text:
Exporting animation with emission loses its glow work in After effects
I have an animation which has emission, when it renders using EEVEE, it seems fine, but when I import the animation sequence(PNG) into after effects, there is no glow.
This is my node setup :

This is how it looks in Blender and After Effects :

As you can see, there is a glow in Blender but not in AE.
What do I need to do?
Here is the Blend File

Try to change the blend mode. Or export your png over black background (no transparency) and set it to screen in AE

This is my node set up simple emission: https://ibb.co/MPgkG8x
I didn't understand the black background with no transparency, can you do a screen shot please.

Actually that wouldn't work with the black background because the emission shader is also affecting other objects in the scene giving them some tint highlights.

Ok, may be I misunderstood you. Can you post screenshots of your scene and your AE composition so I can understand your problem better? A pic of your render and a pic of how it looks like in AE

Here's the screen shot, and I also provide the blender file too.
https://ibb.co/Jj3Zm59

I see, it's because Blender doesn't render the bloom's alpha. There is a workaround here https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/200068/blender-eevee-how-to-render-bloom-effect-when-using-transparent-background

I have followed the tutorial connected the nodes (Checked on BLOOM) , but when I import in AE its still with no glow: https://ibb.co/0XGnwZV

Can you upload the modified file? It should have worked

an easy way, render a video with only the bloom pass, then in after effects mix it with screen or add mode

Here's the Blender file:

make your 'color ramp' wider, set the 'set alpha' node to 'replace alpha', in after effects interpret as premultiplied with black... try those things, or just export the bloom as a video and composite as add or screen in after effect, you get more control and is easy, I've done it before

That did the trick, replaced Alpha which I had missed and widen the color ramp. Thank you.


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How to render an object with arbitrary edges shown?
I'm new to Blender and was wondering if it's possible to render an object with the edges drawn?
For example, I start up Blender, and draw a few lines on the cube as shown below:

But when I render it, none of those lines show up.

Any aid would be appreciated.

Those lines are not really proper on a mesh, and the object could have many issues down the road as a result. What kind of effect are you trying to achieve specifically?

The first link you provided was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

To draw clearly defined and 'arbitrarily' chosen lines on the surface of an object, one effective method would be to simply lay one or more 2D planes onto it's surface(s).

Add the first plane and -
Reduce it's thickness so it ends up as a very thin line.
Give it a material slot and colour it black, remove it's specular so it won't reflect light.
Add as many of these as you wish, (or duplicate the first) and drag them around as required
Once positioned correctly (a tad above the cube's surface), either parent or join them to the cube when animation is involved.  (so they don't get left behind)
You could as an alternative subdivide the cube's surface to form the lines but that may introduce unnecessary complication at some point down the track.  The planes on the other hand are independent and can be removed, reshaped, and changed about at will.
-=====-

The ico sphere was treated a little differently but again the 'lines' end up as a separate frame
and is simply laid against the sphere.
The procedure -
Some ico surfaces are selected in Edit Mode, then duplicated.
The copied surfaces were (P) "Parted by selection" and moved to another layer to make it easier to work with.
In Edit mode these faces are all removed so we only have a wireframe. (2nd image)
The wireframe was duplicated and "Shrunk" (scaled down) enough to give us double edging.  (this is where the lines' thickness is adjusted.  Lines can be given their own individual thickness if required)
Both edge-sets were "Joined" (CTL-J) and their vertices filled (F) at the ends so we get enclosed areas which can be filled in to form surfaces.  These are all coloured black.
Combining the two layers give us the overlay picture.  The frame is moved a tad out from the Ico's surface so we don't have surfaces conflicting and tearing each other.
Some ico panels were deliberately left open with only one or two edges included in the end frame.  This was done because of the word 'arbitrary' used in your your question.  You're not bound or limited to which edges are to be drawn, which aren't, or each line's thickness.
Parenting the frame to the ico sphere is a good idea.
EDIT:
On reading @cegaton's links in the comments above, the wireframe modifier idea could be combined with what I've posted here to give full control over the lines themselves as to which will remain, their size and thickness and even individual line colours.
Duplicate the 1st model, move that into a 2nd layer and in Edit mode subdivide as required.
Expand that so it's easily distinguishable from the original when viewed together.
Apply the wireframe modifier to the clone so we have a mesh cage.
Colour all or individual faces of the wireframe and re-combine the two models again but don't join them, just parent the wireframe to the original model.
Rescale the clone so it wraps neatly around the original.
We get this -

When the original model is to be textured there'll be no interference
from the cage lines.  These too can be modified at will and again, without affecting the original.
For a movie the lines could be made to appear and fade away using keyframed transparency, expanded or shrunk to disappear inside the model's skin.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Fill Holes wont work
I need to fill these holes in the mesh.
The fill holes command doesnt work - There are no double vertices.I have also tried to use decimate modifier bevore.Also i cannot use edge loop to fill it manually.
Please help out - thanks

What is the error displayed?

hi and thanks. No error message as far as i can see - nothing happen. i attached a new screen showing info box.

Are you selecting the entire mesh this way? Because Blender will not recognize the upper right "hole" as a hole, since its not closed, nothing will happen. Additionally your sides modifier might not be enough.

ok thanks - i deleted the mentioned hole - but doesnt work. Can it fill out only one hole ?

Have you increased the amount of sides as I suggested? For these irregular shapes it will need to be quite high. Like above 50 i would think.

yes i just tried it out with 50 - but no sucess :/

Then the holes are simply too complex to fill. But try the slider to maximum.

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


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How to stop independent actions on multiple armatures from fighting with each other
It's a little hard to explain, so I've created a video to accompany it.
I'm just trying to get the basics of animation actions in blender, but am coming across some nasty problems, that aren't expected (to me).
When I have multiple armatures under one action (move up), and then try to create a second action (move down), it seems that just selecting an armature changes the action in the action view, and even when the channels are locked, the first action is destroyed after I've finished moving the bones for the move-down action. It's as if multiple armatures aren't supported or conflict if used in two actions sharing the same timings/keyframes?
(not shown in the video) It seems that I can get the first action working again simply by selecting the bone and chosing 'move up' again in the animation window.
See the video - what am I doing wrong? When I lock a channel I MEAN LOCK.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV_ML0Cvaik&feature=youtu.be
Here's the original blend file
badactions.blend
NOTE1: This is a simplistic example. My actual model was a huge steampunk cross bow, launching ships into space, that had many moving parts to draw and release the bolt & position ships.
NOTE2: I can fix the end result by selecting the cube armature again and chosing the 'move up' action in the animation window - that seems to alter the animation data and fix it - but that's totally ridiculous to do.
What I'm trying to achieve is really easy and obvious - yet blender seems to make it hard.
What I'm looking for is instruction into how to build animations without having to constantly double check that actions I've already finished haven't been broken by new actions.

Each armature has its own reference to an Action datablock.  While it is possible for each armature to refer to an identical action (because datablocks are reusable) this would usually only be used when both armature objects use the same armature data (or use compatible armature data with compatible bone names).
It is unclear what you are trying to accomplish and why this behavior is a problem for you.
Just understand that it is inaccurate to say "I have multiple armatures under one action ".  What blender can do is have multiple armature objects which use the same action.  If you want an object to act differently than another object, they need to have different action datablocks in their animation_data.action field

I wanted two actions - move up that moved both armatures up; move down that moved both down. I could then use them in the dope sheet or  in unity. But as clearly demonstrated, when I tried to do this in blender, the move up action has been corrupted by my positioning in the creation of the move down. The sphere seems to have behaved, but the cube is wrong.

Obviously my example is simplified, but I encountered the issue multiple times on creating N actions to orchestrate armatures.

One thing that is confusing is that you have one action that appears to apply to bones in two different armatures.  To get to the bottom of this you are going to have to post your sample .blend file, not a video.  I think mostly this is just a failure to understand how animation works in blender and experienced users can't even imagine what mental model you have built up that mismatches blender's mechanics.

Absolutely - that's what I want. Actions that affect bones in different armatures (each action would be run synchronously). I'll update the post with a .blend file

After several more attempts to solve the problem, and not being able to cleanly set up independent actions which affect more than one armature, I've found a workaround. So I can only assume that Blender has a bug when working with multiple armatures, or it just isn't designed to pose more than one armature in an action, which feels like a bit of a gap.
By splitting the actions into multiple .blend files I can successfully retain a move-up and move-down action on two armatures. (remember, this example is SIMPLIFIED), when tied together it works fine in Unity. Splitting Animations
If you're interested in the real model that I encountered this issue, you can see a video of it here - skip to 2:40. It has an armature per cog, another for the bone that pulls back the string, and an armature for the crane, all in one model where animations need to be in perfect synch. It was hard to get Blender to stop fighting, but somehow I managed it without splitting up the files, but I daren't ever edit it again. So, you can see the obvious need to manipulate several armatures in each action (draw,crane,release,rest), run on demand.

Any reason why you are using separate armatures for different parts of the same object? Blender (and in fact most 3d programs) are built around the assumption of one armature per 'character' which in this case is your spaceship thing.

@Sazerac (in my head) there are a number of distinct sub-objects in the scene. The cogs, the crane and the drawstring. It made sense at the time that in real life these could act independently, with some orchestration that ties them together (actions). If I ramped up to a bigger scene that's what might happen anyway. Now I'm more experienced I can see how to do it all with one armature. Blender let me hang myself and did produce very wacky results instead of warning me of my foolishness.

@Sazerac after doing more modelling and animations with a 3D dog, I've come to the conclusion that your simple comment is pretty much the answer - One should use one armature per .blend file, and use disconnected bones for sequencing animations which look like they're independent actions but are just orchestrated bones. If you enter an answer along those lines I'll mark it as correct.

