why did my fluid change into multi colored spheres? the fluid mesh is under there but it's surrounded by these spheres

The spheres are the particles of the fluid simulation and their size can be controlled via the Viewport Display properties in the Liquid particle settings.

Changing the Size to 0 will result in point particles instead of spheres.
Alternatively, you can hide them completely by disabling the visibility settings alongside the particle system in the list :


HDRI environment texture assigned to background only shows a checkered background I've just received a project which I imported into Blender with no issues.
However, whenever I go from World to Color then select Environment Texture and open my HDRI image which works with every other Blender project, all I see if a checkered gray and black background in rendered view.
Is it something to do with my viewport, or is it the project itself?
I tried editing the nodes and everything.

In the render properties editor, disable Film > Transparent.


How do I fix the edges that runs around my cube from becoming really long when scaling on an axis? I'm really new to blender, and I thought I'd make a cube for my game that has glow in the middle and edges running around it. I extruded faces inward to make the edges, but when I scale the cube in any axis the edges of the cube that face that axis becomes really long and it doesn't look good at all. Any way I can fix this? I looked around and couldn't find any solution, therefor I'm asking here. Thank you in advance!

Here's the file

If you want to stretch the cube without deforming the edges, you need to modify the mesh itself in Edit mode, because if you stretch it in Object mode will also change the edges width, so switch to Edit mode, press AltZ to have transparency, select the vertices of one side, and move them along the axis you want:


How would you go about making a polarizing camera filter in Cycles? I know that since Cycles is not a spectral raytracer, it cannot simulate dispersion and other wave properties like polarization. How could you fake a controllable polarizing filter that can be implemented outside of a water/glass shader? For reference, this is the effect I would be looking to achieve, without have to tweak the shader of the water/glass objects.

https://i.imgur.com/8ycFH0K.gifv

You can fake this effect from the material point of view not from Camera or global as @JaroslavJerrynoNovotny stated in the comments.

This effect can be used to control object Roughness (best with Principled BSDF) or for mixing material/shader with Transparent Shader (water, glass) or just for mixing different materials.

Scene setup

Most important thing here is to have object in front of Camera which will be our "filter".

I've used Plane parented to Camera for ease of use.

Materials

"Filter"

It's only Transparent shader. Pure white value for invisible filter or a little bit darker to make it more realistic as polarization filters tend to be darker.

Water/Glass/Mix

In this setup we are using Light Path > Transparent Depth as a mix factor to utilize our transparent filter. Math node controls how strong this mix is. You can make material fully transparent or leave some reflections as I did.

To make this process faster along other materials in the scene you can create simple group out of Light Path, Math, Transparent and Mix exposing Math socket and shader socket.

Other materials

You can use Light Path > Transparent Depth (with Math) as a Roughness input but this method seems to be way to artificial. If I come with better idea than this I'll make an edit.


How do I create a widget for my armature I made a simple door with a one-bone armature that allows it to swing plus/minus 90 degrees, and I wanted to have a widget to grab while posing it, instead of using the bone itself. Something like arrows pointing in the direction of each axis.

How would I assign such an object to the armature so that when in pose mode, I see and manipulate it instead of the bone?

I've seen UI in other rigs (Pitchipoy, etc.), but I can't tell how they're set up for this. There's a Custom Shape property in the bone panel, but it seems to replace the model for the bone itself, whereas I'm looking for a sort of proxy for that bone.

This could be one way to create a custom shape to control your bones: create a custom bone. https://youtu.be/6aRdurh30f0?t=1m9s

However, I'm sure you're more interested in this way, creating a custom shape that can control an aspect of a bone (like how the arrows in your image control the rotation of the door). https://youtu.be/8-IkdjzyJMQ?t=23m4s

Hope this helps!


Why is there a white dot in my scene? I am trying to get rid of this white dot, but can't seem to... does anyone know how to help?

The dot displays the origin of your object. This also defines the axis the object will rotate on. It won't show up in your render though.


Blender 2.91 Linear Animation acting like a Bezier i got a Weird Problem since i updated to 2.91, then i try to loop my animation by changing the interpolation type to Linear the Result almost looks the same as Bezier, i did try it with a new scene and a simple Cube with a Armature and a single bone. the Animation seem to be faster with Linear but the end and start from every key frame is still eased in/out.

The problem is that you're using Quaternion (WXYZ) Rotation, which is the default setting for bones in Pose Mode. Set the Rotation method to XYZ Euler and animate the Y Rotation from 0° to 360°.
You should also set the last keyframe with 360° on frame 101 instead of 100 if you want a looped animation from frames 1-100, because 0° = 360° and the animation would look as if it pauses for one frame.


How can I make two objects interact I am making an animation where a person sits down on sofa. I need to make it such that when the person sits on the sofa or presses it with his hand, it deforms. However in my case, when he presses on the sofa, his hands goes trough the sofa. How can I fix this problem?

You can use Dynamic Paint simulation, which is the recommended way, and generate very vivid result.

Set Sofa as Canvas object, and choose Displace for Surface Type.
Set character as Brush object, and choose Mesh Volume for Paint Source.

Example File


Mapping node animation does not work in Blender Internal! In Blender Internal renderer mapping node keyframes do not produce inbetweens during animation. Other nodes do. In cycles they work. Are there any workarounds?

Well, I found a workaround:

Instead of animating the mapping node I animate a blue value in a combine RGB node. It is possible because Blender converts RGB colors to XYZ coordinates automatically.


Is there a way to turn an obj into a partial shrink wrap for another obj to deform into? As you can see in the image below, I have two faces. One with a complete head, and another as just the face. I'm trying to deform the one with a complete head to match that of the 'face'. Shrink wrap doesn't work as it just causes the entire head to shrink into the mask and I cannot combine it as the mesh for the head cannot be deleted/merged as I plan to use it as a morph target in Daz3d. Any help would be appreciated.

Shrinkwrap contains a vertex group field. Just assign the needed vertices in a group, and specify this group in the shrinkwrap modifier.


Transparent mesh in Edit mode I am working on large project (256x256 meters) and I use metric scale.
Suddently, in Edit mode ( either in Solid or textured)  all my mesh are transparent . By running a search about the issue I found it can be related at this one

1: Shadows along edges of mesh in 3D View and this one

I tried to change the clip Start at 1mm End at 10M but nothing changes. I tried to change these values in many ways but nothing change.

I am sorry to post it as a new question , but my "reputation" does not allows me to post comments.

TYVM in advance

Note : It is NOT the "Limit selection to visible" button ;-)

Disable Hidden Wires

You may accidentally enabled the Hidden Wires Option in the Shading section of the the Property bar.

Because the mesh is composed by a single N-gon, there are no other wires to display than the boundary edges.

The option is available since 2.69 version and is usually helpful while retopologizing. You can find more info in the release notes.


Smoke simulation - how to make a slow fog I'm trying to achive a fog effect with smoke simulation. But what I'm getting looks more like a flame and is moving too fast.
Does anyone know how to make it very slow and smooth - as a real fog would behave ?

Here is my example and my smoke settings: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxWsWeQP5ugaeHQwQ3owa0t2cEk/view?usp=sharing

There are 2 ways and you may need to use a combination of both depending on how slow you want to slow it down:

1) Change the Time: Scale with the CUBE DOMAIN

2)
Slow down the frame rate. E.G. change 29.97 to 120 fps.  Unfortunately it's not a perfect solution- it will change the characteristics of your smoke and you'll basically have to tweak everything from the very beginning.


Node viewer window is missing when i go into 'shading' I'm following a tutorial video on youtube and when the guy goes into the shader mode, his screen shows the main window, then below that a window in which the nodes that he's playing around with are located. There are also two windows to the left that show files (at the top) and some sort of viewing window (bottom).

When I open it I see the main window, the two side windows but no node editor/viewer window. Please see screenshot below.

I've been searching for how to bring the window up for over an hour and no luck.

Someone please tell me how to set my shader mode so that the node window appears at the bottom of the screen.

You can change any window to any view.

Drag out a new window,
On the top left corner, Editor Type icon, choose Shader Editor.

P.S. I had the same problem before. lol


How to display different layers in each 3D View? How can I show different layers in separate windows? For example, show layer 1 and 2 in one window, and show layer 3 and 4 in another window?

I need this so I can see everything I am doing correctly since I do have a messy rig.

Disable lock layers to scene in 3D view > Header to use local layers:

Then each 3D view can have it's own visible layers.


Multiplying with positive and negative noise modifier I have a baked f-curve, and I also have a script to unbake it. I want to multiply this f-curve with positive and negative noise, however, the noise modifier only uses positive and negative if I use replace, If I use multiply it ranges from 0 to 1...
And i can't use replace since I want it to scale proportionally.

Workarounds are also an option, maybe some channel or driver-thingy?

Here an image of what I mean, I basically want to multiply the blue curve with the red curve

I've found the solution to my problem! I added the original curve and the noise on seperate Action strips for the same property into the NLA Editor and set the Blending on the Noise to Multiply


Change the channel color in Dopesheet/Graph Editor I am trying to change the color of the channels in the DopeSheet, Graph Editor and Timeline.
Can somebody tell me where to change the yellow-ish color so I can actually read the channel names?
I tried finding it in Preferences-Theme-Graph Editor, but it isn't there.
I'm using the dark Theme in Blender 2.90 on Ubuntu20.04

It's probably because you've assigned colors to your bones in Pose mode:

You can disable it in the Graph Editor > header menu > View > Show Group Colors (I don't know why it is not available in the Dope Sheet though):


How to hide edges/viewport after import from Warehouse (Sketchup/Collada) I'm trying to use models from 3d Warehouse inside my Blender scene. So I'm downloading them in Collada (.dae) format instead of Sketchup formats since Blender can import dae.
Problem is that they are included with weird black wireframe, even that I have wireframes hidden. I cannot find way to hide it. In render they look ok, just not in viewport.

I had same look with my model when imported .dae
In my case it was textured mesh+ wireframe. So just go to edit mode, and in material properties click on your material and press select (do this with all materials).
After that you should have selected all mesh without wireframe (you can press ctrl+i to invert selection to wireframe and delete it)
Hope this will help you.


