I'm trying to add a script as an addon and it does not seem to work I'm trying to use this script: http://sourceforge.net/p/ogreaddons/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/blenderimport/ogre_import.py

To import ogre .Mesh files into blender. However when I drop the script into my addons folder it does not show up on the addons list, nor does it's behavior show up in import. If I try and add addon from file, the same thing happens.

Whats going on here? How do I use this addon? If I can't, what other ways can I import an ogre .mesh file?

The script you link to is written for Blender 2.36, easily identified by looking for registration info.

#!BPY

""" Registration info for Blender menus:
Name: 'OGRE (.mesh.xml)...'
Blender: 236
Group: 'Import'
Tip: 'Import an Ogre-Mesh (.mesh.xml) file.'
"""

Blender versions above 2.5 won't be able to load this particular script, because internally and externally Blender has changed a lot in the years between Blender 2.36 and the present 2.7+ series.

Your options are:

Find an Ogre I/O addon compatible with Blender 2.5 onwards.
https://bitbucket.org/iboshkov/blender2ogre (compatible with 2.7! )
This addon seems to be in active development at the time of this writing, that's a good sign.
Use an old version of blender, available from here


Is there a way to delete bone constraints by name? I'm trying to delete all bone constraints containing part of the name 'Action' for selected pose bones. I'm still learning scripting and this is the best I could come up with. Any pointers would be really appreciated!
import bpy

for bone in bpy.context.selected_pose_bones:
    if 'Action' in pose.bones.constraints.name:
        bpy.ops.pose.constraints_clear()

Delete the constraints with name "Action" or delete the constraints from bone which contain "Action" in bone's name? I will assume the later one in my following answer:

Use bone.constraints.remove(constraint) instead of operator. armature - delete bone constraint in python

Directly use what you get from for loop

import bpy

for bone in bpy.context.selected_pose_bones:
    if 'Action' in bone.name:
        # Iterate over all the bone's constraints and delete them all
        for c in bone.constraints:
            bone.constraints.remove(c)  # Remove constraint

import bpy

for bone in bpy.context.selected_pose_bones:
    for c in bone.constraints:
        if 'Action' in c.name:
            bone.constraints.remove(c)  # Remove constraint


Why this material doesn't render? this issue is driving me crazy. I have this simple node material with a dirt texture (.png) applied to a plane.

In the preview render it works and shows up but as soon as i try to render i get nothing!

Someone can help?

Because transparent shader brings alpha channel information.

Diffuse shader by default contributes to the final image alpha with a value of 1.

Transparent shader contributes with a alpha value that reflect its colour HSV value's... value. High values corrispond to a low alpha (not in a proportional way).

By using an Add shader you are combining the shaders's alpha info (or you can  call it Transparency values) in the final render too. I can't exactly tell you the math between the values combination (see below for some thought about it)... anyway the important thing is that the low values rules!

If the Transparency values would be the imputs of a logical operation, the Add shader node would work quite like an OR operator.

In this particular case, the white transparent shader would bring to an almost completely black alpha channel in the final rendered image. If you examine the composite pass without enabling alpha channel I bet you'll see the image correctly rendered, and the alpha channel almost completely black, resulting in an empty final image.

What about the preview?

The difference from the preview cames from the fact that the preview has no alpha, and the grey checker pattern that looks to us as if there is nothing...it's merely a simple, true, background image! It gives the illusion of transparency but it's not related with the final alpha channel. It's the same result you would get in the final render by adding a checker background.

In fact if you put an object with alpha behind your geometry, it will shows up correctly (same thing if you disable Transparent option in the Film panel).

As the resulting shader bring not exactly to a completely black alpha channel, you can try to exaggerate the difference of the values stored into by adding a Math node set to Greater than as in the following picture:

By the way, the most common way to use alpha from texture in shaders involve using the mix shader node as in the following picture:

So the final alpha will be composed from a mix of values of the diffuse alpha (1) and the values from transparent shader (0) masked by the texture's alpha channel.

Here's a brief analysis of how Add Shader node combines two imput values.

Testing scene setup:

Some values:

As shown by the blue function in the graphs above, the resulting alpha is quite similar to the sphere sector equation. The difference is probebly due to the use of some dampening factor, anyway there is no doubt that should be something not too far away from:

Alpha = (1-Value1^2-Value2^2)^0.5

As stated before the Diffuse shader gives you an alpha value of 1, so it means it behaves as a black transparent shader, so it's Transparency = 0. By setting a full white Transparent shader (Transparency = 1) and adding the two shaders you'll have:

Alpha = (1-1^2-0^2)^0.5=(1-1-0)^0.5=0

Which means that with that node setup your images will always have an empty alpha channel.

I wasn't able to find any evidence in the documentation of what I said, so consider it as my personal opinion.


Objects places opposite partly in particle system I am making grass field and part of my grass group for particle have object placed up side down.
I tried to rotate the up side down object too but still it doesn't rotate when used in particle. How can I fix the rotation?

I found out!
If I apply rotation and scale, then it works.


Hard surface modeling - How to model engraved lines? I'm trying to model a sci-fi helmet, in particular those hollow lines that I marked in red color:

So far I have tried:

Boolean difference using super thin cubes
Modeling each part separately

Both methods are time consuming and I imagine there are better options. What kind of tools or methods you would recommend to do this sort of modeling?

Method 1 - Split Vertices
Such engraved lines can be created by splitting vertices and using the Solidify and Bevel modifier. The vertices of edges can be split manually in Edit mode (V + Enter) or mark them as Sharp and use the Split Edge modifier.

The vertices around the circle are split manually, the others are marked as sharp.

Modifier stack is:

Subdivision Surface: level: 2
EdgeSplit: [_] Edge Angle (unchecked), [X] Sharp Edges
Solidify: default values
Bevel: Segments: 2, Limited Method: Angle, Angle: 30° (default)

Video: Modeling Techniques Hardsurface in Blender combined - Pedro Augusto (The part about panels comes towards the end of the video.)
Method 2 - Boolean Modifier
Alternatively, you can copy the model parts, use the Boolean modifier (operation: Difference) to cut it out, and another Boolean modifier (operation: Intersection) on the copy to get the cut-out part. This way you have a deep cut between the parts. Finally, add a Bevel modifier to each part. And tick the Shading → [X] Harden Normals option in the Bevel modifier to fix the shading. Note: This requires in the Object Data Properties the Normals → [X] Auto Smooth setting to be activated.
The Bool Cutter object on the screenshot is 2 cubes join together. One cuts the sphere at the top, the other one cuts it at the bottom. The sphere is actually 2 spheres (one is the middle part, the other one is the top and bottom parts).

Video: Blender Hard Surface Modeling | Slice Operation
Method 3 - Mask Modifier
A flexible method that uses the existing edge loops of the mesh and Bevel and Mask modifiers to create the support loops and the gap. It's described here by Robin Betts:
What is the best way to model the intersection of multiple hard-surface pieces?


Weight Paint not going away where needed I am modeling a zebra but am running into the issue of the ear has some of the mane selected with the weight paint. I try to use the F Subtract brush but it is not producing the desired results as the main weight paint is not changing and it is also unselecting part of the ear. Any ideas?

Before Stroke

After Stroke

It's easier to paint weights if you mask your selection. In Edit Mode select the vertices you wish to work on, and then in Weight Paint Mode press M...

Back in Edit Mode you can also check the Vertex groups and manually remove unwanted vertices...


How can I have separated Layers in Texture painting in cycles? I'm following this tutorial here which is just what I wanted, but it is in Blender Render and I can see any similar feature in cycles
enter link description here

I'm having issues working on my painting because I was hoping to have a layer for my strokes and another for color, shadows, hightlight etc.

those layers would be converted in just one UV image file after I am finished painting.

I'm hoping for a blender solution without addon (I bought zero brush but unfortunatelly is buggy and doesn't work well with existing texture)

I appreciate any tips, thanks

The related comment that cegaton provided shows an answer (via a screenshot of the cycles node editor) in the link that identifies how to add more than one image texture to affect your material.

I think more specifically to you is how to manage this in texture paint mode.
The easy answer is add all of the images you wish to use for all of your different reasons first.

If these images do not exist you need to create them as new images in the UV/Image editor and save them to a file first.
You can do this in the node editor if these images already exist by just adding the Texture >> Image Texture node, and selecting that image in the dropdown selection of the node.

Once you have all of your images in your blend, you just need to make sure that they are present in your material.

They need not be connected to anything yet, it just needs to exist.
Once they exist go into texture paint mode within the 3D viewport, and manage the active image by selecting it via the slots tab on the T menu at left.


Principled volume shader's weird behavior in Eevee I applied a material with Principled Volume (or Volume Scatter) shader only to the cube but it seems like the whole world is affected too.
This only happens with EEVEE render or in Material Preview, it works fine when I render with Cycles though.
I sent the file to a fellow blenderer and it actually had no problem on his computer, so I think this has to be my laptop or settings.
EEVEE without the cube:

EEVEE with the cube:

Solutions I've tried:

Creating new file with factory settings.
Using another version (Blender 2.9 beta)

Rendering with Cycles works fine
Cycles without the cube:

Cycles with the cube:

Okay this seems like a bug but only with some types of hardware. I updated Blender to 2.83.5 which was released yesterday and am so happy that they fixed it. However, it only works with newly created files. Old files still have the problem sadly.
Edit: I don't know if they really fixed it or not but I tested again and sometimes it worked sometimes it didn't.


Why can't an emitter go past 200 frames I want to make a cover for a preview of my first animation, so in he middle of my animation video, I put all the models in the main set to make a cover for the video, and grabbed one of the cameras.

However when I render it, it just shows the render of the last frame I did on the animation. Its like Blender doesn't want to shoot the cover and just wants to get back to the animation.

