How do I snap one object into place with the opening of another object? (See picture) As you can see, I'm trying to put this object into the opening below it. Is there a quick and easy way to do this? The top model is not rotated exactly correctly to match the opening, although the model is exactly the right size so if it were matching orientation it would fit. I'm looking for a way that I can sort of 'click' the top one into it and it will adjust accordingly.

If it's only about location and rotation around the Z axis, it should be as simple as:

Select the object you wanna align
Go to Editmode Tab
Select all A
Make sure you are in Vertex Select mode CtrlTab
Hold Shift and click a vertex twice, which you wanna use to align location(makes it the active vertex)
Enable Snapping ShiftTab
Make it snap to vertices CtrlShiftTab
Set Snap Target to Active
Grab your object G and snap it to the other model's corresponding vetex
Snap Cursor to Active ShiftS
Change Pivot Point to 3D Cursor .
Hold Shift and click a vertex twice, which you wanna use to lineup rotation(make it active)
Rotate the model R, constrain to Z axis and snap your vertex to the corresponding vertex of the other model(this can be really tricky, try to make the models a bit transparent to see what you are snapping to)

Not sure if the vertex in step 12 needs to have the same Z location as the first vertex... But even then, it should be possible to use any vertex with a bit more effort, to be able to constrain the right rotation axis in step 13 - using a custom transform orientation, which you would have to set up first...

If the models did not align originally, you might be able to snap to edge instead in step 13...


Can I achieve orthographic lighting in Blender? I define orthographic lighting as a single light source that cast a shadow at the same angle no matter where the shape is? Either in front or behind the lamp shading is at the same angle.

Conditions: Blender render, toon shading (non gradient shading), and you cannot node any objects only the lamp.

Can this be done?

Use a Sun Lamp
Form the blender manual:

A Sun lamp provides light of constant intensity emitted in a single direction.
This direction can be changed by rotating the Sun lamp, like any other object, but because the light is emitted in a constant direction, the location of a Sun lamp does not affect the rendered result (unless you use the “sky & atmosphere” option).


Why is the assigned material larger than the selected faces? I'm a total noob and was trying to customize my plate/donut from the BlenderGuru tutorial. My goal was to add a thin gold trim around the plate. I loop cut a thin band on the surface of the plate and then assigned a gold material to it. But it didn't work how I thought it would. Why does the material show up so much wider than the faces I selected? How do I make the gold band thinner?

You experiencing this problem because of the Subdivision-Surface modifier.
When you add in a default sub-surf modifier, it just displays the modifier in the edit mode (as well as in the object mode) but won't show the change in geometry that the sub-surf modifier makes. Here is an example with respect to your model:

Notice how the geometry change when the subdivision surface is switched on.
To solve your problem just make Loop cuts with Edit Cage on.(the icon in the circle):


Test for the object with the biggest x-vector using python I am trying to get the object out of bpy.data.objects with the biggest x-vector but i cant figure out the code.

You can do this without constructing an auxillary dictionary, in one line:

biggest = max(bpy.context.scene.objects, key=lambda ob: ob.location.x)

The key parameter makes max() return the item from bpy.context.scene.objects with the largest location.x property.


Wrong model appearing in UV editing mode In modelling mode, have no problems - object selected, UV unwraps, ok let me see this in UV editing mode - correct texture on UV window, entirely different object in the 3d window, - have looked/clicked everywhere to fix this, makes no sense

Fixed it - was the local view toggle in UV editing mode, - (the / hotkey)
glad I got out of that rabbithole  :P driving me nuts


How can I fix the black parts after I apply subsurf? As you can see in this picture I was trying to create a face, but when I apply a subsurfaces modifier you get these black spots. Does anybody know how to fix this.
thanks in advance.

It might be because the vertices in the mesh are not made properly positioned that the blender is not able to properly calculate how to apply the modifier. So try these:

Recalculate the normals properly using: "Shift+N"
Go to edit mode and remove duplicate vertices by "Merge by distance
option" (make sure you set the proper distance in the dropdown menu). Also, make sure
that there aren't overlapping faces


Does Blender 2.8 have a working import-export plugin for After Effects? I know it's still in Alpha but having the ability to render quick visualizations in Evee with camera animation data would be an absolute game-changer in my production environment.

Does anyone know if an update has been made to this plugin?

At the moment, I'm animating and exporting camera data in 2.79 and then rendering the frames out of to 2.8 to use Evee.

You should not use Blender 2.8 for production until it is realeased. It is not stable yet and you may lose your work if you do.

Other than that, the add-on does not seem to contain anything that is changed in the bpy API from the first glance(I might be wrong), so you could try to just find the add-on's file
[Blender 2.80 install location]\2.80\scripts\addons\io_export_after_effects.py and change it with a text editor. If you changed the 27th line from version 2.79 to version 2.80, you would be telling Blender that it's fine to register it:

...
bl_info = {
    "name": "Export: Adobe After Effects (.jsx)",
    "description": "Export cameras, selected objects & camera solution "
        "3D Markers to Adobe After Effects CS3 and above",
    "author": "Bartek Skorupa",
    "version": (0, 65),
    "blender": (2, 80, 0), # <- here (2, 80, 0) instead of (2, 79, 0)
    "location": "File > Export > Adobe After Effects (.jsx)",
    "warning": "",
    "wiki_url": "http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/"
                "Scripts/Import-Export/Adobe_After_Effects",
    "category": "Import-Export",
}
...

I don't know if that is going to work or function as intended, but looking at the code it seems it could.

I would like to state it strongly that I do not recommend to do so and I do not reccommend to use Blender 2.8 for any production, because it is not finished yet and it may corrupt your saved files. It might not be a bad idea to carry on doing it as you do now, so you allways have a backup saved in 2.79.


Bump Maps vs Normal Maps I have read the Blender manual regarding bump maps and normal maps. But still it is not very clear to me when you would make or use bump maps and when normal maps. Who can explain ?

Bump maps and normal maps are essentially the same thing.
The primary difference is that normal maps have more information in them(because they use an rgb input) to give a more accurate bump effect.
The rgb information in the normal maps correspond to the x,y,z axis.

Bump maps use only a black to white map to understand the depth.

Both bumps and normals are essentially a way to cheat the shading to give the effect of depth...meaning no resolution is added to the geometry in anyway... to do that that we use displacement maps.
Displacement maps unlike the other two actually modify the geometry at render time.


How to fix these hard Edges in Render? They are not UV seems and I recalculated the normals. Does anybody have any idea of what it would be?

here is the blend file https://drive.google.com/file/d/1te2NBPLglBqUzw8PGbYGmgm85URY6SEo/view?usp=sharing

Your issue is indeed caused by the model topology. One option is to use Subsurf modifier to smooth out the mesh. The problem with this approach is that you will loose lowpolyness of this object. Current 735 vs 70,370 verts after 3 level of subdivision (this level reduce artifacts completely).

As an alternative you can just smooth it with Sculpt Smooth brush.

Go to Sculpt Mode.
Select Smooth brush and set Strength to low value - I've used 0.1.
Smooth it!


Unintentional edge and face selection So I'm trying to follow a tutorial on YouTube to design a basic sword. I'm able to follow his steps about halfway until I get to the step at time code 12:13. When I delete those faces at the top, my sword blade has about two faces on the inside that have been extruded upward with the rest of the blade. These faces are not supposed to have been extruded and I don't know where I went wrong. No matter how many times I've attempted to make this sword from scratch, I always run into this problem. I would assume the problem is that I'm unintentionally selecting extra faces that I can't see. Which has happened in the past and I've had to circle around the model to deselect faces on the underside that were not meant to be selected. Does anyone know how to stop this and ensure that I only select the edges and faces that I click on? I read somewhere that you can change your selection mode limitation to be that which is visible only but I couldn't find this setting in my user preferences. I'm using blender 2.81.16

It may be a bug or your selection is wrong. I would strongly suggest upgrading to the latest stable release, which is 2.82a at this time. To get a finer selection, try Z "Wireframe". You can also toggle "X-Ray" with Alt+Z, and you can hide / unhide faces / edges / vertices by selecting them and then hitting H and Alt+H.

My method:
Select the faces you want to extrude with "X-Ray" turned off. Turn "X-Ray" back on to see if any faces got selected by accident. You can also Ctrl+i to invert the face selection. H to hide them. This will leave you with only the face you want to extrude, and you will know for sure if any extras got selected.

One last thing:
You might have overlapping edges causing those extra faces to form on extrude. Before extruding, try F3 Merge by Distance and adjust the Merge Distance to something small that only overlapping vertices will be affected by.


How to change object color depending on its location? (EEVEE or BI, no Cycles) I have a colored plane (4 faces 4 colors) and I'd like another plane which is above the first one to change the color accordinly depending upon which face is under.

I tried Data Transfer modifier but nothing happens. What's wrong?
Or is there another way to do that? No Cycles render. EEVEE (2.8) or internal (earlier versions).
Thank you.

Your source object doesn't have vertex colors at all, hence the problem (no data to transfer)

To add vertex colors to an object:

Add new vertex color layer
Go to Vertex Paint mode
Enable face selecting
Select face on a mesh
Choose a color
To fill a face with color: Paint -> Set Vertex Color

Steps above in one pic:

Now it is working in Vertex paint mode:

To see it in actual Blender Internal render, check Vertex Color Paint option in material settings:

And for Eevee/Cycles use Attribute node, just type vertex color layer name you have:


How do I get proper reflections (Eevee)? I added my modeled car into an eevee-scene and for some reason it refuses to render. When I try to render a white box appears around the car instead of the reflections. I have tried all the settings eg. screen space reflections, added a reflection plane, cube map reflection but nothing works.

Q: How do I get proper reflections instead of this box?

