Stack several time the same channel? I have a complex animation movement so I parented my mesh to several empties that I animate separately.

EDIT : eg. a robot character, made of serval meshes; which are parented to :

a null who rotates on the Y axis (main move); which is parented to :
a "ticking" cycle on the Y axis; to break the "linearity" of the rotation with a stopmo-like movement.  The tick is only a few keys with a cycle modifier applied on the curve.

I personnaly think that it's more easy to "break" the animation steps.

I was wondering if, rather than doing this (can be a mess for complex animations), it was possible to stack several time the same channel (here, Y rotation) so I can combine those two movements while keeping my keys clean ?
If it is possible, how ?
Thanks !

Using drivers, you can use a channel as input value for almost everything you want to animate.

To keep it simple, I've used only two objects: the location X channel of the Sphere will be applied to the location X channel of the Cube

In this example, I've added drivers to the Cube location, (move the cursor over the location fields then press d)

In the Graph Editor, switch to Drivers Mode

Select the channel you want to animate, then set the Drivers properties in the Properties Panel (n)

If you only need to copy the channel without any operations, you can set type="Averaged Value".
Otherwise, you can choose the type you need:


How to Translate All These Objects At Once? I am new to Blender so this question is probably a very easy one to answer.
I have this minecart obstacle I made with 17 different objects that can be seen in the "Layers" Tab. I would just like to know how to select all the objects at once in the "Layers" Tab and translate them to the origin so the minecart as a whole is at origin. Is that possible? Right now the minecart is to the left of the origin.
Thank you! :)

you can select them one by one in the "outliner" (not layers) by Shift clicking on each object's name, one by one.
or you can go to the 3d View where your objects are and press A once or twice to select them all.

To move them to the origin (0,0,0 at the center of the 3d view) , first press shiftc to make the cursor go to the origin.
then (while the objects still all selected ) press shiftS , and choose selected to 3d cursor.


Strange drawing of selections in edit mode I am running Debian testing/unstable with LXDE as Desktop, and with the latest Blender update (2.71+dfsg1-1) selected vertices are drawn differently. See the following picture for a before/after view.. How can I make selections again appear like in the left part of the image (except downgrading to a really old version)? Or is that a bug with the Debian version of Blender?

UPDATE: I installed the latest Blender for Linux from blender.org, blender-2.72-linux-glibc211-i686.tar.bz2 -- the problem is present in this version as well. This makes me wonder if it could be a problem with the Linux desktop. Are there graphics settings that can be tweaked?

Additionally, if I enable the setting 'Show Weights', the vertex is rendered correctly (left image), just everything has a blue tint. If I enable Shading -> Multitexture -> Matcap the selection is rendered correctly as well. This leaves me to believe it is not a bug related to the graphics drivers but to some other (default) setting that has changed recently. Any ideas?

UPDATE 2: I checked all combinations of options and with some the rendering is ok, with some not. With some it depends on the selection mode -- for example, with matcap if I switch to face selection mode, the middle point is missing. The bad thing is that there is no combination where the behaviour is acceptable :/

Probably not important, but with Windows 7 it works flawlessly (so I figure it's not a HW bug at least).

Hardware: Intel i7 860, ATI 5750 (I know, this one is ancient). I'm using default Debian graphics drivers which should be the open source ones. I should stress that until and including 2.69 there were no problems; the fact that I can switch on `Show Weights' and the lines are drawn correctly leaves me to assume that the drivers shouldn't be a problem. Is there more information I can provide?

When a selection looks like that it usually means that there is a double vertex there. Two vertices in the same spot, and you only selected one of them.

To select both vertices, change the Viewport Shading mode to Wireframe Z, then with either circle select C, border select B, or just right clicking twice, select both vertices. If you want only one vertex there, with both (or more) selected press Alt M > At Center.


exec() works differently in Blender? Found this example on StackExchange:

foo = "bar"
exec(foo + " = 'something else'")
print(bar)

Should print:

something else

Blender (2.73) gives an error that bar is not defined. Can this still be done in Blender?

EDIT: This actually works in a blank file. What doesn't work is:

class testThis():
    def printMe(self):
        foo = "bar"
        exec(foo + " = 'something else'")
        print(bar)

test = testThis()
test.printMe()

Result:

NameError: name 'bar' is not defined

So I'm not sure if it's Blender related.

Official build of Blender come with the latest of Python (3.4.2 as of Blender 2.73); this means that your code cannot compile/be interpreted since, when moving to version 3.0, Python changed print from a keyword to a function.

Your code should be:

foo = "bar"
exec(foo + " = 'something else'")
print(bar) #Print is now a function; must use function call syntax.


Emissive material not visible through glass on Eevee? Hi there i’ve been playing around in eevee with frosted glass and diffusers for lights. I seem to be running into an issue whereby the emissive material is being occluded by the glass shader at a certain point.
I’m not sure if this is a limitation of rasterization over ray tracing but it just seems to cutoff when the camera gets to a particular point (see cycles render fot the result I am after).
i’ve tried adjusting the refraction settings and adding in reflection cubemap but doesn’t seem to help, has anyone run into similar issues?

any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you

I've found glass shaders to be not so useful in EEVEE, so I save them for Cycles if I need them. Instead, try using a node arrangement such as this. I tinted the glass green to show that it's actually tinted, and I put a light bulb (on the front side) to show it's actually glass (reflective AND transparent). Pay attention to the blend modes on the right.

Hope this helps.


Preview a voronoi/magic/clouds/other texture? Usually, when I am using a Displace modifier on an object and want to use a texture for it, I can get a preview in the texture tab:

However, when I use the texture in the node editor as a mix shader fac input (as I have been doing recently), I cannot preview the texture in the texture tab.

How can I preview the texture in the node editor and change the contrast/brightness as I can with the Displace textures?

Thank you in advance.

You can't currently preview cycles textures independently in the texture tab, as far as I know, they belong to a completely different rendering system.

You can however get some kind of preview of the texture by previewing the material itself in the Materials tab of the Properties Window by expanding the preview panel and switching to a Flat preview object.


How to view the Console December 23, 2018

Blender 2.79

Installed the Add on Trainz Exporter and it is on my Blender Window:

I need to Install the TrainzMeshImporter however; to get it to work.

The console will tell you where it goes. I get the message:

Export failed please check CONSOLE Window

I can't find the Console Window no matter what I do.

There is a button in the upper left hand corner that has a Blue Circle I
This has a selection Python Console but this is not it.

Any Suggestions?

You are looking for the system console. That's in windows > Toggle system console:

Do not click the X on the console window since this will close blender. You can close the console only by clicking the toggle system console button again.
Edit: Here's how to do it on a mac: How to open system console to get output from Blender on Mac OS 10?
Hope this helps :)


How to export/import color palette from Brush in Texture Paint tab - Blender 2.8 Beta How can I export/import a color palette from Brush tool in Texture Paint tab for Blender 2.8 Beta?

I would like to use this palette in another project.

I found a previous question for an older version, but I am unable to find the same options: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/41136/65827

My Brush options looks like the following image, there doesn't appear to be a way of exporting/importing palette:

If you save your palette in a blend file, you can append that palette into a new file to work with. name it something so you can differentiate it from generic names if you want to keep from losing track, but the steps are pretty straight forward.
File>Append, then navigate to the source blend file, and once appended, choose it from the palette drop down menu.


Making trails in a curve mesh created by the Animation Nodes add-on I've asked the question before in here: Creating trails using Animation Nodes by delaying the frame of the following polygons . This was for making trails, but for objects only. I realized I want to do it with a curve that was hooked by two empty objects. Since Animation Nodes is not (yet) observing curve hooks, I can't apply the same  method suggested by Omar. I've also tried my first solution

But it didn't get what I've expected, for the curve is changing over time. Here's the result:

The solution that I've come in mind is to create a spline/curve using the add-on to avoid hooking so I could make trails in it by instancing the previous frames. But the question I have in mind now is: Would I be able to create this trails, and filling a polygon between them. (Additional question: If it's possible, how do I fill up with polygons between the created curve edges), if it's not possible, what method could you recommend to create trails in a hooked curve.
Animation Nodes - Animated object trail I've found this article that could help me create this, but I realized it's has a long method so I decided to ask a question first before doing it. Here's the nodes to create curve between two object (there could be a better method than this):

Blend file:

I'm currently using Animation nodes 2.0 in blender 2.79b, but you can answer me in Animation nodes 2.1

EDIT

Now I've tried to do making it myself with Omar's answer, I've tried to loop over the frames using float range in the time info node and plug it into the frame input of "object transforms input" to get the previous transforms of the two empty points I've made. (That's why I used AN 2.0 because it has frame input in object transforms input node unlike AN 2.1)
Now I have the vector list of the previous locations of my two empty points, I don't know how would I connect the spline according to indices of the vector lists, and connect it to "spline from points" node. Here's the nodes: (This maybe wrong XD)

If it is possible to achieve the desired result without the said frame input, it's welcome to be accepted.

You say you implemented hooks proceduraly, consequently you can construct the spline at any frame of your choosing. So, what you need to do is loop over the frames, construct the spline, evaluate some points onto it, and append those points. The loop will output a list containing the evaluate points at all frames. All you need to do now is construct a mesh from that by using the edge and polygon indices of the grid node as follows:


Why a mesh is begin squishes connected on a path with the curve modifier? This has never happened before, where am I going wrong, so weird.

As always with the curve modifier there is a lot that can go wrong lol, but I'd say you haven't applied the scale of your curve.


Bake object with many parts I need to bake this model for a game, but there are lots of small cylinders. If I join all the objects, the bake comes out with lots of black spots. Do I have to manually bake each object or is there an easier way?

