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sharp creases on the edges between the mirror and the model
for some reason i keep getting this raised surface in the middle of the face of my model. i checked the order of my modifiers and i tried smoothing it out, adding more edgeloops but that creates its own set of problems i found out. what i have been doing is manually adjusting each vertex but its a tedious task and feels very inefficient. also i don't want to have to do this for every organic model i create with the mirror modifier. also, i'm not sure if this is due to the mirror mod or the subsurf mod or if it's just me not placing the vertices in the correct spots.

Possible duplicate of Weird line in my mirrored mesh

Related https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/353/how-can-i-make-the-mirror-modifier-work-right/

Looks like it's just a problem of adjusting the position of the vertices to me, did you by any chance modify the crease value of those edges? you can find it in the transform panel on the right under "edge data" when you are in edit mode, make sure it's set to zero.

Hi, thanks for the quick response.  i haven't modified any values aside from moving the vertices to create the facial topology. in fact i never even noticed the crease values below the transform values. I keep thinking that it might be related to how I'm placing the vertices on the face. but I don't know for sure. i wish I could uppload the file so you guys can take a look for me.

Then I guess it's just a problem with how youplaced the vertices, I know it's a long and boring task but try to adjust them by hand and see what comes out.

Apply the subsurface modifier after the mirror modifier.

I think it would be handy to see a wireframe of the model as well?

There could be a face inside the mesh, right where it gets mirrored. That often causes some weird stuff to happen if you add another modifier


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Is there any way to combine/simplify interpolation curves?
To put things bluntly, 5 curves per bone has always intimidated me.
In short my questions are:
Can I combine curves in to one master curve?
If not what is the best way to simplify this workflow?
I've been looking for a solution to this for a while, if I've been dumb and missed an obvious google search can someone point me in the right direction? :)

How are you getting 5 curves per bone? In quaternion mode bones have 4 rotation channels and in euler mode, they have 3. Location and Scale also have 3 (XYZ) values.

sorry, you're right. Clearly I'm still a noob at this.

An fcurve that you see in the graph editor is able to animate only one value throughout an animation. As you follow the curve from left to right, it's x,y location gets translated to the frame and value for the property being animated.
For an object (or armature bone...) you can have one fcurve for the x-location, another for the y-location, one for x-scale and so on, meaning up to nine curves for the loc/rot/scale. You may also have extra fcurves for an object if you have other properties animated, like visibility, shape keys, modifiers, constraints...
While you need an fcurve for each value that you want to animate, you don't have to have an fcurve for every possible value, you only need an fcurve for each property you want to control during an animation. When you insert a keyframe using I->Location blender will create three fcurves for the location. You can also  RMB on the x-location display and choose Insert Single Keyframe to only create one fcurve. If you then use I->Available only the values with existing fcurves will get new keyframes.

If you have excess fcurves that you don't want, you can delete single fcurves in the graph editor. With the fcurve name selected and the mouse over the list press X to delete the entire fcurve.
When you have multiple fcurves, you can also simplify the graph editor display to make it easier to work with. For each fcurve and each group of curves, there is a small eye icon that can show/hide the fcurve or groups of fcurves. The cursor in the header allows only selected items to be listed in the graph editor, while the magnifying glass to it's right allows you to filter by name.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Solution for constraints - need help
Hi fellas I have a problem with solving an issue possible to find in the .blend file provided.
If You open the file there is a simple scene with constraints applied to the AXIS parenting two objects. Rotating the "toroid" along the Y GLOBAL rotates the axis along Z LOCAL. Problem is that to work as designed all objects has to be rotated simultaneously cause parenting axis to the toroid somehow break the global-local thing so to keep the axis in place all objects has to be rotated.
To test the function simply select ALL objects from the front view and rotate along Y so You could see how its working. Problem is when the rotation is finished, the next rotation does not work (global rotation somehow "resets" to 0,0,0 again imo and whole thing break-up).
Rotate for example for 30 degrees along Y, confirm it and try to rotate again to see what Im talking about. I need to solve this somehow but failed using all combinations in mind. Probably something else than constraints will be needed but dunno what.
Appreciate any idea and solutions buddies!
Sincerely, Jan

It seems to me that one problem is that you don't have the local Y axis of the empty, axle, or wing pointing in the direction you want, which I assume is along the major axis of the axle.  Would changing that help? I also think you might want a copy rotation constraint on the empty with the toroid as target with only the Y axis copied world -> local.

Hi could You "repair" my file and re-send? In fact I dont really understand that "axis axle major pointing along" thing ;).

I don't have an alternative that works yet, but I have tried to clarify my comment below.

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


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Any solution for a colour-restricted glow?
Hi fellas my problem is that I need to glow only part of a scene and dunno how to. As You could see here...

...the white cube glows and blue not and I need the exact opposite result. For best I need to respect/glow only the colour of my choice because in original scene I have an alpha-texture like and LCD raster so the object is visible only every now and then (the EVE could be a good example but I have full-black and full-white parts).

THX in advance for tips!
Sincerely, Jan

I withdrew my answer.  I misunderstood your question.

It seems to me that I would put the blue cube on a separate layer, create two render layers, apply the glow filter to the cube layer and mix the two.  The thing I can't figure out / remember how to do is use the white cube as a mask so the fog only hangs over the visible areas of the blue cube.

Yep, thats the problem I have Marty. Also used the separate layer but when its something in front of the eyes the problem appears.

I'll dig through my notes some more. There is definitely a way to create a mask from the white object that prevent the glow coming from the hidden face.  I just can't recall how I did it, or find an example in my .blend files


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Installing sculpting brushes permanently
I wonder if there is a way to install brushes (sculpting ones) to be accessible all the time when I open Blender. I know I could APPEND these and use them but everytime I close Blender and then start it up again I have to repeat the process.
Found out that I should be able to append them and save the Startup File but it does NOT work for me. Any ideas?
Sincerely, Jan

It's simple, just start a new project, add the brushes, and after you press ctrl+u

If You just try to read again the question, then You will find out that it does NOT work for me.

Better - check Fake User option when appending brushes

You'll need to set fake user for all appended brushes and then "Save Startup File".

Awesome! Worked perfectly!

it's not clear to me what's the meaning of "set fake user".

it works for me. I have to check this fake user icon for every brush.

To answer to Sanbaldo in the previous post

Hope it can help


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Using some kind of unit of measurement for scale?
So I'm not very experienced in making scenes. So for my first attempt at doing so I want to make a scale model of my apartment. I'd like to make it last night and still possible, but I don't know how to turn gauge what the foot is in blender. If there's no built-in function for this, is there some way I can measure things to some kind of equivalent scale?

In fact Blender could be switched to Metrics or Imperials using menu shown below...

...in my case, every single "rectangle" of the grey grid is one square metre. After switching to this You will be able to simply put the EXACT data in the "N" menu (right one) of your ViewPort where the Location or Size is (Location could be seen on the picture).
Hope it helps buddy, Jan.

another neat feature is the blender will also convert for you once you set a unit.  Like if you set to Metric, you can type "1 in" in a numeric field and it will change to 2.54 cm.


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Having trouble with the space settings on copy location bone constraint
So I used to know how to set up the copy location constraint so the bone using it would move when the target moved relative to its own location, but could still move in t's own space. Now I'm trying to do that in 2.91 but it can't seem to get it to work anymore.
What I'm trying to do it have a pole target that has no parent but has copy location on an empty which is parented to to the target bone of the inverse kinematic constraint. That way the pole target moves with the IK target but it doesn't affect the IK of the leg unless moved in it's own space.
How do I do this?

it should work, where does it fail for you? Also, why do you copy the empty location rather than directly the IK target?

Well I can make the pole target follow the owner of the constraint but it can more on it's own. It's stuck to the owner, And other settings I have tried move the pole target way beneath the owner.

I tried constraining the pole target to the IK target, and it didn't work so well. When I moved the target up the Pole moved in an opposite diagonal direction


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I changed the rest pose, and now I can’t x flip poses
So I made the mistake of setting a new rest pose so my characters hands weren't mirroring each other, and now I can paste the pose mirrored on the x axis. All the solutions I could find said just start the rig over, but I have spent like over twenty ours on this thing and I refuse to do it again, especially with the weight paint. So does any one have a solution to make it so I can x-flip poses?

You could just load an autosave

Non of the auto saves available were taken before I changed the rest pose, so no go.


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Having trouble with finding x-ray weight paint function in newer version
So I have having been learning all the differences in versions of blender since 2.8. Now I’m stumped about having the x-ray function in weight painting in version 2.83. I have been looking for an answer but all I can find is people saying turn on 2d falloff, but it seems to have been removed since the version that was being used when the answers were given. The answers show pictures of where the toggle for 2d fall off can be found and not only is the toggle not there in my version, but the menu its in is very different in my version.
Please help me out, I’m stuck with a weight paint issue that seems it can only be solved by the x-ray function.
Why did they have to go and mess around with the UI that was in 2.7.9 when they just make things much more complicated and harder to navigate.

Sorry, what happens if you go to weight-paint mode, turn on X-Ray, and select Wireframe preview? Is this close to what you're looking for?

In version 2.8 and beyond, the x-ray button seems to do nothing, even with wireframe. I read things about now having to use 2d falloff, but it doesn't seem to exist in 2.8.3. Again why do they try to improve the UI and just make it far harder to use?

I read that in the new version you have to change the falloff shape setting from sphere to project but it did nothing for me despite then guy asking saying it did for him.


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I can't get the shade editor to use nodes in 2.8
So I have used 2.83.0 for a while now, but this is the first time I have used the Shade editor, since before 2.8. The thing is I tell the editor to use nodes, and design said nodes, but when the shader is displayed in the viewport it only renders the setting used without nodes. I tried switching from eevee to Cycles and no change has occurred. What am I doing wrong?

