How to clean up mesh after using Knife Project on a curved surface How can I clean up this Knife Project operation so the bad shading disappears?

The edges created by the Knife Project operation will be used to create a hole in the mesh using the Inset operation.

try to make a strait line as on the pictur it shuld atleast look better.

if you whant to kep the shape add a new edge close to it and work whith it insted.

the last thing I whant to say is if you combinde the subsurfes and mirror modefiers. Put the mirror modefier firs if you don't whant a sharp edge on the mirror point.


How to create a GUI based window in Blender Game Engine that displays text? How to create a GUI based window in Blender Game Engine that displays text? So I was going to create a NPC chatting menu in my RPG based game, using only logic bricks. I found this to be difficuly because what I wanted to have happen is when the player is talking to the NPC, a window within the game pops-up and Displays what the NPC is saying.

You can try to follow some Tutorials like for a HUD, a Health Bar or maybe some Word Wrapping of a text overlay...


multiple cameras for simple RPG game I am developing a simple rpg steampunk game. Can anyone tell me how do I make, with logic bricks, a simple key (for example C) switch to a second camera view? I have 2 cameras placed in different angles in the scene. I can not program python. If it is of course possible only using logic bricks.

Keyboard Sensor -> AND/OR/... -> Scene Actuator in Set Camera mode.


How to add details on a model I started on low poly models, but now I'd like to create HIGH poly models too, with details. How do people create details like those in the red boxes?

Is this done with something of normal mapping/bumps? Or is this done literally adding a new cube and create a model of it and place on it... I really wonder how people to these DETAILED parts.

Here's a link to the blender artist thread about the spaceship.

Those in the image definitely look modeled, not some sort of bump map or normal map trick, but both techniques can be used or even combined to achieve desired effect.

Deciding whether to model them or use some trick like normal maps or bump mapping/parallax mapping will largely depend on the purposed of your model , where or what for it will be used, and the limitations of that system.

If you are doing regular rendering with cycles/blender internal and have no/very little constraints in terms of polygon counts you should definitely consider modeling them for more realistic accurate results.

If your computer is slow or can't handle the details, or if they are not the main focus of the artwork and will be very far away/out of view you may consider using some sort of simplification like a bump map or a normal map to simulate the effect.

You can combine both techniques (modeling + normals) to obtain even further detailed model.

You may also choose displacement maps to generate actual geometry bumps from an image texture, at the expense of higher polygon counts. These are generally more suited for organic or irregular models.

If you are planning using it in some sort of game engine or real time visualization where complexity is a limiting factor you may bake the details into normal maps or bump maps from a high poly to a low poly version of the model

Either way, if you want to do it very accurately, you will probably have to model the gribbles in 3D yourself anyway, so you can use it later to bake it to the lower poly version.

As to the modeling part they seem to be simple boxes repeated across the surface, nothing too special about them. Use modifiers like Array for repetition, or the Shrink Wrap to place "2D" shapes across the larger surfaces then give them volume with a Solidify modifier. You can keep the greebles as a separate object parented to the main mesh so as to not increase the polygon counts/triangulation of the original, and still be able to turn them off or reuse them elsewhere with ease.

There is a thread on blenderartists.org which deals with one way of achieving this effect.

Sculpting with UVs and Displacement

There's also a complete video tut from Oliver Villar that shows this technique in great depth.

Video Tutorial


Normal Map + Micro Displacement = Bug? In experimental render mode I tried to combine micro displacement and normal map. This has been a common workflow for high Quality materials in other 3D applications.

While I can render normal map in supported mode:

in experimental mode it turns object very dark (this is not the issue of object/tangent space, you still can see object little bit)

not much changes when I add displacement

turning normal map off, the objects reappears with displacement, I miss the fine detail of normal map however

Small remedy is that you can plug bump map into normal shader node, this adds the finer detail, I find bump maps much inferior to normal maps however.

I have reproduced this bug with other normal maps too. I have double checked that normals are set to non-colour data. Is this well known and reported bug, or am I missing something else?

Thanks a lot in advance.
File:
enter link description here

It seems as of version 2.79, displacement node, Adaptive subdivision (experimental mode) cannot be combined with normal map node. Workaround for now is either using only bump map or switching off the adaptive option inside of subdivision modifier.

This bug is not noticeable when using simple plane: (probably here tangent space is same as object space)

In case of a sphere, shading artefacts appear when combining Normal Map and Adaptive Displacement

Unfortunately I now have the file in version 2.8 only
http://gofile.me/2mjhf/tn9buuTmU

Node setup in 2.8:

Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems like developers were aware of this bug and changed it in the upcoming version 2.8. Since that is around the corner I can live with the 2 above mentioned workaround in 2.79 until then.

Thanks

1) If you're using tangent space normal maps, specify a UV map for your normal map node.  UV is how the tangent is determined.

2) You can't really get away with using tangent space normal maps with a mapping node.  Here, yeah, it's okay because you're not actually doing anything with the mapping node, not apparently.  But you should know.  (And Blender devs should give us a tangent input to our normal map node so that we can actually use a mapping node with a normal map node, but it's free and I still love Blender, so I can't complain too hard.)

3) Any time it's too dark, try reducing the strength of the normal map.

4) Blender handles displacement and normal mapping a little strangely, because it says, "Surely you want your normals to be your displaced normals!" but sometimes you don't.  There are some hidden dependency issues involved here.  I wouldn't at all be surprised if normal map node tangents did not actually use displaced normals while the normals did, which, yeah, would break normal mapping, but that's why it's called experimental.

5) Bump maps aren't bad!  Use higher image bit depth, avoid lossy compression, and bump maps are fine.  If you enable true displacement + bump, there's really no reason to use both a bump map and a normal map.  This, I believe, is what experimental true displacement was tuned for, not for some weird thing involving the use of multiple ways to distort normals.  (I don't get the feeling Blender devs use normal map nodes at all, or else we wouldn't have the previous issues I've mentioned, which have been around a long time.)

6) If you want to use normal maps with displacement, consider using a displacement modifier instead.  The only thing you lose is adaptive subdivision.


How do I add a Specials Menu to the Video Sequencer? There doesn't seem to be a context-sensitive "Specials" menu for the Sequencer(like shortcut key 'w' in 3d View). How do I add one to the Sequencer with python scripting?

(I know about the "Add" menu in the sequencer, and options can be added to this one, but I need a new menu only containing context-sensitive editing options. Ex. if there is a gap between two strips at the mouse cursor position, then a "Remove gap" option would become selectable in the menu.)

This is where I am at the moment(menu containing the add menu options):

import bpy
from bpy.types import Menu

class SEQUENCER_MT_edit(Menu):
    bl_label = "Edit"
    bl_idname = "sequencer.edit_menu"                        # ID name of the class that code will call, lowercase
    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout

        layout.operator_context = 'INVOKE_REGION_WIN'

        layout.operator("sequencer.movie_strip_add", text="Movie") # Example options
        layout.operator("sequencer.image_strip_add", text="Image")
        layout.operator("sequencer.sound_strip_add", text="Sound")

        layout.menu("SEQUENCER_MT_add_effect")

addon_keymaps = []
def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(SEQUENCER_MT_edit)

    # handle the keymap
    wm = bpy.context.window_manager
    kc = wm.keyconfigs.addon
    if kc:
        km = wm.keyconfigs.addon.keymaps.new(name='Sequencer', space_type='SEQUENCE_EDITOR')
        km = wm.keyconfigs.addon.keymaps.new(name='3D View', space_type='VIEW_3D')
        kmi = km.keymap_items.new(SEQUENCER_MT_edit.bl_idname, type='RIGHTMOUSE', value='PRESS', shift=True)
        addon_keymaps.append((km, kmi))

def unregister():

    for km, kmi in addon_keymaps:
        km.keymap_items.remove(kmi)
    addon_keymaps.clear()

    bpy.utils.unregister_class(SEQUENCER_MT_edit)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

This seems to be working, however, the cut functions aren't called properly for some reason?

import bpy

class SequencerEditMenu(bpy.types.Menu):
    bl_label = "Specials"
    bl_idname = "SEQUENCER_OT_sequencer_edit_menu"

    def draw(self, context):

        if context.space_data.type == 'SEQUENCE_EDITOR':

            layout = self.layout
            layout.operator("sequencer.gap_remove").all = False
            layout.operator("sequencer.gap_insert")
            layout.separator()
            props = layout.operator("sequencer.strip_jump", text="Jump to Previous Strip")
            props.next = False
            props.center = False
            props = layout.operator("sequencer.strip_jump", text="Jump to Next Strip")
            props.next = True
            props.center = False
            layout.separator()
            layout.operator("transform.transform", text="Grab/Move").mode = 'TRANSLATION'
            layout.operator("transform.transform", text="Grab/Extend from Frame").mode = 'TIME_EXTEND'
            layout.operator("sequencer.slip", text="Slip Strip Contents")
            layout.separator()
            layout.operator("sequencer.cut", text="Cut (Hard) at frame").type = 'HARD'
            layout.operator("sequencer.cut", text="Cut (Soft) at frame").type = 'SOFT'

addon_keymaps = []
def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(SequencerEditMenu)

    # handle the keymap
    wm = bpy.context.window_manager
    kc = wm.keyconfigs.addon
    if kc:
        km = wm.keyconfigs.addon.keymaps.new(name='Sequencer', space_type='SEQUENCE_EDITOR')
        kmi = km.keymap_items.new('wm.call_menu', 'W', 'PRESS')
        kmi.properties.name = "SEQUENCER_OT_sequencer_edit_menu"
        addon_keymaps.append((km, kmi))

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

    for km, kmi in addon_keymaps:
        km.keymap_items.remove(kmi)
    addon_keymaps.clear()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()


Best way to divide a face of a cube into several specific faces So I want to subdivide the top face of a 8x8x1 cube into this specific pattern:

I tried fumbling around with the subdivision tool, but wasn't able to arrange it correctly. I also have some other more complex patterns, so I wonder if there is an easier way of doing this kind of operation.

