White Noise in Blender Z Pass with alpha value in Mix Shader I am trying to get the depth value using z pass from my scene which is a simple head model, but while rendering there is white salt and pepper noise in the hair and eyelash. I have saved in both png after normalizing and in openexr file with the raw data.
While looking into it I figure it out that both the object are using alpha value from the diffuse and opacity texture file. Below are the composite pass I am using -

Following is the node editor for hair/eyelash object -

Following are the image and corresponding depth (z pass output) as png in with the original alpha values -

Then I manually edited the alpha channel value in the texture image of the hair:
I edited the alpha as 255 where there is a alpha value present ( > 0)

This reduced the noise a lot but at the same time its reduce the rendering quality of the hair mesh as well -

I have also tested with changing the max bounces for transparency and transmission but it did not change the result

Is there any further solution of this issue...

Blend File Link :

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1LzJ-RiZzgxlY1aGHTTAAaS0OrGTseyvc

Switch to Branched Path Tracing

Switch the sampling method to Branched Path Tracing and set Min Transparent Bounces to 32 or higher to eliminate the noise.

Also, it is better to use Mist pass instead of Depth.

You need to map the value from 0-1 to 0-100, depending on your mist settings, to match the depth pass.

Thanks to skw Stefan Werner for the Branched Path Tracing hint. https://blenderartists.org/t/cycles-depth-and-mist-passes-for-a-transparent-material-give-a-lot-of-noise/1192751/5

Stay with Path Tracing

If you need to stay with Path Tracing, which seemingly ignores Min Transparent Bounces, you can create a new view layer with material override.

The material will be with Camera Data node and mixing by the object index N.

Change the object indexes of all the particle objects to N, easily with Copy to Selected.

It gives the same result as the mist pass.


Blender + Captivate - Transparent Flash Video I'm creating a captivate training module, and it would simplify some work if I could just create an animation in blender, then import it into captivate. However, I will need the video to have background transparency.

I've played around with the animation output types in blender, and some do produce transparent background video, but that turns to black in Captivate.

Any advice on the output type or workflow would be appreciated.

You cannot render with alpha straight from blender.

Follow the steps:

• Render the frames to PNG with alpha RGBA;

• Open the images with Adobe Flash or any software that you can import the sequence of images (Handbrake,VirtualDub-1.9.11, Quicktime Pro) ;

• Use the option inside flash:

• Save to MOV with compression type like PNG;

• Encode the MOV with Adobe Media Encoder mark the encode alpha channel;

• Import the FLV generated inside Captivate, naturally your output must be SWF not HTML5.

You cannot export sound of course cause your rendering images, that´s the only solution for now!

When I use videos inside CP and my output is HTML5 I usually use the same background on the motion graphic and the CP background to make the course seamless. Like this screenshot:

And this is are a few FLV´s done using the workflow above and published as SWF (Steve Jobs moves on the grave when the word is pronounced hahaha).


Trying to figure out a proper way to Snap Well, my evaluation of potential switch from Maya to Belnder continues and I got another question and this time about snapping.
On the attached picture I want to align all the green verts to the red verts. In maya this is child proof and takes a second. Well, in blender I'm stuck.

Tried all orientations including 3D Cursor and no matter what I do, I can't get it to work. Each vert normal is elsewhere and normalizing doesn't help so I can't use that. Same with edges. All I want is to be able to move the vert in line with the long edge (to the right) and snap alignment to the vert on the top.

Any ideas or tutorials where snapping is explained?
Modeling in blender (or anything for that matter) is not straightforward vs industry standards and blender's "unique personality" is starting to beat my motivation again.

Press . to change the center of manipulation to the cursor, center the cursor to the red vert, select the green vert, then size x 0


Why does part of my scene get cut off when going into camera view? When I go into camera view, part of my scene gets cut off automatically. The render tab and shading tab also has part of my scene not visible but the scene is fine in all other modes.

Try setting Clip Start to 0.01 or lower and End to 500 or higher. Does that solve the camera? What are the parts that are missing in the other tabs?  Do you have screenshots?


Hollow object with Boolean filling up with ocean modifier? I honestly am having a hard time describing this error, it may just be a bug. I've included a .blend file and screenshots as a reference.

I have a ship in a bottle on a plane with an ocean modifier, the plane also has booleans, so that the ship stays hollow. This works, but on frame 14 the ship suddenly fills with the entire ocean material.

I've been experimenting with the modifiers trying to figure out what the issue is. At this point I'm a bit lost.

Here is what the image should look like:

Here is what it looks like on render:

I've also attached a blend. I'm completely lost, any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Blend File: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zLqDeVBwMfVUwvZ593x8OzJT1_DKmFid/view?usp=sharing

So, I didn't change anything, but I clicked on and off all the render icons for the booleans and now it works. Either something got left off that I didn't realize or it fixed whatever bug was occurring. – Remington Jul 18 at 19:01


One side of an object appears normal but the other side is transparent I have Blender 2.49b and have this mesh:

Front:

But on the back the mesh is transparent:

How to fix this?

2.49b:

Try adding some thickness to your mesh.

It seems to be currently a 2 dimensional plane, which will only have one side drawn unless double sided faces is enabled.

2.6x:

It seems that double sided faces was removed in 2.6x.
Backface culling can also cause this.
The Backface culling setting is located in 3D view > Properties panel > Display:


Cast light from one Object onto another Object I want the sun to glow and cast sunshine at the earth. I have set the surface of the sun to emission and 1000 in strength, but the earth is still in the dark when in rendered mode. Does anyone have a suggestion?

I am using Blender 2.8 and Cycles.

In Cycles:

Set the desired Emission node value to your Sun-sphere;
Put, a bit in front of the Sun-sphere, the spot lamp lighting the Earth-sphere. The lamp's strength should match the emit value. And align the lamp with both spheres.

Done


What's the 'generate grease pencil' command in render view? I saw something amazing in render view.
It was a command, 'generate greae pencil' in above picture.
But despite the execution of the order, nothing was done except that the name of g.p.object had been added in outliner(see below picture).

I thought that if I had done that command, a g.p.object like rendering image would appear in 3d veiwport.
But I could not find anything.
How can I use that command?

To create an image in the image editor and create a grease pencil object with it.
In the image editor create a new image (Image>New).
Change to Draw Mode.
Create your drawing.
Select Image>Generate Grease Pencil Object.
Switch to the 3d viewport, the grease pencil object should appear. The grease pencil object will be created with the lower left corner at the place where the 3d cursor is.


How could I find the intersection between a face and an edge? The Dynamic Content Menu add-on for the 3D View is very useful most of the time. But, on a project I'm working on, I need to find the intersection between a face and an edge and I can't figure out how to do this through the add-on's menu. How am able to find said intersection?

Not sure if this is what you mean, but the TinyCAD extension might be able to do this.

It doesn't have an "intersect face with edge" operator, but as a workaround it can extend an edge to a face, so you might be able to do this by shortening your edge enough that it no longer intersects said face, then extend it.

Snap the 3D cursor at the end of said edge, set pivot to 3D cursor and scale the opposite vertex towards it.

You can then press W Specials > TinyCAD > Extend Edge to Face


Center of orbit stuck The center of orbit is stuck on a doughnut. I have tried moving 3d cursor, origin, selecting different objects, tried number-pad period, tried directly clicking frame selected (just puts view in center of doughnut), changing settings (already tried rotate around selection), tried rebooting it. There isn't any other posts with the same question, some are similar, though none completely match and no suggested  solutions have fixed this. You can see in the images, that no matter where the orange dot is, the camera centers around it (even if it is off screen, I lost the whole scene a couple times this way), and everything else is moved. It also appears this does not happen in sculpt window, even in object mode, but in modeling window, in all modes, it has this behavior.

About 20 seconds after I posted this I realized there was another view options section on the top right side of the view port or it can be accessed with hotkey N. I had pretty much every setting in the view section on the top left hand side, and almost every setting in the navigation and view port sections of the preferences settings. Please discard this question, I am just a beginner and am not used to the interface yet


Cloth is going through the collided ball I want to create an animation that, when the ball collied with the curtain, the curtain should shake a realistic way but in my animation, the curtain goes along with the ball, and it's very unrealistic. I have tried so many things. But couldn't get a good result. Give me help with this scenario.
This is what I get,

For the ball, I added Collision physics and for the curtain, I added Cloth physics as well as subdivision surface.

The vertexes in the curtain are getting stuck inside the ball--You'll want to increase the collision distance:


How to convert an object transformed by a Hook Modifier to an object with Loc,Rot,Scal Transformations? I create one triangle whose is transformed by 3 animated cubes.

To realize this, I use "Hook Modifier" (as proposed in this topic ) , each vertex of the triangle is associated to a hook and each hook is parented to a cube. Each cube is animated.

During the animation (from position 1 to position 2 in the screenshot), the origin and the vertices of the triangle stay in the same position.

Is there a method to move the origin and eventualy the vertices of the triangle when the cubes move ?

In other words, is it possible to convert this Hook Modifier with animated cubes to get Location , Rotation and Scale keyframes of this triangle ?

(Rem: it is the same problem after applied this modifier as shape keys )

You can parent both your object and the hooks to an empty, that would take care of the origin.
You can also use the empty if you want to animate all the cubes relative to each other.

However:
I would strongly suggest you just use an armature with 3 bones and put one vertex to weight 1, and the other 2 to 0 for each according bone. Hooks are dangerous, they have no rest position, and an armature keeps everything neat and tidy.

You'll probably need to check a more detailed tutorial on this, but here is the breakdown:
Add -> Armature
In edit mode on your triangle, select one of the vertices -> cursor to selected.
In edit mode on armature press SHIFT A, it will create a bone at the cursor location. Call the bone 'A', repeat for 2 other verts.
Object mode, select object, then armature -> CTRL P -> with empty groups.
Edit mode on your plane select a vertex, select the group of the bone it's supposed to be dragged by make sure weight is at 1.0 and press assign.
Take One of your cubes, SHIFT-select the armature, go into pose mode, select the corresponding bone, CTRL P -> active bone, repeat.
If this was too abstract there's tons of tutorials on that online.


Generate rig from mesh Is it possible to generate a rig based on a mesh? I'm thinking something simple like having one bone per edge.
I'm going to look into scripting it I guess but if someone did something similar already it may save me the trouble.

If you have one connected edge loop, you can use this script.

The mesh object has to be selected before executing the script.

import bpy

def CreateBoneChainFromVertices():
    obj = bpy.context.active_object
    if (None == obj):
        return

    if (obj.type != 'MESH'):
        return
    bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='OBJECT')

    edgesA = []
    edgesB = []
    for i in range(len(obj.data.edges)):
        ver = obj.data.edges[i].vertices
        edgesA.append(ver[0])
        edgesB.append(ver[1])

    chain = []
    chain.append(edgesA[0])
    while(True):
        current = chain[len(chain)-1]
        if current in edgesA:
            idx = edgesA.index(current)
            next = edgesB[idx]
            del edgesA[idx]
            del edgesB[idx]
            chain.append(next)
        elif current in edgesB:
            idx = edgesB.index(current)
            next = edgesA[idx]
            del edgesA[idx]
            del edgesB[idx]
            chain.append(next)
        else:
            if (chain[0] in edgesA) or (chain[0] in edgesB):
                chain = list(reversed(chain))
            else:
                break

    amt = bpy.data.armatures.new(obj.name + "_vBones")
    rig = bpy.data.objects.new(obj.name + '_vRig', amt)
    bpy.context.collection.objects.link(rig)
    bpy.context.view_layer.objects.active = rig
    bpy.context.view_layer.update()

    print(chain, "here we go")
    bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()
    for i in range(0, len(chain) - 1):
        bone = amt.edit_bones.new(str(i + 1))
        bone.head = obj.data.vertices[chain[i]].co
        bone.tail = obj.data.vertices[chain[i + 1]].co
    for i in range(0, len(amt.edit_bones) - 1):
        amt.edit_bones[i + 1].parent = amt.edit_bones[i]
        amt.edit_bones[i + 1].use_connect = True
    bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()

CreateBoneChainFromVertices()


Can I manually edit the points along a path or curve in the blender UI? I create a curve or a path in Blender and can clearly see that it is defined by a set of points. What I want to do is manually edit the position of one of these points, instead of dragging it. That way I can ensure my curve / path is 100% accurate in terms of direction and length.

I am new to Blender and this community, so forgive me if this question is stupid. I have searched google, this site, and the blender manuals and have found nothing.

How can I do this in the Blender UI?

My properties menu looks like this:

In Edit mode, press N or click View -> Properties to open the properties panel. Then, under Transform you will have Control Point. This is the coordinates of the currently selected point. If you have several points selected, it will change to Median and editing the values, will move all selected points so that their median is located at the specified coordinates.

By Properties panel, I'm refering to the area that I marked with red edges in the image below. If it's not visible, you need to open it, either by pressing N or by clicking View -> Properties


Snap and shrinkwrap won't keep above surface I've been doing some retopology, but snap and shrinkwrap won't keep the retopologised mesh above the surface of the original mesh. Why is this and how can I fix it?

This is the topology of the mesh.

The Shrinkwrap Modifier can only move vertices to match the target object. If there aren't many vertices in a particular area, that area will not match the target object as well as places where there are more vertices.

A simple surface will require less vertices as there are less details to match, whereas a more detailed surface (or areas of higher detail) will need more vertices.

Patches of the original object showing through are indicative of not having enough geometry, or not having placed geometry where it's needed.

By overlaying your images we can see that the places that are showing through are where some of the larger faces are. You need to either add more geometry into these areas (a guide of where you might add an edge loop is marked in red) or move edge loops that are near those areas, closer together so faces are smaller:


Best/ preferred way of storing Image references? I'm currently working on a project-specific addon where I'm dynamically loading and removing images on the fly.

So far I've gotten away with a simple Image.isProjectProperty, but I now need an (ordered) list of these dynamically loaded images. However, a CollectionProperty with a type of BlendDataImages seems to be out of the question, and there doesn't appear to be a StringVectorProperty to store the names in either.

I could probably sort a temporary list, then find their bpy.data.images[] indices and store those in an IntVectorProperty, but that doesn't seem very safe either; what if 0-user images get removed between sessions? Is there a better way of going about this? What am I missing?

If you need multiple strings, why not use CollectionProperty? bpy.types.PropertyGroup comes with a StringProperty already (name), then just add new items to the collection and assign an image's name.

*VectorPropertys shouldn't be used if the amount of integers, bools or floats aren't limited conceptually. They are meant to store things like transformation matrices, which are never larger than 4x4.

Since image datablocks are ID types, why don't you add an IntProperty and assign a number, then sort images by that? Set the default to -1, and ignore these to distinguish unrelated images from your project images:

import bpy

# Register property - should be in register()
bpy.types.Image.project_id = bpy.props.IntProperty(
    default=-1,
    min=-1
)

# Assign number
img.project_id = ...

# Filter and sort
sorted(filter(lambda x: x.project_id > -1, bpy.data.images), key=lambda x: x.project_id)


Combining speed control and transform effect strips I have a video that I want to trim and rescale, and also slow down by a factor of 2. I am able to do this separately, but I can't find the way to combine all the effects. What am I missing?

It's hard to tell what you're asking without some pictures, but I think you're adding all the effects strips to the original footage. This doesn't work when you're trying to combine more than one effect on the same section of footage. See the following example:

In this (contrived) example, I have a Gamma Cross, a Transform, and a Glow effect that I want to all be applied to that transition between the two strips. If you select one of the purple strips and add each effect to it, then the only effect that will actually be applied is whatever effect is on top.

In order to have all the effects combined the way you expect, you would add the Gamma Cross like normal, then select the Gamma Cross and add the Transform to the Gamma Cross strip, then select the Transform and add the Glow to the Transform strip. This will make each effect combine with the others the way you'd expect them to.


Game Engine - Smoke Trails For Moving Objects? How do I create a smooth particle system in BGE for moving objects? Normal methods work fine for candles and volcanoes, but when it's a moving object all you see is one particle at a time spaced out from one another. It doesn't look like smoke, it looks more like bullets coming out the back.

I have a simple file here that uses the same method as what I have in my game. This way you can see how I'm making smoke. What I want is for each sphere to overlap one another so that it forms a trail. I have yet to figure out how to do this, even on relatively slow objects. In my actual game, it moves between 2.5 to 7.5 in terms of the motion thingy.

The ONLY way I've been able to accomplish this, is by adding a motion to the smoke object, but it looks really bad when you go to steer. It's also inconsistent when you change speeds. Playing with the frequency or the "skip" doesn't do a whole lot but make it look really bad.

I cannot think of a solution that does not require coding.
One simple-ish solution is to stretch the sphere based on the velocity, so that it is forced to join with the ones infront/behind.

Consider using an object that deforms. This means that there are no particles that spawn far enough apart to be distinguished. This method is used in some AAA titles such as Tomb raider:

There is an small analysis of this effect (where I pulled this image from) over here.

Unfortunately there is no built-in method for doing this, but I have done it successfully in the past. For example, the trails in this video are done using a python script to manually move the vertices:
https://youtu.be/l1PHHe-kz4k?t=1m2s
Monster has made a demo of a similar system available here.

It may be possible to do something here with an IK armature and some physics object that 'lag' behind the target, but I have not tried it.

I have also seen demonstrations of GPU based solutions using a custom vertex shader. This should offer a lot more performance but is beyond my current GLSL programming skills.


How do i copy my user preferences settings and load them into an older version of blender? Is there a way to copy blender config (user preferences settings) from blender 2.82 to 2.81 version? My blender keeps crashing randomly and i think switching to the stable version is my only option.

Yes you can copy the files with the preferences and default project to the folder of other version of blender. The files are called userpref.blend and startup.blend (there are also files for bookmarks.txt, and recent-files.tx)

For the location of those files in your particluar operating system refer to:

Where is the startup file stored?


Cloth simulation makes object "cripple" so I am a beginner at blender. I am currently making clothes for my character and I ran into a problem. So I have a some kind of tie, and I'm trying to simulate it. When I bake the simulation it "cripples". I don't have an idea how this happens, any help would be appreciated.blender file

A large part of the problem here is with collisions and the boundaries of collisions. This is resulting in some of the meshes being effectively intersecting at the start of the simulation - or becoming trapped below the surface part way through the simulation - which is then dragging the surface into the mesh in an unpredictable manner.
The first thing to change is the collision on the button meshes - these are hooked onto the front of the shirt and have their own collision settings. This is having two effects - one is that it is interferring with the shirt itself (since it is pinned to the surface and is also colliding with the surface it is causing a conflict in the forces that result). Since the buttons are small and should not significantly affect the simulation it is easiest to simply remove the Collision from all of the buttons.
Secondly, I noticed that the 'neck' section of the tie is getting dragged under the surface of the shirt at the start of the simulation. This is a sign that the meshes are starting the simulation effectively already intersecting. While they don't appear to be intersecting, the collision settings (in the Collision physics modifier and also the Cloth settings themselves) include 'bounds' that can extend beyond the mesh surface. When diagnosing such issues it is a good start point to change those bounds (the Inner and Outer settings in the Soft Body and Cloth settings of the Collision settings and the 'Distance' in the Cloth Collision settings). Note that as soon as you get one cloth vertex dragged below the surface of a collider, it can result in more of the cloth being pulled through the mesh.
Once the above changes had been applied I re-ran the simulation with a much better result. Any further discrepancies should be able to be resolved by ensuring the meshes start slightly further apart in the problem areas, by reviewing your geometry to avoid large variations in edge lengths (areas of cloth where the vertices are close together will behave differently to those where they are further apart) and I also noticed that the tie itself is made up of two layers of faces - it would be better to model as a single surface and then add a Solidify modifer to give it thickness.


Looking for a complete list of Shortcut Keys for Blender 2.8 I’m new to the world of Blender and looking for a complete list of Shortcut Keys for Blender 2.8.

Thank you,

You will find them in the preferences menu. Edit>>Preferences>>Keymap


How do i merge a moveable part of an object? i'm quite new with blender, so pardon me if this question is trivial.

I'm trying to import this model to vrchat and realize that the pauldron part is actually separate despite being the same object.

So, i don't need it to move separately and want to make it merged as one. How can i do it?[![enter image description here][1]][1]

Edit:
i'm sure my words earlier made some confusion, what i meant is i want to make this part of the model to keep attaching when move. how can i do it?
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/434777529677774869/622668359787479060/ezgif-1-ac95a637266d.gif

Are you talking about the bones being separate? Because you only have one object in your hierarchy.

If you're talking about the bones you can go into edit mode, select the ball on the end of each bone you want to connect and press F to create a new bone between them.


Increasing mesh detail from existing model I recently started with Blender to upgrade a model from a videogame character so I can 3D print some parts of it on a 1/4 scale. This means some parts of the model need to go from a low polygon model to a high polygon model, which includes the texture details as an actual mesh.

Some parts have already been recreated from scratch, but for some complex parts I just want to increase the detail from the existing mesh, as that would save me a lot of time.

One part of the model consists of a bunch of different leaves, which need a much smoother, rounded edge. What is de easiest way to achieve this?

Final result:

Overview:

Sadly you will need to retopologize your meshes. Happily it's not that hard and it's certainly good practice.

Main goal is to have quad only topology, which will allow us to use modifiers and have better control over the mesh itself.

There is no simpler method that I'm aware of to get high poly from low poly in order to prepare mesh for 3D printing.

Steps:

Remove vertices from the back of the mesh.
Merge two bottom vertices (I think only this particular mesh has this issue).
Delete one side of the mesh.
Add Mirror Modifier and select Axis accordingly to your mesh and check Clipping.
Delete inner edges.
Select two bottom vertices and hit F few times to fill in faces.
Make Loop Cut trough the mesh.
Place top vertices a little bit higher (use Edge Slide - G>G) to make nice Edge Loop and add another Loop Cut for sharp center (press E when sliding edge to make it even with left/straight edge).

Add Solidify and Subsurface Modifiers.

Final thoughts:

Now you can add as many Loop Cuts as you want to have sharper/smoother edges. You can use Mean Crease to sharpen them even more. Meshes from your file may produce some issue while printing. It's better to make an effort and prepare good mesh then loose time and money while printing.

Blend file:


Debug and step through addon? I've installed the DirectX export addon (found here). I'm exporting an object with armature animation but it's not working how I expect it to and the documentation isn't helpful (See this question).

Since the addon is just a Python script, is there a way to set a breakpoint in the code and step through the exporter script like a debugger? I've looked a this similar question but running the Blender interactive Python console, I can't set my export options for the exporter, so it fails when I try to run the 'export' command.

I'm hoping there's something like the following:

Open Blender normally (by double-clicking the Blender shortcut on my desktop)
Enable some sort of Python debugging mode
Open the file I'd like to export.
Click File > Export > DirectX
Choose my export options and filename
Click Export DirectX
Blender brings me into a code window showing the exporter script and it's paused on the first line, waiting for me to step through the code.

You can do this with Free & Open Source software, using Eclipse and PyDev.

Download & install Eclipse from https://eclipse.org/downloads/
Follow PyDev installation manual http://www.pydev.org/manual_101_install.html
Install my remote debugging add-on from Github
Configure it in the addon preferences for /home/sybren/.p2/pool/plugins/org.python.pydev_5.3.0.201610121612/pysrc/pydevd.py (adjust for your system)
Start a debug server in PyDev
Press Space in the 3D view and search for "pydev", then choose the operator to connect to the PyDev debugger.

You can see me explaining the steps in my Blender Conference 2016 talk Develop add-ons like a pro.


Active Keyframe Panel is not showing in the graph editor I have selected a keyframe in the graph editor and I want to view it's properties.

I selected keyframes in the graph editor.
Pressed N key and tried pulling out the side arrow.
Instead of getting the "Active Keyframe Panel" I'm getting the "show cursor" option.

Is there something I can do to get the Active Keyframe Panel seen in the link below:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/graph_editor/fcurves/properties.html#id3
See my attached screen shot of what I get when I press N in the graph editor.

Found the issue.  I was selecting the channel group folder instead of the actual channel itself.


Why I can't cut there with the knife tool, I want to make a quad out of this n-gons Why I can't cut there with the knife tool, I want to make a quad out of this n-gons

You can Cut Trough by pressing Z while knifing

  Allow the Cut tool to cut through to obscured faces, instead of only the visible ones.

or using Knife selection Shift-K (by default)

  Activates the knife with another set of options so only selected faces are cut and Cut through is on by default.

Knife Tool


Question about unjoined/unconnected mesh/object The highlighted cube is not connected to the mesh below, is it going to cause issue ? I've seen couple people did this and from what I've learnt, everything must be connected?

I think there are two questions here:

Should the parts of my model be manifold?
Is it OK for my model to comprise several parts, manifold or not?

For all the reasons given in it, the first question has a nice answer here

As for the second, IMO,  wherever possible, model parts which are separate parts in the real world as separate parts in the model. Reasons not to do that include:

3D printing as one piece.
Needing a surface to behave well under (possibly unrealistic) deformation when animated
Economy. Simply reducing complexity and poly-count, modeling time.

But you often see people struggling to achieve good topology across regions of a model which could be separate surfaces with no harm done at all.


Play .mov or .avi in BGE I am trying to make an explosion in the game engine, using GLSL shading.
The Alpha works so all you can see is the fire, but blender is treating it as an image texture and not playing the video.

Are there any easy ways to make the game engine play animated textures? I do not mean by using this method:

You can play videos (and images and render from other cameras) with the VideoTexture module.

You can test that with Dynamic Texture 1.0 - easy to use VideoTexture.

Edit: You can find the official documentation of the VideoTexture module (incl. example) in the BGE API.


the emission of the lamp isn't working at all I am beginner in blender.

according to my toturial (grant abbit) I have to create an emission lamp in my project.I did what he had said. (make emission white and assign it...) .but it didn't work.what's wrong?

here is the blend file:

and this is the result (with light)

You are in Eevee, and the emission shader lighting other things can only be done in cycles (or at least as far as I know).


Is There A Difference In What Render Engine I Use For Exporting Edited Videos Or Frames To Videos? If I have an edited video and I want to export it would there be a difference in what render engine i have set it to?

The choice of the render engine has no impact on the video export. Video rendering has nothing to do with the rendering of a 3D scene.


Converting Particles Into Fluid I wanted to ask if there is a way to convert a particle system to a fluid?
Is it possible?

There is a plugin called Cube-Surfer that can do that. It voxels your particles and creates a mesh-skin around them.

Take a look:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz2VivdcfQs

Download:
http://pyroevil.com/cubesurfer-addon-download/


Animation Node Loop with Randomized Color for Each Instance Blender 2.79, Cycles, Animation Node add-on

I'm trying to set up a node group to let me create stacks of books that will use the same UV mapped Image Texture, where I've randomized the X & Y on Location, Rotation, and Scale. That part works beautifully. Now I'm trying to give each book in the stack a random pick between 5 colors. Here is my AN set up:

Here is the Material set up for the cover (the text block uses two other images that I don't want to change the colors for):

Unfortunately, instead of changing the color of each book selecting between positions 0 to 4, it's mixing the colors of Pos 1 and 2 together.

I've tried adding in CMO nodes for the X and Y locations but there was no change. The only tutorials I've been able to find on how to change colors require timing or location changes. I want the book colors to remain static so that I can be flexible on where I position each stack (and how tall the stack is) in the environment. I'll be creating multiple copies of the nodes so that each stack will vary.

Clearly I'm missing something, but since I'm still brand new to AN I have no idea what and there aren't that many tutorials out there that I can read/watch to help me through this. Any and all suggestions are welcome!

Your Animation Nodes look fine. I think your issue is with the Cycles NodeTree. There are a couple of issues. First, this connection:

doesn't do what you think it does. Right now, it takes the luminance of the image texture and colors the each pixel of the image based on its luminance. The modification you make to the ColorRamp node with Animation Nodes is overridden. If you want to change the colors, you should use a MixRGB node to mix (or multiply) the ColorRamp output with the image texture:

There is still another problem, though. All of your objects will use the same material, so you can't set the color randomly with Animation Nodes; all of your objects will use the most recent modification of the material since they all point to the same material datablock.

Instead, you can use the Object Info node in Cycles to give a random color on a per-object basis to your material:


How do you activate the Curve Tool in the latest version of Blender? I have seen a tutorial on using a plugin for Curves in Blender.
Called Curve Tool.
Doesn't seem to work in Blender 2.74.
What is the trick?

I want to "loft" between curves.

I think that you have to be in Object Mode to be able to use this. Then, in the add menu the option to add curves will appear.


Low FPS clips too fast in VSE I am using the Video Sequence Editor and when I put a low FPS clip into it it is way too fast. I think that Blender is basing the speed of the clips on their framerate rather than their actual speed and length. Can I fix this?

You can setup FPS of the scene in render settings:

But if you have video files with different FPS values in one scene, you can do this:

Add a movie strip with different fps value:

Select Video (not sound) and add Speed Control effect (Shift+A -> Effect Strip -> Speed Control)

By moving end of the strip adjust strip length to be equal sound strip:

Optionaly, you can put all this in meta-strip (by pressing Ctrl+G)

If you haven't sound strip, you can setup Speed Control this way:

Uncheck "Stretch to input strip length"

In Speed factor put {FPS of your file}/{FPS of your scene}

And extend movie clip if it needed


delete 16 vertices that are on top of each other I looked through the blender forum and tried all the suggestions but none of it worked. My problem is I have 16 vertices that are stacked directly ontop of each other and in order to delete those vertices I have to press the delete key and then select vertices 16 times there are multiple areas where that occurs and it took me about an hour to delete all of the vertices. I want to avoid this in the future as I will be creating many of the same meshes/objects. Does anybody know how I can select and delete the vertices all at the same time instead of pressing delete 16 times?

You can use the Merge by Distance option.
To activate the option, use the shortcut M, than B to activate the function.
If any vertices are deleted, you should get a message like the one to the right in the screenshot.
The pie menu to the left in the screenshot are options for the function such as delete by vertices distances (from each other), selected or unselected, etc.


Objects are moved when file is re opened When I save my model and reopen it, I discover that many objects have been displaced and moved to the origin.

However when I recover an autosaved backup file just before the save, objects are where they should be.

This is what my file looks like before saving - (or recovering an autosaved backup) which is the correct arrangement of objects

And this is what it looks like after opening the saved file.

When I File > Open an autosaved blend file, objects are relocated to the origin.  The same file accessed by Recover AutoSave opens with objects located as last edited.

As a workaround I can continue to open the autobackup and ignore explicitly saving my file but this can't be normal!

It's a messy file and I'm learning by remodelling a sketchup dxf import. File can be checked out here Save this file with a new name and reopen to reproduce.

I’ve found the reason and a possible solution.

Reason:
All of the misbehaving objects are set as children of some weird object.
It probably happened during import.
As you can notice, all of them have location set to zero (0,0,0) without physically being at zero point.
Weird right?

Solution:
1) Select all objects through Select->All
2) Clear the parent by Object->Parent->Clear and Keep Transformation.
This will clear their relationship, but they’ll stay in place.

And you’re done.
All of the objects will be where they’re supposed to be, and they’ll stay there.
You can save the file, reopen, whatever.

Additional tips:
1) Check all categories in outliner - its a messy file, and this will help you with orientation.
2) Clean up the file
The file is full of empty text objects and curves.
They were created during import, but now are mostly useless.

Check all categories in outliner.

Hope this helps.
If something ain’t clear, let me know.


Animation Node Grid Animation I know this question isn't directly blender related, but I hope someone with more experience with the animation nodes addon could point me in the right direction.

I'm currently trying to create a animation that should kind of do this

For this version I used Animation Nodes with a Spline Falloff, which kind of works. Though you have to use the AnimAll addon so you can animate the spline that is used for the falloff.

This gets really fiddly as you have to animate more and more points that move to the next point.

I'm wondering if there isn't a more elegant solution for this. Something like an "effector/null Object" Moving along the spline affecting the cubes closest to it? I know you can use object falloffs but as they move away from the cubes..they would come up again.
I tried some things with this but can't find a way to get it work.

It would be great if someone could point me in the right direction here.

Cheers
Daniel

Edit for clarification: The problem that I have is, that I also need to animate multiple cubes at once (as seen below always two in a row) so going with an idea is not really working as the delay makes them move one after another.
I'm also going to animate a harvester along the lines which will take longer to take the curve between the rows..so a delay will only work if I speed up this animation.

First you may try the Delay Falloff node, it will rely on the order of the objects.

If the order of the objects is not what you want, you may consider using the Selection Order ID Key Method:

Check the Documentation for other ordering methods.

And of course you can sort objects using the Sort List node, and sort objects by name:

Or based on the object's y location.

Or in a slightly more complicated method, by using the formula e.location.y + (e.location.x)/1e5 Which will make the animation start from the left instead of the right. Which is exactly what you want I suppose.

Exact solution to your problem:

Lets say your grid is composed of n objects, you instance the cube 2n times, n cube for the right one and n cube for the right one, so 2n in total. Then you edit the first n objects as you wish in whichever method you like, then you offset the final vectors couple of units in the required direction and then combine both the unoffsetted and offsetted vectors and transform the objects based on them.


Rigged mesh deformed after opening blend file I have a linked object in a master file. I then create a proxy of the rig, and everything works as expected, I then save and close the file.

But when returning to the master file, the mesh is completely deformed.

If I put the armature in 'Rest Position' or remove the armature modifier and re-rig the object from scratch, I no longer get the problem.

The object in the linked file has scale and rotation applied, and the armature seems fine as well (using rigify). I'm new to working on a large scale project and using linked objects, so is it possible a step could have been missed, or if this could be a bug? (Using Blender 2.78c)

As Firewill noted, it is a standard problem with python scripts. By default, Blender disables running scripts from scene, because downloaded scripts may contents malware.

So, to run this scripts you mast press "Reload trusted" in header of window, to confirm that blender may trust scripts:

If for some reason, you haven't this buttons, there is a workaround: Open User Preferences, in File tab click auto run python scripts:

In this case it is recommended to add a downloads path as Excluded.


Why is my Face Fill doing this strange thing I already did this once, successfully, unfortunately Blender crashed shortly afterward and my edit wasn't in the autosave file or my saved version so I am stuck with doing it again.  The first time I had all the windows highlighted as shown, and when I filled them, they obliging filled with a nice flat face.  Now it is filling from window to window through the inside of the structure which I do not want.  Why is it doing this?

https://gyazo.com/06ca0382308c77f5a77167e2466a1526

You need to use Vertex > New Face.
Shortcut: F

(while it has a similar name, Face > Fill is a different operation)


Small automated script I need your help for a small script, because my python skills are very low.

I would like to automate on my selected objects:

Duplicate object "linked"
Constrain duplicate to original object with "Transforms"
Set all material_slots of duplicate to "object"
Override all empty materials with custom material. A black one for example
Move duplicate with black materials to specific layer

It would be nice if this would work on a hierarchy so it would be possible to do this with rigs.

This is what I have done so far, the biggest problem is to set a material to the empty slots.

import bpy

for ob in bpy.context.selected_objects:
    bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')
    ob.select = True

    bpy.ops.object.duplicate_move_linked(OBJECT_OT_duplicate={"linked":True, "mode":'TRANSLATION'}, TRANSFORM_OT_translate={"value":(0,   0, 0), "constraint_axis":(False, False, False), "constraint_orientation":'GLOBAL', "mirror":False, "proportional":'DISABLED',       "proportional_edit_falloff":'SMOOTH', "proportional_size":1, "snap":False, "snap_target":'CLOSEST', "snap_point":(0, 0, 0),     "snap_align":False, "snap_normal":(0, 0, 0), "gpencil_strokes":False, "texture_space":False, "remove_on_cancel":False, "release_confirm":False})

    ob.select = True

    bpy.context.scene.objects.active = bpy.context.selected_objects[0]

    bpy.ops.object.constraint_add_with_targets(type='COPY_TRANSFORMS')

    mat = bpy.data.materials.get("#BLACK")

    new = bpy.context.selected_objects[1]

    for matslot in new.material_slots:
        i = ob.material_slots.find(matslot.name)

        matslot.link = 'OBJECT'

The result without calling operators.

import bpy

from bpy import context
# all mesh objects
meshobs = [o for o in context.selected_objects if o.type == 'MESH']
# black material (or None)
black = bpy.data.materials.get('BLACK')
# copy layer
copy_layer = 19
copy_layers = [i == copy_layer for i in range(20)]
if black is None:
    print("WARNING: no black material")

scene = context.scene

for o in meshobs:
    # linked copy
    copy = o.copy()
    # new copy transforms constraint
    ct = copy.constraints.new('COPY_TRANSFORMS')
    # set target to original
    ct.target = o
    # loop thru material slots
    for slot in copy.material_slots:
        # object link
        slot.link = 'OBJECT'
        # set to black material
        if slot.material is None:
            slot.material = black

    # link to scene
    scene.objects.link(copy)
    # move to copy_layer (after linking to scene)
    copy.layers = copy_layers

It only sets existing slots with empty (slot.material is None) material to black.


How do you rig and orbit an object while it follows a path simultaneously? What's the best way to have the flat cylinder plate follow along the path(s) drawn, and then have those two vertical cylinders above simultaneously orbit around the empty?

Ok, here's what I have so far. I'm still trying to work on the keyframed rotation start, but the object keeps staying in the same place when everything else keeps moving.

Here is the base setup. I used a simple flattened cylinder as a disc, two bezier circles, one of them scaled by 10 in edit mode, and another cylinder I made skinny and transformed/duplicated in edit mode so it becomes one object comprised of 2 cylinders sitting on either side of the disc. I made them all in the center because that way I could be assured they all have the same origin.

I parented the small bezier circle to the flattened disc, and applied a Path Follow Constraint to the two-cylinder object, pointed at the small circle. I set it to follow curve, and noticed that this changes the transform for some reason. I simply went to edit mode, selected everything, and moved it back over the flattened disc (for me it was simply a 1 unit transform on the Y, I think). Anyway, once it was back over, I Animated the path.

Then I selected the flattened disc and added a Path Follow pointed at the larger curve (which represents your main path). I checked Follow Curve, Animated the path, and presto - two cylinders rotating around the center of a disc that is moving around the scene.
I know this isn't the final result you're looking for, but you requested my steps up to this point, so there they are.
I'll upload the blend, in case you want to have a look. It's nothing special. I'll also keep working on how to keyframe the cylinder rotation start delay (assuming that's the part you want delayed). I'll post an edit to this answer if/when I find it.
File is here -


A rectangular-parallelepiped of light in a volume shader (related to this and this) Well, I'm not yet (but not so far) ready for cylinders but still trying to learn!
Now let's play with rectangular-parallelepipeds and do the same thing : A shape of light inside the same bigger shape with a volume scatter. :)

The goal is to do this with 1 object, only playing with math and vector nodes connected to an emission and a volume scatter nodes in a single shader.

Thanks to Chebhou's setups (see question for links) I found something that fits my question. here is the node setup:

But I wanted to know how to make the light inside from all sides...
here is the node setup

The important things to note are the placement of the object's origin (all rotations applied) and the value node controling the space between volume scatter and light, normalized. 0.2 means 20% up/down (Z), 20% left/right (Y) and 20% front/back (X). The last multiply node just adds strength to the light.


Motion track image does't appear in render I make sure the transparent checkbox was hit, but the only thing it appears in render is this.

The images used in the workspace are for reference only.
Go to compositing workspace, check Use Nodes and thenShift + A > Image Sequence.
Then Shift + A > Viewer and connect image sequence to the viewer and Composior node. If the image size doesn't fit, you can try to use Scale node, I am not that sure if that's the right name
The basic node setup for tracking is described here:
Transparent rendered object over tracked background


Blender 2.80 AV Sync missing? I just installed Blender 2.8 and for the life of me I can not find AV Sync anywhere and video editing has become impossible. Is there some new setting I am unaware of?

It's available in the Timeline header menu > Playback > AV-Sync dropdown menu, it seems like it worked the same in the previous versions, no?


Is there a way to have vertical stripes on all timelines? I find it difficult to visualize and calculate a 1 second of time with a solid grid slab. I thought maybe if there was a background pattern that slices a second or a half second into vertical bands would make it easier to time animations.

Image is a mock up of what I am talking about. Where the animation is at @30fps.

The timeline will highlight between the start and end frame. There is a preview range option that allows a second set of start/end frame values to be used, when this is enabled the one frame range is highlighted in each time based editor. I don't know of any other way to highlight sections of the time based editors.

The only other option would be using markers, these are named triangles shown at the bottom of each timeline.


How are these meshes being moved up while their origins are NOT moving? I watched a tutorial and at one point, the person moved their objects up the Z axis, but the origins did NOT move!

I watched the screencast keys, but I still can't figure out how it was done.

Any ideas?

They are moving the geometry in Edit Mode.

Toggle edit mode with Tab, or select it from the header:

Select all geometry with A.

Press GZ to move the selection along the Z axis.


Reflection on an semi-transparent object I'm trying to create projection of objects in my scene onto one specific object (in my case a sphere). In theory it is simple, by giving the object a reflective surface but here is my problem, the sphere has to be semi-transparent. Meaning it should be reflective and showing the other objects in the scene clearly but at the same time then parts of the sphere not showing any other object should be semi-transparent.
I'm trying to get this working with cycles (cycles is a must) but no luck so far. I'm open for any ideas.

Update:

I created a small test case containing my sphere and a cube with a marked corner. The reflection of the cube is on both sides of the sphere but I want it to be only on the side pointing towards the corresponding object. Additionally, the Mix Shader of the Glass and the Transparent BSDF turns the reflection grainy (for lack of words).

Update 2:

I found a way to remove the unwanted reflection but this results in the reflection that I want to only be visible from the direction of the reflected object. I can not see the reflection through the sphere, which is the reason I want the sphere to be semi-transparent.

As I understand it you are trying to illustrate a spherical camera using reflection on a sphere. But your main problem is that the reflection is relative to the position of your (the viewer) perspective.

As you rotate around your sphere, to eventually seeing the backside of it, the reflection of the square gets distorted. For example, in the image below (fig 1) I have positioned a NURBS path to go from the center of the cube to the center of the reflection on the sphere.
Yet as we move around the workspace, we see that the distortion causes the reflection to change its position on the sphere (fig 2):

If you wish for the "reflections" (if we can even call it that at this point) to be mapped to the sphere regardless of camera position, then you need baking. (animated gif):

How I accomplished this:

First I set up my scene: added a background, the sphere, some props from the archimesh addon and a cube with black lines around it.
I selected the sphere and went into edit mode, turned on orthographic mode, and snapped to front view via numpad-1.
I unwrapped the sphere using "sphere projection" (u key) and opened the node editor and the uv/image editor.
I created a new "blank image" in the image viewer, and set up the material for the sphere, like so: Note how the Image node is not connected. It is also important that the image node uses the new blank image, and that the image node is the selected node.
With the sphere selected I go to the render panel, under "bake", select "glossy" and click the bake button:

As you can see in the image editor, the "blank new image" is no longer blank:

Then I reconfigured the sphere material to use the baked image, taking into account the transparency you asked for, etc

After this, it works! However, there are some caveats:

Because it's a baked image, it doesn't work well when the environment around it is changing. To get by this you would have to bake an image sequence of it per frame or take advantage of the equirectangular uv mapping and somehow pipe a camera into its texture (not sure if that's even possible).
It's annoying to have to rebake every time you change something.

Good luck and happy blending!


What is the Python code related to collection actions for blender 2.8? 2.8 is new and I can't find how to:

Create a new collection.

Add selected object to collection "name here" .

Add selected object to collection created in the same code.

Could someone show me how?
i found this and this in the API
https://docs.blender.org/api/blender2.8/bpy.types.Collection.html
https://docs.blender.org/api/blender2.8/bpy.types.BlendDataCollections.html

Here an example i made, it will place the active object to a new collection.
it's a really simple example i hope it can help the beginner (like me) out there.

import bpy

obj = bpy.context.object
obj_old_coll = obj.users_collection #list of all collection the obj is in

new_coll = bpy.data.collections.new(name="COLLECTION TEST") #create new coll in data
bpy.context.scene.collection.children.link(new_coll) #add new coll to the scene
new_coll.objects.link(obj) #link obj to scene

for ob in obj_old_coll: #unlink from all  precedent obj collections
    ob.objects.unlink(obj)

here another examples:

import bpy

A = bpy.context.object
A_old_coll = A.users_collection #list of all collection the obj is in

terrain_coll_name = "Scatter: ["+A.name+"]"+" Terrain"
if terrain_coll_name not in bpy.data.collections: #if this collection name is not in all collection already:
    terrain_coll = bpy.data.collections.new(name=terrain_coll_name) #create new coll in data
    bpy.context.scene.collection.children.link(terrain_coll) #add new coll to the scene
else:
    terrain_coll = bpy.data.collections[terrain_coll_name] #else let re use the already existing one

terrain_coll.objects.link(A) #link obj to terrain coll

for ob in A_old_coll: #unlink from all  precedent obj collections
    ob.objects.unlink(A)


How do i made a vertex group for all objects I have several objects that all make up one big person. I want to rig this person but I can't because whenever I add a vertex group to weight paint, it only adds it to one of the objects. I don't understand how I'm supposed to rig several objects as one body (without merging it as one object, which I cannot do.)
Am I doing something wrong?? People act like weight painting is really simple but they always do it on one big mesh.
Edit: Also how do I attach a vertex group to a bone.

your question for "how do I attach a vertex group to a bone" is answered by how-to-assign-vertex-group-to-single-bone, although you can assign to more than one group in succession, I believe (and then perhaps need to adjust weights if >1 group).  Here I took a sphere and parented it (Armature Envelope weights), which generally would parent it mostly to the right arm and spine area.   I then put the sphere in edit mode, selected some vertices , created and assigned to a new "group1" (just I could select them later if needed), but ALSO assigned them to the automatically created group "hand.L" (left hand).  As you can see when I posed the Armature to swing the Left arm upwards, my selected vertices of the sphere tracked with the left hand position.   Here's my blend example:


I have a problem with baking - "No active UV layer found" As you can see in my screenshot im having trouble baking a texture for Ambient Occlusion. I  already added a new image and smart uv unwrapped my low poly mesh "rock_lp". It is the second one i selected, so its the active one. The other one is the high poly version. When i try to bake, I get the error "No active UV layer found in the object rock_hp". What does this mean? Is there something i forgot to do?

PS: I already added a new image after doing retopology on the low poly mesh so that was ok I believe.

Your high poly one is the one active, which explain the error you are getting about the UVs for your high poly mesh. Just reselect them and you should be fine.


Create a linear brush stroke with weight paint? So, I'm trying to edit weight paint data in Blender, and I want to create a gradient to create a smooth bend in the rig I'm going to edit (I'm editing a rig I downloaded so that the legs and arms don't just move at a direct, unrealistic angle), but I don't just want to hold LMB and hope that I move my mouse in a somewhat horizontally straight fashion. How does one draw a stroke that is completely strait and linear by just clicking and dragging? The Blender manual says you can create a linear gradient by holding Alt and dragging with LMB, but my result is pretty useless.
http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=88490
As you can see, what happened in the GIF wasn't very useful.
Does anybody know how to draw a line in weight paint mode?

This isn't an answer to the question you asked, but it may be helpful in solving your situation.  You can use vertex groups, created in edit mode, named the same as your bones in your armature, to create more precise rigging.

http://www.pasteall.org/blend/36178

You can see what I mean in a quick demo I built just now.


How do I reload a linked blender file? How do I reload a linked blender file?

I linked a .blend file into another. After I update the linked file (say change the material color), how do I make the project I imported it into update?

Navigate to Outliner
Change type to Blender File
Right click on the .blend you want to reload
Hit Reload

Then you can reload the lastly reloaded file by pressing Space and writing down Reload Library


In edit mode scaling, moving and any other manipulation is done via increments Basically, the functions of ctrl have switched with the basic controls. If I want to have smooth scaling, I now need to press ctrl. I don't know what I have toggled , but I'd rather not reload an entirely new project and copy over the obj file.

It sounds like you have turned snapping on. Press Shift + Tab to toggle it off.


How to do i disable a row.operator in my custom panel by detecting if there is a specific modifier type and name is present or not? How do I detect a modifier specific modifier name and type and use this to create and if/else statement to disable a row.operator(Button) in my custom panel ?

It is not the panel's job to decide if a button is enabled/disabled, the operator is responsible for deciding if it is able to be run with the current selection. The poll method of the operator class is used to determine if the operator can be run, if the poll method returns False then it's button will be disabled in your panel.

class myOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = 'object.testing'
    bl_label = 'Simple test setup'

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls, context):
        mod_types = set()
        for o in context.selected_objects:
            for m in o.modifiers:
                mod_types.add(m.type)
        return 'ARRAY' in mod_types

    def execute(self, context):
        # do stuff
        return {'FINISHED'}

A panel can look through the context and adjust it's content based on the current selection, note that it is altering it's content and not disabling an item.

class samplePanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    bl_idname = "OBJECT_PT_example"
    bl_label = "Dynamic content"
    bl_space_type = 'VIEW_3D'
    bl_region_type = 'UI'

    def draw(self, context):
        mod_types = set()
        for o in context.selected_objects:
            for m in o.modifiers:
                mod_types.add(m.type)
        row = self.layout.row()
        if 'ARRAY' in mod_types:
            row.label(text='there is an array modifier')
        else:
            row.label(text='No object using an array')


2 Different Rigs, Copy animation using key bones? I'm wondering whether it's possible to get a second figure to copy the motions of the first by having the former's key bones (or as many as are logically similar, even!) ?parented? or otherwise keyed to the other's?

Put another way, while I know it's ideal to have one rig for multiple figures, could you still copy an animation sequence by having a second figure mimic the gross movements of the first? You could do the same thing if you moved all bones, keyframe by keyframe to match the original, but it seems like there should be a way to automate this a bit ...

All animation data are stored in a datablock called "Action": you can access it in the dopesheet window, changing the menu from "dopesheet" to "action". In the proposed situation, they are keyframes data reporting loc, rot and scale values of bones.
As long as the names of all bones are the same, the action can be applied to many different armatures, and you can (i.e.) apply a location offset to a main bone for having them working "in parallel", for instance.
Be aware that if the names of the bones are the same but their position and size is different, the animation can give unexpected behaviours.
All animation data referring to a bone name not found in the armature will be simply ignored.
You can "code" rename as occur to re-assign them in single bone strings (dopesheet/actions).
So select the second armature (which could be a copy of the first) go to the action editor window, assign the action, and both armatures will move in Sync.


My model doesn't set up for texture painting properly Hi I am following Darin Lyles texture painting vid

When I paint my character, only some of it goes black, the rest is bright orange. I am not sure what I have done wrong.

Here is a simple way to do that:

List item
Select your object
Go to Edit mode ( Tab key)
Go to UV Editing ( see bottom of the application)
Move the mouse under your object, press U key, and select Smart UV Project.
You can use Mark Seam / Mark Sharp ( Ctrl+E) to fix your UV map.

This will make your texture based on the UV map.
This texture is your cloth material (with UV).

When you are painting your texture you will paint on this texture.


Added reference pictures are pink I've added new images into a blender file and they turn up pink. I haven't moved the file, which I understand can affect how Blender finds them. I have tried packing and all sorts of things, but the image doesn't show up in the first place, unlike other questions I've seen where they came back a day later. I have tried both .jpg and .png files and nothing seems to work. I've tried File > External Data > Report Missing Files and nothing comes up as missing.

These are the things to check -

naming/paths - try to put the images in a path without gaps, or non-standard characters. First try something like C:\test.jpg, where nothing should go wrong.
path of your blender file, same as above.
image format - open the images in an image editor, resave them
if these don't work, it might be some kind of a bug, specific to your operating system.


How to select all the vertexes with border select? Hi guys I'm new to Blender, and have this question about selecting vertexes.

I tried to select all vertexes within a rectangle region by drawing the rectangle with mouse after pressing B in Top View, but I actually ended up with only selecting the vertexes that are closer to me.

Here are my steps:

After pressing B I selected multiple vertexes with drawing a rectangle:

I deleted them with X, but I see some in that region actually still exist:

You can see I actually only selected the upper 2 which were closer to me:

So is there a way to really do this? I'm using Blender 2.71, but I saw Jonathan could do it in this video (but he must be using an older version): CGCookie tutorial: Modeling a Shipping Container

That is the regular behaviour of Blender. By default "Limit selection to visible (clipped with depth buffer)" is enabled.

When you disable the button I marked in the screenshot, select the vertices again, all four vertices will be selected.


help with baking in blender 2.8 I modeled a simple door-handle, UV'ed it, exported it to Substance where
I  created a base-color, normal and roughness map. With these maps I wanted to bake a final base-color map in cycles, but it just won't work.

While the rendered preview output looks fine, the bake result looks completely different.

here is a screenshot:

Well, found a solution that works for me: I had to create an unconnected image-texture nodes to every material slot (for the bake result). Looks like it always wants to bake all materials and not just the selected one, and if those other materials don't have that node, then their bake-result end up in another image-texture node ...


FBX export adding extra bone I'm doing a fbx ascii export on Blender 2.78 to 3ds max 8. This is for Neverwinter Nights 2 models. I notice fbx has added an additional bone, I think it comes from the armature container in Blender, this causes problems with the animation. Is there a way to only export actual bones? On a max nwn2 mdb import the body mesh and bone goes to the scene root in 3ds max(using nwn2utilsmaxplugins).

Thanks,

Rick

It could be caused by the "Add Leaf Bones" option. It is checked by default. You can find it in the export options under "Armatures".


How to set Default Shader to Principled BSDF I saw in this youtube demonstration, that this is possible. I just can't imagine where I can change the default shader. I want the diffuse white shader to be a diffuse white Principled BSDF when I click the "+" in the material slots. Any ideas?
As Duarte Farrajota Ramos pointed out, the video was captured from the EEVEE branch (2.8). The Principled BSDF shader is the default shader there, so there wasn't any customization done to achive this behavior.
How would someone write a script or add-on to do this in pre 2.79 series?

This script adds an app handler triggered on scene update. That runs my watch_materials function.
First the watch_materials function checks to be sure you are using cycles. Then if there is another material it goes to the active object's active material and changes the node.

import bpy
from bpy.app.handlers import persistent

mat_count = len(bpy.data.materials)

@persistent
def watch_materials(something):
    global mat_count
    if bpy.context.scene.render.engine == 'CYCLES':
        if len(bpy.data.materials) > mat_count:
            mat_count = len(bpy.data.materials)

            #get active object's active material
            node_tree = bpy.context.active_object.active_material.node_tree
            #save the location of the diffuse node
            location = node_tree.nodes['Diffuse BSDF'].location.copy()
            #delete that node
            node_tree.nodes.remove(node_tree.nodes['Diffuse BSDF'])
            #add new Principled node
            principled = node_tree.nodes.new('ShaderNodeBsdfPrincipled')
            # move it to where the diffuse node used to be
            principled.location = location
            #make the connection
            node_tree.links.new(principled.outputs['BSDF'], node_tree.nodes['Material Output'].inputs['Surface'])

bpy.app.handlers.scene_update_post.append(watch_materials)

Just copy that script into blender's text editor and press the "Run Script" button. After that any new materials you add will look like this.

Granted, there are still things that could be done to this script. For example if you added a new material without the default nodes (can only be done through python) my script will break.

I have to mention Jerryno, his comment pointed me towards the app handler. I had made a version of this using a timer driven modal, it was nice, but far more complex (it works too).


Blender Eevee Keeps crashing when i try to render So I have this animation full of custom rigs that I animated in blender 2.79 and am trying to render in Eevee. When I hit the f12 key the frame renders out, but as soon as it's done blender closes.

I was wondering if anyone had any insight to what the problem might be and how to fix it.

Instead of opening the 2.79 file in blender 2.80 i just appended the objects in my scene to the startup file for 2.80 and it rendering seems to be working so far now.


How to add multiple PBR textures on one game-ready object I am making Roulette Wheel and I want it to have multiple different PBR textures, and those textures have their color,normal,roughness maps, for example: marble,oak wood,metal etc. It is for the games so if I do it by making UV seams on places I want some texture on and selecting those faces I want texture on I create new material, import downloaded textures,assign them to that faces and so on.
But at the end it seems I have multiple textures ,and as I understand it, they should have all be on one texture and then move UV maps to match it as you like if you want it to be optimised. What is the right way for multiple PBR textures on one Game-Ready object?
I hope question is clear, let me know if something is unclear.

You're probably talking about the trim sheet method where one material can be referenced by multiple parts of the same mesh. With the way you've UVW unwrapped that model, trim sheets wouldn't work too well. You'd need to straighten those circles into straight pieces. A trim sheet works by tiling but those pieces won't tile well at all. I highly suggest downloading a free add-on called TexTools which will straighten things like that out for you so you can then use them better with trim sheets.
I've created a short video demonstrating the best way to go about this, with your particular model.
Hope this helps!
Using PBR textures with tileable textures.


Does anyone know how to mesh this robot claw? I'm just getting started in Blender

I'm trying to model this small robot I really like called "Servbot", from the Megaman Legends series, and I made a quick sketch of him and tried to reply it as a reference on Blender. Everything was going well until I had to make his hands, little claw-like robotic thingys. I'll leave the drawing on the post so you can take a look.

Does anyone know how to make those? Like, step by step or any other method that will make it look closer to the original one (a sharp, hard-surfaced metalic shape claw)?

I already tried booleaning with cylinders, and applying long flat cubes to circle curves so to make them round, but still won't get good results.

There isn't need for a lot of complex mechanics. In 3D, you often fake it.

This is the fastest way I know how to do it:

Start by making a cylinder in a new scene. I chose these settings at the start. The main thing is, don't give it a cap fill type. I set mine to None.

With your object selected in Object Mode, go to the Modifiers Tab in the Properties Panel and create a Solidify modifier. Change the Thickness setting to 0.5. Then apply the modifier.

In Edit Mode, make sure you're in Face Select Mode (3 key), and box select, then delete the eight faces at the bottom center of the new shape. Then go into Edge Select Mode (2 key) and then Alt + Select an edge at the top center of the same object. Then split these edges by pressing Ctrl + e to bring up the Edge menu, then choose Edge Split. Note: This menu item seems to have been removed in Blender 2.83. If you are using this version, use the search function instead (F3) and type "Edge Split" in the search field to get access to this function).

In Edit Mode, choose Face Select Mode again and press a to select all faces. Press p and from the Separate menu that pops up, choose Loose Parts. Now you have two pieces. If not, then the previous step, where you selected edges and split them, was not completed properly, and some edges remained connected. Go back and check, and repeat that step if necessary.

In Object Mode, select either of these two new claw objects, and go into Edit Mode. Again, select all faces, and this time go to the top of the 3D view, and choose Mesh > Clean Up > Fill Holes. This will automatically cap both ends of your new object. Repeat the above steps for the other object.

Now go into Object Mode and select either claw object, and then Shift select the other claw object. Now go into Edit Mode (since both objects were selected before entering Edit Mode, they are both equally accessible in Edit Mode).  Go into the top orthographic view with Numpad 7, and select all faces again, which will select all faces for both objects. Translate them vertically by pressing g, followed by y, then dragging the mouse upward. Align these parts so that the middle of the bottom gap between these objects is centered on the Worldspace origin (try to get close to it, anyway). You can snap by holding Ctrl while moving the mouse, and get even finer control by additionally holding Shift. When you leave Edit Mode now, both objects will have their object origin centered at this location, which will make hinge movement easier.

Go back into Object Mode and, with the 3D cursor at the Worldspace Origin (if it is not there, put it there with Shift + c), press Shift  + a to add a new cylinder. It should appear where the 3D cursor is, which should be the same location as your origin point for the two claw objects (You may find that the Add Cylinder panel remembers some of the settings of our earlier created cylinder). This one needs to be smaller, to fit between the claws, and the Fill Cap Type needs to not be None this time. I chose Ngon, and a radius of 0.2.

Finally, go into Object Mode and select both claw objects, and then add the new cylinder to the selection last. Press Ctrl + p to bring up the Parent Menu, and select Object. The claws will now go where the pivot object goes. If you want, you can lock the axes that shouldn't move in the Transform Panel in the Properties Shelf to the right. You don't even need bones for this setup, nor drivers, really, since you can zero out the rotation values to get your claws back to their starting position, or else press Alt + r to restore the zeroed out values instantly.


When I do this UV unwrap the cube becomes transparent and shows vertical and horizontal lines When I UV unwrap the cube, and place a logo/image in it I get 2 things:
1) the Cube becomes transparent. How can I keep the diffuse not transparent. I used the transparent node to get the alpha from the logo.

2) I also get some weird vertical and horizontal lines.

Any ideas?

Is this the way to do this? Is there a better way? any links to tutorials?

Here is the blend file:

The lines are most likely a problem with the image Alpha channel. However, the Blend file you uploaded does not include the image - you need to select 'Pack' in the UV editor to pack the image into the file before you upload it. However, load the image into an image editor and check the Alpha channel to ensure there are no lines or other noise present. Also, set the Image Texture node to 'Clip' rather than 'Repeat' - this way the other 5 UV faces (outside the UV boundary in your image) definitely won't be picking up any content from the image.

As for the cube becoming transparent, you do realise that you're using a Transparent shader for the red shading...? Replace the Transparent shader node with a Diffuse shader node and it will no longer be transparent.


alter paths for boost libs in Blender's CMake to use my system boost i need help on how to alter blenders cmake to use my system boost instead of the one it dowloaded by itself. It automatically dose it for python, to us the same python I'm using on my computer. I believe this is pretty simple to do, but i have no idea on how to do it.

the reason for this, is that there is a library I'm trying to run in blender and it makes its own bindings with the boost it is made with. and so i can import DLIB into blender, but i cannot use any of the advance features. From going around the web, the only way for it to work properly in blender is for dlib to be compiled with blenders boost, which i believe is much harder to do, or for blender to be compiled with dlibs boost, which is what I'm going for.

So how do you do this?

thanks pascal

Hm, it is strange it downloaded boost.

If you are looking to change the CMake file, then go to line

find_package(Boost bla bla COMPONENTS ${__boost_packages})

Before that line, insert:

SET(BOOST_ROOT "path/to/boost/")
SET(Boost_NO_SYSTEM_PATHS YES)

With this, it should look for boost only in the specified BOOST_ROOT directory. You might need to move these commands to the upper-most levels of the if's.


Add Rigify Widgets to Weight Painted Figure Working in Blender 2.79 using the Rigify Cat(Meta_Rig) I discovered problems with the front feet when trying to apply Automatic Weight Painting.  After much tweeking and retopoing of the area Blender still didn't like it so I separated the fron feet from the main mesh, Auto Weighted the mesh to the rig, then reattached and hand weighted to offending area. Checked everything was working smoothly by moving the bones around, and finally highlighted the metarig and hit GENERATE RIG to create Widgit Rig. This took several tries and both Blender and computer reboots before it cleanly generated. But now it is there.

Problem: The weighting does not seem to have carried over to the widgets as they are not controlling the mesh. How do I link the widgets to the weighted mesh?

I asked a similar question back in June before working out the weight painting issues of the front feet.  The discussion went into Chat because of it's length but has been erased because of time.

BLEND FILE

With Rigify, you need to generate the rig from the meta rig first, before weight painting.

In blender all control widgets etc are also bones, but may or may not be allowed to move the mesh, depending on whether the deform flag is set on them or not (this can be found in the bone properties tab in the properties editor). In the generated rigify rigs, the deform bones are hidden by default, and normally on the third to last layer:

These are the ones you need to weight paint.

You may also find the following (slightly old) link useful:
https://blenderartists.org/t/rigging-with-rigify/673045/2


Applying shrinkwrap modifier corrupts the shape I've added lots of circles around a mesh in an effort to retopologize it with BSurfaces later. But I never get so far.

I've applied shrinkwrap on them all with the object as the target, and linked the modifier.

This works well so far:

But then I want to join the objects into one object. This creates problems because it now has only one origin and shrinkwraps all circles towards the new origin:

So, I thought, to fix this I should apply the modifier to the objects first, so that they retain their shape when they are joined. But if I try to apply the modifier, this happens:

I have no idea what's going on here.

Why does it get this shape when I apply the modifier, and how can I fix it?

And a side-question: How could I apply the modifier to all of the selected rings, instead of one by one?

This is because the objects are Curve objects. Note the warning in the Info panel that appears when the modifier is applied:

When the modifier is active (not applied) it affects the polygon geometry generated by the curve object. When you apply the modifier it will only affect the Control Vertices (CV points) of the curve, giving a different result:

As you can see, the CV points are shrink-wrapped to the edges of the mesh, redefining the geometry defined by the curve.

To retain the shape, you must convert the object to a Mesh. This can be done with AltC> Convert > Mesh. This will take the geometry generated by the curve object and turn it into a mesh object:

Note that this will apply all modifiers as well. (See this post)


Can you use vertex Weight as falloff? My question is how I could use vertex paint as falloff.
My goal is to make something just like with a object falloff but when the object falloff is gone over a polygon it must stay "disappeared".

I know you could do it with a paint modifier and after that a mask modifier and use the weight group made by the paint modifier but the mask modifier does more of a "cut" than slowy dissovling the poygons + in animtion nodes you have more control over the how the animtion plays.

I think the problem is in difference in list lenghts after you use the "Prepare Polygon Transformation" node but I can't a solution or a work-a-round.

So I hoped someone here could help me

Welcome to Stackexchange! You are trying to transform polygons based on weights of vertices, so your current approach wont work as you expected.

Instead, you need to somehow compute a weight for each polygon based on the vertices that make it. One way is to take the average of the weights of the vertices of each polygon. To do so, loop over the polygon indices, get the weights at those indices and average them:

Then you can use the Offset Polygons node to transform the polygons based on the custom falloff just as you did. There is no need to extract the polygon info or recreate it, the Offset Polygons node takes care of this:


Video sequence editing, cutting strips I'm trying some video editing with Blender and for now just wanna do some simple cuts. Whatever I do the strips keep some frames from what I thought should have been cut as soon as I start moving the strips around.

I know what happens under the hood as documented here for example: https://www.blender.org/manual/de/editors/sequencer/usage.html#moving-and-modifying-strips , but I still can't figure out how to do a simple cut like you can for example in Premiere Elements.

In the VSE you can cut a strip at the current frame by pressing K, which gives a "soft cut". You can also perform a "hard cut" at the current frame by using ⇧ ShiftK

The two strips resulting from a cut still know the video that they are from and frames that were "cut" from the strip can still be recovered.

The difference between a hard and soft cut is that with a soft cut you can drag the start of the clip to recover frames before the cut, while with a hard cut this will duplicate the frame at the cut to the adjusted start of the clip. This works the same for the end of the strip.

In both cases you can adjust the start and end frame by adjusting the strip input properties - press N to show the properties region.


Why does linking materials between objects seem to have no effect? I used 3 cubes.
I changed the first cube's material (check pic).
I selected the first two, then the last. I clicked the cube, pressed Ctrl+L and chose 'Material'.

I got in right menu Material.004 and Material.006 but color does not change.

It has 'changed the color' ... to Material.04.

You could have been linking materials between objects with completely different topologies.. the editor has no way of knowing which materials to assign to which faces. So by default, it will assign the material in transferred-slot-0 to all faces.

If you switch the order of the material slots in the first cube, (using the up/down arrows at the bottom right of the list,) when you link the materials to the other cubes, they will turn blue. All over.


Is there a way to export an object to Unity 3D while keeping any applied textures? I exported a .fbx file to Unity 3D, but it retained none of the applied textures.

Is there a way to create a textured model in Blender and export it into Unity while retaining the textures, without having to export my UV layout and retexture it again within Unity?

Textures and diffuse colors are not assigned automatically. You have to manually assign them by dragging the texture onto the mesh in the Scene View in Unity

You don't have to export to .fbx, Unity supports .blend. To import a file into Unity,

Right-click in the Projects pane, choose 'Import new Asset', and navigate to the file
Move the .blend file into your project's Asset folder

You can read more here.


Using a Wacom Tablet in Blender I'm a complete noob when it comes to sculpting. I recently began CGCookie's The Fundamentals of Sculpting course...

...and I can't figure out how to make my Wacom tablet work with Blender. It "left-clicks" just fine (yay, I figured it out! :-P), but I've been unable to figure out how to tumble around the scene...or to select objects...

...embarrassing, I know...

So, if anybody would mind helping a poor naive soul, could somebody please point out how to use these Blender operations that normally are operated with right- and middle-mouse clicks using a Wacom tablet?

Wacom has extra software provided with it's tablets where you can setup the tablet and pen buttons. This application is called "Wacom tablet settings" on Windows. Since you are working with macOS, you will probably find help right here.


Export bullet physics with the Y and Z axis swapped I'm using the script example used in Blender's physics documentation:

import PhysicsConstraints
PhysicsConstraints.exportBulletFile("Physics.bullet")

The problem is that the Y and Z axis appear to be swapped when the data is loaded at runtime by a third party game engine. Is there a way to swap the coordinates before exporting to the .bullet file?

Can this swapping be automated in the script?

A video showing how the script is used

As a side note, the bullet exporter is not an add-on exporter, but rather a feature of the physics engine module.

according this post Is it possible to make Blender a Y-up world?
not really, though most exporters have an option to flip it.


access to time or current frame in OSL I'm trying to create an OSL shader which will select a different texture depending on which frame I'm rendering.

I don't need it to be in OSL but I have a mixture of texture groups each with a series of texture maps and I want to render every combination of each of them.

I thought I could setup a loop and iterate through an array to do so but I can't seem to figure out how to access the current frame information.

To access the frame info you could create a simple OSL script:

shader frame_node(
    int  frame= 1,
    color Color1 = color(0.8, 0.0, 0.0),
    output color Diffuse = 0)
{
    Diffuse = frame * Color1;
}

and keyframe the frame input socket accordingly.
e.g.:


How to confine particles within a volume? Hi I am using Particle Properties - Hair to put slender particles inside a specific volume mesh (Emit from: Volume). But I find for some particles, they can go outside my volume. How can I confine particles within a volume? Thanks a lot!

Duplicate your main volume in place
Remove the particle system from the main volume
Scale down the duplicate so that the particles fit into the main volume
make sure to turn Show Emitter off in the Particle Settings panel


Particle size as key frame I want to render a scene with 300 frames. I have particles included and in frame 1 I want to have particle size 0.001 growing linear until frame 300 to 0.05.

I am already aware how to use keyframes for rotation, but here I seem to fail.

The parameter I am talking about is in the lower left.

While i am sure you have a reason to use the older version of Blender (update is much recommended though).

That said, you should be able to get it done by doing the following:

Go to frame 1, where the scale is supposed to be 0.001
Enter the value of 0.001 and then with the mouse over the scale field, press I to set a keyframe for that attribute at frame 1.
Now jump to frame 300 and enter the new value (0.05) for the scale and again with the mouse over the scale field press I to set another keyframe.

If you now play the animation, the scale value will be interpolated between 0.001 and 0.05 over the run of 300 frames. If you want a linear interpolation, you need to go in the graph editor and under key menu -> Interpolation Mode -> Linear. Or just press T and select Linear, like in the picture below.

I packed all in a little visual demonstration:

Happy Blending


Error, region type missing in..? What is this? Keep getting this error message amd would really appreciate your help.

Any idea what this means?

I've edited some of the original code, changed around some of the parameters such as changing the name of the objects. I don't know if that had an effect?

If it did/would, vaguely what can I do to ensure this error message doesn't keep propping up.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

The blender system is structured with Area's 1 and Regions 2.

Area

The application window is always a rectangle on your desktop. It is divided up into a number of re-sizable areas. An area contains the workspace for a particular type of editor, like a 3D View Editor, or an Outliner.

Region

An area is divided into regions (a sort of placeholders). For example:

Header
Main
Tool Shelf
Properties
etc

Scripts can use these regions to (for example) add custom panels to a region.

Now the Error

The message Error, region type missing in - name is send to the console when a script wants to access a region in a area for temporary windows.

This used to happen when users open a user-prefs or render window (those are temporary screen and). And then start using it as a regular window (split it, change space types... etc). This was solved in 2015, but could still be possible when scripting.


Step-by-step execution of BGE mainloop for debugging? I'm wondering whether it is possible to run the game engine in a "cycle
- by - cycle" fashion.

I.e. a sort of debugging mode where one could
associate the mainloop cycles to keyboard events (for example) rather
than a time interval.

A simple way to go would be enable the console and to add a Always actuator somewhere with pulse mode enabled, linked to a Python controller using the following "script" :

input("Next step ")

Then at each step the python script will be blocking the whole execution until you press enter for the input to return.


How to get motion blur without an animation I have scene where the spider man is falling from a height .I am just making a render and I don't wanna get my hands dirty by adding an animation to the camera and the rig.I guess motion blur won't work unless I have an animation. So I wanted to know how to make a background motion blur to my scene to make it more realistic...I hope it will also  tell the viewers that spiderman has been falling at a high velocity. But now my spiderman looks like he is standing in mid-air.I would love to know if there is any way to do it ?

Use a directional blur node in the compositor for the background, it should work for all other superheroes as well.


Blender VSE: What to do with 20gb SSD (performance enhancement/rendertime)? so my D drive has about 1 -2 gb of drivers on it. Otherwise there's over like 22gb of free space there. So let's say 20gb to be safe. Blender and everything else is on my C main hard drive.

How can I take advantage of this to improve blender vse performance and render times? I don't care about the 3d stuff so much atm.

Things that I'd like improved:
-render times are horribly long in my vse (if I'm rendering with the cpu it's in the 90% load rate in the task manager generally) I render to preview my work and make sure there's no errors, before creating the final render. Would writing it to the ssd and then viewing test copies there and then deleting afterwards greatly increase my render times?

-I have to use 25% proxies most of the time when doing any major editing. I can finetune with no proxy but its painfully laggy and slow, and things jump around and stutter and freeze.

-in my big project which is 20-30 mins of footage, it constantly reloads the strips when I zoom out. And its really laggy even with 25% proxy, and no proxy things jump around and freeze up. My fps has gone from the native 22.81 down bit by bit and its at a measly ~8fps even when I'm previewing blankspace at 25% proxy (there's alot of stuff in there atm). my ram is usually only up to 60% used tho when dealing with 25% proxy mode even tho it laggs so much, at no proxy tho the ram can hit the 90%'s and thats generally when it does freeze up for a second or two and studder)

Can I improve any of these with my 20gb of ssd that's inside my laptop there? Specifically what, and how would I go about doing it? Just note I do have the 1-2gb of drivers there (came pre-installed that way and some of them are dealing with backups and other important stuff). Otherwise I don't really know if the drive is even running or being used tbh. SO limited knowledge leads to hesitation to do anything too fancy.

Blender and all my video file are on my hard drive atm....and when I move file locations I have to always go in and re-select where the new location is or it won't showup in the vse. And I'm unsure if I'd have to do that for every strip I made a hardcut on, or every separate video clip or if there's an easy way to change the reference folder for LOTs of items rather than doing them all 1 by 1....or if I'm best only touching the ssd for future projects instead.

Would appreciate any insight, thxs. Please elaborate where possible, I'm not overly tech savy. People say it makes blender load up faster, that doesnt really do much as it loads fine alrdy. Its just moving stuff and interacting with the vse as well as rendering that I want help improving. Surely rendering would be better no? or does it not matter since encoding is the slow part and not the writing to disk?
I was looking at using my ssd as extra ram like u can do apparently with usb drives..? But apparently ssd don't work the same way or something, and are simple hard drive functionality? Is buying a large usb drive and using that as extra ram gonna be helpful as well? I think I can only upgrade my ram directly to 12gb or 16gb from my 8gb...or mbe not at all it might be soldered on the cpu

It get faster renders from Blender VSE when I make sure to eliminate any scaling. My Canon cameras produce 1920x1088 footage. Set Blender to render at 1920x1088.


Blender 2.83.5 - disable right click -> move I just installed 2.83.5 and I am setting things up
I just cannot find where to disable 'right-click' -> moves object
I don't want objects to be move when I select them with the right button
thanks

in preferences
input
untick releases confirm
but the way it feels is not like previous versions, I just hate 2.8 so far


What's wrong with this face filling? Whenever I try to fill the face connecting the selected vertices (by selecting the edges and pressing f:

I get this weird filling

So, why isn't that face filled properly? and how can I fill it smoothly?

by selecting the edges and just pressing F you are creating a so-called n-gon (face with more than 4 vertices). The subdivision modifier can't handle those very well and thats what messing up your mesh.

Select the top and bottom row of vertices (1st image) and use grid fill to make the faces.

Mesh ‣ Faces ‣ Fill/Grid Fill

Result on my mesh: (your proportions are a bit different, but its basically the same structure):


Use center of entire object as pivot point in edit mode (2.8) I know how to set the pivot point to the center of an object in Object mode.

But in Edit mode, as soon as I select a group of vertices (or edges or faces) the pivot moves to the center of the selected items.

How do I keep the pivot point in Edit mode the same place as it is in Object mode?

Selecting Pivot Point - Active Element does not work. I know I can use 3D cursor but then how do I easily set the 3D cursor to the same place as the Object's pivot point?

Thanks!

I don't think the mesh has any knowledge of its object's pivot point in Edit Mode.. so to put the transform pivot at the object origin, that would be, (with 'Pivot' set to 'Cursor'),

Tab to Object Mode
ShiftS > 'Cursor to Selected'
Tab  back again.

I find it's pretty unusual, though, that I don't want my pivot at the center of some edge, face, loop, or somesuch.. in which case that can be selected, and the Cursor sent to Selected in Edit Mode.