By default, Eevee will reflect the HDRI and the lights but it won't reflect the objects of your scene.
For reflective volumes, you need to create a Light Probe > Reflection Cubemap in order to reflect the object(s), as explained here by Tutor4u. It's a kind of trick to recreate a proper reflection.
For flat surfaces like mirrors you have other light probes: Reflection Planes,  much easier to handle, you don't need to bake and it will reflect in real time so you can animate. Just make sure that the light probe is a bit shifted so that it reflects correctly, and that the mirror object has thickness, or Backface Culling enabled.
For a volume, here is a Suzanne, I gave it a Glossy node, it reflects the world HDRI and the lights but it doesn't reflect the objects (here the checker ground):

In order to make Suzanne reflect the objects of the scene you need to create a Light Probe > Reflection Cubemap that contains her. It acts like a scanner that takes an image of the environment and projects this image on the surface of the reflexive object(s) that it contains.

First, put your cursor on the exact same point as your Suzan and create (ShiftA) the Light Probe > Reflection Cubemap. In the Properties panel > Object Data tab you can choose the light probe shape: Sphere or Box. In your case choose Sphere and stretch it a bit so that it adapts to the car shape.
Go in the Properties panel > Render > Indirect Lighting, click on Bake Cubemap Only button, enable the Auto Bake option so that you'll see all the changes you'll make in the settings in real time. Actually in my case this option doesn't seem to work so I had to re-click on Bake Cubemap Only to check any change.
Keep the light probe selected, go in the Properties panel > Object Data tab, in Viewport Display enable the Clipping option, and in Probe, set the different parameters :

Clipping Start determines where the scan begins, the Clipping Start dots must begin just outside the geometry of your object (otherwise the scanned image will be black as it begins inside the object) but as close as possible (as it is supposed to scan the object environment, it must not miss an object that would be too close to the reflective object).
Clipping End determines how far the scan must go. If an object is beyond the value, it won't be scanned and therefore it won't be reflected.
Radius will determine how large the light probe is, if it's large enough to contain several reflective objects, it will influence all these objects, meaning it will project the scanned image on all of them. It might be ok in some cases but it can give bad results as objects being contained may not reflect each others (yes because the image that is projected is the scan made by the light probe, not the real reflection produced by each object). In that case create as many light probes as you have objects.
The Falloff will determine the decrease of this influence. For example if an object is in the area between the Radius and the Falloff, you'll see that the reflected image will decrease along this area.

Nota Bene: The reflection won't be automatically refreshed when you move an object, you'll need to recalculate. It means that if you animate an object you will need to calculate each frame.
The Light Probe > Irradiance Volume as nothing to do with reflection, it is used to bake the indirect lighting.


How to set Ctrl+MMB to Orbit? How do i set my MMB + Ctrl to orbit. What is the hotkey term in keymap settings?
Very much grateful for any suggestions, Stewart

The shortcut for rotate view can be changed in user preferences. Assuming you are using 2.8 keymap, see the gif below:

Open user preferences.
Go to keymap section and search for rotate view to middle mouse in key binding.
Then you may simply change the shortcut for Ctrl + MMB from the default
MMB


Getting separate body parts from a Makehuman object file I have the object file for Makehuman, which is basically an open source human body mesh.
For my project, I need its individual body parts. Now, I can do this by manually selecting the corresponding mesh vertices in blender (which I have managed to do).

An obj file would typically look like:

v -0.3110 7.3315 1.4107
v -0.3481 7.3465 1.4062
v -0.3095 7.3456 1.4117
v -0.3487 7.3574 1.4039
v -0.3080 7.3566 1.4103
....

Now, I want to segregate this obj file so that I can get the vertices and edges corresponding to the selections. How can I do so?
PS: I also need to preserve the global indices in the segregated mesh files, so simply deleting off the unselected parts and exporting to a new obj file isn't an option.

You can use this script on blender to show vertices for each item in the mesh:

import bpy
for object in bpy.data.objects:

    print(object.name)
    if object.type == 'MESH':
        for vertex in object.data.vertices:
            print(vertex.co)

if you need to show just one part called part_name: you can do like this

import bpy
for object in bpy.data.objects:
    print(object.name)
    if object.name=='name_part':
       for vertex in object.data.vertices:
           print(vertex.co)


Can Image textures be mapped to empty object like procederual textures? I try to map an image texture to an Empty object (a plain axes) in blender. However, unlike procedural textures, the image texture appears streaky. Here is a picture:

The texture is supposed to be some light brown tiles. A picture of what the texture (kind of) looks like:

The image is stretched. I have another project that has the same texture in it, and it is different sizes on different objects. Here is a picture of that:

I'm using the blender Internal rendering engine.

Yes

Build a setup where the image is mapped with Object coordinates and poin to the Empty object.

What you are probably missing is that, while a procedural texture has usually variable colors in the 3D space, an image has only 2D informations, so the texture is projected onto the XY plane of the Empty. The Z values are all the same, it's the same texture thet is being reproduced, that's why you see those streaks.

By rotating the empty you can project the texture on other sides of susanne, but along the Z axis of the empty you will never get a texture variance without adding something (noise texture, ...)


Normal map seams showing on mesh First of all, I've seen tons of questions about this already but none of them solved my issue.
I've tried:

Rebaking in Marmoset with custom padding (8, 16, 32, no success)
Make mesh smooth shaded
Enable Non-color data on Color Space (Image Texture node)

Also, in Marmoset, the seams are almost invisible (can be seen if zoomed in too much, yes). But in Blender, it's visible even from a distance since it's interrupting the normal map with a weird shading (pic below). Is there anything else I'm missing? Thanks!

Re-baking as .png 16 bits format solved the issue (was .tga before)


How can my process of modeling be Sped Up? I noticed that it takes me too much time modeling some simple things, I can't understand why it is so.

I am using Blender for quite a long time already and using all the Hotkeys possible, but still I think I'm not efficient enough.

I would like to know if there is a way to 3D Model Faster / More Efficiently, Apart from being an experienced user and knowing where every function/button is or using Hotkeys.

There is no magic bullet. The only real way to get faster, is to practice and learn about the different tools available to you (watch tutorials).

As you practice, you start to notice things that you do a lot, and eventually you might find a tool that can achieve a task faster. Tutorials help speed up the process, but they only show what the tools can do, not how you should use them.

You also might find that you work faster with a certain tool than other people. Essentially, some people work well one way (and that's what they'll teach), and others work better other ways.

Lot's of things can be taught in tutorials, but you can only learn to do those tasks quickly as you become comfortable with them. The only way to become comfortable with them is experience.


Why won't Evee open the selected material in compositing I remember that in older versions of Blender the current material would be selected, if you chose an entity with a material.
As you can see in compositing editor, there should be some type of diffuse and image node.

You are mixing up some things here:

The node-based material definition process is not the same thing as "compositing". They share the feature of being node-based but they are not the same thing.

Since they are two separate things, Blender 2.8 split the editor into two: the "Compositing" editor and the "Shader Editor" (Eevee doesn't really matter here, this is an unrelated change).

The one that you find in the "Compositing" workspace is the compositing editor. The one you need is in the "Shading" workspace.

It is also in whatever workspace you want, if you select the editor type to be "Shader Editor".


How to make Blender exit after running Python script from command line? I have the problem that Blender does not exit after executing in background mode from command line.

For example this command:

./blender -b -P test.py

gives me this output, but does not exit Blender:

Read prefs: /home/mbc/.config/blender/2.79/config/userpref.blend
found bundled python: /usr/local/blender/blender-2.79-linux-glibc219-x86_64/2.79/python
Hello world

My Python test script is very simple:

import bpy
print("Hello world")

Even if I don't run a Python script but just render a single frame, the Blender process does not exit.

I am running blender-2.79-linux-glibc219-x86_64 on Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS with linux image version 4.4.0-112-lowlatency.


What do blue and black edges mean in edit mode? I applied a n = 2 subsurf modifier to my mesh. Here's the 3D view of the mesh in edit mode.

It seems that the original edges are in light blue, and the new ones are in black.

What do these colors mean? I kinda feel something is off with my mesh subdivision.

Blue(Cyan, to be exact) means it's marked 'Sharp'.  If you are using the default blender theme that is.  This colour can be different in different Themes.

The reason they are blue are probably because the original mesh you extracted these faces from, had all its edges marked 'Sharp'.  3D Scanned objects are known to have interesting stuff tagged with their surface information.  And to blender, those stuffs tagged sometimes are identified as 'Sharp' or other markings.

Black lines, those aren't on your mesh, are probably glitches, or they belong to a very huge object in the background.  You can try to select them in the current edit mode showed in the picture.  If you can select them, they exist inside current editing-object.  Otherwise they belong to other objects in your scene.  Note that Lamp and other type of objects also use black lines to show themselves.

Those on your mesh, obviously are the wires that create faces and connects vertices.


When to use sRGB and when not to? I discovered that in my Scene Color Management, Display Device has always been set to sRGB. When I turn it off, the color of a given RGB now seems to match what I see in say Matplotlib. No matter how many times I try to read about color spaces, I always feel like I've walked into a movie 45 minutes late. So I'm not going to even try to sound knowledgeable here.

Since I'm looking at Blender with a computer screen which presumably already has a limited color space (compared to human vision) why would I want to push a button that at least appears to limit it even further?

I'm going to generate non-photo-realistic images (fixed an moving) to post on the internet. I like the colors I see when sRGB is turned off, but should I be using it anyway?

Here's what I was doing when I finally realized the colors were looking washed out with sRGB turned on:

import bpy

rr = [0.000, 0.000, 0.325, 0.663, 0.780, 0.925, 0.941, 0.961, 0.988, 1.000, 0.561, 0.000]
gg = [0.451, 0.255, 0.267, 0.318, 0.278, 0.196, 0.380, 0.525, 0.725, 0.945, 0.780, 0.659]
bb = [0.431, 0.545, 0.537, 0.545, 0.376, 0.216, 0.208, 0.204, 0.176, 0.071, 0.290, 0.353]

xx = np.linspace(-5, 6, 12)
for i in range(12):
    ok = bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cube_add(location=(xx[i],0,2),radius=0.4)
    ao = bpy.context.active_object
    mat = bpy.data.materials.new('mat')
    mat.diffuse_color = rr[i], gg[i], bb[i]
    ao.active_material = mat

sRGB:

None:

This plot comes from comparing the RGB of the screen shot with sRGB turned ON, compared to the python RGB values in the script. The slope of about 0.45 makes sense - the sRGB is roughly like a gamma of 2.2 applied on a per-color basis according to Wikipedia. 1/0.45 ~ 2.2

Edit: Note this is an ancient answer, pre-Filmic Blender. The TL; DR version is that you must always pixel manage everything. Do not turn transforms off, and appropriately tag your buffers.

