Blender Cycles Bake Not Looking Like Object in Rendered View I have a couch in Blender that looks like this in rendered view.

I baked it with a combined texture and this is what it came out to be.

This is what it looks like added to the mesh.

Why does the view with the baked image not look exactly like the rendered view?

Does it have something to do with my mesh and faces?

This is my mesh.

This has never happened to me before as I baked a couple things before this which came out perfectly.

Did you use Blender to UV the model? It looks like it is UV'ed, but somehow the point order has changed and the UV's and Verts no longer match up.

I sometimes get this problem when I go back and forth between Zbrush and Blender and mess up point orders either during import or export. The UV's may look correct, still, but each polygon in UV space doesn't correspond to the 3D space polygon it was originally assigned to anymore.

Do a simple UV again in Blender and see if that solves the problem.


How do you access the camera besides using CTRL+ALT+0? I've been trying to use CTRL + ALT + 0, but it doesn't work at all for me.

Either Select it from the 3D scene or outliner and make it active, or set it as active directly from the Scene tab in the Properties Window


Using triangles on low poly models I see alot of low poly models using triangles on specific parts. I know this workflow can help reduce the amount of tris, and even help with joints deformations. But for some parts I’m not sure why triangles were even used, (like the shoulders of the examples posted down below). Is it supposed to reduce shading issues for stretched quads or something like that? Thanks for answering!

First of all, any model you create will be converted into triangles eventually by the game engine. Sometimes the engine makes a bad decision for which way it should triangulate the polygon. When it does, the texture stretches wrongly, also as a form itself may look broken. That's why on the extremely low poly models you may find some polygons triangulated by the modelers


Merging two simple pipes? Boolean looks awful, carefully connecting the meshes does too This should be so simple. I’m trying to create the vestibular organ.

I am trying to connect two 8-faced low-poly pipes.

I have tried carefully deleting and connecting the mesh at the base which creates awful geometry and horrible artifacts.

I have tried creating a 16-faced base to connect them to. It became impossible to make the base round and was way off.

I have tried a Boolean Operation but there is a sharp crease that even merging select vertices doesn’t seem to reconcile.

Any recommendations?

Also, I am in this position because I couldn’t find a way to create this shape. Does anyone know how to wishbone a Bezier Curve that could accomplish the clean split-off in the reference?

I don't have enough reputation to add extra links to my initial answer in response to John's request in comments above, so adding a second answer to do so. Here, I rebuild the same piece, with minor improvements to my first approach:

In response to the request for my workflow in building the last example... I started with two unjoined, Bezier curves (which I converted to Meshes, though you can't see that here):

I joined them:

I deleted the "center" where the T-intersection needs to be built:

I deleted the "extra" bit of center/right-hand-side tubing with L-select:

In top view, I added a few extrusions to limit the amount of intersection I would need to build; also, I rotated after each extrusion, still in top view, to maintain the soft angle of the curve. These were extruded with Shift+Z to keep the tubes of identical height:

I then added all of the "easy" connecting faces by selecting 2-4 verts as needed and tapping the 'F' key a bunch of times. I did this first on the outside, and then in the middle of the top part of the T-intersection:

I then loop-selected the verts in the two spaces that were still not covered by faces, and noticed I needed an extra vertex to get nice quads (although perhaps larger/with more extreme angles than I would ideally like; that could be cured with a bit of moving around loop cuts, or maybe using a third Bezier curve for the right-hand-side tubing, with 2 extra cuts running its length...). To get that, I added a loop cut to the middle-of-T-intersection faces, and filled in the remaining gaps with 4 more taps of the 'F' key:

This is a little bit angular-looking in the T-intersection, so I then:

turned on Shade Smooth, to see how angular it will actually look at desired render settings
grabbed everything except the ends of the tubes and used smooth vertices (which I have hotkey'd to Q, not that that's necessary) twice.

In the original image, I also played around with smoothing different subsets of vertices to get the look to about where I wanted it -- more art than science, there.


How can I animate the camera in a perfect circular rotation around a fixed position? I have an object at a fixed position in 3D space. I would like the camera to circle around it while facing it. I want to path of the camera to be circular in 2D, meaning that it does not move up or down.

I need this to be pretty accurate. I don't want to manually set a keyframe every frame for position and rotation. I would like to do this maybe with an expression, not with manual keyframing. I am not sure how to go about this but I think it is going to involve Python as well as some trigonometry.

Yeah, you could...

You could do this with trigonometry. You'd need three drivers: X Location, Y Location, and Z Rotation.

If you want to drive it based on, e.g., the frame, you could pick some constant T for the period (the number of frames for a full circle) and r for the radius, to get:

X Location: r * cos(frame / T * (2 * pi))
Y Location: r * sin(frame / T * (2 * pi))
Z Rotation: atan2(y, x) + pi/2

Create a variable y with settings Transform Channel, Camera, Y Location.
Create a variable x with settings Transform Channel, Camera, X Location.

...however, this is downright silly.

There is no reason you would really want to do this. Here are a couple problems:

There's no need to be dipping into Python and drivers when all you want to do is a simple orbit.
It makes things more complicated and more difficult to maintain. If you want to change the radius, for example, you have to change it in two locations. Same for the period.
You have to have a trusted blendfile. Since Blender 2.68 you have to load a blendfile as "trusted" to use any Python (as you should!).

Better way to do this:

Use an empty, rotation, and a constraint. Create an empty and parent it to the object you want the camera to follow. Then, parent the camera to the empty. All you need to do now is insert keyframes on the Z rotation of the empty to rotate the camera around. To ensure that the camera faces it, add a Track To constraint.

How and why does this work?

When you rotate the empty, it also rotates all its children about the empty. This is exactly what you want — an orbit. The camera will turn, as well, but the Track To constraint makes sure it's in sync with the object. Otherwise, it could be turning at the right speed but always facing out, or always to the right, etc.

Benefits of this solution

If you animate the object that the empty is parented to, the camera will continue moving correctly.
This is really easy to do and takes about 30 seconds.
If you work on a team, people will know exactly what you're trying to do.
You can also animate the camera if you want (move it up or down, in or out, etc.) and the tracking will still work.

Here's what it looks like:


How to reduce mesh vertices to obtain homogenous density while maintaining manifoldness in Blender 2.79 I used to have a technique to make meshes have an even/homogenous distribution of vertices. I would start to increase the number of vertices (if necessary) using the "subdivide" or the "remesh" tools. Then I would apply a "remove doubles" (in 2.79, now it's called "merge by distance") with a distance that corresponds to a density I wanted.
The issue is that using the "remove double" would work pretty well in version 2.79, however in recent versions (e.g., 2.92) using the "merge by distance" tends to produce a lot of non-manifold faces.
This can be demonstrated just by using the default cube scene:

Start with the default scene cube
Apply a default settings "voxel remesh" (usable from object mode, not from edit mode)
Apply a "triangulate faces" and a "shade smooth" (that will help visualise the issues in the next step)
Do a "merge by distance" at 0.2m
Deselect all and then "select all by trait" - "non-manifold"

As it can be seen, the mesh becomes all messed up.
For comparison here is the result of the equivalent operations in 2.79:
Is this a bug? Is there any workaround for this?
Is there a better way to achieve homogenous vertex density while maintaining manifoldness?
Thanks.

Well, I think I may have found a nice way to solve my own issue using the remesh tool itself:
Using the "QuadriFlow Remesh" with the "Edge Length" mode set to the desired value, or using the "Vertex Remesh" with the "Voxel Size" set to the desired value, produces pretty and homogeneous meshes while maintaining manifoldness.
Example:

Starting with a UV Sphere, which has a vertex density not so homogeneous

Apply a "QuadriFlow Remesh" with the "Edge Length" mode

The mesh gets a more homogeneous vertex density

Using the "Vertex Remesh" with the "Voxel Size" set to the desired value

will result in an also nice mesh:

The other remesh settings, may also produce nice results.
(Anyway, I still think that the merge by distance has some kind of bug, or else it must be used carefully. Edit: it's not a bug, it's expected behavior)


Transform not working in pose mode I'm fairly new to this.
I have a rig set up, and there's one bone that will not transform in pose mode. If I try to move it/rotate it using the 3D manipulator widget, it does that free rotate thing with the black arrow instead. However, it does work properly in Edit Mode. Manipulate center points is disabled.

EDIT: Screenshots.

I parented the bone that wouldn't move with the one below it and changed it to Keep Offset, and now I am able to move it.


Video sequence editor preview video is full screen The preview panel in video editing is taking up the whole area of blender. I don't know how to get out of it. There are no buttons or menus anywhere.

I tried:

Alt-F10     - Toggles maximize/restore window.
Ctrl-Up     - Nothing
Ctrl-Down   - Nothing
Shift-Space - Nothing
Alt-F11     - Toggles real full-screen (no window)/window

Ctrl-s or Ctrl-w to save current progress.

Open the file by un-checking the Load UI parameter.


Meshify a Graphic in order to form and deform it Is there a way to 'meshify' a bitmapped graphic so I can push and pull it in order (in this case) to simulate the crinkles in a the almond bag? I suppose kind of like uv-unwrapping onto a graphic but I want something more direct. Something like select graphic + add polygons and then manipulate the graphic directly.

Well the answer is yes you can do it with images but not with blender alone,
and not with a single image as well. What you need to to learn about the modeling
technique using photography.

Currently there are 2 free opensource software VisualSFM and Meshlab that allows
modeller to create 3d models from a set of images there is are tutorial videos
on the youtube that shows you how to use them.

Here is one of the video. The guy even uploaded a set of the images he took
so you could follow those steps. Installing VisualSFM can be abit tricky though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6eqW6yk50k

Good luck cheers.


How do I set the location of the 3D axis? I am new to Blender, so this is probably a common question.

The origin and the 3D axis indicator are in different locations. This affects how modifications applied in edit mode via S and mouse drag.

I found the N panel that lets me enter origin location.  How do I set the location of the 3D axis indicator?

Also, how is there any way to lock the origin so that it does not change with every left mouse click?

