text:
Mesh modeling and shad smooth results
This is a sword pommel I am modeling.  Last part of the sword and it will be done as my fist modeling test in blender.
As you can see I tried my best to keep the mesh as simple as possible.  In order to have a good smooth result.

Then why am I getting this when I add a simple smooth shade?

If I try a multiresolution, subdivide or smooth modifiers it is even worse with the whole mesh messing up terribly the more I add on the modifiers.  WHY?
I have a file upload here for you to check.  It is the pomel and the crossguard of the sword on which both I used a mirror modifier.  Guessing is the source fo the problem.

I think I have solved the problem by first perfecting the mesh a bit then cutting the mesh in half on the side which best was effected by the shade smooth and added a mirror modifier.  Still, I would love to understand normals a bit more especially what is the difference between the red and blue?

Hello :). You can also upload your file here, so others can take a look.

I forgot I could upload the file.  What a noob!  I have a file upload here for you to check. It is the pommel and the crossguard of the sword on which both I used a mirror modifier.  THANKS

Hello :). I checked your file and edited my answer. I also added and explanation of what Normals are.

Your mesh has some modeling issues :).
I'll talk only about your Pommel object here.
01) Lots of N-gons
N-gons (faces with more than 4 sides) don't work well with shading or Subdivision modifier.
It's better to use quads and tris.
You original mesh left, repaired right

02) Overlapping geometry
This is a big problem in 3D modelling.
You have double edges, vertices and faces.
Some can be cleaned up by Mesh->Clean up->Merge by distance, but others have to be cleaned manually.

03) Flipped normals
Normals show which way a polygon is facing. If they're not facing the same way, it causes problems with shading and Subdivision.
You can check your normals here.
Blue should be facing out, red should be facing in.

To fix all, select your whole mesh and go to Mesh->Normals->Recalculate outside.

Additional issues:
Your origin point isn't in the center - it's a tiny bit to the side.
This causes problems with the Mirror modifier.
Other tips for your workflow:
Set your units to milimeters for better precision.
Use orthographic view - it will help you be more precise.
Enable absolute grid snap - it will snap precisely to your grid.
Mirror modifier has a Clipping option - use it.

You're doing great so far, don't feel discouraged.
Good luck with your model, you're on the right track :).
Here is the repaired file:

I need to learn more on Normals since I seem to encounter this problem a lot and I still cannot understand.  I tried both your suggested solutions  Reculclate outside link but the result is still the same.

Thanks very Jachym your explanation was great.  I will try to correct my models as per your suggestions to see if I can manage it up and thanks for correcting it as well.


text:
Boolean Operations - Why the fuzzy result after union of 2 objects?
I am trying to join this cube.

With this cube with a Boolean Union modifier.

The result is always this fuzziness in the final mesh.  WHY?
I have checked for correct face orientation and Scale and Rotation.

Here is a file upload and screenshot of the Boolean as requested.

Below is a  successful joining of 2 intersected objects without fuzziness as I explained below.

Can you show a screenshot including the boolean modifier? Also, can you upload the file so we can see what's happening?

Do you have faces/objects overlapping? This looks like z-fighting. See: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/5441/cause-of-black-artifacts-in-render

I added the file and screenshot as requested.  Thank for the help.

You need to hide object used in Boolean Union operation.
As for now you have "two" objects in one place.
Remember to hide it also for render, or apply Boolean and remove it completely.

I did as you said I hid one of the objects and in fact yes the fuzziness vanished.  However, the 2 objects were still visible as separated in the collections menu.  if ii made the object visible again the fuzziness returned.  So after do I have to join the 2 objects?   I tried it and it seems the object united and the mesh of the second object (the one below) started from the face of the first object.  I posted an image of this above in the main question.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
how to setup the opacity in the stencil brush mode in blender 2.8
I'm trying to make the projection painting of the face texture over the old one,but the new image texture is not transparent enough and I'm not able to see behind. How can I make it more transparent ? thanks...

You can look in the properties panel under the tool and see the panel 'Display' and open that, and there you can set the stencil brush opacity and toggle it to disappear on stroke.

thanks. is there some shortcuts to rotate,scale,transform the texture ? I see that I can modify the angle,the size etc but I find that using that method is not comfortable.

Yes, explore what happens with RMB to to move, Shift-RMB to Scale, and Ctrl-RMB to rotate.

Blender 2.83 - moved under >Cursor >Texture Opacity..
or
Under Overlays

Blender v2.83
When you are in Texture Paint mode in the 3D Viewport and are using a texture as a stencil for the Draw tool, you can adjust the opacity of the image which displays when you use the tool. This is found under the Cursor setting, detailed below.

Using a texture as a stencil

Open the 3D Viewport and set the mode to Texture Paint.
Select the Draw tool.
Open the Properties Editor -> select the Active Tool and Workspace settings tab -> Brush Settings -> Texture -> and change the following :

          [] set the texture, or locate an image for the texture here,
          [] set the dropdown for Mapping -> to "Stencil"

Changing the visual opacity of the stencil
There are 2 locations (as of Blender v2.83) to change the visual opacity of the stencil (note, this is different from the strength of the tool, and this is also different from the Stencil Mask)
Select the Draw tool in the 3D Viewport while in Texture Paint mode.
Then find the setting at either of the following locations:

3D Viewport -> Sidebar -> Tool tab -> Brush Settings panel -> Cursor -> Texture Opacity

Properties Editor -> Active Tool and Workspace settings tab -> Brush Settings -> Cursor -> Texture Opacity

Word of caution :
The following setting will not affect the opacity of the Stencil which displays under your cursor when using a Texture Stencil as described above.
The following setting affects the Stencil Mask opacity:

3D Viewport -> Texture Paint mode -> Show Overlays (just below the Header's Menu) -> dropdown options
-> Texture Paint -> Stencil Opacity

The Stencil Mask can be toggled on in the Overlay options via :

3D Viewport -> Texture Paint mode -> Header Menu -> Masking Dropdown -> Stencil Mask checkbox.

The following animated gif demonstrates the difference between the Cursor's Texture Opacity setting (the answer I gave above to Marietto's question),
from the settings affecting the Stencil Mask:
https://i.imgur.com/eT5HD5u.gif

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


text:
Mesh is not displayed correctly
I'm tryng to model a character and would like to know how can I fix the mesh that you can see on the attached screenshots,because it is not complete and wrong. Thanks.

I'm not sure what you mean by "fix", but if you mean corner of the mesh in the screenshot center then it maybe a way to go is to add face loop to its bottom (instead of sharp edge loop), and lower amount of loop cuts. That part is not connected to the rest of mesh for some reason, if you wish to you could reconnect them by changing topology of that unconnected part.

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


text:
Some UV map islands are part of larger islands but are separated from them...how to compact them?
I'm trying to learn how works UV maps and how to texture laying-out body uvs. I don't know how to explain the problem using very technical terms because I'm a newbie in blender and I don't speak english as primary language. I don't know why the uv map of my mesh is composed by some fragmented islands while the others seems to be more compact. I can move a lot of islands by clicking mouse at any point on their area,but some of them are part of larger islands but are separated from them and I can't move them by clicking the mouse on a point of their area,but I have to select everything. Is there a way to optimize them ? Also because character mesh seems to have no problems. I hope that the attached screenshot is self explanatory. Thanks.

If you ask about the fact that you see selection in several areas of UV map while you selected only one island, then the reason is that the latter in this part has connection to another island on UV map. This depends on model and might be ok (not always).

problem could be that I don't know how to color the fragmented uv maps because they are not a plan surfaces...

Infact,please tell me how can I color this uv map : http://psychonews.it/dati/2016-03-13_22-45-15.png

did it. check here : http://psychonews.it/dati/2016-03-14_21-38-45.png ; what should I do now ?

Now you can see how much distortion does UV map have. All those squares should be of roughly the same size and form. In your case they aren't. The problem now is how to apply seams correctly instead of current ones, keeping in mind that seams should be hidden in unvisible parts of mesh. This means composing another question about correcting this UV map but asking it may be out of scope of this site, so try on http://community.cgcookie.com or http://blenderartists.org.

clear seams and re do mark seams may help ?

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


text:
Get position of Focus Point of Camera
I am working on a Python script on Blender and I need the location of the focus point of the active camera. I know we can display the limits of a camera but I can't manage to get the exact position of the focus point using Python.
Could you help me to find it ?
Here is an illustration with point of focus display (Yellow cross) :

The following script calculates the clip start, end and dof distance locations and visualizes them in the viewport (like the Limits option for cameras), the rotation mode does not matter:
import bpy
import bgl
from mathutils import Vector
from mathutils.geometry import intersect_point_line

def is_camera(ob):
    return ob is not None and ob.type == 'CAMERA'

def draw_callback_px(self, context):

    sce = context.scene

    if is_camera(context.object):
        cam_ob = context.object
    elif is_camera(sce.camera):
        cam_ob = sce.camera
    else:
        return

    mat = cam_ob.matrix_world
    cam = cam_ob.data
    start = mat * Vector((0, 0, -cam.clip_start))
    end = mat * Vector((0, 0, -cam.clip_end))
    if cam.dof_object is None:
        dof_loc = mat * Vector((0, 0, -cam.dof_distance))
    else:
        pt = cam.dof_object.matrix_world.translation
        line_p1 = mat.translation
        line_p2 = mat * Vector((0, 0, -1))
        loc = intersect_point_line(pt, line_p1, line_p2)
        dof_loc = loc[0]

    # 80% alpha, 2 pixel width line
    bgl.glEnable(bgl.GL_BLEND)
    bgl.glLineWidth(2)

    #sce.cursor_location = dof_loc

    def line(color, start, end):
        bgl.glColor4f(*color)
        bgl.glBegin(bgl.GL_LINES)
        bgl.glVertex3f(*start)
        bgl.glVertex3f(*end)
        bgl.glEnd()

    line((1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.8), start, dof_loc)
    line((0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.8), dof_loc, end)

