text:
The Rain Model's eyelids suddenly stopped working, I'm not sure what could be causing it
I've run into an issue that I can't seem to resolve on my own. I've been working with the Rain character model for a while now and everything's been going good but suddenly out of nowhere the eyelids have stopped moving. I can't think of what setting I could have touched that would cause something like this to happen

I've gone through all of the cloudRig settings and messed with every single one and yet still nothing is fixing it.

If anyone has any kind of advise they could give I would be so thankful to you!!

Does anything else work?

Hey, yes as far as I can tell every other bone works except the eyelids

Do the bones and the vertex groups still have the same names, or are the eyelid bones actually controlling a different set of bones via drivers?

Well the bone is called ACT-Eyelid_Upper.L and the vertex groups it effects are DEF-Eyelid_Top_1-4.L
What I have noticed is that it's actually all the acting bones that aren't working right now

Umm, hmm. Do the bones actually move? Is it possible you’ve disabled the armature modifier?

The bones were able to move but I never messed with the modifiers to my knowledge! Since the project file was not the most important thing for me to keep around, I've uninstalled and reinstalled the Rain Character project from blender cloud and everything seems to be back to normal!

So I think I've found out what ended up causing this issue. With the base Rain Character download they come with a bunch of other actions that effect some acting bones on the face. I didn't see the point in having them at the time so I just removed them from the blender file. So far it seems like any modifications to these actions causes issues with base face positions and affect the usability of of the face bones.
----DO NOT MESS WITH THESE SETTINGS----


text:
Mantaflow smoke looks a bit weird
I tried following this tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCdQgREfVq8&t=362s) Im at 6:15 And my smoke ball looks nothing like his. Mine looks like this
Ive followed every step and thats where im stuck.
Any ideas?

Did you read the comments? Often people write problmes + solutions in the comments.
So next questions:
Did you use Cycles?
Did you bake?
Did you see that comment here:
NOTE TO NOOBS LIKE ME AND ANYBODY ATTEMPTING THE TUTORIAL - when Olav says the word "flame" is important, he actually is referring to how it's typed, not just what is typed.
DONT USE CAPS! Took me forever to realize it's like an input term, not a name, and effects the results it must be written as "flame" or it won't be recognized as the intended value. I had F capitalized.  The attribute flame won't work right if typed in any other way.

...and...what i made wrong often: every little step in the tutorial, do it exactly how the teacher does it, else everything can happen. I often did thing slightly different which looked the same in that moment, but weren't the same. E.g. if you move your cube in object mode with G, it is something totally different to move your cube in edit mode!!! Because the origin point changes! Took me quite a while to understand this "little" differeence...

I retried it and mine still look about the same as before. I followerd every single step

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Will Cycles eventually replace Blender Internal?
I remember reading (I can't remember where though), that the Blender Internal render engine had become difficult to maintain and is not based on a modern architecture (hence - Cycles was created).
My question then is this:
Will Cycles ultimately replace the internal renderer?
I have grown somewhat fond of the internal renderer (because I'm accustomed to it and setting up scenes for it), and wish it could be more modern, but I know things might have to change.

Personally, I don't think so. Blender has it's on specialties (tile based, faster on CPU plus freestyle doesn't work with cycles). It's always a good thing to have options. :D

Personally I don't think that this is a good blender SE question. Rather something for the forums.

@miceterminator 19 voters think otherwise.

If so, I hope that the "feature complete" requirement is truly complete.  I like Cycles more than BI, but I need to export .OBJ (wavefront) models, and than means using BI textures.

Oooh, I sure hope not. BI has its uses, moreover, in some rare cases it is even better than Cycles. http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/31088/noise-reduction-in-tight-area-in-cycles?noredirect=1#comment47678_31088 In this example of mine it produces a more acceptable result for me.

Update (5 years later)
Yes, for the upcoming Blender 2.8 release, Blender Internal has finally been superseded by Cycles.

As far as I know, It is not yet officially confirmed. I asked a developer on IRC and he said No. However, one of the other developers has this on his blog.

The goal of Cycles is to probably replace the Internal Render Engine
  in 1-2 years and have a fast and modern Render/Shading system which
  can be used for production rendering and for animation as well.

from code.blender.. the main developer also hints with..

There may of course be developers that want to continue developing
  Blender Internal, and the intention is not to drop it immediately.

From BlenderGuru

Cycles will eventually replace the internal rendering engine, becoming
  the standard that every Blender user will soon use. The sooner you can
  jump aboard, the better.

It seems such a decision was made a long time ago too.

@andrewpprice There has been no further development for the BI (for
  about 2 years now) apart from critical crash fixes. That won't change.

