Merging 2 objects, no loose parts I would like to ask if there is a way to merge 2 objects together in a way that later it will not be separable if I hit "Separate by loose parts".

I am facing this problem when I am making a torch like object which consists of two objects, an icosphere and an elongated cube. When I do Ctrl+J to merge them, it's fine because it's only one object. But after I use the array modifier to make a lot of torches and then separate them by loose parts, I get all the icospheres and cubes separated too, not just the torches.

I have no idea how to solve this problem. I will appreciate any help.
Thanks.

We can avoid the separation of the two objects after hitting the Separate by loose parts in these steps:

Merge the two objects with Ctrl + J
Go to Edit Mode and select 2 vertices, one belongs to the first object and the second belongs to the second object
Merge the vertices with Alt + M


Dyntopo adds vertices but does not deform mesh I am sculpting some things using dynamic topology. Everything was working great, but then my mesh stopped deforming.  Vertices are still added, but the mesh doesn't deform.

Image 1 This is the mesh before I try sculpting with dynamic topology.

Image 2 This is the mesh after sculpting an area with dynamic topology.  Notice the vertices have been added but the mesh has not deformed.

Image 3 & 4 Show brush settings.

It would appear that your custom brush type is set to simplify, change it to something that deforms the mesh.

From the manual page

  Simplify - This brush collapses short edges (as defined by the detail size) whether or not the Collapse Short Edges option is enabled. This brush has no effect if dynamic topology is not enabled. It can be found in the Brush ‣ Sculpt Tool menu.


How can I import my video properly? I used a cellphone and it records .3gp I converted to mp4 and When I put it in the video editor it goes wrong

It seems that it triesa to put it in the computer resolution

From version 2.92 on, the scaling problem is resolved. So, I suggest that you upgrade your version. If you want to do it manually, you have to add a transform strip to the .3gp clip and set the scale yourself. You can find the original resolution of the clip in the properties panel under the section Source.
So, if your project resolution is 1920 x 1080 and your .3gp clip is 360 x 740, then your scale Y should be 1080 / 740 = 1.46. This will make the smartphone clip as tall as the project viewport. Of course, you should also scale the Y axis with the same amount (360 x 1.46 = 526 px) to avoid distortion (what you'll have automatically in the previous version), leaving a black bar at each side of the clip.


Debugging Blender on VSCode I am trying to debug blender via gdb on Visual Studio Code. I have a launch.json file and it will open up blender but immediately close. I am not sure what is going on, has anyone successfully . Here is my json file:

{
// Use IntelliSense to learn about possible attributes.
// Hover to view descriptions of existing attributes.
// For more information, visit: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=830387
"version": "0.2.0",
"configurations": [
    {
        "name": "(gdb) Launch Blender",
        "type": "cppdbg",
        "request": "launch",
        "program": "path/to/bin/Debug/blender.exe",
        "args": [],
        "stopAtEntry": false,
        "cwd": "${workspaceFolder}",
        "environment": [],
        "externalConsole": false,
        "MIMode": "gdb",
        "miDebuggerPath": "path/to/bin/gdb.exe",
        "setupCommands": [
            {
                "description": "Enable pretty-printing for gdb",
                "text": "-enable-pretty-printing",
                "ignoreFailures": true
            }
        ],
        "preLaunchTask": "Build Blender Debugger"
    }
]

}

It seems to build but when it launches Blender it immediately closes. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I found the issue is using gdb ... When I changed the debugger to be used cppvsdgp I was able to get it to launch and debug.


Info Pane: How to copy output? When I perform actions, the Info pane at the top outputs the equivalent python commands.

If i try to select the text to copy, It won't allow the selection.

Is there a way to configure this to work?

Right click the line you want to copy, and it will highlight. Press ctrl-C to copy and then also right click it again to deselect it or otherwise it will copy every line that is highlighted next time you highlight and copy. Paste it into the text editor, etc.


Can you see why texture isn't rendering? (Screenshots included) Can you see why the texture isn't rendering? You can see that it's been UV mapped and appears on texture paint screen.

I've screen captured my materials and texture menus. Anything accidentally been checked or unchecked?

Texture in your setup doesn't influence anything, so you need to enable Color checkbox in its settings.


Non symmetric walk cycle Usually walk cycles are symmetric which allow the first leg that moved forward to go backwards to its original position when the other leg starts to move, that creates the 'walk in place' effect.
I'm trying to create a non symmetric walk cycle, in which you always advance with one leg and close the gap with the other leg.
I'm not sure how to create a proper loop for the cycle, a loop the keeps the character in place so the following cycle will sync to the previous one.
You can see the issue here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5MYRZSlG1s
How do I prevent the sliding back after a step issue?

First, create a 6 step animation of your character moving forward. Don't move or keyframe the root bone for the moment, keyframe all the other ones. The fifth pose needs to be the same as the first one, except a step forward of course. The sixth pose is a duplication of the fifth so that your character makes a pause like in your animation. Don't forget to choose interpolation > linear.

Now animate the root bone only: Keyframe it at frame 1 as it is, then at the last frame make it go backward so that all the other bones are at the exact same position as at the first frame.

In the Dope Sheet switch Dope Sheet to Action Editor. Save your animation, push it down into the NLA. In the NLA, repeat the strip several times. Make the whole armature move from point A to B, make sure again that the interpolation is linear, move the second keyframe (or move the point B position) so that the speed of the armature in the scene synchronizes with the speed of the walk cycle (or play with the strip scale in the NLA N panel). You can also use a Follow Path to make the armature move, same thing you'll have to synchronize the speeds.


Nvidia Quadro K1100M. No GPU listed There is no GPU listed in Compute Device section in my Blender 2.77a x64 under Windows 7 in order to render using Cycles. I have a notebook that is equipped with NVIDIA Quardo K1100M, with computing capability of 3.0. I downloaded the driver from NVIDIA website, 362.13-quadro-grid-desktop-notebook-win8-win7-64bit-international-whql.exe, and performed the update with no problem. How can I get Blender to detect my graphics card as it is listed as a supported device here and here.

From what I can find, that graphics card doesn't support CUDA or OpenGl... When you start Blender, does the Command Prompt display something like:

Buggy display driver! Disabling OpenCL!

If so, there is really nothing you can do.


Align two faces without math I'm a complete beginner in Blender (altough I'm quite experienced in CAD use) and I'm trying to build an complex object starting from two solid bodies.
This's the current placement.

What I want to do now is to merge the three bodies into a single one joining them by the facing surfaces without any deformation. The objects are already aligned on X an Z axis I just need to join them. I bet there's a way to do this without having to calculate the offset. There's probably a way to select surfaces to align/match and let Blender do the hard work. I looked around but I found only examples to join surfaces by creating another set of faces or trough deformation of existing faces. Once aligned I would like to merge bodies to have just one single item in scene hierarchy.

-- EDIT --

BTW the result solid shoud be this one:

In the 3D viewports menu bar, enable snapping by click the Magnet Icon. Next to the icon, in the snapping to dropdown menu. Select Face, since you want to snap to a face and choose Active.

By moving an object in object mode you can snap its origin to other faces. Go into edit mode ↹ Tab, go into face mode 3. Select the face which you want to snap (it gets highlighted as the active face) and add all other faces which you want to move to the selection. (Box Select or A)

Press G to move the geometry and by hovering over the face of the other object with mouse, the face snaps to it. Press X during the G operation to constrain the movement to the X-Axis.

If you want to automatically modify the orientation while snapping to an oblique face, check Align Rotation to Target in the snapping settings.

The position the objects center at the face you wish to snap and snap it in object mode.


Blender normals are grey I want to render the normals of a scene in Blender, and I'm doing this with the the 'normals' matcap texture. It seems to be mostly correct. At least in some simple test cases, the pixel intensities matched my calculated values.

However, I animated a 360-degree camera spin, and at one point many of the pixels turn grey. This is super weird to me since in the frame before and after (where the camera angle is slightly different), the colors are strongly red or blue. Is this a bug or is this expected behavior?

Here are the frames before and after the greying.

 ->
 ->

If you are using Blender Render and a texture with Normal Coordinates (as opposed to the viewport MatCap), the grey pixels apparently come from the image sampling.

In the Texture properties, try setting Extension to 'Clip'.

Or use the OpenGL render with the Normal matcap, which works well.

This happens because when your camera view vector is normal to the faces' normal vectors (in other words, when the face normals are at 90°), the texture is sampled at its border. If the surface is vertical or horizontal (eg. walls and floors) AND the texture repeats, it is sampled at both the left and right borders (respectively top and bottom for floors and ceilings), resulting in an averaged grey.


Mesh seems weird after applying solidify modifier I am modelling a car.i applied solidify modifier on the mirrors of the car and it is mesh is looking messed up.Is this normal?Should i worry about it during final render?

I think you need to apply the modifiers in the order you created them, otherwise the results will be unpredictable


Change material texture by loading an external .png file with Python I'm trying to change the texture of an object by changing the .png texture image I'm loading from an external folder.

When using the Blender interface, all I need to do is going to the image tab in texture and open the file I want:

then

The changes are then operated automatically.

How would I go about to do the same in Python?

I have read other stackexchange answers to similar questions but I'm not sure to what extent they apply to my situation.

Let's say I have a plane with an image texture called leaf1.png and I want to change the texture to leaf2.png.

If I hover my mouse over the source area, I can see some text at the bottom of the tooltip that says how to access that data with python. Like this:

From this, I know that I can access this with python using bpy.data.images['leaf1.png'].filepath

So to change the image source with python, I do:

import bpy

bpy.data.images['leaf1.png'].filepath = 'path/to/leaf2.png'


When I select a material in doesn't appear in the Compositing Editor Even though I am using the Cycles render engine and I have also ticked the use nodes box,
no nodes appear when I select a material. Also I cant find any shader in the node editor!

These nodes appeared when I opened the editor. Can anyone see whats the problem? I am new to blender!

