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How to add multiple images as a strip in the video editting with python?
I am trying to automate a process whereby I add specific images as a strip in my video editing.
So far I figured out how to do this for individual pictures,
'scene.sequence_editor.sequences.new_image('p01', '/real_path_to_file/000.jpg',1,1)'
but not for multiple images.
Does anyone know how I can do that?

Related https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/101129/15543  To clarify do you want to add an image sequence or multiple image strips? If the latter use a loop  for image_path in image_paths: ...

I can't remember who did this slideshow snippet. I just made a gist copy sometime in the past. Maybe you'll find it useful: https://gist.github.com/tin2tin/fd09d580eabc791700731497d6ca6916


text:
Blender won't render sound (even when enabled) in Compositor
I'm having fun compositing some videos on Blender and it's awesome. However, when I'm done compositing a video and start rendering with both Compositor and Sequencer checked, the video renders with audio BUT no compositing effect that I added is rendered (only raw video and audio are rendered)
When I uncheck Sequencer and leave only Compositor checked, the video is rendered with the compositing effects that I added, BUT no audio is rendered! Why?
Here are some screenshots of my set up:

I'm surprised nobody asked to see a screen shot of the VSE; but anyway, this is probably related to a VSE bug that was fixed in 2.93.4.  If you show a screenshot of the VSE it would help.

Did you ever solve this problem? I'm running into the same issue.

@jglasse did either of the solutions answer your question?

Does this solve your question?

Although the other answer helps, it doesn't include what you may need with the VSE (the audio setting will try to get audio from the scene). I was able to replicate your problem and resolve it with the VSE. Here are the essentials:
First, a scene with your compositing setup:

Check the compositing checkbox but not the VSE.
Second, create a new scene (in 2.9x at least, a scene can't use itself in the VSE), open up the VSE. Add the original video - this will add an audio and video track. You can delete or hide the video track, but keep the audio (and be sure your frame rate matches! This syncs the audio). Then, add your first scene (which has your compositing setup) as a track above any other video. It will show your 3D camera view, but don't worry - as long as you check compositing in the first scene, you'll be fine.

Make sure the sequencer post-processing checkbox is checked for the second scene, and then render out the video. :)

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

sort: votes


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Object instancing for 3D tileset
I've been using Blender to create a 3D tileset for a game.
In my scene I have an object for each tile that I have built.
When I want to test my tileset I make copies of the tile objects and place them accordingly in another part of the scene.
It would be great if instead of making copies I could define these objects instead as instances of the original tile objects, such that when I update an original tile, all instance update too.
How can this be achieved in Blender?

Copy them using Alt+D keys.

Brilliant, that's exactly what I needed, thank you.  As I understand this is essentially creating a new object that references the same mesh as the original.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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how to simulate a rocket exhaust engine like shown below
Hell, i want to achieve this result of the rocket exhaust as shown below. this is from space x starship animation.
i tried volumetrics but didnt get quite the result.
a glare and a blur got me close but not there yet.
the photo show some volumetrics were used because the light is jagged.
am i missing something? is this achievable in blender and how.
thank you.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/108702/mach-shock-diamonds-in-blender https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/76728/rocket-engine-thrust-point-density-node https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/48816/how-to-create-a-fire-light-effect-in-a-spaceship-engine

The first link is very useful. Thank you. Point density is useless. Blender crashes with point density animations. I submitted a bug report but blender developers has been aware of this bug since 2018 and they don't want to fix it ::


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Blender Source File Path
How can I define path of source files such as video, image, etc relative to blend file instead of absolute path in Windows?
In blender, when I want to define path of source files I use their absolute path.
When I change blender file location, connection between blender file and the videos, images, ... linked to it get broken.
As I asked how can I define path of sources used in blender file, relative to blender file, instead of using absolute path in Windows?

I see if my source file name is my_file.mp4 e.g. if I change the path to //my_file.mp4 (if my_file.mp4 is in same location as blender file) , it works.
Wonder if there is a way to make all paths relative by default.

Just to illustrate cegaton's comment.
Filepaths in Blender are saved as relative by default.
You can still change them to absolute/relative though.
File > External Data > Make all paths relative/absolute.

You can also change this default behavior in preferences:
Edit > Preferences > Save & Load

On top of that, you can set default relative/absolute paths for some types of data (scripts, textures, etc...)
Just go to Edit > Preferences > File Paths


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Can't sculpt a specific area of a model
I'm just learning Blender, and making a little head for practice. I want to make the temples a bit more set in, but for some reason none of the sculpt tools can affect that area of the head. The face is still sculptable, but even at full strength the upper sides of the head, back of the head, and neck are unaffected by any sculpting tools. What might cause this? There are plenty of polygons.

Make sure you didn't somehow mask them.

Oh thanks, that was the issue.


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Eevee - Duplicated lights not appearing in render / Lights that once appeared are gone
A bit of desperate situation, I've got a pretty large night-time scene that I've been working on for the past 3 weeks. Recently I noticed that a light that I placed as the moon early on, is no longer rendering. I've also created multiple street lamp meshes with lights placed in them, however only a handful of lights appear in the render.
I've found that this is a common issue with 2.81, so I updated my OS and upgraded to 2.82 with absolutely no luck. I found that I can open the project in 2.80 and render it correctly, however that version won't let me apply changes to the scene, so I've had to flip back and forth from 2.82 to 2.80.
Does anyone know a workaround for this in 2.81 or 2.82?

There is a limit on the number of lamps EEVEE can fit in the GPU for rendering, there was also a limitation that didn't allow rendering shadows from lamps inside duplicators in 2.80

can you make some of the lights, in the back ground be emission shaders on the mesh?

Thanks Duarte, I actually found out about the limit shortly after posting this, and that seems to be what the problem was.

I originally tried to use emission meshes for the lights, however I had to switch to lamps because I wasn't able to see the light casting onto my floor mesh when I had a top-down view of the light pole, and I used 4 lights per pole because that's how the lamps I based these on are irl, so it's understandable that I had this issue now that I know there's a limit


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how to animate camera zooming and FOV keyframes
you know how you can, like, stretch the camera out to change the FOV? how do I make a keyframe of this movement, to sort of zoom in and out?

Inside the properties for the camera is a value for Focal Length
If you hover over the value and hit 'I' on your keyboard, you will create a keyframe for that value - at that frame.

Alternatively if you don't want to remember the shortcut, you can click on the little dot on the right of the field to record a keyframe

thanks! that helps!


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Bevel in 2.81 is not the same as in 2.8
I am a beginner and I am modeling a technical piece in blender 2.81 and I can't get the same result as in youtube video (2.8) I use:
https://youtu.be/WSR6bVFe5LM?t=974
Either bevel is broken in a newer version or I am doing something wrong...
This is what author of the video has, what I need:

So he selected 2 "bottom" edges, clicked Ctrl+B for bevel filled in amount & segments count = 12, that's all!
What I have in blender 2.81:

I tried to change bevel types & parameters but I can't get the same result!
Also, I can't apply transformations for some reason:

I go to the object mode, press Ctrl+A, select All transformation OR just Scale but scaling numbers are not changing, so it is not applied??
Please help me to get the same results as author of the video has... I am stuck for 3 weeks already with this issue :(
A link to a blender file + reference image in case someone want to try on his PC:
one drive

Apply the scale of the object. Ctrl A in object mode.

my mistake was that I didn't select object in OM before applying transformations :(

holy smokes! I've realized my error! it is not enough just apply "all transformations" in objects mode, before that you need to select the object itself! that was a key... now all is working as needed!
p.s: why blender doesn't show an error if you haven't selected anything!?

Make sure to mark this as the answer


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Where can I change "snap to symmetry" tool settings?
In Edit Mode, I can do Mesh -> Snap to Symmetry. The operation is performed and I can see the results. However, the manual shows that there are settings (Direction, Threshold, Factor, Center). I want to change the values of these settings, but I don't know where to find them.

In the Operator box (bottom left of your 3D view)

Thank you! That works.


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Front Flip Animation Messed Up Due To Quaternion
I made a front flip animation for my character however when I play the animation, the character goes to the keyframes, but once it gets past the second to last keyframe and goes to the final pose, it rotates all the way back around the opposite way.
Now I was told that its due to the bones on the rig being set to quaternion and I needed to set them to euler, however, I have found when I did that it messed up the animation.
What could I do?
https://streamable.com/kphuab

Switch to pose mode and find and select the bone that rotates backwards. Go to the last keyframe in your animation (frame 80 it looks like), and negate the W, X, Y, Z of the rotation in the Bone Properties panel, ie. replace 0.1 with -0.1. Insert a keyframe to save the values. Your rotation should now work.
(I think there's an op that will do this automatically but I can't remember what it is...)

So a little update. I found an addon that would automatically convert the bones to euler rotation instead of Quaternion. So I did that however now the problem occurs in between 48 and 56 keyframes.


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Front Flip Animation Bones Rotate After A Certain Degree
I have this front flip animation that when I rotate it about the X axis as shown in the video linked below, the root and target bones flip all the way back around and then get to the finish pose.

This animation was originally a quaternion animation but has been since converted to XYZ euler

Video: https://streamable.com/w2wg3a

hello, could you please share your file? https://pasteall.org/blend/

@moonboots Here ya go: https://pasteall.org/blend/b162d4c18ff540259dfaa0c638a0ce18
It will be the player flip animation.

could you please describe what you wanted to achieve? You would like the root bone to rotate 360°? for the moment from frame 56 to 64 it goes from 146° to 70° so he's flipping back

@moonboots Correct.  I am trying to get it to make a full 360° rotation to make it look like a front flip.  (For a double jump)

So at frame 64 you need to type a number greater than 146°, like 250 or whatever

@moonboots Ok. I set the root bone to 250 and it seems to have fixed that, but when it goes from 250 to 0 is goes back the other way again.  Also in between 48 and 56 the target bones rotate all the way around for some reason.

go from 250 to 360

@moonboots Omg.  Ive had this problem for the past couple of days.  Thanks you very much.

For the moment from frame 56 to 64, the root bone goes from 146° to 70°, so your character is flipping back. You need to make the bone rotate from 146 to 250 then 360° for example.
Also, it's better to create a root bone that is completely independent, at the bottom of the character, and not use the spine as the root. Instead parent the spine to the root you've created.


