How to wrap / bend an object So the above will be a bracelet, and I want it to wrap downwards symmetrically (as around a wrist / arm). I've tried a bunch of different things, and have gotten pretty close using the curve deform modifier.

I read up on how to use it, which is why the origin of the path is on it's first point and not in the center (otherwise the mesh leaps to line up to the left.

However, as you can see in front view, this drags my whole mesh to the right instead of staying locked around the Y axis for a nice symmetrical bend. I feel like there's probably something obvious that I'm missing but I can't find the answer anywhere - something to do with the origin maybe?

Or if you know of a better way of doing this then I'm all ears.

I'd use the Simple deform modifier.
Add a bezier circle. Select the bracelet and go to the modifiers tab. Add a Simple deform modifier. Set it to bend and set the origin to the bezier circle. The bracelet will bend over the bezier circle's local Z axis, so you will have to rotate the circle. To get the result in the image below, I rotated the circle 90° around the global X axis. If I misinterpreted your description, you may have to rotate the circle differently. Once it bends the way you want it, change the angle. In the image below, I used 360°.

Note: I deleted the modifiers you had, except the subsurf. I did this for my convenience. I take it the curve modifier you had was the one you were using to get the bracelet to bend. If so, you should delete it. The order between the simple deform you already have and the one I'm suggesting makes a difference, and you will have to try to see which you want. You can change the order in which they are calculated by clicking the up and down arrows in the upper right corner of each modifier's config dialog.


Weird texture in bge When I press P to play my game, my mesh transforms to ugly textures, but when I just view in the viewport the mesh is perfect.

It does not come from normals or from GLSL.

Here is a GIF of my problem
Problem.gif

The gif is big (40mb), wait for it to load before viewing.

I guess you have semi-transparency enabled. Turn it off.

Other than that you might have a mirror modifier active or mirrored the mesh somehow.


How do you make the inside color of a cup different from the outside? I want to change the color of the interior cup but I can't seem to do it without the image texture being deleted when I attempt to transition from image texture to color. Even after the material gets duplicated.

You could go to edit mode and select all the faces inside the cup that you want in a different color. Change to vertex mode and make the selected vertices a vertex group. Then add a new material for the cup and assign this material to the vertex group


How to remove part of a model and create a handle? I'm new to blender so sorry if I posted it in the wrong place or someone else has already answered this.

What i am trying to make is a bleach bottle something like this:

Right now i currently have a basic shape for the bottle:

but i want to know how i can remove a curve from the model and put in a curved handle.

Not a direct answer, but I propose this approach :

Upper left, the base shape (only extruded cube)
Lower left, the same with a subsurf modifier
Upper right, vertices adjustment in order to fit the shape
Lower right, the same with subsurf

Edit for some explanations as Thefundude said to be new to Blender :

The main idea is to start from a basic shape which as the topology of the bottle. So mainly here, has a hole below the handle and is opened at the top.

The very basic first shape is here for that (defining the topology), but also, as it is very basic (few vertices), its vertices can be used as handles to reshape this starting mesh to the wanted shape.

The subsurface modifier is used to round the shape.

Here is how to set it up :

Select your starting mesh
Go to the modifier panel and select the subsurface modifier
Give it one or two subdivisions

Now the first part to enhance will probably be the handle. We want it curve. We will use the spin tool for that.

Remove the non curve part
Place your cursor at a pivot point (the spin uses the cursor as pivot). Select the location and Shift+S and 'cursor to selected'
Select the vertices to spin
Place the view in the spin axis. Here front view so NumPad1
Then Alt+R to invoke the spin tool
Change the amount of steps to an amount which more or less preserves the proportionalities of the whole model (the same precision everywhere, for now)
Finally, as the spin has created vertices which overlaps already created vertices (these on the bottom right here), select them (or all) and remove doubles.

After that, this is mainly tuning and adjusting matter.

For instance you can scale the handle :

Or add some more geometry to refine the shape :

Or want to add more edge loops, in particular to flatten the base (I used here the 'inset tool' which is invoked by I (then adjust moving the mouse) :

Step by step (but starting from an appropriated topology, adding few vertices as you want to master the shape easily) you can refine your shape without arriving to the complex situation of your question.

Cheers !


Armature with automatic weights is deforming mesh I have created a pretty standard armature but when I try and apply it to my mesh it deforms it pretty wildly. I have removed doubles, but nothing changed. I think areas with higher poly counts are attaching to the armature but I'm not sure. https://youtu.be/_UcUPfmRt-0

Mesh normals are inverted which is the main cause of the issue.

To correct it, enter edit mode, select all and use ShiftN to recalculate normals.
Also the mesh is scaled and rotated. Preferably, apply scales and rotations before parenting CtrlA in object mode.
Last point, the armature is not in rest position: set it to it or set the current pose as rest pose.


Manipulating .blend file text blocks with blendfile.py (CRUD) To search or to open text blocks in blend files in text editors (as a couple of examples)  it would be handy to read texts from  a blend file without any need of blender or bpy.

There is a module for blend file io shipped with blender addons_contrib/io_blend_utils/blend/blendfile.py

I am using blender 2.8. The tools have been added to addons_contrib (come with blender) as of July 4

Scripts at Repository

Re blender 2.79. I imagine that script to read text lines from datablocks using either would be similar and put me on the right track.

The walker script gives insights on how to read the blocks.

Test script below lists the textblock name, and how many characters are on each line.  I'm sure there's a simple way to get the body string of the TextLine data block, but it escapes me.

from io_blend_utils.blend import blendfile

def get_id_name(block):
    name = block[b'id', b'name'].decode()
    return name[2:]

filepath = "/home/batfinger/Desktop/test.blend"

bf = blendfile.open_blend(filepath)
texts = bf.find_blocks_from_code(b'TX')
for t in texts:
    i = s = bf.blocks.index(t) + 1
    print(get_id_name(t))
    while bf.blocks[i].dna_type_name == 'TextLine':
        print(f"line {i - s} chars {bf.blocks[i][b'len']}")
        i += 1

How do I read the data to give me the text buffer of a text block?

CRUD EDIT.

Thankyou to @lemon re the Reading piece of the crud puzzle.

As an addendum, would very much appreciate any details on usage of the blendfile api for:

Creating, Updating and Deleting text blocks.

I did it in 2.79.

The bad is it seems there is no documentation for this module and we don't know where to go. And of course I don't know if it is the better way to do it.

But, once you have the TextLine block:

Get the length property.

Get the pointer to the block which corresponds to the line content, it is a block too.

Seek the file to the file offset of this last block.

Get the value using DNA_IO.

from io_blend_utils.blend import blendfile

def get_id_name(block):
    name = block[b'id', b'name'].decode()
    return name[2:]

filepath = "/home/batfinger/Desktop/test.blend"

bf = blendfile.open_blend(filepath)
texts = bf.find_blocks_from_code(b'TX')
for t in texts:
    i = s = bf.blocks.index(t) + 1
    print(get_id_name(t))
    while bf.blocks[i].dna_type_name == 'TextLine':

        # Get the block
        block = bf.blocks[i]
        # Get the length
        length = block[b'len']
        # Get the line data pointer (a block)
        line = block.get_pointer( b'line')

        # Search for the line block position
        bf.handle.seek( line.file_offset, 0 )

        # Get the value
        line_content = blendfile.DNA_IO.read_string( bf.handle, length )

        print( i - s )
        print( bf.blocks[i][b'len'] )
        print( line_content )

        #print( bf.blocks[i].user_data )
        #print(f"line {i - s} chars {bf.blocks[i][b'len']}")
        i += 1

bf.close()


Installation Blend4web 2.76 I wanted to know, how I can install blend4web in version 2.76?

Thanks for your help.

This is probably best asked at the specified product user forum or website, or follow the instructions of the creator, since it doesn't seem like a Blender specific question.

Try following these instructions from the addon author documentation


How to unwrap a cube into a LINEAR Cubemap (all sides next to each other)? Ok, I have a cube that I need to unwrap into a linear cube map like the one in bottom left:

All tutorials reference the T shape. I tried unwrap by cube projection, and then tried arranging the UVs by hand, by they're not perfectly placed. Pack islands just screws it up.

How can I unwrap in a straight line, or align them on a linear cube map?

What problem do you encounter when you try to do it manually? You could do it this way: choose to unwrap with Smart UV Project option (and a marge of 0.03 for example), then in the UV/Image Editor, choose the Vertex snap mode, and rearrange your faces holding ctrl to make them snap. Does it answer?


How to correct Normals for DupliVerts? I have been trying to align objects along a curve only pointing along the Z-Axis. I found i could accomplish it using DupliVerts and checking rotation, but because the mesh only has two verts, it doesn't know where to point the objects.

I can fix the problem if i extrude the mesh upwards, but i don't want to do that because now i have two sets of mesh.

Does anyone know how to force Blender to point the normals in one direction? Any help would be awesome!

Place the pillar at the beginning of the curve, be sure to apply rotation and scale (or at least have an alignment relative to the world or the object itself, locally)  :

Parent the pillar to the curve, and set dupli as frames (uncheck the speed button) :

For the curve, set it to path animation tunes the frame count (it will be the amount of pillars) and check 'follow'.

Now add a constraint to the pillar to 'limit rotation', and check the wanted axis (here Y). So the pillar will follow the curve without rotating around this axis.


Blender doesn't use system resources optimally let me just preface this by saying I am new to Blender and have a very minimal knowledge pf it as of now.
The problem happened as I was following along with a tutorial and while doing a cloth simulation, I was getting about 0.4 fps (this was my first time running an animation), I checked blender's usage of system resources via task manager and everything was under utilised, with blender using memory 6-7%, cpu 8-12%, gpu 2-4% and no other major applications running. I have looked for ways to make it use more of these resources but couldn't find any that made much difference, I did in the end get it to 2 fps but that was due to a post that said scaling small objects up makes blender process the simulation better. I am hoping someone here can tell me how to optimize blender to better use these resources. I am running the animation in viewport and solid shading, this isn't with regards to rendering speeds although even then the system resources remain under-utilised.

