Is It Possible to Select Faces (in Edit Mode) Based on the Normals of the Faces Connected to It? I understand how weirdly specific this is, but is there no way to select faces based on the normals they're facing AND the adjacent faces' normals?
What I want is a little complicated, but if I were to have a subdivided cube with perfectly flat faces, would I be able to select every face on the X positive normal but make an exception for any face that's connected to a different face with a Z positive normal?

I've tried putting specific selections into different vertex groups, but I'ven't been getting much luck using that work around. Could I not use python to make a custom search and dot in my own parameters?
[EDIT 1]
Alright, thinking a little better this time, I realised that what I was asking was odd because of the examples I used. So, I'm editing this to better clarify, using a model that correlates much better to the issue I'm having.
I suppose there'd be 2 options to what I'm asking: "select adjacent faces of normal based on the faces' normals" or "limit selection of faces based on the connected faces' normals." Though in all fairness, I'd only profit from the 2nd case. Giving examples now.
In the first case, "select adjacent faces of normal based on faces' normals," I've set up an example. In this case, I asked to select all the Z+ normals AND select adjacent faces that have the Y- normal. As you can see, only the faces that are making contact with the Z+ faces are selected.

In the second case, "limit selection of faces based on the connected faces' normals," I've another example. Again, I ask to select all Z+ faces, but this time, avoid any faces that are on the Y- normal.

Is there any way to do this? Not a big deal if there isn't, I just spent the better part of my day trying to do something like the earlier 2nd example with only commands and couldn't.

Select +Z faces and neighboring -Y faces if they go down:
import bpy, bmesh
from mathutils import Vector

up = Vector((0, 0, 1))
side = Vector((0, -1, 0))

def main():
    me = bpy.context.active_object.data
    bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)
    for face in bm.faces:
        if face.normal == up:
            face.select = True
            conditional_select_neighbors(face)
    bmesh.update_edit_mesh(me)

def conditional_select_neighbors(face):
    for loop in face.loops:  # each edge has a 'loop' associated with it for each face
        loop2 = loop.link_loop_radial_next  # radial_next gets the loop of the same edge but another face
        is_side = loop2.face.normal == side  # as R. Betts spotted, this is not enough
        loop3 = loop2.link_loop_next.link_loop_next
        is_lower = loop.vert.co.z > loop3.vert.co.z
        if is_side and is_lower:
            loop2.face.select = True

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Select +Z faces without -Y neighbors:
import bpy, bmesh
from mathutils import Vector

up = Vector((0, 0, 1))
side = Vector((0, -1, 0))

def main():
    me = bpy.context.active_object.data
    bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)
    for face in bm.faces:
        if face.normal == up:
            conditional_select(face)
    bmesh.update_edit_mesh(me)

def conditional_select(face):
    face.select = True
    for loop in face.loops:  # each edge has a 'loop' associated with it for each face
        loop2 = loop.link_loop_radial_next  # radial_next gets the loop of the same edge but another face
        if loop2.face.normal == side:  # in this case this is enough
            face.select = False

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()


How to execute multiple animation node trees over time in a single scene? I'm trying to work out how to execute two seperate node trees (with different falloff settings) within the same scene on the same objects for different camera angles... is it possible to start and stop different node trees?

Node Trees

Actually when you have mutliple node-trees they both work at the same time, but the most-recently created one overrides the oldest.

This is a completely useless example, but it demonstrates the last created node tree (here 2) will override the z value written by the first (1).

Maybe they are some cool way to make a use of multiple node trees. For example by using booleans:

Cameras

If you are able to check with a script node which is the active camera (if you are using multiple ones), return true if it is one and false if it is the other, you will be able to switch node tree using the animation nodes.

If you are using only one camera, I would suggest you to switch if the Time Info node returns a frame count >= than your angle change:

Here you can see how to use multiple cameras in one scene


How to change camera from perspective to orthographic? I can't find any property that does this.

I'd also like to change from one to the other with an animation setting halfway through my video, but not sure how I'd do that either.

Update: the animation question is answered here: Is it possible, without knowing Python, to animate between orthographic and perspective camera view?

Go to the Properties panel > Data > Lens, press the Orthographic button, and choose the Focal Length to zoom in/zoom out.


I can't find 3D cursor Options I am new to Blender an am following a course on LinkedInLearning 2.8. The tutorial mentions selecting the 3d cursor and then opening the Tools panel and choosing Options/ Align/ Geometry but in my Tools panel I only have Workspace showing. Where can I find Options?

I'm not sure but it might be in Object> Transform> Align Object. You should have a popup right under your screen titled "Allign Object"
e.g.:

If I'm wrong, feel free to correct me!!
Note: select your object before aligning it


How to get procedural shader to deform with bone deformation? I'm using a procedural shader (Cycles) on a model that I've rigged for animation.
When I pose the bones, the texture seems to be projected based on the world space and doesn't move with the deformation.
I saw someone fix this in a YT video a while ago, but now I can't find it.

If you UV-unwrap your model and use the UV coordinates as "Vector" input for your procedurals, you should be fine independent of deformation.
You will probably need to readjust the scale of some of the procedural textures after using a different set of input coordinates, though.


Elegant way to animate a binary value? Lately, I've been doing a lot of animation with binary values: things such as changing the visibility of an object, changing the value of a constraint from 0 to 1, etc. The way I'm doing this currently is by, on one frame, keyframing it, then on the next frame, changing the value and adding a new keyframe. But, since there aren't actually any frames in between the keyframes, this seems like a weird way to do it. Is there any better way? Or is this how it's done? Are there any add-ons that make this more elegant?

When keyframing binary values there is no need to include a "holding" keyframe as you have described before each change.  Blender knows to only switch the value at the keyframe since there is no way to interpolate a boolean.

In the above example I have visibility keyframes at frames 1, 15, 30, and 40.  Notice that I don't need keyframes at frames 14, 29, and 39 to make sure that it stays constant up until those frames.


Why is my material index not working on the other eye? I have a robot with a monocle on one eye, and now I want to give his eyes a glare effect. So what I did is, I gave the emission material that is assigned to the eyes a pass index of 1. But after the render the eye behind the monocle wasn't detected. And the glare effect only worked on the open eye.

What would be the best way to add glare to the eyes in this situation?

My best thought is make sure you have the blue part of the eye as a separate material index. Then use that as a factor for black and the original image. This will separate the eyes from the mesh.

Afterwards, you can use a glare node on the eyes. If you where to following this work flow make sure the threshold low.


How to project an image through the lens? I have an image (on the top in printscreen 1), the lens, and the white plane (screen) under the lens. I expect to see projection of the image, I change position of the lens - nothing matters, the screen is black.

I also have a small cub and you can see that refraction does work (you can see refracted cub).
Is there any way to manage that? Eevee (2.8+) or blender internal (2.79-), no Cycles.
This is 2.8 file

EEVEE is not supporting indirect lighting right now. You still can use Irradiance Volume and indirect light projection to Bake those effect into your scene.

If you set a proper light map, it might work

Refraction won't provide any light into the scene maybe. And it use some algorithm to achieve it in EEVEE, which is not focus on project light. In these kind of problem, we usually adopt ray tracing to mock the effect, which EEVEE is not good at it. EEVEE is rasterization rendering engine.


Is there any other way to model this archway? I want to make a hole to a plane in this way but it's taking so much time. I deleted faces and added spin to a vertex and joined the vertices I want to make it even easier is there any other way to make this

Sounds like a job for Proportional editing.

Set it to Sphere faloff and adjust size to your liking.


Driving emissives with mesh objests Is there a way to achieve something similar with Blender? Specifically, I want to drive the lights with a 3d mesh.
https://youtu.be/zRJ_HWQ7peE

Here is a gross way to do it. Unfortunately I couldn't use the NLA with the node actions which would have made it simpler, either I miss something or Blender doesn't manage node actions like other actions:

Create 4 spheres within one single object, unwrap with Project From View, build the following node setup, basically a ColorRamp is used to manage a transition between a blue emission and transparency, I made the setup a bit more complex as I wanted a bit of Layer Weight. At frame 0 set the Mapping Location value in order to make the object completely transparent, keyframe the value:

At frame X, change the Location value so that the sphere are now completely lit:

select the object and press AltD to link-duplicate, move the duplication, rotate it, duplicate it again to create a whole triangle. Also duplicate the material and change the Mapping Location values in order to delay the light:


How do I check for floating vertices non connected edges? I'm doing a very basic tutorial and trying to recreate a model which has basic geometry, figuring out the best way to use edge flow and to tie up any NGONs.
The model seemed to be behaving very odd as I was trying to make cuts to an NGON. I've only just realised I had vertices and the odd edge overlapping in the NGON from previous attempts at doing this.

I know it was just sloppy work, but is there a way of quickly checking your model for any floating vertices and/or edges?

Try this. It removes disconnected vertices and edges.


Cannot index UVs by [0]/[1] or .x/.y (broken coordinates in python!) Trying to get the XY of a uv_layer[index].uv by using [0] and 1, or .x and .y, return extremely weird results. However using the uv value itself (e.g. print(uv_layer[index].uv)) gives correct results. Example:

This is not just a printing issue. When writing the values to a file, I get these same broken values in the file. Seems only that 0.0/0.0001 coords are broken maybe?

How do I obtain the correct X and Y values, individually?

That's not specifically a blender issue, it is showing the inaccuracy of representing a decimal number in binary storage. The python docs have a page explaining the issue and show some ways around it, the best is probably using format() which replaces the older '%.3g' % val style.

>>> val = 0.1 + 0.2
>>> print(val)
0.30000000000000004
>>> print('{:.3g}'.format(val)) # '.3g' will give 3 significant digits
0.3

While python has the decimal module to better support decimal numbers, it doesn't help when working with blender's data.


How do I get blender to stop creating so many files? I have a problem naming files. I tend to name them crazy things because I don't feel like naming them properly when in a hurry.

Anyways, I am very used to photoshop, and just about every other program out there when it comes to saving things. With blender, I save a file, and choose to overwrite the blend file, but for some reason it creates a blend1, or a blend11, or some other crazy combination of blend.blend1.blend, etc.