  No matter how many times I try to read about color spaces, I always
  feel like I've walked into a movie 45 minutes late.

Don't feel too bad as there is so much misinformation out there and confusion that many artists end up following what amounts to digital alchemy rituals in order to get things right. The best advice I can give you is to figure out who you believe you can listen to, and ask as many questions as you can until the subject is absolutely clear. Your work will most certainly be elevated once you manage to grab onto the rather slippery subject.

  Since I'm looking at Blender with a computer screen which presumably
  already has a limited color space (compared to human vision) why would
  I want to push a button that at least appears to limit it even
  further?

This is a seemingly simple question that has a massive set of roots under the surface. The TL;DR is that if you don't enable sRGB, the result is wrong.

  I like the colors I see when sRGB is turned off, but should I be using
  it anyway?

TL; DR: Yes.

Since you took the time to ask the question, I'll do my best to try and give you an entry level conceptual framework to work with. Hopefully it will aid your understanding and help you grasp a little bit more about colour and its management.

Two Sides to Colour

At the core of colour and how it is encoded into data are two loose concepts.

The first is the colour of the light, or in colour nerd terms, chromaticity. When we think of an RGB triplet of data, we have to ask ourselves what the values mean. RGB data is merely an arbitrary numerical representation of three primary lights for each of the red, green, and blue channels. If I were to say "Hey, grab a flashlight in your house that looks red and turn the slider up to 0.8-ish.", that is roughly what we are communicating when we fail to use colour spaces and colour management; we are communicating absolutely nothing.

Without associating the RGB encoded values to a colour space, we are speaking gibberish. We know nothing about the actual colour of the light on your flashlight, nor do we know what the heck 0.8 means in any meaningful representation.

In addition to the chromaticities of the primary lights, we also have what is known as a transfer function, sometimes erroneously called "gamma." This is a term that describes how the values relate to each other in intensity, where the ground truth is a radiometrically linear quantity of light in relation to a scene or a display’s output. 0.8 in our example above tells us absolutely nothing about how intense the value is in relation to the other values because we don't really know anything about the encoding system used nor how the transfer function is defined.

Colour Space

To solve the above issues, we need more information than purely the relative RGB data. We need to communicate what the values actually mean in relation to some known standards or ratios. If we know what the colours of the primary RGB lights are in absolute terms, what the transfer function ratios are for the data, and some other aspects, we could call that combination of variables a colour space; an encapsulation of a bunch of additional data not communicated with the relative RGB encoded data.

sRGB is one such creature. sRGB has very clearly defined absolute chromaticities defined for each of the red, green, blue channels, as well as a defined white point. It also includes specifications for the transfer function. These facets allow us to 'decode' the RGB values in an image and properly communicate their intention and handling through a pipeline.

Why Linear?

So what does Blender have to do with all of this and why the hell do we see "linear" somewhere and what is sRGB and why? Why? WHY?

The answer to this is rather simple. In practical terms, Blender is completely blind to the colour of the lights (see chromaticity above) and merely worries about performing math on the data values. Cycles, however, is a ray tracer and attempts to, as best as it can with a tri-colour or tristumulus model, emulate real-world physics when it comes to rendering.

Real world physics is pretty simple when it comes to math. One unit of light plus one unit of light is, in shockingly, two units of light. Energies operate in a linear fashion, and as such, they behave very rationally.

sRGB on the other hand, for various historical reasons and circumstances, is a non-linear colour space. That is, the transfer function portion of the colour space is bent in such a way that the values are not linearly related. 0.4 plus 0.4 in sRGB is not twice the radiometric amount of light! To see a quick visual effect of this non-linear nasty math, fill up a background in your favorite imaging application of full green and full blue for a cyan colour. Now take a fuzzy fully red brush and paint across it. See the nasty fringing? That is a result of bad and broken math due to a nonlinear reference space.

When you load an image in Blender, it is rolled through OpenColorIO. OpenColorIO is the library that handles and tracks all of the colour space related complexities. The goal of OpenColorIO within Blender is to make sure that the reference mixing space is always linearized such that Cycles can perform proper math for the imaging.

Phew

So why sRGB? If we use a linearized reference space, and we were to dump those linear values direct to the display, our display's output would look wrong. In particular, it would look extremely dark because we haven't properly "corrected" the values back to a nonlinear response. When we select sRGB in Blender, we are telling the program to roll the linearized reference data back out through the correct nonlinear sRGB transfer curve.

If we don't do this, the data is entirely incorrect for storage in a JPEG, a TIFF, or other such nonlinear wrappers. It is also completely incorrect for viewing.

So when you are entering your values, you need to be certain whether you are entering tone response curved values or linearized values, and be absolutely careful at which point in the pipeline you are entering them. An image loaded from a JPEG would need to have its display referred non-linear data properly linearized to display linear before use.

If you mix and match the values without care, the visible representation of the values will not match what is 'expected' from other applications that are likely using nonlinear sRGB values.

This is, despite being a long winded bunch of rubbish, only the tip of the colour space iceberg. There's so much more to expose yourself to that will almost certainly be interesting to anyone creating visuals.

I hope I didn't lose you, and I hope you manage to understand why you should be using that odd sRGB viewing transform. I also hope you try to learn a little more about the rather vast subject of colour management.

Addendum

This answer was provided in the context of the default set of transformations present in Blender. The answer tackles "Should there be a transform between the scene referred data and the display referred output?" abstract question. To this end, the answer is provided in that context. If this is of interest, researching the various transforms that can be used to elevate scene referred rendering and imagery would be useful. There's more than a few of those out there now...


How do I get hair to follow the rig? I created a model with make human and added hair via the emitter tool.  I added clothes and rigged the person with pitchipoy.  Everything seems to be moving right except for the hair.  While animating the object the hair stays in place, shouldn't it follow the emitter and the bones?  Or do I have to add bones for the hair somehow as well?

You need to make sure that the armature modifier is above the hair particle system in the modifier stack. If they are in the wrong order, move them up or down in the stack by clicking the arrows at the right end.

Next you need to mark Use Modifier Stack on the particle system settings. You may also need to activate Hair Dynamics, depending on exactly what you want to do. I don't use hair dynamics much, but what I can tell you about it, is that the more segments the strands have, the higher you need to set the stiffness, or the hair will fall through the emitter.

The movement of this sphere is controlled by a single bone, and as you can see, it follows the emitter, after setting these options. It's a bit jumpy, because I only rendered every tenth frame, and I didn't bother to make it looping endlessly, but I hope the point is clear anyway.


Object dimensions changing but not changing I am having a simple problem with Blender 2.76b using Python 3.4.2.

I'm trying to change the dimensions (not scale) of a mesh, and then put another object next to it, depending on the new size.   However, after changing the dimensions (which works fine, the actual size in the animation changes) it still gives me the original dimensions when called.

Code:

add_cube  = bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cube_add
add_cube(location=(0,0,0))
actor_name = bpy.context.scene.objects.active.name

#randomized size to check if post resize call is working:
sizex = random.randint(3,10)
sizey = random.randint(3,10)
sizez = random.randint(3,10)
bpy.data.objects[actor_name].dimensions = (sizex, sizey, sizez)
#end of random resize test

objdim = bpy.data.objects[actor_name].dimensions
print('Actor Dimensions: ', objdim)

A standard cube is (2,2,2) big.  When the code runs it changes the object size, but then prints "Vector((2.0, 2.0, 2.0))" when it should be bigger.  Putting in static values instead of random numbers produces the same problem.

Running this in the python command line in the scripts window works fine, running from script does not.  Am I missing some refresh thing?

Anyone come across this?  It's like it's not refreshing the actual dimensions when I call them.

It seems the answer is to do a scene refresh after updating values.   This works for this particular problem, but I suspect this issue is also elsewhere in the API.
Code up to 2.79:
bpy.context.scene.update()

For 2.8+ version:
bpy.context.view_layer.update()


Choose 10,000 random points inside mesh I'm going to be throwing a mesh into a BEM acoustic simulator.

There is a well-known resonance problem with BEM acoustic simulators --if you test for a frequency that matches one of the resonance modes of the mesh, it goes crazy.

There is a known workaround which involves creating random points inside the mesh, so that's what I would like to do.

How would I go about implementing a python script to do this?

I'm assuming scripting is the best way, please someone correct me if I'm wrong here.

EDIT: how about picking a random point-pair P Q, intercepting it with the mesh, and if there are exactly 2 points of intersection A and B, then use A + t(B-A) where t is randomly chosen between 0 and 1

For a closed mesh of a human head and shoulders (so mostly convex), a significant number of points pairs should produce a valid result

The only question is: can I determine the points at which a line hits a mesh?

EDIT: mathutils.geometry.intersect_ray_tri from http://www.blender.org/documentation/blender_python_api_2_65_5/mathutils.geometry.html

EDIT: http://www.blender.org/documentation/248PythonDoc/Mesh.Mesh-class.html#pointInside

There is  way to do this without python, using particles.

Create a particle system and pick volume and random as the distribution settings:

Also set the physics to none to conserve processing power.

You'll want to set the Number to 10000, but I don't think the computer I'm currently on will like that :P.
Create a one-vertex object. The easiest way to do this is by adding a plane and deleting three vertices. After you delete the extra verts, switch back to object mode (Tab) and press ShiftCtrlAltC> Origin to geometry to snap the origin to the single vertex.
Pick your single vertex object as the particle system object in Particles > Render:

With the object with the particle system selected, press Convert on the particle modifier in the  modifiers tab:

Join the resulting vertices to your object with CtrlJ (everything should already be selected correctly). Remember to remove the particle system, as pressing Convert does not delete it.

