Guidance on creating a Celestial Sphere I have a project in mind that I want to create with Blender. I'm trying to create what's called a

  Celestial Sphere.
   In astronomy and navigation, the celestial sphere is an abstract sphere that has an arbitrarily large radius and is concentric to Earth. All objects in the sky can be conceived as being projected upon the inner surface of the celestial sphere, which may be centered on Earth or the observer. If centered on the observer, half of the sphere would resemble a hemispherical screen over the observing location.

   Earth rotating within a
  relatively small-radius geocentric celestial sphere. Shown here are
  stars (white), the ecliptic (red, the circumscription of the Sun's
  apparent annual track), and the lines of right ascension and circles
  of declination (cyan) of the equatorial coordinate system.

I would like to create everything with objects, i.e. I'd like to avoid using a texture wrap on the entire sphere.

What would be a good way of achieving this ?

Wireframe modifier is your friend when you need to create the grid of
the outer sphere
Constellations are just some vertexes connected with edges (the hard part is to put them in the right position - if you have coordinates you can insert them in the object properties > Transform > location XYZ attributes)
you'll need to work with shaders to config how the edges are going to be rendered


Multiple Holes On surface I have a cube shape with a hexagon hole in the middle (Bevel modifier added). I have added loop cuts around it, made straight lines on the face of the cube to get better topology. I then selected the vertices on one side just for the example using Shift Ctrl + B, subdivided it, then with loop tool made a circle. But the holes are not as smooth, and also There's Ngons. The holes still look a bit edge, not perfectly ellipse shaped. Is there a better method to achieve this?
Thank you.

PS: I'm avoiding the subsurface modifier for this mesh,

You could do it with several arrays of cylinder that you use as booleans. Give your cylinder as many vertices as you want (16, 32...). Use the floor topology to precisely set the offset value of the array:

Once you apply, shade smooth the object, and auto-smooth:


Metaballs disappearing when renamed So like I said in the title I have an issue with metaballs disappearing when renamed, only leaving the outline visible. For renaming I followed this guide https://youtu.be/Y7R2_F-ZukQ?t=330 and I do not get the same result. When I rename them back to Mball, they reappear. When I try this process in a new clean file it works without any problems. Does anyone possibly know what might be causing this to happen?
This is the new name, it still follows the naming guidelines:

But I get this:

So I figured out what was causing the issue for me :D The number in the new name I was renaming the metaballs to. When I renamed them to Slime instead of Slime1 works fine. Just leaving it here in case anyone else has this problem. :) But any additional knowledge on this topic is welcome.


Blender. How can i separate mesh / Edge I was wondering if its possible to separate from a mesh inly The edges, as curves, só i can later transformar that "tube" in geometry.

Like in Max you can detach and choose The type of mesh, and if its a spline you can "mesh" it!

Thanks!!

In Object Mode press Alt+C and select Curve from Mesh/Text. Then in the curve properties under Fill select Full and to give it depth under Bevel increase Depth. Also use Resolution to make it more round.


(Blender 2.8) Why is my smoke simulation animation not visible in flow type? sorry if I use incorrect terms for my question, but i'm new to Blender and dont really know much of the correct way to describe them.

I'm currently following the Blender Guru tutorial series and i'm trying to put an object on fire. I did exactly what i saw on the video but no results. When i set the smoke type to "domain" (in the physics window) it shows the animation correctly but whenever i set it to "flow" nothing seems to happen.

I tried to restart Blender but to no avail.

I'm using a Macbook Pro (2015) running Sierra 10.12.3 by the way.

For the smoke simulation, you need two objects.

One is the source of the smoke (Flow), and the other is the volume in which the smoke will appear (Domain).

The Flow object MUST be inside the Domain object, otherwise you will never see anything.

If you use the Quick Smoke option, it makes the selected object the Flow object, and automatically adds the Domain for you (typically a cube).  It's worth experimenting with Quick Smoke in a separate blend file or collection, just to see how it works.


Bone roll not mirroring correctly I'm am having a really bad time with Blender lately and im hoping i can have some answers to a specific problem. After using Symmetrize on the left side of my rig, the position of the bones are correct but if turn my orientation on in the armature tab, i notice that the roll of the bones has been inverted along the x axis and i cant seem to get it fixed.
I have tried applying all the transformations to the armature, rigify armatures are also inverted. Recalculating the roll along every axis doesnt seem to work either]1
[]2
[]3
[]4

I have tried pretty much everything i could find on the internet and im quite stumped since i cant move on to animation.
If anybody could help me i would really appreciate it! thanks!
Here is the link to my .blend file

Bones pointing along the world y axis have their roll correctly mirrored.
I am expecting most of my rig to look like the bones in the third picture. 4th picture is a simplified version of my problem.

I forgot to post my answer oops, but Leander has cleared things up for me. Basically i cant mirror a bone axis exactly and this bone roll behavior is normal
and during animation i have to set certain roll modes depending on what the bone is actually suppose to accomplish. Quaternion is better along bones with a vertical axis while horizontal seems to prefer regular xyz Euler coordinates. This allows me to mirror my pose correctly.


How to make this unfolding anime do you know how I can make this unfolding anime?
Should I do with shape keys or armature?
The mesh is imported from 3D max, so it is not clean. Please see the attachment below.
Thanks for your time!
There is a video. https://imgur.com/a/JSTH2fL

Here is a quick try with bones, I guess it's the right solution, but you'll probably need to clean the topology:


Adjust symmetry on Retopoflow I'm trying to do some retopology to a simple model with Retopoflow but the symmetry is being miscalculated. I don't see any option to adjust this and the center of the object is already at the center of the mesh and the origin of the scene. How could I repair this? Thanks in advance!

Nevermind, I just found the solution. To adjust this just exit Retopoflow, pick the Retopoflow object and you will see it's using a mirror modifier. Align the origin of the mesh with the one of the object you're retopologizing and go back to Retopoflow, the mirror will be fine now.


How do I make an object glow? How do I make an object glow?

I've tried everything to make it glow but it isn't. I even made a separate material and added the texture again and used a mix shader to mix the texture and glow.

apperently most of the original nodes from McPrep were useless, so i kept the original texture node and used 2 emmision ones, a mix shader and a light path to make it look like a normal glowstone block


Array modifier with curve is deforming mesh? This is simple, but I can't figure out why it's happening. I took a couple weeks off of Blender (still a beginner) and I've apparently forgotten a lot of stuff..
I'm trying to follow this guide on how to duplicate an object along a curve, but no matter what I do, my mesh object gets deformed like crazy. In my example I was trying to duplicate a plain old cube along a circle curve. The only thing I changed was the scale of the circle curve.
Can someone tell me why it's not working as it is in the guide?

If you scale and apply the scale of a cuve, its vertices radius will change to the value before the scaling, here it looks like you've scaled up to 9.677. To bring the value back to 1, select all the vertices and type 1 in the N panel:


Not able to apply material to a Animation Node target i watched Curtis Holts Animation Nodes tutorial and started making a drone glitch effect project with it , so the target is to make a plan with a simple flooring texture and displacements , some walls , a drone model parented to a empty, The animation nodes will be taking the mesh from the plane which is the flooring and generating a target using the object output and mesh input. The floor which is just a subdivided plane has problems with materials. When i Unwrap the mesh , it works fine but when i move the empty which changes the geometry of the plane , the mesh returns to a brown texture without the proper flooring texture
Original Plane

Target Plane

My Uvs are proper , the normals are not flipped....

You have to unwrap your object.
When you don't unwrap your object and use UV coordinates in the texture coordinate node, Blender will make some assumptions about the material, which is why you see the generic looking color that you see.
Unwrap the plane to add a UVMap to the object, and that will solve the problem:


Constraint's target problem I have two objects, human and fridge. I want open the door of the fridge with my human's hand. So... I need to do two different animations, one for the human and one for the fridge. But i got a problem.
My right hand have a "child of" constraint and it's target is my fridge door. But in my game I need separate the fridge and the human. But when I delete the fridge from my scene in the Blender, I lose the target.
How can I keep target even it doesn't exists? Or how can I set target in Unity for Blender's constraints?

Solution it's a use the bake action. Just select your action, press spacebar and type "Bake animation" and then select "visual keying" and "clear constraints" parameters.


Removing superfluous vertices in a large mesh I have a mesh for a procedurally generated maze, in which there are, due to overlapping walls, a large number of superfluous vertices along the walls and corners.

(Edit: Actually, the walls are all individual, slightly overlapping cuboids, so maybe I should try some boolean operation like union on them?)

(Edit2: See below for the .blend file)

Is there an easy way to remove all of these so that I am left only with the straight planes? I thought I could use something like limited dissolve or the Decimate modifier, but I can't get these options to work. (Not sure what I am doing wrong, but applying them either does nothing or causes the mesh to go out of shape).

Here is the .blend file: maze.blend

I have tried to mimic your scene and this worked quite well for me... so maybe it is worth to try:

EDIT: It looks like this method works only for a simple model like in my example, if it is more complex scene, you need to divide it into smaller parts otherwise the Remesh modifier does not reconstruct the model properly.

Join all blocks into one mesh
Add Remesh modifier, untick Remove Disconnected Pieces and play with the Octree Depth to get the initial shapes
Add Decimate modifier - planar
Apply modifiers

Then just apply that last modifier (the gif was too big to upload so I had to cut it there).

The result should look like this:


How to form a tapered stamp from an SVG I am trying to make a stamp from an SVG. I have found a model on thingiverse that demonstrates the desired outcome well.

Given an SVG, and a "body" mesh:

I would like to make a stamp where the body tapers into the impression:

I am very new to blender, and have been trying all manner of boolean operations and extruding, but am stumped on how to create something as elegant as this - preferably without lots of vertex nudging.

I believe the example was done in fusion 360.

This result can be achieved easily using basic operations.