    # restore opengl defaults
    bgl.glLineWidth(1)
    bgl.glDisable(bgl.GL_BLEND)
    bgl.glColor4f(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0)

class ModalDrawOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    """Draw a line with the mouse"""
    bl_idname = "view3d.modal_operator"
    bl_label = "Simple Modal View3D Operator"

    def modal(self, context, event):
        context.area.tag_redraw()

        if event.type == 'ESC':
            bpy.types.SpaceView3D.draw_handler_remove(self._handle, 'WINDOW')
            return {'CANCELLED'}

        return {'PASS_THROUGH'}

    def invoke(self, context, event):
        if context.area.type == 'VIEW_3D':
            # the arguments we pass the the callback
            args = (self, context)
            # Add the region OpenGL drawing callback
            # draw in view space with 'POST_VIEW' and 'PRE_VIEW'
            self._handle = bpy.types.SpaceView3D.draw_handler_add(draw_callback_px, args, 'WINDOW', 'POST_VIEW')

            context.window_manager.modal_handler_add(self)
            return {'RUNNING_MODAL'}
        else:
            self.report({'WARNING'}, "View3D not found, cannot run operator")
            return {'CANCELLED'}

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(ModalDrawOperator)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(ModalDrawOperator)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

for area in bpy.context.screen.areas:
    if area.type == 'VIEW_3D':
        bpy.ops.view3d.modal_operator({'area': area}, 'INVOKE_DEFAULT')
        break

Thank you, I manage to run this following script, using yours. Selecting my camera and generate a 'b' empty object at the Focus Point Position :
`import bpy
import bgl
from mathutils import Vector
from mathutils.geometry import intersect_point_line
from math import *
Focus_pt = bpy.context.object.matrix_world*Vector((0,0,-bpy.context.object.data.dof_distance))
bpy.ops.object.add(type='EMPTY')
bpy.context.active_object.name = 'b'
bpy.context.active_object
bpy.data.objects["b"]
b = bpy.data.objects['b']
b.location[0] = Focus_pt.x
b.location[1] = Focus_pt.y
b.location[2] = Focus_pt.z`


text:
How to determine lens undistortion values for motion tracking?
In the camera setting in motion tracking, how do I tweak the K1, K2 and K3 value properly. I was told that these values are not necessary to tweak but I do want to adjust it, just for the sake of perfection.

Do note that the lens distortion will change at different focal lengths.

There is a pretty good explanation by Sebastian König in his Track, Match, Blend! tutorial, Part 08 at 14:25.


text:
Will running Blender on RAM Drives increase Blender's "Speed"?
What I am referring as a RAM Drive is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_drive. If I Install Blender on a RAM Drive, would it increase Blender's "speed"? Additionally, since "speed" is a very loose word, it would be nice to also mention 'what' will be faster (e.g. a better GPU will increase cycles render speed, etc.)

I don't think it would, at least not very much. It would only help when reading/writing from the drive, which I don't think is done at all during the really long operations like rendering. As for GPU rendering, it depends on your current setup and the GPU you want to use. "faster" is relative. In general though, GPUs are faster, but have tighter memory constraints.

No. Not while rendering.

@cegaton I am deciding whether I should learn to create a RAM Disk or not based on this question. I realize the potential harms it could do to my computer but if it's clearly beneficial, I would do so. Being not too savvy at computers, I'd say it would take a while before I make a RAM disk. BTW, I appreciate your thought of scientific experimentation.

Reserving memory for a file system was a good idea 20 years ago.
Modern operating systems use all the available memory that is left by the running processes for caching.
When you start a program the first time it takes longer than subsequent starts because the files and used libraries are still available in RAM. This is the best way because if a process requires more memory cache areas can be evicted. A RAM-disc whereas would  statically allocate the memory which might be needed by another process and couldn't be temporarily released.
tl;dr
No, It would harm the overall performance of your system.


text:
How does blender calculate the solve error in camera tracking?
Just curious, how or what algorithm does blender use to calculate the solve error in camera tracking. A quantitative explanation would be great.

Blender currently uses a KLT-Tracker (Kanade–Lucas–Tomasi) which is documented here.
For the calculation of the solve error the documentation of this implementation might be interesting.


text:
How do I copy Bones and animations to another model
So I have two models and they're the same. I just modeled one better but the old one has a complete rig like animations bones etc. I really want to save time and know if it's possible to copy the animations and bones to the new one instead of creating a completely new one.
and How do I do it if it is possible?
Thanks

if you give the same names to the bones of your new armature you'll be able to use the same action, if this is your question


text:
How do I flip a pose along the y instead of the x axis?
I am trying to flip (or would mirror be the right word?) a rigged character pose along the y axis instead of the x. I understand for normal walk cycles etc you only really need to flip along the x. But I have a character on a longboard. In-game it is possible to turn the board by 180 degrees. The stance of the character is then supposed to go from "regular" to "goofy" (these terms describe poses standing on a skateboard or snbowboard, "regular" is facing your body right, left foot in front and "goofy" is facing your body left and right foot in the front in relation to the forward position of the board).
So, when the character slides/turns the board 180 degrees in-game the part of the board that was front is now the back and the character turns his head, torso, as well as the orientation of his feet, without changing the actual stance (position) of the feet. Basically what was backwards is now forwards, since he turned the board by 180 degrees.
Pic 1 shows my original stance and pic 3 is (obviously) what happens when I copy/paste the flipped pose. What I need is an option to flip it so it's like Pic 2 (I quickly did the Pic 2 pose manually to show what I mean). And obviously I could do this by hand and make a "goofy" alternative to every "regular" stance. But I don't think this is a very good process from a technical aspect since I do want the poses to basically be the same, just flipped. Not to mention all the extra time wasted in manually re-doing every pose in it's flipped version...
I hope this makes sense and is not a stupid or obvious question. Also hope my explanation wasn't too convoluted... Thanks in advance!

EDIT: side question, I started this post with a "hello", which got deleted for some reason, anyone know what's up with that?

For the 'hello', read these guidelines: Expected Behavior

It seems to me that what you're looking for is the already established Pic 3 pose, plus  a 180 degrees rotation of the root bone on Z axis.

@joshsanfelici you're absolutely right! I had tried something similar but it resulted in weird behavior. I probably had messed something up in regards to the local/global/pivot/cursor settings yesterday. Whatever it was, doing exactly what you suggested worked like a charm!

@GordonBrinkmann fair enough, got it!


text:
How to Correctly export Material as a texture image?
I followed multiple tutorials on UV Mapping and exporting a material, but I can't seem to get it right.
I made a texture on a Torus like this:

And so I tried following multiple tutorials to export it as a PNG image so I can use it in a game, but when I tried applying that PNG texture to the Torus, it looked like this:

Is there something else I need to do when exporting the UV as a PNG?
And Yes I baked it and the texture looks exactly like the image right above in the game I'm making in Java.
Here's the .blend file:

could you please pack the image and share the file? If you still have the original torus, could you please share it as well? https://blend-exchange.com/

@moonboots okay I added the .blend file.

AFAICT, you're second picture comes from applying the image Baking.001 onto a newly created Torus? The reason it looks different is the newly created Torus.001 does not have the same UVMap as the original Torus. You need to use the image with the same UV map it was baked for.

it looks like it works fine, give the whole torus a new material, and in this material plug the Image Texture into the Base Color of the Principled BSDF, the UVs are ok. I'm not sure how you got the result you show, maybe share it as well

As others have said, this is an issue with the UVs. When baking, make sure you have a good UV map because that's how the program is going to decide where to paint the image when baking. Just make sure you don't change the UVs after baking or they won't align with the baked texture.
Smart Project can work for simple shapes, but you can get a better result with some lazy seams. Mark a seam in 3 places: Once along the inner edge loop, then any two edge loops opposite each other on the torus. Then, unwrap. It won't be perfect, but it'll be a lot better than the Smart Project.

Okay THanks ill try that


text:
Separate & Combine HSV in cycles
is there a way for my toon shader to combine and separate HSV for a lighting for selective shadows

sorry for not clarifying, i want light to cast shadows on objects like this:

but it looks like this in cycles:

I think it has something to do with the separate HSV nodes so i was wondering if theres an issue with it in cycles

Could you clarify the for a lighting for selective shadows part please?

Shader To RGB works only in EEVEE. Maybe we can help you get around the reasons you feel the need to use Cycles.

@RobinBetts Sorry, I thought it was the HSV nodes that didn't work in Cycles but it was the Shader to RGB. I only wanted to use Cycles because it looks better and I'm fine with using EEVEE. Is there another way to do this in Cycles without the Shader to RGB node?

Cycles has a Toon BSDF node. You can combine a few of them to create a toon/anime shader. Have a look here: https://youtu.be/CgTOih255Mg

Thank you! The Toon BSDF works as a replacement for the node setup above.


text:
Joining two object in Blender
Continuing on my previous question.  Here below is the result of my first try at joining 2 objects in one.  A sword hand grip and a pommel.
I wanted a smooth seamless result as in my reference so I decided to join the objects and then merge the vertices between the two objects together.
All went well except for the small dents you see where the joint lines where.  I know there is something wrong with the mesh.  In the examples below I joined one side where I even subdivided the Handel mesh adding a vertice to have a vertice merging point.  This produced the following result.

The second pic is the result where I have not yet joined the vertices.

I have uploaded a file as well if you could help in removing those 2 final dents.

I think I may have solved the problem by connecting the vertices you marked below to the middle one.  Here is the result. A smooth surface.

Hello :). The biggest issue are those horizontal faces inside. Remove them, and it will be way better. Subdivision modifier doesn't like non-manifold geometry.