Result:


How can I trace an image to create an object? For reference material, I've loaded an image onto a plane and made it un-selectable. Now I'd like to "trace" it by clicking to create a series of vertices, make them into a path, turn that path into a plane, then extrude the plane into a 3D shape. (In Photoshop terms, I'd like to use the Blender equivalent of the Polygonal Lasso tool to create and fill a selection with color.)

So far, I've been doing this by adding a plane, then subdividing and pushing around individual vertices until I have enough to approximate my reference. It's a slow process and it strikes me that there's likely a better approach.

You can hit e to extrude a vertex or you can ctrl + right click to extrude to mouse position. F while two vertices are selected will join them with an edge, and if you have an edge loop selected the same f will fill it with a face.


How to bake materials [With complex node setup] into Texture in blender 2.9? I want to convert my snow material into texture and I followed the baking method but for some reason only the sides of the object are baked any kind of help or fix will be appreciated

my node setup for material is as follows

The required material render is as follows I need the glittery snow effect to the snow material but only the top face of the object wont render on the texture

The edges of your snow object are very large n-gons:

The vertices of the n-gons do seem to be coplanar, and the normals appear to be facing the right direction, so I’m not entirely sure why this causes any trouble. But empirically, they do seem to be the source of the issue—if I remove them, the problem goes away:

If you need the edge faces, an easy way to recreate them is to select the outermost edge loop, then extrude downwards along the Z axis:

To make the lowermost vertices coplanar, you can then press SZ0⏎ to scale to zero along the Z axis:

Now you can re-unwrap the mesh, and for baking, I recommend using UV ▸ Lightmap Pack, since that will fill the space as optimally as possible. Then re-bake:

(Note that I’ve used a small sample size here for a short baking time, which is why the result looks so noisy, but obviously you should bake at your normal resolution to get better results.)


Problem with moving vertices in shape key edit mode Does anyone know why a totally unrelated vertex is moving with the vertex that I want to move when I'm trying to build a shape key in edit mode? There are no drivers and no unusual modifiers other than the armature modifier?

Vertices in their original position.

The only selected vertex moved upwards, the vertex in the red circle moves along in a completely random direction.

EDIT: A gif of how the rogue vertex moves

EDIT: Here is the blender file
Bear.blend

When in Edit mode, there is an Options tab in the Tool box (T).  In the tab you had X mirror and topology mirror turned on.  If you untick X mirror, the two vertices stop moving together.

(Also, you ought to Apply Rotation, (Control A/ Rotation) so that local axes agree with global axes, not that that was the cause of the problem. It can cause rigging problems if it's not applied. Also you should Apply scale (Control A/Scale) because if you ever animate a child object rotating around the bear it will inherit the Scale as it rotates, and become bigger on one axis, then shrink again as it goes further around)

Note that if you apply Rotation and Scale, but don't untick the X mirror box, the two vertices now move in a logical, mirrored direction at least. So your local rotation and scale values were interfering with the proper function of the X mirror tool.


Add custom hotkey for existing addon fuction in the keymap editor An addon I installed has a button in the interface with an associated function, and the button doesn't have a hotkey. When I hover over the button, there's a python tooltip with the function, something like "bpy.ops.addonName.functionName(arguments)"
How do I add a new custom hotkey that mimics a press of that button, running the associated function and arguments, through the keymap editor in Blender settings?

Right click on the button, and use "assign shortcut":

It will be saved in your settings and available for the next sessions.


Projection painting from images sequences/movies I have a shot where the camera is moving around an object. The scene was tracked and a digital object was modeled over the real one. I want to use the image  information from the movie clip to paint over the recreated object (on a texture) by stepping through the frames and using the current frame as my projection. (Hopefully my explanation makes sense)

So far I noticed that in the source clone image options from the clone brush in texture paint mode, I can use the viewer node. Maybe that could do it?? So far I wasn't successful.

How can I make this work?

As nobody seemed to be able to answer my question, here is how I worked around my problem:

So my goal was to paint a texture over an object, using image information from a movie clip (displayed in the background image as a camera clip).

My first approach was trying to use the clone brush in texture paint mode. The problem here is that it is only possible to use an image as the source. I was then thinking about writing a python script, that would use the viewer node to export an image (current frame in camera clip), load it into the source from the clone brush so that I could essentially paint on my object from the camera clip. But ... yea that turned out to be too complicated and too long for me to work on (would be a nice feature though). So I looked for a more reasonable and not so time consuming solution.

The thing I came up with seems pretty straight forward. Simply split up your movie into chunks and use one image per chunk. Then I could make vertex groups, unwrap them using camera projection and project the image that I want for that specific group onto the texture. I then combined the textures and smoothed the edges out, so that you wouldn't see them in the final result.

And that's it. I think the clone brush would have been a nicer solution, but this also worked fine.

Hope this helps someone out there :)


Use image to make circuit board I'm trying to give a mesh a Circuit board texture with an image as the refrence.

I need the green lines to extrude out of a mesh. Here's my setup

and here's what i got:

As you can see, the lines are fuzzy and distorted. how can I get them crisp and extruded?

I think the displacement map not working properly is a side effect of the colour in the image. You probably want to convert that into grayscale before using it as a displacement map.

Well, with a quick bit of photoshop work, here's what I came up with. It's not perfect and you can see the pixels if you zoom in a bit too much, but it works somewhat.

Displacement map:

Colour:

Node Setup:

Final Result:

Edit:

Typically you won't want to plug in the normal map node. I did that because there were some shading issues that cropped up in Eevee, and it seemed to fix it. In cycles, it works fine without the Normal Map node.


Trouble extruding complex shape from model I am having some trouble adding the following geometry to my model:

The problem in the picture is that the gray geometry isn't connected to the black part of the model. I'm doing some bevel work, and it needs to be connected. I tried using a knife project of the shape, and extruding it from the model. But I had trouble getting all of my faces to stay flat. It created weird artifacts. I also tried using boolean operations to connect the gray part to the model, but the boolean operation failed, and I couldn't figure out a way for that to work either. I am not sure how to solve this.

I feel like there is a better solution; everything I have tried so far has produced artifacts. Are there any modeling techniques for extruding this kind of geometry? Or is there some other way for me to attach the gray mesh to the rest of the model?

You need a quad strip running along where the two meshes meet to get your result without artifacts.

I would suggest:

Dublicate everything and hide the original versions of both objects.
Use a boolean operation to union the two copies.
In edit-mode, delete everything but the edge where they meet. You should now have a face less object that just describes the cut.
Bring back the originals and join everything.
Delete faces around the seam and create new faces that connects to the real seam.
Bevel the seam a slight amount.

Both objects:

Unioned objects with all but seam selected.

Original objects joined plus seam. Faces bordering seams deleted.

Merged geometry. Not all faces are quads, some are pentagons. Try to avoid that (I was in a hurry).

Geometry in wireframe view with beveled seam selected

Same geometry in solid view. It turned out ok.


I want to make animations, is Blender the right program for me? I want to create a short 3D animation series. I found out about source filmmaker but as time goes on I am starting to look elsewhere.

It will be a simple male character, holding a monologue behind a desk. I would want to save certain gestures for use later — for example, once I get a few different goodbye waves, I might not need to create another and being able to recall or save old gestures would be great. It also would be the same scene (sitting behind a desk).

I started off with using source filmmaker, but as I learn more about it I realize I will be using custom stuff anyway and it might be smarter in the long run to start with something like Blender instead.

As you can tell I'm totally new and realize that it will take months before I am ready, but I figure I'll ask as I want to make sure I'm heading in the right direction.

Blender is definitely a good program to use, seeing your purpose. It just needs a bit of patience and practice.

And  about saving actions — it can be done using the action editor in the Blender interface, so that you can use it multiple times. Though you should go through some tutorials on how to do this. There are numerous tutorials on YouTube that explain this functionality. Here's a link.


How do I convert a triangle mesh to a quads one? I'm throwing a 3D triangulated mesh into an acoustic simulator.  The simulator instructions say that ideally it wants quads.  If it receives triangles, it will consider them as a degenerate quad (i.e. A B C -> A B C A)

Is there some automatic method of converting most (or all) of my triangles into quads?   Somehow pairing them up...

π

While in Edit Mode, select the parts of your mesh you want to convert and use Alt + J or from the Faces special menu with Ctrl + F > Tris to Quads to convert tris to quads or via the 3d view header, use, Mesh > Faces > Tris to Quads.

This tool converts the selected triangles into quads by taking adjacent tris and removes the shared edge to create a quad, based on a threshold.
To create a quad, this tool needs at least two adjacent triangles. If you have an even number of selected triangles, it is also possible not to obtain only quads. In fact, this tool tries to create "squarest" quads as possible from the given triangles, which means some triangles could remain.


Why do i get wrong shading like if there are sharp edges that shouldn't be there? This propeller i modeled has wrong shading on the tip of the blades, like if there are sharp edges but there aren't. The vertices are all connected, the normals are calculated correctly like u can see in the screenshot. I tried splitting it on the wrong shading line and rejoining them, but even after cleaning by distance the problem is still there. The model is using the auto smooth at 180° so that's not the problem either. Also if it can help, when i try to unwrap it, i get separate islands like if those sharp edges had seams aswell even if they don't. What could it be?

You need to delete the inner faces that we can see here, they are messing up with the normals:


How can I get correct audio output? I'm using blender 2.79b to edit a video.  I'm not using it for 3d modeling at all.  I edited the video in the VSE and everything plays fine from inside of blender.  I then render the video to a file.  I've tried every combination of audio codecs with the MPEG-4 container and H.264 video codec but every time the audio is either not present or is garbled when playing in Windows Media Player.  Every case except for using Vorbis as the audio codec is garbled or not present when using VLC.  I tried uploading the version using Vorbis to You Tube and the You Tube playback was garbled.

My searching and experimentation has reached its limits so I'm hoping someone can help me.  Thank you!

I finally got good output by converting the file I was trying to use to a wave file and using that in Blender.  The weird thing is the video in Blender would then be choppy when previewing it, but the rendered output was ok.  If anyone knows why this happens, or a way where files other than wave can be used, please let us know.