I suggest you to "explode" the geometry and then bake,
explode means; you take everything apart so there is a margin between they, you have to do this for every pass except the ambient occlusion pass

-separate the pieces when there is a weird angle(not sure of this last pàrt)

Supplementary:
this video shows the process done in maya and substance painter, but its the same for blender
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fY3LEnoRxU&t=7s


texture baking problem I have 2 textures, I put them on the object and edited it with uv. After that, I baked them, but to me the cherry was such a thing! why is that ?

It looks like overlapping UVs. But I am not entirely sure if that is correct. You might want to check your UV wunrapping and see if there are some parts that overlap. If they do: Remove the overlapping side of the UV and bake it again.


How to do an Emboss effect in Blender? How can I create an emboss effect in Blender and set the angle and height. This node doesn't exist in Blender.

This effect is popular to convert a normal map into a curvature map.

Creation of the emboss filter effect

Blender has no emboss effect node, you have to recreate it, hopefully this effect will be available in the future into one node.

An emboss effect basically duplicates an image in two directions defined by an angle direction, one of the two images has his colors inverted. From 0/(-)180 the direction is only horizontal, from 90/-90 it is noly vertical. If the angle is set to the left with for example 95 the horizontal images are inverted, if it's at the bottom like -20 the vertical images are inverted.

The emboss takes three inputs:

the image on which to perform the emboss
the angle, it's the direction of the emboss
the height, it's how strong the image are separated

To better understand how the angle works, it will define a multiplier for the X and Y direction:

Angle at 90: it sets a multiplier at X: 0*height and Y: 1*height so the images won't move horizontally
Angle at -90: 0*height and Y: -1* height, the vertical images will be inverted
Angle at 45: X: 0.5*height and Y: 0.5*height
Angle at *-45: X: 0.5*height and Y: -0.5*height, the vertical images are inverted but not the horizontal because the angle is at the bottom right and not bottom left.

So here is the node setup to achieve the emboss effect, you can download the node setup here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18BIzLtwe_27HdtuB2ZZ_lfYCcq3Ym4Qv/view?usp=sharing

The node setup starts the three inputs above. The image is set in black and white and one is inverted.

For the Angle it is converted into a radians in order to works for the value is multiplied by Pi: 3.14159265359 then divided by 180. To define the direction multiplier the X value uses Cosine (the second value doesn't matter, it has no effect) and the Y value uses Sine.

The height is divided by two, because to have a separation of 50 pixels for example you need to move at 25 pixels in each direction. The value is multiplied by the direction multiplier then the X is plugged to the X input of a Translate or Transform node and the Y to the Y input.

The non-inverted image colors must have is translation values inverted and for the inverted image colors the translation values aren't inverted.
In the node setup above the top translation has the image inverted and the bottom has the values inverted.

Finally both images are combined with a Mix or Value node at 0.5.

A Gamma node at 2.2 can be added after it to convert the image in Linear like the generated emboss effect of Photoshop. Keep it in sRGB (without the gamma node) to work on it with gradient colors or to overlay it.

What can you do with the Emboss effects?

Almost every game artists use the Emboss to generate a curvature map from a normal map.
On a normal map the Red channel creates lighting coming from the right, so with an emboss at 0 degree and height generally of 1 to have 1 pixel width (Substance Painter's curvature use an height of 8) overlayed with the green channel with an angle at 90 degrees and the same height as the red you can generate a curvature map. Don't forget to set your normal as Linear in the "n" menu to convert the image in sRGB to get a correct result:

Additional informations:

Normal to curvature map (a quicker way to generate it without doing the emboss math nodes): https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/72602/23134
Normal to curvature smooth map: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/100637/23134
Fake hand painted texture: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/90153/23134


Advanced bevel of a rounded corner I've been racking my brain about this. I've been trying to model this relatively simple handrail but there is one part where I am just stuck. Here is the reference:

Now I sort of tried to bevel the corner of a cuboid. But I only get so far:

I kind of faked the desire result with a cylinder and a sphere, but I am sure there must be a more efficient way of getting there:

Grateful for any input! Thank you in advance!

Of course there is a simple way :)

Use Bevel modifier set to Weight, and with  Clamp Overlap
set Bevel Weight to 1 for selected edges.
It will result in some double vertices, you can use the Weld modifier to get rid of them.


How to apply force to a face of an object? I wanna do a test on an square (softbody) where the top surface is fixed and i want to apply a force to the bottom surface toward down to see the deformation of object due to the applied force.
Does anyone know how to do that? Thank you in advance!

The result is likely to be something like this:

Cheers

So there are a few questions here.  First, how to anchor the top of the soft body?
Soft body physics are anchored through the use of the "goal" trait, which is by default set to 0.7 strength for all verts-- so once you start using goal to pin soft body verts, you might find that your soft body physics change.
Create a vertex group for your mesh.  Assign the top vertices to that group, at weight 1.0.  Now, on properties/physics/soft body/goal, specify your vertex group as the goal vertex group, then in soft body/goal/strengths, set the default weight to 1.0.  Your assigned verts will no longer move with the sim-- they'll act pinned, as with cloth pinning.
This will prevent the other vertices in your soft body simulation from having any goal weight.  You can assign the other vertices to your goal group (at a lower weight than 1.0), or you can set the "Min" goal in soft body/goal/strengths.
The next question is, how to apply a force to a soft body mesh?  There are a number of different ways.  You could set collision type to "face" and then use a collider to press down on the mesh.  You could use a force field.  You could just use gravity.
What you describe in your comments is the desire to exert exactly 5 Newtons on your bottom verts.  That's the force necessary to accelerate 5kg by 1m/s/s, or to accelerate 1kg by 5m/s/s.  Using default Blender scales, and default soft body mass settings of 1kg, the simplest and easiest way to exert this force is via gravity.  In properties/scene/gravity, set your gravity vector to 0, 0, -5.0 and your softbody's 1kg verts will be accelerated downward at a force of 5 newtons.
But maybe you don't have constant mass for your soft body.  You can use a force field to do the same thing, just without quite as much precision.  Make a new force field, of "force" type.  To make it directional rather than radial set the shape of the force field, in properties/physics/force fields/settings/shape, to "plane".  Then, in force fields/falloff/Z direction, choose an axis for the force field to operate along.
But what strength to use to represent 5 Newtons?  Tests on 1kg and 5kg rigid bodies suggest that a strength of 120 is about right for 5N at 24 frames per second.  If you want to get more exact, remember that the distance that an accelerating body travels is equal to at^2/2, where a is acceleration and t is time.
But if you want to know what it's going to look like after that?  The answer is, it depends not only on your forces, not only on your soft body settings, but on your vertex density and your topology.  Soft body physics are not real physics.  Even though I did my best to answer your question, if you're wanting exact numbers for your forces, you shouldn't be using Blender's physics for your problems.  Blender's physics are tools to create pictures.  They bear only the tiniest resemblance to actual, real world physics.


Is there a way of applying the true displacement A new experimental feature that comes with Blender 2.78 for Cycles is that you can affect the geometry's displacement by plugging in a texture into the displacement input of the material output and setting the bump method to true.

My question is: Can you apply this deformation somehow? And if yes how and if no are there any work arounds?

There is no way to do that (at least currently) and unless your object covers a distance that would make adaptive subdivision useful (has parts that are far and others that are close), you should use a Subdivision Surface and a Displace modifier. If your object does cover a big distance and you want to have a decreasing amount of detail over the distance, the only workaround I know is dyntopo.

in sculpt mode, select the SculptDraw brush and set the strength to zero.
enable Dyntopo in relative detail mode
from your camera's point of view, paint a stroke at each distance step. Don't paint a single stroke ! The detail is defined from where you click and stays this way until you release the click, so if you paint multiple strokes in multiple steps, it should give a very similar result to adaptive subdivision. However it may not be as easy to paint on for every object. I tried with a plane and it worked fine (I selected Subdivide Edges in Dyntopo to avoid deforming the sides).
If it's impossible to do from your camera's point of view because of the shape of your object you'll have to move around and tweak the detail size manually and maybe select the Constant Detail mode in Dyntopo instead.


BGE Switching camera I have 3 cameras in my game scene. When I press P, I am using one camera. How can I use the other cameras?

Like pressing F1 to switch to front view, almost like a racing car game's camera views, which have a lot of view options for the player. I don't mean split screen .

You can specify the active camera with the Scene actuator, which has a "Set Camera" mode.


Achieving Motion Blur on a still image After reading many tutorials and watching videos, I don't fully understand how to get it to render for a still image. I have a car scene I'd like to have the wheels rotating for in the shot. Can someone explain the steps to doing it?

Fastest way to achieve such effect is to animate the object and use the tools Blender is already providing.

First of all your objects need to have some kind of animation in your scene, even if you are rendering a still. Motion blur/Sampled motion blur need to acquire the pixel's velocity vector from the scene and sample from there the blur effect.

In the provided example, Suzanne's Y rotation has been keyframed.

Pick a frame where the object is in motion (e.g not frame zero, where Suzanne is still, but something like the fifth).

The things you'll have to enable change their names a bit between the two built-in render engines:

Cycles:

Enable Motion Blur checkbox

Blender Internal:

Enable Sampled Motion Blur checkbox  and set an approriate value for the number of samples you would like to render (more samples cause longer render times but increase the effect quality)

In both cases you should set an appropriate Shutter frequency value(low values make stronger blur).

There is also a Compositor node if you prefer to add the effect during post-production. It can be found in the Filters menu. You should in this case enable the Speed/Vector pass, connect the relative sockets and tweak the parameters to your taste.


Makehuman pose broken between 2.69 and 2.7x I just upgraded from Blender 2.69 to 2.71. I loaded my previous save file and found, to my dismay, that my pose no longer displayed properly. I'm using Makehuman version 1.0.0. It appears that FK still functions as expected, but IK does not. IK hand and foot targets do not affect arm and leg placement. The root bone appeared to work.