If I understand your question correctly:
By default, in your particle system the particles emit from frame 1 to frame 200.
Try to increase the "End" value.


End of the spotlight I have some issues with the spotlight (Im using blender 2.8). Actually, I have a spotlight in top of a box. I want my spotlight to go throught the box (see inside) but I want to end it after the box. In other words, i want the light to stop emitting after the box edge. I tried to cast shadow on different elements but no success.

*note: I need to have the spotlight above the box to have the perfect cone.

I am sorry, but the question is still very unclear... You don't have to share your project, but at least give us more informations. For now I'll try to interpret your question as best as I can, and I'll edit it later if you explain yourself better.

The way I understood it is that you want your light to shine through the top face of your object, but not through the bottom faces. I assume you want your top face to be a solid material, and I assume you want to keep it all as one single object. I'll also assume the spotlight direction is always above the object and that you don't want to have extra objects (e.g. shadow catchers). As you can see a lot of assumptions here.

In this case you can do it with 2 different materials applied to the cube. On the bottom faces you have your normal material, while on the top face you have this material:

The principled shader is your material, the other nodes are just there to allow the light to go through the face itself


Blender mesh ray_cast doesn't work, doesn't detect intersections In a Blender script I'm trying to cast a ray against my object and see what face it hits. However, ray_cast doesn't work in any way.

You can see in my example I try casting a ray from every angle to the center of the scene. I'm using the default cube that comes with Blender's startup scene. You can easily test this script by opening Blender and deleting everything except the startup cube.

ops = bpy.ops
scene = bpy.context.scene
current_mesh = scene.objects[ 0 ]
scene.objects.active = current_mesh
ops.object.mode_set( mode = 'OBJECT' )

print( current_mesh.ray_cast( ( 0, 0, 10 ), ( 0, 0, 0 ) )[ 0 ] )
print( current_mesh.ray_cast( ( 0, 0, -10 ), ( 0, 0, 0 ) )[ 0 ] )
print( current_mesh.ray_cast( ( 0, 10, 0 ), ( 0, 0, 0 ) )[ 0 ] )
print( current_mesh.ray_cast( ( 0, -10, 0 ), ( 0, 0, 0 ) )[ 0 ] )
print( current_mesh.ray_cast( ( 10, 0, 0 ), ( 0, 0, 0 ) )[ 0 ] )
print( current_mesh.ray_cast( ( -10, 0, 0 ), ( 0, 0, 0 ) )[ 0 ] )

You can see the result of the above script in the screenshot. Every ray cast comes up False:

I also get the same empty, incorrect results if I replace current_mesh.ray_cast with scene.ray_cast.

Why is ray casting completely broken? Since my object is at (0, 0, 0) I don't think I need to translate any of my ray origins, but either way I'm casting from every cardinal direction and nothing comes back.

I'm using Blender 2.77.

It turns out ray_cast takes start, direction, not start, end, as parameters.

Given a start and end, you can find the direction with something like:

direction = end - start;
direction.normalize()

Assuming that start and end are Vectors, as in start = Vector( ( 0, 10, 0 ) )

Don't trust any Google results about the Blender API docs, because the newest documentation doesn't appear in Google search results. Here's the correct documentation which won't show up when searching.


how do you render falling snow (particles) in cycles render? I can't get the snow I made to be visible in the final animation.

Particles are just points in space, by default have no geometry or anything for light to interact with so they do not render.  There are several ways to render particles, but for your case I would use Object particles.

First create the object you want to use for the snowflakes.  The level of detail depends on how close and in focus the snowflakes will be, but for most applications a simple circle with 8 vertices should work fine.

Next go to the Render rollout of the particle system and select Object and select the snowflake object to use for the particles.


Blender 2.8 sometimes freezes with imported file i work as an 3d artist with 3DS Max; and i thought to give Blender a try.

My problem started that Blender doesn't seem to have native import for IGS/IGES or other CAD files. I solved that by importing the object into 3DS Max and converting it into a OBJ file. (No big deal)

Trying to open the obj file is very slow and sometimes it seems Blender just gave up; but in the end it opens.
File size is 1.53Gb and the model has around 15.858.388 triangles.
As you can see the models i work with are quiet heavy.

But know i got my main problem; that's where my question is...
When i try to work with the model; even isolating an object; Blender sometimes freezes for a few seconds.

Am i doing something wrong?
Do i need to enable or disable some settings?
Can it be the obj file i exported?

Because everything works fine with 3DS Max; and i want to have the same experience with Blender.

I use the same PC for both programms, so i don't think it's the problem.
Intel Xeon v4 @ 2.20GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti (MSI)
32GB RAM

I've just noticed that 3DS Max has an option to export OBJ file optimized for Blender.
That seems to be the solution apart from lowering the polycount on import from IGS file.

EDIT
After some tests i’ve got the following results:
Default import option: 15.858.388 triangles
Optimized import option: 557.088 triangles

Export to OBJ for Blender:
Default import + default export: 1.53Gb file (that’s a killer for Blender)
Optimized import + optimized export: 58.9 Mb


Why does mesh shrink when using shape keys? This is the first time I've used shape keys, but from what I understand they should be pretty straightforward.

I have the Basis key and I've added an Arms_up shape key, see mesh examples below:

Basis shape key

Arms_up shape key

The problem I have, is that half way through the interpolation of the Basis and the Arms_up keys, the arms are shrunk. What could cause this? Are there considerations should I take into account when using shape keys?

Here are my shape key settings.

Where am I going wrong? I should also note that I have two unapplied modifiers in the stack, a mirror modifier on the X axis and a subsurface modifier.

Shape keys work by smoothly, but blindly, moving each vertex from one location to another. It's likely that as each vertex is blindly trying to get to its destination, the intermediate result is this shrunk version of your mesh.

Shape keys are "dumb." They do absolutely nothing to maintain volume, do any kind of skinning, or anything "smart" like that. It's a SUPER simple transform.

I wish I could upload images from where I am, but imagine a plane with 4 vertices. You have a Basis key that looks like the plane, and then you have a Flipped key that moves the vertices in an X pattern. The top-left vertex goes to the bottom-right, the top-right to the bottom-left, etc. So that the end result is also a plane, but it's upside-down and backward. Each vertex is going to go straight to its designated destination without any concern for any other vertices, so you can imagine that exactly half-way through the process, they're all going to be basically a really tiny point in the middle of what used to be a plane. Something similar is what's happening to your arms, there.

This is what rigs are for ;-) Rigs can preserve the relative position of the vertices so that they don't do weird things like this.

EDIT: For some reason, my image isn't supported on this site, but you can find it here.

In this animation, I add two blendshapes, basis (which you always have) and key1, to the default cube. Then, I select all the verts in edit mode and rotate them around the x-axis (this will be hard to follow, if you can't see the gif). This is now my key1 blendshape. The point of all this is that it doesn't matter that I rotated the verts. If I were using keyframes, the rotation would matter, but not with blendshapes. When I adjust the strength of key1, each vertex will move along the shortest path between its two positions, regardless of where any of the other verts are. This means that all the verts pass very closely to each other about half-way through the transition, which makes a really skinny prism.

This is basically what's happening to the arm. Each vertex is blindly moving to its designated destination, and the intermediate result can sometimes be undesirable.

The solution might be adding intermediate shapes, but this is not the way blendshapes are usually used.

I hope that helps!


Move UV coords like Object coords? I want to have a decal texture on an object move based on the location of an empty.

It is possible to use Object coordinates projected from another Object using the drop down in the Texture Coordinate node. This allows you to project a texture based on the location of this object, usually an Empty. But that texture has to be mapped with Object coordinates, so it needs to be a procedural texture. I am looking for a way to do something similar but with UV coordinates so I can do it with an image texture.

I know it is possible to use drivers to change the mapping, but I'm not clear on the best way to do it. If there's a solution that doesn't require drivers that would be better.

As the texture is projected in the positive quadrant of the XY plane of the input vector, we need to translate the coordinates by (0.5,0.5,0.0), and clip them.

And to stop the texture from being projected on other places of the geometry (i.e. the backside), one can use a mask to limit the Z distance.

Now it's only a matter of placing and orient the empty for the needed projection.

Here's an example:


Apply a grunge texture across an array I am experimenting with creating a wooden plank array. The texture uses the Generated option in the texture coordinate node for texture variation on the array objects. The modifier stack includes subsurf and displace modifiers to create some mesh variations for each array object.

I am wondering: is it possible to apply a grunge texture across the entire array? For example, a drip stain from top to bottom if the array was used for a wall. Any help would be appreciated.

I figured it out with the following node setup.

The grunge texture is applied via the object option in the texture Coordinates node.


How to switch different sequences of characters with Animation Nodes? What I want to achieve with Animation Nodes is below:

For example, Using four text objects to represent 1,9,9 and 8 individually, then I want to switch it to 2016, which means

1 to 2 (the switch sequence should be [1,2])

9 to 0 (the switch sequence should be [9,0])

9 to 1 (the switch sequence should be [9,0,1])

8 to 6 (the switch sequence should be [8,9,0,1,2,3,4,5,6])

Then, I want to do both animation styles like below:

A:
when 1 to 2 is finished, the 9 to 0 animation will continue, then 9 to 1, then 8 to 6.

And B:
all four digits switching animation can start together and end together, in other words, with the same duration.

Here is the file to start:

Oh that's an interesting problem. Here is my solution:

I started by making a group that 'interpolates' between two characters (numbers in this case, but I wanted it to be more generic).
The group takes the Start and End character as well as a list of the ordered characters. Additionally it has a Step input. The output is the current interpolated character after the given amount of steps.

With that given the first effect you described is fairly easy to archieve:

The second one is a little more complicated because we have to calculate the amount of required steps to get the timing right. The group that does that is very similiar to the other group.

