Is Blender a sensible environment for making a first-person orrery? I want to show simple views of various solar system phenomena from the perspective of an observer on a crudely simulated Earth (basically a ball with some relief bumps as pseudo-mountains to provide some guide to rotations of the view, etc). The phenomena of interest are things like the tracks of the sun and moon at various latitudes/times of year, eclipses, and planetary motion. Somewhat unusually for a Blender question the graphical quality isn't important, instead I hope to get a high degree of automation. Taking the example of a sun track from dawn to dusk, I hope it's possible to place a camera on a bumpy globe, set the camera to point to the sun, and then simply rotate the globe (mountain bumps and camera included) - this seems a lot easier than using the API to slide the mountains and camera around the surface of a smooth globe. At the same time the other planets would be moving in their orbital paths (ideally ellipses, though for simple didactic work circles are probably good enough)

From my reading and (ignorant) playing with Blender I'm unsure whether this approach of forming a complex object (with attached camera) and then moving it is well within normal use or whether that's going to be an uphill struggle to use Blender in some other product's native domain (e.g. CAD/CAM). Part of my difficulty is that as a rank amateur I lack even the usual vocabulary so may be overlooking some clear guidance in the FAQ (etc).

How are you looking to present said orrery, are you planing on taking a few simple screenshots or full realistic renderings?

Will you be presenting some static images, or are you thinking of animations or video? Or perhaps even an interactive/real time game-like demo?

Either way all you want to achieve seems pretty reasonable and relatively withing reach.
Blender has good animation and modeling capabilities that suffice for what you want to do.

Since you say you lack the vocabulary and terminology here are some quick keywords and that may be useful for your research and to get you on the right track.

You may need to look into animation and mostly constraints stuff, also Curve path Animations and Follow track. Look for tutorials youtube, there should be plenty to get you started

If you are looking to make some sort of interactive or game-like real time first person demo Blender Game engine may be useful, even though it's considered outdated and stalled in development.

A more flexible and modern approach may be WebGL based solutions like blend4web


How to return to the default view that you see when blender starts? I was wondering if anyone knew how to reset the viewing angle to what it was at the startup. I just want to reset it to that view, not reload startup file or load factory settings or anything. I want to have this viewpoint

but still have all the work that I did.

If you want to reset the default viewport view and not the camera view,run this in text editor :

import bpy

vm = ((0.41, -0.4017, 0.8188, 0.0),(0.912, 0.1936, -0.3617, 0.0),(-0.0133, 0.8959, 0.4458, 0.0),(0.0, 0.0, -14.9892, 1.0))

for area in bpy.context.screen.areas:
    if area.type == 'VIEW_3D':
        v3d = area.spaces[0].region_3d
        if v3d :
            v3d.view_matrix = vm
            v3d.view_perspective = 'PERSP'

if you are wondering where those values are from , i simply started the default scene and used
print(v3d.view_matrix) to get the default coordinates.


Make a 2D sprite from an object's shape This involves using GIMP to get the shape of objects from Blender. How do I get the shapes of my objects, as seen from the camera view, and make them a single colour, with an invisible background? Is there a way to do this with total accuracy, and possibly as a vector image?

Basically, how do you do the computer version of tracing an object from a photo and colouring it in, all one colour, (with no outline afterwards), but with complete precision.

So, a blue vase, seen from an angle, would turn into something like this, but with an invisible background, not so pixelated and in GIMP instead of paint:

I'd rather not share my work (which is on my desktop PC, which has a broken internet connection) and have my idea stolen, so I shouldn't provide screenshots of it. Sorry.

In the "Scene" tab go to "Passes" and enable "Object Index". Then select the object you want and go to the "Object" tab. Under "Relations" you will find the "Pass Index". Give it a value, example: 1.
Then go to the compositor and add an ID mask node and a File output node like this:

Set the ID mask node to whatever your object's index is example: 1.
You will get a Black and white image of the silhouette of the object.
Make sure to have a decent resolution so that your image is not pixelated.
Hope this is what you were looking for.


Extruding Plane goes 3D I'm new to Blender and am working through a few tutorials via YouTube, but have encountered a problem that isn't shown in the video. When I loop cut then extrude a 2D plane using E then X, it creates extra faces to make the extruded section 3D (as shown in image). Am I doing something wrong or is there an option somewhere I need to change?

Thanks in advance.
Andrew.

You are in face select mode and it appears that you extruded a face along the Z axis. Use Ctrl + Tab > Edge to change to Edge Select Mode to grab and extrude edges. However make sure that you have removed or undone the face extrude operation before this.


EEVEE not rendering Grease Pencil lines as expected I'm testing out the basic functions of the Grease Pencil by drawing some sketchy lines on simple objects. In the viewport, when in Render mode, the lines look as expected. When I render them in EEVEE (F12), some of them appear broken. I've quite literally gone through all the different render settings in EEVEE (including new settings like anti-aliasing for GP), and on the Grease Pencil object itself, and have not found anything to make these appear correctly when rendering.

I've attached a screenshot of the difference between the viewport & a final render. This is the same in 2.82a, 2.83 beta, 2.90 alpha & is driving me nuts (especially because it's the same render engine?!)..

Any tips would be appreciated on how to get them to render correctly like they do in the viewport (without using Cycles - the lines appear correctly there).

EDIT: I've tried things like turning off bloom, AO, etc - basically tweaked everything in the EEVEE render settings with no luck.

Thanks!

After lots of rage & trial/error, I have a workaround for this:

Add an Offset modifier to the Grease Pencil object
Try changing the Location value by + or - 0.01 on whichever axis will move the GP object closer to the camera & away from the 3D object.

I'm assuming this is a bug in Blender, causing the GP object to be considered closer to the 3D object it's near. For animation, I've keyframed the Location value of the Offset modifier & increase it when the camera zooms out & causes this issue. Then when I zoom back in (to where it renders correctly), I keyframe the Location value back to 0.

Hope this helps somebody.


How to merge faces without creating new shapes I'm in the process of learning how to create models with Blender.
Right now I'm trying to create a circle with a hole in the middle, for that i create a simple circle and then I extrude with this result:

I then proceed to select all the faces and I press F.
I can do this but at the last face this happens

Why this happens and how con I avoid it? The goal is to have a ring with only one face, export it to fbx and import in Unreal Engine.
For reference, this is the end result I'm aiming for:

I've also tried to do the same on a vertical axis and this happens (images before and after some merges):

If you create 2 unfilled circles and press F, they will fill independently, Blender won’t fill the gap between them. If you put the small circle inside the big one, it’s the exact same situation, the same thing will happen.

This explains what’s happening with your ring, if you delete all the faces within the ring, Blender can’t guess the 2 circles are supposed to be linked to each other, it will fill both the outer and the inner circle but won’t fill the gap between them.
To do so you need to create at least 2 edges between the outer and the inner circle , then in Edge Select mode select each face and fill.


Add Outline to the Edge of Faces of an Object I know there is an outline option in post-processing, but is there a way to get an outline on the edges of each face of an object?

The Wireframe Modifier can do what you are asking. Note that it will add some extra geometry, so that may or may not be an option for some use cases.

Under the options for the modifier, you will want to uncheck replace original, and change the material offset to 1.

Add two materials to your object, the material in slot 2 will be the material for the wireframe. If needed, you can change the material offset to 2 or 3, and the material slot for the wireframe will go to 3 or 4, and so on.

This is how the material slots look for Suzanne below:

And the result:


What does "data" inside standalone game mean in the Blender License? The Blender License says that games you create with blender are not covered by their license, however, any "data" inside "standalone" games are subject to the license.

  Games created in Blender (.blend files) are program output and therefore not covered by the GPL. You can consider them your property, and license or sell them freely. With stand-alone games however, any data that is included inside the actual stand-alone executable is covered by the GPL. If this is a problem then you should set up the stand-alone player so it reads from external .blend files. A common practice is to include a “please wait, loading…” scene in the standalone, and read level files externally.

As I understand it, all software is technically "data", so I was wondering what exactly this was referring to. Does it refer to the parameters of the object, like, say, for example, the coordinates of a cube's vertices? Maybe the height of a character, the high score of a player?

Thank you for your time.

If you use an addon to export your game in BGE (Build Game, Game Engine Publishing, etc), the addon will attach your blend file at the end of blenderplayer executable. This way, your blend file is part of the executable, so your blend file must comply the GNU GPL license.

To avoid this, you can keep your blend files external to the executable and simply run them through the Game > Start Game From File actuator, so that your blend files can comply any license you want.

Alternatively, you can run the blenderplayer through command line, with a batch / shell script. I've made this tool using this method, you may find its information useful.


how do i change 24 fps to 60 fps without affecting the speed? i tried time remmaping but that messed up the keyframes and i really dont want to rekeyframe my animation. like when i set 24 fps to 60 fps and put 24 in old and 60 in new the speed is fine but the keyframes end way after. i dont have anything more to put here. this is all that i tried and i searched everything and found only a tiny bit of people who were in this situation.
edit: i'll explain it better. when i time remap my blender animation from 24 to 60 (old: 24 new: 60) and put framerate to 60. the speed is fine but the keyframes in the timeline get very desincronized (if thats how you say it)

There is a time remapping option to remap your speed under the Render Dimension panel:

After the remapping, you need to calculate the end time by your self.
And also, you can directly "scale" the animation inside your time line as you do in 3D View (press s). As 24 to 60, press 2.5 in your numpad should give you a correct result
The keyframe and animation is kind of complicate and give various option to tweak and customize the result. Give it a try and if still having problem, list more detail on what you've encountered with clear figure or good structured text description.


How should I create a realistic landscape based on a real place? I'm making a short film about a flying carpet, and the background plate for the green screen needs to be CG.

I have this model based off terrain data of the actual location taken from Open Street Map:

And I need to make it look kind of like this, except photorealistic:

What's the best way to do this? I'm using Cycles by the way. Any help would be appreciated.

