Achieve Escher holding sphere, but with real image I'm trying to achieve a specific effect based on the idea of the famous Escher "Hand with Reflecting Sphere" image, but instead of reflecting a modeled environment, I want it to reflect a real image of myself holding the sphere. I first saw this effect 25 years ago in the video The Mind's Eye, which contained a part an animation called "Prime Corporate Video".

You can see specific part of that video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP2g4uprgx4&t=4m3s

I've always wondered exactly how that animation was made since I first saw it 25 years ago. The animation was made in 1986 so I don't think the hand in the video was rendered, so maybe raytracing wasn't even the technique used and it was just some photography/greenscreen trick.

Either way, I've been trying to reproduce a scene like this and haven't figured it out. I usually end up with image mapping issues like circular regions that look distorted and the sphere reflecting part of the background instead of only the real image.  I'm wondering if maybe I have to use some tricks with render layers.

Below is an example of what I've been able to produce using a world background image using "Object" Texture coordinates that have been vector mapped 0.5 xyz location, rotated -90 on X and scaled x 0.3 and y -3.9. The background is just an image on a plane sitting behind the sphere.  This is all done using nodes in Cycles.

Any ideas?

Do compositing using a lens distortion node to give a bit of sphere effect on your image, add this to your rendered glossy sphere with modeled arm with the sphere objectID as factor/mask

the render of the sphere and hand has to use a black background (because you'll add your reflection) and also you have to check tranparent in render settings/film options


Rigid Body and directional constraints I would like to be able to 'push' multiple Rigid Body objects up along Z-axis (using another Rigid Body). The trick is that they must only move on the Z. And once pushing force is gone the objects should fall back along Z-location - like gravity but without spinning or rolling.
Using the regular Object Constraints seems to be completely overruled by the Physics.
Currently working in Blender 2.82 and/or 2.91.2 and I found a very nice youtube-guide for Blender 2.76 with a Sensei-add-on (https://youtu.be/7jwqXgdBM_g?t=1170) but I cannot find the same "Dimensions"-options as shown there. I'm guessing the add-on doesn't introduce new features in Blender only a kind of skin to organize and access features quickly(?).
So is it possible to restrict/constrain the movement of a Rigid Body - and how could that be done?

You can do this with Rigid Body Constraints.
The 'Generic' constraint allows you to set up the constrains between two objects to set the amount the objects are allowed to vary from an Angular (rotation) and a Linear (position) point of view. By linking your 'Active' Rigid Body object to a 'Passive' one (that acts as the anchor) you can easily limit the motion.
The settings I used were as follows :

Here the limits on X and Y prevent it from moving in anything but the Z direction and the limits on Angle prevent it being rotated. Note how each is enable/disabled and the Lower and Upper limits set. In my case the Cube was the Active body and Sphere was passive to act as the anchor to it.
To set this up, simply select the two rigid bodies and select the Connect option, specifying to connect as contraint type 'Generic', then select the created empty and setup the constraint as shown above.


AN - Change Color and Text on Empty Location Let say i have a grid 3 x 3 of plane objects.
And when I move Empty object into center of the first Plane (upper-left), the blue color changes to pink and Text object (on side) change number to "4".

Note: The numbers displayed on planes are not gone be displayed in animation. I put them only on to show you order of planes (and numbering).

If I separate to steps:

First

I want to let planes to come from out of screen to grid position (in ascendent order-see screen). Like 4,5,6 one by one and then continue 7, 8, 9 and so on ... but with this node tree (Directional) in comes all row at once.

Second

I want to control color of plane by position of another object.
Like Empty object in plane location change color from blue tu pink.

Third

I have text object next to planes that I want to let display a specific number from text editor list.
(or in specific range like 4-12). Controled by the same object that controls color of plane.
Ideally something like empty object howering over plane.

Thank you for help.
I really try to get in, but it seems it takes ages to dive into this system.

First Question

You can use the Delay Falloff node to do the animation after sorting them by name, making sure that our objects are named by their number.

Second Question

What you need to do is check the max 1D distance (distance between components of vectors) to see if the empty is located inside the square or not, so a node tree like this works:

Third Question

In the same loop, you add a text input and reassign it to the object name if and only if the boolean we computed before was true, so a node tree like this works:

I didn't describe each in details because you seem like you know AN. However, if you want them in details, please ask.


Hide smoke domain objects in OpenGL quick render Is it possible to hide the domain object for a smoke simulation in an openGL quick render without hiding the smoke?
The domain can be distracting in preview renders even when rendered as a wireframe.
Toggling the visibility of the domain hides the smoke as well.

Is this possible?

If your domain's Maximum Draw Type is set to Wire (Object Properties > Display panel), you can set the 3D View's display to Only Render (Properties region [N] > Display panel) and the domain should be hidden from view.


Blender 2.8 eevee - Is there a limit for image nodes quantity in a material? I'm making a customizable character with switchable skin via driver.
It is organized by 9 types of skin and each type with 3 make-up as you can see in the 1st image. A total of 27 images. So the driver property Skin range is 1-9 (bigger group) and MakeUp 1-3 (smaller groups).
The problem is it isn't working. If a mute any 3 images, given me 24 images, it works. If I un-mute one of them going back to 25 images enabled, the shader became the magenta error.

So the question is:

Is there a limit for number of images in a material?
Is there a better way for me to do this? like a Toggle node or something like that. I guess a script node would be the way to go, but I have no idea how to do it.

Cheers.

I recently posted a similar question here and had some adequate responses that suggested this is a limitation of Eevee, on both an image texture level, and a hardware limitation.
I saw another post that pointed to this tutorial by Creative Shrimp on a procedural asphalt that uses "layered" materials, to get around the issue in Eevee, but have yet to try it myself.


Texture paint not staying in object mode On blender 2.7, I created a model and i was texture painting using an image (that i previously used made using UV mapping). I've done this before and it worked but this time the texture I want is only visible on the texture paint mode - not on object mode. Can anyone tell me how to fix this? I've added some pictures below showing what's happening. It's my first time animating and i could really use the help thanks.

Here is a screen shot of my nodes for reference! (sorry, bit of a newbie here, hope these are right)

If the object is pink, it means that blender cant find your textures. It's probably an issue with your shading. Would you mind showing your nodes?


Is There A Way To Make Reflections Act Similar To Cycles In EEVEE? I have a low-poly glossy character in my scene, and when I render with cycles, each face is sliced into reflective triangles which looks very good.
But, when I try to render the scene in eevee, the faces reflect without being cut. Is there a way to make the character look similar to cycles in eevee?
Blend File:

EEVEE

Cycles

Creating a Light Probe > Reflection Cubemap and a Light Probe > Irradiance Volume brings you close to the Cycles result. If you need any explanation on light probes, please ask.


How to solidify photogrammetry model by filling it from inside? I struggle with making a photogrammetry model a solid.
I tried a Solidify modifier, which works quite well until the thickness value is big enough to intersect trough the outer shell and destroy the fine structure. And unfotunately the safe value (for not intersecting the outer shell) is not enough for a desired thickness of my solid to be 3D printed.

Then I just made a solid by intersecting the model with a cube, triangulating the new solid and trying to scrape out the material using sculpt. OK, still I cannot control the distance between the model shell and my digging. This results in occasionaly intersecting the outer shell. And I want to optimize its volume to keep the printing cost lower.

So, is there any way to fill the mesh (viewed from bottom on the attached picture) like "pouring some clay" inside to stick to the faces in a given distance? Any parameters to Sculpt tools that would not affect the outer original shell?

Please, help me to solve this issue as it seems to be out of my Blender experience.

EDIT: After 10 Replies answer I need to add a visualization of the final result of the recommended transformations. The lighter shaded faces are those of a "shrinked" extruded inner shell.

Try going into edit mode after selecting the model. Press E and then Z to extend only in the z direction. Now, if you want the bottom to be completely flat, press S, and then Z to only scale in the z direction, and then type 0 on your keyboard.


Blender > Unity Animation Export (Missing Actions) I'm trying to export my rigged character animations to Unity. But, there are always lots of missing actions that don't seem to make it to Unity. Here's a picture showing my settings and workflow.  I've tried every possible combination of settings I could think of, but to no avail:

AND, just in case it helps, here's a download link to the file in case anyone wants to test things for themselves: Link-HERE
Thank you so much for your time!

Have you tried to bring the blender file itself into unity instead of exporting as fbx or just save it to the assets folder i think it works the same way


Rendering a specific set of frames in one job I want to render every 2nd(or even) frame and every 5th frame that end in '5' is it possible to do that in one render job.....not very good at scripting but will take any advice I can get

It's possible loop over a list of the desired frames, set the correct frame and render it within a Python script.

I didn't manage to automatically enumerate frames according to the Blender Output Panel documentation, so I set the filename manually for each frame and restore the original value afterwards.

The following script should render all even frames as well as all frames that end in a five.

import bpy

scene = bpy.context.scene
tmp_filename = scene.render.filepath

all_frames = range(scene.frame_start, scene.frame_end + 1)

for f in [f for f in all_frames if f%2 == 0 or f%10 == 5]:
    scene.frame_set(f)
    scene.render.filepath = '//frame_{:04d}'.format(f)  # frame_0000 etc.
    bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True)

scene.render.filepath = tmp_filename

You can select the desired frames by list comprehension like above or use Python's filter function.

The “render with script” approach will make Blender unresponsive during the job, but I think the operating system won't shut the process down unless you tell it to do so, i.e. click on the “Blender is not responding” dialog box.


How to remove Armature bone from Binary fbx export? Exporting from any blender version with binary fbx support leads to addition of a redundant bone at root with same name as the armature.

How do I disable addition of that root bone for binary fbx export?

I'm not sure if the bone being exported is infact Blender's armature object (since Blender has an armature object, which can have multiple root bones in the armature).

Seems like this is a known bug, see this report: https://developer.blender.org/T45368 for details.


How do I use the node editor for material? I was using the node editor in an earlier project and I found it fairly easy to follow, so I opened up a new one to experiment. I added a plane, created a material and went to node editor, where I was completely dumbfounded. The nodes I expected to see with the diffuse and output weren't there, and the material changed to black. Not only that, but I couldn't even add any shader node!