This could be GPU related - Try updating your drivers.

Actually I updated my Graphics cards driver less then a week ago, however this is the first time I have encountered the issue. Could it because its not completely compatible with the new version of the driver?

I also updated to the newest version of blender, and it's still happening.

It's possible. You could try a rollback to the previous version (if you are able) and see if that fixes anything, however this sometimes requires all traces of other driver versions to be removed from the system (using something such as DDU) to work properly. Only do it if you're comfortable with doing so.

Also, what GPU do you have, may I ask? If it's an older card (or a brand spanking new one), it could be a compatibility issue.


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How to do retopology?
So this seems to be an essential skill in blender when you sculpted something and it has to many vertices. I have tried to figure it out but all my attempts have either taken days to do some or ended in it still having way to many points. I have tried watching videos but the people doing just start doing it without without explaining anything and I can't seem to copy them just by visuals only I'm also heavily auditory.
So can you guys give me a few some tips or point me somewhere that can help me?
And please don't just type retopology into google or Youtube and post the first video that comes up. I tried that many times, so please make sure they are good first or you have used them before.

There are plenty videos explaining that. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+retopology
What you say is not true.

Maybe you don't say enough about what your object looks like. Also, retopology is not the same as simplifying a mesh with deleting edge loops etc. But if you're talking about retopology, here is the basic way to begin in my opinion:

Create a plane over the high-poly object you are supposed to retopologize. This plane will be your low-poly version.

If your high-poly is symmetrical, give your low-poly a Mirror modifier. Enable the Clipping option.

On the horizontal menu bar, disable the Limit Selection to Visible option, enable the Snap, choose the Face mode, enable all the snap options.

Begin to move the vertices of your plane, you'll see that they will stick to the high-poly surface. Extrude edges, try to follow the main shapes and angles of the high-poly. About good topology and topology tricks, you can find some good advices here, it would take too long to summarize everything here.

That's the process I already use and got nothing but time consuming garbage.

what's the problem with this process? You don't have any easy way to do it, you can sometimes easily simplify a mesh if its topology makes it possible, that's all. But when you say "people doing just start doing it without without explaining anything", could you please be more specific? Because it's much too vague to help...

As far as I know, the best way to make retopology with Blender is RetopoFlow, an awesome addon capable of turn such a boring task into something that's almost fun.
You can buy the addon on Blendermarket and support the developers or download it for free on GitHub.
By the way, it's not a big deal but currently there isn't a 2.80 compatible version so you have to go with Blender 2.79 if you choose to retopo with RetopoFlow.

No problem that's exactly what I use, 2.8 has to many glitches

There's a modifier for this. It's called Decimate. You'll might have to use either Collapse mode or  Planar mode because Un-Subdivide only works on quads. Let me know if this still doesn't solve your problem.

Decimate often works fine for meshes that do not deform, but if you are modeling something like a human face, you need the edge loops to work well with the underlying muscle. I know it sucks to read this, but only experience will make you get this right, and you can always improve. Eventually you will get a "feel" for how the topology needs to be based on how a unique model will deform.


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What is the term used to create a mesh with less vertices using shrinkwrap?
I used to know this term but I haven't thought about it in over a year, so I completely forgot about what it's called. The term refers to using the shrink-wrap modifier to maker a new mesh over an old one to change the amount of vertices when the old one has too many?

retopology? I'm not sure shrinkwrap is always the best way to retopologize though

Ya thats it. Is there a better way to retopology?

I think you're referring to Retopology. And yes, in Blender the Shrinkwrap modifier is commonly used in combination with other modifiers to perform retopology.


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I got this problem with animating, when I switch frames, the pose of reverts
So I have the problem where I'm making an animation of a character walking after making one of them in idle pose. The first animation was easy, but now that I am trying to make the walking onwe I have run into a problem I can't figure out how to solve. Basically I made the beginning pose on frame zero and make a key frame of it. Then I moved to frame 20 and made a new pose and key framed it. However if I moved to a different frame and then back to twenty the pose has reverted back to the one from frame zero. Though the key frames I made still register on frame twenty on the dope sheet they have reverted.
Here is my blend file, since every time I ask a question is ends in my having to upload it anyway.
blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/embedImage.png?bid=6006

Please show you work as a Blender screen capture .  I am aware you may have attempted a file inclusion.  It may be unnecessary to open the file.

Your file include, if you attempted one, is not working in the standard fashion.

Ya I messed up the link code, just copy and paste it into the address bar, it works that way I tested it.

I have the same problem I have no idea how to delete the cache, I can't create new animations because all poses revert back to another animation no matter how many times I saved the frames

Okay this is weird, I inadvertently solved the problem, it was apparently a glitch after all. What I did was changed the timeline to the idle animation to make sure it wasn't messed up too. And when I changed back to the timeline of the messed up animation it was working properly all of a sudden. To think I wasted a weak not getting my project done because of this problem and that was all I had to do.

I do believe Blender has these lapses of sanity once in a great while. I tend to see that during Particle work.  I have no not seen or do not remember your pose issue.

week or weak?  spelling correction perhaps.

@atomicbezierslinger  is right!  When these inexplicable glitches occur I find the cure is often in saving the file to another filename, exit Blender altogether, delete any cache files it makes, (usually in the current project folder) and also any quit and other files in Blender's temp folder. (as setup in User Pref's)  Reload your new Blend file .

Can you go farther into explaining how to delete the file caches and the the blender temp folder?? I tried to figure it out myself but I couldn't and did find an answer on the net?


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Bones flip out when posed using inverse kinematics
Okay so I have rigged many armatures in my time in blender, and this problem happens from time to time but its usually slight enough to ignore, but not this time.
So I have a rig made for a human, with IK constraints and bones to manipulate them with. The constraints are applied to the shins, hips, upper, and lower arms. When I use the IK bones for the shins like lift them up and forwards it spasms and contorts twisting around.
Now I did remove the parents to all IK bones, and I just doubled check it before posting this. Also I don't know if this is part of the problem, but when I just raise the shins up the knees fly far out to the sides instead of just bending.
Any ideas?

Rig the legs like this: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/21379/how-to-ik-rig-legs/21385#21385 using only 1 IK constraint and a Pole target. Similar with arms. After you have that working add bones for twisting: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/41550/7777

I have done that before, but usually used it on animal rigs, will try it here. But I don't understand why the original method I used doesn't do the same thing with the arms?

From the description I am unsure how is your rig exactly setup, maybe a picture or a shared .blend would help, I don't know what you mean by original method. My suspicion is it is something you should no do and does not work, but I can't tell what might be the issue. So I just linked a setup that works, but if you add more detail into the question I might be able to help with what you have so hopefully you don't have to re-design your whole bone setup.

please share your file (at least the armature): https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/


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How do you clear the cache?
So I have been having trouble with this blend file I am working on, different parts of the animation process keep glitching and very inconsistently. For instance if I run an animation I have made the leg of the character might spasm, but if I change the current animation I'm viewing to another and then back to the orginal after it's fixed till I load it again and the glitch is back.
Someone suggested this
@Edgel3D
When these inexplicable glitches occur I find the cure is often in saving the file to another filename, exit Blender altogether, delete any cache files it makes, (usually in the current project folder) and also any quit and other files in Blender's temp folder. (as setup in User Pref's) Reload your new Blend file.
They disappeared before I could get further information. SO how do I delete the files cache as well as the the ones in blenders temp folder?
I tried searching for the answer on her and google and none of the ways I phrased it got an an answer.

As far as I know there is no "cache" that I am aware of. Blender writes very little to disk beyond the file itself and a bunch autosaves in temp

When I'm using physics, particles, or the VSE I get cache files and I find them in the current project's folder as a rule.  They do tend to cling and affect subsequent loads and that's why I delete them and re-save under a different Blender filename, temporarily at least.  The cache files are in fact a folder with the title "Blender_Cache_Files" or similar.  I'm talking version 2.77a which is getting a bit out of date. 2.8 may do things differently.  Speaking from memory here I think you can elect where the particles cache goes, either 'externally' (to the drive) or not.

Further to the above, if you can't find these files, perhaps it's due to some interaction?  (Modifiers, constraints, physics etc)  You could try saving to a new filename and deleting or disabling other elements one at a time, see of it clears up.

Any time I've encountered "spasming" like you describe, tabbing in and out of Edit Mode has fixed it for me. I think changing frames will do it as well. Can happen when you have a lot of parent-child hierarchy going on and modifiers affecting the positions of those objects.

I can't find the folder for the specific project which is flustering because I could have sworn a couple weeks ago I stumbled into it during a search for location of the actual blend file itself.
Also Mentalist I tried you suggestion with out affect.
(Edit) I just stumbled across something strange, I don't know if it matters but when I play the animation backwards it works perfectly despite it spasming when I play it forwards.

I think there's gotta be some kind of cache Blender is using, particularly around modifiers. I've created the same mesh deform modifier between 2 different files, and for some reason it doesn't take to one at all, but does the newly created file.

on Windows delete chache files found typically here C:\Users\You\AppData\Local\Temp\blender_a*

I was looking for how to clear the animation cache and this is the top hit in my search engine.  After looking further I found this.
https://youtu.be/Ho8bUwGMs3I?t=57
Here is the relevant bit.

The drill down for this is:
Data Properties (Pane)
  > Scene Properties (vertical tab)
    > Rigid Body World (section)
      > Cache (section)
        > Delete All Bakes (button)


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Knee acting weird in walking animation
So I got my rig set up right so it doesn't glitch. But now I'm having a weird problem with the knee in the walking animation. If you open the copy of my blend file and run it from frames 40-60 you will see that I move the foot forward at those key frames. Now when the knee moves between 40 and 60 I fully extends straight then bends again in those ten frames. The two key frames don't shift the knee so the leg should go straight so why does the knee do that for a second between the two key frames at 40 and 60?

