How to animate a closed string as in string theory How would I get a circle string to wiggle, as in the attached link? https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7tvtxv

I think he has used a Displace modifier:

Create a circle, extrude, deform a bit, give it a Displace modifier and a Subdivision Surface modifier. Choose the Displace Direction:

In the Displace modifier, click on Texture > New, and in the Texture tab, go select the Clouds texture. Play with the Size and Depth.

When you'll move the circle it will deform along the given direction.


Render in parallel view I'd like to render a scene in parallel view, where the camera distance is at infinity:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall99/cs426/lectures/view/img016.gif

In the camera setting panel I can only select "Perspective", "Orthographic" and "Panoramic".

Is a parallel view possible in Blender?
Thanks!


How can I switch connected Falloff nodes on a keyframe? I have an an animation setup that uses a Falloff node to animate my scene into view and at a set frame I want another Falloff node to handle the fade out of the object but right now I have to manually connect the node at my desired frame.

FADEIN:

The Offset Matrix node is set to End and the object fades into view.

FADEOUT

The Offset Matrix node is set to Start because I want the object to exist and then Falloff by reducing its scale. I can keyframe the Offset Matrix node's options but I have to manually connect the FADEOUT Falloff node and continue from that frame. I'm sure there is a better way to do this but I've been unable to solve it.

Is it possible to switch connected Falloff nodes on a keyframe?

I continued my SOW browse and came across a post that mentioned the Switch node. I combined this with a Compare node using the Time Info node and I have exactly what I needed.

Credit to 3pointedit for asking this question How can I drive the Switch nodes True/False value?


Rendering smoke and volume object which is emitting light causes black spots I'm creating animation with shooting gun.

I've created gun model, smoke emitter which is placed at the end of the barrel and muzzle flash - volume shader with emission.

Everything looks fine until the smoke starts to flow out the barrel cause you can see 'muzzle flash' which looks like big black spot inside, even when volume density is 0.000.

Another problem is that smoke also affects muzzle flash when volume density is 1.000 there are transparent deformations which causes holes in flashing object.

It looks like smoke is ruining everything in my animation. Because without this effect everything looks really cool.

I've tried to separate gun, smoke and flash. I can easily render each of those but rendered together causes same problem (gun with smoke - good, gun with flash - good, flash with smoke - bad, gun with flash and smoke - big fail) .

Image:

I still don't know how to fix this. Maybe it's just a bug and that's why I'm asking: Do you know how to solve this problem or maybe just how to separate layers? And why smoke and emission (even if it should be 'transparent') affects each other so much?

By the way - I'm working with Blender Render.

It looks like i've solved my problem. I've changed muzzle flash volume object that was appearing and disappearing - now it's a paricle emitter. Particle lifetime is just one frame so it looks pretty similar to previous effect. Smoke is not hidden anymore because there is no object that could do this - particle emitter surface is not visible and muzzle flash particle is there for very short time.

Strange thing is (which I've not expected when i was thinking about this solution)  that particle - which is an object with volume shader - is not bugging anymore! I mean there is no black deformations inside flash object even when all objects are on the same render-layer.

This funny trick fixed my problem but it will probably still exist if someone try to render smoke and volume object inside which is not moving or disappearing - black deformations on volume and hidden smoke when volume density is set at 0.000.

I hope this will help somebody.


How do you import a rigged character from one blender file to another? I have multiple blender characters in different blender projects and I want to bring them together in one single project, I already googled this and saw that you have to use append and link.

When I do that, the meshes appear with the rigs and everything but when I try to move the bones and rigs, they have no effect on the character, they just move independently.

You can copy and paste models from one running instance of Blender to another using the same Copy and Paste keyboard shortcuts that work for the majority of software. Ctrl+c and then Ctrl+v.

The Mac version for these shortcuts is Command+c then Ctrl+v but Blender was programed to also recognize the windows version so usually you can use either for OS X Blender.

Anyways, open the rigged model in a second instance of Blender and select the Object that you want to transfer over to the other scene.  Copy the model using the appropriate shortcut and then move over to the other scene and paste it in.  The rigging should be pulled over with the objects that are parented to it.  The materials will also transfer over with the model.

Here's how it looks.


how to add outline and reflection to water mesh? So yesterday I saw this youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g5bROk9Hvc , and I tried to make the same thing.
The thing that got me confused is how to add the outline for the water mesh and the reflection in the youtube video

I already try to make a simple outline with solidify modifier and flipping normals but doesnt work because the water mesh is just a single plane. any suggestion about how to do it?

If you want an outline at the edges of meshes you could try the layer weight node. Grab Mix Shader Node and plug the the main shader you're using into the first shader input. Then concont whatever shader effect you want the outline to be and plug it into the second shader input. Finally grab the layer weight node and plug it into the 'Fac' input (still in the mix shader node). By adjusting the blend parameter on the layer weight node you should be able to manipulate how much of an outline you're seeing. Note: This may not be as successful on a flat plane, but have you tried adding a small wave modifier to your stream mesh? This way you'll get a more dynamic stream and will also be creating the information for the layer weight mesh to show up. Suggestion: If you make the outline white it may even give you more of those white streaks that looks like frothing water.
As for the reflection, using the principal shader for the first input (into the mix shader) and turning up the metallic parameter might help. Adjusting the roughness after that will affect how sharp the reflection is. To give you the best chance of reflection make sure you're using a nice HDR or in this case (for a non realistic environment) a purpose built lighting set up. Play around with different lights in the scene depending on where the camera viewpoint will be.
Hope this hels.


BGE mouse view python script I followed a tutorial in youtube for basic mouse look.I would like to use my mouse to move  the camera around my character.
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYlOhtDwElM ]
I followed every steps and it just didnt work for me.
Can you please help me check my file and tell me where the problem lies?
Here is my file --> [http://www.mediafire.com/download/u9q0cashtwmjqzm/test%282%29.blend ]
Tyvm.

If you look in the console/terminal, you will see python errors which describe the problem type, and where it occurs, with pretty decent accuracy (for the most part).

Here's how I solved the problem:

I start your game; I check the console; I see this error:

Python error compiling script - object 'camera', controller 'Python':
  File "mouseLook.py", line 27
    return vec_mouseposition = vec_screencenter
                             ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

It tells you everything you need to know: The object, controller, file and line where the error occurred. It even prints out the line in question, and points out the problematic symbol.

If you watch the video tutorial again, carefully, you'll notice that it's a -, not a =.

After I fixed that, I tried again:

I start your game; I check the console; I see this error:

Python script error - object 'camera', controller 'Python':
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "mouseLook.py", line 2, in <module>
ImportError: cannot import name 'vector'

And that makes sense, because vector doesn't exist on the mathutils module.

If you watch the video tutorial again, carefully, you'll notice it's Vector.

After I fixed that, I tried again:

I start your game; I check the console; I see this error:

Python script error - object 'camera', controller 'Python':
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "mouseLook.py", line 39, in <module>
NameError: name 'MouseLook' is not defined

You defined mouseLook, but you're trying to instantiate MouseLook.

If you watch the video tutorial again, carefully, you'll notice that the class name is MouseLook, and that the filename is MouseLook.py.

After I fixed that, I tried again:

I start your game; I check the console; I see no errors; I move the mouse a bit; I check console again; I see no errors ... but nothing is happenning.

I look at the controller; I notice that you're running in Script mode ...

If you watch the video tutorial again, carefully, you'll notice that the controller is set to Module execution mode, and that it specifies the actual function being called MouseLook.main.

After I fixed that, I tried again:

I start your game; I check the console; I see this error:

Python script error - object 'camera', controller 'Python':
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/dev/shm/blender/mlook.blend/MouseLook.py", line 43, in main
  File "/dev/shm/blender/mlook.blend/MouseLook.py", line 31, in main
NameError: name 'self_getMouseoffset' is not defined

If you watch the video tutorial again, carefully, you'll notice that it's self.getMouseOffset().

After I fixed that, I tried again:

I start your game; I check the console; I see this error:

Python script error - object 'camera', controller 'Python':
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/dev/shm/blender/mlook.blend/MouseLook.py", line 43, in main
  File "/dev/shm/blender/mlook.blend/MouseLook.py", line 31, in main
  File "/dev/shm/blender/mlook.blend/MouseLook.py", line 24, in getMouseOffset
NameError: name 'self_screen_center' is not defined

If you watch the video tutorial again, carefully, you'll notice that it's self.screen_center.

After I fixed that, I tried again:

I start your game; I check the console; I see no errors.

At that point the mouse look works, but if you want to have a proper orbiting view, you'll need to create an additional empty to act as the head, parented to whatever acts as the body. The camera should then be parented to that new head, not the body.

Here's your demo, with those modifications: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/32275

If you don't know Python basics, and you wish to learn, try my Python video tutorial series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGQv7bR6zCQ&index=1&list=PLDFB7FFF90EE6F0C1


How Can I Deform a Cloth During Simulation? I'm trying to figure out what techniques there are for controlling/manipulating/deforming a cloth during cloth simulation.  Specifically, I'm trying to mimic the effect of a woman "hitching up" her skirt before kneeling down (otherwise, her heel gets caught on the bottom hem):

I'm sure this sort of thing must be done a lot in practice.  I just can't figure out how.

