How to make a through hole using inward extrusion in Blender 2.8? I am trying to make a through hole using inward extrusion.
I enterd into edit mode, then I drawed an outline of my hole using knife tool.
then I turn into wireframe shading, rotate my view an select snap to faces and then extrude the hole outline inward

so the hole is created successfully, but I still have a face at the hole bottom.
I can select this face separately

But If I try to delete it, I siply delete this face (I can't select it anymore after deleteting), but I do not see through hole, so the basic cube face is still here.
So how to remove the hole bottom?

You can use the faces of a mesh to dig a hole in the same mesh, using the ctrlF > Intersect (Boolean) tool. Just push the face a bit further down. Then in the Operator box choose Difference and Solver > Fast.

Or use a second mesh:


adding property while the bge is running? is it possible to add a game property to an object while the bge is running?

I realize you can access them easily enough, I am not asking about accessing properties just so that's clear.

I'm well aware that you can use a string as a list in the bge like so / which would be perfectly fine in most scenario's(and the same goes for dictionaries.) but I think it'd be more professional if you could physically add properties to objects in real time.

    import bge
    scene = bge.logic.getCurrentScene()
    scene.objects['CentralControl']['L1']=str([(000.000,000.000,000.000),(000.000,000.000,000.001)])
print(scene.objects['CentralControl']['L1'])

postscript: this probably isn't important but i'm using blender v2.78a

Yes, that's possible.

Game objects behave like dictionaries, so you can just assign any value to any name (no need for adding a property in the Blender GUI):

scene.some_object["new_property"] = "Hello"

You can even store lists, objects and any other data type in these properties.


Camera view not saved I downloaded a model and I adjusted the camera view as desired. However, when I save the file and open it again, the camera view is like it was on the originally downloaded file. Even when I press "Render" the view returns to the old view. Nothing is parented. How is that done and how can I remove it?

Here is the file - http://www.pasteall.org/blend/31636

Reading the other answer, it looks like you might have auto-key turned off, which would reset your camera to the original position. If you have auto-key ON, any change you make will be automatically recorded, even over old keys on the same frame. So it's not entirely necessary that you delete all the keys in order to reposition the camera; you just need to set a key on the frame you want to render (press "I" and select LocRotScale to key all transforms).

This is just my opinion, but I generally work with auto-key turned on so I can avoid this. I'm also too lazy to want to set a key every time I make a change (I'm an animator; that's a lot of changes), so I let it do that for me. This is more of a workflow thing, but it is certainly something to know about. Good luck!

EDIT: Just remember that auto-key is not specific to cameras. It's a general automation tool that will capture attribute changes throughout the scene, such as a transformation or even a material change. You'll find the auto-key toggle button in the playhead in the timeline (the red circle).


Color codes in image do not match the material I am rendering a scene with the intent to label objects using a "solid" color.

For this, objects have an emissive shader where I set the RGB colors by script.

In the render view, when I click on the pixels, the color codes are correct. Once I save the render and open it in an image processing program, the color codes change.
I tried different image formats and with the exception of OpenEXR this does occur with slightly different outcomes in all image formats. So I guess it probably has something to do with compression or color space conversion?
I expect it should still be possible to obtain a predictable color using PNG or JPEG.

What kind of settings am I missing?

First, "colour codes", aka hex values, have no absolute meaning. The values, whether stored in hexadecimal, integer, or float, represent an encoded value with respect to a given colourspace. Frequently, with display referred imagery downloaded from the web, this is sRGB. In a plethora of many other contexts however, it is not sRGB, hence the values have no absolute meaning.

Second, it sounds like you are having issues with a understanding the conversion of a display referred image to a display linear version, via an inversion of the encoded values transfer curve. There are a few posts here regarding that. The TL;DR is that the RGB values will represent linearized (display linear in cases where you are using an encoded PNG or JPEG, for example) values.

Third, bear in mind that while some values are labeled "Diffuse Colour" in shaders for example, they represent nothing of the sort, but rather a float ratio from zero to one of reflectance with angle math, also known as an albedo. Here, "Diffuse Colour" is a misleading term, and may have imagers conflating an albedo for an intensity triplet.

Finally, bear in mind that file formats are not created equally, nor are their implementations consistent across applications and libraries. A file format can store a variety of different imaging alpha channel encodes, colour spaces, and encoding formats.

The solution would be to take your encoded colour values and linearize them. If you are using an emission shader, bear in mind that in scene referred terms, there is no ceiling value and the dynamic range is from zero to infinity.


Camera Tracking markers I want to do some camera tracking. The things that I will be filming does not have a lot of detail on it, so that I will have to place some extra markers here and there. I am not sure what kind if markers to make. Should I make simple X's or should I just put some dots on it?

With the new affine/perspective tracking you can get much better tracking by having a marker that has some features within it. Here's a brief hierarchy of how I think about what makes a good tracking marker:

Bare Minimum:
Some kind of point you can track the position of. Vulnerable to being lost due to noise. Can't track scale or rotation very well.

Better:
A corner gives you more to track, and is less likely to get lost, but can disappear it the camera moves too much around the object, and you probably can't track it's scale.

Best:
Some kind of small pattern or grouping of features. This gives you something with high contrast that you can also keep track of the rotation and scaling of with the Perspective motion model. This should give you a more robust track and thus a better camera solution.


In texture paint mode, is there a way for brush to be normal to surface instead of parallel with viewport? By default when you draw a brush stroke in texture paint mode, the paint is applied as if you're spraying paint from the pixel you clicked on in the viewport to the model.  It would be useful if instead the brush was transformed so that it was spraying at the point on the model under your mouse cursor and normal to the surface.

Is there a way to do this?  I can't find anything obvious in the brush settings.

Not yet, but the ability to do so is coming since Pablo Dobarro has coded it in development and it should be coming in official 2.82 later on. He made it consistent with the way the new 2.81 sculpt brush drawing works with the brush following the normal.


How to rig this character? I have a model that I have been trying to rig for hours now. I kept getting errors in unity when I used a rig in Blender, so I ran the model through Mixamo. This also had bad results, as the model's arms are severely deformed. However, this model has the proper hierarchy, etc. in Unity so I figured I could just modify the rig in Bender (the rig from Mixamo) and everything would be good. However, while I think the rig looks okay in pose mode, as soon as it enters a pose other than rest, the arms deform again. Any ideas why this might be happening?

If I'm not mistaken: based on what you're saying, you need to change a setting in your bone menu so that this deformation doesn't happen. Un-tick the box that controls this function; moreover, it's highly important that bones are not only correctly placed, but have the right mesh parts parented to them. An example of such is if the model is rotated without updating the bones themselves to accommodate this change (which then comes down to parenting). Such will result in distortion (e.g., a bone is assigned to the other arm instead of the arm it sits on).
For more on the topic of bone deformation see here: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/rigging/armatures/bones/properties/deform.html
And refer to this image for the deformation box:


Can I OpenGL render a quad view? Is it possible to playblast (openGL render) the quad view? In quad view if I launch playblast, only 1 of the views is rendered. Am I missing something for it to work (like an option in the user preferences)?

You could fake it with 3 additional ortho cameras layered in the VSE with scale transform effects arranged in a quad display. It renders super quick.


Rendering an image slow at beginning I have a problem with rendering a certain scene in the cycles engine. When I press the render button, it seems like before any tiles are rendered, Blender stays stuck at the grey screen for quite a long time before starting to render any tiles, where it proceeds to render at a reasonable speed. Even when I change from solid view to rendered view, Blender stops for a little while before beginning to render. Is there a certain cause for this? My scene has about 150,000 verts in total.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Cycles needs to cache the scene into memory, this takes time, see: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/31976/21508

That answer also correlates with your question.


Fade a mesh out due to animated distance from Empty In Cycles I have a cube with a red diffuse material on it, parented somewhere inside a larger Empty (type 'cube'). The Empty can be re-positioned anywhere, moving the cube with it as you'd expect.

I want to animate the red cube – JUST the red cube, not the Empty – to 0,0,-2 BU relative to the Empty (the Empty's local space). As the cube moves, the red cube should fade to invisible.

The key point is: I need to make cube fade out due to the cube's movement from the Empty, not a deliberate keyframe animation in the node editor or compositor. The cube's transparency value is dependent on the distance from the Empty's origin.

I'm guessing the node to use is Object Info in materials, and somehow configure it so that -2 BU in the Z-axis means the red diffuse shader transitions to a transparent fader via Fac input. But I don't know how to manipulate Object Info's output. Any help?

The point is to be relative to the "empty" parent.

For that, use it as input in the texture coordinate node (left).

Then few calculations (simply the distance sqrt(xx+yy+z*z), modulated by the "2" input value), to drive the mix shader. If only the Z interests you, you can simplify that.

if the cube moves :

If the empty moves :


Cycles Image as Plane: How to improve the quality of Image? Sampling rate? I am importing images as plane into Cycles render.  The image is a bit blurry, not as crisp, compared to the original image from Photoshop.  Is there something I can do about this?  Currently it is 12 x 12 and 300 dpi.  I imported it as emissions.

Is there an optimal render sample rate for images as planes?

Is there a special way to adjust color/contrast/etc. ?

Should i just 'sharpen' the image in Photoshop to adjust to the slight blurriness when I import the image into Blender?

I am new to this, so perhaps there is something obvious that i am missing.

Thank you for help!

Have you tried to raise the Map resolution in multiple importance under the world settings?

It can also be a UV map issue. The texture is stretched over the UV map's surfaces. If the surface is too small, it will become blurry and pixelated.
This also applies for the texture source itself, if it is to small it will become pixelated.

If you use light sources, you can make the shadows more sharp (become more crisp and clear) by reducing the light source's size (to something around 0.01).

With the shorthanded information you gave, I hope one of these suggestions will help you.

EDIT
Why are you importing it as emission? That will emit light and for sure as light spread, it will become blurry. Why not wrap the image on a plane as a texture?