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Newbie question about editing vertex maps
I created this vertex map by selecting and assigning them in edit mode. Can you suggest a method to obtain a sharp edge without the gradient from red to blue. I’m trying to use this vertex map for a particle system to make fur. Thanks in advance.

Vertex weights (which is what it looks like you're talking about) are not a property of faces, but a property of vertices.  The vertices are assigned to the exact numbers you specified, but in order to help you visualize this, gradients are drawn across the faces.  These gradients don't actually exist.  Simply put: you can't get rid of apparent vertex weight gradients.  If you want finer control, you need to either create more vertices, or else use an image texture to control the particle characteristics.

Thanks for the reply. I understood most of it, but can you please explain how an image texture can be used to control particle characteristics?

That's a new question.  Do your research first, then if you can't find anything, ask a new question on SE.


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Particle system puts everything on a circle around object ? Tried with Geometry nodes too, the same
New to blender I try modeling a tick .. I'm about to put hait on the body but it doesn't work.. when I add a partcile system (or geometry nodes) everything is added on a circle around the object.. here's the link to the file.. : https://pasteall.org/media/f/8/f855c53839b7736296afd8b4775acd7b.blend
Any ideas ?

Hello and welcome. please add more than just the Blend file. Screenshots of your object, your settings and so. The more info, the better to answerd the question

Your hair object is far from its origin on the X axis, that will shift the hair away from the emitting faces on their Y axis (I still don't know why hair's X axis becomes Y on the emitter though). If you move the hair object in Edit mode towards its origin it will shift back:

Thank you so much, it actually helped me to find the origin of the problem, no pun intended, since the object's origin was off center.. just had to align origin to geometry and that did it !


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Blender Armature not looping continuously
I don't understand why this test animation doesn't cycle continuously.. Must have missed something simple but can't find it :-( I tried everything, different tutorials etc. but I can't get it to work.
https://pasteall.org/media/c/5/c5145484239e484b000bb1c48612d0bb.blend

You have created a rotation on W, X, Y and Z, but for the moment you have only created a cycle on W, so you also need to create a Cycles modifier for X, Y and Z: Select all the tracks and Shift E > Make Cyclic).

Thank you so much !! <3


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bpy: handlers.save_pre not updating immediately before saving
This script is to update  a property to its relative path when the file is saved, however how it is currently set up, the property does not update until a few seconds after the save. Even worse, if I close the file before it shows the update and try to reopen it, the file will crash.
If there is a way to ensure stability or another approach to keeping filepaths relative, please share. Thank you.
import bpy

def rel_path_on_save(scene):
    props = bpy.context.scene.props
    path, _ = bpy.path.relpath(props.dir_path)
    if path:
        props.dir_path = path

class Props(bpy.types.PropertyGroup):
    dir_path: bpy.props.StringProperty(
        name="Folder",
        description="Export from the chosen collections",
        subtype='DIR_PATH',
        default='//'
    )

def draw_export_panel(self, context):
    layout = self.layout
    props = context.scene.props
    layout.prop(props, "dir_path")

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(Props)
    bpy.types.Scene.props = bpy.props.PointerProperty(type=Props)
    bpy.app.handlers.save_pre.append(rel_path_on_save)
    bpy.types.VIEW3D_PT_tools_object.append(draw_export_panel)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(Props)
    del bpy.types.Scene.props
    bpy.app.handlers.save_pre.remove(rel_path_on_save)
    bpy.types.VIEW3D_PT_tools_object.remove(draw_export_panel)

# Run script
if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()


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Geometry Nodes: Detect if an Attribute is Unassigned
In this case, I would like to only delete a mesh if the color attribute is black, but not if the attribute is unassigned/None. My guess is that geometry nodes interprets null attributes as black. Attribute statistic seems to me like the closest to what I am looking for, but not quite.

AFAIK, there is no such thing as "null" attributes. They must have a name, and when created, no matter what you do it will have a default value (the one you plugged or the default value of the slot). What about using a boolean attribute which stores if the attribute is null or not ? If you don't have a color that you can use as null value, I don't see any other solution.

Thanks for sharing those options. In my case, I setting the default value to white fulfills my needs.


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bpy scripting: Join objects in a collection
How can I join all objects in a collection? This is what i have so far:
def final():
    Coll=bpy.data.collections['low']
    #finalColl=bpy.data.collections['final']
    for obj in Coll.objects:
        if obj.type=='MESH':
           ob.join

You have to make sure you have selected all the objects you want to join using obj.select_set(True) in the for loop and make sure one of the objects is active (yellow outline). Then you can join them using bpy.ops.object.join() after the loop has finished.
import bpy

def final():
        bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')

        Coll = bpy.data.collections['low']
        for obj in Coll.objects:
            if obj.type == 'MESH':
               obj.select_set(True)
        #bpy.context.view_layer.objects.active = bpy.data.objects["Cube"]
        bpy.ops.object.join()

final()

Thank you! I've hear bpy.ops isn't the mos performant way to do things. is there a method that just uses python?

nope. in this case bpy.ops is the way to go.


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multiple glTF files sharing the same textures
My question is about if there are export settings that will prevent duplicate texture maps when I import them into a game engine because glB files typically pack the textures into the file.
Outside of the game engine, this looks especially silly when an smaller level of detail(LOD) version of the model(5000 tris) is similar in size to the high poly version(60,000 tris) because they are packing the same textures.
Thank you.

On the glTF export dialog, have you tried picking "Format: glTF Separate"?  It should keep the textures separate.  Beware it may overwrite images in certain circumstances, so I would save the glTF file(s) to a folder that's separate from the Blender project and source images.

This is the solution I'm looking for. Thank you.


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Getting the name of an object before it was changed using a handler
I'm trying to make sure a list of objects gets updated with an objects new name once it's renamed. The challenge I'm having is connecting the original name with the new name. I'm even more uncertain about when I rename multiple objects at once, either programmatically in another method, or using batch rename
This is what I have so far:
import bpy
curated_list=['Sphere.002','Sphere','Cube']
prenamess=[]

def prenames():
    for obj in bpy.dta.objects:
        prenamess+=[obj.name]

def postnames():
    for obj in bpy.data.objects:
        #find objects with name changed
        if obj.name not in prenamess:
            if obj.name in curated_list:
                #update curated list to match new name
                curated_list[prenamess.index(obj.name)]=obj.name
            #replace list of object names
print(curated_list)

bpy.app.handlers.depsgraph_update_pre.append(prenames)
bpy.app.handlers.depsgraph_update_post.append(postnames)

You might as well add a new custom property to all Object type and write the name you want it to have there, and add custom logic to make sure they are in sync. But I have trouble seeing your end goal here, would you mind adding a bit of info on your workflow ?

I've actually have now left the method described in the question and am using an object property. Thank you.

Limitation: Since objects pointer are lost after undo/redo, if you undo a batch rename operation, objects index will different and you don't know which object name changed
import bpy

OBJS = {obj : obj.name for obj in bpy.data.objects}

def postnames(dummy):
    for obj, old_name in OBJS.items():
        if obj.name != old_name:
            print(f"{old_name}  change to  {obj.name}")
            OBJS[obj] = obj.name

# objects address lost after undo/redo
def update_objects_pointer_after(dummy):
    global OBJS
    OBJS = {obj : obj.name for obj in bpy.data.objects}

bpy.app.handlers.depsgraph_update_post.append(postnames)
bpy.app.handlers.undo_post.append(update_objects_pointer_after)
bpy.app.handlers.redo_post.append(update_objects_pointer_after)


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Is there a way to drive an object's location by it's position on the Outliner or similar?
I've been using Blender for some multi-object 2d scenes with an orthographic camera setup and wondered whether there was a way I could drive an object's Z position based on it's position within the Outliner?
Basically I'm looking to mimic graphical software's (GIMP/Photoshop) layer organisers where the top item on the list is at the top of the render and bottom is at the back.
I'm thinking a driver would work on the Z axis if there's a way to reference the Outliner position but it doesn't look like there is? Would be delighted to be proved wrong.
Thanks for any input.
Matt

A standard driver (without enabling auto-executing scripts) - probably not. A more advanced driver or just a script that observes outliner and updates positions of objects - sure. The bigger problem is how to stop the Outliner from sorting items automatically or how to recreate an outliner-like control to be used. I see that collections aren't automatically sorted, but still the interface isn't designed to easily rearrange them.

Thanks for clarifying. I think this sounds like it might outside my skillset. I'll have to commit some time to it when I can


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Triangulate modifier setting matching triangulation pattern in fbx and glTF exports
Is there a way I can ensure that a model's triangulation pattern on a modifier will be the same as exporting it as a glTF(always triangulated) or fbx with the triangulate faces option?
I am not sure if the modifier options, beauty and clip match the triangulation of these exports?
I am interested in this for real time asset workflow.

Usually exporters have an option called "Apply modifiers" that should do what you're looking for. Have you tried that ?

Hi @Gorgious. I am not asking how to use modifiers on export, instead, what triangulate setting on modifiers matches the triangulation on export.

I've tested this before, and AFAICT none of the options are always the same as the triangulation shown in the viewport (which is what glTF exports).


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Texture painting with flow, hardness, density
I am wondering if the patch linked below patch to add more options for brushes like flow, hardness, and density will be implemented into Blender. I do not see it in Blender 2.90 but it was created Sep 2019 by Pablo Dobarro. If it is unknown when it will be implemented, how can I incorporate it into my build of Blender?
https://developer.blender.org/D5697
Thanks.

The patch still has yet to be reviewed properly after the suggestions Campbell made on initial review, and there are actions requested because the code system for paint affects several modes in the unified paint system. There are instructions on building blender to include patches in the build, but those instructions don't appear here on BSE - I see from a previous search that asking about how to build blender is off topic here. That said, I see from a google search that there are many options covering the different OS available.


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How to use image as alpha while sculpting?
How are you?
So, I'm having this trouble while sculpting where the image I'm using does not apply as an alpha, which would change the way my brush works. It's working more like a Stencil or something and leaving the shape of the image on my sculpt.
How can I turn it into a real alpha?
Thanks.

