How does Blender Internal work? I know that Blender Internal is a scanline renderer, but how exactly does it work? When compared to Cycles, it's much less accurate, but much faster; Also, it doesn't have the concept of sampling, so, it finishes, as opposed to Cycles, which could theoretically keep going for ever.

How does Blinder Internal work?

The difference between BI and Cycles is the difference between a biased and unbiased renderer.

BIASED RENDERING

A biased renderer uses shorcuts to achieve the final image  (fewer samples on every pixel, averaged out by the engine, and certain effects are pre-calculated in dedicated passes). It does not simulate how light behaves (at least not fully). Blender Internal does not have indirect capability, so that helps in speed too.

The advantages of a biased renderer is speed.

UNBIASED RENDERING

Unbiased rendering similates how light behaves. While Cycles can be tweaked to defy physics (certain brightness/contrast node combinations that exceed the brightness of what its reflection should be), it simulates the photons (though in reverse direction, tracing the rays from the camera to the source). Too few photons (samples) will produce a grainy image, as under-exposing a camera sensor or film would. There is a lot more math involved, and as a result, is slower than biased ray tracing and even slower than rasterization.

The advantage of an unbiased renderer is physical accuracy.


How can the active bone group be set from a script? According to the docs

  bpy.ops.pose.group_select()
   Select bones in active Bone Group

How can the active bone group be set?

Context:

import bpy
is_debug = True

def debug(msg):
    if is_debug:
        print( "Frame:%d %s" % (bpy.context.scene.frame_current, msg ))

def find_bone_names_by_group(passedPose, passedGroupName):
    result = []
    for b in passedPose.bones:
        if hasattr( b.bone_group, "name"):
            if b.bone_group.name == passedGroupName:
                result.append(b.bone.name)
    return result

def dump(obj,name="obj"):
   for attr in dir(obj):
       if hasattr( obj, attr ):
           print( "%s.%s = %s" % (name,attr, getattr(obj, attr)))

def assign_pose(rig, bone_group_name, pose_name):

    pl = rig.pose_library
    pm=pl.pose_markers[ pose_name ]
    #dump(pm)
    debug("pose_marker=" +str(pm))
    p = rig.pose

    bones_to_modify = find_bone_names_by_group(p, bone_group_name)
    if len(bones_to_modify ) < 1:
        print("No bones found in group [" + bone_group_name + "].")
        return

    action =  bpy.data.actions[pl.name]
    debug("assign_pose " + pose_name)
    for agrp in action.groups:
        if agrp.name in bones_to_modify:
            i = p.bones.find(agrp.name)
            if i != -1:
                pb = p.bones[i]
                debug("Found bone:" + pb.name )
                # check if group has any keyframes.
                for fc in agrp.channels:
                    tmpValue = fc.evaluate(bpy.context.scene.frame_current)
                    # Determine where to assign this value based upon the data_path.
                    if fc.data_path.find("location") != -1:
                        pb.location[fc.array_index] = tmpValue
                    if fc.data_path.find("rotation_quaternion") != -1:
                        pb.rotation_quaternion[fc.array_index] = tmpValue
                bpy.ops.anim.keyframe_insert(type='BUILTIN_KSI_LocRot',confirm_success=is_debug)
                #bpy.ops.anim.keyframe_insert(type='DEFAULT', confirm_success=True)
            else:
                print("Pose bone [" + agrp.name + "] not found.")

txt = bpy.data.texts["pose.txt"].as_string()
for line in txt.splitlines():
    if line.find(" ") != -1 and line.find("#") == -1:
        sframe,rig_and_poses= line.split(" ")
        rest=rig_and_poses.split(":")
        print("-"*40)
        rig_name=rest[0]
        poses=rest[1]
        pose_list=poses.split(",")
        bpy.context.scene.frame_set( int( sframe ))
        for assignment in pose_list:
            bone_group_name,pose_name=assignment.split("=")
            rig = bpy.data.objects.get(rig_name)
            if rig == None:
                print("rig name=" + rig_name + " not found.")
                break
            debug("assign rig:%s bone_group:%s, pose:%s" % (rig, bone_group_name, pose_name))
            assign_pose(rig, bone_group_name, pose_name)

Example:

import bpy

obj = bpy.data.objects['Armature']
bone_groups = obj.pose.bone_groups

bone_groups.active = bone_groups[string_key]
#or
bone_groups.active_index = new_index


Open a panel below two other panels In the following screenshot, I want the panel which the yellow creature is showed in, to be completely below the other two panels (i.e dope sheet and 3d viewport). It's currently below the 3d view. How can I stretch it to be below of both other panels?

Grab the three hash marks at the bottom, left-hand corner of the Dope Sheet and drag up to split it. Make sure that the seam between the two Dope Sheets is at the same height as the seam between the two 3D Viewports. Adjust the 3D Viewport's seam to equalize. If the seams are at the same height, you should be able to grab the three hash marks in the top, right-hand corner of the bottom 3D Viewport, drag them to the right, and release to collapse the bottom Dope Sheet.


Regroup channels in Object Transforms of Graph Editor As shown in the screenshot attached below, the Z location and Y rotation channels alone are present outside the 'Object Transforms' group. However, I would like the two to also be inside that group. I want it so because I find that when I set keyframes for the camera, the values for Z location and Y rotation dont change as I desire.
I would also appreciate if someone can explain what these channels control and what these groups mean, for I have not been able to comprehend much from the blender documentation.

In the dopesheet and graph editor, you can select some or all channels and use the menu Channel with the "group channels" (Ctrl G) and "Ungroup channels" (Ctrl Alt G) functions.
This grouping/ungrouping is useful only for organization purposes, when you have lots of curves and you want to organize them, it has no impact on their behaviour.


Can't choose Plane Track in Plane Track Deform node while compositing I created 4 markers and used them to 'Create Plane Track'. This worked fine.

Then, in the compositor, I added a 'Plane Track Deform' node, selected an image for it, and chose 'Camera'. Clicking on the plane track dropdown, I don't see my plane track. The dropdown is empty.

What am I missing? I looked at tutorials, they all just pick the plane track from the dropdown, and mine is empty. Could it be that the plane track is not associated with the camera?

For the record, here's the plane track (in the motion tracking layout):

Then, the plane track doesn't show in the compositor:

Any idea what I'm missing? Thanks.

You need to create a plane track, just select the solve tab, then plane drop down and lastly create plane track. you should now be able to select the plane track compositing.


How can I make a mesh have holes during segment creation So I have a quite complex mesh, I usually use SketchUp to create my meshes, however, I have a project where the only software I can use Blender, and any of the Adobe Suite (2014 CC)

I am trying to make a mesh of this image:

I made it transparent and converted it to a DXF, which I could import into Blender by activating an input type in the Add-ons.

After converting my 'curve' to a 'mesh', I worked on creating a 2d segment with holes where they belong (inside the shape and letters).

However, after multiple different methods of digging inside of Blender's User Input options, and even switching over to Maya controls. I always end up with creating a segment that makes a face INSIDE the unwanted areas:

Can someone please tell me of a way to create the faces without including the unwanted areas, it is depressing since someone has already done this before and was outsourced: Outsourced 'SEA' Recruiting video, with a 3D model of the logo
I know I have the solution in sight and I imagine that I am not far off from actually making it happen, I know what do AFTER this and I have been stuck at this part for the last 2 days.

If i understood the question here is the answer

Import the autocad file

Convert to Mesh

Press W key to Remove doubles

Press delete and select limited dissolve

Press Alt+F to fill the faces

Once again press delete and select limited dissolve

Select the Faces and extrude and Press Ctrl+N to flip Normal


How to unset multiple values from Bezier objects? I'm creating poly hair using Bezier Curves. I set the bevel Object to create a solid object but right now I want to unset that value from multiple objects curves. Why? because some curves really looks strange so I have to fix this manually

I mean how to set and unset this from multiple bezier object curves, it's really a lot of work clicking multiple times for do this repeating work.

I also check this.
Add the Same Modifier to Multiple Objects at Once?
It doesn't work on Curves.

There is.
Set it for the active object, then right-click the property and select the option Copy to Selected


How do I select strips in the Video Sequence Editor? I'm having a lot of trouble trying to gather pieces of stripes to move. I don't want the all the strips to be selected but only a few. How can I select a few strips without having to select all? Others say to press A to select all but I don't want to select them all!

you can use some of the same selection tools that are used throughout blender.

Pressing A will select all.

WithByou can do box select and draw a rectangle around the things you want to select.

You can just click-select individual strips or press shift and click to add to the current selection.

Clicking CtrlI will inverse the selection.

CtrlNumpad + and CtrlNumpad - will select more or less.

Also if you look at the menu there are a lot more options:


Can Blender 2.79 Fluid Physics act on Rigid Body objects? I'm trying to have a flow of water rotate a solid-body propeller in Blender 2.79.
But before I went any deeper, I got curious about a comment by a Blender Artist saying this:

  The fluid simulation does not interact with other objects but other objects can interact with the fluid sim. Set an object to be an obstacle in the fluid settings and you'll have to keyframe animate it's movement. It's movement will then interact with the fluid.

This was back in 2013. Is this statement still true today. If fluids can't help, can I use Particle Physics, or do I need to extend the current Physics Engine by code?

Thanks in advance.

Yes!!!
After 2 days of work, I can finally say: It is Possible!
See the picture below.

You can watch the full animation Here on Youtube 11s Video
By the way, no it is not a keyframed animation of the turbine that you are seeing. It is pure physics.

The author wrote under the linked youtube video:

In Blender, Rigid Bodies effects on Fluids are very to implement. However, for long, the reverse interaction was dubbed impossible. No more! Using Blender Particles to emit particles, then converting them to rigid bodies and finally applying Cube Suffer on the resulting animation.
In this video, I'm using a modified version of Cube Surfer to make able to utilize simple meshes (not particles as in the original version).
If there's enough likes, I might post a detailed tutorial.


How to get rid of unneeded vertices? I have some objects that were made by joining two objects together. This results in a plane that cuts through the object (see below):

I already removed the doubles, but is there some way I can remove the plane itself, so the four vertices there go away?