My specs:

Dell XPS 15 9560 | Windows 10 v. 1909 64-bit

GPU - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050

CPU - Intel Core I&-7700HQ @ 2.80Ghz (8-core)

RAM - 32 GB

Please let me know if the information is incomplete.

Blender most likely is fully using your system resources. In the task manager, change one of the charts to display CUDA and you'll see that its being fully utilized.

I just started a render on my computer, and you can clearly see when it fully using the GPU resources for CUDA even though it says usage is just 12% in total.

Edit

Windows may throttle your performance based on your power settings. Open up the start menu and search up Edit Power Plan.

Then go to Change Advanced Power Settings, and under Processor Power Management, check that the Maximum Processor State is set to 100%.


Intersect boolean in animation doesn't render properly and gives blackout/whiteout I'm creating an animation where a plane moves leftwards with a boolean intersect modifier, whereby only the intersect will show as shown in image 1.

image 1: frame 75, perfectly normal
However, this is not the case through the animation. What happens at (what i presume to be) random keyframes is a black or white boolean cube. This anomaly shows up in my video renders as well, as shown here:

image 2: frame 95, blackout

image 3: frame 128, whiteout
my question is, what the hell is going on and how do i fix it

In a recent version an "Exact" mode has been added to the boolean modifier. It is enabled by default, and it is supposed to handle non-manifold and co-planar meshes better than the regular "Fast", mode, but it is also computationally very heavy and there are still edge cases where it fails.
You can try to toggle between "Exact" and "Fast" and see if it changes anything.
Also, booleans do not work well with non-manifold meshes (eg a plane) You can try adding a solidify modifier with a very low value.


Turn off brush overlay in Texture Paint mode? I'm looking for a way to draw strokes with Texture Paint with soft brush and Strength set to low so that all painted strokes to be the same strength. The problem is that if the mouse button / tablet pen was released (while the stroke wasn't finished), it's better to erase the whole streak, because the strokes will overlay.

Currently if Strength is set to something other than 0 the strokes will be painted as it's shown on the left. I'm looking for a way to paint with Stregth set to low and get result like on the right (the result on the right was created with Strength set to 1).
It seems that in the wiki is written about blend modes, but either no denial nor approval on whether this is possible.

Im not sure if this will help, but i think its the answer your looking for..

In Texture Paint, on the tools tab on the Left (shown in your picture)
underneath radius and strength, is a blend option.. you have it set to "Mix" you can change this to lighten, Darken, Multiply, Subtract, etc..

try messing around with these options and see if that helps


For which formats are Cycles materials completely and accurately exported? I'd like to export my scene to one or more of the file formats listed in the File → Export menu:  .3ds, .dae, .obj, and so on. Which, if any, of these formats records all the details of Cycles materials – all the types of shaders, RGB curve nodes, all the texture types, and so on?  If I make a complicated material in the Node Editor, will the visual appearance of the rendered object be properly conveyed to someone using 3D Studio or Wavefront? I'm not worried about meshes or most other things, just materials.

Lacking any of the software which would normally use any of the exportable formats, I have no way to check by direct experiment.  Even if it did work – and even if Blender can re-load an exported file and the scene looks okay – I can't be sure if I just got lucky and unwittingly avoided some tricky feature.

OSL materials transfer best, as James pointed out.
As far as I know, Cycles cannot currently export it's own materials. Blender Internal can sure export textured things though.

Anyway if your scene is already built up with Cycles your best chance for going to 3Ds Max is first .fbx and then .dae.

About file formats:
.3ds is old.
.obj is old too, but has worked well for me, especially concerning mesh-only models.
.dae is great with textures, optimized for gaming.
.fbx is great with textures, optimised for autodesk :)
dae and fbx should probably support shaders, but as stated before, Cycles doesn't support exporting them yet anyway.

more on .dae


Noise appears locked to the camera, as if looking trough a dirty glass I am attempting to animate entering a theater on a foggy or rainy night:

I used cycles rendering with a world volume setting of volume scatter to have the two spotlight cones appear as if they are shining through the haze. I like very much how the above still image appears.

However, when I animate the camera walking into the theater, the volume scatter appears static and locked to the viewpoint of the camera. It is especially noticeable when you are under the marquee, it looks like you are shooting film through a dirty pane of glass!

Entering a theater animation - draft01

I was expecting to have the sense of the camera walking through the fog particles.

What would be a better modeling approach to have fog that the camera walks through when animated?

On the sampling section enable the icon that looks like a clock.
That will generate a different seed for every frame, making the noise pattern different.

Blatantly taken form the Blender Manual:

Seed
Seed value for integrator to get different noise patterns.
Animate Seed (clock icon)
This button which can be found on the right side of the Seed value can be used to give different seed values. It is a good idea to enable this when making animation because in the real world each frame has a different noise pattern.


Camera movement shows in viewport but not in render animation I'm trying to render my animation, but the camera movement doesn't show when clicking on Render Animation.  The camera stays still ignoring the keyframes.
I've unchecked the sequencer in post-processing as a question suggested but it didn't work.
The camera movement does show when rendering a single image throughout the different keyframes. But when you render an animation, it lays still in the first keyframe.
I've tried baking the camera animation, but it didn't work either.
It's probably something really dumb but I can't seem to find the solution.
File the file in the link below:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/rtljuyxvcumnhk5/30%20Animating.blend?dl=0

I just had to reboot.
Things that might solve the problem:

this: Why is my camera pan not rendering
Rebooting
Adding a new camera to the scene.
Making sure you're not using a mesh as a camera (How can I make a camera the active one?)


Cloth Simulation : Self collision results in cloth "exploding" I'm trying to model a cotton garment by simulating it's draping process. I'm having issues only when I enable self-collision of the cloth. Without self-collision , there are no issues but I do need self-collision for later stages of work and can't proceed without enabling that. I'm using 2.73, and I didn't modify any settings; that is , I use the default collision settings and for everything else too. Below are screenshots of the issue.

Rest state:

End result, without collision, close to what I want; but as seen, cloth is penetrating itself:

When I enable self-collision, this happens right from the 1st frame itself:

The end result is also similarly messed up.

These are my cloth settings:

I believe that the simulation is finding the cloth particles close together and hence repelling them from each other, given the messed up result. I set the "distance" value in the collision settings to 0.5 and 1 too, but both of them gave the same result.. Any idea why this could be happening?

A POSSIBLE WORK AROUND (that at least worked for me):

Scale up everything, then apply the transformation (CTRL+A > all transforms)

Sometimes cloth simulations in Blender results in error with too small meshes.

Hope this may help.

G


Is there a way to simulate convection with a particle system? As stated in the title, I want a particle system that will have particles heat up and rise, and then sink when they cool. How can I simulate this?

Additionally, I want to make sure the particles attract each other and move around on the x and y axes.

The end goal of this is to make physically accurate cumulus clouds (the puffy, flat bottomed ones), where the particles are emitters for a smoke simulation.

EDIT: Per Erik's comment...

Here's an example of a Node setup where the individual particles are on their own program.  I changed the particles to be emitted over time instead of all at once to give a little more separation between particles . The smaller particles move faster than the larger ones but you can easily remove that if it doesn't suit your requirements.

The modulus operator (Math Node) is for looping the simulation indefinitely.  This setup essentially uses the Minimum of the two range nodes as well as the length of time the particle has been living to determine where the particles should be along the Z-axis.

Of course there's a lot of room for tweaking, improvement, randomization, etc.
In this gif, I added a little velocity in the X-direction using Blender's own particle settings.

EDIT 2:

Just saw your edit to your question.  Here's an example with smoke simulation.  You just need to add Smoke to the original object and make sure you select Copy Full Object so that it also copies the Smoke sim with each Instantiation.

EDIT 3 (per Erik's comment):

The single-tri smoke emitter objects will simply have no bearing on bake, simulation, or render times.  Blender will crash from the smoke and particle sim long before the number of triangles.

I would concentrate on making the smoke more realistic before adding more particles.  I understand that you'll need more than hundred, but the smoke is going to be the makeup of the cloud and there's a lot of "tweakability" in the smoke sim.  The particle objects are only for emitting and serving as a method to give you control over location.

Here is a sim with a little bit of turbulence added (affecting the particle objects and the smoke).  Sorry it's so small and crappy, I had to keep it under 2MB for upload:

And here's a happy little cloud render from this scene:

Here's the unbaked blend:


CubeSurfer Replacement for 2.8? CubeSurfer add-on by Pyroevil currently does not work with Blender 2.8, so I am searching for a good replacement, but my searches have come up dry.

OR

If any of ya'll have figured out a way to force CubeSurfer to work, I'd be really happy with that as well.

I'm currently just using the metaball method, but the results aren't nearly as clean as CubeSurfer when making fluids with particles.

I found it in case you still need it. You can download a zip from the GitHub page at https://github.com/porkminer/CubeSurfer, but it gives you an error when you try to istall it in Blender. I fixed it by changing the line from cubesurfer import mciso just to import mciso. The download link is https://gofile.io/?c=sEWqb3.


Export blender scene as xml I have a blender scene with various meshes and different properties (e.g. material, texture etc) assigned to meshes. Are there plugins to export the meshes as obj and the properties assigned to meshes as xml file?

Short answer: No.

XML is per definition too broad to cover all the specific user cases one could imagine.

OBJ and its material format MTL on the other hand are highly defined in their purpose.

Even if there would be a OBJ/MTL to XML exporter, it's highly unlikely that it would meet all of your requirements.

The long answer: Since OBJ and MTL are well documented, it might be easier to program a converter instead of an exporter.


Procedural material not bending correctly around mesh during animation I made a simple mesh and added bones, as I was practicing keyframing a bone structure.  I applied a procedural wood material to the mesh, and applied smart UV projection.  After rendering it out, I noticed that when the mesh bends, the material doesn't follow the deformation, choosing instead to remain "upright".  Attaching below my .blend and a link to the rendered clip.