The 3D-Cursor is one of the unique and very useful features of Blender, albeit sometimes confusing to new Blender users.

The issue you mentioned seems to be because of the pivot center for rotation and scaling set to use the 3D cursor PERIOD key (the before the ? key).

If you press COMMA key the rotation/scaling transformations occur about the Bounding box of the current selection.

The 3D cursor has many uses in Blender.

The 3D cursor is where new objects get added in the scene
The 3D cursor can also be used for setting a temporary pivot axis for an object and then perform rotations and scaling (by pressing PERIOD). To reset the 3D cursor back to world origin, press SHIFT + C

Custom 3D Cursor placement behavior

If you really do not want the 3D cursor to be shifting when LMB is clicked, then you can customize it from the user preferences. This is an advanced customization step and must be followed carefully.

Invoke the User Preferences Window CTRL + ALT + U
Search for Set 3D Cursor
Click the white triangle to expand the key map.
If I want the 3D cursor to be placed when I hold SHIFT and CTRL keys and then press the left mouse button, so I check SHIFT and CTRL.
Try it out in 3D view
If satisfied, save the user preferences.


Animation not included in rendered video Animation: https://gyazo.com/3e56fd22fe83be0c86af384dced417b7
The problems is that when I try to render the video it just shows the sphere which can be seen in the right part of the image, but nothing of the actual fluids I made. Any ideas?
I've checked several posts with similar issues, but with no luck.
My .blend file (uploaded to WeTransfer): https://we.tl/t-VbOcBdUbsq

Press this button here:

and then turn render on for your fluid...and it works like a charm! ;)


metalness map in cycles? I made a model that consists of several pieces, mostly metal but some are non-metal. Instead of making a completely seperated texture map for the non-metal pieces I decided that I am going to make one big instead that has all the necessary textures but then I realised that I don't know if it is even possible to use metalness map with cycles renderer. If it is then how would I set up the nodes?

Regards,
Koreenium

You can assign several materials to a mesh and a material can be used by several meshes.

In this first image, 2 materials (1) are assigned to the left object (2), and the wood part has its UVs located in (3) in the texture.

In this second image, again 2 materials are assigned (1) but to the right object (2), and its UVs are located in (3).

To assign several materials, use the '+' button on the right, so that a new material slot appears.
Then assign (or create) a material for this slot.
Last step, go to edit mode, select the wanted faces and click 'assign' in the material part :


Scale and snapping ... something doesn't work I have a problem with snap and scale. I follow the tutorial on this forum.

but it doesn't work for me because when I try to achieve the border that I want to reach, my object goes on another direction and continues to scale. why the object behave in this way?

The maneuver in your illustration is a constrained scale along global X, with the 3D cursor as pivot.  I'm not sure how the constraint was applied; I would expect to see it in the keystrokes or in the use of X axis of the scale manipulator.

Anyway, the settings show: "snap the 'Closest' element (vertex) of your transforming  selection to a 'vertex' on the target, (chosen by hovering over it), while transforming the rest of the selection with it"

So the moves are:

Ensure the pivot is at the center of your scale. That's the point which won't move
Select the vertices you want scaled away from the pivot
Hit SX, or use the manipulator to constrain the scale to X
Hover over the target vertex
Left-click with your cursor inside the little snap target circle to confirm.

'Closest' seems to select the vertex of the transforming selection that was closest to the hover target along the constraint axis before the transform began as the point to lock on the the target. At least, it does when the entire transforming selection was to one side of the target down that axis before the move was made. However I have to say I find its behavior unpredictable when the target is between or inside the source selection.

So I would much rather take the little extra time to use 'Active' as the source element. Then, in vertex mode, you know exactly which vertex will be aligned with your target by ensuring it is the last selected. That may involve shift right-clicking it twice.


Animate a spheres system as a camera diaphragm I have to make an animated intro from this logo

As you can see, there's a galaxy shaped array of spheres forming something similar to a camera's diaphragm. I would like to know which is the fastest way to create mesh for that shape, being able to animate it as a close-open diaphragm.

I was thinking about creating the "galaxy", ring by ring, creating a single sphere and then using array modifier, set to "fit curve" and then linked to a ring curve. Is that the way? I need to animate the spheres in a way that the ones closer to center gather at it, while the outer ones keep in position. The intermediate ones move the most as they are closer to center. That movement must be spiralled, as keeping the "galaxy" idea.

If you don't need the circles to morph so they never intersect, you can quickly fake it using a few dupligroup instances.

Create a singe circle, use an array modifier over it with the option Object Offset and Relative offset. Exactly over it add an empty object and scale it down as desired (in my example by a factor of $0.8$).

Create a group from the arrayed circle, and add a instance of it in a separate scene. Place the 3D Cursor at the desired position for the center of the iris, press . (Period Key) to use it as pivot for transforms, then duplicate-rotate the circle instance around it several times to fill a circle with the desired number of times.

Animate them by keyframing the rotation property, rotating around individual centers with Ctrl + .

Have in mind that this technique will cause intersections at more extreme angles. If you wish to compensate for those you will probably also have to animate the scale property of either the circles or the array empty. You may also look into Animation Nodes addon for a node based procedural setup.


Enceladus plumes particle fx I am asking for help because I am not that experienced with the particle generator, and I want to create the Enceladus plumes effect. I currently have the scene with the whole Saturn system,  using Cycles, and I have the probe near Enceladus, in the region of plumes. And I want to make the plumes touch the probe. And I don't have an idea how to do the plumes.
I want to recreate this:

You can use a lot of translucent particles

(But you may prefer a more fuzzy (i.e. volumetric) solution)

The result:

This is my setup:

a planet (diffuse white sphere),
an atmosphere (bigger sphere with a "Volume Scatter" material),
a distant area lamp representing the Sun,
a monkey shaped probe
a randomly subdivided plane with a white "Translucent Shader" as material

The planet has a Particle System emitting 1000 particles, with a "Child" duplication set to 200 (but higher numbers will give you fuzzier plumes, and longer renders).

The particles are emitted slowly along the Normal (0.100) and have a fair amount of Brownian force (0.360). They are not affected by the scene gravity  (Gravity Field weight = 0). They are rendered as "Object" using the subdivided plane as the Duplication object.

You can play a lot with the settings to make it look right. These are my settings:

This can also be used in animation: the plumes are dynamic -- even if maybe too fast with my settings.

I attach my blend file if you want to have a look at how it works.


Why does Assign Material do nothing? Following a tutorial, I created a black Material and selected Faces in edit mode and hit 'Assign'. Nothing happens, however. What can I be doing wrong?

You are in solid mode. Materials are only displayed in rendered mode.

If you want to see a color for a material in solid mode use the viewport settings for the material.


What is the Ambient Color in the Blender Internal Renderer exactly? I'm using Blender 2.77 and I have currently arrived at the native Blender Renderer engine, and I fully want to understand how it works and how I can use, adapt, modify it for my own Blender projects.

I've already read many free e-books, articles and watched many videos about it, but I want to be able to truly understand AND visualize its inner workings.

Unfortunately the official Blender Render manual does not offer much in-depth/under-the-hood insight on how stuff really works.

QUESTION: - What ARE the World: Horizon, Zenith and Ambient colors?
Are they real light sources (which gets internally ray-traced) or simply visual overlays which gets mixed onto the camera image?

Ambient Color: The Ambient color is a constant color added to the reflection model. Light sources are summed together and used in the calculation of the diffuse and specular part (See Phong reflection model for details)

phong reflection = diffuse + specular + ambient

Horizon Color: The color to use when the raytracer does not find any intersection for the primary ray (direct ray from the camera). It does not influence the shading at all. You can see this as a sort of background underneath your render.

Zenith: When using sky_blend the background will blend from the Horizon Color to the Zenith. This is done by the output pixel coordinate so the result will be the same for all camera angles and positions.

So the Horizon Color and Zenith, that generates the background, can be seen as an underlay.


How to get all available entries of an EnumProperty? As the questions already states? How do we get a list of all possible/available entries of an EnumProperty?

Enums are something Blender defines, which doesn't have a Python equivalent.
Therefor you need to use the RNA API. (See API docs)

Here is a function which returns possible values for an enum:

import bpy

def enum_members_from_type(rna_type, prop_str):
    prop = rna_type.bl_rna.properties[prop_str]
    return [e.identifier for e in prop.enum_items]

def enum_members_from_instance(rna_item, prop_str):
    return enum_members_from_type(type(rna_item), prop_str)

# Test the functions above:
enum = enum_members_from_instance(bpy.context.object, "rotation_mode")
print(enum)
# ['QUATERNION', 'XYZ', 'XZY', 'YXZ', 'YZX', 'ZXY', 'ZYX', 'AXIS_ANGLE']


Random placement of cylinders with random orientations I need to write a script that randomly distributes spheres (around 300) in a specific space and after the placement of the spheres I need to randomly distribute cylinders(5 times the number of spheres) with random orientation. All the spheres and cylinders should not overlap. After the spheres and cylinders I need to fill a percentage of the remaining space with ellipsoids.
I managed to distribute the spheres without overlapping by generating random locations, but I still have problems with the cylinders mostly because of the random orientation. My question is if there is any way for Blender to return the volume coordinates of an object when it is created, so that I can check for overlaps or if you possibly know any other methods to avoid overlapping.

