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Removing Tabs from Tool Shelf ("T" key)
I'm trying to remove unwanted tabs in the left-hand toolshelf, such as "Grease Pencil" and others I never use. I saw an answer here from 2014 that suggested you edit the "space_view3d_toolbar.py" file in C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.xx\scripts\startup\bl_ui, and comment out the class(es) that pertain to the tab you want to remove using """ at the start and end of the class.
However, I tried that for the Physics and Relations tabs, and it also removes a bunch of other tabs as well as the top menu. Also, this file doesn't seem to include the "Grease Pencil" or "Layers" tab info. I've done significant C# programming, so I doubt I messed up the commenting...
I'm wondering if something has changed in recent years. Is there a different file, or maybe I'm missing an easier tweak or add-on somewhere?
Thanks !!

Unregister the classes.
Rather than mess with the UI code, you can unregister the classes.  When a class is registered it is added to bpy.types  Using autocomplete in python console, dir(bpy.types) or looking at bl_ui.space_view3d_toolbar we can find the classes we wish to unregister.
Let's take the grease pencil tool bar panels as an example. The naming convention shows the panels we wish to remove start with VIEW3D_PT_tools_grease_pencil  Similarly for animation.
Test script to remove grease pencil and animation 3d view toolbar.
import bpy
from bpy.utils import unregister_class

gpclasses = [c for c in dir(bpy.types)
        if c.startswith("VIEW3D_PT_tools_grease_pencil")
        or c.startswith("VIEW3D_PT_tools_animation")]

for c in gpclasses:
    cls = getattr(bpy.types, c)
    unregister_class(cls)

Change above script to suit.
Hit F8 to reinstate the panels.

Excellent I'll give that a shot. And your solution even opens up the option of adding a "Tab Cleanup" function to the custom Tool tab I already have. It can remove or add tabs as needed. Sweet.

Dude, that's excellent !!! I now have a button on the custom Tool tab I developed that unregisters selected tabs. It works great. Thanks much.

By the way, it kinda surprises me that it works in real time. As soon as you click the button to run the unregister code you posted, it erases the tab.

I'm not really posting an answer, I just couldn't get my code to post in the comments.
For any other noobs like me out there who might want to know how to make a custom button to remove selected tabs using batFINGER's excellent code idea, here's what I came up with. It seems to work, and instantly deletes the tabs when you press the button. I merely packaged his code into a class (and just like you would with any custom button you also have to register the class and add it to the buttons on the tool shelf):
class RemoveTab(bpy.types.Operator):
    """This removes Grease Pencil, Relations, & Animation tabs"""
    bl_idname = "myops.removetab"
    bl_label = "Remove Tabs"

    def execute(self, context):
        gpclasses = [c for c in dir(bpy.types)
        if c.startswith("VIEW3D_PT_tools_grease_pencil")
        or c.startswith("VIEW3D_PT_tools_animation")
        or c.startswith("VIEW3D_PT_tools_relations")]

        for c in gpclasses:
            cls = getattr(bpy.types, c)
            unregister_class(cls)

        return {'FINISHED'}

Thanks again batFINGER. I've been wanting to tackle this forever.

Yeah, that's much nicer. And thanks much for the F8 trick to re-instate. That makes it so much nicer. I tweaked my answer to update per your idea. It works great.


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How to apply the effects of weight painting instantly?
I am having problems when I weight paint. I can paint and the color shows as expected, but the corresponding mesh movement only happens after click on an item in the tool shelf,  eg. belly How can I apply the movement instantly?
cheers jan

I have no idea what button on the tool shelf you are talking about "belly" Are you using some rig with buttons?

Select your mesh and in the properites panel, modifiers tab, enable thoose little two buttons on the armature modifiers: in this way you will be able to see the effect of all weight paint strokes in real time.

thanks for your comment. But it did not solve the problem. I still have to click on a tool shelf item. I use Avastar 2.0 it might a part of the problem?

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Vehicle Glass Image Warping Issue
I am currently working on a Lamborghini as an assignment, and while I was working on the textures for previewing, I encountered an issue with the glass. For some reason, the objects in the interior have their position and shape warped by the glass, as seen in the example below.

Another issue this causes is that when there are multiple windows within view, the parts of the interior objects don't appear as if they would actually connect to eachother.

So far, I have tried adjusting the lights, adding thickness to the glass (which didn't work, so I removed it), and altering the material for the glass, but nothing I've done so far has worked. I'll provide my node setup for the glass below, and you can download the blend file here. Thanks for the help!

index of refraction (IOR) should be closer to 1.33

Thanks! Still didn't fix the issue though :(

If you just plug in the glass shader to the surface do you still get alot of distortion? the closer the IOR is to 1 the less distortion you should get.

Yes, the issue remained with glass shader being directly connected to the material output, but I lowered the IOR even further and the warping issue seems to have been fixed, although the glass looks less realistic. I'm going to read the duplicate real quick and see if that fixes my issue.

Oh, I forgot to apply my scale. Thanks for the link, and thanks for the advice with the IOR! ^-^

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


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Using subsurface modifier on circle
So, I'm trying to use a subsurface modifier on my mesh, but it displays weirdly... I know how to use edge loops on a square side, but how can I make this work on a circle side ?

The bottom face is made as best as I could, by merging two extruded vertices.

The Subsurface Modifier (and others) work best with "Quad" based mesh. You have a huge N-gon on the bottom of your mesh.

You can select the bottom face and use the INSET TOOL (Hotkey : I) to adjust.
But Keep in mind you have a N-GON(poly with more than 4 verts) down there, and subsurf and ngons don't work great together.
You can fix this deleting the NGON face, select all the boundary verts, extrude the verts/edges and scale them to the center

This worked. However. if its triangles instead of quads, does it still do the same thing ? Because to do what you're doing in the gif it makes triangles, not quads.

Indeed there's tris on the center, but there's no mesh importance in there so the subsurf don't mess anything. N-GONS aren't bad, the problem is the subsurf can produce shading imperfections, and some external engines can't handle NGONS that good, but keep in mynd, at the end every poly will be converted to tris(especially in game engines)

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


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Subsurface creates holes in mesh
so I'm quite new to blender and am now using the subsurface modifier. However, it seems like it kind of creates holes, which weren't there before. Here are some screenshots:

There are no double vertex and I have no clue how to fix that...

First problem

The order of the modifiers is important.
In your example, the quarter is first smoothed by the Subsurf, then duplicated by the Mirror.
If you put the mirror first (with the arrows right to his name), the quarter will be duplicated, then the whole table will be smoothed.

Second problem

You have an edge inside the model, it connects the vertex at the center of the hole, with a vertex above (the center of the table, i think). Removing it should fix the hole.

That did it, thanks :) I dont really know how that edge got there, but deleting did it.

It often appends to me when I press F (create a face or edge) instead of G (grab)

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


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Subsurface modifier creates gaps on extrude
So, when using a subsurface modifier, it always creates a kind of gap between the main structure and the extrueded one. I never know why.. here's how it looks like:

Anybody knows how to fix that ?

This happens because has a face betweeen those. You need to delete that face.However this is not a normal behavior.


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Moving parent in world causes copy locations to act odd
I am trying to create a model of my sons toy train and am using a mixture of parented and copy location and rotation constraints to get the wheels and connecting rods to animate correctly.
My differs from a normal piston style train as the body of the train moves with the motion. Here is a gif of what I have so far:

The trouble I am having is when I try to reposition the whole train whether it be by moving it in the world or by rotating it.
The following image shows what happens after moving my Train parent in the Y-Axis.

As you can see, the body has become separated from the cab.
I have spent hours trying to solve this issue with no luck. I have tried adding a limit location constraint as proposed in this question but couldn't get this to work either.
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Hi @Edgel3D, thank you for this, from the video this looks exactly what I was after!
I have opened the blend file to take a quick look but cannot seem to see anything on the ATT plane, judging from the texture panel it looks like a text file should be included but I am guessing it has not been embedded.
I will hopefully get some time tonight to pick through the blend to see how it all works nevertheless.

To recover the text file - Get into the textures properties, open the "Image" tab and click on the tiny folder icon that's grey'd out. (lower one) Select the second option. Exit from Blender and don't save.  This will keep the text file and create a folder from the current one called "Textures".  A copy of the file will be in there.   (Nice model by BTW)

PS to the above - Have corrected a misleading instruction in the text file.  A revised Blend file has replaced the old one and also a copy of the text file is at the above link.  You may need a short video to demonstrate an easy way  to synch up the two parts if you have problems.

@Edgel3D, thanks again for your help with this.
I have managed to find some time to follow your instructions and have ended up with the following: https://youtu.be/1L2Cat8aKxY
I used the loop count setting in the NLA editor which I think is what you refer to as the loop back feature?
I need to find some time to add in the smooth start up and slow down at the end and some more interesting camera work but your method has certainly helped me get the desired effect. Lining up the two circles on each keyframe was genius.

