Blender 2.8 render farm on DL380 Gen9 w/ Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration We're looking to upgrade our render farm from 2.79 to 2.80 using a Tesla M10, Quadro P6000, or Quadro RTX6000 and enabling Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration on DL380 Gen9 – We're trying to meet the OpenGL 3.3+ requirement in particular and this would utilize VMware’s 3D driver, which does have support for OpenGL, but would need to be certified by Blender if it is not already. I searched Blender’s site but could not find anything regarding the certification of VMware’s driver. Would Blender devs be able to comment/answer or is this more appropriately directed at HPE/VMWare?

You would have to ask the developers at the Blender Organization to see if that driver could be used on the program.


How can I set the image to use the UV Map using the python api I would like to bake normals (and potentially other parameters later) of an object via python code.

I came up with the following code, but it fails on the last line saying that it cannot find a valid image to bake to (I use the standard blender scene with the default cube).

I suspect this is because the image I created is not linked with the UV Map generated from the cube_project function.

How do I associate it to the image ?

Or maybe I am taking a wrong approach?

import bpy
cube = bpy.data.objects["Cube"]
bpy.context.scene.objects.active = cube

bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()
bpy.ops.mesh.select_all(action='SELECT')
bpy.ops.uv.cube_project()
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()

image = bpy.data.images.new(name="test", width=512, height=512)

bpy.ops.object.bake_image()

Every UV face needs to be set to the image datablock:

image = bpy.data.images.new(name="test", width=512, height=512)

for uv_face in cube.data.uv_textures.active.data:
    uv_face.image = image

bpy.ops.object.bake_image()

Note that a uv_texture can't be accessed in edit-mode.

In addition to the UV face assignment, every mesh face should get a material with an image texture assigned (same image as for UV faces) and the texture coordinates be set to UV. Otherwise the texture may not show correct in viewport, although it might be baked correctly (better test!).

Have a look at the Material Utils addons, it let's you transfer UV face image assignments to material texture assignments and vice versa.


Blender beginner with Bone Problem I recently created an armor with various bones. But when I go to connect them it starts to rotate in all directions for no reason. I have constrained the bone of the lower arm with the inverse kinematics command ... When I go to select the second bone after the objective pole it starts to rotate, even if I change the angle pole it doesn't fix.
How do I solve this?

ok, i'm very stupid ... i didn't add the chain length. For all those who don't understand I mean the length that the movement has to influence: this right here


Cloth collisions with another cloth I am trying to create a scene where a cloth will collide with another cloth;
The error is where the clothes are interacting and after that is going wrong....
I have attached here the blender project:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iYXjxMVHKUPsjYT9fv76l3W86nseNzWu/view?usp=sharing
This is an example, my project is more complicated, here I uploaded something more simplified as a reference.
How can I solve this problem?
I expect that things will work like in real life, just like throwing two clothes on top of each other at the same time, they will sit on the ground, now they are flying in the air

I followed the Chris answer and I unchecked "Single Sided" and it works


Export object with vertex paint I am a beginner when it comes to Blender, so bare with me.
I painted my sculpted character with vertex paint. Now I would like to export it to .obj or something like that, and if I have understood correctly it should be possible(?) But the colors doesn't show after exporting.
I have tried .ply too, but it doesn't work either. I have searched tutorials etc. from YouTube and internet and made "Attribute" node to the "Col", but it still does nothing. I really like how the paint turned out, so it would be a shame to start over.
(Hopefully my problem is understandable, English is not my first language. :D)

For render - ensure Vertex Color name matches with the Name in Atribute node field.
For export -

PLY - exporter works for me (vertex color option is enabled by default)
ABC - exporter can also store vertex color data, just enable it in export options
OBJ - exporter doesn't have this feature. So you can export as PLY or ABC and use free app Meshlab to export as OBJ with vertex color.

Alternatively you can Bake vertex color into texture.


2.80 grease pencil - highlighted points in edit mode I am testing the new grease pencil and i’ve a little question. In “edit mode” when I select points they’re no more highlighted in orange like before.
Is there something to activate in the interface to see the points highlighted again?

PS: please, excuse my poor english. :p

Under Edit Mode on a Grease Pencil object go to the Overlays menu in the 3D View header and enable Edit Lines.

Bellow increase the opacity value as desired. Stroke edges will now appear in a very faint gray color, and selection in orange.


Driving Hair from a Texture I want to grow grass (hair particle system) driving by a texture instead of by a weight paint (because vertices are not accurate enough for my purposes).

According to my understanding, this should be possible using the Vertex Weight Edit modifier, as seen in Vertex group from texture. However, the .blend file included in that response does not even work, and I am unable to figure out how to set this up.

As an example, I want to grow grass in the white areas, and have no grass in the black areas.

Here is the .blend file I set up so far:

A sleepless night brought up the following question: How to add a Particle Texture?

The steps are finicky but work well:

Create the particle system, and create/paint a new texture; include it as the object texture if you want to see what you're doing (the object's texture/material won't affect the particle system).
In the Particle Properties tab there's a dropdown called Textures. Select your texture.
In the Texture Properties tab, go under the Image > Settings dropdown and select your image (again).
At the very top of the Texture Properties tab, set the dropdown to ParticleSettings - Texture.
Finally, under Influence (still in Texture Properties), check Density to let the image drive particle density.

Also, for the particles to appear at the right place on a non-square surface, it may be necessary to select the UV unwrap for the particle system to match the texture placement. That's under Texture Properties > Mapping > Coordinates, select UV.

Steps 3 and 4 are particularly strange at first, but work well after all. Tabbing in/out of edit mode will reflect the particle system changes. Then, to texture paint the hair, go to texture paint mode and paint more white on the texture, remembering to tab in/out of texture paint mode to update the particle system.


Key Delay In Logic Editor I want to make it so when the player presses spacebar they cant press it again in another 1,5 seconds, im not sure how to use the state or delay sensor/actuator someone please help :)

Information
Use an game-property with type integer.
Blend File (made in a UPBGE 0.2x release)
https://blend-exchange.com/b/AEQKXKbY
Screenshot


How to get uv map for mesh faces? This may be an unusual case, but I have an equirectangular image that I am wrapping onto a cylinder mesh using an environmental node on a bsdf material tab so that the end caps line up properly. The image wraps perfectly which is great. But I want to export this which apparently means I need a UV mapping but I cannot figure out how to make the UV mapping since there is no unwrapping of the mesh that matches how the image is wrapping to the shape.
I thought that perhaps if I could get the faces from the rendered mesh then they would map to the default unwrapping of the image (two circles and a rectangle) but what I currently get is a rectangular image in the UV plane with the cylinder shapes randomly on top of it.
Has anyone got experience with this?

In the properties editor, in the mesh tab, UVs panel, you can manage UVs of your mesh as well as creating several UVs.
Note that one UV map in the list has the camera incon turned on: it means that UV map is used by default by your image texture nodes and by your Texture Coodinates nodes.
If you want to manually select a particular UV map from your shader, you will need to use the UV Map node.


Strange render, though in object mode I can see the object just fine I am having a strange issue where I could see well through camera in object mode, but when I am trying to render it, the result seems to be grainy color of the object but the actual object is not visible. The following is the view through camera:

after rendering the exact same frame.

Added the blender file. Yes, I have tried the camera settings and added additional lights into the scene, it is rendering on the final frames, but it is not rendering in the very first frame, the camera is set to follow a simple path.

Your scene is enclosed inside a giant cube that is disabled for the viewport ( and enabled for render (camera icon).

What you see is the inside of that cube that has a very dense value for volume scatter. To view the animal like object in your scene you can disable the renderability(camera icon) of the cube  on the outliner or bring down the volume scatter to a more reasonable level.


Baking object with "combined" results in much too bright an Image Texture (Cycles) I am attempting to bake the chairs in a living room scene in Cycles using the "Combined" bake.  When I apply that image texture to the chair it is MUCH too bright compared to a render of the same chair. What other types of bakes should I use and how would I combine them?  The original chair uses a Wood.jpg image texture into a diffused shader mixed with a glossy shader.  I've tried baking diffused direct, diffused color, and glossy, and MixRGB them together, but it looks even worse.  Adding a brightness node & turning down the brightness looks bogus too. What am I missing?

I'm adding some more info, but I don't consider this problem answered because what I came up with is a ridiculous kluge that's sill not quite right.  I've tried so many things that at this point I don't think I can replicate all the bakes I'm using. The chair on the left is the one I'm trying to bake. In a nutshell:

Two slightly different 'combined' bakes are totally subtracted from each other which leaves shadows too dark & the color messed up. A color adjustment node (RGB Curves) corrects the color which is 'lightened' with a 'diffused color' bake to reduce the shadow from the table.

Like I said, not really a solution.

I can't be sure, but it seems entirely likely that your whites are getting crushed. I can guarantee that the white in your specular highlight on that chair is much higher than "255." But a typical image can only hold up to a 255.

Generically, this situation is handled one of two ways. Either, anything over 255 is just clipped/clamped to 255, or the whole range of values is crushed/scaled so that everything fits in a 0-255 range. This makes all the highlights darker because what used to be between 1000-2000 level of intensity gets scaled down to something like 150-250.

You situation would only be explained if Blender is doing some kind of intensity compensation that's tuning everything down so that your whites are crushed instead of just clipped. I don't know if Blender actually does that or not, but it'd explain what you're seeing.

I also don't know how to solve that, unless you can bake to an EXR or HDR that will record values higher than 255.

Hope that helps.


How to bend and use on mesh (as shrink wrap) I have mesh and i added array and tried with simple deform method. Did not work for me. With the shrink wrap modifier i tried that also did not work for me. I want to curve the mesh with array modifier and fix (shrinkwrap) on the curve mesh.

Always have this same issue to use shrinkwrap on the surface. Any detail answer can fix my issue for ever. Any suggestion or help. Thanks

To do what you want to do you could try the Mira Tools addon (demo here) or the Surface Follow addon (demo here).
But as your lamp shape is rather simple there are 2 simple tricks, Mesh Deform modifier or a second Curve modifier (as suggested by Robin Betts):

Put your ornement around your lamp.
Create a cylinder around the lamp, subdivide it several times horizontally.