Here's are the possibilities I can think of for doing this:

Pinning - Pinned vertices will stay in place.  Apparently they can be weighted, and they can be moved with shape keys (although I haven't actually tried either).  But to do the "hitching up", I need to turn the effect on and off via keyframes.  And I'm already using pinning to hold the cloth at the waist, so I'd need to turn it on and off for only some vertices in the pin group.
Armature - From what I can see, armatures (with weighted vertex groups) don't have any effect on the cloth during simulation.
Collision objects - I tried having a small object move the skirt from the inside; this almost worked, but it quickly ripped through the cloth.
Forces - The cloth is obviously affected by gravity.  According to one tutorial, it's also affected by wind and turbulence.  From my testing, it is not affect by a general force effector.  Regardless, I can't figure out a way to use forces for what I want.
Sewing springs - there might be a way to use these, although I'm already using them for something else, and there can only be one sewing spring vertex group.

Is there some clever use of the above that I'm not seeing, or is the answer something completely different?

Use a hook modifier with pinned vertices.

First, add the vertices you want to use to move the clot up to the same group as your other pinned verts (the ones that hold the cloth at the waist).

Now you need to add a hook object like an Empty in the region you want the cloth to move.

To your cloth add a hook modifier. Select the hook empty and the pinned vertex group. Set the radius to something small so it doesnt interfere with the sim until you need it to.
Make sure the hook is above the cloth modifier in the stack.

Let the sim run.

Once it gets to the point where you need to manipulate the cloth, move the empty and the vertex group will be "pulled" alongside the empty.


Curve bevel, both built in and using another curve not uniform in thickness Im trying to make a pipe using single edge, converted to curve, and then bevel it to add some thickness. but the result turns out weird.

as in the picture, the vertical section of the pipe is in uniform thickness, but the horizontal segment is much more thicker. This happen whether using built in bevel selector or using a bezier circle as bevel object.

how can i make it all uniform in thickness?

You must have scaled it on the Z axis. Select your curve and ctrl A > Apply Scale


Armature | Rig Smooth bends I'm using a Minecraft character rig which only has sharp bends.

I'd like to change them so that there are smooth bends like in this rig:

You may do it by increasing the Curved Bones segments number or using the Spline IK bone constraint.

In the Armature Data header change the bone display type to B-Bone. Then in the Deform panel of the Bone header increase the segments number for each bone. Play with Ease In and Ease Out values to control the smoothnes of a bend.


Difference Boolean 2.8 not working as expected; Weird shading and not removing face I'm only on my third day of trying out Blender after hearing about 2.8 changing the workflow. I followed the classic donut tutorial and now I wanted to try a simple project of my own.

I'm trying to use a boolean modifier difference operation to remove an object from a cylinder. I imported a SVG and solidified it and turned it into a mesh as the object I would like to remove out of the cylinder, but it's not working as expected. I suspect the SVG is the weird part because I can remove a sphere from a cube and it works as expected.

In the cylinder object mode using X-Ray, I can see that the shape is cut into the object but the face between the two objects is still there. In smooth shading mode you can see a hint of the process. I haven't seen this problem in any other question about booleans, including the ones this question is marked as a duplicate of. It doesn't even show up/cut the shape out.

The only time I've seen it work correctly is if I'm in edit mode for the SVG Shape and I've hidden it from viewport but I can't do anything from there. The shading is weird, but it removes the geometry how it should.

I've tried searching around but I'm not quite solid on 3D terms yet, and it's talked about normals, limited dissolve, merge by distance, etc. I've tried a bunch of things suggested but I can't seem to figure it out after a few hours.

In the SVG shape - delete the edge split modifier.
In the cylinder add an edge split modifier.

The current edge split modifier is breaking the shape into multiple pieces which doesn't work with the boolean modifier. Using an edge split after the boolean operation will give you the sharp edges you want.


Where do I find the latest Blender release? Where do I find the latest Blender release to install and what version should I use?

I'm not sure what OS I have and don't know what 32bit or 64bit is.

The latest production-ready version can be found on
  www.blender.org in the downloade page. (Direct link - blender.org/download)

 Finding the right version

If you are unsure of what version you should use, try the one that the page suggest with a big button. If you are denied to install or start it, go to the list of other versions and see if an archive (.zip / .rar / .7zip example given) version that matches what was recommended from the page. Open the archive and copy the folder that is in it to the desktop or where you like to keep your files. You start blender by launching the executable (same thing as a program) blender and not BlenderPlayer. (if the page recommended a 32bit version a 64bit is unlikely to work)

  If you have come this far. If someone does call you on the phone from a number you don't recognize and offer you support, say that you will call them back and only do that if the number belongs to someone you can trust.

If neither the recommended version or the archive work ask your support for help or computer administrator if needed. (The administrator will probably appreciate that you asked the support first)

If you don't have any support you can try this steps to find what OS you have and try the version for that instead.

If you have an interface that is based on typing on your keyboard to enter commands only. Ask the person that installed it or gave it to you for help, otherwise, go to your local computer store and ask for help.
Enter mmc.exe in the search bar and if you can launch the program you have windows. Try the different 32bit versions or if it complains and wants a 64bit, try them instead, otherwise test the next step.
If you have a  <- Apple Inc. logo in the corner, press it and go to about this mac. If you can do this you have OS X, otherwise, test the next step.
Contact the person that did give you your computer and ask for help or go to your local computer store and ask for help, otherwise test the next step.
Se if you can find the answer on these pages:

support.microsoft.com
support.apple.com

 Wher to find the latest features/experimental builds

The newest features and build can be found on builder.blender.org and should be considered unstable. Don't save anything with the realizes that you need later because the versions might corrupt the files.

If the version does cause the computer to freeze or crash repeatedly under normal use, go to the builder page and enter the requested information and force a new build for that version if no new have been realized.

If you want one of the current development versions read the wiki.blender.org on how to compile blender from the current code.

!!Do not forget to do the checkout or it will not work!!


Calling an Operator from an application handler I want to invoke an operator when rendering is finished.

import bpy

class FooOp(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "development.fooop"
    bl_label = "Foo"

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls,context):
        return True

    def invoke(self,context,event):
        self.report({'INFO'},"running FooOp!")
        return {'FINISHED'}

def make_foo(scene):
    bpy.ops.development.fooop('INVOKE_DEFAULT')

bpy.app.handlers.render_complete.append(make_foo)
bpy.utils.register_class(FooOp)

When rendering finishes, this error message is printed to the terminal:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/reillyi/Dropbox/blender_dev/addons/render_notification/call_operator.blend/Text", line 16, in make_foo
  File "/Applications/Blender/blender.app/Contents/MacOS/2.71/scripts/modules/bpy/ops.py", line 186, in __call__
    ret = op_call(self.idname_py(), C_dict, kw, C_exec, C_undo)
RuntimeError: Operator bpy.ops.development.fooop.poll() Missing 'window' in context

If I replace line 16, calling my FooOp operator, with

bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_torus_add()

Then a torus is created with no problem.

Can you help?

If you're only going to call this operator from the callback, you don't really need to use an operator.

However, the reason that your operator fails is that it doesn't support execution rather than invocation.

Add a method called execute with (self, context) as the arguments. If you want to use the invoke() method's code, just call self.invoke and pass None for the event (be careful with this). The execute() method should return a set for the result just as invoke() does, so if you're using invoke's body, just return the result of self.invoke(context, None).

Finally, call the operator as 'EXEC_DEFAULT' instead of 'INVOKE_DEFAULT'

import bpy

class FooOp(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "development.fooop"
    bl_label = "Foo"

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls,context):
        return True

    def execute(self, context):
        return self.invoke(context, None)

    def invoke(self,context,event):
        self.report({'INFO'},"running FooOp!")
        return {'FINISHED'}

def make_foo(scene):
    bpy.ops.development.fooOp('EXEC_DEFAULT')

bpy.app.handlers.render_complete.append(make_foo)
bpy.utils.register_class(FooOp)


Hold gizmo axis transformation shortcut In 3D Viewport constructions is usual to rotate the visualization often, so as it's gizmo stay at top-left side of application I observed me moving the mouse a lot.

There would be a keyboard shortcut to simulate holding an axis?
Or is possible to create this shortcut?

You can easily rotate the view by pressing the middle mouse button and moving the mouse. To pan the view, do the same but also maintain Shift. To zoom in/out, do the same but also maintain Ctrl (or simply use the mouse wheel).

You can use the numpad keys to set the view to :

front 1, back Ctrl+1
right 3, left Ctrl+3
top 7, bottom Ctrl+7
camera 0


Partitioning/ segmenting a 2D plane How can I uniformly divide a plane into even segments?
I am hoping to split a 2D rectangular plane into a series of smaller rectangles along its long horizontal axis before animating each individual piece differently.

With your 2D plane selected, enter edit mode with TAB.
Move your mouse along one of the long edges.
Hit CTRL+R.
Roll your mouse wheel until you see the correct number of cuts (in purple).
Click the left mouse button.
Click the right mouse button.

Your plane will now be subdivided into equal parts.

You can now separate them into individual objects by selecting each one in turn (in face select mode) then hitting P then ENTER.


How. Filming inside a landscape? I know how to animate a little figure. with a back screen. but how do prof animate in a little map, with trees.
Will try to make a little car. moving around in a landscape. but at the same time I will like to control my wheels in there.
Can't find the right set of words. to find tutorials on Filming or animation inside a landscape.
can you help me find som link on tutorials for that?

or tips to programs used for the animation recording part?

Thanks and peace :-)

You are also starting out on a new adventure, and a very steep learning curve. If you don't already have it, you will need to gain an understanding of modelling, texturing, rigging, lighting, staging, sound/sound fx, pacing, composing, compositing, story structure, cinematic structure, and, and, and. Blender can do many things, and you have a lot to learn just for that. But consider you will also have to gain some mastery of other programs like audacity (for audio) and the gimp (for texturing/backgrounds) as well before you can, as you say it, prof animate in a little map.

