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Mirror Modifier Problem
I'm new to Blender and I'm currently trying to sculpt a bipedal dinosaur character, I decided to apply the mirror modifier to create the main body however when I try to transform the faces it creates this problem. All boxes in the modifier are checked.

What you are talking about saying "this problem" is not so clear to me. But are you taking into account that mirror use the object's center (the big yellow dot) as pivot point for each mirror axis?

When I transform a face, the face transforms on the opposite side of the cube. The big yellow dot is in the center of the square.

What you describe sounds like it is the purpose of the mirror, not the problem. Can you describe in terms of what you expect to happen in contrast to what does happen? Use axes information, e.g. "I move a face on the extrem positive x of the object and on the extreme negative x another face moves, too." or "If I move a face on the exterme negative y, iexpect the twin face on the extreme positive y to also move."

Welcome to Blender SE. The Mirror mod uses the object's origin as the point of reflection for left-right, front-back, and top-bottom (x, y and z axes). One problem I can see - as you say you have turned all mirror axes on - is that you have extruded or moved faces past the origin, which results in faces overlapping each other. This causes confusion later on. If you're modelling an animal with only one axis od symmetry, I suggest just using the x mirror axis, and don't extend faces, lines or vertices past the mirror point (origin).

You probably don't want to check all the boxes in the mirror modifier. Based on your scene, I advise you un-check X and Z.

Thanks for your help everyone, the problem appears to be solved. I deleted the box and made a new mirror modifier and only checked the box on the Y axis. The box extruded with no issues :)


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Can't select two objects in Edit Mode
Here is part of my bipedal dinosaur character, I want to select two objects in order to connect the hand to the arm, but so far it's only allowing me to edit one object. (I am also using a mirror modifier)

How could I select the two objects so I can attach the hand to the arm? I want to be able to connect vertices and faces together, if anyone could offer tips to do this it would also be a great help. Thanks for your responses in advance.

You have to join the two objects first. In object mode, select them both and use "Ctrl+J" (the last one selected in yellow will be the active object, so the other one will be joined to it)

Ah thank you! I tried that earlier, however the mirror image disappeared, I didn't realise I needed to select the body last in order for it to work. Thanks! :)

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license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


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What is going on with the Extrusion?
Hi so I am currently creating a Witcher Wolf School Medallion just for fun, However it's decided to do this with the last extrusion. I saved before this happened so I've being unable to fix it.
What is this and is there any way to fix it? I appreciate any help given!

Gemma

you need to activate the Clipping option of the Mirror modifier if you don't want your extrusion to create inner faces, but anyway, I guess if your extrusion was not following the X axis is because the original face was a bit tilted on the Z axis, no?

I mean, by default your extrusion will follow the face normal, if the face is not aligned to the axis, the extrusion won't be

By default your extrusion will follow the normal of your face, so if your face is slightly tilted on the Z axis it won't follow the Y axis. If you want your extrusion to follow the Y axis, you need to constraint the extrusion: press E to extrude, then Y. Also don't forget to activate the Clipping option of the Mirror modifier, it will prevent the creation of any inner faces.

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


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No Grease Pencil Option Showing (at all)
I've decided to learn Grease Pencil for 2D animation in Blender, however the option for Grease Pencil isn't showing up at all.
I've downloaded 2.79 for Mac (as screen capped) so I don't know what I'm doing wrong, is there something else I need to download to get it to work?
Any help is greatly appreciated, Thanks!
Gemma

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


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Grease Pencil Vertex Problem
I've recently gotten into Grease Pencil animation on Blender v2.79 but whenever I try to select the whole grease pencil frame to position the drawing elsewhere, the drawing only selects a single vertex to pull out when I want to move the whole object.

Like so....

Is there anything that I am doing wrong here? I would greatly appreciate any help, I have looked on youtube vids and they never seem to have this problem. Thanks!

Gemma

You've probably already solved this by now, but it looks like you're in "Edit" mode.  Try selecting the drawing in "Object" mode (by hitting ↹ Tab), then try moving it.


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UV Texture Bleeds Over
I've nearly finishing texturing a Pelican in Blender painting on UV maps from photoshop and importing the result on the Pelican, everything is fine except for the beak, where parts of the uv are bleeding over into each other particularly in little corners. (See Image) other than cutting up the mesh of the Pelican again is there any other way to fix this? I have the mirror modifier applied as well.

Please add an image of the wireframes for this type of a question.

I can't seem to add another image

Maybe as a link? If you don't have a https://imgur.com account, it's okay, you can add a picture there even without an account.

Try switching your subdivision surface modifier from Catmull-Clark to Simple.

Tried that, surface goes all blocky and can't seem to set it back to normal, Thanks for the tip though.


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Mirror Modifier Collapsed in Centre
I've being modelling a pelican with the mirror mode modifier when I came to apply the subdivision surface
I was horrified to discover the mirror modifier has collapsed inwards in the centre, this didn't happen previous when modelling a dinosaur, is there any way to fix this or do I have to start again? Appreciate any advice to help resolve this!

Maybe you forgot to delete faces on the seam?

Yes! That was the issue! thanks so much to you both :))

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/6063/subsurf-and-mirror-modifier-creating-a-split-in-mesh


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Select all faces parallel to ground
Is there a way to select all faces in my mesh that have normals that point upwards, with a range of how much they need to be pointing upwards to be selected?I have a mesh of a house, and I want to add a solar panel material to all the faces that point upwards but the mesh just has too many faces to do it manually. It also has an inside that I do not want to be selected. I am not sure whether this  will involve scripting (I know absolutely nothing about scripting by the way)Preferably, my selection would look something like this:Thanks in advance for any advice anyone gives me.

I would use c for circle select and pick the top parts of the globes then either grow selection or use select similar.
Select similar which is Shift + g can be used to find faces with similar angles/direction which should be your best bet. Then just grow your selection using
Ctrl + +
More ways to select can be found here https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/curves/selecting.html

yes shift G > Normals then play with the Threshold of the Operator box, or ctrl +, seems to be the solution

Thanks so much! That worked perfectly, I will have to deselect a few things like the floor inside and window ledges, but that will be nothing compared to the amount of work that it would be to select everything manually.


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The score resets when scene resets
I need help keeping score when I reset the scene.
This is the game file link.  https://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/92672
My score shouldn't reset when resetting scene.  It should stay when scene resets.

you can use a Game actuator, load global dict and save global dict, i dont know how this actuator works. i think you'll need little bit of python to do this.
google for "bge global-dict". there are a few tutorials on youtube.
or you can just create a file.
with open("file", "w") as f: f.write() f.close(),
save the file a openit up from other scene.
with open("file", "r") as f: f.readLine() f.read()... and so.
It's basically the same thing. A dict that blender handles or a "dict" you handle.

This doesn't help me.

If the right answer does'nt help you. You must be some special kind of common factor. Good luck!

I want the game to do it all itself

I see, so ask to your game how to do it.

the game should do just what you said above


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Can't seem to bake fire animation?
I am new to baking and animation in general, but I was in the process of trying to add a basic fire/smoke animation in Blender 2.82. In the process, I create my smoke domain (using quick smoke) and fiddle with Cache Type until I can actually get the render to display.
Once I run it through the replay, I switch type to final, bake it, and it seems to be working - YAY! I then go to my other object and follow the same workflow, yet when I bake this one my original animation seems to just disappear? There is nothing that happens, the domain just becomes completely empty.
I thought maybe this is just a short-termed cache and once I bake the other animation it deleted the original, so I tried baking through object > animation > bake action, and this seemed to do the same thing.
What can I do to get this working? This seemed really interesting and fun, but now I can't seem to get it to work at all.

can you please add an image

I think I managed to solve it!

I managed to solve this by saving each bake to a separate directory! This kept all of them for the final render.


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List of contiguous faces of bmesh
Is there a way to get the list of the connected faces of the bmesh in their connection order? In other words, if I start from any random face within a continuous bmesh I should get the list of all the faces and each of them should be ordered in such a way that it is connected to (i.e. sharing an edge with) the preceding one in the list.

How exactly is the selection in the video we see made? Did you select it by hand or did you use a function in blender for that? Can you also share the .blend (maybe not needed n this case but speeds up the testing and answering process)

I wrote the function myself, which traverses along the connected edges in clockwise direction. But as you can see it gets into a cul-de-sac at a point. The mesh is very simple a cube with a couple of extruded faces and some dyntopo sculpting. And it's triangulated to simplify the algorithm.

Could you give us the algorithm and the .blend so we can debug it better?

The .blend is at: The algorithm is kind of naive.. take a face and an edge, get the second edge from this one and select the face. I am looking for a better algorithm not a fix in this one :)

Just in case my earlier comment sounded impolite, I just want to let you know that I did not mean to be rude. It's just that my algorithm is all wrong and sharing it will not help at all. For example I started with the assumption that the triangle edges and faces have a standard convention of indexing the vertices. Looks like this assumption is wrong. That's the reason I said I'm looking for another, better algorithm, which takes into consideration the blender specific way of arranging the faces.


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Types of Edges In a Triangulated Mesh
I added the triangulate modifier on a mesh and then applied it. For this mesh in edit mode, I see two types of edges, thick bright ones from the original mesh and thin black ones, newly created by the modifier.

Now if I create a new bmesh having new faces with the same vertex coordinates of the triangulated mesh, all the edges in the new mesh are uniform color.

The new mesh also has slightly different shape. Is there any explanation for the two types of edges in the original mesh and is it possible to replicate them in a new mesh, so that I get exactly the same shape?

The difference is: smooth attribute value of the edges with orange border is False, that of the ones with black is True. I guess, the new edges added by Triangulate modifier are smooth. So when recreating a mesh vertex by vertex, one needs to copy the edge.smooth attribute along with the vertex coordinates.


