Cycles Render passes: Glossy Direct vs. Indirect What are the differences between the Glossy > Direct and Glossy > Indirect passes in Cycles?

As you might know, Cycles is a Path Tracer, which calculates light "rays" shooting out of the camera, bouncing around, and then finding a light source. This, however, is the opposite of reality, where a light shoots out photons, which bounce around and make their way to our eyes.

Glossy Direct

A Glossy Direct pass produces a black and white result (a fac, or factor) that shows exactly what part of a scene is made up of visible Glossy BSDF materials.

In the following scene, there is a plane with a Glossy BSDF shader that is reflecting a blue-hued Diffuse BSDF shaded cube. It renders like this:

The Glossy Direct pass shows this:

Note how it excludes the background, the part of the plane hidden by the cube, and even the reflection of the cube. What it shows is only the rays that hit the Glossy BSDF and go directly to a light source.

These rays:

Not these rays:

Or these rays:

Or even these rays:

Glossy Indirect

A Glossy Indirect pass produces an in color result; at least partially. It is black everywhere except for any reflections.

In the same scene as above, the Glossy Indirect pass renders like this:

Note how it shows only the reflection of the blue cube. This can be especially helpful, because it can first be turned into an alpha mask pretty easily (see the Matte > Color Key node), which allows for compositing on reflections. See how it is used in gandalf3's answer on Post-processing Lightsabers in Blender. It can also be used just by itself. You can edit out the floor of a scene and leave yourself with just an object and it's reflection, which can produce a very cool result:

Above result composited like this:

These are just a few of the possibilities.

For the technical side of things, a Glossy Indirect pass shows these rays, which bounce off the glossy, hit any obstructions, bounce back to the glossy, and then find a light source. They indirectly touch glossy and find light:

Hope this helped and happy Blending!


How to get python reference for a menu? I would like to make hotkey for this list

like this

what I should do?

Switch to Scripting screen
RMB on Brush and click Edit Source
Cursor will be located in this line: layout.menu("VIEW3D_MT_brush")
Search for VIEW3D_MT_brush in the file (CtrlF, you may need to enable Wrap)
You will find the class VIEW3D_MT_brush(Menu): ...
Scroll down a bit and locate Curve Presets, the code line islayout.operator_menu_enum("brush.curve_preset", "shape", text="Curve Preset")

As you can see, there's actually no menu, but an enum property that is displayed like a menu.

Thus, you can't use bpy.ops.wm.call_menu(). If you use UILayout.operator_enum() in the draw function for WindowManager.popup_menu() and wrap that call in an operator, it is possible to show the presets like a menu:

import bpy

def draw_func(self, context):
    layout = self.layout
    layout.operator_enum("brush.curve_preset", "shape")

class SimpleOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    """Tooltip"""
    bl_idname = "object.simple_operator"
    bl_label = "Simple Object Operator"

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

    def execute(self, context):
        wm = bpy.context.window_manager
        wm.popup_menu(draw_func, title="Curve Preset")
        return {'FINISHED'}

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

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

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

    # test call
    bpy.ops.object.simple_operator()

How to set up keymaps is covered here, if you want to let the script do that itself: Addon Tutorial #Keymaps (you should make your script an addon in order to use keymaps)


How to create material that goes along curved mesh? Excuse me, I have a cube, which has a curve modifier applied to it. I want to create a material that goes along the curved mesh, like this image below:

Here is my setup, which doesn't work:

Edit:
Setup with Curve ...

I hope my question makes sense.
Thank you so much
Stay safe :)

If you dont mind you can use just a Curve.
Shape

add Curve Circle, in edit mode Rotate 45, Duplicate and move 2.8 on X axis
select all vertices switch handles to Free V and delete from both circles the center segment
select end points and press F to connect

To get even distribution of colors you need to evenly distribut a curve's control points, that is not right now, but you can add another curve object - straight like, subdivide several times and deform this curve by previously shaped curve.

Add some stickness to curve (tube) - go to Properties editor > Object Data > Geometry >  Bevel > Depth
It is better to keep curve in type Shape > 2D and Fill > None
Add Curve modifier (ensure origins both objects are at the same place)
Moving along X axis will move along shape

2.7x Material

Plug UV Texture Coordinate socket into Separate XYZ node
and use X socket to lug into ColorRamp
Enable under Properties editor > Object Data > Texture Space > Use UV for mapping.

To see material switch to Rendered type view mode.

2.9x Material
is like here, you don't have to worry about UV in curve properties, it is set by default.

Notes:
Changing X Location will move gradient along curve.

Changing X Scale in Mapping node will change gradient scale.


Have a lamp rotate around a fixed spot I want to have 3 lamps in a group that are supposed to rotate around in a circle. However, I want the light rays to remain shining onto a fixed spot as it rotates.

Do I constrain it to an empty or what is the best way to go about this? Will it still work if the lights follow a path?

Thanks for your help.

Make the light follow the path with a Follow Path constraint, Target should be the curve that you want to use as path.

Then add a Track to constraint. Set the Target to the empty (or object you want the light to point to)  with the following settings:

To = -Z

Up = Y


GPU rendering for Cycles on MAC PRO (late 2013) As the development notes of Blender 2.76 tell, there should be support for GPU rendering under OpenCL now and it should be possible to let the AMD GPU's do the Cycles Rendering.
I tried and it seems to work but it is outrageously slow and I will return to my old habit again (modelling at MAC and rendering at a Windows / NVidia machine. Anyone who can explain how to render Cycles with reasonable performance at a Mac Pro? And what can be expected in near future?

The original graphics cards that came with the mac pro's aren't up to much so I'd expect the cpu to render faster. However if like me you want to stick with the mac pro you can get an nvidia card and use their web drivers.

I think there are many PC cards you can put in there (you'll just lose the boot screen). I got a GTX 980 from Mac Vid Cards which is awesome to render on. Sometimes I get a CUDA error but generally a restart of blender fixes that.

Another option that I use is Ray Pump. You need to pay but it's really cheap. They've been down for maintenance but I assume they'll be back up soon.


How can I have a strong emission object without it turning white? For my project, I need a light source with powerful light, and I need it to take a shape, or at least appear to. Currently I have this :
This is emitting teal-ish light, but with the perfect strength it turns white. Is there a way I can keep its teal appearance, or at least make it look that way?

Technically, Cycles is correct in making it look white.  Because it's so bright, the camera is overexposed and it comes out as white.  If you try to take a real picture of a light bulb, depending on how you set the exposure, the light will appear white instead of yellow.  If you put your light in an actual scene, it will cast a teal glow.

If you want to make it appear teal, the most accurate way to do that would be to use a glare on the fog glow setting in the compositor to make a teal halo around the light.

Also, unless the entire object is glowing, it might look more realistic if you just set a small portion of the light (such as a filament in an incandescent light) to actually glow, it will cast bright teal light on the rest of the light and make it clear that the light is teal in color. (Just note that Cycles doesn't do a very good job if the light is inside a glass bulb)

If the entire thing is supposed to be glowing, depending on what look you're going for, you could try using the Principle Volume shader to make the emission rather than an emission shader (i.e. turn it into a glowing volume rather than a glowing surface).  That way, places on the edge would be duller and glow teal rather than white.  Note that this may negatively affect render times, and the effect honestly didn't look as nice as I was hoping in my example.  But maybe you could try it.

One final "cheating" way to make it look teal is to give it a week, teal emission for any rays coming from the camera but a strong, teal emission for all other rays so that it looks teal to the camera but still gives off the same amount of brightness as before.  The way you could do that is by mixing a strong and a week emission shader together with a factor dictated by the Light Path node "Is Camera Path" option.


View vertex color in edit mode instead of material color? I am using vertex color to create the colorID map for Substance Painter. I canot use materials for this, because I use materials to define Substance Painter's textures sets (there is no other way for the latter as far as I know). Is there any way I can view the vertex color in the viewport, when I am editing the model in the 'Edit mode' instead of the colors of the materials?

In Blender 2.8+, select Solid viewport shading and click the arrow button to bring up the viewport shading menu. Set Color to Vertex. Setting Lighting to Flat may also be helpful.


Fill Gaps between Meshes with smooth surface I've been trying to attempt modeling on my own for my 3D Designs after going through tutorials, but I am having an issue smoothing the gaps between meshes. In the image below I have added to UV Spheres and molded them as I would like, but I am having issues smoothing the gaps between the two to appear to have one smooth mesh:

I have been adding vertices and faces manually, but the effect comes out very patchy. Is there a tool to help smooth this?

NOTE: For those not familiar with the character in the background, I will include it below for reference:

It looks like, there are vertices connected with edges and a face on the inside of your model.

This could have happend, when you extruded a face and then cancelled the action. Canceling the action only reverse the move position, but would have given you an extruded face at the exact same position.

You have to remove any unwanted faces/edges and possibly reconnect your vertices in that area. To do that, in Edit Mode, switch to Face Selection Mode (in the menu bar of the 3D View). Then select one face after the other in that area and move them around (G). This way you could easily identify misplaced faces. Remove a face by  RMB selecting it and pressing X > Faces.


Problem when exporting from Blender to Unity 3D? I'm having a problem when trying to import my character to the Unity Engine. It gives me message:

Unable to open Assets/untitled.fbx: Check external application preferences

Can anyone please tell my what's wrong and how to fix it?

I followed the steps from a tutorial I watched: I exported my character as a .fbx file and unchecked Include Default Take, but it doesn't work.

The Blender exporters sometimes don't work perfectly. However, Unity supports .blend files, so you can simply drag and drop the .blend file into the Unity project.


How to cut out unwanted content from the 3D model Hi People hope everyone is good and having a good day, i am trying cut out a quater of a circle and i have tried using the knife tool but found this rather dificult and have tried the default editing tool and tried inverting the excess inwards but this did not work as well, as you can probably tell i ahve only just started learning how to do 3D modelling on blender. Basicly i just want to get rid of the excess quater i do not need. please see the PNG i have attached.
Any help would be apreciated.
Thank you :)
P.S. i have done a landing foot and cut corners out thanks to bruno's instructions :) however i do it manualy for each corners and some corners as you can see from the picture are not equaly continuitive :)is there a way that i can duplicate the first cut like for like so all corners are the same :)

Simon

Sometimes it can save time to build the new geometry you need.