Ronin,
I've taken a look at the model, you have a simple vertice problem which is solved like this:
Select vertice 1 and then select vertice 2

Hit Alt + M and select "At Last" to merge at the second vertice

Do this for both of these, and your problem should be solved

I would also recommend deleting these faces as they are only taking up vertice count and can potentially mess up the model.

Before

After

Hi Karl,  First of all, thanks for your help.   I followed your instructions but when I selected the vertices and hit alt M, I was not given the option at last.   Before posting I tried to do the same with at centre option though and it resulted as you see on my first screenshot.   I would like to obtain a totally smooth surface there.

Yes, if the option at last is not apearing is probably because you selected both at the same time. Try selecting one vertice the holding down Left Shift and selecting the other. Then when you press Alt + M it should give you the option


text:
How to add keyframes to a rig?
I have modeled and rigged this dragon with riggify. All seems to be working fine with the rig parented to the dragon with automatic weights and when I try it in pose mode the mesh reacts according to it.
However, I found it first very difficult to insert the first keyframe only succeeding when I pressed the buttons to the right of the object properties menu. However when I then posed the dragon and keyframe the next action noting is happening when I playback, except for the location movement of the dragon.
I really find it hard to insert the first keyframe but what I would like to know is what I am doing wrong in respect of the animation.

for the moment, you're keyframing the object, not the armature, if you want to keyframe the armature you need to select the armature, switch to Pose mode, move the bones, and press "i" to save the pose

Check the second pic.  I did as you said.  By pressing is I could not insert the first keyframe. I only did it by pressing the right buttons in the object properties menu.  Still, after I moved the rig and set the frame to 20 for a test it did not move and the green location and rotation tabs stayed to 0.

I just keyframed the bone properties and the animation worked.

if you go in the Properties > Object > Transform panel, you are keyframing the whole armature, not a bone, to keyframe a bone, move your bone in the 3D view, stay in the 3D view and press "i". Also, don't forget to remove all the animations you've created for the whole armature and object.

I did it.  The main error was that I was not pressing   I   in the 3d view.  I also selected keyframe whole character and all the bones I moved animated.  THANKS.

If you go in the Properties panel > Object > Transform panel, whether you've selected the object or the whole armature in Object mode, you'll keyframe the object or the whole armature, not the bones.
If you want to keyframe the bones you need to select the armature, switch to Pose mode, move the bones, let your cursor in the 3D View, and press i to save.
Don't forget to remove all the animations you've created for the whole armature and object.


text:
Moving an object back to the original position and rotation
I am finding it hard to move a copy of an object back to its original position.
How can I move the big object you see in the foreground back to the exact position and rotation you see the small object in the foreground at the center and aligned to the world origin?
Thanks.

Hello, it depends what you've donne with it, could you please share your file? what does it give if you put the 3D cursor on the one on the background, select the one on the foreground and put it on the 3D cursor? (with Shift S)

Thanks for the help.  I don't know exactly what I have done these are just two parts of a larger project I have been working on for months.  I would need to know how to realign the object to when I first created it because I need to cut it and insert some pin cylinders for 3d printing.   I have uploaded the file as you recommended.

Select 2 faces of your object in Edit mode, create a custom orientation in the Transform Orientations panel:

Back to Object mode, enable the Transform Affect Only Origins option:

Then Object > Transform > Align to Transform Orientation:

Disable the Transform Affect Only Origins option, press AltR to reset the rotation, come back to Global orientation:

Then RZ90 to rotate 90° on Z, CtrlA > Apply Rotation, select the small object and ShiftS > Cursor to Selected:

Then select the big one and ShiftS > Selection to Cursor:

Now their origin is at the same location:


text:
Mechanical animation
I am trying to animate a missile launcher I built.  All was going fine till I encountered the below problem.
As you will see from the images I am trying to give the missile loading container.  All of the objects are parented to each other.
First pic a 90-degree turn in the x-axis - all is good.
2nd and 3rd pic another 90-degree turn in the z-axis (downwards) and insert a keyframe.
4th Pic When I play the animation I get this weird turn before the object comes in the place I want and I do not know what is causing the problem.
Any help would be gratefully appreciated.

i would recommend uploading a blend file with an easy object and just your animation so we can check it out

I have added a simple blend file with interested file as suggested.  Parenting is as follows.  Missile loader is parented t its holder and the holder is parented to the joint.

is this [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/m1OjR.gif what you wanna have?

Assuming you want it like my gif shows....

delete your last keyframe

set timeline to your 2nd keyframe, keyframe delta transform rotation

now set timeline to 550 again, set delta transform x to 90 and keyframe

result:

Thanks a lot it worked.  Never even noticed there was a Delta transform.  Will have to study its functions well.  I have another set of animation for this part, after this one.  Should I continue in delta from now on?

You are welcome


text:
Bevel question: it is possible to bevel in different directions?
Here is a cube with the edge beveled and behind that is a normal cube to better explain.
1

My question is: is there a way to bevel an edge so that is not uniform as in picture 1?
In picture 2 I created the bevel I want, but I had to use a loop cut which is not what I'm looking for.
2

Thanks.

..Expanding on @francois gibon's answer..

in Vertex Mode on the corner-vertex, AltD duplicate it, dragging slightly in the direction of interest, and right-clicking to cancel the move. (Don't deselect)
GG slide the duplicate vertex along the edge to the point you want the bevel to stop.
Repeat for the other direction(s)
CtrlShiftB bevel the corner with 'Width Type: Percent', to 100%. If the bevel tool is already set up from previous use, that's just dragging the bevel as far as it will go.
With all vertices selected, AltM merge > 'By
Distance', to tidy away the duplicates.

As far as I know the only way to do a non uniform bevel is to use "width type: percent", but it probably won't work for what you want to do... it's easy enough to set the gizmo on the "fixed" face, then use the transform tool on the newly created bevel faces to scale them to your liking (don't forget to set the pivot point to cursor).

You can scale your object, apply the bevel, then scale it back again.
Specifically, let's say you want the bevel to be 50% smaller in the x-direction:

In Object Mode, change the x-scale from 1 to 2, then enter Ctrl + A and Apply Scale. Now your object is twice as long in the x-direction.
In Edit Mode, apply the bevel. The bevel will be uniform in all directions.
In Object Mode, change the x-scale from $1$ to $.5$, then enter Ctrl + A and Apply Scale. The bevel will now be 50% smaller in the x-direction.


text:
EXR Artefacts / Lensdistortion STMap to Nuke / 3D Tracking
I bumpt into a STMap artifacts problem
In Nuke i generate a plate
red      (x+0.5)/width
 green    (y+0.5)/height"
 blue      0
 alpha     1

Format is EXR 32bit zip1
In Blender I undistort it with the tracking result and render it out as an EXR 32bit zip1

When I use this STMap for lens distortion in Nuke then i get artifacts

The lower and clean part of the image is the lens distortion applied directly in Blender.
Artifacts only appear when i render a EXR. Tiff does not have that problem, but does not allow linear workflow nor is it 32bit.
Something I found in an other Forum:
https://www.mail-archive.com/nuke-users@support.thefoundry.co.uk/msg12365.html
Quote from this thread:
¨Just to follow up. I spoke with the folks at Imagineer and they said the issues with distortion maps were fixed in v4, but it's possible that exr's are still affected. Tiff's are being rendered correctly from Mocha Pro v4 at 32-bit and the aliasing problem has disappeared.¨
What I'm doing wrong. Is there a faulty implementation of the EXR code?
Thank you for your help.
Differencemap Tiff vs. EXR:

This image heavy gamma lifted to show the differences in the picture. Ideally if everything works as expected with EXR the image should be black (RGB 0,0,0).

Although I am completely unfamiliar with your particular software and issue, could you explain what the exact error you are seeing is? Is it the shearing across the image? Part of the issue would be properly decoding the JPEG, and linearizing the nonlinear encoding. Hard to know exactly where the potential breakage is, as there are many points that could snap.

Hi Troy
The last picture with the car shows it clearly. The upper part is blocky or shows artifacts, the lower part of the picture is how it should look.
This gives you an overview:
https://vfx-rants.blogspot.com/2013/07/using-stmap-based-deformations-for-lens.html

Guessing you are ingesting an EXR? Regardless, are you flagging the image buffer as non-color data?

Unfortunately, there is no such option (non-color data) in Blender when you load a single image to the compositor. I'm not going through the Shader Editor.
This workflow is not limited to lens distortion: it can also be applied to bend and warp objects in compositing that are behind a rendered (CG) transparent object (IOR).
How can I provide more help? pm?

Open image editor, properties. You set the colourspace there. It’s dumb, yes.

I’m not sure what the issue is just yet, but it would start with evaluating the encoded data within Blender. That is, if the EXRs the software is making are broken, then using the TIFF encoding correctly and doing an A/B test against the encoded values is where I’d start. Compare the float values inside the file with what is reported.

Colorspace to non-color data does not change it. Tiff works like expected. I made a difference map from EXR vs. Tiff: it's the last picture in the main post.
This picture should be completely black.

I strongly suspect the EXR is not being encoded correctly in the source software. I would create a test EXR with known values and see if it is encoded correctly. It sure feels like broken EXR encoding.

I managed it to get an EXR that works. It was always there, I was just using the one that was rendered from the output (under Stereoscopy). Even it had the exact same settings it was a lot smaller in size.
The one that comes out from the fileoutput in compositor works now. - what brings the next question up?: How to render the overscan in the exr. It is cropped to the resolution of the project. - maybe I open an other thread.

