Make Evenly Spaced Out Loop Cuts I have a trapezoid shape and I want to make loop cuts. but the problem is, is I want the loop cuts not to go across the shapes... "normal"? I guess is what you'd call that. How can I get the lines to be evenly spaced out and the gaps between the lines be parallel no matter what the shape is? (Also, I can't use the knife tool because I need to make a lot of lines).

Knife Project is a possibility.. (Illustrated with X across, Y up)..

EX  extrude a long edge horizontally, Shift D duplicate, P part off into a new object.
X delete the original extrusion, X delete 'Faces Only' of the new object,  move up in Z, and tweak its X.
Header Menu > Mesh > Knife Project the grid down onto a couple of your segments:

Hide the grid...

Shift D R Z 60
the segments, and Shift R repeat,
Alt M > 'By Distance' merge double vertices.

or, work under a radial Array modifier, if you've got more symmetrical work to do.


How do I make a free form tail animation? I have a quadrupedal mechanical creature that has a tail. I like to make the tail animation natural or kind of adapt to the animation of the body but will return to its original transform when in idle like the ones below. I want to use this as a player in a game made with unity. I just want to mention that because it might be solved with unity instead. Not that I'm sure of.

I have the picture in pose mode but it's straight when in edit mode.

Any help is appreciated.

I'm sorry of the description is not clear. Please point out the things that is not clear so that I can edit the description.

Parent an UV-sphere to the dog (?...sorry) sized and positioned that way, that
its "north pole" touches the end of the dog and its south pole is just a little
further away from the dog as the tip of its tail. Or in other words: The diameter
of the sphere is roughly a little longer than the dogs tail.
Parent the sphere to the armature in object mode.
Vertex parent an empty to the "south pole vertex" of the sphere.
Attach an IK-solver to the tail and as target insert the empty.
Adjust the chain length accordingly.
Add a softbody simulation to the sphere.
Make the north pole the goal for pinning the sphere at a stiffniss of "1".
Play with the other parameters of the softbody simulation.
By the way: When jumping around from one frame to a totally different frame
the cache of the softbody simulation can get corrupted and blender not alway notice
that ... which leads to very weird results or none at all.
The easiest way to clear the cache is to set the number of the last stored from
before the number of the first frame temporarily.
Don't forget to set both values to the length of your animation at least.


Replace Image option is blank? The image replacement button is blank after I've tried to replace the skin. When I tried to experiment by going into open new image, I've replaced it. I reversed it, but still can't find a solution after going on forums. Anyone know the solution or can back me up on this?

The image could be "packed" into the .blend, you must unpack to replace it.
You can do this by clicking the small icon shown below, then you should be able to replace it. Remember to "pack" it back if you need to stay in the .blend file!


Writing my first blender Addon and I am confused on these string keywords I am currently writing my first blender addon and I have opened up one of those sample templates as a reference. I have noticed that if I want to create a button to make it appear I have to use these default string keywords. Eg. frame_start, frame_end or render.render. My question is, can I make my own custom slider or button that doesn't use these predefined string keywords?

At first, I thought these were replaceable strings but if I mistype just one letter the entire button disappears. Basically, I want to create a slider or a button that says "Number of final output images" in the box itself instead of "End Frame:" or "Start Frame: " how should I proceed?

The example "strings" that you show belong to two different categories, frame_start and frame_end are property names while render.render is an operator name. The properties will display as a number that you can edit while the operator will show as a button that will perform an action when clicked.

The strings that you use need to match an existing property or operator for them to work, an operator is identified by it's bl_idname property. You can specify a property or operator name and have a different string shown by passing a text paramater.

row.prop(scene, 'frame_start', text='adjust this here')
row.operator('render.render', text='This is my render button')

To create extra properties that are only used by your addon, you can use custom properties, which you should create in your addons register() function.

class MyPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    ...
    def draw(self, context):
        row = self.layout.row()
        row.prop(context.scene, 'my_prop')

def register():
    bpy.types.Scene.my_prop = bpy.props.IntProperty()
    bpy.utils.register_class(MyPanel)

For operators, you can make your own and then use the bl_idname that you set in your operator class to show a button for it. If no text paramater is passed, an operators bl_label property is shown on the button.


Why are Images Imported as Planes Hidden by a Reference or Background Image? When I import an image as plane with the alpha channel for transparency, and it is in front of a background or reference image I can't see the object (plane) to place or edit it? Why is this?

If this is a duplicate question please link / flag, I have looked but can't seem to find an answer... Thank you for any help you can offer.

This happens because Images as Planes addon automatically uses Alpha Blend mode.

Switch to Alpha Clip or Alpha Hashed and it will work as intended
(You need to be in Eevee, for these options to show up.)


How to un-mirror object? So I currently have my mesh mirrored to where if you edit one part of the object, it will edit that other side exactly the same way. I want to turn this off since I want to edit my left arm and not the right arm. How would I do this? I already tried turning off X-Mirror under Mesh Options but that didn't work.

Here is a picture of my object

I solved it! I had to get hit apply on a mirror modifier and an armature modifier I added.


Is it possible to make glares brighter I have planned to use the glare as a simple light flash, kind of camera flare.
I noticed the glares are quite dark:

It looks nice with dark background, but on the main animation, it pretty much vanishes.
Question: Is there a possibility to made these brighter? I tried to use "Bright/Contrast", but that impact to the full area. I did not manage to impact only to the glares.

It looks to me like you’ve got the glare affect set to low. Turn it up. If that doesn’t work, separate the glare effect from the main image, brighten the glare, and then mix them back together, instead of using the glare effect’s automatic mixing.


Modeling and Sculpting a Crown I am progressing on my first Blender sculpt.  I am currently modeling a crown for a statue of a king lying on a marble slab.  Sculpting has progressed well so far as long as it consisted of a subdivided spheres.

For the crown, I decided to try modelling.  I used a cylinder and I am modeling it for the first time. I would like;

1st; to extrude 2 small points upwards at the side of the crown.  I extruded the vertices which I then connected.  How can I then add faces to the joined vertices? Or is there a better way to produce the wanted points?  the point you see in the photo was obtained withe the smoothing tool.

2nd; I would eventually like to sculpt some engravings in the crown.  To do this I added a multiresolution modifier in the layout, in the hopes of adding enough subdivisions to be able to sculpt but the result with the draw brush in sculpting mode is terrible and worst when I put dyntopo on.

multiresolution modifier applied.

Normal draw brush applied.

dyntopo draw brush applied

Thanks in advance for all the help you can give me.

Your first question is not very clear, maybe show a picture of the kind of crown you want to create. If you want to fill a face, select the 4 vertices you want and press F. But instead of extruding 4 distinct vertices, select a top face and extrude it with E then scale down. You can simultaneously extrude several faces as individual faces with alt E, then scale them down with the Pivot Point set to Individual Origin.

For the second question: You can either model or sculpt your ornement. If you choose to sculpt it, the best thing is to keep a low-version of you crown, and once you're good with the sculpted high version, you bake its normals and use the normal map you get to fake 3D on the low-poly. To sculpt I guess you can do it 2 ways: either with the Multiresolution modifier or with Dyntopo. Here is a comparison that might help: sculpting - Everything is edgy and sharp, but I want it smooth


Reciprocal Frame Design in Sverchok I am wondering if there has been any work done to create reciprocal frames in sverchok for generating/prototyping designs for architecture.

Have not admitted any. But you can start https://gist.github.com/f25845210d1d3b7e542c65fb9c696409 from importing this one


blender 2.8 renders png with transparency inverted I have a png with transparency, not an alpha channel:

I have set up my shaders like this tute:
https://www.katsbits.com/codex/alpha/

My object renders the transparency inverted from the texture map (the transparent map region renders opaque, and the tree regions are transparent).
What did I do wrong/how to fix??

I also tried using an explicit alpha channel PNG, and it has the same problem.
Also it doesn't matter which render engine I used them all, they all show the same transparency problem.

Also in EVEE, I have the material Blend Mode = Alpha Blend.  Alpha clipped, hash and blend all render the same.

Thanks

OK.  So after poking at this for a while, I come up with the node ordering going into the mix shader affects the transparency.  I had built an alpha channel png, and I was able to get it to work, and when I inverted the mix shader inputs the result was identical to my original post.

So I went back to my original file, swapped the mix shader inputs, and the scene now works as I expect!

Thx


How to overlay a picture with transparency overr a movie clip? I added a movie clip into the VSE and also a picture which is a cut out head of a gorilla with the rest being transparent (png file).

However, when I hover over both clips with the timeline marker, one can not see through the transparent parts onto the movie clip below.

(p.s. what is the best way to decrease the size of the gorilla?)

Here is the asked answer:

in comments above I suggested a method in less than 15 words, but there is also another way that could be even faster or simpler, so this answer will be double:

anyway, you start from this situation, where you have an image with transparency and an underlying video, and you wish to overimpose the image to the video using that transparency.

method 1: set the image blend type to alpha over

with the image strip selected (RMB) in the "properties" panel (press N to show/hide) there's a "blend" type selector, by default set to "replace". Set it to "alpha over", done.

in this case you can use the slider below "blend" to set (or animate) the opacity.

method 2: add an "alpha over" effect strip

with both the video and the image strips selected  (shiftRMB) , add an effect strip "alpha over". Done.

in this case, to set the opacity, you can select the effect strip, and in the "properties" panel (press N to show/hide) unset the "default fade" checkbox, and then set (or animate) the "fade" you wish from that.


How to enable shadows on glossy surface with enviromental mapping? So I am a noob in blender.. but scene is in attachment.
As you can see, I dont get any hard shadows. With Sun size 0.062. How can I re-enable hard shadows so they are visible or what shader can I use to enable them again?
On diffuse they work fine, I removed diffuse because I wasn't sure if it was needed.

Try to use another type of light source, like Area lights, preferably. Also, notice that you've got an old version of Blender. Maybe the Principled BSDF shader in Blender 2.8 could give you more flexibility.


How do I get an icon to appear in the label of my custom python node? Note: This was an issue in 2.79, but has been fixed in 2.83.

Custom python nodes have a bl_icon property which, when set to a valid icon name, is meant to display an icon for the node.