Give your ornement a Mesh Deform modifier, with the cylinder as Object, click Bind.
Select the cylinder, go in Edit mode, enable the Proportional Editing option, scale and move the horizontal edge loops so that the ornement sticks to your lamp.

Second approach:

Deactivate the Array and Curve modifiers for the moment, create a new Curve modifier, put it on the top of the stack, create a curve, use it to make the ornement fit the lamp bottom profile.

Apply this modifier to make it easier, bring back the 2 other modifiers (Array and Curve).


How to reverse all animations, physics and simulations? I simply want to reverse EVERY animation, physic, motion blur etc. so that the scene is EXACTLY played and rendered backwards.

Is this possible?

I don't want to render my scene forward and use the VSE to put it in reverse, because I want to use motion blur, which looks odd when being reversed obviously. So, is there any way (without scripting for hours) to reverse everything, including physics, simulations and particle systems? Reversing only the motion blur would be okay as well (but I don't think that this is included as a feature by scratch), but not as great as reversing everything.

Thanks beforehand for taking some time to read through and provide help!

This can be done using the Video Sequencer Editor.

In the Render tab, scroll down to Post Processing and make sure Sequencer is checked.

Go to the VSE.

Click Add -> Scene -> Scene

In the VSE's Properties panel, scroll down to Filter and make sure Reverse is checked.

Go back to the default window layout (select Default where you selected Video Editing in the second step above), and render your animation.

During render, the original frame number will be displayed, counting down from the max to the min number. After render but before saving to file, the image will be passed through the VSE, and the file name will be changed appropriately.

As for the motion blur, it can be made to appear reversed by setting Position to Start on Frame and the Shutter Curve to fall from the upper left corner to the lower right corner.
Position defines when the shutter opens in relation to the frame's start time, and the shutter curve defines how it opens and closes. I also got slightly more pleasing results setting Shutter Type to Top-Bottom and Rolling Shutter Duration to a high value, though the difference is marginal.

The animation below moves the ball from the top left corner to the lower right corner, and was reversed by the above method to appear to move from the lower right to the top left.


Is there a software to reverse normal maps? Said software would combine normal map with low poly mesh and re-create the high poly that was used to create it.
Does this software exist?

The process you are describing is called "Baking". You can follow this process to do this, baking from selected to the active mesh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnipHJAQJbQ
Marmoset is a dedicated baking tool and has a lot of features and optimizations that make it especially efficient. You can also do this in substance painter. Other 3d softwares also support baking, but are not their specialty


How to scale multiple objects in Blender 2.82+ without a plugin Blender 2.82+ question. Imagine you have 3 cubes. You want them scaled to exactly 42% on the X axis. I cannot find a way to do this without a plugin.
I mean not scaling by dragging the scale handles, but scale using value input.
What I end up is that I get only one object scale, the rest do not change.
EDITED.
Apologies, seems I've posted the question strangely truncated.

Change the scaling mode from 'Median point' to 'individual origins'.
Scaling three spheres 3 increments on the x axis with the default - 'median point'.

Scaling three spheres 3 increments with transform settings set to individual origins.

What this does is allow the objects simultaneously selected to scale around their own origins instead of the active selected object. (The one highlighted in yellow).
To scale the objects "42%", go to select mode (the default when you open blender), select all of the objects, make sure you have the transform mode set to individual origins, and press S then press X. Type in '.420' to set the scale to 42%. You do not need to be in transform or scaling mode in object mode to scale an object.


How to use Mesh to paint weight to another I need to paint weight on a surface with precision.
Can i put another mesh on my plane and paint it with that?

I have this "gray" plane and this "pink" shape. i want to use the pink shape to weight paint the plane below

Thank You

You could use dynamic paint to do that. Make the plane a canvas, and the pink object a brush, and set the plane's surface type to Weight.

Note: you should be aware that the resolution of the weight painting depends on the subdivision of the plane.


Why is rigged car's XYZ location different from its physical XYZ? I just rigged a car (following WannabeExpert's DVD tutorial).
And have a weird issue.

When I move the car, its root bone's location says it's 40m away from the center.
However, its real distance is about 12m.
And it just scales up when I move further (E.g. it says 140m when it's 45m away etc.).

I thought I missed some checkbox or something, so in a new file, I made a starter cube with a single bone.
And when I move it, it also has inaccurate coordinates (e.g. it's 60m away, but says it's 87m away).

Don't think it's because of the size of the bone, as there's no way the bone is big enough to make such a big difference.

EDIT

Perhaps it's worth mentioning that when I apply a "distance constraint" to the bone, it calculates the distance from the center correctly. However, it's odd to use such monkey-patch.

EDIT 2

I did apply the scale.

It's because your model and/or your Armature hasn't "applied" their scale. It's always a good practice, at the end of the modelling stage, to apply rotation and scale to every object, so that rotation results in 0,0,0 and scale 1,1,1.

To do it, select an object and press Ctrl+A, then choose rotation and scale.

After you correctly applied rot and scale to both mesh and armature, you can establish their armature parentship, and you will have correct measurements.


Face was broken while zoom in Does anyone knows what happen with my model ?
Why the face was broken while zoom in?

I guess it's due to the camera clipping settings. Set the clip's Start value to 0.001 and it may solve your problem.


How to create a render layer in blender python In Blender's 'Render Layers' tab in its 'Scene' section there is a list of render layers. I wish to know how I can create a new render layer and customise that layer using a script.

For example, to create a render layer called "Characters" that only renders scene layer number 1 (ignore mask layers for now).

Create a new render layer with Scene.render.layers.new()

As a rule of thumb, I always use an  API method such as  new_render_layer = scene.render.layers.new(name) in preference to the operator, in this case bpy.ops.scene.render_layer_add().

Test code, creates a new render layer named "Characters". Makes it the active render layer. Sets only  scene layer 0 (the first) as included, turns off zmask, and, just for fun,  makes true for every odd zmask layer.

import bpy

context = bpy.context
scene = context.scene

new_rl = scene.render.layers.new("Characters")
# make active
scene.render.layers.active = new_rl
# set only layer 0 true
new_rl.layers = [not i for i in range(20)]
# don't use z mask
new_rl.use_zmask = False
# every odd zmask layer
new_rl.layers_zmask = [not i % 2 for i in range(20)]

See RenderLayer docs for more render layer properties to set.


2.8 What happened with the Edge Loops? The Edge Loops selection function used to be in the Edge menu (ctrl + E) but now it's gone, and I guess can only be accessed from the bottom (now top) bar > Select > Select Loops > Edge loops.

This is pretty frustrating for me to have to go through 3 different dropdowns to the use the same function I used to access through just pressing CTRL+E, is there any way to change this or at least any reason for it being moved?

The normal loop-select shortcut in Blender is to click one edge of the loop while holding down alt. This works in both 2.7x and 2.8x. control+alt clicking an edge will select an edge ring. Make sure you are in edge select mode and not face or vertex select. In face select mode, these will select loops/rings of faces. In vertex select mode, it will try and select a loop/ring, but since edges often share a vertex this will probably select more than you intended.


How to get back to scene view after opening python console? So, I'm very new to blender. I am trying to do a batch scripting project for a friend, so I'm just trying to learn the scripting/console environment. I already know python pretty well.

I found out you can press SHIFT+F4 to open the console... but after that, how do I close it? I want to see the changes I've made from the console on the scene in blender, but I can't find a way to go back to the default starting view--with the cube and the lamp and stuff. Pressing SHIFT+F4 again doesn't seem to help... I'm on a Lenovo thinkpad so I actually have to press SHIFT+FN+F4, if that makes any difference.

In Blender 2.79, you close Areas by dragging them by their split widget towards the area you want to close.

By pressing Shift+F-Key (F1-F12), you switch the Area to a different Editor. You can also do this by clicking on the area's pop-up menu button and select a different area from there.


Background sky is gridded [
So I've been working on this haunted house for a school project and I got a problem.  Whenever I zoom out, the grid would come towards me and block the model

You likely have Transparent checked under the film section of the render properties panel. Uncheck it to bring back the background:


Interactive clipping plane In this question, How can I easily animate cutaway views on multiple objects? it was suggested to use the camera clipping distance as a cutting plane.

Is there a way to have an interactive cutting plane that is not parallel to the camera?

What is needed is a way to review complex geometry in real time by moving a cutting plate through the geometry in a way that does not necessarily line up with the camera view clipping planes.

For use in the viewport, try the clipping border AltB:


How to get the Controllpoints of the *hull* of a Bezier Curve? I am currently trying to write a python script for getting the controllpoints of a Bezier curve. I want to use this points in a game, so I can reconstruct the curve there.

Getting points with a python script is easy, but the only thing I can get are two (or more) points on the curve itself - this is not what I want. A Bezier-curve is defined by controlpoints where only start- and endpoint lie on a curve, and at least one point should be outside of it. Those points also make up the convex hull of the curve.

So my main question is: How can I get the "real" controlpoints of the curve? (Not only the ones with the handles, which lie on a curve).

Additional question: I can get those points from a NURBS-Curve, but can I make a NURBS curve behave like a bezier curve? (When I click the "Bezier"-Checkbox in the "Active-Spline" panel, it doesn't look to me like a proper Bezier curve, as the endpoints don't lie on the curve.

Edit

For clarification, what I would prefer to use is a Bezier curve. What I want for that curve, is 4 control points like the NURBS curve has (= the 4 points of the orange bounding polygon as seen in the NURBS-picture).
(How) can I get those points for a Bezier-curve in blender?

Oh I see the confusion now. The handles of Bezier curve are the "real" control points. These points form the 4 control points for the cubic segment:

And that's also how you convert Bezier to BSplines - per segment. You can make a BSpline segment in Blender with Path curve with 4 points.

You get the described points with text like this:

bpy.data.curves['BezierCurve'].splines[0].bezier_points[1].handle_left
bpy.data.curves['BezierCurve'].splines[0].bezier_points[1].co
bpy.data.curves['BezierCurve'].splines[0].bezier_points[1].handle_right

Like this you get all the blue points.


