How can I make Christmas lights to put on a Christmas tree I am wondering how to make Christmas lights in blender. They need to be simple, I am not going big for the cords, but I am focusing more on the lights.

I am fairly new to blender, so it will be a simple animation.

You could do this with Modifiers, E.g. an Array modifier and a Curve modifier:

Create a stretch of wire with a light or two. The ends should be precisely placed so that the array modifier can merge them.

To model such a basic lowpoly cable, you could add a Circle with 5 vertices:

Then:
In edit mode, rotate 90 on the X axis (RX90), then extrude (E) it to both sides with increment snapping (Ctrl) so it is aligned to the grid:

Create two loop cuts (CtrlR) on either side of the middle edgeloop, then delete the middle edgeloop (Delete> Edge loop)

Scale the two top vertices apart (SY):

Extrude the two top faces up (E) and flatten by scaling to 0 (SZ0):

Extrude and scale in, extrude and scale up in a bulb shape, then merge (AltM) the remaining vertices:

add an Array modifier and enable Merge:

Add a Curve modifier and set the Object to a curve object:

Also see this tutorial on Blender Cookie


How to use the viewer node? I'm completely at a loss as to what the point of the Viewer Node is. To me, it doesn't appear to do anything. I've read that it allows you to see the results of each node in the tree, but whenever I've attached it to another node, it doesn't change. I don't see any difference anywhere. Some screenshots show it with an image, though I've never had an image box appear on it. What am I missing here?

You either need to have the backdrop enabled or in the UV/Image Editor set to 'Viewer Node'

Form the manual:

The Viewer node is a temporary, in-process viewer. It could be plug in anywhere to inspect an image or value map in your node tree.

Select a view node with LMB to switch between multiple view nodes. It is possible to automatically plug a Viewer node to any other node by pressing Shift-Ctrl-LMB on it.

Using the UV/Image Editor

The viewer node allows results to be displayed in the UV/Image Editor. The image is facilitated in the header by selecting Viewer Node in the linked Image data-block menu. The UV/Image Editor will display the image from the currently selected viewer node.

To save the image being viewed, use Image ‣ Save As Image, F3 to save the image in a file.

The UV/Image Editor also has three additional options in its header to view Images with or without Alpha, or to view the Alpha or Z itself. Holding LMB in the Image display allows you to sample the values.


Creating a mesh object problem Hi everybody I am a newbie! While I was working on Blender I added a uv sphere object and since I know it should be created in its default form ( I mean eg: adding a uv sphere segments:32 size:1 etc etc) but when I clicked on it to add it, it was added in a form that I last added a uv sphere. How can I revert my original uv sphere addition form back? I don"t know maybe I accidentally clicked on smt.. but I don"t really know. And Now I checked that this problem occurs in every blender file I am working..

In theory, if you close and restart Blender all operator presets should be reset to default values, but if you don't want to do that you can reset them one by one by hand.

Just add a new UV Sphere or invoke any other operator, and from the 3D View Tool Shelf (T key) you can reset any property to default value by right-clicking it and choosing Reset to Default Value


Any way to control light halos in the compositor based on emission level? I am wanting to animate a row of LED lights. I have separated the LED lights from the rest of my object with the pass index/ID mask functions; currently all of my LED lights are on pass index #1.

What I want is to have a minor halo effect around the lights, but only when they are active. Currently, when I add a halo effect to my pass index #1, all of the LED lights have a halo effect regardless if the LEDs are emitting light. All LEDs are diffuse and emission shaders, so I can animate by controlling the mix amount between diffuse and emission.

Is there any simple way to have the halo effect created through recognizing light emission values, or will I have to just animate each LED as its own layer of compositing?

With the glare node you can control the threshold at which the effect kicks in.

In this example a the cubes have different emission values. Form left to right they double in intensity.

Using the threshold control on the Glare node you can determine at what point the effect starts:

How would you know which values to use? You can see the values for the rendered image if you left click and drag the mouse over the image. You'll see some values at the bottom of the screen On the left side you'll see values for RGB (red, green and blue).

Those values are the scene referred values before any color transformation. Konwing those values you should be able to determine the value for the glare threshold.

Update for 2.8:

To show the sampler in the Image Editor window press the right mouse button. The sampler window will appear at the bottom of the screen.


Where is the sampling menu in Blender version 2.77? Where is the Properties panel > Sampling menu in Blender version 2.77? I want to reduce the noise in an object.

You are currently in Blender Render. Change to Cycles at the top of the screen.

to

Alternately, if you want to reduce noise in a Blender Internal render, select the light, go to the Properties panel > Object Data tab > Shadow dropdown and increase the light's samples.


Bmesh : how do I keep track of vertices in edited topology? I'm trying to write a script to bisect Ngon rectangles, horizontally or vertically, at a given percentage of the distance along their sides. (The sides may consist of more than one edge).

Some of the script involves finding the right edges to cut, and moving the new vertices to the right place, but I hope this is a minimal expression of my problem:

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

bm.edges.ensure_lookup_table()

e1 = bm.edges[4]
e2 = bm.edges[3]

ret = bmesh.ops.subdivide_edges(bm, edges=[e1], cuts=1)
v1 = ret['geom_inner'][0]

ret = bmesh.ops.subdivide_edges(bm, edges=[e2], cuts=1)
v2 = ret['geom_inner'][0]

bmesh.ops.connect_verts(bm, verts=[v1,v2])

bm.to_mesh(me)
me.update()

bm.free()

(Here, I've hard-coded the edge selections)

The  bmesh.ops.connect_verts(bm,verts = [v1,v2]) generates an error: '..BMVert has been removed..', which is perhaps understandable, but how would I keep track of v1,the vertex generated by the first cut? If I run this snippet without the connect, the vertices appear just fine in the updated mesh, so they are there, somewhere.

I'm in 2.79
The mesh starts in Object Mode (does that make a difference?)

Tag the verts.

As mentioned in the comments could be done via

bmesh.ops.subdivide_edges(bm, edges=[e1, e2], cuts=1)

in one fell swoop.

When an operator creates new geometry there is a chance any old geom becomes invalid. However the data of the old will match the new, in which case can use the tag or select attribute to advantage.

Make sure to ignore the invalids with How to remove dead BMVerts from a list?

Test script. In edit mode to see what is going on.. Will work same in object mode

import bpy
import bmesh
ob = bpy.context.edit_object
me = ob.data

bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)

bm.edges.ensure_lookup_table()

e1 = bm.edges[0]
e2 = bm.edges[2]

ret = bmesh.ops.subdivide_edges(bm, edges=[e1], cuts=1)
v1 = ret['geom_inner'][0]
v1.tag = True
ret = bmesh.ops.subdivide_edges(bm, edges=[e2], cuts=1)
v2 = ret['geom_inner'][0]
v2.tag = True

bmesh.ops.connect_verts(bm,
        verts=[v for v in bm.verts if v.tag and v.is_valid])

bmesh.update_edit_mesh(me)
me.update()

Note  in 2.80 a mesh can be in edit mode in one view, object in another.

On a formatting side, in argument list, space after a comma, none around equals.


What is causing the bright edges on this mesh when using volume emission shaders? I've followed an old Blender Guru tutorial on creating muzzle flash, using it in Cycles instead of Blender Render as he did. The mesh is shaped like a rounded double-ended cone, then has Subsurf and Displace modifiers applied to it to create the flared effect. The material uses a 50/50 mix of Emission and Volume Scatter shaders plugged into the Volume output.

When rendering the scene, bright lines appear on the edges of the displaced mesh, highlighting them. I've been learning 3D modelling/rendering for the past several months so am still relatively new and unsure as to what is causing this, it's as if the light rays are trapped in the sharp edges.

This issue doesn't pertain to this particular model or scene either, as I tried modelling it from scratch again in a different scene and had the same issue. Could anyone please advise me as to how I could stop the bright edges appearing? Ideally the orange colour should just fade out.

Your mesh apears to be non-manifold. Specifically, it looks like you have split faces, or 'holes'. Volumetric shaders require manifold geometry to work correctly. Remove doubles, ensure that the geometry is clean, and do another test render.

Edit: Apply Scale Ctrl A > S should also be done for this object. Note that your object has a scale of 0.006 which can have consequences and cause artifacts. Try to keep a scale of 1 on your object, unless there is a specific reason not to. See Campbell's explaination on why/how non 1:1:1 scaling and rotations can cause issues within Blender (This is true for other 3D apps as well).


How to add a watermark in simple blend4web turntable scene exported as .html by using either Blender or directly coding in .html? How to add a watermark for a simple blend4web turntable scene exported as .html by using either Blender or directly coding in .html?

There is a special feature in B4W called Viewport Alignment. Using this feature, the object can be aligned to the active camera, so that the object will remain in the same place of the screen regardless of the position and rotation of the camera. This is especially useful for creating UI elements and watermarks.
Taken from the B4W manual.


How is Cycles different from V-Ray? From what I know, V-Ray is the most realistic render engine out there. But, I also know that Cycles is physically accurate. How is Cycles different from V-Ray and what are the major differences when it comes to shadows and lighting?

V-Ray and Cycles use similar methods to light a scene (path tracing, global illumination). The differences is in their implementation and ease of use.

In cycles we define materials using "nodes". V-ray seems to take a more traditional approach in just having a giant material with lots of settings. Example would be to do a normal looking material in cycles, you have to mix diffuse with "glossy" shader. In Vray, glossiness is just a parameter for the material.

This allows cycles to have unique optimization strategies for rending, but it costs in its ease of use in my opinion.

Also cycles seems to be built for use on the GPU. It looks like V-ray has slightly more restrictions as to what is supported on the GPU compared to cycles (currently the only thing not supported on cycles GPU to my knowledge is subsurface scattering, which is on its way).

In the grand scheme of things, I think you could get 2 renders looking similar using both cycles and V-ray. V-ray has the advantage of money behind it, and I believe is more polished at the moment.


How to make a custom sculpting brush using the bake function Made two objects a plane and a pyramid then bake using the displacement mode with select to active.

