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Are there any special considerations for using Blender on Linux?
Are there any special considerations to be made when using Blender in Linux over Windows? Specifically Ubuntu?

I'm running (arch) linux, and there aren't any that come to mind immediately. Note that it tends to run a little faster on linux (I think, I haven't done any actual measuring) ;)

Can you specify your questions more? Are your questions concerning technical or legal issues? Technical I see no advantage in using Blender on Windows over Linux (especially Ubuntu). I have used Blender for many years on Linux exclusively. Note that Linux (esp. Ubuntu) was also used for open movie projects.

I use both linux and windows 7. For me windows 7 runs is better because: drivers are always up to date, more GA builds, in terms of speed I did not notice an real change at all.

Well GA builds are usually no concern for a linux user cause building on linux is a piece of cake anyways. Drivers for Ubuntu are also no problem in most cases.

well than you are all set I guess for linux. But for me there really is no difference.

As mentioned, linux tends to be a little faster in terms of rendering on linux.  The only downside I've seen is getting good drivers for a graphics card- especially if it's not nividia.

@Vader - nvidia and ati have up to date drivers on Linux too.

The question is vague, but off hand here are some things to consider.
Compatibility

Make sure your hardware is supported,some hardware has poor support or is completely unsupported.Note: at the time of writing, NVIDIA has much better support for GPU rendering then any other hardware, but this may change with newer drivers & hardware.
Path names are case sensitive (if you share projects with ms-windows systems you need to take care of this, since ms-windows is case insensitive).
Unlike OSX, Linux doesn't support Quicktime codecs. This means some formats (such as gif) can't be loaded. Though Blender uses FFMPEG which supports many video formats (input & output).

Performance

Linux (and associated tool-chain) has been proven to be faster in some areas (many users report faster render times with Cycles for example). But this depends on your exact configuration.The ability to run Blender with no graphical desktop to use all available memory can be an advantage too (especially for render farms).
Blender for Linux takes advantage of a high performance memory allocator (jemalloc), which is less prone to memory fragmentation, see:

jemalloc home page
Sintel, Blender Jemalloc benchmarks
how-does-jemalloc-work-what-are-the-benefits

Some of Blender's code takes advantage of compiler optimizations which aren't available in Microsoft's compiler (MSVC): (explicit branch reordering with __builtin_expect and more efficient macros with statement expressions).
Greater choice for compilers (GCC, Clang, IntelC++) are supported on Linux, but only MSVC is supported on ms-windows.

With the ability to boot of an external drive, you can test how well Linux runs and that it supports your hardware, before installing onto your system.

Notes:

some of the advantages I've listed for Linux are also advantages for MacOSX, FreeBSD
MS-Windows+MSVC are also advanced technologies and undoubtedly have some advantages over Linux+GCC..or other compilers... (your-mileage-may-vary).
The questioner askes about Ubuntu, however this is not really an important detail, (pros/cons apply to other popular distros too).


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Adjust the image offset and image crop for multiple strips
Initially I had done my video in a portrait size 9x16, but now I want to make it wider - something like 16x16.
So I changed the render size, but now all the strips are resized (not proportionally too) to fit the new size. I know that by checking the Image Crop property and adjusting Image Offset I can have the strip stay in the input size.
But I have many strips, is there a way to apply these settings for multiple strips. Is there some plugin or script?

I found a solution, there is a script called Extra Sequencer Actions
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Sequencer/Extra_Sequencer_Actions
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?248129-Extra-Sequencer-Actions
Initially I came across it they were mainly talking about batch editing proxies. But after installation I found it had and many sub menus under the Strip menu.
It behaves as desired.

source: Stack Exchange

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

authors: حيرني هواك اتعبني غلاك

sort: votes


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Using a scripted expression driver to combine two angles
I am trying to use a driver with a scripted expression to place an object's rotation in between the rotation of two other angle-measuring objects.
So there are objects I've labeled BeginAngle and EndAngle, as well as ResultAngle.
I've managed to script it so that ResultAngle will be placed exactly halfway in the middle using:
((endangle-beginangle)/2)

What I really want to do is not just place it halfway but instead specify ratios in decimal like 0.333, 0.618 etc.
My Python and math skills have proven insufficient thus far.

.blend file here.
Thanks for any help!
Things to note:
Rotation along Blender's Z axis is inverted (- degrees), making this trickier. Also you may need to tick "Auto-Run Python Scripts" under Preferences > File.

I assume you mean that you want a "convex combination" of the angles, so that:

0 will return an angle that is just BeginAngle
0.5 will return an angle halfway between BeginAngle and EndAngle
0.33 will return an angle that is closer to BeginAngle than EndAngle

In that case, you can use the scripted expression:
(1.0 - 0.33) * BeginAngle + (0.33) * EndAngle

Fantastic! Elegantly simple and customizable. Exactly the sort of answer I was hoping for. Just tried it out. Thank you.

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How to select a strip in the video sequence editor?
I can't seem to select a clip in the sequencer. When I try, all it does is move the scrub point. I don't want to move the scrub point, I want to select the clip. I want to move the clip around. I want to delete the clip. But I can't select the clip!
I have tried ⇧ Shift clicking, ⎈ Ctrl clicking, ⌘ Cmd clicking, ⌥ Opt clicking, and every combination I could think of...

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/vse/sequencer/selecting.html

Selecting is done with  RMB. Also make sure you click more in the middle of the strip, as the ends of a strip can be selected separately.

Click in the middle of the strip, not the ends with the arrows.

A selects/deselects all.
B starts Box Select.
Nonkeypad Home centers the selected strip.
Ctrl +MMB zooms.

It may be easier if the clip is of a manageable size.

Ok, I figured it out. The other answers seemed to assume you were not on a Mac or that you were using a physical mouse. If you have a physical mouse (with more than one button) attached, your  RMB should work to select. If not, try checking your mouse settings to make sure a right click is really a right click.
If you are using a multi-touch track pad a two finger click might work. If not go into your trackpad settings to see what combination of presses equals a right mouse button click.
I felt really dumb after figuring this out by accident. I spent a day clicking again and again grumbling against stupid Blender.

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


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Creating animations for Unity models using Blender?
I am relatively new to Unity.
Currently, I am trying to make some animations using the free model Unity-Chan available from the asset store. Could someone post some helpful tips or perhaps a link with a brief walkthrough on how to perform this?

This is very simple:

First export your model from unity: http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=ObjExporter
Next, Import it into blender:

Add animations using the rigging tools
Export FBX to unity using these settings:

Done!


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atan2 equivalent in Cycles nodes?
The Cycle's math node has an "Inverse tangent" option. This function however cannot discriminate between two opposite points on the circle, as they have the same tangent. Usually, this is solved with a function called atan2, which receives two inputs, the x and y of the vector, and returns the angle. Can I construct something similar in Cycle's nodes?

The simplest way would be an OSL script. Drawback is no GPU suport.
#include "stdosl.h"

shader atan2(
    float X = 0.0,
    float Y = 0.0,

    output float result = 0.0 )
{
    result = atan2(X,Y);
}

Paste that into a text block and select it in a script node.

I like this, but when I try it, the node puts out only a constant. Is this source correct?

Found the trouble!  There's a secret checkbox in the render settings which one must turn on, and is never mentioned in any tutorial/intro that I've seen so far.  Thanks to Blender S.E.  http://blender.stackexchange.com/a/20876/606

Very old question, I know. However, here's an alternative (and simpler) node-based solution to produce the atan2(x,y) function.

The difference between 'arctangent' and 'atan2' is that the 'arctangent' only provides unique values for one half of the rotation - the other have returns duplicate results. In order to extract the second half of the rotation (as is available from atan2(X,Y)) we need to use the sign of one of the input values (in this case X) to determine when we are in the second half of the full rotation.
The Less Than node detects the change in sign while the Multiply changes the 0.0/1.0 output of the Less Than into either 0.0 or 'pi' (which represents a 'half turn' (180 degrees) since we're working in radians rather than degrees). This is then added into the result of arctangent(Y/X) and, finally, adjusted by a quarter of a turn (pi/2 radians) to match the output from 'atan2(...)'.
In order to test this I compared it to the OSL example provided by @sambler to prove that it produces the same result as the OSL 'atan2(X,Y)' function.

@Pisurquatre I notice it’s now even easier in the latest build of Blender (2.79.5) as there is an actual atan2 operation on the Maths node!


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How can I animate the visibility of a face?
I am making an animation where the character is shimming across a ledge, and the ledge starts to crumble.  I would have to delete faces of the ledge to make them crumble.  How can I do that?

Try looking at the answers on this question and see if they help: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/3337/procedurally-generating-wear-on-an-object If not, leave a comment asking for more help.

You can also try this: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/3370/is-it-possible-to-generate-an-image-based-on-edges-and-corners but I'm not sure if it's what you're looking for.

You could use a Mask modifier if you really want to delete certain faces on a certain frame, however I'm not sure this is really what you want to do.
Mask modifier:
If you really want to delete a specific face (or faces) on a certain frame, then you can use the Mask modifier.

Select the faces you want to hide and assign them to a vertex group in Properties > Object data > Vertex groups

Add a mask modifier and select your vertex group and enable Invert by clicking the button next to the vertex group selector:

Keyframe the visibility of the modifier by hovering over the eye icon and pressing I.

If you want more variation, try using a reversed Build modifier. This will delete all faces in the object over time, either randomly or in order.
Fracturing:
If you are trying to make a more complex/realistic
You might also want to try the Cell fracture addon (see this post):

Or the explode modifier.

All faces touching a vertex assigned to the Vertex Group also disappear.  To get just a single face to disappear, select that face in Edit Mode, then go to Mesh > Faces > Poke Faces, and only assign the new vertex at the center of the poked face to the Vertex Group.


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How to get the color of a particle with Python?
I'm trying, with python, to get the color of a given particle in a simple particle system. So far, when I create a particle system, the particle get the color from where it's emitted, right? I can ask for it's position, orientation, and a lot of cool stuff.  But, do you know any way to get the color information? An average RGB will be great.
I guess one way could be through the UV of the emitter?