I also have conflictions with my animations that conflicted with each other even though they were seperated on different armatures. What I think that helped for me is that I removed the accidentally created stashes that wrongly connected to the armatures.
When I reposed and keyed one the other started going crazy and now it seems to be okay. Maybe this helps for future reference I suppose

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


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CORK on Blender fails when using the OFF import plugin
I posted this on another, less expert site a few weeks ago, and while I did get some general advice and I barked up those trees to see if it would work, nothing came of it, not so far. I'll start with what I know and work backwards to what I guess.
I can install the OFF import plugin and CORK on Blender plugin. CoB has no issues installing at all and OFF will install as long as you unzip it first and point it to the off_import.py file. On one machine, I was able to get it running by placing it manually in the addons folder, but both installation paths lead to the same issue. Once installed the OFF import plugin does its job just fine, even with very complex meshes. When I try to use the CORK on Blender boolean plugin, all functions throw this error:

Error: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "usr/lib/blender/2.70/scripts/addons/import_off.py", line 97, in execute mesh = load(self, context, **keywords)
File "usr/lib/blender/2.70/scripts/addons/import_off.py", line 184, in load file =(filepath, 'r')
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: b'/tmp/tmpmq0jcfzc/result.off'
location: /usr/lib/blender/2.79/scripts/modules/bpy/ops.py:189

If there's more, I'm not seeing it.
So it seems like just pointing in the wrong places, but I've barked up that tree to best of my ability for over a week now. I'm asking for help here because it was suggested I contact the developers, but I'm still not sure this isn't user error, and I'd rather not bug devs about an issue that so far seems to effect just one lone idiot.
I've tried this on my main workhorse and did a fresh (including OS) install on my sacrificial computer and it's having the same issues. I'm running Linux Mint Sonya 18.2 MATE 64 bit, latest stable version.
I've installed blender from the ppa, and I'm running version 2.79.
CORK on Blender came from it's github, https://github.com/dfelinto/cork-on-blender. I did not compile the CORK binary, I used the one available on the git, figuring it would be one less place I could introduce error. CoB has the OFF import plugin as a dependency, which I also took from the github. https://github.com/alextsui05/blender-off-addon.
I've banged my head into several corners over the last few weeks and I'd like first to see if it's just me. Is anyone else able to replicate this issue? Is there any other info would be useful in figuring this out?


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Baking results in an all black square, googling is not helping
I'm trying to bake multiple materials into one UV on one object.

I made a seperate back UV and made sure it was selected
I made an image to bake to and put it in an image node inside each
material in my object
I put a light next to my object
I unselected direct and indirect lighting while leaving color on
I made sure there was no metalic value in any of my materials

I have no idea what to do at this point. I've looked up multiple tutorials and read many other questions about this. Nothing helps.

Here is a Higher Resolution image
I also tried making a new image to bake to and made it white, because I wasn't sure if bake was outputting all black, or doing literally nothing. It did turn all black.
Here's the blend file:

I'm specifically trying to bake "Bulkhead-Lights-005" under the "Corridore" collection.
Thank you for any help you can provide.
Update: I made another blend fild and extruded a cube, applied multiple materials and made two UVs with differnt configurations. Baking works fine.
I wonder if something got set different in the blend file?

The textures are missing from you file so I can't bake anything from it. But if you only want to bake the Diffuse color, you could try to temporarily CTRL+SHIFT+Click on the last node before your Base Color input and bake the Emit instead. It would bake faster and help you debug your problem more efficiently.

I'm not sure what you mean by the textures aren't there. If I zoom out of the output image node you can see them in the first matereal. There are 8 materials in this object and they all have variouse texture maps. https://i.imgur.com/n8bnbX7.png

Do you need to bake 8k textures? Why does this 6k verts object consume so much memory? I've appended the object to a fresh blend file, lowered the samples to 10, and tried to bake the texture. It takes forever and memory usage goes up to 13GB. The blender.exe used 20GB Not sure what's going on here.

There's a lot of 8 and 4 k texture maps throughout the scene. There are eight materials with nigh res texture maps on it that I'm trying to bake down to a single material for that object.

@user145371 I mean the textures are not in your file, I am talking about the actual images, not the nodes. You have the images on your hard drive, they don't follow along with your blend file unless you pack them, you haven't.

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


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Smoke rendering
I am a Blender user, still a student. I work with version 2.78 on MacBookPro Sierra 10.12.6. I follow instructions of Blender Reference Manual, according to which I have to assign material "volume" to the Domain cube, while setting density to 0 (see screenshot 1. I use rendering engine Blender Render. My problem is that when I turn on the Render mode the simulation does not appear (see screenshot2 ). If I try to render the file, same problem. I don't know if this is due to my system, or to my Blender version? Or to a mistake I am making...? Thank you all in advance for your help! Have a nice day. Silvia

Use [edit] link to include more info into your question, in particular how material for the smoke domain is set up (screenshot from the Node editor), what render engine are you using (Blender Internal? Cycles? other?), what result do you get when rendering. You can also upload the file here - http://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com, but show some screenshots as well

What "unable to render them to a video file" means? you render the video but the smoke sim is missing? what spcifically fails? does it render on a single image rendered with  F12?

After you set the density to zero, you create a texture that uses the voxel data from the smoke sim to adjust the density within the domain based on the smoke simulation.
From the default scene, try Object->Quick Effects->Quick Smoke and you will get a sample material that has a smoke texture setup with the following settings (for Blender Render) -

Problem solved! Thank you "sambler" :-)


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How to catch and respond to a scene addition event?
My add-on uses a number of dynamically registered panels, created and configured per scene. It needs to refresh/rebuild itself whenever the scene changes to represent the data in the active scene. I'm using a msgbus subscription upon bpy.types.Window.scene to respond to scene switches by destroying/rebuilding the UI, but this doesn't catch scene creation/deletion events.
In order to do that I've added an app handler for depsgraph_update_post, which fires for scene deletion events but unfortunately is not triggered when a new scene is created. When a new scene is added my UI is left in it's previous, now incorrect state, until the user does something to trigger a depsgraph update and my UI rebuilding code is executed. I've enabled various debug options in the console and monitored output during scene changes to try and find something I can hook into and leverage but I'm coming up empty handed. I'd rather not implement a recurrent timer-based check of the current scene to trigger a UI update, but that's what I'm now faced with.
Does anyone have any ideas or advice for use of msgbus and/or app handlers that would allow me to respond to scene creation events in a timely manner? Thanks in advance for your help, I am constantly amazed by this ingenuity, patience, and generosity of this community. Kudos!
Edited, adding context below:
The number of panels in the sidebar is determined by the user clicking Add/Remove operators in a static master panel. The number and configuration of these dynamic panels in a scene is stored in a property group in the scene. When the active scene changes the add-on destroys/unregisters the UI panels for the previously active scene, and creates/registers new panels according to the panel config of the newly active scene. It's trying to replicate the behaviour of the modifier stack, where selecting a new object destroys/creates modifier sub-panels according to object selection. Except instead of modifiers on objects, I'm doing this with panels per scene. This works nicely when switching back and forth between existing scenes, and it can catch the deletion of an existing scene by using the depsgraph update to trigger a UI refresh, but when a new scene is created it don't have any means of responding to this until the user does something like add/move an object to trigger a depsgraph update.

What is the bl_context of your addon? It should draw or poll if the scene changes, i think.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/13569

@lemon The add-on creates panels in the 3D view sidebar at runtime by registering panels with bl_context = 'objectmode'  sub-classed from an unregistered 'template' panel

@Daurte Thanks, but my question wasn't about custom event handling. Put simply, why isn't the dependency graph update triggered when a scene is added? I believe the depsgraph_build handler used to be exposed in a previous version of blender, and that would have been perfect for my use case, but that's not available. Do you have any constructive advice?

This is super hacky and not a direct answer to your question, but I've worked around similar things in the past by registering more panels than I need, and using the poll method to hide the extras. The other thing I've done, as you mentioned, is using a timer. Unfortunately I've never worked with scene handlers so I can't offer anything better.

@Chris Thanks, appreciate the input. I've done something similar in other projects with pooled resources being setup in bulk beforehand and assigned/released dynamically upon demand. In this use case leveraging poll methods to show/suppress panels. But then we're into the complexity of pool management and operator reassignment(?!). There used to be exposed handlers for scene_update and depsgraph_build events in previous version of the API so why these are no longer available and now require hacks on top of workarounds on top of kludges escapes me. Meh! Thanks for your encouragement anyway! :)

Quentin, what proposed @ChrisHayes works. Don't you have some scene properties to rely on in order to trigerr a timer?

@lemon Yes, I'll throw together a recurring timer check against scene properties to trigger UI refreshes. I'd prefer something more aligned with the handler and msgbus systems but at least I know that it's not failing because of my own ignorance. Which makes a nice change for me. Thanks again for your help!

@QuentinWalker, you can fire a timer only once from poll, just in order to allow your code to modify the scene as you need. So no recurrent timer calls.


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How can I render a material with wireframe and keep the faces showing, in the BGE?
OK so I know how to render a material with just wireframe only, but when the game engine is on, the material becomes completely transparent and only displays the wireframe with the color i gave it in the material, that's expected, but is there a way for me to render the wireframe while keeping the faces visible when game engine is running?

Related https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/57134/wireframe-and-halo-together

Select your object then
Properties Panel -> Object -> Display -> Maximum Draw Type -> Wireframe
Running in game mode should use whatever material you have assigned to your object.
Object mode:

Game mode:

You're welcome!! Could you please vote up my answer? I am in desperate need to reach 50 rep to be able to comment!! Thx

I did, but since i haven't reached 15 reputations, the site wont allow me to publicly change your vote. Once I reach 15 Reputation, I'll be able to publicly vote for answers. I'm sorry man I'm trying my best to reach 15.