The two most important nodes I used to archieve the effects are the Search List Element and Shift List node. This screenshot hopefully shows how they work:

[EDIT:]
To have a text list as input you can reuse most of the existing nodes. The final setup looks like so (I don't show the nodes that did not change here):


How to move the handles of a sequence via scripting? There are the following commands:
create sequence editor
bpy.context.scene.sequence_editor_create()
add strip (name, filepath, channel, frame_start)
bpy.context.scene.sequence_editor.sequences.new_image("coolName", "path/db.png", 4, 1)
Until now I have created a sequence on channel 4, starting at frame 1 like in the following picture:

I want to control the starting frame of the slider and the ending frame of this strip. How can I achieve this using blender script?

You can reference the sequence object immediately when creating it:

seq = bpy.context.scene.sequence_editor.sequences.new_image("coolName", "somePath/img.PNG", 4, 1)

Then you can edit the frame_final_start and frame_final_end to edit the sequence start and finish, same as the handles:

seq.frame_final_start = 10
seq.frame_final_end   = 50


What happened to the new 2.9 feature "Blueprint at the time"? Some months ago Blender announced a new feature "Blueprint at the time" which would let us draw faces out of edges in kinda SketchUp-like manner. It also displayed additional blue grid under your cursor to help with incremental snapping.
It was meant to be added to v2.9 but I could no longer hear about it. Perhaps it was withdrawn due to instability?
Does anyone have clue what happened - are they still developing this feature or did they give up? It would be wonderful to have it inside Blender!

This feature has been partial implemented for Blender 2.91 as the new add object tool. It allows to control the parameters of a handful of primitives interactively. The design task for this is T57210, the commit that added the feature was rB122cb1aea823


Is there a way to edit around another object? Sorry for my poor english! I couldn't find an answer for this since I wasn't sure what words to use to find the solution.
I'm trying to make a mesh around another mesh without editing the mesh that I'm trying to model around for. Is there a way to lock the first model that it wont be effected or moved when I edit the second model around it?

As long as the meshes are different objects, editing one will not affect the other, in other words you can only edit one object at the time.

When you create an object in object mode it will be independent of other objects.

A more detailed explanation:

Blender uses a hierarchical structure to organize data.

You can Add a Mesh in Object Mode and Edit mode, but they are not the same.

So what is the difference?

When you add an mesh in Object Mode you are creating both, a mesh and an object. Objects created in object mode are independent of each other, meaning that they will be named with a unique name and will all have their own separate origin (or pivot point), and can be transformed independently.

Meshes created in Edit Mode are part of the Active object, an already existing object that is being edited.

Objects can contain one or many meshes, connected or not.

All meshes within that object will share a common origin and will behave as what they are: a single object, meaning they will move, rotate and resize together when transformed in Object Mode.

For example: Here's a scene with four different objects created in object mode. Each one of them shows as a different object in the outliner.

If new meshes are added in edit mode, they become part of the active object, note how the outliner shows no other objects being created, all new meshes are part of the same object called "cube":


2.8 Outline on Curve Objects Is there a way to hide these outlines that are on curve objects? They kind of get in the way in my render preview.

switch off overlays (3d viewport - top right)


can`t remove selected face I was trying to remove selected face.

So I entered edit mode and selected designated faces

pressed delete (face) and got below result

I don`t know why vertexes and edges still exist

How to remove this completely?

I have uploaded my project file.it is from the C-130 model made by manilov.ap in https://skfb.ly/6OR7z. (CC BY 4.0)

do I missed something?

These are different objects.

You can edit them all together by selecting them and switching to edit mode.

By the way, Blender has .WRL importer:

but it seems to be broken for the recent versions.

Generally it is better to download original files from SketchFab because glTF messes them up.


Image Texture Node Copy / open / unpack behavior Windows 10
Belnder 2.79b

Hello there,
I've been using Blender now for about three years or so. Recently had to reinstall my system from scratch and after doing all that I noticed a behavior in Blender that is new to me and I want to make it stop lol.

It seems to me like something it's supposed to do but it didn't used to so I need your help. And here is the question...

When I am in cycles working on a model that has several textures I like to set up the first one with the Principled shader, add my images texture nodes for color/roughness/Normal etc..pretty standard stuff.

In the past I would then copy and paste this to the rest of the materials and then click the little folder icon in the Image Texture Node and it would open to the folder where the materials were for the last texture I applied, I select the new one and move on...

But now, I click that folder icon and it has a popup called UNPACK with 4 choices to USE/Write/Use/Write in various ways. I have to click the X to clear it all and then I get an OPEN button where i have to then search back to where the textures are....you get the idea.

How do I stop this?

Thanks in advance
Richard

This happens when you packed your external data into your .blend file. Meaning the textures are stored inside the .blend file.

So when you click this icon, since the pictures are packed, it asks you to do with the packed data.
In your case, you may want to unpack them. If I remember correctly you have the choice between exporting the files into a custom folder, or into the original folders if they still exist, or into subfolders from the .blend file.


Align neck body to head geometry I did some editing of the head so it no longer fits properly to the body. How do I match the body neck mesh edge to match the head neck edge perfectly?

I know I can connect them and then detach but I already have vertex groups and face keys for the head, is there a more passive way to align the mesh?

1- Enable the Snapping Tool clicking the magnet on the 3D view bar.
2- Next to the magnet icon hit the icon next to it to select snap to what> Select
Verex.
3- Select a vertex along the neck edge.
4- Move cursor close to its desired destination.
5- Hit G, then ENTER when in snapped position.

Note: Transform manipulators doesn't work well with the magnet.


What are some use cases for the singlar ray output? Using the singular ray output, it's possible to detect whether or not the object is being viewed through a perfectly sharp reflection or refraction:

Besides changing colors of reflections, what are some possible use-cases for this variable?

I still have not spent the time to do a proper write up of this, but here is a preview of the effect, and the Blend File for your own use.

Even though this seemingly begins to look like a distance based thing, I really believe (in my own opinion, without further study) that this is still using amount of refraction as the basis for this effect, and the margin is pretty small. I would imagine that playing with settings such as the ones found here: This Link would change this potential up quite a bit, how ever I can see some sequential lighting animation being done with this node, as long as each light would have to pass through something that would cause this type of refraction like the glass prism shown in this answer.


Is there an equivalent to Remove Doubles for Bezier curves? I have been doing a lot of work with curves recently (mostly Bezier because of the greater control) and I have stumbled across an issue, I can't seem to find an equivalent option to Remove Doubles used for meshes. Is there a way to merge all vertices along a curve within a given distance?

For clarification, a double is considered two vertices in the same space (same coordinates), but part of different segment strings. For example, you may have a cyclic curve, three segments  of which are duplicated, and not part of the one coherent whole of the cyclic curve.

There is no equivalent to Remove Doubles for Bezier Curves. This is likely due to the difference in the nature of Curves versus Meshes. As Denis stated, if the two points have different handle positions, how should this be, um, handled? ;-) Should the handle positions be averaged together? Also, Remove Doubles can just merge vertices based on a distance threshold no matter how many edges are connected to it, but Curves are fundamentally different since a point cannot have more than two segments connected to it. Simply put, Curves are linear while Meshes are non-linear.

This doesn't necessarily mean such a feature couldn't be implemented, but it would have limited use cases, and for non-identical doubles it would have to make reaching assumptions about how you want your points merged. For example, if your Curve doesn't cross itself you may be alright, but if it does it could easily end up getting merged at the intersection and the path rerouted in an unexpected way. Here's a screen shot to illustrate what could happen hypothetically:

In conclusion, it could be useful in cases where the doubles lie right on top of one another, but at higher distance thresholds could produce unexpected results. Such a feature could be useful for certain situations, such as for removing points lying on top of one another that you can't see.

For now, you could find such disconnected points by selecting at least one point on each of your curve segments you intend to keep, using Select Linked CtrlL, Hiding them H, then Select All A and Delete X the disconnected left-over points. Then Un-Hide AltH the segments you will keep.


How to import OBJ files into Blender with script? I'm working up to building a small script which will allow me to import and render 2D views of several OBJ models, but I'm struggling at the moment with the very basic first step, which is importing a model from a folder on my computer. I attempted to follow the code in the script in a somewhat related question, but even if I directly copy-paste the code and just change the directory path to where my model is located, when I press Run Script, nothing happens. I don't see any errors, I don't see anything happen, just nothing. I'm fairly new to both Blender and Blender scripting, so I'm not very sure what's going on and any help would be appreciated!
This is my code at the moment (copied and pasted from the link above, but modified to have a Linux file path):
import bpy
import os
import glob

# Model directory
model_dir = '/home/yuerno/Downloads/test'

# Specify OBJ files
model_files = glob.glob(model_dir + "*.obj")

for f in model_files:
    head, tail = os.path.split(f)
    collection_name = tail.replace('.obj', '')
    bpy.ops.import_scene.obj(filepath=f)
    myCol = bpy.data.collections.new(collection_name)
    bpy.context.scene.collection.children.link(myCol)
    for ob in bpy.context.selected_objects:
        myCol.objects.link(ob)

Try adding the trailing / to your directory path. You're searching for /home/yuerno/Downloads/test*.obj instead of /home/yuerno/Downloads/test/*.obj
Or better yet, use os.path.join to put the parts together:
# Specify OBJ files
model_files = glob.glob(os.path.join(model_dir, "*.obj"))


Can I colorize hair particles based on the Emitters Shading? I'm  experimenting with CELL SHADED fur. The thing is that it doesn't look that great... I'd like for the hair particles to just take on the flat color of the surface where they're placed, after the emitter's been shaded.
I've experimented with the 'shader to RGB' node and geometry normals. Also, I thought about baking the shadows as a texture and then coloring the hair based on UV, but I think that it wouldn't work with animations, because the shading would change with each frame.
Here's how the emitter/ object looks after shading, without hair:

Here's what I wish it looked like with hair (based on the shaded sphere):

Here's what a normal cell shaded fur ball looks like:

I think that the hair casting shadows is a big problem too...
Any tips would be appreciated. c:

Transfer Normals on Instanced Particles
Theory:
Currently I don't think there's an easy way to pick the value of the shaded surface of another mesh and transfer to the built in hair strand, but we can copy it's normals orientation and use the same material and transfer them to another object.
We basically just neet to create a separate Object that will work as a particle system, but it's actually a mesh, so we can tweak it's shading.
If you want to know more, there's a YT video about the same technique used for making NPR trees foliage by David from Lightning Boy Studio:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEgzuMmJtu8

Practice:
Starting from a situation similar to this one:

You need to create a particle system using an Object as Render instance.
Don't put any actual object in the Instance Object field, as we are going to use a Particle Instance modifier on another object.
Create a new object containing a custom strand shape mesh and add a Particle Instance modifier to the object pointing to the mesh with the particle system we created before (system_mesh in my case).