Material appears in Shader editor. In Compositor appears render.
If you dont see nodes in Shader editor, go to View > View All


Correct vector input to map texture light in Cycles What is the correct vector input for a texture connected to a Cycles lamp so that I can make a projector-like textured light?

I am trying to make an projector-like effect with a textured light in Cycles, currently trying it out with a Spot type of lamp, but I am open to any solution involving other lamp types if they work correctly.

The problem is that whatever vector input I use, the texture is always projected downwards, towards the global $-Z$ axis in scene world space, no matter where I point my spot light. I would like to have the texture always project "forward" towards the the direction the spot light is pointing, in the local $-Z$ axis.

The plan would then be to use this spot at several places in my scene, pointing at different directions, and as it currently stands I would have to have a different node setup for each spot instance, manually compensating for each unique rotation in the scene, which would quickly become unpractical.

I have searched around the internet and I am currently using a solution similar to the one on this BSE question.

Is there any better method, perhaps involving some funky Vector Math, or is this not currently supported?

You can do this without drivers.
You can achieve it using an area light instead of a spot light, then make use of the Geometry node's Normal and Incoming socket and subtract them using a Vector Math node.
It still suffers from tiling/mirroring artifacts at extreme angles like the solutions by @gandalf3, but those can be adjusted with the Vector Mapping node as long as multiple instances of the light are maintain within a certain angle threshold from eachother, and overall it seems like a more maintainable solution in the long term.

Blender 2.79+
As of Blender 2.79 Blender, Cycles can correctly use lamp texture coordinates directly for Spot, Area, and Point lamp types without any further contrivances.

Committed by Lukas Stockner Cycles: Implement texture coordinates for Point, Spot and Area Lamps
Cycles: Implement texture coordinates for Point, Spot and Area Lamps
When using the Normal output of the Texture Coordinate node on Point
and Spot lamps, the coordinates now depend on the rotation of the
lamp. On Area lamps, the Parametric output of the Geometry node now
returns UV coordinates on the area lamp.
Credit for the Area lamp part goes to Stefan Werner (from D1995).

Just use the Normal output on the Texture Coordinates node as vector input for a texture.

If you are using an image based texture you may need to offset the texture coordinates by $0.5$ units on $X$ and $Y$ axis using a Vector Mapping node to center the image on the projection direction.
Smaller sized area lights will produce sharper image projections.


Noisy output instead of image? I have everything in my scene working fine , but when I render my image is shows up like this?

Camera settings on the right

There is a hidden cube (Arm.Hand.Target) and a hidden sphere (Arm.Elbow.Target) in your scene, which are blocking the camera.

Rendered shading in BI doesn't work quite the same as in cycles, the render visibility setting (camera icon in the outliner) is used in the viewport when in rendered view.


Why are there black edges on this textured mesh? I have a problem using texture when I unwrapped all the objects. The texture is 4k and I don't know what the problem is, because the texture am seeing at the edges is not good enough.
Can someone help me out.

See the paint over I made - your edges are suffering from lack of pixels that are provided in the unwrap. It doesn't matter how big an image you use here if your model faces are only given a few pixels in that image.

If you were to rework that unwrap and allow more equal spacing for the faces in the green area compared to the pink area, you might see less of a problem. A way around this is to use a box mapped image texture to get a nice blended texture and then bake it through an emission shader to a blank image that uses the UV mapping, baking Combined. This way the pixels are arranged nicely on the model surface and then are mapped back to the uv mapping on a new texture to use that isn't showing signs of strain.


Shrinkwrap moving below the surface I am trying to use the Shrinkwrap modifier to wrap clothes around my model but some of the clothing is moving below the surface on some of my model. If I use a negative value for the shrinkwrap the parts that were outside my mesh are inside and the parts that were inside are outside.

Looks like you most likely have flipped normals on some of your model (the arm). The Shrinkwrap is set to move the cloth above the closest surface. For the arm the normal is pointing “inside” so “above” is effectively inside your model.


Change the window icon on an executable I am wondering if and how to add your own picture here.

On Windows, the icon is embedded in Blenderplayer.exe. You can either...

Build Blender yourself from source code, with the modified icon.

or
Replace it after-the-fact with another tool like Resource Hacker.

On Mac OS X, the icon file is part of the app bundle. To replace it is as simple as modifying the blender player icon.icns file.


What's the recommended method of circumventing infinite recursion with the scene_update_post handler? I am writing a Blender addon that stores extra information inside a mesh (as custom vertex data layers).
The information in these extra layers needs to be recalculated whenever the mesh changes. More specifically, this custom data is a function of the vertex position, so whenever a vertex's position changes, the data needs to be recalculated.

One way to recalculate the data when vertex positions change (the only one I know of) is by handling
bpy.app.handlers.scene_update_post. However, when I write the recalculated data to the mesh, bpy.app.handlers.scene_update_post is triggered again (as it should be)! This leads to an infinite recursion.

This behavior of bpy.app.handlers.scene_update_post is intentional. A similar thing happens with update callbacks for custom properties, as documented on developer.blender.org.

  What is the recommended way of sidestepping this problem? In other words, how can I avoid infinite recursion when handling bpy.app.handlers.scene_update_post?

I ran into this problem myself a while ago - the way i solved it was basically using a semaphore-like approach, where the handler would set a boolean value to true when it is invoked, and set it to false before it returns. Before setting the boolean, it would first check if it was already set, and if so, return without executing. I doubt that race conditions are a thing in Blender's python API, but hey, it works.

handler_running = False

    def handler():
        if handler_running:
            return
        handler_running = True
        # Do something
        handler_running = False


Make the camera go and return on the path? I would like to introduce a character by showing a round trip on a part of him to make like a gif. Anyway there's my problem/question :

How can I get the camera to go back and forth on the path ? like this :

You can achieve this using the following steps:

Create a path with the desired shape
Switch to Edit Mode, select all control points and duplicate them Shift + D and unselect all
Border select the point were the Camera is supposed to turn around
Create a segment between the two select control points by pressing F
Add a Follow Path modifier to the camera, tick the Follow Curve checkbox
Press the Animate Path button in the modifier

With the two points being in the same place the camera turn will be very sudden, but I assume this is what you want, judging by your description.


How come the Blender 2.83 Splash Screen by Ian Hubert takes so much less time to render than my Doughnut tutorial? I'm completely new to blender and going through the Doughnut tutorial at the moment. I'm working on an old laptop (GTX 850M, i5-4210U, 8GB RAM) and the doughnut and cup together take about 10 mins to render.
So just for the fun of it I decided to download the Blender 2.83 Splash Screen by Ian Hubert and render
it on my machine, expecting it to render for something like a day. :P
But to my surprise, it took only 47 secs to render!
I realize that the splash screen is using Eevee and the doughnut tutorial uses Cycles but my mind was still completely blown by the time difference.
So my questions are:-

What are the most important factors contributing to the less time taken by the Splash screen? Or should we just chalk it up to Ian being an actual Blender god?!

More importantly as a beginner, should I spend more time and effort learning to use the Eevee renderer seeing that it takes much less time?
Or is it that the more experienced you become on Blender the difference between the two render engines becomes less pronounced and you can master both of them?

While Cycles is a "path tracer", Eevee is rasterizer.
"Unlike Cycles, Eevee is not a raytrace render engine. Instead of computing each ray of light, Eevee uses a process called rasterization. Rasterization estimates the way light interacts with objects and materials using numerous algorithms. While Eevee is designed to use PBR principles, it is not perfect and Cycles will always provide more physically accurate renders. Because Eevee uses rasterization it has a large set of limitations."
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/eevee/introduction.html
for example almost all game engines are Rasterizer. That way we can "fake" most stuff to look like the real deal.
And you are in luck. Eevee and Cycles are very close togther in node setup so your work is have been cut in half already. But what you do need to learn is the Eevee limitations.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/eevee/limitations.html


My animation stops halfway through? I'm doing a short little animation for a side project and the length is 167 frames. I think I accidentally clicked something and now it only plays up to half of the clip before looping.

So for example let's say I was doing an animation of someone sitting down. Halfway through this animation, it just cuts off as if it reached the end of the clip already.

Also that green line that runs while the animation is playing is always really far behind my mouse. I'm really stuck and confused by this, so I'd really love some insight on this subject.

Also due to copyright, I can't actually share or upload the file or any of it's contents.

Here are some screenshots of the timeline and settings:

Having non equal numbers in the "Time remapping" fields results in a "warped" time: the timeline frames and the animation frames cease to correspond 1-to-1 to each other.

If setting these Time remapping values to 40 and 100 wasn't intentional, revert their values to 100 and 100.


Poliigon textures reflection map with PBR At the moment Im using Blender 2.78. Im using Blender Guru's PBR Workaround for materials. In the scene I'm working on I use textures from Poliigon.com. In the Poliigon help guide it says that reflection maps should not be used in a PBR workflow. So that socket will have no node connected to it. Is it then up to me to estimate the reflection value for the material? That doesn't feel right.

This is how Andrew Price set up his wooden floor.


Eevee - how to do god rays emitting from a transparent object? Alright, Im trying to emulate the god rays/light streaks emitted from an explosion like this, in 2.8 eevee -

Ive looked at typical tutorials like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQooOGayOQI and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8wLd4Lob-o but these all deal with opaque objects to filter the light source.
I have a series of transparent bubbles that comprise my explosion - upping the intensity on a point light does nothing for this.
How can I accomplish god rays out of an explosion?

I know this also involves the use of opacity to obscure the light, but unfortunately, that is one of the limitations of EEVEE. You can't apply masks directly to lights using nodes like in Cycles. However one way you could do this is to give the sphere itself a semi transparent texture, and then shine a light through it, capturing the rays with a volume.
Start with a sphere and give it a texture with transparent "holes". I used a Noise Texture, clamped with a ColorRamp to make this texture, and since it's black and white, I also used it as an alpha factor. As you can see on the right, I set the Blend Mode to Alpha-Clip.

Next, add a cube, roughly the size of the desired "explosive radius", and give it a volume with a Volume Scatter node. You may want to adjust the density to meet your needs.

