How do see fluids through glass (Eevee)? I don't see my fluid inside the glass, but i can see the object inside the glass. Does somebody know, what i have to change, to see fluids through glass?
Or is this not possible in Eevee? Can i fake it somehow?

If you use the Glass node you need to enable the following options :

Render panel > Screen Space Reflection
Material panel > Settings > Blend Mode > Alpha Blend
Material panel > Settings > Screen Space Refraction

There is a limitation for the moment in Eevee: You can't see an object that is in Blende Mode > Alpha Blend through an object that has a Glass material, as you can see here, object 2 is not visible:

If you give object 1 a bit of transparency and therefore decrease its Glass value, you kind of get around the problem (you can also get rid of the Glass node and find another way to simulate glass, like a mix bewteen Glossy and Transparent):


Is it possible to get an objects scale through an input in the cycles node editor? I am working on a material for a candle, but I'm using the geometry input to get the Z value as a fac for a mix shader.

I've already taken into account the objects position using the object info input, but I've realized that if I duplicate the object and scale it up or down, the material no longer works as it should.

Is there a way to get the objects scale in the material node editor to multiply the Z value by?

You can use the following nodes to extract the scaling information :

The key here is the use of the Vector Transform node. The Vector Transform node allows you to transform a vector between different coordinate spaces - World, Object, Camera. When transforming between Object and World coordinates, blender will apply any object Translation, Rotation and Scale and this can be used to extract the scale directly without the use of drivers.

By feeding a known vector into the Vector Transform we can use the output to glean information regarding the object. In this case, the vector [1.0, 0.0, 0.0] is being transformed from Object to World space in 'Vector' mode, meaning that only the Scale and Rotation is applied (the location is ignored). We know that the vector entering the transform has a length of 1.0 and the Dot Product node used this way, followed by a Power of 0.5 (square root) will output the length of the resultant vector and this allows us to ignore the rotation - the change in length is a direct result of the scaling.

The input vector [1.0, 0.0, 0.0] will effectively read the X scale. Passing in [0.0, 1.0, 0.0] will read the Y scale, and passing in [0.0, 0.0, 1.0] the Z scale.

We can therefore use the following material to color the object based on its X, Y, Z scale as R, G, B :

For your situation you can simply use the output of one of these scales to drive your mix factor.


Is there any way to copy the weight of one bone over to another(forgot to use x-mirror)? I solved my other problem and I finally got it to deform to an acceptable level. However now I'm having trouble, I forgot to activate x-mirror when weight painting and I got the weights right on one side but I can't or don't know how I can transfer it over to the other side. I want to transfer the weight of thigh.L to thigh.R so is there anyway I can do this?

I'll show you the method that works for me.

Activate the 'corrective shapekeys' addon (file--> user preferences--> addons--> corrective shapekeys). It can be reached from the 'object data' menu (under the 'vertex groups' header) by clicking the black 'down arrow'.

In 'weight paint mode' select the bone with the assigned weight and click 'copy vertex group' in the corective shapekeys addon menu.

Now you have a thigh.L and the thigh.L_copy in 'vertex groups'. With the original one selected, click on the padlock icon and lock it. Next select the copy and click the 'mirror vertex groups (topology)' option.

Rename the thigh.L_copy to thigh.R.

Now clicking the bone on the left and then the bone on the right, you can see that both have individual weights assigned to them.

The last thing is to assign the proper vertex groups to thigh.R bone. Select thigh.R bone and enter the 'edit mode' (TAB). Press A key to deselect everything and then press 'select' under 'vertex groups'. As you can see the right bone has assigned vertices that belong to the left one. We have to to remove it.

Unselect (B + mouse scroll) the vertices from the right side.

Remove the vertices from the left side by pressing 'remove' under 'vertex groups'.

Press A to deselect all and pres 'select' again. Now only the right side vertices are assigned to the right bone.

The left side weights and assigned vertices have been transfered to the right side.


How to get the upper X% of an object and remove the rest I have been messing around with my 3D printer quite a bit and nowadays my prints usually work out well. I sometimes still have failed prints though, and in this case a 5 hour print failed just a bit over half of a print. I wish to simply reuse the bottom part which was printed (so my time wasn't a complete waste), and just print the upper part.

That's why my question is how I can remove a certain known percentage of the full 3D object, so I can export the remaining part with the same scale as the original and simply glue them together after. In this example, I estimate a good 200/375 layers (of 0.3mm, first one 0.35mm) were finished, so 53.333..%

One way is with a boolean modifier.

Add a plane (⇧ ShiftA> Mesh > Plane) and make it large enough to exceed the bounds of the target object.
Add a boolean modifier to the target object and specify the plane as the second object:

Also ensure the boolean operation is set to Difference or Intersect.
This plane can be moved around and the mesh will be cut and filled accordingly. By using the dimensions of the target object, it's not difficult numerically place the plane in order to remove e.g. 75% of the object:

Which side of the mesh is removed can be controlled by flipping the normal of the mesh (⎈ Ctrl⇧ ShiftN) in Edit mode (↹ Tab), or by switching between Difference and Intersect boolean operations.


Mix node to limit value Can anyone figure out why a mix node with black and white was used in conjunction with the minimum and maximum nodes of this node group? The purpose of the two math nodes (with minimum and maximum) is to limit the input value (in the upper input of the Mininum node) to a smaller range.
Currently the maximum and minimum are set by changing the Fac(tor) input of the mix nodes. However, in my head the result should be the same if I simply control the value by the lower input of the math node?

OK, after some more experimentation, the only explanation I can find is that the author of the node group wished the input to be a slider instead of simply a value. Perhaps this makes sense, since the values should be between zero to one.
Does anyone else find some other explanation?


Resetting UI on the viewport I downloaded a blender file from online, and all the menues like "view" "select" "pose" options are at the bottom, when they were normally at the top. Is there a way to reset all these UIs?
Thanks

You can right click on a menu item and select Header -> Flip to Top to restore the menu to the top.  If everything is all messed up, you can just add a new default workspace by hitting the + button at the end of all of the selectable workspaces at the top of the window and choosing the one you want.


Black surface in render view I have a wall for which one I have applied a displacement modifier with the cloud texture. In the picture below you can see the wall in the solid viewport.

When I try to catch the coordinate of the wall in the ColorRamp shader I get the walls like if they were inverted. One side is correct whereas the other one seems inverted...
Can you help me ? Why do I have this wall inverted in my Rendered view ?

EDIT :

The wall's normal vectors are in the correct direction

You're using a color ramp output in a normal input. That cannot work.
If you intended to use it as a displacement map, use a vector displacement node with the displacement input of your material output.


Do i Build Blender for every change I make in the code? I want to see how the BVH import script in blender works.

I was thinking if i could print the values of the variables at different points in the code to the console then it would help me a lot.(just like the logs printed in Report Console in blender)

Will i have to build Blender everytime i make a change in the code ?

And what does build exactly mean ? (if it is not something similar to what the commands  "gcc -o testOut test.c"  does to a C file)

Any References, Documents, Links would help.

Thanks.

No you don't.

The BVH import addon is a python script. You should be able to disable/enable the addon after you make changes so that blender reloads the scripts. At most you may need to restart blender.


Is it possible to edit bone positions on the posed (not rest) stance? EDIT3: Apparently my question is harder to solve than than I expected, so here's my Blend file.

I have a model which is A-posed at rest ("rest", arms closer in angle to the cape bones shown in the final image), and have been using the T-pose ("posed") to modify his mesh. Fixing the mesh makes the arm and finger bones appear relatively incorrectly placed, and I would rather fix them in T-pose to avoid dealing with all the diagonal transforms. In other words, I would like to keep the A-pose as rest and T-pose as posed, but edit the bones from the posed position to have changes appear in the rest position. Redefining the T-pose as rest would require me to redefine the A-pose as rest later. It's possible to edit the mesh in the posed stance by enabling "on cage" (triangle icon in first image) and "edit mode display" (square icon) for each meshes' armature modifier, but is there a similar option for the armature itself?
Armature modifier showing the On Cage and Edit Mode Display options enabled. Normally this modifier only has the Viewport Display and Render options enabled.

This gif shows that the changes I made to the mesh are fairly drastic.

This shows where the posed bones are now relative to the new mesh. (Ignore the extra bones near his shoulders and hips which belong to invisible clothes. The Blend file omits them.)

If I understand correctly, you want to change your rest pose, but permanently, so that when you go into Edit Mode, the bone positions do not revert to any other position, because they've been truly changed from the position they were in originally, making the new position the new default rest pose, even in Edit Mode. There is a way to do this, and it's not difficult, but the steps are somewhat counter-intutive.
With your desired pose in place, go to Object Mode and select your character mesh. Go to the Modifiers tab in the Properties Panel, and locate your existing Armature modifier. Duplicate it. You may notice that the mesh jumps, but don't worry. For the moment, it's having the tweaks it's receiving from armature modifiers doubled because there are now two of them. Thankfully, this will be a very short-lived issue.
The next thing you want to do is apply the instance of these armature modifiers which is higher in the stack, and keep the other one.
Now go into Pose Mode and select all your bones. Press Ctrl + a and then from the Apply menu, select Apply Pose as Rest Pose.
You're done. When you go into Edit Mode, you will see that the armature really is in the new pose.
Hope this helps.


How can I make a long strand of bones without having to extrude each one? How can I make a long strand of bones without having to extrude each one? Here is what I'm trying to accomplish:

Subdivide One Large Bone

Thankfully there is a very easy way to do this: simply create one large bone the length you want your final strand of bones to be, then Subdivide that bone repeatedly:

Select bone -> TAB -> W -> Subdivide


How to Change Object's local Axis? How can i change Local axis of this tire to be like the axis in example?
I have no idea how to do this. Is there any way i can achieve this? I'm a beginner.

If i can rotate the object without rotating the local axis, I can achieve what i need. But i don't know how to do it. Any help Appreciated.

You can check Only Origins to only transform the origin point.
It's in Sidebar > Tool > Transform, Shortcut: N

Then you can rotate the local axis, without affecting geometry.


