How to remove artifacts from an ambient occlusion bake This object has had some weirdness with its faces for a while that I've never been able to track down. There are no double vertices and the normals are fine. There are no rips between faces. There were, but I fixed them. But when I bake ambient occlusion, a bunch of strange things show up.

What should I do about this?

Well the issue is in overlapping faces.

First, the solidify modifier. When you press bake witch face will project: internal or external? In the place on your screenshot - external.

But even worse, if you disable the solidify modifier you will get same problems, becouse you have overlapping faces in UV-layout also.

This gif shows the overlapping faces:


Matcap material in Cycles How to recreate this selected matcap material in Cycles? It's most glossy in the center and has this special coat.

To recreate this matcap try to use some Layer Weight nodes. Experiment with the Color Ramp node's modes and slider's placement also.

Here's my nodes setup. I basically added two Emission shaders- one with the white color and the other one with black color. Then used the Layer Weight (Facing) (with different Blend values) and Color Ramp (with different modes- Constant for the bright rim and B-Spline for the blurry interior of the sphere ) nodes.

Here's the test I've done using my low poly gerbil model. The matcap and the render result look almost the same. It is a matter of tweaking some things. If you want to play with the nodes to make the rendered matcap material look perfect here's the .blend:


Blender 2.78 Manual for offline use - how - where? Blender Help says I can download the Blender 2.78 Manual for offline use - how - where?

There is a link for the online documents here: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev . I'm not sure why it doesn't work, but there is a link to download a zip file, but the actually link tag isn't working in the wiki. For now, you can download directly, I guess: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/blender_manual.zip


Blender 2.8 how to keybind pop-up menu In Blender 2.8 when you click for example z it brings up a pop-up menu.

There are different options to choose from and these have keybinds assosiated with them, from 1-9.

I took a look through the keybinding settings but didn't manage to find a way to edit these default keybinds, anyone know how to change them?

as far as I am aware the only way to change those bindings is by modifying some python files. those number are being assigned to the menu automatically in base of the order the calls are made. it kind of doesn't make too much sense but there is a specific order in which are assign. the first 4 calls will always be the S,W,E,N points and so on.

so in order have your favorite menus calls with the keybindings you like, you need to change the order of the lines.

added some duplicate lines that creates number 7 and 9

If there is another way I am not aware.. you better of learning how to do your pie menu and use that IMO.

the file in question of the Z pie menu in Blender 2.80 is space_view3d.py. you can find it in blender configuration inside the script/startup/bl_ui folder.
mac path will be

Application/Blender_2.80/blender.app/Contents/Resources/2.80/scripts/startup/bl_ui/space_view3d.py

I am not on windows right now but that will be something like

C:\\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.79\scripts\startup\bl_ui\space_view3d.py


How to combine Hair and Rigid Body physics? I would like to combine a rigid body behavior with hair dynamic.
I created a sphere with hair all around with hair dynamic on. I would like the sphere with attached hair to bounce of a plane. When I run a simulation hair does not follow the ball. Particle Hair stays in a position. I am almost sure it worked some time ago. I tried different settings ie. collision settings in rigid body panel. It sometimes works (i just tried to set "source" to "base") but still, the ball loses hair after a while. Why?

As far as I'm aware, Rigid Body and Particles don't work together - this is the case for hair and also for particle collisions - the particle simulation mostly ignores the state of the rigid body (for collisions and hair, although it strangly does work for particle emission, just not hair). It's not likely to be fixed by the developers due to the current and planned re-development of the physics simulations (which will hopefully support such cross-simulation interaction anyway). The only solution at the moment is to select the Rigid Body object and 'Bake to Keyframes' so that it is no longer a Rigid Body simulation - then the hair simulation should work fine.

Update
Just found https://developer.blender.org/rB342a6b5f9339c31931f4d2c87d9f47b88307e8cc, which mentions a recent change to how the modifiers (which includes collision and particles and hair) are applied in the sequence of applying the various simulations. With the Rigid Body Collision set to 'Base' your hair (with Hair Dynamics enabled) should follow the rigid body - without having to Bake to Keyframes.
I put together a crude example to demonstrate (Blender 2.83.6) :

Note that after changing your RB settings to 'Base' you will likely need to free and re-bake your hair simulation (or invalidate it by performing another change on the hair properties or base mesh).


Is a render farm suitable for using high-res stills? This question is primarily for curiosity. I'm aware that render farms are used as a method to speed up rendering time for animation sequences. Is it a good alternative to use for high-res stills that would take a lot more time to render by just using a standard computer to do so?
If there is such an option, where can it be found?

That will depend on the render farm you plan to use. Normally a render will generate a complete image which means animations can easily take advantage of multiple computers as each computer can render a single frame from the animation.

It is possible to cut up a single render into multiple pieces that can later be stitched together into a larger image, this will allow multiple computers to work on the same larger final image. Blender's render border option can be used with a python script like in this answer, it is possible to use imagemagick to automatically stitch the pieces into one image.

Some commercial render farms include an option to do this, Render.st is one example. If you are creating a personal render farm then chances are you will need to add this ability yourself.


Object is rotated in edit mode? My mesh appears fine in Object mode, but when I enter edit mode, it rotates 90 degrees. Any idea why?

Object mode

Edit mode

The character is posed: the bones of its armature are not in rest pose (at least one of them). When you enter edit mode, the mesh is shown in its rest pose.

You can enable these two buttons to have your armature have effect in edit mode also:

Or you can temporarily disable the armature modifier to show both meshes in rest pose, or even select all bones and press Alt + G , Alt + R, Alt + S to reset all poses of the bones or, at last, select the armature and in its properties panel choose rest position instead of pose position.


Material "Base Color" doesn't change when "Use Nodes" selected Okay, first off, I'm a totally new Blender 2.8 user. I'm pleased that so much of what I've encountered is very intuitive. But the one thing that I'm having trouble wrapping my head around is changing the material. Starting with just the default cube: I found the Materials palette, changed the Base Color, and it's still just a grey-white cube. This seems to conflict with every tutorial I've seen -- the cube should change to match the color. On a lark, I turned off Use Nodes, and then suddenly my color appeared, but many of the other options in the Material palette go away. Turned Use Nodes back on, and I'm back to a grey-white cube. Is this a bug, or am I missing some step?

You probably have the solid display button on and haven't pressed the render button.  In the video you mention there are several buttons at the top right of the 3d viewport that are associated with overlays and displays like wireframe, solid, lookdev, render, and shading -- note that the render button, just to the left of the shading drop down menu, is turned on.  BY the way, on my 2.8 beta version all those buttons are at the bottom right of the 3d viewport.


Why is Loop Cut and Slide not in the CTRL+E/F menu? How can I get to Loop Cut and Slide via a popup menu? I can only find it in the T side bar.

Neither W nor any of the Ctrl+E/F/V menus seem to show me the Loop Cut and Slide tool.

I seem to only be able to find it in the T bar on the left. Am I missing another popup menu shortcut available for modelling operations? I'm a newcomer to Blender.

You are correct, Loop Cut and Slide is available currently only as a shortcut (Ctrl-R) and in the Toolshelf, in the Mesh Tools panel, as stated here: https://www.blender.org/manual/modeling/meshes/editing/subdividing/loop_subdivide.html


How can I model something that behaves like molasses? I need to create a candy with a filling that is like jam or molasses, and make a render of one candy half eaten with the inside spilling out.

While modeling the candy itself and creating texture and material wasn't too difficult thanks to many resources found online, I'm at a loss as to how I could create the molasses-like inside and make the spill look natural.

Is there a way to model it via the use of soft body or particles or something alike, or would I need to model or sculpt it?

I use Cycles on Blender 2.79b.

For a still image, many tools can be used: an experienced 3D artist will probably use just mesh editing or sculpting. Someone would use particles and meta objects. I would personally go with a two step approach: fluid simulation first to get an overall realistic shape, then sculpting, mostly to smooth it well and make it look nice.
TL;DR
The very short answer if you're going down the "Fluid simulation" route is: a low "Exponent" (1 - 2) in the Fluid > Domain > Viscosity settings makes a thick fluid.

Step by step example

Scale. Make sure your existing objects (empty candy and plane) have the dimensions of a few decimeters = ~0.1 to 0.5 Blender units in v2.79b (it's not important that they are exactly real-size, EDIT: and actually if they are too small the fluid simulation could not work at all, but they shouldn't be 1 unit long either, i.e. 1 meter). Resize them, then apply their scale (CtrlA).

Set up a Fluid simulation. Like this:

a Fluid-type ball inside the cavity
your existing candy as Obstacle
a non-slip Domain cube with its bottom face corresponding to your standing surface. Reduce Exponent in viscosity to 1 or 2
set the Final resolution to a medium value (e.g. 120) and the Viewport Display to Final, and reduce the Scene's End time to something like 80. You don't need 250 frames for this!

Bake the fluid cache. Then choose a frame that you like, go to the Modifier tab and Apply the Fluidism modifier

Sculpt. I would mostly use the Smooth brush, and a bit of Inflate and Grab to add variation

Shading. Give it a specular, smooth, transparent, translucent material.

(I've also added some volume-emitted particles as bubbles, with a transparent, IOR<1 material)


Refract grease pencil object? so I'm trying to use the new 2.8 Update to do a grease pencil animation behind a dirty glass window in Eevee, but the grease pencil object does not get refracted or effected at all by the glass shader, it instead renders as if it is in front.

So here is my grease pencil object behind a Principled BSDF glass material with some textures effecting the roughness and specularity. It appears to not get tinted or effected by the glass' refraction the way you would expect it to.

For comparison, here is an image applied as a texture to a plane, and the glass' refraction and roughness does smudge and effect the image the way I would want the grease pencil object to.

As a side note, I did find that setting the plane's material blend mode to "Alpha Blend" instead of "Alpha Clip" or "Alpha Hashed" results in a similar effect that the grease pencil object had, so maybe it's something to do with the alpha blend mode of grease pencil objects?

At the moment, Grease Pencil is not integrated with Eevee, but this is planned for the future.