Connect parts of your shape, so it only has one edge (select 4 vertices and press F and repeat)
Connect it to a circle (or your handle)
Add some ridges and move your shape upwards to taper it.

Make one outside edge and connect it to a circle (or other shape)

Extrude it to make a handle (unless you already have one)

Add some ridges and move the shape upwards, it will taper nicely.


Why is the fire Not looking like a Fire This is how it should look like.

This is how it renders

Smoke settings:

By default, Blender does not add all the nodes necessary to create the "fire" aspect of the Smoke Sim to the Material Output.  Basically you need to edit the material of the flame in order to make it visible in Cycles.

1.) There is an Attribute Node that must be added with the name "flame".
2.) The Factor output goes into a Color Ramp Node that you will edit for the desired color.
3.) That Node's Color output will go into an Emission Node since fire "emits" light.
4.) You will then add that shader to the rest of the material shaders:

EDIT: I've included a .blend file below that has all the basic settings enabled and tweaked for creating a simple fire in Cycles:

FYI, here is a pretty good video tutorial for explaining the basic settings for fire in Cycles: https://youtu.be/u-zK7Bu8cAI


Key to switch between vertex, edge and face in Maya bindings Is there a keyboard map to switch between vertex, edge and faces in Edit mode using the Maya key bindings?

I'm also on a laptop with Emulate Numpad set.

It's documented that "Ctrl-Tab" should work with Blender keybindings but this switchers to Weight Paint Mode instead. (So I can't use that to search the key bindings to find/switch to something useful.)

In Maya, the keys are F9, F10 and F11, but these do something else, regardless of what key bindings are selected.

(If someone knows a good way to find Maya bindings in Blender that would be good too)

In Blender 2.78a.

Ctrl+Tab is documented for default Blender layout; there it changes selection mode in Edit mode, in Object mode it activates Weight Paint.
In Maya bindings Ctrl+Tab switches to Weight Paint interaction mode both in Object and Edit modes.
It appears that select mode menu in this case will be on clicking RMB.

I suggest refering to User Preferences > Input window to check for the key bindings there.


In 2.8 how do I drop a modeling tool? While I'm modeling in 2.8 I will be using a tool, like the "extrude region" tool.  Is there a key command to drop the tool and be back to the original selection arrow tool?  If I use "b" for box select, I can change my selection, but I'm still in the "extrude" tool.  How can I drop a tool?

There is always one tool active so closest option to exiting tool is to switch to Select Box.
For shortcut:
You can press first 'Escape' key to cancel if in middle of operation and then 'W' key once to switch out of current tool like extrude/inset etc. to Box select tool.
Pressing 'W' second time or more will change the select option from box to circle and so on.


Why is Blender's V.S.E. Slow? What I know about blender's V.S.E. is that it can cache a certain amount of frames before dropping frames(Related). But, on my Ipod I have video editors like Imovie, and Cute Cut and there is never a delay with the videos, even with different FPS. (maybe because Cute Cut and Imovie have a MCFI?) So what method do they use, or does Blender just use an out-dated version of Caching? Also my Ipod has much smaller RAM so it wouldn't be able to Cache much. Then when I'm finally done making a video why do  have to I render it? With other Video editors, like lightworks or Filmora or Imovie or CuteCut or WindowsMovie maker or pretty much everything else, I export it. So is Blender's VSE outdated- or the opposite, it's so good that normal pc's can't handle it? Which begs the question, why not have a dumbed down version for normal pcs?

Wow, ok that's a lot a questions, sorry, but to narrow it down to one(two) question(s):
How does Blenders VSE work, what makes it so slow?

Short answer:

There is no “rendered” cache.
Not all codecs are equal.

As to the first point, every single operation, including shifting resolutions from your source file to destination, alpha overs, etc. are all done in real-time. This means that if you stack twenty strips with Alpha Over, every one is calculated on the fly.

As to the second point, codecs are designed with different design goals. Some are to compress the data size, some are for streams, some are for other nuanced things. These codecs can put more or less demand on a system depending how they were designed.

Typically, you shouldn't be doing manipulations and effects work in an NLE anyways, so it isn't much of an issue; use an NLE to get your beats, but use other tools for your grading or effects work in a non-realtime environment.

To maximize the VSE's ability to perform, you might want to try a few things:

Keep your rendering output dimensions precisely the same as the dimensions of your input file. Some DSLRs for example shoot 1920x1088, and using 1920x1080 will result in a costly scale every frame.
Use temporary simple effects strips to block in your complex work. Worry about keeping the frame rate high instead of how it looks. You can do the heavy work later in a compositor.
Don't bother grading or adding more processing. Again, save that for when you are finished so you can grade it more precisely in a proper tool, at proper deeper bit depths.
Keep dissolves and overs to an absolute minimum. The VSE can keep up if you avoid stacking many together.
Use a codec designed for quick seeking and decoding. A non Group Of Pictures (GOP) codec that stores all I frames is ideal.

As someone who decided to try and take a piece to broadcast with Blender, I can tell you that it can be used effectively, albeit with some effort and planning.

Hope that helps you along...


Why is my dynamic paint image sequence coming out blank? I am trying out a project with blood smudging on the floor, and doing it with vertex mode is cooking my potato laptop, when I tried to bake it into an image sequence, its coming out blank.

I have checked all the Necessary options, I think. Please help.

Link to .blend:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1frJXE78Z5R8thPltGo9Bai67M3MHuPxJ/view?usp=sharing
Link to inspiration Video:https://youtu.be/pDr_Jqjd7zQ
Time Stamp: 0:05-0:08
Thanks.

your subdivisions of your plane is far too big. So just make your plane much (!) smaller or subdivide it more (which i do not recommend if you do not want to crash your computer) - i just made your plane really tiny (after i rebought a new computer when i tried to subdivide it more...) and then  bake your images again and i got small red lines on the pngs. But i think your Shader setup is wrong too because i never saw red lines on the plane.


Missing "Building Objects" addon in V2.79 I installed Blender V2.79 just a few weeks ago.  I cannot find "Building Objects" in the Add-ons.  Is there a way to fix this, such as downloading it?

Never heard of this addon before.
Apparently you can download it from this github repository though it hasn't been updated in a while.
There's no guarantee it will work under current versions of Blender.


Adding cold breath effect over a video I can render a basic smoke simulation in Blender but I was wondering if anyone knew of an approach for creating a convincing cold breath effect? Is it the same basic principle as a smoke simulation but messing with the physics etc?

I'm not sure how to see the video so I can position exactly frame by frame a simulation either.

I can't find anything on Google but even pointing me towards a tutorial would be very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

You could do it using breath made from smoke, but it might be challenging matching up all of the elements. Not simply in terms of footage, but in terms of performance and nuance of your actors.

Lock Your Picture

You don't want to be sinking in effort until you are certain of which frames you will be performing surgery on. Once your edit is locked, drop the raw frames into a 16 bit half EXR per shot. Assuming you have shot this on a DSLR or like camera, isolate your final cut from the VSE and render out.

If you have several to many shots, maintain solid control over your organization. One directory per shot, with versions as subdirectories or an alternative approach that works for you. Bear in mind that if you are performing a dissolve or an over where two shows are displayed at the same time, you will need to make sure that you have a full series of the entire frame count, including the overlapping portion, in your half EXRs.

Gather the Plates

Ideally you would have a library of plate shots, shot against black. Consider a back light to bring just enough lift into the breath to give distance between the lower black of your background and your foreground breath. You could capture these using a DSLR without much effort, assuming you can find a cold enough area to work in for a bit. Gather up many plates so that you can combine them in ways that suit the breath required in your shot. If in doubt, capture more rather than less.

If shooting is unrealistic, consider rendering out plate elements with variations using your smoke concept or gathering up found footage that might be available online with permission to use.

Alpha Technique

Use associated alpha (sometimes sarcastically referred to as the One True Alpha) on the plates based off of a luminance key pull, making sure to bring up your lower end enough to threshold out the black you are photographing against. If grading is required, make sure to unpremult the alpha otherwise you will incorrectly skew the RGB to alpha relationship leading to glowing or darkened fringes.

Tracking

Depending on the nature of the breath element, you might be able to get away with a 2D manually tracked element with an empty and some scaling. However, if you have a shot that warrants it, consider tracking it and laying in your elements as it shouldn't be too complex and potentially add tremendously to your work. You gain the ability to add subtle depth of field and possibly some depth cuing for free.

If you do track your shot, consider adding a subdivide or two to your floating plates and subtly warping them with a quick sculpt or curve. This will add some perceptual parallax as the camera moves and more greatly sell the effect.

Matching Footage to the 3D View

  I'm not sure how to see the video so I can position exactly frame by
  frame a simulation either.

From the Properties panel (hotkey N) you should see "Background Image". Set accordingly. To keep your sanity, position the camera at a perpendicular position to the grid and position your elements accordingly. If you are going to attempt a 3D effect, make sure to set your camera lens to roughly what your shot was conducted on, and set the sensor size to APS-C or whatever gate size you shot on. If you are going to do a strictly 2D approach, this isn't an issue.

If you are attempting something strictly 2D, where you are using an orthogonal camera and floating 2D planes,this can be a little tricky if you aren't careful. First, make sure that your render dimensions match the dimensions of your footage. Second, if you are seeking to perfectly match a plane to the viewport, you will need to set the scale of your pla such that it matches the ratio of your frame. That is, for 1920x1080 footage, your scale would be 1.920 by 1.080. If you don't use the fractional values, you will end up triggering some cubic scaling on your images and the result will end up a blurry soup, so be aware.

If plausible, try the 3D approach for fun.

Further Reading

Here is one approach, loosely summarized above, from a larger budget production:
https://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-thing-a-matter-of-life-and-breath/


Creating Camera Sway There seem to be a lot of tutorials on creating camera shake within blender but I can't find any about creating slow camera sway, as if someone is holding the camera. Is there a way to do this in blender without animating every move or is there a tutorial or addon someone can point me towards? Thanks!