Object-Specific, "Material Preview" Viewport Shading? One of the ways I like to incorporate references into whatever I'm modeling is by inserting an image into the 3D space I'm working in. However, in order for the Texture Image I've added to show up, I have to go to "Material Preview" Viewport Shading for the entirety of my scene.
I'd like to only apply "Material Preview" Viewport Shading to my reference (so the texture displays) and stay in "Solid" viewport shading for the rest of my scene/whatever it is I'm making. Here's what I'm referring to:

Is this possible? If not I can make do modelling in "Material Preview" instead of "Solid" (like I have thus far).

Just set colour to texture with that little dropdown arrow :)


Keep straight and sharp lines when sculpting with Dyntopo How do I keep a sharp and straight line when sculpting?If I decrease the res detail the line isn't sharp anymore and if I increase the res it becomes jiggly...and how do i keep the tip sharp?Thanks

Change the Dyntopo Detail Refine Method settings from Subdivide Collapse to Subdivide Edges.


Acrhimesh Texture Problem I am struck with a very annoying problem, I have created a Cube and fixed a texture on the cube using UV Map. Everything is fine, But When i add archimesh, the texture is removed, and when i add any primitive object like plane, etc. then texture remains.

Does anyone have idea, whats going on with Archimesh.. I searched google, youtube for tutorial or the solution, but nothing found about texturing an archimesh. Please help me how to solve it..

Here is the Video - Whats going on - http://tinypic.com/r/2s91zb7/9

Thanks

I'm not sure if this is a bug (when stuff is added) or by design but this addon seems to expect Cycles as the default engine as the new objects get created with a cycles mat (perhaps ask on the github repo?). Notice the engine switches when you add a new archimesh object. The texture isn't disappearing, the engine just changes and Blender Internal and Cycles materials can't be used simultaneously or interchangeably .

Simply switch back the engine, delete the cycles material from the archimesh and add a new material and texture that.


Child of constraint not working for two handed object holding I'm trying to get both hands on the sword handle the first arm works but the second arm only the rotation of movement will be applied here is what i did :
1- made a bone for the sword handle.
2- made the sword handle bone to be child of the right hand.
3- made the left hand to be child of sword handle.
how ever it's not working the same is with copy transform.
i tried to add IK to the hands and targeted them to the sword handle it works but i can't move or rotate the hands any more and it looks ugly because i can't pose it properly.
so what is your solution?
Here is the file:

Ok so I fixed it myself.
The problem was in the arm rig and how i setup the IK.
my arm rig didn't have any separate IK bone so i was setting-up the ik on the actual rig.
what i did to fix it was :
1- created a bone from wrist of hand and named IK.Arm.Handle
2- separated the wrist bone and offset it to the IK bone
3- then put the IK constraint on the arm with IK.Arm.Handle target
4- after that i simple put the child of constraint on the IK bone and set target to the object bone ( in my case was sword handle bone ).
I hope helps anyone facing the same issue.


Selecting polygons by size Is there a way to select all the polygons within a mesh having a size similar to a given one.

The idea was to have an automatic selection of all the polygons within a range of size similar to one you select.

I think it could be done by scripting something using polygon.select and polygon.area, but I have no idea how to start.

I am not a coder but if someone gave me good indications and it is not going to be particularly difficult I could try to make a script.

Thanks in advance!

Try to use the following menu:

Select your required polygon, go to Select -> Select similar -> Area

Best of luck!


Blender 2.8 how to see rendertimes in RenderView I want to compare my seen in 2.79 and 2.8 but in Cycles (2.8) I can't see the time how long it rendered.

Well, it's still written at the top of the image viewer with render result opened:


In texture menu is only World and Brush to choose I have a stupid question... Where is an object or particles to choose in texture menu? I need to add for the plane a voronoi texture for not to have the same length of grass. See attached image. Blender version 2.79. Works on Mac. Thanks for your reply.

Problem solved I guess... When I change render mode to Blender render and add new voronoi texture, change influence to length then change it back to cycles... the effect retained... suddenly the particles appeared in rolled up menu above. Thanks everything for helping me :-D


How to force compositor nodes to execute? Whenever I add certain compositor nodes after a render is done, it doesn't execute these automatically without re-rendering (By automatically I mean whenever a change to the node setup is made, regardless the state of the rendering process).

I'm specifically referring to the ''file output'' node here.

Is there a way to force this node to execute?
(Automatically and/or manually)

So, it turns out there is no easy way (if any) to trigger either compositing or file-save in both the GUI and the Python API. Or at least not without re-rendering the image.

Based on this anwser I made an extension that does the following:

Make a new dummy render layer
Disable all scene layers
Render the dummy layer (and only that layer)

As a byproduct it will re-composite all your render layers and thus re-trigger the compositing of your image.

Afterwards it will delete the dummy render layer.

To make it easy I made it so that you can search for "recompose" by hitting space or hitting the "Recompose" button in the Node Editor when you're inside the Compositing Node Tree.

You can find the addon here: http://cloud.webvi.be/index.php/s/NYbHNlrVX4ZikXn


How to filter multiple file-extensions to limit which files display in an operator's file-selector? I'm creating an image file importer based off the operator_file_import template. I want to set script so that it recognizes image files, because right now it's only recognizing text. How do I go about defining a list of extensions that show up in the file browser when I launch the script? Right now, based on the starting template, the only thing I can import is a .txt file.

Here is the code - The generic comments are still there and anything that I changed is indicated by a comment/CHANGED tag.

import bpy
from bpy.types import Operator
import collections
import os
from bpy.props import (
        StringProperty,
        BoolProperty,
        EnumProperty,
        IntProperty,
        FloatProperty,
        CollectionProperty,
        )
from bpy_extras.io_utils import ImportHelper
from bpy.types import Operator

#CHANGED read definition to class name
def read_pbr_textures(context, filepath, use_some_setting):
    print("running read_pbr_textures..")
    f = open(filepath, 'r', encoding='utf-8')
    data = f.read()
    f.close()

    # would normally load the data here
    print(data)

    return {'FINISHED'}

#CHANGED class name
class ImportPbrTextures(Operator, ImportHelper):
    """This appears in the tooltip of the operator and in the generated docs"""
    bl_idname = "import_test.pbr_textures"  # important since its how bpy.ops.import_test.some_data is constructed
    bl_label = "Import PBR Textures"

#CHANGED filename_ext to png
    # ImportHelper mixin class uses this
    filename_ext = "*.png"

    filter_glob = StringProperty(
            default="*.png",
            options={'HIDDEN'},
            maxlen=255,  # Max internal buffer length, longer would be clamped.
            )

    # List of operator properties, the attributes will be assigned
    # to the class instance from the operator settings before calling.
    use_setting = BoolProperty(
            name="Example Boolean",
            description="Example Tooltip",
            default=True,
            )

    type = EnumProperty(
            name="Example Enum",
            description="Choose between two items",
            items=(('OPT_A', "First Option", "Description one"),
                   ('OPT_B', "Second Option", "Description two")),
            default='OPT_A',
            )

    def execute(self, context):
        return read_some_data(context, self.filepath, self.use_setting)

# Only needed if you want to add into a dynamic menu
def menu_func_import(self, context):
    self.layout.operator(ImportPbrTextures.bl_idname, text="Text Import Operator")

#CHANGED class registration to ImportPbrTextures class
def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(ImportPbrTextures)
    bpy.types.INFO_MT_file_import.append(menu_func_import)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(ImportPbrTextures)
    bpy.types.INFO_MT_file_import.remove(menu_func_import)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

    # test call
    bpy.ops.import_test.pbr_textures('INVOKE_DEFAULT')

In the operator's filter_glob property, (which you've already defined), you can define multiple extensions using the ; separator, eg:

filter_glob = StringProperty(
        default="*.png;*.jpg;*.jpeg;*.bmp;*.exr",
        options={'HIDDEN'},
        )

If you want to make a list of all extensions Blender supports you can use. bpy.path.extensions_image eg:

"*" + ";*".join(bpy.path.extensions_image)


VSE using two Effect Stips I want to add some images onto a video. Each of those images has transform key-frames to make them look less static. And each image blends with the others for smoother transitions.

I tried to find something, and I think I am supposed to use "Meta strips", but I never used them and they seem very complicated. Isn't there an easy way to do this? I guess I could render each image with key-frames, and add them in video form back in, but that wouldn't simplify a thing!

Sadly I only found out that it was an issue after rendering -.-

I appreciate any help I can get!

Blend the transform strips into each other instead of the original ones as you do right now.

Just remove the blend effects and add them again onto the green strips.


Bevel Tool is acting weird I was planning on smoothing pretty much all hard edges on this model with the bevel tool. But on quite a few of the edges the tool does not work, giving chaotic results as in the picture.
I have tried resetting the scale and rotation of the object and I have removed all Ngons, it still gives this result.
If anyone knows what's up or has a better alternative I'd be pleased to know.
Thanks!

Looking at that screenshot, I think that the bevelled edges are crossing over each other. This is often caused when trying to bevel sharp edges that are in close proximity. You may have to manually delete the local geometry, use the knife tool ("K" in edit mode) to cut in new geometry and fill in the new faces.


ImportError: No module named 'bge' The question is almost the same one that has been published before. But I think it's good to treat it again because it is not very clear, at least, for me.Also it does not have an accepted answer.

I want to draw a line using:
bge.render.drawLine(fromVec, toVec, color) Draw a line in the 3D scene.

Parameters:

fromVec (list [x, y, z]) – the origin of the line

toVec (list [x, y, z]) – the end of the line

color (list [r, g, b]) – the color of the line

but I get a error message:

NameError: name 'bge' is not defined

Reading the question someone did before, first I put enable the game engine by selecting it in the render engine menu:

But I get an error when a try to import bge

ImportError: No module named 'bge'

Blender Scripts

Pressing the "run script" button makes the code be executed as Blender script. This does not rely to the BGE. Importing the BGE API will always fail with:

ImportError: No module named 'bge'

BGE scripts

BGE Python code gets executed by python controllers. This means in the logic editor you add a python controller.