I guess you need to do what every one of us has done, search for tutorials on what you need to know at the time. Why not start with the opening shot on your example there. Model a rock, some trees, flowers, and a little character like you already have. Then light your scene and set up the animated camera shot. All of these links are to tutorials I found with a single search, all leading to dozens of others that may fit your needs more.

I was going to suggest that you also try to track down the production files for Big Buck Bunny and study the blend files because that movie opens similarly to your example. But it seems that more and more of Blender is getting locked up behind paywalls. Even so, there are many good blend files still freely available that you can download, open up and study.

I hope I haven't put you off. But I think it will help you more to understand that you will never get to where you want to be (prof animate) by starting with a single animation and then asking SO how to do everything else.


Round edged-curved mesh from CAD-Program How can I round this curved mesh?
I tried to subdivide the faces, didnt work.
Bevel also didnt work.

I dont know how to do it. Anyone has a tipp for me?

The model was created in Fusion360 and imported as a .stl file.

Kind regards

You can smooth the model by going to Mesh -> shade smooth in Object mode or selecting faces in Edit mode and choosing Face -> shade smooth.

However, as others have pointed out, you seem to have some redundant edges (edges that do not change the shape of the model). Even if they change the shape slightly, it is not noticeable. You can remove every other edge by selecting the edge ring (select an edge, hold CTRL + ALT, and select a parallel edge) and choosing Select
 -> Checker Deselect. I think which edges are deselected is based on the active edge (the last edge you select), so if you would prefer the compliment edges were deselected, undo and shift-select any edge in the edge ring you want to be deselected before running it again. When you have the edges you want to delete selected...delete them.

Fun fact: changing the settings for Checker Deselect will allow you to deselect every Nth edge, N being whatever number you like; third edge, fourth edge, etc.


How can I translate parts of mesh without affecting the hidden part? When I have a large mesh and I want to work on only part of it, I hide the unwanted part and work on the rest. After finishing my editing on it (including translation), I reveal the hidden part, and the mesh becomes distorted as the two parts are no longer in the same position. Is there any solution for that?

Not really, that's what you get for not looking at everything that you are transforming. Think of it like this:

Vertices are "linked" to every edge that they are attached to (duh).
Edges are "linked" to every face that they are attached to.
Faces are "linked" to each other through edges.

This is the fundamental problem...if you move a vertex, edge, or face with some of the "components" that it is linked to hidden, Blender has no choice except to move those along with it. Blender's mesh tools act no differently with things hidden or not; it is simply a way to get unnecessary parts of the mesh out of your way. You should only really be hiding things that won't be affected by your editing (i.e., only hide things that are relatively far away from the area you are changing).


Small 2D image plane disappears at short distance? I’m using 2d images with alpha (opacity) as a sort of “decal” on my model, but if the camera moves even 5ish meters away, the 2d image totally vanishes from view. My clip start and end are at 0.0001m and 1000m respectively.

These decals are used for the facial features of my character so it's important they stay rendered at distance.

When your clipping maximum and minimum are too far apart you can get some glitches (hence why we need clipping in the first place). Therefore when you lower your minimum from 0.1 (default value) to 0.0001 make sure you do the same with your maximum to keep things balanced (from 1000 to 10).


Boolean difference not working I tried looking up ways to resolve my issue, but it seems like nothing has worked.

I have a cylinder that I'm trying to punch a specific shape into. Originally, I created the shape combining a bunch of different objects and it worked fine. Then, I discovered I needed to change the shape slightly, and since then it has refused to work at all, even when I completely re-made it from scratch.

I read questions answered elsewhere and tried removing double vertices and recalculating normals, and even tried the 'flip normals' option, but nothing is working. Instead I've gotten a slew of different errors as I've tried, everything from the "cannot execute boolean operation" to the model I'm cutting into disappearing completely, to it cutting into the cylinder... but in completely the wrong shape.

I'm pretty new to blender, so this has been pretty confusing (especially when it worked fine the first way I made it!) Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'm attempting to make a hole in BOTTOM with HOLE PUNCHER NOPE.

And here are the pieces before they're combined.

Your HOLE PUNCHER NOPE object seems to be a pretty much a revolution object, it could be easily and cleanly modeled by drawing a simple profile and using a screw modifier.
That will yield a cleaner consistent geometry that will be error free and less prone to errors using boolean modifiers

Recreate your object from scratch by draw a single continuous bi dimensional edge profile by extruding from a single vertex and tracing over your existing object with snapping to make it easier. Then you can add a Screw modifier to it.

Recalculate the normals on your "BOTTOM" object, add the Boolean modifier and it should work.


How do I create a light streak like this? I am trying to figure out how to make these light streaks inside a tube, I have been trying to make a light follow a path inside a glass tube but it doesn't look anywhere near this. Any advice?

https://youtu.be/LSxPkyZOU7E?t=24

Yes, you want to create a curve to follow the path of the light streak. You are going to go into the curve settings in the property panel and go into geometry. Increase its depth to the width that you would like the streak to be. Then apply the material of the streak based off of an opacity map with a basic color. I would choose something basic like white. You are then going to animate the curve with streak with the bevel start and bevel end option in the same geometry menu in the curve settings of the properties panel. You then need to find compositing software that you can apply glow effects too from a render layer that you rendered the object in. If it is under glass it should not matter what order you render in. If you can afford BorisFX it is great for stuff like this. You can see something basic that is relevant to what you are asking that I did with the same instructions here in this scene. https://www.dropbox.com/s/1d3844h6kvg78ym/TheRealmOfCelesbian%27sFantasyHold.mp4?dl=0


Add repeating text 6-8 times on a UV Sphere using texture instead of mesh I have been trying for a day to create something similar to the above. I need to repeat a small text on a UV sphere (ideally created by subdividing a cube and then converting to sphere for equal face size) 6-8 times uniformly distributed on the sphere.

A lot of the suggestions and tutorials suggest to create text and convert to mesh, then use something like boolean modifier on the sphere but that will create a high poly object. I want to create it using only texture. It would be best if the method allows for baking into a single image.

I have tried to first add a base material to sphere, then adding image texture to select faces only but because of scale perhaps the image  of the text doesn't show. I created the texture as a simple png file.

I also tried to add Mapper with  Texture coordinate in node editor, but I couldn't make that work either.

Sphere or rounded cube, from Generated coordinates, the Image texture can be projected not as FLAT, but drop down and find, BOX. Blend 0.0 is fine for you but you'll need to tweak some polygons in the UV Editor to flip the numbers around correctly.

I'd love to make a video of this if anyone's still having trouble. It's a great question! Also, don't use the image directly as a color; use it to control the FACTOR in a Mix Color Node between two other colors or black and white.

You can also use this image texture to mix between two shaders in a Mix Shader Node. Using a .png directly can lead to odd problems that you don't need to experience. If it's distorting, ensure your modifiers are applied if they distort the mesh.


Tips for proper topology I'm confused on how topology works and the videos don't really help me much.
i am trying to make an anime characters face with a video from daniel and i am having trouble keeping a good topology.

This a fairly large topic. But i try to give a rough overview that may serve as a general guideline for further investigation.

Main goals of good topology:

Animation friendly mesh
Being as low poly as possible

Why animation friendly:

In real world skin behaves like a tight layer that gets stretched by the muscles and bones right beneath it. Logically real skin does not have any polygons, meaning it bends right where the muscle is.
But in 3D we have polygons and this is a problem. Mesh deforms along the edge loops. If the edge loops and the desired wrinkles are not exactly at the same position, the mesh will deform not correctly, exposing the faces and creating artifacts.

Firt pragmatical fix, most of the people come up with "just increase the polycount until i see no more artifacts. But this is NOT how you do it. You want to keep your polycount as low as possible!

Why low poly:

Many inexperienced people think, their mesh only gets professional if it has a high polycount. But the opposite is the case! You need to keep your polycount low at all costs. Otherwise editing your mesh gets needlessly tedious. Also skinning (=weight painting the mesh to bones) your mesh gets more tricky. Not to mention it simply costs more compute power.

How to achieve animation friendly topology:

In general your mesh must follow roughly the form of the muscles and wrinkles of your model.

This means you have to look, where the muscles are and where they push the skin and where the skin forms wrinkles. Then try to build edge loops along those positions.

The face is especially tricky because there are lots of muscles at the same spot. Logically you can't rebuild all of them, because of "being low poly". So you have to find a good balance between those two rules. Mainly it depends on what amount of realism you are going for. If it is anime or toon style, you can ignore most of the muscles and just priorize the wrinkles of the skin. But if you are going for non stylized, pure realism, you have to study the human body and try to recreate most of the muscles in your topology.

Most important wrinkles of the head:

Eyes
Mouth
Nose
Jaw

If those parts don't have an edge loop, your head will most likely don't deform well.

How to achieve low poly:

Only set an edge loop where it is necessary! If the edge loop does not add anything to the mesh's detail, delete it. Use support edges wisely and with caution.

Where is the line between high and low poly:

Generally everything you model by hand, is still considered low poly. Modeling the mere foundation of wrinkles/creases is the highest form of low poly. If you are defining a complete shaped and sharp crease you are most likely already over the top of low poly.

Such fine details aswell as pores or mini wrinkles (like finger wrinkles) are not part of low poly and will be added using a normal and/or displacement map!

I created a pinterest side for some examples of good topology: https://de.pinterest.com/demons_fate/mesh-toplogy/


Does Blender have a tool that does auto lip sync Detail: I don't use bones, I use 100% shape keys with my rigs to do facial expressions.

