Converting tapered hair to mesh I want to convert a hair particle to mesh, but whenever I press the convert button in the modifiers panel it converts to a curve. I can then give depth to the curve, but I can't give it the same tapered effect I could get in the particle settings. How do I fix this?
More info:
What I want:

(I got this by rendering it)
What I have:

(The converted curve)

From the Blender Manual
on taper objects.

The taper curve is evaluated along the local X axis, using the local Y axis for width control. Note also that: Tapering a curve
causes it to get thinner towards one end. You can also alter the
proportions of the Taper throughout the tapered object by
moving/scaling/rotating the control points of the Taper Object. The
Taper Object can only be another curve. Editing the handles and
control points of the Taper Object will cause the original Object to
change shape.
In order for this to work:

It must be an open curve.

The taper is applied independently to all curves of the extruded object.

Only the first curve in a Taper Object is evaluated, even if you have several separated segments.

The scaling starts at the first control point on the left and moves along the curve to the last control point on the right.

Negative scaling, (e.g. negative local Y on the taper curve) is possible as well. However, rendering artifacts may appear.

Might need to increase the curve resolution to see more detail of the taper.

With closed curves, the taper curve in Taper Object acts along the whole curve (perimeter of the object), not just the length of the
object, and varies the extrusion depth. In these cases, you want the
relative height of the Taper Object Taper curve at both ends to be the
same, so that the cyclic point (the place where the endpoint of the
curve connects to the beginning) is a smooth transition.

In the example below, Suzanne has had a simple hair system converted to curves, then a bezier curve is used as a taper object.

The geometry settings for the converted hair are below:

The hair curve also has a subdivision surface modifier to further smooth the shape after conversion.
The hair system itself is nothing special, all default settings except that the count is changed to be much less than the default 1000 (only 36)and for suzanne is using a density vertex group for emission. Also, in order to prevent the hair from detaching from the emitter due to the forces after being converted, I used emit from volume rather than faces, or vertices.
The shape of the hair is created with two forces, turbulence and vortex
In short, as long as the curve is along the correct axis, as shown in the example you should have no problem reproducing in your own project. Once satisfied with the final shape of the curves, you may convert them to mesh via Object ‣ Convert To ‣ Mesh
I have also included a finished sample file demonstrating the taper on suzanne, hopefully it will get you in the right direction.


How to access a class from blenders python console? I have an operator with a class name of say Mesh_OT_Add_Thing. Printing self.__class__ shows that the class is __main__.Mesh_OT_Add_Thing. I've tried a few different ways but can't seem to get to the class to check a specific member.

How do I do this?

You can access classes for registered operators via bpy.types.

eg:

cls = bpy.types.OBJECT_OT_make_dupli_face

import inspect

inspect.getsourcefile(cls)
# 'release/scripts/startup/bl_operators/object.py'

inspect.getsource(cls)
# 'class MakeDupliFace(Operator):\n    """Convert objects ... <snip>


Beginner Model Ideas Been off and on using Blender and was one of those guys that jump into it and just looked at tutorial after tutorial and really didn't learn anything.  I am following Blender Guru tutorials and they are really good in that it teaches you the whys and have found it very helpful.  I am doing this more as a hobby and am looking to sharpen my modeling skills.  I am looking for a challenging beginner model (not a car) that poses all the beginner problems that need to be overcome.

Does anyone have a suggestion on type of models or models that you did starting off that when you look back said..."wow that was a great project that I learned a lot!".

Thanks in advance

I just started learning blender as well. The one tutorial that really inspired me was making billiard balls and animating them. Here are the links :
1. this one was the one I used to get me started, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGh8tTHAL4o&t=2127s)

This is a link to my animation, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMIC0SE1rmY)

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did when I first started like 6 weeks ago.


Certain shadows don't appear while playing in BGE I can't get certain shadows to show in BGE. I have the correct lighting with the sun and hemi lamps.

When I'm editing in BGE, all the shadows show like I want.

But when I press p to play, all shadows still work except for one. The one that doesn't show while playing is a bunch of planes connected together, all of them with the same texture on it to make a clump of grass.

When I was making it on a different layer with the same lamps, the shadow it casted worked while editing and while playing. But when I moved it to a different layer with the same lamps, the shadows only worked when editing and not when I press p to play. I have no idea why. I'm using GLSL if that matters.

you need adjust this settings to correct the shadows projection in the bge
and this apply in bge, blender render and cycles


Is it possible to control where texture is applied with weight paint or similar I am using a two noise textures to create different sized cracks in a iPhone display.
I was wondering, if it is possible to control the location and the density of the smaller cracks.
Usually the cracks on a phone display are not evenly distributed and there is an area of impact with lots of small cracks.
I was wondering, if it is possible to control the location and the density of the smaller cracks?
I thought of weight paint since I used it before, to control particel symstems.

Masks can be used to control where you want to have cracks. It's similar to weight paint but used in the shader editor.
Create one or two grey-value images (masks) and a MixRGB (or Mix Shader). Use the image texture as Fac value for the mix node.
Depending on your shader node setup you might need a Math mode (Multiply operation) to control the color of the cracks and the base color. Alternatively, you can different materials and transparency. The mask then controls the transparency.
Example:
Default cube with cracks


Smoke wont update when moving the source or resizing the domain? I tried making a normal smoke simulation with the usual domain and the generator, the smoke starts the moment i click the quick smoke but stays in the first frame, when i resize the domain, the smoke sizes up as well, and doesnt update when moving the generator, no matter what i do.
anyone know how to fix this?
The Box shown in the render is another cube, i didnt edit the domain in any way besides resizing
Im using Blender 2.83, downloaded from steam
Link to render and blender file: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13qhZd3OP0e5x91m5dTPqKk7N3aTcjpfI?usp=sharing

There's a known bug with current Blender versions when using a Replay Cache (in the Domain settings, the Cache -> Type -> Replay setting).  See issues 77170 and 76095.
As a quick fix, you can go into the domain settings, and change just about anything (e.g., temporarily change the resolution divisions).  That'll invalidate and regenerate the cache, and your smoke should start generating from the new cube position.
You could also consider switching the cache from Replay to Modular, which gives you Bake and Free buttons to allow more direct control over the cache.


How can I stop Blender from rendering the 3D scene instead of my video? I am trying to render a video in the video editor of Blender 2.83b. However, when trying to render it, Blender just renders a view of the default cube instead. I have never interacted with the 3D scene in this project and I just want to render the video I made. How can I get it to render the correct thing?

The solution is to check the Sequencer tag. I wasn't able to find it from other answers originally as it has moved in the new 2.8 UI.


Missing body parts when importing mhx in blender I have a problem when importing an mhx file to blender. Some body parts are missing after importing the model.

But when i import it to a new blender file it works fine.

This is what is expected when you export an .mhx from MakeHuman with clothing.  You need to deselect the options that hide the body parts under clothing in MakeHuman prior to export.

MakeHuman provides those options to reduce polygons/vertices that are not intended to ever be seen in a game, render, or animation.

Likewise, when importing an .mhx model in Blender, you are given options for hiding/showing various aspects of the model.  Just make sure your "hide vertices under clothing" options are set to be disabled in both programs.


Transform panel. Quaternion mode. What is the 4L button good for? When you switch the rotation mode to Quaternion in the Transform panel, then you will have four values available. W, X, Y and Z. That's a quaternion, which prevents gimbal lock.
Switching to quaternions also reveals a button called 4L. What it does is to show or hide the lock behind value W. The description of this button is rather cryptic. And i cannot figure out what is meant.
So what is this button good for?

Found it out. A quaternion is made of three axis x, y and z. And the value W, which is a calculated value. Normally this calculated value has no lock since it is a mathematical calculated value. It can be used to retrieve the actual rotation around the defined angle.
The 4L button simply allows you to reveal a lock at the W value too. And that's already it for the functionality of this 4L button.


What is the best way to make the B shape in this gif? I am modelling a set of stairs:

and wish to turn them into a high polygon model to resemble this with clear spaces between the bricks and all bricks to be of the same size:

I saw the below gif from Rigid Body Dynamic Animation Problem but no way to reproduce the B it so that the model is made up of cubes with the edges of the model being smoothed or curved to fit the original mesh.

So far all I have is this built from arrays (I am aware I'll need many more) from this tutorial Destroying any object into cubes but my blender locks up for quite a long time and has yet to finish processing it:

Any suggestions?

In the end, I decided to use Destroying any object into cubes and breaking the model into a more simple geometry for my computer to handle.


Python script to extrude with scale restriction I am working on a python script and to find the right function calls I have been cutting and pasting from the top bar of the scripting window after I do the step manually. It was going great. For instance, I went into edit on an object, selected some vertices and manually did and extrude restricting it to the Z axis.  Then I put the code into my script:

bpy.ops.mesh.extrude_region_move(MESH_OT_extrude_region={"mirror":False},
                                 TRANSFORM_OT_translate={"value":(0, 0, 0),
                                 "constraint_axis":(False, False, False),
                                 "constraint_orientation":'GLOBAL',
                                 "mirror":False,
                                 "proportional":'DISABLED',
                                 "proportional_edit_falloff":'SMOOTH',
                                 "proportional_size":1,
                                 "snap":False,
                                 "snap_target":'CLOSEST',
                                 "snap_point":(0, 0, 0),
                                 "snap_align":False,
                                 "snap_normal":(0, 0, 0),
                                 "gpencil_strokes":False,
                                 "texture_space":False,
                                 "remove_on_cancel":False,
                                 "release_confirm":False})

and it worked fine.

But, then I selected a different ring of vertices and did an Extrude (E) -> Scale (S) then restricted the scaling to the XY plane (Shift+Z) and did the scaling extrusion.  In the UI it worked fine. But, when I copy the code:

bpy.ops.mesh.extrude_region_move(MESH_OT_extrude_region={"mirror":False},
                                 TRANSFORM_OT_resize={"value":(2.12492, 2.12492, 2.12492),
                                 "constraint_axis":(True, True, False),
                                 "constraint_orientation":'GLOBAL',
                                 "mirror":False,
                                 "proportional":'DISABLED',
                                 "proportional_edit_falloff":'SMOOTH',
                                 "proportional_size":1,
                                 "snap":False,
                                 "snap_target":'CLOSEST',
                                 "snap_point":(0, 0, 0),
                                 "snap_align":False,
                                 "snap_normal":(0, 0, 0),
                                 "gpencil_strokes":False,
                                 "texture_space":False,
                                 "remove_on_cancel":False,
                                 "release_confirm":False})

to the script and run it, it says:

TypeError: Converting py args to operator properties: : keyword "TRANSFORM_OT_resize" unrecognized

Error: Python script fail, look in the console for now...