All I want is to be able to save my file with one name. If I want to save that file as a different name to make a copy, I'd like to just do a "Save As" to save it with an alternative name.

My desktop is FILLED with orange blender icons! If anyone could help me get this working the way I described I'd really appreciate it. I'm very new to blender.

Any file with ".blend" and then a number is a backup file created by blender. This is not related to Save or Save As, which act the same as other program's implementations of them. Every time you save, the previous saved version gets loaded into ".blend1", so these extra files are your previous saves. If you ever wanted to use one of these previous saves you would rename the extension back to ".blend" and open it.

You can go to File> User Preferences> File and set Save Versions to 0 if you don't want these extra backup files:


Surface rendered with a different blur frame by frame I'm using Blender 2.79 to render an animation. While many frames look consistent, every three or four frames, a series of frames crop up where a surface is rendered differently than the rest, often with what appears to be a depth of field blur in a different place. See the differences frame by frame with the ground surface here:

The first image is correct and the rest not correct.

I'm using a camera with a cube as a depth of field focus object, if that matters. Also using denoising, which doesn't seem to be the issue, and the fracture modifier for destruction. There is only one light in the scene that does not move.

Any hope for making the frames more consistent?

Whatever the issue was, it was resolved by re-rendering the whole project with a version of Blender 2.8 with Fracture Modifier (rather than 2.79b). Thanks to rjg for the suggestion!


Texture Painting - wrap brush to mesh? Perhaps its that I haven't used the right phrases but I haven't been able to find not only a solution to my issue, I haven't been able to see the issue raised at all.

In texture paint mode the paint is projected from the viewport through the brush. This has been an entirely unworkable process for me, Every stroke I make has unintended consequences - jagged edges, projected silhouettes... Instead of projecting the painted area based brush bound by the view, is there a way for the brush to essentially be anchored to the topology of the mesh, such that the brush literally serves to isolate geometry to work upon, rather than project from the view axis onto the mesh.

A line drawn from left to right, slight feathering

Hitting the edge of geometry from one view always leads to sharp, hideous edges etc etc etc

Like I say, I haven't seen anyone else post about this. I don't understand why, it's not workable for making a base coat never mind finer details

...appreciations and props to whoever points out the inevitably obvious setting I've missed, or first git gud post

You can use the Project Paint settings to get around this - by default, Occlude, Cull and Normal are all on, as well as a 2 pixel bleed. You can uncheck these like I show in the picture, and then your paint will paint through the mesh all the way like a blade - and if you want to only do some of it, you can use the Face Selection masking in the header window, right next to the drawtype icon.


find one or more chars in object name I'm new to python. For learning I'm trying to create a script to find a character "ä" or "." etc in all selected objects; and select only those objects.

Here is my code:

for obj in bpy.context.selected_objects:
    if "." in obj.name: #how can i add more additional character e.g. space?
        print("script found space or points")
        #how do select this objects?

    else:
        print("names all right")

Ok first try to think what you really want to do. You are trying to select some object based on its name, however you are looking at the selected objects.
So what you really want to do, is unselect everything else (because the object(s) you do want is already selected).

Here is a loop that goes through every selected object bpy.context.selected_objects:, and if the search term does not match the current object name it deselects it. Which leaves you with only the matching objects selected.

import bpy
searchTerm = "cube"
for obj in bpy.context.selected_objects:
    if searchTerm.lower() not in obj.name.lower():
        obj.select = False

The .lower() part converts everything to lower case, which makes the search case insensitive (if you did not "c" would not match "Cube").

Now one way you could search for more then one search term at a time, is to add in a or into the if statement.
Which would look like this:

if "a" not in obj.name.lower() or " " not in obj.name.lower():

Note the second condition " ", that is searching for a space in the object name.

Here is a slightly more useful version that looks through all the objects,  selects the matching objects and deselects any that do not match.

import bpy

for obj in bpy.data.objects:
    if "s" in obj.name.lower():
        obj.select = True
    else:
        obj.select = False


How to make gray spaces disappear? I have a question
Blender "eats" my constructions with gray spaces.
I would like to know how to move away those gray spaces so that I can work with more space.
Thank you so much to anyone who answers me!

Press N  on your keyboard to open the Properties Panel, then go to the area marked with red.

Then increase the Clip End to fit your work


How do I use the cycles Denoiser? For quite a while, I have been using realtime GLSL shading for most of my projects. I decided to re-vist cycles after hearing about how awesome the new denoiser is. What does the denoiser actually do, and how do I use it?

The denoiser is a wonderful part of the cycles render process. It runs after the tile has rendered, but during the render process. It takes information about the scene and calculations cycles makes to turn a noisy image into a remarkably smooth render.
Because it is part of the render process it works better then any filter you could throw on the image after the fact.

This image was render at 10 samples, with the denoiser on at default settings. Notice even the shadows are smooth.

Now here is the exact same render, but without the denoiser. (click for full size to see the difference)

The denoiser is at the bottom of the render layers tab in the properties window. Simply check the checkbox and open up the Denoising section.

Now given that you are not using Progressive Refine, and have blender 2.79 or higher then you are all set.

The three main settings are Radius, Strength, and Feature Strength.

Radius is how far the denoiser looks around each pixel.
Strength think of this as the strength of the over all denoising filter. Lower numbers are sharp (noisy) image, a value of one is full denoising (can kill small details).
Feature Strength controls the strength of a pre-filter, before the denoiser works its magic. Here again low values equal more detail, and a value of one is full strength.

The manual page for the denoiser. The release notes from 2.79.

Note that Denoising will use a lot more resources from your computer and might even yield out of memory errors. Denoising needs the information of all of the adjacent rendered tiles to work, meaning that for every tile being rendered blender will keep in RAM the information of all the surrounding tiles and will only release that ram once a tile has been denoised.


Whenever i try to render my video its just all white? Whenever i try to render my video its just all white?
Here is a photo of my test render:

First of all, set your exposure and gamma to 1:

Then you have a complete powerful sun (strenght 1.0) with a complete powerful environment lighting (strenght 1.0) resulting in too much light!
This is a test render with both set to 0.1.

Lighting is very complex and very powerful, so .... good luck!


Blender 2.8 does not render current camera view Why doesn't blender 2.8 render the view from the currently selected camera; this view:

produces:

How can I render an image viewed from a specific camera?

select the camera press 'n' and in view check 'use local camera'


Blender 2.83.1 Can't find render bake option in cycles I am making a floor texture and want to create a normal map. I looked up some video's and they refer to the Render -> Bake option in cycles. I can't seem to find it. Here is a screenshot:

Am I doing something wrong or is the option elsewhere?

It took a while before I figured this out. I watched video after video still not knowing how to do it. Until a few days ago I figured it out. I needed to bake a normal map and I still did not have the bake option. Then this popped into my head: "I wonder what happens when I switch it to CPU mode instead of GPU.". After I switched it to CPU I saw the bake option. After about a month I figured it out. They really should add that to the documentation or make it more clear.
TL;DR:
Make sure you use Cycles and use the CPU.


Is the active object and zeroth selected object always the same? I see a lot of scripts on BSE that use for example

bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cube_add()
cube = context.selected_objects[0]

instead of one of

cube = context.object
cube = context.active_object
cube = context.view_layer.objects.active # 2.8
cube = context.scene.objects.active # 2.79

is the zeroth selected object and the active object always the same

Not always

After calling an add primitive operator it is almost always the case that the new object is both active and selected. In which case it rings true.

>>> bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cube_add()
{'FINISHED'}

>>> C.object is C.selected_objects[0]
True

but the selection can be manipulated such that the active object is None, and there are still selected objects.

>>> for o in C.scene.objects:
...     o.select_set(True)
...
>>> C.view_layer.objects.active = None
>>> C.object is C.selected_objects[0]
False

Then not true.

Selecting then setting active object

>>> for o in C.scene.objects:
...     o.select_set(True)
...
>>> C.view_layer.objects.active = None
>>> C.selected_objects[0]
bpy.data.objects['Cube']

>>> C.view_layer.objects.active = C.scene.objects['Cube.001']
>>> C.selected_objects[0]
bpy.data.objects['Cube']

Again not true.

Or no selected objects, with or without an active object

>>> C.view_layer.objects.active = C.scene.objects['Cube'] # or None
>>> for o in C.scene.objects:
...     o.select_set(False)
...

>>> C.object is C.selected_objects[0]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<blender_console>", line 1, in <module>
IndexError: list index out of range

In conclusion, suggest if you want to be sure it's the active object use context.active_object or context.object.  Check if not selected and set selection if need be  Don't rely on using context.selected_objects[0]


Broken lighting in Blender file I'm having difficulties with a Blend file:

Point Lights and Area lights are almost invisible
Sun, Spot and Hemi lights are functioning normally

By 'almost invisible' I mean that I have to crack up the intensity to 100.000 to see a dim shine. Preview pane at this level is completely blown out, as well as the entire scene if I switch to Sun, Spot or Hemi.

Does anyone have any idea what I'm doing wrong here?

A simplified file can be found at

Thanks for any pointers you might be able to give.

Warner

Have you played with the "Light Falloff" node?
Just add the node into your light material and try the different falloff types.

But you can go further if you play with math nodes. First you need to understand how to build them:

Constant falloff : same strength everywere, no matter if you're close or far from the emitter.
Linear falloff : strength decreasing with the distance (strength = 1/distance).
Quadratic falloff : same as linear but decreases faster (strength = 1/distance²).

Now we can play with math nodes to get tweaks and lower strength values.