As far as I know there is no simple way to get the color of a particle. In the case you have an object with UV's and 1 image texture defining the color you should be able to get the color.
The following example is for BI and assumes you only have 1 UV map, the texture is in slot 1 and there is only 1 particle system and 1 modifier (the modifier for the particle system) on the object.
import bpy
from mathutils import Color

def get_pixel_color(img, x, y):
    # Get the 'index' of the pixel. Pixels are stored as one big list of
    # numbers. The R, G, B and A value for every pixel, one after the other.
    pixel_i = y * img.size[0] * 4 + x * 4
    pixel_col = img.pixels[pixel_i:pixel_i + 4]
    # Return the color as Color object, which doesn't have alpha info.
    return Color((pixel_col[:-1]))

def get_uv_color(img, uv):
    # Get the x and y coordinates of the pixel for the given uv coordinate.
    pixel_x = int(uv.x * img.size[0])
    pixel_y = int(uv.y * img.size[1])
    uv_col = get_pixel_color(img, pixel_x, pixel_y)
    return uv_col

def get_particle_color(p, ps, ps_mod):
    p_uv = ps.uv_on_emitter(ps_mod, p)
    p_mat = bpy.data.materials[ps.settings.material_slot]
    p_mat_tex = p_mat.texture_slots[0].texture
    p_mat_img = p_mat_tex.image
    p_col = get_uv_color(p_mat_img, p_uv)
    return p_col

obj = bpy.context.object       # The object with the particle system
ps = obj.particle_systems[0]   # The particle system you need to query
ps_mod = obj.modifiers[0]      # The modifier for the particle system
p = ps.particles[0]            # The first particle

p_col = get_particle_color(p, ps, ps_mod)

For Cycles (assuming that there is only 1 Image Texture node in the Shading Node Tree) you should change the get_particle_color function. The statement for p_mat_tex should be changed to:
p_mat_tex = p_mat.node_tree.nodes['Image Texture']

It works great in my early tests ! Thanks Jasper ! :D

If you using Blender Render

Particle Halos allows to can set a material on the emitter and select it.  Particles textures can modify color and size among other properties.
Object and Group Particles maintain their own color

If you are using Cycles Render

The [particles info] in the materials node editor can provide more info and can be programmed with the nodes for precisely colored particles.
Textures can change size and other properties

The question specifically asks for a way of getting the colour via python not how to colour the particles themselves.

These "worse-than-Word-art" arrows are dreadful, you are atomising the reader's sight at the expense of clarity.


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Play back of animation stops on last rendered image
I have a simulation of a wreaking ball hitting some blocks. I click Animation and when it is completed animating and I click play to watch it, nothing happens. It just shows me the last rendered image in the animation.

did you make sure you are exporting it somewhere? if you arent then make sure to export in a readible format and play it from the folder

Where are you pressing "play"? What happens if you press Ctrl F11?

I just changed some resolution around and a couple little things but I don't know how and where to save it?


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Blender game engine track to a property
I there any way to duplicate the action of the Edit object > Track to Actuator; so that it can track to a game property and not a object? It would be used to track multiple objects without having to list them all as separate track to actuators in the logic bricks.
blend file demo

I really hope this question to get answered, I don't want to list all the AI separately :S.

The link to your demo is dead.

Almost 5 years later, and the link is still dead.  #sad mess

You can only track one object at any given time, so you'll need to define a set of priorities by which a single target can be selected from a group of valid candidates (objects with the relevant property).
For example, if you wanted to track the closest object with the relevant property, you could do it with this function:
# track.py

def target_prop(cont):
    self = cont.owner
    objects = self.scene.objects

    tracked = [o for o in objects if self["target_prop"] in o]
    tracked.sort(key=lambda o: self.getDistanceTo(o))

    target, *_ = tracked

    act_track, *_ = cont.actuators
    act_track.object = target

    for act in cont.actuators:
        cont.activate(act)

Example: track_to_prop.blend
As you can see, you can specify the target property via a property on the tracking object (target_prop in this case). Also, you can set the always sensor to "true level triggering" (aka: "pulse mode"), to constantly re-evaluate the closest target, if that's required.

Will you add some info as to what *_ on lines 8 and 10 does? Also will to explain why you need to loop through the actuators to activate them. Thanks

@David That's just iterable unpacking syntax, to get the first element. The variable preceded by the star (the underscore in this case) is a list containing the rest of the elements, with act_track referencing the first. As for the actuators: You don't need to use a loop, as long as you can activate the relevant actuators, but I think a loop makes sense in this case, because I want to activate all that are connected, and that's what cont.actuators represents.


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How to make a realistic snow material in Cycles?
I have looked at many snow shaders, but haven't yet come up with one that looks good. I have many examples of not so good looking snow that I have tried to make.
I have looked at these materials:
Youtube tutorial
thread on blender artists
about the same material on blendswap
another material on blendswap
All of which have disappointed me in some way.
I'm looking for some way to capture the displacement, both small and large, the bright highlights of glistening snow, and the subtle grain over all.
Here are two reference images I took last winter.

You may be looking for something like this, I think a combination with Volumetric shader would be worth trying.

Could you add a reference image which shows the kind of effects you want?

It's incredibly hard to create a material that works at a microscopic scale as well as at macroscopic level. The level of detail requirement is simply very different. I'd focus on producing maybe 2 shaders, one for closeups and one for medium to long shots.

While it is a citizen tutorial the snow shader forge does a good material and each part is explained so you understand how to adjust it to your needs.

Here is what I have come up with:

In a still shot the sparkles look kind of like fireflies, but when you animate the camera they look great!
Here is the node setup:

The base material is the diffuse and glossy mix.  It uses a fresnel the opposite as you would normally, grazing angles give more diffuse.  I have found that this looks quite good.  There is also a slight bit of bump applied to the diffuse which greatly enhances the look.  You can adjust the roughness on the glossy shader to change how icy the snow looks, smaller roughness = more icy.  Values between .025 and .1 work well, I am using .1 for a fresh snow look.
The second layer is technically not photorealistic since I am adding as opposed to mixing in a gloss, but it looks pretty good.  It consists of a glossy shader mixed with no shader (this is so we are adding a fraction of a shader) and then added to the base shader.  The glossy has a very small voroni texture plugged into the normal to get the sparkles.
Here is a close up, for this I used an even smaller voroni, size = 30,000:

The purplish/yellowish is from the HDR, I am using Greg Zaal's Golden Gate.
The mesh is just a large bent plane with six subsurf levels and two displacement modifiers using different sized clouds textures.
The separate/combine RGB nodes just filter out the green channel of the voroni so it looks like a normal map :).  It's totally unnecessary but you could use it to change the strength if you want.

 My amateur's attempt at updating PG's snow for my project (Edit: Scale vorinori texture to like 30k)

Here is a simple node setup that I used to create a snow effect. It is not as realistic, but still looks decent.
~ samples = 20
~ refractive = off
~ reflective = off

This is pretty good for a first answer! Welcome to the site :)


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Blender 2.8 Boolean inconsistencies
I'm trying a simple boolean add. I select the first object (sphere) then add a boolean modifier (cube).
In first attempt with sphere in position 1, the results are as expected.

When I move the sphere to the left, and apply the modifier, the sphere disappears.

Any help greatly appreciated.

I had an object of the same name that was hidden in a different collection. When I renamed the cube the modifier worked correctly. Blender doesn't like duplicate names for objects. Hope this helps someone.

Try playing with the overlap threshold option. Also adding a few loopcuts or a subdivision modifier (set to Simple)  on your main object will help with your issue.

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


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Blender 2.8 create viewport similar to startup user perspective
In CAD programs there are usually standard viewports that have buttons so as to find or easily return to a viewport. When you start a new blender file, it opens up in a somewhat isometric view of a cube. I am trying to return to this view or recreate it with an easy way to return to it as a default reference.
Thanks in advance.


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Using arrays as custom properties in Blender PropertyGroup
I'm very new to Blender scripting (not programming in general) and I can't seem to figure out how to save an array of some data type (probably want it to be another PropertyGroup) in a PropertyGroup that I put on bpy.types.Scene.ssData.
What I have tried so far is variations on this:
class SSData(bpy.types.PropertyGroup):
  totalCount: bpy.props.IntProperty(name="Subscene Count", description="Integer", default=0)
  list: ['ford']

but when I try to get the list property like this: bpy.context.scene.ssData.list I get an error AttributeError: 'SSData' object has no attribute 'list'. The other property is registered fine btw, I can get totalCount and set it to some other value as well.
I've searched in the Blender docs for some Array type that I can use like bpy.props.IntProperty but I can't find anything. I understand that the object I want there should inherit from bpy_structs but I don't know if I can make my own type based on that.

Does this help? https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/16511/how-can-i-store-and-retrieve-a-custom-list-in-a-blend-file

@RayMairlot This definitely helps! Thank you very much. I tried something similar as well but I wasn't sure how the CollectionProperty thing works (given it has a function called add() that I didn't know about).


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Texture Paint painting on back of selected object
I'm new to Blender, trying to use Texture Paint mode on a model I've made. I've got the texture and UV map set up right so far as I can tell, but when I try to paint on the object, the texture is painted on the back of the selected object.
So when I tried to paint on the front half of the purple object, the white circle was painted on the back instead. The texture is not currently set up with nodes. Thanks in advance for the help.

Turns out I just had to fuss with some of the default settings, though why they were set to such an odd default, I don't know. For anybody else with a similar problem, this can be fixed by entering Texture Paint mode, then selecting Options > Project Paint on the left panel and making sure only Occlude is checked

Thanks for this!  I had this problem just now and wouldn't have figured it out if it wasn't for this post.

Thank you, spent a ton of time backtracking my tutorial to find out what I was doing wrong!

