text:
Are there stock characters?
Newb here, just learning Blender.
In tutorials I see artists creating characters from scratch so I wondered are there stock, undefined characters that you can upload to Blender and then modify from there?
I'm also curious what are sources for character sketches if you don't make your own if maybe you don't draw so well? Is that even a thing?
Sorry for the maybe dumb questions. :)
Thanks.
Jazz

You can search for whatever baseobject you want in google with ".obj" or ".stl" in the search term. You can then import them into blender with "File -> import"

Oh, wow. Great info. I had not see that mentioned in the vids I've watched.  Thank you!!!

Here’s a list of useful websites for you :

https://sketchfab.com/feed
https://www.blendswap.com/
https://www.poliigon.com/
https://www.textures.com/library (they also have 3D models)
https://www.blenderkit.com/

The last link I believe would be the most interesting for you. You just need to create an account. Download the zip file of the add on. Go to file > Preferences > Add ons > Install. And then open the zip file. There are many tutorial videos. You don’t need to browse the web to use this add on, once installed.
Hope that helped.

Thanks so much!!!!!


text:
Issues with texturing an egg shape - Displace Modifier
So I would like to make some textured egg models for 3D printing. I took the default cube, subdivided it and then used the Cast modifier to ensure quads. I then selected the model, assigned the entire model into a Vertex Group. Finally adding the Displace modifier and the texture including another subdivision modifier.
The final result is pictured below. Both top and bottom of the mesh has the exact same crazy pattern as if the texture is squashed?
Where did I go wrong?
Kind regards and thank you in advance. Any advice is appreciated greatly.

Edit
Without the quads I end up with the tomato topology on both top and bottom on the model.

I think it's related to the fact that you have 'corners' on the top and bottom where 3 quads come together.  (You can see the 'Y' in the edges at those corners.)  I suspect that they match the original corners of the cube and are where your deformation weirdness happens.

@MartyFouts Thank you for the response. So I guess that using the cube is a bad idea for this sort of shape when applying textures?

I think spheres are just hard to texture no matter how you generate them.  I'm sorry I can't be more help.

What sort of displacement are you looking for?

@MartyFouts Thank you for pointing out the 3 quads though, that is a useful step in this investigation.

@RobinBetts I'm looking for a way of consistent displacement for the top and bottom as shown throughout the rest of the model without the craziness as pictured. I've edited the post to show what happens when the topology has triangles on the top instead of quads.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
How can I clean the topology of this rectangular shape which was beveled?
I was wondering if there are methods of improving the topology to prevent ngons from occurring in the shape pictured below:

I have attempted to inset the face to continue quads but it ends up like this:

When attempting to add more loop cuts and auto smooth, the ngon has artefacts. Attempting to sculpt doesn't allow any work done to the object.

I appreciate your help.

hello, you don't necessarily need to avoid ngons if the ngon doesn't cause any problem

@moonboots thank you for your reply. Unfortunately I'm having issues when trying to sculpt. Also when adding more loop cuts and auto smoothing it causes strange artefacts, I have updated the post with a picture attached.

If you want to sculpt, keep a low-poly version, then you could create this topology for example:

Then subdivide with a Subdivision Surface modifier in order to get enough topology

Thank you for showing me this, to achieve the desired result in the first image was this just a matter of a simple Subdivision Surface modifier applied?  Or was this a remesh?

i've used J to join and alos the knife (K to activate, A to cut orthogonally), and for the horizontal edge loops on bottom part I've loop cut (Ctrl R)

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


text:
how to apply a bevel modifier for sharp edges from a rig
I have a simple rig that works great for animating opening and closing a box based on this tutorial.
Is it possible to add an edge bevel modifier when there are sharp edges from a rig?

Hello, what do you mean by "sharp edges from a rig"? Please show some pictures. I guess you can add a bevel modifier without problem

when I create a mesh (for example a basic cube) I can easily add an edge bevel modifier that smoothes out the edges. when I create a cube from the tutorial linked above by rigging a flattened die-cut it also creates sharp edges from the folds that we'd like to bevel

maybe put the Bevel modifier before the Armature modifier? If it doesn't work show some pictures or even share your file

as moonboots commented, yes you can:  [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/Fbl8U.gif

not sure how to share a file but I've added a screenshot

Sure you can. See this video posted on YT 5 days ago.

thank you everyone -- all your comments and links really helped. after spending all day and looking online for bevel issues I got it to work by turning off "clamp overlap". for whatever reason it bevels fine when I manually fold the edges but if I use the rig to fold the edges I need to turn off "clamp overlap" to get it to bevel


text:
Please tell how this whole mesh is modelled...?

I am not able to understand how this shape has been modelled. I really need to learn this.. please help.

Don't understand the question. You seem to have the mesh so can't you just look at it in edit mode? What exactly are you struggling with?

One way could be:

Make a cylinder.
Make two loop cuts per paddle. I just start with two loop cuts overall and will do the others later. (STRG+R)
Move the loop cuts close together, or not so close for the thing at top. (Mark one loop with ALT+Click and move with G.

Extrude then scale these faces (E then S)
Now select some vertices first at top and scale to 0 (Sthen Ythen 0). Make sure you mark all the vertices (at top and bottom layer oder the paddle)
Move these vertices as it is seems right. (G, then Y).
Do the same with the vertices on the other side (or delete half of the mesh and use the mirror modifier).
Now move the outer vertices at the z-axis with proportional editing activated (O and SHIFT + O for mode selection). . You can also scale on the x-axis to make them closer to the cylinder. You can also scale the top ring of the paddle in a similar way to achieve a look closer to the model you presented.
Use the subdivision surface modifier on the mesh. To avoid strange behaviour at top and bottom of the cylinder, add a loop cut close to the top and bottom.
Play around with the exact positions.
The top paddle is thicker as the others, but it should be possible with the same techniques.

My final result looks at least similar to the one you showed:

This should give you one possible idea for the mesh.

Does this answer your question appropriately?

thank you so much god bless you.. that should do it..


text:
Use Blender2.8 grease pencil as live texture
Is there any way that a stroke object can be used as a 2d texture? (Blender 2.8)
I would like to be able to use my animated stroke, as a texture which I plug into whatever material I want. This could be used for 2d cartoonish facial expressions, which are then wrapped over 3d objects, and used over multiple materials at the same time. Is this possible?
I can already guess that rendering the 2d animation to a movie and importing the said movie and using it as a texture is, in fact, a possible solution. However I find myself desiring something a bit more live, so I can edit strokes and see immediate results. (not to mention the loss of quality when rendering it to a movie and reimporting it)
Edit:
I'm also using cycles

I want to know the same thing!  To bad this hasn't had much attention.  :(


text:
Dope sheet summary name part is hidden

Does anyone know how I can get the name of my dope sheet things back up without restarting my entire file?
The second picture is what happens when I press T. It didn't work sadly.

try pressing the Home key while the mouse is over the dope sheet and yes, I am clutching at straws

Just press the little + button

Press T , and your panel should come up.


text:
How can I make the 'delete' key immediately delete faces instead of displaying the 'delete' menu?
I'm a beginner in blender. I want to delete a face, but pressing the X to delete the face brings up a menu like this:

I do not want to display the menu and delete the face each time I press X, I want to delete the selection as soon as I press X.
How can I make this happen?

As Jonathan said below, you cannot avoid that menu, but doing the
  specific selection of faces may help you out.

There are two ways:
Selection by C:
Press C to make easier selection of faces you want to delete by clicking and moving mouse on the faces and delete Faces, you can change the size of the selection cursor by scrolling in and out middle mouse button. You can also Deselect incorrect selection by pressing middle mouse.

Revise:Press C and: Left click and Drag to
  Select. Middle Click and Drag to
  Deselect.

Shift + Left-Click:
It can also be done by Shift and clicking the faces to make selection.
Delete all the selection with only one click and your are done.

They know how to delete, they want to avoid seeing the menu every time.

@RayMairlot Yes, but the question was just about saving time, no matter how, and this the way they can do it. Is my answer not related to the question?

There is no specific way to change that. The delete menu is important, because blender needs to know what part of your selction you want to delete, because there is a huge difference between deleting only the face and deleting all selected vertices.


text:
How to Export a BoxCutter mesh into a renderer?
Blender beginner here.
I'm playing with MasterXeon1001's amazing BoxCutter add-on in Blender2.8, and I'm getting undesired results when I try exporting my cut-up model into Octane (see image).
Is there a certain process that I need to do while exporting for the exported object to look the way it does in Blender?  I've tried exporting as both an OBJ and an FBX, but have similar results.
Thanks in advance!

What did you try so far? How did you export your model? Format? Export parameters?  You can add the missing information to your question by using the edit link below it.

Updated the post to reflect this.  I only tried exporting as an OBJ and an FBX.  Neither have worked.

Export parameters still missing...

Sorry!  Once again, im a newbie in both Blender and the world of 3D.  Bare with me.  I've included the parameters in a new photo in the post

Box cutter and similar addons are boolean based. Boolean operations are (as you can see) very bad workflow in Blender. You problem lies not in export, it comes from unclean modelling techniques.

So there is no way to freeze the geometry (as bad and dense as it is) to open it up in a new program?

Bumping this up, as I still have not received an answer

Import to sustance painter and then export remember Apply triangulation

I have found a solution. Modus Destructive not Non destructive. Export as .stl file.

Note: In boxcutter, you can work non-destructively for a while, and when you're satisfied, you can apply the modifier stack to get a final mesh.


text:
Animating a rigid body collision with keyframes?
I'm new to physics in blender so I apologize if this is a trivial problem.
I'm trying to make a sphere slowly push through a wall of bricks in zero-G.  I set the individual bricks to Rigid Body, and applied Rigid Body to the sphere as well.  But when I try to keyframe the sphere's forward movement along the Y axis, it snaps back into its original place in frame 1.
As a workaround I tried creating a "pusher" object behind the cube to scoot it along, set that to passive rigid body, and it just goes right through the cube and the bricks.  Setting it to Active also didnt help.
How can I achieve what i'm aiming for?  Seems weird that such a simple idea is so difficult to get to work.