What am I doing wrong?  Thanks in advance.
Material

Rendered Animation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psGZs0R25iQ
.Blend
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fAdkggf7pFVdGza_jHum_jYY_oAy6pgb/view?usp=sharing

The problem was that you used object coordinates. Object coordinates always point towards obeject X, Y and Z-axis. To fix this you have to either change it to UV or Generated coordinates which bend with the object.
SET TO GENERATED:

SET TO UV:


Pink material when using 2 x PBR (Principled BSDF) materials into a mix shader w/Eevee When I combine two PBR materials (with Principled BSDF Shaders) in Eevee through a Mix Shader, the output is pink?

Alone, each Principled Shader works, even if I pass one material through the mix shader, that works. As soon as two go through, it's pink?
I've tried re-creating in a fresh scene with two Principled Shaders, some basic noise textures for color/roughness/normals, but unable to recreate in that case. Seems to be linked to the use of images possibly?
Any help is most appreciated. Thanks!
Have tried the materials on their own, and they work fine:

Top Principled BSDF Shader works fine on it's own:

Bottom Principled BSDF Shader works fine on it's own:

Running a single BSDF Shader through the Mix Shader works as expected

The mask I am using (for context):

I believe the limit for EEVEE is 24 textures per material. In cycles, you can get around the limitation by enabling "open shading language", but I think in eevee, you're stuck. In the end, it doesn't matter what the "theoretical" limit is - If you hit a point where adding a new texture to the graph causes it all to turn pink, you just have to find some other way around it, such as using a texture atlas.


Rotating object to axis Is there a way to rotate my object such that it matches perfectly with the axis? I'm trying to mirror a spherical object but the mirrored product is always off due to (what I suspect to be) rotational issues. I'm new to blender and I've been struggling with this for hours, any help would be welcome

You can simply use spin for this check out this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRgcXnd1Wl4


Shader for reflective black plastic surface After some research on how to model reflective plastic surfaces best I established this as my surface:

which I found in an older thread here: (https://blenderartists.org/t/cycles-glossy-plastic-material/582572/5)
If I turn the glossy BSDF dark there is no reflection what so ever.
What I want to achieve is something every close to this:

You can get this result with just the principled BSDF.
If you look closely at your reference image you'll see the environment.  As mentioned in the comments those highlights are what we want to reproduce, and the ones you see in this image are coming from an HDRI environment texture.  This isn't even a particularly good HDRI for taking an image of something so round, perhaps.
You could approximate this by setting up some large area lamps focused on your object.


Blender FBX import issue - normals/shading I imported a fbx file (a car) to blender and the shadows on the mesh get crazy. Can some one tell me why and how I can import without this mess shadows destroying the 3d Art.

here is a image of the problem:

Your FBX file more than likely uses custom normals.

Up to a one week ago, this was not supported at all by Blender, so custom normals were lost during import and you would get that ugly shading.

This has been fixed (added!) now in Blender master, please try it with an official build from the buildbot.


Vertex color bake to texture causes wrong color margin I import a .ply file from MagicaVoxel to Blender, it looks good right now:

I want to export to .fbx but it has no color data. Then I baked vertex color to texture, but the problem is that after the bake:

What the hell are those color margin lines between the grids?

I am totally new to blender and have no idea how to fix this, I just do the steps following online toturial:

Add a material, check "Vertex Color Paint"
Select all in "Edit Mode" and click "Smart UV Project"
Add UV image, size default 1024 * 1024
Bake Mode: "Texture" and start to bake, then the result goes wrong.

Anybody has any ideas?

You can get the .ply model from MagicaVoxel, it's free and looks great.

Give some margin

If you inspect closely your uv, you should se than there are no margin and some colors that are not exactly aligned with the uv grid.

This happens because the uv grid (which depend on the number of faces) has different size from the pixel grid (which depends on the baking texture size). You can try to match these with some calculations.... or you can re-unwrap the model in the following way:

set the smart uv margin tho a proper value (for a 1024x1024 tex I set 0.05) and than bake with a minumum bake margin of 1. Setting a margin allows a certain tollerance between color, avoiding overlaps and pixel-grid issues.


How to select freestyle style module programmatically? I'm using python scripting in blender to create scenes, with static scenes rendered in freestyle. I am aiming to be able to use freestyle style modules (eg japanese_bigbrush.py or user defined) to control freestyle output. I have a function

bpy.context.scene.render.layers["RenderLayer"].use_solid = False
bpy.context.scene.render.layers["RenderLayer"].use_halo = False
bpy.context.scene.render.layers["RenderLayer"].use_zmask = False
bpy.context.scene.render.layers["RenderLayer"].use_all_z = False
bpy.context.scene.render.layers["RenderLayer"].use_ztransp = False
bpy.context.scene.render.layers["RenderLayer"].invert_zmask = False
bpy.context.scene.render.layers["RenderLayer"].use_sky = False
bpy.context.scene.render.layers["RenderLayer"].use_edge_enhance = False
bpy.context.scene.render.layers["RenderLayer"].use_strand = False

bpy.context.scene.render.use_freestyle = True

bpy.context.scene.render.resolution_y = 1500
bpy.context.scene.render.resolution_x = aspectRatio *1500
bpy.context.scene.render.resolution_percentage =100

#change to script mode
rl = bpy.context.scene.render.layers.active
rl.freestyle_settings.mode = 'SCRIPT'

#add freestyle style module
bpy.ops.scene.freestyle_module_add()

#open freestyle style module
bpy.ops.scene.freestyle_module_open(PathToModuleHere)

#render image
bpy.context.scene.render.filepath = PathToRenderedImageHere + fileName + '.jpg'
bpy.ops.render.render( write_still=True )

When calling the freestyle_module_open function I get an error

  'expected a string enum in [list of strings eg INVOKE_DEFAULT, INVOKE_REGION_WIN]

I have also tried incorporating the python code from the style module straight into my function. Also adding the style module as a code block in blender. No joy.

I can get it to work if I add the style module manually in blender then run the function, but can't work out how to do this programatically.

You will most likely want to enable freestyle in your render layers settings

bpy.context.scene.render.layers["RenderLayer"].use_freestyle = True

To add a module and set the script you can use -

#open freestyle style module
text_block = bpy.data.texts.load(PathToModuleHere)

#add freestyle style module
freestyle_module = rl.freestyle_settings.modules.new()

#set the script to use
freestyle_module.script = text_block


Break node connections from within Property Editor? To create a node and connect it to a Property, I can click on the color-coded dot next to the Property name. This launches a pop-up menu of permitted input nodes for that data type.
So how do I BREAK a connection from the Property Editor? I know I can go into the Node Editor and break the connection there. But I should be able to just break the connection directly in the Property Editor, restoring that Property to its default status and UI.
In Maya, I can do this by right-clicking the attribute name and choosing "Break Connection". But for the life of me, I can't figure out how to do this in Blender. The documentation wasn't helpful, I searched and searched and couldn't find anywhere this magic colored dot was even mentioned. I wasted a great deal of time trying to find it.

Sure. Click the linked shader property and select Disconnect from the list in order to break the connection. You can also select Remove if you'd like to get rid of the linked node:


Video preview window in VSE missing I've removed the preview window somehow but I have no idea how to get it back. Ive gone through the properties but I can't find a way to bring it back.

Use the three buttons in the Video Sequence Editor header to control the view mode. Either Sequencer, Preview or Both.


Accessing Blender's DNA Mesh struct via as_pointer() How can I access the actual structure of a Mesh datablock in memory using the value returned from bpy.types.Mesh.as_pointer() In 2.79 Blender there used to be a possibility to do that by just passing the pointer value to your C++ module or Python's ctypes and referencing that pointer with an appropriate type.
Example for 2.7 can be seen here:
https://blenderartists.org/t/exporting-triangles-api-challenges/694524/2

However, when I access it the same way in 2.8, I get a struct which is 0-ed. It does contain a valid ID sub-struct in it, but the rest of the data is nulled. Could that be the issue brought by the new depsgraph in 2.8?

C++ side:

#include "mesh_utils.hpp"

extern "C"
{
    #include "bl_src/makesdna/DNA_mesh_types.h"
    #include <blenkernel/BKE_editmesh.h>
    #include <bmesh.h>
}

#include <iostream>

namespace bpy_boost
{

BlenderMesh::BlenderMesh(::std::uintptr_t mesh_pointer)
{
    const Mesh* mesh = reinterpret_cast<const Mesh*>(mesh_pointer);

    ::std::cout << (uint32_t)mesh->totloop << ::std::endl;
}

}

Python side:

def execute(self, context):

        from ..bpy_boost.src.bpy_boost import Mesh

        ds = bpy.context.evaluated_depsgraph_get()
        obj = bpy.context.view_layer.objects.active

        object_eval = obj.evaluated_get(ds)
        if object_eval:
            mesh = object_eval.to_mesh()

            if mesh:
                mesh.calc_loop_triangles()
                if not mesh.loop_triangles:
                    object_eval.to_mesh_clear()
                    mesh = None

            if mesh:
                if mesh.use_auto_smooth:
                    if not mesh.has_custom_normals:
                        mesh.calc_normals()
                    mesh.split_faces()

                mesh.calc_loop_triangles()

                if mesh.has_custom_normals:
                    mesh.calc_normals_split()

            ptr = mesh.as_pointer()

            Mesh(ptr)

        return {'FINISHED'}

The validity of the pointer value between Python and C++ has been checked. Python-C++ interface is done with Cython and is not provided here since it is not important.

I managed to figure this issue out. It made a mistake using a Mesh structure from 2.9 Blender sources instead of 2.82 which is the Blender build I am running this code on. The mesh.as_pointer() does give a valid pointer to the DNA Mesh struct right away.


Active camera not working on blender game I have a feeling this is a small mistake but I can't trace a solution for it myself. Basically I made a small Resident Evil style room with multiple cameras. I also set up an actuator system to trigger the activation of each camera as active as the character moves in it's respective area. But when I press P for the scene preview it just shows the viewport view instead of the camera views. I'm losing my mind, can someone tell me what is going wrong here?

There's several issues on you file...

Character Structure

Try to read the BGE Guide To Character Setup, you will understand that an armature should not be the physics object of your character: make an physics object with physics type Capsule and parent the armature to it. Also, make sure to check the Actor checkbox, so your player can be detected by the zones.

