text:
How do I fix my animation that is created from a XML file?
What I have: Blender 2.70, a XML file of Ogre3D origin with data of armature and animations.
What I've done so far:
I have managed to create an armature using the data from the XML file.

I tried to create animation for my armature with the data from the very same XML file that has created my armature.
These are the results:

Walking animation: Both arms are swinging in the same direction when it should not.

Climb Ladder animation: The right arm! Argh!

Climb Over Window animation: The legs are messed up! Only the left arm appears to be correct.
This is the script that I've created to enable my non-perfect animations.
def xCollectAnimationData(animationData, xDoc):
    OGRE_ANIMATIONS = {}
    AnimationDuration = {}
    animationData['animation'] = OGRE_ANIMATIONS
    animationData['animationLength'] = AnimationDuration

    scn = bpy.context.scene
    arm = bpy.data.armatures["Rig"]
    rigobj = bpy.data.objects["Rig"]
    scn.objects.active = rigobj
    rigobj.select = True

    bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode = 'POSE')

    for animations in xDoc.getElementsByTagName('animations'):
        for animation in animations.childNodes:
            OGRE_Animation = {}
            if animation.localName == 'animation':
                animationName = str(animation.getAttributeNode('name').value)
                animationLength = float(animation.getAttributeNode('length').value)
                OGRE_Animation['name'] = animationName
                OGRE_Animation['length'] = animationLength

                action = bpy.data.actions.new(animationName)

                for tracks in animation.getElementsByTagName('tracks'):
                    for track in tracks.childNodes:
                        if track.localName == 'track':
                            trackName = str(track.getAttributeNode('bone').value)
                            OGRE_Animation['track'] = trackName

                            #Select the bones
                            try:
                                boneSelect = bpy.context.object.data.bones[trackName]
                                boneSelect.select = True
                            except:
                                boneSelect.select = False
                                print (trackName + " not found!")

                            for keyframes in track.getElementsByTagName('keyframes'):
                                for keyframe in keyframes.childNodes:
                                    if keyframe.localName == 'keyframe':
                                        time = float(keyframe.getAttributeNode('time').value)
                                        OGRE_Animation['time'] = time

                                        for a in keyframe.childNodes:

                                            if a.localName == 'rotate':
                                                boneSelect.select = True

                                                angle = float(a.getAttributeNode('angle').value)
                                                axis = a.childNodes[1]

                                                try:
                                                    axisx = float(axis.getAttributeNode('x').value)
                                                except ValueError:
                                                    axisx = 0.0
                                                try:
                                                    axisy = float(axis.getAttributeNode('y').value)
                                                except ValueError:
                                                    axisy = 0.0
                                                try:
                                                    axisz = float(axis.getAttributeNode('z').value)
                                                except ValueError:
                                                    axisz = 0.0
                                                print (trackName + ": " + str(angle)+ ", " + str(axisx)+ ", "+str(axisy)+ ", "+str(axisz))
                                                OGRE_Animation['rotation'] = [axisx,axisy,axisz,angle]
                                                bpy.ops.transform.rotate(value=(angle), axis=(axisz,axisy,axisx))
                                                bpy.data.objects["Rig"].pose.bones[boneSelect.name].keyframe_insert(data_path='rotation_quaternion', frame = (time * 30), group = trackName)
                                                bpy.ops.transform.rotate(value=(-angle), axis=(axisz,axisy,axisx))

                                            if a.localName == 'translate':
                                                boneSelect.select = True

                                                x = float(a.getAttributeNode('x').value)
                                                y = float(a.getAttributeNode('y').value)
                                                z = float(a.getAttributeNode('z').value)
                                                OGRE_Animation['translate'] = [x,y,z]
                                                bpy.ops.transform.translate(value=(x,y,z))
                                                print (x,y,z)
                                                scn.update()
                                                bpy.data.objects["Rig"].pose.bones[boneSelect.name].keyframe_insert(data_path='location', frame = (time * 30), group = trackName)
                                                bpy.ops.transform.translate(value=(-x,-y,-z))

                                            boneSelect.select = False
                                        #except:
                                        #    return
                            boneSelect.select = False

                OGRE_ANIMATIONS[animationName] = OGRE_Animation
                print (animationName)

    scn.update()
    bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='OBJECT')
    return OGRE_ANIMATIONS

TLDR: What I did is that I select my rig, make it as my current active object, then switch to pose mode.
From there, I select the specific bone I want to animate to be current active bone; I give it a rotation by doing a bpy.ops.transform.rotate(value=(angle), axis=(axisz,axisy,axisx)) (angle,axisx, etc are gathered from the XML file), keyframe it at a specific time (timing also from XML), and then rotating it back to the original position. The same goes for translation of bones.
This is the snipplet of the XML files. (I have no idea if I should give the entire XML file, companies..., though the file doesn't seems so secret to me.)

2nd Sample

Conclusions: My task for importing this xml file into blender seems so close to completion yet feels so far. I've tried messing around with the rotation but to no avail and have been stuck with this issue for a week. The animations appear to be almost correct with the exception of certain bones.
Colleagues have suggested that I used matrix to rotate the bones for animations, but I would not if it's possible and would rather stick with my current way of rotating the bones and tweaking/resolving it to make my animations the way it is.
By doing a bpy.ops.transform.rotate(value=(angle), axis=(axisz, axisy, axisx), am I rotating as an axis-angle rotation or quaternion rotation?

This question appears to be off-topic because it is too long for this format for a scripting question.

Solved it. Turns out, I don't have to do rotation with the data at all. I simply did a
bpy.data.objects["Rig"].pose.bones[boneSelect.name].rotation_axis_angle = [angle,axisz,axisx,axisy]

and keyframe it.


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Render window broken
I have made my render window broken by accident. Now it only shows vertical stripes. It seems the vertical dimension is infinite. Probably I have clicked somewhere or hit a key. Does anybody have an idea how I can switch back to normal view?
screenshot http://imageshack.com/a/img820/1886/rkoo.png

Do you have any composite nodes?

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Create "two-sided" curves
I have been trying to create tubes for use in my game (in Unity).
I've used this question to accomplish that. The extruded curve's normals are facing out, like I would expect. However, this means that when imported into Unity, the inside of the tube is invisible, and the collider that is generated is only recognizing the normals in the proper direction (like I would expect).
My solution so far has been to convert the curve to a mesh, duplicate it, and flip the normals. This works, but it feels super inefficient, and like I am missing some tool or modifier that might exist.
Any advice is appreciated, as it seems I am perpetually new to Blender :)

I think you are missing Solidify modifier.

Aha! Perfect. I knew I was over complicating things. Thanks Daniil.

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


text:
Make path move like snake in snake game
In my game I have a Nurbs curve in the XY plane. I have a rigged car, that has a follow path constraint, so that it follows this curve.
I would like to make the Nurbs curve behave like a snake in the snake game. The snake should move by extending its head and cutting off its tail. When the player presses the 'up' arrow, the head should extend forward and the tail should be cut off. When the player presses the 'right' arrow, than the head should make a turn to the right, and idem for the 'left' arrow.
Is it possible to do that? In the pictures, the dots are the vertices of the Nurbs curve. I can give more details if necessary. Thanks :)
Examples of the curve turning to the left, the right, and moving straight:

You said ..[the head will extend forward and the tail will be cut off].  Some readers may not understand. How is this different than regular movement? Can you include a picture with some frames or a small animation file.gif?

So you want the previous nurb curve vertex to be placed at the position where the next vertex was during previous frame if the position isn't where the next vertex is right now?
I don't know how to do it, I'll be honest.

The following code moves each point in the curve ahead one spot.
So the second point moves to where the first point is, the third to the second, and so on.
All you need to do is decide where the first point needs to be moved next.
import bpy

# Assumes your curve is the only one in the scene.
curve = bpy.data.curves[0]

items = curve.splines[0].points.items()
point_count = len(items)

for index in range(point_count - 1, 0, -1):
    current = items[index][1].co
    previous = items[index - 1][1].co
    current.x = previous.x
    current.y = previous.y
    current.z = previous.z

first = items[0][1].co
first.x -= 1

The final part moves the first point to the new position.
So you could do first.x -= 1 for left, first.x += 1 for right, and first.y -= 1 for forward.
This is making assumptions about the orientation of the scene, so you should adjust x, y, and z to suit your scene.
This code is very simple, but hopefully it is enough to get started.

Consider using shape keys.  You have the shapes above. Also move the entire curve object in the direction that suits you.

Thanks, but I would like to keep extending its head and cutting off its tail, while the 'up arrow' key is pressed


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Rendering a tracked scene without background
I've tracked a scene in Blender so that I could animate and adjust material lighting to an object placed in the scene. Once the footage was tracked, I set up a tracking scene and set the background.
Once I was happy with my animation I wanted to render with Cycles just the object animated without the footage in the background. Where can I disable the rendering of the footage?

This depends on how you got the footage to get rendered in the background in the first place - but try enabling Transparent in the Film panel of the render settings: http://i.imgur.com/qKIhnf6.png - otherwise check your compositing nodes.

once I was in the Edit Clip Editor, where the footage is tracked and the camera is solved, there are 2 buttons in the 'Solve' tab, under Scene Setup:  Saet as Background and Setup Tracking Scene.  These buttons set the clip as a camera projected background.

The 'transparency' box is checked.  Navigating around the scene in rendered view displays no background clip.  It only apears throught the active camera since the camera is constrained to the solver.  But I dont want the camera to include the projected footage in the final rendering.

ok, I had to go into render menu, and under 'Post processing' I had to uncheck 'Compositing'.

Unchecking Compositing in the Properties editor > Render tab > Post Processing rollout did solve the problem.
Side note: you can go to the compositing nodes in the Node editor (or choose "Compositing" screen layout) and change/remove the Source Movie to remove video from render.

I flagged this so a moderator can turn it into a comment hopefully

pre-compose the layer with the 3d track without the background.
open pre-composed layer. export

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


text:
Make particles follow true (material) displacement
I'm experimenting with some procedural surfaces and I have a particle system on it. The problem is that, even though I'm using material displacement, the particles lie flat on the mesh.
Is there a way to get them to follow the displacement?
I have tried baking the displacement and applying it as modifier but it didn't work, because the baked map was very imprecise.
I will also have the same problem with a fluid simulation, I think.

EDIT: the baked map is clamped, even though it shows correctly in viewport

A have node setup in displacement input of material output node

You're right, but then i have another problem with my displacement texture for the modifier, because if i bake the one from the materials all the values are clamped, even though they show properly in the viewport. I will upload the screenshot

A link to learn how to get a texture out of geometry ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arvhK4tvYuY&t=75s

This addon can do it. Only for UV coordinates materials.

https://blenderartists.org/t/atool/1267349

Also make sure you checked "Use Modifier Stack" in particle settings

This method doesnt use displacement modifier but displacement node

"I have tried baking the displacement and applying it as modifier but it didn't work, because the baked map was very imprecise."
You indeed need to bake the node displacement as an image (probably a UV mapped image).  If it is imprecise, it is because you used insufficient bit depth or saved as a .jpg (imprecise in depth) or because you used insufficient resolution on the image (imprecise in XY.)
For baking displacement maps, I would recommend checking out Johan Apes answer at Is it possible to make Particles follow Displacement Node? .  Baking depth maps is also dealt with elsewhere on Blender Stack Exchange (many times) as well as elsewhere.
When worried about precision, I would recommend baking a depth map as a floating point, non-color image, and saving as .exr to preserve both the bit depth and values outside of the 0,1 range.
Swapping in a displacement modifier for nodes displacement is mostly straight-forward.  For the values you're showing, you would need only to specify the texture image to be used and change the coordinates to UV.  Modifier "Strength" corresponds to Scale and Midlevel corresponds to Midlevel.  The Height from the Displacement node is what you're baking into the image.

I think this may be a problem caused by the order of your modifiers.
Select your displacement mesh and look at the modifiers tab. All the particle systems should be at the bottom, below the displacement. If they are above the displacement, they will work off the flat mesh not the modified mesh.
This is the order you should have:

I hope this helps!
Regards, C.

Thanks, but I'm not using displace modifier but true displacement, the experimental feature

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


text:
"Start" and "exit" buttons are not working properly in blender game
Screen 1
When I hover over and click the exit button it works, but when I am doing the same thing with the start button it shows an error:
line 9, in main  KeyError: 'requested item "startGame" does not exist'

Screen 2
In the second screen, when I deactivate all sensors and actuator of the exit button, the start button is working properly.
Please help me.

Mouse over text does not work, instead use a plane invible and parent it to the text (child), to make parent use Alt+P.

The plane needs to be an actor to be detected.

Use the logic on the planes:

And to change the color use cont.owner.children[0].color = [1,1,1,true].
When you use module execution mode it pass the controller to the function.
#Note that there is no imports

def start(cont):
    l_click = cont.sensors['MouseStart']
    m_over = cont.sensors['MouseStart1']
    game_actuator = cont.actuators['startGame']
    if l_click.positive and m_over.hitObject:
        cont.activate(game_actuator)

def exit(cont):
    l_click = cont.sensors['MouseExit']
    m_over = cont.sensors['MouseExit1']
    game_actuator = cont.actuators['Game']
    if l_click.positive and m_over.hitObject:
        cont.activate(game_actuator)

thanks for support  problem has been resolved but another problem generated and i am trying to resolve that

Could you describe the problem that still persists?

I strongly suggest to separate hover from activating. This makes the implementation much simpler.
Hover
There are two different designs to achieve hover:
Individual Hover
Each objects handles the hover by itself. This is fine when each object has a different way to present hover
E.g.
Mouse Over Sensor -> AND -> Action Actuator Mode:Flipper Action: Hover.Action
Hover Controller
One object the Hover Controller handles all hover and performs the according actions. Due to it's dynamic behavior you need to Python to do that.
Mouse Over Any Sensor -> Python
import bge

COLOR_HOVERRED = [1, 0, 0, True]

controller = bge.logic.getCurrentController()
storage = controller.owner

sensors = controller.sensors
mouseSensor = sensors[0]

if mouseSensor.positive:
    hoverredObject = mouseSensor.hitObject
    storage["last hoverred"] = hoverredObject

    storage["original color"] = hoverredObject.color.copy()
    hoverredObject.color = COLOR_HOVERRED
else:
    lastHoverred = storage.get("last hoverred")

    if lastHoverred:
        lastHoverred.color = storage["original color"]

This code is based on your sample. When you want to hover certain objects only you can setup a filter property (e.g. "hoverable") at the mouse sensor and give each Object an according property "hoverrable".
Button Click
The button click is very simple and you do not necessarily need Python
mouse over sensor + mouse click sensor -> AND -> actuator

thanks for support  problem has been resolved but another problem generated and i am trying to resolve that


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Why can I not see color when a material is assigned?
I am trying to make a new base color for the eyes of my seal. I have vertices groups for inner eyes and corneas making them easy to select. In edit mode, the inner eyes are dark grey. The dark grey color only shows up in edit mode! The eyeball in object mode is very light standard grey only in object mode, is this normal?
The eyeballs are dark grey because that was the color of the original material group nose_eyelids, which included  the inner_eyeballs vertices group. Although this color does not show up in any of the material previews on the material control panel!
What led to this result is this: First I reassigned the material group, not to include the inner_eye vertices group. And then I changed the color of the remaining material nose_eyelids to the dark blue color you can see in all the pictures. The dark color grey remains from the original selection as it was previously chosen. In object mode, the standard grey is showing up all along, though all the other colors have carried over between object mode and edit mode.
In an effort to resolve the problem, I created a new material and named it "eyball" (I should have named it "eyeball"). I assigned the new material to the inner_eye vertex group. The color as I decided to change it to white is displayed in the preview. The inner_eye vertex group can be selected and deselected from the material control panel. Yet, the chosen color white is not showing up. Still I have dark grey in edit mode and light grey in object mode.
However, this is the setup before I had assigned the new material to the inner_eye and maybe I would see the white as light grey anyways. In edit mode, the new color change is not showing up. It is like the new color choice has had no effect. Am I forgetting a step?
How come the constant dark grey color doesn't show up the same in both object and edit mode? And how come I am not seeing the change in color to white, although my material group is being selected and deselected successfully within the material control panel on my new material "eybal"? Maybe these pictures will help:
This is my seal head mesh and materials in progress in object mode:

This is my seal head mesh and materials in progress edit mode cornea selected:

This is my seal head mesh and materials in progress edit mode:


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Areas with no light in cycles engine (even with a light source right next to it)
So recently I've been trying to learn blender and came across an issue when following a tutorial. There seem to be black areas on the object no matter if I put a light in front of it or super far away. On Eevee, it doesn't have this issue but with Cycles, it does :(.  If I could get some help with this that would be great as I'm a complete noob :).
Here is the link to the file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_ELOnZeBz2aZee5takXzCX67cAJsUKH0/view?usp=sharing
And this is what it looks like on cycles viewport:

Hi. Please use a title that reflects the content of the question. It should be descriptive but succinct, unique and identifying, summarizing the issue so that users can at a glance understand what your post is about. Use the [edit] link below your post and avoid anything not strictly essential to the post. Remember, your title is the first thing potential visitors will see, and makes your question findable for future users. See "What is the problem with posting an image or link and asking “How do I do this?""

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/5441/cause-of-black-artifacts-in-render https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/21/how-do-i-avoid-rendering-glitches-from-overlapping-faces


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why is one side of my parented object deformed on animation but the other one is fine?
i'm new to rigging and animation and encountered this problem but i dont really know what to search/ the keyword for this type of error

test animation.blend

Pls upload your blend file because you didn’t give us any useful information ….so we can just guess around…could be wrong weight painting….

hi, i've edited the post to include the files

It's because bones from the one leg affects vertices from the other:


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Some Mesh won't follow the rig and weight painting and rig is lagging
I'm new to blender and i'm making a human 3D model and somehow some part of my mesh won't follow the rig,first i modeled each of the meshes separately and then join all of them into 1 mesh and then parent it to meta rig,but somehow only the body,handband and boots follow the rig,hair and dress didn't.
then i was trying to weight coloured the dress and hair but to no avail,not to mention it's very laggy.does someone have any solutions?my blend file is as follows

Without looking at the blend file, I immediately suspect that either the weights are wrong for the dress (and from the screenshot, probably everything else as well). If they truly are all one mash, and there’s no physics on the dress, unless the skeleton is very strange indeed, it pretty much has to be weighting. Lag with deforms is typically because of a ton of vertices in the mesh. Try decimate, limited dissolve, or un-subdivide.

well,i used automatic weight for the entire mesh.and yes there's no physics on the dress.but how do i apply the physics on the dresses when they are already join in one mesh?should i separate them first?

No, you don’t want physics. I suspected that there were some physics active.


text:
Rig not moving my model/mesh
I am new to blender but I know to parent the rig, and none of the armature deform options are working.
Blend/Blend1 File
https://pasteall.org/blend/51a4e2b9ca1c447da2b100b7ffaf5318
https://pasteall.org/blend/c244b8421782437e93f703817cad41d1
When I try to use my rig's controls none of them do anything other than move the rig controls themselves, I've tried the basic solutions I've found online as well as similar and suggested solutions I have found on this site but none of them seem to fix this.

Hello, welcome to Blender.SE! Could you please clarify exactly what your problem is and give a few more details so we can help?

Yes, when I try to use my rig's controls none of them do anything other than move the rig controls themselves, I've tried the basic solutions I've found online but none of them seem to fix this.

Does this answer your question? Armature Arm and Leg FK's are not moving the character

The fix mentioned in the post only causes the rig controls to also move the connected rig controls, in my image you can see the hand controls don't move along with arm controls, now they do, but the arm mesh/model still doesn't move.

The mesh is bound to the metarig (check the armature modifier on it.) To fix it clear the body's parent (Alt+P) and bind it to the rig armature (Ctrl+P, with automatic weights). rig must be the active object, selected last.

That's fixed it, thank you.


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animate custom property generates error 'can not be animated'
I am setting values (and keyframing) for custom properties of my animation from a python script. For most of the custom properties I make this works fine, however there are also custom properties that generate the error 'bpy_struct.keyframe_insert() property "["Clamp High"]" not animatable'. In the IU the properties show like in the image:
when I press the the 'I' key in the UI I get the same error. However, when I press edit of the particular custom property and immediately press OK, it shows like

and I can press 'I' and insert a keyframe.
What is happening here?

I found the issue: I was setting string type values which cause the issue. Pressing edit and OK in Blender most probably converts it to float and make it work. Explicitely converting all values to float in my python sccript solves the issue


text:
Background photo missing in render
I made a campfire in Blender and I would like to render it with a specific photo in the background, but when I start rendering, the photo is missing.

Edit:
Thanks for your links they explain my problem. But I have a node setup like this:

I don't know where to link the image and alpha node! Is there a possibility to create a new node channel where I can set my complete campfire nodes as one node?

Background images are viewport only. For rendering see: this and this

Images for background aren't added into material nodes (unless you create a plane specifically for that image behind your objects and assign new material with that image, but even then you won't insert the image into cube material), images for background are often added with compositing nodes

ok i understand. But i cant get the necessary nodes into my node setup. Is there any possibility to load all the nodes from the campfie into one node? Than i can create the node setup out of the other links from post 1 and 2. But actually i dont know how to do this


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Is it possible to rotate hair (object) in timeline?
I'm trying to animate bugs over my character and can't seem to move them in the timeline using hair particle settings. Could anyone give me advice?

See here: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/59031/how-would-i-make-a-hair-particle-travel-across-a-surface

But I am not sure what you want is possible. If you find something, please be sure to post it here as an answer. Also, CrowdMaster does some amazing stuff, but I have not used it in the manner you require. Find it here: http://crowdmaster.org/
And, also, Ick!

I'm not sure how well this technique can be adapted to your situation--it looks like your bugs are largish objects, and I think getting the rotation correct (so the bugs are correctly oriented to the surface) might be hard with any particle system solution.
But if it's useful to you, I can explain how to get an effect like this one:

The bugs are small symmetrical objects (icospheres) that move using brownian motion and are confined to essentially the surface of the sphere by invisible collision objects (also spheres) just below and above the desired "shell" of motion.

that might just do the trick. any way you can expand on making invisible collision objects?

that part at least is easy!  you can simply give the collision mesh a "transparent" shader.

excellent suggestion. I'm trying out now. thank you!

that worked. I made the characters skin solid, and an outer shape invisible. the bugs bounce between the objects. worked like a charm. thanks!!

my pleasure, glad it worked!


text:
White background turning grey during video creation
I use filmic color management and cycles. I have done a 360° turntable animation and created 120 PNG frames (8 bits) with pure white background.
However, when I create a video from this PNG sequence (with VSE), the white background turns to grey (I use MPEG-4 and H.264 codec). I encountered a similar problem when I created the frames: I used compositing to add the pure white background, since everything was transparent except for the subject, but I faced issues due to the fact I was using filmic. This post saved me: White background with filmic blender.
So my question is: what can I do to have a video animation that have the same color range than my input PNG sequence and then have my pure white background?
Edit 1: after investigation (I'm new to Blender), it appears that the background already turned greyish on the preview in video editing mode. Maybe it can help to find the source of the problem.


text:
Loft tool in blender 2.8
I am using cinema and 3ds and I am amazed from Blender 2.8 UI upgrade and I am trying to switch to Blender.
As I am a newbie in Blender I am trying to do some lofting but I haven't found any tutorials on that.
Any ideas where to look?

Could you briefly explain what a loft tool does so we might be able to help find an equivalent?

I guess what you're looking for is the curve bevel, you can find a lot of tutorials about this on youtube with these keywords, and on blenderstackexchange you have this page for example: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/58564/curve-bevel-function-scale

Related https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/1503/how-to-make-uv-loft-like-3ds-max-in-blender-using-curves https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/746/lofting-between-splines https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/138901/loft-tool-in-blender-2-8/ https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/278462/create-mesh-from-four-curves-loft https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/301152/how-could-a-loft-object-be-closed

Bridge Edge Loops from the Ctrl E Edge menu is a pretty good lofting tool, with some limitations.

You can select multiple loops at a time.
It will loft meshes, not curves, and is only really satisfactory when the loops' vertex counts are the same.
You can make adjustments to the number of cuts, and interpolation, between loops
It's destructive.. you can't adjust later
If you want to loft along a curve, you would do that by hand, perhaps by assigning a 'Follow Curve' constraint to the profiles as separate objects before joining and bridging. See @batFINGER's answer here

Bsurfaces was a more flexible tool for lofting, IMO, but it's broken now. I would love to see it come back to life. If it doesn't, maybe if/when I get good enough at scripting, I'll give it a shot, in 2.8

there is an addon called loop tools and it has a tool called loft not sure if thats what your'e looking for, it should already be installed you just need to enable it in the user preferences, don't forget to click save user preferences so that the addon remains enabled after you close blender
after installing. W > looptools > loft
.

That's exactly what I was looking for.  Thank you.

I couldn't get this one to work properly on 2.93 as twisting one segment breaks the twisting of the other one, but I gave a try to the Bridge Edge Loops suggested by Robin and the result was exactly what I expected after I increased the number of cuts. I had never used BEL in this way before. It's great.

If the loft you're talking about is similar to 3DS Max loft, then it's very similar in Blender, if you need to loft a shape using a path, and taper the resulting loft, then you need, three curves, one for the path, one for the shape (you can convert a mesh object to curve and vise versa) and one for the taper.
To do this, start with creating a curve (a Bezier curve for instance), then create the shape using another curve (a circle curve for instance) select the first curve (path), in the properties panel click the curve tab button, select the shape under Bevel.
For taper, you need a third shape to use as the taper curve, assign it the same as you assigned the bevel, except this one will be under Taper menu rather than Bevel.

In addition to George's answer:
Using Blender 2.82 version. With 2 curves to create a LOFT SHAPE, I created as below.

Select the path to apply shape. In Curve properties tab, under Geometry tab, use circle shape under Bevel Object (Blender doc Reference)

Shape becomes

[Optional] If you need to taper the shape, you can create another curve, aligned along x axis and curved towards Y axis (As per your tapering) and add it.


text:
Texture doesn't show up in final render
I am rendering an animation in Cycles and the texture doesn't show up in my final render. The texture shows up in the material preview and the render preview but not when I render it. It is the only texture that this happens to as well.
I have everything UV unwrapped and the texture is mapped to the UV via a texture coordinate and a mapping node.
Any ideas on how to fix this?
Blend file: https://www.mediafire.com/file/kyx0mw6zkj9wo8t/Submission.blend/file
Screenshots:

Here is the node setup:

Please, when you ask a question about shading, add a screenshot of the viewport it would be very helpful for others to understand the issue.

You have a plane at the same location in the scene as the real floor, and it is rendered on top of it.

I can't believe I didn't notice that. ♂

@Bluffyyy not a problem, happens to everyone =)


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Why using Boolean Mesh node material is ignored?
I have a mesh, and I want to extrude a part of it. Editing the mesh is not what I want (first of all is a big mesh), I want it procedural.

Now I loosed the material in the resulting mesh...
Any way to solve this?
Thanks...
EDIT 1: Set Material node doesn't work for me...

When Blender performs a boolean operation, it normally takes the material from the face which originally occupied that position if that material is available, so both source objects contribute some materials to the result.
When you're cutting into one object with another object, all of the 'new' faces 'made' by the cut (which are more accurately faces partially or totally copied from the cutter)  are going to inherit the material from the cutter, not the source object.  That being said, the source object needs to have the inherited material available on a slot so that the new faces can be set to that slot.  There are addons that may do this for you but by default this has to be configured somewhat manually.
Unfortunately, geometry nodes seems to do something a little different.  Here are some hopefully useful results:

This shows a default cube being cut by a node created cylinder geometry.  There is a muted set material node on the cutter which will be important later.  Also of note is that the base cube has two material slots, each linked to a different material - one black and one teal.
With this setup, the cutter has no material set and so the new mesh has entirely the first (black) material slot across its entire surface.  If the set material node on the cube is changed to teal, something a little unexpected happens:
In this case, the outside of the result (that was originally from the cube) has changed to teal as we expect.  However, the inner faces from the cylinder cut are still black.  This implies that the boolean is actually going on slot index rather than what actual material is used.  A further followup test (and the original odd case that prompted this deeper investigation) is what happens when we apply a material to the cutter - any material, the result is the same.  This screenshot shows the cube back to black, and the cut faces are now showing teal - but both the cube AND the cutter were specifically set to use the black material!

It doesn't matter what the material in the set material node for the cutter is, the output will always be teal, but the set material node does need to exist, as otherwise it will be black (see image 2).
As far as I can tell what happens is that the mesh boolean node reads the cutter and determines it has a material slot at all, discards what's actually in that slot, but increments the material slot on the result.  The actual materials are pulled from the original object.
One more images just to confirm this - Adding a third orange material to the cube, we can control that being applied to the cut faces by adding two set material nodes to the cutter, and making them different materials.  It will not become orange (remaining teal) if they are the same, as that would not cause the cutter to have two material slots - you need to have both set to something different for it to result in it referencing the third slot.

Without knowing how the slots are set up a specific instruction of what to fix on your own mesh is difficult, but if you have multiple slots, removing them all down to one slot is probably a good start.  If that doesn't change anything, look to the UV mapping if applied to the texture.  Using object coordinates with appropriate scaling in a mapping node instead of the UV coordinates might be more successful when dealing with procedural geometry.

I´d tried Set Material node at the beginning of this issue with no success... I'd edit the question with images.

@Olivier I've updated my answer with more detail after further experimentation.  Turns out I was wrong about how geometry nodes specifically handles booleans and materials, which is pretty unintuitive and doesn't match how manual or modifier booleans work as far as I'm aware.  In short, you need to do things with material slots on the original object, and also potentially add extra material slots on the cutter.

Oh!! What a detailed answer/investigation... Awesome... I really appreciate it.. Thank you so much.. BTW sorry by the delay, family issues. I will check it during this weekend, here is 4am.. Again, thank you..


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How to create ambience in inverted planet?
I'm creating a Game of Thrones world like (Intro), and it is an inverted planet. How can I create ambience (like Dynamic Sky) in this situation?
I've used mist pass and ambient occlusion... and is not what I'm asking about...
Any help would be appreciated...
Thanks...
Edit 1: What I'm trying is to get rig of that flat looking. I do that in After Effects by adding Optical Flares, using 3d lights and tracking (or animating them manually) video. Using it carefully (low intensity) makes some "professional" looking to my shots... As a reference check the first 15 seconds of original GOT intro (1st season).
EDIT 2: I don't want to composite the "atmosphere". For that I can use even After Effects. I want it to be physical. Another thing I'd tried is to create volumetric clouds over the surface, but not what i'm looking for...
Any thoughts?


text:
Masking body parts underneath clothes and armor?
I have game character with armor, and I need to avoid parts of the body clipping through the armor.
I tried using shape keys to shrink body parts under clothing, but it seems like it would be a lot easier to just hide the majority of the body that is underneath.
What would be the best way to go about this? I also need to be able to export the resulting mesh to Unity.

A way to do this is with a "Mask Modifier", simply create a vertex group and add weight to the vertices you want to keep visible. then on your object's modifiers, add the one named "Mask" and set the vertex group box to whatever name you called the one you just added the weight to, and voila! its now masked
:D!!!
Step 1:
Add vertex group and weight paint the parts you want to be visible

Step 2: Add "Mask" modifier and select the vertex group you just created, I named mine "Mask"

Step 3: Confirm that it was done properly (I changed the armor piece visibility from textured to wireframe to demonstrate this)

Hope that helps n.n!

Yes very much so! Now i need to figure out a way to code this into unity when the piece of clothing is equipped! Thank you!


text:
Cutting heart shape in a mesh
I am new to blender and have been having issues with something I thought is relatively simple.
I tried looking for answers to this but could not find anything that can help me.
Basically, I followed a video to create a "simple" heart shape mesh using 2 cylinders and a cube I had combined them into a single shape, removing the overlapping part with Boolean modifier.
However, when I tried to use it to cut the shape into a cube, I can't get it to work properly.
I noticed that the heart mesh has the sides of the cube connecting to the half cylinders have multiple faces etc.  But the model appears to be air tight.
Can I get some suggestion as to the easier to go about doing this or fixing the issue I am having?
Any pointers will be very much appreciated.
p.s. I wanted to upload the heart mesh I have but I don't know how - I am new to this forum too.
Edit: Here is the example of what I am trying to do.
I wanted to create an mesh (in this case a heart) as follows:

Then use it to cut into another mesh as follows:

Boolean does not work as expected even if I tried making the cut using Boolean modifiers the cube first, then the cylinders separately one at a time.
The tried various combinations of combining the heart mesh, playing around with the mesh, applying the mesh as separate components etc but cannot get Boolean modifier to work.
What would be the best way to accomplish something like this or a cut through?  I know it works for simple shapes but not for primitive shapes.
Thanks again.
Edit:  Here is the heart mess sample for cutting.  Thanks.

You can upload files here, making sure it is as simple as possible to illustrate the issue, but we would prefer screenshots of your scene and setup. Also I'd strongly advise to ditch booleans as a modeling technique if you wish future success, and adopt proper topology as your main concern

Possibly related https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/50538/how-to-cut-an-object-along-a-curve

Your specific problem (based on your blend file) is a faulty heart mesh. If you press z to see the wireframe mode and this will become obvious. You need to have a mesh that does not contain inner geometry or walls, or double edges/vertices, which this mesh contains both. Unfortunately the tutorial and method you were following to create the heart is "simple", but rather faulty and bound to get you into trouble in the future.

These mesh issues caused an inaccurate polygon in the cutout, which could be fixed fairly easily.

You could also clean up your cutout mesh, but it's not worth the work. I recommend making a more accurate and stable mesh, using the following steps:

Create a cylinder (shift+a).
Go to edit mode (tab).
Turn on proportional editing o, and change the mode to sharp.
Select the top, center vertices, and scroll the mouse wheel while grabbing them (g) until you have the desired result.
Do the same for the bottom.

Here is an animation demonstrating the process.

To perform the cut, use the following steps:
Add a boolean modifier and set it to difference.

Select the mesh which needs the hole in it. (not the mesh to make the hole!)
Go to the modifiers tab and add a boolean modifier.
Set the type to difference, and the object to the shape to make the hole (your heart shape).
Apply the modifier.
Select and delete the heart shape (or just move it away).

There now should be a heart shaped hole in the mesh.

If you want another option, enter edit mode (tab), add a little more geometry (ctrl+r for loop cut) and use the cut out tool (k) to manually cut out the geometry. Before doing this you will want to switch to orthographic view (numpad 5) and top view (numpad 7) to get the proper cuts. Then disable limit selection to visible (see image) so it will cut all the way through the mesh, and click where you would like to cut. When you are done, press enter to finish the cut. If you would like to cancel push esc. I hope this helps.

Here is my blend file.

Hi Snail, thanks for the reply.  I had been using the Boolean method but it seems to work only for simple shapes.  I have not problem with cylinders, or rectangles but it does not like a composite shape like the heart mesh, which is made up of a cude and 2 cylinders.
The second method will work for relative simple shape but will be quite difficult to make a complex object like a more well rounded heart shape.

It worked for me. I just created a heart and cut it out. I'll post the image. I suspect that the culprit is double vertices on your cutter (heart) mesh. Try using the circle selector to select all vertices at the spot where the square and sphere joined, and then press alt+m to merge them, and choose an option. You can easily check if there are two vertices in the same place by going into edit mode and pressing "remove doubles" on the toolbar. If on the top status bar it shows vertices were removed, you can be sure there were issues.

If you want to make sure your mesh itsn't the culprit make a new one starting with a cylinder. Go to edit mode, turn on proportional editing, change the mode to sharp, select the top center vertices, and scroll the mouse wheel while grabbing them until you have the desired result. Then do the same for the bottom. That ensures that your mesh is good, with no gaps or double vertices, not to mention it is way easier and I could make a heart shape in about 30 seconds. :)

I am working on uploading a blend file right now.

Hi Snail,  Thanks again for the quick response.  I am pretty sure the issue is with the heart mesh created by combining multiple shapes - I just don't know how to fix it and I did try to play around with the vertices but could not fix it.

I actually started building the heart mesh using a single cylinder but it involves "manual" shifting of vertices, so I looked at other possibilities and saw the "easy" way.  The reason why I went that way is also because I see this method may be easier for create complex shapes like a Spade - by combining meshes...as it turns out, the method creates more issues - at least the way I wanted to use it.  Guess I will have to go back to single object method.

Having said that, how will you create a Spade?

@DuaneDibbley Thanks.  I did tried, but the mesh seemed quite complex to fix (assuming it is fixable).  Using wireframe, I notice the cube faces that connect the half cylinders actually have 2 faces each.  I tried removing them but didn't work out either.  I actually thought that this is a relatively simple operation - who knew?!

I may make a basic modeling tutorial for you about modeling a spade, because i want to, but I can't get to it tonight. It's kind of funny and ironic, because I am actually designing a card deck right now, except I'm doing it in Krita, Inkscape, and Gimp. :) It can be done in Blender too. Just remember, you can add objects in edit mode, press "e" to extrude the selected vertices, and press alt+m to merge vertices. This can get you a long way, with just those simple skills.

@UncleSnail any help will be much appreciated.  After spending so much time trying what I did, I think it is about time for me to give up and recognize that it is not the way to go and back to more direct method of producing shapes.  I will go back to the drawing board and start experimenting with creating meshes with single object.  Thanks again for the advice.

@UncleSnail if you are doing the tutorial, do you mind doing the Club instead of a Spade.  I think I can figure out Spade but not idea how to produce the 3 circles for Club without causing the same mess I did.  BTW, I tried creating the heart as you had outlined above and it was quite easy - have completely forgotten about proportional editing, although I have only seen it once before.

Alright, I have created a quick tutorial on making the card pips in Blender. https://youtu.be/5AD4MP4gwd0

@UncleSnail Thanks again for the effort.  Very useful instructions for creating clean meshes.  Much appreciated.


text:
Using python to set inputs on geometry nodes
I am trying to use blender to create a visualisation, and I have set up a 'template' object with geometry nodes that I can copy and manually manipulate to set the desired shape and colour. This works.
The GN input panel is with inputs is:

I am now trying to read a set of data from a CSV file and programmatically set up the visualisation elements. I can read the correct data from the file. I pass the data to a python routine, the relevant routine (ignoring the main code) is:
def createRFBandObject(name: str, lower: float, upper: float, power: float, category: int, showPower: bool):
    print(f"{name} is ({lower}, {upper}, {power}, {category}, {showPower})")
    obj = bpy.data.objects['RFBandTemplate'].copy()
    obj.name = name
    nodeGroup = obj.modifiers['RFBand'].node_group
    nodeGroup.inputs['Lower (GHz)'] = lower / 1000 # Convert to GHz
    nodeGroup.inputs[3] = upper / 1000 # Convert to GHz
    #nodeGroup.inputs[4] = power
    #nodeGroup.inputs[6] = category
    #nodeGroup.inputs[5] = showPower
    obj.data.update
    return obj

For completeness:
Found Geometry Node modifier RFBand
Input Input_0 is named Geometry with type GEOMETRY
Input Input_7 is named UoM (MHz or GHz) with type STRING
Input Input_2 is named Lower (GHz) with type VALUE
Input Input_3 is named Upper (GHz) with type VALUE
Input Input_4 is named EIRP (dBW) with type VALUE
Input Input_5 is named Show power? with type BOOLEAN
Input Input_6 is named Category with type INT

The routine creates the right type of object but does not set the correct attributes (does not set any attributes at all). The above code as written will not run due to TypeError: bpy_prop_collection[key] = value: invalid, expected a StructRNA type or None, not a float. My search of StackExchange and other sites suggest using .default_value which is not logical in the first place and, while not creating an error, does not change the attributes of the shape.
(Edit: default_value, on investigation, does exactly as it says - it changes the default value in the underlying GN definition - thus changing it for all shapes that are using that GN setup.)
I am completely lost. How can I use python to set the GN inputs on the new shape I have just created?
[For reasons, I will not be uploading a copy of the blend file, or the data set. I know the shapes work as intended when data is entered manually, I know the template shape is being copied and named correctly, and I know the data is being ingested correctly.]

I think you want to set values for modifier inputs and not the inputs of the node group.

(for tooltips like that enable Python Tooltips in the Preferences, Interface tab, Display panel)
So that would be:
...
#first of all you'll need the identifier for the input, not the name
identifier= obj.modifiers["RFBand"].node_group.inputs["Lower (GHz)"].identifier
obj.modifiers["RFBand"][identifier] = lower / 1000
...

Upgraded to Blender 4 and this code no longer worked. After half a day of mucking around (and one file that is doing something weird on the CSV import) I managed to make it work - added a new answer.

I upgraded to Blender v4 and the accepted answer (https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/301431/49849) no longer worked.
The following is the modified code to get the identifier (Blender Version 4.0.1).
# First line is the old code
# idLower = obj.modifiers["RFBand"].node_group.inputs["Lower (GHz)"].identifier
#
idLower = obj.modifiers["RFBand"].node_group.interface.items_tree["Lower (GHz)"].identifier
obj.modifiers["RFBand"][idLower] = lower / 1000 # Convert to GHz

Amazing, thank you! I was having the exact same issue when upgrading to Blender 4.2

nodeGroup.inputs[3] this will give you the Input object which has multiple properties. Try to print it to explore more. Or try it in blender python console.
What you need to do is
nodeGroup.inputs[3].default_value = something
As far as my knowledge goes, most of the Input sockets value need to be assigned via default_value but some have other ways.

default_value, on investigation does exactly as it says - it changes the default value in the underlying GN definition - thus changing it for all shapes that are using that GN setup.


text:
How to get seams as an edge property in Geometry Nodes?
I need to split a mesh by the edges where the seam is set, to then access Mesh Island Index of a face/faces (by using Mesh Island node)
Currently I am assigning a very low value crease on the edges where seam is set, and accessing it as a "crease" property but this is more of a hack rather than a solution.

Using vertex groups will create extra cuts on the corners.

Is there a way to access "seams" as edge property (boolean/float)?
or a way to set which edges to split mesh on (not verticles/vertex groups)?
or a way to get the index of UV Island of selected face(s) without using the approach described above?

Don't know if either of the new UV nodes coming in Blender 3.3 alpha are likely to expose them? This is the developer commit for them which mentions existing seam flags in the mesh geometry, but that's way outside my experience so you may have to dig there for more details.

import bpy

def add_seam_attr(attributes):
    return attributes.new(name='seam', type='BOOLEAN', domain='EDGE')

obj = bpy.context.object

if obj.type == 'MESH':
    mesh = obj.data
    seam = mesh.attributes.get('seam')

    if seam:
        if seam.data_type != 'BOOLEAN' or seam.domain != 'EDGE':
            mesh.attributes.remove(seam)
            seam = add_seam_attr(mesh.attributes)
    else:
        seam = add_seam_attr(mesh.attributes)

    seam.data.foreach_set('value', [e.use_seam for e in mesh.edges])
    mesh.update()

This script operates on the mesh of the active object. It will create or update the attribute named seam on domain edge and of boolean data type, it's values will be the same as the use_seam flag in the edges.

Data is not updated when ran from edit mode, so it's better to change to object mode before running the script.
After creating the attribute, you will be able to use it inside Geometry Nodes:

Genius. Damn, we need a Python node.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/269344/89484
was a great idea, so I created an add-on.
This will make it easier to unwrap while checking the UVs.

bl_info = {
    "name": "Add Seam Attribute",
    "blender": (2, 80, 0),
    "category": "Object",
    "author": "KSYN",
    "description": "Add or update the 'seam' attribute for selected mesh objects",
    "location": "View3D > UV Mapping",
    "warning": "",
    "doc_url": "https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/269330/how-to-get-seams-as-an-edge-property-in-geometry-nodes",
    "support": "COMMUNITY",
    "version": (1, 0, 0),
    "blenderapi": (3, 6, 0),
    "update_check": False,
    "category": "Mesh",
}

import bpy

class AddSeamOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "object.add_seam_operator"
    bl_label = "Add Seam Attribute"
    bl_description = "Add or update the 'seam' attribute for selected mesh objects"

    def execute(self, context):
        def add_seam_attr(attributes):
            return attributes.new(name='seam', type='BOOLEAN', domain='EDGE')

        bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='OBJECT')

        obj = bpy.context.object

        if obj.type == 'MESH':
            mesh = obj.data
            seam = mesh.attributes.get('seam')

            if seam:
                if seam.data_type != 'BOOLEAN' or seam.domain != 'EDGE':
                    mesh.attributes.remove(seam)
                    seam = add_seam_attr(mesh.attributes)
            else:
                seam = add_seam_attr(mesh.attributes)

            seam.data.foreach_set('value', [e.use_seam for e in mesh.edges])
            mesh.update()

        bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='EDIT')

        return {'FINISHED'}

def menu_func(self, context):
    self.layout.operator(AddSeamOperator.bl_idname)

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(AddSeamOperator)
    bpy.types.VIEW3D_MT_uv_map.append(menu_func)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(AddSeamOperator)
    bpy.types.VIEW3D_MT_uv_map.remove(menu_func)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

Further improved version
Completely original attributes can be added to edges, vertices and noodles.
2024-04-13　I decided to manage this in GIT for study purposes because of the long character count.
https://github.com/Hydrocallis/AddAttribute
https://github.com/Hydrocallis/AddAttribute/wiki


text:
Something wrong with hands armature orientation/offsets when retargeting animation
I have human model generated with Human Generator addon. Next I import bvh I recorded on Deepmotion and retargeting its bones to my model bones with awesome Renim Node addon. And here is the problem, retargeting is good, except hands part. You can see on the screen it's not even intersection, hands bones of the model clearly don't follow the bvh armature. I've tried set offsets inside Renim bone nodes, but it's impossible to get something good this way. I've tried it on both metarig and rigify, all the same, all good, hands are bad. Rotation on both human and armature is quaternion. Maybe someone faced same problem and can point me to the solution?

Example with rigify https://imgur.com/a/ZGFe2OB

I just got rid of bvh import, got fbx from deepmotion then did all bones retargeting as I did before and achieve the exact thing I wanted. So, someone who is strangling with similar behavior and use bvh, try avoid bvh and use fbx instead if you have such an option.


text:
How do I make a pulsating light effect material?
I wanna make a material or animation that can do something similar to this video on multiple different points on a surface. But with different speeds and distortions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj0NEtvvUZ8

At first I tried selecting an area of faces, create a vertex group, select a wider area of faces, create a new vertex group and repeat that a few times. Then I tried to plug in the vertex group into the vertex group field of the wireframe modifer and animate it. With all the vertex groups animated together, I was hoping to get a pulsating effect. But when I keyframe a new vertex group, the last one always gets overwritten for some reason.
I also tried to see if I could do something with the mapping node in the video below, but can't get anything that I'm imagining.
https://youtu.be/5_4lNC0JXW4
Can anyone help with this?

what do you mean by distoritions? i just see change of lights in there...?

Dynamic Paint type Waves should work for you ... To get idea  at 7:20 https://youtu.be/rsy0mtIOb8A

You may want to take a look on the Commotion blender add-on. It allows you to offset keyframes which may be the thing you look for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCirN-WGZV8

@vklidu I don't need the surface to ripple. I want a effect that looks like the circumferance of light on a surface is expanding

"...on multiple different points on surface." Any reference? Do they will overlaps or completely separated? Also your reference use circular pattern, that means in multiple places - multiple separated circular patterns ... or do you expect one rectangular grid surface with just circular light appearance?

You could create a row of icospheres (or simply circles), with an Array modifier on X, then a second Array on Y:

Give it a Simple Deform, choose the Bend option on the Z axis, with a little less than 360°:

Adjust the Array count on X so that the circles don't overlap and you have the hole you want:

As pointed out by Robin Betts, if you want to avoid the stretching of the circles you can also try with 2 Array with Object Offset, use empties as objects, move, rotate and scale them, except the gap between the circles is decreasing towards the center, unlike your picture. First Array with Object Offset, to duplicate and scale down the circles on Y:

Second Array with Object Offset, to move the circles on X and rotate them:

Apply the modifiers, Unwrap > Project from View, then give your object a Gradient (Spherical) node before a Wave Texture and a ColorRamp. Tweak the Mapping location values in order to center the circles:

Change the Wave Offset value in order to make the light move:

and the master strikes back again....! Great answer as usual.

I'm not completely satisafied actually  ;)   I hope someone will find a better solution, I would prefer to use a Spherical Gradient but I didn't find the way to animate it properly, I hope you will

i was not even close of thinking about such idea like you had. For me you are a Blender genius! And that you are modest too makes u just even more sympathetic!

and now i try to understand and rebuild what you did in 50 secs... ;)

Ah ah thanks but i know i'm not, wait a bit, someone will find the answer  ;)

i just don't understand why the strength has to be 14.98 ....this must be a secret message....but i will find out!!! :D

To have a bloom effect you need to push the emission strength a bit

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

Another great example. Both solutions were really good, but I was having some trouble following your steps because I'm a noob. For something like this I gotta see it on video lol. Here's some screenshots of what I got, but I also wasn't sure how to apply the simple deform and keep the model in a circle shape.
https://imgur.com/a/R8GDALH

I'm not sure what's happening, but I don't know why your second array is on 2 axis, it should be one axis as the first one, and for the Simple Deform maybe set a bit less than 360°

Oh I zeroed out the Z-axis on the 2nd array. You can ignore that. It's the same without it.

please share your file so that I can test it: https://pasteall.org/blend/

Rather than trying to do this in 2D wouldn't it make more sense to create your "tunnel" in 3D? Since that's what a tunnel is, after all

Yes I thought about that but I think the question was for a 2D object

see the gap between the dots, it is equals, while it should decrease with the perspective

@user253751 this shader isn't actually for a tunnel or a plane. I'm planning on applying it to a different object. If I was using a tunnel, I'd probably just use point lights or something.

@moonboots this is easier to understand now. I think I got it. The final result of Robin Betts might be a little better, but your answer is much easier to implement, so I'm adding it as the preferred answer. Thanks! :)

A pure-shader option, for use on a simple plane, or any surface:

The top branch wraps the circumference into segments, using a Gradient > Radial node. The wrap is controlled by 'n Spokes' input.
The middle-ish branch wraps the radius into rings, by length from the object origin. The wrap is controlled by 'n Rings' input.
There are quite a few 'convenience' nodes in there, so the user doesn't have to fish around for tiny numbers, and to put 0 at the middle of each cell the plane is divided into, when the circumference-wrap and the radius-wrap are combined to give a per-cell X and Y.
The bottom branch splits the radius into color-bands, with an extra bit to dim the center to pure black, if you want to.

This sort of result:

I guess there's a limitation here.. the dots are not perfectly round. The 'Roundness' input fudges that. But they aren't round in your reference, either.
The effect is animated by keyframing the 'Phase' input.

WOOOOOOOOOW!!!!

oh ok it's pure procedural  ;) yes I was wondering how to make concentric circles that would keep their shape?

@moonboots That's an intriguing problem.. I think I have it, but ng.. too many nodes. You start, I think? with by letting each shading point know the center of its cell.

your node setup is too complicated for me, I was wondering how you would do it with a classical method (for the moment, like for yours, my circles get stretched towards the center)

@moonboots I would love to find a snappy way.. it's probably there to be found.. I'll keep trying. :D That's an advantage of your way. You could do that ok in geometry.

Wow this blew up! This is super helpful. I was just looking for pulsating lights, but you went above and beyond and made it just like the example. Thank you! I don't think I'll ever get to the level of understanding shaders like this.

@moonboots, where would I connect a mapping and texture coordinate node if I wanted to move it around?

what do you mean by "move around"?

@moonboots I mean I want to move the location of the shader on an object. You know how on the mapping node you can change the X,Y,Z coordinates of a shader?

Are you talking about my solution or Robin's? I haven't studied Robin's but I guess you can, and you can with mine as well, you just need to tweak the Location values in the Mapping node


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I can't create a UV map for this object and I don't know why (sphere unwrap)
I have a horse model I'm working on. So far, so good.
Now I'm trying to add eyes with an iris texture. I added two spheres, assigned a material and a texture, but the UV Map is too small and needs to be resized (my horse now has insect eyes. Every face of the sphere has its own texture.)
When I try to apply/resize my UV Map (in Edit mode), here is what I get:

The sphere has a Material & texture, so it should work:

So, what am I doing wrong? TIA.

The faces of your sphere are overlapping in the UV Editor because you must have unwrapped with the Unwrap option (first one) without any seam on your mesh. The result is that each face displays the pupil. You should mark a seam on one of your sphere longitudes (select the edge and press CtrlE > Mark Seam), then select all and unwrap again (with the first option called Unwrap). This time it will take the seam into account. You can bring some corrections like scaling up and down the UV in the UV Editor and align it to the pupil.

Thanks for the reply. How do I "mark a seam on one of your sphere longitudes"? Must I select every vertices by hand all the way around? Because simply using Ctrl-E alone does not appear to do the trick (in Edit Mode.)

in 2.79, alt left click should work to select an edge loop

Thx. I must be missing something though. I'm still not getting a UV Map. I select the seam (alt+LMB), Mark Seam, Unwrap, Select All (as in your photo), and get the same "too many faces selected" white box (in UV Edit mode.) If I don't Select All, I get the texture, but still no UV Map. :(

Once you've marked the seam, select all then unwrap with the first option selected (Unwrap). I don't know this "too many faces selected" error...

Ah! Unwrap AFTER selecting All! That was my mistake. The "error" I described is when you select too many faces in "UV Edit" mode, it doesn't know what to map, so you get the white box seen in my first photo. Thx.

Have you tried unwrapping it with Sphere Projection? (One of the Unwrap options)
How about using a Texture Coordinate with Mapping node to manually arrange it? (Texture Coordinate (UV Data) plugged into Mapping plugged into Image Texture plugged into Shader—adjusting the Mapping parameters to fit).
John


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How to achieve this look/unwrap (Swirl texture on tree)
Trying to reproduce the following tree :

I fail miserably; how to achieve it ? Is it the mesh rotating or the texture ?

I think you are almost there, just unwrap with the Follow Active Quads option (select all in Edit mode then reselect one of the faces to make this face active) and rotate the UV map in the UV Editor:

Wow ! Amazing ! Would you be kind and explain what's the 'orange surrounding box' on the left side ?

I'm in Edit mode  ;)

Yes but the shape you created on the left (trunk) is actually smaller than the surrounding orange box; what is this ? is this a curve or ?
Would you mind sharing your blend file ?

it's because I gave my object a Subdivision Surface, here is the file:

Ohhh ok i didn't know about that modifier; exactly what i was looking for ! Superb Thank you very much !

I'm pretty sure the mesh is the one rotating, and you should make the actual mesh before texturing. Your texture is good, but maybe make your mesh in the UV Unwrap smaller so that the lines appear bigger.


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When UV Mapping, can my mesh contain triangles or N-gons?
I was following one of BlenderGuru's tutorials (creating an anvil) and reached the section on UV Mapping. I noticed that my mesh had two to four triangles on my mesh which appear to be hard to reach and edit into quads (my entire mesh is  destroyed when I try.) Will it matter that I have these triangles when it come to UV Mapping, and will I run into any other problems? (I am learning the skills for game development in the Unreal engine.)
Here's a picture showing these small triangles that I can't edit without destroying my mesh.

for a game model, triangles are the norm.

Short answer: no, triangles don't matter, but N-gons might.
Here is an article demonstrating some of the triangle's downfalls.
I have heard people talk about triangles being hard to work with before, but that has mostly been in the context of animation. They can also be difficult to model, because you cannot use some functions, like a loop cut, on triangles. As far as I can tell, it shouldn't affect unwrapping in any substantial way. I usually try to stick with quads, because for a few minute reasons, they are generally easier to work with, but a few tris in my mesh has never given me any problems.
They shouldn't give you any problems either, because you say you are learning for game design. Remember, most game engines actually triangulate the mesh anyway, before taking them in the game. The engine doesn't think of them as quads anyway, it thinks of them as triangles, so having some triangles in the mesh shouldn't be a problem.
So if there are some extra tris, I wouldn't worry about it.
N-gons, however, are good to be avoided, especially if there is any type of animation or deformation to be applied. This is because if you have, say, a circle of six points, where one point is lower than the others, how is the computer supposed to draw that face? faces, by definition, must be flat. Depending on what engine you are using, these N-gons will usually be broken up into triangles, so that the engine can show something that fits the shape. However, usually you want to control where edges are, and you may not be happy with the way these N-gons are handled in your engine. This is one of the causes of polygon flickers while in game, and meshes looking wrong.
So N-gons should almost never be used, if possible, except on completely flat surfaces that will not be deformed.
I hope this helps, and if anyone has anything to add or correct, please do.

Thanks for the help. I was just worried that unwrapping a mesh with triangles would result in either result in visible textures seams or the mesh would just not unwrap at all. I understand thanks to your help now. I will try to stick to quads where I can and will avoid N-gons.

My opinion is that while technically possible using tris and ngons in UV mapping, on simple shapes like this:

this could work well, but if you object is (easily) more complex, since your texture (through UV maps) needs to follow its topology, mesh subdivision other that quads (tris and ngons) may, in some situations, make object (and thus texture) deformations more difficult to control for you, even if you're doing a still image and not an animation.
I can't correctly explain the technical/mathematical reason, but I think that since adjacent quads can always be thought as a sequence with a predictable direction, this helps both animation deforming algorithms, and sometimes also "2d over 3d" graphics mapping ones, since this also is (except in a very planar example like mine above) a deformation, of a 2d image over a 3d shape.

Yeah, I see your point. I just found that I had two to four triangles so small I could not do much with them without completely destroying the mesh. I will attempt to use quads at much as I can, hopefully as I improve I will be able to avoid triangles. Thanks for your help.


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Partially high noise using glass material
I created a simple bottle and applied a glass material using the new principled shader.
When it comes to rendering the surface of the bottle turns out incredibly noisy, except the part on the front that looks like glass. I tried several solutions with light paths, sampling settings etc. but it doesn't change anything. Any thoughts on that? :-)

It’s strange that one part would be rendered fine but the rest is so noisy.... things to try : move the camera - does this affect how each surface is rendered? Rotate the object - does this affect how each surface is rendered? Check the geometry - overlapping faces, remove doubles, recalculate/flip normals. If none of this helps, upload screenshots of anything that might help - geometry, modifiers, nodes, etc. and upload the blend file if possible.

I added the blend file! Rotating the object doesn't help. Mesh seems fine to me.

You can do a simple test: Render it without your Background. You'll see that the noise appeared only where the bottle reflected your Background. (All the noise is in the indirect gloss pass). As the model and the material seem to be fine, I think it really just comes down to using more samples. (Or denoise). Also, use at least a simple diffuse shader for the background. But still, I'm curious if anyone can find a better solution.

Hej guys, thanks for the suggestions so far. It's true. The noise appears where the bottle is reflecting the background.
Here is an image rendered with 2000 samples and denoiser. The background is a simple diffuse shader. Unfortunately there is no improvement. I don't quite understand why the bottle is losing its reflection.
https://imgur.com/a/fP0hR

Update: It does look good, when I remove the white background plane and instead use an HDRI as environment texture. But what do I do, when I want my bottle to be on a white surface?

Update 2: In the material settings of the background I unchecked "glossy" under "Ray visibility" so that the light doesn't bounce off the background. Is this a lazy workaround or something common to do?

Update 3: Render with 1000 samples, no denoising. As mentioned above, the light doesn't bounce off the background plane. What do you think about that? link

You shouldn’t need that many samples. Have you got Roughness on the glass? (I haven’t downloaded the blend to check settings) Ensure Roughness is zero.

@cegaton thanks for the hint! will do the next time:) it was my first question here on stackexchange.

Your lighting is using very bright mesh lamps and this isn't helping. You can get much better results by using Area lamps instead. Also, Branched Path Tracing can produce much better results with significantly less samples.
Here are the result I got with just a little tweaking :

This is simply using two Area lamps replacing the mesh lamps (scaled to the same size), each with Emission of 15 and with my own HDR image for environment (yours was missin). I swapped to using Branched Path Tracing, removed Clamping and Light Sampling limits and adjusted the Samples to favour Diffuse and Glossy. I also set the Render AA Samples to 10.

@cegaton I always thought area lamps were much more efficient than mesh lamps but I've just re-tried some comparisons and can't see much difference, to be honest. I'll need to look into that a bit more I think. The presumption was that the render engine could optimise area lamps more effectively - certainly you can set Multiple Importance Sampling on an area lamp - but I can't see much actual difference now. I think the main difference for the original question is to use Branched Path Tracing without Clamping.


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Tool similar to looping tool in 3d max
is there a tool in blender that works similiar to how the looping tool in 3ds max works in which it will calculate my loop to auto clean my geometry. or make a curve i've been using loop tool addon however it it doesn't clean existing geometry just curves. It would be helpful if the tool also does like in max moves the edges to the center between the two existing edges. the tool that i'm looking for is set flow. if there are other tools like this in blender or a good addon to add similiar functions that would be helpful i dont want to spend hrs cleaning geometry if it can be sped up.

enter image description here
so if the geometry is screwy like this
i need to clikc the loop flow a few times to get this
thats what i am looking for

Could you show the tool you are looking for in action? It is hard to understand what you are trying to replicate

Is this what you are looking for? https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/64592/how-do-i-space-quads-evenly/64595#64595

is there a cleaner versions that works closer to the loop tool in 3ds max


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Blender 3 - Make Shadow Catcher pass transparent instead of white
The new shadow catcher is awesome. However the rendered pass has a white background (in the viewport it works as expected).
How can I get a pass with just shadow data, transparency and no white?
Edit: Film -> Transparent also does not work.
Edit: Here is the .blend  file
I found a workaround, which works, but not perfectly:
Masking the shadow with a black and white inverted version of itself. This does however introduce artefacts.

Render setting > Film >Transparent doesn't work?

@MikoCG Sadly no :/

Can you share this file with us?

@MikoCG I added the file in the question :)

You have to multiply the shadow catcher pass on top of your background, see the actual release notes: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/3.0/Cycles#Shadow_Catcher

But I dont want to have a background from the render. I want to add the image with a transparent shadow on for example a website or other graphics in Photoshop
Or do you mean that I just multiply it with composite? I try that out. Edit: Does not work :/

Hello, I was about to ask this same very question here and ran into your post.  I am having the exact same problem.  Previous versions of Blender seem to do it just fine, but Blender 3.0 seems to render ShadowCatcher differently.  Even if I export as OpenEXR to photoshop, the ShadowCatcher render layer is still black and white!  No transparency.  Hoping this question gets answered.

You can reroute any color chanel into alpha chanel. In the example below "Gamma" node manage shadow transparency:

Also it is possible to create shadow of any color:

Hi :). Nice. Could you please add more details about why you used the Invert Node, and separated the Blue channel? Just wanna learn how this stuff works :)). Thanks.

@JachymMichal Full transparent RGBA: R=0, G=0, B=0, A=100. Black RGBA: R=0, G=0, B=0, A=0. White RGBA: R=100, G=100, B=100, A=0. That is why i have to invert white into black. If I will not use Invert Node there will be alpha at the place of shadow. Nevermind what color channel will be set to alpha. It could be Red or Green instead of Blue. Because all color channels are identical when they are parts of black or white or grayscale color.

Hey thanks for the details, much appreciated ;)

The shadow loses all colour information and turns black and white then.
This technique however  does not introduce artifacts.

You are looking for Set Alpha node, probably ...

The shadow also looses all coulor information with that technique :/
However, plugging the shadow catcher pass into the "Set Alpha" - Image parameter does the trick I think. Have not tested it well though. Can you edit your answer to include that?

Yes, color is lost due running data into Alpha channel. Yes, you can plug Shadow Catcher into Image socket, but you will never get naturally looking result (shadow doesn't interact with bg colour). With Set Alpha node you will lose also Emission/Indirect data, if any. Proper compositing is with Math > Multiply node ... see here ... but without transparency. OpenEXR can store all those data for later proper compositing. If you are OK with just a fake for PNG file use my A, adjust color in Set Alpha.


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How can I close the neck gap between two seperate meshes for my detachable head objects?
I want to have separate detachable models for each head on this body as if it were a hat so that I can swap between them and not have to need a completely new model and texture for each character (so they can be modular). So i have each head on a separate layer  and I've generated weights for the body and the head for the same armature but there is a distinct gap between the armature and the head  that also opens when the head is tilted.
I could try making the neck larger so it overlaps into the body but that wouldn't look as if the head is actually attached to the body and there'll probably be clipping issues when moving the head anyways.
If there's a way to have two separate objects act as if they are attached in the same mesh without actually having them be the same object that would be great. Otherwise I'll probably just have to have multiple body models that are more or less the same for each head which would be redundant.

You'll probably have small gaps anyway due to calculation rounding even if weights at the junction are exactly the same. Though you should weight when the vertices are still merged in order to have the same weights.

I've been thinking about a similar problem and how to radically expand modularity in my models; I had no success with maintaining multiple objects, unfortunately, mostly because Blender doesn't seem to have great tools for constraining arbitrary subsets of vertices in a mutli-object but precise way. Maybe it would be reasonable to join the objects, but use a mask modifier to control which head appears (or doesn't appear, more to the point)?

Per my comment above, I've been trying to think about how best to achieve the same thing: introducing radical modularity into my models. I tried a few ways of precisely linking subsets of vertices across multiple objects with Hooks, Constraints, Vertex Parenting, etc, and found them all to be insufficiently flexible, and generally just very clearly not designed to achieve the intended goal. I even invested considerable time taking a mesh with one shape (a MakeHuman human head) and tediously building a ShapeKey that could deform it into an entirely different shape (a lion head -- the one you see below in this answer); that actually works quite well in some ways (you won't get unexpected splits when fitting an Armature to it!), but it also is severely limited in other ways that I found unacceptable (building an incredibly complex ShapeKey that would take hours to re-build forces you to avoid adding new Loop Cuts and similar edits that can alter the topological assumptions the ShapeKey has made, for example).
I hadn't come up with a good solution yet, but reading your question got me thinking: why not drop the requirement that the two objects be separate, and use a Mask to control which head is visible? With this approach, in principle you should have full control using standard Armatures / Mesh Deforms as you'd normally like, and there should be no risk of meshes splitting in unexpected ways.
Here's a very crude first shot at this, which I think basically serves as a strong proof-of-concept that this can work...
First, I'll use this stylized female character I've been working on, and I'm going to set her up to switch between a lion(-lady?) & human-lady head:

Second, I have to join the two objects, of course. Here is what they look like in Rendered View (note that things will be rather ugly throughout this, as I'm not cleaning anything up, including making no attempt to make Materials consistent), where you can clearly see that she's got two heads:

Third, I'll add a Pitchipoy rig (from which I'll use a single bone as an example), make sure the two heads are both joined to the same edge loop, and start selecting the vertices I need to make four vertex groups (Lion Head, Lady Head, Lion, and Lady, where Lion is the Inverse-Select of Lady Head, and similarly Lady is the Inverse-Select of Lion Head):

Fourth, just to illustrate how this should work, I'll assign all the vertices in both Lion Head and Lady Head to spine.004 from the Pitchipoy model, to verify that there's no unexpected breaking of the meshes etc. Here, we see we can turn the Lion Head & Lady Heads simultaneously using the relevant bone in pose mode:

Fifth, I'll just check that it turns in the opposite direction, too. Nothing unexpected here:

Sixth and seventh, we'll now check that we can do similar rotations, but with our Mask modifier choosing whether to show Lion or Lady:

Lastly, here's just an illustration of what the Lion vertex group looks like, visually (and Lady is analogous, of course):

In short, I think this provides a workable flow for using standard tools (Armatures/Mesh Deform, notably) to deform a single mesh that has multiple heads (or other limbs).
However, a few caveats/issues I haven't explored or that need more attention:

I may have been moving a bit too quickly (maybe I had one of the two heads hidden at the time of weighting), so I'll go back and doublecheck this and update my answer, but in my crude test automatic weight assignment for the Armature seemed to get quite confused and only to apply weights to one of the two heads at a time. If this is the case, it should be possible to work around it by fitting each model separately before combining the models and their vertex group weights, I think, but that would certainly be an unwelcome complication (EDIT: On further tests I am unable to replicate this problematic behavior; standard Armature parenting/automatic weighting seems to work just fine on the multi-headed mesh. I don't want to delete this bullet point just yet, though, as -- being unable to replicate it -- I do not yet understand why my original Armature-parenting failed.)
In this test case, I was able to use Mask to select an entire character at once by just inverting the part of the model (whichever head) I did not want. This logic doesn't extend to the case where multiple limbs can be combined in modular fashion, though, or even just where there are more than two heads. I think a combination of Vertex Weight Edit/Vertex Weight Mix modifiers and more modular vertex groups (one on each torso, one on each head, etc) could overcome this (and, failing that, it could certainly be overcome with a custom Python script)
Stuffing everything into a single object like this overcomes the issues you asked about, but severely limits the options Blender provides for organizing your model. You won't be able to move the Lion Head and Lady Head (or Lion / Lady, of course) into separate collections, since they're part of the same object, and if you pursue this far enough, the single model could become so complex that you (or your CPU/GPU, more to the point!) would never want to display all its vertices at once. You'll mostly be limited to Vertex Groups for documenting/organizing what would normally be treated as separate Objects/Collections, and limited to using tools like Mask to avoid displaying too much of the overall mesh data at once

A modular workflow like this stuffed all into one model can make for an enormously complicated single model, so I'm sure there's more to be discovered about when/where it has limitations, but from what I can tell this is a reasonably flexible starting point for achieving the desired effect without troublesome splitting of the modular sub-components of the overall object/character.

I have never done this personally so I cannot guarantee its effectiveness, but you might get something useful by:

set up your models so that there's no gap before any parenting.
create empties at all or most of the vertex locations that the heads and neck intersect.
Parent these empties to the armature so that they move along with the head and neck
set up a vertex hook on both child meshes to move the ripped vertices back into the correct positions, which should be where the empties now are.  Fiddling with proportional falloffs and possibly also specific vertex groups for the hooks and such may be necessary here.

I tried applying a hook to a vertex group containing the single vertex to the empty object in the position I want the vertex to be pinned to and the vertex flies off into the distance instead of being pinned to the empty's position but i guess that could be manually adjusted.  I then tried moving the armature around to see if the vertex will stay in place while the empty isn't moving and it doesn't work anyways.

I want to try removing the vertex from every single vertex group so that the empty is the only thing that determines the location of the vertex but i can only remove groups from selected vertices, there's no way to check what groups a vertex is in from what i can tell. Removing and placing every neck vertex after having the mesh weighted to the armature to ensure that they weren't included into a group before applying the hook modifier would be really tedious.

Alternatively if there was a way to select what vertices to apply the automatic weights to that would also work. I can segregate the vertecies i want to not have any groups applied to and merge it with the mesh after applying the weights so it is actually feasible if this works. (i.e. https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/76951/hiding-vertices-from-automatic-weights-process )

Ok, removed the vertex from all vertex groups except the one that is relevant to the hook and... nothing, nada, the position of the empty didn't constrain it from moving around when the supporting mesh behind it moves.  ¯|(ツ)/¯


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How can I have the bones of my armature find the most direct path when reseting their rotation?
My character does a backflip and therefore the hip and abdomen bones have been rotated "360" degrees. Considering that the idle pose hasn't made these transformations if the end of the backflip animation were to be meshed back into the idle pose; the abdomen and hip bones would need to revert themselves by taking the long way around (i.e. rotate -"360" degrees) to reach their original orientation.
I tacked on a keyframe from the beginning of the animation to the end as a sample of what I assume would happen:

Is there any way to have the bones ignore the specifics of their original rotation to make a direct transition without needing to include a jump between two frames where I flip all the rotations manually?
(I think that would disturb the physics if i did add a 1 frame jump to reset the rotations anyways)
Or am I going about this wrong and there happens to be an option for this issue when animation meshing?

In this scenario I would try some workarounds, like having your backflip rotate from - 360 to 0, or create a copy of the idle in which the hip bones have a 360 rot vaue. But maybe a real Pro has a better answer!

Actually the workaround doesn't seem to work at all. There doesn't seem to be any reference for the bones' rotation relative to their origin. I think that there's an extra layer to this whole thing that only counts transformations made throughout the tweening process and the armature itself isn't relevant to the path of the transforms.

manually rotating the bones -360 in the span of one frame doesn't work but If I Alt-R it does act as if I've reset the rotation of this "extra layer" of the pose that determines the origins.
so what i have to do for each of these bones to implement this workaround is:
1) copy the rotation values from the bone in it's original pose. (i had to paste them into notepad, I'll need to activate the Copy Attributes Menu Addon to do this faster)
2) Alt-R (reset the bone)
3) paste the copied rotation values back into the bone and flip the negatives and positives.

Nvm, the "Copy Attributes Menu Addon" doesn't help with this and i need to manually copy and paste these values into and out of a notepad.  :(


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Cannot get GPU to render Cycles but my CPU can - Why?
I have a 2016 Macbook Pro with AMD Radeon Pro 450. In the system preferences of Blender I have the ‘Cycles Render Devices’ set to ‘Metal’ and ‘AMD Radeon Pro 450’ is checked. When I try to render, Blender freezes. I’ve tried to also place a checkmark by ‘Intel(R) Core i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz’ so both my GPU and my CPU is checked, but still the same result, Blender crashes. What’s weird though is if I uncheck my GPU and only have my CPU checked, Blender does not crash and renders just fine (though terribly slow). What can I do to get Blender to not crash while trying to render with my GPU so I don’t have to wait as long for renders? Just started learning Blender this week, so I’m extremely unfamiliar with everything still.
Linked answer is not a solution to my problem.

I know nothing about Macs but there's an article published last month here which says that "Mac users wanting to take advantage of the new Metal rendering need to have a device running at least macOS Monterey 12.3 or later."

I am running 12.4. Do you know why my question just got closed? The answer that was linked is not at all a solution to my problem.

From that answer it sounds as if your graphics card may not be new enough to be supported or you may need to update your graphics driver but, as I said, I know nothing about Macs.


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Blender rendering slower with second GPU enabled - RTX3070+Quadro M4000
I have an RTX 3070 and a Quadro M4000. Blender shows the (Display) next to the M4000 device in preferences and in task manager the M4000 is listed as GPU 0 and the 3070 GPU 1. Not sure how to reverse that. I have my primary display attached to the 3070 and a secondary to the M4000. Certain applications like Madmapper seem to require the primary display be attached to the rendering GPU so my Idea was to leave the primary on the 3070 and have the M4000 handle secondary display and projectors in addition to providing additional rendering power to Blender.
With the M4000 disabled in Blender it renders 2 seconds faster than enabled.
In task manager I can see the usage of both cards go to 100% at times and then either card will drop to 0 periodically, almost like the issue is the cards struggling to work together.
In the Nvidia Control Panel i have the 3070 set as the OpenGL Rendering GPU.
I tried installing the Quadro driver, but then learned you can only use one driver at a time and reverted to the Studio driver for the 3070 to work. At least I can still use the Desktop Manager application that requires a Quadro card..
Anyone have any insight on this?
Thanks

It's a known bug and it's being worked on.

Do you know more about it or where I can find forum posts about it? Not sure what exactly to search.

See T87836 for a complete list of tasks related to GPU scheduling.  The best place to look for discussions like this is either devtalk or developer


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Weird Boolean Modifier glitch (double faced after intersecting with more than 1 mesh?)
I have a boolean modifier with the following settings that is modifying the object outlined in green with the following settings:

where Cube.018 are the 'ribs' around the edges (they are all joined together in 1 mesh for simplicity

I'm trying to cut some holes in the main object (the ribs actually go into it a bit). As you can see, they all work fine up to when the ribs start intersecting with the extruding cylindrical object (that's actually PART of the green object; it was added in edit mode). Then it just starts going haywire with darker double surfaces (inverted normals? I tried flipping normals already though) and whatnot.
Any help is appreciated
EDIT: Not duplicate because nothing 'goes invisible' and as far as i can tell, nothing connects (although that may or may not be the cause of the double surfaced (?) faces. I also removed doubles for both meshes as well
EDIT 2: As requested by Mr Zak, here are some screenshots in edit mode and the blend file:

Possible duplicate of Boolean Modifier not working

If it's the normals then why not for the ribs before the messed up ones? Also, if the culprit are doubles then why do I remove 0 when I try removing doubles?

Removing doubles depends on threshold of operator.. Normals are messed up if object e.g. has negative scale (Object mode > Ctrl+A to apply) There're no screenshots of meshes in Edit mode, no file to debug (https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/), only screenshot of result. As of now this is a duplicate of linked question because there is general one showing common cases. In all the cases boolean problems are caused by incorrect (non-manifold) geometry, which is described there. In your specific case maybe it's due to intersecting geometry.

Edited (blend and edit mode screenshots)

There isn't any difference between adding geometry in Edit mode or adding in Object mode and then joining objects, result will be the same. There is intersecting geometry in your file - second screenshot from your last edit. Cylinder intersects with the rest of the object which can't by solved by Boolean in this case. If using Boolean, do it on objects with not intersecting meshes or cut manually.

As a workaround, you can try to switch the solver to the old Carve one. The new BMesh solver is usually the preferred solution, as it is way faster, but the Carve onve can handle more of these corner cases. This is what your mesh looks like if you switch the solver type (see the Solver field on the right):

Remember that you need to put the cutting object on a different layer than the source one, and turn off the visibility of the cutting layer, otherwise you always see both objects at the same time.

Interesting. It turned out that if I separated the extruding cylindrical 'sub-mesh' if you will, then everything works out fine. I suppose it has something to do with the fact that I inserted that object in Edit mode instead of Object mode.