I have this script,

...
# Function to calculate the distance between two points
def distance(a, b) :
    '''
    list , list --> float
    a = list with three element
    b = list with three element

    return the distance between two points in float
    '''
    return sqrt((a[0]-b[0])**2+(a[1]-b[1])**2+(a[2]-b[2])**2)

# How many Sphere you want to add
count = 50

# Cylinder properties
radius = 0.03
depth = 0.2

# The sphere will be created between -domain <--> domain
domain = 0.5

# Max time to try finding a new location before break the loop
maxTry = 50

# Variable to count how many try has been done
Try = 0

# list with three element to generate locations
location = [0, 0, 0]

# Variable to hold the distant between balls
dist = 0

# True == Won't collide , False == Will collide
State = True

# This tuple will hold centers of created spheres
locList = ()

while count > 0 :

    # Calculate x, y, z position
    location[0] = randint(-domain*10, domain*10)/10.0
    location[1] = randint(-domain*10, domain*10)/10.0
    location[2] = randint(-domain*10, domain*10)/10.0

    # Start check if it will collide with other spheres
    for x in locList :
        # Calculate the distant
        dist = distance(x, location)

        # If it's too close make State = False
        if dist < radius*2 + 0.1 :
            State = False
            break
        # If it's in a good position State = True
        else :
            State = True

    # The distant is too close , recalculate the location
    if State == False :
        Try += 1
        continue

    # After Try reach maxTry break the loop
    if Try > maxTry :
        break

    # Successfully found a New location
    # Add this point
    locList += (location[:],)

    # Smooth the faces
    bpy.ops.object.shade_smooth()

    #Create a new sphere at the same location, and resize it to an cylinder
    bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cylinder_add(radius = 0.1, location = location)

    #Give the cylinder a random orientation
    bpy.ops.transform.rotate(value=(2*pi*random()-1), axis=((2*pi*random()-1), (2*pi*random()-1), (2*pi*random()-1)))

    #Smooth the faces
    bpy.ops.object.shade_smooth()

    # reset Try
    Try = 0

    # Decrease the counter
    count -= 1

The problem of this script is in the condition of overlap between two cylinder, someone can solve this problem of overlap?


Texture aspect ratio independant of scene aspect ratio I'm experimenting with making a shader that looks like linework and colouring on paper.  As part of this I'm trying to apply a repeating texture map to give the base paper look to everything in my scene.  As it's supposed to look like it's all on the same piece of paper, the paper texture needs to be independent of the object surfaces in the scene.

I found I can get pretty close to what I want by using the Window texture coordinate node with the texture map I'm using to represent the paper.  However, there are a few issues, biggest of which is that the aspect ratio of the texture changes to that of the viewport, which I don't want to change.

Here's a perfectly square rendering with a resolution of 1920/1920 (note: The "paper" texture is a simple placeholder to test the concept, and I'm also adding a colour ramp that won't be in the final version to exaggerate the contrast of the texture (it's very light grey on white.  Also, the items that have colour are part of a previous shading experiment and should be ignored for the purposes of this question).

Here's the same scene rendered in a 16/9 aspect ratio.  As you can see, the texture has been squashed horizontally, the only thing that's changed between the first and second image is that I've changed the output resolution to 1920/1080.

My node setup looks like this (The colour ramp on the texture is there purely to increase the contrast and it won't be in the final version):

What I'd ideally like is for the paper texture to be pixel exact to the input image with no scaling at all, so that it looks like I simply drew the lines over the top of the original file.  Failing that, I'd like the aspect ratio of the texture to be preserved and not dependant on the rendering aspect ratio.

Is that possible?  How do I achieve it?

You can divide the perspective out of a perspective camera's texture-space like this:

.. and scale it to the desired size in the texture, a Mapping node, or multiplication.


Apply depth transparency to array object Can I fade in transparency of a material based on distance to camera when the object is part of an array of objects? It seems that they only use the original object's location attributes. However when I apply modifiers the material still won't attenuate based on ray depth?

I am trying to fly through the array objects, but I want to fade them in gently as I go so that they don't 'pop' into view.

Use the camera data node and a color ramp to control the transparency.

Note that you might need to increase the transparency bounce settings for the  Light Paths to prevent artifacts.

Or you might want to try controlling the transparency through the Ray length on the Light Path:


Invisible objects in the wireframe 3D is invisible with Wireframe enabled.

In wireframe mode, the object is actually supposed to be see-through. You also set it to transparency mode so that is why the lines aren't visible. On the top section, you will see the square behind a square like here :

and click on the square where I have pointed, your problem should be fixed.
cheerios,
Aster17


Where can I find the Texture tab? I have recently downloaded blender 2.72b and am having trouble finding how to texture objects. I have tried to look up videos about it but they all seem to have the Texture tab, in the Properties panel, whereas mine is off-screen and I can't get it on screen.

How can I get to this tab?

The Texture tab can be found in the Properties panel, but in the default state of the interface, it may not be accessible; What you need to do is to simply hover your mouse over the list of tabs in this panel, in the top, and use the Mouse Wheel to either scroll, on press it's button and drag.


Why are my particles getting cut off the top and bottom of my render? I'm completely new to Blender, so probably all my wording is wrong :-) I started exploring it to be able to create a Youtube intro for my son, who wants to be a millionaire Minecraft Youtuber. So bear with me :)

I found an intro template for blender, you can take it off my Google Drive. This is actually where it gets synchronized whenever I save it locally:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9par3l2T-UJQ1paY0tZRXlpN0E/view?usp=sharing

I'm rendering into PNG. The problem is that the particle cloud seems to fully extend to the right and left borders, but it ends abruptly towards the top and bottom:

Can you advise how I can have the particle cloud fully extend to all four borders?

Following my comment, considering the context (new to Blender, etc.), here is some more information.

The rendered scene parts (text and particles) are reworked using the 'compositor'. This compositor allows to tune how all this is mixed.

Here, it uses a box mask which is too small in its height (0.35).

To fix this, open another view. Set it to 'nodes editor' (1), then select the compositor (2), find the box mask and change its height (3).


How to render a 3d object in a texture So I have somewhat of a 3d space inside this texture and I wanted to know if it is possible to draw a 3d sphere inside of

how do I tackle this with nodes if possible at all, should I use a Parametric Sphere Formula?

the end goal a sphere inside a sphere

This isn't perfect as the shading is a bit off. But maybe you can improve on this:

(If you add a vector mapping node to the object texture coordinates you can scale the inner sphere.)

All that is necessary is the dot product into the bump node, but this causes the auto smooth shading to go away. So the color ramp is trying to add smoothing back, but not quite perfectly.


Why doesn't my plane array align to a curve? I'm trying to align an array of planes to a curve using the curve modifier. However, instead of the planes following the track, they just build a straight line which crosses the starting point of the curve in a 90 degrees angle.

I made sure the plane and curve both have the same origin coordinates, using the Shift+S menu. I tried the "Rotation & Scale" thing in the Ctrl+A menu, made new and simpler curves to try it with, as well as move the curve around. There are countless tutorials for this, but all of those seem to do exactly the same thing as I did and it never worked for me.

Here's my blend file: https://www.mediafire.com/file/gpdf16ubpo3wy7l/plane_curve_issue.blend/file

Thank you!

You ran into 3 gotchas.

The transforms on plane and path were not CtrlA applied. The object-level scale was sending deformed planes over the clipping horizon, which I also adjusted. As a general rule, while modeling, scale the mesh in Edit mode, rather than altering the object's transform.
The 'Radius' checkbox was set in the path's curve data tab. This means the scale of the deformed plane-array was responding to the curve's radius, which was somewhere near 100. In Edit Mode, under the Transform panel, I selected all the curve's vertices and set the radius to 1.
(Maybe not one?) The curve was not closed (cyclic). To toggle that, in Edit Mode, hit  AltC

Here's the file..

(BTW, on BSE, this is the preferred (dedicated) site for exchanging .blend files.)


Light Area under Glass I have a scene with a glass floor and a cavity underneath the glass. I would like to be able to actually see the cavity instead of just black glass (which is black for some reason that I'm hoping you guys can figure out a workaround to).

What is the workaround so that I can still have the slight darkening and reflections that come with glass, but also be able to see through relatively well? I'm going for a steampunk piano with some circuitry under the floor (not yet fully modeled).

A .blend (minus Image Textures because they're huge) to play with:

You have your Light Paths set to 0 Bounces in the Render tab. Try changing all these settings back to their default. I did and this is how it rendered.


why the armature its faded in the outliner? why the armature its faded in the outliner? what does that mean, i cannot edit it,even bones dont appear, its like blocked or something?.i tried to parent (ctrl+p) back again and the popup doesnt come out

Have a look in the Object Properties Panel and make sure you have Selectable checked in the Visibility section.

In 2.81, the faded text indicates that Show in Viewport is unchecked.


Triggerring left click events via python on 3D view screen I want to be able to emulate a user clicking on a point on the 3D view screen with the left mouse button from a particular angle.

The goal here is to snap the 3D cursor to the volume of an object from that projected point (something that blender does very nicely when used via the UI, but would probably be more than a bit tricky to do in other ways).

Is this possible? If not, which approach can get the same result?

You could try casting a ray from a specific angle, and see where on the mesh the ray intersects.

Check the mathutils library for the function intersect_ray_tri

mathutils.geometry.intersect_ray_tri(v1, v2, v3, ray, orig, clip=True)

Blender API intersect_ray_tri Function

Here is some code I found googling:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-154521.html

def CheckIntersections(mesh):
     intersects = 0
     obj = Blender.Object.GetSelected()
     origin = Blender.Mathutils.Vector(obj[0].getLocation("worldspace"))
     ray = Blender.Mathutils.Vector(0,0,20)
     print "Shooting ray from ",origin," towards ",ray
     for f in mesh.faces: # for each face
          v = f.verts # get vertices
          intersectionpoint = Blender.Mathutils.Intersect(v[0].co,v[1].co,v[2].co,ray,origin,1)
          if intersectionpoint != None:
               print "Ray intersects face at ", intersectionpoint
     intersects = intersects + 1

If you know the vertices of the object you want to position the 3D cursor on, you can select those verticies (1 or more) and snap cursor to selected (with more selected, it will go in the center (average) of the selected vertices).


Video Editing - Send a strip to another scene same project file I am trying to do some video editing and I want to send a metastrip or strip from one scene to another scene. But copy and paste doesn't work because it do not copy the curve animations, just the strips and all the fade in and out are gone. Is there another way to send a video strip from one scene to another scene?
Attached image: from the scene in red "logo" to the scene in blue "Scene_01".

I already found it! Well, I'll leave it here if someone else has the same issue:
In SEQUENCER just click on ADD> SCENE> Choose your scene. In the right panel on the "STRIP" tab go to SCENE and change the INPUT to SEQUENCER insted of camera. Done.