How do I make Blender do automatic lip sync?

Blender has a plugin for automatic lip sync.  You can download it here: https://morevnaproject.org/2015/11/11/automatic-lipsync-animation-in-blender/  However, I do not know if it works with shape keys.


Detect user event (bpy.types.Event) anywhere from blender? In blender interface, when multiple objects are selected if we press "ALT" on the keyboard while changing a property, the behavior of the property execution change (in this case we can batch change every selected objects at the same time)
How can I have a similar behavior with my python bpy.props properties ?
is there a way to tell if the user is pressing "ALT" from my prop update function?
How can I make my property run a different execution if my user is pressing the ALT key when interacting with my prop from the GUI for example?
Thanks

What i really need is bpy.Types.event, unfortunately, it is only accessible from an Operator invoke() or modal()
so here's the trick
_event = None

class SCATTER5_OT_get_event(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname  = "scatter5.get_event"
    bl_label   = ""

    def invoke(self, context, event):
        global _event
        _event = event
        return {'FINISHED'}

def get_event():
    global _event
    bpy.ops.scatter5.get_event('INVOKE_DEFAULT')
    return _event

event = get_event()

to get event from anywhere in your script
what would have been be nice is something like bpy.context.window_manager.event, unfortunately this API does not exist (not sure why this type is only accessible from operators?)
Also, it would be ideal if there was a built-in python module that can detect keyboard input, unfortunately, I didn't find one.
feel free to propose an alternative method

example of implementation by @batFINGER
press alt/shift/ctrl/oskey while interacting with foo prop
import bpy

_event = None

class SCATTER5_OT_get_event(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname  = "scatter5.get_event"
    bl_label   = ""

    def invoke(self, context, event):
        global _event
        _event = event
        return {'FINISHED'}

def get_event(exec_context='INVOKE_DEFAULT'):
    global _event
    bpy.ops.scatter5.get_event(exec_context)
    return _event

def foo(self, context):
    event = get_event('INVOKE_REGION_WIN')
    print(
        "Shift" if event.shift else "",
        "Alt" if event.alt else "",
        "Ctrl" if event.ctrl else "",
        "OSKey" if event.oskey else "",
        event.value)

def draw(self, context):
    ob = context.object
    if ob:
        self.layout.prop(ob, "foo")

def register():
    bpy.types.Object.foo = bpy.props.IntProperty(
            update=foo,
            )
    bpy.utils.register_class(SCATTER5_OT_get_event)
    bpy.types.TEXT_HT_footer.prepend(draw)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()


There is a way to instance two rigid body objects with hinge constraint between then using AN? I want to make several instances (clones) of a simple rigid body setup: two rigid bodies linked with a hinge constraint. Each one of the instances need to bend by the hinge in its proper individual way. Using the particle system, I managed to make it, but the problem is that all instances behave like the source setup.
In Cinema4d it is very simple, just set up the bodies and hinge and put it into the cloner or emitter object and it is done.
Is possible to solve this problem using Animation Nodes ? (I managed to clone the rigid bodies but the hinge constraint does not work)

When you instance the object using the Copy Full Object option of the Instancer node, you are copying the constraints of the source object to all instances. And the constraints data for all instances will be the same. So all you have to do in this case is to update the data of the constraints. Consider the following example where we instance a group of cubes having a Damped Track constraint, after instancing, all cubes point to the icosphere because it is the target.

What we can do now is instance the icosphere and set the instances as the targets of the constraints of the cubes. The Object Attribute Output node can be used.


How do I make tank treads without the treads becoming distorted? I wanted to make realistic tank treads, perhaps for a game, that would not become distorted by the curve modifier. How do I make the links properly follow the curve, only rotating the the joints of the links?

Besides the comments provided, you can also avoid this by not having geometry along the X-axis that lets the object bend.


Bone doesn't rotate at right axis I created an armature for my birds wing. The wing should be exactly rotated from the edge of the part of the wing. But everytime I rotate it by the x axis it leaves this line and there is some space between it (see the picture). This is because the part of the wing isn't parallel to the ground, but it goes up a bit in the Z axis. I don't know what to do, to tell the bone to rotate by another custom axis...

My .blend file:

You have three options,

1) what you want is to rotate bone on custom axis, for this please see
Rotate object on axis between two points

2) if (1) this is cumbersome then i'll suggest, join all mesh (KFlügelR, FlügelL, Vogel, FlügelL, KFlügelL) together (select all mesh and do ctrl+j ). Then assign the armature to this joined mesh, use auto weight for first try . ( if you do not know how to do this then just ask :) )

3) Make the mesh so that its pivot is aligned to the bone orientation.

I'll suggest option (2), as it should be the right way anyhow.


Fluid not showing in fluid simulator These are the settings of the flow object and the domain object.

I think I got all the settings right but every simulation I bake does not show the fluid. I tried restarting blender but it keeps doing this. I checked the 'liquid' tick box and it was enabled. I just can't see anything even the atom-like particles. What could be the problem?

Increase with the Resolution Diverges. Higher resolutions allow it to detect thinner, smaller objects. (For small objects, resolutions like 512+ may be needed and can take a while depending on your computer).

As well as baking the data, you also have to bake the mesh. Scroll down a little to get to the Mesh section:

Now bake the mesh.


How can unwanted rotation of hair particles be avoided? A hair particle system is used to emit leaves from an animated tree, for some reason the leaves rotate. How can this be stopped? I know that I could convert the particles to meshes, but I would prefer  too keep the particles.

Two subsequent frames:

The settings:

Emit from faces instead of vertices makes it appear a bit more stable (but then no more particles will be emitted at the tips of the branches), not all leaves are rotating.

.blend

This sudden odd orientation change appears to be caused by the Armature modifier on the tree. The particles seem to respond much differently when the vertex positions are moving (it could possibly be because it is changing the size of the faces).

One way to combat this would be to move the perticle systems up the modifier stack until they are before the Armature modifier.

So instead of this:

You would instead end up with this:

It is important to note that when the armature moves the mesh, the particles might not move with it. You will need to convert to a mesh and add it to the armature deformation.


How to render a pixelated, occluded wireframe with freestyle? I'd like to combine these features:

The pixelated look of a wire material with anti-aliasing disabled.
Proper occlusion of hidden lines.

A wireframe material produces the first feature, freestyle produces the second. Can a line set be created that produces neither double pixels nor gaps? Line thickness alone does not seem to be the answer.

There is the trick with two materials and z-offset, but I have trouble getting a really clean solution at the outline of the object. So a freestyle solution would be best.

The main problem is that freestyle (to the right) produces double pixels:

You can use the Blender OpenGL viewport rendering for this.

Go to edit mode, activate edge-select and Z-Clipping:

Go to User Preferences, System, then disable all lights and make the final one black (color and specular, in my screenshot, only the specular ones are set to black).

Go to the Theme settings, 3D View and set selected edges to white and selected faces to black.

Select everything and press the "OpenGL render active viewport" (3D view header, the left one in the screenshot).

To remove other lines such as lamps you can enable Only render in 3D view > Properties panel (N) > Display > Only render and press CtrlSpace to toggle the 3D manipulator.

If the background is a problem, you can put a face there or also make it black in the theme settings.

AA has to be disabled, otherwise you will get smooth lines.

Result:


Nearest point to a z(x,y) function Let's see if I can express my problem.
I have created a grid mesh and then assigned  to each (x,y) a z value (this is how I create z(x,y) function in animation nodes, I don't know if it's the best way).

Now, this is a discrete function, I can't have a value of z(x,y) if that point doesn't belong to my grid mesh. What I want to know is if there is a way to obtain an aproximate value of z(x,y) for all the (x,y) inside the boundaries of my mesh (like you would have in an analytic function, in my case z=sin(x)).

I assume that for creating the surface, Blender has to generate planes that join all the nearest vertices of the grid mesh, so getting the intersection with a vertical line that pass trough the point (x,y) that we want to evaluate (the orange one in the pictures) and those planes should be possible.

You can get an intersection using raycast BVH tree node. I have used your node set up and added an icosphere and an empty and have always execute option ticked in AN as shown. Just grab the empty and move it around.

Make sure the always executing box is ticked so it updates when moving the empty.

And if you want to find the point on the mesh nearest to the intersection just add these three nodes.

If you move the empty below the mesh it will not work as the Ray Cast BVH Tree is just projecting downwards in -z direction from the empty. To solve that, tick the"Start in infinity" box in the Ray Cast BVH Tree node, it will then project in the  opposite direction aswell.


Lamps appearing on particles I'm using blender 2.8 and i have a scene with a donut with sprinkles for which i used the particles function. But when i try to add any object, every single sprinkle gets equipped with the same object, when i try to delete them, sprinkles disappear too. I'm guessing, it might have something to do with the weight paint i used for the sprinkles. You can check the file here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16M--sEhafyabL10aAXjqivKVprbfprCW

Take a look at this image from your particle system:
Your are telling Blender to Render everything that is inside Collection 2 as particles, so every new object that you put inside the Collection 2, will be part of the particles. Just move the lamps to a different collection and you will be good to go.

Good Luck


Bloom not working correctly? so I've been following a few of ducky's videos to learn some new techniques, however I've followed his most recent video to create a glowing particle effect animation.

However, the effects of the bloom are just nowhere near his and I can't figure out why, I've tried fiddling with intensity, threshold etc.

Nothing seems to work

Here is how his looks https://imgur.com/fjW0INs

and then here is how mine looks https://imgur.com/gKxymNU

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

It seems like your bloom is not enabled at all.

Go into the scene tab and make sure the bloom box is checked.