I presumed this icon would appear next to the node label like the compositing nodes have:

However, I have not been able to get an icon to appear for my nodes, and even the template in Text Editor> Templates> Custom Nodes doesn't seem to succeed in displaying the icon it defines.

Is there some other property that needs to be enabled to get the icon to appear or am I misunderstanding the purpose of defining a bl_icon property?

So far, the node icon only seams to appear in outliner (like datablocks).
Not very useful.

+The icon you show in the picture is preview button and it's hardcoded. not py

AFAIK you can alter, even in "real time" , the label with draw_label() and also the sockets texts. And of course, the color and size of the node. But not much more.

-

There might be an extreme workaround...

If you really need an image or something else on top of that, so much that you'd design a whole system just for that (instead of making great nodes and addons :D ), you can use OpenGl to draw something on top of the node, or header or whatever area

an example is this (note that the white rectangle could be on top of the self node! whatever the coords you need, you can work out the header area with precision)

and it's about
https://github.com/JacquesLucke/animation_nodes/tree/master/graphics


Object does not appear in render view but appears in all other views After updating to Blender 2.79, I had to fix my rig by using the following fix: 'LIB ERROR: object lost from scene' error when opening file

But after doing that the object does not appear in render! It is enabled for rendering but it does not appear in render view or when rendering, but it does appear in solid, textured and material views. Can anyone help please? I am using Cycles Render.

I figured it out: The Diffuse BSDF node was linked to Volume in the output, instead of to Surface.


Line between two 'empty's Simple question: I need a line between two previously made objects 'empty' so that it remains attached to these vertices: the line itself can't be moved, but moving the vertices modifies the line. Thanks!!

You can use vertex hooks, example: draw a line mesh (2 vertices).

Then in edit mode, select one vertex, press CTRL+H and select "hook to new object". Here an example for a cube mesh, easier to visualize: it works anyway.

A new "empty" will be created where the vertex is, and the vertex is "hooked" to it (meanwhile a "hook" modifier has been created, for your line mesh, with proper relations to empty object).

Do the same with the other vertex. Now you have the line mesh and two empties. Wherever you move the empties, their respective hooked vertex will follow.

You can also hook to existing objects (empties or others) or bones, choosing other options after CTRL+H. You may need to select them first.

In this case you'll probably have to move the control points to the respective empties origin while in edit mode to set their position:


Synchronisation between Video and UI/Image editor I am a  fresh Blender user. I started collecting training videos and some of them are very explanatory indeed. So I guessed, following their instructions I could manage. The problem I describe here is a problem I have with all the videos I shot with my Panasonic Camcorder  HC-VX870.

In this video, wanted to blur the ship floating on the river Seine.

System imformation :
Computer ASUS Desktop PC P30AD
Processor 4 Intel Core i3-4160 CPU @ 3,60 Ghz
Memory : 3914 MB
OS : Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS

Specs of the video :
Duration :  1 minute 24 seconds
Container : Quicktime

Video :
Dimensions : 3840 x 2160
Codec : H.264 (High profile)
Frame rate : 25 fps
Bit rate : 61128 kbps

Audio :
Codec : MPEG4-AAC
Channels : Stereo
Sample rate : 48000 Hz
Bit rate : 256 kbps

Media details
Demuxer : lavfpref

Let us now take a look at  the process itself.

Step 1 : I add the video. It appears in the upper-right side window. Everything works fine.

Step 2 :  I open the UV Image Editor in the upper-left side window . OK.

Step 3 : I create my mask (upper-ledt side window). I call it Blur_01. OK.

Step 4 : In the Upper-left side window, I open the video. It appears. No sinc yet, but so far, so good.

Step 5 : In the Upper-left side window, I select View/Properties, in order to sync the left side and right side.

Step 6 :   In the Upper-left side window, I now tick  the Match movie length and Auto Refresh boxes… and the video disappears.

I have been trying hard over the past week to solve this problem, to little avail, so I am turning to you now.

I also tried on Blender 2,76. I managed to move my mask around in the UV Image Editor, then I ended up with two cases :

If I start from image 1 (say image 1 to image 50), everything seems t work fine and I manage to get full sync (i.e. the mask  moves around nicely in both windows).
If I start from another image (say image 51 to 100), then I cannot get the sync and, while the mask moves around in the Upper-left side window, it stays stuck at image 51 in the Upper -right side window.

I hope I clearly stated the nature of my problem. Thanking you in advance for your time and efforts.

I recommend you to convert the video to an image secuence, you can do it with Blender if you want, render the video without changes to a series of images. Anyway I prefer using ffmpeg to do this job, is free and you have lots of examples on Internet.

I think the problem could be that, as the video is encoded, a frame in the middle could not exist (completely) and this is why it can't show the image.


Not recognizing my Nvidia RTX 2060 for optiX I am using Debian Linux Buster 10  with a Nvidia RTX 2060 card I have included back ports non-free so I have the Nvidia 440.82 drm installed. I am using Blender version 2.83. The card is recognize just not the optiX. I was under the impression that this driver supported this function.

After further study linux needs a package called libnvoptix1. This is a linked library that blender needs to run optiX once I installed this it recognized and worked. I am getting two warnings while rendering the classroom find_node_operation: Failed for (DRIVER, 'cycles.seed') libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile Anyone ever see these.

So after further study linux needs a package called libnvoptix1. This is a linked library that blender needs to run optiX once I installed this it recognized and worked.


Subdivide a face into 1 x 1 squares I have a mesh (just 1 face) that was created in another program that tries to optimise the mesh when exporting.  I would like to subdivide it 1 x 1 square grid like pattern (which is basically how the program created it in the first place).

I tried subdivide, but that just adds more vertices to the edges.

Is there an easy / quick method instead of me cutting it up manually with the knife tool, as I will likely have more meshes like this to clean up and work with?

File added (different mesh):

Step 1: Creating a large mesh of 1x1 squares

There are several ways to accomplish step 1, here's one possibility:  Create a new 1x1 square as a new object.  Use the "Array" modifier to make a row of 1x1 squares, wider than your target object.  Apply that modifier, then use a new "Array" modifier (set to Z offset instead of X) to make multiple rows, taller than the target object.  Apply this modifier as well, and "Merge Doubles" on the resulting mesh of 1x1 squares.

You should end up with a mesh of connected 1x1 squares, that extends larger in all directions from the target object that you hope to cut.

Step 2.  Use Knife Project

With your large mesh selected in Object Mode, shift-right-click on the original target object, to multi-select that.  The target should be "active" selected object, with the new mesh a reddish-orange multi-selected color.  Enter "Edit mode" on the target, with all vertices selected.  Set your view to look along the axis perpendicular to the meshes (typically, numberpad 7, 1, or 3).

Finally, click the Knife Project button in the left margin.  This should cut a batch of 1x1 squares into your target mesh.


How to output 3 objects as 3 seperate nodes in a g3dj file I have three obj files: a ship, a turret and a gun.
I want to import these back into Blender and output such that the g3DJ file contains three seperate "nodes" (as achieved by Xoppa of libgdx fame - probably using Maya).
All I get is one node with "children" having 3 "parts".
How do I achieve seperate "node" output?

Figured it out!
I was exporting from blender to a wavefront obj file and then using fbx-conv to convert to a G3DJ one: this gave one node with 1 children with 3 parts.
Now when I export to an fbx file and convert to G3DJ using fbx-conv I get 3 nodes as required.


My point light doesn't appear in cycles render, why? So I'm rendering in Cycles the DONUT, lately my renders have no light (the objects are not black but really dark) and the strange part is, that it doesn't matter what I do to my light in the viewport, because the only place the light changes in, is in the viewport (the renders keep the same dark lighting). Im new to blender and I really don't want to get discouraged by something like this, if anyone can help i'd be happy, thank you in advance.

Here is the file for further information and details: https://we.tl/t-N9EJ2FRiXs
It's a .blend file so don't worry and thanks

Check your Outliner, or press AltH to unhide everything, you have a plane that is hidden in Viewport but not in Render, and it makes a big shadow on your scene.

Here you can see how the hidden plane is interfering with the light:


How to calculate for every ray the total distance it has traveled from camera to emitter I would like to modify the intensity of a light ray based on the ray total distance traveled from camera to emitter.

In the light path node, ray length gives how far ray has traveled since the last bounce.

How could I get to the total length for all bounces?

Cycles only provides the Ray Length for the current section of the path (ie, between bounces or interactions with a surface) and does not prove a means of summing that over the entire path of the ray - the only link between one 'bounce' and the next is the intensity of light and we cannot even directly access that. However, we can use a maths trick to encode the 'length' into the intensity of light and later use the compositor to decode it.

Consider an imagined ray that follows an assumed path :

It leaves the lamp
It bounces off a reflective (glossy) surface
It bounces off the ground
It bounces off an object
It gets to the camera

Each 'surface' (and the lamp) has a Color - lets call those C1 (lamp), C2 (glossy), C3 (refractive), C4 (diffuse). In addition, the light may fade between the interactions - eg, light travelling from the point source lamp will 'falloff' as it travels and so will be less intense the further it is from the source - lets call those F1, F2, F3, F4.

The light from the lamp (with initial intensite 'I') travels the path from the lamp, through all the interactions and to the camera and at each stage the intensity of the light is multiplied by each of the interaction's Color and Falloff.

So,

FinalIllumination = I x C1 x F1 x C2 x F2 x C3 x F3 x C4 x F4

At each stage along the path we can control the Color of that interaction - so we could vary the resultant light based on the ray length for each 'bounce' and combine these to represent the total ray length, extracting the result in the compositor.

However, this mechanism only allows us to multiply values together - we need to be able to add each individual ray length into the total at each stage, and we can do this using exponents and logarithms.

We can use the Maths 'Power' node to raise a number to an exponent - eg, 2^5 (or 'pow(2, 5)' or 2x2x2x2x2) = 32. Mathematically, multiplying two or more such powers together (with the same 'base' number - eg, 2^5 and 2^4) is equivalent to adding the exponents together.

ie,
    b^n x b^m = b^(n+m)

The Logarithm function is the reverse of the Power function and this can be used to extract the result (n+m) at the end. We can use this trick to manipulate the 'color' at each bounce to add in the ray length at each stage and extract the result (the total ray length) in the compositor.