Transparency of whole image at the position of an object Is there a material or render setting which makes the whole rendered image transparent at the spot of an object? I.e. not to create only a transparent object where the background is visible, but a transparent „hole“ with Alpha=0? I know that this can be achieved post-rendering by the Compositor and e.g. Cryptomatte, but I would like to define the transparent areas before rendering.
Greetings from Germany, Tschöbbel

Holdout based on a material

The Holdout shader node sets the alpha to zero for the area occupied by the object in the rendered image. This is documented in Blender's manual:

  The Holdout shader node is used to create a “hole” in the image with zero alpha transparency, which is useful for compositing (see alpha channel).

  Note that the holdout shader can only create alpha when Properties ‣ Render ‣ Film ‣ Transparent is enabled. If it is disabled, the holdout shader will be black.

Holdout for a collection in the current view layer

As Jachym Michal noted, you can also use the holdout restriction toggle to mask all objects inside a collection for the current view layer. It will not affect the visibility of the same collection in a different view layer.

Display the holdout restriction toggle:

Activate the holdout for, e.g. Collection 2:

This approach sets the holdout attribute for the LayerCollection in the current view layer.

Alternatively you can also set/clear the holdout from the context menu in the outliner, if you're using Cycles as render engine. This can be accomplished by right-clicking on the collection to open the context menu and then using either View Layer > Set Holdout or View Layer > Clear Holdout. At the time of writing this option is unavailable when using any other render engine, due to a hard coded check in OUTLINER_MT_collection_view_layer (space_outliner.py).


I am getting strange shadows when using hair cards and cycles I am getting strange shadows when adding view my hair cards in Cycles. I think it occurs when the hair cards are overlapping but im not sure. Anyone knows if there is a fix?

I've lined up several transparent planes here as shown.

You can see that in rendered view we get some shadows on the ground even though these planes shouldn't affect anything.

This is because the ray cast from the camera hits the Transparency bounce maximum (which is low-ish by default), and reports back that the ray was lost, giving the color black.
Raising the value under Render properties -> Light paths -> Transparency should fix this.


Set parenting with automatic weight causes my mesh to deform in the abdominal and pelvic area I am trying to set a mesh parenting with automatic weight to a skeleton I created. When I do so, I go from this:

to this:

How can I fix this?

After a quick search I solved it. I had to CTRL+A in Pose Mode and Apply Pose as Rest Pose before I set the automatic weight.


Rigify : skin overlapping clothes so i know this is a weightpainting issue, but i have no confidence in my weighpainting skills, so whenever i try to fix it it just comes out worse and the deformation gets worse for some reason. can someone tell me how to fix it? .blend

This is a common issue in automatic weighting. There is no "one click solution", so I can only propose some tips to improve your weighting skills:

1 - put your subsurf modifier after (down) the armature modifier and enable two little buttons that let you see the changes you'll make in edit mode and weight painting mode.

2 - in edit mode, if you select one vertex you can read the weight assigned to every bone - vertex group in the "N" panel, vertex weight tab.

3 - in edit mode select some vertices (tipically some edge rings), then switch to weight paint mode and click the red highlited button: your weight painting will apply only to the selected vertices

4 - if you select some vertices you can directly assign a weight in the vertex properties, vertex group tab.

Always consider that every vertex is moved by all the bones to which a weight is assigned.

Hope it helps!


How can the Levels compositor node be used? I was looking at the compositor output nodes, and I saw the Levels node. The wiki says:

  The Levels Node takes an image as an input, and can output a 1D value based on the levels of an image. It can read the input's Combined RGB, Red, Green, Blue, or Luminance channels.
  It can output a Mean value, or average of values, or a Standard deviation, which measures the diversity of values.

However, the wiki says nothing on how to use such a node. So, how can I visualize the data the Levels node outputs?

This node will output a single float value based on input image.

Mean is the average value of all image pixels in specified channel (combined, red, green, blue, luminance). It tells you how dark or bright the image is and can be used as such for setups that depend on how is input "bright" or "dark".
The Std Dev is how much those pixel values differ from the mean. A low standard deviation indicates that the pixel values tend to be very close to the mean. A high standard deviation indicates that the values are spread out over a large range of values.

The visualization of such data is just a grey rectangle.


How to add a LightProbe to the scene without using bpy.ops.object.lightprobe_add()? I tried this, but it gives me an error:

data=bpy.data.lightprobes.new('IrradianceVolume')
bpy.data.objects.new('IrradianceVolume',data)

RuntimeError: Error: ID type 'LIGHT_PROBE' is not valid for an object

I want to avoid using the bpy.ops.object.lightprobe_add()

Has anyone found a way to do this?

You are on the right track

Check your version. The code below adds a lightprobe to the scene as expected.

Using python console

>>> D.lightprobes.new(
new()
BlendDataProbes.new(name, type)
Add a new probe to the main database

See the options for type by deliberately getting it wrong (Or consult the docs) Note somewhere between 2.80 and 2.83  type has been added to the BlendDataProbes.new(...)(current, currently 2.81) BlendDataProbes.new(...)(master currently 2.83) method.

>>> D.lightprobes.new("Some Name", 'SOMETYPE')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<blender_console>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: BlendDataProbes.new(): error with argument 2, "type" -  enum "SOMETYPE" not found in ('CUBE', 'PLANAR', 'GRID')

Add a cube probe, link to a new object, link object to collection

>>> lp = D.lightprobes.new("LP", 'CUBE')
>>> foo = D.objects.new("Foo", lp)
>>> C.collection.objects.link(foo)
>>> foo
bpy.data.objects['Foo']

>>> foo.type
'LIGHT_PROBE'

>>> foo.data.type
'CUBEMAP'

>>> bpy.app.version
(2, 83, 1)


Strugging to render my fire animation with Alpha/Transparency correctly i've made a little fire animation using the particle system that i'm happy with, but i'm really struggling to output it correctly as a 4second .Mov with alpha/transparency enabled so i can import it into another NLE.

I'm making sure that i'm using a codec with RGBA enabled (I've tried them all now) in a Quicktime container.

Whatever I do, the fire looks fine...but the background stays black/non-transparent.

I then discovered the film/transparent checkbox in the render tab. This fixes the transparency, but now all the Orange colour/glow has gone from the fire, & i'm left with something that looks like grey smoke (see screen grab)

I'm new to Blender, but if someone could talk me through what I need to check/uncheck to make this render correctly, I'd very much appreciate it.

Thanks

Blender’s viewer is and always has been broken with regard to alpha encoding displaying correctly.

Apply your rendered fire plane to an alpha over, and you’ll see the emissive yet unoccluding fire return.

Again, Blender’s viewer is and has been totally broken for a decade.


Possible to make the bones visible when the mouse is hovering over a rigged model? I was thinking something like in sfm (source filmmaker), cause the bones are often in my way, but when you hover over the model that has bones and is rigged, the bones automatically becomes xray, but when you take your mouse away, the bones are no longer visible. I was just watching this video, and i saw that the bones were only visible when his mouse was over it, take a look: https://youtu.be/FtBdRE5lRRU?t=178

Scouts (the model he is posing) bones are only visible when he actually has his hands over the model, i would love if there was something like this possible in blender.

As far as I know there's currently no way to do it without coding a custom solution that will hide bones and only show them on mouse hover. This would actually be very cool if we had something like this as default on blender (with maybe a slider to customize mouse distance-to-bone activation, etc) but as of today we dont.

The best similar solution that I can think of is an addon that is called Skin Selection, unfortunately, it's paid.

https://www.blendernation.com/2017/09/18/add-skin-selection/

This is a video of it working:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8AOj-nDn2o

It allows you to select a bone by selecting the surface of the mesh as if it was the bone... and allows for multiple controllers to be assigned to similar regions of the mesh. So nothing gets in the way, every bone is hidden.

I have not bought it to experiment and say how hard it is to configure, or how automated it is, but I'd advise you to check it out, its not that expensive.


Difference between two models, objects disappear from view, cameras added? I am quite confused and hope someone in this forum can help me out. When I add an object (Add > Mesh > Sphere) in Blender, it appears in the camera view at first, but then when I try to scale it, it disappears from view (I can still see it in Persp/Ortho View though). Also, a new camera appears all of a sudden? And why does the object seem to move when I change scaling - isn't it just supposed to get bigger/smaller? I do need the camera view, because the object should appear in front of a background image.

Also, I'm trying to figure out the difference between a blender model I received as model from my predecessor and my current version - I've attached both, something seems to be fundamentally different but I cannot figure it out.

Ideally, the camera should look straight at the center of the sphere and the sphere should be in front of the background image.

I'm using this at work for research purposes and it would be really great if someone could help me! thank you!

my version (1st file), Model (2nd file)

In your 1st blend, you've checked "lock camera to view" in the "N" panel. This could have caused some strange things on the view and camera position.

You can't see your (flat) sphere because the sphere and camera are at the exact same Z position.

Move your camera up or your sphere down (on Z axis, use G, Z to constraint the movment on Z axis) and you'll be able to see it.


Can I use previously rendered frames as texture in Cycles? A good example would be a giant screen in a football stadium. The last rendered frame would be used as texture on the screen for the current frame.

This texture would be emitting light (as it is a screen), so I really need it as a texture input for an emission shader in cycles.

It differs a bit from that question: Is it possible to use the output of a Renderlayer in the material nodes of another RenderLayer? as the given solution gives me a pink screen on the ~20 first frames.

Is it possible in Blender and if yes, how?

The answer to this is basically the same as Is it possible to use the output of a Renderlayer in the material nodes of another RenderLayer?, except you must render the first frame repeatedly until the replicated images of the render are smaller than can be seen (this of course depends on the resolution)

I've thought about this, and as far as I can tell, there is really no true way around it using compositing.

The reason for this is that this is a feedback loop;
The rendered result depends on the lighting, which is affected by the texture of the rendered result, which is affected by the lighting, which is affected by the rendered result, etc.