Old post but a more probable root cause of that issue is inverted normals. it's easy to replicate by just creating any object, invert the normals and try to paint the texture, you will get exactly that effect, because the paint will be applied to the facing face in term of normal, not visibility.
Even if you fixed your issue by using 'only Occlude', your model stayed all wrong in term of normals and should have been fixed in edit mode with alt- 'recalculate outside' or shift-n to recompute normals.


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Why does my model have black lines on the mesh when I zoom out?
I have no idea why this happens and I am really stressed out about it. Can someone please help me?
Close: No Problem.

Far: Black line left of eye where my UV seam was...

maybe it's a preview artefact, because of the UV? If the render is ok I guess you don't have to care?

not necessarily, because i design assets for games. They have this problem when they are in Unity as well.

How does the UV map looks like in the UV/Image Editor?


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How to remove Mesh Data of a Blend File?
Hi recently I was working with big files in a Blend file now I decided to separate the Objects so well I was able to do that but now I just have one object. But I have a lot of mesh Data.

As you can see I only have one Object in the scene called "Banquita" but It seems that I have A lot of "Meshes Data" inside the Blend file that increases a lot the size.
I already check DataBlocks but there's not option for this, delete the Mesh Data.

If the mesh data is not used anywhere else it is erased automatically by Blender, you just have to save the file and reopen for it to actually be gone though. So It will stick around until you close and reopen Blender. Also check if you didn't press the 'F' Fake User button for those datablocks, that will make blender save those datablocks even if they have no users

Ok know I know why I can't delete that. But now how can you set 0 users to the data mesh ? An image is easy shift + x to the image in the editor but here I only was able to set just one user, but I need 0

If the mesh data still has users just delete the respective objects (check if they are not in a different scene. Otherwise if they all have fake users it might just be easier to import the one you want into a new blend file than erase all the unwanted ones manually

Yep I even try to write a script is more easy to create a new blend file and import the objects. Thanks

Well it was more easy than I thought. Just go to the Outliner, change to the Blender File. There you can see all the data of the actual .blend file

Select all the unwanted meshes and right click Delete .
That's all.

When you delete an object, not all information about it will be deleted. Its mesh data will remain in the file.
Of course, you can try to delete this data one by one, or try to re-open the file several times, but there is a way more simple:
So if you want to delete the unused mesh data, open Outliner in Orphan data mode and click on Purge All - it will delete all mesh data that are not used in the scene.

You can remove all unlinked data blocks as follow if you are willing to use Blender's Python API. This way you can make sure there will never be any memory leakage what so ever. You can execute the following code after you load each object or every couple of times (say every 10 objects).
First remove the meshes/objects with the following code:
for obj in bpy.context.scene.objects:
     if obj.type == 'MESH':
         obj.select = True
     else:
         obj.select = False
 bpy.ops.object.delete()

where you can check type against any of the following values according to [this documentation][1]:
[‘MESH’, ‘CURVE’, ‘SURFACE’, ‘META’, ‘FONT’, ‘ARMATURE’, ‘LATTICE’, ‘EMPTY’, ‘CAMERA’, ‘LAMP’, ‘SPEAKER’]

Then you can execute the following code snippet to remove all the unused blocks. This way you don't have to close/open Blender or save/open a .blend file:
for block in bpy.data.meshes:
    if block.users == 0:
        bpy.data.meshes.remove(block)

for block in bpy.data.materials:
    if block.users == 0:
        bpy.data.materials.remove(block)

for block in bpy.data.textures:
    if block.users == 0:
        bpy.data.textures.remove(block)

for block in bpy.data.images:
    if block.users == 0:
        bpy.data.images.remove(block)

IMPORTANT NOTE: It looks like that there is some dependencies between some data blocks such as mesh, texture, image and materials. If you do not remove the data blocks on the highest level of the hierarchy, you will not be able to remove other data blocks or you have to take the risk and remove data blocks with users more than 0. So make sure you use the code above in the following order to remove data blocks. This way you can remove all unlinked (users == 0) data blocks:
remove meshes --> remove materials --> remove textures --> remove images
The followings also have data blocks:
bpy.data.curves
bpy.data.lamps
bpy.data.cameras

This is more relevant to how you can prevent memory leakage in Blender


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How to exclude an object from Freestyle render?
The question is how can I exclude an object from the freestyle render?
What I need to do is create a Clay render with the wire only on the airplane.
My scene is simple I only have two objects the "Toy Plane" and the "floor".
For the Clay render I only override the materials to a simple clay material and done.

But this happens when I use freestyle. How can I tell freestyle to ignore the "Floor"?

I never used freestyle, but you talk about the wireframe modifier but you dont tell us why you dont use this solution. This tutorial could help you if this kind of render fits your needs: How to Render a Wireframe

So you want freestyle on the plane but not the plane :)
This is very easy to do. Add the plane to an object group. Select it and press CtrlG.
Now in the Scene tab of the Properties panel scroll down to the "Freestyle Line Set" section, and add Group to the "Selection By:" setting. (outlined in red in the image below)

Set the group you made earlier as the "Group" (the group field will be on the bottom).
Now depending on which plane you grouped, click the "Inclusive" box if you grouped your airplane; because you want to only include objects in the group in this freestyle lines. Conversely  if you grouped the ground plane click the "Exclusive" box, to exclude the ground plane from freestyle.

Thank you David this works. So you cannot exclude objects this is only possible using groups and a group can have multiple objects.

yes, kind of. This is the simplest way to do it, but you could use different render layers, or using "Face Marks". But there is no way to just say "only render lines on this object" or exclude this object. Closest thing is a group with one object in it.

in Blender 2.9+ this is now called "Collections" instead of "Groups"

For Blender 2.82 in the Outliner add a new collection by right-clicking on an existing collection and selecting New).
Name it, if you want, to "No Freestyle" and drag the object into it.
Now go into View Layer Properties and under Freestyle Line Set check Selection By: Collection. Now at the bottom choose the collection you created and check the Exclusive box.
In the render all objects in that collection should be without freestyle edges.

Note that this has to be done for each style defined within the "Freestyle Line Set" panel

Addding to the previous answer, if you want to avoid using Groups, under Edge Types uncheck all checkboxes except Edge Mark. Then to freestyle a particular object, go to it's Edit mode, select all edges. Then Mesh -> Edges -> Mark Freestyle edges
This would apply freestyle only on edges that are marked. Worked for me... :)

For Blender 3.6:

Create a new collection for all objects you want to exclude from applying Freestyle. Example: "Collection NO FS"
Move all objects you want to exclude to the new collection.
Go to "View Layer" Tab and locate "Freestyle Line Set"
Enable Collection, select the collection you created.
Set Negation to Exclusion.


text:
Make MouseLook actuator follow rig
I have a simple character rig, and I want my Mouse Look actuator to work with my a bone in my character rig, not my object. How can I achieve this? I want my character head to look up when my mouse does. (Left and right does not matter)

I must be missing something.. What is wrong with this?

That is the object with no rig, my previous character. Now I have an updated one, with a rig. Character is one object.

Simply add the mouselook to the armature instead. After doing this, you will realize that the ENTIRE rig points to the center of the screen. Quite obviously, this would be undesirable.
To fix, go into edit mode, select the top half of the armature, and hit Ctrl+Alt+P. Then Tab out of edit-mode and Parent>Bone the top armature to the top bone in the lower armature. see this answer to do that if you can't figure it out.
Remove the mouselook from the bottom armature, or add it just too the top if you don't have it yet.

Did not work, P in edit mode does nothing. Please respond ASAP.

Pardon my mistake, [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[P]. Editing accordingly


text:
Why is my Material Nodes -based blender internal texture not translucent like the other one? How do I work around it?
I'm trying to animate a neon sign that blinks, but I'm having trouble with my materials.  Here's the .blend file
I am using the Blender Internal renderer.  In order to have a neon sign that blinks I created a material that uses nodes to alternate between two simple materials.

The "Fac" property on the mixes is animated using constant interpolation so it toggles between 0 and 1.
One of the materials (neon phase 2) works just fine.  Unfortunately, neon phase 1 (which is the "opposite") does not.  When it is off it is not translucent like glass.  It is a shiny opaque grey.
What is the critical difference between the two node-based materials that makes one work correctly, and the other be opaque all the time?  How do I fix it or work around it?

Thanks to Vailreth from IRC.  He noticed that the Transparency under Render Pipeline Options (which started out minimized) was not checked on the problem material:


text:
Black spots in normal map
i'm trying to make a normal map out of a high poly tyre. But i always get black spots in the normal map (see red circles). Left is the originial, right the low poly with the normal map.

Here is the blender file
tyre.blend

Your Subsurf modifier is set to the "Simple" algorithm, which in this case adds a lot of extra geometry without giving you any actual geometric smoothing (The normals are sampled more densely though which makes some difference in appearance). In any case you still have those strong edges in your geometry, that, combined with problably some form of floating point precision irregularities during raytracing give you these 'artifacts'. If you switch the SubSurf algorithm to "Catmull-Clark", remodel your tire pattern to make use of close proximity edge loops and the likes to retain the original shapes while gaining actual geometric smoothing via the SubSurf modifier, and then reattempt baking the normals, I would very much believe that your artifacts will be gone.
If anything (or all) of this sounds like gibberish, please let me know and i'll try to clarify further. :)

Thanks for the tip. I spent the whole day till i finally got it right looking. Here is the result with the 2048px normal map: http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=71813.

But could u explain further how i could retain the original form while using catmull? Cause as my picture shows my result is much smoother now.

This explains three techniques for creating sharp(er) edges in a subsurf-smoothed model, which is exactly what you will need to do! You will pick up a better feeling for how these subdivision algorithms behave as you go along, just keep experimenting and don't get discouraged, it's really not all that magical as you will discover soon. ;) More insights on this for instance also here


text:
How to use russian letters in object names and filenames in Blender?
I don't want this

21st century is now. Every app should be multilingual out of the box. How to teach Blender to accept russian letters?
No patches accepted.