In this case:

Add a new UV sphere aligned to the world axes, with twice as many segments as rings. (Here, 32 and 16)
Delete the exterior faces over the section to be removed.
Put your snap settings to vertex, active, snap to self.
Extrude the vertex at the north pole downwards, constraining to Z, (E,Z) and snapping to a convenient vertex on the equator. This will create the edge from the north pole to the centre of the sphere.
Set 'Automatically merge vertices' on, and extrude the new central vertex outwards twice, once to each of the bottom corners of the removed section of the sphere. This will create the other two straight edges you can see.
Select all the new straight edges, and from the (ctrl-E) edges menu, select subdivide. At the bottom of the Tools panel, set the number of cuts to 3.
Fer each new flat face you are going to create, select the edges surrounding it, go to the face menu (ctrl-F) and select 'Grid Fill'. At the bottom of the tools panel, set the span to 4.
Bevel the edges of your new faces, if you want to.

It may all seem like a bit of a faff, but once you can find your way around, this sort of approach can take less time than tidying up after a Boolean. (I'm sure someone here will point out how I could have saved a few steps.)


Inscribing text into an object I have a cube, and I would like it to have a text inscribed in it, so the text would be in the cube but we could see it. Is it possible to do this?

You could also use Knife Project.

Subdivide the face you want to be engraved (knife project needs some geometry)
Place the text above the face.
Select the text
Select the cube (must be the active object)
Change to Edit Mode
Click Knife Project
Extrude the selected faces (in or out)


How can i solve this error when importing materials? When I try to add materials to Blender I have this error pop up, I tried importing different materials but without any luck.

bpy.context.space_data.recent_folders_active = 2
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 2.82\2.82\scripts\addons\node_wrangler.py", line 2689, in execute
    if not active_node.bl_idname == 'ShaderNodeBsdfPrincipled':
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'bl_idname'