The output from the bake is grey for the plane and flat white for the pyramid. When the image texture is used as a sculpt brush it doesn't create the same pyramid shape that was used for the bake. Don't know what I have done wrong could I have some help please.

I really don't think you can have such a deep point on a displacement texture. That's why it just bakes a white square. Your brush is essentially just a square brush.

I quickly made an example of how the texture should actually look like. It's not precise but it's to give you an idea.


How to delete part of an fbx model? I have exported a mesh character from Unreal Engine 4 as a fbx file. I want to remove everything but the head.

I literally have no idea how to use Blender and the UI seems confusing and overwhelming.

Could anyone possibly tell me how to delete everything but the head, step-by-step.

.blend file

First, import the mesh by pressing File > Import > FBX and navigating to the .fbx file.

Once you have your object imported, ensure that it is the active object (orange outline). If it's not active, right click on it.

Then press Tab to enter Edit Mode where you can edit the underlying mesh.

In your case, you can select the parts of the mesh you want to delete by:

Selecting a vertex on the head with  RMB
Press CtrlL to select linked geometry
Press CtrlI to invert selection

Once you have the vertices you want to delete selected, press Delete > Vertices to delete them.


Dimensions of spheres are wrong I have created three spheres (that together should make up the earth). I first created the inner sphere (the earth surface). Then I duplicated that and set the x,y,z scales at 1.012 (this sphere is for the clouds).

After that I created the third sphere (atmosphere) and set the scales at 1.017. No - a few weeks later - I have a look at the file and see that the x,y,z dimensions of these spheres are wrong. I expect the x,y,z dimensions to be the same for one sphere. How is this possible ?

By the way ... when I created these spheres I was doing this Blenderguru tutorial and as far as I know his dimensions were "perfect" for all three spheres.

The earth

Cloud sphere

Atmosphere

I am not that familiar with Apply Scale ... but should  I have done that ? What could have happened ?

And is there a way to get the dimensions and scaling right (next to create the spheres from scratch) ?

This is because it is not a perfect sphere, it is constructed of flat faces and it is not perfectly symmetrical. ( could have a vertex at the top and a flat face at the bottom), to get it  close to the dimensions you want increase the resolution of the sphere (segments and rings ).

just consider a simple case of a circle since it is made of finite straight lines its dimension wouldn't be as expected depending on its resolution :

you can clearly see why X differ from Y for this circle.


The rigged eye does not close completely I'm rigging the eyes of my character following this video tutorial

The mesh of the left eye deformed almost correctly. There is again something broken because the eye does not close completely and the bones move too far from their initial position. I would like to know what to do to fix it. I've attached two pics to show what happened.

It's a weights problem.
This tutorial is quite advanced and relates to a dense mesh properly and evenly modeled because it's automatically weighted.
As I can see from your 2nd picture (in example) even the closer vertices of the lower eyelid don't follow exactly the closer bones: it means that those vertices are weighted also in other Bones/vertex groups. Probably your mesh needs some manual weighting to work properly: if a vertex is weighted (any value of weight) to a bone/vertex group only, it follows EXACTLY the bone movement.
The button assign gives to the selected vertices the weight indicated below (from 0.0 to 1.0). The button remove removes the selected vertices from the vertex group. The button select adds to the current selection all the vertices of that vertex group. The button deseletc removes from the current selection all the vertices of the vertex group (but those deselected vertices are still assigned and weighted to the current vertex group, so - if you click select - they appear again). In edit mode, press N for the properties tab, select a vertex and you can find the "vertex weight" tab that shows you all weights and all  vertex groups your vertex is in (sorry for my english, I'm from Italy).


Incorrect Rotation for Imported Vertical Video in *Movie Clip Editor* Unexpectedly, blender rotates the vertical video shot on my iPhone when I import it into the Movie Clip Editor. How can I rotate the footage in the Movie Clip Editor view so I can clearly work with the tracking options without the footage being rotated the whole time during the editing process?

you can open your movie in video editing and then insert the rotation value 90/-90 as you need it and then just render it out and use the result for your tracking.


Why does the rotation of the material on my Earth model shift in the viewport Material view? This one uses cycles and nodes I posted this question a few days ago; however, I couldn't get an answer. So I decided (at the urging of @Uncle Snail) to do one using cycles, but the same thing happens:
It looks fine in the Rendered view of the viewport. But I would like to see it in the Material view so I can edit it while the material is correctly displayed. Also, there is a bump map applied in addition to the material. The .blend file (with the packed files) is linked.

This was a bug, which is fixed in the version 2.78.


What skills are required to model / sculpt this head? I came across this image in a dutch newspaper and I would like to know how you would create this head in Blender ? What kind of skills do I have to learn ? What are the most important techniques to be used ? Or can it be done much better in another software package ?

As already mentioned in the comments, make human is the shortcut.
A  shape created by this awesome tool in two minutes, limited in details but could be tuned wihtin blender:

Another way to re-create this with modelling either trace the contours of a background image. Or use subdividing, insets and proportinal editing:

After ripping V the mouth, the mesh could be easily adjusted to whatever head shape you want. Kudos to What's the best way to model organic shapes?

You might also need this addon: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Add_Mesh/Add_Gear


Reuse the value of an animated shape-key-value for the animation of a emission strength value of a material There is an mesh with an animated shape key.
How can I access/reuse the value of this shape key in a driver for a emission material?
(How to add a driver to a shader value is known...the way to access the value
of the shape key is the problem for me here.)

Enable Python Tooltips in Preferences > Interface > Display.
This helps discovering the data paths. To check if a path is correct, paste it into the >>> prompt in the Scripting workspace and hit enter. Either you'll see its value printed out, or it'll give an error message that the path was wrong.

With that, I was able to work out this:

Select your object with the keyframed shape key.
In its object data under Shape Keys, right-click the keyed value and select 'Copy Data Path' (or Shift-Ctrl-C). For me this yielded key_blocks["Key 1"].value, since "Key 1" was the only shape key I had other than the Basis shape.
I noticed that the Python tooltip was actually longer, and said: bpy.data.keys["Key"].key_blocks["Key 1"].value

Which tells us everything we need to use this in a driver.

In the Shader workspace add a new Input > Value Node.
Right click on the numerical value field of that node, and 'Open Drivers Editor' or just Add Driver and try editing in the smaller window.
Set the 'var' input variable to be a 'Single Property'.
On the 'prop:' row set the ID Type (the small icon part) to "Key".
On the 'prop:' row set the ID to be the key name from the python tooltip above.
Note: this one is the name from the first part of the full Python path, bpy.data.keys["Key"] in my case, so "Key".
In the 'path:' row, paste in the copied shapekey path (in my case key_blocks["Key 1"].value). That is, just the latter part of that full Py tooltip.

This appears to work and do what you asked.


Which is the best way to model a low poly coat? i have this 3D model here

I want to know which is the best way to model a low poly coat like this one

For low poly clothes you could start by blocking out the shape with just vertices and edges. Begin with a simple plane delete two vertices, add a mirror modifier and start extruding vertices around your model with E and connecting vertices with F.

Then when you get something like in the picture, you can start connecting those edges and pairs of vertices to make faces around your model using F in edit mode.

When you get a simple geometry that works you can add loops to refine the model with Ctrl+R. Then you can add a solidify modifier and play with the thickness parameter to give volume to the cloth.

For the details as it's a low poly model you'd have to texture them, but you can simplify the process by sculpting first then baking the results and applying a normal map or displacement map to get volume.


Bridge/extrude/join vertices in a ring I have a ring of vertices, and I would like to connect them with another edge together quickly.
I tried bridging 4 vertices together, but that took too long and made faces. Extruding with 'E' would also take too long.
I couldn't find any way to do it before, but here is an example of what I would like to do: https://youtu.be/ENmN5PVMcQQ?t=1m41s
How do I do this?
I tried the bridge loop method, but it does all of the vertices at once, and it creates triangles, which I do not want either.

If you want to do this automatically, you can use Bridge Edge Loops by selecting the rings, pressing Spacebar and typing "Bridge Edge Loops":

If you prefer a semi-automatic way, make sure you have F2 addon enabled in User Preferences Ctr+Alt+U > Addons.
Then select 2 vertices using F and continue filling the loop by moving your cursor in the direction you want to create faces and pressing the F (can be pressed repeatedly):


Help modeling this dome I am very new to blender and still using 2.78, I have this idea in my head and but can't think of how to model a dome shape with a cross on top if that makes sense. I attached a sketch of how I want it to be, sorry if it is hard to understand. I don't care a lot about size or measurements.

I've tried this. It's made with bevels, mirror, extrusions, join and knife. I corrected the final extrusion as, as Lemon has pointed out, it looks like I inverted the cross.


Both Rendered viewport and final render are blurry after processing I have followed Blender Guru's tutorial on modelling the donut, cup, plate and table, however, at some point along the way of getting there something happened. Both in my rendered viewport and when I try to render a picture of all the objects, it all gets blurry. You can see how it is working on the particles in order to render it, but at one point it decides to blur everything. The final render is all blurred up. Could you please help me with this? I tried playing with all the settings, reached 5th page of google looking through forums, but I could not solve it. I am quite desperate. Thank you very much, I really appreciate it. Have a great day!

Edit:

Under the film tab you had Blackman-Harris at value 10.00, and the default is 1.50.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/settings/scene/render/film.html


Is it possible to give a shortcut to a specific screen layout? I know about the shortcut Ctrl + Left / Right arrow to switch between the screen layouts, but that forces you to go through all of them if you have many.

I'd like to give a screen layout (not only to an editor) a single shortcut like:

F1 = 3D View Full

F2 = Animation

F3 = Compositing
...

Is it possible via User preferences > Input?
If so, what is the exact code operator I should put in the key map? (like "screen.screen_set" but with the specific name of my screen layout)

Thank you.