I searched for TRANSFORM_OT_resize and I can't find any ref to it.

thanks batFINGER, your suggestion worked like a charm.  this is it:

    bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode = 'EDIT')
    bpy.ops.mesh.extrude_region_move(MESH_OT_extrude_region={"mirror":False}, ...snip...
    bpy.ops.transform.resize(value=(1.5, 1.5, 1), constraint_axis=(False, False, False))
    bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode = 'OBJECT')

with some magic numbers.


Cycles - Normal maps seam when baking HighPoly->LowPoly Yes, there are already plenty of similar questions here, none has an answer. The normals are inverted on my baked low-poly mesh :

I have this high poly mesh :

and this low poly mesh (the borders don't match exactly because this is a simplified scene, I deleted a lot of stuff) :

The low-poly UVs are decent (again, partial mesh only; seam selected) :

I baked the normals using Cycles, CPU only, both 8bit and floating-point textures. When connecting the normal map to the diffuse color, it gives this :

Ok, why not, that's how tangent space works.

However, when connecting to the diffuse's normal slot, it gives the image above. This one is NOT ok.

It seems that Cycles' baking tool does not use the same tangent basis than the renderer... Does anyone know a fix ?

.blend : http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=43471

In your last image there is the problem - you are connecting normal map texture directly into the vector slot.

Please connect it through the Normal Map node (Shift+A > Vector > Normal Map):


Cylinder Subdivision surface Modifier Problem I'm trying to make smooth hollow cyclinder with subdivision surface modifier but Blender goes to failure. Can I solve this problem or how can I make smooth hollow cyclinder ?

Avoid ngons (polygons with more than 4 vertices). They do not subdivide nicely.

You have a big and ugly ngon connecting the two rings. Delete that.

To connect concentric circles is easier to extrude and scale or use Bridge Edge loops. Both of them will give you topology based on quads. Those will deform correctly


Setting the pivot point of an object I have a sword that currently rotates around a pivot point thats off of the actual object. Im new to blender and im not sure how i would go about changing it so that the sword rotates around the handle. Any help would be appreciated!

You need to either change the origin of the object, or use the 3D Cursor as a pivot point.

A quick way to change what is used as a pivot point, is to look at the bottom menu in the 3d view and select "Pivot center for rotation/scaling":

But to actually change the object's origin, you could first move the 3D Cursor to whereever you want the pivot point. To do this accurately, you can snap it to whatever you have selected (both in Object Mode and Edit Mode by pressing Shift-S and choosing "Cursor to selected".

Then, in Object Mode with you object selected, use the Object Tools menu on the left (T to make the menu appear if you don't see it), press Origin button, and choose "Origin to 3D Cursor".

-->

For Blender 2.8:

The 'Pivot Point' selector can be found at the top of your viewport in a drop-down with a double 'chain-link' icon on it


Difference Boolean modifier. How do I get it to work with my mesh? I want to make a screw head, but I can't get the cross in the screw head; the Boolean modifier doesn't work.

Link:

Hi It does not work because your cube.001 topology is bad. You have two overlapped object instead one solid.


Unwanted black frames around fog material So I was following this Tutorial; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72LPW4S8bns&t=1263s
then I was creating the fogs but suddenly the fog boxes that are further from camera started getting black corners.
Im posting the nodes, please take a look

The problem and the solution to it is mentioned in the video you are linking to (appr. 20:10).

You have to increase the max bounces for Transparency under Render Properties / Light Paths / Max Bounces until the "black boxes" doesn't show up anymore.


Why is only one object being rendered? So I am working on something based on a tutorial Blender Beginner Tutorial: Create a Lightsaber - 2 of 2.
I am trying to finish my project and render it, but it only renders the main object (image 2), which is the lightsaber. It wont render the laser or the ground.
Although I can see this in the render preview (image 1)
What can/do I have to do to change this?

image 1 (render preview)

image 2 (complete render)

Check your objects renderability in the outliner, see if any of them are set to visible in the viewport but not renderable.

I also notice you have objects in different scene layers, turn them all on before rendering.

Are you also using any render layers? Check your are rendering all render layers and if all objects are assigned to render in at least one of them.


How to use the Bevel node in 2.79b I'd like to know how exactly to use the new bevel node in Blender 2.79b. It's in the manual now, but I've not yet been able to even locate it. How exactly do you use it?

First of all, the bevel node is only available in the development version of Blender. It is not in 2.79b, the manual just contains docs pre-written in anticipation of 2.8. You can download a build of this at builder.blender.org, but be aware these are development builds, not finished releases. However, at the time of this writing, the "master" branch contains only non-invasive changes eventually planned for Blender 2.8. THERE IS A PLAN TO COMBINE THE "MASTER" AND "BLENDER 2.8" BRANCHES IN THE FUTURE. While the "master" nightlies currently offer 2.79 with some extra Cycles functionality, that will not be the case forever.

So assuming that merge hasn't happened yet, or you're reading this in the future when 2.8 has a stable release, the bevel node is located under Add Node > Input > Bevel. The bevel node modifies the mesh normal along mesh edges to approximate a smooth edge. This does not modify the underlying geometry and can even bevel between intersecting meshes, so long as they are all a single object:

(for performance reasons, it will not bevel intersections between separate objects)

The "radius" control adjusts the width of the bevel (it is a world-space distance in meters, same as the bevel modifier when in "width" mode). The "samples" control adjusts how many rays are traced to find nearby edges. More samples reduces the noise in the bevel effect at the cost of reducing performance.

The bevel effect is a essentially a procedural normal map, so it comes with all the limitations of bump/normal maps vs actual geometry. This answer about bump vs displacement maps has some examples: What is the difference between the displace socket and a bump map?

The bevel node can also be used as a simple curvature/edge detect shader by taking the cross product of its output and the mesh normal.  This is vaguely similar to the "pointiness" effect. However, it is calculated per-shading-sample rather than per-vertex, meaning it is "infinite" resolution regardless of the underlying mesh. This may be useful in some cases. It has a much steeper performance cost than pointiness, however.


How can I get these mesh information for exporting? I'm trying to write a mesh exporter, which would export vertex position, normal, tangent and texture coords. These would be used in my own engine. But I'm not fully understood the data organization in Blender's mesh.

In a GPU pipeline, primitives are usually limited to triangle lists/fans/stripes. However, it seems Blender meshes are organized in individual polygons, which don't have by-material large-sized triangle stripes? Is there any way to get the polygons by material?

I made a simple test geometry by subdividing twice on one surface of a cube, so this cube has 16 polygons on one face, and each one polygon on remaining 5 faces. When Auto Smooth is selected, vertex on different polygons should have different normals. However, the number of vertices is still 29 (by print C.object.data.vertices), which is not increased. So where are the polygon-specific vertices being stored?

Vertices are shared, no matter what material etc. the using polygons have.

Per-face vertex data is stored in loops (C.object.data.loops).

The elements of C.object.data.uv_layers[#].data[#] correspond to loop indexes. The first UV coordinate of the active UV map can be retrieved like .uv_layers.active.data[0].uv.

I'm not sure if triangle stripes and fans are still used nowadays. If a game-engine handles vertices like Blender and shares them among faces, there's no real difference in memory consumption...

You may wanna use the Separate P operator and split a mesh by material. Or create a lookup dictionary from material assignments to efficiently retrieve the right polygons.

Elements in C.object.data.uv_textures[#].data[#] correspond to face indexes, e.g. .uv_textures.active.data[0].image for polygons[0]. Note that the image attribute is set via UV / Image Editor, but that there's a second type of material assignment - the one from Material tab in Properties Editor, which sets polygons[#].material_index (just an interger, which is the index of the material in C.object.data.materials[#].


What causes these black artifacts? What did I do that caused the face of the mesh to glitch out like this? And how do I remove/fix it? I'm not sure if it is two faces ontop of each other?

As Cegaton said,

  Z figthing... you have two or more overlapping faces

This happens when two or more faces overlap. When trying to fix this go edit mode TAB then press z to go into wireframe mode. The darker sections darker than the normal greys are where faces overlap. Follow those to the vertices and move the vertice. (you may have to move than one)

References

Cause of black artifacts in render?


How do I thicken my procedural dot texture? I have this procedural noisy dots texture and I would like to thicken the dots outward.

I am looking to create an effect where the dots would expand similar to how you can grow a selection in GIMP or photoshop and then fill the selection with black.

This is the desired effect. Thanks for any help.

What kind of dots are you making? If a "swiss cheese" effect would suit you, a Voronoi texture works quite well. If you like, you can use a Power (math) node to control the size of the dots.


What is a blend file? I am 100% new to Blender and to the Blender Manual.  Could anyone tell me what a blend file is please.  It is discussed at length in the manual except for explaining what a blend file is.

The .blend files are the project files of Blender.

They are binary files with the .blend extension as in fileName.blend. Blender saves its data as .blend files and can only open .blend files.

Other 3D files types are not "opened", but imported.

Blend files contain the models, materials, the scene (camera, lights and animation) and the information for rendering and viewing along with the state of the user interface.
By default they don't contain images used as textures unless you pack them. Read: How to pack images into blend file

Also not contained as part of the file are simulation caches or the add-on used to create the scene.


Limit "prop_search" to Specific Types of Objects Currently working on a piece of custom UI that contains an object selection box.

layout.prop_search(scene, "myselection", scene, "objects")

I'm wondering how I can make it so it only lists objects that contain a certain data type such as curves in the same way that the Follow Path constraint does.

Thanks for your assistance.