The best and easy way I found to make easy camera sways is by using the graph editor.

Steps:

Press I with the camera selected and add a rotation keyframe.
Open up the graph editor and select Camera Y Euler Rotation for example.
Click the N button to pull up the side bar
Click Add Modifier and select Noise
Now you have very fast camera shake, but you want swaying, so set the Scale to something like 10-20. And set the Strength to something like 0.2 - 0.05
Now you could apply this to the other rotations or even some location, but remember to randomize each noise by changing the Phase value for each noise modifier.

Hope that helps!


Where do I put the Blender folder on linux? It might be a silly question: where do I have to put the folder extracted from .tar.bz2 in a linux machine (Debian)? Usually I use a repository to install it but with the experimental versions I never know where to put it and I don't even know how to link the executable to the gnome application menu. Any help, please?

Simply unpack it into Documents folder, and it works fine


bpy.ops.sculpt.brush_stroke Incorrect context when called using the bpy module in headless mode I have been trying to sculpt a mesh using the Python API (v2.83), running via the bpy module in headless mode. So far, I can render the mesh as is, but as soon as I try to use bpy.ops.sculpt.brush_stroke() I get the RunTimeError:

  RuntimeError: Operator bpy.ops.sculpt.brush_stroke.poll() failed, context is incorrect

The following are the contents of my bpy.context:

Note that I have set the mode to "SCULPT", and would like to sculpt the "Body" object. Inspecting the contents of bpy.context.area, it is None. Should it be "3D_VIEW", and how to change it since bpy.context.area is read only?

Thank you in advance.

bpy.context holds some information about the current windows and open views which is needed by bpy.ops.sculpt.brush_stroke and not available in headless mode. Take a look at this example here to see how to use brush_stroke() without headless mode. If you use Blender on a machine which doesn't have a graphical user interface, you could use a virtual frame buffer (see here).


Node for setting render colour, regardless of lighting [Blender 2.78a] I'm aware of Node for setting render colour, regardless of lighting, and tried following it. However, the output color seems quite off from the input color.

For example, load the default scene that opens on blender. I disabled the light.
All other settings are the default for cycles in Blender  2.78a in Windows.

Set the shader to output (0.5,0.2,1.0) or (128,51,255).

After rendering, however, the output color is quite off from what I'd expect. Instead of the desired (128,51,255), the output is (188,124,255).

I suppose there's quite a lot going on under the hood in cycles. However, I wanted to use cycles in my own research project, with a custom OSL script defining the final mesh color without any disturbances.

With the prior discussion in mind, is there something I'm missing here? Is there a way to get the exact input-output using cycles?

Thank you for your time and attention.

When you save the final image to disk, Blender applies the nonlinear sRGB gamma correction curve. Internally Blender works with a linear color model, which in general is also true for the color picker.
If you want your final image to have certain color values you have the option to apply gamma correction to the color that you pick by adding a Gamma node with the value 2.2, which is a close approximation to the non-constant sRGB gamma value. In this case this would lead to RGB values of 128, 48, 255 in the final image.

Alternatively, instead of adding the gamma node you can enter the desired colors in hex format as Blender's color picker does compensate gamma correction in hex mode. For this particular color this would be 8033FF. The color values in the final image here would be RGB 128, 51, 255 as originally intended. But if you later decide to use colors not expressible in hex format you would have to make trade-offs there.

If it's necessary to exactly match some values then I assume you would have to calculate the RGB values yourself by using the formula mentioned in the sRGB Wikipedia article.


How to connect 2 faces? I am new to blender, and tried to make my sword based on my mind. And I found a problem...

I want to connect the center/middle cube to the lower sword part(the small gap between the sword), but I don't know how. I tried to connect it, but it will be intersect with each other and unable to delete the area inside it(at least I tried). I tried to use boolean method, but it  got an error(might be my drawing's problem). Can you teach me how to fix/do it?

In Edit mode, and on edge mode, select the edges you want to create a face with and hit the F key.


Keyboard shortcut for texture paint brush strength? When texture painting the two most commonly adjusted settings are (in my experience) brush Radius and Strength. Radius already has shortcuts to decrease or increase: [ and ] keys respectively.

I want to configure a shortcut to similarly adjust the Strength.

From the console I can see that when [ is pressed this happens:

bpy.ops.brush.scale_size(scalar=0.9)

And when ] is pressed this happens:

bpy.ops.brush.scale_size(scalar=1.11111)

Here is what the key configuration for [ looks like:

So I am hoping there is some kind of corresponding command for Strength, but nothing I've tried has worked.

For example: brush.scale_strength does not work.

Is it possible to set keyboard shortcuts for the Strength slider?

Thanks

Use Shift+F for Strength, F for Radius, and Ctrl+F for rotation of brush texture.

When using a brush texture in Stencil mode, RMB to move, Shift+RMB to scale, and Ctrl+RMB to rotate the stencil image.

When using Stencil in Brush Mask, Alt+RMB to move, Shift+Alt+RMB to scale, and Ctrl+Alt+RMB to rotate.

I use these all day, and prefer them to the typical  [ and ] usage in photoshop and other editors.


Glass bottle's inside remains opaque in blender render bottle Trying to use Blender render to create a glass bottle, however transparency settings do not effect the inside of the bottle even though it's all one object.

Make sure the Depth is set high enough in Material > Transparency:

Note that setting it to very high values will increase rendertime significantly (note the rendertime recorded in the top left of the gif), so try and use as low a value as you can get away with.


Align vertex into a straight line non paralel to an axis I have two faces, the should make a straight plane, but I want to keep the mesh without Ngons. Is there a way in which I can align the 3 (6 counting the ones behind) vertices into doing a straight line non parallel to an axis?

I have realized what can be done. Scale it on the z axis to 0, and then rotate the whole selection.


How do I make spiraling loop cuts around a cylinder? How would you make these spiraling cuts around a cylinder?

Things I've already tried:

Simple Deform modifier with Twist. This warped the cylinder too much. I could reduce the warping somewhat by putting a bunch of horizontal loop cuts in, but it'd still warp a little bit. Pretty sure this isn't the best way - the reference image above is a perfectly straight cylinder without any warping/deformation.
Poke Faces. This did make some diagonal cuts, but it also generated a lot of unwanted faces in the process (and didn't give me direct control over the angle of the diagonal cuts).

I'm sure there are more ways of doing this,but I can think of 2 ways:

First one, with tools you already have:
screw modifier and array modifier:

Second one with addons Add Curve: Extra Objects and F2 addon.
Extra objects addon allows you to to create spiral curves, and F2 addon enables you to fill in the spaces quickly

Create the spiral curve with the extra objects addon, and pres Alt+C to convert it to mesh, then, with the F2 addon fill in the cylinder

and in both cases you find the end of the spiral, place a cursor on it, select the rest of the loop and pres S + Z + 0

and finally, remove the double verticesyou have from the scaling


Blender IK Constraint Location Offset? I may not know all the correct terminology for this, but I'll try my best to make it understandable. I also don't know if this has already been answered elsewhere, because I don't know how I'd go about searching for it.

I'm having an issue with IK constraints involving location. I'm trying to constrain the left hand to the right hand (on the same armature) and it works well, however the left hand automatically snaps to the origin of the right hand's bone, as pictured here.

I need to offset the position of the left hand back to where it was previously, before I added the modifier [perhaps somewhat similar to the way child constraint's "set inverse" option works].  Is this possible?

Here the file:

I simply did these steps:

1) In your Hand.L I delete the Copy Location (it's useless) and delete your IK constraint connected with the bone Hand.R

2) I create a new bone(the one in the immagine called CHILD), named BONETARGET.L (no deform), and i set this bone near to the position where i would like to have my Hand.L, hanging my weapon.

3) I create a constraint between "body" (there is a bone you called body) and BONETARGET.L; theh my BONETARGET is the child of body

4) I create an IK contraint between my BONETARGET and the Hand.L; then my Hand.L has the BONETARGET like the target for its IK

In other words i have created a chain,

you move the Hand.R that moves in the same way the "body"
the BONETARGET.L will move like the "body", and at the same time will be the target for your IK left arm that will move following this bone (BONETARGET.L)

In the end I add other 2 things:

4) I tick "Perserve volume" to mantain the volume of your mesh while you are animating, and i add a modifier (PS this one is available from the last blender verison, 2.77) called Corrective Smooth. It helps a lot and keep the mesh clear from strange and tricky deformation.

Tell me if this is the solution you were searching


I can't make my armature affect any mesh deformation I am having an impossible time setting my armature to auto-deform the mesh like I've seen a dozen times in YT tutorials. Every time I attempt to do so, I fail. Here is the workflow:

Select the mesh
Shift+Select the armature
Select Object - Parent - Armature Deform with Automatic Weights (Note: Ctrl + P does not show me any armature parenting options; I don't know why; seems to work for everyone else).

[Here is a link to my .blend file][1]. Just in case you are interested. I'm basically at my wit's end. I've recreated armatures for this stupid thing three times. Every single time, I watch someone in the tut very easily move their mesh around with Pose mode after they parent. But I can't. Ever.
If I need to use weight painting to do this manual, I will. But I would really like to know what I'm doing wrong since the manual way is going to add a lot of time. At this stage in my education, I'm still trying to understand all the basic functionality and this is one of those.

I downloaded your file and got it to work. I am very out of practice with Blender but the file seems to have issues. seems like a lot of vertices for the bear, there is some strangeness in scales of things too. there was a parent loop in the Teddy and armature , when I cleared the parenting the armature shrank. I ended up deleting the whole armature and just making a new one and then the parenting with automatic weights worked.


Why is this blue color appearing I have a wave modifier on on object which has a couple of array modifier. i object , then an array to make it 10 , then an array to make total 100(multiply) .Then these 100 peices (one single)  have a wave modifier starting a empty.
The node map is
As you can see there is some strange color at places where there is no emission shader. Why is it soand how to solve it.