An operator to set screen by name.

import bpy
from bpy.props import StringProperty

class SCREEN_OT_set_by_name(bpy.types.Operator):
    """Change Screen by Name"""
    bl_idname = "screen.set_by_name"
    bl_label = "Set Screen by Name"
    bl_options = {'REGISTER', 'UNDO'}
    name = StringProperty(default="",
                          description="Set the Screen by name")

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls, context):
        return context.screen is not None

    def execute(self, context):
        to_screen = bpy.data.screens.find(self.name)
        if to_screen >= 0:
            # context.screen
            from_screen = bpy.data.screens.find(context.screen.name)
            delta = to_screen - from_screen
            if not delta:
                return {'CANCELLED'}
            sign = abs(delta) / delta
            delta = abs(delta)
            for i in range(delta):
               bpy.ops.screen.screen_set('INVOKE_DEFAULT', delta=sign)
        return {'FINISHED'}

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(SCREEN_OT_set_by_name)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(SCREEN_OT_set_by_name)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

    # test call
    bpy.ops.screen.set_by_name(name="Default")

Keymap F1 to change to "Default" screen.


How can I separate my scene into render layers to render my animation faster in Cycles? I guess this is more of a general 3D question than specifically of Blender.

How can I separate my scene in layers to render my animation faster on Cycles?
Meaning, is there any rule what should be on what layer and how should it be composited?
I don't want to spend a huge amount of time rendering the whole set for each frame when I can just render the animation and composite it over the BG.

There's a lot of tutorials on how to do it with stills, but I haven't been able to find anything regarding animation.

Thanks a lot!

So here's what I came up with:

Basically, if the shot's fixed, and the camera doesn't move I pre-render the BG and the FG (The first 2 image inputs).
Then, with render layers:

Animation Render Layer: I put everything that has to be animated or interacts with the animation on visible layers and the rest just influencing those objects, but NOT VISIBLE.

Shadows Render Layer: Has a basic ground plane to receive the shadows with Shadows and AO render passes enabled. Here, I EXCLUDE the BG and FG.

Then, the Shadows Layer needs a Dilute/Erode node

And voilá! From about 1-2 hours of render time to 5 minutes per frame.
Again, this requires fixed shots.

Still...I'm no compositor wiz and this surely needs improving! For example, the Shadow Pass simply doesn't work...why is it there in the first place. Only the AO works. But it would make sense that the Shadows pass is what enables the shadow only calculation in the first place.


Outputting full length of video node to scene I've got a video node that I've applied some coloring nodes to for effects; output nodes to both composite and view; and I've added the scene into my VSE. Once I had this all configured I then configured my properties so that the End frame was correct and my output was going to mp4 and the my framerate is correct.

For whatever reason the video node is still only outputting the first 250 frames of the video clip. So if I render I get a video with the first few seconds and then the rest of the video is frozen on frame 250.

See in the screenshot how my scene spans the entire length of my video, but as you can see there is a green portion which is the 250 frames.

When you Add a Scene, the length of the strip is the same of the length of the Scene in the moment that you added it. So, if you change the length of the strip, the content lasts the same.

In those cases, just delete and Add again the Scene Strip. The new strip will work for the entire Scene's length.


Automatic weights deforming my character rig I'm making my second rig, and I'm having problems when I want to set the mesh as the armature parent. Once I press Ctrl+P to open the menu and select "With automatic weights" it deforms the mesh.

I have looked on several pages and done everything they said, setting Roll option to 0, or setting the pole angle to 0 to align all the bones.

What else can I do?

Thanks.

You have got multiple problem with your model.

Your Character's head has half an extra meshes with the mirror modifier.
I select the extra vertices and deleted them.
You have overlapping faces on within the model.
I removed the extra faces with W key, then select "remove double"
The body of your character have normals facing in the opposite direction.
I corrected the the normals with CtrlN.

Here is the blend file after I corrected those issues. The weights are now correctly applied.

Extra note
I must say I have noticed that your have rigged the hand IK object to the hand bone. Shouldn't it be on the lower arm bone, you might have to get a better tutorial on the subject. Your bone objects are not rotated to the correct front facing position at rest. Always check your bone orientation with it's local axis turned on.

Here is the improved rig.


Suggestions to make a "uwrap" animation with this ball model I would like to convert my ball model into a 2d-ish model with an animation. Already tried to find some tutorials or materials presenting ways to do that, without success.

I would like to animate the ball into something like this:

I believe this is a hard thing to do, specially cause I don't have too much experience with Blender (started to model with 3Ds max) or animation, but I would like to try even so. Any ideas or tutorials?

If you are looking for result like in your second image - ready to use file (print-cut-glue), use build in "Paper Model Export" addon by Emu.

But for unfolding, use his "Convert to Armature" addon - download version for 2.8x. More info here.

Unfold Animation

download-install-enable addon
select object, go to edit mode (Tab), select edges you want split
Ctr+E > Mark Seam
search Split Seams
additionally select one face you prefer to start generate bone tree
search Convert to Armature

That's all ... to be precise, object is not animated yet. Script generates Armature object with bones assigned to faces and creates unfolded Pose. To animate unfolding - go to Pose Mode (Ctrl+Tab), select all bones, add Keyframe (I) > Rotation, move on Timeline, Clear Rotation (Alt+R), add second Keyframe > Rotation.

If you have more complex mesh you can let "Export Paper Model" script to Mark Seams for you (3Dview > Properties Panel (N) > Paper > Unfold). Continue as described above - search Split Seams ...


Make vertices of a mesh "match" an adjacent mesh I have two meshes that should be gracefully joined into each other. To better understand what I mean, the two meshes are two roads, and they should blend into each other without creating any discontinuous surface.
I've already gone the manual way, taking each vertex of mesh B (the selected one in the picture below) and moving it along Z with the edge snap enabled. The way it has been cut, mesh B's vertices should lie along an edge of mesh A - only along the segments to join of course.
Is there a better automated way to do this?
I would like to do this without having to actually join the meshes, as I prefer to keep the objects separate.

An approximation to this could be achieved using the Shrinkwrap modifier.
Select al the vertices on the border you want to move, press Ctrl + G, and choose Assign to New Group.
Then put a Shrinkwrap modifier on the object. For the Vertex Group choose the newly made group, and as a Target choose the object you want the border to move towards. As the mode for this case it is probably best to choose Nearest Surface Point or Nearest Vertex, though both probably do not give an optimal result.

The result varies for different shapes of a border curve. As you can see from this keyshape animation two vertices of the vertex group moved to the same vertex on the target object, leaving a slight gap next to it. (So if it works for you depends on the specific meshes you work with and the amount of manually fixing you're willing to do.)


Generating jigsaw pieces from svg curves I have generated the laser cut of a jigsaw in Inkscape.

After importing the svg in Blender I am now trying to extract each jigsaw piece into it's own object.

The problem is that my SVG is made of multiple overlapping bezier curves and I cannot I use "separate" > "loose" to extract the pieces

I have tried  Boolean modifier on a plane but it doesn't seem to work with a flat opened loop ( even if I extrude it)

When I extract the pieces, I would like to control their name (like r1c1, r1c2 ... ) to identify their original position.

Knife project curves

The main problem with your object is that the pieces are not defined by a boundary. The curves are not intersecting each other: they are just drawn lines, and expecially in the "crossroads", there is't a common point between them.

In order to get the intersection, I would suggest to take advantage of the Knife project tool to a plane object (Shift+A Add mesh: Plane) of the right size. It has some degree of approximation but should be good enough for the provided example. Remember to keep the whole mesh inside the 3D view and run the command in ortho top view as it is view dipendent.

You don't need to convert your objects to meshes or join them: just select them all and run the command in edit mode (it might take a but of time to complete).

Finish by:

calling  the Edges Split operator (you can find it in the Crtl+E menu) in order to disjoin the faces
and then finally run the Separate by Loose parts (P) command on the remaining faces.


Can't blur certain material in a scene I created a cube, I selected a series of faces and then I seperated those faces (by selection). So I have two different objects with different materials.

What I'm trying to do is to apply Blur filter ONLY in the material of the second object (I'm trying to create a glowing cube), but I can't.

The whole scene is Blurred. Even with the Pass Index parameter I couldn't manage to apply Blur only on a certain material.

Thanks in advance.

To do something to part of a render based on an ID mask, you need to first separate that part out. One way to do this is:

Use the ID mask node to get a boolean mask of the part you want from the ID pass. When given the same index as the one you set in your material (in this case 3), this node will give you mask where pixels on that material are 1, and everything else is 0.
Use this mask to set the alpha channel of your image, with a Set Alpha node.
Perform whatever operation you want (blur).
Composite the result back over your first image, with an Alpha Over node.

That said,

If you are trying to create a bloom effect you may be better off separating by brightness alone. This works best if you make your scene with a realistic dynamic range (tl;dr: make lights bright and adjust the camera exposure).

If you have your lights set up with appropriate brightness, you can get pretty nice results with just the Glare node:

Regarding this comment:

  Why can't we blur a material without Pass index? I mean, it's already a seperated and unique object. Why blur isn't just a material's property? Why I can't see the actual render in Render mode view? Thank you in advance, you've already helped me so much.

The compositor does post processing, that is, manipulations to the image after the render engine has rendered it. The compositor doesn't deal with 3D objects anymore, but rather flat arrays of pixels the render engine has spit out. So, if we want to do something to a very specific set of pixels, we need to have the render engine spit out a flat array of pixels telling us which pixels represent our material (a mask). Then we can have the compositor use that information to change some pixels to our liking.

Blur isn't a material property because materials describe how light interacts with a surface. A surface can't really be "blurry" in the sense you're looking for. In the case of bloom, in the real world the object's surface isn't blurred, rather, our view of it is what is blurred.   So, blurring our "view" of the scene — the render engine's output — seems a reasonable way of implementing a similar effect.
It should be noted that "blur" is perhaps too simple a term to describe what is actually going on with what we call "glare" and "lens flare"; the phenomena involved can get quite complex.


How to delete extra audio track I have video and audio in video sequence editor. Video is short and audio is long. How can i cut the audio to match the video.

Any suggestion or help. Thanks

Blender hasn't extended audio capabilities:  you will have to render the audio of the portion you need (use PCM encoding, which is quality loseless) and then reimport the new audio data, or edit the file in another software (Free open source Audacity, Cubase, Logic or the professional Pro-Tools).


