How do I create a vertex at the intersecting point of two intersecting edges without addon or scripts, no faces involved? As seen in the screenshot, I'm using version 2.79 . Is it possible to do it with plain blender, without installing addons?

If doing that without addons you need to subdivide both edges and use snapping tools to snap vertex from one of the edges to another.

In ideal situation, your edges will be aligned with the world axes. However this is not always the case, hence this solution assumes they aren't (it still works even if they are) and uses custom transform orientation for snapping vertices. Alternatively it's possible to align view to the selected edge and use View transform orientation, although it might be less convenient navigating in the viewport.

With edge selected, create Custom Transform Orientation with Ctrl+Alt+Space (or from the Properties shelf > Transform Orientations rollout). Note that Selection mode should be set to Edge so transform orientation is created for it. By default this transform orientation will be selected as current one; if not, choose it in the Transform Orientations menu or with Alt+Space.

Enable Snap during transform tool. Set Type of Element to snap to to Vertex (or Edge depending on which element you will hover over to snap vertex to). Set Pivot point to Active Element to use active selection as pivot.

Subdivide one of the edges once (W > Subdivide with edge selected).
Select vertex created after subdividing, then Shift select corner vertex of the edge to scale to. Activate Scale tool with S to move the vertex, press adjacent axis name twice to use custom transform axes and hover mouse over the vertex of the edge to snap to (or edge itself depending on what you selected in step 2).

Do the same for the other edge.

Select all and use W > Remove Doubles to join 2 vertices into one vertex at the intersection.


Appended group opening in original location So I appended a group of objects to my level in BGE, but every time I reopen it (the level) the appended groups go back to the location at which they are saved in their own individual files. How do I get the groups of objects to remain where I put them in the level? Thanks.

Not sure you'll need to muck around with the Graph Editor - Try this first...

Select the main armature or whatever it's parented to.

Press SH-S --> Cursor to selected.

SH-A  and add an Empty.  (It will appear at the the same origin/pivot point as the armature or parent)

Parent the armature (or parent) to the Empty, choose  "Object (keep transform)"

Drag the empty around and the model should follow it.  Place it somewhere.  Run the animation.

It should do it's thing but now from it's new location.


How can I seperate parts of a human body to add materials for texturing? I have a few human models that I am trying to work with to add textures.
When I select all in Edit mode and ty to separate by loose parts nothing gets separated. I believe it is one solid mesh. There aren't any seams or anything to separate like in the tutorials I have watched.

Does anyone know a way I can take a solid model and separate it so I can add material slots in order to texture them?

Why do you need to separate your mesh? You can have multiple materials on a single mesh. In the material window you can add as many as you want. Then just go into edit mode and select the faces you want to give a different material, and then assign the matching material from the material window.


Transparent textured planes produce black artifacts Having problems with hair transparency using cycles. I ported over a model from daz studio (have done this a few times before with no issues).

Using a simple mix shader, transparent top, diffuse bottom, black/white texture in the fac.

Heres the blend http://www.pasteall.org/blend/39347 with images packed.

Looks like you need to increase the maximum number of Transparent Bounces in Render settings > Light Paths:


How to model this irregular shape I'm looking for the optimal way to model the back part of this camera (just the back with the viewfinder) while having a good topology. The general shape is easy, but I can't get the viewfinder and the way it merges with the rest of the shape right. I've tried from sculpting to drawing it with a beizer to using a lattice, but it never looks right or the mesh ends all messed up. What would be the best way to do it?

My best attempt:

I got there using a subdivision modifier and adding support loops and creases. Then I joined it with the viewfinder (a separate mesh) using a boolean modifier.

But the mesh is a mess. Is it a good approach? Is it worth fixing the mesh?

The bottom-line is that no matter what I try, I can't get this curves right:

I am not an Expert about blender, but i can help you.

Start off with a cube.

Go in edit mode.

Subdivide the cube by a small value (4).

Grab the edge you want to pull inwards ONLY ON ONE SIDE!

Move the selected edge inwards. (G Key).

Exit edit mode.

Apply a mirrors modifier (use the correct axis).

Now you should have the curve on both sides.

Grab the intact face on the back.

Extrude It where you want that  "long rectangle" to be.(E Key).

And grab the tip face of the long rectangle.

Inset that face a bit.(I Key)

Extrude the insetted face inwards.

Grab The Bottom of your creation.

Extrude It Down.(E Key).

Enable Shade Smooth.

P.S.
If the model looks weird After Shade Smooth, go ahead and enable Auto Smooth Normals!

I'm Sorry this Is a bit of a weird and probably not correct answer, but i've fine my best.
Hope you Will understand It.


Liquids flows to weird direction. (It flows toward one area of the domain object) I'm doing some assignment with Blender to use physics simulation, and I found my fluids are flowing to a weird direction. The fluid was supposed to flow downward, because that is how it usually works, and it worked so before an hour ago. Somehow I may changed some setting but I can't find what changed it's behavior.
I tested with other quick liquid domains and their fluids goes into same direction too.
Here are my domain setting. I also checked the scene Gravity setting, but it's not touched. (-9.81 m/s2 for Z-gravity)

Okay I found what was the problem.
I found that the Wind Force Field I had at the outside the domain was affecting the whole scene! This is the first time I'm using the Force field and I didn't know it could affect the whole scene.


How to model the needle/spiral of a badge/button? I try to model a badge/button and now I’m having some trouble to model the half-spiral of the needle (see picture).
My result is ok I think, but it was hard to get there via two circle paths, then deleting just a quarter of one and finally merging the two circles together. I also tried to build it via Curve > Curve spirals but there is no basis from which a good result could be achieved.

So I’m interested now to know how some of you would solve it, perhaps there is a much easier way to do it.

EDIT: the first picture is not my result, it’s just a reference.

You can use a Circle and a Screw modifier :

Note that the object origin will be used as the screw axis, that's why I offseted it in my picture. But you can also use an Empty as an axis, just use the AxisObject field for that.


How can I render these edges more realistic? I would like to have a realistic rendering with this hard surface. These edges appear too soft to look realistic, so I applied a 'Mark Sharp' but they appear with the same rendering as if I didn't apply any Mark Sharp. What am I doing wrong?

I tried many things. On the middle crease of 0.44 and on the right, a bevel with two edges. Is there a better way or if not what is the more realistic option?

You can edit the edge sharpness by increasing the 'Mean Crease'


Is there any way to duplicate bones radially? I'm building an object that has radial symmetry, and it's armature would have the same symmetry. Is there any way to automatically duplicate bones radially after building the initial piece, or do I simply have to duplicate and position by hand?

Just an idea... you can dupliface the armature:

Here I used a cylinder: the number of faces will make the radial distribution.

Once original armature is ok, you need:

to select the cylinder and make duplicate real
to select the duplicated armature and make them single user
then join them:

Though, I don't think there is a mean to duplicate the eventually created animation on the original armature by this way...


Freestyle rendering problem (REALLY big gaps/"fur") Okay, so I have this cartoon rabbit Im working on. I've set up the freestyle rendering so that it used to look like this:

Had tiny gaps but I could live with it. Now, I made some kind of small change (Im still not sure what exactly caused this, but Im pretty sure I didnt modify my freestyle settings), and now it looks like this:

I can fix that a liiiitle bit by disabling the "Face Smoothness" option, but it still looks terrible:

Can anyone help me fix this bug? I looked around on the internet, but no one has had a freestyle gap problem quite this bad or even similar to this. The usual "huge gaps" people complain seem quite tiny in comparison. Unfortunately I dont have any backups of the old version (that tpose render is all I got of), or else I could backtrack or compare what went wrong...

Yes, Grimm was right, I had double vertices, I must have duplicated the model accidentally! This is solved now. Thanks a lot!


How to morph / merge / blend from one mesh to another? Hi everybody im trying hard a way to have one clean mesh , wth a kind of morph inbetween two different and mismatching meshes .

Anybody can help me with this?

Thanks a Lot!

I assume you want these two meshes to become one mesh, with a connection of some kind between them. If your meshes have the same number of vertices around their respective outer edges, it's as simple as follows:

First, if you want to keep those edges looking the same when you join them, you need to add a loopcut very close to them, then two more between those two. If you've already done this, or have applied holding edges in another way, feel free to skip this step.

Second, you need to remove the faces at the end of both objects that you wish to join, leaving only that outer edge. This will keep little dimples and grooves from showing up in your final work.

Third, make sure both edges have the same number of vertices. While this isn't strictly necessary for the next operation, it tends to make the mesh look bad, which is what you want to avoid. If they don't match, add loopcuts along either object until the vertex count for the outer edges are the same. (You can check this number without counting in the upper right of blender next to the menu bar. The first number is the number of vertices you have selected, and the second is the number of vertices in your object).

Fourth, hit the space bar and type in 'bridge', then select 'bridge edgeloops'. DON'T CLICK ANYTHING ELSE YET. Hit the 'F6' button on your keyboard. (If you're using a laptop, you may have to hit the 'fn' key simultaneously.) Adjust these settings until you get something you like, hit enter to confirm any typing, and move your mouse out of the menu. You may now move it around as you like and continue with your modeling.


How to set material underneath a texture? I am have this image and I'm trying to set the black background color to match the rest of the extinguisher. I tried messing around with some settings like Emission and subsurface color, but that messes with the image. Any help with my personal project would be greatly appreciated. Thank you :)

Prepare the sticker image, give it a transparent background (Alpha 0%). Select the faces where you want the sticker to be displayed, unwrap them, give them a new material.

Prepare your node setting: Create an Image Texture and load your sticker picture, plug it in a Diffuse node. Mix this Diffuse with another Diffuse node that has your object background color (red in your case).

Plug the Image Texture Alpha output in the Mix Shader Factor input so that the sticker background appears transparent.


Retopo: Can we apply shrink-wrap to multires subdivisions? An idea came to me recently that I think would be very effective for retopology.

The dilemma

If you've tried doing Multires sculpts you've probably noticed that pinching, stretching, and uneven mesh density are common side effects, yet DynTopo, especially when used in Subdivide Collapse mode, doesn't have this issue. You can sculpt freely, but at the expense of having your nice quad mesh obliterated into a glob of tris. So we end up going back and painstakingly building another quad mesh over our DynTopo sculpt.