I'm not sure I understand correctly what you mean, but I think the main problem in your walk is that your Hips bone is much too high at frame 40 and 60, which makes your walk not good at all: when the legs spread, it's like the low of the walk sinusoid, the hips are supposed to lower down much more, and thus make the knee bend more naturally, perhaps that's the problem you're talking about?


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How to add copy of an object from a controller without Logic Brick being present?
I mean without controller being connected to Edit Object > Add Object Brick. Furthermore, I need to add that object at a specific location, instead of putting it on top of the owner, since I will be adding more than one object so they can't be all at one location. I tried moving the owner but it cannot move and create objects more than once in a single frame for some reason, probably because it takes a frame to pass for a controller to reach a signal towards an actuator Brick. So I figured doing it from a controller might be a solution but I don't know how to do that.

How to add an object at a specific posistion in Blender Game Engine
import bge

scene = bge.logic.getCurrentScene()
object = scene.addObject("Sphere","Sphere")
object.worldPosition = [1,1,1]

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


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Boids avoid collision?
Im trying to make a flock of birds in a massive cage using boids.
But they keep flying through the walls.
How do I tell them to stay in the cage?

Create your cage, I have used a box
Select your box and enable Edit Mode (Tab)
Keep the box selected and go to Mesh > Normals > Flip Normals
Then go to the Physics tab, and enable the Collision modifier

Now your boids should interact with the cage. Hope it helps.

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


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off band with Ambient Occlusion and Environmental lighting in Blender render?
Im trying to tweek the ambient occlusion factor with environmental lighting on and I get an odd band across suzzanne.
Is that normal?

8.0 is probably too high for your scene.Remember AO is specifically for shadowing in tight spaces, not large shadows.


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Bake Normal space: Camera vs World vs Object vs Tangent
The manual says:

Tangent space normal maps are the most common, as they support object transformation and mesh deformations. Object space normal maps keep sticking to the surface under object transformations, while World normal maps do not.

Its a bit confusing to me.
I thought normals are those hair looking things that come out of faces and vertices.
so when they say "support object transformation"???
Does that mean its possible to disconnect normals from the mesh and have them float in mid air?
Can anyone re-phrase the difference between the different normal spaces?

Normal maps are an encoding of a geometry inside an image. Each pixel color (RGB) corresponds to a (XYZ) orientation which defines a fake normal for each particular point defined in the UV map.
If we take the example of the cube, unwrapped like this :

And if we bake in the tangent space (which means the space X Y in the face plane and Z along the normal), we obtain a flat image because the encoding corresponds to the face itself (so no alteration of the normals). This is like to say "encode me in my own space coordinates" :

If we bake from object space, this space is unique to the cube but each tangent space of each face is orientated differently from the object space point of view. That's why we obtain this below. And you can notice that one of the face has the same color as above because this face shares the same coordinate system as the object (in this particular case) :

Now from the normal map node, this is the same principle but inverted. The bake encodes the coordinates and the node decodes it at the render time :

World space : decodes from the global (world) coordinate system. It mean that the render will change if the object (in its whole) is rotating (not sure of that last point).
Object space : similar to the bake above. Encoded faces normals (point by point) are translated from the whole object coordinate system
Tangent space : each point of each face is decoded from the face coordinate system

We have seen above that baking in tangent space gives a flat image. So this seems to be useless. But in fact this kind of bake is generally used to bake a complex object (highpoly) into a more simple one (lowpoly). Here you use the 'selected to active' option when you are baking.
So what happens after that : the image encode the highpoly normals and the "normal map" node decodes it for the lowpoly rendering. That mimics the highpoly normals along the lowpoly faces.

this is confusing, when you bake the normals from tangents the resulting image will actually follow the UV as for 'object' or 'world', I don't know how you managed to get this first picture but this is not what happens when you bake normals...also you don't unwrap a cube like that: haven't you been carving  cubes in paper when you were in school ? =)

@Yvain, for the first comment, just give it a try. And about the UV map, just use "smart UV project". If you mark seams and unwrap it like a cross (paper cube like) you just loose space in your texture. For the second comment, sorry but I do not understand it... Do you want to talk about it in chat ? Maybe in french ?

Actually I'm very confused about this now, I haven't been running blender for awhile and probably never really understood the mechanism behind Tangent/World/Object normal. I can see you know what you are talking about but I cannot understand it myself, now if YOU don't understand what I mean it probably means that I'm wrong.. I'm deleting this com. (always ready to chat) Have a good day !

each pixel has a normal that will point in the direction you choose from: Camera vs World vs Object vs Tangent http://d22zlbw5ff7yk5.cloudfront.net/images/stash-1-244250d58073b0ed1.jpeg I think I got it


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What is the right term, properties panel or shelf?

I heard it being called "viewport properties panel"
even though panels are the things inside the shelf.
I heard it being called the "tool shelf"
But I get the feeling that tool shelf refers to only the (t) shortcut shelf that appears to the left side.
Maybe the right term is "properties shelf"?

to me iNformation panel or property following the menu (but I don't think this is good here)

but the manual says : Panels are collapsible sections within "regions" to help organize the interface. https://www.blender.org/manual/interface/editors/panels.html

I read a little further down the page and its called "the properties shelf"

ok, but in fact what is the aim of your question ? I mean N for this panel, and T for the tools one... but what more with all that for your question ?

im thinking of editing the manual because when I was reading here: https://www.blender.org/manual/render/workflows/multiview/usage.html and it said: "You can toggle this and other display settings in the Stereoscopy tab of the viewport properties panel." I was hella confused were those settings were. I think I will change the words "viewport properties panel" to "viewport properties shelf".

And change "Stereoscopy tab" to "Stereoscopy panel"

I don't know what your question is... but if it is to stereoscopy, you may edit it to explain that a bit more, don't you think ?

my question is on proper terminology because I think the manual got some of it wrong.

Maybe this kind of subject is to be discuss on the meta (is BSE the good place to talk about that). I am not sure, but have a try, or search for this kind of subject. And surely Blender's documentation can be edited by users (I don't know how but surely you can participate).

I know how to do it, its easy. But I dont know everything so I want a second opinion before changing it. You say BSE is a good place for that?

No, I meant asking on meta if BSE is a good place to ask that. Or directly ask on meta about it

thanks for the heads up, I will go there when I have a  question on documentation.

I believe @lemon was saying that you should ask on the meta whether questions regarding errors in documentation are good questions for this site, not that you should ask documentation questions there.

o i c http://ct.fra.bz/ol/fz/sw/i52/5/3/26/frabz-of-course-that-makes-sense-320044.jpg

Blender's naming scheme is quite confusing, especially since many creators (including me) of tutorials and howto videos don't use them consistently (and there's a reason for this mess).  So let's break it down a little.
The Blender Manual introduction says that Blender's UI can be broken up into the Main Window, which contains one or more Areas with each Area containing an Editor. Editors usually have a Header and one or more Regions. Regions then contain Panels.
According to the Manual the highlighted area in your screenshot is called "Properties Region". It shows all properties of your currently selected object(s) and lets you also edit some additional properties for your scene. Some of them could also be changed within the Properties Editor (I'm trying to stay with the terminology here...)

This seems a little absurd but it immediately makes sense if you switch the 3D View to fullscreen area (Alt+F10).
The reason why Blender's naming scheme is still confusing is that even Blender itself calls it Panel.

Over here its called the properties shelf: https://www.blender.org/manual/interface/editors/panels.html   But over here its called the Properties Region : https://www.blender.org/manual/interface/introduction.html#regions  And in Blender its called a  "panel" as you pointed out... https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAJQAAAAJGY4OTU1NDAzLTg2ODYtNGNmNC04YjMwLTI0MTU0MGZmOTdmNw.png

do you think it should be called "properties shelf"? I think that makes the most sense, no?

I'd stay with properties panel. I for myself stopped using the term shelf around the time of Blender 2.59. If they have the Key tags on that wiki, maybe that would be enough?

so this page is wrong in saying: "Panels are collapsible sections within regions to help organize the interface. They are heavily used in the Properties Editor but also appear elsewhere (For example: in the Tool Shelf or the Properties Shelf, available in some editors)." https://www.blender.org/manual/interface/editors/panels.html


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What does the coordinates node do?
The input node, in Blender Render, called "coordinates":
outputs the geometry local coordinates, relative to its bounding box as RGB colors.
But the coordinates of what object?
No matter what I do to any object in my scene, the coordinate node outputs the exact same image.

You can try this kind of configuration :

The bounding box is considered as a local space from (0, 0, 0) to (1, 1, 1), and each vertex of your mesh has a position into this bounding box. The 'coordinates' node gives this position.
Here with a sphere, no vertex has coordinates greater than 0.8, so you don't have any white part (this is a top view) :

oh so the texture isnt meant to change? Only the mapping of the texture changes based on the coordinates of the vertices?

@eromod, yes as all objects have proportionally the same bounding box. Only the vertices positions relatively to the bounding box matters.


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When Blender says out of memory error what exactly do I need to free up or replace?
I am trying to render this complex scene I am using an hdr and a couple of hair particle systems and when I tried to render the animation it said out of memory so what do I need to do ? Do I get a new bigger ram or a new graphics card . I’ve been using blender for about a year and it was rendering fine but now I am trying both cpu and gpu renders and it won’t work .