Definitely worth another thread! Happy the issue was diagnosed.


text:
moon light effect in cycles are not working?
im using cycles and following cgmatters tutorial and the transition is weird help

help plz i dont know whats going on

can you show the model in the editor?

could you please share your file? https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/

ook i put it in


text:
When would you use Simple subdivision rather than Catmull-Clark subdivision?
Subdivision is selected as Catmull-Clark by default. However, the Blender development team still includes the Simple subdivision in Blender 2.72. Does it serve a purpose? Why should I use the Simple subdivision instead of the Catmull-Clark subdivision?
Here is a picture of the Subsurface panel. You can clearly see the options Catmull-Clark and Simple.

Simple subsurf just subdivides all faces without moving any geometry.  Catmull-Clark subdivides the mesh and moves the geometry around to smooth the look.  Specifically I believe each vertex gets moved to the average position of itself and its neighbors with its own position being weighted twice.  Simple is usually used just to add more geometry for another modifier like displace to use.

One can use the simple Subsurf Subdivision Modifier when additional geometry is required without the deformation that occurs when Catmull-Clark algorithm is used.
Simple subsurf can create the geometry for a Displacment Modifier .
See this image its underlying geometry is a default torus. But has two subsurf modifiers and a displacement modifier.

Without the 2nd simple subsurf it would look like:

This technique is call UV-sculpting and a tutorial was posted at this BA thread.

As an example of a case where simple is might be preferred over Catmull-Clark, say you have a large plane which you want to subdivide non-destructively for use with the displace modifier.
When subdivided with Catmull-Clark, it becomes nearly a circle:

But with Simple it maintains the original square shape:

This is just one example. There are probably many such use-cases where Catmull-Clark subdivision doesn't provide the desired result without extra things like edge-creases.

About Simple Subdivision from the wiki:

Only subdivides the surfaces, without any smoothing (similar to W → Subdivide, in Edit mode). Can be used, for example, to increase base mesh resolution when using displacement maps or textured emitters with indirect lighting.

I think it's a suitable example. It's just an option to programmatically subdivide your object's geometry. It can be used to add more detail to your geometry very quick without e.g. manually placing new edge loops. The main advantage is that the modifier have no effect on the appearance of the object itself (non-destructive) unlike the catmull-clark algorithm.
For illustration purposes here is a simple test environment. I've selected the real edges of the geometry to better see the difference between both modifiers.

Example geometry without Subsurf

Example geometry with Simple Subsurf

Example geometry with Catmull Subsurf
Note: There is a interesting wikipedia article about the Catmull algorithm.


text:
Using python to create a curve and attach its endpoints with hooks to two spheres
I'm trying to create a curve with python to depict a bond between two atoms (spheres) like so:
bpy.ops.curve.primitive_bezier_curve_add()
obj = bpy.context.object
obj.data.dimensions = '3D'
obj.data.fill_mode = 'FULL'
obj.data.bevel_depth = self.bevel_depth
obj.data.bevel_resolution = self.bevel_resolution
# set first point to centre of atom_1
obj.data.splines[0].bezier_points[0].co = self.atom_1.locations[0]
obj.data.splines[0].bezier_points[0].handle_left_type = 'VECTOR'
# set second point to centre of atom_2
obj.data.splines[0].bezier_points[1].co = self.atom_2.locations[0]
obj.data.splines[0].bezier_points[1].handle_left_type = 'VECTOR'

The curve endpoints seem to get set to local coordinates and not to the centers of the spheres.
How do I add the hooks to attach the endpoints to the two spheres so that the curve ends stay attached to the spheres when animating the movement of the spheres?

(take a look at iwHiteRabbiT's answer if you want to avoid bpy.ops, which is always a good idea .)
Based on the answer linked by Seppo Silaste I have come up with the following example code which you can modify to fit your application:
import bpy

def hookCurve(o1, o2, scn):
    curve = bpy.data.curves.new("link", 'CURVE')
    spline = curve.splines.new('BEZIER')

    spline.bezier_points.add(1)
    p0 = spline.bezier_points[0]
    p1 = spline.bezier_points[1]
    p0.co = o1.location
    p0.handle_right_type = 'VECTOR'
    p1.co = o2.location
    p1.handle_left_type = 'VECTOR'

    obj = bpy.data.objects.new("link", curve)

    m0 = obj.modifiers.new("alpha", 'HOOK')
    m0.object = o1
    m1 = obj.modifiers.new("beta", 'HOOK')
    m1.object = o2

    scn.objects.link(obj)
    scn.objects.active = obj

    # using anything in bpy.ops is a giant pain in the butt
    bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='EDIT')

    # the mode_set() invalidated the pointers, so get fresh ones
    p0 = curve.splines[0].bezier_points[0]
    p1 = curve.splines[0].bezier_points[1]

    p0.select_control_point=True
    bpy.ops.object.hook_assign(modifier="alpha")

    p0.select_control_point = False
    p1.select_control_point = True
    bpy.ops.object.hook_assign(modifier="beta")

    return obj

o1 = bpy.data.objects['atom 1']
o2 = bpy.data.objects['atom 2']

obj = hookCurve(o1,o2, bpy.context.scene)

This works! I'd up vote you but I don't have reputation ;o) I'd like to understand: Why does p0 and p1 have to be assigned again? Why create a curve and also an object with the curve? Thank you!!

I moved them above the mode_set() call and the hook_assign() did not accomplish its mission.  I'm assuming that the mode_set() changes the curve object in a way that invalidates the pointers inside the python objects p0 and p1.  This is a common danger with blender's python API (and any other system that uses pointers, which is a lot of them).

Oh, and don't worry about upvoting.  If this answer is actually correct and solves your problem, click the "accept answer" icon.  If it does not, let me know how it fails so I can fix it.

'bpy.context.object.modifiers["alpha"].subtarget = "bone_name"' this is needed if you are adding to a bone instead of an object.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/184565/how-to-create-a-hook-modifier-on-every-point-of-a-curve-using-python This shows a solution to add the hooks with out bpy.ops

The accepted answer is indeed working but like said the author "using anything in bpy.ops is a giant pain in the butt".
So here's another solution where you won't have this pain in the butt :D
def hook_from_objetcs(objs, collections):
    name = '_'.join(['bezier'] + [o.name for o in objs])

    curve = bpy.data.curves.new('curve_' + name, 'CURVE')
    spline = curve.splines.new('BEZIER')
    obj = bpy.data.objects.new(name, curve)

    for col in collections:
        col.objects.link(obj)

    spline.bezier_points.add(len(objs) - 1)

    for i, o in enumerate(objs):
        p = spline.bezier_points[i]
        p.co = o.location
        p.handle_right_type = 'AUTO'
        p.handle_left_type = 'AUTO'

        h = obj.modifiers.new(o.name, 'HOOK')
        h.object = o
        h.vertex_indices_set([a + i*3 for a in range(3)])

I wish I had scrolled down. lol I came to the same conclusion after a lot of head banging. this is a better answer

This is not a direct answer to the question, but rather to the underlying application of the OP.
I occasionally want to display proteins, where the hook method would be terribly slow (calling bpy.ops methods for >10000 bonds...). My current working solution for this specific problem of displaying a bond between two atoms is using constraints, which are much faster to handle with a script.
Here is a (rather lengthy) working example. As a bonus it reuses the data (mesh or beveled curve) for all bonds automatically. So the slow bpy.ops calls only happen once. They could be replaced entirely by creating the base mesh or curve from scratch but are more convenient in this case.
import bpy
import bmesh

def get_bond_data(type='MESH'):
    new_bond = None
    if type == 'MESH':
        data_name = "bond_mesh"
    elif type == 'CURVE':
        data_name = "bond_curve"

    data = bpy.context.blend_data.meshes.get(data_name)
    if not data:
        # save last selection to restore later
        selected = bpy.context.selected_objects
        last_active = bpy.context.object
        # bond should start at origin and have length 1 in y-direction
        if type == 'MESH':
            bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cylinder_add(location=(0,0,0),
                depth=1, radius=1.0,
                end_fill_type="NOTHING")
            new_bond = bpy.context.object
            data = new_bond.data
            data.name = data_name
            # rotate vertices 90 degrees around x, and shift along y axis
            bm = bmesh.new()
            bm.from_mesh(data)
            for vert in bm.verts:
                tmp_co = vert.co.copy()
                vert.co.y = -tmp_co.z + .5
                vert.co.z = tmp_co.y
            bm.to_mesh(data)
            bm.free()
            data.update()

        elif type == 'CURVE':
            bpy.ops.curve.primitive_bezier_curve_add(location=(0,0,0))
            new_bond = bpy.context.object
            data = new_bond.data
            data.name = data_name

            bp = data.splines[0].bezier_points
            for i in range(2):
                bp[i].co = (0,i,0)
                bp[i].handle_left_type = 'VECTOR'
                bp[i].handle_right_type = 'VECTOR'

            # get bevel object
            bevel_name = 'bond_bevel'
            bond_bevel = bpy.context.blend_data.objects.get(bevel_name)
            if not bond_bevel:
                bpy.ops.curve.primitive_bezier_circle_add(radius=1.0, location=(0,0,0))
                bond_bevel = bpy.context.object
                bond_bevel.name = bevel_name
            data.bevel_object = bond_bevel

    if new_bond:
        # finally delete object and reselect old selection
        bpy.context.scene.objects.unlink(new_bond)
        for o in selected:
            o.select = True
        bpy.context.scene.objects.active = last_active

    return data

def add_bond(first_atom, second_atom, type='MESH'):
    bond_name = "bond_{}-{}".format(first_atom.name, second_atom.name)
    bond_data = get_bond_data(type=type)
    new_bond = bpy.data.objects.new(bond_name, bond_data)
    bpy.context.scene.objects.link(new_bond)

    c = new_bond.constraints.new('COPY_LOCATION')
    c.name = "from"
    c.target = first_atom

    c = new_bond.constraints.new('STRETCH_TO')
    c.name = "to"
    c.rest_length = 1.0
    c.volume = 'NO_VOLUME'
    c.target = second_atom

    # scale bond so it looks better
    scale = 0.15
    new_bond.scale = (scale, 1.0, scale)

a1 = bpy.context.blend_data.objects.get("atom 1")
a2 = bpy.context.blend_data.objects.get("atom 2")
add_bond(a1, a2, type="CURVE")
#add_bond(a1, a2, type="MESH")

Hello what version of Blender is this written in?  I'm getting an add_bond error: bond_name = "bond_{}-{}".format(first_atom.name, second_atom.name) AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'name'

@volvox I think it was 2.71 at the time, but it should work in other versions as well. You need to make sure that you have at least to objects in your scene called "atom 1" and "atom 2".

