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

I want to "loft" between curves.

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


Frame Dropping vs AV-Sync? What exactly is the difference between the Frame Dropping and AV-Sync options?
I understand that they both drop frames in order to make the playback closer to real-time in the 3D view, but how does AV-sync make it more synced to the sound than frame dropping, if they're both just dropping frames to get the correct frame rate? Is there any time when I should use frame dropping instead of AV-Sync, if they both get the correct frame rate?

As far as I can see:

No Sync just tries to play back every single Frame no matter if it causes lags or time shifting problems with the Audio or the actual physical time.
Frame Dropping drops Frames from the ViewPort Animation Playback to match up with the actual Frame Rate being used
AV Sync skips Frames from Video Footage in the VSE so that Audio and Video in the Image Preview Sequencer Mode stays in sync

av sync drops frames from the sound.
frame dropping drops frames  of the animation/video.


How can I make a tower of stacked boxes stable in the game engine? I have a tower of flat boxes, but the simulation is not stable. I have tried with split impulse turned off and on.

I have tried:

setting the collision shape to box, convex hull, and mesh
increasing the number of steps per second and iterations per step (though this does improve the stability, it still eventually collapses without outside influence)
enabling deactivation
start deactivated (but as soon as an object touches the tower, it gets very "bouncy")

I have even tried to gradually increase gravity, hoping that the boxes would eventually gently settle all opposing forces (gravity and contact constraints). This blend file shows that gravity is squishing the boxes a bit.

This technique, combined with enabling deactivation seems to work alright, until an object activates the boxes (on contact). Does anyone know of a less hacky way to prevent a tower of boxes from bobbing up and down like this?

Is there a way to make this kind of tower stable without resorting to these kinds of tricks?

Put collision shape to box and increase  linear and angular damping up to your needs. Remember higher the damping, higher the viscous effect will be (honey like). I suggest to start with 0.3 for both and then try to tune them up until they are stable.

if the boxes are inside of another object in the simulation Ex. inside another cube the boxes will instantly fly away from each other.


Python to show one of objects by choosing I have a question about Python. By the way, I'm a beginner of English and Python. I have a script to show Toruses from an imported txt file containing center coordinates. Thanks to this website, it was made and worked really well. But I'm facing another problem. Although all of Toruses are showed by the script, I would like to show one of them by user's choices and erase it and show another one if the user choose the another one. Or I would like to show the Toruses one by one by using the function of Timer or Animation. Sorry for this mess explanation, but I would really appreciate if someone helped me. Here is the script and some lines(Atom`s coordinates) from my txt file.

import bpy
import math
from bpy.types import Operator
from bpy.types import Panel

class MeshGenTool():
    @classmethod
    def main(cls, context):
        scene = context.scene
        objs = importFile(scene['File'])
        for obj in objs:
            bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_torus_add(
                location=obj[0], rotation=(math.pi/2, math.pi/2, math.pi/2))
            obj=bpy.context.scene.objects.active
            mat=bpy.data.materials.new('Torus')
            mat.diffuse_color=(1.0, 0, 0)
            mat.alpha=0.8
            obj.data.materials.append(mat)
            MyMesh = context.object
            Mymesh.name = "MyMesh"

class MeshGenButton(bpy.types.Operator):
    """Execute generation"""
    bl_idname = "object.simple_operator"
    bl_label = "Generate"

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls, context):
        scene = context.scene
        filevalid = (scene.File is not "")
        return filevalid is True

    def execute(self, context):
        MeshGenTool.main(context)
        return {'FINISHED'}

def importFile(File):
    obj_loc = ()
    obj_dia = 1
    obj_data = ()
    objs = []
    f = open(File, 'r')
    for line in f:
        if line.startswith('ATOM'):
            words = line.split()
            obj_loc = (float(words[6]), float(words[7]), float(words[8]))
            obj_data = (obj_loc, obj_dia)
            objs.append(obj_data)
    return objs

class VIEW3D_PT_Blank1_Blank2(Panel):
    bl_space_type = 'VIEW_3D'
    bl_region_type = 'TOOLS'
    bl_category = "Import Atom Coords"
    bl_context = "objectmode"
    bl_label = "Import Coords"

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        scene = context.scene
        row = layout.row()
        col = layout.column(align=True)
        col.prop(scene, "File")
        col.operator(
            "object.simple_operator", text="Add items",
            icon='MESH_TORUS')

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(VIEW3D_PT_Blank1_Blank2)
    bpy.utils.register_class(MeshGenButton)
    bpy.types.Scene.File = bpy.props.StringProperty(
         name="File",
         description="Path of File to read from",
         default="",
         subtype='FILE_PATH')

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(VIEW3D_PT_Blank1_Blank2)
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(MeshGenButton)
    del bpy.types.Scene.File

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

CRYST1   65.961   65.961   65.961  90.00  90.00  90.00 P 1           1

ATOM      1  N   GLN X   1      32.110  46.350  52.070  1.00  0.00
ATOM      2  H1  GLN X   1      32.470  45.850  52.870  1.00  0.00
ATOM      3  H2  GLN X   1      32.931  46.641  51.559  1.00  0.00
ATOM      4  H3  GLN X   1      31.568  47.112  52.451  1.00  0.00
ATOM      5  CA  GLN X   1      31.200  45.480  51.230  1.00  0.00
ATOM      6  HA  GLN X   1      30.402  45.041  51.829  1.00  0.00
ATOM      7  CB  GLN X   1      30.390  46.250  50.180  1.00  0.00
ATOM      8  HB1 GLN X   1      30.811  46.160  49.179  1.00  0.00

If you show some object (a torus) by user action it seems like a [game] description.  You may want to search Blenders game engine or some other game engine.
The
hide_render and hide Python attributes, the eye and the camera icon in the outliner window
can be set to True or False to assist you in your goal.  Or you may insert keyframes or individual as scripts opposed to frame change handlers.

BSE Link Show and Hide child objects along with Parent
Your code in your question may benefit by placing all the items in a (group) which can source of an iteration in Python (for loop) and used with other ideas later in this proposed answer.  A small number of copy/paste actions can be done manually with regard to your patience.
If you want to an animation with no user control I suggest you see the topic of [particles].  Particles have location and render visibility which may interest you or allow you to think about your task differently.  You may employ 1 or more Particle Modifiers.
If you do not want to use particles then with a script I suggest you use a frame change handler.
Please search
frame_change_post and
frame_change_pre

and modify the render visibility to True or False.

This proposed answer are high level remarks to guide you in the correct direction and (not) a tutorial.


How do I move game pieces around a three dimensional board in a turn based game? I have the board made, and some rudimentary pieces. I need to figure out how to use the game engine to move the pieces around. I do not want to write script yet that actually plays the game, because it needs a lot of play testing to work out any issues. I've watched several game engine tutorials, but none I find relate specifically to moving pieces around on a 3D object like this. Any ideas about where I can look for this type of info? I will continue to work on better renditions of the board and pieces while I'm learning the rest of what I need to know.

Represent the board using a more abstract notation. Essentially, you need a way to store co-ordinates in 3D space.

One way would be to place empties at all possible piece locations. Then you can snap to them. This is quite a limited approach. A better solution is to use a mathematical representation. For example, a sphere is very easily notated in ... spherical co-ordinates (two angles and a radius). Thus to snap a piece to a location is just a coordinate conversion issue. An easy way to think about this if you don't have experience with spherical coordinate systems is if you have a single piece at the top of the board, parent it to an empty in the middle of the board, and then rotate the empty. The piece will follow the surface of the sphere.

You will need python for this for the reasons pointed out by Quacksilber. I can think of ways to do it using animations and logic bricks but it will be a huge huge huge effort that will be very tedious.

I am quite interested in your game. Looks a bit like chess? Programming chess is never easy at the best of times (aka a flat board)

I think, the easiest way would be using a flat baord, I guess it's nearly impossible to do the 3D-board version without python scripts. The only way I see to move the figures on a 3D-board is by animating every figure, placing it manually on the fields, one "frame" per position. But that would cause a total mess if you want to move them all around - allready for a single figure you would have to connect one logic brick per field on your board. So let's say there 50 fields, multiply with let's say 40 figures makes around 2000 logic bricks you'd need to connect by hand. (If not using scripts)

By using a flat baord:
You probably might search for videos on "point and click", so by clicking on a field, the selected figure would go to it. Then you should also look for the mouse-sensor option "mouse over", which tells you, whether the cursor is placed over an object (wich you can specificate by using game properties).
Firstival, you should declare game properties like "turn" and "selected figures".

Please tell me, if you consider using a flat board, if not I could tell you more about the action-animation way and if using a flat board feel free to ask about the property stuff! :)


Objects in edit mode are all black I have created two bezier circles, then converted them to meshes. When I press tab to enter edit mode, the objects appear completely black.

You can see the exact tutorial I am following at 6:20 of this video

Why do they appear black, and not have any subdivisions? Is this a problem with blender, or is there a setting I need to change?

Edit Mode

Edit Mode + Wireframe view

From what i can see in the image your object has about 166000 Vertices. In Edit Mode vertices are displayed in a certain size independent from the polygon size, so it may well be that you only see the black vertices, while all edges are hidden because of the vertex "display size". Here is an example with 4 rings of increasing vertex density:

Also none of your vertices is selected right now, so this would explain why the mesh appears in black. So i guess when you hit A then your rings will turn from black to light orange (the color of selected vertices)

Maybe you had added a subdivision modifier to your Curve ? When converting your curve to a mesh the subdivision modifier would be applied...

What fixed this issue for me is:
Material>shading> enable the checkbox that


How can X, Y, Z and W go above one in a quaternion animation on Blender? I am trying to import a collada file generated by Maya on Blender and that file was exported using what I think is the correct representation of a quaternion (x, y, z and w elements are between 0 and 1) and that file is not imported correctly by blender.

I am not an expert in mathematics but as far as I know, the elements x, y, z and w on quaternions are normalized, so they should never go above 1, they always vary between 0 and 1. So, Maya is correct.

When I create a quaternion animation on Blender, I see that Blender allows these elements to go above 1 and apparently the sky is the limit.