location: <unknown location>:-1
```

You don't have an active node selected and the Node Wrangler add-on had a bug that didn't check if an active node existed. Select the Principled BSDF node and it should work properly.

The bug in Node Wrangler has been fixed.


How to show the panel with Geometry - Modification - Offset / Extrude In this question:

How to make a bevel on text

... the screenshot:

... shows Geometry panel, with Modification: section, with Offset and Extrude inside - how can I show this panel?

ah found it, partially through here:

https://spolearninglab.com/curriculum/software/3d_modeling/blender/blender_02.html

You simply have to click on that icon with two white dots connected with a curved line (have no idea how its called, when I do a mouseover over it, I get:

Type of active data to display and edit
Data: Object data
Python: SpaceProperties.context
bpy.Data.screens("Default") ... context

... which tells me absolutely nothing - but by the icon image, I'd guess this submenu is called "Curves"); and then you get Geometry panel...


Blender 2.82.7 - Animation sequence from images - how to reverse/backwards? I know that I have created a video of images in Blender 2.8 beta and have been able to reverse the sequence of images with a checkbox called 'Reverse' or 'Backwards', now that I am at Blender 2.82.7 I simply cannot seem to figure out where this is.  I've checked all the different editor types, call menus, drop down menus etc - Did this feature get lost from the latest kit or has it moved or am I just a noob missing the obvious?

Thanks in advance

Finally found it, maybe this post will help someone else.


Object not tracking all the time? In follow up to this problem, I am having an issue. Look over that question, and the correct .blend file is included there. I replicated the logic there to have everything the same. An empty is supposed to be in the center of my screen when it collides with certain objects. For my .blend, when I move my mouse over an object it is supposed to track to, it tracks to it. There is an issue though: if I keep my mouse in that object and keep moving, the empty will not track again. In other words, the first time I look over an object, the empty will track there and will not continue tracking unless I go to another object. If you look at the .blend in the other question, and add a cube ontop of the empty that is a child of the empty just to see where the empty is, everything is flawless. If you look over an object, it tracks there. If you keep looking around within the object, it keeps updating. I tried to explain this the best I can, and I hope you understand. How can I have it constantly updating its position rather than every time I look over a new object? Thanks!

EDIT: Just to avoid confusion and the fact that my other question's .blend is old, both .blends [good and bad] will be below, and you can see for youselves:

The incorrectly working .blend.

The working .blend.

Take a look at both .blends, they both generally have the same concept. If you still do not understand, the best way to understand is to do the following: download both .blends, and move your mouse over a wall or a cube in the game; keep your mouse on the object and move around still within the object. For the working .blend, drag your mouse across the floor and notice how it updates quickly. For the incorrectly working one, drag your mouse across a cube and notice how it tracks once and only once unless you go over another object.

You have to keep the script running all the time, it is better to have an always sensor in pulse mode attached to the Python controller :

or just activate the pulse mode on the ray sensor to keep activating the script even if the hitObject is the same :


Pointiness for edge mask doesn't work at all I'm trying to use the pointiness techniques to find the edges of my models, but I can't get it to work. I've tried googling, watching tutorials, but nothing has worked. I'm on 2.91, using Cycles with GPU rendering.

I've tried both the version with just pointiness in the color ramp, and also the dot product of Normal and Bevel shader. (I also tried connecting the color ramp directly to the shader). I just get black. (The white on the bottom left is an highlight from a light). I simply added some bevels to the cube to smooth it out.

I feel like I'm missing something dumb.

Subdivide the cube. It requires more geometry to be displayed. "Dirty Vertex Colors" in Vertex Paint mode works the same way if you want to mask out edges and corners.
EDIT: No wait I just realised what's wrong. You should move the color stop sliders in the ColorRamp node more to the left. Tried setting it up like yours and it's all black here as well. Try 0.515 for the black stop's position.


How can I create a single Cycles texture with a different image for each object it's assigned to? For a model I've made I'd like to keep the basic properties of the Cycles material (shader type etc) the same for most of the objects that make up the model, but have a different image mapped to for each object. This is so the (for instance) nacelles have a particular image as part of their material, the main fuselage another etc but all are made of the same basic type of "metal". I don't want an entirely separate material for every object though.

The reason for this is that I want to be able to tweak how shiny or whatever the whole model is without having to repeat this for every single object.

Is there a way to do this? Am I missing something obvious? I'm Happy to elaborate with specifics if I haven't made my intention clear.

You can use a node group for your settings. The texture is an input to the node group but all other settings are hardcoded into it. Go into the node editor with a material you want to reuse. Select the nodes you want to make common (for instance, hold down shift while selecting). Press Ctrl - G to make them a group. You are now seeing the internals of your group. Press tab to close it. Press tab again to edit it. It is sort of edit mode for node groups. It looks like this:

To the left you see inputs and to the right outputs. There are empty circles on the input and output nodes. Drag from or to these to add more parameters. There is also an editor for this to the right in the properties panel. Here you can add, remove, reorder and rename parameters.

If you tab out you can rename your group.

Now that you have your group. You can use it in other materials. When adding a node in the node editor, your group will show up under groups.

Here I have used my SimpleMaterial on two cubes. One of them got a checkered texture for color and the other got a solid color:


How to animate noise texture "seed"? It's possible to animate a change noise texture by animating the texture coordinates with a mapping node or by animating the texture space, however this only works on one axis at a time (on the other axes the texture will appear to be sliding across the object's surface).

For example, the top face has the desired effect but the other faces appear to be moving/sliding upwards:

Even with all three axes location and rotation animated it still appears to be sliding rather than statically changing.

Is there some way to make each face appear like the top face in the first gif but still be seamlessly blended with the other faces? This should work for other shapes as well.

In other words, I'm looking for a way to animate the "seed" of the texture.

You can not animate the seed of a 3D gradient noise texture because it´s usually all fixed in a permutation table. What you are basically looking for are 4D gradient noise textures.

Why do 3D gradient noise textures not work? Imagine a 3D procedural texture as a continuous grid in space containing colour or intensity values at any node. Also imagine your mesh inside this grid. For simplicity imagine that every point on the surface of the mesh gets the colour of the nearest point of the grid assigned to it. Now imagine moving the grid or the manifold mesh. Eventually the points will move along the normal of a few faces but they can usually not move along the normals of all faces at a given time. And if they don´t move perfectly along a normal they will slide along the surface.

To overcome this limitation we need to add a dimension which we can then animate.

So how can we do this in blender/cycles?

We can program it ourselves in OSL(Open Shading Language). First we need the code for our 4D texture shader (e.g. a very simple one):

#include "stdosl.h"

shader simple_noise_texture4d(
float Scale = 1.0,
float Time = 0.0,
output color Color = 0.0
)
{
    Color = noise( "uperlin", P * Scale, Time );
}

Use the internal text editor and name the above text block e.g. noise.osl. We use the builtin noise function with 4D unsigned perlin noise. The 4th component named Time will be used to animate the texture. Scale is used to scale the texture as usual. The output is named Color. For more information see the OSL specification osl-languagespec.pdf.

Edit: By the way, there already exists a script template "Noise" in the text editor called noise.osl. I didn´t know this by the time I posted this answer. It provides some more 4D noise algorithms.

Important

On the render tab of the properties panel enable "Open Shading Language". The Open Shading Language checkbox will only be available with CPU render mode.

Then add a material to the object as usual and add a script node and set the shader script to "noise.osl". Click the "Update shader.." button next to the shader name input. Use the output colour e.g. as input colour for a Diffuse BSDF shader.

Now Time can be animated as usual.

For more complex noise just edit the OSL code accordingly.


Import image to plane not exported in GLTF I want to create a 3D object of an image to use in AR using the Blender Python API. I've added the image to the scene as a plane, this works perfectly. The image is also shown in the .blend file. However, when exporting to GLTF, the image is missing. I simply get a blank plane, and this seems to happen to other export options as well. Aside from not exporting correctly when using the Python API, it does also not work when exporting manually from Blender.
To place to file in the scene:
bpy.ops.import_image.to_plane(shader='SHADELESS', files=[{'name': PATH}])
To export:
bpy.ops.wm.usd_export(filepath=PATH)
Any idea's? Running Blender 2.91.

Unfortunately the glTF exporter does not recognize the setup that "Import Images as Planes" uses for a "Shadeless" material, which looks like

However if you delete the group node, it can recognize that graph as "Shadeless" and should be able to export it.


Boolean Cutting is not Working I have been working on this for like 5 hours but still can't figure it out. I want to use the plane and the Boolean Modifier to remove the end of the nose from the elephant, but it doesn't seem to work, and either the plane is gone or the size of the nose cuts the plane.

I have attached the file, if anyone could help that would be great! Sorry for the trouble once again, thanks in advance.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1atL5yEH1WCgFQqHJp0WW-m-y0HmZfVwZ/view?usp=sharing

Booleans are a volume-based operation

Literally, boolean is about doing simple maths between two volumes. Like A + B or A - B.
A plane has zero volume. So you're asking Blender to do the maths A - 0... Which equals A.

If you want to remove the end of the nose, extrude your plane so it contains all the parts you want to cut off:

The modifier must be set on the target final object

Your goal is to have your elephant without its nose, so it's the elephant object that should wear the boolean modifier:


How to switch strokes of the grease pencil in 2D Animation mode? I searched but could not find a duplicate.
I want to apply a modifier to only some parts of my animation. My idea was to create separate stroke objects (Add -> Grease Pencil -> Stroke). However, I cannot seem to easily switch between which stroke I'm drawing with. I did manage to do it by accident, and now if I select the different stroke in object mode, I can draw with it later. But that's a lot of work to switch strokes.
Selecting the different stroke in the outliner does change the timeline data so it corresponds with the new stroke, but does not switch the materials, and does not let me draw with it.

In Draw mode or Edit mode you can click since Version 2.91 (See patch note) in the outliner on the left column of the row of your object to switch to editing this object.
See :


importing .OSM to blender in 2.8 hello I was watching a tutorial on creating a city in Blender with the open street map website, but it seems that blender no longer has the importing .OSM addon.The tutorial:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4ySFm4ey9U&t=223s

Blender-osm addon is free now. Get it here.

All source code of the blender-osm addon is hosted on Github. The addon documentation is also available at Github.


Why doesn't Blender detect RTX 2060 with OpenCL? Though the question was asked many times, I can't find explanation for Nvidia RTX 2060. Nvidia drivers got OpenCL support. I don't understand why Blender says no GPU detected to render cycles with OpenCL. Did blender drop OpenCL support in favour of CUDA?

That is because Cycles in Blender 2.8x only uses OpenCL for AMD GPUs. For Nvidia GPUs you have to select either CUDA or OptiX (only for RTX cards until 2.90, then for Maxwell GPUs and higher). This is documented in Blender's manual.

Nvidia
CUDA and OptiX are supported for GPU rendering with Nvidia graphics cards.

AMD
OpenCL is supported for GPU rendering with AMD graphics cards.


Why won't Smart UV Project automatically unwrap a simple chair? I created a very simple chair mesh and I would like to unwrap it so that I can map a texture. I would like to have Smart UV Project unwrap it automatically, but whether I do it that way or try manually, I am unable to unwrap the model.