Any ideas how I can (preferably) revive my save files with the new version? Alternatively, is there a way I can export the pose from 2.69, save in the neutral position, then re-import the pose in 2.71? I don't see any export options for poses in 2.69.

If you had auto run python scripts enabled in your preferences for 2.69 and you haven't enabled it or copied your user prefs in the new version, then it might be because some python drivers are being blocked.

If this is the case, there should be a message in the info header (at the top of the window by default):

You can either press Reload trusted each time you open the .blend, or make sure auto run python scripts is enabled in User preferences > File > Auto Execution:


How can renders be matched up in Blender? What is the best way to set up rendering in Blender so the images come out at the exact same position and size as another program?

For example, I have a series of color renders from Maya and want to add a pass with just line art from Blender. How can I match up the two in Blender?

I would setup a background image. By setting the axis to camera you will always see the image or movie while looking in camera view Numpad-0. If you select a movie it will change as you change the current frame in blender allowing you to follow the animation.

You will most likely want to ensure that the render settings match the original video so that there is no distortion or misplacement. You can also choose whether the image shows up in front of or behind your models.

This is a viewport only display, the image will not be included in the final render, you will need to composite it over the video.


EEVEE seem not to benefit from multiple GPUs for rendering Recently I have built a new workstation PC with dual GTX 1080 Ti. I know that in Cycles, each GPU renders 1 tile but I'm not sure about EEVEE. I tested it and it seems that even if I have checked both GPUs in user preferences EEVEE still uses only 1 GPU. I tried opening 2 instances of Blender 2.8 and set different GPU in each but the result was same; it keeps using one GPU only. This might not be implemented yet or SLI bridge might be required, I am really not sure. Do you guys have any experience with it? Has anyone done some rendering using SLI?

Multi GPU support for EEVEE is a really hard goal to atchieve because of the nature of the technology. It is not being worked on at the moment and it is not planned for any time soon. EEVEE might benefit from SLI or Crossfire setups. It would be logical to wait untill it's realeased to test that though. I believe it is safe to assume that EEVEE will definitely not be able to use multiple GPUs that are not connected with SLI/Crossfire for real time rendering when it is released or any time soon after.


Edit Mode buttons for selecting vertices and edges vanished When I am in Edit Mode for my project, the Mesh Select Mode buttons have disappeared!

I loaded the default project and the buttons are where they are supposed to be; the issue is only in my project.

This is because you are in Edit Mode for a Lattice Object. Lattice Objects have one very specific type of Edit Mode and a user can only select vertices.

  A lattice consists of a three-dimensional non-renderable grid of vertices.

Read more on the Manual.


Operator Panel, values/tweek options don't show up some issue is bothering me for a while now. I could manage to work around it but i realise that I'm missing some options.

What I usually see in tutorials is that the options/values of a specific options, lets say, the bevel tool in edit mode (ctrl+b), will show op in the operator field.

Most of the tools I execute, the tweakable values/options, don't show up, or in the bar below:

Thanks in advance]1

Operator options show up in the Redo Panel after the operator has been executed.

If the operator is cancelled instead of confirmed, no options will appear as no operator has been run (even though an operator was started).

Your screenshot shows the operator is running, but not yet finished/confirmed.


Why is my texture rendering in a different position than it shows up when in texture view? I made a UV map and an eye texture based on the map and attached the texture to the eyeball.  I decided to just put the image on the object without using a UV map node because I heard that blender will now unwrap the images correctly if you have a UV map for the object.  I then went into material mode and low and behold the image was placed correctly on the object.  Then I decided to do a test render and the image shrunk around the object and I am curious as to why it renders differently than it appears in material mode, and what I can do to fix it?  Do I just need to use the UV map node?  BTW, I'm using cycles render engine.

By default, Blender uses 'Generated' Corrdinates for placing textures on objects when rendering with Cycles. In the viewport however, when you have Cycles selected as a render engine, the texture node which is selected will be previewed on the object using the currently selected UV map. That's why you see it mapped correctly in the viewport, but mapped in a different fashion in the rendering.

Now I don't know why you were told that Blender would not unwrap correctly using the UV map node, but anyways: Use either a Texture Coordinates Node and plug the UV output to the 'Vector' input. This will use the UV map from the object which is currently marked as 'renderable' (yellow circles in screenshot). Or, you use the UV Map node. Here you can choose the name directly, but remember that if you rename the UV Map later on in the mesh data, you'll need to update the input field in the node as well (red circles).


Different color Between Video as plane and the Scene What is the best way to put a video of dancers inside a 3D scene??
I put the video of the dancers as plane background but the color of the People in alpha channel are
Completely different that the color in the scene and also looks like Blurry.
How can i fit the color with the one in scene?
I also don't want my video to go slow in an active camera view.

I assume that you have inserted the video with the add-on "Import images as planes". If not, you can enable this free add-on (menu Edit > Preference > Add-ons. Search for Images and enable the add-on).
When inserting the video, you should choose for "Emit" in the material Settings (see figure 1). That way, the colors of the video are more independent from your lightning setup in the scene. If the colors still loooked a little washed-out, may be you can change the Color Management > View Transform from Filmic to Standard in the Render Properties tab (see figure 2).
About the speed of the video. It's hard to tell without further info. Are the frames per second of the original video and your blend file settings the same?


How to make a shiny panel on a matt texture I'm wondering how I can add a shiny panel to the back of this object. I have a mask uploaded but am unsure of how to link the nodes up without undoing the other finishes on the material.

Any help much appreciated

Blend here.
Thanks guys.

Your node organization will depend on the result you want. For example where exactly do you want to see shininess?

Anyway, as your mask has a big rectangle, let's imagine that you simply want to display a silver rectangle. As this rectangle is transparent and your mask image seems to play with transparency, and not black & white, it is made to use the Alpha output of the Image Texture node.

By the way, there are also grey areas on your mask, grey areas won't be useful if you play with the alpha channel, it will only be useful if you play with black & white, and therefore if you use the Color output of the Image Texture, and not the Alpha. In that case, if you want to use a B&W mask, your rectangle needs to be white.

So let's come back to our case: Just plug the Alpha output of your Image Texture node to the Factor of a Mix Shader. This node will mix your previous nodes organization and a new one, a Glossy, and a glossy rectangle will appear.


How to fold a plane while keeping length of edges? Can someone tell me how to fold a plane (e.g. modeling a paper plane)?
Because when I want to fold an edge (the middle line), but have the edges scale... Is there a way to have a pivot edge for the edge to turn around?
I don't need it animated later, I just try to have a folded paper plane with correct texture afterwards.

I know how to get the 3D cursor as pivot point, but I need more of a pivot edge I think?

Also, is there a way to automatically get the folding pivot edges? So you can take a vertex and move it as you would do in real life with a sheet of paper?

Ok, the trick is really pointing with the view through the folding edge path...
The first fold worked - but the second one is a new problem:
The selected vertice has to go to the crossing of the circle and middle line - with rotation of course because of the UV...
So how can the folding edge be created/found? Is there a way to lock the edges from the selected vertice in terms of length?

Today I tried some geometry to accomplish the problem: generate the folding edge... but I don't know how to get a vertex in the crossing point of the 2 lines here (2 orange selected edges crossing - i need a new folding edge from top tip to this new point to fold the side) - Any suggestions?:

Welcome to Blender SE cheese!

While rotating the vertices around the fold, you must align your view so that the fold points directly away from the view. All vertices along the edge occupy the same point on the screen.

Now, you can set cursor to folding line, set pivot point to cursor and rotate.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to exactly align your view. If you need full precision you can create extra geometry and then align your view to it. Then remove the extra geometry.

Start like this:

Extrude a corner vertex at the end of the folding line. Right click directly to extrude it on top of the original.

Using the opposing vertex as cursor, scale the extruded vertex up some.

Now extrude that edge to create a face. Extrude the face to create a cube.

Select the face point away from the fold and hit Shift + Numpad 7. Now, your view is exactly aligned to the edge. Rotate the outer vertex.

NB! Extruding the edge the right way may be hard sometimes. You can experiment some and see. I'm not sure.

If you don't need exact precision. Align you view the normal way and rotate away.

Good luck!


How to move edge loops made with knife using only vertexes? So the image below is what I am dealing with. I want to move the cuts I made on this mesh ("mouth area") by using vertexes. However, when I do so it moves the entire mesh with it. Even tho I only grab 1 vertex. Any thoughts on how to go about doing so? I need to manipulate that center knife cut you see by the cursor by using its vertex. However, when I try It deforms the whole mesh instead of just moving that corner in the direction I want.

Maybe you just need to deactivate the Proportional Editing button?


How to paste the keyframes of one animation at the end of another So I have an object with 4 different idle animations. I want to combine these into one animation which has one playing after the other.

I succeed in combining them using the NLA editor, by dragging them one after another. But this is not what I want, as this makes an NLA track that consists of 4 animations. I want them to become 1 animation, placing the keyframes one of another.
How do I achieve such a feat?

This is the reason I cannot use multiple strips in 1 NLA track. The GLTF export cannot export those.
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF-Blender-IO/issues/763

tap on your second action to select

2.) tap G and move it with the mouse to the right

3.) repeat steps 1-2 with all other animations you want to move


Compositor: Get the second darkest value I have an image that is mostly values between .3 and 1, but has a few areas of solid black. I want to set all the pure black areas (or perhaps near black to also catch aliased edges) to be the next lowest value instead.

This is possible with color ramps on a per image basis, but I need a setup that will work across multiple frames where the specific values could change quite a lot (in one frame it may be .3, then the next .5, etc.)