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Boolean Operation on Extruded Edge
I need to clean up a mesh and thought of using boolean operation to remove the unwanted part. But the 'hanging' edges don't seem to be affected by the boolean operation. For example: if I have a cube and I extrude an edge, I thought a booeal difference with another object overlapping this edge would slice it off. Which doesn't seem to be the case. I get similar results with other boolean operations and even boolean modifier behaves the same way.
Is there a way I can achieve the objective of cutting off a portion of an object via another suitably shaped object?

Boolean operations only work well-ish on manifold gemoetry

I get the best (but still unsatisfying) results by adding thickness to planes with the Solidify modifier


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Single key input property in UI Panel
How to capture a single key user input in the UI panel of the add-on?
The UILayout documentation mentions an event parameter in the prop method. If this is set to True, there appears a single key input control in the UI Panel. But I am unable to capture the key pressed on this control.
Would appreciate any help.

To capture a single key, the event param of prop in UILayout needs to be set to True and the corresponding property needs to be an EnumProperty with ALL the key codes mapped.
When the user presses a key on the control, the EnumProperty item that is related to the code of the key pressed, gets selected.
Please post your answer if you have any better alternative.


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How to Change Grid subdivisions (2.81)
The subdivisions options in viewport overlays is greyed out in 2.81. Any changes in this have no effect on grid display. Maybe, I have set some system option by mistake. How do I enable grid subdivisions in 2.81?

Hello :). It seems this option is temporarily disabled in 2.81 to keep the units coherent across the UI. Hopefully, in 2.82 it will work again.

@JachymMichal Thank you very much for the update :)

Go to Scene Properties> Units> Unit System and set Metric or Imperial to None.
Then the option to change the subdivisions in the Viewport Overlays will be enabled again.
I'm using Blender v2.82.

I found when I set units system to none the grid subdivision worked.


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Finding display state of a dynamic property
There is a BoolProperty p defined in a custom PropertyGroup class; and p is displayed in a panel based on some conditions (say cond1).
Later in the code, I need to find out whether p was displayed in the panel or not. (And it's cumbersome to repeat the cond1 check everywhere.)
How to find this out? (The params.p gives me access to only the value of the property (True / False) and not other attributes like its visibility.)

Store the result of the conditional check in a instance attribute that can be accessed from the other classes.

@rjg The condition is dependent on the selection of EnumProperty in the same panel. So no use storing it.


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Spotlight not working in Final Render (Cycles)
Having a bit of trouble with the spotlight when it comes between the preview render and the final render. In the preview render, everything is what I'd like the final render to be. I have a spotlight shining onto a platform in a cave, this is in the render preview.

However when I hit the render button on cycles, the result is a whole lot darker, as below.

I made sure the spotlight is close to the mesh, reset the transform and scale, adjusted the brightness and yet I still get this same result. Is there anything else I need to check or click in the light or render settings? Here are what I've set my lights and render too.

Thank you for any help!

Hello, have you checked in the Outliner if the light is enabled for render?

Where is that button located in Blender? Thanks!

In the Outliner, make sure that the camera icon is enabled for your light: https://zupimages.net/up/22/45/e7ef.jpg

Theres no camera icon next to the light, just an eyeball, is there any other way to see the icon?

Ah found it, yeah it appears the render camera is on for the spotlight

mmh that's weird, could you please share your file (at least a part of it)? https://blend-exchange.com/

Let us continue this discussion in chat.


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Any way to prevent this 'pinching?' with the cylinder?
I want to create a looping animation with moving red blood cells along with letters of the different blood types, I used and modified a cylinder in edit mode and this is the result, however there is a 'pinching' that is bothering me in the middle. (See Below)
I know this had something to do with the edges but is there any way to make these vanish?
Thank you for any help!

It's getting subdivided into a 24-pole of triangles, which is bad topo for subdivision.  Delete the face and use a grid fill operation on the border that leaves to try for good, all quad, 3 and 5-pole topology.  Doing some searches for "3d topology" would probably help with learning about it.

Sorry I'm not understanding your answer so delete only the faces (but that gets rid of the edges, or only delete the middle face?) and then use grid fill to fill the edges all in?

Replace the center circle face with gridfill

To add to Arafium's solution:
This topology will cause pinching because Blender tries to smooth between the second circle and the inner ngon circle:

But if you inset in order to create a co-planar circle the pinching will disappear as there is no need to smooth between the 2 circles:

Delete the circular face, select the edge loop like this
Then press ctrl + f and select grid fill and done, this is the result


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Keep Wave Modifier inside an Object?
Whats the best way to keep a Wave Modifier inside an Object? I have a Goblet here with the Wave Modifier applied to the liquid inside, however I only want the liquid surface moving and not the rest of the liquid outside the goblet. (See Pic)

I've tried Collision for both the liquid and goblet, and converting the Wave Modifier to Liquid, no results so far. Attached are the current Wave Modifier Settings.

Create a vertex group for the top of the liquid surface and use the vertex group for your wave motion.

Got it, Thank you!


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Cannot move object from parent
I'm having a hard time grasping the logic behind how objects works in Blender. I have watched a lot of tutorials on it, but they all show the basics where everything seems to work as expected, but when I follow the tutorials something completely different happens and it seems like I can't undo it.
Is there anyone here who is kind of enough to tell me what I did wrong, how did I end up with this?
Here's what I did:
I started by adding a simple cylinder (Named Body) and played a bit around with sculpting it. Then went to the Material tab and created the ClothesPurple Material.
Then I created an Icon Sphere, moved it on top of the Body object and renamed it Head. Tried to to the same with material as before and added a SkinColor material, which didn't work. It kept having the material of the Body object.
At this point I realized something is wrong, but not sure what. So I tried to move the Head object away, but seems like no matter what I do (e.g. dragging it or go to Object> Parent> Clear> Clear Parent), it doesn't want to leave the parent

What I also noticed is that whenever I click on the Head object, it always goes into Edit mode for both objects. I can't select the Head object on it's own.
Now I know that at this point the objects are very simple and it would be quick to redo it, but if I don't know what I did wrong, I know I will end up with the same problem again.
I would expect to be able to still use the Head object like an individual object by selecting it, but for some reason I cannot understand those two objects are now seen as one single object in Blender

Probably you have added the second part whilst being in edit mode for the first object. So both meshes belong to the same object. Use "tab" to switch between edit and object mode. When in object mode, try again to add some object.

Ahh, that seems to be the problem. Thank you for your help :)

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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Check for user interaction in the workspace
I'm trying to make what I think is a basic script in Blender 2.9.1; however, for this to work I need to check if the user performs any form of interaction in the current workspace (essentially if they're idle or not). How can I go about performing this check? I've looked through the API documentation, but I haven't been able to find anything that does this. The only real approach to this I can think of would be to go through all operators and add a check to see if they're performed perhaps.
If someone could point me in the right direction, I would really appreciate it!

For your special case I would use a mix out of modal operator and the depsgraph_update handler.
The modal operator doesn't run when the other operators run. E.g. move operator.
Then the depsgraph_update handler run, because the user make important changes to the scene. So if one of them runs the user interact with blender.
Some cases that are not caught: moving nodes, moving the frame slider (only found these 2)
For these case you maybe could use an event to check if the mouse was pressed and then released or if a key was pressed which starts the moving.


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Direction of shadows from my sun
Hi I have a scene with a fence as the single mesh. I have a HDRI as an environment texture and a sun lamp, to add some colour to my light. But the shadows from my fence don't point in relation to my sun. Can anyone help please?

Try to increase the brightness of the sun and/or decrease the brightness of the HDRI

Please share your blend file so that I can take a look at it? You can do this by uploading the blend file on this site - https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com and copy + pasting the generated url here. Please pack the external data and save the blend file before uploading.


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trackers not showing after making camera solver
I've been tracking a video but when I add the object constraint "camera solver" trackers aren't showing in the 3D view...can you help me, please?
Thank you


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Accuracy of Edge length measurements
I've been trying to modell with some accuracy using Blender 2.8 using the Edge Length under Viewport Overlays > Measurements. However I've noticed that the measurement is not always accurate or at least when I use the MeasureIt addon the Edge length is different to the MeasureIt output.
This is with the same edge selected but two different measurements.
Edge Length: outputs 1.95cm

MeasureIt: outputs 1.0cm

Am I doing something wrong with Blender's edge length..?

Check if object scale is applied (Object mode > Ctrl+A  to apply)

Doh! Totally forgot.... That did it!

I forgot about 'Apply''ing my objects data after I started changing it in edit mode.


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Fluid is not simulated at the target location
I've tried to set the S mesh to be a fluid or inflow object and have created a large size domain around it. However, the fluid is generated in the top left corner instead of around the S mesh.
How do I make the S become a fluid?

Origin point of the fluid object was set putside/on edge of the domain.


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When should object parts be part of the mesh and when separate?
I am learning to model in Blender with emphasis on character design and animation.
I have both tried to implement models as a single mesh with Vertex groups and shapes keys as well as separate objects (parented). However, I still do not have a clear idea on which is a more correct method of attaching extra elements to a mesh, such as, eyebrows or eyes.
It seems like having them in the same mesh is easier to manage. Whereas having them as separate objects/meshes allow easier re-usability.

Your question is currently being closed voted (by me as well) as primarily opinion based. You should just choose the separation you feel comfortable with. Related question for a situation, were merging is not advisable.

@Leander The usual StackExchange mentality where no suggestions from senior experts can be given, everything is a duplicate and "just do whatever you want" is an acceptable response? There must be specific facts on which approach is better or worse - same as with software development, there are things to do and not to do to ease your life down the road.

@ArtursVancans, in this specific situation I do believe the only answer not entirely based on one's opinion is to do what works for your situation. The 'usual StackExchange mentality' might come from the usual StackExchange philosophy and values. There can be too many possible scenarios with characters in CG to meaningfully discuss them in an answer, this would be too broad and impossible to answer following the philosophy of the platform and not making it an opinion based discussion that this site is unsuitable for.

