Issue with IK armature messing up when I try to shrink my model Hi there I'm starting out and just finished making my first model that has a IK to FK switch, but I only realized afterwords it was way bigger than I'd have liked, so I went to scale it and this happened  So I tried a few things like changing the transform orientation and pivot points but had no luck and then I noticed the issue seemed to be with certain IK bones, so I switched from IK to FK and tried scaling it again and got this So it seems like the issue is with certain IK bones messing up but I don't have a clue why that'd be, they don't look to have any differences with other IK bones. Any ideas? I can provide more info if needed

Go to object mode TAB, select your armature, and press CTRL + A to apply scale if you didn't do it before.
Hope that solves your problem :)


Is it possible Animate the Compositor node parameters? In blender compositor Ineed to animate some Node parametors like Transform, Colore curve, Set alpha values etc.. Is it possible Animate the Compositor node parameters?

Of course. As (almost) everywhere in blender:

Insert a keyframe by placing the cursor over a property and press I
Move to a different frame in the timeline
Set the property to the desired value
Press I again for a second keyframe on this property

Alternatively, you can just right click on (almost) any property and choose Insert Keyframe:

Dopesheet & Graph Editor:

Alt+I removes a single keyframe, Alt+Shift+I removes all keyframes of a property.


How increase/decrease undo steps? I've been working on a mesh in edit mode, and have done several hundred actions. After realizing I was clearly going in the wrong direction, I hit Ctrl+Z a bunch of times, but it only took me back 20-30 steps.

If I leave edit mode and press undo, it undoes ALL the hard work I've been working on for the past hour and a half.

I know I probably can't save this mesh, but how can I get more undo actions when in edit mode?

As mentioned on the Blender wiki page on undo, there is the User level of undo, and the System level.

User level:

Expanding on the existing answers, You can configure the number of undo steps in User Preferences > Editing:

or Preferences > System > Memory & Limits in 2.8:

However, this value is arbitrarily limited to 64 256, or the Memory limit value. In other words, Steps is the maximum possible amount of undo steps, no matter what the Memory limit is set at.

Note that edit mode undo steps and object mode undo steps are stored separately, so you can have 256 edit mode undo steps and simultaneously have 256 object mode undo steps. (if you have enough memory)

System level:

You could use blenders autosave features to do something like zeffi suggested automatically.

  Save on Quit
  The function Save on Quit is enabled by default in Blender. Blender will always save your files when you quit the application
  under normal operation.
  Save Versions
  This option tells Blender to keep the indicated number of saved versions of your file in your current working directory when you
  manually save a file. These files will have the extension: .blend1,
  .blend2, etc., with the number increasing to the number of versions
  you specify. Older files will be named with a higher number. e.g. With
  the default setting of 2, you will have three versions of your file:
  *.blend (your last save), *.blend1 (your second last save) and *.blend2 (your third last save).
  Auto Save Temporary Files
  Checking this box tells Blender to automatically save a backup copy of your work-in-progress to the Temp directory (refer to the File
  panel in the User Preferences window for its location). This will also
  enable the Timer(mins) control which specifies the number of minutes
  between each Auto Save. The default value of the Blender installation
  is 5 (5 minutes). The minimum is 1, and the Maximum is 60 (Save at
  every one hour).The Auto Saved files are named using a random number
  and have a .blend extension.

Settings are in User preferences > File:

Or Preferences > Save & Load in 2.8:

I personally use a combination of automated saving and manual saving, and always save or at least duplicate the object when doing something destructive such as applying a modifier.

Images are from the wiki


Stencil image for texture painting shifted too far away from viewport center Hello,
I am facing this issue where the image is not centered to the mouse, hence I can't paint. Do you have any idea how to reset this picture position to put it under mouse cursor while painting?

Hold right mouse button, click on the image to move.


How can I copy all selected Keyframes? I tried to select a few keyframes and copy them at a later position in the dope sheet, but only a single finger was copied. Probably all keyframed items must be selected before copy and paste, how can this be achieved?

The image shows what happens when the keyframes to left of the current frames have been box-selected and pasted after the current frame.

Instead of copy and paste, have you tried duplicate shiftD and drag, (or type in the number of frames) to the required position?

You will find that copy is applied to the selected object/s (or in pose mode the selected bones) As shown in your example Finger-2_L is selected, the highlighting across the whole line indicates this, and therefore that bone has the only copied keyframes.

Duplicate however will duplicate all selected keyframes (all the diamonds highlighted in yellow) which is the action you want in this case.


Mantaflow Simulation: Fire and Smoke not rendering in Eeevee I am learning how to use Blender (2.8) on a macbook pro 2017 and have recently attempted to put together my first explosion using the following tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCdQgREfVq8&t=2s

I was able to follow through without issue except that the rendering is done in cycles which is too demanding for my macbook (rendering a single image shows as taking up to ~8 hours) so I want to render instead in eevee. I've baked the simulation but I can't seem to get what's in my viewport to show in my render when using eevee. cycles shows up fine. I am sure this is most likely a setting or misunderstanding of how I have arranged the elements. Was hoping someone could lead me in the right direction.

I've attached my blender file for reference here. Thank you. Below are images as well for reference to show how I am able to see in viewport my explosion but not in render.

RENDER

VIEWPORT

Seeing from your file it seems that your simulation domain does not have a shader, that's why.
At that point of the tutorial the dude creates the shaders.(below)

https://youtu.be/YCdQgREfVq8?t=420


I cannot see or render an image as the world background in cycles When I set the background to an option from blender it works fine but I wont work when I select an image from my computer.
In the screenshot I have an image selected but its just coming up as one solid colour as shown

To use a flat image, (really not recommended, you don't gain any dynamic range or depth of the environment) you will need to use an image texture node rather than an environment texture node and set the texture coordinate node to window so that the image fits within the camera bounds at all times.
There is a significant drawback to this, in that using an image this way does not provide the lighting that an HDRI does provide, and therefore it is better to use an actual HDRI that contains the lighting information and that captured the correct equirectangular projection that the environment image should have. See the gifs below for an example of the differences.

Regular photo, it contains no real light information, uses window coordinates stays static while the camera rotates:

HDRI with light information, correct projection as would be expected of the world when camera is moved:

Either of those two options will solve your current dilemma, if you do not have any HDRI images, there are plenty of resources for free ones, see our Resources for Blender post here for some good ones.


How to render only a section of the screen? I am rendering a small animation with Alpha that will be incorporated into a video. This animation will only occupy an area of 550 px wide by 650 px tall.
I know changing the Resolution in the Rendering tab is not the right way (as it keeps the same dimensions but with less resolution/pixels).
Maybe there’s a way to crop it? (just thinking out loud)

The VSE Video Sequence Editor and Compositor can offset and clip images already created. These techniques can be animated.
They can clip one image sequence and write those out to another set of files, another image sequence .
Of course you can change the camera location to create a whole new set of images.

In case you want to see part of a render without changing the camera the User can use this technique. This seems likely for testing purposes only, yet that is your choice.  This technique saves time because part of the image will be solid or transparent and no further calculation. Above has mentioned that image sequences can be offset and clipped.

The image resolution is << not changed >>.

View Menu

Render Border

Control-B

Choose the Camera View first. Then keystroke and draw rectangle like box select. Test Render.

I will leave you to explore and search more.
You may be able to do that faster than my time allows me to write a lot of words


Wall angles - Is there a quicker way of achieving this result? At the top of my walls, I want to angle them in and then sit a ceiling on top. To do this, I'm selecting each wall indvidually and extruding a portion upwards then dragging the top face into the room area a bit.

The end result is this:

I have quite a few individual wall sections to do...

I'm sure there must be a better and faster way of doing this. What's a better way to go about it instead of tackling each wall section indvidually?

There are a few ways to do this. My personal choice is to use a curve representing the wall shape as the bevel object for another curve representing the floor plan.

Create a mesh object with the outline of the wall shape you want to use, such as this
Convert it to a curve (ALT-C -> Curve from Mesh)
Create a floor plan and convert it to a curve, such as this
Use the wall shape as the bevel object for the floor plan

You can create the curves directly if you prefer and you can convert the beveled curve to a mesh (ALT-C -> curve to mesh) so that you can modify it.


Subdividing a beveled mesh creates new vertices in wrong places A new vertice forms when the object is being subdivided.

I beveled my mesh and added a subdivision surface modifier, and now a new face/vertices are created where the black areas are:

It appears that when the mesh has the modifier active, the subdivided mesh goes to a singular point in the center:

I applied Rotation and Scale to the mesh already after it was edited. Nothing changed.

How do I get rid of the odd mesh warp when my mesh is subdivided?
I want to get the center curve near the bottom to be as smooth as possible, without signs of low poly mesh. Like a perfect part-circle.

Here is the blend file:

This happens because you have a face made up of more than 4 vertices (N-GON), and with the subdivided surface, you have to be careful, and try to use a more regular topology. Ngons will not subdivide correctly.

I used the command crtl + T to triangulate the face.


Is it possible to bake to a texture with animatable alpha gradient? Starting with a scene like:

I want to bake to a transparent image like:

In Gimp a gradient can be added to transparency channel:

Result should be an animatable alpha-gradient (with high transparency but visible ,then the objects should blend in along x-axis):

How can this be achieved in Blender?
Ideally all of this:

initially 20% transparency of objects
a gradient that allows to make the objects opaque from left to right
optinally a white border (no transparency at all).

All I get from the attached .blend is something like:

The transparency is lost after bake.

I had no success with baking, but could achieve the desired effect by rendering the image.

Set the materials alpha channel to initial transparency

Materials properties

Add a plane with an alpha gradient as texxture behing the scene

In Gimp create an image with the required dimensions
From the layer context menu select  Add Layer Mask

Use the Blend Tool to create tha gradient

Export to .PNG

Set camera to orthographic

Render and save the image.


Boolean Modifyer dissapears if I delete object So after watching many tutorials on how to carve a 6 into the side of a cube (making dice), I followed steps to use the boolean modifyer to use a "6" object to carve into one face of the cube. All the tutorials say I should be able to delete the 6 object now. But when I do, the boolean modifyer deletes also. I end up with a blank cube again. Can someone help me? using the 2.8 blender. Also when I export as a stl file so i can put it in my 3d cutting software for the printer, it exports with all the numbers popping out of it, instead of boolean differences cut out of the cube.