How can I rotate/twist a torus about its major circle? The problem: I am building a torus with an intricate regular pattern that includes a twist.
A simple example:
http://netz.smurf.noris.de/blender2.png

I have built one torus segment – my "real" example is obviously a lot more intricate, not just a simple inset operation.

Now I want to transform the left segment into the right one. The end goal is to do that six times so that, in this example, I get a torus with a doubly-winded spiral around it.

As far as I know, there is no easy way to rotate about a curved axis.  Your best bet would be to model the segments straight, use an array modifier, then bend them.

First model a straight segment of the object.

Next add an Empty to the scene and position it at the end of the segment.  Then add an Array modifier to the segment, and uncheck Constant Offset and Relative Offset and enable Object Offset, selecting the empty as the offset object.

The Array modifier works by duplicating the geometry of the mesh and placing it at the position of the offset object, further parts of the array copy this relative transformation.

Now add a Simple Deform modifier to the object and set it to Bend with an angle of 360°.  You will probably also have to add another empty and use it as the Simple Deform origin so you can rotate the axis being bent around.

You can adjust the diameter of the torus by increasing the Array count.  Note that since my example model is 90°, I need to use multiples of 4 for the array modifier so that the teeth line up at the seam.


Applying Textures and Particles I made some grass on a plane, when i applied the texture to the particles it also affected the plane... i am wondering if there is a way to apply the green texture to the particles only and a dirtbrown to the ground.
appreciate any help.

Try applying a ground texture to the ground then going back to your particle system and assigning your particle’s material in the particle system drop down menus again. In that order it should work.


Is there a way to create a copy of the default keymap configuration? I'm trying to programmatically create a Key Configuration that is a copy of the Default configuration except all "S" and "O" mappings are swapped.
eg.

Ctrl+O -> Ctrl+S

Alt+S -> Alt+O

I was able to swap the Key Mappings of the Default Key Configuration with the following code:

wm = bpy.context.window_manager
default = wm.keyconfigs['Blender'] # Default Key Configuration
for keymap in default.keymaps:
    for keymap_item in keymap.keymap_items:
        if keymap_item.type == 'O':
            keymap_item.type = 'S'
        elif keymap_item.type == 'S':
            keymap_item.type = 'O'

However, I cannot find a way to create a copy of the Default configuration, since making a new configuration (wm.keyconfigs.new()) doesn't actually copy the Defaults instead it just creates an empty Key Configuration where you cannot iterate over the keymaps (since they don't exist).

So, is there a way to create a copy of the default configuration?

Holy smokes, this was miserable to figure out but this appears to work:

        import bpy

        wm = bpy.context.window_manager
        CopiedMap = wm.keyconfigs.new("CopiedMap")

        #Get list of default keymap items
        keymaps = wm.keyconfigs.default.keymaps.items()
        for i in keymaps:

            #Put default values in to new keymaps
            CopiedMap.keymaps.new(i[1].name, space_type= i[1].space_type,
                                  region_type=i[1].region_type)

            #Get list of default keymap_items contained
            #within the keymap
            keymap_items = i[1].keymap_items.items()
            for j in keymap_items:

                #Put values in to new keymap_items
                CopiedMap.keymaps[i[1].name].keymap_items.new(j[1].idname, j[1].type, j[1].value, any=j[1].any,
                                                              shift=j[1].shift, ctrl=j[1].ctrl, alt=j[1].alt,
                                                              oskey=j[1].oskey, key_modifier=j[1].key_modifier)

I'm not a very good scripter so this is probably not a very good answer, but maybe it'll get you by until somebody better at this comes along. :)


How to find x,y,z coordinates of a mesh in edit-mode? I have ply format mesh in edit mode in blender. When I select some vertices , I need the x y z coordinates to be printed as output. Is it possible?

As ideasman42 wrote in his comment, this will work for any mesh in edit mode, regardless of whether it was imported from PLY or any other format, or generated within Blender:

import bpy, bmesh

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

selected_verts_coordinates = [ mw * v.co for v in bm.verts if v.select ]

print( selected_verts_coordinates )

This will only work for selected vertices when the mesh is in edit mode.


Most of my water simulation scene disappears when viewed through the camera I created this water simulation animation and I'm ready to render it. when I tried to set up the camera most of the scene disappears. I tried deleting the original camera and adding a new camera but the same problem happened. Any help you can provide is greatly appreciated!

John

It is almost as if your camera is clipping. Maybe your scene is so large as to exceed the default 1000m end clip? Go to the Camera Object Properties and change the Clip End to suit your scene better. Here is an example of camera end clipping.

Not in camera view:

Same scene in camera view:


How do I taper a cylindrical object in blender? I'm trying to taper the object (on the bottom of the picture) in blender from it's cylindrical shape to match the profile of the tapered one (top of the picture).

That should be easy. Add a lattice to your scene. A basic one with just 8 vertices is best. Scale it in world space to match your engraved form. Don't do it in edit mode! Now, when the lattice object enwraps your engraved form completely, add a lattice modifier to it. Now, if you move a vertex of your lattice in edit mode, the mesh deforms accordingly.

Select the top four vertices of the lattice, press Shift+S and click Cursor To Selected. Now, you can simply scale these vertices, until your engraved form match the form of your cylinder.


Blender export as dae file contains broken 3D render General information
Blender version: 2.79

I am currently working on an animated 3D model that I will be using in a game being coded in Scenekit. I'm currently facing the issue where my exported 3D model turns out to be "broken".

Here is a picture of what the render should look like.

This is what happens when I export it as a .dae .fbx or even .obj. As you're able to tell the cape surrounding the character is "broken". I'd like to know what I can do to resolve this problem or what I'm doing wrong.

How I export the 3D render in Blender: file -> export -> .dae

To me it looks like the face normals are facing different ways. Game engines use backface culling to only draw one side of a polygon.

In edit mode select all A and use ⎈ CtrlN or ⎈ Ctrl⇧ ShiftN to set the normals to the same direction.

You may also want to look at not using backface culling so that both sides of the robe are visible in your game.


Blender freezes, but no resources are maxed out I have a complex object in Blender (about 336,000 vertices) to which I'm trying to apply modifiers. A smooth modifier is pretty quick, but a laplacian smooth takes a really long time. I have to wait about 5 minutes every time I change one of the settings. If I click any button during this wait, windows says 'blender (not responding)' and the screen gets grayed out, but after some time it actually manages to process my change.

I would understand this slowing if blender would say, overfill my RAM, or max out my GPU, but this is not happening. I cannot find where the bottleneck is.

I'm on Windows 7 Professional 64bit with intel core i7 3.5GHz, 32Gb of RAM, and I use a Nvidia Geforce GTX 750 Ti. Whenever Blender is stuck, I see no changes in CPU usage, GPU load (as monitored by Techpowerup GPU-Z 2.7.0), GPU memory used, GPU temperature. Blender's memory usage goes up slightly, by less than a Gb, but it's nowhere near maxing out.

If I were to upgrade my PC to make this process faster, which part should I upgrade?

Processes like render can be separated in different parts, as you can see as a tiles. But some processes (like the smooth) can't be divided into threads to use all the processor cores. In this case one thread use only 1 CPU core: 1/4 or 1/8 (depends of how many cores in your CPU) of all CPU power. If so, CPU monitor will show that only 25% or 12% of CPU is used.


Render multiple Layers, how to mix/combine them, it's not working here I am startup up with Blender and through an internet course I created a scene, which are heavy to render on my pc.
So I started to investigate Render Layers, ideal for my situation I thought, I can render each Layer at a time, also on different computers and eventually combine al rendered images together, to created a final Rendered masterpiece.
I am figured out that I have to set Transparency on, on all images.
So I did.
And for the background (World), which will be displayed on the back, with everything in front of it, I figured Transparency is not needed, so I rendered an empty Layer with the Environment setting on.
I now have 3 images to start with, more Layers will be rendered in a later stadium.
So I find out that I have to use the Node Editor with a box called Alpha Over to combine them, so I did, see screendump picture.

But the problem is, my combined end result is not showing anywhere.
What am I doing wrong, is my approach not right, I'm kinda stuck here.
Help would be much appreciated!
Regards
Martijn.

It worked. I rendered 3 layers and in the node editor I checked use nodes and backlog.
And then using alpha over I combined them and the result was shown :


My UV Islands Overlap I Imported a Model I took from GMod, But the UV Islands Overlap. How do I separate?

It's unlikely that this overlap matters; assuming this model works okay in GMod, these are probably different materials that use different textures.

However.  A smart first step is to create a new UV map to work with, so that you can later bake any textures from this UV map to your new UV map.  Switch to properties view/data/UV Maps, select your UV map from the list with LMB, then hit the + button to the right of the list.  This copies that UV map to a new UV map.

Okay.  Now select your object, switch to edit mode, and select all vertices.  Open up a UV editing window; if it's set to a rendered image, change the image to something else so that you can see and edit your UV coords.  Select all verts in the UV editor ('a' once or twice or however you want.)  Hit ctrl-p to pack the islands.  This will translate and scale the UV islands in order to eliminate any overlap.  (There are other techniques you can use, but packing islands is the easiest and simplest.)

At this point, if you need to, you can bake your original textures from their original UV to your new, packed UV.


How to slim down a cuboid? I would like to slim a cuboid with the base of the heart. I want to slim it down only in relation to the X and Y axes by exactly 0.4 mm. I would like the edges of the new and old hearts to be 0.4mm apart.
The scaling operation does not do what I would like. Gaps of various widths are created. I wish the gaps were 0.4mm wide everywhere.
I attached a picture from another program because it was easier for me to show my problem. The picture shows what I don't want to get.
Does anyone have an idea how to efficiently modify an object the way I would like?

I would make the heart shaped base, then make sure to Ctrl +  A to apply scale and rotation. Then select the surface and inset  I. You can type in the exact distance in the pop up on the lower left of the screen.
If you want to copy it to create a second object, press Shift +  D,  P, then Selected.
You can extrude that face to make a smaller heart.


Camera rotation over the object I have a camera tracking an empty object on a path and when the camera above the empty its rotating. Is there an option to lock the camera?