Then, just place a point light at the center of the sphere. You can make the "god rays" look cleaner and more defined by adjusting the Volumetrics settings in the Render Properties panel. You can change the color of the light as needed. However, there are some limitations to the volumetrics in EEVEE - as you can see, the rays hit the edge of the cube in a rather noticeable fashion. You can make the cube bigger, but then the volume density can become more noticeable. You may have to spend time adjusting things until it looks tight in your scene.


Render preview looks different than material preview I am using blender for the very first time today, and I'm trying to make my stairs white and have a glow around the whole staircase. It looks just the way I want in the material preview, but how do I make it look the same in the render preview? What is the problem that caused it to look so drastically different? Thank you in advance.

Material preview uses a hidden HDRI image for a source of lighting and reflections. if you want to add one yourself, go to the shading tab, and change the box in the middle left from "object" to "world. Then add an Environment Texture (Add > Texture > Environment Texture) to the graph (not an image texture) and select an HDRI for your image. The ones that come with blender are in the Blender Folder at .../2.93/datafiles/studiologhts/world (.exr files). You can also find them online for free in many places - one of the most popular is HDRI Haven (https://hdrihaven.com/hdris/)


Can I colour the same text in two different colours? I want the text to have this sort of colouring

And this is the text.

Create two materials, set their colors.
Then enter edit mode in your text.
Select the wanted letters Shiftkeyboard arrows, and assign them to the wanted material.

General indications to do that using Python:
import bpy

# Get the text
o = bpy.data.objects['Text']

# Get all the characters descriptions
characters = [c for c in o.data.body_format.items()]

# Look at it:
for character in characters:
    # The index of the char
    print(character[0])
    # The format to the char
    print(character[1])

# Get the third char (for instance)
my_char = characters[2]

# Get its format
my_char_format = my_char[1]

# Assign it a (existing) material index
my_char_format.material_index = 1


How to reverse an animation? "I'm looking for a way to reverse my animation so it is identical the other way."

This is commonly asked and so I am presenting my solution.

This is a simple addon that using the scaling principle allowed by the NLA editor.

Its features:

Auto-baking
Works on rigid bodies
Auto-alligns so it starts and ends exactly where the previous animation did

Installation:

Go to https://github.com/FreddieRa/BlenderAddons/blob/master/AutoReverse.py
Click on "Raw" on the top left
Then right click anywhere and click "Save page as"
Save it as "AutoReverse.py"
Go into Blender and go to "Addons" in user preferences and click "Install from file"
Navigate to where you saved the .py, and then tick the box when it appears in Blender

How to use it:

Simply press "space" and type "Auto Reverse"

There are two different things this can be used on, normal animations, and rigid-body simulations.

For animations:
You don't need to do anything except have at least two keyframes

For Rigid-body simulations: All you have to do is place a keyframe (of any type) at the start and end of the section you would like reversed. This is just so you can select part of the simulation, or all of it like in the picture. Keep in mind it will be baked and so the rigid-body nature will be removed, however this can be put back in afterwards.

Tips and Tricks;

Use "Cell Fracture" to split a cube, a forcefield modifier to blow it apart and then "Auto Reverse" to change it into an animation of all the pieces flying back together
It will reverse everything selected so you can use it on multiple objects at once

How it works:

This works on the principle of scaling a block of keyframes, but in this case by -1, in order to invert them. It is done around a central point so it's not shifted at all, and baked in order to produce a better result.

It automatically gets the first and last keyframe of any animation and then simply reverses it. It also works on objects that are already baked, meaning that you can repeat it on the same object, and just flip the animation backwards and forwards if you wish to.

So there you go, use it, mess around with it, it's all commented so you should be able to see what's going on. I welcome comments and suggested improvements.

This is my first addon and so I will have made mistakes but I just hope this saves people time and can be used for interesting projects!

-Freddie


How to use Node Editor for the Video Sequencer? How can I use the VSE with the node editor? I've tested about two addons and one script, and nothing has worked out.

The best result was to use the VSE Compositor Node proxy, but it is only affecting the "Viewer Node" in the node editor. When I want to render an animation,
it renders pure VSE sequence without compositing.

Can someone tell me about a good working addon like this for Blender 2.72 or at least try the script I mentioned themself on Blender 2.72 to see if it's working? (maybe I'm doing something wrong, and it's not about the new Blender version)

Make sure that you add the composited scene back to the sequencer or VSE, then check that the VSE scene has the render properties Post > Sequencer ticked.


Making a Sail-Shade-- Plane with curves So here's the thing. I'm trying to make a sailshade. I'm going to be making many of these over time, so I want to find a fast and accurate way of doing this. Basically, a sailshade is normally 3 or so fixed points with a curve between the fixed points.

That's how most of them look, although some are more complex.

What i'm trying to do is make a plane that i can shape and stretch to how it needs to be, that way i don't have to constantly modify all the vertices. Sadly, i'm not an expert at Blender yet, and was wondering if there was some way to 'control' the curves that i put on the plane? For example, i could have a square plane with 8 'control points'. 1 on each point (4) and 1 between each point (4) to control the curves.

I'm pretty sure his is possible... but I haven't quite figured it out yet... Anyone able to help?

Please and thank you!

That isn't exactly the solution i was looking for, using a cloth modifier doesn't really work for what i'm doing.

In addition to Duarte's answer, I'll  add another method. It will use the subdivision surface modifier as well, but another method to create the sharp corners

Add a plane. Subdivide it once. Add a solidify, bevel and subdivision surface modifier.

Since the sail would have a thickness anyway, the bevel modifier comes in handy. Otherwise just scale the value down untill it is no longer noticeable (but no 0). Use a high number of segments and a high angle. The angle has to separate the corners from the sides. The corner angles are going to be > 90 in your example, so I entered 80°.

You can now easily edit the shapes. Other shapes (not just quads) are equally possible as long as there is a distinction between side angle and corner angle.

You could also use NURBS surfaces. Add a surface, delete the standard additional points and close the endpoints, by checking Endpoint U and V.


Can I name an output file from an output node? When I give a new name to a File Output, Blender ignores it.
It is using this name to create a new folder instead in which it is saving the image. Can I give a name to an output files or can they only be called Image0001?

The Base Path field is only used to specify a folder.
To modify the name, use the node's File Subpath in the Sidebar.

And this is the result:


Grey blank screen when animation is rendered New to blender, and this is my first animation. All I want is a 3d model t-shirt spinning. I placed the camera in view of it but still its grey and nothing shows.

Iam also new to Blender,

but I guess that you not switch to the Cameraview, press the little CameraIcon on the right
or  0 on the numpad

http://builder.openhmd.net/blender-hmd-viewport-temp/editors/3dview/navigate/camera_view.html


Black screen when creating movie I've rendered about 300 frames for a short clip. The frames look fine, but when I compile into a movie all I get is a black screen. I haven't been able to find anything to solve this problem. The individual frames are well lit, capture what I want them to, look great. Just creating the AVI or MPEG results in a clip that has nothing but black.

You have an unused video strip in the VSE and in the Post processing options you have sequence enabled. That makes the Video Sequence Editor take precedence and it will not render your scene, but whatever is happening on the VSE. Disable the sequence box and you'll be able to render your scene.


How to make Normals on seemingly flat surface smooth So I'm having this problem where from certain angles this geometry is showing creases where there shouldn't be. Here's the things I've tried:

selecting all the geometry that should be level and scaling it across the Z axis to 0, no luck.
Auto smoothing the normals and marking sharp where it should be sharp, no matter what degrees I use for the smoothing it doesn't seem to make a difference.
Triangulating the n-gons, still didn't get rid of it.

I've seen a lot of people have a similar issue, but usually they're using Booleans, which I'm not doing here.

It could possibly be my geometry, maybe I'm breaking a rule there. Any help would be appreciated.

Tris on ngons won't work fine on slightly bent surfaces. You could use this kind of topology:

If you can't use a Subdivision Surface modifier it needs a higher topology but you can keep this sort of solution:

etc...


How many "polygons" does my model have? I have my model and in the info bar its show this

May I need to know how many polygons it has, but  there is no option to find polygons. Verts, Edge and Faces nothing polygon option there.
In the website its say that the upload limit is 400,000 polygons. I did not get over that limit or how many polygons my model has?

Whenever you have a "poly limit" it is referring to triangles. You need look at Blender's Tris count.

A "face" is just two or more triangles (quad has two triangles, an N-gon has more) so the face count is not the real number.
If you make a model with only triangles, the face count and the Tris count will be the same.

Notice the face and triangle count in the images below.
This first cube is a default cube with 6 quads. The other cube has been triangulated. Notice the face and tri count match.

This is an object consisting of a single N-gon, and nothing more.


How to make liquid boil Super simple premise, but can't figure it out. How do I make a spitting boil, like lava or another thicker liquid?

Thanks in advance

Create Plane.
Create icosphere.
Select Plane, go to properties tab, particles:

Create a new particle system.
Go to render tab on particles properties and select object. Use the
picker and select the icosphere.
You will see particles being emitted downwards.
Go to world tab, scroll down to gravity tab. Mark it off.
Play animation. Bubbles start coming up. Great!
Go to the property tab-particles and choose emit number: use 25.
Next change life: set life 6 frames.
Next change emission from faces. Choose Random.
Now play with life parameters RANDOM to give particles a random
timing of death between 0 and 6 frames.
After you set that, you can add a turbulence force field. leave as
 default. Watch them bubbles.

Now: Any changes you do to the icosphere will reflect on the bubbles.

Create a sphere move it to intersect half of your icosphere. Select icosphere and use a boolean modifier. Select the sphere as boolean operation set to SUBSTRACT.

Play particle sim, you'll see your bubbles have a hole.

Now, animate the boolean sphere up and down quick enough in the timeline (you can press play and move it with G) and some will come complete and othera with just half bubble.

If you animate this consistently you'll get desired BASE effect.

Thank you for your consideration to vote this as answer by ticking the check mark at the left side.