For anyone not familiar with this, see Intro to Dynamic Topology Sculpting in Blender

The solution?

What I was thinking is that if we duplicate our mesh object to make a backup before breaking out the DynTopo, we can slap a Multires Modifier and then a Shrinkwrap Modifier on that original base mesh and it will conform very nicely to the sculpted mesh! But the big question is - how can we get that shrink-wrap deformation data into the subdivision levels of the multires so that we can have the dyntopo-sculpted detail at various levels in a clean quad mesh?

Visual aid - The red mesh was sculpted using DynTopo, the blue is the original with modifiers on it:

(X-ray display is being used so that we don't see ugly overlapping faces)

Since the Multires Modifier necessarily comes before the Shrinkwrap Modifier in the stack, we can't send the shrinkwrap vert position data backwards up the stack and into the multires subdivision levels. And if we apply the Multires Modifier then obviously that defeats the purpose because it's not Multires anymore.

So how?

Could there be a way to get the vertices within multires Sculpt Mode to snap to the same location as they are in when Shrinkwrap is used? And if it can't be done by some snapping method, could it perhaps be done (even more efficiently) by using a Python script?

Imagine a script that gets the vertex position data from a version of the mesh that has had its Modifiers applied, and copy that vert position data into the not-yet-applied multires data of the other. Of course the subdivision levels would have to match. I am especially curious to hear from anyone familiar with how Python can manipulate vertex data. But Python or not, if this can be achieved by any means it would be extremely useful. What do you think?

After a few months I decided to revisit this and... I've got the answer!

It was right under my nose the whole time, right there in the interface - a button called 'Reshape'.

Reshape will... okay, I'll let the Blender Manual do the talking:

  Reshape - Copies vertex coordinates from another mesh. To use, first select a different mesh object with matching topology and vertex indexes,
  then Shift select the object you wish to copy vertex coordinates to
  and click Reshape.

So what's so exciting about this button and how does it further humanity's progress?

You can enjoy the flexibility of DynTopo and get great topology easily.

Here is the workflow:


How to make tied knots in Blender? I don't know how to make tied knots, for example when I want to make shoe lace.
Someone can help me, please?
Thank you (:

You can start with a simple mesh which roughly defines the knot shape, which for now is flat. Top view here:

Then give it some relief and add a subsurf modifier, still roughly :

Now, convert it to a curve :

Alt+C then curve from mesh
Enter edit mode, set the curve type to bezier then the handles to auto
Now set some bevel to the curve

Doing this, you may have some adjustments to do, but initial vertices (in "mesh mode") are much more easy to manipulate than starting with a curve from the beginning :


How to use a 2D video to make a skybox and reflect it in a mirror object I have a 2D video (nothing special, just view from ground) of a sky with clouds passing by. I want to use it and have it reflected on the surface of a complicated curved mirror-like 3D object in my scene. I think that what I want is called a skybox but my "texture" is a normal video, not a panoramic video.
The reflection doesn't have to be precise. My object could even be "satin finished" instead of mirror so it's more about "atmosphere" than precision. I want the viewer of the final render to feel that the object was there, surrounded by this cloud sky.
Just point me to a tutorial fs you know one. I will learn from there. Thanks for any help.

Another similar option that make less distortion on mirror (metallic), but some edges on glass ... For World shader is used video texture in Environmental node > Mirror Ball ... plus video object behind.


I'm trying to make a cigarette. I made the burn area and the ash, but I can't get them to combine. Can you guys help me? Here are the nodes for the cigarette/ash parts. I don't know how to mix them. I tried mix shader, but my ash part overlays the paper texture.
The last picture is what I'm trying to achieve.
I'm waiting for your replies.

A mix shader should work just fine. Just make sure to use the same alpha factor that you used for the "burn mask".


Material Overrides for view layers (per object) I've been a casual Blender user for some time now. Really enjoying the progress in 2.8, and use this now over maya for most modeling needs, and would love to ditch autodesk altogether, but there are some serious limitations.
First on the list to make this a viable replacement for a team such as ours are some questions related to the view layers.

Maya refers to these as render layers, and a core feature of a render layer is the ability to override ANY node, object, material, or light properties on a per render layer basis.

One common usage of this workflow would be to override the material to alter output (ie change it entirely, not just an aov, not a shadow catcher, and not overriding all materials on all objects at once).
I've seen nothing covering this kind of workflow in Blender.
This goes well beyond the holdout / indirect toggles allowed in the outliner, And the only way I can see to do this (since materials are linked to mesh or object data only) is to link to object, then duplicate the object (even if the mesh is instanced), and this is still far from ideal.

Thanks for any guidance.

Actually Blender is pretty great at Render Layers:

you have collections which is kind of like a supercharged group (one object can be in multiple collections, collections can be instanced in other scenes, like Maya's references)
you have view layers, which can contain collections can set which passes to render, to override materials etc. (this is render engine specific, I'm referring to Cycles here, Eevee doesn't support that)

You can read more about it in the Blender manual on view layers


What is the physical difference between the Subsurface Scattering and Translucent shaders? Generally speaking, I know to use translucent for leaves and SSS for skin, but why is this? Physically speaking, how do these shaders refract/scatter rays differently? Why does translucent have no sliders or options? If anyone could sketch up some rough optical diagrams, that would be absolutely awesome! Any responses are appreciated :)

Translucency allows light to pass through an object. Using only a translucent shader will leave an object dark on the side receiving light with the other sides being lit.

Sub Surface Scattering allows light to penetrate the surface and be distorted before bouncing back out. Each colour component disperses differently, leaving areas with a different colour than others. Thin areas allow light to pass through to light the opposite side before being bounced back out, these thin areas give a translucent appearance.


Limit selection to visible not working in orthographic perspective I am using blender 2.73 and I want the model to be opaque/solid in the viewport instead of this.

I know I can do this by using limit selection to visible but it doesn't work in orthographic perspective. It works in user perspective however. Is there something I can do?

I also tried moving the object into a new blend file but the problem persisted.

I reduced the clipping distance down from 1000000 to the default 1000 and scaled down the model and it solved the problem.


How do you make a lamp light up glossy surfaces? Working on a candle project to practice:

Under the 'world' properties I have turned the strength down to 0 (thus making it pitch black). I then added a lamp to the workspace and adjust its strength to 1-2 (doesn't matter) and it starts lighting up the candle. If I adjust the strength too high the candle starts getting over-exposed looking and just stark white, but the ground remains mostly black. You can BARELY see the ground's reflective surface, but the sun lamp seems to have no affect on the ground.

If I remove the Glossy BSDF property from the ground the ground then reacts to the sun lamp as expected, immediately getting brighter to match the lamp.

What could be causing this? Shouldn't reflective surfaces still brighten up a bit when a lamp hits them.

On the left you have the exact same image, nothing changed except for the properties of the ground with (left) and without (right) the Glossy BSDF characteristic. (which expands beyond the entire image).

I think your problem is that light is being reflected of the ground plane, but not into the camera. (see specular reflection)

  Shouldn't reflective surfaces still brighten up a bit when a lamp hits them

It's not a matter of "brightening", the light has to hit the plane and then get bounced into the camera.

Diffuse objects scatter light, so they bounce some light into the camera regardless of the angle. Completely glossy objects (no Roughness) will bounce light without scattering it at all, and slightly rough glossy surfaces will scatter light slightly:

To visualize this in 2d:

As you can see, the camera will not receive any light from the (slightly rough) plane. Except for light reflected of the diffuse object:

Workarounds:

To work around this, you could:

Add more lights. You could add a light in front of the camera and behind the object which bounces light off the plane into the camera:

Increase the world background brightness (in the real world there is almost always some ambient light) You could make it so the world appears black to the camera while actually emitting a little bit of light by means of the Lightpath node:

Add a tiny bit of diffuse reflection to the glossy shader:

The diffuse shader input color brightness controls how much diffuse is added. (black is none)
Mix some diffuse reflection into the glossy shader. (with a mix shader) Note that this is slightly different than adding.

Replies to comments:

  Thank you for this great response! Unfortunately, adding additional
  lamps on the far side of the object has absolutely zero affect on what
  the ground looks like. The ground has not seemingly changed one pixel
  with the addition of another lamp or with the moving and re-adjusting
  of the lamps and their strength. It HAS affected the candle though,
  and the candlestick has a glossy finish, so I don't understand why the
  planar floor won't do what the candle base is doing.

It depends on the angle of the surface and the camera. (and the type of lamp)

To get a feel for this you might want to try playing with the view (with viewport rendering on) with just the plane and a couple lamps to get an idea of how this works.

  I should add that I wanted the candle to appear to be the only light in the room. I made the flame an emission source and that lights up just fine, but when the candle and candlestick are lit up but the floor is not it just looks weird

In that case you probably don't want to add extra lights. (you might even want to remove all the lights except for the candle flame)

Keep in mind that in an actual room there is some indirect lighting from the walls and other objects. You could set the world to a very dark color (but not black) to simulate this.

  In the end you were right. I had my floor as a glossy surface, with a roughness of .100 which apparently makes the surface too glossy to reflect light? I had to make it a .2 or higher to get any sort of light reflection off the object. Although I feel like even a polished brass sphere should glow when a light hits it.

Again, an object is only visible when light bounces off it and into the camera. AFAIK, there is no such thing as "too glossy to reflect light", it's just not reflecting light where you want it. (i.e. the camera)

The reason increasing the roughness makes reflections more visible is that it scatters light in more directions, increasing the probability that some light will enter the camera.

I think the solution you want here is to mix some diffuse reflection into your glossy material. This will bounce light in pretty much every direction, making sure everything is visible to the camera.

  If I had any questions left, I'd ask if there's a way to adjust the
  intensity of an emission source that isn't actually a lamp? As it
  stands I have the flame set as an emission 'texture' but i put a lamp
  inside the object and adjusted the lamps brightness to compensate for
  the flame's lack of brightness.