Bone animation rotation problem Good afternoon guys,

i have this little animation:

https://gyazo.com/aa8917e8bcbc0988f47d5f1b3a3617b9

I want to make a popup like stairs, i am copying the rotation from the major bone in each little bone and then i am inverting like this
(invert,non,invert,non,invert,non)

The problem is that the last bone should remain in the "ground" and the other bones shouldn't go in the z axis more than what they are to be physically correct. But i am having a rough time finding how to...

I tried to limit location but didnt work maybe i did something wrong.

The blend file is here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/a9tzk4oagqfpenm/PopUpStairs.blend?dl=0

First of you should delete the constraint on every second bone. This will give you a pop up behaviour.

In order to make them not intersect by bending to far, I would simply manually rotate the large bone to the point, where the deformation looks fine.
A real popup book would never be able to fully close. Your model also doesn't have proper volume, so cheating is best, as long as it looks good.

Finally, I would suggest adding a root bone. Assign the bottom card to the root bone, and constrain all bones parallel the floor to the root (which will also be parallel to the floor).

This will ensure not only closing downwards, but also closing upwards (if you want that).

In the following I also constrained the large yellow bone to the root.

This is how I would construct the rig.

Step by step instructions how to create the rig

Set up all the bones as they were, add a root bone, which will be used to rotate and move the whole rig.
Parent the first bone (red) of the step chain to the horizontal large bone (green).
Parent the large green and red bones to the root bone.
Make sure all bones' Z-axis are parallel.
Lock the X and Y rotation on all bones, except the root bone.
Create an additional horizontal bone with the same orientation as the horizontal bones of the steps and parent it to the large green bone. This way we can use less confusing world space copy rotation constraints.
Add a Rotation Constraint from the large red bones to the small red bones.
Add a Rotation Constraint from the small (inverted) green bone, to the small green bones controling the steps.
Hide all small bones.

(Long Gif.)


Why is the bone group remove button disabled? I want to delete these bone groups but the remove button is disabled. How do I unlock and delete them?

You must be in pose mode.

Select the armature and press CtrlTab, or set the mode in 3D view > Header:


Hair particles rendering white dots When I use Hemi light to do rendering I got white dots on hair particles, but when I use sun light it shows no such issue, what am I doing wrong? Cuz the issue goes away when I do not use the glossy shader for making my hair more gloss like.

When with hemi light rendered:

When with sun light rendered:

Shader nodes I used to create the shiny hair effect:

The issue with the white dots is solved, I used different node setup, now it looks much better with hemi light as well:

Here's the node setup I used:


How to easily create stadium tribunes? How to make stadium tribunes as fast as possible using modifiers and use one global texture as base to all tribunes with no UV maps?
Thanks.

Search on google: bunyodkor stadium

Just for fun, you can make a fully procedural tribune in just 3 steps.
Use the Screw modifier and the Mapping node.

No UV unwrapping. All modifiers still editable.

Create a profile and use the Screw modifier to make it round.
Create your image texture
Use the Mapping node to position it on your tribune.

Create a tribune profile and add the Screw Modifier.

Adjust your texture position using the Mapping Node.

You're done.


How to "straighten" a rigged character's head So I have a playermodel that isn't in a t-pose, I managed to rig it with an autorigger, however the issue is that his head is turned slightly to the side around 20-30 degrees meaning he is stuck looking to the side when animated. Is there a way that I can use the bones to straighten out the character's head permanently so he looks forward?

You can try rotating the bone to be straight and then use Ctrl + A and select rotation to apply the current rotation as default/rest position,


Tracking your render progress Doing high quality renders requieres too much time, we all know that.

Up until now I have always been roughtly calculating when I have to start then next render and many times it has ment getting up in the middle of the night to start up the next one.

Is there anyway to track the progress, for example when a render is done to get an alarm on Windows or on my phone?

I am not sure you are still struggling with your render as its a late answer. But may be useful for some one else too.

Its not good to do that manually or set the finished alarm.

I will take back you to 90's where we can set the commands in command prompt in a batch, using batch files.

Lets say you want to render two files you may use it like this

cd C:\Users\Me\Downloads\blender-2.79-windows64

blender -b "D:\Path\Train 001.001.blend" -s 1 -e 2 -a

blender -b "D:\Path\Train 002.001.blend" -s 2 -e 4 -a

The first line is for the blender exe file path, you may set it according to your system.

The second and third lines are for rendering two different files and different frames.

You may save the above code in a text file and save it anywhere in your computer and with any name but extension should be .bat

Now right click on file (.bat) we just created and Run as administrator

You may add as much files and frames as you like

or have several interesting and useful render options here Command Line


Is there a way to tile a texture automatically over an object? There must be a simple option to tile a texture evenly over any object automatically. Are there any ways to do this?

While it isn't entirely clear what you are asking, if my assumption is correct, you want to map a texture onto an object in a way that it repeats X amount of times over one or both axes. Like a tiled floor.

The easiest way to do this is to scale the UV coordinates in the image editor to X times the bounds of the UV space. Any faces assigned UVs outside of this space will loop or "tile" like so:

Before scaling

After scaling


Some images are painted on. These changes will be lost. Continue? I get this message when attempting to pack all textures.
My actual question is: How to easily locate those "unsaved" textures?

I did this before with a copy of this file and there were no problems. The difference this time around is that I packed some textures individually. Then I went to the File menu and chose External Data/Pack all into .blend.

Thanks guys,

DPC

If you don't save the painted textures as images they will be irretrievably lost. Blender does not save painted images on the blend file by default. They need to be saved as images first (F3). Only then you can pack them into the file and save.

To know if an image has been saved see the bottom bar on the UV/Image editor window: Unsaved images (Images that have been altered, or painted over) will show a star (*) right next to Image on the menu.

Once they've been saved (F3)the star will diappear and they can be packed properly into the blend file.


How to make Modifier panel visible in Toolshelve import bpy

from bpy.types import Menu, Panel, UIList

class View3DPanel():
  bl_space_type = 'VIEW_3D'
  bl_region_type = 'TOOLS'

class OpenStudioAddRigPanel(View3DPanel, Panel):
 bl_label = "Test"
 bl_context = "objectmode"
 bl_category = "Test"

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

    ob = context.object

    layout.operator_menu_enum("object.modifier_add", "type")

    for md in ob.modifiers:
        box = layout.template_modifier(md)
        if box:
            # match enum type to our functions, avoids a lookup table.
            getattr(self, md.type)(box, ob, md)

def register(): bpy.utils.register_module(__name__)
def unregister(): bpy.utils.unregister_module(__name__)
if __name__ == "__main__": register()
print("Add Rig loaded")

So I try to learn how I could move the modifier stack into the tool shelve so I can work full screen without the need of the button menu.

I am totaly new at UI scripting and scripting in general with Blender, so I am looking for some guidance and tips what to do. I managed to make some modifier related stuff appear in the tool shelve but it does not list all added modifiers and such.

So I looked into: "properties_data_modifier.py"
This defines for example a boolean modifier operation but I fail to see how
I could also get this running in the tool shelve. Sad me ;)

def BOOLEAN(self, layout, ob, md):
    split = layout.split()

    col = split.column()
    col.label(text="Operation:")
    col.prop(md, "operation", text="")

    col = split.column()
    col.label(text="Object:")
    col.prop(md, "object", text="")

So to sum it up: what I try to look for is the ability to list all added modifiers in the 3D view port tool panel and in addition enable you to edit them.

I did a quick hack and edited the modifier py script and it all can be displayed in the tool panel - so technically this is possible. Can somebody tell me how one could include this as a class in a new script?

The panel displaying the modifiers includes methods with names matching every modifier type that are used to display the properties of the matching modifier, getattr() is used to find the matching method based on the type of modifier in the objects modifier list.

While inheriting the modifiers panel directly causes issues, you can create a local instance of the panel and make use of the methods it contains.

import bpy
from bl_ui.properties_data_modifier import DATA_PT_modifiers

class myModifiersPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    bl_label = "Object Modifiers"
    bl_idname = "OBJECT_PT_mymodifiers"
    bl_space_type = 'VIEW_3D'
    bl_region_type = 'TOOLS'
    bl_category = "Modifiers"

    def draw(self, context):
        mp = DATA_PT_modifiers(context)
        layout = self.layout
        ob = context.object
        row = layout.row()

        if not ob.modifiers:
            row.label('No modifiers')
        else:
            for md in ob.modifiers:
                box = layout.template_modifier(md)
                if box:
                    getattr(mp, md.type)(box, ob, md)

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

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


How can I make a conveyor belt FBX that spins without rigging? I tried rigging, doesnt work. I tried exporting it with curve unapplied, doesnt work. What WILL work? I am grappling for help right now, Ive looked at everything. Please help me, I need help.

I have a conveyor belt with a curve modifier unapplied. I move a cube and the tracks roll. the object doesnt actually move. I have tried rigging it with bones because i thought there was no other answer and spent 3 days on tutorials and 8 days total on this issue. I import it to unity, and it suddenly isnt rolling, but translating. It just moves, because the curve rolls in blender when i move it, but in unity it just moves the whole thing. I need help.

If you want to make the belt "spin" without any rigging, I'd suggest animating the texture offset of the material applied to only the belt inside of Unity.
This will give the illusion of the belt "spinnig"
http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Material.SetTextureOffset.html

Just increase the x or y offset every frame in

void Update ()

And make sure to multiply the increment by Time.deltaTime so the speed is consistent across all framerates


How to select overlapping objects If you duplicate an object in edit mode with Shift+D, and then hit P to make it its own object, it deselects and remains in place over/with the original object. What’s the keyboard move to determine/select the duplicate object from the original one (not using the outline)? Andrew Price does this too fast to figure out.

If multiple objects are very close together or even overlapping entirely and visually indistinguishable from one another, you can use Alt + right click to get a drop-down menu that allows you to choose from a list of objects in that area.

In the screen shot below there are actually two identical cubes overlapping. The menu lets us choose which one to select.

More on this and other selection methods in the Blender Reference Manual.


