Is it possible to add key frames to initial shape setting? when you first create a shape it asked you what you want to input for creating different variation of a shape, but one you click away those setting are gone forever. Is it possible to insert key frames into those initial settings?

Not as keyframes, but you can create presets when you add a shape, by pressing the + sign right next to the operator presets.

By creating a preset you can recall custom settings.

Note that once you modify an object in any way there is no way to go back and re-edit the parameters of the created object.

Read: Is there any way to edit parameters for an object after it is created?

If you want to create an animation by modifying the shape look into using shapekeys

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/animation/shape_keys/index.html


Using a video from the Video Sequence Editor in the Movie clip editor? So what I want to do is track a video that I have edited in NLE, but when I click on the movie icon whilst in the Motion Tracking layout, the list is blank.

Blender uses a fixed pipeline for rendering the VSE is part of this process. The movie clip editor let you track movies that can be used for modeling, compositing or sequence editing. Movie clip editor is an input for the rendering process.
It is a common mistake people want to do this the other way around, but that isn't possible. Another analogy is the chicken and egg problem. Which of the two came first. For blender (and any other render engine) this is solved by having a hard  cut-over moment. Everything after pressing the F12 cannot be used by something before the F12 button in the same scene.
The render pipeline consist out of Render an scene => Render Compositor => Render VSE => Write image. This is a simplistic version of what really happens but suits the question.
If you want to track a video that is rendered you need to create a second scene where you load the rendered result in the movie clip editor and start tracking.


When dragging a mesh onto a rig, the rigging menu with "with automatic weights" option won't appear I'm using the basic meta rig produced by using the Rigging plugin. I aligned the rig's bones to my model and when i parent the go to rig it the menu with options like "with automatic weights won't appear"

Did you try to apply the rigging in edit mode or object mode? The rig with automatic weights only works correctly in pose mode. Also, you can not select "with automatic weights" in object or edit mode by going to the object tab, because it will not parent the bones correctly. I make this mistake often.


When I render the model it appears without the subdivision surface modifier When I apply subdivision surface modifier for a model I set render and view to 3 then I apply it but when I render the model it appears without the subdivision surface modifier as if it is set to 1 what should I do?

I tried to render it as a video or as a photo I do not see the modifier applied.

You need to apply subdivision surface.Dont leave it click apply and then you can render video or image with sub surface.


Applying a material to a model which has preassigned materials I exported a model from Cinema4d into Blender. I exported it as an FBX file and in the file, there are already predefined textures:

This is how the model looked when I imported it into Blender:

Any idea on how I assign the specific materials to the specific areas such as the head and the body?

Select your object. Tab into edit mode.

Hit P. It will bring up 3 options

Selection
Loose Parts
By Material

Since you are asking about adding materials to different parts, you probably don't already have them.
If th mesh isn't solid (i.e., body, head and hat don't share vertexes) take the "Loose Parts" path.

This will turn each part of the mesh into a separate object. They can be colored separately.

alternately, you can mouse over a part of the mesh and hit L. follow this answer to color the selection.


Outline using freestyle missing some parts of the mesh I use freestyle to add outline but somehow the hair line takes over the face.
And the face seems behind the hair.
No not just the hair its also behind the neck.
Like somehow face mesh doesnt exist :|

Please help me fix this
I dont know where I was wrong :<
Thank you

Sorry guys
Thanks for ur concern
Its my fault from the first place
I used solidify modifier to test the out line and some how flipped the face
and well... accidentally clicked apply


Can't select object in edit mode So I am a beginner in blender and trying to make a tree with sapling tool. I made it, added texture on leaves and I wanted to do the same to the bark but I faced a problem. When I want to select bark in edit mode to unwrap it, I can't. I only see these particles, these threads.
Do you have an idea how to transform the bark into an object and unwrap it?

The tree's bark is a beveled curve, not a mesh object. You have to convert it first. Select the tree in object mode and hit alt+c then select curve to mesh. After you can unwrap it.


Positioning a collection of objects along a curve Is it possible to automatically position a collection of objects along a curve? For example, I have 100 cubes (all are different) and want to distribute them evenly along a Bezier Curve.

I searched for a way to do that, but only found how to use Array and Curve modifiers to repeat one object along a curve. This is not what I'm looking for since in my case all the objects already exists.

Even though I was able to get it to work with a particle system, it was pretty fiddly, so I think I have a better solution using a little scripting one-liner.

Make a backup of your blend file, in case something goes wrong.

Then, assuming your cubes are in a single collection called "Cubes", switch to the Scripting workspace and enter the following one-liner into the Python console:

>>> for n,o in enumerate(bpy.data.collections["Cubes"].objects): o.location.x = n*3
... # <Press Enter> #
>>>

The "3" here spaces the objects 3 meters apart along the x axis.  Use whatever spacing is convenient to keep the objects separated.  We'll adjust the final spacing later.

Now, we're going to create a mesh grid at the origin to control the cubes.  Switch back to the Layout workspace, and feel free to hide or unhide the Cubes collection as necessary.

At the origin, add a Grid mesh with a number of X subdivisions equal to the number of objects (say X=100) and Y=3 subdivisions.
In edit mode, select the whole grid, and "g x 1 " so the left hand edge starts at the origin.
In object mode, scale it up so the X subdivisions line up with the individual cubes in the collection.  The easiest way is:  "s x 1.5 " to scale it from 2 to 3 meters (to match the spacing in the Python one-liner, and then "s x 99 " where 99 is one less than the number of cubes.  Double check that all the X subdivisions are in the centers of the cubes.  Also, scale it down in the Y direction so the edges of the grid lie within the cubes.
Now, VERY IMPORTANT -- Ctrl-A Apply the Scale on the grid.
Back in edit mode, Alt-select the middle Y subdivision edge loop and move it along the X axis slightly.

The idea is to have a triangle of points contained within each cube.  It should look like this:

Now, back in object mode, select all the cubes, Shift-select the grid, and Ctrl-P Parent to Vertex Triangle.  Each cube will be parented to the triangle of three points it's closest to which will control its position and orientation.  Now, you can adjust the spacing by selecting the whole grid in edit mode and scaling it from the world origin pivot.  (Note, scale in all dimensions, not just along the X axis, or the cubes will tend to twist.)

Finally, you can tie the grid to the curve in the usual manner.  The most reliable method seems to be:

Select your curve, and Shift-S Cursor to Selected
Select your grid, and Shift-S Selection to Cursor
Select grid, then shift-select curve, and Ctrl-P Parent -> Follow Path

Now, the curve can be moved, rotated, and scaled in object mode, and the grid w/ cubes will follow along (in particular, the cubes will scale with the curve, so don't do per-axis scaling in object mode).  In edit mode, the curve can be scaled without changing the size of the cubes (they'll slide along the curve to maintain spacing).  To readjust the cube spacing (also without adjusting cube size), size the grid in edit mode.  You may find it helpful to turn on the Edit Mode Display for the Curve modifier in the modifier tab.

Finally, if the cubes start to twist, note that you can edit the grid and pull just one of the three Y subdivisions forward or back to untwist them.  Don't forget to turn off rendering of the grid or give it a transparent material or something.

Here's a 2.80 blend file that shows an example with 100 colored cubes.


Is there any standard way of measuring SSS according to real-life objects? I was wondering if there is a standard way measuring SSS in comparison to objects in the real world like the index of refraction measurements. I know that scale plays a large role in its appearance and intensity but it has to be estimated visually on trial and error. Is there some sort listing of comparisons of the types of material with SSS measurement, such as 'wax=1.000' or 'skin=0.541'or is it better to guess the amount?

I would recommend to base your values on observation instead of guessing. since it's hard to get measured data for something as basic as albedo values, I think it is safe to forget about SSS measurements even if they existed. Correctly exposed and white balanced photographs in similar lighting conditions to your 3d scene should be a really good source of information.


Particle system doesn't affect part of mesh? I'm trying to create a grass effect on a small landscape I've created. My current approach is to use a hair particle system, and style the hairs to look like grass. I've got a simple particle system added, and adjusted a few settings (note: I haven't made the grass green yet. It's just grey for now), but for some reason the particles don't go on certain parts of the mesh:

You can see that to the left of the "lake" there is a lot of missing particles, in triangular areas. Although this screenshot was taken in rendered 3d view, it also has the same issue when I press the render button and do a "true" render. Here's some of the geometry:

Any ideas why it isn't completely covered with particles?

Make sure use modifier stack is checked under the emission rollout of the particle settings.


Blender can't open blend file using Append. Says "Listing Dirs..." but does nothing Maybe I have a bug here or maybe someone has seen this before, which is why I am asking.

I have a .blend file that I purchased, which has groups of trees in it. In the scene with my terrain, when I go to File> Append Shift + F1  and select the tree Blend file, Blender just shows "Listing Dirs..." at the top of the screen and acts like it is doing something, but never does. I would love to be able to solve this problem if I knew what might be preventing Blender from listing the contents of a .blend file. Has anyone seen this before? Anyone know of a solution?

I would love to post the asset but since it is one that I paid for, I have an issue with posting it here for anyone to grab.

Sounds like a bad blend file.

You mentioned having purchased it, so I am assuming you downloaded it from some kind of online store, right? Have your tried downloading it again, file might be incomplete or have become somehow corrupted.

Is the file very big, does it contain a lot of images (like say textures for the trees or something) or very big meshes? It might just take a while to load all information.

Can you open the file directly?


Where is the glass button on the materials list? I was watching a YouTube video and it showed how to get a mesh to look like glass but the surface folder in materials is not there on my bender

Go in to Cycles Render Engine with the Selector at the top of the User Interface then in the Materials tab create a Material and if needed click use Nodes then there should ba a Surface tab below.