How to delete unwanted material? How to delete unwanted material and texture used in my scene?

I have an interior scene and when I press shift+Z it renders in a good way, but when I press F12 a small render shows up and it's stuck there. I thought of removing the extra material and texture used. Some are assigned and some are not assigned.

I want to delete all the material and texture which are not in use. I have used the Orphan addon, but did not see any success. Is there any other addon or a quick way to delete them?

In Blender Version 2.79b go to "Blender File" in the Outliner. Find the material you want to remove and right click it. An option to delete it will be presented to you.

Be warned that this will permanently delete the material with no undo.


Master bone not moving rig properly I have parented all controller bones and IK bones in my IK rig to a master bone. When I select all controller and IK bones I can move the rig fine. However, when I try to move the rig with the master bone the rig acts like it's being dragged around and ends up leaning in all sorts of strange directions. I'm not sure how to describe it. The image here shows kinda what's going on. The instant I parented everything to the master bone, stuff went wrong.

Here you can see how I can move it just fine without master bone. Does anyone have any ideas why this may be happening? I've been searching everywhere but every question I find talks about bones not moving the mesh properly.

So I found out that I had to set the constraints on one of my bones to a number greater than 0.


Rendering issue. No image [![enter image description here][1]][1][![enter image description here][2]][2]Ok, so im currently in a crap house. Can anyone explain why all of a sudden my scene no longer renders properly. It was doing just fine up until last night.. When i rendered a scene it sometimes gives me a black image and other times no image at all. Even when i go back to scenes that rendered successfully before. I get nothing now. Any ideas??

So i figured out what my issue was. First problem was that, (some how) my compositor nodes came undone. After i fixed that i was my image but it was in black in white, so i had to adjust from RGBA to RGB in the output section of the render tab. Now everything is back to normal.


simple UV map on a cube gets rendering artifacts near edges I'm using 2.69. I have a simple cube object, and have set up UV mapping for the face and sides, and added an image as texture via this UV mapping.
The UV map is simple, just a cross, and I've welded the points together rather that having separate rectangles for the front face and each side.
All normals are facing outwards.
When rendering, I get artifacts near the edges, that show part of the hidden sides through the front face (bottom and right of the front face).
The cube is a simple cube, no subsurf or anything fancy.
What is wrong here ?
(the artifacts show here as black, if I disable shadows I see the hidden faces instead.)

OK, I could eventually solve this. Seems with a camera at 50mm focal length artifacts occur. Set focal to 100mm and moved camera, no more artifacts.


Is it possible to create seamless repeating noise in 3D I'm very familiar with the following nodes for creating a 2D seamless repeating loop within procedural noise. I have been unable to find a method for repeating in 3 dimensions, this would be incredibly useful for me if anyone is familiar with a means to do so through nodes or OSL.

I was thinking about perhaps a 4d sphere and looked to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-sphere but this didn't produce satisfactory results due to considerable distortion at the poles.
However, on playing around with the nodes I came up with this setup :

Each of the X,Y,Z channels is passed through a Cosine function to make it cyclic and then to an Arc-cosine to make it linear again. The product of the Sine of each of the coordinates gives some travel through the 4th dimension of the noise which allow the noise to loop back to its start point without being a pure reflection of the noise - ie, straight 'bouncing' at the transition. This isn't perfect (there's some rotational symetry in the result) but is pretty close - and might be close enough for your needs.

Another option requires the use of a 6-dimensional noise texture - by generating cyclic coordinates from each of the X,Y,Z channels to produce X1,X2,Y1,Y2,Z1,Z2 (as suggested by @RobinBetts). In Is it possible to have a procedural texture radiate from the CENTER of a sphere? I did something similar using a Musgrave5D texture generated by combining two noise textures and a similar technique can be used here - but this time we have 4D noise available to us so we could theoretically generate a 7-dimensional musgrave-like texture (but we only need 6).
Consider the following nodes :

Here we're combining the output from two 4D noise textures to produce something that resembles a musgrave texture. Musgrave is very like Noise except that it has a different range of values (typically -1 to +1 instead of 0.25 to 0.75 that is typical of noise); the differing range isn't a problem since we can adjust for that using simple maths functions. The 6 inputs to the two Vector sockets can be considered as the 6 input dimensions of the noise while the two W inputs can be used as a 'seed' (you should ensure they are never set to the same value or the output will fall off to zero as they cancel each other out).
By using Sine and Cosine functions we can now take the original X,Y,Z coordinates and generate 3 sets of cyclic coordinates for input into the 6D musgrave.
Here's the complete node group :

The input coordinates are separated into X,Y,Z channels and Sine and Cosine used to generate pairs of cyclic coordinates. The result is Multiplied by a value to provide a means of scaling the noise and each set combined to feed into the associated Noise texture (note that I've opted to pass all of the cosines into one texture and all of the sines into the other - for neatness). Since I didn't need to use the W inputs separately, I've just calculated them as an opposing offset driven by a Value input node (so 0.770 results in 0.770 passed into one texture and -0.770 into the other). The outputs of the Texture nodes are combined and the Absolute allows the negative values to be seen.
This produces the following result :

Note how the noise is seamlessly repeated in each dimension. In this case the scaling of the first mapping node changes the Generated coordinates into the range 0.0 - 10.0. Since the 'cyclic nature of the Sine/Cosine functions is 2Pi (approx 6.3) this results in the pattern repeating about 2/3 of the way across the faces.
Note that if you want something closer to the output of 'Noise' (rather than 'Musgrave') you could add an Add Multiply node or a Map Range node to adjust the range as appropriate.


Blender command line - Change input image when rendering? I'm rendering an image from the command line using this command:

blender "file.blend"  --background  --render-output "output name" --engine CYCLES --render-format PNG --use-extension 1 --render-frame 1

However, I'd also like to set the image path for an image node named "Target Node" in one of the materials as well as the world material.

How can I do this? Do I need a python script? If so, how do I pass the value to it from the command line.

You can use a script for this.

You can read command line arguments with the sys module's argv property.
Access the image filepath through the image texture node (lines 9-14).

Code:

import bpy
import sys
from os.path import isfile

# Take image path as the last command line argument
imgPath = sys.argv[-1]

o  = bpy.data.objects['Cube'] # Replace with your actual object's name
t  = o.active_material.node_tree
im = t.nodes['Image Texture'].image

#For the world texture, use something like this:

w  = bpy.data.worlds['World'] # Replace with your actual world's name
w.use_nodes = True
t  = w.node_tree
im = t.nodes['Texture'].image

# If provided image exists set is as the image texture node's image
if isfile( imgPath ): im.filepath = imgPath

Run blender with the script and provided image path thus:

blender.exe pathToBlend\scene.blend -b -P pathToScript\script.py --render-output renderPath --engine CYCLES --render-format PNG --use-extension 1 --render-frame 1 -- pathToImage\image.jpg


Skin modifier giving wierd geometry I am getting weird geometry when i try to add the skin modifier to an edge. Im following the tutorials but my starting result is off.

Scale was set too high for the modifier, which was putting the vertices way to close to each other giving me errors. Seemed starting at the default scale while building the mesh, and then scaling it up afterwards still enabled me to use the scale i needed for importing.


Reference image not showing up? I've seen tons of other posts on this, but they don't help. I'm following a certain Youtuber's tutorial on modeling, and he uses a reference image of a mug to help him model his mug, so I decided to do the same. Thing is, it's not showing up, even when I go into Front/Side/Top Ortho view. Here:

EDIT:

.blend file

Reference Image

Your image is not a JPG file...it's a WebP file, which Blender does not seem to be able to load as a background image.  Try a different image.   I took a screenshot of the image from my web browser, so you should be able to download and use this one:


Flatten mesh with no distortion I am using Blender as the basic 3d tool to design the paper craft (like origami, but with die-cut).
My question is that is it possible for me to flatten the mesh with the polygon undistorted? So that I can print it out on paper and reconstruct the 3d model.

If I understand your question, it seems the Export Paper Model would do it fully automatically. Related Blender Artists thread.

This addon will export an SVG of the flattened model.

It works well for most shapes, you even get extra flaps for sticking. Note the outward surfaces will generally not overlap, if there is overlapping it is only the stick-lips.

This:

becomes this:


Texture image not coloring properly I've imported a DAE file from another program, I added a siding texture and am now trying to change color though the color is very washed and faded, as seen below the color through nodes is a very dark blue though is rendered as very light blue/purple.
Thanks in advance for any help!

Try using different blend modes in the MixRGB node. Can't tell which one will help for sure. There's a good explanation of all blend modes but in Photoshop: https://youtu.be/i1D9ijh3_-I


Is automatic "Reload from disk" confirmation in Text Editor possible? I use an external editor for my scripting. When I return to Blender I want the script in the text editor to reload my changes. Blender does indeed detect the changes (red button) which is great but it quickly becomes a nightmare having to confirm my changes over and over.

So, is it's possible to make the "reload from disk" confirmation automatic, via preference, console command, or scripting?

Update 2:

@batFINGER I tried to wrap it into an addon but I'm new to this and cant get it to work properly.

Edit: removed code as it should be posted as a new question instead.

