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Why is the default axis of 3d cursor rotated by around 45 degree in Blender?
When I shift + right click anywhere in the viewport, the 3d cursor will be placed there. When i rotate the screen I can see that the 3d cursor is rotated by around 45 degree. It is not in perpendicular orientation. So when I import models using blenderkit addon, all the imported models will come rotated due to the rotated 3d cursor. The models should ideally be inserted normally and straight, not rotated 45 degrees.
Please provide me the answer to this, since I am stuck here.
Thank you,
Kris

Check your "N" properties panel, View tab.

Thank you for the reply. After I change all these 3 values of rotation to 0, and then again click shift+right click elsewhere on the screen, the values will again change automatically. It seems it has made these values as default. How do I make the rotation values as 0 by default.

What happens with the shortcut Shift C?

@joshsanfelici Shift+C resets the 3D cursor's rotation but also its location to the world origin. If you want to keep the cursor where it is, Shift+C is no option.

You can press backspace while hovering on the rotation to set it to 0,0,0

I don't know how to do it with Shift+RMB, but using the 3D Cursor Tool you can change the default orientation when positioning the 3D Cursor.
So, if you set Oritentation to Transform for example, it uses the orientation which is set for transforming. If this orientation is set to Global, then the 3D Cursor will be placed rotated like the world's orientation axis.
If you want the 3D Cursor to be aligned to the face of another object, you can set Orientation > Geometry.
//EDIT: I'm not quite sure if I understood the question correctly: do you want the cursor to be at the world's center and without rotation, or place it somewhere in the view without changing the rotation? For resetting rotation and location you can simply press Shift+C.

Transform works perfectly. Thanks. That is exactly what I was looking at.

@KrisM As you commented on the other answer, Geometry is also possible if perhaps you want to place objects not aligned to the world's orientation but some face of another object. Added that to my answer for completeness' sake.

@KrisM Would you mind accepting one of those answers here? ;)

When you place the 3d cursor with your mouse(Shift+RMB or with Cursor Tool) it gets aligned to your current view, that you are using for the operation. You could use the Snap menu(Shift+S)

to snap the cursor to something retaining its previous orientation or you could use orthographic views when placing your cursor in addition to choosing its orientation in the n panel.

Thanks for the answer. Now I understand how 3d cursor works in Blender better. We cannot always keep thee 3d cursor perpendicular since it will align to the view in which we are working. The solution for importing blenderkit objects will be that, we must select the cursor tool from the left vertical panel, then select orientation as geometry, and click on any floor surface. Then when you import the model it will be perpendicular to the floor and look proper. Or as josh sanfelici said, we can change the values from n panel.

@KrisM I know of course that you can change the values, but I thought that would be to uncomfortable to do manually if you only want to reset to 0.


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How do I get freestyle lines to render "behind" a mesh?
I'm using freestyle to create thick, bold black outlines around my models. I use a line set with external contour edge type at a high thickness value. The problem I am having is that my freestyle lines occlude my models at render time. Here's a simple example of what I'm talking about.

This is a zoomed crop of one cube intersecting another. The freestyle line is drawn in red. You'll notice that the external contour line clips into the corner and edges of the two intersecting cubes.
I'm a beginner so I am not sure what the proper terms or workflows are called. But what I want to be able to do is (1) render the freestyle separately, (2) render the model separately, and (3) combine the two, with the model "on top" or "in front" of the freestyle lines. This way, the freestyle lines won't "subtract" from the model's contour. Is this possible? Are render layers and compositing what I'm looking for?
Thanks in advance!

Here is an example of using Freestyle and the Compositor that might be of use: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/170301/how-can-i-freestyle-render-outlines-but-remove-the-object-itself

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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My blander worked normal on my pc today when i went to open it, was asking for opengl 3.3
my blander worked normal on my pc today when i went to open it, was asking for opengl 3.3 try reinstalling but it didn't work, i never needed to put anything for it to open, could this be some kind of virus ??

You're seeing the message because Blender can't find a suitable GPU on your system that supports OpenGL 3.3. It seems there is an issue with your graphics card driver, GPU or OS. If it worked properly before and you haven't manually updated to a newer version of Blender in the meantime, then this is most likely caused by an automatic update of a graphics driver or OS update.

Try to find out what GPU you're using, check that it fulfills the minimum requirements for running Blender and then install the most recent driver from the manufacturers/vendors website.

when I put this opengl32.dll the blander is extremely slow, seriously I didn't need anything to open the blander until last month

Nome do Sistema Operacional Microsoft Windows 7 Professional
Versão 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Compilação 7601
Fabricante do sistema INTEL_
Modelo do sistema DH61WW__
Tipo do sistema x64-based PC
Processador Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2120 CPU @ 3.30GHz, 3300 Mhz, 2 Núcleo(s), 4
Versão do SMBIOS 2.6
Pasta do Windows C:\Windows
Pasta do sistema C:\Windows\system32
Dispositivo de inicialização \Device\HarddiskVolume1
Nome de usuário Corei32120-PC\Core i3 2120
Fuso horário Hora oficial do Brasil
Memória Física (RAM) Instalada 8,00 GB
Intel graphics 2000

Yes it is slow because by placing the DLL in Blender's directory, you using software rendering. This means no hardware acceleration by the GPU. I explained possible causes for Blender not detecting your GPU in my previous comment., Without additional information about your system, e.g.what OS and GPU you're using and the version of the graphics driver, we can only guess.

Intel HD Graphics 2000 is below the minimum requirements for running Blender with an Intel GPU. You could try to install the most recent driver from 2015 for it, perhaps it will allow you to start Blender. Additional you may want to upgrade your OS, Windows 7 has reached its end of life and therefore doesn't receive security updates anymore.

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


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The gizmo line display is strange
I am using a translation.
sorry for the inconvenience.
I am using Blender 2.83.
The gizmo line display is strange.
I'm seeing a bug like the image, but I'm not sure why.
I would be very happy if someone could give me a solution.
Thank you.


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Is it possible to make a change that affects the whole animation but keeps the original animation relative to the change? (like 3ds Max)
[Sorry for the long post, I tried to keep it short but that's the best I was able to do]
I tried to make the question as simple as I could but I think it will be clearer with an exemple (animators familiar with 3ds Max might find it easier to undersand because that's something Max does by default):
Imagine you have an object, a cube, and you animated the position (location) of that cube. So you have, for exemple, 4 keyframes:

Frame zero: 0,0,0
Frame five: 0,5,5
Frame ten: 5,10,5
Frame fifteen: 5,10,10

After you set the keyframes you realized you needed the cube to start not at 0,0,0, but some other location (like 100,100,100). But you still want the animation to play the same relative to the initial location, regardless of where that initial location is.
In 3ds Max, you just turn off auto-keyframing, and then you can simply move the cube to the new starting location and the animation will update relative to the change you made, without setting any new keyframes. So, with auto-keyframing turned off, you go to frame zero and move your cube to the desired starting location, for exemple 100,100,100.
Then the animation will be:

Frame zero: 100,100,100
Frame five: 100,105,105
Frame ten: 105,110,105
Frame fifteen: 105,110,110

The animation keeps exactly the same, but offset by the change you made when auto-keyframing was off.
As you all know, Blender doesn't work that way: if you try to move an animated object with auto-keyframing turned off and you don't set the keyframe, the change just doesn't 'take' and the object's location reverts back to where it was in the animation. If you set the keyframe, the location will be update only in that keyframe, but other keyframes won't be updated relative to this new location.
I know I can parent the cube to an empty and move the empty, and that works for a simple animation such as the one I described, but now imagine the cube is actually a bone in a complex bone chain, and you are animating the rotation instead of the location. It's already parented to other bones, and parenting it to something else will break the armature.
So that's the question: is there a way to make a single change that 'offsets' the values of all the keyframes in the animation?

From your question, a "Master Parent" should do what you're seeking.
See here -
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/106609/appended-group-opening-in-original-location/107621#107621

This works for moving the whole armature or bone chain, but not for specific bones in a bone chain, like when you want to offset the animation of some bones and not others (for exemple you want the angle of the head and neck bones to be offset by 10 degrees, but you don't want to change offset the spine and other bones in any way).
I was hoping there was a simple option to make it work like Max and just 'take' the transformations you do when auto keyframing is disabled and apply it as an offset to the whole animation (as opposed to applying as a single keyframe or not applying at all).

Let's start with a simple animation.

With the Delta Transforms
I think this would be the preferred way to do it since it is pretty straightforward.
Head in to the object properties and expand the Delta Transforms panel. There you can add an additional transform that will be added to the animation.

Note the Delta Transforms can also be animated.
With the graph editor :
Hide all the channel you want don't want to offset. Select the channels you want to offset with A while hovering over the curves.

Now type G, Y, 100 and Enter to validate. This will grab (G) the curves, and move them uniformly along the Y axis (the actual transforms values) by 100 units.
Note that if you press G, X and a value this will offset the keyframes along the time axis.
You can also access the Grab tool by going Key > Transform > Move

Thank you. The delta transform is useful information. Unfortunately single bones don't have the delta transform option (only the whole armature).
I was afraid the only option would be to edit the keyframes directly in the curve editor as you suggested. In a complex character animation it's very impractical to get the position you are aiming for when you are dealing with multiple bone rotations in a complex bone chain. Was hoping there was a better option, like what Max does.
Thanks for the answer anyway!