That is pretty much how the alpha works, it defines which area is under the influence of the brush. If it behaves like a stencil and you cant do a stroke with the brush it will be probably the brush settings, not the alpha image.

Right, but what settings can I change? I have no idea.
Thanks for the answer

Ok, I just found out. In the brush settings there's an option to change the image mapping. I changed it to 'Area Plane' and it worked fine. Thanks a lot!


text:
How to make Stove Fire?
how are you? So, I'm going to create and Stove animation and I wanted to know how can I make a Stove fire with Fire Simulation in Blender. I have seen lots of tutos on fire, but they are all the same with big fires. Is there a way to make the fire more smooth and consistent, and also blue?
Kind regards.

Hello :). What have you tried so far, and where exactly are you stuck?

I just created some fires following the tutorials online, which means they were always big fires. Didn't really try to make one small and blue and with little movement. That's pretty much what I don't know how to do. How can I make a fire that doesn't move much and how to turn it blue?


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Unwrapping Blender Model results in a deformed uv map
I'm new to blender so its possible I've made a mistake, but when i tried to unwrap my model, all that appears is lines and polygons. I've tried removing doubles and manually selecting each face to make sure I hadn't selected any extra faces, but my results were the same.
Any reason why this is happening?
(The reason I was unwrapping the model was to create a texture out of the materials i had used to colour my model, and then export the texture.)

Welcome, MashyZ. You must learn about "seams".

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/meshes/editing/uv/unwrapping/seams.html

Like that it looks when unwrap is Reset, try to search for unwrap methods https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/meshes/editing/uv/unwrapping/index.html


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How to make a volume fade from center in Blender 2.8?
I've come across COUNTLESS different tutorials to make this work in older versions of blender. I am attempting to create a rayleigh scattering effect at the edges of planets viewed from space. I have followed youtube tutorials, and even bought that Space VFX class for 60 bucks hoping for an answer. The old way to do it was quite simple as shown below :
Note : the default values the tutorials all use are all roughly 1. i just used this screenshot to show it didnt work, even when values were cranked to extremes. If anyone knows how to work around this or a better method, i would be eternally grateful!

On going from Gradient Texture node to Math node (using Multiply) you have a multiplication factor of 0. Hence the strength of the emission will be 0. Here is a node setup that seems to work


text:
How can I rotate 'LOCAL' orientation in 2.82 python Script
Blender : 2.82
Windows 10
This is my code
and i want to rotate 'Global' and 'Local' both
import bpy
import numpy as np

this_scene = bpy.context.scene
view_layer = bpy.context.view_layer
override = bpy.context.copy()
override['selected_objects'] = bpy.data.objects["MyOBject"]
rot_obj = override['selected_objects']
now_pos = rot_obj.rotation_euler[0:3]

rot_obj.rotation_euler = now_pos + np.deg2rad(np.array([10, 10, 0]))
bpy.ops.transform.rotate(value=np.deg2rad(50), orient_axis='Y', orient_type='LOCAL', orient_matrix=((1, 0, 0), (0, -4.37114e-08, 1), (0, -1, -4.37114e-08)), orient_matrix_type='LOCAL', constraint_axis=(False, True, False), mirror=True, use_proportional_edit=False, proportional_edit_falloff='SMOOTH', proportional_size=1, use_proportional_connected=False, use_proportional_projected=False, release_confirm=True)

this works fine in python console in line by line.
but the problem is 'Run Script' (there are about 200 ea files exist)
when i Run Scripts by pushing 'Run Script' button
"MyOBject" rotates only GLOBAL orientation.
i found some code Blender 2.82 Python API but don't know how, don't know what it is ...
bpy.types.TransformConstraint, bpy.types.TransformOrientation, bpy.types.TransformOrientationSlot, bpy.context.scene.transform_orientation_slots
and one more, is there fully functional intellisense(autocomplete) in blender?
or API using guide? the documentation is quite not kind:(
(so many def, function, class are not work even in console)
please help ..


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How do you save, or make check points using the blender game engine?
So recently I’ve tried using some the game engine side of blender as opposed to the animation work I usually do, I’m enjoying using it and have learnt the basics of how to make an operational game, but I’ve got no idea how to make a save/load point for my game.
Can anyone help me please?
Thanks in advance

==> https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ErvI2CB8UUhBa_-L1dVRnI_3jPoX93rF   <==
above is simple system example of save 'n load system (saves to text in your computer).
it's pretty simple when near sensor is triggered it's automatically saving if you want it to be manual add keyboard sensor and if you want to make limited amount of saves, add an property sensor(which decrease with each save) and so on and so forth . logic is pretty basic . Feel free to study and use the example blend file.


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Importing inventor model into blender - problem with coloring separate parts
I am new with blender program. I have a need to render animation for a inventor model I have.
I got stl. file from inventor which is an assembly. My problem is that I need to color that model before rendering ( In inventor model is painted but when I import it to blender its in default grey).
When I apply coloring in blender it affects whole assembly, which is not good for me, I have some parts that I need to paint in different color.
My question is how to separate those part? As for now I see that assembly as one part and anything I do will affect it whole?
Thank you in advance.


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Compositing multiple masks
I'm dropping a 3d object into footage of a real city and want it to be occluded by buildings as the view orbits the object. I can mask buildings fine, and use a set alpha node to combine the mask with the original image sequence no problem. But when I use the output of the set alpha as the image input for the next mask, nothing happens.
This works:

This however, with the next two buildings that block it from view added does not work:

Here, I highlight which mask/set alpha is applying to which building. If I reverse which mask is applied last, then the building in green is the mask that works. It's only the last mask that works. Is there another node I need to be using instead of set alpha for multiple masks. I have 4 more buildings that need to mask over the rocket as the camera orbits. I've seen examples on youtube with multiple set alpha nodes but I can't seem to get that to work. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/179752/adding-combining-masks-together

"Set Alpha" should be used only once, to associate the alpha channel to the RGB information on the image.
To combine alpha channel use a math node and add (or subtract) the alphas together before associating.


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Blender 2.8 How to inset faces and bevel into an oval
I'm looking to recreate the effect seen in the video linked. I've linked it at the start of the part and it runs for about 40 seconds. I'm trying to recreate the rounded inset faces. I can get the faces to inset just fine, but then they do a lot of things in rapid succession and I'm getting lost. Pretty new to blender so if you can be detailed that would be very much appreciated. Imperial Shuttle in Blender 2.8

Hello and welcome :). Just slow the video to 0.25 speed and it's all pretty clear. Steps after the insetting: 1. Invert selection (Ctrl+I), 2. Delete selected faces (Delete >Faces), 3. Bevel vertices (check only vertices), 4. Add a solidify modifier. Also don't forget, that in [38.58] they duplicated and separated the selection into a new object.

@JachymMichal you should put that as an answer

@JachymMichal So what you said makes a lot of sense. The bit I missed was definitely duplicating the selection. That part I didn't catch. One other thing that has me confused, my vertex bevel is looking very different than the one in the video. Where as his constrains to the corners and rounds the rectangle, mine seems to make an oval. Here is a screen recording. Any tips here? Thanks again for the welcome and help! Very appreciated.
https://youtu.be/jPOISYcntNY

Hello :). You need to apply your object scale. Go to Object > Apply > Scale, and all your transforms will work correctly.

You are my hero. :D If you want to respond with that last as an answer I'll mark that as the answer and everything! Now I'm going to have to go look up what the apply scale does and everything so I understand what just happened. Thank you thank you thank you!


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Texture pain stencil has right color on UV, but extremely faded on mesh
I've created a png stencil with transparency. Positioned it and painted it onto the mesh... it looks perfect in the UV, but in the texture paint view it is extremely washed out. You can just barely make out the blue circle. I've included the shader nodes as well. Created an image texture, black, 2048x2048. Went to texture pain. Added a texture, in texture added the png file, set it from repeat to clip. Back in the paint settings, brush is TexDraw, mode is stencil. The brush color is white.
Any idea what would be causing this?! The blend mode on the mix color node is set to add. Changing the factor doesn't help. It either goes away or looks as shown in the image. Been working on this for 2 hours and my brain is fried.

"The blend mode on the mix color node is set to add" - this is the problem. Set the Blend mode to "Mix" and then that acts like Photoshop's "Normal" mix mode. "Add" combines the colors to create a lighter color similar to "Screen" but not the exactly the same, but a Stencil should be using "Mix" mostly when just putting the pixels into the target texture.

Oh, interesting... I didn't realize it behaved that way. Turns out that was 50% of my problem. The other half was when I created the new image texture in the shader, I left the alpha at 1. Dragging that to 0 fixed the other half of the issue.
THANK YOU!


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How to have person in video mask added geometry as they walk in front
I have a video plate that I shot and have motion tracked into Blender. There is a person walking through the shot and I want to add geometry in front and behind them. However, things that should be behind them obviously aren't as they are in front of the video.
Is there a way in blender to have a mask matching the person tracked to the person so that the background geometry appears to go behind them? Or am I going to have to take this to After Effects or something and hand roto a mask and export it as a new video element and composite it?
Pretty new to all of this so may not be using the right terminology. Also assume I'm an idiot when responding and explain it to a 3rd grader. :) Thanks everyone who shares anything. Stuck on this one.

In the video clip editor you can create masks and animate them with keyframes. For precise rotoscoping over video, load the video element on the Video Clip editor, create a new mask and you can animate the shape and feathering as you like.
Overlaying an image to cover a face in a video?
You can also use trackers and parent the points of the mask with the trackers, to ease the rotoscoping process.
Can a mask stick to a shape in the motion tracker?
Then you can use those masks in the compositor with a mask node that uses those masks to combine other images.
You don't need to use AfterFX.
How to draw a Rotoshape (mask) in the Compositor?
To work with geometry you can check this link as well:
Use masks as part of materials in cycles


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Need Help With Settings for Hair Particle System \w dynamics enabled
Goal: Model of Solar System, I'm currently stuck on some animations I'd like to sketch up for the sun.
Scene Setup: Currently, there is one main object (icosphere), the sun (in blender terms, it's large, with a radius of 695km). Within the sun, is a force field (charge). The sun itself is a particle emitter (hair), the particle system has a field enabled (charge). Both fields' powers have opposite signs and there is a large difference between the power strengths. My expectations were that would create a strong charged field that would attract the hair (with high velocity) as it tries to leave the sphere, and pull it back.
I can see the hair particles, and the look/feel is ok for now. But they won't move at all.

What I want:
- Hair particles to bunch/twist in thin filaments primarily at the poles of the UV sphere (north/south). I currently have them bunched and twisted as I want, but they tend to get placed randomly on the sphere, I'd like to have them concentrated at the poles. Or know how to go about doing that. These are what i think are the relevant settings below

Dynamic Effects (animation intent), I’d like those bunched filaments to be pulled into the sphere, semi-randomly over the course of the animation. The dynamics and physics settings are below

The rendering & viewport settings:

(This is an example of the motion I’d like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWjtYSRlOUI)
Problem(s):
- i'd like the hair particles to form and bunch at the spheres poles
- i'd like to get a better grip on how to solidly control the movement of the hair using fields (or whatever is the best option)

note i unfortuantely don't have much rep, so i couldn't upload the rest of the screenshots. anything else i can add to help let me know i'll try to get it sorted.

So working through this some, I found out that a lot of the changes I wasn't seeing may have been because it seems to only update changes when i'm positioned at frame one in the timeline. With that solved, I found ways to shape and animate the hair using keyframes that will work for the first layer of motion. Next, i made a more simple blend and played with the hair, a simple object, and various fields. It seems the charge field doesn't work, or I can't get to the bottom of how it should yet, but I can mimic a similar effect with other fields. Also found out how to associate the hair with a vertex group for placement =)


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Question on creating a spiral
I saw that using the Add Curve: Extra Objects add-on, it's easy to make a spiral curve, but I also wanted to try to make one "from scratch."
I tried using the screw modifier on a single vertex, but nothing rendered.
I then created a line and also (by accident) an unattached vertex, and then applied the screw modifier. This time, voila!, it worked, giving me both a spiral screw (with a two-dimensional surface) in the middle, and also a one-dimensional spiral curve (mesh) on the outside. I then deleted the screw in the middle, leaving me with the outer one-dimensional spiral curve (mesh), which was what I wanted. Finally, I converted the mesh to a curve.

The only thing is, this all seems a bit clumsy to me to have to create the extra object and then delete it, so I'm wondering is there any way using the screw modifier to create a one-dimensional spiral curve (mesh) by itself, without creating the two dimensional screw as well?
Thank you in advance!

That's true.. the Screw modifier doesn't seem to know how to display itself in Edit Mode, unless there are faces to display.
The screw of a single Mesh vertex is there, if viewed in Object Mode.. and if the modifier is applied, a valid spiral of edges results. (Not so for a single Curve point, where the modifier can't be applied in any case)
If you need to be able to see a screwed single vertex in Edit Mode, a get-around is to make a small E extrusion from it while editing, and delete it when no longer needed.
This does seem anomalous behavior.. but then, so many settings in the modifier deal with faces.. perhaps this case was overlooked, or considered too awkward?

Thank you, and much appreciated


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Worms crawling under skin
I wanted to create a scene where you can see a worm crawling underneath the skin of a person's belly.
I've tried it with the tools provided in Blender like the deform modifiers (mostly I tried with Cast modifier, warp modifier and partially the displace modifier) but it just doesn't look like a worm.
The cast and warp modifier do not support custom shapes, only the basic sphere, cube and cylinder.
Does anybody know how I can achieve this result? I also tried with softbody physics, but that didn't really work out well when pushing a collision from the inside, especially because the shape didn't really come through.
Is there any way I can get the form of a more abstract shape seen and shaped through another object without using shapekeys?
The whole scene is CG, so it isn't about a real video where I want a CG worm to crawl underneath the skin; its just a CG character.

Is the whole scene CG or do you want to do VFX with real video footage?

Just CG. No real video footage :)

You could use the Vertex Weigh Proximity modifier to control displacement.
It will use the actual shape of the mesh to correctly displace the surface.

Create a new vertex group in your "skin" mesh and add all vertex to it with a strength of $1$. Now add a new Vertex Weigh Proximity modifier, pick that vertex group, set the "Worm" mesh as Target Object and make sure to set the Distance Mode to Geometry.

After that add a Displacement modifier with weight affected by the previously mentioned vertex group. No texture is required (although you can optionally add one), just adjust strength and displacement distance values as necessary.

You can move your worm mesh around and it will deform according to both position and shape.

That is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you! :D

Got that working and added a Lattice for the worm to "compress/decompress" through and it looks truly creepy, wiggling along.

Sounds interesting, now I'm curious to see how it looks

@rob do post a screencap of the effect!

@JohnDvorak enjoy https://youtu.be/Td6LaZ0ISjI

I joined just to say that you made an impressive work. It looks so easy, even for someone who never used blender. However, I must say this: that is SO CREEPY! I actually feel real itching on my skin from this. Thank you .

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos Wow, you have LOTS of tricks up your sleeves.

Have you tried with Lattice? Not easy to manipulate though...

Create a plane, subdivide it. Create a lattice above your plane. Give your plane a Lattice modifier with the lattice as Object.

Move the lattice vertices so that it deforms the plane the way you want. Create some shapekeys if you want this shape to change over time. Move it over the plane. You'll probably need a Subsurf above and one below the Lattice modifier to have a smooth bump.

Thanks for your answer. It actually does work okay. It is hard to get the correct form, but it should work for something as simple as a worm!

maybe Duarte's answer works better   ;)

It did. Still thank you for spending your time and telling me about a possible solution :)

Works pretty darned well, IMO.


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Smoke viewport Display in 2.81a
Just started to play with smoke in Blender 2.81a, I did not use the Quick Smoke, but start from scratch.
Here are the steps I took:

Create a sphere as Flow object
Create a Cube as Domain (sphere is inside Domain)
Create a Principled Volume Shader and link it to the volume of the sphere

Then press Space to run the simulation.
In Layout tab, I can see the sim only in Wireframe or Shade Mode, but not in Material Preview nor Render Mode.
In Blender 2.81a volumetrics seem to be ON by default in the Render Properties, so I don't know why I can't see it in Render Mode.

OK I got it, you need to put the shader on the Domain, not the flow object.


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Exporting armature animation using gtlf exporter for blender 2.82 error
I have been spending days now trying to export a GLTF file, but each time I export, an error occurs while viewing different animations in the GLTF online viewer.
For Example, if I export two rigged objects with animation, in the GLTF viewer the Object 1 will play both its own animation and the other object animation.
Object 2 will remain static like it has no animation. I have tried to fix it but it seems there is no solution.

See the guide in the glTF addon docs about animation. You'll need to assign animations to objects, either as active Actions, stashed Actions, or NLA Tracks. Otherwise there is no association between the animation and the object.

If that isn't working, you may need to file a bug on https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF-Blender-IO.

I think i just needed to rename some objects and all went as expected


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How to animate 100's of objects cast modifier's Factor
I am trying to animate the factor of the cast modifier of 100 objects in my scene. I was able to use ctrl+L to copy the modifier to all objects, but it doesn't copy the keyframes with it.
Is there a way to keyframe the cast modifier of all objects without doing it manually for each?

you could make all the vertices converge in the Graph Editor? Or with a script?

The graph editor contains no cast modifier keyframes unless I manually add a keyframe for each object. My question is how to add all of these keyframes.

my bad you're right you need at least one keyframe

ah looks like I could ctrl+L to copy animation data

oh yes of course, so put it as an answer!

Also consider using drivers. Eg one scene property can be animated & then used as a target  to drive all modifiers. Changing the properties animation will be reflected by all driven by it... as opposed to all objects sharing the same action (the result of link animation data).

ctrl+L allows you to copy animation data too.


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Bridge edge loop acting weird between 2 clean edge loops
How edges looks like before bridge edge loop:
How mesh looks like after bridge edge loop:
Why is it acting so weird, 8 edges in the first loop, 8 edges in the second loop, that seems simple to connect. Am I doing something wrong?

I think the vanilla "Bridge Edge loop" is not quite efficient.
I tried the "Bridge" tool from "Loop Tools" addon, it works like a charm:

This addon is shipped in Blender. Just enable it in the user preferences and you will find the Loop Tools submenu in the Specials menu (W by default).

It's kind of interesting to know why Bridge Edge Loops isn't working.. it doesn't like the clockwise/anticlockwise order of vertices in the inner loop. If you fill the inner loop and send its normal in the same direction as the other faces, B.E.L  works. Perhaps the tool needs a 'reverse' option like the Loop Tools version.


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How can I modify the thickness of an inset after it was done?
Is there a way that I can alter the thickness of an inset after it was done?

No, there is not. Use modifiers whenever possible

This is not strictly possible, however, it is practically possible using the following easy steps.

Select the inset loop using alt + right click
Press G twice to enter edge slide mode
Move your mouse to resize as desired.

Note: as with any other action, you can also pressspace and type edge slide if you don't remember the shortcut.

It may be easier to just press "G" key twice and it'll go to edge slide.

Thank you so much. I didn't know about that shortcut and will add it to my answer.


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How to smooth out these 2 perpindicular edges
How can I smoothen out this perpendicular edge to multiple smoothed out edges to give it this curve?
Current

Goal

I tried beveling but that didn't seem to work.

Try beveling for vertex select those two vertex and SHIFT +CTRL+B.If it doesn't it work switch to object mode click CTRL + A  and  apply scale.The again in edit mode bevel it.

Good answer. Works perfectly - I only needed one vertex selected when testing.

Beveling creates a lot of geometry on the other side too: https://imgur.com/PYviPQC
Is there any way I can restrict it specifically to this edge?


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Will a baked animation be consistent over many animations?
That is to say, if I crash and restart my PNG render from file 137, will my frame 136 and 137 be smooth, even if I have complex physics and turbulence set up?
Right now I am troubleshooting a bug with my animation, and I want to rule this out as a root cause

If your physics and all simulations are baked, then the animation will be consistent


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While rendering Image, 32GB RAM memory is used before blender crashes, 3.0 Ubuntu
Before I hit render, I am comfortably using 3.4GiB/32GiB of memory just for Ubuntu, web browser and blender.  3.1/32GiB before I open blender and the scene I wish to render.  Below is a screenshot of my view port before render, because maybe you guys will notice something obvious about my setup.

I am rendering in cycles, @4k, with experimental options turned on (necessary because of the adaptive subdivision modifier), on the GPU.  When I hit render I get a the following memory utilization curve:

I may have a lot of vertices, but 32GB is a lot of memory to consume within a 30 second period.  Thanks for any input.  Any idea on how I can identify if this is a memory leak, or how I can reduce my memory use?

It seems that de noising was really messing me up.  I set de noising to 0 (adaptive, based on anti-aliasing settings) and I was able to get memory consumption down.  I'm not sure why I got the double hump pattern.


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Creating a plane composed of equilateral triangles
Is there any straight forward method or existing python script for handling this case?  I want to make some renders of "nets" of tessellated equilateral triangles.  So far I have not found a straight forward way to achieve this.
Perhaps an existing bpy script someone has?

How do you want to control the boundaries of these nets?

If I were to write a Bpy script,  I would create a "depth" variable to iterate through how many times I would iterate through a list of outside edges and generate a new non-duplicate triangle.  so depth =1 gives me a triforce and depth 2 would tessellate more triangles on the outside edge.  When I have the mesh I could quite easily trim it to approximate a square sheet using normal methods.

Try this script, you only need to change depth to your liking:
import bpy
import math

# create an equilateral triangle
mesh = bpy.data.meshes.new('Triforce')
r = math.sqrt(3) * 0.5
mesh.from_pydata(
    [(-r, -0.5, 0.0), (r, -0.5, 0.0), (0, 1.0, 0.0)], # vertices
    [], # edges are inferred from face
    [(0, 1, 2)] # face
)

# make an object for the triangle
triangle = bpy.data.objects.new(mesh.name, mesh)
coll = bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].collection
coll.objects.link(triangle)

# select the triangle edges safely
bpy.context.view_layer.objects.active = triangle
bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='OBJECT')
bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')
triangle.select_set(True)
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()
bpy.ops.mesh.select_mode(type='EDGE')

# subdiv until happiness
depth = 5
while depth > 0:
    bpy.ops.mesh.subdivide()
    depth -= 1

# final state: only triforce is selected
bpy.ops.object.editmode_toggle()

Result from the script with depth = 5, depth <= 0 gives you a single equilateral triangle.

Edit: Here is the script for a triangulated plane, just change sizex and sizey to your liking:
import bpy
import math

# create a plane of equilateral triangles
mesh = bpy.data.meshes.new('Triforce')
r = math.sqrt(3) * 0.5

sizex = 40
sizey = 20
verts = []
faces = []
offset = 0

if sizex < 2: sizex = 2
if sizey < 2: sizey = 2

for y in range(sizey):
    if y % 2 == 0:
        offset = 0
    else:
        offset = -r
    for x in range(sizex):
        verts.append((x*2*r + offset, y*1.5, 0))

for y in range(sizey-1):
    for x in range(sizex-1):
        if y % 2 == 0:
            faces.append(((y+1)*sizex+x, y*sizex+x, (y+1)*sizex+1+x))
            faces.append((y*sizex+x, y*sizex+1+x, (y+1)*sizex+x+1))
        else:
            faces.append((y*sizex+x, y*sizex+x+1,(y+1)*sizex+x))
            faces.append(((y+1)*sizex+x, y*sizex+x+1, (y+1)*sizex+x+1))

mesh.from_pydata(
    verts, [], faces
)

# make an object for the triangles plane
plane = bpy.data.objects.new(mesh.name, mesh)
coll = bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].collection
coll.objects.link(plane)

Result:

You are surely a scholar and a hero

Nah, a script creating a more plane like net would be better... glad i could help.

@WhisperingShiba added a script for a plane-like triangulation, have fun.

Thats great.  I was able to just delete faces to get the result, but this is a much more principled solution.  Seeing your scripts are a very helpful resource for my learning about bpy package.


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'Edge detection' with Nodes or bpy
I know this must be possible because Blender can take this image...

And by selecting the object the edges can be found perfectly.

So surely this most be a capability of Blender?  I've already tried Bevel and pointedness, and I wasn't able to get the desired effect.  Any ideas?

Are you trying to use this edge detection in some kind of modeling application or in a shader tree?

bmesh maintains boundary loop information internally that you can use find the boundary edge loops; but that information is not available to the material subsystem.

There is the line art capability of Blender.  Suggestion. Please search Freestyle.  Typically on the bottom of the Render Properties panel.

@atomicbezierslinger I am familiar, but it is less accurate than whatever algorithm the object select edge detection is using.  It is also a bit tricky to bend to my will.

@Jakemoyo It would be cool to get it for modeling application, but a Shader tree would be great.  Bevel and pointedness are not working on this petal geometry for some reason

@MartyFouts can I programatically create a spline derived from this geometry and then extrude the curve, then apply an emission?

bmesh only works on meshes, so if your flower is a curve, you'd have to convert it to a mesh but sure you could do that.  In bmesh terms each pedal would be an island, so iterate over islands, find the boundary loops, extrude those on normals, and assign the new faces to a material slot that has your emission material.  It's a lot of code, but you can find it in answers to various questions here.

I got something i think might work, totally procedural. Using Geometry Nodes. I kind of over emphasized the edge thickness for visibility in this demo, but its easily adjustable by setting the changing the EdgeScale value to slightly something slightly larger.
It's not totally perfect but for a proof of concept I think it works alright.

Node setup:

Good enough for now, thanks Jakemoyo


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Drivers only working for Z rotation on some objects within scene
I'm having a problem rendering a scene with multiple icospheres animated using drivers. I'm using X and Y drivers to move the objects along an ellipse (closed) path. And I'm using Euler Z rotation to rotate those objects on their Z-axis while they orbit. (fundamentally mimicking solar system orbits for the main planets).  The problem I'm seeing is that only Z rotations are working for some objects but not X Y translations.
When I'm in 3d view and hit the play button in the timeline, orbital rotation (around the object at 0,0,0) works fine for each of the 8 icospheres, so they move properly around an elliptical path (bezier curve object) about the sun (icosphere at 0,0,0). The reason the bezier curve exists is that initially I was using a simple path animation, but opted to use drivers to better control the "planet" motions more to scale with reality.
The Z rotations mimicking sidereal day periods also work fine in the 3d view. When I try to render this blend however, there is only the motion on the Z rotations, and all of the XY translations fail to render, so the planets simply spin in their original position.
X location driver code (not working in render)
0 + (sin(radians(frame/rotation_period)) * (major_axis/2))

Y location driver code (not working in render)
0 + (cos(radians(frame/rotation_period)) * (minor_axis/2))

for completeness, these are the working Z rotation driver settings
0 if frame == 0 else radians(degrees(2*pi)/((local_rotation_period/1)/23.5))*frame

Notes:

No errors are logged on any of the drivers in any interface.
the custom  "rotation_period" exists for all objects independently.
it's properly added to the driver interface as a single value.
Initially, I used simple path animations, that's why the bezier curve orbit guides exist (disabled in render), but fundamentally, having them there allows me to know the X and Y drivers are working as expected (in 3d view)
when enabling the driver, I disabled the path animation by disabling the constraint and unchecking the animate path checkbox in the object settings, I cleared the location on the target object (putting it back to 0,0,0 origin, then made the origin the object geometry, there seemed to be an issue properly following the curve ellipses if the object had world origin) , and then attached the X and Y driver setup.

I did some review/checkup and i don't see that I have any of the drivers disabled from contributing to the render output & I don't have any translation channels locked
I also have a set of 4 armatures controlling curve guide fields with a driver manipulating their x/y translation and they work fine in 3d view & rendered. Which makes me suspicious that maybe some way that i'm using the driver specifically for the planet orbit translations is buggy? The driver code which does translations and does work in render view is below:

sin(frame/50)*100

I can really use some help working this out, I've been working on the blend for quite some time and it's become a thing lol. I do prefer the driver based motion to the path animations which were very choppy and harder to tweak given the requirements. I can add any additional details needed, thanks in advance.

Suggest using 360 in place of degrees(2 * pi) above

thanks, I will give it a shot. that was a WIP honestly, it started as the standard formula for angular displacement and kind of morphed into something else lol.


text:
problem when using multiple mixRGB nodes fed into base color of principled BSDF
I'm having a problem using the combined (mixed) outputs from multiple mix RGB nodes as an input to the base color of Principled BSDF shader. (Eevee/Cycles alike)
When I route the color output from the final mix RGB node (last in a chain of interconnected mix RGB nodes) directly into Material Output node, I get the expected output in the 3D viewport. However, when I route the same final mix RGB node through Principled BSDF, the object material turns pink.
expected output

when routing all of the mix RGB nodes via base color input on Principle BSDF, the material turns pink

If I make a test connection 2 levels back of mix RGB into the Principled BSDF it works, albeit it's not the complete set of layers I'd like to display along with normals/spec map etc.
partial success when connecting from a few mixRGB back, bypassing the larger mixes of ~4 image datas, but only displaying part of what's expected

partial success when connecting from a few mixRGB back, bypassing the larger mixes of ~4 image datas, but only displaying part of what's expected

Is there maybe a limit on the amount of mix RGB layers or does the data get converted improperly after some level? Is there any way to see what's being passed to perhaps understand what may be going wrong? I've looked around the community boards and it seems in many cases of pink, it's misusage of some node or missing files. I have rechecked the node topology but I don't think I'm passing any incompatible data intentionally, and all of the files are definitely there (there are a total of 10 png format grayscale masks I'm using), I can view them in the image viewer.
One strange item I notice is that on the "last" image texture I added to the material setup, it refused to just name the file the files actual name ("Patch.png") and continues to name it "Image", although bypassing that node completely yields no difference in end result.

Did you ever figure this out? I'm having the same problem in 2.9 whenever I use a mix shader to combine 2 principled bsdf's.

Are you using GPU rendering by any chance? IIRC there's a maximum number of textures that can be used with GPU rendering, and things turn pink if you exceed it

The limit referred to in that post was removed entirely for GTX 6xx and higher cards as part of a project for the 2016 Google Summer of Code. Support for earlier cards in Cycles has also been dropped since then, so basically that entire question is obsolete now.

-_- Thanks for the responses. I have to revisit this one, I will try to reproduce it and get back to you all.


text:
Render time triples after updating to 2.82 from 2.81
I just re-rendered a project I'm working on after updating to 2.82 from 2.81 and my render time looks to have tripled after the update. I checked my render settings in the project as well as the render device settings in my preferences and nothing seems to have changed. I can't remember all the places I ticked boxes to optimize my render times as I'm pretty new to Blender, so I'm wondering if there's something else I should look at or any likely culprits?
FYI I'm rendering using Cycles, 500 samples, max total bounces at 4 with GPU Compute selected under Scene settings and CUDA (geforce + intel cpu) selected under preferences. I'm using the detailed denoise information in my denoise node on the compositing screen.


text:
How can I fix an "error invalid python expression" in the drivers editor

I created a driver to have a shape key driven from a sound (in the drivers editor) the Prop: object, in this case a pyramid shaped object that has a sound source (pyramid.003). I also tried driven from a Prop:sound, and the sound is a wave. Neither way works. I keep getting the "error invalid python expression". the expression is var and var (just below the "add input value"). both places show just var, I think that is the way it is supposed to be?
So how to fix the "error invalid python expression". Tks in advance

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

Ok, you try to animate a mouth, here a very very basic example.

add a torus

add an armature

Tab -> Edit mode

Click on the head of the bone

tap E X

click on the head of the first bone

tap E X

click on the upper bone, G X until so:

click on the lower bone, G X until so:

TAB -> object mode

select the torus, shift select the armature -> CTRL-P -> with automatic weights

now you have a VERY basic mouth rig:

Sound driven animation:

do the things i described above

install + enable animation nodes (if you don't have already installed it)

add a sound file in the video editor

use this node setup:

result:

*** UPDATE ***
for me this worked:

might not be the "cleanest" solution, but it works.
OR use this method:

right click on your custom property -> copy as new driver.
Then paste this in your bones location variable with "paste as new driver" -> then it works. If enter the same thing manually, it won't work. I guess this is a bug.
*** UPDATE 5 ***
The reason was:
You have to choose Mesh -> Pyramid in the driver panel.
Not Object -> Pyramid.
Then it works.

Hi @Chris I created a new file per your instructions. I can move a bone to animate. What I cannot do is animate using the sound from the sound bone.n https://we.tl/t-mNYW2QdsKW Suggestions please.

The structure of answers seems to be changing. The answer by Marty Fouts Jan 14 is true for my comment 3 hrs ago. The problem I cannot find any other path. This is a new file following chris's example which works but does now include the sound animation part.  Please cheers

@MartyFouts I tried using shape keys https://we.tl/t-74IIqUGvQA and it works but have yet to solve using bones https://we.tl/t-gZLYl63XG8. Cheers

i updated my answer. I just know how to use animation nodes to get a sound driven animation. You can download and check out the blend file i appended.

I know there is a „kind of“ barrier to learn it. It is a new way of thinking - as geometry nodes too. But I just can say: it‘s worth it. Watch some beginner tutorials. Check the reels from years ago what they did with animation nodes. It is still (!) much more powerful than GN (but I hope GN will be better in the near future). And it is maybe more open than GN will ever be, because you can write your own nodes by using python and so you have the same power as any python developer out there!

I have all my life been curious and wanting to learn. But. The barrier that I have is time. My time is short due to a life termination illness, could be half a year or so.  I would like to concentrate on finishing this movie. So since the bones issues is not solved yet, I will go for the shape key way. I'm grateful to all you folks. Cheers

i am sorry, i didn't know that. Wish you all the best!!!!

I was able to make a simple file that worked using shape keys  https://we.tl/t-we.tl/t-74IIqUGvQA . But now I tried cutting down my regular file a lot lot: https://we.tl/t-nrKOCQGfxg and back to invalid expression. Please take a look.  Cheers

your first link doesn't work ...

...and as i wrote, i never used sounds without animation nodes. I don't know how to add sounds without it. Do you have a link for me how to do that?

ok, i watched a tutorial. Didn't sound that complicated ;) and i made a tutorial. Maybe it helps you? https://youtu.be/3fRD_y_r-fc

I watched your tutorial and commented. I don't know if that is the proper place to chat with you.

you can write me an email - it is in my profile. I think as comment to my video -  it is not the right place. I think i will delete it.

don't copy the text, it won't work. Use right mouse click on your custom property and choose "copy as new driver". Then on your bones location: right click, paste as new driver, then it works.

Hi Chris. Here is a link to a file using shape keys I made that works and packed. https://we.tl/t-ot9DuQbmHO and this is the file that does not work https://we.tl/t-awR21z9YL1. Please have a look. I don't understand where you say 'don't copy...' I copy the path, then go to shape keys, add driver, insert path in the RNA slot. I works fine in the first file but not in the second cut down file.  Cheers

i updated my answer again -> you need to choose Mesh -> pyramid in the drivers panel. Don't choose object -> pyramid.

I tried mesh as well as object. the first file works with object. The second file does not show an invalid expression, mesh or object, but no animation.

the file you sent me showed me an invalid expression. If it doesn't show you an invalid expression -that's very weird. did u try to update blender? whats your blender version?

I'm using Blender 3.0

i tried on both version 3.0 and 3.1 -> it showed always the wrong python path with this red background.  [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/Vg3cj.png

I found the driver (dad-base object, go to shape keys, uncheck relative), but everything seems OK:

Now, changing ["Viejo Father"] to what we can see on your screenshot: ["Sound Viejo Father"] does cause an error, because no such custom property exists on the target Pyramid.003:

Tks. I think that what I've been doing is trying different way to animate, such as shape keys driven from an object (pyramid.003), mouth bones driven from another posed bone (made just as a source for the sound), etc. And got confused which was which.  The problem I have now is that using any method, with your help, does not animate the mouth.  I have done this with 'selves' and 'brujo', but can't make it work with other characters.

@RobertoCollinsLazo whenever you try to do something new, first create a "prototype" - a simple project, where you test if the functionality you want to use works the way you think it does. Not only it will be easier to test without a ton of other stuff possibly interfering, but it will also be easier to share the problem in the form of a lighter file. Cheers. :)

The Path entry in the input variable section is highlighted in red.  It means that what you have entered there is not a valid path.  Replace the "Sound..." entry with a valid RNA path to solve your problem.

@RobertoCollinsLazo What is an RNA (or DNA) property?

@RobertoCollinsLazo You are very welcome.

@RobertoCollinsLazo I have ~ 60 kB/s upload speed, so I can relate!

Thank you all. I deleted all drivers + a few other things and now it works. Cheers from an Ol' Fart


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Can someone give me a roadmap or a routine to help me learn Blender?
I have been studying Blender on and off for a couple of months but I feel like I always hit a roadblock. I wanna start from the beginning(kind of). Can someone give me a routine they used to study or a roadmap which I can follow or just which concepts I should first(again)?

What you'd like to do using blender?

There are ample supply of free videos for beginners on the web site that has the name that rhymes with noonoob. Or you can provide optional support. Some series probably have 80 installments.  So you can follow their sequence or create you own within their offerings.  I read books all the time.  But with Blender I would recommend at least 75% videos.  Maybe a free book from a library.  Library may have free online access to Blender Training. Most books I have seen on Blender were out of date before printing.  Make sure to create simple Python drivers.  I would only entertain electronic books.

Of course you will run into roadblocks.  Blunder is a nightmare.  One random video selection ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccOk5JWg1Qg&ab_channel=BornCG

I mainly want to use it for simulations and modeling.

For modelling I'd suggest find something you're interested in the real world eg. any design object or even a special flower should help you stay motivated working on. If you're stuck right now, I recommend against practicing any fluid simulations since it's a lot of tech, research and not documented pretty well. Keep motivated!

Thank you. I willm I have been working on Fluid sims and based on your comment they are the most fun so Ill keep at them.


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Strange bevel and union behvaior
I was trying to follow this tutorial to increase my understanding of bevels.
I got to 19:36 when I noticed that my cylinder can only go so far towards the edge, until it starts acting strangely. Is there a way I can fix this?

Further from edge

Closer to edge

Disabling loop slide on the last bevel modifier seemed to do the trick, it doesn't look very smooth though so if anyone has a better answer please post it


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Why is my plane flickering in solid view mode?
My 5 sided plane is flickering when rotated in solid view mode
The plane has only one face and doesn't have any inner edges, I have tried creating another plane and it doesnt look like it has this problem.
Why would my plane flicker like that?

Have you checked for double vertices with Remove Doubles [W]?

As @Leander said you can resolve this issue by removing doubles. You have two copies of the mesh on top of each other causing Z-Fighting artifacts in the viewport

@Leander Yes I have made sure to remove doubles, there weren't any

@SamirRahamtalla the other plane in the picture is the one I was trying to make to confirm that there is nothing wrong with my blender, it was at another point in the z-axis

It may help to upload a condensed version of your file with only the plane in question to blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com and post the link in an edit to this question.

Next to viewport shading buttons go into the options menu, and check "Backface Culling".
NOTES:
(1) When solid shaded objects get larger for the units of measurement used (mm or m?) it may cause flicker that does not occur on small objects.
(2) With backface culling enabled, you will only see faces from the outside, where the normals are set. This is OK for solid volumes, but when removing faces from a solid in edit mode, you may want to disable backface culling.


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How to offset bezier curve?
I am not able to find offset bezier curve option in blender which is available in most of software

You could do it this way but it's not completely satisfying if you want to keep curves (and not convert to mesh), so maybe there's another solution? Select your curve, go in the Properties panel > Geometry. Play with the Extrude value. Duplicate your curve with shift D and Enter. Play with the Offset value of your second curve.

Is it possible if i convert curves to mesh

yes you can convert curve to mesh with alt C

after alt c how to offset it

it looks like there was an addon (the Offset Tool) to do it but I can't find it, so I guess you only have indirect solutions: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/36862/outline-bezier-curve-in-2d-mode

After alt C, it's now a mesh, you extrude it on the Z axis, then alt S to offset it

Activate curve tools addon and use outline feature.

Someone will tell if I'm wrong but it looks like there's no easy way to do it. In this question they talk about an Offset Tool but I don't find it.
You could do it this way, but at the end you will need to convert your curve to mesh:

Select your curve, go in the Properties panel > Geometry.
Play with the Extrude value.
Duplicate your curve with shift D and Enter.
Play with the Offset value of your second curve.
Convert your curve to mesh with alt C.
If you decide to come back to curve, again alt C. As you will have a lot of vertices you can use the Simplify Curves addon (play with the values on the bottom of the T panel).

You could also directly convert your curve to mesh, then extrude your mesh on the Z axis, and alt S (shrink) the shape. Then convert back to curve if you need, and again, use the Simplify Curves addon if you want to limit the amount of vertices.

In Blender 2.8 in Edit Mode Curve > Transform > PushPull does the offset of selected vertices. Just found accidentally.

You can create a 2D curve, and in Object Mode,CtrlD duplicate it, and then set the Offset value in the duplicate.
Or, you can create a 3D curve, and in Edit Mode, select all vertices, CtrlT90 twist it through 90 degrees, and set an Extrude value to the desired width.
Neither of these options actually offsets the curve; neither moves the curve's vertices. They both, in their own way, make an offset of the polygonal approximation to the curve, whose resolution is set in the curve's Preview U field. In order to get two curves parallel to one another, with their own control points, you would have to convert to mesh and back again.
If you try things like setting the pivot to 'Individual Origins', the Transform Orientation to 'Normal' and in Edit Mode, selecting all vertices and CtrlDYY duplicating them along their local Y tangent, you can see where the problem is. Although this actually works quite well for cyclic closed curves if the vertices are set to 'Aligned', open curves go awry. At the very least, in a Bezier, the control points would need altering in another direction to keep the splines parallel, when the vertices are moved. So the problem is not simply one of interpolation, as it is with a mesh: it's one of parametric curve-fitting.
Is the application you illustrate actually doing that? Plenty of vector-based drawing applications do, by approxination.
See here  and other places, for the problem.

As per answer provided by: @Robin Betts
Using Blender 3.2  :

Enable Curve Tools:  Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > Add Curve: Curve Tools
In Object Mode, Right click on selected curve to get context menu and select   Offset Curve

You can generate multiple "offset tool paths". I don't know an easy way to separate multiple paths, so I generated several offset paths 1 path at a time.


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When I tick the use nodes button no nodes appear on my screen
I am currently doing a donut course by The Blender Guru on Youtube and when I tick the box that says use nodes no nodes appear on screen.

Hello :). You can press the Home key to display all added nodes. If there are none, you can always add them manually.

@JachymMichal I am a bit confused, where is the home key and also how do i add them in maually?

No problem, I added an answer with a gif. Please add a screenshot of your workspace into the question :).

This can have multiple reasons.

You can try View > View All, (Home) to show all present nodes.
If there are none, you can also add them manually through Add > Search


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UV Unwrapping is eneven
I am trying to unwrap a object (shirt) in the blender by marking seams. I added new uv grid image using image texture node.  But for some reason the pattern on unwrapped image is not even on both side. I don't have much experience when it comes to uv unwrpping so I'm not able to figure out what the problem is .I am attaching .blend file, hope that helps.
Thanks in advance.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hUIulFz6sgqSMBpHU_EF_8sDqgf0X2nY/view?usp=sharing

Hello :). Please add an image of you mesh and of your UV map. You'll have a better chance of getting an answer.

Inside the shirt, there is a Ngon that breaks the flow of the edge loops, so your vertical Seam fails to "cut" the model in two halves :

A quick fix would be to add a Seam along on side of this Ngon :

It would also be a good idea to add a Seam inside the arm, same position as outside :

For your future models, i would suggest avoiding unnecessary NGons. Also, you can use the Solidify modifier instead of modelling the outside and the inside, it's much easier and avoid this kind of traps.

oops you're right, didn't even realized there was a seam inside  ;)

@thibsert thanks for your help. Adding seam across the ngon did the trick. Also I had used solidify modifier but before going for unwrapping, I applied all the modifiers. Thanks for your suggestions :p.


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How to scale active rigid bodies during simulation in blender
I am new to blender simulations and I am trying to create a simulation of a ball (active rigid body) falling freely and colliding with bunch of other objects (passive rigid bodies). During the simulation at certain frame I want to scale the ball and continue its motion (in simulation) with that new scale. I tried using animated flag and keyframes but it didn't work. Some of the technique that I tried and problems associated with them are :

Checked animated flag at the frame where I want the active body to be scaled and
added keyframe. But when I check the animated flag the ball gets
shifted to the original position (at the start of the simulation).
Scaled the active body at the frame where I want the active body to be scaled. Then added scale keyframe. But when I scale the ball, it stays at that position even if I play the simulation from start.

I am sure there is a simple work around for this but I couldn't find the solution.

Shall the ball scale in free fall or during its interaction with other rigid bodies?

During interaction with other passive bodies. In my case the ball bounces on 2 passive objects and I want to scale ball after it bounces from fist passive body and before hitting other one (in the air).

I found that using keyframes on the scale factor without the animated checkbox worked.
The animated toggle works as a binary flip between rigidbody physics that does not follow location or rotation keyframes and following the animation which does not follow rigidbody physics (but still can collide with objects).

At first it didn't work with my test file and gave weird results. I then tried it with animating the Delta Transform Scale which worked perfectly. Trying again with normal Scale gave weird results again - and then Delta Transform didn't work anymore either. But setting up everything completely new suddenly made it work in each variant. But it's really frustrating how sometimes deleting rigid body bakes doesn't have any effect at all. I wonder if there is no setting to get completely rid of the old cache.

@common grey can you please explain it in the steps. Because as mentioned in the question, when I scale the active rigid body (anywhere during the simulation) it stays at that frame even if I play the simulation from start.

Ok so I have solved the problem. Thanks to @common grey and @Gordon Brinkmann, I was able to play around with different types of keyframes and managed to achieve desired the effect. I am adding link to a .blend file with sample simulation. Here's what I did :

I am using cube as active rigid body and a plane as passive rigid body.
I first enabled animated flag for cube and added a keyframe, because I wanted it to start falling down at specific frame. So at frame 20 I disabled animated so that the cube starts falling.
Then on frame 44 (totally random number) I added keyframe for scale (Hit i and select scale). This will be starting point of scaling of cube.
On frame 56 I enabled animated flag (which shifts the cube at starting point - this might throw you off at first but its totally fine) then scaled up the cube and added a keyframe for visual scale. This is where cube stops scaling up in the simulation.
Again I did the same for scaling down the cube.

Thank you.


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Weird issue with LMB on caps lock
Running Linux and using a small Python script globally in Xorg to bind left mouse down + up to the caps lock key. I use this because of RSI and the buttons on my trackball are crap.
It just works with everything. But in Blender it only works in some situations.
For instance selecting objects in Object Mode doesn't work, but it of course works using the real left mouse button. Dragging to select works though, although only some areas of the viewport will let caps lock activate the drag region.
I'm using pyautogui.mouseDown() and pyautogui.mouseUp() when caps lock is pressed and released. And using pynput.keyboard.Listener() to listen for events.
Anyone got any ideas to make it work? Script below.
#!/usr/bin/env python3

from pynput import keyboard as keyb

CAPS = keyb.KeyCode(16777215)

def on_press(key):
    if key == CAPS:
        return pyautogui.mouseDown()

    pass

def on_release(key):
    if key == CAPS:
        return pyautogui.mouseUp()

