fluid simulation in blender 2.8 I am using the current version (2.8) blender.
No matter what I try, fluid stimulation is not working. Initially it would not bake the simulation. Now even though it bakes, there is no output. Domain is still visible and there is no fluid animation.
Have gone through many tutorials but no solution.

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FmkKvXrzben85DPn_cwTA0Y9hQr72OZt/view?usp=sharing][1]

this is a file i have been practicing with.

First, all your fluid simulation participant objects must be within the bounding box of the domain object.  So any inflow, obstacle, outflow etc. meshes should be encompassed by the domain.

The also seems to be a problem residing with your inflow object.  You must set the Volume Initialization to Shell or Both.  I don't know why this would be the case, but it's the only way I could get it to work with your blend file.

Update

I think that this maybe had something to do with your inflow object having it's origin outwith the geometry, can't really be sure.

I strongly advise you to read the Fluid Simulation documentation as there are a lot of caveats to specific objects.

Here's a final screenshot

And the updated blend file:


I export to the fbx and load it into the clip studio modeler, the mesh breaks The obj extension was loaded correctly. I have to load with the fbx extension. I have to apply mobility.

What's wrong?

this is boolean error.
you have to triangulate face or tris to quads.
sometimes tris to quads not affect.
you search and affect it.
so it's ok


Blender 2.8 to Unity export problem I recently created a tiny space ship, it looks like this in Blender:

but when I import it into Unity it looks weird and the animation is broken(no bones only scene graph):

Check if scale is applied - in object mode Object>apply>Rotation&Scale.  Make sure you select each separate mesh.
Check if any modifiers are applied - In properties Modifiers...apply any that are there.
Then check the bones are parented correctly.
Export as a fbx.  Select the space ship mesh and bones in the rig. Then check in export box the Selected Objects and check experimental apply transform.
Drag and drop the fbx in to unity assets or any file.


How do i fix armature deformation (robot rigging) i am having problem with my animation, the armature is deforming the model while it should be a straight bone. how can i fix that.

For objects like that (machine, non-organic), don't use With Automatic Weight when you parent, because it will create weight gradients along the mesh and this is not what you want, instead use With Empty Groups, it will create as many vertex groups as you have bones but for the moment it won't assign any vertex to those groups. Then, in the Properties panel > Object Data > Vertex Groups, assign each part of your mesh to the group it is supposed to be part of.


How do I convert a 3D scanned mesh into a useable/editable model? I have an Artec scanner and would like to use it to scan 3D models and process them in Blender.
Can anyone recommend the best method to use, or work-flow to follow?

Within your Artec Studio software I would export it as a .wrl to preserve the color data. Then in Blender turn on VRML2 import under addons/Import/Export. The import the .wrl. If you don't need color data export as an .obj


Blender Render, can't render a background I am new to blender, and I just finished my first low poly scene. I would like to add a night sky background, but when I click render, the sky disappears.

Is there a way to render my scene with the background? I have the Sky option checked in the 'Shading' tab as well as in the Render Layer.

Assuming Blender Render
Blender has background which can appear in the render.  With the camera selected and shading panel verify that alpha has sky selected.
Under the layers tab you must have Sky selected as well


I'm having trouble with image rotation I'm trying to import an image into Blender that I can make rotate continuously. It's just a simple 2D circular image that I want to make rotate. For an example of what I'm trying to do, see the last 15-20 seconds of one of the more recent videos here. (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQiojTHkAvFvdCSajklqUXA) His logo is a T shaped and rotates horizontally, mine would be a circular image, and rotating against the background rather than on the axis his is. For anyone wondering, I'm working on creating an outro card for my YouTube videos. Any help?

I've fiddled with Blender some, but not enough to have any real skill at it. Any assistance is appreciated.

Use the add image as plane addon to import your image as a texture on a plane, if your image is transparent around your logo then you can use that to only make you logo visible.
Animate the rotation of the plane. In the 3D viewport press I and choose rotation.
In the graph editor select the axis you want to rotate and add a generator modifier. Play the animation and adjust the values until you get a rotation speed you want. Negative numbers will reverse the rotation.

To get a more detailed object spinning or if you need to cut out the image surrounding your logo, you will need to do a little modeling. Starting with a circle, you can either extrude it or use a solidify modifier to add thickness. UV unwrap it and add the image to the material, you can use the material created by add image as plane if you started with that.


Using a baked position as new start position My problem: I have a (probably insane) model with about 30000 shapes. I want to drop the entire thing using rigid body physics. I am not really interested in the animation as such, nor is it important that the simulation is 100% correct, I just want the final pile of shapes.

The problem is that I can't bake all of it in one go (blender crashes far before the bake is finished).

I am currently trying to bake some frames, then use the baked position as my new starting position, and bake again from there.
I use the following script, and it seemed to work when I tried it on just a few objects, but it does nothing as far as I can see when I run it on my big model.
Script:

import bpy

def usebake(frame = 20):
  bpy.context.scene.frame_set(frame)
  i = 0
  for obj in bpy.data.objects:
    i = i+1
    obj.location = obj.matrix_world.to_translation()
    obj.rotation_quaternion = obj.matrix_world.to_quaternion()
    #obj.rotation_euler = obj.matrix_world.to_euler()
  print(i)

The process I have used is as follows:
Bake -> run script -> free bake -> bake new

Am I doing something wrong?
Alternatively, is there another way to achieve what I'm trying to do?

It turned out all my objects had an animation linked to them for some reason (I'm guessing it is because I had been experimenting with keyframes as another way to solve my question, but I'm not sure). I reverted to a backup file without the linked animations, and it works just fine now.


Bevel is warping the surface I've constantly been running into bevel issues, where instead of 'rounding' the selected edge, it is warping the surface, creating texture I do not want. I am currently using a Mac (shortcut I use for bevel is command+shift+b--command b does not do anything for me) and every tutorial I try out, I get stuck when it comes to rounding any corner or edge. Is there possibly a fix for this?

For the moment you can't bevel the edge because you have an inner face, the edge is common to 3 faces and therefore Blender can't guess how to bevel, once the inner face deleted, Ctrl B should work:

If you have a problem of shortcut, you can open the Preferences > Keymap and type "bevel" in the search field, then redefine the shortcuts you want for this operation.


Is it possible to use SSAO in Eevee without world lighting? I'd love to use SSAO in eevee to just add a little depth to my scene, but I've created a studio-esque lighting set up, and as such need to keep the world lighting dark, only lighting my scene with lights.

Is there a way to force AO in a dark scene? It seems like AO in eevee only works when the world is emitting light. Is there a workaround for this?

If you only need it in the final render, you can apply it in the compositor:

Enable the Ambient Occlusion pass in Properties > Render Layers > Passes.
Use a Mix node to multiply it with the render.


Blender shows exported meshes as a box I have .blend file which when I open through blender, shows up like this:

Now, when I export it as .3ds, and then open it again through blender, it shows up as this:

Is this normal? Why is this happening?

Open blender and go to File>Import>.3ds then import your file via there


Baking ambient occlusion gives odd black vortex output? I am having a very strange problem when I bake an Ambient Occlusion!

The problem is very very visible, When I click Bake, it bakes everything and then in the last few seconds it does this weird "vortex" kind of effect. It always starts from the bottom left.

Also, any UV unwrapping doesn't work either (UV unwrap, Smart uv project etc. all don't work).

For some reason this seems to be caused by the wire material.

If you remove it by pressing the - button:

Then it works as expected:

This looks like a bug to me. You might want to consider reporting it to the tracker. I've since reported it here.

Also note that there are some internal faces and non-manifold geometry in your model, which can also result in some artifacts. Try pressing ⎈ Ctrl⎇ Alt⇧ ShiftM in edit mode to select problem spots.


Geometry nodes: change points rotation I can't understand how to tell geo-nodes to face these bolts outwards. They are propagated on cylinder vertexes, which have no info about vectors (unlike faces).

I'm not quite sure what you mean by face outwards, but I think you could use an align rotation to vector, with the position as the vector attribute, like this. If you want to use this technique on other meshes you might need to fiddle with the rotation axis:


Blender version 2.79 and older crashes on startup Recently Blender version 2.79 and older crashes upon startup in my Windows 10 64-bit computer, and after further inspection, apparently it has something to do with the Cycles renderer. Blender 2.80, strangely enough considering it's still in alpha state, works fine, until I activate the Cycles renderer method and crashes itself too.

What I mean by crashing is the application freezes forever, making Blender prior to version 2.8 unusable in my computer. I tried fresh install from official installer, nightly build, updating the GPU driver, and nothing changed after following the troubleshoot procedure. When Blender freezes, the Task Manager shows Blender is using 25% of CPU usage and doesn't change far from that number.

Using --debug-all command line argument shows the program freezes after CLEW Initialization Succeed.

I can't continue with Blender 2.8 since I'm relying on an addon that doesn't work on 2.8. So, how do I solve this problem?

OS: Windows 10 Home 64-bit
CPU: Intel Core i5-6200U @ 2.4GHz
GPU: AMD Radeon R5 M330, using latest Catalyst driver

Reinstalling the Windows (build 10586, with proper drivers installed) finally solves the problem and Blender runs fine, even the Cycle renderer works fine too.

I had no idea why that problem persists before reinstalling, because previously, I already tried troubleshooting by:

using --factory-setup argument
deleting Blender's AppData stuff
switching GPU driver versions back and forth
trying other versions of Blender (including nightly builds)
reinstalling Blender

...and aforementioned steps doesn't solve the problem for me.


Objects missing in final render whenever I try to render an image all the props/rigs and sky appear in the final render but the actual scene/environment does not.
this is what I'm trying to render:

this is what is rendering:

please help this is for a final year multimedia major project!!!

@cegaton select the affected objects and be sure the icon camera in the outliner window is active.

Or be sure the object properties "Cycle Settings" has the Camera selected in the Ray visibility settings.


What file must I use for a animation render to post online? I am experimenting with rigid bodies. I created a scene with a wrecking ball crashing through a pile of blocks. I tried rendering it in MPEG, but that makes it into a .dvd file. I want to post the end result on my facebook page, but it won't accept .dvd files. So what file format do I need to use to post online?