Since blender 2.79 this is possible using the poll parameter of the bpy.props.PointerProperty.

import bpy

class OBJECT_PT_HelloWorldPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    """Creates a Panel in the Object properties window"""
    bl_label = "Hello World Panel"
    bl_idname = "OBJECT_PT_hello"
    bl_space_type = 'PROPERTIES'
    bl_region_type = 'WINDOW'
    bl_context = "object"

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        scene = context.scene
        layout.prop(scene, "mychosenObject")

def scene_mychosenobject_poll(self, object):
    return object.type == 'CURVE'

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_module(__name__)
    bpy.types.Scene.mychosenObject = bpy.props.PointerProperty(
        type=bpy.types.Object,
        poll=scene_mychosenobject_poll
    )

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_module(__name__)
    del bpy.types.Scene.mychosenObject

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

See the documentation 1

bpy.props.PointerProperty(type=None, name="", description="", options={'ANIMATABLE'}, poll=None, update=None)

Returns a new pointer property definition.
Parameters:

type (class) – A subclass of bpy.types.PropertyGroup or bpy.types.ID.
name (string) – Name used in the user interface.
description (string) – Text used for the tooltip and api documentation.
options (set) – Enumerator in [‘HIDDEN’, ‘SKIP_SAVE’, ‘ANIMATABLE’, ‘LIBRARY_EDITABLE’, ‘PROPORTIONAL’,’TEXTEDIT_UPDATE’].
poll (function) – function to be called to determine whether an item is valid for this property. The function must take 2 values (self,object) and return Bool.
update (function) – Function to be called when this value is modified, This function must take 2 values (self, context) and return None. Warning there are no safety checks to avoid infinite recursion.


Python performance without Blender operators After reading some posts here, i try to avoid using operators in order to avoid useless scene.update slowdown.

Unfortunatly i still have a slowdown when creating multiple objects in blender, here is the 'test code' showing performance hit (seems to be linear and not exponential).

import bpy
from datetime import datetime

iter = 0
startTime = datetime.now()

def duplicate_object(scene, name, copyOb):
    global startTime
    global index

    mesh = bpy.data.meshes.new("tmp")
    ob_new = bpy.data.objects.new(name, mesh)

    ob_new.data = copyOb.data.copy()
    ob_new.data.name = name
    bpy.data.meshes.remove(mesh)
    scene.objects.link(ob_new)

    print(iter, datetime.now()-startTime)
    iter+=1
    startTime = datetime.now()

    return ob_new

for i in range(0,5000):
    duplicate_object(bpy.context.scene, "toto", bpy.data.objects['Cube'])

Not sure why script slowdown with object number, it doesn't seem to check for every object in scene to create a new one.. Is it only blender having bad time handling more and more objects (even before any scene.update()?)

Any help welcome ! :)

I'm not sure, but I think it's mainly Blender having to deal with more and more meshes. In your case an extra slowdown is introduced by first creating a "tmp" mesh.

Here you have an improved version of your code, which is a little bit faster, but still slows down after duplicating more objects.

import bpy
from datetime import datetime

def duplicate_object(scene, name, copyOb, iter):
    startTime = datetime.now()

    mesh = copyOb.data.copy()
    mesh.name = name
    ob_new = bpy.data.objects.new(name, mesh)

    scene.objects.link(ob_new)

    print(iter, datetime.now() - startTime)

    return ob_new

for i in range(5000):
    duplicate_object(bpy.context.scene, "toto", bpy.data.objects['Cube'], i)


How would I take the average color of a material (lighting included) and turn that into a flat color? I know that's very specific. I think the best use case other than my very specific one would be if you were making a scene out of voxels, and wanted each voxel to be a flat color, but still wanted each to react to lighting. How would I turn the blended color from the object, into a flat material?

The only way I can think of achieving this would be to have each mesh assigned its own 1x1 image and use the UVs to Bake the image from the surface.
Since the image is just a 1x1 single pixel, the whole bake will be merged into that single pixel. The image can then be used to shade the surface.
Note that this would be Cycles only (for the baking - you can use the image in Eevee, just can't bake it there since Eevee doesn't (yet) support baking) and that there would be a great deal of setting up to create and bake an image for each material.
It would be feasible to use scripting to automate the creation and baking of the images to apply to a whole scene/frame.


How to use bmesh.ops.transform? I could not find an example for the Bmesh function:

bmesh.ops.transform(bm, matrix = matrix, space, verts_extrude_b1)

What is the matrix argument and what do you pass it?

bmesh.ops.transform() expects a 3x3 rotation matrix or 4x4 transformation matrix each for matrix and space.

matrix specifies the desired transformation, which can be anything with a 4x4 matrix (translation, rotation, scaling, skewing, mirroring etc.).
space specifies the space in which this transformation is supposed to happen in. If not specified, the transformation will happen in local space (object space). If you give it the object's matrix_world, the transformation will happen in global space (world space). But you can give it any desired space if necessary (e.g. to rotate around an arbitrary point in space instead of the object's origin).

Simple example:
Translation in local and global space of an rotated object

Mesh with no transformation applied yet. The object is rotated by 45° around X.
Translate mesh 1 unit up on Z-axis in local space:bmesh.ops.transform(bm, matrix=Matrix.Translation((0,0,1)), verts=bm.verts)
Same as 1.
Translate mesh 1 unit up on Z-axis, but using matrix_world of the object to perform the transformation in global space:bmesh.ops.transform(bm, matrix=Matrix.Translation((0,0,1)), space=bpy.context.object.matrix_world, verts=bm.verts)

Giving a space-matrix is the same as multiplying the inverse of the transformation space matrix by the transformation matrix and the transformation space matrix:

matrix_world = bpy.context.object.matrix_world
bmesh.ops.transform(bm, matrix=matrix_world.inverted() * Matrix.Translation((0,0,1)) * matrix_world, verts=bm.verts)

Matrix tutorial:
http://www.opengl-tutorial.org/beginners-tutorials/tutorial-3-matrices/


Missing Render Passes in Blender 2.8+ I can't find the UV render pass in the new Blender UI. In fact, a lot of passes seem gone. Is there any hidden way of enabling it? What's the easier way of reproducing this effect? (I haven't used Blender in several years)

You need to select Cycles render under render properties >>> Render Engine >> Cycles


Error : out of memory I have a model and when i press shit+z to render view or final render it gives and error out of memory. I tried on both cpu and gpu but the result is same error and stop there. How can i get rid of it and render my scene. Any suggestion or help to render.

GPU mode

CPU mode

When i open the file memory usage

Check that your computer has memory. Rendering something the computer needs some memory of the computer, I think. See at the top where it says Frame 1 Time: 00.05.35 etc? There you can see Mem.8.68M  - stands for memory (I think).


probabilistic termination of transparent bounces From Cycles documentation about Light Paths:

The maximum number of transparent bounces is controlled separately
from other bounces. It is also possible to use probabilistic
termination of transparent bounces, which might help rendering many
layers of transparency.

What should I do to start using this probabilistic termination?

From Blender Manual > Light Paths > Bounce Control

Light paths are terminated probabilistically when specifying a minimum
number of light bounces lower than the maximum. In that case, paths
longer than minimum will be randomly stopped when they are expected to
contribute less light to the image. This will still converge to the same image, but renders faster while possibly being noisier.

Related thread on BlenderArtists.org


Blender Brush doesn´t work in Ocean Modifier I just get stuck with what is actually probably a simple matter. I'm relatively new to Blender, so maybe I just overlooked something small here. I have a ship on an ocean that should leave a trail in the water while driving. To do this, I marked the ocean and created a Dynamic Paint and set Surface Type to Waves. The same for the ship, but as a brush. I attached a link to the file. When the ship goes, nothing happens. How can that be?
Blender File
I would really appreciate your help!
Best regards,
Tim

Honestly, i don't know why it does not work, but i have some tips for you.

Fake it 'til you make it:
Do not use your ship to create the waves - it has to much details, too complicated. Just slows down your computer - although i am not sure whether you are working on a render farm, because your blend file is so fully packed and on my macbook i got 0.1 fps with your settings....
So i just build a quick mesh like this to create the waves:

first try out with very simple models/blend - files, whether your "idea"/concept works at all...

test: https://youtu.be/jhXz2EItvZ4
check, works

try to adapt your model in that way....

so i deleted your brush and added the super simple model from 1 to your blend file

added some movement by adding keyframes

-> that's what i learned from this time consuming "session": copy location does NOT work together with dynamic paint. Don't ask me why. I have no clue. But it works if you animate via keyframes. I guess that's why dynamic paint never worked with your ship because it is also moved via copy location.

result: (of course you should hide the primitive model and tweak the settings so that it is looking good. My waves are shitty, i just wanted to show that it works)

https://youtu.be/qFZQnPT3q9I
and this is how it looks without the "simple model", so the ship is really making the waves -> is just deleted the copylocation modifiers and animated it by keyframe.
Result:
https://youtu.be/vuQTpul-YHM
and rendered it looks like this (ok, boat was too quick ;))
https://youtu.be/musNu7EPj1Y


Duplicating an object but when you move it. it distorts blender community

I am struggling with a problem of when I duplicate an object that has an animation and an armature when I move it to another location using X, Y, Z axis it distorts...

Duplicating...

Annoying distortion...

Your problem seems to be the following one:

If you duplicate an object that has an armature, you should also duplicate the armature, otherwise it will still be influenced by the original armature, because by default it is still parented to it.

On the center of my picture, my original object + armature. On the left, copied with the armature, it's not influenced anymore by the original armature but by the copied one. On the right, copied without the armature, it's still parented to the original armature.

So you need either to copy object + armature or to unparent.


How can I rotate multiple objects in their LOCAL axis? Hello blender friends.

I would like to rotate multiple objects by random, but in their LOCAl axis. NOT global.
I already know the random transform function for objects, but it's working always for the global axis only.

Bit I would like to rotate random around the local z axis e.g.

In Softimage XSI in 2005 it was possible to type in mathematical functions into the input fields. There were a function like this r(1,10). It has generated a random value between 1 and 10.

Is this possible without using python?

There's a simple method for that in Blender.Here The couple of Cubes represent your Multiple Objects.

Select one of the  object in your scene. (The nearby objects to the selection will have more influence of Random Rotation).

Change the Pivot Point to Individual.(So cubes will be rotated on their Local Axis)

Press 'O' in keyboard (To turn on Proportional Editing) & set it to Random.