Blender keeps data of all modifier in temporary state until the modifier is applied. Simply putting at this stage you can do whatever you want with modifiers. So, blender is not sure at this point. You can delete the modifier and object will return back to it's base form. So, modifier data and object data are dependent to each other. If one is affected then other one will be affected too.
Coming to your scenario, Assume there is a cylinder going through the cube. Boolean modifier is configured to affect the cube. So, if cylinder is going through the cube it will make a hole in cube. When you delete the cylinder you will loose hole too. Because object data and cylinder data are dependent to each other. So, to save your hole apply the modifier. This will now make modifier data independent to modifier object and your target object will be modified. After you can delete the modifier object. in this case after applying modifier you can delete cylinder and you will have hole in cube.


How do I switch form Object mode to Edit mode, Weight Paint, Vertex Paint or Sculpt Mode mode in version 2.8? Pressing the ↹ Tab key does not toggle object and edit mode in 2.8

How can I access and exit edit mode?

How do I access Weight Paint, Vertex paint or Sculpt Mode mode in version 2.8?

To toggle between different modes use the keyboard number keys

1 for Object Mode

2 for Edit Mode

3 for Weight Paint

4 for Vertex Paint

5 for Texture Paint

6 for Sculpt Mode

Source: https://youtu.be/t-EKbCJagqI?t=356


How to set a context value Smooth Shade is a simple command one can call via:

row.operator("object.shade_smooth", text="Smooth", icon="SMOOTHCURVE")

But how to you set a auto smooth to False or True?

bpy.context.object.data.use_auto_smooth = False

Can this be used like an operator as well?

row.operator("object.data.use_auto_smooth = False", text="AutoSmooth", icon="SMOOTHCURVE")

I highly assume this is wrong and that this must be maybe a flag to turn on or off.

Specifically this line makes no sense to bpy:

row.operator("object.data.use_auto_smooth = False", text="AutoSmooth", icon="SMOOTHCURVE")

The first parameter in row.operator() needs to be a known operator path. That parameter isn't used for setting anything, but merely to identify which operator you want to call.

  If you rightlick the AutoSmooth button in Normals panel, and select Edit Source and open the TextEditor's textblock properties_data_mesh.py, it opens directly at the line used by Blender's UI system to show you how it does the layout.

it shows:

mesh = context.mesh
col.prop(mesh, "use_auto_smooth")

mesh is available in this context because it's the Mesh Properties panel. If you have a menu elsewhere you'll have to get at it using obj.data.

This assumes there's an (active) object, use a poll in your menu to ensure this.

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

    obj = context.object
    mesh = obj.data

    split = layout.split()

    col = split.column()
    col.prop(mesh, "use_auto_smooth")
    sub = col.column()
    sub.active = mesh.use_auto_smooth and not mesh.has_custom_normals
    sub.prop(mesh, "auto_smooth_angle", text="Angle")


Disable deforming with armature I want to create an animation of a stormtrooper. For test purposes, I've set up a simple armature with some cubes as armor. When I parent them to the armature and move/rotate bones, the cubes get deformed. However, I only want them to follow the movement of the armature but not deform since the parts of the armor should be rigid.

If I turn off "deform" in the bone properties, the cubes just stop to follow the movement of the bones.

The .blend file is available here:

It is just some cubes parented with automatic weight. I've made an colloection "old" with the same cubes but not parented.

I've found the solution! If you go into Weight paint for the disformed object, you can select individual bones. In my case, I selected the left upper arm bone and then painted the cube blue, so that a rotation of the arm bone doesn't affect the other cube


Numerical value of keyframe in the Graph Editor I'm manipulating animation keyframes in the Graph Editor in Blender and although my keys are clearly marked "Value", I can't see exactly what the value of this key is ; I can only eyeball its location by manually moving the keyframe up and down the Y axis in on the graph.

I would like to manually set the height of the keyframe in the Graph Editor by inputting a numeric value. How do I do this?

Show Sliders

From the graph editor view menu toggle view sliders

Now each fcurve has a slider in the channels region.

When the scene frame is on a keyframe, highlighted yellow, updating will change the keyframe value. When green, will add a new keyframe at that frame.


Blender render or camera view clips my object or shows nothing I am new to blender and 3d modelling.  I have tried searching for the answer to no avail.

I'm having a hell of a time positioning the camera.  At first it was clipping my object as such (bottom left tire)..

I moved the camera and now I see nothing in the render or the camera view.  I have linked my blend file here...

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8ZnFrE6fxi_a3FGZWVENExtLVk

I have moved my camera in a thousand different places with no luck.  In a previous project I was able to manipulate the camera and render with no problems.  I'd guess I hit a hotkey by accident that messed everything up in my current project.

Thanks for any help.

Ok, so a couple things going on, but they're common mistakes that people make, especially early on (and sometimes later!).

The primary problem is that your object is scaled to gigantic proportions.  Select all objects (A) and scale them down (S) to .05.  Move everything so that your Zamboni is back in the center of the grid and resting on the grid, just for (optional, just for aesthetics and to keep a reference point).

:edit:  I forgot the 2nd part.  Though the above will solve your view problem, it would be a good idea to select your Zamboni after you've got it all scaled down, and press Ctrl + A which will apply the current scale as the objects default scale.

In blender there are essentially two scales for a mesh.
First, you have it's size according to the mesh (the actual geometry).  But when you're not in edit mode, but in object mode (when you press Tab you are toggling between the two modes) and you scale the object, the mesh size, according to Blender, is staying the same.  But the object size is getting bigger.  A bit tough to understand, maybe, but think of it like this:

You have a cube in blender that is 2 foot x 2 foot x 2 foot.

You decide to scale it up 2x by going into edit mode, selecting all the vertices, and scaling them up 2x.  Blender now sees your cube as 4'x4'x4'.

But lets say instead you take your 2'x 2'x 2' box and and scale it up in object mode by 5x.  Blender doesn't actually see a 10'x10'x10' box.  It sees it as the original 2'x2'x2' box multiplied by 5.  So essentially like this (2'x2'x2')x5.

This is important for many simulation type things, but it can cause problems when your object is so extremely large that Blender doesn't quite know how to display it.

So going back up to the Ctrl+A command and applying the scale, your telling Blender that the size that the object is, is the size that you want to be the default 1x scale.

Taking the cube example I made above, if you scale a cube up 5x in object mode, giving you the (2')x5 cube, then press Ctrl+A Blender now sees your cube as a 10'x10'x10' cube.

I hope this is clear, let me know if I can clarify anything for you.


Changing Spline Evaluation Rate in Animation Nodes I would like the ball to accelerate in the begging and end of the spline evaluation and deaccelerate in the middle, while it is in the air. Is there a way to change the default location?

You can evaluate the time at some interpolation whose derivative represents the velocity of the animation. In your case, such interpolation would look like:

Also, don't keyframe your nodes, try to use the Time Info and Animate Float nodes instead. Finally, you don't need the Mesh Info node, the same output is in the Mesh Object Info node.


I dont seem to have the bisect tool I also checked the add-on list for the bisect tool figuring it was probably unincluded but found no add-on as well so I am confused.

It's there - You have to click on the icon and hold down the mouse button before you can select it. See below:


How to I get light to not affect the rest of the scene I made a test of a idea I had and I had a problem with the lighting of the scene
So I have a reflective face shield of a astronaut and way off there's an object(the orang band) that has an emitter node. The space/stars thing is a hdri, how to I make the orange light of the band not effect anything else(ie the backround cause its really red)

This is - as far as i know - not really possible at the moment. The feature is called "light linking" https://developer.blender.org/T68915

In Eevee you could try to work with light -> custom distance

Or work with layers, meaning to seperate your renders per object/ fore-/background and combining them again in the compositor.


Paint Weights Mirroring Same Weights When I begin to paint weights for arms/legs, it paints the same side weights on the other side instead. It mirrors the same weights. My mesh is symmetrical butt I also check it by doing edit mode and symmetrical. Also, I've tried keeping on/off Auto Normalize but I would get the same results. Thinking it might be my mesh, I made a new scene using the default cube, used a mirror mod(applied it), created some geo/bones, and repeated the process. The same thing happened, so I'm not sure what could be causing it. Here are some images to give you an idea. And the brush settings are default "mix."

There are two different symmetry options while using wheight paint:
Symmetry 1 mirrors the strokes along X axis in the active vertex group.
Symmetry 2 mirrors the strokes on two vertex groups which have the same name and suffix like .l .r, .L .R, .left .right, and similar (check Blender manual for a list of valid suffix).


Loop cut entirely after dissolving an edge I can still cut it entirely with the Loop cut.

Thing is, I want to get rid of that edge, I do that by dissolving it:

Now here's the problem, after that, I can't cut it entirely. I've also tried dissolving the remaining vertices but it didn't work.

So what I want to do is to cut it entirely after dissolving the edge, instead of doing it separately as you can see in the pic. Is there a way to achieve that? Did I make a wrong move?

You can not use the Loop Cut tool because you have an n-gon (face with more than 4 vertices, in your case 5) on the top.

The Loop Cut tool only works with quads (faces with 4 vertices).

First use Dissolve Edges then immediately after use Dissolve Vertices; Or update to the newest version and use Dissolve Edges and Vertices.


Hair particles tighten on a certain point I am trying to set the ponytail using hair particles on a cartoon female model, Most of work go smooth.

Result:

My Hair Setting:

Comb View:

I am having issue to tighten up hair in a hair catch. The area where I want to put an hair catch is real big and I am looking for a real narrow.

Can anybody point out, how to achieve it or Is there another tool other than comb to narrow any specific area?

Thanks in advance :)

A commonly used trick to create better looking hair, if you want to have a better look, is to use multiple hair particle systems. If one uses a single hair particle group it becomes difficult to comb it precisely.

With more particle systems you get better control over them by combing only a part. You be able to comb less hair but with more control, and be more precisely without without affecting wrong hairs.

back-upper-left
back-upper-right
back-lower-left
back-lower-right

Those are only 4 hair groups but you might (weight paint) even more hair particle areas, the best Blender hair models you usually see have lots of them.

Adding another tip, to futher improve precision of the "hair artist" :).
It might be helpfull to comb in ortographic view (press 5 on numpad)
So you get real exact positions (Left / right top) to start your combing width. Together with the earlier tip i was able to put a hairgroup trough a needle. Also be sure to have enough segments in your hair.