Press CtrlR, then use the scroll wheel to bring the number of cuts up to two. Enter out of it, and then press S to to scale, and constrain it to a specific axis. This insures that the loop cuts are evenly spaced, and not one further away from the edge than the other.

You might notice that the middle edges go through the top and bottom sections. While you might now like to see this, it is necessary. You could technically do with out it by using N-Gons, but this is generally a bad idea.

After turning away from the problem and coming back to it later, I suddenly had the answer:

Mark 2 opposite edges and subdivide the face with 2 cuts.
Mark the 2 edges going through the original face and subdivide with 2 cuts again, then arrange the edges as necessary.

My other question still persists, though: Is there a generally easier way of dividing plain faces into specific patterns?


How to avoid pinching on concave shapes with the bevel modifier and subsurf? How can I setup the Bevel modifier to only work on 30 degrees angle and avoid pinching at the same time on convex shapes?

I want to avoid pinching generated on concave shapes to replace the manual edge loops or sharp edges workflow for hard surface models:

It's interesting to have a look at why this happens. This is a transition from  2x Simple subdiv to Catmull-Clark subdiv on a corner beveled with one segment.

It's not 'pinching' in the same sense as the pinching you get at say, the poles of a UV Sphere. It's more like 'leapfrogging'. Under the CC algorithm,the edges of small faces that were next to large faces in their own plane move further than small faces that were next to small faces at an angle to them, to the point that they overtake. This effect is compounded with each iteration, and the smaller the bevel by comparison with surrounding faces, the worse it gets.

I've never been able to think of a solution to fully automate away the need for hand-modified holding loops, or using creases to pin vertices and prevent them from being moved by CC.

Personally I tend to think in 3's, (put in a bevel with 2 segments) and not restrict by angle. Then the extra edge-loops an be 'tied off' (reduced from 3 to 1) elsewhere on the model, if needed. But that's still hand work.

Try adding edge split after beveling. That usually works for me


how to connect two paths I am trying to connect 2 separate paths somewhere along its centre, see picture:

Is there a way to do this?

Select the points you want to connect and press "F".

If i understood your question you want to join to verts

Go to edit mode ->

Select the 2 verts and Press Alt+C


How can i add hotkey for a group Selecting a group object is long process. We click and object and shift+G and then a pop arise and then we click on group again. After several click group objects selected Or we go to the out-liner and change from all scenes to group then we select the group.

Any other way or hotkey to add for just if click on a object and press a hotkey it should go all the process and select the group objects.

You can select in the Preferences what type of group you want to be selected specifically:

You should be able to set a custom hotkey for selecting in a group (just right-click the menu item when you pull up the Group selection menu and choose Change Shortcut).

Alternatively, don't forget that you can use numbers on menus like the Group selection menu. In your case, you could use Shift+G→7, since the Group option is the seventh option in that list.


Glitchy lighting for volumetric clouds I'm new to Blender and followed a tutorial I found online https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPAYX8z9i8M&t=495s to create a procedural cloud.

I got a single cloud right, however, when I scaled it up things started becoming glitchy.

Anyone have any ideas how to fix it?

Use a point light instead of a sun lamp. Sun lamps create shadows in one direction regardless of their placement, whereas a point light (or a spot or area light) emits only from a specific coordinate in the 3D environment.


Can't select everything in edit mode When I'm trying to import this mesh into UE4 (the mesh is a wooden chest). I keep getting missing faces and I've seen people say it's due to Blender and that I should try going in edit mode and select everything with A then press CtrlN, but when I get in edit mode and press A, it only selects the lid or the base of the chest. The part not selected is underlined red so I'd assume it's related.

You can check, the normals, and also what kind of polygons are better with ue4, quads or triangles.As for the a key, I don't know.Do you use any version under development.The official is 2.78c


Cycles lamps have no effect and light disappears if ambient occlusion is turned off I have set up 3 spot lamps and a sun lamp to illuminate an interior. I have never used Cycles lighting before and I'm new to Cycles in general. I have played with the strength, size, and rotation of all the lamps but the lighting is always the same. It is highly diffuse, no shadows. The only thing that changes the lighting is the Ambient Occlusion fields in the World section of the Properties editor. If I uncheck that, everything goes black.

I am looking to give the setting natural indoor lighting, but the sky is black because it is the Moon, so World > Surface > Color is set to black. The sun filters down between very tall beams and through glass. It should cast the shadows of the beams, it is lined up to do so, but no shadows. The three spot lamps are intended to show the light filtering in from light tubes, but there is no sign of the lamps.

I imagine there is some basic thing I have done wrong. How do I correct this?

Edit: Objects with Emission shaders do work as lamps (I just tried it). So I could simply switch the lamps over to that, although that isn't going to help for the sun. I had understood that now most lamps work in Cycles, except for the Hemi lamp.

To get some light through glass you need to modify the default glass shader as it will not let direct light go through (see this answer)

Change the glass material to something like this:

Then the sunlight will go through the glass:

Then you have at least one light that is outside of the object. Move it so that the light is not obstructed by the object.

It's actually a very simple fix.  Turn ambient Occlusion off completely and then put in your lights.   That's it.


Game Asset Workflow and Software Pipeline I'm brand new to the Blender world (and 3D in general). I started diving in about a week ago, with the ultimate goal of making assets for a video game project I plan to start next year with some friends.

My question is what is the de facto workflow to create meshes, apply maps, texturing and lighting effects for game art? I'm especially hazy as to where and how you create the various maps (like normal and height maps) and add textures (i.e. wood, steel, etc.)... Is that typically all done in Blender and brought directly into your game engine or would that part of the process handled in Unity/Unreal?

I've seen some great tutorials online but they usually only handle one part of the puzzle and don't explain how the various pieces are integrated. The more detail you can provide, the better! I'm a longtime Photoshop user, but if you explain the process from the Gimp perspective, I'm sure I can figure out how to translate it to PS.

Specifically

Do applied Blender shaders work in game engines or are they only for rendering directly from Blender?
If so, do lighting effects (like emissive materials and specularity) work in an equivalent way in other game engines?
Can you stack multiple maps (i.e. diffuse + specular) and then import the targeted asset in another program?
When you unwrap a mesh, can you import it into photoshop? Is there a "best practice" to doing so? Any tutorials you'd recommend?

TL;DR

What is the standard game asset workflow for Blender? For example:

high-poly mesh in Blender >
bake to low-poly mesh >
UV unwrap >
digital paint and maps in Photoshop >
apply maps, shaders and lighting in game engine (Unity/Unreal/whatevs)

There are many ways. Sometimes, I use this way:

model low poly first
UVunwrap it
texturing
In properties panel, go to "data" tab and then "UVmaps", add a second UV map
by clicking on the plus button, highlight it by clicking on it, unwrap the
low poly model for a second time for a good unwrapping because of the
texturing
create a new texture and bake "textures" and normal maps
Remove all materials and the second UV map
duplicate the low poly
add more details to the second low poly models
bake normal map of the the high poly mesh on the low poly one


How do you rotate an object so that a particular face is parallel to the ground? How would I make the face of an object parallel to the ground? I could just eyeball it and use the rotate tool, but it probably wouldn't be perfectly flat. Is there a way I could possibly snap the face of the object I want level to the top of a block (making it parallel with the block) and then delete the block?

Not sure if there is a more efficient way to do this but the method I most frequently use is through an auxiliary empty object to snap to the surface.

Add a Plain Axis Empty to your scene
Activate Snapping and Align rotation with the Snapping Target
Align the empty with the part of the surface that is to become the base
Now you will have to manually copy the three axis rotation from the empty to the object inverting them. That means if your empty's rotation is 10,50,30 you will have to paste in your target object -10,-50,-30
Apply the rotation to your object

Adjust it accordingly to fix the orientation by rotating 180º in needed axis.

Side note: It is usually helpful if your "flat face" that is to aligned to the ground is slightly subdivided so there's a few extra vertex for Blender to snap to.

A very simple way is to rotate the whole object by hand until it's close to parallel, then select all the vertices (in edit mode) that sould be parallel to the ground, and scale them to 0 relative to the Z axis.


Python script to snap selected object to cursor anyone know python script for Object>Snap>Selection to Cursor?
(Assuming I have the object selected)

I figured it out. Just select the object and set it location to (0.0,0.0,0.0)

bpy.data.objects["name"].location = (0.0,0.0,0.0)


Blender 2.8 image texture node and color space As of release of Blender 2.8 version the Image texture node has changed, before we had only "Color Data" and "Non color data".
Now we have that drop down menu titled "Color space" and various types to choose from.

My question is when we use which type of color data (do we still use "Non color" for normal maps, roughness etc or do we choose one of new ones)?

In short:

Use "non-color" for inputs that are supposed to be spatial (3D) vectors or simple factor values.
Use one of the others (depending on your needs) for what is effectively a color.

More details:

I've dig a bit into Blender code and into OpenColorIO (OCIO) documentation and my (very young and superficial) understanding is the following.

Blender uses a processor component to handle image data. This processor can be based on OCIO or be a 'fall back' one if OCIO is not present (I don't know why it could be absent... maybe to allow Blender to run on some low level hardware?).

The main goal of OCIO is to allow to transform image data into device rendered image data which fits the best to human eyes perspective as (for instance) our perception of light intensity is not linear (so intensity can be coded or manipulated linearly, as it is, but rendered differently). But more globally, OCIO can process image data transformation 'the way you want'.

OpenColorIO is a set of libraries (programs) that are provided OCIO organisation and these libraries are open source.

From that, when an image is processed (in our case for texture nodes) it is given to OCIO to do it. And OCIO is based on a configuration that can be found in 'Your installation path\2.8\2.80\datafiles\colormanagement'.

In this directory, we can find a file called 'config.ocio' (describing the possible configurations) and two subdirectories 'filmic' and 'lut' (containing data tables used by these configurations).