I'm using your file but I had to fix your plane (removed doubles and useless perpendicular face)


Cannot mix .user and .addon keyconfigs in register() I've been messing around with keymaps lately and I've come across behavior that doesn't make much sense to me. I am searching the current keyconfig for a specific keymap item, removing it, then adding a new keymap item with the same assignments. I am doing this in register(), which I think might not be able to mix the two keyconfigs.

def register():
    wm = bpy.context.window_manager
    km = wm.keyconfigs.user.keymaps['Mesh']

    # remove default keybinding
    for kmi in wm.keyconfigs.user.keymaps['Mesh'].keymap_items:
        if kmi.idname == 'wm.call_menu' and kmi.properties.name == "VIEW3D_MT_edit_mesh_select_mode":
            km.keymap_items.remove(kmi)
            break

    # add multiselect keybinding
    km = wm.keyconfigs.addon.keymaps.new(name='Mesh')
    kmi = km.keymap_items.new('wm.call_menu', 'TAB', 'PRESS', ctrl=True)
    kmi.properties.name = "VIEW3D_MT_Multiselect_Menu"

Note the difference between wm.keyconfigs.USER and wm.keyconfigs.ADDON

However when I activate the add-on, the original keymap item is gone and the new keymap item has not been registered. If I register the new keymap item under .user, it works well enough to get by. Similarly, I have another function elsewhere that (un)registers keymap items in the .addon space that also presents inconsistencies:

I have a toggle button in the user prefs to toggle between one menu and another (pie and list menus). Using .addon, I can toggle the menus and the pie is registered properly and list is unregistered, but toggling back removes the pie and does not register the list menu. If I use .user, both keymap items register and unregister just fine.

Let me explain why I want to do it this way.

First off, I'm using a custom keyconfig, which presents its own difficulties when searching the active keyconfig for an existing keymap item. This is why I'm using .user instead of .active (.active was telling me 'Mesh' was an invalid keymap and didn't exist. Using default Blender keyconfig does not give this error).

Second, I want to not overwrite or write into the existing keyconfig. Presumably this is why .addon exists. I want to keep it 'clean' for lack of a better word.

Ultimately, I want to make a system that auto-detects a specific keymap item and its assignments (in the case of a custom hotkey assignment), stores all that data, then on unregistration restores the original keymap item and its assignments. There are many other inconsistencies I've come across, but each of those deserves their own questions.

My Question:

Is there a way I can combine .addon and .user spaces OR use .active without it telling me 'Mesh' keymap doesn't exist (there are clearly keymap items in the Mesh category)? I see other add-ons use .addon without issue (yafaray, for example), but they don't try to mix the two spaces.

OR use .active without it telling me 'Mesh' keymap doesn't exist

Have you tried checking for and adding it if necessary?

kc=bpy.context.window_manager.keyconfigs.active
km='Mesh' in kc.keymaps and kc.keymaps['Mesh'] or kc.keymaps.new('Mesh')


How to change alpha for background image (camera) with python? I'm trying to figure out how to change the Alpha (image opacity) for a background image in the Camera settings "Background Images", but can't quite figure it out, any ideas?
The tooltip says CameraBackgroundImage.alpha and bpy.data.cameras['Camera name'] ... alpha

Q: How to change alpha for background image (camera) with python?

Python console
Given the tooltip, and the property being in 'DATA' panel can see that the property belongs to the data part of the camera.
I find autocomplete in the console handy for working these things out.
The data part of the scene camera (it's also the active object C.object.  In console C is a shortcut for bpy.context (see startup message).
>>> C.scene.camera
bpy.data.objects['Camera']

>>> cam = C.scene.camera.data
>>> cam
bpy.data.cameras['Camera']

Ok, if you autocomplete on cam.<TAB> will notice that it has a background_images property...  Ok it's a collection
Here I've looped over the collection and displayed the alpha and its attached image.
>>> for img in cam.background_images:
...     img.alpha, img.image
...
(0.5, bpy.data.images['1b.jpg'])

Set first in list to alpha 1
>>> cam.background_images[0].alpha = 1


How to make a specific area of a soft body behave like rigid body (or vice versa)? Is it possible to make a part of a soft body mesh behave like a rigid body without pinning the vertices of the object? For instance, following this answer I painted some of the vertices of the soft body object and set the soft body goal to the painted vertex group. However, this will make the object immovable and instead of the whole object, gravity will only affect the unpainted vertices. This affect could be shown better if the object weight is set to a high value. The main issue here though is the pinning; I do not want the object to get pinned to the painted vertices. Here's a gif depicting the issue:

Instead, I would like to make some parts of the soft body behave like rigid body without having the pinning behavior. In other words, I would like to vertices' weights somehow make the springs between vertices become pretty stiff so that the entire object will still fall down due to gravity but the weighted vertices won't move.

So I wonder if you guys know a way of achieving what I want with weight painting? If achieving this with weight painting is hard, would it be possible to simply assign soft body to some of the vertices of a rigid body instead?\

Here's a .blend file that you can begin your work with; I used Blender 2.79b for this work:

Although it seems impossible to make a part of the mesh like a true rigid body, but following cgslav comments I could do this to some degree by assigning the vertex group to Springs as shown below. Note that the object is a bit heavy (10kg) and that's why assigning weight 1.00 to the vertices will still result in them moving a lot. Assigning lower weight values to the object fixes this issue to some degree and that is sufficient for my work.


How to create and bake animations in Blender (when you already have created the Rig Skeleton) I've created a little blocky character in Blender, with a rigged skeleton. I've tested the joints out in Pose Mode and they seem ok. (the character is for a 3rd person 2.5D side-scrolling platform game, I need idle, run, skid animations for now)

From the instructions ive been following and several tutorials, I believe I need to bake each keyframe. Now I'm not fully sure what that is, but I understand it basically means taking position details etc for every frame so that the rig doesnt need to be manipulated in my code in unity.

I am going for very simple approach here, I dont mind things like foot sliding and stiff like that. Its going to only be a few keyframes per animation.

I have to make it into FBX file i believe, however I've downloaded a few OBJ before off the net and they worked with animation in unity (if i recall correctly).

Here is the screenshot for what I've done so far showing the model and the rig skeleton. What screen do i need to go to in order to start making keyframes, and saving animations for unity?

(Sorry if this is quite a dumb/broad question, im just stuck again :\ )

Thanks for reading

To answer your answer , when creating animations i personally do prefer to go to frame 0 press A in view to select all bones and press I & select PosLocScale to get the starting pose and do the same on the last frame of the animation , then i just skip to certain frame and edit bones i need to , before jumping to another frame i select the bones i have edited and press I => Set LocPosScale or u can press A and set it.


How to remove black areas of transparent image in reflection I'm trying to render png emitted clouds but have no idea how to remove the black areas of png's reflection as shown below

Here's the node setup

I turned off its glossiness in the ray visibility menu under object tab

Could be the only way of solving the black background of the png as of the moment.


How to save 2 image per frame? I'm very noob, i don't know how to save 2 diferent image for the same render animation to save time.

i want to save this both image per frame automatically:

like: frame1_0.png & frame1_1.png, frame2_0.png & frame2_1.png etc...

Using compositor you can easily output passes you want.


Is there a way to copy/paste keyframes to a extrapolation cycle? I want to make all the keyframes appear like this

instead of the blank cycle like this

Is there a way? I want this because sometimes I need to make change on the cycle and without keyframes, a single new keyframe will ruin the cycle. I really dont want to copy/paste all keyframes on the dopesheet because everything will be a mess and will take too much time!
thanks

This can be done with F-Curve cycles modifier. The F-Curve modifier panel is located in the Properties region in the Graph Editor.

To add a modifier, select the curve you want to add cycles to, select Modifiers tab in the properties region, click on Add Modifier and select Cycles.


Extrude seems broken Just starting out, created a planar mesh, in edit mode, hit E to extrude, and I get this:

Extrude doesn't create any perpendicular faces or vertices, it just duplicates the flat mesh and grabs it. What's going on here?

I think you might have hit Extrude once, and not moved the mouse and now there are duplicates of every vertex. You can remove doubles and Extrude again, should work fine.

This is what you're seeing:

Select everything, press W -> Remove doubles. Then try to extrude again:

This is what you want to see


Gaps Appearing Within UV Map I have been using Lynda.com to learn character modeling. However, I have been unable to find a comprehensive guide to UV mapping. Because of this, I've had to figure it out using various bits of different tutorials online, and I've had some good success. However, I recently came across a problem that has halted my progress completely.

When applying textures using UV mapping, these strange gaps started appearing only on the hands of the character, everywhere else looks fine. If anyone could tell me what's going on, I would greatly appreciate it.
edit mode

object mode

It looks to me that certain marked edges get altered with your Multires/Catmull-Clark modifier: the "new" faces created by that seem to be misplaced to the white areas of the texture that you are using.

I would suggest that first you check for the split edges. I might be terribly wrong, but it looks like you have them on your sleeve... and body too.

It's very easy to miss and set *Mark Sharp" instead of Mark Seam, for instance, and then as you set multires or subsurf modifiers, edges marked sharp are getting split, which, among other things, means that integrity of the UV is violated.

Also kindly check doubles (Edit Mode > W > Remove Doubles).

I would also suggest that after you have done it you could try applying your multires modifier for testing purposes and check the exact position of UV for the "white" faces on the hands. Blender now allows both selecting faces in the 3D Viewport and seeing them on your UV in the UV/Image editor, but vice versa too. There is a button "Keep UV and edit mode mesh selection in sync".

Hopefully this would help.


I can't paint on my meshes? I need help setting up texture paint on the Image Editor/ 3D Viewport So i'm creating a kitchen scene in blender 2.8. It's my first scene that i'm going to fully texture, give materials, give proper lighting, etc., and i can't seem to figure out how to set up texture paint. I painted some other meshes with texture paint, but I can't figure out what i did that isn't allowing me to paint, even though I'm in texture paint mode. If someone could help me out, that'd be great.

You've opened a completely black Texture Mask so you can't paint anything, just close it.


Render not saving correctly For both AVI files and other still image ones like JPEG, the saved file just gets saved as a 'file' file. (The image should help get my point across)

Please halp.

What I think it could have happened is that you have simply disabled the File Extensions checkbox, under the Output Section in the Render Settings. Just reenable it and from the next render, the images will have the right extension.

If you want to be able to see the images you render, insert the extension that you selected in the rendering in the file name. For example with the render settings in the photo, you would have to insert ".PNG" in the rendered image file names.