Using a large 'base' would result in distant rays flooding the more relevant 'closer' bounces - using a 'base' slightly less than '1' results in progressively smaller values for longer distant rays while keeping reasonable precision. 0.95 seems to work OK for my range of distances - use a smaller number to increase the precision at small scales (eg, 0.9) and a higher value to allow for much longer distances (eg, 0.98 or 0.99 or higher).

We can use the different color channels (Red, Green, Blue) to represent different quantities. By making one of the channels always multiplied by '1' we can use that to accumulate the falloff of the entire journey (ie, F1 x F2 x F3 x F4) and this can be used to adjust the exponential accumulation of the ray length prior to the logarithm to effectively 'cancel out' the falloff prior to extracting the result. I used Green to represent the exponential accumulation, and Blue as a constant to measure the natural illumination falloff so the logarithm of Green / Blue should provide the total distance travelled by the ray. This leaves the Red channel which could potentially be used to 'count' the number of bounces using a similar technique (ie, use 'base ^ 1' to add '1' for each bounce).

To achieve this we need to replace each material in the scene with one that performs the calculations to generate a Color based on ray length. Here are materials for Diffuse, Glossy, Emission and Lamps. Similar materials can be used for Refraction/Glass.

NOTE : The World illumination should be set to zero to avoid it conflicting with the ray length (since they'll be coming from 'infinity' and would swamp our measurements).

Diffuse

Glossy

Emission

Lamp

Once the scene is rendered you can extract the path length in the compositor using the following nodes :

Note that the 'base' (0.95) used in the compositor must match those in all of the materials.

To demonstrate, here's a test scene consisting of a diffuse cube and plane, an emissive sphere, and a glossy mirror :

The result of the captured ray length (using a color ramp to map colours based on distance) :

Showing a progressive 'pulse' based on total ray length (bear in mind that the total ray length is measured from emitter to camera, not just the distance from emitter to the surface - also where multiple paths exist the shorted path will tend to override any longer paths) :

Blend file attached.


mathutils.Matrix's position returns an empty vector instead of the actual position In 4x4 matrices, the values of the last row are usually the position, however in blender, when scripting returns 0, even though when i display the matrix on the console, the values are shown properly (Even applying the matrix to the object)

Here's what i do in the code

tfm = node.properties.transform
print(tfm)
dec = tfm.decompose()
print(dec)

decompose() returns 3 values, which are the position, rotation, and scale:

<Matrix 4x4 ( 0.9962,  0.0000, -0.0872, 0.0000)
            (-0.0000,  1.0000, -0.0000, 0.0000)
            ( 0.0872,  0.0000,  0.9962, 0.0000)
            ( 9.6625, 12.2470, 55.6297, 1.0000)>

(Vector((0.0, 0.0, 0.0)),
Quaternion((0.9990482330322266, 7.4434889363317325e-09, -0.04361938312649727, -3.249897295720672e-10)),
Vector((1.0, 1.0, 1.0)))

These are the results after decomposing, which is what is applied to the object in blender when i do:

obj.matrix_world = tfm

However, even though the object rotates, it does not move.

A workaroud for this is applying the position is this way:

obj.location = (tfm[3][0],tfm[3][1],tfm[3][2])

However i should not be doing this and i would like to straight up apply the matrix and get all the values properly. Am i using the wrong method? Or maybe library? I think i'm not getting the proper values, even scale and rotation wise.

As batFINGER said, the problem was that blender uses the matrices via rows instead columns, so i had to do the following to get the stuff right:

Doing this would fix it:

tfm.transpose()


How to nest a glowing cube inside a larger cube in and render using Cycles? Hello I’m trying to make an effect like the red cubes in this scene but I can’t get the same effect. So far I’ve tried using a bigger glass cube and a small cube with an emission shader inside of the bigger cube.

One object, one material solution

Overview

For this method to work you will need to use current Master branch of Blender 2.79 or 2.8. You can find them here: https://builder.blender.org/download/

This is because we will be using Bevel node for edge detection. Without it there are some workarounds in Blender 2.79b like for example using Bevel modifier and second material for bevels.

Nodes

Let's break it down to the most interesting parts.

Inner Cube

This is my dumb version of clipping vectors. What it does it basically using Color Ramps to clip axis vectors from left/right, top/bottom, and front/back to make smaller cube inside mesh. So two for X, Y and Z. You can tweak them in the same manner to get smaller or bigger cube. Those Color Ramps.

Volume Noise

It's noise. In Volume. Added to the Inner Cube. Nothing much here except that you will need to use grey color for one of the handles to make it darker than cube itself.

Edge Mask

This is why we need Master branch. We are using here Bevel node to detect edges and use it for mixing Glass with Emission.

Glass and Edge

Nothing fancy here. A bit optimized Glass shader and Emission for edges. Remember to use small Roughness value. I don't know if it's a bug or 'feature' but without it Master and 2.8 are going nuts with simple Glass.


Python: how to get name of active render layer Using Python, how do I get the name of the active render layer?

I have three render layers.  All three are enabled.  But only 1 can be "active." (highlighted in blue when I select it)

I would like to write a script that gets the active render layer name, appends it to the render Output filename, and only renders this layer.

Thank you.

bpy.context.scene.render.layers.active.name gets the name of the active render layer.


Best way to make a coin pile? Okay, here's a little something in need of a solution:

I am planning on making some piles of coins for a dragon's treasure hoard.  This would be for game content, so it would all need to be low-poly, probably as a mesh pile with a textured surface.

Is there any good way to do this that would make the pile look authentic, or at least believable?  Like, for example, would it be possible to create a particle system, and then bake its output to the surface of a mesh?  Or would there be a better way to get natural results?

EDIT 1: If possible, I'd also like to get decent normal maps for the coin pile.

Model a coin (depending on how detailed you need just a short cylinder). Then use rigid body physics to drop the coins into a pile. cg cookie tutorial (archive). After you have a pile of coins then you can bake a normal map to a low poly mesh. Short description of the process on bottom of that page.

For the color, bake that too (also on that page). You would want a full render, or a Textures bake for the diffuse map.

If you are using cycles, the bake options are a little different.


How to change the material (texture) in the BGE? Example: A character is using default material, but I want after he has lost half his life, change his material to one with blood, with dirt, or if he is causing the character to change color like the Hulk, like me would you do to switch textures?

One sloppy logic-block way is to make a duplicate of your character model, put it on a hidden layer, then use the Edit Object actuator and Replace Mesh drop down option. The hidden layer character model will have your alternate material (texture included).

ad: I say sloppy because if you do this as a programmatic alternative, you're gonna have a hidden layer full of alternate materialed copies of one object. And that could wreck memory allocation as all those materials get loaded into memory.

Programmatically, if you wanna take the time, the KX_BlenderMaterial python object is a much cleaner way of swapping materials. look for the blender 2.78 or 2.79 api docs. It has an example of mixing textures, but you might be able to puzzle it out. (https://docs.blender.org/api/2.79/#) I would suggest downloading the zip so you always have it.


Objects appear as outline only I need your help Blender suddenly became like this:

This is the solution that works for me !
Enabling High Quality Normals in Performance under the Render tab.
Thank you again!


How to make duplicated object be colored independently? I have a blender object. I applied a diffuse color to the object. Then I duplicated it. Now I want to apply a different color to the duplicated object, however, the original object also changed to the new color.

How can I make the two objects have different colors?

You will need to add a new material (you duplicated the object but you didn't make a different material).

Click the number next to the material name to make a single user copy.


Apply Object Texture Coordinates Recently, I used Cell Fracture on a wall to split it into pieces. I then used an Empty and Object Texture Coordinates to map a Brick Texture over the wall. However, when I simulated the wall (Rigid Body Simulation), all of the textures changed (kind of like I expected).

What I was wondering is is there a way to "apply" Object Texture Coordinates, or otherwise, how can I fake it?

Here's my current result:

New .blend:

You can do this by creating a special new material of the texture coordinates and baking it, then using the baked image for the texture coordinates of your split objects.  Note thatt this should be done before cell fracturing your object.

First unwrap your object.  It doesn't have to be a super clean unwrap, just something not too distorted.

Now create a new material and name it something like "MappingCoords" or whatever makes sense to you.  For the material just plug the Object texture coordinates into an emission shader.  Since color and vector datatypes are no different from each other the XYZ texture coordinates will now be represented by RGB values.

Now go to the UV/Image Editor and add a new blank image by clicking on the New button at the bottom.  What resolution to use will depend on how big your model is and the resolution of the texture you will be using.

Next go back to the node editor and add an Image Texture node.  Don't plug it into anything or modify your nodes, just select the blank image you just made and make sure the node is selected.  Now go to the Render Properties tab and scroll all the way down to the Bake Rollout.  Select Bake Type Emit and hit the Bake button.

The bake should look something like this:

Now go to the UV/Image Editor and save the baked image as an OpenEXR file (other file formats will undesirably clamp the <0 and >1 values to 0 and 1).  You can then load the image and plug it into the Vector of the image texture for your material.

Now when you cell fracture the object each fractured piece should retain its UV unwrapped coordinates, which are being used to map the baked texture coordinates for the actual image texture.

Here is my .blend so you can take a closer look at what I did:

You will have to either re-bake the coords or download the above image (it's a PNG not EXR, but it will work in this case since I used generated coords which are in [0,1]) since the file was too big to fit on Blend Exchange.


Unwinding spool of rope I want a spool of rope to unwind natural...

I made this one using a curve and a curve modifier on a mesh. I have a hook on the curve so that I can pull it.

I need a way to unwind the rope natural: this means starting from the top layer, and the rope should move side to side. Like this...

How can I achieve this. I tried using soft body physics but the rope has to go through many small whole and interact in such a way which I couldn't get it to work. Also I don't really need physics so is there a way to achieve this?

Thanks for any help.