Color/contrast etc.. can be altered in the Compositing editor for the scene.


Can someone explain why my models hips are doing this after subsurf modifier? I am very new to blender and I decided to make a man. However when I apply a subsurf modifier, my mans hips look strange. Can anyone explain why??

Here is a link for my images...

http://imgur.com/a/JPHNi

Thanks.

Looks like you have some extra geometry in the hip area. Try using Remove Doubles or fixing it manually.


What values do the --verbose and --debug-value options accept? Running blender with either

blender --verbose

or

blender --debug-value

returns Error: you must specify a verbosity level.

The wiki page about command line options does not specify what these options do or what values they accept.

What are some values that these options accept, and what do they do?

Both these arguments are mainly for developers.

--verbose is currently only used by libmv (camera tracking), however we will likely use in the future to control other output.
--debug-value is mainly for developers to test alternative behavior, from Python you can access it from bpy.app.debug_value from C/C++ you can access it from G.debug_value (with BKE_global.h include).

For example --debug-value 2 makes the manipulator rotation handles draw differently.

For verbose logging with camera tracking use --verbose 2.


How do I randomise a glossy node's roughness within a specific range? I have a glossy node with the roughness set to 0.05. I am using this material on many objects, and want to randomize the roughness by a small bit on each model (to be specific, between 0.02 and 0.05). I know that the way to randomize is to add an Object Info node, but what should I put between the Object Info node and the Glossy node to put the values 0.02 and 0.05 and plug into the roughness?

Thanks in advance!

All that is needed is a bit of math:

With an input of 1: 1 * .03 = .03, .03 + .02 = .05
With an input of 0: 0 * .03 = 0, 0 + .02 = .02


How to place repeatedly a small texture on very large surface? I want to apply a texture(small image) on a very large plane(100.000 km x 100.000km)
If i do nothing,texture will be too much large.
So i want to apply repeatedly the same no large texture in this very large plane.
How to do that?
thanks

This should be your basic material for any Image

To increase the texture size, Simply increase the scale in the mapping node

WARNING  However with most textures, you will see noticeable tiling
To reduce the amount of tiling, i suggest looking into Blender Guru's Video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VgtSL5ZpYc&feature=emb_title


How can I add procedural porcelain cracks? Okay,I'm gonna ask this and I hope to God this isn't a duplicate of another question. Do you remember in FNaF Sister Location how the plastic suits of the animatronics like Circus Baby have that porcelain crack texture to it? Well,I'm trying to replicate it for my plastic material in Cycles,but when I try procedurally,I fail. I resorted to textures online and I still failed. Can you please help me out?

The closest that I could find procedurally is something like the following, but the brick pattern really is Too consistent, that's why I tried to break up the mix with the musgrave texture, and the Random values for the monotony of the brick pattern (see below for the node arrangement).

Here's the Result on a sphere - keep in mind, it's not all that impressive, but should serve as a good basis to build from should you pursue it further.

I have another attempt here, and thought if we could some how mix the structures, we would have a pretty good method. So here it goes:


Multi-File Packages need to unregister all classes from files Blender (2.70a) is crashing with segmentation faults when I enable/disable/reenable my addon. I've inherited a project with a multi-file package design. I'm suspect that some classes are not unregistering since they aren't being called when the addon's unregister gets called.

I've reviewed this cookbook. And in both examples there are no bpy.type.Operators except in the __init__.py file. But in my project some files have Operators and Panels and some don't.

Does anyone know if reregistering classes can cause a crash?
What's the point of calling bpy.utils.unregister_module(__name__) if it doesn't unregister. Here is my __init__.py

bl_info = {
   'name': 'MyTools',
   'author': 'Me',
   'version': (0, 3),
   'blender': (2, 69, 0),
   'location': 'bpy.ops.mytools',
   'description': 'MyTools',
   'warning': '',
   'wiki_url': '',
   'category': 'user'}

import os
import sys
import importlib

# import/reload all .py files dynamically
for file_name in os.listdir(os.path.dirname(__file__)):
  if file_name      == '__init__.py' or \
     file_name[-3:] != '.py'         or \
     file_name[0]   == '.'           or \
     file_name[0]   == '#':
       continue

  module_name = 'mytool.' + file_name[:-3]
  __import__(module_name, locals(), globals())

  module = sys.modules[module_name]
if 'bpy' in locals():
    print(module.__name__)
    importlib.reload(module)

if 'bpy' in locals():
  print('Reloaded Mytool AddOn')
else:
  print('Imported Mytool AddOn')

import bpy

def register():
  bpy.utils.register_module(__name__)

def unregister():
  bpy.utils.unregister_module(__name__)

if __name__ == '__main__':
  register()

And mock up of one of the other files. foo.py

from . import myUtils

import bpy

class myOp(bpy.types.Operator):
   bl_idname = "mytools.myop"
   bl_label = "my operator"
   def execute(self,context):
       self.report({'INFO'}, "awesome")
       return {'FINISHED'}

bpy.utils.register_class(myOp)

Is this as simple as adding register and unregister methods to all of my other .py files.

If there are any custom PropertyGroup classes in the submodules, they have to be loaded in the correct order. You also need to "unregister" the submodules.

This is a pattern in the main file

def register():
    #register operators and propertyGroups explicitly
    bpy.utils.register_class(myPGClass1)
    #and/or run a helper function that finds all the classes and registers them

    bpy.utils.register_module(__name__)

    #add to the schema
    bpy.types.Scene.myTool = bpy.props.PointProperty(type=myPGClass1)

def unregister():

    #important: delete custom schema
    del bpy.types.Scene.myTool
    #unregister_classes, or use helper
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(myPGClass1)
    bpy.utils.unregister_module(__name__)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    register()

The this should work find if everything is in the __init__.py file. But since this is not the case, then these are the issues I discovered.

register_module() just finds the bpy.types.* classes in the module and runs register_class which looks to be a python call into C. So this doesn't look in the other files. So one has to call register_class on anything defined there.
enabling and disabling scripts will find the register and unregister functions by duck-typing. But only the __init__.py file will be in the list that gets checked. So anything in unregister() will not get called. This is the del types.myType line.
even though registering and unregistering is not working. Reloading will import the submodules, thus causing erratic behavior and classes will be reregistering, and the schema will try to update from a dereferenced raw pointer.
disabling/enabling addons has more to do with marking modules with a flag than with loading and unloading modules. Loading happens on first load and reload(f8).


Open user preferences directly into Add-ons tab I'm using a script to show the User Preferences dialog:

bpy.ops.screen.userpref_show('INVOKE_DEFAULT')

But it shows the preferences "input" tab, and I want it to show the "Ad-ons" tab. I tried using this:

bpy.types.UserPreferences.active_section

It didn't work. How can I do that?

You'd want to use
bpy.context.preferences.active_section = 'ADDONS'


Is there a way to lock the topology in edit mode? I wonder if there's a script for locking the topology of an object when you are editing so you are only allowed to do transformation operations, grab, rotate, scale, and so on, no "destructive" operations.

I use ManuelLab and Makehuman for making my models, and I accidentally change the topology, be ripping, extruding, edge looping, so I try to restore the original topology but then I encounter that the vertices indices are all messed up, and because of that if I try to join a shapekey from ManuelLab the shapekey gets corrupted.

I'm using ManualBastioniLab too, and do the same accidental thing, grr. Right now my fastest solution is to delete it, start a new avatar, and import the backup json file (there's a plugin somewhere  - I can't remember where I got it, google to find it). Not a perfect solution, because I've usually just fixed the overlapping UVs that ManualBastioniLab creates and will need to do it over, but it's faster than trying to repair the broken topology.


Use another node to control Vector Mapping I'm using a node group which has vector mapping in it. Unfortunately, there is no socket to connect the scale/rotation/location to either the node group input, or another node. Any ideas on how this could be accomplished?

You can create your own node groups to do that. First, let's start with examining what UVs are, or better how you can think of them. Start with creating a cube and unwrap it. Note that in the latest Blender version, you can even choose to automatically create texture coordinates from the last operator panel. Then create a node setup like in the screenshot here:

Note that you should connect the UV output of the Map Node into the Color of a Shader. This way, you can see what a UV Map 'looks like'. UVs are 2D coordinates of vertices / faces of your mesh. They exist in a space which ranges from 0 to 1. The 3D vector you get from the UV Map node carries the U direction in the first slot, the V direction in the second, and 0 in the third. check these screenshots:

you'll see that the map, if you split it out into its U and V sub components, gives you a gradient. Black is equal to 0, and means (for the U direction) left hand side in the UV Image editor, and in the end also in the texture which you map. For the V direction it means bottom, while white (= 1) means top.

So how to bring this in connection with the operations Translate, Rotate and Scale? Let's handle them one by one, starting with Translation. Since 0 means left / bottom, and 1 means right / top, one can simply add arbitrary values to move the UVs across the texture. Yes, you move the UVs, not the texture, which mathematically is something different. It will nonetheless enable you to do what you want. To do it, you can use any node which allows you to manipulate three channel input. You can use the SplitXYZ node and the Vector Transform node, but you can also use the MixRGB Node. In this case, it is the easier choice, because it has one additional element: the Fac socket:

In this example, I used the CombineXYZ node as the input node. It has one advantage over a simple RGB color node: You can set negative values. As you can see, you only need two of the sockets. Now, let's fool around with the Fac input:

To go further, let's create a node group so we can reuse what we have in other Blend files. Publish the socket values like in the screenshot, so you can add Noise or other effects to your result:

And this is what the result looks like from the outside:

Give it a nice name, add a fake user, and consider even to save this in your startup file to have it around every time you create a new file. Now let's handle Scaling. Luckily, this is really easy, because the logic is exactly the same as for rotations. The only change here is the math operation inside the node group: Make a duplicate of the node group, and change the math operation of the MixRGB Node from ADD to MULTIPLY, that's it:

Rotations are the ones that makes peoples minds crack. I admit that I didn't come up with the following node tree entirely myself, I took it from online references. Search for "rotate 2D vector" or "rotate 2D coordinates" to find the math equation, and build it with nodes like this:

The first multiply node basically gives you the Fac value for the Node group again. It was a deliberate decision to put it here like this, you can create variations of it if you like. The framed part is a conversion setup, because for the Node Group, the user most likely wants to type in rotations as Degrees, but Blender handles rotations in radians. That few nodes handle the conversion (pi / 180 * rotationvalue). The rest is trigonometry functions to rotate the coordinate around.