BFCT_Schiller


Blender 2.7 render view badly pixelated but all other views are good/fine/ok I am brand new to Blender. I have tried all remedies offered, adjusting resolution, dimensions, etc... but I could get none of them to address the problem:

Render views are very badly pixelated looking, as divided along edges in this cylinder.

But, in Material or Texture view, image quality looks excellent.

Perhaps in my learning curve I had adjusted some obscure parameter which permanently causes this.

If I paste the object into a startup Blender Render, the problem persists.  But, it looks fantastic in other non-render views.  It's a head-scratcher.

Sorry for the repeat, but no remedies worked.

Don't worry - Blender's working just fine :)

The Render View algorithm is set at a low quality value for performance reasons, so you can manipulate the view of the model in real time with approximate ray-trace lighting conditions including reflections, transmissions, transparency, etc. It's not meant to give you an excellent result, just a guide result. If you want an excellent result, F12 :)

Material view only takes into account diffusion and light - no reflections, transmissions - so it's even quicker to calculate. There are no calculations done to approximate reflections or caustics, which is what's 'fogging up' your Render View.

Blender Render (otherwise known as 'Blender Internal' or 'BI') is supported, but no longer developed. Everyone's moving to the Cycles render engine (or other third party alternatives). Among many other features Cycles includes flexibility in setting both Preview and Final render settings independently. This means you can increase your Render View quality quite a bit... at the expense of view-handling performance.

As an aside... for a tiled pattern that's one helluva huge bmp you're using :) Think about using a smaller tile that just captures one iteration of the pattern: then in the Texture > Image Mapping panel, set it to Repeat and increase the X and Y values until you're happy.


Cannot get rid of smoothing. But why? (not: "But how?") (Note: there are many questions about smoothing - but this does not seem to be a duplicate of those. I referenced some at the bottom of this post.)

I have a column. It should be smoothed around the z-axis, but not along horizontal edges.

I tried "Auto Smooth", but that did not have any effect at all (and I do not know why). So I disabled that option again.
So I pressed "Tools"->"Smooth" in Object-Mode, which smoothed all of the object (as expected). Then I went into Edit-Mode, selected the edges that I need to be sharp and pressed "Shading/UVs"->"Edges"->"Sharp". I thought it had an effect at first... but it seems not to.

Question: Why did neither "Auto Smooth" nor "Edges"->"Sharp" work for me?

Regarding duplication:

The answer to this question does actually split the edge into two edges, which a) I would like to avoid, and b) does not answer why the obvious ways did not work.
The answers to this question offer a collection of fascinating ways to smooth/unsmooth things... but do also not answer my question of "why".

"Sharp Edges" only works in correlation with the option "Auto Smooth" enabled.
Auto Smooth uses the angle of edges standing on each other to determine if they should be shaded flat or smooth. The input "angle" is the starting point, so if the angle > 50° the faces will be shaded smooth

You could see the option "mark sharp" as an overwrite for the auto-smooth shading. "mark smooth" is essentially just a reset to default, or in this case the shading determined by the auto-smooth. Thats why only mark sharp has a visual edge highlight in the viewport.


UV map affects the color of the mesh I have this problem. When i apply a UV image to a certain area of a bottle the rest of it it take the color of the image.

I don't understand what doing wrong here. This is my nodes:

What it looks like is happening is that both the label part of the bottle and  the “pink” part of the bottle are using the same material (node setup).

The label part has been unwrapped to map the test grid texture correctly but because the “pink” parts are also using the same material node set up but have not been UV mapped all the vertices of the pink part are at the X = 0, Y = 0 location (bottom left hand corner) of the UV square.

To check this, select the “pink” parts in the bottle then go to the UV editor, those vertices/faces will be selected, now hit the G key and move them around the UV square with the mouse and you should notice the “pink” parts change colour depending where they are on the colour grid.

To correct this you need to give the “pink” parts their own material and node setup.


How to remove sound from sound spectrum in animation nodes? this is infuriating. Even if I delete the sound spectrum node, even if I restart Blender, the sounds that I loaded into sound spectrum node will remain there to be played simultaneously. How do I clear that node from previously loaded sounds?

When you load sound file in sound spectrum it will automatically appear on video sequencer.
You can remove audio from there.


“Cannot execute boolean operation” when subtracting several spheres and cylinders from cube This is a follow-on question as suggested by a commenter. What I'd like to do is to create a geometry with the following properties:

A cube with several spherical indentations carved out on top. 16 indentations are half-spheres. The 17th indentation has the shape of four half-cylinders that form a ring (with slightly rounded corners corresponding to the radius of the cylinders).

My plan of attack is as follows:

create and scale the cube
create 16 spheres clustered around the center of the cube's top face
create 4 cylinders, scale and rotate them to form the basic ring
create 4 more spheres at the corners to complete the ring
add 16 DIFFERENCE boolean modifiers to the cube with the 16 spheres from step 2 as targets; hide each sphere after adding the corresponding modifier
add 4 DIFFERENCE boolean modifiers to the cube with the 4 cylinders from step 3 as targets; hide each cylinder after adding the corresponding modifier
add 4 DIFFERENCE boolean modifiers to the cube with the 4 spheres from step 4 as targets; hide each sphere after adding the corresponding modifier

Steps 1 + 2 work as expected:

Steps 3 + 4 also work as expected:

And so does step 5:

And even step 6 for the 1st cylinder:

However when I try to subtract the 2nd cylinder the visual result is unexpected and the error message appears:

What is going on here and how can I obtain the desired geometry?

Could the problem be caused by the fact that the two cylinders I wish to subtract from the cube are themselves overlapping? (The Blender documentation mentions "concurrent Boolean operations for the same modified mesh, which in most cases is impossible to execute depending on the chosen target" but does not elaborate further.)

UPDATE Here's the (still expected) result when joining the 4 cylinders and last 4 spheres before subtracting the from the cube (see @Polosson's comment):

Cases where boolean operations can fail:

Overlapping geometry between objects:
Multiple vertices in the same location will often cause the boolean modifier to act up.
From this bug report:

  this is a known bug in Carve upstream (a library we're using for boolean operations)

Self intersecting objects:
Boolean operations with non-manifold objects or objects that are not water-tight will fail when non-manifold parts interact in the boolean operation.

Some things you can try:

Add supporting geometry. The boolean operation creates a lot of tris, so this might make subsequent operations difficult.

For example:

The spheres boolean causes this mess of tris where the cylinders will go:

However, if you add some loop cuts around the spheres:

The tris are contained in the center, keeping the topology clean where the cylinders intersect:

With modeling tools

You can get the result with conventional modeling too:

Add a sphere and two cylinders (the cylinders are just guides)
Rotate and move then into position using increment snapping (Ctrl) to keep everything precisely aligned:

Snap the 3D cursor to the sphere object by selecting (in object mode) it and pressing ShiftS> Cursor to Selected
Press . (period) to set the pivot to the 3D cursor
Enter edit mode with the sphere active and delete these elements with X or Delete> Vertices:

Scale the 45 degree edgeloop along the X and Y by pressing S and then ShiftZ, then holding Ctrl to snap until the edgeloop at 45 degrees touches the intersection at the two cylinders:

The cylinders are no longer useful after this step, so you can delete them.
Select the vertices as shown:

Extrude along the X axis (EX):

Set the pivot to Bounding box center (,) and scale the selection to 0 along the X by pressing SXO (zero):

Do the same for the other side:

Add a mirror modifier and enable X and Y:

With the sphere active, enter edit mode and select all (A), then move it so the object origin is not in the middle of the sphere:

Before:

After:

Enable Clipping in the mirror modifier and move each edge so it merges with the mirrored geometry:

You can then use this for the boolean operations:

Here is the blendfile.


Cycles Render Option Not Showing Up In Blender 2.77 I installed Blender 2.77 RC1 but I only get the Blender Render and Game Engine options for rendering.  Cycles doesn't appear in the pull down menu.

I've reinstalled 2.77 and checked all the preferences, but no joy.

Anyone having the same problem?  If so, is there a trick of some sort to get to the Cycles opation?

You have to enable it in user preferences and addons.


Texture Exporting Problem I have the Problem, that when I export my project as Fbx, the Textures don't come with it. I tried changing the Method used to reference paths to copy and activate embed Textures but it didn't work. I also tried to unpack all into files but nothing. Any suggestions?

1. Do you have any procedural textures (nodes)?
If so, bake them to image textures. Lot's of stuff about baking on YouTube.
2. What is your aim with exporting it?
Is there some way of importing those textures into where ever you want the model?
If so, the UV's should be there whether or not the textures are.
3. Are there any other formats that you could use?
4. Relative paths?
Have you tried moving your textures into the same folder as your blender file, but not packing it all into the blend file?
5. And of course restarting Blender.


How to stop and save during a 'Progressive Refine' render in progress? When using the Progressive Refine render option, how do I actually stop a render prematurely and save it? I understand that is one of the benefits as I've read here and elsewhere, but I can't seem to find an answer or figure that aspect of it out.

To stop a render in process, be it progressive or not simply press Esc.

You can also click the x next to the progress bar in the Info header to do the same thing.

To save the image, press F3 with your mouse in the UV/Image Editor window with the Render Result or output from the compositor Viewer Node displayed.


How to install Blender while retaining addons Since Blender is frequently updated, how do you install the latest version while keeping all of your addons including purchased addons from 3rd parties?

New Blender versions can be installed along side the previous versions, meaning that your old install of Blender will continue to work with its add-ons.

For the new version of Blender you will have to install the add-ons again. If the add-on you've previously downloaded / purchased is compatible with the new version of Blender, you can use the same files (.zip, .py) for the installation of the add-on. Should they not be compatible, then you will have to check if an updated version of the add-on is available for that specific Blender version.

Add-ons for 2.79b and earlier can't be used in Blender 2.8x because of the changed API.


Blender Trim Sheet UV's not unwrapping The only reasoning I'm asking this is because I've searched and searched but none of the answers seem to fix my exact issue. I've used all the UV unwrap methods I found pertaining to trim sheets. They work exactly fine when I unwrap a circular mesh; however, when I try to unwrap an 'S' curved mesh I get some really bad distortion.