If you want to lock the camera in such a way that it's upside down when it reaches the end of the curve:

you can use a Damped Track constraint.


how to divide one window into two windows I'm having difficulty dividing a window into two parts vertically. I know how to divide it horizontally but I cannot do it vertically.

What difference is there between the two?

To divide the window vertically click the upper right corner and drag downward with the mouse.  The direction the mouse moves after you start the click and drag determines which way the window divides.

Dragging to the right breaks the window horizontally, dragging downward breaks the window vertically.


Solid not smooth using screw modifier I am importing an SVG shape and rotating it using the screw modifier.

I have applied the Shade Smooth on the two examples below.

On the left, the object is still a curve with the screw modifier, and on the right, it is converted to mesh.

On the mesh, I have checked that I have "Clear Seams" and "Clear Sharp" edges on edit mode, but I still have flat reflections.

The specific problem appears when I activate the Auto Smooth checkbox, so I get rid of the ridges of geometry on the left, regardless of the Auto Smooth angle (right).

Can you please tell me how to smooth this?

Here is the file: http://otake.com.mx/Foros/Blender/Bottle.blend

Your bezier version has its Fill Mode set to Both, it looks like when you convert it to mesh it creates inner faces that are connected to your outer faces (edges must not be connected to more than 2 faces) and that mess up your geometry, so switch it to None, convert, and it works fine. Also don't forget to recalculate the normals (ShiftN).


Select Active Rigid Body Parts I am doing this tutorial and try to learn how Rigid Bodies work. I have selected the center parts of the brick wall and made them active.

Somewhat later I want to reselect the active parts but how to do that ? How can you reselect the parts that you have made active ?

Operator
As a select physics  operator.

Edit update for 2.8

bl_info = {
    "name": "Select RigidBody Objects",
    "author": "batFINGER",
    "version": (1, 0),
    "blender": (2, 80, 0),
    "location": "View3D > Select > Object > Rigid Body Object",
    "description": "Selects Rigid Body Objects",
    "warning": "",
    "wiki_url": "",
    "category": "3D View",
    }

import bpy
from bpy.types import Operator
from bpy.props import EnumProperty, BoolProperty

class OBJECT_OT_select_rigid_body(Operator):
    """Select Rigid Body"""
    bl_idname = "object.select_rigid_body"
    bl_label = "Select Rigid Body Objects"
    bl_options = {'REGISTER', 'UNDO'}
    rna = bpy.ops.object.select_all.get_rna_type()
    action: EnumProperty(
        name="Action",
        items=tuple((i.identifier, i.name, i.description)
            for i in rna.properties['action'].enum_items),
        default='SELECT',
        )
    enum  = bpy.types.RigidBodyObject.bl_rna.properties['type']

    items = [(o.identifier, o.name, o.description, o.icon, o.value)
              for o in enum.enum_items]
    type: EnumProperty(items=items, name=enum.name, description=enum.description, default=enum.default)
    extend: BoolProperty(name = "Extend Selection", default=False)

    def execute(self, context):
        scene = context.scene
        obj = context.active_object

        rigids = [o for o in scene.objects if o.rigid_body
                    and o.rigid_body.type == self.type]
        if not self.extend:
            bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')

        action = self.action
        if rigids:
            if action == 'SELECT':
                select = True
            if action == 'DESELECT':
                selection = False
            if action == 'INVERT':
                select = not obj.select

            if obj not in rigids and not self.extend:
                scene.objects.active = rigids[0]
            for o in rigids:
                o.select_set(select)

        return {'FINISHED'}

# Registration

def add_select_menu(self, context):
    self.layout.operator_menu_enum(
        OBJECT_OT_select_rigid_body.bl_idname,
        "type",
        icon='PHYSICS')

def register():
    bpy.types.VIEW3D_MT_select_object.prepend(add_select_menu)
    bpy.utils.register_class(OBJECT_OT_select_rigid_body)

def unregister():
    bpy.types.VIEW3D_MT_select_object.remove(add_select_menu)
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(OBJECT_OT_select_rigid_body)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

Install addon as shown here https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/1689/15543

To enable.

Alternatively (aka old answer)
A simple script to add a toggling property to the object select menu. (Avoids setting up an operator, but end up with code useful to create an op later if needed)

Showing the checkbox on menu

If toggled from false to true will select all active type rigid bodies.  The other way will deselect.

import bpy
from bpy.props import BoolProperty

def select_active_rigids(self, context):
    # deselect all
    if self.select_active_rigids:
        for o in self.objects:
            o.select = False
    rigids = [o for o in self.objects if o.rigid_body
                and o.rigid_body.type == 'ACTIVE']
    for o in rigids:
        self.objects.active = o
        o.select = self.select_active_rigids
    return None

bpy.types.Scene.select_active_rigids = BoolProperty(update=select_active_rigids)

def draw(self, context):
    scene = context.scene
    layout = self.layout
    text = "Deselect" if scene.select_active_rigids else "Select"

    layout.prop(scene, "select_active_rigids",
                text="%s Rigids" % text,
                toggle=True)

# hit F8 to clear from menu (reloads all)
bpy.types.VIEW3D_MT_select_object.prepend(draw)

For scripters: an example of defining a context property.

import bpy
def selected_active_physics_objects(self):
    return [o for o in self.selected_objects
                if o.rigid_body
                    and o.rigid_body.type == 'ACTIVE']

bpy.types.Context.selected_active_physics_objects = property(selected_active_physics_objects)

'''
Example Console Output
>>> C.selected_active_physics_objects
[bpy.data.objects['Cone.001'], bpy.data.objects['Cone'], bpy.data.objects['Cube.001'], bpy.data.objects['Cube']]
'''


How do I delete keyframes? How do I delete frames that have been place by the auto key frame insertion tool thingy?

Opening up a dope sheet window allows you to view all keyframes that you've made, accidentally or otherwise. You can hit A to deselect all the keyframes while hovering over the dope sheet; all frames are automatically selected. Hit B to select the frames in question and then delete them.


Moving grid instead of model problem I use A to select all my model parts, but when I hit G to move it only the grid moves. How do I correct this?

Are you currently looking through your camera? If so, by selecting everything in the scene you also select the camera. By then using GKey to move, you're moving all your parts and the camera as well, so it'll appear that only the scene grid is moving.

Try locking the camera in place (the X, Y, and Z locations on the N Panel) and see if that helps.


How can I render in blender via GPU on my 64 bit PC that has Intel HD graphics 620 as well as radeon 27 m445 display adapters? I read a tutorial on this site about rendering in windows 7. I have installed windows 10 pro, which is similar to 7. You told me to download drivers according to my display adapters but they are not present in NVIDIA site. I am using DELL 5567 model laptop. I want to render via GPU in blender. You can see more details in my question. Please help me.

First, the radeon is an AMD graphics card, not an NVidia, so you won't find drivers for it on NVidia's site.

Second, while blender can use openCL, it demands a reasonably modern GPU. Yours seems to be a bit older, so not sure blender will be able to use it, even with the proper drivers. (see the blender documentation for more details)


Saving a mesh from a frame in a cloth simulation? So right now I'm trying to put a mesh of a small pouch on the side of one of my characters. While I could make it like I would any other mesh, it would look kind of un-natural. When playing around in blender though, I noticed if you were to use the cloth effect to drape it over a few object that are close together, it makes something much like the desired effect.

So my question is, could I take the 'animated' cloth dropping over an object, say at frame 60, and make that the default way the shape is? Of course allowing me to then rotate it upward and edit it to the character.

Yes you can. You have to apply the cloth simulation.

Go to the frame where your object is looking the way you want it to (frame 60).
In the Properties panel under the Modifiers tab click the large Apply button on the cloth modifier. That will get rid of all the cloth simulation settings, and make the mesh "real", (just like applying any other modifier.)


How do I use the alt left-click shortcut to select an edge loop without making the closest vertex active? Sorry if this is a dumb question, I'm a beginner to Blender.

At 6:55 in Part 1, Level 3 of the Modelling - Blender Beginner Tutorial by Blender Guru, he uses alt left-click to select an edge loop of the coffee cup base. Note he is in edit mode with vertex select set on when he does this. He then scales in the edge loop, which scales in towards the centre equally on all sides.

When I use alt left-click not only does it select the edge loop but it makes the closest vertex or edge (depending on my selection mode) active. So when I scale it in, it scales the selection towards the active vertex/edge, pulling it off centre.

How do use alt left-click to select an edge loop without making the closest vertex/edge active? I could  manually select the loop on the mesh with xray active, however that defeats the ease and convenience of using a shortcut.

I'm using Blender 2.82. This is the tutorial in I'm referencing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a0cHFs7jkw&t=415s

The problem is not that you have an active element, but that the active element is being used as the pivot point for your transformation.

Go to the Pivot Center dropdown in the header of your 3D View, and select 'Median Point'. Then the selected elements will scale about their average location. (My shortcut is keyboard .)


Where is the render display mode setting in 2.8x? I can't find display mode in 2.8x versions. In older versions when you hit the render button from the navigation there was a display mode option. Now it's gone.

Where can I find it?

You can access the settings related to displaying the render in the Preferences now (Interface > Editors > Temporary Windows > Render In):

To get to the Preferences you can hit F4 followed by P or go to Edit menu on the Topbar and choose Preferences:


multiple objects scaling problem I want to scale multiple things at once but the "center of Scaling" should not be in the middle of all obyects i selected but in the middle of each seperat/induvidual obyects center. do you know what the shourtcut to this is?

ctrl+., then scale as usual.

This is basically this option:


Moving object in only one axis I am a near total newb with a frustrating issue. Doing Blender Guru's tutorial making a donut and cup, I am trying to move the saucer in line with the cup/mug. It seems totally easy. I align it properly on the X&Y axes then proceed to move it on the Z using (G)(Z). Confusingly, it also moves forward on the X. I tried not touching the mouse and also hit the two keys at the same time thinking that I am nudging it. Time and again, it moves on multiple axes.

Make sure your using the global axis which is located at the top of your screen in the middle


Environment variables specific to Blender? Do they exist? Are there any global variables in Blender? I was searching for them in Blender docs, but didn't find anything.