Sorry I meant accept my answer, not upvote it! Thx.

Sorry, how do i up vote it?

To mark an answer as accepted, click on the check mark beside the answer to toggle it from greyed out to filled in.
https://stackoverflow.com/help/someone-answers

OK I accepted it :)


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Edge loop reduction at the wrist
Is this a good idea? Is this going to cause trouble when animating the hand bending and twisting?
If it's incorrect, please could you help and advise where would be the best place to reduce edge loops from arm to hand?

maybe results in tiny weird deforms when bending because the vertices are not aligned with others making it look like a triangulated faces

I guess that's a way to do it, but do you need so many vertices for the arm?

I actually don't think I need that many vertices for the arm now that I am learning how to reduce loops for different parts of the model. I created the model base by sculpting and thus needed it dense. For now I just want to speed up to start learning how to rig and animate the hand.


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Follow path Constraint, relative locations for offset objects
i made something like this using follow path constraint on 4 objects and 1 curve.
for my project, i need them to become like this. staying at the center but behaving as if they are still on my curve. something like this gif below:

this may be a noob question but my project depends on your answer :>

One approach, (I don't know whether it's the snappiest, or most controllable)

Copy the entire rig, track and trucks
On the copy, delete all trucks except the copy of the one you want to remain stationary in world space.. 'Target Truck'... ( red in the illustration )
Put a Copy Location constraint on the original track, targeted on 'Target Truck', World space, X,Y and Z, all inverted in the constraint.

WOW, u r just amazing. it worked. tho i have to understand this method. seems pretty handy.
thanks again.

@shiyonsufa     Curious.. how did you make your 2nd gif? I saw it, and thought you must have answered your own question!

i just used a tracked camera to tell u what i really want :3


text:
(Is there an easy fix?) Imported model bones are all rotated 90 degrees
I am learning how to model in blender, and am trying to make a character for my game. Instead of making a character from scratch I imported a default model from unity and am modifying it.
I noticed the bones in the rig are all rotated as shown below. Should I just delete all the bones and redo it myself, or is there an easy way to fix them? They seem to be working correctly. (I don't think I would be able to redo the eyes and mouth rigging)
Thanks! :)

I am just redoing it. I tried alt + R as someone suggested to me elsewhere but it didn't work.

there are addons and scripts that can do that and correct rotated bones it depends on the format though.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/222330/rotate-all-bones-in-rig-by-90-degrees


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How to round edges on mesh
I'm trying to get round edges on my mesh but using inset extrude or subdivision and bevel don't seem to do the trick this is what i have

and this is what i want

You tried using crease when you did subdivision?

No, i will definitely try though

it works for smoothing out the mesh in general but i get horrible artifacts on the side of my mesh and it's not smoothing it in the way i want it to

press smooth on left panel to get this:

add supporting loops (ctrl + r) to sharpen the edges (the effect will be visible when you will add the subdivision surface modifier)

selec the upper faces and press "i" to inset them (by doing this you add a supporting loop near the edge of your shape)

finnaly add the subdivision modifier and increase the number of subdivision in the view panel up to 2 (this modifier smooth the shape but the closer edges are, the sharper is the angle made by those edges)

the order of the operation (adding edges loop and adding subdivision surface) is not important

Thank you very much for all the detail i will try it:)

Thanks this helped alot

Your Mesh normals are reversed, press ctrl + N to fix them while all faces are selected. You can select the edges you want to bevel and ctrl + B them, or you can set a bevel modifier to work based on edge angle. If neither do the trick, try creasing and subdividing

Thank you ill try this:)

Clearing my normals seemed to do something however the bevel is still the same as before and i already tried creasing and subdividing


text:
object instancer animation nodes only work on a clean new blend file?
i don't know if Jacques Lucke is here on blenderstack for help but
it seems that i can't make the object instancer node work on top the work i'm currently doing
in the picture below, i set the instance of the object to 3, i know (from my observation) that without any other nodes involved the object instances will pop right at the center location of the world, in this case where my object is at. but all i select when i try to place the instances around is the object alone, no other instances.

i tried the same with a new blend file

no problems
there must be a setting to set here but i just dont know :(

maybe it has something to do with layers. otherwise please upload the file if possible

probably sir, is there an issue with layers?

the test object is on the 8th scene, layer 6 (horizontally)

the instanced objects are in the same layer as the source, but not in the same scene! each node tree has a scene attached to it (you see which one in the left toolbar). also you can use a "Create Scene List" node to tell the Instancer node which scenes the instances should be in.

ok, then please upload the file, I don't know how to help otherwise..

i erased the comment when i saw the incremented number on the scene name,  sorry, it solved it as you said, my instancer referred to a different scene.
So the object instances are defaulted to appear in the first scene instead of the current?

Thanks for the great addon again sir :)
I'll put your comment in the answer now

right. everything else proved to be more complex when working with multiple scenes. you can change it manually though :)

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

The instanced objects are in the same layer as the source, but not in the same scene! each node tree has a scene attached to it (you see which one in the left toolbar). also you can use a "Create Scene List" node to tell the Instancer node which scenes the instances should be in.

Reset Instance Object under Instancer Node.

Suggestions ("Try also ...") should be added as a comment.


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Background Image Troubleshooting
Why isn't my background jpg. image showing up in this instance, have I missed a setting somewhere?
I have included a screenshot below and It should be showing up in the right Ortho view as far as I know.
What I have tried so far,

When I import an image, or drag and drop an image into blender to use as a background reference image, it does not immediately show up in the view port I am trying to put it into. With the axis preference setting set to all views in the properties menu. It usually default drops the image into the Top Ortho view where I cant immediately see it. I can usually only see it after I cycle through the keypad and/or play with the properties settings axis setting it to a specific view such as Top or right ect.. Other times when I drag and drop it into a user perspective window , it does not show up in the Top Ortho, but the Right Ortho. I realize that it does not show in any of the perspective views because the load background feature (located in the properties panel) only works in Otho view ports.
I have tried to see if it was a corrupt file, the file checks out OK in other viewing editors, file attached below.
I have navigated through the different view port views, such as perspective vs. Otho view, and also camera view. I have also tried to view it from the Quad view (picture inserted below) as opposed to a single view with the same results.

4.I also tried playing with the transparency slider and the view as render tick box.

I have also looked through a few other similar posts and tried the solutions suggested in searching for a solution. Although insightful, no solution was suggested that worked.

The solutions and walk throughs I have already tried are posted below.
Thank you in advance. Any thoughts, resources, or further suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Background image not showing up in any 3-D view
and also
Background images not showing up at all in persp or ortho view
and this one to
https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?260731-Background-Image-not-showing-up

If I open blender up new, then load the same image. It will work in the Right Ortho View as it should and seems to function correctly. However, if I open it up in the previous file with my objects as shown in the previous screen shot, then this image will not load. The only difference I could see between the 2 blend files is that one has a few more mesh objects in it and a couple of key frames inserted into the time line. I have inserted the image below with the jpeg functioning correctly.

Mabe it's a bug.. By default it should work in all preset ortho views + camera view if drag-and-dropping image into the 3D Viewport. Do other images work in that .blend file ? Is it possible to preview background image in other files ?


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Planes next to each other are clipping
I have several plane objects on top of each other, but they all clip behind the largest one, which is supposed to be under all of them. I thought this is only viewport issue, but when I render, they are either hidden or clipping. So this is not about setting clipping distance. I thought it is because I have them separated only by 0,002 distance, but even when I scale the scene up it does the same thing. Some angles are OK, but in some angles it clips completely.
Its been a long day of blender not cooperating, I even had to reinstall. I just cant spend another 5 hours figuring this out on my own.
Hopefully someone will be smarter than me. Thanks.
EDIT: Well that was random. I turned blend mode of the largest object to opaque and it stopped the clipping. Still not great though - I need Alpha for the other planes. Currently they dont clip much, but that will probably change when I add the rest of the layers...
EDIT2: Knowing that the issue is with Alpha, I tried playing with those settings. Changing to Alpha Hashed seems to fix the issue. Still, would like to know if there is any way to make it work with Alpha Blend?

@susu thanks for the answer, I tried that and it didnt work. I even increased the distance between planes 20 times and It was still happening.
As for the explanation - I thought my explanation was enough, and an image would not be able to explain anyway. The images in your answer are NOT what is happening to me. My clipping is only hapenning when moving the camera/viewport (I cant capture that in still image).

Looks like you can fix it in Alpha Blend by just applying all transforms on your objects.
So for each object:

select the object in Object Mode
go to Object > Apply > All Transforms or hit ⎈ CtrlA > All Transforms


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Rendering animation is not working
I only have an animation of 5 seconds and is only rending like less than 1 second,  the worst is rendering stuff that is not there, I don't understand why.
In the first image is how is supposed to be, and the second pic is how it render.

Does this answer your question? Why does my object not show up?

please provide your blend file - so we can definitely help you. Everything else if often just guessing what it could be...because there are several reasons possible.

thank you. i added an answer which helps you.

The problem is this (your "empty")

This won't be rendered.
If you want to render an image do this:

add plane

resize it and move it as you want it (basically give it the size and the position of your "empty")

give it this shader

then you will get:

But i don't want to render with the image. that was just for reference and that flower in blue i don´t know why is there, i deleted. the end result should be like the first image on my post. i still don't know why is that flower appearing :(((


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I'm trying to use volume scatter node on an OBJECT material in EEVEE, but every time it gets applied on WORLD
In the first image I've deleted the principle BSDF and added the volume scatter node

And on the second image even though I've applied volume scatter on the cube, it gets applied on whole world

why is this happening is there any settings I've to change?

please show us your blend file. i tried it out - it works. Which Blender version do you use?

[edit] your question and add an image that shows the material settings for the world.