Optimize your scene, reduce complexity, subdivision levels, particle counts, texture sizes, number of objects, use instancing whenever possible. If that is insufficient then consider upgrading

Are you rendering it on GPU or CPU?
If it's GPU then you
(a) try splitting up and rendering the scene over different render layers
-OR-
(b) try rendering it on CPU instead. I had to render a complex scene too earlier this month, it kept crashing every time I tried to rendering it on GPU; worked just fine on CPU however it took longer (obviously). If the problem still persists on CPU rendering then you could consider upgrading your RAM; I, myself, have 16GB and that just barely enough for complex renders.

What does the frame rate effect ? Does it take up memory or what ? I rendered another scene with a lot of particles but no hdr at 24 FPS I want to try 60fps is that too extreme?

@RonyAhmed 60fps means you need to render 60 images to get one second of animation. And you should render as individual PNG or EXR images, not a single movie file.

@RonyAhmed yeah, what he said, rendering the output as an image sequence is a very safe method, in case the render does fail, you can continue from that point onwards... As for your other question, no, it doesn't affect the frame rate


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How to import textures for premade model?
I have a model downloaded from the internet that comes with textures as .png and I turned the model itself into a .blend (originally a .pmx) but I can't seem to figure out how to place the textures that came with it. If someone could help me that would be great! (also if there is a way just to straight up import the model with the textures at all once please tell me)

see my comment here https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/98716/why-is-blender-not-importing-material-and-uv-morphs-shape-keys-from-mmd-models#comment174815_98716

How are texture maps imported into Blender?

I figured it out myself, you just need to push the “shadeless” button in the menu to the right of the screen, it’s hidden until you push the arrow to show it.


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Render, viewport "Rendered" preview, and material preview white
I've been working on a scene for a while now with no issues. Today, I found that when I rendered the scene, it came out as completely white. Furthermore, the material preview window is also showing completely white.
I've noticed that, until a few samples have been calculated, you can actually see some of the scene/material in the previews, but after just a few samples, the scene goes completely white. Here's a screenshot I managed to take of this phenomenon.

And a screenshot of the material preview, which behaves similarly.

I've checked everything I know to check (which honestly isn't very much) and can't seem to figure out what's up. I've uploaded a copy of my scene (with most of the models removed) to demonstrate the problem here: https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/b/4535/

This ended up being the curves I had set for the Filmic OpenColorIO configuration:

Somewhere along the way I accidentally reset the White Level values to zero.

@cegaton Happy to give it a shot, but I don't understand (1) why the issue manifested in the first place, and (2) why resetting the curves and then recreating them fixed the issue.

@cegaton Good observation, I didn't even notice. I must have zeroed them out somehow accidentally. Mystery solved!

Your scene is simply too bright. If you lower the exposure to -10 in the Scene panel, you can start to see the color of the surfaces.
A more permanant fix is to lower the energy intensity of your 2 lamps in the scene, as well as the world HDR map.

Hm, changing the exposure does seem to help some, but adjusting the lamps or the HDR doesn't affect the material preview, and -10 is the minimum exposure value. I know all those values were the same in this scene before; I must have changed something else I suppose?


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How do I scale in, and then extrude a smaller square column up
I am 3 weeks in to Blender and completely stuck.  Watched all the videos that show a face selected.  Then the face is scaled in or out then extruded and repeat.  My problem is that I have been unable to find the answer to online or in the manual deals with the scaling part.  The object edges follow my face when I select the face and scale in or out.  I can not just get the face plane to move independently.  Please help.

are you looking to inset (I button) a face?

Have you tried using (g) on your keyboard to grab the face and move it?
you can also extrude in any direction by pressing (e) to extrude, and then the direction you wish to extrude in.
e, x - this will extrude in the direction of X. You can also use (g) after you extrude to fine tune your extrusion
g, x
If this is not what you want, please be a little more descriptive with your question.

Thanks for the comment Internet Warriors.  Let me see if I can add more.  The below pic is the top view showing an attempt to scale the top face in on a cube.  I wanted to scale in and then extrude a smaller square column up,  The top pic is the front view that shows my problem I am having.  The top face is not releasing from the rest of the cube like everyone's videos.  My process is in edit mode with just the top face selected.  I hit s and with the mouse move inward and the  pics tell the rest.  I hope this information helps describes my problem better. Thanks

oh, yes I tried g.

Instead of extruding and then scaling in, just press i to inset, then once you've scaled in to the point you want, press e to extrude in your desired direction. Does that help?


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Edge, Vertex, and Face tool do not show up anymore on the menu
The edge,vertex, and face tool in edit mode disappeared! How can I fix this?

Please don't post the same question more than once

Even if this as already got an answer, I'm going to breifly explain you why.
I assume you are working with a Lattice. In lattices you can actually select only vertices, so there is no Vertices/Edge/Faces button. if you need to select an edge, just select the extreme vertices, so do for a Face.


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Making Diagrams and Blueprints for Engineering
In comparison, a lot of Autocad products are based on Architecture and Engineering, like making graphs and complex but easy to read blueprints.
Does blender have any such features, or are there any relevant plugins?
If you know of them, please give a link to the appropriate documentation and a brief overview of how these features work.

Blender is not designed to be a CAD type program and as such doesn't do these things well. It is designed for authoring content for artistic/entertainment purposes rather than for engineering, so if you are looking for an open source alternative to Autocad, blender isn't really a good option.

you may find https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/53293/is-blender-actually-useable-for-engineering helpful

As mentioned Blender is not at all adequate as an engineering or CAD application. You may look into Freestyle renders for "blueprint like" rendering

I agree with what others have commented. But don't get the wrong idea - you can certainly model a house in Blender, as well as render blueprints. But not on the level of a professional architect. More like, on the level of an artist doing architectural visualization.

The measureit addon is probably the most relevant to what you want.


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Weird texture on surface of model
I am currently making my own Overwatch Wallpaper and are doing the logo of it right now. So I have moddled a it and painted texture on it, as we know the design. But for any reason the texture is looking like this:

You can see the darker stroke in the bottom of the picture and on the left.
Why did it happen and how can I get rid of this? More pictures of the model following.
Untextured:

the mesh:

in paint mode:

and then the texture as a image itself.

I don't see any issues, could you post a better image? Do you really need an image based texture here at all? Sound's like overkill if your object gonna be simply flat colored. You could just assign two differently coloured materials.

well I am not very experienced with blender and this was a way I found at the intenet. What I think looks weird is that where the spikes go inside there is a bit a different shading on the ring. It is a bit darker. But I will trie it.

well, thank you, that solved the problem, but why did it look the way it did when I used the image?

Add Texture Coordinate with your node setup & connect Texture Coordinate (UV) to Image Texture. This can solve the problem!

@Sheroz Khan unfortunately this did not work. I connected UV with vector at the textures, but it did not change it.

Connecting UV output socket from Texture Coordinate node can't change anything in material here by definition as texture will use selected UV map anyway. I don't have idea why assigning materials instead of texture solved it, if your problem is around selected edge loop on screenshots then there is much more dense geometry smoothened with Subsurf which can lead to shading artifacts. If it isn't visible now then it's fine.

How does it look if you simply use a generated image with the color map or the uv squares? I wonder if when you use a generic white texture if it will still show that way. The fact that the error is across the mirror just means it is in the are in the image.

I have found a solution to this. So I had to use two different materials for both the yellow top and the silver part of the logo. I heared that this issue is caused by too dense geometry there.


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Label shows in texture view but not in render?
can anyone tell me why a label texture might not show up in a render (full render or viewport preview render), whilst it seems completely fine in the texture/material viewport?
I followed a tutorial for this in another project and did it successfully yesterday and have copied the nodes from there exactly / followed the tutorial again. But I cannot seem to find what might be missing.
I am using cycles. There is light in the scene, the viewport seems to have the UV mapped correctly. It is not mapped to the inside of the bottle. I have recalculated normals. I have used File -> External Data -> Find Missing Files. I have reloaded / saved the texture file as a different name and mapped it anew.

Print: http://prntscr.com/g0p9la
Thanks

This was exactly what I needed to read! Thanks for the speedy and informative reply. Result: http://prntscr.com/g0q2rw


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How to prefetch video?
I'm baffled and annoyed by Blender's playback speed. From searching the internet for the past hour or so, I've gathered you can somehow prefetch the video (I'm using the video sequencer) to make it faster. However for the love of me I can't find this option. I'm using the latest version of blender (2.80). I've read that pressing 'P'should do it but that just highlights my mouse with dotted lines.
How can I change my preferences so that blender will always prefetch the video?

To also improve playback speeds, open the Properties panel in the Preview window and set the View Settings - Proxy Render Size to 25%.

You'll find it in the Preview sidebar:

Shortcut 'P' is for setting the preview range, and will not influence the playback speed.
If you do not want to mess with proxies(which is the natural next step), try lowering the resolution percentage:

Nb. make sure that the project resolution is set to match your footage, by selecting a movie strip and in the menu select Movie Strip > Set render size.

I'm in blender 2.90.0, and there's a convenient set of buttons in the side menu of the Preview Window under View -> View Settings, where you can activate Prefetch Frames, and decrease the Proxy Render Size to make it even faster.


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Eevee outputs large sections of video completely black
I'm trying to render a short 8 second mp4 animation loop, but for some reason Eevee keeps replacing large sections of the outputted video with complete blackness. Some of it renders the way I want, but then the rest is just black.. I've looked through the settings and I can't find anything that looks like it would cause that, and I have only two animation keyframes to make the camera move, nothing that would affect lighting. Can anyone help?

Okay I fiddled some more and fixed the problem. Turns out I had broken image files in the video sequencer that were overwriting it. In case anyone else has this issue, try rendering it with the sequencer bypassed. Hope this helps someone!