Create a mesh from image with transparency Is there a way to create a flat mesh from an image that has transparency, so that the mesh matches shape and does not include the transparency in the geometry?

I have tried converting my image in an .svg with inkscape and adding a bitmap, but the results get very messy.

Here is my image:

Thanks.

I wrote a script to do exactly this a while back, here it is:

Tips on usage, if you really are using pixel art, then avoid representing the pixels using 4 pixels. You don't have to.. but it makes the resulting mesh unnecessarily vertex heavy before doing any operations like 'limited dissolve' (which joins all adjacent geometry when possible)

Script, is a little long but I'll include here anyway.

from collections import defaultdict

import bpy

scene = bpy.context.scene

color_map = defaultdict(list)
filename = "aYlTzbV.png"
img = bpy.data.images[filename]
scale = 0.3

def idx_to_co(idx, width):
    r = int(idx / width)
    c = idx % width
    return r, c

def co_to_idx(r, c, width):
    return r * width + c

def rgba_from_index(idx, pxs):
    start_raw_index = idx * 4
    return pxs[start_raw_index:start_raw_index+4]

def sv_main():

    def is_fully_opaque(rgba):
        return rgba[3] == 1.0

    pixels = img.pixels
    pxs = list(pixels)

    w = width = img.size[0]
    h = height = img.size[1]

    num_pixels = len(pxs)
    gl = grouped_list = [pxs[i:i+4] for i in range(num_pixels)[::4]]

    for c in range(w):
        for r in range(h):
            idx = co_to_idx(r, c, w)
            rgba = rgba_from_index(idx, pxs)
            if is_fully_opaque(rgba):
                color_map[tuple(rgba[:3])].append([r*scale, -c*scale, 0.0])

def create_repr_plane(obj_name, mesh_name, vlist):
    s = scale/2
    verts = []
    v_add = verts.extend
    faces = []
    f_add = faces.append

    for i, v in enumerate(vlist):
        x, y = v[:2]
        v_add([[-s+x, s+y, 0], [-s+x, -s+y, 0], [s+x, -s+y, 0], [s+x, s+y, 0]])

        offset = i*4
        f_add([0 + offset, 1 + offset, 2 + offset, 3 + offset])

    profile_mesh = bpy.data.meshes.new(obj_name)
    profile_mesh.from_pydata(verts, [], faces)
    profile_mesh.update()

    profile_object = bpy.data.objects.new(obj_name, profile_mesh)

    scene.objects.link(profile_object)
    return profile_object

sv_main()

for i, (k, v) in enumerate(color_map.items()):

    obj = create_repr_plane("dupli_object_" + str(i), "dupli_mesh_" + str(i), v)

    repr_of_color = "{0:.4f} {1:.4f} {2:.4f}".format(*k)
    mat = bpy.data.materials.new('sv_material_' + repr_of_color)
    mat.use_nodes = True
    mat.use_fake_user = True  # usually handy
    obj.active_material = mat
    nodes = mat.node_tree.nodes
    nodes["Diffuse BSDF"].inputs[0].default_value = list(k) + [1]

It does a few things:

rages through the image (if doesn't really care if it's low or high res, but high res will slow it down)
Indexes the coordinates of all similar coloured pixels
generates a quad based mesh to represent each pixel, and joins them all in one mesh object for one colour
makes a cycles material node for each object and sets it to the indexed color.

doesn't do
Several post processing steps

doesn't join the resulting objects into one multi-material object
doesn't perform remove doubles / limited dissolve

Warning:

This script assumes your low res image doesn't have thousands of different colours. It will create as many different objects as colors found in the image. Tip is to first Quantize the image or let some tool index the colors for you. This will perform terrible with lots of gradients, if you need gradients this script is not for you. It's writen in the spirit of low res low dynamic range images.


Using project painting, texture obtained is much darker then the images projected I'm using images to project-paint my model with the stencil brush.
After I painted, the texture originated, and ofcourse the uv layout image, is much darker then the photos originally used.

I tried changing the shading settings, adding lamps aimed directly to the model, but it seems to only effect the model itself and not the texture. On top of that I tried saving the image and externally edit it, increasing brightness or contrast, but it wrecks the fine details.

Anyone, any ideas? thank you!

Is the strenght in the tool tab  set to 1?


Scale Rotated As If Not Rotated I am trying to figure out how to scale some rotated geometry as if it was not rotated. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but imagine this situation: Let's say I have an oblong cylinder that is rotated at an odd angle and I want to scale the cylinder so that it is now round, how could I do that (see pic)?
I tried scaling along normals, while that works for certain things, say I wanted to make the cylinder longer a normal scale along the z axis works, but trying to scale it like in my example does not work, along any axes or any orientation.
Another solution I thought would work is to orient my camera along the top face with shift+n7, however it doesn't seem to align the camera perfectly and that causes scaling along the view to distort. Sometimes if the shape is perfect the camera alignment will be perfect, but if it's off by just a tad the alignment get's out of wack.

If you haven't applied the rotation, you can use the local coordinates, either change to locale in the Transform Orientations dropdown, or hit S -> Y -> Y for scaling on the local Y axis (or X twice for X etc.)
If you have applied rotation then creating a new Transform Orientation will be required. Select the face on one end of your cylinder, then in the Transform Orientations dropdown click the + button. This will make a new coordinate system aligned with the selected face. Then scale as required.

But the easiest way for this particular problem would be to use Loop Tools addon. Select the verts on one end, right-click and choose LoopTools -> Circle and like magic your verts with be a circle retaining the plane they are on and their median location!


Rigid body: gears physical animation I've a problem with the rigid body animation of 2 created gears. The gears always end up overlapping each other.

Edit:

The gears in the first file have a module of 1.5. When the sensitivity of the gears is set to 0.01 the animation works.

The gears in the second file have a module of 0.5. In the second blend file the animation still breaks even with a sensitivity of 0.01. Are the gears in the second blend file to small to animate with rigid body?

Second blend file

To improve the accuracy of the Rigid Body simulation you can increase the Steps setting in the Rigid Body World settings of the Scene properties. This defaults to 60 - larger values breaks the simulation into smaller steps at the expense of taking longer to calculate - try increasing by a factor of 10 or more. Smaller steps results in better collision and a more stable simulation.

However, that isn't actually the problem with your animation. The problem is actually due to the meshes themselves - the normals are flipped and pointing 'into' the object rather than 'out'. This means that the collision becomes confused and Blender is behaving as if the objects are actually caught within each other which results in the 'stuck' animation as one cog attempts to turn.

The solution is to simply select each cog in turn, enter Edit mode (Tab), select all (A until all is selected) and press Ctrl+N to Make Normals Consistent. This tells Blender to recalculate the normals, by default pointing them 'out' of the object.

Once the normals were corrected I didn't need to make any other changes on your file for the cogs to animate.


Use a higher resolution background image in an animation render I have a image which has full HD resolution (1920x1080) and I want to use it as background for my animation without decreasing the resolution. My animation is in HD resolution (1280x720). The background is added using compositing with nodes. When I render the animation Blender cuts of the edges of my background image so that it fits the animation resolution.

Is there a way to keep the resolution of the background image but render the animation with another resolution and still have the whole background image in the final animation?

Add a Scale node ("Distort -> Scale") to your background image. Then set the space to "Render Size". Then select "Fit".


Can a Lotus Kalam be done in Blender? Example (Mathematica: Demonstration Project):

All the settings are there as to how it's done in Mathematica.
Is this enough for determining how it could be done in Blender?
My first thought and goto was Curves / Torus knots.
I'm not sure what information, based on the example would go where.  Or even if that's the best (or only place - code maybe / nodes maybe) to work this out.
Maybe Braided Knots? Curve Spirals - Torus?
Another possibility, based on the example, maybe a base curve rotated via empty using the array modifier?
https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/KnotPatternSimilarToALotusKolam/
Kolam:

Kolam (Tamil: கோலம்), or also known as Muggu (Telugu: ముగ్గు)is a form of drawing that is drawn by using rice flour, chalk, chalk powder or rock powder, often using naturally or synthetically colored powders, in Sri Lanka, the Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and some parts of Goa, Maharashtra as well as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and a few other Asian countries. A Kolam is a geometrical line drawing composed of curved loops, drawn around a grid pattern of dots. In South India and Sri Lanka, it is widely practised by female Hindu family members in front of their houses.1 Kolams are regionally known by different names in India, Raangolee in Maharashtra, Aripan in Mithila, Hase and Rangoli in Kannada in Karnataka.[2] More complex Kolams are drawn and colors are often added during holiday occasions and special events.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolam
I don't get the impression that this is "the" Kolam as much as "a" Kolam based on the definition.

If the question is not about mathematical accuracy, that can be done easily with a curve (or some segments), a circular array and a weld modifier, as you mentioned in the question.

Start with a curve circle, in edit mode open it (toggle cyclic) and shift it from the center.
Add an array modifier, with 9 occurrencies, set it to "object" and use an empty as object. Rotate the empty 40 degrees (360 / 9).
Add a weld modifier with a relatively large distance (that makes the next step easier).
Now adjust the "open circle" extremities so that they join.
If you want it in 3d, move the two other vertices up and down.

You can also do something similar starting from a mesh:


How do I increase the mouse manipulation speed? It's an awkward question and I don't know how to word it right.
I'm working on a small object about 10cm across. When I want to inset a circular face, I can't do it to the degree I want because Blender sees that I'm zoomed in all the way and so huge mouse movements only make a tiny inset. And because the maximum inset distance is reached when my mouse cursor is over the center of the circle, the space I have to move the mouse is limited. That means I have to either inset many times before I get to the desired amount or I have to zoom out a huge way back but then I can't see what I'm doing.

So the question is, is there any way to increase the amount of manipulation per distance traveled with the mouse during an inset operation, so I can use circular insets on a small scale?

thank you.

While you're doing the inset (or most any transform), you can actually just start typing a number and Blender will use that and ignore your mouse pointer. You can see it in the header at the bottom of the view.