For example, I want to override the default /tmp directory with another directory. But I want to do it by overriding the environment variable.

For example Nuke has NUKE_TEMP_DIR variable, which I can simply override with a new value, and every time I start Nuke the temp directory will be as in the variable.

Houdini also has this kind of variables, Maya and so on.

What about Blender?

Environment Variables:
  $BLENDER_USER_CONFIG      Directory for user configuration files.
  $BLENDER_USER_SCRIPTS     Directory for user scripts.
  $BLENDER_SYSTEM_SCRIPTS   Directory for system wide scripts.
  $BLENDER_USER_DATAFILES   Directory for user data files (icons, translations, ..).
  $BLENDER_SYSTEM_DATAFILES Directory for system wide data files.
  $BLENDER_SYSTEM_PYTHON    Directory for system python libraries.
  $TMP or $TMPDIR           Store temporary files here.
  $SDL_AUDIODRIVER          LibSDL audio driver - alsa, esd, dma.
  $PYTHONHOME               Path to the python directory, eg. /usr/lib/python.

But the best way is to modify your prefs (File->path) as said above.


Control the rotation of an environment map I use the following node setup for world settings:

Notice the keyframe on the z-axis in the mapping node. At the end of the animation, the environment map will be rotated by a full 360 degrees.

The rotation defaults to a bezier curve, which I don't want - I want to switch it to a linear rotation, to be able to create a continuous loop. However, this animation never shows up in the graph editor.

(I understand that the graph editor shows only curves on the selected objects, but how do you 'select' the environment map? You can't even click the 'world' entry in the outliner.)

Is there any other way to control the animations behaviour?

I am using Blender v2.75.

Select the mapping node in the compositor, then go to your animation scene, to your graph editor and you can change it to linear.


Is there a way to create a Color ID map in Blender? All of the most powerful texturing applications require a color ID map (Substance Designer, Substance Painter, Quixel DDO). I've been using a Maya plugin called Nightshade Blockout to export color maps for use in these programs. Nightshade may be one of the most-used plugins for texture artists abroad, simply because it's referred and linked by those giants.

I would hope it's as simple as assigning a material color and baking the texture, but it's safe to assume such a map wouldn't come with edge padding (extending the boundaries of each color island by a certain number of pixels, to hide seams during the texturing process).

If there is a Blender workflow/plugin for this, I would love to know about it!

Thanks for reading,

Allen

It's possible to export the ID color map straight from UV/Image editor without baking it by using this addon. It's fast and writes the UV layout into a png file, filling the polys with the color assigned in the viewport color slot:

Set the viewport colors for all materials:

Go to UV/Image Editor > UVs > Export Colour Layout:

Result:

Original thread (www.polycount.com):

  Blender Export Colour Layout Addon -
  This is an addon for Blender that enables the exporting to png the unmodified diffuse colors of applied materials using the meshes uv map as a layout. In essence it generates a colour ID map for use in applications such as Quixel Suite DDO. As it does not use baking it is easier and quicker to generate colour ID map, it also (appears) to work the same regardless of whether you are using Blender Renderer or Blender Cycles. It is heavily based on the original UV Layout addon and is still a work in progress, but it exports the colour map just fine. In the future I'd love to work out a method of assigning DDO colour link id's to Blender materials and export those, instead of having to set the materials diffuse colour. The download has a brief read me with more details in it. If you have any problems with the addon feel free to post them in this thread and I'll see if there is anything I can do to help. I'm unsure if not going the baked approached means that something important is missing. As far as I can tell uv islands are not anti-aliased, but materials that share the same edges are and that appears to work fine within DDO.


Shading artifacts on the render I am trying to model Cap's Shield but when I render it, there are some artifacts near the star. Can anyone tell me what's the issue here?

Blend File
(Please your own hdri since the file would be too long)

If you decrease your Subsurf subdivisions (View and Render) down to a value of 2 this will fix the problem, I guess a high subdivision creates additional faces that try to smooth but actually mess with the topology.


Why did my IK bone shrink? I was animating a run cycle and this happened at some point but I can't figure out how or when. Any help?

You've changed its scale, in Pose mode you need to select it and alt S to reset its scale, you can also reset its rotation (not sure why you put the target in front of the foot and not behind, though. Also, I'd make the target parent of the foot but there are a lot of rigging methods so I don't know).

Now, if you want to delete scale and rotation for the whole animation of this bone, select the bone, in the bottom menu bar of the Dopesheet press the arrow button called "Only Include Channels Relating to Selected Object and Data" so that it only displays the keyframes of the selected bone, lock the tracks you don't want to delete (in your case the 3 Location tracks), select all the keyframes (A) and press X > Delete Keyframes.

How did this happen? You must have accidentally scaled this bone at the beginning of the walk, and as you've chosen to automatically save the Whole Character pose when you press i, it automatically recorded the scale setup.


Particle trails in Cycles? Is there a way to render trails behind particles in cycles?

I tried using hair particles with Use force field weights for growing enabled and a turbulence force-field, however the trails become unstable after a point:

Is there another way to do this?

You cannot do this with blender/cycles particles itself but you can use BTrace addon to create animated curves from traced particles:

The addon is still under development but it works very nicely.


Scroll wheel zooms when using Loop Cut And Slide here I'm on Windows 10 with Blender 2.8. Before the update, when using Loop Cut And Slide I could use the scroll wheel to alter the number of cuts, and after clicking I could move the cut to the desired position. Additionally, after the click I had left the Loop tool and could straight work on and select another vertice or whatever. Now, with Blender 2.8, this tool just proposes a cut in the middle of the focused edge, and the scroll wheel just zooms in and out. I need to click the number of cuts in the helper dialog, and to leave the tool I need to click another tool like Select. That's horrible and slows down my workflow enormously.

More strange: The Loop Cut And Slide tool on my computer at work (Manjaro Linux and Blender 2.8) behaves exactly as I'm used to from Blender 2.79, while at my computer at home (also Manjaro Linux and Blender 2.8) it's the same as described above.

What can I do to get the smooth workflow from Blender 2.79 back?

Fortunately I stumbled over the solution for this. It has nothing to do with OS or how Blender is installed.

It's simple: If you click Loop Cut in the tool shelf, you get the crippled behaviour with scrolling and not being able to slide the new cut. But if you use Loop Cut And Slide with the shortcut Strg+R, it behaves as usual. I've tested it with Blender 2.79 and can confirm that you get the same behavior regardless of how you start the tool.


Extremely Grainy Renders - Render settings help I know this question is probably asked a million times on this site, but I can't seem to get a good clean render. I have my preview at 200 samples, a min of 3 and a max of 12 light bounces. I don't understand why it is still so grainy, are there any settings that will make a huge difference?

I'm still new to blender, so please bear with me.

I have also had trouble reducing graininess. I use Blender to model buildings and graininess (noise) is always worse on interior scenes.

I don't believe there is one simple answer.

Certainly increasing the number of samples (to say, 1000) will help.
If your scene includes glass you should ensure you are modelling it correctly (so that Shadow rays see a pure transparent shader).

I have always found graininess to be most severe when modelling an interior lit from outside (through apertures). My intuitive understanding of what is going on (which might not be correct) is that the randomly chosen light paths 'bouncing' off diffuse materials have trouble 'finding' the light sources. One pixel will find a light source, a neighbouring pixel might not. Increasing the number of samples gradually smooths this out.

There are other things you can do also (caustics, clamping, portals) but I am afraid I don't know enough to advise you reliably on those


Emission material reflecting other emissions I have been working on creating a material to simulate LEDs and have produced this:

Although I am happy overall with the result I have not been able to resolve the issue of the yellow reflections on the other LEDs, this is the node tree I have been using:

The material is uniform except for the change in emission colour, I therefore have two questions:

Is there a way in which to remove the coloured reflection and still retain the exact effect created?
Why is it that only the yellow light is reflected and the yellow LED does not behave this way, I have checked multiple times that the node tree settings are exactly the same.

Many thanks in advance.

The reason the effect is more noticeable with the yellow is due to how the colors are made up of components of Red, Green, Blue in conjunction with the high strength of the emission. The Red is pure red, the Green is pure green, while the Yellow is a mix of red and green. Since your emission is high (10) the rendered pixels in the camera will be truncated to an upper limit of 1.0. So for the Red LED the pixels will be around RGB values of (10,0,0), the Yellow (10,10,0) and the Green (0,10,0) and these are truncated to become Red (1,0,0), Yellow (1,1,0), Green (0,1,0). Adding in the reflection from the Yellow LED on the Red LED (assuming, say, 10% reflection) you'll get (11,1, 0) which will become (1,1,0) (yellow). The Red reflecting on the Yellow will be (11, 10,0) which will become (1,1,0). The Yellow reflecting on the Green will become (1,11,0) which will become (1,1,0) when values above 1.0 are clipped. ie, so Red + Yellow reflection becomes yellow, Yellow + Red reflection becomes yellow, Yellow + Green reflection becomes yellow - so it appears that there is no reflection of the Red and Green LEDs as they are 'lost' in the saturated yellow emission.

That's essentially what I believe is happening here. I don't think I've explained that too well - hope it makes sense.

I think this would actually be similar to how this would behave in the real world - although less pronounced since the human eye has a wide band sensitivity to light rather than the strict narrow banding in Blender's RGB model.


Problems with Render Layers I seem to have nothing but problems with compositing and Render Layers. :-\ Every tutorial I’ve followed so far on Blender Guru, I’ve been unable to replicate the process whether in 2.79 or 2.80.
As part of a tutorial, I’ve added some lights in their own Collection, added another Render Layer and called it (Spot) Lights, disabled all the Collections I don’t want, unchecked the eye for everything I don’t want, and the other Layer has everything else in the scene enabled with the eye on. Rendering out my first scene/RenderLayer proceeds to render out the next RenderLayer containing the lights. However, for some weird reason, it renders out some of my other lights in the scene, along with the background and the floor.
If I continue to follow the tutorial and set up the nodes the same, the end result is almost there, but my main building/object becomes semi-transparent.

How could I fix this? How can I prevent the second Layer from including those objects when they're not even enabled in that layer?