The code gets executed when any connected sensor triggers the controller. e.g. by an Always sensor right after loading the object.

Script mode

In Script mode you enter the name of the text block into the value field. The text block will be executed from top to to bottom.

E.g. drawALine

import bge

bge.render.drawLine([0,0,0], [10,10,10], [1,1,1,1]])

Script: drawALine

Module Mode

In Module mode you enter the name of the module (the file name without ".py") with "." which concatenates a function name of the module. The module can be a text block or an external python file that is in the python search path.

E.g. painter.py

import bge

def drawALine(controller):
    bge.render.drawLine([0,0,0], [10,10,10], [1,1,1,1]])

Module: painter.drawALine

Blender API inside the BGE

Using the Blender API bpy inside the BGE will not fail when you run your game embedded in Blender. But any writing to the Blender API will not take effect before ending your game.

When running your game without Blender importing bpy will fail the same way as running BGE scripts inside of Blender:

ImportError: No module named 'bpy'


Image texture passed through emission shows up in render window, not in camera view, shading window or final render Good morning,

I'm trying to use an image texture on an emitting material. As pictured in this screenshot, the texture coordinates are generated. Although it shows up in the render window, it does neither in the camera view, nor in the shading window, nor in the final render.

Thank you very much for your help, have a good day.

Alright so I found the answer to my own question. The issue was with camera range ! And it is because the shading mode had camera view activated in the preview window that it did not show there either.


screen composition in blender How do I do screen composition in Blender. Cinema 4d has buffers you can render out and replace the screen with images or videos in after effects. How do I go about placing moving pictures on the screen of a blender 3d iPhone model or an iMac.

You can use the compositor for this.

Normally I add 2 materials to the object. One for the case and one for the screen. The faces for the screen I assign to the screen material.

When the screen material is selected under settings you can set the pass index to 1 (default is 0). With this pass index you can extract the visible parts in the compositor

for the screen make sure that the UV coordinates are correct.
make sure you select "material index" and "UV" in the render passes

In the compositor you can then extract the mask and apply a different texture using the UV Map node

Normally in these cases you can render out to OpenEXR Multilayer, and load the prerendered images directly in the compositor.


How to show Image with UV coordinates? I have a Color Grid on my model, but I can't see it in a viewport.

UV texture can be seen also in Solid mode, just enable Texture Overlay


I want one object to "chase" another object So for this example, let's say there is a red circle and a blue circle. The red circle moves in a circular movement. Example here is the red circle moving by itself: https://i.imgur.com/DVwlKzN.mp4
What I want to happen is that the blue circle moves towards the red circle every frame. What I don't want is the blue circle to mimic the red circle's movement like so: https://i.imgur.com/TaOpZnA.mp4 Is there some type of clamp I can use to execute this? (I'm no expert in python, so is there an easier way to do this?)

Chase:

View from top - Ortho view

An empty is placed at the center of the red circle's intended orbit and rotates. The circle is parented to this
so it rotates around the empty.

A narrow and invisible plane is added and has it's pivot point set to it's upper end.  This is then located at the red circle's center (SH-S)  and will act a leash.

The leash is scaled in length and rotated so it's other end is at the stationary blue circle.

The blue circle is then parented to the leash choosing the "Vertex" option. (child = blue circle)

The leash's two end-vertices (at the blue circle) are then shapekeyed to shrink the leash over the same number of frames (minus a few) as it takes the red circle to make one orbit.  You can have this happen (the intercept) much sooner or over several orbits if you wish.

When played the red circle does it's orbit and the leash is forced to follow and rotate with it.
At the same time shapekeys are shrinking it's length, automatically making it close in on the red circle.

By adjusting the leash's shape key F curves in the Graph editor, the nature of the intercept can be varied to suit.


Iterate an object along path I'm modelling a backpack. And want to recreate a zipper. So i cannot iterate and object along a path (yellow dotted lines on secong image). I used array modeifier but it doesn't work. Please suggest me a tool to implement it. If somebody wants to open a file and to tinker, path along which object is iterated called "Path", and object called "Shape". Thanks!!!

Blender File

Select the curve, ALT C to convert from mesh to curve, Ctrl A to apply rotation and scale, in edit mode select the first point of the curve, Shift S "cursor to selected", then in object mode set "Origin to 3D cursor" (in the T panel).

Select the shape mesh, Ctrl A Apply rotation and scale, Origin to 3D cursor, add an array modifier and then a curve modifier, choosing the curve as target.

I had to smooth the curve where it bends nearly 90 degrees.


How are textures generated in 3D in compared to 2D I'm curious on how Blender generates textures in 3D space for Volumetrics compared to 2D textures for a surface.

Many procedural texture generation algorithms can be generalized to be n-dimensional. And even if a given algorithm cannot be generalized, the concept that the texture is based on most likely can be, so a new algorithm can be devised for higher dimensions.

Usually, the procedure for generating, let's say, 2d musgrave noise is not much different from the one used to generate 3d Musgrave noise, which is not much different from one used to hypothetically generate 4d musgrave noise, or 5d, and so on...

Also, almost always a high-dimensional texture generation algorithm can be generalized for lower dimensions by discarding high dimensional information. For instance : if you generate perlin noise in a volume (as in 3d noise) and take only a slice out of it, discarding the rest, then you've effectively generated perlin noise on a plane (as in 2d noise), this is most likely what blender does. (in reality most procedural textures are generated per-sample-point so this procedure doesn't really play out as described, you just don't generate samples in the whole volume, just ones that lay on the plane that you are interested in)


depth of field to work not working I have blender 2.78 and I am trying to get the depth of field to work, but I just can't make it. I think I have all that as needed the camera and the target  an object, the compositing is on, I even have the cameras limits set to the target object, I tried to render it in blender internal, in cycles and in the 3D window, but nothing seems to work. I'm wondering is it possible to get the dof to work without using nodes and if it's possible what should i do.
I now try to add more information that i think is needed. I have set the measurement system to metric in the scene , and the object that is the target has the value of 1.0 as size. the camera I used is canon aps-c. I  have tried different focus-stop values that seemed not to help. I'm not sure what the lens is that I'm using, or where to find the lens used ? I wonder that if i have difficulties with this because I can´t somehow set the right distances between the camera and the object and do nut fully understand the relation between the metric grid, object size, and the distances and adjustment´s needed to make the depth of field seen. I have read many depth of field tutorials, but I seem to miss awarness of something very essential to get it work. I have NOT been using nodes when trying to do this .

Depth of field (as defined by circles of confusion) depends on three factors:

The length of the lens used (in mm). Longer lenses will have less depth of field
The distance to the subject. The closer the camera is to the object the more critical focus will be, and the depth of field will be shallower.
The f stop on the lens. Higher f-stops will give you larger depth of field (more things will be in focus) Smaller f-stops will reduce the depth of field.

You are using a wide angle lens (35mm) and a very high  number for f stop (31.8), and your object are quite large and far away.  with those settings is very unlikely that you will see the effects of selective focus (which I presume is what you are looking for). Lower the F-stop to something like 1.4 or even less than 1 to see the effects. Also in cycles you can preview the depth of field in preview render mode.


Why does voronoi texture switch use intensity coloring when ramped? I am using a voronoi texture set to position coloring to drive a displacement modifier.  But I want to control the interpolation of the texture with a color ramp.  However when I go to the texture panel and check ramp the effect of the displacement modifier seems to switch to intensity coloring, even though the texture is still set to position.  Why does it do this and how can I ramp a position voronoi texture?

Here is the texture setup with no ramp, working as expected:

Here is the texture setup when I check ramp, the displacement now seems to be using intensity:

Also notice that the preview has gone blank, I have no idea why.

This is the kind of result I would like to achive:

This was made using the experimental cycles true displacement option, which is not an option for my final application.

The ramp color dominates the Voronoi [position] as we have witnessed.

Design or Defect? Why? Perhaps the Blender Foundation can be asked.

The Blender Render texture settings can desaturate the position Voronoi colors to gray.
Once a gray is achieved the Blender Render can change colors based on a mapping space such as UV with a ramp.

The texture settings ramp can NOT change a color randomly based on a previous color, that information is not present.  That is a feature of the node systems.

The visual similarity of the color ramp in the Cycles Material Nodes and the Blender internal material/texture ramp is deceiving.  The Cycles node color ramp produces a color based on an input.  The Blender internal Material/Node color ramp specifies a color in a texture coordinate space which can be used to blend.

You wrote

[ I want something like if I put a cells Voronoi texture through a color ramp in the cycles node editor].  The texture settings of the material/texture without nodes cannot do this.

Perhaps we are using Cycles nodes so much we forget the old lesser capabilities of Blender Internal Material Textures.

It appears we are looking for a feature in the wrong place.

The node system of Blender Render can recolor a Voronoi texture based purely on color.

The node system of Cycles Render can recolor a Voronoi texture based purely on color.

Of course stating the some feature is not present in some area of Blender is a dangerous act.


Is there a way to remove all weight paint on an object/armature? I set automatic weight paint from an armature to an object, but I wanna undo it but it won't let me ctrl+z that far back? So... can I get rid of ALL weight paint without using the subtract brush ? Like just clear absolutely every paint. My character's hair mesh intersects with the arm mesh just a bit, so the paint for the arm bone got on the hair mesh, and it's moving the hair wherever the arm is, and it looks bad, lol.

Thanks for your time.

I had the same problem, only way I was able to re-rig with all the old armature removed and start from scratch was to delete the bones that get created on the object itself, one at a time:


Casting Shadows in BGE In the blender game engine, are there any ways to cast shadows aside from using a sun lamp or a spot lamp?

If you are talking about just the "normal" lamp types (Point, Sun, Spot, Hemi, and Area), then no. The Sun Lamp and Spot Lamp are the only two that cast real shadows in the BGE. (FYI the sun lamp has only been able to cast shadows since 2.64).