I'm not sure what you mean by emission texture, but if you are asking what I think you are asking:

You can make an emission shader that appears the color set in the Color input while emitting more light than a Strength of 1:

Only an emission shader with a strength of 1 and 20:

With the above node setup:

Example renders:

Completely black world with some diffuse mixed with the glossy materials:

Completely black world with only glossy reflection:

Only glossy with a mesh light (selected) affecting the glossy floor:


I can't select "Armature" when adding a Track To constraint So, after adding a track to constraint to the bone that will follow the eye bone, I try to select "Armature" but when I click it, it wont add it to the "Target:" field.  Furthermore, I noticed that it says "Add Object Contraint".  It should say "Add Bone Constraint".  Please refer to the photo below.  I want to make the "Armature" option appear in the field after I click it and I want to make sure that above, it says "Add Bone Constraint".  Can someone help me?  Thanks!

You've clicked on the Object Constraints tab, where you could give a constraint to the whole armature, it's not what you want, what you want is the Bone Constraints. To have access to this tab you need to switch to Pose mode, select your bone, click on the right tab.


How to bend the shape I have made the leaf shape and want to bend with the reference image.

I have on the proportional editing on also. But the problem its not bending its moving from the place.

Later i have to extrude and offset.

Any suggestion and help. Thanks

Topology

First of all if you need to bend a mesh you will need proper quad based topology. This will allow also to add Subsurf Modifier later on if needed.

Here is an example how it can look:

You can make it as you want, just keep quads.

Bending:

In this method I'm gonna use Bezier Curve and Curve Modifier.

Add to your scene Bezier Curve and place it accordingly to your leaf mesh. For example:

After that add Curve Modifier to leaf mesh and select Bezier Curve as Object.

Now you can move leaf mesh or in Edit Mode change Bezier Curve shape as needed.

Blend file:

You can check my answer here for similar method:
 Bending a ping-pong racket


GPU Rendering Slower? After looking around the web for a while, I've gathered that GPU rendering in Blender is supposed to be much faster than CPU rendering, but on my machine, the CPU is actually slightly faster? My GPU is a GTX 1070ti with a 200mhz OC and my CPU is an i5-8400. Rendering a simple image takes around 45 seconds on the CPU and 50 seconds on the GPU even with the 200mhz OC. Is there something I messed up in the settings? Or is it supposed to be like this?

use the CPU
she will be faster,
leave the video card just for video,
blender works best with CPU


IK + Pole Target {Rig} is =//= Twisting my Characters Mesh When i apply this rig i have here to my test model.
With automatic weights. It totally twists my model.
Any clue whats causing this? I tried to mess with the poles rotation.
And i tried to apply rotation and scale.. nothings helping.

Picture:

Edit:
I found out that when i disable the Pole targets it seems to do it right.
But how can i make it right with poles enabled?

Turning on Axes for the bones can be really helpful when things twist, and/or before parenting mesh to rig. Like it seems in your case, the twist occurs when you parent mesh to rig with Auto-Weights.

I suspect a complete bone rotation in Y axis in one step, (Y axis is Up for bones)

So probably step 1 can solve it, step 2) 3) are more indepth regarding IK.

What happens if you change IK Solver to iTaSC

Sometimes adding stiffness can solve at least weird rotational behaviour.


cant see edit mode in front viewport blender 2.8 i cant see any vertices or faces or any kind of grid in the front viewport.
In 3D mode when i shift around they appear as you can see in picture 1.
however when i click '1' in the numpad to go to front view edit i cant see any geometry- no edit grids or lines. i can only see it if i click wireframe mode.
have i clicked something? everything in my viewport overlays is clicked on.

You are probably viewing the back of your model rather than the front. Press CTRL+1 to view opposite side or/and ALT+Z to toggle transparency.


Stopping Follow Path at the beginning I'm mixing animations in NLA editor, and I want start with follow constraint turned off.

For example, I want my character to wave, and then play the walk cycle with follow path.

The keyframing influence didn't help, the timeline is snapping origin forward.

Okey I found the solution to keyframe follow path curve. You Need Delete Evalution Time in Fcurve.

And Then Manually Set Values Frames and Evalution Time, Click I to keyframe.


How do i make a smooth UV sphere? I was following a tutorial where the Youtuber went Shift + A Mesh > UV Sphere, his sphere had a very smooth surface.

But when i did it, mine looked like this.

How do i make my sphere to look as smooth as his?

In object mode, you can just select the UV sphere, right click and choose "Shade smooth".


How do I fix certain parts of my character not moving with the armatures placed? So this is my first somewhat decent looking  character,, and I am trying to place armatures inside to see what I can do with him. However, once I finished doing what I thought would work, this happened. Can anyone help me and tell me what I did wrong? I can post the .blend file somewhere so you guys can get a better look if you need.

.blend file link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/95lo4tixzu795yn/NatureFile.blend?dl=0

Update:

Added link to .blend file

it is a weight paint error , i've checked the file and the part that is not moving has no parent , So
-re-parent the whole mesh with "envelope or automatic weight "
if it doesn't work :
-go to weight paint mode and do it manually
or :
-add theme to the vertex group with the bone name


Anyone knows how to round out objects like this? Anyone knows how to round out that cube at this video from 10:11
i really looked every where but since i am new here i couldn't find anything.
would really appreciate that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jwgvOwowuk&t=10s

Please try to Sphere. Edit Mode.

Cube with high vertex density.  After To Sphere operation it looks like ... well a sphere.

Shift Alt S

The move your mouse away and experiment.


Material become black when observe from angle If I observe mesh from acute angle it borders become black. I use PBR materials from Blender Guru.

This is a problem caused by the fresnel node. I believe increasing the geometry (for instance with Subsurface modifier) could potentially help.


Viewport colors look darker in Vertex Paint mode Blender 2.8 Viewport shading set to solid and color to vertex with flat shading,
the colors appear to be darker in vertex paint mode than in object mode.

By default vertex colors get multiplied when entering vertex paint mode.
Set opacity of vertex paint mode overlay to 0 in viewport overlays to make object and vertex paint mode look the same.


Extrude the outside of a cylinder using a grayscale image I'd like to create model of a ring with a relief for 3D printing. The relief should be a raised, but degrading text (like its very old and used).

I'd imagine to create a grayscale image and use the gray values as height information to extrude the outer surface of the ring, but don't see how this would work. A bump map doesn't help, because 3D printing needs real 3D structures.

My questions:

Is it possible to do so and how?
If not, what would be the best way to achieve the effect?

You have the right idea! Adding "bump" doesn't change the geometry, it only gives the illusion of surface detail. So instead we need to use a Displace Modifier.

As others have stated, you need a sufficiently subdivided mesh and a carefully prepared displacement texture. I will go into some of the details of setting this up.

Here is an example result:

Type your text

You can create the text in whichever software you are most comfortable with. If you want to do this in Blender, the steps are as follows:

Add a Text Object, Tab into it, and type your message.

Set the Extrude value to give the text some Z depth.

You can add Bevel to your text if you want, but adding some Blur later when compositing gives a similar result while requiring much less geometry.

Place your camera facing the text and set it to Orthographic mode. Set the Orthographic Scale to fit the text, with some extra padding.

Add a plane just behind your text that will represent the Z depth of 0 (flat).

Prepare a noise texture

This can be done in Blender, of course. Or you can use an image editor.

Composite the noise into your text

This also could be done in an image editor, but why not use Blender?

Here is an example. The Normalize and Invert nodes are a standard setup for grabbing Z depth with black as farthest and white as closest. The blur node is being used to round off the text edges. The color ramp partially flattens the noise to create parts of the text that won't be worn. Multiply is subtracting the dark parts of the noise from the already light text. This creates the indentation we want in the displacement map.

Create a part of your mesh with dense, even geometry

Here is a grid of quads in the cylinder. Only add density to the region where the displacement is to be applied, otherwise you'll be looking at much larger file sizes and slowed Viewport performance.

UV unwrap the dense region of your mesh

When UV unwrapping you will want to Hide all other geometry and use Follow Active Quads (Length mode). Scale the UV layout as needed, but keep it square in proportion to match your grid of quads.

Displace!

Here is what such a Modifier Stack might look like:

Notice that Subdivisions for the View are set to a low value to keep the Viewport manageable, while for the Render they are set high. When your model is all done and ready to export, you will want to set the View Subdivisions to something high like 5 or 6 for maximum detail in your geometry and then Apply the Modifiers. (When Applied, Modifiers use the setting of the View, not the Render.)

In this example the displacement relies on a UV map to get the texture coordinates, so in the Displace Modifier the Texture Coordinates should be set to "UV". If you only have one UV map on your mesh you don't need to specify the UV Map name, but it never hurts to do so.

The value for "Midlevel" should be set to 0 in this sort of use case, because the black areas are considered "flat" - not displaced at all. The white areas on the other hand represent the areas of maximum displacement.

How far out should the maximum be? That is controlled by the Strength slider.

If this is for 3D printing you will want to keep your object's shading Flat while you work so that you can see all the imperfections and address those issues before you print. If it is for rendering you can go ahead and use Smooth shading for better render results.

Below is a link to a .blend that contains Scenes for:

Rendering the noise texture
Compositing a displacement map from the noise and text
Displacing a cylinder using that displacement texture


What is the best fps to use if one plans to add music later? I am about to begin animating my project.  I plan to add music later, and at that point I will be fine-tuning the animation, syncing it to the music.  At what fps should I animate?  I am new to this and bound to make some terrible mistake, so I am wondering is there any crucial detail I should know now before I animate, so I do not run into any audio/video sync problems later?  I read on one of the posts here that 29.97 fps is the best frame rate to use for animation, to avoid future sync problems, but perhaps I do not understand?

Any advice is appreciated!

If I were you I would take your song's tempo into consideration when choosing a frame rate. This is assuming you don't have tempo changes - if you do there's nothing you can really do since the frame rate must remain constant.

Here's a handy BPM / FPS calculator to help you choose the best frame rate for your song.

So for example, if your song is 120BPM and your video is 30FPS you are looking at 15 frames per beat.

Keep in mind that the song tempo should not be the only criteria to consider. You should consider how this video will be delivered as well, like is it only for YouTube, or does it need to play on some specific devices, etc. Higher frame rates are usually better, but will obviously increase file size and render time. If your tempo can fit into 30 or 24 FPS, one of these will be pretty easy to work in while being hi fidelity enough for most situations.