This is a quite long task to do.

First you'll also need some texturing for the ground.

Then you'll need to have the models of all the building, then texture every one of them. Then the same thing for the roads and so on...

Their is an addon call blenderGiS (https://github.com/domlysz/BlenderGIS) which can take care of importing google data, i.e. building (the one google knows the shape) and road (it import the road a curves i believe).

This solve partially the problem of how to get all the 3D model in blender. However, you'll have to do some modelling for the road or if you want very realistic building model since google has only the very low poly models of building.

Then you need to texture everything.... So good luck !


Fitted, Flushed, Twisting Clothing I am trying to make a flowing twisting detail for a clothing set. If you look at photo #1 you will see that it is flushed against the characters arm. That is what I want. However , I do not want it to be in that shape. Photo #3 is how I want the detail to appear, flushed and twisting perfectly around the arm.

Photo #2 is simply the curve from photo #3, but with depth. Shrink wrap does not produce the desired effect.

The method used in photo #1 is simply selecting faces, duplicating and solidifying.

I have been trying to fix this for a very long time and nothing I do produces the desired effect. I obviously could just model and sculpt this, but being that I have hundreds of pieces that need this type of effect, I would like to complete this before the next decade.

Thanks for reading.

Considering you have hundreds of pieces like this, I am not sure this approach is good enough, but this is the best I have found so far.

The principle is to use a small square with an array, make it follow the curve and shrinkwrap it :

That can be also done using a bevel object with the curve, but the array allows to handle easier the polycount.

Doing that, the main problem is to align the twist / tilt of the curve so that all is aligned along the arm (same problem with a bevel object).

So I had to tilt Ctrl+T each vertex of the curve to align the band with the arm :

Once done, apply the modifiers and you can refine the model (a bit), for instance adding curve and stretch it a bit :


Can't select and delete an object Okay, so this thing, is for me very strange. It still might be very obvious, but I started with blender 4 days ago.

So what is happening is that when I am rendering my animation, I have a white wall and ground where the scene grid is.

Here is a screenshot when in render mode:

And here it is in material mode:

I would really like to remove this, and I have tried for hours now with no success. I tried to unlink "world" from the scene but then it got all dark when rendered.

If you have any idea of what could be causing this?

(I am making an animated minecraft intro)

Edit: I was told to do alt + h and then the wall and the ground was visible in material mode as well. Here is a screenshot.

But I can't find a way to delete it...  :/

Not a bug, no black magic needed to get rid of the object.

What you have is an object that cannot be selected. The selectable switch has been disabled.

Enable that, select the object and delete it!

Those icons on the outliner are toggle switches:

Eye to make the object visible in the viewport.

Arrow for selectability

Camera to enable the object for rendering.

Make yourself a favor and read the manual page for the outliner here: https://www.blender.org/manual/editors/outliner.html


inverse kinematics with bone constraints only work, if i stop cursor movement and release mouse button Is it normal, that my inverse kinematics movement which is restricted by a bone constraint only works, if i release the mouse button?
e.g. -> movement restricted to x rotation. I can move with IK in any direction, so it "ignores" my constraint. If i release the mouse button, the position will be corrected.
video here: https://youtu.be/KavMfJzCESE
blend file:

Okay, so after seeing the .blend, I was wrong in my comment.  (Because there have apparently been some changes made to how Blender handles IK.)  However, these changes made to Blender aren't really great changes, and I'm still going to recommend doing it the old fashioned way.
So, first, let's explain what's going on.  You are moving the chain via IK.  The IK algorithm doesn't know about the limit rotation constraints that you've set for the IK bones, so while you're moving it, it's not using any these constraints.  However, at the point that you confirm, it's then evaluating those constraints and so changing the bones' transforms.
Limiting the angles of IK with limit rotation constraints is, well, kinda hacky.  Hopefully obviously here.  (Limit rotation is a deceptively hard constraint to use well anyways, for reasons that are spectacularly math-y, particularly in world space like you're doing here.)  It looks like Blender devs have tried to make it work, but it doesn't work well.
A much better way to get the IK you want is to delete these constraints and use IK angle limits and locks.  You can see these by selecting a bone in pose mode and then looking at properties/bone/inverse kinematics.  In this particular case, we want to lock Y and Z axes for all of the bones:

Note that these are no longer world-space limits on your rotation, like you had with your constraints, but I'd bet a lot of money that you didn't want them world-space anyways.
With this setup, it works fine for me-- but I'm still wary of the unusual structure.  It's typical with an IK setup to designate a target for the IK constraint, but if this works for you, that's fine.  The more typical way to do this would be to put the IK constraint on Mid, give it a chain length of 2, duplicate and unparent Upper and designate this duplicate as the target of the IK constraint, and finally give Upper a copy rotation constraint targeting the duplicate.  (Which could be followed by a limit rotation if you wanted.)


Blender knife tool options So I'm 3d modeling a logo and there's one oddly shaped part that needs to be extruded. I am trying to use the knife tool to cut it out, but every time I finish it deletes the face. In the operator I can see the option that I obviously need to change, but it's grayed out saying redo unsupported. What do I do?

N-gons with a hole

Currently holed-ngons (e.g. a doughnut section) are not supported. If in the cutting process you are creating one of those, the software will try its best in finding a way to continue anyway (in this case by splitting the ngon in two and as a side effect deleting th inner face).

In the picture below you can see the difference of behaviour of the command upon the same mesh but with different topology:

I suggest to continue knife projecting the shape as you were doing and then simply re-fill the boundary with a new face. Just select the hole boundary and press F or with another method (e.g. fill holes operator).


How to hide Relationship Lines in 2.8 You used to be able to hide the dotted lines of a Parent Relationship by going to the Display tab and disabling the checkbox of "Relationship Lines". That option cannot be found there anymore. Where is it now?

In 2.80 all things that displays on top of the renderable objects calls overlays. You can edit what do you want to display in viewport in this Overlays popover:


Is it possible to make visible spotlight lightrays? I'm using a Spotlight on one of my scenes, first I planned to make the effect of the lightrays on other editing software, but maybe it's possible on Blender. It is possible to make a spotlight look like the image below? (also, I'm using cycles)

Thanks in regard! :)

Yes, this is now very easy to do efficiently. Add a spot lamp where you want it, and then add a cube and edit to just barely contain the spot lamp:

Make the material of the cube as shown. Note that the Transparent shader is not necessary, and you can leave the Surface input blank. However you can have a surface material and a volume material at the same time.

Then add a plane as the ground and render:

Since the volume is so small to render, it renders very quickly, this test render took about 3.5 seconds.

If you want to move your spot lamp, just parent the mesh to it with CtrlP > Object.


Why Does My Mesh Move When Attaching Armature? I have a mesh and I have an armature that I placed within the mesh. I select the mesh, I select the armature whilst holding shift, then I do a Ctrl+P to attach the armature. I click Armature Deform with Automatic Weights, and suddenly my entire mesh decides it needs to be somewhere else and moves to some new location--the bones are no longer within as they remain where they were. What gives? Why is my mesh moving away from the bones?

To fix this follow the below steps:

1- Select your armature and hit ctrl+A

2- Hit Apply Rotation

3- Do step 1 again and hit Apply Scale then again and Apply Location

4- Select your mesh and do steps from 1-3 again.

5- Voila, it will work :)


Grease Pencil Help - Placing 2D Stroke Animation Over 3D Mesh Object? I'm pretty new to Blender so I'm testing out its different capabilities, particularly in Grease Pencil mode, but I've found myself stuck and would appreciate some help.

https://youtu.be/IWZDvbiEMNE

The link above shows my issue. I'm working in Blender Grease Pencil 2.8, and while I've figured out a decent way to use a 3D mesh object as a reference to draw stroke lines over (first half of the video), I can't figure out how to have my 2D animation, the stroke lines, on TOP of the 3D object (from the camera's viewpoint), as if the ball were bouncing up the 3D mesh. Instead, the planes of the drawings are slicing THROUGH the mesh, when I just want them to be the top "layer," if that makes sense. Since the 3D stairs are not a stroke layer, I can't just place it below the strokes, and I've tried moving the 2D animation closer to the camera itself but that screws up everything, in regards to camera movement and angles of the stroke planes. There must be a simpler way of accomplishing this than just compositing two separate renders, one of the stairs and one of the strokes, but I don't know how. Any tips or solutions would be greatly appreciated!

(I tried to search for an existing topic about this but couldn't find it, so apologies if this has been asked before.)

I guess it wouldn't be a problem in Blender 2.79. There was an option to keep the grease pencil always on top of 3d objects (it was called x ray i think). In 2.8 You have to be really carefull while chosing position of your grease pencil object, and the mode of drawing (origin, 3d cursor etc.)  I would make the bouncing ball a separate grease pencil object, and animate it's positon first, making sure that the GP object stays on top of the 3d stairs, and then make handdrawn part. Or you could use the the "3d cursor" drawing mode, and make sure that the cursor is on correct place on every keyframe. Or finnaly You could just send the the handdrawn part and 3d staircase to different view layers, and finish it in the compositor (putting the ball animation on top of the stairs) But still, you got the part at the end, where the ball is supposed to be behind the stairs. I would go for the first solution. Not sure if it helps you, but I do some intense research on GP as well and still have to learn a lot about Blender


How to separate all faces I have a default torus

In edit mode i have duplicate 2 times and select all and Press P key i get 3 option by loose parts and when i click get 3 torus separate in outliner.

But when i select the single torus in edit mode select all the faces and hit P key and select loose parts and nothing happens. Here im not getting all the faces separate like the torus separated above.

How can i get separate loose faces. Is there any addon or how can i get all 576 faces separate.