You can use lighting tricks, like a fake shadow texture on a plane. Or transparent planes with the light cast pattern and beams.
You could even bake the lighting to textures and then use all shadeless materials in game.


How to make parts of texture shiny and reflective? Basically, I'm making a matte object with no highlights, and only some parts of it are covered with metallic paint that should be glossy and reflective.

Hopefully this explains what I mean:

I'm using Blender Internal render.

The "desired effect" part has Wardiso specular and a bit of reflection.

I have a specular map on the column body (blue parts are black and golden parts are very light grey), in the Textures tab it's set up like this:

I've tried bringing up the Specular in the Material tab (it's currently at 0), but it affects the parts that are black on the specular map as well. It's my first time using specular maps, did I not set it up correctly?

Anyway, is it possible to achieve the desired effect without having to separate the mesh?

UPD: Golden parts are much more shiny now. I only need to make them more reflective to imitate metallic paint properly.

For demonstration purpose, the specular map is also being used as the diffuse channel to showcase the effect more.

Normally, the diffuse color map should only have the 'Diffuse Color' checked in the influence tab and the specular map shouldn't have this one checked at all.

Without the specular map influence:

With the specular map influencing the material's specular behavior:

Reflectivity:


exporting video with transparent background I have searched but not found an answer that exactly answers or works.

I have a rotating rendered head animation that I want to export with a transparent background so I can import into final cut pro x and lay over video footage or still imagery. I have tried saving as a blender render as quicktime .mov with alpha as transparent and as RGBA but doesnt work, a black BG. I have also tried as a cycles render but still black BG. Is there any particular file format that is better for this? H.264, MPEG, .mov? or something I am missing? thanks

Alpha and codecs don't behave terribly well. At last check, only the horrific QuickTime encoder on OSX permitted an alpha channel.

As with all good work practices, it is much more prudent to encode to a still format where plausible, and deal with encoding at the very tail end of a pipeline.


How to quickly find sound assets I can easily find and edit all image assets in the image editor, but I was wondering how can it be done with sound assets.

You can see all the sounds that are being used by the blend file by using the 'Outliner'.

Change the display mode of the 'Outliner' by changing the dropdown box from 'All Scenes' to either 'Sequence', 'Blend File' or 'Data Blocks'.

'Blend file' and 'Datablocks' each have a 'Sounds' section which lists all the sound files that are in use in the current blend file. The 'Sequence' view will only show audio files in use in the Video Sequence Editor and not in other sections of blender.

To further filter the results in 'Sequence' view for just audio and not video or images type the extension of the audio files, in this case '.mp3' into the search box.

Each of these views only lists audio files that have been loaded into blender and not a direct way to edit the audio file.


How to get solid render with wireframes and no shading I got this by using the advice here...
How to display the edges of a mesh while in Object mode?

Basically, use object mode and check "wire" and "display edges". Then I adjust materials until I can get it as white as possible. Unfortunately, I still get some shading.

Is there any way to do this with no shading, zero, nada? Here's something along the lines of what I am trying to acheive...
http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-116577055/stock-photo-high-resolution-concept-or-conceptual-d-wireframe-human-female-head-isolated-on-beige-background.html?src=pp-same_artist-116574211-2&ws=1

And to top it off, I'm a total Blender noob. I slog through it once a month to get wire frame images for a regular blog feature.

Any thoughts?

There are quite a few ways to accomplish this.

OpenGL

See this answer for details on setting up the wireframe.
Note that the Hidden Wire draw option can be useful for culling the wires on the back of the model without setting the color of the model to match the background.

See this answer for details on making the models in the viewport shadeless.

Pros: Very fast.  Usually no artifacts or missing lines. Works with optimal (curved) wireframes.

Cons: Total hack, requires setting theme colors to adjust the color of the wire and background. No control over line width.
Blender Internal

See these two answers for setting up the wireframe materials.

To make the base material shadeless, enable Shadeless in material settings > Shading:

To make it automatically match the background color, enable Mask Transparency in the base material and set the alpha to 0:

Pros: Works with optimal (curved) wireframes.

Cons: Can have issues with the Z offset causing missing lines or visible lines which should be occluded. Limited control over line styled/width.
Cycles

To get wireframes directly in cycles, see this question and the wireframe node.
To make a shadeless material in cycles, see this answer.

Pros: It's cycles

Cons: Perfect non-triangulated wireframes are not currently possible. There is a workaround with UV coordinates, however this results in line sizes relative to polygon size.
Wireframe modifier

The wireframe modifier generates actual mesh geometry representing the wireframe of the input mesh. Since the output is just a mesh, it works with both BI and Cycles.

See this answer for details on setting it up (answer is for cycles, but the process is identical for BI).

For shadeless renders, see the previous sections in this answer regarding BI and Cycles for descriptions of their respective methods of creating shadeless shaders.

Pros: Just works

Cons: Generates geometry; line thickness is defined in 3D space.
Freestyle

Freestyle is a line rendering engine which supports drawing over both BI and Cycles renders.

For cycles, see this answer.
For BI, see this answer.

Pros: Lots of control over line style etc.

Cons: Sometimes edges have gaps/other artifacts. Can be resource hungry.


How to disable vector pass calculating on unwanted frames? I have an Internal Render animation more then 2000 frames and for 150 frames there is some postcomposed vector blur. All is good, except that calculating of vector pass taking about 10 seconds.
So to not wasting time, I've tried to drive the Vector checkbox in Render Passes tab, but it is working very buggy - sometimes it fails to produce decent vector.

Is there a decent way to avoid unwanted calculations?

To use vector information for frame 10, information from frames 9, 10 and 11 are used. This make sense, because to get a sense of speed, Blender needs to compare the positions of objects before and after the current frame with the position in the current frame.

Lets say that you want to use vector info for frames A to B. Is it the case that you get weird results for frames A-1, A, B and B + 1 only? In that case I would simply manually re-render those frames with the vector checkbox ticked.

It might be possible to use a math node in the compositor to automate the
influence of the vector pass in your node setup, taking 0 as the input to the vector pass node for the frames I mentioned and the actual vector values for the other frames


Object with faces that intersect adjacent faces The following file
https://www.dropbox.com/s/dpwqgv2brfgzstg/PathPrefab5.blend is part of a project I'm working on.
I tried to make a curved mesh by extracting faces from a cylinder, and extruding the extracted faces, constraining the z axis, to give the mesh depth. But the cubes resulting from the extrusion collide with each other. How can I create this without the meshes colliding?

For that particular example, you could merge near vertices:

Select all (A)
Remove doubles (W> Remove doubles)
Increase merge distance (F6> Merge distance) until the adjacent vertices are all merged.

Once you do that, you will still have internal faces. To get rid of them:

Press Interior faces in 3D view > Header > Select to select internal faces.
Delete them (Delete> Faces)


Code to toggle viewport display material alpha I'm new and I'm trying to learn how to make a toggle for the alpha channel of of the viewport display material so that I can set a shortcut on it. I can't do that by normal means it seems. So I'm trying to make a script for it. I already know how to make an addon. I know how to do something like this in Maya but I can't figure it out here in Blender!
What would be the line of code I should use to make this happen? I'd like to toggle between a value of 0.2 and 1 with the said command.
This is the attribute in question:
bpy.context.object.active_material.diffuse_color[3]
Thanks!

You would have to implement an Operator for a shortcut. I'd suggest ask for the alpha value and set it based on a certain condition. Following example is based on our famous operator_simple.py template that comes with Blender (Text Editor > Templates > Python > Operator Simple):
class SimpleOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    """Tooltip"""
    bl_idname = "object.simple_operator"
    bl_label = "Simple Object Operator"

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

    def execute(self, context):
        # Get viewport display color
        diff_clr = context.object.active_material.diffuse_color
        # Get the alpha component and set it
        if diff_clr[3] == 1.0:
            diff_clr[3] = 0.2
        else:
            diff_clr[3] = 1.0

        return {'FINISHED'}

How to implement the shortcut: Create keyboard shortcut for an operator using python?


When working in the UV editor, how can I snap the face corners to the four corners of the image? I do a lot of modeling with mesh that has rectangular faces. I would like to unwrap them and then align the four corners of my faces to the four corners of the UV image. I simply want the entire image to cover each face completely. It is easy to select each of the four verts to move them to the corners, but is there a way to get them to snap to the corners?

You can check Constrain to image bounds option in the UVs menu:

Then you can scale your UVs as long as they take less place then the texture space. When they meet the boarders you'll no longer be able to scale them up.


Motion capture in Blender Is it possible to do motion capture in Blender? Basically where someone will have a bunch of sensors on them and the person, or objects motion get's turned into 3D motion.

Check out NiMate, it's an addon that let's you motion capture with a Microsoft Kinnect and use the data in Blender.

http://www.ni-mate.com/use/blender/


How can I turn the frames rendered by blender in an animation into a video? I made an animation in blender, and I rendered the animation. However, when I rendered it, Blender exported the animation as individual frames and not a video. How can I turn the images into a video? Do I have to use additional software/programs?

Open Blender and go to the video sequence editor view.
Add->Image. Select to the folder with all you images and select them with a (all), b (box select), or shift+click (single select). Press "Add Image Strip"
You image sequence will be added as strip
Set start and end frame according to the strip's size.
Go back to the default view.
In the rendering tab of the Properties panel, make sure that "Sequencer" is checked in "Post Processing".
In "Output", set the wished video format, compression and out file
Render the animation (Ctrl+F12)


Can snapped vertices be automatically merged? Two vertices snap together when snapping during transform is enabled with snap onto self :

How could both vertices be merged?

AutoMerge Editing might be what you are looking for.  It can be toggled on and off by clicking the entry.

EDIT: I've added the image posted as a comment by username: gandalf3 since he pointed out that there is also toggle button in the header bar which makes this feature easier to access.


Slow motion video like TWIXTOR for vse How could I achieve the Twixtor effect with the VSE (Twixtor in After Effects).