How to draw geometry in 3d View window with bgl Since there isn't demo in API docs, so I tried simple script below:

import bpy
from bgl import *
from bpy import context

def draw_line():

    glColor3f(1.0, 0.0, 0.0)
    glLineWidth(10)

    glBegin(GL_LINES)
    glVertex3f(0, 0, 0)
    glVertex3f(0.5 ,0.5, 0.5)
    glEnd()

draw_line()

But it doesn't work, I can't find a line in the viewport.
I want to know the simplest way to draw a line with bgl, not with modal operator. So I tried script like below:

from bgl import *
import bpy

def draw_line():

    glColor3f(1.0, 0.0, 0.0)
    glLineWidth(2.0)
    glBegin(GL_LINES)
    glVertex3f(0.0, 0.0, 0.0)
    glVertex3f(1.0, 1.0, 1.0)
    glEnd()

def draw():
    if bpy.context.area.type == 'VIEW_3D':
        handle = bpy.types.SpaceView3D.draw_handler_add(draw_line, 'WINDOW', 'POST_VIEW')

    bpy.context.area.tag_redraw()

draw()

But it doesn't work, too. What's wrong with it?

Using a modal operator is the simplest and especially the correct way to draw something with bgl.

import bpy
import bgl
import blf
import gpu
from gpu_extras.batch import batch_for_shader

def draw_line_3d(color, start, end):
    shader = gpu.shader.from_builtin('3D_UNIFORM_COLOR')
    batch = batch_for_shader(shader, 'LINES', {"pos": [start,end]})
    shader.bind()
    shader.uniform_float("color", color)
    batch.draw(shader)

def draw_typo_2d(color, text):
    font_id = 0
    blf.position(font_id, 20, 70, 0)
    blf.color(font_id, color[0], color[1], color[2], color[3])
    blf.size(font_id, 20, 72)
    blf.draw(font_id, text)

def draw_callback_3d(operator, context):

    # object locations
    cube_loc = context.scene.objects['Cube'].location
    lamp_loc = context.scene.objects['Light'].location
    camera_loc = context.scene.objects['Camera'].location

    # 80% alpha, 2 pixel width line
    bgl.glEnable(bgl.GL_BLEND)
    bgl.glEnable(bgl.GL_LINE_SMOOTH)
    bgl.glEnable(bgl.GL_DEPTH_TEST)

    # green line
    draw_line_3d((0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.7), camera_loc, cube_loc)

    # red line
    draw_line_3d((1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.7), cube_loc, lamp_loc)

    # blue line
    draw_line_3d((0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.7), lamp_loc, camera_loc)

    bgl.glEnd()
    # restore opengl defaults
    bgl.glLineWidth(1)
    bgl.glDisable(bgl.GL_BLEND)
    bgl.glDisable(bgl.GL_LINE_SMOOTH)
    bgl.glEnable(bgl.GL_DEPTH_TEST)

def draw_callback_2d(self, context):

    bgl.glEnable(bgl.GL_BLEND)
    draw_typo_2d((1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0), "Hello Word")
    bgl.glEnd()

    # restore opengl defaults
    bgl.glLineWidth(1)
    bgl.glDisable(bgl.GL_BLEND)
    bgl.glEnable(bgl.GL_DEPTH_TEST)

class ModalDrawOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "view3d.modal_operator"
    bl_label = "Simple Modal View3D Operator"

    def modal(self, context, event):
        context.area.tag_redraw()

        if event.type in {'RIGHTMOUSE', 'ESC'}:
            bpy.types.SpaceView3D.draw_handler_remove(self._handle_3d, 'WINDOW')
            bpy.types.SpaceView3D.draw_handler_remove(self._handle_2d, 'WINDOW')
            return {'CANCELLED'}

        return {'PASS_THROUGH'}
        #return {'RUNNING_MODAL'}

    def invoke(self, context, event):
        if context.area.type == 'VIEW_3D':
            # the arguments we pass the the callback
            args = (self, context)
            # Add the region OpenGL drawing callback
            # draw in view space with 'POST_VIEW' and 'PRE_VIEW'
            self._handle_3d = bpy.types.SpaceView3D.draw_handler_add(draw_callback_3d, args, 'WINDOW', 'POST_VIEW')
            self._handle_2d = bpy.types.SpaceView3D.draw_handler_add(draw_callback_2d, args, 'WINDOW', 'POST_PIXEL')

            context.window_manager.modal_handler_add(self)
            return {'RUNNING_MODAL'}
        else:
            self.report({'WARNING'}, "View3D not found, cannot run operator")
            return {'CANCELLED'}

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(ModalDrawOperator)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(ModalDrawOperator)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

Documentation: https://www.blender.org/api/current/bgl.html#module-bgl

Blender 2.7x

Click to enlarge
import bpy
import bgl
import blf

def draw_line_3d(color, start, end, width=1):
    bgl.glLineWidth(width)
    bgl.glColor4f(*color)
    bgl.glBegin(bgl.GL_LINES)
    bgl.glVertex3f(*start)
    bgl.glVertex3f(*end)

def draw_typo_2d(color, text):
    font_id = 0  # XXX, need to find out how best to get this.
    # draw some text
    bgl.glColor4f(*color)
    blf.position(font_id, 20, 70, 0)
    blf.size(font_id, 20, 72)
    blf.draw(font_id, text)

def draw_callback_3d(self, context):
    bgl.glEnable(bgl.GL_BLEND)

    # object locations
    cube_loc = context.scene.objects['Cube'].location
    lamp_loc = context.scene.objects['Light'].location
    camera_loc = context.scene.objects['Camera'].location

    # green line
    draw_line_3d((0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.7), camera_loc, cube_loc)

    # red line
    draw_line_3d((1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.7), cube_loc, lamp_loc)

    # blue line
    draw_line_3d((0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.7), lamp_loc, camera_loc, 2)

    bgl.glEnd()
    # restore opengl defaults
    bgl.glLineWidth(1)
    bgl.glDisable(bgl.GL_BLEND)
    bgl.glColor4f(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0)

def draw_callback_2d(self, context):

    bgl.glEnable(bgl.GL_BLEND)

    # draw text
    draw_typo_2d((1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1), "Hello Word ")

    bgl.glEnd()
    # restore opengl defaults
    bgl.glLineWidth(1)
    bgl.glDisable(bgl.GL_BLEND)
    bgl.glEnable(bgl.GL_DEPTH_TEST)
    bgl.glColor4f(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0)

class ModalDrawOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "view3d.modal_operator"
    bl_label = "Simple Modal View3D Operator"

    def modal(self, context, event):
        context.area.tag_redraw()

        if event.type in {'RIGHTMOUSE', 'ESC'}:
            bpy.types.SpaceView3D.draw_handler_remove(self._handle_3d, 'WINDOW')
            bpy.types.SpaceView3D.draw_handler_remove(self._handle_2d, 'WINDOW')
            return {'CANCELLED'}

        return {'PASS_THROUGH'}
        #return {'RUNNING_MODAL'}

    def invoke(self, context, event):
        if context.area.type == 'VIEW_3D':
            # the arguments we pass the the callback
            args = (self, context)
            # Add the region OpenGL drawing callback
            # draw in view space with 'POST_VIEW' and 'PRE_VIEW'
            self._handle_3d = bpy.types.SpaceView3D.draw_handler_add(draw_callback_3d, args, 'WINDOW', 'POST_VIEW')
            self._handle_2d = bpy.types.SpaceView3D.draw_handler_add(draw_callback_2d, args, 'WINDOW', 'POST_PIXEL')

            context.window_manager.modal_handler_add(self)
            return {'RUNNING_MODAL'}
        else:
            self.report({'WARNING'}, "View3D not found, cannot run operator")
            return {'CANCELLED'}

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(ModalDrawOperator)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(ModalDrawOperator)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()


Blender won't select the object I want to select For some reason I can't seem to select a sword that I duplicated from a previous one. The previous sword is still selectable but the duplicated one is not. For some reason blender selects whatever is behind the object. However I dragged a box over it about 20 times and found that it worked once, but it selected everything with it.

Check to see if it is listed in the Outliner. If it is, click on it's entry. If it still won't highlight, check to see if the arrow icon is toggled. Click it to make sure it's not greyed out. This indicates whether an item is selectable.


How to do texture colors looking the same as in the jpg I would like to create a texture based on an image that has the same color (in the viewport and in the render) as the jpg file. Independent from the light source. In 3ds max I used self illumination for that. Can anybody tell me how to achieve this?
So if there is #000000 color in the jpg pixel, I should see #000000 in the render and in the viewport. If there is #123456 color in a jpg pixel, I should see #123456 in the render and in the viewport.

Similar to emission but that's not 100% is the same as the original...

Thanks

You may be getting unexpected results because of the Color Management (in Render settings) - change the View Transform from Filmic to Standard if you want your render to match the input texture

Emission shader is OK, you can also get the same result without adding any explicit shader, just connect the texture node to Surface of your Material Output.


Why is my fire simulation so light? I have been struggling to get a match tip to actually look like it's on fire and no matter what material shaders I try, I can't seem to achieve what everyone else does, I can in other scenes, just not this one. :(

Try black environment ...

Also there is nothing wrong to use Principle BSDF node :)

blender 2.8.1

blender 2.8.3 - 9.x (Mantaflow solver)


Can't export point clouds as a ply file I want to export vertices (no mesh exists) as ply file. However, after exporting the data by File->Export->.ply, the generated ply file contains no vertices. Can anyone help? I'm using blender 2.8.

Thanks in advance.

Your assessment is accurate, Blender's ply exporter loops over the triangles. This can be seen in line 90 of export_ply.py.

for i, f in enumerate(mesh.loop_triangles):

Any vertex that is not part of a face isn't included in the exported mesh in Blender 2.8.


How do I make an environment sphere thing? (like Blender's preview) So, I just want to re-create a material like this one from blender
Is there any way I can do it? Thank you.

It is quite easy. Just have a glossy material with very little or no roughness.
There you are, done!

Really? But, where is the texture?
The reflections are not part of the texture, the reflections are determined by the environment that surrounds the object, just like in a mirror.
If you add an HDR image as your world enviroment texture it will be reflected on the surface.

More info on this link:
Why does an object with a glossy shader render in black?


How to mimic IK to move a bone using Python without actually setting up IK? Using Python in the script editor, I am currently moving my skeleton using motion capture data. For times when the data jumps to an inaccurate place or when there are gaps in the data, I want to use Inverse Kinematics logic to know where to move the bone.

Specifically, I would prefer to know the coordinate locations of where the bone head and bone tail would end up if inverse kinematics is applied and we know the locations and rotations of the bone's parent and its child.  Is there a formula or Python code to calculate this?

edit: the reason why I can't manually set up inverse kinematics to do this is because when combined with my method of moving the armature with the mocap data, it totally freaks out so I want to do it case by case manually for a specific frame and bone when I need it

Many parts of Blender are accessible through the python API, like bones. Constraint logic is only accessible as it is via the interface, meaning you can setup constraints with python and bake their transforms.