It also seems that there is an ongoing project that is extending the Internal Renderer
It is all inconsistent information here and there but all very credible sources, so a definitive answer for this would be, It has not yet been confirmed.

Maybe Cycles will replace BI as the default engine, but BI will still be an option?

@Gwenn Cycles is resource hungry, if nothing were to really replace anything, I think the current setup will remain the same.

There is a slight miscommunication with the answer as it stands currently. As Ton goes on to discuss following the screenshotted tweet, it is technically not Cycles that is superseding the BI engine, but EEVEE: https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/986999798598438912. This is mainly due to the main benefits of using the BI engine (particularly in animation) stemming from its speed when compared with Cycles, at the cost of accuracy. These are benefits that EEVEE has over Cycles as well, whilst having the additional positives of being physically-based (more accurate) too!

Blender is really made by and for users. Removing any feature from the program won't be done without a good long public debate (and good reasons).
Our blender.org project works with the "Module Owner" principle, developers who are responsible for maintaining and work on areas in Blender.
If you want to know who can give a reliable answer for the future or plans on specific development topics, check on the Module Owner list here:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Template:ModulesOwners
Or check with one of the Blender project admins, such as Campbell Barton, Brecht van Lommel or me :)

Hi Ton, honoured to see you here and have you answer directly :)

There is no plan to drop Blender Internal at the moment.
It got some new development recently with Freestyle support and 3D viewport rendering so that definitely would not be thrown away soon. How much further development it will receive is unclear, but as long as there are enough users it is unlikely to be removed.

How does one activate 3D viewport rendering in Blender Internal? I don't see it under SpaceView3D.viewport_shade in r56533; am I missing something?

It's not in the 2.67b release, going to be 2.68 (or get test build from builder.blender.org)

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

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


text:
Why is "Smooth" shading slower than "Flat" shading in the viewport?
When I set a Mesh to shade as "Smooth" vs "Flat" on a high-poly Mesh Object (such as one with a subdivision modifier), it makes Blender much slower than normal, sometimes almost unusable.
Why does this occur?

voted as nonconstructive - any number of reasons hardware can perform worse it depends a lot on details of your config, draw modes, drivers, hardware. In some cases there are known limits which can be documented but dont think this is one of them, also blender doesnt use pixel shaders for solid drawing.

IMHO this should be left open. Instead, it should be edited to address a specific, concrete question regarding shaders and performance.

I agree that this should be left open: Part of the question the OP is asking (unwittingly?) is "should I be worried about this?" What makes this question useful, IMO, is discovering "Oh yeah, smooth shading on 10,000 polys is really expensive, a slowdown is totally understandable" versus "No...that really shouldn't happen, you're running into a hardware limitation or you have a problem." This can be a really important detail for troubleshooting.

Since I don't know how many polys you are talking about, and what hardware you are using, there is a general answer that smooth shading is always slower than flat.  Flat shading uses one normal per face to calculate the color of the entire face.  Smooth shading interpolates between the normals of each vertex to render a smoothly curved face. Since a face is at least 3 vertices (i.e. a triangle) then smooth shading will always be at least 3x as slow as flat.
In most cases, even 3-4x as slow is a matter of milliseconds so you don't really notice, but on older hardware with a ton of faces you certainly could.

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


text:
CSV File Data Read
Please help, I have tried a Python forum and although I have had many suggestions none work.
I need to import data from a csv file.
Here is my code.
import bpy

ob1 = bpy.data.objects["Base"]
ob2 = bpy.data.objects["Middle Arm"]
ob3 = bpy.data.objects["Top Arm"]

ob1Strt = 0
ob1Dist = 1.5
ob1FrmEnd = ob1Dist*33

print (ob1FrmEnd)

import csv

line = 1 column = 2

with open("Program.txt", "r") as file:
    mycsv = csv.reader(file)
    mycsv = list(mycsv)
    text = mycsv[line][column]
    print(text)
    rotate=int(text)

I get the error message;

49.5 Traceback (most recent call last):   File "C:\Users\Owner\Desktop\Blender\Probot 2\ProbotPositions.blend\Text",
  line 21, in  FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or
  directory: 'Program.txt' Error: Python script fail, look in the
  console for now...

Did you name your csv file "Program.txt" ??  If so, you may need to specify the directory it's in, because your script might be reading from the dir the script is in, or the blender base dir, which probably isn't the same dir your csv file is in.

How Do I specify the directory the CSV file is in. I have tried many suggestions and none work.