File:

You need to enable "animated" on the sphere's rigid body settings.

doing that causes the sphere to not interact with the bricks

Then there's some other problem in addition, but unfortunately, we can't tell you what it is with the info provided in this question.

Please share your file: https://blend-exchange.com/

A share would help folks spot the problem much more quickly than a discussion .. please edit one into your post, as suggested.

As Nathan wrote, you have to set "animated" that you can keyframe a rigid body.
Of course the animated rigid body need two keyframes so that it really "moves". is it possible that you have a third keyframe on your sphere? unfortunately you didn't show us any of your keyframes nor your rigid body settings so we can just guess.
I made a small demo blend file, how it could work, hopefully it helps:
Animating a rigid body collision with keyframes?
result:

the left box is animated and has two keyframes for location. The others have just rigid body active (cubes) and passive (ground)

I have it set up like your demo, the cube (now a cone, i changed the shape for a tapered look) has two keyframes to move it, but it just passes right through the bricks.  I've been trying to upload the file for awhile now but it's taking forever

I've uploaded the blend file, would appreciate anyone who takes a look and tries to see what's wrong

i am not 100% sure but i would say your file is corrupt. I just added a plane as rigid body object and it didn't move at all. Did you ever remove your rigid body world or changed the collections?

proposal: open a brand new blender file and append your objects. Then it works (at least i did this with your bricks and they started to fall down, which yours didn't which is awkward)

yeah, i also appended your cone and it worked as expected: [2]: https://i.sstatic.net/m00sw.gif  so i can just assume you played around with collections/remove rb world (which when i did that, i had similar problems) and that made your file corrupt


text:
Surface deform with geometry nodes
I want to this object
cover with this
to make this sofa:
Im taking UV from object and putting weave on it then deform it in initial object.
My geometry nodes setup:
Weave purfectly fit uv but problem is that it did not deform back in original shape correctly. Weave flat after deforming.

Can you pls tell me what i do wrong?

For this you should rather use a Shader instead of Geometry Nodes. I'm pretty sure @Crantisz would get that done with a few nodes ;-)

Maybe. But the goal is to make it with geometry nodes.

OK, this will certainly be fun. Do you have any idea how you want the transitions at the edges to look? ...especially with the curvature it might be difficult. How do you want the geometry to run there?

Literaly no idea... one step at the time... I was thining about carefuly and strategically placed uv island so transition wont be noticible, but i have my doubts...

Yes, me too, which is why I advise you to use a shader here. In your example photo, it's not clear how the transition at the edges is designed, and how the fibers run here. Also, you won't be able to solidly match an existing mesh with GN to this shape (at least not with reasonable effort) and creating the mesh in GN requires a more detailed plan of how the result should look at the edges. ...just my tip on this.

At least, according to my estimation, this is relatively complex, even if it may look simple. And since you don't understand the "stolen" nodes either, I doubt anyone here is really rebuilding this thing for you. So in my opinion, the question should rather aim for a solution with shaders, or be closed.

Its not your place to tell me that i cant understand the answer. If you don't have anything helpful to say, pls just go away.

.... I'm very sorry that you feel attacked, but I really wanted to help you. And in the end, you were the one who said he only understood half of the stolen nodes.

If i understood them all i would not need to post questions here, I could have done all by myself... Always thought this is the place to ask questions when you dont understand stuff. My misstake i guess...

@Psion quellenform
is trying to help, You should try and collaborate with the people trying to understand your issue, rather that drive them away

@Duarte Farrajota Ramos He literaly told me that i should do shaders like he said or close the question. Im sorry, but this anything but collaboration. Question was about geo nodes. Not shaders.

I wanted to help you, and I just wanted to tell you that the question, as it is currently formulated, does not specify the task clearly enough for Geometry Nodes. Closing a question is basically the way to react to unclearly formulated questions. As soon as the question is informative and the task is clearly formulated, I am sure that people can be found here on BSE who can help you. Since you yourself have given to understand that you are actually not clear on what exactly this should look like, I would suggest that you tweak your question. All this was not meant in a bad or personal way.

@quellenform I have no idea how more clearly can i ask question "Why weave come out flat?" I didnt ask anything more than that. Well, whatever, close, dont close, i dont care anymore...

It comes out flat because you use Transfer Attribute and Set Position to move all points to the nearest position of the underlying shape. But you're right, I have interfered too much here. Sorry about that, good luck!

This is a fairly unrefined version of a possible strategy.

Save the target's 'Position' attribute, before..
Splitting the target's edges and flattening its geometry to its own UV Map.
Fire rays down from a sheet of wrapper geometry onto the flattened target
Use 'Hit' to trim wrapper-sheet
Pick up the pre-flattened target Position from the ray
Warp the wrapper using that position

(This is the step I think you're looking for....)

Thicken the wrapper by some scale of its original Z, along (the unflattened ) target's transferred Normal.

'Unrefined', because there's probably a nicer way of handling seams, reducing gaps. But this is maybe a start.

Edit
In response to commentary. The best luck I've had so far with a trim to cover seams, maintaining a half-decent topology, is to delete the original mesh where it is not close to UV seams, and extrude the rest:

With this sort of result.. it's pretty twitchy, but with careful attention to bevelling the original, seam placement, and scaling UV islands, could be OK:

Thank you! But i got some distortion waves https://imgur.com/a/6hpEedn If i decrease mutliply value on wraper to lessen the destortion, weave became almost flat again :(

Hi, @Psion ! Can you share a faulty sample on blend-exchange? It may help 'refine' the answer.

Sure. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rUBAMw1a3UzNv0-w4pEIjVMgQzCd4DEy/view?usp=sharing

@Psion attending to it. The main problem has been the base geometry (inconsistent normals, duplicate vertices, etc.) But, even having cleaned that up, your example has thrown up an edge-case in the GN modifier,  which I think I've diagnosed OK, (ray-cast is prone to floating-point error) ... so trying to find a neat fix for that.

@Psion Okydoky, so far, so good. Any other problems, ideas for tweaks, fire away. Here's the file. You could, for example, arrange for a trim to be put over seams, just like in RL,

Amazing! It works! :) Tnx so much. Was banging on this wall for a week now. My idea for seam edges was to carefuly place weave so that it merges with other parts. Is it even posible to make it automatically? Or only by hands?

@Psion I was having fun thinking of ways to make a trim. But lining  the weave up automatically  would be very tricky, I think, unless you made some sort of procedural weave in 3D space, like a shader, maybe .. worth a thought, but I think the automation would be so case-by-case for the wrappers that by hand is probably better and quicker. .. you never know, there are some very cunning folks here.. :)

I was afraid of this. Wanted to make it all procedural, it would have been so cool :) Well about trim, i added node to isolate trims but dont know how to wrap them. Sadly i yet to fully understand your nodes :(  https://blend-exchange.com/b/eBrjydmy

@Psion OK, some progress, see edit to answer, The best way to understand the processes in a GN tree, I've found, is to Shift-Alt Click nodes to see the output of various branches. (Node Wrangler must be  installed)

Yea, i know about wrangler, without it there no chance to understand any node setup :) So i tried to look up how this done in other 3d application. And found out that in 3ds max there Ornatrix weaver modifier. It uses splines and UV islands that very close to each other to seamlesly connect edges. Here, maybe it be of some use: https://youtu.be/RZbY6d9DY0M?t=214


text:
Make holes in complex curved surface for subdiv
I need to make a chair with many holes in it.

I made base carcass with subdiv

But how do i make holes? Problem is if i add more topology to make this holes there too much topology and i need to make every little bit of this curve by hands (with prety much impossible or too much work). But if i try to add holes after subdiv there too much mesh and problems with shading.
Is there a way too make it without spending 40+ hours moving every verticle to its place?

did u try boolean modifier?

i ask how make it easier, not harder :)

then u should improve your question and write what you did try and what you don't want....how should we know?

I didnt know that i need to explain that subdiv and boolean dont work well together. I thought its common knowledge. My bad. Also its almost impossible to make this shape using boolean...

Supposing you have already created the form of your seat as a single skin:

Then one way to retopologize a portion of it, so you can simply remove faces to create the slots, would be, with a helping hand from Geometry Nodes, to extract 2 matched edges from your form:

The top edge is duplicated from part of the boundary, the bottom edge is the result of a horizontal Bisect operation, with both the 'Inner' and 'Outer' cleared. They're converted to curves, which can be resampled to matching counts with a tiny GN modifier:

So, as on the right above, they can be Converted back to Mesh, linked with Bridge Edge Loops, and have a couple of even cross-loops cut in.

The cross-loops can be bevelled with 2 segments, and a selection made as shown above, with the help of CtrlShiftNumpad +. If you delete those faces, the resulting topology survives  Solidify, Bevel , and Subdiv modifiers, when eventually assigned.
There various routes to deriving the seat-base from this geometry (Grid-Fill and projected Shrinkwrap to your original form?) .. I guess that's another question.

Amazing. This exactly what i asked for. Thank you very much. But what about bottom? Connect it by hands?

I won't deny its fiddly, I've gone far enough with it for proof-of-concept, before posting. My method was: (Still in single-skin,) 1. F close the bottom edge to cyclic, subdivide the closing edge to  roughly the same density, ensuring an even count in the whole loop, and Grid Fill. Then shrink-wrap the seat in Z to the original form. (The shrink-wrap can be aimed at a vertex-group, and adjustments weight-painted in)


text:
Adjusting a texture's color temperature
I'm fairly new to Blender. I have a HDRI background and I wonder if it's possible to adjust the texture's color temperature using a blackbody node.
Thanks in advance.

To adjust the color temperature I believe you must use some color adjustment node live RGB Curves or Hue Saturation. The Black Body node is used more commonly to simulate realistic lamp light color by converting temperature color into standard RGB

I think I've seen CG cookie has a node package including a color temperature node.