You can avoid the modifier step: as said above in comments,

in edit mode, select all faces
then use CTRLE to split all edges

now all faces are unconnected (note the vertices/edges count increased)
then select all and press P to split by "loose parts"

now you have an indipendent object for each face


How to smooth or blur a procedural texture? I am looking for a way to smooth/blur the edges of a crunched procedural texture using nodes. (for example a noise texture)
The way I want to do this is by placing 'the solution node setup' between nodes for full control.
Also, is it possible to have the scaling of the blur always match the input size?
(so that the image won't get blurred more or less when aplied to a different model.)

I want to achieve a result like the image shown below:

PS: feel free to edit the question if my english confuses you :)

To blur such a procedural texture, you can't simply add a 'blur' node or similar at the point you indicate. Instead, you need to manipulate the input Vector to distort the texture and then rely on the Render Samples to produce the blurring.

One easy way of achieving this is to add the nodes shown.

Use the relevant output of the Texture Coordinate node (Generated, Object, UV, etc) depending on how you want the texture (and blurring) to be applied. The 'Subtract' node is set to its default (mid-gray) with factor set to 1.000 - this is to adjust the Noise texture to ensure the blurring is even. The Noise texture is set to a very high scale and the Factor of the Add node can be adjusted to change the strength of the blur (0 = no blur, 1.0 is maximum blur).

As mentioned, you should set your Render Samples (on the Render properties) to a higher value so as to allow the rendering enough samples to produce a clean 'blur'.

Examples showing no blurring and blurring :


Every time I click an ico sphere appears I have no idea what I clicked but every time I click on the screen an ico sphere appears. I don't want this. How do I get rid of it??

If you are using version 2.8 and if you are referring to the 3D Cursor, you can hide it in Overlays > 3D Cursor (uncheck).


Object change places in render view I have an object that I di some sculpting on. After baking a displacement map, I wanted to try it out and see if it works. As the scene was dark, I decided to add a light, and things got worse in a way that I didn't expect. I'm not really sure what's going on, but when I change the view mode from material view to render view, my object changes its location. Does anyone have an idea what is going on and how can I fix it?

You need to plug the texture color into the height, and not the normal input of the displacement node.
You can play with the scale field if the displacement seems too high.


Moving parent in world causes copy locations to act odd I am trying to create a model of my sons toy train and am using a mixture of parented and copy location and rotation constraints to get the wheels and connecting rods to animate correctly.

My differs from a normal piston style train as the body of the train moves with the motion. Here is a gif of what I have so far:

The trouble I am having is when I try to reposition the whole train whether it be by moving it in the world or by rotating it.

The following image shows what happens after moving my Train parent in the Y-Axis.

As you can see, the body has become separated from the cab.

I have spent hours trying to solve this issue with no luck. I have tried adding a limit location constraint as proposed in this question but couldn't get this to work either.
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Instead of the crank's motion driving the body back and forth, I elected to keyframe the body's animation and synch that up with the crank's motion...

Here's how...

Position the crank with one of it's ends hinged at the rear wheel's crank-pin.   Set it's Point of Origin at the pin's center.

Use the "Track to" constraint to always look at the front wheel nut.

Rotate the rear wheels 360 degrees over the desired frame range for speed of rotation.

Make sure the two keyframes are set to "Linear" interpolation.
(select keyframes in Dope sheet and press T)

Step the timeline cursor to the 2nd last frame and insert another rotation keyframe.

Delete the last rotation keyframe.  This is to avoid a one-frame pause when at the next frame, we loop back to the first rotation frame again.

Play the animation and check that both keyframes are indeed linear.  If unsure, check the graph editor.  There should be a straight line (no curvature) in the transformation.

Set the view into Ortho Mode and from the side view and at frame 1, position the crank (in the Y axis only) over the front wheel nut as desired.

Add an object or mesh circle and center it at the front wheel nut's center.  Make it a child of the crank.

Duplicate the marker and move it out in the X axis slightly, parent that to the Wheel nut.

These are going to be reference markers with which to keep the front wheel in the same relative horizontal position with respect to the crank.  (i.e. keep both markers aligned in the Z axis by moving the body (boiler) in the Y axis only)

Step to frame 2, Drag the body (boiler) in the Y axis so both markers are aligned in the Z axis again.

Repeat this over the full number of frames you've got so far.  (29 frames?)

Save the project under a different filename.  (One_Rev.Blend?)
This will be a return reference point which you can always come back to.

In the Dope Sheet, duplicate all keyframes for the rear wheel's rotation and Body's animation and slide them to the right, one frame on from the final keyframe.

Check that out, make sure there's no jitter between each revolution.

Repeat the copy procedure, doubling the animation frames each time until you have sufficient.

Check it, make sure the crank isn't slopping around the front wheel nut.  LCD screens may make it appear to be doing this but if you switch off the nut's visibility you will see that it's not.

If a slow down is required at the end, the Body's keyframes will need to be realigned for those slow-down frames.

The model is now ready to follow a path or be moved about manually or keyframed.

Save the project.  This can be used for other projects that wish to use the loco.

-=============-

Repeat Loop-backs for the extended animation would be a desirable alternative to the duplication process but in Vers 2.77a it appears you either have "cyclic" for a dopesheet strip, or you don't.  There's no Bezier + Linear + Bezier again to start off slowly or slowdown at the end that I can see.


Bringing extruded plane to one level I have extruded a plane, and I did this all from the front-view.

I am not sure how this could be happen, but when I switch to side-view, I can see that the plane was also moved on some other axis.

It is not an even plane anymore.
Can somebody tell me how to bring it back to one level again and perhaps also tell me how to avoid something like this in the future?
Thank you!
ps: And if somebody could also tell me how to bring the leftmost vertices to one level on the blue axis to allow for mirroring, I would be very thankful as well! Thank you.

I presume, you want to flatten the mesh, to do this select all the faces and press S + Y + 0.

This should give you the flat plane you are looking for.

In future when modelling, you can replace "Y" with any axis and also when extruding planes, be sure that in the side view the face/edge is flat so that you can extrude worry free in the appropriate orthographic view.


Image stretching after Render Everytime I press render, the image comes out distorted, I've tried changing lens, views, type of camera to no avail.

judging from your outliner you might have a hidden mesh/object.

Try Alt+ H


Invert weight paint values with modifier Is there a way to invert the weight values of a vertex group in the modifier stack?

Yes. (Besides being able to invert the influence of the vertex group in many of the modifiers, by hitting the small double-arrow icon next to the Vertex Group field....)

If you want to invert the group itself, you can use the Vertex Weight Mix modifier targeted on the group (here, 'Group'), and mix with an anonymous Group B, with B's default weight set to 1, and the Mix Mode set to 'Difference'.

(Excuse the grotty color quantization)


Freestyle is not exporting with the object Here is what it looks like in Blender Render (Not Cycles).

This is how I set it up.

Basically, I'm trying to export it, but it's not including the "Freestyle" lines.
When I open up the .dae file in Finder, it looks like this:

What is wrong here? I want it to be exported (COLLIDA .dae) with the black outline. I'm seeming to think that maybe the "Freestyle" is only for the Blender Render. Am I right? How would I go about getting the black outline included in my exported model? Is it an export setting I have to tick?
Thanks for any helpful answers.

As mentioned in the comments the cartoon-style black outline is an image only effect done internally in post production over the rendered image, it does not affect the model nor is it part of the geometry, there fore it cannot be exported in any file format other than a rendered image, or at best as an SVG vector file (using the Freestyle SVG Exporter addon), you can then place over your image.

Where are you exporting your model in COLLADA too? Some Game engine? Other modelling application? You will most likely need to recreate the outline effect there in the destination software.

Otherwise if you actually want to have it in-model with actual geometry there are a few other options.

Either us a wireframe modifier over your objects to construct a cage-like structure over you mesh
Use a Bevel modifier on your mesh with a material index offset

Manually bevel your geometry and assign different materials
UV Unwrap your model and use an image texture, created in an external image editing software with the desired black edges in the correct places along the edges.


Cannot edit single NURBS curve control points after changing its properties If I do the following:

Add a NURBS curve
Select a control point
Press N and change its y property to 0.0
Repeat this step for all the control points of the NURBS curve

Then I'm unable to edit the single control point: if I select a single control point and try to move it, the whole NURBS curve with all the control points are displaced. It seems like the curve becomes a whole object whose single points cannot be modified. If instead I just change the x,y,z values of the single control points through the panel they are edited singularly.

Sounds like you unintentionally pressed O key by accident and turned on Proportional editing.

Try disabling it in the 3D view toolbar at the bottom of the screen


View3D operations problem Currently i am trying to change the viewport of the 3D View window using a python script. I am using this function

bpy.ops.view3d.viewnumpad(type='TOP');

But it always get this error

  RuntimeError: Operator bpy.ops.view3d.viewnumpad.poll() failed,
  context is incorrect

The same error is gotten when I use this function

bpy.ops.view3d.view_persportho();

Waht is the problem?

import bpy

for area in bpy.context.screen.areas:
    if area.type == "VIEW_3D":
        break

for region in area.regions:
    if region.type == "WINDOW":
        break

space = area.spaces[0]

context = bpy.context.copy()
context['area'] = area
context['region'] = region
context['space_data'] = space

bpy.ops.view3d.viewnumpad(context, 'EXEC_DEFAULT', type='TOP')
bpy.ops.view3d.view_persportho(context, 'EXEC_DEFAULT')

or without operators:

from mathutils import Quaternion

r3d = space.region_3d
r3d.view_perspective = "ORTHO"
#default - look down z-axis
r3d.view_rotation = Quaternion((1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0))


How to creat a mecha style mesh for character? I try to creat a mesh look like following pics. I want to make a torso for my character.
Please give me some tips or tutorials?

You should study and use:

extrude (E key)
move edges and vertexes (G key)
fill faces (F key)
inset (i key)


How to rename all text objects by individual text content? I have about 70 text objects in a scene that I neglected to rename as they were created, thus quickly making a disorganized mess in my outliner.

Is there some script or some other trick that will efficiently speed up renaming all text objects by the content of the text?