How can that be? Is there a way to make Blender work with quaternions between 0 and 1 and import that file correctly?

But....Blender does work with quaternions between 0 and 1.

There's an interesting video put out by Nathan Vegdahl (that's part of his Humane Rigging series) that discusses quaternions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRD0PgsY3pU&index=14&list=PLE211C8C41F1AFBAB
If you go to about 10:31 in the video, it talks about quaternions only being valid between 0 and 1. By 11:09, he mentions what Blender does with values greater than 1.

Not sure what would prevent the file from being imported correctly.

This link is semi-related, in that it uses similar logic as to the resetting of values in rotation.

For your case however:

You can parse your file to the following logic, to solve your particular problem.

I will use pseudo code to represent it, and if time allows, or somebody else can implement it, then feel free to modify the answer to suit, in my case I'm not all that familiar with Quanterions (hoping the value of 1 = 1 Revolution), or the Collada file format, so I don't know how these values live in terms of storage, however the logic should suffice.

#for every place this occurs replace the target with this logic
if axis.rotation >= 0.0000000000 && axis.rotation <= 1.0000000000:
    #then do nothing
else:
    return float("0." + str(axis.rotation).split('.')[1])

Like So


How do I make faces and vertices invisible in viewport? I started learning Blender recently, however once I got to a point in a tutorial, it showed faces and vertices being invisible (2nd image), my view doesn't show this, despite, as far as I'm aware, having the same settings as in the tutorial, how do I make these become invisible? I'm sure it's a fairly simple fix, but the tutorial I'm using didn't have any information on how to change this

In your first picture, we see a cup of tea in object mode. No big deal.
In the second one, we see a cup of tea in edit mode. With a subdivision modifier display. But with optimal display On.

My guess is, your tutorial shows you a mesh modeled with a subdivision modifier, and the authors has it set so that in edit mode, the subdivision modifier displays a preview of its effect (that's the default behavior), but has the Optimal Display option checked on so that it doesn't draw the created geometry's wires:


Overlaying multiple textures in one I have generated a 3d Modle with Meshroom and when I import it in Blender it has three Materials on it each with one of the three textures generated:

I am trying to combine the Three materials into one but whatever I try it does not work properly:

I have tried to get a mask from the black of the images but it didn't work either.

Here is the model with the images. Thank you for your time.
The model might look slightly different because I have already cleaned the mesh up a bit. And I also was not able to export a single texture in meshroom it crashed.

You can do it by two ways.
First notice the UV map:

It is made as 3 parts, each corresponding to a texture.
So you can either use the new UDIM features of Blender or calculate it in a node tree.
Using UDIM tiles
Create a UDIM texture in the image editor. Check "Tiled":

Add each of the textures to it (in the correct order):

From the image tab on the right, open the first image from disk with the folder button.
Once done use the "+" on the right of the tile list. Open the second image.
Use the "+" and open the third image.
At the end, you should see that:

Now you can simply use the UDIM image as a normal image in the material editor:

Without UDIM feature
If your version of Blender does not have UDIM.
You can use the following nodes, testing the UV map parts with math nodes.

The model you are using actually has three separate materials you need to use. There's a drop down menu in the middle of your screen next to the material name. I have circled it in this image.

The textures conveniently have the name of the image you need to use to texture them, so adding the right one is pretty straight-forward. You don't need to do any mixing at all. All you need to do is hook the image texture node directly into the base color of the Principled BSDF shader node.


How to prevent legs from stretching when moving other parts of body? I wanted to move this part of the leg as highlighted in the image

As you can see this part of the leg becomes stretched and thinned really weirdly. Does anyone know how to prevent the leg from becoming thinned and stretched really weirdly and to prevent the dimensions from changing?

There are some tips to fix your problem.

subdivide
weight paint
preserve volume

1. subdivide

For a "good" rigging, your model seems to be too low poly. I suggest you add some loop cuts (near the joint) or add a subdivision surface modifier above the armature modifier.
Make sure that your new vertecies have appropriate vertex weights.

2. weight paint

By using weight painting, you can manipulate "the influence of the bone on a certain vertex". If some of your vertecies seem to move too much, decrease the vertex weight, mainly at the vertex paint mode.

3. preserve volume

At the Armature modifier panel, there is a check box labeled "preseve volume". Ticking it may improve your armature deform.

i recommend setting up IK since you arent animating using rotation alone.


Rendering: Excluding a layer while keeping it's influence (Masking?) I am making this Christmas Tree but the problem is that I can't render the whole scene in one go because of too many particles. So I have rendered my tree and now I want to render only tinsels wrapped around the tree but I want it as png with alpha so that I can add them together as layers.
So how can I do this?
Thanks.

Tree

Tinsel

It should work if you replace the transparent with a holdout shader. However that doesn't solve the Memory issue.
There's a fairly easy solution, which of course doesn't work in all cases.
In post you can use the Z-pass in order to combine renderlayers.
Compositor -> SHIFT A -> Color -> Z-Combine.
It is intended to do what you want, but it will produce strange results when MB or DoF is involved.

In my own opinion the only way do so in Blender 2.8* is to override the hidden but influencing materials with Camera ray to Transparent setup:

Diffuse BSDF must be replaced with your Node setup.


How to avoid overlaping corners on hard surface modeling? i´m trying to model this armor piece but im getting overlaping geometry in some corners using bevel modifier with bevel weight and subsurf.

The only way i can manage to get rid of them is by adding edge loops but with that i can´t keep the roundness of my object.

Any help, advice or suggestions are much appreciated, thanks in advance.
If someone wants to take a look at the mesh in blender here´s a download link:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1wat10y8BVTwcdP_rpkes6gixkH9rZwMn

i say it's the mirror and subdiv-suf modifiers, mess around with their positions in the stack. Mine seems fine though.


Gltf export with animation not working I'm trying to export a .gltf with animation, but it doesn't work. I turned on "animation" in the export window, but it doesn't export animation. if I then import the .gltf back into blender, the object is exactly the same only without animation ...

(I work with the blender version: 2.81.16)

I have same problem at 2.81 and automatically resolved at 2.83.
For migration to 2.83 attention to project import routine. It make some change at object and some minor options.


Cannot link group to a scene My scene file is a group of buildings, all linked in from separate files, no problem. but on the new building I am working on, I have selected all objects and grouped them,as before, but when I go to link the group into the main scene, I have no group option. (In the building file the group is shown in outliner). Can anybody help please?

I think I have cracked it! The file I was trying to link in to had some existing objects selected, so I pressed A to deselect, and my grouped file showed up. Magic.


How do I make objects translucent but keep background images solid? First of all, new to Blender (about 2 months now) so if this seems like a basic question, I apologize.  Here is my situation..

When modeling, I am using the Background Image for referencing front, back, and sides.  I am able to set the opacity/transparency of the images and model with the objects, but I am trying to do the reverse.

I am trying to figure how to set the opacity of all the objects in my viewport to be translucent, while leaving the Background Images with full solid opacity.  This way, I can easily see my drawing even through my objects.

When I do the translucent images, the lines begin to get hard for me to see.

Welcome to Blender Stack Exchange!

In Blender 2.8 and on, there is an option to enable translucency in a scene, called X-Ray. It can be found in the shading options in the viewport.

Once that is enabled, everything in the scene goes translucent. Images may also go translucent depending on how you imported them. If you import your reference by going Shift+A, >Image >Reference they will stay fully opaque.

I think you want to use a PNG file with a transparent background to start with, this can be done in most photo editing software's like Photoshop or the free GIMP program.


How can I create a toggle 'view to selected' hotkey? I've changed my 'view to selected' hotkey and would like to make it a toggle shortcut that allows me either to focus on the selected object or toggle back to the whole scene. Can anyone help me with that?

Use the "forward slash (/)"  in the number pad on your keyboard to toggle 'View Selected'

View to Selected

Goto>Tool Shelf
Look for "Display Tab" at the corners where there are other Tabs. You will see "View to Selected" in the display tab options.!

Click here to view image illustration


Export Blender 2.79 PBR shader to Unreal Physical based material this is my first question on stack exchange :)

If I've created and applied a material to an object using Blender's PBR shader. How do I bake out the nodes I have textures assigned to?
For example I have textures assigned to the metallic, roughness Transmission and Normal nodes.
I was expecting to see Bake options that correspond to my PBR nodes, which I could select, bake out and plug into Unreal's PB material shader.
Assuming that I should indeed be baking out my PBR material what bake options should I be using? Is my workflow incorrect?

Thanks :)

Bit of a late answer, but I have recently released an add-on for Blender 2.8 to do exactly this simply and easily (though admittedly not quickly - baking in Blender, like rendering, takes time).

Documentation here: http://www.toohey.co.uk/SimpleBake/

Available here: https://gumroad.com/l/mzYoz

It is also possible to do this manually. In a nutshell, you need to create an image within Blender (in the UV Image Editor) and add an image node to every material you are using set to that image. That image node needs to be selected in every material, though it doesn't need to be "hooked up" to anything at all. It just floats there.

The best way is to then take each input to your Principled BSDF shader one by one, run it through an Emission shader (connected to the Material Output in place of the Principled BSDF you had before) and then bake emission.

It's a bit of a long and painful process if you have an object with lots of materials - hence why I wrote the add-on.


How can I get the materials used in an array's caps to be properly assigned? After building an object for an array, and its start and end caps, I added materials to the objects. The caps appear with the materials in the wrong place. The objects themselves have the materials where they should be, but when they appear as part of the array, they are in the wrong place.

Deleting the material assignments and the array modifier and redoing them all hasn't helped. I don't think there are any normal issues. The objects that are the caps display properly, it's only when displayed as part of the array that they are wrong.

As this seems like an odd thing, I've included the file.

I took a look at your blend.

It seems that the order of materials matters when using the start/end caps in an array modifier (maybe because of material ID's!?). Not sure why it works this way or if its a bug.

Notice on my RGB pic of materials the colors match the slot number on all objects.

However in yours, the metal brush and mirror are swapped. I guess this "swap" does not carry over in the caps of the array modifier.

So just make sure all the objects have the same material on the same slot number.