Enable Children and "Size" options if you are planning to take
advantage of these features.
Pick Local in the coordinate system so your particles object will
follow the main object.
Also enable Create Along Paths to make your strand following the
hair curve.
You may want to disable Keep shape for more control, but it really
depends on your particle system settings.

Now duplicate and assign the same material of the base mesh, we'll get rid of the shadow casted from the hair object by setting None in the Shadow Mode option. That's the only difference between the materials.

Note: you can obtain a great effect by actually leaving the shadow on and using the Soft Shadow fature an playing with the Cube Size and other light/shadow related parameters
Final step is to add a Data Transfer modifier to replace the shading normals of the instances with the ones from the nearest face. Remember to enable autosmooth and to set it's value to an appropriate value, in this case 180°.

Final test and blendfile for inspection:


Smoke is not appearing in cycles, neither is the CPU option I have v2.75 and I keep seeing that I need to change the render to CPU, but I don't even see the option... How do I fix this so that I can see the smoke when I render it?

The CPU/GPU dropdown selection menu is not visible because you don't have an Nvidia GPU card enabled for usage (either your card isn't Nvidia or it's not enabled for rendering) in the user settings. CPU mode is the default render mode in this case.

If you DO have an Nvidia card installed, you may have to update to the newest drivers for it to show up in your CUDA user preferences selection.


Packaging external libraries in the game engine 'Create Runtime' I'm wondering if I create a game using the game engine that relies on external libraries, for instance midi device libraries like pyGame.midi, if those can be bundled in the executable created by the game engine?  I want to generate midi to external devices from the game engine, but I want to be able to use python modules that use ctypes etc to connect to native dll's/.so's.

What are the rules for packing external resources into the game engine?
Does anyone have an example where this is being done?

I have seen a lot of posts describing using socketed IO to communicate with externally packaged apps, but I would like to be able to bundle everything for an architecture into one executable.

Or just not possible?

The limitations of the Make Runtime Function is that it can only work on the Blend file that's currently open. If your game has external assets (unpacked textures, unpacked sound, other blender file as libs, external Python modules), these will not be packaged automatically.
But it's definitely possible to make a stand-alone package with all the Python modules. It's just a matter of knowing where everything goes.
Python Module Basics

Understand where Python looks for modules (hint: local modules override system modules)
Because the current path of the Blend file is always the first place Blender will look for Python modules, you can just place any module right next to the Blend file. Alternatively, I'd like to keep all my non-standard modules in one folder. So if you have a myModule, I would place it in a directory called externs.
You can access modules you've placed under externs by import externs.myModule

Packaging
For packaging a runtime to include all the external libraries, you just need to keep everything in place relative to the Blend file, since the blend file is always going to be your starting point. This applies to Python scripts/modules as well as unpacked asset such as textures and sound.
Pure Python modules are easier to deal with because you don't have to worry about them not working on different OSes. For dynamically linked libs (dlls/so's), just make sure you have a working version for each of the platform you are releasing for.
Folder Structure
Unfortunately, the structure of a packed runtime is slightly different for each OS. So you'd have to know where the Blend file is in order to copy the py modules to the right place.
On the mac, a runtime is pretty much the original blenderplayer.app with a game.blend file stored under the blenderplayer.app/Content/MacOS/Resources/ directory. So typically all your external asset that's not packed by make runtime need to go in the myGame.app/Content/MacOS/Resources/ folder.
On Windows, a single .exe is created that contains the blend file. So, any external asset go relative to the .exe file.
I believe Linux is the similar to Windows, external asset go relative to the binary blob.
Hope that helps!


How do I add thickness to my cardboard cut-out image-as-plane? Greetings fellow Blenderers. This is a continuation of the issue first presented here.
I have a very nice 2d plane that has both my PBR cardboard texture as well as the single image with alpha-channel. Now, I'd like to solidify it. Currently, this is the result:

Now, I completely understand why there is no center. It's just a flat plane and there is no geometry to extrude, per se. My question then becomes: How do I do that? Or, if the answer is (it's too complicated), then how do I fake it?
Thanks in advance for your attention. Hang in there. Like that sun. All smiling and happy. What's his con?..
UPDATE
Okay, I have an idea of a workflow that will work, but I have to get over one really big sticking point:

Keep the existing material because that part works
Go into Illustrator and turn the overall shape of the sun into a single SVG
Import the SVG
Object - Convert to Mesh from Curve
Solidify
Marvel at the truly ghastly default geometry that has been created

Become confused as I can't effectively remesh the resulting geometry so that it has nice, square shaped UV maps.

So yeah, List Item #7 is where I am currently stuck on.
Be great.
Here is a link to my source file. I have pain-stakingly broken out my process flow into individual layer/collections. It should be quite self explanatory once you open it. It's basically a time-lapse of my activities with the shape, trying to make the shape do what I need to eventually receive the texture. I am now amazed at how hard this is.
Update on AM of 7/28 / Thank you for the overnight responses. Specific replies:

Susu: I actually did that, but the resulting mesh (using either fill method) was similarly bad looking, though it was still be best result given all the other bad ones I encountered.
Moonboots: That's actually what I want to avoid. I have a number of 2d images I'd like to convert to 'cutouts' and manually drawing points takes far too much time and effort.
Jachym: Sadly, that doesn't work. When it comes time to apply my texture, I encounter all kinds of display problems. Something about the botched geometry is deforming the results.
General Reflection on this: The 2D import behavior is just wretched. I come from a 2D background where SVG's have mostly behave themselves and worked fine in whatever workflow I happen to find them in. But Blender needs to an intervention.
Glorious (7/29 Afternoon): I have definitely decimated. Included above is a link to the source file. Thanks for looking! Also, projection mapping didn't work. There's something wonky in the geometry that caused it to look mangled.

Thank you all very much for your contributions.
Current Key Observation: I'm having the darnedest time removing the side geometry from my little sun shape. I can't figure out a proper way to auto-select it without completely butchering the overall geometry. What kills me is that I know I did it last night, but I can't replicate it.

I realized that - once again - I'm overthinking this. With more time away, the solution came to me.
In my above question, I identify Step #7 as the issue, but it doesn't have to be. Instead, I realize I should ignore all that goofy geometry. All that matters is I have my ugly extrude with terrible faces.
What I have is that extruded shape set at 0.009 m Z-depth (thin like cardboard). Then I put my 2D plane on it. As long as the material is close to the color of the cardboard (or dominant 2d image color), it will look just fine.
My Current Understanding of Workflow:

Process image to ensure that it has necessary alpha channel. Export a PNG.
Pull image into Illustrator and use the Image Trace option to create a simple outline around the imagery. Export a SVG.
Import Image as Plane; apply additional textures as necessary (if overlaying texture on top of corrugated cardboard texture as I am).
Import SVG as Curves; extrude to needed depth; turn to a mesh.
Place the flat 2D image 'on top of' the 3D mesh that will become the cardboard's faked-depth.
Enter orthographic mode to look at the model head-on. Make final adjustments to ensure the SVG and PNG 'match' locations, as my tests have shown that it won't perfectly match at first. Simply nudge it in ortho and you get your results.

Final note: For whatever reason, when I do this, the 2D image clips into one side of the mesh geometry. Simply adjust the placement (or flip the model over, as I have). This seems to fix it.
Thanks to all of you on my little mini-rollercoaster ride. I will treasure this moment of feeling like I figured something out... because Blender amirite..


What's happening with vector displacement 2.79b? pretty quick question. I use the vector displacement node in order to add greebling to models. The latest version of 2.79b doesn't have that node, which seems to be why sheepit render farm is returning "flat" non displaced models.

Does anyone know if I should just wait for an update? Or if there is a way to do displacement without the vector displacement node?

Thanks guys, appreciate any advice!

Try connect it directly. For example, connect Image Texture color output to Displacement input of Material Output node.


Dark material = less reflection? I want to create a dark material in cycles that is strongly reflecting the HDR. That would be no problem with a bright color but a dark color seems to swallow the reflection. Why is that?

I tried to increase the brightness of the HDR with RGB-curves but than my bright materials are overexposed.

What node-setup do I need to bring back the reflections in the dark material?

"Strongly reflecting" and "dark" are mutually exclusive.

However, maybe all you need to do is decrease the saturation of your material's colour. If the colour contains no red or green components, then there will be no red or green components in the reflected colours and the material will look quite dark.

For example, here are three reflective balls rendered in Cycles. From left to right, the saturation of the blue colour applied to these materials is 70%, 85% and 100%. With a lower saturation, the results look a lot more natural.


How to bend tube so it's ends fit given positions? I am trying to bend the tube, so it fits the end caps.

The bent tube is made from the straight one at the right. I wish would tube reach the end caps correctly, but failing.

In another attempt, I used a "by-eye" approach.