I'd do it layer after layer (they must be separate). You simply need to move the upper layer to the side one diameter of the rope per one rotation. Let's say diameter is 10 mm, so each rotation the upper layer moves 10 mm to the right (on your file). Then the next layer the opposite direction.


radially equidistant "melting" of image onto spheroid (head) - reverse of equidistant azimuthal projection noob here wanting to "melt" a radially symmetrical mesh (SVG at the moment) onto a 3D scan of my head (STL at the moment) to eventually make a 3d printed scalp-conforming hat/cap (so projecting onto a convex spherish surface) in such a way that there is no distortion in distances from the center of the image (in other words the reverse of an equi-distant azimuthal projection (aka EDAP) of a sphere onto a plane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azimuthal_equidistant_projection

Feel free to sacrilegiously suggest plugin X of program Y (any major OS) that is not blender, as I am just starting.

Responding to comments: Yes this is projecting a flat surface image on something sphere like.  Pretend for the moment that the latter is a globe.  At first I thought something like UV Project modifier would work, if the flat image were transformed first in a fisheye lens kind of way.  But lets say the image is projected from above the north pole of the globe.  As the projected image gets close to the equator it gets more and more distorted and any errors will be magnified and be noticeable (especially in a shape that is not quite a sphere like a head).  Also the shape might in some cases keep wrapping to points south of the equator which the projection can't reach.  A better metaphor than projection, especially for an imperfect sphere, might be shrink wrapping or melting (or blow molding if it was on the inside).  The radial distances of points in the image to the center point on both the original planar image and on the spheroid, need to match up fairly well or this particular image will look unpleasantly distorted.  The fact that the other polar dimension is distorted (compressed if you think about it) will not be particularly unpleasant.

For an example of doing what I want see the wikipedia page above and think bout going in the opposite direction from flat map to globe.  Anyway my local hackerspace buddies thought blender had the best chance of working, and I had played with it a little in the past and so here I am.

A solution based on Python (image and svg found here) :

The script :

import bpy
import bmesh
from math import *
from mathutils import Vector

#Reposition the mesh vertices calculating a 'reverse of equidistant azimuthal projection'
def reverseOfEquidistantAzimuthalProjection( model, propFactor = 1 ):

    rad90 = radians(90.0) #A way to have pi / 2

    modelData = model.data

    #Calculates vertices boundings (relative to vertices coordinates, because of the case of a not centered mesh)
    minX = min( [v.co[0] for v in modelData.vertices] )
    maxX = max( [v.co[0] for v in modelData.vertices] )
    minY = min( [v.co[1] for v in modelData.vertices] )
    maxY = max( [v.co[1] for v in modelData.vertices] )

    #Center in X and Y, we consider here a flat mesh in Z
    centerX = (minX + maxX) / 2.0
    centerY = (minY + maxY) / 2.0
    center = Vector( [centerX, centerY, 0] )

    #Radius of the projection
    baseRadius = (maxX - centerX)

    for v in modelData.vertices:
        pos = Vector( v.co )

        #Position relative to center
        posXY = pos.xy - center.xy

        #Proportionality of the vertex relative to the radius
    #Between 0 and 100% where 0 corresponds to north pole and 100 to south
        prop = posXY.length / baseRadius

        #Conversion to -90 (south) / +90 (north) (in rads)
        angle = rad90 - (prop * pi)

        #Relocation in X and Y : cos(angle) gives the radius of the cut
        posXY.normalize()
        posXY = posXY * baseRadius * cos(angle) * propFactor

        #Set the vertices new coordinates
        v.co[0] = center.x + posXY.x
        v.co[1] = center.y + posXY.y
        #In Z : keeps the eventual Z value and place the point relatively to that
        v.co[2] = v.co[2] + sin( angle ) * baseRadius * propFactor

model = bpy.context.object

reverseOfEquidistantAzimuthalProjection( model )

The first experiment is based on a circle extruded and cut :

I have also try to use the svg symbol of the United Nations. Some difficulties :

The curves are in a lot of parts (you may have to select them all, convert to mesh and join them)
Edges are made 'as they come', so applying the script gives some unwanted results (some edges may have to be removed manually)


Create material node tree using script I am trying to create a series of materials nodes that are linked together. My script successfully creates a new material and connects a Mix node to the material output node. It also creates an Ambient Occlusion node, but fails to connect that AO node to the Mix node.

import bpy

bpy.data.materials.new(name='test')
mat = bpy.data.materials.get('test')
mat.use_nodes = True

#define where output of new node will link to
matout = mat.node_tree.nodes.get('Material Output')
#define new node type to link in
newmat = mat.node_tree.nodes.new('ShaderNodeMixShader')
#create new node with link
mat.node_tree.links.new(matout.inputs[0], newmat.outputs[0])

matout = mat.node_tree.nodes.get('ShaderNodeMixShader')
newmat = mat.node_tree.nodes.new('ShaderNodeAmbientOcclusion')
mat.node_tree.links.new(matout.inputs[0], newmat.outputs[0])

The console tells me that the matout = mat.node_tree.nodes.get('ShaderNodeMixShader') fails to find anything (AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'inputs').

Am I approaching this wrong?

Answering my own question ...

Once it is created, the node names are different. So you create a node using, e.g. ShaderNodeMixShader, but after that it is called 'Mix Shader' (i.e. as it appears in the node panel).


Moving one leg moves the rest of the armature https://gfycat.com/ContentLividBullmastiff

I did a simple rig following a tutorial but when i want to move its legs using ik, every time the thigh moves, the whole body follows, i already checked the weighs and that is not the problem, any idea what could it be?

P.S: The problem is solved when I un-parent the thighs from the hips, but I cant leave it that way...

Does changing the chain length fix it?
In the Properties Editor->Constraints->IK

https://www.blender.org/manual/rigging/constraints/tracking/ik_solver.html


How can I create a pure black-white brick texture node? I'm new to Blender.
I need a texture with offset 'bricks', so I found the brick texture node to be exactly what I needed, the only problem is that it works by blending two colors/textures, whereas I'd like to keep the inputs 'pure' (not mixed).
This is because my brick color inputs are two textures of the same tile, with the only difference being their x-offset in a mapping node (one of two is offset by 50%).
Almost like a checker texture with brick-like offsets.
I need this to make a flooring material starting from a 1-tile sample.
Starting tile texture:

Desired result:

I've tried a few solutions but I'm ultimately unable to solve this.
I'd like to make it without any additional hand-made textures to keep the result procedural.

You need to understand how UV coordinates work for this. Every vertex has such a pair of two numbers that get interpolated across the mesh. Suppose you have a square made out of four vertices with the shown UV coordinates:

The bottom left of your image will always get mapped to (0.0, 0.0) and the upper right to (1.0, 1.0). If the UV coordinates exceed these bounds, the image will get tiled, which means copies will get mapped to (1.0, 1.0) -> (2.0, 2.0) etc. This means, you can simply multiply (scale) the the UV coordinates by using a mapping node and your texture will get projected onto the mesh multiple times:
.
The only thing missing is the shift. For this, you want to copy your mapping node and input some value in the location x field. Then, create a MixRGB node which will choose when to use which mapping depending on some parameter. To create this parameter, you want to devide the scaled V coordinate by 2, take the fraction of it (which bastically is the rest when devided by 1) and see at which points it is greater than 0.5:

All that is left to do is to plug this output parameter into the MixRGB node, connect the two mapping nodes to it, if you haven't done so already and change the location x input of the second mapping node to your liking.


How to get cameras local x-axis pointing up? I have my Camera moving along a Path, and following an object with a damped track constraint, but i does some weird movement, like rotating on its own. In order to fix it I would like to make the local x-Axis of the camera always facing upwards. How can I do this? Is there a Constraint for that?

(I have deleted all rotation frames, but it still is messy, I also have tried to lock the axis, on the n-panel but since this is global it won't work..)

You probably want to use the "Track To" constraint. Then you can configure which axis should point to the object, and which axis should point upward. For a camera this would be typically -Z for the "To" axis, and Y for the "Up" axis:


Is there a way to automatically add faces in proper places to this mesh? I have this mesh (.blend below):

I want to add faces so that the object is a solid, but with holes (marked with red O's):

I know how to manually add faces by selecting vertices and hitting F. Is there a way to do this automatically, so I can tell Blender to turn this mesh into a solid object with holes in specific areas?

Use a boolean modifier

Add a Cube scaled to flat in the desired location without hole. You may not even need to be precise because your edges may be intended to be hidden in frame. Or use F as you mentioned above. Assume name window01.
Create a sphere named  Sphere01.  Sphere01 will be the hole cutter.
Add a boolean modifier [difference]  to window01.  Sphere01 is target of modifier .
Position Sphere01 where the desired hole should be.  You may hide the sphere to view easily ,  or view in wireframe mode.  You can use multiple spheres or other deformations of the sphere.  You determine placement.
Press apply button for the boolean modifier.
Reshape hole produced by the boolean modifier on window01. You might enjoy proportional editing in edit mode for this.
Duplicate window01 to new locations or repeat process for each new window.


Why is my render coming out blurry? When I try to render a wave, it keeps being rendered in extremely low quality. I'm not sure exactly which setting is causing this, but increasing the renderand viewport sampling don't seem to help.

in your ocean modifier the render resolution is 3. To get a similar result to your viewport you should at least raise it to 32 too.
Then you get:


Import and Extrude DXF to 3D I have a 2D Vector Drawing that I imported to and extruded in Blender, like this one:

What I want is the top to be closed and the cylinder would be a hole. Is there a way to import into Blender or export the dxf from the vector software correctly so that the areas are closed.

If I do this manually it takes long and If I connect all the vertices on the top layer the holes won't show. It is one connected area like so:

And finally if I do it by hand and connect some vertices in steps, I can't dissolve the result to one area (which I need).

I hope I explained myself. I lost quite some time to find a solution for this and if anybody knows how to connect this quickly I would be very glad to know.

Thanks in advance.