One thing - disabling Eye icon in Outliner Editor hides object from viewport not from Rendering, for that you have to enable Render (Camera) icon in filtering.

Disableing these objects from rendering will affect both Layers. To fix it you have to place them into separate Collection (I called it "Scene"). Like that you can disable it for one layer and keep in others by switching checkbox of collection.

Second thing - To add additional Lights with Glare in compositor I would use rather enable Film > Transparency and in compositor use Alpha socket as input. Alpha because even you disable whole Scene collection you still use world light that will affect compositing. Like that you can also save one Mix node from tree to get same result.


Parent to vertex unwanted offset Making an wraping dodecahedron animation. All the pentagon's movements are related with parent vertex.
It's ok on the final stage - all connects correct, but while the animation the pentagons are moving with unwanted offset one from each over:

Short answer as already answered here  Wrapping geometry object animation

If you start with a face setting like this, you can rotate 72° to obtain the other faces:

Now if you set the snapping like this:

And use an empty as active element, you can place the face next to the others as you need:

Finally you obtain this:

From that you'll need (I describe this quickly as this is not the direct subject):

to join the bones,
join the faces (and remove double)
parent them with empty groups and assign the needed vertices to the corresponding groups manually

Now, as the bones are all along their local axis (along Y), you can rotate them all around X using 'individual origins':

So you can rotate them all around their local X axis, using RXX (twice X for local axis):

Last step: the dodecahedron as an angle of arcTan(2) = 63.434949°. So we need
to set a keyframe for this rotation value.


How to make quick menu items permanent in 2.8? When I add items to the quick menu in 2.8, they are lost every time I restart Blender. Any way to make them permanent?

Edit: in addition to the answer below, I discovered that the quick menu keys are different depending on which mode you're in (i.e., Object, Edit, etc...)

go to the edit->user preferences-> and click save(usually this button will be on bottom left.)
i think this will save the settings. so next time you open blender the settings will be loaded.
i hope it work...


How to change particle size? I was trying to make fire on blender and i got a problem with the particles , I know that particles size can be changed from the physics panel throw the size value but it doesnt work , any idea why ? is there other way to change the size ?
Thz , if u need more info tell me.

I think a picture should help

I want those shiny particles to be smaller and orange, how do i do that ?

I tried to change the size from the material, but it doesnt respond , neither to the color , maybe i did it wrong ? Where do i have to create the material ?

If you're talking about the halos, they are actually controlled by the material settings. You can change the size there. Just make sure your editing the correct material. The particles will use the material specified in the Render portion of the particle settings. E.g. if "Material" is set to 1, then the particles will use the first material in the list.

I think what you actually want is for the halos to go away, and to use smoke instead (they're different techniques).


How do I hide wireframes of other objects, showing the wireframe of only one? As pictured:
What setting did he toggle and how do I do it so it looks like his layout too?
Edit: My current layout is to the right, his is to the left

After searching comments on youtube for hours I found a few people having same issue, OPTIMAL DISPLAY  on SUBSURF MODIF should be UNTICKED , and Xray dropdown under Geometry WIREFRAME should be set to 0.5  to get the same display as Andrew.


Tracking Problem with floor and wall and other things I'm try to track a video with a garage.

I tracked the garage and the solve error is 0.11 because there is no movement, and now I want to model a sci-fi door that will be placed instead of the garage door.

The problem is when I set origin, the wall and floor and the other things like X and Y axis the placed content that will be made when I click on setup tracking scene is not in the right place.

When I click setup tracking scene a floor for the shadows and a cube will generated, and this floor should be on the ground of the garage video to catch shadows from the later modeled things, but I can't align it right.

How can I make it? I know I can rotate the camera self but I can't get it good.

And the second thing is  I want to make a sci-fi door and normally the set origin should be for the this. I tried it with tripod and then solve, then without it and set other scale but nothing helps.

Here is the file with the tracking, you only need to solve it:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s0noe8i3mqa52ar/garage%20tracking%20june.blend1
https://www.dropbox.com/s/upt6gb516549mcr/garage%20tracking%20june.blend

Here is the file of the door:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/g29m6aw7x0tnwpy/dooranimationneu.rar

I tracked the garage and the solve error is 0.11 because there is no movement

If there is no motion there is no way to solve a scene. You can't determine 3d information out of a still image.

3D reconstruction is based on calculating 3d space based on the movement of different elements across the frame. Moreover, only translation movement, (where the camera moves sideways or up down, not only rotation) is useful to recreate 3d data. Blender needs parallax information.

For situations like this use BLAM or Fspy.

Read:

How can I recreate geometry using a photograph?

For a comprehensive post on motion tracking read:

How can I get better results when doing camera motion tracking?


just god rays, without shadows or anything? (Blender Internal) I want to cast some light rays from the sky in my scene. As far as I know only way in Blender Internal is to use Spot Lights with Halo enabled.
But I don't want the light to actually illuminate the scene, nor have the obstacle which creates the rays to be visible. Can I do this?

You could

Uncheck 'Specular' and 'Diffuse' illumination options in your spot lamp and only check 'Halo' (+ adjust 'Size', 'Intensity', etc. as you like)

To get some more defined and realistic rays you can add a so called cookie ("stencil") object (e.g. a plane with some holes cut in it). To make it just cast shadows and not show up in the render itself you have set up the "Shadow" section of its material as follows (main part being the "Cast Only" setting):

Use the Compositor node 'Filter'->'Sun Beams' to get the effect in post


Blender 2.8 not showing objects in render view (cycles) Eevee works Ok and I can cut and paste into 2.79 and this displays in render view OK too? At the start of the project all was fine.  (It will generate a render OK)

You've accidentally paused the rendering. Click on the pause icon to update the view.


Creating a sphere from a rounded cube is causing ridges I'm hoping you can help me with a basic issue that seems to have me stumped!
I've been trying to create a sphere from a rounded cube but I've had a problem with it not joining correctly and I'm having issues with it creating a harsh ridge around the x and y-axis. (Second picture should show this)
I'm following a tutorial where you place a rounded cube, pop the radius at 1, pop the object in edit mode and delete half of the verticies (pictured below)

I'm then adding a mirror modifier, and ticking the "Clipping" box, and then adding another subdivison surface modifier of 2. The tutorial I'm following has a perfectly spherical appearance but mine has these harsh ridges.

I thought adding "Shade smooth" on object mode might help but it has worsened my problem.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated :) Here is the tutorial I am following if it helps explain my problem at all. https://youtu.be/rEBwBrRzyhw?t=180
Many thanks,
Ali

You have overlapping vertices as you can see here (I had to disable the Proportional Editing option as it would move the other vertex):

It creates a face that stick to the mirror axis, thus the artefacts. So select all and Merge by Distance to remove all unwanted vertices.


Is there a way to temporarily 'ignore' keyframes on a specific frame? In the Dope Sheet I have numerous keyframes. Is there a way to temporarily "ignore" the keyframes on a specific frame so they aren't considered when running the animation?

You can't disable them as such, but you can move them out of the way.

Select the keyframes you want to 'disable' and ensure the current frame is frame 0. Press S to Scale and type -1. This will scale using the current frame (zero) as the origin and swap the keyframe to the other side of the axis - so, for example, keyframes on frame 20 will be moved to frame -20. This will move them outside of the normal range of animated frames and effectively disable them (provided you have a keyframe at the start of the animation to set the initial state).

Enabled - the keyframe is in it's 'normal' position

Disabled - the keyframe has been moved to the opposite side of the axis

To 're-enable' the keyframes you can simply repeat the same action to mirror it back to the positive side of the axis (ie, frame -20 scaled by -1 becomes frame 20 again).


How Do I Move The Center Of My Model To The Blender Origin? My first post!

I'm completely new to Blender so you'll need to ELI5 I'm afraid lol

I've created a model in SketchUp then exported it as an obj file so that I could UV Map it using UV Layout Pro. I've then exported it in Maya as an fbx file and textured my model using Substance Painter. I've gone through this process using a student version of Maya which I can no longer use because I'm no longer a student so I've switched to Blender.

Now the problem I have is this:

I'm going to be using procedural generation to build my levels but as you can see from the pic above the pivot point is in a corner. I need my models to be rotating with the pivot point in the middle of the bottom face so that the corridor module can rotate 90 degrees clockwise or anti-clockwise without moving the corridor.

When I import the corridor into Blender I've worked out that I need to translate the model in the X and Y axes to bring the middle of the bottom face to the origin (0,0,0) but I don't know how to get this exactly in the right position. In SketchUp you need to have things 100 times the size so that you have the correct measurements in the Unreal Engine, so the cube that the model is made from is 300m x 300m which equals the model in Unreal being 3m by 3m. Is there a way of finding the middle of the bottom face:

And dragging that to the origin? Or am I thinking about this all wrong? Can I just move the pivot point to the center of the bottom face instead without needing to translate the model at all?

Sorry for all the n00b questions, I'm new to this modelling and game development lark and I need all the help I can get lol :D

I'm not sure there is an easy way.  The hard way that I can think of is to use the 3d cursor to move the origin of the object, move the cursor back to (0,0,0) and move the object to the cursor.  Unfortunately you then have to move the object origin back where it belongs.

The origin of an object starts out as the geometric center of the object.  It appears as a small yellow dot. Step by step to do this

select the object in object mode
switch to edit mode (TAB-KEY)
switch to face select mode (CTRL-TAB and select face mode from the pop up)
move the 3d cursor to the center of the face (SHIFT-S and select cursor to selection)
switch to object mode (TAB-KEY)
Move the origin of the object to the cursor (SHIFT-CTRL-ALT-C and select origin to 3d cursor)
Move the cursor to the origin (SHIFT-S and select Cursor to center)
Move the object to the cursor (SHIFT-S and select Selection to cursor)
Set the origin back to the geometry (SHIFT-CTRL-ALT-C and select origin to geometry)

There are other ways, but this one introduces you to using the cursor to precisely align objects.


Why do normals exist? I know what normals are, because I took physics.  However, I have this question: why do they exist in blender?

The only use I've ever had for them is negative side effects.  They make my mesh render funny.  Why doesn't blender simply treat both sides of the mesh the same?