It seems like the way to accomplish this would be to create a mask of the dark areas, and then have a node group that mixes that area with the second lowest value. For this to work, I need some way to get the lowest value in an image, and a way to ignore certain areas.

Is this possible? Or any other ways to solve this issue?

This node setup is mostly what HenrikD proposed:

It takes an image input and tests for pixels whose R, G, and B values are all less than a user-specified value (in this screenshot, it was .0005, which appears as .001 in the entry box).  Those pixels can then be replaced by any user-specified color, I'm using red here to show the affected pixels but you would instead substitute your almost-black color.

Output with limit value of .01:

Output with limit value of .03:

If it is necessary to actually calculate the almost-black color from the image itself . . . I'm not offhand sure how to do that, sorry.


Ik rotation Deformation Problem I am trying to use inverse kinematics but for the bone would not bend in the right direction so i tried rolling it but the it deformed the foot and leg of the mesh how do i fix this?

There are couple of problems in your file.

First the IK bones needs to have the deform property disabled as shown below:

Second, you need to adjust the pose position to be your rest pose to avoid bad bone roll values. To do this, switch to pose mode select the whole armature bones by pressing A then hit the space bar and write Apply Pose as Rest Pose as shown below:

Last thing is parenting your mesh to your armature. To do this, go to object mode, select your mesh first, then select your armature with right-click, then hit ctrl+P and choose With Automatic Weight and that's it, the mesh will be nicely deformed and parented to the armature as shown below:

The updated .blend file can be found here:


How to save Child Of relative transform to absolute Hello I have few animations in my character, in one it will be helpful to have child of constraint, but in future, I will need to remove it, so how I can get absolute position and rotation for some frames and apply it to work without this constraint?

In the list of keying sets you will find several "Visual" options, these options keyframe values of the visual location/rotation/scale, which is after constraints have been applied.

The only explanation for visual keying I can find is in the keyframing preferences, where you can make this the default behaviour.

  When an object is using constraints, the object property value does not actually change. Visual Keying will add keyframes to the object property, with a value based on the visual transformation from the constraint.


Optimal noise threshold for Adaptive Sampling with AI Denoiser The feature "Adaptive Sampling" allows the Cycles renderer to automatically calculate the samples need per pixel by analyzing the noise level. Next to the option to enable it, there is a small dropdown. When opened it gives some additional settings for the feature.
They are "Noise Threshhold" and "Min Samples". The value I am curious about is the "Noise Threshold" value. This tells the renderer to stop sampling when the noise level is at this value. If set to 0 this is automatically calculated. This seems to have the render make sure that there is zero noise inside the result. However, we do not need zero noise because of the somewhat new AI denoiser (the intel one).
Is there an optimal value for this noise threshold? It should allow as much noise as possible but still have it able to be cleaned up by the denoiser with no artifacts remaining.

"Optimal value" is quite a subjective measure and depends on available render time compared to desired quality - so it's not possible to generalise to one specific "optimal" value. The impact will also vary based on your particular scene and lighting conditions.
For each 'tile' rendered in the final result, Blender determines the 'noise' for each sample over the whole tile - with the noise being measured by comparing each render result with that of the pixel it is being merged into. As the tile converges towards its 'ideal' (infinite samples) pixels the difference between the newly rendered "passes" and the current rendered result (the combination of all the previous "passes") will reduce. The Noise Threshold determines how close the difference should be before this tile is considered 'complete'. The noise will depend on the amount of illumination and bright/dark sharp edges as well as reflections and caustics, etc.
The "optimal" setting is subjective as well as the render overhead giving diminishing returns (doubling the samples will typically half the noise - so to get rid of all noise requires a very large number of samples). The best option is to render a scene at various thresholds and compare the result with the render time, picking the level with most appropriate render time to quality ratio.
NOTE: The adaptive rendering will only make use of the maximum number of samples you are rendering your scene with. Therefore, ensure your total Samples is sufficiently high to allow the adaptive sampling to get the noise level low enough to produce the desired quality for a 'full' render.
In order to determine an optimal value for your scene you could follow the following process :

Increase the total number of render samples to a suitably high value (the 'best' quality you desire for your render)
Set Threshold to a suitably high number so that each tile is effectively only rendered once. eg, 1.0000.
Render the scene and record the time taken.
Reduce the threshold to a significantly new value - eg, 0.1000.
Render the scene and record the time taken.
Compare the result and time taken.
Repeat until you see suitably high quality results. eg, at 0.001
Try increasing slightly again (eg, 0.0025) to compare the time saving with additional samples until you hit upon the 'sweet spot' for your situation.

Bear in mind that like the Denoiser, Adaptive Sampling is not a 'magic bullet'. It requires some tweaking to get the best results and will always be a trade-off between render times and final render quality - which will depend on your scene and your needs and priorities.


pressing on a vertices displays this So I pressed on something by accident and this shows whenever I press on some vertice. It seems to be move option but I don't know how to turn it off.

You have enabled a gizmo.

To change or remove it, make the tool bar appear using T, if not already displayed. Then choose another one or choose the selection box tool.


Bevel question: it is possible to bevel in different directions? Here is a cube with the edge beveled and behind that is a normal cube to better explain.

1

My question is: is there a way to bevel an edge so that is not uniform as in picture 1?

In picture 2 I created the bevel I want, but I had to use a loop cut which is not what I'm looking for.

2

Thanks.

..Expanding on @francois gibon's answer..

in Vertex Mode on the corner-vertex, AltD duplicate it, dragging slightly in the direction of interest, and right-clicking to cancel the move. (Don't deselect)
GG slide the duplicate vertex along the edge to the point you want the bevel to stop.
Repeat for the other direction(s)
CtrlShiftB bevel the corner with 'Width Type: Percent', to 100%. If the bevel tool is already set up from previous use, that's just dragging the bevel as far as it will go.
With all vertices selected, AltM merge > 'By
Distance', to tidy away the duplicates.


How to connect sharp edge with smooth one? For me, the hardest part is usually connecting creased edges with non creased (or sharp surface with smooth one). I am always trying to use proximity loops technique explained by Jonathan Williamson here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBkwodrQq_4

Currently I am working on model in the picture below.
.

What I need to achieve, is to have sharp edge at the place in green circle and smooth surface on the area in red circle.

Topology details in edit mode.

However with this kind of topology, the edge is sharp all along it's length. I am not sure if there is some plugin that can arrange edges so that even edges that are very close together can form smooth surface (something like circle in loop tools), calculating the adjacent edges.

All you need to do is separate the edge loops on the side you want smooth. Think of it as the opposite of proximity loops, where proximity loops make edges sharper, spreading out the edge loops will make it softer.

Simply select the vertices on the side you want smother, and press GG to edge slide them in to place.
If you get any shading artifacts, switch to side view and make sure all the edges and vertices are aligned. Scale to 0 on (an example) the Z axis to re-aline. For example, if you lowered one of the vertices, that will create a dip in the subdivided mesh and break the smooth look.

The vertices I moved are selected in this image.

Edited mesh in object mode


How to model a fake grass mat I'm modelling a scene that is supposed to look like a real life model, not something realistic but something that actually looks like a model. And part of the scene includes this fake grass.
It's a fake grass mat but with a lot of colour changes throughout the scene.
I've looked up grass tutorials but they all show how to make natural grass with just a uniform colour.
The kind of colour palette I'm going for goes from light green (as seen here) to a light-blueish brown with several darker shades of green in between.

You could try something like this (bump mapped material option).

I just used a couple of noise textures mixed together to make a randomly patchy surface. I used a mapping node to stretch (scale) it a bit to make it longer like grass. I used the mix  as the basis for a bump map. The reason I ran them through a MixRGB mixed with white first, is to soften the contrast, which would give to strong of a "bump effect" otherwise. Even after doing this, I still had to reduce the "distance" on the Bump Node. I also used a third noise texture  which I used as a mix factor for the "main grass colors". You can control the mix by sliding the sliders on the ColorRamp.

I used an Ambient Occlusion node to give extra dark (shaded) patches, as well as to add a bit of a darker blue accent color. This can also be controlled by the ColorRamp. Usually, when using an Ambient Occlusion node, you should enable "Ambient Occlusion" in the render properties panel to get the full effect, but in this case, the "full effect" comes out too dark without further manipulation, so I left it unchecked. The node itself still provides values that can be used.

Lastly, I turned up the roughness and turned down the specular reflections to make it less "shiny". These may need to be adjusted to better suit your "model".
This is just a simple approximation of a grass shader, you can get much more detailed if necessary, this is just a starting example. I'll include the .blend file so you can play around with it without having to set it all up again yourself. Hopefully you can manipulate it successfully to your liking.
File is here -


How to polish curving edges? I have 2 questions please:
1. Just wondering how to polish these edges and make it look clean? And make it look more like hard edges.
2. I'm not satisfied with how the curve looks. I'm using snake tools to create it.

Curves that I wanted to create

The Grab brush (Shortcut "G") is great for getting the right shape for your curve.

What I'd use here would be the Fill/Deepen brush (shortcut "5") and the Flatten brush (shortcut "6"). Then I'd gently smooth the flat surfaces until close to the hard edge (shortcut "Shift").

If there's any edge that I was completely happy with, the pinch brush (Shortcut "P") is great for getting a sharper edge to finish it off.

Just play around with strength and keep undoing things if you make mistakes.

Sculpting these harder surfaces takes a bit of practise but it's generally the fastest way.

OR

If you don't feel comfortable with this, perhaps you could try retopologising it using a shrink wrap modifier and a vertex group. This way you can remove certain vertices from the shrinkwrap vertex group and play with a specific vertex until you're happy. With your retopologised mesh, you can play with the Mean Crease in properties panel ("N") underneath the transform data to get those edges nice a crisp when applying a subdivision surface.