Here my options:

Here is how my dxf file looks like. I want the yellow araes to be connected:

Bezier:

Dxf can't be uploaded:

Not particularly quick, but quite simple, try this:

Import the DXF file, with the default DXF importer, enabled from the preferences > addon menu, like this:

then

Use the standard settings

You will find your DXF shape as group object in your scene

Select the group shape, and reset it to its origin (from the toolbar as below, or press ctrlaltshiftC), select "Geometry to Origin"

Now remove the group with shiftaltG

Now you have your shape as curve object: convert it to mesh with altC and select "mesh from curve"

Now you have your shape as mesh

Enter edit mode, select all, and Press altF to fill faces, leaving holes

Now you have a filled/holed mesh, and extruding it should get you what you want... You can of course first clean the filled surface using dissolve, but it works anyway, like:

then

to get, finally:

I hope this was what you were looking for... :)


Change active View Layer with Python I'm currently trying to figure out how i can change the active view layer with python. The change to 2.8 made sourcing for documentation quite difficult.

I'd be thankfull for any help!

Set Window.view_layer

From https://code.blender.org/2017/09/view-layers-and-collections/

  For simplicity now, we stick to having a single ‘active View Layer’
  per Blender window.

Set the view_layer property of the context window to the view layer you wish to be active for that window.

Example using py console. I have 3 viewlayers "RenderLayer", "View Layer" and "XXXX", code below sets "XXXX" as active in current (context) window.

>>> vl = C.scene.view_layers['
                              RenderLayer']
                              View Layer']
                              XXXX']
>>> vl = C.scene.view_layers['XXXX']
>>> C.window.view_layer = vl
>>>


Connect / Weld Vertices / Edge I dont need this vertices and/or edge.
What is the best way to get rid of them?

Select the edge with Alt+RMB, then hit Del or X > Dissolve Edges.


Import file from Alias .wire I was in need to know a good workflow to get alias files to work into blender (mainly for cycles rendering)

What It's obivious to do is to export to some common format like .obj (or trought other programs like maya or rhino and from there get other possibilities like .3ds or .lwo).
But the program splits up the nurbs planes in different mesh pieces, who won't stick together (I'd have to do a lot of work to get a topology), so isn't there any tool to stick the overlapping edges making from them some ngons? for example when I get a file from rhino I just have to remove doubles and I'm done, but here the planes aren't connected, and I can`t shade the surfaces.

Thanks in advance

you just export mesh geometry. you can tesselate your geometry in alias (Auto Studio only) by the plugin "optimize for draw", that tessellates your mesh as fine as your construction options are. If you use the light Alias version you can tesselate also by the tool in the palette but it will leave you gaps. Take the meshes and export it as FBX. Done! If you are using an earlier version of Alias you do not have FBX export. You will have to export every part separately by OBJ. You could think of exporting everything by Material.


Radeon Pro 580 and Blender 2.8 I know about the whole "stop using Blender on Mac thing" but still -I do. I use a iMac 27" 2017 with Mojave and have a Radeon Pro 580 8GB GPU -and it works really fine with 2.79b! But now, when I try the 2.8 beta, no GPU is found. As far as I can tell the Radeon Pro 580 has OpenGL 4.6.

Will my GPU work in later builds?

Its not the GPU's Fault. More like Apple's support for OpenGL/CL.

the RX 580s run very well under Windows and Linux. You can either use dualboot or a Virtualmachine using HW Passtthru to use blender thru for example Linux with direct Hardware access to the gpu.

Regarding the second Question: You should mostly never render to Video directly. You may try a newer 2.8 Build or a different codec.


Making new items in an array fade in I'm working on an animation in Blender 2.8 wherein a line is increasing in length over the course of 40 frames. I'm using the array modifier, so a discrete rectangular shape is duplicated along the length of the line.

Using keypoints on the array count (from 1 to 25) works, but the new items simply pop into existence along the line.

Is there a way to make these new items fade in, going from transparent to opaque? Perhaps using nodes? I'm going to be rendering in Cycles.

Please check the BUILD modifier (you can also apply it to lines).
BUILD modified let you animate the generation of a line and on the line/path you can control easily the radius/thickness.

Make 2 curves: one path (the line), one circle or square
one the line apply a GEOMETRY > BEVEL > OBJECT > choose the circle or the square
Edit the size of the path with ALT+S (you can "inflate" a node of the path)
apply the BUILD modifier to the line.
animate and have fun


Editing normals for a cylinder I have a cylinder completely smoothed like the following (the purple lines are the vertex normals):

My final goal is to reach the result below:

I'm using the Blender4Web Addons, but I can't still achieve the target. I can easily have the situation below:

The problem is creating the right angle for the vertex normals along the curve... How can it be done?

One way would be to copy the normal position, from a duplicate of the mesh, without rim faces. Like this:


calculate height, width and breadth of a object Primary Question

I need to somehow place 3d objects besides one another using python script or command line

Secondary Info Optional Reading

I am creating a project named "text to scene" where user can enter a sentence and the output will a complete scene rendered using blender. I've completed the initial phase using NLP but for the later stages of the project I need to somehow place objects in blender as needed or directed by the user in the sentence. I've stored all the data (regarding the objects) but I can't find a method to apply it in blender(or any other 3d modeling and rendering software).

So I basically have to

1). import objects into blender(can be achieved using python script)

2). find their dimensions(length, breadth, height)

3). place other objects relative to the dimensions of the root object

EXAMPLE :

INPUT: "A vase is on the table."

WORKING: (Skipping the initial NLP part) First import 3d model of "TABLE" into blender then calculate its height, width, length and then place a model of "VASE" above the specified height at the center of the top face of the table.

OUTPUT: 3D scene in blender

Location and Dimension

In the image above is the Blender 3D View.  The information panel shows by pressing the letter [N] ... N.  The location and Dimension are shown.  The tooltip shows the Python expression for the dimension. Click on image to see original larger size.

This is not the whole story.  Know that object origins can be moved anywhere for your convenience or not.

Just a quick example of querying an text object. Example from another question.  Inspect and improve.  The blue objects are placed at x-axis rights side of characters.

Click on image to see larger version.

The console window of Blender.  Multiple queries.  After each Python statement I have edited text to add a character in the Blender 3D View edit mode.  Note the increasing X dimension for languages like English, French, Spanish (left to right and top to bottom) with left justified text.


Why does cycles render this scene as black, while evee renders it like I expect? https://www.dropbox.com/s/cn17ibk3u8xpaw7/zwart.blend?dl=0
I probably changed some setting, but I've been looking everywhere and I can't find what I've done.
I deleted everything from my .blend file and added just a cube, so it's not in the materials or objects. Some cycles setting I guess.
I realize this is probably some stupid thing and I feel a bit anxious to ask other people to solve it for me, but I am so annoyed that I can't find out what it is...
So If it is not some obvious beginner mistake, please don't waste any time on this, I'll just append all collections into a new .blend file if all else fails...

Thanks to Leander's comment:
The checkboxes in
Properties Panel > View Layer > Filter
were somehow disabled.


How can I simply map a procedural gradient from the equator to the poles of a sphere? I am struggling with something in the shader node editor that I thought should be rather simple, but apparently isn't. I want to map a linear gradient from the equator of a sphere towards the poles (white in the middle, black on the poles). I thought I could just separate the Z from the Object coordinates or the Y from the UV coordinates and plug it into a color ramp, but controlling the result is turning out to be very un-intuitive. When I use Object, I end up with an extremely narrow strip at the poles, and when I use UV, I have to move the stops on the color ramp almost on top of each other to narrow the gradient down. What is the optimal way to do this so that it can be easily modified?

Here is my result:

And here is my node setup:

The absolute value node works well here because instead of going from a large negative to a large positive, with zero in the middle (creating a standard linear gradient), we instead achieve a positive value on both the top and bottom of the sphere, with it linearly going towards 0 in the middle.

You can change the color ramp type to 'ease' to get a larger area of black in the middle if you want, and changing the emission value also affects it.


How can I see a texture on my model? I made a model and I'm trying to add color to it, but for some reason the colored texture doesn't show on the model. I can't see any difference in the model. These are the steps I followed:

I unwrapped the model.
I made a blank image of the model and I baked it with 'bake mode: ambient occlusion'.
I created two .PNG files: one of the already made 'ambient occlusion' and another one of UV layout to work with them in Photoshop.
I copied the 'ambient occlusion' image to the 'UV' image as a second layer and I just added some color to see if it shows color in the preview of the model in Blender, but it doesn't.

This is my model (the viewport is in 'texture' mode):

Maybe I have not followed the right steps, or I've overlooked something. I'd appreciate any idea of how to solve it. Thanks!

To add an image texture to your model you need to follow these steps (There might be other ways, by the way; but this is the way that i would do it):

UV Unwrap your model
Add a new material to it

Add your image texture to the material

And you should be good to go


How to add realistic grunge to crevices I'm modeling BB8, and having difficulty getting really good dirt and grunge on him in the right places and the right texture.  I did watch Andrew Price's video on how to add grunge using dirty vertex colours but as you will see the effect I'm going for is not quite the same as what he did.  I'm trying to get precise, accurate dirt that really looks like something has been rolling on a dirty surface for a while.  How can I achieve this?

Here's the reference photo I have been working off of:

Here is the render:

Here is the vertex paint settings:

Here is the node group I made for the grunge (it is plugged into the principled node):

And not sure if this helps but this is the grunge image I was using (colourized with brown in GIMP):

Here's a link to the .blend (was too big for giant cow films): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1edSlMISPUr0KYetTipJ9FHTacljA2am3

Okay I think I may have found the issue?  Where you have an Add node I think you really want a Multiply node, as follows:

And the render looks more like this:

Which seems more like your reference photo I would say.


How to make a sky-to-ground view shader? So, I have a scene with a cube which I have modified into a group of clouds and a plane which I intend to be the ground. The camera is placed such that I can see the ground through the scattered clouds.
Like so:

However, I'm not able to create the ground shader. I need it to look as realistic as possible.

click to enlarge
By feeding a wave texture into a noise texture,combined with true displacement, you can create a good starting point for a procedural terrain. The color ramp determines the shading, and the RGB to BW node creates a grayscale mask from the color ramp for the parts that should be water.
Here is the node setup, this is based around the planet plane material from the material library vx add-on which is now included in blender as of version 2.79:

click to enlarge
The contents of the displacement node group:

click to enlarge
The file to play with:


How to restrict proportional editing of vertices to an edge loop? I am trying to model a fat guy and need to adjust an edge loop to better fit around his gut. I want to use proportional editing but only have it affect vertices on the edge loop. How can this be done? This is not the most pressing example but I will require smoother adjustments soon.