The only thing you can do is try and make the initial render a reasonably close approximation of how it will look after enough iterations have been done to make it appear infinite (i.e. emitting bright pink doesn't help). This way it will look "good enough" in fewer iterations.

Using the setup in my other answer, rendering a single frame will write a file via file output node which will then be read by an image sequence node in material nodes the next time the scene is rendered. So all you have to do is press F12 repeatedly..

To automate pressing F12, you could render an "animation" where nothing changes for as many frames as you want iterations.


Weird spiky shadows around the edges of my walls I am new to blender and was trying to model an interior of a room. I used an Irradiance volume around the entire house and an environmental lighting. In the render properties, I have enabled ambient occlusion and screen space reflections with default settings. After baking the indirect lighting, I am getting these spiky shadows around the edges of the walls.

Something like that generates Sun light.

You can try to get rid of by Shadow - Cascade Shadow Map - Max Distance, but seems to be a tricky solution.

This effect is such visible when Lamp light is switched to Sun where Strenght of light is too high (1000). Lower value to 3 is ussually fine in most cases.

Edit
Later I noticed - light still penetrates the corners

Enable Contact Shadow subpanel and play a bit with values

... or, instead all of this, use another type of light :)


OBJ with Vertex Group export and import I have a problem while exporting and importing vertex groups data through OBJ format. I have certain vertex groups in my object which consist of only single vertex (as shown in the following two images)

Now I export it by checking the 'polygroups' option and the 'keep vertex order'option in the OBJ export options and then import it by checking the 'Polygroups' option under 'Keep Vertex Order' tab in the OBJ import options. I see that, as expected, the vertex order is maintained, but when I tried selecting the vertex groups, I am selecting faces (as shown in the following images). How can I prevent this from happening? Why is the vertex group with single vertex changing into a vertex group with 4 vertices and the corresponding face is getting selected when the vertex group is selected?

Ok, I've just been testing myself, basically it's what I said before. OBJ file format specification probably doesn't support "vertex groups" feature.
There is no such structure or way to store that information in this file format.

What blender does apparently try to map vertex groups to the "poly groups" feature of OBJ. Since polygroups - as the name implies - only stores groups of faces it as a few caveats as it can't unequivocally map vertex groups to faces, so it can't store certain cases like single isolated vertex from vertex groups.

The minimum supported is probably three vertex, which is the least possible to define a face. This is what my four-corner vertex group (to the left) was imported like, two separate meshed with the four corners separated from the main one (colors for clarity purposes).

So short answer is it is not supported, either find another file format that supports this, recreate you vertex groups in your destination application, or fix them by hand there.


Rotate the result of a mirror modifier I am making a tire. The treads on the left and right side of the tire need to be offset from each other, ie, rotated about 10 degrees.
Is there a way to rotate the result of a mirror modifier? I tried using an array modifier with the array object being an "empty" that is scaled -100%, but the result is an inverted side.

Here is the half I have:

Here's the mirror result:

And here's how I want the mirrored portion to be rotated:

The way I produced this result was by applying my modifiers, but I need to be able to rotate the mirrored half without applying, if possible.

EDIT: I thought I was onto something when I realized that you can mirror using a  "mirror object", and the mirrored half will rotate when you rotate the mirror object, HOWEVER, it will only rotate in the other two axis: If I mirror over the X axis, I can only rotate the resulting half on the Z and Y axis. Seems like that should be an update to the feature.

EDIT 12-22-15: My workaround:

What I hoped to accomplish was to model an entire tire by simply only making the mesh for 1 tread on 1 half of the tire and using modifiers for the rest. That doesn't seem doable. For now at least, I modeled 2 treads, 1 on both sides of the tire, and will array that.

Ben, no the mirror modifier only produces symmetry across a plane; there is no way to rotate. One approach I used to model a tire was to model a strip across the entire width of the tire, and use an array modifier around an empty to arrange the instances of the array around the center point. The bit of the tread I modeled is outlined in white.

.

I should note that I only modeled the raised parts of the tread, and not the side wall or base; these were a separate object.

This technique worked, but the results were unsatisfactory because I was modeling a real tire, and it turned out that the different strips around the tread did not have the same size; the left three parts of the thread occupied a smaller part of the radius (1/48th of the radius, as I recall) than the right two parts (1/40th of the radius), so what I wound up doing is modeling the tread pattern as two different bits, the three left in on bit, the two right in the other, and applying the two different segments around the body (the sidewalls, and base of the tread), as in the illustration, where I've rotated the tire body, and highlighted the two segment arrayed object for illustrative purposes.


How do I specify the 3D Cartesian coordinates of each vertex in a plane? I have a specific system with a given origin. I want to make a plane with 3 vertices where each vertex has a specific position in 3D space relative to the global origin that I want to specify explicitly. I know that you can move vertices in each direction with your cursor but I want to set it in place the same way you specify the position of a UV sphere.

If you're doing it by hand, in Edit (Vertex) mode when a single vertex is selected, you can read/write its coordinates in the N Properties Region, 'Item' tab.

You have the option of seeing them in World or Object space.


Blender is not rendering the camera view I'm new to blender so I don't know what happened to my scene but anytime I render this appears instead of my camera view:

What did I activate and how can I fix it?

Check also if you have a video in the Video Sequence Editor (VSE) that may block rendering the 3D view. You can swtich what to render (Compositor and/or Sequencer):

go to Properties Panel > Render
than Section “Post Processing”:
if you have checked [x] Sequencer and have clips or media in the VSE, than the 3D view will not render but the VSE instead, i.e. the “Sequencer”. So in that case un-check it for the Sequencer


How do I calculate how much of a object is covered in a 2D image? I'm using code from here: Save the 2D bounding box of an object in rendered image to a text file

To calculate a bounding box coordinates for an object (say a human) in a rendered image. That works great.

I want however to expand this to be able to calculate how much of the object that is covered by other objects in the rendered image.

I want to do some research in AI/deep-learning as to try to train a neural network in detecting various computer generated objects in traffic. So any help here would be adding to that work.

In the "Render Layer" / "Passes" panel, enable the Object Index pass. You can then give each object, like your human object, a unique index using the "Pass Index" property in their "Relations" panel.

Once you've given each object of interest a unique "Pass Index", you can inspect that render pass after the image has rendered. Each pixel will have an RGB value equal to the "Pass Index". You can render twice, once with the obstructing objects and once without. Once you've done that, you can find your answer simply by counting counting pixels in each case; dividing the obstructed count by the unobstructed count will give you the unobstructed percentage.


What does 'Cube Size' mean when using Cube Projection UV unwrapping? I don't understand how Cube Size is handled when doing a Cube Projection.
Here is my example scene: my cube is 1m by 1m, applied rotation & scale, so its just a clean, perfect and beautiful 1m cube.

Let's say we have a perfect tiling texture where the correct mapping scale is 1m.

So I apply my cube projection... but I must set 2 to have the correct scale. Why not 1, like 1m?

Cube projection iterates over the mesh faces and for each does the following:

It considers the dominant normal axis of the face, and keeps the coordinates around this axis. For example if the dominant normal axis is X, the considered coordinates will be Y and Z. This is the 'cube/cube projection' aspect and this cube is fixed along the global axis (we'll have a flat projection on the world's axis).
Then it calculates U and V from the center of the UV Map (0.5) and adds 0.5 * (the parameter 'cube size') * (the object's location + the corresponding vertex location)

The code is the following:

luv->uv[0] = 0.5f + 0.5f * cube_size * (loc[cox] + l->v->co[cox]);
luv->uv[1] = 0.5f + 0.5f * cube_size * (loc[coy] + l->v->co[coy]);

So the result will depend on: the cube size parameter, the object's location (at 'object level') and the vertices location (at 'edit level').

BUT for the first vertex of the face, it calculates a rounding which will offset all the vertices of the mesh, using:

if (first) {
    dx = floor(luv->uv[0]);
    dy = floor(luv->uv[1]);
    first = 0;
}

And after that using the following for all the vertices of the face:

luv->uv[0] -= dx;
luv->uv[1] -= dy;

So the result may appear erratic as the way the rounding of the first vertex works does so, depending on the way the faces are organized (shared vertices between faces), some UV faces will overlap or not.

Once this calculation is done, the operator considers the two other parameters which are 'clip to bounds' and 'scale to bounds'.


Weight Painting - using a single colour How exactly can you use a single colour when using Weight Paints? I've added a few in custom colours in the User Preferences - blue, light blue, green, orange and red - but no matter what brush type I use, I keep getting a mixture of two colours, eg: orange mixed with green, with the green around the sides of the orange. Is there any way of just using one solid colour?

Thanks

I'm not sure of what you mean.
Weight painting needs at least two colors no matter what because it has to represent values between 0 and 1. So you will always have at least one color for 0, one color for 1 and it will display in between colors for every value between.

If you want to have only two colors for your weights paint (ie black and white), just set only two colors in your userprefs:

If you want to have as little transition as possible between values, use the "constant" interpolation and decay one of the sliders:


Is there a simple way to change the origin point of a lot of objects at once? I have a piano keyboard, so there are 88 individual keys. Unfortunately, I left the origins in the centers of each key. As a result, I can't rotate them properly. I could go through each one and manually correct each key, but that would be a huge pain. Is there a way to set them all at once? (I only need to move the x location on each key, in case that makes a difference).

Select all your piano keys.
Set your 3D cursor to the location where you want your point of rotation.
Object -> Transform -> Origin To 3D Cursor

That will set the origin for all the piano keys at once.


Why are the camera and lamp objects appearing in the OpenGL render? I am new to blender. First time I tried rendering the animation using Cycles render it worked fine. After that I tried OpenGl render, and after that this problem has started. The objects including the camera and light(lamp) in the 3d viewport are being rendered in the images.
I don't know if its a feature or a bug. Please help.

OpenGL render renders what you see in the viewport to a texture:

In the viewport, go to the Properties panel (N) and check "Only Render" in "Display".

OpenGL render again, and:

So, yes, it's a feature.


Rendering smoke to texture sheet Is there a way to bake an explosion in blender as a 3D texture with each slice of the volume rendered to a texture sheet? Here is an example done with Unreal 4.

