Why does parenting Heel IK to Thigh Bone cause jittering in right leg but not left leg? I have a character with legs that are not parented to a torso bone (they end at the top of the thigh - each thigh is a highest level parent). Other than that, I rigged the legs normally.

I wanted my character to be able to retract his legs upwards into his body. To do this, I scale each thigh bone down in pose mode.

This works for each leg, but each foot remains the same size, because each foot bone is parented to its heel IK bone.

To solve this, I tried setting each thigh bone as a parent of its respective heel IK bone. This worked fine in the left leg. However, in the right leg, this causes the bones to move wildly all about in pose mode.

To see what was wrong, I tried separating the right leg with all its bones into a different armature. When I did this, the right leg behaved normally.

My paint weights are fine, and influence the mesh properly; this problem is only with the armature. Both legs appear to have identical bone hierarchies, and identical constraints.

I've been able to solve my problem by setting a bone constraint to match each heel IK's scale to its thigh bone's scale. However, I'd still like to learn why parenting the bones the way I did caused the strange behavior, and I'd really appreciate help. Thanks!

I can post more information or screenshots if that would help.

Edit: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-bWzTfC_T1BdgUn1wnHGU0S8ra1XRreM

To have an IK controller which is child of a bone which is part of the IK chain must be considered a rigging error, because it creates a circular dedendency, leading to unpredictable behaviours (and jitterings).

Instead you can create a new bone (which I called "scaler") that will be parent of the thigh and the HeelIK. In my picture scaling the scaler bone caused the whole left leg to scale proportionally, maintaining full functionality of the IK leg chain, without any need of constraints.


How to scale the cameras view bounds? The current issue is that I need more space to the right for my text, but scaling the camera to capture more of the area won't work. Why is this so?

This is what I wish to achieve:

But I am stuck with scaling the camera:

(what is shown in red is what I wish to achieve)

How can I capture more of the area? (I prefer not to do any compositing).

You can also change the Resolution in Render Settings > Dimensions:

For this you probably want to increase the X resolution.

Notice

Note that you can't scale the camera up by adjusting these values, you will need to move the camera and/or change the Focal Length to zoom/scale the camera.

Adjust the Focal Length in Properties > Camera > Lens
The easiest way to zoom in/out with the camera is:

Enter Camera view (Numpad 0) and select the camera
Press GZZ to move the camera along the local Z axis.

By using a combination of the above techniques, you can place and scale the camera however you want.


Every time I touch an object a full-render starts I don't know what setting I switched, or what happened, but for some reason now every time I move, scale or rotate an object in the 3d View - blender starts a render. I am not talking about the 3d View being in "Rendered" mode. I am talking about the same behavior as when you click the "Render" button (switch to image editor, begin full render). This is driving me crazy and I can't seem to figure out how to turn it off or what I did to start it. It happens whether I use the mouse or keys. If I open a new document the behavior goes away so it is probably a preference setting(?) If you can help, I will be eternally grateful.

Thanks in advance.

In the compositor windows turn off Auto Render


how to search in a list of 2d points for a specific 2d point I'm trying to develop an addon which takes all of the individual UV vertices of two meshes.

Then it compares the target UV to the source one.

If two UV vertices match, then I want to find the vertex's 3d source position.
I'm trying to find a more efficient way to look for each target UV vertex through source UVs.
Right now, for each target UV vertex, I'm looping through every UV vertex of source UVs until I find the same one.

I wanted to see if there is any better way to do it or not.
Thanks in advance.

A KDTree is a structure for fast comparison/search based on 3D coordinates (more information here).
In your context, you can create a KDTree from the uvs of the first object (translating 2d coordinates into 3d for the KDTree).
Then loop over the uvs of the second and query the KDTree using find (or find_n, find_range depending on what you exactly need).
find will return a tuple of (coordinate, index, distance) of the vertex that is found.
The script.
import bpy
import time
from mathutils import Vector, kdtree

def make_kd_from_uvs(uvs):
    #Create a kd tree
    size = len(uvs)
    kd = kdtree.KDTree(size)
    #Populate it
    for i, uv in enumerate(uvs):
        kd.insert(uv.uv.to_3d(), i) #With 3d coordinates
    #Prepare for querying
    kd.balance()
    return kd

def loop_to_vertex_map(obj):
    #Create an array of loop indices to vertex indices
    polygons = obj.data.polygons
    return [v for p in polygons for v in p.vertices]

def compare_kd(obj1, uv_name1, obj2, uv_name2):
    #Get uvs for each
    uvs1 = obj1.data.uv_layers[uv_name1].data
    uvs2 = obj1.data.uv_layers[uv_name2].data

    #Get maps to look up from loop indices to vertex indices
    map1 = loop_to_vertex_map(obj1)
    map2 = loop_to_vertex_map(obj2)

    #Make a kd tree from the first
    kd = make_kd_from_uvs(uvs1)

    #Loop over the second
    for index2, uv2 in enumerate(uvs2):
        co2 = uv2.uv.to_3d() #With 3d coordinates
        #Query the kd tree
        co1, index1, distance = kd.find(co2)
        uv1 = uvs1[index1]

        v1 = obj1.data.vertices[map1[index1]]
        v2 = obj2.data.vertices[map2[index2]]

        #print(v1.co, v2.co)
        #print(uv1.uv, uv2.uv)

obj1 = bpy.data.objects["Cube"]
obj2 = bpy.data.objects["Cube.001"]

start = time.time()
compare_kd(obj1, "UVMap", obj2, "UVMap")
end = time.time()
print(end-start)


How can I get Blender to render the 3D view instead of the what's in the VSE? I added a video sequencer/preview as reference for the animation I am doing, but now when I render, it renders from the sequencer rather than my 3D camera.
How can I fix this?

In the Properties panel > Output > Post Processing, disable the Sequencer option.


Set a modified mesh (with shape keys) as default mesh I have basic rigged body mesh that i modified with shape keys sliders to my needs.

And i need to export it, but when i do, it will only export the non-modified base mesh.

How do i set a modified mesh with shape keys as the the defaut mesh in blender?

Set all the values on all the shape keys to 1, or to whatever you want in your final object.  Click on the down arrow (see pic), then on New Shape from Mix (see pic)

Highlight, one at a time, all the shape keys (including the Basis) and click on the "minus" sign on the right hand side (just above that down arrow.)  You'll be left with only one shape key.  You can export that and it can be imported as the end result you have just exported, without shape keys.


Graph editor shows too high of values I can't seem to find the menu item that adjust the coordinate value and it's going all the way up to 60 causing my curves to look flat.

I don't need it that high but when I zoom in, I zoom in on the frames too and it'll only show 20 frames when I get it to "mountain" curve.
I want it look like the below.  It captures over 160 frames and the value goes up to 10.  How do I adjust?

Thanks.
UPDATE:  I was able to set it back to normal by hovering over the graph editor and pressing "home".  However, I'm still not satisfied with this answer because it's so automated.  Isn't there a way I can freely adjust the Graph Y Axis?

Hold down CTRL+MMB and move the mouse up or down in the window.


Why my bone moves with the whole mesh When I move a single bone in pose mode, the whole mesh is moving, not only the eye-lid, as I wish. What am I doing wrong? I set the parent: mesh to bone (armature deform, with autom. weights). How should I precise, I want only the specific eyelid to move with that specific bone and not the whole mesh?

You have to reassign the influence of your eyelid bone to the eyelid vertices of your mesh.

As L0Lock said, you can fix your problem in Weight Paint mode, with the Mix or Substract brush.

You can also do it with the Vertex Groups "Assign" button:

Select your object, go in Edit mode, go in the Properties panel > Data > Vertex Groups.
In the vertex groups list, select the vertex group that has the name of your eyelid bone.
On the right of the vertex groups list, there's a down arrow that gives access to a menu. Press Remove from All Groups. Now there's no more vertices in this group, so the eyelid bone can't move anymore vertex.
In your mesh, select the vertices that are supposed to be part of the eyelid vertex group.
In the vertex groups, keep the eyelid vertex group select, and click on the Assign button that is under the list. You can modulate the assign ratio to give more or less influence to the brush.


how to separate the sculpting layer as a different object in blender? i have sculpted a dragon now i have applied some texture/alpha like curly horns,skins using brush on whole body of a dragon, now i want that extra texture which i applied as a different object or layer. so that i can independently edit both of them. if i can hide the texture , i want to see only original dragon body or vice versa. that's what i want.

If you have applied these directly to your base mesh you will not be able to separate them.  The closest you can get to what you want is to use the multires modifier which will allow you to sculpt different levels of detail at different resolutions.


Is Blender able to make complex night skies with stars and galaxies? I am really interested in making night skies full of beautiful stars as in this image

or even this

But the best Blender tutorial I found about making such a thing ended up looking like this

Is Blender able to make such a thing, or do I need to learn Photoshop to make stars and galaxies?

Ok, so here it is. Here's my attempt at your shader. I'll just let you take that all in. It's not perfect, but it's getting closer to what you're looking for, and hopefully the breakdown will help guide you in your own shader making adventures.