Finally, to do Translations, Rotations and Scales, simply daisy chain your Node Groups.

By the way, Bartek Skorupa did a comprehensive explanation at the Blender Conference 2014: https://www.blender.org/conference/2014/presentations/110 is the current link, however if it breaks you can find it by searching for 'how to manipulate texture coordinates like a boss'

well worth watching!


Making a spring for use in Unity I've created a spring animation using shape keys in Blender and I would like to import it to Unity. I can get the spring into Unity, but I can't get the animation. How do I get the animation to work in Unity?

I believe this dude goes into that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CSUxATQVLw

create resource folder in unity.
set char origin and bone origin to the same locations.
export char to that location
unity should automatically import all animations, materials, and other important contents.


Bake Diffuse texture color wrong shades I'm still fairly new to Nodes/texturing.
Had it baking correctly until I Appended the material into another model that needed the same treatment. Realized I had changed and saved some of the node settings (color/color ramp) so I copied the 2nd model back to the original to bake. The mask baked fine but the 2nd bake has 3 tones of red??? I thought it may have some thing to do with the 2nd model using a different 'Ray Distance' as I baked the normal on 2.7(I think) and have only recently started using 2.9(new PC), but I have 'Selected to active' turned off.

Spent about 3hrs trying to fix this and have finally given up. I Appended it to a cube if anyone can take a look. https://pasteall.org/blend/d49a6e9cc5fd4d99b17f96c2769369a3

After a heap of testing to every part of my nodes I eventually found one of my Normal Maps was plugged into my Color ramp. Not sure how I did it but that just killed a day of work (took a day off due to extreme frustration towards myself).


How to delete a mask in the movie clip editor? I can't find find a way to remove masking data in the Movie Clip Editor. How to get rid of it?

Hold down Shift and click on the X button right beside the mask dropdown.

This will unlink the 'mask data-block' from your file. To get rid of the mask's data, you can either save and re-open your blend-file or just click the Purge All button in the Outliner:


Model pinball machine light I like to model a pinball light as you can see in the picture.
Modeling it is not the problem but how can you get the inner pattern modeled. I don't know how you call that.

(Using Blender Cycles)

Final result:

I have slightly different method then @user3800527 it's quite similar but I've started making this answer before so I'll just post it.

Before proceeding further enable F2 add-on in User Preferences.

Steps:

Create Mesh > Circle with 64 vertices (or as much as you want) and Fill Type > Triangle fan.
Select outer Edge of this Circle then Select > Checker deselect.
Hit S and Scale them a little.

Most annoying step. Select each "inner" vertex, hover mouse to outer edge then press F to make new face.

Select one of the outer vertices then press Shift+G (Select similar) > Amount of adjacent faces.

Press G>Z and move those vertices down a bit.
Select 3 vertices from outer edge again Select Similar then E>Z and move them down.

With still selected bottom edge press S>Z>0 to make vertices even on Z axis.
Extrude them again and scale E>S and after that press Shift+Alt+S>1 to make this edge a Circle.

Before closing this shape, go back to the top of it, select one of the longest edge, again use Select Similar, but this time choose Length and move them down a little G>Z.

Now we are ready to close this shape. Select bottom outer edge, extrude it up to cover our inner part, then extrude it again and close circle with Alt+M > At center.

Now select top edge and Bevel it using Ctrl+B, you can use mouse wheel to choose number of Edge Loops.

It's almost the end. Select all and press Ctrl+N to Recalculate Normals.
Select only outer faces, choose Shading > Faces > Smooth and turn on Auto Smooth in Data tab.

Edit:

Lightning.

For lightning I have used HDRI studio environment, as for example this one:

HDRI studio - this one is free to use. I've used one that I've created by myself.

Material.

For material I've used Principled BSDF from Blender 2.79 RC2 with this settings:

Roughness for making it a little bit "milky". Play with this value to get desired result.
Clearcoat to add extra shiny layer.
Transmission to make it glass-like.

  Note that results may vary based on Camera angle, HDRI image and it's
  strength, object thickness and such.


Get light position in shader for 2D lightning I'm trying to replicate an effect/shader I've seen used in Ori and the Will of the Wisps, a videogame. Basically it's a 2D game with real-time lightning. The lightning in 2D is achieved by having various versions of the sprite with light drawn-in manually at various angles and then based on the position of the light source, two or more drawings are blended together to create the final lit sprite. This effect is not normal map based, so just dropping a light in the scene would just give flat lightning to everything. I wanted to replicate the effect in Blender because I think it would be interesting. I was thinking about trying this in both Cycles and Eevee.
From my googling and trying stuff in the shader editor though, I haven't found a way to feed the light position in the shader. I've seen the Light path node, but from my understanding it's just a boolean that says if a ray is of a certain type or not, without info on the location where it's coming from.
Is there any way to achieve this?

If you want the location of the light in World space, you can do it with drivers:

That's the disconnected Combine XYZ node labelled 'Light Location'  in the illustration. Pin the material's node editor open for convenience, right-click each of the X, Y and Z fields in the light's Transform > Location panel, select Copy as New Driver, and right-click > Paste Driver in the XYZ fields.
You can also do it without drivers, by adding/subtracting the coordinates of the shading-point in various texture-spaces. However, you probably don't want the light's location in rotated spaces.. the only way I can think of getting round that is to associate an un-rotated target Empty with the objects of interest. I've called them 'Locators'. They have Copy Location constraints on their objects, but don't rotate with them.

Then the Yellow Vector Math node in the illustration gives the Light's location with respect to the cube's location, and the Turquoise one gives the Light's location in World Space.
Drivers are probably the way to go, otherwise it's more fiddly to reproduce the material for different objects.


create random distribution of dupli objects on particle system but keeping one object per face I'm having a problem with distributing the objects I modeled in random ways. What I was able to do successfully is emit one object per face which keeps the objects from intersecting one another like this:

But when I vary the count of each object randomly in the particle count settings the buildings repeat in a weird pattern like this

As you can see if I change the count of each object in my group it should place my objects in a random pattern. Instead it seems to place them in weird strips. How do  set the particle system so  can adjust the amount of each object and have them placed randomly keeping one object per face

I noticed that you haven't changed the random slider (the one next to the 'object' slider, at the top of the particle settings). For the rest of the random settings to work, you need to make this a non-zero value. This only controls the distribution, rather than the rotation, so you shouldn't have any worries on that score.

This might not solve your one object per face issue, however. Perhaps try applying your group particle system to a plane the size of one of those faces and using an array modifier. This should achieve the intended result.


How am I supposed to handle muscle deformation while rigging? Sorry for this broad question, but I can't figure out how to put it succinctly in title.
My situation is that I'm able to:

Sculpt a semi-realistic human body in T-pose.

Rig and animate a wooden mannequin.

But when I try to make something from a reference like this:

I have completely no idea how to handle all the muscle deformations. Like the "squash" at her back waist, between the hamstring and calf, etc.
Where should I even start?

Unfortunately what you're asking about is a very broad and difficult topic and there isn't a very straightforward answer for Blender. I myself have done some research on it for team projects and can share what I have found.
Modeling muscle deformations is no easy task in 3D software. Large studios such as Pixar will often run complex simulations that account for elasticity and the like to create realistic forms. Blender doesn't natively support these capabilities, at least not to the extent of realism that these studios have.
There are (often expensive) add-ons available, such as X-Muscle System, which can run physical simulations for organic tissue. You could also write python scripts to do this yourself (though who knows how long that could take.) Personally I've never used either of these approaches, so I can't vouch for the benefits of either.
Even if we don't have an excess of time or money, hope is not lost. The most common approach I've seen is using shape keys, often called "Corrective Shape Keys." Here's the general idea:

Create your rig as normal. A cool trick is to not have the armature deform the mesh itself, but rather have it deform a mesh lattice/cage, which in turn deforms the mesh. This often results in smoother deformations and is used in many advanced rigging tools such as Juan Pablo Bouza's BlenRig.

Now, on the base mesh, create a shape key for each joint whose muscle deformation you want to adjust. For instance, your reference picture, you'd probably want a shape key for each knee, elbow, shoulder, and the torso.

For each shape key, bend the joint to the extreme and edit the mesh so that it looks you'd want it. This can be done in edit or sculpt mode (but don't edit the topology!)

Using Drivers, drive the factor of the shape keys with the rotation of the corresponding joint. This can be tricky to get right sometimes. With the knee for instance, you'd want the factor of the shape key to be greater when the knee is bent and around zero when in rest pose.

If you prefer video resources, this YouTube video has a good demonstration of corrective shape keys and this one is a decent introduction to using drivers.


Is there an established procedure for programmatically creating a Cycles material to match a physical one? I've started building a procedure for systematically generating a Cycles material and it has evolved into a involved process; So, I wanted to query the community before putting too much effort into it.

My procedure involves taking two photos of a planar surface at two different angles using a flash (and no other external light) and derive a "hardness" value for each color band as well as a surface normal/bump map and a normalized image map.  The procedure is entirely programmatic and I use Python/Numpy/SciPy and PIL to output the property values automatically given two image files.

Googling doesn't find me much but it might be that my Blender vocabulary is not advanced enough.  I only just started using Blender but am fairly knowledgeable in the physics of radiant energy.

