate the objects manually along a very complicated mesh resulting in a waste of time.

Thanks!

While i can suggest to use bisect, i have an even better solution, i wrote a little "free" add-on for exactly this situation. Called it Bisectplus, as it can take a plane object and generate 3 vertex groups which represent the cut loop, as well as both sides (which include the center each) to make it easy to use for further operations.

The source-code can be found under https://github.com/Xylvier/Bisectplus/

As it says, seeing is believing:

No harm was done to the monkey.


Why am I getting pinching on my mesh? I can't identify the problem here. I know I have a couple of tris there and I know it's a bad practice, but I didn't see a way around it.

EDIT: here's the file:

The problem is that you have one long edge connecting the upper and lower vertices, as well as several shorter edges in the same place.

Select the long one, and remove it, and the problem will go away.

To select it, you may have to click several times, to alternate between the long one and one of the shorter ones. Once the long one is selected, remove it by pressing X followed by E.


Setting euler rotates camera, but setting quaternion doesn't I was trying to make a camera look at a certain object. I used the following code:

diff = objs[2].location - objs[0].location
rot_quat = diff.to_track_quat('-Z','Y')

Then, if I try to set the rotation using quaternion - it does not work.

camera.rotation_quaternion = rot_quat

But, when I try euler rotations - it works perfectly.

camera.rotation_euler = rot_quat.to_euler()

It seems weird to me that this should happen. Any ideas why this is?

It works with eulers because rotation_mode is set to XYZ by default.

Either change it to QUATERNION or modify matrix_basis (or some of the other matrix attributes). You can easily convert any quaternion to a matrix using its method to_matrix and resize it with to_4x4

I.e.

mat = q.to_matrix().to_4x4()
mat.translation = cam.location
cam.matrix_basis = mat


Why does Blender have the Z-axis up but is the depth-pass actually called a Z-pass? I understand what it does, but it doesn't make sense. The terms used might be confusing for new users.

Because 3D space and image space are unrelated.

It makes sense that you have (X, Y) used for a 2D image, so then its logical that the depth be Z.
Which axis represents 'depth' in 3D space is undefined, there is no right answer and it's not consistent between applications, if you work with maps it may make sense that (X, Y) are for a 2D top-down view and Z is the land height. But you can rationalize this differently too, so what makes sense to you is probably based on the applications or use-cases you've previously been used to.


Simulating a 40W Light Bulb Let's say I have a light bulb at home that I want to add as a light source.

Specs:

40W incandescent light bulb
5cm in diameter
Color temperature of 2700 kelvin

What values should I enter into Blender to have this simulated properly?

I will accept an answer explaining this for Cycles, together with how the conversion of my numbers above into Blender was done.

Bonus points for Eevee settings as well, which are not the same IIUC.

NOTES

Just filling in 40W in the Blender light settings is wrong and will not work.
The light "Size" setting in Cycles is documented as being the light radius, not its diameter.

Simply convert Lumens to radiant flux.

Set Color to white, Power to 1W [link], and Size to 25 mm
Enter 450 Lumens (energy emitted by a 40W incandescent lightbulb)[link]
Divide the Lumens by 683 to get radiant flux [link] (which is used by Blender)

You can use Blackbody node to specify the 2700K color temperature.

Sources:

Cycles, unit of light energy ATTN: Brecht
Why Watt as light value - Comment by Troy_s
CG Cookie - How physically based, photometric lighting can improve 3D renders


full single rotation last pass strange behavior (incomplete X / Z rotation) I have a strange behaviour of the pass between 2 last keyframes of X and Z axis in full single rotations - instead of snapping the original state the model rotates backwards, both in Blender and c++ code? where can the problem  presumably be? I, not that deep into Blender to guess the reasons myself:( Applying the recorded video describing the said above - thank you :)
https://youtu.be/tw0JBH1Bobo

It is because of the way quaternions work.  To perform a single rotation from q=(1,0,0,0) around axis (0,0,1) it will go from (1,0,0,0) through (0,0,0,1) and return to its original orientation as (-1,0,0,0).  Now it may seem strange to start at (1,0,0,0) and end at (-1,0,0,0) and still be in the same orientation, but that is just the way quaternions work.  q and -q represent the same orientation.

Since you aren't ending your spin at (-1,0,0,0) that means the animation system animates the figure unspinning instead of completing the spin.

I first realized these properties of quaternions back in 2014 shortly after I asked How do I ensure a sequence of quaternions from matrix.decompose() is continuous? .  Take a good look at the difference between the fcurve screenshot in the question and the screenshot in the accepted answer.


Sculpting with texture as a mask? In Zbrush there is an option to sculpt using texture as a mask. Is it possible also in Blender? If yes, than could you tell me how can I do that? I have textured model, and wherever is bright colour, I would like to have bump, and wherever is dark colour, I would like to have cavity.

I'm pretty sure you're the same person who asked it on Blenderartists, so here's the same answer for other people who fell here instead :

Blender currently doesn't have this feature, but there's a rightclickselect proposal about it, so you should upvote it !

In the mean time I found a workaround but it requires 3 add-ons and the detail is limited to the resolution of your current geometry :

Weight-and-Color
Mask Tools
Bake UV-Texture to Vertex Colors (included in Blender, you just have to enable it)

Here's how to do it :

enable Blender Internal renderer
select your object and go in Edit Mode
in UV/Image Editor, select your texture
in 3D view go in Vertex Paint mode
In Tool shelf > Misc tab > Bake, click on "UV Texture to VCols" (you can then go Back to Cycles if that's where you were)
with your cursor hovering the 3D view, hit Space and search for "weight & color"
in Convert, select "Vertex color to weight" and in "Color type" select "Gray scale"
go in Sculpt Mode
In Tool shelf > Sculpt tab > Mask Tools, click on "Create Mask"
MMB drag on the 3D view to refresh the view and reveal the mask
BOOM !
haha !

It gets fast enough when you're used to it. But if someone knows a quicker workaround, TELL ME !!!

Notice that since you can convert vertex colors to a sculpt mask, this means you can use "Paint Dirty Vertex Colors" ! How neat ?
Don't forget that unless you check "Dirt only" you won't have a high contrast with pure white, so you may want to enable it and tweak the angle values to have a good contrast.

ALSO, you may notice that the Mask tools add-on (sculpt tab) has options to directly mask by cavity, but you will find that it looks crappy as f*** compared to "Paint Dirty Vertex Colors".


is there any way to make a loop animation in blender? a short loop animation in blender 2.81 ? How to make a short animation looping, so it plays and replays the animation itself.

Step 1. Make the animation

Step 2. At the end frame, duplicate the first keyframe of your animation and move it there.

Step 3. Done!


Texturing a sphere with a tiled texture I want to create a wrecking ball in Blender. As a first try I created a sphere, UV unwrapped that sphere with Sphere Projection and then tried to texture that sphere with a tiled texture. This is the material setup:

This is the texture I downloaded from textures.com

And this is the rendered image:

I tried scaling this image texture but this did not work I think. How can you texture a sphere with a tiled texture ? Perhaps this is easy with procedural textures but that is a skill I don't have at this moment. How to do it with an image texture or is it just not possible ?

P.S If I am taking the complete wrong direction by trying to texture this sphere with a tiled texture, please tell me. In the end I just want to texture this sphere in a way that it looks like a rusty wrecking ball

P.S I thought I had a tileable texture. But this not being the case this is not a good question. Sorry

Your texture is  not tileable, that's why it doesn't scale well: to make it tileable you can import it in Photoshop or Gimp, apply the "offset" filter at half the resolution of both X and Y dimension (1120 x 787 in your case), and use the stamp and/or the healing tool to eliminate the seams crossing. Pay attention not to touch the border of the image, or you will have to redo the operation.
When the texture is seamless you can generate the relative normal map (i.e. with the Nvidia free plugin for Photoshop, or free online sites), or use a black/white version to control a "bump" node.

In addition I suggest you, instead of fixing the ratio between Diffuse and Glossy (0.1) to plug a "Layer Weight" node (Fresnel output) and control the amount of glossiness with his control: this adds some Fresnel effect, more glossiness at the outer border of the sphere (relatively to the point of view), which helps beliavability of every material.