Finally, if you have software that will allow you to change the tempo of your song, don't rule out that option.


Cannot Edit the Length of VSE's Transform Efffect I am new to Blender: So I have a video clip in Blender's VSE. I would like it to zoom into a specific part of the video for about 100 frames. I found that you can zoom by adding a transform effect strip to the video. However, I can't change the length of the effect (it spans the entire video and the "length" parameter in the side menu is greyed out) What can I do? Thanks!

[AV]

Try cutting the strip at the places you want the zoom to occur. Then add the Transform effect to only this short strip. You can add keyframes by hovering over the scale value and pressing the i-key. Use the F-curve editor to change the keyframes in time.


I cant extrude in Z Axis Iam attempting to extrude in Z Axis iam pressing E+G+Z but I can't extrude the plane.

I am following this tutorial: https://youtu.be/OHg-CHcflPM?t=1299.

Don't press G

The E shortcut is for the "Extrude Region and Move".

The move (or grab) command you are trying to recall with G is alredy active. So by pressing G, you are activating the Vertex Slide option of the grab command.

Just press E and then Z to restrict the movement because you are already grabbing the object around.

Or yuo can press E and then Esc to Extrude the region only. After that you can activate the grabbing with G and restrict the movement with Z.


Eeevee & Lookdev all materials bright white I'm on mac os 10.11.6, trying 2.8 beta. System is old Mac pro with quadro fx 4800 but is compatible with opengl 3.3.

All materials are rendering bright white. Any setting to solve this?

Same issue on linux ubuntu 18.04.2. Always after suspending or hibernating. Restarting blender solves the issue to me.


Rendering Freestyle along with Grease Pencil I’ve been trying to render a grease pencil drawing on top of a Freestyle rendered object. But, when I do it the Freestyle lines can be seen behind the Grease Pencil object. Is there a way to solve this?

I made an example with a blue circle made with Grease Pencil, in front of a cube rendered with Freestyle.

I’ve tried using Eevee, Cycles and Benchmark.

Thanks in advance.

Viewport:

Render:

This isn't a perfect solution (I don't know that there is one, at least as of 2.82) but when faced with the same problem, I added a utility mesh to put behind the grease pencil object, just so that the freestyle pass knew to obscure whatever was behind the mesh.  In order to stop the utility mesh from itself creating freestyle lines, I added to a collection that I then excluded under Freestyle Line Set.  I'm animating my grease pencil object using an armature, so I parented the utility object appropriately to the same armature, so it moved in sync with the grease pencil drawing.

Another cleaner possible solution, depending on what your scene required, would be to render the grease pencil object and the 3d environment separately and composite them together afterwards, but that only works if you never want any of the rendered objects in front of the grease pencil drawing (though, of course, you could also composite more than two renders together, but this could get more complicated than the first solution).


How to make interface for add-on with mutipule colorpickers I am trying to create interface for this code (look bottom) in Blender.

Python code helps find dominant colors in image. It would be great if color data from program send to colorpicker elements on panel (Blender interface). But I couldn't find information about colorpicker elements and how send data to it.
I am using sys.path.append() to import Pillow (PIL for Pithon 3.X), NumPy and SciPy from Python 3.3 dir.

import struct
from PIL import Image
import scipy
import codecs
import scipy.misc
import scipy.cluster

NUM_CLUSTERS = 5
print ('reading image')
im = Image.open("C:\\Users\\User\\Desktop\\maxresdefault.jpg") #path to your pics
im = im.resize((150, 150))      # resize pics, to reduce time
ar = scipy.misc.fromimage(im)
shape = ar.shape
ar = ar.reshape(scipy.product(shape[:2]), shape[2])

print ('finding clusters')
codes, dist = scipy.cluster.vq.kmeans(ar, NUM_CLUSTERS)
print ('cluster centres:\n', (codes))

vecs, dist = scipy.cluster.vq.vq(ar, codes)         # assign codes
counts, bins = scipy.histogram(vecs, len(codes))    # count occurrences

index_max = scipy.argmax(counts)                    # find most frequent
peak = codes[index_max]
colour = codecs.encode(peak, 'hex_codec').decode('ascii')
print ('most frequent is %s (#%s)' % (peak, colour))

Summing up I want to ask you:

How to create 5 or more colorpicker elements on panel?
How to send data from program to colorpickers? In hex for example...

I would be grateful for any help!

Thank for help!
I have one more question: How create button to execute python code

#Analogue colors
m = bpy.context.scene.color_prop.h + 0.125
n = m - int (m)
bpy.context.scene.color_prop1.h = n

m = bpy.context.scene.color_prop1.h + 0.125
n = m - int (m)
bpy.context.scene.color_prop2.h = n

m = bpy.context.scene.color_prop2.h + 0.125
n = m - int (m)
bpy.context.scene.color_prop3.h = n

m = bpy.context.scene.color_prop3.h + 0.125
n = m - int (m)
bpy.context.scene.color_prop4.h = n

import bpy

class ColorItem(bpy.types.PropertyGroup):
    color = bpy.props.FloatVectorProperty(
                 name = "Color Picker",
                 subtype = "COLOR",
                 size = 4,
                 min = 0.0,
                 max = 1.0,
                 default = (0.75,0.0,0.8,1.0)
                 )

class ColorPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    """Creates a Panel in the Scene properties window"""
    bl_label = "Colors"
    bl_idname = "SCENE_PT_colors"
    bl_space_type = 'PROPERTIES'
    bl_region_type = 'WINDOW'
    bl_context = "scene"

    def draw(self, context):
        for i in range(5):
            row = self.layout.row()
            row.prop(context.scene.colors[i], "color", text=str(i))

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(ColorPanel)
    bpy.utils.register_class(ColorItem)
    bpy.types.Scene.colors = \
        bpy.props.CollectionProperty(type=ColorItem)

    for i in range(5):
        bpy.context.scene.colors.add()

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(ColorPanel)
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(ColorItem)
    del bpy.types.Scene.colors

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

Adapted the SimplePanel Template to show 5 color pickers. Access and set their values via

bpy.context.scene.colors[index].color = (0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0)

Additional infos:

Here is the link to the official  api documentation. In the section quickstart introduction you will find an example of an operator.

You can find a template in the text editor -> Templates -> Python -> SimpleOperator.

In your case you simply wrap your code in a function which will be called from the operators execute method:

def main(context):
    context.scene.color_prop.h += 0.125
    context.scene.color_prop.h %= 1.0
    #...

Define an operator (see the SimpleOperator template), and extend the panel's draw method:

def draw(self, context):
    #...
    row = self.layout.row()
    row.operator("object.simple_operator")

Here is a full listing copy & pasted together.

These sections #1, #2 from the docs might be helpful.


Making rounded dips in cylinder I've just started to learn blender and try to model an old style coke bottle. The basic model is done:

However I have no idea on how to model these dips around the bottle:

As you can see it's not a flat bevel, each bump flows into the next one. I've tried selecting edges/vertices and moving them inwards but the result is unfortunately not uniform then.

I really hope somebody knows how to do this. Any Ideas?

As you model a glass bottle, you'll probably want to have caustics taking into account all those bumps on a mesh. Hence in this case those parts should be part of geometry and thus modeled.

Extruded base object (circle) has 24 vertices for overall roundness of final mesh provided that additional loops needed for details. Select edge loop where curved bumps will be. Deselect every other vertex of the loop (you can use Checker Deselect for that); use curvature for reference. Selected vertices will represent the rounded bumps of the bottle.
Scale them along normals (Alt+S) and grab in the opposite side from the sticker (so if you work with the loop lower than sticker, grab selection down). Do the same for all other loops where you'd like to have roundish bumps.
Make sure to convert all other edge loops into perfect circles for preserving correct form of the bottle (select them one by one and choose Circle operator from W > Looptools menu; note that Looptools addon should be enabled for that). After adding Subsurf modifier (on the 2-nd level of subdivision) scaled parts will be subdivided good enough so non-planar Ngons won't cause any problems here.

Most likely you'll also want to add thickness to the mesh in order to have better caustics. The only thing with adding Solidify modifier in this case is that you'll need to apply it and then use W > Looptools > Circle once more, but this time on the edge loops created with modifier (they will be copied from the outer curved loops and hence may refract light in an unexpected way).


Blender 2.8 Video editing - annotation Do you know if you can annotate a video in Blender?

I have tried to d + mouse draw, but I need to control when the grease pen stroke is shown.

I am trying to add circles to a video sequence, to bring attention to an area.

Thanks in advance

The annotation tool is an internal tool for the user, it is not for adding visual drawing to the rendered output.

In the VSE, you can add a scene strip, which means you can create a circle using geometry or a grease pencil object in the 3D view and add it to the VSE.

You can also add a single image to the VSE. So you can save a circle as a PNG with a transparent background and add that to the VSE.


How to merge a vertex to an edge? I occasionally have two objects with a vertex overlapping an edge:

My question is how can you create vertices on the edge touching the other vertices, without having to subdivide and merge. In this situation it would be quite simple, but other times it might be more complicated. Is there an addon that can do this?

In case of intersecting meshes Intersect operator could be useful. In this case, Intersect / Knife is the one needed.

Select faces which intersect (or select all faces if convenient).
Press Ctrl + F > Intersect / Knife. Faces were cut, i.e. one from the rightmost cube got 2 new vertices and became an Ngon. However meshes aren't connected yet, because there are 2 pairs of vertices which share the same location.
Remove doubles with W > Remove doubles. Now meshes are connected.

Note: Intersect / Knife tool is accessible starting from version 2.77.


How to make effect of burning objects from Particles? How to make so that Boolean affect on color & shape of particles?
Here's example, I need to create effect so that grass from Particles burns. But grass doesn't change color & shape from Boolean & Dynamic paint like ground does. Particles just disappear when circle narrows.
I guess that for particles need to use not Dynamic paint, but something else. The only thing that comes to my mind is converting particles to mesh, but this is inconvenient variant, especially when particles are animated.
How to make so that Boolean affect on color & shape of particles? Or maybe not Boolean, but something else. In general, how to make effect of burning particles (on the example of burning grass or something similar)?