The problem appears to be due to negative values being used in the Mix factor resulting in artifacts where the 'negative' of the orange colour is becoming evident.
Each channel from the Normal is in the range -1.0 through to +1.0 and so the 'add' can result in negative values. Normally a 'mix' factor will automatically clamp the values at 0.0 and 1.0 but in this case that doesn't seem to be happening. By enabling 'Clamp' you are limiting the output of the Add maths node to strictly the 0.0 to 1.0 range so that the mix is behaving consistently.


Turning my own character into animation I'm a completely new blender user! I want to change my own drawing (on paper) into animation using blender. Is it possible? and if yes how should i start?

its definitely possible.

you've got to model your drawing.

how to model

When I start creating a character, I draw it on a paper how its supposed to look from the front, then how its supposed to look from the side.
Then you put your drawing as a background image in blender and model the mesh along the lines of your drawing.

give it an armature, that armature acts as the skeleton of your model and you can animate the bones of that armature.


Edge loops Vs crease? I know its the kind of question that being asked a lot.
and its seems the majority is in favor.
of using edge loops when subsurfing a mesh.
because:
-crease creates unrealistic edges.
-edge loops are allowing more control on the shape of the edge.
-crease can create shading issues when object being deformed.
-creases can not be exported
so here is my question:
I'm learning how to do Hard surface modeling.
my model are not suppose to be deformed ( tough they are intended to be exploded later
up until today my favorite workflow in those situations.
is to
-add sub surf modifier,
-use the crease to keep the sharp edges were i want to.
-add bevel modifier below the subsurf modifier
in order to bevel those edges.
can i expect any issues of shading with this method?
and if so what kind of issues should i expect?

Subdivision surface modifier creates new faces between the existing ones and uses the material from adjacent faces to fill in the new ones.  So if you're assigning materials to faces, you can run into issues where subdivision pulls the material seam away from where you want it.
You see this when there are faces of different lengths:


How do I parent a bone to another bone for an imported model? I have an imported character model where the sword is floating near the ground and I'm trying to get it to be in the correct place near the hand.
There is already a bone on the handle of the sword which is called sword_1 and it has a dashed black line to another bone which cannot be selected and doesn't seem to have a name (see picture).
There is another bone called weapon_root which is exactly where the weapon needs to be, near the end of the dashed black line, but I don't know how to move the sword there.
I have tried to make the weapon_root the parent of sword_1, but it didn't move the sword at all and it didn't seem to do anything because in the bone hierarchy they were still at the same level.
What should I do to get the sword_1 bone to follow the weapon_root bone origin?

The dotted black line is called a relationship line, and it reveals that some kind of connection, either a parenting connection or a constraint connection, already exists between Sword1 and whatever this unnamed bone is. In either case, you will probably want to break this connection and start over. With the Sword1 bone selected, go to the Constraints tab in the Properties Panel, to the right of your 3D View, and check whether anything shows up. The relationship line is probably coming from something that will be found here. The other place you can check, but seems less likely, is the Object tab (not Object Data tab), and look under the Relations section, to see if the bone has a parent. If you found any connections, remove them. If you found none, then select the whole armature in Object Mode, and then tab into Edit Mode, then select the Sword1 bone, press Alt + p, and choose Clear Parent. Now your Sword1 bone should still be part of the armature, but shouldn't move with any part of it during posing. Go into Pose Mode, and move the Sword1 bone to the hand position. It might be a good idea to make sure the armature is in its rest pose before doing this, which can be activated in the Object Data tab, under the Skeleton section, where you'll see two buttons, Pose Position, and Rest Position. Choose Rest Position to see the rest pose. Once you've activated the Rest Position, however, you can't move any bones until you return to the Pose Position. So after activating the Rest Postion, press Ctrl + a and from the Apply menu, choose Apply Pose as Rest Pose. Now return to the Pose Position. You shouldn't have to do this again. It's a kind of calibration effort to ensure that you're working from the rest pose before adding constraints. If you add constraints without being in the rest pose first, weird things can happen.
Finally, while in Pose Mode, select Sword1 and create a Child Of constraint for it, and point this constraint to the hand IK target bone as the constraint's target. You will want to press the Clear Inverse button after creating the constraint to get the sword to remain where you placed it. It should follow the hand now when moving the IK target, and by keyframing the influence slider for the constraint, the sword can be released by the hand, or retrieved by it, any time you want.


Constraint camera to move with object's bone I have a person and a camera which is looking directly at him from side view. My question is how to set a constraint to move camera with spine bone? The camera should not rotate with bone, just move with the person to keep the side view. I have tried to set camera as the spine's parent but it rotates along. Also, I used child of, transformation, track,... constraints but can't figure out the right way. Another issue is that after setting the parent relation location of camera changes. Any help or suggestions is appreciated.

A ChildOf constraint allows you to parent an object to another with the ability to turn off some of the transformations that are copied.

To have the camera move with the character and allow the head/shoulders to rotate within the camera view, you turn off the rotation options in the constraint. You just need to pick a bone that you want to follow, maybe the shoulders or hips depending on how much of the character you want to move in front of the camera.

When you first choose the bone, the camera may jump out of place, click the Set Inverse button to fix this. You can also move the camera into position after you add the child of constraint

Here the camera has a ChidOf constrained set to the selected bone, you can see it follows the bottom point of the bone but doesn't rotate with it.


No reference images of my daughters face for modeling It may be practical problem of the few beginners, the Problem i am facing is most of the tutorials are using reference images to model face, I also want to model my daughters face but i dont have the reference images like front view, side view, top view, etc also I do not know how to perfectly take photographs of my daughter face to model the same. Can someone shed some light on this problem.. Many thanks

Blender 2.8 changed a few things up, like with this instance. On the add object menu (Shift+A) there is an option called 'Image' where you can insert reference pictures and move them around the planes like you would with Blender 2.79's referencing feature. Just make sure you're in orthographic mode when you do this so that your model appears the same size as the photo.


Change camera field of view on keyframe? I need the camera to be able to zoom in (field of view) on a certain frame.

However, when I do that it effects all the frames and isn't good at all.

Is there any way possible to make it so that on one frame the field of view is 32, then on the next frame it is 2.07?

You should be able to simply add key frames to Focal Length (I don't have Blender at hand to check, but I think I've done it recently in one of projects).

Selected one frame, enter value you want at that frame then press I when hovering mouse over Focal Length value input. Then next frame, enter new value and press I again.
This also lets you use F-Curves editor to specify whatever interpolation of value you want.

Also, I don't think you want to be changing sensor size (though that I would suspect should also support key frames).

edit:

Apparently you can't keyframe FOV (I thought it didn't matter whether you operate on FOV or FL), but you can focal length:


Reflection map baking I have an Island and water on which i want to add fake reflections, I know I have to bake a map and use it as difuse color through reflection mapping but how do i create the map ?

This shows my render blender settings from wich i want to bake the reflection map to use in the bge

Not really my area of expertise, but depending on what you want you could try baking a texture from a glossy sphere.

Create a new UV Sphere, you may want to make it an all quads mesh
first by removing the top and bottom vertex, then selecting the
first open edge loop, and extruding it, then scale it to zero so
that all vertex merge at the center, but don't remove doubles.
Mark a seam along one of its vertical loops and select one random
face. Now Unwrap it using the Active Quads option. In the image
editor it should wield a perfect orthogonal grid mesh.
You can now assign a perfectly glossy material to the sphere and use
it to bake an environment map of your island.

I have not tried it myself, but it should work; I used a similar technique under Cycles render to create a cube map environment


Set Size Of Object To Perfectly Align 64x64 Image I'm making a really low poly character, he is literally made out of cubes with various size vectors. I want to be able to draw on him using a 64x64px image which is basically pixel art and I want the pixels to fit perfectly with the UV. I've tried everything, even making the image 100x100px and then making the size of the object rounded to one decimal so from 0.1 to 1. All I need is a formula that I can use to get the closest value for each axis (X, Y, Z) to which the pixels will be aligned in a 64x64px image where each limb is a separate cube with it's own texture and UV Map. For example in the X axis of my arm the size I gave it is 0.3 and for it to perfectly align the UV with the texture it must 0.325(example). Or if there is a simpler way do this please tell me. Thanks in advance :)

If it's sufficient to align the UV islands to the pixel grid of the image, then you can snap selected vertices to the pixel grid with Shift+S > Snap Selected to Pixels.

Additionally, there's the option to snap the vertices with every transformation by activating UVs > Snap to Pixels in the menu of the UV/Image Edtior.

If the proportions within your texture are important, you should make sure to align and scale all islands so that they approximately lie on the grid before you snap them to it. Otherwise your islands will be distorted:


Rig won't change Model I wanted to make my own 3d model to use as part of my game inside of Unity. This is the first time i used blender. I watched some tutorials and created my basic model, wich worked fine.

Than, I started Rigging the Model, wich did also worekd at some way. I parented the Rig to the Body. (It is displayed as a parent, so this should have worked). I used automatic weights.

When in Pose mode, to move my bones around, nothing happens. The Bones are moving - The body is not. I searched in the web but couldn't find any awnsers.

It would be really nice, if someone could help me, what i made wrong. If you want to see my model: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kLMnq8uy9orStyIPaPJ2f755zKODz8a8

Thanks for your help ~BrainyXS

You parented the rig to the body.

But you should be parenting the body to the rig, so you select the body then hold SHIFT and then select the rig (in object mode) then press CTRL+P then choose with automatic weights. After that try moving the bones in pose mode.

Don't forget to let me know if that works or not.

You might have to remove the first parent to do this.

Good luck.