So, I think I'm going to go ahead and name this one "A whole lotta noise", because, as is the case with many procedural shaders, it includes a great deal of noise textures. It is my task throughout this breakdown to help you make sense of all of them.
Let's start with the obvious - a stary sky is going to need stars - lots of them. Big, small, bright dim - the whole deal. So, leet's make some stars. I see from your image that you have that part down pretty well, but regardless, i'll walk through the apporach so others reading can follow as well, and maybe you can combine our two styles in your final shader.
I got my initial star shapes by combining a Voronai Texture with the randomness set to 0, with a White Noise Texture. This special little combo yields "Cell noise" otherwise known as pixellated squares of varying brightness. I chose squares, because it was an easy way to get a lot of stars, distributed the way I want. The fact that they start square doesn't matter so much, because they will be small, blended with other things, and I have plans to blur them slightly later on as well in the compositor. So, In my mind, squares are fine for now. To get a more varied look to the stars, I used 4 different White Noise Nodes of different scales.
However, the result given by the White Noise is mostly on the light side (not very star like) so I clamped the values with a ColorRamp. I clamped it rather tightly because the initial map yields too many "stars", so I clamped even most of the grays, leaving only a small amount of white with just a tiny bit of variance in grey levels that I take advantage of in the next set of ColorRamp Nodes that I use to give the stars a bit of color. I didn't give any color to the smallest stars, because they are very small, and color variations wouldn't show anyway.
Lastly, I started mixing them together. FYI - all the MixRGB Nodes  set to "ADD", that are adding a nodes values to itself, is just a quick way I know of brightining the "bright" values of an image, without brightening the overall image. See below:

The next stage (actually 2 stages) was to remove some of  the extra "noise" (too many stars), by multiplying my star-maps with some Noise Textures of different scales  and distortions. I used ColorRamp Nodes to control the strength of the noise I was using to darken. This has 3 effects - Firstly, it flat out removes a bunch of the stars. this is good, because it makes the image less "noisy". Secondly it varies the brightness of all the stars that are left in the map, making them more realistic, as if some were closer than others. Lastly, it rounds off many of the sharp edges to the White Noise squares, making them more like stars and less like blocks.

Ok, so now we have a starfield, but that's rather boring, so let's add some "nebulae". Firstly, we don't want the nebula to take up the whole sky, so we have to "section off" an area for it. To do this, I used a Gradient Texture, rotated and clamped it, and multiplied it with the dark values from yet another Noise Texture to get a slightly "whispy" horizon. The reason I left it whispy is because I will be using this as both an image and a mask. I want the image to be varied in brightness, as well as a mask that is varied in opacity. Because pure white is considered "fully opaque" as an alpha value, and pure black is considered "fully transparent", I wanted a bit of grayscale variance so the transparency "blends", without harsh cuttofs - Kind of like a cloud.

I then multiplied this map with "darkness mask" I made from a Gradient Texture.  NOTE - the TEXTURE COORDINATE I am using for this particular gradient is UV, as opposed to GENERATED for everything else. I did this because it gives me more precise control over the gradient's position via the Mappong Node and the ColorRamp. I used this as a way to further "section off" the cloud. The result of which looks like this:  (FYI - The brightness and contrast values (mainly brightness) do a pretty good job of controlling the cloud size.)

Now starts the coloring section. The first thing I did was give 2 "layers" to the cloud, by using 2 different ColorRamps, one Blue, and the other Pink. The pink one I made smaller than the other by reducing the brightness (and subsequently the cloud size) ahead of the coloring. I then mixed them together, using an inverted version of the smaller "cloud" as a mask that I further adjusted with a ColorRamp to make the pink cloud "show through" the blue to my satisfaction. See below:

I then combined this with the darknes values from a detailed and clamped Musgrave texture to make it look more like a real nebula, with dark areas abound.

For the area "inbetween the stars", and to form part of the "background noise" of the universe, I combined some more Noise Textures and a Wave Texture with some bue and aquamarine ColorRamp values, using the wave to help define some of the "flow areas" to what I will now call "cosmic gas".

I also made a second set of "background-background" noise, which I mixed in right near the end, because I felt dark areas of the image were still too dark, ad were missing something in my mind. I think I could have chosen better colors, and a beter mix, but I was tired of fiddling with it at this point.

Lastly, I used a Gradient Texture, mapped, rotated and mixed with some more clamped Noise Textures to define the area of the sky where the sky background noise would effect.

Lastly, I mixed them all together - The STARS, the CLOUD and the BACKGROUND NOISE.  I ran the result through an emission shader to boost the values and the result looks like thsi (I pictured on both a plane and a sphere.) I turned on bloom as well for a slightly added effect - you can control this by the emission value to an extent.

But wait, we're not done - time for some compositing. The last step is to put a camera in front of the plane, and render an image. From there, you can go to the compositing window and play to your hearts content. I was aiming for the minimal work possible, so I just slightly enhanced the image with a Glare Node. This further rounds out the stars, and adds a twinkle". I purposely over-used it in the final image because I really wanted to demonstrate how it makes an image seem "fantasy like". Feel free to change the values to your preferences (it's largely controlled by the "threshold" value of the  Glare Node).

Final result looks like this:

I've also included the whole blend file for all those who want to play with it.
File is here -
A last note - for a real bonus, switch over to the WORLD section in the shading tab. I've left the same map there just waiting to be hooked up. Give it a try, but be warned, it made my GPU take quite a breath. Use sparingly.
All the best.


Debugging Rig performance I have a complex character rig. Its a Rigify rig base, but with a bunch of other stuff i've added, like a custom face rig. Somewhere in the process of building it all, the performance has gone down. Its now quite slow when attempting to pose things. The rig is slow on its own even when all armatures are disabled, so I know the problem is somewhere in the rig.
I'm trying to find out if there's any tools or debug options that can help me narrow down what part of the rig is causing the slow performance. I don't know if its one problem driver or constraint causing a big slow down, or a bunch of things contributing.
Of course, I can delete parts of it a bit at a time and see if that helps, and then narrow it down from there. But if there's some better way to approach this, I'd like to know!

To begin with, are you sure that the rig itself is a problem? I mean what if you delete everything except the armature(s)? Will it remain being hard for FPS of your scene. I've made & seen different rigs, including very complex, but I've never seen FPS going down because of Armature constraints/drivers/whatever. But OK, if the rig is the problem, I'd start with these suggestions:

cyclic dependencies: bone/object/property A somehow depends on bone/object/property B while bone/object/property B somehow depends
on bone/object/property A (constraints, drivers, parent-child
relationships - and take hierarchy into account, because it's often
quite not obvious, that 10th child of bone A depends on 12th child of
bone B & vice cersa); you can check if there any cyclic dependencies
in your file by toggling the command line, it will be shown there
along with some other helpful info: errors, missing paths, lost
drivers and so on;

action constraints: I've noticed that among all the constraints Action constraints are the hardest ones - especially when there are
100+ of them (I had even much more when made the rig with large
amount of facial emotions);

drivers with complex logic: large expressions with many variables and
modifiers can potentially slow down FPS;

driven shape keys: if you use shape keys with drivers on them, it can
really slow down the scene, I had mesh with 50+ driven shape keys and
it had been freezing my FPS like hell, and when I tried to delete
them all, FPS increased from 5 to 30;

other complex modifiers: OK, let's say there's no more Armature
modifiers and our mesh is no longer connected to its rig (well, at
least - it's no longer obviously connected); but what about other
modifiers? Lattice, Mesh Deform, Laplacian Deform and other deformers
like that can catastrophically reduce your FPS.

So, there's no scripted way to find the bottleneck of Mesh-Rig relationships, and I just tried to mention some of the approaches I use in my work.


IK Constraints Swinging Around Wildly My IK's are out of control. I've set up enough simple IK's to know how to do it correctly and I have not idea what's going on here. I've tried redoing the IK's, recreating the bones completely, but nothing has worked. After making this post, I'm going to try to remake the whole armature.

Blend file

The Problem here is your Control bone for those IK is parented with the IK bone. So simply clear parent it will slove the problem.
-Select FrontFoot.L bone
-Press Alt + P
-Choose Clear Parent

The IK work correctly now.


How can the demarcation between two materials be smoothed? After assigning two different materials to a subdivded mesh, I would like to smooth the demarcation between them from:

To something like:

I tried to isolate one material and selected the outline using Select / Non Manifold
and hoped that I could rotate the edges around z-axis with individual origins but this didn't work as expected.

How can the edges be smoothed as in the 2nd image (preferably without separating the mesh before) ?

You can try the Relax operator of Loop Tools (a bundled addon):

To use:

Enable the addon in CtrlAltU> User Preferences > Addons:

Then run it by pressing W> LoopTools > Relax.


Make 2 square holes in a cube Good morning,
I'm trying to make two square holes in a cube.
I managed to make the first one:

But when it's time to do the second one, the software can't take the sides of the cube anymore since the cube has been transformed, I can't select the top side but only certain side of the lines, so if I try it gives me something like that:

May I know how to make two holes? Thanks.

What steps exactly are you taking for this process? Could I suggest using The Boolean modifier? If you don't want to use that you could always use the knife tool or CTRL+R to create edge loops.


How do I fix this Cloth simulation? Each time I make an edit to my cloth in blender 2.9, it will sew together just fine and lay on my character mesh. After running the animation through once, it starts to shake and go through the mesh. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Edit 9/14: I found these weird lines in edit mode that were sewing the end to the thickness modifier. I then disabled the thickness modifier and the lines went away.
Extra sewing lines with thickness modifier:

No more extra lines without it:

I took away the thickness modifier and then played the animation but it still wen through the mesh.
I looked at it from the side and it looked like this:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XBwliFJtRSeqXAr41OiIiB2juPFqnjmG/view

Try increasing the quality steps. Sometimes if you have the steps set too low they clip through each other. If that doesn't work take a look at your cloth thickness, it may be too thin.


How can I automate a audio file to transformations? So I am lip syncing, and I am not exactly doing a traditional mouth, I have a single light, and lets say on it's y axis I set a boundary from 0 to 10, then I get an audio file and say at no volume the object is a y = 0, while a max volume y = 10? And of course everything else in between. Would it be possible to do any of that?

Bake Sound to FCurve

Add a single keyframe to the Y location,  open the graph editor and choose "Bake Sound to Fcurve" from the graph editors "Key" menu.

To change the range of the baked fcurve add an envelope modifier.

Combine F-Curve Modifiers with baked Sound

What's the range of values on a sound-baked f-curve?

Rescaling a baked F-curve to values between 0 and 1


Volumetric cloud render noise in Cycles I'm rendering volumetric clouds using Procedural cycles Clouds shader.
I'm getting a good result, but with a strange noise (middle bottom screen):

It's about 180 passes. As you can see everything is good, but this place is noisy.

How to reduce it next time?

Also first time I used a default Transparency value – Min 3, Max 8. I got this result:

As you can see in the same place a black box are visible. In other places you can see other boxes. I think it is one of many particles border. I reduce it by increase Transparency value.