Multiplying the color of the HDRi with the blackbody color seems to do what you want. I don't know if it's physically accurate however.
Multiply node is added by adding a Color > MixRGB node and changing the operator to Multiply

No, you cannot just multiply some warm or cold color over the image - because that will change the luminance of the image. RGB needs to be converted into HSL, do the temperature adjustment on H and S channels and the L channel needs to remain unchanged. Then converted back to RGB. It is though much better to directly change the whitepoint of image by converting into XYZ space then into LAB, where the reference white point can be easily changed.

You can check the luminance by this formula L=0.5*(max(R,G,B)+min(R,G,B))

hmm, debating whether to delete the answer or not. It still gives the reader somewhere to start...

just for the record, this helps, but its not what i needed.
a hue node worked for me but not to my exact needs.

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


text:
Unregistered "static draw" handler for sequencer
I'm trying to write a sequencer add-on. I need it to add a bgl UI on top of the sequencer timeline, without a real interactive part, so I'm trying to make it a kind of "static handler" (I'm no coder, I don't know the specific term for it) instead of a modal operator with timer.
So far, I have this working, but I can't find a way to unregister it correctly when deactivating the add-on...
Here's example code with "hello world":
bl_info = {
 "name": "modaltest",
 "author": "tonton",
 "version": (0, 1),
 "blender": (2, 7, 9),
 "location": "Sequencer",
 "description": "",
  "wiki_url": "",
 "tracker_url": "",
 "category": "Sequencer"}

import bpy
import bgl
import blf

def draw_callback_px():

    font_id = 0  # XXX, need to find out how best to get this.

    # draw some text
    blf.position(font_id, 15, 30, 0)
    blf.size(font_id, 20, 72)
    blf.draw(font_id, "Hello Word ")

def register():
    bpy.types.SpaceSequenceEditor.draw_handler_add(draw_callback_px, (), 'WINDOW', 'POST_PIXEL')

def unregister():
    bpy.types.SpaceSequenceEditor.draw_handler_remove(draw_callback_px)

I tried a bunch of ways to unregister the handler, nothing so far has worked. Do you know what I am doing wrong? Thank you very much in advance! :D

2d example: How to draw shapes in the node editor with python bgl? Just replace the Space to SpaceSequenceEditor and Area.type

thanks for the answer, but i don't have problem with the drawing itself, but i don't want it to be a modal. In my code you can see i register the handler, not a modal. This way, the drawing is here anytime (loaded at opening) when the script is installed as an addon, but i can't find the way to unregister it...

Similarly there is this method that doesn't require a modal handler.

thanks @batFINGER, this method seems to work also, but i don't have a clue to unregister this properly neither... (sorry if that's a dumb question!)

NP.  Suggest make a global list or dic eg widgets = {} defined globally. Add to in register widgets["Foo"] = DisplayClass() and in unregister for key, dc in widgets.items(): dc.remove_handle()  Note might be an issue passing context as argument from register method, could instead use bpy.context in draw callback.  It's late here, will get back to it if need be.

Define a "drawing class".
Similarly to method used in this answer  When registered the widgets are drawn on all VSE spaces.  When unregistered the drawing handles are removed.  Simple message and location passed to class.  In script below two "widgets" are created drawing "Bob" and "Jack" at different locations on VSE.

bl_info = {
 "name": "VSE blf test",
 "author": "",
 "version": (0, 1),
 "blender": (2, 7, 9),
 "location": "Sequencer",
 "description": "",
  "wiki_url": "",
 "tracker_url": "",
 "category": "Sequencer"}

import bpy
import blf

class DrawingClass:
    def __init__(self, msg, loc):
        self.msg = msg
        self.loc = loc
        self.handle = bpy.types.SpaceSequenceEditor.draw_handler_add(
                   self.draw_text_callback,(loc,),
                   'WINDOW', 'POST_PIXEL')

    def draw_text_callback(self, loc):
        font_id = 0  # XXX, need to find out how best to get this.

        # draw some text
        x, y = self.loc
        blf.position(font_id, x, y, 0)
        blf.size(font_id, 66, 72)
        blf.draw(font_id, "%s" % (self.msg))

    def remove_handle(self):
         bpy.types.SpaceSequenceEditor.draw_handler_remove(self.handle, 'WINDOW')

widgets = {}
def register():
    widgets["Bob"] = DrawingClass("Bob", (0, 0))
    widgets["Jack"] = DrawingClass("Jack", (140, 140))

def unregister():
    for key, dc in widgets.items():
        dc.remove_handle()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

Might find this handy for 2D  coordinates in VSE.
PS.  Initially forgot to change SpaceView3D type in handle_remove, and found another sure fire way to crash blender.  Suggest actually passing the space type to class as well as demonstrated in BGLWidget class

thanks a lot for this very complete answer ! works like a charm ! you, sir, just made my day ! :)

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


text:
Settings to improve animation render speed
My system is very underpowered. But I’m hoping, someone might be able to tell me what settings I could use to get the best outcome.
I’m using Blender to create a 3D version of my band's logo. I want to animate the camera rotating around the logo, but up close, just viewing small sections at a time. The animation has a particle plane (that uses three circles to animate floating embers).
I started a real small render (100 frames last night... and I’m estimating it to take 15 hours, for approximately 4 seconds of animation)
My system is iMac 21.5inch, late 2013
2.7ghz quad core intel core i5
8gb ram 1600 MHz ddr3
Graphics - Intel iris pro 1536 mb
Engine is cycles on CPU
Light bounce total set at 2
Tiles set to 16x16
Resolution 1920px x 1080px
24fps
Sampling is set at “render 200”
Format is set to avi jpeg
Quality 80%
Because it’s for social media (insta and Facebook) can I maybe get away with reducing certain things? Or changing settings somewhere to speed up the render?

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/52559/how-to-render-a-scene-faster-in-cycles

You can consider using the Eevee render engine, which is much faster than Cycles.
It is less photo-realistic, but it seems to me that photo-realism is likely not a requirement for your logo.
To switch renderers, go to the Render Properties tab, and select "Eevee" in the Render Engine dropdown.

Ohh really, I thought cycles was faster? Just going off one YouTube tutorial

Nope, Eevee is much faster. Eevee uses rasterization instead of raytracing, making it almost realtime. Give it a try - the two engines are compatible, so you won't need to change much besides the renderer.

Amazing! It actually looks better in eevee and took 5 mins to render  thank you


text:
How to get candle flame
Using the fire simulation, I want to create a candle flame. What settings should I use for this? I'm bit confused: the flame goes up or gives extra fire. I'm getting a circular effect at the bottom and I need the effect in the reference image: pointed upward, and not circular at the base. What am I missing to get that small candle fire light effect?

I got this flame:

 here is your flame, you can play with the settings
huge effects on this type of fire have :
resolution
vorticities (0 = flat smoke stream)
disolve dont use smoker high resolution for this.

related: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/43248/make-the-flame-of-a-candle-more-yellow

Looks good Thanks for sending the file. How can i control the height. I want the height of the flame should me low or less. Other than that its look perfect. So can u go in detail little how to control the height to make it shrink half of its original size for now. Thanks

on the outer side cube try the setting "smoke flames" speed.
that should mimic how fast the material burns, ea benzine vs wood

Related: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/101694/procedural-candlelight/101701#101701


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Newb looking for project advice
I am working on a tutorial of a rocket, it is going well but I would like to modify it. I know that there are a lot of ways to approach it but I am looking for the best way to make the inside of the rocket hollow so eventually you will be able to see something in the window.
If I start by making a hollow cube will it remain hollow even after I put it through many modifications and scalings?
Boolians?

I understand your description. I think part of my confusion is that I'm having a problem with the boolean modifier. I believe I'm applying it correctly.

The thing hollow is kind of uncertain naming. Blender use surface based model for manipulate, which only surfaces are defined in your scene. So yes, every thing you see in your model can be a hollow thing by its model properties.
Maybe you are asking a closed surface behavior after manipulating? In that case, making a shell for the rocket will be a better idea. Using Solidify Modifier can make the object getting a thickness shell surface. So when you look inside the rocket through the tiny window, the surface will not be the wrong direction (backface).
But when the backface is not a consideration. You don't need to solidify it if the view is OK with backface as below:

You don't need to care if your shape is hollow or not, just model your rocket, if the shape is closed it will be considered as full, but at any moment you can dig a hole and it will appear hollow, then if you want to give it back thickness you can easily do it: extrude the whole mesh and scale down, or simply use a modifier Solidify and apply at the end.

I understand your description. I think part of my confusion is that I'm having a problem with the boolean modifier. I believe I'm applying it correctly.   Unfortunately, I'm not able to add a jpeg to comments but when I add a boolean modifier to 2 intersecting meshes a hole (difference0 is not cut.

Actually I didn't boolean, I made a hole, extrude the hole and scaled down, then use the W > LoopTools > Circle (LoopTools needs to be activated)

yes, as Cegaton says, use Circle tool or shift alt S to transform to circle


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What causes these black streaks along certain (concave?) edges?
I have a model with an open mesh terrain surface and some closed building meshes – when rendering in Cycles I'm seeing black streaks along some mesh edges.
On the building models it seems to be wherever there's a concave edge connecting two faces, on the terrain it's less clear but I think also at concave edges:

What is causing this??
Edit: Here's what the material nodes look like:

And how it appears in a full render:

Also, after duplicating and separating out a section of the terrain mesh for clarity, and correcting the normals:

Blendfile:

Is this image from a view window in rendered mode?  Does it do this on a full render?  Can you show the material node graph?

added a link at the bottom of the original question

Your scene was hard to use. I had to change things.
- applied scale of everything
- changed the origins to geometry
- moved everything back to world origin (35km away on X, 7km on Y)
It seems to fix the artifacts.
I can't tell exactly what happened but it is probably because blender has some limits calculating surfaces with big numbers like that (scale issue).

I also change unit system, unit scale, disconnected HDR world texture and propably a few things here and there while testing...