With Inset specifically, the scale appears to be that 1.0 insets all the way to a point at the center of the face, 0.5 is halfway, etc.


Baking Metallic map? Hey what's the best way to bake Metallic maps since it's not one of the types of baking blender's interface offers you?

I know about plugin your metalic node setup into a diffuse node and bake that, but it can get tricky if you use multiple Mix Shader nodes making your material (so your metallic information could be split among tons of tons all over the place).

I need to do it through code reliably, if possible.

Metallic maps are maps that tell the shader which parts of the object to make metal, and which to make dieletric.  If you want to make a custom map, the best way to do it in my opinion would be to texture paint a black and white map in blender.  it's not really a type of map you can bake.

hope this is helpful :)


Shrinkwrap tetris shapes without scaling or diagonal shapes Hello guys I want to achieve a Shrinkwrap modifier from a sphere to a tetris shape like this. This shape was achieved by merging two cubes Scale (1,2,1) and (1,1,1) I also tried getting this shape by modifying the vertices but the results of the shrinkwrap were the same

I kind of already did other shrinkwrap shapes that worked perfectly like these

These are exactly the way I want the shrinkwraps to work by adding a shrinkwrap modifier and putting the mode to nearest vertex and setting the target as the shape I wanted but all of these were made with cubes in where only the scale got changed. The mode nearest surface point needed me to scale the sphere so it fits the shape but I cant scale the sphere (the game I develop doesnt allow it) so the mode nearest vertex did the thing I exactly wanted. This is what I got when I try to shrinkwrap the tetris shape

the shape doesnt select all the vertices as a whole shape like the ones before so the outcome will not be good. Somehow there are even triangle shapes outside the actual shape.

So how do I achieve the shrinkwrap to perfectly wrap around my tetris shape (just realized its not even a tetris shape) without triangles and that.

I'd be grateful for any tips (I am a newbie in blender btw)

Avoid Boolean whenever possible. For such simple shapes you should not need any "merging" , proper topology is important especially if you are deforming shapes where constant mesh density is helpful.

If you just want the morph into a sphere use the Cast modifier instead, it yields cleaner results.

Model the shape by extruding two faces of a default cube, then add a Subsurf modifier set to Simple to give it geometry to work with, followed by the Cast modifier set to Sphere. Control progression from the Factor slider.


Add text to an equirectangular photo I've got an equirectangular photo and I want to add a simple text to the scene. Is it possible to do that easily with Blender Cycles or some other technique?

First setup your equirectangular image as an environment texture to the world surface :

Go to the world panel, in the surface part: choose 'environment texture', then your image and select 'equirectangular'.

(below, the world panel setting on the right, the node equivalent on bottom and the view rendered on top with default cube in place)

Add a camera, set it to 'panoramic' in its property panel, then choose 'equirectangular'. This camera will be used to render the scene, so you can here choose its orientation in order to have the same centered image as your original (as you need).

Add a text... somewhere... depending on where you want it to be.

To adjust its position, go in camera view Numpad0 in rendered mode, select your text, and move/rotate/scale it as needed

Now we need to render the image :

Go to the render panel, choose the size you need and the format you want, and click on 'render' :

Save your image F3 and in the options which are at the bottom left, choose the export format you want :

You are done. To test the result, simply set this new image as environment texture (as we did for the original image at the begining)


AMD GPU Material in "material preview mode" and "rendered mode", is entirely gray as background. Only outline is displayed I don't know why but now, when i go in material preview or rendered (in solid mode it works fine), my object is entirely gray, or invisible idk, because it has the same color of the background.
I've been working for days on this project without having this issue, it suddenly showed up.
I tried opening other old projects and suddenly they all do the same so i guess it is some blender program setting that applies for all the projects, but idk how it happened cuz i didn't change anything :/, anyone got any tips?

Update: Blender 2.92.0, 2.91.1 and 2.83.11 will contain workarounds for the missing / incorrectly rendered surfaces of mesh, curves and metaballs as well as the incorrectly rendered wireframes caused by bugs in the graphics driver.

The graphics driver version Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.11.2 and later appear to cause issues for several users, as reported in T82856 and related tickets. Installing a previous driver version should solve these problems until the bug in the driver is fixed or Blender provides a workaround for the problem.


Changing Multiple Influences Simultaneously I'm a new Blender 2.8 user, and I am creating my rig for the first time.
Is it possible to select and change the rotation constraint influence of multiple bones at the same time? My rig goes back and fourth between motion capture data, and custom tweeking data. Sometimes I want the influence to be closer to the motion capture, sometimes I want it to be more influenced by the custom tweek skeleton.

But when I try to select multiple bones and change influence, it only changes the last bone I selected. There are about 50 bones including fingers so changing them one at a time is extremely tedious. I feel like there has to be a quicker way, but I haven't been able to find it.

Thank you very much for your time!

You can set up a custom property and drivers to do do this.

Basically you do the following:

add a custom property to your armature to control all the influences (see)
For one of the copy rotation constraints, right click and select add driver->manually create later
Go to the graph editor view, put it in drivers mode and find the driver you just created and press n to show the drivers panel
Set its variable to a type of single property and select your armature as the object
Find your custom property and right-click on it and copy data path. Paste the data path into the path field on the driver variable.
update the Expr field in the driver panel to the name of your driver variable (by default this is var)
for each other constraint, you can right-click on the first constraint's influence and copy the driver, then use right click to paste to the new constraint
You can now update the custom property and all the constraint influences will be updated at the same time.


How to display patterns on an LED cube? I'm trying to render a test for a large scale LED cube, and it would be cool to light it up virtually.  I can't think of a way to add textures other than on the surface of the LEDs themselves (i.e. all of them being one colour, as opposed to some being the default plastic shaders and others being emissions).  Currently, all balls are set to a procedural transparent plastic texture. What I want is for some balls to illuminate entirely and others to be off, like an LED cube, but in a definitive shape, like a lotus or wave.  Rendered in cycles.
This is the cube for testing:

This would be an example of a shader effect that shows pixel for pixel an accurate image like this lotus:

So pretty simple solution actually...I basically used an object (in this case icosphere) inside the cube and gave it an emission shader and used the boolean modifier set to intersect with the cube.  Not perfect, but did the job somewhat reasonably.


Boolean modifier just remove my object I wanted to apply a modifier between two cones. Here is what you can see before I make it visible:

and after:

As you can see, the bigger cone just disapeared. I tried to update the normals (Shift-N in edit mode or Mesh > Normal > Recalculate outside) of both the small and the large cone, still the same issue. Actually, the cone disappear even if I use union!
Also, to make sure that the pointy vertex is not removed, I made sure to shift a bit the smaller cone:

Here is the file: http://www.filedropper.com/01problememodifier
-- EDIT --
I also tried to intersect these two shapes:

and here is the result (fast mode):

In exact mode, I see nothing... but if I click on self, it works!

I turns out that I just need to click on "self" on the modifer, no idea why it's not checked by default:

EDIT: as pointed out in the comment, the problem may be instead that the shape had double vertices (created when I turned the cylinder into a cone by scaling one side). Therefore, it may also be enough to remove doubles vertices (Edit mode > Mesh > Merge > By distance), thanks!


Why does the smooth brush create holes in my model? I was trying to smooth out my model in sculpt mode and as I did so big gaps started to form on my model. How do I prevent this from happening?

Here is a picture:

And here is the blend file:

Thanks

Those are the result of unconnected geometry forming the mesh.

Some of edges forming faces are extruded and placed atop of another edges. Thus those vertices meet in nearly the same place, but they do not share the same edges:

Once you sculpt, those will reveal themselves because geometry is not connected and one edge will be moved more than another. However these aren't double vertices so you won't be able to fix this by deleting duplicating geometry as vertices do not share the same place.

To quickly fix it use Remesh modidifer. The example mesh has quite bad topology with a lot of Ngons, interrupted loopcuts (and several double vertices, remove them with W > Remove Doubles). With Remesh modifier you will be able to quickly generate new topology:

You can also fix that manually.

Delete vertices which aren't connected (see the first screenshot),
Select the resulting hole and fill a face.

From there on you will be able to edit that geometry as closed, so adding more edge loops, cutting where needed etc.

This is quite related question:

Why do gaps appear in my mesh when I animate it?

Do note - for good sculpt you'll want even topology (kind of one resulting from the Remesh modifier), so avoid Ngons unless working on completely flat surfaces (which aren't the case in your example) and even then they might be undesirable.


Color management affetcs video sequencer I try to match my scene to a reference video (which I have loaded into the Video sequence editor) by changing settings in the Color management tab such as contrast, exposure or gamma. However, this also affects the clip in the Sequencer. How can I prevent this or use another color management for the video sequencer?

Press N in the Sequencer and in the Side Panel Just head over to Modifiers and add any modifier you want to add to manage your look of the clip
Hope this may Solve your Problem


My render is turning out black link: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9MnoB3KD97sbjNJQWg1MWkyNnc&usp=sharing

I have a light source, but it renders black

Can anyone see what the problem is?

The error on your file is that you set film exposure to 0, making everything... black. It's like taking a photograph with the lights off (or with the lens cap on).

Set it back to one!


transparent outside and opaque inside I have an element in my model, which is, when exported e.g. to DAE or obj, turns "inside out"

However, within blender itself this element is rendered absolutely ok, both Eevee and Cycles:

What am i doing wrong?

It must be a problem of flipped normals, some softwares only display the normal side of the face. select your object and in Edit mode press ShiftN.


I can't paint in the UV map editor In the other objects it worked but for some reason in the skirt doesn't. I'm in the paint mode of the UV Map editor.

For viewport painting:

make sure you have selected the correct image in the slot option ( left side panel slot tab)

uv editor:

make sure you have the texture active by selecting it from the drop down menu in your uv editor.

For both paint modes :

make sure your current texture brush isn't the target texture you're trying to paint on. In the texture option for your brush set it to none ( double check and make sure your mask doesn't have the same texture either )


Viewport Wireframe Backface Culling In viewport is it possible to cull backfaces of wireframes? (To make wireframes disappear while looking through the back side of the polygons.)