Why the boxes are visible with default Transparency value?

May be I should change another value to achieve better result?

Thanks for your suggestions!

I had the same issues when I used the same shader recently (in Blender 2.79). This is how I solved them:

I. Decrease the Step Size value.

I realized that I had to reduce the Volume Sampling Step Size (Under Geometry section in the render settings). This removed noise in those areas where the volume density is very less.

But there are side effects of doing this:

This will increase render times, so you will have to find the exact value which is good enough to remove the noise.
The clouds would look more denser, so you may have to decrease the overall volume density in the shader.
Some cloud volume, if placed far away, might disappear, or get cut if Max Steps value is set low. You may have to increase the Max Steps value if that happens.

Tip: Step Size and Max Steps properties work in relation to each other. Reducing Step Size may need increase in Max Steps in order to make distant volumes visible since the renderer may reach the maximum number of volume sampling steps before it reaches the far away volume (because it is taking a smaller step to calculate the volumetric shader)

II. Regarding the black boxes, Increase the Max value for Transparency under Light Paths. Increasing the value did not affect my render time.

All the cloud instances are rendered inside cube geometry with a transparent shader on it by default (if no surface shader is defined and volume shader is connected). Now since the volume and background ray has to travel through many of these transparent boxes to reach the camera (or from the camera), sometimes it may hit the maximum transparency bounces value and that will render a black box there as the volume ray and the background image cannot pass through.


Trying to dissolve edge, but sometimes blender brings the origin to a face instead and doesn't dissolve the face. REALLY annoying! I'm trying to dissolve faces, but half the time it doesn't dissolve them but instead moves the origin to the middle of a face on my object. The same face every time. Why??

I think you are confused about how to use  dissolve..  or about the differences between dissolve and delete:

check this fast video I made for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vEnOqUZ7Lk

also check:

Differences between dissolve and delete?

and this:


Tilt a loop cut without affecting the whole form I want to rotate a loop cut from this:

to this:

If I simply rotate it, it would affect the whole form:

which isn't what I want.
I know in this particular case, I could've use a knife tool to cut through the cube. But I'd like to know if it's possible to "tilt" an existing loop cut without changing the bounding geometry?

Just to amplify on @moonboots' comment, you can use the ShiftCtrlAltS Shear tool, (with X or Y to determine the direction of shear,) which works in View space.
If your cube is not aligned to one of the preset orthogonal views, you can align your view to a face of the cube by selecting the face, and hitting Shift7 on the numpad.


Transparent object create opaque alpha channel. How do you get transparent objects over a transparent background? I have a transparent object that I am rendering without any sort of background, ie film is set to "transparent."
Rather than have slightly transparent pixels, the alpha channel is black and white, no greys.
Is there a way to render a transparent object over a transparent background in such a way that the alpha channel is reflective of the transparency of the object, not just the shape of it?

Not presented as an answer so much as extension of comments above: You can add a fresnel and holdout to your material to generate other alpha-node output characteristics...


Automate connections in 2 columns of nodes Here is a video proposal :

Tell me what you think

Partial solution (adding reroutes to all unused inputs and replacing them) :

If you prefer to read or didn't understand this rushed video :

So you have a bunch of nodes and you want to add reroutes to their inputs

add any node (doesn't matter which one since you'll delete it later)
move it on the left of your bunch of nodes
select your bunch of nodes and the new lonely one which you set as the active one
press K (with Node Wrangler enabled) to connect the lonely node to the bunch of nodes.
select and group the entire node tree except for the new lonely node which stays outside
in the group, Shift + left-click drag on the group input links to add reroutes on them
Tab to get out of the group
Alt+G to ungroup it
delete the lonely node you added previously
reorder your reroutes properly if some are not in the right place
Shift+= to arrange them perfectly

Voilà. Now you can replace those reroutes by any node with Shift+S. And if you need them to have specific parameters, don't forget Right-click > "copy to selected" to apply your changes from the active node to all the selected ones.


How cam I make a building's walls grow as if its being constructed? I saw this blender animation on youtube showing a building walls grow into completion from the ground up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNSdnzUH9IY

Does anyone know how to achieve this result, I have a building model. Just have to show the walls rising up and covered with the ceiling.

Thanks

For the walls you could use a Boolean modifier:

Create your walls.
Create an object that will mask your walls, like a cube.
Give your walls a Boolean modifier. Choose Operation > Difference and select your cube as Object.
To make the cube invisible, go in the Properties panel > Display > Maximum Draw Type > Wire, and in Cycles Settings, disable all the options.
Now when you move up or down the cube it will make your wall visible and invisible, you just have to put some keyframes.
Repeat the same operation for the other walls with new cubes.

For the roof :

Create an array of tiles, with or without an Array modifier.
Duplicate this array of tiles with a new Array modifier. Put some keyframes on the Count Value to display more and more tiles.


Boolean Operation is not filling mesh I'm trying to make a cutout like the following (a hourglass shape) in an object.
But when I add the boolean it doesn't fill the mesh. I get a cut out like a cylinder instead.
You can see the inside of the object.

There is only a subdivision modifier on the object applied currently.

I've found the problem, it had to do with the Mirror modifier. When I created the object I deleted 1 face of the object that was on the inside. Which is why it was empty instead of filling.


Heightmap on sphere gives a weird equator I tried applying this heightmap on a sphere to obtain the surface of the moon.

Here is a step by step procedure of what I did:

Created a grid of 1024 X-subdivisions and 512 Y-subdivisions
Scaled plane along x axis by 2 (Didn't Apply Transformation)
Modifier Properties->Add Modifier->Deform
In Deform Properties Texture->New->Show Texture in texture Tab
Image->Settings->Open->Selected the image above
Went to edit mode
Went to Orthogonal Top View and Select All using A
Rotated along X by 90 (R->X->90)
Rotated along Z by 180 (R->Z->180)
Moved it along Y by 1m (G->Y->1)
Mesh->Transform->Warp
Warp Angle->180
Rotated along Y by -90 (R->Y->-90)
Mesh->Transform->Warp
Warp Angle->360

The result was this moon:

The Different Views

You can see that the top view looks perfect, but I don't think the top view in my model is the actual top view to be obtained by this image.
I think that the sphere needs to be rotated but I am not sure what direction.

Along the other views you can see that the model along the equator seems weird. It seems stretched along the middle region. I dont think that it is an issue of the image but I am not sure.

What have I missed or messed up? And how do I fix it?

Also is there any other better way to do this?

And the rotation of the model, what is the correct one?

Sorry this answer only the "is there another way to do this". Check out @Cegaton comments for pointers to ways to fix your problem.

Since your texture seems to be Equirectangular (tell me if I am wrong), you can use Environment texture node which can be used directly on an sphere or icosphere without manual UV mapping.

The example below uses cycles adaptive subdiv modifier (requires experimental features enabled). This works also with regular bump displacement with Cycles and Eevee.


How could this looped animation be made in Blender? I was watching Six Major Paris, and noticed a looped animated background they use for shoutcasters' scene, and just wondered how it made using Blender?

The looped animation is here:
https://youtu.be/mX-N4aIBrXQ

Thank you

Hmm... the way I would make an animation like that is to have a plane with an object poking through it. The object poking through it would then have a number of shape keys assigned to it and I'd slowly cycle from one shape to another over the course of the animation using the shape keys.


Why does the grease Pencil Fill becomes transparent when zoomed out I'm trying to draw an oil tanker with a combination of a 3D mold and 2D drawings with grease pencil, but when the grease drawings are close to a 3D mesh or another Grease pencil object, it becomes transparent so I see the lines behind it and the fill mixes with the colors behind it, also the closest the camera is to the object the worst.

example: I have a 3D box made with grease pencil rectangles when I'm close it looks how it's supposed to look but when I zoom out I can see the lines behind

So this with the right zoom it looks ok but when I zoom out it goes crazy. On the GPencil layers, I already set the strokes depth order to 3D Location so I don't understand why this is happening, what am I missing? is there any way to fix this issue?

Not sure if you've figured out a solution for this problem, but if not, this could be worth a shot:

Select Grease Pencil object
Add an "Offset" modifier
Try changing the Location value by either +0.01 or -0.01 across each axis, then render the results to see if it's fixed the issue. Do it one at a time; you're basically testing which axis the grease pencil needs to be "pushed away from the object" & towards the camera on for it to display properly.

I've had a similar issue which only happens the further the object gets away from the camera. Up close is fine, then if I zoom out, I've had to use this offset modifier & change the location value for my Y axis to -0.02 .. then keyframe it back to 0 when moving back in. The further away the object is, Blender seems to get confused by how close the grease pencil is to another GP object or a 3D object, hence using the offset to move it further away.

Hope this helps


texture mapping in cycles for game model Hai following is a texture painted map I created for my character. how can I use image texture for each part of my uv, like cloth texture for cloth and leather texture for bag, without using multiple uv maps.

Found the answer my self.
Here is the link to the youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO9gOeDcgzg

this method will help to consolidate uv's and create one single texture material and it can be used in unity.

hope it helps someone. I asked it my self but no one answered, may be they didn't understand what I meant. anyway....this is what I wanted.....


Object moves but the location doesn't change I have an object with an animation.
Everything works fine but at one point the object does a "jump" but the position is not changing. (only one frame)
I mean it moves in the 3D space but the location of the object doesn't change.
I really don't know why.

I tried to change the position in this frame so that the object is on its right position again.
But if I do so then all the other movement of the object is changing even if I put the keyframe only in the one frame.

Before:

After:

In both pictures the location (red square) is the same (exactly).

Why did the object move, and how can I prevent it from moving?

EDIT:
Here is the Blend-file

There's a ClampTo constraint on the object jumping there around and this constraint has its Influence option keyframed to become 0 at that frame:

Thus at that frame the constraint stops influence the object and it changes its position. You can edit keyframes' values or delete them to avoid jumping.

Also note that location of the object by X axis which is also keyframed has quite rough animation curve:

You might need to change the curve to make that moment correlate with the rest of the animation.


Motion Capture Animaton Retargeting I'm new to rigging in Blender. I only know the basics like creating bones, parenting to meshes, etc. For my school project, I have to make some animations. Fortunately, I obtained some motion capture data from our supervisors. I searched the internet and found a plugin called "Rokoko Studio Live". I watched a few tutorials and tried to apply what I learned. I created a new armature for my 3D model and I set the corresponding bones to the MoCap bones. But pressing the "Retarget Animation" button did not give the result that I wanted. I don't know how to describe it but my model was doing the animation in a weird way. Like it was hanging on-air while doing the motion. Do you know how can I fix it?
The Motion-Capture Data:

The Result:

I have contacted the Rokoko support and they told me to toggle off the "Auto Scale" button, and it worked.


what is instancing in blender When we create a new object in Blender, we say we instantiate an object, this is true when we hit Shift+D as well. Alt+D means a linked duplicate, which means we create a new object with one of the previously available data blocks. But, I'm not particularly sure what  this word 'instancing' in this website really means. It says it helps save a lot of memory, but yet, it is  different from creating linked instances or even creating dupliverts as they have points of their own. So, what is this instancing as mentioned in this site.

There is a bunch of definitions for Instance. The article you mention use the definition: Make it duplicate when in rendering pipeline
Instead of Alt+D, instancing will not likely directly been manipulated by user. E.g. you won't Alt+D for 1000 trees in a mountain, you will rather use particle system to plant instances for you, with some weight control or random method.
But if you want to place three identical boxes in specified places, you will want to Alt+D for actually manipulate the position for boxes.
They are similar concept but with different strategy. Depends on how you want to use them.
Other Instances
Instance is a common computer terminology that indicate we make something actually exist in memory and scene or workspace.
In Unity, instantiating an object mean to make a copy from its resources. Which might be totally as same as Alt+D in Blender. In Python or other OOP, all objects you manipulate are an instance from their class. Also, instance might mean to separate some minimum attribute to make it more easily to manipulate without having a full copy.


How to save an image in UV/Image Editor with grease pencil strokes visible? I made a few grease pencil strokes over an image displayed in UV/Image Editor, is there a way to save an image that includes those strokes (except making a screenshot)?

Using "Save as Image" saves only the original picture:

The most obvious workaround is to not use Grease Pencil at all and use texture painting instead. The "mode" button should be switched from "View" to "Paint" and then all the paint strokes are saved with "Save as Image" option.


reorder modifier/constraints stack order in python Is there any way to set a modifier or constraints index in the stack without using bpy.ops?
The idea is to easily reformat the stack order of constraint.
An example could be to re-order constraints alphabetically

Sadly no. I ran in to the same limitation when trying to sort logic bricks.

The constraints, modifiers, and logic bricks are all read only collections.
The only way to reorder them is through the ops operators, moving one at a time, up or down one place. (which stinks for any scripting)

For constraints it is:

bpy.ops.constraint.move_up(constraint="constraintName", owner='OBJECT')
bpy.ops.constraint.move_down(constraint="constraintName", owner='OBJECT')

For modifier it is:

bpy.ops.object.modifier_move_up(modifier="modifierName")
bpy.ops.object.modifier_move_down(modifier="modifierName")

For logic bricks it is:

bpy.ops.logic.sensor_move(sensor="logicBrickName", object="objName", direction='UP')
bpy.ops.logic.actuator_move(actuator="logicBrickName", object="objName", direction='UP')
bpy.ops.logic.controller_move(controller="logicBrickName", object="objName", direction='UP')

bpy.ops.logic.sensor_move(sensor="logicBrickName", object="objName", direction='DOWN')
bpy.ops.logic.actuator_move(actuator="logicBrickName", object="objName", direction='DOWN')
bpy.ops.logic.controller_move(controller="logicBrickName", object="objName", direction='DOWN')

You probably would not want to reorder constraints or modifiers alphabetically. Both constraints and modifiers work from the top down, the order effects the out come.

Here is an example with the exact same modifiers and default settings, just the order is reversed. Stack order makes a huge difference.


Mouse keeps flouncing when I try to edit an object I'm trying to edit and object and the mouse (I'm using a trackpad on a macbook pro) literally flounces: if I try to grab an object I may move the mouse for many blender units, but the object doesn't move... at a certain point if I keep moving the mouse the object moves but too fast. It literally moves at steps, the movement is not continuous. I registered a video to make this clear. In the video I press G to grab the object, and like you can see the movement is not continuous, but it just makes a huge step after that I dragged the mouse for a while.

If I create a new project I don't have this problem anymore, it seems like there's something wrong with my project settings or my objects.

You have "snap to grid" turned on. Click the little magnet button next to the Proportional Editing settings, and that will turn off snapping. You can use the pull-down menu next to the magnet to choose what element to use for snapping.


Colomanagement Workflow - how to achieve requested target RGB Values? i think this is a colomanagement workflow qestion at its best. Imagine the following scenario:

Say there is a nitpicking customer, and he requests the following you from you: Deliver an image showing a sofa with three pillows on it, and the pillow colors shall be

-Pillow 1 RGB = 0.8 0.01 0.01
-Pillow 2 RGB = 0.75 0.8 0.065
-Pillow 3 RGB = 0.05 0.8 0.22

Thank god he did not ask for a canvas print with target CMYK Values! (but this is a topic for the upcoming discussion)

So, how in terms of managing colors, can i achieve this? Typing the given numbers into the color wheel of the shader input may be the worst idea.

I think this example explains what i am thinking about. From what i've learned so far, the problem can be compared with music:

I take my guitar, plane the note "c", this note i will record using a digital microphone. Then i take the recording on my computer, burn it on CD, put the CD into my hiFi system and play it.

What note will i hear?

So, the question again is: How can i achieve target color values at the very end of my color pipeline?

I'm loking forward for a good discussion.

Thank you in advance.

CMYK and RGB are relative colour spaces, and as a result, individual values mean nothing. In RGB's case, it means the intensity of three lights, a white point colour, and a transfer function which are not specified by the values alone[1]. In CMYK's case, it means four (or more) arbitrary ink colours as well as paper stock and illuminant.

Taken in isolation with no additional metadata, RGB values and CMYK values mean nothing, and there is no method to convert them.

In order to specify a distinct colour, values would need to be offered using another colour encoding model such as xyY, along with some additional context, or, optionally, in RGB with a clearly defined colour space. Same would go for offset work, via an associated printing colour space encoded into an ICC format.

It should also be noted that when dealing with shaders, you should not match sRGB values, for example, but rather match how the physical object reflects light relative to the lights used in the renderer's reference space. This is likely the subject of another post however.

  I take my guitar, plane the note "c", this note i will record using a digital microphone. Then i take the recording on my computer, burn it on CD, put the CD into my hiFi system and play it.

It is closer to the idea of a guitar tablature; you don't know the guitar tuning, so playing the particular fret position is essentially meaningless without knowing the guitar tuning.

In much the same way, RGB values purely are intensities. What isn't communicated via an intensity value is:

What the colour of each light is for each red, green, and blue intensity. Is the red a purple colour, the green a yellowy tone, the blue a cyany?
What arbitrary scale the intensity is mapped to. Is it a physical ratio, a non-linear scale of one of the infinite out there, or some perceptual scientific ratio?
What the achromatic value is intended to be. What colour are we using as the adapted achromatic colour for our notions of white?

Hence, according to the ISO, we must answer all three of these questions before we can use the term colour space.

Given an RGB colour space and the values, we can get an absolute device independent notion of what the colour in question is, and convert it to any other domain accurately.

[1] http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=37161


is it possible to replace face of a humanoid model with a plane face object? i have a 3d alien, i made it's body using adobe Fuze, and then i replaced it's head and feet with an alien model, now i want to replace it's face with a cute face that i just made, but the face that i want to use is a plane object and is not shaped like a face from the side views. i tried the techniques that someone in this website taught me to replace the feet and head but i couldn't make it, I'm wonder if it's even possible to do that?

here's a picture of the model and the face, but don't worry about the eye balls of the plane face, if i be able to put it on the alien's head, I'll handle the eye balls myself, they're separated objects.

Thank you for stating your problem clearly.
Yes, there is a way to do the lazy way (but will only get you half way there).
Position your FLAT face directly in front of your ALIEN head.
Select your flat face and press CTRL+3 this will give it a lot of subdivisions.
APPLY this modifier to the FLAT face.

Now, press CTRL+A to APPLY all your transformations both for the alien and the flat face.
Select the FLAT face, go to properties>modifiers>Deform>Shrink wrap.
Select the ALIEN FACE as the object deformer and play with the X, Y, Z orientation parameters (by default should work immediately on Y).

Now you have conformed your increased polygonal flat face onto the surface of the alien's face like you wanted.

Thank you for voting me up as the answer for this question.

BFCT_Schiller


Blender crashes when rendering I've got a really big file to render, and I've played with render layers. But then I wanted to put everything back like it was before, to render everything in one piece, but now I have a problem because when I render the final object, the render doesn't stop. It says Freestyle:  Mesh loading 99% and no matter how long I leave it, it stays at 99% and after 15 minutes blender crashes. How to change that? I'm not sure how the render layers work right now, so I want to render everything at once like I did before.

When a render dies on Freestyle, it's usually a RAM issue. Freestyle takes a LOT of RAM (significantly more than Cycles for the same scene.) Once it runs out of your regular RAM, it will go into pagefile/virtual memory. This will slow your computer down to a crawl, because it's using your hard drive as memory. If it also runs out of pagefile space, it will crash. This is likely your issue.

The work around, if you were to attempt to still use freestyle, is to cut the scene down into more layers. Technically you can increase pagefile to give it more to work with, but even with a solid state drive this will be so slow as to be pointless.


What do the preferences keyframing options actually mean? The reason I'm asking: It seems that I've fumbled too much with these options and weird things happen.I couldn't find any meaningful explanation in the docs.

What do these options influence, especially on keying and editing actions (poselibs)?

Auto Keyframing:
Enable it and create a new scene, add a cube for example, then move the cube, scroll to a different frame on the timeline, and move the cube again. Keyframes will automatically be created for the transformations (inserts a LocRotScale group if you e.g. use G to translate the object).
You can find the same toggle in the timeline header (icon only, red circle).
Show Auto Keying Warning:
If Auto Keyframing is active, a notice will appear in the upper-right corner of the 3D View during transformations, to inform/remind the user, that new keyframes are going to be added (if one confirms the transformation).
Only Insert Available:
Keyframes will be added to existing F-Curves only, and no new groups are implicitly created for you. So manually keyframe e.g. Location once, then change time and move the object around. Keyframes will be created for its translation, but not for rotation or scale, because rotation and scale don't have keyframes / F-Curves yet.
Visual Keying:
From blender wiki:

  This is to be used with objects or bones that have
  certain constraints that can affect the key values. For example,
  setting a key on an object with a Copy Location constraint would
  normally set the key for it’s unconstrained location. Enabling this
  option causes the key to be set for the constrained location.

Only Insert Needed:

  Will add keys only when needed (i.e. only to F-Curves controlling
  properties that are changing).

For completeness: the documentation on Timeline has more detailed information.


How to assign a double click as a keyboard shortcut I've tried searching for this seemingly obvious topic. The following article has been the most accurate and detailed I've found so far for what I'm trying to do (see Benu's reply):

http://blenderartists.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-376596.html

It's from Jul 2015, so not too old. Except it describes a left dropdown list and right dropdown list in the User Preferences, next to individual shortcuts, which I do not have. Nor a "double click" option. I'm just finding my way around Blender, version 2.76b. Best I can do is selecting "Mouse" in the device dropdown list and enter "Right click" (or left) as event. No other fields.

What am I missing?

Thanks!

Under Blender User Preferences > Input > 3D View > Mesh

Add a new keyboard entry with the operator mesh.loop_select change input type to Mouse and select Left > Double Click


Blender 2.8 dosen't recognizing my graphics card I have GeForce GT610. I saw the settings of Nvdia control panel and add Blender for CUDA support but Blender 2.8 is not recognized my graphics card.

Cycles in Blender 2.8x requires a CUDA compute capability of 3.0 or higher. The Nvidia GeForce GT 610 has a CUDA compute capability of 2.1 which is below the minimum requirements for GPU rendering. This is documented in Blender's manual.

CUDA
CUDA requires graphics cards with compute capability 3.0 and higher. To make sure your GPU is supported, see the list of Nvidia graphics cards with the compute capabilities and supported graphics cards. CUDA GPU rendering is supported on Windows, macOS, and Linux.


Blender python math operations on vertex I can print a vertex in Blender, but how do i do basic math operation;
Like add multiply or divide them with other 3d coordinates ?

As here the last line doesnt work :

      for face in current_obj.data.polygons:
           verts_in_face = face.vertices[:]
           print("face index", face.index)
           print("normal", face.normal)
      for vert in verts_in_face:
           local_point = current_obj.data.vertices[vert].co
           total_points = total_points + local_point  # <<< error here

When you initialize total_points outside the loop it should work

import mathutils
..
..
total_points = mathutils.Vector((0,0,0))

for vert in verts_in_face:
    local_point = current_obj.data.vertices[vert].co
    total_points = total_points + local_point

For all available vector operations you can lookup the mathutils docs


How to circumscribe a cilinder around an irregular shape using edges of irregular shape? How can I create a cylinder using these edges shown in the picture?

Is there an easy way or any tutorial?

Cylinder not with only 7 faces, round shape.

I would recommend adding a new cylinder with more sides in this case.

Press Shift+A to add a new object, and select Mesh > Cylinder.

Before you click or do anything else, you should see a small collapsed box in the bottom left corner labelled Add Cylinder. Expand it, and change the number of vertices (first option).

If you're looking for a good beginner tutorial series, I would recommend you follow the Donut Tutorial Series by BlenderGuru.

Edit:

Here's a lengthier method if you want to build off the starting mesh.

If you want to keep the original shape, first duplicate it then work off of the new object.

With the object selected, Tab into edit mode. Press 2 to enter edge select mode, and while holding Shift+Alt, click on one of the horizontal edges on the top, and bottom. This should have selected the top/bottom edge loops.

Now, right-click (or left, if you're using right-click select), and select Subdivide at the top of the menu that pops up. This will add additional vertical cuts in the middle of all the faces.

Now, hold Ctrl+Alt and select one of the original vertical edges. This should select all the vertical edges. Next, go to the Select drop-down menu in the top left corner, and select Checker Deselect. Now only the newly added edges should be selected.

Now, you can press S to scale, then Shift+Z to scale in XY axes only. Scale it up a bit, and there you go, the mesh is closer to a cylinder. If you want a clearer view of the mesh while scaling, press 7 on the Numpad to enter the top orthographic view.

If you wish to add even more sides, you can repeat this process.

If you're looking for a smoothly shaded cylinder, follow the process below.

In edit mode, select the top and bottom edge loops using the same shortcut as before, then right-click and select Mark Seam. Then, Tab back out into object mode, right-click and select Shade Smooth.

The last thing you will need to do is to go to the Object Properties tab (the icon is a green triangle with squares on each corner), and go to Normals > Auto-smooth. Enable auto-smooth.

This is the result using one iteration of subdividing the surface.


How can I write a custom smoke cache? I'm working on a project where I'd really like to get voxel data loaded in cycles.  This comment  from a question I asked a while back indicates that it should be feasible by converting my voxel data to a smoke cache.

Is there a tool or api that can I can use to help create the a smoke cache from my voxel data? Or technical specification that describe the smoke cache file format such that I can write it from scratch?

Alternatively, I'm open to any other hacks or workarounds that can get my voxels into a Cycles texture!

Since 2.77 Blender can use the OpenVDB format for smoke caching, and OpenVDB has a nice API and documentation. (There is also a Python API)

It is also an industry standard, which will be better supported in Blender in the future.


Change color space of image texture node using python? I have trouble to get a script working within Blender 2.8. What is the correct way to change Color Space mode of an image texture node?

node_opacity = nodes.new(type="ShaderNodeTexImage")
node_opacity.colorspace_settings.name = "Linear"

The colorspace is shown from the image data, it is not a node property.

node_opacity.image.colorspace_settings.name = 'Linear'


How to properly combine Z passes using multiple .EXR files? I'm having trouble combining openEXRs (rendered with subframes on multiple nodes) containing Z passes in the compositor.

Whenever I run 1 subframe into the normalize node I get the correct output.
But when I try to combine all subframes through mixing them, I can't seem to get them overlaying each other properly.

What am I doing wrong?

Blendfile:

The general problem with EXR images, is that they don't really behave as a normal image (like PNG). A PNG has, for each color, a min value 00 and a max value FF. An EXR is just a mathematical value from 0 up to infinity for each pixel.

So rather than using multiply (as you are doing, and which works for PNG images), you should use minimum (or maximum,depending on the base layer you are using). And repeat the process for each subframe/tile.

The end result will be a complete image with values ranging from 0 till...

You can then use normalise to change these values to something that represents an image (from 00 till FF).

Tip: make sure you don't use normalise on your subframe EXR or all of them will go from white (clearest point) to black (furthest point) for each subframe rather than 1 time for the complete image.


How do I disable physics for multiple objects at once? I'm using multiple rigid body spheres to fill a mesh after I converted them from particles to mesh. Now after a few frames of them jumping around and reaching equilibrium(almost), I want to freeze them relative to the mesh since the mesh will need to move afterwards. I am not able to use the "copy from active" when the active object doesn't have any physics enabled. I can only copy physics of an object and paste it to the one without any physics but not the other way around. Is there any way I can do this?

Just found out the (obvious)solution. Select all the objects with physics - go to object[top left]> Rigid body> Remove.


Brighter SSS in Blender Internal I'm working on BI materials for my model of a highlighter. I already have a Cycles version done. The SSS in Cycles looks good. The colour of the marker is intense, almost true fluorescent. I want to achieve the same result in BI. But the result is very dimmed. Is it possible to make it juicy as in Cycles? I noticed that when I turn on Environmental Lighting in BI then it looks very nice and intense too, but this is not the point. I need a material that will look good, not the lighting. See images as example of my settings.

Also, is it possible to further strengthen the BI mesh lights? They are already at 2, which is maximum, but the light is still dim.

Ok, after some trial and error and reading the Blender Wiki on SSS, I found a solution. It all depends on the Scattering Weight Front and Back parameters. I set them both up to 1.7 and the effect is much more juicy and brighter. As the Blender Wiki explains, these parameters are responsible for how much light is absorbed or added on the front and back side of the object.


How to mirror head geometry? For example, I have a human head model, which is cut in half, because i want to mirror it. But the problem here is that some faces are over the Y axis and some do not touch the axis. When I then try to mirror this shows up, where let's say some points don't touch and other ones, where faces are over the axis just collide. Is there a possibility to align the "edge" faces to a certain axis, so the mirroring becomes perfect?

In the mirror modifier check merge and clipping : this will automatically aline and merge the vertices

change the merge limit if there is some gaps

you can also select these vertices and hit S+x then 0 so they aline on the Y axis


Add Image to Blender's VSE fails to display alpha channel transparency In Blender's VSE (Video Sequence Editor), on trying to overlay a background video or image sequence with multiple foreground images (each containing transparency, or alpha channel, information), transparency is intermittently lost. Some images are shown with a black background, others retain their transparency.

Possible reasons?

NOTE: This question has been posted so that I can provide an answer derived from my own tests. As the question relates specifically to VSE, it has nothing to do with answers addressing 'Import Image as Plane', those referencing use of the RGBA output setting (which no longer appears to exist), nor those relating to alpha over / alpha under settings - which under these conditions have no effect.

Blender won't handle an alpha channel in a codec. Alpha in a codec is largely a nonstandard practice.


How to save texture bake image file to local drive in python How do i access and save a image file ?

Under Image there is a Save As - option

i need to know how to access this and save the image to some location.

bpy.ops.image.save_as(save_as_render=False, filepath="\\\\C:\\JCJ\\Desktop\\3d_Project\\fbx\\1\\Textures\\ElementName.png", relative_path=True, show_multiview=False, use_multiview=False)

This line of code is what i have been trying to get to work. Doesn't work though. I hope someone has an answer or a tip

An Image ID datablock has a save_render method.

bpy.data.images["Image Id Name"].save_render("C:/path/to/file.png")


How can I make one surface follow the form of another? I'm trying to make a paceman model based on the one from the Super Smash games. I'm stuck on having his eyes curve on the surface the sphere. For some reason the cure modifier won't let me select anything for the eye to curve to. I'd try using the project knife but it says I've got nothing selected. I do though. I selected the eye then the sphere in object mode then went to edit mode to use the tool but it doesn't work. Can some one help me solve one or both of these problems? Or maybe a different solution to get my end goal. Thank you.

I would recommend using a UV Texture, there is a tutorial here and the blender manual here.  If you want to bend an object around another, you will need to use the shrinkwrap modifier, although you will need a good about of vertices.  You can use a subdivision surface modifier set to simple to add more vertexes and then apply the shrinkwrap modifier to the object that you want to bend and set the Target to what you want it to bend around.

If you want them to only slightly bend and not be directly on the surface, you can use the cast modifier.  The process is the same, just with the other modifier.


Rotating a camera around a still ball (mini golf aiming) I'm making a mini golf game and I'm completely finished apart from this one detail. Once the ball is shot I want to be able to rotate the camera around the ball to see the hole, but right now the camera is stuck on a single axis right behind the ball. I used this method to parent the camera to the ball to eliminate camera roll.

I'm not looking for a 360 animation, just to be able to reposition the camera while maintaining centering on the ball

Here's my blend file if you want to take a look!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxB2pKMjGzzqT3dldXVhZkZkTkU/view?usp=sharing

I would use a second camera and just switch cameras . The second camera would have a "Track To" constraint so it will be looking where you want it to and you can position it or animate it as needed. You can use an empty as the target and have more flexibility if needed.


Editing a rigged mesh (MakeHuman > Blender > Unity) I'm trying to use this program called MakeHuman which creates a rigged mesh for you, but I am trying to edit the mesh in Blender before using it in Unity. There are so many layers and complexity to the Blender scene that I don't know what to do, even given that I have done basic rigging manually before.

For simplicity in example, I would like to replace the head of the mesh with a cube. I believe what I must do is:

Unparent the mesh from the rig (how do I do this properly?)
Edit the mesh
Re-parent the mesh to the rig
Assign automatic weight painting

I've tried this before and what I get is my character floating in space in Unity, I believe because there is something wrong with the weight painting?

Please help!

Thanks

http://www.pasteall.org/blend/37244

Recently I've tried clearing all the Vertex Groups and modifier after Clear Parent, editing my mesh, then reparenting with automatic weight. When I go to bring this into Unity with animations put onto it, it just stands there.

I think your steps should look more like the following:

Edit the mesh

1.1 - delete the vertices for the head

1.2 - shift+a (to add) and select cube (while still in edit mode)

1.3 - The cube should be selected. Place the cube (g button) to desired location.

1.4 - make sure the vertices of the cube are still selected, and go into the "data" panel (icon is a polygon triangle thingy), find the vertex group named "DEF-head", and assign the cube vertices to that group (set slider to 1.0 and click "Assign" button).


2 images as planes, one of them shows incorrect control for alpha I imported image as planes after enabling the add-on.
In First image , I have imported Image A as the BG and the alpha is numeric value and can be used to reduce opacity.
In second image, I have imported Image B as the BG but here I am not getting an alpha value to manipulate.
Based on @susu comments here is the nodes>Base Color

I further went ahead and added a proper plane and using material I added the image as material. Doing the same you can see I get controlable aplha value. What I don't understand is why is the image coming out looking grey??

I exaggerated the problem due to lack to knowledge to application. I just needed to add BG's which can be reduced in transparency.
I was given simple solution of add Image as refrence. It is easy transparency with no grey etc issue.
Importing image as plane creates material complications which for SB work are unnecessary.
Thanks for taking the time out to answer.


How to move a bunch of bones exactly to the cursor with a single click operation I'm trying to find a solution to a problem. I want to move a bunch of bones to the cursor and I did "selection to cursor",but as you can see on the attached video,the bones were placed on the cursor higgledy-piggledy. I would like that they are placed exactly in the way that you see towards the end of the video,but without moving them with the g key,because in this way they aren't placed exactly where the cursor is located....

video

To do this set all the child bones (finger bones) to have the connected option ON
After that select their parent bone (wrist) and then snap selected to cursor as you did, this should move the parent bone with all its child bones together.


Freestyle Lines on Wrong Frames Basically the character is posed and rendered with various props. At random, suddenly, the lines are "sticking" among multiple frames despite the fact that the object has been moved.

What could be the cause of this, and how can I fix it?

This only started happening recently - I had done many renders with this file / model and suddenly this has started.

The magnifying glass frame is two or three frames down from the hammer one.

I can think of two things that you might have done:

You have Motion Blur switched on as suggested by Mechanic
You have used a transparent material to hide it.

I can't say anything else if you don't provide the blender file through https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/. With the actual file I would be able to troubleshoot your problem effectively cause I can't see your settings and stuff through the two images.


Blackbody node is not in the node list? I'm looking for a node called Blackbody. I already looked at this, and I am in cycles mode. The manual says it should be under converters but it isn't there.

I have version 2.66a, that ships with my distro. Is this a new feature only in newer versions, or do I have to enable this somehow? I didn't see it in addons either.

Probably not in a version that old. It's time to update!


Why do only some tools have redo capability? Many tools can have their settings modified after activating them (via the toolbar or F6 popup), however some tools have this panel greyed out.

eg:

Ctrl+Click Extrude.
Editmesh rip tool.
Bend transform.
Knife.

Is this a bug in the tool, whats the reason for this limitation?

First of all there are cases where redo doesn't make any sense (render, save, open), in those cases simply running the operator again is fine.

Operators have their own internal data which is used to execute an action, in most cases this is sufficient to store all information needed to redo an action (make use of the F6 popup, or be called from a Python script).

But consider the knife tool for example, can have the view manipulated as its accessed, so the tool would need to store the viewport orientation of every line added.

While this is possible of course (in principle), the benefit of adding this is limited since these tools are intended to be accessed interactively.

Another example is the rip tool, which will give different results based on where you're cursor is in relation to the selected vertices. Its also possible to simple store the mouse location and re-use that, but its unlikely to be very useful.

There are cases such as bend transform which could be made to redo, but depend on the view orientation, 3d cursor to define a line to the mouse and the distance the mouse moves once the tool is activated. Manipulating these values only-via buttons is possible but would end up being an nonintuitive matrix of buttons. Such settings would be better manipulated via an adjustable on-screen widget however blender currently doesn't have such facilities.


Cycles texture mapping, generated coordinates with world orientation? Basically I want to map a texture in cycles with the generated coordinates, but have it ignore the orientation of the object.

The effect I want to achieve is a material that has a gradient, spread top to bottom of the individual objects dimensions, but always orientated top to bottom of the world no-matter how the object is rotated.

Any way to achieve this? thanks

Yes, this is possible.
There are several ways to achieve this, here are a couple:
Position:
You can use the Position output of the Geometry node and separate out the blue (vertical) channel:

Note that since it's based on the world center some objects end up with values outside the 0-1 range:

Texture Coordinate:
You can also use the Object or the Generated output of the Texture coordinate node and convert it to world space with the Vector Transform node:

Now each object will have a gradient from 1 at the top to 0 at the bottom regardless of rotation:


How to get fragments of an exploded object to react more accurately to collisions with a plane? Since a picture (or animated GIF in this case) is worth a thousand words, I will begin by providing an example of the problem I am trying to solve:

As you can see, the fragments of the monkey never change orientation as they fall and "bounce" off of the plane that they are colliding with.

I created this animation by adding a monkey to the scene and using the Object->Quick Effects->Quick Explode tool. The fragments never change their orientation, which is grossly unrealistic.

How do I fix this?

You can make the explosion shards/particles rotate dynamically by enabling Rotation and Dynamic in the particle settings:

Result:

However, if you want realism I recommend you try the Cell fracture addon with rigid body physics. See this question for more info.


Find an object's mesh in bpy.data.meshes Simple question: How can I find an objects mesh in bpy.data.meshes?

e.g.

ob = context.scene.active_object
bpy.data.meshes[ob.data]???

Is it possible without looping over the complete bpy.data.meshes and comparing?

if you have a reference to object, then you have a reference to its Mesh too.

obj = context.scene.active_object

# all three of the following lines will refer to the same Mesh.
mesh = obj.data
mesh = bpy.data.meshes[obj.data.name]
mesh = bpy.data.meshes[mesh.name]


How do I export a single pose to FBX? I have a model (Rinky from Big Buck Bunny) that I want to export to FBX for use in Unity. I only need a static model, no walk cycles or anything. I have posed the model and saved the pose in the pose library (there is only one pose in the library). But when I export to FBX, I get the rest pose.

How can I get my custom pose rather than the rest pose when exporting to FBX?

Suggested tags: fbx, pose

One rough way could be to apply the pose as rest pose (CTRLA) and then export. Then undo if you wish to revert to the original rest pose.


Exposure in the viewport is drasticly different than the render Okay, I am used to slight differences between my view port and the test/final renders, but this is really odd. I have never had the exposure be this far off!

What am I doing wrong here?

I am on 2.79a. using filmic. And, I think, just my usual settings. I have tried multiple hdrs and they all are wicked bright in this file.

When I put the bullets into a new file and render with the same settings, the two match.

What did I bump with my elbow by accident?

Found it! Thank you, @cegaton!

I had two area lights from testing the system previous to putting on the hdri that were turned off from preview (eye icon) but on in the render (camera icon) in the outliner.