What were the intentions of the developers including normals in the program, and not treating both sides of the mesh as if they had the normal?

A normal is a vector in 3D-space that is perpendicular to two other vectors (determinded by two edges of a face). It is calculated by the cross prduct.

A basic use of normals is in shaders e.g. to calculate reflections

Imgage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_(physics)

Normals could also be used for backface culling. This is a performance optimization which allows to skip rendering of faces which will not be visible (normals pointing away from to the camera). OpenGl uses a different method for that described here.

Left image includes backfaces, the right one doesn't.


Blender is playing animation very slowly after animating for a while,  my animation started to play very slowly in Blender, I have no idea why. It was playing very quick and smooth before but now it is very slow

A screenshot during one of the playbacks.

It is hard to tell, but there are two likely issues.

Solution 1

You accidentally changed your frame rate in the Properties panel > Render tab > Dimensions drop down. Make sure the value is set to 30, or 24, or whatever it was at before.

 or

Solution 2

Most likely, your animation got too complicated for your computer, and it started slowing it down. I notice that you are in Material view and have No Sync selected in the bottom-right of the Timeline panel. Material view is very intensive on a computer. The symptoms of No Sync include a Red FPS bar in the top-left of the 3D Viewport. You do have this; It reads "fps: 23.45," which is way slower than your 30 fps time that's been selected. To fix this, change No Sync to Frame Dropping.

...changed to...

Hold up!

It does occur to me that now you might think, "I should always use Frame Dropping!" No. I am now going to explain the place to use each.

No Sync

This should be used before you render an animation to make sure that each frame looks right. No Sync will ignore the set FPS if it has to to show each and every frame.

Frame Dropping

If you want to see an accurate representation of how events will flow in your animation (time) this is the way to go. Note that Frame Dropping does exactly that: It drops frames. It drops frames in order to have your animation's time flow correctly, but you will miss some frames, and therefore, any events that only happen spontaneously (like the initial fireball of an explosion) could be missed. You should probably keep this on until it's time to use No Sync as notated above.


How to rig a plate so that it points to a target, with off-centre tilt, and constraints on elongation and tilt a question from someone who has never done rigging before.

I need to make a plate (in my example: a cylinder) follow a target (a empty). But with some constraints:

There are three degrees of freedom: height along Z, rotation around X and Y.

Note: the centre of rotation is somewhere (a given percent) between the origin and the total "elongation"

The plate mustn't change size.
The rotations are constrained by 20 degs, the total elongation is constrained from zero to a fixed maximum

Here is a sketch ↓. Note that this is NOT rigged, it's just posed by hand to illustrate possible cases. I really have no experience with armatures so, if the answer uses a completely different setup, it's fine! (I added a third bone so that it could stay always the same size, but it's probably unnecessary. The first two bones have always the same proportions, so that the rotation pivot is always roughly half-way)

Walktrhough of the cases: the first plate is fully Z-extended, no rotation. The second is rotated to follow the Empty, but can't extend anymore because of the Z-height constraint. The third is compressed because the empty is closer to the origin. The fourth and fifth are compressed and tilted. The sixth is compressed and tilted, but the tilt has stopped due to the rotation constraint.

How do I set up this armature, so that once this is set up, one just has to move the empty around? What parenting relations, constraints and bone constraints are needed?

Disclaimer: This solution is not quite geometrically perfect, it doesn't take into account the disk radius and angle when adjusting the height to the target, so the disk doesn't necessarily touch the target at close ranges, but otherwise it seems to work, and ended up being relatively simple.

Just setup a single armature with two bones, so that the middle hinge is at half the whole height of the armature. In this case the armature is 1 unit high, so the tail of the second bone is at $0.5$ units in Z.

Create your $Target$ empty exactly at the tip of the second bone.

Add a single Transform constraint to the whole armature, and set it up to transform the Z location of the source object into Scale transform of the armature, and pick the $Target$ object as source.

Getting the right values was sort trial and error, but since the armature is 1 unit high, I suspect the min and max values for both source Z coordinate are respectively $0$ and $1$. Set the max scale to whatever height you want to limit the arms to; set space from World to Local.

Now enter Edit Mode in your armature, select the tip bone and add a bone constraint of the Damped Track type and point it to the same $Target$ empty. Track with Y and set Z as Up. You may also want to add a Limit Rotation to bound it to the desired values.

And is about it for the setup. Just create your disk object and parent it to the tip bone (not the whole armature). Make sure to add a Limit Scale constraint with all axis set to $1.0$ so it doesn't change size with target height.

Moving the $Target$ empty around should give you the effect you want while always bending at the middle hinge point.


How Do I Make A Perfect Uv Sphere For Water (Not For Equirectangular) Hello so i have a water texture i'm trying to uv map to a sphere without hard lines and stuff i managed to unwrap it pretty good then my old version but there's still just 1 hard line in the middle how would i get rid of it take a look

here's how the uv's look

all i'm trying to do is get rid of that middle hard line if anyone knows please let me know thanks

While in Edit mode, select one meridian at your choice. Press "Space" and write down "mark seam". Select one "rectangle" near the equator and connected to the seam you marked, and press "a" to select all, press "u" to bring the unwrap menu and select "follow active quads". You can leave on "length average" and press "Ok". You will get a new UV map with equirectangular projection, with this UV map selected, in the UV Image Editor, adjust the size to match the image, or leave it if the image is tileable.
An easier method (assuming that you are using cycles, and without the need of unwraping) is with a node setup like this:
You can even try to build a seamless procedural sea image your self, and if you really need, bake the procedural image onto a a new image (it will get seamless on your sphere). You can try the following node setup:


Nothing appears in final render I'm not sure what I press wrong, but now, my final render doesn't show anything...just stays black.

In Viewport shading everything is visible as it should be...

Any idea? :( .....see screenshots below:

Thanks!!!

Two more screenshots with camera view....

Found what cause the problem thanks to @RobertGützkow :)

Found what cause the problem thanks to @RobertGützkow :)

I have delete somehow Render layer in Compositing tab, by accident. noe it's working perfectly ;)


Objects in animation moving at different speeds on the same keyframe I have a crown that is composed of a gold frame and pearls. The gold frame is one object and the pearls are a second object. I hit "a" in order to select both the crown and the pearls. Then I added two key frames one of the current location then one 10 frames later of the crown rotating and moving downwards (like it is falling through the air). However, in frames 1 and 10 the pearls are in the correct location but during frames 2-9 the pearls move at a different speed and follow a different path then the crown so they don't look like they are connected to the crown when it is falling. How do i fix this?

You could parent the pearls to the crown, so that they follow the crown without being animated.

To do this, select the pearls and then the crown (so that the crown is active), and press CtrlP. Now you only have to animate the crown.

As for the reasons why the objects are out of sync in the first place, my first guess is that the origins are not in the same place.


making vertices follow along a straight line I'm trying to make something following a blueprint, I've angled the object following the side of the blueprint but now when I try make the front of the blueprint I don't know how to move it so it follows the straight line of vertices.
Thanks to anyone who helps :D

Try changing your transformation orientation to local or normal or even you can try view but then you have to align the camera to the object.


How do I use world properties in blender? I am doing a lighthouse project in Blender 2.92, and for the last 3 hours, I've been trying to figure out how to access world properties like Mist, Horizon and Zenith. I can't figure out how to access Blender Cycles as I'm told that's where I can access these properties from.

Most of these things would be in various tabs in the properties editor on the right hand side of the default UI, but as @Gorgious said, zenith and horizon are not currently in Blender. I checked, and these are from Blender Internal Render, which was discontinued in 2.80 release. I’ve included locations for Blender 2.79b, the last release with the Blender Internal Render engine.

Mist. Visual effect. Makes distant objects more and more transparent to the world background. It seems you are expected to composit this in yourself nowadays, and you can enable it for compositing in Properties editor -> View Layer Properties tab -> Passes panel -> Data sub panel. It will then show up as a Render Layer node output for this layer in the compositor. In Blender 2.79b with Blender Internal Render enabled, you can also enable readymade mist in Properties editor -> World tab -> Mist panel.
Horizon and Zenith. Archaic settings of the Blender Internal render engine, which was no longer used with the 2.80 release. In 2.79b with Blender Internal Render enabled, you can find these settings in Properties editor -> World tab -> World panel. Note that “Zenith color” will be unavailable unless “Blend sky” right above it is checked.
Cycles. A render engine. Comes packed with blender as an add-on and enabled by default, but not selected for use (you bought the screwdriver and it’s in your working tool bag, but it’s not in your hand yet). The render engine that is selected by default is EEVEE, which provides pretty decent fakes of physical accuracy for quick rendering. Cycles provides high-accuracy photorealistic ray-traced renders and hopes for an NVidia GPU to do its high-spec work. You can currently change the selected render engine in Properties editor -> Render Properties. It’s at the top. In Blender 2.79b, you can change the selected render engine in Info editor. In the default 2.79b UI, this is at the top of the window.


Drag mesh by single vertex/point I'm talking about this:

In Google Skethcup, you can select a mesh, then any point on the mesh, and then move that mesh around as if the selected point is it's origin.

In the above picture, for instance, I'd like to be able to drag the entire mesh by the lowest vertex (The one the cursor is on).

Is it possible to select a mesh, and then move that mesh by a certain point?

In order to rotate around desired vertex / vertices you can make choose them as origins of transform and change Pivot Point.

Rotate around active

Enter Edit mode of the object.
Select everything that should be rotated. To select entire mesh select one of its vertices and press Ctrl + L to select linked  edges / faces.
Deselect desired vertex which should become origin point for this moment, and select it again. This will make it active.
In 3D View header change Pivot point to Active Element or press Alt + . (period). Rotate mesh.

Rotate around 3D Cursor

You can set 3D Cursor to that vertex and rotate around it.
This method might be more flexible because you can use it in Object mode.

Enter Edit mode.
Select what you want to be origin point. Press Shift+S > Cursor to Selected.
Change Pivot point to 3D Cursor in 3D View header (or press . (period)).
Select what should be rotated, and rotate (if several objects should be rotated go to Object mode in this step).