Zones Physics

Static objects can't detect collisions, so you have to change your zones physics types to Sensor and enable Detect actors. Also, disable the pulse mode on the collision sensors, it takes a lot of memory.

A Silly Mistake...

Your collision sensors are looking for an object with the property Player, but your player does not have this property! Add it to your player and the sensors should detect it.

Conclusion

Also, there's a lot of optimization you could do, especially disabling the physics on objects that don't need it (paintings, lamps, statue, etc). Try to read these guides to learn a bit more about logic, structure and project management.

Your file with some of the issues corrected:


Wicked mesh deform: Misusing bones, meshes or both? I have a sea turtle mesh and skins I have created in ZBrush and Blender, and I spent some time in Blender trying to make as nice a mesh as I know how... or at least as I think I know how.

For the head, neck and much of the rest of the critter I get good movement and deformation of the meshes and skins, except in the armpit... when the flippers meet the body. See the images I have attached.

Although that showing the tearing at maximum bone movement, it shows up with almost any movement.

Am I asking individual bones to do too much? Add more bones and reweight? Or should I have built more crenellation into the skin, so there are true folds that can move? And/or have a I missed something even more obvious? The tearing and stretching of the mesh is more than I have seen in other rigs we've done, and leads me to think I am missing something really fundamental about geometry and weightpainting...

Thanks!

Actually... I threw away everything and recreated, using face masking to assure good delineation of weights.... but that leaves two variables to explain it: better bone alignment to the intended motion of the critter, and more precise weight painting. Face masking rocks.  This is the final one... I did not get a weight view of the faulty one.


Feathered wing - how to keep feathers from colliding with eachother? I am a brand new Blender user, but loving it.  I am jumping in with my first project, to build and rig a properly functioning feathered raptor dinosaur.

I've hit a roadblock trying to rig and animate the feathered wing/arm of the raptor.  Each individual feather is made from a modified cube.  All the feathers are parented to the armature rigged to the arm.  When I pose the arm, the feathers are all moving correctly in relationship to the arm.  However, the feathers intersect each-other in certain positions.  I have turned on rigid-body physics (passive) for the feathers and tried to adjust the collision margin.  Nothing changes however.  What do I need to do to get these feathers responding to collisions with each other?  And how can I make sure they stay in position in relation to the arm while they collide?

I apologize if there is a really simple solution.  I am still learning the vocabulary needed to search for solutions.

Thank you!
Ari

Unfortunately there is no simple solution to this. Passive rigidbodies don't do anything but collide with the active ones, while staying in place, so they won't help you there. Could try to use hinge joints with a lot of constraints (RB settings, not object constraints), but I doubt that will produce steady results (worth a shot, let me know if that works).
Not even animation nodes will get you very far I'm afraid, because they can't simulate, just animate, so they might be able to move some of the feathers, but they will probably collide with the next ones.
The only sure-fire solution is to create your animation and then manually adjust the overlapping parts, by either making a bone for each feather and bone-parent (what I would prefer) or animating them as individual objects.


How to know if it's a good or bad retopology? I retopologized the whole object and I don't really know if it's good or bad. In places it's very dense and in other's it's not so much. Here I am leaving some pictures of my retopoed mesh. I need some suggestions about what I should do to make this retopology usable
The back is quite lowpoly but it might have to deform in animation

these areas will deform a bit while running and jumping should I increase edgeloops here?
##

you topology seems good, but i recommend to smooth/relax some of those edge loops in the back/shoulder, and additionally you can improve a bit the shoulder edge flow like this, also a add more captures of the head and other areas if you can... remove some unnecesary edge loops in some areas can help too, addtionaly when you rig this check the preserve volume option in the armature modifier, and add a smooth corrective modifier below with the default setting should be fine, and then also add 1 level of sub-div modifier below of that one, then it should be fine for animation, also remember to avoid 6 vert poles in your model, also the model has to be all quad based as possible (you can leave a few triangulates in some areas, the subdiv modifier will erase it) to use the subdiv properly


Do invisible polygons influence rendering time using Cycles renderer? TL;DR The number of polygons has negligible impact on rendering time.
I'm having a furniture designed part by part using FreeCAD and exported as Wavefront OBJ (following Tutorial Render with Blender). This furniture is then placed in a very simple approximation of my apartment (also modeled using FreeCAD).
The problem is with rendering time. With 8K resolution and 2048 samples this is ~14 hours on (not built for this purpose) entry level 8 core 2nd generation Xeon Scalable Processor. With this amount of samples noise is still clearly visible, especially in shadows. Going down to Full HD reduces time to some 50 min.
This amount of time is in odds with what I found on the internet, where (apparently) much more rich models tend to render in an order of minutes.
This makes me think about one thing: my furniture model is probably much more detailed than average model of object used for rendering in blender. In particular there is plenty of polygons inside the object which are clearly not visible. Do these still slow down the rendering?
If yes, is there some tool which could automatically simplify FreeCAD models for rendering removing invisible polygons?
Just for the record: I don't have any GPU capable of rendering.
EDIT:
I made one more super simple experiment: I removed all the furniture leaving just an empty apartment, light and camera. It had negligible impact on total rendering time (Full HD, 32 samples). In retrospect I could have done more to answer this question myself.

Blender calculates all geometry in the scene at render time.
Here is a very simple example:
Suzanne alone:

render time 00:12:30

Suzanne with torus and cube outside the camera field of view:

render time 00:14:37

The scene from the above example:

The difference in render time is not alot here, but in a large scene could become exponential. If the object is redundant then remove it. Interior geometry that the camera will never see can be in many cases safely deleted. This will only improve render time.


There is no " Object Tools" it just says Transform I apologize for the newbie Question and if this was the wrong site to post this Question I have tried to search not doing that right either,I have no idea what i`m doing following  tutor4u " realistic chain tutorial" I can make it to 8:37 into the tutorial, need to add  "Rigid Body Tools" My tools bar is saying "Transform" instead of "Object Tools"
 My Learning Curve Begins/ Continues/ Never Ends

Thank-you for any advice

Wally

The UI has probably changed since the tutorial was made. Blender moves and changes UI elements quite often.

Rigid Body Tools is in the Physics tab. The Objects section is pretty much the Transform section, just with the title renamed. Make sure you're in the proper mode when you're looking around (i.e., mesh Edit mode vs Object mode).


Resetting Transforms of an Object Changes Pivot of Object Simple question, why is it that when I go to Object --> Apply --> Location to clear the location transform (or, reset it), that the pivot of the object then gets moved to the center of the grid in my scene?  And then when I set the pivot point back to it's origin by doing this: Object --> Set Origin --> Origin to Geometry, the pivot moves back to the center of the object but the location values that I cleared come back.  This is so annoying because when clearing the transforms, the pivot SHOULD NOT be moving back.

That's why some of you might recommend this: Object --> Apply --> All Transforms to Deltas.  But the problem with this is that when it moves all the transforms to the detla transforms, it messes up the rotation when you later go to rotate the object.  This is ridiculous.. it's like there's no way to reset transforms without there being some kind of a problem.

Does anyone have a solution?  Thanks!

You are asking for an impossible thing. Applying location keeps the geometry in the same location but zeros out the transforms.

What you are calling the pivot is the object origin. The origin is what all the transforms are biased off of. Take these images as an illustration.

The cube is at the global origin or scene origin (0,0,0).

Here the cube is moved, simple object mode transform (-4,0,2).

Here the cube's location is still the same as in the image above, but the cube is in a completely different pace. The reason being the geometry was moved in edit mode.

This is essentially what applying the location does. Blender clears the location (moves the origin to 0,0,0) and moves the geometry back to where the object was.

All that is  explaining what is happening to an object when you apply its location.
Modifiers, constraints, parenting, and rigging will effect an objects location and moving the object's origin will likely mess at least one of those up.


expandpath() ?? can python reach out to an external directory on users comp? I have a scores text file (game scores kept here) that gets created on completion of game level.

I am installing users downloads of my game into C:\Program Files\ folder, but programs folder is not writable.

My Python logic (below) in my game levels creates a text file in the existing installation folder, where my other game blend files are stored.

But when I test the download, no scores saved, because the file installs into Windows C:\Program Files\ folder (which is of course fine, it's the right place for a game, but I lament).

So I want to get the script below to not just create a scores.txt file in the existing folder, but to create it in documents (not My Documents/).

My installer will add a blank folder in documents whose name is known, lets call it blurb\, then Python does exactly what it did before, but create the folder (and of course fetch/get/load) in documents\blurb\scores.txt.

This I assume is where it all happens:

scores = _loadScoresFromFile("scores.txt")

from bge import logic
import pickle

def _saveScoresToFile(list_scores, string_filepath):

    file = open(string_filepath, "wb")
    pickle.dump(list_scores, file)
    file.close()

def _loadScoresFromFile(string_filepath):

    try:
        file = open(string_filepath, "rb")
    except IOError:
        print("Failed to load scores from {}".format(string_filepath))
        return []

    return pickle.load(file)

scores = _loadScoresFromFile("scores.txt")

def display():

    scene = logic.getCurrentScene()
    writer = scene.objects["Writer"]

    name = logic.globalDict["name"]
    score = logic.globalDict["score"]
    score2 = logic.globalDict["score2"]

    tup_entry = (name, score, score2)
    scores.append(tup_entry)
    scores.sort(key=lambda entry: entry [1])

    new_entry_idx = scores.index(tup_entry)

    for entry, i in zip(scores, range(len(scores))):
        new_writer = scene.addObject("Writer_new", writer)
        new_writer["Text"] = "{:d} - {:s} - {:2}:{:2}".format(i + 1, entry[0], entry[1], entry[2])

        new_writer.worldPosition.y -= 0.105 * i
        new_writer.localScale = writer.localScale

        if i == new_entry_idx:
            new_writer.state = 1

    _saveScoresToFile(scores, "scores.txt")

def setName():

    scene = logic.getCurrentScene()
    name = scene.objects ["Name"]

    logic.globalDict["name"] = name["Text"].strip()

def setScore():

    cont = logic.getCurrentController()
    score = cont.owner

    logic.globalDict["score"] = score["Text"]

def setScore2():

    cont = logic.getCurrentController()
    score = cont.owner

    logic.globalDict["score2"] = score["Text"]

Python is able to access the entire file system, except paths that require elevated rights (such as C:\Program files\ and C:\Windows\). It can also access them if you run your it as administrator, but you would usually not want that.