How do I make baked ambient occlusion surfaces appear white instead of gray? I baked an ambient occlusion map of a model but the main surfaces appear gray. I would like them to appear white so that I can multiply the ambient occlusion map with a texture map that I make.

How can I bake ambient occlusion maps where a flat surface appears white rather than gray?

Here is a picture of the model which appears gray:

Here is the AO map which shows the gray:

This depends on the diffuse color of your object.
Make sure the color is set to white and the intensity is set to 1 before baking:

Result:


Bubble like fur with displacement modifer What kind of texture would I need to use to get what you see on the left, with a displacement modifer?

The left hand side model is made with sculpt mode and dynotopo, but that of course ruins the topology.

I tried using black circle texture to no avail, and kind of stuck on what kind of texture I would need to create to achieve what I'm after.

Any help would be appreciated, blend attached!

Looks like the job for a Voronoi type of texture.

You may have to invert the Strength parameter of the modifier to a negative value get the displayed result.

Adjust the size value and play around with intensity and distance metrics to get the perfect feel.
Distance Squared gave me the closest feel to what you show. Make sure your mesh subdivided enough, high density is required for sharp corners.


Can't figure out how to fix non-manifold geometry in my game title So I have this mesh and I'm having issues figuring out why these are non-manifold geometries, I've pulled them apart, dissolved them, merged them by distances, checked for any faces that shouldn't be there or extra vertices / edges and I don't understand why these are being marked non-manifold, normally this wouldn't even be a problem because I won't be further modifying the mesh further, but I need to UV unwrap this to apply a texture to it in my game and that requires manifold geometry from what I understand, I also can't dissolve these edges to make the title look sleek and clean.
I've tried quite a few guides on non-manifold geometry and it seems like my entire model is derped both in terms of vertices and edges, faces are okay apparently but I don't understand what I did wrong, I just extruded and merged vertices by edges to make essentially all of it, and even if I had extruded extra edges and forgot to undo them I merged all the selected points manually and by selection by trait and neither produces any result so I don't imagine there are duplicate vertices / edges.
Any help for fixing and/or improving my modeling technique would be greatly appreciated, I've made a few models but this is the first time I've ever even encountered this sort of problem.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iqUoXQXGYPrqvPpo2CdKPBRoVGIl1vWA/view?usp=sharing
A link to the blend file

You sure you merged by distance? I tried it upon first opening your file and it removed 195 vertices right from the get go (shown at bottom).

As you can see from the face orientation overlay, half of your mesh has faces facing inwards and the other half outwards. There is also a problem with the circled face (there may be a couple more instances). It looks connected, but it is in fact overlapping (you can tell by the z-fighting). This may be a result of the merge, but it needs attention nonetheless.

You can fix the normal direction by selecting all and then selecting mesh > normals > recalculate outside, but the face will have to be edited and "re-connected" manually.


Wrong spline length with Animation Nodes With Get Spline Length i get wrong measurments for curly spline.
How to get proper length?

Animation Nodes 2.0.4 Blender 2.79b

The Get Spline Length node approximates the length of the spline, as there is no efficient analytical solution to that. The node provides a resolution option in the Advanced Node Settings to control the precision of the approximation. Increasing that should allow a more accurate computation of the length:


I cant use dyntopo because it reacts very slow In sculpting mode, when i enable dyntopo and click on a brush the whole sculpt degrades to a very low resolution and when I draw on it affected area becomes por low poly! I tried changing the size to 2 or 1 then, blender lagged so much! It took 8-10 seconds for blender to respond after each stroke with dyntopo! Im on a Ryzen 5 3400 processor 8GB ram and no graphics card!  Is it because of my potato computer or is there any other fixes for this? Thanks!

The default setting of Dyntopo for the option 'Detailing' is Relative Detail. This means the closer you are to the object the more "high poly" to the mesh becomes when you draw on it with a brush. On the other hand, the further away you are from the object, the more "low poly" it becomes when you draw on it. A setting of 1 or 2px for Relative Detail is way too high in my opinion. You should be fine with 12px, try 6px for more details, 30px for less details.
Alternatively, you can switch the Detailing to Constant Detail. This will make the underlying mesh to have always the same density. Try a value of 150, increase the value if you need more fine details.
In the Overlays (the icon with the 2 circles in the top right corner of the viewport) you can activate the Wireframe overlay that shows the mesh. So you see better what's going on with the density of the mesh.


Missing Texture Color This may be a bit OCD from me, but whenever I see people mention the pink missing textures I yell magenta (and get strange looks from my family). I have looked in the manual, but can not find any reference to the color. There also does not seem to be a preference to change the default missing texture color. Finally I have also tried to get it from a Blender output itself, but this depends on the lighting/settings etc.

Does anyone know how to get the actual RGB values for the missing textures, ignoring lights, shadows etc? I need to know if I am a crazy or just crazy smart.

The color, that is used when a texture is not found, is defined by four macros in util_texture.h. The color is magenta with full alpha (no transparency).

#define TEX_IMAGE_MISSING_R 1
#define TEX_IMAGE_MISSING_G 0
#define TEX_IMAGE_MISSING_B 1
#define TEX_IMAGE_MISSING_A 1

Code is licensed under GPLv3

The macros are used whenever image data isn't available, e.g. in ImageManager::device_load_image() image.cpp when the loading of an image failed or in ImageTextureNode::compile() nodes.cpp when no texture has been selected in the Image Texture node.


Drag select with mouse Is it possible to select the objects by dragging left mouse button like in other CAD or 3D softwares. If i change the keyboard shortcuts to Maya in the settings I could do that. But I dont know which key is mapped to that. This could be done with box select but i want to achieve something by clicking on blank screen and dragging the mouse.

I believe that you are looking for B. B allows for exactly what you describe -- Box Select. Upon its being pressed, the cursor turns into a crosshair and awaits your  LMB dragging. Note that you can additionally use  MMB to Box Deselect.

It works as an additive or subtractitive tool, only selecting more or less, never affecting ones already selected or deselected. It works in every editor that you can select something (not just the 3D Viewport but the UV Image Editor, Graph Editor, etc.)


Problem with linking Objects to Bone So I tried weight painting first then just simply straight "Assigning" bones but either method results in the below picture.

As you can see, when I move the model in pose mode the face objects attached to the head bone clip through the body mesh. Any help would be very much appreciated.

PS. I also don't know how to have the bones show up in the "vertex groups" for the "Pupils" object. Somehow they show in the other face objects but not the pupils. Help with that would also be appreciated. Thank you.

First thing, you should lower down the Subsurf View value of all your objects to 2 because at 5 it's hard to work.

Now, about your problem, it's because your eyes, eyebrows and eyelids are separate objects, and you didn't parent them With Automatic Weight but directly to armature as a simple parent: as you can see, if you select them, enter in Edit mode, and see what are their vertex groups in the Properties panel > Data > Vertex Groups, there's only Armature (meaning the armature object on its whole will move these objects, but not the bones within this armature, i.e. like a basic parentage from an object to another).

So first select eyes, eyebrows and eyelids, join them to the whole body with ctrlJ, go back in the vertex groups list of the whole body and delete this Armature group. Now assign all these new vertices to the group called "head". It should work (well, still some corrections to make in Weight Paint mode so that the neck bone doesn't affect the head mesh).

Hurray and Happy New Year !!!!


Displacement Maps look pixelated in EEVEE When I add a displacement map to a UVd object in EEVEE the details look pixelated (although they look good in Cycles).

In EEVEE I have tried using subdivision surface modifiers and disabling half-res trace but the details still look pixelated. Am I using the wrong settings in 2.8 Beta or is there currently no quality settings at the moment because it is in Beta? I have added a screenshot showing what it looks like.

This is a known limitation as of Blender 2.80. Displacement maps aren’t truly supported. The displacement shaders will only affect the normals, not the actual vertex positions. Aka, it’s a bump map. And all bump maps in Eevee are currently limited to 2x2 pixels blocks, see https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/eevee/limitations.html#materials


Strange bevel and union behvaior I was trying to follow this tutorial to increase my understanding of bevels.
I got to 19:36 when I noticed that my cylinder can only go so far towards the edge, until it starts acting strangely. Is there a way I can fix this?

Further from edge

Closer to edge

Disabling loop slide on the last bevel modifier seemed to do the trick, it doesn't look very smooth though so if anyone has a better answer please post it


How do I remove gaps between two wavefront OBJ layers? I have generated two wavefront OBJ layers - a terrain surface from GeoTIFF to TIN to OBJ and some buildings from shapefile to extruded shape to OBJ - using Safe Software's FME.  In the FME previewer the two layers sit flush but when I import to Blender (2.78a on Windows 7 64bit) and render a scene the buildings are floating above the surface.

In the image below you can see the odd white line above the black hole of the building footprint.  I also created a single OBJ file by combining the surface and the buildings and embedded the buildings into the surface by offsetting in the Z axis by -1m. The problem persists in Blender.

Is there anything I can do within Blender to move the buildings into position?

The imported OBJ files were projected to the British National Grid (EPSG:27700) and as a result they were located very far from the origin. So, selecting the layer and setting Origin to Geometry and then updating the Location to (0,0,0) results in the buildings sitting flush on the surface.

Thanks to suggestions from batFINGER


Copy transforms from one object to another I want an object to have the same Transforms (location, rotation, and scale) as another object. How can I copy the Transforms from one object to another?

Select the object you wish to move
While the First object is selected, SHIFT Select the other object
Go to the transforms panel

Right click in the Location properties

Copy to selected
Note: You only need to do this for one of the axis, blender will automatically do the other axis as well

Repeat step 4 for Rotation and Scale


what is the name of the blender feature in which a 2d artwork/image is used as a guide to create a 3D model of the artwork I have been watching some blender tutorial videos, in which it is like a 2D art is traced in other to build the 3D model of it. like this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAO4C_8y0w8&t=1301s. What is this feature called in blender ?

Background Image. Hit the plus sign to the left of the outline panel, and it's located about 3/4ths of the way down the panel.


Shared Network install / config priority I'd like to deploy Blender with a custom startup scene and some enabled addons on a network drive, so that every user here can run Blender from there with all the settings and addons.