I dont think there is an easy solution in the direction your heading.
And probaply no easy solutions exists.
But know that Blender understands Python, and with that it should be possible.
If you know the locations of the object replace them, or better use shape keys on them to shrink them. Then be able to move a texture over the object so it turns black from top to bottom. Doing this with python might not be easy, though all actions you do are logged inside
Maybe animation nodes could allow something like this (but i'm not sure).
Generating trees with leaves is one of the goals though.


Selecting a new material slot to selected vertices I have a few vertices selected and would like to change the colour of those vertices with Python script. This means adding a new material slot.

I have tried this script, however it changes all the vertices and not the ones selected.

activeObject = bpy.context.active_object #Set active object to variable
mat = bpy.data.materials.new(name="MaterialName") #set new material to variable
activeObject.data.materials.append(mat) #add the material to the object
bpy.context.object.active_material.diffuse_color = (0.121583, 0.144091, 0.8, 1)

One way to do this:

import bpy

mat = bpy.data.materials.new("PinkMaterial")
mat.diffuse_color=((0.8,0.2,0.8))
bpy.context.object.data.materials.append(mat)

for p in bpy.context.object.data.polygons:
    if p.select:
        p.material_index = len(bpy.context.object.material_slots)-1

This would add a pink material to the active object and then go through it's faces to see which ones are selected and then change their material index to the last one.

There might be more efficient ways to do this as well.


Blender 2.77 cycles. Smoke generation stops working when I click on flow I'm trying to get fire/smoke working in Blender. I have Blender 2.77 running on Windows 7. To reproduce:

Create a new file (Ctrl+N)
switch to Cycles Render
Select the cube
Choose Object > Quick effects > Quick Smoke in 3D View header.
Press Alt+A to play animation. Smoke appears as expected
Go to the Physics tab on the newly created smoke object. Click on "Flow".

Smoke disappears and doesn't appear again when the animation is played again.

For smoke to work you need at least two things:

A Smoke Flow Object, the source where the smoke is generated from.

A Smoke Domain that contains the smoke simulation.

When you select an object and apply Quick smoke, a new object appears. That "newly created object" is the smoke domain.

If you convert the smoke domain to flow, the smoke simulation will not work. To change the flow settings select the original object.


CUDA out of memory when I have plenty I have a NVidia GTX 1060 6GB Edition GPU. When I try rendering my scene, I get that error. It peaks at only 5GB, meaning I still have 1GB of memory left. However, I'm still getting the error. I could just render with my CPU, and I have, however, I really want to use my GPU because it renders like 3x faster. Any ideas that could help?

I guess I really am out of Memory then, kinda sucks. I just ran another render on my cpu and it hit like 12 Gb. I'm gonna get two 1080's in SLI at some point, so that should solve it


Shortcut to switch between Rendered View, Material View & Solid View? At the moment, I have to go down at the header to keep on changing views in my 3d view port. I would like to speed up my workflow, could you help me out and let me know what is the shortcut to switch between Render View, Material View * Solid View?

Thank you,
W

Switch Between Viewport Shading

Press Z --- Wireframe

Press Shift+z --- Render view

Press Alt+z --- Texture view

For Solid view its a Toggle key. When you press same key (repeat key) it will turn to solid view.


Separate Mesh for each Letter I need to convert each letter of a text object into an individual mesh. I have tried to convert the text into a mesh and then separate by loose parts, however, that has the unintended side-effect that all i-dots, colons, etc. get separated from their main parts. I could merge these manually, but that would be rather cumbersome. Is there a way to create exactly one mesh per letter?

Install animation nodes addon, there's a text > object separate node that works as an operator...

more info:

you just need one node, that acts as an operator, press separate or update...
the algorithm counts the number of splines on each glyph to do it correctly;
node also allows you to have text / curve or mesh output


What is the reason to make quad or triangle faces on a surface? Following the answers to my last posted question I incorporated the answers and reworked the exercise to create a 3D Logo.  This post shows what I did to make it work.

You can see that I remade the closed complex shapes and pressed "F" to make a face on them.

That worked fine, then after selecting everything I went to the Front Ortho view.

The extrusion worked just fine.  But there are no Quad or Triangle faces

Are they needed?  How do I make them?

Thanks again,

Randy Van Nostrand

There are several reasons to use only quads in your models.

some modelling tools only work with quads. eg Loop cut will cut quads but stop at a triangle or ngon.
triangles and ngons can deform badly when animated.
ngons are automatically broken into triangles to be drawn to screen, particularly on non flat ngons, these may not be cut in ideal locations causing noticeable shading artefacts.
the subsurface modifier also doesn't subdivide ngons very well.
generated textures can also suffer from bad co-ordinate generation on ngons.

For flat surfaces shaded in a single colour you can get away with leaving ngons in your final model if you want to.

To get quads you need to cut your mesh up where you want the new edges. you can select two vertices and press J to cat a new edge between them or you can use the knife tool K to cut new edges and vertices where you want them.

An easy way that can work under some conditions is to use the remesh modifier. Once you are happy with the settings you can apply the modifier to make the new mesh permanent.


Create Indian dish 'idli' texture and rough edges? This is the image of the dish I am trying to make in Blender, I am having hard time with the texture and randomness of it as all the pores are not exactly circular.

I also needed help with the rough and irregular edges.

Simple speaking, with basic sponge textures or wall pores textures we can make idli textures.

found a "sponge texture" from google images.

then converted it to blackandwhite image using Photoshop

and used that blackandwhite image to covert it to NormalMap image Filters>3D>NormalMap(or)BumpMap.

Made a simple scene containing a plate and idli. Making chutney would take quite a time.. so just added a plate and idli. Then unwarped idli and added above textures and hence this final render fellow indian.

or for detailed texturing try what @Robin Betts said in comments section.


What shader do I use to have a shadeless cartoony look on my model? Can anyone recommend shaders / materials to use so my model looks something like this? I need it to look like this in Unity as well.

I want the game to look something cartoony and "shadeless". Here's another sample reference

Does a shader / material like this exists?
Thank you!

The typical setup for a toon shader is as follows:

Although, your image does seem to have SOME shading, so maybe something more like this?


Blender2Xplane texturing? I attempted to model my own plane to use inside the Xplane flight sim. I have done everything correctly inside Blender and Xplane's Plane Maker. The plane flies with the model inside the program, but the only part I cannot figure out is how to get the image texture to show up. I've watched danklaue's youtube tutorials, yet all he does to accomplish this is assign the texture to the UV unwrap. I assume this problem might be solved by linking the texture to the UV unwrap without nodes, but even if this happened to be the solution, I don't know how to do this in Blender 2.80. I don't think Eevee's texture editor (with nodes OFF) allows you to have an image for the base color, and Cycles only uses nodes in the first place. If anyone knows this solution please let me know. I've noticed the little documentation on this for the present Xplane2Blender so I doubt many people know how to do this. I apologize if this is the wrong place to post this question. Thanks in advance.

I'm Ted. I'm the developer of XPlane2Blender. The best place for this type of question is GitHub's issues page.

XPlane2Blender used to have a feature where it would use a material's texture slots to automatically fill in the TEXTURE path. Blender 2.80 removed Texture Slots so now while a similar feature is being implemented, we're just having people put in the relative file path by hand. Remember not to use spaces. You'll find that in the OBJ settings.

In this image, some Empty or Mesh or other Blender Object has been marked as exportable (or "Root Object" in old 2.79 UI). The name is my_example_object, and its TEXTURE is my_texture.png

XPlane2Blender doesn't check that this file exists so that is up to you.

Read the release notes pages for recent releases of XPlane2Blender as it is currently the best source of documentation on new features.


Is it possible to change the smoke colour without clearing the cache? Is it possible to change the smoke colour attribute in Cycles, without having to clear the cache and rebake?

This does not appear to be possible.
Hopefully in future the smoke system will output a mix factor for the smoke instead of a color, as then the colors of the smoke would be fully editable. Currently the output is the actual RGB color so this is not possible.


IK lagging behind to point at target bone I am using Blender 2.75.  So I have an armature for a pig.  I used IK to have the legs always bend (a certain direction using a pole target) to connect with the target bone.  I am pretty sure this is all set up right.  I have animated the location (only) of the target bone in an attempt to make a walking animation.

However, it seems the IK is lagging behind when changing what frame of animation I am on.  This is also tricky because in the final animation, I will be using an online render farm, which sends one frame to each render node, and does not "play" the animation up until that point, only says, "jump to this frame and render it".

In the attached gif you can see that I have to set the frame twice to make the IK point to the target bone properly.  How would I force the IK to not lag behind and point to the target on its first try?

Note: I'm not worried about the IK not stretching to reach the target bone when it is too far away, that is intentional.

Here is the blend file that I used to record the gif with (with keyframes):

You've got many dependency cycle into your Rig, as you can see on console :

This is because you add a limit distance between your IK target and bone that have the IK constraint.
Delete your limit distance constraint, and everything will be find.

(Why exactly you added this constraint ?)


Auto weight painting error Hi very new to rigging a model and have no idea whats causing the error.
I've tried recalculating normals and removing doubles but nothing has worked

here's a link to file
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3wbhbfvr52bl719/squidmonkey%20test.blend?dl=0

I just had a look at your model. It fails to parent the base mesh properly with automatic weights and this usually happens for a number of reasons.

It's because there are errors with your base mesh. Looking around the neck you'll find quite a few holes in the mesh. These need to be filled in being careful not add interior edges or faces.

Around the hand I found a few more holes.

I assume, what you did was to sculpt the monkey and then decimate it.

Decimation basically decimates your mesh (destroys it). So it's no good really for animation.

Honestly the best way to approach this is to prepare your model for rigging by retopologising it correctly. So you want to avoid triangles but also make sure there are no duplicate vertices, holes in the mesh and that there are no extra parts of geometry overlapping each other. Retopology really helps us have a lot of control over our mesh to ensure that we don't have errors.