Problem modeling in perspective view When I arrange vertex in a shape in front perspective view and when I move them forward from side view the shape looks bigger as it comes forward in front perspective view and when every time I move it forward I need to shrink it to make it look same the same size as it looks before, this takes a lot of time for modeling. Is there any way to shrink the model as it comes forward so that it looks the same size as it looks before?

Perspective, while it is the way we see things in the real world, is an illusion.

These train tracks look like they are converging, but obviously they can't be.

.

Orthographic projection is a way of seeing 3D shapes in 2D at their actual sizes, without perspective distortion.

Here is a comparison of orthographic versus perspective, with the same camera angle.

The orthographic version doesn't look "right", but the tracks appear parallel, which is how they actually are.

By moving the camera backwards and increasing the focal length, you can kind of get an ortho-like look.

Assuming you are modeling from an orthographic or nearly orthographic reference image (obviously it is impossible to get a true orthographic projection from a camera, but photographs can be "close enough" if taken with a long focal length), modeling in ortho is the best way to go. It does take a little getting used to though..


Is there a way to mass-rename an object's suffix? I like to bake my models in Substance Painter. It bakes by mesh name so I don't have to explode the mesh. I have to end the name of each object with _low or _high.

renaming 30 or 40 objects gets tedious. Is there a way to grab everything that is .00# and change it to _high?

Not natively, no, but you can try one of these addons:

Name Panel Addon http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?272086-Addon-Item-Panel-amp-Batch-Naming-1-4 or
Batch Rename Datablocks http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Object/Batch_Rename_Datablocks


Irrelevant Baked texture maps So I built procedural textures along with actual textures.
Every thing is properly UV unwrapped too!

However, when I bake the diffuse texture, it looks messed up like this

What am I possibly messing up with?
Requested Blend file
Blender file

Welcome to the Blender SE forums :)

You have three materials mapped to same UV space, so before you bake you need to tell Blender to bake each of those materials to the same image. (3 materials all baked to the same image).

To do that ......

1: In the UV editor Create a new image to bake to. In the screenshots below I named this image 3 material bake. save this Image to your hard drive.

2: Select one of the three materials.

In the Node Editor add a new Image Texture.
In this new node load up the image that was create in the UV editor. Leave this new node unconnected but selected! (Very important to leave it selected).

Select the second material and repeat (Add new Image Texture and load up same image to bake to as was done for the first material and leave it selected).

Repeat for third material.

3: In the 3D editor, Object mode select the model.
   Hit that Bake button.

All three materials should now be baked correctly    to the image that was created in step 1.


Animation time offset for multiple objects Trying to rotate objects by setting copy location from already rotating empty, and driver, as a influence controller for every object.
I have 10 objects, but i'd like to set an offset, so every object will rotate few frames after previous one.
How should I achive this result?

I have Animation Nodes, so I can try this way, but don't know how.

You can set a delay with the "Delay Time" node in Animation Nodes and then restraining the animation with a "Math" node set to "Maximum" :

Result :


Most ideal way to connect two parts of a mesh when one has multiple faces? I often run into scenarios similar to the following:

I have two parts that I need to connect together, but one has (a lot) more parts to it. There are two approaches I'd usually do to solve this. Here's one:

The problem with this method is that everything won't be connected together. I can select any of the vertices (along the widget, x axis) and move them around, and they will move freely. They are not connected. Here's another approach:

This method connects everything together, but everything looks absurd. It is hard to tell what's what, and everything looks so pinched and hideous.

If I come across a similar scenario (picture 1), how would I approach modeling the two parts together? What would be considered the most ideal/best method? Thanks.

When connecting a high poly mesh to a low poly mesh you can progressively reduce the vertices in several steps. This can be helpful if you don't want the extra vertices to continue through the entire mesh.

Here is an all quad sample that takes three steps to go from 22 to 2.


How to get a new mesh with modifiers applied using Blender Python API? I've been scouring the Blender Python API docs for a way to get access to the mesh data that is displayed in the view-port. (with modifiers applied - WYSIWYG)

For reference, this was possible with the 2.4x API's Mesh.getFromObject method.

The option to apply modifiers is common for exporters included with Blender, so you can check how they do it.

Typically you can use the Object.to_mesh function, which returns a new mesh. You can manipulate it without distructively editing the user's data.

import bpy

# --- setup variables ---
context = bpy.context
scene = context.scene

# assume we have an object with geometry, nurbs, metaball, curves... _not_ a lamp
obj = context.object

# --- get a mesh from the object ---
apply_modifiers = True
settings = 'PREVIEW'
mesh = obj.to_mesh(scene, apply_modifiers, settings)

# ... do something with the mesh ...

It's important to remove the mesh, unless you have explicitly assigned it to an object. Otherwise it will be stored in Blender until the file is saved and loaded again.

# optionally remove it
bpy.data.meshes.remove(mesh)


I have yet to get the mesh deform modifier to do anyhting I tried on a character, with a complex mesh, nothing worked, so tried a new grid that was simpler from scratch, didn't work, now just a cylinder with Suzanne (supplied file) nothing. I checked to make sure scale =1 , location and rotation  are at zero and UV's are pointing out.

The cylinder comes with a shape key to skew it.

I never got the modifier to work once.
What am I doing wrong?

In your file everything would work exactly like it should my friend if you'd add mesh deform modifier to appropriate mesh :). You should add it to the mesh you want deform and as Object choose the mesh you want to deform with, so in this case modifier should go to Suzanne and the object should be Cylinder.


Extruding Vertices Is Moving the Original Vertices I've been following the BlenderGuru donut tutorial and was extruding these two vertices but it somehow moves the original vertices as I do so. Anyone know how I can extrude these vertices without moving the originals? I tried switching off proportional editing and that doesn't help.

'On cage' option is on for the subdivision modifier.

Set it off.

This option shows vertex positions as if they were already modified by the modifier.


In bge, how would I zoom using mouse scroll in ortho view? How would I incorporate the ortho zoom to my mouse wheel?

This seems close to what I need, but I don't know why it's not working.

import bge

cont = bge.logic.getCurrentController()
cam = bge.logic.getCurrentScene().objects['Camera']

if not "DefaultFOVset" in cont.owner:
    cam.ortho_scale = 20
    cont.owner["DefaultFOVset"] = True

FOV = cam.ortho_scale

if cont.sensors["MWHEELUP"].positive:
    if FOV < 20:
        FOV += 1 # linear increase
        FOV /= 0.9 # exponential increase
    if FOV > 20:
        FOV = 20
elif cont.sensors["MWHEELDOWN"].positive::
    if FOV > 10:
        FOV -= 1
        FOV *= 0.9
    if FOV < 10:
        FOV = 10

cam.ortho_scale = FOV

Here's another one, I can only get it to zoom out. https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/58556/37524

Typo on the line 18
positive:: to positive:
You need 2 sensors for each of detect wheel up and down.
And the sensors have to be connected to the python controller.
This is why you got only one of zoom out or in.
You have to make the names in blender to be consistent with the names in the script, also the script file name.

Advice:
You can open console from menu Window > Toggle System Console. The console shows error messages from BGE when BGE is running.
Be carful, closing the console window closes whole blender.


Initial state for particles Is it possible to setup initial state for particles? I want to simulate drops on bottle, and need to be animated. If this is simple animation I would probably just render from specific frame but I need it to be from frame 1. I can not start emitting from negative frame as than particles are not colliding with collider, they only start on frame 1. But on frame 1 I need all particles to be born and none born after that ...

You can set the start and end frames of the particles emission in particles setting tab. This can be negative frames (end must be the same or greater than start).


What this issue displayed in my UV a symptom of? I don't know what the term is for what is displayed, and therefore I can not search for the issue. It's messing up my bakes.  I'm hunting my mesh for the issue and ican't seem to resolve it.

This looks like new geometry added after your intial unwrapping was already done.


Object appears as orange points in object mode, but looks fine in edit mode I cant see my gas station building while in object mode.

Looks good in edit mode:

But only dots are visible in object mode:

Your object has a halo material assigned to it.

change it to surface.

(By the way you also have issues with overlapping surfaces causing z-fighting. Fix it by removing doubles. See this answer: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/21218/1853)


Creating cables that can drape over objects I've been trying to create mic cables for a studio scene that can drape realistically over objects, and have had varying success creating a mesh line, extruding vertices to create the basic path and form for the cable, and then converting to a curve and beveling the curve to create a tube.
Then I've converted the tube back to mesh and used the physics tab to apply cloth to it. I've tinkered with various settings, like more or less subdivisions, greater & lesser tension/compression/bend values in the cloth, and it's coming out OK, but I'm having trouble getting the "cable" to not collapse or deform.
Figured out the pinning routine so I can easily pin the cable to the mic, created collision settings so it can drape nicely over a mic stand and floor, used subdivision surface to smooth out the final product, but can't quite get the cable to stay nice & round. Certain bend points tend to flatten out. How can I get the cable to maintain it's roundness?
Any suggestions...?

You can do this wihout cloth simulation, use the Draw Curves tool.
Add a Bézier curve object.
In edit mode delete all vertices (x).
Select Draw Curve from the toolbox

Press N to bring out the properties region, and in the Tool tab set the Draw Depth to Surface.
Then draw your curve freely.

Then set the curve to have some bevel, to make it the width you need.

You might need to adjust the Tolerance and Detect Corner values to fit your particluar needs.
For more detail on the tool read the manual:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/curves/tools/draw.html?highlight=draw%20curve


why not complete line? when I set ctrl+R the vertices dont appear around of model,please explain

Because as it crosses a triangle, Blender doesn't know where it is supposed to continue, that's one of the reasons you should use quads as much as possible, with quads there would be no ambiguity.