Imported Image strip has really low FPS I am working on some stuff for videos I want to make, and am coming close to my goal.

However, after I rendered an intro I made, when I try to scrub or play the image strip in the sequence editor, it runs at about 1 FPS(It was rendered at 24).

The resolution is 1920*1080.
Windows 8.1
12 GB of RAM with 3000 mb allocated in the system memory cash option.
I have clicked refresh sequencer.
I opened the strip in both the blend file I created it in, and a fresh one - same result.
The images are png files.

Any ideas? If you need more info let me know.

-CAA

You should use proxy when working with video editor.


Cant apply Glass shader properly? Was wondering what I was doing wrong, Im trying to apply this Eevee glass shader to the "glass" Material I made onto the blue faces I already assigned this material to
Im doing a literal step by step method following this video @6:30
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzqvGTb6xQI&list=PLvC8NqWpAG3U2MhNbyWzTzPwLEWkCZusD&index=14&t=167s&ab_channel=ArchitectureTopics
But for whatever reason it just doesnt work?
Heres the file
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14Qvm2RQn8jgnpHEYJTVXbRbScSH7M1Y-/view?usp=sharing
This is the glass shader Im trying to apply
https://ibb.co/Ms95TGR

Heres a video on what I did
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y-FHs4hrjC2QTHDoKY8d0Zk_RYvHv9LR/view

change your material in this way

result (if you decrease alpha to 0.6):

UPDATE:
i am sorry, i didn't get that you wanted that drag and drop functionality.
I just tried again - and it worked. You can check my video here:
https://youtu.be/U2dKeZhib60
but...please be a little bit patient, because my internet upload is blazingly fa....slow :(
Can you show us a movie/gif so we can see what you are doing (wrong)?


How to align vertex selection to an edge/vert? TL;DR: how do I get my vert selection to align so that the two circled verts align in the Z axis?
edit: to make my question clearer, I'm looking to move all of the selected verts such that the two circled verts are aligned in the z-axis. I know several ways to get just the circled verts to line up.  What I need is to get the entire selection to align with the bottom of the object so that it's suitable for 3D printing.

Here's a super quick and dirty version of what I'm looking to do:

I've been searching through various snap modes and nothing really seems to work.  All of the tutorials that I've found assume you are aligning separate objects, not a selection of verts to other edges/verts in the same object in edit mode.
I've tried messing around with moving the cursor around since I assume that you have to inform Blender which of the selected verts should be treated as the origin of the selection but that has also failed to work. I'm not very familiar with manipulating the cursor though and it's likely I'm doing it wrong.  I have a hard time believing Blender doesn't have a way of doing this since this is a pretty obvious operation with mesh manipulation

You can use Vertex snapping set to Active.

Select all the vertices you want to move
Make the aligning vertex active (white), by clicking it on/off while holding shift
Set snapping to Vertex > Active
Move cursor over the target vertex


Can I extrud multiple faces according to weight of a vertex group Can I extrude multiple faces each one of them separated ,  according to weight  of a vertex group

Yes, with the displace modifier. First paint your weight, then add the displace modifier and set it up with you vertex group, then play around with midlevel or strength to get desired result.


Clearing Screen Layout List I have two items showing on my screen layout drop-down list (blender 2.71). Clicking on them takes me to the file browser screen, where the screen layout list doesn't show, so I can really delete them. If I click Back to Previous, it takes me to the addons screen.
How can I get rid of these two items, or clear the screen layout list?

The following code will remove all screens from bpy.data.screens except the last one (because there must always be at least one screen):

import bpy

for screen in bpy.data.screens:
    bpy.ops.screen.delete({'screen': screen})

There is no RNA method to remove screens. In general, you shouldn't deal with screens a lot with Python scripts, because the API is incomplete and not fully working (joining is buggy and requires coordinates of the split/join widgets for instance).

Modal areas like the file selector a special, as well as other maximized areas, which create a additional, temporary screen.


Problem editing text converted to mesh I have a problem with my text.

When I press the TAB key I can not change the text from "CINEBRICK STUDIOS" to "******* STUDIOS". It just shows like a wireframe. The text was previously converted to a mesh.

I watched the video and imitated everything perfectly. At first everything went well. I could change the text with the TAB key. However I want to change it again, which does not work. It was a long time ago when I imitated this video. Original video link (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do0jF3zb5_U

Here are a few pictures of the current situation.

What you're seeing is the wireframe of the mesh when you're switching to edit mode by pressing the Tab key.

Once you've converted your text object into a mesh you can't edit the text anymore. Since the conversion is not reversible you will have to create a new text object perform the desired changes to the text and then convert it into a mesh.


Is it possible to omit some objects in a scene from being affected by the environment texture lighting? I have a scene setup with some objects which i want to be affected by the environment texture i have created and some which i dont (they are darker areas and are being lit up too much) - Is it possible to omit some objects in a scene from being affected by the environment texture lighting?

There is no way to render it all at once in Cycles. You can use 2 different View Layers with collections as masks to render twice and composite them in the compositor.


Load .blend file into Blender as Python Module I am using Blender as a Python module.
Now I am trying to load a scene into blender.
Unfurtunately the obvious function bpy.ops.wm.open_mainfile(filepath) does not work as expected.
The command fails saying:

  Calling operator "bpy.ops.wm.open_mainfile" error, expected a string
  enum in ('INVOKE_DEFAULT', 'INVOKE_REGION_WIN',
  'INVOKE_REGION_CHANNELS', 'INVOKE_REGION_PREVIEW', 'INVOKE_AREA',
  'INVOKE_SCREEN', 'EXEC_DEFAULT', 'EXEC_REGION_WIN',
  'EXEC_REGION_CHANNELS', 'EXEC_REGION_PREVIEW', 'EXEC_AREA',
  'EXEC_SCREEN')

Can anyone explain to me how to load an existing .blend file when blender is used as Pyhton module?

I found an answer to my question.

Problem was, that Python misinterpreted the passed argument filename.
Assigning the argument filename as follows fixes the error.

filepath = "path\to\file.blend"
bpy.ops.wm.open_mainfile(filepath=filepath)


Blender crashing during the execution of a script processeing moderatly to large graphs from graph_tool Summary
Code which works outside of blender for any sized graph works in Blender for small-sized graphs but causes Blender to crash for moderately and up sized graphs.
detail
I'm trying to write an Addon which lets users manipulate Graph_tool (https://graph-tool.skewed.de/) Graphs in blender. I've been trying to achieve this using Icospheres as vertices and beveled NURMS curves as edges which have constraints on them to get them to stick to one vertex and stretch to another vertex. I've been attempting to save on memory by sharing mesh and curve Datablocks (I think thats the correct word although I am still a noob to blender python scripting).  I've got a basic class  working which lets me do this. I've got graphs of around 300 nodes and 400 edges working. It takes about half a second to setup all the icospheres and curves and Blender reports it's using less than 50MB of memory once it's finished. However If I go much bigger than this Blender starts to crash during the execution of the script. I get errors such as terminate called after throwing an instance of 'terminate called recursively or terminate called after throwing an instance of std::bad_allocWriting: /tmp/testing.crash.txt .  I've run the code outside of blender and everything seems to work fine (I set bpy to a dummy module), even for much much larger graphs (tens of thousands of nodes, hundreds of thousands of edges). I'm managed to find the line of my script which seems to be causing the issue when I run my script in blender. It works out a layout for the graph and can take quite a long time.
Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this or where to look? Is there any way to memory profile my script as it is run inside blender?
Here's my main class and how I use it:
import bpy
import graph_tool as gt
from graph_tool.draw import sfdp_layout
from graph_tool.generation import lattice

class Graph(gt.Graph):
    def __init__(self,g=None,directed=False,prune=False,vorder=None):
        super().__init__(g,directed,prune,vorder)

        self.pos = None

        self._vertices = Vertices()
        self._edges = Edges()

        self.n = self.num_vertices()

        if g != None:
            self.non_empty_setup()

    def non_empty_setup(self):

        #This is the line blender freaks out on for large graphs:
        self.pos = sfdp_layout(self,C=5)
        #It computes x,y position for each vertex in the graph

        self._vertices.update(self,self.pos)
        self._edges.update(self)

g_ = lattice([200,200]) # an inbuilt graph_tool function to generate a graph of a lattice

g = Graph(g_)

I can post the other helper classes (Vertices and Edges) If that would help.
For reproducibility, I've found the easiest way to install graph_tool for Blender is to sym-link the site-packages directory of Blender's internal python installation to the site-packages directory of a conda python installation of the exact same version and then install graph_tool using https://git.skewed.de/count0/graph-tool/-/wikis/installation-instructions#conda.Please let me know if you think my strategy of using icospheres and curves is a dumb idea. I'm trying to find the most efficient approach which doesn't look ugly.
Edit
I've realized that my issue can be reproduced by running the following from the text editor:
g = lattice([20,20])
pos = sfdp_layout(g) #  blender crashes here

This occurs even if bpy is not imported. This led me to believe my issue is in fact with how I've set up my python interpreter. I've outlined how I set it up above. Is there a better way? Installing graph-tool is a pain. I've only worked out how to do it using conda.

After much messing around I found I was doing two things wrong.

The first was I should have been importing graph tool with from graph_tool.all import graph_tool as gt instead of import graph_tool as gt.

The second problem I was having was not symlinking correctly. Instead of symlinking the whole site-packages I found that only symlinking what I actually needed worked.

I wrote the following bash script which will do all the necessary sym-linking given the name of the blender installation folder(this is so it will work for different versions of blender). You'll have to change the paths specifying where your conda installation is and what folder your blender installation directory is.