Is there something I'm missing?

I tried a few guides, but I'm not sure where I'm going wrong.

My File: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/34625

The image editor is currently showing the 'render result' as shown in the header. When the render result is set to display, the uv unwrapping will not be visible (it doesn't stop it being unwrapped, it just stops you from seeing it). Press the 'x' button to remove it and the uv unwrapping should appear:


Red Line at bottom of video sequencer gone in new update Hey guys their used to be this red line at the bottom of the video sequencer that isnt there anymore in the most recent blender update, do you guys know how to get it back? it was super useful for just scrubbing through and making the animation render quickly.

You switch the drawing on in the View menu(Check: Show Cache and Final Images):

You select, what you want it to show here:

And if you want it to prefetch, you check that here:


How to turn the Compare Math node result into a gradient? I need help. I need the bracket (shown by the yellow grid on the floor and ceiling) along Y of this material to have a gradient, that meaning, to have the always "1" return from the Compare math node get converted to a gradient of values from 0 to 1 before connecting to the Factor on the Mix shader.

To achieve this, you need something that alters that value specifically along Y with its maximum and minimum values on the exact limits of that bracket which is animated to move along Y (but not scale, scale stays the same).
I believe the answer is not that obvious as slapping a ColorRamp or a Gradient Texture somewhere in the middle of that, unfortunately... I have tried that and much more with no success.
Any ideas?
EDIT:
For clarification, the desired effect looks like this:

Just... Animated correctly to move at the same pace as the bracket, as this is a shoddy workaround I just figured out.
EDIT2: This solution has this result where there's a black gradient right across the middle of the yellow section and it shows differently positioned on the rest of the scene elements that do also share this exact same material (car and columns).

EDIT3:
I had my nodes in the mix shader inverted, sorry for that oversight. This solution does work, although I will have to tweak it for the gradient to extend over a larger area (I mean, make the edges darker and have the gradient extend further thowards the center).

EDIT4:
I believe this has given me the desired effect.

I will now try to replicate a similar effect but one sided for the black area.

So you need a gradient to follow the car?


Large Braids with Hair Particles How could I take out the space in-between the hair strands on a large braid?

I would like to remove those "holes" and make hair children better distributed. I tried reducing the amplitude, but it gets too skinny. As you can see on the settings it's 1 parent with 10k children particles.

I'm pretty sure I can make adding a custom property, but I don't know which one to choose.

Well, I had play with the Children settings till actually got some reasonable result:

Here is my recipe for a nicer looking braid:

As you can see, mainly Random and Size properties made the strands get thicker, but it can also mess around with the shape at the end. So I suggest trim it with Length.
Use a high value for Clump on Effects Section and a low Clump on Kink Section.
If you get a fading effect like I was having on my question, try to change the Shape value to something like -0.9 on Cycles Hair Settings.

Suggestions are very welcome.


Python: find faces with incorrect normals to flip and flip them .

Hi all,

Here is the issue. I've a mesh with some faces that need to be flipped in other to have something consistent:

These faces are selected:

So I would like to find the faces that must be flipped and flip them using a Python script. I tried making faces constistent by it didn't work.

My idea was the following:

Loop on the bmesh vertices  (I can do it)
Check that the vertice is selected (I can do it)
Check that the normal has to be flipped (I can't do it. Should I check the normal??
Flip normal (I can do it)

I hope I explained the issue clearly.
Thanks,
Maxime

PS: here is my blend file enter link description here

This script finds the average normal from the selected faces, then finds normals that are very different by calculating the dot product between the average and each face normal.

Any face that has a negative dot product will be flipped. This fixes the normals on the faces in your blendfile, although your selection doesn't include all the flipped faces (if selected, they will be fixed).

The script assumes you are in edit mode with all the faces of interest selected.

import bpy, bmesh
from mathutils import Vector

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

# Reference selected face indices
bm.faces.ensure_lookup_table()
selFaces = [ f.index for f in bm.faces if f.select ]

# Calculate the average normal vector
avgNormal = Vector()
for i in selFaces: avgNormal += bm.faces[i].normal
avgNormal = avgNormal / len( selFaces )

# Calculate the dot products between the average an each face normal
dots = [ avgNormal.dot( bm.faces[i].normal ) for i in selFaces ]

# Reversed faces have a negative dot product value
reversedFaces = [ i for i, dot in zip( selFaces, dots ) if dot < 0 ]

# Deselect all faces and (later) only select flipped faces as indication of change
for f in bm.faces: f.select = False
bm.select_flush( False )

for i in reversedFaces:
    bm.faces[i].select = True
    bm.faces[i].normal_flip()  # Flip normal

bm.select_flush( True )


How to view all autocomplete options? I wanted to view all the stuff inside bpy.types so I used the autocomplete inside the python console. However the results are cut off. How can I get the full list? I'm trying to find a method so I can call a function as soon as anything is imported.

Where the autocomplete list starts

Okay I found an alternative situation. I wanted to make a dropdown menu that added all armature objects in the loaded file. My idea was for it to update every time an object is imported. I was able to achieve this based on dynamic list examples of this website:

https://elfnor.com/drop-down-and-button-select-menus-for-blender-operator-add-ons.html#dynamic-lists


How to use particles in Yafaray So I'm starting to use Yafaray for my projects, but I noticed it doesn't support Blender's particle system yet.
I heard someone say that the best way to have those particle systems to render in Yafa would be to convert them all to meshes.

The problem is, for mesh-heavy systems like grass, for instance, it would hog tons of memory and crash to convert it to pure mesh (this won't happen using cycles or BI, since the particle system feature has ways to control the amount of children on viewport vs. rendered).

Is there an alternative workable way to have those particles on Yafaray?

Apparently, as of Yafaray 0.1.99 Experimental, with Blender 2.75a, the native particle system is now supported.


Materials show up in material preview but not in render preview I creating a project in cycles, but I am having trouble with the materials. The materials show up fine in the material preview, but when I switch to render preview, some materials turn pink. How do I fix this? Thanks in advance!

 material view  render view

Pink usually means that image texture path is lost (it requires re-linking). It might also be caused by wrong or missing Texture Coordinates mapping (material nodes)...


How to make a DIY bevel shader Sheep-It Render Farm doesn't support the bevel node (yet). Is it possible to construct a custom node setup that does the same thing as the bevel shader?

Baking Normals

You could try baking the bevel to normal maps.


How can we use more than 2 cameras in one scene ? (Just like this) Dose any one can tell how to take the scene like this in one time with more than one cameras.
When I use this

I found a video doing what you wish on Youtube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vrP7H1PpTI

The video is quite old (2014) so the UI has changed but the process seems still  valid. In short, you can create copies of the scene linked to the same objects and then use compositing node to assemble all the renders into one.

There is also a Blender add-on facilitating multi-camera rendering named Render Burst. Here is the Github repository  and Presentation video. It seems more adapted to picture rendering though.


How to make a single user copy of a group of nodes in matrial on python in Blender? I have a material on one object and I need to copy it to another object.
I do ... material.copy () but the group node in the material copy does not become a single-user copy. How can this problem be solved?

The copy function can be used on the node tree as well. The copy function returns the copied node group, so it can be used replace the original group with the single user copy:
original_group = bpy.context.objects['Object'].material_slots['Material'].material.node_tree.nodes['Baking_node'].node_tree
single_user_group = original_group.copy()
original_group = single_user_group

Then just loop that over all your materials


How to get a rigid body to rotate? I would like to get a cube to rotate in a scene as seen in this image. Is there any way to do this without animation?

It's really very easy to do this, Just follow these steps:

In addition to this if you want to add a force in the forward axis, then add a linear velocity or force in that axis.


Copy and pasting with CTRL + C and CTRL + V from one scene to another isn't working! I have 2 scenes in blender, i'm making a game in the blender game engine. For some weird reason when I try to copy and object with CTRL + C and then paste it into another scene by pressing CTRL + V, instead of it pasting the copied object into the scene that I want it to be pasted it in, it just creates a copy of the scene I copied the object from,  I don't get it, it doesn't make sense, I know I can just press CTRL + L and link the selected objects into the other scene, but then they always match the same location of which scene they are currently active in, I want to just be able to select an object, press CTRL + C and then switch to the scene I want to paste it in, then press CTRL + V, and the object I copied just simply gets pasted into the scene. Please help if you have a solution to this. Thank you.

This phenomena could be caused by having to less RAM memory present on your computer,(since all data from one blender project needs to be  in RAM memory, before it can be   into the 2nd Blender again.

Here are a few solutions:
1 - Close down every other applications you do not use at that moment and then do the copy-and-paste operation again. See how that works.

2 - Copy and Paste object by object instead of everything at once

3 - Export all needed objects (to hard-disk) and then import them again from the 2nd blender application

4 - If all fails, re-create the object in the 2nd scene.


Stopping Blender seeing all system/network folders in campus/school install When I install blender on a school Windows network all the folders are suddenly visible, such as the C: drive, these folders aren't visible from MS products such as Word. Is this a blender issue or a network set up issue?  How do I enforce folder permissions on blender?

@pluke - These are no vanilla MS product settings, your tech team set those settings via group policies which are part of MS active directory services.

Blender does not use the operation system's file selection system (or any other default file selection system on other operating systems), thus it doesn't read any of the group policies.

There is no easy way to do that and more important you'll need administrator rights.


How do I use dynamic paint to control hair density? I tried using the dynamic paint modifier to control the hair density of an object but it didn't work out like I wanted it to.

First is set up a plane, gave it a few subdivisions and added a dynamic paint canvas. The canvas is set to weight paint mode and I assigned a vertex group to write the data to.
Then, to paint the canvas I added a sphere as a dynamic paint brush and placed it inside of the plane. The sphere has a basic animated path through the plane.

I'm just using a simple hair setup with basically no settings changed.
The only changes are in the vertex groups panel. There I, obviously, tried assigning the vertex group from the dynamic paint to the density slot, to no avail. The exact same vertex group can be used in the length slot and the effect will be seen.
When I use normal weight paint with the vertex group i can control the density.
I also tried swapping the two modifiers in the modifier stack and enabled the use modifier stack option in the particle settings.

Any ideas how I can solve this problem?

Pre-bake the dynamic paint. Generate a group on the final frame.
Pre-paking simulations is the key to what you´re looking for. Blender manual mentions this but doesn´t cite any practical examples.


how to dig a hole on a object? I simply want to dig a hole on a cube. I tried to extrude after creating a circle on the surface, which left me a hole with both ends covered by the original surfaces. I tried the Bridge Edge Loops and got the same result. I cannot find a way to get rid of the surface inside the circle(it cannot be seleted and delete).

I am a beginner hopefully anyone can help me.
thanks in advance.

Add a Cylinder and put to where you want to have your hole and how deep it shall be.
Add a "Boolean" modifier on the cube. In the settings set "Operation:" to Difference and the Cylinder as "object:"
Apply the modifier.