If there is no default way, I made a grid of planes stacked onto each other with their UVs lined up exactly like the example above but I don't know how to do projection rendering for fluid renders onto textures.

I have previously developed an add-on to achieve this (Smoke2EXR) for the old smoke simulation (Blender 2.81 and earlier) and am in the process of updating it to work with the new Mantaflow fluid simulation (Fluid2EXR) in Blender 2.82 and later.
The add-on can be downloaded from https://github.com/baldingwizard/Blender-Addons/wiki (click on Fluid2EXR, download the ZIP and use the 'Install..' button in the Add-on Preferences editor to install it).
Once you have run your smoke simulation, save your .blend (important to not lose your work - as well as the add-on needing to save your image 'local' to your Blend file, so it needs to have been saved first). Press F3 to bring up the operator panel and type 'EXR' to find the add-on.

You should now be prompted by the add-on for the frame you wish to convert (it defaults to the current frame) :

Click 'OK' and after a "short" delay (it will take much longer for higher resolution smoke domain) should complete. Note that it can take a long time and will hang Blender while it is running - open the System Console before you run the conversion to be able to monitor progress (it outputs diagnostic messages to the console).
Once complete you should have your smoke domain in a 'spritesheet' format.

Note that in addition to the smoke density it will also extract the Flame, Heat, Color (only useful if you've set the color of your smoke) and Velocity data to separate images.

The filename is based on the domain size (eg, '64') and the 'spritesheet' grid dimensions (eg, '8x8').
I'm currently looking to enhance the building of the images to use Numpy which should hopefully drastically improve performance (it can currently take a very long time to extract a large domain or one with more than a few levels of Noise).


Re-directing Help>Manual Menu to Local Drive I've downloaded the Manual pages to my Hard Drive and would like to access them via the Help>Manual menu. Is there a way to do this either through Prefs or the source code?

Thanks.

Two ways I can see to achieve this.

1 Manually edit the UI script

Either manually edit the space_topbar.py topbar UI file traditionally found at Blender_2.82\2.82\scripts\startup\bl_ui\space_topbar.py and type in an entry there to link to your local file.

You can optionally remove the online manual entry from there and replace it with an instance of wm.url_open operator pointing to your local file. Just copy one of the existing templates and modify it to your own use.

This is a quick and dirty solution, allows removing the existing entry, but is less maintainable, since it will likely not survive a software update nor is it easy to port to other installations.

2 Create a script or addon

Create a script that registers a new menu entry with a link to your own file. Easiest is probably to use wm.url_open operator pointing to your local file.

import bpy

def menu_func(self, context):
    self.layout.operator(
            "wm.url_open", text="Local Maual", icon='HELP',
        ).url = "Z:/Applications/Blender/Documentation/Blender_Manual.pdf"

def register():
    bpy.types.TOPBAR_MT_help.append(menu_func)

def unregister():
    bpy.types.TOPBAR_MT_help.remove(menu_func)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

As far as I know this won't allow removing the existing entry, but you can have the addon under, several instances, and can easily be reinstalled after software updates.


Corner making a tri face On the edge of my model I'm trying to eliminate the tri face it's making. If I do a knife cut vertical, it'll make a quad, but if I go horizontal it'll make a tri face. When I add the subdivision modifier, it seems like a much cleaner topology. Is there a solution when it comes to avoid the mesh from making a tris?

You don't need the knife cut at all :).
Just inset the corner slightly, it'll move the ugly quad out of the way.
The corner is now smooth, and you can add more loopcuts to make it sharper.


Cycles: compositing alpha channel I have rendered an object using hdri and lamp lights.
Using render layers i want to have object and shadows only.
I show you my nodes.
I need to know how to transform white pixels to alpha channel using nodes.

One solution would be to enable a shadow pass, invert the colors and use that as alpha using a Set Alpha node.

The Dilate/Erode will help with the antialiasing of the shadow pass.

EDIT

Now... if you hate the previous option and absolutely want to use the layers you have set up, you can try this:

From the background layer you can indeed subtract the shadow layer, creating a black and white image that holds the shadow information only. But use difference instead of subtract (also, you don't need the invert node because you can invert the image with the curves node, but you do need to get rid of the color information). Next, combine that image with the alpha channel of the sphere, and use the resulting image as alpha channel on the mix of the shadow and the sphere...


How to i extrude 4 faces at the same time I want to extrude them all to the center but i don't know how to do it, any recomendation¡?

To extrude all the selected faces to a central point you can simply press E to extrude but then cancel the extrusion with Esc. This will leave the newly extruded geometry in the same place as the originating faces, but still selected. Then simply scale them to 0 with S0Enter.

The above actions will scale the etruded faces to a point - ie, it will taper together at the central point. To avoid this you can apply the scale in all but one direction - in your case the 'depth' of the object is in the Y direction so you could use S Shift+Y 0Enter.

Note that once you have scaled the faces together you might want to Remove Doubles to merge the vertices together.


How can I reproduce the same mesh many times 9000 (seriously) So, I'm working on a project where I have to create a front panel of an LED light. The front layer is made up of little diamond shaped surface, the light passes through this, and these tiny diamond shaped front panel helps illuminate and spread light evenly across. Anyway, the problem I'm having is that I tried the easiest way i know to create this panel, which is to make it using a plane mesh, and duplicating it. However for the size I needed, I ended up with over 9000, yes over 9000 (9435) separate duplicates put together. It has the look I want, but its impossible to edit or render it out because there is obviously too many of them and blender keeps freezing. So I'm stuck. How can I fix this without blowing up my PC. If anyone knows an alternate way to create this, please help me! :> I would really appreciate it.

Every time yo find yourself doing the same action over and over, think that there has to be a better way, either by instancing, using arrays or scripts to save you from tedious tasks.

In this case creating a large number of copies of the same object can be done with the Array Modifier

Create your base object.

Add an Array Modifier.

That will duplicate the object however many times you want it. The default is on the X axis (but you can modify that).

Then add a second array to duplicate however many times you need in the Y axis (or any other axis you need)


Cannot find Mesh: Relax I have blender 2.82, and when I go to edit >> preferences >> add-ons, I can't find Mesh: Relax at all. Keep in mind I'm a total beginner :)

You need to activate another add-on: Add-ons->Edit Mesh Tools.
How I understand Relax add-on include in Edit Mesh Tools add-on. This problem was discussed at the bug tracker.
Though the official manual tells us another information:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/addons/mesh/edit_mesh_tools.html#
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/addons/mesh/relax.html
Maybe the developers didn't correct information in the manual.


Blender Game Character Jumping Issues So...

I am making a simplish maze game.

My Issue at the moment is with making the character jump. I have a keyboard sensor for SPACEBAR that when the player presses it, it gives them 0.05 motion upwards.

Well, you keep going upwards until you let go of SPACEBAR, and when you do, you go slamming back down to the ground.

Another thing, you can jump 1. when your in the middle of a jump, or when you have fallen off the edge...

The blender game engine has a special function for jumping: first, make sure the Physics Type for your character is set to "Character". Then, in the Motion actuator, set Motion Type to "Character Motion", leave all the numbers at zero and set the "Jump" button. As the tooltip says, the settings for that are in the Properties panel, Physics tab (right underneath the Physics Type).

If you can't use the Character type for whatever reason, another way to make it work (the old way) is to add a collision sensor that references the ground, then "and" that with your keyboard sensor.

FYI: this seems to be a duplicate of How to create a realistic jump in bge, but since I don't have enough rep to flag it as such, I answered instead.


Why does my character model bunch up when posing? I make a fan model of a game character, but when I pose his fingers they bunch up.

I can't understand why it does that, if anyone has an explanation, please help.

The weights probably aren't proper. Click on the mesh and press Ctrl + Tab, then click the bone you're moving. The more red an area is, the more it's influenced by that bone. Play around with it until you achieve the desired result.


How to verify if all objects are selected? How can I create a Boolean variable that is true when all objects in the scene are selected?


My Viewport looks like im having a graphics bug My viewport is looking weird..

Problem:

See below for Solution

Solution:

Select your camera and go into the properties. The near-clipping of the camera is to small.


Smart UV Project on multiple objects simultaneously, but independently? How do I perform Smart UV Project on multiple objects/groups/components simultaneously, but independently?

When I try, it creates one giant UV unwrap/map that combines everything into one.

You don't.

If you want to have independent UV maps for each of your mesh, you have to perform the Smart UV on each mesh separately. You cannot select everything, perform Smart UV and expect to have have independent UV maps for every thing that you selected. That's just not how it works.


Why is the texture scale changing randomly between frames in my animation? I'm trying to render an animation, but I've happened upon a strange texture quirk for which I can't seem to easily determine the cause. Every so often, one of the frames will render with the texture scaled differently:

(frame 9 on the left rendering without issue and frame 10 on the right with the problem)

I am using Blender v2.83.3 on Windows 10 (64-bit)
I have tried switching from GPU to CPU rendering in Cycles, but that made no difference
This happens both when rendering as an animation and rendering stills
The bug does not show up when viewport shading is set to rendered

Here is a link to the .blend file.

It has to do with the Motion Blur's Shutter value, it is set to 0.5, if you choose 0.4 or 0.6 it works, I can't tell exactly why though  ;)


make a object see through to reference image behind I was working on a subway from a tutorial and when I try to go into wireframe mode the image disappears anyway for me to fix this?

You probably want to be using X-Ray mode instead of Wireframe. You can do this by hitting Alt+Z to toggle it on/off or by hitting the circled button in the image below.

Ironically, it's right next to the Wireframe viewport option :)


Curve fill is clipping from Illustrator SVG export Can't figure out why the fill in this imported SVG "k" curve is clipping like this. Other letters in the same import are filling fine even with islands but two letters are clipping like this. Any idea why?

The answer ended up being that I needed to change the "decimal" input to a value of 1 in the SVG export options in Illustrator.