    pass

with keyb.Listener(on_press=on_press, on_release=on_release, suppress=False) as listener:
    listener.join()
```

Ah, tried setting it with xmodmap and it works!
xkbset m
xmodmap -e 'keycode 66 = Pointer_Button1 Pointer_Button1'


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Particle System + Collision
I am having an object, it has particle system with velocity 0. I have a sphere that acts as the collision to collide with the object & its particle system. The sphere did interact with the object, but it seems like it does not collide with most of the particle (as shown in image below). May i know what could be the problem or setting that need to be adjusted? I will attach the blend file in case someone would like to have a look in it. Thank you so much.

Ok, Everything is fine all you have to do is change the end frame to your desired value at the moment you have kept both frame start and end for particle system the same, Change that.
if you want the particles to disappear change life time.

If you found it useful pls upvote and hit the tick mark as this might help others facing the same problm

Hi, thanks for trying to help. But that was intended to make the particle system to have the same start and end frame. The expected output is while the sphere almost hits the shard, the particle system acts like the small tiny shards that only appears when the glass breaks. Thank you and hope that make sense.

@CheXuian do you what particles to disappear as soon as the ball is hit?

Nope, i need the sphere to collide with the particle, but now the sphere is like not colliding with most of the particle which is so weird.


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Cycle does not reflect changes directly
I was trying to paint a texture on an object in cycle, but i found that the changes will not be directly reflected in cycle. I have to switch to other view and back to render view to see the changes. May i know is it the nature of cycle or is there any problem in it?

Besides, is there any set up for the environment that is good for texture painting? Should the background be totally black, or placing lighting by myself, or just use a HDRI?
Thank You so much for helping.

You can use the Solid View for texture painting with some success if you are looking to really examine your painting in context of what you are changing in the specific texture. I set it to Flat and turn off shadows.

You can also use the Material View with blurred background, or turn on full background HDRI and lights from scene if you want to get a better idea of what your painting is doing in its interaction with your shading tree.

I think switching to Cycles render view is better for previewing the effect you have built up and to check your shaders, and not for the actual act of painting. The Material view has a very good result in comparison, and can be used as a preview of what it might look like before switching workflow to the shader tree for tweaking.

Alright noted, thanks :D


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Image Texture Node Output
Can someone kindly explain the difference between color and alpha output from the image texture node? I can't really find any useful information in understanding the difference between these two. Thank You So Much.

Well explained in the manual: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/shader_nodes/textures/image.html#outputs Does this help? What else?

Alpha datas are useful when you want to give transparency to an area of your material.
In the case of the Image Texture Alpha output, let say you have a PNG with a transparent background (0% alpha). Plug the Image Texture's Alpha output into the Alpha socket of the Principled (or into the Factor of a Mix Shader between a Diffuse and a Transparent shader), the alpha of your image will be recognized as the area that needs to be transparent.

Thank You So Much :D


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Why do my rigid bodies freak out after adding one more object?
Trying to rig the mesh hair to have physics. It works fine, until I add one more (passive) rigid body (the opaque cube) to the scene. Any idea what may cause this?
https://streamable.com/g3lhak

Interesting. Have you tried applying scale, location, and rotation to the bones and objects? Select them and Ctrl+A.

I'm not sure what you mean, but I did align the axes of the objects to the axes of the bones.


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Newbie Modeler Question: How to unbend a character arm before rigging
I'm just learning Blender, and have figured out a lot, but I haven't grasped a lot of modeling yet. I have a character (Slimer from Ghostbusters) that I'm trying to rig but it came posed, not in a T pose. I'm not good enough to figure out how to bend his arms back into a T pose without destroying the mesh. Any suggestions here?

Try to set the 3D cursor at the shoulder, then grab the arm and rotate the arm around the 3D cursor. Proportional editing might help keep things smooth around the shoulder.

This worked. I forgot about Proportional Editing, and it just took some careful work to get it straightened out. Then I went into Sculpt mode and fixed some of the bulging. Since its a crazy creature it won't look odd to be slightly deformed. Thank you for the tip!

The character may have been modeled that way and in that case there's not much you can do without deforming the mesh in some way to get it to be in a T pose.


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Optimal settings for Cloth dynamic to create jiggle
I followed a tutorial in an old version of Blender to create a jiggle effect for an object. Unfortunately the older version didn't have the same settings so it was hard to figure it out. Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boGA0Tn8-yY
Does anybody know the best settings for this type of thing? I've got pinning working using weights but any setting I use totally deforms the rest of the body. I could use some tips on this!
I'm a brand new Blender user, but with past experience in other packages. I've been learning this system (and loving it) over the pandemic.


text:
Post Rig modeling/object question
I recently rigged a character that is a single object, with no parts. Just one mesh. The rigging is fine and works, but when I move the Master controller everything moves with it, except the teeth and the pupils. Is there a reason why they would be separate? I made sure there was no odd weight texture on it (I think) but can't figure out why the teeth and pupils don't move, as if they were totally separate. And they don't deform. They just sit there.
Any advice would be appreciated!

they must not have been affected to any bone, you need to select these parts and assign them to the Vertex Group they are supposed to be part of

At this point, the only separation is that they are different textures. But still the same object. How could it not be affected? And I did weight paint them in to a bone controller, so can't figure out why it wouldn't touch them.


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Random texture appears during rendering?
I am trying to animate a cheaply-made 3D scan of my body a friend rigged for me, and something that is not in the scene shows up in the render. It's like a low-res texture of my own head stuck in a T pose in the middle of the frame. The character has their head facing the ground on the first frame of the shot.
Here is a screenshot of the blender file yesterday night:

Here is the result of one of the first frames of rendering:

You can see the top of my head in the foreground, and in the background there's this kind of weird artifact that is not supposed to be there.
Any help would be super appreciated! Thanks

Could it be something you have hidden in the viewport? Objects hidden in the viewport are still visible in renders.

that was it thank you! Feeling a bit stupid, lots of troubleshooting just to realize that collections do not work like groups in photoshop. thanks!


text:
Something wrong with mirror selection?
relatively new to Blender. I made a model with the mirror modifier, then I followed a tutorial to rig it and everything was OK. But when I was trying to correct some weight paint I couldn't select ALL the mesh. What did I do wrong?

if it is mirrored...you can always just select one part of the mirror - that's how the mirror works. If you apply the mirror, you can select the whole mesh.

Yes, that was the solution. Apply the mirror from the Object Mode. Thank you.

you are welcome


text:
Doubt about Bezier handle type switching
Have you ever encountered that the handle type of Bezier vertices cannot be changed from time to time?
To ensure that the Bezier handle type changes, you need to do one of two things:
(1) Use Box Select to drag to a large area outside the Bezier handle.
(2) Single-click on the area outside the Bezier spline before dragging around the vertices.
If it's as designed, it's a bit annoying.
What do you think about this?
Please refer to the image for details.
NOTE:
These are not the case if you select one vertex directly.
Only when you select vertices using "Box Select".
With the view that this issue is "working as designed",
Not considered a bug.

I think you misunderstood the design. If you select only one handle of the control point, you can set only this handle to a particular type. If you select the control point, it automatically selects both its handles, no need for box select. And if you change the CP's interpolation type, both its handles change accordingly

Thank you for your feedback.
In the case of one vertex, you're right.
I've shown it at one vertex for simplicity.
The actual work is dragging many vertices, right?
At that time, I think that there will be a problem with the behavior of the vertices of the edge.

I'm still not sure what's exactly your problem but you can hide handles and show only Control Points using this requires at least v2.92 or 2.93 can't remember

I'm not asking for an answer in this matter.
Please refer to the image.
Do not perform (No. 3 "Full drag of handle")
and (No. 7 "single click"),
and proceed to the next process.
Maybe you won't get a circle immediately.
Why is that?
I want you to consider the reason.
Thank you.

Sorry I still do not understand the question. Could you rephrase it in one sentence eg "I do not understand why, when I perform x, y happens" ? FYI this is not a site for discussing design decisions.

Wasn't this a site for discussing design decisions? Sincerest apologies.
One last thing I want to tell you.
Common Bezier spline tools are
Selecting a Bezier handle does not hold it.
I'm used to this so I'm confused in the Blender.
Blender is special and holds the Bezier handle selection.
I think the hold of Bezier handle selection is beneficial,
I think it would be nice if I could choose to hold or not hold the Bezier handle selection.
Thank you and Good night.

I will explain what I understood.
To make sure change the handle type of Blender Bezier spline,
It turned out that "it is necessary to make everything selected, including not only the vertices but also the Bezier handles."
Blender's architecture is special,
The Bezier handle holds the "selected" and "unselected" states.
For beginners, the "Hold select and deselection of Bezier handles" function should be "disabled".
In other words, it does not create the "selected" and "non-selected" states of the Bezier handle.
I think that the function of "holding the selection and deselection of the Bezier handle" is beneficial in its own way.
In the preferences, I think it would be nice to be able to select "enabled" or "disabled" for that function.
Common Bezier spline tools do not have the ability to "hold selection and deselection of Bezier handles".
Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Blender Add-on Bezier Utility,
I'm used to these behaviors, so I'm very confused by the operation of the built-in blender Bezier.


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Edges selected as dotted lines. Cannot slide or move
I use Blender 2.9. I am trying to make this stand alone cooker top. The edges were working fine. I then selected the little edge we see at the top and 'Edge Slide' it to move it lower along the 2 vertical edges besides (I though the edge would 'slide', but it formed a new edge and slid it along, exactly as I wanted it to. Happy me.)
But when I try to do the same with the other little edge (the one below),I noticed that the edge got selected as dotted lines, and I could not move or slide it. And so were the other edges(as shown in the picture below).Rest of the edges on the face(The diagonal edges, the middle 2 vertical ones, and the happy edge) work fine.

I'm new to Blender, this could be something simple. Why are the edges misbehaving? What's with the dotted selection? Also, what would be the most effective way to slide the edge, making a new face in between? (Like I did on the top but I don't know how I did it)

I think you may have duplicate, coincident edges. If you select an edge with the tweak tool, does it span all those junctions?

Nothing changes with the tweak tool. The edges behave the same. Also, the stubborn edges do not get pulled/dragged with the yellow select/drag circle (sorry I don't know what its called) , but the other edges do. Also, all the edges can be moved by 'G' grab and move.


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Can't connect nodes in shading
I am using blender 2.82, 2.83, and 2.90 they all have same problem with nodes I can't connect the nodes in them..at first it was working..then due to no reason blender says unsupported graphics card. After fixing that nodes issue came. So I think it has to do something with it

is your graphics card, in fact, unsupported by blender?

Well at first it was going all well I can connect the nodes of shading etc. But few days later it said unsupported graphics so I wanted a tutorial on YouTube and I fix it. After fixing that shading nodes problem came.


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How can I create a rope like object, that can attach object on the bottom and they will both respond to force field
So for my scene, I've created a lantern and I want to hang it on a rope so it will swang with a wind force field. So my idea is to create a long strip of plane and use cloth physics and pinpoint one end, and it seems alright, but I got no idea how to do the other end.
I've tried using physics constrain but I realize it will not move with the end of the rope so the lantern is just fixed in the space.:(

If I understand correctly you want to stick an object to the bottom of your rope? If so you can do it this way:

Select your rope, go in Edit mode and select 2 or 3 of its bottom vertices.

Back to Object mode, select the rope, then select the lantern object, then click ctrlP > Vertex (Triangle) to parent the lantern to the vertices.

If you play the animation the lantern should follow the swing of the rope.

Thank you so much for your answer!!! It works perfectly!


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CPU usage when rendering
So I'm rendering a scene using OPTIX and only my GPU (RTX 2070 Super). For some reason, when the time left on my render hits 0.04 seconds, my CPU usage hits 100% for a few seconds and then goes back down once the render finishes, no matter how I optimized the settings, this always happens. How can I make this not happen and why does it happen?

Compositor? Denoising probably

The compositor N-panel has some performance options including enabling OpenCL for gpu calculations.

which version of Blender?

If you are using a denoiser other than Optix, such as NLM this will happen. Also, writing a file in itself can need some CPU.


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Object too dark after solidify from an SVG
I've:

Created a voronoi pattern as an SVG
Imported SVG to Blender.
Turned SVG into a Mesh.
Used "Solidify" to "extrude" the mesh.

I now have a 3D object - I do only hard surface modelling for 3D printing.
The issue:
The object is very dark (no matter what Viewport shading I use) and I can see vertices, edges & faces ONLY in wireframe mode (see image below).
Question: how can I light my object to appear as other "native" Blender objects?

Thanks,
Roy

I guess when you imported it, it has a created a material with the color your svg had. Go in the Material panel and delete this material

Thanks! that did the trick :)

When you imported your svg object, it automatically created a material with the color of your svg. Go in the Properties panel > Material panel and delete this material.