How to split material for separate meshes I have a piece of terrain from NZ made with BlenderGIS and I've split the terrain mesh into a few parts and I want to split the terrain material into sections which fits the individual meshes.
TLDR: I want an individual material for each individual mesh that I can save as a .png
if you need a bit more of an explanation of what I need then ask because I don't think I worded this very clearly lol

You can apply different materials to different Objects (meshes) AND different faces within the same mesh. A material is not a texture; A material (oof, don't quote me) is shader that has inputs driving its properties, some of which can be image textures.
You need to be more specific about 'saving materials as PNG's' because that isn't a thing (for the reason I stated above). However, you can unwrap the mesh's UV coordinates and export the texture projected on those unwrapped faces from the UV window.
I would recommend you Mark the border edges of each mesh as Seams, Join them all into one mesh, Unwrap the whole thing at once, and separate the meshes again (select the faces in edit mode and hit the "P" key to put the selection in a new mesh Object).


Cannot Confugure Sapling So, um. Ticked in curves sapling addon, then saved preferences. Now, after adding the tree, configuration menu is grey and even clicks can't activate it.
Thing tried:

Reactivating addon
Turning each addon

any solutions?
[]

Okay, solution founded. All I had to do is tick "Global undo" in the Editing tab.


How can I use vector displacement like this streamer? When I see Youtube video, the streamer's displacement material rises highly enough.

But when I try same thing, my displacement material do not rise like his.

Below my work

How can I raise brick material from surface like that guy?

you have to enable the displacement in the material setting


Portion of glass appears opaque in render I'm new on this site.
My problem is with a glass window. The top portion of the window is opaque (see ) The glass is a standard setup (Glass BSDF+Transparent BDSF to Mix Shader to Material Output). There's a light (sun) aimed at an angle directed at the window and a plane with an emission node on the ceiling.
I'm using Blender 2.91.2
Render engine: Cycles
GPU Compute: CUDA
OpenImageDenoise
See images for some of my settings.
Let me know if you've seen or had this problem before.
Thanks in advance!
Updated render with the sun perpendicular to the window:
Updated render using an area light:

I would say it is just coincidence. The upper part is shadow casted by outside wall. It looks solid for several reasons. Partly because rendering this glass is very noise and thanks to denoising it just looks like flat (even more with your contrasted image).

When rendering in viewport without denoising, it looks also solid but with some more details.

As you already discovered - two "Table Lights" do some difference in render, even they are far and with very low power (just 10W and 60 W). Here rendered without those lights.

With those lights the render is significantly darker ... that is weird and I don't have an explanation for that, just theory.
Left render with two Point lights / Right render without ...

With provided file I didn't get such solid thing for final render with 240 samples.
Left render with two Point lights / Right render without ...

There is a difference in light rays bouncing, so it can be possibly caused by Render Properties > Light Paths > Clamping > Indirect Light.
Also you are using Limited GL preset so try to increase Max Bounce for Diffuse to 8. With those changes the render seems to be same brightness also with the two Point Lights.


how to remove block effect from bump node with textures I am trying to add a bumpiness to a texture on a sphere, but when rendering at close zoomed in proximities, it looks pixelated/blocky.

I've tried modifying the subdivision of the sphere to 6 (render), tried smoothing faces/recaculating normals, etc - but no matter what I do, it still gives me this 'blocky' look. I've tried using an input texture into the bump node, as well as simply using the bump node itself, but still get the same thing.

Any idea on how to fix this? Here is an image:

Any idea how to fix that? Also - I am using a couple different light sources. Thanks!

First thing is you have your image texture set to 'color', that should be 'non color' data. plus looking at your image it looks too low res, you need a 16bit image to make good bump maps.


How to create a submenu especific shortcut? I've recently been making my way into 2.8 and I've been wondering if there is a way to link keys exclusively to submenus. Let's say I want to shotcut "Clear Seams" to the "C" key in the UV menu, in the Edit Mode. Something similar to how you can double tap "U" to Unwrap a mesh.

Thanks.

Open any menu you would like to have assigned a shortcut to. Right click on the menu item to assign a shortcut.


How to separate locked areas? If you move an area to match up with another area, the get "locked" and I can't figure out how to separate them without joining and splitting a new area.

You can see that at the beginning the areas are separate, but at the end they are locked:

For easy understanding, let's just call the areas in your image as "Left" and "Right"; and "Middle" for the new split area:

A Three-click Way:

Right Click on the border of the right area;
Choose "Split Area", move the mouse to the area you want to split;
Click and drag on the little triangle at the upper-right corner of the left area towards the middle area, to join them as a new one. Release the mouse button.

As shown below:

A Two-Click Way:

Click and drag on the little triangle at the upper-right corner of the left area;
Click and drag on the little triangle at the upper-right corner of the middle area towards to the right area, then turn back to left. Release the mouse button.


how to move multiple objects into the centre of a circle Hi. Is there anyway that you can move multiple objects in to the center of them in a proportional way but not using scaling up and down?

I want to make it like the below but maintaining their proportion. I tried grab each of edges of them toward inwards and hit "G" and moved but I doesn't work like "S" key and scaled down.

Same Problem with edge slide

My apologies for the fast gifs, but one way since the spokes are separate objects is to create one and offset it's Y axis if you need to (but you don't have to).

Then set the cursor to a center point in object mode and rotate the objects around it (alt + d).

Select one object and go into edit mode. Select the tip of the spoke and drag using the Y axis. It will maintain it's size and go towards the center.

Then you can make the objects one object (ctrl + j).

EDIT: Just found an even faster way if all objects are combined and you're selecting ONLY the edges...
Simply:  (Alt + s)


Cloth Pin Has No Effect? As per tutorials:
1. Created and subdivided a plane
2. Made a vertex group of vertices along one edge.
3. Clicked cloth button in Physics tab, checked "Pinning" and assigned the vertex group.

Yet it just falls, without hanging on to the pin vertices. What did I miss?

The problem is you didn't actually assign the vertices to the vertex group. Once you create the vertex group, you click the Assign button to assign the selected vertices to the vertex group.

As shown below:


How can I scale these objects without breaking their relationships? I have this setup:

Duplicate part of a big mesh, and separate it into a new object
Hook each vertex of the new object to an empty
Parent each empty to the corresponding vertex of the original mesh

Now if the base mesh is deformed (shape key, cloth sim, etc.), the separated object follows it.

Now I've realized that my model is too large, so I'd like to scale everything down, but I can't get it quite right:

How can I apply a scale without breaking the setup?

Instead of CtrlA->Apply Scale, I needed CtrlA->Scale to Deltas.


Cloth Stimulation Not Working (Blender Not Responding) I am much new to Blender. I have been following several tutorials online about Cloth Stimulation, and I have followed exactly the same procedure but mine Blender freezes during Cloth Stimulation, and I have to force close Blender and reopen.
I have tried it 20-30 times but no luck. Could it be because of my laptop harware? I use a Sony Vaio i5 processor, 6 GB RAM and NVIDIA GeForce 410M. My laptop may not have best hardware but never had this problem even while using Unity.
I am using Blender 2.90.1
Please check the raw file. Blend File
Thanks in advance.

The problem is that your model is very small. I think that a severe collision has already occurred at the start frame, making it difficult for the calculation to converge. When I increased the size of the model by 10 times, the simulation became much faster.


Latest selection in multiples different Okay, I'm new to Blender and my search has failed so far. Perhaps I just don't know the right terms.
I'm used to CAD programs. When I ctrl-select or shift-click to select multiple vertices or lines in any of those, they're all the same. However, in Blender (at least 2.8) the latest one is white instead of the others' orange, and many alterations seem to not effect it or do so in a very limited manner.
For example, scaling two halves of an edge will move the orange half into the white half, and doesn't move the end of the white one.
What purpose does this serve? And how do I correct it?

The item (object or mesh element like vertex, edge or face) in white is considered the active element.

It is generally the "master" whose properties are shown in the UI (properties region sidebar or properties area); and may also be used as the pivot or center of transformations, if selected in the 3D view header.


Model upholstery with buttons? How can I model backrest upholstery for a bed?

I Have used the Bevel command but it's not close:

The following workflow is recomended:

Method 1:

Create unit mesh;
Array modifers;
Bevel modifier (type: Vertex Group);
Apply modifiers, inset ngons, then poke;
Proportional edit (type: Random)
refinement.

For Step 1:

For Step 5:

Example file for Method 1

Tip: Things can be much faster by using Select Similar operator (ShiftG) while processing.

Method 2:

Create unit mesh;
Array modifiers;
Translate the four corners and one center vert with Proportional Editing Falloff.
Refinement.

For Step 3:

Example file for Method 2

Note: Comparing with Method 1, the topology is cleaner with less wrinkles, which may be less realstic, but could probably be expected.


Stereoscopic camera export Working on integrating the stereoscopic camera into a render addon (appleseed).  Thanks to Brecht I figured out how to set the proper view and retrieve the X offset for the camera lens when off-axis mode is used, but I can't figure out how to get the matrices for the two views.  None of the camera matrices (world, local) change when the view is changed in the render engine.  Is there a matrix that I'm missing or do I have to do the math manually (which would suck)?

Thanks to Brecht (and some bug fixes to Blender), here's the workflow for using stereoscopic rendering in a render addon:

There are three main commands needed, all are part of the RenderEngine:

active_view_set: this is used to set the view to one of the stereo cameras.  Use the same name as the view, i.e. if the view is called 'left' the command would be active_view_set(view='left')

The camera matrix of this view is retrieved by using camera_model_matrix.

If you use the offset orientation then there is also an x-axis lens shift in one or both cameras.  That is retrieved with camera_shift_x.

For feeding render results into Blender, you need to add the view name to the begin_results call.  Blender expects the render engine to manage the logic of rendering the image twice from the different cameras and feeding the results to the correct view in the render results.

Note: Due to a bug that was fixed after the release of Blender 2.79b, camera_model_matrix only works correctly if a recent buildbot build of Blender is used.


The anatomy of a Cycles render? What processes comprise a Cycles render?
I was watching the top of the render view and watching the progress messages:

Synchronizing Object | ObjectName
Updating Mesh | Computing Normals
Updating Scene BVH | Building BVH
Packing BVH Nodes
Path Tracing Sample 1/xxx

There were a couple others I missed because they happened so quickly.
But this got me wondering what actually is happening underneath the hood and I thought you guys might know.

I am especially interested in finding out what BVH is, since I've heard of BVH data being imported/exported between 3D applications.

I can't provide explanations of all the steps, but I can explain a few and do some research of my own.

BVH:

BVH stands for Bounding Volume Hierarchy.  It is a method of grouping up the parts of your scene into bounding volumes so that Cycles only has to be concerned with objects within a BV that the current ray intersects.  This speeds up render times by eliminating unnecessary collision checking.  It does add a very small amount of extra time at the beginning of the render though to build
the BVH (i.e. split up the objects).

For more on BVH check out this answer.

Path [Ray] Tracing:

Ray tracing is the actual rendering, all the previous steps are simply getting the scene ready to render.  Ray tracing is the process of calculating the paths of light photons (called rays or sometimes paths) through the scene.

Cycles is what is called a backwards ray tracing engine.  This is because instead of tracing the rays trough the scene starting a the light source, cycles traces the rays backwards starting from the camera.  This eliminates having to waste time calculating rays that never hit the camera.