Maybe your material is shared by a bigger object encompassing your scene


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How to make a high-poly monopoly car piece
I'm fairly new to Blender, and I am having some troubles making the iconic car piece from Monopoly:
The part I am having troubles with is the rear of the piece, which can be observed on the left here:
Note how the rear has a sharp edge going down the middle, with the sides being curved. Also, there is the hump near the top as well. If anyone has any ideas on how to model that shape, that would be greatly appreciated! I have inserted the low-poly version that I currently have.

Edit: I finally made it! Thank you to moonboots for your help. I have inserted the "final" result below. Art is truly never done...

Actually the solution depends on your current topology, so you could share your file if you want us to give a try.
If I had to do the back of the car from scratch I would begin with a 8th of a subdivided cube that I would stretch and mirror:

Then I would cut the shape of the outgrowth with the knife tool:

Extrude it:

Move the vertices:

Then retopologize:

For the rear, you can create a new edge loop then again, extrude:

So from your current topology:

I would simplify like that, then follow the same techniques:

According to this article, the original car could have been inspired by an old Kurtis Kraft Midget Racer, while others surmise it could be a 1934 Mercedes Grand Prix W25, a Maserati 8CTF, or an Alfa Romero 158.
In my opinion it's a mix but the Mercedes is pretty close:

The Alpha Romeo:

Thanks for responding! The link is here:  Also, how would you make the rear pointy as seen in the second picture of my original post? And how would I ensure a subsurf modifier wouldn't have any harsh edges (because I wanna make it high poly)?

I've edited my answer, I hope it helps. If you give it a Subdivision Surface, keep it as low-poly as possible, just add some edge loops where the angles need to be sharp

Awesome! Thank you so much!!

I have inserted my final render to my original question. I could play with lighting and angles a bit, but I'm really grateful for your insight!


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Custom shading nodes for point objects
I am scripting Blender 2.81 to model scenes for my own renderer, with custom material nodes, which are defined as (MyRendererNodes and MyMaterialNode):
"Shader Editor" -> "Add" -> "MyRendererNodes" -> "MyMaterialNode".
This approach works fine for mesh objects, but cannot add any nodes to point objects (e.g. a point light source, created via "Object Mode" -> "Add" -> "Light" -> "Point").
How can I add custom material nodes to point objects?

One trivial workaround is to create a small mesh object (i.e. plane) and define my material nodes. But I would like more elegant ways to handle this issue.

@RobertGützkow Sure. So I am wondering how can I add materials to point lights.


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Problem with UV unwrap, collapsing vertices
I am somewhat new to modeling but I have done uv's a few times before, but for some reason, I can't get it to work right this time. I have marked seams and set up a blank texture but when I unwrap (using the basic "unwrap") it comes out really strange, with most of the islands being a diamond shape.(Edit) I have deleted all seams and started from scratch and the same problem persists so it cant be from modifying the mesh after the uv is made. ]2

Attach your file here https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com to inspect whats the problem is

The vertices in your uv map are pinned, did you try selecting them in UV editor and unpin with Alt+P?

@MrZak This fixed the problem, thank you so much! :D

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/42807/having-a-uv-maping-problem-does-anyone-know-what-this-is-and-how-to-fix-it

The problem was that I had pinned vertices(They are red when pinned), the fix was as simple as selecting all vertices in the uv editor and pressing Alt-p. Thank you so much, Mr Zak for bringing this to my attention.

Yo it might be because there are so many curves on your mesh , you can unwrap it , try cube projection sometimes it help me out for applying texture , otherwise you might have to mark your seam on 2 part ( front and back  ) might be more easy too

Adding more seams doesn't seem to help and cube project breaks it up too much.


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Remove a verticle in a tricky place
I didn't know how to describe my problem in the title, so I'll try to do it here. Below I have a project. I needed to take a small piece from the middle of the object, and I couldn't get sculping to work, so I just used knife tool and excruded after I had created what I wanted.
Now, when I'm finally rendering, I'm getting unwanted things on the render result, caused by these extra verticles. Is it possible to remove them? I tried making the holes new objects, but that didn't really work.
Oh and, with 'verticle', I'm refering to the line that connects the hole into the rest of the object.
http://www.filedropper.com/blend1 (a link to the blendfile)

can you show the render result?

Added to the post

thanks for update. Can you specify in the image which borders you want to delete? Is there a possibility to share the file?

I put the .blend into the main post now.
Just the two lines that are going out from the hole towards the body.
Oh and this is just a school project where I need to show rendered pictures, so if somebody has an idea how to fix the crappyness in rendering by changing texture mapping or whatnot, I'm fine with that, too.

where is the vertical its clean mesh http://pasteall.org/pic/index.php?id=120329

I don't know if I'm using the right word, maybe what I'm referring to is 'edges'. The ones that are yellow in the new photo.

in my image there is nothing yellow edge

Can't have an ngon with a hole in it.  You can remove one edge, and have the other closer to the edge. Similar to ngon here

same issue as here

The top and bottom vertices are missaligned.
Select all the top vertices and tyoe these letters:
 s ,  z ,  0  "Numpad zero". Not at the same time.
This will aling all these vertices in the Z axis.
Repeat these steps at the bottom vertices.
See the image below:

Thanks, this was it. I was wondering why it would have render issues cause of those verticles..


text:
Should I change a curve to mesh when modeling?
I created an object as below:

Front view

1. Should I convert this curve to a mesh for export? My final goal is to export this object to an .obj/fbx file and use it in javascript, ARKit, games, or any universal format for 3D objects. I have multiple mesh objects in this scene (file). What would be the most clean and conventional/agreed way to create a final model?
2. Should I convert it to mesh only if I want to get rendered scenes (jpgs)?
If I don't need an .obj file but want to only render several scenes, can I leave them as vector curves?

If exporting to obj or fbx afaik object will be converted to mesh either way, so better to convert it yourself to keep track of topology. If rendering you can go with curve as long as you add bevel to the object (either simple bevel or assiging a bevel object in curve properties) as by default curve itself won't be rendered with e.g. Cycles (no thickness in geometry).

Thanks @MrZak. good to know they will be converted to mesh.


text:
Sculptmode paint with image texture has no color and is black and white
Using an image texture under brush settings in sculpt mode makes the texture loose its color information.

Using the same settings in vertex paint mode works as expected (ignore the yellow tint):

(I want to use the new 'roll' mapping mode for textures in sculptmode, otherwise I'd just use vertex color mode)


text:
Procedural toothpaste texture on beveled curve
Imagine drawing with colored toothpaste.
If you rotate the tube around its own axis while drawing the path, the texture is simple like this:

But if you hold the tube in a fixed position while drawing,
the texture should twist in a way that reflects the direction of the underlying path
Like so: (wrongly simulated by rotating z axis of mapping node)

How do I do that, what's the approach here?
Should work on any path, see 'complex_path' object in example file.

Just another visual example of the effect in 2D.
Using a 2 colored brush texture you get black on the left side and red on the right side and all halftones inbetween.

I'm not sure if I understood your question (the toothpaste rotation example is confusing). If you just want to twist the curve you can change its Tilt value. I would do this with GN along the spline. Example: https://imgur.com/a/bnVnC4V Is this what you are looking for?

So simple, curve tilt is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.


text:
Why is there no option to convert a mesh to metaball object?
I realize this wouldn't be optimal for detailed meshes, but it would certainly be useful for creating others.
Sometimes I have meshes I'd like to join together, only I'd like them to interact as if they were metas.
One Meta from Mesh Exterior?
Since metas look similar to a remesh modifier with low poly, couldn't the add-on just lower the poly count as much as necessary (and only use the object outline as a guide) before converting to meta?
Multiple Metas as One?
The answer to this question: "Are there any non-standard meta objects available?" says it's not possible with python programming but suggests there may be a work around if the shape is composed using many meatballs. I feel there must be some other reason a "convert to meta" add-on isn't available.

One indirect way to achieve this will be using a grid distributed particle system, with a meta-ball as the particle object.
Here are the important particle system settings for doing this:

And here's the meta version vs. the original:

You can also set the overall resolution via the metaball's resolution property.
Since these are all fairly simple PS properties, it wouldn't be difficult to automate them as a script or addon.

Thanks, this would attain the result i'm looking for in most meshes.

pretty excellent concept

Metas are objects that are defined by very simple mathematical formulas and converting complex objects to metas might not be possible, or would require very complex coding and processing resources.
For example, a Meta Ball has just few variables to calculate:

Location in space
Resolution
Radius

Comparing this to a default sphere that has 512 faces would result in a drastic increase of parameter values and calculation time.

As an alternative solution, you could try and use dupliverts or dupli-face to duplicate a standard metaball onto every element of your source mesh, which would probably give you something -vaguely- like what you want.
You might need to scale down the original a bit, and then play with the radius of the duplicated metaball.
You should also be aware that on anything but the simplest base mesh, this will bring your computer to its knees attempting to calculate that many metaballs, so it's probably worth simplifying, decimating or generally reducing the quantity of base vertices and faces before doing this :)

TLousky's answer will probably generate a more useful version than this one as it copes with volume a lot better - a property important to metaballs.

This is a useful approach, between TLousky's and yours I feel nearly all meshes could be made meta.

You could use magnet and snap on faces, that will get you a result like a metaball where it extrudes when you move an object within an object. There is a proper tweak to it where you have to bevel the edges of the object touching the faces and shrinkwrap it and use data transfer to the source object.

Having said that - Could you potentially get what you want by adding a subsurface modifier to your original meshes (possibly with quite a lot of creasing so you don't lose as much of the original shape as normal) and then joining them together and manually adding faces over the join?
Subsurfs with low-poly control cage meshes often look quite similar to metaballs, joining with a rather organic looking join.

ooh, a -1 already.  Okay, why isn't this a useful suggestion?