No bloom:

After checking the bloom box:

If you really have checked the bloom box, try making the threshold much lower or increasing the emission amount and increasing the radius to get it more glowy. If neither of those work, try testing the bloom feature on a plain cube like I did to make sure it works.


How to make a holographic reticle shader in cycles Does anyone have a lead on how to set up a shader in cycles to mimic the behavior of hologhraphic sights in blender, as shown in this image?

I don't want to have to try and figure out exactly how to get the lenses and reflectors etc. physically correct because there seems to be no public knowledge of how exactly it's done.  I'm thinking it will probably have to involve some vector math, but I don't know how to do it.

Pure Shader Solution!

Hey look, high-school maths does have a purpose......

From what I could understand with a little research, holographic/reticle sights display a holograph that appears (when looking through the sights glass) to be fixed to a spatial position a certain distance (d) from the glass. Basically, we need to work out the x,y coordinates of the point d distance down the camera ray for each point we render on our sight. We can then use that to map our texture.

This would be a piece of cake if we had matrices in cycles nodes (in particular, the transform matrices of the sight object and the camera, as well as the projection matrix). We don't, so lets improvise.

The camera data node (which is where you'd expect to find the view and projection matrices) is a good starting place. While we don't see any juicy matrices, we do get one vector.

The View Vector

Location: Camera Data Node
Age... No idea when it was added
Height: ....Dude, this is a node
Weakness: Its normalized

The view vector provides a vector representing the ray that was shot out to hit that point of our mesh. This direction is in camera space. Therefore Z is always forwards, x is always left/right, and y is always up down. Each vector is normalized, so they always have a length of one.

Lets visualize this a bit. We'll do this in 2D because I can't draw this in 3D it will be easier for you to understand.

Looking at our camera top down in camera space, z is forwards (now up relative to our view), and x is left to right. This is drawn with the dark colored axis. If we look at our ray (in yellow) which has a length of 1, you will see that it can be broken up into an x and a z component (light colored axis). This is the ratio of x to z movement needed to travel down the ray.

I am available to illustrate geometry textbooks.

Do you remember when I said

  Basically, we need to work out the x,y coordinates of the point d distance down the camera ray for each point we render on our sight.

If we multiply the View Vector by d, we will get the x,y coordinates of a point d distance from the camera in that direction. Progress!

However, our sight is now fixed to the camera. We can improve this, using the vector transform node.

Vector Transform

Strength: Secret sauce that makes everything work
Weakness: Doesn't seem to understand the idea of location

Obviously, our hologram should not always be d distance infront of the camera. It should be d distance in front of our sight. To do this, we will need to go from camera space to object space. The vector transform does exactly this:

To explain exactly how this space conversion works, we will need to understand object space. Object space is where the origin of our space is the origin of the object, and all the axis (plural) line up with the objects local axis (plural). Pretty simple. Our sight just needs to be d distance down the z axis is object space.

So how does this space conversion work?

If you will direct your eyes to my next graphic (again drawn looking top down), you will see that a plane as been added (our sight), and the camera has been rotated. In light colors are the axis of the object space, and in dark the axis of the camera space.

If we ignore position for a moment, and overlay the two spaces, we can see how the axis don't align:

If we line the axis up as such:

We can see that the ray, which is in camera space, is pointing the wrong way. If we apply the inverse of the camera's rotation to the data, the ray will go back to pointing the correct direction.

This is what the vector transform does.

However, this space transformation does not take the relative positions of the camera and the object into account. Therefore, if we move the camera, our sight slips:

To fix this, we need to take position into account.

Object Texture Coordinate

Location: Texture Coordinate node
Weakness: Weird positions for object origins

The object texture coordinate give the object space location of the ray/mesh intersection. Since our rays are traveling at the right angle, all they need is to start at the right place. If we take the object space coordinate, and travel d distance along the ray direct (in object space), we will get our desired x,y coordinates. This can be achieve simply be Adding the two vectors together (using the vector math node).

Now it works:

Lets re-cap.

We take the view vector, transform it to object space, multiply it by the distance d (scalar multiplication). We then add it to the object texture coordinate.

Since we sample textures in 0,1 space, and our xy coordinates range between --25 and + 25, we then divide by d, and add .5 to the xy coordinates, Clamp to avoid the texture repeating, then sample it. The whole setup looks like this:

I created my own vector clamp and scalar multiply node groups. Those can be obtained in the provided blend file.

Denormalizing the View Vector

The view vector travels out from the camera, which is a point in space. We adjust the position, transforming it to the origin of the object. Because the vector is normalize, our "projection" plane is actually a sphere d distance from the origin of the object.

In the examples, we view a very small slice of the sphere, so the curvature is not very noticeable

However, if we were to place a camera with a very wide FOV very close to the glass, we would see a much greater amount of curvature:

Which would produce very visible distortion (clamping is turned off because the repeating pattern makes to distortion more visible):

To fix this we need project the point represented by the normalize view vector (Yellow) onto a abstract plane (Teal) that is one unit away from the camera along the z (depth) axis.

The target point is in magenta. RGB lines represent components of the view vector. Also, 2.8 grease pencil improvements are awesome.

This diagram is a little confusing, a top down view provides some more clarity:

If we scale the vector's components by the ratio of the distance to the plane and the z components 1.0/z (big purple bracket divided by little purple bracket) We can extend the vector to the plane.

Implemented in nodes:

And now the warping is gone:

The center target is still roughly the same size. They appear to have shrunk since the spherical projection was moving the outer targets closer.

Author's Notes

This is a pretty robust shader. It handles object rotation, scaling moving, and zooming (focal length changes) in stride. The scope texture will always be centered around the object origin, and be visible when looking down the z axis of the object. Because the output of view vector is normalized, the output x,y coordinates used to map the texture will be projected along a sphere d distance from the objects origin, rather than a plane. This shouldn't be too noticeable. Pity they don't let the user decide whether it should be normalized.


VSE proxy showing wrong frames So I make a new VSE session. Add in my video. All the fps and resolution is correctly lined up. First thing I do is set the proxy and rebuild it at 25%. Takes  awhile, then I go to the preview window and enable it to 25% so I can view it as a proxy. Done.

Problem is while I'm editing the frames are not always correctly displayed in the proxy preview window. ANd if I disable the proxy and go back to no proxy 100%, it'll show a completely different frame from the next scene. It usually happens on the frame right before a scene change in the video, it also happens on lip movements. So I could have a completely open mouthed character in the 25%, then I change it to no proxy and it's actually closed mouth....a very very big departure from the proxy.

Seems to be random. So only some frames before scene changes are displayed incorrectly, and only some lip flaps are displayed incorrectly.

The disturbing part is that the 100% no proxy also displays incorrect images in the preview window sometimes, and I have to hit refresh sequencer and it changes to the real scene. I've had issues where I hit refresh sequencer but it even renders the incorrect frames after they've been refreshed manually.

Is there a way to refresh the proxy or fix this problem? I need to use a 25% proxy or something with similar performance or I can't edit. 50% is too laggy as well and the other %'s don't solve the problem either it seems.

I had a similar problem where I was using a screen-capturing device that output some strangely encoded mp4 files. Whenever I tried to edit these in Blender, I had the same troubles you describe.

I fixed the issue by converting these strange mp4 files to a standardized format that blender can easily recognize. Here is the python script that I used, but you must have ffmpeg installed for it to work. To use it, save the text into a file that ends with .py and place it in the folder where your video files are stored (and no other files) and run the script:

import os
import subprocess

for file in os.listdir(os.getcwd()):
    if not file.endswith('.py'):
        filepath = os.path.join(os.getcwd(), file)
        outpath = os.path.splitext(filepath)[0] + '.mp4'

        if filepath == outpath:
            outpath = os.path.splitext(filepath)[0] + '_converted.mp4'

        subprocess.call(['ffmpeg', '-i', file, outpath])

If this doesn't work, perhaps you can provide a sample video that I can play with so I can find a better solution and edit this answer.

One problem with this method is that you lose quality everytime you convert and compress a video. If you have the hard drive space, I recommend altering the script so it converts the files to RAW avi files instead, like this:

import os
import subprocess

for file in os.listdir(os.getcwd()):
    if not file.endswith('.py'):
        filepath = os.path.join(os.getcwd(), file)
        outpath = os.path.splitext(filepath)[0] + '.avi'

        if filepath == outpath:
            outpath = os.path.splitext(filepath)[0] + '_converted.avi'

        subprocess.call(['ffmpeg', '-i', file, '-c:v', 'rawvideo', outpath])

The added benefit would be that you would no longer need to make proxy files.


One object with multiple elements ,different colours to elements inside object After applying a particle instance I now have 1 object that has hundred of elements inside
I would now like to assign random colours to the different elements
I know how to do it to differnet objects and particle systems but not with one objects that has multiple elements inside
The object info node , random output is only relevent when the object is duplicated , but the elemnts inside still have the same colour

The screenshot shows a sphere with hair particles ( left  )  , for the rendered view I choose path
Then I created a small cube ,  and added a particle instance  modifier , pointed that to the sphere particle system   and applied the modifier
The result is a sphere (object ) made out of cubes ., right part of the screen.
ONe object with multiple mesh islands

I know how to add differenet materials  to differet faces , and I could do that here too , but we have around thousand cubes here , so doing it manually requires a lot of work
I basically want 1 material , and apply random colours to the separate mesh islands .
SO far , I have.t found the correct   node module yet .