You could make it applicable, if you narrow down the question to a concrete example. "character design and animation" is still to broad... I would gladly vote to reopen, if you would for example add a description like: "I have rigged my face with armature deformations and shapekeys for this, this and that pose and a curve modifier for whatever. [screenshot of rig or something]. I have joined the eyebrows. I thought I could run into these problem -A- and -B-. Can this be solved by separating the brows into their own object? What would the advantages of separate objects be?"

Eyeballs and eyebrows are often separate meshes but they usually belong to the same object (i.e. you can create an UV sphere when you're in edit mode with the face selected). Then using vertex groups you will assign the different parts of the object to the control bones. In this way it's easier to edit the weights, expecially when two intersecting parts are not moving together as expected. Often modelling a single manifold mesh is not easy and having spare parts is not a problem, even if sometimes the automatic weight function gets confused and assigns weight to the wrong bones, so that some manual editing of weights is required.
In case you decide to have more than one object, I suggest you not to parent them to the main object, use bones instead - with their own parent-child relationships - to have the whole character moving as expected.

There are no rules about this. Whatever is more convenient for you in a specific situation and whatever works is fine.


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Mark edges as loop
I've imported an SVG and, unfortunately, Blender doesn't recognize the loops. This makes selection much harder—I have to select each edge individually rather than use loop selection.
Is there a way to mark a group of edges as a loop, so that I don't have to select each of the edges every time?

It's possible to save selection to vertex groups as is shown in the answer, though note that selecting edge loop with Alt+Left click works only if it is formed with quads.

You can add Vertex Groups.

You might also use Select Next Element to select the edges faster if they are in a loop. Just select the first 2 edges and then use the short code CTRL +  SHIFT +  +.

Wouldn't that be (1) - (3) - (2) - "Assign"...?!

That image comes from the blender doc, they specify the (1)-(2)-(3) there. See first link

Plus should be pressed first (to add the group), then choose it to define which groups to add to. Or press Ctrl+G with vertices selected. The context in the manual is slightly different, they explain there that list is empty on (2), so it's not a step to do

Edited the example image for clarity.


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Important Blender shorcuts for object modeling
A few years ago, I've learned basic modeling with Blender through a university course. However, now I need to use Blender again and it turns out I forgot all of the useful shortcuts that were indispensable to my work.
What are the most useful shortcuts when modeling objects in Blender?

the way you warded it "best shorts for modeling" is probably going to draw close votes as "primarily opinion-based." You might want to [edit] that, and change it a bit.

@David If I said "most commonly used shortcuts" instead of "most useful shortcuts", would that be enough? Most commonly used has an objective answer, though I doubt that data is open to the public.

meh, either way it's kind of the same thing. I think the question is ok. Was just trying to find a way to steer you clear of some DVs.

Blender has a LOT of keyboard shortcuts - and as others have mentioned, "the most useful shorrtcuts" will vary based on each person's workflow and preferences.

Important short are obviously biased.
G - Grab
R - Rotate
S - Scale
↹ Tab - Toggle Object/Edit Mode
E - Extrude
F - Make Face/Edge
X - Delete
⎈ CtrlR - Loop Cut
GG - Vertex / Edge Slide
I - Inset
W - Specials Menu
⎈ CtrlV - Vertex Menu
⎈ CtrlE - Vertex Menu
⎈ CtrlF - Vertex Menu
⎈ Ctrl↹ Tab - Switch Vertex/EdgeFace mode
⎇ Alt RMB - Edge Loop select
G, R or S followed by X, Y or Z - Constrain the grab/rotate/scale action to a specific axis.
[The above] followed by ShiftX, ShiftY or ShiftZ - Constrain the grab/rotate/scale action to a specific plane.
Space- Search for a command
Hotkey Maps by mrdeyo

Interactive Hotkey Map
Currently for 2.78, but there aren't many modeling changes.
How to find all hotkeys
In Blender, press ⎈ Ctrl⎇ AltU to open up the settings menu. Locate the Input rider and go to the 3d View section. The operations and hotkey for modeling will be found under Object Mode and Mesh.

How to find a specific hotkey
Open up the menu and locate the desired operation, the hotkey is written to the right of it.

Another command that I've now learned that I find helpful is Space to launch command search.


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Texture UVUnwrap Follow Up-- What did I do wrong?
Previously I asked a question about textures not appearing correctly. I tried unwrapping it manually and it really hasn't helped very much, as you can see:

I'm starting to wonder if the texture itself is just too small an image or something, or too large?

Looks like you need to watch some beginner tutorials about unwrapping and texturing to get the basics first

open the texture in the UV/image editor so you can see where the texture is in relation to the UV map

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos Thanks but I already understood and know about the information in that thread, I should have mentioned I've watched a tutorial already.

@DiogoValadares How do I open the texture in the UV editor?

Figured out what I was doing wrong. I deleted my file, and started from scratch. I realized that like what @DiogoValadares said, I have to actually put the "maps" / islands on the texture while in the UV texture editor. Unwrapping it cleanly isn't enough. To do this, go to your UV editor, then in the bottom left to the right of "UVs" tab, press the little image icon and select the texture you want.


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Shading Render Not Present In 3D View
back again with my sword :D
I've figured out rendering and everything thanks to you guys but this time I'm asking about why there seems to be a shadow that I don't think should be present when looking through the Solid viewport. I'll show the difference with pictures in rendered view and solid. Keep in mind moving the lamps in the scene didn't change anything. Rendered:

Solid^

Ths could have many causes. Please attach your blend file. It could be face/vertex normals, duplicate faces, or any strange lighting setup. Really hard to diagnose from these images.

Looks like a subdivision surface changed it... Unfortunately I'm stupid and changed things around a little and didn't make a new save file. I can still show you the new version but I don't think it has the issue, at least not what I can see. However I would like to ask you if there's an easy way to get rid of duplicate faces like there is with vertices as I seem to have a bad habit of making faces that overlap and stuff like that...

Getting rid of duplicate vertices/faces can be done by selecting the wanted vertices and then using Mesh > Vertices > Remove Doubles (or Ctrl+V > Remove Doubles, or Tools > Remove Doubles, there are plenty of ways)


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Texturing Not Displaying Fully On Face
I'm brand new to texturing and fairly new to blender. I can get the texture to appear on the model but it looks like only part of the image is actually on the face I assigned it to. Basically the face has about a fourth of the texture on it. It also looks like there's some folds in the face, or a slight bend, but I can't figure out why as there are no edges in it... See pictures for "with bend / crease" and "without".
My question is, how do I get the texture itself to display itself fully on the face, instead of the way it is now?

With Crease, The Model Itself

Without Crease, The Texture Itself, No Model

The problem is that you need to change the size/format of your UV map.
Go to edit mode in the viewport and then you will see the UV map in the UV/image editor:

EDIT: in order to see the uv map, you need to select the vertices in the viewport while in edit mode or select this option:

Then select one or all of the vertices in the UV/image editor and move/scale.

Yea see I'm at a complete loss as to where to find the UV editor. I've even googled how to get to the UV editor in blender and haven't found anything that clearly tells you what to do lol. When I go to Edit mode nothing looks like your UV editor to me, is it a button somewhere? Or do you need a camera (is that the viewport or is the viewport the "built in camera" that you move around yourself?

oh, I forgot to mention that in the viewport you need to select all the vertices unless the Sync option in the lower bar of the UV editor is pressed.

Soo right now my UV map looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/Up6HFwz                        If I'm honest I am a bit lost as to what I need to do here :P

search for UV unwrapping tutorials, It's just not properly unwrapped.


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Hair problem in Blender 2.93.2 (viewport vs. render)
I have an object covered in multiple hair particle systems with children. They appear fine in the viewport with Cycles (even with the viewport children count set to the render count) but are distorted in the rendered view as seen in the pictures. The object with the hair is small on the final render (the pictures below are highly cropped). Any ideas what can cause this?
I'm rendering on a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 and have already installed the newest driver (4.5.0 NVIDIA 471.68).

Blender version: 2.93.2, branch: master, commit date: 2021-08-03 05:58, hash: 1eb06de2607a, type: release
CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K

The answer was a different subdiv-level on the emitter object between viewport and render. I am not sure wheather it is a bug or not, but the render is fine when I use the same subdiv-level for the render. The effect may be related to the "Use modifier stack"-option for the hair systems.


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Write new bone constraint
I have an idea for an IK-like bone constraint solver which I'd like to try. As far as I understand, there is no way to add such a constraint via the python API, is this true? What is the simplest way to bring such a solver into Blender? Is the only way to add it to the source code and compile Blender from scratch, or is there a walk-around, if just for testing?
What needed to be possible for my idea to work is to:

set a chain length
recalculate the bone transforms for all bones in the chain from a given input transform (translation/rotation) as well as from the IDs of the selected and active bones


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Shadows of small objects in Eevee
When I try to render close-ups of objects as small as a few cm in Eevee, I cannot get the shadows to work properly. With Cycles, everything is fine, and I can accept the difference in look between both render engines, with the exception of the missing shadows.
Here is a comparison between both engines with the same scene:
Cycles:

Eevee:

The disk-like object is about 1.5cm in diameter. The scene is illuminated by a spot light and low level world background with a solid color.
How do I set up the shadows ideally for small scenes? Which parameters are most important when it comes to scaling, and what is their influence? Is it possible to even have shadows in Eevee in that scale?
I have read the Blender Manual - Light Settings-page but did not find a suitable set of settings with it.

The main thing would be to go to your spot light properties, and enable "contact shadows", You might also want to enable "ambient occlusion" in the render settings.

I did enable contact shadows but it had no influence. With AO enabled together with DoF I get strange horizontal band-like artefacts across the picture. I guess I have a wrong combination of all the different parameters, but without some basic understanding there are too many different combinations.

Hmm. Try going into render properties > shadows and disabling "soft shadows" and enabling "high-bitdepth" You may also want to increase the shadow cube size. I find that these settings, in combination with contact shadows and ambient occlusion cover almost all my "shadow" needs in eevee.

@ChristopherBennett: If you make this an answer, I will accept it. It solved my problem. Thanks a lot!

I use a combination of factors if I'm looking for "clean" shadows in eevee.
The first step is to ensure "Contact Shadows" are enabled for all lights that are casting shadows.

The next thing is to Enable "Ambient Occlusion" in the Render Properties settings, and as well, disable, "Soft Shadows", and enable "High Bitdepth". The removal of soft shadows may cause some jagged edges on your shadows - to mitigate this, you can increase the shadow cube size.


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Texture paint on loose parts
I'm using Blender 2.8.
I have a mesh/model with different loose parts (joined models) in it. When I go to texture paint, I can't paint on the loose parts except of one. I can paint fine on the flat image with the unwrapped faces but not on the model. I guess I can union boolean all the parts together but it's not the effects I want when animating.
Any tips? Thanks.

May be you have multiple materials.

Your joined meshes probably have separate materials that do not share the same image texture and UV map. You will need to make sure that they all have the same UV Map and Image texture so that you can paint across all of the parts despite them possibly having different materials.


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How do I manipulate curves of animated textures?? (not showing in graph editor)
Animated the mapping coordinates of a texture (pressed i with cursor over attributes) - but can't see these keys in timeline/dopesheet/graph editor.
I need to adjust the interpolation of these keys and also ad some modifiers to these curves.
PLEASE HELP.

Think I figured the issue out.
Normally if I select an object, it's animated properties show up in the animation editors (graph/dope/timeline)... but it seems that to access animated attributes of an object's shader nodetree, both the object AND it's animated shader node has to be selected.
I selected the object in a 3d viewport, and also clicked on the animated shader node in the shader editor.... and the animated channels where available for editing in the graph/dope sheet/timline.


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API: How to hide faces, edges, vertices of an object in Object Mode?
I am following this tutorial for a custom GUI, accessible in the Object Mode, working in Blender 2.8.0.
There, I have a several collections with one object comprised of one mesh each. Currently, I hide a whole object cubes_0 via a boolean property show_0_cubes as follows:
bpy.data.collections['cubes_0'].hide_viewport = not mytool.show_0_cubes

Now, I want to hide all faces of the mesh/object that have more than a certain distance from the origin. However, calling face.hide = True does not have any effect in object, but only in edit mode. There, I don't see my GUI. How do I hide certain faces, edges, vertices in Object Mode?

Create vertex group of vertices/edges/faces you want to hide.
Add Mask modifier, there select vertex group from list and press invert button (<->)

Edit:
To answer your question as far as a know you can't hide faces in object mode,
you would need to separate the faces as a separate object and hide that instead and join it again later.
An alternative would be to try to make your GUI visible in edit mode or maybe use a material to represent "hidden", you may even be able to make it transparent and in certain view modes it would essential be hidden.
I'm sorry I couldn't be more helpful.
-
bpy.ops.mesh.hide(unselected=False)
works copy and pasted, just make sure you have your faces, edges or vertices already selected and you're in editmode.
Edit: might also be useful
bpy.ops.mesh.reveal(select=True)

... question does stipulate object mode.

thank you I missed that, sorry!


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What causes and how to fix shading artifacts on curved surface?
Here's what I'm talking about, I've been using boolean then tried to manually clean up topo to the best of my ability while trying to keep quads:

Is it just bad topology or is there something else I need to do to get rid of those artifacts?

Hello :). Are you using any Bevel or Subdivision modifier there?

Hello! I have tried using bevels with Weighted Normals, however to no avail. In the above pictures I am not using either of those though, I've added everything manually (filled the face where the hole is, Inset it a little, then extruded it inwards and turned the N-Gon into quads)
This is a closer look: https://i.imgur.com/DEum6Ak.png

Well, there may not be enough geometry, or it's non-planar :). I'd try Subdivision modifier, 2 levels and use edge creases where needed.

These shading artefacts are du to the irregularity, the difference between the rest of the cylinder and the diagonal lines. Have you tried it in rendered view? There's a good chance you won't be able to notice it in rendered.

@FrederikSteinmetz Yes, you are correct, they are basically non existent once the model is textured. Thank you both for your answers!


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Why is it that sometimes the bend modifier bends in two different directions while other times it works as intended?
Sorry for unclear question, but the Simple Deform modifier has been one of the most difficult ones to use consistenly. It sometimes does what I intend it to:

while other times this happens:

Transforms are applied, everything else seems to be fine, and the two objects have basically the same topology, so what causes this difference? Also tried using an empty for the Axis Origin of the 2nd result, but to no avail. If anyone could give me a quick rundown of why this happens and how to use the Simple Deform modofier properly, it would be greatly appreciated. At the moment whether it works as intended or not feels like a gamble.

Hey :). This thread could help: https://blender.stackexchange.com/q/174599/

@weittakes Hello and welcome. Don't just add thank you as a comment, upvote the answer instead. If you feel it completely solved your problem consider marking it accepted


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Blender cursor changing when importing meshes
Ever since I've updated to 2.9 after every import my cursor turns to a black box with 4 digits inside of it. Now this is not a massive issue, and I initially thought it had to do with the time it takes to compute high poly imports, but apparently it does so even with a simple default cube. I don't remember this happening in older versions (or at the very least not for such long periods of time). Does anyone know how to fix this and what this cursor modification represents?

Thank you!


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How to bake floating geometry to normal map?
For the past days I've been trying to find a way to bake floating geometry onto any mesh that's not a simple plane. Now the problem isn't as much getting the geometry to bake properly on the face that I intend to, but the fact that it creates a problem on the faces on the opposite side of the mesh.

Any help is appreciated!

could you please share this file?

@moonboots Well I didn't save that specific one since I just created it for the purpose of illustrating my problem, but I recreated it here: https://www.mediafire.com/file/shgvwsz2bsb1x6n/floater.rar/file

sorry I can't unrar your file, could you please try another format?

Yup, maybe ZIP works: https://www.mediafire.com/file/sf6ci50ls25b3vx/floater.zip/file

Why don't you just bake it to a plane of the same size of one of the cube's faces, and then apply the normal map to the cube in the cubes material?

So here is what’s happening. Let say you have object A (the highpoly object you need to bake) and object B (the lowpoly, the object on which you want to use the bake)

The bake is a kind of scan that begins from the faces and goes in the opposite direction of their normals, it goes as long as necessary, until it hits the surface of the object that needs to be baked. That’s the basis of baking (as I understand it). So here is what happens for the top face: With a Ray Distance of 0 the scan begins from the top face, it goes downwards and hit nothing, so no baking.

If some faces of object A go a bit beyond the surface of object B, you need to make the scan begin a bit before with the help of the Ray Distance value. It’s the case here, object A is out of object B, so you need to have a Ray Distance value higher than 0, in your file your value was a bit low, so it didn’t scan the whole object A, you need to increase the value a bit, 0.2 seems good.

The bottom face of your object B scanned in the opposite direction of its normal as it is supposed to do, so it scanned upwards until it hit object A. But in this direction it hits faces that are flipped, so the scan gave incorrect colors.

I suppose you didn't expect the bottom face to have any baking. In that case the simplest solutions are either to paint your normal map with purple, or to close the bottom of your object A with a face so that the object won't be scanned by the object B bottom face (only slopes can be scanned, not surfaces that are parallel or perpendicular to the scan direction).

Wait, now that's something I wasn't aware of, is Blender scanning in the direction opposite of the normal? Thanks!

Yes it took me time to understand, I haven't found a good explanation anywhere. By the way I've edited to add a simple solution in your case, just close the bottom face of your shape.

Thank you! This helped a lot with understanding and fixing the problem. In case anyone will look for a solution for this in the future I'll leave here a couple of other solutions.

Duplicating the faces affected by the baking
Duplicating the entire object and baking it onto itself alongside the floating geometry
Adding a solifiy modifier to the floating geometry and making the bottom planar/flat


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Weave spiral object around a guide?
I am trying to make an object like this lance:

however am having a hard time wrapping my head around how to approach it. My initial attempt involved using a weave heightmap on a cylinder then tapering it in:

While I did manage to remove the seam that the technique created initially, the attempt is ultimately unfruitful since the flows are bad, edges are jagged even at 10 minion polygons, and most importantly continuing the bands past the point where the cylinder ends would be almost impossible to do cleanly at this density. I'm currently looking to imitate the approach the artist of the original image took, which I assume was using curves with a profile snapped onto the surface of a cone. And here is where I am currently facing difficulties due to the fact that, while I could just twist an array of curves on Z to get the spiral effect then taper it using the simple deform modifier, adding the weave effect on top of that has me beat at the moment. Any advice is welcome.

Woven Sleeve with Geometry Nodes
I used geometry nodes to create a woven sleeve of curves. This could be a good jumping off point to create the woven lance in the image you shared.

Create Strands
Start by creating eight strands. Each strand is a Mesh Line with three verts. The strands are instanced on a Mesh Circle with eight verts. Use a Realize Instances node to give the geometry of the strands.

Twist Strands By a Quarter Turn
We want the tops of each strand to end up one quarter turn away from the base. Use a Vector Rotate node to rotate the Position attribute. Use the Z component of the position as a factor for the rotation. Our strands are one unit tall, so the quarter turn will be complete at their tops.
Note that rotations are in radians so a quarter turn is pi / 2 which you can type into Blender and it knows what you mean.

Create Opposite Direction
Create the strands for the opposite direction by using a Transform Geometry node with the X value set to -1.0. Give it some rotation too so that the new strands are offset from the original ones. Join the transformed geometry up with the un-transformed geometry. Also use a Capture Attribute node at this point to grab a boolean indication of which direction each strand is. Traditionally in weaving these directions are known as warp and weft.

Weave Strands with Trig Functions
Use Math nodes set to Sine and Cosine to wiggle the strands as they travel up the Z axis. The offset for the sine/cosine wave for each direction is controlled separately using a Switch node and the the warp vs weft indicator that we set up in the last step. These offsets require some tweaking once the whole structure is assembled to get the strands to actually look woven together.

Duplicate Up and Smooth
Up until now we've been working with one chunk of the sleeve. Use an Instance on Points Node to copy the chunk onto each vert of a Mesh Line.

Bevel The Curve
Use a Curve to Mesh node with a Curve Circle as the Profile Curve input to give the strands thickness. The Curve Circle can be transformed to make the strands look more like ribbons than noodles. You'll notice that the tilt is off at this point.

Set Curve Tilt
Use the Z component of the Position Attribute to set the tilt. This takes some tweaking to get it to look right. Use the boolean weft vs warp indicator that we set up earlier along with a Switch node to set the tilt for each direction individually.

Stretch
The weave in the reference looks a little more stretched so multiply the Z component of the Position attribute by some value to stretch the whole structure.

Here are the exact input settings that worked for me that aren't seen in the other screenshots.

Thank you for such a well-formed answer. Nicely done :)

Thank you for the kind words @RobinBetts !


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My animated object is distorted during export
I downloaded a model from the internet and found it.
animated (it was already gerigged). In Blender it looked like this:
:
After I exported it, it looked very distorted:
I don't know much about Blender, but I've tried everything.
Thank you in advance!

did you solve the issue?

@four two
no unfortunately not, but thanks for your help


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Keyframes not storing the movement of vertices
I'm trying to animate a helicopter's blades rotating, but the keyframes aren't storing the vertice's movement. It just changes the vertices of all the keyframes for that object.

could you please show some screenshots? you can't keyframes vertices except with shapekeys

what r shape keys? btw i started using blender like 3 days ago

@nicasso Shape Keys are basically how you rig objects a. To do it for individual vertexes there is no tutorial you can learn it as it's not too hard.


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Overlapping meshes
I'm sort of new to blender.
I'm having problems with overlapping meshes. when I render, the strange blackish effect is observed.
Specifically, I'm trying to model a 6-point star ("star of david"). e.g., see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Star_of_David.svg
I start with a non filled triangle, duplicate it and scaling it down in edit-mode, and then creating 3 quad faces. I duplicate in object mode, rotate 180deg around the z axis, and do a bool union.
However, in the resulting object, the vertices don't land on the intersection of the triangle edges, so I can't delete the overlapping regions.
How can this be done?
Thanks.

Hi JohnDope so it takes some time for me to answer so follow these steps and images...

Make a circle with 3 points (NO FILL) and then extrude it in edit mode using "E" and "S" to the desired width like here...

Make a copy of this triangle in object mode using "SHIFT + D" and rotate it 180degrees using "R" like here...

...in fact now You have two options. You can slightly move the 2nd object up or down so there will be no overlap and then select both triangles and join them using "CTRL + J" and You will be good beause of using a really slight move (0.01mm for example - the object will look good enough).
Second option is to edit it properly and thats the one we do now ;).

Go to the object mode, select 2nd triangle and move it up. Then select 1st triangle with the 2nd still selected so use "SHIFT" when clicking. Then go to edit mode so the scene will look like this...

Now use the Knife Project as "rectangled" on the image below. The 1st triangle will get a new topology because of that knife-cut (circled green) on all places needed. Its importand to look from top when cutting because this function is VIEW-DEPENDENT!

In object mode select both objects and join them together using "CTRL + J" and enter edit mode. We have to move all the point into the same height and to do this we simply make the height ZERO. Select all points and hit "S" then "Z" and then "0" (ZERO on the numpad) and "ENTER". The scene should look like here...

Now You select only the vertices of the 2nd triangle in edit mode. Hit "X" and select Only Edges & Faces option so the points will stay in place like here...

You have to face-up the whole thing now so select 4 vertices at a time and make faces using "F" key like on the image below...

Simply make all the necessary faces and YOU ARE DONE MATE - CONGRATS!!! Final object should look like this...

Thats all - hope it helps Buddy.
(Please dont forget to ACCEPT ANSWER using checkmark if it suits You)

My way of doing this:

Create a triangle as shown above
Set Origin to the center of mass
Duplicate the triangle
Rotate the duplicate 180 deg around Y axis if your view is Front
Align the triangles
Use Knife Project and remove highlighted faces
Ctrl+J

Done


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Problems using joined objects as a boolean cutter
I used 3 objects to create the shape I wanted to create a hole in another object. I joined the three objects into one but when I do the boolean operation it leaves a hole that looks like I used the three objects individualy. How do I keep this from happening?

I guess your boolean object has some problems, like inner faces... by the way, you could easily create your shape without any boolean modifier

care to elaborate?

please share your file so that we cas see what's your problem

I think your problem is that the topology of the object you used as boolean object is bad (probably some inner face?). Here is a way to do it without boolean:

Cool thanks for taking the time to demonstrate! this is helpful :)

You don't need to start with three different objects just simply start with one object and add the Bevel Modifier.

I've been messing around with the bevel modifier and the bevel tool and haven't been able to get this exact result. Since it's so easy care to explain how you would go about it?


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Is there a way to change the default Booean operation type?
I use the Boolean modifier a lot and almost always use the "Difference" option. It would be great if I could make that the default rather than "Intersection". Is there a way to do this?

This has been asked before in 2015: Where are the modifier scripts in the Blender package contents folder?
They are part of the main app coding, so unless things have changed, not easily modified.
I would like to do this, too, as I use Booleans a lot for 3D print drawing.
Not changing dimensions from millimetres to CM would be good as well.


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How do I create a nice miter joint between these two pieces?
I would like these two pieces to meet up at the correct angle so there is no overlap and no distance between them. I'm used to sketchup where I would have been able to use the snap to intersection functionality to drag the edge lines to the point where the pieces intersect. It doesn't seem like blender has snap to intersection functionality. What's an easy way to accomplish what I'm trying to do?

Does this help you?: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/131677/split-face-along-edge/131697

As always, I'm open to correction, but creating miters at the ends of existing meshes is a fuss in Blender, unless the angle is at 45 degrees, and you can KC cut through with constraints, or ShiftCtrlAltS shear the ends of the stock pieces to a known extent. The shipped 'TinyCad' add-on can help, generating vertices at the intersections of edges, but even then, you'll find yourself creating guides of one sort or another to snap to, removing and creating faces by hand.
By far the quickest way to create miters is with polygonal curves. Create a track and a profile curve (possibly by AltC converting them from duplicated edges borrowed from existing meshes)

The profile curve will be swept along its local Z
Its origin will lie on the track curve
Set the track curve to 2D in its data tab, fill 'None'
Set the Bevel Object of the track curve to the profile curve..

...and miters will be formed at every corner. The rightmost object has beeen converted back to a mesh; you may have to hit CtrlN in Edit mode to make its normals consistent.


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How do I print to a particular scale?
I'm trying to print some building plans. I would like for the plans on paper to be scaled so that 1 inch equals 1 foot. I have an orthographic camera set up but I don't know what to set the orthographic scale to so that I get the result that I want.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/64914/setting-camera-to-position-where-it-can-render-a-seamless-repetable-orthographic/64920#64920


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How do I snap to an interstection
I have two walls that meet in the corner, one is at an angle and the other is square. I would like to be able to drag the selected edge up to match the angled wall. I want it to align exactly because I'm using the model to figure out precise dimensions. What's the easiest way to do this?

Possible duplicate of Is there any good way to snap to intersection?

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/2976/how-can-i-add-vertices-to-intersection-of-two-edges/ and https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/62840/how-to-make-a-vertex-meet-an-edge-exactly


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Is there a way to have dimension shown in fractions?
I can enter dimensions in fractions but then can only see dimensions ofr objects in decimals. I live in the US and I'm using blender to create build plans. For the plans to be useful to people in the trades dimensions need to be shown in fractions.

AFAIK only thousandths are possible in UI eg 5" 375thou for five and three eighths inches.  Surely this is a simple by sight conversion. (even if shown as a decimal)  I imagine  if not able to convert decimals to fractions renders the plans as a blender file un-useful, the user may also have difficulty with using  blender itself.,  If you are rendering the plans for distribution,  then  convert output of  dimensions  to required units,  fractions

I'm afraid it's not possible at the moment to have something like 5 3/8". Request this feature or try to find a Python script. And it's possible to import, with an  app, .obj files to AutoCad and do the measuring there with fractions supported. Blender's primary goal is not architecture/housing.


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Best way to smooth out object

Hey guys. Hoping you can help me out. I've got a section of pipes that was poorly modeled to start and I am trying to see if blender has any tools to help smooth these out for rendering. I am just trying to render this model and the rest of the objects look good except for this. I am fairly new to blender, sorry.
I have already tried the subdivision surface and smooth modifiers. Any other ideas?

you've already tried subsurf and smooth and you still have this result? that's weird... by the way, I guess you're talking about smooth shading, and not modifier... perhaps share a part of your object so that we can see why it doesn't smooth more than that...

No, I was referring to the smooth and corrective smooth modifiers, but even the smooth shading doesn't do much for it. I can share it, but what's the best way? When I save just the pipes section as a blender file, it is 85MB.

oh ok I don't know this modifier. You can just keep only one pipe and upload it here: https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/

You could use https://www.myairbridge.com for the whole object. Btw cases like this SubDiv solves everytime. From the picture it looks the pipes are modeled some weird way cause there are some incosistencies in the polyflow. Share with as so we could explore. Usual way to model this kinda object is to extrude circle along path or extrude it, resize and rotate manually...

I figured out how to select faces and toggled the limit faces to visible option to allow easier deletion of unneeded vertices. Here's the file.

Jan, I did try the SubDiv and it did create a lot more faces, but didn't change smoothness of object. I'm not sure why they decided to model this way because the rest of the pipes in full model are done properly and look great when rendered. They even forgot a y-pipe section at the top which is even more fun.

The pipes are made from faces that are disconnected, this keeps each face as a flat surface.
In edit mode, select everything A and remove doubles W->Remove Doubles. You may also want to use ⎇ AltJ to turn all the triangles into quads to cleanup the mesh.


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Smoke Simulation Render Issue
I was trying to render a rocket takeoff, but where I have my domain set is just a gray box on the final render?

Does this answer your question? Low lying fog bounding object rendering as solid

You will need to add color emission to your object by using an Attribute node with the property flame spelled exactly like that.
Then connect that node to a ColorRamp. Adjust the color ramp settings to be the color of the flame, and then attach that to an Emission shader.
Set the power of the Emission shader to 5, then connect that to the Add shader in the Cycles node setup for the smoke domain.


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Softbody is clipping and shrinking when it comes in contact with an object (with collision enabled)
I've recently been trying to make a softbody animation, and I have ramps that the ball falls down into. It rolls down fine, but when it reaches the end of it, the ball immediately shrinks and is attracted to the object. The ramp has collision enabled, I have tried recalculating normals, and changing the incline and rebaking it, but nothing seems to work.

The ball just seems to stay and then shrink a little bit, and will not just hop over the cylinder like it should.

Try changing the the collision type of the ramp from Convex Hull to Mesh

Maybe the inner thickness of your collision object is too high and thus surmounts the outer thickness, effectively pulling every softbody-vertex into the collision object.
As far as I know the thickness values are actually in meters, if you didn't know that already.

Exactly this - the Inner of the opposite side of the cylinder at the bottom of the ramp will project out of the surface and will “grab” and soft body vertices that stray too close. The solution is to reduce the Inner collision bounds. Also worthwhile to Apply Scale on all meshes involved in the simulation and collision since odd scale after resizing can produce unexpected results.


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SFM to Blender Conversion
I was wondering how to convert the files for sfm models, such as .vtx, .phy, .mdl, and .vvd into a Blender 2.8 compatible format.

i'd recommend looking it up more on their workshop page. there are guides and add ons there that are essential to importing and exporting SFM models

You'll first need to decompile the .mdl file into an .smd file. Crowbar is an excellent tool to decompile mdl files, find it here: Crowbar (Source Engine Modding Tool)

After that, you can use the Blender source tools as 8foldhero suggested: BlenderSourceTools
Install it as an addon like usual, and you'll be able to import any smd file into Blender by going to File > Import > Source Engine (.smd, .vta, .dmx, .qc), then choose the file from the dialog box. I recommend changing the Bone Append Mode to Make New Armature. Good Luck!

There are some guides on the SFM workshop and wiki on how to do it specifically (Here is one from the wikia in particular https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Blender_Source_Tools_Help )
but the most essential think is the "Blender Source Tools" add-on. You will need to install this into blender, and then from that (File > Import > Source Engine Filetypes)
https://steamreview.org/BlenderSourceTools/


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I'm Trying to inset circles on the corner of the mouth but I can't quite figure it out
I bought this model for 3d printing and I've been doing some customization to make it look like different characters in the anime.
Current State of Model:
Circles I'm talking about:
Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

I figured it out, I just need to create a cylinder of the right size and position it properly. Then apply a boolean modifier to the mask object with the cylinder as the picked object.


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How to prevent the intersection of mesh particles
So I know this has been asked before, but the most recent article I could find was over a year ago so I am curious if this has been fixed.
I created the scene below by simply weight painting a subdivided plane and applying a collection of 3 objects as hair particles.
Can anyone recreate this scene WITHOUT any of these objects intersecting one another or is this still not possible to do in Blender?

As perhaps a partial solution.  You can create more faces and limit the emission of particles to one per face in the Particle emissions panel. This may create too much space for you in an artistic sense.  A triangle based mesh would somewhat limit non random pattern recognition.

I thought there was this physics technique where different spheres were allowed to settle in place thus producing spacing. I would need to write something new to investigate .. perhaps I am being lazy.

well still... I appreciate the effort!!!

Is it true you want to elimanate two tree trunks in the same place and are less concerned with branches intersecting?

I wonder if there are existing seamless images or data that address your issues.  I was trying a few web searches.  Other stack sites have similar questions.

Yes I want to avoid intersecting trunks and branches as I will be animating this shot and my camera will be going low through the valley ... so I don't want harsh looking overlaps.
I certainly tried to search the topic out ..

There is the hexagonal grid.  Voronoi texture in Blender.  Penrose tiling.  There are probably other non Blender tools that generate those vertices and other useful data.  I just do not use them so its a long search.

Perhaps part of a solution.  On the far right a single mesh has many triangles.  In the middle the mesh has some randomness introduced by user actions.  On the left is a render of particle system with minimal overlap and some randomness.
Of course my views are focused on a top down view for explanation purposes.  Your views will have artistic intention.
A Bit quick and dirty because there are not scripts or externals tools.  Some user action is required.
The far left image of triangles can be created by multiple means.  One method is to place 4 triangles in a mesh, add two array modifiers, then apply the array modifiers.  The triangle faces were for legibility.
In the middle part of the image.  Edit Mode, Face Mode. [Select Random] of faces by 10%. Or you can select faces manually. Copy and Paste faces or not. Toss a coin, Delete the faces .. or not. Then a proportional edit with [individual centers] and [Proportional Edit Falloff] Random or not. Adjust influence sphere. Repeat as necessary. Try many quick experiments and maybe the GPU will burn out. The distortion of the triangles was not a goal.  Proportional edit minimizes some work since it can operate on large portions of the mesh.  Be careful or mistake will occur with crowding.
On the right is the particle system.  Random <= False, Emit from faces, Particle/Faces <= 1, No Physics. No Gravity influence. Emission frame interval [1,1].  The idea was the Blender User Can see the locations.  If the terrain is flat enough a shrink wrap can be performed.
Perhaps a script would be easier.


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How to select objects in the outliner with only hotkeys
Hopefully this is a super easy answer for someone. Just curious if anyone knows how to use the keyboard to make an object selection from the outliner? I mainly need this because I have a ton of objects that I need to name and doing this with arrow keys, a hotkey for object select, and then using F2 to rename would be so much more efficient than having to click on each one with my mouse.
Thank you so much!!

In outliner you can use 'A' key to select all objects.
With one object selected press 'shift' and select another object for range select.
Use 'B' key to box select.
Besides use Batch rename instead of single Rename!

I use "industry standard" interaction mode in Blender 2.92
With the Outliner focused, F2 works to rename the object under the mouse cursor.  Ctrl + F2 will batch rename multiple selected objects.
This solves your problem.
Be advised:  When Outliner is focused, you can navigate by keyboard and select different objects with arrow keys, however F2 will always rename the object under the mouse cursor, not the object selected.  (This is infuriating behaviour, and if anyone knows how to change it please let me know!)

Is there a shortcut to actually focus the Outliner? I noticed Shift+F5 brings up the outliner, but then selecting the object and hitting enter does highlight it as selected, but in fact the object isn't in the 3D view. The Outliner on the right still shows the old selected object. I would like to be able to "cycle through" objects with the use of keyboard shortcuts. Do you know if this is possible? I am trying to use the mouse as less as possible, that's why I am asking. Thanks.


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Is there a hotkey for moving whole collections around?
pretty basic question:
Does anyone know of an easy way to select a collection and use a hotkey to move it to it's desired location?
I have tried a lot of different ways involving (M, ctrl + M, ctrl + G) and I can't seem to figure it out.
I just don't want to always have to drag and drop collections around, I want a way to move them around as fast as I can move objects around.
THANK YOU!

You can select all objects in your collection.
Then move them around as one object.
Select > Select Grouped > Collection
Shortcut: Shift+G

so is there no similar way to move collections like " M " does with object ?
That seems so strange.

Well, there are collection instances, which behave exactly like objects. I use them all the time :). (and the shortcut to move stuff is G)


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seamless texture in blender
i would like to create seamless texture directly in blender,  is there a manner to do it, i tried with offset but the tiling seams not working,may be i do wrong and also in photoshop to blend texture better there's the content-aware feature, is there a similar thing i can do in blender. I  use photoshop, but i would like only use blender. Making seamless textures in blender would be great no? but is it possible, I'm very beginner, so forgive me if the question seems stupid

In your brush settings, activate Tiling (X  and Y). Now when the brush go past the left of the texture, it continue to draw on the right seamlessely.
In the Properties of the Image Editor, you can check Display/Coordinates/Repeat. Now the texture repeats itself on both axis, and it's easy to see if it is seamless.


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Impossible to bake 8k normal maps?
I want to bake highpoly tangent normals to low, works fine for 4k textures, takes about 4 times longer for 8k (as reasonable) but gives me some wierd colored texture thats definitly no normal map. Yes, I also changed the texture in the node editor. What am I making wrong?
PS: Do you use TexTools? Why is it so damn slow (exponential, takes forever for a 8k tex) compared to the cycles internal "render button"?
My system: Blender 2.79 (regular build), Windows 7, GTX 980ti, i5
Sorry for the Inglisch ;)

Cycles is only as fast as how many samples + performance settings you pick for it. But not sure how textools handles it internally. Im going to try and see if 8k does the same for me.

seems fine here, can you elaborate on your workflow?


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Getting the full address of an interface item
In blender menus, I can CTRL+C on a menu item and get it's full address (correct me if this is the wrong terminology) that is ready to paste in python code. In a properties window, there are some buttons that I can right click on and choose "Copy Python Command." However, if I right click on the X field in the Transform Location in the same Properties window, I only have the option "Copy Data Path" which puts the text "location" in the clipboard. If I hover over the same X field, I see at the bottom of the tool tip:
bpy.data.objects["Plane"].location[0]

Is there any way to copy this to the clipboard?
Here's why I'm doing this: I have an idea on how to simplify the workflow for Drivers to somewhat mimic similar functionality in the best compositor in the history of VFX; Shake (R.I.P.) and want to make a proof of concept for how this will work. Basically copying an address to a value number field and pasting that in another number field with the option of using it as part of an expression. The expression would be parsed and then executed via
exec()

and
eval()

commands.
So basically enabling expressions in a number field and allowing that expression to include updated values from object parameters.
I think that this would be a great addition to blender, but noone seems to be interested in the idea. But if I could show everyone what a great idea it is...

There are a number of keyboard shortcuts you can use to copy different forms of fields and components out of the interface.
The simplest is Ctrl+C - this copies the value of the field (eg, 0.0).
The next is Ctrl+Shift+C - this copies the local path to that value (eg, location).
Finally, you can use Ctrl+Shift+Alt+C - this copies the absolute path to that value (eg, bpy.data.objects["Cube"].location[0]).

And there it is. I thought I'd tried every key combination of CTRL SHIFT ALT & C, but I guess I missed the big one.

It looks like Absolute Path was the terminology I was looking for. Thanks for the help, Rich.


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Can I affect the particle frequency of objects in a collection?

So I have a scene that I am working on below. Currently I have only one type of tree simulated across the entire surface, but I want 3 different types instead. However I do not want an equal mix of these 3 trees, instead I want 80% of the first type of tree, 15% of the second, and 5% of the third.
Is there a way to put 3 trees in a collection and have the particle system affect the frequency of the objects inside it in this way?

For extra points let me know if there are settings to help prevent these trees intersecting to heavily ( I will be going in close on my animation )

Thank you so much!

https://youtu.be/aZ5ungDgFNc?t=1055 This ought to help you deal with the tree mixing

In the particle settings select the Use Count for your collection. Then change the count for each item in the collection.  See the settings near the yellow arrow in the image above.

WOW!!! .... I love Blender so much ... just so so so much
THANK YOU!!!

is it awful for me to ask you what you think about the extra credit question ... :o

Its not awful.  Its tempting for you to ask two related concept question in one BSE question.  Why not ask it separately? Its a gradient area sometimes.

GAHHHH, ... I actually DID ask it as two separate questions ... https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/167449/how-to-prevent-the-intersection-of-mesh-particles
man oh man ... I can't help myself .... but seriously ... this is a game changer ... THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!

That being said ... I thought there was this physics technique where different spheres were allowed to settle in place thus producing spacing. I would need to write something new to investigate

interesting ....

Ok, let me ask you one last question atomic ... you have showed me how to change the frequency ... but do you know of a way to then assign a texture map to that somehow and cluster these frequencies together ?
so when rare trees do show up they are surrounded by some of their kin...

Please place a new question.


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How to get my normals functioning

Hello everyone!
So in the picture above you can see in the background one of my objects has a normal map that I am very happy with. I created another object and then applied the exact same material ... but the normals are not working ... they were both made the same way ( with solidifier and bevel mods ( which I applied ) ), I applied rotation and scale, I checked both of their UV maps, I looked through all of the object data, I double checked that they shared the right material, I went through all the display radio buttons, I recalculated the normals... and I am stumped as to why this is not working...
I feel like there must be some simple solution
THANK YOU!!

It would help if you posted screenshots of the node setup.

.. or even shared your file


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Units on the graph editor
So below I have a quick animation.
Notice that I have the units set to meters ( yellow arrow ) and when you look on the graph editor ( red arrow ) these units are represented perfectly and you can (G) + (Y) + (value in meters) move these points around just like in the main viewport.

However if I change my world units to inches the change is shown on the viewport location values ( green arrow ) but the graph editor values ( pink arrow ) DO NOT change.

How can we sync these up? Is it possible?
Thank you everyone!!

Seems like blender haven't support imperial units in graph

bummer :(
I know the imperial system is not great but still ...
Thank you for the reply RUben!


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How to only get one axis to track
So I hope in the scene below it is very obvious what I am trying to do. I basically want to have cutout models always track to my empty BUT ONLY on the Z Axis.
I want 1 empty to control an entire scene full of cutouts ( keep in mind I want these cutouts in many different locations along the z axis ).
This way when I setup a shot I can just have my empty attached to my camera and all 200 cutouts just rotate on the Z axis no matter where they are along it.
Hope that makes sense, and thank you everyone!!!

Use "Locked Track" constraint with locked Z axis

You nailed it friend! That is exactly what I was looking for :)

@Serge_L Can you help me with this question please? https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/163003/animation-nodes-how-to-make-an-object-face-camera-yet-let-the-object-rotate-ar


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How can I create topology that is going to stand up to bevel and subd modifiers?
I was about to model a game console and this shape came up and I just froze ... how can I create a topology that is going to stand up to bevel and subd mods.
This is my first pass... curious if someone would be interested in presenting a better method.
Thank you all so much!

Do you have a reference photo? It would help if we could see the shape you're trying to achieve


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A shadow in a world without light ? Can you crack this riddle?
I have a plane with shadow catcher enabled and there are no lights in the scene and no background lighting but there is still a shadow represented in my viewer ???
Just curious why that is ..
Thank you all !!!

I could be off base, but when this happens in my scenes it's usually because of either;
the object has flipped normals
or the scale is inverted (which is kind of the same issue)


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rendering volume the right way?
So I am rendering some abstracts and I have never really rendered a scene with volume and I am noticing how much noise it can create. I have searched around but can't seem to find a smooth setup for how to render this locally with cycles.

Here is an image rendered at 1920x1080 with 300 samples

Here is that same image at 2880x1620 with 600 samples
So there is still a ton of noise and very little improvement even though the render time went up from 3 minutes to 15 minutes per frame...
It makes me think that when rendering volume I need specific settings for my tile size, denoiser, volumetrics, AO, etc ...
If anyone has any pointers it would be deeply appreciated.
Thank you all !!!

I don’t know much about volume rendering but you can check out https://youtu.be/kYv3ZIlb_sU this guys videos about nebulae and volume rendering with eevee (actually pretty good).


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Light calculation issue

So I have tried so many things to get this blender denoiser to work properly on this image but I can't seem to figure it out. I am almost finished with this image but no matter how much I increase the resolution or samples nothing seems to fix this, I also tried every variation of denoising ... I would deeply appreciate any advise. Thank you !!!

I do have an 8K HDRI installed

The image is very heavily compressed. To my eyes that looks like regular reflections and not noise, but that may be because of the compression. If the denoiser in 2.80 doesn't work well enough, then you could try the denoise node in 2.81. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/compositing/types/filter/denoise.html?highlight=denoise

Thank you so much! That helps a lot!


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Techniques to composite geometry and volumetrics together for an animation
Hello everyone I hope you are hanging in there!
I spent about 2 hours trying to figure this out with Stack and YouTube but still can't wrap my head around this.
The scene below will eventually become a small tabletop environment with birds, wind, flowing river, etc. The hardest element for me to add though is the CLOUDS because volumetrics are so tricky. My thought, since I am working with an online render farm (RenderStreet) , was to separate the clouds on one layer and send it in for rendering then set the clouds as a holdout and send in the other half. In theory I would end up with 2 videos that I could stitch together and this way the clouds would be isolated and easier to render whereas rendering everything together would take 90 minutes for 1 frame.

I have seen a lot of compositing material out there but not much specific to animation. Am I on the right track or is there a way better method to get this done?
Thank you all so much!

You are on the right track. Compositing an animation is exactly like compositing a picture (an animation is just a sequence of pictures), so any tutorial will work for both.

It all depends on the kind of volumetrics you want to add. Clouds would need to project shadows into the landscape, and scatter light, so the quality of the shadows would neet to be affected. The tricky part is how to recreate the interaction of volumetrics and how those are broken by the geometry of the landscape. If you are going to use a render farm anyway, try to create all of it on a single pass.


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Incorrect white background in compositing
Really straight forward question here, basically I have a few doors I want to render with an alpha layer and a shadow catcher, then I want to use the compositor to add in a PURE white background ( HEX: FFFFFF ).
Even though I have a pure white selected in the compositor when I render it and use a color tester it is quite a bit less than PURE white ...
Must be missing something simple I guess ?
Here is my compositing setup ( you can see my HEX code ):

Here is my test of the result ( which is not pure white ):

Render Properties/Color Management/View Transform/Raw or  Standard?

Hello :). This answer should help: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/142693/

Big thanks to both Bruno and Jachym Michal !
I was able to switch my " look " control ( under color management ) to " none " and then I got a perfect white backdrop.

It actually did! surprised I did not find that when I was searching! ... so what do I do ... I wanted to give you the right answer but you submitted a comment ...

@CameronT0101 Just upvote the linked answer, and this question will be eventually marked as a duplicate :). To keep the site nice and tidy.

Ok ... now my question is does my post still live on ? Perhaps I used different words that others might easily find to help spread available paths to the correct answer, no ?


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Hide header from python
I need to hide the part of the header that has transform orientation, snapping etc. buttons using python script.
bpy.context.space_data.show_region_tool_header = False hides the entire header, but I need to keep showing Menu and Tool Settings.
Does anyone know how to do this?

Also had this issue a while ago but I think it's still not possible to manipulate headers the way it should be. However, if you really want to go down into the rabbit hole you can change space_view3d.py by an addon removing the lines temporary: Rearranging elements of a panel or re-define the draw method of the header.

@p2or OMG, this a very deep hole! I will be sued by the user if I do this with his / her installation through my script :) But thank you for giving an insight into Blender UI. BTW,  it looks like VIEW3D_PT_view3d_meshdisplay is no more there in 2.8.

@p2or I guess, I did not explore the pointer given by you thoroughly. Sorry about that. As suggested in the thread, setting the draw reference to a dummy function does the trick. The menu object in this case is: bpy.types.VIEW3D_HT_tool_header. Appreciate your help!