Vertices deforming in the wrong way... can't figure it out I gave my character a belt and I want it to keep it's form when he sits down but it seems like I can't get the belt to not deform regardless of how I paint the weights. I left him in the pose where the deformation of the belt is most noticeable  but if you reset the rotations you'll see what it looks like normally. Can anyone help?

Sometimes you can fix this kind of problems with weight paint, maybe it's possible in your case?

For example I've removed the back of the belt from all vertex groups and parent it to the bone called Spine and it seems to work. It won't give you a big control on it though:

You could have also created a different mesh for this part of your character (which would have made sense as it's a differente object than the shirt or pants).

But if we keep your current mesh and want to keep a precise control, for this kind of cases it may better to create some additional bones that will be the only ones to control the part of the mesh with problems, so here for example you could:

Create 3 additional bones that you parent to the spine:

Call them for example backbelt1, backbelt2 and backbelt3:

Select the back of the belt and remove it from all vertex group so that no bone have anymore influence on it:

Create 3 new vertex groups called backbelt1, backbelt2 and backbelt3 and assign each part of the back of the belt to each group. Now the back of the belt is automatically controlled by a bone:

If you bend the character, move the bones so that the belt is not deformed a way you would not want:


When Blender says out of memory error what exactly do I need to free up or replace? I am trying to render this complex scene I am using an hdr and a couple of hair particle systems and when I tried to render the animation it said out of memory so what do I need to do ? Do I get a new bigger ram or a new graphics card . I’ve been using blender for about a year and it was rendering fine but now I am trying both cpu and gpu renders and it won’t work .

Are you rendering it on GPU or CPU?
If it's GPU then you

(a) try splitting up and rendering the scene over different render layers

-OR-

(b) try rendering it on CPU instead. I had to render a complex scene too earlier this month, it kept crashing every time I tried to rendering it on GPU; worked just fine on CPU however it took longer (obviously). If the problem still persists on CPU rendering then you could consider upgrading your RAM; I, myself, have 16GB and that just barely enough for complex renders.


How to use the "Combo" tool? I have been following a tutorial and since this tutorial is really old (2009), the person used a tool called "combo" to extrude and rotate at the same time, without moving the rest of the body.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUifORl-faI

The part that I'm stuck is around 7:20.
Does this tool still exists in the 2.79 version? If not, what can I use to have a similar result?

Thanks!

You can press Shift and click each of the manipulator types to add them to the widget, and this will allow you to have the 'Combo' that they show in the video.


Not running at 24 fps in viewport My main problem is that I have a character in a scene and the scene is only running at 17 fps in viewport. Everything is turned down to the lowest render settings. I have a i7-9700k and rtx 2070 super. Is there something I can change to get better performance or do I need to get a different cpu?

Thank you.

Depending on the complexity of the scene the animation won't necessarily run at full frame rate when viewed in the viewport even with EEVEE but will be the correct frame rate when rendered to a movie file and played back.


Can't Seem to Fully Isolate Already Separated Islands in UV Editor This is the first project in Blender, and I managed to create it up to this point using online tutorials for sculpting and retopology, adapting them to how I want my character to look.
Now I have to create the unwrapping. My problem is that the moment I select the unwrapped leg, there are selected portions from the model that shouldn't be selected. More specifically, the marked seam between the leg and torso, and the marked seam between the leg and foot. For some reason, I can't isolate the seams.
How do I split a model into parts with seams (marking for unwrapping) where each part is independently controlled by the UV editor?
This is how it looks:

I don`t seem to have surplus vertices, because the moment I turn it smooth it looks nice.
I also thought that it might be a problem that it doesn't have a flow in retopology because this was my first time, and so I got a little confused about the torso-leg part.

select the vertices you want to separate via the UV islands, then in the viewport, press Y. That should rip it with the shortcut I believe. Some game engines don't like multiple UV islands on one mesh so it's become a standard practice for me.


Round or hard corners on a single vertices in 2D I have an 2D object (eg. circle) and would like to modify single vertices and their angle. Very much like in any graphic software I would like to select one single vertice and convert it either in a hard corner or a "soft"/smooth corner.
Couldn't find that in Blender. Proportional editing and smoothing won't work.

Related to this question I would like to manipulate vertices by exact dimensions and find that sometimes this is hard to achieve. For example I would like to scale by an exact dimension.

Mesh objects always have what you seem to be thinking of as "hard corners". When you're saying "like in any graphic software" I assume you're thinking about vector-based software like Inkscape or Illustrator which typically use Bezier curves.

If you want to manipulate points in a similar manner you would have to create Curve objects, not Mesh objects.


Show metadata from photos (image sequence)? Is it possible to read metadata from an imagesequence? I am doing a timelapse and thinking about using Blender for putting it all together. Need to read the date from metadata and show it.
Thanks

You can use Python and getctime to get your desired data.

try:
    mtime = os.path.getctime(file_name)
except OSError:
    mtime = 0
last_modified_date = datetime.fromtimestamp(mtime)


Is there a way to change the edge from 'Auto Smooth' mode to a complete curve? My purpose

I made the following modeling to make parts for the robot’s tilt arm.

What I tried

I first used the Surface subdivision modifier to express softness and curves. However, using this modifier with the Bevel modifier does not produce the results I want. In more detail, after applying the Surface sudivision modifier, it is difficult to express the slope and sharpness of the edges, using Bevel Weight and Crease. Thus I found out that, for the slope and sharpness of the complexly constructed edges, there was a function called Auto Smooth, partly by looking for an easy way to apply softness.

With ‘Auto Smooth’ function, it was easy to apply soft effect while maintaining sharpness of each edges. And using the Weighted Normal modifier, it formed a more realistic surface (I still don't understand the Weight normal).

Point

Most of them have been resolved, but unlike Surface Subdivision, Auto Smooth does not soften to the outlines.

The outline is not smooth and still angular.

To get a clear answer

I know that Auto Smooth function does not actually make the surface
smooth, it only makes light rendering smooth. However, if I render
later, if the outline fails to come out smoothly, I can't make a
realistic rendering.
Also, I think it difficult to maintain the model in the future to
divide Surface from the beginning of the modeling.

Q. Excluding the above concerns, is there a way to smooth the outline?

You need to do two things.

Add more Bevel segments, so the shading works properly
Add the Subdivision Modifier to "smooth the outline"

(There's no need for the Weighted Normal modifier.)

Note:
I'd also strongly reccomend, that you make your model all quads.
Most of your problems are caused by n-gons.

Edit:
To keep your corners sharp, add more geometry manually, without the Subdivision modifier.


editing a object after solidify How to edit my object after I use solidify modifier without getting two (doubble) marked vertex at the same time? I need to fix them separated, not together. Anyone?
Im new in the Blenderworld so probably basic stuff but Im stuck with this and it annoys me a lot, need this input for sure. :) Working in 2.8

Constructive modifiers (like solidify) only create new verts after applying. So you have to apply them to edit the new geometry.
Form the [blender Manual:]
(https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/modifiers/introduction.html)

Apply
Makes the modifier “real” – converts the object’s geometry to match the applied modifier, and deletes the modifier.


Access Audio Strips Sample data in Python for a Cross-Correlation I want to perform an Audio Cross-Correlation in Blender (like with numpy.correlate) to align two Audio Strips. But I can't figure out how to access the Sample Data of an Audio Strip inside Blenders Python Console. How can I access the samples via Python? The Developers access these samples in the sequencer_draw.c. But with a Python Sound Object like bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].sequence_editor.sequences[0].sound I cannot access the waveform data.

I cannot use an external program like the syncaudio Add-on does as only one of my Audio Strips is based on a WAV-file, the other one is from a MTS-file and is already properly imported into an Audio Strip by Blender. And the Audaspace API as well doesn't allow me to access it.

The audio Sample Data doesn't seem to be directly accessible via python.