Saving textures and materials I recently heard that it is a good idea to save the texture image not only in the textures panel...but also in a other panel as well, I think it was the uv mapping panel? Or image veiwer? And that if you didn't and closed it down then you may loose some of your work. If this sounds familiar to anyone, I was wondering why you hade to save it in essentially 2 different windows?  Does Maya or 3dm have these kind of ideosyncresies also in anyone's experiance?

I think this question is about misunderstanding. Maybe someone doesnt know what your talking about or maybe you don't understand how to ask the question right? In either case......
If you save image to HDD, it will be saved. ..done. There is no reason why Blender should be  deleting them.

But:
If you bake, paint, texture, or edit an image in Blender, then you must save them  before you close the project. Blender will don't save images when you save .blend file.


fSpy doesn't work with vertical pictures I've been trying to camera match a vertical picture with fSpy into blender. When importing a picture into fSpy, the program automatically turns it into landscape mode and it seems that there is no way for me to change that.

Of course it is possible to manually rotate the camera and the background picture after importing fSpy file into Blender, but I find this very tedious and manual.

If anyone knows how to make this process automatic, please let me know! Thanks in advance!

This is the portrait (vertical) picture from the picture above, it didn't turn to landscape.

I do use Fspy very well, and it is far better than Blam. And since I've been using Fspy, I've not encounter any error


Shrink-wrap not conforming to X-Axis I'm trying to shrink-wrap a simple rectangular shaped object onto another mesh. The vertical-axis works fine but it will not conform on the horizontal. Strange as the text in the middle worked fine.
Could anybody help me please?

Shrinkwrap is doing its best, with the provided vertices.. it can't bend an edge defined by only two points.

Subdivide the edges you want to conform to the curvature
Adjust the offset

And.. if you want a less destructive way (fussy clients, etc.), assign a lattice deform modifier to some or all of the vertices of the square, text, etc. and Shrinkwrap the lattice. This allows an extrusion without applying the Shrinkwrap.


Moving a vertex along an edge I need to move a vertex along an edge. I want to make a vector of 2 vertices and move the vertex along this vector using Python.

In this example, I show that I want to move the vertex with index 13 to the dot edge.

Here is a step by step calculation using vectors:

import bpy

obj = bpy.context.object

edge = obj.data.edges[0] #An edge, the first one

vIndex1 = edge.vertices[0] #Get the indices of the vertices of this edge
vIndex2 = edge.vertices[1]

v1 = obj.data.vertices[vIndex1] #Get the corresponding vertices
v2 = obj.data.vertices[vIndex2]

vCoord1 = v1.co #Get their coordinates
vCoord2 = v2.co

edgeVector = vCoord2 - vCoord1 #The vector formed by these two vertices

edgeVector.normalize() #So that it has 1 unit length

distance = 0.5 #Say we want to move v2 of this distance of 0.5 units

v2.co += edgeVector * distance #Translate the vertex

You can summarize by:

v2.co += (v2.co - v1.co).normalized() * distance #Translate the vertex


What is the best way to mirror lots of vertices? I got this vertices setup on one side of the blade:

What is the quickest way to duplicate this vertex setup to the other side, without having to manually do all the loop cuts and try to match the original side? I can't do mirror modifier, because the other side is supposed to be flat

Select the whole mesh (A) and unselect the nonmanifold edge loop (Shift+Alt+RMB while hovering the cursor over it). Duplicate the selected vertices (Shift+D) and scale it along the X axis by 0 (S,X,0). Finally remove doubles (W-->Remove Doubles).


How do I fix this weird lighting (normals?) problem? So I made this fork.

The middle two spikes have a sudden difference in lighting normals it would appear at their base (top of pictures). There was a large quad making up the area underneath the four vertices (seen in the top right image), so I thought maybe breaking that face into multiple would help. Instead I get these weird lighting triangles (bottom left picture).

This problem seems to persist in same way regardless of how I breakup the face.

To make it weirder I am positive that the 8 vertices at the base of the fork spikes have the same x & z coordinates, they only differ in the y axis.

What is causing this problem and how can I fix it?

If anyhow relevant, the left images are taken in Unity game engine.

As others have mentioned, Unity is probably getting confused about what direction the normals should be in. You need to change the topology of the large area that causes trouble. I think this would be the most logical choice:

Have you tried this combination?
To get to it, simply delete all the "wrong" faces, insert a face (F) in their place, and cut it up using the knife tool (K).

If this doesn't work, or if you're too lazy :), try adding a Bevel modifier with a small Width.


How to export Alembic Mesh Sequence Cache to FBX? I am making demolition animation for a realtime render engine that does not support Alembic, so I am trying to convert Alembic import from Blender to FBX, but only the first frame of the animation gets exported to FBX, so I was wondering if there was a way to convert the Alembic Mesh Sequence Cache so that all the animation gets exported to FBX?

Thanks in advance for any help!
Gilles

Humm. If we take into account that alembic is a cache format, similar to a dmm or pc2, what should be done is to export the first frame as .obj, and then create a dmm / pc2 of that sequence. I do not know if it works well ... The fact is that alembic separates the different meshes, so you must make a "key shape" for each component, not as a cache. This you can see if in the timeline, each frame is marked, which does not happen with alembic. That's where things go ... (I'm not very expert in Blender, but that will generate a considerable size in Mb ..) Besides, each software company has "its peculiarities" when it comes to interpreting a FBX.


re-exporting object with material gets more memory I got Many FBX and now I'm importing to paint them. Then I export them like the same file.

Example With one of FBX. FBX get example 550KB, I paint it, now it's  get's
for example 1MB

Any body know how to fix it?

If you export a previously blank (without material) obj, obviously it takes more memory, because you added material to it.
I don't know if this helps you... Maybe I misunderstood the question.


Artefacts in topology of imported SVG I've exported design from Illustrator to Inkscape to turn it in SVG and then make a model in blender. I've traced bitmap in Inkscape and everything seemed fine but when I click edit mode in blender - object appears with strange artefacts in topology coming from holes of an object. How do I fix this?

I've tried to voxel remesh as well but objects becomes too small and nothing really changes.

If object has mostly straight angles that need to be traced:

Create curve->Right click->Set spline type->Poly-> Just keep clicking E to extrude individual points. Because Object itself consists mostly of straight angles, its easier to do that.

If object need to have round angles in the end model:

Create curve->Right click->Set spline type->Poly-> Just keep clicking E to extrude individual points->CTRL+SHIFT+B on vertices in edit mode for accessing vertices bevelling.


How to use properly viewer node I'm having my first approach with Nodes, I don't understand how to use the viewer node, on the manual it is said that shift +ctrl+LMB on the node and the viewer must appear, but nothing appends when I do this. And just for clarity, does LMB stands for Left Mouse Botton?

That action is dependent on having the Node Wrangler Add-on enabled. Go into User Preferences > Add-ons and enable it.


Manual scale dialog in edit mode The manual scale dialog seems to be missing when I'm in edit mode.  What am I doing wrong?

There is no manual scale panel in Edit mode, only in Object mode. Vertices don't really have a specific scale—when you scale them up or down, it's a one-shot action. So it doesn't really make sense to have a manual scale box—when you weren't editing it, it would always display 1.


Combine models into a model How can I simplify the wire structure? I can't simplify it after joining with Join and Booleans is not working well (with Union option).

Thanks in advanced!

Marcell

It looks like Boolean doesn't work well because of overlapping faces. Maybe there's another to do it, but to merge 2 crossed Parallelepipeds, you could use the Tinycad addon:

Download the Tinycad addon: https://en.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Modeling/mesh_tinyCAD
Enable it in your Preferences.
Select your whole mesh and press W > Tinycad > XALL/Intersect Selected Edges.
It has created some additional vertices on the crossing edges but it has also deleted faces.
Remove all the doubles with W > Remove Doubles.
Fill the faces with F.


Is it possible to add distance constraints to the vertices of a mesh? I'm custom modelling a piece of paper blowing in the wind (i.e. not using the cloth modifier), but it's difficult to even fold a corner without distorting the overall shape of the paper.

I know that physics cloth simulators include this type of feature, but is it possible to get something similar to this in edit mode?

Doing something like that manually would be relatively hard, but I would recommend using proportional editing (O, Scroll Wheel to adjust strength). That should be able to do most of it. The next best option would be sculpting. Try using the 'grab brush' to get the overall shape, then just play around with various brushes like the clay brush or the draw brush to get some smaller details, just fiddle with those until you find what you like. Try taking a look at this and this. One of them is a tutorial for animating, you probably won't find much specifically on modelling the paper, but you might find some things in there to do with how he modelled it, and the other short one is just an animation, you might have to do a little bit of digging around to find out how he did it if that's along the lines of what you are doing.


Can Cycles take more samples at object borders? Can Cycles be coaxed to cast more rays in pixels containing a large gradient/discontinuity in depth (or high contrast in brightness)?

My scene is fairly simple (effectively an image mapped to a sphere as an emisive
material).
Rendering with a small number of samples (eg 5) produces good results for the
surface, however the edge of the sphere is jagged/noisy. Increasing the the sample count to 30
cleans up the edge but greatly increases the render time.

Cycles is a requirement since I need equirectangular rendered images.

What you are referring to is a strategy called Adaptive Sampling, which, unfortunately, cycles doesn't support yet.

To clean up the noise for this, I would recommend using the Branched Path Tracing integrator. This allows you to use different sample counts for different ray types!

It is likely that the noise is caused by only one or two of the ray types, or "passes" in Cycles. To find out which one(s) are causing the most noise, enable all the pass options in the Scene Properties tab and within the compositor, view the passes of the render output node individually.

Then, you can increase the samples for that specific pass using the corresponding "ray type" in the Branched Path Traceing sampling settings. This allows to increase the samples for a problematic element of the render while keep the samples the same for the rest.

Hope this helps! If you have further questions or need clarification, feel free to ask


Hiding a panel in blender I just started using blender. When I start using a new software / tool, I usually hide panels that I don't need and I show them back when I need them. In that case, I saw a panel at the top right (Hierarchy) which I wanted to keep. I have no idea what i did but i have like 7 duplicated panels...

Here it is...:

The top right panel is really weird and i have no idea how to remove them...