Sounds easy enough, but the problem is that the users can't generate their own startup/settings because the config folder on the server has a higher priority than the user  config (they would change the settings for all users).

This doesn't make sense at all, and it is different in all other software I can think of. User settings shall always override system settings. Is there a special reason why it is that way in Blender? And even more important: is there a workaraound?

Thanks!

Blender searches three places for a startup file in the following order -

local  - located next to the blender application.
user   - located in the users home folder.
system - located in a shared system location (like /usr/share)

When you save your settings it is saved to the same location as it would be read from at startup.

This works well with the way blender allows you to have multiple copies on your machine, each can have their own config settings unique to that copy.

In your situation you have the local settings in a shared location that you consider a system location.

One option is to compile your own version that ignores the local copy.

Another is to copy your initial startup file into place on each machine.

Maybe the users could start a small setup script instead of blender (or appears to be blender) that checks existence of user config and copies your initial setup to the users machine from the network drive, obviously not located in the proper startup location and then starts blender.


Interactive output in blender I am learning how to use blender. After I create an animation in blender, how do I send the output from a blender application so that it remains interactive?

I mean, I can save as .exe but it is not interactive. How do I create a standalone file that has buttons to fast-forward and rewind the movie and change the camera view when I do something like dragging with mouse?

EDIT
I have an animation in blender. I want to export a standalone player with buttons/features that can change angle of view and do something like change frame rate of animation, or such stuff.

Rendering an animation will create a movie file(or a string of .pngs) which is not an interactive format. It sounds like you want to create an interactive application with the Blender Game engine.

To export a Blender Game (as an Windows exe or Mac app):

Create the game using the Blender Game engine(which can be selected in the render engine dropdown). I'm not going to explain how to create the game, but there are tons of resources available.
Enable the "Save Game as Runtime" addon.
Go to File > Export > Save Game as Runtime


Weird shadows in cycles render I noticed when I render my low poly tree I get this weird shadows/almost unfinished rendering. The render looks all pixelated. What i'm I doing wrong, i'm a complete beginner. thanks! Also i'm using filmic blender.

You haven't rendered anything yet. That's just cycles render preview which uses less samples. You can increase the samples in the render properties. Pressing 'F12' with a camera object in your scene will use the default 128 samples and look much better. The noise in your image is considered normal for the settings.

Preview:

vs

Render at 300 samples:


Quickly Copy UV's from one face to another I am looking for a way to increase the speed of my workflow. For the task at hand I will be using custom textures with replicated UVs across the same model. In other words, the walls will reference the same UV, as will the floor tiles, etc. Right now I have to select a face—let's say a floor tile—resize the uvs until they match the correct area of the texture, and then repeat the process for every other floor tile. It's a little too time consuming. I was wondering if there is a way that I could simply copy the UV rectangle of one floor tile, and copy it to the rest. Here is a picture to further articulate my wishes:

Does anyone have any tips to increase the copying of UVs?

Use this add-on:

https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/UV/Copy_Paste_UVs

You could also just unwrap one, then use an array modifier to duplicate it down the row, then remove doubles.


How to map a pose to the restpose of another rig with same topology? I have 2 rigs with the exact same bone topology, but with different rest poses, see left image below. The T-Pose Rig is displayed in green, the A-Pose rig is displayed in black. Now i want to align the pose bones of the T-pose rig to the edit bones of the A-Pose rig as shown in the right image below.:

I tried to do this by copying the edit_bone.matrix values of the A-Pose rig to the pose bone matrices of the T-Pose rig and on first sight this seems to work perfectly (if all bones are disconnected).

        #Assume the context.object is the t_rig
        for bone in t_rig.pose.bones:
            bone.matrix = a_rig.data.bones[bone.name].matrix_local
            #need to do this, not sure why:
            bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='OBJECT')
            bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='POSE')

But...

I have a problem with the Bone Roll. Here is what happens on the upper arm bone in my example:

For the T-Pose Rig the bone roll z-axis of the arm bones is aligned to the world z-axis, while for the A-Pose rig the bone roll is rotated by 45 degree:

So, when i simply copy the bone matrices, then the bone rolls gets rotated as well. But this has an undesired impact on the bound meshes: the mesh gets rotated with the bone roll:

What i really want to achieve is to copy the matrices without changing the longitudinal rotation of the bones so that the arms are not rotated:

One way to do this is by working through the T-pose rig from top to bottom and for each pose bone do:

move the pose bone head to the corresponding location on the A-Pose rig
Calculate the rotation difference between the pose bone on the t-pose rig and the edit_bone on the a-pose rig
Apply the rotation difference to the pose bone on the T-Pose rig.

However i wonder if there is a better way to align the pose bones of one rig to the edit bones of another rig and keeping the longitudinal bone rotation unchanged.

This requires a lot of matrix math which is complicated by the fact that the mathematical relationship between the various python-accessible matrices and fields is almost undocumented.

Here is an excerpt from http://web.purplefrog.com/~thoth/blender/python-cookbook/pose-match.html that should accomplish your mission:

import bpy
from mathutils import *

def matrix_scale(scale_vec):
    return Matrix([[scale_vec[0],0,0,0],
                   [0,scale_vec[1],0,0],
                   [0,0,scale_vec[2],0],
                   [0,0,0,1]
    ])

def matrix_for_bone_from_parent(bone, ao):
    eb1 = ao.data.bones[bone.name]
    E = eb1.matrix_local # * Matrix.Scale(eb1.length,4)
    ebp = ao.data.bones[bone.name].parent
    E_p = ebp.matrix_local # * Matrix.Scale(ebp.length,4)
    return E_p.inverted() * E

def matrix_the_hard_way(pose_bone, ao):
    if pose_bone.rotation_mode == 'QUATERNION':
        mr = pose_bone.rotation_quaternion.to_matrix().to_4x4()
    else:
        mr = pose_bone.rotation_euler.to_matrix().to_4x4()
    m1 = Matrix.Translation(pose_bone.location) * mr * matrix_scale(pose_bone.scale)

    E = ao.data.bones[pose_bone.name].matrix_local
    if pose_bone.parent is None:
        return E * m1
    else:
        m2 = matrix_the_hard_way(pose_bone.parent, ao)
        E_p = ao.data.bones[pose_bone.parent.name].matrix_local
        return m2 * E_p.inverted() * E * m1

def pose_to_match(arm, goal):
    """
    pose arm so that its bones line up with the REST pose of goal
    """

    matrix_os= {}
    for to_match in goal.data.bones:
        matrix_os[to_match.name] = to_match.matrix_local
        #print([ "matrix", to_match.name, matrix_os[to_match.name] ] )

    #xyz' = s * m * m(parent) * xyz

    for to_pose in arm.pose.bones:
        if to_pose.parent is None:
            len2 = arm.data.bones[to_pose.name].length
            len1 = goal.data.bones[to_pose.name].length
            to_pose.matrix = matrix_os[to_pose.name] * Matrix.Scale(len1/len2, 4)
        else:
            # we can not set .matrix, because a lot of stuff behind the scenes has not yet
            # caught up with our alterations, and it ends up doing math on outdated numbers
            mp = matrix_the_hard_way(to_pose.parent, arm) * matrix_for_bone_from_parent(to_pose, arm)
            m2 = mp.inverted()* matrix_os[to_pose.name] * Matrix.Scale(goal.data.bones[to_pose.name].length, 4)
            loc,rot,scale = m2.decompose()
            to_pose.location = loc
            if 'QUATERNION' == to_pose.rotation_mode:
                to_pose.rotation_quaternion = rot
            else:
                to_pose.rotation_euler = rot.to_euler(to_pose.rotation_mode)
            to_pose.scale = scale / arm.data.bones[to_pose.name].length

#
#
#

pose_to_match(bpy.data.objects['gamma'], bpy.data.objects['beta'])


Need Texture To Fade Around the Edges So I have a stain texture I want to use.

But as you can see it's not a splat, like this one.

I really want to use the first one, but its a rectangle. So I want to know how to make it grow transparent around the edges of the texture (which I want to put on a plane and put in front of my wall in the scene) in Cycles so it fades out and fits in better with my scene.

I once had to do something similar, and I've used two different solutions.

1) Simply add an alpha channel to the image, or create a separate grayscale alpha map to use alongside it.

2) Inset the mesh, with the resulting face being close to the edges (or further, as desired).  Then go to Vertex Paint mode, and set the vertices along the edge to black, and the other vertices to white.  The Vertex Colors are exposed to cycles via the Input->Attribute node, where you type in the name of the Vertex Color dataset (Col by default).

To get the transparency, you plug the alpha (either a map, channel, or vertex color attribute) into the factor input of a Mix Shader node, with one input being Diffuse BSDF (or whatever you're using) and the other being a Transparent BSDF node.  You can use the Color->Contrast node on the alpha input to make it less gradual, or use a Converter->Color Ramp instead.

The image below demonstrates the second technique, using vertex colors:


How can I make my particles freeze in time and convert them into a Mesh? I made a particle system but now i want to extract the particles as a Mesh, or just froze the particles in time, for render time, is this possible?

Find the frame most suited to your goal with the particle system.
Press the Convert button of the particle system modifier, you will have duplicates.  Make a selection of only the emitted particles. Do not include the original particle system mesh.
Join the Meshes with Ctrl-J


Can I combine translucent, SSS and diffuse shaders using the light path node? I have a hair system on a head - I want to use a translucent shader in the head's skin material because a translucent shader allows the colour of the hairs to be seen when they pass beneath the skin -

however, I also want to use a subsurface scattering shader in the skin material because it's more realistic that a translucent shader for skin - unfortunately, though, the SSS shader does not allow the hair colour to be seen beneath the skin -

I'd also like to use a diffuse shader on top of the translucent/SSS shaders to get nice sharp shadows on the skin (both translucent and SSS shaders soften shadows that fall on/into them) - but, of course, the more the diffuse shader is applied the less the translucency/SSS shows up

using mix shaders to combine all these shaders is not optimal: it's always a balance game, more of one means less of another - and the add shader breaks PBR -

I suspect I can combine these shaders in a more controllable and discreet way using the light path node (perhaps using Is Transmission Ray?) - but I've been unable to get it to work - any suggestions?