If you want to get the user directory path, use:

from os.path import expanduser
home = expanduser("~")

It also works on Windows. Example result: 'C:\\Users\\CoDEmanX'

Note that the Documents folder is not necessarily called like that, if you really want the actual path, you'll need to do this:

import ctypes.wintypes
CSIDL_PERSONAL= 5       # My Documents
SHGFP_TYPE_CURRENT= 0   # Want current, not default value

buf= ctypes.create_unicode_buffer(ctypes.wintypes.MAX_PATH)
ctypes.windll.shell32.SHGetFolderPathW(0, CSIDL_PERSONAL, 0, SHGFP_TYPE_CURRENT, buf)

print(buf.value)

For me it prints D:\Dokumente, because I set it up this way on my system.


Armature doesn't properly bend arm mesh I have a problem. I'm making an animation for project and all I need is to animate bending arm. I have a mesh, but when I add armature and pose it it doesn't seems good. Any ideas what's wrong?

At first glance, there are multiple reasons why your rig could be bending sharply, but if you try moving the upper arm, things should become a little clearer.

Your model has weird bends because of your automatic bone envelopes rig.

The vertices in the range of the bone envelope need to slightly affect the vertices outside of the envelope as well, producing a falloff.

You are using a modifier with automatic bone envelopes, so you will have to manually weight-paint the bone influences, or assign vertices manually with vertex group rigging.

It is going to be tedious due to the sheer number of vertices your model has. However, you can make rigging easier for yourself in the future by following a very important rule: BE CAREFUL WHEN APPLYING SUBDIVISION SURFACE MODIFIERS.

Applying a subdivision surface modifier is destructive and cannot be reverted. You will have to make your 3D model from scratch if you are unable to weight paint every single vertex to each bone or use the vertex group method.

The cubes in the top image are all the same model; the desired result has an un-applied subdivision surface modifier, and the sharp bend result has an applied subdivision surface modifier. It is better to work with un-applied subdivision surface modifiers since there are less vertices to select and navigate around when rigging manually, which you will have to do to fix your rig.

Automatic rigging options, such as the checkbox in the armature modifier, or parenting a mesh to an armature with automatic weights, sadly, do not always work.


make "z" toggle between textured mode and wireframe? Is it possible to make the keyboard button toggle between wireframe and textured
instead of wireframe and solid?

It sure is. Just go to Blender's preferences in the Input tab. Search by key-binding: "z". In the 3D View section you will find three "Context Toggle Values" shortcuts, one being assigned to the z key only (no modifier keys). Expand this and change the value of "SOLID" to "TEXTURED".

There is a small yet notable inconsistency in labeling that, in the UI it is listed as "Texture" yet its value name is "TEXTURED" with a D on the end.


Object I was sculpting disappeared in Sculpt mode, how do I get it back? -I was sculpting a head in Sculpt mode on Blender 2.90
-When I attempted to zoom (ctrl +) I may have pressed the wrong button and the whole object disappeared
-I tried to pull up another object in Sculpt mode without any success
-Both objects are visible in the Layout mode and every other mode except Sculpt mode
-This is what I see in Sculpt mode

You're in Local View. This hides all other objects. It can happen that you selected another object or deleted the local object, and now the view shows nothing or always the wrong object. This happened a few times to me and I wondered where my stuff was gone.
To exit this view press Numpad+/ or use the menu: View → Local View → Toggle Local View
Hope that helps...


Mirrored armature animations I have a rig that is built symmetrically and moves that way. Is there any option to apply some kind of mirror modifier to animate left and right parts at once?

Just rig one half of the model and mirror the mesh after the Armature modifier.

If you need to mirror pose bone poses, you can use the Copy/Paste buffers to copy a mirrored pose to the other side (Ctrl C, Shift Ctrl V).

If you need one side of the bones to follow the other side interactively, you will have to use constraints.

The Copy Location/Rotation/Scale constraints should do the work. Setup them like this (for mirroring on X axis):

Note that you will be able to only pose one half of the model with the other just being a "dummy side", else there would be dependency issues.


Why is part of my model not being rendered? Why is the selected object displaying in the 3D view, but not rendering?

In object mode, it shows up:

However, it does not show up in render mode:

Why is this so and what causes it to hide in render mode?

There are a lot of reasons why this might be happening. While these may not be the reasons for why it's happening for you, it's a good place to start.

Render visibility disabled in outliner

This is one of the most common reasons for something not appearing in a render.

Just make sure that this is always checked for any objects that you want to render.

Blender Internal Specific Issues

When working with Blender Internal, there are some issues with materials that could be causing your object not to show up in the render.

Having those settings in your material will cause the material to be completely transparent. Having a texture effect the alpha can also cause this.

Cycles Specific Issues

There are a few ways an object can be accidentally hidden from a render in cycles.
Probably the most common, is to accidentally uncheck camera from the ray visibility in the objects tab of the properties panel.

Unchecking camera will basically make the object not show up in the image (although reflections, shadows, etc. may show up and the visibility of those can be controlled using the other checkboxes)
In cycles, an object could also disappear from the render, if the material was transparent (contained a transparent shader).

Layers

The last major reason why an object might disappear from a render, is layers and renderlayers. Always make sure that the object that disappeared is on one of the currently viewed layers.
For renderlayers, be sure that you have all of your scene layers selected. These are the same as your currently viewed layers, and are tied to them. If you select or deselect a layer from there, it will also be selected or deselected in the viewport.

The layer section is where you include the layers that you want used in a specific renderlayer.

The last things to check is your exclude and mask groups. The exclude group simply excludes the contents of a layer completely. No lights or anything similar from those layers will be shown.

For mask groups, just make sure that you aren't masking out any of the layers that you want visible. If you have a mask layer enabled, it will automatically cut out any pieces of it that appear in a higher Z-Depth.


Why cant i see the verices on this mesh? So as you can probably see i have been following this tutorial on how to make a donut in blender since i am new to the program. It all worked fine until i suddenly could'nt use the weight brush on the top half of the donut (the icing), which i found out was caused by the fact that only the edges were editable, since it would only let me use the brush there. Really hoping someone can help.

Object Mode always displays the entire mesh, even if you have parts or the entire mesh/vertices/edges/faces hidden by using H.

So coming back later in object mode and switching in edit mode to find that parts are missing/not displayed, is solved by pressing Alt+H, which brings everything hidden back.


Boolean Modifier Red Won't Work or Behaves Strange I'm using Blender 2.73 on MacOS.

I've been happily blending away for months since the last time I had a prob with modifiers. But not much issue lately. Suddenly I had a crash (I was subsurface-modifying and it went into a perpetual spin that wouldn't finish.)

I lost some work, but picked up from my last save again and kept going.  As I came to the steps where I need a few boolean difference operation, I couldn't use it anymore - it's shaded red (see pic) and it failed to apply.

I added a cube and tried with that, and it failed to apply also.

I created a new empty file (below), and it also shows boolean as red, and when I try to apply, it does strange things. Intersect instead of difference etc.

Here's a copy of the file for download - just two cubes. Can you see some setting that's precluding me from using the boolean modifier or making it behave weirdly?

Question then is what does the red shading indicate? I searched the docs for "boolean modifier" and "red" and can't find any explanations. Googled wildly without any success.

It's red because there's no object selected to Boolean with. When I picked the other Cube it worked fine.

The "Cannot Execute Boolean" is because of this beauty:

In this case the geometry was obviously a bit untidy. But it can happen that this similar situation happens at much smaller scales, which are less easy to see without zooming in. In this case the manifold check in the 3d printing tools doesn't pick it up either.


What is this line in the middle of my blender screen? I am curious as to what the line in the middle of the screen could be.
When I move the dot on the bottom of this dashed line it moves my mesh, this line moves along with it.
Also in the middle of the screen there's another dot. It move my armature.
I'm trying to do an animation with this mesh but I can't figure what the correct way to do it with an animation and a mesh would be?
Here's an image:

(from the manual)

"The Origin of an Object is shown in the 3D view by a small orange circle.
While the Origin is equivalent to the center of the Object, it does not have to be located in the center of the Mesh. This means that an Object can have its center located on one end of the mesh or even completely outside the mesh."

That dotted line means that an object is parented to other object.

"Moving, rotating or scaling the parent will also usually move/rotate/scale the child/children. However moving/rotating/scaling the child/children of the parent will not result in the parent moving/rotating/scaling. In other words, the direction of influence is from parent to child and not child to parent."

Read this: https://www.blender.org/manual/modeling/objects/groups_and_parenting.html


A grey wedge appears on the screen A grey wedge appears on the screen
I've uploaded a picture of what keeps happening, I keep masking out part of the scene and can't figure out what keys i'm pressing, any help really appreciated!
Thanks.

You've set a View Clipping Border

View Clipping Border (⎇ Alt +B)
Allows you to define a clip/ping border to limit the 3D View display to a portion of 3D space. It can assist in the process of working with complex models and scenes.
Once activated with Alt-B, you have to draw a rectangle with the mouse, in the wanted 3D View. It becomes a clipping volume of four planes:
A right-angled parallelepiped (of infinite length) if your view is orthographic.
A rectangular-based pyramid (of infinite height) if your view is in perspective.
Once clipping is used, you will only see what’s inside the volume you have defined. Tools such as paint, sculpt, selection, transform snapping, etc. will also ignore geometry outside the clipping bounds.
To delete this clipping, press ⎇ Alt+B again.
The dark gray area is the clipping volume itself. Once clipping is deactivated with another Alt-B, all of 3D space will become visible again.