However, there is a workaround that suits my needs:
I can use Bake Sound to F-Curves which actually results in an already project frame rate based curve. This will add an .animation_data.action.fcurves entry for my Object I added my FCurve to with an attribute sampled_points. These sampled points have lots of FCurveSample entries that include a co Vector. Each is a pair of my frame and the corresponding sound hull curve point. Iterating this Vector I can "extract" a value for each frame which is enough to perform a cross-correlation on:

fcurves = bpy.data.objects['Empty'].animation_data.action.fcurves
samples = []
for value in fcurves[0].sampled_points.values():
    samples.append(value.co.y)

Afterwards I can delete the FCurve again.

When I do this twice, I will get two sample-lists that I can feed into correlation = numpy.correlate(audio, video_strips_audio, 'valid') to perform the cross-correlation. Afterwards I can get the time shift difference between the two sound files by correlation.tolist().index(max(correlation)).

Though this doesn't work directly yet when the second sample-list starts before the first one, but I'm working on this to get it right as well... This depends on the optional mode parameter from the correlate function. I will update this answer when I get this working in general.

Why I do all this: It allows me to automatically shift two Audio files between each other until they match and can be synchronously played back even though they were recorded at the same time but their absolute start time was a bit off. So I can timewise align two or more cameras that recorded simultaneously but weren't started recording thogether. Or a Camera outputted video files audio track and an Audio Recorders Sound file.

The main advantage using this method is, that I don't need to use WAV-files only as with the mentioned add-on, but can rely on any media format including Video files that Blender can already handle via ffmpeg internally as opening a Sound file to bake to an FCurve will be handled the same way any other media/movie file I want to add to the Video Sequence Editors timeline.


Move/Rotate/Scale without needing to hit the gizmo with your mouse I have turned on the Maya settings (I'm coming from Maya, and in the beginning I want to keep the learning curve as small as possible).

Is there (in these settings) something similar like in Maya the Shift+MiddleMouseButton?

Shift+MMB would let you apply the transformations (over one axis) without explicitly selecting the small gizmo. You could just hold your mouse anywhere above the viewport, move globally in the direction of the X, Y or Z axis and it would just transform in that direction.

For me it's a really intuitive way of modeling, because I don't have to select a small gizmo for every transformation.

Is there something similar in these settings?

As @Aardenon said, you can push G to use the grab tool. From there, pushing X Y or Z will lock it to that axis. If you're in edit mode, pushing X Y or Z again will allow you to move your selection on a local axis, and in object mode, this just unlocks the axis.

Also, you can hold Shift + [axis] to exclude that axis from the lock (e.g. holding shift + X will lock the transform to the Y and Z axes).

This also works with the rotate tool (Rkey ) and the scale tool ( S key).


Problem with fluid simulation, cannot get fluid to move up a thin pipe Hi all

So I created a little pipe system which I require water to flow through. It's meant to start by the water getting sucked up through the thin pipe currently located in the water and then flow through the rest of the system. I have tried to create a fluid-inflow object within the bottom end of this pipe (currently covered by water) and set its z inflow velocity up, unfortunately, this is not working. Water starts appearing in random areas outside of the pipe. I think it could be due to the domain being really large compared to the small inflow object, but not sure how to solve the problem. You can also view my blender file at

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

There are several options which make fluid simulator fail while finding correct paths for fluid in this case.

Most objects in this scene have scale / rotation unapplied, so just select them all and use options from Ctrl+A menu. In case of fluid simulation, Fluid Sim modifier will not know that the scale of the object was changed if it wasn't applied to the object data. This may lead to unexpected results (same for rotation).
For more info on why is it important to apply them, see Why is it important to apply transformation to an objects data?.
There is internal face inside of your pipe mesh (assumed to water the big vessel with fluid). The face will effectively prevent fluid from going through the mesh, so delete it.

There are also several double vertices in the mesh, remove them with W > Remove Doubles.
The pipe, assumed to water the top vessel, consists of several objects; the main pipe has holes where they should connect. This will prevent fluid from coming all the way up to the top vessel because of that hole just in the middle of the main pipe:

Smaller part of the pipe was hidden

To achieve expected results of animation, join these meshes and make them manifold in the place of joint:

Topology is horrible, however at least they are joined and closed. This can be easily done by closing the gap in the main pipe, and using Boolean Union option to join objects effectively.

The joint between this joined small pipe and big vessel can be left as is - it will only depend on the resolution of the fluid.
The final result will really depend on the bake resolution. If quite low values are used (as 80 or 100), then make sure to scale the pipe a bit up, because otherwise baked fluid will be too fat to flow into it and will just splash in the bottom vessel. You can scale the pipe along normals for that.
Fluid baked on higher values should deal with that (although I don't know how much those values should be as I didn't tested it).


Multiple Blender processes for multiple GPUs? I've got a Ubuntu 14.04 headless server running right now for 3d rendering on Blender's Cycles rendering engine, across 4 GPUs.

Specs:

(4) ASUS GTX 970s, 4GB
1300W PSU
Core i7
16GB RAM
250GB SSD

Animations are rendering beautifully across the 4 GPUs in Cycles, but my question is concerning parallelizing processes to those cards:

Is it possible for me to have 4 separate blender processes running in parallel targeting one specific GPU each?

Running all 4 cards as "one" card (CUDA_MULTI_0 in a .py setup) is not actually a full 4x speed increase over running just one card, though it is still quite fast, and amazing i might add having come from mostly CPU rendering. Anyway, it turns out to be more like 3x speed, and i want to maximize render times further by rendering one animation frame per card in parallel, giving me a true 4x speed.

Theoretically, it should just be a matter of running 4 separate blender processes on the command line, while having python scripts setup to target specific cards like this:

$ blender -b file.blend -P cuda1.py -s 1 -e 10 -a &
$ blender -b file.blend -P cuda2.py -s 11 -e 20 -a &
$ blender -b file.blend -P cuda3.py -s 21 -e 30 -a &
$ blender -b file.blend -P cuda4.py -s 22 -e 40 -a &

and the cuda[x].py scripts look like this, where each one is targeting a specific CUDA device:

import bpy, _cycles

bpy.context.scene.cycles.device = 'GPU'
bpy.context.user_preferences.system.compute_device_type = 'CUDA'

# this is different in each cuda[x].py file, CUDA_0, CUDA_1, CUDA_2, CUDA_3
bpy.context.user_preferences.system.compute_device = 'CUDA_0'

So, this all technically works right now, but here's the big issue i'm trying to figure out. When i do this, only the first blender process gets GPU access. Processes 2-4 default back the CPU, ignoring the GPU instructions. All four cards work just fine, and as I mentioned, one blender process using the CUDA_MULTI_0 device in the python script is leveraging all four cards as expected.

Is there some known limitation to blender, or CUDA/NVIDIA for that matter, that only lets a single processes access any or all the GPUs at one time, that maybe i'm just not aware of?

Any advice on this is greatly appreciated.

It turns out all I needed was to update the NVIDIA driver to v346.72 for the ASUS GTX 970 Strix cards to be able to handle multiple processes in tandem.

Update - Oct 2019

To those wondering if there was a performance gain in doing this: yes, there was.

I don't have the specifics with me as this was done a few years back, but I do remember the render times breaking down like this simplified example:

1 GPU renders 1 frame of an animation in 4 minutes, so in theory bulking up to 4 GPUs should render that one frame in 1 minute. This wasn't what I was seeing in reality though. The actual result took more like 1.2 minutes per frame.

So for a 200 frame animation, the math broke down like this:

All 4 GPUs working as one:

(200 frames / 1 Combined GPU) = 200 frames * 1.2 minutes per frame = 240 mins total

Splitting up the GPUs to independently work on a queue of frames:

(200 frames / 4 GPUs) = 50 frames per GPU * 4 minutes per frame in parallel = 200 mins total


Batch rendering of 10,000 images from 10,000 obj files I have around 10,000 wavefront (obj) files with a volume.

I would like to load a predefined scene with a camera position, light, etc. Then load an obj file, render a snapshot from that camera (no animation), save that as a png file and then pass to the next one and repeat the operation.

I know bash and python, but I am not sure how to do this "load & render" from the command line or using python.

Cheers.