Blender does not currently support unicode in the file browser. Sorry to disappoint.
~Dan


text:
Opening a blender file during python script execution without changing context
During execution of a python script, I'm trying to import a .blend file. It's currently not an option to load the file when Blender boots, although ideally we would get the same result either way. I'm using:
bpy.ops.wm.open_mainfile(filepath=path)

However, this destroys bpy.context ({.window, .screen} = None), but only when blender is started without "--background". This is the relevant Blender source code (blender/windowmanager/intern/wm_files.c):
if (!G.background) {
    /* in background mode this makes it hard to load
    * a blend file and do anything since the screen
    * won't be set to a valid value again */
    CTX_wm_window_set(C, NULL); /* exits queues */
}

This causes "invalid context" problems for different operators (e.g., bpy.ops.transform.*) called afterwards.
It would be great to be able to open .blend files without the WM/GUI interference altogether. However, since there doesn't seem to be a WM-less Python call for now, restoring the original context (or at least a context equivalent to the one when Blender starts up) would also work. Bonus points for solutions without WM hacks (e.g. simulating clicks) ;-)

Do you run Blender in background mode or not?

In our live environment we do, so there it's no problem, but for developing and testing we run without --background to see what happens.

In fact, the purpose of importing a .blend file here is to import predefined objects + (Cycles) materials & lights. While everything works fine for Blender render with other file formats, .blend seems to be the only one able to export+import Cycles materials. Another way of importing Cycles-compatible scenes (without the bloated .blend file import) is also welcome.

Found a WM hack based on this answer that seems to work. Some operators still complain about "PyContext 'blend_data' not found", but this doesn't seem to result in problems so far. Still feels a bit hacky though.
def fix_context():
    """Fix bpy.context if some command (like .blend import) changed/emptied it"""
    for window in bpy.context.window_manager.windows:
        screen = window.screen
        for area in screen.areas:
            if area.type == 'VIEW_3D':
                for region in area.regions:
                    if region.type == 'WINDOW':
                        override = {'window': window, 'screen': screen, 'area': area, 'region': region}
                        bpy.ops.screen.screen_full_area(override)
                        break

Edit: this works (with --background) but only if there's running an X server for the current user. Feels like there's some gui hacking going around when Blender python scripts are running background... Running on an X-less server gives a segfault.

Background mode is actually just hiding the interface, though it is still required to hold necessary data, which is used by operators etc. I'm pretty sure you can just set bpy.context.area.type = 'VIEW_3D' to avoid context overriding, which should slim down your code a lot.

This crashes 2.80


text:
Is there any way to clean a triangulated mesh?
I've been handed some off the shelf meshes to use and I'm finding a number of them have really dirty geometry which is causing an issue with rendering them in (three.js).
Screen shot of the geometry mesh can be seen here:  actual mesh can be downloaded here http://just.dabe.co.uk/dump/three/model/iphone4.obj
The problem is when using THREE.SmoothShading the bad geometry shows up. Is there a tool that can fix a mesh so the polys are equally spaced etc?

Try the Remesh Modifier, or Alt J to convert triangles to quads.

Also related: http://blender.stackexchange.com/q/7532/599 and http://blender.stackexchange.com/q/5613/599

Really appreciate all the answers and apologies for the dupe question, I had searched but didn't know enough about the problem to search to get the right results. I've tried the re-mesh modifier and that really makes a mess of things. The  'tris to quads' kind of works but doesn't fix the big issue (the none-uniform tris, it just ignores them). Thanks for the suggestions

@CaseDeveloper No need to apologize, duplicates are not a bad thing. They make it easier for others to find the answer in the future. Also, if you don't mind having a tri based mesh and just want them evened out, I would recommend trying dynamic topology sculpting or the decimate modifier.

Not good enough out of the box. What you are asking is basically retopology.
If you don't care about number of polygons and good smoothing, you could use remesh (a modifier), but that would preserv the edges and not let you smooth them. See this screenshot using that modifier. Also, note artifacts (encircled).

You should use a retopology method (snapping or shrinkwrapping) and build a new mesh on top of the old one. This new mesh should have good enough geometry to be smooth.
Here are a good answer on retopology:
How to convert from high poly to low poly

I tried the same thing with the Remesh modifier but it's having big problems on the curved areas of the corners so using UnSubdivide afterwards ends up being pretty messy.  I started a manual retopo to give you some hints as to how you may want to handle the poly flow.  It's definitely not perfect or anywhere near complete but the smooth shading on the corner that I did looks pretty good.  Here's a screen-capture of the highlights across the corner http://www.pasteall.org/pic/79491 And the .blend file. http://www.pasteall.org/blend/32666
I used the snapping method mentioned by Gunslinger

btw. the reason I am not posting an answer is because what I think you need to do is waaay too involved for a Q&A site like this.  It would take a full tutorial and all day just to scratch the surface of retopo tools and techniques.  Jonathan Williamson of CG Cookie has made a specific focus of this area so you may want to look for his free tutorials.

Guyslinger, I'm marking your answer as accepted as I believe that retopology is what is required to fix this mesh. I had hoped for a simpler solution especially so as my knowledge of 3d modelling is next to nothing but after a couple hours of research this evening, including watching this great tutorial here - http://cgcookie.com/blender/2011/08/08/retopology-with-the-bsurfaces-add-on/ this is the only real solution.
Thanks for all your help and suggestions.

I wouldn't recommend retopo for a relatively simple mesh, just create it from scratch scale a cube and add a bevel modifier (apply it when your're happy with the result):

Than add two loop cuts like in the next image this will help to avoid crazy meshes when using Knife project

Unfortunately I've little-to-no 3d modelling experience and these cases are quite accurate. I wouldn't trust myself to re-create them. In my naivety the problem didn't look that complex... nothing a button that said 'fix flat faces and redistribute polys' wouldn't fix. Thanks for your suggestion though.


text:
Python basics: interactive script
I've seen lots of scripts working interactively, meaning if you change a property value the viewport updates right away. But I only saw this for mesh operations, like adding vertices and then calling mesh.update().
Is there a generic method to make your script interactive, like whatever it does? I can't call just my myClass.execute() method from within draw() as it gives me context errors. On the other hand I can't implement my whole set of operations in the draw() method for the same reason. I'm sorry if I failed to understand some basic structure / behavior of Blender python scripts but I'm just a beginner.
Could someone post an example script, like adding a cube with a property, let's say number of cubes, which updates the viewport on changing the number of cubes? That would be awesome!
(EDIT: Really adding / removing cubes, not adding geometry and calling mesh.update())

You have basically 2 options: modal operator or scene update handler.
Modal operator is what an interactive script would use, here is an example with over-commented code. It will create panel in tools under Misc. and the operator can be ended with ESC:
import bpy
# for random positioning of cubes
# so they dont stack one over other
from random import random

class Panel(bpy.types.Panel):
    """
    This displays number_of_cubes property in tools panel
    And can run a modal operator
    """
    bl_label = "Custom Panel"
    bl_space_type = 'VIEW_3D'
    bl_region_type = 'TOOLS'

    def draw(self, context):
        # display cube count if modal operator running
        # else display button to run it
        layout = self.layout
        if context.scene.watcher_running:
            layout.prop(context.scene, "number_of_cubes")
        else:
            layout.operator("my_custom_op.cube_watcher")

class CubeWatcher(bpy.types.Operator):
    """This will run in background monitoring user actions"""
    bl_idname = "my_custom_op.cube_watcher"
    bl_label = "Cube Watcher"

    # this function should be used to do stuff
    # in our example to adjust the number of cubes
    def execute(self, context):

        # get cubes already present in scene
        cube_list = [object for object in context.scene.objects if object.name.find("Cube") >= 0]

        if len(cube_list) < context.scene.number_of_cubes:
            # add cubes
            for i in range(context.scene.number_of_cubes - len(cube_list)):
                bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cube_add(enter_editmode=False)
                context.active_object.location = (5-10*random(), 5-10*random(), 5-10*random())

        elif len(cube_list) > context.scene.number_of_cubes:
            # remove excess cubes
            for i in range(context.scene.number_of_cubes, len(cube_list)):
                context.scene.objects.unlink(cube_list[i])
        return

    # this function will be called everytime user does something, even moves a mouse
    # should be used to react to user input
    def modal(self, context, event):

        # when user interacts, adjust number of cubes
        # this will react to all event types
        # which is kinda inneficient but simple
        self.execute(context)

        # end modal operator when hitting ESC
        if event.type == 'ESC':
            # set the monitoring property to False
            context.scene.watcher_running = False
            return {'FINISHED'}

        # all other events pass through to blender
        return {'PASS_THROUGH'}

    # this is run when this operator is called
    # usually inicialization code is here
    def invoke(self, context, event):

        # this is important, it will run the modal function
        # without this the operator would just execute and end
        context.window_manager.modal_handler_add(self)

        # set the monitoring property to True
        context.scene.watcher_running = True

        # run self to spawn cubes
        self.execute(context)

        return {'RUNNING_MODAL'}

def register():
    # register classes so blender knows about them
    bpy.utils.register_module(__name__)
    # add a property to scene that will control number of cubes
    bpy.types.Scene.number_of_cubes = bpy.props.IntProperty(default=0, min=0)
    # add a property that will monitor if modal operator is running or not
    bpy.types.Scene.watcher_running = bpy.props.BoolProperty(default=False)

def unregister():
    # unregister classes
    bpy.utils.unregister_module(__name__)
    # remove properties
    del bpy.types.Scene.number_of_cubes
    del bpy.types.Scene.watcher_running

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

A handler is a function added to some event, in this case before scene updates. This will produce similar result as code before but will be much more likely buggy or laggy. Next example is simple and does not handle any error cases. Use this only when you know what you are doing.
import bpy
from random import random

def cube_count_handler(scene):
    """This function will be run everytime before scene updates"""
    cube_list = [object for object in scene.objects if object.name.find("Cube") >= 0]
    if len(cube_list) < scene.number_of_cubes:
        for i in range(scene.number_of_cubes - len(cube_list)):
            loc = (5-10*random(), 5-10*random(), 5-10*random())
            bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cube_add(enter_editmode=False, location=loc)

    elif len(cube_list) > scene.number_of_cubes:
        for i in range(scene.number_of_cubes, len(cube_list)):
            scene.objects.unlink(cube_list[i])
    return

class PropPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    bl_label = "Custom Panel"
    bl_space_type = 'VIEW_3D'
    bl_region_type = 'TOOLS'

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

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_module(__name__)
    bpy.types.Scene.number_of_cubes = bpy.props.IntProperty(default=0, min=0)
    # add handler if not in app.handlers
    if cube_count_handler not in bpy.app.handlers.scene_update_pre:
        bpy.app.handlers.scene_update_pre.append(cube_count_handler)

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

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()


text:
Maximum number of materials that can be added in a scene?
I have very large number of planes in my scene and each needs to be assigned a color, and to do that, I am assigning a material to each plane. Blender is allowing 2^15, i.e. 32768 materials.  But the number of planes in the scene are on the order of millions.
How can I make blender handle more materials so that I can color all the planes?