Hard to tell from your question if that's one script or 2.
Might just be because you aren't used to entering code on StackExchange.
Preface code with four spaces, a tab, or surround with backticks.
Seems strange at first, but that's how they do it.
Assuming line = 1 and column = 2 are on separate lines,
as Python would error there otherwise.
Good practice to put all your import lines up top,
so if this is one script, I'd bring import csv up.
Bad practice to use the word file, as that happens to be a Python keyword.
Might not be important for the purposes of this script, but I called it openfile instead.
You can specify an absolute location of the filename in one line if you prefer,
then you don't have to bother with the .join().  It's up to you.
Might be easier if you reuse the script for other files.
Edit:  Assuming limb only rotates along X-axis.
bpy.data.objects[limb].rotation_euler.x
if Y-axis rotates, you'd use .y instead.
import bpy
import csv
import os

ob1 = bpy.data.objects["Base"]
ob2 = bpy.data.objects["Middle Arm"]
ob3 = bpy.data.objects["Top Arm"]

ob1Strt = 0
ob1Dist = 1.5
ob1FrmEnd = ob1Dist*33

print(ob1FrmEnd)

directory = "C:\Users\(User_Name)\Documents"
filename = "Program.txt"

joined = os.path.join(directory, filename)

with open(joined, "r") as openfile:
    mycsv = csv.reader(openfile)
    for row in mycsv:
      limb, direction = row
      print(limb, direction)
      bpy.data.objects[limb].rotation_euler.x = int(direction)

import csv
import os
ob1 = bpy.data.objects["Base"]
ob2 = bpy.data.objects["Middle Arm"]
ob3 = bpy.data.objects["Top Arm"]
ob1Strt = 0
ob1Dist = 1.5
ob1FrmEnd = ob1Dist*33
print(ob1FrmEnd)
line = 1
column = 2
directory = "C:\Users\Owner\Desktop\Blender\Probot 2"
filename = "Program.txt"
joined = os.path.join(directory, filename)
with open(joined, "r") as openfile:
mycsv = csv.reader(openfile)
mycsv = list(mycsv)
text = mycsv[line][column]
print(text)
rotate = int(text)

I haven't seen the csv file you're using, so it's really hard to attempt writing code for it.  This will only print out line 1 and column 2.  Is that what you are going for?  I'd imagine from your answer that it still didn't do exactly as intended...  What exactly do you need?  For it to iterate through each row and column?

I have a model robot arm, I want to control its movements using data from a csv file.  the print commands are only for testing my code. the csv file is simply contains the name of the limb then the distance moved separated by a comma.

i need the code to read from the file

I finally got a solution that works, thanks to everyone who answered.
import bpy

from pathlib import Path
p = Path('C:/')/'Users'/'Owner'/'Desktop'/'Blender'/'Probot 2/Program.txt'
print(str(p))

import csv
line = 1
column = 2

speed=50

with p.open() as file:
    mycsv = csv.reader(file)
    mycsv = list(mycsv)
    text = mycsv[line][column]
    print(text)
    distance0=int(text)*0.0175
    rotate0=int(distance0)*speed


text:
Render is either all white or all gray
These are a few images of my scene.
I added lights, camera and rendered image. It turned out to be all white.
This first image is my entire scene with camera and light setup.

Second is the camera view render.

Third is the camera view of the scene.

this is the link for images
Let me know if I need to add more images.
Here is my .blend file.

Welcome to Blender Stack Exchange! Is your camera really positioned where you think it is? Nothing obstructing it? Hard to guess from just screen shots. If you can post a .blend it will be easier for us to answer.

my camera is positioned correctly sir...how do i post .blend

http://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/

I uploaded the file  can u please telll me what am i doing wrong ,,Thank you

where's the link to your blend? are you rendering on gpu? what gpu do you have? what are your world settings?

i uploaded my .blend to the link blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com, i have nvidia 560 cu II, can you please tell me other site where i can upload my blend file

http://imgur.com/a/Xty46 i am dealing with some bug here is zip file https://www.mediafire.com/?q6ziuvd3o8hrzi6 i will also add it to the post ty

I've downloaded your blend file and the answer is what Mentalist already suspected: Your camera is looking straight at a wall. If you want to leave the camera where it is you could increase the clipping start value of your camera from .1 to 1. Otherwise you have to move the camera to the inside of the wall, if you want to render what's inside.

Yea camera is not on place at that one because ,because the time i uploaded the file was experimenting on camera ,but now that you have the files u can try to take camera  inside the area and take render then tell me if its working or not

it is working...


text:
How to approach the modeling of paneling on walls and floors?
Panelling in Sci-fi models is especially important because it adds visual interest and I would love to learn how to do it. I would like to learn how you model paneling, especially with complex shapes? I think I'm mostly confused about getting the fine lines between panels and how to conform them to the model especially on complex shapes.
Here are some references for what I want to do.