You can't.
Twixtor, and other apps that do slow motion, use a technology called Optical Flow that estimates motion vectors to create interpolation.
There is no way, that I'm aware of, to do optical flow in blender.
Blender has no temporal interpolation for video other than repeat or drop frames, or cross-fade (frame-blend) between two frames.
None of those will give you the smoothness of extreme slow motion.
For an open source alternative to do optical flow re-timing try
http://slowmovideo.granjow.net/
or
https://linuxhint.com/slowmovideo-slow-motion-video-marker/


Reflections from a EmissiveTexture and ReceivingShadow Ok. I have a setup where a plane has a texture that is set to emission to have a good reflection on a glassurface on the opposite side. But now the Surface did not receive shadows anymore.

so I tried shadow rays, glossy rays etc feed into a mixshader to darken the shadow area, but nothing works.

So how do I get the plane to reflect properly and the shadows on the glassdoor  too ?

here is a Picture of the setting and as you can see, there is no shadow on the glasssurface:

This is what i think the Image should look like

Have a look to this node setup:

Try applying this to your Windows.
Hope this may be helpful.


Video texture not rendering correct on different pc I'm simuating fire by using a video texture. (see: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/80954/6102 )
This works fine on my pc.

Now if I try to render on a different pc (I have tested 3 different pc's)  I get each time a sqhare instead of a nice explosion (where you only see the explosion from the video instead of the full rectangle of the texture being rendered).

The result should be a nice explosion (which I have on my other pc: https://i.stack.imgur.com/o3gw9.gif )

Any idea what is wrong? I'm using the latest blender version (2.78c)

I have this setting:

and GPU compute with feature set supported is active.

My blender files also have "External data" -> "Automatically pack into .blend file" enabled, so the video texture should be enabled.

Update: this is a test file which works fine on my pc (shows the explosion nicely) but on the other pc's it shows just some kind of white rectangle.

I wasn't aware of this before but as mentioned below, Blender doesn't pack video files.

One solution would be to manually copy the avi file alongside the .blend-file.

Another would be to use the .png files that was supplied with the avi as an image sequence.


Armature animation is transformed incorrectly and cannot reset to its default position I am not sure what I did, but suddenly my bones in pose mode are no longer the one that I had before. And therefore, all the animations I did before (which were normal) are now weird and distorted.
The bones in edit modes are still the ones that I had before, which is expected as rest pose in pose mode:

But in pose mode (rest pose), the bones are now like this (Note the foot bone and arms, which is clearly not the same to the ones in edit mode):

And for animations, the running animation which goes forward is now going backward instead, with a weird animation:

By the way, here's the same animation which I exported before:

Additional information

No constrains nor modifiers (except mirror and IK) are used.

What I tried

Clear transforms in pose mode
Applying transforms in object mode
Re-parent in object mode

What I guess that is happening

I have accidentally applied a position as rest pose (couldn't figure out a button to reset it, however I tried the this process and it modifies the bone in edit mode as well, so I'd discard this possibility)
I have scaled the armatures and as the animation transforms are not scaled, the animation is distorted (however, it doesn't explain why my character is running backwards nor the weirdness in rest pose)

I figured it out. When I was animating I accidentally got into edit mode and pressed ALT-R (thought that I was in pose mode), which reset the roll position of the bones.
Recalculating the roll position brings the bones to the rest position when no transforms are applied.

However, the animation still has weird behavior, it might be that the recalculated roll is different to what I had when rigging the bones.
Anyway, here's my tip: RECALCULATE ROLL BEFORE ANIMATING. So if you accidentally changed the roll, you only have to recalculate the roll and not to reanimate all the animations.


Create still copies of a moving object (using python scripting) I have an object A that is constrained to move on a path and I want to create still copies of it while it moves on the path. I tried the following code but it failed. In particular, it arbitrarily moves the object A itself and all the copies go crazy. Could you please help me fix this? Thank you!
A = context.active_object

for i in range(1, copies_number+1):

    A.constraints["Follow Path"].offset_factor = (i-1) / (self.copies_number-1)

    A.constraints["Follow Path"].keyframe_insert(data_path='offset_factor', frame=i)

    copy = duplicate(A) #this is a function that I have introduce to duplicate objects

    bpy.context.view_layer.objects.active = copy

    bpy.ops.object.visual_transform_apply()

    for constraint in copy.constraints:

       copy.constraints.remove(constraint)

Without operators
Here is an example of doing this without operators.

Have the constrained object as active
Create a copy, strip the follow path constraints from it.
Create all the copies needed from the copy
Loop thru the copies,

calculate the frame,

set and keyframe offset based on frame

change to that frame

give the copy the same matrix world as original at that frame

link copy to collection

Test script:
import bpy

N = 10 # number of copies

context = bpy.context
ob = context.object
scene = context.scene
collection = context.collection

copy = ob.copy()
cons = [c for c in copy.constraints if c.type == 'FOLLOW_PATH']
while cons:
    copy.constraints.remove(cons.pop())
copies = [copy.copy() for i in range(N - 1)]
copies.append(copy)

frames = 250
for i, copy in enumerate(copies):
    f = i * frames / N
    # find constraint properly 0 for example sake
    ob.constraints[0].offset_factor = f / frames
    ob.constraints[0].keyframe_insert("offset_factor", frame=f)

    scene.frame_set(f)
    copy.matrix_world = ob.matrix_world
    collection.objects.link(copy)


How to edit textures with texture paint in Cycles like GLSL in Blender internal? When I edit my textures (color, spec, normal etc.) in cycles I can only see the texture that I am currently editing.

Sometimes when I edit one specific texture, e.g. when I edit the bumpmap, I want to see all the other textures to get the best result.

In blender internal it is possible by using GLSL shading. Is there a way to do that in cycles as well?

All textures are mixed with mix nodes. The last mix node is connected to a Shader Output node. Cycles renders everything correctly, therefore the node setup is okay. However, I cannot see all textures together in 3D View.

Can you help me?

You could try the viewport shading to Material, it will display image textures as mixed in the shader node setup:

From the wiki:

  Material: a simplified version of the entire material is drawn using
  GLSL shaders. This uses solid lighting, and also is mostly useful for
  editing, painting and mapping textures, but while seeing how they
  integrate with the material.


1980s Chroma Interlacing effect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSTAWoER80Y

A Blender user in the U.K. made this recreation of old BBC schedule slides from the 80s. If you're watch it closely, there seems to be some fluttering (or, as the user calls it 'twitter') in the lettering, especially the yellow ones with the black outlines. Does anyone know how to achieve this effect as well as how to create an old NTSC or PAL filter

Create a black and white texture to be used as the interlace.

(I did this in blender with a texture on a plane, but it can be done with any image creation program)

Then use that image as a factor to combine different versions of the base image, that have been distressed with different filters.

(Click on the image to enlarge)

If you animate the values for the distortion filters or animate an inversion of the interlace texture you can maybe emulate NTSC in all of its glorious ugliness...


Losing WORLD position when importing to FBX (for unity) i have made two animations, using the same base rig that play together, essentialy a judo throw, when i play it in Blender it works perfect, but when i play in unity (setting animation positions to original), both animations are played at the center of the bodies, instead of their respective positions.
How can i fix this?

all other animations i had done work fine in unity, by putting into original position, they work the same as in blender, however i had to fix this one in particular due to a mistake i made, and since i dont want to re-import all other 90ish animations again, i made a new blender file and copied the mesh and rig, worked there, saved and exported.

i been trying to find a solution for hours, but it cant find it.

any help would be really appretiated.

In the individual import setting for each animation on the FBX in Unity, there is a setting for applying root motion (location, rotation...).  What you likely will need to do is play with that setting some, likely by applying it to the root bone.  Without a file or other things to play with, I can't really go into more detail.


Can you extrude a mesh like a 'stroke'? In a 2D app like Photoshop or GIMP, you can add a stroke to an object, and an outline is created for it that's of even distance around the shape. I want to do this for an irregular mesh in Blender.

For regular meshes like circles, spheres, squares and cubes, everything works well - E, S, scale out the extrusion. But for irregular shapes, I'm stumped.

This 'E' was selected, then E, S, mouse-dragged out (median point center). It doesn't border the original 'E' at all, and I wouldn't expect it to. Is there an option/add-on that allows for an extrusion at a set distance from the original mesh?

Edit:

This script can apparently be used to stroke edges outward:
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Modeling/offset_edges

If, for some reason, you can't use the script, you can use the workaround in my old answer.

Old answer

This is just a workaround. Find an add-on if you have to do this frequently.

1 - Extrude the shape

2 - Select one face on the top and on the bottom

3 - Select linked flat faces

This should select everything on the top and bottom.

4 - Select inverse

This will select the rim edges

5 - (optional) Extrude, don't move them and Enter

6 - Shrink/fatten

You should see this result:

7 - If necessary, delete unneeded geometry

Select one face on the top - Select linked flat faces - Select inverse - Delete!


Trying to symmetrize bones, not working When I select half of the bones on one side of my armature right click and hit symmetrize, the bones do not appear. I may be doing something wrong, or just being a noob and missing something simple. Help would be appreciated!

Make sure each bone name to be mirrored ends with .L which means LEFT (e.g.: hand.L) and press Shift+C to center the cursor.
Hopefully that will help.


Texture inside out (XNALara) .idk what im doing TLDR :
texture inside out of solid.
im a beginner at blender and practicing it.
so idk whats happening.
i appologize if i sound ignorant or seems to be stupid but i've done some research about this and have 0 clue on how to fix it still.
XNALara was used. (ver. 2.0.2).

https://imgur.com/a/vmbwPq7

Press F3 and search Flip Normals. If that doesn't work press Ctrl +  T while the image texture is selected in the Shader Editor. Try using object/generated coordinates.
You might also want to try applying the scale and location, and apply all geometry shifting modifiers like Solidify or Subdiv.
I am not an expert, that is just the troubleshooting procedure I would have tried based on my very high number of mistakes.


Whats the purpose of Ambient Occlusion node in Cycles? I can only connect the node immediately to the surface otherwise i don't get any AO effect. I cant use for example as the vray dirt map. So what the purpose of it?

thanks in advance :)

The purpose is that you can control how much AO each object has.