First, delete the inner face by selecting it and pressing Delete > F. Next select the edge loop and press Ctrl+E to bring up the Edges menu, and then press G to select Edge Slide. Now slide the edge to the top or the bottom:

Now select all with A and remove doubles with W to bring up the Specials menu and then R to select Remove Doubles. You should now be back to your standard cube mesh shape:


How to add a new audio track to a video clip I'm using Blender in the video editing mode and I'm trying to add a different audio track to a video clip than the one it originally comes with. The audio works on its own. The video works with its original audio. But when I add the new audio and delete the original, the new audio won't play even though the video clip is playing just fine. I do have the AV codec set to MP3 though the volume button below that is grayed out. I can change the volume from one, but it jumps right back as soon as I click out. I can, however, change the audio volume in its own properties box but it has no effect. AV-sync is on. File output is set to Xvid. The video is in channel one and the audio is in channel two. The audio is currently longer than the video clip. I intend to add more until the clips match the length of the audio, but this shouldn't affect being able to hear the audio, right? I need to be able to hear as I edit because matching the clips to the audio is the whole point. I'm not sure what else to add. Please use small words; I'm very new at this.

Okay, so I'm posting this answer to my own question in case someone else has the same problem as I did. If you feel this isn't helpful, please feel free to vote to delete it.

The issue was that I tried adding the video clip to the audio instead of the other way around. Once I reloaded the file and put in the video clip first and then deleted the original audio and added the new audio it worked just fine.


Cannot transform, scale or move (aka edit) vertices, faces or edges - X,Y,Z locked I'm using 2.8. Yesterday I had no issues editing my mesh. Now, after I select vertices (faces or edges) I cannot scale or move it for editing- it feels locked. I turned proportional editing on and off. I also tried using cursor, move, transform, etc. Maybe I accidentally pressed something. Any ideas?

It worked after I removed a shape key and turned on shape key edit mode.

I'm not sure why I wasn't able to edit the other shape key. Any input is welcome. See pic.


Render subsection of frame I'm hoping to be able to render frames of an animation where I render slices that are set to different points in the animation. This effect could easily be achieved in after effects but the render time in Blender would be drastically more so ideally I'd like to cut it down. (Have lots of slices and cameras to merge into single images)

Is there a way to have the animation at frame 1 render the top 50% (or any number of pixels) then move the animate to frame 50 and complete the bottom 50% of image. This would become frame 1 of the rendered footage.

Same then start the next frame this time with frame 2 in the top 50% and frame 51 in the bottom 50%. And so on until we have the completed animation with bottom half offset by 50 frames.

Any advice would be appreciated so much.

Blender will only render the scene as it exists in one specific frame, meaning you can't change frames half way through a render. While you can use the compositor to crop half of the image out, the entire image will be rendered before the crop happens so no time will be saved.

The only way I can think to reduce the render time is to cut the horizontal resolution in half. That would also mean moving the camera to compensate for the altered resolution, two cameras could be parented to stay in the same relative position so that both renders match up. Camera one can then be used to render frames 1-50 and camera two for 51-100. The two "half" images can then be composited together to get the final result.


Array with degree of curvature I'm trying to use an array to do this where I can make adjustments to the curvature by changing the angle between the cubes. Is there any way of doing this with the array modifier to control that angle? I have tried several of the Array tutorials without any real success, thanks for any suggestions.

You could use object offset in the array modifier and then rotate the offsetting object (and then hide it if you don't want it visible in the scene)


Prediction of linear RGB color in Vertex Paint I'm using VertexPaint to generate masks for specific vertex groups on meshes together with AOV and rendering to EXR.
It's very important for me to be able to control the exact color values that's rendered.
I understand that the input values that's set using Vertex Paint are set using SRGB then transformed to linear space.
But it seems to me the transformation isn't perfect and the colors I get are actually not the exact colors I'm setting.
Can any one point me to the correct solution for this?
I understand that the transformation user by blender is lossy, but is there a way to be able to predict what exactly will the values be transferred to?
I have tried few suggestions: playing with color management, setting display device to srgb or none:

This is the Compositor setup:

The result always the same for all setups, input = (0.2, 0.3, 0.4) - sRGB
Output:

The color is wrong - Blueish color on the side of the cube.

Change render properties -> view transform -> to "Standard"


Opaque plastic in Blender I have been trying to produce a polytunnel in Blender, without success. Can anyone please let me know how to make a tunnel covered in opaque plastic.

Welcome to Blender Stack exchange. As wikipedia says

  A polytunnel (also known as a polyhouse, hoop greenhouse or hoophouse, grow tunnel or high tunnel) is a tunnel typically made from steel and covered in polythene, usually semi-circular, square or elongated in shape.

I tried making a low-poly tunnel with least efforts quickly, it looks like this :

The way I achieved this is by

Modelling the polytunnel in the way I wanted.
Adding a transparent shader/glass shader as the material to make that plastic covering.

Here's the node setup for the material:

You can also use the glass shader, here's the usage: I can't make my material transparent in Blender 2.80


Is there any way set the render border to be a different shape? I want to render multiple 10000 pixel large image in blender, but the render border only has a rectangular shape (at least from my current knowledge), and it certainly causes unnecessary time because it will render the corner of rectangle render shape. Is there any way to customize thae render border shape?

It would be better if you provide Python solution!Thanks!

The output image will always be rectangular.
But you can mask some parts out using the holdout shader.

Add a mask in front of your camera - it can be a simple plane with a hole
Give it the Holdout shader
In Render Tab check Film > Transparent

Your masked area (and background) will become fully transparent, and will render waaay faster.


Bake a giant UV with multiples materials and textures tiled? I'm working on this project:

I needed to bake the house structure, so I joined all objects, created smart uv project and started the bake.
It succeded, but the texture result wasn't correct:

The UV shrink
So seeing the UV (yes, it's a mess because of the object join) I think the problem is because of the scale:

If I create a bigger image texture, then the UV and UV canvas scales with it, so that's not really working
I'm pretty lost, I already tried packing islands (it still requires to scale UV outside limits so the tilling textures are displayied correctly and the bake keeps failing)
What could I do? Should I do a smallest bake? I tried searching how to increase the size of the UV canvas but I don't know if that would be correct or even possible
Thanks for your time

You cannot bake anything with overlapping UVs and outside of UV coordinates in the square (0,0),(1,1). You could create a separate UV map if you need to have different UV maps for other textures:

It's fine to scale other UV maps than the one used for baking, but you could also use a vector mapping node.
You would need to connect the right UV maps to the image node you are baking to and to other textures as well:

All UVs intended for baking need to be inside the square and not overlapping like this:

This defines where the information from the bake is going to be saved in the baked image so if you have overlapping UVs you have places on the image where Blender would need to save information from multiple places of the 3d object so that cannot work.


Repeating image texture not repeated I am trying to use an image texture for this mesh, but the texture is not repeating on whole mesh.

How can I have the texture repeat (section 3) through section 2 (white for some reason)?

I made sure there is no duplicate mesh with white material and normals are correct.

First modifier: solidify, second modifier: subdivision surface. Swapping order gives same render image.

I am trying to make a smaller example with just the mesh but I am getting a different problem. I just copied the mesh from my scene to another file and it looks like only inside of mesh is colored.

blue.png

What could be causing this problem?

Still not sure what you want to achieve, but you can use transmission value for glass like effect, or if you don't like the effect then use alpha value (not recommended).

Here is the final setup:

Please be noticed that transmission will directly bound to color of Principle BSDF color, so if the color is too dense (like RGB: (0,255,0)), it will make the light difficult to penetrate the material, hence need a stronger light source. Or just lower the value to reduce the color dense.


Motion blur not applying to rigged propeller For one of my projects I have a propeller rigged with an armature.  I have animated it to spin for the express purpose of getting motion blur on it (I am just rendering a still image).  However when I turn on motion blur in the render settings (shutter = 1.00) the propeller is not blurred.

Here is a simplified example scene and render.  Note the example box and cross are blurred properly but the propeller is crisp.

Thinking is was because the propeller is animated from an armature I tested a different armature-animated object but it blurs fine.

Why is the propeller not being blurred?

I can't be quite certain WHY, but Cycles isn't properly understanding the mesh distortion that your armature is doing. When I separated the moving parts of the rotor from the mast into two separate objects, and then animated the rotor object instead of the armature, the rotors blurred properly:

I suspect the armature isn't what's causing the problem, rather that it's the mesh distortion. Here's why: I also tried animating a shape-key instead of using the armature (with the whole mesh as one object), and Cycles did the same thing you're seeing. So, it must have something to do with Cycles not properly blurring meshes when they are deformed, instead of TRANSformed (LocRotScale). Even turning on "Deformation" in the motion blur settings for the mesh didn't change anything.

I suspect that you can still use the armature, so long as the moving components are a separate object from the non-moving components (or from components that move differently). I'd wager that your test rotor was also a separate object from the two cubes below it, and that's why it blurred properly.

This MIGHT be a bug. I'd recommend looking in the forums to see if it's been discovered. In the mean-time, it's somewhat more conventional to separate a mesh by moving parts, anyway ;-)

I hope that helps!


How to remove interior faces while keeping exterior faces untouched? I built something Minecraft style model by cubes. Now I met a problem: when I'm trying to remove all interior faces, it appears that some exterior faces are influenced inevitably. I wonder if there is some better way to do it better.

P.S.: There are three things I've tried:

Non-manifold checking (Ctrl Shift Alt M)
Select Interior Faces (Select -> Interior Faces)
3D Print Toolbox (Addon)

I didn't work it out so far, which leaves me no choice but manually deselect those faces I didn't want to remove, which takes quite a bit time for other cases.

There are answers like this Merge touching faces on model. But I don't think it works exactly in my case.

EDIT: Is there any faster way than enabling Limited Selection to Visible then manually deselect them from different views? (it will not work effectively in complex cases that require similar need)

Update, this is working in Blender 2.81 (see: T68401)

Use the following steps:

Enter Editmode
Set the Selection type to Faces
Select all
Vertices -> Merge -> By Distance
Deselect all
Select -> Select All by Trait -> Interior Faces
Delete

You say Select -> Select All by Trait -> Interior Faces didn't work; I expect it's because you didn't remove doubles first.