It is confusing to work with overlaping wireframes. So far I could only find the solution to hide and show the oposite side of the object while constructing the topology which is not so productive.

Thanks for your reply Cegaton. That reduces the confusion a lot. I can't beleive I missed it. Though I still need to ask if I can hide the object's frontal wireframe faces behind the sculpted arm as seen below. It would help to see the details on the object more clear while deciding to add geometry.

Use the "Limit selection to visible" option.

From the Manual:

Limit Selection to Visible
If you are in solid, shaded, or textured viewport shading mode (not bounding box or wireframe), you will have a fourth button in the header that looks like a cube, just right of the select mode ones.
When enabled, this limits your ability to view and select vertices occluded by the objects geometry (as if the object was solid). This is done by the viewport with depth buffer clipping.


Scale an edge loop to match another I were trying to scale edge loop A so it would be the same size as edge loop B:

Intuitively I scaled and snapped like this:

But now A is slightly bigger than B.

My snapping settings and pivot point look like:

I fiddled with these settings for a while but couldn't get it right. I looked up LoopTools but it seems to for more complicated operations. Is there a simple way to make A just as big as B?

Just make sure you are constraining the scale to the X/Y axis. For that, hit Shift+Z after s.


Emitting smoke off a curving mesh I am making a scene which I want to be a static image. To this scene I am trying to add smoke. And seeing as I'm quite new to these things in Blender (last time I remember playing with particles was 3D Max) I may not be doing things right.

So, I've put together a bit of an elaborate scene that consists of a number of curves that have been fleshed out by a circle (forming a tube) that go in large sweeping arcs around the scene. Now I want to flesh them out more by having smoke emit off of them.

I start with the longest one, convert it to mesh, create a domain that is larger than the scene, apply smoke flow to the tube, advance the frames, and it looks like the smoke isn't emitting from the surface of the tube but rather that the domain cube is just filling with smoke.

In the tutorials I've looked at, they simply say make box, make object, set box to domain and object to flow, and the result is smoke rising from the object. But when I do these same steps, the tube isn't smoking like in the tutorials. Either it is one big blob of smoke or patches of smoke all over that scales when I scale the domain.

So, what values should I set in the many settings in the domain and flow so that it looks like the smoke is emanating outwards from the tube's surface by about twice the tubes thickness, rather than filling the whole screen?

Also, in Rendered View it looks black, like if it is blocking all the light.

Ok, so I've learned a lot since then, and after a long while of putting it off because I didn't like having to redo stuff, I managed to fix it myself. This is what I've learned:

First off, size does matter. Having a kilometer large room doesn't help (Source models are huge so always scale down).

Secondly, I figured out that the smoke is created on a grid-based system, which is determined by the Divisions. Though by amplifying that number tends to cause the program (or whole computer) to be unresponsive.

Because of these things, it felt best to make several smaller Domains that surrounded the tubes rather than the whole room.

And finally, I removed a few elements from the smoke material, and that was the color Attribute and the additional Add shader.

The results finally came together nicely, even with a few redos...
http://fav.me/dbmid4o


How can I build a model out of hexagons? (honeycomb effect) I am trying to build a dome that consists solely of hexagons.
They may vary a little in size but should retain their hexagonal shape and should not be squashed at the bottom.

Also, is there a way to make the hexagons a certain size?

Example of the model:

Desired effect (right half):

EDIT:

I found out that what I'm asking for is a mathematical impossibility.
The shape I was going for is cald a Icosahedral Goldberg polyhedron.

As you can see the mathematical equation for faces by type is:
 12 {5} and 10(T − 1) {6}
 T = m2 + mn + n2 = (m + n)2

Therefor it cannot exist.

My perception of the desired effect was false as this simply was a 2D tiled image.

What should I do with this question which I can not translate to a correct answer?

You could use "tissue" plugin to achieve similar result.

http://www.co-de-it.com/wordpress/code/blender-tissue

Use on icosphere for dome.


is there a shortcut for toggle between default screen layout and composit screen layout? i click a lot on the two screen layouts , composite and default.
every click that i do often,  i try to find a shortcut for it.
but i doubt there is a shortcut for screen layouts ?
i have not seen a Phyton code showing up at these places.
or am i missing something ?
is there a way to get this shortcut ?
in the worst case i will just keep on clicking each time.
 but i prefer the shortcut.
i hope anyone has an answer, thanks.

Yes, press Ctrl+Left Arrow to go to composite from Default, and Ctrl+Right Arrow to go back.


transparent (test) grid showing up when rendering? When I'm rendering, I've noticed that there is the transparent grid, even with the user's perspective filled with non-empty texture.
How can I get rid of that?

The rendered scene you posted seems to be from an earlier version of your blend file than the one you posted. When I render using the blend file you posted, I don't have any transparency problems:

Try rendering again and see if you still have the problem.

One thing about your file I noticed is that on frame 1, the camera itself is positioned partially inside the wall:

The part circled in green is where the camera sees from, not from the front, shown here in red:

That results in your scene at frame 1 of your animation being partially obscured by the wall, like this:

To fix this, simply move the camera at frame 1 fully into the room, then set a keyframe for it:


Imported model only visible in orthographic views? The model was created in Creo. When importing the model into blender I only can see it in orthographic views (Numpad 1, Numpad 3 and Numpad 7) but not in any user perspective. I already checked clipping and that's not the issue.

Q: What am I doing wrong?

As we can see in the n panel of the 3d view with your object selected in the Outliner, the dimensions of your object are 2.4km by 1.35km by 2.509km:

So that might be an issue, since the viewport clipping ends at 1km. In any way, it is hard to believe you want an object multiple kilometers in size, so just press s followed by something like 0.001 to scale it down in order to be able to see it. Or you could also check the clipping one more time and this time set it to something appropriate for the enormous size of the object like 10 and 10000.


Is there a way to not limit vertex painting to visible geometry? Is there a setting for vertex painting which allows you to paint on geometry that is visually obscured from the view by geometry in front of it?  (I am looking for something similar to the limit selection to visible toggle in edit mode.)

Here is a picture that illustrates what I am trying to achieve:

I have a simple object consisting of two planes.  I painted across the entire object from the view shown on the left.  However, as seen on the right, you can see that it did not paint the part of the back plane covered by the front plane.  Is there a way to paint "through" geometry like this?

This may not be a direct answer, but you could try the following:

Enter Edit Mode, turn off the limit (marked in red), and use the brush to select vertices you want to paint:

Then enter Vertex paint Mode, and turn on the face selection mask:

It doesn't matter where you click with your brush, because the paint is limited to the selected faces

Results are (at the front)

and (at the back)


How can I enable the Laplacian Lightning Generator? The Laplacian Lightning Generator addon broke with some recent API changes, as reported in this bug.

Attempting to enable it results in this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/blender/2.68/scripts/modules/addon_utils.py", line 294, in enable
    mod = __import__(module_name)
  File "/usr/share/blender/2.68/scripts/addons_contrib/object_laplace_lightning.py", line 117, in <module>
    scn = bpy.context.scene
AttributeError: '_RestrictContext' object has no attribute 'scene'

As it was only some API changes that broke this, I assume (also from looking at the error) that this might be a fairly trivial problem (I'm inexperienced with python, so that might be a false assumption)

Are there a few simple changes I can make to get this addon working?

I know it works to run it in the text editor, however I would like to be able to use it as an addon without having to re run it every time I start blender.

Read about the API change:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.66/Addons#Restricted_Context

And here I posted an example script to show a possible solution:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/API_Changes#Restricted_Context

There's also a hack to circumvent the context restriction:
Add an app handler for the scene_update_post event, let it remove itself and run the initialization code in the body.


I can't install CrowdRender or any other add on in Blender For some reason I can't install any add-on on Blender 2.81. I tried to install it directly from the zip file, I also unzipped it and put it on Scripts/Addon in blender program...nothing works. I tried to install the whole the thing, I tried only the py file. What's happening? Why it doesn't get installed? What am I doing wrong. Thank you for the help.

G'day Daniel, The install function in blender just copies the addon files to your scripts/addons folder for the version of Blender that you install the addons from. So there are somethings we'd like to check.

1st is the addon actually installed into the correct directory? You will need to check your addons folder for the version of blender you are using. This location depends on your settings, but usually it will be on a path in your user directory. Mine is

~/Library/Application Support/Blender/2.81/scripts/addons/crowdrender - for mac
~/AppData/Blender Foundation/Blender/2.81/scripts/addons/crowdrender - for win
~/.config/blender/2.81/scripts/addons/crowdrender - for linux.

Check that you have a folder in addons called 'crowdrender'

If you do and it still doesn't work, can you try opening a console and running blender from it. When you try to list your addons, or enable or install the addon, any errors will be printed to the console, you can post them in response to this answer as comments.

Alternatively, you can actually post in our forum and ask for help there since we support the crowd render addon. Asking here on stack exchange will take longer since I don't really come here that often!

Forum is at www.crowd-render.com/forum-1

All the best and look forward to hearing from you soon :)


Weight Painting/Deform in shoulders So I have been messing around a lot with the weight painting on the shoulders.

I'm still new so I don't know much about the type of weights should be on the shoulders, I've tried a lot of different weights but my model keeps deforming.

I'm content with sliding the arm forward/backwards like when you're walking, but moving it in another way like raising your hand for a high five or moving your arm back to throw a punch, the shoulder deforms and I don't know why.

Is this because of my weighting, or because of the model itself?

I'm very inexperienced when it comes to rigging, but I'll try to point you in the right direction, your rig lacks the collarbones, as scuh you expect their behaviour to be included in the shoulder.

this guys right here.

I think doing your own rig can be agreat learning experience and you can also tailor it to your own needs, I'd suggest importing the rigify rig and studying it a bit to see how it works, also looking at a few anatomical references to understand where you should insert the bones into your model.

Also skinning is very trial and error, try animating different movements and seeing how your model reacts, most high end rigs have corrective blendshapes which iron out some kinks when doing certain movements, or bulge out muscle when flexing, many ways to skin a cat.


