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Why can't I parent the mesh to the armature with automatic weights?
I'm trying to create an animation of an alien hand picking up a plate. After watching some tutorials, I downloaded a free model of an alien hand and rigged it. Every time I attempt to parent the mesh and the armature with automatic weights, Blender freezes and I have to force quit the program.
I don't know how much of this is relevant but I'm pretty new to Blender and this is my first rigging project...
-I'm working on a surface pro laptop that is probably not ideal for Blender and there's 45 GB of free space.
-The only projects I've made so far include a small low poly scene, and the Blender donuts that lots of people make (without the animation), and one project with just two small objects. Not sure how much this affects memory within Blender??
-I've gone through and deleted any objects I don't need within my project in case it is a memory issue with Blender.

When I try to parent the two, I'm in Object Mode and first select the mesh. Then select the armature and press ctrl-p and try to select 'with automatic weights' and that's when Blender freezes every time.

Here's the wireframe view of the original model. After looking around online, it seemed like maybe the mesh could be causing the problem and I should retopologize it so it's more simple. The original model had over 72,000 faces. So I retopologized it using a voxel size of .005. I also added a decimate modifier 'de-subdivide' option without applying it, per someone else's suggestion and was able to lower the number of faces to just over 3,400. But Blender continues to freeze up at that step every time.
I'm really stuck. Any help would appreciated.

Using a Remesh modifier with a 0.005 voxel size is quite overkill for your mesh, or for most mesh to be honest. That's how the default cube would look like:

You need to zoom to macro level to even see the individual faces...
Using a decimate modifier can be a nice way to reduce polycount, but weights are done on the vertices from the raw mesh. So if you didn't apply your remesh or decimate, you are still asking Blender to work on the original mesh, not the one with modifiers.
To be honest, I doubt you would get a hard time making a manual retopology even though you are new to Blender. It would be pretty fast to do, would give you full control lover how the mesh deforms, and nothing prevents you from adding a subdivision modifier after the armature deform modifier.
You could go from something like this:

With that kind of model, handling weights is easy, performance when deforming with an armature is optimal.

Thanks for responding! That's good to know about the modifier. And I wasn't aware you could manually retopologize. I'm assuming that's a different process than using voxel remesher or the quad remesh? Should I use the decimate modifier to drastically reduce what's already there? Or what do you suggest I use for search terms to look up a tutorial on how to do that? I'll definitely give it a shot!

using modifiers to retopo is a quick and dirty way, mainly used for unimportant static non-deformed objects. Manually modeling the final model is the most common way to for any important model or ones that are to be deformed.  Making a full tutorial on retopology here would be out of topic and overkill. There are plenty of resources everywhere on the web. In your case it's a simple hand with no high detail to worry about so you could very much free-style it as I did. You could also look up for pictures of nice low poly animation-grade hands topologies and try to replicate.

Oooohhhh, I get it now! You're suggesting I just model the hand myself based off of the model I downloaded. I'll give it a shot. Thank you for your help!

I ended up reloading my model into Blender and remaking the armature. Even though I didn't exactly follow your suggestion, everything you've said is applicable to what the problem was. I did end up using voxel remesh with a voxel size of .09. This drastically lowered the number of vertices to around 4,000. I did try applying the decimate modifier but it didn't make enough of a difference to use it. You were correct that by not applying it, Blender was still trying to parent the original mesh. I just wanted to add this info here for anyone that might run into the same problem.

4k triangles for such a simple shape is still high and unnecessary. My rough hand probably had like 500 quads / 1000 tris.

I'm sure you're right. But I mostly want to just finish my project because I'm almost done. So I'll just keep things as is for now. But I would like to try your suggestion next time instead of using a model with a bajillion faces that slows down Blender.


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I'm Trying to make a blender image sequence. Nothing Shows up and it says "Can't Load"
I'm Trying to make a blender image sequence. Nothing Shows up and it says "Can't Load"
Im on blender 4.0 and there are 3 images all pngs labled image01.png image02.png image03.png.
How do I fix this?

Also I exported these out of photoshop. Smallest Size

Are you sure the image sequence is where it is supposed to be? The // in front of the image file name says, this is a relative path and the sequence is located in the same folder as the blend file. If you now moved the images or the blend file to a different folder then this relative path does not work anymore.

Thank you Gordon! That worked!

source: Stack Exchange

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

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How to switch textures/add sevral on top
Im making a roblox rigging animation in blender.
Like a animation I want still pngs that change but I want the face to be on top of the texture?
here's the video link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nOECArFhFw
Like how the still pngs change.
blender 4.0 windows

Hello if you're talking about face expressions, see my answer here, I give several solutions: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/181389/how-can-i-animate-a-2d-face-rig-on-any-3d-object If you'retalking about something else please be more specific

Hello and welcome. While files, images, and external videos or links may be helpful additions they should not be the only way to obtain information about your issue. Don't make understanding your question rely on downloading a file, watching a video or visiting an external site. Use the builtin tools to upload images or gifs, along with thoroughly explaining the problem in written form so it can be indexed and searched for thus helping future visitors with similar issues.

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


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How to animate face textures with images?
I want to animate a face texture after a character gets punched to change.
I have 3 images.
Here is the shader editor setup, I got the rig from someone else.
How would I do this?

There are plenty of suggestions on this site about texture animation.  Odd that you just didn't search for "animate texture"!  Find one where you can select one of three images based on a custom property setting (e.g. based on a "Punched Index").  I often use this to select a cloth pattern (e.g., "red or green underpants")

also check my answer here: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/181389/how-can-i-animate-a-2d-face-rig-on-any-3d-object

I'll leave you with my example of Shader nodes "image chooser" logic, here for hair texture (color) index based on a custom property.  I use a custom property at the object level (instead of the suitable material level) because of some problems with linked library overrides.
First I create the custom property that will be an index for hair color:

Then as an input to the Diffuse color, I use a group node called HairColor:

Inside this I supply the various texture images (think: your face punch images!) to a Chooser group node :

Inside the chooser group node (Hair Color Chooser), I use Mix nodes.  I first hover the mouse over the previously created custom property and right mouse click to the context menu, and select Copy as New Driver.   In the Factor property I right mouse context Paste Driver, and then edit the driver expression (another context menu item), to add the logic so that I get a cascading binary selection (A or B selection of the images).

It is unfortunate that there is not a multi-choice node (instead of just Mix Node with A through B inputs), which would reduce labor.
Here is my example to explore:


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Why isn't the main armature visible?
I'm completely new to rigging. I downloaded a model of an alien hand that I'd like to animate grabbing a plate. After watching a few beginner tutorials, I'm trying to set it all up. As you can see on the 'Data" tab for 'Bones', I've opted to show the bone shapes, colors, and 'in front'. The tutorials I watched indicated that by selecting 'in front' I should be able to see all bones in Pose view. But the largest bone/armature isn't showing up like the others.
You can see in the screenshots that it's visible in Solid view but not really accessible. And it doesn't show up in rendered view at all. What did I do wrong?

The bones of the main armature are displayed as an outline because you have 4 armatures, and only 3 of them (those for the fingers) are in Pose mode, the main armature is still in Object mode. You have selected it after switching modes (Object -> Pose). In the outliner,  Click on the white dot to the left of the name, the Mode toggling, to put the armature to Pose mode. You will then see 4 icons of the type "white dot + stick figure" in the first column of the outliner.

But... why don't you use just one armature that has all bones in a proper bone hierarchy?

I can't answer your question. I've watched what seems like extensive tutorials on YouTube... they're all about an hour long. But I don't recall hearing the phrase "bone hierarchy". The biggest challenges of learning 3D are not knowing if something is a good tutorial and not knowing the proper technical names of tools or steps to know what to look up. Thank you for your responses! I'll definitely try what you suggested and look up what you asked about in your question. Let me know if you have any suggestions of processes or search terms to use when looking up tutorials for rigging or posing.

Your suggestion worked. Thanks!

By bone hierarchy I mean that the finger bones are children of the palm bones, and the palm  & the thumb bones are children of the hand bone which is the root. If you have an arm then the hand is a child of the forearm, that is a child of the upper arm, and so on. Here is a Rigify hand. You can see there is only 1 armature that has all the 20 hand bones and you can see the hierarchy in the outliner (4). You can do the same if you select the 4 armatures and join them (Ctrl+J). 1 armature is enough & you can easily create poses for it.

Oh I see! I guess I didn't create a proper bone hierarchy as you describe it because the beginner tutorials I've watched feature very simple hands that are more like mittens. They only created a thumb bone and one main hand bone. It didn't occur to me to create something more complicated. I did just try to to join them per your suggestion and the armature became huge. But I'm sure I can shrink it down. Thanks again for your help!


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Why can I only see one side of my camera view?
I was trying to move the camera to where I wanted it to be for a scene and it got stuck at a weird point. It wouldn't zoom in any closer to some objects where it has had no problem zooming in until now. Since I wasn't sure what the problem was, I unchecked the option - lock 'camera to view'. Then I tried to zoom in and now I can only see a small part of the camera view as you can see in the screenshot (the arrow points to the edge of the camera view). I tried to undo that action but it didn't change anything. I tried to re-select the option to lock 'camera to view' and it didn't fix anything. I tried deleting the camera and adding a new one but that didn't change anything. How can I fix this?

When my camera stuck sometimes clicking on View -> Frame All resets everything and solves problem.
If you are interested in a particular object the other thing you can do is select the object and click View -> Frame Selected.
This works for the viewport. But maybe once you have fixed the viewport view you can place correctly the camera again.

I didn't have a chance to try your suggestion. Everything worked correctly about a day after I posted my question. I'm not sure what was wrong but both Blender and my laptop had crashed quite a few times that week. Thank you for your reply!


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I'm animating a hand picking up a plate. Why do the fingers remain in the most recent pose even when I try to play the animation from the beginning?
I'm trying to animate an alien hand picking up a plate using keyframes. This is my first animation, by the way.
I'm able to pose the hand just fine. But when I try to play the animation, the fingers always remain in the last position even though I had initially posed them differently. The location and rotation of the hand always show up correctly. It's just the fingers that seem to be the issue.