Glad I could help. Re-read your question right now, I'm sure you already know that but just for the sake: you can temporary hide the elements in order to display some text onto the header area like the grab operator does for example, there is: C.area.header_text_set("string") and you can also pass an empty string of course... Cheers!


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Assigning shape key to a curve
To create a shape key of a curve we need to start with the curve's base geometry and then move the points in edit mode to have the new form, that's assigned to shape key.
Is there a way I can directly assign a curve to another curve as shape key? I can then draw the two curves (or maybe import them from an external file) freely and assign one as the shape key of the other.

Found the answer here:
https://blenderartists.org/t/blender-add-on-to-import-shape-keys-from-youtube/1124990
Here's the add-on that does this:
https://youtu.be/XMimQfQR_ss
As per the suggestion in the comment, here's the brief description:
The add-on descried in the video above imports svg paths directly as shape keys. So if I have a rectangle and circle in the svg file and if I group them with rectangle at the top in the xml group, circle will be imported as shape key and rectangle as the target. Apparently, there are no limitations about the number of nodes, as texts can also be imported as a shape key. There can be many shape keys for one target.
Download link: https://github.com/Shriinivas/shapekeyimport

While reference links are useful, link only answers are discouraged here, if the links go down your answer becomes useless for future visitors. Please describe shortly how you solved the issue and how the links help and are related

here's an old script also, not very smart but don't need the svg step
https://blenderartists.org/t/join-curves-as-shapekeys/

I don't know a way to do this in native Blender, but with the addon Animation Nodes you can look at the control points of each spline and mix their coordinates. If the splines don't have the same number of control points, you can also evaluate an equal number of points of each spline and mix their coordinates.
You can start with a loop that takes two vector lists an mixes pairs of vectors according to the float factor.

A Spline Info node is used to extract the coordinates of the control points for each curve. The previous loop is invoked three times to mix control points and left and right handles. A Spline from Points node will create a new spline from these mixed coordinates. Finally, a Curve Object Output will create a object out of this spline.

This looks a little complicated though. Please see the answer above.


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Assign random color to spline list
I created a spline list following this guide. Now I want to assign a different color to each spline using Cycle's random node, but it doesn't work because the splines are grouped into one object.
My solution to this is to instance the spline object and loop through each instance, creating one object for each spline. This worked when I checked Deep Copy, but did not animate. I animated the start/end for each spline and need that to be carried over as well. If I do not check Deep Copy, it duplicates the same spline, stacked on top of itself.
What other way can I do this? Or can I assign random colors to splines using animation node?
Below is a screenshot of my entire node setup.

Also, in the screen shot you can see when viewed from the instance, each object has a list of 50 splines, but when viewed through the loop, there's only 1 spline. What's the reason to this?
I am using AN 2.1, python 3.7.

You should use the Object Instancer node to create a number of empty objects, this is done by disabling Copy From Source option. Then loop over both the objects and the splines and output the splines to the objects as follows:


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Add created vertices to a list
My goal is to add every created vertice to a list.
import bpy
import bmesh
def add_vert(loc):
    bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(bpy.context.edit_object.data)
    v = bm.verts.new(loc)
    bm.verts.index_update()
    bm.verts.ensure_lookup_table()
    vertlist = []
    vertlist.extend([v])
    print(vertlist)
    return {v}
add_vert((1,1,1))

This is what I get as output:
[<BMVert(0x0000020E20C3CF20), index=12>]
[<BMVert(0x0000020E20C3CF58), index=13>]
[<BMVert(0x0000020E20C3CF90), index=14>]
This is what I would like: [<BMVert(0x0000020E20C3CF20), index=12>,<BMVert(0x0000020E20C3CF20), index=13>,<BMVert(0x0000020E20C3CF20), index=14>]

Loading an edit mode bmesh, updating and reindexing it every time a new vertex is added is complete overkill.  Which is why I pointed out making only one bmesh in this answer as a class property  ... or pass the bm to the method.

What I want to do is change the color of each vertex in the list using Bgl and so I have to make and update the list while in edit mode.

Ok let's put it another way. Let's say you add 1000 verts to your list to display in bgl. I contend you can create the bmesh once, add 1000 verts then update once. via your method above you create 1000 bmeshes and update a 1000 times.

I’m just using this example of what I want to do so I can get right to the point. I plan on implementing this into what u showed me.

You need to define your vertlist variable outside of the function. Currently, vertlist exists only within the scope of the add_vert function. You can either define it before hand:
vertlist = []
def add_vert(loc):
    ...

or add a try statement to check if vertlist already exists:
def add_vert(loc):
    ...
    try:
        vertlist
    except NameError:
        global vertlist = []
    ...


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What are some good progressions for beginning modeling?
New guy to Blender, want some advice on tutorial projects with small polycounts. So far I have modeled a pawn and a mug.

Try a toy train or a low poly landscape. Or a toy train in a low poly landscape


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Cannot see mesh for reference images Blender 2.80
This is a new problem for several months. Cannot see mesh for reference images Blender 2.80. Did not have this problem with 2.79?

Background images as we used in 2.7x are not available in 2.80.
Now when we load a reference image, the image is attached to an empty which displays it in the viewport. As it is an object you can move it in front of or behind any other objects or hide it when not being used.

We can also make the image transparent by adjusting the image properties for the empty.

Note that cameras now have background image properties, this allows an image to always be aligned with the camera view. These settings have a depth option to display the image in front of or behind the scene.

I am too old to understand!

@BillTillman but can you adjust the transparency or move it out of the way?


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Can't install filmic blender on Gentoo
I put the filmic blender files in /usr/share/blender/2.79/datafiles/colormanagement as normal and the default sRGB values still show.

@cegaton I installed the normal way on gentoo of emerge -aq blender yes I renamed the files. All the folders and files are in the same spot as ubuntu. I can use filmic on the tar.gz version of blender but I have special CFLAGS I wanna use


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Motion tracking with large sweeping camera moves
Hi I wish to motion track a scene that involves large sweeps which means the end frame contains none of the markers placed in the first frame. I'm not sure how to have adaptive markers or markers that are not in the first frame which are included in the solve/bundle? I'm coming from boujou where it updates new trackers if old ones are not on screen.


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What is the best parent to use when weight painting?
I have a simple minecraft looking character and i'm trying to assign weights to my armatures and i was wondering the best parent to use in order to successfully weight paint on my armatures

what do you mean "the best parent"?

The easiest, fastest method is parenting with automatic weights first and then adjusting it. It does the job fairly well, and cleaning up the weight paint should be pretty easy with your type of character.
Just make sure you apply the scale of the character mesh before applying the armature. That can definitely save some tweaking later on.


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How can I fully utilise all CPU cores for a hair dynamics bake?
I am working on a huge grassy field using a hair particle system that has 500,000 hairs. I have some forcefields blowing the grass around. When I bake this particle system to the disk, one of my CPU cores shoots up to 100 percent and the others stay around 5%. The grass blades don't interact with each other at all. Is there a way to make it use all 8 of my CPU cores, and if so how?
I have an i7-6900k and I'm on Ubuntu 17.10 using Blender 2.79. I have 16GB of RAM, but am considering an upgrade especially if it would help with this situation.

Related https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/7425/can-blender-use-100-cpu-when-baking-to-speed-up-baking/


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Torus animation rig
I am trying to deal with Blender's IK solving system (though maybe I don't need it at all?).
I need to animate torus into a smile-like figure (upside- and downside-"smile" animation will be for the same armature.

Maybe it would be good to use b-bones, but this is for export to the game engine, so it is not possible to use any blender-specific features such as b-bones, drivers and so on.
Below is my current result, but it bends rather strangely and is extremely inconvenient to deal with. In case of a hand or a leg IK is rather obvious, but here is a cycle of four (on the gif there are even more, a separate IK on each bone except side ones and non-deforming bones to operate them).
And additional question: which bone and with which method I should connect to the global parent (not shown on images) to resize and rotate all the structure?

Consider using a shape key.

Thank you, but “it is not possible to use any blender-specific features”. Plus, it will be a part of a larger bone rig.

The name Shapekey may be Blender specific, but the concept is not. (Maya/Unity's Blendshapes, Babylon JS' morph targets) They can be exported into another format. Most game engines support them, maybe tell us about your game engine.

Unity. Yes, blendshapes can really be the way, thank you, Leander. But I’ve never used them (bc always thought that are Maya only), can you hint me for bigger picture? In general, it will be a rig of a character (it is ready, rigged and animated), with this torus as a part of clothing - which should be separately animated as in topic, but also be deformed and move with the whole body (that’s why I thought about full bone-rig and two animation layers in Unity).

Blendshapes blend the mesh shape between 2 or more sets of vertex positions for the whole mesh. It could work better for mouth but depends on the style you're going for. It's harder to maintain the round profile with shape keys as the transitions between vertex positions will be linear unless you make a blendshape per frame which is very heavy and likely not worth it.


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Nvidia Quadro M2000 4GB - does this grapic card meet system requirements?
Does anyone know whether the Nvidia Quadro M2000 4GB meets Blenders minimum system requirements and is compatible?

This is a Maxwell-based card, and will support Blender just fine, including Cycles' CUDA mode. However, Quadros are very expensive compared to the GeForce series for the same GPU core performance, and the extra features of a Quadro will not be useful for Blender. Unless you need a Quadro for some other software you will be using, or some other reason such as non-Blender-related hardware features, or enterprise purchasing requirements that only have Quadros for workstation hardware, you should get a GeForce series card of similar cost, such as a GTX 1070.

Thank you for your input on my question. That was a great help. cheers!


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Material not textured
I'm having a problem with textures not being applied to the material as you can see in the picture. It is possible to get it to work by clicking on the white X and manually selecting the image but it's too time consuming. Thanks in Advance.

How did you get that already-textured scene objects? Have you tried using the options under "file > external data" about missing files?

Yes tried that already. I selected textured solid to get the textured scene

Managed to get it to work by selecting diffuse/color