#pass it the blender installation directory. You will have to change $Blender_folder_directory to wherever you installed anaconda.
#Also make sure the anaconda environemnt is called blender
condaInstallation=/home/ben
Blender_folder_directory=/home/ben #which directory your blender installation folder is in.
name=$1
version=${name:8:4}

ln -s $condaInstallation/anaconda3/envs/blender/lib/python3.7/site-packages/graph_tool $Blender_folder_directory/$name/$version/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages
ln -s $condaInstallation/anaconda3/envs/blender/lib/python3.7/site-packages/scipy $Blender_folder_directory/$name/$version/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages
ln -s $condaInstallation/anaconda3/envs/blender/lib/python3.7/site-packages/cairo $Blender_folder_directory/$name/$version/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages
ln -s $condaInstallation/anaconda3/envs/blender/lib/python3.7/site-packages/matplotlib $Blender_folder_directory/$name/$version/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages
ln -s $condaInstallation/anaconda3/envs/blender/lib/python3.7/site-packages/dateutil $Blender_folder_directory/$name/$version/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages
ln -s $condaInstallation/anaconda3/envs/blender/lib/python3.7/site-packages/mpl_toolkits $Blender_folder_directory/$name/$version/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages
ln -s $condaInstallation/anaconda3/envs/blender/lib/python3.7/site-packages/gi $Blender_folder_directory/$name/$version/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages

ln $condaInstallation/anaconda3/envs/blender/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pyparsing.py $Blender_folder_directory/$name/$version/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages
ln -s $condaInstallation/anaconda3/envs/blender/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pyparsing-2.4.7.dist-info $Blender_folder_directory/$name/$version/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages

ln $condaInstallation/anaconda3/envs/blender/lib/python3.7/site-packages/cycler.py $Blender_folder_directory/$name/$version/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages
ln -s $condaInstallation/anaconda3/envs/blender/lib/python3.7/site-packages/cycler-0.10.0.dist-info $Blender_folder_directory/$name/$version/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages

ln $condaInstallation/anaconda3/envs/blender/lib/python3.7/site-packages/six.py $Blender_folder_directory/$name/$version/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages
ln -s $condaInstallation/anaconda3/envs/blender/lib/python3.7/site-packages/six-1.15.0.dist-info $Blender_folder_directory/$name/$version/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages

ln $condaInstallation/anaconda3/envs/blender/lib/python3.7/site-packages/kiwisolver.cpython-37m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so $Blender_folder_directory/$name/$version/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages
ln -s $condaInstallation/anaconda3/envs/blender/lib/python3.7/site-packages/kiwisolver-1.2.0.dist-info $Blender_folder_directory/$name/$version/python/lib/python3.7/site-packages


How to texture paint one image over another image, while still keeping the background color of the first image I am making a scene where I have texture painted paper material onto a plane.  Now, I also want to texture paint an image of music notes onto the paper, but still keep the background color of the paper, instead of the white part of the image that comes with the music notes.  (see pictures below)
this is what I have so far ^

this is what is happening currently ^.  I would like to be able to paint on the music notes, but without the white background.
If anyone knows how to do this, or something like this, any help is appreciated! :)

One way to do this is to prepare your sheet music image with a transparent background. Select the black notes and text and invert the selection and remove the white background. Export this as .png.
In Blender, UV Editing mode create a new image and unwrap your object. After unwrapping and before texture painting, create two new textures in Texture Properties tab, one with your base of old paper and another texture with your notes on a transparent background.
In Texture Paint mode, paint the base coat, then switch the texture to your notes and text, and paint over the base coat. Save the Image, and then apply it as an image texture into the Base Color of the Principled BSDF.
Hope that helps, I think mixing the images in this case will want to produce a slightly washed out mix of the old paper with the bright white of the sheet music. But give that a try and see if you like that result better.


Stretch To with Copy Location bone constraints not working properly I have 3 bones and 4 empties. I am trying to make each bone stretch to one of the empties where each bone has a copy location constraint to one of the empties, but for some reason it's not working, not sure why. I can change the value of the Rest Length manually but this is not what I want as I want it to work correctly without manual adjustments as this will be written in a python script.

As shown below is a screenshot of the problem and highlighted the desired output.

My .blend file can be found here:

You need to do two things here, uncheck connected on each bones' parenting as it messes with the copy locations, and then set the bone tips to the same position as the empties in edit mode before resetting the stretch to length.

Uncheck this checkbox on each bone:

I would suggest making the stretch to target the next bone rather than the empty, as that will make it easier to set the rest positions/lengths with reset.

Fixed blend:


Render Viewport shows textures, final render does not (Cycles) first time posting and fairly new to Blender.

I've been working on a project for a couple of days, and so far everything has been working out pretty well. Today I was working on creating UV maps and had made some textures using Substance Painter. I got them working using the Shader editor (Node Editor) and everything looks good using rendered shading in the viewport, but when I go to Render > Render Image the output does not seem to have any of my texture data.

Render in viewport on left, render result on right.

Any suggestions would be great! Thank you.

Solved very quickly, I had another object that was on the same spot as my textured object (Stick.save) which was showing up in the render. I simply disabled it by clicking the Enable/Disable in Renders button on said object.


My baked textures are black. ( file included ) I have tried everything for the last two days, even exported and imported back into a new file and I am just a mess over this because I cannot figure out why my texture baked black.

I have included the new file I created as well as the old file.Both are a mess. I am new to blend for forgive my ignorance.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3c7thoxqnwhhw90/Lipstick%20Blend%20v2-Question.blend?dl=0

This is the one I had issues with; It's probably an absolute mess but, I thought if I remove the object from this file it would be better, but, it's not...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ztknxbwxlur8xok/Lipstick.blend?dl=0

Help please

I tried rendering and I noticed that there were no light in your scene, you are trying to bake the difusse color of your object without a light that can make the program recognize it's color, I've tried different things for the baking and I realized a few things.

1) I checked the normals of your model and realized that inside of your models are some parts which can't receive light, I did the unwrap a second time and noticed how it changed.

After that, I tried to bake and the problem persisted.

2) The other thing I noticed was the fact of no light in your scene, that's probably the biggest reason of why your bake was totally black.

What did I do was to bring a lot of world light in order to make the bake successful and noticed that it worked, one thing you should try when baking in Cycles Blender is to enable the world light so you can properly bake the textures with correct shadows and ambient occlusion. In fact it is preferable to have world light instead of using multiple light spots like lamps, suns, etc.

Here is an small tutorial of how to turn on world light.

Go to the world tab in the properties panel and follow as the screenshots show.

->

Here's the bake result, the exposed faces of the model received the world light so they changed.


"Unable to create version backup" It happens fairly often when I save. Incrementing the file name fixes it. It also doesn't stop the file itself from saving, as far as I can tell.

What causes this to happen? I do save my iterations via Google Drive, could that have anything to do with it?

Google Drive is very likely the reason in this case, as it has to lock access to the file while syncing it with the Cloud. But it can also happen (and does happen) to me when a file is located on the server, and the server is creating Shadow Copies of it. In our company the server is setup this way, every hour changed files will be backed up, so the likeliness of saving over just that one blend file which is currently being backed up is not that small.

What I noticed then is that on the Server a file with an '@' at the end will be left behind. I have to manually delete it, before I can save my blend file again, if not Blender will continue to complain about it being there.


Why did my armature disappear? I built an armature. After completing it, I moved it to another layer. Now all my bones are gone.
If you look at the video, you see the mech on one layer, and as I select the layer where I moved the bones to, they are not visible.  In the mech layer, I see the black lines connecting everything, but now I can not pose the mech as I have no access to the bones.
In the video, I go through each mode and use Alt+H, but nothing is happening.
Where are the bones?

The bones layers are different from the mesh layers. To find your bone layers, you select your armature from the outliner then under the skeleton menu under the properties panel you will find the bones layers there.


"extra shading pie menu items" option not showing in custom keymap In Blender 2.80 in Properties > Keymap if you use the standard Blender preset you get Preferences windows with option to check "extra shading pie menu items" option under Tilde Action. This option extends the shading pie menu

But when you use a custom Keymap the preference window is unavailable.

Is there a way to turn this option on other way?

I tried using python line that I got from the Info window but I only get en error

>>> bpy.data.window_managers["WinMan"].(null) = True
  File "<blender_console>", line 1
    bpy.data.window_managers["WinMan"].(null) = True
                                       ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

"extra shading pie menu items" is available if you manually change the keymap name from VIEW3D_MT_shading_pie to VIEW3D_MT_shading_ex_pi


How to add transparency to a group of objects I would like to make a group of objects semi-transparent. I could not find a straight forward answer and the ones related include menus I cannot find in my Blender. I am working with Blender 2.69.

Blender internal:

You can add a material with the transparency option enabled:

Cycles:

For cycles it's a bit different:

Assign material to your objects

After that you can assign manualy your material to your object one by one, or you can select all the object that you want to assign the material and select at last the object wich has already the transparent material. Then do ctrl+l and select Material. All your selected objects have now the transparent material.


Graph Editor does not show any keyframes I already made and rigged a character. When I make keyframes in the dopesheet to time my animation, the graph editor does not show any of my keyframes, for any of my animated parts. Even when I go to check the drivers, the driver pane is completely blank, just an empty graph as well.

The weird part is, a couple of sessions ago, it was working completely fine, because I know I was able to edit drivers then. So what could possibly be happening here? I unfortunately cant share the blend file due to the fact that it belongs to the project group I work with, but I was hoping for some general pointers on how I can figure this out. Keep in mind my dope sheet and NLA editor works completely fine, it's just the graph editor.

Here is an image of what it currently looks like:

and here is the corresponding dope sheet for the same animation:

ok if fcurves are missing, click the little ghost icon at the bottom of the graph editor pane. apparently if that is off your curves wont show...why would they design it like that though?


Searching for text in the properties panel I would find it useful to be able to search all of the tabs in the properties panel for the label text. So for example I could search "mist" and have the tab highlighted that include the word "mist" in the label text. Does this ability exist? Sounds crazy I know but I think it would help me become less frustrated finsing stuff.

Some of the way there.

Here is a script that looks at all the panel classes in the 'PROPERTIES' ui area.  Technically I've looked at all modules in bl_ui having a name beginning with "properties_".  Conveniently each of these modules will have a classes list.