Life is in the details!


How to Join two objects properly I've made an animal model, which consists of two objects: eyes and a whole body. I decided to make them into one object. When I tried to do that with Ctrl  + J one eye joined to the body and the other disappeared. What's the problem?

In essence when you join objects all Blender does is merge their meshes. If you have 4 objects selected, the last object you clicked will be the dominant Object (In Blender we call it 'Active') . This can have interesting (but probably undesired) effects if the dominant Object has a different modifier stack than the objects being added.

When you join two objects that have different Modifier stacks, the dominant object's modifier stack will be used, and the other modifier  stacks are discarded. This is why you will lose the mirror modifier if the dominant object doesn't have a mirror. To remedy this you would need to apply the modifier on the 'joinees' first, or cut the dominant mesh in two and add a mirror modifier  there.

To emphasize you could test this on a small scene, imagine I have 4 objects with all different modifier stacks

object_1 with modifiers (mirror, subsurf(level=2))
object_2 with modifiers (mirror, subsurf(level=4))
object_3 with modifiers (array modifier, subsurf(level=1))
object_4 with no modifiers

If I select in sequence, object(1,2,3,4) , then all associated meshes are added to object 4's mesh, and because object 4 has no modifiers all modifiers are dropped.


Blender runs out of memory while rendering fabric hair on GPU Yes, I do know there are 2 other similar questions to this one that have been answered here, but I believe this might be a different problem since I've not seen it or heard about it behaving this way anywhere else.

So I followed Andrew Price's tutorial on how to make towels to test towel physics and particles for other scenes. After finishing the tutorial I did a test render, only to have the surprise of my render displaying an "Out of memory" message and not much time later crashing.

This is pretty much what happens:

After pressing the render button, the objects are being synchronized, the BVH is built, etc.
Then after roughly 4 minutes of calculating (no sample has been rendered at all), the render suddenly cancels leaving the simple message of "Out of memory" on the top tab.
And then after that, PC lag starts to intensify, just a little while later crashing Blender.

I had a similar issue before on an older computer (only difference is that blender crashed in seconds, the problem was I was using a 32-bit OS which did not work, quite at all, for cycles hair.)

Since the problem might I also be my computer, here are some of the details:

OS: Windows 7 64-bit
RAM: 4GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 840M 2048MB DDR3
CPU: Intel Core i5-4210U 1.70 GHz 2.40 GHz

I've tried rendering this on my CPU with 128 samples, it taking 10 minutes to calculate and around 20 to render, so if I did a test render, then done some little tweaking for an actual render, then rendered it again it would take +1 hour to render just a simple towel. An architectural bathroom scene (which is what I was currently working on) would take an immense amount of time rendering with such limitations.

So what I'm asking is: What is it that causes this running out of memory? And are there any ways I can still render this hair on GPU, mantaining a reasonable rendering time?

I know I made this description waaay too long, but I want a clear enough description for a clear enough answer.

Here's the .blend file if it helps.

@Wiirexu That simply means that the 2GB of VRAM you have on your GPU is not enough for the scene. If you want to render the scene using your computer's available RAM, you have to render with CPU. If you render with CPU and there is still not enough memory, your only options are to get more RAM, or use a render farm.

You do not have enough VRAM available on your GPU for rendering the scene you are trying to render. Your only other options are:

You could try reducing the amount of geometry in your scene using the decimate modifier.

You could switch to CPU rendering. This will render your scene using your available RAM, instead of VRAM.
(If you render with CPU and there still isn't enough memory, you will need to add more RAM to your system.)

You could use a renderfarm service, such as SheepIt! (Free)

You could upgrade your current GPU or add another to your system.

You could ask someone to render it for you (I'd probably be willing, I've got 6GB of VRAM)


In VSE, voice and video are not synchronized in rendered video In my 3.5 minute video, the rendered video is slightly behind the audio at the beginning. Then near the middle it is synchronized, and then gradually the video gets ahead of the audio.
I have tried rendering in various formats, with AV synch on an off, but nothing helps. I am new to video editing, so please include lots of detail in your reply. Thanks

You should provide more details: general info (version of Blender, operating system) but also specific info (extension/codec of video file, source, frame rate, ...). You can easily get this information from a program like Mediainfo; see https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo)
Your problem is probably that your 3.5 minute video has variable frame rate (eg shot from a smart phone). In order to compress a video, sequences with less action (eg still images) use a smaller framerate (less frames per second). The audio however uses a constant framerate. That's the reason that the audio is drifting away from the video. A more profound explanation is found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keA2Gyye-D0.
You can check the framerate with the forementioned program Mediainfo. This should show something as:

Your solution of AV synch does not help because this option only helps in previewing the movie within Blender, making sure that the audio is in sync with the video by dropping some frames while previewing, if Blender can't catch up with the frame rate. Also, changing the output formats doesn't help because the problem is with the input video file; which is probably variable framerate (check this with mediaInfo!).
The solution thus is changing the framerate from variable to constant. You can do it with a program like Handbrake. See, the forementioned video for a in-depth explanation of the procedure.


Cycles Gradient between two materials How do i create gradient between two materials in one mesh? (second screenchot was edited in PS)

Here is one option to use the Vertex Paint Blur tool on the border between the white color vertex and the black color vertex. I paint the center area white in vertex paint mode, and then invert and set paint to black (in the header, go to Paint> Set Vertex Color and this will act like a fill). I used Face Select masking to do this without overriding the center white area.

I then switch tools to the Blur tool and blur the area around the white spot so that it cause a gray area. To deepen it, I subdivide once to force the vertex paint to blend across the changes. I then use this vertex color in the Attribute node (named Col by default) as a factor to mix between a diffuse black shader and a blue emission shader.


Straight line draw animation how doing it? I am trying to do something simple yet i haven't found a way to do it in blender that is animating the drawing of borders of a shape (rectangles, triangles...) you can see an example on youtube of the result i am trying to achieve :
How to Animate Shape Borders in Adobe After Effects CC (2017)

If anyone has a good technique to do it or a blender file it would be cool.

Thanks.

You can add a Bezier Curve and make it any shape you want to. SHFT +A > Curve > Bezier.

"Extrude" it to add some width.

Then Animate the start and/or end of the Bevel Factor. Hover your mouse over the Start or End input box of the Curve press I move the Playhead in the Timeline, change the value and hover your mouse over the Start or End input box press I again.


Subdividing mesh to get equal vertex density in all direction This is the twice subdivided mesh of a cylinder:

As you can see, the vertices are very close together in horizontal direction but the vertical distance between them is comparatively very large. Is it possible to subdivide only the vertical edges of this object, so that I would get a mesh with edges equidistant in all direction?

Use the 'ReMesh' modifier on 'Sharp' mode and adjust the Octree depth to match the desired resolution.


Keyframing constraints overwrite I have a objectA, and when I add a copy location constraint to it to another objectB with influence 0 at frame 10 and then add keyframe. Then on frame 11 I change the influence to 1 and add a keyframe, but when I go back to any frame from 1-10 I find that the influence is 1 as if it overwrote the inserted first keyframe which was inserted when the influence was 0. Any advice please?

To keyframe the influence value of the copy location constraint:

set the influence value to 0
go to the frame before the value should change
place the mouse cursor on top of the influence slider
press I to insert a keyframe
jump to the next frame in the timeline with →
set the infuence value to 1 and press I again


Apply collision collection to a group? How do I link a group of 100 objects to same collision collection? I don't want to do it manually and ctrl+l link modifiers / collections doesn't work

Ok I found a solution - select all objects, make the object with desired settings active and do f3 and type copy rigid body settings.


How to model a teardrop shape I'm trying to make a sort of an elongated tear drop.

First I tried to draw it manually with vertices in 2D and then extrude to give it height.
Then I tried to utilize the Screw modifier but none of the properties I tried made it look correct.
I also tried was to make a straight bezier curve, add a solidify modifier, and then fatten the points near the end of the curve to try and create a tear drop shape.

What is an easier and quicker workflow that gives a more accurate shape?
Thanks.

You can use Proportional Editing.

Start with a default UV sphere
Move the top vertex upwards
Check ✓ Proportional editing, Falloff > Sharp and adjust to your liking


Copy Part of Frame in 2D Animation Mode Maybe this is an obvious feature, but I am an absolute noob at Blender 2.82a's 2D animation feature and would like to know if we can copy a part of one frame and paste it to the next. For example, I want to animate a vase falling down and I want to do it the traditional frame by frame way. So can I copy the strokes from frame N and paste it to frame N+2?
I've googled it but couldn't find an option like this.

You can copy part/s of a Grease Pencil object (Strokes and Points) as follows:
Copy/Paste

Go to the source Frame in the timeline
Ensure Blender is in Object Mode
Select your Grease Pencil Object
Change Blender to Edit Mode
Select the desired strokes/points/parts of the Object
Copy with: Ctrl-C  -or-  right-click Copy  -or-  [Grease Pencil] > Copy
Change to the destination Frame in the timeline (new or existing)
Paste with: Ctrl-V  -or-  right-click Paste  -or-  [Grease Pencil] > Paste
optionally Return to Object Mode (or continue editing)

You can also use similar techniques to copy parts of one Grease Pencil Object into another.
Duplicate
For Steps 5,6,7,8 - you can also use Duplicate (Shift-D) as follows:

Select the desired strokes/points/parts of the Object
Change to the destination Frame in the timeline (new or existing)
Duplicate with: Shift-D  -or-  right-click Duplicate -or-  [Grease Pencil] > Duplicate
Hit [Enter] or left-click in the workspace to position the new duplicate

The Duplicate method has the effect of merging the Strokes and Points into whatever is currently visible in the destination frame.