Are you using BI or Cycles?

Blender Internal
In Blender Internal you can set object colors independent of the material.

Set the object color in Properties > Object > Display (or with object.color)

Enable Object color for the material in Properties > Material settings > Options:

All these cubes have the same material, but are colored individually via object color:

Cycles
For Cycles, see this post.

Use the same material for every object but have different colors for it.
I assume you will generate this dynamically. Some methods I can think of:

Generate a 4096x4096 texture and assign that. Use nearest interpolation (like in minecraft). Have each planes UV-coordinates point out what pixel to use.
Use vertex colors for each plane. Have the material use the the vertex colors. Use the attribute node: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Nodes/More#Attribute
If you don't need exact colors, if you are content with a random color, use the object info node to get a random value for each node, insert it into a color ramp node.


text:
Save file inside an operator
I have written a simple operator to save the current blender file, but when the operator reaches the save function I get an error. I used the bpy.ops.save_as_mainfile() function for saving a scene, but I don't know if it's the right one to choose.
The console outputs this error:
TypeError: 'BPyOpsSubMod' object is not callable
location: /opt/blender/2.70/scripts/modules/bpy/ops.py:188

Does that mean I cannot call functions from bpy.ops?
My script is the the following:
import bpy
class SaveOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "object.save_op"
    bl_label = "Save scene"

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls, context):
        return context.active_object is not None

    def execute(self, context):

        # build file name stuff
        # ...

        bpy.ops.save_as_mainfile('~/' + new_file_name)

        return {'FINISHED'}

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

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

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

    # test call
    bpy.ops.object.save_op()

You have to pass your parameters as keyword arguments. See api docs
The correct call should be bpy.ops.wm.save_as_mainfile(filepath=your_path)

Yeah, this might be the correct answer. But this ends up in the following error: Cannot open file ~/untitled0012.blend@ for writing: No such file or directory. I don't know why there is a @ symbol in the error message, but the filepath is without it. Maybe blender has a problem with creating a file. I also tried it with open() command and it ended in a FileNotFoundException.

Try using an absolute path. Have a look at the python docs


text:
Make a keyframe last longer than one frame
I am creating an animated title screen and want to have the animation repeat a certain frame, so text can be shown for a longer period as if the animation had been paused before continuing the rest of the animation.

Related: http://blender.stackexchange.com/q/3753/599

You can duplicate the desired keyframe(s) and move it further in the timeline. As it interpolates between those two points, the animation will freeze at that keyframe for as long as you specify.

As Puck suggested, you can duplicate keyframes to achieve this effect.
To do this, open one of the keyframe editors. I'd use the Dope Sheet view for this task since you need adjust the keyframes in the timeline, but don't necessarily need to change their location/rotation data.

Make sure to deselect all keyframes by hitting A. The keyframes will be white when deselected. Now select the keyframes you want to duplicate by hitting B and using your mouse to drag a box around them. The selected keyframes will turn orange.

Hit ShiftD to duplicate them and move the mouse. The keyrames will follow, so you can position them in the timeline. There will be an orange line signaling duplicated keyframes and the length of the pause the animation.

If you want to move the keyframes again, hit G to grab and re position them again.

thats great thank you, if you play the animation un rendered in 3D view will the pause show? or does this only show up on the full rendered animation?
I have duplicated the the required frame and set for pause as suggested but the 3D animation when played through just continues.

I have a cloth falling over some Text created with cubes etc not the normal insert text feature.
The animation i am attempting to create is so that the text looks as though its being pushed up from behind the cloth and pause when the text is most legible and stick to that frame until the end of the animation...
I imagine that i have gone the long winded way of doing this but it was the easiest way I could think of for first go on Blender.

I have managed to get it sorted and now have a working 3 second animation for a title screen of a short film. Thanks eveyone


text:
Python 2.x class in 3.x
I need to use a class written in Python 2.x, but get tons of errors in Blender 2.71 Python 3, any ways around this problem?

There isn't one single way to translate your class from Python 2 to Python 3.
You could try using the command-line tool 2to3 to do the translation, but it's not perfect, so you'll need to verify the results.

If it is a pure python class then you can run it through the 2to3 as @Garreth mentioned, this will give you the python-3 equivalent in pure syntax updates.
If the class has any Blender specific code, such as using the old Blender module, this has been replaced with bpy.
If you are creating an add-on, you will need to refactor your code to be registrable as a module. The bl_info, register() & unregister()
You will also have to take into account the various api changes that have occured,

animation IPO system replaced with F-Curves
BMesh & polygon based geometry system.
Interface code is done though bpy types


text:
How do I change the name of the default action created when inserting keyframe?

My code for creating the animation if necessary
def testAnimation():

scn = bpy.context.scene
arm = bpy.data.armatures["Rig"]
rigobj = bpy.data.objects["Rig"]
scn.objects.active = rigobj
rigobj.select = True

bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode = 'POSE')

boneSelect = bpy.context.object.data.bones['LBicep']
boneSelect.select = True

bpy.ops.transform.rotate(value=(0), axis=(1.0,1.0,1.0))
bpy.data.objects["Rig"].pose.bones['LBicep'].keyframe_insert(data_path='rotation_quaternion', frame = 0.0, group = "LBicep")

bpy.ops.transform.rotate(value=(math.pi*0.5), axis=(1.0,1.0,1.0))
bpy.data.objects["Rig"].pose.bones['LBicep'].keyframe_insert(data_path='rotation_quaternion', frame = 100.0, group = "LBicep")

bpy.ops.transform.rotate(value=(math.pi*0.5), axis=(1.0,1.0,1.0))
bpy.data.objects["Rig"].pose.bones['LBicep'].keyframe_insert(data_path='rotation_quaternion', frame = 200.0, group = "LBicep")

boneSelect.select = False
boneSelect = bpy.context.object.data.bones['LThigh']
boneSelect.select = True

bpy.ops.transform.rotate(value=(0), axis=(1.0,1.0,1.0))
bpy.data.objects["Rig"].pose.bones['LThigh'].keyframe_insert(data_path='rotation_quaternion', frame = 0.0, group = "LThigh")

bpy.ops.transform.rotate(value=(math.pi*0.5), axis=(1.0,1.0,1.0))
bpy.data.objects["Rig"].pose.bones['LThigh'].keyframe_insert(data_path='rotation_quaternion', frame = 150.0, group = "LThigh")

boneSelect.select = False
boneSelect = bpy.context.object.data.bones['RThigh']
boneSelect.select = True

bpy.ops.transform.translate(value=(0,0,0))
bpy.data.objects["Rig"].pose.bones['RThigh'].keyframe_insert(data_path='location', frame = 0.0, group = "RThigh")

bpy.ops.transform.translate(value=(0,10,0))
bpy.data.objects["Rig"].pose.bones['RThigh'].keyframe_insert(data_path='location', frame = 300.0, group = "RThigh")

bpy.ops.transform.translate(value=(0,-10,0))
bpy.data.objects["Rig"].pose.bones['RThigh'].keyframe_insert(data_path='location', frame = 700.0, group = "RThigh")

bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='OBJECT')
scn.update()

keyframe_insert() creates animation_data and an action if necessary, and makes it the new action of the active object.
Thus, you can simply access your object's action and change its name:
bpy.data.objects["Rig"].animation_data.action.name = "foobar"

Note that you shouldn't do this before any call to keyframe_insert(), as it would error out if there's either no animation_data or no action.
Refer to this question to learn about other approaches for animating things:
Python performance with Blender operators

authors: معلومات عن ميكرافت


text:
2.8 Bake unexpected results
I am trying to learn how to bake in Blender 2.8 with a simple cube. I have followed multiple tutorials but the result is always the same. See attached images.

The normals are all pointing outwards and I have tried with a multitude of lights and none. I have tried all baking options but I still get more or less the same result with black areas where there are none in the render.
Any help greatly appreciated.

What are you trying to bake?

A cube as in the first image

I added an hdri environment background which fixed the issue. Thanks for the anonymous downvote.
Weird Black "Shadows" On Rendered Image


text:
Does Blender has input Degrees, Minutes and Seconds?
How can I enter angles in Degrees, Minutes and Seconds in Blender?
for example : 30º 23' 45 "

Surprisingly simple -- type the string 30d23'45'' into any valid rotation field. Note that Blender will take this input and convert it to the decimal form (30.3958d) if you click on the field again.


text:
Slightly edited Mesh disappears when activating Dyntopo in Sculpt Mode. Blender 2.8
Total newbie here. I was trying blenders 2.8 sculpting tools and i came across this situation.
I started a new sculpt file and began sculpting the default object that comes in it. Once i was satisfied with the overall shape, i tried to activate dyntopo to start working on the details. But once i activate dyntopo and select a tool or move in the viewport, the mesh disappears completely. I tried with a lot of different (dyntopo) settings but the problem persists.
  For a moment i thought it was a hardware issue, with my pc not being what you'd call super fast. But the funny thing is, when i started a new (sculpting) file with the same object and the same mesh density, BUT activating Dyntopo from the beginning, it works just fine!
Id really like to continue my original file. Or at least, id like to understand why this happens?
If i wasnt clear enough, what can i show you or tell you to be more specific?
By the way, sorry if my english is bad.