Here you can see Blender's code structure.

  /source/blender/ikplugin/

  Inverse kinematics API, abstracting the itasc and iksolver modules.
  Note that while this system supports multiple inverse-kinematics
  solvers there is no plug-in system exposed from a user perspective.

You are probably interested in the iksolver_plugin.c file, which contains the code to calculate IK.

If you want to implement it from scratch, I recommend an iterative approximation.

Since you are mainly interested in arms and legs though, simple trigonometry will suffice as an IK system with only one joint only has "one" (or no) solution.


Why vertices are changing their position during Weight Paint Mode? I am new to Blender. I am making a MineCraft character.
In the Weight Paint Mode, When i am assigning weight to vertices they are changing their positions. Like, a small change in global z axis or along x axis.How can i solve this problem.[![enter image description here][1]][1]
Thankyou.

ImageBeforeWeightPainting:: [1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/P7xiG.png
 ImageAfterWeightPainting::   [1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/lhDpy.png

Via weight painting, you increase or decrease influence of the bones on vertices. That's why they change position. If f.ex. some bone influences a vertice with strength of 0 nothing happens, but when you give this vertice weight of 1 it starts to be influenced by this bone with strength of 1 and it's moving closer to it. This is normal and expected behaviour. Although your example looks weird.Could you provide the .blend?


Trouble locking an object to an axis while moving them! Using either the G-- x,y,z or even the gimbal, the object seems to jump out of alignment along one of the other axis.
For example, trying out Blender Guru tutorials, trying to move a circle vertically down, I would press G, then the axis to lock... but the circle seems to "jump off the rails" so to speak... and seems to come closer to me.
Even in a pure side view where it appears to only move vertically, soon as you swing into a 3d view... it has mysteriously moved out of the axis I was trying to move it along.
I'm not using the move excluding a certain axis, and I've played with the various orientation controls in the move menu.. I'm stumped.. and unable to move any precisely!

You have to disable the Snap option. Right now it must be set to Increment, which means that the object will snap to the 3D view grid.


How to merge two sculpted meshes? Is it possible to merge two sculpted meshes?
If you want to make a 3d printable mesh, you want to make it hollow... so you copy the mesh and scale it down, inwards. Then you make faces between those two meshes... Is this realistic to make with an complex sculpted mesh, or should this be done, before you make the complex sculpting? Or should I retopology?
Also I sculpted the face/head and the hair in two seperate meshes, also the eyes are seperate... how do I efficient merging all those meshes into one?
Many thanks and happy modeling :)

You may use a Direct Union option of a BoolTool add on.

Activate it in User Preferences (Ctrl+Alt+U).

In my case I have four objects with different vertex count. Some of them were sculpted, some of them not.

In Object Mode select all the objects and press Shift+Ctrl+Num+ (or press Spacebar and type 'direct'-->Direct Union).

After this operation you'll achieve a joined mesh ready for sculpting.


Snapping two objects by edge in Object Mode This might be a pretty newbish question, but I've just started learning Blender and I'm having a really hard time doing some precision work. I have two objects and I'm trying to snap them to each other (using the snap settings) by their edges (illustrated in the picture), so I can later combine them into one. I tried many things, but none of them seem to work. Could you please help me, or give me a link to some good tutorial concerning that topic?

Thanks.

Select one cube, then enable the snap during transform option (click on the magnet icon), change the snap element to Vertex and snap target to Closest. Move the cube (G) along X,Y and Z axis until it snaps to the proper place.


Weird Copy rotation constraint behavior I have made simple armature and a cube. When I try to add Copy rotation constraint to final bone from the cube it's direction is inverted. Whats wrong?

Thanks.enter

More info is needed, such as is that armature posed(has it been transformed) ?? What are your settings for the C/R constraint ? What axis are you copying ? What are the Bones axis ? Have they got 'roll' compared to the 'owner'?
I can tell by that black dashed line that the bone with the 'Cube' is a child of the last bone in that chain - that means it automatically inherits rotation from its parent (unless it was un-checked). So adding a C/R set to 'World' space, copying all 3 axis should have left it looking just like the bone it was copying. , using 'Local' space on both (Target & Owner) would leave it maybe looking like it is now, depending on the actual rest position. ALWAYS turn on 'axis' display in the 'Armature' display panel, it makes working on stuff much easier to see and understand.


Keep objects from intersecting each other when positioning them? I'd like to position objects in the 3D view, but constrain them as to not intersect with another. I don't want to snap them together, rather have some fixed 3D object like a wall and be able to move cubes around and not allow them to penetrate other cubes or the wall when manipulating them.

I really wish Blender supported this out the box and it could be as easy as enabling/disabling 3D manipulator. But the simplest way I found is the following. Assuming you started with default scene with a cube:

Enable Rigid Body for the cube in Properties > Physics and select the first Cube and Properties > Physics choose Passive for Rigid Body > Type.
Duplicate it (ShiftD) and move (G, X) new cube somewhere so it does not touch original.
Set End frame to big number, for example, 10000. Make sure Properties > Scene > Rigid Body World is enabled and set End in Rigid Body Cache to the same big number (10000 in this case). You also may want to disable Gravity.
Select the second cube and duplicate it and in Edit mode with pivot set to Median Point scale up the third cube slightly (for example, 1.01), set its Maximum Draw Type (in Properties > Object > Display) to Wire. In Properties > Physics > Rigid Body Collisions choose Mesh as Shape and (assuming 1 BU = 1m) Margin to 3mm (if it fly away immediately when you start playing animation at step #6 - try smaller value and return to frame 1 to start again). Go back to Object Mode.
Select the second Cube (the one you actually want to move) and in Properties > Physics choose Active for Rigid Body > Type.
Click Play Animation. To manipulate, select the third cube (displayed as Wire) and move it. Second cube will follow and Rigid Body Physics will do its best to prevent collisions, but if you force it too much, it may fly away; if it does, press Esc and go back to first frame to try again. To put it on other object without intersection, move it slowly, when it start shaking it means slight intersection happened, move it away a bit and when it stops shaking, stop moving. When done moving/rotating, pause animation, select all, CtrlA to Apply and choose Visual Transform and then go back to Start frame.

Obvious drawbacks is that you have to enable Rigid Body on objects and create temporary object to move object you want to move, then delete temporary object, not to mention the temporary object introduces problems - direct manipulation would be much more convenient.


I Extruded up with z and scaled down 8 times but have a square to deal with You're looking at a leather seat from a dining chair. I modeled this chair seat by creating the very bottom loop of vertices then extruded them up and scaled down many times using the image planes as a guide. I was surprised it worked as well as it did but in the picture you can see what I ended up with at the top.
Maybe there's a better way to model this?
Thank you for your help!!

If you want the center to be just vertices (As shown in @Neil's answer), click alt+m while only selecting the square in the center.
But if you want the center to be a circle:

Select only the center square
Press Space bar (EDIT: Press F3 instead as Space bar was for an outdated version of Blender)
Type in sphere and click the to sphere option.
mess with the values in the tool bar (Scroll to bottom of toolbar) to get your desired result.


Blender Guru Anvil Tutorial Base Problem Ok, so I followed the tutorial pretty much to the letter. I was near the end of video 2. I deleted the bottom face and extruded it together with Clipping and Merge like he showed, then proceeded to put in the other missing faces on the left and right of the base as oriented in this photo. When I showed the Sub Surf Modifier, I got this instead of it being completely smooth, you can see the weird flat part at the bottom. I'm not sure how to fix it.

One note, I did have an older version of Blender, 4.6x. I just recently updated it to 4.79 yesterday. I just tried to fix the bottom and I still get this problem. Please help.

Edit: Ok so here is the Blender Guru's Anvil Mesh...

Then here is my Anvil Mesh...
So there's that.

Here's the .blend file:

You have several vertices overlaying at the same position, you can delete them quickly with A (Select All), then W > Remove Doubles


White outline for a text object How do a i make the most simple white outline for a text mesh? I am exporting a 3D text to a graphic editor as a PNG. The background and the mesh are the same color so i need a white outline. Is there a super easy way?
Render engine is Cycles.

The object is polygon geometry or rendered already
In a 2D postprocessing step, you can use a dilate node on the alpha channel. This could also be done in any image editing/compositing software.

The object is a 3D text

Duplicate the text object.
Change the color of the duplicate.
Decrease the texts extrude property and increase its bevel and offset properties.


Sound F-Curve of wave frequencies by default baking sound to f-curve is going to work with the wave amplitude. If instead of the amplitude I want to map to frequencies of the wave, what would you suggest?

@batFINGER 's add-on sounds like it would probably do what you need:

https://github.com/batFINGER/batFINGER-blender-addons

If I understand you correctly, though, you may just be missing the controls here:


Cloth simulation ready before frame 0 I'd like to know if there is a way to "pre-calculate" a cloth. I explain:
I'm modeling a character for a game, and I want to export the animation to Unity3D. The problem is that the cloth simulator takes 1 or 2 frames to put clothes well.
And having a big plane in an animation of the game is not cool.
So if someone knows if it is possible or to "cut" the exported anim in unity or to pre-render it before frame 0...
Thank you]1

Go to the Cloth Cache settings and put a negative value into the start field. So animation will begin before timeline starts. Then press "Bake".


Setting scaling to 1, but keeping object size in meters I open a new file in Blender, so I get the Cube. The edge lengths of the Cube are 2 meters. Now I change the scale factor from 1 to 2, so the edges grow to 4 meters.

Is there a way to set the scale factor to 1 again, while the edges maintain length 4 meters?

I need this feature to solve a problem with HDRI environment textures. My object is a car, and it is too small for the roads in the HDRI panorama. The proportions in meters of the car are correct, but it has a scale factor of 0.3. I suspect the scale factor has to be 1 for the meter size of the object to match correctly with the HDRI.