You can close windows by taking the diagonal 3 lines in the bottom left-hand corner and dragging it up or down to collapse it. In the viewport create a new window by dragging left on the 3 lines in the top right-hand corner, but collapse by dragging right on the same lines.

Hope this helps! :)


Blender render output is completely white In my layout view, everything looks perfectly fine, but when I hit F12 in Blender the render output is completely white:
Layout view:

Render View:

I tried some suggestions I found in other answers, but they were hard to follow due to being for older versions of blender, and finding the similar settings here was hard/had no effect.
How can I get Blender to render the output normally? I don't see any layers that should obstruct, and even when I disable everything all I get is white, I can't find an "ambient" light setting that might bleed over everything. I tried changing the settings of rendering to color, opacity etc.. but it had no discernable effect. I tried moving the camera, ensuring my item is in field. I tried hiding the plane layer to see if that caused issues, but nothing I did seemed to have an effect on the rendering.
I'm using blender 2.90.1

Your world shader is the culprit.
The Background Shader has a strength of 500!

Change that to a more sane value, and you will see results more like you would expect.


Dashed lines in dope sheet, can't edit keyframes I have an animation of an object (just locRotScale keyframes) that I was editing. I don't know if I pressed a key or what but my keyframes in the graph editor turned from selectable with solid lines to these dashed lines. I can't even delete them as when I right click on them the options are all greyed out. Is there any way to delete these or get them back to being editable?

It's because you pressed tab wich lock the curve, press tab again


Blender 2.80 Subdivision Surface Modifier has no effect The Subdivion Surface Modifier in Blender 2.80 on Ubuntu is not working for me.
I create a cylinder, grid, cube or UV sphere, then apply the modifier, nothing happens. When I press "apply" the rror message is: "Modifier returned error, skipping apply".

Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

Updating to version 2.81 Fixed this for me.


New vertices snap to wrong position, can't change the snapping distance I scanned my car with photogrammetry and moved the pointcloud from colmap to blender, to reconstruct the faces by hand.
All worked fine in version 2.79. I had the pointcloud visible as orientation in one object and in another object (reconstruction-face-object) I drawed vertices, that snapped to the vertices of the pointcloud (to get that position).
Then I updated Blender to version 2.92.0 just to use a photogrammetry plugin, which gives me the advantage to add an extra OpenGL Point Cloud with colored points (only for extra visible orientation), next to the normal pointcloud and my reconstruction-face-object.
My Problem in version 2.92 is:
If I try to make a new vertex in my reconstruction-face-object and move it to one of my orientation pointcloud verteces from the other object, it first snaps there, which is fine but then jumps to the nearest vertex of my reconstruction-face-object if I confirm the transformation and if the distance is too low.
With higher distances to any vert of my reconstruction-face-object, there is no problem with that workflow.
I tried to figure out how to decrease the sanpping distance, but only found grid snapping stuff.
Do you have any idea how to solve this?
Thx

Ok, after a long search and a break I found the solution.


place bone-armature given selection of faces/vertices/edges for cursor I am trying to place a bone in an exact position on my 3d model. I need to use other geometries as references such that the desired position of the bone can be inferred from the selection of vertices/edges/faces. I have been trying to follow these 2 other answers to move the base of my bone.
Change pivot or local origin of an object
Move cursor to center of some selected geometry/faces
My issue is that I have to "Enter Edit mode" and then select the desired vertices/edges/faces, but they do not specify which object needs to be in edit mode, the bone or the object(s) with the reference geometry. Also, I find that the only way to see all of the geometry at once is in wire-frame mode, but then I am unable to select the faces. In short, I do not know how to apply the answers above in the context of my question.
The bone seen below needs to have its base placed such that it is in the middle of the block model (around where the green Y-Axis is) and the Z-X plane (Blue-red arrow plane, only red line can be seen) location should be coincident with the hole for the lever. If looking along the green axis (centered) at the big block, the base of the bone would be right in the middle of the block. If looking directly into the hole, the bone base would be centered on the center of the hole. Does this make sense?
(Ignore the holes on top of the big block. Only looking at the hole near the lever/leg peg)

The user @batFINGER solved my problem:
"If you are selecting a face / edge / vert then the mesh will need to be in edit mode. eg select a face, shift-S cursor to selected, moves cursor to face. Exit edit mode of mesh, go into edit mode of armature select bone and shift-S snap selection to cursor. (the snap options are pretty intuitive)"
There are special selection tools available when you use the Shift-S hotkey that enable the fine-comb control required to move the 3d cursor to place objects.


How can i sharp only an edge as in this video? In this video https://youtu.be/ltuD1wg9MoE?t=10s he sharp only an edge of the cube, how can i did it?

Select the edges (in edit mode) you wanna bevel
Press CTRL+B
Move your mouse to set the scale
Scroll your mouse wheel to increase or decrease the no.of cuts


Wrapping a bar around rough surface I am trying to wrap a "metal bar" partially around a rough surface like a statue.
How do I do this?

I created a "metal bar" by adding a cylinder object and scaled and positioned it to the right size
I added subdivisions to the "metal bar" so it can bend

this is how far I got.
I think the shrinkwrap modifier is a good way of achieving this, but it does not work as I had imagined.
I want the bar to stay in the x-axis plane, this can be achieved with mode 'project' in shrinkwrap and selecting the x-axis I believe but for some reason it does not project onto my statue, the bar just stays a straight bar in front of the statue.
and it should stay a bar (for some reason shrinkwrap flattens the bar like it's clay or paper when I select a different mode in shrinkwrap)
I also want the bar to behave like a semi sturdy metal bar or wire, moldable but not stuck in every corner of a dent in the statue and lay on top of the surface.
I can't get it done, please help.
here to download the stl file: https://gofile.io/d/Zbr3ff
below screenshots

I would bevel a curve to give it thickness, and have easy control over the curve shape.

Make a curve circle and put it in place. In your case: Shift + c. Shift + a and choose Curve > Circle. Then S 1 4 Enter. Then G Z 2 0 Enter.

Put a Shrinkwrap modifier on the curve and target the knight. Mode: Project, On Surface. Direction: Negative (only)

Press Alt + C and choose Mesh from Curve/Meta/Surf/text. Then press Alt + C again but now choose Curve from Mesh/Text. Changing the curve to a mesh and then the mesh back to a curve Applies the modifier and gives us more vertices on the curve.

In Edit Mode A to select all. then hit F3 (default search key) and type "Set Spline Type" and choose Bezier. Then hit F3 again and type "Set Handle Type" (or press V) and choose Aligned.

(Alternatively you can click on the buttons next to Edit Mode in the header of the 3D Viewport. Curve > Set Spline Type > Bezier. and Control Points > Set Handle Type > Aligned.)

In Object Mode Scale the curve a bit bigger, 1.05 times seems suitable. Then go to Properties > Object Data Properties > Geometry > Bevel, and set the Depth Value to 0.03 m (and maybe increase the Resolution value).

Fine tuning:

Decimate Curve to decrees the amount of vertices. Subdivide to increase them if needed. (Both also easily found by hitting F3 in Edit Mode).
Select vertices and press X or Del and choose Segments if you want an opening in the bar curve.
And of course move the vertices around to get the exact desired shape of the bar. : )
Press Alt + C and choose Mesh from Curve/Meta/Surf/text, if you want a mesh bar in the end.


Reflections are displayed nicely in preview, but not in final render I'm running into a strange situation in Blender, where reflections show up nicely in Preview, but not in the final render (using Cycles). What could be the cause of this?

Preview:

Render:

here are my settings for Cycles:

and my blue, glossy material:

Is there some settings I'm forgetting about?

Here's the file:

This is caused by the simplify option in the scene-tab (at the bottom  of my screenshot).
simply disable it and you're good to go. you can also set the "AO bounces render" to 0 if you want to use other options of the simplifier (simplify subdivisions etc.). This option limits all non-diffuse bounces (0 = no limit)


Prevent Blender to add numbers behind materials when importing a FBX is it possible that Blender don't add numbers behind the materials when I import a FBX?
Because right now I have the problem, that I have to change the material for every window in the scene.

For example, the normal Name for Glas.120 should only be Glas.

Thanks for your help.

Hopefully, using a Material Specials addon could do the job for you:

Enable it in User Preferences (CtrlAltU) > Addons.

After you import your model, use the slots menu by clicking the arrow down button (beside material slots list) and navigate to Specials > Merge Base Names

Set AutoRename and click OK, it should remove .00X from all materials (not only for selected object)

If you get multiple materials with the same name, you can try Clean Material Slots function:


What is the differences between Object AXES and Edit Mode AXES What is the differences between Object AXES and Edit Mode AXES
Image Reference

In object mode you can read the orientation of the whole Armature object (which is the orientation of its origin, and can also be in a location in which there is no bone), in edit mode you can read every single orientation of every single bone of the armature.

The orientation of every bone is displayed at the tip of the bone, but I think is more intuitive to think at it located at the root of the bone, where the rotations will happen.


How to create a button for wind in Blender For a 3D Winter Snow Simulation I'm working on in Blender for one of my college classes, I am required to create a button that causes wind to shift falling snow in a different direction. The following is what the instructor is looking for:

  The environment should have a Wind Wheel, such as pressing a button it starts or stops. Every time the wind wheel is turned on, the snow keeps falling and it is affect by the wind when it gets close to the wind wheel. For sake of simplicity, consider that the entire snow is affect once on the same high of the wind wheel, if the wind wheel is active.

Please tell me what I can do to accomplish this.

I would go with drivers for the relation button ↔ snow, with and force fields for the wind effect. Create your button object, and make it drive the properties of your wind.


I have to use control+left click to move an object using the 3d arrows Part of why this is an issue is that when I hold down the control button and use the movement arrows it turns on snapping for that object. I also have to use control+left click to connect things in the node editor. I've tried resetting the settings, deleting the folder blender is in then reinstalling it, restarting my computer and updating my graphics card and any outstanding drivers, but nothing has fixed it yet.

May be the snap to function is enabled. To disable press Shift+Tab


Why is my Xerox font degrading in appearance in Blender? I was gonna make a Xerox logo remake in Blender, but the letters and et cetera were degraded and their pixels were invisible. How must we fix this??!