But if you want to keep your topology as it is and quickly create your edge loop you can use the knife tool.


Apply transform (rotation) to video clip before motion tracking I have a video clip filmed on a GoPro in wide angle format.  I've figured out how to apply the Lens Distortion K1, K2, and K3 values which will cancel out the fisheye look of the video.  I drew polylines on the video in the Motion Tracking tab of Blender, and edited the lens distortion K values to match the contour of the polylines to features in the video.

However, the polylines do not match up properly because the video needs to be rotated slightly before changing the lens distortion.  I can rotate the video after applying the distortion just fine.  But I cannot figure out how to apply the rotation transform to the video before applying the distortion, viewing the rotated video in the motion tracker, in order to be able to draw polylines on the already rotated video.  Is there a way to do this besides rendering out a rotated video and loading it back into the motion tracker?

Though I don't think is necessary to rotate your image, here's how to do it:

Add two trackers on opposite ends of the frame that don't track anything in the footage, with a a weight of 0 (so they don't add anything to the camera solver) and use those to control the rotation.

On the Display tab enable Display Stabilization.

Enable 2D stabilization. Select both trackers and add them to the stabilization box.

Do not enable autoscale, enable Stabilize Rotation and select one of the trackers to control the rotation of the image.

You can rotate the image now by moving any of the trackers up or down.


Default size for empty Is it possible to set the default size of the Empty Object? The problem is since I switched my blender scale to metric, the Empty's default size is kinda large for most times I need it.

Directly after you add an Empty press F6 to get the Add Empty Operator parameters.

The Radius parameter will set the visual size of the current Empty and all new Empties that you add afterwards during that session.

Unfortunately there isn't a configuration option to set the default radius permanently.


Normal map rendering blocky shading/ shadows I hope I don't seem like I'm spamming but I've looked around this site and google for advice and non of it is really helping.

My problem is that if I use the normal map I baked from my high-poly rock model (2nd one in the image) then the normals are completely fine. If I use the normal map I created from the diffuse using Bitmap2Material and specify that it's an OpenGL normal map I still get these blocky shadow areas on my normal map but the map itself is totally fine:

(I've intentionally used a jped in this example so I can upload, but the real file itself is a PNG, about 4.7mb)

Anyone know why this is happening and how I can fix it? The reason I want to use the normal map generated from the diffuse is that it contains more of a bumpy texture and it looks nicer than the baked normal in comparison.

Here's the normal map working totally fine in the texture program:

Solutions tried: smoothing edges, vertecies, faces in edit mode. Setting faces to smooth shaded. Opening my normal map in photoshop and re-saving it to see if it alters the data somehow. Changing from colour to non-colour data. Playing with normal intensity.

I couldn't figure out the solution as to why my normal map was giving me such harsh quad shading. I opened it in other programs and determined that the normal map generated from the baked diffuse I used on the rock always contained harsh edges even though the normal map itself doesn't show it.

Instead I found this incredible tool for combining normal maps and used my original baked normal map and combined it with another to give it more texture. The method I used was to open the broken normal map into gimp2, turn it back&white and then use the gimp2 normal map plugin to turn it back into a normal map.

https://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/76176 <<< This is the combine normal map tool I used. Huge thanks to RadCapricorn for uploading this.

Here's my result:

So agian in bullet points:

-Take broken N-map into Gimp2
-Turn it greyscale and edit contrast according to how much detail you prefer
-Use Gimp2 normal map plugin found here: https://code.google.com/archive/p/gimp-normalmap/downloads and a cute tutorial on how to use it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Jdo3ZmtPWk

Then if you want to combine the normal map with your original baked one then:

Use this blend file: https://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/76176

Follow the instructions contained within the blend file itself.

New blender 2.8 shortcut to save images: SHIFT+S (it's no longer F2)


Create food Mold using voronoi texture I am trying to figure our how to create food mold using voronoi texture.
A similar question was asked procedurally generated mold (fungus) using voronoi texture?
previously but I was hoping to get more insight on how it works. I tried setting up my nodes according to the screenshots from the link but it doesn't show the complete nodes graph
I have attached my node graph. I am confused with how to use the transparency node
https://imgur.com/t8YAS3m
Thank you

As Timaroberts mentioned in the comments, the entire graph is little more than shown in the image. Here it is with the most basic setup - note the blend modes I have highlighted on the right - these are necessary for transparency:

EDIT - This is the proper connections for the image you posted in the comments:


tracking a bone to the average location of 2 bones I'm rigging a skeleton and i need the kneecap to be averaged between the rotation of the shin and the femur. I tried making two pull bones for the knee cap to track to hoping it would track to the average of the 2 pull bones but it will only track to the bone on the bottom of the modifier stack. Is there a way to do this?


How can i connect the body to the hand? Im pretty new in Blender and this is one of my first modeled characters.I'm trying to figure out how to Connect body to hand, but I don´t know how.

The body and hand are both joined (and they have Mirror modifier added) but every time a try to connect them with Bridge Edge Loops it makes something horrible... see picture 2.

Like Duane Dibbley is saying you are having the hand on the wrong side.
Try to attach the hand on the other side or enable 'Adjust Edit Cage' in the Mirror modifier:


How to use a curve modifier in-game (work around) I have some cords that have a curve modifier on them so that they don't stick straight out of a robots leg. The problem occurs when animating. since one end of the cord is attached to the leg, and another to the body, the cord will need to deform. Is there a way I can make the cord update to its new positions realtime? I would try this with shape-keys, but animating them never seems to work.

You can't use curves as they are not supported. But you can get the effect your are looking for via armature.

Create an armature to control your cord. Parent the cord via Armature Deform to the armature <ctrl+p>.

In pose mode add an IK-constraints to the top bone.

You will see the cord will follow the target in preview. To make it do the same thing in the bge use the armature actuator.

If you move the target while running the game, the cord should follow as much as it can.

I hope it helps


Set a white background color for rendering I want my rendering to have a white background. Is there a simple way to achieve this?

Under world properties there is a Surface section where one can set the color for the surface "Background". Does this do what I want? And also is it a good way to do this?

Yes and yes.

If you change your viewport shading to Render Preview:

Or change the Viewport Shading to show the Scene World, you will see the rendered result of your background selection.


Deleted Game logic layout by accident Accidentally deleted game logic layout is there anyway of getting it back?
haven't been able to figure it out.

You have 2 menu below that looks like icons with 2 arrows. In your screenshot  there are icons like "cube" (which is view port where you can see your objects, scene and anything you are working on) and "clock".

If you don't use the clock just click on it and choose Logic Editor, and then after all set up you can save this view as  "game logic" - just rename it from "default". So as we see even we accidentally delete any of menus we can add it by yourself


Need help with strange scaling behavior on my torso model; following a blender video I am brand new, and I am following a blender video by Sebastian Lague, and I just want to figure out why i am not able to properly scale the selected edge of my torso model, as he does in the video.

  The vertices / edge i have selected before
  scaling (I use alt+right-click or
  alt+shift+right-click, just as in the video)

  What the issue looks likes when i try to scale it with the S or alt-S
  hotkeys

  What it should look like

What the heck is going on? If this isn't normal behavior, I seem to have accidentally created double vertices at the same points or something? If this behavior is normal, i must not be selecting the edge / vertices properly?

Thanks in advance and happy holidays!

You have a different number of loop cuts than the example - were you embellishing the design, or had you made some errors in following the example?  From my own experiences, making errors and then correcting them during a tutorial led to some weird results and it was a while before I learnt to remove duplicates.

To check your theory about double vertices, select your entire mesh (A followed by A again should do the trick from the view in the images) and then select remove duplicates from your left hand menu. Off the top of my head, I can't remember if it is T or N to display this menu from the view that you have in your images - one will bring up the right properties menu and the other will bring up the left menu options.

Are you also trying to scale along the right axes? S-Y will ensure it is locked on the y-axis as noted in the video. Selecting Shift-Y instead of Y will result in the scaling happening along the X- and Z-axes. Can't judge from your static screen shots.


How to copy keyframes from one armature to another I am having a lot of problems trying to do a certain thing. I'm trying to integrate a simple scene into Cycles from Blender Internal, and to do that, I have to append a version of the rig for my character that was designed for Cycles instead of BI. I really can't just go into Cycles and re-texture it. I can import the new rig, but I have to also be able to copy every single keyframe from the first version to the second. The copy and paste feature is simply not working. I can't just go into the dope sheet or graph editor, select everything and press Ctrl + C and paste the group of keyframes into the second rig's dope sheet or graph editor. It acts as if there's nothing in my clipboard at all. I have searched far and wide for something useful, but nothing works. Even the articles on this site which appear to have the same problem don't appear to be working for me. I am using version 2.73.

When an animation is created, Blender creates an object data called "action", that can be appended or linked to another object (in your case the object will be the rig).
So you have to import in the new file the action from the old file.
you can reach and rename your actions through the dopesheet, changing in the header of the window from "dopesheet" to "actions".
Of course - to work properly -  both rigs should have the same bones, same names, etc..
Check manuals about "actions" for more infos.


How can I proportionally scale a UV Map when scaling the object I have a mapping node connected to an image texture to tile a carpet image on a plane. The results are OK until I scale the object. I am looking for a way to scale the plane without enlarging the carpet image texture.

Node setup: UV Map -> Mapping -> Image -> BSDF -> Output

OK result

After I scale the plane the carpet texture is too large. I know I can go back to scale the texture but is there a way where I do not have to do that?

IDK if it matters, but I want to keep this in EEVEE.

One way is to use Object Coordinates and an Empty.
The texture will then keep its size when objects are scaled.

Add an ampty to your scene
Set texture coordinates to Object and target your empty
Adjust the texture position/size by moving/scaling the empty or via the Mapping node.