Fluid mesh disappears when I save I am brand new to Blender and this is the first project I've made. I am using 2.83. I am following this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zOjJfc6ZJI to make a fluid fill a container.
Yesterday I baked my data and my mesh and everything seemed to look as it should. I saved this project with multiple versions each time, 5 to be exact. I could close the file and reopen it and everything still looked correct. Last night my computer died of low battery, however, I knew my files were saved, and I was going to save rendering for today. Now that I opened the file today, my fluid looks totally wrong
The fluid and its color is still there but it now fills the container in a weird way:

When I am in the solid view and I move through my timeline I see no particle data and no mesh at all. When I am in the render view it looks as it does in the attached picture. Everything is in this weird oval shape and there is no movement. I've also attached how things should look as in the tutorial. This is how it looked for me yesterday:

I am not sure how to fix this other than freeing the data and baking it all again.

Inside the fluid simulation settings, go into the Cache menu. Inside of it there should be a file path. This will lead to the location where your fluid data is stored in.
Navigate to the folder where the Cache says the data is. Inside that folder, look for more folders titled with names like Data, Mesh, Config as those are the folder names that Blender uses to store fluid sim data. If you are able to find these folders and they have files inside, then you have a problem because Blender is not reading them. Double-check the file paths.
If they don't exist, then you have a problem because the fluid simulation files are gone. This is usually because if you do not specify a cache folder, then Blender finds a temporary space for it. On my computer, this temporary space is always cleared when it shuts down or restarts. This means you have to rebake everything again.
To avoid this problem in the future, always specify a cache folder in the cache menu before you bake anything.


Can't Copy Paste Mirrored Pose I am following this tutorial but when I reach this part part at 19:38 I press Ctrl + C it copies but when I press Ctrl + Shift + V nothing happens.

A little menu appears on the side with Flipped on X-Axis selected but the right side doesn't copy the left side.

What am I doing wrong?

In order to perform any kind of mirroring operation on your bones the names on the left and right side of your rig must have identical names, other than the L/R indication. All the bones on the right side of your armature have '.001' at the end of the names left over from being copied at some point. Remove the .001 from each of the names on the right side so they match the left side and you will be able to paste the pose mirrored.


Copy Grease pencils strokes from a range of frames to another I am working on a very simple talking head animation using 2D Grease Pencil in Blender 2.83 LTS.
This is my first attempt at using Blender and its significant learning curve. Following along with various tutorials on the web.
I have spend some time animating an eye blink over a series of frames. I would like to copy those strokes/keyframes to various other places in the animation. I know I can cut and paste strokes from a single frame to another pretty simply. But I have yet to figure out a way to copy strokes from multiple frames to a new location in the animation. Is this possible?

After much fiddling around, one can use the cursor to block select a range of keyframes in the timeline/GreasePencil editor then press Shift-D. Then you can drag the copy of the keyframes to a new location.


Script for save camera position, to file I need script that can save animated camera position and rotation to file every frame. Ideally in .csv format.
Camera will follow path.

Expected result:

001,0.0,-8.42116,3.4081,70.3,0,0
002,......

where:
frame,location x,y,z, rotation x,y,z

I have very basic knowledge about programming, but I'll be thankful also for guides me to the right direction.

Thanks for your time :-)

From the text_editor templates > python > operator_file_export.py .  Changed the write_some_data function to export matrix_world location of active object.

Just using location and rotation_euler will not give visual location when there are constraints or follow_path (et al).

def write_some_data(context, filepath, use_some_setting):
    print("running write_some_data...")
    camera = context.active_object
    mw = camera.matrix_world
    scene = context.scene
    frame = scene.frame_start

    f = open(filepath, 'w', encoding='utf-8')
    while frame <= scene.frame_end:
        scene.frame_set(frame)
        x, y, z = mw.to_translation()
        rx, ry, rz = mw.to_euler('XYZ')
        f.write("%d" % frame)
        f.write(", ")
        f.write("%5.3f, %5.3f, %5.3f" % (x, y, z))
        f.write(", ")
        f.write("%5.3f, %5.3f, %5.3f" % (rx, ry, rz))
        f.write("\n")
        frame += 1
    f.close()

    return {'FINISHED'}


How to compare small changes made in the graph editor? If I make a small change in the graph editor, is there a way I can compare the change made from before and after I edit a channel in the 3D viewport? Like a before and after view or something.

I'd just make a copy of the object/armature and parent it to an empty and move the empty aside:


I separated arms from the torso of a model, how can I seamlessly attach them again? So I ended up separating the arms from the torso of this model to make it easier to rig. I just got into blender today and I don't know how to seamlessly join them back together with the torso again without disturbing the weights of the model. How can I join these edges back together?

You could just snap vertex and then merge them by distance (or remove double vertices)


Blender to unity fbx export comes out destroyed So the problem is as follows, I got a model with a rig and animations attached and just saving it as .blend and opening it in Unity works wonders, but when exporting to FBX hell happens.

The model shrinks and goes upside down, and animations dont work. Exporting to OBJ seems to be fine but animations can't be exported on obj. so that wont work.

I'm not sure if its fine to continue using .blend files on a project we're going to port on android? Anyway its somewhat pain in the ass since it requires everyone on the team to have blender installed.

Any clues?

In the second image the crouching one is .blend and the messed up one is .fbx.

I've also applied scale and everything, and tries "Experimental apply transform" on fbx export but it didnt seem to do anything.

In Blender:

-Firstly (THIS IS IMPORTANCE) in Dopesheet - Action Editor tab, before you do your animation you have to name it accordingly and hit little F icon there to add a Fake user otherwise the animation is not being saved when you close Blender.

-Then you select the mesh itself and the armature that you want to export. Go to Export option in File/Export/FBX

-You can see the option for 'Export BFX' at the bottom-left corner, leave everything as default only check the 'Selected Objects' checkbox. Also choose only Armature and Mesh to export down below.

In Unity:

-Select the FBX file in the Project panel that you just imported in (I assumed you already know how to import it in)

-In the Inspector panel:

with Model make sure scale factor is 1.

in Rig make sure Animation Type is Humanoid for your character. If it is a thing or anything not full body human, pretty much choose Generic.

Animations down below at Anim. Compression. Choose Optimal.

Now anything left is to create animation controller and assign animations to the character :) If this does not work or I'm not clear in any step, please don't hesitate to leave a comment so I can help you. Goodluck!


Objects messed up when I re-open the file I'm not an expert in Blender (and sorry for my english), so I'm really having troubles with an issue I'll describe here:
I've modeled a body with every part as a different object.

I want to sculpt it now, so I applied the scale of each body part.

The problem is that now, if I close the file and then I re-open it, I find every object completely messed up in scale, location, ecc..
I also tried to apply every transformation but the result is the same.

What am I doing wrong?
I am using Blender 2.91.2
Thank you

Because you have keyframed Location, Rotation and Scale values.
To see the issue you don't have to reopen file, just move on Timeline to another frame.
After Apply Ctrl+A All Transforms you have to set keyframes again I. Yellow color indicates keyframed value, orange edited/unsaved a change.
What is happening here? When you apply transforms they became to zero and  1 for scale, but unsaved keyframes remember saved value and when you move on timeline or reopen file, they "jump" back, so they are used like twice now.


Normal map baked from multires looks bad (seams and general wrongness) I'm trying to bake a normal map to a low-poly model with a multires modifier on it (no sculpting, just 3 subdivisions). It seems to work at first, but the final render has obvious seams in the lighting corresponding to the model's UV seams (for example: along the back of the left ear as shown in the picture, and between the fingers). Plus, the shading just looks like hot garbage in general; not at all smooth like I would expect. Why?

Here's the blend file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ijba9uxtwuaq3dt/normalMapFailure.blend?dl=0
To reproduce my images, just Bake the normals again, then render the model. The image, texture, and multires should be set up already.

I've gotten the same results in Blender 2.66 and 2.73.

Edit: I get much better results if I make a copy of the object and Bake "selected to active" instead of "from Multires", so I think the major problem is not related to the UVs.

problem #1 is that there are not enough seams.  If you can't make the UV islands out of real paper and still be able to wrap it around a real model; then you are going to have problems trying to do this with computer art.

The texture will be stretched to the point where some parts of it will have a high resolution and some parts may be low enough that all you will see in that area are pixelated artifacts.

After adding a texture, you can change the type for visualization purposes.  The texture for the next few steps is a checker texture that allows you to see if the UV's are mapping to the model well.

It's a good idea to repeatedly toggle the SubDivide UV's option for the generative modifier to make sure nothing weird is going on here.  OpenSubD is supposed to correct this issue but it has not been implemented yet. ;)

Also, you can toggle the modifiers visibility on and off to look for potential problems that should be corrected.

In the following .gif animation, there is some minor distortion when the modifier's settings are toggled.

If you see any obvious stretching when toggling a Sub-Division modifier, you can sometimes correct this by adding a control loop near the area that is being affected.
The following animation shows the difference before and after a control loop is added to the wrist area.

The ears have no seams along the sharp edges which flow along a curve.  This area will be distorted.

Uv islands should have at least a few pixels between them and if you zoom the UV Image Editor in and out, you should be able to see a clear distinction between the UV Islands for all distances that the model may be viewed at.
If the edges appear to be in the same place visually, then texture Mip-Mapping will shows artifacts along the seams when the model is zoomed in and out of the 3D Viewport.
The various UV Islands will bleed color into one another at the seams.  Normal maps will exaggerate these errors.

A Margin of 0.01 is a good place to start.  This factor depends on how many Islands there are and how big the texture is and the models position relative to the view position, scale, etc...

There are settings for both Blender Internal and Cycles that must be set when using normal maps. In BI, the Image Sampling Normal Field must be set.  In Cycles, the texture node should be changed to Non-Color.  The normal map will look broken if you forget this step.

Here's the final result.(Right-click the image and choose 'View Image' to see the larger version.)

