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Linked models showing hidden objects used for modifiers
I've created a few scenes to be used as linked objects in another scene, and a few of them are using boolean modifiers to "cut" out shapes from other objects. I've noticed that when linking the objects to the main scene, the shapes used for the boolean modifier are still visible.
Main Scene

Source Scene

I've disabled the objects from view and render:

but I'm assuming I'm missing something else, and I can't seem to find any info about it anywhere. Thank you in advance!

I wanted to recommend to disable in Viewports Globally (check Filter options) ...

... but even with this enabled I just linked it at it is hidden as welll, hmm.

Thank you, this seems to have worked


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Rope moves away
When i move bone, rope goes away from bow, i want to weld it at top and bottom.

I think we need more information about how this is rigged and why you expect the string to be attached to the end. Also, it would be good if you uploaded the blend file.

https://ufile.io/qiowo

The sting ends have weight from the "puller" bone. They should be weight painted to the end bones of the bow.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Incorrect Smooth object
On flat shading it looks good, but on smooth displays incorrectly.
With subdivision surface, it looks terrible!!
How to fix it. There is my blender file: https://ufile.io/5qja2

Your Meshtopology is not made to be subdivided, because you have some n-gons (greater then 4 verts) that even make a kink. Because Subdivision Surface modifier operates on them as one face those ugly fragments show up.
on the screenshot you can see all n-gons, you can select them by "Select/Select All by trait/Faces by Sides/greater then 4".

I would recomend to fix your mesh and cut those n-gons to polys.
Sometimes "Grid Fill" can help in those cases but it doesnt to magic.
Then there are addons like "F2" or "Smart Fill" that could help.
And also you could use the "Edge Split modifier" to solve the problem with sharp angles and "Smooth" turned on, but be carefull to put it last and not before a subdivision Surface modifier, because it splits your edges as its named and could produce some problems itself

To understand whats wrong you first need to understand what subdivider does.
Subdivider simply takes 3 vertices, and outputs the average of these 3 points, which in your case these are the points because your magazine lacks horizontal vertices
https://gyazo.com/a39bbb69b08b39541eac0cda3077ec60
you need to have vertical vertices along your magazine and other places where it deforms, something like this:
https://gyazo.com/4f41ac0fd74ee7850644daf9e7b975ed
and then add edge loops to sharpen corners.

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


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Weight painting not applied for particular vertices
I'm weight painting my character and some of the vertices on the finger are not moving with the others despite the fact that it is included in painted area.
Here's the example of moving the finger's bone and it's top view with vertices selected.

Maybe you've got some ideas of fixing that.

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

My project exceeds maximum size (24Mb) so I've uploaded it to Google drive. Here's the link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16-3hkaFURk2YY-zkh4kOq5GSEI3Q1XHc/view?usp=sharing

The bone's name is index1.L but actually bone named spine2 gives the same problem and I cannot understand why. As for spine2 when rotate it along the X axis so the character leans left and right several vertices  on the neck are staying on the place.

If I enable the modifier's On Cage option, select the vertex, open the N panel and take a look at the Vertex Weights, I can see that this vertex is also part of the group called Spine2. Just remove it from this group (press the X button):

Parenting With Automatic Weights won't always work fine, you often need to give it correction in Weight Paint mode. Select the armature, shift select the object, switch it to Weight Paint mode, select a bone with Ctrl left click. In the brush settings, don't forget to disable Front Faces OnlY if you want to paint through:

Thank you very much! Finger issue is actually solved. What do you think is the reason for these artifacts? https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZzYPFm-VZpf2a7vrmqRMXuBavlgehHSZ/view?usp=sharing

same thing, it's a bad parentage issue, but it's hard to tell how it happened, as I said if it's caused by the Spine2 bone bad parenting, then try to reparent for this bone only for the moment?

Spine2 has spine1 as a parent. Which other bone  should I assign it as a parent?
I used empty groups for all the bones not automatic

reparenting With Automatic Weights doesn't seem to fix the issue, you should try to correct that in Weight Paint mode. In the brush settings, disable Front Faces Only

That's exactly  how I'm trying to fix this issue with Weight paint mode but I don't see any vertices not included in any of the bones. Why can this happen?

Wow I see your gif erasing these vertices, how do you erase them? Which keys?

a vertex can be wrongly assigned to a vertex group or non-assigned to the good one, you often need to give some corrections, see my edit

Yep that worked! Thank you so much for your help!


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Geometry artifacts on a mesh
I'm a newbie to 3D modelling, making a 3d mesh. I notices such strange artifacts on my model. Could you please help me to find the reason for it?

Applying rotation & scale makes it all even worse.
Thank you in advance!

Hello, maybe share your file, or at least the part you're talking about (copy paste the link it will give you): https://pasteall.org/blend/

also, how did you created that hand? Also, did you use modifiers?

If I did it right here's the link with my blend project file: https://pasteall.org/blend/fd712d7f98be4c60810233f9f4abfd9b
I used subdivision surface and mirror modifiers as it's shown in the tutorial but mirror is already applied: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_X9v29i-Iw&list=RDCMUCyu4kn_ROhA34jug2g_AwJA&index=3

1: It is the Solidify modifier that is causing the issue, why do you even need a solidify modifier? Turn the Thickness value right down to 0.01 or even better delete the solidify modifier. 2: 4 levels of subdivision is way to much, dial that back down to 1 and in edit mode with all of the character selected Face menu >Shade Smooth. The hands will still have hard edges because they have many edges Marked Sharp!? Again with  all selected, Edge menu > Clear Sharp.

Thank you very much! that was exactly the issue. You helped me a lot

The issue was caused by solidify modifier. Deleting it gets rid of artifacts.


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Non-identical behaviour of symmetric armature
I did foot controls armature on the left foot and symmetrized it for the right (btw I did the same manually without symmetrizing them and the problem appeared as well). As you can see , on the picture below when I rotate footRollCtrl.L up foot goes up and the toe stays parallel to plane. If I do the same with footRollCtrl.R the right toe moves together with the rest of the foot.
Here's the link of my project uploaded to Google drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lfQUZVkqnnkMpt_DeWPyuIr1jcwICEA6/view?usp=sharing

The issue here isn't the rig. As you can see, the rig behaves the same on both sides:

What is different is how the mesh is deformed.
If you go in Weight Paint mode, you will see that the toe area is assigned at full weight bot to your toe group and foot root:

The solution is to remove the toe part from the foot weights.
Since you have it selected in Edit mode, just go in edit mode, select the foot vertex group and click remove, so that the toes vertex get unassigned from the foot.

Thank you, that worked for me!


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Copy rotation keep offset for the bones doesn't work
I'm following this tutorial in making IK controls for the bones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVHKBSknFhA&list=PLyelx0TsmSpcgsINPt6fOh3yWjTjk2Nz9&index=7
The problem starts with 12:40 in the video when  the author adds Copy rotation constraints and sets the offset in order to keep toe parallel to the ground when moving foot control forward. For my mesh that doesn't work. Toe bone stays parallel to the ground as it's shown in the video but the mesh itself moves.
Here's the link for my project saved in the issued state.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16QYTn4FCY3f6jFgqNfj7yxzJ7Lk1xoGI/view?usp=sharing
Will be very grateful for the help.

The problem here is with your weights.  If we select a toe vertex in edit or weight paint mode, and look on sidebar/item/vertex weights, we can see it weighted 1.0 to both toe and foot.  So it won't follow toe exactly: it will follow toe halfway, and foot halfway.  If you want it to follow toe only, weight it only to toe.

Thank you Nathan, that solved my issue.

The issue is solved by weighting duplicated vertices of toe and foot bones to only toe.


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Why do the new materials don't show up on an imported STL file?
I have imported some files from Solidwork in a STL. format. When I import them in blender, they show up in the solid mode viewport, but are glitchy in material and render preview. When I try to add a new materiel, the preview is all black. I tried exporting it in a obj. format and importing it in a new blender file but it still does the same thing.

Can you share a small stl that exhibits this issue?

This looks like a hardware problem. Make sure your drivers are up to date and your GPU/CPU can handle this data


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Object gets smoother when moving into sculpt mode
I've got an object that gets smooth when I select it and head into the Sculpt mode (I mean the object on the left, the right one remains the same in all modes for reference):

I must have messed some setting specific to that object, because I can head into sculpt mode with any of the other objects I've made and they retain their look - where I can see their faces, just how you'd see on the first image.

That could be for a number of reasons. Does that object have any modifiers on it? Did you turn on Dyntopo?

I don't think I've turned on Dyntopo at any point. Some modifier's been applied for sure - mirror at some point, and subdivision surface.


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Why don't my objects remain still in my camera footage despite having good tracking?
Good day, I am having an annoying issue with Blender's tracking. I am trying to motion track footage, and every time I do it, I get a low Solving number of below 0.5 Px. Despite this, every time I set up a tracking scene and try to align the mesh. My objects keep moving, they don't remain rock solid like I want. Honestly, it's quite annoying. Does anyone have any idea why?
Here's what the solving error looks like, with my trackers.
I can't post a video, but basically imagine the Shadow catcher and the cube that come with 'Setup Tracking Scene' but instead of remaining still when playing the  footage, they keep stuttering back and forth annoyingly. It's quite demotivating. I don't know the camera settings, as I know that will help immensely in tracking. It's a footage I downloaded online.

Try playing around with different values for Keyframe A and Keyframe B. They don't have to be the first and last frame of your footage, they can be any two frames.
Try making the values closer to each other, like frame 60 for Keyframe A, and 120 for Keyframe B. Click "solve" again and see if it's better. If it's better but still not good enough, try again with different values.

I'll try to do so, I also found out that when I use the Tripod option in the Solver, it gives me the result I want but it puts the px amount to insanely high.

Update: I had to set the floor and wall by setting them using the trackers, so much appreciated to everyone for the comments. The motion tracking now is much better.

I am no expert, but I remember seeing people refusing anything above 0.3 and sometimes even 0.1.
Once you solved your camera, have you selected three of your markers' empties in the 3D scene and set their orientation using the Movie Clip Editor > Tracking mode > Sidebar > Solve Tab > Orientation panel ?