Reread my question and the previous answer. This answer doesn't say anything new, and ignores part of my question. Not trying to be rude, but can't help being blunt about it.

Nothing in your question or any of the other answers have suggested using subdivision surfaces.  Remesh is similar but it generates different results to applying a subdivision surface (at least when using the default catmull-clark surfaces).  I therefore believed it was a novel suggestion.  You're welcome to think it's a bad suggestion and that's fine, but I disagree that it doesn't say anything new.  It doesn't ignore any of your question, but I freely admit it doesn't use metaballs at all, I did state that the -results- of using a subdivision surface often look similar to metaobjects.


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Particle system within particle system?
Is there any way to use a particle system within a particle system?
I'd like this:

But currently have this:

I'm trying to avoid having multiple real meshes (as I've done to create the first image).
Current Workarounds:

Manipulating an array to achieve the inner particle system (long tubes) -- it works but is cumbersome.
Adding 2 particle systems to one larger mesh (larger hexagon), and again manipulating the location. It's difficult to work with as well because I keep thinking there must be a more straightforward way.

In the end, I'd like for only these 3 meshes to be "real".

This is because I'm going to largely increase the amount of particles, and ideally add a fourth mesh encompasses the previous three (the largest hexagon would be it's particle). I'm not so concerned with the fourth mesh though.
The meshes are just are simple cylinder and a "screwed" edge (hexagon), but here's the .blend

How about using an object group as a particle? You could create your smaller hexagon particle system in a separate scene, apply it and group it and then use the Particles > Render > Group > Whole Group option to render it. Would that work for you?

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos I just noticed my question isn't clear enough, I'll fix it. The starting particle is only one cylinder, and it is the particle used by the particle system belonging to the smaller hexagons (which is actually just one hexagon to begin with). I tried grouping the small hex and cylinder, then using the "Whole Group" option, but it didn't interpret the particle system.

maybe dupliframe or dupligroups?

While particles can give a varied result, it looks like you may prefer a more structured duplication system. I would suggest using dupliverts. Start by creating a mesh that has a vertex positioned where you want each cylinder, only vertices are needed but you can add edges and faces if it makes it easier for you to work with.

Then parent the cylinder to the vertex only mesh, and enable duplication for verts.

You can then repeat the first step with a larger spiral, here I duplicated the first mesh and scaled it up. Then parent the first mesh to this larger one and also enable dupliverts, you will get the first mesh and its cylinders duplicated at each vertex location. You will find it helpful to have the first vertex and the child object both located at the object origin to keep things aligned.

Thanks, I havnt used dupliverts much because a particle system usually does what I need and seems to handle it better. This must be one of the advantages of dupliverts, thanks again

Short answer is no. You need to convert the small groups to meshes in order to distribute them with a particle system.


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texture is not going on the outside of my rock object only the inside
I'm using blender 2.77 fracture version.

The texture does not show in final render and when I'm in object mode. when I'm in edit mode it shows
This is in object mode after UV unwrap

This is inside the cube

Maybe nobody has the answer for this

I have been checking your blend and it looks like the normals of the fractured object just point inwards instead of outwards (Recalculate Normal -> then it should work again, and of course re-execute Fracture)
I also took the liberty to tweak your blend a bit. As the rock texture was not packed, i just put the bottle texture onto the fractured object as well, just for demonstration. For example I used triggers and constraints, and reduced the displacement a bit, because the displacement "happens" after the physics and the more displacement you have, the more unnatural the shards will behave.

Edit: to have an "inside" actually, you need a solidify modifier on top and a Fracture Modifier below it, and need to refracture. The "inside" of the solidified object counts as "outside" too and will have the same material as the "real" outside of the cube. Additionally you could set an "inner material" on the Fracture Modifier and refracture. This will be applied to the inner shard faces.

not really what I mean, I need the whole cube to be textured not just one side I need it to look like rock outside, inside, edges of shards. As I appreciate the tweak my question was about the texture.

Duh I figured it out just had to add outside and inside uv mapping with two materials.


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I cant get the bump to show up on this soil texture
I need to have this look like real soil because its going to be viewed from a straight on view and I cant seem to get the bump right with my nodes.

nodes

Blender file

Two things I see : In your texture coordinate node your UV map should be in the object selection box. Your Math Node is set to "ADD" it should be set to "MULTIPLY. Also you should have an additional "Texture Coordinate Node and "Image Texture Node for the "Displacement" socket

Also If you need real displacement either feed your texture to a displace modifier or use the 'true displacement' feature available with experimental feature set. Its does the same thing but displace modifier cannot use cycles textures so this is a way around.

when I change to object it just adds tiled squares generated in image coordinates actually makes it look better

First, try changing where it says Add to Multiply. I also notice that you are viewing the soil at a pretty shallow angle, rather than perpendicular or slightly less (optimal for node based bump). If you are going to continue to do this, I would suggest also using the Displace Object modifier along with the node based bump as demonstrated at about 57:52 here.

the displace object modifier worked great thanks

I didn't do the node based bump but worked tas good as for what I need

Glad to help! @BenSmith


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Checker deselect with disconnected faces on same object
Select random even works on unconnected faces when part of the same object.
Why checker deselect doesn't work that way?

Hello :). Well, that's just how it works - Blender Manual - Checker Deselect

Just to explain - checker deselect goes in all four directions ← ↑ ↓ →, and simply doesn't know how to continue on disconnected faces :).

There is no operator (currently) that jumps to disconnected geometry and keeps a pattern, Ctrl-Shift-Num+ (select next)is the same way...

Checker deselect works after randomising vertex indices... it uses edge-connectivity to decide what a 'checker' is. You can stash selections in vertex groups..

Okay, as Jachym Michal pointed out checker deselect only looks in all directions and stops at disconnected geometry. It doesn't jump over to the next elements index of the object when it finds disconnected geometry.
Here is a script that selects every other polygon, assuming their indices are ordered.
import bpy
obj = bpy.context.active_object
i=0
for p in obj.data.polygons:
    if i%2:
        p.select = True
    i+=1

.. and you can order vertex-indices in various ways, yourself, using Mesh > Sort Elements


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Move points along their own path in python
I have a list of vertices.
I want to move the verts/white squares along their own paths like so:

(Assume the polygon is closed)
How can I do that with python and get a list of shifted vertices back?

Every time I read this I get more confused. Is setup something akin to this answer https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/133032/15543 sliding edges (connected vertices?) along a path. Is the goal not to have the icospheres intersect?

Perhaps OP needs a tool like vertex slide, except in that tool at start a copy of geometry would be made, then converted to a path, then all vertices would be moved towards either of two ends of the path, depending in which way the mouse is moving...

I completely rewrote the question, hope it's clear now. @Markus von Broady You are right, vertex slide, but verts can travel beyond their adjacent neighbours.

Ok think I have it.  As mentioned, convert a copy to a path and then flatten the edges and feed onto it as in first link commented.  See https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/214036/how-to-flatten-a-vertex-path-a-list-of-connected-edges-into-a-straight-line-wh

Not sure I understand. Flatten the polygon and doing the shifting on a straight line and then transform back? How does transforming back look like in python?

Here is the solution I ended up using. Suggestions welcome.
import bpy
import numpy as np

#assumes closed polygon with vertices in linear order
#creates new objetc with shifted/slid verts
#https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/191649/how-can-i-sort-vertex-positions-sequentially-indices-in-a-closed-area
def multi_slide_verts(obj, shift_length):

    def read_verts(obj):
        length = len(obj.data.vertices)
        coords = np.empty(length*3, dtype=np.float64)
        obj.data.vertices.foreach_get('co',coords)
        coords.shape = (length, 3)
        return coords #numpy array of vert array [[x,y,z],[x,y,z]...]

    def write_obj_from_pydata(name, verts, edges=None, close=True):
        if edges is None:
            # join vertices into one uninterrupted chain of edges.
            edges = [[i, i+1] for i in range(len(verts)-1)]
            if close:
                edges.append([len(verts)-1, 0]) #connect last to first

        me = bpy.data.meshes.new(name)
        me.from_pydata(verts, edges, [])

        obj = bpy.data.objects.new(name, me)
        bpy.context.scene.collection.objects.link(obj)

#collect segments, their length and directions in parallel numpy arrays
    P1 = read_verts(obj) #all verts
    P2 = np.roll(P1, -1, axis=0)
    segs = P2-P1
    dists = np.linalg.norm(P2-P1, axis=1)+0.000000001
    dirs = segs/dists[:, np.newaxis]  #.np.new axis to give same shape, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7140738/numpy-divide-along-axis

    shifted_pts = []
    for i in range(len(P1)):#iterate over all points

        #normal/easiest case, shift point on own segment in segment direction
        if dists[i]>=shift_length:#dist is big enough
            copy_original_pt = P1[i][:]
            shifted_pt = copy_original_pt+(dirs[i]*shift_length)
            shifted_pts.append(shifted_pt)

        #case where you need to look beyond neighbouring verts for shifting direction/dist
        else: #dist is not enough to apply shift, so you need to lookahead and see if next seg dist is enough.
            traveled_dist = dists[i]
            lookahead = 0 #number of segments to skip to have enough for shift length

            while traveled_dist < shift:
                                         #check if next segment is enough and note down traveled_dist
                lookahead+=1

                #to make lookahead indices stay in range when looking further than last point
                rotate_index = (i+lookahead)%len(dists) #rotate i lookahead goes further then last point, cause for now your path is cyclic!
                traveled_dist+=dists[rotate_index]

            #same for distance to calculate rest amount you didn't travel yet.
            shift_rest = shift - (traveled_dist-dists[rotate_index])
            copy_original_pt = P1[rotate_index][:]
            shifted_pt = copy_original_pt+(dirs[rotate_index]*shift_rest)
            shifted_pts.append(shifted_pt)

    write_obj_from_pydata('shifted_pts', shifted_pts, edges=None, close=True)

obj = bpy.context.active_object
multi_slide_verts(obj, 9.3)


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"Create new object-data users and apply transformations" after joining meshes
I joined multiple meshes with batfingers script here
How to join objects with Python?
#get mesh copies of collection and join into single mesh
col = bpy.data.collections['export']
obs = [o for o in col.objects if o.type == 'MESH']
_obs = [o.copy() for o in obs]

#context override to join them into one obj,
with bpy.context.temp_override(active_object=_obs[0], selected_editable_objects=_obs):
    bpy.ops.object.join()
    bpy.context.scene.collection.objects.link(_obs[0])
    _obs[0].name='single_mesh'

It works, but trying to apply all transformations to the new object,
I get the following warning 'Create new object-data users and apply transformations'.
Clicking 'Ok' will apply the transformation.
What am I doing wrong here and what does Blender do in the background?
.blend file is here, using Blender 3.2.

i didn't get any warnings. can you share your blend file https://blend-exchange.com

@HarryMcKenzie added a .blend file

The problem has to do with that the creation of the _obs variable is not copying everything correctly.
It seems like it's still joining the objects with one of the currently existing objects and then linking the joined object to the collection again. Whatever one that was used as the active object in the temp_override winds up as the joined mesh, with the same data as the _export_single_mesh that was linked in.