The following link shows a turntable animation hosted on Vimeo.  (I get an invalid certificate warning from this link.  Vimeo should be safe I think?, could be a mistake)

https://vimeo.com/123225350

Here is the .blend file.  http://www.pasteall.org/blend/35226

And some further reading on the topic.  How can I bake textures on uneven goemetry without tearing and stretching


Rigid body simulation requires mass input every time I created a rigid body simulation using hinge. But it only simulates when I enter the mass of the rigid body. Otherwise it never shows simulation. why it happens?

Rigid body always need mass to work properly.

You can`t apply forces to 0 mass rigid body.

Rigid-body dynamics studies the movement of systems of interconnected bodies under the action of external forces. The assumption that the bodies are rigid, which means that they do not deform under the action of applied forces, simplifies the analysis by reducing the parameters that describe the configuration of the system to the translation and rotation of reference frames attached to each body.

Wikipedia

EDIT

Try if this Works


Correct way to render crepuscular rays in cycles? While trying to use the new cycles volumetric rending features to create crepuscular rays (with the intention of updating my answer here), I have found this to be a little trickier than I anticipated.

When I create a basic setup with a spot lamp (sun lamps don't seem to work, not sure if that is a result of their one directional nature or what..) and a world material like this:

Which gives me this (500 samples):

The problems with this that make me think that I'm missing something (aside from the rendertime and noise, which I understand to be a part of using bleeding edge new features) are:

The background shader/sky texture isn't visible at all (volume is too dense?)
The lamp needed to be set to 50000 strength (this is of course dependent on the distance from the camera, but the kinds of strengths required to get some nice defined rays will blow everything out if volumes are disabled)

I can't seem to get a straight render (no compositing tricks) to look anything remotely like the pretty image in the release notes:

  (source: blender.org)

Is this just how it works?
Or is there some trick I have missed (not counting compositing/renderlayer tricks)?

This is really a tricky one.

First off, world surface shader and sun lamps dont work for world volume shading for now (as stated in the manual). Also, if you use object volumes the camera can not be inside the volume. But you can make a cube bubble around the camera and parent it to the camera. E.g use a "Boolean Modifier" with the bubble (intersect) to cut it off. Of course this only works when your bubble sticks out of the volume but you can extrude it in any direction that doesnt point forward anyway.

Here is an example of the node setup for a volume:
volume scatter shader and volume absorbtion shader as input to an add shader. Thats it.

For the sun lamp use simple emission with strength of e.g. 9 to get deeper shading for the rays. Also helpful is to set the sampling size for the shadow to 0 to get crisp lines. Background can be set to a Sky Texture.

To keep render settings simple volume scattering events can be set to 0. For the Volume Sampling it might be necessary to tweak the Max Steps (e.g. 2048) and Step Size (e.g. 0.04).

This is what it would look like:

To get more crepuscular rays (like in the image you provided) you could add some shadow shapes between the sun and the volume (acting as clouds). Of course this example looks horrible but you get the idea.


Python camera.rotation_euler problem I cannot figure out why the following line of code throws the error "AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'rotation_euler'"

bpy.context.scene.camera.rotation_euler =(0,0,0)

If the camera exist but this is NOT set; then you get the error

you must set the camera


How to mirror the contraints rotation and limit rotation? Hi I would like to mirror the left hand's bones to the right hand's bones, I have constrained some of them and limit their rotation in one hand (I think I put the x-mirror too late, very late ) , however it seems x-mirror does not work, or not update ...so I have one hand with the constraint and the other have not any contraints. How can I mirror the constraint (location and rotacion ) from one hand to the other?

To do what you want it will be easier to use python. I wrote a script that copies constraint from bones with ".L" to corresponding bones with ".R"

import bpy
context = bpy.context
scene = context.scene
arm = bpy.data.objects["Armature"]
bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')
arm.select = True
bpy.context.scene.objects.active = arm
bpy.ops.object.posemode_toggle()
bpy.ops.pose.select_all(action='SELECT')
all_bones = bpy.context.selected_pose_bones
for bone in all_bones:
    bpy.ops.pose.select_all(action='DESELECT')
    if ".L" in bone.name:
        boneL = arm.data.bones[bone.name]
        boneR = arm.data.bones[bone.name.replace('.L','.R')]
        boneR.select = True
        boneL.select = True
        arm.data.bones.active = boneL
        bpy.ops.object.constraints_copy()
        bpy.ops.pose.constraints_copy()
        for con in arm.pose.bones[boneR.name].constraints:
           con.subtarget = con.subtarget.replace('.L','.R')

Another way to do it without Python is to use the Copy Constraint, which involves manual work to be done, you select an object then add a Copy Constraint, then select which other object you want to copy the property from (location, rotation). So no need for paste constraint.


Blender 2.8 Beta Vincent Eye movement problem I'm testing the Vincent character in version 2.80-4ef09cf937f2.
It seems that the eye texture does not rotate correctly along with the eye object.
Even though it looks correct in the viewport. This does not happen in v2.79. How do I fix this?

Apparently this is a feature that hasn't been implemented in eevee.
Eevee - Generated coordinates don't follow mesh deformation


Compositing versus video sequence editor for combining video file with own animation I need to make a video where I take a movie file and add some of my own blender animation to it. Last time I did this I did the whole thing as a standard blender animation, with a "screen" object in my scene which had a video texture. I realise this is not optimal and that there are at least two better ways to do this: compositing or using the video sequence editor. I have not used either. My question is, what are the pluses and minuses of each of these ways? Can one say that either is easier than the other for a novice to pick up?

The sequence editor is designed for non-linear editing. While it has some basic comp features to layer images on top of each other, you do not have the level of control that you get with the compositor. For anything but a trivial overlay, I highly suggest using the compositor for the task.


Blender only rendered one layer in animation My animation consists of 250 frames and 6 layers. When I came back to my laptop this morning, I saw it only saves 250 frames, and they're all from the same layer. What did I do wrong, or where did it save my other rendered layers?

You need to change your ouput format to OpenEXR multilayer.
After that you can access the different layers by adding an image node and changing the renderlayer like shown below.

If you want to use the sequence in an external compositor like nuke this should not be a problem. the channels are named according to the renderlayers (e.g renderlayer001.z).


Baking to an image using cycles with two sets of existing uvs I would like to know how to bake diffuse indirect lighting to an image in blender using cycles.

My scene has two objects. Both objects have two sets of uv maps. The first map is for the base color texture. The second set exist and should be used to bake out the lighting. When I click bake though, it seems to only use the first uv map, not the light uv map.

I have clicked the camera icon, which I assume means "Use this uv map for baking". But that does not seem to work. How can I achieve this? I would also like to make both objects render to the same texture. Do I need to join the objects as one to do this?

Below is my node setup and the uvs for each object:

For Cycles baking, the Vector input of the texture being baked to has no effect(for now).  You must select the bake target UV's using the following dialogue.

It's one of those controversial design decisions but I do believe that python can access this input socket so scripters can programmatically choose the UV Coordinates.  I have not tried this though so I could be totally wrong about how that works.


Trapeze profile for 3D letters, lines Can somebody please help me? I should make fondant/marzipan stamp. I can make the 3D object - letters, lines (extrude from the svg) but I do not know how to set that profile where the top is narrower than the base (like a kind of  trapeze as you can see on the picture) So I can easier remove the stamp from the material... Somebody said that would be the bevel but I could not make it :-(

Thank you for your help in advance
Zsolt

I made a textobject in Blender, but with svg curves this could also work. The bevel is the outer form of your geometry. Than I added a curvecircle and defined it right as bavel object (yellow) and got the result at the right sight. You should set the vektor handles (v in curve edit mode) of the circle to free to get sharp angles. Also you should use only one core as a contour. (Red in the exmaple)


Make a curve be exactly a perfect slice of a circle I've a curve which is part of a train track. I would like to make this piece a perfect "slice" of a circle. Is this possible?

I'm really new to Blender and modelling (in general), so I'm sorry if this is an easy task.

Here's the code:

  http://pastebin.com/p0cKF7ED

Note the object should still be a mesh of triangles (triangulated).

As you can see from the following picture:

the curve is not totally and exactly in the circle.

Any help is appreciated.

Try the following:

Model the train Rail as linear, uncurved Shape.
Insert a Circle with add-mesh-Circle. Use the Number of verts as a multiplier of 360 degrees,  e.g. 36 verts.
Delete as many verts as you Need until you geht the Desired bow.
In Object Mode,  use Alt+c to convert the Circle bow Into a Curve.
Apply a Curve modifier to the linear Rail from 1., Using the curve from 4. as Curve.

Be aware of that both objects Need to have applied scale,  rotation and Location.

I Hope this Helps.

Kind regards,  Karl Andreas Groß


Rigify error Generation has thrown an aception 'None Type' object has no attribute 'bones' I have the same problem, but here the spine bone is set up correctly, so are all the other bones. This MetaRig is made of 2 rigs, a face rig that I did earlier, then I made a new MetaRig which I combined with the face rig correctly. Earlier I was getting the error saying spine 004 was disjoint, but I fixed that by connecting it to spine 003 using the connect button. any suggestions

Your fix for "Spine.004 is disjoint" was not exactly a fix. It just removed the error message and created further problems. It's not your fault, Rigify setups are just easily messed up with by making small changes.

parent the neck back to Spine.004
snap the neck bone to the end of the spine

If you have trouble snapping the bones together, here is how to do it:
https://youtu.be/ILDdIbAwxJM?t=490


Rendering a still image (not animation) with motion blur I want to simulate the camera shake while taking a photo and see the result. Everything works fine, but I have to create an animation and then try to render the image of an specific frame in order to see the motion blur caused by camera shake.
Actually I don't need the animation because my job is working with images. So is there any way that I won't have to create multiple frame animations in order to render desired image?

Thanks

Why do you need to create an animation?
Because you need transformation, both in space and time.

For motion blur to exist there has to be a notion of before and after. An object (or the camera) was in one place in frame 1

and is in a different place in frame 3.

Depending on the distance the objects moved, and the shutter speed set in the motion blur settings, you might see the movement in frame two represented as a blurred image.

You certainly don't need to render an animation (frames 1, 2 and 3) you can render just frame 2 and the motion blur should be there as a still image.

Notice that in this example even in frames 1 and 3 there is some motion blur because of the magnitue of the transformation from frame to frame(relative to the shutter speed).

If we were to render frame 0 and 4 the cube would appear static because there is no transformation from frame to frame anymore.


nurbs curve not bending mesh correctly on this car tire model, the nurbs curve is not bending the mesh (surface of intended car tire) correctly:
It is obvious what I mean by looking at this screenshot, and feel free to inspect my blend file:  https://app.box.com/s/s7vi3l06lf9vv6ir9j5ysfz9t0v9qhka

what i want is the mesh perfectly (smoothly) aligning, bending exactly right together at each end. I've been trying for hours to manipulare the nurbs curve, and since i'm a newbie to blender, still don't know how to fix the curve just right.
Any tips?
Cheers / Dan

You just need to reset the object rotation values for the nurbs curve so that it is exactly 90 degrees on the X and Z axis. Then it will line up correctly.


What does the "View as render" option in the background image settings do? What does the View as render option in the 3D view background image settings do?  The Blender wiki does not mention it, and I have not been able to find anything about it.

It does nothing for the background image in the 3D view. However View as render is a setting for the entire image datablock.
What View as render does do in the compositer and image viewer is toggle on or off the Color Management settings in the properties window.

With View as render off   click for full size

With View as render on    click for full size


animating a body and having it effect cloth I have a body I've created and put clothes on him.  I gave them a cloth modifier and him a collision modifier.  When I simulate the cloth it falls on the body and reacts like cloth, however if I animate the body, it goes through the cloth is there something that I need to do to make the cloth keep reacting to the body as it is animated?

You could try pinning the mesh and make a parent relation to your main body, it will then follow the body you modeled, take a look at this explanation on how it works:

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/physics/cloth/settings/cloth_settings.html#cloth

Have a nice day.


Is there a way to search and replace in Blender? In this illustration,

the red line in the upper part of the image is one pair of a large number of pairs of vertices, each pair connected by an edge in Blender. For each pair, I want to replace the edge in red with the vertices and edges in green in the lower picture. If the red edge between one set of vertices is a different length from the red edge between another set of vertices, I want the green replacement to be scaled proportionally, along (in this case) the axis of the existing edge. I know I can do it like Johnny Cash's Caddy, but I'd like to be able to do it more than "one piece at a time". Is it possible, perhaps with an add-on?
.

I'm not aware of a simple way to replace edges automatically. The direct approach to this seems to be to loop over the edges and to generate the geometry manually.

With the add-on Animation Nodes I was able to create a setup that replaces all edges of an object with some template profile. Selectively replacing edges based on some condition determined by the coordinates (e.g. replace all edges which are longer than…) is also doable. I was not able to figure out selectively replacing them by criteria like whether the edge is selected or if the edge is marked as seam or sharp.

The new profile could either be oriented along some global axis or an axis dependent on the two vertices' normals. It's also possible to use conditions like “point the profile towards global Z, but point it along the normals if the edge points in Z direction.”

Generating the new edges works fine and this process will also generate any faces that may appear in the template profile. But reusing some faces of the original mesh (without using all of the old vertices and edges of it as well) is more problematic. AN only exposes edges and polygons by index and I assume simply deleting edge indices will lead to errors.

Here is the node setup that I used…

…and the blend file as I guess nobody wants to copy the wiring:


Import FBX using script Edit: answered my own question! Moderators please delete if not appropriate to leave this here as it doesn't require an answer.

I'm a fool. But for anyone else who might have a similar question in the future ...

import bpy

bpy.ops.import_scene.fbx(filepath="F:/Blender/2019-04-09-S.fbx")

Source: https://docs.blender.org/api/blender2.8/bpy.ops.import_scene.html

Original question:

Can anyone help me to import an FBX file using a script in 2.80?

Based on other answers here, I've tried:

bpy.ops.import_scene.fbx (filepath = 'F:\Blender\FBX\2019-04-09-S.fbx')

Posting as an answer (to my own question), as requested.

For anyone else who might have a similar question in the future, don't forget to use forward slash '/' in filepaths ...

import bpy

bpy.ops.import_scene.fbx(filepath="F:/Blender/2019-04-09-S.fbx")

Source: https://docs.blender.org/api/blender2.8/bpy.ops.import_scene.html


Bevel modifier doesn't work with imported LEGO brick mesh (OBJ file) I am using Blender 2.90.1 and I want to add that nice tiny bevels (so called brick seams) to a simple 1x4 LEGO brick (imported as OBJ file) using bevel modifier which doing its work very nicely with standard Blender cube (as seen in zillions of online tutorials about the bevel modifier).
But when I apply the same bevel modifier with the exact same values to the LEGO brick model, it extrudes edges of the LEGO brick erratically in all directions.

When I change the LIMIT METHOD to Angle and set it to 45° (or to any other angle) - as I need to bevel only edges under/above specific angle, it does nothing at all.

I guess there may be some sort of problem with the mesh defined inside the OBJ file, cos when I deleted all the faces except the side ones and re-apply the bevel modifier with amount value increased to 1m this is what happened:

For anyone willing to test it I uploaded the LEGO brick obj + mtl file to zippyshare here: https://www111.zippyshare.com/v/ZMN8UVNM/file.html

All the surfaces - cube and LEGO brick - are triangles.
My question is how to make the bevel modifier work with the LEGO brick mesh?

The topology is bad:

You have overlapping vertices, you need to select all and AltM > Merge By Distance.

Transform your tris to quads with AltJ

Your top cylinders are not part of your base cube, so there won't be any bevel on their bottom, you need to correct your geomatry if you want that.

Also their top and bottom are not perfect circle, select each circle and right click > LoopTools > Circle.

In the Properties panel > Object Data > Geometry Data, clear the Custom Split Normals Data to have correct normals.

Give your object the Bevel modifier.


Where are located custom themes? I am making a new theme and have clicked on the + button in the Theme tab in User Preferences and named it but when i go in "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.78\scripts\presets\interface_theme" i don't see my custom theme.

Where is my custom theme located in Windows?

Windows's Blender preferences, scripts, and themes are located at:

C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\<version number: ex. 2.78>\

The theme folder is located at:

C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\<version number: ex. 2.78>\scripts\presets\interface_theme

For example,

C:\Users\user1\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.78\scripts\presets\interface_theme


Which operations are expecting input in radians and which in degrees? Triggered by this question (unfortunately the OP didn't elaborate on the context), I'm puzzled now: which operations are done in radians and which in degrees?
In the 3d window all navigation is in degrees (presuming the Units selected for the scene are indeed degrees), but from what I read, internally Blender is using Radians, leading to some confusion when setting drivers, constraints, modifiers or texture mapping. So far I haven't run into any issues but I'm just trying to understand the logic behind it.

You can input a value in either radians or degrees by appending a "d" suffix (for a value in degrees) and a "r" suffix (for a value in radians) to the numerical value.

"1.5913513r" => in radians

"1.5913513d" => in degrees

For example, if you click the X-axis rotation button of an object to input a rotation value manually, and write "1r", after you press ENTER to commit the value the button will show 57.3º. Hovering the mouse over the button will show a tooltip saying "radians: 1.000000" (and 57.3 degrees is the approximate value of 1 radian).

You can use this when editing drivers, rotations etc. in case you prefer one unit over the other, and Blender will do the conversion for you.


Blender 2.8+ Laggy everywhere Mac I've installed multiple different versions of 2.8 and also tried 2.9 but the whole application runs at below 20fps when im using it and im not sure why. Id love to transition over to 2.8 and onwards but working and modelling with a frame rate below 20fps constantly just isnt possible. Im using a base model MacBook Pro 2017 and 2.79 still runs fine, but im not sure what to do to fix this?

I never tested it against 2.79, but I had severe performance issues with 2.8 on a quite new MacBookPro as well. Turned out it was for me the Graphics Chip not able to deal with 2x Retina. I use EasyRes from the App Store to bring it down to 1x


How to remove black patches under hair? for some reason, whenever i use blender cycles the hair get weird back spots under it? anyway to make the black spots disappear or transparent?

That looks like the hair strands that are on top of other hair strands are shadowing the ones underneath. Try adding more light bounces for transparency (In the Render properties tab, Light paths, Max bounces)


How can edge loops move independently and stay connected? I have two edge loops that are moving in an animation. The edge loops are different in shape and number of vertices. The animation below shows an example of the edge loop shapes and their movement.

Using 'bridge edge loop', I can generate a geometry that blends between the two shapes, but it is not obvious how to animate it so the edge loops can be animated.

How can this geometry be animated so the edge loops can move independently and stay connected?

Animate the bones of an Armature in Pose Mode.

Above is quick armature which you can greatly improve.
An armature modifier was created.
The master bone has deform disabled.  The other two bones deform the mesh.

A vertex group is selected to show weights.


Restrict Armature only for Pose Mode Is there a way to restrict the mode of armature object only for pose mode? Because once you created bones on Edit Bone and finished tweaking setting on Object Mode, It's unnecessary to go into those other modes but Pose Mode And I sometimes accidentally go into Edit Bone mode by pressing Tab. So I wondered whether there is such an option just like disabling option to select the object on Outliner or Locking Location / Rotation / Scale.

Yes, this method will disable edit mode of the mesh too.
First put the armature layers into the Protected layers.

To do so, in the Skeleton panel, Ctrl-LMB click on the relevant
button, the layer lock will be enabled.
.. all bones in this layer will not be editable...for all proxies

Here is an example using  Vincent, a free, open source, fully rigged, professional model.