If you want a cylinder to connect two objects a hook modifier probably isn't enough.  As the atoms move relative to each other, the caps of the cylinder won't know to rotate to face the other object.
In order to address this shortcoming you can create a cylinder with a 2-bone armature.  The cylinder has two vertex groups (one for each cap) to map them to each bone.
The bones then have bone constraints.  The first bone constraint is a Copy Location to place the bone in the center of the atom.  The second bone constraint is a Track To to point the bone at the other atom.
In order for this to achieve the desired effect the bones must be oriented correctly in edit mode.  Notice how the top bone points down and has a roll of 180.

If you need help figuring out the python to construct this sort of arrangement automatically, post a comment and I'll help figure it out.

As best I can tell blender does not have what you need for Bezier curves.
It does have something for meshes.  There is a hook modifier you can apply to a mesh.  You then specify a foreign object and a Vertex Group that will be hooked to that object.
So replace your Bezier curve with a simple mesh rectangle (or tube or whatever) and add the hook modifiers.
If you need python code to build the mesh, vertex groups, and modifiers reply in the comments and I'll cobble together something concrete.

Someone seems to think it is possible:http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/13452/attaching-a-curve-by-its-endpoints-to-two-spheres

I guess a cylinder could also work, but it doesn't have end points that I could set to the centers of the spheres. That's why I'm thinking about a curve.

Put the ends of the cylinder such that the center of each cap is in the middle of a sphere.  Make each cap its own vertex group for the Hook modifier.

Interesting, Seppo.  I was discouraged because I added the modifier through the menu, not through Ctrl-H.  There is no obvious readout in the modifier pane that shows you what curve control points are members of the hook, but it works.

The python API for the hook modifier object doesn't have any obvious ways to set which points on the curve are hooked.  It looks like the only way to accomplish this is bpy.ops.object.hook_assign() which has all the drawbacks of everything in bpy.ops.  But it is probably possible.


text:
Greek letters in Blender OSX
How can I use greek letters for text in Blender 2.71 OSX? I need to use a lower case delta for a partial charge symbol in a chemistry reaction animation.

See http://blender.stackexchange.com/q/3522/599

Ok. Thanks. I searched for "Blender greek letters" and got no results so I posted this question. Should I leave the question for those who might search for greek letters in the future or should I delete it?

You can just leave it since it will help searches as you said.


text:
keep selection after bevel
I'm trying to simply bevel a subdivided cube and each time I click out or click enter to apply bevel the whole mesh gets selected. I'm trying to keep selection after bevel and it's so frustrating does anyone have any idea why this keeps happening?


text:
How to get a similar hair effect
I'm trying to recreate this and no matter how much I mess with the particle system's settings(which include Brownian, shape & clumping), I can't get this soft fluffy effect.

Maybe I'm just using them wrong. Or maybe a specific material is required. Can someone help?

I restored most setting to default to start over and this is what I'm currently dealing with.

The number of hairs on that model is in the millions, if that helps :p

surely does not help my laptop.

I'm talking about the softness of the hair not how many

Is this for Eevee or Cycles? Maybe add a screenshot of your work. For fluffy fur, you need thin hair and a lot of it as Allen Simpson suggested.

Eevee, and I'm starting from scratch but i can send the model.

Try with new hair system, also, use the tools to comb the hair a bit and add more steps to make it look softer

can you add more details pls or maybe a screenshot

I think you need to tweak some parameters to make the hair length a bit randomized, to make them clump, etc, you should watch these tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQxkRSlJC54 ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVj1fETtuN8

thanks, I'll check them out

I just notice that you said you are using EEVEE, which means that it's going be very hard to get something closer to your image, take a look at this image which uses a material with Hair BSDF (cycles only) https://i.imgur.com/3KQqrfp.png

It's the only object in the scene right now so I can probably bully my laptop into switching to cycles  ; )

Can u help me with the settings for this result tho.

Can you use Blender 3.5? It comes with new GNs and assets for fur. There is also a tutorial video and a demo file with 4 different fur types (cattle, zebra, beaver, and sheep). Have a look here: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/3-5/#hair

Yeah came out a couple of weeks ago. Thanks for the link


text:
Make one color of color ramp emissive
I have this cube with a displacement modifier and a color ramp and I'm trying to set the purple part to be emissive.

Any help would be appreciated.
File:

At the moment, the color-ramp has no input, so your whole object is one color (0.5 on the ramp). The ramp is having no effect. Which parts do you want to be purple, which parts black?

I want most of it black(displaced parts) and the parts closer to the center to be purple

To give the effect as if the black part is a shell and the purple glow is appearing through cracks in the shell.

Cycles or EEVEE?

I'm using Evee Engine

try this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaDkMP5ruh4&pp=wgIGCgQQAhgB

I will do that, thanks

It's not a perfect solution, but you can use Ambient Occlusion to drive the ColorRamp with the emission:

I'll try it, thanks

I used this method and it worked perfectly but when I tried adding a plane below the cube the whole bottom started to glow due to shadows between cube and plane.

That's why I said it's not ideal - if you want better control over the "position" of the emission (without it changing based on interactions like ambient occlusion), you will need to use the same texture for the displacement as you do for the shading - Unfortunately, blender's shader system has no access to the textures used by the displacement modifier,  therefore you will either have to perform the displacement via shader (which requires cycles and a highly subdivided model), or you can import an external "noise" texture and use it for both.

Last option is to bake the emission texture when the object is "on its own", and then apply that texture when you need a plane nearby or something like that.

Can you please explain further the option with the noise texture? Even better if you add a screenshot.

Actually, now that I think about it, it's been a while since I properly applied a non-procedural texture to a cube (to a plane it's easy because there a re no "sides" to worry about). I'll look into making an example if I can,

That would be great, thanks.


text:
How to make a liquid gold texture like reference
I want to achieve a similar material to this one by Andrey Panfilov
Reference

ok. Could you please add some picture of it?

I added a link but smth went wrong ima fix it rn

there, sorry for the inconvenience

Thanks for accepting my answer, I just looked at the image in the question for it. Now that I've seen the video I can only confirm that a lot of the effects there are created with multiple light and glow etc., so as I said in my answer, the material itself is only part of the solution.

The material is not the complicated thing, with metallic materials (especially colored metals like gold) the problem is always, they can look very different depending on the light and environment.
For example, this is how I would create a very simple material for gold - of course you can use noise textures and other things to bring variations into the base color or the roughness, but let's start simple: some yellowish Base Color, Metallic set to 1 and Roughness to 0.25, that's a good start (I would probably make the color even less saturated and a bit darker, but the reference is a very warm tone):

Now the result however can be what you want or not - this is a comparison how this material can look just by varying the HDRI for the environment, adding other light sources etc. could have even more effect:

So actually this question cannot be answered perfectly, because even if you have the same material, the exact look you will only get in the same environment and with the same light sources placed in the right spots.

that was very useful thank you. can you pls share the exact color/hex code you used

@JoxXx Sure, although you can get it from the screenshot since the color field shows the color as it would appear in for example Photoshop as well: #E8CC8D


text:
Optimize Sim Cache
I have a big blend file that contains simulations and my pc can't handle rendering it and I can't upload it to a render farm cuz when I  add external cache files it gets too big. Whenever Itry rendering it blender crashes.
Rendering in Eevee btw.
I'm trying to upload to sheep it but it's max is 750 mb, the zip file is currently 3 gbs
File contents:
3 .mov files 50mb
packed blend file 50mb
flip fluid cache 100 MB
smoke & fire cache 3gbs
Help pls

Simplest solution without changing the sim would be to divide your render into several batches of frame. Make several files with each a different frame range and provide only these frames' caches. Otherwise, redo the simulation at lower resolution and no "noise" if you have some.

I'm sorry but I don't exactly know how to do that can you pls explain simply or send a tutorial?

The simplest solution without changing the simulation would be to divide your render into several buckets of frames. Make several files with each a different frame range and provide only these frames' caches. Otherwise, redo the simulation at lower resolution and no "noise" if you have some. Or even a combination of both.
Buckets method
First, you need to look at your cache files to figure out how many frames you can share without going over the upload limit. Then, use that number to make each bucket.
Let's say you established that you can have up to 10 frames of simulation without going over 750MB.
Open your scene, set your time range to the first 10 frames:

Save this as a new scene. Then make a zip file with that scene and only the first 10 frames of simulation caches.
Repeat for each 10 frames until you covered the whole frame range you need.
You can then send each scene to sheep it.
Modifying the simulation
Since it's the fire simulation that takes most of the space, then let's focus on this one only.
To my knowledge, there are two parameters that drastically impact the file size of caches: the domain's resolution and noise.
My advice would be to first disable the noise entirely. Then lower the domain's resolution to the lowest you can to get the overall shape you need, then enable the noise again and adapt its upres factor to the lowest you can to get the look you need.

Resolution Divisions: how many voxels you have in your domain. Similar to image pictures: the higher the resolution, the more data, the heavier the file.