Using a draw callback

Investigated a few ways to do this for an edit with vim addon I put togeter. In the end didn't go with any,

My first choice would be using the loophole in the draw callback that lets us manipulate properties, which you cannot do from a draw method. The red lifesaver on text editor header is drawn when text and text.is_modified. I have left in the reload method I use, however it doesn't update the text.is_modified. I've used the reload operator instead for this question. (intead I use os to keep tabs on file modified time)

If the test script below is run from blender text editor it will add the draw callback.  To use from an addon or such, would import the class and instance it, that way it can be removed, or stopped by calling instance.remove_handle().  An update on a boolean property to turn on and off could be another alternative

The script.

import bpy

def reload(text):
    fp = bpy.path.abspath(text.filepath)
    text.clear()
    with open(fp) as f:
        text.write(f.read())
    return False

class DrawingClass:
    lock = False
    def __init__(self, context, prop):
        self.prop = prop
        self.handle = bpy.types.SpaceTextEditor.draw_handler_add(
                   self.draw_text_callback,(context,),
                   'WINDOW', 'POST_PIXEL')

    def draw_text_callback(self, context):
        if self.lock:
            return
        space = context.space_data
        text = space.text

        if text and text.is_modified:  # if is_modified(text):
            print("reloading text")
            bpy.ops.text.reload()
            '''
            self.lock + True
            self.lock = reload(text)
            '''

    def remove_handle(self):
         bpy.types.SpaceTextEditor.draw_handler_remove(self.handle, 'WINDOW')

if __name__ == "__main__":
    context = bpy.context
    dc = DrawingClass(context, "Draw This On Screen")

Other approaches worth considering:

A modal timer operator. See  text editor > templates > python > Operator Modal Timer .  The issue here is that while a modal timer is running, you may be turning off auto-save.
A scene update handler.  (IMO a pita, as it runs toooooo often)


2.79b YZ rotation widgets are using incorrect AXIS I have an issue with rotation, using the 3D manipulator is rotating wrong, The Y manipulator is rotating on the X axis, The Z manipulator is rotating on the Y axis, X axis widget appears to be fine. Using the XYZ keys work as intended, this is only a Manipulator via cursor grab issue

I have reset factory setting, I have uninstalled, checked global and local. I have been searching google but don't really know what to search for to get good results.

I tried everything I could think of, un installing, re installing, deleting Appdata folder, reset to factory settings, log off user and to a new user installing blender, tried 2.77-2.79b nothing helped untill someone linked me
https://blenderartists.org/t/issues-selecting-the-3d-manipulator-arrows/546452/6

gif of problem https://giphy.com/gifs/8TFmoAEgHjbMMcRXQm

Solution: (( User prefs>System tab>Selection (drop down setting)>OpenGL Depth Picking ))

Thank you


How to hide an object in front of a mask instead of behind it? I have a scene with two characters (mesh objects) in the camera frame, and I'd like to remove and replace the character closest to the camera as the scene progresses--WITHOUT changing the location of the character object, because that would disturb hair/cloth dynamics parented to the mesh. In Cycles this was easy to do by keying exclusion layers, but I need to render this in Blender Internal, which doesn't have that option, so I've started looking at masking. I put a plane into the scene between the two characters that I can animate in and out of the shot, similar to this (imagine the plane large enough to completely hide the green monkey):

However, trying to use this plane as a mask or with a mask layer only hides the green monkey, instead of the red one.

Is there a way to completely hide the red monkey in the render and only show the green one, preferably in a way that can be keyed/animated?

You can enable the X-Ray option of the Cube and the green mesh, so they will be visible infront of the red mesh as shown below:

As shown below I made a scene with a red monkey and a green cube where the monkey is in-front of the cube.

This is the result of the rendering:

To avoid the red monkey from appearing while rendering then you un-click the render button of this object as shown below:

This will be the result of rendering:


Can I Put 2D GIF Image on 3D Object Is there any way to put 2D GIF Image on a 3D Object? For example, I have a box. The box has 6 Faces. Can I put 2D gif on one of the box faces?

I am not sure if animated gifs are supported, but videos can be used as color inputs.
You can see more about video textures here:
https://www.blender.org/manual/render/blender_render/textures/types/video.html

in order to make the video appear on only one face of the box the best way would be to add one more material slot and assign a new material to that particular face.


reseting rest pose is offsetting my armature and model I am trying to make a new rest pose for my character (T-pose) for unity, but when i try to POSE_APPLY_ REST POSE this happens. As you can see my hand and finger bones do not match up with the model. How do I fix this?

First of all in pose mode pose your character where you want to be the new rest pose, then select the mesh and apply the armature modifier, then select the armature and, in pose mode, apply the pose as rest pose; then re-parent your mesh to the armature.


Run VSE movie strip output through Compositor or Compositor movie clip output through VSE within one project possible? I wish to add a movie clip into Blender then simultaneously use both
VSE and Compositor (nodes) to produce various video effects.
The VSE offers some nice options, and so does the Compositor.
So far, within a single Blender project, I have not been able to figure out how to either
-take the output of the VSE movie strip and then run that output through the Compositor for further processing
or
-take the output from the Compositor movie clip and run that output through the VSE for further processing.
I wish to do this all within one project file.
Is that possible?
Thanks for any ideas.

You can make a separate Compositor Scene that only outputs the compositor result. Then in the VSE scene you can add the Compositor scene as a scene strip.

You can not send the output of the VSE anywhere except for mixdown to codec. Don't worry, everyone asks this at some point.

The VSE is designed to be the end of the production chain.


Nodes issue, shadow catcher is visible My earlier issue was a problem with jagged edges.
I found that if I remove the ID Mask Index: 1 output from the Mix Fac input, the edges are crisp, but the shadow catcher mesh becomes visible, see below.

Requested by Mentalist:

Now I can't figure out how to get the shadowcatcher to be invisible again.
Can someone help figure this out?

What I've realized, after watching the tutorial, putting this together myself, and then looking at your node setup again, is that by disconnecting ID Mask: Index 1 you have broken your node setup. And with the Mix Node's Factor set to 1 there is no meaning in having a Mix Node at all (combining 0% of one image with 100% of another). Sliding it to anything less than 1 won't help either, because it needs the ID Mask to mask your car object back in.

If I were you, I would revisit your original problem with eliminating the jagged edges instead of trying to hack the node setup.


Why text object can't align to Y axis accurately? i am new to Blender, i certainly set Text Object Alignment in Left Horizontal way
and set object's X location to 0

However , the Text Object looks like this ,The left side of "P" character doesn't align exactly to 0 X location , though with its axis align to 0 location

Here is what i want , i want the Text object 's left side 100% accurately align to 0 X location every time i input 0 X location rather than manually adjust it to 0 X location

Thanks if you have any ideas , and Python adjustment method can be also acceptable to me !

Your location is based upon you origin (little orange dot)

If this is offset from your geometry then you will have problems in setting the exact location through this method. Also with text the origin will be the same location, but per character/font/style you may need it to be in a different location. There are some other nuances for example, here the default Bfont drops the lower case characters under the origin.

So you can set it up (by adjusting your origin), but this will not be automatically applied to each new text object.

So in your specific example (where you have converted the text to a mesh) adjust the origin to the lower left of the P and it should just go to the world origin if you set the transform to X=0, Y=0. NB Moving Origins is easy now in object mode, press Options and select Origins and then you can simply move the origin of the object. I would recommend doing this by snapping to vertex.


How would you set 2 "child Of" constraints on the same object? How would you set 2 "child Of" constraints on the same object.

I already have a "child Of" constraint on the Hat using the robot hand as target. Because the hat is not parented to the body, it stays stationary when the robot spins 180 degrees on the Z-axis. The hat has a design on one side but because it does not spin with the robot, we cant see the design after the robot has spun around to face the viewer.

My question is is it possible to add a 2nd "child Of" constraint on the Hat and use the robot body as target? How can this be set up?

I was just looking for an answer, and I've actually found a workaround myself.
Create a new armature for the hat, scale the root bone and make it small, then parent the hat to your new armature. You will have 2 armature sets and you can use "Child Of" again. If you changed the influence slider, you may have not the desired influence movements, so what worked for me was to subtract the first armature influence with the new one.


Multiple Blender Threads (targetting CPU and GPU ) I am using blender 2.77a on windows 10. I intend to do work in separate blender thread(modeling, texturing..small tweaks) while I put my finished frames to render. While rendering blender uses 100% GPU and only 30% CPU.

I am facing serious lag while running another blender process, however I can run other windows applications smoothly as I still  have like 70% CPU and enough memory.

I am sure there is possible solutions as I intend to run another blender process on CPU only. Any suggestions are welcome.

Blender uses OpenGL for both the 3D viewport and rendering. If you use GPU rendering the render engine occupies the whole GPU and AFAIK there are no settings to influence that in the current builds (even not in development builds).

The only way to get a little more responsiveness while rendering in another instance is to switch from Cycles to Blender internal and then switch the 3D viewport from GLSL to Multitexture. This might at least help with the modeling part.

Other software might continue to work without (or maybe a little) lag, if they don't make use of your GPU in any way. Keep in mind that even more recent versions of MS Office (since 2013) puts load on the GPU to speed up rendering as well as some audio players.


How to add driver to an input of a node in the Animation Nodes? Whenever i add a driver to an input of a node in animation nodes nothing appears in the Driver editor.

I do realize this topic is a few years old, but this is one of the first results that shows up on Google when you search for this issue... so perhaps this can help some passersby:
A gentleman named Kuldeep Singh posted a workaround a while back, which would involve (for example) adding the driver instead to an empty's transform channel and then using an "Object > Transforms Input" node to feed that data into Animation Nodes. (Source: https://blender.community/c/graphicall/0hbbbc/)
His workaround may be purely academic for most situations, but perhaps there are niche applications where this might be practical. Hope this helps! Peace and God bless!


Can modifiers be computed and applied from the command line? For heavy modifiers, the time it  takes to compute can range between a few seconds to half an hour or longer.

Can modifiers be added, computed, and applied from the command line with some sort of indicator of progress?

Running from the command line would be useful for running blender GUI-less without a WM to save memory.
It would also be ideal to have some idea of how far along the modifier is.

You'd have to use bpy.ops.object.modifier_apply, e.g.

import bpy

for obj in bpy.context.scene.objects:
    bpy.context.scene.objects.active = obj
    count = 1
    length = len(obj.modifiers)
    while obj.modifiers:
        name = obj.modifiers[0].name
        print("%s: Applying %s (%d/%d)" % (obj, name, count, length))
        bpy.ops.object.modifier_apply(modifier=name)
        count += 1
print("All done.")

For info on how to to run the above, see here.


I have no option to export my model as an FBX I was told on a video to put your model in Unreal Engine, you must export the file as an FBX. However, I do not have this option like in the video. The video was made recently and I cannot find any fixes for this onine.