This trick is shown in this video: Camera Tracking with Blender for Beginners! (VFX Tutorial) - YouTube. He uses "Floor" in his video, but I guess yours would need "Wall".

Much appreciated, I found out that using fSpy might help with the tracking and apparently the Tripod option in the Solver does do what I want l, but it messed it up by increasing the px amount.

Update: I had to set the floor and wall by setting them using the trackers, so much appreciated to everyone for the comments. The motion tracking now is much better.  Thank you.


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My mesh would completely break when i move the bones
I'm quite new to blender as i made this little electronic hand on my own with only 2 days of experience. but the problem is that when I went to rig it to make it animate it just wouldn't work. the armature is made and the mesh is linked correctly but the arm looks like it becomes a liquid when I move any bone.
when the arm is stationary:

when moved:

I have tried countless stuff to fix it even remodeled the thing a few times and still it just refuses to work. I tried asking on Reddit for this one and someone replied. if you are reading this then thank you so much! but the problem is that as a beginner I didn't understand a thing of what they said.
the comment:

and I still don't understand. if anyone can help me with this it will be really REALLY appreciated as I'm working on a game that has this arm as one of the main stuff and it was planned for months. the only thing that held me back for 2 weeks was this stupid arm rig.
that's the project file if it would be of any help to you:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u8LabX_Pr_LT9f-Et4TMPopVqMBIEv0N/view?usp=sharing
and thanks to all of you beforehand.

It is exactly as the comment you pasted in here:
you have "inner geometry". If you delete that, it should work.
To "see" you inner geometry, you can select your outer faces and then press H to hide them:

then you can see clearly your "inner geometry".
Delete all that inner geometry in both arms, the select your arms in object mode, shift-select the armature and ctrl-p -> with automatic weights and it works.

doing this really helped the rig be more complete. thank you so much. but now there are some more problems I have no idea how to fix. one fo them is that when I move something like the forearm it wouldn't be connected to the bisep which isn't that big of a deal considering I can just put a sphere in there to make it more natural.
but the biggest problem is the fingers. not the joints themselves they look not perfect but acceptable. the problem is in the beginning of them. yknow where it says like "Index1.L" or smth. when I move those bones the entire palm is twisted. how do i fix that?


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I'm trying to create this model for 3d printing. Blender says I have zero faces even though they have area. How do I fix this?
I started off with a plane and applied the solidify modifier to it so that it was 1.5 mm thick. I used plane cut to cut off some corners and now blender says I have zero faces made from those cuts. What are zero faces and how do I fix this?

I believe that is telling you there are zero area faces present, and that tool will  highlight them if you click on the actual button that is reporting them . You can probably simply delete the faces it has highlighted and all will be well.
Maybe a better approach would be to select all of the faces in the object (in edit mode) and then go to Mesh -> Clean Up -> Degenerate Dissolve, which will dissolve all zero area faces and zero length edges ....

The thing is, those aren't the only faces marked that way. of the other pieces you see in the screenshot, those are all marked zero faces. I'm not sure what or how I created these zero area faces so I have no idea how to make the rest of the geometry if I don't know how to avoid it. I noticed that they seem to all be from places that I separated the mesh at and either filled holes or joined meshes at but I'm not sure then how I could do those things without creating a zero face


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How to flip all the normals properly on this model?
this is my first time here on StackExchange. I'm pretty new to Blender but I have successfully created some simplistic models so far.
So I just modeled a roof rack made for Euro Truck Simulator 2. Since it's made out of cylinders a lot of normals need to be flipped, but doing it one by one could take hours and it's a pain.
The model with the default material:

The model with a chrome-like material, as you can see the normals are off almost everywhere:

Is it possible to flip every normal with a simplier method? Thanks in advance for the answer! :)

Wow, such fast help! Thank you very much!

Glad it helped :). Welcome to the site.


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How to slide vertices into the opposite direction in the exact same angle?
I'm trying to improve my modeling knowledge via modeling different cars but I always fail miserably shortly after modeling curved panels because I made bad topology, which I have zero experience with unfortunately. I thought the problem would be that I move the vertices on the X/Y/Z axis instead of sliding the vertices in the opposite direction of what is possible via pressing Shift + V.
What I would like to do:

Basically in the X and -Z direction without the angle of the edges changing. I would like to do this with the vertices as well as extruded edges.
Thank you in advance for your help!

I think you may find an answer here. If that's what you need,we may close this question as a duplicate.. could you let us know, please?

Yes it's the one! Thank you you can close the question now!

Great! I think we can close then, thanks for the reply.


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How can I solve this artifact (or bad shading) caused by this tri-gon?
This might be a stupid question as there's a chance that without the file it's not possible to figure out how to solve this, but:
I am modeling a Daihatsu Midget and I can't figure out how to replace this tri-gon with a quad-gon to solve this shading issue:

As you can see I am using Subdivision with Levels Viewport set to 3. Creases don't really help but I want the wheel arches to stay sharp, removing the Vertex Crease just makes it look even worse.
Do you have any idea how to remove that bad shading (or turn the tri-gon into a quad-gon) to get this look nice and flat?
Thank you in advance for your help!

Hello could you please share this part of your object? https://blend-exchange.com/

Hello, yes I uploaded it to Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Kg5v5gwqmV3Wer6hOtRRr2Zv108WIDJe/view?usp=sharing
Note that it has another similar artifact on the other side of the wheel arch.

Maybe try this topology (I've removed all Mark Sharp and so on):

Thank you this will be great :)


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How can I cut this mesh into the object while it retains it's shape?
I've been modeling this Daihatsu Midget for a while now and I got to this part but I don't know how to "cut through and paste" these objects into the rear panel.
What I have:

What I would like to have:

So it can be part of the panel.
I tried knife project but that only cuts the outline of the objects and the rotation of object and the red panel is different so I can't just move it into the panel and merge the vertices.
Thanks for you help in advance!

Sorry about this late comment, but did you try the boolean (difference) modifier?  you can then "hide" the cutting object.

Hi, I tried it but as the cutting mesh is not exactly rotated as the mesh that needs to be cut it just partially works, but thanks anyway

You might want to consider including a reduced blend file (only the essentials to meet the <30MB requirement of blend-exchange.  If I cannot figure it out, I can start a bounty as I have enough points to share.  Indeed knife project only does an outline, and only of manifold edges.

You might want to try out the (included) add-on Bool Tool as demonstrated here that will use one objects mesh, to cut another object, the solution to this question.
In the following I demonstrate using a sphere positioned into a cube.  The tool creates the additional required vertices in the sphere in the positions of the same vertices of the sphere and connects the edges to existing edges of the cube:

The wire sphere you see is a duplicate of the cutting/boolean-diff sphere.  The cutter is deleted/joined to the cut mesh and cannot be "changed" in the future.  I.e., the cut object mesh is permanently changed, so you might want to keep hidden copies of the original (cut and cutter) if you decide to change the sculpting later.
You can also investigate using a mesh as a sculpting tool, although that would also permanently change to sculpted object.


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Can I render single pass with cycles?
I would like to render single passes in order to tweak some parameters like resolution or sample count. For example I would like to render a low sample count indirect light then denoise it and compose it back.
Or is there some way for me to change the sample count for different pass? I don't know if that just possible.

Yes.  Go to View Layer Properties in the properties editor and open the passes panel.  This will allow you to select which passes are rendered.

If you want different sample counts, render to .exr for both sample counts and then composite them together.

Thank you guys! But it seems that I cannot control light path just with view layer. But duplicate scene with linked copy seems to work for me.


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Multi Rigid Body hinge joints not keeping alignment
Set up:
In the Front Leg Demo file, I'm using rigid body Passive element as the horse body (not moving), Active rigid bodies for the three leg parts and Hinge constraints for the joints that connect the links.  There are two additional links (rod and spring) that a Active rigid bodies that also have Hinge constraints and these parts help form parallel mechanisms to control the movement of the lower leg links.
Problem:
The Hinge constraints do not keep the Active rigid bodies aligned along the initial rotation axes.
I have tried:

Adding "Lock To" object constraint to the Hinge (empty) and an empty located on the part, where both empties have the same initial loc./rot.  This is not shown in the demo file.
Adjusting the objects weight and it's origin has a large effect on how the Hinge rot. axis stays aligned, but this throws off the physics simulation.
Modifying/disabling/removing collisions and/or collections.

Other notes:
Running rigid body physics in Blender is super finicky... To update any changes, I have to jump through a few different hoops and cross my fingers that it works.
Here is a shared folder with the working file: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YuomtLYRkzkzBzJEiYg6tRfQ1du6fmF9?usp=sharing

you enabled collision here:

which i think cannot work because your rigid bodies have convex hull as collision shape and so the rigid body collisions won't work because the objects are already inside each other.
I don't know how much experience you have with blender physics, but maybe first try a bit with easy geometry to get a feeling how it works.
This gif shows the difference between convex hull and mesh:

Many thanks for your help.  I have converted the Active Rigid Bodies to MESH and made a few other changes.  Great results so far.  I will post an updated file when ready.

Hi @Chris, Here is a quick update blend file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MWh8L7C_7NXjXSKv6q-JBMqyVTI1LNQ-/view?usp=sharing
However, I still have a problem with the Hinge Joint Axes not aligning when the mechanism impacts a rigid body (ground surface) as shown in this blend file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vZEO0Ibho2dKE7PpuOgAB_ndpX73GuON/view?usp=sharing

Hi @Chris, I have solved the issue by using a very simple Rigid Body "skeleton" structure and parenting it to the actual part.  I followed a path similar to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5zBqQELdVU&t=4s and https://download.blender.org/demo/compound_collision_chain.blend

I have solved the issue by using a very simple Rigid Body "skeleton" structure and parenting it to the actual part. I followed a path similar to: youtube.com/watch?v=M5zBqQELdVU&t=4s and download.blender.org/demo/compound_collision_chain.blend
For example, use a simple wire mesh Rigid Body to represent the real mechanism (the leg link and the hinge joints).  Then parent that part to the real geometry (the actual high poly count leg part).  And example is below:
The selected box is the "high poly count" leg link.  It is a Rigid Body and its Collision Shape is "Compound Parent".
The simple wire mesh Rigid Body part shown below is the actual Rigid Body part that is used for the physics calculations and is much easier on the system to handle.