I am using the "follow active quads" unwrap feature. (Like I said, when I use it on a circular mesh like used in all the tutorials, it works fine. Maybe it's because of the UV space not being the same on all the faces? If so, how do I fix it?)

thanks in advance!

There is nothing wrong with the UV map you created. Using Follow active quads gives you good uv islands suitable for trim maps.

You should instead focus on how you built the model. Try to keep your quads as square as possible so that the distortion gets evenly distributed across all faces.

I added a wireframe to the model so that you can see how the quads gets split up into triangles and how the texture stretches over them.


Tank track deformation rigging for Unity. Worked well before, fixed a problem and created more Here is the first tank model I made. It uses the array and curve modifier for the track shape and I purposely left a gap which I stitched together with the F key function to create a solid shape in Blender. When I placed it in Unity the stitch I made came out as a partial void but the track suspension worked:

Notice the void in the track links where I tried to stitch them together.

And the tracks deform perfectly.
After this I tried to fix this issue by making the number in the array just a bit too small and then I edited the bezier curve to make it just small enough to made the track almost connect. I did not edit this after applying the array and curve modifier.

And the later model looks like this, notice that the track comes out perfectly without any gaps or voids.
But when I try to deform the bone it ends up very broken

As you can see the track does not deform properly. In a newer version, I tried arranging the bones better so that the automatic weight painting would look better.

But the issue is still persistent in Unity:

The model and armature/bones:

I have tried creating these tracks several times. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

First you can delete the faces on the sides of the track segments, where they connect. These will end up on the inside of the track where you can't see them, so you don't need them.

When you merge your track segments (to get rid of the staircase effect) by checking the Merge box in the Array modifier, you can also check the box First Last to close the loop. It doesn't always work though, like in my example.

But that's not a problem. : )

You can close the loop manually in Edit Mode, after applying the modifiers. Select pairs of vertices than need to be connected and press F. Then use F to make faces between the newly created edges.

Or select al the 8 vertices you want to connect and do Edge > Bridge Edge Loops.

Or you can add a Weld modifier, and increase the distance until the gap is bridged.


The rendered image has nothing to do with my animation so today I tried to make an animation got it finished, then started rendering it and it would load a image that had nothing to do with my animation, so there I waiting for like 3 hours to find a 10 second video of that image. Ok so it might be corrupted file but then I rendered it as an image and the images were that odd image... here is the video of what keeps happening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmg9wnbbu6ghelp!

If you look at the top left of your screen it says Object as Camera.

In the scene section choose your camera as the active camera:


Can I use something similar to the ParticleInfo Node but for meta objects? In cycles you can control the color of a Particle-(dupli)Object with the ParticleInfo Node. You can, for example, divide Particle Age by Lifetime and use the result as factor for a mix shader.

I wonder if and how it is possible to do the same with a metaball (instead of a cube)?

I have a particle system and i'm using a object (in this case a sphere) as dupli object.

In the picture you can see that the material color is affected by the age of the particle. If i change the dupli object from the sphere to a meatball the age of the particle has no influence. The material is same material that i used for the sphere

My example Material
Sphere as dupli object
Metaball as dupli object

You could color your Metaballs easily with the Point Density Texture/Map. I recently found it works also great on surface coloring just like the volume coloring. You could set the Radius in the Point Density settings high enough to reach the surface of the Metaballs and it should work properly.

EDIT:

I just tried it myself and it actually works. When you use the Point Density in the Material of the Metaball you have to select the Object with the Particle System on it and make the Radius high enough. You can also select if you want to know the speed or the age of the Particle. Also Cubic Interpolation is much more beautiful in my opinion so select that.


How to denoise animations using Blender's Temporal Denoiser? I've been diving into the secret Blender Animation Denoiser function mentioned in February of 2019 by Pablo and documented on the Developer Site.
Here are some things I figured out after digging around:

When you render for the animation denoiser you have to use OpenEXR Multilayer.
I then enabled denoising within the Blender view layer settings panel, like instructed.

My code looks like this:
bpy.ops.cycles.denoise_animation(output_filepath="//Render\Denoised Sequence\Denoised_Images_")

After hitting enter on the above command, it worked!!!!.... except it didn't.

It went through the process of creating the images of the new denoised sequence.  But when I open the files... they are not denoised.  Simply exact copies of the original noisy images.
So close, yet I don't know where to go from here. Any ideas?

How to use the Temporal Denoiser

Step 01: Pack Denoising Data

Enable denoising data in View Layer > Passes > Denoising Data
Set file format to OpenEXR Multilayer (so Blender packs the denoising data)
Render your animation

Note:
Blender 2.8 needs to be used in the pipeline to pack the denoising data. Simply open your .blend with Blender 2.8, set up the denoising data and save. Then you can reopen the file and render with any version.

Step 02: Denoising
import bpy
import os
import glob

inputdir="D:/Animation/"
outputdir="D:/Animation/Denoised_"
os.chdir(inputdir)
myfiles=(glob.glob("*.exr"))
for file in myfiles:
   print(inputdir + file + " to " + outputdir + file)
   bpy.ops.cycles.denoise_animation(input_filepath=(inputdir + file), output_filepath=(outputdir + file))

Copy the above script into Blender's Text Editor (and backup your animation files :)
Change the location to where your rendered files are. The default location is D:/Animation/
Run the script by pressing the Play button ►

Notes: The used code is from this Reddit thread. All credits to toadfury.


Why does my procedural texture look different after cell fracture? I've got a character out of MakeHuman that I want to break apart like a statue. I've applied a procedural stone texture to the character.

I applied the armature modifier, then separated the hand (the part I want to break apart) into a new object.

With the hand object selected, I broke it apart with the cell fracture addon. After the fracture, the new pieces aren't textured the same as the rest of the arm, or the original hand. What am I missing?

When you use procedural textures the texture coordinates are based on the object's position, rotation and size. When you shatter the object it will turn into many objects with different position. It can be solved by using the Texture Coordinate node's Object output using a common object as reference. This will however not solve the problem once you move the parts away. The texture will "slide".
You will need to create UV coordinates and bake down your procedural texture to an image and have this applied as a new material.


It's dangerous to flip a mesh with S + (X, Y, Z) -1? i read somewhere here about how to flip a mesh, i found that using the x + axis -1 trick works perfectly to flip an object, but also i read that someone said it was "destructive".

Is it really safe to use that? i mean, it doesn't affect my mesh in a bad way?

Modelling wise you will most likely end up with inverted normals. This may cause invisible/missing faces or an inverted in-side-out model effect, with unexpected material shading. This can be easily fixed in edit mode by selecting all faces and flipping them or recalculating them with Ctrl+N.

Cycles is mostly immune to inverted normals in most regular materials, but it may still give adverse effects under certain situations when materials use normal maps or vector normal input.

Negatively scaled objects may also adversely affect certain simulations, like physics, fluids, smoke, certain modifiers, and/or constrains and rigging, that read or rely on object transforms.

Other than that nothing intrinsically wrong with it, it is the only quick method to invert an object after all.
If you no longer need the object to be an instance of other, or it is already an isolated object data user, then you may apply the scale with Ctrl+A > Scale.


how to fix a hole in a photoscanned rock? i'd like to fix the hole in this photoscanned model so it look complete

if it is using a UV texture you can use the clone brush in texture paint mode and copy texture from other places (using clone brush, control + left mouse button to choose area to clone, and then paint with left mouse button and drag)


Applying Array Modifier - Still instance? I got a short question: If I apply the array modifier, are the objects still instances or are they converted to real objects? I also don't want to change these objects.

No.
They are never instanced, even before the modifier is applied.

The array modifier makes a new copy of the mesh for each repetition, storing the same geometry over and over. This allows other modifiers to make modifications to the mesh as a whole.
Unless you separate them after applying the modifier, they are all one object and part of the same mesh.

So they are never instanced, because they are never actually separate objects.

To instance objects with an array modifier, you could try using the technique in my answer here.


Why are the particles floating around the objects instead of sticking to it? So I am trying to add some sprinkles to the Donut as I have been revising myself of a tutorial from Blender Guru. It worked fine, but then my computer crashed and I didn't have a chance to save it. I am very new to blender, and I have researched some from here but they didn't work this out. So, I am wondering what is causing such problem.

The emitted particles (sprinkles) are attached to the emitter (donut) in their origin points. If the origin point is far from the object, the emitted particle will be far from its emitter. Check the origin point of the emitted object, Perhaps it's not adjusted to geometry.

Select the emitted object (the sprinkle) > Right click > Set origin > Origin to geometry.


How can I make a camera the active one? I have multiple cameras in a scene. What I want to do is to change which one is active. This way I can view the scene from different angles. How would I do this?

There are a few ways to set the active camera.

Key Binding: select it and press Ctrl+ Numpad 0.

From the menu:3D Viewport Header -> View -> Cameras -> Set active object as camera.

Scene property:
Scene tab in the Properties Editor and pick a camera object from the list:

Outliner (V2.90+):

You can click the green camera icon beside the camera's name in the outliner to toggle it as active for the scene.

Animation:
To change the active camera during an animation you can use Markers.

Add a marker where you want to change the active camera (M in the Timeline, or Timeline header > Add marker will add a marker to the current frame):

Select the object which you want to set as the new active camera and the marker which you want to bind it to, then press CtrlB in the Timeline (or Timeline header > View > Bind camera to markers):

Note that markers behave like keyframes, so you will need at least two markers with cameras bound to them to have any camera switching.
To illustrate this, here is an example with Camera.001 bound to the marker on frame 1, and Camera bound to the marker on frame 5:

Note: If setting the active camera is only effecting a single view, you may have Scene-lock disabled. In the 3D View header (Right hand side of layers buttons), there is a lock icon. This should normally be pushed in, unless you explicitly want to set a camera & layers only to a single view.


Is it possible to use a texture to control the size of particles? I'm trying to make a forest with a particle system, but I want a controlled variation in tree size. Is it possible to use a displacement texture or something similar to control the size of the particles?

Just add a texture to your emitter and in the influence panel of the texture choose Size for emitter particles or Length for hair particles.


Nodes increment by 0.1, can this be changed? I was looking at the sliders on nodes and I wanted a more dynamic change. When, for example, on the Fresnel node, slide it up and down it will increment or decrement by 0.1.

Is there a way to modify this behavior so that it will change by a value of 0.001 for instance?

This may be hard coded. I'd like to know how to modify this for a smoother experience transitioning between values.

Trying holding down the shift key while clicking and dragging to change the values. This will allow you to increment the value by hundredths versus tenths.


Blender Game engine Animation Not playing The Tux character in the attached blend does not play the walking animation. The parenting is set correctly (armature) and all modifiers have been removed.

Any ideas?

GoogleDrive Blend

I can't open your file from here.

You need at least the armature modifier. You can easily get them by

select the skin mesh object(s)
shift select the armature
ctrl+p Set Parent To \ Armature Deform

Usually you need Vertex Groups set that match the names of the armature's bones.

ctrl+p Set Parent To \ Armature Deform \ With ... allows you to create such Vertex Groups.

I hope it helps


How to use the array function Apologies if this has been asked before but I cannot find anything that answers my question. I'm trying to use an array with an empty offset by 2 degrees. The idea is to create multiple planes rotated around the Z axis. However, when I set the array up it just creates 4 planes 2 degrees from each other. I want 46 planes rotating around to create a quarter circle. I have uploaded the file, so hopefully, it will show the problem far better than I can explain it.

Dave

The first thing you want to do is to have a starting object that is more than just a line. The array modifier will take your object and duplicate it with some offset. Thus, what you would've ended up with (in the case that the array was setup properly), would be 48 lines without any planes.

Add a Mesh > Circle with 48*4 = 192 vertices. Then, select all of the circle's vertices except for two adjacent ones (that you want to keep) in Edit Mode, press ALt+M > Merge at Center. This will create the center vertex. Join the two perimeter vertices by selecting them and pressing F, then select everything with A, and press F again to fill in the triangle.

Then, add in the Array modifier to the triangle. Disable the Relative Offset, and enable the Object Offset as you did in your attached file. Add the Empty Axis, and rotate it in the Z-axis by 90/48 = 1.875 degrees.

Use the empty for the Object Offset in the Array modifier, and you've now gotten a quarter circle made up of 48 triangles.

Edit:

From your blend file, the reason why your array isn't working properly is that you have an unapplied rotation to the "Circle" object. Select the circle object and press Ctrl+A and select Apply > Rotation. Your array works fine after that step.


Change origin/pivot point without using 3D cursor (or basically the GUI) Is there a way we can change the origin or pivot point for a rotation/scaling activity in edit mode without using the 3D cursor, as I'm trying to run blender from a command-line without GUI and hence can't use 3D cursor.

try this .. bpy.context.scene.cursor_location = (0, 0, 0) in edit and object mode.


Model are far away from center grid I'm a newbie in Blender, but I've noticed one of my friend's models is not placed exactly at the center of the grid.

I've grabbed the model and placed it in the center, but manipulator with root bone also moves, but I want to keep root bone in the center of the grid as well.

Here are some screenshots with my problem

Root bone placed correctly (by default) in the center of the grid, but the model is away from the center.

Ok, the model is in the spot that I want it to be, but root bone moved away from center grid?

BTW I'm using blender 2.77 version

To place an object to the center and also change the pivot point to the object's center, follow these steps:

Select your object and tab into edit mode.
Hit A to select the whole mesh
Hit Shift+S and select "Cursor to Selected"
Tab into Object Mode and hit Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C
Hit Shift+S and select "Cursor to Center"
Hit Shift+S again and select "Selection to Cursor"

If this answer solves your problem, please vote and also mark it as "accepted"


Failed to read BLEND file..... TYPE error in SDNA file Hi to all Masters out there. I encountered a problem regarding with a certain file that was created and modified weeks ago. when I tried to open it back again to do some revisions but it can't be opened anymore and an error message was displayed saying "X\XXXX\XXXX\XXXX.blend": TYPE error in SDNA file.
any ideas what happended to this?
thanks!

I do not know if this is your case, but if the .blend file was opened in another version of the blender you were editing or even in another engine (eg upbge and armony3d), it may no longer work in the blender.


Make strip active or deactivate it in python I found out that the 'active variable of a strip is read-only.
Is there another way to activate and/or deactivate a strip with python?
Maybe a predefined operator which I can use?

try this:

import bpy
se = bpy.context.scene.sequence_editor
se.active_strip = se.sequences['0001.png']

There appears to be some lag in the UI that I'm not sure how to work around.


Planetary Gears: How to rig for rigid body physics engine? The following image shows a planetary gear mechanism under a rigid body physics simulation. All gears involved are under a hinge constraint, and the central red gear is also under a motor constraint. The cylinders are used as Object 2 for the corresponding constraints, and marked "passive".

What I need, however, is for the outer (yellow) gear to be stationary and the centers of the satellite gears (blue) to move around the center. But I can't figure out how to rig this correctly.

Can someone please nudge me in the right direction?

Thanks in advance.

You have already done the most part of the job.

Connect the gray cylinder (the bottom one) to each of the pink cylinder with a constraint of type hinge.
The created empties (empties added by the previous constraints) need to be aligned on the center of the system (Z axis) as the pink cylinders need to rotate around this axis
Set all the pink cylinders to active as they need to move
Set the yellow gear to passive as it needs to stay in place


Texture "stretching" New to Blender and my first time using textures. I tried to do a clay-like model but on some parts, the texture is stretching (eyes and legs particularly).
Any idea what I did wrong?

Have a look at the UV map.
The leaf takes a lot of texture UV space but it's fairly small in 3D space. That way it has a lot of details (=compression).
But the eyes get very little texture space and are big in 3D space. So they have only little texture details (=stretching).
A checkerboard texture can visualize this for you. Ideally, the chess patterns should all be the same size.
You can try to unwrap again with Smart UV Project (What is the difference between Unwrap and Smart uv project?).
Or edit the UV map

scale down the leaf in the UV editor (hover mouse over an UV island and press L to select it).

and try menu: UV → Minimize Stretch. The editor will then try to give the eyes more space (hopefully).


How can use the mapping node for two noise textures I'm actually creating a planet with this node set up :

I would like the continent texture to be appearing only near the poles but they keep appearing randomly like this :
I guess I have to use the mapping node in some ways but I can't fix it
Does anyone have a solution ?

You can use a geometry node which allows to use the rendered position to do this kind of thing.

The additional nodes can be plugged before the top left colorramp of your material:

From left to right (the top nodes line):

Rendered position: the position is given from the object origin
Separate XYZ, in order to keep only Z (for the poles)
Absolute: the sphere here is 2 meters height and its origin is a the middle, so "absolute" gives a value between 0 and 1
A color ramp to be tuned so that the earth surface is more or less far from the poles
Multiply: to mix your noise input with the previous ramp which translates the Z value
The last output is injected in the color ramp of your initial material (or at least I've tried to mimic it)


Is there a hotkey for making a face from the inner outline I did in this picture? I am trying to make the darkened section of the reference image:

Select all inner edges (like on screenshot), then go to Mesh - Faces - Fill (Alt+F), it will fill all with Triangles, selecting all of them. To turn Most of them into Quads, go to Mesh - Faces - Tris To Quads (Alt+J).
If there's any Triangles left - dissolve their edges, and then just continue the needed loopcuts through created faces, where needed (mostly at the place, where Triangle's edges were dissolved) with Knife tool (K).

I'm pretty shure that there's a better method, but this will work, too.


How to wedge in, or extrude triangularly? Or how to go from this

to this

I know it can be done with the knife or by extruding an edge and then delete faces and recreate them, but both solutions seem too complicated for a single thing that is so often needed. The same applies for creating a wedge out, though that is a bit easier.

You can push your top face down, add a loop cut, then extrude one face up. Then, you can simply drag the remaining edge to the same height.

You can also skip the first step, and simply add a loopcut. Select the face on the right, press extrude, and LMB. Then, pull up that face and the other edge.

This one is a little bit tricky, but uses the same method. Add a loopcut, Select the face on the left, press extrude, then click. Then, with the vertex selection mode active, press Ctrl+I to select evreything but the vertices connected to that face. Then, deselect all vertices except for the two in the middle. You can now move them down. DO note that you may want to also press W - Remove doubles, as this method will have two vertices in the same spot.


How to copy the full data path of a property to the clipboard? I right click on the cube Z location, then select "copy data path". When I paste that into the console I find the word location. Why doesn't it paste bpy.data.objects['cube'].location[2]?

Place the cursor over a property and press CtrlShiftAltC to copy the full RNA data path of that property to the clipboard eg. bpy.data.objects["Cube"].location[2].
The hotkey calls bpy.ops.ui.copy_data_path_button(full_path=True) operator:

Somehow related: Add menu entry to generic right-click menu?


Where is the bge module file located? I want to access the bge module's code, but I cannot find it anywhere in the modules folder, or in any other folder from Blender. Where is it?

There is no file in the module directory that gives acces to the bge module's code which is written in the source of blender executable.


Why is it rendering twice before I get the final rendering? Is that normal? The last time I checked it, it was near 100% rendering, now it's at 4% as you can see. Why is it starting again?

The possible chances are that, either you might have clicked on render animation, which is present under the Render menu, or you might have multiple passes in view layers or in simply you are rendering passes.


how to push back / repel clothes from a surface? Hello!

I am trying to design clothes to a character that I made.

And I get stuck on that problem:
Is there an easy trick to repel the clothes from the body.

I modeled the clothes above my model but the holes keep happening.
I tried with shrink wrap Offset but it just makes the clothes to wide.
I tried to use the cloth simulator, but it doesn't solve the problem, and adds a lot of wrinkles.

thanks for the help,
Mathieu

Go into edit mode with a piece of clothing selected.