For example, if the content of the text object is "Blender" the object name should be Blender (or TXT_Blender if prefix is used). Although it would be useful for further organization, I am not too concerned with adding a prefix to the object names at the moment.

I know that I could copy/ paste each text to rename, but an automated solution would save a tremendous amount of time, considering the number of objects at this point.

import bpy

for ob in bpy.data.objects:
    if ob.type == 'FONT':
        ob.name = ob.data.body[:10]


When animate nodes names are translated, the Chinese will not display properly Obviously he only supports English, but what can I do to make it show Chinese
(I tried Unicode)

def setup(self):
    self.label = "B网格网格BMesh Mesh"

great！


How do I make array move together? I'm new to blender and I'm trying to follow a low poly flower tutorial but when it says to add an array modifier for the petals and then move them up they turn into a spiral. How do I get them to move together?

It's because your empty is not at the same location as your object origin, so the distance between the origin and the empty shifts the iterations. What you can do is:

Select the object
Press ShiftS > Cursor to Selected
Select your empty
Press ShiftS > Selection to Cursor

It should work.


Eevee Preview Render from Python As part of my Bachelor thesis I'm looking to render a live preview of the model on the RealFiction Dreamoc HD3, a holographic display with three viewing directions.

Using bpy.ops.render.render() is too high quality, resulting in the three renders of the default scene (a plain cube) taking ~0.5 seconds, far from the desired 30 fps. Even rendering at decreased resolution (1280x720) and one side per frame leaves my addon at ~0.12s, still far above 0.0333s.

It would seem the only option is to render at "editing" quality, i.e. the quality the user can see on the main display, but I haven't been able to find anything on this in the documentation. Is this even possible?

Not direct answer, but maybe helpful if you choose the way of the viewport.
The viewport is mainly faster because the GPU pushes the image directly to the screen instead of copying it back to the cpu for colomanagement and other calculations. So using the viewport, maybe directly pipelining it to whatever other output you seek might be one of the fastest solutions possible.

More detail below, basically a question and answer to and from a blender developer:
https://youtu.be/YqOs-VwehuM?t=1175

Rough transcript:

Question: "...but along those lines I've noticed that when I try to render out the EEVEE viewport, it's
significantly slower, even if I'm just rendering out as if in the OpenGL viewport in 2.79 when I'm just
trying to render out hte viewport settings equivalently I get significantly slower render times and if
I'm trying to render out a significant portion of a significant frame count I can preview it at 60 fps,
but when I render it out it's something like 5 fps ..."

Answer: "...basically when you do it in the viewport it's rendered by the GPU and it's displayed directly on
the GPU so that's fast and if you are doing a play back blast (?) in the viewport it only calculates a single
sample. So when you render to an image a lot other stuff will happen. It renders 64 samples, but that's
not the main case that happens. What happens next is that the GPU in image is copied back to the CPU
and on modern GPUs that's a really slow process, you can only do it 20 times per second. That's the main burden
of that. Why do we copy it back to the CPU? That's for the color-management that's for the sequencer, that's for the
compositor."


Baking Glass and Glossy materials Cycles I'd like to ask if what is the proper method for baking textures in blender. I've followed a tutorial from blender guru but the problem is that the baked results for the glossy and glass materials are not as good as the original. Does this have something to do with how I bake them or something else?

Baked

Original

Thanks in advance

Baking for RT Render Engines explained

One of the common misconceptions about baking is that people think they can use a render engine to "bake" materials for game assets.

In reality you can bake only certain aspects of a material into a texture. These are obviously diffuse maps, normal maps, displacement maps,  ambient occlusion maps and certain hybrid forms of them ("albedo" as a new term for "diffuse + light/shadow values", for example). Furthermore you can bake certain "helper maps" to help a RT render engine to generate physically based or dynamic aspects, like specularity and lightmaps.

Specularity maps are black and white or greyscale images that are are processed by any real-time render engine where black is interpreted as non-specular while white represents the opposite on that scale. They work, similar to normal and displacement maps, as non-color maps.

Lightmaps are similar to ao maps a static representation of light and shadow and their primary use is to reduce the GPU load on shadow calculation.

Other material aspects like transparency, translucency, reflection and refraction of glass-like materials cannot be "pre-baked", since they depend on the render engine's capabilities and techniques to generate them. If your game render engine is capable to recreate these effects, they have to be created in the game engine's material editor.

If this explanation answers your question, please mark it as accepted.


How to get rid of these artifacts? I am brand new to Blender. Currently creating donut with tutorial series from Blender Guru and immediately run into problem. Do you have any ideas how to get rid of these ugly artifacts in object mode?

Use reasonable view port clipping range in your 3D view, please.

There are fixed amount of precision degree in view port (32 bit perhaps?). If you make the view port cover range too large (from 0.000001 to 1000), it will cause z-fighting in your scene.

If you're doing that infamous tutorial, use these setting should handle your scene correctly.


Boid Particle System Collison Objects I'm looking for my boid particles to not intersect with my collison objects. I already changed the mesh to collision, and there are tiny areas where the dragonflies still pass through the mesh, as you can see on the right and front facing sides. I tried bumping up the inner and outer settings under collision, but those don't seem to have any effect.

Thanks!

While this isn't a direct solution to the issue of collison, something else that works is placing a slightly smaller collision box within my box above and setting the material to transparent. The dragon flies slightly go through that inner collision object but prevent anything from showing on the outside.


Is there a custom character creator addon in Blender? Basically I’m trying to make some characters in sculpt mode, I can do it but it takes me a good few days to make it look the way I want and then it comes to texturing and that’s where it all falls apart, I can’t get them to look right.

I wonder if there is a custom character creator addon. What I'm looking for is sort of like The Sims character creator with sliders and pre-textured skin and hair and pre-exsisting facial features.

Ideally I want as high resolution and realistic as possible, it’s for a card game so poly count does not matter and they don’t need to be rigged I can add that bit later on, clothing is not much of a problem as I can make clothes

Was wandering if anyone on here knows of a add on like this or any other software that could do what I need, maybe I’m going about this all wrong and maybe you have an easier solution.

In addition to the already mentioned MakeHuman (which actually started as a Blender Add-on but is now a standalone application) there is also Manuel Bastioni Lab.

It is a Blender Addon that allows parameter driven custom character creator directly inside the Blender viewport, in a similar vein to MakeHuman.

It can create realistic human figures as well as fantasy or anime themed characters.


Can't join 2 vertices I tried all day to connect those 2 points but I can't for some reason. I keep pressing F but it doesn't work. I tried ctrl+J, didn't work

You can edit multiple meshes in edit mode since Blender version 2.80 and the operation you are trying to perform is for a single mesh. Make sure it's a single mesh. Go into object mode and join the meshes if they are separate with Ctrl+J


can we send vertex info to voronoi texture node to create texture Can I use the vertices of a mesh as an input for site points of the voronoi cells (voronoi sites) to create a voronoi procedural texture with the Node Editor for the very same mesh?

I need something simpler (no extra features, no real time update necessary), but kinda similar like in this video, between 0:30 and 0:45.
https://youtu.be/Aljbw9PQlck?t=31

EDIT: The video is a bit misleading, cos it shows real time update, thought it would be nice (for easier edit) if possible but it isn't necessary. Main goal is a full control over the position of the cells.

The input mesh is suppose to be kinda a Delaunay-triangulation, except the 'triangulation' part, how the edges connect the vertices is not important only the vertices as site points for cells.

Animation Nodes can be used to dynamically generate voronoi diagrams. Storing the color information of the diagram and accessing it from the render engine is a problem and our options are limited, one option is to use vertex colors, where the quality depends on the number of loops in the target mesh.

Vertex Color

First, you should study how vertex colors works in blender and how to assign it using Animation Nodes and Python. For this, you should see  my answer here. I will be using the Vertex Sample and Vertex Colors subprograms defined there in my node trees, so make sure you implement them first.

A simple F1 vornoi diagram based on random points can be generated using a KD tree as follows:

If one wants to use custom points locations, then one should replace the random locations with the custom locations:

If you want to have a solid color for each voronoi cell, then the indices output can be used or a random number based on it:

You might notice that the quality starts to become rather low, and that is the downside of using vertex colors, they are dependent of the loop count.

The other options we have are not any nicer, but they might be suitable for some cased.

Screen Space Tracing

What we can do is make a small render engine of our own that renders the vornoi as a fragment shader and use the output in the more advanced render engine. The render engine will cast a number of rays on the mesh defined by a BVH Tree, get the location on the surface point they hit, use it in the KD Tree, and then write the output colors to an image. To write an image given the greyscale value of each pixel, its width, height and name, a script like this can be used:

if imageName in bpy.data.images:
    image = bpy.data.images[imageName]
    image.generated_width = width
    image.generated_height = height
else:
    image = bpy.data.images.new(imageName, width, height)

image.pixels = [v for color in colors for v in [color]*4]

The ray casting part is simple, align a grid with the camera orientation and location, scale it based on the orthographic scale (3 in my case), we will perform an extra 90 degree rotation around the local z axis because the grid node returns the locations in the vertically first order while blender expects a horizontally first order, the node tree is as follows:

You may see the rendered image in near realtime in the UV image editor

Now, if I used the Windows texture coordinates (Screen Space Coordinates) with a material like this:

We will get the render projected on our object, which we can then use to do what ever we want:

I created this to work in orthographic view, I will let you create the perspective version on your own.

Other methods include UV space projection, it can be done as following. BVH ray cast is used to get the index of the polygon the ray intersect, we get the barycentric coordinates of the surface point through a barycentric interpolation, we get the UV space locations of the polygon's corresponding UV polygon, perform a convex combination using the barycentric coordinates we computed before, get the pixel nearest to the result of the convex combination or use some kind of interpolation like bilinear or bicubic, write the color to it. The resulted image can be used in the UV objects space as a normal texture. I shall not explain this method, because it doesn't really have any advantages and is hard and slow to implement.