A clean quaded topology also allows for nice animation, so focus on getting nice edge loops around where the limbs fold and that the vertices are spaced out nicely and this will prevent any ugly artifacts from appearing during animation.

If you'd prefer to skip the retopology of your model (which I don't really recommend although it'll save you time), really check your mesh carefully for holes and inside faces and overlapping geometry. This actually might take more time than just retopologising it. The mesh looks quite difficult to manage as a modellor (also considering that the mesh consists of mainly triangles and many ngons).

However, to retopogise it, start with a plane and turn on snapping to face and apply a shrinkwrap modifier to the plane. Then start extruding one edge along your model.

That's the basic explanation but I suggest checking out youtube for some good tutorials on retopology.

NOTE: After applying the Remesh modifier, I was able to Parent the mesh to the Armature with automatic weights. So it's definitely that there are some issues with the mesh.

I hope this helps you and good luck with it!


Smooth transition between two materials I need to make the transition smoother between the 2 different colored objects in my scene, somehow like one of the colors fades into the other one, while still keeping the line between them.

In Blender Render engine you may achieve it using the material nodes.

Being in Edit Mode unwrap your mesh (press U-->Project From View).

Create some materials- basic Orange and Pink materials (the ones you want to blend), Transition (this material'll be used for blending the ones above using material nodes) and Gradient (this'll be used to create a gradient texture for blending materials).

With Gradient material selected go to the Texture header, set the texture type to Blend, check the Ramp checkbox in Colors panel, then press the Linear and Vertical buttons in Blend panel. Also set the Mapping coordinates to UV. Your gradient texture is now ready.

Now select the Transition material and press Use Shader Nodes button.

Go to Node Editor and set up nodes as pictured below. First add two Material nodes- the Orange one and Pink one (Shift+A-->Input-->Material) and mix it using MixRGB node (Shift+A-->Color-->MixRGB). Use the Texture node (previously created Gradient texture) as a factor for blending. Plug in the UV output of the Geometry node (Shift+A-->Input-->Geometry) to the Vector input of the Texture node as shown below.

Now you may manipulate the transition between materials (go to the Texture header of the Gradient material and play with the sliders in Colors panel for different results).


How to separate 2 faces connects by an edge I want to separate these so I can put one edge over the other later on.

Go to 'Edit Mode' and select the edges that u want to separate. Now select Alt + M. Then select Faces by Edges option. That will do the trick.


Only part of the scene renders I'm a newbie to Blender. First, thanks to all that help novices. I'm learning Blender Internal first.

My first project was to merge two existing shared blender files: first was an animation of 600 frames (20th Century Fox Intro). Then I imported shared 3D automobile objects. The merged scene (in 4 layers) looks fine in solid, material and even rendered VIEWS. But when I render the camera image (in BI or even in Cycles), the top half of the 3D scene is gray. Seems I have a solid gray plane (just above my grid plane) cutting off the image. But there is no plane object there. See my screen capture slice below.

I'm on a 2009 iMac with ATI Radeon HD Graphics (512MB), 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and 16GB of RAM.  Couldn't find a similar reported problem here or on the web.

QUESTION ANSWERED. I had checked for render borders, and camera clip distance and objects in Layer 1 blocking camera view and have determined it came in with the automobile in Layer 4. I couldn't see anything just above the grid floor. Then I noticed "Plane 022" in the Outliner with the Viewport (eyeball) disabled. Once I enabled it, I found it was a pan to help reflect light onto the automobile from the creator's original light sources. Only then could I see it. "X"! "Plane 022" gone and my BI render looks great now. Thanks for the help. Sorry about posting the sample image twice. Not used to this Blog.
Cheers.


How to know which side of a face is being rendered? I have a plane that I divide using knife in some faces.
Using nodes, I Apply a material to each side of the face.

I want to know which side of each face is being captured by the camera?... I mean, which side is being rendered?

Actually, I tried to capture the order of the vertices of each of the faces, the normal of each face, try to get the Reversed faces because have a negative dot product value and many ideas!., but nothing work.

do you know some solution?

You need 2 vectors for calculating this:

A = the face normal
B = a vector pointing from camera to the face center (face.calc_center_median(), = point of face normal origin)

You get both from the python API from mesh or bmesh data and from Camera object location.

Then you calculate a Dot product between these 2:

from mathutils import Vector

C = A.dot(B)

if the dot product is negative, the vectors point towards each other (face is oriented towards the camera)
if the dot product is 0, the vectors are orthogonal and the face is not visible
if the dot product is positive, the vectors point in the same direction and you see the backface from camera

You can see how dot product works here: www.falstad.com/dotproduct/

Alternatively to solve this inside shaders you can use the Geometry node. In Cycles the socket is named Backfacing, in Blender Internal the socket is named Front/Back. You can have a material that chooses from 2 materials based on this mix factor. This approach will dynamically switch between materials even if the camera is animated, this does not happen if you assign materials with script and then during animation the camera angles change.


The hair of my character gets left behind I have downloaded a character from Mixamo and imported into Blender. I then deleted the armature and created a new armature so that I could use the Rigify addon. Everything works great except the hair is left behind. I'm sure I selected it when I parented the model to the armature. https://imgur.com/gallery/sbUgf25

Go to modifiers section and rearrange your particles modifier. I mean place it before or after armature modifier. One of it should work. Hope that helps!


Why are there holes in the icing? I tried to follow the new Blender 2.8 tutorial from Blender Guru.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OTX3ZdYvEA

When entering "Sculpting" with the icing there were suddenly alot of holes in it. Why is this?

Alt + H  in Edit Mode before apply modifier and you can solve this problem.


Can I extrude a plane into a half cylinder? Is it possible to take a 2D object like this rectangle and extrude it into a half-cylinder?
And, could it be done so that a pattern on the former is transferred to the surface of the latter? Not by simply draping the pattern over the half-cylinder, but projecting each point upwards from the plane to the cylinder's surface.
Because the height of any point on the curved surface is related to the horizontal distance from the long edge in a predictable manner (Pythagoras' theorem) this feels like it should be a simple process, but I cannot work out a method.

Or you can use proportional editing.

Get into front view (View > Viewpoint > Front)
Move the middle vertices by your 'radius' (that'd be 100 mm in my example)

Check ✓ Proportional editing
Set Falloff > Sphere
Set Size to 'your radius' (0,1 corresponds to 100 mm)
Check ✓ Projected 2D


Rescaling in the VSE yields low resloution, blurry images I want one segment of my video to be zoomed in, showing only part of the original images. I managed to create that effect by scaling using the VSE Transform Tools addon, but that made the resolution for those parts decrease.

The original images are big enough to maintain a good resolution, but the transform seems to be made on the strips where it is set to 720x576 (that I want as the final result). Is there a way to avoid this?

-- Edit to include images --

This is how it looks after scaling in Blender (blurry as if it only uses part of the image data):

This is the original image cropped and scaled to the same size in Gimp:

Screenshot of how the rendered animation looks:

It seems that it's not possible (or at least not easy) to pack image sequences into a .blend file, but here is the file + one image:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0ckrx13hl6f3jnm/AABk7Km4Ofqu1YE_RtFTv7HUa?dl=0

Short Answer:

Besides the fact the the gimp is using a much different algorithm to re-scale the image, the issue (as pointed out by @TheBeachcomber) is that the image is getting rescaled twice: downscaled to fit the canvas and rescaled up using the transform strip.

Now off to the Long Answer:

When you bring an image into the VSE using the default settings, it gets re-scaled to fit the canvas set by the Render Dimensions on the project.

Lets replace your image with a resolution chart from wikimedia, its dimensions are 2000 pixels x 1545 pixels:

As you can see all of the image gets squeezed into a canvas of 720 x 576:

When you add a transform strip and resize it like you are doing, the transformation is not from the original image, but from the bottom layer, meaning the squeezed image.

Even changing the interpolation from bilinear to bicubic doesn't make the image any better. It will take away some of the blockiness, but will be as low quality as before (clik on the images to enlarge):

Now off to a convoluted (and non-ituitive) solution!

Instead of resizing you need to Crop your image (!!!, I know, Crazy...)

Crop is done in pixels so you need to guestimate how many pixels from the edges you need to loose.

The re-sizing is done from the original resolution of the file.

If the change is not evident please enlarge these images to see a side by side comparison:

As an alternative, you can force blender not to re-size your original image by enabling Image Offset for the strip. Then the image will be used on a 1 to 1 pixel ratio (no re-scaling). Find then the area you want to use and then you can use the transform effect strip to re-scale. The re-sizing will not be as extreme, since youi are using the original resolution of the file.

The limitation of this last approach is that the information available for the trasnformation is still limited by the frame on the undelaying strip. If you wanted tho show something beyond it, that information will not be available.

Now in your file, It's hard to see, but think that cropping is going to give you the best quality:


Very bad performance on Cycles OpenCL using Ubuntu 18.04 and Radeon VII We've got a new render machine for our Company. Threadripper 1950x + dual Radeon VII + 64 gb of ddr4-3200 RAM. (Only one Radeon installed now for testing)

Our CPU testing went flawless. With great results that easily surpassed any of our (older) Xeon based systems.

For our GPU testing I installed the latest amdgpu-pro driver using --opencl=rocm but the performance was really bad. I'm talking minutes to render the default cube after kernel compilation was finished.

I also tried the non pro driver and tried to use --opencl=legacy to no avail.

I had more success on another system (ryzen 1500x) and a Radeon VII. My next step is to swap haddrives and rule out any kind of hardware problem.

All in all I found about 8 of so useful resources about enabling Vega on Ubuntu 18.04 for Blender. But non of them were complete or completely up to date.

Are there any pointers to a definitive guide to set this up? Or any idea why current performance is so bad?

EDIT:

Back at the office so here it goes. I put on the Barcelona demo with standard settings and it finished in 24 minutes and 10 seconds.

For my installation I used this as my primary resource:
https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-the-latest-amd-radeon-drivers-on-ubuntu-18-04-bionic-beaver-linux

Installing both the iobaf/graphics-drivers PPA and the official AMD GPU driver. I stayed clear from including DRI 3 for Xorg as that made my system unresponsive on my first attempt.