How to use multiple HDRIs My question is, how would I make the visible HDRI/Enviroment Map be image 1 and then have reflections as Image 2? If someone can post a node setup, or a .py file that would be great <3 I was thinking maybe using the Is Camera Ray node but I'm not confident it would work, and have no idea where to start.

A simple solution with no compositing, is to have two images as the background material for your environment texture.
You mix them using a color mix node controlled by Is glossy Ray in the light path node. The glossy surfaces reflect one image, while others use the other HDRI image normally:

Alternatively, you can use Is Camera Ray to can have the one image not interact the objects at all but stay as backdrop for the scene:

Update for 2.8

In the shader editor, set to edit the world.


Maya camera navigation while keeping blender keymap Im learning Blender. I want to keep the native shortcuts for learning purposes but I like Maya's alt centric camera navigation . is there a way to do this?  Thank you

Go to Edit > Preferences > Keymap

Search for "rotate" and set your custom shortcut :

Also, I don't remember if maya rotates the viewport based on selection pivot but to set this behaviour go to Edit > Preferences > Navigation and check the "Orbit around selection" :


Map a texture to a torus In my latest render for Instagram I ran into a mapping problem. As a referece, this is the image:

The black and white striped bridge basically is half a torus with two cylinders attached to it. I couldn't immediately think of a way to unwrap it properly to get the procedural brick pattern flowing correctly. So what I did was create a cylinder, calculate the length of the bend, subdivided the part that should be bent and added a bend modifier to only those vertices.

But the transition from torus to cylinder on both sides is not completely smooth. So the next time I run into the same situation, I would like to use half a torus and extrude the ends on both sides. But how can I unwrap this shape properly so that the brick pattern is mapped just like in the render above? Or is there another way to approach this?

A more procedural workflow suggests the use of Splines to create the shape. Moreover, Spline UV maps can be used to create the pattern you are looking for. First, model the spline and give it a full depth as follows:

Then enable Use UV For Mapping and utilize the modulo operator to create the pattern you are after. The value nodes control the number of lines along the spline and radially while the less than values control the depth of the lines:


The fur I'm trying to make isn't looking like real fur. It's coarse and I don't know how to fix it I am trying to make fur, but for some reason, I can't seem to get it to be softer it is coarse and doesn't look soft as all. I made a little ball of fur as an example of this:

Sorry if the title doesn't convey my message clearly, I wasn't sure how else to put it. If anyone has any way of fixing this I would love to know, thanks.

You seem to have clumping at 100%, which will make it look coarse.

In Particle Properties->Children->Clumping I changed Clump to 0 and in Particle Properties->Children->Roughness I changed Random to 0.5.  Whilst this may not be exactly what you are after, it looks a lot more 'softer'


How to get Blender Internal-like specularity in Cycles? As the title says how can I achieve the kind of specularity you see in Blender Internal like Phong, CookTorr, etc. in Cycles. I've gotten close with a diffuse and glossy shader put together with an add shader but no dice.

Is there a certain Cycles node layout that can achieve the kind of specularity (again like phong and etc.) like in Blender Internal? Also we can't use different scenes it must be in one scene and rendered only with cycles.

A specular highlight in real life is in fact a reflection of a light source, so to get a physically accurate highlight, the glossy shader is what you want.

However, another way to get such a highlight is the Toon shader:

This shader gives you more control over the exact size and smoothness of the highlight.


Blender to Unity. Particle Settings Can you help me please? I modeled a realistic flower in Blender. The flower itself isn't very complicated but the middle is very hairy with hundreds of stamens. I modeled one stamen and multiplied it using Particle Settings with render as object. The question is how to bring it to Unity properly? Because if I convert it into mesh the model weighs 35 MB which is not good I guess. Please give me your expert advise :)

1000 Stamen is quite a lot, are you sure you need that many in Unity to make it look good?
There are some solutions:
Ignore the 35MB, let Unity optimize it. That would be np if there are no other objects in the scene
make sure the stems have as few vertices as possible and reduce their number.
If the stem source object(s) have modifiers on them either remove or apply them, that way Blender should create instanced meshes, which Unity understands
If you are fine with coding, export one stamen and replicate it in Unity. FBX is usually the best format to exchange 3D models, it can handle instances, carefully check the export settings (choose export and where you are supposed to state the file location, press n). You don't need any import settings to support instances, but also go through the options of the fbx import in Unity, there's often stuff you can customize to fit your specific situation.


How to do proportional beveling? Sorry for the non descriptive title. I don't know what to call this. Basically I'd like to know if there is an easy and quick way to create bevels like this:

Essentially what are the good ways to create bevels along edges that smoothly go from one radius to another either linearly or expotentially like in the pic. I know I posted a simple cube but imagine that the surface is not flat and has many loop cuts in the middle so manually adjusting bevels is not really an option as it doesn't produce smooth results very easily or quickly.

It's not parametric, but bevels (tool or modifier) do have a 'Percent' width type, which will bevel the given proportion of the way along adjacent edges. So if you can arrange for adjacent edges to have appropriate lengths...

You might also want to look at all the possibilities offered by the Bridge Edge Loops tool, for connecting open edges.


How do I copy the normal axis orientation from a mesh face to an Empty hooked to the face OR a bone parented to the face? EDIT: Ok, my question/explanation doesn't seem to be clear enough, so I'll try to restate my goal.

The end result I'm trying to achieve is to hook an empty or bone to each separated face, BUT using the face normal orientation so that the faces can be animated by each hooked empty/bone and the rotation will occur with respect to each face's normal.

I'm trying to find a way to rotate faces of a mesh on their normals. Currently it seems one needs to separate the faces to individual objects in order to control rotation from an empty/modifier/constraint. However once the faces are separated, and Transform>Origin to Geometry is called, the orientation is not based on the original normals of the mesh face.

How does one copy the original normal orientation of the mesh face to the separated object data?

Is there another way to control rotation of mesh faces (assuming the faces have first been separated within the mesh object)?

I should also mention that I'm wondering about a non-scripted solution, as I could probably figure out a script to do it, but was looking for simpler solution first. Feel free to post script solutions though if you want.

Ideally, a solution that allows mesh face rotation on the individual normals based on an external input without separating faces to objects would be preferable.

You don't need to separate faces to different objects, but you have to separate them. One way is add EdgeSplit modifier, set angle to 0 and apply it. When you have separete faces, just set Pivot point to "Individual Origins" (it's where you setting Median, 3D cursor, etc.) and Transform Orientation to "Normal". Now if you press [R] for rotation, you can press x,y or z for locking rotation to one axes in global world, but if you press x,y, or z again, the rotation will be around each individual face normal. Hope it will help.


How to apply a material to a noise zone? Hello Blender Stack Exchange people :)

I'm a huge beginner in Blender so excuse my question if it's dumb ^^

I've got this going right now :

This might seem a little dumb, but I'm struggling to change the color of the lens ONLY on the spots covered by frost marks... Please help ? ^^'

Thanks in advance :)

EDIT : This question has been answered, but here's the .blend file with the old and the new (wanted) material :p

Blend file (forgive the name, I didn't have any idea of what I was going for when I started ^^')

Here are two ways of doing this, both are using Color Ramp with Constant value, and both can be changed to something else and with white value (from Color Ramp) you can control how much colour will affect area.

Mask between two shaders:

This is best option if you want to have not only different colours, but also different shaders assigned to "frosted" area.

Different colours for one shader:

This is best suited if you want only to change colours.


Why do freestyle outlines occasionally have gaps? Sometimes freestyle renders will have gaps in the lines:

Closer up:

What causes this and how can I prevent it?

Try the following:

Make the mesh smooth (I guess this has been already done in your scene).
Enable the Face Smoothness option in Properties > Render Layers > Freestyle.

A detailed explanation of these settings can be found here.


Black spots in normal map i'm trying to make a normal map out of a high poly tyre. But i always get black spots in the normal map (see red circles). Left is the originial, right the low poly with the normal map.

Here is the blender file
tyre.blend

Your Subsurf modifier is set to the "Simple" algorithm, which in this case adds a lot of extra geometry without giving you any actual geometric smoothing (The normals are sampled more densely though which makes some difference in appearance). In any case you still have those strong edges in your geometry, that, combined with problably some form of floating point precision irregularities during raytracing give you these 'artifacts'. If you switch the SubSurf algorithm to "Catmull-Clark", remodel your tire pattern to make use of close proximity edge loops and the likes to retain the original shapes while gaining actual geometric smoothing via the SubSurf modifier, and then reattempt baking the normals, I would very much believe that your artifacts will be gone.

If anything (or all) of this sounds like gibberish, please let me know and i'll try to clarify further. :)


Change the brush of a grease pencil object Is it possible to change the brush type of an already drawn grease pencil object? For example, I drew a line with the airbrush and I'm happy with the shape of the line but would like to have it drawn with the ink pen instead. Is this possible?

It's possible but you don't have much control. Here is how you can do it.
First Select your grease pencil object and go into draw mode and select the brush type you want it to be redrawn with. Then go into object mode and select your grease pencil object and right click and select convert to bezier curve from the context menu. Select the generated bezier curve usually named Lines. then right click and select convert to grease pencil object.


Python Script attribute error while using node editor I am trying to use blender python script for creating textures in cycles render mode. While executing a script which is to be used to get the nodes, I am getting an attribute error

AttributeErrror: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'nodes'

Here's the code I am using

import bpy
import os

mat = bpy.data.materials["Material"]

nodes = mat.node_tree.nodes
material_output = nodes.get ("Material Output")

node_texture = nodes.new(type='ShaderNodeTexImage')
node_texture.image = bpy.data.images.load ('C:\\Users\\KM\\Desktop\\Blender\\auto.png')
node_texture.projection = "LINEAR"

links = mat.node_tree.links
link = links.new(node_texture.otputs[0], nodes.get("DIffuse BSDF"),inputs[0])

The error is from the line "nodes = mat.node_tree.nodes". Hope you guys can help clear the doubt.