To visualize how this works say we are rendering a 16 x 9 px image.  Now imagine that a 16 x 9 pixel grid is overlaid over the camera view.  The way cycles computes the final render is by shooting a ray at the center of each pixel.

The path of this ray is then traced through the scene, interacting with the surfaces or volumes of the objects in the scene according to their shaders.

The path will stop when either 1. the ray has hit a lamp or emission shader, 2. the ray will not hit any more objects on it's current trajectory, or 3. the ray has completed a maximum number of bounces.  Cycles will then compute the color of that pixel based on the emission strength and color of the final medium it hit, the colors of the mediums it interacted with along the way, and the length of the ray.

However, if cycles only shot one ray per pixel you would end up with a pretty terrible looking result.  After all, if a surface is 50% diffuse and 50% glossy, that one ray can't act both ways, it has to choose one.  Not to mention more complicated shader node trees, or even the fact that many shaders (like diffuse) introduce a random element to the bounce of a ray.  This is solved by sending multiple rays per pixel and averaging the RGB values of each ray.  You can change the number of rays cycles shoots per pixel by changing the number of samples.


linking objects in blender 2.8 Is there a different process for linking objects in blender 2.8? I've tried to link objects in blender 2.8 the way we used to in blender 2.79:

Go to File
Click on Link
Browse to directory(Objects) in my case I wanted to append an object.
Click on the object
Click Link from Library.

The object gets linked, but I can't move the geometry at all. What is the problem, is this a bug in blender 2.8? OR is there another method for doing this now?

You'd better just make a Proxy (Object -> Relations -> Make Proxy) or make a link duplicate of the linked object ( Duplicate Linked ).
Linked object can't be moved, but linked duplicate of linked objects can (they work just like proxies for this matter).


Creating Materials for Second Life I have been creating materials on mesh objects for Second Life by selecting an area of vertices and assigning a new Material to it. When I export to Collada/DAE and upload to SL, each of the Material areas appears to have a line/shadow around it. I have also been using Separate by selection to divide larger mesh objects into smaller mesh objects, but I get the exact same outline/shadow between mesh objects. Is there some setting or procedure that is optimal for creating materials/objects for Second Life?

Here is a snapshot of how it looks in SL:

~Sean

Adding a screenshot of my Blender setup.

My question was answered on the Second Life Forum: These shadows happen because of a setting during upload to Second Life/OpenSim. On the first screen of SL/OS upload is a setting called "Generate Normals". Setting that to on causes the shadows. Setting that to off will not produce the shadows seen above.


How to edit object deformed by a curve modifier In the objects that are deforming along a curve, I would like to know how to move an edge along the curve.

When I try to edit an object that is deformed along a curve in the "Edit Mode", the object reverts to its original form. I want to edit in a state of being deformed, before applying the modifier.
And if possible, I want to move some edges along the curve that are used for deformation. Sorry for my poor English.

In the modifier there are two options that will allow you to work in edit mode.

The first one will allow you to display the modifier in edit mode.

The second will allow you to edit the mesh while is being deformed by the modifier:


How to animate a surface that only emits light when touched by object? I'm trying to find a way to make a surface (or object) that sort of "reacts" to touch/collision by emitting glowing light around that touched area. Best example would be the scenes in James Camerons "Avatar" where they run through the forrests full of reactive bioluminescenting plants. Basically I need it for an architectural project where I want to add that pressure sensitive light emission feature to stair surfaces to make them interactive and more attractive for the employees to use. Need to make an animation of that under the bottom line. Ideas anyone? Keyframing when touched seems to be a bit unauthentic/ineffective.

Set up your reactive surfaces as a Canvas for Dynamic Paint, and your contact surfaces as Brushes.

You can store the effects of the brush on the canvas either as vertex data or as a a UV-mapped image.

In this example, The steps were UV unwrapped, and a wetmap was baked as an image sequence, which was then used as the factor to mix between a diffuse and emissive shader in the steps' material. The wetmap was set to fade after about 40 frames. On the whole, the tools guide you through their use; I can't think of any major gotchas.

The Canvas (Steps) was set up like this:

The Brush like this:

I baked out the maps using the 'Bake Image Seqence' button in the 'Canvas' panel.

You can use the image sequence as a mask. something like this:

And this is the sort of result -

The method given here bakes the paint result to image-maps, on the assumption that you won't want a highly subdivided model in your architectural render. However, to preview the effects of the various settings, it would be better to make a highly subdivided test-bed canvas, (a plane will do) and set up a simple brush, say a sphere. Then set the 'Format' in the canvas to 'Vertex', and the mode to 'Paint'. Then by having the animation set to continuous looped playback in the timeline, and moving the brush with respect to the canvas, you can see the effects of settings live in the viewport.

I would suggest you want to select 'Wetmap' as the preview in the Output sub-panel, and play with 'Spread' and 'Shrink' effect speeds, and 'Drying' and 'Dissolve' times in the Advanced panel. Also adjust the initial 'Wetness' (load) of the brush. These will all interact to give a variety of organic feels to the animation.

Don't forget, either, that the wetmap can wind up being used to mask a variety of other effects in the material of your steps, including, for example, other textures, which may themselves be animated. The results can also be used to control particle systems.


Where is mesh debug to be found? I am working in blender 2.69 and have been following the Blender Tutorials DVD12 on Youtube --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaKYhO-XMFo
The video above refers to the "Mesh Debug" options in the properties pane. I know its only visible in edit mode but for some reason I can't see it on my version. i have also downloaded the latest version of Blender 2.76b and the mesh debug option is not visible there either. Any ideas how I can make this option show on my version?

It's in the (by default included but disabled) 3d print toolbox addon, but it changed the name, now is called "mesh analysis" in the 3d view properties panel (open with N)


Best way to bevel corners for rendering imported CAD models? I'm trying to rig and render models that I'm exporting from Siemens NX. The models therefor have sharp edges, and in rendering them I would like to round/bevel the edges. I am at the moment attempting to use the bevel modifier, but it typically fails to work at all, and when it does it runs into some pretty bad failure modes. I'm hoping that this is something that someone else has done before. Thanks!

Here is a sample widget exported straight from NX (stl): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8j_hMJwdVcBcFBXLWpXTHVZMUU/view?usp=sharing

Bevel with angle limit (80deg, but happens with most angles):

Failure also happens when there is no limit; the edges become notched.

As mentioned by Mr Zak, the problem here is your topology which, as is common importing from CAD-Like solid modeling applications, is quite messy and unfriendly for mesh based subdivision modeling.

Ideally you should bevel directly in the CAD application, as it is the most accurate and geometrically correct way to do it, otherwise, cleaning up your mesh may give some positive results.

After importing enter edit mode on your object and press Alt +
J to convert all triangles to quads.
Then add a decimate modifier and set it to Planar, adjust the angle limit to a desired value, not to high as to remove too much detail from your geometry, not to low, as to leave too much geometry for beveling (around 2º worked fine for me)
Add a a bevel modifier and set the Limit Method to Angle


How to prevent users from firing weapons really fast? I made a weapon that shoots projectiles in blender. Whenever the user holds down the fire button, the weapon shoots projectiles at the rate I want it to shoot. However, when the user hits the fire button rapidly, they can shoot as many projectiles as they want depending on how fast they press it.

How can I make the gun shoot at the same rate, regardless of wether the user spams the fire button or not.

This method explains how to achieve this result using only logic bricks.

First enable TRUE level triggering.
Then assign the number of ticks it requires before proceeding to the next action.

This should easily work in your case.


Special Builds With Blender I installed a special build from GraphicAll.org for blender. It gave me a .7z file after the download. How do I install this into blender or use it for blender?

You don't have to "install" that file into blender. That file IS a blender version! You just need to decompress that file with 7zip (http://www.7-zip.org/), a free open source compression/decompression utility which handles many formats. 7z is usually more efficient than .zip so is often used as alternative for big files.


How to run Blender on the discontinued Intel 4 Series Express Chipset Family? is there any way to run Blender on the discontinued Intel 4 Series Express Chipset Family or will I have to fin

That is a very old Intel chipset. If you are asking about the integrated GPU (which is my assumption), the answer is, unfortunately, no.
According to https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/ you'll need a 4th gen Core i3/i5/i7 series (Haswell) CPU with integrated GPU or newer for Intel graphics.
Edit: The Intel 4 Series Express (Mobile) Chipset has the Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics hardware onboard. This is the same as the desktop GMA X4500 hardware, which is an OpenGL 2.0 card: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/gma-x4500.c3140
If you really want to try blender, try a version before 2.76, as per the requirements page--it only needs up to OpenGL 1.4. Your performance will likely be terrible (slow clock speed, no dedicated VRAM, so it siphons some from your system) and you definitely will not get any CUDA support or any other fun things. Sorry!


Simplify a complicated mesh for export as an STL ok so basically, I’m trying to make a mesh for the purposes of 3D printing. I started with an imported stl file and then did a bunch of sculpting to shape areas how I wanted. This has made the blender file huge and my computer hates me. Anyway I finally managed to get it to a stage where I could export the model as an stl file, however when my 3D printing software tries to process it can’t because the model has these points with an absurdly high concentration of vertices around the sculpting areas (most of it now essentially ‘inside’ the mesh). If I try to decimate the model or merge by distance its basically impossible to keep the overall quality. Is there any easy way just to make a new mesh using the ‘outside’ shape of the model? This will then be simplified and my 3D printing software will probably be able to handle it?
Thanks for anyone’s time who has read this

I agree with Jachym.   The remesh modifier may do the trick.

In object-mode, select Modifiers, and add the Remesh modifier.  Find the Octree Depth Option (it will be the main one for your issue) and adjust it up or down.  Careful! With high poly-counts like you have - adjusting it higher may cause Blender to crash so take the necessary precautions with this in mind.

See this vid at the 1:30 timeframe to see it in action.

https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-symantec-ext_onb&hsimp=yhs-ext_onb&hspart=symantec&p=tutor4u+blender+text#id=5&vid=79e85e222216fa41a1ec00cee407affe&action=view


Is it possible to store edge data layers? Something that I do frequently in blender is use a UV map for coordinates to map an otherwise procedural texture, such as when texturing a snake. I don't always know where the best seams would be beforehand, so I like to try putting them in a different places and create multiple UV layers. So I was wondering, in the same way as one can switch between multiple UV maps, is it possible to store edge data sets, for example, save multiple sets of UV seams or edge creases and toggle between them?

You can save "edge data" like that in the form of seams on UV maps.  Use "seams from islands" operation in UV editor to select what your seams would have been for that UV map.
Can also maintain multiple copies of your model, and use a data transfer modifier to copy seam status (or all sorts of other edge statuses.)


How do I merge material slots? I have a complex shape with many materials assigned to it so I can't just easily pick faces to those to apply this material, so how do I reduce 3 slots that have the exact same material into one slot on one shape?

Merge materials in 3 easy steps.

This is your materials list:

RED
GREEN
BLUE

If you want to make all that's BLUE to be RED.
1) Select the BLUE material.
2) Use the up arrow till the BLUE is under the RED.
3) Delete the BLUE by using the minus button.
Done!
Now all that was BLUE is now RED.

The way Blender behaves if you delete a material all the material that used that slot will inherit the slot above unless it is the top slot then it will inherit the one below.