Fonts are known for topology issues and this one is, too, incontinuous (see below)

Maybe Blender has problems qualifying it as a separate object or a hole or yet something else and hence the incomplete filling.

One way out of this is to make the logo in an external app and import it as a plane to Blender. Then, just set the camera to ortographic, add proper world color and you're done.

Or, if you want to do some more Blender work, use it as a background image for your model.


Python Commands from Terminal Aren't Working Ubuntu 13.10 I'm fairly sure I'm doing something wrong and this isn't a bug, but when I installed blender from the 'blender' repository and have 2.66a running in an Ubuntu 13.10 VM, I got problems with using Python in the console.
After starting blender I get the following warnings:

Color management: using fallback mode for management
connect failed: No such file or directory

After this when I try to type in any Python commands at the terminal, nothing happens.  The >>>, suggesting an interactive Python session also don't appear.

What am I doing wrong?

As mentioned by sambler, the terminal from which blender is started is not normally used as an interactive python console. (however it is possible)

Usually one uses the python console built into the GUI.

The python console is an editor just like the 3D view or the text editor, so you can arrange your screen layout however you like to incorporate it with your workflow.

For example:

You can even split an editor into a separate window (as in the kind handled by the window manager).
This can be accomplished by pressing ShiftLMB on the area splitting corner and dragging, or by selecting the option from the editor areas menu:

For example:

Note that you probably still want the terminal from which blender was started open, as any error messages/warnings are printed to stdout and will appear there  (they will not appear in the interface by default, but there is a workaround).


How do you fill in a space between two objects and leave the middle open? I'm not 100% sure how to word this so ill try to simplify it. Lets say you have 2 circles. One circle is inside the other like a doughnut. How would you fill the space between the 2 circles while leaving the middle empty if the two circles have a different number of vertices?

If you have the circles as separate objects, first you need to join them into one mesh by selecting both and using CTRL+J shortcut.

Then switch to edit mode, select both circles, then hit CTRL+E and select Bridge Edge Loops from the menu.


Is there a way to select 'back' vertex/edges/faces without having to turn on x-ray? Say I'm on perspective view and some vertices on a cube are 'hidden' away from view and I want to select with the front vertices...I'd have to turn on x-ray, right? I just find it a unecessary step most of the time I'm modelling...can I turn this off?

Tks!

I may misinterpret what you say but:

The shortcut to switch from Solid to Wireframe mode (and thus to grab a hidden vertex) is Z in 2.79 and shiftZ in 2.8.
When you are in Solid mode you can activate/deactivate the Limit Selection to Visible (2.79) or Show Whole Scene Transparent option (2.8) on the horizontal menu bar.
In 2.8, in both Edit or Object mode, use altZ to switch to transparent/not transparent.


Problem with keyframes So first I added keyframes for the robot bobbing up and down and then added a rotation to her body and this is the result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lLgtj1HkQ&feature=youtu.be

I want her body to be rotated throughout the whole animation like that

I'm also planning on making her wave her hand

I really cant describe the problem well, just watch the video and you'll understand.

Also do you have any recommendations for free screenrecorder? :D

Maybe what you need to do is create a root bone that will allow you to move your robot up and down while its spine will rotate:

In Edit mode, create a root bone. Make it the parent of the spine basis (and also of all the IK controllers, pole targets, etc...).
In the Properties panel > Bone > disable the Deform option so that this kind of bone (like IK controllers, pole targets...) won't have any influence on the mesh.
Now you can independently rotate the spine basis and move the root up and down.

Another way could be to move the armature in Object mode, but the best, if your robot stay rather still on the scene, is to create a root bone so that the armature (as an object) remains not animated.

But when you'll make your robot move along a path, most of the time you'll use this second option, though.


How to mathematically round positions of all vertices to nearest integer? I have a mesh with 1.5M vertices, and I'm trying to round off vertex positions to reduce the filesize of my exported .obj file. Each vertex has a very high level of precision, which I don't really need for this project. For example, I have a vertex at [492.98198, 382.19873, 274.98789], and would like to run a Python script to round it to [493, 382, 275], effectively reducing my output by over 50%!

Is there a python script that I could run to round off all 1.5M of my vertices in one go? This is as far as I've gone:

for vertex in bpy.data.meshes['meshname'].vertices:
    vertex.co[0] = round(vertex.co[0], 0)
    vertex.co[1] = round(vertex.co[1], 0)
    vertex.co[2] = round(vertex.co[2], 0)

But it seems like I can't really change the vertex values this way because mesh.vertices is a readonly attribute.

Anybody know how to modify the script so my vertices all snap to the nearest integer?

Use the following script:

import bpy

obj = bpy.context.scene.objects.active

for vert in obj.data.vertices:
    vert.co.x = round(vert.co.x)
    vert.co.y = round(vert.co.y)
    vert.co.z = round(vert.co.z)

Let me know if you run into any problems :-)


Where are the options for the Loop Cut and Slide? I'm a bit lost in the Blender 2.80 interface. I'm in edit mode trying to do a Loop Cut and Slide (although I'm having the same issue with other tools). Where are the options?

I'm selecting the edges in edit mode and ⌘+R and I expect there would be settings/options somewhere, but I get nothing.

It's not in the N menu, nor in the "screwdriver & wrench" panel, nor anywhere else that I can see. I searched here and in the documentation but I couldn't find an answer.

The last operation box is in the bottom left, just click to unfold:


How do I add in a octagon shape from a plane mesh? I'm new to Blender and currently watching tutorials on modeling. In this video, at 6:50, the person adds a Plane mesh that is already in a octagon form; it has 4 vertices but looks like an octagon. I've been trying to find out how he did this but can't find out the answer.

To have an octagon out of a square (4 vertices) add a subsurf modifier

To make a real octagon add a mesh>Circle and make it 8 vertices:


Numbers appear all over mesh Can anyone please tell me what all these numbers are, or better yet how to get rid of them? They appear when I "select" anything: https://gyazo.com/99a42904702e4ed92f8295cad67e3e18
I cannot seem to get rid of them, no matter what I click.  I suspect I turned them on with an unknown keyboard combination.  I just want to know how to get rid of them!  I cannot build with numbers obscuring the mesh!

It was Edge Length checked just below the Normals, in the Ctrl + N Recalculate Normals dialog.


Unity messed up weight painting from FBX file exported from Blender Here, this is the model I made, "RightMainBayBone" is rotated and it rotates connected meshes:

In Blender, it works fine. But when I imported in Unity and rotate the bone, it also rotate other meshes:

Rotating Left Bone doesn't make this problem.

I exported as FBX with apply transform option.

I think this is Unity's problem but I'm not sure, because there might be something I missed.

Any advice will very appreciate it.

p.s. There's no parented bone.

Unity normalizes weight per vertex so you can't have vertices with zero weight. So the armature needs to have a root bone that you use to paint the weight of parts that don't move.


Can you make a mesh follow another mesh with Cloth Sim? Basically, I have a mesh that is being controlled by Rigid bodies and another one by a Cloth Sim that is pinned.

Is it possible to have the pinned part of the cloth mesh follow the other mesh that has rigid bodies?

What you can do is to link the pinned of the vertices and the rigid body to a bone.

Create a bone and apply the metarig to the cloth with empty groups first.

After this, delete the Bone vertice group and copy its name to the name of the pinned group.

Now parent the bone to the rigid body(select the bone first).

And there you go.


What are these spots appearing along seams? When I paint on this texture and save, it kind of resets at the seams and gets these strange parts (didn't happen with another texture):

The .jpg that is saved contains these strange little grainy textures at the seams again.
Also when I paint at these spots with the draw brush and save, it kind of makes the new drawn color transparent over the grainy texture and shows it up again.
It is only at the seam, tried to work around it but I don't have a clue what causes it.

I guess this might have happened to someone else and probably asked before, so I apologize for a possible double question.

Any suggestions?

These look like jpg compression artifacts. jpg is a lossy format, which means that the saved image is not exactly what it was originally (the difference depends on the quality setting the file was saved with).

The advantage to lossy compression is that jpg files are typically very small compared to lossless formats. However it's not the best format to use during production, especially when a file is being edited and re-saved a lot. When saved in a lossy format repeatedly, the image will gradually lose quality. This process is called generation loss.

Try saving to a lossless format like png instead.


How to add a texture color specificed "glow" to a HUD panel? I've been trying to figure this out,
I'm using Blender 2.79 and the new Principled shader but it doesn't have an  alpha channel or an emissive channel built in (yet?). I can accomplish what I'm trying to do below in C4D but I'm trying to switch entirely to Blender. I have a material that's called "glow" that gets applied to HUD and LED
type panels in a spaceship which has an alpha channel.

Here's a wide image of my node setup

I'd like to have the emissive match the color of the diffuse map (minus any black) and have the alpha applied so only the color in the diffuse is emitting light for this material.

If I have to create a modified tiff from the diffusion with alpha texture to make one specifically for emissive that's okay.. just want to know how best to accomplish this?
Thank you very much!
I'm new to blender and it's absolutely amazing!

Figured it out

Just had to plug the texture directly into emissive color instead of trying to use the output from the principle BSDF into emissive color. This works! Problem solved.


Unexpected "color" transition in half transparent cylinder with Cycles I try to represent red and blue spheres moving in a tube, and render it with Cycles. I made a part of the tube opaque and another part semi-transparent following the "color based on height" trick. I get the following result, but I am anoyed by the color transition that takes place at the third sphere (from the bottom right). It does not seem to depend on the orientation of the sun.

I built a minimal working example, with a half-transparent cylinder and got the same effect. The corresponding Blender file can be found here. The effect is not present if the cylinder is opaque.

Do you have any idea where this effect come from and how can I avoid it?

It seems that the reason of this shading 'glitch' is topology of your Cylinder. I don't know exactly why this is happening, maybe because of stretched faces (or for sure). When you scale it down on the X axis (to make it shorter) problem disappears.

You have two options:

Add Subdivision Surface modifier.

Add Loop Cut in the middle of the Cylinder (or couple of them to be sure that it doesn't happen again.

Personally I would go with second one as this is 'lighter' solution.