Ctrl + A then click Scale, this will reset your scale


A clean way to create crease-cavity I have a certain geometry. See image. I need to create 3 creases/cavities on the surface. I tried 2 methods, see images. One is Knife Projecting mesh edges onto the surface, and then fiddling around with it. The other is using Difference Boolean operation (including cleaning up triangles afterwards). Both methods give terrible results, plenty of artefacts. What is a clean way to achieve the result? Or do I have to unwrap the mesh and create a bump map with these creases?

Artifacts come from shading issues.

First thing to check is to have something that is able to control which faces are shaded flat or smooth, for example the Edge Split modifier:

Better results could be achieved by controlling manually what edges will be splitted. In thdepicted case, the border of the subtracted suzanne is one edge that should appair hard. Select it and Mark as Sharp Edge will help the modifier in recognizing it.

Now the only artifacts that should be present are caused by the tris faces that surrond the border. Shading of tris doesn't look as good as shading from quads, expecially where there are a lot of them who are diverging from a common vertex and plenty of tiny faces along the border (a situation that always occurs whith boolean operations) and also after triangulating N-Gons made of non evenly spaced vertex along the perimeter.

Long, thin, tris (an in minor part quads too) don't have a good shading behaviour

To avoid such artifacts, you should work on the shape of the faces and the flows of edgeloops. You must aim to obtain what is called a "clean topology": the mesh should be composed by evenly-spaced mostly-quad faces.

It requires hard work, lot of paticience, probably you'll have to rebuild most of the mesh, but it is the only whay that guarantee a perfect shading.

Above you can see some guidelines of a possible retopology for the depicted case.


Match Depth of Field of Background Image Either using Cycles or Blender Render - Need to match the depth of field on an object to a background image. Basically, I want to have a background image (that has DoF in it by itself), mapped flat on the background, and then a 3D object with matched DoF - so the DoF is only applied on the 3D object but NOT on the background image. Any hints welcome!

If you enable Transparent under Film, then the background of the rendered image will be transparent, allowing for it to be easily composited with another image:


Bump node seems inverted on one side of the object First of all, I'm quite new to Blender and 3D graphics in general, so this problem might be trivial, but I can't seem to figure out what is going wrong here.
I decided to put a bump node on a metallic texture to simulate scratches. At first, I was getting "bumps", and also they were way too defined, so I ran the image through a math node set to -0.0005 which solved the problem and I was quite happy with the result (as you can see on the right side of the image).
But then I noticed that the texture was "inverted" on one side of the cylinder, thus showing "bumps" again, so now there are ridges on one side of the cylinder, but bumps on the other. Obviously, though, I want there to only be ridges on the whole object.
At first, I thought it might be caused by the negative value on the math node, but when I put in a positive value, the problem is identical but inverted (ridges are replaced with bumps and vice versa).
So my question is - why? What is causing this and how can I fix it?
The scene is lit with a single point light. Below I've included images of several views of the problem as well as the node setup I am using for the metallic texture.

Node setup:

Thanks for any help.

Your 'Bump' node is not being used correctly.
The 'Bump'takes a 'Height' and generates a Normal - to be fed into the Normal of a shader node. However, you're using the Normal to pass into Displacement of the Material Output.
The Displacement socket of the Material Output used to only be a Scalar value (a grey socket) but has since been enhanced to be a Vector. This does mean that it's now the same colour as the Normal and can cause confusion.
Instead of Bump, use a Displacement node. You should connect the output of your Multiply node into the Height of the Displacement and the output from the Displacement node can then be passed into the Material Output 'Displacement' socket. This will result in a diplacement in the direction of the normal of the surface at each point.


Making a crystal material in Blender I'd like to make a crystal triangular pillar in Blender that looks like the example someone gave in response to a question like mine.

I've tried to get it to look like this but just end up with it looking like this

Since I do not have to privilige to comment yet I can't ask the creator how he/she did it. Can someone please help me out?

Thanks in advance ;)

It eens to me that you should add a little more geometry, make sure the roughness value on your glass shader is the same as your examples and the main difference that I see is the lighting setup. The other person is using some sort of image texture as their light source. A very nice touch. Also, I suggest you turn up your samples so the image isnt so grainy. If you have any questions as to how you can do any of this jut ask


OSL shader issue, could not find include file: node_texture.h" I am trying to (re)create an OSL shader in Blender, but I receive an error "error: could not find include file: node_texture.h" when compiling.

I've Googled it up, but can find nothing. Where can I find this file, or change the search path?

The change happened before 2.72 was released and I still haven't got around to looking into whether the change came from blender or OSL 1.5. It is a matter of search paths and I think they need to be changed in code.

The file you are looking for is included with blender, it is installed in 2.72/scripts/addons/cycles/shader/ You can also find it in blender's source tree at intern/cycles/kernel/shaders/node_texture.h

The solution for now is to place a copy of it in the same folder as the osl script that wants to include it.


Problem Selection order Python 3 am trying to copy the cache sequence modifiers from one mesh to another.
The character with shaders and the character with the alembic sequence modifiers share parts of their names, example "BODY_GEO" and "AX_EP998_PUN02_ANIM_V010_ESC05_PL018_C01_ALUX_00_BODY_GEO".
my goal is for this python script to select everything with a 'for' that doesnt contain "AX_" in the name, that select all meshes from the shader character, and then i select the matching pair with a nested 'for'
like this:

bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')
for sel in bpy.context.visible_objects:
    if sel.type == 'MESH' and ('AX_' not in sel.name):
        for ob in bpy.context.visible_objects:
            if ob.type == 'MESH' and ('_'+sel.name in ob.name):
                print (sel, ob)
                sel.select_set(1)
                ob.select_set(1)
                bpy.ops.object.make_links_data(type='MODIFIERS')
            else:
                bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')

But that code seems to apply the same modifier to every mesh in the outliner.

if I do this:

bpy.data.objects['BODY_GEO'].select_set(1)
bpy.data.objects['AX_EP998_PUN02_ANIM_V010_ESC05_PL018_C01_ALUX_00_BODY_GEO'].select_set(1)
bpy.ops.object.make_links_data(type='MODIFIERS')

It works perfect, but the name of the mesh on the alembic will change with every shoot so it wont work that easy.

What em i doing wrong, i now that i may have to use a break to stop the second for once finds the pair but i get errors when i try.

Im very new to blender and i know that selecting things is terrible difficult, please help me with this.

Override the context

IMO At issue with code in question is not setting the active object, ie the one you want to copy modifiers from, to the others selected.

To set object ob as active

context.view_layer.objects.active = ob

which sets the active object, aka context.object and context.active_object to ob, but until selected it is not context.selected_objects[0]  Wrote this re using "first selected" for active object.  It causes confusion that relates to your issue here, you're only selecting, not "activating"

Anyhow, forget that, recommend overriding the context.  Build a dictionary of the context members needed and pass it to the operator. No messy selecting and setting active object.

Simple test script. It happens I am working on a tree that has a number of modifiers. I will make the tree object active. Add a cube to scene and override it as selected object.

After some testing have determined that the operator needs to override, screen, scene, object and selected_editable_objects

To test replace "Tree" with name of object with modifiers (source) and "Cube" with the name of target mesh to copy to.

Modifiers copied from tree to cube with neither selected and empty active

import bpy

context = bpy.context
scene = context.scene
cube = scene.objects.get("Cube")
tree = scene.objects.get("Tree")

override = {}
override["screen"] = context.screen
override["scene"] = context.scene
override["object"] = tree
override["selected_editable_objects"] = [tree, cube]

bpy.ops.object.make_links_data(override, type='MODIFIERS')

can see how this could be made into a little helper method, simply pass it context and the target and source object.


Imported Image Displays Too Small MakeHuman 1.1.1
Blender 2.8a
OSX

I first created a 3D human model and exported it as .fbx file. Next, I imported the image file to Blender 2.8a, then I found that:

the imported image is too small (so small that I had to manually enlarge it), though the image was created at a normal size in the MakeHuman.

What settings should I use such that after the image is imported to the Blender, it will display at the same size as it was in the MakeHuman?

Thanks

Eugene

When your importing .fbx files you have a scale option in the file folder just before you import it. Scaling that upward will increase the imports size. Fbx does not preserve object size, location, and rotation from the export. If you are looking to preserve and exact location, rotation, and scale of an object, you must import as an .obj.


Why do all the faces in my mesh turn into circles when adding a Subsurf modifier? i'm trying to use subdivision surfice modifier on models that i import from Sketchup. but they look like this:

before applying the modifier:

This happens with all models from Sketchup, even the simple box form to the left in the pictures. I've tried a bunch of different formats (3ds, fbx etc.) but it's all the same.

What might be the problem here?

I'm completely new to Blender, so please excuse my lack of knowledge.

All edges of the mesh are "split": every face has an  edge perfectly overlapping the edge of the adiacent face. If you select all in edit mode and remove doubles everything will turn fine.


Delete Object with Zero Verts When separating a mesh in edit mode using P,  bpy.ops.mesh.separate(type='SELECTED'), it will select your vertices and make a new object. You are left with two objects.
However, if you select all of the mesh of one object and use it, you will be left with two objects, of which one of has no vertices in it. I need to select this object "if no vertices are present" and delete it.
Here is why I need to do this. I have one object, say a sphere and then using Vertex Weight Proximity and Vertex Weight Edit on other objects (which are joined with one name), I am able to detect all objects intersecting my sphere. These will leave a vertex group, which I can then link up ⌃ Ctrl + L and separate the objects.
However, if all the objects are selected, then I am faced with the problem of having one object with no vertices. I do hope I am clear enough in my question. I need some help with the python script of deleting the object if there are no vertices.
Here is my initial script to separate the objects.
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()
bpy.ops.mesh.select_all(action='DESELECT')
bpy.ops.object.vertex_group_set_active(group='V_Group')
bpy.ops.object.vertex_group_select()
bpy.ops.mesh.select_linked(delimit={'SEAM'})
bpy.ops.mesh.separate(type='SELECTED')
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()

Remove all zero vert mesh objects from scene.
Script below will remove all zero vert mesh objects from the scene.  For your use case could instead look only over context.selected_objects.
import bpy
scene = bpy.context.scene

empty_meshobs = [o for o in scene.objects
                 if o.type == 'MESH'
                 and not o.data.vertices]

while empty_meshobs:
    bpy.data.objects.remove(empty_meshobs.pop())

Another alternative is to not split if the selected vertices are all of total.
sel_verts, _, _ =   context.object.data.count_selected_items()
if sel_verts < len(context.object.data.vertices):
    bpy.ops.mesh.separate(type='SELECTED')


Face rotation results with deformation in modifier stack I try to rotate a face, but the original form is deformed. Please view attached blend file for more details.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AuAcyL2kNiCPg7l0Vk7C-Vl4Bo0FKg?e=LdeKBM

Your issue comes from Scale transformation that is set to x=5 y=3 z=1 now.