Although there are plenty of formats that are currently supported by Facebook, when uploading to the online video sites, I personally like to choose H.264 format, and simply choose the same in the Preset list in Encoding panel after that. Then give it a tweak if you want. The result format is *.avi in this case. Of course you can also try Xvid and others, as long as  they can be well supported by those sites. FYI and good luck.


Blender 2.8 (Python) - knife project In Blender/Python 2.8, I am trying to use knife project to cut a circle through a cube.  I am attempting to automate a process I can do manually.

My code is below; the last line throws this error:

RuntimeError: Operator bpy.ops.mesh.knife_project.poll() expected a view3d region & editmesh

When I do the process manually, I set the view as front ortho (numpad=1) so that the circle cuts the cube correctly.  My code leaves that out as I don't know how to do the equivalent of setting the view in python for the purposes of knife project; and I am unsure if emulating the numpad keystroke will solve the problem, anyway.

Thanks for whatever help you can offer!

bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')
bpy.ops.curve.primitive_bezier_circle_add(radius=.25, enter_editmode=False, location=(0, 0, 0))
bpy.ops.transform.rotate(value=1.5708, orient_axis='X', orient_type='GLOBAL', orient_matrix=((1, 0, 0), (0, 1, 0), (0, 0, 1)), orient_matrix_type='GLOBAL', constraint_axis=(True, False, False), mirror=True, use_proportional_edit=False, proportional_edit_falloff='SMOOTH', proportional_size=1, use_proportional_connected=False, use_proportional_projected=False)
bpy.ops.transform.translate(value=(0, -2, 0), orient_type='GLOBAL', orient_matrix=((1, 0, 0), (0, 1, 0), (0, 0, 1)), orient_matrix_type='GLOBAL', constraint_axis=(False, True, False), mirror=True, use_proportional_edit=False, proportional_edit_falloff='SMOOTH', proportional_size=1, use_proportional_connected=False, use_proportional_projected=False)
bpy.data.objects['Cube'].select_set(True)
bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='EDIT', toggle=False)
bpy.ops.mesh.knife_project()
```

Here is the code corrected,...
I have used a function from here for override context: link
and an operator described here for updating the view3D camera change: link

import bpy

def AssembleOverrideContextForView3dOps():
#=== Iterates through the blender GUI's windows, screens, areas, regions to find the View3D space and its associated window.  Populate an 'oContextOverride context' that can be used with bpy.ops that require to be used from within a View3D (like most addon code that runs of View3D panels)
# Tip: If your operator fails the log will show an "PyContext: 'xyz' not found".  To fix stuff 'xyz' into the override context and try again!
for oWindow in bpy.context.window_manager.windows:          ###IMPROVE: Find way to avoid doing four levels of traversals at every request!!
    oScreen = oWindow.screen
    for oArea in oScreen.areas:
        if oArea.type == 'VIEW_3D':                         ###LEARN: Frequently, bpy.ops operators are called from View3d's toolbox or property panel.  By finding that window/screen/area we can fool operators in thinking they were called from the View3D!
            for oRegion in oArea.regions:
                if oRegion.type == 'WINDOW':                ###LEARN: View3D has several 'windows' like 'HEADER' and 'WINDOW'.  Most bpy.ops require 'WINDOW'
                    #=== Now that we've (finally!) found the damn View3D stuff all that into a dictionary bpy.ops operators can accept to specify their context.  I stuffed extra info in there like selected objects, active objects, etc as most operators require them.  (If anything is missing operator will fail and log a 'PyContext: error on the log with what is missing in context override) ===
                    oContextOverride = {'window': oWindow, 'screen': oScreen, 'area': oArea, 'region': oRegion, 'scene': bpy.context.scene, 'edit_object': bpy.context.edit_object, 'active_object': bpy.context.active_object, 'selected_objects': bpy.context.selected_objects}   # Stuff the override context with very common requests by operators.  MORE COULD BE NEEDED!
                    #print("-AssembleOverrideContextForView3dOps() created override context: ", oContextOverride)
                    return oContextOverride
raise Exception("ERROR: AssembleOverrideContextForView3dOps() could not find a VIEW_3D with WINDOW region to create override context to enable View3D operators.  Operator cannot function.")

bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')
bpy.ops.curve.primitive_bezier_circle_add(radius=.25, enter_editmode=False, location=(0, 0, 0))
bpy.ops.transform.rotate(value=1.5708, orient_axis='X', orient_type='GLOBAL', orient_matrix=((1, 0, 0), (0, 1, 0), (0, 0, 1)), orient_matrix_type='GLOBAL', constraint_axis=(True, False, False), mirror=True, proportional='DISABLED', proportional_edit_falloff='SMOOTH', proportional_size=1)
bpy.ops.transform.translate(value=(0, -2, 0), orient_type='GLOBAL', orient_matrix=((1, 0, 0), (0, 1, 0), (0, 0, 1)), orient_matrix_type='GLOBAL', constraint_axis=(False, True, False), mirror=True, proportional='DISABLED', proportional_edit_falloff='SMOOTH', proportional_size=1)
bpy.ops.object.convert(target='MESH')
bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')
bpy.context.view_layer.objects.active = bpy.data.objects['Cube']
bpy.data.objects['Cube'].select_set(True)
bpy.data.objects['BezierCircle'].select_set(True)
bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='EDIT', toggle=False)
oContextOverride = AssembleOverrideContextForView3dOps()
bpy.ops.view3d.view_axis(oContextOverride, type='FRONT')
bpy.ops.wm.redraw_timer(type='DRAW_WIN_SWAP', iterations=1)
bpy.ops.mesh.knife_project(oContextOverride)


Rename multiple objects in Outliner Is it possible to rename large groups of related objects using a "replace" type capability?

There doesn't appear to be anything in the add-ons for this.

I'd like to be able to add prefixes/suffixes or change a specific characters form "A" to "B".

Thanx in advance for any help.

You can Batch Rename objects in the Outliner (since 2.81)
Shortcut: Ctrl + F2


Objects not in Viewport appearing in Render (Armatures/Rigging) As you can see in the image below, I have a scene with three characters, which are all animated, either
doing a dance or just sitting idle. I downloaded a minecraft rig and uploaded it to Mixamo to get
them animated. Everything looks good until you hit render and see geometry that you do not see in the viewport. I'm trying to figure out what it is, and what I can do to get rid of it to have a normal render. Currently using EEVEE. Issue also persists in Cycles. I am pretty new to rigging so I assume the issue comes from somewhere in the armature that should not be rendered, but I just cannot figure this one out.

Below are source files on Google Drive.
This is the .blend for the scene >>> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jr0czbMXa2m8NSEZZBQlSQq14pE1q_9E/view?usp=sharing
This is the .blend for the rig I uploaded to Mixamo.com >>>
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XWKYnwbYEhUykrwM2hDitCmJzSD921mb/view?usp=sharing
Thank you for your time.

These 3 objects were hidden in Viewport but not in Render as you can see in the Outliner:


How to enable undo for operators in sculpt mode? I wrote a operator like that, And when I run this from object mode, everything is fine but if I run from sculpt mode, it cleans all the undo history and I ain't able to undo anything I did before.
Why is that?
class MaskDecimate(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "flow_tools.decimate"
    bl_label = "Mask Decimate"
    bl_description = ""
    bl_options = {"REGISTER", "UNDO"}

    invoked = False

    ratio = bpy.props.FloatProperty(
        name="Ratio",
        description="How much to recuce",
        default=0.5,
        min = 0.0000001,
        max = 1.0
    )

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls, context):
        if context.active_object:
            if not context.active_object.mode == "EDIT":
                return context.active_object.type == "MESH"

    def invoke(self, context, event):
        self.bm = bmesh.new()
        self.bm.from_mesh(context.active_object.data)
        wm = context.window_manager
        return wm.invoke_props_dialog(self)

    def execute(self, context):

        ob = context.active_object
        bm = self.bm
        bm.to_mesh(ob.data)

        layer = bm.verts.layers.paint_mask.verify()
        vg = ob.vertex_groups.new(name = "paint_vertex_group_mask")
        vg.add([v.index for v in bm.verts], 1.0, "REPLACE")

        for vert in bm.verts:
            mask_val = vert[layer]
            vg.add([vert.index], 1 - mask_val, "REPLACE")

        md = ob.modifiers.new(type="DECIMATE", name="Decmater")
        md.ratio = self.ratio
        md.vertex_group = vg.name
        bpy.ops.object.modifier_apply(modifier=md.name)

        bm = bmesh.new()
        bm.from_mesh(ob.data)
        layer = bm.verts.layers.paint_mask.verify()

        for vert in bm.verts:
            vert[layer] = 1 - vg.weight(vert.index)

        ob.vertex_groups.remove(vg)

        bm.to_mesh(ob.data)
        bm.free()
        return {"FINISHED"}

As a variant of a solution. I could suggest adding history before all the code. But I'm pretty sure this is a bug in Blender's sculpt mode.
if context.mode != 'OBJECT':
    bpy.ops.ed.undo_push()


Setting render options from the command line I was hoping to render blender using the command line mode on linux. However, I do not no how to set the output resolution and H.264 as the encoding. Both these options work in the GUI mode but I wish to use them from the command line

Command line
One way is to set the properties from the gui, save the file, then render. The settings will be preserved for rendering from the command line.
Note that (as already mentioned by iKlsR) you can set the render output format from the command line with -F:
Format Options:
-F or --render-format <format>
Set the render format, Valid options are...
    TGA IRIS JPEG MOVIE IRIZ RAWTGA
    AVIRAW AVIJPEG PNG BMP FRAMESERVER
(formats that can be compiled into blender, not available on all systems)
    HDR TIFF EXR MULTILAYER MPEG AVICODEC QUICKTIME CINEON DPX DDS

However, it seems H264 is not a valid setting for this argument.
Further reading: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/advanced/command_line/arguments.html#python-options
Python
Another way is to use blender's python API, and run a python script in blender from the command line (see this post), e.g.:
blender --background /path/to/file.blend --python /path/to/script.py --render-anim

or
blender -b /path/to/file.blend -P /path/to/script.py -a

The render resolution can be set with bpy.context.scene.render.resolution_x and bpy.context.scene.render.resolution_y.
The output format can be set to H.264 with
bpy.context.scene.render.image_settings.file_format = 'H264'.
Note on scene values:
You may want to assign the settings for all scenes to avoid confusion with complex setups which use multiple scenes.
for scene in bpy.data.scenes:
    scene.render.resolution_x = 1920
    scene.render.resolution_y = 1080
    scene.render.image_settings.file_format = 'H264'

Note invoking render:
When using a Python script to render you have the choice to...

Pass the --render-anim argument.
Call bpy.ops.render.render(animation=True) directly from the Python script.

Both do the same thing however calling the operator from Python means if the script fails to run, render won't execute, This may be good/bad depending on your use-case.
Calling from Python also gives some flexibility - for example you could call render multiple times with different frame ranges.


Blender internal: How to get a plain rendering of an object by ignoring its materials? I wonder is there an easy way to render an object in the scene without its materials to get a rendering of a plain shape? By "without" I mean somehow hiding the materials that are applied to the mesh without removing them. The only option that I thought could help was "Traceable". However, after I unchecked Traceable the materials still show on the object after rendering. The hard way to do this is to remove all of the materials but I wonder if there is an easier solution to this?