Mirror not work correctly for stl imported file I have a troubleshoot with my blender file. I've upload a stl file in blender and when i apply a mirror modify to X axis i see 2 objects. I tried to change 3d cursor position, but not work.

By mirroring you don't get two different objects; it's still the same. The point on which your object is mirrored is not the 3D cursor but the origin of the object.

Change the Origin

If you want so set the origin to a specific point, mark the point with the 3D cursor, where you want to set it. Then hit Ctrl-Shift-Ctrl-C and click on Origin to 3D Cursor.

Alternative Way without changing the origin

One property of the Mirror modifier is called Mirror Object. Instead of mirroring the object at its own origin it will use the chosen object's.


How to keyframe smoke particle size via python script Hi Blender Python users!

I was just wondering if anyone knows a way to key frame the particle size of a smoke flow particle system over time with a python script.

For example: I would like to change the flow settings particle size to start at size=1 and end at size= 0.1

Great community here! Thanks for your help!

Right now my script looks like this.

        bpy.ops.object.modifier_add(type='SMOKE')
        bpy.context.object.modifiers["Smoke"].smoke_type = 'FLOW'
        bpy.context.object.modifiers["Smoke"].flow_settings.smoke_flow_type = 'FIRE'
        bpy.context.object.modifiers["Smoke"].flow_settings.smoke_flow_source = 'PARTICLES'
        bpy.context.object.modifiers["Smoke"].flow_settings.particle_system = bpy.data.objects["Smoke/Fire Particle Emitter"].particle_systems["ParticleSystem"]
        bpy.context.object.modifiers["Smoke"].flow_settings.use_initial_velocity = True
        bpy.context.object.modifiers["Smoke"].flow_settings.velocity_factor = 0.2
        bpy.context.object.modifiers["Smoke"].flow_settings.use_particle_size = True
        bpy.context.object.modifiers["Smoke"].flow_settings.particle_size = 1.2
        bpy.context.object.modifiers["Smoke"].flow_settings.subframes = 50
        bpy.context.object.modifiers["Smoke"].flow_settings.use_absolute = False

Script for blender 2.79 with a few options.

import bpy

keyframes = [1,10,20,30]
object = bpy.context.active_object

frame = 50
value = 3.14159265

grouped = [(70,10), (80, 9), (90, 5), (100, 1)]

def incremmental_add(obj, frmlst):
    for frame in frmlst:
        obj.modifiers["Smoke"].flow_settings.particle_size += 1.0
        obj.keyframe_insert(data_path='modifiers["Smoke"].flow_settings.particle_size', frame=frame)

def single_frame(obj, frm, val):
    scn = bpy.context.scene
    scn.frame_set(frm)
    obj.modifiers["Smoke"].flow_settings.particle_size = val
    obj.keyframe_insert(data_path='modifiers["Smoke"].flow_settings.particle_size', frame=frm)

def tuple_list(obj, frame_n_val):
    for i in frame_n_val:
        single_frame(obj, i[0], i[1])

incremmental_add(object, keyframes)

single_frame(object, frame, value)

tuple_list(object, grouped)


Help With Boolean Modifier, Cutting Objects Still Visible I am trying to cut out a certain part of my model in a circular pattern and I am using the Boolean modifier to do it, unfortunately in the final render, the cylinders (which is what I used to cut) stay visible even when I hit the visibility eye.

Here are the cylinders cutting, the part.

The boolean object is not deleted after applying the Boolean modifier, it is still here, you need to delete it or make it invisible. You say that you've disabled the eye icon but the eye is only for viewport visibility, you need to disable the camera icon if you don't want it in your render, first enable it in the dropdown menu:


Floral 3D pattern more efficent way I want to print a ball with flower pattern on it for my niece, like this cylinder I already did. This one, I made in sculting mode by hand, painting some flower patterns on in, but I think, there could be an more efficient way to do it, maybe by normal maps, or brush tamplates with patterns of flowers.

There are at least 2 ways, the Displace modifier or the Sculpt mode.
You could find a black and white floral repeatable pattern, blur it a bit:

Then create your object, subdivide it a bit, give it a Displace modifier with the floral pattern as texture (If you've unwrapped your object you can choose Coordinates > UV), give it 2 Subdivision Surface modifiers, put them above and below the Displace modifier, and when you're glad, duplicate the object and apply the modifiers:

You could also sculpt on your object. In that case make sure your object is subdivided enough, then in Sculpt mode, use your pattern as texture image (go into the Properties panel > Texture to load your pattern) and set the Mapping to Stencil (left click to move the image, left click + Ctrl to rotate the image, left click + Shift to enlarge). This way you can be more precise:

If you struggle in any of those steps, please tell me.


Modeling Airplane Nose Shape I need help recreating the nose shape of the airplane you see in the images below. I also have the .blend file included because I think it would be easier to see everything that I have already tried and so you can see the shape that I'm trying to go for.

http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=53057

Please look through the different layers in the .blend file. The second layer has an airplane that was downloaded online for reference which I'm trying to recreate, and the rest of the layers are just attempts. I have tried using the bridge operation mostly and the loop tools addon to create the circle at the end. The third layer is my mesh but merged with the front of the other airplane. I also had to apply one subdivision so I had more vertices to work with. Also, the name of the airplane is SR22T if you may need more reference images.

I fixed it by using creases and looptools for the end bits


How to make a smooth mesh Im making a twisted iron bar. I have added array modifier and with the help of empty i have twisted. After adding array modifier the edges been seen. How can i remove that edges of the array to look a continious mesh. After adding the sub division modifier the mesh look odd. How can i make a smooth mesh and plz suggest me is this method right or can i go with other method

You need to delete all faces that are going to be hidden by the Array modifier (selected on the screenshot, delete them on both sides of the object). Then enable the "merge" option in the modifier settings.

Normally, this is the way I'd be going for. Sadly, I can't tell you why the subsurf modifier messes up in this mesh. But if you put a fairly high Crease amount on most of the edges (except those that should be smoothed) it works fine.

If you are looking from your object from a distance, the Edge split modifier will do the trick. If you have some spare render time, go for a Subsurf and eventually then a Bevel modifier.


How to model this seat with curved edges/corners I would like model this seat. I'm using version 2.91 at the moment.

I have not found a way to smoothen the blunt edges. Currently this is the state of the seat:

Note that the edges are rounded in the initial image. How would one do this using the least complex method? I am fairly new to Blender, and am not yet familiar with 98% of the functions. I would also like to be able to make the corners rounded. Does anyone have any advice?
Thanks

Yes, itś really simple, all you have to do is shade it smooth, in other words, find ¨shade smooth¨ and click that. DO NOT just add more faces until it looks smooth, blender will likely crash as it did with me.


How do I resize colour effect strips in the VSE? I need to be able to resize the effect strip "Colour" in the VSE, which is defaulting to full screen size, and I can find no options to resize it to be smaller and occupy the exact part of the video I need it to occupy. It's all or nothing. I tried looking it up in the Blender manual, at https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/editors/vse/sequencer/strips/effects/color.html, but those instructions were not helpful at all and appear to be wrong. I have no tools to edit the size of my colour strip and I tried using the "crop" tool inside the "edit strip" box, but that did nothing.

So how am I supposed to do this?

When you enable cropping, enable "Image Offset" as well.

I also recommend you check out the VSE_Transform_Tools Addon which makes this kind of thing a piece of cake.


How to model the interior of a building, inside the actual building Let's say that I want to model the interior of a house, inside the house. By this I mean that I have a scene where the outside of the house is modelled but the inside of the house also needs to be modelled. What is the practical method to do this?

What is a practical/accepted method of doing this?

Should I cut away some of the walls? (but then, how do I render from a viewpoint that should include the walls that have been cut away?)

Is there some other clever method to do this?

I'm not sure what exactly you are trying to do but I think this might help:

You can "hide" the walls by selecting them and pressing "H". Then you can place your models inside the building. Also, you can make use of the "Wireframe" mode. Just press "Z".

I hope this helped. :)


How to set the value of a MeshPolygonStringProperty to a string? I am trying to set a string attribute per polygon on a mesh. To create the property, I use:
a = m.polygon_layers_string.new(name='object')
x = a.data[0]

but when I try to set the data:
x.value = 'blah'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<blender_console>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: bpy_struct: item.attr = val: MeshPolygonStringProperty.value expected a bytes type, not str

When I inspect the types:
type(x)
<class 'bpy.types.MeshPolygonStringProperty'>

and
type(x.value)
<class 'bytes'>

But the documentation here mentions the type of x.value should be a string, or am I misreading?
What is the correct way to store a string per polygon?

Use the bmesh API
Suggest using bmesh for polygon string layers.
import bpy
import bmesh

context = bpy.context
ob = context.object
me = ob.data

bm = bmesh.new()
bm.from_mesh(me)
str_layer = bm.faces.layers.string.new("Foo")

for f in bm.faces:
    f[str_layer] = bytes(f'Face {f.index}', 'utf-8')  # b`foo`

bm.to_mesh(me)
bm.clear()

for s in me.polygon_layers_string:
    print(f" Layer {s.name}")
    for p in s.data:
        print(p.value.decode())


Can I get vertex's coordinates result of cloth simulation? blender version==2.9.
I want to get vertex coordinates result of cloth simulation(with python script, if I could).
Now, although I could get the vertex coordinates, they are before cloth simulation.
v_world = v.co @ obj.matrix_world
bpy.ops.object.empty_add(
                 type='ARROWS',
                 location=v_world)

can anyone help me? Thanks in advance!!

You can use the dependendy graph to do that (supposing the simulation is already baked):
import bpy
import bmesh

# Set the frame considered as the result of the sim
bpy.context.scene.frame_current = 30

# Get the dependency graph state for this frame
dg = bpy.context.evaluated_depsgraph_get()

# The object
obj = bpy.context.object

# The mesh from the object and dependency graph
bm = bmesh.new()
bm.from_object(obj, dg)

# Take the coordinates
for v in bm.verts:
    print(v.co)

del bm


Can Blender still be used commercially since Java licensing has changed? As I was installing Blender, I was prompted to update my version of Java, but I don't want to update it because of the Java licensing change.
Can Blender be used with an older version of Java that predates the licensing change?

Blender is made with Python and C/C++, not Java. Also Blender is free and open source software that can be used commercially in any condition.
In completement a link to Blender's licence page.

Blender is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL, or
“free software”).
This license grants people a number of freedoms:
You are free to use Blender, for any purpose
You are free to distribute Blender
You can study how Blender works and change it
You can distribute changed versions of Blender

The GPL strictly aims at protecting these freedoms, requiring everyone
to share their modifications when they also share the software in
public. That aspect is commonly referred to as Copyleft.
The Blender Foundation and its projects on blender.org are committed
to preserving Blender as free software.


Imperfect symmetries (in sculpt mode) When in Sculpt Mode, I usually keep the X symmetry locked, which is useful. But isn't it also a bit inconsistent? now and then, while sculpting, i notice that the symmetry is not always perfect. is this normal? or am i doing something wrong (such as hittin without knowing some shortcut or something)?

There are absolutely inconsistencies, I believe it's a result of smoothing but may be wrong. Mesh is absolutely perfect before using sculpt mode (I checked), from the side in this image you can see that the mesh no longer aligns correctly. This was using X symmetry, the default brush (+ autosmooth) + smooth / autosmooth.


Tryed to install mb-lab- master to blender user preference error message invalid syntax tried to install MB-Lab-master from github and receive this message from the user preference menu on Blender 2.79b
see: https://github.com/animate1978/MB-Lab/wiki/Installation
second question is , If I can get it to load , does it add a tab
in the user menu the same way the makehuman add-on did ?
and the entire error message reads :

Traceback(most recent call last):
File"C:\Program files|Blender Foundation\Blender\2.79\scripts\modules\addon_utils.py.line 331 in enable mod=import(module_name)

File "C:\users\thund\App Data\Roaming\Blender\2.79\scripts\addons\MB-Lab-master_init_.py, line 1241 filter_glob: bpy.props.StringProperty(