To make a black paint in vertex paint mode (with face selection masking for painting) and in node editor, mix the two materials. Connect an attribute node to the fac in a mix shader, from the color output. And write name in your Vertex Color input field.


Is there a way to make an emission shader effect in blender engine? I'm trying to remake these materials in the blender engine, I can do the grey one of course, but I have no idea how to make the emission ones, is there a way?

The best option is to switch to cycles and use the cycles emission shader. I am guessing you have never heard of it... you can do that by moving your cursor to the top and changing your render to cycles render. next go to your materials panel and click on the box that says diffuse and change it to an emission. If you need clarification on any of these steps just ask.


Apply color ramp to a face? I am trying to apply a color gradient to single face of a mesh, selected using the edit view. I made a color ramp in the texture view but I can't figure out for the life of me how to paint that onto the mesh. It looks like only material tab changes the render. How can I use the color ramp from the textures tab on the face?

The Material -> gradient only has a black/white gradient, how do I change the color of that?

You're using cycles so you'll need a node setup, similar to this

where you see that there are two materials. The "gradient" one is "assigned" to the single face, while all the rest uses the default grey one.

The material needs a factor that rules the Colorramp transition, provided by a Gradient Texture, which needs the coordinates to be mapped to that face only: for this you need a UVmap: in edit mode select only the face, press U and select "unwrap". Done.

you have to create a new material for that face then select it in edit mode then use "assign" it to that face
you should uv unwrapp your model or at least that face since it's going to contain a texture


Remap spacebar to last action/command? Coming from an Autocad layout, it's so convenient to repeat the last command/action by hitting the spacebar, anyway to do that in Blender?

Repeat Last (Shift+R) should do the trick:

You might want to try deleting the space bar's default "play animation" setting and then try doing it.


Glow effect invisible on transparent background I'm trying to render a lightsaber on a transparent background to use as game sprites. I've followed a tutorial on youtube to create the glow/blur effect and it worked great on a black background but it's completely invisible on a transparent background.
I figured I had to put an alpha channel node somewhere to make it work but I tried all the "alpha" named nodes all over the place and without success.

This is how the node setup looks like

Here is the blend file if you want to take a closer look.

EDIT: Found a solution/workaround. Doesn't look as good as before but it's close enough.

There is a fundamental problem with glows. Glow cannot be merged into a composite with alpha, because such layer is then composited using the 'mix/normal' color operation. What you need is having the glow separate and combine it with add/dodge. Here is the explanation:

If the Glow layer (foreground) is lighter than Background, the Normal/Mix color operation with alpha will not be as bright as original Add operation with alpha. If the Background is lighter than the glow (a color glow on white) - the end result will be darker than Background leaving unwanted effect!

That's why you never ever ever composite color glows into a single merged layer with alpha that's supposed to be overlayed with Mix/Normal mode over some other than complete black background.

Now let's say you have object with a color glow on black background and you need to make this background transparent. Here is how you correctly do it:

You break down the image into channels and use each channel as alpha for a solid red green and blue - what this is is separating the background per channel. As it is black the alpha of the background is 0. You then add the colored channels with alpha together to reconstruct the image. Simple.

With nodes when adding the channels together turn Include alpha of second input on:

What I would personally do, is to use the Difference Key or Color Key node with the version with a black background. Both nodes provide the transparent color and b&w matte.


How to render voxels? I have a voxel representation of a model of the human body in numpy and would like to render it directly in Blender.  Is there a file format for this?  Most of the ones I've seen use polygonal meshes (ie. .obj files).  In other words, could one render Minecraft directly in Blender?  (or if not, in Unity3D, Maya, UnrealEngine, or any other popular modeling 3-D software?)

While there are several file formats used for voxel data, they are used for volumetric data, such as smoke and fluid, which I doubt will help you.

As you have the data in numpy, I would suggest letting numpy save the data to file using numpy.save, but if you are using numpy to generate the data you can use numpy in blender and not use a file format at all.

By creating your selection of block types, you can then use a script to duplicate a block into each position.

import bpy
import numpy as np

objs = bpy.data.objects
scn = bpy.context.scene

scene_objs = [
        objs['sand'],
        objs['grass'],
        objs['water'],
        ]

voxel_data = np.array([
        [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1],
        [1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1],
        [1, 0, 2, 0, 2, 0, 1],
        [1, 0, 2, 0, 2, 0, 1],
        [1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1],
        [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1],
        [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1],
        ])

for x in range(voxel_data.shape[0]):
    for y in range(voxel_data.shape[1]):
        obj = scene_objs[voxel_data[x,y]].copy()
        scn.objects.link(obj)
        obj.location = (x*2.1, y*2.1, 0)


Switching between Image Sequence and Movie Clip for Compositing So I used an image sequence as a video and edited it using masks. However, I want to insead use a movie clip because I will be able to do more things with it.
However, when I replaced the image node with the movie clip node, the scale of the video was changed and all of my masks were misplaced. I don't want to go back frame by frame and change each mask, but I also don't want to render the current video (with the image sequence) because I want to be able to edit the masks if I wanted down the road.

With Image Sequence:

With Movie Clip:

the video seems larger, however I can't zoom out for some reason.
Also, the masks seem to be in the right place, but they do not render as such. I didn't move them or anything, they were automatically there when I put in the movie clip.

Any ideas?

Nevermind, found a workaround.
Just used a scale node on the image.


my curve modifier does not modify my arrayed object around the curve? my curve modifier does not modify my arrayed object around the curve?

The curve modifier has deformation axis options :

Try to click on X, Y or Z. Or check you did not clicked on the "eye" button on the top of the above picture.


Cycles Material "Texture missing" in render? I spent hours on creating a background with matte textures.

No problem, they show up in the Material and the Texture view:

Everything works.

Solid view:

Now I tried to render it and got this:

Pink textures all over the place. I have seriously no idea why Blender keeps doing this. I double checked all textures in the node trees, they are exactly where Blender points them at.

Here is the material:

but they just do not show up in the render.

I have no post-processing so far.

Here my lightpath settings:

I hope somebody can help.

Thanks in advance!

Update!

Apparently it has something to do with an out of memory error (since this is just a background for  gigantic scene with hundreds of textures)

As you can see it doesn't render properly when all objects are visible

But as soon as I hide every object except for example a tree that isn't rendering properly, everything works as it's supposed to

Blender gives no CUDA errors though.. I'm really confused.
I have 10GB or RAM installed and a GTX 550 ti with 1GB btw if that helps

SOLVED

Apparently there was indeed a CUDA out of memory error. It's fixed by just switching to CPU render.

Thanks everyone for their input!!!

Pack all the texture into .blend an then put render .......


How can i make hollow cylinder but to be closed on top and bottom only hollow inside? I want to make a cylinder that is hollow that's simple i did: Cap Fill Type > Nothing

But then the cylinder is open from top and bottom. I want it to be closed and hollow only inside hollow or empty and not open on top and bottom.

Then i want to add a door or to cut some nice square on the cylinder side.
In the end i want to convert this to a unity3d object so i can move inside the cylinder.

The problem is how to make it hollow/empty without keep the top and bottom open?
How to cut/make door ?
How to convert to unity3d object ?

I did this simple tutorial:

Hollow Cylinder

Add a circle mesh.

After that, go into edit mode and extrude it down by selecting all the vertices, pressing E, and then dragging down on the z-axis. Then, select  all the vertices on one side of the cylinder you just made and press F to fill it in, then do the same on the other side. You can use box select to select all the vertices faster (press B and drag out).

youtube channel:  BLENDER BUBBLE.
Title: HOLLOW CYLINDER
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIOpgKswi58


Why doesn't render animation work? I made a rather simple animation using video sequence editor (mostly blinking between two images), but for some reason I cannot render it. When I clicked render animation, all I see in the render result window is the blank "image" and nothing happens. I made the animation in blender 2.8 and I though maybe there is a problem in blender 2.8, but it didn't work (the same file) in blender 2.79 either. This was the second try of the same animation, first rendered fine, but crashed so I had to start over. This is what I get:
I can render image and get the first image of the video.

Here is the title and ID for a youtube video that explains step by step how to render an animation.  He is excellent at explaining things and would do it better than I.  Hope it helps.
Title:  How to Render Animations in Blender
ID: dd5RT8rEPqU
Here's the link:  RenderingVideo


How to create golf ball with dips in each dips? What is the fastest way to create a dipped golf ball ? What I call dipped golf ball is a golf ball with three dips in each dip.

I followed this tutorial in order to create a golf ball but I can't repeat the operation in each dip.

EDIT: to be clear, this is what I call a dip:

When you click the faces and press I key and nothing happens reason

Individual options is off

To ON u have to press again I key

And with the faces selected S to Scale

A small preview of the ball


PBR dielectric material in luxrender? I have found many tutorials on PBR dielectric materials in cycles, but how do I do this in luxrender? In the past I would use a glossy material, but it handles roughness diffrently.

I believe the Glossy material type in luxrender does what you want out of the box.

Unlike the glossy shader in cycles, the luxrender glossy material includes a "matte" component (diffuse in cycles-speak), making it loosely analogous to the following cycles setup:

Luxrender glossy node for reference:

Render comparison

Cycles

Luxrender

I'm not really sure why the cycles render is dimmer than the luxrender example in this case. The difference appears to be in the diffuse part of things. If someone knows what's going on here, I'd definitely like to hear about it

I've been trying to create a phisically correct glossy material in luxrender for Blender for more than two weeks. Seriously, I'm nowhere near a beginner in photo-realistic rendering (I been working in this since good old POV-Ray 3.0 years :). I've tried every known way to achieve this task: glossy material, a matte base plus a glossy_coating, layered, car_paint, etc. To my astonishment, all of them lack the same excess of shine (in fact, there's a way: chosing one of the predefined car-paint shaders, which have no way to be edited -even color; if you swich to manual settings, the material fails). This is the real reason for the difference between Cycles (correct) and Luxrender (too bright). So, to my knowledge THERE IS ACTUALLY NO WAY TO ACHIVE A PHISICALLY CORRECT GLOSSY MATERIAL IN LUXRENDER. I know this is hard to believe, but sadly, after my thoroughly tests and comparisons with other engines (Indigo, Cycles, Mitsuba, and Yafaray). This is is my conclusion:
"Lux glossy material is buggy: at shallow angles (object contours) it is not energy conserving (it reflects more light than it receives)"


Just tip when moving an object https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGV5LPLwMgk

In this tutorial to unity, he makes a river and animates it. But at 1:12
 when he moves the object it moves the "waves" in that direction.

But when I try to do it just does the moves at 1:09
I am completely new to the blender I have been stuck on this for ages....
Thank you for your help or any type of advice!

If i understood is that you need the wave to be moved.

Add a Empty

In the Displacement Modifier tab -> Texture Coordinator -> Object

Below in object select empty. Select the axis which you want to move in my case its Y axis

Select the empty and move it.

You get this result


"active object is not a selected mesh" error Trying to join different meshes together.

In object mode, if I select a couple of objects and try to join them I get the error active object is not a selected mesh.

If I select the meshes, it puts me into Edit Mode and the join command is not visible.

If I select meshes in edit mode then change to object mode I get the error no data to join.

It's super confusing.   What am I doing wrong?

What I am actually trying to do is to simplify a model, by joining parts with similar shaders together, for import into three.js . I want less data in the json file and want to make it simpler to animate in three.js, with less objects. Is there a better way to go about this?

In order for selected mesh to combine make sure one of these objects is text highlighted in the outliner, it's a means for Blender to decide which part inherits the other parts. If none of the parts are text highlighted you will get that error message and they won't combine.

You can only do two objects at a time.(select the two objects you want to combine then hit Ctrl j)


Any way to temporary hide wire frame in edit mode (2.80)? I would like to be able to toggle wire frame visibility off and on without exiting edit mode, to be able to see the surface better, but without changing the camera's rotation origin (using rotate around selected option). When I exit edit mode, the camera rotates around the object's origin, which makes it a pain to check out small areas on large objects.

Thanks for any advice,
Robert

You can just press Shift + Z. Also you can customize it as you want in preferences.


Is it possible to create a loop with Hair Dynamics? I have a walk cycle of a character I created that uses hair strands with dynamics turned on.

I was wondering if it was possible to make the hair dynamics loop along with the animation. Because as of right now, every time the animation loops, the hair physics restart which looks strange.

if you're able to have the forces on the hair dynamics be equal in the beginning and the end of the loop, you can bake the hair from a negative frame to get it to settle in the same position that it will be in on the final frame of the animation.

Have you took a looks at this ?

https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?382857-Baking-scenes-with-fur-and-hair-dynamics-Library-linked-rigs

Might help...


Why is there no option to convert a mesh to metaball object? I realize this wouldn't be optimal for detailed meshes, but it would certainly be useful for creating others.

Sometimes I have meshes I'd like to join together, only I'd like them to interact as if they were metas.

One Meta from Mesh Exterior?

Since metas look similar to a remesh modifier with low poly, couldn't the add-on just lower the poly count as much as necessary (and only use the object outline as a guide) before converting to meta?

Multiple Metas as One?

The answer to this question: "Are there any non-standard meta objects available?" says it's not possible with python programming but suggests there may be a work around if the shape is composed using many meatballs. I feel there must be some other reason a "convert to meta" add-on isn't available.

One indirect way to achieve this will be using a grid distributed particle system, with a meta-ball as the particle object.

Here are the important particle system settings for doing this:

And here's the meta version vs. the original:

You can also set the overall resolution via the metaball's resolution property.

Since these are all fairly simple PS properties, it wouldn't be difficult to automate them as a script or addon.

Having said that - Could you potentially get what you want by adding a subsurface modifier to your original meshes (possibly with quite a lot of creasing so you don't lose as much of the original shape as normal) and then joining them together and manually adding faces over the join?

Subsurfs with low-poly control cage meshes often look quite similar to metaballs, joining with a rather organic looking join.


The blender won't start up I'm completly new with all of this.
I've downloaded blender from official website, but it doesn't work.

When I try to opend blender.exe it shows console for quarter of a second and closes with no notification from windows.

I menaged to catch console on screenshot, here it is.

I tried to reinstall it three times, but, sadly, nothing works

It's windows 7 64

I hope I can get some help, that would be great :)

(I'm not too good witch computer nor English, so don't get too complicated with wording please?...)

My instance of Blender mysteriously stopped working on Win 10 64-bit.  The Visual Studio debugger said, "unhandled exception 0xc0000904."

I uninstalled Blender 2.75, re-installed the MS Visual Studio redistributable (msvcr120.dll), installed Blender 2.77, went through the usual windows service troubleshooting steps starting from a clean boot.  All no help.

I finally ran the Program Compatibility troubleshooter, the diagnostics log in %appdata%/temp said "python incompatible".

So I deleted the PYTHONPATH environment variable.  Voila! Now Blender starts fine.


Proportional edit mode can't be activated Need to grab that selected vertex that you can see on the screenshot using "Proportional Editing". However, even though I activated this mode, every time when I press "G" and try to grab the vertex, the circle of proportional editing does not appear. Initially, there was a thought that circle is large a little bit so I was trying to use a scroll to make it more small, but there is not circle at all. How to solve this issue?

3D cursor should be aligned with the object you edit.


How to use dual scroll wheel mouse in Blender? I've seen some mice with an extra scroll wheel like the Logitech MX Revolution. Is it possible to use this in Blender? If so, what is a good use for it?

I currently have a MX518 mouse, which has these buttons

Left / Right / Middle-scroll
Resolution switch (pointless)
Menu button (could be usable)
Back / Forward button on thumb

I'm about to buy a new mouse now, and I'd like to know if it's any point with two scroll wheels.

Also, I'd like any tips on mice that are recommended to increase effeciency in Blender, for example using multiple buttons for common commands.

Or is it simply better to just have your hand on the keyboard (which I guess I do anyways) on S, G, R, etc?

A hacky solution could be use AutoHotkey script:

*WheelLeft::Send % ((A_PriorHotkey=A_ThisHotkey)&&(A_TimeSincePriorHotkey<20))?"":"{Blind}{F14}"
*WheelRight::Send % ((A_PriorHotkey=A_ThisHotkey)&&(A_TimeSincePriorHotkey<20))?"":"{Blind}{F15}"

And then use HorizontalScroll as it was F14 and F15 that is normally unavailable in most keyboards. (it works with modifiers keys also)

I personally use a Logitech G602 gaming mouse. 11 programmable buttons and the Gaming Software allows you to create a rather dizzying array of commands and functions which you then drag and drop to assign them to a specific button. It automatically changes to the appropriate profile depending on which program is active. There is also a profile shift command so you can make different profiles for the same program and then shift back and forth between them. I have all my common tasks such as all transformations, toggle edit mode, create object, etc... mapped to specific buttons on the mouse and find that it greatly speeds up my workflow.


Blender Cycles: baked texture is completely black When I try to bake a texture in Cycles, the baked texture is completely black, however it looks fine on the Render Preview. I have tried recalculating normals, but it didn´t fix the issue. I have no idea what else to do. Here I have the .blend file: http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=48466

It turned out that I tried to render Diffuse, but the Principled shader does not render diffuse. Rendering Glossy worked.

I can only use Blender 2.79 (no GPU), and I ran into this problem many times trying to cut down on render time. I read the Blender manual, and it said that the material out node must be selected to properly bake textures. I tried it and I haven't been getting the black textures any more.


Can I make smoke to cast light? Is there any way to cause (or fake) light emission from the fire within a smoke simulation? Obviously smoke doesn't work in Cycles but is it possible in BI for the flames to contribute light to the scene in the same way that FumeFX does in 3ds Max?

Alternatively is it possible to convert a flame into a cloud of particles in order to hack this somehow on a different pass?

What I do is in the Blender Internal Renderer select the material that is going to have light cast on it. Then enable mirroring and turn down the glossiness.

You can adjust the number of samples it uses for smoother results.

Sorry for the wait, lack of internet at my home right now.

I think that if you go to your texture influence properties for your domain object (voxel data), and check 'emission' it should work.


Glass render problem I am trying to render a lightbulb in cycles.  I am still very new to this, but I cannot get the material correct and it is bugging me.  I have the IOR at 1.5. I also set the film to transparent, but that is not showing up either.

I would like it to look like this:
http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/494548

Here's the blend file:

Any ideas?

Thanks
Greg

To improve:

Add thickness to the glass. Otherwise, it will be considered as a big block of glass, which certainly makes it unrealistic. You can add a Solidify modifier to it, with a very small thickness value:

Add a "skybox" to hold all objects in. It can be told from the reference image that there seems to be an indoor lighting setup, so you may want to build a simple "photostudio" for that, instead of an open boundless world:

Here is one solution for the lighting setup:

Set a background plane with material nodetree like this:

Create a box with the same material on each face:

In the box, add a few area lamps:

Tweak everything until satisfied.

A test render with comparison:

EDIT:

After reanalyzing the reference case, since it seems a bit "fake", it is very likely that the bulb material can be simulated without refraction property, which means, no glass shader needed, and no Solidify modifier needed.

So it could be a mixture of Glossy and Transparent:

Test render with comparison:

NOTE: Since no calculation for refraction, it is much quicker to render. Time can be dramatically saved in this way.

I think there are many things to explain. You need almost an entire process of creating a scene with materials, lightning and setup rendering. There are not "one click" solution. This need study of a lot of things.

In this tutorial you can find some very useful tips how to create what you need.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbc3KMIOuKM


How can I parent objects from different scenes? I have two scenes. Particles in one (blender render), text in the other (Cycles render). I need the camera in the particles scene to move with the camera in the other scene - it is for an intro animation. Is there any way i can do this?

I ran into a problem very much like this when I went to create fireworks. At the time, I assumed the same thing as you, "One must use BR for halo particles." I did not run into the camera problem because I used the Track To Object constraint for the cameras so that they would follow the firework's progress. I set the alpha to none and used the alpha over node in the compositor to combine the two scenes.

The assumption that one must use BR for halo particles, however, is not true.

Using the point density node as shown in this tutorial will allow you to use Cycles to render halo particles.

Alternately, to answer the question you asked...

Scenes

I used the default Blender startup file for my example, as it has a camera, light source, and object. The first thing I did is duplicate the scene by pressing New Scene -> Full Copy.

Animation

Go back to the original scene and insert a key frame at frame one, move the camera, and then insert one at a later frame. The camera should now move when you play the animation. Next, go to the Animation Screen Layout. Make sure the scene selected is not the one with the moving camera. Select the non-moving camera. Go to the Dope Sheet panel and change the type from Dope Sheet to Action Editor (the same way you would change from Object to Edit mode in the 3D View). Where it says + New along the bottom options, click on the dropdown menu to the left side, the same way you would select an old material rather than creating a new material. Somewhere in there should be something resembling CameraAction, or Camera.001Action (the name of the moving camera followed by Action). Click on this. The movement of the two cameras should now be linked.


How can I select every Nth edge in only one direction on a plane? Using Nth in shortest path requires selecting every every length of vertices.
I've tried manipulating checker select.
Select similar selects all edges in one direction. Adjusting the threshold doesn't help.
I don't know how to write for select pattern.
All the other similar questions don't help.

I'd like this pattern.

You can do this in 3 easy steps:

Edge select one Edge with Alt + RMB.
Click on Select > Checker Deselect (F6 for Nth Selection, Skip and Offset)
Click on Select > Edge Rings

You just have to deselect the top and the bottom edge. In the .gif it is done with Shift + Alt + RMB.

Further Reading on this answer.

Further Information:

After using Checker Deselect you can adjust the desired Nth Selection at the bottom in the Toolshelf Panel or by pressing F6.

  Nth Selection
        Number of points to select.
  Skip
        Number of points to skip.
  Offset
        Offests at what point to start at.

quoted from the Manual

With much less steps than DrRiisTabs solution you can just:

Alternate loop select CtrlAltRMB a vertical edge row:

Add the following vertical loops to your selection via ShiftCtrlAltRMB:

This is the only part where you have to walk along one side of your whole plane and select every other vertical loop. Unfortunately, the Repeat Last command doesn't work for Selections.
Border (B)- Deselect (ShiftLMB-drag) your bottom and top row to get your final result.


Is there a software to reverse normal maps? Said software would combine normal map with low poly mesh and re-create the high poly that was used to create it.
Does this software exist?

The process you are describing is called "Baking". You can follow this process to do this, baking from selected to the active mesh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnipHJAQJbQ
Marmoset is a dedicated baking tool and has a lot of features and optimizations that make it especially efficient. You can also do this in substance painter. Other 3d softwares also support baking, but are not their specialty


Having issues with Low Poly Texture Colours Blender Novice here.
I been getting into some basic low poly modelling for unity and have been working on applying a simple solid color texture to one of my trees.

The issue is that the colors seem to mix with adjacent colors in the texture even though the mesh is contained in the center of the color on the UV map.

I have been trying various methods but cant seem to fix it.

Any advice on how to deal with this?

EDIT: I dealt with it mostly by shrinking my meshes even more on the palette and then trying a better seam. Original seam was running along the top of the leaves now running along the bottom darker area and I no longer have the color leak.

As you can see in the image, green is leaking into the trunk of the tree from the color below it in the palette. As well as on the leaves.

you probably have too high the specularity of the material, what I'm showing you is an example in blender render, I'm not a render professional, my area is programming, but I've been studying for almost 4 years and today I work with shading language, and I'm still using BGE.

in conclusion you have to lower the specularity of the material so that it does not seem like it is going beyond the spaces of your color palette

I made my palette with 128 X 128 px squares
use unwrap view project, with the View Ortho 1
from the leaves of the trees select some faces from my unwrap and place them in another color to contrast

if you need to expand this answer, just say uqe more you want to know to include it in the answer

You need to "rip" islands in UV editor. Otherwise they are still connected and this is why you see Uv sliding. Rip islands in uv editor, position them on colors. Profit.


Where do the white lines come from in my composite? I'm having this issue for years now, and I'm not sure if I am doing something wrong on my end, or if what I would like to achieve - or expect to see - is even possible. My question is about compositing artifacts when using Blenders mask layers. Let me explain:

In the Blend file provided, there are two objects: Dragon A and B. Each of them is on a separate layer, rendered on a separate render layer, and masked with the other one. So A is masked out by B, and B is masked out by A. Like this:

scene setup

RenderLayers A and B

When I render, I write out two MultiLayer EXRs with 16bit depth. That Stuff, I feed into the following comp:

and it gives me this:

You can clearly see the white lines around the areas where the dragons mask each other.

If I comp in a weird fashion like this:

I get this:

It's not perfect, but still a lot better than the first one. What I am doing is kind of cutting off the bright alpha values, making a 0.75 alpha value equal 1.

My question is: Why do I see the white background shine through after all? Is it something which is fundamentally unchangeable and we have to live with? Am I doing something wrong on my side? Do you have an alternative solution?

Edit

The solution Ray Mairlot came up with solves the issue by only masking one of the two, the other one would exist un-masked underneath, and thus provides a perfect overlay. However, I'd like to still mask one against the other for specific reasons: I'm sending images to a web application, which layers them dynamically (a configurator in essence). There can be 30 or more image layers, each of them needs to be downloaded by the website visitor. If I could mask one part against the other, the individual file size would be smaller. Not really a necessary reason, but that's why the idea came up. The other reason is, if I mask the layers, the individual layers render faster. This can save me some 30% of the render time per configurator (which renders on average for 12 hours).

Those two images you're trying to composite together have "correlated" alphas. The Alpha over operation isn't the appropriate operation for this situation.

The solution is simple: you just have to add those images together, then add their alphas together and assign the resulting alpha to the result of the first addition.

Here's how:

Why alpha-over doesn't work

Alpha over is, like its name states, an "over" operation. Something is over something else, covering it. The alpha channel determines the occlusion of the background by the foreground.

When you inspect the alpha-over formula for two associated (premultiplied) images, you'll see it's just an addition, but before that addition the alpha channel of the foreground is inverted and multiplied on the background, casting a shadow on the pixels that the foreground occludes.

Associated Alpha Over Operation:

Foreground.RGB + ( ( 1.0 - Foreground.Alpha ) * Background.RGB )

Porter Duff Alpha Merge Operation Uncorrelated Geometry:

Alpha.A + Alpha.B - ( Alpha.A * Alpha.B )

Correlated Geometry:

Alpha.A + Alpha.B

When alphas are correlated, like in your example, there is no foreground-background situation. It's rather filling a hole in one image with the other image.

The hole and the image that will cover it fit perfectly, so there is no reason for casting a shadow on the background. There's already a hole in it.
If you use alpha over, the "shadow" of the foreground will be multiplied again on the antialias pixels that are already shadowed by the mask, causing a doubled value of transparency, and that's why you get those semi-transparent pixels where they should be completely opaque.

So, skipping the "over" part by just adding the two plates together works perfectly. In Blender you have to add alphas too and assign the result to the mix.

The problem is that you're overlaying the silver dragon with a white background, before you overlay it on the orange dragon. Just use one alpha-over. One image with an alpha channel goes into one slot and gets overlayed onto another image which goes into the other slot, instead of the white color.


How do I use nodes to combine two images when both have transparent areas? Is there a way to use nodes to combine two images if both the images have transparency (i.e. alpha channels)?

You can use an Alpha over node to automatically handle the alpha mixing:

However, if all you want to do is mix the alpha channels, a normal mix node will do (think of the alpha channel as a gray scale image):

There are a few ways to do this. I will show you the way that worked for me. I drew some images in photoshop with alpha. Here is how to combine two images with alpha using the blender compositor. I found that this is the most reliable method to use for external images.

Final Node Setup:

Final Result:


What sculpting tools would I use to separate a jaw from the skull? I'm pretty new to sculpting and 3d modeling overall and just picked up blender yesterday. I modelled this dinosaur head and now I want to model teeth, but the problem is that my model is made from one mesh (except for the eyes) and there is no oral cavity. So I need to find a way to cut trough the lips so I can have the initial shape of mouth then sculpt it.
I've tried using a subtractive brush, but i couldn't cut across very evenly. I tried using the knife tool in another mode but it didnt cut though, not super sure why it didn't work.
What would be the optimal steps for separating the jaw from everything else?
or would I just have to cut my loses and use the subtractive brush
This is what I have so far:

There is the Boolean Modifier in Blender. It's can be used to separate, merge, and cut off parts of objects/meshes. In your case, you can easily cut the lips and create an oral cavity with it. Then use the Pose brush to open the mouth.
Separate the lips
First, create a "knife". For this, switch to Object Mode (CTRL + TAB). Add a plane (SHIFT + A). Add a Solidify modifier to add some thickness. (The modifiers are located on the right side. Click the blue wrench icon.) Add the Solidify modifier, adjust the Thickness, then apply the modifier (in Blender 2.9, you need to press the little arrow on the right side of the modifier's name). Then scale and rotate the "knife" so you can place it between the lips of your dino head. Use S to scale. While scaling you can (for example) press X to restrict the scale to the X-axis. Use R to rotate, and G to move it around.

Now cut the lips apart. To do so, place the "kife" right at the beginning of the dino's lips between them where you want to separate them. Select the dino's head. Add the Boolean modifier to the head. In the modifier's options select the plane ("knife") as Object value, use the default mode Difference to cut out geometry. Apply the modifier. After that, move the knife a bit further along the lips into the head, apply again a Boolean modifier. Repeat these steps again if needed until you have cut the full length of the lips.

Create the oral cavity
This is very easy to do. Still in Object Mode, just add a sphere, scale it and place the dino's head where the cavity should be. Then select the head, and apply a Boolean modifier with the sphere as Object value and mode Difference.
Open the mouth
Switch to Sculpt mode. Use the Mask brush to mask the upper jaw of the head. This prevents that this area is affected by brushes. Then use the Pose brush with big size to move the lower jaw down. This part is a bit tricky since it still can happen that some vertices from the upper jaw are dragged down. Try to hide the masked area or use the Pose brush at a different spot or angle.

In the Sculpt menu you can hide masked areas and reveal them again.
The added geometry (cavity) has a lower vertex count. Switch on Wireframe overlay or to Edit mode to check it. You can use the Remesh in Sculpt Mode, or activate DynTopo and touch the area with the Clay brush and a very low strength to add needed geometry when you want to sculpt details there.

Enable bool tool from addons then go to side view by hitting 3 numpad and press shift + A and add a single vertex (you should to Enable addon : Add mesh : Extra objects) go to vertex select to an select your single vertex now by Pressing E extrude your vertex and make a line through where you want to make a cut. Extrude the line through the mesh again and just a little thickness . now go in object mode . select  your cutter object and then your dinosaur head and press CTRL + - to Mines what you want from your head , you can use repeat this way for making a hole for mouth too
PM me if you need more help .
GL.


Blender to Unity, UV Map is messy in Blender and in Unity im New to Blender since i was using Cinema4D all the time,

i´ve done a Medieval House out of 5 different Textures, i baked them together into one Texture 4096 by 4096,

now i deleted all materials which were attached to my Blender Model, i Created a new Material and i attached the UV Map to it,

in Objekt Mode it looks fine:

in Render Mode my Model looks Messy i dont know why, i hope someone can help me.

Blend file

Baked texture

This is what I expected. You have two UV maps. The one called UVW is messed up and ruins your render. Take a look at the screenshot below. You either need to get rid of UVW map (indicated by red area) or plug in the correct UV map into your image texture node (indicated by blue area). Hope this helps.


i don't know how to make smoke particles in blender render I'm trying to create an object that emits red smoke from it and i can't find a way to create colored smoke(or ANY smoke). I'm new to this so I don't know how to use Blender too well, can someone please help me? also I'm sorry if the tags are wrong or something (I'm new to this site too).

You click on the header bar then click on object(note: object, not object mode). Go to quick effects then quick smoke


Using python to create a curve and attach its endpoints with hooks to two spheres I'm trying to create a curve with python to depict a bond between two atoms (spheres) like so:

bpy.ops.curve.primitive_bezier_curve_add()
obj = bpy.context.object
obj.data.dimensions = '3D'
obj.data.fill_mode = 'FULL'
obj.data.bevel_depth = self.bevel_depth
obj.data.bevel_resolution = self.bevel_resolution
# set first point to centre of atom_1
obj.data.splines[0].bezier_points[0].co = self.atom_1.locations[0]
obj.data.splines[0].bezier_points[0].handle_left_type = 'VECTOR'
# set second point to centre of atom_2
obj.data.splines[0].bezier_points[1].co = self.atom_2.locations[0]
obj.data.splines[0].bezier_points[1].handle_left_type = 'VECTOR'

The curve endpoints seem to get set to local coordinates and not to the centers of the spheres.

How do I add the hooks to attach the endpoints to the two spheres so that the curve ends stay attached to the spheres when animating the movement of the spheres?

Based on the answer linked by Seppo Silaste I have come up with the following example code which you can modify to fit your application:

import bpy

def hookCurve(o1, o2, scn):
    curve = bpy.data.curves.new("link", 'CURVE')
    spline = curve.splines.new('BEZIER')

    spline.bezier_points.add(1)
    p0 = spline.bezier_points[0]
    p1 = spline.bezier_points[1]
    p0.co = o1.location
    p0.handle_right_type = 'VECTOR'
    p1.co = o2.location
    p1.handle_left_type = 'VECTOR'

    obj = bpy.data.objects.new("link", curve)

    m0 = obj.modifiers.new("alpha", 'HOOK')
    m0.object = o1
    m1 = obj.modifiers.new("beta", 'HOOK')
    m1.object = o2

    scn.objects.link(obj)
    scn.objects.active = obj

    # using anything in bpy.ops is a giant pain in the butt
    bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='EDIT')

    # the mode_set() invalidated the pointers, so get fresh ones
    p0 = curve.splines[0].bezier_points[0]
    p1 = curve.splines[0].bezier_points[1]

    p0.select_control_point=True
    bpy.ops.object.hook_assign(modifier="alpha")

    p0.select_control_point = False
    p1.select_control_point = True
    bpy.ops.object.hook_assign(modifier="beta")

    return obj

o1 = bpy.data.objects['atom 1']
o2 = bpy.data.objects['atom 2']

obj = hookCurve(o1,o2, bpy.context.scene)

As best I can tell blender does not have what you need for Bezier curves.

It does have something for meshes.  There is a hook modifier you can apply to a mesh.  You then specify a foreign object and a Vertex Group that will be hooked to that object.

So replace your Bezier curve with a simple mesh rectangle (or tube or whatever) and add the hook modifiers.

If you need python code to build the mesh, vertex groups, and modifiers reply in the comments and I'll cobble together something concrete.


2.8 Can I automatically remove all vertex groups that are not influencing any mesh? When I assign Apply Automatic Weights I want to then delete all unused vertex for simplicity sake when my character to rig is composed of many mesh parts.

The Delete Unlocked Vertex Group option helps but I wish I didn't have to delete hundreds of vertex groups by hand to begin with. I know sometimes a character to rig is one mesh but for when it isn't I wish there could be a way to just have vertex groups created only if they are influencing the part of the mesh.

eg: I don't need feet and finger vertex groups for the head mesh.

Ideally, if I can remove all vertex groups that are not influencing any mesh with one click would be optimal.

Is there a script or add-on that can help me speed up removing unwanted vertex?

You can just:

select your skeleton
get a Text Editor window
paste the script below & run

import bpy
bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='OBJECT')
skeleton = bpy.context.object

for object in [object for object in bpy.context.scene.objects]:
    if object.type == 'MESH' and len(object.vertex_groups) > 0 and skeleton == object.find_armature():
        for vGroup in object.vertex_groups:
            if skeleton.data.bones.get(vGroup.name) is None:
                object.vertex_groups.remove(vGroup)

I still think the first answer is valid for those searching & do not feel comfortable running scripts to just mass delete everything in advance.  Hence the 2 answers. The question was a year old, and I also assumed the original asker had moved on.

There is an operator bpy.ops.object.vertex_group_remove(all=True).  Since you are going to be adding all new vertex groups when the Armature modifier, seems like just deleting them all BEFORE would be a lot simpler.
I do not know if there is user interface, which will get this called or not, though.


How can I speed up rendering an animation with Cycles? I started to render an animation (of 200 frames), using 1000 samples, at 1920x1080 pixels, of a scene including a fog object and mesh files  (from Alias).
It took almost 10 hours for 1 frame, so I think that something is wrong. Is this a usual amount of render time?
I want to keep the quality as high as possible.
I'm using Cycles rendering with CPU, because when I try to use GPU, Blender shuts down.
Specs:
AMD Ryzen 5 3600- 6 core processor
16 Gb RAM
GTX 1660 SUPER

I'd recommend you use the GPU. Blender probably shuts down because you didn't set it to use the GPU at the preferences tab. Go to Edit > Preferences > System > Set it to the GPU you use, NVIDIA is CUDA, AMD is OpenGl. Other things you can do is optimize the amount of bounces in Render Properties > Light Paths > Max Bounces.


bpy.context.space_data.text throwing error from command line I'm new to Blender and Python, but have programming experience.

I'm writing a script that iterates through all the .stl files in the current directory (current being where the script is), does a few things, then exports them as .fbx files.

When running it from the Scripting screen in Blender, it works great, but I want to run it from the command line.

When I do that it hits an error on this line that grabs the directory where the script resides:

workDir = os.path.dirname(bpy.context.space_data.text.filepath)

The error is:

  AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'text'

Why does this work via the GUI and not the command line? Is there a different command I should be using?

Thanks

In the text editor window the [filepath] refers to file location where you save the script.
In the console window there is no such structure.

import bpy
import datetime

print(datetime.datetime.today())
print(bpy.context.space_data.text.filepath)
print(bpy.data.filepath)

The above was executed in the Script window.  You can compare the results.


makehuman visemes to shape keys for unity I'm very new to blender so bare with me.

The idea is I am trying to get lip syncing to work with my unity game using facial shape keys made from blender.

I have imported a "makehuman" character (mhx2 format) to blender. I know I need Shape keys for a script in unity3d. I am struggling with trying to export shape keys from blender to unity (Exported character as fbx format from blender).

With makehuman import it comes with a whole bunch of visemes. I would be more than happy to export these as shape keys with my model. I have tried setting the viseme then going and manually adding a "New Shape From Mix" shape key. It comes in as 0 being what I want it to look like and 1 being too much. So I move the shape key min range to -1 and max to 0. This doesn't work because the shape key doesn't appear in unity.

Is there a way to export the preset visemes with my character as shape keys? Am I missing something simple?

Since there are not enough details in your question, there are many things that can go wrong.

Two things to note:

1) When you import mhx2 into Blender, you must choose to override the default settings at the import menu at the bottom left:

Override Exported Data: Checked;

Import Human Type: Base, Offset, Face Shapes;

Masking: Apply, Conservation Mask;

Rigging: Add Rig, Rig Type - Exported, Custom Shapes.

2) Make sure you export your model from Blender in a fbx file.

3) Import your fbx file into Unity. Before you drag it into the view/hierarchy, make sure that in Inspector you have the box ticked for importing face shapes - should be the default but just in case.

This tutorial is for a plugin for lip sync in Unity, which uses blend shapes/face shapes. You may or may not need it but the first half of the tutorial is very useful for your case. If you follow it step by step, you should be able to get the blend shapes/face shapes into Unity successfully.

Yes, there is a checkbox you need to check in Blender when you export so that the visemes show up in Unity. If you still need this answer, I'll be happy to help.


In 2.8, Blender crashes while rendering trees I'm trying to render a scene and in both render engines it crashes right before it would start making the image. I thought trees were the issue so i tested the render without them, but it crashed anyways. It might be my computer not being the best too, but if anyone knows a fix please tell me what's wrong.
Computer Specs: AMD Fx4300 (3.8GHz), 16GB RAM, AMD Radeon 260x (2GB), windows 10)

i think 6 subdivisions are way to high. reduce to 2 and test it again..
you can open Task Manager if you are on Windows and check the MemoryManagement. then see if it fills your Memory.

you can also start blender with debugging turned on then you get a report when blender crash and close and you have some more Information.

Start blender_debog_log.cmd and wait for the crash

Okay I fixed it, not by finding out what was wrong, but just by re-making the model. Same blender file, I just deleted the model and re-made them and now it's not giving me the problem.


Copying a rigged object and having it use the same armature Is it possible to copy a fully rigged object and connect it to the same armature with the same rig weights?,  i have been having issues with this

Shift-D is the way to copy a specific object.


is it possible to have particles with tails using Cycles? An example of the effect I'm going for can be found here, with the particles going into the brain. They have a glow around them, and a small tail behind them which has a sort of falloff.

yes, you can model a mesh to behave exactly like you described, then assign that mesh to the particle.

To make them glow you can assign a surface emission material or volume emission material
and you can even blur anything that moves to give some realism.

But if you want to have the same effect as in the video, then you can get away without using particles. Just constrain the mesh to a curve and animate it.


opening Blender, empty white screen I installed Blender and once I run it this is all I get

I have a win 7 64 bits and I already have the latest drivers of my graphic card

For those of you who either have this problem, like I do, or will have the problem in the future, arklight posted a .dll to download. Once I moved that into the folder with my blender.exe it instantly fixed it.

  I have a nvidia geforce 9800 gtx/gtx+ also I made this thing I found in the link "Download opengl32.dll from ftp.blender.org/sergey/softwaregl and put it next to blender.exe. This will switch blender to fully software opengl" and now it seems i can open the program but it go slow... this means is a NVIDIA driver problem which means I need to wait for the next driver update to be fixed? – arklight Jun 12 '16 at 15:20

Right Click -> Run with Graphics Processor -> Integrated Graphics

Enjoy :)


GPU Render slows when computer is inactive I'm a newbie here and I coming with a strange problem (for me...).

Just to introduce my config: I use Blender with an i7 CPU (3930K 6-core), a GeForce GTX660Ti, 32Go RAM, and I work with Windows 10 Pro.

I made often simple scenes, the last one are a dozen of gears which turning and that's all, all frames have the same complexity level.

When I render animation with a render time about 2,5 minutes/frame in 4k resolution for example, as long as I used my computer (to surf on Internet or some little things) the render time is stable, BUT if I leave my computer, after some time, the render time slowing down! And the frame use even 5 minutes!!!
If I move the mouse, the next frames becomes normal with 2.5 minutes... Strange, no?

All right, all the time saver are off (screen, hd stop, etc...), please have you any idea about that problem?
Thanks a lot in advance!!

I think that as you are using GPU rendering after a while as the image is still roughly the same on your screen, the GPU hibernates/ power saves as it is not being used. That is probably why when you browse the internet it goes back to normal.

I would recommend CPU rendering unless your GPU is O.P. compared to your CPU which i don't think it is.


Snap FK/IK does not copy the motion I have had an amazing problem about IK and FK mode. Snap is used to copy the animation from IK to FK or from FK to IK. So, normally, When i do an animation using IK and FK mode, I can finally run it in each mode without loss for any motion. but in http://www.pasteall.org/blend/34672 , I remark that when i run it in IK mode for all bones, the hands did not move. What is the problem?

When editing the walkcycle action alone (file has the same issue as in this question) you haven't properly keyframed the IK-arms. In the timeline set the VisualLocRot as keying-set:

Go to the keyframes in IK mode and place the hands where you want them to be. Thereafter you can switch seamlessly between IK and FK mode.

A rig that has both IK and FK controls will have two separate bones that may control your character, the setting to switch between each determines which one is in control at any given time. You also need to keyframe these settings to ensure the right bones are in control.

You don't appear to have any keyframes on the IK/FK settings.

To keyframe a value you can right click and choose Insert Keyframe or press I while the cursor is over the value. You may want to change the interpolation to constant in the graph editor or set keyframes on two adjacent frames to switch between the two.


The end grain problem I'm trying to figure out how to create a render that accurately represents the effect of applying a clear coat or oil treatment to a wooden artifact such as a box with finger joinery or dovetail joinery such that the end grain of the objects are darkened.  What I've found so far simply applies the wood texture and there's no means of tweeking the faces that need darkening. Is this an easy fix or am I delusional?

You can go into the Node View and use different nodes like Coloramp etc to change characteristics of your texture. These can be bound to keyframes in your animation.


Only part of the scene renders I'm a newbie to Blender. First, thanks to all that help novices. I'm learning Blender Internal first.

My first project was to merge two existing shared blender files: first was an animation of 600 frames (20th Century Fox Intro). Then I imported shared 3D automobile objects. The merged scene (in 4 layers) looks fine in solid, material and even rendered VIEWS. But when I render the camera image (in BI or even in Cycles), the top half of the 3D scene is gray. Seems I have a solid gray plane (just above my grid plane) cutting off the image. But there is no plane object there. See my screen capture slice below.

I'm on a 2009 iMac with ATI Radeon HD Graphics (512MB), 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and 16GB of RAM.  Couldn't find a similar reported problem here or on the web.

QUESTION ANSWERED. I had checked for render borders, and camera clip distance and objects in Layer 1 blocking camera view and have determined it came in with the automobile in Layer 4. I couldn't see anything just above the grid floor. Then I noticed "Plane 022" in the Outliner with the Viewport (eyeball) disabled. Once I enabled it, I found it was a pan to help reflect light onto the automobile from the creator's original light sources. Only then could I see it. "X"! "Plane 022" gone and my BI render looks great now. Thanks for the help. Sorry about posting the sample image twice. Not used to this Blog.
Cheers.


Make material thick around edges I want to make the material in the provided .blend to be like the provided image. .blend https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ZDs_sCikX-TMTRcuNTmoQeKwBAvsabfk

Here is the solution that I came up with:

1: These nodes are a fresnel node with other nodes to disperse it

The second group is a color ramp to blend in the fresnel to the rest of the material
This is a mix shader to add it to the rest of the material


Is the blender smoke engine able to do this? I love Andreas Barden's work and his been playing with TurbulenceFD with some amazing results. I'm wondering if we can do something similar with Blender. Is Blender's smoke engine able to do something like this? And if so, how?

I don't see why not. I'm not seeing anything particularly fancy going on in that sim. It appears to just be a spinning block emitting smoke that rises into a sphere.

Cinema4D cannot accomplish such a smoke simulation, but it's the TurbulenceFD plugin for 399$. In the cinematic industry you find a lot of plugins for Maya, Cinema or Lightwave which are developed for special effects like explosion and smoke and they all vary between a few dollar to millions.

Sure if you are able to program python or another language then you can develop your own plugin and control particles in order to fly around a object. Maybe someday someone will write such a tool and give it to the community for free ;)


How to edit a custom property in a python script? I am creating a custom property on an Empty in a script, and then editing the property's data such as the name, limits, and Tooltip description.
I am using the commands echo'ed from the info panel when I perform these operations in the Blender UI.  While the object is selected and active I get these commands...

bpy.ops.wm.properties_add(data_path="object")
bpy.ops.wm.properties_edit(data_path="object", property="Scale", value="1.0", default="1.0", min=0, max=10, use_soft_limits=False, is_overridable_library=False, soft_min=0, soft_max=10, description="")

When using these commands in the script or Python console, the first "add" command succeeds, but the edit command fails.  I get this error message...

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<blender_console>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/private/var/folders/z4/pm8ygsf16f1_kw3dsfpttthm0000gn/T/AppTranslocation/66464DE9-7039-455C-8E08-0581D47CFD84/d/Blender.app/Contents/Resources/2.80/scripts/modules/bpy/ops.py", line 201, in __call__
    ret = op_call(self.idname_py(), None, kw)
RuntimeError: Error: Direct execution not supported

Is it possible to edit a custom property from a script, and what is the proper command, please.  Thanks.

_RNA_UI dictionary

As descibed here https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/43786/15543

import bpy

context = bpy.context
obj = context.object

if not obj.get('_RNA_UI'):
    obj['_RNA_UI'] = {}

# set it
obj["scale_factor"] = 1.0

# property attributes.for UI
obj['_RNA_UI']["scale_factor"] = {"description":"Scale Factor",
                  "default": 1.0,
                  "min":0.0,
                  "max":10.0,
                  "soft_min":0.0,
                  "soft_max":10.0,
                  "is_overridable_library":0,
                  }

# test UI in text editor footer

def draw(self, context):
    ob = context.object
    self.layout.prop(ob, '["scale_factor"]')

bpy.types.TEXT_HT_footer.append(draw)

So I added some tag_redraw code straight from Blender's API documentation, with changes to focus on the Properties window. It does the job of redrawing the UI, but that has no affect on the outcome of the above code.  The code that makes it work is the repeated obj.get just above the creation of the property.

import bpy

context = bpy.context
obj = context.object

rna_ui = obj.get('_RNA_UI')
if rna_ui is None:
    rna_ui = obj['_RNA_UI'] = {}

rna_ui = obj.get('_RNA_UI')

# set it
obj["Scale_Factor"] = 1.0

# property attributes.for UI
rna_ui["Scale_Factor"] = {"description":"Multiplier for Scale",
                  "default": 1.0,
                  "min":0.0,
                  "max":10.0,
                  "soft_min":0.0,
                  "soft_max":10.0,
                  "is_overridable_library":False
                  }
# redraw Properties panel
for window in bpy.context.window_manager.windows:
    screen = window.screen

    for area in screen.areas:
        if area.type == 'PROPERTIES':
            area.tag_redraw()
            break


Particle System is floating in the air and not on the surface I need help, how can I make the grass stick to the surface? There's a lot of options here that if I change it, it moves the grass closer to the floor but smaller the more I reduce it.

The reason why your grass is not where it should be is that the object's origin is way off from the mesh, -30.5 m in X direction, 3.1 m in Y direction and 0.4 m in Z direction. That's the reason why they are not close to the surface or sometimes sinking in, because they are "growing" more than 30 m away from where they are "born".

To get them distributed correctly you should set the origin close to the bottom of the grass mesh (image below). One way to do it: go to Edit Mode, select the bottom vertices of the grass, Shift+S > Cursor to Selected. Then back into Object Mode, right-click on the grass object, Set Origin > Origin to 3D Cursor.