You can't use material nodes in Blender Internal. Try changing your mode to "Cycles" in the drop down that has "Blender Render" in it right now.


Differences between Center and Median options of Blender snap target menu? As title: what are the differences between the "Center" and "Median" snap target options?

The Blender manual explicates with pictures only one of the two options I'm trying to compare: the "Median":

https://www.blender.org/manual/editors/3dview/object/transform/transform_control/precision/snap.html#snap-target

I use all the options them for a very long time and I know what they do but what I want to figure out is just what differences are there between the two options cause it seems to me that they behave exactly the same way.

Center uses the pivot point instead of a property of the object itself. The default for the pivot point, however, happens to just be the median center, which is why selecting "center" doesn't appear to do anything by default:

In other words, you can think of the "center" setting as a "defer to pivot point" setting. The primary use of this is that it lets the snap point be defined by the 3D cursor by selecting "3D Cursor" in the pivot point menu (see above image) while the snap target is set to "Center". Using "Center" with the other pivot point options isn't too useful in most cases.


How to copy background images from one .blend to another? I have a bunch of background images in one .blend, and I'd like to "append" (or link if that's possible) them into other .blends.

I couldn't find anything in the append tree for appending background images; I can append the just the image datablocks from the image tree, but seemingly not the background image entries.

Is there any way to copy the background image entries, not just the images themselves?

Coming up against the same thing I wrote some scripts many moons ago, with the idea of making it an addon. Only got this far, I've updated to handle clips.

Run this script in the blend file with bg images set up.  It adds a set of properties onto the images mirroring the background image settings, & also the name of the screen the 3D view is in. (Doesn't discern for multi 3d views in same screen).

import bpy

context = bpy.context
text = bpy.data.texts.get("BGImages.py")
if text is None:
    text = bpy.data.texts.new("BGImages.py")

text.clear()

spaces = [space for screen in bpy.data.screens
         for a in screen.areas if a.type == 'VIEW_3D'
         for space in a.spaces if space.type == 'VIEW_3D' if len(space.background_images)]

for s in spaces:
    text.write("#Screen: %s\n" % s.id_data.name)
    for i in s.background_images:
        text.write("#%s\n" % ("-"*72))
        for p in i.bl_rna.properties.keys():
            if p in ['rna_type', 'image_user', 'clip_user']:
                continue
            val = getattr(i, p)

            text.write("i.%s = " % p)
            text.write("%s\n" % repr(val))

            if not val:
                continue
            if i.source == 'IMAGE':
                i.image["screen"] = s.id_data.name
                if type(val).__name__ in ["bool", "str", "float", "int"]:
                    i.image[p] = val
            else:
                i.clip["screen"] = s.id_data.name
                if type(val).__name__ in ["bool", "str", "float", "int"]:
                    i.clip[p] = val

It creates a text file named BGImages.py, ( ultimately making this a script to link / append then run and import, was the idea 8^)

#Screen: Scripting
#------------------------------------------------------------------------
i.source = 'IMAGE'
i.image = bpy.data.images['getting_started.blend2.png']
i.clip = None
i.offset_x = 0.0
i.offset_y = 0.0
i.size = 10.0
i.rotation = 0.0
i.use_flip_x = False
i.use_flip_y = False
i.opacity = 0.5
i.view_axis = 'ALL'
i.show_expanded = True
i.use_camera_clip = True
i.show_background_image = True
i.show_on_foreground = False
i.draw_depth = 'BACK'
i.frame_method = 'STRETCH'

Now in your new file if you link / append the bg images  & run this script

import bpy

images = [i for i in bpy.data.images if "screen" in i.keys()]
clips = [i for i in bpy.data.movieclips if "screen" in i.keys()]
dic = {}
images.extend(clips)

for i in images:
    l = dic.setdefault(i["screen"], [])
    l.append(i)

def gonk(self, context):
    space = context.area.spaces.active
    for i in dic.setdefault(context.screen.name, []):
        print(i.name)
        bi = space.background_images.new()
        if i["source"] == 'IMAGE':
            bi.image = i
        else:
            bi.clip = i
        for k in i.keys():
            if k in ["screen", "image", "clip"]:
                continue
            setattr(bi, k, i[k])

def bgimages(self, context):
    layout = self.layout
    screen = context.screen
    l = dic.setdefault(screen.name, [])
    layout.enabled = len(l) > 0
    layout.prop(context.screen, "toggle", toggle=True, text="%s (%d)" % (screen.name, len(l)))

bpy.types.Screen.toggle = bpy.props.BoolProperty(update=gonk)
bpy.types.VIEW3D_PT_background_image.append(bgimages)

 You will see a button which tells me that two images in the Scripting screen 3DView can be added to the backround images of this 3D view in the Scripting screen of my new file.  You will need to change the screen name to match the screen name of the original file.


How do I make the shape of a Kinder bueno chocolate bar? I'm really struggling tor recreate the shape of this candy bar. I tried making a cube, insetting it and extruding it but I'm at a loss for how to do

and this is what I'm trying to make:

You're on the right track :-)

Start with a modified cube
Add an Array Modifier and a Subdivision Modifier (3-4 levels)
Use beveled Curve with Shrinkwrap modifier for the topping

(I took a small bite, sorry about that...)


Move 3D cursor back to center hotkey? Is there a hotkey to move the 3D Cursor back to X=0 Y=0 Z=0?

Use Shift + S and then "Cursor to center".

Or you can use use a direct hotkey Shift+C.

You can also use the right panel to set the position manually (bottom right of the picture) :


How to create a progressive coil spring in Blender 2.82? I've been trying to create a coil spring with a progressive elongation of the spiral in the Z direction and so far have been coming up short. Seems like it's possible to scale the radius easily enough, but not the tightness of the spiral itself.
I've primarily been using the screw modifier to achieve a basic coil.
Does anyone have any suggestions? will I need to use a particular modifier combo?

First add a vert and use the screw modifier.

Then add a lattice and scale/move it in objectmode to the correct size and location. Also subdivide it alonge the Z-Axis.

After that add the lattice-modifier with the newly created lattice-object.

Now you can change the coil by editing the lattice-object in editmode.

So I did the fast method by just adding a skin-modifier and changing the size in edit-mode with ctrl+a.

You can also apply the modifiers and convert it to a curve and set it to nurbse...


Random step between instances on animation nodes Can the step distance between instances on animation nodes with a matrix distributed in a spline be random or varied?
I just need the distances between the cubes to not be even.

You can use Evaluate Spline node instead of Distribute Matrices node and feed random floats as its parameters input.


Using a .step file or other CAD files in blender A while ago I tried to find out how to convert a .STEP file to a format that I could use in Blender and I noticed some people didn't think it was possible and some others gave links to blender addons that had no working free versions. That's why below I will tell anyone looking for the information I was previously after as simply as possible.

There is a free program you can get called CAD exchanger, it's the only option I have found that actually works. You just put in your file and it allows conversion to many useful formats. I've found that collada works best for Blender, as the obj was blank when I tried it.


What is the best way for me to change multiple paths or values on an object with multiple variables for each one? I am trying to make an addon that will randomize path variables. The system I have works by adding and subtracting boxes that contain an input for a data path.

It works fine except for one issue. Because I have to create properties for each of the variables (input box, min, max, randomize on render), all of the values are linked, and every input field, max, min, etc. is all the same:

So how would I fix this issue so that I am able to have independent variables that can be easily created or destroyed?
Here is my code:

import bpy
from bpy.types import Panel, Operator
from bpy.props import *
import random as r

paths = 0

class add_data_path(Operator):
    bl_idname = "path.add"
    bl_label = "Add a data path to change"

    def execute(self, context):
        global paths
        paths += 1
        self.report({'INFO'}, 'Added path variable')
        return{'FINISHED'}

class subtract_data_path(Operator):
    bl_idname = "path.subtract"
    bl_label = "Get rid of a data path to change"

    def execute(self, context):
        global paths
        if paths > 0:
            paths -= 1
        self.report({'INFO'}, 'Removed path variable')
        return{'FINISHED'}

# Panel
class RANDOMIZER_UI(Panel):

    # Create a Panel in the Tool Shelf
    bl_label = "Randomizer"
    bl_idname = "RANDOMIZER_Manager"
    bl_space_type = "VIEW_3D"
    bl_region_type = "UI"
    bl_category = "Tool"
    bl_options = {"DEFAULT_CLOSED"}

    # Custom Properties
    text = bpy.props.StringProperty(name="Text:")

    # Draw
    def draw(self, context):
        Mybool = True

        layout = self.layout

        obj = context.object
        row = layout.row()
        row.label(text="Path Randomizations:")
        row = layout.row()
        row.operator("path.subtract", text="-")

        i = 0
        while i < paths:
            # Visible UI
            box = layout.box()
            row = box.row()
            row.use_property_split = True
            row.label(text="Path Variable:")
            row.prop(context.object, "varpath", text="")
            if context.object.varpath != "":
                row = box.row(align=True)
                row.prop(context.object, "minvar")
                row.prop(context.object, "maxvar")
                row = box.row(align=True)
                row.prop(context.object, "randonrender", text="Randomize On Render?")
            # Special Number
            i += 1

        row = layout.row()
        row.operator("path.add", text="+")

        RANDOMIZER_UI(self)

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(RANDOMIZER_UI)
    bpy.utils.register_class(add_data_path)
    bpy.utils.register_class(subtract_data_path)

    # Registering Variables
    bpy.types.Object.varpath = StringProperty(name="Variable Path",
    description="Input field for the randomized value")
    bpy.types.Object.maxvar = FloatProperty(name="Max Value",
    description="The maximum value for the variable path", default=1)
    bpy.types.Object.minvar = FloatProperty(name="Min Value",
    description="The minimum value for the variable path", default=1)
    bpy.types.Object.randonrender = BoolProperty(name="Randomize On Render",
    description="Determines whether or not the value is randomized upon rendering an image")