Blender Fluid Simulation Inflow From Particle System With Liquid Simulation I can't figure out how to make liquid inflow come from the particle system. I know smoke and fire simulation can use particle systems. So how can I make particle systems work with liquid simulation? Or how could I make spray effect some other way?
Link to example project: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mi1Cn4jw-h5rlnegF6LBxAVLh3T7ydUr/view?usp=sharing

The workaround for this could be the use of dupliverts, which gives 99,99% of the particle system effect. The difference can be found in the Blender manual. And if you want to model a shower you can punch holes in a cylinder's bottom, make it an obstacle and put the inflow inside.


Possible to replay repetitive tasks using Python? Is there a way to do a particular task manually, generate the code for it automatically and update that code to do some task repeatedly?

I'm looking for something like record macro functionality that's available in MS Excel.

If you pull down the Info header you will find that a fair amount of operations you can perform in Blender are printed there for relatively simple stuff such as adding a lamp or a modifier etc.

This example:

adds a cube
scales it by 2.0
translates on the Z axis by 1.0.
sets the color to red
shows the name
renames the object.

Select the lines (mouse-click, border-select or AKey)
Ctrl+C to copy the selected lines.
Paste into the text editor.
add import bpy at the top of the text block.

After that, if you were to have a look at the api, you could cut out much of the fluff and just use said commands in a script to reuse whenever you need to provided it is simple enough and in the correct context.

For example:

bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cube_add(
        radius=1.0, view_align=False, enter_editmode=False,
        location=(0.0, 0.0, 0.0), rotation=(0.0, 0.0, 0.0),
        layers=(False, False, False, False, False, False,
                False, False, False, False, False, False,
                False, False, False, False, False, False,
                False, False))

... can be shortened to bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cube_add() in most situations.

This is as close to a macro like functionality that you can get in Blender and it is linear so any actual repetitive bits will have to be crafted by you, loops etc. It is also worth noting that many of these commands need to be run in a specific context so I would recommend using it as a means of learning the correct calls instead of trying to reuse it directly.

Note

For most operations, there is an accompanying line of code printed. Including changing numeric values, toggles... etc.

Excluded operations are typically not useful to redo, zooming/panning, setting the cursor location... etc.


Moving an animated / rigged object I have a model in Blender that is rigged and animated. The object is not at the origin, and I would like to move it there. I can move the object to the origin by selecting the armature bones and transforming them until the object is at the origin, however, when I start playing an animation or export the file, the object snaps back to its original position (as I'm assuming is defined by the animated key frames). How can I translate an object, animations and all, to the origin without affecting the animation?

Do it by make your armature an Root bone.
1. Select your Armature

2. Press Tab to enter Edit Mode

3. Press Shift + A To add new bone. Name it Root or whatever you want

4. Parent your current Root bone (which mean if you move it, the whole armature will move with it) to your new Root bone you just add.
Select your current Root bone, then Hold Shift and select new Root bone.
Press Ctrl + P then select Keep Offset

5. Now you can move your new bone to the origin and whole armature will go with that.


what does pink mean when I try to append a material? I am trying to append a material onto a new file. the first time i tried it the icon showed the dirt look i wanted but the object was hot pink. the second time, the material morphed into a hot pink 'guy'-- what does that mean?

Pink means that the image texture used is not available.
Either it does not exist in the hard drive, or it is in a folder that is not accessible, or has been renamed, or it could mean that the image cannot be mapped the way it is set up on the material.
By default, Blender does not store images used as part of the file, it just uses a reference to the path in the computer where such images are saved.
If you want to save images as part of the .blend file, you need to pack them.


Changing object location in local coordinates don't work If I:

start a new blender project
press Z for viewing in wireframe (helps later)
set the origin of the cube to vertex (-1, -1, -1). Do that by pressing TAB to enter edit mode, A to deselect all, right click vertex (-1, -1, -1), press SHIFTS with the mouse cursor inside the 3D viewer then select Cursor to Selected, then TAB to exit edit mode, CTRLALTSHIFTC and set Origin to 3D Cursor.
set pivot to the origin (individual origins)
rotate 45 degrees on X
add a sphere
set sphere as child of the cube (CtrlP then selecting Object)
reset location/origin of sphere (AltG then AltO)
change transform orientation to local
select the sphere
grab sphere (G)
constraint to Y axis in Local (press Y then Y again)

I expected to have the object move within its local Y axis (rotated in relation to the world coordinates), but unfortunately even pressing Y twice, the Y axis constraint is not being set to the cube's rotated Y (it does show "along local Y" in the status bar).

I did manage once to have it constrained by the proper rotated axis, but I can't seem to understand what I did and couldn't reproduce it again.

Can I get some advice on what I am missing?

MORE INFO
It seems to me that when I add the sphere to the cube as a parent, the sphere's rotation is not relative to the cube's. I'd have to rotate the sphere to the same 45 degrees in X. However if I add the sphere the cube as child before I rotate the it, now things work properly. But how do I do it when the cube is already rotated? It would be really not optimal to have to remove rotation every time I wanted to add a child object.

From http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Parenting:

  The “Clear Parent Inverse” function sets this inverse transformation to the identity transformation, so the child picks up the full parent object transformation.

I guess instead of adding the object to the parent with CTRLP, I have to do it so with CTRLSHIFTP, so that the child+parent relation ship is set and the Clear Parent Inverse is performed.

NOTE: I don't understand the details so if anyone adds a proper answer I'll mark it as answer. For now though this will be the answer for this question.


Why am I not able to move some bones? I tried myself on doing a rig for a low poly crab and somehow I changed some settings without realising. Now I'm not able to move the bones except of the base. Normally, if I select one, it looks like this:

If i try to move it now this happens:

A bone is defined by two points, known as the head and tail of the bone. When you select one of these points you only move that point, the bone/s defined by that point then stretch to fit the opposite point.

If you want to move both points of a bone together you select both points. Clicking the body of the bone will select both points for you.

While I don't think it applies to you, you can lock the points of a bone in the bone transform properties, so that they can't be moved in edit mode. If this is the case, it is a matter of turning off the lock.


Is glass in Cycles just broken or am I doing something wrong OK So I've been trying to make a simple scene of my room as a bit of practice but I've run into trouble while doing the windows. Whenever I place glass in them it just doesn't act right, to the point that even leaving the widow "open" gives a better result.
I decided to do a little test on how the deafult glass behaves (Principled BSDF with Transmission on 1)
First I made a reference render with no glass. My scene is just a narrow spot light pointing down. I added a volumetric cube as well to help visualize it.

As expected the "Laser" makes a dot of light on the ground.
Now here is where things get wierd. When you point a light at glass what do you expect to happen? You expect for it to show up on the opposite side as glass is seethrough, perhaps with a bit of a reflection on the glass it self.
Well, here is what happens in Blender Cycles:

Nothing comes through to the other side!!!?!
Not only that but look at that harsh shadow dropped by the glass, that's something that just wouldn't happen in real life. There should be some shadow where the edges are but other than that considering this is an unrealistically 100% pure glass there should be no shadow in the centre at all.
The only thing that's there is the desired reflection.
This is the problem I was having when making my scene. I would put the glass in the windows and suddenly
the scene would get really dark and you wouldn't see those squares of lights that windows often produce...
What the hell is going on there. Isn't Cycles supposed to be a physically based renderer!? How can it fail to render glass so hard. Room windows are one thing but this would entirely screw up so many other renders with more complex glass shapes...
Or am I just incredibly stupid and doing something wrong here.

I can't really speak to this laser situation, but if you want no shadow at all you can do something like this:

You can decrease the Color value of the Transparent BSDF to control the amount of shadow.


cannot export .glb with material setting like specular When I export the scene as glTF 2.0 file format, it exports it with textures, but without any material information like specular-ness. I literally set it to 0 in principled BSDF, but when it's exported as glTF 2.0 .glb file it exports without that material setting.

Above is my node settings in shading tab.

And this is the result, which shows it exported without material information.
Thanks in advance.
**Solved, Thanks!

glTF 2.0's core material system uses the metallic + roughness PBR system.  You are correct that the specular channel is not currently included.  This may change in a future version of Blender, as there is a newer glTF extension proposal for including it inside of the metal/rough workflow.  But it could be some time before that appears in Blender's importer/exporter for glTF.
In the meantime, for this model you may be able to work around this by setting Roughness to 1.0.  That should make the material diffuse enough to not show any specular reflection.


Using shin/elbow twist bones? I see lots of character rigs have the shin bone split into 2 or even 3 pieces. Why is this done? All I can find is that it has something to do with the ankle? It seems to be a common practice, but does not seem to be done in game rigs.

EDIT: I have found from another source that these are twist bones to deal with distortions from rotating a bone at it's root (in this case, the knee or elbow.) How do I use these correctly?

The previous answer is wrong.
The reason sometimes you see a bone or sometimes multiple bones in the middle of a limb section such as in between the shoulder and elbow bone, or in between the elbow and wrist bones is for volume preservation during twisting.
Do this:
Stick your arm forward palm down.
Now just turn your palm up but watch your forearm.
You will notice that your entire forearm twists smoothly across its length!
but if you turn your hand to the side or up and down, just the hand turns.
The idea of placing a bone in the middle of the forearm is to separate the twist from the other bone rotations for better skin weight deformations.
the same applies to the upper arm. if you stick your arm out to the side and twist your arm, you will see that your bicep muscle kind of sort of smoothly follows the twist of the arm WHILE the deltoid DOES NOT! so the idea of placing a joint in the middle of the bicep is, again, to separate the twisting from the other two rotations for better skin weight distribution.
If you can get away with more twist bones, the better as they will help preserve volume better than a single bone.
the same applies to the leg.
If you twist your leg, the big leg muscles near your hips will do little twisting and your gluts will do very little.
And same with your calf if you twist your foot HOWEVER the effect is much much smaller there.
If you want more help understanding this, look into the "Cane Toad" rig for Maya. Variations of it are kind of the standard across platforms.
I'm actually trying to find out if it's easy to setup something like this in blender before I decide to switch to it.


can the "channel" button for the preview screen be set to a new default value When I create a new blend project... the "channel" button for the preview screen is set to channel 1, apparently by default.  Is there a way to make that button default to channel zero?

