Blender Rigging process. Is skinning a must? I'm new to Blender, not so new to Unity.

I built a 3D human model using Make Human, imported it to Blender, and used the following tutorial.

Using Blender And Rigify

I set up a an Armature, rigged it and deleted WGT bones.

Now, the tutorial says that I need to skin the rig to the model, but, after I added the armature and parented the rig to the mesh as the tutorial says, I already had the model rigged, I was able to animate and to import it to Unity with everything configured correctly.

So, why is the section Skinning the Rig to the Model there and how was I able to do this without the skinning process the tutorial mention? I am sure happy to be able to skip this, but it makes me feel like there is something I do not understand.

Maybe in Blender 2.69 the skinning process is included in the parenting?

When you press Ctrl P and select With Automatic weights, blender sets up all the vertex groups for each bone. Blender uses the mesh closest to the bone for each vertex group.

In some cases With Automatic weights will work very well, if you have good bone placement. Other times you will have to tweak each bone's weight (the vertex group).

The unity tutorial talks about skinning specific bones to use with unity's Mecanim.


Why are text objects not mesh objects? Why are text-objects text objects, and why can they not be calculated like mesh objects? Why is Blender not able to calculate text-objects like mesh objects? If there is a way to completely edit a text-object as a mesh, but keep it a text, or some add-on to do the same thing, could you please tell me?

It has to do with specific font properties.
And also copyright rights :).

Modern computer fonts don't have fixed proportions like meshes do.
They're ever so slightly adjusted when you scale them up/down, to look optically correct.
In low resolutions, they also take advantage of hinting data, to avoid pixel distortion.
Good fonts also contain kerning data. This tells them how much space to put between different character pairs. And allows for ligatures.

When you convert text to mesh/rasterize it, it loses all of these important features.
That's why some font creators explicitly prohibit rasterizing.

Font characters slightly change when scaled, to keep their legibility

Ligature - joining two glyphs into one. Not possible to execute with rasterized text.


blender 2.8: where is the "axes" tool for moving vertices visually? I started using blender 2.8 and I'm not being able to move a vertex on one direction like in Blender 2.7, since I can't find the little visual widget with axes (see below):

↑ the widget in Blender 2.79

Is there any way I can make this tool show, or at least a way that would let me select additional vertices in "move mode" (G) instead of needing to go in and out from the move mode for every vertex?

The 3D manipulator widget can be enabled from the toolshelf (left of the 3D viewport) using this "arrows" button:

In addition to the "move along X,Y,Z" action, this manipulator also enables the "move on the XY, XZ or YZ plane" (see the little squares between the axes).

There are also other kinds of manipulators in the tool shelf that you can choose from: move, rotate, scale and all the three things combined.


Curve to mesh option is disabled I am using 2.80 blender version due to system requirement. I want to convert bazier curve into mesh. I applied mirror modifier on curve. When I tried to apply it on object it gives me message first convert curve into mesh.I am trying to convert it in object mode > Object > convert to > mesh from curve /meta/ surf/ text but both options are disabled or grayed out due to which i can not apply it. I am attaching a screenshot. Please do the needful.

The object is active (yellow origin visible):

But not selected (yellow or orange outlines visible):


Is it possible to get rid of these shading artifacts for a smooth shaded flat surface? I am modeling a logo and want beveled edges that will be smooth shaded to look rounded but a flat surface that looks flat do you have any sugestions?
This is the result after beveling edges:

Proper Topology

Having a proper topology depending on the kind of work you are doing solves this problem

as here blender doesn't have enough info to shade the front face correctly

you can check the CGCookie guide for clean topology here


OSL Struct SyntaxError I'm trying to create a way to calculate imaginary numbers in OSL using the struct constructor. Here is the beginning of my code:

#include "stdosl.h"

struct complex {
    color r;
    color i;
};

complex test;

According to the documentation, that should create a complex datatype, then initialize a variable named test. Instead, I get these errors:

ERROR: <path-to-file>.osl:8: error: Unknown shader type: complex
ERROR: <path-to-file>.osl:8: error: Syntax error: syntax error
Error: OSL script compilation failed, see console for errors

This seems to indicate a syntax error on line 8, but I can't figure out what is wrong.

You should declare the variable inside a shader

struct complex {
    color r;
    color i;
};

shader node_complex(output float result=0.0)
{
    complex test;
}

This will resolve the compilation error. The issue is that Global variables in OSL are predefined and it is not possible to create custom global variables.

You can use these structs inside shaders and pass it around.


How to reopen a 2D Blender File? I made a 2D animation in blender and saved it. But when I reopen the file, it opens up in the 3D form with the 2D part on a flat plane in the space. How do I change it so that the camera faces the 2D animation straight again?

When doing 2d animation, you are still in 3d space but your camera is positioned vertically above the drawing plane.

So to get back you just

press Numpad 0 if there is a camera in the scene
or press Numpad 7 to go into
top view with the viewport camera.


Why can't I move some of the objects in this model? I recently downloaded this model of a car. This model consists of several objects. For some of the objects (such as "Neumatico"), I can change the location of the object using the Python Console with

bpy.data.objects['Neumatico'].location = [0,0,-1]

or in the Properties Editor via

Properties -> Object -> Transform -> Location

Both methods successfully move the object in the 3D View. However, for other objects (such as "Detalles 1" in the model), neither the Python nor Properties techniques above move the object. Although both techniques do change the location values, the objects do not move in the 3D view. Also, the behavior I described for location also occurs for rotation.

I also tried using the command bpy.context.scene.update() but that didn't seem to help.

Why can I move some parts of the model, but not others?

This behavior occurred because some of the objects in the model had been added as rigid bodies. I made the objects movable again by going to

Properties -> Physics

and clicking the button to remove the rigid body settings from the object.


How to overlap curves With the curve in edit mode i have deleted & with the draw tool, I have created some infinity shape. With the tolerance 3, Why the curve not overlapping curve on each other.

I tried this way.
Im looking to model this type of folded wire / cable.

Any other way which i can create in quick way, other than mine, plz do mention. Thanks

The solution is to manually move the curves over each other so that they give the appearance of overlapping. Curves in Blender do not automatically overlap, so you must do this yourself.
Simply move the curves over each other in edit mode until you get the desired result.
Setting tolerance does not automatically overlap the curves.


Limited dissolve many faces I have mesh 700k faces and limited dissolve work bad. File is big, 250 mb. Is some practic to decrease number of faces and not loose geometry?

If you don't want to loose a geometry and overall shape of the mesh you may use a Decimate Modifier to do it. As you can see after setting it up (reducing the Collapse's Ratio factor to 0.15) I reduced the verts count from over 2.000.000 to over 300.000.


All objects are invisible I was working on a game, but when I play it, all objects are invisible. It turns out, they all have the invisible property in the physics tab enabled. I don't know when it happened, and there's a lot of objects so turning them all visible again would be a nightmare.

Is there a way to do it to make all objects visible again?

There is an incredibly easy way to do this using the outliner. All objects with the  "invisible" property enabled will have the render icon faded out. Instead of selecting all your objects and manually turning off "invisible" on all of them, you can simple click the render icon in the outliner to re-enable visibility.


Blender cycles and blender internal look the same and my materials are too shiny even on diffuse Blender cycles and blender internal look the same and my materials are too shiny even on diffuse. I want my cycles object to turn whiter instead of being grey like the blender internal. Here is a screenshot of how they look; First is the cycles object that looks the same as the blender internal instead of turning whiter. Second is the material on diffuse.

In your screenshots only the OpenGL viewport "preview" shading is being used; to see what your materials actually look like when rendered with BI or cycles, switch from Solid shading to Rendered in 3D view > Header (or press ⇧ ShiftZ)

You can adjust the way a cycles material is rendered in solid view via the options in Materials > Settings:


Which modules are guaranteed to be present in Blender's Python? Which modules are guaranteed to be included in Blender's custom Python build?

Everything included in the Python standard library, except the modules tkinter, turtledemo, distutils, idlelib, lib2to3 and test.

Here's the rationale for why these modules were not included.


How to remove the circle? On the screen that I use, there was a cross in the middle of the circle. I think, I have entered this mode with "c" and I have found no solution to exit this mode.

On the toolbar on the left, you can select a tool, such as the Move tool. right now you have the circle select tool enabled (the one highlighted in blue)


Pin an object onto a character I have an animated character, and I would like to pin a separate object onto its belly. The object is made up of a couple parts: a soft body and a cloth hanging from a shape key'd mesh, all parented to an empty so I can move it around easily.

I'd like to pin this empty to the character mesh, so the object moves with the character and stays on its surface as it animates. How can I do this?

[edit]: I've seen a few similar questions that are answered by simply parenting the object to a bone in the model. As the surface of my character's belly deforms as it animates, I don't think this will work for me.

Parenting to the character's vertex was what I was looking for. To do so:

1) Select everything.
2) Enter Edit mode (tab), and select the vertex you want to pin to.
3) Exit edit mode.
4) Select the object(s) you want to pin.
5) Shift-select the character.
6) Enter edit mode. The vertex should still be selected.
7) Press Ctrl-P to parent to vertex.

The objects will now follow around that vertex as it deforms.


Mist and depth render passes in Eevee are either entirely white or very little shows up Hi everyone! I'm trying to figure out how to adjust the mist pass but it doesnt work well to begin with. I either get a completely white pass or it looks like this.
 Could someone better explain to me what the settings are that control the mist and depth passes?

The depth pass is not normalized, so the colors represent the actual distance to your camera. The values between 0 and 1 will be represented by a grayscale gradient, but everything above 1 will be white.

In order to get a normalized output, you need to map the value in relation to the greatest value, that is to say the furthest element in your scene.

That is what the mist pass does. The values will be mapped to the [0;1] interval so it should render as grayscale.

But then, due to the interpolation which is quadratic by default, elements which are far from the camera will be so close to the upper bound that they will be unrecognizable from the pure white value.

You can change the default distances in the world settings, under the Mist Pass panel :

A solution is to restrict the range, not to [0,1] but to [0,x] where x is a value you can tweak with a math divide node.