First I adjusted limits and moved the bent tube appropriately:

Then I applied the modifier and removed the unneeded faces:

This works, but I'd like to use a more precise solution. Can anyone think of a way to do this more precisely?

Its not the precise awnser to your question using "curves".

I suggest you use the "spin tool" to get the desired "precise" effect and control.

Add a circle.

In front view.

Go to edit mode.

Move the circle to which point you want.

Press spin. (It wil spin around the midpoint as centerpoint)

And adjust your desired settings.


Create a Mesh with vertices If I have a list of vectors. Then how can I create a mesh out of it using the vectors as vertices?

I don't wan't to create a mesh before that exactly matches the vertices count to the one of the vector list.

To give an example, a mesh existing of vertices from this vector list:

AN allows you to manipulate meshes with the Mesh Object OuputNode. It takes Mesh Data as input and in order to get mesh data from vectors (vector list), you have to call the Combine Mesh DataNode.
Take the vertex location list (vector list) that you need and connect it to the input of the combine mesh data. Then Choose an object to copy the data to or create a target by clicking the +button.

The thing is this node setup will only create the vertices in the mesh, and no faces. Why is that? Because you didn't give the AN enough information to create edges and faces. How should it know which vertex to connect with which one if you don't say it explicitly? This is why there are two more inputs to the Object Mesh Data Node. Edge Indices and Polygon Indices.

Unlike the vertex locations, these inputs are a little bit more difficult to understand. In order to know how to fill these intputs and get a whole mesh, let's see what the vertex location is. If you are familiar with any programmation language, you should be familiar with the concept of lists. If not, a list has got elements in there, (here 3D vectors). And to access these element in the list, each of the vector has an index. The first point will have the index 0, etc. You can figure this out by selecting the node which outputs the vector list and hit W and then debug. If your list has 5 elements, the first is going to be 0: V("x", "y", "z") and the last one 4: V("x", "y", "z").

Now let's go into the edge indices: as we have seen it's just a way to connect two vertices. Edge indices is a list, so it is also going to have elements and indices. Each element is a list (a tuple if you are familiar with python or programmation) saying which index of the vector list is connected to which one. For example if you want to have one edge connecting the second and third vertex, the element is going to be 0: (1, 2). The 0 is the index of the edge (there is only one), the one is the index AN uses to access the second vertex and to connect it to the vertex of index 2 (the third).

The same principe applies to the polygon index list. I think the polygon indices select the vertices to create the faces, and not the edges

So now how do you create these lists in order to say the AN how to create the mesh? You can use the create edge indices list and create edge indices nodes.
From there you can set each connexion between each point.

for the polygon indices, call the create polygon indices list, and create polygon indices.

If you don't want to become crazy with all these indices, you can take the edge and polygon indices of a basemesh (ex: base_cube). Just make sure your target has the same amount of vertices than the mesh you use to copy the indices.


How can I smooth or add loop cut without putting it between faces one by one? I want to add loop cut in each faces without putting it one by one. How can I do it?

To add multiple loop cuts at the same time, use Ctrl+R to enable the loop cut tool, then scroll up/down to increase/decrease the number of cuts.

Edit:

Use Subdivide rather than loop cut. Select all the faces, press Ctrl+F, then select subdivide. You'll end up with an extra loop parallel to the circle, so select that loop, and Dissolve Edges.


Driver based on Render Layer I want to drive a property in a Cycles material based on the current Render Layer or Scene being rendered. Is there any such property? If not, is this something that could be made as an addon, or is there some technical limitation that prevents it?

You can use Animation Nodes addon to control both:

Basic setup for driving by active render layer:

Explanation:

Scene Input node: Used for reading scene data. (Note: this node can only be found by searching via Ctrl + A. And, considering the huge amount of all kinds of nodes in AN, as a beginner, you may want to create the following nodes by searching as well.)
Expression node: This is a very powerful node, which can do a lot of things. In this case, it is used for reading the name of the active render layer from data path.
Compare node: It outputs the comparison result between A and B. In this case it means: if A is equal to B, or more specific: if the active render layer name is RenderLayer.2, then it outputs True,  a boolean value, otherwise False.
Switch node: It outputs either one of the two values based on the condition input from the previous node.
Cycles Material Output node: Used for controlling Cycles material parameters, very intuitive to understand I bet.

Basic setup for driving by selected scene:

Explanation:

Mostly the same as above.

You can download the addon here. More info see here. If you really want to drive things like that without coding yourself, it is worth learning it a bit.


Rigid body settings to a group as a whole I would like to apply rigid body physics to a grouped set of objects, but would not like that set of objects to be dismantled during the simulation (preserving their relative positions).

For example, imagine two spheres forming a "water molecule":

And I want to bounce such molecules in my simulation without breaking them apart. How do I go about doing that in Blender?

Join objects together. Select objects you want to join then press Ctrl+J.


How can I see the python actions in Blender Is there a way to see the python code generated when I do actions? I know that this may be a simple question but I just started using blender.

You can do this by dragging the top menu bar downwards and you’ll see the python code there as shown in the top of the snapshot below.


Texture rendering looks different from preview I created a 3d duck with png alpha feathers.
I merged feathers to the body of the duck.
Cycles rendered preview is cool but when I export the feathers take the unalpha texture of the body (not of the feathers)

I almost give it up :)

You have set body material in View Layer Properties > Override - you have to disable it.

Second thing is your UVMap - rotated 90 deg. = squized image.
If you would like to fix it, it would be such painful unwrap each feather so I would suggest just to rotate original images to landscape orintation.

Third thing is - "someone" wanted paint feather to brown and destroyed alpha channels. I saw some separated alphas (masks) packed in your file, so you would probably use them instead original ones.
Funny, with all these errors, it is looking cool in Worbench engine :)

Note to Normals direction - if you will have some shading issue in render,
select all faces and press Shift+N.

Nice flight, your forensic team from future, in hope message will be delivered on time :)


Efficient method to extrude curbs Very often I need to extrude a shape inwards or outwards to create a curb/wall or simply another edge loop. I move the verts around manually and it's a painful and long process. I'm looking for methods of extruding every vert by a set distance of it's parent vert.

This is what simply extruding and scaling does:

This is what I need:

Any fast way to do this?

select the upper face, and press  I  to activate the inset tool.


How to export an Image(png / jpg) as glTF? Sorry if I'm a complete noob, this is my first time using blender.

So far, I've managed to import the image as a plane with the addon  (import/export image as a plane), and now want to export it out as a glTF file type.

However when i do so, the exported glTF does not have the image I've placed and is empty.

I've found another forum (link) that guy stated he had a similar problem to what I was having. However, the solution which requires to uncheck/disable the transparency/z transparency, but is missing from my blender project - as seen from the first image above while in materials tab.

Maybe I am at the wrong part of blender or is there a newer solution to this issue?

The imported image is using the "Diffuse BSDF" shader, but glTF has a PBR material system that is based on the "Principled BSDF" shader.

Luckily, you can just swap one for the other to get this working.  Use the "Shading" tab at the top of Blender 2.80 to get to this area, and replace "Diffuse BSDF" with "Principled BSDF":

Additionally, if your image has any translucent parts, set "Blend Mode" to "Alpha Blend" in the material settings (Eevee only) like so:


Hair particles laying flat on hills I am trying to make grass using hair particles. When I add hills to my scene the grass/hair lays flat - I need them to stay vertical.

Here's a picture and my .blend file. What's going on? I have looked everywhere for an answer over the past 3 days.

blend file

In the particle panel, click on advanced, then in the velocity section, lower the normal strength and grow the Z strength :


Exported .fbx not opening I have a rigged and animated file made in blender that was exported as a .fbx file, but I can't open it with FBX Review or Unity. There is no error message that show up in either tool.
I have no idea what the problem is. I did a lot of searching and reading still have no clue on what is happening. I can't reproduce the problem. It happened on this file only.
Any help is appreciated.
The file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1INcxwUYd8i0rmObaHUsYJz9C4VmVQsHJ/view?usp=sharing

I found the reason:
I didn't apply the modifier inside Blender, but applied it when exporting.
That's why it crashed. Just apply the modifier in Blender, before exporting, then everything is OK.


Object rotation in node I have a field of ellipsoids with various rotations. I'd like to colour them by their rotation. Is it possible to get an object's rotation in a cycles material node?

Sort of..

You can insert a "Value" node (under Input) into your Cycles shader, then add a driver to it (right-click the parameter and select Add Driver); get the driver to copy the rotation axis of whatever object you want to use:

With the Value node selected, go to the Graph Editor.
Switch mode from F-Curves to Drivers.
On the left hand side of the editor, find the "Value" inside Material > Shader Nodetree and click on it.

At this point you might need to reveal the panel at the right hand side of the editor - hit N if you can't see it.

In the "Drivers" panel, change "Type" to "Averaged value".
In the variable panel, make sure "Transform channel" is selected, then specify your Object from the input by name, change Type to "X Rotation" (or Y rotation, etc) and you should see its current value appear.

You can then attach the output of your Value node in Cycles to a Hue/Saturation node, or to the Fac of a Mix node to alter the colour. If you want each rotation axis to be available in the material, add a separate value for each rotation axis.

If you want to do something like map each axis directly to a part of the colour - e.g. X becomes R, Y becomes G, Z becomes B - add an RGB input node instead, right click the colour and add a driver to that. You can then find it under "Drivers" the way you might have found the value, and you can drive the four different components of the colour (R G B and A) individually.

Worth noting: the rotation value will hit the driver as radians, not degrees. It's also possible that the driver will get an input which is less than zero - you can get around this to an extent by setting the Type to Scripted Expression and using an expression like "abs(var) % pi" to keep the colour away from black.

There's an annoying drawback to this method though: as far as I know, you'll need to set the driver and material up separately for each object - so you'll end up having as many copies of the material as you have colour-changing ellipses. If your Cycles node setup is particularly complicated and you still want to be able to tweak it, you might try Grouping all the nodes in your material except for the Value, but use the Value as an input to your group. If the Object Node had X/Y/Z Location/Rotation/Scale, this wouldn't be necessary.


Camera Path Constraint not working as wanted I'm trying to make my Camera follow a path with a constraint but every time I change the offset, nothing moves except a dashed blue line follows the path in the exact way I'd want the camera to. I'm pretty confused, any help would be very appreciated!

What you say there:

  nothing moves except a dashed blue line follows the path in the exact
  way I'd want the camera to

Makes me believe that you have the Influence set to 0.

Here a visual version of what i could imagine you have.

The camera or whatever object get's the follow path constraint, follows with it's position relative to the start-point on the path. Since it's not key-framed, it's still possible to adjust the location to suit your needs.

A suggestion i would want to give you is that it might be a better idea to parent the camera to an empty and let the empty follow the path instead.
That way you can give the camera it's own constraint, for example to target an empty for easier targeting. If you then parent the target-empty to an object, it's possible to slowly focus onto the object stay with it while in motion and eventually even wander around on the object, to then finally move away from it to close a scene. (hope that tip did not burst the topic)

Happy Blending.


How do I add colour to this set of nodes? I'm attempting to create a sort of starry effect using nodes. However, I can't seem to be able to add colour to it. This is the following node setup:

And this is the result:

This is essentially three layers of noise textures. One on its own, and two modified with wave textures, to create different densities, and to add a cloudy effect. Unfortunately, this is all black and white, and I'd like to control the colour of each 'layer' of noise textures.

Changing the colours in any of the ColorRamp nodes has not helped. Setting random colours to any of these nodes simply controls brightness. Adding a MixRGB node before the Math nodes at any point seems to achieve the same result, or no change at all.

How can I add some colour to this?

If you replace your Math nodes with Vector Math you can use a color ramp to color the result.

I'm not exactly sure what the end result should look like or why you chose the particular mathematical operations, so the end result is just to show that it contains color set by the color ramp.


Can't find any tutorials on Body Edgeloops I can find plenty of tutorials on good edge loops while modelling the head, hands, feet but nothing on the main body itself, any help please?

I will compile comments to other questions.
Click on the images to enlarge them.

Should I restart my character mesh?

  There is no need to reinvent anything topology-wise, it has been done many times before by experienced artists. A simple search shows many examples. Just research and copy if you are not as experienced.

  lightwave base mesh
  upper back and shoulders

From Are self intersecting edge loops legal

  You want to have the edge loops perpendicular or aligned with the direction of movement/the alignment of the muscles. The ring muscles should be supported with multiple loops. Self intersecting loops probably are not the best solution, spirals most definitely not.

The Blender Foundation's Blenderella Training course, also focuses on the lower body.


Where is Particle Velocity and Rotation in Blender 2.7a? I'm trying to make some Grass in Blender 2.7a but, I can't seem to find the Velocity in the Hair emitter settings, nor the Rotation, I use these to add random Velocity and rotation to my grass, can anyone help?

Velocity is a setting category for both emitter and hair types of particles. If you are using the hair type of particles, click on the advanced check mark (Under the type drop down box). If you are using the emitter type then you should see it by default.

For random looking grass, I would recommend you use Brownian under the Physics category then Newtonian type.


Arranging One Mesh Over Plane Mesh I created a plane mesh (ground) and then another mesh (tree).

On right view, it seems like this:

However on top view, the tree doesn't seem there. I also tried boosting the z-value but it doesn't come on top of ground any how. (But for right view, it goes high if I change the z).

Also when I start tilting a little in the right view, It becomes like these:

And in render, it creates an unexpected shade on the tree which I believe the above problem is causing.

The unexpected shading could either be flipped normals, or a lack of lighting. You could try turning on "Ambient Occlusion" in the display settings tab to help you be able to see the tree in top-down mode. It's not showing because it's the same color as the groun.


When I'm texture painting, how do I know which texture i'm painting onto? Is the UV/Image editor window supposed to automatically change to the active texture or something? Or is there another way blender indicates which one you're working on?

The best way to control which image receives paint strokes, is to select it in the list of available paint slots, which can be found under slots in the toolbar.

This works with both Blender Render and Cycles. If a UV/Image editor is visible it will get updated to show the active image.


How can I disable click to move (grab)? When I select an object by clicking right or left mouse button, the objects moving with my cursor.
I'm new to Blender, not sure if this is a normal default. I tried to disable translate under 3D View, it's not doing anything. How can I disable this behavior?

Thanks.

How to stop objects from moving when clicking in 3D view in Blender 2.8:

In Blender 2.79, you could right-select an object, and if you left-clicked anywhere in the viewport, it would only set the 3D cursor position, and the object would NOT move. BUT... in Blender 2.8, the Default NEW transform behavior has changed. If you select an object and then you left-click OUTSIDE the object in the 3D view the object will MOVE. This is highly undesirable behavior, and by default occurs when the "Move", "Rotate", "Scale" or "Transform" tool is selected (not the "Tweak" tool).

Thankfully, this change is easy to disable.

The Transform tool lets you change this behavior interactively:

(Open sidebar with N, select Tool > Gizmos > Drag Action. Change from "Move" to "None")

For the "Move", "Rotate", and "Scale" tools":

Go to Edit > Preferences > Keymap > 3D View > Object Mode
under "3D View Tool: Move" UN-CHECK "Move"
under "3D View Tool: Rotate" UN-CHECK "Rotate"
under "3D View Tool: Scale" UN-CHECK "Resize"

Example image shown below:

EDIT: The above info will solve the issue of accidentally moving the object when left-clicking outside of it in the 3D view. If you ALSO want to disable accidentally moving the object while clicking on it (as was the case with the original poster, and which also occurred by default in 2.79), then do the following:

How to stop object from moving when clicking on object in Blender 2.8:

Go to Edit > Preferences > Keymap > 3D View > 3D View Global
UN-CHECK "Move" next to the optional labelled, "Tweak". Leave the other "Move" next to "Keyboard" checked.

I hope this info helps someone like me who was confused by this behavior! :-)

EDIT 2: The process is the same for 2.79 users. To disable automatically moving when clicking on an object in 2.79b:

Go to File > User Preferences > Input > 3D View > 3D View Global
UN-CHECK the "Translate" option next to "Tweak" (leave the "Translate" option checked next to "Keyboard".)

2.79 called it "Translate", 2.81 calls it "Move". :-)


Struggling to 'fix' normals This is a really simple model, I can't get the bevel op to smooth the edges because the normals are wrong.

Normally(!), calculate outside fixes all this, or is this a bug in 2.82?

Recalculate Outside (CtrlN or CtrlShiftN) is Face Normal orientation.
What you have marked on screen is Vertex Normal Direction.

Try search for Normal Average.
For more info read Blenders Manual bottom part.


Eye bones are stuck on Eye Mesh when Posing other bones I have an interesting issue. I am doing some tutorials and no matter what I do I cannot get past a specific area. I am doing Rigging and Posing, but when I go to move any part of the body my Eye Bone Rig is "Stuck" on my eyes. This is creating really odd issues as I cannot do any pose outside of move my eyes.

I can do some of the basic ones such as move arms, hands, and some minor lower body, but if I do anything that moves the entire top part of the body the eye mesh gets dragged along.

See examples below.

Here is another one where the head is moving backwards

I have been stuck on this for a while. Any help would be appreciated.

Another user posted the fix on a different thread. My Armature was at the "bottom" of the list causing the deformations. Once I moved this up it resolved my issue.


Fill along the front of a path of an SVG I have an SVG logo, which I will import into Blender. I'm trying to think how to have the colour (not outline) fill up from left to right.

I think the following steps put me on the right track, but struggling how to full resolve this:

Import SVG to Blender
Convert Curve to Mesh for the imported object
Extrude object (to make it 3D)

That's as far as I know how to do, then I think the following steps are needed (which I don't know how to do).

Create an outline of the 3D object (with no fill)
Draw a path across the object with timeline
Animate the path being filled

Would be grateful for any ideas how to achieve this.

:)

Don't needlessly convert your bezier to a mesh unless strictly necessary, it is a destructive process and will ruin your model and the benefits of using curve objects.

For an animated outline and fill effect you will need to independent copies of your original SVG imported curve object.

Animated Outline

For the animated outline make sure a new copy of your original curve is set to 2D, non-cyclic (i.e. open) and has no fill. Then add a Bevel Width to it as desired then animate the Bevel Factor Start or Bevel Factor End property by keyframing it.

Animated Fill

For the fill animation a new independent copy of the original curve is needed. Extrude it and bevel it as desired, by using the builtin Curve Extrude and Bevel properties.

Afterwards add a Build Modifier to it, and adjust the animation parameters as desired. You can see the result by scrubbing the time line.

To animate fill followed by extrusion afterwards, keyframe the "fill process" of the Build modifier so it starts and ends first, then animate the Extrude parameter of the curve by keyframing it, so it only starts after the build concludes


Arm resets position when exported? So in edit mode when I export my hand model into unity 3d, the hand resets its position, but when I go into edit mode the hand also goes back to its original position. I have a animation with it, so if I select the armature the hand doesn't animate. Hard to explain.

The mesh uses a modifier to deform based on the position of the armature. By default the deformation from the armature is not visible while in edit mode but can be turned on if you want to. The button highlighted in red will show a 'shadowy' version of where the mesh would be based on the armature. The blue highlighted button is only visible if the first one is enabled and when enable the mesh will be shown fully deformed while in edit mode.

As for Unity - check that you are exporting the action and that Unity is using the action and not just the default pose position.


How do I animate a character with dangling chain I have a fully rigged character and I would like to attach some loose parts to it, including a chain. How do I set this up, so the chain would freely 'dangle' from the character, following forces like gravity and the character's movements / momentum?
I was thinking I'd setup parts along Bezier curve, then link them by bones. The first bone would parent to a character mesh. But then how do I set this up, so when I animate the character, the chain follows the character's movement's realistically? Is there a smarter way to do it?

You would need to enable rigid body from the physics tb for each chain link. Set the one you want to animate as passive all others to active. The collision shape must be Mesh.

Settings for the links:

To control the passive link by an armature you could add a Copy Location Contrained

If the chain breaks in the simulation increase the Solver iterations from the Scene / Rigid Body World settings and click Free Bake followed by Bake All Dynamics.

Demo .blend


IK not working properly I did the exact same IK steps in two armatures and one of them SimpleArmature works great, but with the second one HumanArmatureit works really bad. Each of them has an IK bone named "IK" which should control the left Arm of each armature. With the HumanArmature once I grab the IK bone I find it flickering and rotating and it's very hard to control. I don't know why and how I can have a better IK control in my HumanArmature

My blend file can be found here in this link.

It's a circular dependency: the Ik bone is moving the forearm, which is moving the ik bone, ........

Select your armature, go to edit mode and unparent the ik bone from the forearm. Then you can parent it to another bone which is not part of the IK chain.


how can I position an object at a moving bonehead? I would like to draw a steam locomotive with rotating wheels, driven by a horizontal rod.

Cannot find an Object Constraint to couple an empty to the head of a rotating bone.

The base of a second bone should follow the head of the rotating bone.
The head of the second bone should move lineairly on one axis.
The base of a third bone (the horizontal rod) should be connected to the head of the second bone.

3        2/\
---------/  \1

You don't tell enough but if you just need a basic animation you can do it this way:

Create a 3 bone armature. Top horizontal bone is parented to right bone.

Switch to Pose mode, select the left and right bones, open the N panel (on the right of your 3D View) and in Transform > Rotation, choose the XYZ Euler mode instead of Quaternion. Create a first pose for those bones, then a second at 180° (on the Z axis for me), and in the Dopesheet click ShiftE > Linear Extrapolation. Now your bones rotate indefinitely.

Still in Pose mode, select the top bone, go in the Properties panel > Bone Constraint and give it a Track To constraint (might be a Copy Location as well) with the left bone as Target, a Head/Tail value of 1, To > Y, Space > Pose Space/Pose Space. This bone will follow the movement.


Texture paint paints some pattern Heres the model with UV map, i unpacked it again and created a new inage for it, so UV would me clean, but no result. U can see the red markings on UV from my brush.I was trying to paint on my model, and this happened for some reason. I didnt want to paint like this, i was painting with the casual brush. Looks like the pattern is the actual UV map.. *Its dull from inside

I see that the pattern looks like an UV unwrap painted image, so look to see if you have also loaded your unwrapped texture as your texture brush - because if you do, you will see this pattern continue to tile across your painted object. Simple method is to look under your brush for the Texture panel and press the X to disconnect any texture from the brush.


Normal map looking weird on mesh I've been studying more and more about creating normal maps and texturing the mesh.
However, I can' t really find a solution for my question in the Internet and I was wondering maybe you could help.

Here's the problem. I baked the normal map for the mesh by creating a duplicate of the mesh and making some details on the duplicated mesh with multires modifier. However, the normal map creates really weird shapes on my mesh.
I was wondering and read that the problem can be caused when I have small amount of seams when creating UV map.

Also, there are some really weird holes in my UV map, might it be caused due to fact that the meshes aren' t at the same exact place?

Here' s a pic for illustrating my problem:

Here's a little bit better picture of the problematic place of my mesh + additional view of my material nodes.

The problem is somehow associated with the neck of this humanoid. I made a duplicate of the face and just raised the level of the multires modifier. Whenever I raise the level of multires subdivisions, it will look like this. When I remove the modifier, it won' t affect the mesh.

I was struggling days to find out what caused the problem with baking normal maps and think I found a nice solution. I could have used much easier way to bake normal maps for my mesh.
To bake normal map for my mesh, I needed to do the following:

Have only one mesh for baking normal map
Use multires modifier on that object
Raise the levels of subdivisions as high as I need to have nice details
Once I've created details in sculpt mode, go to Cycles Render Engine
Go to "Render" tab and open "Bake" option
Make sure that "Selected to Active" is disabled (becaused baking normal maps with this option is based on other method)
Change "Bake Type" to "Normal"
Hit the "Bake" button and be happy to have good normal map.

This way of baking normal maps for mesh is usually used when your mesh has fine topology (the mesh consists of square-shaped faces and not triangles), because multires modifier will subdivide all faces and mesh that consists of triangles, will deform the mesh alot. However, it's easier to subdivide squares and it doesn't cause any problems this way.


Save PSD (or TIFF) with passes as layers? I wonder if there is any way in Blender for saving render results in PSD (from what I can see it is not supported) or TIFF file with layers from passes (for example refletion pass, object id, material id pass and so on)?
I know that it can be done with compositor, but the problem is that I`m looking for a fast workflow for hundreds of files and in general I need to put all those passes into photoshop layers anyway. So struggling with compositor is not an option for me.

Wow! I think I figured it out. You need to use OpenEXR Multilayer file type when saving and install EXR-IO plugin (free) for Photoshop (https://www.exr-io.com/features/).


Holes in Mesh, when using Subdivision Surface Modifier I'm currently tinkering around with some Blender tutorials.

I created a lowpoly body, but when I apply a subdivision surface modifier, I get those weird artifacts/holes in my mesh.

Any idea what could be the reason for this?

maybe double verts, select everything in edit, press W, and click remove doubles, if that doesn't work i'm not sure.


How to spin or rotate same shape I'm making a Ferris wheel. I want my single mesh to rotate in same shape. I array and with the empty I rotated its going in different direction.

Any suggestion on how to rotate the same shape?

I want to rotate 12 meshes this way

Or.. using Dupliverts

Ensure the origin of your gondola is at the point you want to be attached to the wheel.
Create a 9-sided circle
Select the gondola, then the circle, and CtrlP parent the gondola to the circle
In the Circle's Object Properties > Duplication panel, check 'Verts' and uncheck 'Rotation'

As mentioned before, if you want to make the duplicates real, use CtrlShiftA.

This answer doesn't cover how to rig the wheel so when it's rotated, the gondolas swing independently, but I guess that's another question.

EDIT: having read @moonboots' answer... all you have to do to rig it is keep the hierarchy when you make the duplis real (you're given that option), and apply his 'Limit Rotation'  constraint.


KDTree returns invalid indexes I make efforts to study kdTree but get the wrong result. I return indexes that I did not expect.

Please tell me what my mistake is.

Video example - http://take.ms/UX1nm

import bpy
import bmesh
import bgl
import blf
from bpy.types import Operator
from bpy_extras import view3d_utils
from mathutils import Vector, Matrix, kdtree
def GetCoordMouse(self, context, event):
    '''Get Coordinate Mouse in 3d view'''
    #scene = context.scene
    region = context.region
    rv3d = context.region_data
    coord = event.mouse_region_x, event.mouse_region_y
    #rv3d.view_rotation * Vector((0.0, 0.0, 0.0))
    view_vector = view3d_utils.region_2d_to_vector_3d(region, rv3d, coord)
    loc = view3d_utils.region_2d_to_location_3d(region, rv3d, coord, view_vector)

    act_obj = context.active_object
    matrix_obj = act_obj.matrix_world

    loc = matrix_obj.inverted() * loc
    return loc
class TetsKD(Operator):
    bl_idname = "view3d.test_kd"
    bl_label = "Test KD"
    bl_options = {'REGISTER', 'UNDO'}

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls,context):
        #return context.mode == "EDIT_MESH" and context.object is not None and context.object.type == "MESH"
        return context.space_data.type == "VIEW_3D"
# ______________________________INVOKE________________________________#
>
    def invoke(self,context, event):
        if context.space_data.type == 'VIEW_3D':
            context.window_manager.modal_handler_add(self)
            return {'RUNNING_MODAL'}
        else:
            self.report({'WARNING'}, "Active space must be a View3d")
            return {'CANCELLED'}
#______________________________MODAL________________________________#

    def modal(self, context, event):
        if event.type == 'MOUSEMOVE':
            #self.me = context.active_object.data
            self.me = context.object.data
            #self.bm = bmesh.new()
            self.bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(self.me)

            #self.bm.from_mesh(self.me)

            self.size = len(self.bm.verts)

            self.kd = kdtree.KDTree(self.size)

            for i, vtx in enumerate(self.bm.verts):
                self.kd.insert(vtx.co, i)
            self.kd.balance()

            self.loc = GetCoordMouse(self, context, event)

            dist = self.kd.find_range(self.loc, 2.0)

            print("index = ", dist[1])
            return {'RUNNING_MODAL'}

        elif event.type in {'RIGHTMOUSE', 'ESC'}:
            return {'FINISHED'}

        self.report({'WARNING'}, "Active space must be a View3d")

        return {'RUNNING_MODAL'}

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_module(__name__)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_module(__name__)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

The fact that I used the mouse coordinates which have not been correctly calculated depth. I solved this problem with the help of rey cast . I take instead of the mouse, position the cursor of the blender

import bpy
import bmesh
import bgl
import blf
from bpy.types import Operator
from bpy_extras import view3d_utils
from mathutils import Vector, Matrix, kdtree

def main(context, event):
    """Run this function on left mouse, execute the ray cast"""
    # get the context arguments
    scene = context.scene
    region = context.region
    rv3d = context.region_data
    coord = event.mouse_region_x, event.mouse_region_y