From the manual, that most ignore, but contains useful information for those that still remember how to read.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.79/editors/3dview/navigate/clip.html


Trying to smooth edges with normal map I recently started using Blender and made my first character model, after that, I retopologized the model to make it low-poly for games. Now I want to smooth polygon edges of my low-poly model and so I found out that I can fake smooth edges with normal maps. I've baked the normal map from the high poly model but the edges on the low-poly model are still sharp.

High-poly:

Low-poly:

Normal map:

Low-poly with normal map:

What am I doing wrong?

I think your low poly mesh does not have smooth shading enabled. You can enable it again by selecting your low-poly mesh, then pressing W -> Shade Smooth or going to Object -> Shade Smooth.


Fog glow and motion blur in cel shading I'm designing a cel shaded phoenix in Cycles. I have used particles as flames as opposed to using the smoke simulator. Now, i want to add motion blur and fog glow to those particles to make them look more fire-like. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

This is my basic set up:

You will have to do the motion blur in the compositor. Just check the Vector pass and plug it into a vector blur node and you're done:

If you want fog glow, mask the glowing materials by setting the material ID on the materials that should be glowing. Add a glare filter and add it to the rest of the image. The filter resolution is set to low because it increases the effect's size (I really don't like how you control the size of fog glow in Blender). Consider using a blur node as an alternative if you're not happy with the results.

If you have a lot of render time, also consider using the not-faking-anything method:

Make the cube's outline real instead of using freestyle. This can be achieved through texturing, vector paint and perhaps clever shading.
Add a Volume Scatter node as the world's background. Volume scattering (and absorbtion) are basically physical fog.
Adapt your lighting (increase the emission shader). Volumetrics really suck lighting
Enable real, Cycles-rendered motion blur.

With this, your render time will explode. But it will look nice :)


Photorealistic grass I've started working with Blender a month ago, so have very little if any understanding of it...
Currently I'm working on a grass for my forest project.
Down below will be link to the final render of kinda photorealistic grass, and texture node setup.
It doesn't look too bad, nor realistic enough to me, so, please, any advise/tip on how to improve it would be great.
Thank you.

Here is a reference image for what I am trying to achieve:

The biggest thing that stands out between your reference and render is variety. There is so much variety of plant species in the reference, but little to none in your render. You need to get to modeling several versions of many of those species to start getting something that looks nearly as good or photorealistic. Your biggest problem is not your material, but your models.

Another (smaller) suggestion I have is to use an add shader for the translucency. You can use a setup like the one below to control the brightness of the translucency (connect a mix shader to the translucent node and nothing else, then run that to an add shader that adds it to the rest of the material...the mix factor on the mix shader will control the amount of translucency). Have you noticed that a leaf with translucency isn't generally any darker on the front side as one that is not translucent? I don't know the physical reason why, (perhaps a good question for physics.se), but it certainly seems to be true at least visually. I first learned this trick by looking at the Grass Essentials marketing material by Andrew Price.

For another example of photo-realistic grass, the Cosmos Laundromat benchmark scene has the Blender Foundation's grass shader which if I recall correctly uses simply a mix shader. They also have much more detail in the texturing than your shader currently has, but I don't know what type or style of grass you are aiming for anyway.

I would reference the Gooseberry project (and Andrew's materials if you have the money). Disclaimer: although "The Grass Essentials" is insanely successful and well-rated, I do not own it myself, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt.

You may find more good reference materials on BlendSwap:

https://www.blendswap.com/blends/search?keywords=grass&is_fan_art=1&blend_license=&render_engine=Cycles&sort=downloads&direction=desc


Is speed control effect for a time range or just one specific strip? I'm using v2.79,when I add speed control to one single video strip,and it would affect audio strip within the time range of the video strip I select,so how can I avoid that?

Try extracting audio and video from your clip to get two separate files. Next, in VSE, change only the extracted video strip speed.


Sending data from scripts to Python Console I wonder if it's possible to send commands/data from scripts (ex from Text editor) to Blender Python Console? I've enabled a Math Vis Console: it draws provided Vector/Line/Etc data in 3d viewport and it'd being a great help, however it requires data to be typed in Python Console. So for example if I want to display an ob.location I have to

print(ob.location) in my script first
then copy string from System Console: <Vector (-1.4095, -0.1780, 1.7132)>
reformat it as a 'proper' Vector: Vector((-1.4095, -0.1780, 1.7132))
paste this along with a variable name (loc) to Python Console: loc = Vector((-1.4095, -0.1780, 1.7132)):

I wonder if there's a faster way of doing that?

You can paste data onto bpy, not sure how advisable it is, but its a technique that works:
In a script:
import bpy

bpy.sergey = (1,2,3)

And then on the console:
>>> bpy.sergey
(1, 2, 3)


How to make "baked powder" effect? As you can see below, the object can be seen to be made of powder:

How can one recreate this effect in Blender (and the object has different colours)?

I thought about having a mesh filled with tiny particles, but:

1. There would be so many particles that Blender would go laggy

2. It would be extremely difficult for each particle to match the colour of the mesh

What other, better methods could I use? I don't know a node to make "powder", what about a noise texture, or are there better ways?

Thanks in advance

You're right, a bump map from a noise texture is exactly the right solution for this problem. Add to that the right specular characteristics (high roughness in Cycles, large specular size in BI) and you're well on your way.

After that, just add a colored texture for the diffuse and it'll be pretty close. In fact, the noise texture actually provides RGB colors that you could just use for the color. (Often the noise texture is converted to greyscale because that's more useful than RGB, like with your bump map you're going to create, but it does actually use RGB values).


can't see material nodes in node editor My material node is missing in the viewer. No  matter how much I mouse around, I can't find it or add shaders to it. If I delete it, and add another material, it's still missing.

Pressing numpad . (the period/full stop next to 0) will bring the selected node/s into the centre of the view.

Pressing the Home key brings all nodes into view. That is it will centre all nodes within the view and also zoom in or out so that all nodes are visible.


Blender uniform Bezier curve without using its shape Ok, I Don't know how to properly express what I'm looking for, but I'll try:

I have a BEZIER curve like this:

My problem is that in edit mode, the distance from the resolution points isn't constant:

I need to use this curve to animate a follow-path constraint, and the non uniform points lenght results in an unsmooth animation. I already looked at this question: Uniform "density" of bezier segments

But it was asked and answered more than 1.5 years ago. Is there anyway in the new versions of blender to do it? It's alright to create new verts too but the important thing is that the curve doesn't lose its shape. Is this possible?

You can do the following:

Convert curve to mesh.
Loop Tools -> Space (edges).
Convert mesh to curve.


What is the difference between a subdivision surface modifier and a multiresolution modifier? I'm currently modeling my game character in Blender (see below picture). What is the difference between a subdivision surface modifier and a multiresolution modifier? I know they smooth the surface but are there specific characteristics to using each and what are those?

There will be quite a difference in peoples workflow, but I would suggest something like this.
Start by making a high poly mesh. Then after you have modeled, sculpted and are done with the high poly mesh, move on the the low poly mesh. When you have established how your character will look, you can much better make a low poly mesh that will "fit" your character.


How to subtract smaller face from a bigger face in edit mode? I want to have the middle circle empty. It should be as a bike wheel.

If you have a solid face and you want to poke a hole on it and conform it to another existing shape (target), you can inset (I in edit mode) the face to be poked, delete (x) the resulting face and then snap the remaining vertices to the target face one by one.
The problem you present, though, requires a different strategy. Instead of selecting all vertices and hitting F to make faces out of them, select vertices by smaller groups that make sense and are more or less free of concavities. First the ones which inset into the desired empty space (the ones that make the wheels' fork end). Select just them and hit F. Then to for small sections of the wheel until you cover what you want covered.
Pay attention so you don't select vertices that shouldn't be adjacent to the new face you're about to create. Blender lends itself to easily create bad topology if the users direct it to do so.
Later, you can fuse the faces together as you wish by dissolving shared edges between them (X).


How to "erase" some of my sculpting I've done quite a bit of sculpting on an object (way too much to start over) but I don't like what I did in a certain region. I'm past the point of undo. Is there any way to reset, or erase, the sculpting on only that region?

Edit: I realize that I can continue sculpting such that it looks more like its original state.

I'm specifically asking if Blender stores the original state of the mesh at a per-vertex level, and if you can revert a set of vertices to that state - sort of a "reset these to the point before you hit Subdivide, then reapply the current level of subdivision to them" operation.

That is impossible. Blender does not store a record of the previous location of individual vertices. Once you have sculpted an area, it edits the original mesh.

There are many workarounds though.

The most effective (and in a way, easy) method would be to select the area you would like to undo (in edit mode) and delete it. You can then remake it, or go back to a previous save/version you have created, and copy back that section. For this method to be effective you need to save a version of your project before you begin sculpting.

However, if you are going to begin a new model from scratch, I would suggest one of these methods.

First, you could create a gray-scale texture, and paint on this, using it as a displacement for the original mesh. You then "sculpt" in texture paint mode.
The main downfall to this is that it cannot auto-update. You need to switch to edit mode and back to see the changes take effect.

The best method

You can model your object, then duplicate it (make sure it is unwrapped). Now sculpt on the duplicate. when you are done (or want to undo something), you can bake the normal map for the sculpt onto the original. (there are lots of tutorials on baking normal maps.) Now use this map in a displacement modifier (on the original mesh) with "direction" set to "RGB to XYZ".

With either of these methods, to remove a portion, use a vertex group to "mask out" the results.

(Using these methods you will need a subsurf modifier to enable the displacement, or to subdivide your original model for more control.)

Here are some more "corrective" options

Use the "smooth" tool.

You can also hold ctrl which generally does the "opposite" of whichever tool you are using.

Otherwise you can use undo.


Precise Box creation (migrating from 3d MAX) I'm migrating my primary 3D tool from 3D Max to Blender.
I Just missing to create a precise form. for instance: create a 10x14x12 Box. The For now I'm only able to create an 1x1x1 cube, and them inaccurately move its vertices to a proper position.

Is possible to create a predefined size basic form like this?

Thanks

A long winded answer.