Modeling subdivided pipes i started to try modeling some pipes, but i'm stucked about subdividing them (the base pipes) as the pictures shown down.

i tried with adding a cylinder, then with a bezier curve then bevel by a circle, any ideas

you want the pipe to branch off into the many pipes? I would try Boolean (union) a cluster of solid pipes (I used subdivided cubes) . Make sure the verts are aligned before you union. Delete the unwanted faces  then select the verts on one end and use the circle command to round them out. extrude then use the spin tool to add the elbow. apply subdivide to taste.
steps from right to left.


Why does my texture image join badly at the edges? Bad UV unwrapping? I added a Texture Image to a torus and when I started painting on the torus, I saw this undesired effect at the point where the edges of the underlying image join:

I can see this effect also in the underlying linked image (right-click on the image and open it in a new browser tab to see it at full-size where it's easier to see the issue):

The .blend file is here (I'm using Blender 2.92).
There's nothing fancy about the torus or how I linked the image. The torus has been just lightly deformed and I don't see anything unusual about the mesh at this join point:

I did no customization in the UV Editing workspace, in fact, I didn't go near that workspace at all.
I created the deformed torus in the Layout workspace, selected it, switched to the Texture Painting workspace. There in the Image Editor, I added a new image giving it the name "Torus_texture" and changed none of the other default image properties. I went to the Shading workspace, added a new Texture Image node, selected the "Torus_texture" and linked the node's Color output to the Base Color input of the material node for the torus. And that's it - the result has this odd anomaly shown above.
Clearly, I have done something wrong but I'd like to know what so I can correct it without starting from scratch again.
I know I've done something that introduced this issue as if I simply create a completely new undeformed torus, add a material and repeat the steps outlined above I don't see this problem:

The hard edge that you see is a stroke that I drew directly on the underlying image, rather than the torus, so that I could see the join point. Here there's no odd anomaly at the join point when I draw directly on the torus.
Its .blend file is here for comparison.

You are using the default UV Map for a torus, which should (and does work) provided you make a small change to the shader.  Here's your original texture node:

In this case, the interesting setting is the 2nd one

This flat projection produces the torus you have in your question

If you change the type in the drop down menu from "Flat" to "Tube"

The problem goes away, but the project changes so that the UV map is on the other side of the Torus:

There ways I solve this later problem: simply reposition the torus so the part you want exposed is visible to the camera
The image texture is trying to map a 2D UV map onto a 3D object.  If you give it guidance by marking seams then you've actually created a flat (almost) representation of your 3D object and "Flat" works.  But if you count on the various smart UV unwrapping modes, they rely on you hinting the geometry of your object in the image texture settings.
There are a very long list of possible combinations, each requiring a slightly different approach to the settings, which is why most tutorials on UV mapping go directly to "mark seams, make flat".  The problem with doing this with a Torus is that if I mark the obvious seams:

The resulting uwrap:

has several problems.  It doesn't match you image texture.  It doesn't use very much of the space available.  You can cut the Torus into pieces to fix the later, but the only way to fix the former is to redo the texture painting.
This is why, by the way, the workflow for texturing is to first create the UV Map, then test it with a UV checker, and only then to create the image texture.


Rendering multiple smoke/fire domains I have several smoke domains and sources that each start a fire at a different time (frame).

now it seems that I have an issue with black rectangles that appear, which is my domain.

After reading this question: Is it possible to have more than one smoke simulation in the same scene?
I've tried to put my domains and sources on different layers, but it didn't work.

Next I removed all my domains and added one huge domain.
This doesn't seem to produce the black rectangles, but now my smoke/fire all starts at the same time and the flames/fire are a bit different now.

Any suggestions on how I can render my multiple smoke/fire domains properly?
(in viewport preview everything was fine)

If you haven't already, you will want to assign a flow group for your smoke domain and place your emitter into a group.

First, select your emitter and assign a group to it (alternative way to group would be to select the emitter, go to the Object tab -> Groups, assign a group and give it a name).

For your smoke domain, under the Physics tab -> Smoke Groups, set the Flow Group to the group you just made. This will prevent mixing of other emitters with that particular domain, allowing multiple domains to be in the same area and layer.

EDIT: One last thing I forgot to mention, make sure each domain has their own material.

And be warned: This may greatly increase render times, so consider placing them on separate layers regardless.


Subdivision Surface modifier not working if applied Well, I started making a plate for my pie. I added an subdivision modifier, when I do not apply it, in the render it shows in the level I set. If I apply it, in the render it shows subdivision on level 1. I don't know what to do. Please help.

When you apply a subsurf modifier, it uses the number of levels in the Viewport box, not the Render value, so make sure the first one is set to the number of subdivisions you want.


What's going on with my Matcap and how do I fix it? Whenever I try to put a Matcap on my object, it turns white. How do I fix this?

Try downloading the correct .dll file from here:
http://download.blender.org/ftp/sergey/softwaregl/
and put it in the same directory as blender.exe.

Explained here:
https://developer.blender.org/T50371


Weird glass artifact I was messing with UV unwrapping, and this is what happened:

I reset the UV map, but to no result. For reference, I have older render of the same glass (the version which was unfortunately overwritten):

How to make it smooth again?

It looks like there are two faces in the same place oriented other ways.
That's how face orientation view looks like:
How to rotate these faces?

Ok. The solution was to recalculate normals by using Shift + N . The problem was, that faces were facing wrong way. Blender renders fronts of faces in higher quality than backs, and mine were facing front and back in checkerboard, so that explains checkerboard thing. Recalculating normals rotated  them the right way. I think that they rotated when I was messing with UV unwrapping.


Armature going crazy Today i was doing some texture painting, and when i saved and closed blender everything seemed fine, but when i opened the blend file later, the body mesh was completely off.

The body was in a different location, alot higher, is even a bit smaller, and two of the fingers are horribly stretched out. Together with this all were broken, and if i tried to fix this by relocating the mesh to the position of the armature all the animations stop working at all.

In the image there is the body i was working on (female), and the armature of the female body in the middle (both were at the position where the male body is)
The male body didnt change location or size randomly, but just got his fingers stretched.

How can i fix this? i have no idea how this happened, and i cant seem to find a solution that does not involve losing ALOT of progress by reloading a backup.

Backup you latest defective file and work with a copy.

The armature modifier can be deleted and then a second bind to armature can be performed.

Deleting an armature modifier may sound error prone.  Yet Blender features can be deleted and recreated.

If you saved the binding position for example in Frame 1 then you can simply bind a second time.

It is unfortunate that you had this location of mesh accident.  There are many ways this can happen. One is moving the keyframed mesh and NOT setting a location keyframe. Keyframe mesh position in frame 1.

You may choose to move your mesh to the origin.  Place the armature and bind to armature correctly.  Frame 1.

You may consider in the future that you may rebind at any time in Frame 1.


Parts of mesh missing after exporting to OBJ I'm trying to export a model I made to OBJ.
After this I'm opening it with Outfit Studio, a tool to make a NIF file to get it into Skyrim.
Somehow the exported model misses some parts when I open it in Outfit Studio.

I removed double vertices and recalculated normals.
This is how it looks in Blender:

I'm kinda lost, why is this happening?

So I was able to fix it myself, the problem were those huge Ngons created by the Bevel.
This works fine in Blender but seems to be a problem in Outfit Studio/Nifskope.

Now I created faces with 4 vertices like this and it works fine:


How to use zooming in Blender's viewport? I'm new to Blender. I've used 3Ds Max, Modo, Maya in the past, and want to give Blender a try. However I can't seem to get a grasp on how to navigate the 3d scene in Blender 2.8. When I press alt, right click and drag in one direction, the camera sometimes zooms in (or out, it's 50/50), then as I keep dragging (in the same direction) all of a sudden it starts to zoom the other way, and it either keeps doing this weird in-out-in-out zooming or it'll get stuck and I'll have to re-frame the camera. The way it behaves is so un-predictable that it gives me motion sickness. Is this standard behavior or what am I missing?

Zooming seems to work fine.

You can use mouse wheel as well as ctrl+middle mouse button and drag. It is often useful to frame selected while navigating as well Numpad . is the default shortcut for that.

As very few people experience problems with zooming I suspect that something may be set up wrong in your settings. You mention non standard hotkeys - there may be something wrong with the keymap you are using. If you are just starting to use Blender, I would strongly recommend to use the defaults for a while especially when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. Customization is useful and most of the time necessary, however you should give yourself a bit of time to get to know what you are changing.


Rising Buildings Animation I need some help. I am looking for the easiest way to create the animation of a few rising buildings. The idea is to start the animation with a natural landscape and then to make appear from nowhere 5 simple high rising buildings that grow till hiding the beautiful natural landscape.

My problems are essentially two:

how to make the first basement appear from the nowhere, as it seems to me that I can't add a keyframe when there is no object, a part from the landscape;
how to make the buildings grow one after the other but, at the same time, separately; I try to explain: I have tried to copy and paste upwards the first floor to create the top floors of the first building and then do the same in other positions of the plane for the other buildings. But when I animate, the floors of the other buildings seem to shift from the first one, as if the animation recorded not just the new rising buildings, but also the movement of the copied floor, from the original building to the others.

I don't know if I have been clear enough. I have looked for a video tutorial for days, but without any result.
I am really a first-time blender user and I am doing this project for a university examination, so I hope somebody could help me.

Thank you a million for any advice.

Enrico

As to the first question: I think toggling the "restrict rendering" button using keyframes should allow you to make the object appear seemingly from nowhere.  The object is there in all frames, but it is not rendered until the frame where you turn rendering on.

I am assuming you know how to insert keyframes (hover over the control on the frame you want, set to the value you want, and type "I")


Grease Pencil, drawing straight lines v 2.78 I am trying to find the focal length and camera position using the BLAM addon for the image below:

I try to draw the required lines in red (entering CTRLDLMB) but blender only draws horizontal lines and vertical lines. What did I forget to do ?

To draw straight lines select Draw>Line on the grease pencil section.

Otherwise press CtrlD and place the cursor on the starting point of the straight line, then release the Ctrl key while still holding the D key, and position the end point of the line and release the D key.