How to turn off light effect I work on a project where I want to render a little video scene out of blender and edit the rendered frames with the Nividia GauGan filter. For GauGan to work my rendered Frames need to be the exact same color values as I imported them before rendering the assets in my scene, but the lightning settings I use always affect the colors a bit. I already tried changing the display device, view transform, and sequencer, but nothing works, because the light always affects my scene. Is there a setting to get rid of lightning completely?
I appreciate any help.

Give the images an emission shader set to 1 (I assume you are mapping the images onto planes). This value causes the image to ignore shadows or lights and display its true colors, thus making it shadeless as you wanted.


How can I change the number of snapping points 'Slide Vertex' uses? I would like to ask if there is any way to change the number of snapping points in 'Slide Vertex' that is enabled when holding Ctrl? I think I have seen tutorial years ago but I cannot recall it now (or maybe it was Maya).

.

Press G twice to slide a vertex and then press Ctrl+Shift. It will allow you to snap a vertex very precisely.

Also, after pressing G twice, you can move a vertex inputting a value from your numerical keyboard.


Trying to duplicate changes across faces of a dodecahedron Can someone tell me how to duplicate changes made to one face of a dodecahedron to all the other faces?

For example if I extrude one face, I'd like the same thing to happen to the other faces!

I tried the steps here: How do I mirror the faces of a cube (edit all of them when I edit one)? but the duplicated faces ended up at odd angles.

Thanks for the help

You can obtain this result, using duplicate linked objects:

If you duplicate linked AltD all duplicates are sharing the same geometry.

So to do it from a dodecaedron:

The gif above was becoming to big, but you see the principle:

Add a dodecahedron, enter edit mode, select and duplicate a face then separate it P
Select this newly created face, duplicate linked AltD then rotate around the first axis (front view)
Select the two faces, again duplicate linked and rotate along a second axis
Do this until you obtain the 12 faces

Once your individual faces edit finished, you can come back to a single mesh doing the following:

Select all the dupli objects
Then in the menu, object/make single user/object and data, and validate for the selection (edit: in fact this step is not useful)
Join them CtrlJ
Enter edit mode and remove doubles


Connect 4 objects with rigid body constraint? I have a simple question. If I have 2 empties connecting two objects each using rigid body constraints, how could I connect both of these empties? Or how would I make 4 objects connect at one point using rigid body constraint?

I have a similar setup with multiple hinges. and I got it all to work properly except there is A LOT of play at the actual pivot points. Like rubber or something. The faster the object moves the more play there is in the joint.

This seems to be a real problem because I have used the exact setup in blender and unity with the same results. I can't find anything anywhere online about this rubbery pivots problem. I've tried making the mass of the objects 0. It had little effect, but it did help. The only thing I can think of is you can't have multiple pivots working on each other.

The way I did it was following this tut.

step by step description on how to connect two objects with a hinge constraint

Again, I think, hinge joints are useless in this case. Sure would be nice if the joints were actually rigid.


My rotation driver variable loses a value greater than 180 degrees I am trying to use the axis of rotation of a bone in a driver variable.
By the way, there is a problem when the rotation value is greater than 180 degrees.

For example, the transform displays -207, but the driver variable value displays 153.
I want to use -207, not 153.
I tried different Euler axes and quaternion as rotation options, but it didn't work.

How can I use a value greater than 180 degrees in the driver?

Thank you in advance.

Auto Euler works the way I want.
It supports rotation values greater than 180.
Quaternion or other Euler options work with a 180 degree limit.
Depending on the situation, you may be able to use Auto Euler or other axis options.


How to exit User Preferences mode? Having selected "User Preferences" from the leftmost menu thingy, the Blender UI replaces the main menu with a bar with some buttons that offer to save settings or install from file. If you're lucky you discover that you can drag down this bar to reveal the actual User Preferences panel.

But then when you're done, how do you get the main back?

I of course went on a detour to discover how to get rid of unwanted panels that proliferate as you try to close panels, but even that "join area" method doesn't work in this case because the User Preferences panel spans the entire main window, and its lower border is shared with three wanted panels rather than just one neighbor.

Eventually I had to quit Blender completely just to be able to exit from Preferences, and restart with a menu. Surely this can't be the intended way?

Blender 2.69, Windows 64.

The way you should get to the User preferences is through the menu in the info window. That will open up a separate floating window, just click the regular windows close button to exit. (as in the first picture)

Now I think what you did is change the editor type by clicking on the button in the very top left. If that is the case then just click on that same button and change the editor type back to the Info view. (see 2nd picture)


How disable delete options menu in Blender 2.8? Hi, how can i disable the delete menu that appear when delete a element?, is really annoying because if i am working in face mode then i will be like delete faces and this menu is complety unnecessary, thanks.

There is an option for this in Blender 2.80.

Open "User Preferences" then go to "Keymap" and search for "Delete" and go down to Object Mode -> Delete (object.delete) click the dropdown arrow and check/uncheck 'Confirm'

You can also get there by "Keymap -> 3D View -> Object Mode -> Object Mode (Global) -> "Delete (object.delete)" and check/uncheck confirm


How to use Blender's dynamic sky add-on? How do I use the dynamic sky add-on to create a:
1 daytime sky with no cloud?
2 night-time sky with stars?
3 sunset sky with clouds?
I'll be using the cycles render engine.
Also are there any other things I need to know about the add-on?
Problems Faced
I don't know how the "sphere" that controls the light direction works

I don't know how to make it look realistic.
I don't know how to control the cloud level and horizon level.
So, I made this using your technique:

Now, I'm unable to add volumetric lighting, such that a light beam is clearly visible from the lighthouse. Also, if I were to change the camera angle, there should be God Rays visible from behind the floating rocks. And light shafts exiting the door too.
Now, the lighthouse has a spot lamp with a 20-degree cone with a brightness of 500 and the lights in the house have a brightness of 10 / 20, all light source emission shaders are connected to a blackbody output with a temperature of 1800K.

First go here: http://www.dragoneex.com/downloads/dynamic-skyadd-on and look at "Instruction" section. This is self-explanatory and will help with further tasks.

Controlling sun/moon

These sphere you are referring to is nothing more then Vector > Normal Node. There is a little info in docs about it so I'll quickly show you how to control sun with it in most understandable way.

Simply, go to the Top View and this is the way you can relate to the sphere shading. If sphere is lit from the left, mesh will be lit the same way. If light will be visible at the center of the sphere, mesh will be lit from the top.

Daytime sky without clouds

This one is the easiest one. You only need to change Cloud Opacity to 0. These will hide our clouds. You can further adjust colors, brightness, etc.

Used colors

Sky - #b0ecff
Horizon - #fbeaea
Cloud - #ffffff
Sun - #bcbcbc

Sunset sky with clouds

In this example colors are crucial. Darker sky, orange horizon, warmer sun light, lower Brightness. Also you will need to tweak Clouds Opacity and Density as needed. Don't forget to place sun near Horizon using tip from first paragraph.

Used colors

Sky - #385179
Horizon - #fb8648
Cloud - #ffb9a8
Sun - #bc9481

Night-time sky with stars

This is where the fun begins and in this paragraph you will learn how to push this add-on to the limits. It's not the easiest way but it will give you total control over it. One thing I can't solve is moon opacity over stars. Maybe someone could help here.

Used colors

Sky - #151f2e
Horizon - #191825
Cloud - #ffffff
Sun - #7688a0

First as before adjust overall mood and colors. Brightness down, colors darker, cool sun/moon light. And after it...

...go to the Node Editor and switch to World. This is an overview of what part of those noodles control what we can see.

Stars

To make stars from clouds change bottom Noise Texture to Voronoi Texture, set Scale in Mapping node to 1 (X, Y, Z) and adjust Color Ramp (from Voronoi) to have "sharp" stars. Upper Noise Texture is controlled by Clouds Density value in add-on tab. This is basically "mask" for the stars/clouds. If set to 1 it will create "gaps" between them.

Moon/Sun

In this part you can control how big sun/moon will be, and how big will be its halo. Nothing really to explain here. Slide Color Ramp values and change upper Multiply Node value.

Horizon level

Another fairly easy setup, left values from Color Ramps are controlling horizon/sky/clouds height. Right (middle) ones are controlling sharpness.

Sun color

You can change Sun color in MixRGB node showed in screenshot. You can also change blending mode to Linear Light to have stronger colors.

Final thoughts

As far as last method isn't convenient one and feels more like "hacky" way to do this I think it could give you pretty much anything you need from this add-on. My advice would be - play with values, nodes, colors in Node Editor to find new ways to use it.

In a matter of making it realistic. Well. Overall lightning is ok. I don't know if it's physically correct but it's really good. One thing that's not realistic are clouds and stars and there is probably nothing you can do about it in this add-on. Of course you can create amazing procedural cloud setup and use it in a place of two Noise Textures but still they will be just 2D representation of clouds without Volume Scattering and such.

If something is not clear in my answer, please point it in the comments. It was pretty long one and something could be missed.


Blender displays the wrong X-relosution for JPEGs, A bit of context first, I setup a Node group that helps me scale textures to real world scale. So I use the images DPI or PPM for this. Thus I scripted the inputs for the Node groups to automatically grab the relevant information.
It works fine with PNG and TIF but not with JPEG.
I use the script below to gather the DPI.
node_tree.nodes["IMAGE12"].image.resolution.y

For JPEGs, I get the wrong DPI, 72 dpi (2834.646 ppm). Even it the correct value should be higher, blender always displays 72dpi.
So, is there a script to access the EXIF of images directly? so that I get the correct DPI all the time.
Thanks

OK, found a solution.
Basically, blender is missing an EXIF reader. Luckily, python has the modules. We just need to install it.
Below is a basic method to install a module
https://b3d.interplanety.org/en/how-to-install-required-packages-to-the-blender-python-with-pip/
But did not work for me. Perhaps, its because of the office firewall or network....
So I installed the module using the wheel file, .whl, with the function below with blender (Not a powershell)
import subprocess
import sys
import os

# path to python.exe
python_exe = os.path.join(sys.prefix, 'bin', 'python.exe')

# install required packages
subprocess.call([python_exe, "-m", "pip", "install", "C:/LOCATION AND FILENAME.whl"])

Don't need to install pip because since 2.8 its already installed.
I am using the ExifRead module. Arbitrary selection. The code below gets me the dpi I want.
import exifread

# Open image file for reading (binary mode)
f = open('C:/Users/csemeon/Desktop/Fabric/RED 1200dpi.jpg', 'rb')

# Return Exif tags
tags = exifread.process_file(f)

for tag in tags.keys():
    if tag in ('Image XResolution'):
        #print ('Key: %s, value %s' % (tag, tags[tag]))
        dpitest =  str(tags['Image XResolution'])
        dpi = float(dpitest)

Had to use a two steps to convert the value to float (or int). Because the Dpi is a tag and doesn't convert directly to float.
Hope it helps someone.