More Info while pressing R for rotate a circle will appear that represents the effective Radius for the Random Rotation that can be changed by (Mouse Wheel) or (Page Up or Page Down)


Python API: Transformation from `Bone` bind pose to `PoseBone` using SQT I am trying to understand the Blender Python API, more specifically Bone and PoseBone types and how they fit in with skeletal animation.

This is how I understand it so far:

The Bone type holds the transformation matrix from the bone's local space to its' parent object's space in its' matrix_local property.

There is one PoseBone for each Bone in a scene for each frame of an animation. Another way to put it is: There is a pose for each frame of the animation and this pose's skeleton (for the current frame) is made up of PoseBone objects.

Each PoseBone holds the transformation matrix to transform the position of the bone in its' bind pose to it's position in the current frame. This transformation can be accessed through the scale, rotation_quaternion and location properties. If I apply these to the position of the bone in its' bind pose, then the bone will be moved to its' correct position for the current frame.

Each Bone has a head and a tail. As I understand it, the head is the origin of the bone's local coordinate space. So the "position" of the bone I mentioned earlier is also the position of the bone's head.

Am I correct in my understanding so far?

I am trying to create an animation system where the bone is initially in its' bind pose. There is a 4x4 transformation matrix to transform from object space to bone space. We use this to compute the origin/position of the bone in its' bind pose.

For each frame of the animation, the scale, rotation_quaternion, and location are used to transform the position of the bone from its' inverse bind pose to the pose in the current frame.

One thing that is not clear to me is what the rotation_quaternion represents here. How do I use it to compute the position of the bone in the current frame?

There is something else unclear to me. I understand that for skeletal animation in Blender, each vertex of a mesh has a list of bones that its' bound to, with an associated weight for each bone.

How is the final position of the vertex computed for each frame? Can I make a transformation matrix from the scale, rotation_quaternion and location properties, compute a weighted average of the matrices for each group, and use that to transform the vertex's position from its' bind pose? Again, I am not sure how to fit in the rotation_quaternion here.

As well, does the tail of the bone matter at all for the vertex skinning? As I understand it so far, all I need to know to compute the final position of the vertex for the frame are the SQT transforms of the relevant bones.

I am stuck on this and would appreciate someone helping me straighten this out. The documentation is appreciated but I think I am missing some essential details for what I need to do that I can't find in the documentation.

Partial answers and hints will still be appreciated.

Thanks,

YUNG PROGRAMMER

using quaternion for rotation does prevent gimbal lock, see Why are quaternions used for rotations?

Use it to set the rotation part of your final matrix at time t. See mathutils for conversion


Symmetry is mirroring on wrong axis I have a model, and for some reason, when I enable the symmetry in sculpt mode (x-axis) it doesn't work as it should. Instead it seems to want to create the symmetry along this seemingly imaginary diagonal axis. As you can see from the photos my cursor, origin and geometry are all centred.

This is because Blender assumes the model is symmetrical in its local space and that would be very useful if you had the model's rotation match it's local space and if it's also rotated in the scene, because the symmetrical sculpting would still work on the object, however for some reason you have the model's space rotated but not the mesh. Maybe you rotated it's origin point accidently.
Select the model in the viewport in object mode and apply rotation data with Ctrl+a -> Rotation so that the orientation of the objects local space is forced to match the global space:


Where can the latest API documentation be found? Some of my scripts scripts are broken e.g.

bpy.ops.pose.armature_layers(layers=sel_layers) # 2.6 api

has been (unnecessarily) renamed to

bpy.ops.pose.bone_layers(layers=sel_layers) # 2.7

In the 2.71 RC1

bpy.ops.anim.keyframe_insert(type='BUILTIN_KSI_LocRot')

leads to an error:

TypeError: Converting py args to operator properties:  enum "BUILTIN_KSI_LocRot"
 not found in ('Available', 'WholeCharacter')

And seems no longer to respect the bone/armature layers.

The latest documentation I found is:

http://www.blender.org/documentation/blender_python_api_2_70_5/

which is not accessible from the navigation pages from blender.org, manipulating the version part of the URL neither works (tried 2_71, 2_71RC1, 2_71_RC1).

Where can the 2.71 API be found?

Update
You can now use http://www.blender.org/api/blender_python_api_current/ to link to current API documentation. The difference from the old redirect is you can now link to specific parts, search results, etc. on the latest docs.
You can still specify a specific version if needed, e.g.
http://www.blender.org/api/blender_python_api_2_76_2/ goes to the 2.76 specific documentation.

Origonal answer
This url is always redirected to the latest API documentation.
It redirects to http://www.blender.org/documentation/blender_python_api_*version*


v2.8 support for 3DConnexion ndof devices I have a wired 3DConnexion SpaceMouse which worked very well with v2.7.  However, it has lost its built-in functionality in Blender v2.8.

In 2.7, Blender worked well with the device with smooth pan, zoom, and rotation.

The 2.8 manual makes mention specifically of support for 3DConnexion devices: NDOF Configuration.  However, the functionality apparently isn't turned on by default.

I have tried resetting my preferences to factory settings and I've tried adjusting the keymaps in User Preferences, but I'm not entirely familiar with doing that.

Has anyone found the right settings to restore SpaceMouse functionality in Blender 2.8?

Tech details:
MacOS 10.14.6, MacBook Pro (15", 2018) and iMac (27", 2019)
3DConnexion SpaceMouse and SpaceMouse Enterprise

I have a 3dconnexion space mouse wireless and in my personal experience, all the basic functions do work without changing the factory settings. However blender still lacks "the what" is built in Fusion 360. In Fusion 360 the space mouse's focus is automatically "locked" to the object you are working on, so you can effortlessly fly around it like an angel. I haven't found the option how to do that in blender with the mouse which makes it more difficult to control.

HP Zbook G3 17" with Windows 10 PRO, 3dconnexion space mouse wireless and latest drivers.

Kody


Rendered viewport shading in blender 2.8 is low-res on Retina screens Apologies for the long post (I feel I should offer a potato).

On Retina resolution screens Blender 2.8 is rendering low-res aliased images in the viewport where it should be rendering crisp high-res images as per 2.7x.

The images below illustrate the issue:

Soft aliased edges in 2.8:

While crisp sharp edges in 2.7:

And it has nothing to do with render / preview settings / samples as they are the same in both files and final renders are fine. I think it's a glitch in the 2.8 Beta version. Can someone report it? Or is there a setting I'm missing?

Thanks
JK

This is a feature, which actually originated from using high resolution screens.
(Other users actually want to increase the pixel size.)

With highresolution screen viewing a small portion on your display, already requires lots of pixels to be rendered. If you just want to have a rough idea of the color and shapes, you don't need a highres version.

Go to the Properties Panel.
Go to the Scene Tab (the second from top).
Go to the Performance section.
Go to the Viewport subsection.

Change the Pixel Size attribute to 1x. If it is set to automatic, Blender probably realizes you are using a high resolution screen and adjust the preview pixel size for better performance.


Avoid Texture Symmetry on complex Uv maps In Blender2.79, texture paint is showing symmetry even after activating these settings-

Mirror modifier - Applied
Texture Symmetry = Off
Sculpt Symmetry = Off

One explanation can be found here UVs overlap causing texture symmetry

However,in this case there is clearly  no Uv overlap as seen in the video below .
How to avoid texture symmetry on complex Uv maps?

Eventhough the Mirror modifier was applied ,it was applied after the Uv's were unwrapped causing Symmetry (even if the Texture paint symmetry options were off).Applying the mirror modifier and unwrapping Uv's after, solved the issue.

Thanks to @Craig D Jones for pointing it out.


Perforated T-Steel Profile I'm actually a bloody amateur, but I'm here to fix this and learn "How to Pro".
I'm working on a spaceship project and I want to make it look like you're building it in real life. Part by part. That said, I need a skeleton to mount the rest of on it. I want to use T-steel profiles with holes. Now my Question.
Is it better to create a T-steel profile Object (3d), drill holes in it using the Boolean function and somehow "Array modify" it along a path, OR would it be better and easier to create a Bezier circle and use the "bevel and taper" function to bring it into the T Steel shape and after that modify it with the array modifier to align Holes along the bezier circle?
Because I want a solid ring object that I can use as a single Skelton rib.

It would be counter productive to use boolean in your case, you'd better create your shape and array it along a curve, like that:

Create a plane and ceate some edge loops:

Cut a hole, select the edge loop, extrude inwards, make a circle with AltShiftS:

Extrude up:

Give your object an Array and a Curve modifier. To get nice round holes you'll need to give a Subdivision Surface modifier, then you'll need to add some edge loops to sharp the edges:


How do I access the faces of the Subsurf modifier? Changing the cube into a subdivision surface thingy is what I need to do for the model I am making. However when I try to use edit mode, graphing and faces on the subdivided cube it doesn't register the faces of the subdivision object and instead uses the old cube surface Like below

Is there a shortcut or something to fix this or do I need to turn on a setting or what? Please help.

I needed to hit Apply in the modifier settings in order to get faces of the subdivided cube editable in Edit mode.


What's the easiest way to rotate around an edge that is not parallel to a primary axis? First, the screenshots:

Given the highlighted edge in the left excerpt of the screenshot collage above, is there a quicker way to be able to rotate the cube around that edge than rotating the whole cube so that the active edge is parallel to one of the primary axes, making the rotation, and then rotating the cube back to its original position?

How about if the cube is chosen, but instead forming the diagonal of one of the faces, one selects the first vertex, and for the other end of the new edge, selects the vertex opposite of the first, along the diagonal of the cube. The new edge referred to is the active edge in the right half of the screenshot excerpt above. Again, is there a faster or more efficient way to rotate around the diagonal, than rotating the cube so the diagonal aligns with one of the primary axes, making the rotation, and then rotating the cube back to its original position?

In both cases, I want to rotate the cube around and perpendicular to the highlighted edge, as in the results screenshots below.

Here is another way ( without effecting the pivot element ):

switch to (Pivot : cursor, Transform orientation : view, View : orthographic ).
select the element and press Shift+S->cursor to selected.
press Shift+(1 or 3 or 7) to go to one of the ortho views aligned to the selected element.
when in the desired view press Ctrl+I then rotate the object according to the view ( use RXX ..).