Noise is a cheap and easy way to add finer details over the original simulation, so that instead of spending lots of computing time and memory on simulating a precise simulation, you instead quickly simulate just the global shape of the simulation and add noise over it to make it look finer than it is. But it's still more data to cache, and the upres factor works the same way as the domain's resolution.

How do I cut cache into buckets

All of your caches have one file per frame and per cache. just include the files for the frames you need for each bucket.


text:
Powder In A Pile
I'm trying to achieve a result similar to this one.

I'm just trying to find a method my actual goal is to make a path of powder.
I tried using a particle system then converting it to a mesh but the particles just went through each other so I used molecular addon but all the particles seemed to explode.
(edited)this is an example of what I meant by a path/trail of powder

but this is a photo taken from afar so its details do not appear entirely. I want to achieve the second photo with the same amount of detail as the first.

You could use Geometry Nodes:

You could then duplicate the object, duplicate the node tree, and modify it slightly to add another layer:

Duplicate the object to create a 3rd layer.
Apply the Geometry Nodes modifier of the 2nd layer, add rigid body physics: passive, mesh shape, full friction (could increase it over 1 manually, but I tried with 1).
Modify the 3rd layer increasing min Poisson distance, so the particles don't overlap. Apply this modifier as well.
Move the 3rd layer a little up, maybe rotate around Z 180° if they look to similar to underlying particles, in such case remember to apply rotation.
Set Physics: active, convex hull shape, full friction (1.0), mass 100 kg.
⭾ Tab, A, P, L Separate By Loose Parts.
⭾ Tab, F3 "Set Origin to Center of Mass (Volume)".
Add a plane, move it a little up (I was sloppy with removing the bottom of the cone), add passive physics, also full friction.

That's about it. Could repeat or tune this process but you get the idea.

Path
For a short path, just bevel a curve and use that as the geometry to spawn particles. For a longer path you probably want to resign from a simulation altogether - it was just a lazy way to get some particles outside of the geometry. Instead you can just spawn some particles on a plane, using "Geometry Proximity" to the curve to control the density of points.

could I possibly ask for a blend file please, it's all for a personal project I'm not gonna sell it or smth plus i mentioned earlier that my original goal is to achieve a trail of powder.

Thanks that's exactly what I needed

you helped me so much this far but if I could ask you one last thing, I need to change the shape of the path and I'm a beginner when it comes to geo nodes so is there a way to do so using the curve pen for example? plus my pc lags a bit when I use the file so I couldn't really keep messing around with the settings till i get a better result

@JoxXx reduce the number of instances (e.g. by increasing the minimum distance in the poisson distribution), don't use sliders while doing that, just input new values with keyboard. As for a curve, you can import a curve just like I import a profile (cross section) for the path, then you can use it to replace the spiral. You will need to readjust the caps because they are positioned manually.

Will do, Thank you so much.

Your actual goal is a path of powder? I will assume that is a typo and you want a pile of powder. You could use particle system with fluid physics, OR use rigid bodies. The picture you show here is a pile of crystals, rather than powder.

Powder can be achieved by creating a convincing mesh, subdividing it and using large scaled noise to achieve the shadows between particles. This one is not very convincing but it can be very low poly.

Crystals can be achieved by using rigid bodies, with random transforms and simulating the gravity effects. Use a cone as a passive rigid body to save memory.

Blend file. Bake before running sim

Those cuboid particles are sweet!

That's great thank you so much but I actually meant a path of powder like a trail


text:
Load and update enum values
I have an enum in my panel and I wonder how I can populate it from a file and then refresh it when needed instead of being static as shown below.
So if I have a text file populate.txt with the below format it should give the same result as the above one so that the values in the text file will be populated in my panel when it's loaded:
populate.txt:
1.5,A,
2.4,B,
-5.2,C,

I also wonder how I can refresh the list after the panel is already drawn and the enum is drawn (read from the text file and update the list).
This is my current script:
import bpy
from bpy.types import Panel, PropertyGroup
from bpy.props import EnumProperty, PointerProperty
from bpy.types import Scene

bl_info = {
    "name": "prop",
    "description": "prop",
}

class PropVal(PropertyGroup):
    enumv = EnumProperty(
        name="my_enum_name:",
        description="my_enum_description",
        items=[ ("1.5", "A", ""),
                ("2.4", "B", ""),
                ("-5.2", "C", ""),
               ]
        )

class EnumPanel(Panel):
    bl_idname = "EnumPanel"
    bl_label = "Panel"
    bl_space_type = "VIEW_3D"
    bl_region_type = "TOOLS"
    bl_category = "Tools"

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        scene = context.scene
        enumval = scene.enumval
        layout.prop(enumval, "enumv")

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_module(__name__)
    bpy.types.Scene.enumval = PointerProperty(type=PropVal)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_module(__name__)
    del bpy.types.Scene.enumval

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

And this is my result:

bpy.props.EnumProperty can be of static nature (as in your example) or dynamic.
bpy.props.EnumProperty(items, name="", description="", default=None, options={'ANIMATABLE'}, update=None, get=None, set=None)

A dynamic enum is one whose items are calculated when clicked on, for example.
def items_file(self, context):
    items = []
    # open file
    # construct a tuple
    # append to items
    return items

Now whenever you click the enum property in the Panel, the items will be fetched from the callback.
Note:

The default parameter must be None for dynamic enum
In the callback, the items must always be assigned to a local variable, populated and then returned (to avoid crash: and this is a documented bug)

https://docs.blender.org/api/current/bpy.props.html

Thank you, it's working now reading from the file but it doesn't update unless I run the script again, any advice? the script is found here http://pasteall.org/429989

I am not aware of a way to dynamically update the enum. Maybe you can add an operator button that could refresh the enum. That is what i can think of.

A normal enum will fetch the new items when it gets opened. To update the set of items, why not try using the update-hook ?

I'm not very clear where the function items_file is called in your example? Also is it possible to refresh the enum items with a specific command rather than every time user clicks on the property in the panel?

Given the fact that you want to get the items from a file, why not add a string property to store the file path. When the file path is updated it can be used to update the enumerated list.
import bpy
import csv
from bpy.types import Operator
from bpy.types import Panel

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

def update_selected(self, context):
    print("file : ", context.scene.csv_file)
    print("list item : ", context.scene.enum_list1)
    return None

def update_enum_list(self, context):
    enum_list_from_all(self, context)
    return None

def enum_list_from_all(self, context):
    """EnumProperty callback"""
    enum_items = []
    objs = importCSV(context.scene['csv_file'])
    if objs is None:
        return enum_items
    count = 0
    for obj in objs:
        identifier = str(obj)
        name = str(obj)
        description = str(obj)
        number = count
        enum_items.append((identifier, name, description, number))
        count += 1
    return enum_items

# Function to import CSV file data
# This is based on CSV file having a header row
# with the descriptions 'x', 'y', 'z'

def importCSV(csv_file):
    obj_loc = ()
    obj_data = ()
    objs = []
    with open(csv_file) as csvfile:
        reader = csv.DictReader(csvfile)
        for row in reader:
            obj_loc = (float(row['x']), float(row['y']), float(row['z']))
            obj_data = (obj_loc)
            objs.append(obj_data)
    return objs

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

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        scene = context.scene
        row = layout.row()
        col = layout.column(align=True)
        col.label(text="Blank2")
        col.prop(scene, "csv_file")
        if not scene.csv_file:
            col.label(text="select a file to load")
        else:
            col.prop(scene, "enum_list1")

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(VIEW3D_PT_Blank1_Blank2)
    bpy.types.Scene.csv_file = bpy.props.StringProperty(
        name="csv_file",
        description="Path of CSV File to read from",
        default="",
        options={'HIDDEN'},
        update=update_enum_list,
        subtype='FILE_PATH')
    bpy.types.Scene.enum_list1 = bpy.props.EnumProperty(
        items=enum_list_from_all,
        name="enum_list1",
        description="",
        default=None,
        update=update_selected,
        )

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(VIEW3D_PT_Blank1_Blank2)
    del bpy.types.Scene.csv_file
    del bpy.types.Scene.enum_list1

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

And in your class "EnumPanel(Panel):"
have you add this:
def check(self, context):
    return True

and you too can add an init() function for pre-calculate something....

Like that:
MyEnum= bpy.props.EnumProperty( items = get_items);

def get_items(self, context):
    l = [];
    with open('populate.txt', 'r') as f:
        for line in f:
            s = line.split(',')
            l.append((s[0], s[1], s[1]))
    return l;

Please add further explanation for how and why this code works, and why it answers the question. Refrain from posting nothing but a code snippet. Adding an explanation for how the code works allow for people to understand it properly and easily edit it to suit their needs.


text:
Bad quality in animation EEVEE Blender 2.81a
I have problem with quality on animation. When I render a picture quality is good but in animation it's very bad. I don't know how to fix this. I tryied to set samples to 800 but effect was same, should I render it on 5000 samples or more? Please help.

Picture

Video

Settings

What are your video encoding settings?

You mean this? I added new photo

Please try to set the Output Quality to Perceptually lossless and Encoding Speed to Slowest.

Thanks! Now it's much better, but quality is still not the best, increase number of samples will help?

I set 500 samples and quality was a bit better so i set 2000 but quality was same like in 500 samples, can you help me?

The number of samples doesn't affect the video encoding. Increasing the samples doesn't help if the still frames already look as they're supposed to. In order to improve the video quality even further you could use a format that supports a codec with lossless compression.