Here you can see the pose of the hand on frame 7. The hand is mostly open and the fingers are barely bent.

Here on frame 8 you can see that I've bent the fingers in, closer to the plate.

Here you can see at the beginning of the animation that the hand is back at the location and rotation as I established for frame 1. But for some reason, the fingers are stuck at the pose they were in at the final frame.
I've tried creating more distance from one keyframe to the next. I also tried selecting 'location, rotation, and scale' for every keyframe even if all I changed was the location or location and rotation, and tried using Auto-IK.
What did I do wrong?

Hello, at frame 1, have you created some keyframes for the fingers you are talking about?

You forgot to set the key when you move it (alternatively use Auto key, with it on any movement automatically creates a key)

@moonboots Yes, I had a keyframe for how the hand looked at the beginning.

@BuzzKirill Do I need to set a keyframe each time I move a finger? I thought I could move all the fingers to how I wanted them to look and then set a keyframe.

please share the file (only the hand armature) so that we can test it

I tried entering a keyframe every time I changed one finger rather than changing all the fingers and then trying to create a keyframe and now everything is working as it should. Thanks for all the responses!


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Lamp casting only on its own collection
Back in the 2.7x days, I seem to recall a feature for "this layer only," leaving lamps and things only affecting the layer they were on.
In 2.8x, of course, layers have been replaced with collections. However, I cannot seem to find a "this collection only" with which to isolate which collections the lamp affects.
How can I achieve this effect?

This was an option that existed only for the Blender Internal render engine. I don't think Eevee has that feature.

Hm, yes. Is there a way to achieve it in Cycles? I haven't been able to find anything.

You can do something similar by putting them into separate collections and then create several view layers where a specific collection is exclude. In the compositor you can combine the rendered images.


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Can Blender open .DDS files?
I'd like to open some .dds image files in Blender as I've extracted some files from a game and wish to view them...
Does anybody know if it's possible (either by default or through an addon) to open .dds files in Blender? And if so, how to use them?

Yes, Blender does open .dds files, though Cycles currently has a bug in 2.79 where some .dds image textures can't be seen in rendered viewport or in the final image, showing a pink texture instead.
This can be solved by converting the image to another format, like .png.
Here's a great answer on how to use an image texture in Cycles: How do I put an image texture on a material in Cycles?
Here's a similar question (and answer) for Blender Internal: [How to] add an image to an object [in Blender Internal]

Thanks, but this does not really say how to use the .dds's. I clarified the article to include that.

@Legoman I've updated my answer accordingly. This is a bit too broad to answer directly here so I provided links to their own questions and answers.

At this moment, the actual answer is "some of them".


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Conveniently make all movie textures play
So, I have a scene with multiple movie textures playing simultaneously, and I cannot get them all to play in the viewport (as the only way I know of to get one to play at all in the viewport is to have the UV/Image editor open, and also to be in Texture or Material shading view).
However, (and I may be wrong about this), it seems as if they will not all play during the final render either—a far larger concern.
I'd appreciate an answer to this troubling dilemma. How do I get all of my movie textures to play simultaneously in the final render, and if possible in the viewport as well?
EDIT: This is a very simple setup, simply consisting of a few materials with a movie file placed into an image texture plugged into the diffuse of a principled BSDF.

Showing planes or other objects textured separately with different movies in the 3D viewport is simply a matter of texturing each in the usual way, and running the animation. (ATL-A) All should play similtaneously as though separate video monitors.  In the texture properties-->Image tab, make sure the 'Auto Refresh' & also 'perhaps 'Cyclic' boxes, are ticked.  For previews, render using OpenGL until you get it right. They will render in a fraction of the time compared to Cycles.

@Edgel3D I've done all of that already, only the video file open in the UV/Image editor will play in the viewport. I'm a bit more concerned with the final render, though. Except "separate video monitors." are you implying that I need a multi-monitor setup to solve the viewport issue?

@Cegaton it's a very simple setup that is used in numerous sorts of projects, added the information to the question.

@Edgel3D Thank you, but unfortunately (as the tags indicate) I'm using Cycles, which seems to function differently.

@Legoman you also mentioned you couldn't see more than one video operating in the 3D(?) viewport.  Hence the video.  Not a problem.  Hope you get around this.


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How to soften HDR shadow
So, I have an HDR file that is lighting my scene (https://hdrihaven.com/hdri/?c=skies&h=yellow_field this one, to be specific), but it's casting rather sharp shadows onto my scene. This is undesirable in the context of my scene, but I'm not sure how to make it do anything else.
How do I soften the shadow cast by this HDR texture?
EDIT The answer given in the "duplicate question" section is not satisfactory to me. I wish to use this HDR file, adding additional light-bouncing objects would not work astonishingly well due to the nature of the scene, and blurring the HDRi as shown in that answer completely changes the appearance of the scene.

Further clarified.

If you want to make the shadow softer, you will need to enlarge the light source (and possibly dim it proportionally to the enlargement). A localized blur around the light source is probably your best bet.


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Changing a hotkey
I'd like to make the hotkey "alt-z" switch me into Material shading mode instead of Textured. However, there's no "change/add shortcut" option on these buttons.
Would somebody please let me know how to do this?

Alt+Z can be searched just fine by key-binding, there change the mode you want to enter. How did you search the setting then? Or use UI Pie Menu addon and use Tab for all the modes

That worked perfectly! Thanks, I was unfamiliar with that part of the User Preferences. Normally I just right-click on an option to change the hotkey. I can select this as the accepted answer if you post it as such. :-)

@MrZak, you should add your answer as an answer instead of in the comments so that this question can be marked as solved.

@rioforce you or anyone else are welcome to add the answer instead, I'm not going to, elaborate only a bit on what to do, steps, screenshots etc.


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Image texture to SSS radius?
I'd like to use an image texture to fully control my SSS radius in a Principled BSDF. However, given that the SSS radius input seems to want a vector output, I'm not entirely sure how to go about this.
Advice on solving this mystery would be welcome.

It's a vector because you can control the amount of scattering for R, G, and B separately if you wish.  It's a bit weird because there is also a "Subsurface Color", but if you set Subsurface color to white, you can see the effect of changing the Subsurface Radius vector:

if you don't want different behavior per RGB color, just pass the color of your image in for that vector.  Assuming it's a grayscale image the RGB values will be the same.
Note that it's not really a radius per se; you can't set it to ".5 inches" for example. It's more of a relative amount of scattering per color, and multiplied by the Subsurface value.

"Assuming it's grayscale the RGB values will be the same" I tried this, and it appeared to create a substantially different result to just typing the numbers individually.

Additionally, as I stated in the question that I would like "full" control over the radius using the texture, if you could edit your answer to address that as well (whether or not it's possible) I might be able to accept the answer. ;-)

I'm sorry, I don't understand your comments.  I just tried creating an image with a medium gray (128, 128, 128) and it gives pretty identical results to setting the Subsurface Radius to (0.5, 0.5, 0.5).  I then tried extracting just the Red channel and it works the same.  See this image; the one on the left is using only the Red channel, and the one on the right is using Subsurface Radius of (0.5, 0.0, 0.0).   https://imgur.com/a/qyiDml8  Also not sure what you mean by "full" control?

Ah, I think I misunderstood. The RGB value does not directly match the XYZ value, it seems. Apologies—thanks for your answer!

oh sorry, I thought you knew that Blender puts stuff in the 0-1 range instead of 0-255.  Another point in case you don't notice it in that imgur image link: if you're using a grayscale map for the SSS radius, be sure to set the image texture to "Non-Color Data" because otherwise Blender will gamma-correct the image and your values could be different than you might expect.

Okay—that makes sense. Thanks so much for your help! :-)


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Preventing the "Indirect Lighting" setting in Blender Internal from making the entire rendered image black
I'm currently working on a 3D scene in Blender 2.71. It has a mesh landscape. For the sky, I use a shadeless UV sphere with shadow deactivated. It also has a base in the center where most of the detail is located. Inside the base I have several meshes with an emit value given to them so that they act as artificial lighting (using Indirect Lighting). In order to make them actually emit light, I set the "Gather" setting to "Approximate" under the "World" tab of the "Properties" panel.
However when I look at the rendered view of my scene, the entire rendered image goes black (erratically when I look at it from different angles). I have tried removing certain items in the scene, but only deactivation of "Indirect Lighting" fixes the problem.
How do I keep the "Indirect Lighting" setting active, but prevent it from causing the entire rendered image to be black?
EDIT: I noticed that when the problem happened again recently, it stayed black from every angle, but the sky stayed visible (even though "cast shadows" is deactivated on the sky object).
EDIT-2: Here are some screenshots of the problem:

Could you provide screenshots of rendered image and what happens when you "look at it from different angles" (also a version of .blend could be uploaded)? That sounds like a bug but probably isn't. Are you sure that looking from different directions your viewpoint doesn't become located inside any object ?

This is no longer a problem after upgrading to Blender 2.76b.

This does not provide an answer to the question. To critique or request clarification from an author, leave a comment below their post - you can always comment on your own posts, and once you have sufficient reputation you will be able to comment on any post. - From Review

@PGmath I think this is fine as an answer, despite being rather short.  Especially since it's the OP answering

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


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collision between RB and softbody objects?
I have been trying to get a wrecking ball to collide with an upright slab of jello, with no success so far.  I've tried so many combinations of physics attributes that I can't remember them all, but so far I have achieved only 2 main types of result:  1) the wrecking ball hits the jello slab and is stopped dead, 2) the wrecking ball goes right through the jello slab.  What I expected:  the slab would cave in at the impact point, quiver and wobble, and be hurled backwards.
I believe the jello slab is more or less correct because I drop it a short distance at start of sim and it compresses and bounces back convincingly.  So I think there is something about collisions between RB objects and SB objects that I'm not understanding.  Can someone point me at the tute or example that I have not yet found by googling?
UPDATE:  One way to do it (sorta):  create a rigid body.  Then add Soft Body to it and proceed to tweak.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/rootlessagrarian/31909036596
I hope that link is visible to others.  Anyway, as (I hope) you can see it is semi-successful, but the "jello mattress" continues to have a life of its own after impact, slithering towards the edge of the floor and remaining obstinately dimpled in places even though Plastic was set to 0.  Also, the observant viewer will notice that the wrecking ball and chain actually penetrate the surface on impact :-(  but it's the best I have managed thus far.  I did try making the wrecking ball a very stiff Soft Body, but then of course it wouldn't stick to the chain... I'd have had to redo the entire chain.
Here is another probably final attempt with even stranger physics.  In this one I went back and adjusted centre of mass for the wrecking ball, made sure to Apply all Scales, and gave the jello mattress a plinth so it could be knocked off.