CrazyBump comes very close.  Just open a photograph and it'll make a pretty good guess at the bump/normal map as well as the specularity map and occlusion map.  There is some manual tuning available, but the initial guess is quite good.


Origin of individual faces don't show up I have a cool model I'm making, but I want to move faces of my model outward along the normals of the faces, so I set the pivot point to individual origins and the transform orientation to normals, but this doesn't work and I can't actually see the individual origins, but when I watch videos on youtube about it they do have the individual origins showing up. Does anybody know how to fix this?
Thanks in advance.
https://imgur.com/qzCkNOD (I'm moving the faces in this picture)

To move faces along their individual normals, you need to change the Transform Orientations to "Normal" as well as the pivot point to individual origins. Then use G -> Z to move the faces along their individual normal direction.

If you wish to add geometry, use "Extrude Along Normals"

And to visualize the normals, the setting is in the Viewport Overlay dropdown:


Material appears flat in render The material preview looks awesome, however the viewport render looks terrible
I got the material online and appended it. The mesh is UV Mapped. What am I missing?

There are three main steps to any 3D project, you have Modeling where you create the actual geometry and polygonal detail. You have Shading, which is creating the materials/shaders, and then you have Lighting which defines how all the previous parts interact to make a final image.

I think your issue in this instance is you have an object (modeling) and a material (shading) but your lighting is off. Here is an example:

Here the lamp is one unit from the surface of the plane, light has a sharp falloff and is very bright.

Here is the exact same scene, with the same lamp moved up one unit. The falloff is much softer and any reflections and shadows will be softer as well.

Based on these examples, it is easy to see that the position of your lamps is very critical to how your scene will end up even if your modeling and shading is perfect. Sadly lighting is a very in-depth topic and isn't really within the scope of this site, but feel free to check some of the linked references below.

Helpful links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgAySB7DoOc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-N149FMlWk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o0PauhFQyo


How to bring back first start Key configure preset selection? If you first start Blender after installation you get a screen where you can select the key bind preset, between Industry standard, blender 2.79, Blender 2.8+ etc.
I Miss clicked there and now i cant figure out how to bring this window back.

On the top meny choose: File > Defaults > Load Factory Settings.
Or delete the userpref.blend file.
To find it, read this link:
Where is the startup file stored?
or read the manual page:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/advanced/blender_directory_layout.html?highlight=userpref


How to keep sync between Canvas and UV Editor When switching between objects the mesh from the picked object will change in the UV Editor only if I go to Edit Mode, but the Canvas Image remains the same as the last object edited.  Node Editor will update by itself.  If I go to Texture Paint the correct image is shown overlaid on the object in 3D View with Material View turned on but it does not change in the UV Editor or Canvas Image selection.  Going to Solid View shows the old image overlaid in the 3D View.  In order to get the correct Image shown everywhere I have to go to Texture Paint to manually change to it.

How can I get everything to sync automatically with an object when it is picked?

PACKED BLEND FILE

Very annoying. I finally solved the problem. Just unpin the following button on UV Editor. Then you will get the assigned texture whenever you select a object and turn it to Edit Mode. (This is for Blender 2.8)


How to configure a joystick under linux in BGE? I am trying to use a joystick in BGE under linux.
Version is 2.76b on Ubuntu 16.04.

I can see that the joystick is working under jstest-gtk, which captures the input from /dev/input/js0.

In BGE i have a joystick sensor connected to a "Quit Game" Actuator, hoping a simple button press would End the game I started before.
But no input is taken from the joystick.

Can someone tell, how to verify, that blender uses /dev/input/jsX?
Some other options? Does someone has it working under different device?

Here's the thing, I found the joystick input works in blender 2.72b and 2.71 in ubuntu 16.04 but not 2.76b or the latest 2.78.  I found out this has also been reported in windows: https://developer.blender.org/D1484 .  This should be reported as occurring in linux as well as windows, idk how to report it, can anyone report this additional bug info?  if not I'll try to.  This is more of a workaround than an answer but until the bug is fixed perhaps this can be the answer.


Problem rendering multiple smoke textures I have figured out what was wrong with the smoke, I could render it but I could not see it but it was there just the same, thank you. Now when I try and render two different smoke colors they both come out the same. I have gone into the compositor and created two different settings but I cannot apply them, also when creating two separate domain boxes and two emitters they only take one setting. I have tried to put them on separate layers but this does not work either, I do not want to go into the video sequence editor as this is long. Is there a solution for this?

It sounds like your materials or your textures or your caches are linked. You can check this by changing one setting for Smoke A and see if it applies for Smoke B. If so, then your issue is linking.

To get rid of the link, click the button with the number on it next to the material and texture. That should fix it.


How to Do Kinetic Text with Animation Nodes? How do I use Animation nodes to animate text like this example:

In video link above, I did an example of kinetic text in Moho Pro 12 (very time-consuming). Now I want to do that with animation nodes? I want to learn how to  flex text, scale fonts and make them jump, fall and bounce.
Thanks in advance.

The first thing to do is create a text object for each character as follows:

Next, create a spline that roughly represents the path that the characters  will take. Then create a follow-spline-action out of that spline using the Follow Spline Action node, then delay the action by some frames. The Action Viewer node can be used to visualize how this action will play out, where each row represents one of the characters, the start of the white block determine the time at which the follow spline animation will start and the end of the white block determine the time at which the follow spline animation will end. As you can see, the delay node offsets the animation of each character by some amount while the duration controls the duration of the animation:

The Object Action Output node is used to animate the objects based on that action we created, however, we offset each character along the x-axis by some amount that define the spacing between each character:

While everything should be ready, the action oriented the texts in a wrong direction, so we are just going to adjust it as follows, but this may vary depending on what orientation you want your text:

Which gives:

You might notice weird character spacing for non monospace fonts, this is because of our choice of a constant character offset, to fix this, a variable offset based on the local bounding box width of each character can be used.

For the bounce effect, a simple Animate Float node to control the x location with the y location controlled by the time evaluated at a bounce interpolation will do. The subtract node inverts the results such that its starts high and ends low while the multiple node controles how high its starts:

The other effects follow the same workflow. Falloffs are also very useful when dealing with such animation, see the documentation on falloffs for more information.


What are the Images in the UV editor for and how to prevent them affecting OBJ export? I'm not sure I understand the UV image editor and its ability to hold images. I thought it was purely to get a visual comparison between your UVs and the image you use for texture mapping, but it seems that if you have an image in there, it affects OBJ material export. I would like to ask if this is an intended effect, and if not how to fix it, or just remove all UV editor images in a script.

More background:

I'm working with a mesh format for a game. I can already convert into this format from an OBJ file with some existing tools.

To export directly from blender, I have written an addon that first writes out an OBJ file and hands it on to the other conversion tool.

The OBJ files blender exports cannot fully support rich materials, but for my application all I really need is the filename of a single texture. My model uses the old blender renderer (no cycles), and has some number of objects/meshes, where each mesh has some number of material slots, and each material has just one shadeless texture and no other properties.

For the most part these are written out into a .mtl file and into usemtl directives in the OBJ.

However some of them are written correctly as

usemtl material_name

but are then using the wrong .png file in the .mtl file.

I dug into the builtin blender OBJ export addon and found that it writes a different image name by picking up something called the 'face image', which turned out to be Image data blocks that are linked to the UV editor. This only affected certain materials that I had manually loaded a UV Image for to manually align things.

So back in the python console I find the following:

>>> bpy.data.meshes[2].polygons[0].material_index
3
>>> bpy.data.meshes[2].materials[3].texture_slots[0].texture.image.name
'om_decals_02a.png'
>>> bpy.data.meshes[2].uv_textures.active.data[0].image
bpy.data.images['om_floor_03d.png']

This shows that it is possible to have one image in the texture, and a different one shown in the UV editor, and it is this latter one that is preferentially exported (but only if it's present).

I can fix all this up in my export by removing all the UV editor images, but my questions are:

why does the UV image preview affect the exported material when the actual material assigned to that poly disagrees?
How can I remove them all from python safely and what impact might that have beyond having to load the image again to align UV layouts.
Have I set this whole thing up wrong and should be building the model in a different way in the first place?

For removing the uv images I have this:

for mesh in bpy.data.meshes:
    for data in mesh.uv_textures.active.data:
        data.image = None

Will this do the job, or will it break things? Is there an API that will correctly handle removal of things like this instead? Is the python internal reference counter the same thing as blender's user counts, or does one track the other?

I think I've found a workable answer. My fragment of python for setting these images to None was almost there, there's a more in depth version in this answer:
How to unlink material from a mesh, with python script?
I keep my materials, but the answer also covers this UV tex_face property that is the problem.

The whole tex_face feature is going away in 2.8 (which is a good thing as it's old and really well hidden and rarely used):
https://developer.blender.org/T51382

However there is one more crucial step which is to drop out of edit mode, otherwise none of the changes to the uv_texture images take effect before the export goes out, see the gotchas here:
https://docs.blender.org/api/2.79/info_gotcha.html#modes-and-mesh-access

So my final code fragment is as follows:

bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='OBJECT')

# Strip all the tex_face data, otherwise the obj export will use it
# We want it to use the material textures.
for mesh in bpy.data.meshes:
    if mesh.uv_textures.active is not None:
        for tf in mesh.uv_textures.active.data:
            tf.image = None

for mesh in bpy.data.meshes:
    for texlay in mesh.uv_textures:
        for tf in texlay.data:
            tf.image = None

Now my export seems to be behaving itself.


TypeError: Element-wise multiplication: not supported between 'Matrix' and 'Vector' Blender 2.8 produces the following error  whilst multiplying a combination of matrices and vectors

>>> M = Matrix()
>>> v = Vector()
>>> M * v
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<blender_console>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: Element-wise multiplication: not supported between 'Matrix' and 'Vector' types

>>> v * v
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<blender_console>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: Element-wise multiplication: not supported between 'Vector' and 'Vector' types

>>> M * M
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<blender_console>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: Element-wise multiplication: not supported between 'Matrix' and 'Matrix' types

Blender 2.8+ Matrix multiplication

The question code method was in place for Blender <=2.79.9. Blender has since adjusted its mathutils module, replacing the asterisk * with the at symbol @, aka the PEP 465 binary operator, for multiplying matrices with vectors.