  The ambient occlusion node gives per-material control for the amount of AO. When AO is enabled in the world, it affects all diffuse BSDFs in the scene. With this option it's possible to let only some materials be affected by AO, or to let it influence some materials more or less than others.

Quote from the Blender Wiki.


How to make 15 textured billiard balls roll? I have a rigid body physic simulation of 15 billiard balls breaking from the hit of a white ball, and they all work well hitting and bouncing from each other, except they don´t rotate like real ones will do rolling over the pool table.

How to make them roll without having to animate them one by one?

I´m using Blender 2.78c latest version in with windows 10 Intel(R)Core(TM)i7-4900MQ CPU@2.80GHz, RAM 16.0 GB and 64-bit operating sys, x64 based processor. I´m new to blender and wonder if there could be a python script to do the rolling, and/or if I have to use the game engine instead of the cycles one I´m using right now. Thanks in advance.

You need just basic rigid body options, imho, there's the standard collision and rotation damp. Just set the collision shape to mesh, always behave better for collisions. Also you can lower collision margins (not zero, at least .01).

it should work like this:

here is the test .blend:


Armature Mesh Deformation Ever since I symmetrized the mesh so that it was perfectly symmetrical, the armature started deforming whenever I rotated it.

This was a completely new armature I made from scratch, I can't tell if it's the armature or the mesh that's making this awful deformation.  What is happening?  I put the automatic weights setting.

Also, when I rotated the armature on its own, it stretches the bones.  When I rotate just one bone it stretches only the tips of the fingers, and then mirrors the effect on the opposite side.  How to fix this?

Going by the image alone,  it seems like the nails might be the problem. I have seen figures with separate nail meshes and that causes problems with AW.

-snip-

One bit of unrelated advice, if this model is to be used in Blender, renaming your bones and adding .L and .R (left and right) at the end will greatly speed up your work. "Forearm.R" reads a lot faster than "Bone 50" and allows you acess to built-in functions like Paste Mirrored Pose

Edit

The next item on your checklist is to go into Weight Paint Mode and check if the messed up parts are (somehow) assigned to another bone.


can you save a wireframe as a png? i am trying for the first time to use blender to create a wireframe so i can turn an object into a 3d lamp, i have managed by tutorials to get the image to a wireframe only which is perfect for what i need, but then there is no way that i can find to save that image out of blender as a png etc with just the wireframe on its own without the model attached to it, is this at al possible please

You can go to the 3D view menu, and choose viewport render image, which will render any combination of viewport overlays you activate.


After joining object is reverse After joining my eye with the rest of my character eye is deformed. How can I fix it to not break my eye structure? (see right eye of the model)

The problem is the way you are creating the transparent surface at the front of the eyeball. This works with a single eyeball object but the Generated output is no longer the same when the eyeball is joined to other objects.

I am not sure but I think Generated is using the bounding box of the object. Hopefully someone more experienced with using cycles Nodes will see this and can explain exactly why it gets messed up when joined and offer another solution, maybe UV unwrapping the eyeball and using the UV's output ?

In the meantime I would suggest you don't use the Texture Coordinate node, and instead make the front of the eyeball a separate material and give it a glossy transparent texture.


How to render only one render layer? How to render just one render layer?

Rerending only freestyle on previous render and Adjusting Freestyle in the Blender compositor explain how to separate the rendering into "normal render" and freestyle-only. Unfortunately they do not explain how to render only one layer.

An code method is explained in Re-render single layer without losing all the others (Blenderartist.org):

Open a Python Console
Run bpy.ops.render.render(layer="FreeStyle")

This appears to not be working:

It freezes Blender (no progress bar or view)
It takes as long as pressing the render button, so it seems to not work and just renders all layers.

I suspect there might be a non-code UI way to do it. Is there?

In Blender 2.80 and later you can find settings for current layer in Layer Properties in Properties pane. Fourth tab from the top, and the relevant setting is at the top of the pane.

To switch layers use layer switcher at the very top right corner of the window.


What is the best way to model this indent Long story short, there's a small indent surrounding this registration plate I need to model in.

The first time I did it, it worked and looked alright, but the faces were absolutely everywhere. I did it by extruding, then moving along the Y axis.

So how would I go about doing this without mucking up the faces to oblivion?

I don't pretend this is the best way, but that can be something like this:

The idea is to loop over the indent and "protect" the external part with an additional edge loop which allow also to reduce the vertex count progressively to the external parts.

But what you concretely need to do may be very dependent on your model as it is for now.


can't transform the object I downloaded Minecraft blocks and append one of the objects to another blender file.
but I can't move this yellow box which I appended from the file (I tried to move this with G from the keyboard as usual). so I opened the right item section for moving the objects by using that sidebar. however that transform section is not active so that I still can't move the box..is there anyone who knows how to solve this problem..!?

Looking at the chain link icon beside the object name, you didn't Append the object but Linked it.

You can't move linked objects directly, you have to use a proxy (old way) or a library override (new way).
If you want to retain the link to the original file, right click on the object in the outliner, then go to ID Data > Add Library Override.
The outliner should look like this :

If you want to have the object act independently of the original file, like it would if it had been appended, you need to right click on the object in the outliner, then go to ID Data > Make Local.
The outliner should look like this :


How to create a flashlight light I just wanted to know how to create a flashlight lighting as it is showed in the pic

I have tried to create a spot light, but it doesn't works. Could anyone help?
Thanks!

BLENDER RENDER
You may achieve it giving the Spot Light a texture.

Add a Spot Light (Shift+A-->Lamp-->Spot), go to Lamp Data header and set up the settings depending on your needs.

Prepare your texture (you may find similar one in the net).

With a lamp still selected go to the Texture header, click a little bulb icon, add your texture and set the mapping coordinates to View.

CYCLES RENDER
You may achieve it adding two Spot Lights with different settings.

Play with the Strenght, Size and Blend settings for different lamps. When finished you may parent one lamp to another with Ctrl+P to make them move together.

EDIT: This method works well in Blender Render also.


How do you slice a joined model into equal slices? I would like to take a complex model with many joined object and slice the whole thing in into regular slices. I have tried Bisect and Ctrl R but that doesn't work on a joined object. Any help?

You can use the Boolean modifier in intersection mode for this.

Add a box (cube) the size of the desired slice
Add a Boolean modifier to the object you want to cut into slices
Position the box precisely on the slicing axis (Z in the example above).
Duplicate the original object and apply the modifier to add a slice.


Baking produces black image I'm trying to combine 3 textures into 1 using baking for external use in Roblox. They don't support a meshes multiple textures. This wouldn't be an issue in most cases except the egg shaped body which has a texture for the eyes/head and one for the face. Therefor I have to combine the textures within blender. I've followed this guy's video because nothing else comes close to combining 3 textures onto one file. The only weird thing happening was after deleting the bones was Shadow Teddie becoming super massive, but that wasn't an issue because I'll probably be resizing him within Roblox Studio once all the textures are on 1 file. After following the rest of the tutorial I hit bake, and Shadow Teddie turns black instead of what should be the textures appearing. I have to then go back to Texture Paint and replace them back to looking like the normal Shadow Teddie.  When baking I got an error about a Circular dependency for image "dark_kuma_hand_t01.png" from object "EM105_6" in the bottom right corner.

When you have several textures and you want to turn them into one you bake diffuse or emit (as you wish) pass, see Bake Taxtures to one Image.

What is wrong and why the warning

The catch that you likely face due to the warning you mention is that if an object has multiple materials baking is happening for all those materials. Thus it takes any selected Image Texture node in every material and tries to bake to it.

There are 2 Image Texture nodes in materials dark_kuma_hand_t01.003 and dark_kuma_face_t01.002, one connected to the shader and used as a source, another one disconnected from everything which is correct.

However there is only one Image Texture node used as color source  in materials dark_kuma_body_t01, dark_kuma_face_t01.003 and dark_kuma_face_t01.004.

This means that once baking is started it will get to materials mentioned in the last paragraph and bake to the image texture used as a source since it can't find anything else there to bake to. Hence color information source for first 2 materials gets overwritten and it also starts providing that black color which is baked above when Clear option is enabled.

This is why the warning Circular dependency for image for material X in object Y is important to notice; it allows to prevent image from being overwritten and saved since you can reload image from disk if it wasn't saved after baking.

The warning isn't always meaning you have wrong node setup; e.g if you bake normal map from highpoly to lowpoly and connected normal map Image Texture node to the tree you will receive this warning as well however it won't mean anything in that case. Still it's better to check your node setup when baking anyway.

How to bake correctly

There are generally 3 ways.
Either copy paste image you're baking to to each material for the object and make sure it is selected for each material for the object, then bake.
Another way is to duplicate the object, remove all materials but those you want to bake and bake from that object to that object (Selected to Active unchecked).
Third way is to create 2 copies of the original object, remove all materials but those you want to bake from the copy you bake from, then remove all materials but one from the object you bake to.


Pinning vertex on soft body to mesh not working I am trying to get a rope to follow a spearhead and flex as the spearhead moves. I can't seem to attach the two. Any help please?

You can add a hook modifier to your rope (use CTRL-H from edit mode, having selected your pinning vertex, to hook this up to an empty), and parent the resulting empty to your javelin.