The FBX format for export is actually available as an addon in the Preferences , You should go to EDIT>PREFERENCES and go to ADDONS to search FBX like this -


Rigging and control rig issue I have a deform rig I'm not allowed to edit. I need to set up IK's on the legs but the bones aren't connected or orientated properly.
I can make a secondary rig over the that has normal connections and all the connections I need but I can't break the parenting to allow proper constraints. Please help. I'm pulling my hair out.

The general idea is to build a new rig (let we call it NR) which will have all specs you need (orientations, dimensions, IK, ......) and all "joints" (bones heads) in the same place as your untouchable rig (by now called UR), then set a "copy rotation" constraint on every bone of the UR, so that the UR will exactly act as stated by the NR (use "local space" on the constraint options).

After you have performed the animation, if you want to export the act (I know you will want) you will have to select (in pose mode) all bones of the UR, and go to the pose menu - animation - bake action, check the all needed boxes (Only selected bones, Visual keying and Clear Constraints). This procedure will create a new action that can be exported and played on the UR without any type of constraint.

You can choose to build the NR as a new armature on its own or a new layer of the same UR armature.

Use the "Shift S" functions (cursor to selected and selection to cursor) to build the NR bones exactly in the same location of the UR heads bones, and uncheck the "deform" option of all NR bones.


How to add a modifier to a collection(group? linked objects? IDK) which it has modifiers inside I'm a beginner to blender and I'm trying to make a cnc model using some different objects which have mirror modifier inside the group(e.g. the bars).
And now I want to add an array modifier to let it line up in a row.
Here is the problem: If I add this modifier, only the first object will be applied,like this pic I put:

I tried using ctrl+j to make them toghther and then add modifier,
but this will erase the mirror modifier I added just like the pic below:

The last thing I can do is to save it as another type of model file then imput, but I think there must be a better way. So any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Short answer, no, you cannot add modifiers to collections.
In you pic your are adding the modifier to 'Cube' as it is the selected object.
You can however copy modifiers to other objects with CTRL+L
For an array modifier, to keep all your parts relative to each other you'll need to use Object Offset and also have all the objects origins at the same point, this will break your mirror modifiers so they will need to use Mirror Object as their mirror point and select an object to use as the mirror point, or add an empty for this purpose.
The last object you select is the object to copy the modifiers from.
Also note, this is simply "copying", so any changes made to a modifier after this will NOT update the others.
In my example I have already set all the objects origins to the same point. I then use the Empty to control the spread of the array


Blender 2.8: Restrict influence of Force Field to its Collection How do I restrict the influence of a Force Field to the Collection it's in?

I'm trying to simulate falling leaves in Blender 2.8.
I have a Collection with the Leafs_Emitter particle system and a Vortex Force Field inside it.
I want the Force Field to only affect or influence the falling leaves inside the Collection.
But currently, it affects all the other particle systems inside my scene.

I hope it's not too late for this answer, I just found out how to do it. In the properties of your particle system, at the Field Weights tab, there's an option named Effector Collection, select the collection where your force fields are and that's it.


How do I fix this strange effect that happens when I start animating items that are set to cloth in physics? When I animate my mesh I'm building, the cloth parts start to look all funny.  I was wondering if this is normal or if there is a way to fix it?

The problem is that your Solidify modifier is above the Cloth modifier:

This means the cloth simulation will use that double layer of geometry, which can cause some instability and self-intersections.

In your case, the inside layer is poking through the outside layer and causing shading issues due to the fact that the normals of the new outside layer are facing the wrong way:

The easiest way to solve this is to move the Solidify modifier below the Cloth one, so that the cloth simulation happens before the second layer of geometry is created:

However, if for some reason you need to take the solidified geometry into account for the cloth simulation, keep the Cloth modifier at the bottom and make sure Self Collision is enabled and uses a high enough quality to avoid instability:


Why won't the rendered image be my current active camera view? I move the camera to the position I want and set it by using 'ctrl + alt + NUMPAD 0' and when I press 'NUMPAD 0' to see what the camera is looking the at the rendered image is different to the view of the camera.

You might have a different camera, or object set as active camera.
To find the active camera go to the scene tab in the properties window. The active camera can be selected there.

Or you can set the active camera (or object as camera) in the 3D viewport.
Select a camera (or object) and make it an Active Camera

The shortcut is Ctrl+Numpad 0


How to get rid of an object's reflection? I am creating a logo for a friend (not getting paid), and I want to figure out a way to get rid of one object's reflection against another without removing the other object's reflectivity. If you look at the image, the "e" in Jewel shows up against the diamond and I don't want it to. Can I place the Jewel on a different layer with an alpha layer background in order to insert it into the image without the diamond having a reflection of it, and then use the compositor to overlay one on top of the other?

How would I go about this? I've looked up tutorials online on how to use the compositor, and they all involve an "image" node and a "compositor" node, but I can't seem to find these under the "add node" button, and I've been searching for a while.

In cycles you can disable the reflection of the selected object. In the properties window go to Cycles Settings and disable Ray Visibility for glossy.

Here's example of how you can make the text objects disappear from the reflection of the cube:


Change background color in Image Editor for transparent image I'm rendering an image with a transparent background, which will eventually be included in a figure with a white background. In the Image Editor, blender displays the transparent regions as a grey/black checkerboard pattern. This is helpful, but I would like to get an idea how my image looks on a white background whenever I re-render.
Is there anyway to temporarily set the background color of the Image Editor?

Here's what it looks like, and as you can see, it's a little hard to tell if the render would look pretty on a white background:

Use the Compositor, with this node setup:

It just takes the areas with an Alpha value, and replaces them with the color specified in the Alpha Over node.


3 scenes into a add and alpha over Im making a animation for some 3D words and i have 3 scenes 1 is the words 2 is a smoke particles and then 3 is like extra particles for color affect. When i go to composting and add them only 3d words show in the pre-render window or the smoke and extra affects appear in the pre-render window. Im watching this guy on YouTube doing and i did the same but his works and my doesn't. My question is why is the alpha over not working with my 3 scenes with a mix set to add with the particles linked?

Extra things if you really want to help
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4xp2cfq0n4jbzaw/Intro%20v3.blend?dl=0

I have found the answer to my question my render for the 3D words was not a transparent in shading.


Texture Paint doesn't paint where I want it to I'm having a problem where I paint on the model, but it paints on the other side of it. I tried unwrapping my mesh with the least amount of stretch as I can, as I am new to this, but it still doesn't change.

Here's the link to the .blend file : https://drive.google.com/open?id=18csQ79BM-SYYKahkvF_Vx4N4GUuK00q4

If you switch to Edit mode and activate the Face Orientation display option, you can see that your normals point inwards (the faces are red instead of blue), you need to select all and press shift N to recalculate outward, then you'll be able to paint correctly.


Why is the color white darkened through glass? So here are two pictures, the first one Has the outer eye object, which is just solid glass, and the inner eye, which is has a UV map of an eye. The second having just the inner eye. I took a screenshot of my whole screen so you could see I turned the outer eye visibility off on the top right.

Why does the glass darken the inner eye when the light is shining right at it? I could understand the outer eye is reflecting the background, but the light is shining directly at the left eye (as you can see in picture 2).
How do I fix the darkening while keeping the reflective property of an eye?

After some extensive testing, I have found that you need to add a glossy effect to the inner eye. For the outer eye, you need to have a mix shader with a glass and transparency shader connected to it.


Can't see the rig/bones I can't seem to see the rig on a .blend file that I downloaded here. (This one). I have tried pressing Alt-H in object mode, Alt-H on edit mode, trying to scale the bones up in edit mode. I feel like I'm missing something, like the bones are hidden away inside a layer or something. I downloaded the file to see how the control bones worked with the bendy bones, but I can't seem to find the bones.

Any help would be appreciated!

You need to enable this button. See picture in the right-top corner.


Fill in missing point in grid I was doing some destructive work in Blender when it frustratingly crashed on me. I was just testing a few things.

I was trying "Dissolve vertices" on my mesh, and ended up with this when I reloaded the project again:

I tried F to join each edge, but it made a strange tugging-looking mesh.

How can I fix this grid mesh, by adding the point in the middle and all the other edges?

Standard way is to remove tha Ngon face and use Grid Fill to fill in with quads. Another a bit less fast way is to use either Connect Vertex Path tool (J) or Knife tool (K) to cut edges according to existing geometry.

However there might be another way without removing that face:

Press Alt+P to poke faces.
Press Alt+J to convert tris to quads.

Note that it depends on geometry what resulting topology you will get. Also note - Grid Fill restores the curvature of the filled surfaces, this way doesn't.


Problem when rendering fire and smoke in Blender Render I'm having a problem when I render my fire and smoke in blender render.  Here is the problem.  In the first picture it shows what smoke looks like in my regular animation, and the second 2 pictures are what it looks like when I render it.  There is no smoke or fire in the rendered versions.  I am using quick smoke and Blender Render, can somebody tell me why I can't see the fire or smoke in the render? Thanks

Edit:
I am using the Blender Render engine for rendering, and all of the settings for the domain and flow are default other then a few things to get a different look for the smoke, and also the smoke cache has been edited in order to choose at what frame the smoke and fire will appear and disappear.

All objects are available for rendering in the outliner.

I have uploaded 2 more pictures, they are the last 2 (the last 2 pictures in the list, not the last 2 forever.. :) ).  The second last shows what the smoke looks like in the viewport, and the last is what the render looks like.  As you can see there are particles coming out of his mouth (the grey object in his mouth is the sphere used as the flow) but they are very faint and almost invisible.  They are there, though.  The flow object I have inside the cigarette is very tiny, and I believe that is why I cannot see the flame in the render.  So how can I alter the render so that the flames are more prominent? Or perhaps make the flames themselves more prominent, along with the smoke?

I have tried changing density and other settings but they seem to make no difference once I render the image, and the renders turn out basically the exact same as in the pictures I have posted below.