LUT stands for 'look up table'. For image calibration it has been defined by Academy Color Encoding Specification (ACES). Linear ACES is one of the possible option for the texture node.

Filmic is another calibration approach. The best is to read this answer from troy_s to know more.

The general principle of OCIO configuration seems to be giving a range to the input data and apply a transformation table to it. Transformations can be direct or reverse.

Concretely, what about 'XYZ', 'sRGB', 'Raw', 'Non-color', 'Linear ACES', 'Linear' and 'Filmic-Log'?

XYZ

'XYZ' is not 3D vector (x, y, z).

CIE XYZ is a calibration and its result is analogous to the LMS color space which corresponds to the cones response of the human eyes.
Y is the luminance. Z is nearly the blue. X is a mixing factor. The response value for them is defined in the OCIO configuration.

This is a transformed data.

sRGB

Stands for Standard RGB and is the "default color space for byte image" as defined in 'config.ocio'. It also has a transformation table defined in it.

This is a transformed data.

Raw

'Raw' is the image encoded data as it is. There is no transformations for it.

This is not a transformed data.

Non-color

This is similar to 'raw' from the calculation point of view. But it is semantically different as it is for things we know to be 'non color'. The comment in config.ocio says "color space used for images which contains non-color data (i,e, normal maps)".

This is not a transformed data.

Linear ACES

It is transformed by OCIO. The configuration is linear (as said in it name) and is done from a table giving parameters of this operation for each color channel.

This is a transformed data.

Linear

Correspond to Rec. 709 (Full Range) and is commented as 'Blender native linear space'.

This is a transformed data.

Filmic-Log

Again please refer to this answer. It is commented as 'Log based filmic shaper with 16.5 stops of latitude, and 25 stops of dynamic range'.

This is a transformed data.

A link to OCIO configuration in the Blender repository.

Note:

When using an image texture node, the color space information is given by or set to the image texture itself. This is not a node property. So that, if you set the color space in one material, this will affect all the others that are using the same texture.

Acording to the manual, filmic log is used when you want to export the image to a color grading program.  It might also be useful when color grading on blender. I did notice that it enhances the colors dramatically, which would be useful when trying to seperate them. you want to use sRGB for diffuse image textures, and non-Color for bump maps.  The other uses are mainly used in the scene color space.


Is there anyway to make blender print errors in the UI? For some reason, sometimes error messages encountered while scripting are not printed in the info panel, only the message Python script fail, look in the console for now....

One question I have is:
Why is this?

I like working with blender full screen, but it gets annoying having to switch back and forth between the terminal and blender while scripting.

Is there anyway to print stdout and stderr (I assume that is where blender is printing these messages) in the UI? (thus also solving the occasional necessity to restart blender because of not starting it from the terminal)

So my other question is: How can I do this?

I realize that this is technically two questions, but they seemed too related to separate.. I'll separate them if it's better that way.

I created a little utility addon that let's you easily run Text datablocks of your .blend (doesn't need to be saved) in the Python Console. Errors will show up there:Run Script in PyConsole (Menu)

You may also check out the Script Runner addon:
http://goodspiritgraphics.com/software/products/script-runner-addon/

It should be possible to run scripts like with Script Runner, but in the context of the Python Console. Some more info:

http://www.blender.org/documentation/blender_python_api_2_69_release/info_tips_and_tricks.html#executing-external-scripts

Maybe not the best solution for some practices, but if you're looking for a simple console output method that doesn't require anything outside of Blender and your system, you could try to utilize speech synthesis.
You might encounter some problems with longer messages that contain lots of useful information, but for a short print statement or an indication if a particular statement gets reached it works quite well, to name a few examples. An advantage of this approach is, especially considering the problem the OP poses, that you're not required to switch to any other view.

As far as I know, only OS X has a way of doing this out of the box with python, namely with the native 'say' command. You would call it like this:

# At the top of your file
from os import system
... # Do stuff
system("say %s" % (your_message))


How can I use the BI Noise Texture in Cycles? Okay,so I kept watching the FNaF material video by Emil "Ace" Macko wondering how to make the most accurate FNaF toy material. I tried Then I see the new toy models made by Everything_Animations and the material in the image is the most accurate. So I was wondering,how do you make the exact same procedural texture that Everything_Animations made,but for Blender Cycles?

I found out that the material in Blender Internal is the hardened version of the Blender Original clouds texture with an inverted Colorramp and what I want is that I want to use the same kind of texture for the glossy specularity using the Cloud Noise listed in the description but in Blender Cycles without using an image texture because of seam marks.

The short answer is "you can't." There is not a 1:1 correlation between Blender Internal materials and Cycles materials. The Clouds material is similar to the Noise node in Cycles, but not quite the same.

The longer answer is that you can make just about any kind of material you need to in either renderer, but you'll have to use different techniques from one to the other. You should start with the Noise node in Cycles, and then tweak it until you get something that looks like what you want. You'll have to play with the settings on the Noise node itself, but you'll almost certainly need to add a Ramp node to control the hardness of the noise.

Anything beyond that is really outside the scope of this site. Please keep in mind that it's not a forum. This is a Q&A site. We love to help, but this site works differently than most people expect. It's not designed to handle conversations, rather it's designed to handle discreet questions with clear answers.

Hope that helps!

I'm back and I'm finally giving you all the solution to this enigma. A couple of months ago, with a little help from someone and some experimenting of my own, I found the answer. It's actually a lot easier than it looks.

Add a Noise Texture node, set the scale to 8. For me, I set the detail to 16. It's necessary if you want it to be realistic.
Add two Colorramp nodes and set them to B-Spline mode. Set the black color stop on Colorramp 1 to 0.046 and reverse the color stops on the second one. Plug the values into the Fac. sockets of both Colorramps.
Add a Math node and set it to Maximum mode. Plug both Colorramps into the node with the first one on top.
Add another Math node and turn Clamp mode on. Set it to Add, plug the Maximum node into the top socket and set the bottom value to -0.05.
Add a Bright/Contrast node and plug the Add node into the color socket. Set the brightness to 0.2 and the contrast to 1.000. If you want to use the inverted version for matte plastic, set the brightness to -0.125 and the contrast to 1.1 then add an Invert node set to 1 and plug the Bright/Contrast node into it. If you want to use both at the same time, plug them both into a MixRGB node and switch between them when you feel like it. For me, I put an Invert node with black in the color input and I plugged it into the MixRGB Fac socket.
Plug the MixRGB node into the Blender Guru's Less/More node group. If you don't have it, you can obtain it easily online. Here's the link: https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/making-realistic-pbr-materials-part-2-metal?rq=PBR
Add yet another MixRGB node and set it to Multiply. Plug the Less/More group into the Fac. of the new MixRGB node. Set the bottom color code to #BCBCBC and the top color to #E0E0E0. The bottom color is for roughness.

After this is all said and done, you'll get something like this:

I hope this helps you all as this has helped me. To make it easier, you can turn this into a simple node group. Create a roughness slider and plug it into the Multiply MixRGB node's second color input. This is the solution to my problems. An answer to the prayers of FNaF modelers everywhere.


Million of vertex/edges (don´t know exactly the name) well here´s the thing I´m new to blender and I started creating a model of a human figure which I will animate in the near future. Now I´m supposed to start with the retopology phase, which gets really annoying cause every time I select the edit mode, the surface of my model is full of these millions of vertex/edges/etc. which difficults my work cause it gets really confusing to create a retopology of my model.

P.S.: I´ve watched retopology tutorials on youtube in which the view of such mesh is disabled in edit mode to make the work easier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VC98kiy10Q

So in light of your wrong retopo setup these are the steps you need to take.

Prep High Poly mesh
1. Turn off "show wires" and "draw all edges" on the high poly object.
2. Give this a dark color material with some soft specularity to aid in retopo work.

Prep Low Poly mesh
1. Create a new plane mesh to be your new low poly retopo object.
2. Turn on xray on the object property panel.
3. Turn on show face normals on the navigation panel in the 3d viewport.

Prep Retopology tools
1. Turn on snap tool, on the drop down menu choose "face"
2. Turn on "snap to self"
3. Turn on "project individual elements on the surface of other object"
4. Turn on "automatic merge vertices"

Learn the "F2 addon" or other addon suggested and use it to work retopology.

Here is the screen shot.

(This answer is from before clarification was added. It is simply a list of ways you can retopologize your object. What he actually wants is something entirely different, and what he is asking for in the question (at the time of writing this) is impossible.)

You can try a few things.

remove doubles.

Go into edit mode.
Click, remove doubles.

remesh modifier

modifiers panel
"generate" section
"remesh"

retopology tool

Retopoflow

recreation

Create a new mesh.
Simply start from scratch.
This time, follow the previous mesh as a guide.
Use your new mesh.
(You can then try to bake in the detail from your previous mesh)

Example of "remove doubles"

Example of "remesh"


Curve Inner Edges of an Mesh (Not the outer edges which I can use bevel on) I am quite new to blender and am trying to model a futuristic delta wing spacecraft/plane. I am having trouble creating a cockpit because I couldn't find how to curve edges. Please note I am not looking for how to bevel the edges but curve the side of an object.

I want to note that I started by making two curves then converting them to meshes. Then I joined the meshes. And last I connected the vertices. If there is a better way to do what I am doing please tell me.

Here are some reference images to help you understand what I am saying and the situation.

Unfortunately I don't have enough reputation to post more images. I hope you can understand what I am trying to ask. Thanks in advance.

I didnt found a precise answer but you can delete the mirror modifier then delete the vertices that are in the positions (x,y,0) axis (so you should be left with a mesh that contains vertice that are connected,) then apply a screw modifier and change axis to y. then once you have that object you can apply the screw modifier then use knife to cut through in souch a way that it would be useful to add the mirror modifier again , apply the cut.Then enable clipping in the mirror modifier and scale at x axis to get a pleasing result.Also at this point instead of scaling you can play around with the curve modifier or others modifiers like deform.If you are good in nodes you can install a plugin called sverchok and try creating the cockpit there but it can be ways harder than doing it with this way.


Importing a complex SVG to Blender from Illustrator - Problems with Fill I'm working on a project of polyhedral lanterns designed on topography, and using Blender for my modelling ahead of prototyping. I'm designing artwork in Adobe Illustrator, a program I'm robustly familiar with, and exporting the SVGs to Blender for import.
Most of the time this works well - but every once and a while when I import the SVG the fill in Blender does not match the artwork in the SVG file.  See below images -
In Illustrator:

In Blender:

I understand that Blender may be interpreting the position of handles improperly and hence filling places that should be empty, or leaving empty places that should be filled.  Due to the complexity of the images (and the fact I want to do this many times with different images), I'm hoping for some kind of work around that keeps me from having to hunt through the many many vertices each time.
Here is a link to a google drive with the SVG: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ITkPdh5p0qhy7y5YPJq4Gz57DgZDjCHS?usp=sharing
Alternatively, I can export the file as a DXF - and fill it after the fact.  But again, because of the complexity I can't figure out how I would easily fill the appropriate areas while leaving gaps.  Any advice would be welcome, and you'd help bring something like the below image into the world (the actual physical, not on the screen world).
Many thanks in advance.

I don't think that the intricacy  of your design is the issue here but how Illustrator is combining the many different paths. It looks like there are way too many points to create the curvature of  the paths. I suspect those extra points are the result of compunding the paths. Even in segments that are straight there are many points in a straight line.

A cure to most of the problem is converting the Handle Type to Vector

but in the areas where there are still too many control points the problem persists. Maybe there are open paths somewhere? Illustrator has tools to check for open paths.

I suspect that the paths need to be simplified and streamlined before they are exported from Illustrator to avoid the problems you are facing.

What helps, is scaling up your illustrator file (for instance x5 or x10). When imported in Blender you'll be able to scale your design down again, maintaining the details.
Don't forget to also simplify when possible, as @susu mentioned/


Cycles: Render result doesn't match render view I'm having trouble getting blender's render result the same thing I see in object mode + render view

Here's render view:

Here's render result

I was following a tutorial tutorial but it didn't seem to encounter the same issue. perhaps I missed or toggled something. Things were going fine until I got to the "preview render" step towards the very end, when my render result showed what seemed to be the objects but with no material or lighting. Messed around a bit whit the UV mapping and world > surface and the result got a bit closer but still not what I expected. I was also having issues getting the camera & lamp to display, they are shown in the outline but in 3D view they are invisible.

project file:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6jU39F0oQekVDQ2a2dDeVM0d2c

The issue is that the 'table' object isn't set to appear on any layer. You can see this by looking at the Relations panel for the 'table' object:

The rows of icons that represent the layers show that it isn't assigned to any layer in the scene and so it won't/can't appear in the final render.

I think this happens when you add a new object while in 'Local View'. If you are unaware, 'Local view' is a way of temporarily isolating any selected objects from the rest of the scene. This is done by selecting an object and pressing the Numpad /. 'Local' is then displayed as a label in the top left of the 3D viewport next to the view mode:

'Local View' can be exited by pressing the same key and it appears that it's only when exiting 'Local View' that new objects are assigned a layer.

To fix your file, either manually assign a layer to the object by pressing one of the layer buttons in the 'Relations' panel for the 'table' object (shown above) or exit 'Local View' (as your 3D view is already in Local View) with Numpad / to have the object automatically assigned a layer.

Bug Report

I did file a bug report about this issue here, but until the bug can be reproduced from scratch not much can be done.

I went with the simple solution:

Create a new blender file

Append your stuff

Don't forget to delete everything in the new blend file before you import your stuff

Also, you might want to watch some of Andrew Price's PBR (photo realistic) shaders tutorials or google something about fresnel.


Clothes tearing during animation I'm importing two OBJs from Poser.  One is the body and the other is a jacket.  I apply the cloth modifier to the jacket and collision to the body.  When I animate it the jacket tears apart.  Any guesses as to what is going on?

FYI : I didn't realize I didn't weld the seams in export.  I thought I did.  It was breaking on the seams.


Rendered image in eevee is not displaying shadows I am not sure where to look.
Both renderings are done with the exact same operating system environment settings yet one of them is not displaying shadows. What is the difference here and how do I fix it?
I have tried shutting down and restarting the computer numerous times with no changes to either file.
Thanks in advance.

EEVEE fakes pretty much everything in the scene when rendering. This includes Ambient Occlusion (which creates more realistic shading in EEVEE), reflections, refractions, etc. If you want a better result in EEVEE, I would recommend you use an HDRI map, and enable the checkbox for "Ambient Occlusion" in the render properties panel.
You can download high quality HDRs and HDRIs for free here.
More about Ambient Occlusion (AO) in the Blender Manual here.


Save objects into separate blender files What I'm trying to do is fairly simple but I've found no way to do it. I want to store each object in a scene into a separate blender file. Here's my code:
import bpy
import os
destination_folder = "destination_folder"

for idx, obj in enumerate(bpy.data.objects):
    ctx = bpy.context.copy()
    ctx['selected_objects'] = obj
    file_name = 'file_number' + str(idx) + '.blend'
    bpy.ops.wm.save_as_mainfile(ctx, filepath=os.path.join(destination_folder, file_name))

The problem is that the operator bpy.ops.wm.save_as_mainfile() doesn't have the flag "selected" as many others wm operators do. Any idea? I think context override is a good idea but I'm struggling to do it

Saving multiple objects as separate Blender's files can be done by using BlendDataLibraries (https://docs.blender.org/api/current/bpy.types.BlendDataLibraries.html)
import bpy
import os
destination_folder = "destination_folder"

for idx, obj in enumerate(bpy.data.objects):
    ctx = bpy.context.copy()
    ctx['selected_objects'] = obj
    filename = 'file_number' + str(idx) + '.blend'
    filepath = os.path.join(destination_folder, filename)
    bpy.data.libraries.write(filepath, set(ctx['selected_objects']), fake_user=True)

This code snippet will save the object in a blender's file. To load then the data in the visible user interface a second snippet can be run on the opened saved file:
collection = bpy.data.collections.new('collection')
for obj in bpy.data.objects:
  collection.objects.link(obj) #link object to collection
bpy.context.scene.collection.children.link(collection) #add collection

This second script creates a collection and loads all the objects in the Blender file into it and (in some sense) sets it visible/active

File Append
You might consider a script ..

Opens a new Blender file or reuses a single file in RAM...
[File Append] (or Link) from the existing large Blender
File.  [File Append] is more tested than anything you will write in the next N months. N ∈ {3,4,5 ...}
Saves the file to hard disk or similar, with a unique path name.  This implies a Python [for] as in the original question.

Blender can take command line
Python script name to (enumerate) and select a given object for the
command [File Append]
The Python script needs an enumeration to Append a different object each time.
The Python script can Append, File Save, Destroy All Objects ,to reduce Object Count to Zero for the next iteration.  You will need a Python list to record your desired [Append] actions.

Perhaps an option

An OS Script (Linux Windows Mac) to Launch Blender (this may be optional to reduce exectution time)


Cycles GPU Render button is looking passive I am adding a image. Why i can't use this render?. I am using Windows 10 and AMD Radeon Software. My Blender versiyon is 2.79. I did install yesterday (27.06.18) I can't find a solution for AMD Radeon and I updated very soon (27.06.18).
And I am adding a photo for you can understand better.

From the manual:

  To enable GPU rendering, go into the User Preferences, and under the
  System tab, select the Compute Device(s) to use. Next, for each scene,
  you can configure to use CPU or GPU rendering in the Render
  properties.

  OpenCL

  OpenCL is supported for GPU rendering with AMD graphics cards. (We
  only support graphics cards with GCN architecture 2.0 and above).

  If your video card is supported, download the latest drivers.


Reflection of floor materials I'm a Blender newbie, following a tutorial. The floor is dull, showing no glossy contrast like in the tutorial (shown in the lower part in the picture). Even if I raise the power of the environment texture to 17 as instructed, the floor is just all lighter, not having the contrast of shadow and light.

Anyone can help me with this? thanks a ton in advance!

You need a Glossy shader for this.

Open a node editor.
Go to the material tab (in the first set, looks like a ball), and then make sure you're in the object tab (in the second set, looks like a cube).
Select (right-click) the Diffuse BSDF node.
Press Shift+S and switch its type to a Glossy BSDF.

This will give you reflections. You can play with the reflection color and roughness until it looks right.

See the manual for more information on Cycles materials.

you can try adding either a glossy bsdf to the material in the node editor or an aisotropic shader (although you might have to tweak it cuz its meant more for metals)


Futuristic water tower—seemingly simple shape, but how tackle a clean topology? I’m trying to model this—looks fun, right?

So I’m having issues (perhaps as you’d expect) where the two pipes seamlessly flow into the main hull of the thing—but I got close.

I took two cylinders, connected them at the top with a semi-circle “bridge” you see in the center, and then used edge loops to connect it to the body.

It’s almost fine, but the topology is a little lumpy and I can’t seem to smooth it out. I’ve tried manually adjusting the vertices.

It’s especially noticeable as I up the subsurface.

Can anyone help me either fix this or, better yet, help me see a more “correct” way of going about this type of shape?

Thank you.

John

Use simple shapes and pump up the subsurf subdivision

I would suggest to model your object with simple shapes (e.g. cubes for the pillars, an octagon for the top) then add the subsurf modifier and start tweaking the geometry with the modifier activated.

Let the subsurf modifier do the work for you. Use the minimum amount of vertices in order to easily control the shape and let the smoothing flow.

To be honest, I think all can agree that topology is certainly one of those more difficult areas of modelling. It really just takes practice. My advice for you would be, if you don't like how the way the pipes are connecting, I'd recommend deleting that part and trying it again with a more simple bust before detailing it.


Texture duplicated on opposite side of object I have a weird issue with an image texture.  I'm attempting to put a logo on a golf ball,,

but the image itself is being duplicated, reversed and enlarged on the opposite side of the object.

Tried deleting everything but the golf ball object, and starting over, but it's doing the same thing.  Just started doing this when I changed the logo size.  Only happens with the logo png file, which I have deleted and remade multiple times.

Here are the nodes.

Here is the uv map.

Any Ideas?

It seems like you've unwrapped the object with one of the "project from view" options. This means your UV map is just a flattened version of your mesh; the faces on the far side overlap the faces on the near side, and so end up bearing a reversed version of whatever image you position there.

A simple workaround is to select the faces you don't want to texture, then (in the UV editor) scale their UV mapping to 0 (S0) and tuck them away in the corner somewhere.

Create one or more seams and create an inspect the UV Map.
When painting make sure to view the UV Map with the active texture so you can see what succeeds to meet your goal and what fails.


Auto apply a frame to over 50 imported paintings I'm new to Blender and making good progress.
In a room, I have over 50 paintings (different sized imported planes).
They all use the exact same frame. The frames are identical in that they're all white with the same texture, same depth etc
Is there a way to auto-apply the frame around my 50 paintings?
Ideally I'd like to do this at the import stage as it's getting very tedious duplicating my frame and then sequentially applying and resizing to each different sized painting.
Here's a screenshot and thanks in advance for trying.

Thanks. P

Yep - apologies. I mean frames as in wooden picture frames.
Here's a screenshot and thanks in advance for trying. 3 frames in a row

They all use the exact same frame.
What I mean is the frames are identical in that they're all white with the same texture, same depth etc

Through the UI:
Design a frame-profile curve in such a way that its origin is on the inner edge of the frame's passepartout. (Test it out in a rectangle)

Import your images as frames
Select all, and ShiftD duplicate the lot. (It's sensible to keep pictures and duplicates in separate collections, for hiding, etc.)
All dupes selected, Alt + Header menu > Convert the duplicate planes to curves, in one move.
All the curves selected, one active, Alt assign the frame Profile as Bevel object. All the frames should acquire the bevel.

So now, all the pictures are framed. Trouble is... they're all separate objects.

Alt Convert all the frames back to meshes.
Choose Locations from the Header Options dropdown, with pictures and frames selected, scale the objects' locations to spread the framed pictures out a bit.
CtrlJ join everything into one object.
In Edit Mode on all, M Merge > By Distance all the coincident vertices of pictures and frames. If your profile was good, that should be all 4 corners on each picture.
Still in Edit Mode, P Separate the framed-pictures object by loose parts.
Object mode, all selected, ShiftCtrlX Origin > To Geometry

Now all the pictures should be framed, as single objects, with origins at their centers. Trouble is... they all now have a lot of surplus material slots.
To clean them up, you could run:
import bpy

sel = bpy.context.selected_objects

for ob in sel:
    bpy.context.view_layer.objects.active = ob
    bpy.ops.object.material_slot_remove_unused()

You can select all the paintings at once in the outliner(Where all the names of the objects in the view-port appear) then go to the timeline and open the Keying > active Keying Set and select the type of key-frame you want to apply and then whenever you press I the selected active keying set (Lets say LOCROTScale) Will be applied to all your selected objects


How to add an edge ring around a hole What is the easiest way to add/extrude an edge loop around the hole in the first image to make it like the second image?

In addition to using bevel (@RobinBetts answer), you can also use Inset.

In face selection select all your geometry minus the ring of faces inside the hole, then inset I. This gives you loops on both sides of the hole.

Select your hole (the cylindrical edge loop) completly and press E and S to scale. Press Shift + Z once or twice to contrain the scale axis correctly. Then type in the amount of scale you want and remember it. Next press Numpad + and scale by 1 divided by your remembered scale. You may need to take out an calculator for that. Hope this workflow helps you


DPIs in blender - How are they set up As far as I've worked with blender and GIMP(which are the ones I mostly worked with). I've only been concerned about resolutions of the images in dimensions such as 1080 X 1920. But, in some employment sites I have found that images need to be in high resolution and the standard is 300dpi. Even in blender I have never seen this option anywhere in setting up the export. I was aware that DPIs means quality of the images(didn't know it was resolution).How can we ensure that our exports are of a certain DPIs of resolution?

Edit: As Duane points out in the comment below, DPI is often incorrectly used and PPI is more appropriate. It is very likely, however, that DPI and PPI are being used interchangeably in the context of OP's question.

DPI PPI means "Dots Pixels Per Inch." It is an expression of resolution over length and is most commonly used in printing. It is used to tell other software how far to spread out the pixels for printing.

For this to be meaningful in Blender, you'll need to know how large the final reproduction of the graphic will be on a page (or poster, or whatever you're making). The math is pretty straightforward:

Render X Resolution = Print Width * DPI PPI

Render Y Resolution = Print Height * DPI PPI

For example, if you were rendering for a 4 x 3 print, the render resolution would be 4*300 x 3*300 ==> 1200 x 900.

Be aware that the rendered file will carry a default DPI PPI definition of 72 or 96, but that only tells the Inkscape or Illustrator how large to make the picture on the page at import. Once you have your render, you can change the file's DPI PPI definition in GIMP or Photoshop without changing the actual pixel count. (Be aware that other softwares may be using DPI and PPI interchangeably.)

Dpi stands out for "dots per inch".300 dpi can be both good and both bad resolution.It depends.300 dpi in an A0 paper would be great resolution compared to 300 dpi in an a5 paper....This is because the A5 paper has much smaller surface than the A0 paper.If you had 300 dpi in a 1x1 inch paper this papers resolution would be 300x300 dots.If you had a 2x4 paper with 300 dpi then you would have totally 600x1200=720000 dots (note that 600 is how many dots are in the x axis and 1200 in the y axis) and so on...Hope this helps!

Extra info:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_per_inch


wrap STL around a cyclinder Is it possible to wrap an STL around a cylinder in Blender using one of the deforms?

E.g. is it possible to wrap this STL
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:651829
around a cylinder to create a face mug?

(I was thinking of using a wave deform one wavelength long and then splitting the STL, inverting one half of the wave and rejoining it with the other half of the wave deformed STL, but that would not result in a circular shape.)

Thanks

Consider a

Curve modifier with a NURBS Circle.
Simple Deform modifier with Bend Selected

After importing the .STL into Blender...

Create a lattice scaled and positioned to contain the object to be deformed, and adjust the lattice UVW values to give it enough control density. (UVW is under object properties specific to a lattice.) Then give the object to be deformed a lattice modifier. Now go back to the lattice, and give it a simple-deform bend modifier. You may also want to use an empty as the reference point for the bend, as that can provide more control.

The intermediate lattice gives more control at preserving volume than the simple deform modifier alone. You can move lattice cage points in edit mode, and it'll affect deformation prior to the simple deform modifier which is applied to the lattice. That in turn should help with controlling how the deformation is applied.

Thus you should be able to adjust your object with those things in reference to a cylinder mesh.

Now you should be able to export that back out, and toggle the check in export settings for modifiers to be applied before export.

If for some reason the lattice doesn't deform strongly enough or has some issue of the object falling out of the lattice bounds, then it may also be worth looking into the mesh-deform modifier as an alternate. It works in a similar way to the lattice modifier but with a bind system, so shifting the control mesh after binding doesn't present some issues of boundaries that the lattice will.


FBX file boujou track data lags behind video I got my FBX track from boujou in blender but I can't seem to get the track to move with my video, I've checked the frame rate and made sure all settings in boujou match blenders.

The track is always just lagging behind the video and I just can't figure it out. I'm not sure what else it could be.

You can clearly see my problem in my gif.

Did you pre-cached?
Also check your current timeline is running at 23.976 it looks like your video is not 24 full frame. Check your video´s fps, then the timeline (render), then the cache before you track.
You need to re-do the track after you set all those things up.
Please vote me up on my answer if you find it useful. Thanks.


Why does my rendered video not animate? I have used Blender to generate a video clip using H264 and the clip works perfectly, however I need to add audio and some titles, so I have re-imported the clip into the video editor and added the other elements there.

The problem I have is that when I export the video, it is not animated. What is exported appears to be a single static frame rather than the animation that is visible when one opens the clip in a regular video player. Unfortunately the clip is not highly mobile, it changes quite gradually, so it isn't very obvious in the preview, but it doesn't look to me as though the preview is animating it either.

I'm wondering if there is something wrong with the time selection, but I can't figure out what is wrong with this:

I am completely new to the Blender-as-video-editor world so I might be missing an essential step, but like most matters for the Blender noob, I have no idea what that would be because the interface has ten thousand settings and every tutorial or document is discussing a slightly different version.

What do I need to do to ensure my video is rendered with animation rather than static?

After struggling with this for a while I switched to a different video editing tool ( I used KDEnlive ) and used that to put together the complete video. It worked perfectly with Blender's exported video and was quick and easy to work with. A Swiss army knife is very practical when you don't have a screwdriver, but if you do have one, use that instead.


Is there a way to hide freestyle outlines on Mask objects Is there a way to hide freestyle outlines on Mask objects. No matter what I have tried it the outline is always there.

Blender's FreeStyle functionality is a rendering engine, which means that it is not object-based. You can only turn it off for the whole scene.

Take a look at this picture from the Blender Manual

The first box is your 3D scene with all its objects. Everything else in the process happens after the objects, their positions and materials are processed.

Looks like you are using BI. I use Freestyle with Cycles. Also I have not much experiences with using masks in general.

That being said, you could try using different render layers (but maybe not usable   because of the mask) and fix in compositing.
Or you could try putting the object in its own group and limit the freestyle lines to that group.


How can I make a Driver expression access image RNA data through the image texture node? So still trying to automate some processes.
I am trying to use drivers to access information about an image (pixel x/y size and DPI)
The location is simple
bpy.data.materials['Fabric'].node_tree.nodes['IMAGE01'].image.size[0]
But the driver cannot access it through a Texture node

As you can see, it works if I go through the image variable. But not useful when the user changes the texture.
What do I need to make it work?

Use self in drivers

Can use self in drivers, to see what is going on can make a driver method, register it, and print to system console what the value of self is, and often more importantly what self.id_data is.

Here is a little test driver foo(self) that also returns a random number, so we can see if it is working, and when.

import bpy
from random import random

def foo(self):
    print(self, self.id_data)
    return random()

bpy.app.driver_namespace["foo"] = foo

Now add as a driver.

Add the driver directly into the property by typing #foo(self) before its a driver. Once it is a driver simply edit the expression in field.

On first time, Make sure use self is checked, and update deps to fire it up.  If it breaks may have to update deps again.

For the simple driver will see that

<bpy_struct, NodeSocketVector("Vector")> <bpy_struct, ShaderNodeTree("Shader Nodetree")>

is printed to sys console, and the driver is a random value.  Ok then self.id_data is the nodetree to which the texture node belongs.

Extending, will give a value of 4 if no image or no  node named "Image Texture" .. but if there is will return the image width.

import bpy

def foo(self):
    print(self, self.id_data)
    node_tree = self.id_data
    tn = node_tree.nodes.get("Image Texture")
    if tn:
        print(tn)
        if tn.image:
            return tn.image.size[0]
    else:
        print("NO IMAGE")
    return 4.0

bpy.app.driver_namespace["foo"] = foo

Could extend further by passing the name of the image texture node and image height or width as an int for instance, and not rely on it being called "Image Texture"

def foo(self, name="Image Texture", index=0, default=0.0):
    ...

        tn = node_tree.nodes.get(name)
        ...
            return tn.image.size[index]

    return default

Now can type #foo(self, "BarTexture", 1, -44) into a prop on nodetree and it will be the height of the image in the node named "BarTexture" or -44 if there is no image or no node.

Notes:

An issue is crossing an ID line in a path for a driver variable.  Starting from material going thru nodetree. If defined as a group then try using the nodetree ID type in a variable  (Haven't had much joy doing this).

Remove print statements if happy with result so you don't spam the console.

Thanks everyone for your help.

I found the solution. It's a syntax issue.

In the console viewport, the code to get the pixel height or width is

bpy.data.materials['######'].node_tree.nodes['######'].image.size[0]

but the code for the driver is

node_tree.nodes["######"].image.size[0]

The Apostrophe ( ' ) should be converted to Quotation marks ( " ).

Don't know why, but it works.


Huge meshes (how to export, textures etc.) So i've got a huge mesh of an house at the moment, with around 900k faces. I could just export the mesh from blender to unreal engine 4, but its way too large, and most of the time it just crashes. What would be the best way to export this mesh? And if it has to be in parts, whats the best way to do that?

Also, is it a better idea to apply textures in blender or in unreal engine 4?

http://i.imgur.com/RRQAi2e.png

Thanks in advance!

You should decrease polycount. To achive this use decimate modifier or remesh modifier

I don't know. I always export it as 1 object because zbrush can separate objects with diffrent materials, maybe in ue4 it works as well


exported fbx with multiple textures has only one I created an object with multiple textures. It looks fine in "Viewport-Shading - Texture". When it's in "Material" mode it fully has only the first texture. It also happens when rendering. When I export it as fbx and import it to unity it also has only that oe texture. Why can it happen?

You have to assign every material to its part and not only unwrap it with the textures.


Blender won't select the object I want to select For some reason I can't seem to select a sword that I duplicated from a previous one. The previous sword is still selectable but the duplicated one is not. For some reason blender selects whatever is behind the object. However I dragged a box over it about 20 times and found that it worked once, but it selected everything with it.

Check to see if it is listed in the Outliner. If it is, click on it's entry. If it still won't highlight, check to see if the arrow icon is toggled. Click it to make sure it's not greyed out. This indicates whether an item is selectable.

Just export obj and the textures in other folder, then make a new workspace and import them back.


Blender bge camera edge clipping aproach help i have this thing on the bge: "see the image"
\n
while the camera moves, the origin of my objects(tiled ground) reachs the edge of the camera" so blender stops rendering it because gets offscreen.

im a python intermediate user, know the bge "well enough".

movin the object origin would solve it momentaneusly, but i'll also have to repositionate the mesh... entering on triky calculations for bunch of objects instances.
this is the question:
is there a way to tell blender to clip [Camera settings] a little offscreen horizontally ??

you know... to render these tiles on the edge of the screen??

tryed tweaking the camera settings but with no clue.
multi resolution meshes but to increese the vertex count for an indeed  offscreen object seems stupid.
thinked on replace the meshes on smaller ones, s the same, just make gaps smaller but + calculation and trickering.

any idea will be apreciated...
thank you! have blend day ;)

here are some ideas google doped ive found useful

https://blenderartists.org/t/update-object-origin/553245

https://github.com/UPBGE/blender/issues/211

the best way seems to be adding other camera.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgXAv9csJu0&index=3&list=PLBF3FB2A571A6BB7C

dont know if i have to delete the questions...??? close thread..??
thanks for the help


Is there a way to map the frame rate to keyframes? Is there a way to change the frame rate during an animation, using keyframes?
i wanna try making certain actions with different frame rates (close ups with 24fps while more action heavy shots take 12fps) without having to render the animation multiple times then stitching footage together or making a different project entirely.

Wait i just realized i could just use the steps interpolation in the graph editor


High poly lag limitation of blender? I have a lag problem with my high poly model 12000000 poly, I made a quick video to illustrate my problem
https://youtu.be/luvN2IeYqNg
When the mouse is out of the 3d view it lags a lot. I have to unselect the model, select an other or refresh the page to have no more lags
I have a quatro m5000
A gtx 1080
2x xeon e5 v4 2,4 ghz
256go ram
Ssd drive
All drivers are ok
I should be smooth !
The problem is coming from my computer ? Blender ?
I need to work on high poly models for my work in archaeology

I remeshed, with meshlab and reduced the model to 3millions poly ant no more lags I definitely thinks it's a blender issue :(


Python Scripting: (relative) Locations and Rotations of Objects under Empty The title says it all..

I'm looking for an easy way to get a list of the relative locations and rotation (Euler) and Mesh names of all Objects (meshes) under each Empty in my project.. But I'm not good with Python, let alone with loops inside Python.

Anyone willing to help?

Great! With the help of batFINGER I made the following solution:

import bpy
import os
import bgl, blf, mathutils

C = bpy.context

empties = [e for e in C.scene.objects if e.data is None]

for e in empties:
    for o in e.children:
        o.matrix_basis.to_translation()
        o.matrix_basis.to_euler()
        if o.type=='MESH':
            mystring = str(o.data)
            namestring = mystring[19:len(mystring) - 3]
            mystring = str(o.location)
            locationtring = mystring[8:len(mystring) - 3]
            mystring = str(o.rotation_euler)
            rotationstring = mystring[7:len(mystring) - 14]
            print (namestring, ',', locationtring, ',', rotationstring)

This can just be copy-pasted in a script, with the output coming through the System Console. Hope it helps someone :)


Texture not showing up in render preview why does my texture, that I painted in Blender, show up in "Viewport Shading" but not in "Rendered View"? Everything is just grey.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Fy_OFy_3RwtG8tq7dtzQ5A8-up_wJ_dp

As can be seen below, you have accidentally paused your rendering, preventing Blender from initializing your render.

Simply unpause it by clicking on the button again. Cheers!

I had a look at your scene file-
1/ You're using 'object' rather than 'UV' in the shader, so it's mapping the image incorrectly.
2/ No idea what has happened to make it invisible, but it is! However I just opened Blender into a default scene, then Appended your object and it shows up fine.

If you get into a mess, just open a default scene and append the objects/lights/whatever. It's a sort-of 'get out of jail free' card...


Blender for iOS without using sidecar or duet? I'd like to use blender on my iPad. Is there any direct download link for iOS?

Blender is written in C++, mostly.  Apple requires iOS apps to be written in either Objective-C or Swift and doesn't provide runtime support for C++, so there is no way to run Blender without alternative support.  As far as I know, there is no useable C++ runtime for iOS that would support Blender.

No.
If it were Android, it might be another matter, but no way on iOS.


Can I control wind area? I want to make animation of wind that blows text in particles from top to bottom, but the wind blows the whole text. I think wind applies everywhere. How to control its area to blow specific things?

You could use falloff for the force field which will specify the shape of the areas where it will make the effect.

In the force field options (in the Properties editor) find Faloff area and check Tube instead of Sphere, selected by default. This will make force field affect in the areas which fall in that shape while with Sphere it affects radially in all directions.
Then enable Maximum, just below the Tube option; this will ensure the force field doesn't affect all the particles in the given area.

If testing this now, force field will affect all the particles in the given direction up to the specified minimum:

Particles are red icospheres; blue line in the middle is the plane which shows maximum area of the force field effect; partially transparent blueish cylinder shows force field shape itself.

This is however not what is desired; the force field affects up to the certain area, but to all the particles, reaching its minimum distance. To make it affect only particles within its shape of effect enable Maximum in the Radial settings:

With that, force field will affect particles up to the certain area (shown as blue line) and within certain area of the tube (in this case) shape.

Click on the wind and go to the right hand properties panel and u can find various settings. In the strength u can lower the wind etc.


Uneven lighting in cycles render I'm making a new animation and for some reason, the lighting in the render isn't even.
I've tried adding an area light but no matter how bright it is, the dark faces on the right don't show any change.
It's all indirect lighting and with the symmetry, I want both sides would be lit the same way.
Here's a frame that shows what I'm talking about. (Surrounding the coin-op on the right hand side, it's all dark)
Any help is appreciated. I'm a bit stumped.
Edit: I've also noticed some splotches of darkness above the coin-op on the left. Could it be the texture?
Second edit: Link to file coming soon. Clamping and environment lighting did basically nothing.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mguxyLO8M8u8hAYRC3nFBJzHZht4XHMB/view?usp=drivesdk
Sorry it took so long to get my file uploaded! Hope this helps!

Difference in lightning does Material 2 - Magic texture.
This node generates black material on some faces differently, depence on object position.
On the left side are black back sides of object on the right sides are black front sides of objects.
Disabling node from node tree fix the lightning issue.

Node attached into Normal socket generates blacks on all negative XYZ axis directions.

I don't know what is a proper way, but ussally you should plug node into Color socket. So try this.

Plus as already mentioned - you have overlaping objects with different materials. But even I kept only one side and Mirrored with modifier, issue was there.

Please Check your Materials. I guess you might have no specular with black base color in you Principled Bsdf node OR by accident you might have attached Black Emission in your shader output.


Save/Export image from compositing tab in Blender 2.81 Any way to save the pre-rendered picture as JPG/PNG from the compositor?

One way is to connect the Viewer Node.
Then just open your Image Editor, select Viewer Node and save the image.

You can save to any format you need .jpg/.EXR are all supported.

Note:
If the Viewer node doesn't show any image, just toggle one of your nodes off/on.
Viewer/Composite nodes refresh only when there's a change in the compositor.

The way I save any scene is to use the print screen button on the keyboard. Click it then  open up a picture editor like Microsoft paint because it loads fast, and paste, crop picture if you want, and then click save as. For more options on editing the picture use a program like Gimp to past the picture into.


Why are some faces in my mesh darker? While rendering a mesh with smooth shading on, I get a dark region/shadow on certain faces.
The effect is more evident when smooth shading is applied to a mesh containing ngons, with the ngons turning black when rendered.

The blackening effect is visible in the viewport too.

How can I solve this problem?

Check your normals. If some of the facess are turned inside out, pointing inward into the inside of the mesh, they can be seen as dark areas.
Before recalculate normals (in the toolbar (N) in the 3D View, or CtrlN):

After recalculate normals.

Note that normals will only be recalculated for selected faces, so you probably want to select all (A) before recalculating.

Sometimes an extrusion goes weird, meaning, it has that dark blue/grey color in such a case, select the culprit faces and go to the "Shading/UVs" tab in your toolbox, you enter your toolbox by pressing "T" once there, find the option that says "Flip direction" and that should give you the lighter colored base material of everything else. if not.... I apologize, I guess this isn't the problem I frequently encounter.


How to show face in edit mode after hiding with "H" Very simple question but I couldn't find answer

I'm modeling some complex stuff which I need to hide some faces to move forward, but after I'm done I want to display those faces back

⎇ AltH or 3D view > Header > Mesh > Show/Hide >Show Hidden will do it:


Creating Corners with Mirror / Symmetry Is there a modifier/tool or plugin to replicate the symmetry/mirror effects like the one at step 12 here:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/getting-started/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2015/ENU/3DSMax-Tutorial/files/GUID-42DD88AC-4988-4CBB-A3FE-6298B1ECC9B3-htm.html

Basically all I want to do is create corner pieces of an existing modular model.
Thanks!

All I had to do was to check Bisect in the mirror modifier after rotating it 45° in Edit mode. Thanks anyways. Problem solved.


Emission: Red glow while the object itself is white I want to make something like this in Blender:

So I created a Torus and I created two emission materials for it (one for the right side and one for the left side) with two different colors and increased their strengths. And then I added a Fog Glow filter (Glare) and a Volume Scatter to the World. But this is the result:

I want the material to be white and a nice green (for the left side) and purple (for the right side) glow around it (like the reference photo). How to achieve this effect? (Blender v2.82 and Cycles)

If you really want to use Cycles: Add a box which encloses the entire scene, add a principled volume shader to the box and play with Density and Anisotropy:

In comp you can add a Denoise node to save render time and a Glare node to introduce a soft glow:

If the volume takes forever to render, a few blur nodes with various blur amounts can introduce a 'colorful blur' in comp as well:

You could try using a fresnel node like Ian Hubert does in this video https://youtu.be/8eNN2Ep3Rqs
Make one of the emission shaders white and the other your desired color, use a color ramp to control the amount of fresnel. If that doesn't work, crank up the emission strengths.


Color node losing shade I was testing stuff with render, render layers,scenes, world and cycle rendering.  Suddenly my colornodes lost its shading.  I went through I couldnt get it back.

Is there any way for me to restore normal coloring and matarial setting?

Most likely you have accidentally put the HSV node to a value that blows out the resulting pixel values. See this screenshot here to understand which value I mean:

In your case, you have set this to 2.0. This will likely send so much light energy down the line that the resulting pixels will overshoot the 1.0 range, thus being clipped to white. I've done this in the screenshot below:

Lower that input value of the HSV node to something reasonable (between 0.0 and 1.0) and see if this resolves the issue.

thank you for stating your question clearly.
At this stage you lost all information.
Blender Render was created to NOT work with Nodes like in Cycles.

The moment you tried a different render method, the previous (Blender render)
deletes all data stored at SCENE level, though at DATA-per-object level remains. (This is why you see the nodes, but they are all white).
This is another reason why Blender internal and other functions in Blender cannot co-exist now that Cycles is better at doing light calculation.

Thank you for your consideration to vote me as the answer by clicking to the left :the icon with a check mark and upvote this answer.

BFCT_Schiller


How do I limit the rotation of the camera in an FPS I have mouselook for my game but the player can look all the way up and down.  I want the camera to be limited in rotation like a normal fps.  Please help!

The mouse move script allows cutomization. In order to restrict up/down rotation you could add the properties as shown in the image.

I make BGE tutorials on my channel, and I have this exact solution, scripts, and .blend file in the description. Just keep watching through the video, I believe I show you how 3 minutes through. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2BL9AxORec


Flip default face orientation of object I'm creating my first model and it's going fine so far. One thing though - I probably did something wrong in the beginning, and default orientation (normals) of faces is pointing inside the model. I can easuly fix it with Ctr+Shift+N, to set normals to point "inside" the model, which happens to be correct in my case. However if I create a new face, sometimes it creates flipped, so it always tried the default orientation, and I have to re-calculate normals again.

Can I somehow set Blender in such a way, that what he now thinks of a "normals pointing inside the model" to "normals pointing outside", which is correct (in my case)?

I didn't understand well, but you can try Alt + R to clear an object rotation, or Shift + C to set the cursor at the center.


How to load an internal blender image using OSL? OSL has the texture command that we can use to load image files and map in an object. Dfelinto made a nice video about it some years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5N2rnFtSlw

We also have many samples of it in the source of blender:
https://github.com/dfelinto/blender/blob/master/intern/cycles/kernel/shaders/node_image_texture.osl

But how we can load using OSL an blender's internal image? Some created inside it or already loaded using the uv/image editor?

If I understand the question right. The internal images are values that are generated from coardinates and do not realy exist. You should be able to call the existing method eather direct or indirect.

If that don't worke for you all of the math to generate them isn't that hard to find on the internet.


Rigid body physics: Why objects are attracted without any force applied? I am running a very simple simulation. However, something weird happens at the beginning of the simulations. It looks like the chair is pulling the monitor towards itself. Or the monitor is attracted to the chair. Why is that?

I tried your file, I found  that just following what @moonboots said above in comments should work, but sometimes... it doesn't, and it's weird!

Here is when I tried to "free" rigid body cache, and also to "free all bakes": it didn't work.

Then I tried a trick: apply scale, and it worked, the "screen" mesh fell in a more natural way, but after reaching the floor, it fell downwards...

So, I tried to apply also rotation, and in this way it worked how you probably expected:

Applying transforms (particularly scale and rotation) is always recommended when you simulate physics in blender, and most of the times it solves even weird issues like this one.

Such phenomena have to do with gravity (it is ca. 9.81 m/s^2) and mass. Check if the screen is heavier or, for one of the monitor's legs, gravity is more than 9.81 m/s^2. If either is true, give all parts of the monitor the same mass and the same gravity and see what happens.


Making a camera with a green tint I'm trying to make a horror game with a green tint to the camera (like above)
Is there any way to make this?

Yes, its possible:

You have to use GLSL, make your horror scene, dont use any lights (for the scene).
After, you may parent a Spot to your camera (Ctrl+P make parent, keep transform), and set the color of the spot to a green tint, decrase the energy for a better effect. There is many parameters for the spot, you just have to try ;)

You can do that using post production,I dont know how to program that but I can tell you how to make it using the compositor and you program it or some one edit that answer and give you the script.
here I have this image from "outlast" with normal vision.

After applying a node tree like this:

Here is the result:


Why does the previous frame sometimes get displayed as transparency when rendering animations? If I just start up my default startup file and render an animation, the previous frame is always replaced with a blank transparent checked pattern before the next frame starts rendering.

However, in this file the next frame is displayed as rendering over the previous frame.

I have also noticed that in the file linked above some tiles will briefly appear transparent (checkered) before rendering, however others do not.

Why is this?
Is there some setting I don't know about?

Is it possible I could render animations without anything appearing transparent?

Cycles cuts the final image into a number of tiles, as each tile begins to be processed it is cleared before the result gets entered into it. Blender internal doesn't appear to do this clearing step, leaving each tile update being drawn over the previous frame content.

For not seeing a tile in it's cleared state you will find the screen view gets updated in a thread separate from the rendering. A tile may get cleared and updated in between two screen updates so a tile that gets cleared may not be seen in a screen update before an image update is entered into it. The quicker the first sample is ready the more chance that the cleared tile is not updated to the screen. To test this set a large tile size and high samples rate using cpu so that it takes a while before an update is ready to view, even a simple background colour that updates quickly can be seen cleared before it gets updated.

As for the difference between your two example files, the startup.blend file has border turned on in the resolution settings with crop turned off. blue_ring.blend has both border and crop turned on.

It appears that border on with crop off causes full image clearing between each frame. Border off or border on and crop on doesn't perform this clear full image step.