Most primitive objects (the ones created by pressing ShiftA) will display a creation menu on the toolbar (T) that will allow you to precisely control dimensions and some variables for that particular object. The same menu is available by pressing F6

Example:

Note that this original creation menu is only available when you first create the object. Any transformation (move, size, etc) will freeze the object with those settings and pressing undo will not bring back the original menu. Any further transformation will have to be done by editing the mesh.

Now, down to the issue with your box.

Blender does not have options to create Cuboids with precise dimensions, so you're stuck with creating a cube.

In the case of the cube there is just an option for radius, as is presumed that in a cube all edges will be the same length.

To create a cuboid you need to deform a cube in Object Mode to the desired dimensions, using the transform section.

Once you set the size it is very important to Apply the Transformation (press CtrlA).

Please read:

Why is it important to apply transformation to an objects data?

and

Why do the measurements of this object seem erroneous?


How to copy 1 part of a mesh to other places on the same mesh (without mirroring) Firstly, I'm new to blender so apologies if this is a really  newbie question.
I'm trying to copy part of a mesh, and apply that to other areas of the same mesh. (On the image below, I'm trying to repeat the recessed area on the left, to the selected faces on the right. I know mirroring is a possible option, but I need to also repeat it elsewhere where mirroring isn't possible, so trying to learn how to do a more "copy/paste" approach)
I've tried following some previous posts which advise using shift + D to duplicate the faces of the object, then move the duplicate away from the mesh, then right click and do separate > selection.
However, when I do that I get a red border around the new object and when I select the new faces (the destination) I can't seem to get it to apply the shape (I also can't "grab" the new item to move it).
Any ideas where I'm going wrong?
Also... how do I stop the mesh from vanishing "inside" the object as visible in multiple places in the image below? It's making it really hard to work when I cant see/select all of the vertices, etc

Thanks!

When you separate the selection, you're actually creating a new object. It seems what you want to do is to split. You don't need to split the part since you have already duplicated it. If you want to "cut" it without copying, and keep it in the same object, what you need to do is right-click and choose Split > Selection - Y is the standard keymap.
Once you duplicate the part, place it somewhere, then the easiest thing to move it where it is intended is to select vertex mode, then deselect and reselect a vertex on the duplicated part (while making sure that the part is still wholly selected), activate vertex snap, and move it to snap with the correct vertex at its intended location.


Optimal way to animate dragging objects through space from a spaceship So I'm working on a short 5 second animation for a stream alert. I've made a rocket and constrained it with follow path, then used some custom animation to make it appear to (shoddily) fly. I also have an astronaut that I want to be attached to the ship on the outside being drug by his space walk cord. I don't know if blender has an easier method of attaching one object to another with a loose rope to be pulled by an already animated object other than just custom animating the drug object and the rope frame by frame. But maybe I can use my existing constraint path on a cord (simple cylinder) so that it may follow like a snake?
Help?
My current hypothesis is that I should attach my space walk cord to the skeleton of my astronaut and custom animate them to follow the ship. But then if I don't know how to attach the other end to the space ship it won't every stay a constant singular distance away.
I'm also trying to smooth the over all animation, as it seems a bit noisy or erratic. Any tips besides how to drag an object through a vacuum to improve the animation is also appreciated
My project is here:
https://pasteall.org/blend/5584f2dbf2004c21abeeb437ad7156af

A cloth simulation of a rope can attach the astronaut to the spaceship, then a simulation will generate the movement for the astronaut. The rope is parented to the spaceship so is it moved with it. The the astronaut is constrained to moved with the end of the rope. The animation below shows the final result.

Details

Create a rope from a cylinder by subdividing along it length. Create a vertex group at the end of the rope.
Apply a cloth simulation to the cylinder.
Parent the rope to the spaceship.
Use  the copy location constraint on astronaut and select the rope and the vertex group at the end.

Blender 2.92 file used to generate the animation. -


2 Objects have the same Particle system setup So I made an object and realized that I majorly screwed up. So I manually selected vertices (sorry if I spelt that wrong) and seperated that, making a new object. Anyways, whenever I edit the particles of the 2nd object, it also changes the first one's particle system. If there is any way to make them different, please tell me. Thanks for reading! :D

You need to click the number button next to the particle selection.


What is the best workflow for texture painting? I am a little bit confused about the best workflow for texture painting in blender.

Blender internal has nice ways to do that. Is it possible to paint a color texture in blender internal, use another texture for bump maps etc., work with different uv maps, and then to transfer it to cycles? (perhaps with baking in blender internal first?).

What is your proposal? I actual don't know the best workflow.

It really depends on a lot of things, what you're texturing, how much more work you have to do on it, etc, but the workflow I generally find useful is as follows:

Finish all the modeling
Unwrap the mesh
Use the texture painting features in Blender to paint really basic colors onto the model (this gives you a "map" of sorts, which makes the next step easier)
Export the UVs as an image that you can overlay on the basic diffuse map you just made
Export that basic diffuse map to an image that you can paint on in GIMP or PS.
In GIMP or PS, adjust the UV layout image such that you can lay it over your diffuse map so that you have a more precise understanding of what goes where.
Paint on the diffuse layer, but under the layer with the UV layout on it.
Use that diffuse map to generate bump and spec maps. Usually, I completely desaturate the diffuse map and adjust that until it makes sense as a bump map, and then do the same thing until it makes sense as a spec map, but it's really common that your diffuse map will not be useful that way, in which case:
Repeat steps 6 & 7 to paint spec and bump maps.
Import those into Blender.
???
profit

Note: it's really easy to port images from BI to Cycles, if you understand how they work. The diffuse image will "noodle" into the color input of a diffuse shader, and the bump will "noodle" into the displacement input of the final material output node (though you might want to us some ramps and other stuff to fine-tune it).

The spec one will be the hardest to figure out, because you could do it a couple of different ways, and they will give different results.

You should always (except for specific situations) use a diffuse shader and a glossy shader. The spec map can either drive the COLOR of the spec shader (grayscale), or the GLOSSINESS of the glossy shader, or the FAC value of a mix shader that mixes between a glossy shader and your diffuse shader. Each of these will give different results, so you should experiment and see which looks better.

Bonus: A color image should never go in the color input of a glossy shader. Except for a few rare exceptions, like certain metals, the spec map will be totally grayscale. Even with metals, you probably won't use an image, you'll just set a single color.


Why does the rendered and baked lighting differ so much? This is the rendered preview:

And this is the combined bake:

What am I doing wrong here? I want my baked texture to look like the rendered preview.

All I did was switch to CPU (I have GPU problems on my Mac) and decrease render samples to speed up the bake and I got this:

My thought is that perhaps your problem was with the GPU since that is the only relevant thing that I changed (depending on what GPU you have, some features of Blender don't work, for example, HDR lighting).

Here is the baked image with higher samples:


Transparent image over texture in faces I have a problem about adding an image with transparent background over the already existing material in a group of faces (or a single face) of an object. I saw similar questions in the forum but none of those gave me the result that I am looking for.
As example, I have cube which has been unwrapped, and has a material with normal map, mapping, etc

Then I want to add and image with transparent background on only one of the faces to get something like this (fake image using gimp)

I tried several approaches (multiple uv mapping, using mix nodes, etc) without getting the desired result. I cannot properly combine the two images to get what I want.  Which would be the best approach to get this done?
Thanks in advance
Daniel

MixRGB node should do it for you. Connect the alpha from the image with transparency and use it as a mix factor.


How do I remove a separated object? I am trying to follow along with this tutorial. I had to put its speed to 0.25 to be able to view it.
In this tutorial it is shown how a cube is separated by selection, and then some part is deleted.
I have taken some screenshots:

I could replicate the first 4 steps, but not step 5.
I have added 2 arrows showing the problem. I don't understand how the author of this video deleted the rear geometry of the cube.
In step 3, he separates the front from the back.
In step 4, he has the entire cube selected in Object mode, and in step 5, the rear geometry is gone.
How did he do that? How did he select the rear geometry to delete it?
Here is a video of my own attempt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNhwZ0L9QIQ
Edit: I have just noticed that in the end of the video, I actually succeed. It was due to help of the answerer to my post, Timaroberts.
Thank you!

After separating the geometry it is it's own object thus, I presume that either the tutor deleted X or hid H the  rear geometry once returned to object mode.


Looptools - cancel not working I am working with Blender 2.9 and LoopTools Addon (which i like) but cancel does not seem to work. Whenever i change e.g. to circle and tap ctrl-z, it does not go back but just does other weird things...
is this a bug or a feature?
ok, here is a movie, hopefully this helps. I hoped i could cancel the change from the quad to circle so it would be the quad again but it just selects some weird things. I am pretty new to Blender so maybe i make silly mistake... :(
So the Command Z at the end (i am working on a mac, should be ctrl-z on windows to cancel a operation) is my problem
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1pcku1wp1zsogc9/0001-4000.avi?dl=0

From your video, it seems you have a problem with your hotkeys. CTRL-Z for you is activating the Select More command, which the default hotkey is CTRL-numpad+
Check your keymap, type in "select more" into the search bar and check what it is mapped to. Since you're new to Blender, it might simply be easier to reset your keymapings to default.


Cannot extrude curve after converting to mesh So I drew a teardrop-shaped bezier curve and converted it to a mesh using Object -> Convert to -> Mesh from Curve/Meta/Surf/Text. A new mesh object appeared in my collection, but when I select it and go into Edit mode, Mesh -> Extrude has no options. Likewise, pressing ALTE just brings up a blank menu labeled "Extrude". What am I doing wrong here?

You can find my workflow here.

You are using Face selection mode.

Switch to Vertex or Edge mode to enable the first extrusion.


How to get selected edges length? I have a female model and I want to know her waist width, so I select the edge loop, then use what tool? Is this only possible with python?

Update
I recommend using the newer measureit addon instead.
To measure the sum of the length of a bunch of edges like this:

Select the edges
Set the Sum group in Tool Shelf > Measurit > Tools
Click Segment in Tool Shelf > Measurit > Tools

Now the total length of those edges will be displayed at the bottom of the Measureit panel in the properties region (N).
Be aware that addons have no reliable way to track vertices, so if you modify the mesh your measurements may go awry.