In summary, I want to go from this:

To this, without removing the materials:

To add to the redundancy of answers in the comments:

You don't need to remove the materials for the objects in the scene or alter them in any way. Just select a material you want for the render and use it on the material section for the render layer. All of the other materials assigned for the object will be ignored.

From the Blender manual:

Material Override

  Overrides all material settings to use the Material chosen here.

  Examples of where this might be used:

  To check lighting by using a plain diffuse material on all objects.
  Render a wireframe of the scene.
  Create a custom render pass such as an anti-aliased matte or global coordinates.

EDIT:

Newer versions of blender don't use layers, but "collections" so the override function is in the scene>View Layer section.

Additional info:

Where is the Layers panel in Blender 2.8?

2.8 - Is it possible to assign (override) a material to a whole collection?


Blender Eevee. I can´t properly see the smoke When I render smoke in this project, in the viewport it doesn´t look as I expect , and when I render it (With previous baked) I can´t barely see it. It doesn´t have anything to do with the mesh or the boxes sourrounding it, I´ve checked it. I thing is should be something about the view options. Any help?

Ah yes, smoke and Eevee. It's tough, that's for sure. It's hard to tell exactly what the issue because you need to show the shaders, and the smoke domain settings. You also need to make sure that the smoke is lit. Sometimes you need to use a fair bit of light. You can make the smoke emit but not directly through the principled volume shader. My recommendation would be to watch Iridisium tutorial on making a simple explosion in Blender.
You also need to check your render settings for volumetrics. Having a clipping distance to far or too close can prevent you from seeing your smoke. Finally, you might need to play around with density, the emitter, and the division value. Too high a setting can make for wispy smoke if you don't change other settings.
Good luck. I have found the smoke simulator very tough to use. There are some great tutorials out there though.


Simplify mesh by cutting out inside parts I have a mesh that I created with a particle emitter and it's just a bunch of cubes randomly rotated. Here's a picture:

What I want to do is simplify this mesh so only the exterior parts are left. Basically something like a binary operation of adding the two cubes together, except every single piece needs to be added together so it simplifies into one exterior mesh with nothing protruding inside. How can this be accomplished?

I don't think there is any easy way to do this. Here are a few ways, however they are quite resource intensive:

Remesh modifier:

You can use the Remesh modifier to do this, however it will take a long time to compute and result in a very dense mesh.

Make sure you have Remove Disconnected Pieces disabled:

Python:

Expanding on Matt's answer, you can make a script that will create boolean modifiers for every cube on every cube:

import bpy

# Make a group of your particle cubes and replace 'Group' with the name of your group:
particles = bpy.data.groups['Group'].objects

#iterate through every cube in the group:
for object in particles:
    # Remove all existing modifiers:
    object.modifiers.clear()
    # For every object in the group,
    for target in particles:
        # Test if the object is the not the same as the object we are currently adding modifiers to:
        if target.name != object.name:
            # Add a boolean modifier
            mod = object.modifiers.new(name="test", type="BOOLEAN")
            # Set the target object:
            mod.object = target
            # Set the operation mode to UNION:
            mod.operation = 'UNION'

I tested it with 100 cubes and it took quite a long time.
Also note that every cube will be joined to every other cube, so there will be a lot of failed boolean operations caused by cubes that don't intersect trying to be joined.


how would you texture map a rope? I would like to make a rope for a game object (so it should be fairly low poly). I know how to divide a cylinder into segments (K key with Z key) and form it around a nurbs path.

for my game engine (unity) my textures have to be powers of 2 and square, so 128x128, 1024x1024 etc, so it would not make sense to use a huge texture with just a thin line used. i need to use the same square rope segment texture over and over again on each segment.

I would like to texture map a segment of rope to each segment, I'm still playing with photoshop to produce the perfect tileable, seamless rope fragment texture, but assuming I work that out, do I have to select each segment and use the uv smart project on each one, or is there a quicker way to do the whole lot.

Create a bezier curve in the shape of your rope.
Create a rope segment with some seamless texture.

Make sure that the bezier curve and the rope segment have origin in the same location.
For the rope segment add Array modifier, set length to Fit curve,
select your bezier curve and tick Merge so it won't generate vertices doubles.
Add Curve modifier and select your rope segment.
Now you should have something like this:

Close the ends of the rope model.


Strange curved topology edge when merging vertices the spots that this happened is where two verts of the surfaces were merged together.

It looks to me like you're merging vertices from two "sheets" of the surface -- the sheets separate as you move to the right. It also looks like you have a Subsurf modifier on, right? Then here's my thought: Each of the vertices you merged had four edges attached. When you merged them, the merged vertex had somewhere between five and eight edges (depending on whether you also merged some of the adjoining edges; since the surfaces are still separating on the right, you probably didn't merge all of them). But Subsurf works well on quads and four-edge vertices; it gets confused on n-gons and poles (vertices with more or fewer than four edges), often causing "pinching" effects.

You won't be able to fix it entirely, but adding edge loops near the poles can make the pinching effect smaller.


Boolean Issue: hole in mesh is.... strange So i'm wanting to make a hole in the plane using the blocks you can see. However after applying the difference boolean you can see what I mean by the hole being strange.

The block disappears on one side of the plane but the other side becomes part of the plane. Anyone know what's going on?

This is my Boolean, however i'm not getting the same 'Solver' feature you seem to have. I'm assuming my blender is out dated and that updating should solve this problem?

Thee problem is most likey due to your meshes not being manifold (ie, completely enclosing a single solid volume). The plane is obviously non-manifold (being just a plane) and the blocks are technically non-manifold since they enclose multiple volumes rather than a single connected volume.

The Boolean modifier includes a 'Solver' setting. This allows you to choose between BMesh and Carve and these use different methods to apply the boolean which can produce different results - especially with non-manifold meshes.

I can replicate your results using Carve and switching to BMesh produces the expected cut-out.

NOTE : The Solver option was introduced after Blender version 2.76b. If you do not have that option then you'll need to address this in a different way - by making the meshes manifold as this results in the modifier producing more consistent results. To make the plane manifold you can simply add a Solidify modifier before the Boolean modifier. With the plane manifold both solvers should produce the desired result.


Python - Undo script if script fails Sometime when writing a python script I will run into an error such as syntax or some Exceptions. The script will partially execute, but not everything. This is frustrating because I have to manually undo what the script executed before I can run the script again. Is there a way that I can have the script undo what it has done if it fails. I want the script to only make permanent changes if it ran without error.

You could enable Undo support for your operator. Below

bl_label = "Simple Object Operator"

add

bl_options = {'REGISTER', 'UNDO'}

But I wouldn't make the operator undo itself on errors, rather let the user do it if necessarily. However, your script shouldn't raise exceptions in the first place, but check in the operator's poll() classmethod, if all pre-conditions are met. Or let it return {'CANCELLED'} inside the execute() body before something is damaged.


What is blender's camera projection matrix model? I have question what is blender's camera projection model.

I want to use blender to my computer vision experiment which need to compare real photo and CG. For real photo, I used camera matrix K for perspective projection, like this

 K= [f 0 Px 0]
    [0 f Py 0]
    [0 0  1 0]

(Px and Py is center coordiate of 2D image, start from Top-Left to Bottom Right)

So I can easily transform 3D vertex to 2D pixel coordinate. To compare this matrix, I need to know how blender make camera matrix K in it's internal rendering process. It seems that blender's camera has 3 parameters (f (focal length), near plane, far plane. Ignoring shift x and y).

How to make blender's camera projection matrix which transform 3D vertex to 2D image coordinate from these 3 paremeters?

The following Python code builds a calibration matrix K commonly used in computer vision from a Blender camera. You can then use the generated K matrix to compare against your own.

import bpy
from mathutils import Matrix

def get_calibration_matrix_K_from_blender(camd):
    f_in_mm = camd.lens
    scene = bpy.context.scene
    resolution_x_in_px = scene.render.resolution_x
    resolution_y_in_px = scene.render.resolution_y
    scale = scene.render.resolution_percentage / 100
    sensor_width_in_mm = camd.sensor_width
    sensor_height_in_mm = camd.sensor_height
    pixel_aspect_ratio = scene.render.pixel_aspect_x / scene.render.pixel_aspect_y
    if (camd.sensor_fit == 'VERTICAL'):
        # the sensor height is fixed (sensor fit is horizontal),
        # the sensor width is effectively changed with the pixel aspect ratio
        s_u = resolution_x_in_px * scale / sensor_width_in_mm / pixel_aspect_ratio
        s_v = resolution_y_in_px * scale / sensor_height_in_mm
    else: # 'HORIZONTAL' and 'AUTO'
        # the sensor width is fixed (sensor fit is horizontal),
        # the sensor height is effectively changed with the pixel aspect ratio
        pixel_aspect_ratio = scene.render.pixel_aspect_x / scene.render.pixel_aspect_y
        s_u = resolution_x_in_px * scale / sensor_width_in_mm
        s_v = resolution_y_in_px * scale * pixel_aspect_ratio / sensor_height_in_mm

    # Parameters of intrinsic calibration matrix K
    alpha_u = f_in_mm * s_u
    alpha_v = f_in_mm * s_v
    u_0 = resolution_x_in_px*scale / 2
    v_0 = resolution_y_in_px*scale / 2
    skew = 0 # only use rectangular pixels

    K = Matrix(
        ((alpha_u, skew,    u_0),
        (    0  ,  alpha_v, v_0),
        (    0  ,    0,      1 )))
    return K

if __name__ == "__main__":
    # Insert your camera name below
    K = get_calibration_matrix_K_from_blender(bpy.data.objects['Camera'].data)
    print(K)

Notes

I've tested this with cycles and many scenes, and it works.
The updated code is now well-tested with non-unit aspect ratio in different scenes.
Non-zero skew is not supported in blender AFAIK.
The principal point assumed fixed at the center of the image. If this is not so, this code needs to be updated to take camera shift into account (see How to set a principal point for a camera)
Lens distortion is taken into account separately, see my answer to Distortion Coefficients and Camera intrinsic of blender's cameras?
I'm ignoring your last column containing all zeros.
The code is written explicitly for documentation purposes. I apologize for the long names and extra variables but it really pays off for debugging careful parameter conversions.