How do I change the MTL File to an actual image? When exporting my Model and importing it into another engine, It require an Image file as the texture instead of a MTL file, so I was just wondering how I would accomplish changing the mtl to and image file

A MTL file is just a material definition. It doesn't contain image data. See here for further (all) details about the MTL file format: http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/mtl/

If you're using OBJ files, you need three things:

the model data as OBJ, contains vertices, faces, smoothing groups and texture coordinates, etc.
the texture(s) (any image format, e.g. PNG)
the material library file (which is referenced in your OBJ file)

See also:

the blender manual about the OBJ file format
this question for OBJ exporting options in Blender


How can I achieve this specific lighting/shading in Cycles? I'm kind of a noob when it comes to lighting, and I'd like to make renders that use one of these types of lighting/shading with a Node Setup. Nintendo tends to use this type of lighting/shading in various 3DS games.

It's like those objects and characters are shadeless (shadeless like the option in Blender Internal), but they clearly aren't?

Here's download links to both the Hand and the characters' Body.

If you are referring to the shade  effect on the ball, this can be achieve by baking a new texture based on cycles rendering.

prepare your scene with all the expected lighting from the game. This is important because if your blender lighting is too different from the game, the shadows etc will look off. Obviously to match the NDS look, try to keep the lighting very simple light a single sun.
select the target object and unwrap the normals or select a specific normal projection
create a new target texture image in nodes and select it
Use the bake feature to render the object onto the target texture

Note: you can also bake only the shadow map (or emission, or glossy...) instead of the combined which you can tweak and merge as desired with your original texture in external editing software

Same concept for Blender internal.


Why does this material change colors throughout the animation? When I turn up the roughness to 1, it completely goes away, but only because the surface is no longer reflective and is completely matte. I just want the material to look as it should (flexible aluminum tubing), but it keeps changing colors. I have point lights in the tunnel, and they're all the same temperature. Any thoughts? The still of the tunnel is how I'd like it to look.

The reason why the tunnel gets brighter and darker is because of the point lights that you've scattered across the tunnel. Areas closer to the lights (orange dots shown below) are brighter.

You can fix that by moving the lights with the camera instead of fixing the lights into a single spot. Delete all but two of the lights and parent them to the camera (yellow dot). It doesn't really move the lights perfectly along the middle of the tunnel, but you could always animate them manually to fix that.


How to make constraint permanent once disabled? I have got a beautiful bone constraint:

I would like to be able to enable and disable this constraint without the bone reverting to the original position.

By default, the bone appears to return to it's original starting position when influence is set to 0 or visibility is set to off.

So, for example:

Constraint is "on" or "enabled" - bone follows Hand.L as expected
Constraint is "off" - bone stays where it is at this exact moment and does not move.

I would like to be able to 'apply' the constraint without actually deleting the constraint, as I am intending to turn it on and off frequently during animation.

Disable and Keep Transform

Hit the X to the right of influence slider. It "applies" the constraint and sets influence to 0

Script Equivalent, copy the transform, ie the world matrix, set the constraint influence to zero (disable) and reset the matrix world.

import bpy

ob = bpy.context.object
constraint = ob.constraints.get("Copy Location")
if constraint:
    mw = ob.matrix_world.copy()
    constraint.influence = 0
    ob.matrix_world = mw


Why does my action not play after another action? Below is my Logic editor of this problem. I have my armature always playing a walk action, then when it collides with a property called "Player," it is supposed to play a die animation. (It is an enemy :) I have set priorities, but right now when "Player" collides with it, my armature just plain stops. Any ideas? Thanks!

P.S. Tell me if I need to add more screenshots. :D

If there is any other way to accomplish the animations correctly, I would love that as well.

First method (but dont know if that'll work):

Second method (more complicated but works defenitely):

Add a game-property to your enemy. ( + Add Game Property )
Set it to boolean and checked (= true). (See red boxes in the image)
Connect the collision-sensor to a property-actuator.
This actuator has to set the property to "false".
Add a property-sensor for each action-actuator. While the property is true (enemy alive) the walk-animation will be played, when the property is false (enemy dead) the die-animation will be played.


I am having lots of trouble trying to get light to shine through a window I cannot figure out why the light won't shine through the window in my .blend file (linked here).

I've made the glass transparent using the BDSF Transparent Shader. On top of this, all materials are allowing transparent shadows.

The only thing that works is if I uncheck "Cast Shadows" on the light material. Can anyone help me figure this out? Thank you in advance.

For some reason my computer isn't letting me access the file, I don't think it's an issue from your end though. I know I can't offer much assistance, but your question brought to mind a glass hack that I once saw in a video from Blender Guru. The link is here and the node set up is at 5:02 in the video. If this is useless information to you I'm very sorry.


Missing 3D printing category tab in tool shelf after activating the addon I've activated the Mesh-3D printing Toolbox in Blender. But the tab doesn't show up in the tool shelf. Please help, a bit urgent.

Thank you

What I have

What it should be:

The panel for the 3D printing tools is only visible when the active object is a mesh object. The active object is the one highlighted in a slightly lighter colour (depending on the theme used).

There are times when an active object can be deleted or deselected without a new object being set as active, usually this happens using the outliner or a script.

Change your selection or ⇧ Shift select one of your selected mesh objects to make it the active one so that the panel shows up.


How can I use 'create new collection' command? I create a collection with 'create new collection' command but the new collection did not appear in scene collection. And I found it in 'orphan data'. I tried to move the new collection(test) to scene collection but failed. I don't understand the way it works like that. How can I use the new 'test' collection?

This is more or less a remnant of old functionality from 2.79 and before that doesn't make sense in Blender 2.8. The developers are aware of the issue, multiple bug reports have been filed regarding the odd behavior.

If you want to create a new collection in the current scene use the M shortcut and select New collection. This will also move all selected objects to that new collection. If you just want to create an empty new collection with the shortcut, make sure that no object is selected.


Black column of pixels when rendering in HDRI pranorama Was rendering some HDRIs to use in other scenes as lighting when I noticed the very last column of pixels on the image to the left was not rendering and came out as black. Since this is a 32-bit image it's a bit of a pain to fix in PS, does anyone know a fix? Also, it should be mentioned I am using Blender 2.8.

Literally seconds after I posted this I figured it out, lol. Turns out this is what happens when the Lens Distortion is used for some reason.


Why is my render not showing quick fire/smoke I'm trying to render my fire/smoke but it seems that it renders a gray smoke domain instead of my fire/smoke.
Any idea?
I used the quick smoke effect.

Update: here is my file:

Your Smoke domain material node setup is empty. Nodes are required for a smoke domain using cycles.
See an example here (smoke only):

A more complex setup for fire+smoke:


Can a link in a node setup be temporarily disabled? To debug a messy material node setup in Cycles, I want to remove one link between certain nodes, then restore it when I'm done putzing around.  Being absent-minded, I don't trust myself to remember.

Is there some easy way to turn off a link temporarily, making it as if it weren't there,  without actually deleting it?

Whatever trick there is to do this, it should be visually obvious, so I can see that the link is disabled.

I'm using Cycles for materials right now, but I assume what I'm trying to do could apply to anything using a nodes editor.


Armature doesn't move part of the Mesh I have modeled the Darth Vader, I've made the rig that matches exactly the mesh, but the problem is that part of the mesh (his shoulders and front panels ) are not rotating or moving at all.

I joined all together, but I don't know if i should do the join or another way.

It is difficult to say for sure without the file, but it looks like the join did not work correctly for some reason. Select the object and go into edit mode. Do the pieces that are not moving go into edit mode as well (you can see the vertices) or do they remain in object mode? If they remain in object mode, they are not connected to the mesh. Try re-joining them.

The other most likely possibility is that those pieces are weighted with a weight of 0 with regards to the armature. This could have happened if the pieces were joined after you parented the armature. If it was an automatic parent, try parenting again. If it was done manually, set the weights for the new vertices.

I hope one of these solves your problem.


Can I import characters? I’m just getting started with Blender, and I’d like to know something in advance: can I import a character from Reallusion Character Creator?

To import models from another program, you basically must find a “common language” format that has all the data you need, such as armatures and texture maps, and is writable/readable by both programs. Blender has many default-enabled import addons, and a few more which are not enabled by default but come with blender, and still more third-party addons around the web. You can usually see what can be imported in the File -> Import menu.
So, what formats can Reallusion Character Creator export to? I recommend Collada .DAE if that’s available as it is Blender’s preferred import/export format.


How would I make an indented swirl around this sphere How would I go about making an even swirl from the bottom to the top that is indented?
I figure you would just insert it, but I don't know how to cut the swirl shape into the object.
I tried to use the knife tool but it doesn't make a uniform curve around the object.

A way to do it is to start with a UV sphere which has a lot of rings. For instance, 360 rings or 720 depending on the amount of turns you want to give to the swirl. Keep segments as default (32 or so).

Having these many rings allows to proportionally rotate around Z the summit of the egg for n times 360 degrees.
Here set proportional editing on, set the fallog to linear, and use RZ360. Make sure the proportional editing sphere reaches the bottom of the egg. Repeat it for each turn you want to give.

Now select an edge loop joining the top and the bottom. Set proportional editing to smooth, and S to scale shiftZ to scale only on X Y and lower the proportional editing sphere so that it influences few vertices around the selected edge loop.

Can also animate the twist... using a simple deform modifier:

In that case, same principle but rotate nothing first just make the indent.
Then add the simple deform modifier and animate the angle:


How to scale objects vertically depending on proximity to an empty? Alright, what I have is an array of cubes that I want to animate scaling vertically depending on proximity to an empty I'll move around the scene. Like this:

As I move the empty sphere around, the cubes will scale down to a flat almost plane or up to an elongated cube. What is the best way to do this? Shape keys and some sort of driver setup? I don't know how to approach this.
With first answer solution:

Can do it using a "shrinkwrap" modifier driven by a "vertex weight proximity" modifier.

Each cube is a separate object like this with a vertex group (only the top vertices are attached to this group with a 0 value):

Each cube as the following modifiers:

"vertex weight proximity" that influences the vertex group values, using the empty proximity in "object" proximity (so that all vertices of the group will have the same weight)

"shrinkwrap" to a plane placed above in "project" mode along Z. Tune the "offset" value to vary the height influence

If you need to set the modifiers to several selected objects from the active one, use CtrlL then "modifiers".