This is because for Sculpting you have to apply all the modifiers before applying dyntopo. I think It would solve your problem.

Hi I forgot i posted this here. No i had no modifiers applied, but i somehow solved it. This is what worked for me, although i dont really understand why or how: I just had to select the mesh in object mode and "make manifold" that did the trick. Hope this helps someone in the future.

I have had the same problem. For me, the problem was with the visibility of the individual geometry components (vertices, edges, or faces).
Make sure to enter edit mode, select all components, hide selection, then unhide again.


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Hide and reveal in blender 2.8
I have just upgraded to 2.8 and upon opening up a project I was working on in the old version I find that only the object I last had active is shown.
Alt H is not revealing other objects event though they are in the outliner. In fact according the to the outliner, all the objects should be shown, but aren't
I am sure there is some small trick here. Can someone please help this noob out
super thanks

Welcome to Blender SE! From the information you have provided, it might not be possible to pinpoint your specific problem. Please consider editing your post to include screenshots and a .blend file (which you can upload to Blend Exchange). Thanks!

@ShadyPuck Problem description is clear, blend file isn't needed.


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remove measurement
I love the new measure tool, but seems I have a measurement that just will not delete.
When I delete it (either with the delete button or with X) it seems to vanish only to reappear shortly later again.
How do you delete/remove a measurement.
Thanks

This is a known issue and already reported to the developers.


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2.8 Issue with data transferring clothing to model's skeleton rig
I've been developing a sculpted model for quite some time now and have finally rigged the main body. I haven't gone in to touch up the weight paints yet, and I attempted to data transfer mod some of the clothing to the character. Well it works and it follows the limb's movements but now there's odd face issues on the surface.

I wish to know how to smooth these out so that the clothing better fits the form of the underlying meshes and looks better with deformation.

Use the smooth tool from weight painting's tool bar on just those verts.  Factor 1.0, source only deselected.

Thank you, the moment I opened the weight painting for the afflicted areas, i noticed the weights looked like a collage painting. Smoothing them out removed most of the artifacting.


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How to convert a single vertex into a plane within a mesh?
I've seen two different videos where the user selected a single vertex and then expanded it into a 4 sided plane. This is a technique I've needed many times but I am not sure how that was accomplished.
This picture sort of demonstrates what I'm trying to reproduce.
before (left) and after (right)

Could you provide a link to a video you saw it in

@IgorTatarnikov I spent quite a while this afternoon looking for it but cannot find it. If I do I'll provide that link.

Select the vertex and press CtrlShiftB that will bevel the vertex, creating a new face.
Do note that doing so will create Ngons in the surrounding faces.

perhaps I should clarify. I'm wanting to add an extra quad inside a grid (example) of existing quads by turning a single vertex into a quad of its own.

@David another cool shotcut I haven't heard about before! Better and faster than TLousky's solution. +1 from me. P.s. Frankly, you were the first person here, who found out the right solution.

From the screenshot in your question, it seems like you're trying to convert a vertex inside an existing mesh into a quad face, rather than creating a plane from a single vertex.
This can be achieved with the bevel tool (Ctrl+B), as seen in this image:

YES! this is precisely what I was trying to do.


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Backfaces give strange results with Fresnel Node in Cycles
I'm trying out a fairly common material setup, mixing a diffuse and a glossy shader with a fresnel node. My issue is that my material has some backfaces owing to its construction. They render correctly using either shader on their own, and if I look at their normals plugged into an emission shader they appear to be treated correctly.
However if I use a fresnel node, the results come out strangely, as if the backfaces normals are being treated as flipped (I know of course they really are, but surely this should be ignored when rendering?).
Here's an image showing the issue:

Left: Mesh with some flipped normals. Middle: Normal output of geometry node plugged into emission shader. Right: Fresnel node plugged into emission shader.
I know in most circumstances the solution would be to recalculate the normals, but the mesh I'm working with is a thin sheet that you see both sides of. Is this a bug or can anyone suggest a workaround?

I don't think this is a bug. I'm guessing the fresnel uses the direction of the normals to calculate what is facing the camera.

What about adding a very thin solidify modifier? After all, nothing is infinitely thin in the real world.

So Greg Zaal tweeted me an even better answer, which is to take the inverse of the IOR value for backfacing faces as in the node setup below:

Works great. Thanks Greg.

If you use the Fresnel node that has an IOR, then this is the correct behaviour, as the IOR is computed taking the direction of the normal into account.
A quick solution would be to use the layer weight node and select "Facing". You can alter the effect using an RGB curves node afterwards. Fresnel is basically "Facing" with a blend of 0.5 and an exponential curve afterwards:

The example above uses exactly the same normal setup as you do, but by using "Facing" the flipped normal faces are treated the same as the regular ones.

Thanks! I thought this might be a solution, I wasn't sure what the math for the facing to fresnel conversion was though.

Oh wow, nodes can solve all of life's problems o.o .  I expected to just see exhortations to not mix solid and planar geometry anywhere it can be seen in an art mesh. (Back in 2.4x i tried to make a dragon/tadpole tailfin on a subsurfed spaceship using a planar extention off the center of a mirror modifier and it gave me no end of trouble…)

Nice to see you here Gottfried.


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Display bounding box around objects
I would like to know how to display a Bounding Box around my objects in Blender, much like the Bounding Box from Maya 3D. All I want to be able to do is determine the outer edges of an object.
I've looked everywhere in the interface, but cannot see how to turn that on.

Please give more details - is this bounding box for display only? or do you intend to use for something else?

I only want to see the edges of the object I'm modeling. For example, if I want to model a chair that is 3 feet tall, then I would add my 3 foot tall Bounding box and then begin to model within that. It would be like having one object in wireframe mode and the others in solid mode, the Bounding Box being the wireframe object.

Assuming you just want to display a bounding box around or instead of each object, you can do this with Draw types.
Drawing a bounding box instead of the object:
You could set Viewport shading to Bounding box to draw the bounds of each object:

A comparison between Solid and Bounding box:

To do this for one object only, you can set this in Properties > Object Display > Maximum draw type:

Drawing a bounding box around the object:
This can be done by enabling Bounds with the Maximum draw type still higher than Bounds:

This looks like this:

You could do this for many objects by:

Select the objects for which you want to enable Bounding box
Enable Bounds in Object > Display
Right click on the Bounds option and select Copy to selected:

I think you got it...I want to do the "Drawing a bounding box around the object" option. That's what I needed. THANK YOU !!!

Just tested it....PERFECT. I actually like "Texture Space" a little better, because I can use that in Edit Mode, whereas Bound - Box is only visible in Object Mode. VERY GOOD!!! Thanks again.

I'm not exactly sure how to vote for the answer yet, given that I'm new here, but this is my selected answer.

@Calixto keep in mind that the Texture space is something different, so while it works for this, you may have problems if you want to change the texture space location or scale. (e.g. for something like this

@Gandalf3 answer still applies, this is just update for Blender 2.9+.
In Blender 2.9+, to display an object's bounding box, you have to select it (in viewport or through the outliner) and then go to Object Properties Tab > Viewport Display.
There you'll find the option Display As with Textured option selected by default. To display the bounding box, you just have to pick the Bounds option, as seen in the picture bellow.

You can display both the object and its bounding box. You can achieve this by selecting Textured option and enable Bounds checkbox.


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Image plane is blocking the one behind it despite transparency
The images have alpha channel checked on. In normal view the image looks fine but when I render the images cutoff the ones behind it.

There should be no gap between those 2 images but the one closer to the camera is cutting off the one behind it. I used the import images as planes addon. My goal is to export a png file that is transparent except for the colored areas. I'm gonna import this file into Unity so it needs to have a transparent background.

Could you upload your .blend or a screenshot of your material settings? I'm guessing that you are using BI and don't have transparency enabled in your material settings (or if you do, then it's set to mask). If that is the case, try Z-transparency instead.

Yes changing it to Z transparency fixed it at least when I go to Render- Render Image. I hope this is how it'll save.

You must enable Transparency in the material settings:

Using mask transparency won't work because it renders sky where there is transparency.

Starting with the basic z-transparency settings from this answer: Why does a multiplied texture with alpha loose detail information?
In the material settings' Shadow  tick Receive Transparency and disable Cast.
The first image shows the same situation as in your post. The transparent parts of the texture cast a shadow:

Now there is no longer a shadow casted from the transparent part, but might also want to remove the shadow from the opaque image.


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How to fill element with color in texture painting?
Is it possible to fill certain elements with color or tiled texture? By "element" I mean one island (for example, Ctrl+L does element/island selection in edit mode) For example, bucket tool in 3DCoat can do it. It is really helpful when texturing.

If you have selected your element or island with L in edit mode (selecting linked mesh), or if you have selected a vertex group in edit mode prior to entering Texture Paint mode, then you can certainly choose the Fill tool and drop paint into just that area provided you have enabled Face Selection Masking in the icon  in the 3d view header. In the Tool Options panel, you can choose how much bleed area you get past that selection, and you can choose to use or not use Cavity masking there as well if you are wanting some degree of edge wear.
For painting a pattern in a brush only in that area, the best mapping method here would be '3D' so that the pattern could be connected later to another part of the painting, respecting the mesh normals.


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How to merge two weightpainted meshes with two separate armatures?
I have two meshes, both weightpainted to their separate armatures.

I have a body mesh with an armature and I have a glove mesh with an armature.
I want to replace the hand part of the body armature with the glove armature - so I will keep the weightpainting on the glove.
However when i try to join them, it seems that one of the armatures just disappears. I have already checked the naming, and it is not the same on the two armatures.
Thanks!

After joining the two objects,
To use more than one armature
i) Set up so the body rig is the parent of the mesh and the first armature modifier (armature parent) ... standard setup for one armature.  If you select your body last you will still have this setup on join.
ii) Make the body armature hand pose bones the parents of the glove armatures, arranged to appear as thought it is one rig.  If you have another face rig make the head bone the parent etc.
iii) Add another armature modifier to the modifiers stack for the glove armature.  (One for a face rig etc)
PS. good practice to apply scale to your rigs and meshes so they are all (1,1,1).  Not doing so can cause problems later.