Amazing! Thanks so much for troubleshooting this. Going to just spell out a few things here to help other people find this if they're having the same problem – the scene geometry here is derived from GIS data, in a  State Plane Coordinate System. In other modeling software like Rhino it's not uncommon to maintain the origin/units from this rather than an arbitrary origin based on your geometry. But, as @Bithur points out, Blender has trouble with these large coordinate values so it's better to establish a project-specific origin.

Glad to help :) It's also easier for navigation. With the option "rotate around selection" and object's origin kms away it was a bit hard to move the view in object mode. I think i can help with clipping too

You need to recalculate the normals of your mesh.
go in edit mode with TAB
select all with A 1 time, or 2 times, or 3 times (depending on if something is selected and if you're using 2.79 or 2.8)
- If you're using 2.79 or earlier, use Ctrl+N (recalculate outside) or Shift+Ctrl+N (recalculate inside)
- If you're using 2.8, Shift+N (recalculate outside) or Shift+Ctrl+N (recalculate inside)

You'll find many questions and answers about normals if you want to know more about them. This answer is just an update because of 2.8 changing keyboard shortcuts. more about normals

I'll take a look at the link, thanks for sharing. After recalculating the normals though things are looking more or less the same, see updated post above. Any other ideas? Could having an irregular mesh topology have something to do with it?

Also, using the smooth tool on the mesh makes many of the streaks go away, but on others it just moves them around...


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Shade Smooth vs. edges
Here is a strange thing:
it's a polyhedron and it's shade is flat:

i want to smoothen it's faces, so i use "Shade Smooth":

weird things happend with edges - no good.
Than i separate polyhedron's faces:

and here it is - result that i want. Than i join back polyhedron's faces:

and it's edges don't retein their previous "weird" state, they stay the way that i want them to be.
Why is it happens, and is there a shorter way to get result that i want?

Use smooth shading and turn on Object Data Properties/Normals/auto smooth should do it.

By splitting and re-joining the faces, you're creating double edges.
That improves shading on sharp edges (since the edges are no longer continuous).
You can achieve the same by adding the Edge Split Modifier.

Or by selecting all vertices and using Edge > Split


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In add-on script, how to automatically rewrite string in the bottom statusbar on each edge select/deselect in edit mode
I'm trying to write my first add-on that should tell me the summary length of selected edges in edit mode if there are any. I got the part with getting selected edges and counting sum length, but what I am currently struggling to do is

to get add-on invoked on each edge select/deselect

to update the sum value to display result on the bottom statusbar (where the name of the active object, amount of vertices/edges/faces are displayed)
For the first one I guess there could be some sort of callback/delegate that I could assign for every select and deselect to be invoked, but I don't know which to use. For the second I guess (and hope) I just need to know which variable to use.

I'm using blender 2.8.71 beta if that matters.
Thanks

I only answer the second one for you since it is a little bit hard to find. But it is actually very useful in many case.
status_text_set(string)
status_text_set(text) in bpy.types.WorkSpace(ID):

classmethod status_text_set(text)
Set the status bar text, typically key shortcuts for modal operators

Parameters:    text (string) – Text, New string for the status bar, None clears the text

So we can bpy.types.WorkSpace.status_text_set("hello world") to set the status bar, cool.
Or since context got an workspace as well, use context.workspace.status_text_set("foo") will be a better idea when using in operator or function which has it own context. - @batFINGER

Important
Clear the content by assign it a None, or it will keep showing there until next function call. You should consider clear it after you leave your operator.

Cool  could also use the instance  context.workspace.status_text_set("foo")

@batFINGER Yeah, that should be better than access bpy.types.

Thanks @Hikariztw. Unfortunately I am currently unable to use blender and check how that will work for me but I will do it to the end of the next week. Also, regarding the first question. If it is a very common question how to invoke add-on method on each edge select/deselect, could you please refer me to another SO thread or perhaps an article describing that since I failed to find a clear explanation on my own.


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Connect\join multiple vertices to one

I need to make topology tris\quad. So usualy i join verteces one by one to opposite vertex. But in most cases i need to join many verteces to only one or two. Its not hard but it is time consuming.
So the question is there an easier way to join them? For example join all selected to last selected or something like this? Some add-on?

Merge Vertices -> At last is a real tool… what do you mean?

I think he means 'join with edges' rather than merging verts, presumably to try to avoid shading problems.

If this is to avoid shading problems, see this YT video from Josh Gambrell which might help.

I mean join vertices, not merge them. Join 2 vertices, one from circle and an other from main part of the object.
Also not a shading issue. Topology issue. How to make topology with less effort.

I don't think that sort of join will improve your topology, so that means I don't understand what you're trying.  What do what to accomplish by just a join?

You can try selecting the face instead of the vertex and pressing ctrl + T to triangulate it, and then in the bottom left menu that pops up, select "longest diagonal," that might give you the result you're looking for.

Couldn't think of a native way, maybe there's some addon..?
here's a little script that should work on a topolgy like that
# connect selected vertices to active one in edit mode

import bpy, bmesh
ob = bpy.context.object

bm = bmesh.new()
bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(ob.data)
bm.verts.index_update()
active = bm.select_history[-1]
select = [v for v in bm.verts if v.select]
select.remove(active)

for v in select:
    verts = [active, v]
    bmesh.ops.connect_vert_pair(bm, verts=verts)

bmesh.update_edit_mesh(ob.data)

you can use addon interactive tools, the function is called super smart create, it does exactly what you need on verts, it can also fills selected edges with faces.


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Is there a limit for how many Stored Named Attributes you can have in a geometry node or receive in a material?

I've been using Stored Named Attributes on this geo node to pass the values to the shader editor - and I've noticed some attributes on the shader have stopped receiving info -, and when I tried "muting" a few Stored Named Attributes on the geo node, some others started working again.
There are no competing attributes or something like that, I've more than triple checked.
I looked up how many attributes I have and they are 22. I never thought there was a limit. Is it like 20?
Or is this a glitch maybe? I'm on 4.0.2.
Edit: Is this it? https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender-manual/issues/92448

You link to an Eevee, not geonodes limitation:

Moreover, each of those can be read in Eevee:

It is when you use too many attributes in a single shader, that the later attributes are not loaded to the GPU memory - I was able to load up to 14 attributes at once:

When testing, change the "Iterations" or otherwise modify the node tree to force reevaluation...

Oh wow... So the max is 14 on a single material? Thats so low for complex projects. When you say to modify the node tree to force reevaluation, you mean compromissing others/swapping the ones that are ON, or that there is a way to read all the attributes by forcing it? And how would one achieve that? Thank you I really appreciate it.

@PedroRibeiro I simply mean that when you test out which attributes you can read or not in the shader, make sure to change some value in the geonodes - afterwards you can again change it back (but better don't use the ctrl+z to undo), to make sure the object is refreshed.

Are these limitations all the same on Win-Mac-Linux systems?

New info and (partial) solution
After the input from Markus von Broady's answer, I took a different turn on my project to account for the attributes limit in the shader editor. For this, I had to rearrange the way I was making my mesh so that the inputs that came from the geometry nodes to the shader editor were not all compacted in a single material but spread through various materials, each one not exceeding the supposed 14 limit per material.
Meanwhile all this, I also got an idea ((not a new concept but)) for virtually increasing the max number of attributes by 4 times. This is done by compacting 3 values/attributes all in one vector or a color and then unpacking them on the shader editor. Color has 4 floats instead of 3 (R,G,B, Alpha) but as in per 4.1.0 alpha the Separate Color node has alpha channel only on Geometry Nodes but not on the Shader Editor, which means you would be able to compact it, but then not to extract the 4th value in the alpha channel. EDIT!: Later after this post I freaking realized you can actually unpack the alpha channel, so you can use 4 slots. Its not through a separate color node but directly through the attribute node which has an alpha output in itself (how didn't i see that lol)!
Demonstration [old method using vector, color is better with 4]:

Anyways, so, with this method I was having the materials in my mesh with only like 3 attributes or less each. And everything was going fine till today, when some of my attributes started not working again, even tho I'm not exceeding the limit per material. I did some testing and turns out the limit is (EDIT) 14 only when you have no Texture Coordinate node and 13 when you do (12 if you use Generated - because I think it uses the 2 vectors that make up the objects bounding box)... and it isn't per shader, but per object. Yeh....
Summary
I'm gonna do a list of basically everything I know now about attribute limits:
(I tested this both on 3.6.2 and 4.1.0 alpha.)

Like Markus tested you can have hundreds of stored named attributes per geometry node and that isn't the problem.
You can only receive a max of 14 attributes per object on the shader editor, independently of how many shaders they are spread on.
Having multiple geometry nodes in the object storing different attributes doesn't change anything, still the total max per object in the shaders is 14.
If a shader has more than 16 attributes, it will literally break and turn pink (only that one, not all in the object).

I'm leaving the .blend file in case people wanna test it out in the future.
I wish the devs would increase this limit in the future updates tho...

"the limit is 13 (not 14 as per Markus' answer..." - I think your material simply uses some other attribute, that takes the memory of the GPU. UVMap or something else... I don't think it's reasonable to say the limit is 13, when I succesfully loaded 14, there's a simple example and a .blend file to test for yourself :D BTW, I'm not actually saying the limit is 14, I don't know what the limit is, what I say is "I was able to load up to 14 attributes at once" - perhaps the limit is higher but I also somehow implicitly used the memory somehow.

Dividing to multiple materials seems reasonable. Material boundary requires to duplicate vertices on the boundary (Blender doesn't show that, but the actual rendering dupilicates verts on UV seams, material boundaries and in some other cases), but that should be much better than having a complex material, because a shader program is run just so many times... Basically always optimize to have as simple material as possible.

@MarkusvonBroady It's 14 you're right. I thought your .blend file was glitching or smt haha sorry... because I wasn't able to reproduce it in my way. I couldn't comprehend how mine was different - yours was connected directly to the surface output, and mine had just a simple shader and mapping before (not affecting the logic of the GN attributes) -, but now that you say it could be a UVMap or smt else that made a lot of sense, and I went to do more tests. [1] (...)