The goal of this was to make an animation of somebody smoking a cigarette, where I have shape keys to allow the cigarette to get smaller, while at the same time I have shape keys moving the domain and flow of the smoke and fire with the cigarette's shrinking (to give the illusion of a cigarette burning and getting smaller).  The character shortly after leans back and breathes out, where I have a smoke domain and flow object move into his mouth (again from shape keys, the object is originally under the ground until it moves in 1 frame to his mouth, and then after the smoke has been given off it moves back into the ground).  The smoke is propelled by a wind force field, which is how it moves horizontally to give the illusion of smoke being puffed out.

I don't know if this is the proper way of doing it, but it is what I came up with and seems to work other then the rendering.  If you know of another way of doing this without changing to much, I would love to hear it.

Update: I have tried rendering an image without both domains in it, and the smoke still looks the same, so I do not believe it is the problem of having 2 domains in one scene.  From what I've read, that only becomes a problem if the 2 domains overlap, and in my case they do not.

Here is the .blend file, so we can cut to the chase here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3lBHOw4Hc3tWmVPYlJscFNydjA

Here is the link to my Flow and Domain settings:

https://imgur.com/a/9RfYJ

Please don't hesitate to ask for more information. Thanks

You have more than 1 smoke domain in your scene.

There should only be one, or if you are going to use more they have to be in different layers.

Read this answer for more details: Is it possible to have more than one smoke simulation in the same scene?


Window glass material (Eevee) New to blender, got a question about window glass.

I have tried several examples but can't get it to do what I want.

The problem is that the background which I have set in the world settings is getting blurred when viewed through the glass material.

I have attached a screenshot. The selected object is a plane to which I have assigned the glass material. As you can see the background through the plane is being blurred.

I have no idea which setting is getting me this effect.
I have tried a lot of sliders :-)

Hopefully someone can shed some light on this.

Edit:

I tried using IOR 1.0. Still the same issue.
Although when rendered with cycles (which I don't use on osx) the blur was gone.

So it seems to be an Eevee setting or issue.

Any idea what can affect this in Eevee?

The refraction algorithms in Eevee (which the glass shader uses either) lower resolution of everything behind refracted surface to speed up render and performance - this is what causes the bluriness. If you don't need a refraction distortion, the solution as it has been already mentioned is in using Principled BSDF. Increase "Metallic" all the way up to 1 and plug in Fresnel node into Alpha socket - you will get a fake glass material without lowering a background resolution. Anyway if you need a physically correct refraction I'm afraid the only way is to use Cycles.


Blender 2.82a cannot use CUDA or OPENCL I am running into an issue that I am unable to solve! I am using blender 2.82a, I have an NVIDIA GT630 installed in my system, and am using Ubuntu 20.04. I want to use my GPU to render my scene, but when I want to activate CUDA in the preference, Blender cannot find any usable device! I have checked as follow:

1 - Additional driver being used

Used both driver but same issue when I try to activate CUDA in Blender preference.

2 - Installed and Re-installed NVIDIA driver

Driver seem to be installed correctly.

3 - Getting the CUDA info from the command line
nvcc --version
nvcc: NVIDIA (R) Cuda compiler driver
Copyright (c) 2005-2019 NVIDIA Corporation
Built on Sun_Jul_28_19:07:16_PDT_2019
Cuda compilation tools, release 10.1, V10.1.243

4 - Uninstalled and re-installed blender 2.82, and 2.82a still cannot activate the device in Blender, even with portable version.

5 - Use Blender 2.79b portable version and it let me select the CUDA device.

I would be grateful for anyone to bring any suggestion as so far I have tried the following links:

How to make CUDA work in Ubuntu so as to enable GPU rendering in Blender?

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2342538

But still cannot get Blender 2.8x to select the CUDA device.

Thank you kindly

Jean

Additional information:

the nvidia-smi returns the following:

Tue Jun  2 09:11:19 2020

| NVIDIA-SMI 340.108    Driver Version: 340.108

| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |

| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |

|   0  GeForce GT 630      Off  | 0000:02:00.0     N/A |                  N/A |

| 52%   64C    P0    N/A /  N/A |    457MiB /  4095MiB |     N/A      Default |

| Compute processes:                                               GPU Memory |

|  GPU       PID  Process name                                     Usage      |

|    0            Not Supported                                               |

Is the n630gt not supported on blender 2.8x?

Install CUDA toolkit from the Ubuntu repo:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nvidia-cuda-toolkit
sudo reboot

After CUDA install, without reboot, Blender won't start at all, so, reboot is very important!
I had the very same problem. That worked for me.


Need help recreating crazy colors/material from example I found this three.js website that has a somewhat whacky color scheme that I really like: http://one-billion-cat.com/test/galerie/scene.html

Here it is as a youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4e6yFQgu6U

I'm trying to find a material in blender that could give me this kind of look, but I'm not getting anywhere, so I thought maybe one of you guys might have an idea of how to go about achieving this.

I'd really appreciate some help with this, thanks folks =)

Here is shader doing same result.

ADD:

Same result for Blender internal engine.


Textured alpha not showing in the game engine? No matter what texture setting I'm in, none of the particle objects will display materials or texture, instead, I just get squares.

I've been having a lot of texture issues lately and even tried resetting factory settings, but things like this still get messed up. Is there a setting in render that I don't understand?

Here's my .blend: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/32269

Try switching to GLSL shading in 3D view > Properties region (N) > Shading:

Then it works as expected:


How to get rid of sharp edges I tried smoothing it out, but it still there. How do i get rid of it.

If you are sure that there is no edge separation in that part just press 'smooth' button in tools panel.

If your surface is flat, your model would be cleaner if you check that in that broken part, all of the vertices are placed in the same plane.


How translate an object with a constraint vertex position without deformate the mesh I will simplify my problem in this question. Let's say that I have two objects in my scene: a cube and a plane.
I would like to translate the cube such that the position of the two down vertices on the right of the cube become the position of the two left vertices of the plane without deforming the cube (and the plane of course). So these vertices will share the same coordinates at the end of the process. I found this code that partially answer to my question, but in that case the effect would be the following:

while I need to have something like this:

Anyone has any idea of how to achieve this in Python?

EDIT: the objects are not aligned, they may be, but I am interested in the most general case. The practical problem is that I have a mesh of a pair of glasses and a mesh of a face. Now I want that 3 points from the bridge of the glasses share the position of three points of the nose of the face. Then, the rest of the glasses would moved property, with no stretching or deformation, in such a way that they are putting on the face. Furthermore, I can obtain the data from these two objects with the bmesh with something like this:

mesh = ob.data
mesh.vertices[1].select = True

I can also activate the debug mode with bpy.app.debug = True in the Python Shell and I can discover which is the position of the vertices I want to move. So for example they are:

mesh.vertices[43].select = True
mesh.vertices[56].select = True
mesh.vertices[78].select = True

in the array of the data of the glasses. Also I know where the vertices of the face are into the array of the face. Let's say they are something like:

mesh2 = ob2.data
mesh2.vertices[1].select = True
mesh2.vertices[10].select = True
mesh2.vertices[20].select = True

So, the situation I have is something like this:

The dimensions of the two objects don't need to be changed. It's just the position of the glasses that need to change according to the vertices of the bridge that has to be in the position of certain established vertices of the nose.

Hope now is more clear.

This method may not work for some cases since your question is not detailed enough (just in my opinion :) )

I am selecting 2 vertices (1 from the Cube and 1 from the Plane) that I assumed to be alligned by looking from your sight (as you see in the blender scene ) and getting their world coorinates. After that I am taking the difference of them to slide Cube. (Also I am assuming our objects are not rotated after created.)

import bpy, bmesh
from mathutils import Vector

bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')

# set active object to Cube
bpy.context.scene.objects.active = bpy.data.objects["Cube"]
# go to EDIT mode
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()

# get Cube's updated vertex data
obj = bpy.data.objects["Cube"]
bm = bmesh.new()
bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(obj.data)
bm.verts.ensure_lookup_table()

# get world coordinate matrix for that object
mat = mat = obj.matrix_world

# get the right-bottom-closer vertex's world coordinates and save it to v1. By your sight , this vertex must have minimum x, y and z coordinates among the others.
# Additional info : if it is that vertex, its x coordinate is lower than upper adjacent , its y coordinate is lower than left adjacent ,its z coordinate is lower than further adjacent so I am searching these in the if and elif statements
for vert in bm.verts:
    minx = False
    miny = False
    minz = False
    for edge in vert.link_edges:
        vert2 = edge.other_vert(vert)
        if (mat*vert.co)[0]<(mat*vert2.co)[0]:
            minx = True
        elif (mat*vert.co)[1]<(mat*vert2.co)[1]:
            miny = True
        elif (mat*vert.co)[2]<(mat*vert2.co)[2]:
            minz = True
    if minx == True and miny == True and minz == True:
        v1 = mat*vert.co
bm.free()
# switch object mode and set active object to the plane to get its vertex data
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()
bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')
bpy.context.scene.objects.active = bpy.data.objects["Plane"]
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()

obj = bpy.data.objects["Plane"]
bm = bmesh.new()
bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(obj.data)
bm.verts.ensure_lookup_table()
mat = mat = obj.matrix_world

# get the left-closer vertex's world coordinates and save it to v2. By your sight , this vertex must have minimum x and maximum y coordinates among the others.
# Additional info : if it is that vertex, its x coordinate is lower than upper adjacent , its y coordinate is higher than left adjacent ,its x coordinate is lower than further adjacent so I am searching these in the if and elif statements
for vert in bm.verts:
    minx = False
    maxy = False
    for edge in vert.link_edges:
        vert2 = edge.other_vert(vert)
        if (mat*vert.co)[0]<(mat*vert2.co)[0]:
            minx = True
        elif (mat*vert.co)[1]>(mat*vert2.co)[1]:
            maxy = True
    if minx == True and maxy == True :
        v2 = mat*vert.co
bm.free()
# switch to object mode to move all cube at once , since we got every information we need
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()

# move cube by their difference vector, so it will slide just by their difference value
bpy.data.objects["Cube"].location+= (v2-v1)