EdSalter , great!  Glad I could help!  Thanks for the note - I tried the loopback feature but in version 2.77a I either have loopback or I don't.  I wasn't able to switch over to a slow down sequence and had to revert to the original idea.  I'll place the whole caboodle up as an answer so you can tick it off.  (Curious since switching to Chrome browser cannot place the @ sign in your ID - the editor takes it then it disappears)

Instead of the crank's motion driving the body back and forth, I elected to keyframe the body's animation and synch that up with the crank's motion...
Here's how...
Position the crank with one of it's ends hinged at the rear wheel's crank-pin.   Set it's Point of Origin at the pin's center.
Use the "Track to" constraint to always look at the front wheel nut.
Rotate the rear wheels 360 degrees over the desired frame range for speed of rotation.
Make sure the two keyframes are set to "Linear" interpolation.
(select keyframes in Dope sheet and press T)
Step the timeline cursor to the 2nd last frame and insert another rotation keyframe.
Delete the last rotation keyframe.  This is to avoid a one-frame pause when at the next frame, we loop back to the first rotation frame again.
Play the animation and check that both keyframes are indeed linear.  If unsure, check the graph editor.  There should be a straight line (no curvature) in the transformation.
Set the view into Ortho Mode and from the side view and at frame 1, position the crank (in the Y axis only) over the front wheel nut as desired.
Add an object or mesh circle and center it at the front wheel nut's center.  Make it a child of the crank.
Duplicate the marker and move it out in the X axis slightly, parent that to the Wheel nut.
These are going to be reference markers with which to keep the front wheel in the same relative horizontal position with respect to the crank.  (i.e. keep both markers aligned in the Z axis by moving the body (boiler) in the Y axis only)
Step to frame 2, Drag the body (boiler) in the Y axis so both markers are aligned in the Z axis again.
Repeat this over the full number of frames you've got so far.  (29 frames?)
Save the project under a different filename.  (One_Rev.Blend?)
This will be a return reference point which you can always come back to.
In the Dope Sheet, duplicate all keyframes for the rear wheel's rotation and Body's animation and slide them to the right, one frame on from the final keyframe.
Check that out, make sure there's no jitter between each revolution.
Repeat the copy procedure, doubling the animation frames each time until you have sufficient.
Check it, make sure the crank isn't slopping around the front wheel nut.  LCD screens may make it appear to be doing this but if you switch off the nut's visibility you will see that it's not.
If a slow down is required at the end, the Body's keyframes will need to be realigned for those slow-down frames.
The model is now ready to follow a path or be moved about manually or keyframed.
Save the project.  This can be used for other projects that wish to use the loco.
-=============-
Repeat Loop-backs for the extended animation would be a desirable alternative to the duplication process but in Vers 2.77a it appears you either have "cyclic" for a dopesheet strip, or you don't.  There's no Bezier + Linear + Bezier again to start off slowly or slowdown at the end that I can see.


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Exporting bendy bones/shape key animations?
How can I export these animations into another program? I don't need the rig itself in these other programs, I just need the mesh's animations to be exported,  if that makes sense. Is this possible, like, with alembic? If it's not possible, do I have to make a 100% bone based rig?

Alembic supports exporting an animated mesh. .mdd and .pc2 also support animated meshes. It will depend on what the other app supports. Basically these exporters "bake" a copy of the mesh for each frame. You can use the mesh cache modifier in blender to use these exported animations within blender. OpenVDB is similar but uses voxels, and is used for smoke and fluid.

Alembic is a nice solution, it can export mesh data "as is visually", like a mesh cache. However it can be quite heavy because it exports a snapshot of the mesh on each exported frame. And it doesn't support materials (though it can export material face groups).
Depending the target software, Alembic is the best solution, but sometimes it's not as ideal. Typically, if it's for a game engine, you better stick to a bone-shapekey-based rig and keep it as lightweight as possible.

rig it in blender then in the modifier tab of the properties window duplicate the armature modifier and apply as shape key
you should only do this at the end once youre sure you have youre mesh the way you want it cause shape keys can be wierd


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Weird Move Object behavior
Something went wrong I can't move my objects like it supposed to be. Description at the gif:

And HOW is it supposed to be? Add some details.

Solution is to disable Snap during transformation: Shift+Tab


text:
How can I replace Bfont with another font upon startup
Blender is being used by Openshot and by default Blender uses Bfont to create text objects.
Currently Bfont that my system has from the 2.79 lacks russian characters. So the only way to render russian text is to load a different font, which I can't do as Openshot uses Bfont in most of Blender interactions without my intervention uses blender -b.
So question is:
 how can I make sure that when blender is started it uses (as Bfont, default font to render text objects another font of my choice) and this is loaded upon startup.
I know how to do it by modifying source files and recompiling blender and openshot from scratch.
I can put another font for blender as bfont and recompile.
I can also edit python scripts on openshot side and try to use/load another font, prior to calling blender.
However, I wanted to achieve the same with vanilla blender (those that I download from blender website)
So any way to call as Bfont some other fine via  config option (User prefs) or placing a file in some ~/.blender/... directory?

I've never used Openshot. Is it bypassing your startup file?

Actually it is probably time the bfont as default for text objects was changed. Blender includes other fonts, which are used for the interface and support multiple languages. Until then, an addon could be made that replaces the current add text object and sets a better font.


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Objects won't showup in render view
I can't find the solutions for this one. Basically the object are not showing up when I switch to render view ( the legs in cycles , the round base in Blender render )

Also you need to pick "one" render engine or the other.

I tried everything that was mentioned inthe linked topic, cycles render. Nothing seems to work

You can't render in both render modes at the same time in the same scene. This is expected behavior.

I was modeling in cycles and when I turned on the render view, you could only see the thing you see in the picture. Then I tested if it's same in blender render...

nop, still nothing everything is visible only when I switch to render view . I tried appending those legs to a new project, they still didn't show up

I turned off the armature and it displayed the objects but i still don't understand how it works

Try to go into edit mode and select the parts that are not rendering press w and then click on flip normal's and if that doesn't help then I think you must explain your question bit more and some more images regarding your problem would help and you can also upload your blend file so that others may inspect it to rectify your problem and sorry for wrong answer because I couldn't understand your problem properly.


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How to assign mesh to certain bones?

Image shows it all, I'm trying to assign the teeth to the jaw bone but I'm new to blender and I don't know how rip

For this I would assign the weights directly by going into edit mode, selecting the teeth, and assigning the weight to the jaw in the object data tab of the properties window:
Don't forget to also remove the influence from other bones.
This works well for teeth because they move 100% with the jaw bone. For smoother things that are influenced by multiple bones you will need to use weight painting.


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Character parenting
This may be a basic question but I need help.  I've designed the character body and added the bones but I'm guessing I'm not parenting them correctly.  The bones move but the body doesn't.

Try to re-parent your bones to your body: first clear parenting by pressing Alt+P on both your 3d object and bones selected. Then in object mode select first your body object (what to parent) then bones (to what to parent) and press Ctrl+P. In drop-down menu choose "Apply armature modifier with automatic weights". This will create default and programmatically calculated bone weights to your object.
Then unselect all and pick armature, switch to Pose Mode and try to move some bones, this must take effect if you do it properly.
Also check your armature settings - it must be a "pose mode", not "rest mode" (if I remember right, it's on armature pane on your right)
After that you can correct your bones' weights by editing your mesh in "weight paint mode".
This is the very basics about rigging, since there's no much information supplied... Good luck!


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How to make a bump map from a texture paint?
I want to have a detailed model. The texture paint png file is like this (though these are the details on the mesh, I will create another paint file and want a bump map from that):
How do I make a bump map from this and have the black lines appear as ridges in the model? This is the model I want to create ridges on:
Will I need to subdivide the mesh? If so, how many times given the image? And will there be any problems because of the topology? Also, how can I see the effects in real time so that I can adjust the strength of bumps accordingly?

I use an rgb image with 0.5 value (gray) and then plug that into a bump node, and then plug that into the Normal socket of the shader node. I paint in black to sink, white to raise but that can be inverted on the bump node.


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How to create dynamic clouds?
Specifically dense clouds that move really slowly, just fast enough to be noticeable in a 15 sec animation. They'll need to be 3d, interact with some floating buildings and reflect the sky. I found the dragoneex plugin "dynamic sky" to be great but the clouds don't move. Should I just modify it? If so, how do I go about doing it?

First of all go here and read this answer: How to use Blender's dynamic sky add-on?
Go to Node Editor and switch to World mode.
In paragraph Night sky with stars (from the linked answer) you can see whole node setup for Dynamic Sky add-on. Find part Clouds/Stars and Texture Mapping node there:

Now you can animate any of the Location values to get clouds moving in chosen direction.


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How do I remove the UV grid from this image?
I'm a beginner and just tried texture painting using this tutorial: Youtube video
At some point, I must have messed up. I applied the material and this is what I'm getting in render mode:
This is the png file used in texture painting:
How do I remove the grid thing? I want to have a metallic material and show these lines on top of it. So how can I remove the UV grid and show the lines on top of a new material?

You added that grid in the image somehow (maybe by baking atop of image with Blender's UV grid pattern) and then added paint on top of it. It's best to redo the image making it blank first and then painting on it. I don't think you can easily remove it, however if you really want to work with this image it should be possible to crop it with image editor

@MrZak can you post a link to a tutorial so help me with it? And can I do the latter option in Blender? If so, how?

To help with what? If redoing all you do is erase current image and create / rewrite it with new one. Then paint your details there again how you did it on this image. As to the latter no, I wouldn't do it in Blender, capabilties for precise selecting of image parts of popular image editors are better for this.

@MrZak a guy helped me on IRC #blender. http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=122573

Possibly post that image directly here as an answer to your question so others might find the solution.

That will work, note only that in case of fine / thin details in the image they might be lost / removed with ColorRamp and moving its color stops won't necessary turn them back without part of background to appear. Other than that nice solution

Well I might be missing the point, but for this actual image you could go into photoshop or GIMP and select by color and fill with white or whatever color you want. If you want to avoid that you can just make the brush reeally big and paint over the entire UV map, by setting the mode to Paint in the UV/Image editor window, then just drag your mouse across the whole thing. If you want it to be translucent later, do image editing.

This solution was provided by a user on irc channel #Blender named JA12.
Also, please read Mr Zak's comments on the question.


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Trying to replicate the Blender Cloud dog
I'm taking a stab at modeling, and I want to do one of the cute dog on the Blender Cloud landing page.

I can cover rigging, but not modeling. Any tips on how to do this? I already tried flattening a sphere and thickening a long cylinder, but they didn't work well.
I'm thinking brushes should work, but I'm not sure how I'd go along with that either. Any suggestions?

If you're a cloud subscriber, you should be able to find a download for the video's .blend assets - seeing the original should help you figure out how to do it.