Imported character from ROBLOX as .obj doesn't show up I am making a Roblox graphic and whenever I open blender and delete the cube and then I tried to import my OBJ of the Roblox character, but it didn't show up.

I've been dealing with this issue for about 1-2 months now.

Whenever models don't import correctly I usually try different formats, different programs or try converting them in Noesis (Handy model conversion program).
If I can't get the model this way then I usually figure the file is completely broken and should obtain it from elsewhere.


IK Rig (Pole Target Issue) Hello there so i have a mesh with IK set up for the arm however as soon as i add a pole target and go back to Position moving for the IK Arm It Screws up the Mesh this only occurs after adding the pole target it works fine without it. Here's a video so you guys can see exactly what's going on http://puu.sh/tCZCS/3039f37ae6.mp4 Right Click Save as Mp4

Notice how in the beginning the IK works fine and after the pole target is added it just screws it up why this happen i need to understand what i did wrong also can you add more then 1 pole target in blender?

My main goal is to just have smooth rotations kinda like how IK does it with positioning it doesn't support Rotation Since IK only works for positioning

Turns out using a curve is not a good idea i managed to get it working by using bones only as the pole target and still keeping the chain in shape without distorting like how it was before.


Blender 2.8 repair mesh I am new to blender.

I am trying to render a fountain pen nib (a parametric surface given by a set of three complex formulae) .

I have imported the *obj file to blender, and then extruded along local normals using proportional editing on. This gives me a completely broken mesh.

See :

or with x ray on :

Obviously, the mesh is broken.

I have seen this question. But it seems that one has to manually correct all the faces.

Is there an automatic way to correct the mesh? I tried :

Edit mode > Mesh > Cleanup > degenerate dissolve
as well as : decimate geometry and delete loose. None of them helped. What can I do now?

Thank you

Edit :

the file after importing the obj (can't directly upload an obj file) :

The file after extrusion :

There was some manual work to do. I don't know how useful this answer is, but my steps were:

S.001 Bring the object to a sensible scale, and apply the scale.
In the 3D View 'View' tab, set Near and Far Clipping to be able to see the object consistently
Note, by enabling Face Normals in Overlays, that the object is already 2-sided
Also note, by seeing the face-dots around the perimeter, that there are degenerate faces connecting the inside and outside.

So.

ShiftG select the degenerate faces by similar area (0). Delete them.
Using CtrlL select (linked) all the inside faces and delete them.
Delete the bottom half of the object and replace with a Mirror modifier in Z, 'Merge' and 'Clip' checked.
Assign a Solidify modifier above the Mirror with 'Rim' unchecked to allow merging, towards the inside. This leaves  gaps which can be filled, but no intersecting faces, which you're trying to avoid.
When it looks good, apply the modifiers.
Enable the 'F2' shipped Add-On.  and use it to run round the gaps between edges, connecting by hand, (holding down F), because 'Bridge Edge Loops' fails somewhere, and I want to see where.
OK, got them, fix the topology at the points by hand. About half a dozen faces.

Bevel and subdivide, if wanted.


How to pixelate a texture in Cycles? I've been creating various camouflage patterns using Cycles material nodes. Now I want to create a digital camouflage pattern like the one below.

My first thought was to pixelate a noise pattern. I've tried to do so but haven't been able to find a way to. So my question is:

Is it possible to pixelate a procedural texture such as noise? Or is there another way I could create this pattern using cycles nodes?

Thanks :)

This is done with rounding the mapping vectors.

The resolution for X and Y can be set with value nodes.
It will work for any texture (for 3D texture just copy the rounding nodes into the Z channel) and you have separate controls for X and Y resolutions.

If you also surround the Multi-Round-Divide nodes with Add and Subtract you can change the center point of effect (add and subtract the same number..)


How to change Texture properties via python? Changing texture data properties via python seem impossible because the properties are inherited from the texture Type
for example texture.noise_scale don't exists yet if texture.type is currently "IMAGE" because texture.noise_scale is a child property of some subclass types
so if you are starting from an image type
the following code won't be able to work
texture = bpy.data.textures["MyImgTexture"]
texture.type = "MARBLE" #changing type
texture.noise_scale = 5.5 #changing noise scale from this new type

What can we do to refresh the child properties? bpy.context.view_layer.update() won't help here

Recast the type
For objects that can have their types changed can recast the types using type_recast
>>> tex.type_recast(
type_recast()
.. method:: type_recast()
Return a new instance, this is needed because types
such as textures can be changed at runtime.
:return: a new instance of this object with the type initialized again.
:rtype: subclass of :class:`bpy.types.bpy_struct`

try it out in console.
>>> tex = D.textures.new("Tex", 'STUCCI')
>>> tex.name
'Tex'

>>> tex.type
'STUCCI'

>>> tex.image
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<blender_console>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'StucciTexture' object has no attribute 'image'

>>> tex.type = 'IMAGE'
>>> foo = tex.type_recast()
>>> foo.image is None
True

>>> foo.name
'Tex'

>>> foo
bpy.data.textures['Tex']

Notice too the two instances keep there type
>>> str(tex)
'<bpy_struct, StucciTexture("Tex") at 0x7f89ff16b448>'

>>> str(foo)
'<bpy_struct, ImageTexture("Tex") at 0x7f89ff16b448>'

btw, if while checking this out in console the properties area is open on same screen, it is being done automatically for us.


How to do flame reflection on a wall? How can I light up this wall as if reflections from a fire? sort of a dancing light on the wall? I tried with an emission surface with a wave texture and colour ramp. but it doesn't seem to work. Any other suggestions? enter image description here

Rather than trying to emit flames onto the wall, animate the flame texture and mix it into the wall material.

Here I animated the z-location of the mapping node to "move" the wave texture and then multiplied it with the wallpaper colour.

Note that from 2.81, or daily builds until then, some of the texture nodes now have a time factor so we can properly animate the textures instead of moving through them using the mapping node.


Is there a way to make a vertical grid show on final image rendered? Like the faint grid in the model window background and the one on the floor, is there a way to force a vertical 'to scale' grid to show up behind the image rendered so the manufacturers can see it's to scale?

One way to "make one yourself" as @gandalf3 said above is this:

add a plane  subdivided as you "scale", and use a material as "grid" and "shadeless".

it will look like this (blender render)

here I used 2 planes, you may tweak the grid appearance...
is this something similar to what you need?

for "cycles render"
you can try a "wireframe" modifier, and a suited material, like

but probably, a freestyle setup would fit both cases... I'll add that later, or others will suggest howto here...

[edit] Yes freestyle would work with both cycles and internal render:

activate the master freestyle flag in the render option tab
set a freestyle linestyle in the render layers option tab, with the color/style you prefer, and enable as edge types only "edge mark" for it
mark all subdivided grid mesh edges as "freestyle edge"
set the material of the grid to be completely transparent (different in cycles and internal, anyway remove all reflection, specular, shinyness)

like this:

results in cycles and internal can be quite similar (for the grid):

and, finally, I tried and even the wireframe modifier works in cycles and internal, only a the grid material must be defined differently (eg: white shadeless for internal, white emission for cycles).

freestyle can give you much more choice of linestyle (eg: dotted, hand drawn, etc), but the setup is slightly more complex, and since is a post-render effect, it could interfere with some of the scene setup to render as you wish, depending on the scene.


Run 2 "instances" of blender at the same time? I was wondering if it's possible to run two "instances" of blender at the same time. As in installing blender twice and running both, using them for different projects. I ask this because I have blender rendering a project right now and it's taking quite a while. I'm being a little cautious here because I don't want any corrupt system files or anything. Thanks in Advance!

My Rig Specs are:

Windows 8.1 Pro

i7 6700k OC to 4.7GHz

Dedicated harddrive for programs

nVidia GTX 1060

AMD R7 370

You can run as many instances as you want off the same install. Just run the .exe again. Note that this may get more complicated if you are launching through a command prompt. I often run multiple instances, especially when doing physics simulations.

Note that when GPU rendering, it tends to cause slowdown/lag on your main screen. This is because the GPU resources are going to rendering. If you have multiple graphics cards it isn't as bad, but you can still get screens slowing down even if they are on a card that isn't rendering.


how to build a carriage that reacts to an uneven ground Dear Blender Community,

i would like to build a very simple carriage kind of vehicle, that is simply pushed or dragged over a surface and has the possibility to react to it. My first idea was to use the rigid body settings for it and just build it how i would build it in real life and push it with a cage like box over the surface. but whenever i start to push it, it simply explodes! I applied all the locations/sizes/transformations whatever and the objectcollision shapes are all set to "mesh". I realy don't get it and can't believe that it is so hard. Maybe someone has an idea how this kind of a model can work and react to an uneven surface, that there is this carriage vibe to it? Would be great!

this is how my model looks now, it doesn't need to be much more complex concerning the design:

I don't know if it will help, but here is a way to make wheels following the ground:

Create a cube (the vehicle), a wheel, and a small plane.
Parent the wheel and the plane to the cube.
Put the plane under your wheel, subdivide it a bit, assign a vertex group to the whole mesh.
Give it a Shrinkwrap modifier, choose the ground as the Target
Give your wheel a Copy Location constraint, choose the plane as Target, select the plane's vertex group in Vertex Group, deactivate the X and Y axis so that it only moves on the Z axis, activate Offset and place the wheel at its right position, on the ground and above the small plane.
Move the cube to test the animation, the wheel should follow the ground.
Copy paste x 4 the wheel + its plane.


how do you change the keyboard shortcuts in blender 2.8? I'm trying to find the search short cut and f3 isn't working on my computer so I'd like to change it to another one.

Changing the search hotkey is available, like all of the shortcuts, in the "keymap" section of the user preferences. You  can change any shortcut there.


Normals Not Applying Correctly Onto Model (Strange Placement) When applying some baked normals, both object and tangent baked, onto my model (Shown Below or Above), the normals show up on the model; however, the normals are not in the correct location. After much research, testing, and personal troubleshooting, I found that nothing helped. Please Help.