Lastly, I found it very helpful to increase the number of Substeps Per Frame calculations above it's default of 10.  Just bumping it up to 15 was sufficient.  This step was critical to keep the joint axes aligned when the assembly comes into contact with an object or when it drops to the floor:

Here is the blend file for those interested and thank you for your help!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BtnHjLc7ivmVK-6ciwByJdoVtmEXFtZe/view?usp=sharing


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cloth doesn't work after meta rig
I have a problem when I want to put cloth on character, after I did meta rig.
I put cloth but it doesn't effect anything, except collision with character...even gravity doesn't work.

You need to parent the cloth as well, or you can use the Data Transfer modifier to transfer the vertex groups, then give it an Armature modifier


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Boolean Modifier isnt working properly
Before I start, Im completely new to blender and im pretty sure the problem is with the model itself rather than the boolean modifier.
Im trying to add internal "walls" to this half circle sphere casing thing as shown in the images below.

As you can see above, even though intersect is not what im trying to do, it reveals that there is probably issues with my model itself.

Now when I apply difference it shows that its not even fully cutting through the parts I want it to. How can I fix this?? Im completely lost and dont know what to search.
Here is my blend file

the topology of the object called "t" is pretty bad, you have overlapping faces etc, it won't help to calculate the boolean


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blender doesnt recognize AMD radeon 780M
when i open blender on windows, it doesnt recognize AMD radeon, i can tick it but then i get HIP kernal for this graphics card compute capability not found, not sure why, i wanted to use it on ubuntu as well, but i dont have that option, maybe because i need to install additional package.
Not sure why window see the AMD radeon but i can't use it to render, any idea? if i buy an egpu do you think i can easily render?
Still a noob in blender, i started to use it recentlyenter image description here


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How to make my icosphere inflate in a heart shape?
I am trying to create a soft body/ cloth simulation where the eyeballs inflate and pop out of the eye socket and form into a heart shape.
I tried quite some different approaches now but none worked out so far.
At first I shaped a heart from a cube and subdivided the faces so it would create a smooth mesh which I added soft body physics to. Then I applied a force field but the effect would not create a realistic round eyeball in the first frames like in this tutorial:
How to create a soft body in blender 2.8
Next I tried to use cloth physics to let the heart shaped cube inflate itself but the shape got lost in the process.
Then I tried this tutorial: Make ANYTHING Inflated | Blender3D Tutorial
I separated the edges of the initial heart form:

I snapped it to the icosphere's surface, beveled and shrink-wrapped it to the surface of the icosphere:

As this did not work at all I took the knife tool and splitted the faces by hand. Then I beveled the edges and assigned a vertex group to it like in the tutorial above:

This was the best result so far but the inflation happens less on the heart shaped part:

Is there anyone that tried this before or has an idea how to create the desired result?
Please let me know if you need further information or screenshots/ .blend file.
Really hoping on somebody's expertise as I am quite a beginner with blender.
Thanks so much in advance!

Hello do you have 2 pictures of the before and after of the effect you want?

+1 moonboots :) ... I see I misunderstood your Q, so my A seems to be wrong ... mockup of desired result is appreciated.

Usually you'll want to ask yourself "what is this geometry supposed to do?", and then imagine a topology that works best for enabling that. Whether it's morphing, armature-driven deformation, physics, or just being a still mesh. Then, think of how to achieve that shape without a higher poly count than is necessary.

This approach works backwards.. starts with a heart model, and normalizes it to a sphere. This could be done with a Cast modifier, Shape-Keys..but if you roll-your-own with Geometry nodes, you perhaps leave yourself with more options, including some not shown here.. other ways of changing eye-shape.. blinking, etc.
Heart-Eye GN:

Example animation:

I really depend on your final animation goal ...
... here just an Icosphere (16/8) with two shape keys. Create a Basis Key and Key1 and in edit mode select midlle loop, move it down and do other small adjustments to reshape sphere into a heart.

Animate Value of shape key of Key1 ...

Create this shape:

Give it a Cloth simulation, disable Gravity and enable Pressure (here -6):

Apply the Cloth modifier, give 2 shapekeys to your object, select the second shapekey, turn it to sphere with AltShiftS:

Move the second shapekey to top, keyframe the value of this second shapekey in order to create this kind of animation:

Indeed, the first answer to actually match: 'soft body'

It's just variation around the shapekey solution    ;)

Forget about turning the sphere into a heart.  Why?  Because unless you use infinite vertices, you need to care a little bit about topology, and spheres are topologically simple while hearts are topologically complex.  Turn the heart into a sphere instead.

Make a heart.  Give it some combination of good topo and high vertex density.  More of one or more of the other, whatever you feel like.

Duplicate the heart.  Give it a cast modifier (cast to sphere, defaults) on factor 1.0.  Tune the shape of the heart so that your topo doesn't give you an ugly sphere.

Convert both to mesh.  Join the sphere to the heart as a shape.  Or, vice versa.


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How to follow a rotating path?
I am trying to create a mechanical cam and cam follower assembly.  A closed loop path is parented to a rotating disk.  One end of a cam follower arm pivots at a static hinge location.  The other end of the cam follower should follow (or slide along) the rotating path as the rotating disk rotates.
My problem is that the Cam follower part does not track to the rotating path.  Any thoughts?
The disk, Base and Cam Follower are all Rigid Bodies.  Each Rigid Body has a collision setting for shapes as "Compound Parent".  That is, they are parented to individual basic geometry that make up the actual Rigid Body parts.
Here is a link to the blend file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i-kg3RCK7WFSifEX5Swcq3ZUgnliPf__/view?usp=sharing

do you really need a rigid bodies simulation..?  I guess it can be done with regular constraints

This drive mechanism is part of a larger assembly that will need rigid body constraints.  The goal is to simulate the physics of a real mechanism.

Hi @Edgel3D, your two demo videos look great and they are very close to what I'm looking for.  ...  I work in consumer goods with a background in electromechanical systems.  I am always looking for ways to simulate systems to pitch new ideas and roughly prove out mech. features.  I use Solidworks, but Blender too.  In this case, the cam mech. drives a toy horse's legs.  The horse walks around virtual environment in Blender.  The cam mech. provides the path for the leg action.

This is the latest blend file that is close to what I want.  There are actually three different demos going on in this file.  Two rotary to linear motion and one cam follower attached to the offset hinge (the one I really need).  You'll see that the cam follower part doesn't entirely match up with the rate/location of where the cam follower should be: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f-CA3jO7LQMc5Va2ltmNrEPfG36iOsOQ/view?usp=sharing .  And here is a ref. image: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PWvWQCTjgZRUShuo5Lk5Td7t4S7dpYzS/view?usp=sharing

@Edgel3D, can you please share the blend file that you are demonstrating in the video?  Many thanks!

Hi, Jack Peach,  The Blend file is yours. I'll post it up as an answer.  I should have added previously that I use Blender vers 2.77 but I would be surprised if the solution employed doesn't work in later versions.  Try it for yourself, step by step and then we can tackle the rest, hopefully bringing your project to a satisfactory conclusion.

I'm using vers 2.77 and cannot load your Blend file.  However I'm hoping this might solve your problem as the solution is fairly universal.  You may need 2 cam & path followers depending on the toy horse.
You also mentioned physics would be required on some components, so it was attempted that way initially including a RB hinge constraint but inertia comes into it then and and some bouncing occurs at sudden cam changes.  This is despite increasing the blue lever's mass and/or moving the RBC's point (empty) back from the lever.  Blender after all is an animator and ideal for producing presentation video, but it's no engineering tool.
The solution below abandons the physics engine entirely and the end result is clean and reliable tracking.

Note - there are 2 followers. an invisible rectangular Empty on the path itself and named 'Path Follower', and a 2nd, the yellow cylinder, named 'Cam-Follower'.  It's easy to confuse the two.
The Path-follower (the original path object) follows the path's perimeter.  The yellow Cam-follower, a cylinder, is parented to the former.
Because the (yellow) cam-follower's outer vertice is set as it's Origin Point, and that in turn parented to the invisible Path follower, (the rectangle Empty) the (yellow) cylinder is automatically held (more or less) against the cam-path's perimeter.  See the last 2 pics below.
-==========-
From the beginning -
Shape the cam by deforming a mesh circle and convert it to a curve.  Give it path properties.
With the cursor at the path's Origin Point, add an empty.  Give it a 'Follow Path' constraint so it will travel around the path's perimeter.
Keyframe the path's rotation one full revolution.  Give that 'Linear' interpolation.  (more on that below)
When played the path-follower will want to track the cam's shape accurately, but as the cam (path) also has to rotate, things can get sticky.
The Empty will want to orbit some pivot point.  Even when that's fixed, it may also deviate forward and back a little when encountering the cam's deeper contours.
The answer to both problems is to bake the (invisible) path follower's actions and -

Remove it's 3 'Rotation' strips in the Dopesheet.

Remove the Z axis & deviating axis' strips.  (the X axis deviates)

As no scaling is involved, remove those 3 strips also, leaving just
the one Transform (Y) axis.