Sub-D box modeling
Dixey has a smooth surface with nice curves.
Easiest way comes into my mind is to block out the overall shape and use the subdivision surface modifier to smooth the blocks. Make sure to use the Catmull-Clark algorithm.
Onece built the base mesh, it should be just a matter of refining the shape with more loopcuts, or you can even apply the modifies and use the sculpting tools to increase the bumpiness of certain ares.
Here's a possible result:

Notice how few polygons are used to control the surface.
Other possible techniques to built a base mesh to work with:

metaballs
skin modifer

That looks like exactly what I need. Thank you so much!


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Is there an addon for touch input?
My math teacher is interested in using Blender in class to help with visual learning. Is there an extension out there that makes Blender usable with only a touchscreen?
We have a Promethean in class, so if there's an addon for that, let me know.
Thanks in advance.

Everything in 2.8 seems to be somewhere on a menu/panel/control whereas in 2.79 somethings were completely hidden unless you had the shortcut. I think you would need to try it see where you get stuck.


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Align audio track to reference audio
I'm editing a music video with one camera but multiple microphones. It's a rather cheap setup, so I had everyone record audio on their phones individually and I plan on using the audio from the camera as a "master" that I can align everything else to.
In other software such as Kdenlive and DaVinci Resolve, there's a button in the context menu that will synchronize playback between audio tracks. The audio tracks would be perfectly in sync and I could remove the audio from the video since it was terrible.
Is there a way to do this in Blender's VSE? I need to use Blender for certain graphics, but if I have to, I could just do it in Kdenlive and then finalize the graphics in Blender.

Try aligning the tracks in something precise like Audacity, REAPER or Adobe Audition (to name a couple examples), render it as a lossless file even if the original format is lossy so you're not losing more information, then drag those into Blender. Smartphone microphones can have frequency responses that are unoptimised for music so there may be additional mixing to do outside of Blender.
It's worth mentioning that, although you wanted to do this in Blender, it is not ideal for editing audio and it is best to establish a workflow that involves multiple programs where Blender is not suited.


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Wire-frames being rendered inside transparent objects
Im sure it's probably a render option I need to turn on or off but I have an animation where we see a crane moving a sign.  As the sign comes closer to the camera, the crane disappears.  I keyframed the material to be transparent and also keyframed the eye ball (viewport visibility).  Most of the objects fade out but these black wireframes are left behind. When I switch to Render Viewport nothing is there but when I actually render, the wireframes are present.
Any ideas?

Which renderer are you using? (..And  which button are you pushing to perform the render?)

@RobinBetts I am using Cycles.  I press F12 to render but also rendered the entire sequence to .jpgs by pressing the Animation button and had the same issue either way.

Not sure I completely understand, but if you want to hide items from the renderer you need to click on the little camera icon (hides in render), not the little eye icon (hides in viewport).

Thank you!  Super noob here but appreciate your input.  Any idea why my objects still have that black wire-frame like material appearing even though I set their material to be transparent BSDF?

Afraid I'm not sure. Could be a number of things. If you are up for sharing, then upload your file to http://pasteall.org/blend/ and add the link here. That will give us the best chance of helping you. If not, then perhaps post a couple of screenshots showing your material settings (nodes and material properties panel).

I uploaded it here: http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=51612

Ah ha! Your light is getting 'trapped' inside your transparent material. You don't have enough transparency ray bounces for the light to escape, so it renders as black. In Properties panel, go to Render / Light Paths and increase the Transparency number to about 60 and your crane will render as completely transparent.

Genius!  Solved!


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Which algorithm does Blender use to bake normal maps?
I am studying Computer Science and have to prepare a presentation about normal mapping in Blender.
While I can find a lot about how I can do it in blender, I could not find anything about which technic/ algorithm is used.
Does anyone know how Blender bakes the normal maps?
I found another link where the standard approach for normal mapping is explained, but I am not sure if this is used in Blender (Link below).
Thank you for the help in advance.
https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch22.html

The beauty of it is that Blender is open source software, you can directly check out it's source code and know how it actually works.


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distorted / squished texture on mesh edges
I'm having a bit of trouble with textures on my meshes. Here's an example of my issue:

The mesh was created by scaling a cube and then applying the scaling via Object > Apply > Scale in object mode. After that, I attempted to apply my material. The texture looks fine on the top surface but squished on the edges as shown in the picture.
I'm sure the fix is simple and any help would be appreciated.

By default (since you don’t have anything connected to the Vector input of the Voronoi texture node) it will be using Generated coordinates which are dependent on the actual dimensions of your object. The Generated coordinates vary from 0.0 to 1.0 over the extent of the individual X, Y, Z dimensions - but that scale can be different per dimension.
To get a consistent scaling of your texture you need to use texture coordinates which are the same scale in each axis. Add a Texture Coordinate node and connect the Object output of that to the Vector input of your texture and all should be well.

Simple, yet I would have never figured that out on my own. Thank you so much!


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Fluid simulation not baking with fluid object
I've been having a little bit of trouble getting the fluid simulator to cooperate with me.
I have a relatively simple scene setup with plain rectangular objects that are scaled to realistic sizes.
Here's a rough idea of what I'm trying to accomplish: (Ignore the background dirt and grime, I'm just trying to show the scraping action on the machinery.)
My plan was to use the fluid simulator and animate the membrane material moving forward and having the top liquid layer scraped off on the edge like in the example photo.

For some reason, the fluid simulator will not bake correctly and change to a liquid. The domain just remains a rectangle.
I've tried:

Making the domain bigger or smaller
Changing the resolution and fluid
world scene units
Double checking that scale has been applied to all objects
Changing directories for where the baked files are stored
If I just create a small fluid cube and put it inside of a larger cube set to be the domain, I can bake that for whatever that's worth.

I've got a blend-exchange file posted with everything pretty much set to defaults for simplicity.

Let me know if there's any more information I can provide.

The size of your fluid is too small in comparison to the domain size. There are multiple solutions: Increase the resolution of the fluid (in the domain object), increase the size or dimensions of the fluid (that large, thin rectangle), decrease the size of the domain or a combination of those.

You seem to be right. Unfortunately, that means I can't get my fluid as thin as I need it to be. Do you have any suggestions of another route I could take to accomplish my goal?

Try the Mantaflow. You can download it (built-in Blender) from here: http://graphicall.org/ There are a lot of tutorial on YouTube.

Try an inflow instead of the flat fluid, that scales it down a lot. Make the domain a small as you can, basically only where you see the animation. You can make the water fall through the domain or make an outflow (to prevent it from filling up). And scale the resolution up for your final render. Mantaflow is said to be okey at fluid simulation, a good, but costly alternative is FlipFluids


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Rendering with filmic log color space and saving output for use in photoshop
I recently learned about the magic of filmic log and love the way it makes my renders look. However, I'm having issue with saving the output from blender. Specifically, for use in photoshop for cropping, sizing and minor image corrections.
My previous workflow was render > save as OpenEXR (rgba / float full) > open in photoshop and save as PSD.
With filmic log, The colors on the EXR file look wildly different in photoshop than they did in the blender rendering output screen. The brighter parts of the images are completely blown out.
Here's an example image, blender on the left, photoshop on the right:

I've tried assigning a color profile to the image in photoshop like the filmic log github suggests. It seems to make no visible difference on screen.
Saving to PNG or TIFF produces darker, low contrast images but does seem to avoid most of the blowout.
Let me know if there's any other info I can provide.

EXR files are always saved without the color management lut applied. They are always linear and is intended for compositing work.
To get a high bit-depth file with the LUT baked in, try saving as 32bit tiff.

I don't seem to see a 32 bit tiff option. I tried using 16 bit and it's definitely much closer to what I see in the blender render output.


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Shrinkwrap an image to a cylindrical / slightly conical object with minimal distortion
I have some five gallon buckets of various different dimensions and artwork for a label that would go on them. I'm trying to figure out how I can show the label applied to a bucket accurately.
The label files are on an 11" x 17" template. The area beyond the die line is transparent. The die line itself is an irregular shape. I've included a picture of the test label I'm using. (The 11x17 template could be cropped down to be closer to the size of the die line but it would be preferable to leave it as is if possible.)
Here's how I currently have it applied:

Created an 11" x 17" plane
Used the test label as an image texture
Added some loop cuts to fold the plane around the bucket
Used the edges of those loop cuts as a pivot point when rotating to maintain the overall length of the plane
Added a shrinkwrap modifier to the plane targetting the bucket and using an offset of 0.03"

The example bucket used has a larger radius on the top than on the bottom.
The distortion on the squares might seem minor overall but it's quite noticeable when using the real label art.
I want to avoid eyeballing and arbitrarily stretching things as much as possible. Some buckets I might not have a physical reference of to tape up a test label to so I want to be able to trust in my technique used.
It's also slightly suspicious how the rendered label art doesn't curve around the bucket quite as far as the real life photo but I think that might have more to do with slight camera differences than anything else.
I'm using blender 2.8.
Let me know if there's anything else I can add to clarify.

IRL bucket with label
Shrinkwrap modifier

Test label

Is there a reason you need the image to be a separate object instead of just an image texture on the bucket?

The main reason is it seemed like easiest way to have an area of a specific size to move around as opposed to trying to unwrap the bucket object and try to adjust the uv mapping.

Can't you just assign the part of the bucket with the texture to a separate material, and then you don't need any uv mapping?

The label is an irregular shape, how would I assign that material without uv mapping? I also do not want to have faces just for the purposes of being a label since there's multiple shapes of label that would be used with a particular bucket. I think I might not be properly understanding your suggestion.

I think you are right, if you want to be able to move around the label easily, than a separate object is a good idea.


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how to animate a cylinder unrolling like carpet / toilet paper
I wish to take a thin rectangle / plane with solidify modifier, roll it into a cylinder and then animate it unrolling. For example, imagine a rolled up carpet or a roll of toilet paper.
The tutorials I've found so far do not do the rolling / unrolling in a physically correct manner. (The coiling action happens in the center and the outer roll diameter stays the same the whole time.)
Is there a simple and easy way to roll/unroll this cylinder back into a flat rectangle? Currently, it's a rectangle with a curve modifier applied.

Let me know if there's anything I can add to clarify what I'm looking for.


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Animate a UV unwrapped plane bending
I want to take a flat plane and animate one end of it rolling up to a roughly 90 degree angle.
The plane is UV unwrapped with a repeating texture and needs the distortion to be minimal.
This image roughly shows the before and after of what I'm wanting to accomplish.

blend file:
Initially, I tried using the curve modifier with a shape key on the curve but I was having issue with the plane sliding around.
Please let me know if there's any other info I can provide to clarify.

Related https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/137554/how-to-create-reeling-spool-effect

Extend your curve a bit in Edit mode so that its 2 ends go a bit further and instead of creating shapekeys, just move your curve on the Y axis:

Awesome, thank you! Your method is what I tried to do initially but I was missing the extra length on the end of the curve so I was getting some unexpected results.


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Smoke Domain renders black
so very odd things, I have seen this in other places, but nothing has fixed it as of yet.
In any mode that isn't Rendered, it works 100% fine:

However, it does seem to be completely blacked out in Rendered view and when I render it:

I have tried a lot of different solutions, but to no real avail. Thank you for reading

So you have lights etc? We need to know what, not if you tried.

I have tried lights, Im in cycles, I've checked and un-checked adaptive domain and I've tried pretty much every setting in User Preferances. Here's the URL for the .blend https://files.fm/u/

https://files.fm/u/7k9b8sbb Sorry, it got cut off


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how do I organize the materials? joining two seperated objects after editing
I used P and from the pull down menu seperated a selection as indicated in the picture. I labeled the new object EAR and added a material I made the object EAR black and added backface culling by individually setting the direction of normals in my transform window while editing the ear object. I am also using a mirror modifier. As this is supposed to be a harbor seal. It only has ear holes no ears on the outside of its head. The back face culling is merely for editiing purposes so that I can set the placement of the ear correctly while I work on making vertices groups and shape keys ect.
    I can select both objects using shift click in the Outliner. However I am having trouble getting the vertices select mode to show up on both objects at the same time. only one of them at a time. I know that I can join the two objects into one by selecting them in the outliner in this way by pressing cntrl J. What I don't know is whether or not, this will allow me to keep my original diffuse color. If so how do I organize both colors? because both objects will then become one in my Outliner right? so can I join the vertices while keeping seperate objects?  I am almost sure this is going to pose a problem simply hitting cntrl J. So I am going to wait for a while to see if anyone is able to answer my question. I have some smoothing to do on my mesh in the meantime, and I can work on other things I suppose.
   Also it may be relevant that I have added vertices and moved them around just a bit after seperating the selection. I hope I am not too confusing, here is my harbor seal so far.

Please use paragraphs and proper spacing in your questions. Walls of text are very unreadable.

Blender only allows you to edit one object at a time, so yes you can only see and select the vertices of one object.
Every face in a model can use a different material, if you join multiple objects, the combined object will have multiple materials available and each face will continue to use the same material it used when it was in a separate object.

In edit mode you can assign a specific material to the selected faces.
If you join the multiple objects into one, you can use the by material option in the separate menu to split each into it's own object based on the material it uses.

So yes you can join multiple objects and they will keep the materials. You can easily re-separate them. You can also create one object, assign different materials to parts as you model and then separate them based on the material when you are finished.

Thanks again. I don't expect you will have time. If you do have time. I have posted another related question. here is the url ; https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/101394/how-come-the-color-is-not-showing-up-once-material-is-assigned-reassigned


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I'm having trouble putting my windows views back, I tried a few things and they won't go back, they did before
So this is a little embarrassing. I have gotten really far on this Harbor Seal project and i can't figure out how to close my python code info viewer? the large arrow won't appear. I have recently saved, I like what I have. Any suggestions?
Is there python script that can hide my python viewer? or simply set to regular format?

If an area is not the same size as the next direction, it will not merge to another area.  You have a small puzzle to figure out.

The simple way (that doesn't involve careful dragging of a corner) is to right-click the line between two windows - eg, the horizontal between the two top-right frames - and select 'Join Area'. You can then left-click the panel that you want to close. Note, however, that as mentioned by @Timaroberts, you can only do this on frames that match in width/height - otherwise you have to join other areas until the panels you want to join match in size.


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Blender not Running using Nvidia Graphics But Run using Integrated Graphics

It can be clearly seen in Image 1 that Blender is running in integrated Graphics but when i turn my settings to High Performance Nvidia Graphics i.e Nvidia 940MX, Blender stucks at the white screen and do not move further. i tried waiting for more than 20 minutes.
My Laptop model is HP- Pavilion 15-cc0xx with 4 GB dedicated Graphic card and 4GB integrated .. Kindly guide me..

Best to report a bug in the bug tracker. Developer.blender.org

Try updating your graphics drivers to the latest version; reinstall Blender, and clear settings to factory default. Your card is also on the lower end of the spectrum, so it is not very powerful and may lead to issues. Otherwise as stated it sounds like a bug report, IF your are able and willing to provide detailed debugging info to the developers.

If nothing works, also check if an older blender version works. Gpu compatibilty evolves with versions, older cards are less supported.

i have the same laptop and have found i had exactly the same problem, and it was driving me nuts! but i'm pleased to say i've found a work around... its a bit hacky but it works, and it seems to be the only thing that does.
The laptop is delivered with both the intel UHD 620 graphics and also the geforce 940MX enabled. you need to disable the intel GPU in device manager, and this stops any conflicts between the two GPUs when launching blender.
First right click on the windows icon in the bottom left of your screen, and select the option for 'device manager'. In the new window that comes up, expand the tree at 'display adaptors'. you will see there are two graphics adaptors enabled, the intel adaptor, and the nvidia adaptor. right click on the intel adaptor and select 'disable device'.

Testing: be aware that although this works flawlessly for blender, there are other software packages that i have installed on my laptop which require both adaptors to be enabled, the intel adaptor only to be enabled, or the nvidia adaptor only to be enabled. also in some software i have found the CPU works twice as hard when the nvidia adaptor is being used. (I assume there are some efficiencies in having the GPU integrated with the intel CPU which you give up when you move to the nvidia adaptor).
In any case, its still a bit of a pain, but this should get you going with blender again. Hopefully various updates will address the issue in the fullness of time. in the meantime, just keep the above notes in mind should any of your other software packages stop working.


text:
Cell fracture not creating proper shards
So there is this model I try to use cell fracture on but the shards that are created are a bit off and I'm stuck on how to solve this problem. I looked for solutions for quite some time but nothing did the trick.

I tried "Limited dissolve" but no luck, I tried the "Remesher" modifier as well, it was a bit better but still not perfect.
Thanks in advance for your help! :)

Cell Fracture often can't break the object as expected if object is non-manifold (has some wrong geometry of known types). Look for it around areas which aren't cut properly

Alright I see, thanks for your comment, I'll have a look at it! :)


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Blender3d not displaying correctly

Blender's rendered useless as I can't access the toolbar and options menu.
The cursor also selects things that are above it, for the example, on the side if I want to select the Camera, I'd have to click on the lamp.
I've tried running it in compatibility mode and playing with the window settings to a degree.
Any help would be greatly appreciated

related: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/82130/the-info-bar-on-top-disappeared-and-the-mouse-pointer-is-misaligned

Have you recently updated your video drivers? I had this exact problem when I upgraded to the newest Intel drivers. I had to downgrade again to the previous version of the drivers (actually the version released by my laptop manufacturer) before Blender worked again properly. EDIT - I see possible duplicate is the saying the same thing, I suspect the OP's problem is indeed this.


text:
How do I move one bone together with each other
I am making a reload animations and the clip is not moving with hand in the timeline. How do I fix this I have restarted many times. Here is a picture

You can animate the influence of a child of constraint to control when the clip follows the hand.

I am sorry but i did not get what the tutorial was saying please explain better thank you!

A child follows the parent. A childof constraint gives you parenting with an influence value that can be animated. This allows you to parent the clip to the hand when you want to remove a clip, then disable it when you want the clip to stick to the gun.


text:
Loop cut (ctrl+R) and space cuts in the same operation
I am wondering if Blender has some hidden function or anything that can make even space between edges when adding new edge loops with ctrl+R. Or even space after adding them, like if it was a mirror effect of the selected edge, so that the other edge moves the oposite way if you know what I mean.
I made a GIF from 3ds max that shows the method I am looking for:

https://i.sstatic.net/ZVx9D.jpg
Figured out with help from Blender discord community that I can select my 2 edges and scale with Z, but this only works if the axises are perfectly alligned. What if I got something bent with different size like a cone, the vertices of the edges would not follow the edge with this method :(
Any ideas?

Ctrl + R then mouse wheel to add additional Loop Cuts.

Ya that is not the answer thoug. Ctrl+R > mousewheel is just how to add more edges. But what I am asking for is how to make even space between those edges, different amount of space in other words. Like in the GIF

In your example you could add two Loop Cuts set them in place and with both Loop Cuts selected press "S" "Z" to scale them on the z axis.

Ye, thats also what I wrote :D But I am trying to figure out, how do to it in every situation where I want two new edges, as the example I wrote above, if I use this method on a cone, with 2 edge loops in the middle, the selected edges wont follow the actual cone, the edges will scale straight up and down :(

Oh, thought it was enough to just post a link

Z isn't the only axis you can scale along. There are also normal axes, view axes etc. You can scale along normal Z or whatever axis, or align viewport with some face and scale along view Z axis. Or you can press G twice and use edge slide to move edge along normals (not all times solution but will work in this case)

But moving with GG I have to do it one edge at the time, that wont get an precise even space?

Related https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/76628/how-to-outset-from-edges-vertices/76651?s=2|38.2469#76651

Use the Bevel operator after loop cutting.
Make a single loop cut were you want the symmetrically spaced loops to happen, then bevel with zero segments.
This will virtually replace the single centered loop with two evenly spaced loops. The advantage is it works well in non axis aligned faces, uneven loop widths and allows adding more loops.

Also see related How to slide a vertex group to make new edge loop? and How to outset from edges/vertices?

Thanks, this seem to be as close to the answer as possible. There is no function for this in Blender when I have more than one loop right?

I am not aware of any, as far as I know. You can however subdivide several rings at the same time, or bevel several edge loops simultaneously

Ya good to know! :)


text:
Hair Dynamics does not collide with its own mesh
My issue is as topic states. The hairdynamics of my mesh goes right through the mesh itself, the hair does not collide.
I have been searching around the internet and looked up several posts here on Blender Stack Exchange, and it seems that no one have found a sollution yet, or atleast not shared it, as in explained it in a detailed way. There is alot discussions about it, but no sollutions from what I can see. I found one like old workaround for a old blender version, but I am using 2.79 and it would make sense if there was a more simple way to achieve this.
So my question is simply, how can I make the  hair collide with its own mesh? so it does not go through it?
This might not be the best example, but you can see here in the GIF that the hair goes straight through the mesh it is attatched to.
Here is a GIF showing the issue (I could not upload it trough the image function here, it did not let me, trust me I tried, I believe it might be too big file)
https://i.sstatic.net/aqMf0.jpg


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Image Texture Automatically packed bug
For some wierd reason, my images, in a specific blender file, started to pack themself automatically. I cannot explain it very well, but I know something is wrong.
This only seem to happen in my latest .blend file. I always start a new file for each object, and append them afterwards. But because this happened for some wierd reason, I also append the packed files, and they stay packed in my main scene, so it takes much more memory etc.
As you can see below. this "packed" icon shows directlty after I open the image, that is not suppose to happen.
I made two Gif showing how it looks like, and how it is  suppose to look like
How it looks like:

How it is suppose to look like:

Make sure the option Automatically Pack Into .blend is unchecked, in the File > External Data menu.

It was checked earlier, but I unchecked it, saved file, added a new image texture node, opened the texture again. still the same problem, like if the "automatically pack into .blend" had no effect

Make sure you unpack any previously packed images, untick option, save file and restart. Also that no addon you currently have active is automatically packing external data.

Hmm thanks for the advice. I did actually install a few addons one day ago, but none of them were specifically for like packing automatically. Let me see if I can remember all I installed:
unBevel,
Bevelr,
TexTools,
Planarizer Master,
Gaffer Master,
modular tree master,
Penfinity bevel,
retopoflow master...
Bought Prism shader and appended it.
Appended Onelvxe Material pipeline blender file for their shader and materials.
Appended sky_free from 3d-wolf (some cool sky with sun able to animate clouds and sunset)


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How to reproject a rendered image onto a plane intersecting camera's view?
I am trying to mimick the process of mapping an 2D image onto a 3D surface (or "orthorectifying" for aerial/satellite image).
The set-up is the following:

a ground plane (in green in the figure below)
an object (a red cube in the figure below)
a camera (which frustrum has been scaled below)

I believe the simplest way is to map the rendered image to the yellow extent, that correspond to the intersection of the frustrum with the "ground" plane.
Any insight on how to achieve that, via the GUI commands or using bpy ? My guess is:

find the four coordinate of the intersection
warp the image externally or using UV mapping onto a new plane + "flat" rendering or texture export

Have you looked into the BLAM addon yet? I am not sure about what you have set up, but BLAM helps to get geo organized for matching to a camera.

Thank you for pointing it out @CraigDJones, the plug-in it's definitively worth a read.


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BLAM add-on does not work with Blender 2.79
I tried installing both the latest version(v 0.6) and the original one. I downloaded the zip file and then clicked on the install addon from file button. Turns out it does not show in the addons list at all.
   I don't know whats the error. A few days ago there was some kind of numpy error in Animation nodes as well. To fix that, I uninstalled and then reinstalled Blender. When I tried installing BLAM, it still does not work.
Any help is appreciated.

This is a bug related to third party software. It needs to be reported to the addon developers.

@sambler Could be the way they are installing that is causing the problem.

I'm using BLAM on 2.79 without any issues. Try to place blam.py in 2.79/scripts/addons folder manually instead of installing from file.

the github page says to get the zip and then "decompress the file and locate the actual add-on file src/blam.py" so maybe you could have used an unsupported install method, even if  that usually work for other plugins...

Thanks everyone for the help. Apparently it was not BLAM which had the problem. The problem was with the version of Blender 2.79 that I was using. Apparently it had a lot of bugs that I would keep run into which the previous versions did not have. I downloaded the recent Blender 2.79a (release candidate) which worked for me.

With some plugins, you just need to update the header info.
So unzip it, edit blam.py:line 26 'blender': (2, 6, 2),
change it to read 'blender': (2, 7, 9),
then in Blender:  File > User Prefs > Install from file > blam.py
I haven't tried it, so I can't guarantee your results,
but I believe this'll get you there.
Otherwise, file a bug report at the github page  https://github.com/stuffmatic/blam

No, I've done this before.  It may have been more than just the version, but it truly was just updating the header and the script worked again.

And, having just tried it with this plugin, guess what?  Yup, it shoes up under 3D View, just as I said.

Blender version is the API level that the developer supports for this version of the add on. It can work on later or earlier versions, but it is not guaranteed. Blender devs do not want changes to the API, but this is not always possible. When API has changed and that part of the API is used by the add on, it possible won’t work. The version in the add on is only a filter. So for one case it works, but the other case it won’t. Best thing is to consult the developer of the add on.


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Glass Problem with Cycles
I'm new here. I'm making glass tube and I encountered this problem(see below the red circles). Any suggestion to solve the problem? I provide the nodes setup I created...

@cegaton, yup increasing the transparency bounces works. Thank you every much!

While waiting for the replies solution.. also I read this one:
https://www.3dtotal.com/tutorial/1737-how-to-engrave-glass-in-blender-part-2-blender-by-filippo-veniero-object-drink-model?page=2


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Why object deformed in Follow Path (ctrl + p)?
I'm trying this method I found in youtube: https://youtu.be/ZgdobdXzKM4
But the problem is the child/duplicated objects deformed when applying the "Follow Path". What would be the reason deformed and what would be missing settings should I configure?

I do not know what you did wrong, but, I did everything that was shown on the video and it worked. Try again.

My bad, maybe I messed-up other configurations because of other previous tutorials. For now everything is good. I want to delete this question, very embarrassing. haha :D


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Image texture (UV Map) blend with procedural rough material
is it possible the image texture blend with procedural rough material? Any tips/suggestion to achieve like this one:

My attempt:

Your attempt looks fine to me. How do you want to change it?

I want the white label will look like it was printed or overlay on the rough surface. If you look closely in the first image. The logo looks like it was overlay with the rough surface.

You would need to apply the normal map to the logo as well by plugging it into the Diffuse node.

Thanks rjg for the hint.

Ok, I think I got the solution without bake normal maps. I'm happy of the result (sort of). Thanks rjg for the hint.
Before

After


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Pose 2 different Objects
I have a character with a barbell in his hands (http://puu.sh/zlxHk/1c8cd144d7.jpg). Now I want to move the hands and move the barbell with it, how can I do this? Should i extrude a bone from the hand through the barbell (but from which bone would I extrude then?) or how can I solve this?
Thanks!


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How can I clear all out everything I don't need in the NLA editor?
In my project, NLA editor is filled up with all of the objects in the scene and when I import this to unity, animations mess up (imported asset has all animations of all objects even thow there is only one animation in one object). How can I clear all out everything I don't need in the NLA editor?

Usually NLA editor has only the object I am animating, this time everything is included. And when imported to unity all of the animations merge into DefaultTake instead of being separate (there should be only one animation and it should be separate of default take);

Try using Edit > Remove Empty Animation Data

That kinda worked, still, there is only the DefaultTake when I import the model to Unity. Shoot and DefaultTake are not separated, instead DefaultTake is Shoot now. I can live with that.


text:
Why are there no tutorials of flames in blender render?
I'd like to do a flame animation that doesn't need to be any sort of high quality, that's why I wanted to use blender render. But is it just so bad or why are there no tutorials?

Blender Internal is well documented in the Blender Manual including smoke and fire domains. You will find what the settings do and how to set it up to make it work. It doesn't teach you how to put the pieces together to make a good looking fire simulation though.
For that you can try Miika Hamalainen's blog, he is the fire module owner and also wrote the code. This was part of Google Summer of Code 2012, when Blender was at version 2.65.
On the blog site there are some fire examples from times when Cycles didn't even had support for volumetrics. You will find what force-fields and noise textures to set, what values to animate for nice looking fires etc. At that time it was thee resource for fire from even which other tutorial makers got knowledge.
After these years, search engines bury old results and promote the ones people mostly want, which nowadays is for Cycles. So you need to dig deep or search with more specific criteria, like "blender fire 2.6" which yields this video for example and some others.
There is also the old BlenderGuru's flamethrower tutorial.
The user-base back then was way smaller, so that's why there are less tutorials. They got buried by search engines and by many more tutorials for Cycles.


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Saving multiple poses to Pose Library via Python
I'm trying to create a Python program by which a user could look at randomly generated poses of 3D model and choose if it to be saved in Pose Library until certain number of poses will be added. This is mentioned part of my code at the moment:
scene = bpy.context.scene
fp = os.path.join(bpy.path.abspath("//"), 'Poses')
scene.render.image_settings.file_format = 'PNG'

num_poses = 0

while num_poses < 10:
    # Randomly generate pose
    # Missing as not important

    # Saving image of current pose to file so user can see it
    scene.render.filepath = os.path.join(fp, 'New Pose')
    bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True)

    # User chooses if it wants to save pose to Pose Library
    answer = input('Do you want to save this pose(y,n)? ')

    if answer == 'y':
        bpy.ops.poselib.pose_add(name=str(num_poses))
        num_poses += 1

The problem is that only the last pose is saved. If I understand correctly it should have something to do with frame number but when I tried to use
bpy.ops.poselib.pose_add(frame = 1+num_poses, name=str(num_poses))

only part of armature was changing when saved pose was selected.
I would be very thankful if somebody could help me or at least point me in the right direction.

I find a solution. If somebody else would want to do that, here's the code:
bpy.ops.pose.select_all(action="TOGGLE")
bpy.ops.poselib.pose_add(frame=1+num_poses,name=str(num_poses))
bpy.ops.pose.select_all(action="DESELECT")

Before adding new poses, Blender requires that you select and deselect pose. Otherwise not whole armature is saved.


text:
How do I import python modules from external files?
As my Addon started growing, I decided to split the ui into different files. I have several subfolders with modules that I want to register und unregister in my main script. I tried to manage this with
from folder.subfolder import module1
from folder.subfolder import module2

...

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_module(__name__)
    bpy.utils.register_module(module1)
    bpy.utils.register_module(module2)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_module(__name__)
    bpy.utils.unregister_module(module1)
    bpy.utils.unregister_module(module2)

Inside module1.py, it looks something like this:
import bpy

class MyPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    bl_label = "MyPanel"
    bl_idname = "...."
    bl_space_type = "...."
    bl_region_type = "...."

    def draw(self, context):
       ....

However, it always prints out this error message:
        Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.79\scripts\modules\addon_u
tils.py", line 350, in enable
    mod.register()
  File "C:/path/to/main/script.py", line 2388, in register
    bpy.utils.register_module(module1)
  File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.79\scripts\modules\bpy\uti
ls\__init__.py", line 685, in register_module
    raise Exception("register_module(%r): defines no classes" % module)
Exception: register_module(<module 'module1' from 'C:/path/to/module1.py'>): defines no classes

What do I need to change in order to be able to register and unregister external modules properly?

Animation nodes, has a register() in each submodule, the addons main register() calls the register for each submodule. Look here

I see, but if you reload Animation Nodes by pressing F8, it prints the same error message (...defines no classes). I try to circumvent this behaviour

It is common to use importlib.reload see this example. I expect that for a complex setup as above you should be able to call unregister() and then register() for each submodule when bpy is already in locals.


text:
Incorrect context for bpy.ops.screen.frame_jump.poll()
I have a problem with the context being incorrect while i try to work with both the animator and do renderings.
I have a script where i would like to do a bunch of renders of the same object dropped in different positions using the physics engine. The problem is that after rendering i can not get the right context to work with the timeline.
Here I can show an example of my problem (I have removed a bit of code which basically remove handlers when they are no longer used, etc. in order to make it more readable)
First i will call this generate image function. Everything works fine and the animation resets and plays. No problem
def generate_image():
  scene = bpy.context.scene

  # Add the handler to know when rendering should be done
  bpy.app.handlers.frame_change_post.append(stop_at_last_frame)

  # Reset the animation (to before physics)
  bpy.ops.screen.frame_jump()

  # Move objects randomly around before dropping

  # Play the animation (run the physics system)
  bpy.ops.screen.animation_play()

The stop_at_last_frame is called when the animation is finished and all physics simulations are done. It looks like this
def stop_at_last_frame(scene):
  if scene.frame_current == scene.frame_end:
    # Stop the physics engine this is omitted for readability
    # Call on render done when rendering is done
    bpy.app.handlers.render_post.append(on_render_done)
    # some setup here is omitted
    bpy.ops.render.render('INVOKE_DEFAULT', write_still=True)

When rendering is done this final callback function is called, which simply starts the process all over
def on_render_done(scene):
  # Keep generating images
  generate_image()

Now when the process starts all over and generate_image() is called after the render, i get the following error
RuntimeError: Operator bpy.ops.screen.animation_play.poll() failed, context is incorrect

This happens basically for all operations using the timeline.
It seems that something has happened to my context during rendering which i have to "reset". However i can not really see what i have to do here.

OK so I found a solution for this.
It should be noticed that I just needed to run everything as a script. I however thought that the UI would help me debugging, hence i tried to run it all from within blender.
The solution was to actually run blender in background mode, and not using bpy.ops for anything else then rendering.
blender blender_file.blend --background --python script.py

When running in background mode, I do not need all the callbacks to know when stuff is done, since the code is no longer async.
Now to do the physics simulation and then render I can simply do the following:
# Reset to first frame
scene = bpy.context.scene
scene.frame_set(0)

# Run the physics simulation
for i in range(250):
    scene.frame_set(i)

# Render image
bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True)


text:
How do i make meshes separate from eachother?
All parts work as their own in edit mode, count as one in object mode. Looking to make them all separate.

In Edit Mode select everything "A" then press "P" and Loose Parts from the drop down menu.

This worked, but it makes all the objects (except the one active in the picture) uneditable and i can't seem to bring it back without loading.

Glad to hear it... Did you go into Object Mode to select a loose part?
Maybe upload your .blend file using http://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/


text:
I parented a light source to an object, Is there a way to apply a modifier to both?[cycles]
I'm trying to make a street lamp, so i parented a light source (an area light) to the lamp object. The problem is when I add an array modifier to the lamp it only applies on the lamp mesh leaving me with only one light source.
Is there a way to make it applicable to both the object and the light.
Thanks!!

No, that's not possible. But I think you can achieve what you are trying to do in a different way.

Make a new collection

Name the new collection "light post" (or something else) and move the light and mesh to the light post.

Remove the "array" modifier from the mesh.

Hide the collection you just made and select the main collection again

Select Add -> Add collection instance

You can see the light and mesh appear in the scene.

Copy the collection instance as many times as desired.

Notice that if you edit the mesh or light all instances will follow, thus giving you effectively the same non-destructive workflow as the array modifier does. You can also add other meshes, lights, cameras etc. to the collection and all instances will reflect it.

I have also been trying to add lamp posts along a road path via blender scripting, and here's the solution I applied:

Add a lamp post mesh which will become the parent of your light source (If your mesh consists of multiple parts, join them by 'Boolean Modifier > Union')
Add array modifier (and curve modifier if your road path is a curve) to your lamp post object to copy it along the road, then apply the modifiers
Apply 'Seperate > By Loose Parts' to your lamp post object to get multiple objects instead of one
For every lamp post, add a light source and make the lamp post the parent of light source

You can see my approach in code down below:
bpy.ops.import_mesh.stl(filepath=os.path.join(os.path.dirname(bpy.data.filepath), "models/lamp.stl"))
lamp_ob = bpy.context.selected_objects[0]
bpy.data.collections["Lights"].objects.link(lamp_ob)
bpy.context.scene.collection.objects.unlink(lamp_ob)

if laneCount == 3:
    lamp_ob.location = (0,4.2,0)
else:
    lamp_ob.location = (0,3.2,0)

lamp_array_mod = lamp_ob.modifiers.new("LampArray", 'ARRAY')
lamp_array_mod.fit_type = "FIT_CURVE"
lamp_array_mod.curve = road_curve
lamp_array_mod.constant_offset_displace = (15,0,0)
lamp_array_mod.use_constant_offset = True

lamp_curve_mod = lamp_ob.modifiers.new("LampCurve", 'CURVE')
lamp_curve_mod.object = road_curve

for modifier in lamp_ob.modifiers:
    bpy.ops.object.modifier_apply(modifier=modifier.name)

bpy.ops.mesh.separate(type='LOOSE')
bpy.ops.object.origin_set(type='ORIGIN_CENTER_OF_VOLUME')

for index, obj in enumerate(light_collection.all_objects):
    bpy.ops.object.light_add(type='POINT', radius=2.0, location=(0,-0.25,1.25))
    light_ob = bpy.context.selected_objects[0]
    light_ob.name = "Light" + str(index)
    light_ob.parent = obj
    light_ob.data.energy = 500
    light_ob.data.specular_factor = 10

This may not be the best scripting practice and there are some lines not related to the solution, so anyone can reach me out if any further explanation is needed :)
Footnote: I use .stl models since texture is not required for models in my case.


text:
"To Sphere" option not working
I'm taking an online Blender course and the instructor is using the "To Sphere" option to make the holes for a bowling ball made from an icosphere. So for the picture here I insetted the edges, subdivided by 3, then tried "To Sphere" but nothing happened. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Showing perhaps a gif containing the exact steps you are taking would help understand the issue you are having. This seems to work fine here.

To sphere operator has a "factor" (0 to 1, 1 is the most spherical possible) which can be set moving the mouse or in the operator panel after the operator is confirmed.

Or use LoopTools addon, Specials menu (W) > LoopTools > Circle

I would do it like this:

of course you have to drag the "to sphere" command action to get the desired amount (1 = maximum effect)

The 'To Sphere' tool on selected vertices is tricky to use because you have to move the mouse and not every direction results in a change.
When you use the tool, moving the mouse left enough will diminish the effect, moving the mouse right enough, it will turn into a sphere.
In most cases, you'll probably want the full force, a clean circle. Then numeric input is your friend. Just use the tool and don't bother using the mouse. Hit 1RETURN. That is a safe way to use the tool.


text:
Quicktime format not an export option?

As you can see by the screen shot I took, when I choose the File format I want to export my animation in, Quicktime is not an option. Anyone know how to fix this? Thanks :)


text:
Blender Graph editor Continuos animation
How can we get a continuous progress(nonstop) rather than a cycle, for example, one has to move from one point to another.

To create a continuous line (rather than between two points) you can add an F-curve Modifier - see https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/editors/graph_editor/fcurves/modifiers.html
The Generator modifier allows you define the relationship between X and Y to generate the required graph. In your case you want polynomial order of 1 so it is of the form y = mx + c - ie, a straight line with the gradient m and cutting through the y-axis at c.


text:
Part of the scene disappearing
Hope you are doing great.
I am coming across a difficulty with the adding up of layers on VSE.
As you can see on the following video, https://youtu.be/Eopt36z7HH8
Part of the animated characters and part of the ground disappear at some point, which is of course undesirable.
The characters come from Muvizu imported as layer 1 on Blender VSE.
The FPS seems fine most of the time on Blender. I tried several times to reimported the characters as layers but I always get the same disappearing. I see no issue on the Muvizu side, I do not see any on Blender so I just cannot tell where the issue come from?
The only thing I can indicate is that usually Muvizu is 25 Fps that I have to increase to match the rest of the content on Blender but I do not know is this can have an impact of this "disappearing"
Any idea that could help?

please provide blend file

I think I uploaded it on Blend exchange. First time I am doing this so hopefully you can get it!

yes, that worked but....i cannot see anything because you did not include your png/mov files. so please before upload the file again, go to file -> external data -> pack all into blend. then upload again. Thank you.

Hi Chris...I read your message and understood it.  just discovered what is going on...The issue does not come from Blender but from Muvizu...When I make (export) the video as image sequence on Muvizu, the PNGs are damaged and part of them are missing. So when you run the image sequence as animation on Blender some parts are disappearing. The issue comes from Muvizu so no use to burden Blender guys on an issue that is not relevant to Blender...Muvizu team should resolve this. I will close my post once you will have seen my reply. Thanks for you intention to help and your attention Chris.

No problem. Thanks for your info. You are welcome!


text:
Sync issue from Muvizu image sequence to Blender
My idea is to make an short animation overlaid on a choir video as seen on the pic below.
In that regard;

I imported and opened the Choir video (the basic one) on Blender Video Editing window.
I made a small video on Muvizu which is 25 Fps and exported it through layers (png files).
I then imported  the Muvizu image sequence on Blender Video Editing window.
The choir video is 30 fps but Muvizu is 25 fps.

Issue:
Once the video is played on the Video editing window, the Choir video hangs around 30 fps, which is fine. As soon as it gets to the first layer of the imported Png sequence (from Muzivu), the fps fall  down to around 7-10 on average.
I then selected the Muvizu image sequence and tried to create a proxy (Strip Proxy & Timecode) with a 25% resolution on this Muvizu strip.
BUT... when I hit "Rebuild Proxy and Timecode Indices" button, it does not create the BL Proxy folder where it should be. it does not seem to do the job. It does not seem to build any and my output location is properly selected for it.
So, I do not know if all this has anything to do with the "Not proxy folder being built" or not but the end result is that:
a) My muvizu video is perfectly sync on Muvizu
b) but not on Blender where I need to render the final animation.
It is slower on Blender software.
Any idea of what is going on here? What am I doing wrong?
Do not hesitate to ask me more details if needed.
Thanks in advance. Roland
Note: shall I had that once I imported the Muvizu image sequence, I had to use Reverse function since they had been all reversed once imported!

You'll need to ensure all source material have the same FPS and they matches the render FPS. The vse do not support multiple FPS. Any GUI for ffmpeg can be used to change the FPS.

I will see what I can do this way. THanks TinTwotin


text:
How to use set up transparent background on VSE (alpha file combined with mp4)
I received one of my very short clips edited from Unscreen website (which removes background of the vid) but they sent me the mp4 of the video (with the background) and an alpha file which I have no idea how to work with on blender (neither on any other software anyway!)
I want to import my video with a transparent background and apparently I have to mix somehow the mp4 and the alpha file.
Does anyone can tell me a simple procedure to do so on VSE?
Thanks in advance
Roland

As mp4 doesn't support alpha channel, the file you have is a black and white movie that brings the alpha information.
White means matte, while black means transparent.
In Blender compositor (or any other) you can plug it into a color mix node, where black will bring the top input image, white the bottom input.
In VSE you can add a mask modifier to the video strip that needs transparency, targeting the alpha strip.
Alpha strip has to stay under the visible strips.

I tried... it is working...tank you so much Josh

I still had trouble because I had to cut my mp4 into 4 pieces and it was lagging. So I made a proxy, then referenced each part to each alpha created automaticaly, but some parts were lagging like hell...did not manage to render perfectly

Blender VSE is far from perfection, use free version of DaVinci Resolve instead, where theese tasks are fairly easy.

yeah, I think I am going to do this...fed up to spend days to try to make that thing work...and it is still not working...Blender is probably very good for animation


text:
Any 'non-destructive' alternative to knife project?
I would like to cut a shape out of a mesh, but in an non-destructive way.
Like the knife project, but then, as a modifier. Or as the boolean modifier, but then without the geometry of the operand.

could you please explain more in detail why you want that, show some screenshots? Maybe there's an alternative to Knife Project and Boolean for your project...

But "without the geometry of the operand" implies like in Knife Project, that this geometry is in some way applied on the object. If you remove geometry which is needed for a non-destructive approach, how should the modifier know which geometry should be used?

Hi @moonboots, thanks for taking the time and trying to anwser my question. What I want, basically, is to cut a hole in the mesh the way knife project does, but in a non destructive way, as a modifier, so that I can still tweak both the base shape and the operand shape. I have a mesh with a subdivision modifier applied to it. A boolean modifier (applied as 'difference') after the subdivision modifier keeps the mesh closed (usinng part of the operand geometry), but I want to cut a hole in it.

Use booltool addon, which does some automatic operations to hide the cutter object from viewport and render but lets you edit the wire frame.

Josh Gambrell on YouTube has many videos on boolean workflow

Hi @GordonBrinkmann, thanks for taking the time and trying to anwser my question. Well off course I wouldn't remove the operand geometry. I'm just looking for a boolean-like 'difference' modifier, which cuts a part out of the mesh at the intersection between the two operands (resulting in an open mesh - with a hole in it). But since knife project is a destructive operation, I'd rather not use is because I would like to still be able to tweak both the base mesh (with subdivision modifier) and the operand mesh.

I think I get what you're looking for:

Another way of putting this is, you want to boolean, but then you want to discard any geometry that doesn't lie on the surface of your pre-boolean mesh.  Putting things that way makes it more clear that yes, this is possible.
One possibility is using Geometry Nodes.  In 3.0, we could do this:

To put words to this, we are booleaning, then we are testing for proximity against the faces of our original geometry, then discarding any vertices for which the distance to our original geometry is greater than some fudge factor to take care of imprecisions (0.001 in this case, mostly just to demonstrate it; it can be smaller.)
If you would rather not use geometry nodes, the same operations can be achieved by testing against a (probably linked, parented) duplicate.  Boolean, vertex weight edit to add all verts to a proximity groups, vertex weight proximity from duplicate, followed by a mask.


text:
Having trouble rendering fire+smoke with transparency
I'm trying to add fire+smoke to a video by rendering out the simulation as a PNG sequence with transparency. It looks fine in the render window and in the compositor but when I drag in the final PNG and view it, it looks half transparent and grainy. I'm only rendering it on 15 samples with NLM de-noising on so that could be it, but otherwise I'm not sure what's going on! here are some screenshots:

PNG is a broken format. Use EXR in Blender.

please provide blend file

Use denoise node in compositing instead of the one you are using. It is better for viewports only.
To use denoise node,go into the compositing tab and SHIFT+A to add denoise node. Now add color,normal and albedo in their respective channel.
To get better results,enable denoising data from the layer settings.
Disable the denoiser you are using and it will give better results

Hi, thanks for the post. This site is not a regular forum, answers should be substantial and thoroughly explain the solution and required workflow. One liners and short tips rarely make for a good answer. If you can [edit] your post and provide some more details about the procedure and why it works feel free to restore it, otherwise it may be deleted or converted into a comment. Perhaps add a few images illustrating the workflow and final results. See How do I write a good answer?


text:
Adding mirror reflection on the picture frame that can see the content inside and the reflection of the environment

i want to add a reflection mirror on the black frame that can see the content in the pink plane and the reflection of the environment. is there any way . thank you

Are you using Eevee or Cycles?

EEVEE

Create a plane

Set primary shader to Diffuse BSDF

Plug Diffuse BSDF into a shader to RGB node and route that node to a ColorRamp

Plug the ColorRamp’s alpha into a Principled BSDF shader’s alpha, and then that into a Material Output surface

Go to Render settings, Film section, and check transparent

In the plane’s Material tab, ensure Blend Mode is set to “Alpha Blend”

Make sure that you are in Rendered View (it does not work in Material Preview) and your Reflection Plane is placed slightly above the mirror surface. You can increase the Distance parameter inside Reflection Plane just to be sure that it covers everything.

Cycles
For the mirror material:

Set metallic to 1

Set roughness to 0


text:
Characters hair faces shows my characters UV's (Textures) instead of solid blue color I'm attaching
Hello guys I'm making a character based on the book "Learning Blender Second Edition" and I'm on the stage where I need to put materials on my characters hair, eyebrows and eyes. Well I did it, but on rendered preview (Blender Render) I see that my characters hair, eyebrows and eyes objects faces individually has characters UV's attached... This is so weird... I thing I made a mess somewhere and I just cannot understand, because I'm new to Blender program and I don't know how the system works... I attached image for you guys, I hope it will help a lot.

When texture repeats on all faces of the mesh likely UV map is made for each face individually and each face is scaled to be of UV texture space (e.g. if you select mesh in Edit mode and press U > Reset). Assign some seams, unwrap and refine your UV layout, I don't know if book covers that though

Thanks for reply! I did reset and removed any materials from hair and eyebrows, but somehow still I can see UV's added to my eyebrows and hair. Now they cover all texture properly, but I don't need those character body UV's on my hair, I just want to put solid blue color to them and it doesn't work at all it's still shows UV's added to my hair elements. It's so weird....

I just want to put blue color on my hair and that's it... But it doesn't work... It somehow shows me UV maps on my hair, but where I put them?... Shows no material on my hair object...

Blender Internal allows to see the texture on the mesh even if there's no material; selecting all mesh faces in Edit mode and choosing image in the UV editor is enough; on the other hand selecting all faces and removing any image should be enough to stop image from showing (by default it won't be rendered though). Internal uses faces textures assignment hence this work. Make sure you didn't add any texture to the material as well

Sorry I still don't understand how to remove Blender Internal assigned image... Searching everywhere for hours now, but I can't find nothing...