I ask this because I was trying to do a gamma cross transition and did not realize the viewer channel was set to 1... so even though Blender was doing the cross, fades, wipes, etc... I could not see them happen... and thought something was wrong with Blender... i.e. a bug... or more likely that I... being a noobie... was doing something wrong.
Once I changed the previewer channel button to zero... i could see the transitions happen... and naturally they were in the rendered video.

Please advise as to whether a new default for that channel button can be set in something like user preferences ... and many thanks!!

First go to the Video Editing layout:

Now, in my Blender (2.77), this defaults to 0, but find the Channel for the preview here:

Click on the left arrow to change it back to 0.

Now here you have an option, you can either go back to the 3D view (Default), or if you are going to be exclusively video editing, leaving it on the Video Editing layout may be useful.

Go to File -> Save Startup File and click it.  You can also use Ctrl + U.  This can of course be used to save Blender in other states (for instance, having a scene without a cube at the beginning).


Z-Axis or Metric Unit gives a worng size to any Object I've found a very interesting problem in the Blender Editor and I can't figure out how to solve it. So I want to ask you.
I want my Object to be one Meter long on the Z-axis. The Problem itself is a simple mathematical thing: When I tell the editor to move my object 1 meter up (so on Z axis 1.0 m) then it moves the center point (orange) 1 meter up, on which my object is fixed. At the same time, I want that my object has a length (also on the Z-axis) of 1 meter. But how is this possible (picture)?: My center point is in the middle, so if the orange point would be on the green y axis, then it would be Z 0. But how you see, I've already set it to 1 meter. But the object is 2 meters long. Which kind of wrong relation is that? Or did I make sth wrong? The distance between the orange point and Z 0 is 1 meter. But the end of my object is again 1 meter above the orange point so it is 2 meters long even though I typed in 1 meter? Please help me out. It really confuses me.

Try popping out the properties panel (it is a panel in the 3d view on the right, usually summoned with the N keyboard shortcut).
Set this to the Item tab, and you can set dimensions there.

You may need or want to reset the scales to 1 in all axes.  If you like the shape of your object but still want to reset the scale you can Apply Scale (ctrl-A is default shortcut for apply menu).  As you can see from the screenshot the dimensions are different from the scale and from the location.
If you set the location first, and then the dimensions, the scale will be set appropriately for you.


How do I fix the issue of my computer crashing wehenver I try to render an animation in blender cycles? I use Blender 2.79 because the newest version doesn't work on my old computer. My Computer crashes whenever I try to render an animation with 185 frames in Blender cycles. I tried both exporting it into an mp4 file as well as png files. Exporting into mp4 doesn't work at all. When I export into png files, my computer crashes after rendering only 1 or almost 2 frames out of 185. It also crashes when I just go to rendered view and want to see a preview of my animation.
To fix the issue I tried to enable gpu render but I had a problem that I couldn't enable it when I go to user preferences -> system. So I wanted to download a driver like explained here ( Enabling GPU rendering for Cycles? ) But I realized that my graphic card is not supported so I couldn't do anything.
Now I don't know what else I could try. Maybe my computer is too old to handle it? Is there anything else I could try?
edit:
about the project I am working on:
I have a scene with a house that I made using a bunch of images as planes. I only used the knife tool, loop cuts, extractions and intrusions to make the house. I'm new to blender so it was made in a very easy way. I was trying to follow this tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff0aobJRSNc) of turning a 2D art into 3D. I did not use modifiers or particles. I made a path for the camera movement. And I also have another image as plane (a video of leafs that I edited in the node editor to make make some parts tranparent). The idea was to make some leaf shadows appear on the house.
additional info:
vertices: 1,479
faces: 1,032
Tris: 2,396
Objects: 30
1 lamp
Mem: 24.87 M
Dimension: 1080px x 1350px
185 frames
I don't understand "samples" so I have a screenshot
info about my conputer:
probook6450b
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M520 @ 2.40 GHz 2.40 GHz
RAM 4,00 GB
system 64 Bit

I don't know if it'll work, but you can modify the workbench render settings to use less samples, not show anti aliasing and other options to optimize viewport, then when you render maybe lower the resolution and if you are useing CPU for the render make shure your samples are as low as you can. Also it could crash your PC because it gets too hot or needs more power (the watts that your pc is getting. you could change this in bios but it is complicated to get right on the first time, try some OC guides)


I deleted my light source... now my bakes look pitch black If i remember correctly, if you deleted your only light source in a scene, blender would automatically light everything related to bakes as seen in the image below

apparently, if you delete your only light source in a scene on blender 2.9, your bakes will be pitch black as seen in the image below

I'm quite new to blender 2.9 and i don't really know how to fix this without adding a new light source, which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid because i want the results as seen in the first image

This s not related to Version 2.9 or 2.x
When you bake combined you should have a source light , or just uncheck Direct and in direct light or just bake Defuse as moonboos mentioned :)


How to Animate The Child while the parent is already animated Trying to animate the child relative to the parent animation , but the result always offset from the original placed position . Even though I Keyframed At The Same Position (By Using ALT+G) It Still Jump

Here's the problem + Blendfile :

I saw the only one solution that didn't work :
https://youtu.be/sUdV9qQXmVk

Also , this is not about parents and unparenting . The whole internet only gives me the "child of" constraint , which isn't what I mean ..!

enter image description here

Update : deleting the config file WORKS ! Things is going well , the problem won't occur anymore .. what makes the problem is still unknown .. since I have 30+ add-ons installed .
Maybe some of my configuration is messed up , maybe some addon changes the behavior , maybe I shouldn't use Windows config to linux config .. who knows .

In my case turning OFF [Preferences / Animation / Visual Keying] fixes the problem.


Orange edges in object mode i'm having a problem where some edges are shown orange while in object mode and won't go away.

In Blender the selected/active object are outlined in edit mode by varous  coloured lines which by default are highlite only on the meshes's boundaries, aka the edges who are shared by less than two faces

Notice that this behaviour make clearly visible those objects who behave like paths or profiles, who have edges not connecting any faces and fall in the category explained above.

In your case you probably have both cases in the same mesh, overlayed.

If you want to get rid of the edges not connecting any faces, you can take advantage of the Delete Loose tool:


shader.setSample invalid uniform value I'm having troubles with my "clouds" texture while trying to sample it into my shader, the error is "invalid uniform value: clouds"

def main():
    import bge
    cont = bge.logic.getCurrentController()
    object = cont.owner

    for mesh in object.meshes:
        for material in mesh.materials:
            shader = material.getShader()
            if shader != None:
                shader.setSource(vertex_shader, fragment_shader, True)
                shader.setSampler("clouds", 0)

vertex_shader = """
uniform sampler2D clouds;
void main()
{
    gl_Position = ftransform();
}
"""

fragment_shader ="""

void main()
{
    vec4 color = vec4(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0);
    gl_FragColor = color;
}
"""
main()

I'd really appreciate some help here.

Check the Color Option under the Influence section of the Texture panel.


are intel cpus beter for blender than amd cpus (no opinions aloud just facts) I see Xeon and I7s in the top ten benchmarks for cycles in the Mike pan
Benchmark for cycles the best single cpu was the i7 3930K it got a time of 2 minutes
And it is a 60 Gflops cpu I have a amd a8 sires cpu (I don't know the exact model and it does not matter) and it is overclock to 5ghz witch is also a 60 flop cpu
And it takes 5 minutes to render the same scene
The point is why are intel cpus with the same computing power as an equivalent
Amd cpu rendering the sceen so much faster

As far as which is better for Blender, AMD or Intel, I don't really know. Beside, if the benchmark is using cycles, they might have been using GPU rendering.

As for why Intel CPUs tend to outperform AMD, the quick and dirty answer to this is that Intel has more money to spend on R&D. There was a point in time where AMD had better CPU's than Intel (Atholon 64 vs Pentium 4), but this caused Intel to get their act together. AMD is making some nice improvements to their processors, but the resources they can invest in coming up with a better CPU doesn't even compare to what Intel can invest. Because of this, Intel is more likely to come up with a better CPU.


Comprehension question about "Interpolation from Curve Mapping" node I do not understand properly the behavior of the "Interpolation from Curve Mapping" node.
At all interpolation nodes the output value of the corresponding Evaluate node is "0" at positon "0" and "1" at position "1". Except for the "Interpolation from Curve Mapping" node; at this node the output value is "-0.5" at positon "0" and "1.5" at position "1", even though the first point of the interpolation curve is at "0,0" and the last is at "1,1".
Why behaves the "Interpolation from Curve Mapping" node like this?

This (at the first glimpse) unexpected behavior exists because otherwise you can't create certain types of interpolations. eg the 'back' interpolation with an overshoot would not be possible.

This is why AN (Animation Nodes addon) remaps the Y values: 0.25 -> 0; 0.75 -> 1

All values below 0.25 or above 0.75 will be the 'overshoot' (and you need this overshoot quite often in motion graphics..)

Fortunately, Blender draws the horizontal lines in the curve mapping editor so that it is easy to see where 0.25 and 0.75 are.

Use the Debug Interpolation node to see the mapping performed by Animation Nodes.

If the remapping would not exist, there would just not be enough space in the node ui to have control over the overshoot: