How to change material to another material at specified keyframe Is there any way I could have the material be a certain texture and then at keyframe 20 it changes to a different texture?

You could use a Mix RGB node, plug one texture into the first input and the other into the second input. Then set keyframes for the Mix factor, change it from 0 (first texture) to 1 (second texture). For an instant change insert a keyframe for 0 at frame 19 and another for 1 at frame 20. If you set the 0 at an earlier frame you can make a smooth transition between those textures.
EDIT: Since Alexis mentioned the Mix Shader node in his comment, here something just for completion: If you really meant materials like in the title instead of textures, you can of course create two completely different node setups in one material. And just before the Material Output node you insert a Mix Shader node, connect those two different setups each in one socket and keyframe the Fac value in the Mix Shader node.


Materials Turned Black When I Opened Blender So I used nodes to put materials to my model, everything was fine and saved. I open it today and all the materials are black. Anyone know why?

You saved your .blend file in a newer version of Blender and tried to open it in an older version.

In this case the Principled BSDF was introduced as of 2.79, while version 2.78 was used on your screenshot to open the file and load that material.

Since Blender 2.78 doesn't know the Principled BSDF, it is behaving as if no shader were present (indicated by the red coloring of the node). Hence no color of the surface, which equals black (same as muting or removing a shader plugged into the Material Output).

To continue working with Principled BSDF, open the file using Blender 2.79 or newer.


Is there a faster way to fill in a set of missing faces? As-salāmu‘alaikum
Is there a faster way to create faces to fill the row than I have to do it one by one?
Example of selecting 4 vertices and create a face with Vertex > New Edge/Face from Vertices (F) in Edit mode:

If you select just the far edge and hold your mouse in the direction you want to create a face, you can repeatedly press (or even just hold down) F:


Exporting to glTF doesn't work properly I have tried multiple times to export a simple design made from importing an svg file, extruding and adding textures to gltf, glb etc and it seems that there is just no way for blender to export the file. It works with a simple cube, so I believe I must have selected a wrong parameter that stops the models from being added to the file.
So I select my two objects I want to be exported:

Exporting them in separated form,

The export doesn't contain the models:
{
"asset" : {
    "generator" : "Khronos glTF Blender I/O v1.0.5",
    "version" : "2.0"
},
"scene" : 0,
"scenes" : [
    {
        "name" : "Scene",
        "nodes" : [
            1
        ]
    }
],
"nodes" : [
    {
        "name" : "path28",
        "translation" : [
            0.01957155205309391,
            0,
            -0.06752680242061615
        ]
    },
    {
        "children" : [
            0
        ],
        "name" : "path24",
        "rotation" : [
            0,
            0.258819043636322,
            0,
            0.9659258127212524
        ],
        "scale" : [
            2.5,
            1,
            2.5
        ],
        "translation" : [
            0,
            0,
            0.045051999390125275
        ]
    }
]

}
I have general suspicion that it has to do with my models textures, but I have very little experience with blender, so it could be that a simple material / object selector was turned off?
Thanks for any indication

glTF is a GPU-ready format that only supports meshes, not other types of geometry directly. Your SVG has imported as curves, not meshes.  To make it compatible with glTF, look for the convert option in the Object menu of the 3D view:

Object -> Convert To... -> Mesh from Curve/Meta/Surf/Text


Animating with Action Sets and Action Constraints I have a rigged robot. I want to animate it so, that when I rotate or move the bone above the head, named EarMover, the EarRingL and EarBallL will move to the side. I set up an action for this movement. The EarRingL and EarBallL move to the side and back over 40 frames. Now I need to attach the action constraint to the EarRingL and EarBallL bones so that when I rotate (or move) the EarMover bone, the Action will get played.
This is what I don't know, how to set up this action constraint so that one triggers the other?

I'm attaching a screengrab and the blend file. It's educational material for me, based on a freely available tutorial, so it is open-source. You may reuse it freely.

Here are some finished constraints.
Below Bone.Left has an action constraint.

Below Bone.Right has an action constraint.

In both cases above

[Bone.Control] of the armature is the target bone.
X location is used.
The action name [Armature.C006Action]
All settings are the same because we used one armature and this is intended to be a simple example.

In pose mode keyframes were inserted on Bone.left and Bone.Right on frames 1 and 20.  Inserting keyframes created actions with a name we can use in the action constraint panel.  When Bone control is moved in the X direction here is the result.

The action name came from the DopeSheet/Action Editor Window

In the image above the action name was created. Saved to the Abstract Vault by clicking the letter F next to the name.  The action name is remembered for the constraints.  The action is removed from the armature. Repeat. The action is removed from the armature. If you leave it by mistake the action will dominate the [action constraint] and the flexibility you want will not function.


How do I convert camera coordinates to world coordinates? Blender has a great function to convert world coordinates to camera coordinates. However, in my case I am trying to do the exact opposite and can't find an existing method of doing so. I have tried reversing the math on this but haven't had any success. I have attached the function here from bpy_extras/object_utils.py

def world_to_camera_view(scene, obj, coord):
"""
Returns the camera space coords for a 3d point.
(also known as: normalized device coordinates - NDC).

Where (0, 0) is the bottom left and (1, 1)
is the top right of the camera frame.
values outside 0-1 are also supported.
A negative 'z' value means the point is behind the camera.

Takes shift-x/y, lens angle and sensor size into account
as well as perspective/ortho projections.

:arg scene: Scene to use for frame size.
:type scene: :class:`bpy.types.Scene`
:arg obj: Camera object.
:type obj: :class:`bpy.types.Object`
:arg coord: World space location.
:type coord: :class:`mathutils.Vector`
:return: a vector where X and Y map to the view plane and
   Z is the depth on the view axis.
:rtype: :class:`mathutils.Vector`
"""
from mathutils import Vector

co_local = obj.matrix_world.normalized().inverted() @ coord
z = -co_local.z

camera = obj.data
frame = [-v for v in camera.view_frame(scene=scene)[:3]]
if camera.type != 'ORTHO':
    if z == 0.0:
        return Vector((0.5, 0.5, 0.0))
    else:
        frame = [(v / (v.z / z)) for v in frame]

min_x, max_x = frame[1].x, frame[2].x
min_y, max_y = frame[0].y, frame[1].y

x = (co_local.x - min_x) / (max_x - min_x)
y = (co_local.y - min_y) / (max_y - min_y)

return Vector((x, y, z))

Is a scripted version necessary to you? Because there is a very simple node setup to accomplish this:

In this image, I convert the vector 0 0 -1 from camera space into world space. If I look from the top, it will be blue, from the back it will be green, from the right (as here) it will be red. This way the color always corresponds to the orientation gizmo.


Is It Possible To Change Camera Interpolation? In Animation, my DEFAULT INTERPOLATION is BEZIER

I wanted to do a camera movement wherein it starts with BEZIER INTERPOLATION first then it changes to LINEAR then back to BEZIER INTERPOLATION? Just like those action movie shots where it start from slow to fast to slowmow then back to fast.

I tried doing it but I failed or just doesn't know how it works. Is it even possible?

You should be able to set a new interpolation per Key. The interpolation will then be effective until a new key sets a new interpolation.

Not an expert animator but I would stay with bezier and use the different handle types for this instead. It's less confusing and gives full control.


How to make Blender keyboard shortcuts work in a non-Latin keyboard layout? my keyboard has two layouts - Latin (English) and Cyrillic (Russian). Currently, in Blender 2.8, keyboard shortcuts work only with English layout - at least, on a Mac and Linux. Is there any way to make them work with Cyrillic layout too?

(Because that constant layout switching is very inconvenient and slows the work down.)

Thanks!

If I can accidentally get it to work on my French keyboard (most confusing, btw), then you can get it to work for your computer.  Just get the keyboard, and set the keyboard (usually under language preferences, bottom right for windows, idk for a mac) up for the language that you want, and the computer will use that keyboard for everything, you don't need to do anything in blender.  That should do it.  Also, idk if this is just a Windows thing, but if you press alt-shift, it switches languages, which is annoying if you accidentally press it, then all of your shortcuts are messed up.


Is there a way to change default start frame on the timeline? I would like to change the default start frame fro 1 to 0, so that I wont have to set the start frame at 0 every time I open up blender.

Open Blender, allowing your default startup file to load (so don't open an existing file).

Set the start frame to 0.

Save the file as your new startup file. Frame 0 will be the new start frame for all  new files created this way.


Blender 2.92 Cannot import OBJ and linked MTL File correctly OBJ Import ignores MTL File therefore not importing Textures at all. I have tested with several Assets from different Platform as well as my own export. All are imported blank. I followed the instructions from other post, but no difference. Checked the OBJ and MTL File internally, nothing suspicious. Are many Assets just broken, Blender having a bug or I am missing something? Is there an example where the import together with a MTL File is working?
MTL File:
# Blender MTL File: 'Moon рабочий.blend'
# Material Count: 1

newmtl Moon
Ns 96.078431
Ka 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000
Kd 0.640000 0.640000 0.640000
Ks 0.500000 0.500000 0.500000
Ke 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
Ni 1.000000
d 1.000000
illum 2

Solution: MTL File must contain map_Kd. And of course, the Path to the Texture must be correct.
Then Opening the OBJ in any 3D Viewer should load its Texture as well.
Tested in Blender 2.92 using Export/Import.
Thx scurest


texturing arrayed object without tiling I built a track for my game by following a tutorial on youtube. (basically using the array and the curve modifiers) a simple texture was mapped onto a small rectangle road section which was then arrayed and mapped to a nurbs curve to produce the actual track.

Now I need to make some white lines and other race track marks on the track.
I have no idea how to do it, I tried texture painting, but once I try painting, blender suddenly freezes ( maybe because of the large no of faces), if however it didn't freeze, the same paint modification I make to some point is repeated everywhere around on the track (just as if I made the modification to the initial section and arrayed and curved it).

You can use multiple UV maps. Add new UV map:
then select your new UV map and go to UV editing layout. Unwrap your mesh and then scale all faces except those you want to have more textures down to zero and place them on the side of the UV map: in this case they are those points on the sides, I gave them a little offset, so that the would be more visible. You need to make those parts, you don't want to have any further texture on some place, where the second texture is transparent. In this picture the only the not black parts are visible, so could I put them anywhere near the edge (I then used the same texture for mix shader factor with black parts for the first texture and white parts for the second texture. That's why I have there the hue/saturation and the brightness/contrast nodes. This is what my second texture looks like (maybe it's bit different, I didn't save the .blend file and I have quite a few of these pictures):) When making the material, in the texture vector input plug UV coordinate your first UV map for the general texture and for each other you have to have another UV map node (please see the picture with the node tree, that should make it a bit clearer). Add new shader for each detail you want to add and mix them using mix shader and a black and white texture for factor (I generated mine right in the node tree from the texture I use for detail, just by decreasing saturation down to zero and enhancing the contrast - white parts will have the second texture added).   the white spot is, where the detail is (tho bottom texture is just basic wave texture and the second one is picture of a solar eclipse (above), it was first I found that could be used)
I hope this is clear enough, if not, ask in the comment.
And I almost forgot to say I am using cycles.

node tree : diffuse shader with texture as color; mixed with another diffuse shader with texture as color using the secnod texture as factor for the mix node (I'm not sure what would happen if you used colored texture, I use black and white (hue/saturation node + brightness/contrast node to decolor it). black and white defines here, where the first texture is visible and where the second (grey wold mix them together)
this is what you should see, when you open node editor with a basic textured mterial:

use wheel to zoom in, shift a to add node and use mouse to connect those together.


How i fix this texture rotation in most of the mesh faces in cycles? the pbr textures when rendered in cycles look rotated differently in some parts of the wall textures for example,this is a testing scene which its very empty because its a test, i am using blender 2.78a (i cannot update it T_T)its this has some thing to do with uv maps or nodes settings?

If you have UV unwrapped and your texture looks wrong then usually best to look first at the UV unwrapping (mapping).

Before creating complicated shading node setups its often a good idea to simply check the UV mapping using one of Blenders 2 UV grid textures instead.

To do that, in the UV editor create a new image: Image > New > give it a name (in this example I name the new image Grid ) then  from the Generated Type menu choose either UV Grid or Color Grid

Next in the Node editor assign this new checker board image to your mesh.

Now lets look at your perimeter wall when it is mapped to this checker board image :

The Checkerboard texture looks rotated and differently scaled on each wall.

From your PBR node setup it looks like you are wanting to use a seamless red brick texture on this wall.

For that to work you will need to have the scaling even on each section of wall, with minimum distortions and ideally without any rotation.

The Brick texture will be aligned horizontally so you should aim to ave the UV islands of the wall also mapped horizontally.

To achieve this you will need to add few more seams so that with a new UV unwrap the perimeter wall will be   broken into 4 UV islands.

Unwrap the perimeter wall again :

The checkerboard texture is looking better but we can see in the UV editor that the uv islands are aligned vertically.

Select them all and rotate 90°.

Now you should be able to use this UV unwrap in your original PBR node setup.

It wont be perfect. I think if I were doing this I would have the tops of the walls as separate UV islands and edit those in the UV editor so that they could be mapped to a part of the red brick texture that looks like the top of a wall but I'm trying to keep this simple.

Here you will find another example of UV unwrapping a wall :
How to unwrap model so its perfectly proportioned?

There are different ways or laying out UV's depending on what you want to do with them.

Don't worry about the perimeter wall now taking up so much more space in the UV square. It shouldn't effect what you seem to be trying to do.
The perimeter wall is using the wall1 texture and now covering 50% of the UV space.
What about all the rest of the model ? The ground (grass001 material) the buildings (wall2 material) etc etc well think of those as different layers on the same UV map.
Each material will be on its own "layer".

The UV unwrapping (mapping) work flow will be:

Select all the mesh which uses material_1 and UV unwrap that, Check the Unwrap using the grid texture and edit those Uv's as required. Laying out the islands so that they are aligned and scaled to the grid.

When you are happy with the layout of the mesh using material_1 repeat for the next material.

When you are finished, if you select all of the mesh the UV's will look a complete mess in the UV space because each material will be stacked (layered) one on top of the other in the UV space. But selecting one material at a time they should look good (understandable).

I recommend you spend a couple of hours watching YouTube videos on the different ways of UV unwrapping depending on how they will be used.

Also...............

Your L shaped building has most of its wall inside out (flipped normals)

Something to think about : I added a 1.80 meter high character to your scene, looks tiny standing beside the well. Unless you have good reason its usually a good idea to model to scale 1:1 .


How to get silhouette with contour rendering in Cycles For an architectural visualization, I would like to use MakeHuman models, but:

Only get them to render white with a black outline (on reflection surface too, if possible).
Interact with light like normal human bodies in the scene (cast shadows, etc).

I can do the outline in freestyle, but any in-Cycles solution would be appreciated (OSL?)

Render your scene twice. First in cycles and then in Blender Internal. Leave cycles materials in BI and change the alpha to transparent in the shading setting. There will be edges only in BI. When you get both of your scenes rendered. Use the compositor with the "alpha over" node.

If you want your human to be a shadeless white, you could use a material index node in Cycles that creates a mask of your object without shadows but it will still cast shadows under image.

Node setup:

Test render:


Subtract properties? I have two properties, for time's sake, I'll call them x and y. I want to know what x - y is in another property, lets say z. Is there a way where I can have a property always displaying two properties subtracted from each other? I need this as, in my FPS, when a player reloads, but still has lets say 4 bullets out of 30, I need 4 to be subtracted from 30, so when you reload you get 26. How can I do this (logic bricks are fine if possible)?

It actually is possible to subtract a value of one property from another.
by using this logic setup on your gun, it will subtract from total ammo the amount of ammo needed to fill the current clip. In this case the clip can hold 30

You can see the result here if you enable the debug properties. Press space to use ammo in clip, press R to reload the ammo in clip.


How to make this plastic material? I'm creating an NES controller, and I'm stuck at making a realistic material for the controller body.
How do you achieve it?

You could try this way: Mix a Diffuse with a Glossy, with a Fresnel as Factor, maybe add a Subsurface Scattering to give a bit of translucency, and also a Noise to give a grainy relief to the surfaces. Change the color and the Noise Scale and Strength depending on the part.


Render History AutoSave? Is it possible for Blender to autosave each render into the Slots in the Render View Window?

Is this possible? Maybe an Addon is available? I also use VRay in 3ds max and it has a frame buffer which is really good for this - it helps massively when doing lookdev.

Thanks,
N

No, you have to change slots every time you render (shortcut keys 1 to 9 on the upper keyboard numbers).


How to merge two characters imported from MakeHuman I started Blender last week and I managed to create my characters in MakeHuman (V 1.0.2), import it to Blender (V 2.76b) and pose these two characters as I want.

Now I want to use them in another scene where they should show up as one object which I can place, rotate, scale, etc. This new object should show up just as the two characters in the original scene.

I tried to join them with Ctrl+J but this does not work - it even breaks the characters and give some weird structures. I think this is due to the internal structure of the imported characters from MakeHuman.

If I just take them as a copy (Ctrl+C & Ctrl+V) they stay as they are, but I have to position/scale them separately which is a lot of work.

Any ideas or hints for me? Please! Thank's in advance.

edit:  just figured out how to attach screen shots.... so here are the screen shots mentioned below in the comments: the first shows the two characters selected with two times [a] and the second after joining them with [ctrl] + [j]

Maybe the problem is, that I do not select the characters properly?

You can parent ctrl + p one of the models to the other or both of them to an empty. And then the transformations should be applied to both of them.

https://www.blender.org/manual/editors/3dview/relationships/parents.html


How to remove HDRI background in lookdev mode? How to remove HDRI background in lookdev mode? I'm using Blender 2.9.

Very easy. Go to shading tab and set the world opcity to 0.


how to render volume as image with alpha background? I have a problem when I render this (using f12 ) node tree on my object in blender cycle I get nothing I tried to render another things and I get a results but with this node tree in my screen shot I get nothing
in render mode

when i click f12

my node tree and my transparent option

The problem is due to the limitation of the image viewer (and the same problem occurs if you try and save your render as PNG) and is the same as that described in Rendering fire animations with transparent background. Change the viewer mode into RGB mode and you should see the results.

When rendering such an image (with combined alpha and emission) you should use a format that supports such images - such as EXR.


Blender rendering: output to unexpected frame numbers I'm correcting some frames in my Cycles render by having them re-rendered correctly and overwriting the originals from frame 135 to frame 144. But when I click animate the render starts at 269 and renders long over the last frame.
Even after I delete the previous incorrect frames and render again and disabling the overwrite option it still starts at frame 269.

Are you sure that you don't have "alternate start/end range" enabled?

Disable it and see if it fixes the issue


How to make independently editable copies of the same node group? I'm working with a node group (⎈ CtrlG) and I would like to make an independently editable copy of it.

When I'm making a duplicate (⇧ ShiftD), there is a second node group created. However, whenever I make changes to the nodes inside this copy, the changes are also applied to the first group. How do I avoid that?

Click the little number next to the name of the node group after duplicating it:

This will "unlink" that node group and make it into a copy, so that editing it will not change other instances of the group it was duplicated from.

The number refers to the number of "users" of that datablock, i.e. the number of instances of that node group.


Blender 2.8 only renders the first frame of an animation When I render an animation -a simple camera movement over the objects-, Blender 2.8 only renders the first frame continously. Problem repeates in Eevee and also in Cycles. I have checked the parameters and everything appears to be fine. It is getting me crazy.

pg

Alright, I had this issue too until a few minutes ago, now it got sorted. What worked for me is changing the composoting nodes. Basically making sure that everything ends up in the "composite" node and not just the "viewer" node.
A safer way I found is once I know how I want the result with the "viewer" node, just get rid of it and point the nodes to "composite"
I hope it helps.


Origin point spits clumps of particles I was following this tutorial (https://youtu.be/SzbuZTlMGPE) and when I play the animation, clumps of particles in a line come out from the origin point, even though the boolean object isn't touching the origin point and the modifier stack option is enabled.

The particle system is based on faces of the boolean intersection between a very narrow cube and the mesh text. The problem occurs when that boolean operation is between letters, creating an empty mesh. The particle system still needs to produce particles at the rate declared (10000 over a few dozen frames) and thus default to producing those particles somewhere at the Origin. May that's a bug... may be not.

Anyway, one workaround is to make the boolean cube (silver) wide enough to never create an empty mesh, i.e. as wide as the widest gap between your letters. This way the particle system will always some geometry to emit particles from instead of emitting from some random location.

Here you can see that with the narrow boolean, particles are emitted at the origin at frame 46 and later when it is in the gap:

And here the particles stopped being emitted at the origin when the boolean cube is wide enough to always intersect with the text object:


export> stl> EXPORT STL, blender keeps saving the wrong file 5 hours now I have this mesh opened in blender that I been trying to export as a stl file. 5 hours blender every time exports the WRONG file. A file that is not even loaded into the editor. a file that I didn't open.
Select is not an ambiguous word. File, export, stl, these words have ONE and only one definition. it's really hard to misspell FILEX.STL, only one button with the label EXPORT STL.
Of course, there are plenty of things that I can double-check 5, 10, 20 times, including the MANY posts on this and other sites telling how to go FileExportStlFilenameButton....
I'm a programmer so I already have parts of my scalp where the nerves are dead from pulling my hair out. I've seen glitches that you wouldn't believe. I've never seen anything like this.
the .blend file I'm trying to export as STL is a quad mesh whereas the .stl image that blender keeps exporting is a triangle mesh which the quad mesh is derived from.
I loaded a triangle mesh, converted it to quad mesh, saved it as a blend file. quit blender, restart blender, load the quad mesh file, check it carefully yeah that's a quad mesh alright. export the quad mesh image as FILEX.STL. run my CAD program, open filex.stl and what do I see, the ORIGINAL triangle mesh file which I know is impossible. spend 4 more hours checking every conceivable way to verify that blender has the right file, to no avail.

STL format only supports triangles.

  STL file format wiki

  STL (an abbreviation of "stereolithography") is a file format native to the stereolithography
  CAD software created by 3D Systems. STL has several
  backronyms such as "Standard Triangle Language" and "Standard
  Tessellation Language".

  An STL file describes a raw, unstructured triangulated surface by the
  unit normal and vertices (ordered by the right-hand rule) of the
  triangles using a three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system.

A simple test would be to export and re-import cube or plane, and note the triagulation.

Related Triangles to quad for 3D printing


Smoothing curve "tilt" There's an option to smooth a curve's radius, but is it possible to smooth the Tilt factor of points in a curve?

For example when making a road or flight path, I'd like to tilt just some of the points and have it interpolate for the points in between, or simply smooth out the tilting of selected points to get rid of unwanted bumps.

Is there any native way to do this?

Curve weight and tilt smoothing has been added in r58575.
Will be available in the 2.69 release or any recent build.


Armature doesn't move mesh I'm new to blender and i've been following a tutorial to create an armature for my mesh, everything went good, until I applied the armature to the mesh. Some parts seem to not move at all.

I don't really know how to fix this, can somebody help?

While you are in  Weight Paint mode, you have two choices, either remove the mesh from bone or add the mesh to the bone,

Please see the attach files

For adding mesh control to the bone

For removing the control from the bone

Red means full control, blue means no control, and in between those color, partial controls.


Is it possible to animate hair particle (object) size? I am trying to create an animation where several instances of an object seem to grow out of another mesh, and slightly move (rotate) then disappear (scale back to 1 again).

In the dumbed-down version of this example, I would have the cube grow out of the icosphere in random sizes, rotate slightly/move, then shrink back to size 0.

I cannot seem to animate / keyframe the Particle Size data box.

After keying it on frame 1, it doesn't let me key a second size on frame 50.

I couldn't find help online or figure out why this wouldn't let me do it. Even if I click on "No" or "Keyed", and apply loc/rot/scale, it doesn't let me change the value. I actually have to go and delete the keyframe to modify the value.

Can this be done?

I'm getting the same result as you, changing the value after keyframing the Size property reverts to the previous keyframed value; it may be a bug or a limitation of the current system.

As a workaround, you can animate the value through the Graph Editor.

Just keyframe it regularly as you already did, then open the Graph Editor, select the object and move the curve vertex corresponding to the desired keyframe up or down according to the effect you wish to achieve.


What is the different between a .msi and .zip Blender installer file? Are there any feature differences between a .msi and .zip Blender installer file?

Both versions of blender have the same functionality, features, plugins, etc.

The main difference is that the Zip file does not get installed in the system as a program, meaning that the executable files are not in the programs folder, the application does not appear on the start menu, or as part of the programs menu. Also the operating system will not associate .blend files to open with blender automatically.

The zip file can be extracted to any folder you want, and the contained blender.exe program can be run from there. It can even be executed from an external drive, so that it can also be run on computers where the user has no access to modifying the operating system (in schools, public computers, your parent's computer, etc).

The zip file allows you to use different versions of the program, whereas the installed version will use only the latest one installed.

The files used on the zip file don't need to be uninstalled from the system, you can simply delete the containing folder.

To uninstall the .msi file you need to use the OS uninstall tools.


Image with lots of reflections is split in half in the final render, but not in the render preview I rendered this image of lots of metallic spheres. The render preview looks fine, but the final render is split diagonally, each half showing unrelated things. I've tried moving the camera and lighting around, but the issue persists. Both halves change when anything is altered. Why is this happening?

I figured it out. The problem was caused by a glass pane which was hidden in the render preview but was present in the final image. The glass distorted the render.


simple add-on not working this is a simple add on just to select a loop so i can make the mean crease value 1

I do this alot and the constant moving mouse right is starting to hurt my had for models then will be subdivided.

I just want to press on a edge, (use the assigned shortcut key to active the add on) it will then select the loop and set the value of mean crease to 1.

This only works with the scripting editor, I can't get the add on to work after saving as test.py any help please.

I get the following errors :

addon_utils.disable: edge crease not disabled
Modules Installed (edge crease) from 'C:\\Users\\RTJ\\Documents\\edge crease.py' into 'C:\\Users\\RTJ\\AppData\\Roaming\\Blender Foundation\\Blender\\2.80\\scripts\\addons'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.80\scripts\modules\addon_utils.py", line 351, in enable
    mod = __import__(module_name)
  File "C:\Users\RTJ\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.80\scripts\addons\edge crease.py", line 35, in <module>
    class EdgeCrease(bpy.types.Operator):
  File "C:\Users\RTJ\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.80\scripts\addons\edge crease.py", line 42, in EdgeCrease
    bpy.ops.mesh.loop_multi_select(ring=False)
  File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.80\scripts\modules\bpy\ops.py", line 195, in __call__
    BPyOpsSubModOp._view_layer_update(context)
  File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.80\scripts\modules\bpy\ops.py", line 157, in _view_layer_update
    view_layer = context.view_layer
AttributeError: '_RestrictContext' object has no attribute 'view_layer' "

the script:

bl_info = {
    "name": "Edge Crease  ",
    "author": "RTJ3DCosplay",
    "version": (1, 0),
    "blender": (2, 80, 0),
    "location": "",
    "description": "delete in context",
    "warning": "experimental, not stable, at your own risk",
    "wiki_url": "https://your web or web of the maintainer",
    "category": "category where the addon is located"
}

import bpy
import bmesh
import mathutils
import collections
import math

from bpy_extras import view3d_utils
from bpy.types import (
        Operator,
        Menu,
        Panel,
        PropertyGroup,
        AddonPreferences,
        )
from bpy.props import (
        BoolProperty,
        EnumProperty,
        FloatProperty,
        IntProperty,
        PointerProperty,
        StringProperty,
        )

class EdgeCrease(bpy.types.Operator):
    """Edge Crease"""
    bl_idname = "object.edge_crease"
    bl_label = "Edge Crease"
    bl_options = {'REGISTER', 'UNDO'}

 # this is all i'm trying to do,
 # i select on edge then active this to loop select and set value to 1
 # id be happy just to set to 1 each time

    bpy.ops.mesh.loop_multi_select(ring=False)
    bpy.ops.transform.edge_crease(value=1)

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

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

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

You need to put your functionality of the operator in the execute function. Otherwise the issue described in this answer will occur.

def execute(self, context):
    bpy.ops.mesh.loop_multi_select(ring=False)
    bpy.ops.transform.edge_crease(value=1)

    return {'FINISHED'}


Is it possible to enable backdrop using Python when running Blender without GUI? I am trying to enable backdrop in Blender using Python and using Blender's Python API (no GUI) but it seems that it is not as straight-forward as I thought. I know how to enable Use Nodes via bpy.context.scene.use_nodes = True and just need to enable backdrop. The most relevant Python documentation for backdrop Here is a bit unclear and I do not know exactly how I can enable backdropping through the NodeSpaceEditor class. Can someone explain how I can do that?

Update: it turns out that the Python documentation is useful when you are running Blender with the GUI. I need to enable backdrop when I am running Blender in the background.

The hard way is to compile Blender from scratch and enable backdropping by modifying the source code as explained here but this is too much of work. I hope there is a way to do it using Blender's Python API.

You can set this property, you just have to know which area is the node editor. Like this:

import bpy

def get_node_editor_area():
    """
    Get the index of the area containing the compositor
    """
    for i in range(len(bpy.context.screen.areas)):
        area = bpy.context.screen.areas[i]
        if area.type == 'NODE_EDITOR':
            return i

area_index = get_node_editor_area()
bpy.context.screen.areas[area_index].spaces[0].show_backdrop = True

If this is for an addon and the user will have the mouse in the node editor area when this function is called, I think you could use bpy.context.space_data.show_backdrop = True instead.


Math.cos is returning wrong value? The cos of 45 should be returning a value of: sqr(2)/2

When I checked the following:
test = math.cos(45)
it returns the value of: 0.5253

So I thought I had to convert it to degrees: test = math.degrees(math.cos(45)) but instead it returns the value of: 30.0987
I don't know what I'm doing wrong here. I just want the cos(45) to return a value of: sqr(2)/2 just as my calculator does ..

Try math.cos(math.radians(45)). Trigonometric functions need their arguments in radians, Blender also uses radians internally.


Instert an icon inside of an EnumProperty ? is it possible? (addon UI) i tried to insert some icon in an enumproperty

test_context: bpy.props.EnumProperty(
    name = 'Context',
    description = '',
    items = [
        ('GENERAL', 'General', '', icon='BLENDER'),
        ('FILEPATHS', 'File Paths', '', icon='KEYINGSET')],
    default = 'GENERAL')

this is obviously not working and i didnt saw any example out there, nothing in the documentation either.
i saw this question but it didnt help
How to add custom icon to EnumProperty in add-on

does someone here know how to do this ? is this even possible ?

original

test_context: bpy.props.EnumProperty(
    name = 'Context',
    description = '',
    items = [
        ('GENERAL', 'General', '', icon='BLENDER'),
        ('FILEPATHS', 'File Paths', '', icon='KEYINGSET')],
    default = 'GENERAL')

test_context: bpy.props.EnumProperty(
    name = 'Context',
    description = '',
    items = [
        ('GENERAL', 'General', '', 'BLENDER',1),
        ('FILEPATHS', 'File Paths', '', 'KEYINGSET',2)],
    default = 'GENERAL')


Make object from a child I would like to make object from a child so i can edit it, there is a way to do this?
I use the Duplication to a sphere from a plane, i want to make object from the result (the new sphere created).

sorry for my english i will put a screenshot for help, i read i have to select the parent and do Shift + Ctrl + A     but its not working.
Thanks :)

Yes i did it! It was simple i just needed to do Shift+Ctrl+A just after the duplication.... and i have all my planes as one object so i can work on it! Thanks


I have a model which I need to separate its head from body I am very noob with Blender. I started playing VRChat and discovered that we can create our own avatar.

I had 0 skill with Animation programs, but I watched some tutorials on how to upload my own Avatar model to VRChat.

So I downloaded an Avatar from the net, used Unity to upload it to VRChat and successfully did it right, but there was no lip sync.

Therefore people advised me to use blender to do that, so I downloaded Blender and imported this avatar to it: I noticed that it has over 40k polygons which is double the polygons that Avatar needs to be to be uploaded to VRChat.

The problem is that the whole body including head, body, hands and legs are under one mesh, but I want to reduce only the body's polygons so that the face doesn't look messed up in the Chat.

Is it possible to separate the head from the body and have it separated mesh so that I can decimate only the body without changing the head and by keeping everything in tact without messing something like the bones and/or the lip sync ?

I will be very appreciated if someone helps me with that.

I'll try showing you some simple way to simplify (by hand) your model body: I downloaded a full body human mesh from this site.

The archive is compressed with .rar format, so you have to unrar it before (it's like a .zip archive, just different): find a suitable program for your computer system (eg: http://www.7-zip.org/, free and open source).

The extracted model itself, is in .obj format so you can't open it in blender directly, you have to import it: blender has a "Wavefront (.obj)" importer by default, use it with default settings, it works well.

You get this model:

how to simplify it body without touching its head?

example: select a "loop" of vertices (this is a particular one that goes over all the model'storso)

how to?

select two vertices sharing an edge, like in the picture below,

and in edit mode use the

mesh > edges > edge loop

you can also get the same menu floating, like in the picture,  using the shortcut CTRLE

anyway you can select loops in any way, with the many selection tools of blender...

  tip: a useful simplified way to select a loop is to select one of its  edges while keeping pressed the ALT key (and, as always, SHIFT if you are adding to a previous selection)

now the loop is selected,

now press X to get the "delete" menu, and use "dissolve edges"

and you get

you can also "dissolve" several edge loops together:just leave some loop between them, like here:

and you'll simplify it faster

that's it, you reduced you vertex count without ruining your shape!

you can do this on arms, legs, torso, just be sure to do it simmetrically, and just where it don't alter too much your body shape and... don't loose your head :))

Hope it helps.

edit:

after importing your real model into blender (using mmd_tools addon), I saw it's quite dense, but made of triangles instead of quads...

as said below in comments, loops work only on quads, but fortunately blender can convert triangles (tris) to quadratic shapes (quad) - 2 tris become 1 quad. with this menu command:

after which you get your model almost entirely in quads

Then I noticed another problem: there are doubles (how I noticed? some loop was still not working, so I guessed that... experience)

So you have to remove doubles first: in edit mode, press W to get the "specials" menu and press "remove doubles"

you see there were some

Now loop tools work as expected, and you can try my suggested path above

You may have noticed that converting 2 tris to 1 quad has reduced total faces count (of course) from about 45k to 25k. But exporting back your "quad" model to pmx, triangles will be restored by the exporting process (so 1 quad will become 2 tris). So, based on your question info, you'll have to reduce your "quad" model below 10k quads, acting on body obnly, I guess. It's a lot!

I also noticed your model is fully rigged, so it could be ready to be animated in VRchat? ...if yes, of course, reducing body vertices could make it move differently than intended, who knows.

It's not as easy as those people that advised you to use blender thought perhaps. It can be done, imho, but it will require a lot of tries and patience, and restarts if it becomes a mess...

Last, about this comment:
"Is there a possibility just to make the head in a different part of the body's part so that I can decimate only the body using Unity? Because I have nice Unity plugin for reducing the Tris but need to make the head a different part or mesh than the whole body. "

you can split your mesh easily in blender, too. select head vertices, the press p, and select "selection", Done. And you can act on body only. But if you later need to join that head with the simplified body, it will be worse. And if the model is to be animated in VR chat, using the full armature that the model has, it will be even worse, trust me...

But you can try different things, at least!

edit2:

about your last comments, and the fact  that you can't reduce much triangles... yes, it is impossible to get below 20k triangles if you don't want to edit the head...

as you see, your head alone (selected) is made of over 12.2k quads, ie: around 25k triangles... that does not deend on blender tools, it's just how this bee is done.

If you want to go below 20k for the entire model, you must edit the head also... sorry...


Connecting two surfaces in Blender I am trying to connect 1 with2, I deleted some faces as it was overlapping with other faces " this is a knitted structure). I tried to select vertices and fill as you can see the resulting figure below, there is an inverted normal in black, if I select all faces you can see this the results at 1,2, just fill each surface, is it possible to fill it once a time?

========= Update======

I think this might work. In edit mode delete faces 1 and 2. Select all the vertices of 1 and 2. Hit 'w' and select Bridge Edge Loops from the list. Hope this works.


How to pause physics simulations I've got an animation which contains some force fields and particle systems. I'd like to pause the physics from time to time, allowing an animated camera to get a look at things from various angles.

Is it possible to pause the physics engine while other animations progress normally?

To the best of my knowledge you can't pause the playback of the particles via the physics system.

In order to accomplish this effect, you need to:

render the original particle sequence with the standard timing
render extra shots of frozen particles with Camera 2 and then edit the shots together in the VSE

In order to do that you need a way to freeze the particles in time so that you can render out the Camera 2 shots.

You can do this by setting up the particles to use a DupliObject, and then using the "Make Duplicates Real" command (CTRL+SHIFT+A) on the correct frames. I found it helpful to also parent the frozen particles to a new parent object.

Here's what I did to accomplish this.

Set up your initial particle system and animation (I chose a 10
particle, 50 frame sequence for the test). You will need to set
particle duplication to an object or group of objects. If you just want
a small point, use a small sphere)
You may want to bake your particle sim to disk and then switch your
particle system to read from external to avoid the simulation
changing.
Move the timeline to the frame you want to freeze (let's choose frame 20)
Select the particle emitter and use "Make Duplicates Real" command (CTRL+SHIFT+A)
Snap cursor to emitter and create new object (empty, plane, etc).
We'll call this one Frame20Parent.
Hide the emitter. Select new particle duplicates, then parent them
to the Frame20Parent object with CTRL+P
(keep transformations)
Now, you can render out frames from your Camera 2 animation with the
particles frozen in place.

Please note: I've spaced out the duplicate groups for clarity, but you would have to keep them in the same location as the original emitter object so the particle locations would match.

If this solution does not work for your project, please provide additional requirements and I can amend the answer.


Video Material does not receive colour? I am using a video as the face of my character:

But as you can see, the face is white. (I want it to be the same colour as his skin) So I made some nodes to fix this:

This is what I have done for another one of my characters as you can see here:

The only difference is that this character's face is an image not a video. Otherwise, I used the same node setup which worked for this guy.

So my question is, why can't I make the background of the video the same colour as his skin, when I can do it for an image?

Change Color1 on your mix node to the color of your character.

Select Multiply or Overlay instead of Mix in your Mix node.

Disconnect your Alpha from the Image Texture node.

You may need to reverse your Color1 and Color2 in your mix node depending on which option you choose.


Using AutoMerge Editing - things aren't merging, what isn't right? I have checked the AutoMerge Editing box in the Mesh menu, and dragged faces so they are as closely lined up as I can make them, and clicked Remove Doubles in order to adjust the merge distance to wider. Still I can almost never get things to merge. Is there something I'm missing?

The default automerge distance is very small, as it's usually used with Vertex Snapping.

To use vertex snapping, set the snapping mode to Vertex (⎈ Ctrl⇧ Shift↹ Tab):

Then hold ⎈ Ctrl while transforming vertices (or toggle the magnet icon in 3D view > Header)

Now automerge should work as expected:

To increase the automerge distance, adjust the Double Threshold in 3D view > Tool Shelf (T) > Option > Mesh Options:


I can't figure out the nodes to have light trough the windows Light won't come in, and any changes to the material won't work .. my question is . Why in the preview is looking near what i actually want and when I render is looking crappy.

I want it to look like the preview and this is the render.

To make the lights shine through the windows, make sure you have your material's Shadow Mode set away from Opaque. Alpha hashed seems to work well for most situations.

The reason the Material Preview looks better is because it uses a HDRI Environment image to provide lighting and reflections. To add your own (so it appears in the render), go to the shading tab and switch the drop box from Object to World. Add an Environment Texture and choose your image. The default ones that come with blender (.exr files) are in the blender folder at 2.90/datafiles/studiolights/world. If you want more, there are several places you can get them online for free. The most popular is HDRI Haven (https://hdrihaven.com/hdris/).


Blender Crashing when changing from blender render to cycles I am having an issue with Blender whenever I change from blender render to cycles blender crashes or just shuts down.

if I go to the game engine no issue.

I am running a PC
Windows 10
i5 CPU
GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

I am at a loss

This fixed the error for me (taken from another thread): Turns out my WIndows Update was to blame, installing a .dll file that was breaking both Maya and Blender. This was called igdrclneo64.dll/igdrcl64.dll. It’s located in C:\Windows\System32 (On my computer it was located in C: \ Windows \ System32 \ DriverStore \ FileRepository \ igdlh64.inf_amd64_250db833a1cd577e.) I moved it to the desktop and now everything works


How do you get the top menu settings back For some reason, Blender isn't letting me getting to the "File Edit Change", like the top menu that usually all programs have. This is the weirdest problem I have ever had, and here's the screenshot:

As you can see, there's no menu at the top.

Just drag from the 3D View corner up to create a new window. Place where desired and the change the editor type to Info


What are edge loops and front edges and how to select them? Can't seem to figure out what i should do, a person said on one of my answers i should select the front edges and whole loops and i don't know much about blender since im still new. He then said before using the bevel tool there are 4 modes and you can switch between them using 'm'. Also when using whole loops and front edges is there a way to select them all?

The selected edges in the picture I attached are edge loops. To select all the way around the loop, hold alt and click. For the bevel tool, just hit control b or apply a bevel modifier in the modifiers panel on the right.


Changing the grease pencil brush from the API How can the grease pencil brush be changed from the API?  The default is Pencil, but in my addon I would like to use the Pen.  I cannot find this anywhere in the documentation.
# Define grease pencil parameters
gp_mat = bpy.data.materials.new("my_mat")
bpy.data.materials.create_gpencil_data(gp_mat)
gp_mat.grease_pencil.color = [0,1,0,1]
bpy.context.scene.tool_settings.gpencil_stroke_placement_view3d = 'SURFACE'
bpy.data.brushes["Pen"].size = 5

# Add grease pencil to scene
bpy.ops.object.gpencil_add(type='EMPTY')
bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='PAINT_GPENCIL')
gp_obj = bpy.data.objects['GPencil']
gp_obj.data.materials.append(gp_mat)
gp_obj.active_material = gp_mat

# Change brush to pen
_________________________________________  # What goes here?

You can change the active brush via the context tool settings like you set the
gpencil_stroke_placement_view3d in your code:
bpy.context.scene.tool_settings.gpencil_paint.brush = bpy.data.brushes["Pen"]

Of course you have to use the respective name of your desired brush.


How many faces can my computer handle? I have a macbook running MacOs High Sierra vs 10.13.6 with this processor: 2.3GHz Intel Core i5, and this amount of memory: 8 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3, and this graphics card: Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB. I would really like to know how many faces my computer can handle without blender crashing. I am wanting to import a mesh that has 7 million faces, is this ok to do?

Thanks for any help.

I have no clue. However, you can make a sphere in a new blender project and subdivide the surface untill the app starts to lag. Then, you can apply the modifier and read the face count in the top toolbar. That should give you an approximation.


Blender Cycles smoke won't render I am trying to add smoke to a cigarette. I've created a Cylinder, hit space and chose quick smoke while this sphere was selected. It created a transparent bigger sphere and it is emitting smoke in solid and texture mode. But when I try it out in render mode, it won't show the smoke for some reason. Here is my setup:

The cylinder has a basic white material.
Thanks!

Smoke rendering in Cycles still has a few tricks:
1- Quick smoke should have created some default shaders for the Smoke Domain, make sure they are there, if not recreate them like this:

Note that the attributes are written in lowercase. Using uppercase will make the materials fail
2- As of version 2.77 Smoke can be rendered using GPU

For blender versions prior to 2.77 you can only use CPU rendering to be able to see the smoke in render view and in the final render.

Rendered Image:

For a detailed description of nodes for Fire+Smoke on cycles read: Rendering smoke in Cycles?


Simple script to resize object I want to add another menu item to my Custom Panel for scaling the size of an object by +2. I get the following code whenever I do the scaling.

bpy.ops.transform.resize(value=(2, 2, 2), constraint_axis=(False, False, False),
constraint_orientation='GLOBAL', mirror=False, proportional='DISABLED',
proportional_edit_falloff='SMOOTH', proportional_size=1)

How do I pass this code to col.operator() so it works as at the moment I am getting an error.

This is my current code which works fine and allows me to add a plane or cube object.

import bpy

class CustomPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    """A Custom Panel in the Viewport Toolbar"""
    bl_label = "Custom Panel"
    bl_space_type = 'VIEW_3D'
    bl_region_type = 'TOOLS'

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

        row = layout.row()
        row.label(text="Add Objects:")

        split = layout.split()
        col = split.column(align=True)

        col.operator("mesh.primitive_plane_add", text="Plane")
        col.operator("mesh.primitive_cube_add", text="Cube")

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

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

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

If all you want to set for the operator is a single property, you can do:

col.operator("transform.resize").value = (2,2,2)

If you want to set multiple properties, use the object that is returned by .operator() and set the properties on it one after another:

props = col.operator("transform.resize")
props.value = (2,2,2)
props.constraint_orientation = 'GLOBAL'


Quick Explosion: How to give shrapnels hitboxes I don't know how to describe my problem, so I'll post a gif of my problem first:

As you can see, the shrapnels don't seem to have a hitbox. They collide with the plane, but instead of flipping around on the ground like tiny metal plates, they just rotate in place at their center point.

How do I fix this problem? (I created this animation using Quick Explosion)
Thanks in advance!

You can't fix that with QuickExplosion.

Since its based on particles, only particle as point (placed in centre of each piece) collides. Maximum you can get is spherical boundary so they stay more above surface, but they will still rotate and boundary will be the same size for all shards = some will levitate some still partialy under surface.
From this answer it seems you can make it better.

To make it work properly you will need to use Rigid Body simulation for shards done with Fracture Cell addon or beter via Fracture modifier (that is not include officially in 2.8x for now).

Some older tips you can find here


Why not just normal map everything? There are 2 ways to add detail to a 3D model. One is to physically change the shape of the model by adding more vertices. The other is to fake the illusion of extra vertices with normal maps.
Normal maps are often used because they are more efficient and don't add more vertices to the mesh. They can also produce quite realistic results.
If this is the case, then how should a 3D modeler decide which method to use to add detail to a mesh and when? Why even bother modifying the mesh to add high-level details if normal maps can create the illusion of depth just as well?

It depends.
When it is not going to view in detail and the geometry of vertices isn't important.
As you said, there is no extra vertices created, which mean, if there isn't a geometry, rendering engine can't render on that pixel. Commonly seen in early game when we can't afford high vertices computing.

As a same result, AO, shadow, light bounces cannot be accurately calculate due to the rasterized geometry (Although there is some trick that can compute them in additional process).
So how do we decide which one to use:

Is our scene need to be realistic as possible as we can?
Can the rendering engine/hardware afford such high vertices? Or high resolution normal map?
Can we obtain the normal map?
Do we have time to bake normal map? (especially you don't want to waste time on tweaking your map and vertices. eg. making animation)
Is the rendering time important? (Realtime Game, VR, AR, news animation)

There is much more thing that we should consider about, including what pipeline are the artist using, which might be the most important factor in current decision. And I don't think an short Q&A post can cover all the issue in this problem.


Can an object be automatically rotated? I have a pistol model whose rotation is a few degrees off:

Does Blender have a function that would automatically fix the rotation and "align" it according to the object's geometry, perhaps like the 3D cursor to Selection option?

Thank you!

Palkonimo has the basics of it right, but you can accomplish the same thing more quickly using Blender's built in snap options.

Begin by picking two points on your model that you want to line up with an axis. Move the 3D cursor to one of those points.
Duplicate that point, and move it away along the axis you wish to align to.
Select the other of your chosen points on the model as the active element, expand your selection of the model using L or Ctrl +.
Rotate, using vertex snap to active element, and target the vertex you duplicated earlier.


Custom Properties in space_data or region3d is it possible to create custom properties in context.space_data or context.space_data.region3d?

I created a property in bpy.types.SpaceView3D.my_prop but couldn't access it via bpy.context.space_data.my_prop.

Is there a way to do that?

See this answer for a listing of classes which support custom properties.
Neither Space nor RegionView3D derive from ID and are not treated special and can not have custom properties.
Screen does inherit and might be a candidate. You might identify an area by its index or its hash.
The former should work with loading/saving the screen from/to the *.blend file.
The latter might persist during changes to the screen layout at runtime.


Curves not showing in Object Mode For some reason when I add a curve it doesn't show when in object mode only edit mode. Could someone clarify this?

I just found that problem and I solved it. In the 2.8 version it's not broken, just go to the object properties> object display and select the nurbs path and change the display texture to bounds.

You will now see that it's visible even without edit mode.


How to get a MovieClipSequence Clip File via Python I was wondering whether it was possible to get the name of the Clip File of a Sequence via Python.

The current Sequence can be accessed via:

bpy.context.scene.sequence_editor.active_strip

I had a look at the Blender Python API, but did not find anything there.

EDIT:
I guess I did not express myself quite clearly. My question is whether (and if so - how) it would be posssible to get the associated Movie Clip of a VSE Strip of the type 'Clip' (imported via the Movie Clip Editor and then added to the VSE via Add -> Clip... -> <Clipname>).

The active 'clip name' is the only real reference at the moment so avoid 'renaming' in VSE:

import bpy

seq = bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].sequence_editor
strip_name = seq.active_strip.name

print (bpy.data.movieclips[strip_name].filepath)

Console output: /home/user/videos/file_name.mp4

Otherwise (although not ideal) you could iterate through bpy.data.movieclips and compare the duration of the 'active strip' with 'all other' clips:

import bpy

seq = bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].sequence_editor
strip = seq.active_strip
strip_duration = strip.frame_duration

for i in bpy.data.movieclips:
    if (i.frame_duration == strip_duration):
        print (i.filepath)


How do I make a curved surface cube? Thank you for any help you can provide!

Add a plane.
Go to Edit mode.
Subdivide 3 times (press W> subdivide).
Select the center vertex.
Enable Proportional Editing (press O).
Press G, Z (to constrain to Z axis) and lift the vertex up.
   the mouse wheel controls how much influence Proportional Editing has


In 3d viewport , how can i add object to new collection without it's being unlinked from current collection? I want to do 'add'  the selected object to new collection while also keep it still linked to current collection so it will be part of 2 or more collections at the same time? I can do this using outliner, but is there really no faster way to do this in 3d viewport ?

3D View object > collection Menu

Link the cube that is already in "Collection1" to a new collection, "Collection2"

The shortcuts as listed on the menu

M Move to Collection
ShiftM Link to Collection
CtrlG Create New COllection


Frameserver in Blender 2.82 In an older version of Blender, there was an option to export video via a Frameserver.

Where can I find this option in Blender 2.82? Or how can I activate it ?

The Frameserver option was removed in Blender 2.8 https://developer.blender.org/T57423
The comment from Susu    Frameserve to external ffmpeg?  gives a good alternative options


Make particles clump together and flow in a specific direction I am creating a cel shaded fire using a particle system in which I want the particles to clump together and flow in a specific direction. Is it possible to make it 'look' and behave more fire-like?

This is campfire example.

To achieve this effect add two force fields.

First one: Shift+A > Force Field > Turbulence

Then change Noise to 5.

Second one: Shift+A > Force Field > Vortex

Change Noise to 2 and Strenght to 0.1.

Blend file:

Final toughts:

I don't know your full setup so some values may vary. You can try change position of force fields and strength/noise values.

Edit:

Based on provided blend file I've change all Force Fields to Force with negative strenght and noise. Also I've zeroed Velocity > Emitter Oject > X and Random.

This is how it looks with Motion Blur.

Updated blend file:


How would I go about converting a 3d model to a .vox file So I really want to convert a 3d model into a .vox file for use in Minecraft, there's a service out there that can convert .vox files to Minecraft .schematic files but my problem is I need a .vox file in the first place. I've tested the service and it works with .vox files with color data so yeah that's fine.
The issue comes with conversion, there seem to be a few options. The first is to convert OBJ to .vox and also literally just a .schematic with the service but the issue is I think what I need is a .obj file and a single image texture to go along with it that contains all the textures but when I export as OBJ in blender I get a .mtl which is definitely not an image file because it's a text file. I know you can do some fancy baking magic but I don't think I want to do that because some of the other solutions seem more fun to do because I'm doing this all for fun, it's for Minecraft. If there's an add-on to do this, that would be cool to know about but I don't want to spend ages trying to bake it and in the end have it not work because I'm using a pretty quirky 3d model that was originally made in a different language for a video game and was shakily converted to Blender so yeah IDK.
If everything fails I have MagicaVoxel which I can import OBJs into and have it be voxelly but I'd have to paint it which would be weird. I could do that however it would just be kinda lengthy to do. There are other options like Qubicle but that's payed and then there's an article on a thing called poly2vox which seems like it could work but the software seems very old and I'm not 100% sure it does what I want, also it's run in your command line which seems a bit too techy for me.
Essentially what I'm asking is if you know any plugins that can do something like this or export an obj as a .obj and one texture file. I'd also like to know if there are any other known ways of converting any 3d model type to a .vox without losing color data. Ok cool I'm gonna go be sad now.
The service: https://drububu.com/miscellaneous/voxelizer/?out=obj
By the way, most "OBJ to Minecraft" tutorials are years old and use outdated programs and things that just don't work anymore.
I hoped this was clear enough in the first version but I guess not, I'd like a way of doing this without losing colors because if I wanted I could just use magicavoxel or the service if I didn't care about colors but I want a way to get colors that works and doesn't require manual input because I can't paint in the slightest.

If you need any to make any mesh in blender look "minecraft-like", use a Remesh Modifier set to Blocks. You can then export this to a variety of formats, including .obj. If you need a .vox file, however, you will need a special addon. One of the best I can find to suit your purpose is here, but I can not vouch for its efficacy.
Addon to export to .vox is here:

https://github.com/Spyduck/voxwriter


Is freestyle Render in Viewport in v2.8x bugged? Is it possible to have Freestyle render layers show in the rendered viewport? This was possible in v2.79:

As you can see, just checking 'freestyle' in the right panel, the Freestyle render layer shows in the 3D view (in rendered display mode).

But in v2.80 Eevee renderer, checking 'freestyle' in right panel does not make Freestyle outlines visible.
I would like to have real-time visual feedback for Freestyle outlines without having to perform a full render. Is this possible?

There are 4 ways of creating object outlines in Blender:

Fresnel effect using a shader
Procedural geometric outline
Grease pencil
Freestyle

Currently I don't think it's possible to generate freestyle lines in viewport. The other 3 methods however, can generate outlines in viewport.
Fresnel
Fresnel is a shader effect and is very fast to compute once the shader is compiled. It produces good enough results on curved surfaces, but flat or near-flat surfaces produce horrible results. In addition, it's difficult to customize it beyond it's color.

Solidify modifier
Procedural geometric outline is a fancy name for solidify method. Add a solidify modifier to the object and invert it's normals. Change the material index to black emission. You can then play with the shape of the outline with a displacement modifier and change the vertex weight if you are experiencing any graphical glitches. Clipping however is still quite common and it effectively doubles your poly-count.

Grease pencil
If you are making an outline for a static object, you can try the method used by Janina Gerards. The method involves duplicating the object, deleting it's faces and possibly vertices and converting the remaining edges to grease pencil. You can find it here:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8lQdnQ
Alternatively, in Blender 2.93 there is a new modifier called Line Art that automatically generates grease pencil strokes in your scene. This Line art modifier feels like a solid replacement for Freestyle, because grease pencil can be customized in a similar fashion to Freestyle linesets (color, thickness, noise, type of edge, selected objects). It also supports face clipping another face, unlike freestyle.

I did not stress test the line art yet, just played with it for a while, so I don't know how it behaves with high polycounts (something that freestyle struggles with). I just know that the strokes are generated only from camera view, so the result will look horrible if you just move in the viewport. The strokes will look fine only if you are looking through the scene camera.
Comparison
Scene setup: 3 monkeys and each has 1 cube in it's head. All monkeys have a basic toon shader. First image is a final render, second image is viewport snap.
From left to right: Fresnel, Line art modifier, Solidify modifier


help needed with shading applied to a certain part of a mesh? tldr :ok so I have a mix shader between glossy bdsf and principled bsdf on a mesh, and there is a part of the mesh I do not want glossy bdsf on, is there a way to control which parts of a mesh a shader is applied on?
more details : i have a hair particle system on the object, and i do not want the glossy bdsf to show up under the hair, and i think there is enough hair and do not want to add more to "fix" the problem.

You can:
Select faces of your mesh in edit mode and assign them different materials. This is the easiest, most straightforward way.
Or
Use texture paint to create a black/white mask for the two textures. Combine the two shaders (Put them in the same material) using a Mix Shader, and plug in this mask as the mix factor. This allows for more control, like smooth texture blending and shapes that are not limited to the object's geometry. However, this takes more work to do.


Saving/Exporting an Image (Directly from 3D View) What if I want to save an image, but not actually render it?

An ‘unrendered’ image.

It’s important to note (I think) that the window captured in the screenshot was the UV Editor, containing the rendered image—as well as the option to ‘Save As Image’ (F3)—right up until I selected ‘3D View’ from the popup menu at lower-left.

Now that I’ve selected that, and have the image I want, there is no option to save or export it.

Please help.

Your only options are to either do an OpenGL Render (available via the Render menu at the top of the window) - which will re-render your image using OpenGL (which is what the viewport uses so is quick and should look the same as your image) - or you can tell Blender to take a screenshot of your current Blender window by pressing Ctrl+F3 (although once you've saved your screenshot you'll need to open an image editor (eg, Gimp) to trim off the rest of the window as the screenshot will consist of everything).


Issues with getting to the material button I'm very new to blender, and I'm following a guide on how to make and color spheres, but I can not get to the materials button to get any farther. The farthest one in the properties tab I can get to is data, and I can not find a way to get any further right. How do I fix this issue so I can get to the materials? Also I have another question, I'm not sure what to call it, but the lower right portion of the screen with lots of options, when I drag from the right edge of the screen, it makes another portion with the same settings, so how can I get rid of these extra portions without having to restart? Thanks for any help

First of all you should include some extra information like a screenshot for example. Are you using the "Blender Reder" or "Cycles Render" (I marked the setting in my screenshot where you can see that). If you could include a link to the guide that you are following it would also make things easier.

Follow these steps and you should be able to get to the material and make your object colorful. ( The numbers of the steps are marked in the screenshot so you can find the buttons easier. )

Step 1.: Make sure you are in the default screen layout. (This schould be already the case)

Step 2.: Make sure you selected the object you want to change the material of. If it is selected you should see a small orange line around it in the 3D-View. It also gets highlighted on the top right corner. If your object is not selected yet just right click on it in the 3D-View or left click on it in the top right corner.

Step 3.: Click on the material icon. If you can't see it just pull the properies panel more to the left so it becomes bigger. Now you should be able to change the material of your object. If you want to see the material on you object in 3D you might go to Step 4.

Step 4.: click on thet icon and select "Material" or "Rendered". (Note thet you might want to add a light source if you select "rendered".


How do you get fixed bends on a low poly model? I'm working on a very low poly model (Minecraft style) for a game, I've rigged it by parent with empty groups, then manually assigning bones to groups.  I want to have bend in the arm, but when I do so the joint "pinches"

Notice how the elbow isn't as thick as the rest of the arm.  How can I fix this?

Blend file

It is the way vertices are deformed to obtain a smooth transition angle between the two parts of arm. If you rotate an edge, by projection, it will look like the size is smaller from the hand point of view. (Simple trigonometry rule.)

On a average higher poly model, you would have more vertices on the elbow, with different weights depending of proximity with the other bone. So the arm have same thickness and elbow will smoothly do transition.

In you case you would need the join edge to change size to keep arm thickness, but even if it is possible, it could give weird results.

In this case, since your inspiration come from minecraft, I would suggest you to separate each bone as a distinct piece (with different object or in one, like you want).

If you don't want same minecraft bone separation effect, you'll need to add more vertices to elbow.


Why does this plane's UVs distort when there is exactly one Subsurf subdivision level set? Why does the texture skew when you subdivide the plane once?

Each quad face is always made of 2 triangles in 3D softwares. I guess the result you see has to do with the way Blender will triangulate each of the 4 faces it creates when it subdivides.
Here I use a grid as image texture to make it more understandable. On the left, the original object, on the right, subdivided once. Here is how Blender triangulates:

If I select my original object, cut edges the same way to make only triangles, and turn the outline into a circle, I'll have the same result:

It would work better that way:

With a higher subdivision, the problem tends to be less noticeable.


Auto show/expand outliner to selected objects I'm not sure if it's possible, but if it is that would be great!
Is there a way to make it so when I select an object in the scene, the outliner will automatically expand the hierarchy to show the selected object?

So we know that if the object is already visible in the outliner (not buried in a hierarchy like bones), it will be "highlighted", but the outliner will not auto-scroll to display it.
If you hover your mouse over the outliner window and enter '.', it will scroll and expand hierarchy to display the selected object.
Sometimes I set up another copy of the outliner, and in the filters select to show "Selected" Objects, instead of the default "All".  However, if I selected a hierarchical child object (like a bone), it will still not cooperate fully unless I enter '.' (will then expand to the selected child).
Note that Shift-"right arrow" will expand the complete child hierarchy from the selected parent.

For those of us 3ds Max converts, blender disappoints here.  I may update if I come up with a python script to "sync outliner to selection" in the 3ds Max way.


How to enable GPU rendering on older Nvidia GPUs? I have an older Nvidia graphics card that I would like to use for GPU rendering with cycles. However, I am having difficulty enabling this feature. If I open up User Preferences, I see the following:

The only available option is "CPU". I don't see GPU listed anywhere. What do I need to do to enable GPU rendering on my machine?

Software:

Ubuntu 13.04 64-bit
Nvidia binary driver version 304.88
Blender 2.66a

Hardware:

Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.6GHz
Nvidia GeForce 8400M GS

As iKlsR said in the comments to your question, we discarded the sm_13 cycles kernel... This is exactly the one needed for your series of cards. Please take my advice when I talk to you as a developer - you don't want to enable this for your card.

First of all it's a hassle to setup nowadays! We don't care for this cards anymore, we don't even check if the code still compiles for it (and it certainly won't with our latest speed improvements for Cycles).
Second, it's slower than rendering with CPU in your case.
Third and foremost you are missing some important features with your kind of card:

There is no support for:

Render-passes,
Ambient Occlusion,
Many Cycles multi closures
Hairs
Motion blur ...

As you can see, this is by no means the optimal way to go! I understand when someone doesn't want to upgrade a system, but in this case you should upgrade for sure!


Smooth shading is seemingly creating incorrect normals I have this happening with my mesh with smooth shading:

The center vertex is crooked even though all of its neighboring faces are pointed in the same direction. This pattern continues across a whole face-loop and creates a long crease between these faces.

I thought that smooth shading was supposed to create the vertex normal by averaging its neighbors' faces, so I'm not sure why this is happening. In flat shading it looks completely flat.

I've tried recalculating the normals.

Sometimes this happens for no apparent reasons. I have gotten into the same issue several times when importing models from other 3d packages. The only way to quickly remove them if apply normals and smooth shading doesn't work, is to ....

Delete the faces only, around the affected vertice and the edges undeleted.
Hit X to delete and choose "face only".
Turn on F2 add-on in the user preferences.
Select adjacent edges and hit F, to fill it with a face between them.

You should now how a clean mesh with the correct normals.

  Note Only use this method if Ctrl + N and applying smooth shading on the model does not solve the problem

.


In layman's term, what exactly is the difference of vertex paint and UV mapping? I was watching tutorials on youtube on how to texture and I don't know which one to follow. At first, I thought vertex paint seems easier but the other looks like it's more flexible. I'm going to use the model in a game so I think I need to know the advantages and disadvantages the the two.

Vertex painting is much more limited. Your mesh's resolution is the upper boundary to the texture detail you can have, since essentially you only have one color per vertex (this color can be a compound of several colors for each edge loop that a vertex is on, but it sums up to just one RGB value).

UV textures enable you to map a 2D image to your 3D mesh. This means you can have a big, complex image with a whole lot more detail on a low poly, low resolution mesh.

As far as I know, modern game assets (especially for higher end games) are almost always UV textured. Vertex painting might be simpler, and does not take as much time to wrap your head around it as UV mapping, but in my opinion the latter is a more important technique, that you should get familiar with as soon as possible.


Rendering cutout transparency 2.8 I bumped into strange problem:
I have prepared some animation with cubes and text, at some point my text is fading in, but in the early phase it is totally transparent. The shader used for material is mix shader with transparent and diffuse.

In evee render engine I'm getting proper result in preview, however, when trying to render in Blender 2.8 using Evee the program crashes.
Now I changed to Cycles render, the rendering starts properly, but unfortunately there is the issue with transparency - the fully transparent text makes some kind of cutout which should not happen - it is behind the boxes and it should be invisible.

Is there any setting that I should try? I found somewhere in the net information about mask and Z transparency but couldn't find it in 2.8 version.

Thanks in advance for any help

This is the result I'm getting in cycles render:

This is material setting for my text:

And here settings for my planes:

TLDR; OVERLAPPING OBJECTS

Make sure you don't have objects in the same position overlapping, I initially thought that I moved one object behind  others but forgot to add keyframe for that. It resulted in overlapping meshes and was the reason of the unexpected render.


a quick time+poly saving trick (Remove a section of Edge Loop) while trying to make a model low-poly I was wondering if there was a way that I could delete an edge and have blender automatically re-join the vertices! To get from the left state to the right state without taking any steps in-between

To remove this edges and keep the faces , do the selection and hit X then choose Dissolve Edges  :


Intersecting shapes in edit mode to create single shape For example use the olympics circles logo. Add 7 circles like in that logo. Now how do I make it into a one object like this:

This is an ugly manual example tho. How do I get intersections with vertices that follows the shape 100%.

There's an addon called TinyCAD, which I think is implemented in Blender by default, so you just have to activate it in the Preferences.

Once activated, select all your vertices in Edit mode, then right click > TinyCAD > XALL Intersect Selected Edges. It will create a common vertex everywhere the edges are crossing. Then you just need to remove the doubles with AltM > Merge By Distance, and remove all the inner vertices.


How to set up a color palette in Blender? There is a youtuber named Imphenzia, who does speed model challenges. He has it set up in a way that lets him select a color and apply it to selected faces. That would make my modeling so much easier. Does anyone know a way to set this up?
Example is this YouTube video (Timestamp 3:52).
Thanks for the help.

I found an answer: Create a 5x5 pixel image, and fill each pixel with a color you want to use.
Then open the shader editor.
Then, Shift+A, S for search, then type image texture.
Connect the image texture 'color' output to the 'base color' input of the Principled BSDF node.
Then, open the UV editor, and in the dropdown select your palette image.
Scroll up to zoom in to your image.
Then, tab into edit mode on your object, hover over the UV editor, then press A, S, 0.
Now, your faces should be tiny in the UV editor.
When you want to change the color of a face or multiple faces, you can select any faces in the 3D view, hover over the UV editor, and press 'G' to grab the faces and move them onto any of the colors in your palette.
Source


How to change minor radius of a torus in blender 2.8 I cannot find the way to change the minor radius in blender 2.8.

In Blender 2.8 after adding the torus (or any primitive) a notification will pop up in the bottom left corner of the 3D View.

After pressing it, a list of options will appear, including the minor radius.

Alternatively, you can use shrink/fatten in edit mode (ALT + S).


Deleting Diagonals from a mesh automatically? I downloaded a low-poly gun model ".obj" online. When Imported, I discovered that the author has added weird diagonals on each face of the mesh.

I can remove them one-by-one but it will take whole day to do!

Is there any modifier to solve this?

You might be looking for limited dissolve! All you have to do is select your mesh in edit mode and search for it in the space search bar.

Before:

After:


How do I attach a skirt with a cloth modifier to the cg cookie flex rig? I have tried parenting the skirt to various parts of the armature and mesh, but this has not worked. I eventually want to animate this character and want the skirt to follow the moment of the hips. Thanks!

Here is a link to the blender file

Note: if the rig does not appear, hit reload trusted in the top bar.

Found the problem, I needed to parent to bone instead of parent to object.


Question on How to Separate Meshes Into Multiple, Disconnected Meshes So I'm very new to Blender and was looking to use it to create some sword fight/lightsaber fight actions scenes. However, I'm running into issues with separating body parts for models.

For example, let's say Luke's hand gets cut off by Darth Vader. How do I go about detaching his hand from the rest of his body so that it can be lying on the ground, separate from the rest of his model? I believe that essentially I'd be creating a new model or mesh, but I'm not certain how to do this from an existing mesh.

Any help or links to tutorials would be appreciated. Thanks!

Enter in edit mesh, deselect all, move the mouse over the object that you want to separate, use "L" as a shortcut and you will have a select option. After you select what you want to separate use "P" as shortcut and click on separate. Repeat this for every object that you want to separate.


Boolean modifier cannot be executed error I'm trying to create a background for a friend with his username, so I've created two text objects, and given them meshes. I hope to make some pretty cool semi-transparent materials for them. However, some of the materials for the objects' perimeter shows through from under the front and back surfaces. I understand the Boolean modifier can perform a "negative extrusion" so to speak on the area in which the two objects intersect, but when I select carve, I get a warning saying that the modifier cannot be executed. Can anyone tell me how to correct this?

Your mesh is open, and that is when the Boolean modifier will start to complain. You have to close the mesh. When you mentioned that parts of the mesh are showing through, it proves that your mesh is open. To fix this, you should redo the whole process, perhaps with a less complex font to make sure weird things do not happen to your mesh (that is if you are using another font apart from the default). Hope this helped!


Standard keyframe animation after soft body/cloth simulation I would like to know, how to create simple loc/rot/scale animation or constraint animation after cloth simulation (last frame in simulation cache). When i tried that, it moved only origin of mesh, but not the geometry. I tried to export and import MDD, but animation was wrong after import. I also tried apply as shape key, but than simulation was deleted.

How can i fix that?

Add Vertex group to your cloth object and assign all of the vertices to that group
Add some Empty object to the scene
Add hook modifier to the cloth object with the group in Vertex Group slot and Empty as Object.

Now you can transform the cloth simulation with that Empty.


Why don't Python tooltips appear for the 'Median' transform values in Edit mode? How can I activate Python tooltips in the transform section in edit mode? For other parts of the UI it's is enabled but it isn't in this part:

In 2.91 version there are not python tooltip too.

Those attributes are not completely using RNA API in its source code

TL;DL What is this DNA and RNA stuff?
RNA is also something that is partially made by code generation, using code in source/blender/makesrna. It is supposed to be a somewhat more abstract and nicer interface to the DNA data. For example, where a DNA struct might use a particular bit in a short for some flag, RNA would expose that as a bool property. So far, this nicer Data API isn't used too much in the C source code. Where it is heavily used is as the interface to and from Python. Most of the Python access to Blender data is generated automatically to use the RNA system. See Source/Architecture/RNA for more information about RNA.

The source of edit mode transform is in source > Blender > editors > space_view3d > view3d_buttons.c::code line 560. Which doesn't seems to provide RNA API for more button information.
Another example from object mode transform, the proper RNA definition is in source > blender > makesrna > intern > rna_object.c :: line code 2740 with the following code:
  /* transform */
  prop = RNA_def_property(srna, "location", PROP_FLOAT, PROP_TRANSLATION);
  RNA_def_property_float_sdna(prop, NULL, "loc");
  RNA_def_property_editable_array_func(prop, "rna_Object_location_editable");
  RNA_def_property_ui_text(prop, "Location", "Location of the object");
  RNA_def_property_ui_range(prop, -FLT_MAX, FLT_MAX, 1, RNA_TRANSLATION_PREC_DEFAULT);
  RNA_def_property_update(prop, NC_OBJECT | ND_TRANSFORM, "rna_Object_internal_update");

Which make those button reveal python tooltip automatically .


Mirrored mesh deforms unexpectedly and becomes uneven when rendered I've got a low poly character on Blender. I modelled it, unwrapped it and textured it with a Mirror modifier on, so that modelling and texturing was symmetrical.
However, when I render it, a some of the vertices just... move, without percievable cause. This deforms the mesh, interrupts symmetry and noticeably displaces the texture, albeit only slightly. It is most noticeable in the face, whereby the eyeball on one side of the face begins to clip through the eyelid, whereas the other remains fine.

The issue is only observable when the mesh is rendered; it otherwise appears fine. When I switch between any regular viewport and a rendered viewport, I can see these particular vertices move away from their original, mirrored positions.

At first inspection, no part of the model is influenced by errant keyframes.

Any assistance greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I'm not sure how to upload a .blend just yet; I am working on it.
Here are some before and after shots that hopefully demonstrate what I mean a little better.

EDIT 2: Here is a copy of the .blend file for your perusal. This iteration does not include the texture. The issue is observable when switching between rendered and non-rendered views of the mesh.
ALee - Zombo Man

The before screenshot: Note the eye and general facial symmetry.

After I hit render: The eye on our right has begun to clip through the eyelid. The area of the texture representing the jowls/dental sphere has also changed. I have deduced that the cheekbone/zygomatic arch has changed due to aforementioned vertex movement. The texture around the neck is also seeing deformation due to vertex movement.

I'm not sure about this answer, but to me it looks like a calculation approximation problem: if you add a subsurf modifier to the body mesh, even with only 1 step of subsurf, everithing goes allright (then you can apply it, to get a pure mesh). Blender is not intended as CAD and your mesh is very low poly, maybe also adding some loopcuts would resolve your odd behaviour.

Consider that, generally, we use a circle of vertex for shaping the "hole" of eyes.

Hope it's useful.


Hard surface modeling - Knife So what to do. I have a problem with topology. I'm still getting used to a 3D way of thinking. I was fixing topology on the other side of the knife, dissolving edges to keep the shape smooth (deleting part of the loop cut). The problem occurs when I have a transition from smooth to not so smooth :D.

If it's possible draw the lines on how to retopology my knife.

The Subdivision Surface modifier (which it looks like you are using) smoothes the object based on the average of the points. So in order to make a crease look sharper, add more geometry there. You can do this with a loop cut by using CtrlR. There are also many other ways.

But then again, as mentioned by @RobinBetts, it is much easier to make the handle and blade separately, apply the modifiers, and then join them together.


How do I make the render lighting look like the materials preview lighting? Before I put in "studio lighting" (I followed this simple studio lighting tutorial, with 1250W area lighting from top, left, right) the metal texture looked quite good, however, once rendered in cycles the color seems to flatten/darken and not stay very "metallic" or textured:

The metal still looks alright in materials preview:

Wondering what can i change in lighting or shading so that the render looks more similar to materials preview, maybe even brighter without blowing out the colors?

The materials preview is not, by default, an accurate read of your lighting because it uses an HDRI (high dynamic range image) to create the reflections you are seeing in the preview.

To fix this, open the Viewport Shading drop-down menu and (with Material Preview selected) you will see the two checkboxes for Scene Lights and Scene World. In this window, you can check Scene Lights to reflect YOUR scene’s lighting and Scene World to switch from the default HDRI to YOUR scene’s world (which I’m assuming doesn’t contain an HDRI).

The angle you are looking at, combined with mostly flat surfaces, without an HDRI, are what’s causing the flatness.

To fix this, start by beveling the edges of those sharp corners (it will add realism too). I would suggest adding a Bevel modifier to accomplish this.

Second, look into adding an HDRI so that the flat surfaces have something more nuanced to reflect.

Third, just make sure that your material’s Roughness value is low (.01 to .4ish) as well.

Fourth, in your Eevee settings (unless you are rendering in Cycles), make sure Screen Space Reflections is checked.

Hope this helps.

John


Render an object from "all" perspectives I have an object at 0,0,0 and want to render an animation with "all" perspectives (or "all" possible rotation combinations of the object) of a camera to that object with a given radius. Its like having a sphere and each face of that sphere is a perspective.

I would like to be able to adjust the rotation steps manually.

I already made one with 300+ keyframes but that is kinda time consuming and not adjustable. ;)

So is there a easy way to do that in blender? I hope that my explaination was not to cryptic...

like this, but the camera perspective is generated automatically:

You can use the Curves Extra Objects Add-on to create a spiral and convert this into a Path. A Follow Path constraint and Track To constraint on your camera will then allow your camera to follow the spiral whilst tracking the object.

While it isn't strickly each 'face' (since it's a spiral rather than a set of concentric circles) it might suit your particular requirement or be able to be "adjusted" to suit - eg, by adding drivers to 'modulo' the coordinates to force them to be in discrete steps rather than continuous.

To achieve this, first go to File/User Preferences... and select Add-ons. Find the 'Add Curve: Extra Objects' and enable it.

You should now have a Spirals option in the Add/Curve menu in the 3d View.

Add a Spiral, set Spiral Type to '3' and set Turns and Steps to the desired values.

Select the spiral and select Object/Convert To/Curve from Mesh to convert it to a curve.

Move the camera to 0,0,0 and add Follow Path and Track To constraints as shown :

This can produce the following result :


How do I convert .xmf file to an .obj file How do I convert .xmf file to an .obj file with blender?

.xmf file is a 3D type of file. Can anyone help me?

The "short answer" to your question seems to be, "you can't, yet".

A more complete answer is that in the 3D software world, the ~.xmf file extension seems to be associated with a software package named CAL3D, which is styled as a "character animation library". If an importer is being developed that would allow one to import this file format into Blender, it (or information about it) doesn't seem to have been released yet. It might be that the design philosophy of the developers of CAL3D is such that it might not be easily accomplished. If it is possible, when the add-on is released, one would download and install it, and use Blender to open the ~.xmf file and write the imported file to a file in ~.obj format.


Does blender have this tool : merge every vertices at certain distance point Hi i can do this with single command in Modo, but hard to find the sama function in Blender. Can anyone help ?
pls see the attachment , i have 8 vertices and i want to merge so the adjacent vertex will blend together , to say to become 4 vertices. The mege vertex in blender will merge them all together become 1 single vertex. Or i have to do it for every 2 vertices and repeat the same process. Look, this is just the simple example. We may easily fix this using other method like dissolving edges etc. So here's the real case : I have a head model which is very high detail polygon. There's imperfections of previous edit , so there's some vertices which is look like single vertex but if i zoom it really close , i found 2vertices (also can be 3 or more) that are really close to each other . The problem is it happen sporadically randomly spread acrross the model. I can't inspect one by one as it's hundreds of poly.

So in modo i have a very handy tool that can fix this in single click. WHere it scan the overall model and find each the adjacent 2 or more vertices (at the treshold we can set ) and blend them. And repeat the process automatically until all vertices is fixed.

In Blender , i can't find that tool. So i have to find it myself and merge them. Can someone tell me where is this tool ?

It's called remove doubles and accessible through the Specials Menu: W > remove doubles. You can adjust the merge distance after applying the operation in the tools panel.

Select the geometry in question (or all geometry with A).
Remove double through the W specials menu.
Adjust the merge distance if needed.

From the manual:

  Remove Doubles is a useful tool to simplify a mesh by merging the selected vertices that are closer than a specified distance to each other. An alternative way to simplify a mesh is to use the Decimate Modifier.

Using the decimate modifier will be not pay exceptional attention to the distance though and is in this case not useful.