So you wind up with two of the same objects, sharing the same data.
I'm not entirely sure why this is happening but you can "solve" it be making copies of the data from each object at the outset and reassigning each object to it's original data. It's a bit hacky but it "works".
import bpy
import numpy as np
import bpy
#join objs in collections
#https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/13986/how-to-join-objects-with-python

#get mesh copies of collection you want to export
col = bpy.data.collections['export']
obs = []
_obs = []
_datas = []

# do this all in one for loop to make it faster
for obj in col.objects:
    if obj.type == "MESH":
        obs.append(obj)
        _obs.append(obj.copy())
        _datas.append(obj.data.copy())

#context override to join them into one obj,
#without changing real selection
with bpy.context.temp_override(active_object=_obs[0], selected_editable_objects=_obs):
    bpy.ops.object.join()
    bpy.context.collection.objects.link(_obs[0])
    _obs[0].name='_export_single_mesh'

# after the new object is linked relink the original objects to their old data.
for obj, data in zip(obs, _datas):
    obj.data = data

# now each object in the collection has it's own data.
# apply transforms should work

Works, but I might not understand how copy() works. Why do you have to relink original objects to their old data in the last step? Original objects and their data stay untouched, don't they?

Yeah like I said, I'm not sure why it's happening, but the context_override seems like it's using the obs[0] not the _obs[0] variable and so the join is happening on one of the cubes currently in the scene. You could maybe see if the same bug occurs if you create a manual context dictionary like old school and see if it does the same thing, rather than using the context.temp_override(). Just something like ctx = bpy.context.copy(); ctx['active_object'] = _obs[0]; ctx['selected_editable_objects'] = _obs; bpy.ops.objects.join(ctx) and see if that works.


text:
mesh.edges.foreach_set() doesn't update
Function to create a mesh from a numpy array.
Object gets created, but edges and verts are only shown when I toggle to edit mode and back to object mode.
Small example, run in object mode with Plane selected.
 def write_obj(verts, edges):

    me = bpy.data.meshes.new("new_mesh")
    me.vertices.add(count=len(verts))
    me.vertices.foreach_set("co", verts.ravel())
    me.update()
    me.edges.add(count=len(verts))
    me.edges.foreach_set("vertices", edges.ravel())

    obj = bpy.data.objects.new('new_obj', me)
    bpy.context.scene.collection.objects.link(obj)

def read_verts(mesh): #return np.array
    mverts_co = np.zeros((len(mesh.vertices) * 3), dtype=np.float)
    mesh.vertices.foreach_get("co", mverts_co)
    return np.reshape(mverts_co, (len(mesh.vertices), 3))

def read_edges(mesh): #return np.array
    fastedges = np.zeros((len(mesh.edges)*2), dtype=np.int) # [0.0, 0.0] * len(mesh.edges)
    mesh.edges.foreach_get("vertices", fastedges)
    return np.reshape(fastedges, (len(mesh.edges), 2))

active_obj = bpy.context.active_object
verts = read_verts(active_obj.data)
edges = read_edges(active_obj.data)

write_obj(verts, edges)

What kind of update() am I missing in my function?
mesh.update() doesn't work.
//
Okay, foreach_set doesn't seem to have a way to update.
Except toggling between object and edit mode, but that made the script really slow.
Originally I wanted to run a time comparison against from_pydata
def write_obj_from_pydata(verts, edges=None):
    if edges is None:
        # join vertices into one uninterrupted chain of edges.
        edges = [[i, i+1] for i in range(len(verts)-1)]
    me = bpy.data.meshes.new("new_mesh")
    me.from_pydata(verts, edges, [])

    obj = bpy.data.objects.new('new_obj', me)
    bpy.context.scene.collection.objects.link(obj)

To clarify is the issue running above in edit mode vs object mode? suggest adding  a minimal working example eg add a test call to the above for a plane or something simple.

I added an minimal working example.

Cheers. IIRC this has come up before and something about not being the intended use rings a bell..   The me.from_pydata method is the intended way to go ... with the bonus of being able to also  add faces.

Ah, okay. Do you mean? https://developer.blender.org/T31340

Use me.update(calc_edges_loose=True). Make sure you do it after you set the edges though, not before where you currently have me.update().

That worked! Thank you. The foreach method takes 0.5sec for 1milion random vertices, pydata takes 2secs.


text:
Cycles selective reflection
I have bottle, "table" and it all lit by environment texture (HDRi). How to setup scene so that the world texture affect the bottle but is invisible (doesn't reflect the table)? The only object reflecting in table should be the bottle. I've tryed the Light Path node for the table, but without luck.

take a look at this: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/6644/remove-reflection-of-one-object-from-another-object

There is no simple way for doing this because blender doesn't have proper ligth linking settings. You can try uncheck glossy from the ray visibility of your world,
but that's not ideal.
What you can do is put your HDR on two sphere objects, instead of world.
One of them with glossy uncheck from visibility rays.
Have two render layer one for the table the other one for the glass and exclude the reflective world for the first one.


text:
Transforming around cursor doesn't work
I'm having problem with vertex rotating. Rotating/scalling around cursor works fine in object mode, but in edit mode Blender rotates verticies around origin point instead. Rotating aroung bounding box also works fine.
What's the problem? Have I clicked something? I'm using 2.79b.

Ok, I got this. The reason was the object scale different from 1. I've applied the scale, and rotation works properly again.
Isn't this some kind of bug?


text:
How to align a cluster of points?
If you have a cluster of points selected like this:

how do you align the points so that they create a flat plane?

You can achieve this by scaling the points along a perpendicular (Normal) axis:
Via Keyboard:

Alt+Space: Change Transform orientation to Normal
s: Scale selected
z, z: The axis to scale on; the first 'z' specifies the global axis. Pressing again specifies local.
0: The amount to scale by
Enter: Confirm the action

Via Mouse:

Then you need to left click anywhere in the scene to confirm and modify the properties of the tool.

And you will get all the points aligned.

You can do this of course also just in global space, instead of normal, or any other. If you press the axis letter only once, you'll be in global, pressing the axis letter twice makes scaling use the selected transform space (view, local, gimbal, normal or stay in global if that's selected). What you end up choosing depends on what you need, of course.

Note this is also doable with the Loop tools addon

If you scale the vertices to 0 along a specific axis, you can make them flat. For example, if you want to flatten some vertices along the X axis, you would press S (to scale) > X (for the X axis) > 0 (to scale them to zero).

How come when i do this, they moved, but my vertices aren't 0, they're stubbornly at 0.02124?


text:
Is there a 2-point clip in Blender?
I'd like to cut a mesh by giving two points (in order to form a line). For example, I would be able to easily cut the mesh in the picture below (which is an arch) instead of roughly bringing each vertex to the hypothetical diagonal line.

Am I missing the tool or are there similar ways to achieve the same result?

Awesome! I think this is a duplicate then.

@cegaton Uhm there is a problem, though. Since it doesn't snap to grid, I can't really make precise cuts. Any solution?

Related: http://blender.stackexchange.com/q/8955/599

@cegaton I did, but there's no snap-to-grid function.


text:
How to UV unwrap a car model using standard perspectives?
I made a low poly car model (772 tris, game asset) but I'd like to unwrap it so that I can use a single texture like this car (no download, jpeg, 70 KB).
Doing multiple "project from view" unwraps doesn't work since it deletes the last one. So what can I do with Blender?

Unwrapping only applies to the currently selected faces. If you want to unwrap the side view, only select the sides of the car, if you want to unwrap the front, only select the front. Then the UVs of the unselected faces will not be overwritten.

@maddin45 Ok but there isn't simply a front and side, there are "gray" areas. I'll try selecting by face.

Uhm no it's not working. Other solutions?

Well, for the gray areas you will have to decide which side you want to use. Otherwise it will get complicated (multiple UV coordinate sets and mixing materials and so on).