How to create a circular shaped grid, similar to a manhole cover I’m trying to create a circular shaped grid, similar to the one in the pic. That’s my first attempt, created by arranging several cylinders with an Array modifier and then cutting the holes via the Boolean modifier.

Now you will probably notice that it looks not elegant in any way. I’d like to have the holes perfectly arranged and in a correct order, so that there are no half holes at the border of the mesh, for example.

How would you do this?

I tried working with Dupliverts but that didn’t work out well.

A duplivert approach.

The aim here is to have a regular quad only geometry.

Here is the result with a bevel and a subsurface modifiers :

To begin :

Make a sixth of hexagon
Make a segment of length 1
Rotate the extremity 60°
Make a face
Rotate all back 30°

Subdivide it the amount of time you want, in order to create the driving vertices (there will be one circle per vertex)
Keep only the vertices

Complete this shape to be close to a circle, duplicating some vertices
Place the cursor at a pivot point and set it as pivot
Select and duplicate the wanted vertices
Mirror these copies along X : Ctrl+M then X

Add a circle with 12 vertices (that will be a good amount for the further tesselation, but you could choose more : see below)
Parent it to our sixth of hexagon
Set it duplivert
Adjust the size of the circles

We will now make the tesselation

First step, make the duplicates real (this detaches the dupli from the sixth of the hexagon)
Make them single user (as they are still a dupli of their original circle)
Join all (note that joining without making dupli single user will work too)
Remove the double (as the selection included the original circle)

Tesselation, second step, enter edit mode
Work on the sixth of one of the circle to link it to its neighbors, so that we obtain the 1/6 of the perimeter
Our goal is to make 'quad only' tesselation, using a 'minimum' of vertices

To do that :

Connect the neighbors, make a face, cut it
Once done for the three in this corner, scale the in between vertices to 0 and remove doubles

Now we have a 6th of what we want, spin it 6 time for 360°
Select the result and separate it

Back to the duplivert, parent this newly created hexagon to the initial 6th of hexagon composed of vertices
We obtain a regular tesselation

Again make duplicate real, join the objects, enter edit mode
Spin all 360 in six steps
Remove doubles
Adjust the normals

The last step : creating the outer circle
We have here 156 vertices in the peripheral
So we add 156 vertices circle around
Then bridge edge loops between
In order to smooth a bit the border, you can also add another outer circle

We are done (long to explain... but shorter to do !).

For information, my first though was to use particles as there is a hexagonal grid option for it. But it seems that there is no way to adjust it so that all the particles stay regularly into the circle. And as you can see, there is an angle between the particles alignment and the hexagon.


Magnetic Force fields I was wondering if it was possible for different magnetic fields to have different gravitational pulls or gravity levels? Just out of curiosity. I have 9 in total and want some to move in the opposite direction of the others. If so that would be great, if not no problem!

You can change the strength of each magnetic field independently to allow for variation. Use the "Strength" input to determine the force of the field.

Along with the strength value, you can also change values such as noise, the seed of the noise, flow and collision to fine tune the force fields to your liking.

Refer to the Blender Documentation for more information on force fields in Blender.

If you want a magnetic force field to push objects instead of pulling them, you can input a negative value in the strength input.

To select a force field, you can either find it in the objects list (The list at the top-right of your screen by default) or click on the empty object in your 3D view (An empty object is a coordinate rather than a mesh). It should look like this in your 3D view:

Hope this helps.


Blender Solidify for rc plane wing I am trying to print a wing for a rc plane with my 3D printer. In order to make the wing as light as possible I need to hollow it (put some stable structure there). I've tried the Blender Solidify modifier to do this but without success. The material on the sharp edge on the rear part of the wing gets thinner and thinner although the "Even Thickness" option is checked (see picture). When preparing this for printing, the slicer puts only one line of filament there instead of two. What I need is a brim on the inner side of the stl file with a constant spacing.

Can someone please help me? I would appreciate any suggestion or other programs which can handle this problem. I've already tried Meshmixer which also has problems with this sharp edge :-(

My Blender Solidify setup:
Thickness: 1.0
Offset: -1.0
Clamp: 2.0
Even Thickness: checked
High Quality: checked
Fill Rim: checked

The stl file of the wing can be found here: https://files.fm/u/5futezwj

Thanks so much for your help!

The acute angle in the trailing edge of the wing will result in the even thicknesses overlapping, I think the surest solution is a bit of remodeling.

Detach the faces constituting the outside of the trailing edge, P separate to a new object
Delete the appropriate inner faces of the rest of the wing, and fill the hole, to prepare to solidify the rest of the wing independently of the trailing edge
Solidify and apply the modifier
Recreate the hole for the trailing edge
Ctrl JRejoin the trailing  edge and the wing, Remove Doubles, tidy up.

This example treatment of your wing passes basic Manifold checks.


How to make use of custom external Python modules in Blender or an add-on on Linux The path for the Python executable used in Blender (up to 2.79) is not configurable.

I looked around and did not find a consistent way to be able to use custom  3rd party Python modules without installing then directly in the O.S. Python.

This would work, although not the ideal solution, but then I had issues with that in Linux, as running pip install system wide adds the modules to /usr/local/lib, but /usr/local is not the in the PYTHONPATH when Blender is started.

An active Python virtualenv - Python's own way of isolating 3rd party modules is ignored by Blender - as the way to activate a virtualenv is simply using it's Python binary (in a different Path than the one used by Blender).

update
I found out that the user-configuration folder for Blender, in ~/.config/blender/<version>/scripts/, though only containing   an addons folder by default, can have also a modules and a startup folder. If packages are pip-installed in the modules folder, they are visible from Blender, so, no custom virtualenv, or custom path manipulation at runtime is needed.

In other words, in a modern Linux, to have a Python package available for my user visible in Python's blender, I can do:

mkdir ~/.config/blender/2.79/scripts/modules
pip install -t ~/.config/blender/2.79/scripts/modules <python-package>

On Windows, the scripts folder for Blender will have a modules folder that can be used in the same way, as per the answers in the similar question here: Using 3rd party Python modules

previous answer

What I did do is a small Python function that is run prior to other imports in the add-on .py file to introspect the system Path and add any active virtualenv's to the Python import directory list sys.path.

The final function I came up with may be robust enough to help others. I add this to the beggining of my .py add-ons:

def fix_path():
    """Enable 3rd party Python modules installed in an
    active Virtualenv when Python is run.
    (Blender ignores the virtualenv, and uses a
    Python binary hardcoded in the build. This works
    if the virtualenv's Python is the same as blenders')
    """

    import sys, os
    from pathlib import Path

    pyversion_path = f"python{sys.version_info.major}.{sys.version_info.minor}"

    for pathcomp in os.environ["PATH"].split(os.pathsep)[::-1]:
        p = Path(pathcomp)
        if p.name != "bin":
            continue
        lib_path = p.parent / "lib" / pyversion_path / "site-packages"
        if not lib_path.exists():
            continue
        if str(lib_path) in sys.path:
            continue
        sys.path.insert(0, str(lib_path))

        print(f"{__name__} Add-on: prepended {lib_path!r} to PYTHONPATH")

fix_path()

(import statements follow)


Make Links Menu option I need to know how can we add in a custom option using python in the 'Make Links' menu which appears when Ctrl+L is pressed in the 3D view, as shown below:

It's bpy.types.VIEW3D_MT_make_links. For demonstration purposes I've added a 'Frame Rate' menu to 'Make Links' menu via append() method.

Frame Rate menu 'appended'

bl_info = {"name": "My Test Addon", "category": "Object"}

import bpy

class CustomFrameRateMenu(bpy.types.Menu):
    bl_label = "Frame Rate"
    bl_idname = "RENDER_MT_framerate_menu"

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

        #frame rate properties
        layout.prop(scene.render, "fps_base", text="FPS Base")
        layout.prop(scene.render, "fps", text="FPS")
        layout.menu("RENDER_MT_framerate_presets", text="Presets", icon="SCENE")

def draw_frame_rate_menu(self, context):
    layout = self.layout
    layout.menu(CustomFrameRateMenu.bl_idname)

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_module(__name__)

    # lets add the menu to Make Links menu
    bpy.types.VIEW3D_MT_make_links.append(draw_frame_rate_menu)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_module(__name__)

    # remove custom menu from Make Links menu
    bpy.types.VIEW3D_MT_make_links.remove(draw_frame_rate_menu)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

Further information you can find here: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/34490/3710


Mesh Face Count Different in Edit and Object Mode I'm new to Blender so go easy! I've modelled a bottle in Blender and I have a label on it. The label is really blocky so I increased the number of faces with the subdivide tool. Problem is this only shows in edit mode, in all other views, including render, the label is still blocky and I can't seem to smooth it out. No modifiers on it and if I do try and smooth it with a modifier it completely destroys the shape of the object which is just a plain cylinder. Top picture is edit mode with correct number of faces, bottom is object and that also follows for all other views.

So I guess your purpose was to create an object that looked smooth. To do it, first you need to press the Smooth Shading option in the Tools panel of your 3D View. Then you need to have a high-poly mesh. The easiest way to have a high-poly mesh is not to create a lot of edges, because it will be heavy and very tedious to work with, it's much better to fake it with a Subsurf modifier.

What I see is that you have both a high-poly and a Subsurf modifier, so as you don't have any reason to have a high-poly you have to go back to a low-poly, and keep your Subsurf to fake the high-polyness.

Also, about your Subsurf modifier, decrease the Subdivisions values to 2 and 2, and choose the Catmull-Clark option rather than Simple.

Now, despite having both a high-poly and a Subsurf, you still have a cylinder that looks squared. It's because the vertical edge loops are aligned on the same axis, 5 by 5, so they create faces. So even if the Smooth Shading + the Subsurf should make your cylinder look round, these aligned edge loops tend to flatten the faces.

So to fix this, either restart from scratch with a low poly cylinder (like for example 12 vertices), or delete the edge loops that create all these faces around your current cylinder.