>>> M = Matrix()
>>> v = Vector()
>>> M @ v
Vector((0.0, 0.0, 0.0))

>>> v @ v
0.0

>>> M @ M
Matrix(((1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0),
        (0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0),
        (0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0),
        (0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0)))

Note using @ will throw the "same type of error"  in <= 2.79.9 Replace with * as in question code.

>>> M = Matrix()
>>> M @ M
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<blender_console>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for @: 'Matrix' and 'Matrix'


Found the same (BMVert) used multiple times I'm trying to import the following .obj file into Blender

v -1.3433 0.3333 -0.7191
v -1.4807 0.3333 -0.3596
v -1.2747 0.0000 -0.8989
v -1.5493 0.0000 -0.1798
v -1.3433 -0.3333 -0.7191
v -1.4807 -0.3333 -0.3596
f 1 2 4 3 5 6

And getting the error specified above. When I switch the order of verts, it seems to be working. Any idea what causes this error and how can I avoid it?


How to delete auxillary/satellite objects from a central object? So I've imported the TwinBlast mesh from unreal engine into blender. For some reason they way they setup the mesh, his two guns and grenade are overlapped on the floor between his feet. You can easily move them and separate them from each other in pose mode, but when ever you go to edit mode they snap back to the original position which is on the ground overlapped.

Im basically trying to delete one of the guns and the grenade which, in object mode, are considered apart of the entire model.

Is it possible to delete these in object mode when you can move them away from each other and clearly see them? I have 2 pictures for clarity and reference.
Thanks.

If they aren't individually selectable, they're not deletable separately in object mode.  They're probably part of the same object, weighted to their own bones.

If they're weighted to their own bones, you have a few options.  One is to pose the model and enter weight paint mode (ctrl-tab from object mode), then switch to vertex select mode ('v' key) and ctrl-RMB lasso a whole bunch of vertices from the object you want to delete, now that it's nicely out of the way.  When you tab into edit mode, those vertices will still be selected, and you can ctrl-l select linked to probably get the whole object for easy deletion.  If not, delete, tab back to weight paint, rinse and repeat until you've got it all.

Another deal is that probably all of the vertices of the individual objects are exclusively weighted to a single bone.  Select one vert in edit or weight paint mode, 'n' to open your properties shelf, and look at the vertex weights section.  Here it will tell you which vertex group this vert belongs to; clicking on the group will select that vertex group for your model.  Now you can look on the properties view, under data vertex groups, and hit the "select" button, which will grab all the vertices assigned to this particular vertex group.  Which is probably the entire object, and only the entire object.  Delete, and you're good.


Object with a particle system doesn't show in render for some reason, my person will not show up when rendered. I have checked the material and it is fine. Not sure what i did. Hoping that someone can figure it out for me.

here's a link to the .blend file: person

You're using the body as an emitter for the eyebrow particle system, and you've accidentally unchecked Emitter in the Render panel of the Particle Settings. Re-check that box, and you should be good to go:


Python auto-execution disabled error I'm getting this error often, and I'm fairly new to blender and I'm not sure if this is the same thing as the Auto-run disabled issue, but I can't finish my project with this error in the way.

It says:

  ERROR: Python auto-execution disabled.

How can I fix this problem?

This might solve it, check here:
https://www.blender.org/manual/advanced/scripting/python/security.html
(Updated: https://www.blender.org/manual/advanced/scripting/security.html 10.23.16)

Relevant text as follows:

Setting Defaults

In the File tab of the User Preferences, there is the toggle Auto Run Python Scripts.

This means the Trusted Source option in the File Browser will be enabled by default, and scripts can run when blend-files are loaded without using the File Browser.

Once enabled you have the option to exclude certain directories, a typical configuration would be to trust all paths except for the download directory.


Extracting a text string info (character's indices) to use it as a material mask I think an image can say more than words sometimes... :)

The idea is to use a different color from the color ramp for each character in the string.
It's related to this question

The color of each character is determined by the material index on the text object. Therefore, to have each character use a different color from the color ramp requires a material for each color.

The steps involved:

A material for each color in the color ramp node.
The text object must have all the materials applied to it.
The characters must reference the index of the materials.

This script takes the colors from a color ramp node, makes new materials and then assign each character a material.

import bpy

txt = 'Text' # The name of text object and text curve.
materials = bpy.data.objects[txt].data.materials
i = 0

# This material holds the color ramp node, change 'material name' to the name of your material.
rampMat = 'material name'
colorRamp = bpy.data.materials[rampMat].node_tree.nodes['ColorRamp'].color_ramp.elements

# Convert colors from the ramp to materials and add them to the text object.
for element in colorRamp:
    color = element.color
    material = bpy.data.materials.new('color')
    material.diffuse_color = color[0], color[1], color[2]
    materials.append(material)

# Loop through the characters setting their indexes.
for character_format in bpy.data.curves[txt].body_format:
    character_format.material_index = i % len(materials)
    i += 1


Audio to affect Material noise / texture values I am attempting to make a procedural material and have audio files affect different elements of the material. Examples..

I would like to have audio.01 to animate the scale of a noise texture node.

I would like audio.02 to animate the rotation of another noise texture that is mixed in.

I would like audio.03 to animate the depth of the displacement.

Been watching videos and having the hardest time finding the best way to do this. Thanks for your help!

Go to the Shader Editor, with your mouse over the value you want to
animate press I.
With your object selected open a Graph Editor and
expand the options (left) until you see your keyframe and select it.
With your mouse still over the graph open the tool menu. (Either
Space, or F3 depending on your settings) and type Bake Sound, you
will see the option I posted. Click that, locate your sound file and
play with the options on the left.

It will replace your keyframe with a curve that you cannot edit after baking, if you want to change it, you'll have to bake again.


Visible gaps in mesh when using adaptive subdiv and multiple materials No matter what I try, I can't close a visible displacement gap between materials when I'm using Adaptive Subdivision.

Enabling Auto-Smooth in the normal options fixes gaps on the corners of objects within the same material, but not between materials.

Catmull-Clark Subdiv doesn't fix it, nor does enabling Use Creases. Turning off Adaptive will fix it, but I really need it for my scene.

Any other ideas?

As mentioned by @lemon, as of Blender 2.80, Adaptive Subdivision is still an "Experimental" feature - and so may encounter unexpected behaviours and issues and may be subject to change in the future (it's only recently that the Displacement socket itself came in to the 'Supported' feature set).
It appears that in Adaptive subdivision mode that each distinct material is currently handled as a separate mesh, effectively splitting the mesh into different faces which are displaced by different amounts, depending on the material. In your case you are telling one material (the bricks) to displace by one amount and the other material (the flat surface) to displace by a different amount. At the boundary between the two materials there is a conflict between where one material ends and the other begins - and so the gap.
I suppose the question to ask is "How should the missing 'surface' between these two displaced edges actually be filled?".
The solution is to ensure that the displacement matches between the two materials at the boundary; if you're expecting the grey surface to fill the gap then that material should displace at its edge to match that of the brickwork. If, however, the brick texture should fill the gap then the brick material should displace to the level of the grey surface at its edges. I suspect this would greatly complicate your materials (as they will need to handle blending the displacement into the surrounding surfaces) but I think this is the only solution at the moment.
Perhaps before the adaptive subdivision comes out of Experimental there will be an option to 'average' or somehow automatically manipulate the displacement at the boundary of contradictory material displacements.


Xray and distracting geometry I want to retopo an object so I tried using the Xray option to make my new mesh appear in the viewport in front of others. However I don't want to be able to see on my new mesh faces that are facing away from the camera or are behind other faces as it's making the process pretty hard. How can I do this?

It turns out that the feature I was looking for wasn't actually X-ray or at least there's another workaround. Instead I used the shrinkwrap modifier with a little bit of positive offset so that the new mesh doesn't sink into the original one.


How to pan UV map with mouse movement in UV Editor Like the snapshot shown above, I have a selected UV map I wish to align to my texture. The only way I know is to adjust the UV Vertex configuration (located on top right UV editor view) by dragging mouse over it. Doing so makes the process very slow and inaccurate. It will really help speed up this tedious process if I can just pan it with direct mouse control like I do as I would move objects. Is such control possible?

Thanks!

You can pan around the UV Editor(and any other 2D view) with the Middle Mouse Button.


How can I apply textures without them stretching? How can I apply a texture to let's say a cylinder, and make it fit nicely on the object?

Or, if I have a model with multiple vertices, the texture repeats itself for every new set of vertices it crosses.

Any ideas?

UV Mapping
A 3D model is usually made by a bunch of faces in the 3D space. Textures are 2D images. UV Mapping defines how the images cover the model
Imagine that you have to peel of the surface of an object and to put it on a table: if you object is a cube, it will not be a difficoult task, you'll just have to cut along some of the edges (the Seams) and unfold it. But if your object is curved, things became less obiouvs even with simple objects ( for example a sphere).
You can have a visual explanation in this video introduction about the topic.  Here's an extract :

As written in the Blender's reference manual page:

Every point in the UV map corresponds to a vertex in the mesh. The lines joining the UVs correspond to edges in the mesh. Each face in the UV map corresponds to a mesh face...
...When you unwrap a face to a UV Texture in the UV/Image Editor, each face of the mesh is automatically assigned four UV coordinates: These coordinates define the way an image or a texture is mapped onto the face.

So if you have a no UVmap assigned, the texture will not be mapped.
If you have a basic UV unwrap (like the one you get from UV mappaing (U in Edit mode) and choosing Reset option) each face will show all the texture, resulting in the repeating pattern shown below:

As the faces are long thin rectangles and the image is squared, the applied texture looks distorted (scaled on th z axis).
Let's modify the uv mapping a bit
Start from marking the top and bottom edge rings and one of the vertical edges as Seams.