I have already asked this question! , Look through my questions and see if you canfind it

@Knuckles209cp Yeah I have seen it. :) I managed to solve unwrapping with seams in the end, but good to know. :)


text:
blender python transfer pose bone position to an object (matrix issue)
I have an object inside a bone, matches the bone exactly (position, scale, rotation). The armature and the object have different origin points.
I am trying to make the object follow the bone exactly when i change its position - rotation using python.
I am guessing my math is wrong (works if the object has 0,0,0 as original position )

And here is the code and the file so it will be easier to prototype

from mathutils import Matrix
import bpy

ob = bpy.context.active_pose_bone
obj = ob.id_data

T =  Matrix.Translation(1* (ob.tail - ob.head))
matrix_final = obj.matrix_world @ (T@ ob.matrix_channel)

obj2 = bpy.data.objects["Bone.001|Armature"]
obj2.matrix_world = matrix_final

Thanks

This post may help you find a solution:
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/265213/transfer-orientation-of-points-to-bone-armature

Couple of possible issues;

It looks like you've rigged this in an odd way... basically bones need to be aligned to meshes in EDIT MODE not 'posed' into position in POSE MODE, if that's done there's a coordinate mismatch between the two if the bone is reset.

Ideally you want to make sure both objects ORIGIN's are in the same location with Rotation, Location & Scale fixed - coordinates are all relative.

Instead of (1* (ob.tail - ob.head)) try (0* (ob.tail - ob.head)); using "1" is offsetting the mesh along the bones Z axis so it roots to the tail bone node.


text:
Get object and the modifier data_path using python
I have a modifier object
<bpy_struct, SubsurfModifier("Subdivision") at 0x0000021FF0A3AF28>

and i was wondering how can i extract the full data_path from that modifier object without the need of using a loop on the scene to find the corresponding object
so from there i want to have this
bpy.data.objects['Icosphere'].modifiers["Subdivision"]

and this too
bpy.data.objects['Icosphere']

which is the name of the object that has that modifier applied to it
Thanks

You can usually get a handle on an object's holder with bpy_struct.id_data.
import bpy

obj = bpy.data.objects["Cube"]
mod = obj.modifiers["Array"]
print(mod.id_data)

<bpy_struct, Object("Cube") at 0x000001E51A4D4808>

You can get the data path with bpy_struct.path_from_id.
print(mod.path_from_id())

modifiers["Array"]

object_path = repr(mod.id_data)
print(object_path)
full_path = f"{object_path}.{mod.path_from_id()}"
print(full_path)

bpy.data.objects["Cube"]

bpy.data.objects["Cube"].modifiers["Array"]

also repr(mod.id_data)

@MarkusvonBroady ooh nice thank you for that !


text:
V shaped gradient texture - Car Livery
I am working on a livery of F1 car (it's my first project after tutorials) and want to achieve a V-shaped car livery like on this photo:

I created a gradient texture with texture coordinate on an empty, like the guy in this video:
YouTube and it looks like below. The empty allows me to rotate and scale the gradient texture. I thought that since there is a Mirror modifier on the body, the shader would also be mirrored, but it's not the case. I want to mirror it, like on the screen from the video.
I tried moving, rotating and scaling the empty, but it didn't work :(

Gradient I want to achieve:

Hi and welcome! I'd suggest to use an image texture instead, I personally do not see any reason why this has to be a procedural shader. BTW: Recommend to take the [tour] to learn about how this site works. Good luck!

Related: Add a transparent image on top of a material

Thank you,  this actually may be the easiest solution! But what if I wanted to keep it procedural, just for the future?

Digital images won't go away in the near future, bullet proof since early 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_image :D

Related: how to create a procedural chevron like thexture material

@susu Thank you! I didn't know the word "chevron" so i couldn't search for it... :D

You were so nearly there... :D
At the risk of starting a game of Node Golf, if the question is: 'How do I make a procedural chevron?' ...then a minimal answer could be something like this, mirroring in X by using its Absolute value:

This assumes the origin of your model is on its mirror axis. The Map Range 'From' figures would depend on the size of your object. Both of those conditions are tweakable.
The texture is in XY, and can be projected through any model:

@brockmann: to get a rounding at the tip pf the chevron without getting too complicated, you could forget the Absolute, and select ranges from y + sqrt((x^2) +n). Here illustrated with n=0.005, n=0.001, and n=0, which returns us to the un-rounded chevron.

Blurring could be achieved by chnging the Color Ramp from 'Constant', and putting in gradients from red to white, and/or, muddling the whole texture space with some noise.

This worked perfectly, thank you! .

In order to make it less perfect (for realism), do you see any chance to round up the corners and blur the lines it a tiny bit? BTW: Nice answer!

@brockmann yes, but it costs a square root!  >8/

@susu Good idea. Thanks.

Try something like this. You may need to adjust the values to fit the size of your object, but the idea is the same - to use wave textures, scaled down so they're only one or 2 stripes, then adding them together on 45 degree angles so they cross in the center of the object. That in mind, using object texture coordinates is a good place to start:

As you can see from the next 2 images, one Wave texture alone doesn't have both the "chevrons" pointing in the desired directions at the same time, so the solution is to use the rotation of mapping nodes to make one going each way, and then splitting their presentation with a Gradient Texture. I also took this opportunity to make the "back" chevron thicker than the front using the ColorRamp:

Here is the gradient. I separated the X and used a ColorRamp set to constant to ensure an even split, then I used this as a mix factor between the two directions:

I then used this new formed texture as a mix factor between white and red:

Wow! Amazing! Thank you! Even if i end up using a texture image, I will certainly try to do it your way, just to try it and learn. Thank you so much!


text:
Image as planes not entirely transparent above procedural metallic shader
I want to add a decal to my model, which has a procedurally generated metallic car paint shader. To help myself with easy changing of the decals, i don't want to add decals as image textures and with UVs. Hovewer the result looks like the image is not entirely transparent. I am using cycles.

I have prepared decals, that are saved in PNG file.
My steps:

Made sure that the alpha in the background is completely equal to 0 (select whole background in GIMP, delete).
Import "Image as planes" - alpha set to 'straight'. Scaled and rotated, etc.
Added Subdivision (Lev 6) and Shrinkwrap
Added small offset to the Shrinkwrap
Node setup as follows
Tried changing offset value (even to 1mm) of shrinkwrap, settings of the shader (including setting IOR to 1) and light paths. Then reseted everything to default values and posted here.

It seams like the transparent layer of my decal is interacting somehow with the metallic shader underneath... Does anybody have any idea what is happening?
Thank you guys!

PS. In viewport shading it looks perfect.

PS2. Updated
Link

Can you share a file?  This is potentially interesting.  Would need textures packed.

Yeah, I prepared a small file with everything that is important. Same problem occurs. It is at the bottom of my first post. @Nathan

Getting a "file format not supported" on your linked file.  What version?

Blender 3.0, installed a week ago or so

The uploaded file is 0 bytes. @Daniel14223

I updated the link. It opens normally when I download it on my second computer. @Benus

it also happens with other transparent images in other Blender versions, it looks like it has to do with the material of the plane underneath (Blue Car Paint), it would be interesting to understand what's the problem with this material

@moonboots That's exactly what I thought. However, I don't have neither knowledge nor experience to find out what is goint on :/

It looks like the Car Paint nodegroup has issues with noise. I suppose giving more samples would help, but I'm not gonna spend time trying.
What you can do instead of using a mesh plane to add your logo, is to simply mix your logo texture into the carpaint shader:

Wow, thanks! It's a nice and clean solution


text:
Blender Shader Node interpolation
I'm trying to color a cube with its own position in 3D space, which works well with the shader node setup I have, but only sets the colors for the vertices. However, I would like this to interpolate across the faces, so that the position is not only correct at the vertices but between as well. Is there some shader magic to get this working?
Img. of my cube and the colored vertices (note how the upper right corner correctly is set to (1,1,1 = white) but that it's not interpolating across the face middle):

It's not that it's interpolating incorectly (and it's not really interpolating anyways, not like you think, it's looking at the position of each sample).  It's that the 0,0,0 world position is in the middle of your cube, and the negative positions are getting clamped to 0,0,0.  You have to decide what you want it to do if position is less than zero or greater than 1.  Because your monitor will never be able to display color outside the 0,1 range.

You're right, ofc I would have to do some kind of normalization.

you can get the result you want by plugging the generated texture coordinates from the vertex positions of your cube in the Texture Coordinate node instead of the Geometry node.
Here's the result :

Perfect! Thanks a lot! Bonus question: do you know how I can unwrap this shading effect, and bake it into an image? Or could you give me some pointers as to what keywords to look up ?

I tried baking using the Cycles render engine and trying to use the Emit Bake Type but I have an error that says that there's no active image found in my material even if I have the position plugged in. Tell me if you find. This other post helped a little : https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/100731/how-to-bake-a-position-map-in-blender

I just found out that this is called "render baking" and "texture baking". Thanks guys!

I'm not that familiar with Cycles to be honest. If I had to do it, I would probably import the mesh inside of Substance Painter and bake the position in it.


text:
Cycles - circular artefacts in displaced PBR render?
I'm trying to model a PBR leather material, with displacement modifier. The mesh is heavily subdivided to make the leather appear smooth and get the creases to have the correct shading.
However, when I'm rendering without anti-aliasing (Cycles -> Film -> Filter=Gaussian, Width=0.01Px), cycles is giving me really weird artefacts, ring-like shapes, see the image attached.
When anti-aliasing is turned on (Filter px width set to something like 1.5), these disappear. However, for my application, I must render without anti-aliasing.
Has anybody seen this before? I suspect it has to do with the displacement, as the texture is ray-marched until the displaced heightfield is intersected, but don't have any idea how to solve this. Any hints appreciated!

Edit: Guys, thanks for the help so far. I cannot share the blendfile, as it's too big for blendexchange due to the high number of vertices and the 4K texture maps. But I added the node-setup and another close-up. Thanks!

You might try changing the displacement pattern from 3D to 2D.

Well, when you disable anti-aliasing, you tend to get aliasing. The only thing I can think of to fix this is to lower your texture resolution until the texel size is ≥ the pixel size.

Does this look like a typical aliasing pattern to you? And even with anti-aliasing on, the effect is still there (less prominent, but still visible), it is just mitigated by the filtering... That's why I suspected there is something else going on behind the scenes.