Okay, I found out the answer. Yes you can move your particles by moving the main object (the instance object) in edit mode, but if you want them to follow the curvature  of your land and avoid some particles from going halfway inside your land, you can use weight paint.


Why can't I open the side menu in 2.8? I'm working on 2.8 and noticed I could not pop open the window on the right side of the screen. Usually that had a "plus" sign, it only has a "less than" V and won't let me open. Is that a bug? or a feature change? Doesn't matter whether I'm in Object Mode, Edit Mode, Layout screen, modeling screen, etc.

Also have a project that has "Lasso Select" stuck on, can't get it to turn off

This seems to be a bug with the most recent builds of Blender 2.8 (as of writing, build of April 26, 07:03:52 - 513b71c89ad0). You can open these items via the shortcuts N and T for the right and left context menus respectively. Once you toggle the menus via these shortcuts they will respond to the mouse correctly thereafter.

In case these aren't your keybindings (these should be Blender defaults), you can find and/or map them in Edit>Preferences>Keymap. You can search "context toggle" by name or find them under the keymaps of the respective editor windows. You are mostly looking for "generic" editor modes NOTE: Every editor window (3D view, node editor, image editor, etc.) has an independent keymap for this action which means you will have to change every case of this mapping you find if they are all not to your liking.

Press N  key on your keyboard to open the properties menu.


Render Smoke split in background and foreground for composite with a recorded image I'm trying to render a smoke to composite a filmed character in the middle of it, as in the example.

I was wondering if there's a easy way to render the back of the smoke in one layer and the front of the smoke in another layer without creating two different domains as the smoke turns around the character.

For the moment the only idea I had is using two cameras with complementary clipping, but it means to calculate two times.

If anyone had any better idea, i'll be very glad to know it !!  :-)

is the character moving or is it only a still ?
Maybe you can create something like a card as a holdout for smoke in the back ?


Why can I not select vertices located behind others? When I use B only the front vertex is selected and not the one behind as well. I have tried turning on and off the Limit Selection to Visible and there is no change at all. I have tried all the tricks people have suggested and its still not working.

I appreciate any help.

Instead of moving the vertices or just changing the view you can change to Wireframe view with the Z button (by default). Then you can select all vertices hidden by faces, edges or other vertices. I use the Z key a lot since sometimes two vertices are in the exact same position.

I've found a solution. I did not realize you couldn't click RMB and drag. The solution ended up being to just press G instead. Thanks for the help though!


Fluid baking stops without errors I have setup a simple scene with some hills (one big object) and dam with water. Dam consists of multiple objects, they are set up as fluid obstacles. Dam breaks (parts of dam are animated with keyframes) and water should start to flow through valley.

But, fluid baking stops on higher fluid resolutions (for example 300) somewhere in the middle of my animation when dam breaks.

What I have already tried:

applied scale and rotation on fluid objects
removed double vertices and recalculated normals on fluid objects
run blender from command line and also with -d switch (to see debug output), but haven't seen any errors, it just suddenly stops
manually cleared the fluid cache folder (deleted all the files)
set all fluid obstacles to Free Slip (as advised in Blender Cookie Fluid Simulation Tutorial, part 3)

I am using blender 2.69 64bit on Ubuntu 13.10.

Here you can download my scene (it is my first try with Blender, so it is very simple) - scena1_2.blend (30 MB - sorry for that size, some textures are included...)

There exists a workaround (at least it works 100% in my setup)!

I have enabled Export Animated Mesh option for all moving fluid obstacle objects and it works!

The only downside is that it enforces No Slip and is slower according to the documentation inside Blender.

There are two things that might be going on.

Your cache is baking a different range of frames than are on your timeline. Make sure that the frame range in the cache settings is what you want it to be, because it might not be the same as your timeline range.
Your baked physics aren't getting freed, properly, and it's continuing to re-use old simulation data without re-calculating it.

This, in turn, might be for a number of different reasons:
You might not know that you have to "free bake" (in the cache settings) in order to run the bake again.
You might be using "disk cache" or "external." External uses a particular set of physics cache files and won't change them, even if you free the bake. This is unlikely, tho, because IIRC, the baking buttons go away when you turn this on.
Blender is acting up. There is a known issue with Blender releasing caches properly with any of the simulators, including smoke and particles. There are a few work-arounds. The work-around that I consider easiest is to change some "significant" value after freeing the bake. This will usually fully free the baked files and allow you to re-compute the simulation. There are some values that will do this and some that won't. You can tell when the files are freed because the colored line at the bottom of the timeline will change. Sometimes you ALSO have to track all the way back to the beginning of the animation. The most fail-safe method is to find the folder named blendcache_[filename] and delete its contents.

Hope that helps!


Rigid body settings to a group as a whole I would like to apply rigid body physics to a grouped set of objects, but would not like that set of objects to be dismantled during the simulation (preserving their relative positions).

For example, imagine two spheres forming a "water molecule":

And I want to bounce such molecules in my simulation without breaking them apart. How do I go about doing that in Blender?

Join objects together. Select objects you want to join then press Ctrl+J.


Blender transforming quads to tris So, I started creating a tank, and when I checked the rendered mode, I found that I have tris instead of quads.

No modifiers applied, no anything.

Anyone please help ?

tris:

edit mode (quads):

The problem is most likely caused by the fact your vertices don't align well on the plane of the quad. And the render engine doesn't magically create new data and uses the quad as is ( which is basically just 2 triangles anyways ). If you look at the lower vertex of the quad you can see it's pointing a bit inwards. If you were to divide a quad into 2 triangles you'd see an edge going trough the middle and that's exactly what happens here.

You might want to consider adding more faces to accommodate for slope or change your shape a bit to make the quads vertices more aligned. Or use smooth shading and the normals of the face are interpolated to bend between faces.

Technically @Ween 's answers should work as it aligns the vertices to be on the same plane preventing the triangle bend of the quad.

You can try select all faces and press Space and input Make Planar Faces and press Enter.


How can I make particles not rotate after lay on the surface? I want to make the falling autumn leaves.
I did a system of particles that rotate in flight.

How can I make them not rotate after lay on the surface?

You could possibly make the Particles die on contact (by checking the option in the collision tab) and display dead Particles (In Particle Settings)

I have other idea:
Decrease Lifetime to end up particle animation and tick  Died under Particle Render tab.


How to turn off gamma correction with Python in Blender 2.69 I'm trying to render surface normals for my scene, and I've gotten it to work in Blender 2.78. One of the important steps was to eliminate the gamma correction which was whitening the image. I did this in 2.78 by doing

scene.view_settings.view_transform = 'Raw'

Unfortunately I also need this to work in Blender 2.69, but I can't find the appropriate setting as the 'Raw' enum was introduced after 2.69.

I've tried setting it to 'NONE' (which the Blender 2.69 API lists as an option) but this throws an error saying that the only option is 'Default'. I've also tried directly setting

scene.view_settings.gamma = 0.0

But this has no effect.

Update: Thanks for your answer, Troy. Ultimately I'm trying to create a png image with the surface normals that I'll use for another task. This other task needs me to remap the colors of the surface normals (to look like this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.4958v1.pdf).

I'm definitely open to using another path to producing normals, but I need to use only Python scripting. Non-color Data sounds promising. Would I be able to render something using nodes, and then save that render (from an output node, not from the RenderLayer) as Non-color Data? Please let me know if I'm not being clear!

Update 2: Thanks, Sambler. When I set scene.display_settings.display_device = 'XYX' I get TypeError: bpy_struct: item.attr = val: enum "XYZ" not found in ('sRGB').

Trying to change

scene.display_settings.display_device = 'sRGB'
scene.view_settings.view_transform = 'Raw'

yields TypeError: bpy_struct: item.attr = val: enum "Raw" not found in ('Default')

This question seems pertinent. In this question the solution was to reinstall Blender. As I'm working on a shared cluster, to ask the admin to reinstall Blender in order to help me debug is, ideally, a last resort.

Wrong approach.

Simply render or load an image and tag it as Non-color Data in the UV Image editors properties panel. Being a good imager, you are already using the EXR format exclusively, as it is a linearized, high precision encoding format for both colour and data.

The Non-color Data tag keeps the buffer entirely out of the colour transform pipeline.

  I'm definitely open to using another path to producing normals, but I need to use only Python scripting. Non-color Data sounds promising. Would I be able to render something using nodes, and then save that render (from an output node, not from the RenderLayer) as Non-color Data? Please let me know if I'm not being clear!

The colour transform tag on an image buffer is only metadata, and as such, if you save that buffer as an EXR, there is nothing more that you need to do. Simply load the EXR, then use Python to set the buffer's tag to Non-Color Data and you are done. Those values will not be put through any view transform.

It should be noted that when viewing Non-Color Data in the viewport, it might seem that the view is identical to when it is set to linear. The difference is that linear is defined as a colour transform and will get passed through various transforms, where, as stated above, Non-Color Data always will pass through untransformed.

scene.view_settings.view_transform is part of the colour management settings, the values accepted vary based on the display device setting. I see the same values available in 2.68 and 2.78

When scene.display_settings.display_device == 'None' view_transform can only be set to 'Default'

When display_device == 'Rec709' view_transform can be set to 'Default' or 'RRT'

When display_device == 'XYZ' view_transform can be set to 'Default', 'RRT', 'DCI', 'Raw' or 'Log'

When display_device == 'sRGB' view_transform can be set to 'Default', 'RRT', 'Film', 'Raw' or 'Log'


Window Generator Disappears when changing perameters I have downloaded and installed the window generator add-on and indeed when I go shift>A add window it shows up the default. The problem comes from when I go to change the parameters the window just vanishes. Probably a stupid noob thing but my project is at a standstill until I figure it out. Any help appreciated.

Well after more research it turns out that the windows generator in 2.79 is somehow over ridden by archimesh which comes with 2.79.....all you have to do is check the box in add-ins and voila


Other programs support .blend Is there any program that import blender objects and animate them with it

Cuz i have made a 3d logo with blender and it is kind of difficult to animate it  (with my little experience ) with blender so is there any chance of another program??

You can use After Effect with Element 3D and then export the blender file as an OBJ