This script will take all OBJ files in a certain directory, and one by one load them, render them, and remove them from the scene again.  This way you can render 10000 OBJ files without having to load them all into memory at the same time. The OBJ files do not need to be named in any special way (except ending in .obj).

import bpy
import pathlib

# Adjust this for where you have the OBJ files.
obj_root = pathlib.Path('c:/temp/obj')

# Before we start, make sure nothing is selected. The importer will select
# imported objects, which allows us to delete them after rendering.
bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')
render = bpy.context.scene.render

for obj_fname in obj_root.glob('*.obj'):
    bpy.ops.import_scene.obj(filepath=str(obj_fname))

    render.filepath = '//obj-%s' % obj_fname.stem
    bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True)

    # Remember which meshes were just imported
    meshes_to_remove = []
    for ob in bpy.context.selected_objects:
        meshes_to_remove.append(ob.data)

    bpy.ops.object.delete()

    # Remove the meshes from memory too
    for mesh in meshes_to_remove:
        bpy.data.meshes.remove(mesh)

The rendered image files will have the OBJ filename in their name, so if you have cube.obj, the output file will be obj-cube.jpg (assuming you're rendering to JPEG files).

The camera and lighting is use as-is in the scene, so you can set it up beforehand and render everything with the same settings.

NOTE: since this is a synchronous script, Blender's UI will block while it's running. You may want to start Blender from a terminal (or choose Window > Toggle System Console on Windows) before you start it, to keep an eye on its progress.


VSE/Compositor - Something similar to Turbulence Displacement effect in After Effects I'm experimenting with creating some video effects in Blender, and I was wondering if anyone knew how to create something similar to the Turbulence Displacement effect that After Effects has (It sort of stretches and distorts the image in a random way. An example image I found is bellow), in the VSE or the Compositor of Blender. I've tried messing around with different nodes/effect strips and can't seem to come up with anything. Thanks.

Try a Displace node with a Clouds procedural texture (in the compositor):

The nodes in the "X Y scale" frame are just for convenience, you can also set the scale directly on the texture node.
The mix node in the "Recenter" frame subtracts .5 gray to keep the result in place; the displace node moves pixels up/right for positive numbers and down/left for negative numbers. To move pixels both ways, the 0..1 range of the texture needs to be shifted to -.5..+.5.

The scale inputs on the displace node itself set the distance (in pixels) a value of 1 in the vector input will move the corresponding pixel of the image input. In this example I set the vertical scale to 0 to mimic your reference image.


Unity flips normal of the some times after Blender export I'm exporting a low poly character from blender to unity but it flips normals of some items, there's no reason to do that.

I found it:
I copied left arm to create right arm and scaled X axis to -1, if I import it like that it works correctly but if I do that and apply scale it flips the normal in unity,  now it works.


How to extrude (revolve) 2D shapes axisymmetrically? I would like to draw a 2D shape and extrude it axisymmetrically (rotational symmetry). Is it possible?

(source)

I think the Screw Modifier is exactly what you want.

This kind of tool is available in many 3d programs. It "screws" or "lathes" a profile around any axis that you pick. Here i've screwed but not used an AxisObject - in this case it uses the Object's own world matrix.

Here's i've picked an axis object, an empty, and rotated it. This is useful when Z,X,Y are not the desired rotation axis.


Discard mesh zones from solidify modifier I would like to discard some zones from a mesh from solidify modifier, but I don't know how

You can choose which part you want to solidify by setting Vertex Groups.

Go to Edit Mode (TAB) and select vertices you want to solidify.
Go to Data tab and under Vertex Group section add ('+' sign) new group and choose Assign (with vertices still selected).

Go back to Object Mode (TAB) and add Solidify Modifier.
Under it's option choose created vertex group.

Set Thickness and a little bit of Factor not to have Z fighting problem.


Bridge the gap - Retopology I am doing retopolgy on a sculpt. But while doing this I ran into a problem. Please refer to the picture below

The region I marked with blue marker contains more vertex and the region I marked with red marker contains less vertex. So how to fill the gap in between? I naturally don't want to populate the region I marked with red marker with more vertex. So how to bridge the gap?

This is one way to reduce vertex count.

enter image description here


How do I clear the normal map seams even though I painted over the texture? I have an altar model that I want to texture. I have visible seams, but I paint over them. It appears correct when a map is in the Color node (diff/normal). I save the painted over image, but when I reload as Normal Map Color node, the seams are there, and they are pretty obvious. I've done the same with the normal map (just smudging the seams but it does appear seamless when the map is in Color). Any clues?

Open it in GIMP.
Filters > Map > Make Seamless
File > Export As > Whatever_you_want_to_call_it.png

Export > uncheck everything > Compression level 9 > Export
Load this normal map w/ node editor, in place of the original.


Can movie data from a movie strip in the VSE link to data in a texture? In one scene of my .blend file, I use a frame from a video file in a texture. In another scene, I have a movie strip in the VSE that uses the same video file. Since this is Blender, I assumed that I would be able to link the data for the movie strip from the data for the movie into the texture, but I cannot see a way to do this.

What I really need is for one to be changed when the other is. Right now my solution is a really ugly python function, but I'd rather it work like other objects/strips in Blender. Is there a way to link the data used in strips in the VSE from other parts of Blender?

Make a scene that renders or outputs the texture (eg. connect it to a composite output). Then in the sequencer instead of adding the video select the scene strip from the Shift+A (Add) menu.


Can we Trigger AN with 'Active' camera object location change? I want to find out a way so that the 'Object' in the trigger is Dynamic, like active camera.

I have tried 'triggers' with object location to limit 'Auto execution' to only when object is moved.

I am basically trying to make LOD system using animation-nodes.

You can use a Scene trigger with the path camera.location.


How do I achieve this color effect in the compositor? I have been wanting to create an effect where the contrast between the warm and cool colors, or the green and violet is very visible. At first I thought I could increse the contrasts on the A or B chanles of the LAB color space, but when I asked this question I was told that this is not the right way to achieve this efect. link to old question: how do I work with LAB color space in the compositor?
This should be somthing that can work for animations. (I.e no pixel by pixel color correction.)

These are some pictures of the effect I am trying to achieve:

Effect #1
https://istoleyourcereal.wordpress.com/2012/05/03/warm-and-cool-contrast/#jp-carousel-117

As you can see the warm and cool colors are very distinct.

Effect #2

https://www.flickr.com/photos/iucnweb/6146692092

It was mutch harder to find an image with this effect, but as you can see the reds are very contrasted with the greens.

You can use a hue correct node and using the saturation controls select the color range you want to affect:


Get the DEF property of a x3d node Currently when Blender loads an .x3d file it does not load the correct DEF attribute, i.e., each shape doesn't get its designated name, and instead is called ShapeIndexedFaceSetXXX.

Is there some way to fix this bug via Python scripting, or is it something deeper?

Found the problem: In Blender 2.74, inside

def getDefName(self):
        data = self.x3dNode.getAttributeNode('DEF')
        if data:
            data.value  # XXX, return??
        return None

Does not return the name in case it found it, changing it to

def getDefName(self):
        data = self.x3dNode.getAttributeNode('DEF')
        if data:
            return data.value  # XXX, return??
        return None

worked for me, however I don't know how to suggest it as a bug fix nor am I sure that it is indeed a worthy fix as clearly someone already noticed that this function doesn't return anything in case there is a DEF.


VSE loss of colour saturation on export I am editing a video(MOV format) shot on Nikon coolpix. And i want same quality output, but an MP4. I tried with fallowing settings and curves modifier But it just darkens the image and not improves the colour saturation. In the screen shot i have overlaid with and without curves modifies and part of the source footage screenshot and my export settings.

How can i match source colours?

Source Video Details

Format                                   : MPEG-4
Format profile                           : QuickTime
Codec ID                                 : qt   2007.09 (qt  /niko)
Overall bit rate                         : 8 419 kb/s
NCDT                                     : NCTG

Video
ID                                       : 1
Format                                   : AVC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile                           : Main@L4
Format settings, CABAC                   : Yes
Format settings, ReFrames                : 1 frame
Format settings, GOP                     : M=1, N=8
Codec ID                                 : avc1
Codec ID/Info                            : Advanced Video Coding
Bit rate                                 : 8 282 kb/s
Width                                    : 1 280 pixels
Height                                   : 720 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 16:9
Frame rate mode                          : Constant
Frame rate                               : 29.970 (30000/1001) FPS
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Scan type                                : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.300
Stream size                              : 315 MiB (98%)

Color range                              : Full
Color primaries                          : BT.709
Transfer characteristics                 : BT.709
Matrix coefficients                      : BT.709

Marks to @3pointedit for likely getting close to the answer. The rest appears to be a stream of complificationingeering.