Notice that the edge marked as Seams are now drawn with a red highlites to be distingushed from the others. They corrispond to the edges where the UV island's edges can be splitted,
Now, by running the UV mapping command and choosing the Unwrap option and scaling the island, you can get the following result:

UV mapping is a complex task that requires lot of practice to be mastered; there are many ways in which a group of faces can be unwrapped and Blender has many different tools to help you (you can find more info by examining the link to the manual at the beginning).
You can also have a look at the following videotutorials:

Blender: Uv Unwrapping a Curved Mesh
Blender Tutorial - UV Unwrapping basics for Texturing
Call for help - UV Unwrapping Slightly Complex Objects In Blender & Other UV Tricks
...

Basically any object that has texture needs a correct unwrap, so you'll find a section about it everywhere.
In the UVImage editor there is a checkbox that can help you to examine the streching of your uv island:

In the example above the circles on top are the UV island of the bottom and top faces of the cylinder. Their blue colour means there is no stretch. On the other hand the Side face's UV island has a gradient because the unwrapping was made without marking enough seams.
In this particular case I didn't set any vertical seams, so the peeled surface is a ring. A ring can be flattened upon a table, but you'll have to stretch a bit the material (inner fibers are compressed and outer are in traction) by twisting it.

Obiuvsly seams are not the answer for every problem. Where there is a seam, you'll have a discontinuity if your texture is not seamsless. Depending on what is the purpose, you'll have to find an equilibrium point between seams (discontinuity) and streching (distortion).
Procedural textures don't need unwrap because are mathemathically defined in the 3D space.


Flattening the intersection of overlapping spheres as everybody know, when you put two spheres close to each other  they intersect other like this :

How do I flatten the spheres at the region where they intersect each, I tried to illustrate this with a quickdraw :

I don't know if it's possible with physics like soft body or collision.
does anyone know how to get this result,  i need this for a still image not for animation.

I'm more looking for something like this:

Bmesh script

Script to flatten spheres on their intersection plane. See intersection of two spheres on Paul Bourke's magnificent geometry site The code runs through each selected sphere, checks if they intersect, if they do clalculates the location of the circle of hit.

If there's a collision, for both spheres, selects all vertices that are within the conic angle of the collision and moves them to the point of intersection with the collision disc.  NOTE: script relies on the origin of the spheres being the (default) centre of geometry.

Test run on UV Spheres.

The script

Select all the spheres you want to modify and run script. Alter the scale to change the angle of effect of flattening vertices.

import bpy
import bmesh
from math import acos, degrees, radians
from mathutils import Vector
from mathutils.geometry import intersect_line_plane
context = bpy.context
scene = context.scene
spheres = [(o, max(axis for axis in o.dimensions) / 2) for o in context.selected_objects]
bmeshes = {}

scale = 1.0 # alter to widen bump angle.
def new_bmesh(me):
    bm = bmesh.new()
    bm.from_mesh(me)
    return bm

def squish(sphere, angle, global_plane_co, global_plane_no):
    mw = sphere.matrix_world
    mwi = mw.inverted()

    bm = bmeshes.setdefault(sphere.name, new_bmesh(sphere.data))
    local_p = mwi * global_plane_co
    local_norm = mwi * (global_plane_co + global_plane_no) - local_p
    # select all verts via angle
    proj = angle > radians(90)
    if proj:
        angle = radians(180) - angle
        verts = [v for v in bm.verts if v.co.angle(local_p) > angle]
    else:
        verts = [v for v in bm.verts if v.co.angle(local_p) < angle]
    for v in verts:
        v.select = True
        d = local_norm if proj else v.co
        o = v.co if proj else Vector()
        hit = intersect_line_plane(o, d, local_p, local_norm)
        if hit and hit.length < v.co.length:
            v.co = hit

while spheres:
    sphere, R = spheres.pop()
    P = sphere.matrix_world.translation
    for s, r in spheres:
        p = s.matrix_world.translation
        v = (p - P)
        d = v.length
        v.normalize()
        if d >= r + R:
            continue
        elif abs(r - R) > d:
            continue
        elif d < 0.0001:
            continue

        x = (d * d - r * r + R * R) / (2 * d)
        # define plane
        pt = P + x * v
        norm = v
        angle1 = acos(x / R)
        angle2 = acos((d - x) / r)
        #print(R, r, x, degrees(angle1), degrees(angle2))
        squish(sphere, scale * angle1, pt, norm)
        squish(s, scale * angle2, pt, norm)

for name, bm in bmeshes.items():
    me = scene.objects[name].data
    bm.to_mesh(me)
    me.update()

scene.update()

Sample run on icosphere cluster on left, result on right

EDIT: fix for inside cases, now projects back onto plane if hit is inside (angle is greater than 90 degrees.


Problem welding vertices/edges As you can see in the gif, my problem is that that one of the vertices is loose while the other is connected, the loose vertex is located on the edge. My question is, how can i weld the vertex of the loose mesh to the edge ?

The blendfile:

If i understood the question vertex is not join.

Select the edge and subdivide once to get a single vertex

Select the verts and press G twice so that it slide on the edge.

Activate snap transform (shift+tab) and snap both the verts and remove doubles.


What techniques are used to begin creating new models? What are the different methods for modeling something in blender? I know a few like mesh modeling and sculpting, but am interested in other methods to create shapes.

There really are only ~6 in blender, except for impracticable ones/not supported, the rest are derivatives:
1. Mesh modeling:
This is where you use edit mode, and move around, connect and disconnect vertices to form a shape.
There are a lot of sub-approaches, like extrude modeling and box modeling to name a few. As a rule, use extrude modeling if you're not going to have to eyeball proportions, since you can use the details from the start and work faster (like modeling off blueprints), and use box modeling for when your eyeballing stuff since it is much easier to adjust proportions.
Some people only like to do it one way, I'd try both and see what you like.
In this area Blender has very good tools.
2. Sculpting:
This is where you work off of a very high poly mesh, and form a shape by pushing vertices in large numbers to form a shape, this can produce very creatve and organic workflow, generally used form non hard surface meshes, although some people sculpt hard surface meshes.
In this area, Blender has quite good tools.
3. Curve modeling
This is where a form is created using joined curves, spline modeling. This technique has been largely fased out, but was popular in the 90's (I think)
The most famous form is NURBS modeling, where you can create surfaces between curves, but as I said few people now use that method.
Blender does have curve support, but no support for trimming or viewport UV's.
4. Procedural Modeling:
This is where code/modifiers does the modeling work. A good example is the displacement modifier, where a mesh can be distorted based on a height map. It is easy to create rock surfaces using this technique.
With code added, procedural modeling can go very very far, see these videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOLhnwllpgs & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP473rNZ_Eo
Blender's tool set here aren't so advanced, though there are external add-ons that can help: eg: https://github.com/nortikin/sverchok
5. Simulation
This is useful only for things like a fluid, liquid or gas/ it also is useful for modeling damage or clothing.
The fluid and to some degree the smoke simulator are limited, but the  cloth simulator is pretty well featured
6. Metaballs
These are basically shapes that are enclosed in what can best be descried as a shrink wrap shell... They merge together, making it easy to modeling something like a peanut. When they are separated sufficiency they split and go back to their original form. There are few practical applications I know of for meta balls in blender.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaballs (this example only shows a few but you can have 100's)
Other Methods of Modeling:
These mostly include scanning and photo-modeling, but Blender doesn't include tools to do this out of the box, you'd need specialized software for this.


What order to texture a 3d object? I have been trying to learn blender. I've created a 3d model for Skyrim, and now I need to texture it. There are videos all over the place about texturing and mapping and it goes on and on. Where is the beginning point? What do I do first? Do I need to make a normal map first? Or the Texture? I can't find anything about the right order of doing these things, just a bunch of videos seemingly starting at the half way point, or somewhere along the process. Can anyone point me in a direction? Also, I'm very confused about scaling the object. I've already posted a question about it but I'm gonna ask here anyway. How do I know if my 3d model is the same size as the one I'm going to replace in game? How do I check the actual size of the object? I don't want a soul gem as large as a house.

I've been through your frustration - thought a step by step 'walk- through' might also help...

Texturing for Newbies -

Start up Blender with the default cube.

Select it with RMB. (Right mouse button)

at the right there is a horizontal line of icons. (If not press SHIFT-SPACE)

Select the little cube icon to confirm you've selected the cube in the 3D window.

Move further right to the little brown ball icon. (material properties)

Select that and press the "New" button.  That will create a material slot for the cube which will be given the default slot name "Material" strangely enough.  You can rename this if desired.

Move one top icon to the right select that. Its a tiny little checkered square.

(and this is where the story really starts!)

Press the "New" button below and that to create a texture slot for the 'Material' slot you created just prior.  By an amzing coincidence this slot is given the title "Texture".  You can rename that too if you're so inclined.

Immediately under the new title you can see that it's defaulted to
"Image or Movie"

Scroll down and open the tab called "Image".  It's probably open already by default.

Click on "Open" and select an image file in your machine.

Chances are nothing is going to be seen straight off, but the image should appear up top where you created the slot.

Close the image tab for now.  You don't want too much clutter.

Go down further and open the "Mapping" tab.  It's probably open already.

For a security blanket, select "Generated" instead of the default UV option so you can see your image appearing correctly on the top and bottom of the cube.  The sides however will probably be just coloured lines.

This is because we need to map the image for each and every side of the cube.

Change the "Generated" option back to "UV".

At the top right of the 3D window, drag down a new window, which should be a duplicate of the 3D view.

Go to the lower one one and expand it's icon at bottom left, select -
"UV Image Editor".

At the UV editor's lower border, expand the menus at left-of-center and select your image.  It might be the only one listed.  When you select this, it will appear large as life in the editor.