Distribute and Edit Objects along Polygon I would like to create an object. Multiply it along the edges of a polygon (e.g. pentagon) and then by editing the original object, modify all the duplicated instances. Like a Mirror modifier but not along x/y/z but polygon axis. How is this possible ? Here an image of what I am looking for. The spheres are duplicated along the edges of the pentagon.

Thank you

Dupliverts should do exactly what you want.

I could spend ages explaining it here, but the manual does it better :)

You'll need to turn orientation on to get things facing in different directions.

Edit: But do follow the link in Mr Zak's comment, it contains many further examples and an entire alternative method.  Not sure why it wasn't an answer too.


Can blender do "deep compositing"? Maxwell Render explanation of deep render and showcase of it

Was wondering, can Blender do "Deep" rendering to EXR, where an EXR file has 3D depth to it? If you go to 1:50 of the video you will see what deep rendering is in it's full awesomeness.

You can get depth information and use it the compositor (e.g. with the Z combine node) or put it in an EXR layer.

However there is no support currently for true deep compositing, which allows for transparency and compositing tricky things such as a motion blurred object.

I don't see it on any of the todos, however it's being mentioned in the mailing lists a bit, so it's hopefully only a matter of time.

If all you need is depth information, then it's currently possible:

The Z output contains depth information. It appears white since most of it's values are greater than 1. To view it, you need to map it's range to the 0-1 range, so you can use a Map range node or a Normalize node:

If you want to put it in an EXR, enable Z buffer in Render settings > Output:

You can use this with the Z combine node, which combines images based on Z depth values. For example, with two renderlayers (one with a sphere and one with some random objects), I can render them separately and then combine them almost as if I rendered them as one:


How to average UV maps between multiple Blend Files Blender has this very usefull function "Average Islands Scale" for UV maps. I would need the same option to apply a Global UV Scale, e.g. a 1x1 plane's uv map would have the same dimensions across multiple (complex) Objects and Blend files. Is that possible somehow?

Still looking for a usable workflow. Even an option to have somewhat equal scales across multiple Objects within a single Blendfile would be better then nothing.

Use Texture Atlas addon to unwrap objects as one into new UV map, set up the UV islands scale as desired and use that map instead.

After activating the addon in the User Preferences, in the Properties editor, Render tab find Texture Atlas rollout and click '+' button to add new one. Options to make automated or manual unwrap will be available. For more control choose Start Manual Unwrap in the bottom of the rollout (.

What it does is the addon temporarily "joins" selected objects (they will be added into group and atlas will be created for them) and adds UV map with the same name per each one. With manual unwrap mode active, you edit objects as if they were one, assign seams as needed and unwrap. If you have UV maps already created select the meshes and in UV / Image Editor find UVs > Seams from islands.

Once finished, exit Manual Unwrap mode by clicking Finish Manual Unwrap button. Objects will again become "unjoined" ones.

Before unwrapping using the addon:

After unwrapping is done objects use UV map named the same for all of them and scale of the islands is set up properly:

The scale of the individual islands will be already equalized to correspond between all the adjacent objects.

Texture Atlas addon's page (the addon is already included in Blender).

Also read:
baking to multiple objects at once with multiple materials
Arrange UV maps of multiple objects without joining them


How, specifically, does the game engines friction work? I have a dynamic physics-typed object. Its material has an option for the amount of friction:

Here is what it tells us:

Well, refer to the first picture. We see, under Force Field an option for distance. Here is what it tells us:

I have a few questions on how this works:

How is the distance created?

Is it a box around the object? Convex hull? A distance from any point on the object? Using Game > Show Physics Visualization, where exactly is this area?

 Why does friction still occur when there is zero distance of the physics area

The Friction option tells us that the changes occur "when inside the physics distance area." Why is velocity still truncated with distance of the physics area?

What formula does the friction use?

What about environmental friction (i.e. friction from other sources)?
Does it use the common method introduced back in Quake? (Sorry about the example not being in python; although, it is very understandable.)

What is the exact formula/method of determining exactly how much velocity to truncate?

Thank you!

Friction belongs to the surface. When the object touches the surface the combined frictions result in a sliding force (both objects have materials).

Distance and Force belongs to force field. The force field is defined above the faces with that material. 'Above' means

+Z (global) when Align to Normal is unset
+Z (local) when Align to Normal is set

I can't tell about the formulas, nor if friction belongs to force field too.


Flag does not move in the wind in Game Enigne My Flag does not move in the Game Engine.
I know how to make the flag work when not in the BGE, but when I move it over to the Game Engine the flag stops working.
What could be wrong?

As said by BlendingJake:

  To my knowledge it is impossible to get wind inside of Blender Game engine without faking it. You can get cloth simulations by using the Soft Body physics type, but then you have to figure out a way to pin up the flag. My thought would be to create a short, loopable animation that could be played.

Posted to remove from un-answered list


How can i add hotkey for a group Selecting a group object is long process. We click and object and shift+G and then a pop arise and then we click on group again. After several click group objects selected Or we go to the out-liner and change from all scenes to group then we select the group.

Any other way or hotkey to add for just if click on a object and press a hotkey it should go all the process and select the group objects.

You can select in the Preferences what type of group you want to be selected specifically:


How do I make my obj import operator preset the default option? The default options for importing obj files are destructive, which is very bad. I'd like to alter the default options.
I am aware that you can save a set of operator presets, but I can't see how to make this set the default.  It defeats the purpose of saving new options, if you have to keep altering the option set every time.
Is there any way to do this?

TL;DR: Editing this file works:
C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 2.83\2.83\scripts\addons\io_scene_obj\__init__.py
Long version: How to edit the file:
This file is a text description of the UI elements a user sees when selecting file > import > wavefront (.obj).
If you look through the file, you will see class ImportOBJ and within that class, several blocks of text called "BoolProperty" or "StringProperty" or "EnumProperty".
Each of these blocks of text corresponds to an element you see in the "Blender File View" window operator presets panel:

In my case, I was looking to alter the default value for "split/keep vert order" (because changing vert order on import is very unwise, as it's destructive), which was "ON" (split) in my distro (2.83.10).  I changed it to "OFF" (Keep Vert Order):
    split_mode: EnumProperty(
        name="Split",
        items=(('ON', "Split", "Split geometry, omits unused verts"),
               ('OFF', "Keep Vert Order", "Keep vertex order from file"),
               ),
        default='OFF',
        )

You can use this technique to change the way the UI appears in many ways.  This is just one small example, specific to this question.


How do I get into edit mode as shown in this video? I'm trying to follow along with this tutorial, but I seem to have a different version of Blender than is being used in the video, and some parts of the UI react very differently.  At timestamp 9:57, the presenter selects an object with modifiers applied, then presses Tab to enter Edit mode, where he gets a graph of all the vertices and edges overlaid upon the object.
When I press it, I get a completely different view:

I'm using Blender 2.90.  No idea what the tutorial is using, but it's a year and a half old and I can only assume they changed the UI around sometime since this was posted.  I have some minimal experience in Blender, but not enough to figure out what I need to do here to continue to follow the tutorial.  Can anyone explain how to get to the view shown in the video on modern Blender?

You have added the modifiers, but you have not applied them yet. That's why it looks different. The transparent cube on your screenshot is the unmodified mesh. The sphere is the result of the Subdivision Surface modifier. The Displacement modifier is disabled in Edit Mode (see icons of the modifiers).
In Blender 2.9x the apply button of modifiers has been removed. It's now hidden in a drop down menu. Apply the modifiers and it should look like in the video.


Make a hemisphere with creases I need to model the white hemisphere on top of the telescope tower of this observatory. As you can see, the hemisphere is not smooth, but it has some regular reliefs (I think they are called creases, but I am not sure). I have tried to use insets, blevels and creases, but I cannot get the desired results. Moreover, I didn't find anything in Google, but I am not sure how these reliefs are called, so probably I didn't search properly.
How would you proceed to create the reliefs of this hemisphere? (I have already made the hemisphere, it is just these regular edges in relief that I don't know how to model).

Select all base edge rings with Select > Select Loops > Edge Rings then deselect a desired ratio with the Select > Checker Deselect operator (may require an Offset value of $2$ for an even distribution).
Select all linked loops with Select > Select Loops > Edge Loops to extend the full corresponding loops.
Bevel the selected edges with Ctrl + B, then extrude them using the Extrude Along Normals option.


Make emission shader emit straight rays Area lamps and emissive materials emit light rays that spread out. How do I make an emission shader that only emits light rays exactly perpendicular to the object's face normals? Is it also possible to adjust the amount of light spread?

That's not something you can do AFAIK. You could try to block out the feathering of the light with a shadow created by another mesh aperture, but even then you have to deal with diffraction of light around the corners. That just isn't how light works.

For example, see this monochromatic light that diffracts when passing through a small aperture:

I'd suggest you look at the rest of the Wikipedia article where that image came from.

The Cycles behavior is relatively consistent (although it appears to only have the central diffraction maxima):

As far as the amount of light spread, you may be interested in the lamp size property. From the Blender manual:

  Size of the lamp in Blender Units; increasing this will result in softer shadows and shading.


After rendering, why can't I find the render on the hard drive? After rendering my render image, I cannot find my file in File Explorer, I set the output like this:

But I still can't find my image after rendering at C:\Users\User\Documents\Blender stuff.

As stated by other on this page, when you press F12, or use "Render Image", the rendered image is not saved automatically.
Only when you use "Render Animation", the images are saved in the path specified in the output section.
To save an image manually, go to the Image editor window and use "Save Image As" (Shortcut: Alt+S).
To save an image automatically every time, you can add a file output node in the compositor.
Alternatively, you can set the "Frame Start" and "End Frame" to 1 and press Ctrl+F12 (or "Render Animation") to render. Then the image will be saved to the path specified on the "Output" settings.


how to set the position of the camera with respect to an object of the scene? I'm new with blender. I want to set cameras at different positions in the scene with respect to an origin point. I don't know how to do the steps I think I should follow:

Set the origin at the point of interest taking into account that I want to position it at Z = 0 m, and on the line between a building and the floor (see the attached figure). I don't know how to exactly set this origin considering the restriction of the building and the floor. Buildings were imported from OSM.