In all likelihood what you are seeing as “saturation” is actually a byproduct of an incorrect curve. The source of the problem is likely that your “source” reference analysis was being decoded incorrectly. Where that is entering the chain is going to be tricky as heck to diagnose.

Any codec is transformed to the YCbCr domain. In doing so, the RGB values should remain (quantization errors aside) very close to your source file RGB.

I can see that the “Source” file looks much more contrasty, which suggests to me that your player you are evaluating the material in is likely not decoding your footage correctly.

Any transform from RGB to YCbCr is typically done to the specification, which stipulates a broadcast range scaling. This scaling changes the 0-255 RGB values to 16-235 and 16-240 range on the YCbCr planes respectively. Those scaled values are, assuming players behave correctly, scaled back to their proper positions on decode.

What I suspect is happening is that the original “source” decoder is likely assuming, absolutely incorrectly, that your Nikon footage is broadcast scaled and chopping off a significant range of values and scaling the remaining values. This ends up making your image much more contrasted, as well as being incorrect.

DSLRs and some pocket cameras introduced a nonstandard “full range” YCbCr encoding which uses the full 0..255 range of the YCbCr stream. Sadly, many decoders decode it incorrectly, and you end up seeing hyper-contrasted images. See that “Range” tag in the data dump? Frequently too, the decoder will use the wrong set of luminance coefficients to decode the footage, which results in colour skew.

There are also a plethora of other areas where an encode to decode chain might go wrong. I outlined some of those tricky steps in another answer here.

Best advice is to check your source footage decode in a few different players. I suspect that, while potentially not perfect, the FFMPEG libraries Blender is using are trying to give you the full range of your shot’s data, as it is decoded from the raw YCbCr values. The result will be a slightly flatter image with much more dense data, which ends up being much more optimal for grading and a better resultant image.

All of that said, how to match a look?

Creative grading is most optimally achieved using a nodal system, frequently non-realtime. Assuming the guess above is correct, you can figure out what portions of your footage you intend to use and grade them in the compositor. It will be a little tricky because of some colour things that are beyond the scope of this answer, but should be achievable. Try an ASC CDL node with a slight increase in Power, and possibly a very slight decrease in Slope.

Bottom line is that there is a better than average chance the decode you are seeing in Blender is closer to the intention of your source stream than what you are seeing in Random Video Player. Test against VLC, FFPlay, or even the free version of DaVinci Resolve.

Your curve is not delivering the result you appear to desire because you have applied a simple arc to it. What it sounds like you are wanting is a subtle ‘S’ shaped curve that rounds off the lower left to a hump towards the upper right.


Amplify shadows in scene I would like to easily amplify all the shadows on the stage, but not increase the lamp's power. Is there a way to do it?

If by "amplify" you mean make the shadows sharper, adjusting the emitter's size down will sharpen them.

If you mean make them darker, one easy way is to change the "Look" of your scene's Color Management (in the Scene tab of the Properties window, under "Color Management") to a higher contrast look, such as "High Contrast" or "Very High Contrast"

Filmic base contrast:

Filmic high contrast:

For more control, in Cycles you can create a "shadow catcher" object (Properties window, Object tab, under "Cycles Settings", tick the box next to "Shadow Catcher").  Put it on its own layer, set up a separate render layer for it, then use the compositor to darken the shadow catcher render layer and overlay it onto the other layer.

Here is an example involving an emitter, a cube, a ground plane, and a duplicate of the ground plane which serves as the shadow catcher.

Emitter is on layer 20.
Cube is on layers 1 and 11.  Layer 11 will be a "mask" layer, so no shadow will appear on top of the cube in the final composite.
Ground plane is on layer 1.
Shadow catcher plane is on layer 2.

The render layers are set up as follows:

Note that Film must be set to "transparent" in the Render tab of the Properties window.  If you need to render the environment, you can add an "Environment" pass to your object render layer and composite it in.

Here is one way to set up the compositor nodes:

You can use the "Bright/Contrast" node to further enhance the shadows, but simply combining the shadow layer with the other layer using "Alpha Over" darkens the shadows considerably.

Here are the output layers (object layer, shadow catcher layer, combined):

And, finally, here is the combined output if I use the "Bright/Contrast" node in the compositor to set Brightness to -2:


How do you create procedural bubbles on a surface? I'm trying to achieve the answer in How to create procedurally generated surface bubbles on a liquid I'm unsure on how to do this in 2.9.

Here's a setup for both large and tiny bubbles :-)

Create a plane or a subdivided circle
Enable Adaptive Subdivision to use microdisplacement
Set Material Displacement > Displacement (only works in Cycles)


How do I display what keys I use? Basically, what I'm saying is, I've been watching a Blender YouTube tutorial (or something like that), I saw that a lot of users had something at the bottom-left of their main 3D view that created a text output of their mouse and keyboard actions. Does anyone know how to enable that feature?
Thanks!

This is an addon called Screencast keys. It is no longer distributed with the official releases due to some limitations, but you can install it yourself if you want:

download it and then click install from file in ⎈ Ctrl⎇ AltU> User preferences > Addons, then navigate to where you downloaded the python script.
Enable it, then turn it on in 3D view > Properties region (N) > Screen cast keys:


Groups from scene to scene How to send group of objects from scene 1 to scene 2 ?

I have group in scene 1 which I would like to use in scene 2.

If you want to add a group instance in another scene just do so from the Add menu with Shift+A > Group Instance > Group name.
If you want to move objects themselves between scenes use method of copying and pasting or linking.


My blender stoped to make subdivisions When I press  + <2>, the program seems to work, but when I go to the sculpture tab, it just doesn't work, when I go to the edit mode that's what I see.

At some point I disabled subdivision, and I don't know how I did it or how to get back to normal

You need to apply the subdivision surface modifier in order to actually get those extra vertices. As of now, you can only move and sculpt those 8 vertices.


Blender rendering makes my pc randomly die and restart Blender has suddenly decided that it is going to randomly kill the power to my pc whenever I render something. I have always been running my renders in Cycles Render and no problem no matter how long or what the quality (Samples) are. I can leave Blender open and model for hours on end... no problem. I can run various programs like the Adobe Master Suite for hours on end... no problem. But when I render in Blender, my power crashes. My motherboard is new, ram is new, graphics card is working perfectly fine, I have 4 hard drives that I reinstalled windows on and installed the latest Blender on... problem never goes away when I am rendering in Blender. I have also done the obvious super clean/vacuuming and done it with anti-static cloths, grounded the case, etc etc etc

Anyone have any idea what could be going on?

Sorry didn't quite understand, did you mention you made a pc upgrade to your motherboard RAM and graphics card? Did the cashes start happening only after the upgrade?

If it's crashing your whole computer it is likely a hardware problem, and not Blender related, though it is hard to say.

Rendering is a pretty demanding task that taxes your computer hardware, it may be overheating, or your power source may be insufficient for all your hardware and that is only revealed on heavy tasks,hard to tell this way.

Have you tried using some sort of hardware or system monitor with logging capabilities while rendering? Maybe it provides some insight into what is happening.


I can't pull up my reference image's on blender I am trying to import one of my reference image, but even though  they are downloaded and I can pull them up in other app's when I go to use it in blender and try to import the picture as a plain or anything else, blender tells me there is nothing in the files. I can open the folder's, but it will not allow me to see or import the pictures I downloaded. I had tried to drag and droop and it still did not work blender is not accepting the files. Does blender no longer accept JPG anymore? I hope these screen shots will give enough info to get me back on track.