To get the full "projection matrix which transforms 3D vertex to 2D image coordinates" you mention in the end of your question, see my answer to 3x4 camera matrix from blender camera.


How do I get the armature/bones to fall with gravity? I cant get the mesh to not wig out after it falls.

I'm guessing I need the bones to fall with the mesh so the mesh deforms relative to the bones. I can't figure out how to do this and nothing I've googled has helped.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

You can't. Armature are not supported in context with the rigid body sytem.
The behaviour occurs, since the Armature is evaluated after the rigid body simulation. You can't change the order of evaluation (as in Maya e.g.).

Shapekey however, get evaluated before rigid bodies.

Use this hacky script to transfer your animation into shapekeys. (Refine it first, then use it!)
To make this script work, the active object:

has to be selected
has to have an Armature modifier name "Armature"
has to have no Armature modifier name "Armature.001"
has to have a "Basis" Shapekey

import bpy

scn = bpy.context.scene

frame_range = [1, 200]
for i in range(frame_range[0], frame_range[1] + 1):
    scn.frame_set(i)
    bpy.ops.object.modifier_copy(modifier="Armature")
    bpy.ops.object.modifier_apply(apply_as='SHAPE', modifier='Armature.001')
    bpy.data.shape_keys["Key"].key_blocks["Armature.001"].name = str(i).zfill(3)

key = bpy.context.selected_objects[0].data.shape_keys.key_blocks

for i in range(frame_range[0], frame_range[1] + 1):
    key[str(i).zfill(3)].value = 0
    key[str(i).zfill(3)].keyframe_insert(data_path="value", frame=(i+1))
    key[str(i).zfill(3)].keyframe_insert(data_path="value", frame=(i-1))
    key[str(i).zfill(3)].value = 1
    key[str(i).zfill(3)].keyframe_insert(data_path="value", frame=i)

Disable the rigid body, by checking its animated property.
Create the Basis Shapekey.
Execute the script.
Hide the Armature modifier.

The animation is now transfered to shapekeys.

Disable the animated property again to simulate.

  If you wish to change the animation, delete all shapekeys and enable the armature modifier again.


Armature not animating in Blender Game mode? I'm relatively new to blender and I'm currently trying to put an animation of Shrek performing the Gangnam style dance into Augmented Reality however I seem to have ran into some bumps in the road.

The blend file is very simple, a looping animation using the always game logic sensor and the animations play great in timeline view, but when I try and press P in Blender Game Shrek disappears which I find odd.

I've tried deleting the armature modifiers in the modifiers menu on the character model but when this happens there is no deformation of the character model in timeline view, and when importing the file into Unity there is no animation here either, apart from in the animation preview which I'd guess say would be the equivalent of Blender's timeline view.

Would anyone be able to offer any advice? I'm sure it's pretty simple.

Cheers,

Oliver

Never mind, found out that it was because I was applying the game logic to the objects for the character model instead of the armature. May be worth knowing for anyone else that may have the same problem though!


How to turn my honeycomb pattern into the sphere? I'm new to bender and followed some tutorials. After following this one I'm trying to make the pattern I have into a ball. I can make the pattern follow a path, so it's probably not that hard to make it follow a sphere. However I'm stuck and I don't know if it's possible. Hope somebody can help. Thanks in advance.

You may achieve it beveling the Ico Sphere (Percent mode) and inseting the faces.

Add an Ico Sphere and subdivide it (in my case I've made 3 subdivisions).

Select the whole mesh in Edit Mode with A and press Ctrl+B to bevel it. Use the Mouse Scroll to reduce segments to 1. Press M twice to enable the Percent mode and scale hexagons to lay as close to each other as possible. Next remove doubles with W-->Remove Doubles. Increase the Merge Distance value if needed.

NOTE: You can achieve similar effect using the Bevel Modifier, but geometry may be more dense then.

Now add a Subsurf Modifier with some subdivisions and smooth the object in the Tool Shelf's (T) Edit panel. With the whole mesh selected press I twice to inset individual faces, then scale the faces inwards to create the holes.

Finally with the whole mesh selected (A) press Shift+E to crease the edges. Play with the Mean Crease value in the Transform panel of Properties Shelf (N) to adjust its strenght as you like.

FINAL NOTE: The model has pentagons as @kheetor warned about, but they're not much noticable.


How to focus the camera to rotate around spots in SCULPT mode? I'm sculpting for the first time and instantly ran into a problem, that I faced before on Edit mode. When I navigate, zoom and rotate to different spots, the camera sometimes gets too far away from its origin/pivot point and turns too fast and uncontrollably around the place I'm working on.

I solved this problem on Edit mode, once I found out about the Num,/Del key, which focuses the camera on the active vertices to allow camera navigation around them. However this doesn't work on Sculpt mode.

So I'm in the need of a similar solution for the Sculpt mode. This problem is especially bad when using a drawing tablet.

The same key (numpad ./del) will focus on the last part your cursor touched. This does mean you need to click somewhere for it to work, but the only other way I know of is to lock your view to the cursor (in the view>view lock tab of the sidebar) which is a bit more finicky.


Artifacts by baking texture (diffuse) after baking the image texture, the result look's a bit odd/ bad. On the left side you can see the model with the baked image texture, on the right side (the selected model) with the "real" materials. Even when I zoom in, you can see strange transitions (last image).

How do I make the baked texture look like the materials from the real model and how do I solve the artifact problem?

Render: Cycles Render
Blender Version: 2.8

Thanks in advance.

The jagged lines in the bake could be caused by a few different things:

Texture Filtering
Bad UV Map
Small Texture Size

1) Cycles image textures have an option in the node for Linear, Closest, or Cubic filtering (Smart is an option if you're using OSL). Try setting this to Cubic.
2)Even if you have a large image, it may be that the UV map in this region is too small to make effective use of the image space. Try altering your UV map to fill more of the image area, if you can.
3) You might just have a really small texture size, so the lines are jagged at that point. I can see the pixels, so this is probably it. Try baking at a higher resolution

Finally, you might use KRITA or GIMP to add a Gaussian blur to the image. You could also use Blender's compositor to do this.


Select and fill face in UV Editor using Fill brush Is there any way to select a specific face / island in the UV / Image Editor while in Paint Mode? I'm not talking about Texture Paint mode in the 3D view, rather, the Paint mode in UV / Image Editor mode.

What I actually want to do is to select one of those faces and use the "Fill" brush, so it doesn't fill the whole image, but only the selected face / island.

I can freely paint and fill the image, but I can't select specific faces to fill. Is it even possible?

No, there is not at the moment a way to do this without using the 3d view. You can use the edit mode in the 3d view and the UV Image Editor to make a selection, and then switch to texture paint mode in the 3d view with Face Select Masking turned on, Fill tool there in the 3d view and see the update in the UV Image Editor.


Adjust the camera view actually separate all my objects I would like to adjust the camera view, so I press the CtrkAlt0 to switch to the camera view window, then I try to adjust the camera window.

Then, I press the G key, and try to move the view window up or down, but finally, I see that all the objects were moved, not the camera view itself:

What causes this behavior?

BTW: I have just tried a very simple blender file (which only contains the default Cube, and I can correctly move the camera view), so are there some settings wrong in my first case? Thanks.

Edit: test blend file

You had "proportional editing object mode" enabled. Toggle it off and it should work as expected.


Blender python script - unhide collections from render I simply need to know how to unhide a collection after hiding it using bpy. Many questions have been answered but none seem to work with Blender 2.83.
My product has many add-ons and I need to render each one individually, for argument's sake let's say it's an ice cream and I need to show a cone but with a ball of each type of ice cream in it. The cone and each ball of ice cream is in a separate collection.
I start with disabling all from the render (a form of reset of the scene if you will), re-enable the cone and subsequently re-enable each ball for rendering, rendering it then re-disabling it and re-enabling the next ball.
I can get all collections to disable for render, re-enabling is proving elusive.
My code:
import bpy
import mathutils

# Store the current scene inside a variable
scene = bpy.context.scene

# Exlude all Collections from view layer
coll = bpy.data.collections

for c in coll:
    c.hide_render=True

# ENABLING BY COLLECTION NAME GOES HERE
# ENABLING BY COLLECTION NAME GOES HERE
# ENABLING BY COLLECTION NAME GOES HERE
# ENABLING BY COLLECTION NAME GOES HERE
# ENABLING BY COLLECTION NAME GOES HERE

# Rendering

# set file image index
index = 0
# render settings
scene.render.image_settings.file_format = 'PNG'
bpy.data.scenes["CONFIGURATOR 800x600"].render.filepath = '/BlenderPythonTest/render_%d.png' % index
bpy.ops.render.render(write_still = 1)

I have tried bpy.data.scenes.layer_collection exclude, bpy.data.collections hide_render False and bpy.context.collection hide_render methods, but nothing works. By that I mean it renders a large black square (if I do not disable at the beginning, all renders fine).
Please help... failing that, enjoy the ice cream you're heading to the fridge for... ;-)

Ok this was my bad. I got it right first time by using:
bpy.data.collections["COMMON REAL ESTATE"].hide_render=False

BUT, I have nested collections in collections. So in this example I wanted to render objects in "COMMON REAL ESTATE", but "COMMON REAL ESTATE" is a child to another collection called "REAL ESTATE", which you also have to activate for rendering. It's not like the "Exclude from View Layer" checkbox where you can just dive in and tick the box anywhere in the chain and it'll render.


How can i skin a model to a pose other than the Rest Pose? I want to skin a character that was modeled for a different rest pose. The following example is just a mockup for demonstrating the problem:

So in this example the Rest Pose (T-Pose) does not match the Model's pose (A-Pose). Hence i can not bind the mesh to the Rest Pose here. But when i adjust the Pose to the Model and then bind the mesh using:

Pose -> Parent -> Armature deform -> with Automatic weights

I get this (and as far as i understand the procedure, this is expected behavior)

So, Blender apparently can only bind to Rest pose, hence the Binding function assumes that the rig is in rest pose. Thus as soon as the binding has happened, the current pose is applied to the mesh and thus it gets distorted (and i expect this to happen).

The obvious solution to fix this problem seems to be: modify the model so that it matches up with the Rest Pose. Then bind the mesh to the armature. But i do not want to modify the mesh, but use Blender to find a better solution.

My current workflow to solve the above problem.

Currently i solve the problem as follows (which works nicely, but i still find it to be a tedious workflow):

Make a copy of my rig.
Modify the rest pose of the copied rig to match the Mesh Model (Apply pose as rest pose).
Skin the model to the copied Rig.
Manually Pose the copied Rig into the Rest Pose of the original Rig.
Apply the Armature Modifier.
Delete the copied Rig.
Attach the mesh to the original Rig (keeping the weight groups).

Anticipated workflow (could be achieved by using an Addon)