Joystick Buttons problem since update 2.78 im making a game on 2.77a, my menus are working correctly.
I updated blender to 2.78, but my joystick buttons are not detected at all.
The Joystick movement still work, but blender is unable to detect any pressed buttons from my gamepad.
I previously made this simple, with logic bricks, but i tried to create a new logic brick, with exact same parameters as before, but nothing work.
I repair the installation but this didnt solve my problem.
Maybe this build of blender have some issues?

I experienced something similar with my pythonscript i created for joystick inputs. It seems like Blender 2.8 changed the input a little bit. All buttons do have other indecies now, so i think you should remap them all, maybe this helps.


How to make glowing particles, with a solid glowing center How can I create a material that looks like this?

Thanks!

3 Concentric Spheres with Emission Particles

Blur in Compositor

Render result and 3 Concentric Spheres each with a particle system.  Image above.

Click on images to see larger view.

Compositor with Blur and Alpha Over Nodes. Image Above.

Particle Settings. 3 Panel of which 2 are pinned.  Unpinned is the largest sphere particle system.  Image above.

The 3 Object particles and the material settings. 2 are pinned.

Please experiment to your taste and improve.
Consider using a more irregular sphere in the center.
You may look at the movement of particle system on many frames and choose some particular frame.

Sloppy Imitation which may serve as a starting point.
Of course there are alternative and more CPU intensive ways to do this.


How to seperate a vertex? There was a shortcut for seperating a vertex without "P".
You selected the vertex and when you , it got loose, seperating one face from another.

What is this operation is called, what is it's shortcut?

Found it, Press "V" to detach edges or vertices. This does not kick the selected parts outside the present mesh like Seperate("P") does.

It's edge seperation.


Vertices coords and edges exporting Is there a way in blender to export vertex coordinates as a numbered list along with a vertex to vertex edge list? I'll show briefly what I'm talking about.

x1 y1 z1
x2 y2 z2
x3 y3 z3

Edge list:

1 2 (edge going from point 1 to 2)
2 3
3 1

Thank you in advance!

Each edge contains the vertex index of the two vertices that it connects. Similarly each face contains a list of vertices defining it.

import bpy

obdata = bpy.context.object.data

print('Vertices:')
for v in obdata.vertices:
    print('{}. {} {} {}'.format(v.index, v.co.x, v.co.y, v.co.z))

print('Edges:')
for e in obdata.edges:
    print('{}. {} {}'.format(e.index, e.vertices[0], e.vertices[1]))

print('Faces:')
for f in obdata.polygons:
    print('{}. '.format(f.index), end='')
    for v in f.vertices:
        print('{} '.format(v), end='')
    print() # for newline


Hovering mouse over something in Blender shows python code, but how does one use it? I know the trick of hovering my mouse over the function I want to perform to reveal its corresponding python code, but i'm not sure how to use this code, for example from vse: menu playback>audio scrubbing and which bit to use:

Scene.use_audio_scrub
bpy.data.scenes["Scene"].use_audio_scrub

I have also looked here, but am none the wiser.

I tried placing the code in the console but got the error message:

>>> bpy.data.scenes["Scene"].use_audio_scrub = true
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<blender_console>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'true' is not defined

The error occurs because true is not a python keyword. You meant to use True (capitalized).

Use bpy.context.scene, this gets the active scene instead of a scene name "Scene".

The code usually refers to the operation or the datablock, which the button or UI controls changes or calls.

The following code works.

import bpy

# Next two lines assign absolute values ("True" / "False")
# bpy.context.scene.use_audio_scrub = True
# bpy.context.scene.use_audio_scrub = False

# method changing the use_audio_scrub state
def Custom_Toggle_Audio_Scrub():
    bpy.context.scene.use_audio_scrub = not bpy.context.scene.use_audio_scrub

# call and execute the method
Custom_Toggle_Audio_Scrub()


No fluid generated when baking data + baking mesh (2.90.1) trying to create an effect of blood dripping that will be late composited into a video.
I've tried changing the scale, resolution, particle min/max, but no matter what i do, baking the data+mesh on the domain does ostensibly nothing.
here is my .blend. Any help is appreciated
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e79pF90GDRhpCRtXR6Dy1S4-1wWk0pV7/view?usp=sharing
there is another object below the inflow object thats meant to throw the blood outward a bit, although i dont think that it is a factor
screenshot of workspace:

When there's no emission, look first at the emitter (Circle, Inflow). Your "Circle" object, although converted to a mesh, may have insuffient surface areas to emit anything.  I checked the Is-Planar in the screen-cap below, and all started to work, even after reducing the Domain's Resolution from 200 to 100 (faster simulation, less accuracy).

I had a similar "dripping blood" for an animation.  It took some patience to get the effector animated to occasionally drip and not occasionally pour.   You might want a few, smaller circles with animated "Use Flow".  Or instead of a circle with "Is planar" (inaccurate), consider using a cylindar, and adjust the Z-dimenison (smaller == less flow).  Or continue to use your circle but scale X&Y.


How to get the updated vertex coordinates of a cube when rotating? I tried to use handlers to update the vertex coordinates but failed. Please have a look at below code:
bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cube_add(size=1,location=(0,0,1))
current_scene = bpy.context.scene
#default_cube = current_scene.objects['Cube']
default_cube = bpy.context.object

degp = bpy.context.evaluated_depsgraph_get()

def update_scene(current_scene):
    cube_eval = default_cube.evaluated_get(degp)
    cube_mesh_eval = cube_eval.data
    current_frame_value = current_scene.frame_current
    default_cube.rotation_euler.z=180/120*current_frame_value
    print(current_frame_value)

    for v in  cube_mesh_eval.vertices:
        print(v.co)
#clear the post frame handler
bpy.app.handlers.frame_change_post.clear()
   bpy.app.handlers.frame_change_pre.append(update_scene)

Changing verts to match those of other objects in handler.
To linearly rotate an object in a scene, suggest that a driver is possibly the simplest. How do I make animations a steady speed?
Given your prior question How to update the connection shortest line between the vertice of a cube and an Ico sphere?  and my answer to it
I have added a simple 2 vert object named "Edge" for example below it is parented to the cube (not vertex parented)
The frame change handler sets the location of the edge object to a random cube vert, and sets the other end to a randomly chosen vert on the depsgraph evaluated ico sphere.  Since the edge mesh has been object parented to the cube mesh, will work in the cube object's object coordinate space. .
When using get to get an object it will return None if no object with that name exists in the objects of the scene passed to the handler.
An evaluated  depsgraph is also available as the second argument of a post frame change handler.

Scrubbing the timeline to test handler, notice both ends are always at vert locations.  The cube is animated via keyframe (as per prior)
import bpy
from random import choice

def update_scene(scene, depsgraph):
    edge = scene.objects.get("Edge.004")
    #edge = edge.evaluated_get(depsgraph)
    cube = scene.objects.get("Cube")
    ico = scene.objects.get("Icosphere")
    imw = ico.matrix_world
    cmwi = cube.matrix_world.inverted()
    # if wish to use evaluted
    ico = ico.evaluated_get(depsgraph)
    v0 = choice([v.co for v in cube.data.vertices])
    v1 = choice([v.co for v in ico.data.vertices])
    edge.location = v0
    #edge.data.vertices[1].co = v0
    edge.data.vertices[1].co = cmwi @ (imw @ v1) -  v0

Replace the random choice with the kdtree code from your other question.  Could make the kdtree outside the handler method.  Recommend tho don't reference objects from outside and use within the handler, always get from the scene objects via some test.
Rather than altering vertex coordinates, another method would be to make a unit length edge, arbitrarily in Z direction, and position and rotate based on end points... more akin to a stretch_to bone constraint.


When glTF export in Blender2.8, an animation is not played well When glTF export in Blender2.8, the parameter of the rotary animation of the glTF file turns into the expansion and contraction.

I make the animation which turned a simple early cube.This does 1 rotation in the y-axis.

glTF exports in this parameter

A cube does not rotation when I confirm animation of glTF in this glTF viewer and expands and contracts.

glTF viwer

This thinks that an export sentence of blender has a problem, will there be the solution?
The movement and the scale succeeded. Only a rotation becomes strange.

file
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/yqbxmrg68m8evwm/AAAbvbYb_00VDH8wbs0rhicEa?dl=0

This should be fixed in the next version of Blender's glTF exporter, where the default value for Always sample animations has been changed to true (in #706).  I believe putting a checkmark on this option may be a quick fix for your problem.

Animations involving rotations are stored in glTF using quaternions (because glTF is a runtime delivery format, meant for rapid load-and-render operations with minimal pre-processing by the loader).  But quaternions have an important limitation, they can't distinguish between +180 and -180 degrees.  If you have Euler angle keyframes at 0 and 360 degrees, both of those values convert to the same identical quaternion, because the object is in the same orientation.  Interpolation between keys breaks down.

The usual solution is to place intermediate keyframes at 90 degree increments (or no larger than 120 degree increments).  One way to do this is just check Always sample animations which makes every frame a keyframe.


How to move points proportionally to keep edge flow good? So lets say we have 3 points A, B, and C.

I want to be able to move C, keeping the points between AB and BC proportional.

How would one go about doing this?

This would help a lot with keeping my edge flow good.

Consider

scaling 3 vertices first which preserves proportion with the correct mode of scale (center point)
then translating by grabbing.


Color Shift when saving rendered image/video Really frustrating issue going on. When I save a rendered image/video as any file format there's this super obvious color shift that occurs. It pulls down the saturation and boosts the brightness/highlights. The only solution I've found is to correct it via an image editor.
This seems to be the same issue as: color issue when save my render. But I am not very smart so idk what to make of the answer— if someone could give me a dummy walkthrough or explanation that would be soo helpful and appreciated.
I'm using Blender 2.92 on a MacBook Pro M1(I know, not ideal)
Rendered image is on the left and the saved image from render is on the right.

did you try to set "view transform" to standard?


Hair particles render not same as 3dView(Eevee) Hair particle renders are not same as in 3dView(Eevee).
Hair is using Principle Bsdf shader and  camera is set to Orthographic.
Force and turbulence fields are applied to it.
How to resolve this?