Place your mouse cursor back in the 3D window and with the cube still selected, get into "Edit" mode. (TAB)

In Edit mode press CTL-TAB and select "Face".  All faces should be highlited.  If they're not, press A.

At the bottom border of the window click on "Mesh", then "UV Unwrap", then "UV unwrap" a second time.

Presto!!!  Your texture should appear at all sides of the cube!

When a contiguous texture is required, you could try "Smart Unwrapping"
and in fact experiment with all the unwrap options.  For now stick to what you've got.

Reflective light called 'Specular' can upset texturing at times, so try turning this off or reducing it to see the effect,  Get back to the top icons, select the Material icon again. (little brown ball)

Just below the diffuse slot is the "Specular" one.  Drag it's slider back to zero for now.

Under the "shading" tab just below that, click on the "Shadeless" box.  That can brighten up surfaces markedly.

-=========-

It could be that the images are all topsy turvy, however each of the cube's surface images can be adjusted and rotated from the UV editor without affecting the cube's geometry itself.

From the 3D window, make sure you're still in edit mode and select a single face.  Go to the UV editor's lower border and two icons on from the "View" option is an icon that when highlited, will keep the 3D window's surface selections in synch with those highlited in the UV editor, and vice versa.  Click on that to highlite.

The image in the editor should also glow.  That's the surface that's going to be affected by what you do next.

Place the cursor in the UV editor and press R.  Drag the image around to the desired angle.  Typing R90 will (would you believe?) rotate the image 90 degrees, R180, 180 degrees.

You'll notice that the UV editor works in 2D.  X & Y axis only.

You can also scale images by pressing S and move the mouse without dragging.

SX, SY will scale surfaces in the X or Y axis respectively.  Make sure you're in the UV editor each time!!!

GX and GY will "Grab" an image and drag ts in those axis also.  Just pressing G will drag it around as you like.

and that I hope, will get you going -


How to UV unwrap a flat mesh in Blender Just getting started with UV unwrapping and not sure how best to proceed. I have a 2d race track that I want to unwrap to begin creating a texture.

If I use standard unwrap with seams, I get the unwrap without any stretching but the UV map is then going to be quite hard to work with as it distorted to look at.

Alternatively, to keep the straights and corners relatively sized to one another I unwrapped using project from View which obviously unwrapped in a way that's easier to manage but now a lot of the mesh has stretching.

I'm new to UVs so I'm a little stuck. Any help would be appreciated.

Unwrap U one segment (polygon) of the road and use UV Squares -> To Grid by Shape, or make it rectangular manually
Select rest of the polygons and lastly this unwrapped segment so it becomes the Active quad
Unwrap -> Follow Active Quads

Then all the road mesh will be unwrapped based on that one quad mapping.


Show the polycount of selected objects in object mode How to show the polycount statistics (faces, tris, etc) of selected objects in object mode? The bar on the bottom of screen shows polycount of the whole scene:

I know I can switch to edit mode and select the whole object to view its polycount, but there are two problems: 1) what if I want to know the combined polycount of two or more objects? 2) When there is a Decimate Modified applied, edit mode doesn't have the information of final result.

It's a workaround, but you can temporary hide every other object.

Select the desired object(s), press Ctrl+i to invert the selection, then H to hide : you can now read the statistics you want. Once done, Alt+H to un-hide.


How can I remove sharp edges from the final render? I'm un-wrapping my mesh and these are all my mark seams:

When I render these are the results:

It seems pretty god, but when I went in the back, near the neck I saw them, straches all long my mark seams.

Did I make something wrong or is it usual with mark seams? What can I do in order to smooth this one and render my figure better?

Delete the vertex of the defective area.  Examine for unwanted pixels.  Add back a new pixel.  Correct Seams if required.

Examine the troublesome area in question in Mesh Select Mode vertex, edge, and face view while in Edit mode and remove, adjust stray vertices.


How to temporarily hide armature for other mesh? I'm trying to make a fight animation between this two.

But I'm having hard time positioning their body because the armature of the other one is being mixed to the armature of the other.

How do I hide the armature of the other one temporarily so I can position the other one properly?

I don't want to completely hide the mesh, only its armature, so I can see them both while working with only the armature of one guy being shown.

.blend file.

Hiding the top object will only hide the skeleton, not the mesh.
If this is what you want to accomplish, Just click the hide button and you should be good!


Blender - Diffuse color change by color "picker" popup I unfortunatly to stupid to make it work.
I need to change a diffuse color of active material by selecting it by COLOR_GAMMA popup - color picker.

I did this:

import bpy
class MaterialColorPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    bl_label = "3dView Material Color"
    bl_space_type = "PROPERTIES"
    bl_region_type = "WINDOW"
    bl_context = "material"
    bpy.types.Scene.color_Material = bpy.props.FloatVectorProperty(name="color_Material",subtype = "COLOR_GAMMA", default = [1.0,0.0,0.0])
    bpy.context.object.active_material.diffuse_color=(1,1,0)

    def draw(self, context):
        self.layout.prop(context.scene,"color_Material")

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(MaterialColorPanel)

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

bpy.utils.register_module(__name__)

But I do not know how to make that picked color value by bpy.types.Scene.color_Material will be copied to bpy.context.object.active_material.diffuse_color and will change it.

Could somobody show me how to do it ?
Thank you!

Ok...at last I have figured it out!
Probably I am not so stupid as I thought.
I made this that works perfectly:

import bpy

class MaterialColorPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    bl_label = "3dView Material Color"
    bl_space_type = "PROPERTIES"
    bl_region_type = "WINDOW"
    bl_context = "material"

    def color_update(self, context):
        col_R=self.color_Material[0]
        col_G=self.color_Material[1]
        col_B=self.color_Material[2]
        bpy.context.object.active_material.diffuse_color=(col_R,col_G,col_B)
        print(">UPDATE:", col_R, col_G, col_B)

    bpy.types.Scene.color_Material=bpy.props.FloatVectorProperty(
                                        name="Material Color",
                                        subtype = "COLOR_GAMMA",
                                        default = [1.0,0.0,0.0],
                                        update=color_update)

    def draw(self, context):
        self.layout.prop(context.scene,"color_Material")

    def invoke(self, context, event):
        print(self.colMat)
        return{"FINISHED"}

def register():
        bpy.utils.register_class(MaterialColorPanel)

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

bpy.utils.register_module(__name__)


Unseen UVs appear in Texture paint? So through all of the little issues I've been able to find and fix online, this one has be stuck....

????Where are these extra shapes coming from and why can I only see them when I texture paint???? I can't select them through the uv panel or in edit mode. I've searched my mesh for double verts and such...the only thing I can think of was sometime in the past I may have made the faces double sided, the sleeves I think. But why can't I edit the uvs if that is the problem.

Please help I've been stuck on this one all day.

Link to blender file:

You have mesh artifacts and double vertices from modeling in your geometry.

There are two possibilities to solve this.

Tab into Edit Mode, hit W and select "Remove Doubles". You need to unwrap your model after that again.
In your UV/Image Editor window, hit A to select everything, turn on "Keep UV and edit mode mesh selection in sync" (see image below), switch to Face Select mode, then select all the faces you want to get rid of. Move your mouse to the 3D View and hit X and select "Faces" to remove them.

Make sure to check and recalculate the face normals after that.


Boolean Modifier not working with Solidify Modifier I am currently in the process of making a plane in blender. To cut out the windows I am using the Boolean modifier, and to add thickness to the windows I used the Solidify Modifier. I would first solidify the cylinder I am using as the body of the plane and then apply the Boolean. I ONLY apply the Boolean whilst my mesh is not shaded as smooth otherwise errors occur. When I have finished using the Boolean and shade the cylinder as smooth I get a problem where there are strange cut outs in the cylinder as shown in the picture. IF anybody could help it would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks.

I would do two things to try and fix this. Firstly, you can try switching the order of which modifier is first.

Also, I'd try playing with the "offset" in the solidify modifier to see if that fixes it


How do I make spikes show wherever you would see solidify lines with flipped normals? Using Cycles, for a cartoony animation character I need spikes to be seen only from the character's edges and behind the character but never seen in facing angles. I want to avoid having to render the scene twice to be composited after.
For example: 2 meshes,
1 skin color, smooth, rigged,
1 blue spiky mesh sticking out, rigged, never seen in front.
I have no idea how to accomplish this.
Do I have to account for camera angle and normals of the spike's base?
Can I just layer one over the other with nodes?
Default look:

Approximate Desired result done in Photoshop.

This seems like a task for the compositor, but you explicitly stated that you don't want to render multiple times. That means only AOVs remain an option for compositing. After trying it I discarded the idea, because it will cause artifacts. Instead I found a solution using only the shader and some Custom Normals.
First you need to redo the spikes. You need a spike geometry with Custom Normals pointing along the spike direction. You can do that in Editmode of the spike by using Mesh > Normals > Point to Target or using Alt+L. Then you can use instancing to put the spikes at the vertices of your model. Then you need to disable ray visibility for any other ray than a camera ray in the object settings of your spikes.
After this setup you can make this shader:

The result looks like this:

You are also free to change your material in any way you want, which could have been difficult with the compositor approach.
Here is the Blend File:


Deform mesh along another mesh without distortion I'm trying to create a non-destructive piece of road with a curb attached. The road and curve are both controlled with a curve that works fine.
The problem occurs when I wanted to add a SimpleDeform to the road mesh to give me the ability to easily taper its width. What I want is for the curb mesh to stick to the side of the road but not get distorted. The closest I've come is using the Surface Deform modifier on the curb however, this creates bad distortion.
Hopefully, the image helps explain. The ultimate goal is to keep everything non-destructive so I could change the taper and the curb would follow along.
Let me know if you think this is possible. Thanks!