Enable proportional editing by pressing O. Turn on x-ray with AltZ in order to help you see the mesh stuck inside the model more easily.

Select a vertice that is inside the person, pull the vertice out of the character. Adjust the proportional size with your scroll wheel. This will determine how nearby vertices are affected. Repeat with other clothes.


I cant render this Grid I'm trying to create my first 3d model with material . so i pick up my radio to be my guide . There is a problem that i cant solve . i tried to create a grid in front of the radio but when i render it for testing i cant see that grid

and im not sure i did the right way to create this grid . I just use plane and then subdivide it 10 time twice ! and then use wireframe modifier to create tiny hold in the grid  AM i doing it right ? Plz give me some advice Thx you :)

Click this button:

The if the little camera is grayed out, it means that the object is not visible in the render
If the eye is grayed out, it means that the object is not visible in the preview


When I paint in vertex paint, and after I switch back to object mode it does not show the paint This is the situation here
https://i.gyazo.com/79225d6fd878431834b8b27ea54f59b0.mp4

As you can see when im in vertex paint I can see what I have painted, but once I go into object mode I can no longer see it.

To see the vertex paint in Object mode you must switch the display mode to Texture.

See the image below showing the vertex showing in Object mode with Texture active:


How many dB (Decibel) are at the extreme limit of the Waveform? How many dB (Decibel) are at the extreme limit of the Waveform, where the Waveform turns red?

Decibel is a comparative unit, like percentage but logarithmic, so red lines say "You went over 100%". But 100% of what? It's 100% of the hardware and software capabilities.
In professional audio there are many different conventions, named dBU, dBA, dBV, and so on, often referred as generally dB, but it's not correct to say dB if you don't specify referred to what.
In this waveform representation you can think that the minimum audio level is silence 0% and the maximum is 100%; red lines underline the fact that signal went over 100%, and it will be cut to 100%, resulting in distortion (like overexposing an image, resulting in uniform white where different shades should appear).
This 100% level is often referred as "0 dB", which is the maximum peak level the system can handle without distortion.
In this kind of representation average (RMS) levels often stays between -14 and -10 dB (but it all depends by the kind of signal and its levels of audio compression).
Level meters are always logarithmic (as our hearing capabilities are very large: from wind whispers to Jumbo Jet takeoff: from + 30 dBA to + 140 dBA), so 50%, corresponding to - 6 dB, is often represented similar to this picture:

In this examples 0dB corresponds to the maximun output level your sound card can deliver (typical levels are - 10 dBu for consumers equipement, + 4 dBu for professional equipement).


How to change the stroke placement of the grease pencil in the UV window? I want the lines to be fixed in a position not to the view, but every time I start drawing the stroke placement mode changes automatically from cursor to view.

After a loooooong time I figured out, I don´t know if it is a bug or something else.

Basically I need to select an image to be able to use the CURSOR for stroke placement, if no image is selected the stroke is automatically changed to VIEW when you try to paint something


make Tab the autocomplete shortcut in the Python Console When working in the Python Console inside of Blender, Ctrl+Space is the default keyboard shortcut for autocomplete. And there is also an Autocomplete button on the console bar that can be clicked.

However, when working with Python files outside of Blender, I am used to Tab being the autocomplete shortcut. So when I want to autocomplete in Blender, I often press Tab by mistake, which has the effect of indenting the line that my cursor is on.

Is there a way to make Tab serve as the autocomplete shortcut instead of Ctrl+Space?

An intelligent Tab key appears to be the default in 2.8x.
When used it creates Tabs in the white-space at the start of a line, otherwise it Autocompletes when used after text characters.


Python module installation does not work For some of my python scrips i need additional modules like pytables. I followed the instructions here, but nothing worked for me:

first I set the PATH and PythonPath system vars to C:\Python34
then I tried to copy the module files from C:\Python34\Lib\site-packages to C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.74\scripts\modules, but when I try to import a module in the blender python console, it gave me an error (see below)
I deleted the C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.74\python, but then in the blender system console it says: Warning: bundled python not found and is expected on this platform. <if you build with CMake: 'install' target max have not been build>

this error:
import tables
Traceback (most recent call last):   File "<blender_console>", line 1, in <module>   File "C:\Program Files\Blender
Foundation\Blender\2.74\scripts\modules\tables\__init__.py", line 25, in <module>
import numpy   File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.74\scripts\modules\numpy\__init__.py", line 185, in <module>
from . import add_newdocs   File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.74\scripts\modules\numpy\add_newdocs.py", line 13, in <module>
from numpy.lib import add_newdoc   File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.74\scripts\modules\numpy\lib\__init__.py", line
8, in <module>
from .type_check import *   File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.74\scripts\modules\numpy\lib\type_check.py", line 11, in <module>
import numpy.core.numeric as _nx   File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.74\scripts\modules\numpy\core\__init__.py", line 6, in <module>
from . import multiarray ImportError: DLL load failed: %1 ist keine zulässige Win32-Anwendung.

I am using Win7 64bit version, python 3.42 and Blender 2.74.
I really don't know what I can still do to import these modules.

If you can start command prompt, and get python34 REPL, and import numpy and tables without errors, there's little reason that Blender's python console can't do the same.

Determine which python executable is used

Run this bit of code in two different locations. First from command prompt python interpreter and then from Blender's python console.

import sys
print(sys.path)
print(sys.executable)

You might notice that Blender isn't finding the same python executable. If they are different, this can explain why imports are failing. If they are the same that's a good thing. Half the battle is won!

Test your Python separately first.

On windows make sure the C:\Python34; is at the start of the PATH line, when you type in python into command prompt you'll want 3.4(.1+) to launch. (At least, I've had success with that and numpy1.8 on windows)

You should also be able to import numpy from command prompt without errors

Python 3.4.1 (v3.4.1:c0e311e010fc, May 18 2014, 10:38:22) <edited>
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import numpy
>>> # also try the other important imports, stuff must work from here too

If you get errors from this python interpreter, forget about blender and fix the errors first. Once fixed, blender too will be able to use the libraries.

If you still have the python directory inside Blender's folder now is a good time to rename it to _python.

The Blender warning when you rename/remove its own python folder

  Warning: bundled python not found and is expected on this platform.

is just that, a warning. Telling you that Blender looked in the directory where it keeps Python and couldn't find it, that's OK. It's perfectly fine to use your local Python34 installation, on windows I prefer to use it that way. Pasting around libraries into scripts/modules folder obviously didn't work, I suggest removing the files you added there to prevent them from interfering with imports.

For sverchok we found it was necessary to install Numpy 1.8 and Python3.4.1, and did a small write-up. I won't reproduce here because this is bordering on off-topic.

Forcing Blender to use your local system Python3.4.x

When Blender is forced to use the system's local python 3.4.x it hoists some paths of its own into the global namespace at runtime, to allow for importing bpy and all other blender modules. Apart from that the py3.4 runtime is entirely your system's.

If your imports are failing inside Blender, even though it uses the local python3.4, it is likely because you moved libraries into scripts/modules/.. or one of the other paths listed in sys.path. Python is going to look in the sequence given by sys.path, it iterates over the list, to find an import that matches your import statements. if Python finds anything before it hits 'C:\Python34\lib\site-packages` that will be tried first and only.

You should have a nice directory with all your python3.4 libraries like

C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\numpy
C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\scipy
# etc


Manually Position Vertex Normals? I have bunch of objects that I want to position next to each other in a scene. When they are next to each other, there is an apparent seam between them due to different normal directions. The normal directions are this way, of course, because the two objects are of a different mesh.

Is there a way to manually change the direction of normals for specific vertices like in 3DS Max, Maya, etc.?

The only method that I know of is to influence the normals by using the Normal Edit Modifier and it works only if you have two or more objects and not one object with several submeshes.

In Object Mode, select Object1, go to "Properties Window -> Data"
and enable "Auto Smooth".
With Object1 still selected, go to "Properties Window -> Modifiers
-> Add Modifier -> Modifiy -> Normal Edit".
Keep "Radial"and under "Target Object" select Object2.
Repeat steps 1-3 for Object2, only with Object1 as target.

Since gif isn't suitable to display the "before" and "after" images, here's a jpeg to illustrate the difference.

I only tested this once with Leadwerks Game Engine and there it seemed to work.


How to change dimensions of an object proportionally? I need to change the 3 dimensions of an object, but only by changing one dimension.

That is, if the object has the following dimensions:

height: 2 units (Z)
width: 0.5 units (Y)
depth: 0.1 units (X)

When I change the height of 2 units to 3 units, then the other width dimensions (Y) and depth (X) should automatically change to 0.75 and 0.15 respectively.

I do this by scaling (S):

I press the S key
I press the = key
After Income Division 3/2. 3 is the new dimension and 2 above.

But I would like to know if there is a better way to do so through the properties panel (N).
The options in the properties panel, when I change the height of 2 units to 3 units, the width and depth do not change.

There is a solution since version 2.70:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.70/UI#Multi-Number_Button_Editing

Click and drag from the first to the last fields you want to edit and release the click. The three fields are highlighted. Enter an expression, eg. *3/2 and press enter. All fields are edited at the same time.


polygon shading when editing Just starting out, wondering exactly what the darker shading means:

Is it simply shadowing based on the current dimensions?

Is it also an indicator that front and side rigging are somehow not correspondent with each other?

Thanks a bunch.

In edit mode, select your entire mesh and press Ctrl+N. This should recalculate all of the normals and the shading should be correct again.


Character physics "jump limit" in bge....! So, I'm trying to make a flappy bird -like game and I'm using the "character physics" to make the bird fly/jump but the limit is 225 jumps...

Any solution to exceed this limit?