See also related question:

Rotate object on axis between two points


Start script on open blender file I have written up a script for my model. But there is a bit of a problem with it. As in I have to run the script every time I open the file. I want the script to run automatically when I open the blender File.

There are two things you need to do -

Setup the script in blenders text editor. The name of the text block needs to end with .py and the register checkbox needs to be enabled.

Ensure that Auto-Run Python Scripts is enabled in your preferences.


Modeling a stadium dome with UVs? Beginning with Blender, I would like to create a stadium dome like the following one:

This is how it looks when textured:

This is the texture used:

This is the UV mapping:

Now you may ask why I don't reuse that model? It's because I'd like to assign a texture with different dimensions so the original UV mapping wouldn't be right. So while I'm on it, I'd rather learn the entire process on how to do it.
Edit:
For instance, I'd like to map it to a texture like the following:

In this case, I would like to map the lower half, so the mountains and a little above to the straightened part of the dome, and map the rest to the spherical part.
Question:
How could I recreate more or less the same dome in Blender?

This is a very easy thing to make in Blender.
Step one- Take a sphere and select the bottom half faces, then delete that part.
You can now scale the top half of the sphere on the Z axis to look slightly less spherical.
Step two- In Edit Mode select the bottom-most edges of the half-sphere and press E then Z to extrude it down on the Z axis, then type "-.1" to move the extruded part down just a bit, then press Enter/return
Step three- Before doing anything else, press Shift+R to repeat the action. This will extrude another part 0.1 down the Z axis off of the already extruded part. For reference, Shift+R is the hotkey you use in Blender to repeat the previous action.
Image of result for reference:

This should get the result you want.
EDIT If you want to unwrap a UV texture to your model, then you have to give the object a material, and add an image texture with the image you want to the color input of the material node.


Can Blender manipulate remote assets, without me having to download them to the client machine manually? I have the opportunity to produce some educational videos leveraging an entertainment company's branded characters. The educational course will be delivered online and students will be using Blender installed on their own machines. Can anyone tell me if it is possible to have students use and manipulate these branded character assets within Blender, without ever actually downloading the assets to their machines?

Not directly possible, Blender needs its data to be local (it does not understand uri, FTP, etc.).

You could set up a 'fake' local file system on your students' machine, though, which would actually be a network one (like a samba/windows sharing, or other similar solution). It will work as long as Blender can see it as a local directory.


Motion blur in scaling object I have a bouncing ball with a texture on it. The Motion blur checkbox on Cycles.
While it is falling I have motion blur, but when it touches the floor, the object itself stops moving, but it starts some squishing frames. I do not have any motion blur there.
Can I have motion blur on scaling objects?

Edit:
Well, this issue is now solved with newer versions of the program.

Scale motion blur was disabled in Cycles due to a known bug in CUDA.

It was added back again recently by Brecht on Jan 11 2018, meaning it will be available on the next major release of Blender 2.8.

Currently it is not possible to achieve this with the last official release.


How to change object scale in bge via the arrow keys? So I'm trying to scale up and down a cube using the arrow keys.
I've tried with this code (I'm not too good in Python so I used a template, and I'm not pretty sure if it's the correct one):

import bge

def main():

    cont = bge.logic.getCurrentController()
    own = cont.owner
    sens = cont.sensors["pixelscale"]
    pixel ["scale"] = bpy.data.objects["pixel"].scale[0]

main()

By the way, this is the logic bricks set up

What do I have to change?

First you should never use bpy with bge.

Your script should look like:

import bge

def main():

    cont = bge.logic.getCurrentController()
    own = cont.owner
    pixUp = cont.sensors["Keyboard.001"]
    pixDown = cont.sensors["Keyboard"]
    factor = 1
    if pixUp.positive:
        own.localScale[factor]*3 # the same as own.localScale[1,1,1]
    if pixDown.positive:
        own.localScale[factor-1]*3 # the same as own.localScale[0,0,0]
main()


Influence vertices in a given direction I have a subdivided tube with an inner and outer wall. The inner wall is pushed out by a sphere upon contact. My script does this by calculating a movement normal for every vertex in the tube, and whenever it is in contact with the sphere, moves the vertex along this normal until it no longer collides:

I would like the outer wall to follow along too, being pushed along the same normal. The catch is that the final geometry will be far more complex and irregularly varied (eg, a gnarly tree rather than a perfectly smooth lamppost), so I need a way of mathematically finding vertices which are 'behind' the vertex and in the direction of its normal to affect. The functionality that I am looking for is roughly similar to the proportionate editing tool, except it would only look for vertices that are in a certain direction rather than any that are within range.

I'm thinking something along the lines of

for x in range(len(deformed_verts)):
    for y in range(len(verts)):
        dir = normal.dot(deformed_verts[x], verts[y]) #probably wrong because my vector math is rusty - expecting closer to 1 = closer to being straight out along the normal, closer to 0 = farther away from normal and splayed out to the sides, < 0 = wrong direction
        if dir > 0:
            distance = (deformed_verts[x] - verts[y]).length
            if distance < threshold * dir #less likely to affect verts out to the sides rather than those along the normal
                #affect vert

This seems to be way too sensitive and causes the tube to explode into an enormous, uniform size. Am I even thinking along the right path, or is there an easier way to do this? If not, is the math sound?

The idea behind your loop works.

The direction should probably be calculated with mathutils.Vector.angle so that you don't have to consider the vector length:
angle = normal.angle(verts[y] - deformed_verts[x], 0)

I used the Animation Nodes setup attached below for the example. The principle behind it translates to code like this:

for outer_vertex in outer_vertices:
    influencing_vectors = []
    for (i, inner_vertex) in enumerate(inner_vertices):
        normal = inner_object.data.vertices[i].normal
        distance = distances[i]  # would be supplied by your script
        angle = normal.angle(outer_vertex - inner_vertex, 0)
        if angle < pi/8:  # or whatever angle you choose
            influencing_vectors.append(normal * distance)
    translation = functools.reduce(operator.add, influencing_vectors, Vector((0, 0, 0)))
    if len(influencing_vectors) > 0:
        translation /= len(influencing_vectors)
    outer_vertex_new = outer_vertex + translation

I didn't include any falloff for the angle which you might want to do.
The performance isn't that good and I expect this to be problematic for larger meshes. My original suggestion would have been to try ray_cast for each of the outer vertices. But the result of the ray_cast method will differ (and look worse when there are large curvatures).


How to scale vertices uniformly in one direction? I want to scale a set of vertices off the center and towards a point.

Here's the current setup :

I want to scale the selected vertices equally towards the edge of the wing. Scaling in X axis isn't working.

What's the correct method here ?

Pivot is the origin, not the goal.

The pivot point is considered the origin of the transformation space. Scaling the objects with a factor smaller than 1 will make them collapse toward the origin, while what you would like to achieve is verteices spreaded from the origin toward another point. The scaling factor should be greater than 1 in this case (e.g. the double, the triple...).

I suggest to change the position of the 3D cursor to the symmetry axis instead of the goal point. This way you'll be able to scale your vertices uniformly, even if they are not evenly spaced.


New to blender trying to figure out how to make a text have a cylindrical side shape Hello I am trying to add a cylindrical side shape to a 3d text. I am trying to remove all of the parts outside of the cylinder as shown in this picture.

I guess you're looking for a Boolean operation.

Convert your text to mesh (Object -> Convert to .. -> Mesh). This is important! Maybe make a copy of your text object first.
Add the modifier "Boolean" to either object (text, in this case)
Change mode to "Intersection" and select the cylinder in the object dropdown

Optionally: Apply [CTRL]+[A] the modifier and delete unused objects.


Keep an object's origin at 0 during an animation? This is difficult for me to explain, unfortunately.. Please bear with me.

I would like to use simulated physics on an object and bake the physics into keyframes for that object, which i have done. But is there a way for me to keep the object's XYZ locations and rotations in object mode at 0 while only the mesh moves?

I'm basically trying to create something like, for example, a model of a brick wall that breaks apart to be used in a video game to give the illusion of real time physics in that game. I figured I could simulate physics for the model and bake to keyframes, and then use those keyframes on the bones that the model will be rigged to. But I need everything's XYZ at 0 in object mode. But I'm a newbie so I don't know how to accomplish this.

So to simplify the question as much as I can: how can I transfer the keyframes from the simulated physics from the object to the bone but keep their origins at 0.

For a video game you don't want to do that. Shape key animations are very expensive and hard to transfer over. Plus, the pieces would not interact with the rest of the game world.

You most likely want to simulate the physics for the pieces in real time in the actual game engine. Often this type of things are made with an intact version of the wall and after the impact happens, the object is removed and the physics-simulated pieces are instantiated.

Or if you want a non-interactive version you could make a rig for the pieces and bake the simulation on the rig in Blender, then export the object with meshes and animation. Considering how advanced and efficient the physics simulation capabilities of even free and indie game engines are today, this is becoming an increasingly obsolete solution.


Can the default font be changed? I have been playing with the settings for the text object recently, and every time I add a new text object, I need to change the font to my favorite one. (Eurostile LT ExtendedTwo) Is there any way to change the default font so I do not need to change it every time I add a new text object?

Example:

This does not appear to be possible without the internal editing of the Blender source. I would recommend submitting a feature request for this. This feature could be very useful and should not be hard to implement. Someone could potentially create a patch that adds that ability as well.


How do I display a mesh with curved lines? I sometimes see relatively low-poly meshes displayed with the lines between the nodes curving to the surface of what I assume to be a subsurfed form. I uploaded a few images to imgur that I found on google that indicate what I mean:

Notice the line coming from the temple and curling around the ear, as well as the vertical lines on the back of the neck.

Look at the vertical lines coming from below the armpits up across the pectoral muscles and the lines running from the shoulders down the arms at the spaces between the deltoids and biceps.

Hopefully, I'm communicating what I mean properly. Anyways, I wanted to know how I can enable these curves.

In Blender, this is the result of checking 'Wire' and 'Show All Edges' in the Object tab > Display panel, while also checking 'Optimal Display' in a Subdivision Surface modifier.