Tip

After this, try Limited Dissolve, it gets rid of redundant geometry which can be useful in examples like this (if you don't have UV's or per-face materials set differently on each face).


Material Reflection: Creating an Optical Filter in Cycles I am very new to Blender and am using it to create images for a new kind of solar energy device.  However, one of the pieces of this device is an optical filter: i.e. it is a square plane that reflects ONLY the red light.  Thus, blue light can pass through.

My question to the wonderful people on Blender Stack Exchange: is there any way of creating a material that reflects only a small portion of the visible light?  I realize that this is a very niche topic, but any ideas or advice you may have will be much appreciated!

Thanks so much in advance.

Would something like this work?  The Glossy reflects only red and the Transparent Shader allows all the Green/Blue to pass.


Imac Radeon Pro 580x. No compatible GPU found I just bought a new iMac with Radeon Pro 580X GPU which supports OpenCL but neither Blender 2.8 nor 2.79 can, for some reason, utilise it with Cycles render engine. The program just says that "No compatible GPU found". I have read that others have managed to use Cycles with GPUs with their Macs so I have no clue what's wrong here.

Can anyone try to help me out here?

I was facing the same problem in Linux. When you install your GPU drivers try to put the following additional options: --opencl=pal,legacy,rocm.

I found this answer here and it worked for me after two weeks with this problem.


Why can't I unhide objects in 2.8 that were hidden in 2.79 blend files? Whenever I open a blend file that's from 2.79 in 2.8, all of the hidden objects from the blend file are grayed out but I can't unhide them. But other times layers from 2.79 that become collections are having the same problem of being grayed out even though they're not hidden in 2.79. Is this just a bug? I cant find an answer for it anywhere online. They do appear in the render, just not in the viewport window

When hiding an object in Blender 2.79 this is indicated by the eye icon in the outliner.

In Blender 2.8x the eye icon has a different meaning. It indicates that the object is hidden in the current view layer (Hide in Viewport), whereas the option in 2.79 had a global effect. Hence, when loading an old file from 2.79, it is treated as Disable in Viewport (Monitor icon) instead. The difference between the two is explained in this answer.

  The Hide in Viewport option is just applied for the current view layer, whereas Disable in Viewports is global and applies to all view layers and viewports.

In order to change the visibility for the hidden object you need to enable the setting to show the Restriction Toggles.

Afterwards you can change the visibility in the outliner and the object will appear in the viewport(s) again. The effect of the restriction toggles is documented in Blender's manual.

The same options exist for the collections as well. Additionally a collection can be excluded from the view layer by unticking the checkbox in front of its name.

More information about this topic is available on the following pages:

View Layers and Collections - An introduction to the concept in Blender 2.8x
Blender 2.8: View Layers and Collections - Release notes for Blender 2.80


Renders with colors on either side of screen When rendering video, there is a bright, flickering, vertical line 1 pixel wide (well maybe wider) on the left and right side of the screen.
https://youtu.be/HwnINVi3aH4 (I suggest watching it half speed)
It happens whenever something bright is on the opposite side of the screen, as though the bright parts on the left of the screen are shown on the right and vice versa.

Here's a frame given a black background to be more visible. See how the white shape top-left is visible top-right for a small part of the screen? And the larger white shape bottom-right is visible bottom-left.
This has happened multiple times, using MPEG4 Lossless and Image Sequence rendering. What's the fix? I'm using Eevee.

The issue was fixed by enabling 'Overscan' under the Scene Properties > Film tab. Keeping it on the default of 3% appears to be fine.

I have re-rendered multiple problematic scenes with overscan enabled, and they have all rendered correctly.


Make a dashed line where objects overlap I would like to configure Blender to somehow render objects with one freestyle line set where the camera has a clear line of sight to them, but then render another freestyle line set for the objects that are blocked from view. For example...

Even better would be to recolor the overlapping area...

This question looked interesting, but not exactly what I'm trying to do:Additive color overlay

What is the best way to go about trying to do something like this? I've tried messing around with the QI Range and things like that in the LineSet visibility options, but I'm kind of coming up empty. The actual objects I'm trying to do this with are more complex and have several parts each which I do not want revealed in the render process.If I had to I might be able to somehow manually combine them and delete the spare parts, but that seems tedious and I'd love to avoid it if I can.

Thanks @Duarte! The dashed line portion of my question can be solved using these steps:

Create a second Freestyle Line Set (and name it something like HiddenLines)
Click on the Hidden toggle
Scroll down to Freestyle Line Style and tick the checkbox for Dashed Line
Modify the line settings to your liking


Properties window missing? I opened a blend file and the far right properties panel is completely gone.  The only way I an access it is to change either the top or bottom info bar to the properties but I want it to the generic way, where I have all three panels on my screen. There's no other option to add a side panel that I can find and I'm getting extremely frustrated because when I open a new file, all my windows are there, but this one file just won't open with the freaking side panel!

You are in the 3D view, and only the 3D view. You need to open the properties editor along side of the 3D view.

Move your mouse to the top right corner. The three little hashes in the corner are a button to split and join windows (editors).  What you need to do is click then drag that button to the left.
Now in that new window change it to the properties editor.

Now the reason you got into this situation is because you opened a file that was saved with this view.
To remedy this (instead of changing the view like I described above) you can simply open the file and leave the "Load UI" option unchecked. That will open the file but use the layout from your startup file.


Geometry Nodes: "Attribute Randomize" - What are the Attribute Variables? I am attempting to use geometry nodes to scatter stuff and I have a handle on the basics of the Point Distribute - Point Scale - Point Instance chain that allows for basic scattering.
However, I am attempting to Add an Attribute Randomize to ensure that my scattered objects aren't all pointing in the same direction. However, while every tutorial I have watched puts "scale" in that Attribute field, I would love to know what else can be placed there.
I know that this is in-process, but I'm sure there has to be a running log of variables. I've tried every permutation I can of 'Z-Rotation' but nothing yet.

Thanks for your attention.
Update: Though it was enough, but no... not yet. I was misreading the screen. When I zoomed in, it wasn't correctly rotated.

Change from Float to Vector, then you can just type in rotation as the attribute, from there you can control the XYZ rotations.


How to get correct context in animation nodes script I am trying to apply Set Inverse on all the ChildOf Constraints on the armature, using animation nodes Script Node in blender 2.82.
But when triggering the script I get only this error:

How can I fix that issue?

import bpy

if inverse:
    oby = bpy.data.objects['metarig2']
    bpy.context.view_layer.objects.active = oby
    pbones = bpy.data.objects['metarig2'].pose.bones

    for pbone in pbones:

        isConstraint = False
        if len(pbone.constraints)>0:
            for const in pbone.constraints:

                if const.type == "CHILD_OF":
                    context_copy = bpy.context.copy()
                    context_copy["constraint"] = pbone.constraints["Child Of"]
                    #bpy.data.objects['metarig2'].data.bones.active = pbone.bone
                    bname = pbone.bone.name

                    bpy.data.objects['metarig2'].data.bones.active = bpy.data.objects['metarig2'].data.bones[bname]
                    bpy.ops.constraint.childof_set_inverse(context_copy, constraint="Child Of", owner='BONE')

    bpy.data.objects['metarig2'].select = False
    activ = bpy.data.objects['metarig']
    bpy.context.scene.objects.active = activ

Then you launch script from AN, bpy.context doesn't include active_object anymore. So, I suggest creating context object from scratch, just 2 elements are necessary:

context_py = {
    "constraint" : const,
    "active_object" : rig
    }

This code works for me (but constantly resetting Inverse makes weird result):

import bpy

if Inverse:
    rig = bpy.data.objects['metarig2']
    pbones = rig.pose.bones

    for pbone in pbones:
          for const in pbone.constraints:

                if const.type == "CHILD_OF":
                    context_py = {
                        "constraint" : const,
                        "active_object" : rig
                        }

                    bpy.data.objects['metarig2'].data.bones.active = pbone.bone

                    bpy.ops.constraint.childof_set_inverse(context_py, constraint="Child Of", owner='BONE')


Diffuse texture baking wrong Made this procedural chameleon texture but when I try to bake the colors it's completely wrong? Any idea what this could be caused by?

When I bake this from the provided blend file, it works.  As such this doesn't directly answer the question, but it's too large for a comment and might be helpful so I will post it anyway - if a proper "here's what you did wrong and here's how to fix it" answer shows up and this no longer seems useful please feel free to delete it.
Here are the steps I took from loading the blend file to having a baked output png saved and the chameleon displaying properly in cycles mode using the texture rather than the nodes:

In the node view of the 'Procedural' material, add a texture setup to receive the bake.  This texture is blank, and in this case is a 1024x1024 black png file which I saved to disk so it existed (blender is sometimes a bit weird about having its files exist before writing to them, also, cycles seems to render from-file rather than from-memory).  It's fine that this isn't connected to anything at this stage

Select the texture node.  Just click on it so the BakedOutput node has a white outline.  This step is important because otherwise it might put the bake somewhere else - probably on top of the chameleon skin texture or something equally unhelpful.

Change the render engine to Cycles.

Set up for diffuse color baking with no lighting information.  I used these settings:

Press Bake, and wait for it to complete

Save the resulting BakedOutput.png or whatever else you have called it.  First because it's good practice and it's easy to lose the bake if you don't, but also, perhaps more importantly, because as mentioned Cycles likes to render with the black blank texture if that's what's on disk.

Attach the texture node to the Color input in the Procedural material to check it works - you may wish to use the texture elsewhere instead, and preserve the Procedural material and just switch to the new one, but I didn't do that, I just swapped the Color input to be faster and more sure it would work.  Screenshot shows disconnected procedural result and connected texture node:

As to what you did that caused your issue I am unsure.  I cannot seem to reproduce it - even baking with lighting information included just produces a badly lit output, rather than the mis-arranged image with the wrong parts mapped shown in the question.  I attempted baking with incorrect texture coordinates but that didn't seem to do it either.  There's only one UVMap provided so I couldn't bake using the wrong one of those... I'm not sure if I can answer the question, so feel free to ignore this answer if it isn't helpful.  Perhaps try recording your own steps and then following mine and see if we get the same result.
I -did- notice that the bake is different (and worse looking, much further away from original procedural output) baked from Edit mode instead of Object mode.  I suspect this might have something to do with it, but it still doesn't match your original image.  Perhaps the pose or armature is involved.


Broken shadow render blender I render my sim ripper from the sims 4, then I put it into the blender, I use a sunlight, and when I see the results of the render, the shaadow is broken, ugly. it's been almost 1 year I don't know how to fix it, I hope you can help me, thank you

https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/b/kdeyXJqk/
this link, i upload file blend

This is a common problem with smooth-shaded, low-polygon-count models. It is caused by mismatching of the true shape of the polygonal model and the smoothed normals.
Here are three solutions:
1. Soften the lighting.
Increasing the size of the light will:
✔ Preserve the polygon count.
✔ Preserve the shader realism.
✖ Alter the look of the render.
2. Adjust the shadow termination.*
Adjusting the shadow termination offset will:
✔ Preserve the polygon count.
✖ Alter the shader realism.
✔ Preserve the look of the render.
3. Subdivide the geometry.
Subdividing the geometry will:
✖ Alter the polygon count.
✔ Preserve the shader realism.
✔ Preserve the look of the render.
* Blender 2.9+ Cycles only


blender kill particles not viewing in render I am making a harry potter video with friends and I'm adding magic between the 2 wands. I'm using 2 particle systems with gravity off pulled by a force field for the magic and killing them when they hit the center with an invisible circle with collision kill particles. it looks great in the viewport but when I render it doesn't kill the particles.
in the beginning, I thought it had to do with the 2 view layers I have so that a stone wall will be clear and the magic will be blurred and will have haze without volumetrics but my moving it around trying to solve the problem didn't seem to help.

viewport -

render-

there is a circle with kill particles

these are the collision settings

view layer 1 outliner (blur + haze)

view layer 2 outliner (stone wall)

I don't think it has anything to do with it but here is the compositing (maybe has to do with rendering or somthing) -

and lastly here is the bled file -
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1P8E1CuaPaVcRmHLIN59RoRzWov3QwpWW

To prevent internal or viewport cache errors, save your particle cache to the disk before rendering. Enable Disk Cache under Particle Properties > Cache and click Bake all Dynamics:

Cache panel

Frame 7200 - 7325 cached to disk and rendered with Eevee

For several reasons but mostly because of the colour range provided by some of the available image formats, I suggest render your animation to an image sequence (preferably .exr) and compile the images into a video container like .mov, .mp4 or whatever afterwards.


What causes these shadow artifacts? This pizza waffle donut sandwich doesn't look so good with these strange shadow artifacts. What can I do to remove them?

My guess - The bevel modifier will try to bevel every edge, depending on the bevel setting... if the "limit" setting is set to "none" then it will try to bevel all edges, even the ones running through an area that should be flat. This can create unwanted "wrinkles" or as it tries to create indentations wherever you have extra edge loops vertices.

For example, in the pic below, the right side of the cube has no edge loops so its bevel looks clean, but the left side's bevel has little dents from all those extra edge loops.

If you have extra cuts like this that aren't doing anything, you could remove some just to keep a cleaner mesh. But even so, there are always going to be extra cuts in your mesh, it's necessary to make modelling easier. So try playing around with limit options on your bevel modifier.

If you can't find a limit method that works only on the desired areas, you may have to apply a bevel manually by selecting the edges you want to bevel, and pressing ctrl+B. Be careful though, this is hard to undo if you decide later you don't like the bevels, and they make the mesh more complex, so it'll be more of a pain to work with. In fact, before applying bevels this way, you might want to make a complete copy of your mesh, and move it to a 'trash layer' as a backup, in case something goes wrong.


How to fix mesh into a more uniform and simple version? I'm finding many issues with making a mesh for a 3d model more uniform. With the current state it is in; it looks messy, is hard to sculpt smoothly creates divots when the triangles don't line up, and generally makes the model look unprofessional. I was wondering if there is some sort of setting or modifier in blender that can fix this, or would i have to do it by hand?

The first picture is my model's arm, the second is mileena's arm from MKX which is what i would like my mesh to resemble.

This is called retopologizing, it is something that's necessary for animatable objects or game assets, there are a lot of addons that help with retopologizing, these ease the process, not replace it.

There are some automatic solutions, a free one is Instant Meshes this will require further corrections.

I recommend doing it by hand, enable F2 and Bsurface addons, this can be quite time consuming so you should be happy with your mesh before doing your retopo, always create quads, game engines will always triangulate your model but originally it probably was 95% quads.


Can visibility states of collections be saved on a view layer? Is it possible to save visibility states of collections in a view layer in such a way that they would be restored when re-activating the view layer, even if the visibility states have been manually changed while the view layer is active? If you control visibilities using the "Exclude from View Layer" check box, that change of setting is stored in the view layer. When working on a complicated scene, one may need to use the Exclude selection a lot when editing objects, and then revert to a previously saved setting of visibilities.

You can use the "Local Collections" in blender 2.81. They can work per ui window and not per view layer.
Go to the "N" Panel>View>Collections, check "Local Collections", and toggle visibility with the eye icon.

You then uncheck "Local Collections" to get back to the previous state.

Alternatively you could duplicate the view layer in the initial state, and then go back to it once you are finished tweaking your scene in the other view layer. The duplicate icon is in the top right corner next to the "remove" icon.


Blender not rendering full image? Here's what the render looks like:

Here's my scene:

This is done in blender internal renderer.

Why is it only rendering that bit in a circle?

Blend file

Your mist settings are bad. To see it, select the camera and check "mist"

You can change this in world settings


How to code a working Pie Menu for Sequencer? How to code a working Pie Menu for the Sequencer? There has been coded pie menus for most elements in Blender, but not the Sequencer. I found this example, but it is not working for me. Nothing happens when pressing "S". Is the reason that it is not possible to do a pie menu for the sequencer?

import bpy
from bpy.types import Menu

# spawn a selection of tools for speeding up VSE workflow

#Select all strips to the left
class SelectAllToTheLeft(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "sequencer.allleft"
    bl_label = "All strips to the left"

    def execute(self, context) :
        bpy.ops.sequencer.select(left_right='LEFT', linked_time=True)
        return {'FINISHED'}

#Select all strips to the right
class SelectAllToTheRight(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "sequencer.allright"
    bl_label = "All strips to the right"

    def execute(self, context) :
        bpy.ops.sequencer.select(left_right='RIGHT', linked_time=True)
        return {'FINISHED'}

#Set current override camera as active camera in the viewport
class OverrideToActiveCamera(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "sequencer.overrideactivecamera"
    bl_label = "Overide Camera to active"

    def execute(self, context) :
        print("coucou")
        return {"FINISHED"}

class VSE_PIE_riton(Menu):
    bl_idname = "pie.vsetools"
    bl_label = "VSE Tool"

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

        pie = layout.menu_pie()

        pie.operator("sequencer.allleft", text = "All strips to the left", icon="BACK")
        pie.operator("sequencer.allright", text = "All strips to the right", icon="FORWARD")
        pie.operator("sequencer.reload", text = "Reload strips",icon="FILE_REFRESH")
        pie.operator("sequencer.overrideactivecamera", text = "Override to Active Camera", icon = "SCENE")

def register():
    #tools
    bpy.utils.register_class(SelectAllToTheLeft)
    bpy.utils.register_class(SelectAllToTheRight)
    bpy.utils.register_class(OverrideToActiveCamera)

    #pie
    bpy.utils.register_class(VSE_PIE_riton)

    wm = bpy.context.window_manager
    km = wm.keyconfigs.addon.keymaps.new(name="Sequencer")
    kmi = km.keymap_items.new("wm.call_menu_pie","S", "PRESS").properties.name="pie.vsetools"

def unregister():
    #tools
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(SelectAllToTheLeft)
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(SelectAllToTheRight)
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(OverrideToActiveCamera)

    #pie
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(VSE_PIE_riton)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

Too many shortcuts in keymap def.

Define the space for keymap
Use keyword arguments to make sure they are assigned correctly.

edit:

wm = bpy.context.window_manager
km = wm.keyconfigs.addon.keymaps.new(name="Sequencer",
         space_type='SEQUENCE_EDITOR')
kmi = km.keymap_items.new("wm.call_menu_pie",
        type="S",
        value="PRESS")
kmi.properties.name = "pie.vsetools"


How can I colour Parts in Blender? I have some problems with coloring in Blender. When I'm in solid mode and go to the material tool I go to diffuse and select my colour.  After that I go to the material Viewport Shading or rendered and it's just black.  can someone help me with this I really don't understand how this works and I need help.

Here's a Screenshot:
https://gyazo.com/4f0b7a9c61dc3b75446407374c8ec68b

You need light sources, or check in shadeless in the material tab, or increase the emission.


Blender panoramic render Is it possible to render 360° panoramic images in Blender, usable to make a 360° pano presentation?

Rendering panoramic images is possible with the Cycles render engine. Open the Render Properties and set the Render Engine to Cycles.

Switch to the Output Properties and set the render resolution for X and Y. Ensure that they have a 2:1 ratio.

Select the active Camera in your scene and open the Object Data Properties. Set the Type to Panoramic and choose Equirectangular for the Panorama Type.


Textures show up in 3D View but not in Cycles Render Here you can see two very different viewports, but they are the same scene. The bottom right is the un-rendered view on Material View. On the first picture you see the rendered view, but it does not show the texture applied to the cubes and to the lines... why?

.

.

These are the node elements for the textured material.

The main problem is not your node-setup but the use of the textured viewport mode. this mode is not very reliable for previewing as it only displays the last selected texture of our node setup and doesn't take texture coordinates and transforms into account. if you want a texture preview without using the rendered view, switch to material view instead.

Your node setup

Delete unused nodes
Don't use color ramps as an input for color ramps (take the node socket's color into account!): The color ramp's input only takes the value of a pixel but no actual color information and translates them to the color gradient. basically your first color ramp is almost useless.
The mix shader expects two shaders as an input (green socket), don't mix a color and a shader with it
same here, connect the mix shader directly into the material output and put the diffuse shader between the color ramp and the mix shader


How do you scale the diameter of a cylinder and torus? How do you scale the minor diameter of a torus and diameter of cylinder without changing other dimensions?

Than you want to scale radius of torus-like objects, the simplest way is using Alt+S Shrink-Fatten:


On linux, the mouse cursor is almost the exact same color as the gray background of the preview window On linux, the mouse cursor is almost the exact same color as the gray background of the preview window, and because of that I keep losing track of my mouse.
Pic:

(The mouse cursor is in the red circle - can you find it?)
How can I make the cursor white instead of dark gray?

On xfce:

Open "Mouse and Touchpad"
Go under "Theme"
Then select a bright cursor theme


Eevee volume scatter movement issue I have used a cube and applied a principled volume/volume scatter on it. When I render an animation in Eevee with a still camera it renders just fine. But when I apply keyframes to the camera with a simple location movement, the volume fog starts moving.
Here's the GIF Preview of the render

My project settings are as follows:
Render Engine Eevee -
Sampling Render 128 -
Viewport denoising on -
Ambient Occlusion off -
Bloom off -
Frame rate 25 -
Res 1920 x 890
Blender 2.92
Cube

Setup

Can anyone help what might be causing this?
Thank you

In Eevee, volumetrics are approximated by combining a number of 'slices' of the volume together. While being much more efficient than rendering the complete volume, the accuracy is very dependent on the number of 'slices' used and how those are spread through the view.
You are seeing artifacts resulting from those 'slices' being in a different position for each subsequent frame and while this wouldn't be noticeable in a still image, it becomes very apparant in the animation.
The solution to this is to increase the number of 'slices' present so that any gaps between them are smaller and therefore far less noticeable. There are a number of ways of achieving this :

Increase the number of Samples in your rendering (the 'Render' and 'Viewport' settings in the Sampling section of the render properties). More samples will result in more detail being rendered in your volume. More samples will slow down your rendering - but should also produce better results.
Increase the number of Samples in the 'Volumetrics' section of the render properties. Again, more samples will take longer to render but will improve the quality of the volumetrics.
Concentrate the volumetric samples in a smaller part of your scene by changing the Start and End settings in the Volumetrics section of the render properties. The 'Slices' of your volume are only calculated for a distance from Start to End from the point of view (the camera or the viewport). If you have 'Start' set very small and your volume is a fair distance from the camera then there is wasted space that will waste your samples on slices that do not have an volume of interest. Increase 'Start' to the distance where your volume starts. Similarly, if 'End' is way beyond where your volume finishes then it will waste 'slices' that will never contain volume. The default values are 0.1m and 100m respectively. If your volume starts at 20m from the camera and ends at 60m from the camera then changing Start and End to 20 and 60 will concentrate the volumetric samples over just that range.

By making the above changes the volume 'slices' will be more concentrated in your area of interest and you should have far less noticeable artifacts.


Python: BVH Find Index? I'm experimenting with the bvhtree python module and am confused about the index attribute that's returned by find(). Assumption is that it's the vertex index but could be mistaken.

https://www.blender.org/api/blender_python_api_current/mathutils.bvhtree.html?highlight=bvhtree#module-mathutils.bvhtree

Also note that the documentation shows find_nearest() but the method is find() at the time of this writing

In the console with mathvis addon enabled, here's an example to test:

bv = bvhtree.BVHTree.FromObject(C.object, C.scene)
hit = bv.find(C.scene.cursor_location)[0]
index = C.active_object.data.vertices[bv.find(C.scene.cursor_location)[2]].co

but the hit and index don't match up as expected (would expect the vertex to be a little off but not across the shape). This is with a mesh object, no scale, no modifiers.

Supporting info is appreciated! Ideally I'd be able to get the vertex closest to a point with low overhead and easy syntax :)

It's the polygon (face) index.

It works like object/closest point on mesh . Not like kdtree, that gives vertex (vectors, points) relation


color and rendering Blender 2.8 I have finished my scene but the colors for my objects are not changing. they are still the default color greyish. I finished creating the scene before making color changes, is there a certain order I should follow to change colors?

before you hit the render button, click the material property icon down the right corner, click on new material, you could check the render in view port while assigning materials to your mesh. i hope this helps


How to improve the accuracy for a rigid bodies How can I keep the objects from intersecting or passing through one another in rigid body simulations?

I have

checked the normals
applied all transforms for scale, position and rotation
set Origin > origin to geometry
increasing the Steps per second and Solver Iterations in the Rigid Body World settings (I tried with the maxima 1000 and 100)
set collision shape to Mesh and tried 0.4 or 0 as margins and source to final

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1R3VSiNKWK5TWL3tfe1ZYt2A8fLL8QoW1

Work smart, not ...

Okay, so you realized Blender bullet solver implementation is not as strong out of the box. Therefore we have to help it out a bit.

Reconstruct your geometry with simpler shapes. In your specific file, I could just create the crate out of 5 cubes (the walls and floor) which are then parented to the crate geometry.

Use simple rigid body shape wherever possible. I made the walls into Box colliders and the sphere into Sphere colliders.

Now, you realized, that the Steps per Second and Solver Iterations don't ensure a more stable simulation, if we just increase them. Here comes a workaround: We'll make our subframes into actual frames by slowing down the simulation and the speeding it up afterwards.

Scale the keyframes apart by 6. The box now moves 6 times as slow.
Adjust the speed of the rigid body simulation. I entered 1.0/6.

Adjust the playback speed. The fps will be 24*6 and the render steps can be 6. (Obviously the scene's end will have to be adjusted as well.)

Increase the Solver steps and Iterations as needed. I used [500, 500], as shown in the above image.

The resulting simulation is stable, although my computer can't playback a 144 fps.


Water Spray Simulation I am working on a project where water needs to be sprayed so to form 60 deg full cone from the spray nozzle in an animation. I have tried it with inflow and v cylinder but when water leaves out it does not exapand to 60 deg as required. Can you please give m advise how to achieve that? I have done hollow cone spray with addition of obstacle but need full cone spray.

Examining the subject at hand, it appears a better way would be to use particle drops instead of a fluid system.

The resulting cone can be easily controled.

The movement can be setup convincingly.

Create an emitter object. Since we'll use the normal as emission, the concavity of this object will determine the outcoming angle.Add a subdivision surface modifier so that the normal direction won't appear stepped.
Create a density weight group, in case you want more water to be emitted from the center.
Add a particle system. Since particle don't have substeps in Blender, we need to increase the frame rate. I used 240 fps.
Enter the vertex group as density for the emitter.
Decrease the gravity value, since we have a faster frame rate. To make the emitter use the subdivision modifier, check Use Modifiers. I use about 15000 particles in a short burst from frame 1-80.
During that burst, I want the particles to have more speed around frame 40 and less at the end. Hence, I animate the Emission value for the normal. I also added some random offset to fight the missing substeps.
Create a cube and smooth subdive it (or use *to sphere). Use it as the particle object. Add some children to each particle. There should be lots of drops.
In the compositing add vector blur. As a material I mixed Glossy and Refractions BSDF.

Sorry, the file is not in the finished state. Have fun.


How could I run a Rigid Body simulation backwards after it is baked? How could I take a Rigid Body simulation (it doesn't matter if it is already baked or not) and reverse it before rendering.
I do not mean reversing the clip after it is rendered (mentioned here).
I want accurate motion blur, because I am running another physics simulation at the same time that I want running "forward".

Option 1
For Rigid Body sim you can try  ... Bake simulation and with object selected search for Bake Action > enable Visual Keying ... it converts cache into keyframed animation.

Now if yo go to Graph editor and move timeline into a middle frame of your anim, you can Mirror curves Ctrl+M Over Current Frame ... results as reverted animation.

Option 2
Another option can be Export as Alembic (.abc) and Import back ... under Constraints Properties you can animate Override frame value backwards - at frame 1 set value of end frame and on last frame keyframe value of 1 ...

Mentioned here


Rigid body physics problem even a torus acts like it had no hole in it When i apply rigid body modifier after punching a hole in a cube for inserting a rotatable propeller so that it rotates only when something collides with it.

But when i run the simulation the propeller shaft pops out of the hole and the cube behaves like it had no hole in it, even after after selecting "mesh" for the shape of physics body.

By default the shape of rigid body collisions is set to 'Convex Hull', if you want the the collision shapes to include holes you need to set the collision shape to 'Mesh':

However like it is indicated in the comments, if you need objects constrained to each other you should use Rigid Body Constraints, otherwise you might not be able to get a smooth simulation without errors.


How to mix emission shaders to get gradient effect I'm trying to get the result like the globe which illuminates more than 2 colours. I have 2 examples, one with ColorRamp and one with 2 emission shaders, but the colour variations are not visible only one appears on the plane mesh. I cant figure out the Node configuration to get the result.

Maybe try something like this. Since you're already using a globe (sphere), you can get a good gradient by mixing the Emission colors using a Fresnel as a mix factor:

If you want a "glassy" globe, you can mix the result with a Glass Shader, using the same Fresnel as a mix factor for that too:


Lifetime and/or age Info not working? So, I was trying the particle system in Blender 2.8 for the first time and made a simple changing color depending on the age of the particle.

After many many tweaks, the color still doesn't change.

I would like to know if the Particle Info node isn't working properly or am I just making a mistake.

I'll leave a screenshot of the nodes I'm using and the (wrong) output I'm having.

Thanks in regard!

The particle info node does not work with EEVEE.

From the manual

  Particle Info Node
  Cycles Only

Switch to the Cycles Render Engine and your node setup will give the expected result.


How to Make Highlights Glow I'm creating this scene with a "Star Wars" feel. And in Rogue One, The ships had this large highlight like the metal of the ships were glowing from the lit sides only. I'm also noticing some slight blue just on the outside of the main bright white. I've tried Emission nodes (not at all what I was looking for lol) and I've tried the Glare node in the compositor node sheet. And I can't seem to find what it is. Is there an effect or addon maybe to help me achieve this "Glowing" effect? Reference on what I mean below.

The 'glare' for the bright parts should be able to be achieved with a Glare node in the compositor - set up the Threshold to ignore any parts that are not bright enough so as to get the effect on only the highlights.

However, for added configurability you could also add in the output of a Blur node as follows :

Adjust the Glare node, the Value nodes, and the Blur settings as desired.

Note the Subtract Mix node set to 'Clamp'. This effectively removes all but the highlights - so you only get blur of the particularly bright sections. The Multiply after the Blur allows you to control the strength of the 'haze' around those highlights. The RGB node allows you to adjust the color, to bring up the blue, for example.

Here's another example - with the effect over-emphasised for clarity :


Houdini's "explode node" in Animation Nodes Not sure how to explain the question clearly, but I will give it a try.

I wanted to simulate "Explode Node" in Houdini, which basically rather simple and I think in Sverchok I manage to do that, but kind of overcomplicated somewhat.

It's actually super simple. And the answer is probably lie in using Vector and Matrix.

Supposed I have bunch of objects in the scene. From those objects each in position in the scene, user provides a custom Empty position, or some kind of Math formula to find the center of mass of the group. Then from that point, I wanted to just push the position of each object away from that point reference empty.

I tried just now, but I make all the objects fly away. This is because I probably doing it inside the loop?

I can't do "Apply Matrix" inside AN ala Sverchok to have the "default position" of each object.

Currently my logic is simply using Vector Add while referencing each object pivot. But I seem to just push all the objects away.

Should I... perhaps create a reference pivot using instance and that reference should not be looped?

---- MORE INFO

I need a way to keep the Matrix transform of object in "current original position", and then push each of the object apart from X point position. I don't want to make each object fly away.

It's kind of when dealing with TEXT object, and I want to have control over each of character letter position, and then adding to that current position.

---- REPHRASING THE QUESTION
Just like what we can do with Text Object (separating into letter), I would really like to do the same to Group Objects or Joined objects.

Manually by hand:
1) Multiple objects in the scene. Joined or Group them
2) Separate them again, control the pivot, usually centered.
3) Now, I would like to control each and every object from here, this position. Probably wiggle, but in this particular question, I just want them to drift and pushed away based on 1 single point position.
4) That way, we have explode in or out effect.

If I understand you correct, what you essentially need is a way to store the initial transformation of objects.

Fortunally Animation Nodes (AN) has an in-build system for that. It is called the ID-Key system (the name comes from the fact that it can theoretically work with all types of ID-Objects in Blender)

Using it is relatively simple - if you know about it:

Select all objects whose transformation you want to save in an ID Key.
Go to the AN tab in the toolshelf of the 3D View and open the ID Keys panel. There you have to click the "From Current Transforms" button. This will store the location, rotation and scale of each selected object in custom properties. You can also see them in the object settings.

Open the node editor, insert a Object ID Key node, click Choose Key and select Initial Transformation. Now you can get the initial location, rotation, etc of the object you have as input. The Initial Transformation of an object does not change unless you press that button again.

The ID-Key system is a generic solution to the underlying problem of storing values per object that are not changed by your nodes.

The same system is used by the Separate Text Object node. If you look at the template, it also uses the Object ID Key node. Also it does not only store the initial transformation of a letter but also the inital text-value.


Making panel gaps without adding edge-loops Problem: I'm modeling a car and (unfortunately) thought too late about shutlines (panel gaps). Now, as I have my finished exterior, I've tried making the panel gaps by creating them as a separate object and cut them out with a boolean. It works okayish, but in certain areas doesn't make a clean edge, instead very blocky and the reflection is unacceptable when I render it. On the exterior I have the subdivison modifier. I've tried applying the subd and then boolean but it created an enormous amount of data, which was very slow to handle and also, it's then not really possible to modify anymore. Even then, the effect was not 100% convincing. I'm hoping there's an easier way.

Question: How could I do panel gaps that are relatively easy to modify or fine-tune if I want, yet still creating a clean and realistic effect? Are there any tools for that? I just want to somehow project them on the finished mesh, without having to modify the structure.

Boolean Modifier is actually a good tool for this specific purpose.

But it can clash with topology, creating tris and n-gons.
Optimize your topology flow to better match with the Boolean shape, and it should work.

Example of Boolean on a 'friendly' topology (Just a subdivided plane).

Boolean on a 'clashing' topology causing tris and ngons.


Using Compositing for Semi-transparent object effect I am new to compositing and find the whole thing thoroughly confusing.

I wanted to create the animation of a planetary gear mechanism and make the outer rings semi-transparent so that the inner workings would be better visible. As you can see from the following image I have been partially successful:

I placed the inner gears on physical layer 1 and the outer rings on physical later 2, then created two render layers: RenderLayer1 incorporates physical layer 1 and RenderLayer2 physical layer 2. The image above was rendered while both layer 1 and layer 2 were highlighted. The compositing layout is as follows:

Frankly I don't fully understand this layout myself, it was created through trial and error. As you can see, the inner and outer wheels are rendered as a single scene: they cast shadows on each other. This is apparently because I have highlighted both layers. I would prefer, however, that each layer be rendered independently and and then combined but in such a way that the Z-index is taken into account, just like it is now.

Any hints how to do it?

Thanks in advance.

-- Peter

Set up the Exclude layers section on each renderlayer so that layers you don't want included in the renderlayer are explicitly excluded:

By default, as you have noticed, objects outside the included layers will still affect the output through indirect lighting/shadows.

This is often very useful when compositing different parts of a scene together which should appear to integrate together seamlessly, but if you don't want this, it can be disabled via the exclude option.

"Excluded" layers will not have any affect on the output of the renderlayer.


Boolean Difference Acts like Boolean Intersect I don't get what I'm doing wrong.
I'm subtracting a simple cylinder from a larger cylindrical object to hollow it out.
I've done this dozens of times in this same scene with other objects (Piston 1 worked fine) and had no problems.
For some reason, on two of these objects (Pistons 3 and 4), taking the difference acts as if it's taking the intersection instead.

Piston 2 - My cylinder-like object.
My simple cylinder to subtract from 1.
I select Piston 2.
I select Boolean.
I select Difference.
I select the simple cylinder.
I get an object that appears to be the intersection of the two.

It doesn't matter if I select apply or not; I still get this intersected object.
This is exactly the same procedure I've done dozens of times right here on other virtually identical objects.
I've retried this a dozen times, each time trying something different and double-checking every step.
I even restarted Blender and opened the original untouched file to be sure it wasn't some glitch.
The only thing I can think of now is to scrap my carefully constructed object and rebuild it from scratch.

A little more experimentation after getting over being stumped, and I have found the answer.
It was indeed the overlap of surfaces. If two surfaces of two objects are exactly aligned, boolean operations can result in ... unexpected behaviour.
I moved the subtraction object by .01m and it worked fine after that.


How to create a cloth stage valance? I'm trying to create a cloth stage valance like this with the cloth simulator.

I've tried pinning the sides. but it's too even and I think the ends should be pinched.

I've also tried weight painting. Still not right.

Final result:

Base mesh:

As a base mesh we will use simple Plane rotated by 90 degrees and subdivided couple of times. Less subdivision = bigger wrinkles.

I've used Subdivide > 10 and than Subdivide > 1.

We need to add Mean Crease > 1 to the outer edge for Subdivision Surface modifier that we will add later on.

Vertex Group:

For Pinning Cloth we will add Vertex Group with two side edges assigned.

Shape Keys:

For folding our Cloth we need to add Shape Keys - Basis and Key 1 with shrunken side edges moved to the top of the mesh.

We can go ahead and animate Key 1 value by inserting keyframes on frame 0 with value 0 and frame, lets say, 25 with value 1.

Cloth settings:

Now we can finally add Cloth simulation to our mesh with below settings.

Most important are:

Pinning - select Vertex Group we have created before.
Mass - higher mass more curve on cloth.
Structural - lower allow more cloth stretching.
Velocity - will slow down/smooth simulation.
Self collision - self explanatory, Distance is important, it prevents cloth from intersecting.

Rest of the settings are more or less important tweaks, described in tool tips and docs.

Final touches:

Now we can add Subdivision Surface modifier and play our animation to see result (this one is 80 frames long):

Thoughts:

You can experiment with base mesh randomization, subdivision or Cloth settings to get different results.

Material used in Final Results is default Velvet BSDF with changed color.

Back drapes are made using same method.


Can't make Bevel Modifier working on engraved mesh I'm trying to bevel the mesh with bevel modifier, for the text area marked red, but the modifier doesn't work,

Even if I apply the bevel modifier on the whole mesh in object mode, it doesn't work either,

I don't know what goes wrong, what I want to achieve is to bevel the engraved text area, to make it smooth.

Turn off the “clamp overlap” in the modifier. This has gotten me a few times too.


why does my hips and ribs move when i am in pose mode and I move the arm Hi when im in pose mode I rotate my arm you know to go up and down and my hips and ribs area would expand looking very awful i want it so that my body stays still if my hands are rotating im talking about blender  not irl I believe the problem is caused from weights however i could be wrong you can notice from this picture that the sides of the character come out his ribs/hips area plz help

You need to go into weight painting mode (click your model first, not the armature), shift right click on your arms/hands, and use the subtraction brush to remove the color from the areas you don't want to move.


Light-bulb Filaments: Brightness and Internal Reflections in Cycles I'm working on making an "Edison bulb" for part of a photo-realistic scene.

The filament is composed of extrusions of a very small cylinder (if that's a poor method, please correct me; I'm very new to modeling) and that seems to have an effect on how bright it can be as an emission surface - whether it's set to 40 or 40,000 it doesn't make a noticeable difference.

The problem is that I can't get the internal reflection on the bulb to show up.  Increasing the brightness has no effect.  I tried to fake it by duplicating the filament, scaling it up, and making it invisible to the camera but that didn't have the intended effect.

Here's a quick render of the bulb - notice the reflections from outside light sources but none from the internal filament. There's even a bit of reflection from the internal support structures. Similar renders without any other light source have the same problem.

Here's a photograph of a similar bulb with great reflections.

Thanks in advance!

A few things you might try:

The color of your background will make significant difference when trying to see the internal reflections. I recommend making the background color the same color as the photo. With a light background like you have now, any light reflecting inside the bulb will be greatly diminished in terms of visibility. Here's an example:

The shape of the bulb will play a very important role in the amount of reflection you get inside the bulb. For example:

So, if you can model your lightbulb to have the exact same shape as the one in the photo, you should get similar reflections.
In addition, the IOR (Index Of Refraction) setting plays a large role in how much reflection is shown inside the bulb:

With an IOR of 1.0:

The same bulb with IOR of 3.0:

Yet another factor that can influence the amount of reflection is the thickness of the glass. If the bulb is a simple lightbulb-shaped mesh with a Glass material, then Blender will consider it a solid piece of glass, like a crystal ball, and this will significantly influence how light passes through it. In addition, if the bulb is a solid piece of glass, that could be one reason why there is no reflection inside the glass -- there is no inside face for the light to reflect off of. Ironically, in order to make the bulb hollow, the solution here is to add a Solidify modifier (as described below) to the bulb -- this will give the bulb mesh a very thin thickness and leave the rest hollow, thus allowing light to pass through the glass like a normal lightbulb rather than as a solid piece of glass:

The camera angle in relation to the faces of the bulb will also play a significant role in how much light reflects into the camera:

In the end, I found the following settings to give a significant improvement in the internal reflections:

Add a Solidify modifier to the bulb and set the Thickness to 0.01 or something similar:
Select bulb  → Object Properties panel → Modifiers tab → Solidify  → Thickness  → 0.01
Then setting the IOR on the glass bulb to 5.0 or so:
Select bulb  → Object Properties panel → Materials tab → IOR → 5.0
Setting the filament's emission Strength to 3000
Select filament  → Object Properties panel → Materials tab → Surface section → Strength   → 3000
Changing the filament's color to something like the following RGB and HSV values:
Select filament  → Object Properties panel → Materials tab → Color

This resulted in the following render:

The fact that the shape of the glass and also the thickness of the glass play significant roles in creating more realistic reflections made me think that in order to achieve photo-realistic results, the physical properties of the mesh models should be physically accurate representations of the objects being modeled. I'm no expert on photo-realism at all, but this just occurred to me and might help in your quest for realism.

In this regard, you might explore setting the filament's color based on it's temperature in Kelvin with the Blackbody node in the Node Editor:

I'm not sure this is necessary, though, but you might consider it.


Trying to animate the camera in Blender 2.8 I tried moving the camera around by using keyframes in Blender 2.8 for the camera to move from one location to another. But when I tried to play the animation, the camera doesn't seem to move at all, and I don't know how to fix this.

Does anyone know how I can do this? Thanks!

If your playhead is at the beginning of the timeline with the camera selected, then do the following:

Move the camera where you want to start (press 0 to look through it)
Insert a keyframe (press I)
Move the playhead on the timeline
Move the camera to a new spot
Insert another keyframe (press I)

...etc


Why does ambient occlusion make a black area above emission object? I did AO in compositor. The body of an emission object is invisible to the camera.
First screenshot - with TURNED ON AO
Second screenshot - with TURNED OFF AO
How it works and how i can keep AO turned on, but fix this problem?
Blender 2.91

You're using the image as a factor, so that heavily white area is getting AO applied to it with massive influence.  Use a viewer node to look at the output of your AO node.


Desaturate colors around lightsource I'm still new to Blender and I just found out that lights have a nodes option and that there are many things you can do with them.
I am working on a render but I have an issue with an area with oversaturated shadows.
I want to make a light source that desaturates the colours around it and nothing else.
Is it possible to do and does anyone know how to do it?

To desaturate objects closer to a light, add 4 nodes to your object's material:

Texture coordinate > Object: target your light
Vector Math > Length - gives lower value for objects closer to that light
Math > Multiply - to control the falloff
Hue/Saturation node, to control the saturation

(You can wrap the setup in a nodegroup and put inside every material)


Mesh disappears when joining armatures I trying to join two separate armatures.
When i select AK47 armature then arms armature and press CTRL+J, AK47's model disappears.

I don't know if it's still relevant to you, but I've discovered a way to do this without having to weight paint again.

In the Outliner Window, drag the mesh for your AK to the other armature and set the Object as the parent. You'll see that the AK mesh is still weight-painted to the old armature, but you won't be able to move it in pose mode (yet)
Make sure there aren't any constraints added to the armature from the AK that you're trying to join to the new armature.
In Object Mode, highlight the AK armature followed by the armature you want to join it with and hit CTRL+J to join them.
In Object Mode select the AK and Shift-select the new armature and type CTRL+P and parent the AK mesh to the new armature with empty groups.

That's it. You should now see your AK has the same weight painting it once had but in a new armature! However, you may have to go into edit mode and translate it a bit to get it to line up properly with the bones.

Let me know if you have any issues!


How can I create a non-self-intersecting mesh from a line mesh? I am currently working on creating a 3D model of a Lorenz system. I want a result fairly similar to the following picture from the Internet, minus the stand:

To accomplish this, I created a C++ program that outputs an OBJ where the lines of the Lorenz system are represented as lines in the OBJ file (via the l command). Then, I was going to apply the skin modifier to this OBJ in Blender to make it solid, as in the picture. When I do this, however, there are two issues. Firstly, the solid lines resemble extruded squares more than the cylinders that I prefer. Secondly, when the Lorentz system wraps back near to its self, there is overlap between the pseudo-extruded-squares. While this overlap is in and of itself not an issue, it creates mesh intersections which are highly problematic for any use of this mesh (ie. rendering, 3D printing):

How can I use Blender to transform the line OBJ file into a model with solid cylindrical lines and correct mesh overlap (similar to a union operator)?

Not sure about the overlap issue, but if you add a Subdivision Surface modifier then you should get circular instead of square extrusions.


how to make camera look through objects from only one side? I have modeled a rather small room, and when trying to get the right camera angles I can't fit the camera inside the room without getting too close, so I wan't the walls and ceiling only to be visible if the camera is placed inside the room. Understand?

Make it so the camera can look through the ceiling and walls from the outside, but they still appear in the cameras view when the camera is on the inside looking out?

Final result:

This is kinda same idea as @Duarte Farrajota Ramos but it is working in Cycles (viewport/camera).

Mesh:

Your mesh normals should point to the inside of the room as in the image below.

Materials:

You will need to assign different materials for floor and walls and ceiling.

Floor material. Could be anything you want.

Wall and ceiling material. Should look like this and in the place of red Diffuse you can and anything you want. Remember to check if Transparent shader color is pure white. Hex value #FFFFFF.


When using "Bake from Multires", the resulting normal map has odd pattern along topology A very peculiar, corrugated pattern appears on the baked normal map from the Bake from Multires option.
Blendfile: https://pasteall.org/blend/53326714fd7e42ab966a58667ca05faf
Everything I've done:

4k Resolution
Non-Color Data
32-bit float
Smooth shaded geometry before applying the Multires modifier.

No matter how I rearrange the UV, it's the same strange result. From top to bottom in the images is the high poly, low poly, the baked normal map, the low poly with the normal map applied, and the weird pattern moving along the topology.

I just had this issue. I know it's months late but I was able to figure it out. In the multires modifier there's an "apply base" option that conforms the base to match the sculpt. This fixed the issue for me.


Compiling Blender with Optix on Ubuntu I followed that instruction add optix device for installing Nvidia driver, Optix and compiling Blender. No errors but also no Optix in Blender. Here is debug:

  CPU flags:
    AVX        : TrueAVX2       : True
    AVX        : True
    SSE4.1     : True
    SSE3       : True
    SSE2       : True
    BVH layout : BVH8
    Split      : False
  CUDA flags:
    Adaptive Compile : False
  OptiX flags:
    CUDA streams : 1
  OpenCL flags:
    Device type    : ALL
    Debug          : False
    Memory limit   : 0

My system is based on amd Ryzen 2700x, Nvidia rtx 2080, running 19.04 with Nvidia 435.17, Optix v.7
Really not sure what to think about, where to look for errors.

I don't know if my CPU is the problem and the question is which directory should I put the OptixSdk in for compiling with Blender?

The cmake patch for OptiX searches for the SDK in the following directories

SET(_optix_SEARCH_DIRS
  ${OPTIX_ROOT_DIR}
  "$ENV{PROGRAMDATA}/NVIDIA Corporation/OptiX SDK 7.0.0"
  /usr/local
  /sw # Fink
  /opt/local # DarwinPorts
)

Where OPTIX_ROOT_DIR can either be an environment variable or the path explicitly set by using -DOPTIX_ROOT_DIR when using cmake. $ENV{PROGRAMDATA} is the environment variable to the ProgramData directory, which would usually be C:\ProgramData.

So your OptiX SDK has to be in either one of these paths (although on Windows it should be C:\ProgramData\NVIDIA Corporation\OptiX SDK 7.0.0) and you would have to create a release build. Alternatively you can configure the cmake setup yourself and specify that you want to use Optix (unless you do a release build) using WITH_CYCLES_DEVICE_OPTIX=ON and the path to the SDK OPTIX_ROOT_DIR=/path/to/NVIDIA-OptiX-SDK-7.x.x-xxx. This is described here, but can also be seen in the code of the patch. How to set these cmake variables is documented in Compile Blender with CMake for building on Linux in the section for Editing CMake Parameter which is pretty much the same on Windows.


How do I create a Smooth Material for my Model? I'm trying to render something like this :

It has a really smooth and nice surface. But I still can't figure out the shading or lighting compositions. I'm using Cycles mainly.

Use smooth shading on the geometry of the object
Use a subsurface modifier to make sure there are no remaining sharp edges
Use a high roughness value, like 0.8 or higher
Use subsurface scattering to give it a plastic look, as if some light is passing through thinner sections, but this is optional
Use a large light source/lamp that won't cast sharp shadows.