Select the object, enter Edit mode, select one face showing the texture, then select all mesh with Ctrl+L to select linked. In UV editor UV map should be shown on top of the image. Remove that image (X button next to its name) while still having faces selected. Example is here https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/58170/remove-texture-from-object though not explained properly why this happens


text:
Deforming text maintaining vertical alignment
I would like to deform my text to fit along a curve, but maintain a vertical alignment like in the picture.
Any help would be a big help! Thanks!

Possible duplicate of How can I align a text object to curve without deformation?

If you are new please search before posting. Related https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/41967/wrap-text-around-a-circle-without-deforming-it-numbers-on-clock/ and https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/80298/how-to-add-numbers-to-a-dial/ or https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/101157/is-it-possible-create-this-text-effect/ and


text:
Reduced model size by almost 3.5 times. Now I am never able to cycles render in Optix
I had a (bloated) model having 3.6 million tringles (just for example) that I was able to render it in cycles (barely, no other apps, just booted) on a RTX 3070 TI (8GB). Now, I have reduced it to 1 million triangles, half a million edges and so on, by working an practically all objects in it and now I am never able to render it. How is that possible?
Simplify is enabled (but appears to have absolutely no effect). I now peaks at 8.3G. Before I started to reducing it, it peaked at just below 6G. what is really going on?

Sorry for answering my own question but desperate time, desperate measures. I saw that my render window (F12) stop a good while loading a texture from BlenderKit, "car pain white rough" or something like that. I listed all instances of it and there was about 8 or them. Removed all and now it renders in cycles about HALF the VRAM requirement, 4.1G peak. Hope this help somebody.
Btw, I tried different version of Blender and the VRAM use was about the same.

Hi, glad you found a solution. It's okay to answer your own question. After a "cooling down" period of about 2 days, you even can accept your answer to show that the question is solved.


text:
Exported textures are black
I'm having a issue were every uv png I paint and export gust show up as solid black none of the color I added exports. It shows fine in render and everything in blender but in unity or in anything else. its gust solid black.

ok so I think I know exactly what's your problem if you are using cycles to paint your UV maps all you have to do is
- create an image texture in the UV image editor give it a name.
- go to the node editor and create an image texture node.
- select your texture with the left mouse button make sure that it's highlighted in orange color.

now when you paint it will show up on the UV map and when you exported it hopefully it won't be black

ps: if this didn't solve it pls post a snap of your setup


text:
Is it standard when creating a 3D game model to only use one mesh?
I'm a bit new to serious 3d modeling, and I have a question focused on workflow and style as opposed to technical tips (which can be found in tutorials).
I'm creating a character model for the game I'm making. Right now, my entire game's art design doesn't have any textures, just different colored materials, so in order to create a nice looking character, there are many meshes involved, i.e. a visor for a helmet, a patch on the character's arm, etc. This is fine until I start animating things and exporting them into Three.js format. Animations don't work correctly or just don't exist at all.
All this being said, I've watching tons of tutorials on the process, and every single one has a character model consisting of one geometry, one mesh. Is this standard practice? If so, then I need to redefine how I make models. Secondly, is it atypical to see material-only artwork? I'm not overly skilled with textures, but if it's a completely uncommon practice, I can abandon it.
Thanks for the time.

I would texture them like this, also make it easy to tweak the color palette at a later time.

Copying a couple performance tips from this thread —

Reuse geometries and materials whenever possible
Use instanced geometries for faster mesh instantiations
Merge meshes when possible

The main thing is that the more meshes and materials you have, the more draw calls you are making to the GPU, and you'll get worse performance than if you were drawing the same number of triangles using fewer meshes. Performance considerations in e.g. Unity may be a bit different, where the engine is probably optimizing your model somewhat for you.
If you're having issues exporting animation, that's probably unrelated: there are a fair number of open bugs about animation in the three.js Blender exporter. May have better luck exporting FBX or glTF (with either of KhronosGroup/glTF-Blender-Exporter or Kupoman/blender2gltf) before loading in three.js.

I think it's game engine dependent.  Modern games will accommodate multiple meshes tied to a single skeleton system, for example:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Animation/CharacterSetupOverview/

Interesting, I'll look into this. Thanks for the reply!


text:
Blender eats up all memory and crashes upon simple small texture
So this one is really infuriating me as I cannot figure it out. I've created a terrain with textures and a skybox in layer 1 just fine and all looks well. It's also very responsive and works great, not slow and laggy at all. I have plenty of memory free and blender reports using a total of 65MB of memory - system reports an overall 6GB of free RAM.
I wanted to add in some grass so I flipped to layer 2 which is empty at the moment and added in a plane then a very small 512 pixel transparent png and wired it up in cycles.
Well shortly after blender immediately starts eating up all of the memory up and eventually crashes. I simply cannot fathom why it's doing this. I've edited the images many times making them increasingly smaller with gimp but nothing works.
If I'm not on layer 2 it works just fine, switch to layer 2 and after a few seconds it stutters a bit, locks up the entire computer (mouse won't even move) followed by a full program crash and the release of many many gigabytes of memory.
Opening it up with a terminal doesn't reveal any information except a small printout from the Linux kernel saying it force closed it.
My specs are:
Kernel: x86_64 Linux 4.15.3-2-ARCH
Resolution: 1680x1050
DE: KDE 5.43.0 / Plasma 5.12.2
WM: KWin
CPU: Intel Core i7-3720QM @ 8x 3.6GHz [35.9°C]
GPU: GeForce GT 650M
RAM: 2167MiB / 7918MiB

I render in cycles but use my cpu, I only use my gpu for GUI rendering if that also helps any.
I've never had any problems up until now out of Blender in this regard and I've done lots of other stuff more intensive than this simple trivial task.

Can you reproduce this issue on another computer/OS? Sounds like a bug for sure.

@MikePan - Yes, as it turns out when I switched over to a mac the problem went away and acted normally. So maybe a bug on the Linux version. Thank you for the suggestion - I was so wrapped up in the problem it just never occurred to me to simply change OS lol.

Finally i have solved this issue on Windows 10. The problem was a driver corrupt file on my case.... I made a clean installation of the drivers and Blender now stays at normal rates. Between 180 MB and 200 MB of RAM.
I had this problem in Linux but I updated my drivers from Windows(dual boot) and problem was solved


text:
How to animate splines using animation node
How to animate linear spline (Outline) on a text like its been drawn from start to end of the word using animation nodes,

did you ever try googling this? there are some good tutorials out there...and they are easy to find. And next question: do you have experience with AN?

Yeah Mr. Chris, Bit familar with animation node..it will be kind of you to aid me or guide me as how i can accomplish the above result,,, Thanks

ok, let's see how familiar you are: here is my guide for you:
Create a text, convert to curve.
Create animation node tree, get curve from object node -> loop over splines -> animate it with trim spline node and use curve object output to show them.
UPDATE:
The "trick" is to use a spline list:

I did follow your node settings, but only one letter gets outline or spline, rest of the letters are blank.. By the way I am using 2.79 and animation node 2.0

please do not edit my answer to show me what you did. This is NOT part of an answer. Edit your question for this. Or include a picture via link in your comment. Thank you. I updated my answer. Hopefully you got it now.


text:
How to put Nodes inside NodeFrame in python?
How to put Nodes inside NodeFrame?

Have a look into: How do I add a node to a frame using python (possible duplicate)
All you have to do is assigning the frame node to the parent property of each node: https://docs.blender.org/api/current/bpy.types.Node.html#bpy.types.Node.parent

Example for all nodes in selection based on Templates -> Python -> Operator Node:
import bpy

def main(operator, context):
    space = context.space_data
    node_tree = space.node_tree

    frame = node_tree.nodes.new(type='NodeFrame')
    for n in context.selected_nodes:
        n.parent = frame

class NodeOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    """Tooltip"""
    bl_idname = "node.simple_operator"
    bl_label = "Simple Node Operator"

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls, context):
        space = context.space_data
        return space.type == 'NODE_EDITOR'

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

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(NodeOperator)
def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(NodeOperator)
if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()


text:
How to update the ViewLayer without warnings?
I want to update the view layer but I am getting this warning.
Should I ignore it or handle it, How?
related to: How to hide/unhide objects in a particular ViewLayer?
import bpy
from bpy.app.handlers import persistent

@persistent
def update_view_layer(scene):
    if view_layer := scene.view_layers.get("NewViewLayer"):
        view_layer.update()

def register():
    bpy.app.handlers.depsgraph_update_post.append(update_view_layer)

def unregister():
    bpy.app.handlers.depsgraph_update_post.remove(update_view_layer)

Original exception was:
object address  : 000002D1EF41C6A0
object refcount : 1
object type     : 00007FFE760E9050
object type name: RecursionError
object repr     :
lost sys.stderr

Why should you update the view layer? Maybe you should not? apparently calling a view_layer.update triggers the depsgraph_update_post which in turn recursively calls the update again thus causing a recursion problem. So it seems not correct to do that. Can you give more details of what you are trying to do and why you need this update so it won't be an xy problem :) maybe call the update not from depsgraph.

Avoid running functions recursively
is_running = [False]

@persistent
def update_view_layer(scene):
    if is_running[0] is True: return
    is_running[0] = True

    if view_layer := scene.view_layers.get("NewViewLayer"):
        view_layer.update()

    is_running[0] = False

But maybe in the first place, it's not good practice to call a function inside a depsgraph callback that triggers a depsgraph callback again?

Also I don't quite get why the boolean needs to be inside a list/array? why won't a simple is_running=True/False work?

Sometimes, you have to refresh again in the refresh function, but it's better to avoid doing this.

is_running=True/False doesn't work because it assigns local variables and not global variables. Or you can use global is_running

ok thank you for the info :)