Set camera position with respect to the new origin.

I hope you can help me.
Many thanks!

After the first answers I received, I tried the example offered by Chris and it did work but I still have doubts about how to position the camera. I show you the example of the monkey. Here I would like to position the camera at a distance of 10 m from the monkey at the beginning. Why is it not aligned with the x axis if the location is set (10, 0, 0)?
Thanks for your help!

add an empty

parent the empty to the camera

now you can set keyframes on z-rotation for the empty on frame 0 (0) and frame 100 (360)

add location keyframe for the empty on frame 100

move your empty to your second point of interest

keyframe new position of empty at frame 150

now you can set keyframes on z-rotation for the empty on frame 151 (0) and frame 250 (360)

you can repeat step 5-7 for several points of interests, but of course you have to adapt the frames!

if you prefer to watch tutorial videos (which i do too because it is much to follow), check this out:
https://youtu.be/_RqDQuLfV1E
UPDATE:

to set the camera to a position just change x,y,z coordinate you want
add "track to constraint" -> choose target your cube/building/whatever
repeat steps from above to rotate the camera around the building

you can also check my tutorial for this:
https://youtu.be/B4jk75gbQwo
UPDATE & hint:
if you do not see all tabs, just hover with the mouse over it and scroll up/down to see more.


Is it possible to group/join meshes by material? I have a model generated from ifc. However throughout the generation process, it's separated all the meshes into individual ones. Is it possible to merge them by materials? Like merge all meshes that use material ifcWallStandardCase for example.
Cheers :)

Join all the mesh objects with Ctrl +  J (or type in Join after pressing  F3)

Then separate them by material with  P while in Edit Mode.

That should give you the result you seek.


How can I get the id name of a submenu? I'm looking at the ui_menu.py template script in Blender, and line 19 shows this line:

layout.operator_menu_enum("object.select_by_type",
                              property="type",
                              text="Select All by Type...",
                              )

I thought I could find the id name "object.select_by_type" by hovering over Select -> Select All by Type... in the 3D viewport, but when I did, I couldn't see any grayish popup saying something like "Python: object.select_by_type()". How can find the id name of submenus like this one?

After a lot of experimenting, I've seen that a submenu can be made from one of two functions in a Menu subclass: 1. self.layout.operator_menu_enum() or 2. self.layout.menu().

1. self.layout.operator_menu_enum()

If it's from operator_menu_enum(), you can hover your mouse over each option and the description will have the same function. For example, in Select -> Select All by Type..., each option you hover over has the description Python: bpy.ops.object.select_by_type(type='[some option]'). That's a good hint to say that the "Select All by Type..." menu was made from self.layout.operator_menu_enum().

(As a side note, I also see that the parameter name shown in the description is what you put in the property parameter when you're calling operator_menu_enum(). So since the parameter name in select_by_type() was "type", I'd call something in a custom script like self.layout.operator_menu_enum(operator = "object.select_by_type", property = "type", text="select_menu test"). And if I was making my own operator subclass for operator_menu_enum, apparently the variable name for the EnumProperty() you define is the string you put in the property parameter of operator_menu_enum(). I guessed that from this question.)

2. self.layout.menu()

If the menu is made from self.layout.menu(), you can hover over each option and you'll see different function names in the description. An example is View -> Align View. To find the id name string that you can use in self.layout.menu(), you can do a search in bpy.types. For example, here's the code and output I got from the Python Console when I was searching up bpy.types:

>>> for i in dir(bpy.types):
...     if "align" in i: print(i)
...
ARMATURE_OT_align
IMAGE_MT_uvs_weldalign
OBJECT_OT_align
UV_OT_align
VIEW3D_MT_view_align
VIEW3D_MT_view_align_selected

I checked for "align" in the if statement because I thought it was the most logical thing, seeing that the submenu name was "Align View". And also by best guess, I saw that "VIEW3D_MT_view_align" was the id name for this submenu (I double checked in a custom script with something like self.layout.menu(menu = "VIEW3D_MT_view_align", text = "align test")). Anyways, that's the best I can come up with. I couldn't find anything in google this time.


First start with sverchok. looking for feedback and how can i make this more efficient I just started a project in Sverchok and before I continue, I would like get some feedback and hear how I can do this more efficient. It looks like a mess.
Do I need 3 Viewers, or do I use some list node for combining all parts?
The two faces extrude with the same matrix, but I want the extrusion to be on the same side of the x Axis. So for one of the extruded faces: 8 * -0.5 instead of 8 * 0.5.
I thought about making a mask list, mirror, copying all the vector information, but with each of them I run into more complex beginner problems.
Note that I have no prior programming/node experience.

Let me just insert the gist
https://gist.github.com/b846e86e59d5458d0b87abba5205f6b2
This example of some ways to solve issue. I don't know aim of your node tree.
First of all, you can use not only extrude to extrude. loft, copy with uvconnect, matrix tubes, simple pipe node or whatever you need. There are tonns of solutions depend of what you want.
Import json and test.


How do I make a control blend file that can link to other blend files and save changes from the control to the external blend files? I would like to add props, sets, and characters from external .blend files into a main .blend file scene but have it save to the external .blend files, rather than append which copys the files or link which gives me very few options to change the objects.

The answer I was looking for was Make Proxy. After linking an object, on that object, It's Object > Make Proxy or Ctl+Alt+P.


How to convert Cycles materials into LuxCore materials and have textures still applied? My problem is: I have made a model with materials in Cycles render with UV Mapping and Nodes. Now, I want to render through LuxCore, but my model is too bright.. noisy.. and without any of my textures !

I thought I had to ''convert'' my Cycles materials into a LuxCore ones, but I don't know how. I have no button '' Convert Cycles to Luxcore ''.
How can I convert my materials from Cycles render engine to LuxCore render engine?

When using a new render engine, many things will change in your scene. There will be an entirely new lighting system, your textures will no longer look correct (although all your UV's will still be good).

The render settings will be completely different, another engine will have different rendering features than Cycles. Render Passes will be handled different, the lighting values will drastically change and may not even work at all. Some render engines (in my case Renderman) requires you to use a separate program called "IT" to render to, you can no longer use your Blender view port to see your renders.

To sum it up:

You will have to redo all your lights, textures, and will have to learn the new settings to best optimize your scene. There is no button to just transfer everything to a new render engine.

Also keep in mind, you may not be able to use any GPU's to render out your scene, I am not sure if this is true for LuxCore but  this is the reason I quit using Renderman.


Remove part of a plane I am trying to build a pool on top of a plane, the pool goes below the plane, How can  I remove the part of the plane that is in the pool?

You can Tab into Edit mode on the plane and use the Knife tool to trace the part of the plane that you want removed. Press K to activate the knife tool and left click to create points, to close a shape, simply left click on the starting point. You can also use right click to cancel a cut if you make a mistake.

Confirm the cut with Enter and there should be a hole in the plane.


Is it possible to save animation as frame by frame to edit? I'm pretty sure this is not a duplicate question been look for this for a month now.

I'm planning to make animations with blender and heard of the grease pencil thing but I need to make 3d animations and edit them.

As in a basic frame rate even with 15fps a 10-20 minute animation would be 9000-18000 frames and to edit every single one would to save each and every frame individually. Is there a way to use the grease pencil with 3d animation or is there a way to actually save 18000 frames?

Somehow I managed a while ago to download a 4 hour video.(around 1.6gb)
Would that be the same as frame by frame or has it been compressed?

Blender does have the ability to render to individual frames (PNG format is popular) and this is the preferred workflow.

I like to increase the compression to 100%, and if you aren't rendering frames with transparency, then use RGB instead of RGBA.  And uncheck the Overwrite box.  If you decide you need to throw away the previously rendered frames (because you updated the animation or whatever) you can delete them using your file explorer or bash.

As you have calculated this can result numerous images, which are usually each pretty large.

When you say you intend to "edit" the results of blender's rendering, you are being pretty vague, and depending upon the nature of the alterations you want to perform, your workflow can vary drastically.


Blender - move camera each rendered frame for mono font For my game, i need to render all chars from a mono type font, where all symbols are the same width and height.
So, i think to type them in a long string against X axis, and move a camera over each symbol to get rendered frames.
Later i will compile these frames with metadata to larger map.
Well, can i execute a script, which will modify a scene by the render trigger or something ?

Thanks !

Implemented it by a script, which generates keyframes for a camera, thousand of them.
Here is the blender file https://yadi.sk/d/6AXRNZDxEwAtDw

And here is the code, note these magic numbers - i was finding them for few hours, and still not sure if they are right, but close

import bpy
from mathutils import Vector

# useful shortcut
scene = bpy.context.scene

# this shows you all objects in scene
scene.objects.keys()
cam = bpy.data.objects["Camera"];
cam.location.x = 0
for frame in range(1073):
    scene.frame_set(frame)
    cam.location.x = frame * 0.35285 - 0.209;
    cam.keyframe_insert(data_path="location", index=-1)


Performance: Eevee vs Blender Internal In my application I use Blender's Internal rendering engine (headless mode) to render quick mock-ups of various items. BI yields plenty quality, however speed is essential (it's a web app) and I wish it was faster.

I wanted to try out Eevee so I ported one of my scenes to 2.80, fixed the textures & lighting and tried rendering the scene.

The scene is very simple - two objects with a basic texture material and three (!) light sources. It renders this:

My 2.79 Blender Internal environment is run on an 8-core (2.7 GHz Intel Xeon® Platinum 8168) 16G RAM compute-optimized VM.

I tested 2.80 Eevee on a Tesla K80 6-core 56G RAM VM, which is comparable in price.