Your Render steps are higher than the Viewport Stand Steps.
Change that and that's it


How to create a Blender camera to follow real camera in video? I have recently taken videos with a drone that I would like to edit in Blender. I would like to attach some objects that I have rendered in Blender into the video to simulate what the houses in the videos would look like with the objects on them.

A friend who used to use an older version of Blender said that it sounded like I needed to create a camera in Blender to follow the real camera path and then attach the objects from there.

Is it possible to do his suggestion? Or is there another way to go about this perhaps?

Thanks in advance for any help. I'm new to Blender and have only just been able to render my object the way I want it and I'm lost going forward with the videos.

Yes, what you want to do is called camera tracking, or matchmoving.  Read the related post that Scott Milner included in his comment, and I also recommend this video from BlenderGuru to help you get started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVPcT0dJmoY
If you don't get your Blender camera to move exactly the same as your real camera, your Blender objects will never "sit" properly in your video.
EDIT: I replaced the video link; apparently the old link didn't work anymore - not surprising since I posted this 3 years ago!


Particle System Removes Landscape when it is rendered Simply put, I am trying to create a Mars scene but when I go to render an image, the landscape disappears.
I am using Blender version 2.92.
I am using two particle systems to spread rocks of various sizes over a generated landscape, one of them is flat rocks, and the other is pebbles. From the viewport, it looks alright and wanted to see what it looked like when I rendered, but when I go to render the image, it completely removes the landscape from the render and only shows the rocks (particles).
Here is the Viewport, which shows the entire scene as intended:

Here is the Rendered Image, the one that lacks the landscape.

The rocks were created using the Rock Generator, and the Landscape was created using A.N.T Landscapes, both are from add-ons. Materials on the objects are PBR materials gathered from various sources.
Does anyone have an idea of what is causing this error? Am I doing something wrong?

Go to the Outliner and click on the Filter settings. Make sure the Render icon is highlighted (camera icon) that will let you see if anything is hidden in render. If you see next to your landscape that there is an X on the camera (render) icon, then you know it's been hidden in render.


Problem with partially UV-unwrapping a simple object Blender 2.8/Eevee,

As I've proven to myself time and time again, my texturing knowledge and skills are  abysmal...

I want to texture a part of my object with a custom texture but I can't seem to get it working. I've tried reading and watching tutorials but I believe I'm doing exactly what the tutorials say and still nothing.

Im trying to put a custom texture ONLY on the top of the counter (as indicated by the names of the material slot and UV map), I've unwrapped only that portion and used nodes to create what should have been a working material (the rest of the object is divided into other materials, by the assign button). However, nothing but the default color can be seen in rendered view. What am I doing wrong?

I found the problem.

Apparrently in 2.8 you can't just add image texture nodes and link everything up like I used to do in older Blender versions. Blender will only read a texture if it's imported through the properties panel, next to the color picker button. Thought I'd try to do the exact same steps that are shown in the tutorial (even though they result in exactly the same node structure) and it worked, but trying to build an identical node setup somehow fails...


I cannot import or export anything in Blender. It throws I am not able to do anything in Blender. Every time I try to either export or import or install an add-on, Blender throws an error saying, "ImportError: This file should not be accessible in Python 3. Either you are trying to run from the python-future src folder or your installation of python-future is corrupted."

I have no idea what it means. So this is what I've done-

1.Reinstalled Blender.

2.Uninstalled Python 2.7 in Laptop.

3.Installed Python 3 again.

4.Uninstalled Python 3 and installed Python 2.7.

None of them worked.

Here are the screenshots.

Importing

Exporting

Add-On

Please let me know what is to be done to rectify this and please ask anything you need.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT

It worked after I installed Python3 and added it to the PATH as specified in the link - https://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/blender/pythonpath.php

Blender is definately running its own version of python, which is python 3.
You get that error message because your "Blender Python" is trying to import reprlib and it should find that file in the Blender python directory, which in your case is "F:\Steam\steamapps\common\Blender\2.79\python\lib\reprlib.py". Make sure this file exists.

For some reason your Blender Python doesn't find that file and looks elsewhere. You might have misconfigured your Scripts directory in Blender. Check you preferences, they should look like this:

Uninstalling and reinstalling probably didn't help because the preferences will not be deleted as they are stored in you application data directory.

If that's not the problem, then there is probably something wrong with your environment variables for python. Check your environment variables as described in this link:
https://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/blender/pythonpath.php


How can I compare different renders? I am rendering an object and am making changes and then rendering again. Is there any way to compare my different renders. By compare I mean just quickly swap between the different renders so I can see the minute changes. My interest in is in this to be quick way to judge my last change.

Saving the individual renders to a file and then using an image viewer would allow me to do this, however it is tedious and time consuming. Is there a way to do this in blender?

In the UV editor, you can select different render slots.  Select Slot 1, for instance, render... then select Slot 2, render again.  Switch back and forth between the slots to compare using J and Alt + J

EDIT:
Only adding by request... in addition to using J and Alt + J, Lukas also pointed out in his answer that the number keys at the top of the keyboard (not Numpad) can be used to select the slot to view.

It should be noted that pressing J will auto-cycle the renders.  If you only have renders in slots 1, 4, and 8, it will only cycle those slots.  So it can be handy.


Blender cycles glow on transparent background I am trying to make an image similar to this one: https://i.imgur.com/EYI0mty.gif?noredirect

But with this model:
(removed link so I could post link to blend file)

However, I would like it to have a transparent background. I have found this question on here:

  Glow effect invisible on transparent background

And I implemented the second answer with the blue glowing cube, but this isn't the effect I'm going for. What I want is just the glow on the outside of the sign, but the above method generates a glow that also affects the black letters and outline, and gives it an "out of focus" or "squinting" look.

To achieve the red and white animation I am using a background plane and moving it from right next to the sign to far away, so the glow gets bigger. What I would like is to somehow keep this glow in the render but loose the plane and have a transparent background instead.

I would like to use blender for this because it's what I'm sort of familiar with, but since this a 2D image and not a model maybe it would be easier to render without the back plane and use GIMP or add the glow through post processing? I'm a total noob when it comes to nodes so any help or pointers would be appreciated. Thanks!

Here is the blend file:

You should do this kind of things in the compositor node.
Replace the background plane's material with a holdout node.

Then, setup your compositing like this:

You can animate the size value to change the amount of glow in the rendering. Keep in mind that you will need to adjust the size of you image to not cut of the glow at the edges. Also try out different blur algorithms, the Gaussian doesn't work that well in this use case (personally, I liked Quadratic)

EDIT

If you want to hat the blur another color, put in the Alpha pass instead of the Image pass into the Blur node. Using a color node in between, you can have the glare every color:

EDIT 2

Sorry, I forgot the transparent background:

The input for the alpha needs to be a white blurred image, so iIf you are using a colored glare, put the color node behind the blue or duplicate the blur node and keep both synchronized. The max node is needed to make sure that the sign will always be fully opaque since the blurring is done into both directions: outside and inside of the image.

EDIT 3

If you want to restrict the effect to specific areas, create a black/white mask and color multiply if with the output of the blur node. In your case, the inside/outside is defined by the alpha pass of the rendering.

Now, the center of your image will be without glow effect. To have actual transparency in the image, you probably will need to add another mask to the alpha output but that shouldn't be a problem anymore.


Apply mods before baking? I've done a model in blender, and also did retopology and UV map of it.
For retopo, I added mirror, subsurf and shrinkwrap modifiers (in that order). Now, I've got 2 questions:

-Should I apply those modifiers before baking? When should modifiers be applied?

-What should i do first: baking or painting the model? Does the order matter?

Thank u

If you intend on painting the model with non-symmetrical details, then you will want to apply the mirror modifier at some point before painting and setting an image texture. The mirror should be applied before baking if you are getting details from the source object - this also will help avoid seams in your normal map.


Wireframe node has no effect on bumpmap Im trying to use a wireframe node to influence the height of a bump node, but it dosn't seem to have any effect:

As you can see in the second image, the wireframe node is behaving properly because it influences the diffuse colour perfectly:

Any solutions to this problem?

There appears to be an issue with that node in conjunction with the Bump node. One solution that appears to work is using the Wireframe node in conjunction with a Normal Map node:

These nodes render a result like this:

Notice that these values can be inverted as well:

One word of warning thanks to @WChagrin:

  I would say that that's almost certainly undefined behavior. The colored pixels in the normal map are supposed to represent unit vectors in tangent space. When the wireframe node outputs a value of 0, that's coerced into the vector <0, 0, 0>, which is not only non-unit, but non-normalizable. That is, trying to normalize it would require division by zero. Relying on this behavior is probably a Bad Idea™.


Why are particles not rendered? I have already done this before emitting a particle out of an object from another instance object, yet this time it doesn't show up in the render, no matter what I do.

If I have overlay on I can see the particle animation, but when I turn the overlay off, there is nothing. I cant for the life of me figure out whats happening, I even followed a tutorial - same result, nothing in render.

Go to  Render, select Object and choose your particle object, also Show Emitter.
Your emitter object is probably in another hidden layer and there for it will not show you your particle system.

Try resizing your particles on Render > Size tab.
The shader assigned to the emitter is the ones the particles will inherit.

Unless you´re working with another object as particle, in which case it will select that object´s material as the particle material.


Background image not showing up in any 3-D view There's a lot of articles like this, but their solutions don't solve the issue for some reason.

I'm trying to load a background image (well, two images, basically) for reference, and they won't show up (in the 3D view). I set they perpendicularly (first I set one to the front and the right, then set them back and left. Neither way) and have it set to perspective mode. I even tried switching it to orthographic mode and cycling through the views to no avail.

here's the ortho view and persp view:

http://postimg.org/image/uotmxqijp/

http://postimg.org/image/f80ddjq6b/

I just downloaded Blender a few days ago; I have zero experience. Dumbing down answers to noob-speak would be appreciated.

If you need any more information on the problem, just ask.

Found the problem: The files had somehow become corrupted and wouldn't actually open in anything except for the Preview app provided by apple, so if this happens to you, recheck the pictures in your browser to make sure that they work and everything. If they don't, just open them in a editing or viewing program and copy paste them to a new project.