Drawing texture on surface I download a seamless grass texture to blender, and put the texture on a plane/the ground. Then in the image editor i made the texture smaller so it looked like realistic grass, but then i want to draw a road on the grass, so i downloaded a gravel texture, but when i try to draw on the plane, it just copies what i drew to multiple places. So what i want to do is that i want to be able to draw a texture on a plane without it drawing on the texture that is on the plane, but just drawes on the plane. Im sorry for my english if it was hard to understand, but i hope you can help me. This happends when i try to draw on a plane.
https://postimg.org/image/it3z93swj/

Your grass texture is repeated (tiled) across the surface. If try to texture paint "over", you are actually painting into that texture so the drawing will repeat too.
If you want to blend the gravel painting over your tiled grass texture, you can do it by several methods, for example:

Add grass borders to your gravel texture (gravel fading into the grass), cut the mesh where you want to make a gravel surface and map that "gravel to grass blend texture". Or you can make a segment with this texture mapped and use Array and Curve modifiers to create a gravel path as in the screenshot below... and then merge this path model to the grass geometry. This method creates some seams between the textures so but it can be almost negligible if the transition is painted well. The seams are often covered by some grass / foliage models.

Creating a gravel path using one gravel segment and Array + Curve modifiers

Merged into grass model:

 2. You can cut the area you plan to cover with the gravel, bake the grass texture from this area to a new texture and paint the gravel into it. Search for a Texture Baking tutorial if you don't know how to do it. This method is usable only for small areas because the texture needs to cover all the gravel area so it can become too large for using it in game.

 3. The game engine you want to use may be able to blend textures nativelly (the blending can be for example defined by Vertex painting) ...so take a look in the documentation to see which methods does it support and look for a tutorial.
This is some Vertex Paint in Unity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDXwSEUYrbI


How to replace an existing material with one from other blend file with python? Currently, I'm working on a lot of files imported from Autodesk Maya to be rendered in Blender 2.8 EEVEE. And of course, the material looks bad when rendered. And will be a lot of work to fix all of these materials on every blend file by hand. So, I tried this python script to replace materials in the current file with the fixed one from other file:

import bpy

scn = bpy.context.scene
D = bpy.data
filepath = '//10_rrd.blend'

with bpy.data.libraries.load(filepath, link=False) as (data_from, data_to):
    data_to.materials = data_from.materials

for mat in D.materials:
    for mat_fix in data_to.materials:
        if mat_fix.name == mat.name:
            print('Found a material copy for '+mat.name+' with name '+mat_fix.name)
            mat.diffuse_color = mat_fix.diffuse_color
            mat.metallic = mat_fix.metallic
            mat.roughness = mat_fix.roughness
            mat.specular_intensity = mat_fix.specular_intensity

The problem is:

Instead of replacing the properties of the material in current blend file, It appends the full material as a new material (with those '.001' suffix) in the current file without touching the materials that needs to be replaced.

What's wrong with my code? Is there is any fix? or should I stick with traditional way of replacing material of every object after it's appended?

By the way, It's not a problem of EEVEE.

This code

with bpy.data.libraries.load(filepath, link=False) as (data_from, data_to):
    data_to.materials = data_from.materials

works correctly and you will get appended materials with suffix*.001* in your actual blend file. I propose , maybe not very elegant solution, but it works I have tested on my side.  And it gives you possibility not to replace all materials after adding. The script looks in next way:

import bpy

scn = bpy.context.scene
D = bpy.data
filepath = '//10_rrd.blend'

actual_names = []
dict_names = {}

for i in range(len(D.materials)):
    s = D.materials[i].name + "_actual"
    dict_names[s] = D.materials[i].name
    D.materials[i].name = s
    actual_names.append(D.materials[i].name)

with bpy.data.libraries.load(filepath, link=False) as (data_from, data_to):
    data_to.materials = data_from.materials

all_names = []
for m in bpy.data.materials:
    all_names.append(m.name)

# finding name of added materials
s = set(actual_names)
new_added = [x for x in all_names if x not in s]

for mat in D.materials:
    for mat_fix_name in new_added:
        value = dict_names.get(mat.name, None)
        if mat_fix_name == value:
            print('Found a material copy for '+mat.name+' with name '+mat_fix_name)
            mat.diffuse_color = D.materials[value].diffuse_color
            mat.metallic = D.materials[value].metallic
            mat.roughness = D.materials[value].roughness
            mat.specular_intensity = D.materials[value].specular_intensity

print('-----------------------------------------------')

#clear appended materials
for mat_fix_name in new_added:
    D.materials[mat_fix_name].user_clear()
    bpy.data.materials.remove(D.materials[mat_fix_name])

#roll back names
for mat in D.materials:
    old_name = dict_names.get(mat.name, None)
    if old_name is not None:
        mat.name = old_name


Dome with smokestack - how to clean mesh after boolean modifier? I am trying to create a dome with smokestack (the best description I have - see pictures).

Creating the dome is straightforward. Then for the smokestack, I create a circle, position it and extrude it upwards along Z-axis so that it penetrates the dome roof. To combine the meshes together I use boolean UNION modifier and click Apply. Then I am having trouble creating a clean correct mesh.

When I apply smooth shading you can see the surface is funky. I tried to recalculate the normals and I played with the geometry. The pictures describe the best I could do.

Could someone, please, guide me what would be the cleanest approach of modeling a simple dome with one smokestack?

blender loop tools addon >>  circle > extrude > edge bevel


Making a Scene more Realistic I just finished modeling a lighthouse scene. My goal was to make the scene realistic, however the result turned out to be very artificial. I tried to add a normal to the material of the lighthouse, however it was causing issues with it.  I would greatly appreciate any advice on how to make the scene look more realistic.

Thanks

P.S.
I included 2 images, one is my render and the other one is my inspiration image.

Take more time to study materials. Water is darker and has a gradient affected by the depth as it gets closer to the coast. (try to make tiling less obvious, combine different bumps or use smth procedural). The roughness from the sand/ ground is too shiny. The lighthouse has kind off poor shading it needs roughneess variation to push its quality.
Study as if you were painting check how values work in the pictures and try to match them in your materials. Use HDRI and photometric color
Your shapes are too general there is no depth in terms on diferent scale, try not to skip details go from big shapes to the tiniest this can help you get a scale sensation and realism
Keep working on it, compare more photos, close ups from similar materials, study a lot. You can do this, build patience :)


Weight Painting in 2.80 in edit mode I jumped from 2.7 to to 2.80 and I am having trouble with the new weight painting workflow. What I would like to do, is to weightpaint specific vertices and faces in edit mode while seing the color code of the weight painting. But all I can do is either use the brush in weightpaint mode freehand style, or apply the weight 'blindly' in edit mode and then check the colors in weight mode. Am I missing something? This was way faster for me in 2.7. I am looking for suggestions of a better workflow for 2.80.
Thanks for being nice.

In the screenshot below I would like to select the individual faces. That's only possible in edit-mode, right? But in edit-mode there is no visible color coding for the weight painting, right?

The answer to my question is simple. After some soulsearching in blender 2.8 I found the checkbox in a new place. The 'Weight Table' is also there like in 2.7. So all is well and good in blenderland. Here a gif for another adventurer to not have to search as I had to.


Mesh appears normal in solid mode but looks weird in textured mode I have Blender 2.49b and have this model:

When I change mode to Textured, the windows look weird:

When I go back to solid mode, it's normal, but the biggest problem is when I export the model, it looks like the image above. How can I fix this?

The most likely cause would be the normals, that is which way the polygon is facing, the outer side is the one that has the texture drawn on it. In edit mode select all and press CtrlN. If that makes it worse try CtrlShiftN to flip them the other way.

Worst case scenario you can select individual faces and flip the normals using Mesh->Normals->Flip (Flip normals is also available in the specials menu W)


Cannot create Loop cuts I have lost the ability to make loop cuts. When I press CTRL+R, nothing happens. I am not aware of any changes I'd made. It stopped working on BOTH my Macs, both running Sierra 10.12.5.

I tried loading factory reset, using the default blender keyboard layout. When i type "loop" in the search box, it returns nothing. I've tried the new 2.79 RC, same issue.

Please help.

You can only add loop cuts in edit mode (which you can enter either by pressing TAB or by choosing it in a mode scroll menu at the bottom).


Planks along a surface using Sverchok I'm trying to recreate this concept art

and i'm having trouble recreating this bit, this dome made of planks

Making it by hand, using, for example, lattice to curve a premade stretch of planks, seems like a waste of time and effort as this seems exactly the sort of job for sverchok, houdini or any other procgen software.
Am i right in thinking so? Can this be done with sverchok? Perhaps first modeling the dome roof as just a shape and then generating planks on it? If so, i would greatly appreciate any links, help or just pointers.
Thank you.

Try example points on mesh in lines  it will give you some kind of
lines.
than follow orientation algorithm, creating matrices based on
three points -

(0,0,0),
first vertex of an edge
second vertex of an edge.

on top - make planks (length can be the length of an edge)  and
texturize them


Sequencer won't show the actual animation Whenever I have sequencer on under Post Processing only the movie in the video sequence shows up while redering and not the animation. When I turn of sequencer the animation shows up but not the movie in the video sequence. Any advice?

If you want a scene to be used in video sequence editor, add a Scene Strip.

Add > Scene

You can add the current scene as well as other scenes.

Check the Open GL Preview and choose the Preview Shading


How do I edit a rendered animation? I created a short animation and after rendering it, I must have had one/some of the nodes not set correctly.  I want to go back into the file and see what I did wrong, but when I open the file up it defaults to the rendered window.

I have gone through all the window settings and cannot find where/how to re-open the nodes panel to make adjustments and then re-render it.  Sorry if this was answered already.  I searched the forum in various ways and could not find this exact issue.  I consider myself a novice-intermediate level Blender user.

if you're seeing something like this(not including the cube):

then you need to go here:

and change it to node editor (or whatever you need to change it to. there are also other ones like that around.)