EDIT:
I changed my code according to specifications now it gets 4 indexes (2 from cube(or glass), 2 from plane(or face) is enough to allign them)

import bpy, bmesh
from mathutils import Vector
import numpy as np , math

index_1_from_cube = 4
index_2_from_cube = 6

index_1_from_plane = 2
index_2_from_plane = 3

bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')

# set active object to Cube
bpy.context.scene.objects.active = bpy.data.objects["Cube"]
# go to EDIT mode
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()

# get Cube's updated vertex data
obj = bpy.data.objects["Cube"]
bm = bmesh.new()
bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(obj.data)
bm.verts.ensure_lookup_table()

# get world coordinate matrix for that object
mat = mat = obj.matrix_world

# get world coordinates of 2 vertices from cube that is planned to allign

v1 = mat*bm.verts[index_1_from_cube].co
v1_for_rotate = mat*bm.verts[index_2_from_cube].co
bm.free()
# switch object mode and set active object to the plane to get its vertex data
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()
bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')
bpy.context.scene.objects.active = bpy.data.objects["Plane"]
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()

obj = bpy.data.objects["Plane"]
bm = bmesh.new()
bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(obj.data)
bm.verts.ensure_lookup_table()
mat = mat = obj.matrix_world

# get world coordinates of 2 vertices from plane that is planned to allign
v2 = mat*bm.verts[index_1_from_plane].co
v2_for_rotate = mat*bm.verts[index_2_from_plane].co
bm.free()
# switch to object mode to move all cube at once , since we got every information we need
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()

# move cube by their difference vector, so it will slide just by their difference value
# but after this operation only the 2 vertices will be alligned,
# so we need to rotate it according to second set of points.
bpy.data.objects["Cube"].location+= (v2-v1)

#select the cube again
bpy.context.scene.objects.active = bpy.data.objects["Cube"]
bpy.data.objects["Cube"].select = True

# we will rotate the cube around the first point since the first points are already alligned (we don't need to change this coordinate of cube)
bpy.context.scene.cursor_location = v2
bpy.ops.object.origin_set(type='ORIGIN_CURSOR')

# get unit vectors in order to find a angle and rotation axis
unit_vec1 = (v1_for_rotate - v1 ) / np.linalg.norm(v1_for_rotate - v1 )
unit_vec2 = (v2_for_rotate - v2 ) / np.linalg.norm(v2_for_rotate - v2)

rotation_axis = (np.cross(unit_vec1, unit_vec2))
rotation_degree = np.arccos(np.clip(np.dot(unit_vec1, unit_vec2), -1.0, 1.0))

# rotate the object around first alligned points
bpy.ops.transform.rotate(value=rotation_degree, axis=rotation_axis, constraint_axis=(False, False, False))


What is the difference between color models (sRGB, Rec709, XYZ, ets) and which cases I need to prefer one of them? I know filmic uses for wide color range. But what is a display device for?
Which cases I need to prefer one of display device settings?

Prerequisite

I think the right word here is color profils not color models.
A color profil defines 3 things:

The white point (what is white)
The primaries (e.g. : R,G,B...)
The transfer function (the contrast curve applied e.g. gamma, Log...)

You may think why defining white? White is white no?
In fact there is no absolute white.
Think to a paper sheet, most of them are "white", but if you look at it under an overcast sky, it's not the same white as if you look it with the direct sun light.
It's colored a bit in "blue" if overcast, "red" / "orange" if direct sun.
It's the same here, you can have different white point, with slightly different HUE.
For exemple the sRGB white point is D65 (see the picture below), but you have D60 white point...

The primaries, it's the same as "black" and "white" we need to define them. For RGB we need to define what R, G, and B are, it also defines the boundaries of the colors you can display in the color space.
For sRGB it's the triangle made by the position of R, G, B.

Remember sRGB is a limited color space made for screen display (3 subpixels R,G,B value range 0 to 255), but there are plenty of colors outside this color space.

The transfer function is a mathematical function that change the contrast of the displayed pixels. (gamma, EOTF, OETF, Log are some functions that can be used)
It's the curve you are playing with to contrast your image.

Answer

With that in mind, sRGB, Rec709... have differents 1., 2., and 3. They are for different purpose and it's the answer to your question, you need to choose the one corresponding to your need

In Blender with the default config you have Display device that defines the white point (1.) and the primaries (2.), the view that defines the transfer curve (3.) and you have the look that is a creative transformation of the image, contrast or color tint.

Color profils are applied at the verry end of the chain, so juste before displaying the image or when saving it.
It means that all the compositor transformations you make are applied on a linear image, so all datas preserved but when saved, the image lost information if non 32bits linear.

So exept for some cases, e.g. basic drawing without light interaction, it's always better to use filmic to view your viewport, even if you save it in linear 32bits at the end.
With filmic what you see correspond to how light intensity works in real life, it's not the case in sRGB / Default setup.

E.G. of use:

For display :

sRGB : is for typical 8bit CRT monitor display, so for web, photo display...
I think Apple use a different profile but I don't have Apple devices so I can't say more.

Rec 709 : is for TV/Cinema display

For post prod :

CIE XYZ :  In blender with the view set to Log you have the typical washed out picture used by studios before color gradding video footage.

Linear space : That isn't a color space since colors aren't defined, it's the scene referred space, it's what Blender calculate internally and how light intensity works in real life. It can't be displayed correctly on a CRT monitor, but keeps all the original datas if the picture is saved in 32bits.

For convertion/compare between different spaces :

CIE LAB : is an absolute color profile, like a reference to calculate all colors even colors that cannot be reproduced in the physical world.

More about the topic :

EDIT 1 : More infos about workflows

Remember, you can preview picture with one configuration and save/export with an one other one, if you know well what's your needs, how color management and color spaces work.
I agree with Troy, color management in Blender is messy, but not only color management there are other part that involved with color management that aren't suited for linear, but it's an other story.

It's not only Blender, I use Affinity Photo, you can't work in 32bits correctly and I don't speak about Photoshop...
All of that because Color management, color spaces, and the different transformation of the chain are really hard to understand and need something close to devotion. But it's really worth it.

About your workflows, since you don't have specific workflow I give you what I usually do:

Blender previsualisation :
Preview in sRGB / Filmic (filmic is a kind of Log encoding)/ High contrast (contrast depends of the final look you want), render an image of the sequence, color grade with the compositor node Color balance, set the type to Offset/Power/Slope (ASC-CDL), then it start to really depend of the needs.
You have to ask yourself, is this shot the final video wich will be diffuse or, will the final grade be made in an external software?

Final video :
Render your sequence with the same color management setup and compositing, and export in the format you want.
For web, screen display, Tiff 8bit, Avi, MP4... this will gives you a sRGB with the maximum light info baked but no more room for playing with intensity of light (contrast, exposure...)
If you work on Apple change sRGB for P3...

Video that is color graded in an external software :
Render you sequence without the color balance node active, in .EXR 16 or 32 bit (if 32 is too heavy), this time you have a 16/32 bit linear output (so no color space baked). Than you can import in Resolve for exemple, change the color space to whatever you want and do the color grading, adding LUTs...
Export the vidéo to your needs e.g. : DCP (jpeg2000)...

Hope this is clear enough.


Inverse Kinematics Not Working. Leg freaks out So i am trying to IK Rig my character and i added knneIK and heelIK bones. When i add the iverse kinematics modifier to the shin bone it freaks out like crazy.

Here's what happens when i try to move the HeelIK Bone:
https://gyazo.com/24c3c96dbeb02493c0bf6b10dd143dba
Any help would be appreciated.

To sum it up, here is how it should be organized:

In Edit mode, switch Lowerleg and Thigh directions (header menu > Armature > Switch Direction) so that it looks like in my picture.
Parent Thigh to Hip, parent Lowerleg to Thigh, parent Foot to Controller, deparent Controller, deparent Poletarget, deactivate the Deform option of Controller and Poletarget.
Bend the knee a bit forward.
In Pose mode give an IK constraint to Lowerleg with the Controller as Target and Poletarget bone as Pole Target. Correct the Pole Angle if it needs to.


vertex groups created from rigging do not work I successfully rigged a high poly 3 piece model and upon skinning the model, the vertex groups were created for all parts of the model. However, the "Neck, Head" and "Hair" vertex groups while created are not recognized in "Weight Paint" and upon applying "Weight Paint" manually there is no effect?
The "Red" paint appears but does not allow heat, animation of the head or neck. The rest of the model works fine with "Weight Paint" and moves correctly. While I am new to blender what would be the best approached to this situation?

The model

When making a rig make sure that every part of the model has an Armature Modifier applied. This is easy when you Merge (CtrlJ in Object Mode) all of the objects you want to rig into one "big" object which means that you only have to apply the Armature Modifier once.

Another "feature" of Blender that comes to mind when thinking about rigging with custom weights is that the weigths are assigned with a vertex group. The vertex group's name has to be the same as the Bone's you want to bind the group to. You can always try to get away with automated weights or use them as a base for your own weightpaint, it gives a decent result most of the time.


Many shortcuts don't work in Blender 2.8. Are these bugs? In blender 2.8 it looks like all the 0-9 keys were remapped to numpad only. Wondering why the viewpoint changes could not be done, I customized the keys back to my upper row or digit keys 0-9, because I have Apple keyboard without the numpad.

Even then the shortcuts don't work as expected. Changing the viewpoint using 0 thru 9 keys only works in Edit and Sculp Mode and only sometimes. What is the logic behind, I would like to know.

When in camera view, the shortcut Shift+F for free move does not work.

Also CRTL(or CMD) + ALT + 0  shortcut does not work.

These are these I discovered after an hour of messing around with Blender 2.8. Are these actually bugs or features? Anybody can chip in? I was used to 2.79 behavior.

CRTL(or CMD) + ALT + 0 shortcut does not work

Edit > Preferences window > Input tab : check Emulate Numpad

  Many shortcuts don't work in Blender 2.8. Are these bugs?

Not bugs.You can find the new shortcuts in,

Edit > Preferences window > Keymap

Annoying at first but I get used to it quickly.