Afterwards I read that VEGA II should use the openCL rocm so I tried to install that. Using instructions from the amd website (https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/faq/gpu-643) I tried to sudo apt install -y rocm-amdgpu-pro but there was no installation candidate. So I grabbed the latest rocm version from github.

I also found that I'm using AMDs driver version 19.10 on the threadripper build. But iirc the Ryzen build used the 18.50 install. I'll try to install that one next and report back with my findings.

EDIT2:

So I installed the same kernel & amdgpu driver version as on the Ryzen build, but performance is not impacted.

3 sidenotes:
 - the Radeon VII shows up in Blender on Ryzen as, Radeon Vega II while the other one, Threadripper, shows up as Vega II. Which is somewhat odd since they are the exact same cards from the exact same brand ordered within a week from each other.
 - in the ~/.AMD folder on Ryzen I only have a GLCache folder. On Threadripper there also is the CLCache_rocm folder.
 - I suspected that I'm not running as OpenCL=legacy as on the Ryzen build, so I commented the line in /etc/profile.d/rocm.sh that I set as part of the AMD install instructions. Now OpenCL is missing from Blender.

EDIT 3:
Installed AMDGPU-18.50 using --opencl=pal as said in the amd documentation for systems of Vega 10 and newer. I get the same glitches as on the Ryzen build: crashing Gnome shell, being forced to use Wayland and some weird artefacts. Performance however is still not impacted.

For now I' will revert to the newest kernel with the latest AMD driver, but any help is really, really appreciated!

Edit 4:
Swapped the harddrive, and got instant performance boost. I'm dd'ing the disk now. Does bug me that I'm not able to pinpoint where the root cause lies.

Have you tried updating Ubuntu to 18.04.2 with HWE (4.18 Kernel) and AMD's most recent 19.20 driver?

A few months ago I had issues getting my Dual RX Vega64 setup working (on a Ryzen 1700 system with Ubuntu 18.04): Just a single GPU worked fine, but when I installed both GPUs, Blender refused to use any of them for OpenCL rendering with Cycles.

Some debugging and writing small test programs later, I figured out the AMD's driver refused to open an OpenCL-context on the Dual-GPU-setup when already an OpenGL-context had been opened before. (With just a single GPU installed this worked fine, though.)

Since then I updated my Ubuntu to 18.04.2 with HWE (Linux 4.18 kernel, instead of 4.15 without the HWE) and updated my driver to the new 19.20 version, and now my Dual-GPU-setup works fine out-of-the-box as if nothing ever happened (with rendering speed-up of 50-100% compared to my single-GPU-setup).


Eevee Texture Edge Problem I'm doing a few tests on Eevee because I'm migrating from Cycles to Eevee. In this particular test, I realized that the edge of my texture is being rendered differently (and inaccurately) with Eevee.

I used these two textures, they are exactly the same except for their colors:

And this is my node setup:

The idea is to use second image texture's alpha to allow me to change the color of the cube without affecting the text's color (Yes, I know there are easier ways to do it, I just want to test out the difference).

So these are the differences:

I noticed that for eevee the text's tiny grey edge became bigger when the camera is further away from the object. As for cycles, it is rendered correctly because the edges are small and "disappeared" when the camera is further away.

Looks like the edges were pixelated and enlarged in Eevee. Any idea on what is happening and what should be tweaked so that it would render similar to Cycles?

Thank you!

This is the blender file if you wish to try it out:
EEVEE_ImageTextureEdgeTest.blend

If you want to avoid smoothing caused by interpolation, set the Texture Interpolation to closest instead of linear. Then both results in Eevee and Cycles look very similar.

Eevee

Cycles

Eevee

Cycles


How to create a curve from a mesh? I have a quite complex mesh object (a spaghetti like structure, see image ).
What I need is a curve/path that does through the core of that structure.
Here is the file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Glmiqkxuw7MGCYJA4PSxLw1MF4X_Ntv0/view?usp=sharing
I would really appreciate any ideas on how to achieve that.
Thanks in advance!

So what you can do to convert it to a curve:

Go in Edit mode, as it is triangulate, select all and untriangulate with AltJ:

Also, you have ripped edges so AltM to merge by distance:

Select an edge loop, separate with P:

Go into the Object menu to convert the mesh to curve:

To simplify the curve, you can enable the Simplify Curves addon, then in Edit mode press ShiftA > Curve Simplify, in the Operator box choose an Error value of 1 and Output > Bezier, it's going to create a simplified version of your curve:

Press V if you ever want to switch from Automatic handles to Aligned:

Now you can do whatever you want with this curve:


Methods of applying bumpiness to materials I've been following some tutorials, and I've noticed several different ways to apply overall bumpiness to an object.  So, first of all, what is the difference between plugging a procedural texture straight into the displacement in the material output verses plugging the same texture into the normal of a shader?  Next, what is the purpose of using a bump node, when you can just plug the same texture straight into the displacement/normal?  Thank you for your help.

Short answer: Use the bump node and just forget that displacement output is even there.

Long answer: Several years ago, Cycles was very young. Being open source and a much desired project, many people were using it and writing tutorials with it before it was anywhere near feature complete. Back then, it didn't have per-shader normals. What it did have was an experimental displacement feature. This displacement feature came with a function to offset the object normal based on the displacement map. This can be used to adjust the normal for fine detail in the disp map that couldn't be represented with actual geometry. You can also use it for bump mapping by just disabling the vertex displace part entirely. Since there was no other bump mapping support and the displacement didn't work 100% right (and still doesn't) the default behavior was bump-only. So people just used it as a bump map socket, and made tutorials as such.

Some while later, Cycles got per-shader normals. These could support 3D vectors, allowing true normal map support. Being 3D and per-shader, you could also do more complicated effects with them, like smooth gloss over a rough surface, or combining normal and bump maps. In order to support grayscale bumpmaps with this new glorious system, the bump node was created which could take grayscale heightmaps and convert them into normal vectors like a normal map would output. It's not that different from the various "create normal map" filters for Photoshop, GIMP, etc.

Fast forward to today: Per-shader normals work pretty well, you can use them for bump and normal mapping, and any combo of the two. The displacement socket is still there, and it is still normally locked in "bump-only" mode. (devs are waiting for opensubdiv to go with it before finishing up that feature, as I recall). If you want actual displacement or that cool displacement w/fine detail bump, you can enable experimental features, then go to the mesh panel and change the displacement type to "true" or "both". But normally it is set to "bump" which is pretty much the same as the bump node, but with less flexibility. And there's a chance the displacement output might change behavior in a future release.

So there's no real reason to use it. Or, almost no real reason. Since the displacement-bump effect works on the actual object normal rather than the normal used to evaluate a shader, the results of the bump show up in the normal pass, which isn't true of the per-shader normals. And as mentioned, there's the experimental actual displacement. If you don't care about those, though, just ignore that output.


Setting bouncing curve in graph editor Is it possible to modify the bouncing and elatic curves in the graph editor ?

For example, modifying the number of bounces, the amplitude, ... ?

Short answer: Not much.
The amplitude is simply whatever time you let between the two keyframes. But you can't edit anything else.
I'd recommend making your own bounces anyway. Unless you just need a quick and dirty solution and don't have much expectations, doing it manually is simpler, and it's not hard to do.
I like to make a first arc, set the apex key to Autoclamped interpolation if it isn't already (use the V shortcut), and the low keys to Vector.
Then I duplicate this arc as many times I want, and I adjust the height of the curve. Scale the apex keys to adjust the timing, and use Free vectors if you really need fine-tuning frame by frame.


How do I animate rotating 90 degrees, then rotate back to the original place? I have no clue how to do any intricate things. (like adding a texture or animating.) I want to spin a more or less rectangular object 90 degrees, twice.

You need to use basic keyframing.

Got to the start of your animation, it I>Rotation move ahead in your timeline, rotate it by 90o and I>Rotation. Move the the next location of the spin animation, and repeat the above steps.


How can I make a smoke simulation look like water bubbles? I'm working on a scene about a guy diving into the ocean, something like this:

I tried particles but this looks unnatural at rendering and it occurred to me to do it with smoke simulation. I found this tutorial, but it is not for blender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKIdlmofLZc

I did some simple tests, but I can't give the smoke a water material or get close to that look.

In the example image there are visible large bubbles as well as the masses of small smoke-like bubbles and it's helpful to replicate the larger bubbles to realistically distribute the smoke as well as adding to the effect.

The standard fluid sim is best for simulating surfaces or droplets of liquid - it's not really suited for modelling cavities or bubbles within a body of liquid so we can instead use it to simulate the bubbles within the liquid rather than the liquid itself.

For this, create a fluid domain and set the object to be an 'inflow' - as it travels through the domain it will leave a trail of fluid behind it. Disable gravity in the scene and set it in the Fluid World properties to a reduced positive value rather than the default '-9.81' for standard gravity and try different Viscosity settings to get the desired behaviour of the droplets.

Adjust the Inflow velocity to be close to the direction and velocity of the inflow object. This will have the effect of the fluid appearing to be 'dragged' along with the moving object.

To make the fluid droplets appear as bubbles in a liquid (rather than droplets of liquid in air), choose a refractive index < 1.0. For example, a refractive index of 0.8 will give the impression of air bubbles in a liquid with a refractive index of 1.25 (ie, 1.0 / 0.8 = 1.25).

IOR = 1.25 - liquid

IOR = 0.8 - bubbles in a liquid

For the multitude of tiny bubbles, add a smoke domain and set the fluid domain to emit the smoke. This will result in the 'smoke' eminating from the larger bubbles. This will mean that the 'smoke' follows the paths of the larger bubbles, producing a more believeable pattern in the path of the falling object.

For the material of the 'smoke' (material assigned to the smoke domain), use the density to control the scattering as with normal 'smoke' but omit the usual Volume Absorbtion (or set it to a much smaller density) to allow more light through the volume as for tiny bubbles.

Ensure the lighting is from the top surface of the water and optionally add an absorbtion (slightly blue) to the 'world' or an additional mesh covering the whole volume of water.