On the other hand , If I would do it the other way , choose the cube as a rendered object for the particle system , then the particle node , random output  would do wha I want .
But this is not relevant here , since I'm working with an instanced particle object that is applied
I tried different textures , texture input node set to generated and going into a colour ramp ..all with mixed result , because something one cube has 2 different colours .
So bassically a need a module that goes into a colour ramp , and apply  1 colour to each cube , in a random order
The particle node random output only works for particle systems and sadly not in my case ( 1 object , multiple mesh islands )

Then we have the object info node , this will work on different objects only , but sadly not mesh islands

Assuming Blender Render.

In [Edit] mode  you can place the mouse over a connected vertex group and

press l the second letter of  B(l)ender to increase your selection .

Then in the materials panel pick one material and click
[assign] button.

Particles can be created with different colors in groups or duplicated faces or material nodes so it may be easier to let the creation of particles assign colors for you.


Blender 2.8 Clothing collision with other object overlapping thank you in advance for answering. As the tittle says, I'm having problems with cloth collision.

There's the cloth object, then a mesh object for the shirt and a mesh for the body. The body collision with the cloth works fine but I'm having problems with the collision of the shirt, as seem in the picture:

Here is the cloth object settings:

Found the answer in this topic: How to prevent a cloth from entering another mesh?

Lowered the collision distance in both objects. Edit: And increased as much as needed the "impulse clamping" parameter.


Line artifact in render? When I render (and in render preview) I get shadow looking line artifacts. I suspected the texture at first but removing the texture in the material it's still there.

Here you can see the artifacts starting in the "Note" and "Volume" text and heading up to the right corner of the mesh.

I don't have any bump map, just a simple texture. Changeing the lamp (type and/or angle) doesn't make it better.

Sincerley
LarsErik

PS. Yeah you guessed right, I'm a beginner with Blender. :D

It's hard to tell the exact problem here without a blendfile but it seems like you used ngon's for the mesh (polygons with more then 4 vertices). For hard surface modeling this is usually fine but it can lead to artifacts because cycles converts them to multiple triangles. here this might mess up your topology when many triangles (that are generated because of the holes for the buttons in the mesh). One simple thing you could try is to make sure your plane is completely flat. just select the whole plane and press S+Y(or X- depends on how you rotated it earlyer).+0

editmode and what cycles does with it


How can I lay down an object on a plane? I am creating a scene with different objects scattered around, as if they were laid down on the floor, and I found that one of my objects it not touching the plane (the monkey head in the back).

So I have to move really up close to the object (then at some point the zoom strength slows down, not sure why), spin the scene around so as to be have my view aligned with the plane, then move it little by little.

But it's a Monkey head, so there's the jaw part, and there's the back of the head.
So after I align the jaw, I see that the back of the head isn't laid down on the plane, just the jaw is.

So I rotate, grab the object up on the Z axis... then the jaw isn't touching anymore...

And then I thought "wait, there's got to be a simpler way to do this".

One solution is to use Blender's rigid body physics simulation. Basically, you simulate the object falling and settling on the floor from gravity.

In the Properties > Physics panel, turn on both Collision and Rigid Body for both your floor object and the object you want to lay down.

For the floor object, change the rigid body Type to Passive.

Press AltA to animate the physics simulation. You should see object fall down to the floor and eventually come to rest. Press AltA again to stop the animation. If you want to apply the final position to all frames, select the object and press CtrlA>Visual Transform, then turn off the physics for those objects in the Physics panel.


Finding domain/range of a specific shader node input/output, inside the Blender UI? Is there anywhere within the Blender UI that displays the dimensionality & bounding sets (e.g., all floats, floats in [0,1], floats in [0,255], etc) of arbitrary shader node inputs & outputs?

I consistently find myself digging through stackexchange/the Blender docs/experimenting with less-than-equal-to to try to figure out what I need to divide by to normalize shader nodes' input/output values to within a specific range, or to center them at 0, etc. This seems like functionality that Blender's very rich UI might already have built into it, though, so I am wondering if I am just overlooking it somewhere.

As an example, I can do something like this, varying the threshold between 0, 0.5, and 1, and observing that in rendered view my sphere switches from all black to mixed black/white to all white, to convince myself that Blender's (Perlin) Noise Texture's Fac output naturally outputs floats in [0,1]:

But it seems odd that I should have to experiment, or search through docs or stackexchanges, to discover something like this. Is this information maybe already neatly displayed somewhere inside the Blender UI, and I just don't know where to look?

You can access this information for every IntProperty and FloatProperty through Python. It requires the access of RNA properties. The approach is the same for UI sliders as it is for node sockets, but as an easier introduction the first example uses a property of Eevee's render settings.

Example 1 - Regular UI Property

Let's start with finding the limits of Eevee's bloom threshold. The value that is currently set can be accessed through:

bpy.context.scene.eevee.bloom_threshold

This will only give us the current float value. If we want to get the property, we have to access the RNA. The following code gets the underlying FloatProperty.

bpy.context.scene.eevee.bl_rna.properties["bloom_threshold"]

There are four limits to the property soft_min, soft_max, hard_min and hard_max. The soft limits are used for the minimum and maximum value that can be reached through the slider, while the hard limits are the actual maximum and minimum values that can be entered manually.*

* This doesn't seem to apply to the nodes though, they allow to enter float values higher than the hard limits.

bloom_threshold = bpy.context.scene.eevee.bl_rna.properties["bloom_threshold"]
print(f"soft_min: {bloom_threshold.soft_min}")
print(f"soft_max: {bloom_threshold.soft_max}")
print(f"hard_min: {bloom_threshold.hard_min}")
print(f"hard_max: {bloom_threshold.hard_max}")

For the bloom threshold the values are:

soft_min:      0.0
soft_max:     10.0
hard_min:      0.0
hard_max: 100000.0

Example 2 - Node Socket

The following example assumes that the material with the node exists. Normally you would need to check for the existence of the keys first.

Assume that you have a material called Material which contains a node Noise Texture for which you would like to know the limits of the input Scale and the output Fac.

First the node has to be accessed (assuming that all these elements exist):

noise_texture = bpy.data.materials["Material"].node_tree.nodes["Noise Texture"]

For the limits of the Scale input we need to access the Property that is behind default_value of the socket that we're interested in. Scale is an input socket.

scale_property = noise_texture.inputs["Scale"].bl_rna.properties["default_value"]
print(f"soft_min: {scale_property.soft_min}")
print(f"soft_max: {scale_property.soft_max}")
print(f"hard_min: {scale_property.hard_min}")
print(f"hard_max: {scale_property.hard_max}")

The limits are:

soft_min: -10000.0
soft_max:  10000.0
hard_min:     -3.4028234663852886e+38
hard_max:      3.4028234663852886e+38

The same approach can be used to find the limits of an output socket, like Fac.

fac_property = noise_texture.outputs["Fac"].bl_rna.properties["default_value"]
print(f"soft_min: {fac_property.soft_min}")
print(f"soft_max: {fac_property.soft_max}")
print(f"hard_min: {fac_property.hard_min}")
print(f"hard_max: {fac_property.hard_max}")

The limits for this socket are:

soft_min: 0.0
soft_max: 1.0
hard_min: 0.0
hard_max: 1.0

There may be cases where the limits change dynamically, which isn't covered by this answer. It looks like a similar approach could possibly work for Vector sockets, where the limits likely apply for each dimension.


OSL script includes and reuse Is it possible to include one OSL file in another so I can use the functions from it or must I copy and paste everything every time I want to reuse it?

OSL seems to have #include functionality, but is there a way to use it for script files within Blender?

(I'm using internal script files, but I can change if that helps.)

After some experimentation, it appears that #include-ing OSL files works with external scripts, but not internal.

The OSL compiler takes a shader file as input, and seems to use the directory of that file as a base for further includes. It also looks in the \scripts\addons\cycles\shader directory.

If external scripts are used, the OSL compiler therefore looks in the correct directory, and will find included files correctly.

If internal scripts are used, the script being compiled is moved by itself to a temporary directory, given a random name, and deleted afterwards. This means that internal scripts cannot use #includes unless the included files are placed in the \scripts\addons\cycles\shader directory.


How would I create this moving flowy mesh on a transparant mesh? How would I create this kind of effect in Blender? Some kind of attracting material / cloth?

Extreme deformation meshes with blender tends to break the geometry of the mesh. Here I take a simple cube with 2 faces deleted and some twist modifiers. You animate by increasing the twist values.

Otherwise you could use a procedural texture on a sphere, you map it to an empty that has an animated position. Use alpha values to cut holes in the sphere mesh. Remember to make the inside traceable in Blender Internal, otherwise Cycles will do this automatically, allowing you to cast shadows inside.

And here is the example blend file I made these images with:


Nvidia Series 10XX on Mac OS Does anybody use any Nvidia card (1050, 1060, 1070, 1080)on a MacPro 5,1 or else version of Mac?
I did not find any benchmark on Nvidia cards on Mac, the "sheet" of Blender developpers using cards, shows very different results according to the platform and the OS used.
Is it worth having two cards (like 2x1060-6GO)?
I've heard Blender will not add or manage 2x6GO like it would manage 12GO on a single card?
Thanks for answers

The GTX 10XX cards were not supported under OS X until just this past week. So benchmark data will be hard to find. For now.

Also, if you haven't already, study up on using newer Nvidia cards in the classic "cheesegrater" Mac Pro's, there are some caveats, especially if the card has not be reflashed. (off the shelf PC cards will work, but you won't have a startup splash and you may need to switch the monitor to a Mac card or use SSH to update the driver after installing OS updates)

Cycles can render across multiple cards, however the scene must copied in its entirety to each card, so you don't get to "add" the VRAM amounts. See: Does Blender support dual-GPU rendering if the two GPUs aren't the same?


how to display Horizon line on camera view image? I want to display horizon line on camera view image. how can I do that? It is more convenient for display horizon line in a new image. Could anyone tell me how to do that?