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(RANDOMIZER_UI)
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(add_data_path)
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(subtract_data_path)

    del(bpy.types.Object.varpath)
    del(bpy.types.Object.maxvar)
    del(bpy.types.Object.minvar)
    del(bpy.types.Object.randonrender)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()
```

Use a Collection Property

Set up the properties.

The number of paths is made a scene property.  When it is updated it adds or removes a node to each scene objects paths collection.

Put all the relevant path node info in a property group.

Add a collection of that type to the object type.

Easiest explained by way of example, run the script below,

import bpy

from bpy.types import PropertyGroup
from bpy.props import (FloatProperty,
                      CollectionProperty,
                      IntProperty,
                      BoolProperty,
                      )

class PathNode(PropertyGroup):
    minvar: FloatProperty()
    maxvar: FloatProperty()
    randomize: BoolProperty()

def adjust_paths(ob, paths):
    while len(ob.paths) > paths:
        ob.paths.remove(len(ob.paths) - 1)
    while len(ob.paths) < paths:
        ob.paths.add()

def update_paths(self, context):
    for o in self.objects:
        adjust_paths(o, self.paths)

classes = (PathNode,)

def register():
    for cls in classes:
        bpy.utils.register_class(cls)
    bpy.types.Scene.paths = IntProperty(
            min=0,
            soft_max=10,
            update=update_paths)
    bpy.types.Object.paths = CollectionProperty(type=PathNode)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

A draw method, to add to layout code.

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        scene = context.scene
        obj = context.object
        layout.prop(scene, "paths")
        for node in obj.paths:
            row = layout.row()
            row.prop(node, "minvar")
            row.prop(node, "maxvar")
            row.prop(node, "randomize")

Note with scene.paths will need some type of "refresh" operator if a new object is added.  A simple test is search for any object whose paths length doesn't match scene.paths

Alternatively the paths int could be associated on a per object basis so as each object can have a variable length collection.

This would involve changing update paths, since self is now an object, not the scene

def update_paths(self, context):
    adjust_paths(self, self.num_paths)

and instead of the scene property for path length, an object property instead.

    bpy.types.Object.num_paths = IntProperty(
            min=0,
            soft_max=10,
            update=update_paths)

and in draw method, the object property rather than the scene.

    layout.prop(obj, "num_paths")

Because of the update method, code below will make sure all objects in scene have 10 paths

for o in scene.objects:
    o.num_paths = 10

Documentation for CollectionProperty (CRUD methods)

Collections can also be laid out with bpy.types.UIList akin to materials and vertex groups.

Create an interface which is similar to the material list box


Animation and modelling workflow Somewhere on Internet I came across a piece of writing, where it said first sculpting is done, the retopology. Then the retopologized mesh is sent to animator.

After that it is sent back to sculptor. The new posed model is again sculpted for details.

But my question is

Is the retopologized mesh sent to animator before normal baking?
If baking can project details from sculpting to the retopologized mesh, why there is the need to sculpt it again for details after it returns from animator?
Animation is not a single pose. So how the second details is projected?

Blender has a very flexible workflow, and you can do things in virtually any order and get away with it without too much extra work. I don't think it is industry standard to sculpt twice, but that should not stop you from doing it if you have to.

This really does not matter, you can either bake the normals first or rig the model. None depends on the other.
I don't really see the need for sculpting again after a pose. The only reason I could imagine (assuming you are talking about character modeling here) going back to bake a new normal map is if you modeled in a stiff T-pose and then decide you need some more details in areas that were stretched in the unrigged model. It would thus make sense to sculpt over those areas again after the pose is changed.
Shape keys can be used to animate the shape of a model in addition to bones. These would surely be made by the sculptor. Again, in blender the order of doing the rig and adding shape keys is irrelevant. You just need a retopoed model to work with.

Hope that helped!


Design dyson roller with unknown broken area I am new in Blender, and doing hard to learn that. I was trying to made a Dyson vacuum cleaner parts by Blender and I made it, but the final model has a problem that I don't know why and how to fix it.
This is what it looks like in the object mode, I saw this problem after I have add solidity and subdivision on it:

This is the rendered image with clear broken area:

This is what it looks like in edit mode and without solidity and subdivision:

In my mind I haven't made any N-gon in these area, so I don't know why it happens, could anyone tell me the reason of that and how should I avoid on next time?
Here is the source file:
Blender File
Thank you very much for reading this thread.

After viewing your model, here's what I did:
#select the meshes then ctrl+A to apply all transformation.
#select the object go to edit mode and select all the vertex by pressing A once or twice. And then shift+N to recalculate normals.
Your mesh had some flipped normals which caused the issue you marked.  Here's the File after applying the fixes I mentioned.


Properly export COLLADA for use in SceneKit What is the correct way to export meshes including textures etc for use in SceneKit of iOS 8 or even OS X? By the default options I can only export meshes - somehow I don't get textures to work. Also Preview in OS X has trouble opening anything output from Blender/COLLADA so far. Running OS X Mavericks.

For instance, the ship.dae that is included in a template SceneKit project in Xcode 6 has Y for up, whereas stuff exported from Blender has Z up. Maybe this causes errors in the Apple world? Also importing ship.dae then exporting it with default options gives likewise "bad" COLLADA output. I was doing a diff in the input ship.dae and the output one and the differences were rather many so I don't know where to start.

Until I can get a tutorial made I will give a couple pointers.

Solve Blender "z" up axis

Create a folder on your desktop and give it an extension of ".scnassets"
Put your collada(.dae) file along with any textures you will be using
Drag the folder into your project and save as copy like usual.
Click on your scnassets folder and you will see a checked box (if not check it) for converting to a "y" up axis.

Using textures with Blender collada

Click on your collada(.dae) file inside your project in xcode.
You should see your scene and on its left side a list of cameras, lights, materials, and such.
Open the materials tab and click on one of your materials.
On the right hand side in the inspection window click on the ball shaped icon to view the diffuse, specularity, and such of that one material.
Click on the diffuse tab and when it opens you should have an option of colors and your textures within your project.  Select the texture you used on your model within Blender.  As long as you UV unwrapped them properly in blender they should apply instantly within your scene view.

NOTE
Blender will not export the texture for you. No need to check on that tab inside of the collada exporter window.

ANOTHER NOTE
If you want to add to or delete something from your scnassets folder, navigate to your project folder to do so and not xcode. This took me a while to figure out so thought I would save everyone the trouble.


Issue with 2D Shrinkwrap (Circle onto Cross) Howdy Blender Community,

I'm attempting to apply a shrinkwrap modifier (in Cycles) such that a circle mesh morphs into a cross mesh:

This works perfectly well when the target is a square, but when the target is the cross, this happens:

The circle collapses into a line. I have tried all three modes of shrinkwrap to no avail, and would be much obliged for any ideas as to how I might fix this.

My thanks in advance!

Make sure both shapes have a height and faces with area, so that Shrinkwrap modifier as normals on which to operate in.

Make sure you circle is big enough to encompass the whole cross.

Make sure your cross is high enough to cover all the circle height.

The point here is to guarantee all face normals encounter the other object operand. If you wish to have 2D shapes you can then after applyinf the modifier remove undesired faces and make them an edge wireframe only.

Change the Shrinkwrap modifier to Project mode, and the Direction to Negative. That should do it


Connect grease pencil to object transform Is it possible to parent a grease pencil layer to a particular object, so the grease pencil can be used to annotate future details of that object.

A workaround is to use a texture for every placeholder polygon, but it seems to be overkill for this particular usecase.

I want annotations to be visible when another object is selected too. Also, some objects are directional, so I need to keep track of the "front" face too, similar to what you get for "Things" in DoomBuilder.

As of Blender 2.78 you can parent Grease pencil strokes to objects or armatures which will make them follow transformations of the parent.

If you want to preview strokes independant on the object selection you should create Grease Pencil layer of the Scene type:

In the top of the menu choose Scene option and create a new layer. Rename it if need be, then choose which object you'd like to parent it to (it isn't important whether strokes are already drawn or not).

As parenting works on Layer level you need as many layers as there are different annotations you'd like to move separately (2 in the example above). So create several layers and choose desired parent in the Parent drop-down as shown above.

To have different colors create several palettes, each for desired color.

If you don't want strokes to be visible through the objects uncheck X-Ray in the Layer settings. After that strokes might be needed to be moved out a bit:

One way to stick them back to surface is to use Reproject Strokes tool available in version 2.78+. Orient the viewport roughly as it was when strokes were drawn (proejcting will be done according to the viewpoint orientation). Then in the Edit Strokes mode (note, not Edit mode) find the tool on the Toolshelf and choose Surface to project strokes back.


Mirrored object showing problems I'm making a head model from another scene, and the body on a separate one. Both are different .blend files. Problem is when I copy (ctrl+c) the head model and paste it to the other scene (ctrl+v) the verts of the mirrored side of the object look clean compared to the original side.

Here is the scene of the head model. As you can see, both sides have retained consistency.

After I copy pasted the head model to the body scene, this is what I get.

The mirrored side looks inconsistent with the original side.

I need both sides to look the same.

Problem is caused by lighting. I fixed mine by deleting the old lighting and creating new ones instead.


Blender Soft Body deforming too much I am extremely new to blender, I am attempting to model some sandbag physics for a 3d printing project. I want the sandbags to have a nice look to them.
The video below shows the issue I am having.

I want the sandbag to still retain some of its shape but still deform a little bit when it hits the ground. I have also attached the .blend file too. I wish to eventually create something like this:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZmSZTsNzK_ImuBXawsH8giCsZZE77aDZ/view?usp=sharing

Soft Body
To keep shape uncollapsed can be achieved by tweaking some parameters, but it will be always more "softer" in a center and "harder" in corners where springs are closer to each other without additional geometry (see Nathan's answer).