Okay, do you know which format supports it?


text:
Procedural Building Windows Generation
One part of project, that I am currently working on is creating a model of russian building type, called "Panelky". This buildings have 5 to 20 floors and due to their nature, every single window on those buildings is very different: some are wooden and were produced back in USSR, some are modern made out of plastic, some windows on the 1st floor have metal shielding and so on.
   I can probably model every single window for one 6 floor building, but it is almost impossible to do that for block of a couple building that are 9 floor high.
My question is: How can i create a system, that will:
 1) Procedurally create a collection of windows
 2) Randomly spread them onto building
P.S. I've attached a photo of "Panelka", so that you can better understand, why I need it to be random and procedurally generated.


text:
Smoke is not showing with particles Blender
I want to make a turnado. My problem is that I want to add smoke and have the smoke react to the vortex of the turnado, so that it rotates with the turnado. Smoke is not showing.

I was able to add a smoke, a smoke domain, but it is not rotating with the vortix

smoke simulation does react to force fields...so what is your problem? i don't get it?

Play the animation button, and you will not see the smoke, that is the problem

you added two flow objects but no domain? uhm...ok, you should have written that you are a total beginner of Blender...You will never see any smoke or fluid without a domain. A domain is the "overall world" in which the simulation takes place. I would recommend watching some beginner fluid/smoke simulation tutorials. You always need a domain for that kind of simulation.

and another hint: you shouldn't make "tornado" simulations if you are beginner. Start with easy (!) tasks and then try more complicated things. Else learning Blender might be a bit frustrating...because simulations are really complicated and changing just one parameter can ruin the whole animation.

I've added your file to a more conventional download link  without the cached sim. data, so it's small enough

@Chris,
I added a smock domain, but it is not rotating with the vortex

@TahaHalabi I'm not the man for that one, sorry.. my knowledge of fluid & smoke sims is very basic indeed :)

@Chris,
Check the new image in the description, smoke is not rotating with the vertics

@TahaHalabi: I am sorry, but this is not how this site works. You can ask questions here and you hopefully will get answers. And hopefully other can learn from your question as well. But it is not sense of the site, that you adapt your question every time you get to know the error and adapt it again and again. Because then other won't learn from your question because comments won't be found by search algorithm. But you can ask as many questions as you want here.


text:
How to make the new curves hair system follow the rig? (Fur body)
I'm trying to make an animated animal with fur. Having created fur through the new curves hair system, I ran into a problem that I could not make it move with the mesh. What should I do?
Converting curves to a particle system is not an option, since this action globally changes the view.

Hard to tell only from the screenshot. Guessing into the blue: you don't have the Surface Deform node in the Geometry Nodes modifier on the Curves object.

added a couple of screenshots, could you tell me which group of nodes to add

Thanks for the screenshots! The problem is the UV map. In screenshot 2, check the GN. It modifier says "Invalid surface UVs on 6914 curves". You already have the "Deform Curves on Surface" node but it requires a UV unwrapped model. The UV islands must not overlap.

authors: Григорий Жуков


text:
Origami animation in blender 2,8
Could someone guide me to create a simple folding animation of an Origami Plane?
version 2.8 or 2.81 if possible.
I will really appreciate.

How to simulate Miura-fold It is from 2.7x but should still point you in the right direction.

I just commented on a post similar to yours from around the same era. While I don't believe I can illustrate a process specifically enough to give an answer, I have at least outlined what the main challenges are. It could serve as a starting point for someone looking into this.


text:
I cannot sculpt grease pencil strokes or see the cursor(display cursor is on)
A new project works good. but this specific project was from 2.9x, and now i opened in 3.6 but i cannot sculpt the strokes any of it. Even if i make a new grease pencil object(in this version or 2.9 it wont let me sculpt it ). is my file broken?
i resized the cursor with F but still goes back to invisible.

i found it,
just once selected the brush in sculpt mode, go to the right on TOOL (active tool and workspace settings)
youll probably see the brush empty, if you click on the little arrow pointing down on the rightr, you can click RESET aLL brushes, or reset brush.  that worked for me. probably there was another way.  but this one worked.


text:
How can i center the panning of the camera perspective view ,respectively to the viewport?(SOLVED)
(SOLVED)
Solution: Press home key when in camera view.
=========================================================
im in camera perspective, (numpad 0 view) is there a way to center the camerawindow to the center of the viewport?

and maybe try even to fit it? i saw the command Zoom camera 1:1 but it still wont center it. i would like the camera to be centered. I know theres a ctrl+numppad  4 , 6 ,8 ,2 but the step is too big for what i need. i would need to make it precisely in the same position everytime i go back to this view or at least have a button or script that puts it in the same position always. (must be as precise as possible, thats why i cannot do it by hand with shift + middle mouse and zoom)
if found that the command view3d.view_pan is the one the ctrl+numpad 4682 , use to move the view, but i still dont know how to use this in python script if i do this through a script.

Try View > Cameras > Frame Camera Bounds
You can also press the Home key.

@RubenD'Andrea See my new edit.


text:
Why am I getting these folding glitches when rigging my model?
This might be a really dumb question but I am trying rigging out and I keep getting this weird folding glitches. I am trying to fix it with weight painting? But is there something else I should be doing?

Share your file? https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/

After looking at your file, it turns out that the vertex weights have some irregularities. This was quick and easy to fix by simply starting the skinning process over again.
Start by going into in Object Mode, select the armature, then click on the Object Data tab in the Properties Panel, go to the Skeleton section, and press the Rest Position button to get your armature into its default pose. We do this to prepare it for proper skinning.
Next, while still in Object Mode, click on the Modifiers tab, find the armature modifier and press the Apply button, thereby essentially getting rid of it. Now click on the Object Data tab in the Properties Panel, and go to the Vertex Weights section. There is a little dark button with a white "down" arrow on it, to the far right of this section. Click on it, and from the popup menu, choose to Delete All Groups.
Next, while still in Object Mode, select the character mesh, then Shift + select the armature, then press Ctrl + p, and from the Parent menu, choose Armature Deform With Automatic Weights. Finally, go back to the Skeleton section and press the Pose Position button to re-enable your rig for posing and animation. If you forget this step, you won't be able to move your rig, and your animation won't even play.
I find that this works. More tweaks may be needed, though. One thought I had was that as clean as your mesh is, the topology might be able to be improved somewhat. But overall, the mesh isn't bad. With a bit of weight painting, it may be good enough like it is.

Oh, wow! Thank You so much!!! :) Spend all day on this XD Can't thank you enough for taking some time to help me out. Have an amazing day. Thank you!!


text:
Trouble weight painting character
I tried my best to rig my first character, but every time I try to weight paint something seems to go wrong. The automatic weights are ok but need some editing. However every time I try  to do  that I seem to make it worse instead of better.
What are perhaps some good tutorials to learn this?
Thank you for your time.

If I select the shoulder bone (the one that affects the mesh and that is on the first armature layer, not the one on the third armature layer), you can see that it influences the neck area (and also the head) when it should not.
Other bones affect the head as well. You need to correct this, for example with the weight paint brush in Subtract mode.
Also maybe simplify your mesh, it will make things easier, unless you have some good reason not to use a Subdivision Surface modifier. And why not simplify the armature as well?

Thank you moonboots, you are very very helpful. I understand what you are saying.I tried to do what you suggested and weight paint with the subsurface modifier not permanently applied yet however that gives me too little vertex point to work with to weight paint for the bones in my armature. I prefer to keep this armature.

I left the weights in the neck because that is what the automatic weights gave me, however when I try to correct them (Like you said) I get those glitches again. I think I need to smooth the weight painting out better, but whenever I spend hours trying to do that, I keep having these glitches. Perhaps I am overlooking something simple. Do know if there is a tutorial I should watch? Or do you perhaps know of a method yourself.
Thank you once again for your time I really appreciate it.

you must make a mistake in the settings. First in the Tool bar on the left select the Draw brush, then in the N panel on the right > Tool > Brush Settings, choose Blend > Subtract, Weight > 1, Stregth > 1, to be able to paint through, in Advanced disable Front Face Only, in Falloff choose Projected and disable Front-Face Falloff. It should work fine. But you also need to correct the other bones: bones of the arm, of the torso, of the belly, they also influence the head!

Thank you for your responses it brought me a few steps closer :)


text:
How to make part of rigged mesh stationary?
How can I make a few specific vertices stay in place and not be affected by the rigging? I've messed around with weight painting and no matter how blue I make it for all the bones it still moves. It actually moves even more when I make it bluer which doesn't make sense to me. Thanks for your time.
I've uploaded my file so you can see what I'm working with. I need the base of the tentacle to stay put. Just the first layer of vertices that are moving a little bit.
I'm using Blender 2.8

Hello! You can upload blend files here: https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/ Just copy and paste the given code into your question.

With weight paint it's definitely worth a look at the actual verts. in the group (as in select the group in edit mode and see if there's verts. in the group where the weight map looks fully blue). Just had this issue myself! If you use any sort of soft falloff painting weights you can still gets 'fully blue' looking verts. that still have a non-zero a weight value.

Do you have any reference vidoes I can watch to show how to look at the verts and see where the soft falloff option is? Thanks MarkS!

As you can read in edit mode, your base vertices do have some weight relatively to many bones, so of course they are moving.
If you want them to stay still, select all of them and remove weight from all vertex groups.
Another more usual way is to create a "tentacle base" bone and weight them to it.
Remember that even a very little weight, if it's not "counterbalanced" by a bigger weight, will have a great influence to the vertex, so you can't trust the blue color in weight paint mode only.

Awesome Josh that worked! Don't know how to mark it as the correct answer.

Just click on the up arrow on the left of the answer!

I'm having another problem I'm really strugglin with and have looked all over for an answer. I have 8 tentacles as separate objects each with their own separate animated bendy bone armature. I want to join all of the armatures into 1 but when I do ctrl-j only one of the tentacles will move afterwards and the rest of the bones are frozen when I press play. Is there a way to join the armatures into one while keeping the animations? Each armature has its own action in the action editor. I've tried for hours to use the same action for all the bones but it doesn't work. Any help much appreciated.