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Rigify for robots?
I created an armature with rigify and want to use it on a robot. All is working fine (I simply parented the limbs to the bones), but the rotations of the bones is not correct. For example: the elbow should only rotate around the x axis, since for a robot with a hinge it looks broken otherwise.
The same goes for the knee of course, but from what I’ve seen, the knee seems to be handled properly.
And when I rotate the upper arm around the y axis, I also get some strange secondary rotation in the lower arm.
Is there a way to configure rigify so all these joints are completely locked on specific axis?
(I think that adding constraints afterwards is not ideal, since I wouldn’t be able to regenerate the rig?)

Select the Metarig, in Edit Mode select the arm and forearm bones and set their bone roll so to have their X local axis aligned with the desired axis of rotation (in my example there's an empty which represents the desired rot for the forearm), you can use the N panel Bone Roll property or the shortcut Ctrl R.
Then go to pose mode, select the arm bone only, go to bone properties, "Rigify Type" panel, and change the rotation axis from "Automatic" to "X manual".
Set the "Limb Segments" to 1.
Repeat for Right side and for the legs.
Then generate the rig.
This method works also when fingers don't bend the way that's expected, just be aware that Rigify rigs are made of chains of bones, and the Rigify Type panel appears only in pose mode and only on the very first bone of every chain.


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How to edit my duplicates
i have built an apartment complex out of many planes.  So rather than just making 4 planes for a house like this noob normal does, I used shift d duplicate in object mode.  Now in edit mode all of my duplicated planes don't have any vertices,edges, or faces.  After looking online, tried deleting all doubles which I had none.  so I asking for help on what I did wrong using duplicate.  I was in object mode, hit shift d, hit enter, then moved the duplicated plane to a new location.      i am using 2.79b

If there is geometry in object mode, but not in edit mode, it could be hidden. Have you tried unhiding with Alt H? Are there any modifiers on your objects?

Try alt H, no luck.  no modifiers,  There is nothing but objects so far.  very bare bones that's what concerns me.  I think it's going to be several hours down the drain but I am eager to try anything if I can save it,  Thanks for the suggestion.

Please show your work as a Blender screen capture.  Please show your work in all future questions.  Carefully pick you screen captures to help the reader solve your problems.

I think we're going to need more details and possibly the file, because this is likely something very simple.
1st- how did you create the plane? Was it Add>Plane?
2nd- Did you do anything to the plane before duplicating it, like some modeling?
3rd- At the top right corner, it should let you know how many faces, vertices, etc. there are on the selected object in edit mode. When you get into edit mode how many faces does it say are there?
4th- Did you apply any modifiers and duplicate that with the plane?


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Boolean Hammering My Anvil
I trying to do my second full project after finishing Chris
Plush's Pretzel.  So I am on to Blenderguru's anvil and have I stalled.  Cutting the circular slots with a cylinder into the anvil built from a plane has been terrible.  My problem is after I finish the the boolean modifier.  Because of the model design I need to go inside of the newly cut circular semi-circle and line up the new vertical edges with the preexisting horizontal edges.  Now I have my anvil with 2 semi-circular cuts in the base with all the geometry lined up and I go to apply the Subsurface and disaster.  The bottom layer of the geometry is gathering together in the middle of the center of the 2 semi-circles.  I have tried this with a miroir, using the loopcut to divide the mesh before the modifier and after the modifier.  I have done it without a mirror and just did 2 cuts and still the same problem.Does anybody have any suggestions on what might be happening to the bottom layer of geometry?
Thanks Wayne

Thanks cegaton, my stupidity, with my frustration level so high I was looking for boolean post and didn't even think to look for for anvil post.  Solve the the problem!


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Why is the Curve Modifier flipping my meshes normals
I'm using an array modifier and a curve modifier to curve a mesh object around a curve path.  Unfortunately, the normals are being flipped somehow, and I don't know why.  The path curve and mesh object are on the origin.  The scale is at 1 for the mesh object and path curve.  What is causing my normals to flip on my mesh objects?  Any help is appreciated.

Hello could you please share your file? https://pasteall.org/blend/

Short Answer: Select mesh and G+Z and move to find you sweet spot.
I try to reproduce you issue and found that when I grab(G) mesh and move along Z axis(Z) when mesh was move close together it start deform.

Hey Terg Turry, thanks for the suggestions.  I am new to Blender and I think what you are saying is to move the curve and array around to different axis points.  This is what I tried with no change at all, so that is why I am wondering if I did it correctly.  I moved the curve and object around the grid separately and as a unit.  Thanks again for your help.

I just edit my answer by reproduce your problem. If that can't solve your problem please consider to share you blend file so we can look up your setup.

Thank You!!!  It worked.  I have spent at least 3 hours trying to solve this problem.  Thanks for spending your time to solve it.


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How to keep z axis aligned vertically while rotating camera angle
When I try to change the direction a camera is pointed, it often changes the relative orientation of the z axis. I can't keep the global z axis "vertical" from the perspective of the camera. I want to be able to turn the camera left, right, up, down, but without rolling.
You don't tilt your head whenever you turn left or right, after all.
To put it another way, I don't want the blue z-axis line to tip left or right on my screen when angling a camera. How do I prevent this?

Thanks in advance.

You simply need to lock the rotation in a relevant axis while rotating.
For example, to rotate Left/Right (in relation to the scene) you need to lock to the global Z axis - select the camera and then press R to rotate followed by Z and move the mouse to 'look' left/right.
To rotate up/down you need to lock the rotation to the local X axis. You can do this by selecting the camera and then press R for rotate followed by XX (ie, X twice) - this will lock to the local X axis. Moving the mouse will now 'look' up/down (in relation to the camera).

This helps a lot! Thanks! I didn't realize that pressing a lock hotkey twice would have different results (I thought it would just toggle on/off).
This method works best for me, because it doesn't make me have to "fight" against a hard lock on the x/y/z axes while orienting. Hard locking an axis really messes with the rotation control.

You can simply lock the Y axis of the camera rotation.
Here:

Or here:

This kind of works, but does have the cost of really messing with the rotation controls. But it DOES work, if using hotkeys like the suggestion below is harder for someone. This is a good backup option to the suggestion below of using lock-to-z for left-right and then locking x for up-down.


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How would I make this glow?
I'm making a lightsaber in Cycles Render.
I'm pretty new to blender and only started yesterday.
I've been watching YouTube Videos but usually I can't access something they have and usually messes it up.
I'm fine doing compositing and Nodes I just need to know how to make this glow,
Current (v)

Nodes

Current Compositing Nodes

Again I just need this to glow but i keep on messing up! Please help, thank you

Do you mean a halo effect like the one discussed here? https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/46660/creating-a-halo-effect-for-a-material-in-cycles

Could you post a picture of what you're trying to achieve? Thank you! :)

Use fog glow glare node in compositor.  Simple emission shader as volume for material would be enough I think.

Related https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/34002/glow-effect-invisible-on-transparent-background and https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/93752/lightsaber-effect-in-cycles-without-compositing


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How do I make bevel equal on both sides of the edge?
I am new to Blender and learning little as I go. I notice that when I bevel on a cube's edge with n-segments, the effect is a nice even bevel (quarter circle). However, if I make a rectangle (as shown on the picture) the bevel is longer on the longest face and almost non-existent on the shorter face. Is there a way to make a nice round bevel that creates quarter circle on the edge? I would like to make a rounded rectangle.
Thanks.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/7298/why-is-it-important-to-apply-transformation-to-an-objects-data

It's because your object has non-uniform scale.
First, go to the object mode. Then press Ctrl + A -> Rotation & scale (object-apply)
Then try again


text:
corner radius or bevel on a complicated triangulated mesh
I have a mesh that is created based on a cylinder that I cut using a Boolean modifier 'difference', against an stl file representing a natural object. The stl file of this natural object consists of triangles. I cannot get a version of this file with quads instead of triangles. The result of this is that the mesh I want to modify, also consists of triangles.
See photo, I want to bevel, or round the edges on the bottom of the mesh, however, I want to know if there is a way to do this that is easier than manually selecting the edge loop on the bottom. Since the mesh consists of triangles, 'select edge loop' doesn't work.

Select loop of outer faces, deselect loop of top edges? Or using Sharp Edges from the Select menu.. If just dealing with selection tools it has a lot of choices

I have similar problems and I really miss nondestructive booleans, but your's is kinda easy to fix.
Let's say you have this ugly topology here:

If you still have the original scanned mesh in place, you don't need to do this: Select all the tris, duplicate them and separate them into their own object. Then extrude and scale both rims to have more surface area.

Go back to your original mesh. Make a cut with the knife tool and get rid of the bad topology.

Select both edgelines and bridge the edgeloops. Now is a good time to assign the top verts to a vertex group. Depending on your mesh, the 'Limit' value of the modifier might suffice and a vertex group will not be necessary.

Give your mesh a shrinkwrap modifier set to project, let it only affect your vertex group and play with the settings until you get this trainwreck.

Turns out the Shrinkwrap doesn't like to project on edgelines that fit perfectly. Move it a tiny bit, any amount will do.

And this is the result. A clean topology, ready to be bevelled.

Sometimes a Shrinkwrap is much better than a Boolean Modifier since it doesn't destroy the topology.
These settings worked for me:

Wait, did I mention that there's another way of doing this? No?
Well, there's another way of doing this.
Ugly mesh again. New one since I forgot to copy the first one.

Select all the top verts and hit X 'only Edges and Faces'. That kills all connecting edges up there. It isolates all of the rogue topology from the edges that rise from the bottom of the mesh.

Hover over the base, hit L to select the important part of the mesh and hide it with H

Select the rest of the verts and utterly delete them. Reveal your mesh with ALTH.

Select the base and hide it again. Switch to top view.

Select all the inner verts, turn them into an ngon with F and delete the ngon with F 'only faces'.