There is also a big game changer - topology. In your specific case if you go to edit mode select all and search for Un-Subdivide like 2, than under Physics Properties > Soft Body > Field Weights > Gravity set back to 1 ... you can see object doesn't collapse.

Cloth
You can try Cloth simulation instead, that has an Internal Springs feature. Here I scaled bag to something more real-size (1 x 0.5 x 0.3). Un-Subdivided to 3. Physics Properties > Vertex Mass 10 kg, enabled Internal Springs. Add Collision modifier with Thickness Outer 0.001 and Friction 50.


Why changing camera's far clip does not seem to clip the distance for depth map rendings? I am rendering depth maps and store the results in OpenEXR format. To make sure things work as expected I loaded one of the renderings into Python using the OpenEXR Python bindings as follow:

import OpenEXR, Imath, array

exrFile = OpenEXR.InputFile('depth.exr')
FLOAT = Imath.PixelType(Imath.PixelType.FLOAT)
(R,G,B) = [array.array('f', exrFile.channel(Chan, FLOAT)).tolist() for Chan in ("R", "G", "B") ] # R, G and B hold the same values
print (max(R), min(R)) # will print something like (10000000000.0, 0.9885767698287964)

Before rendering, I set the camera's clip end value to 2. What I noticed is that the clipping the camera distance does not change the large value in the rendering results. In other words, I will always have 10000000000.0 as the biggest number in the rendering result. I wonder, why doesn't the camera clipping seem to work here? Is there a way that I can clip the maximum depth distance?

I need this because when I need to be able to visualize the result. However, when I divide the numbers by the maximum distance everything is almost close to 0 and I cannot see anything on the screen. One solution that might work is to set the largest number to a much smaller value but this does not solve the problem fundamentally. So any solution would be appreciated.

This is essentially just a matter of interpretation and intended meaning. When the depth reports 10000000000 it’s not actually intended to represent an actual distance, rather ‘infinity’ (but it’s a suitably large enough value to essentially be regarded as that) and so it represents the rays not actually hitting anything. The camera clipping distance is effectively a tool to allow the render to be optimised (so we don’t consider details that are too distant to make a noticeable difference to the final render. It does affect which surfaces are considered for rendering but the ‘infinite’ depth is still relevant to indicate ‘nothing was hit’.

When interpreting a depth map it’s much clearer to interpret a single value (“infinity”) as an indicator that nothing was hit than a ‘variable’ value based on the camera clipping distance - maxing out at the clipping distance would require additional knowledge as to what the actual clipping distance was set to for that particular render before you could determine whether a point hit a surface or not.

If you know your clipping distance you should be able to manually limit the upper bounds with something like `min(9999,max(R))’ - ie, get the maximum value from R and then take the minimum of that and some constant based on your clipping distance.


Why is the preview image better quality than the rendered one? First pic is final render, second pic is what is shown on the compositor, can tell me why the one on the compositor has better quality?

This is rendered in Blender 2.9

If you notice , you have pluged the output of your denoise node in your viewer , if you want the results to be similar to the viewer node output , then you should also plug that into the composite node , the viewer node is only for preview and compositor makes changes in the render itself


model a shape something like a raspberry I am trying to build something like this. Is there a nice way without just snapping spheres to vertices? It could be interesting to look at using the Fibonacci sequence also to distribute the spheres.

Take a look at Dupliverts, that allows the duplication of a base object at the location of the vertices of a mesh. In other words, when using DupliVerts on a mesh, an instance of the base object is placed on every vertex of the mesh.

Or try the Tissue add-on by Alessandro Zomparelli

It allows you to copy a selected object (Component) on the faces of the active object (Generator), adapting its bounding box to the shape of quad-faces.

Thread on Blenderartists.org with more examples here


Ordering hair particles I am trying to practice with blender by creating a plant with bulb or bean shaped leaves as in this illustration (author unknown):

I created a leaf and used a Hair particle system to duplicate it around a trunk, but  am having a hard time ordering the leaves nicely.

It doesn't have to be exactly as in the illustration, but at least somewhat regular. This is what I have gotten so far:

It's not great because the meshes of the leaves intersect and have irregular gaps between them. I tweaked around for a long time but none of my settings are set to "random".

How are the leaves emitted in this scene and how can I order them?

Your particle setting is almost good. For 1 particle per face to work properly though you need to have as much or more particles as faces. Your emitter is pretty dense. I would suggest to lower the face number. Maybe try to make stem from 16 verts circle. I would also suggest to change Initial Orientation setting to Normal instead of Normal-Tangent to avoid different rotation on different rows of faces. Then play with size and rotation of particles until you get satisfactory result.Here is your file with the changes I mentioned.I think it's a good start for further experimentation:


Blender on Google Colab not finding Graphics Card Up until few days ago I was able to run Blender(or sheep it) headless on Google Colab with an GPU(K80 or T4). Now running keras/tensorflow does work fine but blender cant detect the GPU at all and Sheepit tells me that

  "cuInit Failed ret: 100"

nvidia-smi results with:

Sat Aug 24 19:48:06 2019
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 430.40       Driver Version: 418.67       CUDA Version: 10.1     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  Tesla K80           Off  | 00000000:00:04.0 Off |                    0 |
| N/A   33C    P8    25W / 149W |      0MiB / 11441MiB |      0%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The following script did work fine for few months and detected the GPU properly and setup blender to use the available GPU.
https://gist.github.com/donmahallem/a05100077ec1327268f28f0b2bd8da60

I tried a lot but my nvidia/unix foo is pretty limited. I tried to find out if the CUDA Version changed and tried to downgrade the cuda version to 9.2 but couldn't get it to work again.

I'm also facing the same problem. I think colab is not allowing GPU to use for any commands that include "sudo" in it.

Solution I found was to install blender and then run the command to render without "sudo".

I installed blender from PPA ppa:thomas-schiex/blender

commands to execute:

!sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thomas-schiex/blender
!sudo apt-get install blender
!blender -b -P script.py filename.blend -o fileoutput -F PNG -f 1

script.py contains code to select gpu, I generally upload to colab. Save following code as script.py

import bpy, _cycles

bpy.context.scene.cycles.device = 'GPU'

avail_devices = _cycles.available_devices('CUDA')
print(avail_devices)

prop = bpy.context.preferences.addons['cycles'].preferences

prop.get_devices(prop.compute_device_type)
prop.compute_device_type = 'CUDA'

for device in prop.devices:
    if device.type == 'CUDA':
        print('device: ', device)
        device.use = True

this worked for me !


How to trim wall to roofline How can I trim this wall to the roofline? Thanks in advance.

Turn on snapping to face. (In blender 2.79.6 the shortcut is shift+Tab).

In edit mode, grab your vertices on the corner of the wall sticking through the roof and press "G" and "Z" to move it along only the Z axis. When the vertices snap onto the the correct face, let it go and there you go!

Hope that helps!


How to create a velvet fabric material I have been looking at this painting for a while trying to recreate the red fabric material on his hat and poncho (not sure what the name is, but it looks like a poncho) from what i can tell it is some kind of velvet type material. I have found that a color ramp with layer weight as factor does provide an ok result to achieve the high lights effect. but I'm sure there must be better more realistic ways. Thanks in advance for any help! EDIT: this needs to be a shading setup that works in EEVEE.

Here is something that I got to work pretty well. It is a lil on the complex side (sorry).

You could tweak the color ramps, sheen setting, and transmission to adjust the sheen to your liking.
Hope this helps.


V shaped gradient texture - Car Livery I am working on a livery of F1 car (it's my first project after tutorials) and want to achieve a V-shaped car livery like on this photo:

I created a gradient texture with texture coordinate on an empty, like the guy in this video:
YouTube and it looks like below. The empty allows me to rotate and scale the gradient texture. I thought that since there is a Mirror modifier on the body, the shader would also be mirrored, but it's not the case. I want to mirror it, like on the screen from the video.
I tried moving, rotating and scaling the empty, but it didn't work :(

Gradient I want to achieve:

You were so nearly there... :D
At the risk of starting a game of Node Golf, if the question is: 'How do I make a procedural chevron?' ...then a minimal answer could be something like this, mirroring in X by using its Absolute value:

This assumes the origin of your model is on its mirror axis. The Map Range 'From' figures would depend on the size of your object. Both of those conditions are tweakable.
The texture is in XY, and can be projected through any model:

@brockmann: to get a rounding at the tip pf the chevron without getting too complicated, you could forget the Absolute, and select ranges from y + sqrt((x^2) +n). Here illustrated with n=0.005, n=0.001, and n=0, which returns us to the un-rounded chevron.

Blurring could be achieved by chnging the Color Ramp from 'Constant', and putting in gradients from red to white, and/or, muddling the whole texture space with some noise.


Select all visible faces (possible script needed?) I have a very large and complex model that I'm working on, and I need to separate the external faces from the rest of the mesh for various reasons.

I decided to try making use of the Limit Selection to Visible feature to select all of the external faces, and then use the P command to separate the mesh.

Unfortunately, I'm having some trouble actually selecting all of the external faces this way. I had planned on dragging the Border Select over the entire object, then rotating through the appropriate angles and repeating until all of the faces were selected however, the selection tools aren't selecting all of the visible faces.

This is what happens when I'm zoomed out and I use the Border Select on a region of the model. Upon close inspection (zooming back in) I can see that there are a lot of faces that weren't selected. [See image directly below]

If I use the Border Select on the same region while zoomed in, it selects a lot more of the faces; though still not all of them. [See image directly below]

It seems like the selection accuracy decreases, the further your view is from the model.

I need a way to select ALL of the visible faces. Is there a way to fix the  selection accuracy, or a feature that I'm missing? Does anyone know of a script (or would be willing to make one) that is able to do this?

Select one of the front faces and hit Shift+G and from the menu select Normal.
Hit F6 to bring Select Similar operator menu and adjust the Threshold until all the front faces are selected.
Use Ctrl++ to extend the selection


How can I upload my own image as a background image and texture to a 2D animation in Blender 2.8? Although this was been asked and answered before, I still do not understand the process. I am a complete novice- this is my first day using Blender for 2D animation. I don't know how to upload my own images to materials/textures or how to add a plane. I am struggling to find a straight forward answer here, and I've been looking for about an hour now. Please let me know what is the best way to upload my own image as a background AND texture for 2d animation.