If you know how to use the modeling tools, it shouldn't be too hard, if you have reference (like you do). just recreate it. If you don't know how to use the modeling tools there are a massive amount of tutorials. . . like this one on sci-fi panel modeling

This can be done with the Array Modifier and a few modelling tricks.
First start by adding a defining shape for your panel, in this case it is a wall panel. Make sure that the edges join together properly:

Add an array modifier to see how it tiles and for reference when modelling in the next steps:

Now start adding some details to this shape, beveling edges and doing basic extrusions:

Now start modelling other pieces, like pipes, wiring, etc. and then join it to the mesh using Ctrl+J:

This is the basic technique, feel free to experiment and make it your own. Standard texturing and materials methods apply. I would very much recommend watching the BlenderGuru tutorial on making a space corridor as well.


text:
How to add mesh primitives in Blender Python using data blocks
In Blender Python I can add a lamp by doing the following:
DataBlock = bpy.data.lamps.new(name='HemiA', type='HEMI')
ObjHandle = bpy.data.objects.new(name='HemiA', object_data=DataBlock)
bpy.context.scene.objects.link(ObjHandle)

I want to do the same for mesh primitives such as Suzanne. There is an operator for this: bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_monkey_add(), however there doesn't seem to be any way to create a mesh primitive data block.

I am not sure if there are functions which return mesh primitives as a data block in the Blender API. But you can create a Suzanne data block by using a bmesh and bmesh.ops.create_monkey(bm, matrix) which you can then convert to a mesh data block
import bpy
import bmesh

bm = bmesh.new()
bmesh.ops.create_monkey(bm)

# Create mesh data block from bmesh
mesh = bpy.data.meshes.new('Mesh')
bm.to_mesh(mesh)
bm.free()

# Create object and link object to scene
obj = bpy.data.objects.new('Object', mesh)
bpy.context.scene.objects.link(obj)
bpy.context.scene.update()


text:
Unhide all collections hotkey?
It seems like there are only, an isolate and hide/show a single collection, hotkeys, but no show all collections hotkey. Am I missing something?
I often accidentally isolate a collection and it's a bit awkward, that you have to press undo, instead of clicking 1 twice for example.

Put the mouse cursor over the Collections field and press Alt+H to unhide everything.

Now I feel really dumb.

Don't. I struggled a bit to find it too. However if you have a lot of hidden objects in your scene you don't want to unhide everytime the workaround hatinacat2000 suggested is a better way to go.

It surprises me how often the solutions to questions in Blender turn out to be so obvious. Thanks!

Workaround: Make 1 new collection at the top; Drag-drop all other collections into top collection.

I'm here because I had the same issue.  I kept accidentally hiding the collections (bar the first) by pressing 1.
Intuitively I pressed 1 again to reverse the situation.  An easy mistake, but an easy fix, I thought.
Here I find out that I need to drag my cursor over to the Outliner, then press Alt+H to reverse the mistake.
I appreciate that people have supplied the answer, but I feel Elmazz makes a good point: Please make 1 a toggle.


text:
Why does my add-on work from the 'Add' menu in the header but not from Shift+A?
My modal addon is using raycast, I've taken a function from Blender python templates: everything worked fine. However when I try to add my addon to Add menu (VIEW3D_MT_add), it starts to act weird: I think that the issue is with contexts, but I don't know how to solve this.
Here's a stripped down test code:
import bpy

bl_info = {
"name": "Test Addon",
"category": "Object",
"version": (0, 0, 1),
"blender": (2, 80, 0),}

class OBJECT_OT_my_addon(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "object.my_addon"
    bl_label = "My Addon Name"
    bl_options = {"REGISTER", "UNDO"}

    def invoke(self, context, event):
      print(context.region_data)
      return {'FINISHED'}

def menu_func(self, context):
    # self.layout.operator_context = 'INVOKE_DEFAULT'
    self.layout.operator("object.my_addon")

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(OBJECT_OT_my_addon)
    bpy.types.VIEW3D_MT_add.append(menu_func)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(OBJECT_OT_my_addon)
    bpy.types.VIEW3D_MT_add.remove(menu_func)

context.region_data is needed for raycast, so this addon prints it out.
When I run it from Viewport Add menu, it prints out RegionView3D: everything is fine. However if I run it from Shift+A Add menu, I'm getting an error:
ERROR (wm.operator): c:\b\win64_cmake_vs2017\win64_cmake_vs2017\blender.git\source\blender\windowmanager\intern\wm_event_system.c:1486 wm_operator_invoke: invalid operator call 'OBJECT_OT_my_addon'
if I uncomment the self.layout.operator_context = 'INVOKE_DEFAULT' in menu_func, it starts working fine from the Shift+A menu and prints out RegionView3D, but! if I run it from Viewport Add menu it prints None and my raycast doesn't work.