    # get the ray from the viewport and mouse
    view_vector = view3d_utils.region_2d_to_vector_3d(region, rv3d, coord)
    ray_origin = view3d_utils.region_2d_to_origin_3d(region, rv3d, coord)

    ray_target = ray_origin + view_vector

    def visible_objects_and_duplis():
        """Loop over (object, matrix) pairs (mesh only)"""

        for obj in context.visible_objects:
            if obj.type == 'MESH':
                yield (obj, obj.matrix_world.copy())

            if obj.dupli_type != 'NONE':
                obj.dupli_list_create(scene)
                for dob in obj.dupli_list:
                    obj_dupli = dob.object
                    if obj_dupli.type == 'MESH':
                        yield (obj_dupli, dob.matrix.copy())

            obj.dupli_list_clear()

    def obj_ray_cast(obj, matrix):
        """Wrapper for ray casting that moves the ray into object space"""

        # get the ray relative to the object
        matrix_inv = matrix.inverted()
        ray_origin_obj = matrix_inv * ray_origin
        ray_target_obj = matrix_inv * ray_target
        ray_direction_obj = ray_target_obj - ray_origin_obj

        # cast the ray
        success, location, normal, face_index = obj.ray_cast(ray_origin_obj, ray_direction_obj)

        if success:
            return location, normal, face_index
        else:
            return None, None, None

    def KD(face_index):
        # self.me = context.active_object.data
        me = context.active_object.data
        #bm = bmesh.new()
        # bm = bmesh.from_mesh(me)

        bm.from_mesh(me)
        bm.faces.ensure_lookup_table()
        print(face_index)
        print(len(bm.faces[face_index].verts))
        size = len(bm.faces[face_index].verts)
        bm.faces.ensure_lookup_table()
        kd = kdtree.KDTree(size)

        for i, vtx in enumerate(bm.faces[face_index].verts):
            kd.insert(vtx.co, i)
        kd.balance()

        loc = context.scene.cursor_location

        print(loc)

        dist = kd.find_range(loc, 1)
        print("Mouse Local = ", loc)
        # print("index = ", dist[0])
        for i in dist:
            for j in i:
                context.scene.cursor_location = j
                break
            break
        bm.free()

        return dist

    # cast rays and find the closest object
    best_length_squared = -1.0
    best_obj = None

    for obj, matrix in visible_objects_and_duplis():
        if obj.type == 'MESH':
            hit, normal, face_index = obj_ray_cast(obj, matrix)
            if hit is not None:
                hit_world = matrix * hit
                scene.cursor_location = hit_world
                length_squared = (hit_world - ray_origin).length_squared
                if best_obj is None or length_squared < best_length_squared:
                    best_length_squared = length_squared
                    best_obj = obj

                # now we have the object under the mouse cursor,
                # we could do lots of stuff but for the example just select.
    a = KD(face_index)
    if best_obj is not None:
        best_obj.select = True
        context.scene.objects.active = best_obj

class ViewOperatorRayCast(bpy.types.Operator):
    """Modal object selection with a ray cast"""
    bl_idname = "view3d.modal_operator_raycast"
    bl_label = "RayCast View Operator"

    def modal(self, context, event):
        if event.type in {'MIDDLEMOUSE', 'WHEELUPMOUSE', 'WHEELDOWNMOUSE'}:
            # allow navigation
            return {'PASS_THROUGH'}
        elif event.type == 'LEFTMOUSE':
            main(context, event)
            return {'RUNNING_MODAL'}
        elif event.type in {'RIGHTMOUSE', 'ESC'}:
            return {'CANCELLED'}

        return {'RUNNING_MODAL'}

    def invoke(self, context, event):
        if context.space_data.type == 'VIEW_3D':
            context.window_manager.modal_handler_add(self)
            return {'RUNNING_MODAL'}
        else:
            self.report({'WARNING'}, "Active space must be a View3d")
            return {'CANCELLED'}

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

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

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()


How to hide bones in animation How does one put a keyframe for a bone(and the part of the mesh assigned to it) to appear/disappear?
If it was another object one could keyframe the visibility buttons but it is a part of a mesh, f.e. a weapon.

You cannot use a bone for this, but you can use the associated vertex group with a mask modifier.
1st add a Mask modifier to your mesh.

Then choose the vertex group in the list

Invert the mask with the double arrow button

You can animate the renderability by keyframing the "renderable" (camera) button (and viewport visibility with the eye icon)

The mask modifier doesn't use precise weights, it's just yes/no so if a vertice has 0.01 weight, it will be completely hidden.


Need help with sub surf weirdness I cant seem to get rid of the ripples when making holes in my model.  The hole on the right has loop cut and I tried creaes.  Both hold have this weird small flap that keep showing up.

Here is the file if you want to look.model with holes

As stated by @bertmoog this is result of bad topology. I will not elaborate on that as you have enough information in the link in comments, but I will show you how your topology should look like if you want to use Subdivision Surface modifier.

Final result:

I don't know how much do you know about modeling so I'll be brief, and if you need more info - ask in comments.

I've started with simple Plane with Mirror modifier on X and Y axes, extruded it upwards along your mesh. After that I've Subdivided it once and used Inset on top face. Then with LoopTools addon I've created Circle from vertices created by Inset, extruded it down and filed with Grid Fill, to achieve hard edges I've used Bevel Tool (not modifier).

Keywords marked with Bold should be enough for you to learn about this simple technique.


Tapering/spreading out part of a Bevel New to this site however have been playing around with blender for a few years on and off.

I'm in the process of making a game asset so fairly low poly model. I previously made the model before but wasnt 100% happy with the result.

I'm stuck at this stage where I want to take a bevelled curve and sort of spread out the vertices towards the lower part so the bevelled edge is not so sharp and sort of 'tapers' out.

I was able to do this in my previous model by following a tutorial but it was a long time ago and I've completely forgotten the method I used. I know it was fairly simple and it involved grabbing the said vertices and sort of spreading them out.

This is what I have so far and as you can see by my terrible painting I want to spread the lower part out but still keep it fairly even and rounded.

As you can see from my previous model above, this is the desired effect.

Has anyone got any tips or advice on how to achieve this? Its a simple concept but I just can't put my finger on the method I used before.

Joe

I'm not sure what is your problem, it looks good, you should just add some bevels to round the angles and some edge loops to avoid the ngons:


Update animated texture on plane when NOT selected? I'm modeling a complex organic model guided by an animated texture as a reference.
This sequence updates fine as long as I only keep the textured plane selected.
Unfortunately it freezes updating when NOT selected (on editing another mesh) and I'm scrolling through the timeline to check if everything is fine.
Is it possible in Blender to make the sequence on the unselected reference image plane update constantly?
I'm modeling in standard 3D-view in Blender 2.77a
TIA!

(Enhanced) Answer from OP moved here:

In Object Mode simply Add -> Empty -> Image

then open the desired movie or image sequence file(s) under the Empty's Properties -> Data

set the source to Match Movie Length and Auto Refresh.

This way the sequence not only updates correctly when the Empty is selected but also, when working on another object!


Change modifier visibility for multiple objects at once I want to turn modifier visibility on/off for all objects in my scene at once.

Is there a way?

All you have to do is to select all objects, then go to Modifiers, click on visibility button and then Right Click  on that button.

There will be a menu that will give you option to Copy to Selected. That will do the job.


Interaction of 2 armatures with each other Please, could you say how to do so that 2 armatures interact with each other? For example, one character takes the hand of the other one & pulls it with it. But as you can see, the hand of the second character doesn't follow the trajectory of the first one.

If the bone of one hand is tied to the bone of the other hand, it will repeat the trajectory, but the mesh will stretch, not follow the selected bone. If try to fit keyframes, the different location of the keyframes will not allow this to be done correctly (the result you see on the example).

Please please please, help me with this question!

You must parent the hand bone to the lower arm controller, so that when you rotate your controller the hand follow, otherwise it's very uneasy to control the hand properly.

Also, give your hand a Copy Location constraint, with the lower arm as the Target, a Head/Tail > 1, and stay in Space > World Space.


Pause physics to move camera, then resume I'm trying to make one of my first animations. It's the classic wrecking ball and tower of blocks simulation. Everything is working and I've got the camera movement in place but I'd like the physics to pause at a certain frame, let the camera move, then resume the physics.

The way I tried to accomplish this was set everything up for the animation, then when I want it paused, select all physics objects and create a keyframe to turn on Animated, then turn it back off once I'm ready to have it continue. Unfortunately when I tried to bake it, once animated turned on, nearly all the objects just disappeared, and when it came time to turn it back on, blender just froze.

You can vary the speed of the physics engine via the Rigid Body World settings in the Scene properties.

Leaving the speed at 1.000 runs the simulation at 'normal time' while values closer to 0 will slow down the action.

Varying the time in this way can cause some anomalies - particularly if you change it at the point of collisions or interactions between objects. This appears to be due to issues with how the calculations are performed behind the scenes. For this reason, avoid changing the Speed right down to zero - eg, 0.002 (1/500th speed) should give reasonable results - and you will likely also need to greatly increase the Steps Per Second (I increased from 60 to 10000 - but this will take longer to calculate!) to improve the accuracy of the simulation and it might also be worthwhile toggling Split Impulse if you're getting unexpected results.

This can produce the following result :

Blend file attached.


Even Thickness in object I am designing a implant and i want the thickness of it to be 1 mm evenly. I use the solidify modifier for that.
But i noticed that when i am modelling it the thickness is not applied uniformly.  I have attached the photos. Can some one help ?

In flat surfce have 1 mm thickness.

When i change the angly the thickness decreased and then totally disappears in the last.

Make sure you've applied the scale of your object (ctrlA in Object mode), and in the modifier enable the Even Thickness option.


Show Normals of Text Curves If I convert a text object to curves, there are no normals displayed for these curves in edit mode, even though 'Normals' check box is selected (both in 2.79 and 2.8[under overlays]). How do I enable normals for text curves?

If I understand what you mean, you should change type of curve from 2D to 3D