The process is relatively straight forward, but can be made easier by enabling a built in add-on for blender called "Images as planes". Go to User Preferences > Addons and search in the box for images - only one result should pop up -"Import/Export: Import Images as Planes". Check the box and exit user preferences.

Hover your mouse over the viewport you are using and press Shift + A. Select image and then image as plane. A box will pop up letting you select you photo from your PC. Pick the image you want. If instead, you are looking to use a background image, pick "Background", the rest is the same.

Lastly, to see the image, select one of the rendered mode tabs - either Material Preview or Rendered Preview.

This is the 3D viewport in the 2D animation tab. To add an image you have to be in object mode. But what happens when you press shift+a, are you saying nothing happens? If so, have you changed any of your shortcuts/hotkeys? You can also access it from the menu at the top. See image:


Topology question regarding vehicle I am struggling with modeling the roof and keeping it in clean topology. The problem is that I can't find a way to get the roundness and smoothness of the roof to match the real reference. How should I go about it?

This is what I am trying to mimic.

Thanks in advance.

Looks like you are using Bevel on all of your corners?

Another method would be Extrude, Spin and Tweek. Lots of tweeking needed  :)


Did compositing in Cycles, went to eevee for the background, went back to cycles... and all my compositing had been deleted How do I solve that? I had a beautiful planet and now the planet is all pink and plain, not really what I want. Everything that was in the compositing editor is not there anymore.

Ok I solved it, I actually confounded the compositor tab with the shading tab. The pink color was because I had previously deleted the file of the surface of the planet. I put a newer version of the file I did on Photoshop inside the "Image texture" block in the shading tab and tadaa... the planet is no longer pink.


Blender 2.73 textures in solid view mode When I was using blender 2.73, I realized that the option of "textured solid" is missing from the right pullout menu, when in previous versions it was put under "display".

I am aware that I could just change the view mode to textured. However, I am using the game engine, and I want one scene to have textures, while another I need to be in solid view mode. So is there any way in Blender 2.73 to have a "textured solid" mode without completely changing to textured mode?

Texture Solid is in the 'Shading panel', which is below the 'Display' panel:


Copy and Paste Specific character into existing pose I have what might be a tough or easy question. My overall use for blender is to create multiple animations for different characters. Some of these animations will be the same, and I was wondering if theres a way that I can make a basic animation, then copy and paste the character's look (skin, mesh, whatever you want to call it) onto the base character. So then I can just do that with all the different characters.
The proportions will be the same between characters.

I just need a way to have the exact same animations for multiple characters without having to animate it myself many times over, because I wouldn't be able to make it exact.

Any questions about this, please just clarify.

If I understand the question, I think the best thing to do is to make a file of just the armature doing the animations. Select "Save as" and do a different name, then, at frame 0 have the armature in a neutral position (and have the animation start at frame 1) so you can copy the meshes into the file and rig the meshes for different characters onto the neutral position.
Just return to the original file and "save as" again for a new character.
Did this help?


Smoke (mist) not working for existing file I'm doing my first project in Blender. I started in 2.82 and am now using 2.90. I'm making a frost sword where I want a nitrogren mist to fall down from the blade's edge defined by a vertex group. I succeeded in that while modelling, but then I did some changes to the model, and now I can't get the mist to work again. Even if I add completely new simple object to the scene and do quick smoke and bake, nothing shows up. If I open a new blender file and do quick smoke, it shows up fine, so I assume some scene setting has been messed up. It's been driving me nuts for hours now, so any help will be greatly appreciated.
Model file here.

No one , Not the blender file , not the model , not the primitives , not the simulator None of them is at fault.When you make a simulation , you also bake it , and im sure you also did that , if you bake the simulation , what it does is that it records the simulations animation so that it doesn't have to do heavy calculation it does while making the simulation for the first time , so try rebaking and come back again


Apply -1 x scale (mirror) to object mesh and keep custom normals with python I have meshes with custom face normals but they should be mirrored in the X axis. They are not perfectly symmetrical so I have to apply -1 to x scale.

As I apply the scale with
bpy.ops.object.transform_apply(location=False, rotation=False, scale=True)

the face normals get messed up.

How do I store the custom face normals, perform code above and restore the face normals (mirrored in x) in python?
Thanks in advance!

Alright, I found the solution with some help of the answer of batFINGER here.
There's surprisingly little information on the internet about manipulating face normals at the vertex positions, confusingly called 'split normals' or 'loop normals'.
To work with split normals with python you first need to use the method calc_normals_split() on the mesh or else you won't get accurate vector values for the split normals or loop normals.
It took me hours finding that out.
In stead of setting x scale to -1 and applying transforms at the object level, you should edit the vertices, face normals and split normals at the mesh level.
code:

import bpy

## get active object and mesh
ob = bpy.context.object
me = ob.data
## Very important to include line below for working with custom normals!
me.calc_normals_split()
me.use_auto_smooth = True
## go through each polygon, reverse second to last loop,
## multiply x vector of loops with -1, store mirrored vector in
## mirror_split_normals for later use.
mirror_split_normals = []
for iter_poly in me.polygons:
    reverse_normals_indices = [iter_poly.loop_indices[0]] + [i for i in reversed(iter_poly.loop_indices[1:])]
    for i in reverse_normals_indices:
        mirror_split_normals.append((me.loops[i].normal[0] * -1, me.loops[i].normal[1], me.loops[i].normal[2]))

## mirror vertices in x by multiplying x by -1
for v in me.vertices:
    v.co = v.co[0] * -1, v.co[1], v.co[2]

## flip face normals and apply mirrored split normals
me.flip_normals()
#me.update()
me.normals_split_custom_set(mirror_split_normals)

Original mesh:

Mirrored mesh:


Blender shape keys aren't animating properly I am trying to animate a hinged lid so that the hinge will not poke through the bottom, and that it will also properly show itself. I followed many tutorials word-for-word, but when I do what they do, the animation doesn't play properly. I added a keyframe to the hinge called "Stretched", and then edited it by stretching part of it. It checks out, because when I click the pin after clicking "stretched", the object morphs instantly to the stretched shape key. However, when I set the slider to 0 and create a keyframe at frame 0, then set the slider to 1 and create a keyframe at frame 70 (end of animation), nothing happens. The hinge doesn't stretch. I've made sure to turn off all pins and such, but nothing helps. Here are pics:

File:

In your screenshot you can see that your "stretched" shape key was relative to the "stretched" shape key instead of the Basis shape key.  Since it was relative to itself, it represented no deltas.  If you change "stretched"'s Blend: relative_key from "stretched" to "Basis", then the shape key works.


Exploding a solid object I've been trying to make a cube explode without gravity in a solid form.  Just fragments, no fire or smoke.  I've watched every video I could find but I just can't get it to work...quick explode is great, but it seems to just throw paper thin pieces, not big chunks.  Anyway, if someone could post a step-by-step procedure that would be awesome.  Sorry if I'm missing the obvious.

blender file

Thanks

The cell fracture addon creates solid pieces to match the volume of the selected object. If you have failed trying the cell fracture addon you may have missed that it leaves your object intact and places all the new pieces onto the next layer, you need to change layers to see the pieces.

After enabling the addon, there is a cell fracture button added to the tools region but you may find it easier to press space and type in cell. For a simple cube you will either want to subdivide multiple times or add a particle system then run the addon.

This blender cookie tutorial covers the cell fracture addon.


Using particle data to effect an unrelated objects material Basically the sphere has an emission shader that I want to only emit when a particle passes through it.
It is supposed to be a muzzle flash from a firearm and right now I have to manually animate it to line up with each particle. So the question is there a way to have each particle effect the emission shader. I was thinking that I could use particle age but I have no way to link it between the two different objects materials. Is there some way to have the particles weight paint the sphere kind of like you can do with two objects? Or should I make the muzzle flash a particle system too? that copies the emission pattern of the bullets.

Using dynamic paint
Result:

How to:

UV unwrap your "receiver" object (I'm using a cylinder)

On that object, enable (from the Physics panel): Dynamic Paint > Canvas > Add Canvas. Make its type "Image Sequence", and its initial color completely black. Enable "Dissolve" and use a very short time for dissolve, like 5.

Select the Emitter object, enable: Dynamic Paint > Canvas > Add Brush. Make the brush fully white. Change the "Source" to "Particle system" and select the correct particle system. Increase the brush radius.

Go back to the target object, select the correct "UVMap" under "Dynamic Paint Output", and bake the Image Sequence.

Create a material for the target that has an emission shader modulated by the Dynamic Paint paintmap (for the Image Texture, remember to open all the image files together with Ctrl+Shift+Select, and "Detect Sequences" activated):


Multiresolution subdivisions are creating curves down the middle of my model I am currently doing some character modeling and I decided to add a multiresolution modifier to my model. However, when I add subdivisions to my model I get a bunch of curves down the middle of it. My model does not have any of these curves without the subdivisions from the multiresolution modifier.  Can someone please instruct me on how to fix this?

Looks like you have internal faces down the middle (probably left over from a mirror modifier). Delete all the faces that are inside of your guy, they are on the center, right where the crease is.

You can easily remove any interior faces.

Tab into edit mode, make sure no part of your mesh is selected.
From the 3D view header Select > Interior Faces.
Switch to wireframe with Z and if you have any faces selected press X > Faces.


I have a problem duplicating a Mesh and again applying curve modifiers to the copy correctly? I have a cube (A1) and a nurbs curve (N1)
I use an array modifier and a curve modifier so that cube (A1) follows the curve (N1) and fills exactly. But I do not apply the modifiers.

I then use SHIFT+D to copy A1, which gives me a new cube mesh, A2. I make a new nurbs curve, N2. I cannot use this new cube, A2 on the new nurbs curve because when I get upto the step of using a curve modifier, A2 just goes all over the place or stretches too big. Why and how and can this be fixed?

I've tried applying rotation, scale and location on everything, tried changing all the modifier settings  and tried multiple times in different ways but cannot get it to work.