To fix the issue go to Object > Apply and choose Scale...

... scale transformation become to x=1 y=1 z=1 ... issue is gone. For more info see Manual.

Quite important is to understand transformation hierarchy. Modifiers are calculated first, object transforms after that. It means your Solidify modifier extrudes a thickness and after that is calculated Scale transformation on object. Since your object is scaled x=5 y=3 z=1, result is squeezed object.

It's always recommended to Apply Transformations to an object before using modifiers and armatures to avoid strange behaviour.

If you will have a default plane (dimension 2x2), you scaled to 2 (= dimension 4x4), than you add Solidify modifier with Thickness set to 1m ... object appears in a scene with "Dimension" 4x4x2 and not 1, because modifier is calculated before object transformation (like Scale) setup.


Screw shape with Curve How can I get a curve on screw shape/line ? Is it possible in Blender ? I made the mesh above in the picture by screwing an hexagon (circle with 6 edges).

But this way, it is hard to work on its edges without deforming it.
So far result:

My aim is to make like metal part in picture below. So it would be easier with curve modifier.

Try adding bevel and taper to the spiral curve like this (of course smooth shading and subsurf will help).

starting with a setup like this:

you can get something like that shape using bevel, bevel object and taper to the shown curve circle:


Is there a way to save a game in progress? After being exported to a stand alone game, The player/s should be able to close the game and open it to the same place/setup/move at a later time. This is a longer game,and may not be finished in one sitting.

You have to write your own system. I tend to use json to encode data, but other people like pythons pickle module.

If you clarify your question, we can probably help more.


Why is this UV Map face not displaying correctly? Edit 1
Here's the blender file:

Also here's a better image of the face in question

!https://imgur.com/a/PKXzx

The texture of my model is not displaying correctly onto my mesh.

It revolves around the UV/Image Editor, I'm trying to get that face in the two panels of the first image on the right to show the texture as it does in the image on the left. (note that the image on the left is the right arm of the character and the other two are of left arm)

The dotted face in particular. Not sure if this helps but when I scale that face in the uv map, I've noticed the texture is flipped.

it's becouse your triangle is rotated. Let's i describe it in image:

your vertex number 1 is on position of vertex 3, n.2 on position of 1, n.3 on pos. 2.

so it look like all vertex on right place, but this places are wrong:

Selecting in mesh uv sync mode displays that one vertex is on different positions in UV.


How to remove the effect of current rotation while rotating a bone (Python)? The answer in this question is great : How to rotate a bone using python

I use it to rotate bones in Pose mode but it adds the current angle to the new angle instead of setting the new angle regardless of what the current angle is.

Example:

I run the code to set the rotation of a bone to be 10 deg.

I run it again to set a new rotation of 20 deg. But I get 30 deg instead. I get the summation or the effect of the two codes. I need to get the last code's effect only. How can I do that?

Relative vs Absolute.

The "accumulative" nature is the nature of a 3D transform, ie rotate the bone from where it is by this much about an axis.

Whereas you wish to set the absolute rotation.

As well as using method in accepted answer, contend you could also pre-set the rotation to zero before applying any transform, for example if the rotation mode is euler

posebone.rotation_euler = (0, 0, 0)

Zeroing before applying a rotation will result in an absolute value.  Could say, absolute is relative from zero.

Matrices

The following will zero rotation of a pose bone, regardless of its rotation mode, Euler, Quaternion or Angle Axis.

Using matrices can zero the rotation by finding the inverse of the rotation part of the matrix and pre or post multiplying. The inverse of a rotation matrix is the relative rotation to apply to rotate back to zero.

The top left 3x3 submatrix of a 4x4 transform matrix is the rotation part.  A rotation matrix is orthogonal, hence the transpose is also the inverse (a cheaper calculaton)

>>> pb = C.object.pose.bones['Bone']
>>> M = pb.matrix_basis.to_3x3().transposed().to_4x4()
>>> pb.matrix_basis @= M

To set the rotation from whatever to 22 degrees about Z in whatever rotation mode

>>> R = Matrix.Rotation(radians(22), 4, 'Z')
>>> M = pb.matrix_basis.to_3x3().transposed().to_4x4()
>>> pb.matrix_basis = R @ M @ pb.matrix_basis

or similarly using below as rotation matrix, will set a pose bone of any rotation mode to the euler equivalent without the need to set the mode.

>>> R = Euler((0, 0, radians(22)), 'XYZ').to_matrix().to_4x4()

Why?  what if I don't want all the bones changed to 'XYZ' Euler, and instead want to keep all as assigned, using above can keyframe with something like

pb.matrix_basis = R @ M @ pb.matrix_basis

if pb.rotation_mode == 'AXIS_ANGLE':
    pb.keyframe_insert("rotation_axis_angle")
elif pb.rotation_mode == 'QUATERNION':
    pb.keyframe_insert("rotation_quaternion")
else:
    pb.keyframe_insert("rotation_euler")


Blender Crashes Requesting more GPU Memory I was working on the nodes withing the shader editor and suddenly this pop up appeared asking for more GPU memory.

The current configuration of my system is

16 gb ram

nvidia quadro k2000 2gb

It happended when I was on Evee

Do I need to upgrade my Graphic card to a 4 gb ?

Any Help will be Appreciated

You're using a very old graphics card compared to the generations of GPUs being made nowadays. Blender recently increased their system requirements due to all the new features being added. So yeah, its preferable if you get a 4GB or better GPU.

https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/

Edit: A GPU capable of running Blender 2.8 is fairly cheap. You can easily get a Nvidia GTX 1050Ti for somewhere around $140, and it'll be suitable for another 1-2 years before needing a slightly better model to compete with Blender's updates.


How can I achieve a crystalline glaze material procedurally? As practice, I've been modelling a pot. I wanted to recreate the crystalline glaze of the pot as a material, but since I'm fairly new to materials, I've been having trouble. I figures a noise texture would be a perfect place to start, but I'm not sure how to put it into use. I could make blue splotches easy enough, but I couldn't figure out an interesting way to give them some texture. They tended to look flat and boring. Attached is a picture of what I'm trying to achieve.

A favorite trick of mine is to mix a bit of noise into the coordinate vector.

You can use object coordinates here, it's not really important as long as you can make the masks you need.
What I ended up doing is generating several noise masks, some of them share the same nodes, I'm just using a Color Ramp to isolate different parts:

And used Math nodes to add and subtract them rather randomly:

And then I used a Math node set to Greater Than and played with the value until I found something I liked.

Using this as the factor input for a Mix Shader you can create the top and bottom materials to your liking.
My favorite detail of handmade objects like this is that they are rarely perfect.  We often model these objects to (float) precision, perfect all the way around.  So to add an almost imperceptible bit of realism I take a very lumpy Noise Texture and do just a tad of displacement.

Here is a render using these methods.  HDRI environment is Cayley Interior from HDRIHaven.  I'm using only Noise Textures for the base color layers.


Why is the alpha channel not working? I was trying to make a really low poly flower, basically using 2D planes and applying textures with an alpha channel (Targa, 32 bit).

However when doing the UV mapping and applying the texture as usual doesn't yield the expected results. The render either shows the image with the alpha being white, or it doesn't show anything at all (an empty/completely transparent square).

I've tried several settings, but without any results. If I drag the "alpha" down to 0, it makes the whole texture transparent which is not what I want. I've tried selecting Z transparency, and also Mask, but nothing. Is there something I'm missing? It'd be nice to know the basic workflow to get it to work.

Enabling Z-transparency and setting the alpha of the material to '0' was correct but you also have to tell Blender that the texture should affect the alpha channel:


The Outliner doesn't show Parent-Child relations in blender 2.8 I have a pretty big scene in blender. In v2.79 the hierarchy looks like this in the Outliner:

However, with 2.80 Beta, it looks like in the screenshot below. The only indicator that we get for "Parent-Child relations" is the one I circled in the screenshot.

I honestly think that this is messed up. This way it's a lot harder to see / select / interact with the desired objects (for example if I want to select all the objects parented to "_3D_FURNITURE"). I have to check the objects one-by-one to see the relations.

Is there a way to show the hierarchy as in 2.79?

Child-Parent relations are displayed when the Outliner is in the Scenes mode. This can be selected from the header:

A convincing and efficient way of showing simultaneously Collection hierarchies and Parenting hierarchies has been looked for, but hasn't been found yet. I'd say that this is still likely to change before the Beta becomes Stable.


How can I get the world grid and backdrop grid to be visible in a render? I have tried to find the answer to this question in the blender manual and in various forum but have not had any luck.

What I want to do is to make the world grid and the backdrop grid (orthographic view) visible in the final render. I do not wish to create a grid from the add mesh button since they do not look the same as the world grids.

Is this even possible?
Thanks for any advice!

Unfortunately, this is not possible using the standard render methods.

However, one way you can add it is by capturing an image of the grid as a screen shot from top orthographic view after hiding all visible objects. The grey background can then be removed using an image editing program and added to the scene as so:

Grid image (you are free to use this one if you like):

Then create a plane exactly the size of this image (6x6) and UV unwrap the plane

Cycles:

Set the material to the following node setup:

This makes the material only visible to the camera and transparent where there is no grid.

This can then be used in your renders :)

Blender internal:

For blender render simply enable Z-transparency in the materials and set the alpha to 0. Also enable shadeless and disable cast shadow.

Then select the image in the textures tab. Then ensure that the texture affects the alpha of the material by turning up alpha (just under color) to 1.

If the grid is too thick you can scroll up to image sampling, disable MIP map and lower the filter size. This should make the grid thinner.