You are not in the same location. "Pictures" is not "My Pictures". Click on your windows address bar to get the actual path.

it should be something like: C:\Users\USERNAME\Pictures


Clothes pass through the mesh My clothe mesh pass through my character mesh in clothe simulation. How can I change that ? I precise that I can't hide the body inside because I want a clothe a little bit transparent to obtend more realism.
Initial form :

Aspect after some frames with the movement of the simulation clothe :

Thank for your attention !

You have to select your body, then go to the Physics menu and click Collision so that it can interact with the cloth


Why I can't find A.N.T. Landscape in add-ons tab (Blender 2.80) Why I can't find A.N.T. Landscape in add-ons tab (Blender 2.80)

Search for landscape. Then the addon should show up.

Community needs to be enabled.


How to Close Tab/Window I've looked everywhere but I can't find the solution.
How can I remove the 'this window' tab from my environment?
I want to close it.

UPDATE:
Needed to be using a mouse instead of trackpad to see the pop up menu.

Edit : Make sure you are using a mouse with right-click capability.

Right click on the tab and choose Delete

If the popup doesn't appear then there is something wrong with your installation or this is a bug.

You might try resetting Blender to factory settings or there is a hidden feature I do not know in the preferences to disable it...

To reset to factory settings (Caution this will revert every setting you changed after the installation)


Creating "wisp" materials in cycles Could you tell me how make this materials?

1) whispy blue

2) whispy red with probably wave texture but I couldn't get it right

Use the 'Generated' Texture Coordinates to create a Procedural Texture.
Ensure you're in Cycles or Eevee (not Blender Internal renderer) and create a new plane and add a new material. Rotate the plane 90 degrees around the X axis and apply the rotation. This will result in the Z coordinate referering to the 'height' and the X coordinate relating to the 'length' of the plane (I find this more intuitive).
The effect can be built up from a number of distorted 'beams'.
Remove the default 'Diffuse' shader and create an Emission shader. Add a Texture Coordinate node and link the 'Generated' output to the Emission 'Strength' input. The 'Generated' coordinates range from 0.0 to 1.0 along each dimension of the object. For the fuzzy edges of the 'wisps' you need a nice rounded beam that falls off at the edges and this can be achieved as follows :
Strength = 1 - (((Z - 0.5) * factor ) ^ 2 )

The ^2 function creates a nice soft edged symetrical beam centred around Z=0 while the '-0.5' effectively moves it to the centre of the material. The 'factor' can be used to focus it into a tigher beam (higher values equate to narrower beam) and subtracting from 1 results in a 'bright' beam rather than a dark one (and this step should be 'clamped' to ensure the end result is always within the range 0.0 to 1.0). The nodes should be something like this :

You manipulate the beam by changing the coordinate going into the function - in this case the constant '-0.5' is moving it down to the centre. To distort the beam as it travels across the material, use the X coordinate to generate a varying offset. You can use a 'Sine' function to add a wave to the beam, with multipliers to allow you to adjust the frequency and amplitude of the wave.

Similarly, you can add in the influence of a Noise Texture :

In a similar way you can add variation in brightness or width, apply a varying profile to the beam, adjust the phase of the sine waves, vary the intensity of the distortion as the wave travels from left to right, etc. My resultant node tree was too complicated to include in an image here - look in the attached blend file for details.
Combine the 'core' nodes (excluding the Texture Coordinates and Shader) into a group to allow re-use.

You can then duplicate the group and slightly vary the parameters for each group node to give a number of different 'wisps' and combine them, feed them through a Color Ramp node and use the output to drive a Mix Shader to mix between Emission (for glowing filaments - otherwise Diffuse) and Transparent shaders.

Either adjust the values to get the desired still image or drive the inputs via keyframes to animate the waves. It works quite well to vary the input Vector and wave phase so as to make it appear to progress forwards.

The Procedural Texture is considerably quicker to render than a smoke simulation (assuming you don't need accurate smoke) and can even cast and accept shadows (when using diffuse shader rather than emissive).

Using the colour ramp and using a combination of narrow bright beams and wide dim beams can give the effect of glowing filaments with surrounding wisps similar to the reference image (although this particular example is only a very rough approximation - needs more tweaking but it should give you a general idea of what can be achieved).

Blend file included here


replicate both screenspace and world space valley in eevee material? in the "workbench" rendering engine of blender there is an option called "cavity" where you can enable a feature which is called "valley" which basically is similar to ambient occlusion where it fills tight spaces with darkness in the model. is there any way to create a similar effect in an eevee material? i know world space is pretty much just the ambient occlusion node, but i am unsure of how to replicate screen space. and i would like to have both enabled at the same time. is this possible?
Thanks in advance

I'm not sure if Eevee has capability to get there, since all edge detection nodes (like Bevel, Pointiness, or what ever) is not working in Eevee.

The closest I was able to get is with Cycles and yet with problematic part.
Node tree contains Pointiness feature that is sensitive for vertex distances, so to get there I had to use Subdivision Modifier in a very high level. So whole this example is quite useless.
So just for an idea or someones exploration ...
Workbench

Cycles


How can I quickly generate / create a large city without modeling it all by hand? I am trying to create an urban open-world environment in Blender that would be about one square kilometre in size. To avoid having to model hundred of individual buildings, I am looking for a way to quickly generate them procedurally - but there should be an element of variety (i.e. preferably not a grid-like fashion).

Also, it is possible to generate other features such as pipes, windows and ledges on the exterior of the buildings?

I have the feeling that the way about this is using Python scripts, but I am unsure as to the specific details required.

Any help would be appreciated.

City Generation

Suicidator "City Generator" (SCG)
This is a very robust Blender addon that can create amazingly detailed & complex cities:

Generate random terrains (including bodies of water) for your city, or use your own bump maps to create the landscape of your choice
SCG automatically generates all the textures for your buildings, roads, grass, water, etc.
(NOTE: Currently, SCG only generates textures in Blender Internal, not yet for Cycles)
Specify if it's day or night in your city

NOTE: As of City Generator v0.5.7, textures will ONLY be generated in Blender Render, NOT yet in Cycles. So, make sure you are in Blender Render BEFORE you click the Build City button:

You can read the City Generator online manual on their website and see many more examples.

NOTE: There is another addon listed on the Blender Wiki called  "City Block Generator". However, this addon only works with Blender versions 2.4x - 2.5x, so it's not an option for any versions later than 2.5

Adding Special Building Details for Close-Up Shots

If you ever want to have a close-up shot of a particular part of your city and want to add specific building details, you can use these add-ons:

Block Wall Builder: Block Wall Builder allows you to build your own custom walls. It has a lot of functionality, including the ability to add holes in the wall for windows, doors, etc.:

Window Generator 2: Add custom windows. Download it here and read more about it here. Here are some samples:

Jamb Generator: This addon from Seyit Ali YAPRAKCI makes custom door frames/jambs:

Archimesh: Archimesh gives you the ability to add great detail to your buildings: add rooms, house structure (walls), doors (one and two leafs), columns, stairs (strait and curved), tile roofs, cabinets, shelves, windows, books, lamps, curtains, etc. It can also UV unwrap rooms! You can download it here and you can get more information on how to use it here. Here is a sample of the cabinets with shelves:

Balcony Generator: This addon, also from Seyit Ali YAPRAKCI makes balconies:

Chimneys: This addon, again from Seyit Ali YAPRAKCI, makes chimneys:

Flat Board Generator: This addon allows you to make hardwood floors:

Add Pipe Joint: You can read about this built-in addon here and here are some sample joints:

NOTE: If you want to extrude pipes from these joints, see this question and answer for details on how to do it.

Add Snow and Icicles

If it's winter in your city, you can add piles of snow to your meshes with the technique described here and with the Icicle Generator you can add icicles:

Adding Terrain for your City

If you don't want your city to be on flat ground and aren't using Suicidator City Generator, you can make unique landscapes easily with the built-in addon ANT Landscape:

The Blender manual describes how to use this built-in addon.

NOTE: Previously, these landscapes all had the normals flipped the wrong way, which makes the underside of the mesh be considered the top. This has been fixed in an update, but if you have an older version and you're finding this is a problem for you, you can fix it simply by flipping all the normals:

Select landscape → TAB → select all (A) → W → Flip Normals

Add Trees

"Sapling" is a built-in addon that allows you to make trees:

This addon is amazingly robust, capable of making a huge array of different kinds of trees and bushes:

This addon is much easier to use if you watch a tutorial about it.