The Translucent and Sub Surface Scattering shaders produce only an approximation of what is actually a volumetric effect - of the light scattering throughout the internal volume of the material - and this makes it difficult to combine them realistically. You cannot use the Light Path node for this as there is no Light Path that can distinguish between SSS and Translucent paths (since they are both emulated as surface shaders, not actual volumetric rays).

Instead, use a Volumetric material mixed with the surface Diffuse. This allows the transparency of the surface to be adjusted and also allows the volumetric density and scatter/absorption to be adjusted to get the desired effect.

Here's the material :

Adjust the mix node to vary the surface Diffuse/Transparency. Adjust the Value node to affect the volumetric density. Vary the Diffuse shader to affect the surface color and the RGB node to affect the volume.

This can produce the following effect (note the hair roots showing below the surface) :

(Example produced using Branched Path Tracing inteegrator, increasing the Volume samples (to 6) and similarly increasing the number of Volumetric Bounces in the Light Path properties)


Where is the geometry nodes modifier? I couldn't find it anywhere in the dropdown, I also couldn't find it in "experimental" tab in user preference.

If you are looking for it in with other modifiers as subdivision and displace, i dont think you can find it there.
Select the object you want it to be applied and in the editor type (where you go to switch between 3d view and shader editor and all) you will find it there just in between shader and texture node editor options.
And its only available in 2.92 and above. I think . Not sure if 2.91 has it.


Why a new 'merged' mesh is created when adding multiple loop cuts? I'm just introduced to loop cuts which add more vertices to the mesh but for me it seems to be creating a new 'merged' mesh.
I have no clue why especially since I can account for all the the meshes in the outliner and there doesnt appear to be an extra duplicate. Extruding seems to work just fine but loop cuts just do this when I try to transform the mesh after the loop cut.

Loop cuts are inserted using Ctrl+R or the Loop Cut tool in the Toolbar. Both tools are going to place an edge in a loop of faces and do not create any double geometry.
If you have double geometry after inserting a loopcut, it is there definitely not because of the loop cut, but because of some other mistake.


Reflections do not show in imported model I'm making a Martian habitat animation for a school project and I imported one of the public NASA rovers into my workspace to use. One thing I have noticed is that the windows on the rover is black, yet on the videos where NASA showcases it, the ground reflects onto the window.

My model.

NASA's model.

Here is what it looks like in edit mode.

The model contains only one material. If you want the windows to have another one, go in the material panel and add it (see below). For this example I've set it red. I've done it using Blender Internal but for Cycles this is exactly the same principle (you'll simply need to setup the material with nodes).

Now you need to associate the wanted faces to this new material.
Enter edit mode, select the faces, choose the material and click "assign".

Here the windows are composed of four layers (probably for security reasons:). So to access the layer behind I hide the first one with H.

Once done, use AltH to make hidden parts reappear.


What is a paint slot (compared to an image with a UV mapping)? Learning texture painting mask with the help of Blender official User Manual... nah... just kidding ;-)

In the Texture Paint mode, "painting slots" are displayed in the tool shelf of the 3D editor (1). Entries seems to be images (3) associated with material textures (2), provided they have a UV mapping associated with.

If this is the case, is there a reason for having them listed at two locations under two different names?

I see a possibility to associate a different painting mask to each "painting slot" (masking is actually the topic I'm trying to understand). But as it would be possible to have this mask defined in the Property editor without adding another concept, I'm a bit perplexed...

Using 2.79.

I've read this page, but it doesn't help for this question.

A texture painting slot is how you can control which is the active target for paint without having the node editor open to hunt and find that corresponding image node to click it to make it active, nor having to find the corresponding texture in the material texture properties.

The origin of the texture slot panel was actually a GSOC adaptation of the Texture Paint Layer add-on that offered similar functionality in the N Panel, and it also gave the ability to not need the properties editor to be open to determine which image texture was to be the target.

Masking is much more than the Stencil type that is normally used between image textures, and the actual mask tool is very powerful and I have explored it a few times on my youtube channel. You can utilize a different UV projection for masking, or you can use the same as the existing UV mapping for the target image.


Make Blender usable on high resolution screen The Blender UI elements are incredibly small by default on high resolution screens on Windows (15" UHD screen).  I found the Preferences -> System -> DPI setting which can be set up to 144.  This makes Blender usable, but still uncomfortable and difficult on the eyes.  Is there a way to make the UI elements even larger?

To make the UI elements even larger you can choose Double under the Virtual Pixel mode
this option is in User_Preferences->system


Rematch a UV map to an Image Texture after separating a mesh section into a new object The scene has a large terrain. I cut part of it out and made a new object of it. The image texture that was part of its material stayed in place as I wanted, but after cutting bits of it out and then extending new faces, there were artifacts. When I checked its UV map it seemed to have just collapsed to a point. So, I made it again, and scaled and moved it to be properly aligned. But the artifacts remain. Instead of showing the texture in the image for it, it shows a bunch of lines, like the pixels on the edges of faces that were extruded into new faces just repeated over the area of the new face.

The UV/Image editor shows the new faces now properly placed over its image texture. The UV map has been remade fresh and the faces haven't been touched afterwards, but they are still stuck with those odd lines. How can I get rid of them?

The problem was fixed by extruding new faces from unaffected faces. Other ways of rebuilding the faces hadn't worked, but that did. Nothing I tried with the UV map worked.


Operator.report outside operators Is there something similar to calling self.report inside an Operator, but for use without Operators (i.e. from bpy.app.handlers functions)?


Using linked duplicates does not reduce poly count I am trying to optimize my scene, in terms of memory.
I figured I could use linked duplicates for things like chairs and tables that are the exact replicas.
But I when I turn on scene stats on display, I see face count still go up even after duplicating linked, it is like I duplicated it the typical standard way.

Facecount of linked duplicates only concerns base mesh faces.
If a linked duplicate has modifiers (like Subdivision surface), the facecount still goes up.
To keep facecount down even with modifiers, use Collection Instances instead.


Cannot export transparent PNG animation frames in cycles render Newbie here, working with Blender for less than a week, so forgive my ignorance!

I've a simple 100 frame animation I'm trying to export with a transparent background.

Under "Output", I've picked PNG, with RGBA ticked with a color depth of 16. Under "Film", transparent is ticked.

I can render a single image (F12), and I end up with the correct transparency, but when I render it as an animation, the transparency is gone on all the frames, replaced with black. Check out the two images below - one is the animation frame export, one is the single image export.

What am I doing wrong?

I did not have "use alpha" checked in my compositing node. Does that make sense...?


Is it possible to clone objects with a name diferent in blender at a runtime? I want to generate in Blender Game Engine at a runtime, multiples objects with a diferents names that I can select them individuals. Is it possible? If yes, how can  I make it?

I want to generate ... multiples objects with a diferents names ...
  Is it possible?

No, it is not.

When you create an object then you already know the object. You do not need to search for it.


Particle Edit pushing hair into mesh When I comb hair on the scalp, the hair gets pushed into the mesh leaving "bald spots".
STEPS TO CORRECT:

I used puff to bring hair above the mesh and stand straight up but issue repeats whenever I comb the hair, even if I do not comb directly against the scalp.
I tried flipping the normals of the problem areas but it just deforms the mesh.
I selected both "Free Edit" and "Disconnect All" and tried a redo on separate occasions and have the same problem.
I moved my particle edit up and down in my modifier stack.
I made sure I am not in Particle Edit when rendering.
I lessened the strength of the comb tool to .299
I changed the Children from Interpolated to Simple

I tried searching the net and this forum for similar issues. It seems this has been a problem for some years but most answers are guesses (which lead me to the corrective issues above).

Does anyone know why this happens and/or how to fix it?
Thanks in advance.

I believe that this is because of two reasons.

You'll want to increase the Draw Path Steps (should match particle Steps in particle settings for view port hair to match rendered results) to add more detail while you comb. Draw Path Steps is found in the Tools Panel while in Particle Edit* mode.
Make sure that Deflect Emitter is on in the tool panel while in
particle edit mode and set it where the hair no longer collides.


Importing from SolidWorks and then using subdivision in blender When I try to do this with an object that I've made in solidworks the mesh looks absolutely terrible, spikes, jagged edges etc. You know the deal.
I have tried doings "Tris to quads" and "Limited dissolve" with various values in order to fix this mesh. However neither of those methods has worked for me.

I have tried exporting the SolidWorks model in both .wrl format and .STL format, neither of which has looked good when I use the subdivision modifier, I have also looked for a way to export the model using quads instead of SolidWork's seemingly standard setting of exporting in Triangles.

Basically my question is:

How do I modify my export settings or change my mesh in such a way that subdivision surface is possible without ruining the mesh.

OR

If there is any way to make SolidWorks export in quads exclusively

Having worked quite a bit with SolidWorks models myself, I understand your pain. There isn't a single quick fix, but there are some things I have learned that have helped me mitigate the poor topology.

The first thing you should do is merge triangle pairs into quads: In Edit Mode, press Alt + J.

Next, turn on Smooth Shading and Auto Smooth:

I have found these two will often smooth out the appearance enough that I don't need further subdivision.

In the case of the model I used as an example, though, I spent hours and hours reworking the topology in Edit mode to get it to the quality I wanted. As @Duarte said in the comments, the best thing is just to have good topology, which SolidWorks doesn't provide.


Using quick smoke cannot change from smoke to fire When I use quick effects -> quick smoke to create my domain and stuff for me, I have had trouble if I made a mistake as to wether I wanted smoke or fire, and then tried to change it later. Once it is created, there seems to be no way to visually change it from smoke to fire. Even if I get all the physics working right for fire, all that renders is the small amount of smoke emitted by the flames. Setting up the solid viewport color for flames demonstrates the physics side is working because the flames do fade upward like they should.
How can I make a quick effect smoke domain have fire in it after it has already been initiated for smoke?

After changing the emitter type from smoke to fire, in the domain material’s principled volume node, turn the black body intensity value all the way up to one.