File: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mD_Q0tBSlvyyJ6P8mV2lN0pPaThkzCPD

Hi its pretty hard to tell without the project file or a Uv overlay, but it doesn't look like a mapping issue. Looks like there were ray distance issues in the actual bake, try slightly increasing the the Ray Dist value. If that doesn't work try also using a cage mesh and check if there are any intersections in you model


Bullets fall with gravity issue I have some bullets that simply have an always sensor and motion, but since I have gravity on, they fall in a weird way. They do not fall and hit the ground on the tip of the bullet, but rather hit the ground in the exact position they had when they were fired, sleeping. How do I have the bullet tilt as it falls, and possibly have it hit the ground on it's tip?

You can do this by having your gun fire a setup like this.

Before, you gun just fired the cone, and there was nothing to make it rotate. however, if the cone is parented to a cube with the physics set to Rigid Body, and the gun fires the cube, the cone will move with it. however, there is still nothing to make it rotate. This can be fixed by enabling the slow parent option on the cone.

With this option enabled, the cone will lag behind the cube when the cube is fired out of the gun. but we still need the cone to rotate. we can do this by making it track to the cube.

Now when the cube is fired, the cone lags behind and points to the cube. this creates the illusion like it is dropping due to gravity.

However there is still a problem. when the cube hits the ground, it starts rotating. Because the cone is parented to the cube, it also starts spinning out of control. We can fix this by preventing the cube from rotating. Remember, the cubes is only so the cone has something to track to. IF you want, you can also use it to calculate the collisions.

Now we can test it again.

It now looks like it should, but there is a giant cube in front, and the cone does not look like a very convincing projectile. And, when the cube hits the ground, the cone still fires off slightly. we can fix the problems with the cube first by making it invisible, and enabling the ghost setting.

Now it will pass through the plane, making the cone follow it as it would if it was a bomb falling to the ground. however, we made the cube invisible, so we can't see the cube anymore. we can only see the result.

This is good, but the cone still does not look like a very good projectile.
You can obviously model anything you want for this, but I chose to model a missile because they look cool. I also added an explosion when the cube hits the ground, and some other awesome effects to make it look cool.


Beetle Mesh Deformation in Pose Mode In Pose mode, when I try to move a armature, even though I weight painted the rest of the mesh to ensure nothing else would get dragged along also, the beetle deforms on it's side, destroying the mesh when I try to move it. Any help is greatly appreciated!

This happens because many vertices in your mesh are not assigned to any bone so they don't deform.

These steps will solve your problem:

select your mesh
while selecting the mesh hit shift + RightClick to select the armature as well
hit Ctrl+P then choose automatic weighting

This will solve the problem as shown below:


Particle system emitting upside down I am doing a Blender tutorial from Blender Guru on How to Build a City (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCEN0qQOsIA) and I'm around the 30 minute mark where you insert your buildings as a group particle system. Many problems arised once I did so, for starters the buildings were emitting the wrong side of the plane (through the bottom), I fixed this. The buildings were also still overlapping even after I unchecked random, I fixed that as well. Now there's only one problem I can't seem to fix. The particle system of the buildings is emitting the proper way (upwards out of the plane), but they are still upside down (on themselves). Picture down below (first picture shows the top, where the entrance is, the second pic shows the roof with all the addded details on the plane that I'm emitting my particles from):

I've tried messing around with the majority of the particle settings but an't seem tto figure it out, the closest thing I could get was under the rotation tab and messing with the phase, but thiss turns the particles around the plane, not on itself. Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!

Ok I took a look at your file, You had to fix the rotation of two things.

Change the rotation for the particles to Global Z
Go back to your other layer and rotate the group as shown in the image
You had the pivot point at the top of all your buildings, So Blender assumes this is where the building should start. You need to select each building in edit mode, then select the bottom face, hit Shift + S and choose move cursor to selected. Hit tab to go back to object mode and on the left tool bar change pivot point to 3D cursor.

You need to do this to every building in the group.

Or you can just use the fixed blend file.


Texture Paint Mode Paint on 3D Model I'm starting to learn texture paint mode and I have the hang of it for the most part.  But I'm getting inconsistent results.

Before I was able to paint directly on the model (I know it isn't really doing so and is actually painting on the UV image).

But now when I click on the model with any brush it doesn't paint at all, which isn't a huge deal but I'd like to know why it stopped working.

It still works with the "Mask" brush, but none of the others will work.

Any idea why this could be happening?

When texture painting, there is an option to restrict painting to faces that have been selected in edit mode.

If this is something you want to use, you need to go into edit mode and alter your selection to adjust the areas you can paint on.


Can't select everything in edit mode When I'm trying to import this mesh into UE4 (the mesh is a wooden chest). I keep getting missing faces and I've seen people say it's due to Blender and that I should try going in edit mode and select everything with A then press CtrlN, but when I get in edit mode and press A, it only selects the lid or the base of the chest. The part not selected is underlined red so I'd assume it's related.

You can check, the normals, and also what kind of polygons are better with ue4, quads or triangles.As for the a key, I don't know.Do you use any version under development.The official is 2.78c


Why my background appears a blue, when I set it transparent? I am trying to render this image with transparent background, but instead it renders as blue. I have checked the world settings, HDRI. The problem only happens in render and not view port. Problem persist in both eevee and cycles. Any help is appreciated.

You're compositing the blue background in. Enter the compositor and either mute the Mix node or remove it.


How can I rotate an object already at an angle? I can't seem to figure out which setting to use for proper hand rotation. It starts out like:

And no matter what XYZ settings I choose, I end up with a result similar to:

...instead of a nice circular rotation in the socket. (The hand is a child of the arm, which is a child of the torso, if that makes any difference.)
If anyone knows what the settings should be, I'd be most grateful.

Thanks, Rich Sedman; locking the X and Y helped this time around, as well as adjusting the 3D cursor to further up the elbow.


How to turn off subsurf modifier on a lot of objects at the same time I have a model containing about 30 objects, all together about 900,000 vertices. My computer can't handle this amount of verticies and it gets realy slow. Is there a way how to turn on/off subsurf to all these objects at the same time?

Simplify
Enable scene simplification in Properties > Scene > Simplify and set the subdivision level to 0:

Copy to selected

Select all the objects
Disable the subsurf modifier in the viewport, then  RMB> Copy to selected:


Re-UV with SmartUV after scaling UV island I have used SmartUV to unwrap my model (a dog cabine) in Blender. It works perfectly fine.

However, the "interior" of the dog cabine occupies a large area of the UVs.
I don't want them to take up so much space as the interior will have very little color details. A square of 24x25 pixels would do.

When I scale the islands manually, I would have to scale each other part of the UV as well.

Is there perhaps a function that would re-sort / scale the other UVs (which I have not scaled down manually) according to my changes?

I hope it's clear what I want:

I want to tell Blender that the interior should not occupy so much space, but it should still use SmartUV (which is such an amazing time saver for me).

Thank you.

Perhaps you could:

Select everything except the interior, then U Smart UV Project.
Select the interior and again U Smart UV Project.
Scale down and move this second unwrap where you want, or even, if you don't want to manage 2 UVs overlaying, give it a second material (with the same Image Texture).
Note that you could use Vertex Groups to facilitate the selections.
Also, in the UV/Image Editor, enable Keep UV And Edit Mode Mesh Selection In Synch so that you can see both the 2 UVs.


Does Blender offer network rendering on a LAN Does Blender offer network rendering on a LAN? If so, where are the docs to set this up?. I saw something on setting up a Primitive Render Farm, but no docs as to how this is setup.

There is no accepted, included, out-of-the-box way right now.  It's on the roadmap of features for them to add, but they haven't reached that feature yet.

Not to say you can't do it, though.  It will just involve custom scripts, python scripts, and some fiddling around to get it going.  Google "Blender network rendering", "Blender distributed rendering", and "Blender render farm" for some ideas.  Without more details about your situation, I can't really recommend anything more specific.


Curve Editor — Move 2 Handles the same time I am quite new to blender and started out to do some animation with shape keys. That is working quite fine so far and now I would like to make that whole thing a bit more vivid.

Therefore I would like to tweak the Interpolation curves in the Curve Editor, what is in principle working as expected, there is only one thing that bugs me. Please see the image below:

Marked in red are two curves which are somehow identical in shape, but each of them is for a different property, what is just as wanted.

I would like to edit both curves, so that they stay identical. I can select both anchor points and drag them around, but I cannot select two handles at the same time.

Is there any way to do this? If not, how can I copy the setting of one point (anchor and control points) from one to another?

Thanks in Ahead!

[UPDATE]

After some hours of trying and searching the web I just came over drivers, as mentioned in the comments. That lead me to what I am after and gave me ever more flexibility.

To select and move 2 curve handles at the same time you can use simple way which means selecting everything first, and then deselecting what shouldn't be moved.

Select all the curve points which should be edited, set the curve handles type to Free with V > Free.
With MMB deselect curve points and those curve handles which should stay untouched.
Move only one half of curve handles, not moving another.

This works in a similar manner as with editing Bezier curves in 3D View. You can scale, grab those handles etc.

The disadvantages:

It may be hard to tell exactly which handle belongs to which curve point so in order to select / deselect them correctly.
In case of many curve points to process this may be inefficient.


Gltf-model export from blender. Materials are missing in a-frame I'm trying to export to gltf correct. This model is using in a-frame.
The problem is that materials are missing after export.
In a-frame model is represented only in black color. Settings attached.

If somebody know how to solve this, please let me know. Thanks

[Blender model]

[A-frame]

[Export Settings]

glTF 2.0 specification only supports exporting PBR materials based on a metallic-roughness model.

Material support for Blender's glTF exporter only works for Cycles render materials at the moment.

And even then it requires a specific node setup to be used, as mentioned in the user documentation, through the use of a Node Group designed for this purpose. The node group is available for download from the repository.

For future versions, EEVEE material node tree support is planned, using the Principled BSDF Shader, but it is unavailable at the moment.

Also see .fbx export why there are no materials or textures?


What's the best way to topologize this? I'm modeling a medieval stand. It's my first model so I'm having a doubt in terms of topology of the model. Which is the best way? split the column faces in two and avoid having a n-gon at the top face of the column or leave it be and retain the n-gon. Is it worth it to add 4 new faces to remove the n-gon?

EDIT: Inserted the full model image.

I think that there is not an absolute "Best" way to make it.
It depends on what's you goal.