Alternateively could have looked for panel types in bpy.types and checked if the bl_space_type == 'PROPERTIES'

If the panel's label doesn't contain the word (lower case check) then it is unregistered

Result of running search on "collections"

import bpy
from importlib import import_module

def search_mark(self, context):
    layout = self.layout
    layout.label(text="FOUND", icon='INFO')

search_str = "mist"

import bl_ui
pmods = [m for m in dir(bl_ui) if m.startswith("properties_")]
for pm in pmods:
    mod = import_module("bl_ui.%s" % pm)
    for cls in mod.classes:
        if cls.__name__.find("_PT_") == -1:
            continue
        if getattr(cls, "bl_label", "").lower().find(search_str) > -1:
            cls.prepend(search_mark)
            print(cls.__name__, cls.bl_label)
        else:
            bpy.utils.unregister_class(cls)

the output searching for "mist"

EEVEE_WORLD_PT_mist Mist Pass

there is a mist pass panel, somewhere I have no idea where lol.

To UNDO this, type the following  command into python console

bpy.ops.script.reload()

to reinstate all panels.

Result on searching for "vertex"

DATA_PT_gpencil_vertexpanel Vertex Groups
DATA_PT_vertex_groups Vertex Groups
DATA_PT_vertex_colors Vertex Colors
PARTICLE_PT_vertexgroups Vertex Groups

for these could grab the lhs of name, eg 'DATA' and for a properties space, set the context tab via

space.context = 'DATA'

or via a py console example, will set one of the properties area's context to 'DATA'

>>> for a in C.screen.areas:
...     if a.type == 'PROPERTIES':
...         break
...
>>> a.spaces.active.context = 'DATA'

Finally adding a panel with a search string input and a reload button would finish this off.  Apart from hacking the icons, I'm not aware of any method to highlight the tabs.


Change resolution of the video sequencer preview window I am using blender as a video editor on a potato. Is there a way to change the resolution of the Video Sequence Preview window without changing the actual size of the window? My computer is super slow and the resolution of the preview window is really bogging my computer down.

If it simply can't be done, is there other ways I could speed up the on-the-fly rendering of the preview window?

Thanks, Max.

You can change the scale of the video preview display by selecting a different zoom level in the view menu. You can also use the mouse wheel to zoom in/out. This may not speed up the video display though as the same video still needs to be read and decoded.

To speed up video editing blender uses a proxy system, which you can find in the VSE properties region (press N). Creating a proxy will generate a set of reduced resolution images that will be used for the video preview. When it comes to the final render the full resolution source will be used.


Is there a textured but unlit (full bright) viewport mode? I'm trying to display models that have shading drawn or baked directly on the textures, but I can't figure out how to disable Blender's default scene lighting. If there are no lights in the scene, everything is black, but I want to see the textured objects fully bright. How do I disable the lighting?

NOTE: Just before posting this, I found the "Shadeless" material property, which does more or less what I want. However, is there a way to globally toggle the default lighting?

Yes, you can enable Shadeless in 3D view > Properties (N) > Shading while in textured view:

If you are in BI, this only works if using Multitexture shading:

If you are using GLSL in BI or material shading in Cycles, you'll have to use shadeless in the material settings for BI and a emission shader for cycles.


How to get a Center Point from multiple Vertex Locations? tl;dr: I just want to create some curve guides along those middle points of vertex groups but with a script.

I am new to Python in Blender and I can't seem to find how to do this.

So far, I managed to get X, Y and Z coordinates of each vertex, stored in arrays in a variable named like each vertex group. My goal would be to find the middle point, something like a bounding box for each vertex group.

I did find topics about matrix for bpy.types.MeshVertex but what I have is lists of vertices which do not seem to work with those examples.

Edit2:**Thanks for two different answers on how to do it, have a sub-question, if there is a way to create effectors like path, that **start from those points *(Have their starting point there), and I guess prefferably to get them to go outward away from these vertex group locations.

ob=bpy.context.object

GL = {g.index: g.name for g in ob.vertex_groups}
verts = {name: [] for name in GL.values()}
vertsloc = {name: [] for name in GL.values()}
verts2 = {name: [] for name in GL.values()}

for v in ob.data.vertices:
 for g in v.groups:
  verts2[GL[g.group]].append(v)
  verts[GL[g.group]].append(v.index)
  vertsloc[GL[g.group]].append(v.co)

I will just assume that you're not gonna to consider weight averaging.

The following script show how you could get those coordinates and deal with them, with some comment for very beginner.

import bpy
import numpy as np

# This line select and get the active object from context
ob=bpy.context.object

# Create a Python structure: dict(), with key = vertex_group.name
# and value = vertex_group.index
GL = {g.index: g.name for g in ob.vertex_groups}
verts = {name: [] for name in GL.values()}

for v in ob.data.vertices:
    for g in v.groups:
        verts[GL[g.group]].append(v)
# All the location(co) and index can be found in "verts[name]" list by its attribute using '.'
# eg. verts[G_name][314].co == Vector((1,2,3)) #True
# The "verts" dict's list store the references list point to the data (which is object) they linked

vertex_group_info = {}
for key, value in verts.items():
    # Using numpy array for convenience
    temp = np.array([(v.co[0],v.co[1],v.co[2]) for v in value])
    max = np.max(temp,axis=0) #calculate the max
    min = np.min(temp,axis=0) #calculate the min
    # Average the cooridinates by add them and divide by number of vertices
    center = np.sum(temp, axis=0) / temp.shape[0]
    vertex_group_info[key] = {"max": max,
                               "min": min,
                               "center": center}

What is weighted version?

Let say we got 3 points assign to a group with 1.0, 0.02, 0.01 weight. You might want to calculate the weighted average, which is very closed to the 1st point since 2nd and 3rd show little to no influence to the group. The script above still treat these vertices as same weight if the weight value is not equal to 0 (not assigned).

In the weighted case, you will need to multiply the coordinates by the vertex weight and sum all these weighted coordinates. Than divided it by the sum of vertex weight.


How to make 2 objects appearing as connected (while remaining separated in the outliner) Newbie here, can find an answer for this even though there must be already somewhere.
My doubt:
2 separate objects need to look like connected (for instance: a pole and a concrete block).
Instead of messing around with the snap feature, or creating vertex using weight to apply the shrinkwrap mod on the target object (the concrete block lets say), is there a reason NOT to just insert (moving) the pole edge inside the concrete block (taking care for it not to emerge on the other side) and just leave it there as it is?
Is this way of doing considered kind of not the proper one?
Thank you!

The only reason I know of NOT to intermesh objects would be that it may cause complications with modifiers (eg. subsurface modifier).  But for all the hard surface stuff I do, my gosh, 99% of it is objects overlapping eachother. Another solution is the boolean tool. It can union/join objects together so there's no inner/hidden vertecies.


Why do the faces in my model become checkered when rendering? Could anyone help identify my setup error when rendering using cycles.  The model looks fine in the viewport shading window, but when pushed to the render tool it seems to introduce checkered faces.  This is after I've attached all the texture mapping outputted from substance painter.

My blunder.  Even though duplicated objects were hidden in my layer control, they still showed in the render.  deleted them and issue has been resolved!


How to make texture repeat in X but clamp in Y? I'm trying to use blender to create a low poly mountain range.  To make the illusion of a long mountain range without using huge textures, I'm using two different uv layouts to layer a semi-transparent snow cap texture on top of my base rock texture.

For the base rock texture, I can just unwrap and let it seamlessly tile.

For the snow cap, I need to edit the uvs so that the top ridge is within the white region and then squish all the other uvs into the transparent region.

The problem is more obvious for mountains where the snow cap texture only comes down part way.  I suppose that I can squish all the uvs below that into the transparent region, but it would be nice if I could simply tell the graphics card to ignore everything outside of the texture region on the Y axis.

I've used other software programs that let the user control how the texture is sampled when you go out of bounds (usually repeat/mirror/clamp.  Clamp just means that when you go outside the texture area, reuse the pixel on the closest edge of the image).  If I could clamp my snow texture in the Y axis, everying above the cap would be white and everything below would be transparent, making editing my uvs more flexible.

I could get around this by just moving my uvs around.  However, I wanted to know if Blender let you set the texture wrapping type too.

1. General solution (doesn't work in your case)
For many purposes, you can just change the texture repeat settings on the image texture node.

2. More complex solution (works perfectly in this case)
For more complex cases like yours, however, you this can be done quite easily with a mapping node:

Set the min value of, e.g., the y-axis to be whatever works best for your image. The setting 0.4 seems to work well for my simple testing setup shown below.


Can you animate a beveled spiral curve into a tapered version with even thickness? Hey there I’m trying to get this beveled spiral curve into a tapered version (using the Simple Deform modifier) with even thickness.

but it’s turning out like this, ie flattened, is there anyway to have an even thickness if I’m animating from the untapered version to the tapered?

Looks like all I had to press was this button.


Check if selected loop is a disconnected loop using python I have some selected vertices that forms a loop,This loop may be disconnected or connected to other faces:

I want to check if it is disconnected or not using python.

This will do the trick in your case:

import bpy, bmesh

bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh( bpy.context.object.data )

selectedVerts = set( [ v.index for v in bm.verts if v.select ] )

bpy.ops.mesh.select_all( action = 'DESELECT' )
bpy.ops.mesh.select_non_manifold()

nonManifoldVerts = set( [ v.index for v in bm.verts if v.select ] )

commonVerts = selectedVerts.intersection( nonManifoldVerts )

bpy.ops.mesh.select_all( action = 'DESELECT' )
for i in selectedVerts: bm.verts[i].select = True
bm.select_flush( True )

msg = "Not connected" if commonVerts else "Connected"
print( msg )

EDITED:

This will now work with any loop that is completely manifold (i.e doesn't have any non-manifold edge/vert)


Weird Faces In Models I don't know what I'm missing out here but I cannot seem to make this work. I'm trying to connect 4 Vertexes to make a face but it's not happening.

Please see my video of how I created the model here:
https://youtu.be/nVhMPQ-haig

Thanks

You don't (perhaps surprisingly) need to delete the faces before using the 'Bridge Edge Loops' tool.