[2] (...) And yea, basically it's the Texture Mapping node that is adding more attributes - all of the inputs (not just UVMap but also Object, Normal, Reflection etc..) add at least 1, and with Generated adding 2 (this must be because I think Generated needs the 2 vectors that make up the objects bounding box). So to sum up, it's 14 max. but only in the use cases where you don't use no textures/vector mapping in the shader. [2] (...)

[3] (...) Now, I'm pretty sure the +16 limit where it breaks is explained on that link I put in my original question - someone says there GPU limit is 16 ("This makes sure the GPUVertexFormat name buffer does not overflow") and "Position attribute is always needed so we reduce to 15". If the max. we're observing is 14.. + position makes 15, it means there's one more hidden attribute somewhere? Perhaps it could be checked by reading the shader code, but it's prob something that shouldn't be removed so it wouldn't really change anything.

((not Texture "Mapping", I meant Texture Coordinate))

The hidden 15th attribute is the normal. This limitation is now being documented, see https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender-manual/pulls/104697.

@scurest Ohhh Awesome! Thanks for making that report!

@scurest wait idk if thats you who made it lol but thanks for letting me know of that report anyways ahah


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Do duplicates of the "Group input" on Geometry Nodes waste memory?
I started using geo nodes recently and sometimes the "Group input - geometry" is so far away and there are so many overlapping connections... I don't know if doing that makes any noticeable difference in performance. Does anybody know if this is memory wise inefficient (like if Blender has to now individually process the geometry the same number of times as the number of node copies or if all just a light referencing or something like that)? Thanks!

As far as I know, it makes no difference at all. It behaves like in a program where you access global variables. No matter how many times you do that, the values always stay in memory once, no matter how many times you access them.

For each additional Group Input node a very small amount of memory is used in the node editor -- to remember the position of the "Group Input"'s node displayed in the editor and which of the outputs of a specific instance are actually attached.  The amount of data is small and even a dozen group input nodes won't add much extra memory.
Is that extra memory wasted?  Not if it makes your node groups easier for you to read.


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How to curve deform a line of points - of specific uneven distances - and then instance on these points following the curve's rotation?
I started with this:

... And I was able to deform it to the curve with correct rotation like that below - but the points are all in the same position. How do I offset them individually on the curve by the original distances?

PS: The indexes of the points are not in order of X axis position (I don't know if that's important?). It's made of 3 mesh lines, each one corresponds to a place on the repeating pattern. The indexes have this kind of order:

All tutorials, posts I found were using Curve to Points (which are even distances), or complex Curve Deform nodes that deform meshes (works but is overkill for this case). I just wanted to "map" a simple straight offset of points along a curve with the correspondent offset.
Could anybody help me please?
Thanks

You can map the $x$ coordinate to the curve factor:

As the OP already figured, the setup requires a slight adjustment if you don't want to "fill" the curve and instead want to maintain the original distances:

I think the OP wants the length instead of the factor.

Hey! Thanks for the help. This one stretches the distances to fit the curve tho. How do I make the distances along the curve the same as the original ones?
Edit: Yes @lemon
I tried changing the sample curve to length earlier but it didn't work as what's before is done for factor. i don't know what to change.

Oh, I think I got it. I changed it to "length", deleted the Attribute Statistic and Map Range nodes and connected the X value directly to the "length" on the Sample Curve. And to offset it i added an Add math node before connecting the X onto length!


text:
Make a grid of planes fill camera view
I'm making a layout tool for video editing.
How can most efficiently fill the camera view with a series of white planes with even spacing?
I want to have a variable (arbitrary) number of planes, with the gap either -remaining the same or -varying based on number of planes.
Currently I have a:

Plane object (that I can scale)
Curve object to spread an array

Here is the sort of result I need, but there's a lot of manual filling to get it evenly spaced.

Here is the modifier setup I used.

Update
I have accepted the answer by @leander but wanted to add a color solution for the faces. I am driving the unique colors from the segment number of the array. Then I put that through an array with up to 7 unique colors (its a non-variable limitation), using the Window X coordinates.
I wish that there was an easy way to define the Ramp Locations by variable.

Update 2
After using the above solution, I also discovered that I could just add a single large plane then use a brick texture to place a series of box objects across the screen.

Just like Blender Sushi Guy demonstrated with nodes, the same math can be done with driver expressions.

Add a driver to the Constant offset off an array modifier.
Add a driver to the scale (or position) of the stripes.
Create an empty to control the stripes.
To have one less variable, I set the camera as orthographic with a width of 10.
no       number of bars
gap      size of gap between bars
width    width of bars
10       total width

Fixed gap size, varying stripe width
We need to set the width, and the position of the first stripe, based on the number of stripes and the gap size.
Size (X)
(no + 1) * gap + no * width = 10

width = (10 - (no + 1) * gap) / no

Constant Offset (X)
(We have to divide through the width, since the modifier bases its offset on the width.)
[(10 - gap) / no] / width = offset
[(10 - gap) / no] / [(10 - (no + 1) * gap) / no] = offset
[(10 - gap) / no] * [no / (10 - (no + 1) * gap)] = offset
(10 - gap) / (10 - (no + 1) * gap) = offset

Fixed stripe size, varying gap width
We need to set the gap size, and the position of the first stripe, based on the number of stripes and the width of the stripes.
Location (X)
(no + 1) * gap + no * width = 10

gap = (10 - (no * width)) / (no + 1)

Constant Offset (X)
[(10 - gap) / no] / width = offset
(10 - gap) / (no * width) = offset
(10 - (10 - (no * width)) / (no + 1)) / (no * width) = offset

Winner winner! Thank you very much that's soooo much more elegant than mine, and it works great. And I awarded the win as it doesn't require any addons to work.

I like this, I will study... and node it.

If you want solution with Add-On, I am using Sverchok nodes to get this kind of stripes pattern:
https://github.com/enzyme69/blendersushi/issues/201

But with some math, I am sure that Compositor or Nodes Cycles can generate Stripes with Alpha that simply confirm to the Camera View...

I kind of like this method, basically finding most left and most right of camera view, and then draw stripes in between...

Cycles Stripes? Also not the most correct...

I tried this first as well but you get a partial plane at the edge of the screen. Thanks tho ;-)

Also i used Brick texture :D

Aah.. yes Brick Texture that's kind of doing this. There is some algorithm involved to get it perfectly, but it's there.

Can you get screen width to use on a texture to limit width and therefore divide by that for number of stripes?

I thought my answer will be short but it grew to full tutorial.
Here is the preview of the result:
https://youtu.be/pvxXx0uMQwY
Here is the link to the tutorial that includes blend files for the impatient.
http://curiousblends.blogspot.bg/2017/11/create-array-of-planes-that-fit-inside.html
Basically you can achieve the result you want using only Custom properties and drivers without the need of add-ons.


text:
Difficulties with extruding
First, I would like to say that I am very new to Blender and I am not a native english speaker, so... you've been warned! ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I don't even know what to google for to find a solution. I am having trouble extruding my cup's top face into itself - when I'm doing it, it starts to look... well, pretty awful compared to Andrew Price's cup in his tutorial. What am I doing wrong?

Are you trying to make the inside of the cup? If that's the case, all you need to do is scale down the bottom vertices, as it seems currently there's an overlap of the faces.

Intersecting faces are creating the wavy pattern. The reason the top is dark is that you are seeing the backfaces of the mesh. To put it simply - your cup is way too thin, to the point of being partially inside-out.


text:
Is Curve Modifier Axis Alignment working properly?
Can someone help me understand if there's something wrong with the curve modifier axis alignment or if I'm just missing something?
Here are some before/after screenshots:

Could someone please check the attached scene? Is it broken or just my regular dumbness?
Thanks

If this is what you want, rotate your mesh 90° on Z so that it's aligned with X, then in the Array modifier and in the Curve modifier choose the X axis:

Hi. Thanks for the response. I get there are workarounds but would like to know if the fact that it is not working on the Y axis is a bug. Just to be sure before posting has a bug in Blender Issues

no it was not a bug  ;)


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Basic question about normal mapping with two merged meshes (but not joined)
I'm hoping that this is a simple question and answer.  I have a default cube.  I have created an additional torus mesh and rotated and place it slightly into the cube's front face (giving the appearance of a poor camera lense for starters).  This is a test that I was using to calculate a normal map using cylces as the baker.
I have already smart UV unwrapped it (and while it's not joined) they both are selected as one (didn't have to do anything special here).  Note: The UV map shows all of the faces as expected (the torus and the cube - I can even paint the torus via UV texturing).
Here's the blender file:
https://pasteall.org/blend/13d508b19ad7466aa548e3be4a186b23
My basic question is this, when I bake a normal map, it shows flat, as if it's looking at the cube only.  How do I get the normal bake to show the normals (as shown via display normals) including the torus that's slightly pushed into the cube?
Thanks

Hi :). You can share the file through https://pasteall.org/blend/

Thanks! I got it. Will add now!

Okay, now the edit got lost ... :/ here's the link
https://pasteall.org/blend/13d508b19ad7466aa548e3be4a186b23
[edit] if someone knows where the edit button has gone in stackexchannge that'd be great to know, thanks!


text:
Using inflate on a filter mask using sculptures, how can I easily select all of the modified faces so I can create a material group
So basically, I'm trying to engrave a rune onto a sculpture plane, so far I've been able to use mask and inflate to achieve my desired geo, however, I'm looking for an easy to way to select all of the faces I've modified so I can apply a material to it.  I would prefer to be face-level accurate but I'm flexible. And I'm also looking for a way to apply materials to Bezier curves in a similar fashion.
Here's a video about runes using Mask (time is baked in):
https://youtu.be/_ETTUwzMkTc?t=683

Here's an example of what I'm trying accomplish, clean separations, however in my case, more like the 1st image above, using inflation.
https://youtu.be/Y6asaZsDHCg?t=603

This is the kind of final result I'm going for, note the red inside the groove. (note: this is from Blizzard's OverWatch, one of their hero models in game).