Perhaps if you shared the node tree and some close-up renders (to mitigate the artifacts), I might spot something else at play here, but it just looks like aliasing to me. You can [edit] your question to include these.

Try to look into displacement and height map (if any) node setup. Make sure respectful images are set to non-color data, as well as nodes are connected correctly. You can provide your node setup as edit to the question

Thanks, I have updated the question accordingly.

Any ideas on this?


text:
How to serialize simple materials?
I have a bunch of Blender files with similar content. The files share a lot of common objects with identical names. I would like to propagate materials between the files. I plan to achieve this with a script that maintains a database of materials and associates them with objects based on their names.
All the materials will probably be simple - just diffuse and specular components. Some of them will perhaps also have a texture. However, it seems that rna2xml does not work on such a simple material:
for o in context.scene.objects:
    for m in o.material_slots:
        rna2xml(root_node="Material", root_rna=m.material)

Here's the output:
<Material>
  <texture_paint_images>
  </texture_paint_images>
  <texture_paint_slots>
  </texture_paint_slots>
  <texture_slots>
  </texture_slots>
</Material>

Looks a bit too empty (no diffuse, specular components).
Moreover, it seems that Material does not have _ _dict__ attribute nor an _asdict() method, and _ _slots__ appears to be empty. Well, theoretically could look through the attribute list provided by dir(), but I'm probably approaching this issue from the wrong side already.
Edit: For completeness, I also verified that pickle produces identical output for materials with different diffuse colors.
Except for hard-coding material parameters (which should be simple in my case - because I just need simple materials anyway), are there any ideas or suggestions?
I'm using Blender 2.76 on Windows 7 x64.

Would it be simpler (if far less satisfying) to put all your materials into a dedicated blender file and link or append to them from there for your future projects?

@user3825715: Interesting thought. Do you know how to link materials from a different blender file?

File-->Append(or Link)-->navigate to file, click on 'Material' (or any other element of the file), click on 'Append from Library'

root_rna=m.material.node_tree

I can serialize and deserialize any Blender material configuration in JSON. It is possible for me to save my materials in a FreeCAD file and restore all these materials in Blender from this FreeCAD file. for more information see this thread on the FreeCAD forum

Decided to try the dir() approach until someone proposes a better solution. Seems to be working for simple materials without textures, as well as some modifiers, etc. To me this looks pretty dangerous, tho.
In order to later update Blender objects based on the generated dict, I had to skip read-only properties.
def bl_to_dict(bl_object, ignore_getters=True):
    """Generic Blender object to dict converter."""
    skip_attributes = ['__doc__', '__module__', '__slots__']
    supported_basetypes = [
        "<class 'bool'>",
        "<class 'int'>",
        "<class 'float'>",
        "<class 'str'>",
        "<class 'list'>",
        "<class 'set'>"
        ]
    # TODO:: Add support for more types for which casting helps.
    supported_casts = {
        "<class 'Color'>": 'list'
    }
    # TODO:: Figure out how to support bpy_prop_array, bpy_prop_collection, etc.
    # TODO:: Perhaps recurse on members of more complex classes.
    d = {}

    attributes = [x for x in dir(bl_object) if x not in skip_attributes]
    for name in attributes:
        # Get attribute value.
        val = getattr(bl_object, name)
        # Ignore getter properties.
        if ignore_getters:
            try:
                setattr(bl_object, name, val)
            except AttributeError as err:
                continue
        # Check against supported types.
        type_str = str(type(val))
        if type_str in supported_basetypes:
            d[name] = val
        elif type_str in supported_casts:
            d[name] = eval(supported_casts[type_str])(val)
        #else:
        #    print("Type {} of attribute {} not supported yet.".format(type(val), name))
    return d

def dict_to_bl(bl_obj, bl_dict):
    """Update a Blender object from a dict."""
    for key, val in bl_dict.iteritems():
        setattr(bl_obj, key, val)
    return bl_obj

# From here on it's easy to either convert the dict
# to a string, to pickle, json, p-code or whatever it.

Disclaimer: The code is provided as-is. It's not guaranteed to work or anything. Getting and resetting random properties (basically what this code does) might seriously mess up stuff in Blender.


text:
Import fbx file failure
Total blender and general software noob. Trying to import an fbx rig into Blender. Keep getting the following error message:

https://i.sstatic.net/MduH3.jpg
Model, rig, nothing will load in. All I need it for is to reparent a few bones and apply textures. Basically looking for how to get blender to recognize the fbx file or perhaps another program that may be easier than whatever is necessary to fix.

Please provide some additional information as to which version of blender you are using, the software the .FBX was exported with, system specs, etc. .

I'm using Blender 2.79, downloaded the FBX off of Sketchfab. Thing is, 3DMax and Unity will recognize it perfectly fine but Blender won't.
Graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti,
Processor is Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6600K CPU @ 3.50GHz, 3501 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)
Dunno what else is needed but let me know, I'll find it.


text:
Import/export 3ds format in Blender 2.8
I need to import and specially export in 3DS format. I know that I can import a file in 2.79 and the copy-paste to 2.8, but then when I copy-paste it back to 2.79 I'm having problems with textures missing.
Is there any way to import/export 3ds in 2.8 without using any other version or software like we did in 2.79? The extension is missing in the add-ons repository either.

The add-on is being ported to 2.8 by the community. See: https://developer.blender.org/T66329

What I normally do in this case is

Import the model in Blender 2.79 then save the file.
Open the new Blender 2.80 project and go to File -> Append menu.
Navigate to your previously saved project with the imported model in 2.79. When you select the
file you may need to wait a bit for all the folders to show up.
When all the folders populated then click on the Object folder, may need to wait a bit to populate, and
select all the objects here that you want in your new 2.80 project
and click on the Append from Library button on the top right.

All the selected objects should appear with the correct materials in your 2.80 project.
In case you still would not get the materials and textures, very unlikely, then go to the File -> External Data menu and select the root directory of your 2.79 project file. Blender will automatically search for the related textures and materials and add them to your 2.80 project. This later is also good when you moved a project file and after reopening the textures and materials are gone because the path has changed. This way you can get Blender to search for them, you just need to point it to the right direction, so to speak.
Unfortunately I do not know an easier solution to export 3ds files from 2.80 but this process can be reversed and exported from 2.79. On the other hand I think you should be fine to export obj file from 2.80. It is supported in nearly any good software.

Thanks, I didn't know that way of import objects, I usually just import in 2.79 and then open it in 2.8.
I'm using a 3D software for creating tracks in certain games (Bob's Track Builder (BTB)) and it only allows 3ds and collada (every time I try to import a collada file in BTB it crash :( )

This was the only way I managed to move 3ds objects into V2.80 but it works well and at least there is a relatively easy work around to get this done without the 3ds import/export plugin present.

Copy/Paste works, too and is a faster alternative than saving complete scenes out of Blender 2.79. Just open Blender 2.79, import the 3DS there and open the current version of Blender then. Switch back to Blender 2.79 and copy all objects you need there and paste them into the newest version of Blender. This is a fast way, you can try first.

For exporting: In order to get the textures in 3DS export you must carefully name the textures/materials using short names to ensure the image names are 8.3 compliant. Otherwise, the output will not have the proper reference and not be found. It's best to put all the image files in the same directory as the blend file to prevent the appended path name too (this causes file name truncations that can lead to textures not loading).

As @robert-gützkow mentioned, the 3DS addon is still being worked on. It appears to work fine with Blender all the way up to version 2.92. It just hasn't been merged into the main build due to some technicalities that haven't been resolved.
The easiest place to get the current version of the addon is from the Github mirror.
Download all of the scripts (Code->Download .zip) and then pick a method to install the io_scene_3ds addon. Personally, I zipped up the io_scene_3ds directory and used the 'Install...' option to install io_scene_3ds.zip. You could alternatively dump the whole  blender-addons-contrib repository into your blender user scripts directory as discussed here: Installing an addon
Once the addon is installed the import/export menus will have a .3ds option.


text:
How can I map an image correctly over my texture?
My image preview is correct in how the image is supposed to look and doesn't look anything like I need it to.
This is how it should look

This is what I got so far, as you can see I need the label to be up higher on the bottle and lower on the bottle

Can you provide the blend file? It could be a few things: your uv map is probably the cause.

I have one image and I clicked pack all into .blend from the external data

For the darkness, use this material node setup:
It will allow you to have a relatively shadeless image. Tweak the selected value to decide how luminescent you want your model to be.
As for the UV mapping, this is a complicated subject, but Ken Loge does a good job of going over the basics here. Also, consider Blender Guru here. For what I can say, you will want to have a triangle fan at the top and bottom of your cylindrical design and edge select all of the top edges and one along the side. Then key Ctrl+E and select Mark Seam. Next, press A once or twice until everything is selected. After that, key U and select Unwrap. If you do this correctly, it will give you the spiky rectangle thing on the left (a UV Map), which you can Grab (G) to move around and Scale (S) to change the size of your image in relation to the eventual result (all of that is pictured above). You may also want to consider this:


text:
Blender object randomly invisible to camera
so I spent several hours setting up a scene with exploding glass and for whatever reason the bullet is now invisible to the camera... I've done everything and before you say it no it is not turned off in the outline window.  I am at the end of my whits right now with Blender please someone be my hero.

What layers are the target for the bullet?  What layers are the target for the camera?

Possibly related - http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/33787/why-is-part-of-my-model-not-being-rendered. Check for render layers, whther dupliframes aren't enabled etc. Post some more screenshots with these settings.

@atomicbezierslinger same layer

Can you upload your .blend file?

Try appending all your objects to a new file. If it's a glitch it's a glitch and this is what usually saves my day in such situations :-) I've experienced weird behavior with visibility/renderability before...