I have no idea why it is hesitating on its way to the floor... suggestions welcome, though I may soon give up on trying to make these two species of object interact and move on to learning more about things that Blender wants to do rather than trying to make it do things it doesn't like.

This kind of thing is better done with dynamic paint instead of soft bodies.

Can you (or someone) expand a little on that?  Dynamic paint won't allow the whole mesh to bend, as far as I understand it... whereas I was hoping for a real bend, flex, wobble effect, kind of a trampoline look.  Are collisions between HB and SB objects problematic?

It allows a whole mesh to bend, if in the Canvas, you set the Surface type to Wave. Another possibility would be to use two soft bodies, but one with high stiffness settings.

I tried Waves in Dynamic Paint but alas, the target object then has no Collision attributes;  it doesn't collide with the wrecking ball and fall over.  The impact wave is nice, but no other physics... if I try to add rigid body, then I lose the dynamic paint effect;  it appears the two are mutually exclusive...

I know no easy way to combine the two, but there are always tricks. For example before the collision change from rigid body physics to keyframe animation and then change back. Or there is the "everything softbody" solution, as I wrote before.

I tried embedding a collision plane w/in the dynamic paint object, then parenting the DP object to the collision plane.  this was hopeful at first -- they absorb the impact and fall over together nicely -- but the embedded plane seems to damp the wave effect, not sure why, so there is very little wobbling.  also of course the DP object doesn't interact properly with the floor after falling.  I didn't expect RB and SB physics to be so dissociated :-)  I can see now that this is a "clever workaround needed" situation and probably beyond my n00by powers.  ta for the suggestions!

I just noticed your video on flickr, I think it is pretty good, apart from the timing: the ball moves slowly, suggesting a large object, but the  "jello mattress" moves fast, suggesting a smaller object.

lbalazscs (are you with SCS?  I am a huge fan of ETS2, it's the whole reason I'm getting into 3d modelling) I am interested in your timing remark but I think it warrants a new question...

What makes you think I'm with SCS? No, but at least I answered your other question :)

username ended in scs... just a stray thought...  and thanks for the other answer!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/rootlessagrarian/32070780755/
latest version if anyone is still interested:  improving a bit but the jello object still falls at weirdly inconsistent rates, as if it had very little mass and huge air resistance...

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


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Does anyone know of a code-generator addon for Blender objects, properties, etc?
I have been climbing up the learning curve for script-driven object creation and configuration, often first achieving the effect I want manually (by pointing and clicking) and then wishing to recreate it in Python code.  I found myself poring over the Properties panels (various, but let's use Materials and Textures as a good example), digging for property names and setting values according to what I saw in my blendfile, copying and pasting and writing scraps of python to use later in various scripts.
This is, to put it mildly, tedious :-)  Also, it's not super-simple to recognise which properties still have their default values and which I have changed (I'm sure there are old, wise Blenderistas who have all the default values for every panel memorised, but I am far from there yet).  So immediately it occurred to me that a bit of metacoding was desirable, that someone surely must have written some Blender python code that writes Blender python code based on Blender data structures (this is a trick I've pulled many times in other languages);  such an addon could (if the info is available) compare all property values to the default values, and generate boilerplate code that imposes all the user's settings for that object, ready to plug into whatever script you like.  Blender seems so data-driven that I was sure I would find this addon with only a modicum of googling...
After more than a modicum I haven't found it yet :-)  So I was wondering if anyone knows of it by some other name than "code generation" or "metacode".  If only Blender's internal language was Tcl instead of Python, I'd be all over it already :-)  but I'm still struggling with unfamiliar Python syntax, not ready to write anything really clever yet.  Or maybe there's some nifty Blender/Python feature that does the equivalent, of which I'm not yet aware?
EDIT:  I have learned as I do more research that it is possible to get Blender to cough up the code that builds UI panels, via Other-Click -> Edit Source on a live panel.  What I wish, then, is that I could "Edit Source" on Objects as well, and get a complete "this code will re-create this object" dump.  So far the answer seems to be No, but it seems to me that it involves about the same level of introspection as the UI panel source dump... so hey, why not?

is that qr code generator

Related http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/56993/how-can-i-export-my-blender-model-as-a-python-script

Related: http://blender.stackexchange.com/a/72240/26640


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Deform object after another object
I have seen other similar questions but they don't seem to be what I want, please correct me if I'm wrong.
For simplicity: delete the default cube, NumPad7, add cylinder, rotate X 90, then add torus with ext/int 1/0.75 and raise it above the cylinder. It should look like this:.
What I want is to deform the torus against the cylinder, but make it as if it's a projection. This means that, when looked from above, it will look like a normal, undeformed torus (volume changes), but when viewed with NumPad1, it will look like a round-end tube following the curvature of the cylinder, while still having the same round cross-section. To make it worse, my object needs to be deformed by a more complex surface, such as sin(x).
If I'd use soft body, it will look shrinked when looking from above, i.e. it will preserve the volume. If I use shrinkwrap, it either does a projection with its circumference intact, but all flat, or it will project it (similar to what I want), but only the bottom side vertices, like a curtain.
Mesh modifier gets me nowhere since I have to manually tweak the surrounding mesh, and curve modifier also preserves the length/volume, while also squishing the section of the torus at the bending points.
My question(s): is there a way to project (mold) the torus onto the cylinder while preserving it's cross-section? Can this be extended for more complex meshes to be projected or to be projected on?

This is, roughly, what the side view (along Y axis in the 1st pic) would look like after the deforming of the torus:

The unselected shape above is the torus (as it is in the first picture), and the selected shape is what it would look like after the deform, or molding, whatever you want to call it.
And here is what it would look like when seen from above (top view, along Z axis)): https://i.sstatic.net/HVOCo.png (can't add more than 2 pics)
The view would be the same before and after the torus is deformed.

I don't want to cut anything, I'll update the question with a sketch of what I want.

The Curve modifier solution looks good, you could also try this one:

Create a plane behind your torus, subdivide it. Create a cube that encompass your torus like a cage, subdivide it.
Give your plane a Shrinkwrap modifier with the cylinder as Target. Disable the Display Modifier in Viewport option for the moment (eye icon).
Give your cube a Surface Deform modifier with the plane as Target. Click the Bind button.
Give your torus a Mesh Deform modifier with the cube as Target. Click the Bind button.
Enable the Display Modifier in Viewport option of the plane's Shrinkwrap modifier.

I think I might have found an answer, I was looking at the problem from the wrong direction.
The torus can be built by bevelling a curve, which can be pre-scaled to fit the length of the surface/curve/function over it's projected on.
The curve can have a shape as the bevel, which makes the whole process applicable to almost any shape.
Then, this generated bevelled-curve shape can have a curve-modifier, applied to a Bezier, or NURBS, or a converted mesh.
The minor downside (and the reason I say I "might" have found the answer), is that there is a slight deforming of the cross-section towards the ends of the curve, though not as much as in cegaton's example.
Finally, as an example, here's what a round-section, ellipse-torus looks like when bent over a gaussian bell-like curve (slight perpective):

adding a pinch of salt to @moonboots's answer blender-2.8

1 create torus
2 create cylinder beneath torus
3 create plane above cylinder and below torus

4 create cube to bound torus/enclose it inside

5 subdivide cube

6 subdivide plane

7 add a mesh deform modifier to the torus with the cube as target then bind
8 add a surface deform modifier to the cube with the plane as target then bind
9 add a shrink wrap modifier to the plane with the cylinder as target

NOTE: the cylinder was rotated between 6 and 9 so the subdivision of the cube matches that of the plane
  other wise it wouldn't work as expected. Also target mesh for the shrink wrap modifier with more subdivisions/vertices produces a better wrap

This should be marked as the valid response from Blender 2.80+

The best I was able to get was using a Simple Deform modifier set to Bend.  With the torus just touching the cylinder, adjust the bend angle until the torus just touches the the cylinder sides.

It's attractive as a simple enough solution but, even if it would work in this case (it doesn't, plus the cross-section gets distorted), I don't know what I'd do in the case of a sin(x) surface.

I don't think the cross-section does get distorted with this method.

I couldn't bend it tightly across the cylinder and, as I increased the angle, it showed distortion. Maybe I did it wrong but, even if it did work and there were no distortions, this seems to be applicable only to a circle-type curve, which this simple example is made of. If the surface would have more bumps and/or irregular profile, it would not work.

If your shrinkwrapped object is of constant depth, adding a solidify modifier after the shrinkwrap will give it depth again. You can probably also achieve results for other shapes with creative use of other modifiers.


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Automated way to make "Select interior faces" ignore select faces that are visible to the camera?
Here's my mesh. It has some interior faces (it's made out of merged cubes) that I want to remove. I've highlighted two of them for example:

When I run Select Interior Faces, it selects them, but also erroneously selects the large middle face:

I believe I understand why this is happening, due to the nature of the vertices at the edge of this face and how the "interior" faces algorithm works.
Is there an automatable way using Blender scripting to ignore faces that are visible to the camera, or achieve a result similar to that? I'm writing a Blender script to do some automatic mesh cleanup. Removing interior faces is a required part of the process, but I'm not sure how to achieve it in a script.

