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Restrict collisions to certain objects in Blender 3.0 (collision groups)?
How can I restrict the collision modifier on an object so that it only interacts with certain objects?
I see in older versions of Blender this was possible with collision groups/masks, but I can't seem to find that option in Blender 3.0. Where has this been moved to, or what is the modern equivalent of this feature in newer versions of Blender?

Put the active object in a collection, choose this collection under Collisions > Object Collisions > Collision Collection. Put the objects that are supposed to interact in the same collection:

Thanks for the reply, I suppose you can only do something like this on cloth objects then?

@Perpetuum edit: sorry I miunderstood, what sort of object are you using?

That's ok, I was trying to use a softbody cage with mesh deform to add dynamics to another object. I wanted said object to collide with other objects in the scene without colliding with the cage itself, as that seemed to ruin the effect of the physics. However, it seems I can get a similar effect by substituting the softbody modifier with cloth, and simply turning off object collisions for the cage entirely. Was just wondering if this kind of collision grouping was possible with anything other than cloth, but it's not a big deal for the current situation. Maybe I'm just going about this wrong.

@Perpetuum, for softbody you have a Collision Collection on the top of the physics panel, you need to select the collection where the soft body object is, and also put the collision passive object in the same collection


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Render showing bright and dark parts
Just like the picture below, there's this border that shows a bright and dark part of the render. This don't show up on viewport. I don't really know how this is happening.
]1

Need more info. Whats viewport look like? Do you have hidden objects? Whats blender version, render settings?

No hidden objects, just a volumetric scatter object. Blender 3.0, 128 samples, denoiser on, and basically default settings.

Upload the blender file somewhere because there are still so many reasons this could be happening.

Do you have auto tile size addon enabled ? if yes, disable it

I don't have auto tile. Here's the blend file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JYXV2jUvgDFDzoyy9qH00i-i6ymstluU/view?usp=sharing

i couldn't reproduce your result -> this is my 2 sec render: [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/rvk6z.jpg and here 20sec render: [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/JbJ6r.jpg

maybe update Blender version?

Thanks, updating to 3.1 helps.

@max1eee - Blend Exchange should be used for Blender Stack Exchange.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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View or export data from Nodes (eg Voronoi texture node)
I have the following nodes on Suzanne (see image)

and I would like to see what data "Voronoi Texture"-node spits out on "Fac" output. I would like to see it in numbers. A vector, a matrix, or something. Directly to a file or in a console.
Is this possible?
I tried with the script from this link:
Debugging material math nodes in cycles
Without any success, rendering just stops at 0 %.

I think you can use baking to get your voronoi saved to a texture: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/90096/how-can-i-convert-a-node-made-material-into-an-image-texture

When I tried that method, it gave me an error "No active image data", so instead I'll try to solve this by creating a camera pointing at a plane with the material.

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


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Raycast hit position doesn't not change when the parent object not moving on the z axis
I'm raycasting from a face to a plane a. when reading the hit position I noticed that it doesn't update correctly when moving objects. it only updates when the object is moving in the z-axis (the parent object or the plane).

please provide blend file so we can check it out. thx.

The 'Hit Position' is returned in the Object Space of the modified object.
So long as the target plane is parallel to the relative movement of the modified object, then, measured along the modified object's own axes,  the coordinate of the hit-point will be constant.
If the plane is tilted with respect to the movement, that's a different story.


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How can I use fly mode on a camera with constraint?

as you can see if I try to use fly mode on a constrained camera it wouldn't let me
not even if i check "offset" in the copy location constraint

i would say: obviously you can't...

@Chris I think I remember doing this in 2.7X version?

Maybe it was possible in older version. But the error is pretty obvious….


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Blender 3.0 Bake Combined UvMap Border Lines Problem
I am new on bake system. I have a sink and want to bake texture but it is have a big problem. Baked texture uvmap border line seems on object. How can I solve this? I use default bake settings and Optix render.

The problem is in the denoise filter, I guess it applies the filter before extending the capture result, that's why you see the black pixels on the edges.

To fix this, first disable the denoise filter and bake the texture.

As you can see in the image, we now have noise in the baked texture. (denoise filter missing)
The next step is to go to the compositor and add the denoise node here, hit F12 to save the texture to disk.

Reload the filtered texture and ready.

This happens in Blender 3.0.1, I guess they will fix it in future versions.
I hope it helps.

Same problem, and  same fix for blender 4.2 and 4.3,


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how to load texture image to ply model in blender?
I can not load the texture image to ply model in blender, The image is empty, and it does not work

Instead of the Texture properties (red and black checkerboard icon) go to the material icon (red and black disc) and add a new material, set the color to image texture by clicking on the yellow dot on the left of field and select your texture. Does it work ?

it doesn't work.

You’re in solid viewport.


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Why is my Baked Texture Atlas Black?
Title pretty much says it, I'm pretty new to all of this and I'm trying to follow beginner guides on YouTube. So far I've been able to fineagle things and work them out myself but now I'm at a loss.

I've been trying to optimize this model for use in VRChat, because I don't want to be a resource hog, however this is all very involved.
Right now I'm trying to apply a Texture Atlas, and everything goes fine until I actually bake the Atlas, to which point it gives me a black image with my UV mapped items inside of it.

Any advice would be nice, and of course if any additional information is needed I'll be happy to oblige!

It's hard to tell just with your screenshots, especially because nobody knows how your shader group works inside.
But a guess could be that this shader group actually uses emission shaders instead of diffuse shaders. Your baking being set to pickup raw color from diffuse, the result is black.
So, I'd try to set your Bake Type to Emit:

After you have done the baking, you end up with this texture:

Now, as you worked correctly so far, you have your mesh with lots of material slots for each body part, who used a different UV unwrapping than the one used in your baking. So what you need to do now is to set up a single material, that uses just your baked texture, and the correct UV unwrapping.
One way to do that would be to remove all the materials (not mandatory but cleaner) and make a new one. In edit mode, select all your mesh and click the Assign button just bellow the materials slots list. That way your new material will be used on the entirety of your object's meshe.
Then, in the material, you can use the default principled shader or any custom one, doens't really matter. The important part is then to set your baked texture to use your baked UV. Two ways for this:

the safest option is to just add a UV Map node (found under the Inputs category) and specify the baked UV unwrap there. Plug this node to the atlas texture's vector input, and you're good to go.

if you count on using only that baked UV from now on and don't need the old one, you should probably just delete the old so to set the new one as your default UV for that object, you don't have to manually invoke it in each eventual new shader you make.
To do this, got to the Properties Editor > Mesh tab, UV Maps panel, select your old UV unwrap and click the - icon next to the UVs list.
This option is destructive, you do lose your old UV unwrap. So don't use it if you're unsure or keep a backup blend file somewhere.

Next, since lots of your materials used transparency, but Blender doesn't have an easy way to bake that, we're going to use a little trick.
Since it's pretty rare for a color texture to have any pure black, (and advised to not do so nonetheless), and Blender bakes transparent pixels into pure black pixels, we can litterally obtain a quick alpha channel by just taking whatever's not black in that atlas texture and turning it white. The simplest way to do that is with a node Converter > Math. Set its mode to Greater than, plug your atlas in the first input, and set the Threshold to zero. Pixel colors are values, black iz zero. So that node will turn anything not black into white, and thus giving us an alpha texture. You could bake it if you wanted, just plug it into an emission shader and do a new bake in a new texture file. But for my example, I will just plug it into a Principled shader's alpha:

To be honest, I don't either. The model was generated using the software VRoid, available on Steam. I exported it as a VRM file and imported it into Blender using a converter - which doesn't make this any easier.
If you need additional screenshots which would hold more valuable information, please let me know of what and I'll share them!

And for what it's worth, Emission just makes it sort of a different type of screwed up - I can provide that too if you'd like.

maybe just pack your blend and share it so we can dig in x)

Can I.. Just.. Do that? How would I go about sharing that? Lol sorry.

Here, I placed the .blend file into Dropbox with Packing Data available, I hope this works! https://www.dropbox.com/s/qhgz21033y4cerm/Male2B4Atlas.blend?dl=0

Just testes, it actually bakes correctly. The only thing that you can miss afterwards is that you have to set your materials correctly to get the results. Let me add this to my answer.


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Promblem with creating sharp glossy glossy material for metal drinking bottle
I'm trying to recreate this drinking bottle
which as you can see has quite a sharp reflection, so I first tried to use just a sharp glossy shader
which doesn't look like any real object at all because it doesn't interact with light really.
So instead i tried two things: I first mixed it with a normal glossy shader, which just created a weird high light, so then I mixed it with a diffuse shader which created a better result, but looks still is a little off, especially on the edges

So, now to the actual question: how could I create the sharp reflection of the bottle, while still letting it interact with light normally, without creating diffuse high lights?

Further to bstnhnsl's answer, you might also want to look into the numerous references for car paint shaders in Blender/Cycles.  I think there might be some flakes in there..

First of all: if you want to have reflections on your bottle you need something in your scene to show in the reflection. as of now, you just have your light source, a grey plane and the ground background. that's not ideal to check how your material reflects things. (read the answer here why those wavy reflections appear).
I'd recommend using an HDRi to light your scene. here you can grab some for free.
Material:
I'd recommend using the principled Shader. it uses Fresnel to make the reflectiveness be dependent on the view angle.

that's a pretty basic setup, but you can work from there. I'd also recommend using a normal- or displacement map to mimic the bumps of your bottle.

Is it actually correct to set metallic to 1? Sure, it looks metallic, but the it's actually paint, that is not a metal. Does this matter?

looks to me like it's a metallic paint (which consists of small metal flakes  like car paint), so setting metallic to 1 isn't too far off. But you can also play with the values to make the material fit your needs. in cg there's no "actual correct". at the end it's the artists choice. "It's right if it looks right".


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Stick two faces to each other with different rotation
I am trying to stick two faces to each other. These two faces are of the same size, but do not have the same rotation.
I tried to do it manually and I of course experimented with the magnet tool, but it did not work well till now. Is there a possibility to mark two faces like "that they belong together" and stick perfectly to each other like magnets?
Thank you, Huxi

Related https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/56882/how-do-you-rotate-an-object-so-that-a-particular-face-is-parallel-to-the-ground/ and https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/80641/rotate-an-ico-sphere-with-20-sidesicosahedron-to-align-with-the-level-grid

@Duarte and others. This question specifically illustrates joined geometry of which only 2 faces are to be manipulated. All other question refer to object level transformations. I don't think it's the same. This is much more similiar. (Edit mode, joined, cylinder shape.)


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Redo after presing often Undo not possible anymore
I noticed, that  when I want to go back in my work and press "Undo" many times in row, that at some point blender takes me back to the start file and I cannot use Redo anymore. That's pitty, because then I need to rework a lot. I have searched in google, but did not find anything concerning this.
Does somebody know this behaviour?
Thank you, Huxi

Hello :). Can't reproduce this issue. But to save some time you can use File > Recover > Autosave and set autosave for 1 minute in preferences.

Hi. I have set the Auto save, but I just wanted to know what's the behaviour. If it's a bug or a feature :D


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UV Mapping - How to reach always the same scale of the texture
I have an issue with the UV mapping for a longer time, but now it's time for me to fix that.
I will present the issue on an example.
I have 2 squares - one's edges are 4 meter, the other 2 meter. I expect, that when I unwrap them, that the size of the mapping is respektive to the size of the face: the 4m square would have a twice big UV map as the 2m one. But it is not like that. It doesn't matter what size the square has, the UV Map shrinks or enlarges the UV Map so that it fits into 1 "texture unit". When I then apply the texture in unity, the texture will not have the same scale. And that's not good.
What I need is, that every face is mapped so, that 1 square meter of the face is mapped to 1 "texture unit" in the UV map.
Is that possible?
I searched for it in the internet, but found just nothing.
Is there maybe somebody, who could write this functionality as a script / add-on to blender?
Thank you,
Huxi

Default built-in and not fully customizable way is to select faces on UV map and run UV > Average Islands Scale in UV editor. Another way is Texel Density Checker addon. See https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/114408/how-do-i-unwrap-a-model-proportionally

As @Mr Zak pointed out, Texel Density Checker will save you a lot of time. And it's free :).

Hi, so I bougth the Texel Density Checker and it works perfectly. I am sooooo happy. And I did not buy it for free, I spend some money on it - I am like to appreciate the effort of the people making the add-ons :)


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How to not save leaf bones in .blend file
I am having a character which I import into Unity as a blend file. I noticed, that when doing so, unity shows leaf bones.
I have been googling around and found out that it is possible to ignore the leaf bones when exporting as fbx. But I haven't find that option when saving as a .blend file.
Any ideas how I can do that? (without the need to export as .fbx)
Thank you
Huxi

.blend isn't an exchange format. There is no such thing as ignoring leaf bones in a .blend file, they are generated when exporting bones to some format because unlike what Blender makes it look like, bones only have heads, no tails, and that's why there are leaf bones to make bones ends. AFAIK, Unity actually doesn't really reads .blend files, it creates an fbx asset instead. I don't think there is any downside to having leaf bones. But if there is a way to not have them, it most likely is on Unity's side you have to look at, not Blender.

I am looking for it, because so I am having 4 bones at the fingers and I would like to apply the Unity Rigging "Two bone IK constraint" to them which can handle only 3 bones, With 4 bones it is unfortunately not possible. Ok, I will try to solve it differently. Thank you.

Add add_leaf_bones=False, to Unity-BlenderToFBX.py.
Specifically between use_custom_props=True, and bake_anim_use_nla_strips.


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iphone X Camera Preset?
Hi I'm shooting on an iPhone X trying to track my footage. I don't know the iPhone X's camera info and am having trouble finding info that looks like should be putting into blender.
If you have the information please post or point me in the right direction to go. Thank you.


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Lost my 3d Manipulator
Lost my 3d Manipulator in my current session.
Things I've tried, ctrl space, checked snap, and reset to factory settings still nothing.
Started a new blend and the 3d Manipulator is present.
Using 2.79a on a higher end Windows 10 laptop.
tia

[Edit] your question and show screenshot of full 3d viewport window, with its footer and object selected.

At the bottom of the 3D viewport, there are these buttons.

You probably don't see the manipulator wigit type buttons, so click on the button that's got the axies icon. Then, you can see the others, and choose which one you want.

Thanks, it's not the wigit buttons. That was my first goto since I've toggled these before. It's only with the blend I'm working on now. Plus I checked and getting same results on my desktop as with my laptop. I think I pressed some weird key combo but I don't know what.


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Change of Mirror side
Happily sculpting object with sculpt on right hand side, mirror on left (front view). Suddenly switches to left hand sculpt with right hand "mirror". How can I change it back?


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uncompressed quicktime export options
Trying to export uncompressed quicktime movies in 2.79 and I could really use some help.  I can seem to figure out the new export options to do this as I've always done in versions below 2.79.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
thanks

What's the reason to encode uncompressed?

so I can choose my encoding codec(s) based on my needs at a later time. (usually ProRes variant)

There are many reasons (flexibility, file size, color management etc.) to save your animation as image sequence (preferably exr) and encode that to prores or dnxhd... @sean

true but I like to do my compositing in blender from image sequences after I render the images, so the way you mention I'd then have to render the composite to images (2nd render) and then convert my images to ProRes etc as a 3rd render.  I'd much prefer to do as before and render my compositor animation to an uncompressed format as my master file and then encode in another app, based on my desired formats.


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Simplify F-Curves of Shape Key animation
i am trying to clean-up animation curves from facial mocap data.
The recorded data/animation is containing keys on nearly every frame.
Usually i would use the Add-on 'Simplify Curves', wich does exactly what i need (Reduce keyframes).
Unfortunately Simplify Curves does not seem to work with shape key animation curves. The option is just not available from the quick menu.
I am not that comfortable with python, so i can't tell if Simplify Curves is supposed to work on shape keys the way it does on other objects.
If you happen to know more, please let me know!
I am interested in any other tools/approaches for animation clean-up!
Thank you!
f.bra

The simplify f-curves operator has been created in a rigid way that only looks at the objects animation data. Not all animation data is stored in the one place, for example the shape key animation is stored as part of the mesh data, not as part of the object animation.
While some more work should be done to make the simplify f-curves a little more flexible, this modified version(v1.0.4) allows the shape key f-curves to be simplified. You can download and unzip this version, then use the install addon from file button to select the unzipped py file, blender should then replace the existing addon with this version, if you have permissions to write over the file.


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Custom bone shapes missing after using the symmetrize operator
I encounter an issue when symmetrizing the Edit bones through the operator
bpy.ops.armature.symmetrize(direction='POSITIVE_X')
The operator copies the widgets from the left to the right side (e.g. the bone nose.R.001 has the widget WGT-rig_nose.L.002 instead of WGT-rig_nose.R.002 after the operation).
The shapes are missing completely after saving and reloading once. Is there a way to keep the custom shapes without using a custom script? Thank you very much!


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Blender 2.8 Object first time settings
I need to find these settings in blender 2.8. When you add new object (Blender 2.79) you have this object settings, down left. But in version 2.8 I can't find it.
I need to change sphere segments in blender 2.8.
Thanks for your help.

Very hard to answer this question.  Been building the 2.8 branch nightly, and in latest it's hard to miss it.  Suggest waiting till a release candidate pops up before asking about 2.8.

Nice thank you.I didn't have the latest build download. Thanks.

In any case, you can bring that window up with F6

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it about unreleased experimental development software

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos: I'm voting to reopen this, because 2.8 has been released

Why, what is there to gain? It is already answered, and there already are countless duplicates around https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/126568/how-to-reduce-poly-number-when-you-start-creating-object-in-2-8/126570#comment219685_126570 https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/129015/where-is-the-operator-panel-in-blender-2-8


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How to apply a seperate texture to each side of a plane? (Blender Render)
So I've got a two-sided texture that works fine on a plane (Here I've made it a cloth) in Cycles render. However, I was curious on how to do this in the Blender Render?

Blender Render works completely differently to Cycles and if I were able to use a two-sided texture plane in Blender Render it would be a huge help!

Did you try duplicating the object then flipping it normals and applying a different material?

If I duplicate the object would that not mean I have two different cloths which will overlap and create texture artifices as they clip into one another?

I think so. Try it on a simpler scene ans see if it works


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how to make constant, looping animation?
I just want to make some object rotate in a loop, with no interpolation curve things making it "smooth", just want it to go at the same speed all the time. How do I do this? I've made some keyframes but it always slows down/stops for a really short time at the end..

Ok there are multiple reasons why this could be happening.
The first one is: You dont have linear interpolation
The fix for that is:

Go into the Graph Editor
Press V and select Vector

The second one is: your animation ends on the wrong frame or starts at the wrong frame. Make sure your last keyframe which is the same as the first one is never actually shown (or the other way round), because when it is, you have 2 exactly equal frames played in sequence. In practice that means you have to either put your first keyframe at frame 0 and start on the frame 1 and end at the last keyframe. Or you put your start and first keyframe on frame 1 and set the end to be 1 frame before the last keyframe.

very quick answer, but this didnt fix it

make sure your previously made animation is selected in the Graph Editor (press A multiple times)

did my edit fix it?

sorry for the late reply: where am i supposed to cut the animation off? do i stop it a frame before the last keyframe (which is both the end and beginning pose)? if i do that it still slows down at the end, am i supposed to stop it somewhere else?

this is what it looks like right now btw (i set it to start on frame 1 because i accidentally made the 1st keyframe there and not at 0)

@MeowMilk yes you are supposed to cut it off one frame before your last keyframe. If that is not the fix post a screenshot of your grapheditor in your question.


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How to properly make an object to follow a path?
a have a considerably simple path and an object to follow that path. Following the basic procedures:

Create a path and object,
Add Follow Path constraint to the object and select path to follow,
Animate the path.

Now I am facing a small issue at step 2, adding a path to follow causes object to rotate ambigiously (at least for me).
What is the right way to do this? What am I missing?
Here is some screenshots from the scene:
Before adding constraint

Constraint settings

After adding constraint

Check follow curve and click Animate Path.

Some points about the Follow Path constraint:

You need to make sure that the curve goes in the direction you want. Select it, go in Edit mode, check the normals, if they don't go in the right direction press W > Switch Direction.
Once you've given the Follow Path constraint to your object, its new 000 location is the beginning of the curve. So to put the object at the beginning of the curve, select the object and press AltG.
If you want your object to be correctly oriented, you might need to select the good Forward value in the Follow Path constraint. You might also need to rotate your object so that it's well oriented.

There are other things about this constraint, like how to animate it with the Evaluation Time, but it's another topic.

My bad, for Follow Path it doesn't matter where the curve origin is   ;)  I've deleted

plus I think some of your points are not valid or at least not clear at all, why does it mean "select a point where you will start to follow the path once selected"? why do you say "when you do not use an empty the mesh that follows the route tends to deform a little", it's not accurate at all...

I don't think so, the 2 sentences I quoted make no sense to me, you didn't really address his problem, plus you gave off topic recommendations... anyway...


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Missing objects in the final render
I have been trying to render a thumbnail for a Roblox game. I have everything ready I just need to render it. When I try to render the final product It only shows the terrain and not the actual people. I think something is wrong with the camera. Not sure though.

Check your outliner and make sure all the eye icons and camera icons are all turned on. Check your layers to make sure everything is visable

Make sure you enable all objects renderable in the outliner panel. It's the Camera button next to the object name.
Also make sure your render layer is connected to a composite output node.

Can you show me a picture of what you mean by those 2 things? I am fairly new to this so I don't know all the functions.

NVM I found out how to fix it. Thanks for your help!


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Join headphones to a model
I downloaded the free Vincent model at the blender official library and i wanted to modify a few things of him. Adding some headphones to the model it's being a big headache. I model the headphones and try to join (ctrl+j) the head with them, but when i change the pose the headphones doesnt move (also joining those parts i lose the colour of the headphones).
I try also to add a parenting system (ctrl+p) but i don't know if i'm doing it well, after doing it, when i change the pose, the headphones doesn't move.
How can i do this? I just want to place de headphones there, during the animation they aren't goint to move from his ears.

related: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/247422/how-do-i-connect-the-hair-properly/247426#247426

¡¡¡¡Thank you so much!!!!


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Blender 2.9+ Mirror Flip a Texture
So, i've done Mirror Texture Boundaries in other programs, but i can't quite figure out how to do it in blender, i know it should be possible.
To be more specific, i'm looking to do something like this. Lots of nintendo models use mirrored textures like this and stuff. It should be possible right?

If your object is mirrored with the Mirror modifier, you can either keep the modifier or apply it, the UVs will be mirrored, therefore the texture will appear mirrored on the object

Maybe you should tell us what you want to do as an end result?
you can mirror a texture with the help of shading nodes like this:

so the "trick" is to just use negative scale values for a coordinate...


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Fbx file 4kb size?
i just downloaded Blender and i want to export a object with animation applied. I chose .fbx and go to export it. Then, I can see the export product but when open it with simple viewer as 3D Viewer it's just empty, nothing is showing. Something tricky that I found is that all of my tries are 4kb in size.
In the Hierarchy i shift selected all of the stuff. If someone can help me it would be very helpful.

Hard to tell without the source file / blend file

Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking.


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how to fill objects with holes
how can i fill the below file, i only want to fill the selected vertices or faces, but i dont want the hole/circle inside to be filled. when i fill it, the circle also gets fill. i want the fill to be applied only inside leaving a hole in the middle. help please

You can't create holes without edges connecting to the outer edges, so create these edges and then fill the faces:

yes, he can't...but Superman...? That's why you wrote "you can't"...i understand!!!! :D

@Chris, I'm not sure Superman can even do it, maybe Moonboots though, who knows what he's capable of? This guy is incredible...

I've heard of a man called Chris who pretends to be as strong as Moonboots, well, maybe in a thousands of years...

Recently I have bought some Cryptonite…♂

ok but against Moonboots you'll need garlic and crucifix

Damn - again, my 3 problems: wrong place, wrong time, wrong items

Is Crptonite a knew form of Cryptocurrency?


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video clips keep disapearing

this is the first video I'm editing on blender and when i was in the middle of editing videos i looked back and saw all my past clips greyed out and not showing anything on the preview or playing any sound. the non greyed out ones still work fine. I've tried undoing, restarting the app and my computer but it still stays the same. this has happened twice with this one project and i cant find anyone else having this problem. is all my work gone and if so how do i stop this from happening again?

holy crap thank you !!!! im so glad it was that easy <3

A comment that turned out to be the answer:
The clips look hidden. Press A to select them all, then press Alt + H to unhide them.


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How to recalculate vertex normals after transforming a mesh in Python
import bpy
from bpy import data as D
from bpy import context as C
from mathutils import *
from math import *

# work on the default startup scene
me = D.meshes['Cube']
print([v.normal for v in me.vertices])
me.transform(Matrix.Rotation(2, 4, 'X'))
me.calc_normals()
print([v.normal for v in me.vertices])

Running the script with blender -P transform.py outputs the same values twice. The calc_normals call seems to have no effect. How can I properly recalculate the normals instead?
Replacing calc_normals with two flip_normals calls works, but is kind of an ugly workaround.
Looking in Blender's source code, the transform intentionally does not touch the normals, a comment says "don't update normals, caller can do this explicitly". And calc_normals first looks if the normals are dirty, which they aren't, and does nothing.

Turns out this is a bug in Blender 3.1 and has since been fixed.


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Stuck in 'Cut Links' Mode While Working On Nodes
I've somehow entered into some accessibility mode while working on nodes in shading where my cursor / left click is always performing 'cut links'. Holding CTRL allows me to select new objects, but I cannot move them in this mode, nor can I make new links in the traditional fashion.
After an hour of searching I am at a loss. How do I disable this and enter into the normal mode?

It just happened to me(don't really know how it happened), but that's how I solved it: click the arrow in top left corner of the geo nodes view and click on "Use box selection..." instead of "Links Cut"


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Creating speeding stripes via Texture-Mapping
Community,
I already have a few years of experience with blender, but one functionality I could never get my head around was mapping. I've done my first UV-maps for textile models, but I can't solve the following problem:
I'm trying to achieve this animated 'speedstripe' effect: (first video)
OLAY ProX on Behance
I've tried to use a half-circle backplane and moving and rotating an arbitrary gradient texture but couldn't get the same look. The reference looks like a circular or planar map is being manipulated in some way.
Can you point me in the right direction on what to google or how I need to orient my gradient-texture to achieve this effect?
Any help or reference is appreciated :)

Try something like this - if you enter #frame in the Value Node box where I've indicated, the value will change with the frame number when you animate. After that I just added some math nodes to slow down the process and give it a back and forth motion (sine node). You can omit this if you want. The other math nodes are just to give an the values different offsets for the phase offset and distortion respectively.

Here is an example of it in action - pardon the quantization and overall crappy look of the gif - I had to take a really short clip and compress it to make the file size acceptable by this page. The real effect looks much better.

Sorry. I just noticed that in my screenshot I am using "Object" texture coordinates - that was just because I had to mess around to get the best screenshot - it works just fine, and in fact, better, with UV coordinates.


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Armatures breaking apart mesh on pose?
I currently have a mesh that I made of individual cubes that I have joined into the components I want to add motion to (the arm/sword should move as a single unit)

I Have added armatures and set the limbs parent to the center bone with the "keep offset" setting. I selected all the components of my character and set the armature deform to automatic weights.
I Just want to be able to freely rotate the limbs / head about the axis at the base of each bone, but I can't seem to get that to happen as the mesh just breaks apart, picking seemingly arbitrary pieces to drag with it (which I dont quite understand, since I have joined the cubes together into the components I do want to move)

Anyone have any tips for how to get this set up properly?

it looks like your head mesh is cut in half?

The head is 1 piece, composed of a bunch of individual cubes but they're all joined together

oh ok so it looks like the right part is not correctly assigned to the head bone, you need to select them all in Edit mode, go in the Object Data panel > Vertex Groups, select the head vertex group, and assign

Hmm currently all the bones show up in the vertex groups for the head, when I remove all of them except for the head bone i have the same break apart issue

I think its mostly an issue with it regarding my mesh as individual cubes instead of the joined together components ive made with them

individual cubes may be not a good idea but it should not be the problem here, but maybe share your file: https://pasteall.org/blend/

https://pasteall.org/blend/d1f761d9c7a2448ca1125ba5d0d52931

Some cubes are assigned to some vertex groups that they should not be part of, so select all the head cubes, go into the Object Data panel > Vertex Groups list, and Remove from All Groups:

Then assign them to the group that has the name of the bone that is supposed to control them (Bone.001):

It works:

AHHHH I LOVE YOU


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Baking just colors with bake type on diffuse is extremely slow, used to be much faster but I'm not sure what the problem is now
Every time I try to bake, it takes a really long time for the progress bar to go up, it used to be faster a couple days ago but today it suddenly became slow. My PC is certainly fast enough, 1660 TI, 32 GB RAM, Ryzen 7 3700X. I don't know what the problem is but any help is appreciated.

Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking.

Baking is a rendering function, so in Cycles it's affected by the number of rendering samples.
If you're baking a property which is not affected by lights (i.e. base color, without diffuse light, indirect light) you can turn down the samples even to 1, to speed up the process.
Where lights and shadows matter (like Ambient Occlusion) you will need more samples for better results.


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Round Edges on solidified mesh
I am trying to create a piece of clothing.
As you can see I created a simple shirt which has nice smooth round edges. Around neckline, arms opening and the bottom piece.
However the mesh topology in edit mode is bad. Many verts are not connected and the sheer amount of verts which create the round edges is too high. Total vert count is 8776. There are simply too many verts and edges and no way for me to connect and merge all of the verts.

Any way to create these round edges? I have tried using bevel modifier but that doesnt create anything but highlist the quads.
I would like to create a similar look from mesh on the last picture. The edges and faces on it are flat. The vert count is 886. I dont even mind 8000 verts as long as I dont have to go through 5000 merging them.
Any ideas?

Did you try proportional editing mode? If not, that might be worth a shot. Rough outline of how I would go about it:

Bridge the edge loops (works best if both loops have the same number of verts)
Do several loop cuts on the face loop added to create the bridge
Turn on proportional editing mode and set it to "Sphere" or "Smooth"
Select the inner most ring of the loop cuts
Grab and move or scale the selected loop

Thank you! That worked!
Is it possible to UV unwrap only the new loops/vertices while keeping the old UV map? Sort of add the new ones to the already existing UV map?

In theory what you describe should be possible with Blender (or maybe with an add-on like TexTools), but I am not very familiar with this area of Blender. As this is a different topic, I would recommend posting this as a new question if you want to get more input on this.


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Rendering - Noise issue
This is my first post in Blender. I'm currently working on this sugarcane's project, But The rendering result cause a lot of noise or flicking issues. can any one give me a advise? I got turn on Denoising and 120 Samples. much appreciated if you guys could give me a hand. thanks

Below is the test rendering link. please have a look.
https://youtu.be/j08kpjA4r4A

Perhaps it would help to include a shot of your render settings, too....

Hi, Thanks for your suggestion. I have tried 500 samples. I will also check it out the link you sent. thanks.


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How to make x-axis mirror work on newly created bones? (2.79)
I'm rigging a model from scratch, but I'm not sure how to make it detect two bones as the "same" one, so that when I transform one bone (in edit mode) it transforms both. How do I make it so that it sees the bones that way? Is there a specific way in which I need to create the bones, or is there a shortcut I can use, or something else?
Example of it not working:

I think it was naming the left side *.L and the right side *.R

@HenrikD Yes, that was it, thank you.

In order for the Mirror Option to know what it should mirror, you need to name the bones according to some guidelines on the wiki (https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/animation/armatures/bones/editing/naming.html). There are also Tools to for example flip the side in the name or mirror bones and their names. You find them in the Armature Menu > Names.


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Can I import a .vrm model?
I'd like to import a .vrm model. Is there any plugin that allows this?
I'd also like to know if it's possible to convert a .vrm to a .fbx or something else, however just being able to import it into blender is good enough.

this VRM https://dwango.github.io/en/vrm/vrm_about/ ?

yes I'm pretty sure, mine is from VROID studio, and it exported as a VRM, so probably. I already looked on this website but I find it hard to understand, its probably google translated or something as there's also a japanese version of this page.

Bryan had the right idea but added an extra step. You can just change the extension to GLB and import the file as a GLB straight into Blender. There is also an addon that will allow you to import VRM files directly into Blender. So these two methods are the best two methods for importing VRM into Blender.

at the time this question was posted (3 years ago) there was no addon to import VRMs into blender haha but i got it now

if you change the extention from .vrm to .glb and open in Windows Paint 3D, you can then export it to FBX and import to Blender.

changing it to .glb and opening it in Paint 3D works fine, however, Paint 3D doesn't allow me to export to .fbx, so i exported it to .obj. When I tried importing it in blender it gave me an error. I've never tried to import a .obj in blender before, nor worked with .obj's, so I'm not sure if I need to import the .mtl too or not, but importing with .mtl doesn nothing and importing without .mtl gives an error.

Worked for me.  Paint3D totally has the option to save as fbx.  Thanks man, that saved me a lot of time. :-)


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Smooth Shading distorts mesh?
Why does this happen to my object when I apply the smooth shader and how can I fix it? I am working with a low poly mesh, or at least trying to keep it low poly but, I would like it to look smooth and not jagged. Each time I use the smooth shader it completely distorts the mesh. Do I need more faces? How can create that without using the knife tool? Thank you for any input.

Try using an edge split modifier.


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How Can I add an Object so that is not facing the current the view?
I was following a tutorial on blender ( I dont remember which now, as I have watched a lot ). I some how  set up this feature and now I dont know how to turn it off.
Each time I apply an object in to my scene, it applies facing whichever direction my camera is facing. How can I get this back to the default of applying the object in the center?
Thank you in advance.


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I can't change my interaction, frame rate, render present, unit presents

At first I was trying to change my frame rate but I was unable to do so. Then I tried to change my interaction and again I couldn't when I click on the blender(default) this report:error comes up. Please help

Possibly related

https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/


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How to make the 3d manipulator act parallel to a plane
How would i be able to set my 3d manipulator so that one of the axis is parallel to the face of what im moving, i want to move it parallel to the face of the plane.

Select (a face in) the plane
Create a Custom Orientation (CtrlAltSpace)
(Check 'Use after creation' and possibly 'Overwrite previous' in the tool region,if you don't want to bother to name the orientation, and/or don't need it later)
Any translation you now make with G-ShiftZ-ShiftZ will be parallel to the plane you selected.

That should so much be in the menu or as an option in the Transform Orientation tool instead of being hidden away on a hotkey.

I guess the difficulty in simply including custom orientations in the dropdown is the desire to stash them for future use. But nearly all of mine are 'disposable', so yes, a 'From Selection' option in the orientation dropdown would be very handy.

Change the Transform Orientation at the bottom of the 3D Editor window from the default of 'Global' to 'Local'. This will use the object's local axis for manipulation.

You may need to temporarily join your objects to use this method, but it should work.

Yes - this only works to manipulate an object to its own local orientation.

I like this approach, because then you could duplicate your reference object, and parent your target object to that. Translate the duplicated parent, clear the parent, then delete the duplicate reference object (or keep it parented on a separate later, and/or disable it from rendering). This could be useful if you ever wanted to use snapping to get it back into its original starting position (eg. Snap Duplicate Parent Reference Origin to a 3D Cursor position set to the Origin of the Original Reference).


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Attempting to assign faces, why isn't the material showing?
I'm trying to assign different materials to parts of this mesh. I've cornered off the areas and unwrapped them, but can't seem to get the material to show up in the UV Map. How do I assign/bake the texture so I can see it as a flat image on the map?
bear in mind, I'm by no means a seasoned user:

Materials don't show up in UV maps.  Ever.  Are you asking about texture images?  To get a particular image to show up, with the UV map laid over it, from the screen you're displaying, simply select your image from the image picker drop list, the part that currently says "SeatTut".

Okay, I understand that. With Maya I would "bake" the material and use the environmental lights and material render as a basis for drawing on in another paint program and then applying it as a texture afterward. I'm trying to achieve something similar, instead of painting the lights/shadow myself I just make it more glossy or matte and render it into a "baked" UV map. So that's what I'm trying to do here, have blender bake the mats into the corresponding UV island.

Okay, sorry, I didn't really understand that. In Blender it's called baking as well.  I think that if you look for "how to bake in Blender" you will find many hits, including existing answers on Blender Stack Exchange, such as https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/13508/how-do-i-bake-a-texture-using-cycles-bake .

it keeps telling me no active image found- though I believe I've assigned textures to both the material and the nodes. If I only wanted to bake part of the object would it still be the same method as the steps you've linked me? I'll try looking around for specifics more thoroughly.

Follow instructions exactly.  No active image found usually means you didn't have an active image texture in your nodes telling Cycles what to write to.  You can't bake part of an object; if you don't want to bake some mats, don't give them an active image, but it doesn't make it any faster, it still has to render everything to bake anything.

thank you for your help, Nathan! My apologies for not replying sooner. I found out that I had to create an image texture node. So simple, lol! Still struggling with why it bakes black though, despite the scene lights.


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Blender will not start on Ubuntu 16.04
To preface, I have used Blender downloaded from blender.org on my setup quite well for a while now. I have installed it in /opt within the home location to steer around superuser constraints. OK.
Last night, I downloaded one of the recent 2.8 test builds and while figuring out the interface Blender completely locked up. Not only did Blender lock up, the computer locked up, too. There was no signs of the CPU taking on any additional stress. Fans not spinning up or anything like that.
After a hard reset, the computer runs fine, but Blender will no longer start. This includes the 2.79 build that's installed. No errors, Taskmanager listing, no response. Attempting to uninstall Blender gives errors that all the files are write-locked. After going into superuser levels, I could get it removed and reinstalled, but no improvements.
In short, I don't know how I broke it but I'm hoping someone has advice to help me get this working again.
Thanks all!

OK! I found some more details through the terminal:
I attempted manually executing via the terminal. This is the response:
Read prefs: /home/****/.config/blender/2.79/config/userpref.blend
/home/sources/blender-release/intern/ghost/intern/GHOST_WindowX11.cpp:198: X11 glXQueryVersion() failed, verify working openGL system!
initial window could not find the GLX extension

Alrighty! Looks like somewhere the amdgpu-pro drivers were breaking. I uninstalled them, ran 'apt-get autoremove' then rebooted the system. Blender's working again on the built-in drivers.


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How to make a flare
I am trying to make a flare in blender (Not a lens flare) that I can then import into Unreal 4. I am new to blender, and cannot find any tutorials for this. Please give me some advice or guidance on how to start. I have a feeling that I will have to use particle systems and modifiers.

I think I would be helpful if you add a picture of what you're trying to create and maybe what you have already tried.

If you are talking about something like a road flare, you actually cannot do this in Blender (for use in Unreal 4, anyway).  You can model the physical flare object in Blender, but the burning effect will be a combination of shaders and particle effects that run in Unreal 4 itself.
See:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Rendering/ParticleSystems


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Reduce/Remove Sub-edges in Skin Modifier

When using Skin Modifier it will create sub-edges/intermediate edges (Marked Green on the picture) between two control vertices (Red dots on the picture).
 As far as the shape of the object goes, it is only the Edges produced by control points (Red) I'm interested in, so I have to delete all the unwanted (Green) sub-edges after applying the modifier. Which is fine if the model is simple enough (Just select main edges, invert selection and delete the rest), but with a complex one it gets really time-consuming and at times confusing very fast.
 Is there a way to make Skin Modifier go without creating those sub-edges at all somehow?

I don't know if you can avoid edges with the Skin modifier, and I'm not sure it's a perfect tool to create mesh, anyway, you could simplify with these methods: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/114874/how-to-reduce-polygon-of-a-wire-model#114878

You can add a Decimate modifier below the Skin modifier, to reduce the number of faces created by the Skin modifier.

I'd like to add that using the "planar" decimate mode is great with the skin modifier for producing low-poly organic shapes (like handmade trees). It allows you to provide an angle limit and merges planes connected at angles smaller than the limit. Given that the skin modifier produces several parallel planes along edges, setting the angle limit to something arbitrarily small (though greater than zero, like one degree) will eliminate all of these extra planes without deforming the mesh too much at all. Plus, the resulting topology is decent and generally doesn't require remeshing.

It doesn't unless you want to subdivide. Then it's a horrible mess. We need a skin modifier that just doesn't add the redundant loops.


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Different Simulation results
I have two similar objects, however, one of them behaves normally during the simulation process, while the other one doesn't, I can not figure out what results in this difference.

You need to apply scale on both of them.  After doing so, the simulation behaves like you'd expect.  (Be aware too that these are set to "convex hull" which is going to affect their collision-- they are not convex shapes.)

@Nathan, hi, I tried to print both of their scale, and find that, they are the same:

for obj in C.selected_objects:

...     print(obj.name)
...     print(obj.scale)
...
Abnormal_one
<Vector (0.3000, 0.3000, 0.3000)>
Normal_one
<Vector (0.3000, 0.3000, 0.3000)>

Oh I see, it seems that the operation of "transform_apply" is not applied to the abnormal one. Thank you for your help! However, could you please explain shortly the reason why the missing of this operation results in this kind of phenomenon?

Sorry, I don't think I could say.  As a general rule, always apply scale on physics objects.  It appears to screw up their bounding boxes.  I'd call it a bug, but it's been around forever, and there may be a reason why things are designed that way.  Yes, both your objects have unapplied scale-- however, the precise way that they're bugging makes only one look bad.  It's not that the other is okay; it just happens to work out, even though it's bugged.

@Nathan Thank you for your patience!


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There is no button in image (compositing). Button called mist
When I rendered animation (450 frames), I would like to composite it and add mist.
I closed Blender and than reopened it again. But when I go to the compositing and add image node with image in it, I didn't see mist button.
What can I do? I rendered animation for 4 days, so re-rendering isn't my option.

If you want to save channels, you have to use the .exr format, not png... I'm sorry but you have to re-render it if you want to have the mist pass. Although you can render only the mist pass to speed things up

Thanks a lot. I will try some stuff.

Sorry. But how can I render mist pass.

From your image you don’t have Mist but you do have Depth. Assuming that is the actual depth from the render you can use the Depth in a similar way with a bit of Maths to convert into a suitable mix factor for your mist.

Thanks. Is there a tutorial for that?

This answer includes a method of using Depth as a mist pass : https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/109192/29586

Thank you very much!

How did you render the images? did you save them as openEXR multilayer? If you didn't save the mist pass you will need to render again.

Thanks! I knew.

Hmmmm. Looks like despite the Image node having a Depth socket it seems that PNG files do not actually retain the depth (I'd assumed since it had the Depth it must have detected that the depth was also encoded in the image (which was something I was surprised that a rendered PNG contained!) - but after testing it seems it just returns 0 for the whole image). As @susu answered, your only option is to re-render.

@RichSedman PNG encode only RGB and unassociated alpha (if plugged in). No more. It is not a great format. OpenEXR was designed to hold linear data, so the depth pass can be stored unbound and linear. Why is there a socket for anything else is probably an error in the design of the image node.

Short answer. Re-rendering is your only option.
PNG will not save the mist pass, or any other passes. It will only save color and alpha by default.
If you need to save multiple layers use OpenEXR multilayer.

When you import the rendered image back it will have the corresponding sockets for the layers you saved.


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How to make this type of iridescent glass?
I have seen this iridescent soap bubble glass and wanted to recreate it. Does anyone know how to recreate it with shaders?

I have made like You said, but it doesn't work.

it looks like a metal spiral in a glass marble with a bit of iridescence?

Maybe, I will try.

It doesn't work.

Can you add a little tiny bit more details about what you have tried and what didn't work?

I think there's a bunch of postprocessing going on in that image. I also don't think the interesting color effect is iridescence but rather an artifact of light placement. Also, a good deal of the effect is due to the objects, like the mask in the lower left, being reflected by or transmitted through the sphere. I also don't think the inside spiral is metal.  I suspect it's blown glass, possibly of a different density.   Something like this

Here's a quick render of this "Clear Air Trap". It's what moonboots and Marty Fouts said (glass marble, glass spiral, iridescence shader, plus some glare from the compositor) => https://i.sstatic.net/BMuJp.jpg

Thanks. I will try to recreate, but are there any shader (I have searched it all around the internet) -> nothing? Would be very kind, if you attach blender file. Thanks.

The shader for the iridescence effect you can find here on BSE (linked in my answer below). But it's only one part, the other parts are the light in the scene, the point of view, the modifiers, the post effects in the compositor. -- I like your version. Looks abstract, kinda painted :-)

Here is a try to get something close to the reference image. But it's a guessing game since we don't know how it was created and little changes can completely change the appearance.
Let's use what moonboots and Marty Fouts wrote in the comments and go with a glass marble, a glass spiral, an iridescence shader, plus some glare from the compositor. The render engine is Cycles.
The Marble
Add an Icoshpere to the scene and give it a Subsurface Division modifier to make it more round. Set shading mode to Shaded Smooth. Add a Solidify modifier.
Activate add-on Add Curve: Extra Objects that comes with Blender. Then add an Archimedean Spiral. In the options panel that pops up, set Spiral Type to Spheric and Turns to 4. In the curve properties, use the Bevel options to give it thickness. You also can use another curve object (Circle), edit it a little, and use this as a Bevel Object. It will distort the light that passes the spiral.
If you like to have things procedural you can "model" this with Geometry Nodes.
Camera and Light
Place the camera in front of the marble and a Spot light behind it. For the Spot light you can use an IES profile if you like.
To control the reflections you can add a plane over the marble or at one side.

In the World Properties set up an HDRI. It has a huge impact on the appearance of the rendered image. Try different (night) HDRIs. You can turn down the Strength of the emission in the Shader Editor for the World properties.
Iridescence Glass Shader
Search here on BSE for Iridescence and you will find this question Iridescence In Cycles?
We will use the node group from the top answer. Just add a Hue Saturation Value node to control the color spectrum better. (The Hue shifts the color palette of the Color Ramp node.)

To control the iridescence (more on the outside of the sphere, less in the center) we add a Layer Weight node and a Color Ramp node.
The Principled BSDF with Transmission set to 1 and very low Roughness is our glass shader.

Compositor
Here you can add one or two Glare nodes, and a Defocus node if you want.
Marble Examples

uses Sahara Night HDRI
same as 1 but lowered the thickness of the Solidify modifier of the marble
like 1 but Blue Lagoone HDRI, tinted with a very light blue for (Color 1 of the iridescence node group)
similar as 3, but bright plane on top and changed the color ramp values for the iridescence shader
this is Marble 2, no Solifify modifier on the marble but one on the spiral. Tinted spiral
same as 1 but increased the thickness of the Solidify modifier & black plane on top

Blend File
Materials and node setups for the objects and the world backgrounds are included, but no HDRIs. You can get them from polyhaven.com.

Thank you a lot!

Wonderful answer, deserves much more upvotes. Embarrassing for everyone here :)


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Is it possible to transfer particles in the form of object after following a curved path (spiral or something)
I want to gather particles in the form of object after riding it on path. how to do it?
I have two requirements:

Particle should follow our (user made) path (not random) and
After following our given path, i want them to rest in the shape of object
There are lots of solutions and tutorials are available on above either one condition (but not both together)

So please only answer it if fulfils both.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/219525/2214

https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/238971/2214 ... same concept – search for Keyed particles

Does this answer your question? How to avoid collisions of moving objects from point A to point B

Geometry nodes ... https://youtu.be/w15hBuNVq6s

Force Field > Curve Guide (set Free like 0.8 so particles didn't end up at the end of curve)
Final object > Collision (set some Friction and Stickiness)
Inside place one Empty > Force and for second Empty > Vortex or Turbulence let particles fly around the object before they stack on surface
To try keep distance between particles I tried to use in Particle Properties > Force Field Settings > enabled Self Effect and for Type 1 > Charge ...
probably good to disable Gravity under Scene Properties or under Particle Properties > Field Weights ... so you don't have to fight with another force if you don't need it :)

It is all about forces so you would have to play a lot with settings ...

Notes:
There is a quite unnatural way to control speed particles on Curve Guide (for me), because speed is based on Particles LifeTime - at the end of lifetime particles has to reach the end of curve - long LifeTime = slow / short LifeTime = fast.
That could be fine if you don't need let particles live longer, but in your case it is an issue. That is why I used Free parametr that is described in Mannual as ...

Free
Fraction of particle life time, that is not used for the curve.

That way it was easy to set, but hour of experimenting to discover.
Naturally (in terms of blender) I would expect the Path Animation to be a factor for speed, like for object animation (more of that because it is enabled by default ... btw disabling brings crash for me in 2.93) ... hmm, what to say.
Anyway another option to let particles follow a curve is to add Curve object and assign Force Field > Type-Force, Shape-Curve ... that works more natural for lifetime, but it was impossible for me to keep particles follow curve up to end of curve ... they just more and more accelerated out of curve path.
You can also use "final" object as Force Field and Collision at the same time ... but I wanted to separate them to better see what is causing issue.
If you would need to let particles spin around curve you can change Tilt parametr for each vertex of curve.

Now this is what i want, just one more thing (you can explain in just few words): after gathering particles on the object at the end, what force should i add to make random motion of particles within the volume of the object at the end ? thank you

For Randomisation you can try Turbulence force type instead of Vortex, but to be clear - all the methods stores particles on surface not inside. To get them in you would have to make a hole in mesh to feed particles into a volume ... or try to switch face Normals Inside ... that could cheat blender to let particles flow in but not out :) ... the most crazy thing with particles is cache that is not updated with setup change and I know only way to change number of particles +/-1 to get fresh cache. ... Or try to search geometry nodes if they could handle this task in more controllable way ... ?

ok, thank you very much.

... it is a pain ... be prepared :) ... I edited the answer with some other notes good to mentioned

No problem, noted that :)


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I can't save my animation as a .mov and thats the only thing that plays on my mac
I can't save my animation as a .mov and thats the only thing that plays on my mac.
Is there a way that i can add file formats such as .mov

Hello, Ali. I use an old mac pro and I always save my animations in mp4. I also tested in a iMac (also old) and the videos worked fine.

The MP4 (.mp4) container format is derived from the the Quicktime MOV, and also widely supported on Apple products. A MP4 file containing H.264 video and, optionally AAC audio, will play on all Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, and many older PowerPC Macs as well. Simply configure your output settings as shown:

It is important to understand that MP4, MOV, Matroska, AVI and others are CONTAINER formats, not video formats. A video file as we commonly deal with it today is a wrapper around 1 or more video streams(in formats such as H.264, VC-1, DNxHD, and ProRes, and so on), and may include audio and subtitle data as well. Whether you can play a file or not requires your software to both be able to understand the container format, and the video compression format of the video stream within. So referring to things such as a ".mov video" or a "h264 video" is not enough information to troubleshoot playback and encoding issues.
Additionally, it's important to distinguish video compression formats (like h.264) from software libraries that create them (such as x264, a popular open source h.264 encoder)

Export your animaton to ffmpeg or pmeg or h.264. Then go to this website in link here.
Online-Convert.com
Therein, convert files' format to .mov.

Thank for information. I didn't know that.


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Newbie question: Where is my rendered PNG saved to?
macOS Mojave 10.14.4
I set /Users/username/Documents/BLENDER/rendering as output path.
Is the filename from the .blend files used?

Image -> Save as Image. Then enter your filename. Output path is for rendering animations.

If you render only a single frame, you have to save your image manually, by going to menu Image > Save as..
The output path is only for rendering animations or video sequences. This is relatively standard in other 3d packages too.

Vilém, I am new to 3d, so this fact is surprising me. For a good reason: the possibility to explicitly set an output path, is leading (most probably) all new users lightyears away from the idea, images has to be saved in an extra step. - At least I got totally confused by this.


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Why can't I see the result of a boolean modifier until I apply it?
Is it the case that the modifiers don't work "in the same way" ? For instance if I intersect a cube with a cylinder and choose a Boolean difference modifier to it, I can't see the result (i.e. the hole in the cube) until I 'apply' the modification.
Alternately, If I revolve a circle using the screw modifier and change the screw property to a non-zero value I see the result of the modifier straight away (i.e. I see a helix).  I've read elsewhere that some people don't apply their modifiers often if at all. However I find that unless I apply them, other things such as physics won't work properly until the modifiers on objects are applied.
Am I thinking about this the right way? The reason for asking is that there is no way to go back and change a modifier once it's applied which can be problematic unless one saves a lot of different versions in a workflow.

You can't really see the result of a Boolean modifier if the original object is in the way of the transformation, occupying the space that was removed from the other object. See my answer here for a possible solution.

Thanks Duarte Farrajota Ramos - I did consider that but when I moved the intersecting solid out of the way there was no hole to be seen until I apply the modifier, I'm starting to think I'm asking a question that has no real answer. Maybe that's just how that particular modifier works. As I say, I'm just a beginner. BTW what do you use to make the video parts of the answer in your link (should that be a separate question??)

That is how the modifier is supposed to work, it keeps the transformation 'live' and interactive. If you move the object the hole moves with it. Otherwise what would be the pint of being a modifier in the first place? If you want it static then apply the modifier and be done with it.

That question would be offtopic here, it's not about Blender. The software is ScreenToGIF

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


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Problems with the knife tool/vertices when rendering with cycles

Hello! I've had this problem with the knife tool for 4 consecutive models, each time I encountered it I looked online and couldn't seem to find anything to help since I'm pretty much new to blender and don't know the terms. Each time I encountered it I had to trash the model, I tried again with a different blade/technique but to no avail. Whenever I cut onto a surface with the knife tool and try to move the vertices, weird lines show and connect to other vertices without any line in between them. The problem doesn't appear in object mode, only when I render it. Apologies in advance if my formatting sucks, this website is confusing me a little bit lol.

It looks like you’ve created a polygon, and are now basically bending/twisting it in someway by moving a vertex. Everything in computer graphics is secretly made up of triangles. The reason is that if you take a square and twist it in 3-D space so that the vertices are not all coplanar, you can’t really define how you’re supposed to interpret it. So the computer secretly breaks it up into triangles, and if it’s twisted, you can clearly see where it’s broken up. To avoid this arbitrary looking mess, you basically need to either make sure you move the vertex coplanar with the face it is part of, or just triangulate your mesh.


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Sculpt Mode Matcap rotation
The title is pretty self explainatory.
I looked up everywhere but I can't even seem to find anybody asking about it. It's pretty strange considering it's one of most basic sculpting functions.
So back to the question. Can you quickly rotate a matcap in blender. If not then is there an addon that can do that?
Cheers.

With the default functionality it's only possible to flip the matcap horizontally.


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I'm not entirely sure if that topology is "proper"
I have a strange case on my model and I'm not entirely sure If it's in a "proper" way of doing things.
The plane number 1 shows pretty much what I've stummbled upon. As much as those look like two tris they are basically quads. Strange quads nonetheless. They also subdivide into the kinda ok but kinda mess that can be seen on plane number 2/ After some clean up though those quads look nice.
The question is if it's ok to leave that one vertex floating in the middle or would it be better to stick to version number 3.

Hello, it really depends on what you're trying to achieve, if your object is completely flat, the central vertex is useless, and anyway if this vertex is here to pull the shape in some ways, it's probably not the best practice. You don't always need quads when tris or ngons are ok

What you're showing is a "degenerate quad", where three vertices are collinear.  Such a quad may as well be a triangle-- the extra vertex exists solely to meet some "all quad" design goal, but in this case, you'd be better off with triangles.
Topology depends on application.  Whenever you wonder whether something is good topology, all you have to do is ask, does it do what I want it to do?  In other words, if it is a rendering mesh, is the render what I want it to be?  However, for most situations where somebody is asking if this is good topo-- those situations being smooth shaded rendering meshes-- no, this is not good topo.  There are a number of reasons for that, but the simplest to explain is that it may create discontinuous normals on your mesh.
Remember, prior to rendering, all quads are tessellated into triangles.  There are two ways to triangulate any given quad, and it's typical to leave the precise triangulation up to the engine, up to Blender.  Let's look at what happens to vertex color as a quad approaches degeneracy:

The vertex color is not interpolated over the entire quad; it is interpolated over two triangles.  As the quad approaches degeneracy, one of these triangles approaches zero area.  As it does so, the influence of the red vertex over the face approaches zero.
The same thing can happen with normals, which are interpolated across triangles similarly.  The influence of the single custom normal here is also approaching zero:

Blender appears to have some weird things it does to address this, flipping triangulation to prevent literally zero-area faces-- I haven't noticed this before, but it strikes me as unwise, because you don't want animation to cause your triangulation to flip.  Most other engines will not change triangulation to prevent zero area faces.
For animation, in Blender, this topology is even worse.  To demonstrate, and as a demonstration of why Blender's triangulation flipping is unwise, and why other rendering engines don't do it:

That's a UV mapped wave texture.  UV is yet another vertex property that is interpolated across triangulated faces, same as vertex color or smooth-shaded normals.  Notice the popping as the triangulation changes.
As I mentioned, there are plenty of other reasons to avoid degenerate quads; as an example, I have seen autoweight failures on meshes with degenerate quads that resolved on dissolving the degenerate vertex.  Most mesh tools are not based around the existence of degenerate (or concave) quads.
For typical rendering topology, a lot of times beginners get hung up on "all quads", because that's the easiest part of topology to understand, and it provides a reasonable goal before they understand why topology is important.  But topology is about balancing multiple issues: quads are important, but so are the angles of those quads, and so is the aspect of those quads, and so are the poles, and so is how planar those quads are; I think there's a good case that vertex count is another issue that should be considered as a topology property.  Sometimes, those factors are a balancing act.  All-quad at any cost, at the expense of other characteristics of good topology, is a fool's bargain.
Generally, a quad-only topology is recommended as part of good topology for improving smoothness from Catmull-Clark subdivided meshes.  (It's important for normals even without CC subdiv, but that's not as big a deal.)  But a degenerate quad like this isn't going to improve CC subdivision (as mentioned by Jachym Michal, it will create pinching), and it will create problems elsewhere, even in the absence of CC subdivision.  If you cannot dissolve the edge to create a quad spanning the mirror line, you are almost certainly better off with triangles.  If you're happy with your render, and you think you need that vertex for some reason, go for it.  The only important measures of a mesh's quality are the renders that it produces. But if you ever run into problems with your render in that region, you know where to look first.

Thanks! That pretty much describes everything I wanted to hear :D. Normally I'm not to hang up on the "quads are better" mindset. As you said topology should be as good as it needs to be. Most of my models go into external programs so either way they end up in triangles. Still I'm not that familiar with subdivision modeling and I'm trying to get it to at least a decent level. Thanks for both of your and Michal replies they helped a lot :D

The middle vertex serves to change the edge flow.
Which might be desirable under some circumstances.
With Subdivision Surface it strengthens the geometry and may introduce pinching.


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how to rotate only closest element to body?
I am a bit lost with all Blender version changes and I am trying to achieve the following effect:

in where the plane has the cubes as Instance on points, and I have an empty moving through which makes the closes cubes to rotate on z axis, but i cant make it work with the following geometry nodes:

I also have a vertexWeightProximity modifier but i'm not sure i am using it correctly:

When i move the empty through the plane they all seem to be affected somehow.
I tried changing the object in geometry node of last picture to Plane but it didnt change effect.

You're not clamping in any way your calculated distance and values derived from it, so  the bigger the distance the more rotation. One easy way to clamp values is to use "Map Range" node:


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I have a hole in my asset when importing to unity, the model is just fine in Blender, but when I import to Unity, it has a hole in the face
So title says it all, I have some issues exporting a Blender model into Unity. It looks perfect in Blender, but I have issues when exporting to Unity, mainly that hole in his face.

Hoping someone can help me :)
Link to Blender file

it may have to do with the normals, go in Edit mode, select all and Shift N to recalculate, but your topology is not very good so it may not fix everything

This fixed my problem. Thank you very much! :)

It has to do with the normals, go in Edit mode, select all and ShiftN to recalculate.


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Random Emission material in Array
I've created a glowing sphere (basically a visible light source) and made a grid with an array. How do I randomize and animate the strength of the emission so none of the lights are the same brightness and the values change independently?

Blender doesn't give a lot of ways to distinguish between different elements of an array.  One method that it does provide is UV:

I've created a UV map, then shrunk all vertices onto a single point.  When I tell the array modifier to offset UV for each instance, this creates a unique number for each element that I can use as the "seed" for a noise texture lookup.  The UVs of each vertex of the first element, shown, are 0.5,0.5; the UVs of each vertex of the second element are 1.5, 0.5; etc.  Because these numbers are the same for each individual element, the strength is constant over that element.  Because it varies from element to element, we get a different random output for each element.
Here, I'm also doing some manipulation of the noise texture's output to make it more obvious that I'm getting unique values for each element.  The RGB curves and math/multiply are not necessary for the technique.


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Extruding an SVG with draft for mold making
Super new to blender and have tried to find useful tutorials on this problem but they are from 7 years ago and their screen doesn't look anything like mine.
I am working on a project with a school to pour aluminum and plan on using 3d printing to make the master to pull the mold from. We will be making belt buckles or nameplate type things.
These are easy enough to design in tinkercad but that does not allow for a draft angle, which is like a taper to the extrusion, that allows for the mold to come free from the material.
I need to be able to extrude the svg with approx a 5 degree taper.
Can someone help me get this figured out? .

you could give Geometry Nodes modifier a try, it is very simple to extrude a curve and scale the top of it, in Blender 3.1 it's just a few nodes... add some trigonometry to it and you can use angles, I think it's a simple way to automatize the process or part of it

here's a basic setup...
But as posted in the comment this will work fine for simple shapes but no for more complex ones... here's a very quick tutorial on a way you could manually tackle this
1. import svg and maybe adjust resolution
2. right click > convert to mesh
3. go edit mode and select all -press A-
4. press X > Limited Dissolve, use Max Angle: 1°
5. this was to improve topology a bit for next steps, can press Ctrl  T and Alt J to see the changes
6. optional: M > merge by distance and maybe subdivide long edges
7. with all selected press E and then Enter to extrude in place -don't move extrusion-
8. press I and move slowly to inset -to add the draft- and Ctrl move to add thickness

and then here's a different node setup in case you still want to try GN and need better draft angles, it's a bit more obscure than previous though... it's a Blender 3.1 file, it expects a planar geometry -your svg is read as a planar mesh by GN- to begin with, will extrude it and try to fatten the base to generate the slope, could be improved yet

and the 3.1 blend file to test
sorry for the convoluted response..! tried to edit it to clarify


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Truly confusing normals/baking issue, seams and inverted faces in strange spots
I am having some really weird issues trying to get a working normal map for this small props project I'm doing. Here's the whole scene set up in UE4 (after modeling in Blender, sculpting in Zbrush, and texturing/baking in Substance Painter), the lighting is reading completely crazy on this because the normal maps seem to be inverted in weird places. Can anybody help me figure out what's going on? This is driving me insane as I can't find what the issue is.
Scene in UE4 with lighting on (see how all the faces are reading dark and bright in odd places), and world normal mode reflects how whacky this is:

Substance Painter normal preview shows how the faces look inverted in weird areas that are exactly where they look weird in UE as well.

Substance Painter materials view, how the textures (and lighting) are supposed to look... but if you zoom in you'll see the normal seaming issue.

Normals, faces etc. all look fine in Blender. I've tried recalculating and weighting normals, neither have fixed the issue. Here are my fbx export settings as well.

Substance Painter project and baking settings.

If anyone could help me out figuring out what is going on with these messed up normals (and therefore causing the lighting to look completely broken and make seams super intrusive) I would really appreciate it.

did you make sure that the Image Texture is set to Non-Color instead of sRGB and also maybe use 32-Bit Float images? Maybe share one of the object where you see the problem (don't forget to pack the image)? https://pasteall.org/blend/

@moonboots textures are all set to not sRGB in my UE project, how do I change to 32-bit float images? Sure thing here's just the chair (though it is happening with all the assets) https://pasteall.org/blend/764bbc1a1c4c48ab81f032e4b618daf1 Thanks so much for looking it over!

you haven't packed the normal image texture to your file, could you please do it (File > External Data > Pack Resources) and save + share again?

@moonboots Thank you, had no idea that was a function! https://pasteall.org/blend/b8428f90b3c34b2684e03146ea6d73cb

Posting for posterity sake! This was indeed a UE issue not a Blender/texture map one. For anyone trying to find the answer to perceived weird seaming and light information, make sure all your textures are set to the correct compression settings and sampler types in the materials, as well as checking off sRGB.

First, let's talk about what you're concerned about that is not an error:

The reason your normal map is all seamed up is because it has seams.
A tangent-space normal map is measured relative to the surface normal and the UV tangent, which is the direction of increasing U.  The direction of increasing U changes across seams.  Because of that, don't expect the color of a normal map to be continuous across seams.  It's not supposed to be, it doesn't have to be.  Instead, look at the actual normals:

We can see, with a roughness 0 glossy shader, that the normals are continuous across that region, even though the color of the normal map isn't.
You may wonder what I'm doing with my normal map there.  Your pictures indicated you baked this for DirectX, while Blender is an OpenGL application.  The significance of that difference for baking normals is the handedness of the coordinate system, and to convert a normal map from DX to OGL or vice versa, you invert the green channel.
That doesn't mean there are no concerns here.  Let's look at some other parts of the normal map:

This kind of thing doesn't look good.  Although you didn't provide the high poly, it's easy enough to imagine what happened here.  Rather than the low poly's faces following the high poly's, giving you smooth, continuous normals, you've made a low poly out of self-intersecting geometry.  You're not going to get the smooth normals of your high poly on any of these places made out of self-intersections.
Now let's look at your cage, which you provided in the file:

Your cage appears to just be your low poly, with a live displace modifier.  There's not really any reason to use a cage in that situation (as you've noticed, using it doesn't change anything), because a bake with some ray extrusion, or whatever SP calls it, is the same as baking from a displaced mesh.  However here, we can see some self intersection in the low poly, which is going to translate into some wonky reads from the high poly.  If you wanted to use it, it would be smart to edit this cage to smooth that area out with alt-s on individual vertices.
One last thing that worries me here, although there isn't enough information to absolutely know that it's a problem: this mesh is all quads.  Isn't that supposed to be a good thing?  It's not, when you're dealing with multiple engines (Blender, SP, UE) that aren't necessarily going to triangulate meshes in the same way.  Different triangulations will lead different interpolation of vertex data across the mesh, and whenever you bake any kind of texture, you need to know that you're baking it to a particular triangulation.

That's what happens when we flip triangulation on your model (fixed to fixed alternate.)  Neither of these triangulation methods is necessarily what SP used for the bake.  If you are using SP to paint textures, and UE to render, you should be exporting a consistently triangulated model to each.

Thanks so much for the thorough breakdown, much appreciated! Looking back at previous models I may be freaking out a bit too much over the colour but the reason this one in particular concerns me is that where the colours differ across seams is also where lighting information and world tangent information seems to go crazy. I do wonder if this is simply a directx to opengl issue but have tried both with the same results. I've followed your advice and triangulated the mesh and rebaked, but this strange inverted lighting/normals issue is still occurring: https://imgur.com/n8iewGY

Also I've uploaded my high poly here if you want to take a look and that might help diagnose anything: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Rc8Cin4i82N82oelgKDEjnw1W43FIlV2/view?usp=sharing
Good point calling to attention the intersecting geo and cage! However I don't think they're contributing to the overall issue of weird faces/normals. What do you suggest on fixing these intersecting geo normals in future?
Once again, thanks for your efforts and time!

Not being familiar with UE, I can't tell you-- but that is definitely where you need to be looking for answers, maybe some site focused on UE rather than Blender.  I agree, with some better pictures and labelled views ("lighted"), that your issues are more significant than the ones I've mentioned.  The solution on intersecting geo is don't make intersecting geo for your low poly-- make a single manifold mesh.

Thanks for trying to help out anyways!

As you see it seems to work, plug the normal map into the Normal Map node, choose Non-Color in the Image Texture, increase the Strength value of the Normal Map node:

Unfortunately this seems not to fix the main problem which is that the normal map faces are strangely inverted? This would just display the map onto the model right? Is there anything you can see that is wrong with the mesh itself that would be causing the normal map inverted faces issue? Thank you for trying this out though!

maybe try Object Data > Geometry Data Clear Custom Split Normals Data

maybe share the high-poly from which you made the normal map?

I did not have any custom split normals data so unfortunately that is not the problem. My high poly sculpt is too large to share via pasteall so here's a google drive link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Rc8Cin4i82N82oelgKDEjnw1W43FIlV2/view?usp=sharing


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How should I troubleshoot a Blender video edit that is rendering without audio
So I have a video I spent a couple hours editing cutting and splicing segments in Blender.  The audio works when I hit play in the sequencer, however, when rendering the video I have no audio in the final result.  I have my output set to MPEG-4 with MP3 Audio Codec, volume is correct on each segment and is set to 1.0 in output, I have sequencer checked in the post processing panel.  I have tried packing and unpacking external data but have had no progress.  What could I be missing?

Update: after closing and re-opening the project I lost all audio in sequencer as well.

SOLVED: not sure how it happened but my Audio clips lost contact with their source MP4.   I had to individually select each audio clip and re-attached the source by the "load sound file" button in the audio clips strip/source panel.  I hope this helps someone down the road.


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Black faces on cycles render
While rendering animation black objects and faces appear.
They appear at specific frames. The problem is with geometry nodes, I guess. When I change values in nodes for animation, black objects appear on different cubes. I am new to blender and modeling so it may be hard for me to explain something.
Here is my blender file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gWpJhHf3xnIdQr6xNmHtaWfUBohVgsCQ/view?usp=sharing

just don't leave it without reaction ... ussually happens as z-fight (double face at the same location), but since I tried to check your setup I don't see a reason for that ... so probably graphic card? Try to check blender's Bug Tracker if not posted already.

@vklidu, I just redid it in a new file and that issue hasn't appeared. Actually have no idea what was the problem, but yeah probably faces were getting on each other somehow.


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Substance Painter material looks fine in Eve but broken in Cycles
I created some textures in Substance Painter and imported them not blender. In Eevee they look fine, but broken in Cycles.
Eevee:

Cycles:

Node Tree:

Does anyone know what could cause this?

So after some playing around it seems that GPU rendering is the issue. Im on 3.2 alpha and using a MacBook Pro M1Max Chip. when I switch to CPU rendering it looks fine.

Remember that Substance Painter uses DirectX for it's shader systems whereas Blender uses OpenGL. In many instances, DIrectX>OpenGL conversion is necessary for Normal Maps (Separate XYZ of Normal Map, subtract Y from 1 in a math node, then recombine).


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export looped alembic files
Is it possible to export looped alembic files? I exported then imported an alembic object (a deer) from Blender into 3Ds Max sing this method that maintains working IDs: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/149520/exporting-blender-abc-to-3dsmax-with-working-material-id . It came into Max as many alembic objects. Somehow I imported one early, since deleted, that I was able to loop with out of range controllers, but I can not loop this one. Any ideas?

If it worked, and you need to proof a concept, start from scratch with a new blend and simple cube and continue with a new max file. If it will be working, you can asume it is issue specific to your WIP file. In that case we need more info about your setup (or to see file) ... but it can be also an issue of Max, so you would have to ask there maybe. What do you mean loop alembic? Animation?

By looping an amblemic,  I mean repeating the animation indefinitely. So for example a 250 frame walking animal will walk forward indefinitely.

I don't have a Max, but this answer works for me - Loop Alembic in Blender


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Interactive 2D videos on 3D object?
I want to put an illustration (2D) and add some interactive videos/GIFs (2D, part of the illustration) to it, it is possible to use a 3D object as a base for that illustration, all while keeping the interactive parts?

You can use videos as textures, like regular images. But you have to convert GIFs into video files or image sequences.

Is it possible to make those videos interactive? As in, they only play if you click on them?

What do you mean by interactive? Blender is not a game engine, elaborate your question so that we can understand what exactly you trying to achieve

I'm sorry, I'm a noob in Blender, and it doesn't help that english isn't my first language; but: I was just wondering if it was possible to make an 3D base for an illustration, which you would be able to scroll around, and upon clicking on certain images, it would trigger a video (like, if there was a leaf, you could click on it and it would move). I know this can be done in 2D, but I was hoping there would be a way of putting this on a 3D, so you could "travel" around it.

As @Crantisz said, you are probably looking for a game engine. The game engine has been dropped since 2.8 but there is a fork called UPBGE thak kept the Blender game engine. What you want to do can probably be done with this.

What medium do you want to use? Where your interactive will be shown? Is that web site or application for android/iOS?


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DON'T want blender to open the full size of my monitor on start up/opening a file
I have a very large/wide monitor and every new instance of blender or reopening saved files it will open the program fullscreen/to the full extent of my monitor's display.
I prefer to work in a smaller window size as its just easier for me to comprehend. most programs you take them out of full screen and it remebers this on next start up, bender doesnt and it will continue to open maximised. is there a setting somewhere to have it always open windowed that im missing?

Resize the window however you want, then go to File > Defaults > Save startup file

+1  I was just about to write the same ;) And best do it directly after starting up Blender. Or else other things you changed might be saved in the default as well.

Oh man this also remembers on which monitor the file opens ! Never noticed that.

@Gorgious Not just that it remembers any other settings, layout you change, if you add or remove new objects it will remember that too


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I'm following a youtube tutorial. I have added a skin modifier but mine is much fatter than the one in the video. Why?
this is the tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EJRlWitYmo&list=PLnWkebxmBl7Sd5vF2Xt8u6gPELABFy2aC&index=14
I haven't changed any of the settings and I'm using the latest blender version

Maybe your object was very small, you scaled it up but didn't apply the scale? In that case press CtrlA > Apply Scale.
You can also change the vertices thickness in Edit mode with the CtrlA shortcut, or open the N panel > Item > Mean Radius:


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Jaggedly shaded faces and other funkiness
I'm trying to combine two meshes together and am running into some really weird issues. My combined mesh has all these jaggedly shaded faces, vertices I can't select from certain angles and interrupted or dotted edge lines. What's going on? I already ran Merge Vertices By Distance and Flip Normals and the problem persists.
Please ignore the combination of tris and quads and how much of a mess the rest is (unless it has something to do with my issues), I'm intending to go in and fix the topology later once these issues are resolved.

Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking.

In my experience that usually happens when the viewport camera Clip Start and Clip End values (N > View) are too high or too low. They're not real geometry, just shading issues due to excess precision.


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How to Remove this Black Layer
all!
I am new to Blender and 3D editing. I want to eventually 3D print this model of my Warcraft character, but I need to remove the black areas surrounding the shoulders and the sword. I made the replica of my character in WoW model viewer, and it didn't render the enchanted shoulders or sword properly, so I'm having to manually fix it. As you can sort of see in the picture, the rest of the shoulder pieces seem to be underneath the layer of black. When I tilt the character, I can see the rest of the shoulders underneath the black layer. How can I remove those black areas? Any help is appreciated.

There could be more ways, but instead of guessing would be better to share your file  ... Thanks

since these pieces are colored different on viewport check if the model has multiple materials or vertex groups, if you have either of these then it's very simple.
just go into edit mode, then in the materials properties select the material of the dark faces, and click "select"

this will select all faces with the assigned material.
another thing you can do is if these faces aren't merged to the mesh and just joined as the same object, you can select one of these faces then press L. this will select all linked faces that are part of the same mesh


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Console output to file
My Python script prints coordinates of an empty into the system console. Now I would like to save these coordinates in a file to make them available to another program for further processing.
Is there a possibility for this?

Hello ! This question is answered there : https://stackoverflow.com/a/5214587/7092409

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/51706/exporting-coordinates-of-vertices-to-csv