I would like to optimize the above mentioned workflow by merging steps 4. - 7. into one step "restore rest pose". Then eventually change the workflow like this:

Save the Original Rest Pose.
Modify the rest pose to match the mesh model.
Skin the model.
Restore the original Rest Pose without destroying my skinned mesh.

For this i need to save/restore Rest Poses. I know how i could achieve that by creating an Addon. However before i do that i want to be absolutely sure that i do not miss something. So i ask if "Save a rest pose" is implemented already (as far as i can tell the pose library won't work for this).

Ideal workflow (would probably need a change in Blender)

I wonder if Blender could add some support as well. So here is the "ideal workflow":

Pose the Armature to match the Mesh
Parent to Armature as usual
Add an option in the Operator panel of the Parent operator: "Transform to Rest Pose"

This new option would then calculate the reverse transform such that the mesh would keep its original shape when the armature is posed into the pose from where the mesh was bound. OK, i agree this needs to be read more than once ;-/

Optimal Workflow

Now the best solution (imho) would be to add full support for binding to arbitrary poses.
Then Blender would need to support a Bind Pose matrix which allows to bind a mesh to an arbitrary pose.

Questions:

Does Blender support my "Anticipated Workflow" ?
Or is there a better workflow for "rigging a model to a different Rest Pose" ?
Does the "Ideal Workflow" as described above make sense ?
Is there any chance to get the "Optimal Workflow" accepted for implementation ?

I would suggest this: in the rig tab of your armature, create a pose library, and next a pose wich will hold the rest pose of your rig.

Next pose the rig as you like, make it the rest pose, work, and when you're done, restore the rest pose from the library.

BTW, maybe you can even make simpler: in the mesh object, modifiers tab, you can activate the 'Edit' button of the Armature modifier. Then you can pose your model and work on it, not only in 'Edit' mode, but 'Weight paint' too.

EDIT For instance, to rig a character already posed (i.e. being not standing straight), you can:

create a standard rig.
In pose mode, move the skeleton to fit the character body and limbs as accurately as you can.
Still in pose mode, parent mesh to armature with 'automatic weights'.
Then, if you return to rest pose, the mesh will follow.

Hope this helps


Text in the overlay scene BGE I have this overlay scene

The numbers are all part of the same text with spaces among them. If I don't make them into meshes and run the game, some spaces between them get lost so the numbers are not where they supposed to be(every number in the start of the respective box). If I alt+C and make them into meshes it works. Why does it fail to work if they are part of text?

Text objects are converted to a mesh with a plane for each letter. The planes get a rendered texture of the chosen font.

Unfortunately this render does not 100% match the text object it is based on. That is the reason for the size and location differences.

I suggest to split your text object that you get one for each button. This reduces the visible location and size differences. Additionally it allows you to parent the text to the button.


IK not working for legs, where am I wrong? I'm stuck in this armature creation where IK works pretty well for harms but knees don't curve as they should.. I set same but something is not working..

The legs need a bend in their default position.  Select the armature, go into Edit Mode, and push the knees forward a tad.  Here's what it should look like after that.

Also, consider reducing the leg IK chain length to 2.  This will make the bending more predictable.


Hair particle guides remain the same after simulation This is the hair guide I begin with.After simulation,it looks like this in object mode.

But when I switch back to particle edit mode,it is still picture one.
What should I do to get simulated hair guides ?
I accidentally saw the hair guides after the simulation a few times.What I want to achieve is to convert certain frame to hair guides in particle edit mode and make that frame 0.

It seems like it is not natively possible for now, but here is a Heveti's script

switch to Particle Edit - move at least one hair a bit to initiate hair editing
enable Hair Dynamics and Play animation to simulate hairs
move to frame where dynamics should be applied
lt- copy&paste script into blender's Text Editor and Run Alt+P script

Now when you switch to Particle Edit, hairs are at a position of your choice so you can continue with editing. Or enable Hair Dynamics again, move on start at Timeline and run simulation agin from this point of state.

    import bpy

# How to use:
# 1. edit hair system (important, move at least one hair, at least a bit to initiate hair editing)
# 2. run hair dynamics
# 3. move to frame where dynamics should be applied
# 4. run script
# 5. if happy, delete cache
# 6. keep editing hair

# get the depsgraph and the evaluated object
deps_graph = bpy.context.evaluated_depsgraph_get()
evaluated_object = bpy.context.object.evaluated_get(deps_graph)
# assume context object has a particle system (warning, no check), use active
particle_system = evaluated_object.particle_systems.active

# Variable to hold hair-verticies-coordinats
hairs = []

# At current frame
# For each particle (hair)
#   For each vertex
#     Store XYZ coordinates
for p in particle_system.particles:
    hair = []
    for v in p.hair_keys:
        hair.append([v.co[0], v.co[1], v.co[2]])
    hairs.append(hair)

# Deactivate hair dynamics
particle_system.use_hair_dynamics = False

# On static hair system
# For each particle (hair)
#   For each vertex
#     Overwrite XYZ coordinates
for p,hair in zip(particle_system.particles,hairs):
    for v,h in zip(p.hair_keys,hair):
        #print(v.co, h)
        v.co[0] = h[0]
        v.co[1] = h[1]
        v.co[2] = h[2]
        #print(v.co, h)

# Update view and UI
bpy.context.scene.frame_set(bpy.context.scene.frame_current)


Is there a way to link uv's so as to tile them onto an object? Take the default cube, unwrap it and apply a texture. Looks nice; none of the textures are stretched or squished. If you go into edit mode now and select the top face of the cube and move it up or down it will look as though the texture is stretched or squished on the sides... is there a way to stop this happening? A way to link the object to the uv so as you edit the proportions the uv automatically updates the sizes automatically in proportion? In google sketchup you can tile textures so when you edit the size of a surface it just draws more or less tiles and doesn't cause stretch or compression of the textures... I'm looking for the same sort of functionality in blender.

A convoluted way to do this would be to use the UV Project modifier and 3 empties.

In the center of the cube add an empty.
Add a second empty (empty.001) and rotate it 90 degrees on the X axis.
Add a third empty (empty.002) and rotate it 90 degrees on the Z axis.

Select your UV unwrapped cube and add a UV project modifier, assign the image texture, click the override Imabe box. Change the number of projectors to 3 and assign the empties as projectors.

Then as you modify the cube the textuere will repeat in tiles.


Animation with no smoothing between keyframes Most 2D animation software can render the animation 'frame-by-frame'. There are no smooth transitions between each frame, and each frame after is usually blank, and the artist re-draws the scene, a bit different. The last can also sometimes be altered for a new frame. It will be like an animated lego stop-motion like film:

My goal is to be able to have my scene all set in frame one and then duplicate that scene to the next frame to be altered and to not 'smooth' the animation frames.

Question:

Is something like a stop-motion (no actual footage) possible with CGI in Blender? If so, how do I go about creating this environment to animate with?

The default interpolation
 between keyframes is bézier, which will make smooth motions that start from 0, accelerate and decelerate before stopping or changing direction.

Interpolation can be changed in the curve editor (or the dopesheet editor) to be constant, meaning that there will be no in-between transformation between keyframes: Elements will remain unchanged until the next keyframe.

To change interpolation, select the keyframes, press the T key
and select constant.

To change interpolation permanently, open the system preferences (Ctrl+Alt+U), and in the editing section set the interpolation you want to use.


Messed up zoom navigation, need help! I somehow pressed a key combination like Ctrl+Shift+., the zoom center switched to the object origin (I was in 3D view) and now when I press middle mouse button and try to navigate the whole view rotates around the object origin. It doesn't move either when I select vertices in edit mode and press . again.

How to turn it back to normal? I already tried some options in view panel but nothing worked so far.

Edit: It also says "View offset is locked" when I press Shift or Ctrl and scroll middle mouse button.

I found out what exactly went wrong here. The view was locked to the object. So I somehow pressed a key combination that made the current object be the target for locked view.

If this occures to anyone else, press N whilst your mouse cursor is in 3D view window. Scroll through the opened panel, until you find the "view" one.

Now delete the target by clicking on the "x" as shown in the picture. This solved my problem.


Attaching gun to animated character I have a character mesh I downloaded from blendswap, and autorigged / animated using mixamo.

I'd like to add a prop to the character, in this case a rifle. What's the easiest and most reliable way to place a weapon in the hands of my animated character?

I don't need to rig the weapon up to my character or anything, I just want to place a weapon in his hands (which are already animated to hold a weapon).

Select the gun, then shift-select the bone for the hand on the mesh and then go ctrl + P > bone. the gun should then move with the bone.


Where can I control the length of the dashed line indicating the rotation of a sun lamp Pretty much what it says in the title. I can't find the setting to control the lenght of the dashed line showing the direction in wich the sun lamp points. I'm working with large geometries at times and the dashed line can become so short that it is inconvenient to orient.

You could always parent the Sun lamp to say, a single-arrow Empty, aligning the lamp to the direction of the arrow.

Bearing in mind the position and scale of the lamp will have no influence on its effect, (only its rotation,) it should be easy to find a convenient scale and location for the arrow for adjustment, and you can hide the arrow, too, without switching the light off.


Why are there so many denoising passes? I just wanted to ask how should I use the other denoising passes (except for the normal and albedo ones):variance, shadowing, denoising depth and intensity, because nobody talks about them and I don't know how they could be used.

I have a feeling that these passes are used for testing/troubleshooting purposes.
Let's take the Denoising Intensity pass for example. If plugged into a viewer node, you will see a black and white image. An entirely black pixel means that denoising has been applied at maximum strength, and completely white would mean that the denoiser did not touch that area.
I think this would be very useful in figuring out how to fix faulty compositor setups. If there are some strange artifacts, the Denoising Intensity value can be used to let the viewer see if the denoiser is causing the problem, as smart tech like this can be unpredictable. You can even use it to your advantage to smartly blur out the artifacts.
Additionally, because denoising intensities as automatically generated to optimally denoise the scene, the user can also use it to see which parts of the scene are more noise-prone.
This is just my speculated idea of the usage of one denoising pass. I have a strong feeling that the other ones will be of assistance in a similar way. In most cases, however, they would be useless.