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Exporting animations to unity 3d
I'm new to blender's animation thing, and I made an animation for my ship, it simply goes up and down slowly. However, whenever I export it to unity and start to use it, my ship teleports itself to a different position and starts animating from there. I want this animation to stand wherever it is and just do the up and down, how can I do that?
Thanks in advance.

ship teleports itself to a different position

That points to an issue with location. If you have keyframes on the location in blender then unity will be applying that part of the animation when you play it. eg you place the ship in unity at x=20 but in blender you have a keyframe that says x=0 then unity will move it to x=0
As you want the ship to move up and down then you may want keyframes on the z-axis but remove the x and y location keyframes.

You might need to parent the object to an empty GameObject and move that to where you want the animation to play.


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pixel to grid mapping for textures
Given a texture of some size, I`d like to be able to map the pixel size to an arbitrary unit of measure within my scenes. Is that possible?
E.G.: I have a texture which is 512x512px, and I'd like to tell Blender that 512px from the texture file has to be mapped to 1m (or 1 square from the grid, or just 1 arbitrary unit) in the scene.
I'd like every face with that texture to be UV mapped automatically, so if a surface spans 2x2m, it should tile the texture 2x2 times without me having to do the calculation.

this may require a custom script

Unwrapped UV's can be re-sized, distorting any image mapping settings. If you use generated then you can scale the image to taste. A driver could be added to each mapping scale to easily set all usage of the image to the same scale.


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Custom hard edges in Blender
Currently this is my method to get nice hard and soft shaded edges in Blender.
I "shade smooth the whole object. I then go ti it's object data, activate Auto Smooth and set a desired angle." This works for most cases but sometimes I want specific control over how some of my edges shade. Can I select a few edges and mark them to be hard?
Will that information be transfered seamlessly through OBJ and FBX exports?

You can select any edge you want to be hard and press Ctrl+E and choose 'Mark Sharp'.
In the example below I have smooth shaded a cube but set the top edge loop to be sharp:

(The result of this is the same as the result from the next technique mentioned, shown in the image below the next few paragraphs)
If you use Autosmooth (as you mentioned) you can leave it like that. If you didn't want to use Autosmooth you could add an Edge Split modifier to handle the smoothing angles.
Below, I have added an Edge Split modifier, unticked the 'Edge Angle' option and ticked the 'Sharp Edges' box:

If you leave the 'Edge Angle' option ticked you can use a combination of the two methods.
As for which formats support sharp edges, according to the 2.69 release notes, both FBX and OBJ formats now support 'Split vertex normals' for exporting sharp edges. The OBJ exporter calls this option 'Smooth Groups'.


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Preserving depth when rendering in multipe layers (Cycles)
I don't even know how to ask this question  and I a noob to blender.
I wanted to create a plasma canon
I created 3 render layers and Added them on top of each other...
For now this looks pretty good
Gun Front

Compositing tree

But then I tried to look at the gun from the back.... the bullet gets put in top of the gun. Is there any (easy) way to have the layers retain Z order?
Gun view back (bad)

Great question! Compositing is an oft-overlooked feature, especially using Cycles.

When I discovered it. a whole new world opened... (It took me 3 days to find out this feature even existed) I only joined after cycles got implemented, I am still feel like a noob. Maybe you know of a way to get this effect without compositing? I tried but with nodes and materials alone I could not do it.

Yeah no problem,
On the flame render layers layer settings, under the Layer: blocks, there's a Mask Layer:   set of blocks.   Just select the corresponding layer for the cannon (so you're applying the cannon as a mask to the flame)

Below is an example using a cube and a sphere, the sphere occluding and masking the cube.

The Cubes' render layer output

I thank you so much... it works great... I am still in the progress of making the gun and can't post new pictures right now (Read: I screwed it up a bit) I will post them in the next week so, so everyone can see.

hey great, I'm glad it worked out.  Good luck with the project, look forward to seeing the finished product.


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Left click selects everything on my minecraft rig (blender 2.8)

So im a newer blender user, and recently I've upgraded to 2.8. I redownloaded the 2.8 version of my rig, but when i try to move (lets say the eyes) it selects everything and moves those with it, any fixes? Im using the Boxcape Studios Character Rig V3.

You need to put the armature in pose mode. Also, 2.8 has changed some behaviour around selection and modes which may be relevant to you, see https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/127805/i-cant-keep-my-armature-in-pose-mode-when-selecting-another-object

Make sure you're in pose mode rather than object mode. It can be found at the top left in your screenshot ( in the dropdown menu that says "object mode").
Pose mode allows you to move bones. In object mode, the entire armature is considered one object.


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Accessing Viewport Render Result pixels from script
am attempting to access the pixel information for a viewport render, but sadly, I'm coming up short...
Getting that information using Python would be ideal, because it would allow me to update Blender, and still maintain that functionality. Worst case scenario would be to alter source code for that specific feature. I’m not shy of getting my hands dirty,
I’m currently in my Masters degree in Informatics Engineering, but again, this would not be ideal.
I can’t use either the write_still = True or the save_render(filepath), because writing to file takes too long to do (it costs around 70ms on my machine, meaning it doubles my times).
So far what I tried was accessing the Render Result in bpy.data.images, only to find it empty. I used the trick described here. Long story short, you dynamically add a Render Layer Node in the compositor and connect it to a Viewer Node, and there you can access the pixel information.
This works… for renders only. I am bound to using viewport rendering because it is the only way I can get remotely acceptable times for the task I was assigned. For viewport rendering, the Render Layer Node is always empty.
I can visually see in the image editor that the Render Result has finished, and the render is successful. However, the Python API from everything that I researched doesn’t allow me to access those pixels… Anyone have any guesses?
Even if you don't have an answer, thanks for taking the time to read this!

Could you use the workbench engine instead of viewport render?

@rjg Afraid not, it really has to be a final render. However, are you familiar with a way to fix this problem using the workbench engine? It could give me a new avenue to further explore this issue.

Not sure how why you consider workbench render is less final than the viewport render, can elaborate? Both aren't high quality renders, just simple rasterizers. With the workbench engine you can also access it through the viewer node.

Oh sure, I forgot to add, this has to be done using Eevee. It's the same as if clicking on View > Viewport Render Image. The only exception is that I should bypass the need to write to file, and access the pixels of the Render Result.

The viewport render doesn't trigger the compositor, that is why the trick doesn't work. You may be able to accomplish what you want by accessing the OpenGL wrapper, I've never done this but it might be suitable for your needs. (https://docs.blender.org/api/current/bgl.html?highlight=glreadbuffer). Perhaps you can add more information about what you're trying to accomplish with the renders so we can give other suggestions, that may be more suitable?

Sure! What I want is to access the pixel information of a given render result. I want to run a script and have a 360 capture of an object. I currently have a script that rotates the mesh correctly, and the render output verifies it. All I need now is to access the pixels so I can send them through a web socket without writing to file, removing I/O times. And thanks for the help so far!


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How do I remove parts from my 3d printing file?
I have purchased a 3d model online in the form of stl files.
It all printed really well apart from one part. The hook shaped part at the front of the image.

I can't work out how to delete the other three objects from the file so I can print out only the part I need.
I've tried selecting in edit and deleting but it seems to leave a cloud of undeleted bits.
Any help would be much appreciated!
Rob

Welcome to Blender Stack Exchange ! Can you send the blend file is possible?

Thanks! How do I add files?

select vertex of part you want to keep
select linked by L
invert selection Ctrl+i
delete X

That's great! Thanks!


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How do I merge triangle faces

How do I merge these three triangle faces, which are all on the same plane, into a single pentagonal face?
Thanks!

Select the edges and dissolve them:
(Menu) Mesh -> Delete (X) -> Dissolve Edges

Thanks! Both answers worked

You can do it in 5 simple steps:

Select all triangles you want to delete.
Press X.
Select Faces from the context menu.
Now select all the edges of the pentagon you want to fill.
Press F

Thanks! Both answers worked :-)

ah, didn't notice @Jackdaw's, his answer is better and simpler.

Faces selected, and F, if well-formed, or:
Faces selected, and X > 'Limited Dissolve', allowing you to control by angle, (or other parameters,) or:
All internal edges selected, and CtrlX dissolve..

among others, I'm sure.

Super simple - thanks!


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Why does a UV Map cover the entire model?
Briefly, I have done extensive research with tutorials etc regarding a problem I am experiencing and it is my hope that perhaps someone could allow some insight!
I am successfully utilizing projection painting of an image to a model's head, however, upon exporting the model and observing through a web page the uv map covers the entire model rather than just the head area. which has remained the selected in edit mode. The uv map only suggests the head area which is continually repeated over the entire model even after attempting to deselect "Repeat" in image mapping which I changed to "Clip".

At least in blender, all vertices of your mesh must be unwrapped. Not how the exporters/formats handle this, but it would be helpful to know what format you are exporting to.

I am exporting to three.js as the usual json obj. I was suspecting that I may need to unwrap the entire model. Much thanks!

Move the vertices you would like to ignore off the UV Map ... to some side.  Use this in combination with Clip.


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vertex groups created from rigging do not work
I successfully rigged a high poly 3 piece model and upon skinning the model, the vertex groups were created for all parts of the model. However, the "Neck, Head" and "Hair" vertex groups while created are not recognized in "Weight Paint" and upon applying "Weight Paint" manually there is no effect?
The "Red" paint appears but does not allow heat, animation of the head or neck. The rest of the model works fine with "Weight Paint" and moves correctly. While I am new to blender what would be the best approached to this situation?
The model

A Latest Model Revised Copy, Use This   http://www.pasteall.org/blend/29250

For me there are two problems: The first download has no rig at all. The second download doesn't move as described. But maybe the problem is that the head isn't merged with the rest of the model.