It seems that Eevee is slightly faster than BI. The difference is even more significant when multiple clients are rendering in parallel.

Unfortunately, everyone keeps comparing Eevee to Cycles and I haven't been able to find any relevant data on Eevee vs BI. My questions are thus:

Would one expect Eevee to be faster than BI in general? If not, under what circumstances would BI be faster?
Which one has more potential for optimization (e.g. reducing samples vs optimizing tile size, etc.)?

I appreciate that there are many factors in play, especially when it comes to hardware. Hopefully that does not make this question too broad.

EDIT

My scenes are here:

Blender 2.79b (BI): http://www.filedropper.com/phone-279b
Blender 2.81 (Eevee): http://www.filedropper.com/phone-280

I don't really have any specific requirements... Here's what I am thinking:

The final result should not look like it's from Counter Strike 1.6. This is what I have now, and it's fine: http://www.filedropper.com/phone_2 (yes, I am stitching two images together)
Potential load is not yet known, but I might want to plan for maybe 100s of people rendering at the same time...

I know I'm late to the party, but I'll leave this here for reference. Blender Internal is an extremely outdated engine, hence why they replaced it in 2.80 with Eevee, which is far superior in every way.
The most prominent difference between Eevee and Blender Internal is that, while Blender Internal renders offline using the CPU only when you manually go to render, Eevee is a real-time rendering engine that runs on the GPU utilizing OpenGL. This means that Eevee is significantly faster than Internal in every situation, even when rendering on the CPU. In fact, Blender 2.80's material view actually utilizes Eevee for its rendering.
Furthermore, Eevee is much easier to use and has a node-based material system identical to that of Cycles, including PBR support. (Eevee materials are actually compatible with Cycles and vice-versa.) No longer do you have to fiddle with a million settings in order to get a decent result, although optimization settings are still present and very powerful for those so inclined. But your optimization (or lack thereof) in the scene will only ever affect render times in matters of seconds, as the main bottleneck when it comes to Eevee is the time it takes Blender to save the frame to disk and queue up the next frame.
In short, use Eevee and your render times will be faster and your results will look way better.
PS: I don't actually know that much about the technical side of Blender Internal, so forgive me if I got something wrong.


Problem with the grid fill result not the way i want youtube -blender gyroid
I followed this tutorial and try to do grid fill,
but I stuck at "1:48" grid fill step.

-

this is how I do grid fill

I also try to change the offset but I still can't get the perfect grid fill

Ｈope someone can tell me how to fix it, thanks!

this is the result from the video.

2019/2/9 . update

thank you all help me to solve this problem,
however , I still can't fix it by Offset or Span
(press Y it works ,but it will split the model)

I opened a new file and do the same thing again this morning , then it works fine.(I use the same step) but open the old file do the same thing again ,still failed, so ,I guess it is a bug?

the new file:

It appears that Grid Fill takes into account the active vertex when determining how to fill the loop. If you select a corner vertex last (or deselect and re-select one) Grid Fill should behave nicely.

You can also achieve the same result with the Span and Offset settings. Span tells Blender how many columns there should be in the filled grid. In your case there is 6 (you can tell by counting the edges on one side). The offset will tell Blender how to connect the edges. This option depends directly on the active vertex when you did the fill. Count the number of edges between the active vertex, and set the offset to that.


How do I turn off confirmation dialogues? If Blender 2.77a has a user-configurable 'turn delete confirmations' on/off setting, it's sure hidden. To be clear: in Object Mode, for instance, when you key X or press the Delete button on a selected object, a confirmation dialog pops up - confirmations slow my work flow.

Two years ago, an answer to this question (Remove Unnecessary Confirmation Popups ... ) said they were removed - so perhaps this feature is still unavailable?

I don't know if you can user configure it, but you can speed up the editing by pressing XD.

XEnter or X1 also works, but it's probably slower. You also can change the default shortcut for delete to D and then press D twice.


How do I get Blender working with AMD OpenCL on Linux? I am using Arch Linux and am trying to use GPU Rendering in Blender. In the Arch Linux Wiki from Blender I read that I need either the AMDGPU-PRO or the opencl-amd package. So I installed the opencl-amd package and clinfo shows one platform with OpenCL 1.2.

But when I start Blender and change the Renderer to Cycles Render, it crashes. Showing the error
amdgpu_device_initialize: amdgpu_query_info(ACCEL_WORKING) failed (-9)
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

It is also crashing when I go to Settings > System with the same error message.

Blender Crash Log: https://pastebin.com/uaGcZAZ2

I have a RX 580 and using open-source amdgpu drivers on Arch linux.

Having done some more poking around I have specifically pinned it down to only the libdrm update, downgrading to libdrm 2.4.93-1 is currently a functioning workaround.

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/60061


Using Nodes for Laser Line I am currently trying to recreate the laser line described in Making a Laser in Cycles - Straight Beam of Light?

I have selected the Cycles Renderer, enabled nodes on my light (spot and point tested). I can modify the strength and color using various node outputs so the nodes seem enabled. I have tested the other types of laser schemes presented in the link above but none produce output close to what is expected.

Is it the light source which I should be modifying the nodes for?

Something that feels quite strange to me is the use of the value of the cross product which I am uncertain how it would be defined. (area of the parallelogram between the vectors?)

Have I missed something fundamental about how nodes work and if so a source to start reading and learning about them would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

The use of the Cross Product in that example doesn't make much sense - in fact, I don't seem to be able to get that setup to work. The Value output of the Cross Product gives the average of the individual (X,Y,Z) elements of the vector. This could be argued to make sense if the X, Y, Z all have the same sign (ie, all positive or all negative) but as soon as you get a mix of different signs the result becomes effectively meaningless.

My own take on the 'Laser Line' issue would be to use a Point lamp with a small size (eg, 0.01) with the following nodes :

The 'Size' of the lamp will affect the width of the laser line, as will the value in the Less Than node.

Here a 'seed' vector is used to control the direction of the laser, adjustable via the Mapping node. This allows the vector to be easily rotated. The Dot Product compared the direction of the ray with the direction vector - if they are close enough (within the Less Than threshold) then the lamp emits light, otherwise it does not. The Ray Length is used to effectively tighten threshold the further the ray falls from the source - this ensures the ray doesn't 'spread' as it gets further from the source. Similarly, the Light Falloff node ensures the strength of the lamp remains constant regardless of distance.

This can produce the following result :


Final rendered image is completely transparent I am rendering in view-port mode using cycles with GPU rendering but the problem is not there:

But when I am rendering a final render, it calculates everything and after some time, it gives this empty result. Why?

When I am rendering a big scene, it calculates everything and says that there is not enough memory on GPU. But I have 2GB of GPU memory.

The reason you don't see anything when you render is because your **Active Camera** is set to something different than the camera (in this case is set as the Area light).

Select your camera, make it active and your scene will render correctly.

You can do this two different ways:

Selecting the camera in the scene section of the properties window.

Or selecting your camera in the 3D viewport and pressing CtrlNumpad 0
(or on the view menu->Cameras->Select Active object as Camera)


Get count of selected vertices in UV pane I would like to know the number of vertices that I have currently selected in the UV pane.

The stats bar on top of Blender only shows me the overall vertex count.

How could I show the number of currently selected vertices?

If you enable UV syncing, selected UV coordinates will be echoed onto your 3D view, and the header will show you how many you have selected.


Vertices that seems to be aligned, are not? Hi all and good to be here.
I'm new to the forum and fairly new to Blender. I did some tutorials and simple drawings, but now I want to 3D print my designs.

I've created a rim (1/24 meant to be used in scale modeling)
The inside of the rim containts a 'cylinder' that will be used to attach the wheel to the model car. For some reason, the vertices shown in the image below appear to be somewhat offset when I slice the STL export for printing. However, all the vertices have the same Z value of -11mm.
What am I missing/doing wrong?

According to the slicing tool the outer rim first appears on the third layer, where the center starts on the 1st.

I am aware this could also be a problem from the slicing software... but let's look at the design first.

i had problems like that as well. I ended up just starting from new and being very careful. Blender sometimes just creates some weird slightly invisible vertecies out if nothing. and if u don't ctrl + z them, I don't find any way to get rid of them


Building a Shader Switch | How to get custom values from individual objects? I'm trying to build a shader-switch to easily switch the texture out of a set of ten different images. I want to use a single material for a set of picture frames. This is what I've got so far:

The node-group switches ten inputs using an input value between 0 and 1.

Problem: I can't change the input in the shader-node-editor, because all of my object would be updated.
I can use the object-info-node to drive the channel with the random value, but this way I don't have control about the image.

There are already a lot of discussions about this topic, but most of the answers suggest to use drivers. In my case I have multiple objects. So I can't use one driver.

My idea is to read a custom property. A value between 0 an 1. But how can I access such a value in the node editor without using drivers.

Is there a way to use "self" in the driver menu? What kind of object is "self" in a shader-context? Can I somehow reference a custom property this way?

See this comment: Drivers: How to access "self"?

Do you have any tips?
Thanks in advance!

You do not need a custom property. You can use Object Index:

It might also be anoying to go through all the objects and assign different numbers to each, so you could use a very simple Python script to do that for all objects that you have seleceted:

 import bpy

 for i,o in enumerate(bpy.context.selected_objects):
     o.pass_index = i

Add something to i if you wish to start counting from a higher number if you have some indices set already.


Distorted background by models A really beginner here. I’m trying to figure out how to distort a background image with a model in front with a shading like water or even glass. I read a similar answer here before but when I tried to apply it, didn’t worked.
I have a background image in the camera and it’s locked to view. Attached: Compositing, Shading and Rendered image.

Any ideas?

I strongly recommend you do not use the compositor for this. Instead, set up the hello world image as a world background, and use the Texture Coordinate node -> Window (I think) to make the image always exactly fill the camera view. Finally, change the object’s materials to Glass BSDF.