The menu is in the header region
Put together this for prior version of this question. Can also get the region 3d view from space_data.region_3d or area.spaces.active.region_3d
When invoked from the header the region will be the header.
import bpy
from bpy_extras import view3d_utils
from mathutils import Vector

bl_info = {
"name": "Test Addon",
"category": "Object",
"version": (0, 0, 1),
"blender": (2, 80, 0),}

def get_v(context, event):
    scene = context.scene
    area = context.area
    region = area.regions[-1] # or search for region.type == 'WINDOW'
    space = area.spaces.active
    rv3d = space.region_3d
    print(context.region.type, rv3d == context.region_data) # See Output
    coord = event.mouse_region_x, event.mouse_region_y

    print(region, rv3d, coord)

class OBJECT_OT_my_addon(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "object.my_addon"
    bl_label = "My Addon Name"
    bl_options = {"REGISTER", "UNDO"}

    def invoke(self, context, event):
      print(get_v(context, event))
      return {'FINISHED'}

def menu_func(self, context):
    self.layout.operator_context = 'INVOKE_DEFAULT'
    self.layout.operator("object.my_addon")

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(OBJECT_OT_my_addon)
    bpy.types.VIEW3D_MT_add.append(menu_func)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(OBJECT_OT_my_addon)
    bpy.types.VIEW3D_MT_add.remove(menu_func)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

The See Output print above from header menu
HEADER False

and from shiftA menu
WINDOW True

To sum up, only use context.region_data if you are sure you are in the 3D view window. Python console code, a is a view3d area
>>> a.type
'VIEW_3D'

>>> for r in a.regions:
...     r.type
...
'TOOL_HEADER'
'HEADER'
'TOOLS'
'UI'
'WINDOW'

Another method would be to use 'INVOKE_REGION_WIN' as the operator context, to make sure the 'WINDOW' region is used.

Aaah. Ooohh!! Thank you! Both menus and raycast work now

@batFinger Tried to come up with a more specific title for the question - feel free to replace it if you have a better one.

Will do.  @SergeyKritskiy prob should mention INVOKE_REGION_WIN prob fixes this too.


text:
Multiple materials on subdivided face resulting in displacement
I subdivided a face to apply multiple materials to it. However after assigning them, they look displaced in edit and object mode, as well as in the rendered picture. What did I do wrong?
I tested multiple materials and all of them show the same behavior.

I expected something like this:

What did I do wrong? Thank you!

The Bevel modifier is subdividing the mesh again creating new face which are assigned to a certain material depending on there creation method , changing the number of segments to an even number will get you the desired result

nice catch.  It wasn't mentioned that the Bevel Modifier is being used.  :)


text:
Background picture does not appear in the render?
I'm using Blender 2.74 and have added a picture as a background in the view , it is visible in the view but it doesn't appear in the render ,why is that ?
here is the picture

Many thanks,
Meri

please provide us with more information. upload the blend and link it in your original post if you need to:

The picture is 2D http://az624219.vo.msecnd.net/media/1002/paddington_test.jpg
The pictures is 2D . Bhttp://az624219.vo.msecnd.net/media/1002/paddington_test.jpg
Blender 2.74 I am able to attach the pictures and I can see it but when I rendered I can't see anything. Why?
Many thanks, Meri

@Meri  how did you attach the picture ?, can add screenshots

I am going to Background images /add image/image and I open the folder where I have the picture

@Meri the background image in the 3d_view is for reference only( modeling reference) , it does not show up in the render

you have to use it as a texture for a plane (or other flat object) to be rendered

All right. Can you tell me how I can attach a picture that I can see? I understood. Many thanks

@Meri i'm writing the steps as an answer , bear with me

the easy way is to enable the Addon that does exactly that :

go to File➝ User_Preferences
click on the Addon tab search for Import Image,  check it and click Save

go to File ➝Import ➝ Import_Image_as_Plane
select your image  and click Import
position your camera and render ( you may need to tweak light )

to setup easily the render after adding the image as plane :

switch to Cycles Render Engine

in 3d_view hit Num 7 (this the top view)
hit Ctrl+Alt+0 to set the camera in this view (you can move the camera up and down to fit the image )
enable Ambient Occlusion  in the world tab

press F12 to render

@Meri you are welcome , If you need more details I will add them


text:
A part of a model is corrupt
The 3D model I am using (Charizard) is slightly broken; notice on the left wing a portion of it is orange when it is supposed to be blue. Backface culling will not work, as it does not take effect in the actual animation. Doubles have been removed.
Any idea on how to fix it? Greatly appreciated.
model file

is it not possible to fix it manually (move vertices back )

do you try making the normals consistent??  select that face and  ctrl+n anc check inside

@Awsum can you upload this model to take a closer look

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3KjFxxykagrUlQ2b21jSUtEckk/edit

will this be enough  : image with steps

A vertex from the wing is going throuhg the back , move this vertex forward and it'll fix :


text:
Blender Game Engine, python inserting a cube at coordinates
First of all I am a BIG noob at blender but not at python. I want to maker some python games so I thought that blender would be great for this.
I am half way through making my simple game where you move a block around and now I want to make it so when you press the E key, a block appears in front of the cube.
Here is my code so far which I found on-line:
import bpy

bpy.ops.object.add(type='MESH')
ob = bpy.context.object
me = ob.data

me.from_pydata(verts, [], faces)
me.update()

It inserts a mesh at some random coordinates. Does anyonee know how to make it insert a cube at some set coordinates or just simplify my code?
I apologise if my terminology isn't correct but I am new to all of this.

Oh sorry guys I entered the code wrongly.

Here is the code:

import bpy
bpy.ops.object.add(type='MESH')
ob = bpy.context.object
me = ob.data
me.from_pydata(verts, [], faces)
me.update()

Welcome !,  bpy is used in blender but not in the game engine which has kind of separate API which uses bge

see this answer http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/26656/how-to-add-an-object-at-a-specific-posistion-in-blender-game-engine/27695#27695

if you still having problems edit your question to address the issue


text:
blender cloth simulation not simulating properly with collision
im trying to get the hang of blender cloth simulation for an upcoming project of mine but for some reason when i add collision to the human its attached to so as to allow it respond with physics..it went crazy then i increased the gap between them and its still giving annoying reusltslike in the screenshots

EDIT
The blend file with the updated cloth sim file but now its self collision that goes crazy
The new blend file with changed values
maybe increasing the gap will give a better result but it will look too horrible if there is a work around for this i would really appreciate it
and sorry i cant post more images due to my rep

upload .blend file?

I'm no expert at this, but I have seen lots of "crazy" behavior from the cloth simulator.  A few things I've noticed:
a) Make sure it starts off with the cloth outside of the collision surface.  You can use springs & shrinkage to tighten it up, and then save the final "initial simulation" as the starting point for the real simulation.
b) Pinning seems to help a lot.  On my current design (a simple dress), just letting it fall on the shoulders causes it to eventually seep/rip through.  Pinning it at the waist makes a big difference.
c) Extreme values can cause odd behavior.

its getting better i increased the distance but its still crazy ill upload the blend file...and @Jabberwock what do you mean by saving the final initial simulation as the starting point,can you please elaborate on that but thanks for the pointers too :)

so far ive managed to get a better result by reducing the collision margin and increasing collision quality of the cloth but if i use self collision it goes crazy

You can "apply" the cloth modifier at any point in the timeline of the simulation, either directly to the cloth mesh or as a shape key.  I haven't done more than play around with it, so I don't know how well it works in practice.

You might have better success if you scaled your model 100x, so that 1 unit = 1 cm.
In my experience, 1 unit/meter just isn't precise enough for proper collision detection, resulting in the cloth "puffing out". With 1 unit/centimeter, the simulation behaves much better.
I'd love to be proven wrong, though. It's not fun working with two separate scales.

I was wondering about that.  The model I'm currently working on is (accidentally) ~5x (5 units/meter).  I tried scaling it to 1:1 (to match the native scale of the linked rig), and the results were much, much worse.  It seems like scaling the appropriate cloth parameters should correct it, but it doesn't seem to.

thanks i tried scaling my model the way you said and it actually simulated better than usual thanks a lot....really what i needed

Go to the Collision object, go to physics, change thickness to 0.005. That should help solve the puff up.

Add more loop cuts to the skirt (i.e., with Ctrl+R), to make the mesh faces more square.  I added about 5 cuts between each of yours, and it simulates much better now.  It will start to look jumbled at first, but it should straighten out by around frame 40.  This will of course make the mesh much bigger.  You can also do coarser (but still squarish) faces and use a subdivision surface modifier.


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Differences between Center and Median options of Blender snap target menu?
As title: what are the differences between the "Center" and "Median" snap target options?
The Blender manual explicates with pictures only one of the two options I'm trying to compare: the "Median":
https://www.blender.org/manual/editors/3dview/object/transform/transform_control/precision/snap.html#snap-target
I use all the options them for a very long time and I know what they do but what I want to figure out is just what differences are there between the two options cause it seems to me that they behave exactly the same way.

