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How do I separate duplicated objects?

So when I started modelling this character, I duplicated her leg so that whatever i do with her left leg (in screenshot) is mirrored on the opposite end. Now I want to merge the pelvis, which requires me selecting the edges of both legs. So how do I separate both legs (Cube and Cube.001)?

Did you use "Alt D" to duplicate the leg as an instance or a mirror modifier?

Hello why don't you simply use a Mirror modifier?

We prefer using the mirror modifier rather than instances for that purpose. Instances are for populating, modifiers are for modeling.
You can delete one of the legs, then add a mirror modifier on the other. So long your object origin is in the center, you probably do not need to ever apply it untill you need to model in asymmetry.

I'm assuming you used Alt+D which creates a linked duplicate of an object and copy's any geometry changes in both meshes. You can separate them by selecting on one of the legs, and then going to the Object > Relations > Make Single User > Object & Data menu option. Now you should be able to edit them seperately.


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How do I merge the vertices or edges of two separate objects?
While modelling a character, I modelled the legs separates but now I want to merge both objects at the crotch area, but whenever I press "M" to merge the vertices at the crotch area I get a totally different result. It doesn't matter if I select "At Center" or "At Cursor" or anything, I still get this same result.
So here's what it looks like before pressing "M" (with the faces I want to merge being selected)

And after I press "M"

If I understand correctly what you're trying to do, first make sure that the 2 meshes are in the same object, select your 2 faces and use the CtrlE > Bridge Edge Loops. Then if you want the 2 parts to merge enable the Merge option in the Operator Box:

I tried, but it didn't merge for some odd reason. Here's a drive link to the file itself: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19d3NlIex8wCiyCJy6q_ixLtfSGmB4U2i/view?usp=share_link

Remove the Boolean modifier of Cube.001, join Cube.001 Cube with a Ctrl J, in Edit mode recalculate the normals with Shift N, then Ctrl E > Bridge Edge Loops

Press S, 0 keys to scale the selected vertices to a single point - this point is the Pivot Point, which by default is the Median Point (center). You can press . (dot) key to bring up Pivot Point choice, and switch it to e.g. 3D Cursor.
Keep in mind this will produce two vertices, one for each object. Separate objects can't share a vertex. You could merge both objects into one by selecting both and pressing ✲ CtrlJ, then merging will work…

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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I can't add principled BSDF textures in Blender 4.0
So I'm currently trying to add some materials to my plane, as show below:

But there's a problem with the materials tab. First, the "New" and "Open" options aren't shown beneath the "Surface" tab. So I tried opening the Shading tab and was advised to select Principled BSDF and then press CTRL + SHIFT + T (or in the case of my macbook: CMD + SHIFT + T), but nothing happened. Most forum questions regarding this issue are from Blender 2.9, not the current 4.0 .
What can I do to add textures to my plane?

Do you have the Node Wrangler addon enabled in Preferences > Addons? - Those shortcuts are provided by that addon. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/3.6/addons/node/node_wrangler.html?utm_source=blender-3.6.5#node-wrangler. Also you've already got a material (Material.001) on the plane so you won't see a New button unless you add another material and you won't see an Open button unless you've selected a shader that requires a file input.

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


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My donut sprinkles transformed in an extremely unusual way, possibly due to geometry nodes problem, can someone help?
I had reached part 7 of Blender Guru's latest Donut Tutorial series and I reached a part where... I don't know how to describe this, but here's what happened after some tweaking in the geometry nodes:

I need help fixing this. Here is a link to my project.

I think you are supposed to re-watch and re-do tutorials following the instructions more closely if something like this happens. It takes time, but that's how you learn.

Since this is a beginner tutorial, you should really pay close attention to what he is doing, because you definitely missed some explanations there. First of all, your sprinkles are scaled tiny in Object Mode (and even worse, negative in X and Y axis) and the scale is not reset (Andrew does not show that because he scaled them in Edit Mode and did not need to do it), if you then enable Reset Children they are scaled back to the original size, which is very large. The other thing is, Andrew rotated the sprinkles in Object Mode, but then the applied the rotation (and you did not).

All in all I can only strongly recommend just as @MartynasŽiemys did, to rewatch the tutorial and pay close attention, because we are able to fix it - but mostly by simply re-doing it correctly as shown in the tutorial, which I honestly think is your part in order to learn it, not ours.

Hi, MELT UP.. To be fair, I think a beginner's tutorial should really press home the difference between an transforming an Object, (in Object Mode) and transforming its geometry (in Edit Mode). In terms.  See here for how often it trips folks up, especially when scaling. In the light of all those answers, it might be fair to call this a duplicate. (You weren't to know that.) 'Applying' scale  bakes an object's scale into its mesh, and resets the object's scale to 1.


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Donut Tutorial: My long sprinkles are looking thin and weird. How do I fix this issue?
I've been stuck on this issue for a long time and I've redone the tutorial twice and still get the same results. The long sprinkles are weirdly shaped and aren't sticking properly to the icing layer as shown below:

I have tried CTRL + A and applying scale, but this only gives weirder results as shown:

So I tried selecting the icing plus the cylinders (the long sprinkles), but this only made things worse:

For reference here is the node configuration:

Can someone please help me fix this issue once and for all?

It's been a while so not sure if you have fixed this already, but I had this exact same issue as yours see below:

All I had to do was select the sprinkles and Ctrl+A > Apply Rotation. I can see you tried applying scale, this still needs to be applied so may be you can do this after.


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Smooth shading on model causes weird artifacts

it's more visible with matcap, it looks like it's all distorted metal hit with a hammer, but in edit mode the topology looks smooth for me.
i'm a beginner in modeling/blender, i've tried recalculating normals, adjusting various points, using some addons to "relax" the topology and smoothen it, nothings worked, adding a subsurface modifier set to 1 makes the effects disappear but then the model is too high-res for my low poly game, i want to keep it very performant.
blend file

Have you baked normals from another mesh?

i'm not sure what baking normals mean, but this is an imported model that i modified, i'm just not sure where it went wrong, it didn't have this problem previously

Try to disable "autosmooth" (object data properties tab and normals section) and clear custom normals (object data properties tab and geometry data section)

oh wow that worked perfectly, i don't know what autosmooth did but it surely messed up the normals, thank you very much!

Try to disable "autosmooth" (object data properties tab and normals section) and clear custom normals (object data properties tab and geometry data section)

Answered by lemon


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can't mirror objects on other side
i'm trying to mirror 3 still objects that are: shoulder, biceps and forearm.
i remember it was like this: select all of them, center the cursor to world origin (shift + c), duplicate, scale, x, -1. but the rotation screws up for some reason. same for the legs

maybe apply the rotation of your object before making the mirror

I agree, it seems counterintuitive, how SX-1 or ⎈ CtrlM work in this case.
You can always apply a mirror matrix to the object matrix. Simply select the object and execute the following script.
import bpy
import mathutils

ob = bpy.context.object

mat_mirror = mathutils.Matrix.Scale(-1, 4, (1.0, 0.0, 0.0))
ob.matrix_world = mat_mirror @ ob.matrix_world

# For Blender 2.79 and previous, use the * symbol for matrix multiplication.
#ob.matrix_world = mat_mirror * ob.matrix_world

With mathutils.Matrix.Scale(-1, 4, (1.0, 0.0, 0.0)) we construct a matrix scaled -1 along X.


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What is the best way to make these wire wraps around a mesh?
i'm trying to re-create this type of effect on a body mesh i have modeled
basically lots of metal curves wrapped around the mesh, most of them starting from the chest area (the center, core in the image)
the legs are more complex but i'm not doing that, just want the upper body to be shown.
is there a workflow i could use? i'm not too experienced in blender, i was thinking of curves or maybe particle system like hair, but i'm lost...
btw, it's just the model i want for now, if it's possible to animate it growing out it would also be cool, but i have a way of animating an already modeled mesh

I don't know if there's a "procedural" way to do it, but you could do it manually this way:

Once your body is ready, create a second mesh (plane) over the body.
Activate the Snap / Face mode, with all its options enabled.
Begin to extrude your plane to make your straps. As the Snap is enabled, the vertices will stick to the body underneath.
When you'll have finished you can add a Solidify modifier to give thickness, a Bevel modifier to make the angles round, then a Subdivision Surface modifier to smooth (+ press the Smooth Shading button on the Tools panel > Tools > Edit > Shading.
Add some edge loops to your straps to give them more angular angles.


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Render issue - wrong mesh?
As an absolute beginner in Blender 2.8 I modeled a hammer.
Although the mesh looks completely OK to me, it gets ugly in a few places during rendering.
I have 2 questions: 1.) What did I do wrong?  &  2.) How do I fix this?
I would be very happy about your advice.

The complete Model found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VAgxWriZOUKWnnxoGWMVHuRJk8Jojx9M/view?usp=drive_web

By default Blender tries to smooth all edges, even if they are 90deg. So, you need to tell Blender, do not smooth sharp edges. To do this, you need to go in mesh data settings and check autosmoth in normals section

Tx. This is contructive answer that helps. :-)

The mesh looks TERRIBLE, It contains so many unnecessary vertices, edges, faces. And the faces, NO.
And in the render, you turn the smooth shading on, but in your mesh, the edges, they are probably in flat shading. You don't even get enough bevel edge for the smooth shading, that's a reason for your bad rendering.
You may abused the Boolean tool and accidentally apply it to a high-res mesh. Or you just download, import the mesh from other file format.
There are two way to fix this mess:

Join those unwanted topologies manually
Remesh it by some tool and decimate to a reasonable resolution. (Instant Meshes might be a powerful one)

But the mesh it self isn't that complicated to craft, you might want (and need) to start it over again, with some good topologies.
Here is a good tutorial for this task: Blender Guru - Anvil

Unfortunately, I don't really understand your explanation. But what I mean to have understood is that I should probably still bevel the corners. I will try it out right now. I can understand that I have too many surfaces in other areas, but that is not the subject of my question here.