How to install Intel Open Image Denoiser node on Blender 2.79 I'm using Blender 2.79 and Cycles Render. And I'm rendering on 2.81 on Cycles Render with Intel denoiser, but 2.81 crashes. Please help me to use this denoiser on 2.79. Help me to install Intel denoiser for Blender 2.79.

There is Theory Studios build with OIDN in trunk. AFAIK it's the latest 2.79b version. Grab it here:
https://blender.community/c/graphicall/dbbbbc/


Trouble with baking cylindrical objects This is a half Blender/half XNormal question. I'm having difficulty with baking cylindrical surfaces. I'm trying to bake normals and occlusion for the twisted top edging of a wicker basket. Here is the high poly:

The low poly on top:

And the fantastic result:

How can I get a better bake with a shape like this?

I used the shrink wrap modifier which increased the vertex count too much and the result was equally awful:

Here is a link to a blend file with the shrink wrapped low poly model and the high poly twist model:

Will this old method work for you ... using a prerendered hemisphere normal texture.

Basically I have attached a shadeless material of a normal rendering of a hemisphere. You will find the image packed in the blend file. Using a orthographic camera I render from the top view of the model. Also I have replaced the color of the background to a flat normal color which is (R0.5,G0.5,B1.0)

This is where you change the background color under the world tab on the
properties panel.

Hit the render button on the Render panel and you should get this result.

Let me know if you have further queries.


Using cycles materials in video editing I've set green color for cube in cycles render. Than I added the cube to video editor, but color of cube in grey. I want to use cycles materials in video editing. What am I doing wrong?

It seems you are in solid view mode,
Press N to open the properties panel and change the preview mode to  material or rendered.


How to maintain multipart meshes I have done a reasonable amount of modeling in Blender, but am just starting to get into animation. In the past when I was modeling things I would tend to keep things as a lot of separate objects which makes editing different parts fairly easy. But getting into animation it seems that in order to use armatures you typically attach the armature to a single mesh. Assuming that is true my question is if I join a bunch of objects together are the ways of still being able to select the parts again in Edit mode?
I realize obviously that I can lasso the chunks and/or shift-select pieces. I am looking for whether or not are techniques that allow the merged parts to still maintain any of their original selectability. Is this something vertex groups can be used for? Some brilliant addon I haven't discovered?
I am using 2.91.

Instead of Joining the mesh objects into one, you can keep them separate if you wish.   Here I show two spheres that were then bound to an armature (armature modifier).  They respond to the appropriate nearby bones in pose mode.  This is how I might control both a character and possible control cloths (instead of with cloth modifier, although you can get "character bleeds through clothing" effects).  Several child objects could be parented to a master parent, but you'd have to experiment with side effects.


How to transform an 2D sketch into an 3D object with other texture in an animation? The title describes my project really good. I‘ve seen this kind of transformation in an artist film from Erin Sarofsky(youtube.com/watch?v=WWBMd1OvVx4).
I‘ve already seen similar ways in internet, but no one that change this grey pencil texture from a sketch to an realistic texture, or look like transforming to 3D in an realistic way.

Thank You!

There would be two parts to doing that:

Scale object on one axis to turn it from 2D to 3D

If you wanted to be rotating the object in the process, you may want to parent to an empty to animate the rotation, or you could use a lattice modifier to control the deform while it is moving.

Animate from a grey texture to a realistic texture.

You can animate properties in nodes the same as any other property in blender. Use a mix node and animate the mix value to switch from one material to another.


Fluid simulation in moving object I am working on animation in which I have moving object filled with liquid. Problem is that liquid is reaching over the mesh. Scaling does not fix the problem since the liquid does not follow up the animation.

Any idea on how to fix this?

For liquids contained within a mesh you should always ensure that the ‘container’ has thickness (either by modelling the thickness or by adding a Solidify modifier. You should then ensure that the Resolution of the fluid domain is set high enough so that each cell in the simulation is smaller than the minimum thickness of the container. This will ensure that the fluid does not protrude outside the mesh.

For an cleaner boundary (eg, if the container is transparent) between the fluid and its container (to stop them intersecting) you can add a Boolean modifier to the fluid to remove the parts that intersect into the container mesh.


Viewport Performance - CPU or GPU? Which piece of hardware affects viewport performance most (both playback and general just moving stuff)?

It depends on the scenario.
Situations where the GPU will help more:

Extremely high poly scenes
Scenes with complex materials
Scenes with large textures
Scenes with advanced procedural textures

The GPU is mainly used to draw the pixels on your screen, so if you have lots to draw, a better GPU will help. A good way to tell if your GPU is the limiting factor in your performance is to check your frame rate when you are only moving your viewpoint, and nothing else.
Situations where the CPU will help more:

High frame rate animations
Scenes with lots of ridged bodies or simulations
Scenes with complex armatures
Scenes with lots of booleans
Scenes with geometry nodes
Complex animations
Scenes with procedurally generated objects, such as those with displacement modifiers
Particles
Scenes with lots of Multi-resolution/subdivision modifiers

For the most part, the CPU will be your main limiting factor. The CPU must apply all modifiers, animations, deformations, and simulations before finally sending it's data off to the GPU to be displayed. If you are looking for a CPU specifically to speed up the viewport, you should prioritize single threaded performance, as many modifiers are single threaded.


Why does my mesh have no faces on the inside? How can I fix the interior of the mesh?

No worries, your mesh is fine. Just disable the visibility in the modifier tab and you can see it without the effect.


How to solidify edges I have a complex mesh with only vertices and edges that I want to solidify.

The problem is I just want to solidify edges (not any faces) to have some kind of fat wireframe model (i.e. just every edges being cylinders). Not a classic solidify.

How can I achieve that?

Here is my mesh:

You could use the Skin Modifier. After adding it to the object, it might appear fat and blobby, so to adjust the thickness you can Tab into Edit mode and use CtrlA to affect the thickness.

Another way is to just fill in the faces of your model and make use of the Wireframe modifier.


Why can't i render smoke with my AMD graphic card When I try to render smoke one GPU it just gives me an OpenCL error, on the CPU its just fine.

I have a ATI HD 7850 2GB ddr5 OC (gtx970 just fried) and since I installed the graphic card I can't work with smoke.

Can someone tell me if Blender supports smoke rendering with AMD GPU?
If so then what is happening to me??

Thank you guys in advance

Not currently supported, I'm afraid.

You can see the list of supported features over at the Blender manual

As of Blender 2.78a, October 2016:

Feature                    CPU                 CUDA (NVIDIA GPU)   OpenCL (AMD GPU)

Basic Shading              ✔                   ✔                   ✔

Transparent Shadows        ✔                   ✔                   ✗

Motion Blur                ✔                   ✔                   ✔

Hair                       ✔                   ✔                   ✔

Volume                     ✔                   ✔                   ✗

**Smoke / Fire             ✔                   ✔                   ✗

Subsurface Scattering      ✔                   ✔                   ✗

Open Shading Language      ✔                   ✗                   ✗

CMJ sampling               ✔                   ✔                   ✗

Branched Path integrator   ✔                   ✔                   ✗

Displacement/Subdivision   ✔ (experimental)    ✔ (experimental)    ✔ (experimental)


Object contours in depth maps Notice how in scene 12_peach, shot 21 in the BBB repository the bushes' leafs in the background appear as rectangles in the depth map. I assume this has to do with the way the bush's material is set up (probably single images of leafs arranged in various sizes and orientations).

Maybe someone more knowledgeable can shed some light on this bush material setup. And most importantly: Is there a way to get the actual leaf shapes in the depth map as well?

I downloaded the BBB production repository from https://peach.blender.org/download/ (near the end of the page). The shot in question is scenes/12_peach/21.blend. The shot seems to link bush objects from the envs/bushes.blend library in the BBB repository. Note that I am using Blender v2.46 for this since I could not get the shots to render properly on more recent versions. Crashes all the time. But I assume v2.46 is close to the version they were developing/using in production of the movie.

If you look at the leaves.blend you'll see that most of the leaves are just planes indeed

In order keep the polygon count as small as possible, they didn't model every leaf. They used an image with an alpha channel as mask on the materials to create the actual leaf shape instead.

To make this:

Look like that:

The depth map is created with the actual geometry of the objects in space, so it will not take into account "faked" sapes.


Motion tracking footage from 24 DSLR cameras fails, but why? I am driving a bullet time rig with 24 cameras and now I want to put 3D objects into the scenery.
The 24 frames were shot in a studio with a clean white cove where markers were put all over the walls, to make tracking easy. Now I manually added the tracking points to the footage but blender fails to solve the camera. I suppose with such markers it should be possible. However a lot of the markers cannot be solved.
Now since the footage is made with a bullet time rig, a lot of the markers aren't visible in all frames.
I'd really appreciate, if someone could give me a hint how to resolve the camera and which settings would be best when taking the shot.
Here is the project with my markers and with the 24 JPGs.
Thank you so much!

Your tracking is inaccurate. Trackers are dancing all over. Fix that first.

The most important part is that your track elements in the foreground and some elements in the background. The difference (parallax) is the trick to solving a scene in 3D. But without accurate tracking you will get nowhere.


Is there some way to map different image textures to instances of linked duplicates? My understanding is that linked duplicates share an object's material properties and mesh data, but not its object transform properties. In a scene I am working on, I very much like the efficiency of having the mesh data being shared while also being able to scale and rotate instances. But I need to be able to assign a different image texture to each instance sharing the mesh's UV map (which comprises only a small portion of the mesh). If there is no way to make an actual linked duplicate do this, is there some other approach that will keep the mesh data linked?

Keep the object data linked, but make the material linked to the Object, not Object Data:

From there, make a new texture for each object-linked material. That way, several objects can have different textures, while still sharing the same object data.


How to create a blinking star field I'm trying to recreate the blinking star effect seen in this video.