Original answer
You could use the new Ruler/Protractor tool located in the 3D view > Tool Shelf > Ruler/Protractor

Note that this was just added in Blender 2.67.


How to connect two different Textures on the same faces with a transparent background? I want to get rid of that black background next to that golden and red triangle. The golden edge of that red triangle is one texture and the red triangle itself is the other texture. I seperated the edge and the triangle, because i want the edge to be metallic.

You should not add shaders in this situation. If you add shaders, one reflects all the light according to it's properties, but then everything that another one reflects according to its properties gets added to the result. In reality, that does not happen with a material that only has a few different colors. You should use the Mix Shader node in this case, or if it is only a color, you should only mix the color of the shader, instead of a copy of that exact same shader with a different color.

How you mix everything depends on what you want to achieve.

It would make a whole lot more sense to have the triangles on the right color and in one texture in the first place, but let's just say only for learning purposes the task is to add two triangles one on top another and for some unknown, but very important reason they need to be on black backgrounds in the textures, but the color of the material needs to be white.

You would need to make a black and white mask for each of the triangles to separate them from the background. Let's use Math node set to Greater Than mode with a small value for this, so we make all brighter than the small value colors show white. Both triangles need to be mixed on top of your desired color using Mix RGB node. Note that one Mix RGB node has white in it that is the new white background:

Edit:
I just noticed you have one shader with different metallic value. It would make more sense to have the colors in one texture and just a grey-scale map for that single metallic property that is different.

There is nothing mysterious about using grey-scale map for something. Think of it like using a single value, like you are now, just for different parts of the material defined by the texture file. You have metallic value 0 and 1.0 so you only need completely black and completely white in the map. What will be the most convenient way for you to make it depends on how you make the textures. If it is in some external painting software like Krita or Photoshop, or Gimp, you would just make sure you make one image with white instead of the yellow line and black instead of everything else. Then you would just drag and drop the image into the nodes of the material and plug it into the Metallic input.


Attaching mesh to curve messed up Using
What is the fastest way to add vertices to a curve at a specific point?
I've create a curve, and tried attaching a mesh with an array modifier set. This is what happened (.blend atached):

My guess is that where the tiles are merged, the "steps" of the curve are too close. Is there a way to make them equidistant?

Something identically related to:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11980166/equally-distribute-objects-across-a-bezier-curve

enable Loop Tools Addon (distributed with Blender)
convert the curve to mesh (ALT+C) (Object Mode)
Edit Mode
select all vertices (A)
set even spacing of verts: W > Loop Tools > Space
Object Mode
convert it back to curve

https://blenderartists.org/t/solved-is-there-a-way-to-evenly-distribute-splines-points-in-a-bezier-circle/1115092
urgh ...


how does cycles calculate RGB to BW There are many ways to calculate RGB to BW. Which of those ways does Cycles use in the RGB to BW node?  (I took a quick look at the git repository, but it's not searchable and I couldn't find the node source code.)

Black and white, or more appropriately greyscale, is based on the luminance weights of the primary lights for a given reference. That is, not physical energy, but visual energy. If one were to project equal energy sRGB values from a screen, despite being equal physical energy, the visual energy would appear as though the sRGB green channel was most luminous, with red following, and blue seeming the least luminous.

As one can clearly see from the above example, luminance is not an equal average of each channel.  There are countless clueless formulas for calculating greyscale imagery based off of equally clueless offerings, including such averaging and other misinformed foolishness.

The default reference space for Blender is based upon REC.709 primaries, as those are the primaries that define the sRGB specification. As such, to properly calculate greyscale, we use the normalized luminance, or the normalized Y value for each primary as given under the CIE XYZ model, to weight the sRGB values.

Those weights are typically represented as 0.2126*R + 0.7152*G + 0.0722*B. Blender utilizes the values from the OpenColorIO configuration as given on the "luma" line in https://git.blender.org/gitweb/gitweb.cgi/blender.git/blob_plain/HEAD:/release/datafiles/colormanagement/config.ocio.

For any given RGB colourspace such as sRGB, there is exactly one correct method to derive average luminance.


Two Different Materials in One Particles System I wanna make a carpet with two different materials (some part is glossy and the rest is diffuse) using only one plane and one particles system.

How to do that

You can use a black and white texture mask (in this case the alpha channel of the blender logo) to mix between two shaders:

Note that you need to UV unwrap your plane in order for this to work:

With the plane selected, press Tab to enter edit mode.
Press A to select all.
Press U> Unwrap.


How to properly place Geometry in Geometry Node I am looking for a way for the cutout object to be displayed on the vertical edges of the cubes in the blend file. I achieved this for now by creating a vertex group and by moving the cutout shape manually until it is more or less at the edges of the cubes.
But I want this to happen in the Geometry Node, so it is easier to control.
I am using the current 2.92.0 Beta Version of Blender.
Glad for any ideas on this.

if the answer to my comment is "yes"...here is the solution for geometry nodes:
just add a transform node before the boolean operator and connect the translation to your group input node. Of course, if you need rotation too you can connect them as well.


How can I make a low poly triangular pendentive? I accidentally made this once, but I forgot how I did it. It's 3D, and it's the same dimension of a regular cube. I know how to make the arches, but I don't know how to fill it once the arches are in place.

Edit: I'd like an ability to see it as smooth while low-poly, if it's possible. I guess a triangular pendentive is a better way to explain it :)

Any help appreciated!

You can use circle meshes to create the exact shape in your example image, if I understand correctly.

I created circles on three faces of a standard cube, removed doubles, deleted excess vertices, filled the faces, and fixed normals:


Why my text extrude borders but not front? I'm trying to make some 3D text. I'm following a tutorial but the extrution is of the borders of the text not the front or the back. Why?

Your Fill mode is set to "none". Setting it to "both" should fix your problem.


Make Cartoon-like car headlight light I want to make the light appear on the floor in a defined oval shape, without any scattering but be translucent anyway. kind of like this picture, but appearing only on the ground maybe. This is part of an animation of the car going around a small world.

Here is the file. Thank you in advance!!

Are you making this in 2D or 3D? If 3D, you can use a spot light and position it in the headlight of the car, keyframing it's position. You also wouldn't need to use nodes for that.

If 2D, and you want to have it be casting a yellow tint on the background, then you can make the light a yellow plane and decrease the alpha transparency value.


Can't Adjust View in Movie Clip Editor I was following this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmzfaD6IgZ8

and when it got to the point where I need to apply the mask to my 6 frames (png files) of the can, I am unable to adjust how the clip is displayed in the Movie Clip Editor. I can zoom in but I can't click and drag the image left or right to move it to where I want to apply my mask. The person in the video seems to just click and drag. I've tried both LMB and RMB but neither seems to work. I've also tried pressing 'g' before trying to move it and that also didn't work. Lastly, I've checked to see if there were any settings that might "lock" the view in place, but none exist that I see.

For reference, here is a screenshot of what I'm seeing:

Any advice?

Press your middle mouse button (the wheel) and then it should work.


Particles tab is not available when I use nurbs path New to blender and particles tab keeps disappearing from the right side panel. Not sure how to get it back or why it is happening in the first place.  I tried reopening document but it's still missing but if I open a completely new file it is there.

You need to have a mesh object as the emitting object selected.

Currently you have a curve selected, and curves can't have a particle system.

Select a mesh object as the emitter, or convert your curve to a mesh (AltC)


What are the best graphics cards for cycles? I'm considering having a system build solely for rendering for cycles (as kind of a single PC renderfarm). Since the GPUs would be most important here, I plan on having it build around those. I was wondering what would be the best GPU to go for? As far as I can find, 2 gtx 580's seem to be the best option, while two 560 ti's give more bang for the buck. Any chance newer videocards work as well? (600+series?)

Here's a spreadsheet that collates data from many users running the same benchmark scene. The thread with active discussion and a copy of the scene is at BlenderArtists, This is the best we can do without relying on opinion.

Decide for yourself which gfx card makes sense.

Note: Different OS's, drivers and versions of Blender, can all significantly change render times. So you'll need to take that into consideration when comparing benchmarks.


Can not view MP4 output files in HTML As a learning exercise I am trying to use Blender's video editing capability to modify a mp4 file. The problem is that my rendered output can be played using VLC, Dragon, and gnome-mplayer but it won't play when using an HTML <video> element.

To be specific, I am starting with a copy of Sita Sings the Blues in H.264/MPEG4 format. I've clipped out ~ 15 seconds, added a fade-in effect strip at the beginning and also deleted the audio track. The result is an 18 second video which I then try to render and output as an mp4 file. I have tried a variety of output and encoding settings but the result is always the same: I can play it back perfectly in any of my standalone players but dropping it into a browser wont work. Firefox gives me a "File is corrupt" message and Chrome just sits there and does nothing.

BTW, I can generate AVI and MOV files that Firefox will play without complaint. Its only MP4 that is an issue. Unfortunately, I need to be able to play mp4 files in a browser for my intended application.

Has anybody seen this type of problem before or have any suggestions?

Thanks

Larry

I solved this with manualy: I convert the MP4 with VLC to MP4. :) This is a rough solution but works.


How long should the Blender BMW demo file take to render? This is a different question. But I didn’t know where else I should have asked.
I tried rendering the Blender BMW demo file (in cycles, with GPU) and the render took 37 minutes and 48 seconds.
The i tried using CPU instead, and it took 18 minutes.
Is that a very slow render time. If it is, what is considered a “good” render time?
If it is slow, how can I make it faster besides rendering in smaller dimensions and the obvious stuff?

It depends on your hardware. The BMW "blenchmark" should take however long it takes to render without you modifying the file.
The idea of such benchmark is for folks to see how their particular hardware compares to other in similar circumstances, with the same scene with the exact same settings.
The results are here:
http://blenchmark.com/gpu-benchmarks

Are there ways to speed it up? yes, but that is not the point of said file.
If everybody modifies the file, then there will be way too many variables and the statistics and comparisons for rendering are no longer valid.