Select both faces in face mode
CtrlE Edge Menu > 'Bridge Edge Loops'

Done.

The tool behaves nicely and removes the internal faces


How do I stop image textures from disapearing I've had a problem that I've fixed before but i'm asking if anybody knows why this does this. I've worked on one of my projects and when i went back onto it another day the image textures don't show up. everything else does. The objects are already unwrapped and i even tried doing that again. The only known way i can fix this is to remove the image on the image textures and reapply them. No need to unwrap again or anything. Could someone tell me how to stop this from happening because its a long and annoying process to do this especially later on in the project. Also I use Cycles.

First thing that pops to mind is that you do not have an active object using your texture. In the screenshot above, you can see the F button is pressed, so the button itself is dark grey in color. This means that it will be stored regardless of active users. The F stands for Fake, and what it does is simply adding a invisible object that you will never ever see, that has your texture applied to it. As far as I've come to understand it. So make sure this is pressed.

If your texture is still being removed, consider packing it into your .blend file like so:

You will notice the folder icon next to the + changes, meaning it's packed. This way, it is saved into your .blend file the same way objects, materials, etc are.

Your texture(s) are most likely being removed because Blender deletes unused files upon closing Blender to clear up space. When you make a new material, but decide that you no longer want it, you press the X button to remove it. This does not delete the material. It only gets deleted when you close Blender.

Hope this helps.


How do I get out of 3D view I was working on an intro and then I managed to click a random button and now, all the tabs on the side were replaced by something that looked like this:

I really need to fix this so I can get back on track. So can you guys help me since I'm just new to this Software.

You just switched the editor (window) type.

All you have to do is click on the Window type button (first button in the header), and switch the window back to Properties.


Eye blinking method? I have this little character:

I tried to use shapekey but to no good:

Applying Subsurf Mod would make that vertices unable to stay together.
I tried to create a different eye in a different object and then parent to bones but it didnt come out well...
Any other way to do this?

Use Control-R Loop to Loop Cut and Slide one or two more concentric rings for greater control.  More concentric rings reinforce the closed configuration of your eye.

Then select 3 edge rings on edge of eye and

Keyboard Shift E ...Edge Crease ... pull mouse to value 1.

The outside edge is smoothed by Subdivision Surface.

The eye edge is not smooth so vertices can be brought together.

Notice the pink edges of the edges with .... Edge Crease


Can't make the OpenGL Render Active Viewport work on Rendered Shade mode I'm using the OpenGL Render Active Viewport to preview an animation, but even if I'm set the viewport shade to "Rendered", it switch the shade mode to "Solid". I can make it work with any other mode but the "Rendered" mode.
(I can set the Rendered mode in the viewport with no problems)
Any idea why?

Sucks no one told you but you need to click RenderLayer next to OpenGL Render Active Viewport button. Ez pz. Hope this helps anyone else who might have this problem.


How can I use picker in Auto Rig? I installed Auto Rig 3.41.59 and I could bind the rig and everything works fine.

the only problem is I can't use the picker.

You can download the blender file

did you check if your proxy picker is the same version as the one in the the auto rig pro addon folder?  I updated the Mike rig to play with it, and used the proxy picker that come with the Mike rig and I had the same problem


No IK option under Add Object Constraint Blender 2.81. I have been following some tutorials about bone rigging. I get the the part about Add Object Constraint and there is no Inverse Kinetic option in the list like everyone shows.

Inverse Kinematics is a way to let the computer calculate bone angles by the position of just one. For example, moving the hand bone around would cause the elbows and shoulders to automatically bend in the correct ways without the animator manually doing it. (I wanted to say this because it seemed like you were confused about what this is).
As such, the Inverse Kinematics constraint cannot be assigned to an entire Armature/Object because it is not a bone.
Instead, with the Armature selected, go into Pose Mode (You can find it under Edit Mode). Inside pose mode, look inside the Properties Editor on the bottom right section of your screen. Find the little blue bone shape with a loop around it. This is the Bone Constraints tab, where individual bones can be constrained. The Inverse Kinematics constraint will also be found here.


Blender Freezes Whole System I recently started learning Blender and I'm really enjoying it, but it keeps freezing my system. I started a blender tutorial to create a donut and my setup keeps freezing. Every window freezes and starts flickering, but it seems that the desktop underneath still works, I can start any software, but the blender window stays on top. I'm using Manjaro and if I press F12 I can shutdown and restart my laptop from the terminal. However, this happens quite often and I cannot use Blender anymore.
My setup is the following:

Operating System: Manjaro Linux

KDE Plasma Version: 5.18.5

KDE    Frameworks Version: 5.70.0

Qt Version: 5.15.0

Kernel Version: 5.7.0-3-MANJARO

OS Type: 64-bit

Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz

Memory: 7,7 GiB of RAM

I checked top and it didn't seem like Blender was using too much memory or CPU. I'm open to any suggestions as I can hardly use the software and couldn't find anything when googling around.
Thanks in advance!
EDIT: Forgot to mention that since blender only becomes unresponsive and doesn't crash there aren't any logs.

This looks like an issue with the NVIDIA-Optimus powersaving technology, which is somewhat commonly found in laptops.
As the linux driver runs applications per default with the internal Intel graphics adapter, perfomance issues are to be expected.
Running blender with the prefix command prime-run, forces activation of the dedicated 3D adapter and should resolve the performance issues.


MacBook Pro 2018 - No render devices for OpenCL (2.91.2)? I am using a 2018 Macbook Pro and I cannot find hwo to setup OpenCL to accelerate my renders.
Is there any way to make that work?

Have you enabled your devices in user preferences? (I know in my image it says "No Compatible GPU's Found - I don't use OpenCL) Your devices should be listed here - Enable them and they should become accessible from the Render Properties menu.


Shifting/blurring material between objects I have a feeling this question is either trivial or impossible, but I don't have the blender knowledge to know which.  I have 3 planes all of which share the same material, as shown in the picture below:

The colour is determined by a the random output from object info put through a wave texture and ColorRamp, so that I can randomly change the colours on the different areas by changing the Wave Texture parameters.

I would like to produce an element of blur between these objects.  I would prefer real blur, that is an averaging of two neighbouring colours shifted by an amount in space, but if that's impossible I'd settle for a noise/vector curves method, I'm just not sure if that's possible here either.

Thanks, and sorry if this is a really dumb question.

In your ColorRamp node you can set the mode from "constant" to "linear", then add as many control points as you need to get the desired "blurring".


Remove geometry on "inside" I have a mesh that has a internal geometry but not like vertices inside of a closed geometry but rather the faces that are not visible from the outside let me explain with an image:

as you can see the red area indicates the faces on the "inside" how would I go about removing these?

I want to remove the internals to reduce the vertex count! since I won't ever see them anyway.

If my question is unclear  or needs extra info let me know so I can clarify!

Try the select Interior Faces Command and see how close it gets you.


How to scale in Edit Mode after scaling to Zero I was working on Shape Keys when I discovered that an Object cannot be Scale back after scaling to Zero in Edit Mode.

I pressed S 0 to scale to 0 in Edit Mode

Then when I tried to press S again to scale it back in Edit Mode it doesn't have any effect.

Am using 2.79b, and I've tried it on 2.80, same result.

Can anyone help me out?

After pressing S in Edit Mode, I immediately press Esc and set the Scale parameters in the Resize Panel


How to select objects based on materials? Is it possible to select all objects that have a particular material assigned to them?

E.g. if I have many objects that use the same material and I want to select them for Copy to Selected, how can I do this?

You can do this by selecting one of the objects with the material and then going to the 3d view header and choosing Select > Linked > Material or use ShiftL > Material.


Bridging the geometry of two parts of an object that were created separately I am creating a chair and I created the backrest and the seat portion separately. I joined them and I want to model the transition between them but I don't know how to go about it

Here's the chair I'm referencing:

Link to my blender file:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxtZBZThYAyjaHVjUEk2TFAxcFk

Thank you!

@LukeD is right.
You could in edit mode use select edge loop and dissolve edges(ctrl X) to decrease the number of edges of the armchair. Subdivide the lower edged parts to get more edges to work on. Try to conect these vertices now.


Star Trek tractor beam effect I am trying to create the tractor beam effect from Star Trek. I applied an emission shader with a noise texture as the factor and set the scale on the x channel of the texture coordinate to 0. That got me close. I thought if I applied this material to a cylinder then scaled one end of it down I would be done. However I get the following effect.

Can I adjust the coordinates so the rays come together at the top? Is there a better way to get this effect? I want to use it in an animation which is why I used the noise texture. By animating the texture coordinates I can get the rotating beam effect you see in the series.

This  is written for Cycles, however the same steps apply for Blender Internal except you do not need the volume mesh. All steps including the shadow mesh and lamps are the same.

I would recommend using a cone shaped mesh set to volume, a mesh that has holes in it to give the beam shadow, and a spot lamp. Start by adding a cone to your scene using Shift+A > Mesh > Cone:

Now move it, scale it, etc. as desired and add a spot lamp using Shift+A > Lamp > Spot and move it to the top of the cone.

Now change the cone material to have a Transparent surface material and a Volume Scatter volume material in the material settings:

Now all you need to do is add the texture to the volume. I do this by adding a plane, subdividing, and then deleting some random vertices:

Now move it into the beam of light, rotate, duplicate, etc. and tweak the lamp settings and position as desired. You should end up with a result like this:

I have included the .Blend file for you to examine and compare with.


What's the difference between turning up the resolution vs. using smoke high resolution in the Blender smoke simulator? In a smoke simulation, what is the difference between using the Smoke High Resolution checkbox, as opposed to simply increasing the resolution?  I understand that for some mysterious reason, the limit of the resolution is 512, but if I'm doing a simulation that won't need that many divisions, is there really a difference?  I've noticed that if I bake a fire simulation without Smoke High Resolution enabled, it will usually only use one CPU at 100% at a time, whereas if I do enable it, all my CPUs are at 100% (and it takes a whole lot longer to bake).