Here's a video about using curves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQrLlJFdwTY

Bonus question, in the video with the masks, first image, is there a way to select just the inner faces that have been recessed?

It would be better to split your questions into 2 separate posts to maintain the structure of this Q&A site.

Materials are usually not assigned to sculpted meshes because of the high poly count plus the required UV maps. Better use Vertex Colors for sculpts -or- do a retopology of the mesh. Then you have a clean, low-poly mesh to which you can assign materials easily.

If you want to select the affected vertices, invert the mask so that the rune is masked. Then create a face set from the mask using the menu (Face Sets > Face Set from Mask). Then hide everything except the face set (hover the mouse over the face set and press key H). Now when you switch to Edit mode, only the vertices of the face set are shown and can be selected with the key A.

What is the problem when you try to assign a material to a Bezier Curve?

@Blunder thanks for all of your feedback - the issue that I had with Bezier seemed to be a newb mistake of not being in modeling using look dev.  I assume, no matter how many curves I draw, they are all part of the same curve; this was confusing initially but I think I'll just create more curves to use different materials so that's one question down! Thanks

@Blunder I guess in general, what's a common flow for applying Materials to a "segments" of a mesh that was created using Sculpture.  I've tried to just select the geo manually, however, since shading smooth is a fake look, I'm getting aliasing on certain diagonals :/  If I were using hard surfacing, I would normally just select my faces and apply a material to it. I'm not familiar with re-topo but I've heard the term, and while in general I know what a vertex is, I'm not sure how that's different than painting a face?  Also, using vertex paint how could I apply materials, aka not just colors?

@Blunder thank you so much for the face set comment, I just came across a video today about that and I thought it might be useful but at the time it didn't really show how to apply them just create them, thanks for confirming my suspicion, I will take a look at that!

@Blunder so in summary, I'm just trying to carve out some shapes, and apply different materials to them, eg. in the first image, I'd love to have an outer material and an inner one.  I think the face set will help a lot, though I have aliasing in there, so I'm thinking I just need to do some research on retopo as that might be what I'm after - this is for HP to LP baking for reference.  I was thinking of just sculpting my details and then assigning mats and baking using multires mod. I've been able to bake normals perfectly now it's just diff/occlusion/emission/etc next. Thank you so much!!


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Why do I get a hard edge when mixing a Transparent and Glossy node with a Fresnel node?
When I use Fresnel node to mix Transparent node and Glossy node I get a hard edge between these nodes.

However then I see Fresnel node and see the gradient mask, there is no hard edge.

Why mix gives me a hard edge? The same problem I have with some other nodes.
I use Blender 2.82 and Blender 2.81. Render - Cycles.

You can change the alpha blend mode, currently you are in Alpha Clip which rounds the alpha value to 0 for values < 0.5 and to 1 for values > 0.5.
Make sure your render engine is set to Eevee first :

Alpha Clip :

Alpha Blend :

If you want to tweak it further, add a Color ramp between the Fresnel and the mix shader, set to B spline interpolation, and move the white cursor way to the left :

Note you can get the same setup with a principled BSDF, which will be more physically correct :

Unfortunately, I use Cycles. Sorry, I forgot to say that. Can you help me with Cycles?

The only work around I've found for this in Cycles is to use a RefractionBSDF instead of the TransparentBSDF. Set the value of the IOR's to be the same. Use a value node to control both and you shouldn't have that annoying hard line.


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Volumetric Windows 10 logo effect
I'm trying to recreate the windows 10 background effect on a logo I've made in blender.
Half the logo has a glass like material, the other half has a steel like material. And I'm using cycles at the moment.
I've put various light sources behind the logo and tried a few variations of volumetric scatter in the world to get the god ray sort of feel coming off the logo, but it's just not looking anywhere near as effective as I'd like.
I know the win10 background was a real set and photographed, but has anyone come across a tutorial to do something similar in blender?
I'm very new to the tool, I'd appreciate any pointers in the right direction.

Emulate light scattering using a volumetric emission shader
Using Volumetric scatter produces the most accurate results but required a considerable number of render samples to get satisfactory results. A much more efficient alternative is to fake the light scattering using an Emission volumetric shader.
Create an image of the light emission - black where there is no emission and brighter where light is emitted. For example, to mimic the Windows logo you could start with an image as follows :

You can use the Surface of a mesh to render the image of the 'window' and the volume for the rays and the shader will use the Object coordinates. It's helpful to move the Origin of the mesh to a point on the surface and to use a Mapping node to re-orient the coordinates to something more intuitive. In my case, I've used the default Cube, moved the origin to the centre of the face crossing the -Y axis and rotated the coordinate space so that X/Y is along the axes of the window and Z represents the distance from the window.
To achieve this, start with the default cube, open the Properties panel (N) and move the 3D cursor to 0,-1,0. open the Tools panel (T) and Set Origin to 3D Cursor.

Assign a material and add the following nodes :

This arrangement remaps the X, Y, Z coordinates so that the XY plane maps to the 'back' of the cube and the Z coordinate represents the distance from the 'back'. In this way we can easily map our Texture coordinates (XY) and use Z to represent the depth. The re-mapping of the origin ensures that 0 depth (Z) represents the 'back' face of the mesh.
Using an Emission Shader to add the Image texture will result in the image being rendered on both the 'back' and 'front' surfaces of the mesh. To 'hide' the front face we can use the Z coordinate to set Strength to zero whenever Z is greater than a constant and adding in a Transparent shader makes the mesh transparent (Note : I've set the Transparent shader to be less than 100% White so that it shows in this image - normally this would want to be 100% transparent so the mesh is not visible.)

To add the rays we can start by simply adding another Emission shader driven from the same image and connected to Volume Material Output socket rather than Surface. This will produce parallel rays :

NOTE : The MixRGB Add nodes translate the coordinates so that the textures are centred around 0,0 rather than the texture origin falling at the bottom-left of the image.
To get the rays to diverge you can scale them using the Z coordinate - the scale should be '1' at the 'back' surface and increase as Z increases.

It may be useful to be able to control the direction of the rays and a similar technique can be used to add offsets (also based on Z) to Skew the rays as they travel through the volume.

The rays should fade along their length. For this we can simply vary the strength based on the Z coordinate :

We also might want them to spread out as they travel. Again, the Z coordinate can be used - this time controlling the effect of a high frequency Noise texture to scatter the rays :

Finally, we can add some variation to make the rays less uniform.

Bringing it all together produces the following material :

Tweaking the source image and varying the Z-coordinate of the noise used for the rays and adding a Fog Glow in the compositor can produce the following :

Of course, you aren't just limited to single-colour source images :

Blend file attached.

I signed up to this site just to vote up your answer. It's so well detailed and it really helps a complete blender noob such as myself.

This is a fantastic answer, thanks Rich, although it makes me realise I'm probably punching above my fledgling blender weight.

Would also work for recreating the titles of 82' The Thing movie

You should look at the sunbeam node in the compositor - after render, you can add several filters and color mix nodes, but a really good way to get this effect seems to be with the sunbeam node to control the lighting effect. I didn't have time here, but you might try several versions mixed over one another with varying lengths of ray so that they seem to dissipate over the course of the image. Just remember that as in all aspects of blender, the top socket is actually the bottom image similar to the top line of code is the first or bottom, and the last line of code is the top - so too with the node sockets. the bottom socket goes on top of the top socket.

Thanks Craig, I'll work through some examples and see what I can make of it. What you have there looks very much like the effect I'm going for.


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How to color node wires in node editor?
Is there any way to color wires in node editor? If not, are there any add-ons for coloring wires based on the body color of the output node? It seems like it should be pretty simple to do and I've downloaded textures with colored wires but I have no idea how it was done.

What do you mean by "color node wires"? Can you show a screenshot? Do you mean interface of nodes in the Node Editor?

If you are trying to achieve an effect similar to the one you get with the Blender internal renderer, you can use the Wireframe node to separate edges from the rest:

The white (1) regions are at the specified distance from the edges, and the black (0) regions are not. You can pass these values to the mix shader to use separate shaders for these two regions:

should have been more specific, sorry i meant, the actual wires in the node editor connecting the nodes cuz im getting huge messy webs of wires it would help if i could color the wires

@zander oh, I see what you mean now. I don't think you can color them individually. You can only change the color of all wires if you change the theme. If you want your nodes to be more organized, you can use the node framing feature.

unfortunately its not something i can frame, i have to drag a bunch of separated xyz values into a bunch of nodes and i wanted to see if i could color the x/y/z wires different colors so i didnt mix them up

@zander, I don't know then, but maybe someone else does. If you clarify your question, as mr zak suggested, you are more likely to get the answer you want.


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Best settings for denoising in Cycles
I am working on a project and I am using the Cycles render engine. Denoising usually seems like a good option but the image does become a little blurry when I use denoising with the default settings. Is there a way I could tweak it so that I could get a crisp and clear image without fireflies without spending hours on the render?

don't rely on denoise to fix everything.  you're better off using Branched-path tracing effectively, simplify, and turning reflections down some, to speed things up.

I clamped indirect to 3. And I am going to look up branched-path tracing now. And the scene in this case looks much better without denoising I guess. I turned of Multiple Importance Sampling too. This scene requires volumetric rendering too in the world settings so any tips while I use volumetric. Some tweak specifically made for speeding up volumetric rendering?


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Ambient Occlusion Bake problem smooth
I'm stuck in a problem for last few days with my project. My AO bake isn't very smooth. When I increase the size of the UV island, the error gets smaller, but it does not go away. I tried increasing the island margin and bake margin, but neither works.

My uv map is 2048px and my project does not contain many faces.
Here are my settings:

AO Factor: 0.10 ADD
Environment Light: 1.0 (White)
Gather Raytrace,
Attenuation: 10.000,
Falloff: 1.000,
Constant QMC: 12 Samples (I have changed this value many times but got the same result)

Welcome to Blender.SE! You are saying the texture is 2048, but how much surface does the interested part cover? Can you show the whole UV space?