I have created a plane, added a particle emitter and added a sphere as the emitter. In the original sphere particle instance I have used the following node setup.

The Value node has a noise modifier on it to simulate the blinking effect (similar to this). When I animate it all of the particles blink simultaneously, rather than each one individually.

How would I make each behave independently?

My idea is to use a material's Particle Info node and route the Index property into a noise texture to provide a brightness.

You'll notice I animated the Y coordinate of the texture so that the brightness of each particle changes over time.  If you have immobile particles and want the animation to loop you could build nodes to set y=sin(theta) and z=cos(theta) where theta is a function of time to loop the coordinates over the course of the animation.

I rigged my animation to use an Object as the particle render instead of a halo, and the material is on the particle object.  The emitter object's material seems to be irrelevant when using Objects to render particles.

My animation turned out EXTREMELY blinky.  I suspect it would calm down if the slope on the fcurve of my Y texture coordinate were shallower.

Of course, the texture node you use (and what parameters you use to configure it) will affect the blinking behavior as well.

I used an emission node, but that means that my particles can be black.  If you want them to be transparent, then use a white emission BSDF and a transparent BSDF, and route the output of the texture node into the factor of a mix node that mixes the emission with the transparent BSDF.


How does Adaptive Sampling works? On what criteria will this function adapt its number of samples?... Is there a particular situation where you could take advantage of this option ?
I usualy set up the min and max sampling value without knowing their coherence.

With adaptive sampling Cycles automatically reduces the number of samples in areas that have little noise, for faster rendering and more even noise distribution.
More info here: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/render_settings/sampling.html


Aligning a grouped object on the global axes A similar question like this one exists already, but this one is much more specific.

I have uploaded a model here.

This model consists of 2 meshes.
I have used an Empty to group them.

I want to bring this object over to Unity.
This works fine, but in Unity, I have noticed that there's a slightly wrong rotation.

While I want the object to be perfectly rotated along the global axis (so that it appears not rotated in Unity), I can see that it is slightly rotated.

I have spent really much time trying to fix this manually.

I have found a way to automatically align a single object, but I have not found a way to automatically align a grouped object to the global axes.

Can somebody have a look at my grouped object (Blender 2.8 file) and tell me how I could solve this problem?

Thank you!

Firstly, I wouldn't worry that much about slight rotations. They are very hard to notice unless you stare at the model close up in orthographic view. It's also pretty normal for models imported into Unity3D to get given annoying rotations like 89.999999 on some axis. It's better to just ignore it than go insane trying to fix it.

However, to align all your objects to some axis you just have to align the top level parent how you want. Then you can apply the rotations down the stack or not as you wish.

First thing I noticed is your objects have picked up some delta transformations from somewhere. That can make the transformation values confusing, because the actual orientation will be transform + delta. So I'm going to clear the delta transformations from the empty. I'm also going to clear the delta rotations from the child objects because they are all the same. I will leave the delta location on the children because that is how they are matched up. I also zero out the regular transforms on the empty:

Now I find a face or faces in edit mode that I think should be aligned along a global axis but aren't. I take these ones in the centre of the 'bottom' object and snap the cursor to them as well as aligning my view to their Z axis (SHIFT+Numpad 7) since I think they should be aligned on Z:

Exiting edit mode, I add an object and align it to view. I choose an empty in this case:

The 'WeaponCase' empty gets parented to this new empty I just made:

Finally I clear the rotations from the new empty and then clear the parent of 'WeaponCase' making sure to 'keep Transformations':

For here you can delete the empty and apply transforms if desired. Repeat the process if you need to make other alignments but keep in mind that depending on what faces you use to make new alignments, you may break this one.


Disadvantages of importance sampling What are the disadvantages of using importance sampling (MIS) for lamps?

I mean, apparently it converges faster, looks the same as when not using it, takes about the same time... Why not turn it on all the time?

If a lamp is too dim to add any significant lighting to other objects (except for very close ones), including it in MIS just wastes computations for no real purpose. If you are using branched path tracing, it will sample all lights on every sample (with MIS). So you want to make sure it is only spending time doing samples that might return something other than 0 (or close to it). If you are using the simple progressive path tracing mode, it only samples one lamp per sample. So if a lamp won't contribute much, you don't want it to use MIS because it might steal the sample from a more useful lamp.

tl;dr: disabling MIS is a way to tell Cycles "this lamp is too dim to illuminate much of anything, don't waste your time trying".


Turn off HDRI shadow casting Is there a way to make an HDRI light setup not cast shadow? I Want to light my scene with an HDRI, but control the shadow with an normal lamp.

Sadly you cannot turn off shadows for emissive material or the world background.

You can control the shadows of any object in that objetc's shaders using the Light path Shadow ray input or by unchecking the Shadow option under Ray visibility in Object panel, but that reacts to all light sources.

The only solution is to use Light primitives, for which you can turn shadows on/off. If you create a big dense icosphere and you put a point-light in every vertex, you get a sky dome with even light distribution.

Using python you can access the HDRI texture pixels and drive every light's strength and color to match a point on the texture accordingly. How the pixel array works is explained here and figuring the math of turning a point on a dome into 2D point on texture is a matter of some trigonometry. You can use a script to be run once and set this for all the dome lights.

You can also add drivers to link and multiply the strength of those lights with some Scene property for better control. How to create drivers with python script is here.


Can I animate something with the Transform Panel, without keyframes? I’m animating a watch. And I would like to make the arm for seconds jump 6 degres every second/30 frames (in 30fps).
I could animate it for a minute in the timeline and add a cycles modifier.
But I would think there is an easier way of doing this sort of thing.
Is there a way of writing in numbers (script) in the Transform Panel? Like in After Effects, «Telling» the rotation axis to jump 6 degrees every 30 frames?

Yes, they are called drivers.
Click in the transform panel and type #. Then enter the expression you want to use. You can use the keyword frame for the current frame number.
For your suggestion 6 degrees every 30 we can use math:
#floor(frame/30) * radians(6)

The property field will turn purple, when a driver has been added. If you click in it again you can edit the expression. (The # will remain hidden once the driver has been added.)


How to add face to parallel edges of two hemispheres? I'm making a shallow hemisphere for a 3d printing project. I have to add some "depth" to the hemisphere for the printer to be happy so I made a copy of the current object and shrunk it down a bit. In order to close the shape up I need to add faces to hold these two objects together.

I selected the edges of both hemispheres but when I type "F" it fills each hemisphere independently to itself. I've bool > union these two hemispheres together thinking that would help but it hasn't.

How can I get these two circular shapes to close together making one shape rather than having them close independently making two overlapping shapes?

This is my first 3d project from blender so if there is a better way to be doing this please let me know. Cheers.

Select both edge loops and use the Bridge Edge Loops command.


Multiple textures for one mesh Okay so I am converting items for my own personal game play.The platform i use for my game requires one texture only but the items that I am converting has up to three or four different textures and come in as separate meshes. My goal is to have one item with the textures merged to fit into the merged mesh. I already know how to join the meshes I just need to know how to get the textures to align with the mesh.

Add a new UV set in the Properties panel , and unwrap the mesh in Edit mode using that UV set. Open a new image texture in the UV Image Editor at the size you want the final to be, and in the Render tab of the Proiperties panel, open up the Bake tab. Select 'Textures' and then press 'Bake', and you should see your existing textures from the object appear in the new image. Save it, and then set it in the material's texture stack for actual use.


Connecting all vertices in polygon face If you have some n-gon face, how to connect all the vertices so that you get all diagonals?

EDIT: n must be larger than 3.

If you have an n-gon face, then you can get a triangulated representation of that face using the following method (Bridge Edge Loops):

Select the object with this n-gon face.
Go into edit mode (Tab).
Go into Face Select mode.
Select the n-gon face.
X >> Only Faces.
Go into Edge Select mode.
Select the edges that make up the perimeter of the original n-gon.
Visually De-Select two opposing edges.
W >> E.

After getting more feedback from the comments, Is this more along the lines of what you are after?:


Inset Square From a Rectangular Face I was just checking out a tutorial made on 3dsmax and i saw something really nice.Ill post pics

The guy inset this rectangular shape face,and makes it square with some hotkey(i dont speak good english but he calls it something like "regularize")

Is there some way to do that in Blender too ?

There isn't direct way to inset a face without taking into account proportions of the parent face, however you can use addon to workaround that.

After inset use Circle option of the LoopTools addon (addon comes with Blender by default; addon should be activated in User prefs). Operator will likely rotate the face, you will need to rotate it back so that it fits parent face (if the resulting face is oriented unevenly in the global space you should rotate it around its normal to avoid distortions).

If in 2.79 this will be in W menu > LoopTools. In 2.8 it depends on preferences you set for selection mouse button (right or left). By default, it should be in the Right click menu.

Note that Circle operator isn't generally designed for equalizing proportions of faces rather it does what its name suggests - converts selection to circle. As the face in this case consists of 4 vertices it works as expected. If you were insetting Ngon this way would created a circle.


Boolean Modifier Issue. Object 1 wont cut through object 2 for some reason I am trying to make an object cut through another object by using the boolean modifier. I tried using the difference and also tried intersect but to no avail.

This is what I am trying to achieve.

The smaller object Which is named "Output Diff" would be the "Hole" so to speak

This is what I am trying to design.

The boolean modifier for some reason sometimes doesn't work out :/ Is there something I'm doing wrong perhaps?

Your meshes are positioned not properly and have geometry unsuitable for Boolean to work - flipped normals, doubles.

Problem 1. Position of objects