Do the same for the outer verts, select both rings and bridge them with SPACE 'Bridge Edge Loops'.

Select the whole mesh, hit F to fill all the holes and CTRL-N to recalculate normals.

That one helped: Fastest way to turn a ring of unconnected vertices into an edgeloop?

Another beauty. Is the crumpled plane mesh you project onto made from the original mesh?

@batFINGER By the time I got this far I hade already deleted the mangled sphere. So I duplicated the upper part of the target mesh and seParated it. It's of course faster if you still have it.

This might not help, but if you want to round the mesh try using the subsurf modifier. When you do this, you’ll probably get a weird shape with subsurf rounding the top flat section too (like subsurf on a normal cylinder would make a balloon). To fix this go to edit mode and simply press ctrl+r to make a loop cut at the center of mesh (purple ring). Now move the loop cut all the way up till the curve is flat again. If you accidentally place it wrong just select it and hit “g” twice to move it. You can do this for the bottom too if you don’t like the curve. Then, you’ll notice a weird rounded edge at the top. Just select the face and press “I” to inset it. I hope that helps some :).


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Blender freezes, but no resources are maxed out
I have a complex object in Blender (about 336,000 vertices) to which I'm trying to apply modifiers. A smooth modifier is pretty quick, but a laplacian smooth takes a really long time. I have to wait about 5 minutes every time I change one of the settings. If I click any button during this wait, windows says 'blender (not responding)' and the screen gets grayed out, but after some time it actually manages to process my change.
I would understand this slowing if blender would say, overfill my RAM, or max out my GPU, but this is not happening. I cannot find where the bottleneck is.
I'm on Windows 7 Professional 64bit with intel core i7 3.5GHz, 32Gb of RAM, and I use a Nvidia Geforce GTX 750 Ti. Whenever Blender is stuck, I see no changes in CPU usage, GPU load (as monitored by Techpowerup GPU-Z 2.7.0), GPU memory used, GPU temperature. Blender's memory usage goes up slightly, by less than a Gb, but it's nowhere near maxing out.
If I were to upgrade my PC to make this process faster, which part should I upgrade?

Processes like render can be separated in different parts, as you can see as a tiles. But some processes (like the smooth) can't be divided into threads to use all the processor cores. In this case one thread use only 1 CPU core: 1/4 or 1/8 (depends of how many cores in your CPU) of all CPU power. If so, CPU monitor will show that only 25% or 12% of CPU is used.


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Adding consistent raised pattern to surface of mesh
I'm fairly adapt when it comes to modeling, I'm currently working on Captain America's helmet from AOU. Attached is a work in progress, this was rendered in Keyshot... well you see the black areas with the texture, that was just for the the sake of nice renders. However those areas eventually need to have a consistent dot/bump pattern all over them, extruded subtly off the surface of the mesh. I've attached a photo of what I'm after for that. What is the easiest way to go about this? I need the pattern to follow the contours of the helmet, but also not get distorted, the nubs/balls needs to stay consistent size and spacing. I've tried using the shrinkwrap feature, but that's not cutting it. Any help would be great.
Thanks!


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Texture diffuse not showing up
They are both the same menu way do they have different options? How do i get the left options to look like the rights?

Watch out your upper right angle: one is a Cycles material, the second is Blender Internal. They are two completely different render engines, which require different materials.
To switch render engines use this menu:


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Automated Rendering of Multiple Objects
I am trying to use Blender to create a dataset to recognize Dominos for machine learning. To do this I need to be able to take the object files I have and create ~100 random images of each of them (preferably with different backgrounds and lighting). Is this something that is even possible to do with Blender? Or for just rendering is there another, more easily scriptable option?

Im currently doing the same and have fully automatized loading, setting up cameras and used HDRi backgrounds from https://hdrihaven.com/ and rendering with gpu in cycles.  If you are interested and I have some time I can copy the relevant code for you

You will definitely have to adjust and ignore some code, paths etc, but most of it is reusable. You also need the MultiCamera addon.
import bpy
import time
import numpy as np
from datetime import datetime
import os
startTime = datetime.now()

def delThisObj(obj):
    bpy.data.scenes[0].objects.unlink(obj)
    bpy.data.objects.remove(obj)
    return

def setupCamera(scene, c):
    pi = np.pi

    scene.camera.rotation_euler[0] = c[0] * (pi / 180.0)
    scene.camera.rotation_euler[1] = c[1] * (pi / 180.0)
    scene.camera.rotation_euler[2] = c[2] * (pi / 180.0)

    scene.camera.location.x = c[3]
    scene.camera.location.y = c[4]
    scene.camera.location.z = c[5]

    return

# Assumes there is only the car object (no camera etc.)
# example use:  oldmat = [['body'], ['M_0056_Yellow']], newMat = 'Body_Pain_new'
def changeMaterialColor(old, new):
    for o in old:
        for mat in bpy.data.objects[0].data.materials:
            if mat.name == o:
                bpy.data.objects[0].material_slots[mat.name].material = bpy.data.materials[new]
    return

def setEnvironmentTexture():
    # TODO: Load all environment textures if possible
    # TODO: and just exchange which one will be used for curret render

    # Add Environment-texture to image collection
    fileName = 'shanghai_bund_8k.hdr'
    filePath = 'D:\\Anon\\HDRIs\\' + fileName
    fileDir = 'D:\\Anon\\HDRIs\\'
    bpy.ops.image.open(filepath=filePath, directory=fileDir)

    # [4.9.1] Set HDRI background

    # Add nodes
    bpy.data.worlds['World'].use_nodes = True
    texEnv = bpy.data.worlds['World'].node_tree.nodes.new(type='ShaderNodeTexEnvironment')
    nodeMap = bpy.data.worlds['World'].node_tree.nodes.new(type='ShaderNodeMapping')
    texCoord = bpy.data.worlds['World'].node_tree.nodes.new(type='ShaderNodeTexCoord')
    background = bpy.data.worlds['World'].node_tree.nodes['Background']

    # Link Nodes
    links = bpy.data.worlds['World'].node_tree.links
    links.new(texCoord.outputs[0], nodeMap.inputs[0])
    links.new(nodeMap.outputs[0], texEnv.inputs[0])
    links.new(texEnv.outputs[0], background.inputs[0])

    bpy.data.worlds['World'].node_tree.nodes['Environment Texture'].image = bpy.data.images[fileName]

def main(model):
    # [1] Reset Scene, based on factory settings
    if list(bpy.data.objects).__len__() == 3:
        defaultCube = bpy.data.objects['Cube']
        defaultLamp = bpy.data.objects['Lamp']
        defaultCamera = bpy.data.objects['Camera']

        delThisObj(defaultCube)
        delThisObj(defaultLamp)
        delThisObj(defaultCamera)

    for item in bpy.data.meshes:
        bpy.data.meshes.remove(item)

    # [2] Change to Cycles Render
    bpy.context.scene.render.engine = 'CYCLES'

    # [3] import .obj
    filepath = model + '\model.obj'
    bpy.ops.import_scene.obj(filepath=filepath)

    # [4.9.2] Create shadowcatcher
    # Create plane
    bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_plane_add()

    # Make it a shadow-catcher
    bpy.data.objects["Plane"].cycles.is_shadow_catcher = True

    # Scale the plane to match modelsize
    bpy.ops.transform.resize(value=(10, 10, 10))

    # [5] Enable multi-camera addon
    bpy.ops.wm.addon_enable(module="multiplecamera")

    # [6] Add Sun and position it
    #x, y, z = 1, 2, 3
    #bpy.ops.object.lamp_add(type="SUN")
    #sun = bpy.data.objects['Sun']
    #sun.location[0] = x
    #sun.location[1] = y
    #sun.location[2] = z

    # [7] Add cameras and position them
    numberOfCameras = 4
    scene = bpy.data.scenes["Scene"]

    # [euler0, euler1, euler2, x, y, z]
    cam0 = [77.487, -0.000244, 91.4015, 13.6156, 0.094522, 2.19869]
    cam1 = [70.2677, -0.000819, 173.623, 1.1328, 11.1731, 3.33687]
    cam2 = [85.5084, 0.000169, -90.6852, -12.8706, 0.355527, 1.29131]
    cam3 = [74.6794, -0.002039, 11.1926, 3.2923, -15.5643, 4.444]

    camList = [cam0, cam1, cam2, cam3]

    for i in range(numberOfCameras):
        bpy.ops.object.camera_add()
        newCamera = bpy.data.objects['Camera']
        newCamera.name = 'c' + str(i)

        newCamera.rotation_mode = 'XYZ'
        scene.camera = newCamera

        config = camList[i]
        setupCamera(scene=scene, c=config)

    # [7.5] Set resolution
    bpy.data.scenes["Scene"].render.resolution_percentage = 100

    # [8] Enable CUDA and activate GPU
    # code from https://developer.blender.org/T54099

    scene = bpy.context.scene
    scene.cycles.device = 'GPU'

    prefs = bpy.context.user_preferences
    cprefs = prefs.addons['cycles'].preferences

    # Attempt to set GPU device types if available
    for compute_device_type in ('CUDA', 'OPENCL', 'NONE'):
        try:
            cprefs.compute_device_type = compute_device_type
            break
        except TypeError:
            pass

    # Enable all CPU and GPU devices
    for device in cprefs.devices:
        device.use = True

    # [9] Select all cameras
    for i in range(numberOfCameras):
        camera = 'c' + str(i)
        bpy.data.objects[camera].select = True

    # [10] Render selected cameras with mutli-camera addon

    # define outputpath
    path = r'C:\Users\Anon\Desktop\3DModels\TestRenderings4\\'

    bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].MultiOutputDir = path+model.split('\\')[-1] + '\\'
    # render
    bpy.ops.render.multiple_camera_render()

    # [12] Delete every object in the scene
    bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='OBJECT')
    bpy.ops.object.select_by_type(type='MESH')
    bpy.ops.object.delete(use_global=False)

    for item in bpy.data.meshes:
        bpy.data.meshes.remove(item)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print(datetime.now() - startTime)

    listOfModels = [
        '1a30678509a1fdfa7fb5267a071ae23a',
        '1a4337da899da1936909632a947fc19b',
        '1a7125aefa9af6b6597505fd7d99b613',
        '1a7d2c9d3a084885afa2ee0adc62d22',
         ]

    setEnvironmentTexture()

    for p in range(listOfModels.__len__()):
        main(model=r'C:\Users\Anon\Desktop\3DModels\02958343\\' + listOfModels[p])

    print(datetime.now() - startTime)


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Creating and adding a texture to a material (blender 2.8)
I'm fairly new to blender 2.8 and I was wondering how to add a texture that I've created to a material.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/117950/why-arent-most-of-the-displacement-noise-options-available-in-the-node-editor/117970#117970 https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/8697/how-do-i-put-an-image-texture-on-a-material-in-cycles/8698#8698

If you want to add a texture to any material, simply go in to your shading window.
--> choose add (shift+A)--> image texture --> plug that in to a principled BSDF tats connected to the material output.
After that you can simply open up the texture you want and enyoy yore new texture.
P.S look upp some youtub tutorials on the topic


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Connect tail to fix position
How can I fix the following problem?

The second bone most move from left to right and v.s. wen the first bone changed in angle. The tail of the third bone most be a fix position.
Best regards
Jean Nijhuis

If you want a fixed joint, you need a bone head in that position. Once you have setted the two joint bones, you can achieve the desired behaviour with constraints: IK, track to, stretch to, depending on the desired movements.
In my example a simple 2 bones IK chain targets toward the IK target bone, which will be extruded from the "fixed head" bone and setted as not deforming (uncheck its "deform" option).


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Why doesn't Volumetric follow the shape of Mesh in Eevee?
So I was in the middle of making a ball-shaped smoke, but the volumetric effect didn't work following the basic shape. It remains cube in Eevee Blender 2.8; while in Cycle it works, but in Cycle it takes thousands of years for Render.

know i'm a bit late, but.. into the density add a math: Greater Than, and set it to one

Here is the solution that works with Emission Shader, Principled Volume and Volume Scatter.
You can try the spherical mode of the Gradient Texture. I am still experimenting and I want to make it transparent in the middle, but I can't work it out yet. And for more interesting results, maybe try to multiply the Gradient Texture with the noise and play around with the texture coordinates.
This is specific for Spheres only !

I know it's been a while since this was posted but I had the same issue recently. I used the same methodology shown in the screenshot by Alecheck. I placed a color ramp in between the math node and the principle volume. Adjusting the black and white sliders kept the fog effect within the sphere.


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Armature and Mesh not working together as intended
I'm new to blender and trying to rig a model for animation later. I have made the model, and attached bones to the mesh. However, for some reason, the bones that control the right side of the mesh (right arm and legs) don't do anything, but the left side bones work but what they do is mirrored.

could you share your file? for example on https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/

Did you applied Rot & Scale (CTRL+A+Apply Rot & Scale, in object mode) on your model before any skinning or rigging process? That could be the reason you are seing distorted mesh.

If you have a mirror modifier it should be on top of the modifier stack

Could you upload your .blend file on https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/ so I can check and try to help you?

Actually, I think I know how to fix. I still have the mirror modifier on the mesh, as in I haven't applied it. Would that be the issue?

Yep, it was because I didn't apply the mirror modifier before adding the armature. Oops


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Text converted to mesh
I was wondering how to convert text to a mesh? I have tried using a variety of keys including Alt + C but no Convert To Mesh option appears. (new blender noob user here)

It works for me.  It doesn't EXACTLY say "Convert To Mesh" but you should get a popup menu with two options.   Are you on a Mac or Windows?

Only works in Object mode. In Edit mode the menu will not popup. Could it be this? Or maybe your text is a mesh already...

In Blender 2.8 and higher, Alt+C isn't assigned to a command. But you can assign to it to the menu command Object > Convert To > Mesh. (Right-click the menu entry to the assign shortcut.)
Convert To Mesh works in Object Mode when the text is selected.

For more complex (and better looking :-) ) meshes with text, you may want to look at my program Pomelo. See:
https://github.com/dov/pomelo
Pomelo creates the meshes, that may then be imported into blender for further processing.
Here is an example of the kind of meshes that you can create with Pomelo, that would be very difficult to create natively in Blender.

To convert the text, press Alt+C in Object mode with the text selected, and select "Mesh from Curve/Meta/Surf/Text", this will convert the text to a 3d mesh and you will not be able write letters like before.


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Align vertex into a straight line non paralel to an axis
I have two faces, the should make a straight plane, but I want to keep the mesh without Ngons. Is there a way in which I can align the 3 (6 counting the ones behind) vertices into doing a straight line non parallel to an axis?

I have realized what can be done. Scale it on the z axis to 0, and then rotate the whole selection.

or rather use the Shear tool: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/116183/aligning-vertices-diagonally/116202#116202


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What's the input of the render button?
So, recently I'm finding my way into blender video editing and compositing, however, I usually do these things in different projects because I don't know how the blender renderer works.
My question is, when I press "render", how do I know whether it's gonna render the video clip or the camera view, or both?
How should I place my camera to make the objects I model appear on the video clip?
Thanks in advance.

If you uncheck sequencer, the sequencer strips are ignored. If you want to add your Scene to show up in the sequencer, add a Scene Strip.

I don't think I totally get it, could you be more clear?

In Properties, on the Output tab (looks like a printer icon), if you go to Post Processing there are 2 checkboxes for Compositing and Sequencer - for the Compositor and Video Sequencer, respectively.


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Blender Randomly colsing with EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION
When I use Blender it randomly closes without any error message.
I tried to open it via cmd and I noticed it always crashes with the error EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION
There's no specific situation when it happens (mostly while rendering, in every version), but it happens really frequently and it's becoming very annoying, I can't even render a single scene.
All graphics drivers are up to date, these are my specs:
CPU: Intel Core i7 6700HQ
RAM: 16GB
GPUs: Intel HD Graphics 530 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M (Blender is set to use this last one)

Might it be that your processor is overclocked a lot? Or maybe RAM?

Nope, I'm on a laptop, never done any overclocking whatsoever

I'm having this problem on my laptop as well. I've tried a bunch of solutions I googled but none of them have worked. Not sure what to try next.

I've already reported the bug, but they say it's somewhat related to my hardware. Anyway, I think it's not so uncommon


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How to get the angular position of a the rotating object of a motor constraint in python scripting during animation play ? (Blender 2.78)
I have a simple scene with a motor and its shaft on which a spool is attached.
The animation works, the shaft is rotating and I can control its value from python using :
bpy.data.objects['Constraint.motor'].rigid_body_constraint.motor_ang_target_velocity = 0.5

It must be possible to get the actual rotation (angular position) of the shaft, but when I do :
bpy.data.objects['Spool'].rotation_euler

it only gives me the Euler angles at keyframe 0, but not the actual value as the animation is being played.
Is their a way to access this value ?
The final goal is to simulate a motor encoder for a robotics simulation.
Thanks !

The Object's matrix_world is what you're after. Call to_euler(...) to get the Euler angles.
bpy.data.objects['Spool'].matrix_world.to_euler('XYZ')


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How to write to the vertex colors for each frame like animation
How to write to the vertex colors for each frame
ie. Is there a way to assign color to a loop index for each frame and that data should be available to the dependency graph.
Is this possible with bpy? baking physics button does this job I gues, maybe C code. any help in this direction ?


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How to make texture appear only in dark spots?
I'm trying to make a realistic earth but now comes the problem of the lights.
Since I'd like to make an animation I want the night lights(which are just a texture with an emission shader) to "appear" only where the light does not hit the earth.

I really think I just have to plug something into that fac input but I don't know what.

When I'll make the earth rotate I want the lights to stay only where the light does not hit the sphere.
Please Help me out here, I tried everything.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/86775/make-light-paths-only-pass-through-non-emitted-areas

I get what you mean, however, I saw that there are other ways to do it without using the light paths (which is impossible) but using the sun orientation and the earth orientation with a dot product. That doesn't work for me though, I don't know why...

Because the planet is a sphere, with no irregular self-shadowing, you can use a simple mask, in another object's space.
In this example, the planet is at the global origin, rotating about Z. Its diameter is 2 units. The sun is down positive X.
Add an Empty at the center of the planet. (Its local positive X points toward the sun). It will not rotate, while the planet does, and the mask between emissive and invisible lights will be in the empty's Object Space, not moving.
The lights texture is in the planet's Object Space, and turns with the planet.
A simple Black/White transition is made by a Color Ramp, down the X of the empty, and centered on it, to make the mask.  Dimensions may have to be changed, depending on your model.
So the tree is something like this:

(You will obviously be using your own textures, not procedural lights, as shown here, so those nodes don't matter)
With this sort of result:

If you're animating the planet going round the sun, you could parent the Empty to the sun, and the mask will stay pointing in the right direction..
or, in other circumstances, you could constrain the Empty to point its X at the sun in another way.

Wow, that worked man! Thank you so much, it was a great idea! However, the line that splits the dark and the lit section is not so smooth for me, I don't know if you have any idea, you solved my problem though.

I found that I was getting lighting artifacts if I used a point light at a great distance and high strength for the sun, so I wound up using a sun lamp instead.. But that really doesn't have anything to do with the shaders. The edge of the mask is procedural...  should be fine. How high a resolution is your 'lights'  texture? How smooth is your planet?