If you are want to render only this simple geometry,
ngons are ok while they keep being planar.
If this is only the starting point from a more complex geometry,
maybe is better to mantain a quad-only topology to help future
modeling...or maybe not,... it depends! What's sure is that quads are the only way to take advance of the edgeloops, which usually makes the model easier to handle.
If you are going to add a subdivision surface modifier to smooth the
surface, you definetely nedd a quad-only mesh to have easily user-predictable results
If you are making a game asset you'll probably will look for the
lesser amount of polygons, so some quads may should be switch to
tris...
If you want to deform an object for an animation, you'll probably need a high density quad base topology for the interested parts in order to avoid streching

and so on...

At the end, the topology strategy strictly depends on what you are developing meshes for and how.


How to create an arch entance with curves designs? How to model this arch entrance? I have successfully created the overall arch, but adding those curve designs (in the red circle) is my challenge.
My final goal is to completely model this entrance.

you could simply follow the curves with the vertices like this:


Rendered animation doesn't play When I render an animation in the normal ffmpeg h264 MP4 format, when it's done rendering, it doesn't play. And it's fustrating to wait till it finishes rendering only for it not play. Please what can I do to correct this?

Try CTRL+F11 in the main Blender screen (this is not the render result)


How do you link objects so that they use the same materials? I was supposed to link duplicate objects but accidentally used the normal duplicate (shift+D) so changing the materials for all of them manually has become a pain. Does anyone know how to link objects that are already made so they share the same materials without joining the objects into a single one?

Thanks in advance,

Select all your objects, make sure that the last object you select is the one with the material you want to link over to the other ones. Than press Ctrl+L and link Materials
And you're all set.


Ka always zeros in MTL file, reflectance and translucency coeffs also missing I'm exporting a model from Blender into OBJ and MTL files. When I look at the generated MTL file I see that the "Ka" component of the material is all zeros, and there is no information about the reflectance and translucency of the material either. Have a look:

newmtl BigWall
Ns 15.000000
Ka 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
Kd 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000
Ks 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000
Ni 1.000000
d 1.000000
illum 2

Here the Kd and Ks colours have the correct value (all white) but the Ka is set to black.

I've seen that the illum statement can provide some hints on whether reflectance is used, but it does not give me any coefficients.

So how can I make Blender export the ambient coefficient or an ambient colour to this file? And from where can I take the coefficients of reflectance and translucency?

Thanks.

BTW: I found these similar questions here but they were not answered, I hope to run with better luck:

Blender not exporting Ambient Coefficient in .MTL
Export Wavefront .mtl file — Where is the reflectance coefficient

EDIT: Blender's documentation here claims to be able to export ambient colour and shading settings like transparency.

By default the ambient color is black.

If you change it to something else in Properties > World > Ambient Color, then it works as expected:


Create and return a cube using a python script In the above code, I need to change the location and the dimension of the cube. I remark that only the dimensions along the  z-axis is changed. How can I change the name of the cube? I have not been able to find out how to do this in the documentation.

  import bpy
    from mathutils import Matrix
    D = bpy.data
    C = bpy.context
    scene = C.scene

    # ... lots of code omitted for brevity and clarity

    #------------------House-------------

    #Wall1
    bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cube_add(location=(0.0, 2.0, 1.25))
    bpy.context.object.data.name = "Cube1" #to change the name but it does not work
#here to change the dimensions, but only the z-axis dimension has been changed
    bpy.context.object.dimensions[0] = 4
    bpy.context.object.dimensions[1] = 0.05
    bpy.context.object.dimensions[2] = 2.5

When you write

bpy.context.object.data.name = "Cube1" #to change the name but it does not work

you are changing the name of the MESH datablock.  To change the name of the OBJECT datablock:

bpy.context.object.name = "Cube1"

I would recommend altering the scale of the object instead of the dimensions.

bpy.context.object.scale = (2, 0.025, 1.25)


Blender script import model and render it I know python well, but I'm not familiar with blender.

Is it possible to use the blender API to do this?

Setup:  Create a scene in which the the lights and cameras are pre-arranged.

Run a python script which:

Imports a model (fbx or obj).
Renders from each camera and saves output to a .png file.
Returns to step 1 until all models have been rendered.

Here's an outline with obj import, creates one camera in a new scene, loops thru a model list, makes a new scene with links to cam in created scene, loops thru the cams in the new scene (add more) and renders.  You will need to edit the paths to suit your needs:

import bpy
import os
from math import radians

context = bpy.context

models_path = "//"
render_path = "//"

models = ["bretling.obj", "bretling.obj"]

#create a scene
scene = bpy.data.scenes.new("Scene")
camera_data = bpy.data.cameras.new("Camera")

camera = bpy.data.objects.new("Camera", camera_data)
camera.location = (-2.0, 3.0, 3.0)
camera.rotation_euler = ([radians(a) for a in (422.0, 0.0, 149)])
scene.objects.link(camera)

# do the same for lights etc
scene.update()

for model_path in models:
    scene.camera = camera
    path = os.path.join(models_path, model_path)
    # make a new scene with cam and lights linked
    context.screen.scene = scene
    bpy.ops.scene.new(type='LINK_OBJECTS')
    context.scene.name = model_path
    cams = [c for c in context.scene.objects if c.type == 'CAMERA']
    #import model
    bpy.ops.import_scene.obj(filepath=path, axis_forward='-Z', axis_up='Y', filter_glob="*.obj;*.mtl")
    for c in cams:
        context.scene.camera = c
        print("Render ", model_path, context.scene.name, c.name)
        context.scene.render.filepath = "somepathmadeupfrommodelname"
        bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True)

The import operator code can be gleaned from the Python Console by typing in bpy.ops.import and Ctrl+Space which will auto complete, for FBX:

>>> bpy.ops.import_scene.fbx(
fbx()
bpy.ops.import_scene.fbx(filepath="", axis_forward='-Z', axis_up='Y', directory="", filter_glob="*.fbx", ui_tab='MAIN', use_manual_orientation=False, global_scale=1, bake_space_transform=False, use_custom_normals=True, use_image_search=True, use_alpha_decals=False, decal_offset=0, use_anim=True, anim_offset=1, use_custom_props=True, use_custom_props_enum_as_string=True, ignore_leaf_bones=False, force_connect_children=False, automatic_bone_orientation=False, primary_bone_axis='Y', secondary_bone_axis='X', use_prepost_rot=True)

As you mention you are o fay with python, this should be well enough to make you dangerous.

Ideally I would probably set this up as an import operator with multi file select from a folder.


Add marker to a strip Is it possible to add a marker to a strip in the VSE? I don't want to add the marker to the timeline with m, but to the selected strip, e.g. to mark possible cut positions to choose from. Something like this:

No, video-editor strips don't have their own markers.


Show sample rate pass on Yafaray Is there a way to render an anti-aliasing sample rate pass on Yafaray like V-Ray does?

This is extremely useful to fine-tune the render settings and have a quality output without cranking the AA settings high up.

I've seen something like this on the Yafaray documentation (on the render settings chapter about AA threshold) but I couldn't find a way to render it:

I've released YafaRay-E (experimental) v2.0.0, which includes Render Passes, Render Views and, among other things, there is a samplerate pass available that shows the places where the adaptative AA is sampling more pixels. It's not exactly what you showed here, but I hope it's good enough.

You can download it from here:

http://www.yafaray.org/community/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=5132

Best regards.


How to use the volume socket in Cycles? I don't understand what the volume socket of the shader output (in Cycles) does. Just for experimentation, I tried plugging an emit shader into the volume and a glass shader into the surface to create a light coming out of a glass ball, but all I got was the glass. What is the use of the Volume socket and when should you use it?

Update
This feature has now been added, the official documentation can be seen here.
So now you can do just what you suggest in your question:

Have a look at this post: Rendering smoke in Cycles?
The volume rendering socket in cycles is not currently implemented, but it's planned for 2.69-2.70
Presumably, it will be used for rendering volumetric materials. (clouds, smoke, fog, etc. it may also mean the spot lamp will be able to use "halo" like BI)
Also see what the wiki has to say:

The volume shader is currently under independent development.
When the surface shader does not reflect or absorb light, it enters into the volume. If no volume shader is specified, it will pass straight through to the other side of the mesh.
If it is defined, a volume shader describes the light interaction as it passes through the volume of the mesh. Light may be scattered, absorbed, or emitted at any point in the volume.
A material may have both a surface and a volume shader, or only one of either. Using both may be useful for materials such as glass, water or ice, where you want some of the light to be absorbed as it passes through the surface, combined with e.g. a glass or glossy shader at the surface.

There is a patch by Storm for Bi-directional path tracing and Volumes in cycles. If you don't want to compile blender yourself, there are a few builds on Graphical. (see here and here for some tests)
Also see the Gsoc project to add cycles volume texturing with openVDB, and this.


Changing MakeHuman mesh vertices by scripting how can I change the mesh in MakeHuman from script? For example, I want to change the geometry of the nose, given that I have the desired coordinates values of the nose vertices, how can I assign these values to vertices by loading from a file or scripting?

Here is a small script that grows or shrinks the nose by changing the z coordinates of the vertices defined in the vertex group 'nose' (please refer the gif above). If you have the new coordinates with you, you need to have some criterion to determine which coordinate is to be applied to which one in the group. For instance you can sort the vertIdxs based on coordinates (cf. the commented line sorting the vertices by y, x and z). If you have that criterion, you can simply assign the new coordinate values in a loop as done in the sample code.

import bpy

def changeSize(by):
    for idx in vertIdxs:
        obj.data.vertices[idx].co.z += by

vertGrpName = 'nose'
obj = bpy.context.object

if(obj.vertex_groups.get(vertGrpName) == None):
    print('Please create a vertex group with the name', vertGrpName, 'for nose vertices')

else:
    vertIdxs = [v.index for v in obj.data.vertices if (obj.vertex_groups[vertGrpName].index in [g.group for g in v.groups])]

    #vertIdxs = sorted(vertIdxs, key = lambda x: (obj.data.vertices[x].co.y, obj.data.vertices[x].co.x, obj.data.vertices[x].co.z))

    changeSize(by = 0.05)
    #changeSize(by = -0.05)