I've tried this both on blender 2.74 and blender 2.79 and it's the same thing.

recreated blend file:

You've enabled the Object Offset of the Array modifier, with your curve as the offset object, is there a reason for that? Because it messes your object: as your curve is scaled 6 times, it will also scale your cube 6 times...

Object Offset will array your object taking account of the location, rotation and scale of the chosen object, like for example it will scale your original object increasingly if your offset object has been scaled, which is not what you want, you want a simple array, then a second modifier that makes the array follow a curve.

So disable this option as you just want your cube to be duplicated. It's the next modifier (Curve) that will take care of making your object following the curve.

Also, if you choose to apply the scale of your curve, don't forget, in Edit mode, to bring back the Radius of your curve vertices to 1 (on the N panel of your 3D view).


Why are my particle settings grayed out? The particle number on my settings appear in gray, I don't think i'm able to change the number even thought i need it, how can i make it white again?

I just found the solution for it: It is greyed out when it was baked. Go to the "cache" section in the particle system and click on "free bake" to be able to edit the greyed out settings again.


How to send picture to the background so i can see the plane? So this is my workplace, i use this as a background image which will help me to modeling the plane but its look like this so i can't see the plane.

But If I visible the image, this appears.

So my question is: How can i send the plane in front of picture so i can see it?

The fastest way is to add a Background image.

Add->Image->Background
This will keep your image always in the back.

Even when it's physically in front.

Bonus:
You can change these settings for every image in your viewport.
You can also set your image to only appear in orthographic mode, make it transparent... etc.

Properties panel->Object Data
These settings are available for every image.


Set 3D cursor position while left-click selection is enabled (2.8) I decided to switch to the new Blender 2.8 default selection mode, left-click.
But then... How do I set the 3D cursor position ?
left click does nothing, while right click brings a contextual menu.

Thanks !

You have to click on the cursor icon on the left-hand corner


Constraining vertices in the Z axis when array, curve and shrinkwrap modifiers applied I'm creating a road on a 3D landscape.  The road's path is defined in the X and Y axes using a bezier.  I've created a small section which I'm then applying to the bezier using an array modifier and then a curve modifier.
To make the road follow the landscape, I'm applying a shrinkwrap modifier to it using project mode on the Z axis.

The issue is that where the road curves around on a sloping hillside, one side of the road is lower than the other.

What is the best solution to make the road level please?

I managed to solve the problem by using the shrinkwrap modifier on the bezier so it followed the terrain, then I simply applied the road section to the bezier using the array and curve modifiers.
Set the bezier twisting setting to 'Z-Up'.
It was necessary to hit 'apply' to the shrinkwrap modifier on the bezier, otherwise the road simply followed it in 2D.
I hope that helps someone.


How to export pivot point from Blender to Unreal Engine? In blender the position of the pivot point is correct.
But it moves to another direction after importing to Unreal.

Why can it be?

I think this is a question more about Unreal, not Blender, but here community helps much more faster, than Unreal community =)

Edit 2:

Before exporting from Blender, add an empty to your scene where you want your origin point to be, then parent the cupboard to the empty.  Optionally rename empty to 'cupboard' or whatever you want.  This works for Unity, and I assume it'd work in UE4.


how do i fill in this visor I finished modeling the cast of a daft punk helmet, but how do I go about filling in the visor? Any tips?

The bottom image is what I want the result to be.

i got it, i just made an outline of the top portion and spun around.


Prevent ocean from behaving like a mirror This is what my ocean looks like:

This is the node editor of ocean:

This is the result after I edited a few values:

As you can see, I am either able to create a fully reflective ocean (which I did from a video tutorial) or create a blankly grey ocean. I played around with many values in the node editor but they don't make sense to me so I really wasn't able to achieve anything near my goal.

My question is:

What do I need to edit in the node editor setup to make my ocean more realistic?

Edit: I thought it would be apparent, but anyway, I'll want my ocean to be animated and not still.

For large-scale water to look good, you'll need a few things:

An environment for the water to reflect. You already got this.
Waves. Water is almost never a perfectly flat mirror. You will need a lot of extra geometry to mimic the waves. It is a lot more common to use a displacement texture to 'fake' the effect.
A key property of water is fresnel reflection. That means depending on the angle of the surface is to the camera, it is either really dark or really reflective.

Combining all 3, this is what we end up:

The Blend file can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8pf88lwlobv3kf9/ocean.blend?dl=0


How can I select hundreds of items in the outliner that have similar names? I made an asteroid belt from a particle system. Lets say there are 2500 individual asteroids. There are 9 unique models. All the objects are named AsteroidA_LP..., AsteroidB_LP..., etc. all the way to AsteroidI_LP. That makes about 277 asteroids of each type that I need to select so that I can combine them into one object for each different type. I hope to end up with 9 objects, each containing the same type of asteroid that is UV Mapped the same.

I don't know the best way to do this. Here is what I am doing which beats Shift LMB clicking each one.

I have expanded the Outliner is large as I can. I LMB click to select the first object. I press B and drag a box selection across as many of the same type that I can and then I scroll the outliner and repeat the process until I have all the AsteroidA_LP objects selected with a shade of light blue. Once I have all the objects selected in that manner with box select then I RMB click and choose to select the objects and then press Ctrl+J to join all the objects together.

Is there a faster way?

Try Select > Pattern. This will allow you to select objects based on a pattern with a set of wildcards.

The available wildcards are *, ?, and [...]

Use * to match any number of characters
Use ? to match a single character
Use [abc] (or [ABC], but this only matters if Case Sensitive is enabled) to match any letter, and [0123456789] to match any number between 0 and 9. You can match specific numbers too, e.g. [127] will only match 1, 2, and 7.

If you want to select all AsteroidA_LP... objects, then it sounds like you want something like AsteroidA_LP.*.


How to import .pdf file into Blender I have a .pdf file that contains a campus layout. It can be enlarged to extreme (2400X) limits.

I wish to use it to produce flythroughs and as a frontpiece for database access of various information, hardware specificities, electric, fiber and other systems through hot-point selection.

Can I get the .pdf file into Blender and will it autoscale?

Luckily PDF is a standardized format that will wrap both vector and raster elements.

Depending on the PDF in question, it should be viable to open it using any vector based application (Illustrator / Inkscape) or design publishing document application (InDesign or Scribus) and peel apart the various entities you require, or even save en masse to a vector or raster format as required.

If the document entities are raster elements, it would likely be most ideal to export them to a standardized raster file format such as TIFF. Be careful to match the native resolution of the raster elements to avoid inadvertent rescaling / resampling.

If the document entities are vector splines, both InDesign and Inkscape should be capable of pulling apart the actual splines for saving as SVG. Beware however in that you may see odd quantization of point positions or fill colour strangeness. Anything beyond basic fill colours and position or shapes will likely not translate to the import. Make sure to have enough subdivisions when importing the SVG file as the bezier knots may not be rendered correctly otherwise.

As a last resort and the worst possible case that you require a spline based version of a rasterized element, both Illustrator and Inkscape offer a method to do a quantized colour based outlining automatically via their tools. It may require some experimentation to get a reasonable set of splines, but it is possible.
The bulk of this is exactly as Duarte pointed out in his comment, with further detailed instructions to help the solution along.


Weird shading issue in rendered mode I have enabled smooth shading with and without auto smoothing, played with the normals, and tried a million other fixes but i after many hours of trying have made no process, i also searched online and didn't find any fixes to this issue
how can i fix this? any help is much appreciated! :)
link for file here!

This is happening because of the ngons. If you look your model from side, you'll notice the face is not actually flat.

There are two ways to fix them.
First(quick and dirty): use Weighted normal modifier with Keep Sharp option enabled.

The shading is better now. However, the topology issue stays still since the Weighted normal modifier changes normals only.
Second(better way to handle this issue): Recreate the model and use Weighted normal modifier on it. There are unnecessary bevels(like the "triangle-shaped" bevels that will create the shading issues on your model. Moreover, they will create unnecessary vertices.
If you want diagonal face with bevels, the topology should look like this:

And because this topology still makes ngon on the top(which will make shading issue too), use Weighted normal modifier to fix the shading issue.


get coordinates of bone from the perspective of second bone in driver I'd like to get the coordinates of one bone from the perspective of an other bone, i.e. figure out the x,y,z coordinates of bone A where the axis of the space is aligned with the rotation and location of bone B. The purpose of this is to drive different shape keys for when a bone is moved forwards or side wards relative to some other bone. It sounds like something like this ought to be possible in blender but so far i can not come up with a way of doing it.

If there happens to be some other elegant solution to the intended end-goal i'd be happy to take that one too.

Although not in the same direction as i was originally thinking, one can get a good sense of which direction a bone is at using the following construction:

create a helper bone parented to and aligned with bone A, with a damped track constraint pointing to bone B. Now add the driver using the desired rotation of the helper bone  (e.g., X, Z) in swing and Y twist mode within local space. In this mode the angle is calculated as if the bone was first swung in the X,Z axis to align the bone, and then twisted in Y to match up the axis. This thus gives us an indication of the direction of bone B from the perspective of bone A without having to worry about any twisting around the Y axis of our helper bone.


Button over another in the game engine I have a little red plane above a big green plane:

I have set the red plane for one action, and the green plane for another when i click them.

But when i click one the red (in the game) that click activate both of the planes.

How to deactivate the green plane when the mouse is over the red plane?

  If the Mouse Sensor is set to Left Mouse Button, it will simply register if the mouse button is pressed, regardless where you do it.

  You can combine it with a Mouse Over Sensor and use an And Controller. Then the Actuator is only triggered when the mouse is over the right object and LMB is pressed.


Scripting error using view3d Here is what I am trying to do:

import bpy
bpy.ops.view3d.snap_cursor_to_selected()
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()
bpy.ops.object.origin_set(type='ORIGIN_CURSOR')
bpy.ops.view3d.snap_cursor_to_center()
bpy.ops.view3d.snap_selected_to_cursor(use_offset=False)
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()

But this gave error on line 1 that something is wrong with using view3d.
After reading some previous solutions I modified this code to make it work like this

import bpy
for area in bpy.context.screen.areas:
if area.type == 'VIEW_3D':
    ctx = bpy.context.copy()
    ctx['area'] = area
    ctx['region'] = area.regions[-1]
    bpy.ops.view3d.snap_cursor_to_selected(ctx)
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()
bpy.ops.object.origin_set(type='ORIGIN_CURSOR')
bpy.ops.view3d.snap_cursor_to_center(ctx)
bpy.ops.view3d.snap_selected_to_cursor(use_offset=False)==>ERROR LINE
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()

Now I don't know what to do with that error line. Blender closes and I cannot read any error report. I am not a programmer. Hope anyone helps. Thank you.

Some commands require a specific context. For instance, to use the view3d commands you must switch to the VIEW_3D context first. This should do it:

import bpy
#switch context
previous_context = bpy.context.area.type
bpy.context.area.type = 'VIEW_3D'

#do stuff
bpy.ops.view3d.snap_cursor_to_selected()
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()
bpy.ops.object.origin_set(type='ORIGIN_CURSOR')
bpy.ops.view3d.snap_cursor_to_center()
bpy.ops.view3d.snap_selected_to_cursor(use_offset=False)
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()

#restore previous context
bpy.context.area.type = previous_context


How to make balls fall in Blender without passing through each other? I am trying to make an animation to look like this.  Do you have any suggestions on how i can make many balls like this fall down on to each other?  I do not want them to pass through each other and want to stack each ball on itself.  I've attached an example of what I am trying to achieve.
https://www.storyblocks.com/video/stock/pile-of-gumballs-fill-screen-with-colorful-rolling-and-falling-balls-multicolored-spheres-in-pool-for-children-fun-abstract-transition-bright-3d-animation-for-composite-overlay-with-alpha-channel-skp37c9urk1ifyxc6
Thank you

Yes, as Sanbaldo says. If you're still having problems, you might need to increase the "steps per second" in the scene properties tab > Rigid body world.


VSE Audio and Video Sync is off by 2 Frames Every Time I'm using Blender 2.77.  When I import footage into the VSE with the correct frame rate (23.98fps) every single audio strip is 2 frames longer than the corresponding video clip.  I think the problem is that my recordings are actually 23.97fps.  The issue with that is that when using the custom fps setting there are not enough decimal places to input a value that will result in a frame rate of 23.97 (i.e. 1.0015).  I'm not positive this will fix it but I think it should.  Does anyone else have any ideas or experience with this issue?

First off many others have had this problem.

Now you actually can set the Framerate Base with precision out to 6 places. (Go ahead and right now enter 1.00125 as the framerate base.)
Notice in this screen shot that blender knows that my custom frame rate is 23.97; yet it is still displaying that the framerate base is just 1.001.

Copy the line below into the Python Console then press Enter you will see what the value really is.
D.scenes['Scene'].render.fps_base


Blender Internal Noise Texture not showing in Normal channel I'm using a Noise Texture (shader) with the Normal influence channel (in BI). And it doesn't show in render. Something does show when I check the Color influence, but not Normal influence. I think I tested every possible setting, with no success. See the attached images for my settings and the render result. The blue tip should show some bump. What am I doing wrong? Maybe it has to do with scale. The tip is just a few millimetres thick, but I also tested different scale values and nothing shows. The noise does show in the preview though.

I'm attaching another image showing the vertices.

You will get different results with the Influence/Bump Mapping/Space setting


Set Origin to geometry not available I am reading a book called: Blender Game Engine Beginner Guide by Victor Kuller Bacone, from Packt publishing, in which there is an exercise which directs to download from the 3D Warehouse a boat in sketchup format. The next instruction is to export the boat to Collada format, and import it into Blender. In blender, the user is instructed to use Tools > Edit > Set Origin and choose Center of Mass. When I follow those instructions, the boat object is centered. But when I try the next series of steps, downloading a killer whale (orca whale) from the same website into  Sketchup, exporting it to Collada, and import it into Blender, I don't see the menu option Tools > Edit > Set Origin. The keyboard shortcut CtrlShiftAltC doesn't seem to work either. Why can't the option for setting the origin to the center of mass work after importing the Orca?

I am using Sketchup version Make 2014 14.0.4900. Whether I choose from sketchup the "fix it" or "fix it later" options on exporting, I get the same error.

The screenshot shows an object origin at the center of the mesh, with a dotted line to the Orca. If I add an empty to the default scene, and define that empty as a parent of the default cube, I get a dotted line from the empty to the cube much like the line shown in the screenshot. If I select the empty object, the "Set origin" button disappears from the tool shelf. This suggests to me that you don't have the Orca selected, but instead have selected the empty.


How to use the render result from one scene as a texture in another scene Maybe there's a better way to go about this. What I want to do is render 2 scenes for every frame and use the result from the first render as a texture in the next.

Example:

Scene 2: A room animated with a computer on the desk.

Scene 1: The screen of the computer.

This probably isn't even possible in the method I'm describing, but I think you'll see what I'm getting at. How can this be done in Blender Internal?

Neither Cycles not Blender-Internal support this, You just have to render out the files to an image or a movie, then load them in as an image texture afterwards.


The object becomes blur when entered into rendered view mode I'm a blender beginner. I experience some issue recently in rendered view mode.That is when I entered to rendered view mode the object becomes blur.By the way the render engine which I use is EEVEE. I need to fix this issue.So far I didn't find anything useful.I attached a screenshot herewith for the reference.
Thanks in advance.

The pixels can be artefacts of a GPU driver issue. Make sure you have the latest official driver installed from the hardware vendor. Some OEMs (dell or HP for example) install their own drivers which aren’t updated as often as the official drivers. If that is the case make sure you uninstall them before installing the official drivers.


Why images are blury when extracting image sequence from video clip? I have an issue when generating an image sequence from a video clip.
Pictures 1,2,and 3 are three consecutive images from a video clip.
Picture 4 is a close-up of the heel of one of them.
The camera is on a tripod. As you can see there is no issue with the brick wall,
but with any moving part there is.
The camera is a Panasonic HDC-SD100. The clip is AVCHD 1920/1080.
If I use VLC to extract the image sequence there is no issue.
I use all the default settings except for the rendering resolution which I set
to 100% and image compression to 0%.
I have the issue with Blender 2.79b and 2.80.
With this image issue it is impossible to do camera tracking.
Any ideas what I need to do in order to solve this.
Best regards.

You need to deinterlace your footage. Try this checkbox in the bottom of the Source panel. and if this doesn't work, you'll need to deinterlace your footage outside of Blender first.


2.8 - selecting object in collections? I'm brand new to Blender so go easy.. lol

It seems the right click menu is a new concept in 2.8 and I scoured the net and couldn't quite find the solution to what I am looking for.

I am currently going through a very intensive beginners course in Blender 2.8 and my objects are starting to stack up in the Outliner/Collections.

My question (perhaps wish list?) is this:
Is there a way to first left click/select an object in the viewport and have it become highlighted in the Outliner?

I hate to draw parallels to Adobe products but I am so used to Photoshop etc... and anytime you select something it always highlights in the Layers Panel, know what I mean? lol

Thank you for listening, I hope this was semi-clear in explanation.
:)

What you want is synchronized selection between the outliner and the 3D View.

It is called "Sync Selection" and is default behavior for the Blender 2.81, I don't think it is available in previous versions, as far as I know.

You can toggle it on or off from the outliner Filter popover.


Why am I getting this weird anomaly with the loop cut? At first, the loop cuts of the arm and the shoulder weren't joined, so I merged them and I got these uneven areas. Any ideas?

you have a face inside your topology, press Z to see in Wireframe mode, select and delete the inner face


Lofting between two different shapes along a path I want to model a tube-like structure, which slowly changes from rectangular to circular along a pre-defined path. Below is an example created with bridge:

There are two problems here. The first is that the tube does not have consistent thickness, and the second is that it is not possible to control the exact path of the tube this way.

Is there a technique, or an addon, that can help me out with this? I do not want to lay lots of manually half-morphed shapes along the way and use skin modifier. I have already tried lofting with LoopTools and did not get any usable results.

The Curve modifier might give you the results you are looking for and is added after the the loft. You can also sub-divide the curve for more control.


select python code from info view I'm trying to copy python text from the info view, but I can't select any text. I tried 2.6.4 and 2.7.6. Am I doing something wrong?

I'm using Blender on OS X 10.11

Have a look at the UserPreferences->Input->Info

The 'Select Mouse' on window is a right-click. This will highlight a line, and the same action to remove the highlight. Whatever you use on the Mac to select geometry, should be the same key that will work in the info-window to select lines.

Copy Reports: will copy highlighted reports.

short-comings: (November 2015)
It isn't currently possible to select part of a line, it's the whole line or nothing.


Weight painting bleeding onto adjacent faces How can I delete the extra weight painting from the unselected area?
I've selected an Area in the weight painting mode, and when I click to paint, there is weight paint over the other area.

It's like the part I want painted, the red, is bleeding onto the connected vertices.

Here is a screen :

This is not really a "problem." OK, it is a problem for you, but it is how it is supposed to work.

When you weight paint, you are adding weights to the vertices, not the faces. So anywhere you have faces sharing a vertex, you are going to have the weights "bleed" to the other face.

In that picture the two cubes share two vertices. On the left is what I selected and applied a weight of one; on the right are the weights.

The simplest way to remedy your situation is to disconnect the two faces.
Select the vertices shared by the two different parts and press V, without doing anything else press Esc or right click to cancel the transform.

Now hover over the part that should have zero weights, and press L to select linked. In the Data tab of the properties panel assign that selection a weight of zero.


How to start with nothing on texture, then paint texture on? On my texture painting mode, when I assign the texture to paint, it just fills the object with the texture. How can I start with blank and paint the texture on?

To clear the texture open UV/Image editor, set Blend Type to Erase Alpha and Strength to 1 and clear the image with the brush. Same can be done in 3D view paint mode.