Blender 2.8 is a big change and more "industry" compliant, for example:

left click for selection (instead of right click)
Space bar for Play/pause
F3 for search, etc


Lighting objects passing through a portal in Cycles I've created a portal based on this method. Here's what it looks like:

Light passing through the portal is not handled accurately; instead I've faked it by baking the light from the outside onto the outer side of the portal, and then applying the baked texture onto the inner side.

Now, the problem is that, as you can see, the two parts of the cylinder sticking through the portal do not match up, since they are lighted differently.

Is there any way I can get the light on the cylinder to work correctly?

Figured it out myself. It can be done by stacking three renders: At the bottom the interior of the portal, on the next level the exterior without the cylinder but with the shadow of the outer part of the cylinder, and finally on top the partially covered cylinder. The node setup looks like this:

And here's the result:


How to get posebone global location I use the below code to retrieve location of pose.bone, but it always give 0 (or -0).
It seems the pose.bone location is the relative position of its parent so it will not-zero value once I grab pose.bone to somewhere?!
Is there a way to get "global location(X, Y, Z)" of pose.bone??

for action in bpy.data.actions:
    print(action)
    for fcurve in action.fcurves:
         print("data_path:" + fcurve.data_path + ", channel " + str(fcurve.array_index))
         for keyframe in fcurve.keyframe_points:
              print(keyframe.co)

data_path:pose.bones["Bone.011"].location, channel 0
Vector (13.0000, -0.0000)
Vector (29.0000, -0.0000)
Vector (40.0000, -0.0000)
Vector (45.0000, -0.0000)
Vector (83.0000, -0.0000)
Vector (110.0000, -0.0000)
data_path:pose.bones["Bone.011"].location, channel 1
Vector (13.0000, 0.0000)
Vector (29.0000, 0.0000)
Vector (40.0000, 0.0000)
Vector (45.0000, 0.0000)
Vector (83.0000, 0.0000)
Vector (110.0000, 0.0000)
data_path:pose.bones["Bone.011"].location, channel 2
Vector (13.0000, -0.0000)
Vector (29.0000, -0.0000)
Vector (40.0000, -0.0000)
Vector (45.0000, -0.0000)
Vector (83.0000, -0.0000)
Vector (110.0000, -0.0000)
data_path:location, channel 0
Vector (13.0000, 0.0245)
Vector (45.0000, -3.3037)
Vector (83.0000, 0.0245)
Vector (110.0000, 1.5101)
data_path:location, channel 1
Vector (13.0000, -0.0075)
Vector (45.0000, -0.0075)
Vector (83.0000, -0.0075)
Vector (110.0000, -0.0075)
data_path:location, channel 2
Vector (13.0000, 3.0031)
Vector (45.0000, 2.5048)
Vector (83.0000, 1.8442)
Vector (110.0000, 1.8442)

This is a bit of a duplicate of this question, but just to complete the picture, to get the global location of your pose bone, you need to multiply the bone's location by the armature and the bone's transform matrices (sounds complicated, but is actually simple):

p = bpy.context.active_pose_bone  # Our pose bone
o = bpy.context.object            # Our armature object
global_location = o.matrix_world * p.matrix * p.location


Join objects which using the same material I have 117 objects and I tried to connect them into one object and separate by material, but it didn't worked because blender separates the objects which have duplicated materials too (material.001, material.002 etc.). How can I join these objects ?

Fear not my friend. Here I come with help for You :) You have to open text editor in Blender, click New to create new text file, and paste this code snippet (below), then change "somename" to the materials name before .001 (f.ex. if it's Material, Material.001 and so on, You have to write Material there). Then press Run Script and watch the magic (it should select all objects having material with this name part).Important is to keep indentations cause Python is very sensitive about it, so in line 1 and 2 there is no indentation line 3 - 4 spaces, line 5 - 8 spaces, line 6 - 12 spaces.

import bpy
scene = bpy.context.scene
for ob in scene.objects:
    for slot in ob.material_slots:
        if ("somename" in slot.name):
            ob.select = True


How do I get all the Keyframes I see other people using? I see people using all sorts of keyframes when they push "I". I cannot seem to get these options. When I push "I", I get the following: "All Channels", "Only selected channels", and "In active group".

How can I get these other options of keyframes for my projects?

I push "I" in the 3d view and get the menu I want. This only occurs in a new project and does not happen in a project that I have been working in a pop-up says, "No suitable context for active Keying Set".

I do not have the Key Set option in that window either. It skips right over it, from "Delta Scale" to "Location".

"All the other Keyframes" are yes, the Key sets. "Location, Rotation, scaling, locrot, locrotscale, rotscale, delta location, delta rotation, delta scale, visual location, visual rotation, visual scaling, visual locrot, visual locrotscale, visual locscale, and visual rotscale.

I've figured it out. I needed to click the "x" in the active keying sets dropdown in the timeline window. that let me choose what I wanted when I hit "I" in all engine and projects. The "I" shortcut does not work if the keying set is set to "available". just hit the x thee so nothing appears in that window.

Also, the "I" shortcut will look different in the dope sheet than it will in the 3d view. I understand now, and hope that this is able to clear things up for other who may be confused as to what they should do.


Use lattice on part of object I'm trying to model a simple chair, and I want one of the back legs to be curved/bended. I tried using a lattice for this, with a vertex group set to the vertices in the leg. But the result is super-weird as you can hopefully see in the picture.

The vertex group (RightBendyLeg) can be seen selected in yellow.
I don't understand why the leg grows on the z-axis, as I would think the lattice has almost the same size on the z-axis as the leg. Can someone explain this behaviour?
If I wanted to created a bend/curved leg like this, is there a better way than using a lattice?

Thanks.

The problem can stem from applying scale to the lattice. You shouldn't do it. Apply scale to a chair, create new lattice for the leg and don't apply scale to it. Then this setup should work perfectly, but I would suggest to subdivide the leg little more to get the effect, you need.
Also in my opinion it would be easier to just use proportional editing directly on the leg vertices to get desired curvature. Lattice doesn't give more control in this particular example.
I would also suggest you to split the chair on 2 and use mirror modifier to ensure, that bending will be exactly the same for both legs.


Rigid Body Problem - objects not colliding I am trying to complete BlenderGuru's Quick Rigid Body Fun tutorial, but keep getting stuck when trying to add Rigid Body to the chain. My top chain link stays in mid-air, while the rest fall and collide with the floor and each other. But they should just hang in mid-air. According to the tutorial, the plane needs to be set to Passive under Rigid Body, and the top chain link should be Active , but unchecked in "Dynamic". The other chain links should all be Active and checked Dynamic. The top chain links stays as it should, but link#2 just falls right through. Any help appreciated :-)

There are a number of important things to check when setting up a Rigid Body simulation :

Use the correct Collision Shape - on your example screenshot you show the first object as having Shape set to Mesh but check that all of your objects are similarly set. Convex Hull is more efficient but Mesh shape is required for interlocking objects and/or more complicated (non-convex) meshes.
Use a realistic scale - your example screenshot shows your Collision Sensitivity Margin set to 4cm which implies that 1 Blender Unit equates to 1 metre. Each link of your chain appears to be many blender units in size (when compared to the Grid which is visible in the screenshot). This means you have links that are many metres in length and will therefore behave as very large objects, with very large forces as they interact with each other. This can cause unstable simulations - especially if your 'steps per second' simulation setting is too low.
Ensure each object has its Scale applied - it's not clear if that is the case with your example. In order for Rigid Body objects to behave realistically, they need to have a consistent Scale in each of the X,Y,Z directions. To achieve this, select all links in the chain and press Ctrl+A and select 'Scale'.
Ensure the origin of each mesh is at its 'centre of gravity' - if you've created your chain using an Array modifier, split into its separate parts then the origins may be in the wrong place. Select the objects, click Set Origin in the tool panel (T) and select 'Origin to Centre of Mass'. A wrongly positioned origin (especially if it is outside the bounds of the mesh) can produce some very odd simulation results.
If the simulation still behaves erratically, you may need to increase the precision of the simulation - in particular the Scene/Rigid Body World/Steps Per Second - don't increase it too high as this can also cause problems with the simulation accuracy.

If you have addressed all of the above and still have a misbehaving simulation then it would help to upload an animation of what is occurring in your simulation (can tell a lot about how it's set up by how it moves and interacts) and/or upload your Blend file.

In order to demonstrate the difference applying the scale can make, here's a simulation where the chains have not had the scale applied (and have been stretched in one direction and have the scale of (1.0,1.0,5.0)) :

And here's the same simulation with the only difference being that the scale has been 'applied' (so they meshes are identical but scaled as (1.0,1.0,1.0)) :


Roughness in cycles render. Need help with nodes I am new in a blender, So I have a problem. I created photo scanned texture with normal and bump map (8K res)in photoshop.
When I applied it on the object, all looks good in material preview mode, but when I render it in cycles render my roughness missing. I know that I do mistake in nodes, but I can not find it. I search for it on google, Also read and watch about procedural PBR on youtube and google. But can't find my mistake.

Material Preview:

Rendered:

First of all problem with the roughness raised because of the missing glossy map. To tell the truth, I don't have it :)
So if you created your maps as me in photoshop and applied it as texture (Normal; Diffuse and the main one)  always save it as tiff format (don't forget about compression when you save it). Other formats like png make less quality. Also, use RAW photos as donors of maps.
Second: if applied your hi-res texture on your object(without a glossy map) and after rendering you're found that the object looks dry ( For instance you rendered you brownie cake or donut) don't worry! You can solve this problem with MIXShader. After changes of your Principled BSDF Shade create the second one, Glossy Shader. Turn off the first one and adjust glossy shader. Then add Mixshader. Connect Glossy and Principled Shader to Mixshader and magic will happen.
In my case, I adjust bump and normal maps they blowing out my object reflectivity. It helps a lot but not as I want because of a problem with the texture source material.
Second I didn't use HDRI, therefore I add it.
Thanks to everyone who helped me!!