Center uses the pivot point instead of a property of the object itself. The default for the pivot point, however, happens to just be the median center, which is why selecting "center" doesn't appear to do anything by default:

In other words, you can think of the "center" setting as a "defer to pivot point" setting. The primary use of this is that it lets the snap point be defined by the 3D cursor by selecting "3D Cursor" in the pivot point menu (see above image) while the snap target is set to "Center". Using "Center" with the other pivot point options isn't too useful in most cases.

willy asking about the snap median and center not the pivot point

Thanks JtheNinja, I really appreciate the effort for your answer but the menu I'm talking about in the question (perhaps I'm wrong) is not the Pivot Point menu but the Snap Target menu: it is the one near the magnet...

Sorry if my answer wasn't clear: the "center" option in the "snap target" menu essentially is a "defer to pivot point menu" option. Whatever you set as the pivot point also becomes the snap target when in "center" mode.

@JtheNinja, no problem, nothing to be sorry about. This seems a little bit more clear: may I ask you to edit the answer with the comment and also by adding an example to completely clarify the point? Any way I'm doing some experiments my own and it seems that setting one or the other option in Snap Target menu affects the behavior only if I set 3D Cursor in Pivot Point menu. I know I'm bothering you, sorry... But I just want to be sure to really understand the matter... thanks so much.


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Texture paint changing the whole texture
The texture poaint mode is behaving really weird for me. Im trying to draw on to my wall but its changing the texture of the whole model.
After hitting tab it's going back to normal tho.
GIF:

EDIT: when i click use nodes this happens:

Go into the node editor for the material applied to the mesh and select the right image texture node.

@HATMAN makes even more weird things happen (check the edit)

Ah this is the Internal render engine, I am more of a Cycles whiz. I haven't texture painted in the Internal engine before, so I have not had to deal with this issue in it. I added a tag so people know right off the bat in future

I'm not that familiar with the internal renderer either, but this is just a model for a game engine... and i didn't bother switching.

If you check Use Nodes you should select which material it's linked to in the Node Editor window (drop-down list in the Material node). However I'm not sure what nodes are needed in this case for, as originally the problem was with texture painting. Check if texture is repeated over mesh (tiled), and if it is you'll need to find a way to not affect original texture when drawing (so to draw sort of on another layer)


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Material: imitate a glossy ceramic tile
I'm trying to imitate the material (and glossiness) of a ceramic glossy tile as shown below:

The following picture is where I have gotten to now, but I'm not satisfied at all with the results.

I've tried many things in blender cycles, including normal maps, displacement maps, etc. I guess I need some more professional guidance.

Lighting is key with reflections. Poor lighting will make it look very flat and fake. Try and HDR environment setup for a quick way to get complex lighting. Also use the displace modifier, not normal maps.

Try also to add some granulation: one small noise texture set to multiply in the mix, one larger for mixing the orangy variations with the main green.

To get the best result you should sculpt the highpoly surface, bake the displacement, paint the surface and build a shader. This is a lot of work so when you have a reference texture you can do following in your favorite 2D app:

Remove any lighting from the texture. I used cloning-brush to remove the gloss and dodge-tool to re-light the shadows. You should get diffuse like this:

Paint a displacement map. Go into 32-bit depth as you don't want mini-stairs on your mesh from not enough precision.

Always blur your displacement a bit.
Create a glossy mask:

And finally a detail bump map. This will be only noticeable in close ups so otherwise skip it:

Now for the geometry: Simple-subdivide a plane enough-times and apply displacement:

The ceramic tile itself is matte bumpy colored surface with clear glossy smooth coating on top:

The Glossy shader takes gloss mask as color through curves to adjust the glossiness intensity. Do it like this and not with the mix shader slider - you want to keep the diffuse part constant in the shader.
Pick a nice HDR environment or setup some area planes around to give the tiles something to reflect. Here's a render with the reference for comparison:

Thanks Jerryno for your clarifying mini-tutorial!
It's seems that lighting is a very important issue here.
Could you please let me know how you set up your lighting environment? I'm struggling with that.
Thanks in advance!

@Christophe There is only 1 sun lamp and a overall neutral color HDR map. The reflection you see in my render has a cold bluish tone, but the HRD is warm elsewhere to keep it neutral.

@Christophe There is a good answer from Gandalf for lighting here: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/18223/what-is-the-easiest-way-to-have-a-default-good-lighting-setup-for-cycles/18224#18224


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How to use multiple particle types in a particle system?
I created a particle system, duplicating a red sphere. However I want to also have yellow and orange spheres (already have them in another layer) in the same particle system. So I want to know how to use this particle system that I've created to show all three kinds of geometry/objects.

You will first need to select the objects you want to use, and press Ctrl+G to create a group.
Then use the Groups setting under Particle Systems > Render.