How to make a warped spacetime grid? I'm trying to create a warped space curve like examples here. Any ideas? I can't seem to get my plane to dip.

I think what you need is proportional editing. If it is activated, Moving the central vertex down will pull surrounding vertices also, while using the chosen proportional editing falloff setting.

More Complicated ideas:

In the offchance that you actually want to generate a mathematically precise surface, you should look at the Extra Objects addon and Add a Mesh-> Math function.
There are also many many other alternative Solutions that might be useful for different applications, such as the Displacement modifier or maybe even a Force field acting on a soft body by physics animation....


How can I add a realistic metallic texture to this node setup? So here is my node setup for a model i want to animate. Ive added a diffuse,bump, and specular map already but i have one last metallic texture i want to add but there are no tutorials online to help me add it, much less with this setup. Please let me know how i can do this.

To start off, download the weighted normals add-on: https://blenderartists.org/uploads/default/original/4X/b/b/6/bb60fd3ddf118fca056b6840acae494f6e57a06b.zip

To give credit where it is due, I obtained everything I use in this demonstration from here: https://pr0f3550rz00m.deviantart.com/art/Thanos-Fortnite-3D-Model-744104114

Now, for each individual mesh piece: (make sure you're in object mode) Select the mesh, press SPACE and search for weighted normals and hit ENTER. Then, with the mesh still selected press SPACE again and search for Clear Custom Split Normals Data and then hit ENTER

Note do not apply the split normals to his face, as it will cause hard edges on an organic surface, which we do not want. After applying that to mesh, we can begin the node setup!

Also you'll need to remove all of the parts which relate to his skin, as they should not be treated as hard surface objects either.

For point of reference, the metalness and specularity maps contain information as follows:

R = Ambient Occlusion

G = Unknown

B = Roughness/ Metalness/ Emission

A = No alpha channels are included

Helmet and Torso Node Setup

This is the general setup for the helmet and the torso piece, however; the gauntlet and face have an extra part to them as they both seem to contain a part that emits light.

Make sure that textures not affecting the colour are set to non-colour data

Face Node Setup

You could just use the original diffuse map to control the emission value, I just happened to make a duplicate of it in this example.

Gauntlet Node Setup

This time I just use the original diffuse map for the colour input.

Just in case it isn't clear from the image, the blue channel from the metallic map is controlling the factorial of the mix node.

And here is an example of the final result:

Hope this helps.


how I can make the mesh invisible and keep the fire? how I can make the mesh invisible and keep the fire ?

If your mesh is one piece, and you don't want to work destructively,just go in the edit mode and select the unrequired vertices and hit H on keyboard to hide it
You can unhide it by alt+H
If your mesh in seperate,just click on eye button in the outlined
If you want your mesh to be seperate,select the unrequired vertices and press P to seperate it as other mesh


7-segment-display game asset I am "new" in blender and I am using it to create game assets for Unity, where I'm developing something for HTC Vive.

I created a model in Blender using the image below. Now i was wondering if I can control what it displays someway (for example through code).

Is this possible in Blender, or should I create the model in blender and the logic in Unity?

If possible with blender can you tell me some link/info page about it? I have looked for it without effort..

I would create two materials, one for "on" segments and one for "off" segments. Then I would swap out the materials on each segment to display the correct number.

Here's a small script I made to do the job:

# Assumes segment objects are named
# SegmentA, SegmentB, ... as follows:
#   A
# B   C
#   D
# E   F
#   G

import bpy

segments = {
    "0": "ABCEFG",
    "1": "CF",
    "2": "ACDEG",
    "3": "ACDFG",
    "4": "BCDF",
    "5": "ABDFG",
    "6": "ABDEFG",
    "7": "ACF",
    "8": "ABCDEFG",
    "9": "ABCDFG"
}

def setdisplay (s):
    for x in list("ABCDEFG"):
        bpy.data.objects["Segment"+x].material_slots[0].material = bpy.data.materials["Off"]
    for x in list(segments[s]):
        bpy.data.objects["Segment"+x].material_slots[0].material = bpy.data.materials["On"]

setdisplay("4"); # or whatever


How do I control the blurriness of light through frosted glass? I'm trying to create soft lighting through non-bumpy frosted glass. This is my attempt and it's not really working the way I want it to as reflections have no blurriness and not the kind of blurriness I'm going for:

All relevant information is in the screenshot.

I have used a cube as a light source inside the structure. There is a plane (thick) in front of and behind the cube light.

Changing the roughness to max doesn't get me the required result either. Also, at higher IOR values, the cube is only about halfway visible then just cuts of from this perspective. The shape of the light on the wall behind is a hard circle which makes no sense to me.

Another problem is, the reflections do not have the blurriness of the glass. I think that has more to do with the material of the floor which is a simple glossy and diffuse shader mix with Fresnel as input to the mix shader.

Here are some images of the material I'm going for, taken from Stanley Kubrick's films :

Another still from Space Odyssey.

I would like to be able to control the softness of the light behind the source by changing parameters of the glass in front of it.

This is my first post on stackexchange and only 3 days using blender so I'm pretty new to this.

Use a mix of glass and translucent shaders. To control how blurry the light source behind the glass is, play with the factor values on the mix and the roughness of the glass shader.

Here's an example of an emitter object enclosed on a glass cube. The glass walls  have to have some thickness (you can use a solidfy modifier) so that it is not a solid glass cube.

An other factor that will have a great impact in the light effects you are after, is the color transform used in the color management settings. Being able to use a bright light source and a much larger dynamic range for the image, will help you have a more realistic result. Experiment using the filmic blender colour tranforms.

(Click on the images to enlarge)

Read also:

Render with a wider dynamic range in cycles to produce photorealistic looking images


Is their a way to create half of a model and duplicate other side So far i have been modeling by making both sides of a model but i got annoyed have to make exact changes to each side. Is their a way to make only one side of the model?

Yes there definitely is.

You can use the mirror modifier,  this will mirror your model across its origin (or any other object's origin) and merge the vertices along the seam if you want as well.

To do this first add the mirror modifier to the object in the modifiers panel.

The entire mesh will be mirrored across the object's origin along the selected axis.

You can tell it to merge the vertices along the seam by checking merge and adjusting the merge limit to set how close together vertices must be to be merged.

If you don't want to mirror across the origin you can use any other object's origin as the mirror point.  I usually use an empty, an empty is just a non-renderable object that is used in situations like this.

To do this first add an empty under Shift+A > empty > plain axes.

Then select the empty in the mirror object dropdown of the mirror modifier.


How to do difference boolean between two objects in Blender? Hello i have 4 cylinders in a "cube" and i want to extrude cube with them.
I want to delete the cylinders and leave holes in cube.

(cylinders in my case are holes for screws).

I tried to use boolean but not work or maybe i can't able to use it.

I hope you can help me...

Here file:

edit after use boolean

Your problem is that the cylinders you use to boolean your cube have faces overlaying the cube faces, and the boolean doesn't work in these conditions. So here is what you need to do:

Select your 4 cylinders and join them with ctrlJ to make it simpler (one boolean instead of 4).
As you can see the top and bottom faces of the cylinders overlay with the horizontal faces of the cubes. To prevent this, just scale the cylinder object on the Z axis.
Now there is another overlaying, between some vertical faces of the cylinders and some vertical faces of the cube. So you need to select your cylinders object, go in Edit mode, then move each cylinder a bit away from their position on the X axis.
Now you can apply the Boolean, as you can see it works.


What brings 3d software to gain weight? I would like to ask a somewhat unusual question. A few days ago I downloaded the 2.26 version of Blender and I noticed that it weighed less than 5mb, what I wonder is why today Blender (but in general all software like 3ds, maya) weigh 50 times more despite not having multiplied by 50 sometimes the same functionality (and this is especially true for Maya, which is enormously bigger than Blender, although I don't think it has a huge gap compared to the tools you can use). Why? I don't understand much about programming but I would like to know something more. Thank you.

Check out Zipf's law (vsauce youtube video). So functionality is not linearly proportional to code complexity (software size).

Usually 80% functionality takes 20% time to code, but solving all the edge cases, weird interactions, bugs, etc. takes the 80% of time and code.

You can code a nice simple working example, but if you'd like to make it multithreaded, you'd need to link a huge library to the program and make your code more complex. And on a weak laptop you might not even see that big of a change in functionality.

If you'd like to make your program more robust, for example make sure bevel works correctly in all situations, or boolean, this can complicate the code several times more than was the complexity of the original one. It just does not work proportionally.


Apply armature changes to mesh so that both the mesh and armature look the same in pose and edit mode I have a Base Mesh of a human male that I've purchased. Using the Armature that it came with, I've made some changes to it, such as making the model a bit taller, thinner chest, thicker legs etc... So basically I scaled and move some of the bones while in Pose Mode. If I go into Edit Mode for the Mesh or the Armature, it of course goes back to what it looked like at first. My goal is to have the Edit Mode look like my current Pose Mode.

Here's what I've tried:

I applied the Armature Modifier to the Mesh which makes the Mesh look the same both in Edit and Object Mode and that's what I wanted.
I then selected my Armature, went into Pose Mode, selected all the bones and CTRL+A > Apply Pose as Rest Pose. The Armature now looks the same in both Edit and Pose Mode.

The issue that I'm now having is that if I add a new Armature Modifier to the Mesh and then select my rig as its object, about 80% of it looks good, but in some areas it deforms pretty bad, it certainly doesn't look the same anymore. Am I doing things the wrong way or what am I missing?

Thank you in advance!

P.S. - Here's a video of what I've tried and my results: https://youtu.be/WuU03lvx3hI

The problem lies in the fact that when you selected all bones of the rig, you didn't select all "Machinary" bones, hidden in others bone layers. Go tot the properties tab, armature, bone layers, turn on every single layer, THEN check if any other bone is hidden (ALT H), then select all and apply pose as rest pose.

In my example picutre a classic Rigify rig, and the same rig with all the machinary bones revealed.

If that doesn't solve the problem, after you have applied your pose as rest pose, select the "bn chest" bone, in the bone constraints panel search for "stretch to" constraint and click the "RESET" button. Do the same with bn neck 01 and bn neck 02.