That's really not a big deal, I think I just made a mistake, I can't even notice it an more

I spent the better part of the day trying to figure out how to do this, and finally got it to work.

Here is my proposed solution:

It is using:

the initial sphere for the material
an empty that should be placed at the center of the sphere (not parented, you may use a constraint instead if you plan to move the sphere)
a sun lamp
3 drivers to check out the rotation of the sun object and use it to determine the  "shadowed" part of sphere

To create the drivers:

select the rotation X of Vector Mapping node
right click and select "Add driver"
check Type: Averaged Value (optional)
click Object and select the sun object
select the Type X rotation just below
(you may need to click on "Update Dependencies")
repeat for Y and Z properties

(Also, don't forget to set the Vector mapping Z value to -1)

Quick render of the example

.blend file available:


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optimize blenderswap models for unity (mobile use)
i like some of the models on blender swap but the issue most of them have the models as separate meshes and materials therefore it will be a lot of overhead on mobile performance, is there an easy way to open the file in blender and make all the meshes as one object with one material ,  and if there is also an easy way to reduce number of verts it will a lot of help?

There are lots of different ways to achieve what you want, but non of them are trivial, or immediate one-button-press-and-be-done-with-it processes

A, A, Ctrl + J.

As Duarte pointed out, there are no "easy" ways to optimize models for games - especially mobile games - efficiency is everything for mobile.  Most game models are built with a "budget" in mind, and every component of them - from the geometry to the textures to the rig and animations (if it has them) need to be carefully considered with that budget and  overall optimization in mind.  In my experience as a modeler (for games) high-resolution models can present a usable framework to build a low-poly version around and then maps and normals can be extracted - but it will be a very rare object that you will be able to use straight away.

An easy way to generate low-poly objects is to use the 'Decimate' Modifier. Just try the three different modes and see where you can remove the most faces so that the object still looks good enough


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Tracking your render progress
Doing high quality renders requieres too much time, we all know that.
Up until now I have always been roughtly calculating when I have to start then next render and many times it has ment getting up in the middle of the night to start up the next one.
Is there anyway to track the progress, for example when a render is done to get an alarm on Windows or on my phone?

yep: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Render/Notify_after_render

@brockmann Can you add it as an answer so that I can change it to "answered"?

As an off-topic suggestion: consider doing your renders via the command line, so that you can just concatenate several render instructions and have your N-th render start only when the (N-1)-th has finished. To concatenate, use ";" on Linux/macOS or "&" on Windows.

Glad it works for you, I'll post an answer asap @Bonorose

I am not sure you are still struggling with your render as its a late answer. But may be useful for some one else too.
Its not good to do that manually or set the finished alarm.
I will take back you to 90's where we can set the commands in command prompt in a batch, using batch files.
Lets say you want to render two files you may use it like this
cd C:\Users\Me\Downloads\blender-2.79-windows64

blender -b "D:\Path\Train 001.001.blend" -s 1 -e 2 -a

blender -b "D:\Path\Train 002.001.blend" -s 2 -e 4 -a

The first line is for the blender exe file path, you may set it according to your system.
The second and third lines are for rendering two different files and different frames.
You may save the above code in a text file and save it anywhere in your computer and with any name but extension should be .bat
Now right click on file (.bat) we just created and Run as administrator
You may add as much files and frames as you like
or have several interesting and useful render options here Command Line

I'm not sure if this helps, but if you have to render several images anyway, you could open blender in as much instances as needed, and render your images parallel. Your system will divide resources evenly, and after one job finishes, the other blender instances get more power accordingly.
Additionally, if you need one instance to finish before the others, try reducing the task priority of the lesser important renderings - at least under Windows this results in full system use for your first job while the others have to wait their turn.

Task priority is a more CPU related topic. Even if I was running a Xenon E7-8894 v4 this can not and will not compete with a dual or triple SLI configuration, which I am running on two machines (M TitanXs and 1070s). Also I have previously attempted this and after you run out of GPUs to allocate (let's say 1GPU per Blender instance) queueing more resulted in system instability.


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MultiGPU Blender setup - Running Blender on one and rendering on another
Is it possible to run Blender's interface on another GPU? I know you can run it on the integrated GPU, but can you do the same with a multi-GPU setup?
My idea comes from another question I asked recently - because of the high amount of vram the scene needs can't I dedicate 1 GPU to it and let the other handle the rendering, effectivly splitting vram usage.

You can assign your GPUs for rendering and display separately.
Just go to your User-Preferences, and in the System-Panel under Cycles Compute Device assign your secondary GPUs as render device, and disable the card that runs the display for rendering.

Nice setup! Lights must flicker in the whole block when you hit F12 :D

Didn't realize it would work like that. Thanks!


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Is it possible to use both Blender Render and Cycles in one render?
If I wanted to use cycles for a (example) floor and blender render for a (example) humanoid figure, how would I go about doing it? Is there a non complicated way to combine both cycles and blender render in one render output?
Thanks!

Use different scenes, one for Cycles, another for Internal and composite render layers.

Thanks I didn't know you could do that. You can submit that as an answer, it is one after all. Thanks again!


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getting problem in point weighting in blender
I set strength to 1 in weight paint mode, but I am getting green and yellow colors also at the edges along with red color.

This is caused by the "curve" parameter of the brush (in Photoshop is called "hardness").
In my example I've used 3 different curves, maybe you're looking for the second one (wich is the last preset on the right).
In the curve editor x axis is the distance from the center of the brush, y axis is the strenght of the stroke.

Thanks josh for your help, you are right i am looking for second one(only red color) but how to do that?I didn't get that.

You can click on the last of the 6 little buttons under the curve, or manually drag the points of the curve until you have an upper horizontal line (that means full action on the whole brush).


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Freestyle on Render Layers
This may be a question for the developers.
I am using several Render Layers to separate different freestyle line styles.
There is a freestyle option to cache the View Map, which works great if you use several line style within one line set (or several line sets within one layer).
However when is use different layers, the same scene mesh is loaded for every layer that uses freestyle.
This seems very unlogical to me. I can see no situation you would want recalc the View map for a different layer.
Is there a way to circumvent this?
Or would it be possible to adapt or change this in python?

Hi, please make sure your question title is descriptive of the problem you are having instead of just the general topic.

Any suggestion how to a make a descriptive title of a hard to describe question like this?

Unfortunately, I don't use freestyle enough to be able to understand the question, otherwise I would have edited it myself.


text:
Luxrender PBR materials
I know that you should usually ask questions about "direct problems" here but there is a problem where I can't find an answer to. There is a quite similar question but the answers don't really help me at all:
PBR dielectric material in luxrender?
Now here is the question:
A few days ago I have seen an amazing tutorial about PBR materials by BlenderGuru:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3wghbZ-Vh4
However, this tutorial only features the Cycles Render engine. Since I am trying to get used to LuxRender I cannot just use the .blend file from the project. I have already thought about just recreating the steps from the tutorials but since I am new to Blender I think it is better to ask for an advice.
Has anyone experience with LuxRender and PBR materials and give me a hint what to look up?
Thanks for any help.
Kind regards,
Fabian Lins

Have you researched which render engine is better for your needs before committing to learn another one? For faster learning I would just follow Andrew's, the BlenderGuru, tutorial to get familiar with Blender.

Thanks for the reply. For my current projects Cycles is probably the way to go however, I have heard that LuxRender is more accurate when it comes to realism and I don't think it is a bad idea to start getting used to it.

You can use Disney Shader in LuxCore Render Engine with PBR textures.
Connect Albedo multiplied by Ambient Occlusion (if any) in Disney Material Base Color. Normal map in Bump socket (Checking Normal map tick box). Roughness and Metallic in their corresponding sockets. See Displacement note below.
Things to check:

Base Color is the Albedo multiply by Ambient Occlusion and both needs gamma 2.20 (sRGB Color Conversion for a standard PBR texture.)
All other maps (metallic,roughness,displacement needs gamma 1.0 (Linear color for a standard PBR texture)
for Normal map check normal map in image node
for Displacement use height Displacement node>plug the displace texture in height socket and a subdivision node(For limiting subdivision amount) in shape socket and connect Height Displacement node in shape socket of Material output.

For more clarity, here is a PBR setup tutorial for Lux: https://youtu.be/AXACxDlvZAY
See the image attach:

Cool, thanks for taking the time and expanding the answer.


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Hotkey issues for deselect
I tried everything that I know to do but for some reason, out of nowhere, my deselect all "a" key will not deselect. I have to Shift+B to deselect all. I have a brand new computer and the deselect was working fine last week. I tried loading the factory settings from the file menu but same thing. I do not know anything about scripting so I wouldn't know where to begin. Any help is appreciated.

Have you checked into the Preferences > Input > 3D View > Object Mode > (De)select All, and change the shortcut back to A if it's not, then Save User Settings

Yes, it is labeld as A as well as double click. I didn't know about the double click but the "a" still does not deselect

What version of Blender? Where do you install it from? Also did you check the A key works in other programs?

Are you using an off-brand version of blender, such as "blender for artists" or the included maya/max layouts?

@MrZak I am using 2.79b installed from www.blender.org, The A key works everywhere except to deselect all

@Kirbinator, all I know is that I went to www.blender.org and clicked download

Have you installed any addons, updated drivers in last week. Does this happen in default file after "Restore Factory Settings"?

Uninstall The Blender 2.79b Then Reinstall It . If the problem still occurs try installing the blender 2.79a version of it.
HAPPY BLENDING

Got questions. Ask me

... and if the problem still occurs?  Reinstalling software IMO should be a last resort workaround.

yes. but the another version of 2.79