I'm relatively new to bge

There is no easy way to do this. Even though there is a jumpCount property you can not edit it via script as it's readable only. However, after some tests I found a hacky workaround that might do it for you, because resetting the gravity seems to reset the jumpCounter. It can by achieved by this procedure:

Paste this script into the text editor.

import bge

def main():
    cont = bge.logic.getCurrentController()
    own = cont.owner
    hero = bge.constraints.getCharacter(own)
    hero.jump()

    # Reset the gravity:
    hero.gravity = 0
    hero.gravity = 30 #default value. You might change this :)
main()

Then use the following setup on your player to trigger the script. Notice that the jumping is also done via the script.


TypeError: MESH_OT_add_triangle.is_property_set("location") not found I get this error when I add a mesh object to my scene, but I don't know what it means:
Error: Python: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\triangle-test\ui-triangle.py", line 36, in execute
    object_data_add(context, steeve.mesh, operator=self)
  File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 2.91\2.91\scripts\modules\bpy_extras\object_utils.py", line 130, in object_data_add
    obj_new.matrix_world = add_object_align_init(context, operator)
  File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 2.91\2.91\scripts\modules\bpy_extras\object_utils.py", line 60, in add_object_align_init
    if operator and properties.is_property_set("location"):
TypeError: MESH_OT_add_triangle.is_property_set("location") not found

The object is effectively added to the scene but usually I notice that Blender crashes after a few seconds.
Note: I have an operator named T2T_TRIANGLE_add_triangle but no MESH_OT_add_triangle, I suppose it's generated internally.
What am I doing wrong?
EDIT
Code of the operator:
class T2T_TRIANGLE_add_triangle(bpy.types.Operator):
    """Create a new triangle object"""
    bl_idname = "mesh.add_triangle"
    bl_label = "Add Triangle"
    bl_options = {'REGISTER', 'UNDO'}

    lvl = bpy.props.IntProperty(name="Level:", default=2, set=set_level)
    ang = bpy.props.FloatProperty(name="Angle:", default=60, set=set_angle)

    level = 2
    angle = 60

    def execute(self, context):
        steeve = Triangle(level=self.level, angle=self.angle)
        object_data_add(context, steeve.mesh, operator=self)
        steeve.mesh.validate(verbose=True)
        return {'FINISHED'}

    def invoke(self, context, event):
        return context.window_manager.invoke_props_dialog(self)

def set_level(self, value):
    self["level"] = value

def set_angle(self, value):
    self["angle"] = value

The operator requires a location, rotation, align property.
If you are going to use object_data_add to add an object to the scene then make sure you use mixin class AddObjectHelper  As demonstrated in the addon add object template
from bpy_extras.object_utils import AddObjectHelper, object_data_add

class OBJECT_OT_add_object(Operator, AddObjectHelper):
    """Create a new Mesh Object"""
    bl_idname = "mesh.add_object"
    bl_label = "Add Mesh Object"
    bl_options = {'REGISTER', 'UNDO'}

    scale: FloatVectorProperty(
        name="scale",
        default=(1.0, 1.0, 1.0),
        subtype='TRANSLATION',
        description="scaling",
    )

    def execute(self, context):

        add_object(self, context)

        return {'FINISHED'

or annotate your class with the usual suspects location, rotation, align  See https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/160995/15543


Finding the closest point on a line defined by two points I'm doing some simulation work using Blender/Python and I'm stuck on a geometry problem. What I want to do is:

Define a line in 3D space based on two points. One of the points will always be the origin.
Be able to find the coordinates of the closest point on that line to a given point B.

I've found plenty of information on how to do this in 2 dimensions, but none using 3, at least not that are in python and don't use a bunch of vector math libraries that I'm not familiar with.

I've tried working it out for 3 dimensions based on the 2D examples and I keep getting bogged down in the math.

Anyone have an example of how to do this?

You can use the Dot Product for this. Passing a normalized direction vector into the Dot Product along with another vector will resurn a scalar value representing the element of the vector that is in the direction of the direction vector. Multiplying the normalized direction vector by the acalar value will give you your closest point.

Consider 3 points - O (the origin), A (the end point of the line), and B (the point you want to get closest to along the line). You want the point on the line that is closest to B - lets call thay C.

Start with the vector OA and normalize it (make it 1 unit length. The result defines the direction of the line.

Calculate the Dot Product of that Direction Vector with the vector OB to produce the scalar distance to the closest point.

Multiply the Direction Vector by the scalar distance to produce the vector to the closest point - ie, OC.

EDIT : Thanks to @batFINGER for the following example Python code :

from mathutils import Vector
# two points define the line
a, b = Vector((0.0,0.0,0.0)), Vector((1.0,1.0,1.0))
p = Vector((0.0,0.2,0.5))
n = (b - a).normalized()

ap = p - a
t = ap.dot(n)
x =  a + t * n #  x is a point on line
print("point on line  :", x)
print("distance from p:", (p - x).length)

# cross product for distance
d = ap.cross(n).length
print("dist cross prod:", d)

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance_from_a_point_to_a_line#Vector_formulation


Is it possible to stick vertices, and for them not to be affect by proportional editing I have a tablet/pill shape, and I want to select all the outer vertices or edges, and have them stay where they are, so that when I do a proportional edit, they remain fixed, and so the edges/vertices are stretched rather than move around.

This is the effect I am trying to get - a bulge in the dark meshed areas
https://imgur.com/a/qgCjXm5

If I use proportional editing, it alters the edges also.

So is there anyway of selecting the outer vertices, make them stick?

I have tried to create a vertex group, and assign a weight but it hasnt worked yet. https://imgur.com/oF4xY2B

Was enlightened.

I select the object
Edit mode
Select the vertices that I want to stick
Press 'H' to hide
Make my adjustment
Those vertices that are hidden will not be affected
Press 'alt-H' to unhide.


Replace texture coordinate "Reflection" I'm working on an eye shader. It renders quickly, firefly-less and looks fairly good, but I hit a roadblock and could use some help here.

The eye uses a single sphere instead of being broken into into cornea, iris and pupil. I opted to avoid transparency or glass shaders to keep the noise down. The pupil is nothing but pure trickery.

The Reflection coordinate yields impressive results. The eye behaves as if the pupil were inside it. This method is superior than painting a black circle on the surface of the eye, as that would be glaring obvious from obtuse angles.

It's also an one trick pony, because the texture coordinate > Reflection output position is "fixed". It would be perfect if it were fixed relative to the object, but no, it seems to be anchored in the world. As soon I rotate my mesh it's gone, just as in the crow's right eye, where the pupil, always facing the same direction, is turned to the head inside.

How can I recreate this effect without taking the traditional route of modelling iris and pupil separately? I'm really pleased with how clean and fast this shader is. Is that possible to anchor the reflection in the object instead of the world? I tried to use vector transform with unsatisfactory results.

P.s.: This model is built on top of this one, I'm just improving it for my own needs. All credits should go to the original creator.

Not sure I totally understand the issue or if I recreated your setup correctly, but the Vector Transform node seems to be the correct answer.

If you transform from World to Local coordinates it seems to fix the issue of a moving eye.

The Gradient Ramp might need some adjustments afterwards


Assigning shortcut for Alt + Ctrl + C doesn't work I use object_origin_set a lot, that's assigned to shortcut Shift + Ctrl+Alt + C , and since it's a 4 keys shortcut, I searched the object mode shortcuts on Blender Wiki and in the user settings, I found that Ctrl + Alt + C is not assigned, so I thought, well why don't I lose that extra Shift that causes my ring finger to stretch to un normal limits every time. Well it doesn't work, I tried Ctrl+Alt+A it worked, I'm curious, does anyone knows why is this specific shortcut not working?

⎈ Ctrl⎇ AltC isn't working as another shortcut is assigned to it and is used before the set origin shortcut - it will clear constraints, so you probably didn't notice anything happening.

If you untick the Clear Object Constraints shortcut you will be able to use ⎈ Ctrl⎇ AltC.

As shown above there are several groups that a shortcut may belong to, blender goes through each group and uses the first match found. Fairly sure the search order is the same as what is displayed in the input preferences. You can have some duplication as some groups will not match the current context, for example the clear Pose Constraints shortcut will not match unless you are posing an armature.


Blender 2.8 Beta will not run on Linux Mint. Blender 2.8 Beta does not launch on Linux Mint Cinnamon 19.x

I installed 2.7 to test (blender-2.79-f7e9642da9c9-linux-glibc224-x86_64.tar.bz2) and works fine. Basically download, extract and set execute permissions on blender.desktop and then double click on blender file.

Here is the version:
blender-2.80-a30bdcc142f1-linux-glibc224-x86_64.tar.bz2

When I try to launch 'blender' file it literally does nothing.

sometimes blender quits before being even fully loaded or just not responds and for this behaviour You may try to access the folder where blender executable file is and run './blender' or 'sudo ./blender' or if You have blender installed as package just run straight these commands without searching for path to blender exec file. If there's an issue it will be printed in terminal. As an example, one instance of Blender not working in Linux Mint was an unsupported video card, or your computer not having the latest installment of (OpenGL 3.3) installed.


Problem with MMD warping animation When using mmd files the animation ends up warped. What could be done to fix this error?

Frame 1: model looks right

All other frames: model looks warped

Keep Vert Order needs to be on when using mmd in Blender to avoid warped geometry.

Workflow:

File >> Import >> .obj, on right options, turn on Keep Vert Order

Select imported object
File >> Import .mmd


Applying armature removes weighted vertex/armature? I have a problem with a model I made. I made the model, imported it to unity, and everything was fine. The normals are like they should be.
Then i went into blender and added a armature to the mesh. I then parented the mesh to the armature.   In pose mode, i can move the mesh with the bones. BUT, now in unity, my normals are all flipped.

Then In Blender, I found out that under "modifier tab", I had not applied the armature, so I went and did that. Now the normals are fine again in unity, but my mesh wont follow the armature in pose mode anymore.  And all the vertex weight groups are also gone.

What am i doing wrong?

Sincerely, Thomas

Actually, I think i found an answer. I marked my character and applied it's location, scale, and rotation to "3D cursor" at center, and then made the armature. And it works now. But thanks anyway, I did learn something or two :) It must have been something about the mirroring on negative scale ? All my normals had to be flipped once I did that. Have a nice day!