And a 3th tip, you might as well add a cylinder, select top face press i, inserts the face repeat a few times, then weight paint the inserts for a tail only hair system.

and a 4th tip, since your character doesnt seam to be a realisit person, you might as well consider unrealistic hair; using (optionally softbody) mesh based hair, here's an advanced one with bones :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHWflWRkYo0

But if you want to go realistic first 2 answers


Transparent material in 3D View I have an image of a spaceship with the front glass. I want to make a transparent material so that I can see the inner seat etc.
I do not want to change it in the render, but make the material transparent in the 3D View.

How can I achieve that and what settings are required to get that transparent effect in the 3D view?

Ateks, this is a simple example with blender render, explaining what Zac said above in comments:

simply switching to cycles (in this case) gives a similar basic material, and works the same:


Why is my texture stretched over my model? I'm following this tutorial to create a building. And am facing some problems with shading/ texturing. The tutorial is for Blender 2.7x and I'm using 2.8a. If you look at the screenshots below, you'll see that the image texture looks weird in Shading mode and fine in Texture Paint mode.

In the orange node, change the Flat to Box or Cube.


Combine 2 normal maps (1 for layout and 1 for detail) So my question got closed when it is not even resolved.
here: How to use normal inside normal
So I want to combine 2 different normal map with different size.

Normal map for the object layout

this object normal map is in low poly.
Then I want to define the texture normal (like bump, etc) in another normal map:

The second image is the normal map for each small chunk piece of the texture. For example for every 1cm - 5cm of the texture should follow this normal map. So the 2nd image / the detail normal map should be repeated many times covering the whole texture.
How can I do this?

You can mix the 2 textures into a MixRGB node. Put the MixRGB factor at 0.5, and put the Normal Map strength at 2. As they are not supposed to have the same scale, they both use the same UV map but the first one will use a Mapping scale of 1 while you'll use a bigger scale for the second one (here x 10):


How to start rendering (and save result) in terminal on Ubuntu? I am getting ready, to try out cloud computing for Blender rendering,
that's why I'm curious if I can just drop the .blend file and render the scene from the terminal.

PS: Can Somebody tell me if I can save the result right to my disk without saving it on the virtual computer?

Try this:

blender --background /path/to/FileName.blend -f 1

More information on Command Line rendering here.


Cheetah Print Sunglasses Texture This is probably a simple question, but I would really appreciate some help here. I am trying to replicate the material of the attached image. I'm a little lost so far and have tried several different methods in the last few hours, like using a mix shader with a noise texture, but can't quite get anything near what I'm looking for. If anyone has any ideas on how I could replicate the look of these sunglasses, I'd really appreciate it.

I'd say Musgrave texture is a good fit.
Good lighting also plays a big part.

Transmission set to 1 for clear plastic
Musgrave texture with Color Ramp to control it
Mix RGB node to adjust the colors


Black stains/pixels render I am having an issue with a rendering. I am trying to render a outside architecture scene with a sky texture (nishita)
For some reasons, there are some black stains/pixel in some random areas of the render...
I'm using blender 2.90.1
Here is the file :

Any thought ? :D

Thanks
Valentin

Be careful with the musgrave texture. Its values are not constrained to the [0...1] range, which can result in negative values. The roughness is not supposed to get negative values, thus the black artifacts.
An easy fix is to add a clamp node, which will constrain the result between 0 and 1.


How can I disable only being able to extrude along the blue axis of a face? Regarding the extrude tool in edit mode, when I want to extrude it does so only along the blue axis of the face by default. How do I disable this?

.

Extrude Tool works along the face normal, by default (that's what the blue axis shows).
You can change the orientation and direction through the pop-up menu.


How to delete screen datablock Is there any way yet to delete screen datablocks in outliner ? I have a couple of temp screens from my old startup file that freeze 2.75.

To delete one or several screen layouts you should use Info window:

Here the same technique as for deleting images is used, i.e with Shift pressed click  button near the screen layout name to delete it completely from the .blend (it will disappear after reboot).

To delete many layouts, it may be easier to delete all of them except for one.


How do I reset all of my view panels without having to do the click and drag method? I would like to find a different solution to closing these windows without having to do the click and drag.

If you want to come back to the default windows setup you can click on the "+" tab on the top and choose General > Layout (or whatever setup you want to come back to). You can move or delete all this tabs with right click. If you want to save your own custom layout I think you need to create it and Save the Startup File.


Volumetrics in EEVEE working in viewport but not in final render Hey so I'm working on a scene with volumetrics enabled in the Eevee render setting (volumetric lightning is on as well).

It shows up in the viewport and it looks fantastic, but as soon as I press F12 to render it out, everything is ok except the volumetrics are not present.

Any idea if it's a bug or I'm doing something wrong somewhere?

Running Blender 2.8 on OSX Mojave (10.14).

I found a workaround. On your viewport, disable all your overlays and switch to Render View. Click View, then Viewport Render Animation. You can increase your render preview sample equal to the final render too. I did that before when Blender crashed when using conventional render.


Depth of Field F-stop not doing anything? I'm trying to achieve DOF using Blender Internal 2.75a. Everything seems to work, except that the F-stop doesn't seem to do anything, nor in the Defocus node nor in the camera DOF settings. I just get a uniform blur, no focus plane. I followed tutorials and read some posts but couldn't find the correct solution. See the image for my settings. Note that I am focusing on the Eyes object. How to make it work?

Plug the Z pass directly to the Z input on the Defocus Node.

Control the focus distance on the camera settings. Choose and Object to focus on or set a distance. Note that if you choose an object the camera will focus at the object's origin.)

Every time you change any of the camera settings RENDER THE IMAGE, otherwise the compositor will not update.

The Max blur setting controls the amount of blur in pixels. Larger numbers will yield more blur, but will also take longer to render.

The F-Stop controls the depth of field.

A smaller F-stop number will result in more critical focus, with  in objects closer to the camera or further away form the focus point getting blurrier faster.

A larger F-stop number will result in sharper objects in front or away from the focus point.

Setting the focus point with an object:

EDIT:

All of this is designed to work on a "normal" scale. If your scene is Huge those parameters don't work as well. In your case your scene is so big that all objects are several hundred meters, but you've set your scene scale settings to 0.001. The objects will display nice but they are still large (at least when it comes to how depth of field works)... The camera is focusing so far that to have a meaningful blur the F-stop would need to be a very small number, around 0.1 or less (give it a try and see things defocus). The problem then becomes finding the correct focus point, nothing seems to be in focus anymore...

Solutions:

Scale all of the objects in the scene to 1000th of its size (Press A to select all and then S  . 0 0 1) and reset the scale on the scene back to 1, and ta-da! The defocus node works like a dream.

(you still have the issue that the origin of the eyes object is behind the objets so the camera doesn't quite focus on the eyes. I created an empty that is placed on the right eye).


How to blur specific borders of an object? I want to blur only certain borders of an fluid-object, so that its borders have a smooth transition to the white background.

I'm using a fresnel material, so naturally the edges will be highlighted a little stronger. I want to have this effect for the drops, but not for the "ocean".

This is going to be an animation, so I'll need a solution for any angle of my camera.

My first attempt to solve this problem, was to create a ring around the edges with the same material to hide the borders of the fluid, but I realized, that this plane casts a shadow, even if I uncheck the shadow-box in the object-menu  and I also realized, that I just moved my border problem further out.

So maybe a transparent material for the plane, that blurs everything behind it?

In Cycles, you can create a transparent material that blurs anything behind it like this :

The Light Path 'Is Camera Ray' is used to mix between a Transparent and a Refraction shader - this ensures that the material does not cast a shadow.

The Refraction shader has its Normal linked to the Incoming Geometry socket and this ensures that no actual refraction will take place due to incident rays always striking the surface along the Normal. This result in the Refraction shader behaving as a 'Transparent' shader when Roughness is zero but by increasing the Roughness (with IOR set to a suitable value) you can vary the amount of blurring that occurs.

You'll need to ensure the Render Samples is set sufficiently high for the blurring to be smooth.

With creative use of Generated coordinates to vary the Roughness you can even create a material with variable blurriness over its surface. In this example the blurring plane is placed over the edge of the checkered floor with variable blurring from left to right :


Why is the wrong texture showing when I switch from texture paint to object mode? I've just finished texture painting this model, and I wanted to start rigging it and whatnot, but when I try and go from texture paint to object mode, an older version of the texture appears. I have the right texture selected, I have no idea why the wrong texture is showing on the model.

Another weird thing is that I've already done this exact model once before with a different texture paint, and that one went perfectly fine. Unfortunately, I can't remember what I did with the first model that I haven't done with the second model.

This is what it looks like in Texture Paint, and this is how I want it to look:

This is how it looks in object mode, with an older texture that I've since painted over:

Any suggestions?

So unfortunately these answers didn't work, and I still have no idea why it was doing that since it worked with the other identical file, but when I switched it to cycles render I was able to use a texture node, and that seemed to fix the problem. Thanks for the suggestions.


Deformations on back of the head when trying to rotate rig I'm weight painting my model and I am getting weird deformations on the back of the head. I can't figure out how I should weight paint in order to get the back of the head to follow the face when turning.

The file is located here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WajpFseBrH8aKv4AlK9S-y8q88ELArbA/view?usp=sharing
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

What you could do is enable transparency with Alt Z, select all this part of your mesh (back of the head), in the Properties panel > Object Data > Vertex Groups, on the right of the vertex group list, click on the dropdown menu and choose Remove From All Groups, then in Weight Paint mode, assign this part to the bone that is supposed to move it.


Does Blender provide a web-compatible codec-container combination that allows for transparent backgrounds in videos? I want to output a video file from my blender animation that (1) has a transparent background, and (2) is supported by the major browsers via a <video> element. Ideally, it also won't be a massive file.

Does Blender support such a codec-container combination?

I've found that container=WebM and codec=WEBM/VP9 seems to do the trick (though Safari doesn't support VP9 at this moment in time).


Blender Texture/Model Seam Problems I am creating an old Greek pillar for practice but during the creation process there appears to be a seam that's being rendered in the texture and model. I have gone in to texture paint mode and tried using the clone, and smear tool to blend the textures, and while it will blend the actual texture together it does absolutely nothing to the seam.
I have also tried baking uvmap. Does anyone know what could be causing this problem? Did I incorrectly unwrap the model? I have surfed the threads trying to find something to help me fix my issue but it seems everything I try does nothing to make this seam disappear.

I have turned the bias down to zero, it yields a slightly better result but the seam is still visible. Should I be using an image editor to make the texture tile properly?

Make sure to leave some space (a few pixels at least) between your UV pieces. Then turn on bleed in texture paint mode and when you bake things, so your texture extends beyond the boundaries of your model's UV coordinates. Doing both these things will avoid interpolation issues at the seams. There may be more issues in your case, but this is the first thing I would do to get rid of the seams.

*Bleed for texture painting is located in the Tool shelf > Options > Project Paint > Bleed. Increase the value to say 8.
For baking, the same thing is called Margin. But again, for either of these to be effective, you must first add some space between your UV pieces.


Black Lines Along UV Mapped Model I am new to blender and am trying to model an object and export it to unity.

However I am having a problem. Black line are forming along several edges of the model when viewed from a distance.

Some screenshots

Close Up

From A Distance

In Unity

Texture

Either remap your UVs with smart UV project and set island margin to an appropriate value (Experiment, 0.02 works for me), or manually increase the size of the margin around each island by a few pixels. You can easily do this by hand with a photo-editing tool.

The black lines are from the mipmapping used in realtime graphics pipelines, including Blender's editor and Unity. The mipmapping works fine at full resolution (eg: when close to the model) but when the camera is far away, adjacent colours tend to blend together. On your texture, coloured islands are adjacent to black areas, so you have black lines.

This Gamedev.SE answer is wonderful and explains the mipmap bleed effect very well.


How can I achieve this lighting in blender..? I am really curious how can I achieve this lighting in blender

Like you would do in the real world, by adding lights behind the columns. You can do it with long planes and an emission shader or with long area lights.

The blue the light is the effect of white light reflected on a blue surface.


Where is the viewport render resolution divider? Many have asked for this, there is even a thread from august on dev that is closed, one would assume is because its finished? https://developer.blender.org/D1619

I just went though all the settings and couldn't find anything.
How can I halve the resolution of viewports for 'retina' like displays?

(pls no answers that suggest changing my cycles render settings when previewing etc, that is not what I'm asking about)

this patch description (linked from the above D1619 thread) says:

"Cycles/BI: Add a pixel size option for speeding up viewport rendering
This patch adds "Pixel Size" to the performance options, which allows to render in a smaller resolution, which is especially useful for displays with high DPI."

about the UI part the patch shows a new property, called "preview_pixel_size":

this patch  was released Aug 15 2017, but 2.79 final was released september 12 so it couldn't be set for that release, but it is in following releases, such as current "unstable" build blender-2.79-c66983c-win64.zip, in which you can find it where the patch said, under "performance options":


2.92 Fire & Smoke Definition Using 2.92, trying to work on outdated tutorials and struggling. I have my subdivisions set at 1052 so there’s no reason for the fire and smoke to be blurry, but it still is. There’s no colour mapping tool as used in some tutorials and I just can’t figure out how to give my fire and smoke more definition and detail.
Please, please help. I’m going crazy.

I worked it out, whether this helps others or not, I don't know.
https://imgur.com/a/hUIxhe0


Pose is not remembered as Keyframe I use version 2.66 of Blender and I'm a newbie. I downloaded a free model of a human, rigged and skinned it and I try creating a simple animation. I set a pose, then press "I" and LocRot but when I do the same for the next pose the previous keyframe pose(s) become the same as the current. And when I press play not surprisingly see no animation. I see the created keyframes but they are the same. What I see in the Graph Editor is strange for me, because there are no interpolation lines between the frames(they are the same after all). I've tried lots of things. I've read about a similar problem but no solution.

I found out what the problem is. When I'm in Pose Mode I have to pres "A" to select all animated bones. Then I have to press "I".


display driver stopped working While rendering I get a display driver stopped working error. Drivers are up to date, I got a 1060. Not too long ago I formatted my pc and I could render with no issues. Now I can't. It just happens when I make full renders at high quality (around 1000 samples). I was used to render more complex scenes even at 2000 samples. Any advice?

Lately I've been having issues with my hard disk, but I don't think it is related.

The issue is not with the driver per-se, but with Windows.

The operating system has a builtin timer for when the graphics card is busy. If the graphics card doesn't respond for more than a certain period it activates a count down. When exceeded it terminates the graphics drivers process to regain system responsiveness.

As Julian Herzog writes

  The problem here is that Windows has a timeout detection and recovery
  (TDR) system that detects if a GPU computation takes longer than a
  given amount of time, the default value for that being two seconds,
  and then “reinitializes” the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM)
  driver and resets the GPU. This will stop the rendering process. You
  will also notice that any displays attached to the GPU you use for
  rendering will turn black for a short moment.

  Normally, this system is great because it prevents permanent screen
  freezes for malfunctioning drivers or games. But in Cycles, one sample
  is considered one computation, which means that if your sample
  calculation takes longer than two seconds, Cycles (and the Blender UI,
  if you render with UI) will crash.

To prevent this you must change a key in Windows registry

Open the registry editor (REGEDIT)
Got to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/GraphicsDrivers
Set the TdrDelay DWORD
If it contains a kyword named TdrDelay edit its value
If there is no TdrDelay right-click into the empty space below the
values
Create a new “DWORD-Value". A DWORD (32-bit) -Values hould cut it
Set its name it “TdrDelay”
Change the value to 8 or 16 (value is interpreted in seconds)
Beware of the editing mode, make sure you save as decimal value, not hexadecimal (I found only 512 was enough to prevent most crashes).
Reboot your system for the changes to take effect.


How do you make an xray material (or similar) I's there a way to make a material such that when viewed through another object it appears differently?

Example:
object 1 is a black sphere
Object 2 is a glass plane

When viewing the black sphere through the glass pane the sphere becomes translucent, or in some way changes the texture that is visible THROUGH object 2, but anywhere that object 1 is directly visible to the camera it remains a black sphere.

Is this even possible using standard blender tools or will this require scripting and mods?

There are several ways to approach this, the most flexible is likely compositing and renderlayers. However, it is possible to do this from within cycles:

If the incoming ray has bounced more than once and it is coming from a transmissive object (such as glass), it will be translucent. Otherwise it will be diffuse.


Center cursor in python script? I am getting an error when trying to center the cursor in a python script

import bpy

bpy.ops.import_scene.obj(filepath=objFilePath, axis_up='Y')

bpy.ops.object.select_by_type(type='MESH')

bpy.ops.object.origin_set(type='ORIGIN_GEOMETRY')
view3d = bpy.context.screen.areas['VIEW_3D'].spaces[0];
view3d.pivot_point = 'CURSOR'
view3d.cursor_location = (0.0,0.0,0.0)
USER = os.environ['USER'];

bpy.ops.export_scene.fbx(filepath="/Users/"+USER+"/house.fbx", path_mode='RELATIVE', object_types={'MESH'})

Error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<blender_console>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/private/var/folders/48/ptx7wqz138x4_shgs5nk6szm0000gn/T/AppTranslocation/DEB386B3-C3FC-4FAB-B7A2-0954C07B91CF/d/blender.app/Contents/MacOS/../Resources/2.78/scripts/modules/bpy/ops.py", line 189, in __call__
ret = op_call(self.idname_py(), None, kw)
RuntimeError: Operator bpy.ops.view3d.snap_cursor_to_center.poll() failed, context is incorrect

I am trying to center the origin of my model in batch mode of blender.

Every operator requires a proper context to run in. Since you mentioned that you are running the script in batch mode and accessing a view3d operator, you must provide the exact context to the operator

import bpy
# in this case the area at index 4 happens to be view3d
view3d = bpy.context.screen.areas[4]
context_override = {'window': bpy.context.window,
                    'screen': bpy.context.screen,
                    'area' : view3d}
bpy.ops.view3d.snap_cursor_to_center(context_override)

By doing this, I am able to snap the cursor by running the script from the Python console. Also, you do not need the call to poll() since you are providing the explicit context.

Relevant Links

Overriding Context
Execution Context


How to create Coffee with Foam? I wanted to create a coffee and foam on top.

I used Blender Guru's donut tutorial. I saw how he made the coffee and foam, but I can't get things quite right.

The coffee looks dark on the top but the rest of it is light (transparent like water)

The foam in a distance (image) it kinda looks like one but things seem to be off (maybe the reflection or something causing it?), in another perspective it looks like there is no foam.

Here is two images I took (image of the coffee (screenshotted it since rendering it is slow) and the nodes/part of the material properties):

Here is the actual file:

If anyone can see and help what's wrong, I will appreciate it! Thank you!

You need to enable auto-smooth normals. The reason why the coffee is being shaded so weirdly is because you've enabled smooth shading which averages out the normals. As a result, some of those flat faces start getting the strange shading as if they were a curved surface.

So go to Mesh Data > Normals > and enable Auto Smooth. Then increase the angle slightly so that all of the rounded faces that should be smoothed out are smoothed out. However, if you increase it too much, it'll start smoothing out the top face again and you'll end up with the strange shading again.

Edit:

You also seemed to have forgotten to delete some of the geometry from the cup object. that intersecting with the liquid is probably part of the reason why it looked so weird. And please turn down the viewport subsurf modifier on the cup down from 6...there is no reason why that cup should have millions of verts.


Am i allowed to sell a Blender project including the Blender installer? Am i allowed to sell a download of a project for e.g. 2.00$?
And may i include the Blender installer in there?
Am i also allowed to include free blender addons in the download folder?

Take a look at https://www.blender.org/about/license/

"Free to sell your work" seems very clear. It doesn't include Blender and it also doesn't include addons, as long as they don't use different Licensing Models.

You may distribute blender with your work as a dependency, but you obviously may not declare it as your work.


Multiple holes in object by boolean I have a sphere with wall thickness that is separated for 3D print to 36 pieces that intersect a little. I need to randomly pierce it by holes. So I a made the 36 pieces a one object, model the cylinders also made them one object and then tried to subtract them from the sphere. As I expected, the Boolean went mad and it turned out badly. How to achieve the desired model with working Boolean or in other way? Here is my file.

Answer A:
The reason it doesnt work is that you have a very bad (unecessarily huge and unstructered) topology (See 1). Using a fresh and nicely subdivided icosphere/uv-sphere the boolean operation should work better. (See 2) I'd also suggest to use simple topology cylinders with bevels instead of those highpoly triangled ones.
I'd say build it from scratch and lowpoly, but if you dont want to, to keep your creases/trenches you could also try the new remeshing options (Voxel/ Quadriflow) to get some clean topology.
Your specific modell is easily reproduced using a mirror-modifier workflow, after extracting the necessery parts from an UV-Sphere via Separate. (See 4, m-mod is not applied yet in image)

Answer B:
Workaround for unreliable boolean modifier when using a loose parts cutter objects - meaning the cutting objekt has multiple unconnected polygroups inside:
Separate your cutting object by loose parts and apply to every loose part to be cut a boolean modifier per loose part cutting object.(per cylinder in this case)
Doing this by hand is tedious! Here is a script to set boolean modifiers to the active object for every single object in a specified collection:

import bpy

#boolean modifier will be applyied to active object
obj_base = bpy.context.object
#per object in collection named "Coll_Cutter" the active objects gets one boolean modifier
collCutter_name = "Coll_Cutter"

for c in bpy.data.collections:
    print(c.name)
    if c.name == collCutter_name:
        cutterlist = c.all_objects

for cutter in cutterlist:
    bool_one = obj_base.modifiers.new(type="BOOLEAN", name="bool 1")
    bool_one.object = cutter
    bool_one.operation = 'DIFFERENCE'


Sun Lamp doesn't show when background lighting is used Situation: I'm creating an ocean scene. I have an ocean with reflecting material. Therefore, I used a picture on a plane as to have the background image reflected on the ocean.

Problem: However, a sun lamp doesn't seem to work when rendered with the background plane. When I just rendered the sun lamp and the ocean, the ocean is lighted. However, with the background image rendered, the sun lamp doesn't seem to show up. (I had tried increasing intensity and changing color to bright purple first). How could I have the lamp reflected on the ocean together with the background plane on the scene?
Here's the blend file.

Rendering only ocean and light

Rendering with ocean, light, and background image (there should be a purple light, but it doesn't show)

Your plane is casting a shadow. moving the sun lamp will not help since unlike point, the sun lamp casts global lighting. To fix this, move your sun into the same layer as the water and select This Layer Only


How to create a typing text-object animation ? As for the video editor in Blender, I would simply make the five pictures in the drawing and put them one after the other onto a channel. But how to make the same animation if the text is made out of 3d objects in the default layout ? (for instance in order to make them rotate while they are typed )

You can use the Blender Typewriter Addon:

http://urchn.org/post/typewriter-blender-addon

copy and paste the code into the Text Editor, then press alt + p to run the script.

Select your text object and you'll find a new panel into the Font Propery Panel:

Type the text in "source_text" field (NELLY).

Go to frame 0 and insert a keyframe for the character_count = 0 (mouse over the field and press i)

Go to frame 75, change character_count to 5 (text length) and press i

EDIT: Animation Nodes Addon

If you need more control (such as animating letters size, rotation...), you could use the Animation Nodes Addon.

Here you can find a video showing an advanced text manipulation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li7R01PyXuI&index=26&list=PLFSQhJg6cGLKq8WbouMNBOHbMd7xUhuom


Material does not react to light and looks shadeless I have a problem importing old Blender files that I created with Blender internal. I am now using Blender 2.8 and a Principled BSDF.  When I render the object or set Viewport shading to Rendered, I don't see any shading. The objects don't react to the light. They look like materials in Blender Internal when the "shadless" option is checked.  When I set the Viewport shading to Look Dev, the material looks much better, but even here it doesn't really react to the light properly.  Newly created files are shaded correctly.  What am I doing wrong?

I figured it out.

The main problem was that the unit system was set to "none". I set it to "metric" (Context Scene), and then scaled down my object to 0.1. Then the light worked as expected.
I also had to reduce the strength of the background to 0.2 (Context World).

Is there a good summary of what needs to be considered when switching from 2.79 to 2.8?


Animate the rotation of a shotgun barrel How can I rotate the barrel like so, in the first image below?

I want the barrel to rotate 45° so that the shotgun shells can be put into the barrel. But when I rotate, I get this image below:

Thats because the "Origin" of the barrel is all the way to the right of the screen. Every object has an "Origin" and it is the yellow dot that appears every time you select an object.
Here is a tutorial to explain what an origin is and how to change it. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FxrRdbk854


I want to know how the mix function works in the mix rgb code void mix_blend(float fac, vec4 col1, vec4 col2, out vec4 outcol)
{
  fac = clamp(fac, 0.0, 1.0);
  outcol = **mix**(col1, col2, fac);
  outcol.a = col1.a;
}

I want to know how the mix works in the code above.
I think it's a function, but I can't find where it is.
I think blender is mixing by adjusting col1, col2, and fac value, but I want to know the detailed logic.
void mix_mult(float fac, vec4 col1, vec4 col2, out vec4 outcol)
{
  fac = **clamp**(fac, 0.0, 1.0);
  outcol = mix(col1, col1 * col2, fac);
  outcol.a = col1.a;
}

I want to know how the clamp function works in the code above.

source code
material.c
ctrl+f "blend"
https://github.com/blender/blender/blob/master/source/blender/blenkernel/intern/material.c


How do I rename a collection? I read that in 2.80, double-left clicking a collection enables you to rename it, but I'm not finding this to be the case. How do you rename a collection?

Yash's solution works, but you can also Right click, click ID Data and then rename.


How would I make the back of this chair? I'm having a difficult time trying to figure out how to create the back and bottom part of this chair (not the legs, just the outline of the chair). I thought about doing some extruding from creating the bottom but then I got very confused on how to create the circular backing and its seams. I'm still learning each day and this chair might be too advanced for where I am I guess but any pointers would be appreciated!

You can begin with a 60 vertex cylinder, make an inset:

Extrude a quarter of the border faces:

Move up some vertices to make the bumps:

Push a bit back the whole top:

Create some edge loops to round the shape and to prepare the seams:

Select all and make a Mesh > Symmetrize:

Some additional edge loops:


Fresnel gradient shader? I've tried my hardest to try and replicate this style, but can't for the life of me get anywhere near it. Is anyone able to get close to this style?

You can get nice results using the Layer Weight node.

Mix two glass shaders. One with IOR=1 (no refraction), other with high IOR
Layer Weight - Facing to drive the mix shader
Use Color Ramp to control the edge effect


Curve Modifier - not smooth enough deformation I have a plane and added a curve modifier to it. But no matter the number of sub-divisions or loop cuts, the deformation doesn't get smoother beyond a point. I have tried using smooth shading, applying subdivision surface modifier (to the plane as well as to the curve) with sufficient number of sub-divisions, to no avail. Any idea what must be going wrong?

You can try both method

Method 1

Select the curve go to curve tab and in Resolution - Preview U : increase from 12

Method 2

You have added loop cut vertically and no loop cut horizontally

So just select all and delete with limited dissolve

Press W key and add subdivide and Press f6 to increase the count to above 7

No need of subsurf modifier

Apply smooth shading.


Scale a mesh from a different origin I'm trying to create something like 360 degrees protractor or analog clock bars, where every 5th bar is in a different length.

Using animation nodes I'm trying to rotate a plane instance around the world center point and scale it from the mesh bottom edge.

My problem is that both scaling and rotating happen around the object origin.

things I've tried:

rotating the object but scaling the mesh, it's still scales about the origin.
parenting to an empty, rotating the empty and scaling the object - would work but object instancer doesn't instance the child.

Welcome to StackExchange. First, set the Origin of the Plane Object at its edge

Then, use Object Matrix Output node with Type is World (N-panel -> Node -> Advanced Node Settings) and Matrix Math node to rotate and scale the instanced objects from the World Center,

Blend File:


Weird faces bezier to mesh I've created a bezier curve and made it a mesh but there's gotta be some problem because when i try to render it (both with cycles or moving it to Unreal Engine) there are a lot of "problematic" faces, and I don't know how to deal with this. As you can see by watching the wide faces (opposed to the very narrow one) there is a distortion causing the texture to be badly displayed both in Cycles render (it's all stretched) and in UE where it's all badly distorted and broken. It's an unwrap problem or the faces are somewhat badly generated from the bezier tool?

Edit: when unwrapping with a single seam what i get is this, and so the problem seems to be that the two faces which should be close and make the texture continuous are indeed distant

From the looks of it, your texture is mirrored along the tube. Also, you have fairly even spacing all around the tube, and it somehow gets stretched around where you get the texture anomalies.
My guess is, that your mapping is very easy to fix by using Active Quads to unwrap your tube.

Mark one seam down your tube, from one opening to the other

To make sure the Unwrap works properly, I recommend first resetting the unwrap first with Mesh > UV Unwrap > Reset

Then, first deselect one of the faces on the island you want to unwrap and immediately re-select it. You will notice, its color is different from the rest of the selection. This is because this face is now the Active Face.

Now unwrap the strip with Mesh > UV Unwrap > Follow Active Quads

Usually, Length Average gives the best results on strips, but you can toggle through the option to see if you can get a better fit.

You should now have a perfectly rectangular strip of quads in your UV Map. It may require a little scaling along the X- or Y-Axes, but it will make texturing very easy.


Nonuniform Moving of Vertices of Meshes Along Local Normals I have a 3D surface with N vetrices and M faces. I also have independent numpy arrays for face normals, n, vertices coordinates, V, and the triangulation of the vertices in F.

For each vertex, I also have a function, f(iVertex) = h_i that defines how much the vertex should move along the local normal, which can be outward (positive h_i values) or inward (negative h_i values). In other words, displacing the vertices along the local normal are not uniform and is different from vertex to vertex according to the function f(iVertex).

The closest solution I found was posted here. However, I don't want my surface to get disintegrated and I want the faces to remain connected even after displacing the vertices. How can I move the vertices based on f efficiently in Blender using Python without disassembling the faces?

I used an existing base mesh to test this, which is why the code I'm using might need some changes for you to be able to implement it.

The most important thing here is lines 22-23:

d    = normal * h_i[i] # Current vertex's displacement value
v.co = V[i] + d        # Displace current vertex along normal

You calculate each vertex's new location by adding to it the displacement value, which is the h_i for that vertex X the face normal (which is a direction vector).

Here's the complete code:

import bpy, bmesh
import numpy as np

bm = bmesh.new()
bm.from_mesh( bpy.context.object.data )

worldMatrix = bpy.context.object.matrix_world

F   = bm.faces                                 # Face objects
V   = [ worldMatrix * v.co for v in bm.verts ] # Vert coordinates

# Generate a random number between -1 and 1 as a displacement value for each vertex
h_i = 2 * np.random.random( len( V ) ) - 1

# Perform displacement
# Iterate over faces (You might want to zip the face normals and triangulations here)
for f in F:
    normal = f.normal # get Face normal (your n value for this face)
    fVerts = f.verts  # List of face vertices (your "F" variable for this face)
    # Iterate over this face's vertices (F[face_index])
    for v in fVerts:
        i = v.index

        d    = normal * h_i[i] # Current vertex's displacement value
        v.co = V[i] + d        # Displace current vertex along normal

update_existing_mesh = True
if update_existing_mesh:
    bm.to_mesh( bpy.context.object.data )
else: # Generate a new mesh
    m = bpy.data.meshes.new( "Displaced" )
    bm.to_mesh( m )

    o = bpy.data.objects.new( "Displaced", m )
    bpy.context.scene.objects.link( o )


Weird Redering Image I trying to rendering image with low focal length camera (CCTV like) and I getting weird result. Some materials are appearing ahead while they should appearing behind others. My engine is Eevee.
Here is my preview (solid):

And here is my result:

Any sugestions?

Comment echo: This is because of alpha blend in EEVEE materials. Because EEVEE uses rasterizing (fakes physical effects like transparency using formulas), it can be suspect to flaw in odd situations. Alpha blend  tries to implement full transparency function, but mainly experiences problems where it is trying to sort faces within the same object. Which one is in front? Treating something as partially transparent when you’re faking is very tricky to do.
Cycles does not have this problem because it uses ray tracing. It simulates the behavior of real light, and traces out every single pixel in the image. This is why cycles takes more computing power, but produces more realistic results.
If you have to use EEVEE, one good halfway solution is alpha hashed. Alpha hast is basically alpha clip, but with random threshold for each pixel, each sample. Alpha clip means a pixel is either fully transparent or fully opaque, depending on the threshold level. What then happens in alpha hashed with partially transparent materials is kind of a fuzzy mixture that looks better with each successive EEVEE sample.


How do I make a displacement modifier affect multiple objects? [![enter image description here][1]][1][![enter image description here][1]][1]I've ripped this model out of a game, a character that is made up of multiple objects . I want to 3d print it , but since its from a game it doesn't have detail in the mesh , but in a displacement map , but since I want to 3d print it the detail needs to be in the mesh . now the legs , body and arms are different objects but there uv wrapped on one texture.
The displacement map is just one image for arms , legs and body , but I need to have the displacement modifier treat arms , legs and body as one object . Why I cant just join the objects together using Ctrl + J ?
because the displacement map is made for the way that the objects are uv wrapped and joining them together would destroy the uv wrapp and thus make the displacement map useless.

Update:https:
I put the original nrm file in as well

The different parts of the body have different UV-Maps.
As you can see in this image, when I join them, I get 3 UV-Maps

(At the rights side)
You can solve this problem, when you Name them the same before mergin.
Then you get this result:


Blender rendered animation is not smooth I rendered a 40 frame animation at 30 FPS with an output of avi jpeg but when I played the rendered video it cuts off and is slow and lags although I played it many times . I also wanted to know does the frame rate affect how smooth an animation is ?

It sounds like you are using the BlenderPlayer to play back your render. I think that's a tool that is meant to play games made with Blender. Using that tool (from Render>Play rendered animation), I get a lag, too. BlenderPlayer can be used for a preview of what the animation looks like, but it is unable to read image data fast enough to give you a smooth animation.

To get a smooth animation, you can encode it as a video clip. The second half of this video tutorial explains how you can do that right inside Blender. Other tools can be used for this, too.

Does the frame rate affect how smooth an animation is?

Normally, animations are rendered at either 24 or 30 fps and look smooth most of the time. Smaller frame rates might make your animation look blocky, but you don't need more than that, usually. If you have a lot of movement in your scene, you can use motion blur to make it look smoother. As far as I know, movies don't usually use frame rates higher than 30 - some games use 60 fps though.


Is there any way to snap a face of object to other face of other object without addon? I tried to snap red face to blue face without addon but failed. Is there any way for me?

You can do it using an empty:

Create an 'arrows' empty (arrows will show objects orientation)
Set snapping option to face, this way:

Snap the empty to the red surface:

Parent the cylinder to the empty (select the cylinder then select the empty and use CtrlP
Move the empty to the blue surface:

Orientation of the cylinder is inverted, so rotate the empty using local coordinates around Y with 180°: RY180

Select the cylinder
Clear parent using AltP and choose "clear and keep transformation"


bpy.data.images["ID"].save_render("XXX") changes color space I tried to save a baked image using

bpy.data.images["Image Id Name"].save_render("C:/path/to/file.png")

but this always changes the colorspace and I couldn't find where to set the colorspace for save render in the
documentation

Finally I solved it by passing the image editor UI area, where the image is in and using bpy.ops.image.save_as

for window in bpy.context.window_manager.windows:
    screen = window.screen
    for area in screen.areas:
        if area.type == 'IMAGE_EDITOR':
            override = {'window': window, 'screen': screen, 'area': area}
            bpy.data.images['bakedTexture'].filepath_raw = filenameVariations
            bpy.ops.image.save_as(override, filepath = filenameVariations)
            print ("Generated file: ", filenameVariations)

For the future, does anyone know how to do it with save_render?

Because the way I did it, I do not have control over compression and image bit depth.

I am on Blender 2.80

Had the same issue but found that the Sequencer (Render Properties tab, Color Management) seemed to be the cause for colorspace change when using save_render. Setting it to "Raw" fixed the issue for me.

bpy.context.scene.sequencer_colorspace_settings.name = "Raw"


How to inset near a mesh boundary without creating new border faces? I was following a tutorial to create a helmet.
A the step for the mesh under the cube he insets a face to create an indent, but only insets the side of the mesh, not the open border.
How did he do it?

You can do this using the 'Inset' tool.

Select the faces you want to inset:

Press I to trigger the 'Inset' tool and move the mouse to increase or decrease the amount. Press B during the inset to turn on the 'Boundary' option (which will stop creating faces along the boundary of the mesh):

Press Enter when you are happy with the inset and then delete the inset faces with X> Faces


Does Blender still render while off of the screen? So, I'm off of the Blender Program (not closed, but clicked off.) Does it still render at the same speed compared to if you were still on the screen?

Yes:

I tested it several times, and observed variations of ±1 second for both of them, so it seems unlikely that the .14 second difference is of any significance.

However, if you use the computer for other things while rendering, that could impact the speed.


Convesion of curve to mesh makes faces behave strangely? As you can see in the image here,

the outer ring of faces were converted from a curve into a mesh. I welded the points together and proceeded to paint the texture via zbrush. However, I later realized that the outer mesh does not have the texture. Instead, it's black, or requires a separate texture instead. It doesn't show up on UV mapping either.

I think this image kinda illustrates the idea better in that you can see that the outer mesh isn't highlighted like the others.

I appreciate any help since I'm rather confused on what it means.

I've also had the problem where the UV map likes to split parts of the mesh which I'd rather preserve. I've even created seams myself but it still wants to create extra seams. Is there any way to fix this?

Sounds like you need to join the two objects together with Ctrl+J and UV unwrap one more time.


How to combine Render Layers correctly I am having a problem with my render layers. For clear illustration, I created a plane and a box. The box is partly beneath the plane. The plane is on my first render layer and the box on the second. Now when I render, the part of the box that is below the plane is shown in black.

I know that the black part of the box is below the plane, but is there a way to cut this part from the image or even exclude it from the rendering?

I hope someone can help me.

Marijn

Option 01 - for Cube Render Layer mark Floor Render Layer as Mask Layer

Option 02 - use Z-Combine node to merge them together

Notes: It is good to understand what happened in 2.8x versions ...

Render Layers are almost the same concept
Layers are in 2.8 represented by Collections. Now you are not selecting Collections to be rendered, but you mark collections you want to participate only indirectly - objects are not rendered directly, only indirectly by their shadow or light bounce
Mask Layers are the same concept in therm of just activating collection in outliner


How do I roll a tube on itself down the sides? I'm trying to model an object where the 2D tube shape it rolled up along the sides, similarly to how you roll your sleeves up

You could start with a plane and delete one side.

Then add a Subsurf modifier to make the curl smooth. Add a Cast modifier driven by an empty. Then a screw modifier to wrap the distorted edge around into a tube.


Mesh is not becoming smooth after rendering i bought a model from turbosquid which was created in maya with the hypersmooth modifier. In Blender it has very hard edges. So i used a subsurface modifier and a smooth modifier to make it soft again. In the preview render view in blender it looks perfektly smooth but when i render it out it is still edgy. I now increased the iterations of the smooth modifier, it´s getting better but there are still hard edges. Also the Preview Render looks way more realistic in my opinion than the final render.
Use modifer in render is tunred on of course.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kc269zv8uptjijz/AACsoeVHyZJjrAptTd1f8Uwxa?dl=0

So i tried some things but now it´s behaving even more strange. Nothing does what it should do...
Here are some Rendereded Images.

Then some Renders with Subsurface and Smooth Modifier. Render Subsurface was on 3 an Smoothing on 2.2 and 3 or 4 Iterations

Then i removed all Modifiers but the result was exactly the same so i deleted them. After that everything was perfect smooth, but now there are some strange Artifacts over the lenes.

After that i tried only Subsurface with render 4

And Only Smooth with again 2.2 and 3 Iterations but that also does nothing now.
Im totaly confused now... nothing works like it used to be.


How to install import_3dm add-on properly? I'm totally new to blender - mostly work in Rhino, but am wanting to use it to render models that I build in rhino so am trying to install the "import 3dm" addon.

I had blender 2.80 installed. Tried installing the addon from the .zip file on my desktop (import_3dm-master) it shows a message in blue in the bottom right of the screen stating that it has installed that addon but it doesn't show in the addon menu under any of the categories.

I tried extracting the file and copying it directly into the addon folder. Still nothing. Tried installing the import_3dm-v0.0.2 version. This shows up in the menu but has an error (shown in screenshot below). I even installed blender 2.82a in the hopes that this would somehow solve the problem but no luck... Here is the error message I get:

Q: How to install this add-on properly?

The 3dm importer depends on the rhino3dm package that has to be installed as well. In order to get the add-on working:

Install rhino3dm.
Install the 3dm importer add-on.

The first step can be accomplished by running the following script. Open Blender, switch to the Scripting workspace, copy and paste the script into the text editor and execute it. Make sure to check the output on the console for any error messages (Window > Toggle System Console). If everything works properly it should print the version of the installed package.
In case your Blender installation is located in C:\Program Files\ you will have to start Blender as administrator. Otherwise, it doesn't have the permission to install the package.
import bpy
import os
import ensurepip
import subprocess

try:
    import rhino3dm
except ImportError:
    # The import failed, therefore we check ensure that pip is available and attempt to install the package.

    # ensurepip.bootstrap() also calls pip, which adds the environment variable PIP_REQ_TRACKER. After
    # ensurepip.bootstrap() finishes execution, the directory doesn't exist anymore. However, when subprocess
    # is used to call pip, in order to install a package, the environment variables still contain
    # PIP_REQ_TRACKER with the now nonexistent path. This is a problem since pip checks if PIP_REQ_TRACKER is
    # set and if it is, attempts to use it as temp directory. This would result in an error because the
    # directory couldn't be found. Therefore, PIP_REQ_TRACKER needs to be removed from os.environ.
    ensurepip.bootstrap()
    os.environ.pop("PIP_REQ_TRACKER", None)

    # Try to install the package. This may fail with subprocess.CalledProcessError
    subprocess.run([bpy.app.binary_path_python, "-m", "pip", "install", "rhino3dm"], check=True)

    import rhino3dm

print(rhino3dm.__version__)

Next download and install the most recent release of add-on. With the required dependency installed it should activate without any issues.
Important: In case you intend to use the code above in an add-on, it's common courtesy to not connect to the internet or install packages without the explicit consent of the user.


Help with XYZ math surface syntax I'm trying to model a 'super egg' in Blender. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superegg

When sweeping the curve, the formulas for X and Y should be

X = abs(cos(t)**(2/2.5)) * sign(cos(t))
Y = abs(sin(t)**(2/2.5)) * sign(sin(t))

I'm having trouble translating those into the format that Blender wants.

I assume that it's Python syntax, so first I tried to solve that there doesn't seem to be a 'sign' function.
So I added this in the 'A helper function'

0 if cos(u) == 0 else -1 if cos(u) < 0 else 1

When I then put abs(cos(u))**0.8*a into the formula for X, Blender gives me the error message TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not subscriptable which I can't make sense of.

Any help will be appreciated :)

The problem was the abs function.

I opened up the script that creates the mesh ("..\Blender 2.82\2.82\scripts\addons\add_mesh_extra_objects\add_mesh_3d_function_surface.py"). It has a list of 'accepted' functions at the top and abs isn't included. However fabs is. When I changed the formula for X to fabs(cos(u))**0.8*a it worked as expected.


How do I texture paint with glow? I found someone doing this and I wondered how you do it in blender 2.8. Preferably in cycles as I need to texture bake the final result.

I'm willing to add more details if needed.

It has nothing to do with the painting per se.

First, you need to paint the emission map of your shader :

Make sure to use black as blank color when creating the texture, so it doesn't emit light when nothing is painted.
I don't use the Principled BSDF's emission here because there's no strength input.

The glow itself comes from his viewport which is in rendered mode:

And using Eevee which has a bloom effect that can be seen in the viewport:

You can do the same with Cycles, except it doesn't have any SFX visible in the viewport, you would need to do it through compositing using a glare node in fog glow mode:


Multiresolution modifier split face in half I am a blender beginner and have been working on a Youtube project. I wanted to use a multiresolution modifier but when I applied it, it suddenly split my project's face in half! Please help! Images are placed below.

Two checks:

Put the Mirror modifier on the top of other modifiers, a good sequence of using modifiers as example: Mirror -> Bevel -> Sub Division.
If the mirror modifier is on the top, make sure the clipping option is on, then move the vertices towards the middle, they will automatically merge.

Good luck!


Create an image node via code I tried to create an image node in blender with cycles renderer enabled.

My first attempt looks like this:

import bpy
mat = bpy.data.materials["Material"]

nodes = mat.node_tree.nodes
material_output = nodes.get("Material Output")

image = bpy.types.Image(file_format='PNG')
image.file_format = 'PNG'
image.filepath = 'C:\\Users\\Standardbenutzer\\Desktop\\bla.png'

node_texture = nodes.new(type='ShaderNodeTexImage')
node_texture.image = image
node_texture.location = 0,200

links = mat.node_tree.links
link = links.new(node_texture.outputs[0], nodes.get("Diffuse BSDF").inputs[0])

If i execute this code i get the error message:

  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "\Text", line 7, in
  TypeError: bpy_struct.new(type): expected a single argument
  Error: Python script fail, look in the console for now...

In the blender docs i found this:

http://www.blender.org/api/blender_python_api_2_72_1/bpy.types.Image.html#bpy.types.Image

the constructor asks for a ID but even if i set something like 0 i get the same message.

This is how you add image:

import bpy

path = "path_to_the_image"

try:
    img = bpy.data.images.load(path)
except:
    raise NameError("Cannot load image %s" % path)


How can I make vertices on a cylinder create a circle? How can I make vertices on a cylinder create a circle (like in this tutorial https://youtu.be/cHbOCSkqmo8?t=2m43s) ?

You may use To Sphere operation (as @Dontwalk pointed), but Loop Tool's Circle creates much better result.

Activate the Loop Tools add on in User Preferences (Ctrl+Alt+U). Apply the transformations to the object (Ctrl+A-->Rot&Scale). Select the edges on a cylinder you want to transform to a circle and snap the cursor to it (Shift+S). Press W-->LoopTools-->Circle. Finally uncheck the Flatten checkbox in a Circle panel of a Tool Shelf (T).

You may then extrude the circle inwards as was shown in the tutorial.


Convert an EXR render from scene-linear colorspace to CIE XYZ I am making renders for research in computer vision, and need to know the CIE color space values from each render. Right now I am rendering a few different passes to an EXR Multilayer file.

I believe the combined pass in the EXR file is in the OpenColorIO scene-linear colorspace. Is there some linear transformation or operation I can make to get the CIE XYZ values from this pass?

It isn't straightforwards as Cegaton notes.

You could abuse Blender's ridiculous OCIO integration to achieve this however. Save the file as an EXR, and add the following stanza to the OpenColorIO configuration in datafiles/colormanagement:

 - !<ColorSpace>
    name: One-Way XYZ
    family: Input Special
    equalitygroup: ""
    bitdepth: 32f
    description: |
      One way transform to save an XYZ EXR.
    isdata: false
    allocation: uniform
    allocationvars: [0, 1]
    to_reference: !<MatrixTransform> {matrix: 1.0,  0,  0,  0, 0,  1.0,  0,  0, 0,  0,  1.0,  0, 0, 0, 0, 1]}
    from_reference: !<MatrixTransform> {matrix: 0.4124564,  0.3575761,  0.1804375,  0, 0.2126729,  0.7151522,  0.0721750,  0, 0.0193339,  0.1191920,  0.9503041,  0, 0, 0, 0, 1]}

Note that this is a one way transform! Don't use it for anything else. It also assumes the file was saved as default scene referred linear in an EXR.


how to save object data while changing mode (Object mode, Edit mode)? how can I save the object data (Lists , edges , vertices , ...) if I switch the mode from 'Edit' mode to 'Object' mode ?

I wrote a script that append edges to a list in 'Edit' mode then call a function (from add-on called: Edit tools 2) that do some operations ;

One of the operations is changing the mode from 'Edit' to 'Object' then back to 'Edit' , when I want to use the edges from the list after calling this function
I get the error :

"BMesh data of type BMEdge has been removed"

and this error is most likely happening because of switching the mode.

The mesh data stored for an object is different from the bmesh data used while in edit mode, while the object data is static and used for drawing and rendering the edit mesh is optimized for adding and deleting items. When you enter edit mode the mesh data is copied to a bmesh structure which is copied back and destroyed when you go back to object mode. This is why you get the error as the bmesh data that you are using has been destroyed and no longer exists.

I expect you should adjust your code to not toggle in and out of object mode, you should be able to do what you want while the object stays in edit mode or perform the steps after you have finished in edit mode.

One option is to stay in object mode, you don't have to go into edit mode to alter the mesh, unless the user is interactively editing it. You can create the bmesh, edit the mesh and copy it back to the object, using bm.to_mesh() multiple times.

import bpy
import bmesh

me = bpy.context.object.data

bm = bmesh.new()
bm.from_mesh(me)

for v in bm.verts:
    v.co.x += 1.0
bm.to_mesh(me)

for v in bm.verts:
    v.co.y += 1.0
bm.to_mesh(me)

for v in bm.verts:
    v.co.z += 1.0
bm.to_mesh(me)

bm.free()
bpy.context.scene.frame_set(bpy.context.scene.frame_current)


Morph a ball into another (Terminator T1000 style)? Is there any way to achieve this effect: Where a ball intersects and "morphs" into another ball like this (Terminator T1000 style)...?

E.g: I have this blob that needs to morph into this wall, but the wall won't really change in thickness.

Thanks in advance.

You can do this effect with Meta objects.

Shift+A > Metaball

They work like this:


Animating a punctured torus On the torus wiki page there is an animation of a punctured torus.  How would one go about creating same in blender?

In case someone wants to elaborate on @MutantBob shapekey sript answer here are the Parametric equations of a torus.

class Torus():
    def __init__(self, R, r):
        self.R = R
        self.r = r

    def point(self, theta, zi):
        '''parametric_equations'''
        r = self.r
        R = self.R
        def x(theta, zi):
            return (R + r * cos(zi)) * cos(theta)
        def y(theta, zi):
            return (R + r * cos(zi)) * sin(theta)
        def z(theta, zi):
            return r * sin(zi)

        return x(zi, theta), y(zi, theta), z(zi, theta)

Example usage

torus = Torus(2, 1)
SEGS = 10
bm = bmesh.new()
# outer circle
matrix = []
angles = [radians(a * 360.0 / SEGS) for a in range(SEGS)]
for theta in angles:
    # inner circles.
    ring = [bm.verts.new(torus.point(zi, theta)) for zi in angles]
    matrix.append(ring)

for i in range(SEGS):
    I = (i + 1) % SEGS
    for j in range(SEGS):
        J = (j + 1) % SEGS
        bm.faces.new([matrix[i][j],
                      matrix[i][J],
                      matrix[I][J],
                      matrix[I][j]])

mesh = bpy.context.object.data
bm.to_mesh(mesh)
mesh.update()

And we can use the matrix transpose to get the Final shapekey where the loops and rings are swapped.

sk = obj.shape_key_add(name="Start")
sk = obj.shape_key_add(name="End")
for i in range(SEGS):
    for j in range(SEGS):
        sk.data[matrix[i][j].index].co = matrix[j][i].co

Changing coords on end shapekey and some subsurf.

sk.data[matrix[i][j].index].co = matrix[(j+6) % SEGS][i].co.zxy

Useful links.

http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/TurningAPuncturedTorusInsideOut/

http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/TurningAPuncturedTorusInsideOutVariation/

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/VillarceauCircles.html

This question is a nice example for showing how to morph one mesh into another. Lets take a general approach that will work on multiple shapes and lets make the morphing nice (where non-linear morphing is needed).

First we will need the start and end meshes. In this example, the diameter of the hole of the start torus is the same like thickness of the end torus. Because the diameter of subdivision surfaces is different than the control cage, I chose to work with real geometry. This method shouldn't depend on vertex count anyway, so let's have some nicely detailed toruses (subdiv surfaces don't produce perfectly circular shapes).

I obtained these by spinning touching circles around 3d cursor locations:

There are 32 rings with 32 vertices each on both toruses. Now we could map the start vertices to the end vertices (by fiddling with their id, or based on vertex paint, or UV unwrap data,..) and make appropriate shape-key (by scripting), but this is not the intention, because such morphing will result in linear ugly motion, which could cause self-intersecting and other non-desired results.

We will convert edges of the meridians of the start torus into bone chains, and rotate them into the final positions as equators of the end torus. Then we will skin a mesh to this armature and render it.

As the bones will come from Skin modifier, we need to mark the root vertices and also split the toruses for chain ends first (seen as 2 hard lines in shading - because of duplicite vertices, you can split vertices with V when the ring is selected). Unwanted edges were removed, to leave only the chains:

Let's put Skin modifiers on, adjust the thickness and set the root vertices. Setting the roots location and where the chains end will shape the look of animation (roots highlighted and ends visible by shading):

Both toruses are still separate objects, so we'll get 2 armatures. Delete unwanted bones, you'll end up with 2 bone chains per ring:

Similarly we can map any corresponding topologies onto each other to morph them.

The corresponding start and end bones have to have a corresponding name inside those armatures. To fix it, here is a script to name the root bones based on shared location and direction and the chain bones based on chain distance (parent count) from roots. The bones also get a start/end prefix, because we will merge them into single armature later (to have a clean scene). Name the start armature Start, and the end one End:

import bpy

start = bpy.data.objects["Start"]
end = bpy.data.objects["End"]

i = 0
for pboneA in start.pose.bones:
    for pboneB in end.pose.bones:
        if ((pboneB.head - pboneA.head).length_squared < 0.001 and
            ((pboneA.tail - pboneA.head).dot(pboneB.tail - pboneB.head) > 0)):

            pboneA.name = "Start_Chain_" + str(i) + "_Bone_0"
            pboneB.name = "End_Chain_" + str(i) + "_Bone_0"
            i += 1
            break

for object in [start, end]:
    for pbone in object.pose.bones:
        parents = pbone.parent_recursive
        if len(parents):
            pbone.name = parents[-1].name[:-1] + str(len(parents))

for pbone in start.data.bones:
    pbone.use_inherit_rotation = False
    pbone.use_inherit_scale = False

for pbone in end.data.bones:
    pbone.use_deform = False

You can now join the armatures together Ctrl+J. The deformation on end bones was also deactivated by the script.

The next script will create a custom property on the armature to drive the blending:

import bpy

def add_driver(expression, item, property, property_index = -1):

    driver = item.driver_add(property, property_index)
    driver.driver.type = 'SCRIPTED'
    driver.driver.expression = expression
    var = driver.driver.variables.get("blend")
    var = driver.driver.variables.new()
    var.name = "blend"
    var.targets[0].id = bpy.context.active_object
    var.type = 'SINGLE_PROP'
    var.targets[0].data_path = 'data["blend"]'

bpy.context.active_object.data["blend"] = 0.0
bpy.context.active_object.data["_RNA_UI"] = {"blend": {"min":0.0,
                                                       "max":1.0,
                                                       "soft_min":0.0,
                                                       "soft_max":1.0}}

pbones = bpy.context.active_object.pose.bones

for pboneA in [pbone for pbone in pbones if "Start" in pbone.name]:

    pboneB = pbones[pboneA.name.replace("Start","End")]

    constraint = pboneA.constraints.new('COPY_ROTATION')
    constraint.target = bpy.context.active_object
    constraint.subtarget = pboneB.name
    add_driver("blend", constraint, "influence")

    l_A = (pboneA.head - pboneA.tail).length
    l_B = (pboneB.head - pboneB.tail).length
    add_driver("(1-blend) + blend * " + str(l_B/l_A), pboneA, "scale", 1)

This is the result with skinned mesh:

Lastly we will unwrap the torus mesh into a single rectangle UV with the point where the hole will be in the middle. The intention is to animate a material mask to create the transparent hole. In the picture are marked seams and the UV map - I used UV Squares addon to have such nice regular UV map:

In the material lets use a procedural gradient texture set to Quadratic Sphere, offset into the center of UV space, with an animated threshold (the Color Ramp node is animated):

The only problem is that the texture does not warp with the hole. Good news is the procedural spherical gradient to drive the texture warping effect is already in place:

There is the displacement mask on the left, UV coordinates in the middle with progressively blended displacement from 0 to 100% influence and the warped texture on the right.

This is the final result:

And a finished .blend to peak into:


disappearing skin_vertices after assigning new mesh to object This has me stumped.

import bpy

meshes = bpy.data.meshes
objects = bpy.data.objects
scene = bpy.context.scene

def new_mesh(name):
    verts = [(3, 3, -3), (3, -3, -3), (-3, -3, -3)]
    edges = [(0, 1),(1,2),(2,0)]
    mesh_data = meshes.new(name)
    mesh_data.from_pydata(verts, edges, [])
    mesh_data.update()
    return mesh_data

mesh = new_mesh('some_mesh')
obj = objects.new('example_obj', mesh)
scene.objects.link(obj)
obj.modifiers.new(type='SKIN', name='sv_skin')

print(len(obj.data.skin_vertices))

# now switch the mesh to a new one.
obj.data = new_mesh('some_other_mesh')

print(len(obj.data.skin_vertices))

This snippet demonstrates a problem I'm having. Once i've added a Skin Modifier to the object, and then change the mesh data by assigning a new mesh to .data, then skin_vertices seems to be empty.

Yes there are workarounds.

@stacker below points out that I can remove and add the modifier to make skin_vertices again. This is a solution I use already, but it results in a lot of extra code to make sure other modifiers stay in the right place. In viewer_skin.py (linked to) I am hardcoding the modifiers, but you should imagine that I don't want to make any assumptions about which modifiers are on that stack at all (except for the skin modifier)

I'm trying to not use bpy.ops.object.modifier_(move_up, move_down, add) because that requires an active object.

When scripting updates to obj.data there currently (Jan 2016) does not seem to be a way to refresh data.skin_vertices without removing and adding the modifier.

For example if the "SKIN" modifier is named "sv_skin"

    # if modifier present, remove
    if 'sv_skin' in obj.modifiers:
        sk = obj.modifiers['sv_skin']
        obj.modifiers.remove(sk)

    # make new modifier and get reference to it.
    a = obj.modifiers.new(type='SKIN', name='sv_skin')

If you have a few other items on that object's modifier stack then there's a bit more bookkeeping to do.

Here's an example of a working scripted update to generate a lattice mesh with a skin modifier in Sverchok.

The code: https://gist.github.com/zeffii/e556ebcb33737a3fd58b

  <-- includes the script, but does require Sverchok.


Where are .blend files saved? I have looked everywhere on my computer, and I cannot find where the .blend files are saved. I try to Google this question, but I only get results for removing textures.

Blend files are saved where-ever you chose to save them, opening Blender trying to save again will show the default location.

Blender also has an autosave function that saves backup files to a temporary directory, see Blender autosave


How do I adjust animation easing in Blender? Whenever I animate something I dislike the result because blender automatically gives your animations very stretched out and noticable easing, Is there a way to adjust this easing? Im looking for options such as: Changing easing from easing on both ends to only easing in or only easing out,changing the easing intensity and lenght and the ability to remove it altogether.

You can use the Graph Editor for this. The Graph Editor allows you full control over the animation curves, including options to vary the Easing Type (menu Key/Easing Type or Control+E), setting the Interpolation Mode (menu Key/Interpolation Mode or T) - which includes additional Easing options, or by manipulating the curve bezier handles.


Cutout of plane with rounded corners I'm trying to cut a door out of plane, but I need the edges to be rounded. So sort of an inverted bevel. I'm a complete noob can't find the right way to do this. In the pic, the circle would be roughly the radius I need, but the interior of that rectangle would be removed.

Reference image: RV doorway

If i understood the question you need to curve the edges

Select the side verts and Press Ctrl+Shift+B to bevel

Select the edge and subdivide both edges

Select the face and press Shift+S and select cursor to selected

Select the single vert and press Shift+S selection to cursor

Repeat to other side also.

Select both the verts and Press Ctrl+Shift+B to bevel and with the scroll wheel increase the verts

Select the face and delete or extrude it.


How to render from VSE, and not 3D scene? I've an audio strip in video sequence editor and I edited the strip by cutting it from the last, not I want to render it in mp3 format for my animated video.
However when I render it the 3D view camera scene is going to be render and when I deleted the camera it says 'no camera found in the scene'. Please some help me to get the solution.

Make sure, under your Render Properties in the Post Processing panel you have Sequencer checked.