Rendering within a border that doesn't get cropped would be a reason to clear the entire image to prevent any old image data being present around the cropped render. For an animation this step should only be needed for the first frame and should be able to be skipped after that. Probably no has thought of only running the clear step once at the start of the render animation task.

I believe it has to do with the "Persistent Images" option in the Performance section of the Render settings. According to the docs, "Persistent Images option to keep images loaded on the device, saved time initializing next rendering." Though that's not very helpful, it might explain some things.


How do I emulate the Home key on a mac laptop in Blender? I am trying to set the camera to the viewport on a mac laptop.  I use View>Align View>Align Active Camera To View.
This gives me the view but the camera is too zoomed in.  From looking on the stack exchange I believe if I press the Home key this will give me what I want.  How can I do this on my macbook pro keyboard ?

For the Home command, press down the Fn+Left Arrow or Fn+Shift+Left Arrow.

Home : Fn+Control+Left Arrow (Works exactly similar to Windows Home key)

End : Fn+Control+Right Arrow

Page Up : Fn+Up Arrow

Page Down : Fn+Down Arrow

Essentially, all the buttons that would normally appear above the arrows on a  windows keyboard, are mimicked by using arrow keys with modifiers.

I don't know why the other answers are talking about un-related number pad, which is another key group entirely.

Ctrl + Alt + Numpad 0, or maybe Cmd + Alt + Numpad 0.

To emulate the Numpad, go to:
File > User Preferences > Input > Emulate Numpad.

It should be about half way down in the left.


Installing Pyserial in Blender How can I go about getting pyserial installed under win7 64bit for Blenders bundled python distro?

I currently have python 2.7 installed for programming outside of blender, and have pyserial installed for that, but I'm trying to get serial data fed into blender which needs pyserial for 3.3.

When I try installing pyserial with the pyserial-2.7.win32_py3k.exe it doesn't find the python installation and I don't know how to point it to theBlender\2.69\python folder.

Answer:
I don't think there is a way to point a Python module installer to the Blender bundled Python.  So if you must use a third party Blender Python, there are generally 3 ways to go about that:

remove blender python sub-directory, blender will then fallback on the systems python and use that instead. Note that Python version must match the one that blender comes with.
Install a Python environment that's the same version as the bundled Blender Python to your system directory. (i.e. Python 3.3 64bit). Then install Pyserial (py3k) into that Python installation. Lastly copy the installed Pyserial module manually to the Blender Python installation under Blender\2.69\python. Installed Python modules can be usually found under the lib/site-package directory.
Most Python modules are just .py files that can be copies without going through a formal installation process. So, mostly likely, you can try to extract the module files from the installer, and just copy it straight to the Blender Python. This way, you don't have to keep a system Python just for installation purposes.

Non-answer: Do you really need to install it to the Blender Python? You can set up the PATH variable to basically load a module from any where on the disk.

First thing be sure that you have installed a 32 bits version of pyhton. I give you the link of python downloading website

If you have downloaded a win32 version of pyhton 2.7 and pyserial-2.7.win32_py3k.exe the installation should work.

If you want to try if the installation has worked, open a 2.7 python console and type:

import serial

If you have an error the installation of pyserial on python hasn't worked.

When you have installed you pyserial on pyhton 2.7 you have to install it on blender. First thing : be sure to have a 32 bits version of blender

Now you have to copy the serial folder and the pyserial-2.7 - py3.3.egg-info in the

C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages folder (python2.7 folder)

and past this folder and file in your blender folder

C:\Program Files (x86)\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.69\scripts\modules

Now your installation of pyserial on blender is done.


Input script of Mix Shader node for create link? I am scripting an add-on and I need to create link between Glossy BSDF node and Mix shader node's "shader"
material_realistic_gold.node_tree.links.new(BsdfGlossy3_node.outputs[0], MixShader_node.outputs.inputs[0])
This is not working and get an error
Python: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\Yeung\Downloads\Shader 1.0\Script 001.blend\test.py", line 237, in execute
AttributeError: 'bpy_prop_collection' object has no attribute 'inputs'

location: <unknown location>:-1

What is the script of input shader of Mix material node?

I finally figure it out
I need to type
material_realistic_gold.node_tree.links.new(MixShader_node.inputs[1], BsdfGlossy3_node.outputs[0])


How to convert a .svg to a 3D Model? I want to achieve the embossed effect seen in the attached image. I have made an svg file and imported it into Blender. I am not sure how to proceed to get that emboss effect. Do I have to follow some other steps? I don't know I'm going into the right direction

You can get the svg file here

since you didn't tell the detail, I will try to answer in the beginning.

first you need to import your svg file

File > Import > Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg)
its look like your svg is too small, goto edit mode and scale it up

press tab, then 's' to scale it up. remember to do it in edit mode.
goto the curve panel then increase the bevel depth value

this method will not get the very similar result to your reference image. if you want to get a great result you need to modelling it manually.

Within Blender, go to File | User Preferences.

Within the User Preferences Tab, click on the Add-Ons Tab.

Within the search box, type "SVG". You should see the Import-Export SVG add-on as an option. Click the small check box at the top left corner of the add on, and then  click "Save User Settings" at the bottom of the add-ons section.

You can then close the User Preferences panel... but remember to save the user settings before doing so.

Now go to File | Import | Scalable Vector Graphics:

Blender will import your svg.... as you can see in my jpg.

Should if I can help.


Opacity of Textured objects I have 2 objects in the scene red cylinder and blue cube. They both have a basic colour in the Principal Shader. How can I lower the opacity of the red cylinder so I can see the blue cube behind it?

OK I got there. Make the objects that you want to see through Glass then set blend mode to additive.....adjust roughness and shadows to taste......


Fix creases on a curved surface Basically I am working on an aircraft and I had to cut out the windows (I use the Knife Project tool )

But I have these weird shadows/creases.
I know the topology is terrible but this is a quick project and I am not so advanced yet.

Thanks in advance.

These are nearly impossible to fix.  However, beveling the edges of the windows should help.


Creating an edgeless material for flame I'm looking to recreate something like this , but if possible, using just the nodes editor and a mesh. I'm primarily having trouble with finding the right combination of nodes to create that edgeless, or feathered look to the mesh. The rest should be simple enough to do, mixing it in with transparent and emission shaders. I think I have that part of the node setup ready to go, but I need to have the rest of the node setup to be sure. That's where I'm hoping someone here might come in.

Just an idea..

You could just draw with really soft brush in Photoshop/Gimp, something similar to a flame. Then use that as the mask factor.

I just did this on a flat plane. If you use a solid object just make sure all the sides are close to each other or it might look a little weird.

Coloramp to Emission shader and Quick smoke gave me this result:

Add more smoke for stronger effect


Molecular script addon permanently stuck in simulating state I stopped the molecular simulation and... it's not stopped.
It just says that there is time left and when I play the simulation it's in its "slow mode" state.
I have no clue how to fix it and the other post on the forum doesn't help.

NOTE:
I have tried restarting blender, and that didn't help.

This is my first post on this forum so if you need any more info, ask.

-Grimtin10

Add  "free bakes" to Quick Favorites  and "process simulation left..."
At view port just press Q and menage simulation from there.
Good luck

I fixed by assigning a shortcut to the bake tab, then clicking the shortcut once its finished baking.


Fire looks better in 3D viewport then in render? When I take an object and click "quick smoke" and set the flow type to fire, it looks very good in the viewport. However the render looks terrible. Here is an example:

Viewport-

Render-

It, for some reason, has a black outline. I saw this problem much more when I too the monkey, set to to quick explode, then added a smoke domain. The viewport looked so much more better then what the final result looked like.

Also, is there a way to make the fire not fill up the domain and look like a square in the final result?

The viewer is broken regarding images with alpha, and composites them incorrectly. Never trust it. Never rely on it.

Composite your work using the Alpha Over node against an image and you will have an accurate rendering of your fire.

To fix this, I would imagine that you have to edit your material. Another reason could be that you are using the Blender Internal (Blender Render) rendering engine, which is far less realistic that the Cycles Render Engine. The option to change this is on the to where it says Blender Render, click on it and select Cycles Render from the drop down list. In case you do not know how to setup a cycles fire material go to this website: Blender Manual Volume Shader


Force Cycles GPU rendering for a Render Farm So basically I'm on vacation for 2 weeks with a laptop without a CUDA device. I do have access to a render farm with GPU rendering support.

Now the problem is that I can't setup blender to render in GPU and send the file to the farm because the laptop doesn't support it.

The farm has script support if that info helps.

Any ideas or suggestions?

Send it to the farm that will let you change the settings or they will change it for you. Try GarageFarm.NET as they have super friendly support working 24/7


take screenshots programmatically in bge? import bge

from bge import render, logic

def makescreenshot():
    path = logic.expandPath("//")

    def main():

        cont = bge.logic.getCurrentController()
        own = cont.owner

        render.makeScreenshot(path+"image.png")

    main()
makescreenshot()

^This is the code I have to take a screenshot of the current scene and I want to connect this with an always sensor to the camera, but the only way I know to do so is by using bpy...is there any way to take screenshots using bpy or is there any way to add logic bricks using bge?

Thanks!

In Bge you can indeed add an always sensor and link it to the python script


Why does the top fade out earlier than the bottom in this scene? See, in the scene, the top of the flag ends and becomes transparent at a different point then the bottom.  I want the end to be straight, not slanted like I have now.

Connecting different socket types is generally a bad idea. In this case you have the Object coordinates (a Vector - as indicated by the blue socket) connected to the scalar Value input of a Multiply Math node. This will automatically convert from the vector into a scalar (ie, a plain number) by averaging each of the X,Y,Z values of the vector together - not what you want. Instead, replace the Multiply node with a Separate XYZ node and then use whichever of the X, Y, Z outputs matches your requirements (probably X as indicated in the comments).

Looks as if it might be doing something weird with the color ramp. It's going diagonal instead of left to right.

Edit: You need a gradient texture right after the mapping node to convert to color.