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Make other controllers 'available' in pose mode?
I'm rigging a character in Blender 2.91.2, and it's my first time doing this in Blender (I have some prior experience with rigging in 3ds Max).
I pretty much rigged the whole character and it's working fine.
But for the facial animation I created shape keys, and then I created controllers that affect the shape keys via drivers. These controllers are meshes, not bones. They are working pretty well, but then I realized something a little annoying: to animate the body I have to go into pose mode, but in pose mode I can't animate the facial controllers (cause they are not actually part of the armature). I can animate the facial controllers in object mode, but not the armature. It's annoying, specially since things like the jaw and brows are actually part of the armature, but other mouth controllers are not. To animate that you would have to keep going back and forth between pose mode and object mode, so that's not ideal.
I realize now I should have created the facial controllers with bones inside the armature, but I didn't realize this before.
Is there some way I can make the controllers also 'available' for animating in pose mode without having to recreate all the facial controllers with bones in the armature?

The easiest option here is to disable "Lock object modes", on the main Edit menu.  If you do this, you'll still be able to select (and manipulate) objects while in Pose mode.
If there's a reason you don't want to do that, an alternative is to parent (bone parent) your mesh controllers to new bones.  If you really want, you could even give these bones custom shapes, referencing your mesh controllers, and then hide the mesh controllers on some distant collection....

Thanks! I didn't know about that option.


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why won't my object move in the render
I have made my first Blender render.
I've modelled an AtoN (a green bouy).
In layout in moves on the waves, and the light flashes correctly.
Whe I render in Cycles (GPU compute) or in Eevee:

the light flashes correctly
the ocean moves correctly
the bouy and the shrinkwrapplane are static on 1 location.

What am I doing wrong, or forgetting?
In layout, all is well:

In Render, plane and bouy are static:

did you maybe do "render image" instead of "render animation"?

@ETHANDAY, thnx for your quick response. No I first rendered the animation, with the same result. If i do render image, same problem

hm, ok.  Could you share your file?  you can use this link:https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/

Ok nevermind I’m an idiot.I forgot to tick of the render box

lol, it happens


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How do I make a panel that I can select bones in a rig
So what I need is to have some bones type thing off to the side that I can use to chose bones.
Here's what I want similar to the mike rig on blend swap.
Are there any tutorials or something else that I can use to make this?
I have a freelance client that needs this for their rig and I can't figure out how to do this.
.
Thanks for helping.

This is an Auto Rig Pro feature (payed addon), which is not so easy to build without. I personally find it quite unconfortable and I suggest you to have two 3D windows open: one without overlays (so you don't have your character covered by bone shapes) and one with overlays, for selecting purposes.


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How to stick together objects for animation? (Chainmail cape)
i am creating archer warrior asset for a game, and need to somehow stick top and bottom part of "chainmail" cape to head and maybe to body, so it holds and bends correctly while animating.

I could make a top of the hat too, and not try to stick it to head, but i want to know how to do it this way.
Also i want this to bend realistically, like chainmail / cloth would do.
Is is possible to stick it to the head, and how?
And what is the best approach in making this work?
I use blender and unity.
Thanks

Typical workflow is to make the helmet/chainmail part of the character and then add deform bones along the chainmail part so that you can animate it.  It seems to be the only way to get realistic movement of the chainmail in blender.

I thought so. I ended up doing it kinda like that. I was thinking about some sort of cloth simulation in unity, but that seems to be really overkill for this.
I still don't know tho, if it is possible to somehow align those top vertices to the head. Merging them would definitelly be bad workflow. No? If it is even possible to merge a plane with closed mesh.


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Blender Python Script - Add Base Color Alpha to Principled BSDF Alpha and change Settings>Blend Mode to Alpha Clip for all materials In Collection
I'm trying to do as the title says:
I have several hundred models that have image textures that we're imported into the Base Color node. These textures have transparency and I've been able to fix the transparency issue by linking the base color node alpha to BSDF alpha and setting the blend mode in settings to alpha clip.
I am attempting to make a script that will loop through every material and apply these changes but so far I haven't had any luck in getting anything to work. Each material is nested in a collection that is named after the file for exporting reasons. Each material is setup the exact same way.
I've tried adapting the code from : Using python to batch link image texture alpha to Principled BSDF
As this was the closest I could thing I could find as a starting point.
    import bpy

from bpy_extras.node_shader_utils import PrincipledBSDFWrapper

# Run through all materials of the current blend file

for mat in bpy.data.materials:

    # If the material has a node tree

    if mat.node_tree:

        # Link alpha from image texture to alpha on principled bsdf

        mat.node_tree.links.new( mat.node_tree.nodes['Principled BSDF'].inputs['Alpha'], mat.node_tree.nodes['Base Color'].outputs['Alpha'] )

[![]
Thank you very much for your time and help

Hello, writing capitalized words makes sentences hard to read.

Collada import? I don't know why they won't fix the importer. Try this. It sets the blend mode to Alpha Hashed though. Change HASHED on the last line to CLIP if you want to use Alpha Clip instead.

Yea it's the Collada importer

Provided I understand everything correctly, this should make the changes you want. Script is searching for node material in collections. Then blend mode is changed and sockets are connected.
import bpy

for collection in bpy.data.collections:

    for obj in collection.objects:
        if obj.type == 'MESH' and not obj.active_material == None:

            for item in obj.material_slots:
                mat = bpy.data.materials[item.name]

                if mat.use_nodes:
                    mat.blend_method = 'CLIP'
                    shader = mat.node_tree.nodes['Principled BSDF']

                    for node in mat.node_tree.nodes:
                        if node.type == 'TEX_IMAGE':
                            mat.node_tree.links.new(shader.inputs['Alpha'], node.outputs['Alpha'])

Thank you so much, this worked flawlessly!


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How do i automatically assign textures to multiple meshes?
To keep this short,
i have 1,500 (estimate) materials that need texture assigning.
Since they're .DAE files, they dont import with textures.
Although, the materials have the same naming as their textures.
For example, in Blender, the material is named AA_AA_example_AA000_A and the texture file is the same.
Would there be a way to automatically assign all textures to the materials?
Image below shows my problem, the models import with no textures, but they have the same name as the texture it needs, which i thought could be solved if i just automate the process.
There are no image nodes.

The last time i did things by hand, there were only 200 textures, which still was bad for my wrist
If anyone could please help me, i would greatly appreciate it! Thank you so much.
Please message me if you need more information so i could help you help me.
Apologies if this comes out the wrong way, i dont want my questions to come off in a negative way like last time. :(


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How to set the data path of an action driver?
I need to take the frametime of the second keyframe of a parameter as a driver ,so I use the driven system, this is my driver's expression:
but I don't know how to write the datapath of the action.I searched this site,no one had asked about the data path of the action,I am confused....any one can help me ,thank you very much!


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Is there a convenient way to "collapse" the view of multiple, possibly nested, collections in the outliner?
In an Add-On I'm working on, I procedurally generate a modest-to-large number of collections, and often end up with an outliner looks something like this:

I then often find myself tediously clicking the "collapse" arrow one-by-one on each collection, until they're all collapsed, to clean-up my view before doing further work.
Is there a fast way to do this kind of multi-collection outliner-view collapsing? Either a native / built-in or Python solution would be fine.

Hover your mouse in the outliner and hit Shift + A to expand everything, do it again to collapse everything.
This will collapse all nested collections as well, bottom to top, so everything is nice and orderly all the way down the hierarchy.

One way not mentioned in your answer is if you click on the collapse arrow and hold the mouse button down, you can drag down and it will collapse (or un-collapse) as many as you hover over, this works in many other places as well, like vectors or checkboxes.

Ah: I had looked for an option to do this before posting the question, but apparently not hard enough. First, there is a partial answer here, in that using Shift allows (un-)collapsing nested hierarchies:
Expand / Collapse all hierarchy in Outliner
And, second, the +/- numpad keys allow (un-)collapsing multiple collections, level by level. That this is so is displayed under the View sub-menu, if you right-click a collection in the Outliner (which also provides another non-keyboard-based way of collapsing multiple collections, of course).


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Blender 2.92.0 crashing a lot during fluid simulation baking
Any fix for this? It appears to happen more often when "adaptive domain" is enabled, but not exclusively.
Turning on 'noise' also appears to make it more likely of crashing.
It's not RAM, I have 32GB of RAM and only like 20% is being used during baking.

Impossible to give any advice based on this question IMHO. If blender crashes and you're able to reproduce the crash, please file a bug report (Help > Report a Bug).

I don't know if my problem with the Mantaflow Smoke Simulation does apply here because it was independent from Adaptive Domain or Noise, only related to the domain resolution.
But in the latest releases my smoke simulations crashed every time I used domain resolutions like 120 or higher. The problem is that in the Cache Settings under Format Volumes > OpenVDB there are now Advanced Settings that you can expand. There you find Compression Volumes set to "Blosc" by default.
Now "Blosc" might be the best or most efficient compression, but this makes my simulation bake crash with not-so-low-resolutions. Setting it to "Zip" or "None" lets me bake even with resolutions of 500 and Adaptive Domain.
Read my original answer to my problem here, I cannot yet verify if it helps for Liquid simulations since my computer is occupied, but the "Blosc" setting is there, too:
Mantaflow bake alaways crashes

Thanks! I will try and if it works I'll mark your answer as the right answer!

Unfortunately this didn't work in my case. Thanks for sharing your experience though, might be useful to someone else.


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What are the correct settings for exporting rigs and meshes (FBX) from Blender 3 to Unreal Engine?
Every setting I try seems to have some issue when importing to Unreal.
The main one being that the root bone is scaled 100 times when importing to Unreal, even though scale is 1 in Blender. I tried playing with the units settings but I can't figure it out, it seems that no matther the settings something is always scaled wrong (either scaled 100 times or not scaled 100 times but with a 100th of the size in the scene).
Other things I would like to know the correct settings: which axis should I select as forward and up? Should I select what UNREAL considers to be forward and up, or should I select what my model's forward and up are in the Blender file?
What should I select as the bones' primary axis and secondary axis?

Change the Unit scale to 0.1
It's a weird setup but it works
Not so sure about the other settings I'm afraid, its been a while since I had to do this

I tried that, it didn't work. At least not with a rigged mesh. What should be the settings in the FBX export window?

I would have thought X forward and Z up should be the exported settings, I do remember having all sorts of difficulty with it at the time.

Don't know whether this YT video gives you the information you need?

There's another tutorial which has been linked on BlenderNation daily news letter today which specifically mentions fixing root scale in the description here


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Rendering with Cycles with GPU, use tiles or not use tiles?
Is it faster to render using tiles or not?
Or does it depend on the scene? If so, what aspects of the scene would make it faster to use (or not use) tiles?
Also, if I'm rendering on the GPU and using tiles, should the tile size always be 256 (I've read somewhere that this size is faster for GPU rendering)?
For short: What can you tell me about using tiles when rendering in Cycles with GPU?

Cycles before Blender 3.0: tiles. starting at 3.0: (cycles x) no tiles.
GPU: bigger is better but it depends on the gpu. there’s a addon that computes the best tile size included in Blender: auto tile size. from comments: only for pre 3.0 because cycles x should not use tiles.

That addon is automatically disabled when you update to 3.0. https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/244994/no-auto-tile-size-in-blender-3-0


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Any way to save changes to the "open file" window side-bar layout?
I'm talking about this side-bar where file locations are listed in different panels. There's the 'volumes' panel, the 'System' panel, the 'Favorites' panel and the 'recent' panel.

I know I can change the order of the panels by clicking and dragging them, but the changes are not saved. Every time I open a file the order of the panels is reset.
Is there any way to save the changes to the 'open file' window?


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Shader Editor: changing color space in one image texture node also changing another node? (2.92.0)
I'm editing a shader and I'm using one image texture node in the base color and another node to use as bump/normal.
I created both nodes independently (not duplicating), but in both I opened the same image file (it's a concrete texture that I want to use both as base color and as bump map).
However, even thouth I have two different nodes, whenever I change the one I'm using as bump map to "non-color" it also automatically changes the one in base color to non-color too. I noticed that if I use 2 different image files this doesn't happen. Is this a bug? Why can't I use the same image source as two different types of color space in different nodes?

The color spaces of both nodes seem to be linked, if I change one the other one changes too

Hello :). This is intended behavior - even though not very intuitive. You can either use duplicates of your image file or change it procedurally: Is it possible to change sRGB/Non-Color color space procedurally?

Thanks for the answer. Hope they change this in the future, though.


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How to bake displacement map from another mesh (not multires)?
I have a high poly sculpted mesh that I want to use to bake normal and displacement (or height) maps.
I had no problem baking the normal map from the high poly to the low poly, however there is no option to bake the displacement (or height) map.
I did a little research and found that you can bake a displacement map from the high res to the low res if your object is multires, but not if they are separate objects.
Is there a work around for this? For exemple, is there a way to select a different mesh to be the higher res of the multires modifier?
By the way, I already tried using a shrink wrap modifier to make a multires from the low poly, but the result is not very good, was hoping for a better solution.

It's a two step process.
First, give your high poly a material emitting geometry/position-- XYZ world position.  Bake emission high to low, as non-color data.  Save this image to a floating point, .EXR file to preserve values out of the 0,1 range.
Then, give your low poly a new material that outputs baked high position - low poly position (again, geometry/position.)  Emit that and bake it.  Not high to low, just a regular bake of the data.  Again, non-color, and save to .EXR.  You now have an XYZ displacement map.
If you don't want an XYZ displacement map, but just a grayscale displace-along-normals map, then instead of baking highPos - lowPos, bake length(highPos - lowPos), using a vector math node for the length.  The nature of selected-to-active baking means that this distance is along the normal anyways.  Remap that length as desired to fit inside the 0,1 range if you want.

Could you post some pictures to better understand how to get the displacement map?
They seem very interesting solutions, thanks.

@Riccardo If you're talking the GN edit, I don't know what I was smoking, that won't work, and I've removed that edit.

Though I do not test still but if it actually work for complex structure figure well, it is really welcom (and I suppose,  those manual  steps can be done by bpy ,, thanks good tips!

@Nathan ... may I also ask for more details "How to ...?" (node tree) ... I can't make it work. Thank you

@vklidu I don't think that pictures are going to help you any more than the text.  I can offer that there are a few places where people are likely to make mistakes: baking and displacing from different positions (like, baking a low poly and then doing C-C subdivision + displacement, the C-C changes pos); baking and displacing from different normals (simple subdivision changes normals with smooth shading); failing to bake and read as non-color floating point; and general baking issues like ray intersections.  If you get my attention on a question with your specific problem, I'll look at it.


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In Blender 2.83, what happened to Overlay Blend-type in Grease Pencil?
I recently upgraded from Blender 2.81a to 2.83.0. In 2.81, Overlay was a Blend-mode option in Grease Pencil (and I often used it to add specular highlights in 2D work):

In 2.83.0, Overlay appears to be have disappeared, though Hard Light is now a new option:

Based on https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-concepts-layer-modes.html, Overlay and Hard Light appears to be distinct blend modes, and I am not yet sure if it is a suitable replacement in my workflow.
Was Overlay in fact removed from Grease Pencil Blend-modes (or am I missing a some way to access it), and, if so, are there any good alternatives to it?


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Is it possible to automatically inherit/import custom shortcut mappings from an older Blender version to a newer?
I'm about to start experimenting with Blender 2.81; unfortunately, doing so means all of my custom Quick Favorites and Shortcuts (and other interface changes, e.g. select with RMB) have been lost.
Is there any convenient functionality for importing/inheriting Quick Favorites, Shortcuts, & other custom interface settings from Blender 2.80 to 2.81, so that I don't have to manually customize settings one-by-one?

You can import/export keymaps, however when you load the old keymap into the new version you'd potentially lose new shortcuts for new tools.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/139817/will-importing-user-preferences-from-version-2-79b-to-2-80-work-and-is-it-a-good/139878#139878

Thanks, that's somewhat helpful. I think the situation you were addressing with your other, linked answer may be somewhat different from what I have in mind though, Duarte; my goal with imports isn't to avoid adopting new shortcuts etc, but to carry over my established list of 2.80 Quick Favorites, as well as other Shortcuts that I setup because there did not seem to be an existing shortcut for them, not because I wished to override the default shortcuts.
Also, I'm hoping that, with the gap between 2.80 and 2.81 being smaller than between 2.79 and 2.80, importing might be less destructive?


text:
How do I change the default location Blender opens when I want to install an add-on from file?
In case a picture can help to clarify, I am specifically hoping to find a way to alter this location, which seems to default (on Windows) to the current user's Documents/ subfolder:

What do you mean "The default location Blender opens in"?

I mean that, when I select Edit > Preferences > Addon > Install, this appears to default to my user's Documents/ folder, although its behavior seems to change sometimes in ways I don't quite understand yet. I would like to be able to specify e.g. in an interface preference setting the folder that Edit > Preferences > Addon > Install opens.

Ohh I see. So to change this, you may want to go to the File tab in the USER PREFERENCES. To change the location Blender defaults to installing add-ons from, you need to change the location of the render cache. This can be done by clicking on the Render Cache file preferences in the file tab, and choosing a location in your computer or on an external drive. This should solve your problem.


text:
Is there a way to make click-and-drag sliding to resize the extent of a Blender area easy?
I often have trouble accurately grabbing the boundary between Blender Editor sub-areas in order to drag-resize it (or in order to merge it with an adjacent subarea). That is, I have trouble grabbing the 'pane'-like separator between two distinct editor sub-areas, as in this example:

After a few repeated attempts, I can typically grab it and resize/merge as needed, but for an action I perform at least dozens of time per Blendering session, it'd be nice to make it somewhat more comfortable to easily do. Is there maybe a keyboard shortcut for "resize area towads the left/right/top/bottom", or a UI element I can edit to make the 'separator' slightly larger for easy click-dragging?

If there is an answer to this, I'd really like to know - This has been the bane of my blender existence for years.


text:
Is it possible to add property columns to the display in a UIList?
For an add-on I'm working on, I followed https://sinestesia.co/blog/tutorials/using-uilists-in-blender/ to create a simple UIList. It looks like this:

This works rather nicely, except that I'd like the PropertyGroup properties OpenRoof and Furnished (in red squares, above) to display their values in columns next to each object's name in the list (e.g., in the empty squared locations in my JPEG). Currently, I can only see/edit these properties' values by specifically selecting an object.
I've looked through the Python API documentation for UIList but it was not clear to me if there is a way to do this.  Can the UIList display be altered to behave like I've described?

See https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/30444/create-an-interface-which-is-similar-to-the-material-list-box  Simply add another prop to item layout.  Similarly for modifiers  https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/14203/15543

That worked wonderfully, thanks. Some of the code in that answer seems slightly outdated (keyword args as non-keyword args), but was very easy to adapt. Is there an appropriate way to mark this question 'closed', given you answered it in a comment rather than an answer?


text:
Control metal reflection color with PR Shader and an Albedo input texture
I have a metal node setup with textures from texture.com which produces a reasonable metal material with Principled Shader (2.79)- but the 'Silver' reflection is what I don't understand.
How do you control the metal reflection color - let's say I wanted a Gold ball or a Blue ball - if the base color input is already used?
The base color is already input from the Albedo image, but it's application to the surface is controlled by the 'metallness' image (I think) which says which parts are metallic and which parts dielectric. If the Albedo input is only applied to the parts of the surface that are dielectric/diffuse..what's controlling the metal reflection color and how do I control that?

does any of your maps represent those spots? you could try to play with the specular tint values.

The metalness workflow uses an Albedo map to define both the diffuse and reflectivity content.

for insulators the diffuse is taken from albedo, reflectivity color is white and the amount reflected is small (about 4%).
for metals the diffuse is black, reflectivity color is taken from albedo and amount reflected is 100%.

The metalness map is then used to define how much the material is an insulator or a metal and so how the albedo color is used.
It is setup like this to save texture space, which is important to game engines and to render engines alike. In the specular workflow the diffuse and reflectivity colors are set explicitly with two unique texture maps. You can make PBR materials with both approaches, more on this is nicely written on Marmoset's site.

A single complementary texture/pattern can drive the albedo color of the dielectric parts and metal reflection color. The patterns of the abedo texture that drive the metal reflection color must correspond to the complementary patterns of the metal texture that drive the metalness. In your case, even though they are 2 different seemingly unrelated textures, they were probably generated from the same base texture.
Here is a simplified example within blender and a color ramp to apply the albedo and metal reflection colors based on a single pattern:

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


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Small black triangle appears during subdivide in combination with Sub Surface
I have pretty standard mesh with a sub surface modifier (not applied).
Editing has been fine until now - now when I subdivide an edge (one cut) it creates a small black diamond around the new vertex. When I toggle 'Display in viewport' in the subsurf modifier the diamond disappears correspondingly so the two are related.
I also can't recreate this in a fresh scene with just the default cube.
Blender version 2.82.7 - any ideas?

It seems that you subdivided, just this edge. The result is a n-gon which will cause problems with the subsurface modifier. It even looks like the resulting vertex is not connected to both faces, so the subsurface-modifier sees this vertex as a corner and rounds it. Go into vertex-editing and find the 5th vertex (it's exactly where this weird triangle is) and dissolve this single vertex, by deleting it and choose the dissolve vertex option. After that find out if the face over and below that edge are connected, the easiest way to find out is to just move the edge, if both faces follow you are good, if not you will have to merge the faces with on common edge between. I hope I could help you with that. All the best Marco

Thanks Marco you've helped to isolate the problem.This can be recreated with the default cube, add a subsurf, smooth shading, then subdivide any edge. Seems that a while n-gons are supported, a vertex connected to 2 n-gons at the same time causes a tear in the surface.

Great, I'm glad I could help you. All the best Marco


text:
Cannot load model after running blender and installing add-on
I used blender 2.79 2.80 2.90 and when I clicked the import model bottom after installing the Cats plug-in each add-on, I got an import error except for 2.79, and I need a quick and realistic solution to this.

It looks like you are trying to open a file with characters that aren't recognized by the add-on parser (Unicode).

This looks like the add-on fails to set the encoding to UTF-8 thus using your system locale to determine the encoding.


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Is there a way to add a shadow/drop shadow to one object in a scene?
I wanted to add some sort of drop shadow to the letter G (which is an object) in Eevee but I'm not sure how to.

have you enabled the light Shadow option? Also, in the Properties panel > Render > Shadows, there are some settings for the shadows

I have yes, although it doesn't seem to change anything. I basically want only one object in the scene to have this shadow and wondered if there was a way to add/force a drop shadow? Or am I thinking too much like photoshop?

you can play with the sharpness of the shadow, but please share your file: https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/

Ok I've uploaded the file :)

you need to copy the link it gives and paste it here  ;)

Woops sorry, here it is https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/b/ndwAqrkJ/

maybe you want to use compositor? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIUCoCo0oqM

Thank you Alex, I will take a look at compositor it looks like something I should get used to :)

I would say:

In your letter material, disable Screen Space Refraction
Your lights are too strong, lower down their strength and play with their orientation
Give your Point.001 light a Contact Shadow if you use this light
Your material node setups are weird

I hope it will fix your problem?

Brilliant, I've followed these steps and it's doing what I need now :) Yeah the materials are still confusing to me, I was trying to make a gradient after following some YouTube videos and ended up with this as a result. I will have a play around with the lights, is it possible to have a light affect just one object or is that not possible? Thank you for your help too :)

no it's not possible for the moment except with the Compositor

Ahh ok I read something about that, I will check it out. Thank you again, you've been a big help.


text:
Is there something I'm doing wrong with reflections in Eevee?
I've added screen space reflections and want my renders to look similar to how cycle's reflections appear. I'm not sure if I've added irradiance volume incorrectly but my render doesn't seem to have the same reflection in the glass as cycle's. You can see the joystick in the cycles reflection, but not in eevee.
On cycles you can see more reflections in the back window too.

take a look here, if your mirror is just a plane, use a Light Probe > Reflection Plane and you won't need to bake: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/190642/how-do-i-get-proper-reflections-eevee

@moonboots ahh thank you, I shall give this a try :)


text:
Cycles textures render black
I have a problem with my interior design render. I use some textures on tiles (cuboids). And on one camera view they render textured, but on the other - at copied objects with the same material, but in different location and rotation- they render black. The normals of the objects are fine. I copied my scene to another file, and as I rotated everything in the scene 90 degrees, the objects that rendered black were now perfectly fine, while the ones that previosly were textured, rendered black... I use cycles as my engine. Does anyone have a clue what is going on?

Possibly a problem with your normal map?


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weight issue when mirroring bones
I'm currently learning how to rig in Blender. I've been weight painting on this model for a while, then the client asked for me to alter the hands. So I altered the mesh and made some major adjustments to the arms, I deleted the bones from the old right arm, selected the left and mirrored the bones for the right side.
The issue began when I went to alter the weights, the left arm still had weights assigned to the right arm bones. I manually painted all the weights to '0', everything was dark blue, but the left arm mesh would still warp every time I moved a bone from the right arm.
example here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CMQIOIcApSWAAV45Zo4IGLnXv_FAuP-M/view?usp=sharing
I figured, maybe if I removed the weight altogether from the right shoulder bone using the Object Data Properties tab and assign the bone to '0', it would also remove any influence on the left. Unfortunately, it hasn't worked.
I'm a bit stumped, if there's anyone who knows how to resolve this, it'd be a great help thank you.

Hello, please share your file (remove some non-important parts if you want): https://pasteall.org/blend/

hello, this is the file https://pasteall.org/blend/e76893c0a82444959a886333f2e026d8

You could select the whole left arm in Edit mode and on the right of the Vertex Groups list > down arrow > Remove from All Groups. Then select the armature, shift select the object, switch it to Weight Paint mode, select the bone you want and Weights > Assign Automatic from Bones. Or reparent With Automatic Weight, in that case you first need to remove some overlapping vertices (select all and Merge by Distance).


text:
How do I re-center the camera to the axis?
For context: I'm following the beginner's Donut tutorial, and I've reached part 11.
I've made a bit of a weird, unknown mistake which has resulted in the camera not being centered to the grid at all. Whenever I select "view selected", it doesn't recenter or zoom in to the selected object. Even worse, no amount of scrolling will bring the object any closer.
It's a really weird problem that I'm trying my best to explain.

EDIT: (solution)
After viewing your .blend file, i made this little video clip. The 3d cursor needed to be moved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKhNImt1bg8

Try pressing the hotkey Numpad 0 on your keyboard and see if you regain control.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.79/editors/3dview/navigate/camera_view.html
By the looks of the current view, your flipped around (upside down) on the  Y axis.
Taking a screen shot of your cameras properties with coordinates and the Lens, Camera and Viewport Display panels open might help others, help you.
Posting your blend file would be most helpful.
Including a .blend file

I appreciate the help, but all Numpad0 does is bring me to the camera view. What I want is a fix for the viewport. –
Here's the link to the .blend https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HkuGdLBk4IZ3OXm9MVky8PTbr2LpE-QY/view?usp=sharing

Ok, after peeking at your .blend file i made this little clip (also edited my post above to include it). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKhNImt1bg8

Thank you so much for taking the time to help, I didn't think you'd go as far as making a small video. Thank you.

Glad it worked for you. Some times its easier to make a little video to describe a problem or help resolve an issues, less guessing or confusion.

If you look at your image, you can see the prism shaped black outline with something hanging off the bottom.  That's the camera.  What you're seeing in the viewport is the Viewport view.
You navigate the Viewport view using the mouse or various shortcuts.
To re-center the view on your donut, select the donut and type CTRL–Numpad .  That's the period on the numpad, not the one on your keyboard.
If you don't have a number pad, you'll need to dig into the manual entry I mentioned earlier and find out which alternative works for you.


text:
I'm unable to split a face in half
I've ran into a bit of a topology problem while modeling a pedestrian traffic light.
If you look at the image below, I'm trying to split the selected face in half:

I've tried subdividing, I've tried various solutions but I seem to be at an impasse. All I need help with is splitting the selected face in two to continue modeling the traffic light screens.
The blender file is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1z1FW2_EHKVPei6IZv-eFnfWpf6hBjK6c/view?usp=sharing
The link to the tutorial I was following & where I got stuck: https://youtu.be/J_FcEbHd8Bk?si=n_turkbIej6coZt-&t=1052
All help is appreciated.

First thing dissolve the existing edge with X (Delete) > Edges, then use J or the Knfie

You need the Knife operation (Hit k in edit mode).
Select the start and end of the cut, press enter.

It's not having any effect, the faces are still a single face. I've tested the Knife operation on other parts and it's working, but for some reason this split I'm trying to make isn't happening.

Maybe just delete that face, it might be duplicated or folded. Make another with "fill" (f) by selecting the contour edges

This way the inner non-manifold triangular face is still there, which is the reason of the J tool not working properly and might cause problems later as well.

You have messed up geometry there, I do not know what exactly you did or were trying to do. But first of all, when you select the front face, the edge in the center is not selected - which means it is not built from the vertices that built the face.

Hiding the front face by pressing H you can see there is an inner triangular face - this belongs to the visible unselected edge. Select and delete this triangle.

Then unhide the front face with Alt+H. The edge is gone.

Switch to Vertex Select mode and select those two opposing vertices in the center of the large face.

Now hit J to connect the vertices which will automatically split the face.

Afterwards you can select the top and bottom face separately.