Select your edge loop, shift H to hide the other vertices, then play with your edge loop, and when you have finished, alt H to make visible again.


Can I use the weigh paint information as color vertex information? I've came up with a question regarding weight painting and color vertex data.
So this is the explanation to my question:

I would like to use the gradient I created as weight paint to create a mask with B&W information and use it in the node editor like when I create a color vertex data and re use it with the atribute COL in the node editor.

I created a mask manually to show what I ideally want.

Is there a way? thanks a lot in advance!

Well a few minutes after I posted the question here, I sent the question into a Slack Group and Julian Perez (@julper) found this great addon that fits exactly to what I was needing.

I will share what he found with you.

The addon is called Weight-and-Color


I have a model and a normal map, can I bake Ambient Occlusion from both? So I know how to regularly set up ambient occlusion baking in Blender, and I have applied the normal map using Blender Render. However, whenever I try to then bake AO, it does not take the normal map into account, giving me the AO for just the model.

Is it possible to bake the AO, taking into account the normal map, so that all the details are baked into the AO map also?

you need to bake in AO from the geometry, not the normal map...you can bake out the original mesh or possible apply the normal map as a displacement to the current mesh...just add a multires modifier before the displacement and subdivide it a few times.


Trouble with filling up faces, irregular shape I have problem with filling up the face, of the vertices, the curved part has sorta wing look alike joined to the vertices, can anyone help with this problem?

This can be caused by irregular vertex order.
Fill operation works well in such cases.

Select all vertices, Select > All (A)
Go Face > Fill, (Alt + F)
Join triangles into one shape through Vertex > New face, (F)


How to convert a mesh model to a curve/surface? So, I am modeling on a ship, and I wanted to know if there is a way, like I "think" I saw in Rhinoceros 3D. I basically want to convert my model from a mesh to a curve/surface/NURBS model or whatever it is called.

Is this possible in Blender? Without having to re-model the entire thing?

Kind Regards

Skull Kid

In Blender 2.79 you may consider 'shrink wrapping' a NURBs surface to your mesh.

Add a NURBS Surface into your scene above or beside a meshed object of interest (your ship hull) when in object mode. Select the NURB surface and go into Edit Mode, then subdivide as needed to get a suitable resolution for your needs, and perhaps scaling so that the NURBs surface would fully cover your mesh when shrink wrapped. Return to object mode and apply an object modifier in the deform category called Shrinkwrap. Choose the project option with a suitable direction until you get the NURBs surface to fully project on your mesh.

You could apply the result if needed so that the NURB surface retains the ship hull shape for export by pressing the Apply button in the object modifier interface. You could safely delete the ship mesh and the NURB would retain the hull shape.

- Ed -


Verify if model is ok for 3D Printing? I have made a model for 3d printing, I knowthere are some checks I need to do in order to have a good print, but I cant find a place where to see all the bullet points to check.

Is there a page or document where i can see all the things i should have in mind when sending a model to print?

Thanks.

In the user prefs > add-ons > mesh > 3D Print Toolbox __ options are in the side panel in Object or Edit mode.


Molecular script add-on will not run I've installed the Molecular Script add-on on a 64 bit PC running Win7.
I do not have admin rights on the PC.
I made sure to use the latest 64-bit version of the add-on and I am using Blender 2.77.
The file cmolcore.pyd is located inside the "Molecular"-folder here:
C:\Users\mwl\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.77\scripts\addons\molecular

When I click the "Start Molecular Simulation" I get the following error:
File"C:\Users\mwl\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.77\Scripts\addons\molecular_init_.py",line600,in execute mol_report=cmolcore.init(mol_exportdata)
NameError:name'cmolcore' is not defined.

I do not have Microsoft Visual C++ installed on this PC

Any ideas what could be wrong?

The same add-on runs problem free on my 64-bit home PC which runs Win10, and of which I am the administrator.

Kind regards

Ryosei

Hi again aliasguru
I posted an image of the location and version of my add-on.
I'm afraid everything looks as it should  :-(

I found the solution.

It turned out that I did not read PyroEvils instructions before installing the add-on.
I did have Microsoft Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable installed.
But in order to for the Molecular add-on 1.03 to run you need Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable.
I got ITServicedesk to install the 2015-version and now the Molecular add-on runs as it should.

I made sure to make a donation to Jean-Francois.


How do I export as an FBX with colors? Disclaimer:  I am not an artist.

I created a model in blender.  I switched my mode to "Texture Paint".  I painted the model.  When I export as an FBX or switch back to "Object Mode", my paint goes away.  I am opening my FBX View 3D, a native Windows 3D model viewer.

Why does this happen, and how can I prevent it from happening?

Please take a look of the following image:

Please Save as image (so your edit become an external file on your drive as image) and  than add the Fake user by clicking the F button as high lighted.

I hope it will help :) good luck!


Create new Metaball family I'm trying to rename my metaball. If I hit f2 and rename it, the body part disappears in the viewport. If I switch to rendered mode I can see it, but not select it.
Is this a bug? How do I get around it?
Also, if I rename the metaball back to Mball, The body reappears, but in the form of the entire Mball family. Then when I move it, the Mball family disappears. Sort of frustrating.
The docs mention confusing behavior, but I'm in the same scene.
Note:
I only want to create a new family because I couldn't hide parts of it.
I'm writing a python script to render it multiple times, and each time I want the metaball to grow more blobs.
So if there's an easy (ish) way to 'hide' parts of the metaball from a script, I'd sidestep the issue.
I'm using Blender 2.83

So after a while I figured out why it wasn't working: the name of the new family ended with a number. For instance, MballTwo works while Mball2 doesn't.


Weird sharp vertices with subdivision modifier I have a simple skull model, to which I applied the subdivision modifier. For the most part everything works as expected, except I keep getting these weird sharp vertices and I can't seem to figure out how to flatten them.

I'm using Blender 2.8. Is this some kind of feature I can disable/enable for particular vertices? The distance between the sharp vertices and the gray outline differ.

Any suggestions please? Thank you!

EDIT: I also tried selecting as both - vertexes and edges and then applied Edge->Clear Sharp, but nothing changed.

This is typical of inverted normals.

To fix it, go in edit mode, select all the vertices and use ShiftN to recalculate normals.


Why is a 100% mix node not acting as the identity? If I Gaussian Blur white, I get white. No surprise.

If I then pipe this through a Mix node with any other color—say, yellow—the output is black.

I'm baffled. Why does this happen?

This is with the default scene settings, just switched to Cycles.

It also happens if I pass the blur through Separate RGBA and Combine RGBA first, but I've verified that each of the channels is at 1.000 (by sending them directly to the Composite node's image, which appears white).
It doesn't work if I swap out the Blur node for an RGB node with pure white.

It does not happen if I check the "include alpha of second input" box on the mix node; in that case, the base color is used and the blur input is ignored.

Reproduced on Mac 10.10.3 and Linux Mint 17.2.

Bug?

From this bug report:

When the input image file is not available, what happens is that the mix node will still try to use the resolution of the first input as the resolution of the output, which doesn't work well because the non-existent file specifies a (0,0) resolution - thus the black image (there are simply no pixels that would be mixed with the second input).
The mix node cannot detect cleanly whether the input buffer is valid, and the image node cannot guess a meaningful resolution ... It seems to work as expected if i choose a valid image file.
I would like to redesign the whole resolution handling in the compositor. Pixels are just not a very reliable and intuitive way of specifying size and transformation. When this happens we can hopefully avoid cases like this.

For context, this was reported while attempting to do this.
So essentially, the mix node (rather unexpectedly) doesn't know the size of the image it's getting from the blur node. As such, it treats it like the input from the blur node is completely transparent (or 0x0 pixels large).
One workaround is to provide a resolution, e.g. with a mask node:


Armor disassociated from the mesh, how to associate again correctly? This happened after I had trouble importing such a character into the Unreal Engine 4.

The Unreal Engine 4 accused the following problem: Multiple roots are found in the bone hierarchy we only support single root bone

Following the answer to this question (https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/109814/multiple-roots-are-found-in-the-bone-hierarchy-we.html), I was able to get the object imported correctly to Unreal Engine 4.

Transcript of the answer (I quoted the link)::

  First, unparent your mesh to the skeleton (or this may cause crashing later when importing) alt+p, clear parent. Now, go and create a root
  bone if you do not already have one you want to use as root. Join all
  your bones together into one armature by selecting them all in object
  mode and pressing ctrl+j. Select the armature and go to (usually
  tab)edit mode, select all the bones that you ARE NOT your root bone,
  then finally select the root bone and press ctrl+p (make parent), and
  select keep offset, (assuming you dont want to move your other bones
  onto the root bone). Export the armature as fbx as you where and it
  should work now.

Returning to Blender:

Note that it not only separated the mesh from the armature, as you can see that the bones are showing two poses at the same time (in object mode):

I would like you to tell me the correct way to put the 2 together again, so that after that I can import into the Unreal Engine 4.

The answer you've found is misleading: start with a previous version of your file (the one which worked well in Blender but not in UE4).

Delete the two keyframes that are causing the sliding of the rig in object mode: it's better to have all your animation performed by bones only, not bones movements and object mode movements; expecially for exporting purposes.

Then set the dopesheet window as "action editor", press the "F" button to save the animation even if not used, and click the "X" button to disable the animation.

Select the mesh, delete the armature modifier and apply the multires modifier.

Now you should have both the mesh and the armature in the centre of the scene, in T pose; if not, move them manually to have their locations matching well in the center of the scene.

Select the mesh and use Ctrl A to apply loc, rot and scale of the character, then do the same for the rig.

In edit mode add a new bone, call it "root", set it in the center of the rig, under the feets, in any z and y location you want (it doesn't matter), uncheck its "deforming" property.

Here is the misleading part of the answer: you have to set child of the root bone every other bone which hasn't already a parent, probably you will want to set the two shoulders bones as child of the hip bone, and the hip and the two ankles child of the root bone.

Check in the outliner: the root bone should result parent of every other chain of bones.