Render goes black after it's done While I was working on my scene I, decided to give it a render, and it was all going really well but just when it was about to finish Rendering, whole the render Image turned black.

Just like that: !

Compositor :

the compositor is not getting any input, I think.
you can connect the "image" output of the rgb node ALSO to the compositor, which builds the output. Just drag it.

you can leave the viewer connected, to see the result of that (or others) node output, too, like the backdrop, if you use it.


Can't seem to bake fire animation? I am new to baking and animation in general, but I was in the process of trying to add a basic fire/smoke animation in Blender 2.82. In the process, I create my smoke domain (using quick smoke) and fiddle with Cache Type until I can actually get the render to display.

Once I run it through the replay, I switch type to final, bake it, and it seems to be working - YAY! I then go to my other object and follow the same workflow, yet when I bake this one my original animation seems to just disappear? There is nothing that happens, the domain just becomes completely empty.

I thought maybe this is just a short-termed cache and once I bake the other animation it deleted the original, so I tried baking through object > animation > bake action, and this seemed to do the same thing.

What can I do to get this working? This seemed really interesting and fun, but now I can't seem to get it to work at all.

I managed to solve this by saving each bake to a separate directory! This kept all of them for the final render.


Remesh modifier on curve does not work I just saw https://cloud.blender.org/p/settlers/5e7e343c129c886f23af503a and wanted to try it out myself. as you can see in the video: the curve (it's actually still a curve, not converted to a mesh) has a remesh modifier on it and is then shrinkwrapped onto the sphere.

when I do that, it does not work: https://streamable.com/c9fyrz

what am I doing differently / wrong?

So, I read this question and try it myself, after lot of trials and errors, I found the settings that I think get close to the video are:

Curve type: 2D, give it extrude value of 0.01m
Remesh modifier with Sharp mode, Octree Depth: 5, Scale: 0.6, and Sharpness: 0.1
Shrinkwrap modifier with Offset of 0.01m
This one is optional, but I think this is what they do in the video: check Wireframe in Object properties > Viewport Display.


bevel modifier after boolean modifier I want to use bevel after boolean. I have 2 boolean modifier for my object. If I put bevel after the boolean, the bevel doesnt work.

When I put bevel first, it works but there is some stain in my object.

How to solve this problem? Should I manually bevel each edge or there is a another way?

The bevel may be being held back by the “clamp overlap” setting. Turn that off and see what happens.
The stain is normal flaws, and is happening because the shade smooth is averaging the normals between the bevel faces and the large ones that are meant to look flat, affecting the large flat ones as well. The solutions for this problem vary. Most use “Inset Faces” after all modifiers have been applied.


How to undo dyntopo on a specific area? I've been sculpting for the past couple days and realize as I move in for more detailed sculpting that I have a spot with dyntopo that I must have accidentally clicked. This was a couple days ago, so the undo button won't resolve it. I have attached a picture for a visual. Any help would be super helpful, and let me know if I need to supply anything else.

:)
EDIT: Heres an updated picture to pair with the answer that moonboots provided. It seems that changing the dyntopo to collapsed edges worked, and I just needed to play with the resolution and smooth brush to correct it out. Thanks Moon!

Have you tried the Dyntopo > Refine Method > Collapse Edges? It will simplify your topology. Of course you need to set the good resolution, the one you'll choose will define the triangle minimum size.


Modelling for Unity, should I remove intersecting parts? I think, especially when modelling for game engines, using "components" makes production faster and allow reuse of previous models. But this comes with a price: If the designer models (for example) walls and roof seperately, when they try to put them together, inevitably they will intersect with each other (or leave gaps, which leads to same thing).

When the intersecting part is visible, of course it needs to be edited, so it fits in one another.

My question is when the intersecting parts are not visible, does it cause any problems either with unity or with blender to leave them as-is, or should I join them together and remove intersecting parts?

If the pieces are two seperate objects, press Ctrl + J to join them, that is better for performance, because it reduces the drawcalls from 2 to 1. If the pieces are one object with two intersecting pieces, this is fine, in fact, it is better than wasting resources rendering hundreds of faces when you just need 10. Sure, if you zoom in really, really far, the intersection won't look too pretty, but how often do zoom that far in on the roof of a house?


How to give the color texture "light"-gloss instead of just lighten up the color of the pattern? Hi blender stack exchange,
I've encountered this problem at work, where I try to make the pattern a metallic color, that should reflect the light on it, but instead it just lighten up the texture color. I've worked a little with the speccular mapping of the model, because I found some tutorials on youtube about it, but it seems like it isnt the way to solve this problem.

Does anyone know how to fix this problem?

My specc-map:

The best way to test metallic or mirror reflections is to have something to reflect. Perhaps the material IS reflecting correctly.

Use an HDRI environment or other method to create a known environment with light sources, colors, etc. Then you can better judge if the material is behaving correctly to metallic shaders.


I get an error with the archipack Whenever I try to add a window using archipack, I get an error. Before, it was a black screen but I did the render thumbs thing and now it is this.

From archipack issue tracker

I got both archipack and Filmic Blender working together by adding the raw color space and copied directly from the original ..\Blender\2.80\datafiles\colormanagement\config.ocio over into the colorspaces section of the filmic blender config.ocio file, as well as adding the line:

! {name: Raw, colorspace: Raw}
to the displays > sRGB, BT.1886, and Apple Display P3 sections.


restricting area of UV project to projector plane I am trying to model a Rummikub tile (well, game eventually) as my first blender project. The tiles are basically a rectangular cube with a dimple where the number is printed.

I created a tile with a dimple by using a boolean difference modifier. I'm now trying to UV project a face (number or joker) onto the tile using a plane from above as the projector. I can't figure out how to restrict the texture to be limited to the size of the projector plane.

Here is what my node graph and modifiers look like:

I should say that the goal is to place the face in the middle of the dimple, if there is a better way than a UV project then let me know. Ideally I could control both the color of the tile and just use some sort of stencil mask for the face shape. So any pointers along those lines would be appreciated as well.

Here is my file and texture

Orientation, scale and position of the projector will influence the UV project modifier.

So, starting from your configuration (I changed nothing except limiting the rendering of the plane to wire), simply scale and grab the projector.

About a 'better way' to do it. I don't know if it is a better way, but you can get rid of the UV Project modifier defining a UV map for the sphere, because the UV of the sphere will be inherited by the tile during the Boolean modifier operation.


How do you use an F-Curve with negative values? I want to use the start to finish values of
-1.7 -var = (driver value = 0) to -2.7 -var = (driver value = 1)
I've always done it in the expression as a math formula but I never learned to use the F-Curve to achieve the same results and once in a tutorial they make an example here:
https://youtu.be/1WmFaBlDBHs?t=118
But when I tried this with negative values I could only manage to turn the F-Curve into a mess.
How do you use negative values with F-Curves.

Do you mean, you want the driven property to range from a value of 0 to 1, as the driving property ranges from a value of -2.7 to -1.7?

What we're saying is, we want a function [f(x)=y] where f(-2.7)=0 and f(-1.7)=1.  F-curves are function curves.  The X and Y are what we want to see on our graph-- points with those X,Y coordinates.
If you look on the sidebar, you can see that the control point I have selected has some fields for manual entry.  For this particular control point, it has a value of 0, at a keyframe of -1.7.  The other one, naturally, has a value of 1 at a keyframe of -2.7.
You can select a control and manually enter these numbers if you'd like.  That's what I did.
If editing these manually ever screws up your handles, and you want it back to being a linear function like I have here, you can select all your controls in the graph editor and use set handle keyframe type ('v' for me) -> vector, which points the handles at the adjacent controls.
Note that in 2.91.0, when you edit a control point to cross another control point (in the x axis), the fcurve re-orders the points, and you lose active selection of the control.  It's fine, you just need to reselect.


blf + bgl text flickering I'm using blf in a modal operator to draw help text on the 3D viewport. Here's a snippet:

FONT_ID = 0
bgl.glColor4f(1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0)
try:
    blf.position(FONT_ID, x, y, 0)
    blf.draw(FONT_ID, line)
finally:
    bgl.glColor4f(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0)

This works well, but when the user moves the mouse, the text flickers: when the mouse is moving it's a bit bigger, and when it stops it goes smaller. When it's bigger it also appears a little blurry. I think the texture that the text is being painted onto is being scaled incorrectly when the mouse moves. I've checked the parameters that I'm passing to blf.draw and blf.position, and they're not changing.

Is there any way I can stop this from happening?

Oops, I should have been setting the font size.

blf.size(FONT_ID, 14, 72)

My guess is that some other text code is not resetting the font size properly. Similarly, when using text shadow, you have to set the blf.shadow_offset (even if you want to leave it at 0, 0) to avoid the shadow flickering.


How do I delete a Grease Pencil ruler? In the grease pencil menu there is an option for adding rulers and protractors.

Now, as far I understand, I can remove all rulers by pressing ESC but if I press ENTER instead rulers get saved.

In various places (prominently, in a kind of help line while in ruler/protractor mode) it is said that pressing DEL will delete rulers, but I cannot get it to work.
(tried in Blender 2.71).
Is it a bug, an error in the docs, or am I misunderstanding the context of this operation (e.g., how would I select a ruler so that I can delete it?)

Pressing Delete will delete the active ruler (whichever is selected or left-click to select a specific one) before having pressed enter (all the options in the help line are options for during the creation of the ruler).

If you have already pressed Enter you can re-click the grease pencil 'Ruler/Protractor' button to re-enable the rulers and go through the selection and delete process described above.

After pressing Enter the rulers are saved to a grease pencil layer, so you could delete all rulers at once via the grease pencil panel in the properties menu (N) in the 3D view by selecting the grease pencil layer in the list and then pressing the ' - ' (minus) button:


No redraw after assigning new vertex position with python I'm trying to write a new operator which modifies my geometry in some way, but I'm struggling with vertex manipulation. I can get the selected vertices fine and also print the individual components. So, lets say I have a vertex v. I can get the position of this vertex via v.co. But when I set a new value for this vertex with my operator it does not redraw in the 3D View. I assign a new value like this:

v.co = Vector((1,2,3))

Like said above the 3D View does not update. I have to quit my operator and navigate in the 3D View to update. What do I have to do to make blender update the 3D View correctly?