I mean that I want to get the line in any scence, any scence is ok for me. I just want to get the line. To my best wishes, I want to display the horizon line in a spereate image to the rendered one or finished image. And ofcause, the it must be the horizon line in camera view.

I am not at all sure if that's what you're searching, but if you want to display the middle of the camera, that's done in the camera settings. Just select it and go to the following place:

If however you need a custom guide like this:

or this:

...then there's at least 3 things you can do:

Bribe a dev or become one
Do serious Python work and write an Addon
Make a mesh consisting of edges and place it inside the camera.

Options one and two are fascinating yet option 3 is fast and easy.

Just model whatever guide you need out of edges and place the object into your camera. Make sure it's visible from camera view. Put the guide's object origin at the camera origin to avoid relationship lines. Parent the object to the camera. And in the outliner, disable rendering and selection.

If you want colors, just use a grease pencil line instead. You can edit them similar to a mesh.

The stroke can be parented to the camera as well.

For rendering, I'd probably just create an image of the line with transparent background in Gimp or Blender and then composite it on top of the rest with the Node Editor and an Alpha Over node.

Images usually render faster than most scenes that recalculate stuff for every frame.


Change whole blender scene into a cartoon look So, I have a scene full of meshes (around 70 or so) each with own textures (no normal maps etc tho).
I am wondering if there is a way how to change the whole global scene into something more cartoony. Like setting global shadows differently?
I saw a tutorial of changing the surface of the material into Toon BSDF, but doing that for each model? And wouldn´t that ruin the textures?
Isn´t there something like when you can change in Photoshop the saturation, colour ramp and other settings of a picture?

Here is a simple toon shader mixed with a texture. Use multiply for the mix to transfer the darkness values only - keeps the base (un-shaded) texture intact. I multiplied it twice to magnify the effect.


How do I add more particles? I have set to have 500 particles but blender only adds about 50. How do I add more? I know I can increase the number but why do I get like 10% of the amount I put in there? Why doesn't blender add 500 when I ask 500? How do I add say 2000 particles so it actually spawns 2000 in different places?

See the sample file:
https://www18.zippyshare.com/v/56ewtGPx/file.html

I am using a uvmapped texture to guide where I want particles. Texture should be included inside the blend.

If you have no animation or want all particles to show at all times tick the options Unborn and Died in the Properties Window > Partices > Render panel

This will make it so that particles are visible at all times, before being emitted, and after dying or spending their life cycle.


Can frames with no animation be automatically skipped? I have an animation with lots of text objects flying about.

I'd like to render it with motion blur and stuff, but there are quite a few long sections where nothing is moving so that the text can be read. In these sections the render output (should) remain exactly the same.

Since it's pretty pointless to render the same image over and over, is there some way to automatically detect and skip those sections, only rendering one frame until there are more keyframes?

I had the same problem, solved it with a bit of code. This script renders your animation frame for frame, skipping frames with no animation and adding them to render destination as copies of their equivalents.
This gives you the same result as a normal animation render, and saves you a lot of processing time.
The script does the following:

Take each animated object and store its F-Curve values at each frame in the animation.

Create list of still frames, by comparing differences in neighbouring F-Curve values for each frame in each animated object.

Render frames in desired range, skipping each still frame.

Fill in skipped frames with copies of their equivalents.
  import bpy
  import subprocess

  def render_with_skips(start, stop):
      """
      Take start and stop, and render animation only for animated
      frames. Still frames, are substituted into the output folder
      as copies of their equivalents.
      """

      render_range = list(range(start, stop))

      # create JSON like dictionary to store each
      # animated object's fcurve data at each frame.
      all_obj_fcurves = {}
      for obj in bpy.data.objects:
          obj_fcurves = {}

          try:
              obj.animation_data.action.fcurves
          except AttributeError:
              print("--|'%s' is not animated" % obj.name)
              continue

          print("\n--> '%s' is animated at frames:" % obj.name)

          for fr in list(range(start,stop+1)):
              fc_evals = [c.evaluate(fr) for c in obj.animation_data.action.fcurves]
              obj_fcurves.update({int(fr): fc_evals})
              print(fr, end=", ")
          print()

          all_obj_fcurves.update({obj.name: obj_fcurves})

      # loop through each animated object and find its
      # animated frames. then remove those frames from
      # a set containing all frames, to get still frames.
      still_frames = set(render_range)
      for obj in all_obj_fcurves.keys():
          obj_animated_frames = []
          for i, fr in enumerate(sorted(all_obj_fcurves[obj].keys())):
              if i != 0:
                  if all_obj_fcurves[obj][fr] != all_obj_fcurves[obj][fr_prev]:
                      obj_animated_frames.append(fr)
              fr_prev = fr

          still_frames = still_frames - set(obj_animated_frames)

      print("\nFound %d still frames" % len(still_frames))
      print(sorted(still_frames), end="\n\n")

      # render animation, skipping the still frames and
      # filling them in as copies of their equivalents
      filepath = bpy.context.scene.render.filepath

      for fr in render_range:
          if fr not in still_frames or fr == render_range[0]:
              bpy.context.scene.frame_set(fr)
              bpy.context.scene.render.filepath = filepath + '%04d' % fr
              bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True)
          else:
              scene = bpy.context.scene
              abs_filepath = scene.render.frame_path(scene.frame_current)
              abs_path = '/'.join(abs_filepath.split('/')[:-1]) + '/'
              print("Frame %d is still, copying from equivalent" % fr)
              subprocess.call(['cp', abs_path + '%04d.png' % (fr-1), abs_path + '%04d.png' % fr])

      bpy.context.scene.render.filepath = filepath

  start = bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].frame_start
  end = bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].frame_end
  render_with_skips(start,end)

I should stress that this will only work if you do not have anything else moving around at the times when everything else in your camera view is still.
NOTE
At this moment the code is only Linux/OSX compatible because it uses a subprocess to copy frames which is not Windows compatible. MarcHorstmanns's answer below implements my code so it works with Windows.


How to Generate Background Color of Baked Texture from Island Margins? I have a high poly model and I want to bake its diffuse texture to a low poly model.
So here is what I have:

Download the Blender file here:

The result of baking from selected to active looks like this:

However my goal is to replace the transparent background with meaningful color data. Specifically I want the color of the margins to expand into the transparent areas.
Let me show you...
the desired result should look something like this:

I don't want to do it manually.
The goal is to do it automatically with the help of the Blender Python API.
Currently I use something similar to the following code to bake with the Python API:
bake_image = bpy.data.images.new('bake_image',width=2048, height=2048)
bake_node.image = bake_image
bpy.ops.object.bake(type='DIFFUSE')
self.bake_image.filepath_raw = 'bake_image.tif'
self.bake_image.save()

You can set a bigger margin without perturbing the bake itself:

So the result is:

And the models are still quite nice:

So for the api, use the margin parameter:
bpy.ops.object.bake(type='DIFFUSE', margin=512)


Camera Binding not Working I have bound multiple cameras in multiple keyframes but whenever I hit numpad 0
it only ignores the previous keyframed cameras. I can't seem to figure out the solution. PLease help.

I might have had a similar scenario a few days ago, though I think a bit more info would help. What happens is that you have to make sure that you have actively selected the marker that you will assign the camera to (the marker should be glowing orange). If you don't do this, it will just assign the camera to whichever marker is currently selected (in your screenshot that would be the first marker), overwriting any previous assignments of other cameras.


How to simulate fresnel lamps I am doing a theatre scene, which is mainly lit with fresnel lanterns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lantern). The lamps themselves are not visible, but their light cone is.

Unfortunately, I can not get this to look right with blender. First of all, spots seem to be incapable of other forms than round, but due to the use of barn doors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage_lighting_accessories#Barn_doors), theatrical lighting equipment gives more of a rectangular shape.
I fixed this with placing my spot inside a cube which is open on one side, however, this gives me rectangular cones with sharp borders, rather than soft borders as real fresnel lamps do.

Any hints on how to get a rectangular cone with soft borders? Ideally, it would not be too hard to change angle and size of the cone, as I may need several attempts to point them correctly.

I would prefer a solution that works with Eevee, but I can switch back to Cycles if this makes things easier.

EEVEE:

This is as soft as you could possibly get with EEVEE.
Unfortunately softness is "hard coded" so you can't change lamp distance to have more/less softness.
I have used the same method as you - Spot Lamp enclosed in a Cube. I've also parented Lamp to the Cube just to make ability to move/rotate them nicely.
Lamp settings:
Basically this are the only settings that have influence over the lamp softness. Not much to play with:

Softness to the max - 100, Bias to the minimum - 0.001 and Exponent is a matter of taste.
There is not much to explain here, but if you have more questions feel free to ask in comments.


Object does not appear when rendered I am having a problem to see one of my mesh objects through camera. I have 3 components that I imported from sketch up dad format. They are cup, handle, and saucer.

The outliner looks like this:

I have a camera and light set up like this:

When I render the scene the handle and saucer will show, but not the cup body:

peach_cup_body mesh looks like this under material tab. These are all the same to handle, and saucer.

Could anyone have an idea why this is happening? Any help will be greatly appreciated it!!
thank you.

Without seeing a blend file I would guess that the peach_cup_body object does not have the correct material assigned.

There are two materials on the object, one is a cycles material which will render the object as blank when rendering with the internal renderer.