When played, all should return to normal with the cam and path-followers held to the one motion axis and tracking as they should.
As you no longer need the curve, it can be converted to mesh -  That's done  by firstly using a plane converted to a curve and that used to 'Bevel' the path. (cam)  Beveling produces an accurately shaped rectangular pipe - a duct of sorts, and importantly with uniform thickness.
Scale the Bevel Plane and that will scale the duct uniformly until it's  dimensions aren't bloated or too thin.
Convert that to mesh.  (That's ALT-C for me)
It's inner (or outer) vertices are then removed so you end up with cam shaped walls but no top or bottom.  (like a vertical cylinder without end caps)  Go to Edit mode and fill those in.
You could try scaling that so it's up against the yellow cam follower but scaling can deform the shape and thickness some, so using the Graph Editor is recommended.
Simply bias the yellow follower's only remaining axis keyframes.   (Select all keyframes in that axis (ONLY) and use G Y to drag them up or down so the follower is against the cam's walls)
That's about it for the cam follower and cam...
-===============-
As things stand some small tracking errors may still be apparent but mostly when viewed from the Top in Ortho Mode.  Whether these errors are worth pursuing will depend on what it's for and the camera angle used.  The graph editor's handles or additional keyframes will eliminate those.
Path Properties -
All evaluation keyframes should be Linear interpolation.  This is also necessary for the path's rotation.
For absolute smoothness between last and first frames when looped, the path's rotation should be set to 360 degrees over the required number of frames + 1.  (250+1 = 251)
The path's total frames should also be set to this. The final evaluation frame also. (keyframe the evaluation slot)
Play it at least once and step back one frame from the last.  Keyframe that ROTATION angle in the 3D window.
Set the animation (or loop) end-frame to one less, (250) so frame 251 is never played.
-==============-
Making the blue arm lean against the the yellow cam-follower -
A single vertice on the (yellow) cam-follower's surface that's nearest the (blue) arm's surface is to be the parent for an Empty, and that in turn is used as a target for the lever arm to 'Look at'. ('track-to' constraint)  That's what holds the arm (without bouncing) against the follower as though with a spring or gravity.

Note - the (blue) lever arm's origin point (hinge) is set to the same surface as that which sits on the (yellow) follower.

Hi @Edgel3D, your solution is the cleanest I have seen/tried that keeps the Cam Follow Arm (BLUE) on the Cam Roller (YELLOW).  ... Lately, I have been experimenting with combing path driven/animated action with Rigid Body objects and have had success.  I'm still working through many different steps to get something worthwhile, but your input is very helpful.  Thank you very much for the insight and good solution.  ...  I'll be sure to make an update to this post once I have updated my model.

Glad to hear it went well in the version you are using @Jack Peach .
I enjoyed exploring your idea of tracking a rotating path and upvoted your question some days back.  Further to that I would imagine that drivers and/or constraints could drive the horse's legs (bones) at each side of it's body.  A common 'Master parent' would glue it all together when the horse was to move around a scene.  Good luck with it all.

PS to the above -
A successive chain of constraint/modifier/parentage use can often get sticky and unpredictable.  In those instances I keep things modular.  This might also help -
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/189665/animating-active-object-in-physics-simulation/190246#190246

I like the solution of baking frame regions and will give it a try.  The right sequence of deleting, baking, saving new physics collections, resetting physics parameters and adjusting other settings when running physics can be finicky and frustrating since many different results can be produced.  You'd think it would be a "linear" physics system... but over time, the same inputs can result in diff. outputs.  I'm still new to it and learning, but it is a very powerful tool.  Thanks again!


text:
How to remove weird spot on material
I keep having this weird twirl/spiral spot appearing on my object. How can I remove it? It moved location when I join all 4 objects to create 1.

What does the mesh look like in edit mode?

I don't see any inconsistencies in the wire frame. I could be wrong, but I'm convinced it's something to do with the material.

Turn off the "anisotropic" in you material, that is a factor for radial brush patterns in metal.

THAT'S IT!! Thank you!!


text:
Get the source path of the assets in Asset Browser using Python
I am currently trying to make an Asset Library for our team. Since the current Asset Browser does not support Collections, my plan is to create one Blend file which will have all the assets in a combined mesh form, but I will also be preserving the original file - with separate meshes, textures and rigs - in a zip file dedicated to each asset. These zip files will share the same name and path as the assets in the blend file.
Now I am trying to add a button to the Asset Browser side panel using Python, which will detect the location of the active/ selected asset in the Asset Browser, detect its path, and copy the zip file of the same name from the source folder to the Downloads folder, so that my team does not have to manually search for the required file from a vast library.
Is there any way we can do that with the current limited functionality and python support for the Asset Browser?
For clarifications :
All users will be using Windows, and the current latest version of Blender (3.1.2) for this.

You have to understand that the asset browser is a file browser under the hood. So the available elements in the given contexts are the same as the file browser.
Link to the context elements available to the asset browser
The context in this case has a handy selected_asset_files attribute you can use. It is stated it is a sequence of bpy.types.FileSelectEntry, a class which has a handy relative_path attribute. It will output the filepath relatively to the root of the current library.
The root of the current library can be inferred by either

Using the current filepath if we're looking at the Current File library
Using a User Library filepath if we're looking at a User Library.

The active library name can be fetched with context.area.spaces.active.params.asset_library_ref.
Link to the docs
If the current library name is LOCAL, it means we're looking at the current file. I have not tested what happens if a user library is named LOCAL, but I assume it would somehow bug out ?
Then, from the asset library name, you can fetch the asset library filepath with context.preferences.filepaths.asset_libraries which returns the container of all user libraries.
Link to the docs
Which gives us :
import bpy
from pathlib import Path

class PrintAssetPaths(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "asset.print_filepaths"
    bl_label = "Print Filepaths"

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls, context):
        return context.selected_asset_files

    def execute(self, context):
        current_library_name = context.area.spaces.active.params.asset_library_ref
        if current_library_name == "LOCAL":  # Current file
            library_path = Path(bpy.data.filepath)  # Will be "." if file has never been saved
        else:
            library_path = Path(context.preferences.filepaths.asset_libraries.get(current_library_name).path)

        for asset_file in context.selected_asset_files:
            asset_fullpath = library_path / asset_file.relative_path
            if current_library_name == "LOCAL":
                # For some reason the relative path stops at the ID container in local file
                asset_fullpath /= asset_file.local_id.name
            print(asset_fullpath)  # Includes the path to the asset inside the .blend file
            asset_filepath = asset_fullpath.parent.parent
            print(asset_filepath)  # This is the file explorer path

        return {"FINISHED"}

def display_button(self, context):
    self.layout.operator(PrintAssetPaths.bl_idname)

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(PrintAssetPaths)
    bpy.types.ASSETBROWSER_MT_editor_menus.append(display_button)

def unregister():
    bpy.types.ASSETBROWSER_MT_editor_menus.remove(display_button)
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(PrintAssetPaths)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

This will add a button to the header of the asset browser area and print out the filepaths of all selected assets when clicked.

Perfect! With a few minor tweaks and additions, the code worked exactly as I wanted it.. thanks a lot for the prompt and precise reply!

@Adisage happy to help ! Don't hesitate to also post your solution as an answer, it might help others in the process. :) cheers

Good idea! Done ...

Note that context.area.spaces.active.params.asset_library_ref is no longer valid if the user set his category to "all" in blender 3.5

@Fox oh, right. Too bad ! I guess it's not available to the python API then ?

it's strange because there's a context.windows read_only property generated in the N panel only, alongside other accessible properties of bpy.types.AssetMetaData very strange API..  the strange property in question is window_manager.asset_path_dummy which is exactly what we need

Each time I run this script, I have a new button added. Is there a way to prevent this ? thanks

Such a precise and elegant solution by Gorgious... I would have taken tons of lines of code to do the exact same thing (I am not a coder, as you might've guessed...)
Posting my final code with a few minor tweaks and additions, in case someone else is looking for the same :
import bpy
import shutil
import os
from pathlib import Path

class PrintAssetPaths(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "asset.print_filepaths"
    bl_label = "Download Asset"

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls, context):
        return context.selected_asset_files

    def execute(self, context):
        current_library_name = context.area.spaces.active.params.asset_library_ref
        library_path = Path(context.preferences.filepaths.asset_libraries.get(current_library_name).path)

        for asset_file in context.selected_asset_files:
            asset_fullpath = library_path / asset_file.relative_path
            asset_filepath = asset_fullpath.parent.parent.parent
            asset_name = asset_file.name
            asset_zip = str(asset_filepath) + "\\" + str(asset_name) + ".zip"
            path_to_copy = str(Path.home() / "Downloads")

            shutil.copy(asset_zip, path_to_copy)

            print("File copied successfully!")
        return {"FINISHED"}

def display_button(self, context):
    self.layout.operator(PrintAssetPaths.bl_idname)

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(PrintAssetPaths)
    bpy.types.ASSETBROWSER_MT_editor_menus.append(display_button)

def unregister():
    bpy.types.ASSETBROWSER_MT_editor_menus.remove(display_button)
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(PrintAssetPaths)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

If there's any more suggestions to make this better, kindly let me know...
Hope this helps! :)


text:
What is causing this bad shading on this triangulated mesh?
I have this beautiful Lamborghini Urraco model but unfortunately I can't seem to fix this bad shading on this triangulated door mesh, it's very hard to see in Blender but it's quite eye-staggering when exported into a game:

The mesh with the wireframe:

I've been trying to reduce Auto Smooth but I can't go any lower before the mesh gets like it is without Auto Smooth. I also tried to apply sharp edges and replacing triangles but it still looks bad unfortunately.
Here is the .blend file of the mesh if you want to take a look.
P.S. I would like to keep it triangulated because the game automatically converts quads into triangles.
Thanks in advance for your help!

The topology in your blend file looks pretty good, so it may be an issue in the game engine. Can you disable the environment mapping in the game and see if the bad shading persists?

Yes I disabled AO and such shadow effects and it still looks wrong, and even after generating the AO for the car chassis I can't reproduce the same shading problem  in Blender so this must be a game problem indeed, thanks!

Try recalculating normals ⇧ Shift +  N
Also remove any double vertices Edit Mode with  M > Remove Doubles and delete any inside faces.

I of course did that several times to make sure but unfortunately it still looks the same, even though the shading looks almost perfect in Blender...


text:
How to fix this ugly crease on this corner?
I am modeling a Z GT500 and I have this ugly crease on this corner despite already trying Looptools flattening/Gstretch:

Despite the topology isn't that bad:

I even tried manually moving the middle vertice in the corner but I can't get rid of it, even if it seems to be so simple :/
I include a .blend file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_YhHdTOQUBBaDRoVLCQ62NDztvRVjTpm/view?usp=sharing
The rest of the topology looks horrible but that's not the issue as of now.
What method would you use to fix this corner?
Thanks in advance for your help!


text:
What is causing this stretched shading on the mesh and how can I fix it?
I am modeling a Z GT500 and I have this weird stretched shading/reflection on the rear panel:

Despite the topology is somewhat fine. Can looptools fix this or is there any other way?
I include a .blend file if you want to take a closer look:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-0mVlcdVFdSZYZEO0RaS-2kbSpCSOgdB/view?usp=sharing
The rest of the topology isn't the best but that's not the problem now.
Thanks in advance for your help!

That's just looks like the distortion of the built-in HDRI image due to the curved surface of the mesh at that point.

Unfortunately it looks like this even in the game I am making it for :(

Try adding Subdivision Surface modifier. Probably your topology doesn't allow it though… Your question is a good example of why Subdivision Surface or NURBS workflows are powerful.
This might not be a real (or full) answer to your problem, but since I'm adding some images I might as well post it as one.
Such shading issues are typically caused by not enough smoothness. Consider the following shape:

I created it by starting with a mesh circle of a very high resolution (to hide the fact each circle is actually a polygon, let's pretend the screen resolution is infinite and it's an actual curve) and n-gon filling. Then I inset the circle, remove the center face, remove left half of it, and extrude the cut parts to the left. Now, other than the sharp $90°$ corners on the very left part of the image, you would say the orange outline is smooth, right? And you would be correct. But to a similar degree you would also be correct if you said those sharp corners are smooth, as ridiculous as it sounds.

The 1st derivative of smoothness here is the continuity of the outline: it's not a dashed line - - - -, it's continuous. Whichever fragment of the outline you choose, regardless how much you zoom on it, you won't find a gap.
The 2nd derivative of smoothness is continuity of angles: here the corners fail, because once the outer path reaches the top-left corner, there's a sudden jump from $90°$ to $180°$ normal, then from $180°$ to $270°$ then a long smooth inner path leads to the bottom-left corner, smoothly transitioning this $270°$ angle back to $90°$, and then again you have two sudden angle jumps $90°$ → $180°$ → $270°$. But other than that the outline is smooth, and if we applied mirroring on this shape (so it looks like a pill) the inner and outer outlines would be completely (2nd derivative) smooth.
But now consider the outline near the green/blue boundary. Is it smooth? The 3rd derivative of smoothness is continuity of the change of angles. The blue area has a constant change of $180°$ per $π$ meters or $1°$ per ~$17$ mm. A little bit faster (per mm) change on the inner side as the radius of the bend is smaller there, but on both sides separately it's consistent, constant. So the blue part is perfectly 3rd derivative smooth. The green part, not counting the sharp corners, is also perfectly 3rd derivative smooth, because the angle doesn't change at all, and $0$ is constant. The problem is the connection, when the rate (outside) jumps suddenly from $1°$/~$17$ mm to $0$.

To further clarify, here's a screenshot from a cool video game Railbound:

The blue junction (the rounded part) joins with the straight, white rails in the same way the blue and green parts join on the previous image. But this is not how real railways are actually shaped: it's not enough to smoothly change velocity (if a train moving at 50km/h rotated 90° within less than a second, people inside would simply die), you also want to smoothly change acceleration, otherwise people inside will get surprised by the forces acting on them suddenly changing and will fall over. As smooth as this transition seems:

When you go from green to blue (or vice-versa), suddenly the centrifugal force (dis)appears completely. It's very similar with reflections, and those are actually often used to test the smoothness of objects. You can test it here:
Rounded cap on Curve with Geo Nodes
If you download my .blend , add before group output "realize instances" → "merge by distance"  → "subdivision surface", in shader make the material metallic, decrease roughness, and disconnect the normal calculation (which is there for optimization purposes to use instances), you will see how the Catmull-Clark algorithm improves smoothness to the next derivative, improving the reflection change:


text:
How can I animate this simple fan spinning?
I am trying to make a simple fan spinning animation for a video game but I am not exactly sure how it's supposed to spin on its own axis/pivot. As you can see the fan is looking a bit downwards. Here is what I would like to make with keyframes:

But when I rotate it from the same view, it rotates on a horizontal axis instead of keeping its angle.
Do you know how to get this fan to spin on its own angle/axis? Thanks for your help in advance!

an object will struggle to rotate on an axis if it is already rotated on another one, maybe this is your problem? See my answer here: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/129834/how-do-i-rotate-an-object-along-its-own-axis-windmill If it doesn't answer, please share your file

I have tried based on that tutorials but I must have missed something or Blender changed quite a bit since, but it's still not spinning on its own angle/axis unfortunately :/
I will include the fan here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E5-lEKFULFkif1IUrY_zr8bcT8jJriCf/view?usp=sharing

Looks like I figured it out, luckily it also works in the game so everything works now!
Thank you regardless!

@moonboots you can rotate objects around their local axis if you press the button of the axis twice after pressing R. Or you can change the Transform Orientations available to you at the top of the viewport.

OK but it doesn't work once you animate it if the object is always rotated on one of its axis

If it's for a video game, it would be better to use an armature object with bones to animate, rather than animating different objects. Otherwise in the game engine you would have to deal with one different animation asset per object.
Plus it would make this animation simpler to make using bones. With one root bone, parent of a body bone, parent of the fan blades bone, you can have the fan blade mode freely rotate on its local axis while its body bone orient the whole thing in any way you want without interfering with the fan blades animation.


text:
Edit Custom Geometry Attribute outside Geometry Nodes?
I've created a Geometry Nodes setup for creating walls with door and window openings. It takes a simple line mesh as input and "builds" the walls and door/window openings based on input parameters.
I'm using the Edge Crease float value as a Selection in the node setup to control the wall openings.
For example:
Edge Crease = 1.0 --> solid wall
Edge Crease = 0.5 --> window opening (which means solid wall at ground level, window opening, and a piece of wall above it)
Egde Crease = 0.0 --> door opening (which means no solid wall at ground level, but a piece of wall above the opening)
I was wondering if editing Custom Geometry Attributes would be possible in the UI, so it would be possible to use specific attributes instead of "cheating" with Crease values?
I've attached a screenshot and a .blend to clarify things.

Have you tried using a vertex group ?

Material Selection might be an option, too. One material for the windows and one for doors?

@Blunder Interesting idea. You mean setting the selection with the Material Index Node? I'll give it a try!

@Gorgious Unfortunately it must be segments data, because 1 vert shares data with 2 segments

Currently, there are no tools to edit and manipulate with attributes. You can access it via Python, though:

The script looks like this:
import bmesh
import bpy

me = bpy.context.object.data
bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)

# this line works only in edit mode:
bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)

ea = bm.edges.layers.float['CustomEdgeAtr']

# set some edges:
bm.edges[1][ea]=1
bm.edges[3][ea]=1
bm.edges[4][ea]=1
bm.edges[5][ea]=1
bm.edges[6][ea]=1
bm.edges[7][ea]=1

bmesh.update_edit_mesh(me)

I would work with curves and different geometry node trees. E.g. one for doors, one for windows etc.
As i can see you have the knowledge in geometry nodes to do that. So i don't have to show you the node setup.
But i want to show you the advantage of curves when using geometry nodes:

Yeah, could be one way, but it doesn't solve the problem - at least not in my case:) I'm already applying different NodeTrees for doors, windows, walls and glasses. I've 'ALT+D'-d the Master Mesh and applied the different modifiers to them. With this method only one line need to be drawn (extruding a vertex along the blueprint) then I apply the crease values (or whatever, if possible) to set up all the walls - I'm lazy:)


text:
How to fix missing vertices
I'm trying to follow a tutorial in youtube. But I'm facing some problem with the vertices. See image1, noticed that the vertices are still some how present but right after I 'apply' the subdivision modifier, a lot of the vertices were gone (see image2).

What could be the cause of this?
How can I fix this?
How can I prevent this from happening?

they are not gone, they are just hidden by the other object, you can activate the Snap option, choose Snap To Face, and move the faces so that they stick to the other object surface

Hi @moonboots, apologies but i did not quite understand how to do what you mean. Before I have ended up on this issue I already turn "SNAP+FACE+Project Individual Elements" on, then I apply the subdivision.

Also enable the Project Individual Elements option so that each vertex will snap to the surface of the other

Your vertices are hidden under the other torus surface.
In the Snap panel, choose the Face option and also enable Project Individual Elements. You don't have to click on the Snap tool itself (magnet icon), you can simply press Ctrl when you'll want to snap.

Then switch your object to Edit mode, press AltZ to see your mesh by transparency, select the vertices you want to move, press Ctrl to snap them to the surface of the other object:

Thank you @moonboots.
I can now see the vertices :)


text:
why is my sculpt brush is destroying the mesh
when i use the sculpt brush to smooth the adges on my characters arm it makes it really bumpy

Hello please share your file, at least the part that you're trying to sculpt: https://pasteall.org/blend/

Maybe do a remesh first so you get a nice quad mesh? The upper arm looks like it was created by extrusion. At the side, there might be not enough vertices and faces could be flipped. Try Shift+R to set the voxel size and then Ctrl+R to remesh.

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.


text:
Is it possible to render in user perspective?
I notice that the user perspective and the camera perspective look different. (I have made sure that the camera view and the user view are from the same position and angle. Also, the camera is set to "perspective".) The user perspective looks to me more like realistic 3D objects.
I played around with the camera settings to try to mimic the user perspective, but didn't succeed.
Is there a way to render in the user perspective or output a picture in user perspective?

I notice there was a question on this issue 6 years ago. Here is the link.
I wonder if the newest Blender offers this functionality. I am using Blender 3.0.

I found online that OpenGL offers something like 3D viewport. I am not sure if that could help. And, I didn't see OpenGL in rendering engine choices.

You could try Viewport Render(View > Viewport Render Image from the menu at the top - this will render overlays, however, so make sure to turn them off).

The user perspective looks "more like realistic 3D objects"? If that depends only on view angles then I'd say you have to change your camera settings. The foremost difference is the Focal Length, I would guess. You can set it differently for viewport and camera.
By default, the 3D Viewport and the standard camera object both have a Focal Length of 50 mm (unless you changed a setting and saved it in the startup file).
Generally you can use Ctrl+Alt+Numpad 0 to make your active camera switch to the view you see in the current user perspective. If you didn't set different focal lengths for camera and viewport, the camera will show exactly the same perspective you see in the viewport.
Let's say your camera shows this:

In the User Perspective, you have a different view on the cube like this, notice that the Focal Length for View Properties and Camera Properties are the same:

If you now press Ctrl+Alt+Numpad 0 the perspective stays exactly the same, only that now there is a frame showing the camera's field of view.

A different result you will get if the camera and the viewport have different settings for focal length. In the following example the viewport stays at the default 50 mm but the camera has a focal length of 120 mm.

If you now switch the camera with Ctrl+Alt+Numpad 0 you'll see that the resulting view looks a lot different than the User Perspective, but have a look at Location and Rotation of the camera:

If I instead would repeat this with a camera like before, which has the default focal length of 50 mm like the viewport, the new perspective would match the viewport - and it has the same Location and Rotation as the other camera.

So using Ctrl+Alt+Numpad 0 doesn't actually switch the camera view to match the current user perspective view, it moves the camera to a position and alignment where a camera which has the same focal length as the viewport setting needs to be placed.
And one more thing I didn't mention before: under Camera Properties > Camera you have settings for Sensor Fit and Size. They should be left at Sensor Fit: "Auto" and Size: "36", otherwise the camera view will differ from the user perspective as well. Since these settings are not available in the Viewport Properties there's no way to match them any other way.
To use this feature, switching the camera to the current view, you would either have to set the camera according to the viewport settings or the viewport to the camera's settings. The reasons they are not automatically matched to each other are manifold, for example you want a dramatic view from the camera but this doesn't work well for editing the objects, to name but one.
If you like the perspective of the viewport more than the one from the camera, you should take a look at the settings and maybe change the focal length. All in all it is always possible to get a "realistic" view with the camera, you just have to find what you're looking for. It is always helpful if you can identify what makes you think the other view is more realistic and then try to change the camera to achieve this.
//EDIT: Just a little addition to the above explanations. If you are wondering why switching the camera to the current view only uses such a small portion of the whole viewport, that's because Blender tries to fit the camera's field of view inside the viewport window - no matter which aspect ratio the render dimensions have. So the area of the camera's view will never be wider or higher than a 1:1 ratio could get to still fit inside the viewport. You can see below how the camera's clipping section always fits inside the 1:1 area, no matter how big or small the viewport is (this is only valid for switching the camera to current view, of course you can scale in or out afterwards).


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Why don't my textures distort linearly when I "square up" my UV map?
I wanted to create a light up dance floor texture for a part of a model that is flat on the Z axis, but fills out in a hexagonal arch shape in the X, and Y direction. Originally, I was going to draw all my angled lines in a photo editing program, then make a bunch of squares and then round their corners, but then I got an idea and thought it would be way faster to just square up my UV's in blender, make a regular grid with rounded squares in a photo editing program, and then let the natural linear interpolation/distortion/stretching of this square onto the face of my object fit my grid to my object.
What I seem to have discovered is that this face isn't linearly fit/distorted to my object at all. What is actually happening here and why and is there a way to get linear interpolation?
Here's the shape of my flat faces:

Here's my texture mapped to my UV grid shape:

And here's what I'm seeing in my viewport in the shading view:

Why am I seeing this weird jagged distortion instead of a bunch of linear straight lines projected from one edge of my face outward to the other edge of my face? Is there a way to fix this and have it render what I would consider "properly"?

The distortion is caused by the fact that a quad is always made of 2 tris, therefore this triangulation that distorts the texture. I don't think that there's any other way than subdividing your mesh to reduce this effect, or give it a Subdivision Surface modifier:

"I don't think that there's any other way than subdividing your mesh to reduce this effect." -- Basically, yeah, but one option is, don't use distorted UV, and the other is, use a texture image that takes your triangulation into account.  In this case, the latter would probably be a selected-to-active bake from a heavily subdivided copy.

So maybe give your answer, I'm curious to know what you mean by "use a texture image that takes your triangulation into account"

The bake I mentioned would provide an image that took the triangulation into account.

oh ok yes, a bit tedious though


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Unwrap "freeform" mesh for laser cutting approximation?
I'm new to Blender.
I have a geometry which has a very slight double curvature.  I want to 3d print a surface and have a layer of thin laser cut material that sits on top of it (an example of laser cutting surface with holes attached).
The reasons for the holes is that solid parts have to pass through them. The hole locations don't have to line up perfectly, and I included a bit of playroom.
I am trying to find the best way to approximate the geometry in 2D for lazer cutting. Would this be by UV unwrapping? Emphasis on approximation since I guess it's doubly-curved


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Rigify doesn't move my mesh when constrained
I followed a Rigify tutorial to a T (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S52A-K5tLDc) but at around 8:40 when he constraints both of them mine just won't move and I have no idea why, I did the exact same with a previous model a month ago and it worked fine.
I also noticed the legs bend the wrong way but that's a headache for another time.
.blend file

Two problems: 1. You have around 11800 duplicate vertices on your model, and 2. That tutorial is done in Blender version 3 and you're using version 4 which uses Bone Collections instead of Layers! For 1, select your model, go into Edit mode, select All and then hit M > Merge by distance. For the second problem I'd suggest following CG Dive's rigging tutorial using Blender 4. You can keep the armature you've already set up but follow his tutorial for the rest.

For the leg bending problem, in side view (3 on the numpad) move the armature knee joint forward and the heel joint back so that they aren't in line. That should stop the knee bending in the wrong direction.

@JohnEason I followed CG Dive's tutorial to a T but the same still happens, everything works totally fine until the automatic weight constraints which don't move the mesh around


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Save Origin Point in Blender
I have successfully set the pivot point to the 3D cursor. However, when I export the OBJ file and then re-import it, the pivot point is not stabilized.
This also happens when I press Ctrl + A and apply all transforms.
How can I fix this problem?

Wavefront OBJ format doesn't support "transformations", among other things. To make it simple, it exports only basic geometry at world center and some basic material information, that's it.

There is no support for armatures, lights, cameras, empty objects, parenting, or transformations. See Compatibility for more information.

Source: Wavefront OBJ — Blender Manual

If you need more than that, you must use a different format for export. There are plenty of them, FBX is the common industry standard for this.

This also happens when I press Ctrl + A and apply all transforms.

Apply All Transforms applies the location, rotation, scale. Applying the location literally means setting the object's origin to the world center:

Apply (set) the location of the selection. This will make Blender consider the current location to be equivalent to 0 in each plane i.e. the selection will not move, the current location will be considered to be the “default location”. The object origin will be set to actual (0, 0, 0) (where the colored axis lines intersect in each view).

Source: Apply — Blender Manual

If you don't want that, you can use Apply Rotation & Scale. Or apply the individual transforms you want.

It looks, according to this page of Blenderartists, that .obj don't keep the origin location, if you can, export as .fbx instead.


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Stuck on how to apply dirt/grunge to PS2 style image textures
I've been stuck on this problem for a while. I'm trying to make my PS2 style textures look dirty/grungy like in Silent Hill 2 but I just can't crack it. I want to use whichever method will give me the most authentic PS2 look.
I'm a total newbie and many people have said "just play around with mix nodes" which is incredibly vague. I understand a decent amount about modeling meshes but texturing is absolutely not my strong suit. Preferably, I would like to make a clean looking building and then paint the dirt and grime onto it wherever I want. I just have no clue how to do that. Is this the wrong method?
I'm not familiar with a lot of the technical terms so if anybody could explain it for a beginner, that would be super helpful. Here are some example images:
https://cdn.openart.ai/stable_diffusion/2f045b3b7fe31da803a4f27b1c3c2a8671b3b32a_2000x2000.webp
https://cdn.openart.ai/stable_diffusion/d830bf91cc68ef71ce2fab8e27b2d1b78043d2c2_2000x2000.webp
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/fb/9a/86/fb9a86d49159aa31b5b768070fdeeebe.jpg

Hello and welcome. Instead of having users go through links and external sites please use the builtin tools to embed images in your post. See How to upload an image to a post? or GIF. Paragraphs are also helpful to make the text readable

There are many ways to do it, one of the easiest is to use a dirty texture as factor in a Mix Shader between 2 shaders like for example 2 Principled BSDF, one is darker (maybe with a high Roughness, etc), the other one is brighter (with a low Roughness, etc):

If you want to paint over a repeated texture, create a second UV map with the desired unwrap, plug it into a new Image Texture with a transparent texture, use the Alpha as factor into a new Mix Shader:

I appreciate the feedback and I will definitely use this technique for certain things in my projects! The only problem though is I can't figure out how to control the exact look of the grunge. In the pictures I added, the dirt and stains on the walls are very deliberately placed. I'm starting to wonder if that kind of stuff is done outside of blender. Maybe it's painted directly onto textures before exporting them to 3D. I feel like I'm making this too complicated for myself.

You can't really control the exact look of the grunge, you can precisely place it on the surface though, you need to unwrap your objects and move the UV faces in the UV Editor

How are people able to add graffiti or writing onto their textures? I feel like that would have to be hand painted, right? Is there any way to paint on top of a repeating texture without the paint also repeating? On a separate layer or something like in Photoshop?

I've edited my answer, I hope it helps

Thanks! I'll give this a shot


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How do you make a mesh with thickness?

In the first image we see 2 meshes: a chocolate shell and an inner candy sponge. The booolean is there to help you see that the chocolate shell has a thickness and the sponge is nested inside the chocolate. In the far right you see that the boolean operation has gotten confused that the outer shell is a mesh.
The second render is what happens when I apply a cell fracture operation to the combined mesh.
Ultimately the goal is to apply a cell fracture operation to this candy, which consists of 2 meshes with 2 shaders. Hoping that the chocolate closest to the sponge will stay with it. Unfortunately the results are difficult to achieve. Please look over the project file and see what you can suggest.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1z8lbpd4A9yLwc4YS8c2JRtmvldUWbO3N/view?usp=sharing

Geometry
So... right now, you have 3 meshes inside the object.

Chocolate out
Chocolate in
Sponge

There is absolutely nothing (except your interpretation) that connects choc in and choc out. To the algorithm, it's just 2 whole cubes.
So, if you don't think that could ruin your project, you could make a little hole in the chocolates and connect them together, that way you have two meshes, a hollow chocolate with thickness (recognizable by the algorithm) and the sponge.

The cell fracture does recognize the chocolate properly:

So, geometrically, it works great, but the sad part is: every new face it creates will be created with the first material in the list.

So, if chocolate is the first material (image above, left side), the inside of the sponge will become chocolate
If sponge is the first material (image above, right side), the inside of the chocolate walls will be sponge

Material
Knowing the inside materials will always be the same, you can create a geometry nodes setup that:

gets a material index into an attribute statistics
if sum > 0.1 (mixed materials), set material index to 1

Adding this to all the fractured objects solves the material problem. (there is an option to copy to all selected in the same place where you apply modifiers)
Connection
Unfortunately, I can't imagine an easy solution for choc fragments being connected with their respective sponge fragments if you want that.
But I can imagine a manual work where you manually create tiny connections between the sponge and the chocolate (in a similar way you did the chocolate hole, but now creating a physical mesh link).
The two big downsides are:

Boring manual labor
Disrupts the geonodes for material as it creates parts that are intended to have both materials together

Thanks. This will be pretty useful! The root of the problem may be the cell fracture addon


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Why do my particles suspend animation for the final render?

I have a simple particle system for snow. The particle sim bakes for 1000 frames, but no matter where I render in that 1000 frame timeline, it still appears to be the start of the particle sim. Those particles should be touching the ground early in the timeline.


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How do I create camera motion in a heavy scene animation?
When the viewport FPS drops to 1, what are you to do? Even with the highest-end graphics card I am struggling to manage my camera motion artistically. Can I create a bounding-box rendition of the file? What kind of 'simplify' modifier would dissolve the scene to resolve to 30 FPS?
There is simply no way to get clever with camera timing or motion, for a quality product, when the frame rate drops so low. Suppressing collections doesn't work, by the way.

Usually people do viewport renders to check if the animation looks okay at the right speed. You'll find it in the viewport menu under View > Viewport Render Animation.
It renders much quicker than a real render, uses the settings in the Output Properties and renders from the camera if you are in camera view or any other view which you are currently looking at - without having to set up a camera for that.
This has the advantage you can perhaps focus on certain parts of the animation or views which are not so easy to see from the camera but are important to you. Or quickly change viewing angles just to see if they might be better.


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How can you work on a mesh in rest position?
Is there a way to orient a mesh to the global XYZ temporarily, or the viewport camera to the active mesh local XYZ? It's easier to do editing on a mesh when the transforms are removed, but it's a hassle if there's already an easy way to do it. I call it rest position because it's similar to an armature rest position.

Does temporarily switching the Transform Orientation on the top toolbar from Global to Local do what you need?

I picture it toggling so that it will align with global while you edit, then you toggle back to the current active transform.

I can see what you mean but I don't think there's an easy way to do that. See if @Lauloques answer helps.

It's more of a way around, but you could snap your 3D cursor to your object's origin and then set your transform orientation to the 3D cursor.

Change your transform orientation to Local

Select the object you want to snap to

Select the cursor tool in the toolbar

Change its orientation setting from None to Transform

Click anywhere in the viewport to move the cursor, which will align its orientation with the selected object's.

Press ⇧ Shift S > Cursor To Selected to snap the cursor location to the object origin.

Change your transform orientation to Cursor

Then your gizmo and your operators' default orientation are aligned with your objects:


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Why is my edge-wear shader scale dependent?

I apologize for the color scheme but it was quick and effective for the stack. I usually use a color ramp to control things like gradient intensity and distance but this node setup is different. All these faces share the same shader yet some of them look wrong. Without getting too wordy about what's wrong with it, it just doesn't look evenly distributed - the edge-wear. Link to blend here:Blend file


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How do I make my smoke move faster?
I’m recreating a scene where someone opens a door, and in the room it’s all foggy and they turn on their lightsaber lighting up the smoke. Im making it into a Lego versions so I imported a model from mecabricks. I forgot that importing from that scales it up a lot, and I already have my scene animated. Im trying to fill up the room with smoke before the door opens, but the smoke moves too slowly because everything is so big. How can I make it move faster? I already have the heat, buoyancy density, and the initial temperature at max. I don’t know how to make it move any faster. Please help!

In the Domain parameters, there's a Time Scale value, have you tried to tweak it?

No, I’m not currently near my computer but when I get there I will try it. Thanks!

@moonboots: not everybody can tweak the time...remember!?

@Chris hey Chris, still here? I thought you were back in 2055, the 20s must not be so bad after all

we in 2055 can live in parallel universes in different times at the same time. I could explain this now to you, but it would be as if you explain a 3 year old the "Theory of relativity" - you can do it - but it's waste of time :D

Is it this “Timesteps” thing where it has (as default) minimum set to 1 and max set to 4?


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Recreating lightsaber shaders from a game
This is a strange issue that may require some context. I work with ripped models from an old iOS game, Infinity Blade, and I have not run into many issues as most of its shading work is just simple textures. However, the game includes some references to Star Wars with its lightsabers and these things have been stumping me for years.
From everything I have tried, there are two different issues that I reach a dead end with depending on the rendering engine used. When using Eevee, its a problem of backfacing overlapping

And when Cycles is used, the polygons from the "glow" of the sabers are shown, more noticeably with the black saber.

Neither of these are ideal and I'm completely at a loss what else to try. Any help at all is appreciated and I will do my best to answer any questions.

Hello, have you tried with the Layer Weight node? https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/227887/how-can-i-make-cone-look-more-like-light

Unfortunately that doesn't seem to help much due to the saber's reliance on alpha textures and blending, at least from what I believe.


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Plane not moving with armature/mesh
I have this model where I'm using a plane with a texture as eyes. I want this plane to be connected to both, the body and the armature so that I can animate easily. However for the life of me I cant get the plane to connect and move with anything. I've tried joining, parenting, adding modifiers and nothings working. (I've attempted all those methods with both the armature and mesh) Any help is appreciated
Video to show what I mean:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rWG7Y17t6gMlYxCgzaGcl8dTl56I-l9V/view?usp=sharing

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.

You've parented the eyes to the body but they won't follow the head if you move the bone head. Deparent and parent the eyes to the head bone, or join the eyes to the body mesh, then in Edit mode select the eyes vertices and assign them to the same group as the head. Also your mesh seems high-poly, which is not optimal for animation


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Why hair is not moving with bone
In pose mode when i move bone  object is moving with it but hair is not moving here the picture of my problem

in the modifier Stack, put the Particle System under the Armature modifier (or above, I don't remember)

Hair systems are tied to objects by a modifier, so does the armature deformation. They position in the stack affects how they interract with each other.
In you case, you need your hair simulation to generate from the mesh as it is deformed by the armature modifier. So you have to make use the hair particles modifier is AFTER the armature deform modifier.
In addition, you might also want to enable Use Modifier Stack in the hair settings:

If you have a subdivision modifier and need to comb the hair:
Make sure the preview subdivision level is the same as your render when you comb your hair.
Or alternatively: create a duplicated mesh object that sits just inside the skin of your emitting object, and make that one emit the hair insead of the actual main object (also disable its display in the particles settings, so you don't waste precious render resources rendering that invisible mesh).

Thx, solved it for me.


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Final grass render is nothing like camera view
Im trying to make some grass using the hair method in Eeve, it looks nice in the viewport and in the camera view, but when i render it turns into a mish mash of hairs, what can i do?
This is what i want to render , just some grass

this is what i got--doesn't even match the ratio of the camera in the viewport
thanks for helping me this is a great comunity.

What do you mean “doesn't even match the ratio of the camera in the viewport” from what I can see they are the same.

I mean i really zoom in the grass and the final render show a much bigger area,my mistake i mean does not match the zoom . i dont know why.

It looks like the value for your hair children particles is different for the viewport and render. Changing both of them to the same value should fix the problem

Your final render doesn't show a much bigger area at all. Look at the lime-colored grass at the bottom left, they are at the same place in both views. The only difference is the number of the hair particles. The reason is, as @dunnowhattocallmyself says, the hair count for viewport and render may not be the same.

If Chris' answer doesn't work, in the Viewport Display panel, check the Amount % value

you will find the settings in particle settings -> children:

Enter same values in "display amount" and "render amount"


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Can somebody explain how is this a square?
I have a wall that I am trying to add a window to, according to the coordinates and the edge lengths this is suppose to be a square, am I missing something essential in Blender settings because it really doesn't seem like a square to me

Your object's scale is probably not 1. Apply Scale with Ctrl+A ?

Yes that works! How couldn't I think about it?! Thanks a lot!


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Rotating array elements individually
Hello I am new to blender and I am trying to make this shape:

I made this one duplicating and trying to shape it by rotating them so it is very faulty.
I tried doing it with array but this is how it ended up looking:

Is it possible to make it nicer with array or any other suggestions? Thank you very much in advance.

Create your shape, move it away from its origin in Edit mode:

At the same location as the origin, create an empty. Give your object an Array modifier, choose the count, disable Relative Offset, enable Object Offset and choose the empty as Object:

Rotate the empty on Z, use Ctrl to rotate 5° by 5°:

+1 but...does this also work with dollar bills? And if i realize instances afterwards, do i really have multiplied my money? or do i have to 3d print them? questions...over questions? and maybe this isn't a focused question and not even about Blender!? ...aaaargh

@Chris we don't need money now that we can live in Blender, we can build or own objects without eveb paying

well, that's much better than in every state of the world, where you have to pay taxes on everything for just being existing.... ;)

Thank you very much! I tried it but I assume I am doing something wrong because I ended up with an array of elements that gets larger and larger that does seem to be rotating around the cursot tho

@fawkemvegas you need to apply the scale of your empty (Ctrl A) otherwise it will be taken into account

@moonboots yes that did it! thank you very much for the help!!!


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Problems with grab tool in Sculpt mode specifically trying to lock the sphere while grabbing
Hello so whenever I try to use the grab brush like in the gif I provide it moves the whole object but when the video model does it only the specific part she chooses gets grabbed and changed not the whole sphere. I wanted to know if there is a setting that should be turned on or off. I checked everywhere and cannot find a solution. First gif is the creator and the second gift is mine.

The brush radius appears to be too large. You can adjust it by pressing the F shortcut.
If you are using a pen tablet, you can also enable pressure.

Hello yes thank you for commenting. I understand that the brush radius is large but in the original creators gif you can see they also have it at 500 radius but their sphere doesnt move either. Also I dont see where I can enable pressure or increase it for the pen in blender?

@DarkEyeRichi The same set radius maybe, but this is the size in pixels in the viewport, so whenever you zoom in or out it gets larger or smaller relative to the mesh. The tutor has an outer circle that looks about the height of the mesh, while you have an inner circle smaller than the mesh and an outer circle more than twice the size...

@GordonBrinkmann Ah yes I see what you are saying my radius is over the whole sphere while the tutor has theirs at the the bottom point even with 500 radius. So should I be zoomed out more when I work on it or should I be adjusting something else? Thank you for replying.

@DarkEyeRichi That is completely up to you, there is no right or wrong in this case. You just have to know of course it makes a difference if you just cover part of the mesh or the whole mesh with your brush. When using a large brush you probably have to zoom in more to cover a smaller area. When using a smaller brush you have to zoom out to cover a larger area. The question then is only if you can see good enough what you're doing on a small mesh when zoomed far out.

Not sure if you've fixed it yet, but I think it might've been a small oversight. When you add a subdivision surface modifier to round the cube, you gotta click on the little arrow icon in the top right corner next to the render icon (the tiny camera) and choose "Apply". After that, the sculpting tools should work fine :)


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Images as planes black box Eevee
Black box appears if multiple Images as planes are overlaid over same space. I keep seeing similar issue described in Cycles fixed in Light Paths in the Render Properties but I have it Eevee and so have no idea what to do, please help!

Don't overlap them in the same place, move them apart a bit so they are close but not coinciding.

it's not really feasible when there is animation. For example here are moth wings above them there will be more puff to hide the connection to the body, the planes will have to intersect for moving wings or animation wouldn't really work.

If animation is an issue, simply make use of the Shrinkwrap modifier set to Nearest Surface, Above Surface, and offset like -0.0012m so it is only barely off the surface. If all the image planes are then parented to a bone, they will keep the relationship. Consider if it doesn't go as well when rendering, but there are always different approaches to get the job done.

I've already fixed this one but I'll keep this in mind for the future if similar problems pop up! thanks!

It seems like I've found the solution. I'll be honest, I have no clue how it works but changing Render method to Blended (could be changed while importing as well) fixed it!


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3D axis are gone
The little 3D axis in the upper right corner were gone for months for me, I've tried everything with no results. I hoped that in version 4.0 it would be fixed but still nothing. I have all the gizmos enabled and everything. They don't appear in any view or mode. Has anyone had this problem before?

Have you tried clicking on the gizmo? Or using Ctrl + `

In the top bar, go to Edit > Preferences > Viewport and in the Display section, set the drop-down menu 3D Viewport Axis to Interactive Navigation. :-)
(There is also an option to show & hide the Zoom, Pan and Camera icons. Go to Edit > Preferences > Interface and in the Editors section, tick the [X] Navigation Controls checkbox.)

I am new to Blender but I would try to uninstalling the program and reinstalling. Could any add-ons be conflicting with program especially if they are out of date. The usual stuff like windows updates causing bugs and checking for viruses.
Another thought to check your drivers are up to date especially the graphics. They can sometimes fix random issues.

It's not a bad idea, but note that the user preferences and any installed 3rd-party add-on installed by the user are stored in the user's home directory and they will "survive" a re-installation of Blender. Better start Blender with factory settings first (or rename the Blender settings directory). For Windows there is a factory settings start batch file. Alternatively, use the --factory-settings option (https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/154603/107598) to start Blender temporary with factory settings.

Good to know as I was not aware of that. It might help me with my problem which I have been trying to solve myself.


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Animate tracks on an excavator by moving the excavator
I like to animate tracks on an excavator by moving the excavator. I'm doing this to speed up animating process.
Moving the excavator forward or back will animate track accordingly. The track should look like it sticks to the ground and not sliding. Another fancy feature is when the object is turning, the tracks will rotate accordingly, but I want to figure out forward/backward motion first.
This is probably done using shader nodes. I just been using blender for 3 months, so I'm such a noob.
Thanks

You may want to take a look at this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4FOUtCXogY&t=26s

You're talking about tracks that are really meshes or just some track texture? Because the shader nodes are used to setup materials and textures etc. So, presuming you have real track meshes, I would follow @mqbakamqbaka's example and find tutorials on youtube for tank tracks. This is not a simple question like "you want this, do that".

This is exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks!


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Mesh (with bones) keyable in pose mode
I made an animation controller using meshes for a vehicle I am building. The rig is a combination of other mesh controllers and bones. I'm new to blender and just went on and built the vehicle and rig, but I couldn't figure out that how to key objects in pose-mode. Is there a way of keeping my "fancy" mesh controllers without replacing them with bones?

Pose mode is for one model at once (and for bones). If you want to keyframe objects you have to do it in Object mode. The object and rig animations are work together, so you don't have to rig all the meshes.

See if I got this clear. I can only animate bones and one mesh in pose mode. If I have a other meshes, I need to  animate those in object mode? Thanks

Yes Object mode is for managing your objects. All other modes applies for the selected object only. (There are some extra features for example you can be in Edit mode with multiple meshes, but this is just a convenience function it has limitations. Or in Weight Paint mode you can handle the armature and the mesh at the same time).


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Is there a way to change blenders rename character limit?
I, just tried to rename a Blender timeline marker to a longer sentence and noticed there's a limit of 63 characters. So I was wondering if there was a way to change this limit.

Not unless you get the source code, make some changes and make your own build.

Ok, thanks. It's not that important anyway.


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Having trouble processing multiple files in bpy
I'm trying to create code to import multiple files and format it into a properly formatted string, however I'm recieving an error after importing files:
"Python: Traceback (most recent call last):
line 9, in process_files
TypeError: '_PropertyDeferred' object is not iterable
location: :-1"
This is the code:

#imports main modules
import bpy
import os

#returns the joined path the directory and the files
def process_files(context, directory, files):
    import os
    #error appears here - files is not iterable apparently
    for file in files:
        #should join the files into a path
        path = os.path.join(directory, file.name)
        print("process %s" % path)
        #add function here
    return {path + "RETURNED"}

#imports various functions from modules
from bpy.props import StringProperty, BoolProperty, CollectionProperty
from bpy_extras.io_utils import ImportHelper
from bpy.types import Operator, OperatorFileListElement

#----------------------
# Defines the UI panel
#----------------------

class ImageSeqConverter(bpy.types.Panel):
    """Creates a Panel in the Object properties window"""
    #panel properties
    bl_label = "Output"
    bl_idname = "IMG_PT_CONVERT"
    bl_space_type = 'PROPERTIES'
    bl_region_type = "WINDOW"
    bl_context = "output"

    #defines UI creating
    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout

        #text and icon
        row = layout.row()
        row.label(text="Convert Image Sequence", icon='IMAGE_DATA')
        row = layout.row()
        #button
        row.scale_y = 3.0
        row.operator("file.open_filebrowser", text= "Import Images")

#-----------------------------------
# Defines The file browser operator
#-----------------------------------

class OpenFileBrowser(Operator, ImportHelper):
    #properties
    bl_idname = "file.open_filebrowser"
    bl_label = "Open the file browser"

    #filters file types
    filter_glob: StringProperty(
        default='*.jpg;*.jpeg;*.png;*.tif;*.tiff;*.bmp',
        options={'HIDDEN'}
    )

    #test boolean property
    some_boolean: BoolProperty(
        name='Some Boolean',
        description='Testing',
        default=True,
    )

    #creates an array of the different files
    files = CollectionProperty(
        name="BVH files",
        type=OperatorFileListElement,
        )

    #string of the path directory
    directory = StringProperty(subtype='DIR_PATH')

    #activates function up top to return the full directory
    def execute(self, context):
        return process_files(context, self.directory, self.files)

#Register and unregister class to allow for module to be imported
def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(ImageSeqConverter)
    bpy.utils.register_class(OpenFileBrowser)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(ImageSeqConverter)
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(OpenFileBrowser)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

can anybody tell me what I've done wrong? I'm fairly new to BPY and I still can't wrap my head around property groups.
Thanks!

it's a syntax thing on your properties definitions, should  use files: and directory:

more specifically, replace files = with files:  and directory = with directory:


text:
Alternatives to freestyle and grease pencil when using panoramic cameras? For full-dome rendering. Cycles only <3
I'm working on a full dome project, rendering in Cycles with a fisheye equidistant camera with a 210d FoV angle.
Since freestyle and grease pencil are not supported with panoramic cameras (please let me know if I'm wrong) I'm looking for an alternative method that would allow me to achieve a similar 2D line-drawing effect - like freestyle and grease pencil would work when using a perspective camera.
Example with fisheye lens:

I'm getting the lines but they are rendered as if I was using a perspective camera... How could I get those line warped so they match the scene's content?
Example with perspective cam:

This image is just a reference to showcase how freestyle works with perspective cams.
Any leads on this are more than welcome <3

What I would like to know is what your full dome project is? Will your image be stretched out to be a 360-degree view or are you just trying to make a 2d image with a panoramic distortion.