Unknown operation while following tutorial I am following a tutorial but he makes a mouth using some operation that I do not know. It is located at a timestamp of 5:02 in the video linked below.

Youtube Tutorial

Select the 3 vertices, then press V to rip them.


Are they any good tutorials on how to make animated mud/dirt? This is a project I'm working on that features an industrial factory machine (already modeled out), but inside the machine a mud-like substance is poured in, and subsequently slowly pushed through the cylinder shape inside of the machine.
Are they any tutorials out there showing how to make a mud substance that animates/moves?

There are a ton of fluid simulation tutorials that can get you started. You're going to want a high viscosity fluid to emulate mud. You could then set up your machine to be a collider in the simulation.
Here is a tutorial that covers the basics of fluid simulation.
You could also augment your simulation with creative use of metaballs and particles.
Here is a simple tutorial that covers the very basics of metaballs
Here is a more advanced tutorial that covers metaballs and particles
Finally, here are a couple more fluid simulation tutorials:
Create Splashes in Blender
Realistic Fluid Simulation


Blender rendering deleted video I have a project I am working on that involves a view screen I made. At one point, just to tinker with it, I was trying to get a video rendered on that view screen.
All that ended up happening was Blender rendered only that video and not the whole project. I set it up with the movie clip editor section. I decided it wasn't going to work for what I wanted to do anyway so I deleted that video and just put an image on the view screen. I am trying to get Blender to render the project again but it still is only rendering images from the deleted video. I deleted the video from the movie clip editor but it is still being rendered.
Its got to be a simple setting I am overlooking, or at least I hope so. How do I get Blender to go back to rendering the whole project I am working on? If more info is needed, please just ask and I will provide whatever is needed.

Did you save the file after making your changes?

Try reloading the recently saved file.
File >> Revert

This fixes issues like this for me most of the time.


How to select objects based on texture data? Is there a way to select all objects in a scene that are using a certain texture?
Without differatiating materials, linked or appended data, lost database connection and so on.

For example:
I import a scene with a lot of different objects.
Some of them are using the same texture but on different materials.
I'd like to select all the object that are making use of this texture, even if they are located in different materials or lost their connection to the library (linked/appended materials).

Note: Not sure if what I'm asking for is eligable as one question. Just hoping that there is a simple solution for selecting objects based on texture data.

In the outliner editor window, at the right hand side of the menu bar, where the default item in the selection window is "all scenes", activate the drop down menu by pressing the arrows at the right side of the button, and select the menu item "data blocks". In the data blocks list, find "textures", and click on the plus-sign-in-a-circle to the left of the entry, and click on that to expand it. This will show all textures in the scene, and allow you to select them, or if not, to at least determine which objects in the scene are using the texture.


'Limit selection to visible' suddenly not working in user perspective? So I'm working on my model, same as normal and go to select "Limit selection to visible" which makes all the vertices visible and select-able. Except they're not.

I've taken a screenshot and you can actually see the "button" for it is highlighted like it's on but isn't working.

I had a look around and saw someone make a similar post except theirs is for the Ortho view, not the user perspective. Is this a glitch or some sort of setting I need to fix?

Update: I also notice the further I scroll away from the model, I can see the back vertices as if it were activated.

I opened a new project to see if this was an issue with the program itself or to do with the setting in blender. It works normally with the new project but in this current project(that are shown in the screenshots below) the limit selection to visible doesn't work. Based on this I am pretty sure it's something to do with the settings.

While I appreciate temporary fixes, I really need to know how to properly fix this issue so I can get it to work normally again.

Update:

This is how it normally works for me, I open the program and it looks like this before I press the button and after:

Now when I try to "disable" it by pressing that same button(exactly same as I always have done) nothing happens and only becomes partially visible,like in the screenshots of the issue above this.

So telling me I just need to "disable" it (when I've explained that I literally cannot do that for whatever is causing the issue) is not helping at all.

I think you are looking at it the wrong way...it is "limiting the selection to visible" (the verts up front) right now. It sounds like you want to disable it. Also you might want to fix your normals (Select All > Ctrl + N).

Let me clarify:

When the button is disabled you can "see through" it
When the button is enabled it appears opaque


Physics with an object made of several parts I am trying to throw a die made of several parts that must stay fixed. The purpose is to get a realistic physical behavior.

What I tried :
The small parts have an object constraint : Child of set to the biggest part.
Their rigid bodies are set as passive. The parts are not overlapping.

What I get :
The die jumps at the beginning of the animation ... as if a collision was  detected ...

Thank you to suggest a way to do this ... even if it is radically different from what I tried.  :)

Thanks

![die]https://ibb.co/Twyzj6v

create a cube the size of the die, make the cube not rendered and then use it as a rigid body physics and parent the die pieces to it


Masking a whole image in texture mode I'd like to know how I can mask (if possible) my whole image in texture paint mode, so at the end, I don't get unnecessary paint and colors in my diffuse texture.
I wanted to put the following image as a mask to my diffuse texture, but seems like I can't find the right place to do it

Black and white images can be used as a Mask in the texture paint mode, setting them up in the Slots panel.
The cool thing is that you can use that image you have there as a mask, and invert it to paint outside that area as well.
video on mask use with mask tool and stencil mask


Is shrinkwrap adapted in my situation I would like to work on the following corridor:

First I'v model the metal plate using modifier like this:

The I would like to combine array+shrinkwarp to fit my corridor shape (cylinder), but it seem all vertices has been impacted:

I've read on documentation that "It moves each vertex of the object being modified to the closest position on the surface of the given mesh", so is there a way to do what I wan't using another method?

Thanks!

Shrinkwrap is probably not the right tool to use in this situation. You're probably going to want the Simple Deform modifier instead.

If you want to construct your hallway using actual geometry, this is the way you're going to want to go. Arrange your panel so that it's centered at the origin, and then just put in the axis that runs along the length of your panel. You want the Bend mode for the modifier. Your initial mesh will have to have enough geometry to accommodate the bend.

After you apply the modifier, you will have to move your panel into place. The potentially hard part will be calculating the angle to feed into the modifier, but blender can help you with that too.

Turn on 'Snap'. Make sure it's set to vertex and enabled for rotation. Position your 3D cursor in the center of the hallway, and set the pivot point to 3D cursor. You can then duplicate a vertex and rotate it (in my case around the y-axis). Snap it to other vertices, and you will see in the top left the amount of rotation to feed into the Simple Deform modifier.

Once you apply the modifier, you can use the Snap tool to move, rotate, and scale the panel into place. I use 3D cursor as the pivot point, and Active Vertex as the Snap element so that I can precisely control what I'm doing:


Blender 2.81 bad shadows (missing settings) Seems like new version has no shadow settings. I read that new version should calculate and make setting automatically for better results. But it look much worse. Any ideas?
2.80
2.81
Settings:

2.80
2.81

Blender 2.81 has better shadow algorithm, the final result will deliver a higher quality shadow, but it needs more samples in order to get to that result.

Go to the Properties Render tab and in the Sampling panel increase the number of samples.


How to tile/repeat gradient texture based on object polygons faces, in shader editor? i need to repeat the gradient texture for each polygonal face an object has, it's possible?

One way to make that is by creating a special UV unwraping which will basically take every face of your model and unwrap them all on top of each other and taking the entire UV space.

If you have other UV maps already, make sure to first create a new UV map in your object so you don't lose your previous UV maps:

Then select the new UV Map, go to edit mode, select everything with A then press U → Reset. This will result to something like this in your UV Editor:

Once you've got that, you will need to call that specific UV map in your shader. Go to the shader editor, hit ⇧ ShiftA → Input → UV Map. Specify the UV Map you want in that node, then do whatever you want with that:


How to make everything selectable? I made a lot of objects unselectable (intentionally). Now, instead of un-clicking them one by one in the outliner I'd like a button like make all objects selectable. Can a Python script do that?

You can for scene objects:
import bpy

for obj in bpy.context.scene.collection.all_objects:
    obj.hide_select = False

Or for all objects in the file:
import bpy

for obj in bpy.data.objects:
    obj.hide_select = False


What is the name of this item and how to get it back? I think I pressed an unintended keyboard shortcut and this cursor thing

in 3D view disappeared. What is the name of it and how to get it back?

I am already in object mode, not in edit mode.

Edit

From the comment, it seems that it is called "manipulator". However, pressing Ctrl+Space does not show it.

It looks like I have disabled all manipulators like this:

in which case pressing Ctrl+Space does not have an effect.

Turning on at least one of them like this:

brings the manipulator back.

Hovering over the item does not show a keyboard shortcut, so it must have been a mis-Shift-click instead of an unintended keyboard shortcut.


Rigging a driving belt moved by a rotated wheel I have made a classic steam engine, with a big wheel.

I want the rotation of this wheel to move a driving belt and then, apart from the steam engine, the small wheel on a generator.

I've made the belt as a long, thin cube on a path with the curve modifier. And this part work well. If I move belt (cube) on x-axis, it follow the path around the 2 wheels, simulating a drive belt.

How can I transform the rotation of the big wheel to movement on the driving belt, and after that, the moving from the belt to rotation of the small wheel?

You can use a combination of both drivers and Transform Constraints. To synchronise the front and rear wheel, Transformation Constraints are an easy choice, as you can map source and destination value ranges easily using known even values, and just use extrapolate to calculate the rest. I prefer doing this in Armatures, but feel free to also try this on objects.

The constraint between Front and Back wheel could look like this:

The numbers you put in are a relation between the diameter of front and back wheel. So the combination of 5 and 10 is actually arbitrary, it's the relation that matters. 1 and 2 would work just the same.

For the belt, use a Driver instead. Transformation constraint could do the job too, but the issue is, it resets the target bone position after each full revolution of the front sprocket bone. In my case, there was a noticeable popping, so I went for a driver instead:

Note that in my example, the expression is -var, not var, as I had to reverse the bone movement. Thinking about it, I could have also changed the bone roll, and then use Minimum Value instead of Scripted Expression for the driver mode. The expression in my case is only so simple, because the radius of the front wheel is 1.

Final result of this Blend File here: