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How to edit this 3d Model?
I am a bit of a noob but I need help with this!https://free3d.com/3d-model/ironman-rigged-original-model--98611.html
I was wondering how to cut/crop/whatever those little annoying balls from the model?
Thank you for your time and help!!!

Those are controls for the rig that moves the character. Deleting them would limit the functions of the rig. You can hide the entire rig with H if you want them to disappear form the viewport, but they won't show up when rendering, so I would just leave them be.

"Those little annoying balls" seem to be a part of the rigging. This means they can be used to move and animate the figure. If you remove them, you won't be able to animate the way the author intended.
If you don't need to animate, maybe you can safely delete them. But it might be a better idea to hide them, if they bother you now. Just select the ball (right-click) and click the eye next to it in the outliner:

They will be gone! But you can always get them back by clicking the eye again.

I'm kinda new to this but how did you access the window where you can find the rigging and "the annoying little balls?"

@PedroDaSilveira In the default view, the outliner appears on the top right. When you select the object, it will be highlighted in the outliner. If it is parented to an object, you will see a circular highlight next to the object that is the parent. Click the (+) on that object to view it's contents.


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I have heard that you can focus the camera in Blender Cycles, but it doesn't seem to work
I want to be able to have the camera focus on a certain person or object (you know like when stuff in the background is blurry but the stuff in front is clear. I have tried many different things including enabling four min the camera and choosing the object to focus on, and creating an empty and setting the focus on that then placing it on what I want it to focus on). Does anyone know any better way to do that.

Make sure you are looking through you camera ("0" on num pad) in rendered view (shift+Z) then select your camera, go to camera icon, under depth of field choose your empty or any object that you want to be in focus, then change the size setting next to it to your liking.

Related https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/32861/how-to-create-bokeh-circles/32863#32863 and https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/8126/blender-cycles-manual-dof or https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/7395/2d-vs-3d-depth-of-field

Thanks @icYou520, I have tried just that, but it doesn't quite work the way I wanted. When I have the size at 4, the Suzanne heads in the back are nice and blurry like I wanted, but the one to be focused on is way to blurry. When I set the size way down, like (.1 or so), the focus one is great again, but then practically everything else in the scene is visible.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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rendered animations are jumpy
The thing that doesn't make sense the most is that the samples on the images are only 50, then the rendered animation is only 100 samples, but it jumps all weird. Usually I render it as a Avi JPG, (but I have tried multiple others). So, what am I doing wrong here?

please try to better describe what "jumpy" means, maybe an embedded gif or a linked video... also does it happen with other (simpler) files too?

thanks. it is quite hard to describe without just showing you. I don't actually know how to make a gif, but here is a dropbox link to where you can watch it (this part is about 6 seconds for simplicity)

..here... where? edit your question and paste the link there... (another option could be share it through yt or vimeo, etc)

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


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Sand won't stay in hour-glass?
I am trying to make this sand-in-hourglass effect in Blender and I set it all up but the grains don't stay in the hourglass at the end. They collide correctly in the center but they just fall through (or if I change the glass to "Passive" then then about 50% stay). I have tried every idea I can think of.

Thanks for the help!!

Have a look at this question and answer: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/110434/fluid-simulation-in-moving-object

Thanks, my scene is kind of different: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/amxnf5bf39r9iz3/hour_glass_testing.blend.zip?dl=0]

So adding thickness doesn't help? Btw please use https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/ for uploading .blend files :)

tried thickness in many forms but still screws up.

ok so I think I just finally figured it out! I have the steps per second as the default 60; it seems to only work at about 800?

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


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How do I combine AO with my image?
I am totally new to compositing in Blender and I wanted to know if anyone could tell me how to combine the AO layer and the image layer in this LEGO brick scene that I made.

All help is greatly appreciated!  Thanks!

It's an artistic choiche. Most commeon way is to multiply colors, but it dependes on your project's goals. What are they?

Thanks Carlo, I basically want the look of the bricks to be nice and real and the shadows to be realistic. Below is the link to how I set up the nodes: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/1uavn0i83pm59v8/node_setup.png?dl=0]

and this is the result: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/eqmehwmb4135gbl/LEGO_Stack_with_AO_03.jpg?dl=0]. I know it is personal preference, but what do you think?

Use 'bake' in the 'ambient occlusion' and save the image. Now place this image in the object's material, and switch from MIX to MULTIPLY. And remember to check the ALPHA box for transparency to be applied

Thanks guys that settled it for me. I see what you mean.

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


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how do you spin-duplicate an object to make a grenade?
I ma making a grenade like this one in the image:

And I have the main bumpy part here:

so I want to spin them to make that shape, but nothing seems to work.
Any ideas?
Thanks.

Related https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/23659/how-to-use-array-to-create-circular-array-without-spiralling

already viewed those. I can't get that kind of thing to work. Here is the blend file if you want to check it out: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/uz8mi5dxj4l3t8d/grenade.blend.zip?dl=0]

As Sandro suggested: the objects scaling (marked in the image) causes the - in this case (as Kheetor mentioned) - undesired outcome.
Your object is scaled to about 45% of it's original size, so every iteration of the array is scaled to a 45% again, getting smaller and smaller every time.
Select the object and press 'ctrl+a', then select 'Scale'.

Next Step: Your object and the "rotation object" need the same origin. Go into edit-mode and move all geometry to the edge of the circle:

Then just rotate your circle around the Z-axis:

Nice answer, but there's something you could be more specific about. Scaling doesn't exactly "mess with the array", rather the array modifier with object offset takes into account the entire transform: location, rotation and scale. If you have any difference in location, rotation OR scale, the new instances generated by array are going to have all this difference affecting them, it is an intended feature of the array modifier that you could make use of.

You are correct, sir. And I have to admit I already used this intended behaviour. I edited the answer to be more specific.

This is not a direct answer to the question, but...
You can start from a sphere to do that directly:

Choose the good amount of segments / rings
In edit mode select the wanted faces and extrude individual faces AltE
Choose pivot center to be individual origins and scale down the extruded faces
Refine scaling Z the whole sphere and for instance add some bevel

tried it with your file and got it to work:
First I deleted circle and ring. You don't need them.
Your problem was, that you did'nt apply scale/rotation/location. If I had to bet on I would say scale was your problem. Thats why your array objects got bigger and bigger.
Apply those, use an empty in your array modifier as object offset, and rotate it around it's z axis.
If you have further questions or need a more detailed description feel free to ask ;)

think that detailed explanation would help. I tried it but I got some weird result (it won't let me put a screen shot on the comments?).

Thanks guys! All these comments really helped. I think it turned out great! Please tell me what you think of it: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/e5mq6qg3488zjjy/grenades_01%20copy.jpg?dl=0]


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how to make a wet rock material
I am making a waterfall/river scene and it will have mist in the air so I want the boulder rocks to look wet (like in the image below). I have tried using the glass shader and glossy shader in multiple setups, but nothing quote looks real (it all just looks like a crumpled metal rock).
It seems like no one here on the forum has had any question like that either. Please help.

related: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/100745/how-to-add-a-thick-resin-clear-coat-over-a-material if not duplicate (rock vs wood, water vs coating, tomayto tomahto).

Instead of using "glossy" or "glass" shaders, turn the roughness of the diffuse material all the way down.
Hope this solved it!


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Any idea why my video file sizes are so heavy?
im sure this has come up before but I couldn't seem to find an answer to it.
Basically, I want to render out a 1K, 1000 frame video while retaining the quality of the image. The problem is, the file size is crazy huge (about 4 GB). Now all I am doing is dropping the frames into the video editor and rendering out as a ".mov" and then I also tried using the ".avi" file format.
Oddly enough, I tested it and dropped a 90 MB video into Blender with the same settings and I was using and then rendered...the 90MB video went to about 3.8 GB.
I'm sure its just a setting or something, but I have hunted all through the manual and such to no avail.
All ideas are greatly appreciated! :)
Thanks!

Thanks @cegaton. I already understand though what toy are talking about, but the ing is when I send the exact same piece or video though something like Nuke (using the same codec container), but it is way faster and the file size is significantly smaller.

You're using nuke and you don't know why the file size is so big? Suggest to learn the basics first...

from my experience, in a native blender, you can set your movie output in a few formats for example now that you mention it, AVI. you can choose AVI raw or AVI jpeg, the raw one is a 0 compression value (raw format) and with jpeg, it uses a jpeg compression system
but i dont know if you have tried this or not


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How can you render out just the audio from a video in VSE?
Basically all I need to do is render out the track (the top most bar that appears when you drop a video in VSE). I am pretty new to Blender's VSE and I haven't been able to find anything about what I am looking for on the forum, so I thought I would ask for help here.
I really appreciate all ideas and info!
Thanks!

There is a render Audio button next to the render Animation button.

I tried that but it just renders it out and you cant understand it because it is so crunchy-sounding...

Blender isn't a good choice if you are only outputting audio, blender will still render an image for each frame. You can delete all objects in the scene and choose blender render or set samples to one with cycles and use a small image size (50x50) to cut the render time.
If you are only extracting the audio from a file, you would be better off not using blender, using ffmpeg in a terminal it is much quicker to copy the audio track from a video without any conversion.
ffmpeg -i vid.mp4 -acodec copy audioonly.mp3

You may also want to use audactity to open the video file and save out the audio.
If you do want to use blender, in the output settings, select ffmpeg video. For container select one that supports multiple codecs, such as mpeg-4 and then for video codec choose No Video (2.7x this shows as None).

What about the "mixdown" option? It only render the audio, right?

@leander actually in 2.80 that does work. For me in 2.79 it only outputs bad noise. I had thought it only worked with output from speaker objects.

I've used it countless times in 2.79. Check the sampling quality options. I'm not on a computer right now.

Thanks guys, yeah I definitely had to do a low of tweaking and such but I thin k I got it to work.


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How do you loop FBX animations
I have a 39 frame walking cycle from Mixamo and I want to keep looping it through but not where he keeps going back into his first position. I am very new to character animation in Blender so I really can't find how to do it. Thanks!

Here's a video explaining how:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgPDe2GoiRY
What you want to do is open the graph editor, and select the keyframes that you wish to loop over (over their respective time period), press Shift + E, and select "Make Cyclic (F-modifier)".

Well that got me closer. The remaining issue is that the guy shoots back to where he first started on frame 1 of the cycle; and also when I added the cycle modifier, it set it to a huge timeline (something like 10,000 [in the positive and negative direction]. Any ideas?

From your description it appears that you are trying to loop a (I'm going to guess) a walk cycle with root motion applied.
This means that as the character does the walk animation, he probably also moves forward in the scene, when in reality you probably want him walking in place.
If this is your issue, then I'm afraid that the only solution is to find the bone with the forward motion, and delete its keyframes.
Though you'll probably have to adjust a whole bunch of other stuff on the animation.

Go to graph editor and find the forward motion graph line(only one that goes up super high) and do a linear extrapolation on it. us make cyclic (F-modifier for the rest)


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Rendering VDB Smoke in Cycles
I need to export some files from Houdini into Blender to render in Cycles. That being said, I can either export them as [bgeo], [vdb], or [sim] files. I can't seem to find out if Blender can handle any of those file types though; or how to render one for that reason. Any ideas?  Thanks!

Yes I read that post. It doesn't tell you how to import them though, thats the issue.


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Fix Texture Rendering?
I'm texturing a table with multiple textures. I've essentially placed one texture on the top of the table and another for the legs. The entire model is one piece and the model's materials are set to the two I am using. When I press render it only displays the texture that is top of the materials list and doesn't place it where I had it originally. How can I fix this?

Nevermind finally figured it out, I had to go into edit mode, select every face with on the legs and assign the legs material to it, then the same for the top of the table

I would suggest you consider deleting this question, if you no longer need help, because it already has an answer. Sometimes people will come to down-vote questions that have other answers, so you may want to avoid that. It's your choice though.


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BGE Infinite Plane?
I am making an open world game (a game in which players can explore the world, rather than following a set list of events). I've tried making a plane very large, but of course, it is still finite and when I zoom out, it doesn't completely render.
How would I make an infinite plane in the Blender Game Engine?

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/17877/how-do-you-create-an-infinite-ground-plane and https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/63033/how-to-create-an-infinite-plane-in-cycles or https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/88166/how-do-i-make-an-infinitely-generated-game-map-in-bge-using-cloud-texture

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos Most of these are for Blender/Blender Cycles. The only one for BGE is unanswered.


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Could I use BGE, Python, and sockets to make a multiplayer game?
Could I use the Blender Game Engine, Python, and Python's sockets module (internet data/communication module) to make a multiplayer Blender game?

Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIOn4r54l44

There's an addon which adds multiplayer support which may be what you're looking for: https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?363313-Networking-Add-On-V2-Demo

Yes, you can.
Game aspect
You can use any Python network library (such as socket) to send and receive data. The BGE itself does not have a build-in network system.
Access method
I suggest to use a non-blocking polling operation. This means your python code asks the connection for the data received since the last run and applies it to the scene. When no data was received ... do not wait for data as this will block your game.
Threading
Avoid the usage of threads (as you often see in examples). This can cause conflicts inside the BGE game loop. Just Implement the inner code of the thread loop as a script.
Network business
The sole transfer of data (connecting, reading and writing) is pretty simple. The most work needs the business around that.
When to connect?
When to send what?
When to expect what kind of data in what format?
This strongly depends on your game.
Be aware you should think about:

Where to get the servers IP address?
How to authenticate a client?
How to create a lobby to bring the players together?
How to start a game session with known clients?
How do the participants of a game session communicate with each other?


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force unbuffered output for the console
I'm trying to capture blender's console output to a file (as a result of a great suggestions from @Rich Sedman in another post) with something like
$ blender > /tmp/output.txt
The problem is that I need output.txt have always the content of the console but blender is buffering this output and not always I can access the text. I tried all kinds of flushing (line sys.stdout.flush(), or sys.stdout = fopen(sys.stdout.fileno(), 'w', 0), etc) and nothing seems to force an unbuffered output.
Is there a way to really force blender to use an unbuffered console?
Thanks!

Figure out the problem. The python interpreter can be forced to use unbuffered prints if we set the PYTHONUNBUFFERED environment variable. Just use
export PYTHONUNBUFFERED=on
Nevertheless that still did not solved completely my problem because I had a piped  grep together with blender. Hence, although blender was running unbuffered outputs to console, grep was... Just used grep --line-buffered (saw that in s very good post about stdout here https://eklitzke.org/stdout-buffering)
Hope that helps somebody! Thanks for everyone that tried to help!
/edit:
Since 16.01.2020, to make this work you have to launch blender with --python-use-system-env to make it work.
Source: https://developer.blender.org/rBS7c2f0074f3fe2411daa7a6e351d7cbc535246871

Does it work on Windows though? I've tried with SET PYTHONUNBUFFERED=on and powershell $Env:PYTHONUNBUFFERED="on" but still can't get it to print content on live mode, rather than waiting for process end.

I'm afraid I don't know wether it works or not on windows. Probably all the "flush" policies might be quite different from Linux/Mac. Even the grep might flush the output differently, check it out.

https://developer.blender.org/rBS7c2f0074f3fe2411daa7a6e351d7cbc535246871
TL;DR: it works, but since 16.01.2020 you have to launch blender with --python-use-system-env to make it work.


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External libraries within a shader
Can I call functions from external libraries (.dll or .a) within a shader script?
I want to be able to communicate to an external process and/or write a "log" for each point in the surface of an object.
I know that will slow a lot the rendering but the main point is to "log" the render.
I need simulate a detector (like a CCD) within blender.

I don't believe you can call external libraries but you can certainly log messages to the console using 'printf(...)', 'warning(...)' or 'error(...)' function calls. For example :
printf("Point %f,%f,%f\n", P[0], P[1], P[2]);

This can produce the following output :
Point 0.352600 -0.724535 0.683879
Point 0.377360 -0.151356 0.841542
Point -0.081450 -0.115284 0.909532
Point -0.075156 -0.181691 0.885011
Point -0.018898 -0.221594 0.864882
....

The 'warning(...)' and 'error(...)' calls work a similar way but include additional formatting around the output string :
WARNING: Shader warning [my_shader]: Point -0.320504 -0.812141 0.157532
WARNING: Shader warning [my_shader]: Point 0.304608 -0.822310 0.270545
WARNING: Shader warning [my_shader]: Point 0.626177 0.138751 -0.099909

Looking at the OSL spec, there is also an 'fprintf(...)' function that accepts an additional argument for the output filename and will append the output to that file (rather than having to capture the console output and extract the details from there). However, my particular version of Blender (2.76b) does not seem to support that - it's presumably implemented at a later version.

Thank you very much!! The fprintf is good for me! I didn't see it in the specification. Do I need to include the stdio.h (like in C language)? If there was some kind of socket communication it would be absolutely perfect!

You don't need to include stdio.h or anything - it's included automatically as part of OSL.

Thank you! I was thinking about the fprintf but since the shader ia local function, opening a file every time would make the slowdown inviable (I can handle slow, but open a file for each ray seems dangerous). Is there a way to make a global variable?
Thanks again!

@ninguem Yeah - you're probably right - that wouldn't be the most efficient way of doing things. Personally (and running on Linux) I would start blender with a command such as "blender | grep '^MYSTUFF' |tee somelogfile" which would filter off anything starting with MYSTUFF into somelogfile. You could then just use "printf('MYSTUFF .... rest of message', ...)" to output to the log. However, I don't know how you'd do the equivalent on Windows (assuming that's what you're using) - maybe just "blender > somelogfile" and extract the details later. I presume Mac would be similar to Linux...?

I'm using MacOs. Wonderful tip the one you just gave with grep... Thank you very very much!!!
Now I just need to figure out how to implement some kind of "global" (my own, not the P, N, etc...).

In short what I need is a way to save the luminosity of each point in a plane (for instance). I'm simulating the detector of an instrument for a wavefront sensor. I implemented my own retrace in python so I have a panel that I can control everything. But that is limited... I can benefit for the functions already implemented in the shader (like normals, transformations, etc.)
Hence, what I need is to divide the surface of a plane in (say) 16x16 regions and "count" the number of hits in each region...

Figure out a workaround.
Implemented a python script that processes the output form the console and piped that with blender
$ blender | grep --line-buffered "MARK" | ./pipeServerPython.py
the script pipeServerPython.py interprets each line that is produced by a print in the shader.
For that to work we need to unbuffer everyone (notice --line-biffered in grep). Also we need to nonOptimize the shader compilation.
To unbuffer blender, just create the PYTHONUNBUFFERED environment variable (export PYTHONUNBUFFERED=on). To nonOptimize the shader, set OSL_OPTIONS="optimize=0" also as an environment variable.
Thats it. Now we have a "listener" in python for every hit in the shader.


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I cannot find my imported OBJ
So basically I imported an OBJ from a game (Roblox) and it has various parts, but it does not go where I want it to go when I import it.
It is in Blender and its visible I just cannot find it. Anyway to teleport to an object or teleport a object to you?

"It is in Blender and its visible I just cannot find it" how is that? "teleport to an object" use Numpad period button. "teleport a object to you" use Shift+S > Selection To cursor. Related - https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/51685/centre-every-object-in-relation-to-each-other


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How to indent an object using edge loops without changing edge sharpness?
I am trying to make a small indent in the bottom of a gun I am modelling, like in the picture below.
The problem is, in order to add this indent, I need to add detail to my mesh, in the form of more vertices. These additional vertices change the sharpness of the bottom of the barrel by affecting my subsurface modifier, making the edge too sharp where the indentation is.
Is there a way I can both have my indentation at that height, and keep the edge at the desired sharpness?
I know such a small detail is unimportant, but feel it is important to learn.
I have tried three methods.
tl;dr- I tried a boolean modifier, moving my edge loops away from the bottom edge where I didn't need them for the indent, and using vertices without edge loops. The first resulted in unrealistic sharpness in the indent. The other two made the bottom edge unevenly rounded.

The above indent was made with a Boolean modifier. As you can see, the inner edges are rounded, which I achieved by making the 'cutting' object rounded here. But because the bottom edge of the barrel is curved inwards, I cannot make the 'cutting' object match this curve without applying a ton of modifiers and unnecessary complexity which will slow my render.
The result is that the outer edges, marked in red, have unrealistic perfect 90 degree turns.

Here I used edge loops add the necessary geometry for an indentation. The point is, even if I move other parts of the edge loop, the edge was still too sharp at the indentation itself, because the vertices making the indentation also sharpen the edge.
Adding vertices without edge loops has the same problem, but also creates ngons.

My guess is you added details cut before line out your basic shape, can you share your model please? And link to your tutorial (if there is any).


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How to mix textures with colour?
I am attempting to add a logo to a metal material.
Unfortunately, when I render it, it has no color.

I fed the metal shader and the logo's image texture to a mix shader.
Then I used the same image texture as the fac input.
It has colour in material viewport mode, but not when rendered.
Oddly, if I  feed the image texture only into the fac input and not as a shader, it makes no difference to the render.
The upper 3d view is rendered, the lower is material viewport mode.

Realized the answer 5 minutes after posting.
I was trying to mix a texture with a shader.
I needed to mix two materials together.
So I simply added a Principled shader with the logo in its colour input.

You're absolutely right. Rather than using a texture to mix a Principled metal shader and a Principled wood shader, I can use that texture in the metallic input of a single Principled shader. A MixRGB node with the same texture in the fac input will do the same for the colours.


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How can I make scratches in paint so that they reveal the metal underneath?
I have a metal water bottle coated in green paint.
I am using an overlay to add scratches. I have colour and normal maps.
However, this just adds white scratches.

I want to make the scratches reveal shiny metal underneath, as if the scratch removed the paint.
Is there some way I can use these maps to indicate metalness?
Or can I use it to mix between a metal and paint texture?
Thank you.

Don't add values of textures to each other. It won't give realistic result. If you want scratches on metal, it means you want some dielectric or paint material everywhere where scratches are absent and metal where they are present - this is done with masking certain materials, in your case with scratches texture. See https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/32166/adding-surface-scratches/32206 and https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/21283/add-scratches-to-a-material-in-cycles for some (different ways) examples

See alternatively my video https://youtu.be/-v-t_3oQzcs which shows how to create a texture that has metal showing thru paint work where scratched.
This is a slightly dated way of working but, it works - you can also use masking ID and PBR nodes and paint in Blender itself but, it is more complex and cannot be explained here. I will be releasing a video on it (or a series) sometime over next month.

Basic process (more detail in video) If you make a texture in photoshop or gimp (taking a UV export from Blender) make a base layer of a metal texture that you want the look of to show thru as the scratches. Make sure if any grain in metal is appropriate to scale of model. Then create a 'paint' layer over the top and using a brush eraser paint away the areas that you want to show thru as scratches. Save as png and add that to your texture image node in Blender.


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Setting a normal map for only part of a material (single Principled shader)
I am attempting to use a single Principled shader to get wood on one part of a knife, and metal on the rest.
I cannot figure out how to make the normals only apply to the wood part of the mesh.
Attempting to mix them like I did with the roughness and colour only makes the metal part turn black.
I am already aware of how to make this work with multiple shaders.
The image texture in the fac of the input indicates which parts are metal or wood.

It's probably easier to use separate Principled BSDF nodes for the wood and metal, or have the "clean" region over the metal in the normal map itself. (depends on how you're painting this normal map).
However, if you want to use the setup in your example, it can work. You just need to use the geometry node to set the alternate normal to the default mesh normal instead of 1 (which is what the unconnected white socket does):

What  do you mean by the clean "clean" region of the normal map?

If you were painting the normal map in something like Substance Painter, for example, you'd only paint the detail into the wood areas, not the metal areas. The metal area would be blank, or "clean".


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Intersecting meshes
I have a model with 2 separate objects that intersects each other. My question is, is it advisable to left it in such condition? Can i just leave them like that? Or do i have to merge them into one using ctrl+j? And if i merge them, do i have to connect the intersection using faces, or i can just leave them without connecting? Can i leave faces which are inside object, eg. if you intersect cylinder on its axis into the cube?
This might be important as i want to texture the model in external program, and then i might port it into other 3d modeler or into game engine.
Sorry for the trivial questions but i haven't found answer. Im newbie to the whole 3d modelling and game design.

There is no right answer to this question, it all depends on a lot of factors. You are going to have to make this decision yourself, in different situations texturing separate objects is better in other, it is better to have them all one mesh

AFAIK i see downside already to leaving the objects intersected with each other. You have unnecessary parts in UV texture that won't be even visible, so there's no point of giving them a texture. How would game engine eg. unity or UE treat the model that have several separate meshes that are not merged into one object? Can it even work? How it can know which one to select for transformation? These questions might be answered by reference/manual for engines, but i would just like to hear a quick answer.

I guess in 3dcoat or substance painter i can just paint the visible part of the model, so no time wasted for texturing the non-visible parts?


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Blender crashes during bake
I made a model of a small building, lit with HDR and some light planes.  The walls are textured with images, normal maps etc The whole file is about 28mb.  The 4 walls are separate meshes, and I am trying to bake the textures one wall at a time.  I unwrap a wall section, create an image in the UV editor, add a new image texture node in the node editor,  etc. and hit bake and every time Blender crashes immediately.  If I copy and paste the wall section into a new Blender file it bakes just fine. The wall panel by itself is about 1.5mb. I have tried baking while in Object mode, Edit mode, to no avail.  I'm just trying to bake one small mesh at a time so I don't understand if this is a memory problem?  Using 2.79, Cycles, CPU.

what are pass you baking?

I tried both Combined and Diffuse and have the same problem with both.  I think it may be a problem with memory.  I made a second (full copy) Scene so it included my model, lighting etc. and then deleted all objects except the exterior walls and their supporting objects and they baked just fine  The only difference is that the second scene has fewer objects.  I assumed that Blender only looks at the object that is being baked, not the whole file.  If I need to break the model up into smaller pieces in order to bake that will add a lot of time to the process.

This may be standard practice but it works for me so I wanted to post it here. It seems that Blender looks at the render layer settings when baking.  I have a bunch of detail in my file (wall framing, interior trim, furniture etc.) that doesn't effect the baked texture on, for instance, exterior walls.

so when I bake the exterior wall texture I exclude those items in the render layer panel.  This seems to have eliminated the crashing problem. It's just important to be sure that none of the excluded layers would have contributed to the bake.  In this case the exterior lighting casts shadow on the walls so that layer isn't excluded.  There may be better ways of handling this but this is what I have found that works for me.

I had a similar problem but I remembered that the diffuse is just looking at the color of the object so I stopped the crashes by disabling the 'Direct' & 'Indirect' buttons in the bake tab.


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Is there a way to delete bone constraints by name?
I'm trying to delete all bone constraints containing part of the name 'Action' for selected pose bones. I'm still learning scripting and this is the best I could come up with. Any pointers would be really appreciated!
import bpy

for bone in bpy.context.selected_pose_bones:
    if 'Action' in pose.bones.constraints.name:
        bpy.ops.pose.constraints_clear()

Delete the constraints with name "Action" or delete the constraints from bone which contain "Action" in bone's name? I will assume the later one in my following answer:

Use bone.constraints.remove(constraint) instead of operator. armature - delete bone constraint in python

Directly use what you get from for loop

import bpy

for bone in bpy.context.selected_pose_bones:
    if 'Action' in bone.name:
        # Iterate over all the bone's constraints and delete them all
        for c in bone.constraints:
            bone.constraints.remove(c)  # Remove constraint

import bpy

for bone in bpy.context.selected_pose_bones:
    for c in bone.constraints:
        if 'Action' in c.name:
            bone.constraints.remove(c)  # Remove constraint

Thanks for that! I don't think I explained that well. It's for Constraints on all bones with 'Action' in the constraints name. This deletes all constraints for bones with 'Action' in the bone name.

@adam like this? Sorry I don't know constraint can be named with 'Action'

just copied the data path
pose.bones["Action"].constraints["Action move up"].name

Brilliant, second one works great thanks for your help!

@adam if this has answered your question, please consider accepting it by clicking on the green tick beside answer.


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Copy Bone Positions Between Armatures
Is there a way or a simple script to copy all bone properties (head position, tail position and roll etc)  from one Armature to another Armature with corresponding names?
Not copying poses from one armature to another but actual bone positions in edit mode.

If you copy all properties, wouldn't they be the same armature?  You could just specify the armature data used in the top of properties/armature to be the other armature's data.

There are some differences between the rigs, hence just bones with corresponding names.

Try this script here => https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/194425/107598 You need to tweak it a bit if there are additional bones in the destination rig that do not exist in the source rig. Change line 23 to if bone_data.get(b.name): b.head, b.tail, b.roll = bone_data[b.name] to skip the missing bones.


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How to Export Cycles Rendered object for Three.js
I have created a model that I want to use in my THREE.js web application. However, I can only get it work when I export the Blender file while using the Blender Renderer. Does anyone know how to successfully export with the Cycles Renderer to JSON for THREE.js?

The three.js exporter doesn't support Cycles nodes. You may want to try exporting to other formats that three.js supports. The best supported are currently FBX and glTF.


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Is there a way to make a one way mirror? (Cycles)
I'm trying to create a reflection that will repeat an object so it looks like there are infinite but it is only reflecting. Just using white glossy shader doesn't work because it reflects outside.
I'm hoping I can do this with the camera set to orthographic. Probably not though.

You have to use the Geometry node to make difference in the face sides. Here is the guide what I've seen before: Backface culling in cycles
You can set the camera to orthographic in the camera settings in the properties tab.
I made a native file for this: https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/b/6020/


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How to create a property in a panel for selecting one face?
I'm new to python and blender scripting. I'm making an operator addon that will operate on a specific face. i want to create something like the 'lock to object' element in the view panel.
Firstly how do i make a selection box?
Secondly, how do i make is so it can select only faces?
Thirdly, how do i make it so it is limited to selecting one face?
I've tried searching around but can't find much on it at all, so any links will be much appeciated as iknow it's a loaded question.

What's the reason behind the Add-on you're creating? Why should the user only be able to select a single face? What will he do with it? What is the rule / logic? Before we jump to conclusions, please let us know what to strive for.

I'm trying to automate dovetail creation for furniture design, so it needs to specify the face on which to apply. So far i have all the settings to create the regions, which will then be translated from the x axis to the long edge of the selected face, perpendicular to the face, to then extrude and boolean difference.

Sounds like you are trying to do too much at once, but see if this will help to break down the logic and possibly clarify a more specific question.
import bpy
import os
import bmesh
from bpy.types import Operator
from bpy.types import Panel

bl_info = {
    "name": "Blank1",
    "author": "Your Name Here",
    "version": (1, 0),
    "blender": (2, 79, 0),
    "location": "View3D > Tools panel 'T' > Blank1 > Blank2",
    "description": "",
    "warning": "",
    "wiki_url": "",
    "category": "",
    }

def main(context):
    if context.active_object.mode == 'OBJECT':
        print("object mode")
        print("Enumerated list selection")
        print("object list :", context.scene.enum_list1)
        print("Face list :", context.scene.enum_list2)
    if context.active_object.mode == 'EDIT':
        print("edit mode")
        print("selection box : ", context.scene.objects.active.name)
        print("index of faces selected : ", get_index_selected())

class SimpleOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    """Tooltip"""
    bl_idname = "object.simple_operator"
    bl_label = "Simple Object Operator"

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls, context):
        return context.active_object is not None

    def execute(self, context):
        main(context)
        return {'FINISHED'}

def enum_list_from_all(self, context):
    """EnumProperty callback"""
    enum_items = []
    objs = context.scene.objects
    if objs is None:
        return enum_items
    count = 0
    for obj in objs:
        if obj.type not in ['MESH']:
            continue
        identifier = obj.name
        name = obj.name
        description = obj.name
        number = count
        enum_items.append((identifier, name, description, number))
        count += 1
    return enum_items

def enum_list_from_selected(self, context):
    """EnumProperty callback"""
    enum_items = []
    for obj in bpy.data.objects:
        if obj.name == context.scene.enum_list1:
            sel_obj = obj
    for poly in sel_obj.data.polygons:
        identifier = ((sel_obj.name) + " F: " + str(poly.index))
        name = ((sel_obj.name) + " F: " + str(poly.index))
        description = ("face index" + str(poly.index))
        number = poly.index
        enum_items.append((identifier, name, description, number))
    return enum_items

def get_index_selected():
    obj = bpy.context.edit_object
    me = obj.data
    bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)
    mystr = ""
    for f in bm.faces:
        if f.select:
            mystr += (str(f.index) + ' ')
    return mystr

def initprop():
    bpy.types.Scene.enum_list1 = bpy.props.EnumProperty(
        items=enum_list_from_all,
        name="enum_list1",
        description="",
        )
    bpy.types.Scene.enum_list2 = bpy.props.EnumProperty(
        items=enum_list_from_selected,
        name="enum_list2",
        description="",
        )

def delprop():
    del bpy.types.Scene.enum_list1
    del bpy.types.Scene.enum_list2

class VIEW3D_PT_Blank1_Blank2(Panel):
    bl_space_type = 'VIEW_3D'
    bl_region_type = 'TOOLS'
    bl_category = "Blank1"
    bl_label = "Blank2"

    def draw(self, context):
        scene = context.scene
        layout = self.layout
        row = layout.row()
        col = layout.column(align=True)
        col.label(text="Enum lists based on blend file data")
        col.prop(scene, "enum_list1", text="Objects")
        col.prop(scene, "enum_list2", text="Faces")
        if context.active_object.mode == 'OBJECT':
            col.operator(SimpleOperator.bl_idname, "test button")
        col.separator()
        col.label(text="Alternative")
        col.label(text="Active object is displayed or set from box")
        col.prop(scene.objects, "active", text="Active Object")
        if context.active_object.mode == 'OBJECT':
            col.label(text="press tab to enter edit mode")
        if context.active_object.mode == 'EDIT':
            col.label(text='Index of Faces ' + get_index_selected())
            col.operator(SimpleOperator.bl_idname, "test button")

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(VIEW3D_PT_Blank1_Blank2)
    bpy.utils.register_class(SimpleOperator)
    initprop()

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(VIEW3D_PT_Blank1_Blank2)
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(SimpleOperator)
    delprop()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()


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How can I reset the scale of multiple video strips to 100% (the default) at the same time?
I've been editing a video in Blender and just noticed that the scale for all the video clips has been set to .444 (X and Y) when I actually want it to be 1.  I can do it manually but I'd prefer to know how to do it in one command for the future.  I tried selecting all the video strips and setting the property, but it only sets it for the "primary" selected video strip, not all of them.

I ended up figuring it out right after posting this question.  Select all the video clips by dragging a selection box across all of them, then press F3 to bring up the search bar and type 'scale', and select Image -> Clear -> Scale.

also worth noting that with all the clips selected, changing a setting whilst holding ALT should change it on all clips

wow that's a much better solution, if you post it as an answer I'll change the question to be more general and accept your answer.

well, to be fair it's probably a duplicate, but you could add that to your answer and accept it

I don't understand; what is a duplicate of what?


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How do I show the video preview?
I was assembling a bunch of screen recordings into a single video using Blender's "Video Editing" mode (which I've done several times before) when I accidentally clicked something and made the video preview disappear:

How do I get it back?

I figured it out thanks to this question:
First, you want to look for the 'window selector' icon, and click it, and choose the 'Video Sequence Editor' option:

Next, if you don't immediately see the video preview, you want to click a button on the bottom of that window that has a red-and-white checkerboard pattern, that will switch the window to be a video preview:

Finally, if the zoom is somehow messed up so that you don't see the entire image in the window, click the 'View' dropdown and choose the 'Fit preview in window' option:

And when all that's done, this is what the window should look like:

You switched to the Graph editor from the mode selection dropdown menu.
Switch over to the Videoeditor from the same dropdown menu

Thanks for the help, I had tried that and saw the actual sequence editor instead of the preview, so I thought at first that wasn't the right option.  After doing some more research I realized there was a separate button I needed to click to switch it to the video preview.


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How much time should take to remodel this at an intermediate lvl?

i would like to know how much time should take me at an intermediate lvl to remodel this chair, i need to know in order to accept or decline a job.


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Exporting obj with f v/vt/vn instead of v//vn
I need to export a model to .obj-format for a school project. The faces must be defined like this
f v/vt/vn
but they are defined like this
f v//vn
even though I checked both "include UVs" and "write normals".
What could be wrong?
Thanks, Anickyan

It'll help to have a bit more information. When you say "faces must be defined like this", you don't say who declared that they must be. Same for "they are defined like this" -- you don't say who or what defined them like that. Having an example blend file that shows your problem also helps.

Well, the program that uses the obj files can only handle obj-files where the faces are defined f v/vt/vn.
Blender defines them f v//vn when I export obj-files, no matter what options I try.

vt is the texture coordinates, have you unwrapped the object so that you have uv coordinates to export?


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way to customize face colors with the overlay face orientation
In the > 2.8 version of blender, we have the face orientation overlay feature that colors front facing normaled faces with blue and back facing ones to red like so:

This is very useful, but also somewhat distracting at times. Is there a setting that lets us customize this color? Because sometimes I just find it more useful and wish there a material dark color because these flat colors sometimes are to much flat it's hard to distinguish and view.

Yes, you can change it in the preferences in "themes" part for the 3d viewport:


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Bones and weighted mesh parts disappear in object and pose mode
The bones in my project disappear when in pose and object mode, along with part of the mesh weighted to their respective bones. They aren't marked as hidden, and I couldn't find them in any other layers.
The bones affected by this are on the pinky finger of the right hand in the blend file below:
.blend file for anyone who wants to see the issue: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ihh6vx4y0nd6836/m950a_anims.blend?dl=0

what are the concerned bone names?

the bones are ValveBiped.Bip01_R_Finger41 and 42

You scaled those bones down. Select every bones by hitting "A" and press "Alt+S" To reset their scale.

ohhh, I honestly don't remember ever scaling any bones, but that solved the issue - thanks a bunch!


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Make object follow curve without rotating/deforming
I'm trying to make a functioning escalator. I've got an array of stairs with a curve modifier and a bezier circle for the path. When a stair is on the parts of the curve that bend, the stairs rotate and deform with the bend. How can I stop this? Thanx.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/68923/torus-object-stretched-in-array-curve-modifier

This answer will describe the creation of a single "tile" of the escalator.

Add a bone with a follow path constraint with Follow Curve checked. I also checked Fixed Position and animated the offset value.
Add a smaller bone (OrientationBone) beneath it and parent it to the original bone. When the bone is ascending the OrientationBone will be beneath it, and when it is ascending it will be above it.

Because bone > bone driver relation create a cyclic dependency error in 2.79, I added an empty.
I used a copy location and a copy rotation constraint from the bone to the empty.
Next, add a limit rotation constraint to the empty with all values at 0 and all axes checked. Add a driver to that constraints influence. Use the Y Location of the Bone as a driver variable. Whenever the Y Location is between 0 and 6 (orange in the gif below) in my case, the bone is ascending and the driver should return the value 1 to enable the limit rotation constraint and stop the empty from rotation during the ascent. I achieved this with constant keyframes of the driver.

I added another driver for the descend, which will first check if the bone is descending with the help of the orientation bone. If the Y Location of the OrientationBone is smaller than the Y Location of the Bone, the bone is descending, otherwise the driver should return 0.

Very interesting. I kind of figured I'd have to use a completely different method. I really appreciate your taking the time to help.


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Using "end frame" as a variable in a driver
I have an animation that rotates a set of objects, using drivers, from frame 1 to the end frame. I want to be able to change the end frame (make the animation longer) without having to edit all of the drivers. Can this be done? Is there a variable (like #frame) that could be put in the driver expression that will automatically make the objects rotate slower or faster, so they end up rotated the proper amount on the last frame, based on the number of frames in the animation? Thanks in advance.

You can right click most properties and copy them as drivers in blender.

If you want to use the total animation duration (eg. rotate once from start to end) you can use something like
    tau * frame / (frame_end - frame_start)
#   ^     ^-------------------------------^
#   |     fraction of time (from 0 to 1)
#   |
#   rotation amount = 2pi = 360 deg

as the scripted expression in the driver

The screen recording does not capture it, but the animation becomes faster, when total frames decrease :)

Thanks. I got it figured out finally.


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How to properly setup a camera on top of a vertical image?
I have a vertical image, so I want to rotated my camera to fit the composition, but I am running into a lot of issues. My first problem is, after rotating the camera vertically every time I press 0 the view port also rotates. I end up looking at my composition in this really weird horizontal angle. I don't want this, I want the camera to keep the vertical perspective, but rotating the view by 90 degrees. See my problem below.

My second problem is, I want the camera to cover the entire image, so I can accurately place models into the scene with respect to the composition. I thought about placing the camera using orthographic mode to cover the entire image, but the camera bounding box disappears. I am now sure how to do this.
Does anyone know how to solve these two issues?

If I understand properly, you want your camera orientation to be 'portrait' and not 'paysage', right?
If you want to do that, you shouldn't have rotated the camera but change your render's dimensions instead.
Just think about it as a real world camera, if you rotate your camera you'll end up with a tilted image (unless your camera has a gyroscope or a system that makes it detect its rotation automatically).
If you have something like this :

Rotating the camera will give you this (90° on y axis):

And I think it's not what you want so just undo what you've done and look at the dimensions of the image. Mine is 512*1024 which is an aspect ratio of 1:2 so I can just change my render dimensions to exactly 512*1024 (or anything with 1:2 aspect ratio will do):

After that, I just have to adjust the position of the camera to fit the image :

Notice that the camera is still upright as indicated by the arrow that is on top of it and that means the image will be upright too.
There are tools like fspy which allows you to align exactly your camera to an image (dimensions, focal lenght, perspective..). You may want to try it as well.


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Problem mixing a scene with video clips in the VSE
I am using Blender 2.79 on a fully updated iMac.
I want to create a 2-D animation and have 2 video clips before this animation.
The issue is that even if the clips are above the scene strip, or even as in the screen-shot, the scene starts after the videos, the videos do not render.
Strangely, they are show in the preview, but not in the rendered video or even image (F12), as you can see in the screen shot.
Am I doing something wrong, or is it simply not possible in the Blender VSE to mix video clips with the scene?
I could render the scene and then import the video into another blender file, but then I would have to render the movie twice and rendering time in Blender is already quite long.
Thanks for your kind feedback.

Maybe I have found how to fix this.  Under properties, the Post Processing panel, I checked the boxes "Composting" and "Sequencer".  Not sure what it does, but it seems to fix the issue.

The main output of Blender is the 3D window, after that you must activate the Compositor to apply effects (like color grade or blur) by checking the Compositor box in the Scene Properties panel. Then you can bring that compositor output (or the 3D scene) into the VSE for editing with other footage (as you have done). But for this render engine to work you must check the Sequencer (as in Video Sequence Editor) box.
Note that you can check either or both the Compositor or the Sequencer box, depending on what functions you want.
If you only want to edit video clips or pre-rendered animations, then you MUST check the Sequencer box, otherwise the VSE output will not be rendered. In fact all you will see is what is present in the 3D view.


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How may I achieve the effect of insetting a concave n-gon?

The picture above shows the outer walls of a house I'm modeling. The walls of the main house (highlighted orange) need to have an inner layer of insulation, which is half as thick as the present walls.
Ideally, I could create an n-gon with the selected vertices and then do an inset to get the geometry I want. However, an n-gon cannot be created from the selected vertices. Or at least, no n-gon is created when I hit [F].
Is there some way I can avoid a lot tedious vertex shuffling?

This question is a tad unclear but firstly, blender can fill n-gons so its a problem that blender wont do it here, and also, insetting is done with I as im sure you already know so why dont you do multiple insets to create the geometry?

Probably a case for Offset Edges addon

An alternative and perhaps more accurate method would be to use the Solidify modifier twice.
Trace out the outside walls outer edge ground plan then add a Solidify modifier to create the inner edges of these walls. In the example below I set my walls to have 0.2m thickness and selected only the Even Thickness option. The solidify modifier needs faces to work with so the outer walls were extruded up 1 meter.
After applying this first modifier add a second. This will be for the insulation thickness. In object mode apply this modifier.
 The second modifier created unwanted faces ouside of the outer walls so these will need to be deleted. Also delete the extruded edges to return to a simple 2D ground plan.

With Snapping to vertex enabled use extrude to add the missing inner wall and insulation.


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Bevel node, baking normal map problem
bevel node is still under development, but maybe somebody know how to fix problem when baking bevel node into normal map, there are a lot of gray dots on the map. Everything else working well, awesome node.
blender-2.79-ef8bbc8-win64

I don´t know how would you fix it and get a perfect bake, to me it seems like an issue due to ray tracing, where more samples are needed, denoise filter and what not. What you could try: Try to find a denoise filter for Photoshop or whatever ur using and apply it to the normal, see if it fixes it. Also what you can try is playing with blur and then using overlay, difference blend modes to try and patch up those holes with something that works. Maybe copy the normal map, offset it by 1-2 pixels right and up, and use difference blender mode to catch a selection of these dots and then reuse the offset texture to patch it up with those normal base on the difference alpha you get.

baking normals isn't using ray tracing


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Add copy location constraint to each bone, with target empty at same location?
I've got a script that places a empty at each vertex and is parented.
I've got a script that adds a bone to each vertex.
 But I need a script that does a copy location to each bone, and the target must be the empty at the same location.
  Since I've copied and pasted these scripts and know nothing of scripting I'm hoping somebody could help??

Well, not without knowing what you're after. Why do you need this setup? Why not hook the vertices directly to the empties?

The vertices are hooked to the empties, I need the bones to follow the empties.  I then bake the bones after I've done cloth sim.  And I can now edit the cloth simply with actions and shape keys.   Here is what I've done manually https://youtu.be/sLobCOYL8pg

Also here is a link to a forum with the scripts that I use https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?442444-cloth-edit-script&highlight=


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Errors trying to import FBX
I'm trying to import an FBX to blender but I'm getting an error. Any ideas?

I don't think it's possible to debug the problem from the error text only. What is inside the fbx? Which program did create it? Is it the only fbx you can't import? And so on. Probably this is a bug, so report it at https://developer.blender.org/ but you'll be asked to provide as much information as possible there as well, not only screenshot of the error


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Rendering a still image (not animation) with motion blur
I want to simulate the camera shake while taking a photo and see the result. Everything works fine, but I have to create an animation and then try to render the image of an specific frame in order to see the motion blur caused by camera shake.
Actually I don't need the animation because my job is working with images. So is there any way that I won't have to create multiple frame animations in order to render desired image?
Thanks

Why wouldn't you animate the camera? You don't have to render the entire animation, just the frame you're interested in. And it'll give you ultimate control over the exact camera motion blur you want.

That's what I'm doing right now. But in my mind it would make my process more specific if I just render an image instead of an animation. If there is a way it would be more properiate for me.


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Why doesn't the shutter speed have any effect on image brightness?
I'm trying to simulate some motion blur caused by camera shake and object movements. I checked motion blur, and tried to customize the shutter speed of the camera to see the differences.
In the real world, when you increase the camera shutter speed the output image would be darker with less blur, but in my experiments,increasing shutter speed has no effects on the brightness of the output image, but it causes less blur effect. It just makes no sense. Do you know why it behaves like that?

So it seems there is no advantage in slow shutter configuration which is not true in the real world.

I assume, you are using the "Shutter" Slider under the Motion Blur settings. As far as I understand it, this is only meant to affect the Motion Blur, but not the Exposure of your image. You can change that independently in the Scene Settings under "Color Management" - In 3D Graphics, we can "break" some of the rules we and our Tech have to obey in the real world.

@michaelh Thanks for your response. I see your point but I actually want to see the differences in brighness and blur effect together caused by changing shutter speed. So when they are independant, I can't get result for my experiment. And my question is that is there a way to apply the dependancy. For example calculating the exposure based on shutter speed (while ISO and aperture are fixed) ?


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How to extrude in the same way a "3D" angle?
I'm modeling a rubber boat.
I want to extrude the edges of a cylinder in the same way they point before not only slightly up but also slitghly to the left (inwards). If I only extrude "in the same angle" it will causes the rubber boat to have a "nib" and that's not what they look like. Is it possible to extrude it following these two angles (the light blue I drawn and the orange one) without using freehand?

Possible duplicate of How to extrude surface keeping face angles

This might be not what you're after but you can temporarily fill in an Ngon and then extrude, normal of Ngon will be used for extrusion along face. I'd suggest also not beveling geometry on first stages of modeling, it adds geometry which might mess up sketching form of the object

What I do, and what Mr Zak mentioned in the comments, is to create a temporary face then extrude from that.
Simply select the end edge loop, and press F to make a face.
Blender needs some direction to extrude along, making a face creates a face normal.
Now blender will automatically extrude along that face normal. Note that in order for this to work correctly the face must be flat.
In this gif I first extrude with no face showing that there is no auto direction. Then I undo that, create a face and extrude again, this time along the new face normal.


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Render multi-track audio
How to render with multi-track audio and offset? Setting the "mono" option in each sound strip results in using first two tracks without offset and silence on remaining two.
The audio must be AAC, 4 channels. Each of the audio tracks may be a different file.

Video sequencer (VSE)
Audio settings
Rendered

In the rendered, I expect the audio to be offset depending on offset in VSE.

The channels in the Video Editor do not correspond to any audio channel in the final downmix.
What you can do is, select your audio strip, enable the Mono option in the sidebar > Strip tab > Sound panel.
Then you can play with the Pan value:

Sound Strip's pan: Strip — Sound: Pan

Used to pan the audio between speakers in multichannel audio. Only works for mono sources. The number of audio channels can be configured in the Audio Output settings.
For stereo output panning works from left (-1) to right (1). When the output uses more than two channels, values can be between -2 and 2, where 0 means front/center, -1 means to the left and 1 to the right.
To address rear speakers, you can pan to those with the higher values: -2, 2 is back. This value basically represents the angle at which it’s played if you multiply the value by 90 degrees.
For smooth animation you can assign values outside the soft bounds, since the angle wraps around over multiple rotations.

@xgjxcxzk Oh, you found the manual entry for Pan, thanks for editing it in. I was just about to do the same, saved me some work :)

Love it when we tag-team answers


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Why is shrinkwrap not applied?
.blend file
Why is the shrinkwrap not applied?
Tutorial: grow faces over single axis
From:

To:

Hello, usually you can just add a comment below the answer if you fail at one point in the explanation. You simply forgot to add the vertex group to the Shell in the Output Vertex Groups in the solidify modifier : https://i.sstatic.net/VL7zQ.png

I'm a bit lost with the axis but you can fix it this way:

In Object mode, rotate the vertex 180° on the X axis
Give your Solidify a negative Thickness value
Remove the Group from the Shrinkwrap modifier (or assign the only vertex to this group)


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adding a new subpanel to an existing panel
Blender's modes have their own panels:

Basically in this case, I'd like to add a subpanel, with some properties, to the already existing Stroke panel in the texture paint mode. How do I do this?

How much python have you worked with before? If you right click the ui element, do you see a pop up that includes 'edit source'. If you click that, you can switch to the Scripting layout and choose the 'space_view3d_toolbar.py' and then see a highlighted line where the element is located. Script is there that you can experiment with to add what you want there, or you can go about creating an add-on yourself to do what you want since the interface is all in python.

@CraigDJones , I have python experience but only with django, bpy is sort of confusing with me, but doc is not as detailed as django's :) . But, I want to know without editing the space_view3d_toolbar.py , is it possible to create the subpanel inside the shown panel? Like getting a reference to the created panel and inserting a subpanel on top of it.

I'd start slow with one of the packaged templates and experiment with getting additional buttons to show up in the panel of your choice, consistently and then attach the operators/settings you want there. The existing add-ons you use can give you a lot of clues here. After, you can package as an add-on so that you can share it or at lt consistently keep it in place on your machines.

@CraigDJones, I just made a Rig script that has sliders for IK/FK switches and toggling bone layers, and so have a basic understanding of adding buttons into panels, I do know to add a new slot of panel in the texture paint mode, but I want to know if it is possible to add a panel to an already existing panel(in the above slot in our example), without changing the space_view3d_toolbar.py ?

Add bl_parent_id in the panel.
If this is set, the panel becomes a sub-panel.


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Can I vertex paint with an image?
I am vertex painting using Cycles, & I have set up nodes to plug the vertex colors into a shader & it paints on & works fine, renders etc, looks as expected. But vertex painting gives a brush color choice only - Question - is it possible to use an image bitmap instead of the brush colors? Or - is vertex painting only for colors? I made a material with an image, unwrapped my object's surface, but so far I can't find a way to use this image as the color source (apart from just putting this material onto the selected surface area).

I answered the question that is in the title ; however, I suspect your method is wrong, and I can't really understand your second question. What exactly are you trying to do ?

As thibsert said, Properties Panel-->Brush setting lets you select a texture. The brush color/color swatch is only used as an overlay. Select white if you don't want any overlay.

Under the brush settings, in Texture, click New. In the properties panel, in Texture/Image click Open, then locate your picture file. You can now use the picture as a brush.


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How to use blackbody node in compositor?
How to use blackbody node in compositor? It is in Cycles shader nodes:

Searching for "blackbody" in compositor has no results.

Hi :). I don't think there's a blackbody node in the Compositor. Shader nodes and Compositor nodes are two different systems.


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How to extend surface material to volume?
How can I extend the 3D noise texture into the volume to make a 3D solid? plugging in the same surface BSDF into volume BSDF causes the object to be completely transparent.
Alternatively, how to create an object shaped like 3D noise texture?
surface only:

This is probably what you want to achieve ? https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/320509/how-can-i-create-a-quantum-fluctuation-simulation?noredirect=1#comment558085_320509

If I understand well your question, I guess you mean to distribute noise in a volume.
In your case you are using principled BSDF with is for surfaces and also you have connected to surface in material output (last node).
Solution:
Replace principled BSDF with Principled volume and in material output connect to volume instead of surface.
Have a look to the image, it might help.


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Where is the denoiser?
Can someone tell me where this denoiser is? I know it's in the renderlayetab, but i can't find it i can only find view

Thanks

Looks like you are running Blender 2.75. The denoiser was added in 2.79, so you'll need to download a newer version.


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Is Blender building the wrong strips into Proxies
I have a small strip I'm trying to build into a proxy, so I can go through and find all the frames I want to lay pictures and text over my videos. However, I try to make a proxy with 1 minute and 20 seconds of video at 50% and it says 1 hour to complete. AM I doing something horribly wrong that is resulting in my entire 3 hours of the movie being proxied? I only want this tiny clip to be built as a proxy. please help.

What steps did you take to build the proxies?

I selected the strips, flagged them for proxy, selected the 2 qualities i wanted, then selected "Rebuild Proxies"


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How do I make a fluid simulation so it retains its shape till it touches ground?
I am trying to make one of those animation videos where an apparently heavy object is falling on a fragile object. But rather that heavy or rigid object turns out to break or be fluid.
So I made a hammer's head, and a glass. I turned the hammer [head] to fluid and kept it on a height. So when I bake the fluid, on the first frame only it's shape is distorted and it starts looking that its actually fluid.
I want it to keep its original shape and act as fluid at the same time.

In this image, the glass is kept aside because I wanted to run a try first.

You can search also for Blender Fluid Control: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/physics/fluid/types/control.html There are some tutorials about it. You will need to have one object as Rigid Body + Fluid Control and duplicate of this as a Fluid.

One way to do this:

You will need two hammer head objects.  One of them is simulated as fluid, one of them is not.  I will call these the "hammer fluid" and "hammer static" objects for short.
Your "hammer fluid" object should be located in the position where you want the fluid simulation to start (i.e., the first frame where the hammer head touches an object / the floor).  For convenience let's call this Frame 100.  Using keyframes, the viewport and render visibility of the hammer fluid object should be set to OFF from frames 1-99, then ON starting at frame 100.  Once you have added the object to your fluid sim (as type "Fluid"), you will want to give it an "Initial Velocity" that is appropriate to whatever the hammer head was doing at the moment (e.g. falling straight down, moving side to side, etc.).
Your "hammer static" object should be visible from frames 1-99, then invisible starting at frame 100, again using keyframes.
From the viewer's perspective, the object will seamlessly transition from the static object to the dynamic object on frame 100.
In terms of the fluid domain, obviously it should be given the fluid material. It should also be invisible from frames 1-99, visible starting on frame 100. You would give the simulation an "offset" (Physics tab, Fluid section, under Time) equal to the transition frame times -1.  So in this case the "offset" would be -100.
Quick tip: you won't be able to bake your fluid sim unless you're on a frame where the fluid domain object is visible!

I think rather than animating the fluid hammer to appear in between, we should animate the Domain to do so. Because whatever object we set to 'fluid', it never becomes fluid on its own. But the domain turns into actual liquid. Also I tried doing it in both the ways. But when the frame (32nd frame in my case) comes up, the fluid is already on the ground; not in the position ready to fall. Does initial velocity has to do anything in this? I don't know what it does. Thankyou.

As mentioned, you do need to keyframe the domain visibility.  Or do you mean animating the position of the domain as the sim runs?  That may not work as you expect, the sim won't incorporate those motions into the simulation.  The initial velocity tells the sim that "at the time the sim starts, this mass of fluid was already moving in this direction/velocity," but there's no direct way to set the velocity after the sim starts.  As to the fluid already on the ground, did you set the time offset to -32?  That's necessary, otherwise the fluid sim will have already been going on since frame 1.

I think the first frame of the fluid simulation is always directly after the first simulation frame.
You could try swapping out the material on the hammer for the fluid material for 1 frame before the fluid simulation takes over.
Plug both your materials into a mix shader and simply keyframe the value from 0 to 1 to switch shaders on the frame your collision occurs, then keyframe the "restrict view" property in the inspector to make it disappear, whilst making your fluid simulation appear on the next frame.
Either that, or you could try keyframing gravity and other forces on the fluid sim so they don't affect it until the second frame.


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How do you solve the issue with an object with subdivision and multiple materials on it?
I was making a charger and I have given it some subdivision as usual. Now one side of the charger has a bit different texture (less glossier to be specific) so I tried that in blender, but that material looks shrunk.

I have faced this problem earlier also but that was an object with higher geometry. So I used inset and extrude tools to solve that. But here I cannot do that as it is only 1 large face.
This is what my geometry looks like, with the face selected that I want to edit.

Any solutions?

I guess you have two solutions:

create 4 additional edge loops close to your first edges so that it forces your texture to stick to these edges

or

unwrap your object and use a black square as a factor in a mix shader


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How do I twist a curve (by rotating a segment)?
I have already searched everywhere but those threads are about making rope-like objects.
I am trying to animate start and end values of a curve's geometry. But I want it to twist midway. I am trying  to rotate it's segment on Y axis as in the image but it is not working.

Here on the left is what I want to achieve and right is what I have. I tried rotating the segment/vertex on Y axis but its not working.

You're looking for the Tilt (Ctrl+T) function.


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How do I know the mesh number in a GLB GLTF file so I can fix it?
I make 3D models for businesses. I started doing this not long ago.
Often some models show errors and warning in the GLTF Validator. Usually, as long as the model looks good visually, it doesn't need any tweaking or fixing anymore.
But sometimes I am worried about errors, I can't fix them because I don't know which mesh number or images number it is referencing.
Here is a sample screenshot:

Here, I want to fix the 2 errors but I don't know which mesh are they. There are over 20 objects in my model and will have their modifiers applied during the export. So it's not easy for me to find the incorrect object.
I found out what the issue with the model is using this comment on stackoverflow.
Thank you.

For the errors you've shown above, I'll make some educated guesses based on my own exports:

ACCESSOR_VECTOR3_NON_UNIT - Blender usually only writes non-normalized normal vectors when there is degenerate geometry present, meaning a proper normal can't be calculated.  In Blender's "Edit Mode", go to Mesh -> Cleanup -> Degenerate Dissolve, and it might take care of this.

UNUSED_OBJECT ... TEXCOORD_0 indicates that texture coordinates (in a UV map) were supplied for a material that wasn't textured.  You can ignore it, or you can save some space by deleting the UVmap for any object using a material that isn't textured.

To answer your actual question, there's no guaranteed correspondence between a Blender mesh and a glTF mesh index, but there are tools to discover the relationship once the export is complete.  The way I recommend is to install a text editor called VSCode which is free, open source from Microsoft.  Export your model as "Separate glTF + bin + textures" and load the text-based .gltf into the editor.  Install the "glTF Tools" extension that it offers you, and it will call out the exact spots in the text file where the validator finds errors.  For many kinds of objects including meshes, the names shown here will directly correspond to mesh or object names in Blender.
(Disclaimer, I'm one of the developers of the glTF Tools extension for VSCode.)
Here's a screenshot of VSCode showing unused texture coordinates in a mesh called "glassDish":


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3D curve with angles does not produce consistent and straight profile
I have a mesh and separated a line of vertices in order to create a curve object out of it. Then proceeded to add a custom profile to it.
But the issue is that the output of the profile is neither straight, nor with consistent width.

In the top view, its further visible, that where the arch of the design is, the 3D curve is severely distorted. Here is the top view:

It notable that when converting to 2D curve, the distortion is fixed but it also loses the arch design.

Front:

I could only find this developer thread but with no solutions: https://developer.blender.org/T47230
Thank you.
The blend file:

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/66353/how-to-make-beveled-90-degree-corners-on-a-curve-better https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/56079/how-can-i-make-a-perfect-sweep-with-bevel-object-in-bezier-curve3d-pipe https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/259501/inconsistent-thickness-of-curve-profile-using-geometry-nodes/

It may be that there is no good solution for this. As far as I know it might be best to just construct the thing out of separate parts with 2d curves and join them converted to mesh. But maybe some of Geometry Nodes wizards can do some of their magic here. Maybe edit the question and add Geometry Nodes tag to attract their attention.

Okay, thanks, I had an idea about it being a "known limitation" about the ends of the curve, but I wasn't sure about the distorted bends/arch. Anyways I also found one tutorial which is aimed at producing lot like what I need to. So for anyone else, this might be useful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lx-hZGkWNk


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How to apply texture the same size on all meshes? ignore mesh\normal size
I'm trying to apply texture to the wall in "Generated - Cube" mode and when i look at it in the Render mode - it has different scales on the different meshes which have different size. The same thing goes with the polygons - smaller polygons scale texture size.
If one of the polygon's dimensions has a very tiny size - texture looks totally wasted.
How to apply texture on meshes with the different size and ignore it's size for texture scale?
p.s. Blender render

So that's a solution for Cycles Render, not Blender Render: Try some parameters in the Image Texture node, like Box instead of Flat:

That works fine when it comes to one mesh, thank you. Even it's not the Blender render that i use.
So I would accept this as the solution but with the addition: when you need to apply this on many meshes with different size - choose "Object" not "Generated" in the Texture coordinate node. And select the mesh with the texture scale that you desire as a role model for others.

oh sorry I skipped you used Blender Render


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How to bake brick-wall geomerty into texture image?
I have crated a wall of bricks. How can I bake it into the plane texture (not Normal maps just texture)?
Simply i need to be able to bake all selected geometry with materials etc into one texture image.

You can put an orthographic camera in front of the wall (with line of sight perpendicular to the wall surface), scale the camera resolution and the orthographic scale to fit it and render it as an image.

Yes, that was the simplest thing i decided to do first. Even not camera rendering, just viewport in render mode :P

There's An Easy way to Bake a Normal Map from High Poly Mesh (Your Wall) To a low poly simply a cube.The first thing you would have to do. Is place High Poly Mesh in First Layer & Lowpoly in Second.

I hope you'd be using Cycles Rather than Internal its just a slight difference.

In UV Image Editor Click for Image > New Image. Select a relation accordingly (make Sure it will be the power of 2) The Higher Resolution will give better Result.

Black Image Should Appear

Select the Both Mesh High-Poly (Inactive) Low-Poly (Active). Select High Poly First & Lowpoly then(so High Poly will be inactive & Lowpoly Active) (Remember with Both layer Active).

Last one Open Node Setup add a material for the Mesh (if it don't have one). Add Texture Node Don't Connect this node to the shader instead browse the Black Image which was created in UV Image Editor.

Bake It. (I will Edit the answer & will Post the Result later. I was in a Hurry) Sorry :(
For Any Further Video Detailes Checkout BlenderGuru Tutorial

Thanks, man. Generally you were right, but if you want to make it work you need additionally:

Add materials with image texture node not connected to the shader. Could be the same material. Otherwise you will receive an error.
When baking you need to select checkbox "Selected to active" or it woudl just bake two meshes one by one separately.
That worked for me.


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How to avoid texture stretching while rotating on 90 degrees? Generated texture
I'm trying to simply just rotate the texture in the direction I desire (brick wall). The issue is when I rotate this generated texture it gets more and more stretched on some sides of the mesh.

How to rotate texture and avoid this issue? I know it shouldn't be so so what am I doing wrong?

Did You try just using a UV-map? It gets a lot simpler and you don't need to mess with the mapping node.

I can't texture all objects with the same scale if i use UV map. I need generated type of the texture.


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How to rebuild mesh in optimized way? Example inside
I've made an example house out of blocks. Is there any way to automatically rebuild my model into one solid mesh without unnececarry polygons?

Maybe try dissolve faces

That didn't work.

There isn't one.  Because you created individual blocks, even when they're joined they're still independent meshes. Tools like dissolve faces only work on completely connected meshes.

Yeah... but maybe you can recommend me another "solid" modelling style i don't know about? For me the only that convenient is to build architecture out of blocks.

Face extruding and scaling should work well for what you're after. For example, say you have a wall that is one face. Select the face in edit mode, press 'E' to extrude, then right-click so it doesn't go anywhere. Now press 'S' to scale it down, 'G' to grab and move it into place, the extrude again, into the wall this time. Voila! A pocket in the wall, all one mesh! Play with that technique for a while, I think you'll like it.


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I've noticed that Blender changes the size of my Meshes by himself. Is it allright?
I have one mesh 10m*2m*20cm for example. When I check it's size in N-window it shows 20cm - here it's ok. But when I duplicate this mesh and rotate it on 90 degrees - mesh's size changes by itself! When I click again on the size line in N-menu it shows me not "20cm" but "20.000002cm". So the change is very small but still it's not normal.
It doesn't happen all the time I work with the copy of the mesh and I can't actually find out when it happens. But i face this changing quite regularly.
Blender version 2.79. Is that ok? I wonder how I can avoid this bug.

Because anyway 20cm and 20.000cm is not the same and i'm afraid of holes in my models when meshes don't stick to each other well. I would be happy to avoid it.

Your mesh has a 10m side, another of 2m, and you worry about a tolerance of  .02 µm ? Even in reality things are not that precise... any item you have in your house (including the house) is far less precise than that...


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How to update the texture in the UI when using "template_preview"
I'm using Blender 3.4 and I want to display an image in the UI and be able to change it by pressing a button.
The button using ImportHelper executes this code:
image = bpy.data.images.load(self.filepath, check_existing=True)
texture = bpy.data.textures.get("Test_Texture")
if not texture:
    texture = bpy.data.textures.new("Test_Texture", type="IMAGE")
texture.image = image

In the UI the image gets displayed like this:
texture = bpy.data.textures.get("Test_Texture")
if texture:
    row = layout.row(align=True)
    row.template_preview(texture)

Simple, right? After the first button press the first image shows up fine, but the second time the UI refuses to update the image.
I have tried bpy.ops.wm.redraw_timer and tag_redraw() on all regions and areas, but it won't update. Only when the user manually resizes the image it gets updated to the new one.
How can I tell the UI to update the image?

The image type has an update function itself (docs), perhaps it helps you out? So something like texture.image.update().

I have tried this, and it too didn't work.

I had this problem too, if you have found a proper way to update template_preview please share, meanwhile I have found a workaround that works for me. As you noticed when you manually resize the image it gets updated. you can do that also programmatically inside the draw function for example: col.scale_y = 1.01 and also I had to add reload() and update() functions so I created a switch inside my draw function:
updater = True
def draw(self, context):
    layout = self.layout
    prop_group = context.scene.my_prop_group
    split = layout.split(factor=0.5)
    # First column for the image
    col = split.column()
    col.label(text="Image Preview:")

    tex = bpy.data.textures.get("TempScreenImg")
    try:
        tex.image.reload()
        tex.image.update()
    except:
        print("no data")
    slot = getattr(context, "texture_slot", None) #tried this because that's how blender does template_preview but as far as I understand this is optional for what we try to do.

    # Use the texture for preview
    if tex:
        col.template_preview(tex, slot=slot)
        if self.updater:
            col.scale_y = 1.0
            self.updater = not self.updater
        else:
            col.scale_y = 1.01
            self.updater = not self.updater

Now the template_preview will update whenever the panel is redrawn but this still is not good enough that is why if you need to trigger the update whenever you change some properties you can add update function to the property like this:
def update_func(self, context):
    context.area.tag_redraw()

def register():
    #or inside propertygroup
    ....
    bpy.types.Scene.my_prop = bpy.props.IntProperty(update=update_func)
    ....

This approach will automatically resize your template_preview whenever you modify properties that should trigger an update. While this will introduce some extra refresh cycles, making it more noticeable in the template_preview, it's a functional workaround. I haven't found a better solution yet, other than potentially creating custom panels that bypass Blender's native UI.
Additionally, I'm encountering update-related issues with other template_ui elements as well. If anyone has insights into how to properly handle these templates, I'd be interested in hearing your suggestions.

This is actually a really good idea! As a temporary fix I was using some other UI type to show the image, but I prefer this


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How to run python script with multiple files from console?
I want to run a python script in Blender via the console, but I split the script into multiple files. The folder consists of two files, "main.py" and "poser.py". I call the main script like this:
blender -b --python E:\Development\Python\BlenderPoser\main.py

But I get the following error when trying to import the "poser.py" file:
Error: Python: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "E:\Development\Python\BlenderPoser\main.py", line 5, in <module>
    from . import poser
ImportError: attempted relative import with no known parent package

What I get from this is that Blender only imports the main.py file, and ignores all of the rest. How can I tell Blender to also import the rest of the files?

If I'm not mistaking, you should write something like from poser import <module name, or class>

Does this help? Having trouble creating an Addon with multiple modules

Using "from poser import Poser" results in the message "ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'poser'".
And I do know how to create a modular plugin, but I would like to create a script without making it a full plugin.

I solved it by adding the additional files into a separate folder and adding that folder to the system path:
# Add the folder to the system path, so it can be loaded by the script
main_dir = pathlib.Path(os.path.dirname(__file__)).resolve()
core_dir = os.path.join(main_dir, "core")
sys.path.append(str(core_dir))

After this, I am able to import the poser.py file with import poser


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Blender 2.8: Very hard to see selected vertices & edges in edit mode
I am running Blender 2.8 2019-04-30 hash e8daa615704b and it is very hard to see selected vertices & edges in edit mode. In the attached image the left and top edges on the forward face are selected, and if I look very closely I cna see that, but it is not nearly as easy to see as it was in 2.79 or in videos I have seen of 2.80. I also had the same result with an earlier version (f32902e6dacf) from on or about 2019-04-23.
Is there a preference I can set to make this more visible? I understand this is beta software and I may just have to wait. If it isn't controllable via a preference value then I will look to see if a bug has been filed.
Thanks, Matthew

Since the edge edit mode in your screenshot is displayed with default line width, you may want to check the overlay's option in the 3D View panel header bar.
After entering the edit mode, Mesh Edit Mode options will appear in there. Without the center checkbox been checked, the line display in edge mode will be slightly bigger then normal to make difference from face mode.

And for vertex mode,
you can change directly in Setting >> Themes >> 3D View >> Certex Size, but the line width won't change either.
An alternative way is changing Setting >> Interface >> Line Width to thic, making literally everything bigger than usual. Which might not be the best solution.

That is exactly what I needed. I will dig into the Themes area; that looks really powerful.

Also setting the Line Width to Thick was perfect for my 4K monitor.


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How to maintain multipart meshes
I have done a reasonable amount of modeling in Blender, but am just starting to get into animation. In the past when I was modeling things I would tend to keep things as a lot of separate objects which makes editing different parts fairly easy. But getting into animation it seems that in order to use armatures you typically attach the armature to a single mesh. Assuming that is true my question is if I join a bunch of objects together are the ways of still being able to select the parts again in Edit mode?
I realize obviously that I can lasso the chunks and/or shift-select pieces. I am looking for whether or not are techniques that allow the merged parts to still maintain any of their original selectability. Is this something vertex groups can be used for? Some brilliant addon I haven't discovered?
I am using 2.91.

You can define vertex groups. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/meshes/properties/vertex_groups/assigning_vertex_group.html?highlight=vertex%20groups

susu makes a good point, if you want to "join" the objects, you can first define vertex groups that contain all vertices from each object, and then join them.

Instead of Joining the mesh objects into one, you can keep them separate if you wish.   Here I show two spheres that were then bound to an armature (armature modifier).  They respond to the appropriate nearby bones in pose mode.  This is how I might control both a character and possible control cloths (instead of with cloth modifier, although you can get "character bleeds through clothing" effects).  Several child objects could be parented to a master parent, but you'd have to experiment with side effects.


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How to inset odd shape
Disclaimer: Fairly new to 3D modeling; done some simple things, trying to model stuff around me.
I am trying to model a space where I live (Gibraltar in case you care) that is essentially a repetition of the sections pictured below. It looks like the arch could be done as an inset into a larger face, but how to I set up to inset an odd shape like that? Is this even the best approach or would I be better off building it up from smaller chunks?

Hello :). This answer could help https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/174872/

@JachymMichal Oh that is cool!

You should begin with the circle arc, then extrude up, down and inwards. When you'll have finished, use a texture to create the stones.

Mad props for modeling an entire archway complete with doors and windows :).

thanks mate!  ;)

@moonboots that is fantastic! Thanks, I am learning a lot more than I asked for.

this is just about moving the verteces on the right place. I started from the plane, align verteces, extruded, deleted the bottom and use subdivide modifier to make it round. To keep the shape of the corners I use bevel and edge crease (the purple edges, Shift+E) You can as well support the edges by adding more. When the architecture is repetitive, it is a good way to model just part and then duplicate.

subdivide your surface (so you have more points). align inside vertices to have the shape and then after selecting planes you want to make a hole with use extrude but do it to the inside ;]
You could do bollen math but that destroys the mesh

Yeah I did try the Boolean modifier but it looked horrible.


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Subdivision Surface modifier above level 1 subdivide causes boolean modifier to break
I am trying to cut out ridges on an object using another object. When I apply subdivision on it, level 1 is alright, but level 2 onwards weird stuff is happening. Images below illustrate my issues better.

Boolean cutter, applied with level 1 subdivision work fine.

Another view, with the cutters hidden.

Modifier stack.

Now with level 2 subdivision.

Now with level 3 subdivision. I did not unhide the cutter object, it just appeared.

You basically want to make sure that the vertices, edges and faces of the cutting object never sit directly on top of those of the object cutted into. Try scaling or moving the cutting object by only a few micro- or millimeters. Finding a good position obviously becomes harder with each subdivision, since there are more possibilities of nearly identical vertices appearing.

Ayy this worked thanks.


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Can't Save User Preferences
I am unable to save my blender user preferences.

Mac OS: 10.13.3 High Sierra
Current blender build: 2.79.0 daily build

When I go to save, I receive an error saying I can't save due to a 'read only' permission. I've manually made sure all users have read & write permissions and am still receiving this error.
I thought about moving my blender folders to a different location (outside the applications folder) but my OS doesn't seem to allow it. It'll only create shortcuts if I try dragging them elsewhere.
I don't have this issue with my PC, so I assume it may be related to the OS?
Any ideas?

See https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/getting_started/installing/configuration/directories.html

Thanks for the link. I see it says that System locations this can happen. In my case, I've moved the folder to other locations and still have this issue. I am using some custom scripts and a different startup scene. Wondering if either could be interfering with my saving.


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Workflow to get particle animation into 3rd party renderer
I've built a particle animation I like in blender... basically like dust falling through the air. I want to import this to KeyShot for rendering.
I think I need to convert the particles to mesh, but I want them to still be animated as they are. I think I'm missing a step. I want to be able to export via .abc which KeyShot can import as a Keyframed animation.
I'm pretty new to Blender. If someone can offer me the steps, I'd be very grateful. I assume it'll be something like:
Create Particle Animation > Convert Particles to Mesh > Apply Baked Particle Animation to Mesh (not sure how to do this) > Keyframe animation > Export as Alembic
I haven't been able to get it to work. Thanks in advance.

Related https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/4956/convert-particle-system-to-animated-meshes and https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/2745/convert-cycles-hair-particle-system-to-mesh-object

You're right. Turns out this script works perfectly. Thanks for the link.


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Painting with Ctrl Left Mouse in the Image Editor doesn't respect selected secondary color
In a bare-bones scene in blender 3.6.4, I have the default binding to image paint with "Stroke Mode: Inverted" (using the secondary color) as Ctrl Left Mouse.

This works as intended in the 3D Viewport in Texture Paint mode; I can paint with the selected Color (red) using Left Mouse, and with the selected Secondary Color (blue) using Ctrl Left Mouse.

When attempting to recreate this behavior within the Image Editor in Paint mode, though, both Left Mouse and Ctrl Left Mouse paint with the selected (primary) Color.

Is this intended behavior or a bug? I know there are workarounds such as using X to swap the primary/secondary colors, but is there a way to get a standard behavior across the two views?

Doesn't sound like an expected behavior to me. I would use the menu Help > Report A Bug.