Turning up the base resolution increases the actual number of voxels used to calculate the sim. The high-res divisions  are a separate, secondary effect. They are applied after the sim itself calculates for that frame. High-res subdivides the voxel and adds additional noise based on the behavior of the low-resolution base plume. It's essentially a post-process displacement effect, just a more intelligent one than, say, globally mapped noise.

The advantage to this you can take a blocky, low-res sim that is fast to calculate, and smooth out or fluff it up as though it was higher-resolution. The strength value controls the shape, lower values smooth the plume, higher values fluff it up. This way, you only have to raise your base resolution enough to get the basic movement right, you don't have to keep cranking it to get the detail and smoothness you want. Since you apply that as a post-process when using the high-res function, which means faster bakes. And it's much easier to iterate the design of the base sim, because you don't need to sim at full resolution all the time.

It also helps out with an annoying behavior a lot of gas simulators have where increasing the base resolution can radically alter the behavior the plume. So you get a simulation at a lower, easily testable res, then you crank up base-res for the final bake....and 2 hours later, the result behaves nothing at all like your test bakes. High-res doesn't have this issue, because it doesn't affect the underlying motion, just smooths and adds detail.

If you want more information, you can read the paper that all these fluid-upres techniques are based on: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~tedkim/wturb/wavelet_turbulence.pdf


Video editing in mediocre hardware I was thinking of an idea to edit full HD videos in mediocre hardware. Firstly downscale entire video clips to a lower resolution eg. 640px. Edit and play around with these low res clips. Then let the computer repeat these on high resolution clips overnight (undisturbed).

This there such an option or is it possible using a python script ?

Proxy feature is designed for that purpose, make it easier to edit heavy video sequences. Generate 25% proxies of your strips, use those for editing (by choosing them as Proxy render size option of the View Settings panel), and you are done. Original files will be used automatically for final render.

See the manual for more details.


how would I change the camera viewpoint or scene object and output the image at the runtime I have done a 3D parking modeling,  I tried some python code to output the image of the rendering parking, .

output the image

  filepath = self.output_dir + '/images/' + str(i + 1) + '.png'
  bpy.context.scene.render.filepath = filepath

change the viewpoint

bpy.data.objects['Camera'].location = [20,1,0]
bpy.data.objects['Camera'].rotation_euler = [20,30,40) ]

My objective is to let python program collect the images in all camera perspective,  what I can do at the current time is to use the render function during the for loop

  for i in range(0,  car_num):
    self.changeCameraPerspective()
    self.saveLocalImage(i)
    bpy.ops.render.render(write_still = True)

however each new rendering take 2 minutes to load everything from the beginning.

so my question is how to program to make the scene change the camera perspective or modify the object at the runtime (without loading and rendering 2 minutes every time when a small change occurs) , like what we do in the game or 3d modeling?

Well there are 2 options you have here.
1. Optimize all your materials and bake all static shadows. That way the rendering will take as little time as possible.
2. Once you load the scene, move the camera to all locations you want to render but don't render, just add keyframes. When you add keyframes to all locations then start to render the number of frames you need. That way you will only prepare for rendering and load into memory once and then render everything you need in one pass.


Low-poly animation: Water clips through bottom of my floating boat? As the title states, I have a small rowboat "floating" on water... I'm trying to keyframe the floating animation, but the water level keeps clipping through the bottom of my boat. I don't know how to fix this, as I've tried a boolean modifier on the water, but it doesn't seem to work (presumably because it's low poly and it looks bad?)
Any advice?
I'll upload my .blend file so you can take a look.

(Blend file below)
The problem with boats is that they sit down in the water and require the water's mesh to be displaced or booleaned which doesn't always work as planned.  An alternative is to apply a simple mask.
This was first done as an experiment ages ago using OpenGL masking, and yesterday using Blender's internal masking system to confirm that it works just as well.

The details -
For the experiment the water is a plane textured with a water movie.  The boat is sunk down fairly low into this.

Without a mask the water naturally swamps the boat so a mask (another plane) shaped as a lid that sits on the open area of the boat and down a little from the top, cuts a hole in the water when rendered in OpenGL, or if  using Blender's masking, cuts a hole through everything, the water and boat.
For Blender's render, two videos are produced and later mixed in the VSE.
The 1st, the entire scene with the mask active, so when rendered, the scene will have a hole cut into it.
The 2nd, rendered without the water or mask so we have the boat and nothing else.
With the mask...

.
.
Without it...

The masked version needs  Blender's "Shading" in the Output properties to be set to "Transparent" and the rendered output set to a series of .png images with their alpha layer included.
The lone boat version (no mask) doesn't need an alpha layer, but DOES need the shading returned to "Sky".
This is also rendered as an image series and with the same .png format as before.
-=================-
Shaping the mask is best done in Ortho View so you're looking straight down without parallax error.
Drag the masking plane's edges out to match the boat's open top and lower it a little below the boat's upper surfaces.
Expand the edges enough to be inserted just inside the boat's thickened sides and dashboard.
This will ensure there are no gaps. Nor should it be protruding beyond the boat's exterior.

Parent the mask to the boat so they move in synch.  (child = mask)
Armed with the two videos, the 1st version is simply laid over the 2nd in the VSE.  The holed version (top strip) has to be set to "Alpha Over" in it's properties panel at right. (press N)
It's best to fire up a new instance of Blender for this.
When mixed, the masking cuts the hole but under that and showing through is a perfectly matched and synch'd boat, with a dry floor.

Blender file Notes -
...has been set up for Blender Rendering. (F12 for preview snap)
For masking methods see here - Masking


Extrude as individuals? I will keep this as simple as possible, I have a cylinder, and i checker select the faces. I extrude, But i want to extrude each face outwards in the direction they are facing, The only way i can extrude all of them at the same time is by scaling upwards and scaling the x-axis.

Is there someway to extrude each face in the same way if i had only selected one face?

Select the faces and use "extrude individual"


(Noob question) preparing the model for sculpting I have a very simple low-poly mesh, and I want to sculpt on top of it to add fine detail. I would like to automatically subdivide the mesh to prepare it for sculpting, but the faces of the model are uneven in area, so selecting everything and clicking “subdivide” a few times results in a very uneven mesh, with a very high resolution in places where I would prefer it to be way lower, and vice versa.

What are the in-built Blender tools to control the resolution? For example, if it could subdivide automatically with resolution proportional to the area of each face, that would already be fantastic.

You have basically two options to go from here but keep in mind that both of them (and sculpting in general) are destructive meaning they're irreversible. So if you like your low-poly mesh it would be smart to make a fallback-copy of it (Shift+D) and put it in a separate collection that you can hide, so it doesn't bother you during sculpting.

With that being said here are your options:

You can Voxel-Remesh your object (the function can be found in the Sculpting tab on the right hand side) to get evenly detailed geometry that you can work with.
You can use Dyntopo (short for dynamic topology, can be found just above the remeshing tools) which will dynamically add more, finer topology depending on how far you're zoomed in. It takes some time to get used to but it's really fast and handy once you're comfortable with it.


Fluid in moving glass simulation I'm new to fluid simulations in blender.
I'm trying to make a simulation of chalice with a fluid dropped on the floor,
but fluid reacts weird with chalice it escapes mesh of the obstacle in resolution 220 and when the chalice starts to fall (frame 20) fluid do not follow the chalice. Also fluid fly over surface. Link to .blend file

The 'normals' i.e. the direction of the faces on your chalice are inverted, or pointing the wrong way. The darkened shading of the chalice is indicative of this. This means that he fluid simulation will have trouble telling what the inside and the outside of your mesh is. On the left is your model with incorrect normals, and on the right, correct normals:

Enter edit mode for the chalice, select everything and press Ctrl+N to 'Recalculate normals'.

As a side note, your fluid domain is very large. If you need it that large then that's fine, but if you don't, make sure your domain is as small as possible. Using a large domain will use a large amount of ram compared to a domain which is small and compact.

I would also recommend disabling 'Remove air bubbles' in the 'Fluid Boundary' panel for the domain object to stop the liquid appearing through the sides of the chalice.


Why can't I use GPU rendering in Blender? Why is it that Blender will only allow me to render with a CPU (GPU choice is unavailable)? Or is it until I acquire a graphics card that is specially built for such a task?

The images below show a Dell System Diagnostics (Video calibration) and GPU-Z results.

Platform: Dell Inspiron 3521 notebook with Core i3 Intel HD Graphics 4000

Blender Cycles relies on GPU compute languages like CUDA or more recently OpenCL. CUDA is exclusive to Nvidia and while OpenCL is technically cross platform, in practice AMD's implementation is the only one that provides a usable speedup for Cycles.

From the Blender wiki:

https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/OpenCL

... Intel GPU’s are getting more powerful but are not a good target yet and CPU based opencl provides little or no benefit over CPU based cycles.


Is there an easy way to detect unused material slots in an object? I have recently been importing and modifying models from sites such as CGTrader. When I work on the materials for models, it often seems that objects have unused material slots.
At the moment, I'm just going into Edit mode, clicking the "Select" button for each slot, then scouring the object to see if any faces are selected, before deleting the slot if it is unused.
However, it seems there should be a more efficient way of doing this. Can anyone enlighten me please?

In the 3D Viewport, in Object Mode, with the object selected, pick Object > Clean Up > Remove Unused Material Slots.
This also works with multiple or all objects selected.


Python: vertex normal according to World If i get a normal of a vertex - i'll get it in local coordinates.
For example:

bpy.context.object.data.vertices[0].normal

If an object will have rotation or scale - normal direction will be incorrect according to world orientation. How to convert the vertex normal according to the world?

I've run into this problem many times, I always have to search for the answer. But I use the tranpose of the inverse of the world_matrix to get the world normal.

https://computergraphics.stackexchange.com/questions/1502/why-is-the-transposed-inverse-of-the-model-view-matrix-used-to-transform-the-nor

mx_inv = C.object.matrix_world.inverted()
mx_norm = mx_inv.transposed().to_3x3()

world_no = mx_norm * C.object.data.vertices[0].normal