In your file objects are placed one inside of another. The modifier will work (under certain conditions) however you won't see any result (because the result of this operation will be only a copy of object, which was expected to be cut off, located inside of the main one).

Solution
Place object to be cut off appropriately; generally you want it to create an indentation somewhere in the main object, so move it out of main object as much as indentation should be. If you want to cut through the other object (so to "break it into 2 pieces) then scale up the one which is used for cutting appropriately.

Problem 2. Normals

Normals of the objects are pointing in the wrong way.

Solution
In Edit mode select all and press Ctrl+N; if nothing changed choose Inside in the Last Operator panel or press Ctrl+Shift+N.
From manual:

  The face normals are taken into account for the calculations.

See also Why are some faces in my mesh darker? for more info.

Problem 3. Doubles

There are double vertices in the mesh which prevented normals from being recalcualated successfully.

While Boolean, oddly enough, will work without this being done, it's best to get rid of them because of possible problems furthermore.

Solution

Select all > W > Remove Doubles.

Result

Applying transforms

Scale and rotation aren't applied to both objects. While Boolean will work with that, it's best to apply them to have expected result of work of modifiers. See Why is it important to apply transformation to an objects data?.

Optionally: fixing topology

Listed above is enough to make Boolean start working. Generally you would keep track of topology of objects though, because Ngons can be treated differently in different circumstances (still there are cases when they can be good).

As from manual:

  The target topology determines the new topology of the modified mesh.

In your model top faces are Ngons; it's better to not leave this:

and tend to create something more like grid:

It can be easily done with insetting face with I and converting Ngon into grid of quads by filling it with Ctrl+F > GridFill.
Same applies to both sides of both meshes.

More reading:

Boolean modifier not working
Boolean modifier (manual)


Adding an image to a video, but the video isn't playing after addition I was editing a video, and wanted to add some images which should appear at the top and bottom of the respective video.
But once I added an image, made transformations to make it appear where I want, I cannot see the video when I play the sequence. It is just the image I see with a black and grey crossed background.
When I remove the "Trasnform" strip of the image, I am able to see the video along with the image. But I cannot place the image as I wish.
Any solutions? Thanks in advance

Replace the "replace"-blend mode to "alpha over" or whatever your default is there in items like here:

Also you can resize your image/video in the settings and place them via x,y.
Just tap on your video, then go to effect-strip -> transform like this:

Here you can set x/y and the size...and don't forget to change blend to alpha over again.


How can I adapt my topology around beveled corners? I'm trying to model an arcade cabinet but my topology is horrible and I feel like there must be a better way of doing this.

How can I improve my topology on this cabinet?

I don't know what I'm doing wrong,however, I've attached some images that show the Arcade cabinet and its awful topology.

:

I don't think it's horrible, maybe you don't need so many edges on your bevels, and maybe add some additional edge loops through the shape with the knife tool, for example:


Adding keyframes to array modifer I want to write a script that changes the array modifier, and then inserts a keyframe for the new value.

I got it working, but it only does it on the first object.
Unselecting all the objects, and then only the one I want to set it to also doesn't work.

Googling some more I found I should use obj.keyframe_insert, but what do I set the data_path to?

Here is an example of what I want to do

obj.modifiers['Array'].count = random.randint(1, 5)
obj.keyframe_insert(data_path=???)

I tried this first.
    bpy.ops.anim.keyframe_insert_menu(type='Available')
That works, but only sets it for the first object, the one that was selected; and it was iffy to start off with. I had to manually first set a keyframe, else it said 'Available' was not found.

When using keyframe_insert() you want to use it on the object that contains the value you wish to keyframe.

By "object" I am referring to python objects (as in "object" oriented programming) that are defined in a python class, not the visible 3d objects. In your example the object that has the value to be keyed is the modifier.

So to keyframe the count value in the array modifier you want to use -

obj.modifiers['Array'].keyframe_insert('count')

You might also think of it as the class containing the property to be keyframed is the one that gets told to insert the keyframe.

As mentioned by pink vertex you can also go through the parent by using

obj.keyframe_insert('modifiers["Array"].count')

Note the quotes " must be inside ' - swapping them around doesn't work.


When I subdivide a face, how do I get each face from the result in Python? For example, if I subdivided a square face so there were now 4 faces, how I do iterate through those 4 faces in a Blender add-on?

Bmesh approach

Using the bmesh operator bmesh.ops.subdivide_edges(..) with cuts = 1 and use_grid_fill = True will produce the result of subdividing a quad face into four.

Test script, run in edit mode, subdivides face 0, prints the four newly added faces.

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

bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)

face = bm.faces[0]
ret = bmesh.ops.subdivide_edges(bm, edges=face.edges[:], cuts=1)
for f in ret['geom']:
    # new geometry
    if isinstance(f, bmesh.types.BMFace):
        print(f)


Blender camera rotation issues I am trying to rotate my Camera (not the object but my vision), but it's stuck. I watched a many videos trying to fix it but nothing helped. Does someone have any idea about how to fix it?

I can't rotate my camera 360°. I am only able to zoom-in/zoom-out.

I tried to change my user preference by checking and un-cheking "emulate 3-button mouse". I tried restarting Blender and my pc. I uninstalled and reinstalled but my camera is still stuck in the same position.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InwG2v6YvbQ&feature=youtu.be

I finally found a way to fix it. I changed my controls in File -> User Preferences -> 3d View -> 3d View Global -> rotate view and changed it to right click.


'Child of' Constraint, setting Inverse doesn't work? I want to parent a mag to the left Hand Thumb but once I target my Armature the mag absolutely changes LOCATION / ROTATION / SCALE this is really weird, I mean even setting it inverse doesn't help. I need assisstence. I tried doing this over a dozen times, but I just can't get it right.

My Blend file below:

Or maybe there is a better way to do it, easier without the Constraint ?
basicly what I want is to animate the parent of the Mag to the thumb bone.

Thats what I see once the Constraint is applied:

The problem is double parent transformations:

first from parent
second from child_of_constraint

The solution and how to cleanly set this up is:

do not give the Mag any parent, all parenting will be done with constraints
position the Mag so it is both in the gun and in the hand
set 1st child_of_constraint to the gun and Set inverse
set 2nd child_of_constraint to the thumb and Set inverse
switch parenting with key-framing both constraint influences, gun_parent will go from 1 to 0 and hand_parent vice-versa.


How to lock the view to prevent rotation of the view camera? I was wondering if it was possible to lock the view (similar to quad view), so that the view doesn't change if I accidentally bump the middle mouse button.

Is there a setting I can change or a script that can do this?

One way you might want to go about this would be to:

Align Active Camera to View with CtrlAlt + Numpad 0.
Lock Camera to View.
Select the camera and lock it's transformations.


Can I create a separate Volumetric pass for Blender Cycles 2.70? I have a complex scene that I would like to render with GPU enabled, is it possible to add a volumetric pass from a separate, CPU only, volumetric render?

(Volumetrics are not currently compatible with GPU renders in the latest 2.70 test builds).

There is not a Volume Pass, but you can make one by subtracting everything else out of the beauty pass.

From http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?380260-Cycles-Volume-Pass

  Since there is no default Volume Pass checkbox in Cycles yet I put together a compositor node group which just simply extracts it out of the beauty pass by subtracting diffuse, glossy and transmission component. To handle volume pass separately, blur it for example and than add it back without a noise can be rather time-saving.

There's also a node group you can download from that thread and examine.


When is it beneficial for the Active Object to be unselected? Being relatively new to Blender I'm trying to understand the Active Object vs Selected Object paradigm.

When selecting an object I'd assume you'd always want the last object you selected to be the Active Object. But I've noticed you can create situations where a single object is Active, but not Selected. Or Selected, but not Active. You could also have a group of Selected objects on the left and a single unselected Active object on the right, for example.

Are there situations in Blender where having the Active object unselected, or an inactive object Selected, would be beneficial or even necessary?

One situation that comes in my mind is when you have the pivot center set to "Active Element".

I often use this to rotate the selected objects around the active object without rotating the active object itself. To achieve this I deselect the active object before I perform the rotation while it's still active.

(boah... sounds more complicated than it is :))


Boolean difference modifier merges two object i want to use difference in Boolean modifier but actually the result are like it is merged, i want a hole inside a custom shape. beore using difference:

and here is the result after difference is applied, it is like the cylinder is merged instead of subtract:

i have tried this link suggestions:
Using difference modifier on two objects doesn't always work

i am a total beginner so if i am making a stupid mistake please accept my appologies.

You need to have consistent normals on your objects - normals determine what is outside and what is inside.

To recalculate normals go into Edit mode (Tab), select all geometry (A) and perform "Recalculate normals outside" (Ctrl+ N)

After all your pieces have correct normals (you will also notice consistent shading of all objects) - booleans will work as expected.

You might also want to set the object that you do boolean with as wireframe (you do that under Object Display options):


Duplicate, Duplicate Linked, or modifier? I am trying to model something like the image below and I've made an object like one of those red balls with the two feet attached. Now I need to make thousands more. So my question is, what would use up less memory: duplicating, duplicating linked, or using modifiers. Keep in mind that I may need to change, transform, or animate certain parts of this structure, so I would need to be able to treat these parts separate for the rest while (preferably) keeping everything as a unit (by grouping/parenting?).

A good Idea is to use a Particle system that uses the red object as sourc eobject.
If you do you could follow this steps:

create a plane
add the plane a particle system
set the start and end frame to 1 and the lifetime to an high number, for example 20000 (if you plan on doing an animation, the lifetime should be higher than the last frame number, so that the particle won't disappear)
Set emit from Faces, then Grid and set the resolution as high as you need.
Then set the red object as the source
in field weight settings, set the gravity to 0 so the particles won't just fall

in this way you can also create those little "valley" between the proteins (blue object) using a magnetic force field.