Baked indirect lighting from emission not showing in viewport (Eevee) Newish user here and appreciate any help I can get. I'm running into an issue where I can't seem to get my baked indirect lighting to show up in my viewport or render in Eevee.

After baking, the emission from these windows doesn't appear to light the interior of the room.

Here's what I've double checked:

The material I've created has an emission w/ enough power
Irradiance and Reflection cube map Probes are set up
I've clicked the bake indirect lighting button

The other weird note is that when I move the object with the emission material closer to the objects in the scene, it suddenly works as expected. I've included all of this in screenshots. Let me know if there's any other info that would be useful.

Here are my render settings also:

FACEPALM

Turns out I had an object hidden in viewport that was blocking the emission layer. Hiding that object in the viewport and render fixed everything!


How to Create Dust Floating in the Air? Quite impressed by all of Gleb Alexandrov's scenes with some amazing dust floating around.

(To see what I'm talking about > http://www.creativeshrimp.com/lighting-tutorial-atmospheric-effects-dust-book-10.html)

And I started working last night on a scene that is going to need the same sort of atmospheric dust in the air. But when I looked around on how to create dust particles in the air there was nothing there. Not even anything I could adapt from a tutorial. Everything was from 2009 before volumetrics was even introduced.

Someone in an older tutorial did use a particle system and used a scaled down icosphere as a mesh for each particle, but experimenting with that made everything look really tacky.

Is there a way to do dust particles that I'm not thinking of?

Mix an volumetric environment with a particle system:

density of volume scattering will determine the amount of microscopic dust particles that create light rays
particle system will add visible dust

Points to keep in mind:

create the light super-bright and scatter density tiny - that way the small particles get enough light.
give the particles translucent shader or a bit mixed-in emission if they are too dark
the particles need to appear small on camera so they blend with the light-shafts (smaller the better). Particles should be also random in size.

A closeup of such out-of-focus dust:

the black border is there to fight the white page background

Settings (depends on scene size, light distance and camera):

scatter density: 0.003
used light: Point, strength: 5000
particles: 1M
particle size: 0.015, random size: 100%
icosphere scale: 0.1


How to determine whether my bm.select_history.active is a BMVert, BMFace or a BMEdge? I am trying to write a conditional statement for my script. If the user has one Active Edge Selected, then the script will run. Otherwise it won't.

I know that if I have an active edge, then bm.select_history_active will print something like , index = ... etc). Otherwise it would print either BMFace or BMVert (correct me if I'm wrong).

So how can I check whether the bm.select_history_active is a BMEdge? Thanks!

bm.select_history.active actually gives you the object of type of the selected element of the mesh. So actually, type(bm.select_history.active).__name__ will give you the strings 'BMEdge', 'BMVert', 'BMFace' etc. based on the type of selection. You can use this in the condition, which could be something like:

activElem = bm.select_history.active
if (activElem != None and type(activElem).__name__ == 'BMEdge'):
    #The logic to process the edge (activElem.index etc.)

There may be a better way to do this. So maybe, you can wait for a while for a better answer :)


Dark, Unwanted Shadows Between 'leaves' when Rendering in Cycles I am hoping someone can help me with this situation. I am very new to rendering and texturing in blender and have not so surprisingly come across an issue that is preventing further progress.
I am trying to render in cycles a mesh that I have created with a particles system for some low-poly leaves. For some reason, when I render in cycles, there are very dark portions of these leaves that I can't seem to lighten, no matter what light settings I play with.  I thought that it would be due to ambient occlusion, but no matter what settings I change it doesn't make any difference.
I think it would be easiest for someone to see my blend file, It is here -

I'm posting this just so I can post the pic. You can try this setup and see if it works. It should have a good effect, yet it doesn't seem to do much when I look at it. However, as you can see from the photo, the texture is missing in your blend file so everything is pink. This might affect how the setup is working on my end. Have a try on your project and let me know if it helps.


Moving Cube in Object Mode leaves Outline of the Cube on Screen When I want to move my cube in object mode, I see another cube. This seems to be the same cube but in edit mode.

Here are two screenshots, when I tried to move the first cube in object mode.

NOTE: the 3D view (N) are all unlocked so the problem comes from something else.


How to export Blender content in online stores? I am making few models which include animations and textures. I would like to upload these in sites such as BlenderMarket and TurboSquid for selling. I would like to know how to do this especially the animations. Should I upload the models separately and is there a way to upload the animations effects separately. Kindly advise.

When you look at site like TurboSquid you may see that each model has more than one file format. That means you need to export your finished model more than one time with different format each time. That might give you an idea about how to start with uploading. If I were you, I would check some samples from sites like TurboSquid to understand how people exported animation files to begin with.


Problem: material has stretched on side of shape I have a cube that I have cut into triangles with a boolean modifier. I have animated this shape to open out in various ways and begun adding images/ materials onto the sides of this shape.

Some materials have stretched, usually I would double check the material is assigned correctly and made sure I have done UV unwrap.

This screenshot shows what is seen when rendered and what it's meant to look like. All of those pieces of the shape should be correct but two aren't on this side, and are incorrect on a few others as well.

Is there anyway I can rectify this or is there someway someone can take a look?

Only select all the faces on that side of the cube.
Press ShiftNumPad 7 to align the view to the faces (if you have not rotated the cube simply switching to one of the main views will work.).
Press U > Project from View (Bounds)


Viewmode changes from orthographic after using mousewheel. Blender 2.8 (Release candidate 3) If I change to side ortho views, when I move the angle of my view with the mouse wheel, as to rotate my view around the object, it goes back to prespective view, even if I had user ortho enabled beforehand.

I can't seem to find any settings to change this nor anyone else with this issue, but if you can any links will be helpful.

The default setting is to automatically go back to perspective. To dissable this, uncheck the Auto Perspective checkbox in the Preferences/Navigation.


Problems keyframing a simple cube, End keyframe cancels the starting keyframe https://photos.app.goo.gl/YvCDueDAgrZonAcE7
Hopefully you guys are able to see that link above. However, let me try to explain the issue:
I am trying to animate a basic cube. However, I only want to animate one face of the cube and leave the rest intact with the same location and scale.
I am able to insert the first keyframe (frame 0) but when I try insert the second keyframe (frame 60) it seems to "cancel the first keyframe and makes them both look the same, which obviously results in no animation.
Any idea how to keep the first frame the way it is when add the second keyframe?
PS.: shape keys are not possible here because in the actual video I would have multiple movements, so I would need many shape keys.

This kind of animation is - AFAIK - only possible with shape keys.
And as you can see - you can only add a keyframe to location (not to vertices or frame) and just in object mode. So the animation frame does relate to the whole object and it's location. Not to vertices or faces or edges.


Unwrap a simple cylinder in 2.8 I am trying to unwrap a basic cylinder to a picture wich has a size of 4096x1080px.

The UV map is supposed to look like the 64 faces side by side within the boundaries of the image.

Whatever I try - it never comes to that point. I tried to reset first and than unwrap, to reset and to follow active faces, to pack islands, etc.

There is one weird (I guess) thing: In pretty much every case the faces are rotated by 90° in the UV map. I don't know if this is related to something...

This is the standard map when I start from scratch and hit 2xU (All 64 faces are vertically squeezed into the boundaries) - I want exactly this - just horizontally:

Any help is appreciated!

Thanks and best.

Stefan

The simplest way is to generate the UVs at the same time as you create your object. Just enable the Generate UVs box.


Bone Driver Update Fails I have two bones in an armature that derive their Y location from a separate Master bone. One uses a simple Copy Location constraint, the other uses a driver.

If I grab the Master bone and move it around, the two other bones' Y locations update as appropriate, though the one using the driver lags a bit.

If I reset (aborting the move of the Master bone) the bone with the driver remains stuck at its location. The bone with the constraint pops back to the original location as expected. If I then initiate another move of the Master, the driven bone snaps to where it should be and then follows again, though the lag remains.

How can I eliminate the lag of the driven bone as well as have it always update its Y location correctly? I can't use a constraint on that bone because eventually it will evaluate an expression to set its value rather than simply copying the Master's Y location.

The Blend is : here

Thanks.

I believe that is a limitation of the current dependency graph and one of the reasons behind the work on creating a new improved one.

For now a workaround would be to have the bone with the driver to be part of a different armature than the bone being followed.


How to procedurally generate a veiny skin material? I want to make a Cycles material that looks like these images:

The material should be slightly translucent and have thin veins underneath it.

I understand how to make the translucency, but the veins are giving me trouble. Is this something that can be made procedurally in Cycles, or will I need to make a vein texture in GIMP and somehow combine it with a skin material?

You can generate a skin material with veins like this using wave textures, musgrave texture, and translucent materials. The waves are distorted to get the meandering of veins. Different wave textures are combined with different orientations to get the veins running in different directions. The musgrave textures is used to make the veins appear and disappear in different areas.

The bright spot is from a lamp below the 'skin' illustrating the translucency.