If your running the script with the object in edit mode then you can use

# Note that bmesh is the module named bmesh, not an instance of a BMesh.
# me is an instance of Mesh, again, not an instance of a BMesh.
bmesh.update_edit_mesh(me)

If your running in object mode then you need something that will trigger an update, not sure if this is the best way but

bpy.context.scene.objects.active = bpy.context.scene.objects.active

triggers an update in the 3dview.


Custom hair particle system - wrong directions I'm trying to create a hair particle system on a sphere. Standard hair particles works exactly like I need, pointing at different directions opposite to the sphere center:

But when I replace them with custom particles, the directions are wrong.

How can I fix it?
Thank you in advance!

There may be a few issues:
1. Make sure the origin is at the bottom of your particle object. LMB on the bottom of the object, then press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C, then press "origin to 3D cursor:

2. The rotation of your objects looks off. In the hair emitter's particle settings under "Render", check "Rotation":

Then, in the settings of the object being duplicated as hair, rotate the object until it looks correct. For me, it was XYZ 45/90/45, but it may be different for you:


How do I plug in my colorramp so white will be embossed gold and black will be engraved darker silver carving on my silver kettle? Mock-up in middle The gold and darker colors I'd prefer to be their own material, and the silver Kettle will show out at 50% Grey. Blender 2.92.0

I am unsure where to plug in the colorramp, and how the gold material and dark engraved material should be mixed in:

You can use the image texture with different Color Ramps to drive all kinds of values. In my example, I've used Greater Than nodes to split the three grey values up to mix different colors created by Noise Textures. Of course you can use the mix factor to blend many more options or shaders.
I also used the image texture in combination with a Color Ramp for the Metallic input... I decided the gold and silver should be metallic = 1 and the etched part is dielectric = 0 (by the way, for realistic results never use values between 0 and 1, a surface is either dielectric or metallic, values inbetween should only be used for artistic / aesthetic reasons).
The Roughness is controlled by the image texture and a ramp, too. For the black/etched parts I made it absolutely rough by setting it to 1 in the ramp, the grey/silver part I made  not too glossy with a value of 0.3 and the gold I made more shiny with 0.05 (of course you can also plug values into Specular etc.)
Last but not least I've used the texture for the displacement of course. I left it as it is, so the etched part is indented, the silver is the overall height and the gold is buckled up. Without a ramp or anything, the overall Scale in the Displacement also controls the range between the deep and the high parts. Put another ramp in there to change the relations to each other.
All in all you have to play around with those values, see what fits best and where to put the color stops on those ramps. A good way to start is take one ramp set to constant and use it to convert the greyscale image to three bright different colors like red, green, blue and see how you have to manipulate them so that they refer to the correct parts.
Then you can use this basic color ramp and give the stops the values you need or decide how you can address them for mixing factors etc. You dont need them to constant, but sometimes this helps to better outline the different areas (especially when you have antialiasing or artifacts).

Render result:

Node setup:

EDIT: Here just two quick examples how an additional Color Ramp could be used to make extreme differences between the between highest and lowest displacement areas.

Or you could try to make the silver part look like it's brushed metal (just a quick setup, not meant to be perfect) by plugging some noise limited to the grey area in the Normal input of the Principled BSDF.


Flipping pose isn't working when I copy a pose (ctrl + c) and then flip it with this shortcut(shift+ctrl+c) the I see some weird result don't know why.

then this happens after I've pasted it

You can check the blend file if you want. I've uploaded it in my google drive.

Your bone "Arm.R" have wrong rotate.

So,simply to fix it you should delete this bone and all hand bone and add new bone by symmetrize from left side.


Blender with Digital Ocean? Digital Ocean offer SSD cloud servers. Is it possible to run Blender on one? If so, what is needed?

Thanks,

It is definitely possible to run Blender on a DigitalOcean server. That being said, I wouldn't recommend it as it's pretty expensive if you want good performance and fast render times.

Here's how to install Blender on a DigitalOcean droplet:

Download the latest 64-bit version of Blender (choose the right one for your droplet)
Move the file to /usr/local and unzip it
Add Blender to the PATH variable
Install some missing libraries. There's a how-to guide on which packages you'll need here: Installing Blender on a virtual server
Once everything's installed, you'll want to run your render via the command line: ./blender -b path/to/your/file.blend --engine CYCLES [the rest of the render options]

I toyed around with the idea of building a DigitalOcean-based render farm. After a few tests I concluded that it would be prohibitively expensive.


How to create an equilateral triangle base prism I'm trying to make a triangular prism in blender, my first idea was to select the top 4 verticys of a cube and merge them at the center but this made a single point on the top instead of a edge. I have tried a few other methods but couldn't get a perfect even triangular prism. What would be the best way to do this

If you are talking about a triangular prism, ShiftAto add a Cylinder object, then F6 to set the Vertices number to 3.


What is the easiest method to add a half circle cut out Just wondering what is the easiest method to achieve half circle cutouts on the side of a 'cube' OR a link to a suitable video tutorial. See image. The cutouts can be the entire height on the sides (not as per the image) as the object will not be viewed closeup. Just a very simple object.
Thanks

Step 1: Add a cylinder, then size and move it to where you want it to be.
Step 2: Add a boolean modifier onto the box, and select the cylinder as the object.
Optional step 3: apply the modifier by selecting the modifier, and pressing Ctrl+a, or pressing apply on the modifier


Why are there dfferences between Textured and Rendered modes? I have assigned a material with an image texture to this cube (I think) and when viewed in Texture mode I see this

When viewed in Rendered Mode I see this

This suggests I did not properly assign the material but why is it visible in Texture mode ? I know why I get this purple color but the question is why I see this purple color in Rendered Mode and not in Texture mode (this is why this question is not a duplicate imo)

It appears like you have moved the texture after you brought it into blender. You need to relocate the texture. When blender renders it loads the texture from disk (and is unable to find it causing the purple). The material view is using the copy in memory. When the file is saved and reloaded the material view will purple as well.


Bevel not beveling in some cases - message is nothing selected I use blender 2.8, this is my first project.
Problem is that I can not bevel in some cases.

I'm in edit mode, I select an edge and press CTRL+B and when I try to move the mouse to bevel I receive the message "Nothing selected" like in the image.
The blender file is here.

You have 2 problems that prevent you to create any bevel:

An inner face that you need to delete.
A flipped normal, select all and press shiftN to fix it.

Now it works.


material groups are linked with another, how can I unlink them from another? First I will describe what I have done:

In node editor, I added material nodes
I selected material nodes and grouped it
I duplicated the group
Then I edited one of them

However, when I edited the duplicated group, the same edits and the same modifications were applied to the original group too.

My question: why is this and how can I unlink them?

Click that number next to the group name:


How can I make 2 viewports in Blender python have the same orientation? I have this code:

def main(context):
    for area in context.screen.areas:
        if area.type == 'VIEW_3D':
            r3d = area.spaces.active.region_3d
            view_matrix = r3d.view_matrix

How can I change the view_matrix so that it becomes something with my values? I did view_matrix[0][0] = some value etc... but it doesn't change values (and it doesn't give me errors).

So lets say I have 2 screens of 3D_VIEW with different orientations. How can I make them have the same orientation? (that's what i'm trying to do)

Changing the values works for me. The below script changes all 3D views to the first one (by internal order). This does not work in all cases but in most.

C = bpy.context
viewports_3D = []
for area in C.screen.areas:
    if area.type == 'VIEW_3D':
        viewports_3D.append(area)

attributes=['view_matrix', 'view_distance', 'view_perspective',
            'use_box_clip', 'use_clip_planes', 'is_perspective',
            'show_sync_view', 'clip_planes']
ref_viewport = viewports_3D[0].spaces.active.region_3d

for viewport_3D in viewports_3D:
    for attribute in attributes:
        setattr(viewport_3D.spaces.active.region_3d, attribute, getattr(ref_viewport, attribute))


Smooth Freestyle Lines I'm struggling to get crisp and smooth lines with Freestyle (in Cycles). I can clearly see jagged edges, the sort you'd expect from the lack of antialiasing. Is there a way to apply antialiasing to Freestyle renders? Can I do anything else to get presentable images that I can use? I love what I can do with Freestyle, but I have yet to get results that I'd feel OK with publishing. Example below. Thanks!

You've probably solved the problem by now but I just ran into this problem and found an easy solution: increase the Render Samples to 30.

I had the same problem when Cycles only computed 1 sample. At 2 samples, it was much better and so on.

I hope that helps someone.


spline editing or clever non spline editing? I have always liked the example x.files that ship with the DirectX sdk and have wondered if the bigship1.x is a product of some type of spline editing as I have heard the term spline editing used in the context of editing mesh objects.

So, is the following mesh a product of spline editing or not and if so what type of spline editing would edit the curves (or is it just mesh smoothing?).

How would you create this model using Blender?

Spline Surfaces / Patches are used to define surfaces/objects using very few points. It's quite a convenient way to model with the right tools. It is quite possible that the bigship.x was modeled using a form of splines or NURBS, but it's hard to be certain even after seeing the mesh. Blender has (October 2015) a limited set of these tools, but they are there and can be found in The Add > Surface > NURBS Surface menu.

Not many Blender users use this feature, and that might explain why tutorials on the subject are rare. It doesn't fit within the format of this site to give a detailed explanation of how to model something using those tools.

In general modeling inside Blender is done using Polygon modeling techniques and Subdivision surfaces and creased Edges. I made a rudimentary model in about 3 minutes purely by extruding / insetting a Cube object and placing a Subdiv modifier on it. When the object is symmetric you don't even need to model both sides instead add a Mirror modifier.

Here model without mirror or subsurf, but with creases to indicate where the subsurf should become sharp.

Here with the mirror modifier:

Here the added subsurf modifier adds the interpolation and smoothing.

Here in object mode to show the result, also note i've set the mesh to Smooth Shading to get away from the tessellated look:

There are plenty of tutorials about how to do polygon modeling. See our resources page:

Here's what the low poly approach of the ship might look like to the left, and to the right again the model has subsurf and smooth shading and edge creases.