You can now use it in your renders :)


Long render times for a nature scene? I created a nature scene and everything was fine until I tried to render it. I set about 600 samples (quite low) and hit render. I let it sit over night, but when I got up, I saw 6 hours left (even after the 10 hours I've been sleeping). So I started to play with the settings a bit and then I tried a test render:

Even with the low settings (resolution at 50% with 50 samples with some filter glossy) It still took me 30 minutes to render. So I'm wondering whether this is normal, even if I don't think so. Should I try to solve it or just let it render the 16 hours? I think that with my new graphics card it should take less time.
(By the way. For lighting I have an HDR (from Pro-lighting: Skies) with a relatively small sun lamp - 0.015, if it will help you at all)

Here are my computer specifications:
Nvidia GTX 960, Intel Core i5-6500, 8GB DDR4 RAM

(I'm rendering on GPU)

I find it super normal. I once waited three days with relatively low samples and a 1920 x 1080 resolution on my GTX 980, 16 GB ram. Just depends on the day your computer is having. Wish you the best of luck.


text from updating file I'm learning to use blender in order to get this result:
when I push a button on pygame I'll have a solid, like a stone, appearing from the ground. on this "stone" I would have written a text from a file that changes every time I use this function. I would only ask if it's possible with blender to have this result, or it's better to give up and think something more easy to do?
thanks for the help.

It's not clear to me how this is related to pygame so I focus on this part of your question:

  I would only ask if it's possible with blender to have this result

Yes, you could create an action with two keyframes (start and end position of z coordinate of your cube).

At the right side you see the action "CubeAction" in the Dope Sheet (set to Action Editor)
At the bottom a Keyboard Sensor which is active when Space is pressed and an Action Controller which plays the animation stored in the action.

To dynamically create the text object one idea would be to copy it in the text-editor and use:

bpy.ops.text.to_3d_object(split_lines=True)

This function is probably not available while the game engine is running
For how to load a text into the editor see: How to programmatically load a python script in Text Editor and launch it

How to port this to pygame isn't on topic here.


Remove same modifier from many objects I have been searching on Internet for a while and I only have found this piece of code (from this site)

import bpy

scene = bpy.context.scene
for o in scene.objects:
    if o.type == 'MESH':
    for m in o.modifiers:
        bpy.ops.object.modifier_remove(modifier="Smoke")

But it didn´t work for me. It only removes the modifier from the active object, not for all the objects in the scene.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks pals.

Many operators work on only the active object and some will work on all selected objects, removing a modifier is a case of only working on the active object, the active object is the one that has it's properties displayed so is the only one with a visible modifier list.

You can delete modifiers without using operators, this way you don't have to change the active object and it also doesn't matter if the modifier has been renamed.

import bpy

scene = bpy.context.scene
for o in scene.objects:
    if o.type == 'MESH':
        for m in o.modifiers:
            if m.type == 'SMOKE':
                o.modifiers.remove(m)


Blender for Criminalistic is there any tool in blender for Criminalistic analysis?
Modeling a body, see the trajectory of a bullet, etc.
I have seen rigs, and it's very useful but maybe there is a specific tool for this purpose.
Thanks!

I would advise against any serious use other than for the purpose of visualization - you can:

create 3D portrait of suspects
where and how the body fell with rag-doll physics
how a skull was fractured when hit by axe
where did fire or liquids hit the skin
reflections in mirrors or windows
etc.

But these simulations are not driven with real exact physics, they are only approximations and just based on them (simplified for performance) and cannot be used seriously for analysis, they are for shows. In some cases it can give approximate results, but in others there is no assurance that the result would'n be far from reality.

It's the other way around - you need analysis (or some reference) based on which you create the visual. Blender software has tools to match what you want visually.

It is a great tool to show others what you need, so they don't have to rely on imagination, but generally Blender tools lack accuracy to have merit in serious criminalistic proofing.

In cases where Blender is close to reality (as it should be for the visuals to feel believable) you will deduce the same with common knowledge and there won't be any need for such analysis.


How can I make cloth never get inside mesh Now I know I know the collision and the cloth does collide with the mesh but in same frames of me animatiting it gets in the mesh which really bothers me . Am I rigging it the wrong way ? I rigged the cloth the same way I rigged the mesh with automatic weights so that it follows the movement of the body

I think you first should increase the Cloth Collision Quality.
See How can I make sure that simulated cloth doesn't go through other objects?


How does tile size affects render time in GPU compute cycles? I do some tests on a scene with various tiles size. The first time, i set the tiles size to 256x256. It rendered in about 9 minutes. The second time, i set it to 512x512.

Now because the tile size is bigger than the first, i thought it would have rendered much faster, but apparently it finished in 12 minutes. How is this so?

You have to see the cores of your graphic card. The number of cores is the number of tiles it can process at the same time. If you have a big amount of cores make the tiles smaller. About 1/8 of the blender's default size is ok. If you have a really good graphic card try the 1/16 of the blender's default size.


Character Physics movement = no velocity? Using the built-in Character physics, one of the features is Jumping by using the Character Motion "Jump" actuator or using the bge.constraints.getCharacter(obj).jump() function in Python.

when I attempt to print out the character's velocity with print(obj.getLinearVelocity(True)), and also tried False, the console just repeats "Vector (0.0000, 0.000, 0.000)" on each frame as I jump around the stage with my character.

For scripting purposes, I really would like to have an accurate statistic of my character's velocity. Is there a hidden velocity stat that is associated with the Character Physics feature?

In the API, it's missing a lot of info on this subject.
https://www.blender.org/api/blender_python_api_2_77_release/bge.types.KX_CharacterWrapper.html

Problem
The "Character" Physics Type does not imply that this object uses the build-in Physics engine. Regarding the Physics engine this kind of object is still a static object.
Therefore you can't apply velocities or forces, nor can you read them. The object teleports within the scene by its own, rather than it is moving in terms of the physics engine.
Solution
Physics engine
Either you use a real (moving) physics type (rigid body, soft body, dynamic),
Character physics
or you record the position at each frame. This way you can calculate the traveled distance from frame to frame via Python. It is simply the difference between the current's frame position and the position of the previous frame.
Remarks
In my eyes

Rigid Body, Soft Body, Dynamic and Static are real physics types.
Sensor and No Collision are attributes (or attribute sets) of physics types
Character, Navigation Mesh and Occluder have nothing to do with physics and should not be at this place. These setting should be at object level not at physics level.


Weird edge on flat plane I have a cylinder with a hole in it.
The top face of it should be a flat plane but it isn't,
even if there are no edges on it which could cause the unevenness.

I inserted an additional edge (the marked one) so that you could see what I mean.

Why isn't the face a flat plane and how can I make it flat?
I tried to delete the top face and replace it with "fill hole" but that is not possible.

I found a way to make it flat.

There is a second fill option (not fill holes) with ALT + F or under Mesh -> Faces -> Fill (with tries)

With this it worked.

EDIT:
There is a third fill option (GridFill) with Ctrl + F (with quads)

Thanks to Mr Zak in the comments.


Is it possible to save depth values and rendered image in different formats? I render rgb images and depth maps for a series of frames in blender.  For depth, I actually need to store the float values as such, so that I can read them off directly in a python file later.  For that, I wish to use the exr format ( tried png earlier, but the normalization messed up the depth values)
However, I would like to store the rgb images as png.
I have noticed that the output format that is set in output properties is maintained for storing the Z-pass and images as well.
Is there anyway I can have different formats for the two? A solution involving blender's python API is also fine.

The Composite output node in the compositor will use the File Format and Color Management set in the properties window.
If you add a file output node it will allow you to save the image as an additional file with a different format or in a different path.
Set the file type to OpenEXR multilayer. Whenever you save as EXR the file will bypass the color management transforms, and remain linear float. You can add inputs/layers using the + Add Input button for depth or whatever other passes you need.


Applying FBX file data to 3D camera in blender So I did a 3D track in Boujou 5 and exported the FBX file, converted it to another version of FBX file so Blender can read it and now I'm stuck here. Apply the camera data to a 3d camera in blender, I just don't know how to do it.

I have an image of the animated camera from the track, I've highlighted where exactly they are.

activate the "3D view: copy attributes" addon from your User preferences (CTRL+ALT+U)
Save user settings.
Close window, return to blender 3D view.
Space bar > search > import FBX file. Locate your boujou FBX file. Open it.
Draw a new space area for window, SHIFT+F9 to make your current view to outliner. Search using filter: CAMERA. If there´s a camera you´re in luck, go to 6.
select that camera and press CTRL+ALT+Numpad 0. It will make the camera you selected fro myour outline from bojou the "current" view camera. Press 0 in the numpad, your viewport will switch to camera view. Press ALT+A to play animation. See if it matches.
// You don´t need to apply any camera data to blender. Your FBX file SHOULD have a camera element.
Click on your camera from boujou, and go to camera properties on blender (properties zone to your right side of the screen, the camera icon). From there you should have all the properties Boujou sent, like aspect ratio, lens, sensor, etc.. Should all match accordingly.


Draw floorpan to extrude? I'm new to Blender, coming from an arch vis background. Is there a way to draw a series of walls using some sort of spline / path tool, with a degree of accuracy, and then extrude to create walls?

All the tutorials I've watched simply show people rescaling planes and the like - I haven't come across a way to accurately input wall edges?

Thanks,

Derek

Just start from a single vertex (make a plane and delete 3 out of 4 vertices) and extrude it like so. You can make sure your vertices are aligned by turning snapping to grid ON, or selecting multiple vertices that need to be aligned and scaling them to 0 on the relevant axis.

Once you finish your shape, select all vertices and press F to create a face, then use the Solidify modifier or extrude the face.

Does that answer your question?


Object gets darker when I zoom in to the object So I have a sun in my scene and the point of that sun is to give some moonlight to the scene. I have the sun on grayish color with the intensity of 40W but when I zoom in to the object effected by the light it becomes dark. Does anyone know why?

It looks like you have a Point light (or maybe a Spot) as light source in your scene. If it were a Sun than a value of 40 would be extremely bright, also a sun's strength value would be shown as a decimal 40.000 without a W for watts.
Go to the light settings and switch from Point (or Spot) to Sun. Or delete the light source and add a new Sun.


Transfering blender to new pc How do i transfer everything from my old laptop to my new laptop? I want all my blender projects exactly like they where on my old pc. I tried transferring one blend file, but it ended up missing some textures, and looking a bit different.