Then save the file.
Then open a new file and File-->Link -->select the .blend file--> Object folder and select the object and its armature
After the object and armature are linked into the scene, select the armature with RMB and press CTRL+ALT+P to make it a proxy object
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaAHA5IQp_g&feature=youtu.be&t=3m16s

If you upload your .blend  I can make an example


How to tell which function is causing errors from bpy.app.handlers? Some add-ons can add their own handlers which may cause errors or even crash.

How to tell which functions are causing problems?

Asking on behalf of this report.

You can write functions which intercept the existing functions and print out information, eg:

Given the following test example:

import bpy
def test_handler_a(scene):
    print("  Some Pre Handler", scene)
bpy.app.handlers.frame_change_pre.append(test_handler_a)

def test_handler_b(scene):
    print("  Some Post Handler", scene)
bpy.app.handlers.frame_change_post.append(test_handler_b)

This script sets up intercepting functions that print out all handlers that run:

import bpy
import sys

def intercept(fn, *args):
    print("Intercepting:", fn)
    sys.stdout.flush()

    fn(*args)

    print("... done")
    sys.stdout.flush()

for attr in dir(bpy.app.handlers):
    if attr.startswith("_"):
        continue

    handler_list = getattr(bpy.app.handlers, attr)
    if not isinstance(handler_list, list):
        continue
    if not handler_list:
        continue

    print("Intercept Setup:", attr)

    handler_list[:] = [lambda *args: intercept(fn, *args) for fn in handler_list]


Create copies of primitives a number of times along a given or random length between two primitives Thanks for the reply but I’m not sure that the solution offered works as I wanted. I have included a workflow to clarify what can be done easily on Sketchup requiring no calculations. This is what I would like to do in Blender. I’m sure It would be a really good addition to the Array modifier and I’m sure relatively easy to code.

The array modifier can repeat an object with additional space.
The array modifier with Fit Length below.

The array modifier can repeat object along a curve.  Curves can be straight lines as well.  Fit Curve below.

The array modifier is dynamic or can be applied for static placement.
Perhaps the array modifier is more powerful than that other feature in that other software.
Particle systems can also repeat geometry.


Some particles appear too bright So I was watching Blender Guru's videos on donut making in Blender and when it came to the sprinkles they showed up super bright on the rendering. I don't know what happened. In the image, you can see the spherical sprinkles are just fine but the rest aren't

It looks like your particles are actually emitting light. In order for this to happen, they either have an emission shader, or a principled shader in which the Emission value is not set to black.

If the particles using an emission shader, simply change it to a principled shader and that should fix the problem. If they are using a principled shader, simply go to the Emission box and set it to black.


Compositing multiple scenes and passes with transparency I am trying to composite some render layers from two different scenes:

Main scene has objects and mist pass, transparency in world setting enabled.
Sky scene has only sky environment and transparency in world setting disabled.

What I want to achieve is to have the sky in the transparent area of the main scene, and to use the mist pass to add mist to the objects but not the sky, it should only affect the objects.

Main scene with objects:

Main scene mist pass

Sky scene

You can use the alpha channel of the trees renderlayer as a mix factor between the sky and the trees:

You can combine the Mist pass with the trees however you like, just replace the screen node with whatever nodes you want.


UV mapping a straight image around a ring shaped flat mesh Is it possible to mapping a image around a ring shaped mesh? I would imagine there should be a way to curve/distort the image around the mesh. If not, how can I straighten out the mesh easily instead to fit the image?

Using face select, select all the faces of the circle then have one face the active face (selected last, it will be lighter orange).
Press U > Follow Active Quads, then hit OK.
That will give you a straight line of the  UV for the circular faces, which will deform your pattern around the edge perfectly.


Add my own wall into archipack addon hey so i made a couple different walls that i will repeatedly be adding into my project what i am trying to accomplish is add these new meshes into the add mesh Archipack tab. see picture for more info?

It mostly depends on the kind of variations you want to achieve.

If it is related to wall general shape, such as L T predefined parts, you may use "custom objects" (mesh based closed volumes) as walls, this is a feature of 1.3.8+ 1.4_dev free versions for blender 2.79, available on github repository.  https://github.com/s-leger/archipack/archive/140_dev.zip

In archipack 2.0 Pro version for blender 2.8, presets parameters exclude any "segments" one, as they are meant to quickly change wall's aspect (width / height / finishings, materials..) without changing the general shape.

Adding new kind of parametric objects to archipack is not an easy task as the archipack's framework require some time to getting started.


Space between Voronoi shapes I am trying to create a material that looks like the red material in the image below, more specifically the displacement of the red material.

I have a node set up like this at the moment. I have tried mixing it with different textures, changing the mapping values and even using a displacement modifier and mixing with a Voronoi texture. However, the closest I seem to be able to get is the simple set up below, and that is nowhere near close.

I would appreciate any help improving it to get the desired output.

Final result:

Node setup:

Final thoughts:

It's not the same as Voronoi Texture but it's fast and pretty simple.
You can play with Wave Texture's (both of them) values to get more jagged/smoother cracks.

I've used Bump but you can connect it to Displacement if you need.

Blend file:


Can't get simple light path nod examples to work I've seen a few examples of using the light path node; looks cool and very useful! Most simply mix two shaders then control the factor via one of the outputs of the light path node. For example a green default cube with red shadows. I can't get this to work! Starting with a default scene, using cycles render engine, I place a plane under the cube then set the plane's shader to a simple white diffuse and the cube's shader up as shown in the demos. The result however is no different than if I just plug the top diffuse shader node directly into the material output. What am I missing? Have watched multiple examples of people explaining the node, all use the same node setup and no-one seems to mention any setting I might have missed.

I'm not sure what tutorials you've been watching, but this setup should work for you. Nothing special - like your attempt, the floor has a white Diffuse BSDF for it's material, and the material for the cube is shown in the graph. If this doesn't work, please let me know (ideally with a screenshot) what you're seeing instead:
This first image uses the Is Camera Ray output of the light path node to give a solid red shadow with no bounced light glow:

This setup uses the Is Shadow Ray output of the light path node, and gives a red shadow, with green bounced lighting:

Finally, this setup uses both Camera and Shadow rays, and gives a red shadow with red bounced lighting as well:


What do these brackets in viewport overlay text mean? I'm still pretty new to Blender 2.8, and all of the sudden these symbols (<>) started showing up next to the name of every object. What do they mean?

According to the manual, as stated in 3D View documentation, it is the name of the current marker.

The fact that there are only brackets with nothing between them probably means it has been renamed into a blank name.


Freestyle depth of field I am using Freestyle on a Cycles scene with some depth of field. The Freestyle doesn't get affected by the depth of field, and so pops out too much on objects that aren't in focus. I am looking for any sort of trick or method to get some blur on that FS without also blurring it on the focus.

I could switch to doing fake DoF on the whole scene in post processing, but are there any other options?

Freestyle is applied after the actual render, so the short answer is: no, you have to work with post processing (maybe filtering the freestyle edges with a Kirsch filter and apply the blur only to that portion of the image).

But, you might be able to fake something using the "Distance from camera" modifiers in freestyle. This modifier can be applied to color, alpha and thickness. The settings are under line style - here is a quick example:


Rendering what's in viewport I am trying to animate what shows up in the viewport moving around in wireframe mode. I would like to keep the vertex highlighting 'look' (in edit mode wireframe) while panning around the camera. Can anyone advise how to accomplish this? I can render in 'wireframe' but I can't get the vertex highlighting texture.

Thanks

This can be done using OpenGL render while in edit mode. Click the buttons in the header, or Info > Render > OpenGL Render:

Result:


Curve guide on linked object I am linking in a rigged character to another file. But I cannot seem to get the "Curve Guide" physics to work for the hair of the character.

Some bones of the rig controls some empties that in turn works as hooks on a curve.
Finally, the curve is enabled as a "Curve Guide" which controls the movement of a hair braid.

The problem is that the curve guide does not seem to be working when I link in the character in another file. I have made the rig a proxy and I see changes in the curve placement when I move the bones, but the hair is unaffected by the the curve guide.

Is there a way to get this to work? Preferably without making local copies of things.

Note: In the character file everything work as intended. It is when I link the group containing the character, the rig, the empties and the hair emitter that I run into problems.

Particle systems can't be linked into a scene dynamically. So you can't change the shape of the hair from what it is in the original file. You'll have to append the emitter as a local object.

An alternative, for braided hair that could work well, is to model the braids as a mesh object with either particles wrapped around it or a texture. Then use the curve guides+hooks+armature proxy system to animate that.


Why fSpy addon can't be enabled I am trying to install the fSpy add-on for Blender. I've downloaded it as a .zip file and went to user preferences to install it. However, it does not show up in any list of add-ons in user prefs.

When I checked the console it repeatedly shows the following:

Modules Installed () from '/Users/lihechen/Downloads/All Files/Plugins/Blender/fSpy-Blender-master.zip' into '/Users/lihechen/Library/Application Support/Blender/2.81/scripts/addons'

But nothing shows up.
Can anyone please help? I'm using Blender 2.81

New answer (after getting feedback in the comments):
The file you are trying to install is the wrong one (i.e. the repository downloaded as a zip file). Try with the release file instead.

Old answer:
I suspect that it is in fact installed but not showing up in the list because it is not enabled yet (your screenshot is only showing enabled add-ons).

First, uncheck the checkbox that says "Enabled Add-ons Only" to be able to find the add-on, then check the checkbox for the add-on to enable it.


Strange artefacts when using Decimate modifier While using a decimate modifier, I get these weird shading artifacts:

I have managed to narrow it down to the Decimate Modifier causing the problem.

What is causing this weird shading?
How can I avoid it / how to fix it?
How can I keep the low poly count without doing it manually?

The fix was actually very simple, and I did not need to remove the Decimate modifier. All you need to do is just x> "dissolve vertices" in Edit mode on every point where the issue occurs and it will fix the problem.