Apologies if the question seems trivial, I am very new to blender and Thanks in advance for your help

probably this material has been created for the blender render engine (by default nodes are disabled ) so you just have to enable using nodes before accessing the node tree by the following line : mat.use_nodes = True then you'll have access to the node tree, you can do a test before accessing to avoid getting into errors


Child object not following parent I created an 'Enemy' object (Rigid Body) which has a 'Weapon' object (Rigid Body as well) as a child and the 'Weapon' object in turn has a child called 'Muzzle' (No collision, an Empty object). The 'Weapon' object rotates with its parent in a normal fashion, but the 'Muzzle' goes on a rather weird trajectory when the 'Enemy' rotates (like a very narrow ellipse, might as well not be an ellipse at all but some other random curve). Any ideas how to solve this? P.S. Sorry for my bad English...

Make "Muzzle" and "Weapon" one object,with Ctrl J, and set "Enemy" as its parent.


Changing the currently open tab in graph editor with Python I'm developing an add-on, that sits in the graph editor. I've just upgraded to Blender 2.78 and saw that the panel is divided into different tabs (View, Modifiers, F-Curve, etc.). My add-on is placed in its own tab (mmvt). How can I change the currently open tab to be my tab (in code)?

Old question I know. I found this: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Doc/Projects/UI/Tab_Guidelines

you have a panel right?
People seem to need a property called bl_category be set to the tab page name they want to place it on.
In regard to this question it may be:

class panelName(bpy.types.Panel):
      bl_category = "Modifiers"

Also, changing the focus is a completely different task


Hollow / Solidify a Mesh (Without Intersecting Faces) The solidify modifier creates new geometry normal to the surface of a base mesh.  This works well in many applications but creates intersecting faces for many geometries beyond a critical thickness.

Are there any straight-forward, reliable methods of creating a more desirable internal mesh?  There are two acceptable outcomes:

Preserve the detail of the base mesh
Simplify the geometry (beyond a critical thickness)

There are manual methods of addressing the problem but this does not scale well; achieving a uniform wall thickness across any non-trivial mesh presents quite the undertaking.

This problem crops up frequently in the world of 3D printing where solid parts are needlessly resource-intensive.

Yes.  Depends on your definition of straightforward.  Using python and MetaBalls.  MetaBalls are volume based so you are guaranteed a manifold outcome with no self intersections.  However detail preservation will only be to the resolution of your offset and to the detail of the volumetric isosurface calculation with the metaballs.  I use several methods

1)  Add a metaball at every vertex of radius R = offset
2)  Add a metaball at every vertex and a meta elipse at the center of every face (circumscribed by the face)

I pre-process a copy of the mesh to have vertex density such that distance between metaballs is about 1/2 the desired offset.

Works great.  If you want code.  It's going to be a bear to read because it's part of an enormous dental project.

https://github.com/patmo141/d3guard/blob/master/meta_modelling.py

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih4_wb1tegE


Mirror Modifier creates the other part of model far away from the original I'm doing a girl here (the concept is not mine, I'm just training) and when I click on mirror modifier Blender creates the other part of the model far away from the first one, not close like it should

I have no idea how to change that, does someone know what is the reason it works that way?

The Mirror modifier works exactly "as it should".

Meaning it will mirror the geometry using the object's origin (that orange dot that you see in the girl's forehead) as the axis of symmetry. If your geometry is far away from the origin, the mirrored geometry will be as far away from the origin but on the other side of the axis.

Read the blender manual page to understand how the tool works:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/modeling/modifiers/generate/mirror.html?highlight=mirror%20modifier

As an alternative to using the objecct's origin, the mirror modifier can also be used with a control object. As detailed in this answer: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/49355/1853


How does bone roll affect the rig importing into Unity game engine if it does at all? For context, I have a character that I rigged in 3ds max using CAT, ported him into blender as an .fbx, and have been reorienting his bones in edit mode after they loaded into blender perpendicular to their original alignment in max. Following the advice of another post, I have been slowly changing the roll value of each of the bones until what I assume is their local z axis roughly matches the global z axis in blender. What effects does the bone roll orientation have on the bone orientation in a game engine like unity?

Bone roll is important when using constraints, drivers, curves editing, clarity of animation programming; but after an animation is done and saved as Fbx, generally it's baked, so that a "pure" rig (a rig without constraints, drivers, control bones: made with deforming bones only) is exported.
This behaviour is set in the Fbx exporter preferences (bake animations, deforming bones only). The baked animation will correctly perform in Unity with any kind of bone roll.
Be aware that if you change the bone roll every previously made animation will be broken.
A common good practice is to set the "main" rotation of a bone as positive X axis.


Stuck in difference selection mode I´m new to this version of Blender and stuck in what i figured out is difference selection method. However the submenu I found is not displayed and I have not found a shortcut to circle through the options. Any idea where to enable this menu?
Thanks!

I guess these function have now been transformed into icons, either in the N menu > Tool, or in the Properties panel > Active Tool (first tab)


UV Map not being applied to object Been going through old questions and tutorials for several hours and still can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

My object unwraps fine in the UV Editor and I can add the file I want mapped, but it is not being applied in the 3D Viewer or when rendered.

The blue material was added to the object as some references said a material needed to be set before applying the UV Map.

To set up textures properly follow these steps:

Cycles Render

1. Select the material and open Node Editor window
2. Add an Image Texture node, then load the texture and connect Color to Diffuse BSDF node.
3. Add a UV Map node and select proper UV Map if you have more than one on the mesh and connect the node to the Vector of Image Texture node

Blender Render

1. Open materials tab.
2. Create a material or if there is one already existing, make sure the material you want to add the texture to is selected.

3. While the material is selected open texture tab.
4. In texture tab scroll down to Image section and open the texture you want to apply to the material.
5. In mapping section make sure the Coordinates are set to UV and choose the correct UV map in case you have more than one on the mesh.


How can I evenly but randomly distrybute particles in a mesh? I'm working on a project and I want particles to create an object together randomly. Something like this:

But as you can see, it distrybutes the planes randomly but even. There are more of them in the buttom, than in the top.
I tryed to change the seed and I tried to enable Even Distrybution in the Emission-Settings of the ParticleSystem but I get the same problem!

This is, what the mesh looks like:

And here is a part of my ParticleSettings:

The problem is due to the uneven geometry interfering with the distribution of the particles. Add a Remesh modifier just before the Particle System in the modifier stack and, as well as enabling the Even Distribution (as mentioned by @LukeD), ensure to enable Use Modifier Stack. This should result in an even distribution of particles throughout the volume.

Without Remesh :

With Remesh :


Video editing, encodeing, rendering. Video Always Flickers Reguardless of how I set the encoder and the frame rate up, the rendered video is always .avi and it always flickers on the edge of the video. It gets blury and then sharp again about every second. The videos I make are recorded with the Openbrodcaster software, and before I render them with Blender they look much better, even if they have the same bitrate.

You can try to render a mp4 instead of avi. In the Render Tab scroll to Output and choose mpeg-4 or the h.264 Preset and set your desired values, which are similar to ffmpeg settings.


How to make a minecraft character transparant im making an image for a person on YouTube and need to know how to make one of the characters transparent as if he is in spectator mode...i have tried multiple "make transparent" answers but they just made him either disappear or still posed as a solid object in render, i have even tried making the skin itself more transparent but didn't work.

Here is a quick cycles transparency material:


New Editor make the toolbar always on top In 2.8 when I create a new Editor the toolbar is always created on top. Can we change that?
I need to put it on bottom every time....manually...
Or maybe a script that can do it?


How to scale area light icon in viewport? I placed an area light in my scene. Its icon appeared to be unreasonably long. Is there a way to shorten it in the viewport?

You can scale rectangle with S or when you bring cursor closer to rectangle, drag the corner handle.

But I would say you are asking how to change light Distance represented by a line. For that you would have to go to Light Properties > Custom Distance and change parametr (even when it is disabled it change the widget).
It is accessible only via Eevee. Seems like it would need a touch of GUI designer :)


Accidentally mirrored on an offset, too late to undo Recently I've been getting into 3D modelling in Blender.
I started to model a Glock-17, I blocked out the basic shape then extruded with a mirror.
The problem is when I mirrored it had an offset of 0.09 something and now since i have mirrored the object multiple other times since to duplicate surface detail to the other side and now there is so much extra geometry when I UV unwrap i don't know what to do to get rid of it, is there any external tools i can use or built in tools to fix this.
I'm trying to import this model into Unity eventually as a side not.

Start with that: Go into edit mode (vertex select) and select all, then in the menue on (most likely) the bottom left of the screen go to mesh --> vertices --> remove doubles and set the merge distance to 0.02
Then in the menue select --> select all by trade --> interior faces and delete them.
That should at least reduce the problem. From here on cleaning the rest by hand should be not too much work. To help with that you can use mesh analyses (in the properties panel).


How to fix Horizontal particles in plane? I have been following the BlenderGuru tutorial here on how to create a grassy meadow. Everything so far has worked pretty well okay but suddenly my grass particles have begun to appear horizontally. I've looked around a lot and I really haven't found a way to fix this. I'd like my particles to stick vertically out of the ground instead of staying on the side. Here is a link to my .BLEND file, just in case, but I can also provide more screenshots of my settings if you need it.

You need to set in Velocity tab Normal to 0 (if it's to straight try higher values) and Emitter Object > Z to 1.

If my answer was good enough, consider accepting it or/and upvoting.


Bump Maps and how to get more details in them I've been trying to give this particular artwork an embossed look with details, but I'm falling short. This is what I have:

I have been placing the image on a plane as a bump map, but not getting the desired effect.

The image in green is what I'm looking for:

Does anyone have any ideas?

I would use a software like CrazyBump, Knald, or SmartNormal to create a normal map based on the image you have and add that to your material.

If you are using cycles you can run the normal map through a normal map node and plug that into your shaders.

Here's the result I got with SmartNormal.  You could improve a lot by spending more time tweaking the settings, but it's a start.