This material is generated as shown below:

A good reference for generating veins in skin is at https://gooseberry.blender.org/shading-kenny-the-caterpillar/

The blend file:


Mix Shader between values of 0 - 0.5 is the same as 0 What I am trying to do is a glowing transformation, like Pokemons when they morph.
The idea is that I will have a monkey model and an elephant model, and I will make the monkey model glow from 0-1 and whilst I turn the monkey model transparency to 0 and sneakily switch to the elephant model and make it (de-)glow from 1-0. Voila the transformation. The problem is when I change the shader value (the shader for the glowing material), my monkey is fully transparent until the value hits 0.5 and then it will start showing up. There is no in between subtle glowing up or showing up, which is confusing...anyone got any suggestion?

It sounds like you probably have your material’s Blend Mode set to Alpha Clip:

The Alpha Clip blend mode is controlled by the Clip Threshold setting, which defaults to 0.5. This means that wherever your material’s opacity is below 0.5, it will render as fully transparent, and wherever it’s above 0.5, it will render as fully opaque. This clearly isn’t what you want.
Instead, you should change the Blend Mode setting to Alpha Blend. This will blend your object against objects behind it, giving you the smooth transition you’re looking for. You may also wish to disable the Show Backface option to ensure the whole mesh has a uniform transparency.


Accessing Integrated Search Without F3 All my F keys are predefined.  (I'm on an iMac and use the default Apple functions frequently.)  I've found multiple places that say F3 brings up Search in Blender.  It seems like almost everything in Blender can be reached in multiple ways, such as a keyboard shortcut, a menu, or through a pie menu or any of the bars at the side or top of an editor window.
How, other than F3, can I get to Blender's search function?  Or is there a way to add an icon somewhere I can click on to access it?

You can access it manually via Edit > Menu Search...
You could add the Menu Search to quick favorites by right clicking on it and selecting Add to Quick Favorites. Quick favorites can be accessed by pressing Q
You can also redefine your keyboard shortcuts in Edit > Preferences > Keymap (search for Search Menu)


Better way of marking a location for an object to copy In the picture you can see LH and RH these two circles mark where the IK markers(you can see the Right hand IK it is a sphere) for my hands and arms go. These circles are put exactly where they need to go for the hand with the pose I have saved to hold everything without clipping.

Problem is I can not align the hands to the markers because the loc rot data seems to be different. It seems like the bones have some sort of local loc rot data. I tried putting the markers on the rig instead but I used a child of constraint and it maid my object hierarchy way too messy because with 20 of these guys it is confusing. Also that did not solve the issue with my left hand

I currently think I could make a pose to get everything set up then apply my child of constraints so that everything is working. That goes like this

rifle use child constraint to the right wrist.
left wrist is child constraint to the LH circle.

When everything is aligned it works perfect but getting it aligned is irritating because I have to do it manually. now imagine doing reload animations and doping the gun and it is just a mess. So is there a good way to automatically do all of this?

Suggestion.  Try a more casual approach if that is acceptable.

I believe no part of the wrist bone should touch the visible gun. The wrist  placement need not be in the mesh of the gun.   The placement could be near the gun.  See the abstract control note below. The wrist bone maybe able to be specified head to tail for placement.
You might introduce a gun contact bone non deforming if that suits you.
Consider a [track to] constraint. To control wrist bone or connected bone.
You may need to worry about cyclic dependencies.  Whether real or Blender defect.  You may need to have non rendered abstract effector to control both the placement of gun and the hands.The abstract effector could be a simple armature with bones for the left and right wrist placement and location and rotation of gun.   This may eliminate cyclic dependencies if they arise.
Currently your question does not show the hierarchical relationships or parent child relationships.
The placement of fingers tips can just be curled.


Is it common to have many loop cuts? I am building a house, and I mainly work with loopcuts.
I do not delete any faces because that breaks future loop cuts (they would stop where I have deleted a face).
Now my model looks really wild, and I will have to delete many faces when I am done.
I would like to ask if my approach is common and if this happens to anybody or if I am doing something weird here.

Thank you.

It is common to add loop cuts to a model. It is also common to keep loop cuts to a minimum.

A bit of planning can help prevent loop cuts getting too excessive. In your example you have loop cuts to define edges of parts of your window shutters, these don't need to continue all the way around the house. The window shutter could be an object that is separate from the house with loops cuts that only exist in the shutter. Even if you keep everything contained in one mesh, you can have disconnected mesh parts that contain loop cuts that are local to each part.


What scale should I use for a small diorama, and how does this affect lighting etc I want to try to make a small low poly diorama, and don't know what scale to use. In the viewport the scale doesn't seem to matter much, but I don't know how lights and camera's are affected by the true size of an object.
Thanks.

I would recommend using a scale such as real-life dioramas use. I'd say a scale of 0.25 or 2.5 blender cm for a real-world meter. Just a guestimate. It mostly depends on what you want in the art piece.
Your main limitation with doing life-size landscapes is "clipping." Basically, the render system cannot keep calculating the view out into space forever, so past a certain distance it decides to start ignoring whatever's farther on. Get a look at this by making a giant cube or an ANT Landscape, then watching parts of it disappear as you get farther away from them.
If you want to do life-size, you can turn up the clipping limit on the camera to an extent, but for a better solution you can use "mist" to make the clipping effect not so prominent. This is like what Minecraft does where farther away things gradually become more transparent to the sky background (except with Minecraft it's not so much OpenGL as the system memory for how much world is loaded).


Blender 2.8 - Can't select hair in point select mode in particle edit I've recently begun learning how to work with particle hair in Blender, and in some videos about it I've seen that you can select individual hair keys and have the hair tools only affect the selected keys.

I've found the selection modes in particle edit mode, however the "Point" selection mode does not appear to be working. I can't select anything, using A and Alt+A to select and deselect all do nothing. Tip select mode appears to work, but it only allows me to use the tools on the tip of the hair key which is not what I want.

Is there something I am missing or is this a bug?

Thanks.

I was able to look at this some more and it's only an issue in the blend file I was working with. The point select mode works as expected in brand new files.

I originally created the file in 2.79, perhaps that's part of the cause?

I can append everything from the old file into a new file and everything works, so I am going to go with that as my solution. But I'll keep the old files around and maybe file a bug report.


Copy/paste in edit mode in Blender 2.8 Normally, I would agree that copy/paste is not necessary with the duplicate functionality (shift+d), but in this case, I think I have a legitimate reason to ask it.

I am working on a game that detects continuous pieces of same-material mesh to perform specific things with them. So now I have a mesh body where I need to bevel some edges (for aesthetic reasons) into new faces and change the material. I need these new faces to be disconnected from the original mesh while the original mesh stays connected because of what I said above (the game engine needs it).

The way I want to do it is given below:

bevel the edges
copy these beveled faces to the clipboard
undo the bevels
paste the beveled faces from the clipboard as new mesh

Is it possible at all?

I suggest that instead of trying to copy and paste the bevel as a new object, you should simply duplicate the mesh you have, leaving one copy the same, and using the other mesh to create the bevels you wanted.  Simply create the bevels, and with the bevels still selected, hit ctrl-i to invert the selection, and press delete.  This way you end up with just the beveled mesh, yet you still have the original mesh to keep.

Hope that helps.


How can I avoid jagged edges? now it is last thing in my first project in blender. I made the model below in images and I thought everything is going well until I rendered it then I saw the quality is bad around the object that I built?
Is there any thing that I must do in render to have better result?
I will attach blender file to take a look.

Your compositing nodes are the cause. Because the blend does not have textures packed, I'm not 100% sure why you are compositing it the way you are.
However to fix the harsh edge around the container, simply check the Anti-Aliasing check box on both of the ID Mask nodes.

Here is what the mask looks like Anti-Aliased on the left, and without Anti-Aliasing (how you have it now) no the right.


Rendering as an image makes Blender re-render three times My Blender file has started to render a scene three times.

After the render is fully complete, Blender is rendering the same frame, same scene 2 more times.

What is causing this? I am rendering in Cycles, and I do not think I have any denoising going on.

You have multiple View Layers with Use for Rendering set to true in the View Layer Properties tab.

Turn this little guy off.


Keyframe Issue in blender I have an object which is accidently got animated. I have other objects in the scene but only that particular object is moving up and down as I scroll timeline. I can see an orange line under timeline but I can not see any keyframe. I tried to delete keyframes by several ways but no use and that orange line is also not disabled. I checked other objects which are not animated and they don't have that orange line in timeline.

This yellow line represents some type of baked movement like rigidbody , or a constraint , to have a look if this is the problem , you can click on the Physics properties tab 2nd block from the modifiers , their if you see a rigidbody constraint , you need to click the cross to remove it and then start your timeline from the first frame .


Is there a way to determine if a ray is coming from a volume? I am trying to create a light that only illuminates volume scatters.

The input > light path node has "is X ray" outputs for all the various types of rays coming off a surface.  However I'd like something like an is volume ray output to tell if a ray is coming from a volume.  Is this possible?

Okay I am not sure about using some sort of 'Is Volume Ray' value to make a light source only illuminate a volume, but if you simply want a lamp/meshlight to only illuminate a volume scatter material, in the ray visibility settings of that light, you can leave only the 'Volume Scatter' ticked and the rest unticked:

Keep in mind that the light source may still end up illuminating the scene due to multiple volume bounces and the density of the volume.

Here is a simple scene with a point lamp directly above suzanne with a volume scatter material and a maximum of 32 volume bounces. The ray visibility is of the lamp directly above suzanne.

Here is the same scene except with only the 'Volume Scatter' ticked for the point lamp.

Here is the same scene with only 8 volume bounces. You can see how there is more light exiting suzanne with 32 volume bounces than with 8, though it is a very small difference.


Can we change the frame rate for a video to 24 after the image sequence is rendered with a different fps, say 30? I have rendered an image sequence from my animation, with FPS 30. Now, while making the video from that particular image sequence, can I use a different FPS, say 24 ?
Technically it is possible, I have checked with a small test video. But my doubt is, does it make any difference in the video quality inherently ?
Let me assume that the answer to the above question is NO (which also seems logical to me since each png file is complete on its own and they can be viewed at any speed). But then the question that comes to my mind is, why do we have the frame rate settings at all while rendering as an image sequence ? It seems more logical to display frame rate settings only during the video rendering, and disable it during image rendering since it remains meaningless in that case. Or is there any other purpose of setting the frame rate during the image render ?
I have checked some similar questions on this topic but did not get a complete answer to my original question + the doubt above. Hence I am posting it as a new question. Any suggestion from experts will be highly appreciated.

To my knowledge using another frame rate while rendering an image sequence will ,without changing anything else, change the quality of the output video because a different number of the images out of the sequence will be shown in the output video per second. But the other more noticeable effect would be that by packing a different number of frames in each second you would effectively speed up/ slow down the output video.
It is possible to correct for that speed up in the strip options under time, but you run into another issue: While the video is paused it makes no difference in quality, but if the rendered frame rate of the image sequence is not a multiple of the the new frame rate it can lead to glittery motion. This happens because blender sometimes would need frames that lay between the given frames in the images sequence. Because that is not possible it has to decide for one of those frames. The distance between the chosen frames can vary, sometimes be 1, sometimes be 2, so in the rendered video the motion seems to jump.
so most of the time it makes sense to stick to one frame rate from start to finish.

For why the frame rate needs to be able to be changed even if you render an Image Sequence:
One simple reason is that the viewport animation works with the same frame rate so to change that you need that option exposed.
Does that answer your questions?
I hope my explanation makes sense.


Smoke Domain object is black So I'm really new to blender and I'm trying to get a book to catch on fire and fall over, but for some reason the domain for the smoke system is totally black. Not sure what to do or what I did. Any idea what's happening?

That's how it looks before I hit play

To see if it's a hardware problem, you can always create a 'Quick Effect'. If that doesn't work, then your PC hardware is having trouble rendering the smoke (but that's unlikely). If it does work, then you now have a working setup as a reference.

To create a Quick Smoke, start with a new Blender file, then select
the default cube.
Call up the search box with Spacebarand type in 'Quick Smoke'.
Press Alt+A to see the effect.


Why is extruding a bezier curve making these loops? After extruding one time or subdividing the curve, if I try to extrude again, I get a figure 8 loop. I've used bezier curves before, but this is the first time in 2.9. Anyone know how to work around this?

This type of extrusion actually splits this control point and adds a new one in the middle.

It's not obvious that it happens since they are in the same location.


Blender animation using MakeHuman files My objective is to have a room in which a person is doing some activities like bending, walking, etc. I am using MakeHuman to model the person. After that, in blender I import the model from make human. Now, I need some help on how to make an animation like walking. Does MakeHuman use armatures?

There are two different rig-types available rigify and mhx you need to enable the corresponding addon in the User Preferences.

MakeHuman rig (mhx)

Rigify

The bones are organized in layers, with the addon enabled you get buttons to select them, in Pose Mode you can setup poses and keyframe them.

Same for rigify:

Related:

How should an animated character be moved while repeating a walk cycle?
What are the not so obvious features of Rigify?
how to do custom animation in a mhx file made using Makehuman


How to tell if an object is linked with another blend? Is there any way I can check if an object is linked from another Blend file via bpy? I need to do this for xrefs on something.

I was looking for all sorts of variable names in the reference, 'link', 'blend', etc. I figured out that object.library was what I was looking for. It will return None if it's not from a library, otherwise it will return a bpy.types.Library

https://www.blender.org/api/blender_python_api_2_60_6/bpy.types.Library.html#bpy.types.Library


How to create realistic splinters from wood in blender? Creating some broken splinters using cell fracture addon is quite easy, but how do you create some realistic splinters that come from a broken wood?

Specifically, how to achieve this specific kind of thing in blender?

I have made this simple (but probably not perfect) wood splinter bending simulation with the blender fracture modifier.I used more and shorter splinters in the middle so the rubbery constraints let them atleast roughly look like bent longer splinters.
The advantage of this being a modifier is you can just apply the mesh in the "bent" state and edit further if necessary. I also tried with a simple deform after fracture, but this did not look good at all...

The fracture modifier is a separate branch. Links to builds are here

https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?343637-Custom-Build-Blender-Fracture-Modifier

or here (latest windows build): http://graphicall.org/1148

Will upload a blend if I can find the "BlendExchange" button again somewhere... so for now just a pasteall link...

http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=44841


Apply image as texture New to Blender. I want to create a textured look on a 3D model using an image. Unsure of the process.

As an example, I would like to apply the first image to part of a 3D head model as highlighted. The rest of the 3D model would be painted. Would like to create a textured look with image on model instead of the image just being wrapped around 3D model.

Not sure what type of mapping I need to look at. Displacement mapping?

Also looked into normal mapping but looks like normal maps are created using another 3D model that already has texture. Can normal maps be created from 2D image?

Well blender supports applying images as textures only using uv unwrapping and then applying it around your model as a texture. Still if a bit of makeshifter will be fine then you can apply your image on a brush after going in vertex paint mode in blender from there you can increase your brush size go in a veiw when you can see on what you want to apply your texture, mask out all the other areas using a mask brush increase your brush size, increase strength to 1 and pain but make sure that you have applied subdivision modifier or multiresolution modifier(if any) otherwise blender will not able to make out vetices to apply your texture on.

In order to change your image into a normal map it is really easy, you will have to go on a layer where there is nothing accept a plane(you will have to add a plane mesh on layer) mesh added so you can focus on it, go into top veiw by pressing 7 on numpad(num 7), change your veiw to shading make and make sure that your engine is better to cycles or eevee), add a new material and add an image texture with image you want to convert, connect it to a color ramp and feed color ramp into height input of a bump node into displacement input of material output node. Now you will have to add a subdivision modifier change it to normal and apply it for getting some geometry, create a new image in uv grid and make it resolution same as you require for normal map, go to rendering panel on left side of your screen, there you will be able to find an option of baking change it to normal, add one more plane select both by pressing shift and selecting high poly mesh first and add new image texture you created and select it go to baking panel change it to normal and bake, if you get no uv coordinates error then just select both planes one by one go into edit mode press u and select project from veiw(bounds), and your normal map is ready to be used.


How to render UV sphere with edges? Hi I want to render something similar to this image. The below image should be my starting point.I used a UV sphere and I tried freestyle rendering but it is not showing the edges like below.

You could do it this way:

Give your sphere a Wireframe modifier. Play with the parameters, disable the Replace Original option so that it keeps the whole sphere shape, make sure that Material Offset is set to the material slot the wireframe is supposed to display, i.e. Material Offset > 1 for the second material in the object's material list. In the Material panel prepare the materials, choose Emission type if you don't want any shadow.


How can I add UV Sphere to Stickman to later add Armature? This is tough one for me... Althrough I have been using Blender only for a week, about 80% of that was wasted on trying to do what I described in question title.

I have made small stickman with low amount of vertices. Basically it has 2 calves, 2 thighs, 2 forearms and 2 arms + 1 body == 9 vertices (and 9 bones).

It's easy to add armature at this point, but my problem is, I want head that looks like a ball. 100% rounded.

UV Sphere with "smooth vertex" does the job.

But here I encounter a problem: I cant add it to my stickman. I use SKIN modifier (which I later use to add Armature, it has button for it) on my stickman

This seems to add vertices or something similar to vertices. But anyway - it lags my blender if I have joined Head (Uv Sphere) to body (stickman) simply because of the amount of vertices that UV sphere has.

So I did something like that as workaround:

created normal stickman without head.
added skin modifier and armature.
pressed apply on skin modifier.
added head(uv sphere) and joined (ctrl + j) head with body.

But then, my armature wasnt connected to the head. If I moved body, it would move without head, regardless of head being before joined to body with ctrl+J. How can I achieve it?

How could I achieve what I need?

Thanks a lot!

The easiest solution will be to keep the head separate of the body, place the "ball" in place. Change armature mode to Pose, select the ball, Shift select the armature. It'll be in pose mode, so you will be able to select single bone. Select "head" bone and press CTRL+P - Set Parent to - Bone.


How come edge loop select does not work? I try an Edge loop select in the following object. But Blender 2.79 does not select anything, are there any hidden parameters which can influence edge loop select?

(I try this from the Select menu in Edit mode)

Loop selection doesn't work with triangular topology, because at an intersection, it can't determine which path to choose.

You can convert the topology to quads with the Tris To Quads function (select all the faces then Alt+J).


Has the "Use Alpa" option for textures been changed? I'm using .dds textures and I just upgraded to 2.76. Many of the textures I'm handling have an alpha channel that must be disabled. In 2.73 there was a checkbox on the textures tab that said "use alpha". It doesn't seem to be there now. Is this a change or a bug? Also is there another way I can change the alpha option?

still on 2.76? Could something be happened to your installed copy UI somehow, using python? I re-downloaded a fresh 2.76b today from http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.76/

and there is the option, there (here using a png image with transparency):


Addons are not installing I am trying to install various addons to no avail. I have tried many, and they can't all be buggy.

I go to settings, click install from file, choose file, then select install from file again. Search for the addon and it isn't there. What am I doing wrong? I have also copied all of the content from the downloaded file and put it in a new file and saved as name.py. Still nothing shows up. And yes, the document starts with what it should start with, not html.

If your addons are zip files, then it is best to unzip them and place them in the addons directory. For Windows it is (where you installed Blender)/Blender Foundation/Blender 2.75/2.75/scripts/addons directory. Put your addons there, then restart Blender and it will show up in the User Prefs.


How to render turntable of .obj file I am new to blender. I have a .obj file that I need a rendered turntable of (meaning I need to spin the obj and render a frame every 10 degrees or so). Importing the .obj file works fine. However, I cannot even add a camera to the scene. I am trying this:

cam = bpy.data.cameras.new("Camera")
cam_ob = bpy.data.objects.new("Camera", cam)
bpy.context.scene.objects.link(cam_ob)
bpy.context.scene.objects.active = bpy.context.scene.objects["Camera"]

I also tried this:

bpy.ops.object.camera_add(view_align=False, enter_editmode=False, location=(0.0, 0.0, -4.0), rotation=(0.0, 0.0, 0.0))

but when I run

bpy.ops.render.render()

It says

ERROR: Cannot render, no camera

What's the correct way of doing this, and what's the best way of repeatedly rendering the .obj while spinning it?

Thank you.

You need to specify the new camera as the active one for the scene, before rendering, like this:

bpy.context.scene.camera = cam_ob

To rotate an object around its Z axis, just do:

from mathutils import radians
my_obj.rotation_euler.rotate_axis('Z', radians(10))


weight painting ruins the form My first time weight painting after rigging.

When I do that, I wanted to color it red, but as I color on the object,

the form changes like sculpting. For example, it suddenly protrudes or deepen.

How can I fix this?

Best way would be to select your mesh then armature using Shift+RightClick then hit Ctrl+P then choose parent with automatic weighting. This will save you time painting everything manually.


Is this possible, scaling the width, height & angle of a diagram via html5 and blender? Hey there I have a upcoming project where the client would like to have a diagram of a river where it's width, height and angle can be adjusted by the end user on a html5 website.

Here's an example of what I mean changing the angle, ie it makes the river have a steeper incline, thus the rate of water flows faster.

Would I use Blender's game engine for this?

Thanks in advance.

You can't run the Blender game engine in a browser. Some options you have are:

Display pre-rendered image in the browser, you would have to render animation sequences for the water for each angle. (Bad idea)
Import Blender model to three.js using this addon.

Video Tutorial

Use a Javascript 3D graphics framework like three.js with WEBGL shaders

Related

- WebGL Water

water-simulation-in-three-js
Water


Rotating multiple objects to specific centre axis Hi Blender Forum (happy new creative year to all)

I'm trying to rotate these 3 objects, on a 45 degree angle all at once. I couldn't figure out how to do so, so I did them one by one. So how's it possible to rotate multiple objects simultaneously. I know about individual origins, but I couldn't get the result I was after.

You can Duplicate-Link the poles and rotate the original pole in edit mode:

Start with one pole. Press Alt+D to make the other poles (make sure it's Alt+D, and not Ctrl+D)
Go in top view and rotate each of the two other two poles in object mode by 120 degrees each
Select the original pole and go into edit mode and rotate it towards the red dot in your pic.

Note that whatever edits you do to one pole, it happens to the other poles, but not in object mode.


Why is the "Randomize" option missing from my Array modifier (in 2.91)? According to the Blender 2.91 Manual, the Array modifier has a "Randomize" option:
Array Modifier: Randomize
Mine, however, does not.  Is there something I'm missing?
I am so used to being able to do this easily in C4D and I'm killing myself trying to figure it out in Blender.  Little help!?

Unfortunately, the Randomize function of the Array Modifier is limited to Grease Pencil objects:


audio missing from edited video I edited a video and added different audio to it. After rendering the video it has no audio in it. Whenever i render the video its has totally no sound , not even its own sound, its totally mute. What am i doing wrong please help. I tried everything possible but couldn't work it out. I even tried to find encoding in my properties panel so that i will check whether none is selected in audio codec but i could not find encoding and audio codec in my properties panel. kindly help

i could not find encoding and audio codec in my properties panel

That might be the reason. Probably you did (and could) not set any audio properties. Follow these steps:

Go onto the render page in properties window:

Scroll down to the output-tab and select a movie format as output format. Be sure that this format supports more encoding properties. Means: once selected directly under the output-tab a tab called "Encoding" should appear. If I can give you an advice choose H.264 as output format.

In encoding tab, choose your preferred Movie format. In the bottom part of the tab, choose an Audio codec different from "None". For example MP3 (if an average quality of the audio is sufficient).

Hope these steps and advices worked well :)

Greets
Jaspa


Select neighbour faces from a mesh with python I am new to blender and python and try to get the hang of it. PS: Everything should be achieved via python script.

I want to create a low poly model via ico-sphere. That's really easy because I just need to create a ico-sphere. Now I want to randomly select a face and one of his neighbours to merge them via bpy.ops.mesh.edge_face_add() to a new face.

I am having the following script:

bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode = 'EDIT') # into edit mode
bpy.ops.mesh.select_all(action='DESELECT') # deselect everything
bpy.context.tool_settings.mesh_select_mode = (True , False , False) # only faces
mesh=bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me) # get mesh
mesh.faces.ensure_lookup_table() # update faces
mesh.faces[0].select = True # select face number 0
mesh.faces[1].select = True # select face number 1
bpy.ops.mesh.edge_face_add() # merge them
bpy.ops.mesh.select_all(action='DESELECT') # deselect everything

At first I am using bmesh which is experimental. I would like to use a blender api which isn't experimental. Any ideas?
I tried it with faces[0] and 1 and it worked, they are neighbours. But I think that's not always. How can I find out which faces are next to faces[0] for example.

Thanks for helping!

does his help? Start with the template in:

TextEditor > Templates > Python > Bmesh Simple Editmode

import bpy
import bmesh

obj = bpy.context.edit_object
me = obj.data

bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)

face = bm.faces[3]
face.select = True
print(dir(face.verts[0].link_faces))
print(face.verts[0].link_faces[:])

# This gives the list of all edges that use that vertex.
# [<BMFace(0x7f7acb5ddb70), index=52, totverts=4>,
#  <BMFace(0x7f7acb5ddbe0), index=54, totverts=4>,
#  <BMFace(0x7f7acb5ddba8), index=53, totverts=4>,
#  <BMFace(0x7f7acb5dd0b8), index=3, totverts=4>]

bmesh.update_edit_mesh(me, True)

There's also link_edges which could also prove useful, arguably more so

import bpy
import bmesh

obj = bpy.context.edit_object
me = obj.data

bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)

# just assume now there is only one selected face
selected_face = [f for f in bm.faces if f.select][0]

for edge in selected_face.edges:
    linked = edge.link_faces
    for face in linked:
        face.select = True

bmesh.update_edit_mesh(me, True)

produces

And finally, the join command

import bpy
import bmesh

obj = bpy.context.edit_object
me = obj.data

bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)

# just assume now there are at least 2 selected, and are touching
selected_faces = [f for f in bm.faces if f.select]

# the script equivalent of the F key
bmesh.ops.contextual_create(bm, geom=selected_faces)

bmesh.update_edit_mesh(me, True)

Regarding your statement about Bmesh being experimental, I wouldn't worry about that too much, it's being used a lot and has proven to be more than capable. The Bmesh.ops docs are an excellent but admittedly terse resource:


Boolean half the time doesn't work but does union? Im not sure if Im doing something wrong here or what is happening but about 50% of the time whenever I do a normal boolean difference modifier, if I have at all modified the big object previously, I get this instead of a nice clean cut -

Where that bottom cube sticking out was supposed to be cut away. I have no idea what to do about it and oddly a union cuts a hole, but doesn't make the insides have "walls" so to speak. Ive tried recalc normals and everything here How to cut holes in an object using another object?

But nothing is working. What is wrong? its doing an additive boolean.

A Boolean Modifier usually fails for one of two reasons:

Your face normals are pointing in different directions. To the modifier it seems like the mesh doesn't have a clear distinction between inside and outside. Happens often through extrusion. Select all verts and hit CTRLN to recalculate them.
Your mesh isn't watertight. That happens when any edge of your mesh has more (or less) than 2 faces attached to it. Deselect all verts and hit CTRLALTSHIFTM. That'll select most troubling parts. It can be useful  to do this twice, first in Vertex Select Mode, then in Edge Select Mode because the clues from what gets selected are different. If that's the case, recalculating normals won't work either. I usually go paranoid and avoid holes (only one face attached to any edge) as well.


Weird geometry appears when I switch to object mode. How can I make it dissapear? I only used a mirror modifier. How do I make it look like in edit mode?

Try doing an ALT-H (unhide) in Edit mode. It's possible that you hid some geometry while you were in Edit mode and it showed up in Object mode.


Motion tracking stops at a certain frame before the end of the shot I have 7223 frames to track, I set my track mark it only goes to 762 then stops. Even though it does not do that usual thing when it loses it mark, I still reset the mark, then go one frame at a time, and it is not tracking it.
as you see it does not lose the track it just stops and will not go any further.

Any ideas why?

If the tracker is very close to the edge, the automatic tracking will stop. It cannot keep tracking if there are no pixels to fill the tracked area.
Either offset the marker (GG) or create a new one and join both, else you can manually position the tracker for any given frame.


How to scale child object when only part of the parent object is scaled I am trying to make child cube scale properly when only inner surface of the parent object is scaled. It's better to show an image:

I can easily make it so, that if whole parent object is scaled, child cube would be scaled as well, but I totally cannot figure out how to scale this inner cube only when selected faces are scaled. I have tried bunch of methods like vertex groups, copy scale/transformation constraints, hook modifiers, but nothing really worked, most probably I was doing something wrong.

In this particular case, to keep things simple, for a constant offset, you could assign a Shrinkwrap modifier to the cube, target the frame, set to 'Nearest Vertex', and with the Offset in the modifier adjusted to give the desired gap. Here, the frame is being animated using shape-keys.

Perhaps more generally. this time giving a true scale, so the gap scales as well as the cube and inner rim:

Create vertex groups of the inner surfaces of the frame and all of the cube
Create a single-bone armature at the scaling origin
Name the vertex groups the same as the bone
Assign an Armature modifier to the frame and the cube, both targeted on the armature, and both set to 'Vertex Group' using the named vertex groups.

Now scaling the bone will scale all the associated vertices.


object kind of transparent I'm not sure what is the problem, I downloaded few objects and some of them behave strange.
I mean that the object can be seen but in kind of transperent way. For example here the table surface should be clean.

but instead we can see the beams that under the table. I have tried to change the transparency but it's not the issue (if I understood it right). Any explanation what is it?
Edit:
I have tried to recalculate the normals, but it's not really works.
But I found that the object looks strange in the edit mode. maybe it's useful to  understand the issue.

I'm not sure if this will help but if you go into object mode and click on the overlays dropdown and say check the checkbox that says face orientation is the mesh red or blue? if any of it is red you can go into edit mode and select the parts that are red and press alt N to flip the normals. Hope this helps.


Blender is eating GB's of HD space when rendering Blender is eating GB's of HD space when rendering.
Its uses up around 5GB for a few hundred frames of animation and doesn't release it after its finished.
I gather this may have been because I had cache BVH ticked.

I'm on osx 10.9 but can't for the life of me find any BVH files?
How do i find them on a Mac, or is my problem elsewhere?

The bvh cache files can be found in a folder called cache that will be located in the same folder as the config folder that contains startup.blend, the filenames start with bvh_ followed by a unique 32 character string.

See this page for details about where the config folder can be found.

This question has more info on when the BVH Cache can be helpful.


Blender Freestyle : Vertical lines On Blender Freestyle documentation, a picture is shown with two Suzannes made of vertical/horizontal lines.

Click to enlarge

How to reproduce this effect with Blender Freestyle? Using modifiers? Custom shaders?

The contour lines are genuine mesh edges auto-generated by a Blender/Python script as described in the following blog post:

Blenderyard: Contour Lines as in Maps

The script implements a new operator named 'Slices'.  Put the script into a text datablock in Blender and run it by pressing the 'Run Script' button, and the operator will be registered.  If you have an active mesh object, then running the script for the first time will apply the operator to the mesh object.  Then the operator can be invoked using the spacebar search menu and looking up the 'Slices' operator.  The operator allows you to change the vertical interval of contour lines.


Why is my straight edge getting distorted when I bevel it? I have a straight edge that I want to bevel...

When I apply the bevel it crimps and gets distorted...

How can I get a straight smooth bevel all the way down?  Here is my blend file...

blend file

Thanks for any help.

It looks like not all the adjacent faces are connected. The big face on top of the side panels are the problem (image 1). You just need to connect them to the rest. To do that, just create an edge loop on it and merge (Alt+M) the bottom vertex with the one on the top of the wheel hole (image 2). That should do it (image 3).


UV unwrapping wrong but render is correct I downloaded the 'Autumn' model from Blender art gallery to render it in my own open-gl-like renderer. This works fine for the body of the dog where uv unwrapping is fine.
But with the 'scarf' object the uv unwrapping behaves strange (see image).

Scarf unwrap is not properly aligned to the image texture (scarf is the orange-red scarf-like part of the image) ...
... but the render output of blender is fine. How can that be?

I tried to remove modifiers but that did not help.
Why does blender display the rendered output correctly even if uv unwrap is not aligned?
Moreover: How can I realign the uv unwrap to  match the texture?
Hope anyone smart can help me out.

@FrederickSteinmetz was right. I exported all objects to a single .obj file in which the currently selected UV map of the 'scarf' object was included. The render instead used an UV Map Node to refer to another UV map.
To resolve the issue I selected the correct map with (Select object -> Object data -> UV maps; Blender 2.80


Texture Based Collision I'm looking to add collisions to a surface which simulate the rough surface of a wall. Since subdividing for a displacement modifier would be a little too taxing on my computer, I was wondering if there was a way to program collision vector modifiers directly into an applied texture, similar to the texture force field but without adding energy to the particles. I want them to bounce off in slightly changed courses depending on the shading of the texture as if it was a rough surface. I know this seems a little extreme but its essential that we're able to do this.
If its not possible, then is there a way to randomize the direction of a particle upon collision based on an equation (Cosine distribution of particles)?

If it doesn't need to be physically accurate, you can cheat a little by using a small, low-res, invisible collider about the target region. This should work since only a small region of your plane needs to test against collisions, and from the viewing distance, the slight mis-match between the lower-resolution collider and the actual geometry should be imperceptible.


When I render an image everything is black and white. How do I fix this? Everything appears black and white:

How do I fix this?

You probably have your render set to "BW"(which stands for Black and White), instead of "RGB"(Which stands for Red,Green,Blue). It needs to be selected to "RGB" in order to be in color.


Editing fcurve.keyframe points in FAST mode? I can add and remove keyframes like this via python, no issues arise.

#remove all existing keys
for i in reversed(range(0, len(fcu.keyframe_points))):
    fcu.keyframe_points.remove(fcu.keyframe_points[i])
#insert the corrected keys
for frame, sample in zip(new_frames, new_samples):
    fcu.keyframe_points.insert(frame, sample)

But I want to use the fast option to avoid updating the fcurve after each modification and only update after the loop:

#remove all existing keys
for i in reversed(range(0, len(fcu.keyframe_points))):
    fcu.keyframe_points.remove(fcu.keyframe_points[i], fast=True)
fcu.update()
#insert the corrected keys
for frame, sample in zip(new_frames, new_samples):
    fcu.keyframe_points.insert(frame, sample, set(("FAST", )))
fcu.update()

Now that code is also functional, but in the dope sheet, the resulting keyframes are dark grey instead of the usual white. Anything I'm missing or is this intended behavior? Does the color have any significance?

This answer doesn't address the FAST mode issue, it is another method to clear an fcurve and set new points that avoids looping, reversing or using  either the insert or remove methods of FCurve.keyframe_points entirely.

import bpy
frames = [1, 9, 20]
samples = [0, 8, 0]
# some action
a = bpy.data.actions["SomeAction"]
fc = a.fcurves[0] # some fcurve
dp, i = fc.data_path, fc.array_index
# clear the fcurve by removing it
a.fcurves.remove(fc)
# new one
fc = a.fcurves.new(dp, index=i)
# new points
fc.keyframe_points.add(count=len(frames))
# populate points
fc.keyframe_points.foreach_set("co", [x for co in zip(frames, samples) for x in co])
# update
fc.update()


Rigging a surface for game engine Let's say I have a surface, which is divided as follows:

  A   B   C   D
0 +---+---+---+
  |   |   |   |
1 +---+---+---+
  |   |   |   |
2 +---+---+---+
  |   |   |   |
3 +---+---+---+

This surface also have a subdivision-surface modifier added to it, with level 3.
What I want to achieve is, when I grab each of the above points, the other points should "react" along with it as well.

So for example: if I grab A:0 my grab will also effect its closest neighbors: B:0, B:1 and A:1 as well. Now, here comes the hard part, which I couldn't solve because of the dependency cycles it might generate when I try it with bones: if I grab B:0 it should effect C:0, C:1, B:1, A:1 and A:0 as well. Which basically means, "for one second" B:0 becomes the parent of A:0, which of course is not possible, as I already assigned B:0 as a child of A:0.

So what I'm looking for is either a trick to have this grid like bone rig, or some other solutions (such as a 2D lattice or anything) which is available through BGE.

Thanks in advance!

So you want something like proportional edit, where you can grab any vertex and the neigbouring ones move along with it as well?

To do this, simply making sure the weightings (between the bones and the mesh) extend so that some vertices are controlled by multiple bones.

So this is the weight normally:

And this is it expanded:

If you expand all of them, then, although the neighbouring bones won't actually move, there will be the right effect (As far as I understand what you want):

In this case, I could probably have expanded the area of effect some more. And, you may notice you have to move the bone further to get the deflection you want. This is because the vertices you are moving are also influenced by the surrounding 8 bones, so will not move quite so much.


Paint circle with Python in 3D view direction I want to draw a circle into the 3d view in the direction of the current view rotation.

I have 2 vectors (center, mouse_pos), so I have two points in 3d space, so I have the radius - fine.

This is my code so far and the painted result:

segments = 32
mul = (1.0 / (segments - 1)) * (pi * 2)
self._vertices = [(sin(i * mul) + self._center[0],
cos(i * mul) + self._center[1], 0) for i in range(segments)]

With this the circle is painted like I have a "top perspective". I also have a method to get the current view direction:

def get_view_direction(context):
    rv3d      = context.space_data.region_3d
    view_rot  = rv3d.view_rotation

    dir = view_rot @ mathutils.Vector((0,0,-1))
    return dir.normalized()

My question is now how to let the segments of the circle take the rotation of the view into account? Any ideas?

EDIT: First part solved:

rv3d      = context.space_data.region_3d
view_rot  = rv3d.view_rotation

segments = 32
mul = (1.0 / (segments - 1)) * (pi * 2)
points = [(sin(i * mul), cos(i * mul), 0) for i in range(segments)]

for point in points:
    vertex = view_rot @ mathutils.Vector(point)
    self._vertices.append(vertex)

What's left now is to take the radius and center into acount, and I want to move it along the view direction, but I already have a method for this:

def get_view_direction(context):
    rv3d      = context.space_data.region_3d
    view_rot  = rv3d.view_rotation

    dir = view_rot @ mathutils.Vector((0,0,-1))
    return dir.normalized()

So I guess I can add the direction multiplied by a scalar to each vector?

Okay guys got it, sorry to again answer my own question:-)

rv3d      = context.space_data.region_3d
view_rot  = rv3d.view_rotation

segments = 32
mul = (1.0 / (segments - 1)) * (pi * 2)
points = [(sin(i * mul) * self._radius, cos(i * mul) * self._radius, 0)
for i in range(segments)]

self._vertices = [view_rot @ mathutils.Vector(point) +
                  self._center for point in points]


Can I use a texture as hair density map? I would like to use a texture as density map because it can be much more precise than a vertex group, is it possible? In Cycles render.

In Cycles select the mesh, give it a material, then go the Particles header and add a new texture in the Textures panel.

Prepare your black and white density map. Here's mine:

Next go to the Texture header, add a new texture (Image or Movie) and check the Density checkbox in the Influence panel. Note: I also checked the Lenght checkbox to make the render look more clear.

In Blender Internal you can do it the same way. After giving the mesh a material and the particle system you go to the Texture header-->Particle Texture button, load your texture as Image or Movie and select what kind of influence on particles it should have.


The interface for material looks different than the one on tutorial I am a complete beginner and following a tutorial about how to put a texture on a cube. I think maybe they have a different version of Blender because what I see in a few places is different so it is very hard to follow.

In the video after UV unwrapping the cube they click to create a new material then click this little button next to the colour and then get a menu where they can choose 'Image texture'

But in my Blender which is 2.79b when I click Add material it looks like this:

As you can see it is totally different and I can't find anywhere a Color box with a button like in the video. I can't even see 'Surface' anywhere. So I am stuck.

Did they change Blender so much I need to find a new tutorial for my version?
Is there a simple way to do the same thing in the version I have?

OK I found a comment about something called Cycles mode. I don’t know why but apparently you have to switch it to Cycles Render.

There is a menu at the very top of the window. This was not explained in the video. I would love to know more about why it's different or what this means!


Minecraft import world problem I am doing a Minecraft Animations course and one of the things I need to do is to import a Minecraft world. I used Jmc2Obj and imported the Minecraft world into Blender. However, it ended up looking like this:

It's supposed to be a mesa biome but as you can see, it looks nothing like it. I immediately identified it as a texture problem. I tried going to file>external data>find missing files and locating the directory that contains the "texture.png" image and the "texture.uv" file, but that didn't fix it. Any help would be much appreciated.

have you tried using MCprep? https://theduckcow.com/dev/blender/mcprep/ doing the "prep materials" option usually fixes most of these world problems, u do that by selecting all the objects u want to prep materials for, then click on prep on oyur left side pannel (brought up with pressing N) and thats it, a pop up will appear with an option for missing textures, try enabling that and see what happens


Preventing the "Indirect Lighting" setting in Blender Internal from making the entire rendered image black I'm currently working on a 3D scene in Blender 2.71. It has a mesh landscape. For the sky, I use a shadeless UV sphere with shadow deactivated. It also has a base in the center where most of the detail is located. Inside the base I have several meshes with an emit value given to them so that they act as artificial lighting (using Indirect Lighting). In order to make them actually emit light, I set the "Gather" setting to "Approximate" under the "World" tab of the "Properties" panel.

However when I look at the rendered view of my scene, the entire rendered image goes black (erratically when I look at it from different angles). I have tried removing certain items in the scene, but only deactivation of "Indirect Lighting" fixes the problem.

How do I keep the "Indirect Lighting" setting active, but prevent it from causing the entire rendered image to be black?

EDIT: I noticed that when the problem happened again recently, it stayed black from every angle, but the sky stayed visible (even though "cast shadows" is deactivated on the sky object).

EDIT-2: Here are some screenshots of the problem:

This is no longer a problem after upgrading to Blender 2.76b.


Texture Paint is missing in the menu - how do I find it? I am following a guide on YouTube where I need to use the texture paint. But it is not appearing in my view/ topmenu. Can you please help me to show it in the menu.
This is my view:

But this is how it looks in the guides

Your UI is significantly altered from the default. I noticed one tab labeled “game logic“ and I’m wondering if this is actually leftover UI from an old 2.79 blend file. However, the tab you need might be still there. Hover the mouse over the tab area, and then scroll. If you still don’t see the tab, click the little plus tab at the very end, and you’ll see what you need in the “general“ section of the appearing menu.


Why does my sculpting not working like how it does on this video Ok, i am watching this video by blender guru https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OTX3ZdYvEA&t=430s and when he starts sculpting at 5:58 his brush seems to have a  "plus" sign for a cursor, "+". mine doesnt. i dont know what this is called or how to fix it but i think it is messing with my sculpting because mine is not doing what his is doing. help would be appreciated. i have been searching for help for hours.
ps here is what is happening to mine: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AkjW5v_qJtM7j2v6-AJhqNbGJH0D?e=Jh4WlO

Maybe you need to subdivide the mesh further to increase detail.

Try subdividing once more to increase the number of faces for the brush to work on.


There Is No Media Output In A Specific Folder After Finishing My Render As an absolute beginner I am just figuring things out. I was working on a project, which I rendered, but there is no output file in my output folder.

The Render Scene And Options:

My Project In Rendered View:

In blender, animation renders/videos are automatically saved in the output folder location. But image renders are not. This is probably because, many a time we test render a scene to see how things are shaping up and we don't want to clutter our output folder.

In-order to save a rendered image manually, after the rendering is done, go to image editor.You can do this by clicking on bottom right dropdown of any window and clicking UV/Image editor as shown.
Once you are in this window, you can click on image menu and click 'save as image'as shown.
Alternatively, you can just press F3 key without even accessing the image editor window. Doing any of these, will direct you to a screen that asks you to select the folder location to save.

If you want the image to be saved automatically, you can use the following addon. https://github.com/elfnor/blender_auto_save_on_render

Please note that I didn't write this add-on. I only came across this while searching.


Best lighting for minimal shadows for product-on-white rendering I produce a lot of basic "product on white" renderings for Amazon images. I have a few methods for getting to what I want, but most involve quite a bit of rendering multiple images and compositing via Photoshop, etc. I'm wondering if anyone can offer advice on their preferred workflow to get the best on white product images straight out of one render without having to edit. A couple things I'm looking for advice on acheiving:

Pure white background (do you use a seamless and light it? or
just use a white background? Any other tricks?)
Minimal shadows - on Amazon, the container is a tightly cropped
square, so dealing with shadows is an issue and you can't rely on
those nice long, realistic shadows - I'm trying to determine how to
get minimal shadows like the attached examples straight out of the
gate with no editing. I realize the answer lies in lighting, but it
seems that if I adjust the lighting to make the least amount of
shadow, my subject's lighting suffers, and vise versa. Have you
found any ways to control the shadows separately from the lighting
of the object?

To achieve the desired result it's best to create two scenes: the first one for the product, the second for the shadow.

The first scene contains the product and all lighting like lamps, HDRI environment etc. for lighting the product as it should look like. A floor maybe for light bounces or blocking light from below the product. Set Render Properties > Film > Transparent. Hide the floor from the camera by disabling Object Properties > Visibility > Ray Visibility > Camera.
Create the second scene by copying the first one (a word on linked duplicates at the end of this answer). Make the floor visible again by enabling Ray Visibility > Camera and enable Visibility > Ray Visibility > Shadow Catcher. Delete all lamps, set World > Strength to 0.0, put a plane with Emission shader above the product and play with the settings until the shadow is correct. Now hide the product from the camera like you did with the floor in the other scene.

Now both scenes are setup for rendering. In the Compositor, choose a Render Layer Node  for the shadow scene and use an Alpha Over Node with a white colour to put the shadow on a white background. Add a second Render Layer Node for the product scene and place it above the shadowed background with another Alpha Over Node.

If you hit F12 now to render the image, both scenes will be rendered and composited together.

You can now maybe save the setup as a stage for other products. If you want to change something on the product or the floor without having to create the shadow scene again it's best to make those objects linked duplicates, so any changes will apply to both of them. It's important that they're not the same objects just linked to both scenes, otherwise they cannot have different viisibility settings.
A last side note on rendering with Color Management set to Filmic: because it has a much higher dynamic range, the 'normal' white with a brightness of 1 will usually be a light grey instead of pure white. To achieve pure white in Filmic the background white must have a brightness of around 16.19 - which means, the shadow seems to disappear. Considering you want to render with Filmic it would be the best only composite the shadow and product over a transparent background and add the white in another program like Photoshop, Gimp etc.
//Edit: I've uploaded a file where I show the things described in the comments.


Where can I change the background color of the notification in the Info header? I'm using a theme, but I can't find the settings of this message which is almost unreadable. In the User Preferences / Theme / Info-tab  are only a few colors to configure. I also searched in the User Interface settings for something like 'Error Message', but I couldn't find anything. Is there any way to change the color of this GUI component?

To my knowledge it cannot be changed, it is defined by the Box group in the User Interface tab. The only bits of it I could change were the border color and the gradient. The text color is changed globally it seems.

One workaround you could use is to tick the shaded check box and set both values to 100, this gives a bright white which might help against a darker color.

Default

Brighter


FIXED: Glossy Shader in cycles Render rendering with White particles For my project i made a model of a room inside of Google Sketchup (2014), which was then imported as a .dae file,
i added a plane to use as the mirror (because sketchup cannot raytrace (make mirror surfaces)).

I used www.chocofur.com/6-shadersamptextures.html for the nodes (specifically the 100% reflectivity one found there)

yet when it renders there are white particles left-over (which are not there without the "mirror")

EDIT: So i found a way to greatly reduce the fireflies, i did this by mixing two scenes, the end result now looks like this

Fireflies were reduced via mixing two different scenes which were duplicates of each other, however one was rendered with a seed of 10 while the other had a seed of 0.
(Only 100 samples were used to test this so the quality is (hopefully) likely to go up when i do a full render with more samples)


Smoothing overlapping spheres I have three spheres that overlap to form an eyeball shape and the seams looks terrible. How can I fix this?

Instead of using three separate spheres, use one sphere and extrude it (E):


Blender 2.79 Principled BSDF Shader + Substance Painter I want to have shiny paint on top of the metal material. I made a material in Substance Painter. If I use shaders from Andrew Price, I am able to achieve this effect. However if I try this with Principled shader, that shininess of the paint is gone. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

Advice would be much appreciated, thank you.

[![enter image description here][1]][1]

Found a problem. Hopefully my mistakes can be useful to someone.

When you are in substance painter. Make sure to turn off properties of the material which a material doesn't have. In my case "Paint" doesn't have metallic property.


New face affects close by faces I try to remodel a asset store asset. I have used the project knife  tool and now I try to add new faces to that cut out. I select four vetices and press F but it affects the UV of close by faces, see screenshot

Before

After

Thats a backface and shouldnt have UV at all.

edit: Ok so I followed this tutorial to get better topology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axCYMBRMXo0

It now looks better, but there is some strange changes here is the original model in unity, see how the reflection is applied to the PBR material

Now after my changes

My typology now looks like this

What you are seeing is Blender's smooth shading view trying to smooth out the appearance of the faces. Whenever you add new faces, you give Blender more faces to try and shade smooth. Before adding the face, the original face was an edge. Now you are telling Blender that it is actually a corner, and thus the shading is updated. Now, the other reason for how the shading looks is that the original face is an ngon, so it has more than 4 faces. Ngons are much more prone to shading issues, as they have to be triangulated before rendering, and this can lead to unexpected behavior. Especially in this case, you should try to avoid them. Look into trying to clean that up and make your topology better. There are plenty of resources out there for that, both on this site and elsewhere.