For more detailed information about making trees, see this page.

Add Scattered Debris, Litter or Plants

If you want to have litter around your city, or debris & weeds in an abandoned lot, you can do that using a Hair Particle System, which you can learn how to make on this page.

Add Rocks

The Add Rocks addon allows you to quickly add randomly generated mesh rocks, thus making it much quicker to add detail & practicality to your outdoor settings, urban or otherwise. Here you can read about & download this addon (note: the Add Rock addon is part of the bundle described in that post.) Here are some examples of the 5 rock presets:

For lots more details on making Add Rocks, see this page.

NOTE: One thing to be aware of is that each rock has many modifiers on it, and these slow down render time. See this page (at the bottom) to get details on how to solve this issue.

Add Ivy

Blender's built-in "Ivy Gen" addon is very good at creating realistic looking ivy:


Why do we need Composite node? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml1Kic4VopA - I watched this video and wondered - why Composite node exists? What is it for and what does it do? After all, we can work through a viewer node and export the result.

The Composite node is where the actual output from the compositor is connected to the renderer. Connecting a node to the Composite node will output the result of that node's full tree to the Renderer, leaving this node unconnected will result in a blank image. This node is updated after each render, but also if you change things in your node-tree (provided at least one finished input node is connected)
The Viewer node is a temporary, in-process viewer. It can be plug in anywhere to inspect an image or value map in your node tree.
From this you can say that the compositor node exist for the sole purpose of applying the composition to the render while viewer node is mainly used to see specific result of a certain group of nodes as well as it can do the job of a compositor node.
To further explain it:
The problem with the viewer node is that you will have to go into the Render Output panel and would have to select the viewer node to be displayed in it . And then you are free to save it. In highly detailed scenes we will be forced to make multiple renders , improving it gradually . That is where the Composite node comes to help - You wouldn't have to select the viewer node each time and save it.
Blender automatically composites a render if it's connected to a Composite node and will give you the finished result instantaneously. And that is the easiest way to put it...

You can also switch between Composite and View Layer as shown in here:-


Blender not responding when starting a Python script I have a python script what works/runs most of the time but sometimes it makes Blender "Not Responding" (I closed the program after ~20 mins). What is weird that it looks like it's not even starting, because there is nothing on the Console though my script starts with a print:

import bpy
import json
import csv
import math
import struct
import imghdr
import os
import subprocess
from enum import Enum

class RuncodeEnum(Enum):
    GRAPHVIZ_FILES = 0
    WAVEFRONT_OBJECT = 1
    EXTRACT_COORDINATES = 2
    GENERATE_CONNNECTIONS = 3
    REINITIALIZE_SCENE = 4
    IMPORT_OBJ_FILE = 5
    TEST = 99

...

RUNCODE = RuncodeEnum.TEST

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print("Starting script, RUNCODE is '" + RUNCODE.name + "'...")

(Beside these there are a few constants and methods, likely it's not relevant.)

Any good advice what am I might doing wrong?

Apparently I had (have) to press Enter (any key?) in the Console window, but I don't know why...but it's a "solution" at least. If someone knows what can cause this, please feel free to write a post/comment.


OSL trace() : how is the "shade " parameter used? In its description of the  trace() function , The OSL language specification refers to:

  ...the optional "shade" parameter indicating whether or not the shader ought to execute on the traced ray ... .

What does this mean? It can't mean I recursively apply the calling shader to the point hit by trace(), can it? That point will have been / may be shaded by something else, at some other time. Are there any examples of the use of this parameter?

As described in the OSL specification, the main purpose of the trace() function call is to be used within a shader to 'probe out' the surrounding geometry. When used in this way there is no need for the shader to perform the additional work of determining the shading of that 'hit' point - only whether there is something along that ray (and what/where it is). The default of the 'shade' parameter is 0 - ie, only determine whether geometry is 'hit', don't consider it's surface or shading. ie,

Optional parameters include:
    "mindist"  float     Minimum hit distance (default: zero)
    "maxdist"  float     Maximum hit distance (default: infinite)
    "shade"    int       Whether objects hit will be shaded (default: 0)
    "traceset" string    An optional named set of objects to ray trace (if preceded by a ‘-’ character, it means to exclude that set).

From what I gather, setting 'shade' to 1 indicates that the additional work of actually shading the hit point on the surface (eg, calculate the normal, interpolation, etc.) also takes place (taking additional processing time).

So, in summary, it's an efficiency flag - leaving as 0 provides a quick and dirty trace whereas setting to non-zero acivates the 'full' trace, including hit surface properties.

EDIT : For a related question (see https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/106832/29586) I have been trying to trace through the source code for the trace() function.

The trail seems to lead to the trace() function with the comment /* todo: options.shader support, maybe options.traceset */ which seems to confirm that the 'traceset' option is not implemented and the same function does not have any other reference to the 'shade' parameter - it would appear that the 'shader' mentioned in the comment is a typo (should be 'shade') and the 'shade' option is not implemented.


Transitioning the overlap of multiple objects I'm trying to fade an object's regular solid surface into its wireframe.

I've got as far as duplicating the object and deleting vertices until I'm left with an area of overlap.

Is it possible to render this in such a way that there is a smooth transition at the area of overlap? Maybe there is a better way to achieve this effect?

Another example:

According to what you illustrated, I would propose a non-compositing way by using modifiers only:

Enter Edit Mode, Select one face as where the transition starts, ShiftS > Cursor to Selected to snap cursor to that face;
Select all faces, press Spacebar and search for Sort Mesh Elements, choose Cursor Distance in the popup menu, press F6 and toggle Reverse;
Create a duplication for the original object, repeat the last two steps on it, just leave Reverse untoggled;
Add Build modifier to the original object, toggle Reverse in the modifier stack;
Add a Wireframe modifier and a Build modifier to the duplicated object, leave Reverse untoggled this time.

After tweaking the modifier settings a bit, you will simply get something like this when playing animation:

Example file FYI.


How to slide one object on another, keeping curvature? I want to make a character that has no actual face but just a pair of goggles that will slide around on his front to show in what direction he is looking. He is round like a cylinder but its not perfectly round. How can I make the goggles stick to him, but keep the curvature?

If I were you I would probably create a curve that matches the curve of the character, then use a curve modifier on the glasses.

If you don't want the goggles to distort, then you could parent the goggles to the path then you can move along the path by changing the frame (left/right arrows on your keyboard). That doesn't work if you are also animating the character though.


How to register a property group in blender 2.8 Is there a way to add a property group to this method of registering, without adding a separate register/unregister function?

classes = (
    some_scene_variables
    some_operator,
)

register, unregister = bpy.utils.register_classes_factory(classes)

At the moment I am doing this, which works:

classes = (
    some_scene_variables,
    some_operator,
)

def register():
    for cls in classes:
        bpy.utils.register_class(cls)
    bpy.types.Scene.myvars = bpy.props.PointerProperty(type = some_scene_variables)

def unregister():
    for cls in classes:
        bpy.utils.unregister_class(cls)
    del bpy.types.Scene.myvars

But it seems wrong to change how I am registering just because I want to add a property group.

Thanks

Edit:
Something similar to this (just for illustration, I know this would in no way work):

classes = (
    some_scene_variables
    some_operator,
    bpy.types.Scene.myvars = bpy.props.PointerProperty(type = some_scene_variables),

)

register, unregister = bpy.utils.register_classes_factory(classes)

Check the source

As with a lot of blender, can check the code for bpy.utils.register_classes_factory

def register_classes_factory(classes):
    """
    Utility function to create register and unregister functions
    which simply registers and unregisters a sequence of classes.
    """
    def register():
        from bpy.utils import register_class
        for cls in classes:
            register_class(cls)

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

    return register, unregister

As you can see it does no more than register unregister classes.  (Notice the reversing of list in unregister)

I would recommend using your own register methods. Even prior, would recommend own register methods over the now defunct bpy.utils.register_module()

To still use the factory, in conjunction with your own methods.

foo, bar = bpy.utils.register_classes_factory(classes)

def register():
    foo()
    # do other stuff

etc.  Or write your own factory that also takes type, property pairs.