Keyframe the Enabled checkbox of the fluid 'inflow' object so that it is enabled when the object hits the 'surface' of the liquid and is disabled a short while after - when the bubbles stop coming off the recently submerged object. You could also keyframe the smoke density emitted from the fluid domain to control the amount of 'smoke' emitted as the bubbles 'calm down' as the velocity of the object decreases.

This can produce the following result :

This method certainly isn't perfect (or physically accurate) and requires a fair amount of manual tweaking to get the desired effect (to set the velocity of inflow for the fluid sim, to enable and disable the inflow of the fluid, etc.), but it can produce quite pleasing results for stills and even reasonable animated results. Use higher resolution for the fluid and smoke simulations for more accurate/smaller bubbles. Add a volumetric absorption shader in the world to add murkiness, etc.

To take this further and produce better results you could create a separate 'inflow' object rather than using the submerged object directly itself. This would allow more control of the volume of bubbles released and where those bubbles are concentrated on the submerged object. Set the submerged object as an Obstacle in the simulation for the bubbles to pass around it rather than through it. Also, add a mesh at the surface of the body of liquid set to fluid 'outflow' to remove the bubbles from the domain once they reach the top.

Also, you could use fluid 'control' objects to direct the flow of bubbles - to stop them spreading out so much, add turbulence, etc., to produce a more believable effect. Similarly, play around with different forces in the smoke simulation to affect how the micro-bubbles behave (ie, wind, turbulance, vortex, etc.).

You may also want to add some variation to the light shining through the upper surface of the water to simulate ripples in the surface for dappled, uneven lighting.

Blend file attached - bake the Fluid Domain first, then the Smoke Domain, before rendering.


Blender Scripting: ERROR: too much data in this layer, compared to elements in mesh, skipping! I am working on a Blender script that does rendering of FBX file based on the software it was originally generated in Eg. 3D Max, CLO, AutoCAD etc. The script works perfect for all the FBX other than the one generated by CLO. I get following error
ERROR: too much data in this layer, compared to elements in mesh, skipping!
I did try bpy.ops.import_scene.fbx(filepath=file_input, use_custom_props=False) but no success!
Can someone help me to understand what this error mean and what would be solution?
Thanks

This error handling was originally introduced in commit rBAde7d0111100f as a fix for T43718. This issue appears to be that the file contains more entries in the FBX layer data than there are elements of e.g. vertices, edges, polygons or polyloops. If the handling of the FBX importer is correct, then this is an improperly written FBX file. Blender will try to skip the wrongly formatted data.
You should check if CLO has released an update that fixes the issue and if not, export to a different format. If they provide a way to report bugs I would suggest you contact them so that they are aware of the issue.


How can I make part of my object glow? How can I achieve this type of illumination?

This is my result, and it isn't similar as image above

Can anyway tell me the scene setup, and material node setup?
Thanks

This type of effect is not possible using cycles directly,instead we can approximate it using post production technique.

Using a node tree like this:


Object not outlined in Viewport despite Outline Selected enabled I'm working on some models someone else made as part of a project. The .blend files they've given me have several objects that get no selection outline in the viewport despite Outline Selected being checked. Other objects work normally. I assume there must be something else that can cause an object to not be outlined, on a per object basis.

Can anyone tell me what this might be? I cannot find any differences between the settings of objects that do and don't have selection outlines.

I went around and around with this for a bit today and the solution for me was to click the button to the left of the 'Overlays' pulldown.  The tooltip reads "Display overlays like gizmos and outlines".  This did the trick.

Seems like a silly place to bury the toggle for that functionality, but what do I know.


How to detect if a vse strip is used in conjunction with an effect strip with python? Moving strips which are used in conjunction with an effect strips will cause errors if moved(with python) without the effect strips, and most of the effect strips can't themselves be moved because their frame_final_start/end values can't be set. So I need to detect if a strip(ex. movie) is used in conjunction with an effect strip ex. as part of a cross dissolve. How do I do that?

All effect strips that have locked frame values have the 'input_1' attribute (which is set to another strip), so detecting a strip of this type is as simple as:

if hasattr(strip, 'input_1'):

You can also check for transition effects by looking for 'input_2' in the same way.


Chroma key, translate forground, retrieve video from sequence editor I am following this tutorial:

https://youtu.be/gKZ1tOf2daI?t=527

How to translate the foreground video (blond girl) to the left of the background image ?
I used a Translate Node, but coupling this node with a Scale node (to modify the size of the foreground movie) leads to bad results, essentially, the mask only select a little part of the foreground image (only the nose for instance). Maybe I should respect some order between scale node and translate node but I didn't find a good solution.
In the video editing tab, I created a movie in the movie sequence editor.
I would like to use this movie as a foreground image. What node should I use in the compositing tab to do so ? (this movie is just a sequence of images, but it is easy to choose the time where to change the image with the movie sequence editor).

Here is my node editor:

Here are the two images (among 6) that I want to use as a foreground:

Part 1: The Mask node is (usually) see below rendered at Project dimensions. If your image is not the same size as the Blender project then the mask will not fit. Even if you have drawn it to match in the MCE or UV Image editor.

In this image notice that the mask was drawn to fit around the cube but the rendered version is to small.

Use Scale node with Render Size selected, and choose Fit if the aspect ratio of the image is different to the render dimensions.

Notice that the Mask node can be in Scene Size...

*...or you could make it a predetermined size (to match your source media)

To move the keyed image around, first use the Set Alpha node then the Transform node. You can choose to filter these transformations with Bicubic (better quality).

Also you should use an Alpha Over node to combine a keyed image, instead of a Mix node.

Answering Part 2: You cannot send the output of the VSE to the compositor, sorry. You would have to render it first or copy the values (from the VSE Strip) for frame start and length to a Image/movie node. There is a script that will do this for you. Related Can I add the output of the VSE as input to the node diagram?


Is there any other way to make the animation look like on the image below? I need advice oh how to make connections in my animation - I think it requires rig, or is there any other way to make the animation look like on the image in the comment below.
All I have for now is a cloud of empties, to which I parented the spheres. I would like to add lines (could use some narrow cylinders maybe) to make the connections, so it would be more clear that these are the human characters, not a bunch of dots.
What would be the EASIEST WAY TO MAKE IT? :slight_smile:

Add a bezier curve, select a sphere, shift select the curve, go to edit mode, select one control point and press Ctrl H (Hook to selected object). Repeat for the other control point and the second sphere.
With geometry property Bevel, you can set the diameter of the link.


Bone "Mirror names" function makes bones parented I wanted to ask if this is a normal behavior. SO the problem is I am creating a simple right leg rig with three bones and parent them to the pelvis. Then I mirror it to the left leg. And I have noticed that when I leave the checkbox "Mirror names" unchecked - everything works as usual. But when I want to mirror names(Thigh.l - Thigh.r) - the function works but causes some weird dependence between the bones - they rotate together if I try to rotate any one of them as if their rotation becomes linked. If I rename them - everything works as it should, but if I return to the Blender naming convention Name.l, Name.left - the glitch returns. Can someone tell me what I am doing wrong?

In the 3D View N panel, deactivate the X-Axis Mirror option, it makes the opposite bone move when you move a bone.


Loop Cut and Slide using Python not working I'm trying to use loop-cut and slide in Python.

I've tried the following:
Loop cut and slide using python script in blender
How do I override context for bpy.ops.mesh.loopcut?
Loop Cut and Slide using Python

The best I can get is "no error and no loop cut".  -_-
(new_outsideWall is a procedurally created object)

The following code selects the correct object, enters 3D view, goes to edit mode, does NOT generate a loop cut, exits edit mode and returns to previous screen view.  No error at all.

I know it has something to do with either bpy.ops.mesh not targeting the correct mesh, or override not being in the right context. But being a complete noob, I have no idea how to fix, nor can I locate the answer.

Thanks.

In case you're wondering, I'm trying to create a "random building generator" and this is the adjustable cutout for the window textures.  ^_^

old_type = bpy.context.area.type
bpy.context.area.type = 'VIEW_3D'
bpy.context.view_layer.objects.active = new_outsideWall
new_outsideWall.select_set(True)
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()
def view3d_find( return_area = False ):
    # returns first 3d view, normally we get from context
    for area in bpy.context.window.screen.areas:
        if area.type == 'VIEW_3D':
            v3d = area.spaces[0]
            rv3d = v3d.region_3d
            for region in area.regions:
                if region.type == 'WINDOW':
                    if return_area: return region, rv3d, v3d, area
                    return region, rv3d, v3d
    return None, None

region, rv3d, v3d, area = view3d_find(True)

override = {
    'scene'  : bpy.context.scene,
    'region' : region,
    'area'   : area,
    'space'  : v3d
}
bpy.ops.mesh.loopcut_slide(
    override,
    MESH_OT_loopcut = {
        "number_cuts"           : 1,
        "smoothness"            : 0,
        "falloff"               : 'INVERSE_SQUARE',  # Was 'INVERSE_SQUARE' that does not exist
        "edge_index"            : 1,
        "mesh_select_mode_init" : (True, False, False)
    },
    TRANSFORM_OT_edge_slide = {
        "value"           : 0,
        "mirror"          : False,
        "snap"            : False,
        "snap_target"     : 'CLOSEST',
        "snap_point"      : (0, 0, 0),
        "snap_align"      : False,
        "snap_normal"     : (0, 0, 0),
        "correct_uv"      : False,
        "release_confirm" : False,
        "use_accurate"    : False
    }
)
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()
bpy.context.area.type = old_type

if you're still interested, I've found the solution to your problem.
I had more or less the same script for Blender 2.79 and run in the same issue in Blender 2.8x.
All you have to do is adding the variable "object_index" : 0 in MESH_OT_loopcut


How can you copy a weight paint from a Bone in one object to a bone in another object So I have two objects that are identical except for the weight painting. I want to get the properties of the weight paint from one bone onto another bone on the other object. Does anyone know how to solve this? Is it even possible?

Yes it is, even if the two objects are not identical.

Move the two objects in the same spot, select the destination object (or objects), THEN shift select the source, then press F3 (search operator) and type "data", choose the "Transfer mesh data" operator, choose "vertex groups". If the objects are the same all others default options should be OK.

After generating the copied vertex groups, you can rename them accordingly with the names of the new deforming bones