When a increase the size of the face in UV Space the problem gets smaller. https://image.prntscr.com/image/R9LzvqTKTSi_inN0r2zb8Q.png

So it looks like it's only a resolution issue.

Yeah, i think it is but i can't increase the size of my resolution and my project is not much high polly, to have big resolution size. I think i need to find another way to discrease this problems. And i will try a 4048px resolution.

You can also try to optimze your UV layout in order to give to the more meaningful faces the resolution they need. Without other information about your specific project, I can't tell you more than this.

Yeah, i was thinking this, i will try to reduce this problem.

Have you also tried out baking AO with cycles? IMHO much better quality. ;)

You could  sidestep the problem by editing the AO map to lighten those black areas

One solution is to Boolean your intersecting pieces together:

It didn't work, a put the modifier Boolean diferrence but the same result.

@Augusto - Did you apply the modifier?  If not the geometry (and presumably the UVs) will be the same as before.  I have not checked to see, but I would not expect this to work until you actually apply and make permanent the boolean modifier.

Yeah, i apply the modifier.


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Unexpected Gaps Between Linked Mesh Objects using BlenderGIS addon
What I am trying to do
I am working on building a very large mesh terrain using height-maps (DEMs). I am trying to accomplish this by tiling the DEMs using QGIS that maintains the georeferencing data on each tile. Using the BlenderGIS add-on, I import the mesh as a RAW DEM and use Delaunay triangulation to generate the mesh. I use QGIS to generate a hillshade texture and tile that with QGIS using the same parameters for the DEM and then apply to the mesh using nodes.
The Problem
Each tile is imported and save into it's own blend file. I link the mesh object from the external .blend files. Since the entire scene is georeferenced, the tiles are placed in the appropriate location. However, I get these small lines between each tile. I am not sure how to fix this. Is this a problem with the add-on or am I doing something incorrectly?
Since I will ultimately be moving this to BGE, I would like something that is BGE-friendly. However, if the solution is modifying something inside my external .blend files that does not apply.
Here is a screenshot of my tiled mesh 3x3 size:

Here is a screenshot of the mesh with a texture:

Each tile is a 500m x 500m square for a total size of 1.5km x 1.5km. Once I figure this GAP thing out, I plan to switch over to BGE and build a LOD. These are all high poly but I also have low poly version already created for these 9 tiles. When ready, the entire mesh will be about 31km x 31km in size.
Update
I contacted the BlenderGIS plugin developer on Github. He suggested using a smooth modifier, which did not seem to resolve the issue. It only forced me to make all the linked files local, but the gaps remained.
The developer of the add-on suggested to shift each tile by 1 pixel. This sounds reasonably simple for the pictures shown. But when all is said and done there will be about 3000 x 3000 tiles to shift.
Is there a way to create a predefined grid of a specific cell size that I load the tiles into and swap tiles as the camera moves?

@cegaton I posted on the github issues page as well.  I wasn't sure if this was an addon issue or something i did wrong in blender.

Ensure you have the connecting edges on each tile. What I mean with that is.
When you have a left and a right tile (L and R). The vertices of the right border of L needs to match the vertices of the left border of the R. They need to be at the exact same location as the according vertex of the other tile.
As your tiles are in different blend files you might check the positions of the corner vertices of each tile. When the tiles are moved to the center of the scene, you need to subtract the according offset of the tile.

This is similar approach that the creator of the addon suggested.  There is a 1 pixel border around the image.  I will just need to account for that in the blend file for each tile.


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Why does my rig fly away in game engine
I am trying to change my rig to be dynamic so it can stand on top of the static floor.
I tried all the tutorial solutions and I can't solve it. Why does my character fly off screen, and not stand on the floor?
The file is here:

You have all the parts of your robot set as Static, thus your Dynamic rig is colliding with the parts of the robot, which does not work.
To fix that just set every part of your robot, except for the rig to be No collision.
A easy way to do it is to, is set one piece as No collision. Then select all of your robot (I used Border select B in wireframe mode so I would not miss any pices); make sure that piece you set to No collision is the active selection, meaning it is lighter orange (selected last) and press space and search for Copy Game Physics Properties to Selected.
Animation showing setting all pieces as no collision

I appreciate ur help alot . But what is border select b? i dont understand the last part . And can u show me how to select all and make it all into dynamic without needing to change it one by one :O? Thank you very much <3

@XavierChoo the last paragraph tells how to set all the pieces to be No Collision. Will edit to try to make it clearer.


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Rendering my animation loses material colors
I am brand new to Blender (2.87 - Debian Stable) and have been trying to make a simple animation of objects and text that appears whilst I am talking.  I recorded me talking using OBS and the resultant video is a white screen with a feathered transparent cutout with me in it at the bottom.
I have created a 3D model in which a scene made up of Objects (text and some boxes) I want to appear with the faces in the YZ plane being what I ultimately want to see.  These objects have plenty of depth in the -X direction.  Just in front of all these objects is a plane whose texture is composed of the video of me talking.  I animate my talk by deciding at which frame through my talk I want to particular object to start to appear, and at which point I want it fully appeared, and I key frame a transformation on the X axis to that the box, or text, so it moves through the plane and sits just past it, giving a slightly 3D appearance to my diagram.  I can play my animation and it all plays perfectly.

But when I come to render it, I get the video playing on the plane, but when the objects appear through the plane, they come out white rather than the color that they clearly are in the model.

I don't know what I am doing wrong. Can someone help.
I am not using the compositor and nodes (other than the compositing the image sequence of me talking on to the plane) because I don't know how in the compositor you specify a node is the output of the camera - there doesn't seem to be one.

Please add a screen of your issue (render result), Eevee right?

@vklidu Yes. Eevee. Screen Shot added

I discovered what the problem is.  I had world lighting turned up way too high and set to white.  As a result it dominated, washing all the other color out.  Turned it back down to 1 and changed it to black and all is rendering correctly.

Great you found issue by your self :)


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I cant solve my problem with rigging and weights
I tried to connect head with body of my model. But when i tried to setup rigging, smth went wrong with weights. If i rotate neck's bone, head rotates as well but not deformates at all. I have problems only with connected head, other parts of body moves normaly.
P.S. Sorry for my English, hope somebody can help.
Mesh and rig are not connected in file, i leave it to my saver

Hello please share your file (upload and copy paste the generated URL): https://pasteall.org/blend/

Shared, as you said

For some reason (?) the parent With Automatic Weights doesn't work good here, that said what you can do is:

Apply the scale of your object
Deactivate the Deform option of the eye bones as I suppose you'll parent the eyes meshes later
Select the neck bone and in the Bone panel > Bendy Bones > Segments, choose for example a segmentation of 5, so that the neck will twist nicely
Select the armature in Object mode, shift select the Character, switch it to Weight Paint mode, in the N panel, deactivate the Advanced > Front Face Only option in order to paint through, and under Falloff > Falloff Shape, choose Projected, and weight paint to correct the weight.

Once done it works fine:

Edit: For your second attempt, as I say you need to give some corrections after parenting, for example the neck bone should not influence the head mesh, you need to substract weight here:

And as you see for some reason the head bone doesn't influence the head mesh, here you need to add weight:

I've edited my answer, as I said you need to give some corrections in Weight Paint mode

Oh god, man, thank you. You saved hours of my life


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There are extra Edge, in Object Mode
Orange Edges appear, in Object Mode.
It breaks Subdivision.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/29josc8s8jgv87r/head.blend?dl=0

I'm not near my computer, but if I had to guess it's a duplicated edge, on top of the other one. See if you can move it and what's underneath. If it's a double - delete one.

Your highlighted edge is connecting two vertices, but this edge is not separator of two face how it seems :) It is actually one face.

Delete those two edges and use Knife (K) to cut face into two.


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Baking normal map causes weird shading
why does shading look better when normals are inverted?
I baked the normal map of my sculpted rock onto the low poly mesh.

Best regards
EDIT: bevor baking I enabled Auto Smooth on both the meshes (low and high poly) to ensure no hard edges on the normal map.

Maybe your normal were inverted when you baked? Can you post a screenshot of your normal map?

No, I created the low poly cube from scratch, duplicated it and subdivided to sculpt on it. Normals weren't inverted.
The normal map has been attached to the original post (edited)

Your normal map is inverted. Basically, you should not see this cyan-looking color on flat surfaces. probably something you did wrong while baking. Can you upload your blend file and/or describe your baking process step by step?

I created a simple cube and uv unwrapped it.
I duplicated the cube and named both "_low" and "_high" to organize.
Both meshes have the same material with the sahder setting of an image texture node and normal-map node, both plugged into the normal map by leaving the other inputs blank (basecolor, roughness, etc...)
made sure the low poly mesh has Auto Smooth enabled so that the corners aren highlighted when baking.
made the baking process in cycles

Do you have the Color Space for the normals texture map set to Non-Color (instead of sRGB)?

yes, changing it from non-color to rgb makes no difference

In the blend file you sent. The mesh's normals were inverted. When put back in place and baking again, the results where somewhat acceptable. I couldn't fix the smooth-flat problem tho.


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How to fake a volume when you can't use volume? GLB export only supports meshes
I want a cube exported to a GLB file to look like a volume. Think "smoke," not "hard-edged box."
Sadly, GLB format only supports meshes --> hard-edged boxes.
So how might I fake a volume, those nice soft edges and filled spaces? 30,000 tiny semitransparent icospheres? No.
For reference, here's an image showing the Blender screenshot (black background) with meshes/volumes (left/right). And the GLB export screenshot (white background). Notice all the cubes in the GLB export look like hard edged boxes.