Script Only working when running and selecting object I wrote a script and I have been focusing on the hologram button I made. I used the selected operator but the button only works when I select the object and then run the script

import bpy
mat = bpy.data.materials.new(name = "Hologram")
mat.diffuse_color = (0,0.519,0.800)
mat.specular_intensity = 0
mat.emit = 1
mat.use_transparency = True
mat.alpha = 0.503
ob = bpy.context.active_object
data = ob.data
def item_type_lst(self,context):
    types={obj.type:obj.type for obj in context.scene.objects}
    return [(obj,obj,"")for obj in types]

def item_type_obj(self,context):
    return[(obj.name,obj.name,"") for obj in context.scene.objects if obj.type==context.scene.myEnumitem]

class SimpleOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname="dh.simple_opt"
    bl_label="Simple Operator"
    def execute(self,context):
        if len(ob.data.materials):
            ob.data.materials[0] = mat
        else:
           ob.data.materials.append(mat)
        ob.modifiers.new("part", type = 'PARTICLE_SYSTEM')
        part = ob.particle_systems[0]
        settings = part.settings
        settings.frame_start = 4
        settings.name = "Hologram"
        settings.frame_end = 34
        settings.lifetime = 250
        settings.count = len(data.polygons)
        settings.normal_factor = 0
        settings.physics_type = 'NO'
        settings.render_type = 'NONE'
        settings.effector_weights.gravity = 0
        settings.effector_weights.force = 0
        D = bpy.data
        test = "Hologram"
        bpy.ops.texture.new()
        text =bpy.data.textures[len(bpy.data.textures)-1]
        part = bpy.data.particles[test]
        tex = bpy.data.textures.new(test, 'BLEND')
        bpy.data.textures[test].use_flip_axis = 'VERTICAL'
        slot = part.texture_slots.add()
        slot.texture = tex

        return{'FINISHED'}

class View3dPanel():
    bl_space_type="VIEW_3D"
    bl_region_type="TOOLS"
    bl_category="Tech"

class PanelA(View3dPanel,bpy.types.Panel):
    bl_label="Holograms"

    def draw(self,context):
        layout=self.layout
        layout.operator(operator = "dh.simple_opt",text = "Hologram",icon = "OUTLINER_DATA_LAMP")
        self.layout.split()
        self.layout.split()
        self.layout.split()

        col=layout.column(align = True)

        col.label(text = "Mesh Objects")
        col.operator(operator = "mesh.primitive_cube_add",text = "Cube",icon = "MESH_CUBE")
        col.operator(operator = "mesh.primitive_cone_add",text = "Cone",icon = "MESH_CONE")
        row=col.row(align = True)
        row.operator(operator = "mesh.primitive_monkey_add",text = "Monkey",icon = "MESH_MONKEY")
        row.operator(operator = "mesh.primitive_torus_add",text = "Torus",icon = "MESH_TORUS")
        col.operator(operator = "mesh.primitive_cylinder_add",text = "Cylinder",icon = "MESH_CYLINDER")

class PanelB(View3dPanel,bpy.types.Panel):
    bl_label="Panel B"

    def draw(self,context):
        layout=self.layout
        layout=layout.box()
        layout.label(text = "object list",icon = "SORTALPHA")
        col=layout.column(align = False)
        col.prop(data = context.scene,property = "myEnumitem")
        col.prop(data = context.scene,property = "myEnumitem_obj")

bpy.types.Scene.myEnumitem=bpy.props.EnumProperty(name ="Obj Type",items=item_type_lst)
bpy.types.Scene.myEnumitem_obj=bpy.props.EnumProperty(name ="Object",items=item_type_obj)

if __name__=='__main__':
    bpy.utils.register_module(__name__)

Thanks in advance

You defined ob and mat in global scope.  If the script was run without a context object, ie context.active_object is None then you will get errors.

Added a poll method. If there is not context object the operator wont poll.  Set C.scene.objects.active = None in the python console and the button will be disabled.

Made a small change to your script to define within the operator and to list callbacks to use self, since this is the scene as it is defined as  a property on the Scene type object.

import bpy

def item_type_lst(self, context):
    types = {obj.type: obj.type for obj in self.objects}
    return [(obj, obj, "") for obj in types]

def item_type_obj(self, context):
    return[(obj.name, obj.name, "") for obj in self.objects if obj.type == self.myEnumitem]

class SimpleOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "dh.simple_opt"
    bl_label = "Simple Operator"

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

    def execute(self, context):

        mat = bpy.data.materials.new(name="Hologram")
        mat.diffuse_color = (0, 0.519, 0.800)
        mat.specular_intensity = 0
        mat.emit = 1
        mat.use_transparency = True
        mat.alpha = 0.503
        ob = context.active_object
        data = ob.data
        if len(ob.data.materials):
            ob.data.materials[0] = mat
        else:
            ob.data.materials.append(mat)
        ob.modifiers.new("part", type='PARTICLE_SYSTEM')
        part = ob.particle_systems[0]
        settings = part.settings
        settings.frame_start = 4
        settings.name = "Hologram"
        settings.frame_end = 34
        settings.lifetime = 250
        settings.count = len(data.polygons)
        settings.normal_factor = 0
        settings.physics_type = 'NO'
        settings.render_type = 'NONE'
        settings.effector_weights.gravity = 0
        settings.effector_weights.force = 0
        D = bpy.data
        test = "Hologram"
        bpy.ops.texture.new()
        text = bpy.data.textures[-1]
        part = bpy.data.particles[test]
        tex = bpy.data.textures.new(test, 'BLEND')
        bpy.data.textures[test].use_flip_axis = 'VERTICAL'
        slot = part.texture_slots.add()
        slot.texture = tex

        return{'FINISHED'}

class View3dPanel():
    bl_space_type = "VIEW_3D"
    bl_region_type = "TOOLS"
    bl_category = "Tech"

class PanelA(View3dPanel, bpy.types.Panel):
    bl_label = "Holograms"

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        layout.operator(operator="dh.simple_opt", text="Hologram", icon='OUTLINER_DATA_LAMP')
        self.layout.split()
        self.layout.split()
        self.layout.split()

        col = layout.column(align=True)

        col.label(text="Mesh Objects")
        col.operator(operator="mesh.primitive_cube_add", text="Cube", icon="MESH_CUBE")
        col.operator(operator="mesh.primitive_cone_add", text="Cone", icon='MESH_CONE')
        row = col.row(align=True)
        row.operator(operator="mesh.primitive_monkey_add", text="Monkey", icon='MESH_MONKEY')
        row.operator(operator="mesh.primitive_torus_add", text="Torus", icon="MESH_TORUS")
        col.operator(operator="mesh.primitive_cylinder_add", text="Cylinder", icon="MESH_CYLINDER")

class PanelB(View3dPanel, bpy.types.Panel):
    bl_label = "Panel B"

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        layout = layout.box()
        layout.label(text="object list", icon='SORTALPHA')
        col = layout.column(align=False)
        col.prop(data=context.scene, property="myEnumitem")
        col.prop(data=context.scene, property="myEnumitem_obj")

def register():
    bpy.types.Scene.myEnumitem = bpy.props.EnumProperty(name="Obj Type", items=item_type_lst)
    bpy.types.Scene.myEnumitem_obj = bpy.props.EnumProperty(name="Object", items=item_type_obj)
    bpy.utils.register_module(__name__)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_module(__name__)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    register()


Is there a way to bulk move objects under a collection I have created a forest of about 300 trees and I would like to have all of them moved under a collection called tree. I can select them using pattern matching, however when I go to drag and drop the selected item into the new collection it only moves the one I clicked on in the object tree. Is there a way to bulk move all of the selected items to said collection?

I can't reproduce this in 2.83 .. I can select multiple, either in the 3D View, or the Outliner, and left-drag them into the collection by releasing the left mouse-button over the appropriate line.
It may be easier, with such a large selection, in Object Mode, in the 3D View or the Outliner, to hit M. You should then be offered a dropdown menu of collections to which you may move the selection, or the option to create a new collection to move it to.


How do you make the camera's field of view bigger, so it can see more On blender, I am trying to render something. However, the camera is too small? Somebody help!!

You need to change the resolution of your render.

Click on the camera icon in the propery menu.
Change the X & Y value in the tab Dimension.


Animating the development of an organic structure I would like to create an animation of how a gland grows during embryonic development. Imagine tweening between these 4 steps:

As you can see, it's not just getting bigger, it becomes more complex, it changes shape, parts are added and sometimes parts are removed.

The techniques that I have discovered so far appear to require that the mesh stays the same throughout, which seems clunky to me. I do wonder if I have been missing a big-picture approach to this type of problem.

Q: How to morph mesh shapes with different amount of vertices?

A: There is not an efficient way in Blender to animate mesh with varying topology (from what I know).

Blender is able to generate this kind of data as export of fluid sim or metaballs into Alembic (.abc) format. This format can be also imported back into Blender. A bit of setup can be found under Modifier tab - Mesh Sequence Cache (see Manual). But in general - you can transform only on object level (Loc/Rot/Scale or use modifiers on top of this format).

Like a hack of your proposal I tried to animate sculpted object with shapekey. When topology become to its limit I duplicate the object and continue to sculpting with dyntopo on specific part. It worked in kind of, but its was so painfull with pour result.

Q: How to animate growing an organic structure

A: You can try - Particles with Metaballs growing by gradient texture.
In this sample I used just a tree structure (addon Sapling), but you can model gland by your self (or some cool script probably exists for this kind of structure).

add MetaBall object (for later use)
create some gland structure (edges only)
subdivide edges evenly into dense vertex mesh

Particle System

add Particle System to this object with option Render as Object
as object select MetaBall
set a number of particles the same as amount of gland vertices
(it can be found in edit mode in bottom row)
you would have to set particles Velocity to zero and disable Gravity under Scene properties to stop particles to move

Animation

animation is done by illusion - particles scaled in time
particle scale is controlled by Particles > Texture
add new Texture and go to Texture properties
set Blend > Spherical, Influence > Size > enable, Mapping > Object
(You can animate size directly in this panel, but its more flexible use another object. I added Empty into scene.)
additionaly you can enable Colors > Color Ramp to adjust appearence of size in time, so it will looks like growing thickness

It has its limits to animate by texture, but you can probably get some more variations by adding another Particle Texture to "break" spherical growing shape (I didnt try that).


Python 2 library support I am working with Blender 2.78 where plugins are apparently programmed in python 3. However I will need a custom library programmed in python 2 to be accessed from my plugin. As there seem to be python 2 and python 3 in /blender/2.78/python/lib, is there now a way of using python 2 libraries in my plugin?