Simple Deform will give you slightly different results if the objects are not exactly the same. Not very good at deforming multiple objects and keeping them together as far as I know D:
Try this instead:

Select the first or last control point of the curve.
Scale the control point with ALT+S or through the N Panel.
Select ALL curve points and Right Click to bring up the Context Menu
Select Smooth Curve Radius.

Note that this aligns the curb way better, but it's still deformed. Everything you want is certainly possible, but doing it in a way that's 100% non-destructive and easy to modify and without deforming the curb width... all of that at the same time requires a not so simple setup or a more destructive approach unfortunately (or learning Houdini).

If you don't mind being more destructive, you can Shift+D to duplicate the edges of your road (you will have to apply your modifiers to create real geometry first). Then convert those edges to curves and use these new curves as paths for your curbs to follow.


Overlay an image with another image, like in photoshop For my material I have a pretty dark base texture. I want to 'spice' it up with an orange rust texture. I just want this to be overlayed on the base image and to be adjustable. Like two layers in photoshop and the top one you can adjust the opacity.

I'm a noob at the node editor so any suggestions can help.

Well with a bit of exploration I found what I was looking for. The MixRGB Node. I was using the Mix Shader before and that wasn't working at all, then I realized you can't put color nodes in shader nodes...derp.

Anyways if you wanna Mix together different colors or image textures (anything with a color output) just use the MixRGB node and you get all the awesome blend types like in Photoshop (Overlay, Darken, Multiply etc.)


Cycles material What is the syntax to access texture mapping location? I have scripted texture offset through script for blender internal material

loc = bpy.data.objects["RigName"].pose.bones["BoneName"].location.x
bpy.data.materials["MaterialName"].texture_slots[7].offset[0] = loc

What is the syntax to access texture mapping location in Cycles Material
I have the idea of setting up drivers but as i have already scripted it like above showed example for many of the characters so it will help to know the syntax in speeding change to cycles

Let's assume Mapping is the unique name/identifier for the Mapping node in question. To find the unique node name, select the node and view the Side panel (N key).

The code to access the Location vector for Mapping is:

>>> bpy.data.materials['Material'].node_tree.nodes['Mapping'].translation
Vector((0.0, 0.0, 0.0))

or more structured

mat = bpy.data.materials['Material']
nodes = mat.node_tree.nodes
mapping = nodes['Mapping']
mapping.translation = 1.0, 0, 0   # accepts tuple

Hover over the properties and the tooltip will give a hint as to where to find most properties. But for materials, the path is via data.materials and not data.node_groups as the tooltip suggests.


Select first and last edge loop I want to fill the holes of a mesh created from a curve programmatically, so my idea was to select the first and last edgeloop with Python

And then execute a fill.

So my question is: How to select the first and last ring of the mesh in code?

Thx

Contextual Create operator

For the case given, simply finding all the boundary edges and spitting into contextual create operator ngon fills the edge loops

The edges of the returned faces are the original edge loops Use to  fill other than ngon.

import bpy
import bmesh

context = bpy.context
ob = context.object
me = ob.data
bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)

ret = bmesh.ops.contextual_create(bm,
        geom=[e for e in bm.edges if e.is_boundary])

# the seperate edge loops
edge_loops = [f.edges[:] for f in ret["faces"]]
# if don't like the ngon fill then do something here
# eg remove face
# grid fill edge loops,
# poke face for tri fan.

bmesh.update_edit_mesh(me)

Similarly with the edge loop fill operator

ret = bmesh.ops.edgeloop_fill(bm,
        edges=[e for e in bm.edges if e.is_boundary])


What is the name of the vertex relax algorithm? "slide relax" Is there a relax algorithm that would slide vertices from flat areas to sharp ones while maintaining the shape of the loop?
If something like that exists, what is the name of such an addon or algorithm, perhaps there are similar tools in other software?
please, do not suggest solutions like "make subdivide and then limited dissolve"
This is necessary to quickly optimize many loops for low poly geometry, the mesh should be preserved.

One method to do that:

Select all vertices that you want to be smoothed out,
hit CTRL+B to Bevel,
V to bevel vertices instead of edges,
press M until mode Percent is selected,
use the mouse wheel for setting the number of segments you like (an even number let's you keep the original vertices in place, an odd number splits them),
drag the mouse to adjust the bevel,
hit Return or press LMB once you're satisfied with the result.

Of course you can also hit CTRL+B, then Return or LMB to edit the values in the Bevel Properties Menu.
This description applies to the visualization. If that's a top view of e.g. a wall you'd like to smooth, then you don't have to bevel the vertices, but the corresponding, i.e. you can skip step 3.


How do I set a texture as the world background in the game engine? I can't figure out how to set a texture as the world background in the GE. Can someone point me in the right direction?

You could do this with a sky box, or a sky dome - the process is basically the same. In my opinion, sky domes look better than sky boxes, so I'll tell how to do that.

First step - add a sphere. Enter edit mode, and make it big. really big. (about as big as the sky) Select all faces, and click "flip normals". This will make it so you  see the faces from the inside of the sphere, not the outside. Then, add a material. name it something like, "sky dome," or, if your like me and usually don't bother renaming things, keep it as "Material," "Material.001," "Material.002," (Etc.)

Now we need a texture. It shouldn't be hard to find a skydome texture, the one I use often I got from textures.com (back when it was still cgtextures). You should be able to select the sphere, and UV unwrap it with the default sphere projection. Depending on what texture you find, you may want to delete the bottom half of the sphere before  trying to unwrap it)

Most people will tell you to set the material to "Shadeless." However, you get more control over the brightness by moving the "emission" value up and down. 0 is normal material. 1 is pretty close to what shadeless would look like, and 2 is much brighter. Plus, when using the Emission setting, lamps will effect the sky, (which you may, or may not want, actually, depending on your specific case)

The same method would apply to a cube, only you'd need a different texture, and you'd be using a cube instead of a sphere.


Copy animation from rig to rig i have a character rig animated. I tried to "copy and paste" in curve editor the animation from rig to another one but seems not to be the way.

How can i transfer animation from a rig to another?

Thanks.

If (and only if) both rigs have the same structure, with same bones naming, so you can:

Select the first animated rig.
In the dope sheet window, choose Action Editor context, in drop-down menu at the bottom:

Just to the right, there is an Action browser that allows you to choose the current animation of the selected object. Here you can name your action properly, to find it easily later.

Select the second rig, then in click on the left button of this Action browser to display all existing actions, and select in the list the one you named before.

And that's it! Your second rig should have exactly the same animation as the first one.

Be aware that if you change something in the first rig's animation, it will also change the second's one, since they share the same action. To avoid this, you can click on the "2" button (or any number that shows the number of users you have for the action) to make a single-user copy of the action and have two independent actions:


Cutting mesh textures I have a problem with the textures or actually with a very weird problem.
I have a big terrain which has over 100 000 vertices. And I have textured the whole terrain to the same texture file.(UV unwrapping)
Now I cutted my terrain to 64 pieces with the slicer tool(external). For performance issues I want to also cut the texture file. So I want to make texture file for every piece also.

So, I have 64 small part of the big terrain and one big texture atlas, where is all textures of the all parts.

Is there any tool, addon or software which could read the texture coordinates of parts and pick it's textures from texture atlas and make new texture file where is only the textures of the that part?
Or is there easy way to do it manually? Or does blender have tehcnique for my problem?

Thanks for answers

I don't know any way of doing this automatically, but you can do it manually.  I believe what you want to do is export your UV layout.  You can do this in the UV editor under UVs > Export UV layout.

It will export a .png file with transparency which you can then use as an overlay in a program like Photoshop or Gimp to manually cut up your existing UV atlas.


How to save NLA action but don't use it? I'm animating something that I made using armatures. I made a very basic walk cycle, and turned it into an NLA action. However, in the current scene of the animation I'm making, I don't actually need it to walk. However, when i remove the action from the nla editor, it seems to be gone forever, and I can't find a way to get it back (apart from simply undoing the removal).

Is there any way that I can create an NLA action and save it for use later without using it? This must be a noob question...

There is a Muted checkbox in action strip properties. While in NLA editor hit N and open Active strip scroll (see wiki for more info).

This exactly strip will no longer play while in animation.

Note that when Muted is turned on, it pauses on the current action of animation. So you might want to start animation again to make character return to his beginning position.

As another way it's possible to turn on Animated option in Evaluation scroll and set its value to 0.

The advantage is that the current position of character will be automatically set to beginning position when Alt+A pressed.


Using Normal Transformation on a group of objects in Object mode in Blender 2.92 In V 2.83 I got used to selecting a group of objects (last selected=active) and then choosing Normal transformation in Object mode to be able to move the group along any axis of the Active object.
It was like a limited Local transformation for a selection group.
In V 2.92 it seems that I can no longer do that.
Is that the way of it? Is there a workaround?
Thanks!

After you selected the objects just press G and then twice the axis you wanna move.
E.g. G -> Z -> Z to move on local z-axis


How to make an action that contains keyframes from 2 or more different objects? I think the title sums it up, I want to be able to have a special parent object that has one animation that stores the every objects part of that animation. for example, I have a sphere and 2 cubes one on each side of the sphere. I want the cubes to move in 2 different directions, and have the sphere to hold on to an animation that has the keyframes for both the cubes in the same action. However, there is a problem. I select all the objects and I > Location, and the last selected object overwrites the keyframes of the others. How can I fix this?

EDIT

I'm going to keep what's here but sort of reclarify what I'm saying in this paragraph.

So I want to store multiple objects locations or any other value in the same action together, so that I can have multiple objects work together for an animation but not have separate actions for every single part, especially if the actions are supposed to play together at the same time. I hope I have clarified somewhat better this time. Thanks.

You could select two or more different actions in the NLA editor to create a meta strip of actions by pressing Shift + G. All the actions of a meta strip will move together inside the editor, which is what I think you wanted.

You can read more about the NLA editor at http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Rking/Doc:2.6/Manual/Animation/Editors/NLA