How to extrude the selected faces of a cylinder symmetrically outwards? There is some way of extruding all the selected faces toward outside
 so that the extrusion is symmetrical in the object, using blender. Thanks for answer my question.

The I want is to do this in a symmetrical way, an extrusion outwards,
I maked this selecting the faces indeviduously and extruding them outwards.

If you want to extrude all the selected faces out the same distance along their individual normals simultaneously, press Alt-E instead of E.  Hope that helps!


Export Wavefront .mtl file -- Where is the reflectance coefficient? It seems that when exporting a model, the output .mtl file does not include reflectance coefficient, which in blender is set using under "Mirror" in "Material".

The .mtl file is as follow:

# Blender MTL File: 'None'
# Material Count: 1

newmtl Material
Ns 96.078431
Ka 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
Kd 0.640000 0.640000 0.640000
Ks 0.500000 0.500000 0.500000
Ni 1.000000
d 1.000000
illum 2

Is there a way to include reflectance in this file?

Thanks in advance!

I'm not sure this is directly related to Blender, or Blender's .obj exporter. The wavefront file description mentions a set of 11 illumination models (from 0 to 10), none of which seem to specify explicitly any coefficient for reflection, merely that there is reflection:

  Multiple illumination models are available, per material. These are
  enumerated as follows:

0. Color on and Ambient off
1. Color on and Ambient on
2. Highlight on
3. Reflection on and Ray trace on
4. Transparency: Glass on, Reflection: Ray trace on
5. Reflection: Fresnel on and Ray trace on
6. Transparency: Refraction on, Reflection: Fresnel off and Ray trace on
7. Transparency: Refraction on, Reflection: Fresnel on and Ray trace on
8. Reflection on and Ray trace off
9. Transparency: Glass on, Reflection: Ray trace off
10. Casts shadows onto invisible surfaces


Calling bpy ops fails with context is incorrect I have a bare bones script that has 2 lines:

import bpy

bpy.ops.mesh.rip()

I've made sure I am in EDIT mode and have edges selected in edge mode. It fails with

RuntimeError: Operator bpy.ops.mesh.rip.poll() failed, context is incorrect

But I've fulfilled all of the context rules in the docs. Anybody?

For whatever reason, I couldn't get ANY Blender bpy.ops.mesh.rip rip_move rip_edge rip_edge_move at all BUT the same thing exists in bmesh functionality called split_edges (facepalm). Following code splits all edges along any edge that is marked as "seam".

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

seamEdges = []
for edge in bm.edges:
    if edge.seam:
        edge.select = True
        seamEdges.append(edge)

bmesh.ops.split_edges(bm,edges=seamEdges)
#apply
bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode = 'OBJECT')
bm.to_mesh(me)
bm.free()


Weight paint problem I'm fairly new to using Blender and have been able to understand most issues on my own but I can't find an answer with this one.

When I weight paint my mesh's (body, mouth, teeth, etc.) they weight paint just fine but when it comes to the tongue I can't seem to do anything with it. When I click the bone in pose mode and then the mesh and go to weight paint it just looks like how it's shown in the picture.

A couple of things to look at.... 1) is the tongue an object on it's own?   Or a part of another object and it "appears" to be it's own separate object.   2)  I just helped someone else out with this next question/suggestion.   Are the normals pointing in the correct direction or is the tongue drawn inside-out?   Check the normals on the faces.


The lines that follow show that your two cubes are contained as two separate objects:
*snip*
o Cube.001
*snip*
o Cube
*snip*

If the point of failure is how they behave upon import into Unity, it may be better to phrase the question for that community.
Also, exports to FBX are supported in Blender: http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/HOWTO-ImportObjectBlender.html
In any case, there's no way to further separate the object coordinates in obj format than they are already, other than exporting each cube to it's own file.
Are you perhaps asking "How do I independently manipulate two objects from a single obj file in Unity?"?
Hope that helps.


Show split 3D view with and without rig? I'm trying to pose my characters face, but with so many rig layers on top for control, it's hard to see if I'm doing the right tweaks. I want to have two windows, one with my rig controls and one without, but the changes to viewport are global.
My current work around is to have the render result and then use F12 each time, but it would be awesome with live update. Does anyone know how to do that?

In blender 2.8+, you can disable to overlay button in the top right corner. In 2.79, you can press N and check "only render" to only see the object in your scene. Hope this helps!


Is there a way to make bevels automatically dissolve vertices? In hard surface modeling, when I use bevels, probably most of the time I don’t use clamp overlap. And I’ve seen in other polygon-based software that it is possible to make nice bevels with some automatic dissolving feature that fixes the problem of having to manually dissolve a lot of vertices in heavy models. Any help?

What I understand from your question is that you will have to do this before bevelling: Selct your whole mesh by pressing A on your keyboard, and then press M>Merge by Distance. This will dissolve any overlapping verticies, and then you will have good bevels.


Fire appearing unclear & dark on render On default view, the fire appears as bright.
Yet, on when it is rendered it appears as a red dull smoke

The image on the left is Solid view port shading, while the image on the left is in Rendered view port shading:

My aim is to closely replicate how the fire looks in Default to Rendered.

These are the material settings of the domain:

I trully need help

The way how fire looks in viewport isn't much related to what would be rendered. It shows 3 basic things:
- the simulation was cached and is available for rendering;
- the direction of the smoke and / or fire propagating (up / down / etc);
- rough forms of the final simulated effects.
All other details aren't really shown in the viewport, like thickness, scale, color, density etc. of the smoke / fire.
Generally, preview in viewport is accessible just after running simulation; no materials needed. To render that simulation you will need to add a volume material which will tell render engine how light behaves inside of that volume domain, how much light scatters, how much light can pass through, how much light is emitted and so on.

In Blender Internal this is done with materials set to "Volume" type (run Objects > Quick Effects > Quick Smoke to test how basic setup looks like). As fire renders in your case, it has volume material; it's just that it behaves a bit not as expected. As desired result is to get fire of shiny colors, all that is left is to change some settings of the material.

Depending on your needs, in your domain's material settings decrease Emission to something around 1 and Scattering to around 0,1 - 0,9; that should give you the effect you're aiming to:

Note: smoke and fire textures of Voxel Data type were used in this example. This is not discussed here as it's whole another topic, albeit related; Quick Smoke was used to get their setup quickly.

Emission will control how much light is emitted by the volume because of some processes happening there (note - sources of outside light are not taken into consideration). Fire is one of them and it should use that option because it produces light (along with energy) while burning. From manual:

  Some volumes can emit light where there was none before, via chemical or thermal processes, such as fire. This light is generated from the volume itself and is independent of light coming from external sources.

However if emission is set too high (like 2 or more) with Scattering set high too it will produce effect of dark volcanic smoke and not fire. This seems to happen mostly because the options work independently - scattering effect doesn't know what's going there with emission and amount of emitted light doesn't care how much of outside light could travel through; hence strange (and / or unexpected) effects that could be produced.

Scattering controls how light travels through the volume (i.e. fire in this case) and make adjacent amount of the former not to reach distant parts of a volume. From manual:

  The amount of light that is scattered out of the volume. The more light that is scattered out of the volume, the less it will penetrate through the rest of the volume. Raising this parameter can have the effect of making the volume seem denser, as the light is scattered out quickly at the ‘surface’ of the volume, leaving the areas internal to the volume darker, as the light does not reach it.

By playing with these options you can create different effects; e.g. if setting emission to some high value like 150 and Scatter to 0.2, kind of fire of low burning temperatures will be achieved:


Brick Texture On Extruded Cylinder Shows All Mortar Color Very new to Blender, so I'm not sure what to research for on this problem...
If I add a mesh/cylinder I can add brick texture, then get the texture to "wrap" (?) around the structure just fine, as in the bottom portion of this image

If I try to resize the cylider by extruding, the entire new surface reverts to the "mortar" color, as in the top portion of the above image.
The same thing happens if I add a circle and extrude that.
I have tried playing with every visible parameter for the Brick Texture node, but can't get the brick texture on an extruded section.
I'm trying to use extrudes so that I can utilize snap capabilities.
Any suggestions appreciated, including helping me understand where to look for myself
Thanks in advance

It's an UV map problem
You may have correctly unwrapped the cylinder (or used the default cylinder which comes already unwrapped) but unless you are using the brand new (2.90) 3D View Transform option, called Correct Face Attributes, which allows the transform tools to edit the UV’s and vertex colors of your mesh while you manipulate the model, you'll have to unwrap the new faces too.
The UV island for the interested faces is probably collapsed onto a single line in the UV editor, which falls in corrispondence if a mortar.


Locked Y axis rotation is also rotating on Z I'm new to blender

How can i get a Z axis only rotation?

I'm trying to make a mug with a handle and when I lock rotation on the y axis I get slight amounts of rotation on Z also; resulting in the handle spiraling as shown below.

From the image it looks like the rotation is normal but your handle is not centered on the mug and that's causing it to look warped.


Clipping glitch on models I was following a tutorial on YouTube from Dikko on retopologying the face and when it had come to retopo the lips I wanted to turn off the Object Properties< Viewport Display < In Front on the reotopology and I couldn't see the model when facing it.
I guessed it was because I had another copy of the retopo face so I turned that off, but nothing happened.
While working on it I then thought "oh maybe it's the view < Clip start " Because I played around with that, Nothing. I tried importing the head sculpt to the project because I had separately sculpted the head in another blender project, the error is still being applied to the copy. So I guess I don't know what I'm doing

Go to Viewport shading > Click the arrow > Disable Backface Culling

But if you are also exporting to game engine:
Select object > Go to edit mode > select everything (Press "A") > Go to Mesh (left top part of the viewport)> Normals > Recalculate outside

EDIT: Game Engines have the backface culling "locked on" thats why you need to rotate normals as shown above


Cannot import name 'common_utilities' I'm trying to enable my polystrips addon but I receive this error every time I try to check the enable addon box.

It appears you need to grab the code from here https://github.com/CGCookie/retopology-lib and put the source files (ie __init__.py, common_utilities.py, common_drawing.py, common_classes.py)  into the empty retopology-polystrips-master/lib folder