"script.py" is the name of your script:

2to3 -w script.py

https://docs.python.org/2/library/2to3.html


How to have volume material cast shadows? I have a box with a volume material applied, affecting its density.  However, when I render the scene, the shadow of the box is still in the scene. Here is the image:

I am wondering how to either disable the shadows for that box specifically (in case there are other objects in the scene) or to make the light cast volume shadows based on the density inside the box.

Thanks!

You have to enable Receive transparent in the material settings of the floor plane:

Result:


Rotate Object to a random piont I've been having a lot of fun animating armatures, but I've ran into a problem.
I've been using the NLA editor to play around with repeating animations.
Let's say I have an object, that can rotate along the z axis.
My goal would be, to have the arrow slowly rotate to a random z-direction every time the action gets played by the NLA editor. Is there a way to do this?
Thanks!

Driver with animation data as var target
There is a way to do this using the animation system via drivers to "answer the question  as posed"  Would look into other ways of doing this with say driving track to constraint influences to randomly located objects, or by baking an animation.
Proof of concept
Using NLA strip data as a driver target.
Have a scene with a cylinder that rotates 360 (one revolution) via a 2 keyframe action that has keyframes at 1 and 24.
It is added as a strip to NLA track "NLATrack" the strip has been given the arbitrary name "XXX".

A cone is added to the scene with a driver on its Y Euler rotation.  It uses a method we are going to define later.  The animation data of the Cone object is single property var named "ad"

The script.  Defines a list of random angles choosing from  -90 to 90 degrees with 5 degree steps.
The method point takes the animation data of the cone as a variable.  From this a strip named "XXX" in the track "NLATrack" is found.
From the strip  get the repeats, from the action the action length and other info.  Haven't made a good fist of getting the maths just right by checking other strip properties like start frame etc.
For each repeat there is a random number added to a randoms list available to the driver namespace.  (Will not be saved with blend file)
The current repeat is calculated by the whole number dividing the current frame by frames in action.
How far between this and next repetition is the linearly interpolation of remainder of current frame divided by frames in action divided by frames in action.
import bpy
from bpy.app import driver_namespace as dns
from math import radians
from random import choice

dns["randoms"] = dns.get("randoms", [])

def point(ad):
    if not ad:
        return 0
    frame = dns["frame"] # current frame
    strip = ad.nla_tracks['NlaTrack'].strips["XXX"]
    action = strip.action
    repeat = int(strip.repeat)
    nframes = int(action.frame_range.length)
    randoms = dns["randoms"]
    if frame < 0:
        print("Reset Randoms")
        randoms.clear()

    while len(randoms) <= repeat + 1:
        randoms.append(radians(choice(range(-90, 90, 5))))

    rep = min(int(frame // nframes), repeat)
    drep = (randoms[rep+1] - randoms[rep])
    #return randoms[rep]
    return randoms[rep] + (frame % nframes) * drep / nframes

dns["point"] = point

First image below shows result of uncommenting (removing hash #) from
        #return randoms[rep]

Second with the linear interp.


How to make an object in blender game engine react with different collision differently I used collision sensor which reacts to any kind of collision which takes place. So is there any other way to make an object react with different collision differently.

The cube is a ridged body and the plane is static

As the cube falls the plane detects the cube collision and acts as set.

These are the given settings for the above function.

As the cube falls the plane senses the cube collision and does the given function. But if there would be an extra object, for example a sphere, I want the plane object to react with the sphere collision differently. How is it possible in blender game engine?

You can filter the collision evaluation

by Property (M/P disabled Property: contains a property name)
by Material (M/P enabled Material: contains a material name)
no Filter at all (all other cases).

Be aware - the other participant of the collision needs to have the property/material.


Extruding vertices with x mirror X mirror works perfectly for editing geometry, but when wanting to extend / extrude areas, x mirror no longer continues mirroring.

Are there additional tools or options one should check in order for it to respect extruding, cutting etc

X Mirror only works when manipulating vertexes, edges and faces in position scale and rotation.

For any work such as extruding etc, it breaks out of the mirroring tool and will no longer be symetrically affected.

To continue working with a mirrored object, you will have to delete all of the vertexes on one side of the model and add a mirror modifier.

Select the view all vertexes without clipping button:

Select all the vertexes on either the left or right of an object, but avoid selecting the vertexes down the centre of the object, (you'll need these for flipping it)

Delete these vertexes and add a mirror modifier:

You'll now have an object that is perfectly mirrored. If it doesn't look right, make sure you've got the right axis selected in the mirror modifier.


Object colors disappear after diselect I select an object, choose the colors I want and everything seems good. Except, when I select another object, the colors just disappear, come back to the old ones. I don't know what is happening to be honest, but it just started right now. I haven't had the problem till now.

As you can see, the colors stay just when I select the object. What’s happening and can it be fixed?

You have a copy of object in exact same place.

When z-buffer is same blender displays selected object on top of deselected.


Is Inflow Animation Broken in 2.80? So yesterday I spent all day trying to figure out everything I could about the fluid simulation, as I wanted to help answer a post. In one of my test, I came across an issue. So I made a new, bare minimum, test file to test the fundamentals and something seems to be wrong.

In 2.8.0 Build, it seems like animating any property of the inflow objects for fluid simulations breaks the inflow object.

My test was simple as could be, default scene, remove the light and camera, use the starting box as the domain with all default settings (resolution being 200 and up to 400, viewport set to view final resolution) animate for 1 (across 24 frames), and stick an icosphere inside the box, scale it down, apply scale, set to fluid inflow, and use any velocity I wanted to, 10ft/s for z (up) was my default.

What worked: if the inflow or the object had anything/everything animated, it would still work so long as absolutly every keyframe (no matter how many) all were the same value, so nothing ever changed or was really animated).

What did not work: The moment the object or the inflow had a parameter that was animated, and that said value changed to another value in another keyframe, the inflow just stopped working entirely, no mater what values, clearing cashe, etc.

I know inflow could be animated in older 2.79, did it get broken in 2.8.0?

Setting the "Volume Initialization" type to "Volume" on the inflow icosphere seems to do the trick. But this seems to have the opposite behavior, where if I don't animate it, using shell/both is what works but not volume. I think I just have much to learn.


How to deal with a scene that has both very large and very small objects I'd like to make an animation of some objects moving around on flat plane which stretches to the horizon:

Then I'd like to move the camera waaaayyyy into the sky and show that the ground is actually a text object. I'm finding the difference in scales really tough to work on in a single scene (e.g. clipping is driving me nuts).

Is it possible to do the described shot in a single scene? Or am I better off splitting it into two scenes and somehow stitch the animation back together in the video sequence editor?

Why not drive the scale of the objects as an inverse function to the distance of the camera? That way the camera doesn't have to move as far while the objects take up less room.

You can add drivers to the objects that you want scaled. They should take the local location of the camera and divide it into 1. Resulting in a smaller value for the scene.
In fact if there are many objects then i would parent them to an empty and simply drive it's scale.

Here are the drivers with the function attached:

Remember to copy this driver to each channel for uniform scaling.

finally remember that any materials that exist in world space will not scale with the UVs of the objects.


game shield in blender game engine I am trying to make a shield that will end enemies when they come in contact with the shield. The problem is getting the shield to spawn on the character while he is moving. Any ideas? Thank u!

Add empty(which is parented to character bone for example arm) which spawns the shield. and then add logic bricks that parents the shield to the character


How do I gradually go from one material to another? I am trying to put lips on my character, but as you can see, there is an abrupt line between the lip material and the skin material. It looks super fake. How do I smoothen out the transition between kips and skin? I'm using cycles.

I would normally handle something like by using one material across the entire face (or, if it's for a game, one material for the entire character) and paint into the texture the details like skin transitioning into lipstick, etc.
You can use Blender's Texture Paint mode to achieve this, but your object will need to first be UV unwrapped.


How do you combine two different blender files? I have one file with a scene containing animation in one file and in the other file I have an object with armature. Is there any way I can bring the object with the armature into the file with the animated scene?

I most often use append to combine two separate blend files. (File > Append)


Separate distinct internal closed volume (automated) I have an object containing multiple interior faces defining closed volumes.
I'm looking for a way to identify each of those volume and separate them in different objects.

The object is in "one piece" all the faces intersection are edges. This result could be reproduce by taking an object and applying multiples bisects with "fill" option enabled, exept that some faces are missing giving concave geometries.

Here is an example blend file: Example

The green and red parts are two examples of the pieces contained in the main cube (in transparent grey). I want to get all of them, like a puzzle of piece that fit together to form the initial shape.

So obviously the internal faces will be duplicates during the process since each internal face makes the separation between two volumes. I'm trying to figure out how to do that using blender built in functionalities or a python script with a decent complexity.

Here is an 2D view to simplify the undestranding of the problem:

(The red line represent an internal faces that needs to be duplicated)

We can see from that side that 7 shapes are forming the square, and I want an automated way to identify those different shapes. It is easy in 2D but more complex in 3D.

A partial solution would be to use raycasts to find the faces of a box, but it's more difficult when taking the concaves geometries into account.

Any idea would be welcome.

You could try adding the Solidify modifier, boosting Thickness a bit, and then hitting Apply. Then, go to edit mode, select a vertex, and do Select Linked All to select a particular volume. Finally, choose Separate (P key by default) to move the selected volume into its own object.

Your topology will have to be well organized to start I think (i.e. faces don't intersect each other) otherwise the 'solidified' topology will be weird too.


How do I do axis-locking + edge/face intersection snapping? (with screenshot) I want to move an edge of object A onto the face of object B. I want them to meet where the blue lock-axis meets the face of B. How can I do this?

If there isn't a method available, where/how can I suggest this feature to the Blender development team?

You can enable Snapping by pressing the magnet at the top of the screen. If you click on the drop-down menu next to the magnet icon, you can change what Blender will snap to.

To toggle snapping via a keyboard shortcut, press Shift+Tab. Pressing Ctrl+Shift+Tab will bring up a pop-up menu for changing the snapping object.

If you don't want to toggle snapping, you can just hold Ctrl instead to enable snapping only while Ctrl is held down.