Now add an armature modifier to the mesh, setting the armature in its "object" field; in the action editor select your animation: the character will "walk in place"; use the root bone to set two keyframes to have the walking mesh sliding.

Every animation maden with this setup should be imported by UE4 without problems (maybe you will have to unparent again the mesh from the rig, for avoiding crashes) so, if the old animation doesn't work you should redo it with this new rig.


How to set an uv map, from an multiple uv, as primary one? Is it possible to set an uv map as primary one, in a multiple uv?
For exsample I want that map02 becomes map00 (primary map).
If it's possible, how to do that?

You can rename a UVMap in the UVMaps panel, either double-click or ⎈ Ctrl-click the name to edit it.

The little camera to the right of the name specifies the default map for blender, that is the one that is used if you do not select a specific UVMap.


Multiple instances of blender (bpy) in single python script I am trying to parallelize rendering using blender's python API, built as a python module. I'd like to use multiple instances of blender contained within their own classes. Currently, I can generate multiple instances by running a script multiple times, but cannot have two functioning instances of the class in the same script, due to how bpy uses import to initialize the blender instance. Is there a way to get around this? A cut down version of the class is below.

class BpyRenderer(object):
    import bpy
    def __init__(self):
        self.bpy.ops.wm.open_mainfile(filepath='blank.blend')
    def render(self, filename):
        self.bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].render.filepath = filename
        self.bpy.ops.render.render( write_still=True )

Blender only allows one render to run in each instance. As a single render instance will normally use all available cpu's there isn't usually any benefit to running multiple renders at the same time.

If you do want to run multiple renders at the same time, you will either need to run multiple instances of your script or of blender.


Backface visibility for Blender exported JSON files When I export a model from Blender to three.js, it loads fine on the webpage. faces are visible only when I look at them from the direction of its normal and not from the other side. Is there a way to get the visibility of these faces from the back side / opposite side as well?

Edit 1:

I tried using bpy.context.object.active_material.THREE_double_sided = True and that did not work. I also added .doubleSided = true in the html. Still did not work.

In Blend4Web you can do it by disabling Backface Culling https://www.blend4web.com/doc/en/materials.html#rendering-properties


World background a finite distance from the origin? Blender treats the world background as infinitely far away, meaning that moving the background as seen through a camera moving through the space does not scale.

Is it possible to have Blender treat the background like it is a finite distance from the origin, producing the sensation that the camera is actually moving through the space (relative to the background image)?

My intuition is that I'll have to map my texture onto a large sphere/box, but I'm not sure how this affects background lighting.

Overview:

You can use your HDRi map as a Emission color on the Sphere (big one, mine is above 100m in diameter). Set Image Texture projection to Sphere as well.

Differences:

Using this method you will get more noise as for any mesh light in Blender. Everything else like reflection, shadows etc. should be the same.

Environment map (HDRi):

HDRi mapped to the Sphere:


Does the steam version of blender install Python automatically? I'm not really having any problems.
I've just recently downloaded "make human".
on the download page it says it needs Python installed to work.
I haven't installed Python but it seems to work anyway.
And I'm assuming that's because Python must be bundled with the steam version of Blender.  because the version of blender I have was installed through the steam client.
If that wasn't already apparent.

Python is bundled with all versions of Blender, since 2.5 onwards. Many aspects of the UI are declared in python and it is therefor an integral part of the UI system (shipping without would be a world of hurt).

According to Make Human docs the add-on comes with its own version of Python ( 2.7 ).

  (...) there is a bundled python inside the build zips (...)

This means you have at least two versions of python on your machine, one that Blender uses and one that Make Human uses, that's OK.


How do I rotate to see my object from a different angle? I'm a complete beginner to Blender. I would like to know how do I rotate in 3D (to see it from different angles from top bottom and sides) with mouse the initial 3D cube I can see in the initial screen.

Welcome to Blender. In order to move around the platform full you can hold the middle mouse button down and move if you have a mouse or click and move the top right icon with the z, y, and x axis. The buttons on the number pad can bring you directly to different views such as front top and side views or you can use the ` key and it will give you options.
I highly recommend starting with blender gurus youtube course on making a donut from the beginning as he goes into detail on all of the essential you need to know. Hope this helped.


Added .FBX doesn't follow armature "head" bone (newbie here)
I have an rigged character and I am trying to add additional .FBX props on top of that.
Steps followed:

Import FBX prop (a branch in this case)
Add Armature modifier and linked it to the Rig and Checked "Bind it to Vertex Groups"

Create a new vertex group for the newly added prop and add it to "head" (named exactly as my head bone)

Moved the SM_Tree_Twing_02 under Head object in tree (I don't know if this matters, though)

The problem:
If I try to rotate the "head" bone in Pose mode, my prop doesn't follow the bone rotation.
Normal Pose:

With rotated bone:

What am I missing?
I'm sure I'm missing something because if I try to export to Unity I get the branch follow my character and has movement on it (it is linked to something from my Armature). Thank you for your input. I don't mind going to read how it is done but frankly I do not know what exactly to search for.

I think I figured it out. The problem is that you did not parent the object to the armature. Simply adding an armature modifier will not make the object move with the armature. To parent, select the object, then the rig, and press CTRL-P, then armature deform.


What are the not so obvious features of Rigify? I watched a tutorial which explained that scaling the finger controls would make them curl.

Are there more features like curl by scale in rigify which are not intuitively discoverable  ?

Let me start by saying that I think that the finger curl trick might have mislead you a bit. As complicated and advanced a mechanism as Rigify is, it's nothing really 'unique' in terms of rigging in Blender and rigging in general and as Fweeb says above..

...for people who have been using rigs in Blender for a long time, scale controls on the
fingers are a long-standing convention that doesn't feel alien at all.

Apart from the finger curl when scaled, there isn't really anything much left to 'discover' per se, it is just a nice collection of common operations etc. and control interfaces to give animators more control and allow people to skip most of the arduous work when rigging as it can be expanded on if needed.
You might know most if not all of these already.. and I won't attempt to explain Rigify in full detail, that would be very difficult to do and is beyond the scope of this question. — However, as a future reference for beginners…

The top (n) or so things that are not so obvious at first glance about Rigify are:
1. This is not the rig you are looking for…

The very first thing is that Rigify is not really the default armature you get when you add it to a scene. To get the full rig, you go to the Armature: Object Data panel and under Rigify Buttons hit Generate. After that, you can just move the default meta-rig to another layer to keep it out of your way.

2. Now you see me, now you don't

Rigify is a complicated mechanism and often times might get in the way of what you are doing, to hide different parts of the rig as they are needed, you can open the Rig Layers group in the Properties panel and toggle the visibility of each layer of controls as needed.

3. FK or IK?

The rig comes ready to be used in any way you want to animate. It has sliders to change between Forward Kinematics and Inverse Kinematics or give you a blend of both and more depending on how you adjust the slider(s) under Properties and or Rig Main Properties as they are presented or made avilable in the Properties panel.

4. Those aren't really bones..

The custom handles you see aren't really bones per se, they are bones with custom shapes and are actually objects that you can modify and by default they are placed on the last layer (layer 20).

These can also be changed using the Custom Shape input box under Display in the Bones panel but it is worth noting that modifying these can lead to problems with your rig later on so be careful.

5. Bits and pieces

You can encode the meta-rig to python code so that you can generate select parts of the rig as needed. Look in the toolshelf under Rigify Dev Tools and experiment with this.

6. Wait.. who's driving?

This is out of the scope of the question but might be useful if you're planning to build your own rig. Rigify makes extensive use of drivers to automate and make certain operations more 'smooth' etc.

At any time, you can poke around and select a bone and if any of the transform panels turn purple (the default color if you haven't changed it) this means that a driver is acting on it. To dig into this, just open the graph editor and open the Drivers view.

It is also worth noting that since Rigify is glued together by scripts and not manually put together for the most part, a lot of these features will be hard to trace and pull apart etc. but can serve as good reference nonetheless.

Most of these explanations are a bit vague and short, it is a bit more indepth than this but this is enough to get someone new to the rig at least a bit more familiar with it… and so as a last note, I would suggest reading up on Bone Constraints, Drivers and Properties.
Also related.. Armature FK/IK toggles


Keep Refraction and Remove the background object Hope you're all good,

I have a question, I made an object and use the refraction BSDF on it, so it refract the image I put in the background. And I want to keep the refraction of the object but i want to make transparent the background. If you can help me and know how to do this, please tell me :)
I put you the picture i work on. The first picture is with the background. And the second picture is what i want to acvhieve but with the refraction of the first picture.

There are a few methods you could use to achieve this.

The most practical ones are:

Material with a light path node
Compositing

for a simple scene like yours, I'd recommend the material option as you just need to add 3 nodes to your material setup and you can see the result in the viewport.

In my case the sphere is the refractive object, and the cube is the background object.

Add a mix shader between your existing shader and the material output node (in the background object material that is).
add a light path node -> is transmission ray to the fac input of the mix shader node.

add a transparent shader with a white color in the first (white emission shader in the screenshot) and your existing shader in the second shader slot (red emission shader in the screenshot).


Projection Mapping - transparent faces I'm trying to do as Ian Hubert does in his -now famous- blender speech at BCON19.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whPWKecazgM

At 3.47, he 'import images as a planes' then extrude it.
I try to do the same, but Blender doesn't react the same at all.

When I extrude my wall photo, it just gets semi transparent in a strange way, as if it was hollow.
When I do an edge loop a part of the picture just disappears.

On the right the original pic, on the left the same plane that I extruded and loopcutted vertically in the middle.

What am I doing wrong?
Thanks for your help.

There are two things to prevent those transparent faces.

For Cycles - add some thicknes to the whole wall, before extruding individual parts
For Eevee  - Set material Blend Mode to Opaque

Cycles - add thickness before extruding. Just extrude the whole plane first.

Eevee - set blend mode to Opaque


EEVEE Glass shader doesn't show through itself I am having an issue with my glass shader where objects using it do not show up through each other.