In Blender I simply used the Principled BDSF output to the surface node of the Material Output for meshes and the volume node for the volumes. I tried using the volume shader also but I could not make that work either.
Note: I am only using a cube as a simple example. I want to implement this for any object. Suzanne for example.
Follow up!
So not much of a solution, not clever and very time consuming. I am now using shrink. I am reducing/enlarging my emissive object by very small amounts. Each larger size (.01 increments) has a small decrease in alpha. I use six shrunk objects.
All of that work, just to get a bit of "bloom/halo" around an emissive object. Soften up the edges. Think "candle flame" not "candle cutout." Why? Because I can't use bloom or volume when I export the object to GLB (for an AR project and possibly Sketchfab display). Ouch. Perhaps if I knew how to bake? That might work.
Better solutions from those more experienced would be helpful.

There's a section on volume in the manual,. have you tried that?

Yes. My understanding is that that volume is used with thickness in transmission for things like glass. How much darker it gets the deeper it is in the glass. It is not that clear, to me, how all that works but there are other posts which give more detail and exactly why volumes, like clouds, are not supported. Search GLB+cloud and you can also find them.

This type of volumetric rendering is not something that the current glTF specification or its extensions allow. Or any other standard formats I'm aware of, unfortunately, the volumetric technique is just not interchangeable among programs.
I imagine you could do something like this if Blender gains more support for export to node-based material formats like MaterialX or MDL, or if glTF adds similar features (support for volumetric transmission in glTF is fairly new, for example). Until then it is probably not possible.

Yes! GLB definitely is limited in this way. That is why I need a workaround to "fake a volume."
My first thought was to use many planes with emission and various values of alpha. Or a bunch of small spheres with the same material characteristics. But that's a lot of planes and a lot of spheres. And a major difficulty to fill an object, like Suzanne with planes or spheres. If I have to, I will try to find an easy way to do it. But I'm hoping there is an easier way.


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Cannot make a hair with bezier curve and circle
I am a newbie.
I try to make hair with bezier circle and path.
After selecting path, go under geometry to pick object target, it doesn't recognize circle.
Under object list, there is only one NurvsPath.
If I pick circle first, it recognize path, so it make disk like shape.
What can be a problem?
Thanks in advance.

I see you have the bevel object of the bezier circle set to the nurbs path, but I believe this is backwards. I believe you should have set the bevel object of the nurbs path set to bezier circle, as you intially tried to do.
Make sure that when you have the path selected, it looks like this: https://i.sstatic.net/nvRK6.jpg . The nestedness of the collections doesn't have to match what I did, but focus on the way I selected the path.
See how the logo to the left of the object, "NurbsPath" and how it's highlighted? This indicates that the NurbsPath is the active object. Your active object is the Circle, so I would avoid doing any shift-selects if that's the cause.

Actually, I tried it opposite way. First nurbs path and then bezier circle but as I described, it didn't work. Circle was not recognized at all. Cannot pick it. I add the picture just just to show you that opposite way seems working.

Hmm. Well, I know that if you do it the way you have it set up, you'll always get some sort of circular strip with no tubing. I believe the correct way is opposite to yours, but I'm not sure why the bezier  circle isn't being recognized. Could you attach the blend file to this post and tell me, if there is one, which error is displaying on screen when it's not being recognized?

This is the error message from log file and as you see, there are two curve but under object, only path exist. Is it clear for my question? By the way, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

see edit to answer

I go back and try again. Thanks


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Make material change colour based on Intersecting Geo node mesh
I followed this Tutorial on Geo nodes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf_v3RE4F_Y
And have this set up

However I'd like to make these fleshy wires much more wet and icky. By having some stain like ends, like this. (I used texture paint to show what I mean, I'm also unsure if I want to make it 3D instead of 2D by adding a object to the ends of the lines stickin g onto the surface of objects.)

I prefer not to use Dynamic Paint by the way.

Geometry nodes can only modify geometry. This means that you will need to store the position of the wires in some kind of geometry to use it in a shader.
You can either create new geometry (like instancing a plane on each connector and align it to normal of the spheres) or make sure that the connections happen on vertexes you can store a value in.

I completely forgot Mesh to points was a thing,


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Where are the keyframes for the textures tab in the Properties
I am using this texture in Compositing
I have tried to find they keyframe for this :

But have not been able to find it

I turned off Only Show Selected and turned on Show Hidden but it's not there, I have even tried searching but nothing came up.
Is there a way that I can be able to see it?

What does it give if you select the Texture node in the Compositor window? https://zupimages.net/up/23/13/pcps.jpg

you can see it, if you use it e.g. on a cube -> displacement modifier and if you select the cube. If this doesn't work, pls provide blend file to check out.

Forgot to specify that I'm using it in Compositing

@BeeAPotato Unfortunately this seems to be the only way to manipulate the keyframes in the Dope Sheet and also the Graph Editor. You can disable the Displacement modifier if you don't want to displace the mesh, but at least you can modifiy the keyframes then. Although keyframed animations in the Compositor do show up in the Dope Sheet under Compositing Nodetree, this only shows keyframes that are set in the Compositor itself - but the texture is only referenced in there, it is not keyframed within the Compositor (unless you set keyframes for the Offset or Scale values).


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Constraints for attaching planar object to multiple poles
I have flat sheet of solid material (e.g. 1" thick plywood) whose corners I want to attach to four poles. The poles can move independently of each other in the XY plane. When the poles move, I want to plywood to deform its shape as the poles move so that the four corners always remain attached to the poles. Figure below shows a simplified picture of what I want. Note that the four poles and the plywood are constrained to be five separate meshes. So joining (Ctrl + J) the four legs and closing the vertex path is not an option.
The final output is a mesh, not an animation. The final configuration of the poles is user input and not known in advance (pole centers will always be in the same plane, no z offsets). I want to start from five separate pieces in a default configuration (left figure), move the poles (using Python), have the plywood deform with it and export the resulting mesh.

What has been tried:

Make the poles the parents of the plywood, but it is not possible since blender allows only one parent
Add 'copy location' constraint. But this operates at the object level and not vertex/edge level.

I'm not sure about your constraints, but this might be a solution?

Hook each plane corner to an empty (select the vertex and ctrlH > Hook to New Object).
Create your 4 poles (here I've created one cylinder pole).
Parent each empty to your pole.
Move your pole, the corner will follow.
Give your poles some Limit Location constraints if you don't want them to move on the Z axis or if you want to limit them on a certain X or Y area.

This exactly solves my problem.


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Draw axis guid line via Python in Blender
I write a little addon that reset location by a single axis (X, Y or Z).
I want to add the possibility to view axis guide line in 3d viewport when you select one. Like you have in transformations(move, rotate, scale) when you choose the axis.
I didn't find command to draw specific global axes.
Can you help me with that?!

Did you ever figure this out? I am looking to do some thing similar.


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How to remove overlapping geometry in a complex object?
I have this house consisting of many different overlapping meshes. So is there any simple way how to remove overlapping faces? I've tried booltool but it simply doesn't work properly with that many meshes

Why is it a problem?

I'm trying to import this model into UE4 and I have issues with the lighting. UE says it is because of "UV Maps overlapping". I tried creating a lightmap manually but it doesn't solve the problem. While inspecting this lightmap I noticed that some of the faces still overlap with each other so it must be problem I raised above? And also generally people say that it is bad practice to overlap meshes with each other

You only have to fix the UVMap. If you create non-overlapping topology with the same geometry the vert count will be incredibly high. There are overlapping geometries in every videogame, it not cause any problem.


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Why is the wrong texture showing when I switch from texture paint to object mode?
I've just finished texture painting this model, and I wanted to start rigging it and whatnot, but when I try and go from texture paint to object mode, an older version of the texture appears. I have the right texture selected, I have no idea why the wrong texture is showing on the model.
Another weird thing is that I've already done this exact model once before with a different texture paint, and that one went perfectly fine. Unfortunately, I can't remember what I did with the first model that I haven't done with the second model.
This is what it looks like in Texture Paint, and this is how I want it to look:

This is how it looks in object mode, with an older texture that I've since painted over:

Any suggestions?

Try making a new copy of the desired art and give it an unique name that doesn't match the same name as the other texture. Load that new image as a texture in the material texture channel, and then in the uv image editor select the offending image texture and shift-click the X to delete it from the file, and then save the file and reopen it. (This is important - don't close your file until you have made sure that your new texture is saved to disk and can be opened outside of blender).

I can help if you share the blend file through blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com

The image you painted on wasn't saved. You should try to press Image > Save Image in UV/Image Editor, probably this will invoke update in other interaction modes besides Textture Paint.

As Mr Zak said, you need to save edits to your texture manually.

So unfortunately these answers didn't work, and I still have no idea why it was doing that since it worked with the other identical file, but when I switched it to cycles render I was able to use a texture node, and that seemed to fix the problem. Thanks for the suggestions.


text:
Python API: Changing the order of shapekeys quickly
Using the Python API, is there a way to change order of shapekeys quicker than using the operator bpy.ops.object.shape_key_move(type='UP')?
This operator takes a long time to execute (if you want to move a shape key up 20 times, for example).
Is there a way to perform this quicker?

Campbell said me on IRC that there is currently no other solution :

this needs to be done at a C/RNA level AFAICS.
RNA collections need to have a sort callback which Python can use


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The parts of this model are not showing in game engine nor do they have shading
I'm new to the Blender game engine and I don't know what to do with this model glitch. Certain parts of the model aren't showing and there is no shading. How do I fix this?

its hard to tell since we don't know how it's supposed to look, but try recalculating normals and changing the viewport from solid to textured

try chaining to textured shading. You are in solid.

that did not work at all i guess this model is not fer the bge

For the shading problem: the viewport is currently in shaded mode

If the textures still aren't showing, bear in mind that only image textures are supported.
For parts of the model not showing, it is likely that the normals are inverted or that you are using single planes. In computer graphics, most faces have only one side, and if you look from the other side they will be transparent. To fix this you can:
 - Flip the normal to face the correct way (edit mode -> select face -> ctrl+N)
 - Disable backface culling
Viewing the normals using one of the following options is reccomended:

As should be evident, the selected faces have their normals flipped and are thus not visible from where the camera is.

Also from what I remember the BGE only likes a few image file formats for textures like jpeg and TGA i think