Remove the material called 'material' and your object will definitely be using the 'Material.002' material.

Select the material then press the minus(-) button:


Can I get a more fine grained zoom in the UV/Image editor? In the UV/Image editor, and consequently when viewing the render results, the zoom has pretty big increments. If I render at 1920x1080 or larger, I can get the image to fit almost perfectly to the viewport. However, if I render at 1280x720 (which I do occasionally), I either get a ~2.5cm space between the edge of the image and the edge of the viewport or the image gets cropped by ~0.5cm. Is there a way to get smaller increments?

You can use ⎈ Ctrl +  MMB to zoom in and out smoothly. Keep in mind you are meant to press the MMB and drag up or down to zoom in and out, respectively. This works in all editors which support zooming.

Another thing to keep in mind is that, for instance in the Movie Clip Editor, when set to Graph, there are two zoom axis - a vertical and a horizontal one - which can be controlled separately.

There is also another tool called Zoom to Border, which can be accessed through Shift + B. This let's you use something that looks like the Border/Box select tool, but instead of selecting, it zooms in to the specified area.

Note that in the Node Editor (more specifically in the Compositor), any other zoom method will zoom into/out of the nodes themselves. To zoom in in the background image (when a Viewer node is connected) you can use Alt + V and V to zoom out.

Adding to gandalf3's answer, you can press Shift + Numpad Enter, when looking through a camera in the 3D View, to make it match the zoom level 1:1.


How to completely nullify rigid body bounciness A simple question for which I have not yet found a simple answer: why two colliding rigid body objects still bounce if I set both "responce > baunciness" to "0.0"? How do I completely nullify the bounciness in a collision? I'm not using gravity, I have a force field applied to a passive object and another active object hitting it . I don't want them to bounce. Not at all. Never.... I need all physical properties except bounceness ... Is it possible somehow? Thanks.
p.s. I have basic knowledge of Blender, take it easy...

Probably better if you can attach your simplified blend with issue. Use https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com and paste given code into your question. This topic is quite case sensitive :) and not always there is a solution.

Here with Cubes

Collisions > Shape > Box
Surface Response > Friction > 1 (Bounciness > 0)
(probably also for small Cubes > Dynamics > Damping Translation > 0)

Important - Apply Scale Ctrl+A to all objects.

Edit according to the given file:

You didn't set Collision Shape to Box.
Also one very important aspect is set Geometry to Origin for proper simulation. If collision box doesn't fit to your high-poly mesh, move vertices a bit closer to border in edit mode.

Sidenote - Is it OK to have object dimension just 4 mm? On my computer it starts flicker that can be fixed in 3Dview's side panel (N) > View Clip Start = 1 mm End = 100 mm.
I'm asking because part of problems can be a size. Simulation on these micro values is not too much stable in general. But here works without bouncing with RB Active object > Mass = 0.0001 mg and RB Passive object with Strength = -10000.


Limit Location Constraint on Armature Breaks in a Loop Animation I'm having a little issue with this rig I have set up. It's a pumpjack rig with a wheel on the other side.

The gears are driven by a driver but that has no relation to the pump itself.
The armature for the pump in the video is parented to the horizontal arm above
The top bone is parented to the tall cylinder/vertical shape
The second bone is parented to the pump below it
The empty is being tracked by bone 1 and is parented to the pump as well

Hopefully that makes sense, here's a small video that demonstrates the issue I'm having.
https://vimeo.com/544658076
After a bit the arm constraint breaks and go into a weird location. I followed this tutorial on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1GmLAVeySY

Also to add bone 2, the lower bone has "Inherit Rotation" disabled and "Connected" Disabled.

After a few days I have managed to fix it. If anyone comes across the same issue I believe my answer should help.
Again following the tutorial by Max Berends at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1GmLAVeySY
You must have your tracking empty exactly on the pivot point between the lower pump section and the connecting arm.
I recommend using:

Object>SetOrigin>OrigintoGeometry/(Shift+S) to set the origin to the mesh.
At your new origin point, create the new empty.
Once you have an armature from the top point of the arm, go into edit mode for the armature, select the second point and go to Object>SetOrigin>SelectedtoOrigin

I think the discrepancies in location can slowly throw out the animation in this case because of the "TrackTo" constraint, as seen in the video in my question post. Having the empty in the exact location has fixed it.
Hope this can help someone.


Details in retopology I'm doing a retopology of a skull. In some areas, the model appears through the retopology mesh. For this reason, i think i'm making too many faces, so it fits perfectly. Am I doing right? Also, I've read something about baking, and i don't know if it's only for texture.

So, for example: what should i do in that incision?

Notes: subsurf and shrinwrap mods are on

You could continue to retopologize over this incision.
When your retopology is over, you would UV unwrap it, and do some displacement map baking, or normal map baking.

Then you can use the baked displacement (or normal map) textures on your retopologized model. So the incision would not be in the topology, but in the texture (normal map, or displacement). So it would be visible in your render.


Strange shadows in Solid mode I made a scene of two wine glasses on a flat surface, with an overhead light source. For some reason, when I'm viewing the objects as solids, there are strange shading artifacts that appear on all the objects. The planes do not always show the issue; you can see on the perspective on the left, the overhead plane looks normal, but in the perspective on the right it's entirely black (side note, it's an emission plane). These shadows do not appear in other object viewing modes (wire frame, materials). I'm running Blender 2.71 on a MacBook Pro with OSX Mavericks. This is my home computer, and at my work computer, which runs Windows XP, I don't have this issue ever. I'm very new to Blender, so it may be a simple fix, but I don't understand the program enough to understand what's happening and where to look to make the fix. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

There are 2 possible reasons:

Flipped normals
The repair of this is simple: select "bad" object, enter edit mode, press tab, and select all vertex A and recalculate normals, ctrl N.

Something bad in options
The easiest repair is just wipe the options. (file -> load factory settings)


How can I get my EEVEE render to match my viewport lighting? In my animation I have a large rectangular object hidden behind a set of panels that I have keyframed to shift positions. In my viewport the rectangle appears to be affecting the face of these panels in a way that I like

Top image is the render animation - bottom image shows my viewport and the lighting I want as final.

When I render the animation that sort of ambient lighting is not present. Any ideas on why and how to get this to work properly?

I also tried rending as a PNG sequence and when I did that all frames rendered in black and white even though my setting were in RGB (standard PNG export settings)

I am using Blender 2.8 - EEVEE - Bloom effect is on with standard settings.

I figured out that if I decreased my cameras depth of view and allowed some of the background cube to show in the render, that the ambient lighting was then visible. I'm not sure why that is - almost as if because the camera couldn't see the object that it wasn't processing the volumetrics it was emitting


How can I assign a key frame to the bevel effect I want to make an animation with the bevel effect, is that possible?

Yes, you can. You only need to set the key frame from the Bevel field by hovering your mouse over it and hitting I.

You need to use the Bevel modifier and not use ctrl+B in Edit mode. You can find it the right side of your screen, on the Properties panel, if you click on Modifiers (the little wrench icon) the list of available modifiers will appear and you just need to click on Bevel to call the Bevel window, then you hover over the Width field and press I to generate a key frame.

Do that at the beginning of the animation, to set the starting point, then change the value on the Bevel Width field to what you want to have at the end of the animation, make sure you are at the end frame as well and hit I again while your mouse is hovering over the Bevel field.


How do I motion track a person and control an armature? I am working on an animation series with fight scenes. Animating everything by hand takes a lot of time and doesn’t always look good. I was wondering if I could motion track a person with various markers and transfer the movement to a rigged character. Then movements would be smooth and realistic. Can I do this only using Blender or do I need special equipment and software? ;)

Check out the camera tracking capability. The tutorials (e.g. from Blender Guru) use it to track camera motion, but you could try and attach your rig to the tracked objects.

Haven't tried it myself.


How to add details on a model I started on low poly models, but now I'd like to create HIGH poly models too, with details. How do people create details like those in the red boxes?

Is this done with something of normal mapping/bumps? Or is this done literally adding a new cube and create a model of it and place on it... I really wonder how people to these DETAILED parts.

Here's a link to the blender artist thread about the spaceship.

Those in the image definitely look modeled, not some sort of bump map or normal map trick, but both techniques can be used or even combined to achieve desired effect.

Deciding whether to model them or use some trick like normal maps or bump mapping/parallax mapping will largely depend on the purposed of your model , where or what for it will be used, and the limitations of that system.

If you are doing regular rendering with cycles/blender internal and have no/very little constraints in terms of polygon counts you should definitely consider modeling them for more realistic accurate results.

If your computer is slow or can't handle the details, or if they are not the main focus of the artwork and will be very far away/out of view you may consider using some sort of simplification like a bump map or a normal map to simulate the effect.

You can combine both techniques (modeling + normals) to obtain even further detailed model.

You may also choose displacement maps to generate actual geometry bumps from an image texture, at the expense of higher polygon counts. These are generally more suited for organic or irregular models.

If you are planning using it in some sort of game engine or real time visualization where complexity is a limiting factor you may bake the details into normal maps or bump maps from a high poly to a low poly version of the model

Either way, if you want to do it very accurately, you will probably have to model the gribbles in 3D yourself anyway, so you can use it later to bake it to the lower poly version.

As to the modeling part they seem to be simple boxes repeated across the surface, nothing too special about them. Use modifiers like Array for repetition, or the Shrink Wrap to place "2D" shapes across the larger surfaces then give them volume with a Solidify modifier. You can keep the greebles as a separate object parented to the main mesh so as to not increase the polygon counts/triangulation of the original, and still be able to turn them off or reuse them elsewhere with ease.