Here is my current setup for the shader:

Try something like this for your "glass" shader. As Nathan mentioned, rasterized transparency will always be lacking compared to Raytracing, and though EEVEE really doesn't like transparency through transparency, this shader attempts to strike a happy medium. Try it and see for yourself. Pay attention to the Blend Modes on the right, including the backface culling and show backface checkboxes (I just noticed Show backface is covered in my image, but it is un-checked):

However, glass is very much assisted (both in eevee and Cycles) by the use of an HDRI environment map. Switch to your World shading tab and add an Environment Texture (not Image Texture) with your HDRI. Blender's built in HDRI's are in the blender folder at .../2.93/datafiles/studiolights/world and many more can be found online for free. One of the most popular places is HDRI Haven (https://hdrihaven.com/hdris/).

If you want the effect from the lighting, but don't want the image in your background, you can separate them by using a Mix Shader, using the Is Camera Ray output of a Light Path node as the mix factor:


Blender Cycles won't render animations I'm trying to render a 60 frame animation of a crystal hovering in a small dungeon but for some reason it wont render the whole thing, just one frame

This problem has been going on for quite some time, i never really cared but now it's quite annoying.

You had your frame step set to zero. Meaning after it finishes a frame it is done.
Make sure it is set to 1.

Also make sure your file output actually exist and it is not trying to save to a folder that doesnt exist.


How move polygons along the normals with Animation nodes? Im new in animation nodes. And maybe it is very easy question but I cant find solution by myself. I`m trying to make transformation animation and I handled with moving vertices on normals but as I understand polygons have a different approach.

You can use the “Polygon Info” node to access each node's normal and then  pass it through a “Translation Matrix” into the ”“Transform Polygon” node.

The Polygon Info's center output can also be used in calculations regarding the translation distance, e.g. the distance to an Empty or the angle from the torus' center.

BTW: Animation Nodes includes a “Transform Individual Polygons” template which adds the underlying node setup of looping over all polygons and outputting the mesh. You then just need to set up the transformation matrix.


sphere acts weird while changing its worldPosition I have an empty and I have set a sphere as its child. When I change the empty's worldPosition(via right-clicking with mouse) the sphere teleports to entirely different location. The strange thing is that when I print the sphere's coordinates it is exactly the same as the empty's and the mouse cursor's. Any ideas?

Here is the module I wrote.

#Import the bge library.
import bge

#Make the mouse cursor visible during game running time.
bge.render.showMouse(True)

#Set the current game scene and python controller to variables.
scene = bge.logic.getCurrentScene()
cont = bge.logic.getCurrentController()

#The function "initialization" is responsible for setting all scene objects, object sensors and object actuators to variables.
#These variables are created into the function but are for global use. Their names are the names of the objects/sensors/actuators in blender.
def initialization():
    for k in scene.objects:
        exec("globals()[\"%s\"]=scene.objects[\"%s\"]"%(k,k))
    for k in ground.sensors:
        exec("globals()[\"%s\"]=ground.sensors[\"%s\"]"%(k,k))
    for k in cont.actuators:
        exec("globals()[\"%s\"]=cont.actuators[\"%s\"]"%(k,k))

def mouse_2D_coor():
    global mX, mY
    mouse_pos = bge.logic.mouse.position
    #Cramp the coordinates to what the camera sees. (0, 0) at the top left corner and (1, 1) at the bottom right corner.
    mX = max(0.0,min(1.0,mouse_pos[0]))
    mY = max(0.0,min(1.0,mouse_pos[1]))
    #print ("Mouse coor :",mX,mY)

def empty_to_pos():
    cursor_empty.worldPosition = (mop.position[0],mop.position[1],cursor_empty.worldPosition.z)

initialization()
#print (mop.hitPosition)
if (right_click.positive):
    empty_to_pos()
    print (cursor_empty.worldPosition)
    print ("Mouse",mop.position)
    print ("sphere",sphere.worldPosition)

print ("I reached the end of track.py")

Here is the blend file

The answer came from the blenderartist's forum where the user agoose77 wrote

  You need to use

mop.hitPosition

  . The position attribute of the base class of KX_MouseFocusSensor,
  SCA_MouseSensor, returns the pixel position of the mouse, which can
  reach a value in the thousands.

And it worked.


Is it possible to make the object change color when touching another object? I use Eevee and I decided to do synthesizer animation. Faced a problem that I do not know how to properly make the material. The essence of the material is the color change when animating the keys.
Material in action:

Material nodes:

The problem is that the color change is associated with specific coordinates, and I cannot move the synthesizer. How to associate a color change, for example, with the touch of one object to another? Or change the color relative to the main part of the synthesizer? Maybe there is a better way?

I found a way to implement this. I just need to bind the driver to the nodes.
It's not an easy way, but it works great!

Here, the material nodes (each key has its own, independent) are based on a variable that is controlled by the driver, which, in turn, looks at the local rotations of the key.

The difficulty is precisely in the quantity: 88 keys with 88 materials and the same number of drivers.

each key, just in case, is tied to empty, which are collected together and attached to the main empty.

The recipe is as follows:

create the first material with nodes according to the example above
RMB on value -> add driver "guide"

You configure the driver by example. Here the "key name" will change from material to material (the name of the object-synthesizer key is implied).

you transfer the key to the pressed state and turn the ColorRamp until it is white at rest, and green when it is pressed.

An important point:
before all operations, you need to reset the rotation and scale of each key to normal, via Ctrl + A .

You duplicate the key, put it next to it, duplicate the material, rewrite the name of the key in the edited driver and repeat until you assemble the keyboard.

Then link through empties and you can move the synthesizer by pulling the main one
Here it is also important that the animation is exactly the rotation of the keys according to their local coordinates.


modifier subdivision surface not working my subsurface division is not working as in I try to use it but it just does not even show the resulting mesh before being applied I would appreciate any help.

Uncheck "simplify" in the render settings:


What exactly does edge loop selection do? AltRMB — What exactly does it do? After subdivisions or loop cuts, AltRMB does not seem to select some loops.

What should one do to define a loop? How can I use select edge loops efficiently?

An Edge Loop is a chain of connected edges where each edges shares a vertex with the previous edge, and that vertex has exactly 4 edges attached to it (except on the borders of a non-manifold (not "water-tight") mesh, where there will be only 3 edges, 2 of which have just one face connected).

An edge loop is terminated where the vertex has more than 4 edges (poles) or meets a non-manifold edge (an edge with only one face) or an Ngon (face with more than 4 verts). The latitudinal loops (rings) of a UV sphere are perfect non-terminating loops, but the longitudinal loops (segments) all end at two points (the North and South poles)

Here are some examples of edge loops (see where they change direction or terminate and why)

Details on the algorithm from the wiki:

  First check to see if the selected element connects to only 3 other edges.
  If the edge in question has already been added to the list, the selection ends.
  Of the 3 edges that connect to the current edge, the ones that share a face with the current edge are eliminated and the remaining edge is added to the list and is made the current edge.


Why cant I sculpt over my model? I wanted to create a simple dragon/snake thing which I managed to do, but now when I try to sculpt (to add the eyes and some texture and manual smoothing to make it less boxy), my computer lags and doesn't seem to want to let me. I have a powerful computer so its not hardware. Plus the file is less than 1mb. Can someone please have a peak and let me know what I've done wrong and how I can fix this without redoing? Im new to blender.
N

It possibly could be that you have not applied the transform. Try using space to search and looking for 'Apply object transform' and 'Apply visual transform'.

It will also help to have dyntopo checked if you do not have it on already.


How do I delete these vertices? They are only visible in face selector mode So I'm in Blender Render, and I need to delete the extra points on the edges of themiddle left plane. I'm contructing the abdominals for a man, and everytime I try to subdivide this plane blender crash/closes. I think it has something to do with these extra points. How do I delete them? Disclaimer: this is my first blender project.
                          P.S.- Any other tips? Criticism? I know so very little.

Those are not vertices, they are faces with a very small area.

To delete them you either:

Select all and remove doubles by pressing W then Remove Doubles;
Or manually remove them and join the vertices by pressing Alt+M.


Arms detatching from torso on character rig? (rigify) i've been working on this model for a while now and just started rigging it with rigify. However, i've run into an error i've never come across before, and i'm not sure how to fix it. I've been having all sorts of deformation problems with the arms from them just looking downright weird when turning them upwards, to them straight up disconnecting from the torso when I rotate it. How can I fix this? I've provided the blend file below. Thank you for your assistance!
image of issue:
https://imgur.com/a/AGbaoWr
Blend file:

I figured it out. I combined the torso and arms into one mesh, and connected the shirt with the arms. Now it works! Yay!


Select specific area to split (bpy 2.8) i'm new here.
I'm trying to implement an operator that creates and toggles a layout.
From the default "Layout" I would like to split the VIEW_3D into 7 separated VIEW_3D areas as shown below in red.
I'm using the command bpy.ops.screen.area_split(direction='HORIZONTAL', factor=0.5) many times but this operates always on the same area (top right at th end) reaching the result as shown below.

Is there a way to set the yellow area as active and continue by splitting it to reach the desired result?
I've tried overriding the context but that doesn't seem to work.
(Blender version 2.8)

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to do, but from this... I'd recommend creating a new layout and if you want to publish it save the blender file like that, or save it as the startup file


Can i colour part of the same 3D text which was converted from 2D text. ( Convert mesh to curve ) I really need to know how to color part of the same 3D text which i converted from 2D text. ( i added the text and converted it to curve and now it is one big object)
I want to change A's and D's emission color but keep rest of it blue

2ND SS https://gyazo.com/c0b664b12e43b4c160ecff892ec24509

You could use a Gradient and a ColorRamp node to change the color along the curve. That said, I don't know how you can make the gradient follow the curve, someone may have an answer, here I kept the gradient horizontal.

And of course, you could convert your curve to mesh, in that case use a b&w mask as a factor in a Mix shader to go from a color to another one:

Convert your mesh to curve, unwrap it with the Smart UV Project mode.
Give it an Image Texture node. Paint it in black and white. It will be the mask that will separate your 2 colors.
Now organize your nodes, plug the b&w picture in the factor of your Mix shader.

Another solution would be to parent a straight mesh pipe to bones (maybe with a Spline IK constraint) then twist the bones the way you want (or the curve in the case of a Spline IK), the texture will follow.