How to bake roughness into green channel only for usage with GLTF (Blender 2.8) I've got a node setup that uses the red channel of the diffuse map for the roughness. I've described this method here. This works really well for wood textures. The node setup looks like:

I want to export my object to GLTF. To create correct GLTF files, you have to connect one texture that holds the roughness (G), metallic (B) and AO (R) in the different color channels. Therefore the setup I currently have doesn't work. The setup that is needed by the GLTF exporter looks like:

(I'm not 100% sure about the connection to the glTF Metallic Roughness group node; Blender crashes atm when I use this setup).

I use a 2 step procedure now. First I use the setup as described at the top of this post. Then I bake the roughness into a texture. Then use that texture and connect the green channel to the roughness input of the principled bsdf node. Problem is that the generated roughness map contains the roughness in all channels (R,G,B). So when I connect the blue channel to the metallic it uses the same values as the roughness instead.

Is there a better way to do this? Or maybe a way to only bake into one channel? What solution do you use to export GLTF files from blender 2.8?

ok I do kinda understand what you want to achive, you need to do it differently though to get the best possible outcome.
you need a CombineRGB node, plug the Rougthness in R, the Metallic in G and the AO in B (if you want to use the Red channel of the diffuse as the rougthness) and then you plug that in to a diffuse node, this then to the output

then you go over to the baking section, there you select Diffuse (COLOR)

Create your image in the image editor and put it into the material you want to bake, make sure its selected

if you now bake it, you will see that it works, it only uses the color of the diffuse node, not shades, nothing else, just color.

to get the data back you will simply use a SeperateRGB node.


How to separate the selection of a duplicate mesh? I just duplicated a part of a mesh but as I select one of them, both are being selected. I learned about the 'P' hotkey, however, it's not working in my case. I'm using the latest version of Blender.
I used the 'P' button for the selection menu but it's not working.
Please tell me another way to do it

Project link:http://www.mediafire.com/file/mcqsc88v7rb911j/FirstProject.blend/file

You need to go to edit mode for separate by 'P' to work. If you just want to separate the top portion in your screenshot, go to edit mode, select those vertices that you want to separate, press P and choose 'Selection'


How to model spherical corners I am looking to recreate the object shown below but with a better topology. However, I cannot work out how I would model such a shape.

The important details I am trying to achieve is having the spherical corner be "tight" meaning the spherical curvature all happens around a section that terminates across 1 point on either side of the corner (green cross):
The closest method so far is the following:
Method

Select corner edge and bevel
Bevel the edges around the corner

Outcome
This is close, but it is very difficult to control the start and end point of the spherical section, because the end result depends on the depth of the first bevel.
The first bevel needs to be long enough to not cause the second bevel to collapse at the edges:

And even if you do get it close enough, there is always 2 extra segments that cause it not to be tight:
Is there a more precise and reliable method to achieve this spherical corner shape?

If I understand your goal, you can do this in one go.

Select all outer edges (even the horizontal one)
Bevel them with Clamp Overlap checked (Shortcut: C)
Merge double vertices (Alt+M > by distance)


My Blender model has invisible insides when exported to unity I have a crate that I got online and then customized and animated to open and close, and in blender the walls are visible on the inside, but in unity where I imported them they aren't, can someone please tell me why?

Maybe it is invisible in Blender also.Have you switched on Backface Culling?
If it works with this then you can add planes inside or you can solidify the external faces.


How to loop animations If the orbital period of earth is 1, the period of Mercury is 0.241.

In the Timeline, I scaled Mercury to said period by pressing S, .241.

How can I get Mercury to continue it's motion rather than waiting for the animation to restart?

You can select the object, in the Dopesheet select its keyframes (to only see this object's keyframes, use the Only Include Channels Relating To Selected Objects option, small arrow icon button) and press ShiftE > Linear Extrapolation, and the object should continue its rotation infinitely.


Connecting two sphere with a cylinder I want connect the two shperes with a cylinder.

Using the cylinder passes through the centers of the two sphere.

Are there any procedures to do that?

Here is a way to connect two spheres with a cylinder:

Create a cube, then in Edit mode, W Subdivide Smooth, and increase the subdivision with the parameters on the bottom of the T menu

Select a square and W > LoopTools > Circle

Make a hole, then extrude to create a circle inside the circle (E)

Duplicate your sphere and rotate the duplicate

Select the two holes and W > LoopTools > Bridge

After that you can add a Subdivision modifier, add edge loops to make the edge loops sharper, etc...


Gestures to navigate in the viewport Is there a way to turn on gestures to navigate similar to photoshop?
Pinch to zoom, ability to pan/rotate, undo history etc

There is no support for gestures.
The one thing you can do is go to edit -> preferences -> input and turn on Emulate 3 button mouse to hold alt leftclick instead of mouse3. But still, no gesture support for pinch to zoom etc.
If you have a stylus I'd recommend binding mouse 3 to one of your pen buttons.


Text animation (shape ramp) Can blender using a text shape ramp effect as in the after effects ? how if using a blender ?

You can use a curve modifier applied to your text object though it will distort the text shape along the curve slightly. Not sure if that is the effect you are going for or not


Cycles rendering dim lighting This has been going on for a while now but I just want to fix this.

I have a nice bright scene in the viewport, but then when I render it, it looks way too dark.

Here is the .blend https://drive.google.com/open?id=1a7bX40YrLo2u1lplQ9KYhogwmmlm3XqG

I downloaded i tried your mesh. Number 1, if possible use a surface below the object. That way a lot more light bounces and illuminates it. Number 2, you might want to switch your "Color Mangement - View transform - to Filmic (instead of film". Its giving nice results over hear.


solidify modifier adding non uniform thickness to the mesh I have a simple table without any thickness, I started with a cube and deleted 3 of the faces, applied a subdivision surface modifier and did a few loop cuts to achieve this shape shown here:

however when I try to add a solidify modifier to it, the thickness is not evenly distributed so the sides are thicker than the middle and the mesh also gets distorted shown here:

I want the table to have a uniform thickness just like in real life, and get rid of the weird distortion, I am relatively new to blender and this might seem obvious but any help will be appreciated, thanks.

You must have scaled your object in Object mode rather than Edit mode. If you do it in Object mode, Blender still considers the original size of the object when you'll assign it a Solidify modifier.

So you need to select your object and ctrl A > Apply Scale, so that now the scale you've made is applied to the mesh itself and not only to the object.

Also, enable the Even Thickness of the modifier, it could prevent some other distorsions.

And at last, your object mesh must be a little bit messy because you have strange artifacts, try to make a clean topology.


Change a Driver based on which Scene is being Rendered I am looking to drive a property in a material node based on the current Scene when rendering. The purpose would be to mix between two different parts of the node tree so that one Scene renders one input of a Mix node, and the other scene renders the other. The objects the material is on exist in one scene, and a group instance of the objects exists in the other scene.

The reason for using different Scenes is that part of the material is regular shaders that need to be GPU rendered, and part are OSL shaders that need to be CPU rendered. So the only difference between the scenes is that one has the device set to GPU and the other CPU.

I know that I could make copies of the objects/materials and so have a different material on the OSL version, but this gets cumbersome as i'll need to re-copy the objects or re-create the whole scene every time I change an object. This is too inefficient while still working on the project. The Group instance means that any changes I make to the models are instantly updated in the other scene, and lets me use the Group to control which models are rendered in the OSL scene at all.

Is this possible?

It is possible to script drivers. Normally if you use a scripted expression as a driver, you can use any function that is defined in any script and added to driver namespace:

import bpy

def f():
    if bpy.context.scene.name == 'Scene.001':
        return 1
    else:
        return 0

bpy.app.driver_namespace['f'] = f

'Register' would need to be checked in the Text Editor also the script needs to have .py extension and Auto Run Python Scripts must be enabled for the function to exist every time the file is reloaded.

However apparently this does not work with driving material node properties because Blender's drivers seem to be broken in this area.

It would probably be possible to script an app handler that would take care of it, but at this point I would suggest to simply use a script to switch the mix nodes in all of your materials before rendering. Since this extra step takes only a few seconds it might be easier to have less complexity and you could possibly get away with only one scene as well. You could give the Mix node some specific name in every material like for example "OSL_mix"(in the n panel of the Node Editor). Then you could run this to change the values of the nodes with that name in all your materials at once:

import bpy

for m in bpy.data.materials:
    for n in m.node_tree.nodes:
        if n.name == "OSL_mix":
            n.inputs[0].default_value=1 # or 0

For your convenience you could change the render setting with the script as well by adding something like:

bpy.context.scene.cycles.device = 'CPU' # or 'GPU'
bpy.context.scene.cycles.shading_system = True # that's the OSL
bpy.context.scene.cycles.samples = 1000

Or something like that. You can just change what you want in the render settings and copy the command from the Info panel.

I would just have two scripts like that to switch between CPU-OSL and GPU rendering.

I hope that might be a convenient enough workaround.


Is it possible to change the width of edges in edit mode? I'm a math teacher.  I like to use Blender to demonstrate some ideas when we talk about geometry in 3 dimensions, so I display it on our projector and the class will work together to edit some basic shapes.  I've changed the size of vertices so they are bigger and easier to see, but I haven't found a way to increase the size of edges.  Is there an option to do this?

Unfortunately, you cannot. You can edit vertex and face dot size but not edge thickness.

I defer to the other answer for the (easy?) workaround.


How do you draw in multiple colors with grease pencil? Im trying to draw in color, but all my strokes come out the same grey color, no matter if I use material or vertex color.

I have also seen related questions or tutorials where the way they change the color is by either changing the material of a stroke manually or using the tint tool (not that I got those to work either) and what I want is for the stroke to act like strokes in a drawing program, being drawn in the color selected directly and all.
How would you do that?

First, make sure that you are in material preview shading or rendered shading (unfortunately you cut the top of the viewport on the image on the question, don't do that).

Color will not appear in solid view.

For Material.
Set the material for the stroke and fill in the material properties window.

For vertex color
Set the color directly either on the top color selector on the screen.

Or use the tool options in the properties window.