The least troublesome way to transition from one computer to the next is to copy the contents  of all folders used for your blender projects in the same file structure you had in the old computer.
As you learned already images used as textures are not saved as part of the blend file unless they are packed. But even if the textures are packed, any link or reference to other blend files will be broken if the file does not exist in the specified place.
That is also true for the cache files for physics and other simulations. If the files are not found you will need to bake them again.
Note as well that for video files and image sequences and audio files there is no way to pack them into the file either.
A partial solution is to use relative paths, where the file structure doesn't have to be the exact same, as long as the assets are all all within the same folder as the blend file. But again, all relevant files have to be copied over to other computer.
A different approach would be to remove the drive from the old computer and make it available to the new one as an external drive.
As a last resort, if you don't want to copy all of the files, you can use the old computer as a network drive, through which you can access your files directly without having to copy them over. But the access will be slower.


How can I add motion to a rigid body? I'm trying to create a bowling animation and I want the ball to hit the pins.
I already added the Rigid Body physics to the objects but can't get the ball to move.

Obviously I could just add keyframes but

that seems to interfere with the Rigid Body physics
it doesn't look too realistic.

Is there a way to add some kind of motion to the ball?

Using keyframes is the only way I know of to do this currently, but you should be able to get good results by allowing the rigidbody object to be controlled by the animating system, then switching control back to the physics system while maintaining momentum gained from the keyframe animation.
This can be done by animating the Animated option in Physics > Rigid Body.
See the wiki:

The most common trick is to keyframe animate the location or rotation of an Active physics object as well as the Animated checkbox. When the curve on the Animated property switches to disabled, the physics engine takes over using the object's last known location, rotation and velocities.

Also see this post
For example:

Enable Animated on your rigidbody object and insert a keyframe by right clicking on the check box and selecting Insert Keyframe:

On the same frame, add a location keyframe (or rotation if you want some angular momentum) to the rigid body object

Go to a later frame and insert another location keyframe

On the same frame, disable Animated and insert a keyframe by right clicking on the Animated checkbox and selecting Insert Keyframe again.

The motion from the keyframed animation will be carried over to the motion of the object as it is controlled by the physics system.
Result:

Note that while Animated is enabled the object will still interact with other rigid bodies, however its motion will be controlled by the animation system.


What's the correct way of putting these objects together to form a game-ready asset? I am making a character that will be exported as an .fbx file to a game engine (UE4). I made the basic shape of it using multiple cubes with subsurface modifiers and a mirror modifier for the arms and legs. So I came up with the following result:

My very simple collection of cubes looks like this:

Now I need to:

Paint this character's textures (which includes UV mapping)
Rig it
Create an animation

before doing so am I supposed to join the meshes? If so then do I use a Boolean or CTRL+j? If not then do I parent every object to an armature? Please tell me what's the correct workflow for a game ready character. Thanks

You would most likely want to have all of these objects joined into the same mesh. You wouldn't use booleans for this. You need to unwrap, and texture, then rig and animate.


Blender 2.8: Where can I find light energy/intensity in Cycles? I'm a super blender noob. I'm a grand total of 2 days in, so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but I've looked online, and can't find an answer.

Lamp intensity/energy seems to have been removed from the Cycles renderer in Blender 2.8, and as far as I can tell, nothing replaced it. It still exists in the Eevee render.

Since 2.8 is a beta, I first assumed that maybe it was a bug, but the docs mimik this change by listing "energy" as an attribute of lamps in the Eevee renderer, and not listing it for cycles.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/eevee/lamps.html
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/lamps.html

I can't find any reference to "energy", "intensity", or "brightness" on the cycles page at all. BUT in the last section on Sun Lamps, in the last sentence, it does mention:

  Because they are not located inside the scene, their strength uses
  different units, and should typically be set to lower values than
  other lights.

So shouldn't that mean that there is the ability to modify it's strength somewhere?

I can find plenty of articles discussing functionality of 2.7x, but the only other reference I could find about 2.8 was a comment on an unrelated bug, where someone said that they can't find the intensity setting anymore, and that it was probably removed.

https://blenderartists.org/t/2-8-light-bleeding/1130700/4

Was light intensity deliberately removed from Cycles in 2.8? And if so, how do I increase the brightness of a Cycles sun lamp?

Thank you,

-Yurelle

Update:

I do not believe this is a duplicate of this answer. While that post does make a passing reference to the cycles lamp strength, this description is not explicit on where to find this option. Furthermore, it is unclear what version of blender it is referring to. That question was answered in June of 2017, nearly a full year before Blender 2.8's first alpha was released (in June 2018), which makes it unlikely this answer was referring to v2.8. Since the confusing change I am asking about was (as far as I can tell) introduced in v2.8, that makes the old answer insufficient; or at a bare minimum not clear in it's answer applying to the newly overhauled version. As I demonstrated in one of the links in my original question, this change is something which has confused others, not just myself. And, my question serves as an explicit target & solution to that confusion. @Mahmood ul Hassan's answer provides a direct, clear, & explicit answer to the nebulous question, without required other asker's to interpret passing remarks in unrelated questions on ambiguous software versions.

Select lamp, click on "use nodes". There will be "Strength" that you can change according to whatever you like. Which increases or decreases the intensity. Its default value is 100 I guess


Blender unit conversion without scaling relative to the scene? I'm a fairly new employee and Blender user (long-time Maya user). I may have gotten myself into a bind and hoping you all can help me out...

As a new employee, one of the first things I asked was which unit we'd be using in Blender. I was told that everything is in centimeters unless specified otherwise, and that was rare. So I quickly set my units to centimeter, saved the startup file, and never looked back.

Well here we are a few months later and I'm learning that they don't really understand how units work in 3D software, so no one had ever changed anything from the default Blender Unit. All of our tools and exporters are written assuming that 1 BU = 1 cm. But after researching, it appears that 1 Blender Unit = 1 meter. I'm the first 3D artist that the company has hired, so it makes sense that they aren't very familiar with the software. No big deal, but now I have a problem...

I have rigged and animated a few scenes, which now need to be changed from centimeters to Blender Units. Unfortunately, a simple change in the units doesn't work, because then the scene is 100x too big.

Is there a way to convert the units while maintaining the relative scale? The grid floor should appear the same size relative to the objects in the scene. Or maybe there is a way to scale the entire scene back down to the correct size, precisely and without screwing up the rigging/animation? This should be possible, as I don't have any animation on the armatures in object mode, only on individual joints in pose mode.

Thanks in advance for any tips or advice!!!

I had exact the same problem - solution is - select whole scene, literaly everything and parent to empty, than scale empty :)


Why has my camera button/icon disappeared? You know that camera icon that shows up in the right-hand side of the main viewer? Well, it disappeared. I know I can toggle with CTRL-0 but I would really like to know why this happened and what I can do to get it back.
I have looked throughout as many options as I can locate, but no dice.
Here is my viewer:

As you will note, there is no camera button on the right side.
Also: Yes. I have restarted. Would not have posted here without taking a number of steps. No effect. It's like I've toggled something.

Gizmos visibility
You have somehow disabled the gizmos visibility, you can simply re-enable it by pressing the button in the bar:


Linked duplicate of parent/children: how to link transform properties of children? Let's say I have a cube and a sphere, and I make the cube the parent of the sphere. Then I link-duplicate both the cube and sphere with AltD. Then I start moving/rotating/etc. the duplicates around in object mode, together as a unit.

Later, I discover that I want to change the position of the sphere (child) with respect to the cube (parent). I re-position the original sphere, but the duplicate sphere does not change position.

I can manually copy the transform values from the original to the duplicate, but is there a way to automatically have the transform values be linked?

To duplicate multiple objects in different positions and keep the relationship between each instance, you want to use DupliGroups.

Select the objects you want to duplicate.
Add them to a group ⎈ CtrlG
You can rename the group so that it is more meaningful.
Add an empty
Set the empties Duplication setting to group and choose the group you created.
Repeat the last two steps as needed.


Start Game from File, how to send a message I made a game with my pupils in our geography lessons this year. The task is to travel around the World and collect points.
The single levels work very great but we can´t show the collected points at the end. The reason I guess is that we had to split up the levels to different blend-files. We had to do this because of some pythonscripts (mini-map, mousecursor) and the loading time.
The structure looks like this:

                         ->australia.blend ->show collected points (works not)

menue    ->     spain.blend

                         -> show collected points (works)

(Sorry the arrows should be more rotated...)

So is there any possibility to send a message or something like that from one blendfile to another?

Greetings from Hamburg

You can't send anything from a blend file. A blend file is just a container for data. It gets read and written by Blender. The BGE can read them (but does not write to it).
Game Sessions
As you are talking about blend files I guess you mean game session (you are using the game actuator to switch levels). A game session is when you start your game and lives until it ends (quit). When you start again, you get a new session without any relationship to a previous one. Game sessions can run parallel. They still have no relationship to each other.
What you need is to transfer game status between game sessions.
Parallel
When two game sessions are running at the same time they can communicate via network (Python -> socket). In this case I suggest to search for question/answer regarding network communication. Be aware this is no topic for beginners.
Sequential
When two game sessions are not running at the same time you need to persist the game status. Persistence between game sessions can be in the file system (or a database) -> It must survive the end of the game session.
Therefore I suggest you specifically look for a question/answer dealing with Save/Load. This requires a bit of Python knowledge, but there are quite a few tutorials out there.
Levels as Scenes
When your levels are different scenes within the same game session, you could transfer game data via Messages or via Python. This is the case when you use the scene actuator.
Sorry but I can't give you a better answer with the information I currently have.
I hope it helps anyway


How do I evenly emit particles from a surface? Check out the image below:

Notice how the particles are emitted in distinct streams. What I need is for the particles to be emitted in the shape of the mesh they're coming from. I've tried all the options I can think of to get an even distribution but nothing seems to work. In particular, I was hoping that increasing the amount of subdivisions on the emitter would help, but no dice.

Increasing the subdivisions of the mesh should help, you will just need to make sure the subsurf modifier is above the particle system and then check 'Use Modifier Stack' in the particles panel.

Another option is to add some random velocity to the particles in the Velocity panel. It seems (based on brief testing) that adding random velocity will produce nicer results when emitting from volume as opposed to faces.