@cegaton I'm trying to do this in a script. Can bounding box selection be scripted? I can't find any resources on it.

select_interior_faces()
from the docs: Select faces where all edges have more than 2 face users.
also the  "use_occlude_geometry" is situated in bpy.types.spaceView3D
If you want to see how they are done just right click on the icons button and select "edit source", it will open the code in the text editor, but without enough knowledge of bpy it might be really hard to understand.
did you get to this link ? https://www.blender.org/api/blender_python_api_2_77a_release/

Here's the solution I came up with:

Run Blender's built in "select interior face" algorithm
Note which faces are selected
Loop over every face, and cast a ray from the "camera" position to the face.
If the ray hits (the center of) the face, we know it's visible to the camera, so don't delete it.
If the ray doesn't hit the face (hits another face) it means it's probably interior.

This is a bit confusing, so I made two images to show more detail:

Commented code is below. Please note this is taken from a large file so I might have forgot to declare some variable references. Happy to clarify if anyone has questions in comments.
import bpy
import bmesh
from mathutils import Vector

cameraOrigin = Vector( ( 0, 0, 10 ) )

ops = bpy.ops
scene = bpy.context.scene
mesh = bpy.ops.mesh

current_mesh = scene.objects[ 0 ]
current_mesh_data = current_mesh.data
scene.objects.active = current_mesh

# Blender's "select interior faces" doesn't actually select interior faces, it
# selects faces that share edges with 2 or more other faces. In my case this
# erroneously selects some faces that are visible but connect to multiple other
# faces. The solution is to select interior faces, then ignore any faces that
# the camera (positioned at 0,0,10) can see, and delete the remaining ones
# See http//blender.stackexchange.com/questions/57540/automated-way-to-make-select-interior-faces-ignore-select-faces-that-are-visib
def removeInteriorFaces( mesh_data ):

    # First do the built in selection
    mesh.select_interior_faces()

    # And store all faces inside that selection
    indices = []
    bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh( mesh_data )
    for index, face in enumerate( bm.faces ):
        if face.select:
            indices.append( ( index, face.calc_center_median_weighted() ) )

    # Deselect everything...
    mesh.select_all()

    # Switch to object mode to do scene raycasting (doesn't work in edit mode
    # I don't think, got error "has no mesh data to be used for ray casting"
    ops.object.mode_set( mode = 'OBJECT' )
    outside = []
    for index_data in indices:
        index = index_data[ 0 ]
        center = index_data[ 1 ]
        direction = center - cameraOrigin;
        direction.normalize()

        # Cast a ray from the "camera" position to the face we think is interior
        result, location, normal, faceIndex, object, matrix = scene.ray_cast( cameraOrigin, direction )

        # If the ray actually hit the face, as in the face index from the
        # selection matches the face index from the raycast, then this face
        # *is* visible to the camera, so don't remove it!
        if faceIndex == index:
            outside.append( faceIndex )

    # Build a list of the "true" interior face indices, which is the original
    # indices from Blender's built in "select interior faces", but without the
    # faces we know the camera can see
    invisible_interior_faces = [ data[ 0 ] for data in indices if data[ 0 ] not in outside ]

    print( 'Removing ',len( invisible_interior_faces ),'invisible faces' )

    # Select the faces (in object mode this is easy, strangely)...
    if len( invisible_interior_faces ) > 0:

        for index in invisible_interior_faces:
            mesh_data.polygons[ index ].select = True

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

    # Then delete them
    if len( invisible_interior_faces ) > 0:
        mesh.delete( type = 'FACE' )

ops.object.mode_set( mode = 'EDIT' )
removeInteriorFaces( current_mesh_data )


text:
Blender mesh ray_cast doesn't work, doesn't detect intersections
In a Blender script I'm trying to cast a ray against my object and see what face it hits. However, ray_cast doesn't work in any way.
You can see in my example I try casting a ray from every angle to the center of the scene. I'm using the default cube that comes with Blender's startup scene. You can easily test this script by opening Blender and deleting everything except the startup cube.
ops = bpy.ops
scene = bpy.context.scene
current_mesh = scene.objects[ 0 ]
scene.objects.active = current_mesh
ops.object.mode_set( mode = 'OBJECT' )

print( current_mesh.ray_cast( ( 0, 0, 10 ), ( 0, 0, 0 ) )[ 0 ] )
print( current_mesh.ray_cast( ( 0, 0, -10 ), ( 0, 0, 0 ) )[ 0 ] )
print( current_mesh.ray_cast( ( 0, 10, 0 ), ( 0, 0, 0 ) )[ 0 ] )
print( current_mesh.ray_cast( ( 0, -10, 0 ), ( 0, 0, 0 ) )[ 0 ] )
print( current_mesh.ray_cast( ( 10, 0, 0 ), ( 0, 0, 0 ) )[ 0 ] )
print( current_mesh.ray_cast( ( -10, 0, 0 ), ( 0, 0, 0 ) )[ 0 ] )

You can see the result of the above script in the screenshot. Every ray cast comes up False:

I also get the same empty, incorrect results if I replace current_mesh.ray_cast with scene.ray_cast.
Why is ray casting completely broken? Since my object is at (0, 0, 0) I don't think I need to translate any of my ray origins, but either way I'm casting from every cardinal direction and nothing comes back.
I'm using Blender 2.77.

It turns out ray_cast takes start, direction, not start, end, as parameters.
Given a start and end, you can find the direction with something like:
direction = end - start;
direction.normalize()

Assuming that start and end are Vectors, as in start = Vector( ( 0, 10, 0 ) )
Don't trust any Google results about the Blender API docs, because the newest documentation doesn't appear in Google search results. Here's the correct documentation which won't show up when searching.

Or even better - we can now use blender_python_api_current in the URL instead of a specific version that gets outdated.


text:
Problem Exporting Rig/Character to UE4
When exporting my Rig/Character to fbx. I'll import it to UE4 and everything works but the feet. For some reason, each foot is disconnected and are created as their own Rig/Character in UE4. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong in blender and forgot something or if this is a UE4 problem.

Project File: http://www.filedropper.com/ue4charactertest3_2
Forgot to add that there is a error that comes along with the import to UE4.
"Could not find the bind pose. It will use time 0 as bind pose."

Make sure you export the mesh with rig rather that exporting them separately. Also in general make sure you've applies your rotation and scale etc and make sure mesh to rig parenting has been set up properly.

I've checked all of that and I also export the rig and character mesh together. Everything seems right. Hence why I'm so confused why it's not working.


text:
Object not casting shadows on itself
I created a scene, which was mostly a sky of blue with random clouds covering the world, and I want the clouds to look more solid. But rendering the clouds makes them one flat blob. Its just white with no corners to make it look 3D
I messed with the settings to see if I could figure it out, because I had gotten it once before, but nothing worked. As I said, I've figured it out before, but now its not working, no matter what I do.

Could you add some pictures of your current situation?

@Carlo pictures added

Blender Internal or cycles?

@David Blender Internal

if the material is not shadeless, it should be the light setup...

As in.... ?
The character there is shaded, so there are lights.

Ah HA!
The problem was in the options tab, in the materials section for the clouds.
"Traceable" was not selected. The clouds were not being traced. Once selected, it fixed everything.


text:
What are these black lines in my render

Not sure what these are but they seem to appear only on certain edges. I've already checked there's no intersecting geometry and all the normals are facing the right way. Does anyone know what these are and how to get rid of them?

Try to flip normals? And what do you use as a factor in mix shader?

Flipped the normals and nothing changed. I'm using a Fresnel as my mix factor. After further testing i discovered This only happens when I raise the model to a certain height above the grid floor. I have the model positioned on the highest level of a multilevel city I'm designing. When I moved the whole top layer of the city along with the character down to the grid floor, the black lines went away. Strange. Any idea why it does this?

The problem comes from your subsurf.
using the "adjust edit cage to modifier result" option will show you a mesh that is not the real mesh. Sometimes it helps but editing without checking the real mesh can be tricky.

In you case you have edge loops overlapping, you'll see it if you disable this option.

you can fix this by moving you edge loop away with GG (edge slide)

After further testing I discovered This only happens when I raise the model to a certain height above the grid floor. I have the model positioned on the highest level of a multilevel city I'm designing. When I moved the whole top layer of the city along with the character down to the grid floor, The black lines went away. Strange. Any idea why it does this?

Can't guess more without the Blend file, you can post it here. From your screenshot, it could be the armature not visible in 3D view but activated for render.


text:
Script to add rigid body to object in scene?
I'm trying to write a script to add rigid body objects to all objects in the scene. I found this question helpful: How do I add a rigidbody to an object with python?
But when I try the solutions I get a 'context is incorrect' error. I have tried changing the context: bpy.context.area.type = "VIEW_3D" but I still get the error. What is the correct context?

Which operator is giving the error?  You need to have a context.object or context.selected_objects  to use rigidbody.object(s)_add

bpy.ops.rigidbody.world_add.poll() failed. I am unclear as to what I need to do with the context in order to add the rigid body world and the rigid body objects, and the documentation I've read has been confusing.

You might find the script in my question helpful: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/49290/context-problem-with-rigid-body I am stuck in a different place there, but adding a rigid_body works.

This worked for me:
candidate_list = [item.name for item in bpy.data.objects if item.type == "MESH"]
for object_name in candidate_list:
    bpy.data.objects[object_name].select = True
bpy.ops.rigidbody.objects_add(type='ACTIVE')

In the loop it selects all the objects that you want to add rigid_body to. Then add them in one go.


text:
Scale face by units rather than percent
I'm trying to extrude a new face and shrink it by a fixed number of units, rather than a percentage.
Starting from something like this:

I want to end up with this:

Note the distance between the original face and the new one is equal all round. I did this one by extruding the face, moving it a fixed numeric distance, then moving the 2 incorrect edges back double that distance. Obviously this only works for 90 degree edges, so less than ideal.
Using the normal scale method (E, S) I get a percentage based result, like this:

I've seen two possible method of doing this, mianly from this question:

Shrink / Fatten: I've tried (E, Esc, Alt+S) for this, but the face just travels straight up and down - I assume the vertex normals are not correct for this approach.
Push / Pull: This is just apply percentage scaling for me at the moment.

If I actually extrude the face out a bit, then use Shrink / Fatten it works as expected, but I don't want to have to keep manually resetting heights.
Is there a quick way of scaling a face within it's normal, but by fixed units instead of axis percents?

Edit: @zeffii has pointed me in the direction of the Inset tool (W, I).

What's wrong with W -> Inset Faces ? it accepts numeric input in Units.

Tested - absolutely nothing! I knew there would be something simple.. there are just so many features in Blender and I find it quite hard to Google for them sometimes - unless you already know the right names for things, they just don't come up! Thanks for this, please add it as a full answer and I'll accept it. :)

You can try to select the Face and press Inset Faces option in the Toolshelf.


text:
Blender How can I extrude a cylinder outward
I am trying to make a bullet casing. Here is an image of what I am trying to make.

If you have a look at the shell, not the bullet, you will see that it is a cone and it has an angle that goes outwards. The cylinder is extruded outwards. How can I make my cylinder extrude outwards with an angle, not just a flat outward extrusion? Thanks.

Extrude the faces as usual, then select the new edges and move them down

This is a great case for spin modeling. There are two way to do this, you can use the screw modifier (I prefer this way); or you can use the spin tool in edit mode.
I will just describe the process to use the modifier, the modeling it exactly the same for either method; however using the spin tool is destructive (and a little harder to set up).
Start by creating the outline of the shape. This could be done using curves or a mesh object. I used a mesh object, and just extruded a few vertices to make half the shape. Take note of where the object origin is, the origin (highlighted in red) is where the modifier, by default, spins around.

All that is left to do is add the modifier. The default values work very well, provided you modeled the object around the Z axis. The only setting you need to be sure to turn on is Calc Order. That setting makes the normals consistent (sometimes you will then need to then check Flip because they will be backwards).

Your object looks like this:

Extrude your cylinder to the wished length

Scale your loop to the wished thickness

Repeat this process until you get the desired result. Some useful shortcuts you might need:

E to extrude
S to scale
Press X, Y, or Z to lock the axis of your operation
Ctrl+R to add a loop cut
Alt+RMB on edge to select loop
Ctrl+E, g for edge slide

I'd like to add S Shift+X to scale with Y and Z axis locked (all locked except X). Very useful during modeling!


text:
Why don't the freestyle lines show in the rendered image?
I wanted to utilize freestyle for technical drawing, so I followed some simple tutorials. I activated the Freestyle checkbox in the Render menu, also activated the lineSet in the Render Layers menu. I hit F12, and I expected to see the edge lines in the rendered image, but alas, nothing. I used a simple white cube for testing purposes.
Can you help me? What did I miss?
All the best
Twerp
PS: Here is the file:  (https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/b/2422/)

Are you using cycles/internal?

If by internal you mean "blender render", its that.

Welcome to Blender.SE. Please show screenshots of your freestyle settings, render settings and render result; you could upload the file for someone to look into it more closely. Note that freestyle won't appear while rendering image, only after render is done.

Because (probably accidentally) you clicked on Exclusive, and now no edges are marked for inclusion. Click on inclusive, and you will see immediately some edges.

EDIT This is the result:

Damn straight it wasn't intentional ;) did that work for you? it didn't for me, just going through the workflow one more time to check it out.

Okay I tried the simplemost thing i could muster: http://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/b/2424/ . Still not working, it SHOULD work, right? Is there more fundamental thing I could do wrong?

Yes, it worked. Now I re-dowloaded again your original file, and checked again, and it works. I just select inclusive, and thick green lines appear. Maybe you changed something and you are not working with your original settings. Please revert to that. I didn't check your second file.

I edited the answer to include the rendered result

This seems definitely to be working, yet it doesn't for me - what kind of system are you working on, if I might ask? I didn't change other settings, I don't know enough to do that ;)

Windows 8.1, Blender 2.78. Are you sure that if you download your original upload, and try changing this single setting, and wait until the render finishes (the freestyle limes appear only after the render finished), it doesn't work? It would be very strange.

Your second file (simpletest.blend) works for me without any changes. It renders black lines, not green.

I reopened the program, it worked now! Your suggestion that I accidentally seemed to have changed a standard setting turned out to be the right guess. Thank you for your patience!


text:
Making a desk that open
Hi I've been trying to make a desk for a game I'm making in unreal engine 4, but I've been having some problems. I made the drawer, and the cabinet separate objects, and wan't to animate them opening. I did that, and merged the object, but it started moving the desk, instead of just the drawer. How do I make the animation work?

How did you animate the drawer? because when you merge it all into one object, that is going to be causing some problems for the animation.

You can't expect the animated drawer to keep woking after you merge it with another object

Thx for the replies, yah I figured that out, now I'm just trying to figure out how i ma going to animate it. I have a cabinet, a drawer, and a desk, but there separate. I wan't it so that they are together, can I do this somehow with bone?

Ok something was wrong with my design and I had to delete it anyway for me to do this form the beginning?

I suspect that each part of your desk which articulates relative to any other part of the desk will need to be a separate object, and parented to some other appropriate part of the desk. But having written that , the exact method of associating the various parts of your desk so that they articulate as you expect in UE4 will be determined by the design of the UE4 game engine. I suggest that when you have completed all of the constituent parts of your desk that you ask about animating them on a forum devoted to UE4 topics.

Ok thx I'll try that.

I can explain from my end but I use Unity 3D and I am sure it will give you some information:
When I am working on creating props for my games in Unity 3D, let's say if it's a desk and it's drawer needs to open (like the player can interact with it). I separate the 'drawer'from the desk because then I am able to animate it separately in Blender 3D or Unity 3D.
Later in Unity 3D, I can combine the desk + the animated drawer = Prefab.
Hope it's helpful... Good Luck


text:
Intersection Boolean Modifier doesn't work
I am currently trying to apply Intersection Boolean Modifier on a Superman model with a Plane.

It works fine for most of the plane positions but at that point on the picture, it cuts all parts and doesn't find any intersection.
I also tried to apply triangulate modifier to plane, solidify modifier to model, removed doubles and recalculated normals but the result still was not satisfying. (I can actually can do it with knife tool but since I am trying to do this operation via python script, knife tool cannot help me I think)
Here is the blend file :

The meshes used in the Boolean modifier should both be manifold for consistent results. Try adding a Solidify modifier to the plane so that it has at least some depth.

I should apply solidify modifier to the model right? I did it and just a little part of the intersection became visible (other intersection regions still unchanged)

To the plane - both meshes have to have some volume as the Boolean works on the intersection of the volumes.

Have you tried bpy.ops.mesh.knife_project in Python?

adding volume to mesh works better but there are few extra vertices that are misplaced. (Thanks:) )
Also I don't know how to specify the mouse location and draw the line from the script. (Thank you though :) )

The meshes used in the Boolean modifier should both be manifold (fully enclose a volume) for consistent results as the modifier works based on the volume enclosed by the mesh. Adding a Solidify modifier to the plane will give it thickness so that the modifier has some volume to work with.


text:
Selecting 1 side of an edge loop in a mesh

Hi, I created an edge loop by knife tool on this model (with K , then Z shortcuts in edit mode).
Now, how can I select all the vertices only right or left side of it (selected vertices will be included as well) ? Thanks in advance.
I also added my blender file here :

As long as you don't have any other vertices hidden you can hide (H) the edge loop to have to separate parts of the object in edit mode.
Then you can select one of the separate parts by using select linked (L).
After that you can reveal (⎇ AltH) the hidden vertices which are then selected automatically.
Now you have everything to the right or left from the edge loop selected!
In this example the right side of the edge loop plus the edge loop itself are selected.

Note that if the part left and right of the edge loop are connected somewhere else this method won't work unless you hide the other connection as well (e.g. a torus).

Sorry , I andwered so late but still that didn't solve my problem. I can select them as you said after hiding them but when I unhide them new faces (that are related to the hided vertices) still seems unselected.

I also added my blend file to my question and that's my aim: drawing a line that cuts left arm of model and choosing all the faces towards the left hand from that line (including new faces that are creted with this line) and lastly seerate it from the object.

Lastly, I noticed that my problem is related to your 'note' section thank you though:)


text:
Extrude curve with height proportional to position on path

I use this geonode setup to thicken and extrude a Curve/curves. Now I'm exploring if it's possible to alter the height of extrusion along the curve. (e.g. the position on the curve should alter the height).
I tried working with Curve to Points and use information from there but with no luck.
I searched this forum but could not find any information if that's possible at all?
Maybe one of you can point me in the right direction, Thank you!

you need to capture the curve points position and use the value to offset the points on the Z axis. I used a sine math node to make a wave effect but you don't need it. Change it to absolute to prevent the height to be negative

That can be something like this, using random value, as we don't know how you want height to vary.

As curve profile itself cannot be changed along curve, except using radius, use a flat line as profile, then extrude using the captured value.


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Variable extrusion strength based on "depthmap" image
I'm a Blender beginner and already made some progress with the help of this forum. I'm designing vector graphics in Illustrator and export them (DXF) to Blender.
I learned how to use Geometry Nodes to take the 2D Curves and give them thickness and extrude them.

Also learned how to vary the extrusion height with sine functions etc.
Now I'm searching for some more control, e.g. by having two layers for my input graphics:

the vector paths that should be extruded
a "depthmap" with a black&white image to control the extrusion strength/height

Is there a way to archive this with Geometry Nodes? (I want to 3D print the results)
Thank you!

I would say the main problem is, you need geometry to apply the depth map to. There are some leaf veins, okay, but just looking at the outline for example: where are the points covering the leaf area inbetween to be affected by the grey values there? You need some kind of grid mesh to have at least a few vertices being manipulated by the depth map. But there is no grid fill or remesh in Geometry Nodes.

I was hoping that I can somehow sync the curve vertices locations (x,y) with the pixels on the depthmap.
Then I could extrude them 20mm (full white at depthmap location) down to 0mm (black).

Hm, I guess you would have to read the X/Y positions of the curve points and sample the grey value of the pixel which is closest to that location. But I would have to think about it.


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How to get the output of another material datablock via Python?
Basically, I want the information that goes into the Shader Output...
[image]
...to be accessible from my custom node's output. Basically as if the material output were a group output, if that makes sense.
This is the code I have so far.
import bpy
from bpy.types import ShaderNode, ShaderNodeTree
from bpy.props import PointerProperty

class SimpleCustomShaderNode(ShaderNode, ShaderNodeTree):
    bl_idname = 'CustomNodeType'
    bl_label = 'Simple Custom Shader Node'
    bl_icon = 'NODE'

    material: PointerProperty(
        name="Material",
        description="Material datablock",
        type=bpy.types.Material
    )

    def init(self, context):
        self.outputs.new('NodeSocketShader', 'Material Output')
        self.outputs.new('NodeSocketShader', 'Volume Output')
        self.outputs.new('NodeSocketVector', 'Displacement Output')

    def draw_buttons(self, context, layout):
        layout.prop(self, 'material', text='')

    def draw_label(self):
        return 'Simple Custom Shader'

    def update(self):
        nodes = self.material.node_tree.nodes
        material_output = next((node for node in nodes if node.type == 'OUTPUT_MATERIAL'), None)
        if material_output:
            # Access the inputs of the "Material Output" node
            for input in material_output.inputs:
                # Check if the input is linked
                if input.is_linked:
                    # Get the linked node
                    linked_socket = input.links[0].from_socket

        self.outputs['Material Output'].default_value = linked_socket.get()

def add_node_item(self, context):
    self.layout.operator("node.add_node", text=bl_label, icon="INFO").type = "CustomNodeType"

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(SimpleCustomShaderNode)
    bpy.types.NODE_MT_add.append(add_node_item)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(SimpleCustomShaderNode)
    bpy.types.NODE_MT_add.remove(add_node_item)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

The best I've been able to glean is that this should be done within the update() method, but I'm not even sure about that. The code within update() probably isn't quite right either, but it's the best my API documentation sleuthing and ChatGPT questioning was able to come up with.
Any advice?

You can't, because Python code is evaluated on CPU while gathering the data for GPU. Then it is sent to the GPU, along with the shading tree compiled to a shading language, which is then run on the GPU - the "pipeline" of Blender doesn't allow to you to evaluate a shader partially, to then return to CPU and e.g. run some Python code to process it further. There's no vanilla node system (shading, compositor, geonodes) that would allow you to read the contents of input socket or write to the output socket.

Ah. Well, that's a shame. Thank you so much for the explanation!!


text:
Convert walk animation in place
So, take a 24-frame walk cycle where, instead of animating the character walking in place, you animate  them actually moving forward. The first frame and the last frame are identical except for the fact that the last frame is further down the Y axis than the first one. Normally, looping this animation would make it jump back to the original pose. However, using a Cycles modifier with "Repeat with Offset" enabled on every Y transform parameter would make the animation constantly move forward as it loops.
The benefits to this is, instead of having to imagine what the character's movement would be as they waddle in place, I can see them in actual motion. No more guessing at how the feet should move to avoid sliding. It also makes non-constant motion, like a limp or some other behavior that would make the character move slower at some points than others, pretty easy to do.
However, the main drawback to this is that it's no longer really usable as a walk cycle in the NLA editor or anything.
So what I would like to do is, essentially, bake the opposite of what the "Repeat with Offset" modifier is doing. Press a button, and all the selected bones' keyframes are modified so that the forward-moving animation becomes locked in place like a traditional walk cycle. I suppose technically this would be linearly editing the Global Y transform of each bone on a per-frame basis (on frame 1 it moves it back 1 unit, frame 2 it's 2 units, frame 5 it's 5 units, etc.).
Non-constant motion would, consequently, look like the character is sliding backward and forward from time to time to account for, well, the fact that it's not constant motion. (Think as if you had a camera following the walking character at a constant rate. Even though they're moving a fixed amount every 24 frames, the spacing within those 24 frames is uneven and so they look as if they fall behind ever so briefly every loop.)
Is there a way to do this? It can be a little more complicated than just one click of a button if it has to be, if it requires some complex constraint space-switching or whatnot. Certainly would be nice if it could be simple, though.

If I understand correctly what you want, you could parent your armature to an empty, move the empty forward each 24 frame with a constant interpolation, and give a Repeat with Offset to this empty so that it continues indefinitely?

There's actually a new plugin for doing exactly this
In Placer

@moonboots That would work, except it isn't affecting the actual animation. If there was a way to bake that motion to the actual keyframes such that the rig did not need to be parented to the empty after the operation, that would be perfect.

@pacchu I'll take a look at that!

@pacchu it looks like the addon is extremely limited right now, so unfortunately I don't think that'll solve it...


text:
How can I inspect the classtree of Blender internal classes?
>>> import inspect
>>> inspect.getclasstree(bpy_prop_array)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<blender_console>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'bpy_prop_array' is not defined

I am still trying to extract a selected object as Python code (kind of a combined Python-learning and Blender-learning project for me).  The concise version of the project:  for each object property, find the default value.  If the current value is different from the default value, then (eventually) spit out a line of Python code which will correctly set the current value.  I could just skip this check against defaults, but then the output would be unreadably lengthy and would not highlight deliberate tweaks to the object's appearance etc.
Simple value attributes are not too difficult to extract and compare with defaults, but now I'm running into more complex types.  It seems that some tuple or array values have only one default value, i.e. the actual property is a 4-int array, but the default value is a simple int 0.  That's very proper and parsimonious, but means I have to do a bit more footwork to unpack all 4 ints and compare them to the default value.  To do that I need to detect which properties are array-like and figure out how to extract their elements.  Very few are simple tuples; others are Blender-defined types like the above.  So I thought the next step would be to determine the inheritance tree of the Blender type, to see if I could identify it as the descendant of some base class such as a list, tuple, dict, etc.
My knowledge of Python is still quite shallow, and this is my first venture into OO coding (been procedural all my working life) so forgive me if this is a stupid question; I thought that the above code should reveal to me the inheritance of the type "bpy_prop_array" which I encountered when extracting object properties, but it appears there's some issue of scoping or definition that I don't yet understand.
My working code (very messy and experimental still):
import bpy
import string

context = bpy.context
obj = context.object

def fDump(obj,fname):
    f = open(fname,'w')
    dumpThing(f,obj,"object")
    matlen = len(obj.material_slots)
    indices = [i for i in range(matlen)]
    f.write("nn*********************** MATERIALS **********************nn")
    for i in range(matlen):
        matnam = C.object.material_slots[i].name
        f.write("*** Material %d, %sn" % (i, matnam))
        mat = D.materials[matnam]
        dumpThing(f,mat,"material")
        texlen = len(mat.texture_slots)
        for j in range(texlen):
            if mat.texture_slots[j]:
                f.write("******** %d is a valid texture slot for material %sn" % (j,matnam))
                tex = mat.texture_slots[j]
                texnam = tex.name
                dumpThing(f,tex,"texture")
    #lastly get vertices and polygons for obj
    vertlist = [vert.co for vert in obj.data.vertices]
    f.write("obj_verts = %sn" % (vertlist))
    facelist = [[vert for vert in f.vertices] for f in obj.data.polygons]
    f.write("obj_faces = %sn" % (facelist))

    f.close()

def dumpThing(f,thing,which):
    defvals = {}
    f.write("DEFAULT VALUESn")
    for prop in thing.bl_rna.properties:
        if hasattr(prop, "default"):
            slow = prop.name.lower()
            index = slow.replace(" ","_")
            if type(prop) is list or type(prop) is tuple:
                f.write("        BTW, %s is a list or tuple!n" % (slow))
            defvals[index] = prop.default
            f.write("%s : %sn" % (index, prop.default))
        else:
            f.write("%s : NO DEFAULTn" % (prop.name))
    f.write("ACTUAL VALUESn")
    name = thing.name
    for attr in dir(thing):
        attv = getattr(thing, attr)
        atype = type(attv)
        f.write("  %s TYPE is %sn" % (attr, atype))
        if type(attv) is list or type(attv) is tuple:
            f.write("        BTW, %s is a list or tuple!n" % (attr))
        if hasattr(thing, attr ):
            if attr in defvals:
                defv = defvals[attr]
                if attv != defv:
                    f.write("*** SET D.%ss["%s"].%s = %s (not default %s)n" % (which, name, attr, attv, defv))
                else:
                    f.write("    DEF D.%ss["%s"].%s = DEFAULT %sn" % (which, name, attr, attv))
            else:
                f.write( "    NODEF    D.%ss["%s"].%s = %sn" % (which, name, attr, attv))

Please include any relevant code in the answer body itself, not in an external link.

answer body?  you meant "question body"?  OK...

Updated answer here http://blender.stackexchange.com/a/71613/15543, might help a bit.

Thanks batFINGER, that snippet certainly will get me past the roadblock and keep my project moving along... though with the nagging question still unanswered:  should inspect.getclasstree have worked?  Why didn't it?  I don't really need to know, since you have handed me another (looks like simpler) way to do what I had in mind, but I'm curious;  so I think I'll leave this one Unanswered for a while.


text:
Complete Eejit's Guide to BGE -- recommendations?
In light of downvotes and comments it seems like I should delete this question, in hindsight it is obviously too vague.  But when I tried to delete it, I was presented with a dire warning about deleting any question with an answer -- this might result in being banned from asking questions!  If any moderator wishes to delete this question, go right ahead -- I regret having asked it.
I would like to venture into BGE, but given my complete ignorance of game design software I think I'll need some tutorials, examples, etc.  Can anyone recommend their favourite Absolute Beginner's Guide to BGE, preferably video format?  I have a CGcookie membership so can access their stuff, but have not been able to find anything there that fits the bill :-(  I'm also aware of the excellent ebook N00b to Pro, which has been very helpful to me in the past, but I thought a video overview might get me started faster, and a couple of recommends for really good ones would be even better.

If you are gonna be learning about game creation you are probably better off investing in something more future proof with a wider applicability like Unity or Unreal engine. BGE is not really a flexible gaming solution for now

Step 1: Open Blender
Step 2: Switch the top to Blender Game
Step 3: Switch the bottom to Logic Bricks
Step 4: Muck around for about 6 months making little random push-the-cube-off-the-shelf games.
Step 5: Learn Python

There is very little you can do to speed the learning process. If this is your first game engine, it will take you six months to learn, regardless of engine, programming languages, modeling pipelines etc. It just takes time.

I completely disagree. you do not need 6 months. You  can make your first game much sooner then that, granted you will not know everything, but 6 months is absurd. On the other hand, if all you do is "mess around" and not learn anything then it will take you much longer then 6 months.

You can follow tutorials and guides and feel like you have made a game you will not have made your own. In the world of baking, all who follow a recipe end up with a cake. In the digital world, those who follow tutorials end up with the tutorial-creators art/game.

In six months of 'mucking around' you will do all of the false-starts and learn how not to do things in the way that following tutorials will never teach you. Knowing best practice because someone told you is quite different to knowing best practice because you've 'been there done that.'

And perhaps my 'mucking about' is slightly deceptive. When I 'muck about' with a program, I am simultaneously researching how to do specific things. So I'm not following a tutorial, but if I want to know if there's a good way to flatten a face, I'll google it.

There are a huge number of people who can only follow and combine tutorials, and I want to stop that happening.

@sdfgeoff This actually described my first experiences with the BGE exactly! (and I'm still gradually getting through step 5)

@David I can count the number of BGE tutorials that I followed on one hand. (almost) everything I know in the BGE came from "messing around."

Ouch, first time I've been downvoted.  I did do some research, honest -- I just didn't find anything that looked useful.  Am working on my Python skills actively.  Maybe I should go on with Blender Python scripting for a while yet before trying to understand any game engine.  Apologies to those who found this a useless or low-quality question.

@sdfgeoff and come to think of it, it was more like - OH COOL! Rigid Body Physics! knock the cubes down game OH COOL! Edit Object - Add Object!! Shot the cubes over game OH COOL! Integer Properties!! Destroy cubes with health bars and limited ammo game


text:
smoke domain, original object material, how to make it show through smoke: AOQ
So, continuing to experiment with Dynamics features, I am playing with the Smoke Domain.  I drop a cube and make it burst into flames on the way down, then bounce and roll with a hot "gasoline fire" effect, then the flames go out and we look at a smouldering wreck with wisps of gray smoke thinning out.  Everything looks great, except that the cube has lost its material/texture.
I had an original texture/material (metallic) which changed to a blackened and bubbled appearance after the flame-out;  I was hoping that this change would be visible in the animation but instead, the cube is blank matte gray at both start and end.  I am guessing this is because the smoke emitter function overrides the cube's original material and the cube is "smoke coloured" throughout.
So, is there any way to make original material/texture "show through" the smoke effect, so the object appears damaged and burnt by the end of the sequence, but recognisably the same paint job as at the start?
PS blend file attached below in thread.  In this version I think I got desperate and added an outer cube (just slightly larger) with the texture, but even that was masked by the gray smoke texture.  I can see the surface deform at the end (pitting) but no colour -- neither diffuse nor specular.
film at 11...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/rootlessagrarian/31318078720/in/album-72157675807017632/
UPDATE:  Answered Own Question.  The solution, and it was probably too obvious for anyone even to suggest it 'cos you couldn't believe I was that dumb:   make the smoke emanate from Volume rather than from Surface.  Also, I had made an error in my lighting (accidentally turned up Ambient intensity) and the result was unlike anything I'd seen before :-)  a Blender N00by's life is full of surprises...

Post your blend file, you should be able to see the texture through the smoke

http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=44698

Just to remove this from Unanswered Questions, I am answering it myself.  Turns out it was a dumb question anyway.
Point 1:  when textures look weird and you are using BI, check the World carefully for environmental lighting.  This was 90 percent of my problem, just dumb n00b error.
Point 2:  the smoke effect seems to reveal more of the cube surfaces when I make the proportion of Volume smoke higher and the proportion of Face smoke lower, unsurprisingly.  Tweaking this enabled me to get pretty much the look I wanted.


text:
How to fill the surface of a mesh with cones which point to the normal, do not overlap, and have the minimum possible space between each other?
I am new to blender, and I am trying to create a shark which is all covered by thorns.
There should be the minimum empty space between thorns and each thorn should point to the outside of the shark like the normal of the surface at each point.
Each thorn should be an independent mesh and thorns should not overlap.
Something like what is achieved with 4 cones in the below image, but for the entire mesh:

I can do this manually, but it seems a very inefficient way of doing it.
Is there any add-on or python script to do this? If there isn't, could anyone point me in the right direction? I'm familiar with python but not much with blender.
Thanks!

Particle Systems

If you want denser visuals you may use smaller particles size and a greater number of particles.  Your machine may easily handle 100,200 particles, or may not depending on hardware.  Mine is hesitating a little at the numbers below.  Note that you can choose to [render only] the particles by clicking the eye icon off below. [Render only] would allow easier responsive user interaction and produce same render quality. Render On. Visual Eye Off.  Save some compute cycles. So the first two images will show high density particle systems.  To save time the other images will show low density particle systems.
Above image with a fairly large number of particles.  Not yet even to 100,000.  Just a beginning example of dense population.  Of course there are other considerations for a visual effect.

All particles are emitted by frame 0.  Gravity is 0.

Image above.  The Particle System uses the Cone as the duplicated mesh.

Image above.  Two different meshes with different colors.  They are placed in a Blender Group. Keystroke Control-G.  You can be much more artistic than these explanatory examples.  This allows multiple models.

Image above.  You can use the modifier panel to convert particles into ordinary meshes, which can be custom edited.
Dupligroups

The thorn has its parent as indicated by outliner windows and properties window.
The duplication mesh has duplication indicated by Duplication Panel.  Faces and Scale.  Your mesh is the Shark.  The mesh in picture happens to be a stem or tentacle.  The Scale selection uniformly scales the thorn to the size of the face which may be of interest to you.
Displacement Modifier

Above Image.  Horribly non artistic use of the Displacement modifier.

You may also see Tapering a tentacle mesh with uniformly scaled suction discs

Hi! Thank you @atomicbezierslinger but I would need each thorn to be an independent mesh itself so I can later modify each of them (add texture, etc)

Having multiple models is neither a problem for Dupligroups nor Particles Systems. How many thorn models will you have? 3, 33, 333 ? This detail belongs in the original question.  Particles can be made into ordinary meshes.

As many as thorns :S   I'm making this 3D model to export to use in an iOS game. User would then be able to move around thorns (one by one) and change their color.  Added to original question that each thorn should be a mesh. Particles does seem the most effective approach. But I haven't been able to distribute in an homogeneous way to fill the surface.

The issue is addressed above by [convert].   I have provided a starting point for you and now you have some experience.  See my settings in the above proposed answer.  Use must change the setting to emit all particles in the frame [0,0] single frame.  Now that you have a starting point I would suggest a video tutorial.  Everyone here has seen a video tutorial.  Video Tutorial.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLjwN_JqUGU   .  Please know I am not promoting this particular video.  Not my video. There are somethings I like and like less about this video.  Video may be preferable in your case.

Lastly if you have achieved a new milestone with particles, then a new question may be in order with a new search here at BSE.   I or others may answer you new question.  You new question might be ... How do I achieve this type of homogeneous placement with Particles?.  Separate questions are a good idea here at BSE.

Thanks for all your help @atomicbezierslinger, but I'd argue that this question is rather specific (i.e. how do I achieve x?) and has not been solved yet.

I am only here to offer ideas.  Arguement is not my concept here. There are plenty of people here who can work with you.  You have stated you are new to Blender.  Therefore you may create a totally new idea about addressing your concern because you are not bogged down with historical constraints.

Argument is not my concept either, my apologies if it sounded like that, must have been the writing and that english is not my first language. Your approach with particles is very close to what I am looking for. I was thinking of a script which would add cones to the surface while there is empty space on it.. but this might also work. thanks.


text:
Theming the Timeline Area outside the Playback/Rendering Range
The Timeline Area’s background color seems to be controlled by Theme Space Settings > Window Background — but the background outside the playback/rendering range always seems to be a darker version of this color. Here, I’ve set all the Timeline colors I can find to fully opaque #ff0000, but the out-of-range background is still darker:

Is there a way to directly control the out-of-range background color? If out-of-range is actually partially transparent, is there a way to change the backstop color (eg. so that the out-of-range background appears lighter)?

Probably hardcoded to always be * 2 darker than the current color no doubt to be able to distinguish the active set length from the rest.

Off-topic of course, but what a bright theme. I'd say flamingly bright.

I don't need no rose-tinted glasses, I tell ya that…


text:
Rotate Around Selection not working
I have Rotate Around Selection selected in Interface > Preferences but although it was working as expected previously, it now does not. Specifically, the view rotates around a specific mesh vertex which seems to have a permenant orange dot on it (same with zoom too):

It happens regardless of the mesh selected.
I have tried restarting Blender and reloading the design. It does not happen in other designs.
Any help appreciated as it's very annoying!

weird because the orange dot must be the object origin but the view should not rotate around it... maybe share your file? https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/

Unforttunately I can't seem to upload the file to that site, it get's stuck on 0%. Instead I have created a new design and appended all the meshes from the old design which seems to have resolved the issue. Should I mark this as resolved? It's not a proper solution but it has fixed it.


text:
Stucked in world texture panel
I'm learning blender and I want to apply an uv map.
I'm blocked because my texture panel is blocked for the world but I have selected an other object (I'm in object mode)
You can see my panel below. The picture is the picture of my world outside.
Any idea?
My current panel

My wanted panel

You are in cycles render engine. The texture panel, and material panel are different in cycles than in Blender internal.
What you want, is the texture panel from Blender internal.
I'm sorry, but there's not way to get the Blender internal panel in cycles, and it would not be practical, as the renderers work in different ways. You could switch to Blender Internal, but Cycles has many superiorities, so if I were you, I would just use the new design, and get used to the way it works.
Keep in mind: You can switch which texture you are editing in Cycles, by clicking where it says "environment texture", and selecting another texture.


text:
Arranging One Mesh Over Plane Mesh
I created a plane mesh (ground) and then another mesh (tree).
On right view, it seems like this:

However on top view, the tree doesn't seem there. I also tried boosting the z-value but it doesn't come on top of ground any how. (But for right view, it goes high if I change the z).

Also when I start tilting a little in the right view, It becomes like these:
And in render, it creates an unexpected shade on the tree which I believe the above problem is causing.

The unexpected shading could either be flipped normals, or a lack of lighting. You could try turning on "Ambient Occlusion" in the display settings tab to help you be able to see the tree in top-down mode. It's not showing because it's the same color as the groun.

Ambient Occlusion solved my issue. Cheers!

authors: Станислав Денисов


text:
Simple way to separate Text in blender
I am trying to make the whole alphabet together as one piece and mesh it, then make each letter its own item. When I do this with what I do know it makes each letter in 3 different pieces and you can then join those pieces back together but is there a easier way to just put in ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ and sperate each letter into once piece only so I just have the 26 letter alphabet in mesh?

You may want to try using Geometry nodes and / or placing text into a collection.https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/303897/making-different-size-sieve-meshes-using-geometry-nodes

3 different pieces? You mean top, side, bottom faces? Well, then after converting to mesh, go into Edit Mode, select all with A, then M > Merge > By Distance and then press P > Separate > By Loose Parts. Now you have 26 separate letter objects. Only problem is they all share the same origin point.

if you don't mind using animation nodes (free add-on with tons of benefit):

create a text object with your letters

in animation nodes create ONE (!) node, choose mesh, hit update, enjoy result


text:
Modify individual instances after instancing on points along a path
I've created a pipe bracket which I want to distribute along the pipe(a curve), I'm using geometry nodes to achieve this, and my node tree is shown in the picture below. I want to delete the first and the last pipe brackets, and some brackets in the middle,
Can someone help me? Thx.

Delete them how? Do you mean you'd like to skip some points?

(Using Blender 3.6.8)
Instead of deleting instances, it might be more efficient not to spawn these, taking advantage of the Selection input socket of the Instance on Points node.
To improve readability in the following GN graph, a chain of tests is assembled to tag instances not to spawn using Or boolean operators. Then the selection mask is defined using the Not boolean operator. As examples (from top to bottom):

The last point is excluded by comparing its Index to the number of points recovered with a Domain Size node set in Point Cloud domain.
The first point is excluded by comparing its Index to 0.
Three points around the middle are excluded by comparing their distance to the origin of an other object, to a threshold (set to 0.5 here).

Resources:

welcome.
In order to delete points you can use the index, some compare node and math node with a delete geometry node… If I understand correctly what you need?


text:
When trying to shade smooth the model, it makes this gap between the faces. Why does it do that, and how can I fix it?
I'm still relativly new to blender and I've been working on a model. I'm trying to clean up the topology and smoothe the model, but when trying to apply "shade smooth" (while subdivision modiffier is on in both cases) these gaps appear between the faces. Why does it happen and how can i fix it?

Hello, overlapping vertices, inside faces, flipped faces? Maybe share your file...

I've managed to fix it, the problem was flipped faces!

Doubled edges perhaps?

You have flipped faces, select all in Edit mode and press ShiftN


text:
Fluid not showing
I have a basic setup of a teapot, a UV Sphere inside the pot and the cube around the scene.
The teapot should be the effector, the UV sphere the flow source and the cube the domain. When i set all the fluid settings and bake it, it's not showing any fluid. However it is working without the teapot so i assume it has something to do with the interaction of pot and domain.

hello please share your file: https://blend-exchange.com/

Stupid question: why is the teapot effector set to Is Planar? It does not look very planar to me. But the first thing I can see, the Resolution Divisions of the domain are much too low. You see the small cube in the bottom left corner of the domain? That's the voxel size with a resolution of 64, now compare that to the teapot and guess how often it would fit inside the nozzle...

Thanks @GordonBrinkmann
The Resolution Devisions were the point. I upscaled it and now it is working. ♂


text:
Eeevee Light Path, how to make transparent to camera
In my tests, Light Path -> Is Camera always seems to be 1.0, and Ray Depth always seems to be 0.0.
I'm trying to have an object be invisible to the camera, only appearing through a glass object in the scene.
Background: This is because the scene has a background video, handled with motion tracking, and I need some semi-realistic refractions through a glass within the scene.  I placed an object, matching the motion-tracked ground, under the object, with a frame uv-mapped to it, but it's obviously in 3-space and won't match the background properly, so I was trying to use only the refracted "light" through the object, and the rest be transparent to the camera (thus showing only the background video there).  You can safely ignore my messy shader experiments in this screenshot -- but it does show the oddly-shaped mesh object on which a frame is uv-mapped

Ray depth 0?

Eevee has no real concept of rays. But in order to ease the workflow between Cycles and Eevee some of the outputs are supported in particular cases. This node makes it possible to tweak indirect lighting in the shader.
Only a subset of the outputs is supported and the ray depth has not exactly the same meaning:

Is Camera: Supported.
Is Shadow: Supported.
Is Diffuse: Supported.
Is Glossy: Supported.
Is Singular: Not supported. Same as Is Glossy.
Is Reflection: Not supported. Same as Is Glossy.
Is Transmission: Not supported. Same as Is Glossy.
Ray Length: Not supported. Defaults to 1.0.
Ray Depth: Indicates the current bounce when baking the light cache.
Diffuse Depth: Same as Ray Depth but only when baking diffuse light.
Glossy Depth: Same as Ray Depth but only when baking specular light.
Transparent Depth: Not supported. Defaults to 0.
Transmission Depth: Not supported. Same as Glossy Depth.

See https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/eevee/materials/nodes_support.html
In your specific case you could use the compositor with multiple view layers to achieve the same results.

In my tests, Is Camera is not equivalent to Cycles' functionality.  For the above scene, it appears to be 1.0 everywhere.  Ray Depth appears to be 0 everywhere.  I might be using in invalid way of examining the outputs directly, but those seem to be the case.  I am updating my post with an example screenshot where Ray Depth seems to be 0.

The support of this node is to easy the workflow when using cycles as your scene renderer, but have some indication when in material preview mode. Some outputs are supported in particular cases, but it cannot match exactly as EEVEE is a rasterizer and uses screen space effects. So yes it is not equivalent to Cycles functionality.
If you want to achieve the described effect you can use the compositor.

I wonder if we can get some technical information into the docs there -- about what's actually happening in Eevee with those items.  Perhaps a more-detailed "advanced" section lower down.


text:
How to animate mixer / tumbler in blender
Hi Blenderers, I want to animate a cube containing "beans" , how it rotates on one axis like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhwm5pEBVfU
I made my model with physics but when the beans fall on the surface of the cube they don't follow the rotation. this is the problem, how to make them tumble/mix around in the cube and which settings to use. My file http://www.mediafire.com/file/bfv86466zdhmva1/mixing__motion.blend/file
Best Regards,
Alex


text:
The rendered image looks clipped, but in the viewport the clip distance seems OK
I am rendering a scene, and the plane in the scene is being clipped for no apparent reason.  The near and far clip of the camera seems ok, but I extended it to 300 from 100, just in case, and no dice.
The following two images shows how it looks in blender, and the render result:

enter link description here
3:
EDIT: Links to blend file added
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/44179449/jeemoneygrungebrickangled.blend
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/44179449/jeemoneygrungebrickangled.blend1
EDIT 2:
I moved the camera back away from the plane, and this is WEIRD!  Why is it not a rectangular plane?  (Note: I moved the JeeMoney text over, so that didn't automatically change position because of the new camera distance)

EDIT 3:
After 2 hours of fiddling around, I found out that I had a subsurf & displacement modifer that was messing everything up.  I fixed it.  Thanks all!

sub-surf modifier?

Please post your blend file so we can take a look at it more closely.

I added the blend files via dropbox.

I mean, I put the links above in the original post.

This is because Clipping Distance settings exist in two places.
One set for the viewport (in your Properties Panel):

...and another for the Camera / rendering:

Edit:
However...
Now that you've posted your .blend and I've had a chance to examine it, I can say your issue has nothing to do with clipping distance.
You have a SubSurf Modifier on your plane that is curving it.

It was set only to be visible in renders, not in the viewport.
Edit again:
I just saw your comment that you fixed it, so never mind. One last thing I'll mention - you can leave the SubSurf Modifier on, but switch it to Simple instead of Catmull-Clark, and this will give you the fine geometry for the Displace Modifier that follows, without rounding your plane.

Both nears are set to .1 which should be enough.  I changed the end to be set to 2000 in the former, and 500 in the latter.  Still get the same behavior.

Depending on the units you're using, the difference between the camera at 100 clip and 500 clip could be insignificant. Set the camera end clip to 10000.

Mentalist, thank you for looking into it!  I appreciate your time!  That was the solution!


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In mixed-system Linux/Win network render, is there a way to specify cache directory?
I'm using the network render addon (using blender 2.78 on all machines) to render an animation on a network of computers (Master is Windows; slaves are Ubuntu). The animation uses several physics simulations, and each slave starts rendering each simulation as if it started in the batch of 5 frames it receives.
The .blend file and the cache are stored on a Windows directory which is shared with the slaves, but every time I attempt to render I get the message "still missing dependency file".
I'm using relative paths, but it seems like the ubuntu slaves don't know where the cache is, since paths in Windows/Ubuntu work differently.
Does Blender have a place where a cache directory can be manually specified for a slave node, or has anyone encountered a similar issue that they've been able to resolve. Thanks!