About MB-lab addon. How can I fix the problem with red eyelids in characters? When there is a lot of light on the stage, the red eyelids are almost invisible. But when you want to make a dark environment, the eyelids glow red like lanterns.  How can I fix this? I'm using mb-lab 1.7.7.
UPD: I found out that the red glowing is not only on the eyelids, but also on any other thin parts of the body that are in the dark. They have this same glow along the contour.

You can see this red eyelids in the picture:

Here is a .blend file:

I found nothing on the web. Just one person asked a similar question on another forum, but nobody answered. And there is no forum just for mb-lab users, so I'm asking here.

Try decreasing SSS (Sunsurface scattering). It can be found under Skin Editor/ skin_sss


Domain boxes show up in cycles render So I recently made the switch to cycles rendering and smoke modifiers, but it's been giving me loads of problems already.

This is what the model looks like:

And then when I go to render it, this is the result I get.

Why is this happening?

It looks like you have a diffuse shader assigned to the surface of your domain.  Make sure that there is nothing (or a pure white transparent shader) plugged into the surface socket on your domain object, and that the smoke nodes are plugged into the volume socket.


How to stop joint separation I have a problem with a model. I've rigged the model for animation, but what happens is that joints have a really weird separation, like this:

How do I solve this? The model came in four parts. I made them one, but the same happens to where the models meet, i.e. arms to torso, legs to torso. How do I fix it?

This is caused by unequal weights on the edges of the mesh sections. Essentially the bone is 'pulling' on the mesh a different amount on each edge. The two easiest options are to either join the loops (selecting both and pressing W and choosing remove doubles should do the trick) or carefully weight painting the edges to ensure both edges have the same weights.


Knife tool won't select edges I've looked everywhere but nobody has this issue, I'm using blender 2.8 and I'm trying to cut a plane model from a top view, but when I press k, select the edge, and then try to cut the inside, it deselects the edge and ONLY cuts on the inside If you need more details feel free to ask.

I'm following this tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lj643VmTsg) and when he gets to  this part of the video (8:10) I have the issue where it deselects the edge right after I start cutting the inside

An invalid edge can prevent the Knife tool from obtaining a lock on it. Usually because the edge is doubled, often from making an extrusion of a face, thinking it's been cancelled with a right-click (which only cancels the move, not the face-creation) and leaving the double face in place.  Your first step would be to select all vertices, and Remove Doubles.


2.79 Crash on Render (Except Viewport) I just upgraded to 2.79, very excited about the new features (specially the Principled BSDF) but every time I press render image or render animation, it just closes. If I run blender from the command prompt, I can see the error

RNA_pointer_get: SceneRenderLayer.cycles not found.
Error: EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION

Google turned up a couple dead threads, and nothing changed when I tried what was suggested.

I tried just making a new file, empty scene with just a camera, press render image and it closes. Same thing happens if I expand the preview pannel on a material. Strangely enough, viewport render still works.

PS: Is GPU support seriously gone? So far, 2.79 seems like a downgrade.

Using the "Repair" option with a fresh download of the installer from blender.org did the trick. Also fixed GPU rendering abilities


How to add a Stroke Layer in a Collection I'm creating a 2D Animation, but I'm confused on how layers and strokes work or if they're the same, so how do you make a new layer/stroke in a Collection?

I think some of the default names for things in Blender are confusing.

A Grease pencil object (yellow line icon in outliner) can be part of a collection. There's a Grease Pencil object called 'GP Object' in the image.
A Grease Pencil object has a Grease Pencil data block (green icon in the outliner). I've called the datablock 'GP' in the image.
That data block has layers. Called 'Lines' and 'Fills' in the image.
Layers have frames (the playhead selects which frame is the current one)
Frames can have strokes and fills (made of points).
With the Grease Pencil object active, you can use the Grease Pencil datablock tab to add/remove layers.


Manga effect. One side glass coating? Link to 3D model: https://sketchfab.com/models/44e355c0b8d94f7a8a59e5034d3bc3d7

This a a fantastic artwork created by a Japanese 3D artist Atsushi Tamaki.

I was amazed by the manga-outline effect on the character and have been trying to work out how it can be done, but no luck so far. What I can tell is that it seems like the character is coated by a one-side transparent coating(transparent if view from out side, pure black if view from in side).

Looking for some advice. Thank you!

Expanding on the first point of John's answer.

  For realtime or viewport effects like this the general idea is to duplicate the mesh, then change that mesh to complete black then slightly upscale it so it covers your base mesh, as well as flipping all the normals on the black mesh and turning on 'Backface Culling' in the viewport settings.

⇧ ShiftD to duplicate.
Enter Edit Mode ↹ Tab, select all A, flip normals ⎈ CtrlF > Flip Normals.
Fatten the mesh slightly, ⎇ AltS.
Exit edit mode and assign a new black Material.
Turning off double sided faces in Blender: Go to the Shading Panel and check Backface Culling.


Volumetrics Tab Has no checkbox I'm following a tutorial to make fog in my scene. I've tried adding both the principle volume and Volume scatter node to the material output. neither generates fog in the render view or lookdev. It also appears that my volumetrics tab doesn't have a checkbox to turn it on or off like the tutorial says to click. Am I missing something here?

The volumetrics panel is collapsed in the Render Properties panel.

Expand it to reveal the check boxes ...


How to use a custom tangent for anisotropic shading in BI/Blend4Web? I'd like to create a material such as this in Blend4Web (and if it can be done in BI, chances seem good the same approach can be adapted for Blend4Web):

I've rendered the above image in cycles via a tiled tangent texture plugged into into the Tangent input of an Anisotropic shader:

Unfortunately, while BI does have a tangent shading option, I can't find a way to control the tangent direction quite so easily in BI. Is this sort of thing possible? How can it be done?

Here's the .blend with the shader for reference:

The only way (at that moment) to create anisotropic effect (with such texture like your) is to imitate it by adding fake specular over the normal map especialy baked for such material.

 Heres the example of such imitation that works in blend4web.


How to import a rig and animation from maya? Whenever I export the file from maya to fbx and import into blender, the rig changes and the animation it doesn't work like it should.

I tried exporting to a dae and importing into blender, but there's nothing. No mesh or anything.

Here's the maya file.

In past year we used Maya for aditional effects on characters (especially for cloth simulations) and we discovered that the best way to import is .mdd.

This format transfers the maya animation and convert it into animated shapes keys:

Get your first pose (in maya) and export as .obj object
Export the animation from maya as .mdd
Import the .obj object in blender
Select your object and import the animation as .mdd

Always check "keep vertex orders".


Normal Map Baking: Does Low-Poly Mesh need to have larger volume than High-Poly? This is my first character design and I'm afraid I was overly ambitious and made a mess of my vertices. I would really like to avoid starting from scratch, but I'm having troubles baking a high-poly spiky hair model onto a lower poly version (with less spikes).

Do I need to make sure that I have the same number of spikes in my low poly hair model and that the volume of the low-poly spikes encloses the volume of the high-poly spikes? Here's an image of what I'm working with for reference:

It is a bit difficult to tell what is going on from your screenshot, however, the basic answer to your question is yes - your low poly mesh needs to enclose your high poly mesh.

Your low poly mesh needs to follow all the major shapes and features of your high poly mesh. Think of it like wrapping your high poly mesh in wrapping paper. You can't have big spikes sticking out of your wrapping paper.

The purpose of baking a high poly mesh to a low poly mesh is:

To get better topology (your low poly mesh can be created with good edge flow); and
To bake all the very fine surface detail into a normal map so that its appearance is then created by normal mapping, and not actual geometry.

The trick is therefore to have your low poly mesh follow all the major shapes and features of the mesh, while ignoring the very fine detail (as this will be baked to a normal map). Sometimes that is a bit of a judgement call, but if you keep coming back to the wrapping paper analogy (what would you wrap around with wrapping paper, and what would you just paper over), it should be OK.