Probably when you joined the armatures there were some bones with the same name: in this case Blender adds some suffixes (.001, .002, .003, .....). But if the bone has a different name from its corresponding vertex group it doesn't work: so rename all bones with an unique name before joining. If you do it in Pose mode with its action and with the tentacle parented, the vertex groups will be automatically renamed.

I made sure to name all of the bones uniquely from the beginning though.. Also, I'm not sure what you mean about joining in pose mode, When I select all of the armatures and go into pose mode and do ctrl-j and then go back to object mode they're still not merged into one armature.

I was talking about renaming, joining is in object mode, of course.

After joining, check why are the tentacles not moving: choose one bone, check if it has animation data, if it has the same name of the vertex group, if it moves or not .... until you'll find the problem. Or make another question and upload the file.


text:
A way to non destructively, temporarily move all objects on each rendered frame to soft snap them to a unit space? (Pixel conscious 2D GP rendering)
The fixed whole number pixel nature of 2D imaging and the decimal heavy nature of 3D is often a source of trouble.
In the case of Blender, it is easy to generate visual artefacts from scaling and moving objects around in 3D space, causing the rasterizer trouble due to the fractional positions not mapping exactly onto the 2D pixel grid.
Example:
Grease Pencil thickness inconsistency causing line boil/flickering/shimmering on camera move
I am looking for, if possible, ways to clamp/snap object properties to as many whole pixel numbers as possible before each frame is rendered, but without actually touching the attributes created by the artist, or by keyframe interpolation.
It should only be done right before rendering, moving and or scaling all objects just enough (this value is usually very tiny) to align them better, to give the rasterizer more of a chance to not make things wobble and shine.
My immediate/naive thought is to convert scales and positions to 'local' coordinates instead of world, and then nudging them by that value, and I think this would work.
But I don't really know where or how to shimmy that functionality in to even test the naive version.
Are there global 'modifiers'?
Should it be done with Geometry Nodes? (Which would have to be applied to the offenders manually)
Should it be done with some sort of addon script that hooks in the 'render pre'callback?
Something else?

Hello, could you add a screenshot of an example of the limitation you're encountering in a render ?

Hi, it's related to this:
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/285128/grease-pencil-thickness-inconsistency-causing-line-boil-flickering-shimmering-on

Which is almost most definetely is related to interpolation/sampling and mapping that to the 2d image. The more subtle the camera movement, the worse the artefacts become, and that, to me and my understanding of 3d<->2d is related to fractional pixel data incorrectly pushed into the discrete pixel grid, smears, blurs, boiling and wobbles.
I realize that it might be impossible to fix this completely with pixel friendly, 'post processing' snapping but it would help. Opentoonz has this issue too, when using interpolated keyframe data. 3d is fine, but 2d always makes this issue worse.

I've built an addon to quantize values and grid-align stuff in the past, but it is neither automated nor non destructive, though if you don't keyframe changes, they'll snap back to the saved values even for rendering. https://blenderartists.org/t/transform-quantizer/1403707

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos Thank you for providing the source for that, I think the whole deal is overkill for this instance, but I appreciate the learning material.

Would it really fix the flickering problem, though ? I would expect the lines to jump even more from pixel to pixel. Or you'd have to remove antialiasing entirely

I am not sure if it would fix everything @Gorgious but consider the following. The camera and canvas and the drawings are aligned in a satisfactory way on frame one.
Now the camera moves one exact pixel to the right. Now, theoretically, if the rendering process is relatively  deterministic, the scene should be more or less fully replicated, but shifted a pixel.
But now, shift the camera in a way that ends up translating to a half pixel. Now interpolation really kicks in, because all the texels and whatnot now lie on pixel boundaries.
Proper alignment, would lessen this quite a bit


text:
Render looks way too bright in both viewport and render
I have to render a video where a bottle crashes onto the ground.
I managed to render half the video on a PC at my school, but I had to go home so I stopped the render and decided to render the missing frames on my own laptop from home. I don't remember changing any particular settings, but on my laptop the render looks way different to what I got from my school PC.
The colors look desaturated, and the whites look overexposed, in both Cycles and Eevee, and the viewport and the render. The lights in the scene also seem to be the exact same. I've heard people say that messing with the color management settings would help, but that does pretty much nothing for me.
I'll provide a picture of a frame rendered on my school PC next to the same frame but from my laptop so you can see the difference in lighting and colors.
I don't know how I can share my scene on this website since I'm new here, but if you need it I can try to find a way.
Thanks for helping !

https://blend-exchange.com given code copy paste via edit into your Question ... or any other way (retransfer or what ever if it is a big).

This isn’t a strong comparison. One is from the render viewport inside of Blender, and the other is from a separate program reading the final file. Even if they were both final renders instead of one being a preview render, they could still look different because of the video player’s color settings or just how it’s programmed.

By another words you should compare both rendered images (PC/laptop) in player app or blender app ...


text:
Blender Keeps Creating Numerous Invisible Objects
starting noticing that my blender projects have 100s of invisible objects in them, which keep growing every time I edit/save the project. Anyone know how I can find and delete these invisible objects?

Here is a sample blend project - could not get it under 30MB to upload it on blend-exchange: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SsBY7Z_lQQ0qNITnvexc233jmPIf_Ag_/view?usp=sharing

The first image - Are you Appending some object from another blend file to a new one seen on the second image and this object comes with others that are listed in Outliner, but not visible in 3D Viewport?

@vklidu yes, this is the situation - I am appending objects from another blend file but seems these invisible objects keep growing each time I open/edit the blend file.

What is at Layer 1? Probably better if you can share sample source file. Create a file with a Cube (Save, Close) than open a new file and try to Append the Cube from previously saved file. If that works fine would be better if you can share a file that you are using as source (you are append from) ... to see what structure is there. Ideally if you can delete all parts that doesn't participate on the issue (it would be lighter to upload and easier for us to understand to this file. Thanks

@vklidu I had to share the file on Google Drive. Link is in the original post.

From given file I can see two things ...

80 MB file contains 20 MB of Orphan Data (materials and images)

and than a weird thing ...under Outliner > Blend File there are four objects with materials that take the rest of MB.

To clean the file from those right click on each object (Cube.0011 ... .0014) and choose Delete. Those data (objects and materials) are still kept in blender under Outliner > Orphan data, Blender keeps it for next file opening (as some kind of backup). Open save it twice because first open-save delete material orphan data second delete images of these materials.
Why are mentioned objects kept in file I can't say, they are not linked, they are not marked as Faked User ... I don't see any relationship for those Data Blocks (that you can study closer in Outliner too) to behave like that.

If there will still persist some images go to File > External Data > Unpack.

This was about how to store them in the blend, but you were speaking about appending into a new file ... How does that happened for you?
When I try to Append like Cube.0011 into a new file it seams to be fine. The only one weird thing here is light blue color of origin the appended object ... should be orange as outline. Light blue color is referring to Linked object (that is not) ...


text:
How do I fix these blurry artifacts?

How would I fix the artifacting?
Renderer: Eeve
  Blend file: http://www.mediafire.com/file/aoq4aegv55u5g21/monkeys.blend/file

StackExchange is a Q&A site which values questions that show you've made an effort towards solving the issue.
The How do I ask a good question
page from the Help Center may help you improve your question. Please try to describe what you've tried so far
and why this didn't give you the desired result.


text:
textures showing up in cycles but not in evee
I have an ocean texture on a plane in a scene in blender 2.81. When using the evee render engine the ocean texture does not show up when rendering but it does in view port. In cycles it does show up in rendering however I want to render it in evee since it a bazillion times faster and doesn't have as much noise. I will have linked an image of the nodes for the ocean shader/texture and the render in cycles and evee.
Nodes:

Cycles:

evee (rendered with 1 sample):

Does this answer your question? True displacement in EEVEE?


text:
Report: error Traceback (most recent calls last)
there seems to be no answers for the error "Traceback (most recent calls last)" in blender 2.8. Reinstalling blender doesnt fix the problem. this error occurs by just left clicking in the viewport or when importing images into textures and backgrounds. It ruins blender. I have no idea how this has happened.
this is the error:

I do not want to install a new version of blender at the moment so that is out of the option. Please help. This error is really annoying. This must have something to do with a file directory but i am not sure. Thanks in advance.

Set File > Defaults to  "Factory Settings"

thanks sooo much! that fixed it! It kinda feels obvious thinking about it now. Could you make that an answer so I can make the question answered and upvote you?

All python errors are preceded by "Traceback (most recent calls last"   The error would appear to be a context path being wrong either in a panel or keymap having the 3d view context instead of properties.  The latter has context.space_data.context the former doesn't.  If you are happy resetting everything back to factory defaults cool.

Yes. I did not save any presets or alter the default blender module so it would have not effected me. I would be happy to see alternatives that could be applied to solving this error as well however.

Revert to Factory settings.
Set File > Defaults to "Factory Settings"

Usually it will go away by itself.


text:
How to export procedurally generated and animated geometry nodes
I have created tentacles for a creature model I made using geometry nodes. These tentacles are procedurally created and a 4D noise texture is scrolled through a set position node in the offset to make the tentacles move. I need to export these tentacles to unity with this animation as well. How can I do this?
I have already tried:
-Applying the geometry nodes which results in the tentacle becoming static
-Just exporting the tentacles results in the tentacles remaining static
-Baking the action also results in the tentacles remaining static when applying geometry nodes
This is my geometry node setup as well:

Maybe you should consider using a technique more compatible with your final goal of exporting. https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/57531/fbx-export-why-there-are-no-materials-or-textures

The fbx file is unlikely to be the issue. As I mentioned, when exporting as an .fbx the tentacles are exported but they are static and contain no animation. The geometry nodes use blenders engine to animate themselves and therefore I believe I would need to convert these to an actual animated object before exporting in any file type.

That is correct