                      ^
SyntaxError : Invalid Syntax

so can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong here ?

That version has been coded for Blender 2.80 Beta.

You want this version for Blender 2.79 - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Wxly5xEYQwPvCvo1Gn95r7iPk02PTWD-


Render border settings In this question there is a screenshot showing the ability to set render border settings. However when I use Ctrl-b and select an area I don't see these settings in the options area, it just shows the text "Set Render Border" with a blank area (Blender 2.73b).  Was this ability removed?

I'm mainly interested in these settings to see if they can be interpolated in an animation.

The ability to alter the values has been removed. Adjusting the values was removed in 2.69. Up until 2.71 you could adjust the camera only option.

While you may not be able to adjust the values from the operator you can access and adjust the values used for the border. For the final render they can be found at scene.render.border_max_x... Note that min to max values are 0.0 to 1.0 so the clipping is a percentage of the render size. You should be able to alter these values in a frame_change_pre handler.

I think cropping the image in the compositor would be a better approach. You can keyframe the settings of a crop node to move it around.

Some other options are to animate a mask in the movie clip editor (part of the camera tracking) or use object pass index and animate an object to create the mask.


Bad rendering with shadows and facets Its not the first time I render a model but now I have 2 problems as you can see.
The "shadows" on the door for example and the spoiler of the car which is not smooth (even if smooth button is selected).
Catmull-Clark modifier is on with 2 subdivisions on rendering.

What's wrong?
thanx

From the pictures given, it can bee seen that the door is a separate object, the reason the there is no smooth transition between the door and the rest of the car is because there is no shared geometry. I would join the two objects together and use loop tools to bridge the geometry together

To enable loop tools go to file ->user preferences -> add on -> loop tools


I am trying to make an animation of a double planet, can't seem to get it right. Trying to make an animation of a double planet orbiting their sun and sharing a common barycentre.

How do I go about making this work?

My solution is to use an empty (Empty1) as the Moon/Planet barycentre which follows a large path representing the star orbit. The moon and Planet each have a path that follows Empty1 around the Star.

Here you can see a Constraint example:

These are the loops indicating days and a year:

Of course the large orbit path should also be eccentric but I doubt that the difference in mass here would be noticeable ;-)


IK Solver Won't Bend Knees Except Backwards -- Rolling Bones Not Helping, Constraints Not Helping The short version is I have an IK setup on my rig.  The legs work mostly okay, except for the knees. The knees will NOT bend to find a solution to the IK problem. The arms, set up in a similar way, will bend correctly at the elbows to find a solution.

If I lift the foot pad goal up slightly, the knees will NOT bend. However, if I change the constraints on the knees and allow them to bend backwards, they WILL do that to solve the problem. They won't bend in the correct direction.

I thought this might have something to do with the rotation of the bones, so I tried rolling them with no luck. I tried adjusting the position of the knee pole, but that didn't help either. I can't seem to figure out why the IK solver is so opposed to bending the knees to solve a problem. The issue happens on both legs.

I do have a small bend in the knees, so the related issue (Similar issue: IK-rig doesn't bend when I add elbow-target/elbow-pole) doesn't seem to apply.  I can't share the .blend file yet, but I'm working on getting permission.

EDIT: I've tried every permutation of rolling the bones, changing the pole angle, and knee bend limit.

The Leg Setup:

Leg Setup with Axes Showing:

Solution Not Found:

Visible Constraints in the Knee:

Relaxed Constraints and the Bad Solution:

EDIT: Adding emphasis.

EDIT: Adding more images.

If I turn off the knee constraints, leaving only the pole bone, the hip twists backwards and the knee points away.  That might seem like the pole rotation is wrong, so I tried reversing it... (See next picture.)

When I reverse the pole angle, the hip twists around 180 degrees to compensate.  The knee STILL bends backwards, but points towards the pole.

Thank you to everyone who responded.  A synopsis of the workaround.  (I say workaround because this isn't really a fix, but it's more than functional enough to unblock progress and move forward.  A true fix would be figuring out why the IK solver isn't deducing a solution to chains of length three.)

The original IK configuration had the constraint placed on the FOOT bone with an IK chain of length three.  The solution involved moving the IK constraint to the SHIN bone [one up] and decrementing the IK chain by one.  Now the knee bends properly.

I speculate (again SPECULATE, I don't know if there is any basis here) that perhaps having the foot as the target of the IK chain meant that there were two bends [the knee and the angle] which were being used for determining the direction of the bend -- that is to say, instead of pointing the knee bend at the knee pole, it was trying to point the ankle at the pole and ignoring the knee, keeping that segment strait.

I'm very grateful to everyone who provided insight.  Special kudos to Jerryno and Naioai for setting me on the right track.


Creating the Minecraft End Portal in Blender Perhaps a reference video would be needed to show this, but to clarify, merely the portal and its animations appear nearly impossible to create, the frame itself is simple diffusion and optional reflection. Mind this is using cycles.

I though the best way to attain this would be to have the position of the camera changing cause a movement of the portal textures however it has proven futile.

And so I ask, is this possible in Cycles?

EDIT:

My original plan was to use the UV Warp modifier to create the movement effect, with several planes underneath each other to create the depth. However, the way it appears to be a void, another area is the piece I lack.

The frame of the portal, again, is not a problem.

In reference to a comment that referenced a similar concept using a Nether portal that showed the Nether upon the other side, is similar, however there is no need to create another world on the other side, as I want to stay true to the visual mechanics of Minecraft.

Here is an example of the in-game version of what the goal is.
https://youtu.be/ZpJiEbgo3Z4

In Cycles you may achieve this cool effect creating two different Scenes and combining them in compositor using the Alpha Over node (with a Holdout shader as a mask).

First check the Transparent checkbox in the Film panel of the Render header.

Create a plane and place it so it fits the door's jamb. Give it a Holdout shader. It will be used as a mask for mixing the two scenes in one render.

Create a new Scene (press the + button in the very top header), then choose New.

Now you have two scenes. You may switch between them as pictured below. Build two different worlds in each one. Your Camera and door object with holdout plane should be in the first Scene.
NOTE: Remember to change all the settings (such as render engine type, render settings etc.) for the nelwly created scene, so it fits the previous one.

Now select the Camera and door object, press Ctrl+L-->Objects to Scene and choose the second Scene (Scene.001). Objects origins should change their colors to blue- it means they're linked. Now you got them present in both scenes.

Now being in the first Scene go to the Node Editor (compositing nodes), add two Render Layers nodes, choose different scene for each one, render each scene (press the camera icon) and finally mix them using Alpha Over node (Add-->Color-->Alpha Over).

Open the Uv Editor in separate window and render (F12) being in the first Scene . Thanks to Alpha Over node your 'magic portal' is ready.

BONUS: To 'pass through' the other side of the portal you have to animate the Alpha Over node's Factor value. Keyframe it (I) with value 1.000 at the start of your animation, then go to the point when your camera 'doesn't see', what's on the other side of the portal and keyframe it again. Now go to the next frame (where your camera is behind the holdout plane), change the Fac value to 0.000 and keyframe it. After rendering you'll be on the other side :).


UV texture not rendered as seen by camera? I have been working on a finger model and trying to add texture on that. I was successful, but the texture is not getting rendered as seen by the camera. In other way the orientation is different. The images are shown below:

The 3D model of the finger:

Next the texture i am trying to map on it.

The unwrapped layout along with texture:

This is model seen by the camera:

The final rendered image:

The nodes Editor layout:

As you can see, the rendered image and the texture seen by the camera is different.

The problem is that you have 2 UV maps defined for the mesh, and the one selected ("UVMap") is applying the image texture the wrong way.

If you select the other map ("UVMap.001"), you'll get the mapping that you want.


Final render leaves objects out I have been trying to create a donut to practice my Blender-skills and so far, it went pretty well. I have made a donut with icing, sprinkles (particles) and some texture (paint) and because I liked the result, I tried to render the image. However, the render leaves the icing out (see image)]1! I have been searching the internet and found some solutions but none of them worked. I have made sure the render-icon in the viewport is checked and the icing should be visible to the camera (box is checked: object - visibility - camera). I have absolutely no clue on what to try next... Maybe someone here has a useful tip...?
P.S. Is it possible that it has something to do with the particles? I used this donut document to make a donut before and that one rendered completely. This time I tried to make metallic looking particles and now I have this problem... That is the only thing I did different (as far as I'm aware). Every tip is much appreciated!

make sure that under the settings with that square icon that shadow catcher is not checked. and also in the particle settings make sure that 'show emitter' is on.


How do I merge smoothing shaders seemlessly without joining objects? I'm having an issue with creating a game asset for the Creation Engine.

I am trying to have two objects, a head and body, match seamlessly together without joining them. They don't and it's because the normal vectors have a mind of their own, unless I join the objects and weld them together (alt+m).

The smoothing shaders look like a complete mismatch between the two objects. I've tried editing them both, by having two selected and entering edit mode, and then trying to calculate the normals based upon selection, but nothing I've tried seems to be working. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Remove the smoothing shader > merge those 2 objects using CTLR+J > smooth that one (merged) object > apply the modifier > once you're done and you're not going to edit the model anymore, in edit mode select one edge that between your head and body and press P.


How do I add more polygons? I want to sculpt this ball but the polygons are too big, I want to add more, but I don't know how.

Thanks in advance.

When you create your primitive object you always have the possibility to change some parameters on the bottom of the Tools panel, if you increase Segments and Rings it will create more polygons. If you ever move your object or go in Edit mode, though, you won't have access to these parameters anymore.

But actually when you sculpt there's a tool called Dyntopo that allows you to increase the topology only on the area you sculpt with your brush, that is useful because you don't need to increase your object up to a crazy amount of polygons if you don't need details everywhere. The lower the dyntopo Detail Size factor is the more it will add polygons.

Anyway, even if you end up with a very high poly at the end you can come back to a lower poly with tricks like baking the normals for a low poly version of your object (in this case, before any Dyntopo, save the low-poly version).

You could also dig into the Multiresolution modifier, nice way to sculpt.


Can you "shrink to fit" clothes? I once saw someone design a very rough shape for clothes, then run some physics to shrink them into place around the figure. Can Blender do that (run cloth physics while shrinking them)?

Maybe not optimal, but "Shape" in the Cloth options has a "Shrinking factor", it non-zero it violently shrinks the cloth but it can be animated, so a simulation with this going from zero to whatever desired value will make a skin tight cloth.


Why do I need topology? Should I first make a high poly mesh then make low poly mesh based on the high poly mesh so I can animate better or what should I do? Why should I even make new topology, what's the benefit of making it?

A topology is an elementary thing of everything, you can animate high poly sculpt, it would be a pain and your computer would just explode. Good topology makes model deform in a good way with low effort.
It doesn't matter if you start with low poly from scratch or model a high poly and then do a retopology. As long as you want to manipulate the model and animate it you need the low poly. If the model is just for printing or visual it doesn't matter that much, but even tho good topology makes things easier.