One problem is, that there is no armature modifier for head and hair. The mesh is also a bit of a mess (probably due to import/export) so using automatic weights might fail. I'd split all lose parts and separate them into different objects, call automatic weights and fix the weighting by hand afterwards, then join everything back together as needed.

Okay! "WorldSEnder" the idea to "Merge" was a great idea! while "user2859"s idea of the "Armature Modifier" was a wonderful idea which was the resolve of the inanimate items! I selected the "Head, Hair" and "Eyes" then selected the armature, rig while in object mode and applied "CRTL P" with "Automatic Weights" I then provided additional weight an all works good but still needs works but at least it functions as a 1 piece model..thanks much guys!

@WorldSEnder Care to add an answer since it seems it have solved the the OPs issue?

When making a rig make sure that every part of the model has an Armature Modifier applied. This is easy when you Merge (CtrlJ in Object Mode) all of the objects you want to rig into one "big" object which means that you only have to apply the Armature Modifier once.
Another "feature" of Blender that comes to mind when thinking about rigging with custom weights is that the weigths are assigned with a vertex group. The vertex group's name has to be the same as the Bone's you want to bind the group to. You can always try to get away with automated weights or use them as a base for your own weightpaint, it gives a decent result most of the time.

Great Work!....marvelous! very much appreciated!


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One eye of model doesn't follow head?
One eye of model doesn't follow head?
I have a bit of a problem with a "4 Piece Model", "Head, Body, Eyes, Hair, and Teeth". I hope someone can be of assistance while the "Eye's" appear as a pair and don't act as a pair. Upon selecting the eyes in object mode they both highlight as a pair with a single click of one eye and then after shift selecting the models head and choosing Ctrl P > "BONE" the parent only applies to one eye and the left eye doesn't move with the head and rig movements? There is no lattice or such, or any such tracking.

Could you post a .blend file, it is hard to figure out what could be the issue.

I just put up the blend  http://www.pasteall.org/blend/30771

Your eyes are incorrectly weight painted. To fix this, Selected to vertex group DEF-head and go into edit mode (Tab). Select all your vertices (A) and Hit Assign.


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Strange artifacts during camera transition when rendering movie
I'm rendering a movie from a series of PNGs with the video sequence editor and the H.264 codec. When the camera changes from the static position to moving there is a strange jitter artifact (see video).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzKe3AZGZG4 (Need to watch in 1080p to clearly see it)
This doesn't show up in the PNGs. Increasing the bitrate doesn't seem to help. I'm not really sure what the other encoding settings do. Is there a way to fix this?

Maybe you could try to change the GOP Size (Keyframe interval). Try to set it so that a keyframe is set when the movement starts.

Thanks, that does work! The complete animation is quite long however so as a GOP size I used factor that didn't leave a remainder of the offending keyframe. This does present a problem for the future, what to do if there are multiple places where it occurs?

I'd like to see the rest. That looks like quality work.

@David I posted as answer

It seems like the motion wasn't estimated correctly. As a workaround you could try to set the GOP Size (Keyframe interval) so that a keyframe is set when the movement starts.
This seems like an encoder/Blender bug. If such errors occurred at multiple times you could encode with a lossless video format and use one of the many third party video converters as a second step. Possibly with multipass encoding enabled.


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Remove addons from tabs in 3d window
I made my own tab SV, but there are addons that I do not need, Oscurart Tools ,Contour Retopolgy and Object Tools. Why are they not in their own tabs?
green - my panels, red - not mine

If I activate new addons they appear here in my tab also. How to delete the other addons from my list, or how to move my own on top?

When an addon defines a panel for the toolbar it should add a property called bl_category which defines the name of the tab it will be shown in. If this property is not defined then the panel will be shown in every toolbar tab.
Current repository versions of Contours and Oscurart Tools have been updated to have their own tabs. Contours was updated in January and Oscurart Tools in February. The solution for these would be to update them.
class CGCOOKIE_OT_retopo_contour_panel(bpy.types.Panel):
    '''Retopologize Forms with Contour Strokes'''
    bl_category = "Retopology"
    bl_label = "Contour Retopolgy"
    bl_space_type = 'VIEW_3D'
    bl_region_type = 'TOOLS'

I don't know which addon Object Tools belongs to. To manually fix this edit it's source file by right-clicking on one of it's buttons and select Edit Source. Then add a bl_category property to the panel. If this addon is located within the official addons or addons_contrib then you will need to repeat this when you upgrade, if the addon still hasn't been updated. If it is an official addon or from addon_contrib them submit a bug report (include a patch?) to get it updated.

object tool - tool frm oscurart toolbox


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Blender resources for architects?
My interest in Blender comes from wanting to use it to model physical structures and produce architectural drawings; what I have so far is really impressive, but there doesn't seem to be too much information about my particular interest.
Are there any (Blender-) resources that would be particularly useful for architects? E.g. packages of standard 'elements' like windows, doors, roofs or whatever, or perhaps a discussion group specifically for architects?

Hi and welcome to Blender stackexchange. It seems you are asking lots of questions at the same time. Try narrowing it down and dividing it into several question.

This question shouldn't be closed: http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/questions/341/are-questions-about-external-tutorial-resources-on-topic it has 10 times more views than other questions

Some resources
Add-ons

Archimesh for creating architecture elements

Download

Window Generator
Chimney Generator
Jamb Generator
Balcony Generator

Sites:

Blender 3D Architect

Video Tutorials:

Blenderguru: The complete architecture series
 Edit:This tutorial dates back to 2010, the rendering lessons use an external render engine since Cycles wasn't available. (Edited May 3rd 2016).
Cgcookie: Interior 3d architectural visualization
Edit:CGcookie are no longer streaming this tutorial as " it's time for it to be put to rest" yet ZIP files are available to download the lessons.(Edited May 3rd 2016).

Related questions:

How to model effectively using exact measurements?
How do blender units and meters, feet, or yards correlate?
Is there any way to measure angle between edges/faces, or change the angle so that the mesh changes according to the angle we input?

I can't believe no one has mentioned Microvellum yet... maybe it's just too specific to interiors, but it looks incredibly powerful.

This youtube channel shows how to use the Archimesh addon. If you are new to Blender, you should try googling beginner tutorials for Blender to make yourself familiar with its concepts. BlenderGuru tutorials are popular for example.

I would strongly recommend using the Sweethome editor for things like floor plans and basic furniture. Environments can be exported into Blender.

An add-on, called "sun position", will position the sun for architectural ( or other purposes ) based on location, time, and date.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/3D_interaction/Sun_Position


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Speed control effect doesn't change the length of video strip
I ran into some confusing behaviour of the speed control effect.
I've loaded a whole strip of video and applied the effect setting it to a 2x speedup
(in two variants - with the default "stretch to the input length" and "Scale to length").
I expected to see the reduced length of strip, but it appears to have no influence on the length. On the other hand, the video sequencer shows that after some frame, the picture doesn't change while marker is moving. Do I have to calculate this frame manually to insert a new video strip?

When you add a Speed Control strip, Stretch to input strip length is enabled by default.  That gives you the ability to change the length of your video strip (aka "input strip") and the speed will automatically adjust.  For example, if you make your video strip half as long, the speed will be twice as fast.
You also can set the parameter Multiply Speed.  This will change the speed of your video without changing the length.  For example, you can set this to 2.0, but since the video finishes twice as fast yet the length stays the same, the video will run out before the end of the strip, and so for the remainder of the strip, Blender will just display the last frame.

very confusing, still don't get it every time...


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Rigid body objects passing through each other
I am experimenting with rigid body physics using the game engine for a project.
This is the setup:

I have 2 long rectangular prisms with hole.
The 2 prisms are connected with a cylinder (acting as a dowel).
I locked translation and rotation for one of the prism and everything else is free to move and/or rotate.

And here's the problem:
The dowel and the free prism are going through the locked prism. Can someone please tell me what am I doing wrong? Thanks.
Here is the blend file:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/o2y0pxk7ijk12bc/untitled.blend

@CoDEmanX Thank you. I should have done that in the very beginning :)

I think its something about the Collision bounds, the rectangular prisms are actually convex, which is not suitable to be set as Box.

@LeonCheung That didn't work. I changed the prisms to convex hull and experimented with the margins but neither solved the issue. The dowel and prism still go through the other prism.

@LeonCheung There isn't a concave setting. All I have is capsule, box, sphere, cylinder, cone, convex hull and triangular mesh.

Sorry for typo, I mean they are CONCAVE. :P You may consider using the compound in Collision setting. Or try Triangle Mesh. And be sure to apply their scale.

I tried everything in collision bounds and nothing worked. same for compound.

I noticed their scale has't been applied yet. Select them, Ctrl-A > Scale (or Rot/Scale).

Just applied scale. Still the same. Is rigid body the right physics type for what I am trying to do?

There are several problems in this file:

Objects scale hasn't been applied;
Setting Triangle Mesh here is required, since the prisms have holes, which means they are concave objects, so other collision types don't work well with them;
Bound margin should be tweaked carefully, as well. Considering the distance between the surface, try smaller value;
The two prisms stay too close to each other, which will cause "intersection" if bound margin is non-zero.
Demo file_v3. Just FYI.

Added a demo video for better understanding.

That was magic. So the above 4 points you pointed out were the only problems? Or was there other issues?

Basically true. However, as you see in the demo file, I locked some rotation and translation axis for a better result. That's the other nice thing to do in your case, but that's not the key here.

Ridgid Body simulation has a lot of issues with concave shapes. Sergey Reich works on a special "concave" type, but no schedule unfortunately.


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Cloth simulation not animated in 3D Viewport
I'm following this tutorial, and came to the step where I start the physics simulation for a piece of cloth dropping on an object (11:25 on video);
When I press the "play" animation button, the cloth that should fall on the object does not animate, and nothing happens except the animation marker which plays.
I cannot get the cloth to animate as it does on the video tutorial, what can I be missing?

It seemed to work after waiting a few seconds when the play animation button was clicked. It took some time for it to actually start animating.