How do I start motion on a curve on a later frame? I have my camera parented to a curve using "Follow Path", and it travels just right, I just need it to start moving on a much later frame, not frame 1. I tried to key frame the Evaluation Time but I get the error message seen below.

Here is the scene. I typed in "1" for the Evaluation Time.

I pressed "I" over the Evaluation Time and got this -- Report: Error. F-Curve with path 'eval_time{0}' cannot be keyframed, ensure that it is not locked or sampled, and try removing F-Modifiers

What am I doing wrong? Any help is greatly appreciated.

It's pretty easy... once you know what you're doing.

Switch to the graph editor.
Expand the "bezierCurve" object, and select "EvaluationTime".
Press n and scroll down to the "modifiers" section.
On the "generator" modifier, edit the "coefficient for polynomial 'y'"
Lowering this value will make the animation start on a later frame. You can see this by looking at where the line intersects the 0 point.

You can edit the path using "restrict frame range". Simply set the start and end frame, then use the in and out to control the easing.


Pointy meshes pierce cloth sim. How can I get around this while also keeping the physical qualities of my cloth (e.g. mass, stiffness, etc.)? Pointy meshes pierce cloth sim. How can I get around this while also keeping the physical qualities of my cloth (e.g. mass, stiffness, etc.)?

Here is a simple example of the problem I'm having:

I've already tried increasing the collision quality, the distance, and the repel distance, but to no avail.

[ADDENDUM] I've found that an increase in collision quality can fix this (at least in 2.8--they may have adjusted things since 2.79). The only thing is, you can't just up it a few notches (which is why I previously didn't see benefit from it), you need to crank that number--enough that render time can become ridiculous but if it works it works.

As far as I can see, there are two issues causing this problem.

Keep in mind I am using an early 2015 MacBook air to do this so I cannot go to as high samples as you or others reading this can.

Blender calculates most of its collisions through vertices. As they come within close proximity of one another, it slows the vertices velocity. If it is moving fast or there are more vertices pulling it down (As in your mesh), blender has a tenancy to let the vertex pass. So to fix this we need to increase the number of collision vertices. This also can be done using two changes. One is to up the number subdivisions of the cloth mesh and the other method is to up the number of vertices of the point.

Subdividing the mesh is simple enough. Hit subdivide. But to get performance, you may need to select the area close to the point and subdivide that a lot, as I have done in my image below.

Adding more vertices on the point. This can be done by adding a sphere or icosphere to the point of the object. This needs to be small enough that it won't be noticeable from the distance you are rendering at. If it is far, it can be quite large, if it is close, you will need to make it smaller. I have made an example, though it is of low resolution, it still fixes the problem. If you don't want the ball in the render, turn it off in the Outliner window.

The quality steps and collision steps. They will only do so much to the quality of your simulation, but it does help. In my final output, I set my quality steps to 25 and collision steps to 5. The one that made the most difference was the quality, but I think both should be increased.

Here is my result:

Remember, this is on a low power laptop. It took around 1 min to produce the first 58 frames. Yours may be at the same by the time you up the quality. In my render, you can see the change in mesh in the final result between High subdivisions and low subdivisions. If you want to minimise that effect, subdivide on an ever-shrinking area so it fades into the higher quality point of contact.

Hope I helped and best of luck with your project,

BFB


Curved lines on extrusion I was working on creating straight lines to form a plane and I'm not sure what I've clicked but suddenly, all my lines became curved.

Is there any ways to fix this?

Update:

The Subdivision modifier's view is set to 1

It's because the subsurf modifier is active on fireframe in edit mode, just clic the last button (little triangle) in the modifier view settings.


How to dynamically show/hide panel elements with python? I followed the recommendation of How to dynamically show/hide panel elements using python?
for an addon and it works fine during script development. But when I install the addon and use the panel an EnumPropery which defines the layout seems to have lost the default value. The code is e.g.

class ABCK_Panel_with_sectors(bpy.types.Panel):

    bl_space_type = "VIEW_3D" # window type panel is displayed in
    bl_region_type = "TOOLS" # region of window panel is displayed in
    bl_label = "Create ABCK objects in sectors 03" # heading of panel

    def draw(self, context) :

        layout = self.layout
        scene = context.scene
        col = layout.column()
        #.........................................................
        box = layout.box()
        box.label("General definitions")
        row = box.row()
        row.prop(scene, 'Object_type')
        if scene['Object_type'] == 2: #!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!here is the problem
            row = box.row()
            row.prop(scene, 'with_bevels')
            row.prop(scene, 'with_colors')
        #.........................................................
        layout.label("")
        box = layout.box()
        box.label("Math only, no Blender objects")
        box.prop(scene, "Generations")
        box.prop(scene, "all_sectors")
        if scene['all_sectors'] == False:
            box.prop(scene, "Selection_of_sectors")
        row = box.row()
        row.operator("compute.objects", text = "compute")
        row.operator("print_number_of.objects_sectors", \
            text = "print count math")
        #.........................................................
        layout.label("")
        box = layout.box()
        box.label("Final creation")

        row = box.row()
        row.prop(scene, 'Border_type')
        col = box.column()
        if scene['Border_type'] == Border_sphere:
            col.prop(scene, 'Size_max')
            col.prop(scene, 'Size_min')
        else:
            #col.operator('select.object_for_tesselation')
            col.label("select object for tesselation")
            col.label("and press 'create objects'")
        row = box.row()
        row.operator("display_all.objects_sectors", \
            text = "create objects")
        if scene['Border_type'] == Border_sphere:
            row.operator("print_number_of.objects_sectors", \
                text = "print count tetrahedrons")
        #.........................................................
        layout.label("")
        row = layout.row()
        box = row.box()
        box.label("Other")
        box = box.row()
        box.operator("delete.objects", text = "delete")
        box.operator("toogle_select_all_visible.objects", \
            text = "toggle selected objects")

        layout.label("")

        row = layout.row()
        tets_on_layer_0 = [ob for ob in bpy.context.scene.objects \
            if (ob.layers[0] and ob.name.startswith("T_"))]
        if len(tets_on_layer_0) == 1:
            row.label(text="1 object generated.", icon='OBJECT_DATA')
        else:
            row.label(text=str((len(tets_on_layer_0))) + \
            " objects generated.", icon='OBJECT_DATA')

and I get a 'KeyError':

  'bpy_struct[key]: key "Object_type" not found.'

What can be done here?

scene['Object_type'] will refer to a custom property you have added to a scene either by using the Custom Properties panel in the scene properties or by blender automatically creating it as you used scene['Object_type'] = 2 in your script or the python console.

The proper way to create a new property for your addon to use is by using bpy.props.

In your addons register() function you define the new property then in unregister() you remove it. Within your panel you can then access it with scene.myprop

import bpy

class LayoutDemoPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    """Creates a Panel in the 3D views toolbar region"""
    bl_label = 'Layout Demo'
    bl_idname = 'SCENE_PT_layout_demo'
    bl_space_type = 'VIEW_3D'
    bl_region_type = 'TOOLS'

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        scene = context.scene

        row = layout.row()
        row.label('testing')

        if scene.myprop == 2:
            row = layout.row()
            row.label('my property is 2')

def register():
    bpy.types.Scene.myprop = bpy.props.IntProperty(name="My Storage", default=2)
    bpy.utils.register_class(LayoutDemoPanel)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(LayoutDemoPanel)
    del bpy.types.Scene.myprop

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()


Rigify widgets generating in wrong position and won't rotate I am having issues with the rig i generated through rigify. When I hit "generate rig" a rig is created with the "palm" widget turned vertical instead of horizontal.
I also cannot rotate any of the widgets in pose mode. The widget highlighted in blue will not move or rotate. The same thing happens with other blue and green widgets in the rig.

The file is located here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ihXQGdsvz6mLsUTXckzLgcRS05c_jw_D/view?usp=sharing
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Solved in the duplicate topic here: Rigify generated rig, hand IK controller has unexpected rotation
The generated rig tries to correct the roll automatically by default, but this can be overwritten by selecting each upper_arm bone and in Bone Properties > Rigify Type > Rotation Axis selecting the rotation axis manually. If you have copied the roll orientations from the human metarig template, then this should be Z manual for the arms. This causes the hand IK control to be correctly oriented when generating the rig.


How could I duplicate these keyframes...? Whenever I try to duplicate the keyframes for my walk animation I've already done, it does what I didn't consider though makes perfect sense - it tries to re-position the character's legs back to the original starting point. Following a book I have, it suggests to insert the keyframes via Whole Character (selected bones only), which is what I've been doing. Should I have been inserting these keyframes differently or is it simply that I need to add all the keyframes manually and can't duplicate those I've already added?

You need to choose whether you're creating a walk cycle or just a non-cycle walk animation.

If you want to make your character move along a long path, like he's following a road, crossing a room, etc... use a walk cycle.

When you'll create your cycle in Pose mode, the character must not move forward, you'll create the animation as if he's walking on a treadmill.

It's once back in Object mode that you'll move the whole armature through your scene with a  Follow Curve constraint or just 2 keyframes if it's just a straight move.

The second kind of animation will be useful if your character makes only small moves, like walking 2 meters and then doing something else. In that case no need to create a walk cycle.

When you create this animation in Pose mode your character doesn't need to stay still like on a treadmill, you can move his left feet forward then stay at its position and move the right foot forward, etc...

In the second case though, if you want to copy some previous poses, for example the pose with the left foot forward if it's the same or about the same as the previous one with the left foot forward, make a copy paste, then, as it will make your character move back, make it move forward at the right position, select all the bones and press i to create the new pose. So it will be a copy of the one before but one meter forward.

Does it answer?


Changing family of many metas I've got a few hundred meta balls making up an object. I'd like to duplicate it, and convert it to a mesh.

It seems that the duplicated metas end up being in the same family as the originals, so everything gets converted to mesh.

Is there any way to duplicate a bunch of metas, and convert them to a new meta family?

According to the wiki the family of a meta is defined by its name. Since the names of objects in Blender are automatically generated when duplicating them I don't think it is possible to copy metas into a new family.

There might however be a workaround for what you are trying to do: Select all your metas and copy them to a buffer by pressing [Ctrl+C]. Then convert the metas to a mesh. If you now press [Ctrl+V] the previous metas will be pasted from the buffer and you have your mesh and your metas.