However there are a lot of unnecessary vertices which do not serve any purpose. I would select them and hit X > Dissolve Vertices. And looking at the reference image of the traffic lights, I do not think that the mesh is supposed to be moved sideways... and I do not know if it is intentionally unconnected to the mesh in the back. I guess I would just delete this part and start doing it again.


text:
How do I get rid of the blue outline on my mesh?
I was following CrossMind Studio's beginner's tutorial, specifically the pencil modeling part and got stuck after duplicating the mesh and hitting "separate". So now there's a blue outline on this new object and I can't edit it at all, or rather it can't be selected.

The video tutorial in question: https://youtu.be/cdgJaMGx6XM?t=3178

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/10580/what-are-the-colored-highlighted-edges-in-edit-mode

You'll have to go back into Object mode (TAB), select the separated object, then go back into Edit mode to be able to edit it. At the moment you still have the original pencil selected by the look of it.


text:
How to package all assets (image textures mainly) into a folder (not into .blend file)?
I have a model that I need to send to other people and I'd like to make a package with the blend file and all the textures. I need people to be able to easily access the image textures without necesserally going into the blend file, so I want to put everything into the same folder and then I'll package everything into a zip and send. The textures are currently in a few different locations in my drive. I could manually copy all the textures to the same folder but there are a few dozen textures and I would have to double check to make sure I didn't miss any, so it would be really helpful if it could be done automatically.
However I can only find the option to package everything into a single blend file and no option to create a package with separate files.
For those familiar with 3ds Max, I'm looking for something that does exactly what the "archive" option does in Max. Or the "Collect Files" option in After Effects. Literally collect (and automatically relink) all assets into the same folder.

Hello :). You could pack all files into .Blend and then upack. They'll all end up in one new folder.

That seems to be a good workaround, thanks.

You need to use "Make all Path relative" under File > External Data > Make all Path realitve and then you can move the complete folder to another place.
As far as i know, the closes to collect file is Pack Blend File, make all path relative will let you move your files to (for example) another computer


text:
Rendering from command line gives different results from drivers. How to prevent that?
I have a blender file that has 4 different scenes in it.
Each scene is a row of cubes that is animated using drivers to make them rotate based on the position of an empty. By moving the empty I control the rotation of all the cubes simultaneously. In the drivers expression I use "hash(self.name)" to create some random variation between each cube.
It works exactly as I want it to. But I'm using a bat file to batch render the 4 different scenes that are contained in the same blend file, and when I do, the animation of the cubes is different from when I render directly from Blender. It appears that the random variation changes, like the seed of the randomness changed.
Has anyone ever encountered this problem, and if so, how can I prevent that from happening?
By the way, I am using Eevee as the render engine (don't know if that's relevant).

Hmmm, never tried something like this - my first thought would be to use some constant to create variation. For example giving each object a different Pass Index number and reference this in the drivers. Or a custom property... depends on how the values are used in the driver or in which range they should be...

That might be a solution. Although I would like some solution that wouldn't require to manually change a value in each object, something more automated. But if there's no way, I think this will have to do.


text:
What limits the maximum zoom-out in the Shader Editor?
For a Nodes Shader I'm developing, I've built a very large system of nodes in tinkering over the last few weeks. The system is now large enough that I can't view it in its entirety; the maximum zoom-out in Blender is only enough for me to see portions of the node system at once.
What controls this maximum zoom-out? Is it modifiable?

what about using group nodes?

Node groups (assuming that's what you meant and group nodes isn't something else that I'm not familiar with) definitely help to cut down on the complexity; I've got a number of them present already. I could get more aggressive with them, but while thinking about whether I wanted to do so, the question about zoom-out popped up, so I figured I'd see if anyone knew the answer here

Could the folks who voted to Close the question clarify why? I don't think this is answered elsewhere; it seems Blender-specific; and I think I was clear about the question itself. What reason is there to close it?


text:
How can I shift the orthographic camera view over large (>10) distances?
Orthographic cameras in Blender have the shift_x, shift_y settings:

But these are limited to the value range [-10., 10.]. How can I achieve the same effect as orthographic shift when I need the shift to have magnitude >10?

One option would be to simply move the camera along the axis of the image plane (Transform Orientation set to Local). Not sure if that would be a solution for your particular problem. In what context do you need to use this?

That's actually what I've ended up doing (or, at least, I think I have it right; not quite sure yet, hence the question still being open). I was struggling to figure out how to compute the axes, but found I could do so pretty easily with the 4 points returned by https://docs.blender.org/api/current/bpy.types.Camera.html?highlight=view_frame#bpy.types.Camera.view_frame.
Context is that I'm procedurally generating 3D buildings composed of individually modeled tiles, then rendering them orthographically, and re-constructing them in a 2D setting outside of Blender to give the illusion of 3D.

I eventually solved this by directly computing a basis for the orthographic plane myself, and moving the camera along the basis vectors as desired. This was relatively easy, thanks to https://docs.blender.org/api/current/bpy.types.Camera.html?highlight=view_frame#bpy.types.Camera.view_frame. For a given camera object cam, I did this by identifying the pair of top-most and left-most vertices in Camera.data.view_frame(), converting these back to world coordinates with Camera.matrix_world, and taking differences to get two orthogonal vectors which correspond to the local X/Y directions in the orthographic plane, but can be manipulated in world-space:
    top_frame_verts = sorted(cam.data.view_frame(), key=lambda v: v.y)[2:]
    left_frame_verts = sorted(cam.data.view_frame(), key=lambda v: v.x)[2:]
    x_axis = cam.matrix_world @ top_frame_verts[1] - cam.matrix_world @ top_frame_verts[0]
    y_axis = cam.matrix_world @ left_frame_verts[1] - cam.matrix_world @ left_frame_verts[0]

I then moved the camera like:
    cam.location -= x_axis * MagnitudeToShiftInX
    cam.location -= y_axis * MagnitudeToShiftInY

These vectors have the further property that setting MagnitudeToShiftInX = 1.0 makes an orthographic camera moved like cam.location -= x_axis * MagnitudeToShiftInX shift a single "camera box" in the indicated direction, so that the new camera frame will just barely border the old camera frame after this translation. That is, they are normalized to the size of the orthographic camera bounding box.


text:
How can I separate the vertices of a mesh based on vertex distance?
This question is a follow-up on: How can I split all unconnected parts of a mesh? That question was closed, I believe because it was ambiguously asked (and seemed to have prior answers).
The question-asker later clarified the question: given a mesh that is not connected (e.g., may have no edges or faces at all, and just be a vertex 'cloud'), how can we separate the mesh into parts based on distance between vertices? And, provided this image, as an example of the kind of thing they'd like to separate:

The original question was closed for being a duplicate, but, phrased like this, I think it is no longer a duplicate. The closest question I can find to it is Select vertices near the selected vertices by distance, but that question specifies that the vertices should share the same edges.

I wrote the following script to try to address the question:
import numpy as np
import bpy

def distToSet(vertex, set_of_verts, threshold=0.1):
    dist = np.inf
    for v in set_of_verts:
        if (vertex.co - v.co).length < threshold:
            return True
    return False

def separateByDistance(threshold=0.1):
    from functools import reduce
    import bmesh
    bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(bpy.context.object.data)
    vert_sets = {}
    cur_ind = 0
    latest_vert_set_name = -1
    while len(vert_sets.values())==0 or len(reduce(set.union, vert_sets.values())) != len(bm.verts):
        cur_vert = bm.verts[cur_ind]
        valid_vert_set_names = []
        for vert_set_name, vert_set in vert_sets.items():
            if distToSet(cur_vert, vert_set, threshold):
                valid_vert_set_names.append(vert_set_name)
                vert_sets[vert_set_name].add(cur_vert)
        if valid_vert_set_names == []:
            latest_vert_set_name += 1
            vert_sets[latest_vert_set_name] = set([cur_vert])
        elif len(valid_vert_set_names) > 1:
            latest_vert_set_name += 1
            new_vert_set = reduce(set.union, valid_vert_set_names)
            vert_sets[latest_vert_set_name] = new_vert_set
            for vert_set_name in valid_vert_set_names:
                vert_sets.pop(vert_set)
        cur_ind += 1
    print(f"vert_sets:")
    for vset_name, vset in vert_sets.items():
        print(f"{vset_name} -> {vset}")
        for v in bm.verts:
            v.select = False
        for v in vset:
            v.select = True
        bpy.ops.mesh.separate()

separateByDistance(threshold=3.0)

It requires that the user select the object to be split and enter Edit mode. It then generates a new set of objects based on the transitive closure of vertices within a given distance of one another (i.e., if vertex A is within threshold of vertex B, and vertex B is within threshold of vertex C, but A and C are not within threshold of one another, all of A, B, C will still end up in the same final object). It leaves the original object in tact (which can then be hidden or deleted). Walking through this briefly in images:

Go to the scripting tab and select the object

Enter Edit mode

Click the Run Script arrow

In this example, with threshold 3.0, the result is 5 new objects:

I have not tested it on large, complex meshes. If performance is unacceptable, I think it could be made a fair bit more efficient by using KDTree to find nearby vertices, as in this earlier answer to a different question: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/252168/73773
It could also be easily adapted to only select vertices within the distance-transitive closure of some target vertex (a related question that came up in the original BSE post). Isolating this selection code and writing an operator based on it that can be used interactively from the Blender UI might be more useful if the target mesh is too complicated for a single choice of distance to work as intended.
As a small caution to the user, some of the bmesh operations involved in this script (e.g., selecting or de-selecting vertices) do not show visual updates in the Blender UI until the user triggers a scene update (at least, I think this is the operation that causes them to be visible; in any case, switching from Edit back to Object mode and then back to Edit again will reveal the changes that the script makes to e.g. vertices selected in edit mode, if that portion of the script is used separately).
Lastly, note that I assume numpy is available in the copy of Python available in the user's Blender (although it would be easy to remove my use of numpy). I think this is the case in a freshly installed copy of Blender, but have not checked this recently.

An additional discussion regarding this answer that was incorrectly posted as an answer, can be found here: https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/139199/discussion-on-answer-by-floroid-how-can-i-separate-the-vertices-of-a-mesh-based


text:
Physics: Rigidbodies sticking together and softbodies not retaining shape
I am trying to simulate a car crash in Blender 2.8, but during the simulation, several errors occur. The meshes seem to stick to each other, most likely the rigid bodies, and they will continue to follow each other for the remainder of the animation. The cars then phase into the ground after collision, jittering the entire time.
There are also issue with the softbodies, that is that they will not retain their initial "crunched" shape upon collision despite having a high plastic setting (100). I have tried to solve this issue by keying the stiffness to the moment before impact, but for some reason the softbodies still collapse before they even hit.
I have set up the simulation using the following method:

I have a deformed body which has no dynamics of any kind, which is broken up into pieces like the windshield and tires.
I then put that deformed mesh under a rigid body which is used to collide with the floor and the other car.
I then parent a soft body under the rigid body and use that and a mesh deformer to alter the deformed base, and I apply colliders to both cars and the floor.
I then toggle the "animated" function of the rigid bodies to switch from a keyed movement to pure dynamics.

An alternative to this current method would be using shape keys and sculpting the damage of the collision, which would remove the need for softbodies, but I want this simulation to be almost entirely driven by dynamics so that I can use it with any vehicle.

So, I found a solution to the rigidbodies falling through the floor, though they still stick to each other (collision margins set to .1).
I made a new rigidbody with a much simpler cube with a few extra edge loops and increased the mass to 50, and the new simulation does not break into the environment. I am however still having issues with softbodies and the cars still return to base shape after impact.
Here is the link to the updated file
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qnsqfjojrw2star/CrashTest4.blend?dl=0


text:
Hair deformation (Curves)
I am currently working on a hair object for a character. The hair is a series of curves that use two other curves to determine the hair shape and taper variation.
My problem comes with trying to get the hair fit for animation.
My current working solution is to convert all the hair curves into one mesh and then use a lattice to deform the long back part, as trying to use automatic weights with a skeleton achieves horrible results (random weights or just fails to apply any).
I don't really want to rely on cloth physics as the hair is a very complex series of disconnected objects, and I know that would create several issues.
I wanted to know if there was a method to rig the entire group of curves with a skeleton or some shape deformation, or if I will need to go with my current strategy which is a combination of lattice and blend shapes on the merged mesh.

You can't really rig a curve with an armature.  (You can, but you're stuck using envelope weights, which suck.)
Converting to mesh is one option.  If you're interested in maintaining these as curve objects, to one degree or another, you can use curve modified meshes.  That will override your bevel but not your taper-- but I think you'll find that it's not too hard to create a mesh object to match your bevel; you can even use your bevel object, converted to mesh, as a start.
If you do decide to convert your curve objects to mesh objects, there are multiple ways to deform it, and for hair, using a lattice is one of my least favorite.  You can create bones for the strands of your hairs.  This may be easier to autoweight if you leave it as a separate armature, with a root bone that's a child-of your head bone.  But you can always weight it manually as well; simple linear gradients work well for this kind of hair, provided they're not too curvy.
But if you do want to use a lattice, be aware that you can use a lattice on your curve objects directly, without converting to mesh.
Another option, that you didn't mention, is using soft body physics for your curves.  Curves lack most physics options, but they can support soft body.  This can run on the spline (usually preferable) by enabling "Apply on spline" on the modifier (look at the buttons' tool tips.)  To "pin" one end of your spline, select a control point and look on sidebar/item/transform/weight.  This is a factor that's treated as the "goal" for the curve's soft body physics.  Curve physics usually have poor collision, as default soft body collision works just by creating a big sphere over every control, but if your goal is just some slight jiggle, or if you're willing to tune custom, non-rendering collision bodies, it can be fine.

I wound up using an addon called wiggle bones as the basis for the mesh hair solution, and while the collision is still off, it is a way for the mesh to work. I will also look into the curve soft body physics, as that option could provide some good results as well. Link to Wiggle bones: https://blenderartists.org/t/wiggle-bones-a-jiggle-bone-implementation-for-2-8/1154726 Thank you!


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Why do rigidbodies snap back when keying "animated"?
I know this question has been asked before, but no one has properly answered it. I am trying to animate two rigid bodies on a curve to hit each other at a certain point, but upon keying "Animated" tab to off, the involved rigid bodies snap back to a seemingly random position.
I have tried various solutions:

Baking both objects to keyframed animations rather than using the curves
Placing the rigidbodies into groups and animating those, only keying the rigidbody animation on and off on the actual physics object
Repeating the same baking process on the group after animating that on the curve
Applying transformations at different points along the animation.

If anyone has had this problem, do you have any solutions?
Below is the file
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vjmixkwa6j9zg4g/CarExport.blend?dl=0

The only way I can get  the effect you describe is when the objects are following the path directly.

When the physics is switched on by unticking the Animated box, we'd have two functions wrestling to control the same object and clearly they don't get along.
The usual way around this is to use an empty to follow the path and parent the object to that.  The physics will then be free of interference when the Animated box is keyframed off.

If I've misunderstood your query, leave a comment and I'll delete it.

That seems to have fixed it as well as changing some other settings. In retrospect, I think using a shapekey would have been less of a headache in the end, but this solution is the best result so far. Thank you

I haven't enough info to go on so I'm uncertain as to how shapekeys could do this but what you see in the clip above took very little time to set up. Would the Blend file help to clarify what was done?

No, I got my wires crossed on which question this was. This solution works great, thank you for the help!

I know this is an old question, don't know why but somehow I stumbled across it. I just wanted to say contrary to what the other answer says, you can easily do this without having to parent the objects to empties if you want them to move along a curve and then let the Rigid Body Simulation take over.
In the following example I have to Rigid Bodies animated to follow curves. From the moment I want them be simulated I not only switch them from Animated enabled to disabled, I also set the Influence on the Follow Path constraint from 1 to 0.
A normal object would move back to its original position as soon as the influence is 0, but not a Rigid Body. It starts simulating from the location where it is on that frame when it's no longer animated.
Here I have two cuboids moving towards each other on curves, both are Rigid Bodies with Follow Path constraints. On frame #21 they are keyframed to Animated = ON and Influence = 1.
On frame #22 they have keyframes for Animated = OFF and Influence = 0. They don't flip back to their original position, they get simulated with Rigid Body Physics.

Of course you don't have to set the keyframes exactly the same for both objects. The next gif shows an example where the blue cuboid is animated until frame #21 like before, the red one is animated until frame #28. This way the "crash" affects only the blue one as if the red one was "stronger".

...but you could give the red one a bigger weight...would be the same effect ;)

@Chris Yeah, kind of, you're right  My point was firstly just to mention the objects don't have to be animated in the same frame range, you can give each his own animation. Secondly, and this is where it's different than using a bigger weight, the longer animated red cube is absolutely unaffected by the crash (bigger weight might still not prevent some effect) but does affect the unanimated blue cube, If I just gave the red one more weight but ended the animation as early as before, it would move straight on and not follow the curve as far as I intended. So it's not exactly the same effect.


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recreating shadows
How could I recreate this enviroment with these soft shadows? and how to make it more realistic?
Example with good realistic shadows:

My example

maybe give your wall a Noise Texture with a b&w ColorRamp, but it looks like you're already close to your example. As for the shadow it looks like there are 2 light sources in your picture

You don't need to re-create the shadows, that might turn out to be pretty tedious. Just create them, using proper lighting. The latter is an art form and not as simple as it might seem, but it's worth at least understanding the concept (by following tutorials, or reading up on the fundamentals).


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quick export vector groups to fbx
Is there a quick way to export individual Vector Groups to FBX or OBJ?, I have lots to export and doing one Vector Group at a time will take days.
I am new to blender so go easy on me.
Julian


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Outlining a photo for extrusion and point ascend in the z axis. How do I lock them to a 2D sketch?
I am tracing an image-background on blender to created a 2D shape that I will then extrude a few inches as a good starting point for my project. But when I accidentally changed the view angle I noticed this. Why are the points ascending towards me and how do I lock them to the x-y plane to get a simple 2D tracing?
I am having this problem with poly-build (making single point additions manually) and with the bezier tool when I subdivide it to create more curvature.

You were probably working in perspective mode while sketching.From that angle it's a little hard to tell, but:

press numpad 7, see if everything is aligned fine
(stay) in edit mode
press A to select all
press S -> Z -> 0
that should fix it.  if not, please provide a screenshot from a different angle.

Thank you, that did the trick


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Clothes clip and mesh deforms badly when rigging
I've started learning Blender a couple of weeks back. I modeled a character and now I'm trying to animate it, but no matter much I've tried I just can't solve the rigging.
The issue is, it has quite a few clothes/accesories/pieces of armor (https://i.sstatic.net/irlMe.jpg), and I just can't get it to work properly.
The first issue is the clipping. Whenever I try posing, some objects clip through others (https://i.sstatic.net/YqH4W.jpg https://i.sstatic.net/JIWpI.jpg). I tried adjusting the object's meshes/size/etc but it just works for one pose and then not for another, so that doesn't solve it.
The second issue is the mesh deforming quite horribly whenever I pose it (https://i.sstatic.net/ACxcq.jpg https://i.sstatic.net/0RD5g.jpg). While I'm sure a couple of this deformities could be solved by better weight painting, I just can't seem to do it no matter how much I try painting and repainting. I've been having this issue from the start but I figured my mesh was just too low poly, so I increased the polygons with subdivision surface and tinkered around with the topology to try and make it more posing friendly, and that made it better, but it's clearly not enough.
Final pic shows a mix of both problems (https://i.sstatic.net/koJr4.jpg) The belt has been a huge problem area. Lots of little parts and I can't get it to bend nicely either.
I'm putting a link to the blend file if you care to take a peek. https://drive.google.com/file/d/18oJY3WJzmqsTEs9u1CYPUkDpFUxJn6HT/view
I tried to solve it myself for way longer than I'd like to admit and I'm getting pretty desperate and frustrated at this point, so I hope someone can give me a hand. Thank you!

hello, please, instead of links, display your pictures in your message. What you cite are typical problems that you'll meet when rigging. Most of these problems can be fixed with weight painting, have you been through it?

What you cite are typical problems that you'll meet when rigging. Most of these problems can be fixed through weight painting. For the top armor part (Breastplate), I've joined it to the rest of the body, then began to weight paint. Note that you have another top armor that is overlapping (Breastplate.001). Here is what it gives after a bit of weight painting:

Some clipping can't be avoided, in this case either mask the part that is supposed to be hidden with a Mask modifier, or play with shape keys. If a part is not supposed to stretch it should not be parented With Automatic Weight but directly to a bone.


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How to remove grid/graph lines while using zoom in orthographic view?
I'm working with a 2D cad model and need to zoom in and out a lot to make sure what I'm editing is still similar to another part of the model. When I zoom in i'm getting these white graph/grid lines and was wondering if there was a way to remove them or make them lighter as I don't need them.

This might not be the smart way to do it, but I managed to remove the lines:

opened side panel
set scale to 0


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Orbit around selection not working on some Objects?
I`m using Blender2.8 and depending on the object I select Orbit around Selection does not seem to work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mK2A3g2DjRU&feature=youtu.be
Any idea what could be causing this behavior?

First thing to try .. go to the object's properties > Viiewport Display panel, and check 'Bounds'. The view orbit is based on the selection's bounding box.. even one stray vertex will recenter it.

Thanks!. learned something new again. Bounds revealed a stray vertex indeed which solved the issue (as all planes were copies the stray vertex persisted in all of them)

It just happened to me, and I found that the view port camera target was accidentally locked to an object (in my case to one of the lights) so navigating was a nightmare. Go to View tab, under View section, View Lock subsection and uncheck options and clear the 'Lock to object' field. Hope that would solve it.
Good Luck.

I was able to solve the issue by unchecking Navigation > Orbit Around Selection in the Preferences.


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Blender 2.79 finds modules, but 2.80 does not
I'm new to blender, but not Python. I've been handed a blend script and asked to run it. There are a couple imports and I don't really understand where that code lives. In the Blender IDE and can look at these modules, but I don't know where the actual source code is. Is it in the blend file?
The reason I'm asking is because I can run the code in Blender 2.79 and blender finds the modules, but when I try to run the same code in Blender 2.80 it complains that it can't find the module.
I've seen post about appending to sys.path like this:
directory = os.path.dirname(bpy.data.filepath)
if not directory in sys.path:
    sys.path.append(directory)

and this script already does that so I don't think it's the problem.
Why can Blender 2.79 find my modules, but Blender 2.80 can't? And where is the actual source code for the modules?

Apparently there was an API change and should have Googled harder. The answer is here Blender 2.8 can no longer import module from Textblock


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Save is broken and how to save as mp4?
I saved a project, opened it later (solely using video editor, just compiling videos) and it does nothing. It plays, but no sound or video, but when I enter something new into it then it works. Also, how do I save my video as mp4?

Most likely you moved your blend file or the video footage into another folder. So Blender can't find the files anymore.

In the VSE window, select an item, press N, press the folder icon and relocate your missing file. Do the same for every missing file.

These are the settings for saving as mp4, with H264 codec.


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I have a problem making a anvil and i cant seem to find the cause
im a beginner trying to get the hang of blender and while creating an anvil i found
this problem there seems to be my good mesh inside of this bad mesh i cant seem to find the answer anywhere. at the bottom you can see it the most but if i try to drag the model by any part the good model comes through whiste the blocky and bad looking one stays any ideas?

Why not just delete the mesh you want to get rid of?

I think that what you're calling "bad mesh" is the actual mesh without the influence of the subsurf modifier, while the "good mesh" is the result of the subsurf (and actually the result when rendered. When using the subsurf modifier, the vertices should be considered as "control points", which sometimes will not coincide with the rendered forms. To learn how to manage your control points and achieve the results you want, you should search for tutorials about "Hard surface modelling", in particular you'll have to get familiar with Edge control loops and edge crease. Lots of tutorials are available for free, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBkwodrQq_4.

yeah, this should be it!


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Can not get selection box selecting more than one object in Blender 2.8
I am a complete Blender newb, so it's entirely possible that I am messing something up.
In this capture I am trying to select all of the "brick" objects I have created using a mouse-drag box select:
Am I doing something wrong? I saw some bug reports along the same lines but they don't seem to be resolved..
Windows 10, all updates installed, I JUST updated my Intel graphics driver to the latest supplied by Dell for my machine's model.

did you also update the sound driver?

I just downloaded the newest blender, created 20 cubes by duplicating the first one and did a box select as you do ... no problem.

@GeraldDegeneve while installing the graphics driver I did see some Intel Audio driver being updated, but I'm curious why that would be relevant for this? Can you also include additional details for your test? Are you also on a Windows 10 machine? Are you also using an intel integrated graphics device with the latest drivers? Can you think of any other reasons why we would be getting different behaviour?

The audio driver thing was meant as a joke since this is a funny question ;) I should have put it into other words: "Congratulations you found a bug among many!", update or downgrade to a more stable version of blender ;) Once upon a time i downloaded a version where i could not exit edit mode. it would be also worth noting, that blender settings are saved inside the blender file you are working on. so if you somehow messed up the settings you could try reseting them to their defaults.

https://developer.blender.org/T59741 seems to be a relevant bug report.

A newer issue that has a little more follow up: https://developer.blender.org/T62947

I realized the exact same problem when using my laptop without power connected. The box selection bug happens when power is not connected and battery mode is set to "Saver" mode. When set to any other mode other than power saver, the box selection works fine. My laptop is running intel graphics HD 630/Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050.
PS. I am a beginner in Blender.

If you can't comment ask a question.

Hey 3dken, That's an interesting issue you're having but it doesn't appear to be the case for me. I have my computer set to "Best performance" and I have the power plugged in but the issue above still occurs. I have managed to get some Blender devs to look into the issue and it seems they have identified a problem with newer Intel Graphics HD drivers. Perhaps when your machine is in power saver mode it switches the default gfx device to the Intel one which then manifests the issue for you? Check out this report for updates: https://developer.blender.org/T62947


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Mirror modifier changes behaviour of scaling 2.8
I think I'm just doing something wrong here. I looked around here and found several issues pertaining to scaling and mirroring but I couldn't find one that I felt was applicable to me.
Basically I'm learning Blender for the first time through an online course. They had us cut one of our models in two, and then apply the mirror modifier.
This works fine, but then I try to scale out the top ring of my model by three units, and got some weird results.

The top one has a mirror modifier with the top ring scaled out three units and you can see how it's created this oval shape.
The bottom one is the same shape as above pre-scaling. I applied the mirror modifier so it became a full shape again, and then selected the top ring and scaled it out again by three units, and it presents how I expected the mirror modifier above to.. So what am I missing?
You can find my .blend file here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rSZ_AsEMzvMw5ZtUSTj-y5NMIoj8Fer0/view?usp=sharing

Snap the 3D cursor to the origin then set it as the pivot point. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/3dview/object/editing/transform/control/pivot_point/index.html

@FFeller you are a hero! Thank you! Please add as an answer and I will mark it correct. Is there any way to set the pivot to you the object's origin? Or do I just need to be constantly mindful of where the 3D cursor is whenever I'm doing a scale operation on a mirror'd object?

If you use median point or individual origins as pivot point as you can see on the first picture the transformation's origin won't be at the center of your selected mesh because it doesn't include the mirrored verts only the real ones. So you have to use the 3D cursor as the transformation's origin at the right place as you can see on the last picture.


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How do you seperate two objects?
I am currently working on a project, and i've hit an impasse. I was modeling a tree, and just finished. Then I went and made another one. However the two trees that I made are for some reason the same object. It would be greatly appreciated if I could get help on this matter. Thx!

in Edit mode select the part you want to separate (L will make it easy) and press P > Separate

Also https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/68393/how-can-i-select-part-of-a-mesh-and-make-it-seperate


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Need Bar Animation Gradient Fixed
I have searched all over the Internet and here, but no success. I am relatively new to Blender, only used it a few months so far.
The project I'm working on is a Bar Chart. In the scene the bars are cubes with their top faces Hooked to an Empty that is animated via Python.
What I need is a way to fix the gradient position across all bars. As they grow taller, they reveal more of that gradient.
This image I made in illustrator to give you a better idea.

Maybe try using a texture coordinate that is constant like Camera or Window -here I just did a rough try at it for illustration purposes.

Wow. That's exactly what I needed. I set it to Text. Coords. as Window and then animated the bars. The gradient stays fixed as I wanted. Thank you so much!

This is a solution based on the world position in relation to the object. You can adjust the height by changing the denominator on the math-divide node.

Thank you for the suggestion. It makes sense, however unfortunately I can't recreate that scenario. I'm using Blender version 2.79 at work and cannot install the newer one yet.   :P

You should be able to do the same with cycles in 2.79. The nodes used are not 2.80 specific.


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Workflow for adding audio to scenes and combining them in the VSE
I've been trying to experiment with a workflow for putting all animation, editing, and post-processing into one blender file:

0000_Master combines clips of all scenes' sequences and edits them together, along with background audio, VFX overlays, etc
0001, 0002, 0003, ... individual scenes with audio track(s) for lip-syncing added to the sequencer (needs to be in the sequencer to control starting/ending point of the audio)

Unfortunately, I'm running into this issue, where the VSE is unable to combine the Camera (video) and Sequencer (audio) of a particular scene into the VSE. Is there a clean/better way to do this? I'd really like to be able to use the embedded scenes this way, as it allows for quick renderings of previews without preparing different quality files/proxies to export/import per scene, and there's very little setup overall.
If there's a feature request/issue that I can track (if it exists), that would be great to have.

This is a bit silly, but you can create additional scenes and put the scene's camera output in 0001.Video, and then combine that with 0001's sequencer output in 0001.Comp. The latter can then be inserted into your master as one clip that's easy to edit. The render start/ends are a bit difficult to manage between the three of them, but if you overshoot them all (I'm not sure if render times are affected here) and just plan to edit them down in the master's VSE, it's a pretty usable workflow.
e: the 0001.Comp scene can be avoided by using meta clips, but that requires renaming the clip for clarity.

Ow I'm not sure I understood your pipeline/process, but I wanted to do the same thing, basically replicating iClone in blender, having a number of lip-synch animation scenes in my blender file, and be able to edit them together with the flexibility of a video edit.
So I found a super simple way to do that in a couple clicks, just have a blank scene for each animation scene (shot or group of shots) and it that blank scene just define the camera from the aniamtion scene, and the background scene.
So in the VSE having one scene clip that calls the sequencer (not the camera) so it plays your lipsynch sound, and one scene clip for this "ghost" scene that's absolutely empty but displays the camera + animation scene in background.
It literally takes 4 clicks per shot so it seems super handy even with dozens of shots, it would just mean a loot of scenes in the blender file as they are doubled, but if you do a few shots per scene, and say they're more sequences, it might the dream setup, muuch more flexible than iClone as everything is compartmented, and it might still playback the whole film in real time for final edit & tweaks:


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How can I hide texturing seam in torus?
How can I hide this seam on the torus texture?

Hi. Please use a title that matches the content of the question. It should be descriptive but succinct, unique and identifying, summarizing the issue so that anyone searching for a similar problem is likely to find it. Remove anything superfluous, avoid using words like "this", "help with", "issue" or "question about", instead describe what "it" is. Remember, your title is the first thing potential visitors see, answers you get depend heavily on how insightful it is. See What is the problem of asking “How do I do this?"

Note that, if you weren't using a procedural texture, the "trivial" UV mapping of a torus results in seamless texturing when a tileable texture is used. (Unfortunately I don't know of a way to make procedural noise periodic, which would be a "better" solution than any so far given.)

You can "symmetrize" the UV coordinates:

Recenter X (as the vector mapping is rotated 90°) between -0.5 and 0.5 and take the absolute value.
Or more, simply:

Note: there are two seams in fact, but the second one (in the inner part of the torus is not visible). You could symmetrize on Y too.

In addition to the wonderful answers already here, I will point out a solution that doesn't utilize material nodes. This may be useful for situations where a mesh and its UV map need to be exported to a game engine or other software into which Blender's material data does not translate.
Mark seams and unwrap your mesh

Example material reveals the presence of a seam:

Enable UV Sync Selection and select the part to be mirrored

Place the 2D Cursor in the center (0.5) at the axis of symmetry

Set the 2D Cursor as the Pivot Point
(Be sure you are in the UV Editor when you do this. There is a similar operation for the 3D Cursor in mesh Edit Mode, so don't confuse the two.)

Scale -1 on the x axis
(or whichever axis applies to your UV layout)
UV symmetry makes the seam less noticeable.

Note: If the empty half of the UV layout feels like a waste of space to you, you can place the 2D Cursor back at x:0 and, once the whole UV is selected, scale up double on the x axis. Whether this is necessary/desirable will depend on you and your specific project. I'm just pointing it out as something worth being aware of.
Usage: There are other ways to hide a seam that involve proper texture mapping, of course. But for situations where merely making the texture symmetrical will suffice, this technique can be employed. Of course I'm not suggesting this technique is always the best way to hide a seam, but if simple symmetry is all that's needed, this technique can satisfy the requirements.
related reading

If you interpret 0->1  U and V as 0->2pi angles, they can sweep round their own circles in 4-space

The XYZW can be used in a 4D texture, and it will be seamless in both directions:

.. like so:

Included in this blend is another group, which, given Object texture coordinates, will yield a radial, cylindrical texture space: XYZ in, to theta1,radius,Z -> (Vector), theta2 -> (W) out. Seamless in the XY ring, and linear in Z.

You can't because you can't make the procedural texture join with the Texture Coordinate UV output (edit: except with Lemon's method lol), maybe there's another way but you could try this setup instead (use the Object output instead) even though it is not perfect as it squeezes the texture on Z but no on the other axis:


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Emission wont emit through black colour screen
I have a mesh plane which is a glass object, transmission and alpha all the way up, which means its 100% opaque.
Whenever I use a lighter colour the emission shader goes through the glass, but when I use a dark colour as shown in the example Black, the emission wont shine through, so I lower the alpha to get some emission going through.
Why does the black or dark colours effect the emission luminance once placed over it, since the alpha and transmission is all the way up?

Hello :). In Cycles and Eevee, the darker the glass, the less light gets 'through'. Fully black glass won't let any light get through.

Reframing the idea behind “Alpha” as occlusion should make the idea clearer, where “Transmission” is a degree of filtration.
The 0.0-1.0 range in alpha represents the degree of occlusion from 0% to 100% in a properly encoded image, while the RGB represents the quantity of emission. Something can be completely unoccluding (0.0 alpha, 0%) and emitting (nonzero RGB units), as well as completely occluding (1.0 alpha, 100%) and not emitting (0.0 RGB units).
Transmission represents the ratios of light permitted to pass through the object. 0.0 would indicate that 0% of the given channel is permitted to pass through, while 1.0 would indicate 100%. In this way, Transmission behaves like a light “filter”.
In this way, the RGB values are pulling double duty, both as the emission for the alpha component and as the filtration mechanism for Transmission. It is worth understanding that in different contexts the values present in the three channels can mean different things, and it's not always a "colour" per se.

Great information, thank you.


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New default file template?
In Blender 2.80, you have options now to set a file template with it's own set of workspaces. Is there a way to rename, or better yet create a new file template?

You can add your own App Template by using the Operator Search F3 to find Install Template from File.... The underlying operator PREFERENCES_OT_app_template_install allows you to install a zipped App Template.
If you don't have a zip file you can copy and modify one of the existing templates. You can find the location of the template files by switching to the scripting workspace and typing the following code into the python console:
for x in bpy.utils.app_template_paths():
     print(x)

This will print the path(s) where the build in application templates are stored.
Each template consists of a folder containing a startup.blend and a init.py. The former is the default project that is loaded. The latter is a Python script that contains a callback function / handler that is executed once the startup.blend is loaded. This allows to perform additional configurations. The folder name is the name of the template. Below you see the basic structure of such an init.py.
import bpy
from bpy.app.handlers import persistent

@persistent
def load_handler(dummy):
    pass

def register():
    bpy.app.handlers.load_factory_startup_post.append(load_handler)

def unregister():
    bpy.app.handlers.load_factory_startup_post.remove(load_handler)

The load_handler() is the function that will be registered once you select the app template in Blender and then executed once the project is loaded. When you create your template you can add whatever additional Python code you like here. If you copy an existing template to create your own, you may want to edit this function or replace it's content with pass to make it do nothing.
Now in order to create your own template you need to do three things:

Either copy an existing template or create your own directory with a startup.blend and init.py
Open the startup.blend and adjust the UI to your liking
Open the init.py and modify the load_handler. (If you're unfamiliar with software development simply copy and past the example given above, which does nothing.)

Your new template should be available right away when you restart Blender, if you've created the files in the directory where the other templates are stored. Otherwise you will either have to copy it there or create a zip file of the directory and install it by using Install Template from File... as described at the beginning.

They are located in Blender's installation folder:
C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.80\scripts\startup\bl_app_templates_system\  on Windows
You can see a few folders:

You can delete them or copy one of them, give it another name and save an empty startup.blend file with whatever UI you like.

Thank you! For others wondering, on a mac right click on blender, show package contents, 2.80, scripts, startup, bl_app_templates_system.

Here is another way for OSX:

Go to Blender.app > Contents > Resources > 2.80 > scripts > startups > bl_app_templates_system (here you can find all startup files)
Duplicate the one that closely resembled the look you needed, and duplicate that folder
Go inside that folder, open up the blend file inside and changed it to whatever you need
Compresses that folder to a .zip file
Back in Blender, hit F3  and type Install Template from File...
Select the .zip file created and re-start Blender


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How to render in command line?
I have a very very slow computer, but would like to animate 3D. I'm aware we can render via the command line. but I don't know how. I want to render the entire animation of my Tutorial.blend file in the background.

Have you searched for it, because this question already has an answer see this

Firstly open your Command Processor.

Windows(Command Prompt)
  Linux(Terminal)
  Mac(Command Line).

For Windows:
In cmd first type set path="C:\Program Files\Blender 2.80" replace it with path were your blender is extracted or installed. And press Enter.
Now we to locate the folder where you save your Blender files.
So in cmd, type
cd yourpath

If you didn't get what to type after cd than make a folder named Blender Projects on your Desktop and move the .blend files in it, and in cmd type
cd desktop\blender projects

and press Enter.
You are in the expected location,
Now,
If you want to animate,
run
this command,
blender -b yourfilename.blend -a

Rendering Single Frames
blender -b file.blend -f 10

-f 10 describes which frame you wish to render, in this case single 10th frame will be rendered.
You can also set start frame and end frame for animation just add this block in your animation command
-s 10 -e 500

-s refers to start and -e refers to end, replace numbers with yours.
You can also refer the documentation provided by Blender Foundation.

Editing is greatly appreciated to this answer for Linux and Mac users.

Hope this information may be helpful. All the best.