The faces in what you considered is ugly while rendered, is not support by 3 or 4 vertices, but 10. In Blender, it call N-gons, which is a very itchy problem in render shader. It could be OK in flat shading, but when calculate it as smooth, it just wont work as we thought it could be.

I realize I'm still a little overwhelmed. I'll do the Anvil tutorial you suggested, and I'll get back to the hammer when I've learned more. First of all thank you for your help

You can use subdivide modifier to test whether your mesh is in good topologies. If the result seem to be weird in some certain places, than you should look around that area to fixed the problem.


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Edit mode selection doesn't highlight everything
I am having problem with imported mesh from newer version of blender. Then I select all vertices using A or L, it only highlights vertices in vertices selection mode, but doesn't highlight edges. How can I fix it?

Also in face selection mode it doesn't highlight whole face, only face selection points.

I am working in blender 2.79

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

I think you are looking for this overlays options in the N-Panel:
Blender 2.79

Blender 2.93


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Video renders black
I am using Blender's Video Editor to edit and render videos for YouTube. When I render the video there is audio but the image is black. I've tried restarting a few times, and this has not happened to me before today. If there is an answer to this question already, please post a link.

Yes it is @cegaton

When these problems arise, try "Hiding" the modifier and other strips until your video appears in the viewport.  If that fails, make a temp save and then delete each strip that's not the video proper until a picture appears.  If that also fails, it's possible Blender cannot read the video's codec or some other problem.  Convert the video to e.g. AVI, with an external application.

@Edgel3D The image appears on the view port but when I render it out the final video is black.

When rendering from the VSE make sure to select Blender's internal Render,  Also in the render panel at extreme right (little camera icon near the top left) open the "Post Processing" tab and see that the "Sequencer" box is ticked.  Without this you'll be rendering the 3D window, not the VSE.  If anything is in the Compositor and that box is ticked also, then you could be interfering with the output.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/81225/blank-final-rendering

I seem to have figured it out, I had lossless output checked and that causes it to render out as a black image.

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


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UV unwarping stretch
I am trying to make a shoe model but I have a problem with materials. how ever I unwarp it, it gave me stretch in some places from the map. please, take a look on my project file and try to find the problem.

Looks like your material isn't using the UV map, but generated coordinates. Try changing the following in your Material Nodes:

(I can't test the change as your attached blend file doesn't include your texture)

What a quick answer! I tested it and worked as it should. Thanks for help @Nicola appreciate that.

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


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colored Metal material
I did make an xperia XZ mobile phone on blender and everything worked well until I started with materials. I could not make that Metal material with right colores. And when I used a image texture I lost shine effect from glossy node. I want a result as like as the one on pictures down.

Not sure if I am understanding correctly. Also not sure what render engine you are using. If its cycles I recommend downloading 2.79 (if you don't have it already) and use the Principled BSDF shader with the Metallic set to 1 and play with the roughness value until you are happy with the results.
Also keep in mind you need a light source to actually reflect the light. I used an HDRI in this image but you can just use a plane mesh and put an emission shader on it. Then position it how you like best.

Perfect result. Thank you guys. I used the glossy shader and forgot to add an HDR environment in mine.


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Bone heat weighting error after all solutions
I have checked almost all the questions about that here but I could not find any right solution for my case. I did remove doubles and applied all modifiers dissolved vertices. I will attach the blender file so you can open it and try by your self.
Thanks in advance

https://www.dropbox.com/s/yk6rvcwtdd37ibx/Char01.blend?dl=0


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color grading on white background
I am doing a video in blender with two versions, one in black background and one with white background. The problem is with the white one because it feels like the white color reflect on objects and make it brighter and I need the background to be 100% white.
I applied the white color from the world panel>Background>color>Pure white and the color type is Filmic.
Is the problem with the way of making the background or I can grad it in better way?

World background affects the color of the objects' materials if their shaders allow color changings after light bounces (diffuse, glossy shaders etc) which can make materials look flat. You can render scene on whatever world environment you setup (procedural sky, hdri map etc) with transparent background and then add white background in compositing.

Hi guys and thanks. Now I am trying to render one without diffuse and glossy ray visibility. I would try also the transparent background it looks good enough to solve my problem. I tried with background in compositor but I think I did not match that value 17.


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Powder simulation
I am trying to do a simulation for a powder spread out of capsules. I did a particle system alone and a smoke alone.
But I had two problems now. I need to make the smoke react with the particles to be more real like if I can make every particle have a little smoke around it?
And I couldn't change the color for the smoke even!? I did put too much light just to make it like that and I need it white.

Are you using blender internal or blender cycles render ?

I am using cycles until now. @ShamsEl-Deen

There's a way to either base smoke physics on particles simulation (choosing particles system as flow source in the smoke emitter settings) or make particles follow smoke using Smoke Flow force field, see https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/52257/smoke-physics-interacting-with-particles

Could you give a download to the .blend file?

When you say react do you mean that you want the smoke to apply force ( and thus generate movement) to your particles or do you mean you want the shader to produce a different look when the particles are in the smoke?

Try to use Molecular Script instead https://pyroevil.com/molecular-script-download/

I created an example Scene with a smoke Simulation: You have to select the flow object and then change the flow source from mesh volume to Particle system

and there you can also change the smoke color
So there it is.


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making holes in shape
I am trying to make holes out from a pattern. It will be like a star and holes will be a word logo.
I am thinking to make the text as SVG then make a manual pattern in Blender and use Boolean Modifier.
_
Problems:
-It will be flat and the word will not follow the mesh (the second IMG).
-It will take a lot of time to make a pattern in blender.
I liked the one as image texter if it can be done in some how?!
And thanks!


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Replace material and texture with python in BGE
I've a game project done with BGE and i've done a menu where the user can choose the character and the characters have only different material and texture.
I'm not able to change material and texture with python, i just know how to replace the mesh with logic bricks but i want to keep the mesh and the armature of the character.
Any advices?
Thanks for the help

UPBGE has a Replace Material API, but regular BGE does not. However, you can replace the material with a custom GLSL shader.
Changing textures is not doable, but you can replace the images used in a material. A simple python function that does this is:
def show_picture(obj, path, mat_id=0, tex_id=0):
    '''Loads a picture into a texture'''
    prop_name = 'SHOW_PICTURE{}:{}'.format(mat_id, tex_id)
    if prop_name not in obj:
        tex = bge.texture.Texture(obj, mat_id, tex_id)
        obj[prop_name] = tex
    else:
        tex = obj[prop_name]
    raw = bge.texture.ImageFFmpeg(path)
    if raw.status == 0:
        # Error in loading image
        bge.log.error("Unable to load image at {}".format(path))
        raise ValueError("Unable to load image at {}".format(path))

    tex.source = raw
    tex.refresh(True)

Where tex_id is the texture slot of the image.


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Rendering AMD Radeon R7 360
I am using this graphic card, but I don't know how to render via this GPU?
Is it possible? And how to do it because I don't see in options to choose my GPU.
Tnx

The opencl support needed to use an AMD card is not 100%. The list of supported cards hasn't been updated for a while, with some other cards also being reported to work to varying degrees.
First check that your gpu drivers are up to date. The opencl libraries provide the list of available hardware that blender uses to offer available GPU options.
While I'm not sure if the devs are interested in bug reports relating to opencl, they generally appreciate reports of what hardware works and what doesn't.

Go to File -User preference
Select system (to the Right on the menu).
Comtute device(down to the left, on the menu) - select CUDA, then your graphic card.
Then use Cycles Render, go to Render-> Device-> select GPU instead of CPU.

CUDA only works with nvidia cards, the user has an AMD card.


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Moving armature and bones using python code
I am very new to blender and coding in python (less than 6 months). Can somebody please help me by suggesting how to select move, and manipulate armatures/bones?
I have downloaded a rigged person from blendswap and I am trying to program him into specific positions using python. This is for part of a project where the user inputs variables to define a crash scene in a CSV file. For instance they would specify in the file that the crash victim lands prone, in the fetal position etc. I have a CSV file import add-on I downloaded to handle this.
Ultimately then I would need to key frame the rig's position once it is programmed, so the person looks like they are getting hit by a car and falling into the defined position. Which I am also having trouble with...
Thank you for your help!


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How to build surface from lists?
I have lists of lists as those of the image

and to graph them in other software I get a surface like the following one,

the problem is that the image is very little defined and I would like to render it in blender, the doubt that I have is: can to represent this surface in blender from the lists I have ?. I have not found something similar on the web so encourage me to ask. Any help is welcome, thanks in advance.

Simple bmesh script to create z grid from list of lists..

From what I can see assume: The data is n lists of m members, which can be layed out in an (n - 1) x (m - 1) grid.
Simple test script, paste into blank text, and "run script". Note made no effort to scale this, can be done after running from dimensions / scale properties.
import bpy
import bmesh
from mathutils import Vector
context = bpy.context
me = bpy.data.meshes.new("Surface")
bm = bmesh.new()

# rows x cols list of lists.
data = [[1, 2, 3, 3],
        [0, 1, 2, 3],
        [0, 0, 1, 2],
        [0, 0, 0, 1]]

rows = len(data)
cols = len(data[0])
# make a grid for easy skinning
bmesh.ops.create_grid(bm,
        x_segments = cols,
        y_segments = rows)
# assign list coords to grid.
bm.verts.ensure_lookup_table()
for row in range(rows):
    i = row * rows
    for col in range(cols):
        index = i + col
        vert = bm.verts[index]
        vert.co = Vector((row, col, data[row][col]))
bm.to_mesh(me)
# add an object to the scene.
ob = bpy.data.objects.new("Surface", me)
scene = context.scene
scene.objects.link(ob)
scene.objects.active = ob

thank you very much for your help and the time you have spent resolving my doubt. I want to tell you that the solution you propose worked wonders for me.


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Graph in blender a function of two variables,
I would like to know if there is any way to be able to graph in blender a function of two variables, for example Sin (x y2) for the domain of x from -3 to 3, the domain of y from -2 to 2, to get something like the following image:

Clear this without axes, nor box,to later add some material and other things. I searched on YouTube for something similar but without success
I hope someone can help me

How can I generate an object from a mathematical function? may also be of help.

There is an addon shipped by default with Blender called Add Mesh: Extra Objects capable of doing this. It is disabled by default and can be activated from the User Preferences dialog.
Start by opening File > User Preferences > Addons then search for Extra and activate the Add Mesh: Extra Objects addon.
Then in the 3D View press Shift+A > Add > Mesh > Math Function > Z Math Function or XYZ Math Function depending on what you want.
Introduce the function equation in the corresponding fields and adjust precision as necessary.
See related question for more details.


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How can i merge one object smoothly into another while animating?

so i have a baby as one object and a toilet as one object and the baby grows. at the end it is supposed to have the toilet as a head like the first grown person on the right.
how can i merge the toilet head with the fully grown baby at the end while animating so that i can keep on animating it as one object together and so that the colours are a nicer gradient?
does it work somehow with shape keys? but then i'd have to rebuild the whole toilet and i'd need it to look (at least almost) exactly like the first so copying the toilet would be kind of necessary.
if someone could help me that would be fantastic. :)

Shape keys would be one possibility, although I'm not sure this could be entirely done with 3D models alone. It may require some composition and some fading transitions made in post production

@Lisa LOL What a character concept. Is there any symbolism behind it? :)

@Paul Gonet I dub it the Trump effect.

@PaulGonet thank you! :D in the video you only see those two characters, the grown up toilethead person and the baby transforming into one and the camera pans to show another toilet next to the grown up baby so it's back to the starting frame and the video loops and that way you can imagine there being an entire endless row of toilets and people bearing a kid and making them grow up the same way they did. for me personally it is about unhealthy mechanisms you learn from parents and how they are passed on in the family. some i talked to also see a more general negative view on humanity. :)

You may use shape keys to make such animation, but it demands joining the objects together.

Join the meshes with Ctrl+J. Connect the meshes' vertices in Edit Mode. Try to keep the topology clean. After making it one solid mesh add two additional edge loops (Ctrl+R) and place them as pictured below. These will be helpful for further creasing.

Go to Data header-->Shape Keys panel and add two shape keys being in Object Mode. Select the second one, press apply shapekeys in edit mode button and change its value to 1.000. Select the bottom of the character's neck in Edit Mode and press Shift+S-->Cursor to Selected (with a 3D cursor as a pivot point set). Use a border select tool (B) to select all the body vertices. Then press Ctrl+Num- to unselect the very top edge loop. Press S,0 to scale vertices. Slide the edge loops pictured above (press G twice) to crease the edge of a toilet. Your transformation animation is ready.

Now being in Object Mode apply the transformations to the object (Ctrl+A). Change the value of the shape key to 1.000 and keyframe it with I. Select the object and move it down (G,Z). Place it on the grid floor, then press I-->Location. Now go further on a timeline, press Alt+G to reset location, then keyframe the location again with I. Change the value of a shape key to 0.000 and keyframe it again.

Here's the .blend

OH! i only just saw this!! i solved it really complicatedly with a scaled down body hidden inside the toilet in the final video but your approach makes so much more sense and looks MUCH smoother! im sorry i didnt see this sooner! maybe i'll redo it this way. anyways, thank you so much for this tutorial! it makes me really happy! :)


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remove poles from sphere?

hello is it possible to remove these poles on the wireframe and somehow structure the wireframe differently? ive tried deleting faces but it still draws the looks to the pole of the modelled sphere.
my aim is to have the object in a wireframe but have it look even and smooth without drawing the viewers eye to one part of the object.
does anyone know something?

Welcome to Blender.SE. Here's a possibly related question: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/70810/how-to-avoid-the-wrinkle-at-the-poles-of-the-uv-sphere/70862#70862: see if it can help.

Use the "Remesh" modifier.
Play with the settings until you get the level of detail that you want.

thank you so much! i thought i'd have to do it all again


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How can i add an extra object to a mesh/armature that i have forgotten to add to the mesh before i added the bones?
i have a character that i parented to an armature but now i forgot to add one little object on the head beforehand. now i have tried parenting the extra object to the character and it works fine to move it in objectmode but whenever i move it in pose mode (and render it) the extra object wont come along
can anyone help me with this? :)

i couldn`t find where to delete a question but i have the answer for the problem, the object was still a bezier curve that's why it didnt work

I propose you do not delete the question, and enhance a bit your answer as it can be useful for others


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Blender crashes during normals bake
my blender crashes with out any warning message while baking high poly on low poly normals map in cycles.
Any way to make it work?

My hardware:

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8600K CPU @ 4.3 GHz 6 cores
Ram: 8.0 GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Vram- 4.0 GB
OS: Win 10 64 bit.

Your ray distance is too low. You have it set to zero. bump it up a little. You can go really small, but zero is too far. You might recall a part of Blender Guru's normal bake tutorial on Youtube where he had a hole in the anvil that was getting weird artifacts. He had to shrink the ray distance, if I recall. But the distance must have length. Let me know if this solves the problem.

Is it crashing? or just taking a long time I've had bakes last up to ten minutes it'll say Blender is not responding at the top of the window but eventually the bake will finish. I would recommend using a cage for normal map bakes.

Nothing wrong with you hardware, maybe just close other programs while baking and maybe lower the poly count of your mesh and then just use a subdivision modifier so it's less laggy. Also the more windows you have open just cause more lag so just keep it to the baking window and close the 3d view and node view windows.


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I can't figure out how to make PNG file with UV map
I've am finishing up my model. But I want to paint the textures on it, but I don't understand how do I extract image with unwrapped object appearing on image so I would have some kind of guidelines on where should I paint

First, you should try the latest version of blender (2.81 at the moment), then just go the the UV menu (in the UV Editor) and select "Export UV Layout" : you 'll be asked to choose a file name, image type AND a resolution so you can paint on it in an external paint program.

But If you want, you can also just go the Texture Paint mode, create an empty texture Map and directly paint on your model ! Have Fun !


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Boolean Difference doesn't create inset faces
I have problem with Boolean difference modifier in blender 3.6.
I am trying to make inset shapes in my model.

However after applying applying modifier with these settings

Boolean doesn't create inset faces, only holes in my model.

I never had this kind of problem with blender before. So maybe anyone had similar problem and knows how to figure it out. Thank you

Try Solver > Fast. If that doesn't work, make sure all objects have the normals facing in the correct direction.

Thank, you Solver > Fast solved the issue


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Different behaviour in script compared to Python Console
I'm running a script in Blender 2.79b to save 2D proyections of a 3D face model with annotated facial landmarks, I apply random transformations to the mesh and the landmarks, render the mesh and save a file with the proyected landmarks in image coordinates.
I've tested this in the console and it runs fine, but the function ray_cast behaves differently if I run the script (I've tried running it from the Text Editor, with exec from the Python Console and from the linux terminal)  rather than writing it line by line in the Blender Python Console.
Here is the code
from bpy_extras.object_utils import world_to_camera_view
import bpy
from mathutils import Matrix, Vector

import math
import numpy as np
import csv
import os
import time

print(os.getcwd())

MODELS_PATH = "models"
IMAGES_PATH = "images"
MODEL_ITERS = 1
IMAGE_SIZE = 500

np.random.seed(0)

class Mod:
    def __init__(self,row):
        self.name = row[0]
        self.values = row[1:]

    def iterValues(self):
        for i in range(len(self.values)//3):
            yield Vector(tuple(map(float,self.values[i*3:i*3+3])))

    def getFileName(self):
        return os.path.join(MODELS_PATH,"{}.obj".format(self.name))

    def getNumberedOutPath(self,i):
        return os.path.join(IMAGES_PATH,"{}_{}.png".format(self.name,i)),os.path.join(IMAGES_PATH,"{}_{}.pts".format(self.name,i))

## Set Environment
bpy.data.worlds['World'].light_settings.use_environment_light = True
bpy.data.worlds['World'].light_settings.environment_energy = 1

## Set camera
cam_c = bpy.data.cameras['Camera']
cam_o = bpy.data.objects['Camera']
# Location 0,0,3
cam_o.location = (0,0,3)
# Rotation 0,0,0
cam_o.rotation_euler = (0,0,0)
# Focal Length -> 85
cam_c.lens = 85
scene = bpy.data.scenes['Scene']
bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].render.resolution_x = IMAGE_SIZE
bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].render.resolution_y = IMAGE_SIZE
bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].render.resolution_percentage = 100

## Define lighting
lamp_o = bpy.data.objects['Lamp']
lamp_l = bpy.data.lamps['Lamp']

# Load models
with open('mod_coords.csv') as ifile:
    reader = csv.reader(ifile)
    models = [Mod(row) for row in reader]

# For each model
for model in models:
    m_path = model.getFileName()

    ## Load object
    bpy.ops.import_scene.obj(filepath=m_path)
    obj = bpy.context.selected_objects[0]

    obj.location = (0, 0, 0)
    obj.rotation_euler = (0, 0, 0)

    for m in obj.material_slots:
        m.material.specular_intensity = 0

    # Normalize object
    vts_np = np.array([e.co for e in obj.data.vertices])
    desp = vts_np.mean(axis=0)
    sca = vts_np.max(axis=0) - vts_np.min(axis=0)
    dx, dy, dz = desp
    s = 1 / sca[1]
    M1 = Matrix(((s, 0, 0, -s * dx), (0, s, 0, -s * dy), (0, 0, s, -s * dz), (0, 0, 0, 1)))

    obj.data.transform(M1)

    # For each random example
    for i in range(MODEL_ITERS):
        rx = np.random.uniform(-0.610865, 0.610865)
        ry = np.random.uniform(-1.5708, 1.5708)
        rz = np.random.uniform(-0.523599, 0.523599)
        Rx = Matrix.Rotation(rx, 4, 'X')
        Ry = Matrix.Rotation(ry, 4, 'Y')
        Rz = Matrix.Rotation(rz, 4, 'Z')
        # Apply rotation
        R = Rx * Ry * Rz
        obj.data.transform(R)
        obj.data.update()

        Mf = R * M1
        ## Get points
        points_list = []
        for p in model.iterValues():
            p = Vector(p)
            if math.isnan(p.x):
                points_list.append([-1,-1])
            else:
                tp = Mf * p

                # position
                x, y, z = world_to_camera_view(scene, cam_o, tp) * IMAGE_SIZE
                y = IMAGE_SIZE - y
                # visibility
                o = cam_o.location
                d = tp - o

                r_bool, r_loc, _, _, r_obj, _ = scene.ray_cast(o, d)
                print(o,d,r_bool,r_loc)
                # check if r_loc y tp are equal within error
                error = 1e-1
                visib = (r_loc - tp).magnitude < error
                if not visib:
                    print(r_loc,tp)
                points_list.append([x,y] if visib else [-2,-2])

        ## Random Lighting
        rx = np.random.uniform(-5, 5)
        ry = np.random.uniform(-5, 5)
        r_energy = np.random.uniform(0.1, 2)
        r_shadow = np.random.uniform(0.1, 10)
        lamp_o.location = (rx, ry, 2.5)
        # TODO apply energy and shadow

        ## Save image and points
        im_path, pts_path = model.getNumberedOutPath(i)
        # Render image
        bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].render.filepath = im_path
        bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True)
        # Save points
        with open(pts_path,'w') as ofile:
            ofile.writelines([
                "version: 1\n",
                "n_points: {}\n".format(len(points_list))] +
            ["{} {}\n".format(x[0],x[1]) for x in points_list] +
            ["}\n"]
            )

        ## Undo random rotation
#        R.invert()
#        obj.data.transform(R)

#    bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')
#    obj.select = True
#    bpy.ops.object.delete()
    break

Here is an example of the proyected mesh

But every single call to ray_cast returns False. If I comment out the last 5 code lines and add a break after the first model loop I get to keep the model loaded in the 3D View with the applied transformation (this way I get some debugging capabilities :D). As I'm printing the origin and destination variables passed to ray_cast I can call again that function from the Python Console, and the result differs from the one obtained running the script, ray_cast returns True and the colission coordinates matches the target point if there is no occlusion or another point otherwise (This is the desired functionality).
If I rerun the script keeping the first Object and overlaying the second one (as the random seed is fixed), the ray_cast function works as expected, but the render produces some artifacts due to both meshes overlaying. My first hypothesis was Blender had no time enough to apply the transformations so I called time.sleep(5) after loading and transforming the model, but the result was the same.
I have no clue about what to do. Has anyone came by a similar situation? Am I doing something wrong?
Thanks a lot!

I couldn't figure out the reason for the error, but I could overcome it by calling ray_cast model's method instead of the scene's method.
r_bool, r_loc, _, _, r_obj, _ = scene.ray_cast(o, d)

becomes
r_bool, r_loc, _, _ =  obj.ray_cast(o, d)

As I already knew the object I wanted the ray to hit.
I hope this might help somebody.

Object ray cast uses object space, (where (0, 0, 0) is the object origin) whereas Scene raycast (AFAIK) uses global space, where (0, 0, 0) is the scene or global origin.. o and d, the origin and direction of the ray, in examples above would need to be adjusted accordingly for objects with non identity matrix worlds.

Thank you for your comment. In this case, both object and scene share the (0,0,0) origin, so I don't think that should be the issue.


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Materials not rendering
I have been searching online for the answer to this for a few hours now and I just can't get this resolved on my own.
The materials are not showing up in the final render, they show as gray scale but show up colored in everything else. I have made sure the materials are made in Cycles render and that there are no over riding of materials in the renderlayers tab.

You are filtering color channels in the Image Viewer, currently only the red channel is being displayed.
Return to Color and Alpha mode, your image is fine, no need to re-render.

I knew it had to be something so simple! This resolved my issue, Thank you for your time!

Don't just thank in the comments, if an answer helped you upvote it; and if you feel it solved your problem consider marking it as accepted.


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Bake ONE material with two image textures into a texture
I have a book page. There is one Material on that page with 2 image textures, the first one is the paper material, the second one is text, well-positioned on the page.
I am able to bake it correctly but the first image texture (the paper material) is not visible. The result is only the text with black.
What can I do against that? I cannot find a workaround.
I need to do this for unity.
Let me know if you need anything to answer this.

How did you mix the two textures onto the same object?
A screenshot of the shader nodes structure might help....


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Model Edge Beveling Problem
I was modeling my model in Blender, and I tried to bevel the edges of model. I haven't marked all vertices and it didn't make the bevel same on both sides.
I realized it but I cant undo it anymore.
On the first pic is model itself.

On second there is right side which is kind of ok.

On third there is left side which is ugly and not same as the right it is all messed up.

Can I somehow copy right side and paste it to left? Or how can I make it same again? Cant I just delete vertices and make it boxy again? There must be a simple fix.

It should be easy to mirror good part after removing the other one with Mirror modifier. First you'll need to remove bad side, looks like edge in the middle should be made continous (with K (knife tool) or J (Connect Vertex Path tool). Then you can delete and re-mirror the mesh

Ok thanks you so much i will try my best to repair it.

Isnt there any way to remove bevel effect completly and make it all sharp edges?


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Mesh from CSV data
I trying to create a mesh from GPS lat&long coordinates combined with WiFi RSSI data. When imported the data looks like this

I've been playing around with different ways to create a solid mesh, but none seem to work very well.
I was hoping to achieve something like a heatmap geography of a route where strong WiFi signals show as spikes.
Along the lines of what I wanted to achieve:

There is an abundance of similar questions here in the blender stackexchange
(visualization of data). Please use the search. Here is even a question using the same image as you: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/76535/create-model-from-xyz-data-points?rq=1. If nothing matches please explain your data in more detail

This is going to depend on input data are lat and long  in a simple grid pattern,?

I've tried working from that post and it just seems to output a line with no faces.
@batFINGER What do you mean with a simple grid pattern?

In your example pic the x, y of mesh is a grid.  The "heat" z isn't.  If the data is ordered in lat long grid then making a mesh like above is pretty simple. If the lats and longs are a  willy nilly hodge podge, maybe not so simple,

The lat long should be prober, but yeah the heat (rssi) is all over the place. Any pointers on where to go from here would be greatly appreciated.


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Video on "Empty Image" doesnt show in Render?
I added in different random videos (behold first screenshot) on an Empty Image Plane to see if it was the video or its position but the rendered view doesnt show my video even though it runs fine in the program. what am i missing?
any help much appreaciated!


text:
The Video I assigned to a Material is not running, where is the problem?

I rendered a shadeless version of the Animation i made and want to now set it into the TV in my animation so that there is a 2D version of the same scene running in the TV. You can already see the grey shape of the anglerfish in the square TV dummy thing but it isnt moving when i go along the timeline and render.
what i did was unwrap the UV map of the screen and assigned the video to the material that is the screen part. ive already tried "match movie length". Does anyone know where the problem could be?

possible duplicate of https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/105750/image-sequence-texture-no-preview ?


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How can I stop a cyclic animation?
I animated fish that are swimming in a tank with cyclic fin movement. Now I want the fish to die and their fin movement to stop, but I cant get the cyclic animation to stop without the cycle to dissappear completely.
Is there a way to keyframe a beginning and end of a cyclic animation or some other way to make it stop? All help appreciated!

@cegaton thank you!


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Boid Particles come out above the mesh

I'm trying to keep the boid particles confined in between the double wall of the house (behold image) but they keep coming out above or next to the plane itself.
When I move the plane away from the house object they come directly out of the mesh just fine. I have Collision Physics on the house.
Why are the particles not coming directly out of the plane inside the house? does it have something to do with the Collision Physics and how can i change that?

So you have a mesh object for the double-walled house, and a plane (another mesh) object, to emit the boid particles? If so, is the particle emitting plane position in between the two walls?

Yes, it is. the particle mesh is the orange line you see in the picture @Dazotaro


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Weight Paint not working on one character
I've assigned armatures and weight painted several characters in this file and now it's not working for this one character. Everytime i try to weight paint it i see the verticies like in edit mode and can't draw or subtract on any parts of the mesh. does anyone know what is happening here?

It is actually simple why it doesn't work, no need to worry, you just somehow pressed or activated this button:

This function allows you to select only vertices you want and you will be able to draw weights only for those vertices that are selected. It's basically a mask function for weight painting.
Turn it off by clicking it and it should let you draw again (it is also the reason why you see vertices)

ooh haha :') thank you so much!


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All my characters have lost their bone vertex groups. Is there a way to bring them back?
I worked on my project on a different laptop yesterday, then took the new file back to my own computer today. While working on the other laptop i didnt do any character animation, only camera animation, materials and lights.
Now that i opened the file on my own laptop again the armatures are moving as they should but all the meshes are in restmode, being dragged along by their armatures. Their bone vertex groups have dissappeared. Does anyone know if there's a way to bring them back easily or do i have to do everything i did yesterday all over again.. ? Any help very much appreaciated <3

Hello could you please share one object of your original file so that we see if it also loose its vertex groups? https://pasteall.org/blend/

@moonboots https://pasteall.org/blend/8d5525d03f834706bf372a31c90840dc here i added one character from the original file where the vertex groups are fine and the same character with the missing vertex groups. is that what you meant?

I don't know why you have lost the vertex groups, this is weird, also if you are able to append the good object with its vertex groups why don't you do it for all of them on your own computer? Edit: If you want to copy the vertex groups from an object to another you can use Copy Vertex Groups to Selected: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/45898/how-do-i-transfer-only-single-vertex-groups-between-objects


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How to reorder vertex index?
I have a particle system that uses a mesh as an emitter. It emits from the Vertices in a non-random order, and (I assume) it uses the vertex index to determine that order.
It works as intended, with the particles appearing in an orderly fashion, except for one thing: the top line appears first, then it starts from the bottom and makes its way to the top.

(Notice how the top line is already there and the rest of the particles are still appearing from bottom to top)
I don't want the top line to appear first. I want it to start from the bottom and work its way to the top, and the top line is the last one that should appear.
For that I guess I need to change the indices of the top vertices so they are last and not first.
Any way I can do that? It can be manually, although I would prefer an 'automatic' solution.
Thanks.

Have you tried deleting this row in edit mode and re-extruding it ?

Yes, but it didn't work. The particles still spawn in the top line first.

Try to Mesh ⇾ Sort elements and then try available options. I suppose  Reverse is that you are looking for.

I had to try a few options but eventually one worked as intended. Thanks!


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Settings to make viewport playback drop frames in order to keep up with actual animation speed?
I'm animating a character in 24 fps, but my computer is only able to playback at 20fps at the most in this scene, so when I play the animation in the viewport it's actually much slower than it should be. This makes it harder to animate because I don't actually see the animation in the actual speed it should be in.
Of course I understand this is a technical thing: my computer is not capable of drawing 24 frames per second in this particular scene and nothing will change that. A work around is to hide other objects and simplify as much as possible so the computer can keep up with the frame rate.
But there's another possible solution that other softwares use (3ds Max, for exemple): to simply drop frames in order to keep up with the real animation speed. So even though the computer can't draw 24 frames per second, it draws as much as it can but skips a few frames as not to lag behind the "real speed" of the animation. This solution also has it's down sides, but in many cases it's better to drop frames than to preview the animation in 'slow motion'.
My question is: is there a setting somewhere in Blender that does that (makes the viewport playback drop frames to keep up with the 'real speed' of the animation)? Being able to toggle between the two modes (drop-frame or non-drop-frame) would be really good.

Look on a timeline view.  There's a dropdown labelled "Playback".  If you click that, you'll get a pop-up menu.  In that menu, there's a field labelled "Sync".  Click in that field and select "Frame Dropping".

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


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Green and red color on my baked normal map appearing

Hi, it is me again. This time, I am having an issue with normal map baking. I have random red and green on my normal map that which are creating strange white shapes on my model. I tried a lot of things like playing with the ray distance and margin. I also make sure that my high poly model is not overlapping my low poly model.
Now, I am stuck with this, do you have any idea?
By the way, I am doing this character for a video game, is normal map baking on low poly character the better method or should I do it an other way?
Thank you!

Sometimes the ray distance might not work and will create errors like these. I had the same problem where I will adjust the ray distance and I'll still get these red and green errors. So when this happens, there is the cage method.

Duplicate the low poly mesh and make sure it overlaps the low poly and high poly model and rename it "Cage".

With the Cage selected, go into Edit Mode and face selection mode. Press A to select all of the faces.

Press Alt + S to scale it in the normals. Make sure to hold down Shift so to scale it slowly. Scale it so it encapsulates the entire high poly mesh.

Now, depending on your model, you may have to go into Edit Mode with the cage object so that no detail in the high poly is poking through the cage.
Example: In this image you can see a part of the high poly poking through the cage. So edit the cage so that it covers it entirely.
From this:

To this:

Now go to the Bake panel, click the check box next to Cage and select your cage object.

Bake and see if the green red errors disappear. You may have to edit your cage object again to cover up certain areas the high poly model. Keep editing and baking until your normal map is error free!

Hi Azul, I am sorry for the late answer, I didn't saw your comment and it corrected almost all my errors! Thank you very much! I think that my model is having too many problems to be "bakeable", I will just give up for this one, but I will remember your solution, thank you!


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How to make a warped spacetime grid?
I'm trying to create a warped space curve like examples here. Any ideas? I can't seem to get my plane to dip.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/51607/make-a-mesh-plane-deform-on-collision-and-stay-deformed https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/115049/how-to-make-a-water-vortex/ https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/111986/simple-way-to-create-a-curved-tunnel-between-two-planes/112004#112004

I think what you need is proportional editing. If it is activated, Moving the central vertex down will pull surrounding vertices also, while using the chosen proportional editing falloff setting.
More Complicated ideas:

In the offchance that you actually want to generate a mathematically precise surface, you should look at the Extra Objects addon and Add a Mesh-> Math function.
There are also many many other alternative Solutions that might be useful for different applications, such as the Displacement modifier or maybe even a Force field acting on a soft body by physics animation....


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How Do You Remodel a Low Poly Game Model for a Cinematic?
I am attempting to remodel some the characters from Overwatch to make them look the way they did in the cinematics. The models are very low poly in comparison to the models used for the cinematics. If you look here and scroll down, you can see the comparisons for the in game model and cinematic model. What I am wondering is how to achieve this. Any help would be very much appreciated. Here is the file for one of the characters if needed:


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What Texture Map is This?
I downloaded an fbx which came with a diffuse and normal map along with a third map which I really don't know what it is. Also, how would I hook this up to a Principled BSDF?

Most likely it is an image composed of 3 black and white images which were put into 3 color channels of this image, one into R, another into blue etc. One can only guess what exactly those initial images were for, it depends on project quite a bit. It could be roughness + metallic + ambient occlusion, but not necessarily

Thanks for the info, I guess I'll have to try a few things.

I am not sure what the texture is, but the color needs to go to Metallic, Specular, and Anistropic with the alpha in the roughness.


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How do I model a padded surface?
I'm trying to model a padded room like this one:
or like this one:
How is this achievable? I am also going to use a subdivision surface modifier in the end.

Here's a tutorial on a similar patter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TazuIOUgrEI

The final purpose would make a difference to some of the method:  Hi / Lo poly? Game? Close-up?

@RobinBetts thank you for responding, it needs to be high poly.


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Change Blender Render Save Default to RGB from RGBA
Is there a way to change the default for saving a render to RGB instead of RGBA? This saves me disk space when working with renders that don't have an alpha-channel anyways.
I can't find anything on it under Edit > Preferences

You need to save your preferences as a startup blend-file.

Create new default blend-file
Change the image format settings in Output Properties > Output
Save the blend-file
State the blend-file as the default startup blend-file Info Editor > File> Defaults > Save Startup File

Make sure you're in the saved blend-file when you state the blend as the startup default!
Note: I'm not sure if this overwrites previously saved blend-file defaults.
Unfortunately I think not. But it should for all future saved blends.


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Do meshes have to be connected?
I'm new to Blender and I was wondering, do meshes have to be joined?
In the image below, I found it a lot easier to just snap the edges to the top face instead of joining all the vertexes. Is that a correct way to do it?

Your approach to connectedness is fine for your solid objects example today.  Especially true if the object is not animated and not bending.  Your use probably will not run into problems for the activities of your project. (Just a informal guess, since those activities are not specified above)  If you were to animate a organic face with an armature for closeups ... then a whole different set of standards might apply.

Just make sure you know how to extrude faces of a mesh. You should be able to make a choice to save you time and energy.  At some point you may find the extrude operation easier in some cases.  Plenty of videos on the site with the name that rhymes with noonoob address extrusion and snapping.

I see, thank you so much! I'll do some more research on extrusion, so I'm more familiar with it.

Text to mesh conversion can result in meshes of multiple pieces.  Fluid simulations .  And then there is the monkey ...

It depends on your use-case, but in general, no, it's not necessary for meshes to be connected. A good rule of thumb is that if the object is composed of separate parts in real life, it's okay for its model to be made of separate parts.


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Can I merge multiple objects into one, while keeping the rig working?
So I was following this guide of creating a low poly person and rigging it, and as you can see he created a person from multiple cubes and spheres and connected them to one rig manually, by selecting each object and connecting it to a proper bone. That works beautifully and it's simple, intuitive, and fast to me.
Now I wanted to import my model with working rig to Unity, and he also has this guide. The first problem is that he uses a model that is a single object, so I just use Ctrl + J to merge all cubes and spheres into one object, but it breaks the rig completely. Here he uses automatic weights and weight paint, and both of these work terribly in my case. I wouldn't have such a big issue with facts like the forearm actually moving some bits of my legs as well if the weight paint tool wasn't so painful to use for me. I struggle so much to remove every bit of paint anywhere besides where it should be and, even if I succeed, I can never get it to work as it used to while using the first method (like forearm scaling down and leaving the bone while rotating for whatever reason).
Is there any way to somehow merge these objects and keep the skeleton working? I do realize that the rig breaks because references break when I merge the objects, but there's a couple of reasons why I wanted it to be a single object, like changing the center of the whole object to the bottom and make it work so I can animate it with Unity.

what does your character look like, is it made of several pieces like in the first tutorial you cite? The 2 methods are completely different, in the first case it's like a simple parentage, while in the second case when you parent With Automatic Weight it creates vertex groups in your character that are supposed to be controlled by the bones that have the same name. If your character is made of several separate pieces and you want to join them, rather use the With Empty Groups parenting method, then assign each part each group in the Vertex Groups list

if your character is made of one piece, then you need to go through the second method (Withe Automatic Weight) and give some correction, either in Weight Paint mode, or with the Assign button under the Vertex Groups list

As I said, my character is made of several pieces like in the first video and it's working perfectly, but I want to import it to Unity, which I guess I have to make into a single object., but that breaks the rig and I have to use the weight paint, which is a pain to use.

you don't have to use the weight paint, use the method I describe, i.e. parent With Empty Groups, then go into the Properties panel > Object Data > Vertex Groups, select the vertices you want in your object in the 3D view, then select the vertex group these vertices are supposed to be part of, and click on the Assign button under the Vertex Groups list

As a newbie, I got kinda lost in your comment. I used the "Add Mesh:  Extra Objects" addon, selected everything (along with rig, it doesn't allow me otherwise), and used the "Parent To Empty" option, which made everything a child of a new empty object. I've found the Vertex Groups you've mentioned, but I don't really understand what am I supposed to do. Am I supposed to go through every object and select vertices I want in the final object and add them to a single vertices group? If so, don't I just want every vertice there is if I want the model to look the same way?

I think you misunderstood, what you need to do: select all your objects, join them with Ctrl J, select the object, shift select the armature, press Ctrl P > parent With Empty Groups (which is going to create vertex groups in your objects but no vertex is assigned for the moment), go in Edit mode, select one part of tour object (example: the head), go into the Properties panel > Object Data > Vertex Groups, select the head vertex group (i.e. the vertex group that has the name of the bone that is supposed to control the head), click the Assign button under the Vertex Groups list, and so on...

@moonboots thank you for your explanation. Unfortunately, I don't have time today, but I will try to do what you said tomorrow and will tell you if I run into any problems, if you don't mind.

no problem........ ;)

@moonboots from what can I tell, it works beautifully, thank you so much for your descriptive help, I would never figure it out by myself without you.

nice then, you're welcome  ;)

For the rigging of machines / robots / non-organic objects, etc. you have 2 methods.
If you want to keep separate objects, use basic parenting: Select on piece, shift select the armature, switch to Pose mode, select the bone you want and CtrlP > Bone
If you want to join all your objects into on (i.e. your case), parent with vertex groups:

Select all your objects, join them with CtrlJ
Select the object, shift select the armature, press CtrlP > parent With Empty Groups (which is going to create vertex groups in your objects but no vertex is assigned for the moment)
Go in Edit mode, select one part of tour object (example: the head), go into the Properties panel > Object Data > Vertex Groups, select the head vertex group (i.e. the vertex group that has the name of the bone that is supposed to control the head), click the Assign button under the Vertex Groups list, and so on

As moonboots said you can do it with vertex groups but this can be slow and repetitive. So I somehow made a plugin for blender to add vertex groups for each selected object fast. I do this because it can be hard with complex models to assing the vertex groups and I usually rage when doing it.

Select all objects and use the plugin to make the vertex groups for each object.
Then merge the objects together.
Parent the object with armature: parent > armature deform
Then name the bones to the object vertex groups

Link to the plugin


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How to make a lightning trail like The Flash?
I want to make a lightning trail from The Flash where it automatically curves and moves with the character without setting up a bezier-curve
For Example:
https://youtu.be/HDiN4uMDG4Y
https://i.sstatic.net/eFPFo.jpg

Related: Particle trails in Cycles?, How to add trailing light effect to finger tips? and How to create Motion Trail in Cycles

How to upload an image to a post


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Eevee Volumetrics Tile Size
When using EEVEE Volumetrics the minimum Tile Size is limited to 2 pixels. Why it is not possible to use 1 pixel or even 0.5 pixels?
Using higher Global Sampling does not help to refine the VDBs, since the Volumetrics do not seem to react on changes there. (You can check this by setting Vol. Tile Size to 16 px and then render with different Global Sampling - in all cases the Volume is blocky)

That is due to a GPU limitation. Lower tile size would allocate textures that don't fit on a GPU anymore.

Thank you for the insight. But modern GPUs have lots of RAM. So this should be available, maybe when selecting "Experimental Options" or with a Warning...

It is not about VRAM, but about the maximum 3D texture size the driver let you allocate. When hard coding the tile size to 1, I wasn't able to allocate the needed texture and Blender will crash due to that reason.

Ah, thanks, that makes sense.
What kind of VDB resolution you were using? Some smaller grids, like 64x64x64 are so small in the first place, that they are probably downsampled without need. Maybe you could have the 1 pixel option with grids smaller than the specific grid size that crashes? Thank you :-)

Hi J, what is the maximum 3D Texture size after all?


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Blender 3.0 Shadow Catcher result color
I'm getting a weird result with the new shadow catcher when using emissive materials or a colored light.
Viewport:

Result:

Compositor Setup:

I'm guessing there's something wrong with the setup. Any ideas?  Thanks!

I think you need to enable an environment pass and use the output of that pass as the background input.  Otherwise your nodes look fine.

I think in this case, since I'm not compositing onto an existing image or using the rendered background, the environment pass won't be useful. In fact it's black, since there's no input for the world. I'm using the RGB input to define the color of the backdrop.

I think that's not going to work, because the Background shader "should only be used for the world surface output.".  You need to make your world shader be the RGB value you have in the background in the compositor, enable the environment pass, and use its output in the multiply node.

Thanks for the explanation. Isn't the problem then that it affects lighting?

Well, that's the point of the 3.0 shadowcatcher, it's supposed to give more 'realistic' shadows by having the scene lighting interact with the world lighting.

Hmm, but since I can't control whether or not to use world background for lighting, it limits the utility. In the end, I'm trying to get a result like Keyshot, where the output only includes shadows cast from scene objects and that's composited onto a solid color bg of my choosing. With non-colored light, the above setup works great, with no additional photoshop. I could use render layers, but then it's rendering twice. Maybe there's something I'm missing?  I really appreciate the input!

If you're missing something, I'm not sure what it is; but it would be nice to have 2.9 style shadow catching as an alternative.


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Blender File Cleanup - remapping users with duplicate data
I can't seem to locate a way to do just what I want easily, and there doesn't seem to be any add-on utility addressing this, so here goes:
Say I have a file with many materials and meshes, and I want to append some data (scenes, etc) from another file that is using a lot of the same data. An example is that two people are working on the same project, but then want to later merge the two files into one.
Once I append the scenes from the second file, there are many meshes, embedded images, and materials which would ideally be linked and share the same data, rather than being separate (.001,.002,.003,etc). What I want to be able to do with some ease is to remap the users of multiple identical data to a single data block. The filter for determining if data should be remapped cannot be as simple as examining the names and looking for .002, etc. This operation should examine if, for example, meshes have the same vertices and origin point, etc. Likewise for images it should examine file size, or some similar property which would be identical only among true duplicates.
The Material Utilities does have an operation to "Merge Base Names", but that is only for materials, and is problematic because it seemingly only examines the name for comparing if two materials should be remapped into one. If someone makes a variant of a material, doesn't give it some other unique naming identifier but just uses ".002", and changes some aspect of the node tree, then the Merge Base Names operation would lose that change, as it would assume they are meant to be identical.
A further complication is that if you try to do this manually in the Blender File view of Outliner, the remap users menu is unusable when you have a long list of names, since you can't access the list beyond a certain size/length...
Any tips out there for addressing this bloat? It's not just for file size reasons that reusing identical data is important, but also for the sake of future changes to materials, etc, propagating out as they should. Thanks for any help.

Interesting problem that I might have if I Appended two characters that also use many of the same material (e.g., clothing).   Might you consider keeping the original files and using Linking instead of Append?  That's what I do for my various characters when I create an animation with two or more of them.   Otherwise, I'd imaging some rather complex python script that would identify similarly named materials, and perhaps have to step through each node to verify that each has identical nodes with identical input params (ugh!).

I think your first sentence is superfluous and would suggest you delete it.

Linking doesn't really address the workflow issue because within the main file, scenes, etc that are brought in via linking are not editable. I could edit them in the linked file, but then data changes in the main file aren't propagated out to the linked file (material, mesh, image changes, etc). Using library assets for everything would sort of help, but that has to be carefully done from the beginning and isn't a good solution when working quickly or with a distributed team. Unless I'm missing something (?)


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Can't bake normal map for specific mesh
I'm trying to make a simple barrel and, for some reason, everytime I try to bake its normal map it just keeps plain blue. I've tried applying the same material on other meshes and it worked just fine, but for some reason it doesn't work on this one.

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

Hi, I just sent it

please share the URL it has generated

Here: https://pasteall.org/blend/6f7e7a254f8244d0a5f212d8674ad875

there is only one barrel in the file, what kind of bake were you trying to do, were you trying to bake a high-poly towards a low-poly?

Not now, I'll probably try to do that later but for now I was just trying to bake a map for this simple version.

a map from what object towards what object?

actually you can't bake the normals of an object to itself unless you've used the Multiresolution modifier for example but it doesn't seem to be the case here, so I'm missing something here...


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Offset difficulties with Images on Planes and Greenscreen/Transparent movie
I need to tweak the beginning time of a greenscreen image in "Images on Planes". It's a conductor who I filmed in front of a greenscreen in order to create one of those "virtual choir" videos. He is off a frame or two from a timpani hit, and I am having lots of problems adjusting the frames.
First off, after I make an adjustment with offset, I have to close and restart the program, or there will be a weird "bump", or "gap" in the movie.
Second, he may be only one frame late, so, I adjust the offset by one frame, and the next time I open it, he is about five or six frames ahead.
This seems to only be a problem with the movie I created with the "alpha" codec. Other "Image on Planes" videos that are used in the video that are not dealing with the greenscreen seem to be behaving fine.

The quickest way is to export video as Image Sequence (like PNG) ... in that way you can confirm if the issue is codec in your case.

Yes. Using an Image Sequence solved my problem! There probably is something weird going on with the QT Animation codec and Images with Planes, as I could never line up my videos, whereas, once I used the Image Sequence of the same project there were no problems.


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Vertex Group created within a Geometry Node Object (Blender 3.5)?
Through geometry nodes I'm trying to create something that functions like a vertex group within a geometry node object in Blender 3.5 and above. Basically, this would be to exclude part of the mesh for a boolean object that functions as a "hole cutter".
I'm thinking that through named attributes, and stored attributes there must be some way of singling out specific geometry to use - much like vertex groups function. The problem is that this is within a geometry node object, so, there is no way to highlight the vertices in edit mode. So far I haven't been able to find anything like this in YouTube tutorials, or looking through other threads on the blender stack exchange.

Please produce some example of your problem. https://blender.stackexchange.com/q/274922/60486

why don't you just use separate geometry and boolean mesh?

Thank you so much for your suggestions. I was able to solve the problem by adding the "Store Named Attribute" node between two "Join Geometry" nodes. The node appeared directly after the items I wanted the boolean object to surround, then the other items were connected in the later "Join Geometry" node.

Then, for the boolean object I used the following setup:

This refers to the stored attribute before a "Delete Geometry" node. Anyway, the result is just like using a vertex group with a regularly modeled item!


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A rig for a character that has several layers
I have a figure that I modeled that has several layers of clothes and additional elements attached to it (picture attached) and I have no idea how to rig it. I make a rig for one part and another part does not connect. I tried to upload it to Accurig but it turns out that the file is too heavy.
What can be done? Is there a way to rig a character with several layers? I saw that there are more complex characters like knights and the like that they rigged, so I guess my character is also possible, isn't it? In the meantime I was able to make a rig for the character with only the white clothes.

You can probably use the same rig for all the clothes, just parent the clothes to the rig the same way you did with the bare character mesh and then transfer the character's weight maps to the clothes so they move together with the character.
Here is a short video (not mine) that explains the weight map transfer process:   https://youtu.be/yr5KRYz5ybs?si=4bgw_GRV-cZDa-Wh
Disclaimer:   I am not an "expert" or "Blender guru", I just happen to know the answer to this particular question.   Others may have different or better answers.


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Hair twitches in shape change
I created a figure with a beard in Blender, but when I reduce the figure, the beard, created in particles, distorts. I tried to make the beard 'convert to mesh' but it turned black (in the picture) and you can't add texture to it. How can the beard be fixed in another way?

Convert the particles to the new hair curves. The curves can be scaled and converted back to particles. Or you can keep them and texture them like particles.

thank you ,But where do I have the option to convert new hair to curves? In modifiers properties there is only the option of convert to mesh

it's in the drop-down menu of the particle system -> https://i.sstatic.net/Q3tsMtnZ.jpg. After the conversion you need to attach the hair curves to the surface object (scalp/head). Here is a checklist: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/324382/107598. When the curves are a child of the surface object (Ctrl+P) they will scale with the model.


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Disappearing fire simulation
I made fire in blender according to the attached video and everything worked fine. But after a few days when I opened the file again the fire did not work and you can only see the particles without fire.And all the data was in place without any change.
What could be the reason for this and how to solve it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wOS_wvzhnA

Did you bake the simulation (particles and fire)? If not, you have to simulate it again every time you open Blender. If you did bake it, well only seeing the tutorial but nothing of your scene, no settings etc. it is almost impossible for us to find the specific point where you went wrong. And sorry, no offense - but it works like shown in the video, so there must be something you did incorrectly. Perhaps you only have to watch the video again thoroughly and make sure you do everything in the same way.

Thanks for the answer


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How do i rotate a rabbit leg without it looking funky?
I modelled a rabbit and now i want it to be able to lie down. However right now the leg verticies twist crazily because of how the hindlegs are made up. Does anyone know how to properly model rabbit legs and can give me some tips ?

( PS: it's supposed to be a chocolate rabbit so it won't have fur to hide things.. maybe it will look more like a big brown frog with ears? (': )

you need to get some reference on how real-life rabbits move, the back legs shouldn't bend sideways like that https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rabbit+jump&iax=images&ia=images

If you look at many modeling tutorials, one consistent technique is that the fitting of skeleton to mesh is done in a "Rest" position: in essence where the limbs are well separated from the other body parts and not curled up.   This allows the Armature Parenting to better distribute the bone movement "weights" to each vertex in the mesh.  If you did your parenting of the silly wabbit with its legs curled up, this could be the cause of the bad twists in the mesh as its legs stretch out.

Cute little frog :D ... For a rabbit, the body is too short and the back legs are too long (https://agriculture.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0017/651122/Rabbit1.jpeg)


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Normals porblems
My normals are correctly but they still "black". What is the solution for this? Already removed doubles but no sucess.

Have you flipped or recalculated the normals? It looks like blender may think that the normals are "inside" and are coloring them dark for that reason.

Thanks for the help already fixed by ctrl j and x>limited dissolve.


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How can I duplicate a linked vertice from edges?

Can someone tell me how to do this? Im a learning to modeling, and i think this can help me sometimes.

I'm not sure what you are asking about, but is this what you are trying to do?

Probably f2 add on and snap to face. The add on is here https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Modeling/F2


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How to join, and intersect objects?

How do I join this two arcs in a way to connect the vertices (a vertice that connect and join these two objects). (on top and bottom).

(zoom of the picture on the top pf the object)

Given that the two edges intersect:

Select edge1 and create a new Transform Orientation from the edge's normal orientation.
Select edge2 and snap the cursor to it. ⇧ ShiftS > Cursor to Selected
Subdivide edge1 and select the created vertice. W > S
Set the Pivot center for rotation/scaling to 3D Cursor with ..
Scale the vertice to 0 along its local Y axis. SYY0

Delete edge2 (X) and connect the vertices (F).

But it is faster to use the TinyCAD-Addons dedicated operator.


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Align object according to axis
how I can cordinate/align a object according a axis(Z,X,Y)?
This is the top view, and as you can see, its not correct.

This is the front view, as you can see its slightly not according to the axis.

I m not sure what exactly you meant by aligning.But try Ctrl+Shift and rotating the middle mouse button and see if that's what you meant.

Related http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/56882/how-do-you-rotate-an-object-so-that-a-particular-face-is-parallel-to-the-ground/56886#56886

You can use align rotation of the snapping tool. But you have to align an object with straight axes onto your mesh and then rotate it back.

There are a number of ways this can be done - but this way is pretty smart :)

This seems to answer the question I myself have, but I can't manage to understand it. Do you "use align rotation" before or after aligning the cube with the thing ? What is happening to the initial object's set of axis that makes it so you can enter 0 in Z and it unrotates it, but you couldn't unrotate it that way before aligning the cube ?

@NikanaReklawyks Align rotation is active when snapping. Then I join the old mesh to the cube so that its coordinate system is overwritten, you could also use a parent-child dependency. Finally I set the object rotation to 0 by hand.

Thanks : "joining the old mesh to the cube to overwrite the old coordinate system" is the key point I missed.


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When I Render my image, the result is a Black Screen
I am trying to make a simple ink drop animation. The image looks great in Preview, but when I Render a second later the screen is just black. I can't figure out why this is happening.
Here's the project file!
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B0iOn3LRcf5-YzBGRzlDQjgwQkE?usp=sharing
Would love some help!


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Actuator sensor never has positive pulse
While I was working with the actuator sensor I had a problem where it would not send a positive pulse to the controller even when the corresponding actuator was activated. Below is some terminal output produced by a python controller and a .blend file.
DEBUG:0: Actuator is False
DEBUG:1: Actuator is False
DEBUG:2: Actuator is False
DEBUG:3: Actuator is False
DEBUG:4: Keyboard.003 is True
DEBUG:5: Keyboard.003 is False
DEBUG:6: Keyboard.003 is True
DEBUG:7: Keyboard.003 is False
DEBUG:8: Keyboard.003 is True
DEBUG:9: Keyboard.003 is False
DEBUG:10: Actuator is False
DEBUG:11: Actuator is False
DEBUG:12: Actuator is False
DEBUG:13: Actuator is False
DEBUG:14: Actuator is False

This has been problematic. Why has this happening? Is it supposed too? How can I fix it.

There are no positive pulses on sensors. This term is a leftover from an incorrect documentation.
A sensor has two outputs:

an evaluation result (sensor.positive) witch is either positive or not positive and gets calculated once at each single frame
a trigger which marks all connected controllers to be executed on sensor execution (which happens after sensor evaluation)

The actuator sensor senses a specific actuator of the same object. It evaluates positive when the actuator is active and it evaluates not positive when the actuator is not active.
Be aware there are sensors that deactivate themselves within the same frame they got activated (such as property actuator, action actuator in property mode, motion actuator and state actuator).
Processing
t
The sensor detects the actuator is not active. As it was not active before it will evaluate not positive.
The actuator gets activated by a controller
The actuator runs and deactivates itself
t+1
The sensor detects the actuator is not active. As it was not active before (see t) it will evaluate not positive.
...
Conclusion
You can't measure that an actuator that immediately deactivates was running. You need other ways to detect this situation (e.g. by activating a property sensor that actually changes a property).

ok, that makes sense. kind of makes me question the usefulness of the actuator sensor though. thanks for the answer.

The actuator sensor was introduced to allow detecting when an action actuator ends playing (to start some other operation). You can use it on a sound actuator too.


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Can you email a blender model from one device and open it on another?
I created a chair model in blender on my MacBook Pro in hopes of using it on unity, which is the VR development software. My unity though is downloaded onto another device and I want to send my model over to that device, via email, or any other way so that I can import it into unity.

What happens when you try?

I can't see why you wouldn't be able to do that. There might be small problems, but nothing major.


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My background reference image isn't showing within blender?
Good evening everyone. I'm a person new to blender, and I was watching a few tutorials that would take me through the process of creating/rendering a creature design in 3d, and from what was shown, I would need to have a side profile sketch of the design to import into blender as a background reference. I've attempted to open the image a couple of the different ways, through accessing the backgroung images tab as was shown inthe tutorial, and by simply dragging and dropping the image into the program. I've also tried changing the format of the file between .jpg and .png, to little avail. Is there someone who could help me through this issue? I'll link the image in question below.

Are you in perspective mode? Because you can see bg image only in ortographic mode. [Num5]

Alright, I gave it a shot. I am able to see the picture now yes, but I am unable of moving it around to readjust it to my liking, which was shown to be possible in tutorials I have watched

Also whenever i try to move around the screen when I have a 3d object within the file, the picture disappears and fails to properly return, making me have to delete and reinput the file again

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/110532/cannot-find-background-images-feature-in-blender-2-8/110533#110533

Select the image and look at the object data. You can see there are two checkboxes: Display Ortho and Display Persp. You can also set the transparency etc.
Also look in the scene collection and make sure the disable selection is not turned off (the white arrow). If you cant see this then click on the filter icon in the header.


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How to render to a TIFF Float 32 output
How do we render to TIFF Float 32 output? I.e. 32 bits per channel (NOT 32 bits per pixel) TIFF file.
Blender UI only seems to give me the option of choosing between 8 bit and 16 bit for TIFF.
The workaround it seems is rendering in OpenEXR and then converting the files to TIFF Float 32 outside of Blender, but I would rather not do this if possible because even using macro will take some time for a lot frames.
Context:
I need to render animations into individual frames, TIFF 32
Thanks in advance!

It doesn't seem to be possible at the moment, at least from the UI, unless there is some workaround by forcing anything through python, but I doubt that

I'm willing to consider if anybody can provide a guide.


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Curves and curve modifier is a nightmare
I try to learn the basics about curves and curve modifiers. To do this, I tried to make a zipper. It was a catastrophe. Doesn't matter what tutorial i follow, the following things (one, more, or all) happening to me:

The mesh and the curve is fram from each other
The mesh not following the paths shape
The mesh turning to different directions
applying the same origin destroys everything
Apply all transform sets the origin to the pivot of the coordinate system
Twist
Strange shapes

So can anybody tell wich is caused by what? I'm near to breakdown. Thanks

Whenever I have had problems with the Curve Modifier it is because I did not apply Transforms CTRL+a

As I written, I applied Transforms, and the origin jumped back to the pivot of the coordinate system.

Consider sharing your blend file https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/, so we can try to replicate your issue :)

I didn't know There is a place for this! Thanks! Also, somehow for the 1000th try now it's a sucess, so I can't share it. Next time I'll start there.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/64579/why-does-adding-a-curve-modifier-move-my-object-to-the-center-of-the-curve/64581#64581 https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/106587/curve-modifier-does-not-work-when-you-merge-another-curve-to-the-original-curve/106593#106593 https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/51909/mesh-deforming-when-add-bezier-modifier/51913#51913

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/71787/object-on-curve-wont-stay-flat/71788 https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/56344/reducing-internal-faces-generated-by-extensive-curve-extrusion/56352


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Two textures one output
I try to use two texture in the same material.This material is for a jacket, and one texture containing the default leather material texture, and the other someting like a decorative stripes. My question is, how to blend the two textures together in the same output. I tried the "Mix" node with not too much success.

You can try to mix them together with a Color > MixRGB node and find the right mode (here Multiply). Don't forget to put a Diffuse node after the MixRGB.

I'm guessing you are using the textures for one shader so:
Use a mask by painting (or placing) a black and white texture in factor socket mix rgb node.

if the details texture are on a transparent png, use the alpha output of the png image as your mask and connect the alpha to factor of mix rgb. if it shows wrong try inverting the mask color or swapping the color1 with color2.


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Unwrapping turns out really bard
I relatively new to Blender, and try out things. As you can see on the image below, my Unwrapping disastrous.
How can I fix it, and what caused this problem?
Thanks for any help!

Hello and welcome :). What exactly is the problem for you? Is it the lines not being straight? Or something else?

So you don't want the top and the back to be disconnected from the front, right?
In that case, clear the seams from these two edges I painted blue:

You can do so by doing in Edit mode: Right click + Clear Seam. Then, unwrap the UVs again.
Notice how this model looks if I mark the top edges as Seam:

And notice how it looks by clearing the seam:

When you mark a seam you are telling Blender it's OK to disconnect that part of your object from the rest, so only mark them in places that you don't want connected on the resulting UV mapping.


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Is there a way to organise the right hand sidebar in 2.8?
As all plugins/add-ons in Blender 2.8 are now added to the right hand sidebar, I find that mine is now becoming so full it's impossible to read what each add-on is.
Is there a way to better organise the strip of add-on names, maybe make them 2 deep?

Sounds more like a feature request

Sorry if there is no way to currently do this then yes I guess it is a feature request.


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Fluid Simulation does not follow collision object morphing with skape keys
I have an ice cube in my scene that is melting. I want a slow melt so didn't want to use fluid to geometry. So I have my ice cube with a flow object ontop of it acting as the water dripping from the cube. The cube melts by using shape keys. I have used sculping to replicate the ice shrinking. Animating the shape key number value, making the ice cube shrink as the water runs down it.
However the water flow effector only follows the first shape, even though the mesh is being "compressed".
How do I replicate this, do I apply scale to the animation in each time the shape changes? Is there something I need to change?
I have attached images of my work flow below.

Did you bake the fluid simulation before you animated the cube shrinking?

Yes I did, I figured out the solution I'm going to post the answer now

So to correct this issue, I applied a scale keyframe at each start frame and end frame of the shape key. i.e. from 0-1.0 of the shape key key frame. Once all my shape keys and scale key frames were in place I baked the fluid simulation.


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Mantaflow - slow drip
I am trying to create an ice melting animation, so need to have my object slowly drip instead of all fluid moving at once. How do I achieve this effect, I have watched plenty of tutorials and have experimented but can only think of one option -
To create a small inflow object and scale it up as it flows to increase the flow.
Is there a simpler solution?
Thanks I'd really appreciate the help!

What is the melting object (what shape)?

@vklidu it's a cube

Cube just hanging in the air with water dropping from a corner or cube is getting smaller by melting ? ....do you have some reference of desired result? The whole situation matters becausee visually it can be represented by other ways than fluid sim.

Does it has to be fluid sim?
For dropping water from object like icicles ... probably could be enough two meta balls.

One main Mball inside the tip and second as drop with just animated Z loc and scale.

Animate one cycle and under NLA Editor extend dropping by increasing Repeat value in range of your animation.
To make Mballs more seamless you can create whole icicle from meatballs.
If you would need more frequent dripping you can use particle system rendered Object > MBalls

I'm not too sure how to do that. Do I select the verticies on the bottom of the shape or add a new shape?

Answer extended ... anyway I did answer simple because you didnt provide enough details, so I expected I will delete it ... even now when you specified that object is a Cube it can melts in many visual forms ... so please reference, reference, reference :) Thanks

Thank you for your help! I will remember that for next time

If you found solution would be great to share. You can do an Answer of your question. This site is knowledge base so probably others can found it useful. And I'm interested too.


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System says out of GPU memory, when I just got a new laptop
I recently got a new laptop with a

Total Gaphics memory says:

My computer is struggling to render and says "GPU out of data".
My previous laptop had less ram and the graphics cards weren't as good but it never put out this message.
Are my settings incorrect?
Can someone please help me?

You should use OptiX with that graphics card, not CUDA. Try with that first. What is the memory used by your render?

Also deselect your integrated GPU on the processor and let us know if that fixes if it changing to OptiX doesnt immediately fix the issue.
I think to use CUDA you have to install special drivers.  At least I did on linux.

I was using OptiX before and that didn't work either!
How do I deselect my integrated gpu on the prosessor?

Memory used is 196.96M per frame

I tried rendering another frame now on Optix and it says "System is out of GPU memory." again


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How to turn object into "mesh" or "grid" form but keep the general shape?
I am a non-designer user of Blender.
I am designing surgical cutting guide to cut bone in the exact line that I planned. In order to do that, I need the cutting guide to fit with the bone surface which I can do it easily with Boolean modifier.
My question is, how to turn my solid object (the surgical guide) to a grid object with many holes as this picture while keeping the fitting surface. The reason for it is to reduce the cost of metal 3D printing.
Thank you
The source of the image is from the Internet.


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How to paint color on different part of an object?
I have a long object (a leg bone). The object consists of two parts (left and right) which are divided by a non-manifold plane (zero thickness). I would like to ask if there is any way to paint the right part with different color than the left part without "cutting" the object by Boolean modifier?
Thank you

are you using texture painting or vertex painting?

I am sorry, I don't really understand the tool you are mentioning. I'm very new to blender. I just want to paint different color on each part.

here's a video on the very basics of materials, you can assign different colored materials do different faces of your mesh to make them different colors. https://youtu.be/nBdGm_d_8XE


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How can I enlarge an object so that the new object's surface is 1 cm apart from the initial surface?
I am very new to Blender. I have an irregular-shaped object which is a tumor (Figure 1). In order to completely remove the tumor from patient's body, some healthy-looking structures around the tumor also needs to be taken together with the tumor. The margin of the actual removal is 1 cm away from tumor's surface in all aspects (Figure 2). The hand-drawn images are used for illustration
I have done the segmentation and reconstructed tumor on Blender (Figure 3 - don't worry about the cubical part, it's not important). Now I would like to develop the removal mass from the tumor by increasing the tumor object size so that the new object surface will be 1 cm away from the tumor object surface. Could you please show me how to do that?
Thank you very much

Hello :). If it's a 3D object, simply used the Solidify modifier set to 1cm

you can also try Alt S the Fatten/Shrink, the problem being that some faces could overlap but it may be ok for you

Thank you both of you. I have tried Solifiy modifier and it works well. I really appreciate your help.


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STL exported object has hollow
I am very new to Blender without any 3D design background. I am designing a solid object as shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2.

However, when I export the object to STL file and view it by Preview in Mac OS, the object appears to have an unwanted hollow (Figure 3). Another object that I design in the same project has no problem

Therefore, could you please help me to solve this problem?
Thank you very much.

I have the same issue on PC. It is associated with the "solidify" modifier. If I remove that, cura slices correctly. But with the solidify modifier enabled it only slices the "skin" or "faces". Don't know why.

I guess your Mac Viewer shows only faces, oriented to camera, while Blender (by default) shows both sides
For viewing what is the back side and what is front, you should turn face orientation overlay

You can recalculate face orientations using Shift+N, but your object should be manifold.
You can also use Alt+N to flip orientation face by face

Thank you for your answer. Does your answer mean the Mac viewer (Preview) is showing the STL wrongly and my STL object is actually solid?

Well, it is a tricky question. It is not an error that the Mac viewer shows polygons only from one side, it is a standard optimization method. On the one side STL is solid, and the Mac viewer shows these polygons, but on another side (when they are blocked by other parts of the model). On the other side STL is not solid, it is non-manifold, because on the borders of back-faced polygons and front-faced polygons normals of faces turns 180 degrees. So it is not wrong or bad, it is how it has to be. You should turn all faces in a correct way, so the  Mac viewer can show the model properly.

I have tried to recalculate face orientations and it works. Thank you for your help. To be honest, I still don't fully understand the role of face orientation, but the problem is solved for now. Thanks again.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-face_culling