First, select the Group render type:

Then select the group you want to use:

Glad to be of help!

If you just want to have different colors you could also achieve this with the cycles materials. A node wiring like this picks randomly a color from a color ramp:

This way the number of particles having a distinct color can be easily controlled by the ramp settings.

Very interesting approach! I could use that in future! The OP was, however, was asking how to use multiple current objects in one particle system.


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How can i activate the alpha on Blender Render?
I already activated the transparency, the alpha, what i'm missing? if i see the texture preview it looks like it doesnt have a background, but when i render it it still appears.
Help please!

@poor They're not using Cycles.

You need to enable it in the Material settings:

Tick the Transparency checkbox and set the Alpha value to 0.
Also be sure to make that the texture Influence affects the Alpha value:

Already added that setting, with the difference that the Specular, Fresnel and Blend are in gray..

Do you have anything affecting the Transparency value (i.e. a texture?)

Hmm, is a simple image texture, with the Transparency value activated on Material options, and alpha activated on the Texture options, also it's shadeless.

Wait i just activated the Alpha on the Diffuse setting on 'Texture' and it worked o.O

Exactly, you need to tell Blender what texture (if any) is affecting the Alpha.


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Render queue, more layers?
I'm using particles to create letters (on Cycles), but there's a little problem: I have 15 separate letters, that are geometry, every single one have two particle system, so with those I have 30 layers already (I didn't have created every single one for now) plus the light layers and another important objects..
The thing is Blender is only able to keep 20 layers but I'll need at least 40 layers, so I can properly put everything on its place. Maybe I can just open two files and it'll be the solution but still there's the problem that I need to render 15 renders (because after that I'll change the duration of each one in After Effects) and 15 more because I need the render with different textures...
So, it's a big problem now, I may be able to solve it with two separate files, but how do I render more than just one item? I mean, can I make a render queue attached to a layer in Blender? If not, I'll just have to manually modify the 15 particles with different speeds and timing...

Can you post a blend with 2 letters to see what you're trying to accomplish? It seems to be me there must be a better way to do this than with so many layers.

You can put each particle effect in it's own scene, things like lights and materials can be used in every scene to share the same settings. You can either use the VSE or the compositor to bring everything together for the final result.
In the VSE, have the background with each part overlaid (blend set to Alpha Over) You can overlap the timing so that a letter starts before the previous one is finished.

You can use the same output with the compositor, notice the lower image input, it has a frame offset of 10 so the first image sequence is showing frame 11 while the second is on frame 2

For the VSE you can setup each scene and add each scene as a VSE strip, for the compositor you will need to render each scene to file then composite together as we don't have frame offsets when adding scene render layers. While you could have each scene with the same frame ranges I expect a slow down if every scene has to render many blank frames.

Can you not assign different materials to the different particle systems (Mat 1 and Mat 2) each with a Pass ID, and then assign an Object ID (Letter A, Letter B, etc) to each geometry mesh, and then do one render and separate everything in Compositing? You could then pipe each combination into a File Output node OR you could render to MultiLayer EXR frame files and handle the layer separations in After Effects.

If that doesn't work, can you post some more descriptive images of your desired solution?

Hmm, to be honest, i don't know how to do that, i have never used Compositing yet :/ so i think there'll be a trouble...but i'll have to learn.

Well, it shouldn't be that difficult. You can create a mask in the compositor based on the material Pass ID. you can also create a mask based on the Object Index ID. You should be able to combine the material mask and the object mask to get the separation you want into a new mask. Then you can mask out the beaty render with that new mask and output to a file node in the compositor. This would give you framesets for each object and with 2 versions for each material (particle system). If I get a chance I could set up an example blend file later.


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How to fade an object evenly into transparency to give it distance look in blender 2.82
I'm trying to achieve this depth/distance look effect, where part of the object that is closest to the camera will be solid but farther the object is from the camera I need it to fade evenly into the distance. I'm going for like a UFO look. I can easily do this effect in 2.79 with the mist setting and render it in transparent but it's different in blender 2.82. What is the best option to achieve this effect in blender 2.82?
UPDATE, I figured out the look I'm going for, here is the image and my nodes setup but my new question is, is there any way of not using the Depth pass because the Depth pass is causing sharp and low resolution edge to my object.

Could you add a picture of an example of what you are trying to achieve ?

I added a picture and a update to my original post.

If it's a still image you could  make the material fade to transparent from the front to the back of the object using the material itself (I realize this would not work if the objects are animated and distance to camera is controlling transparency). Not sure what your use case is.

Thank you, I will look into it and see how well it looks


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How should you go around with geometry for Unity?
I'm confused. Can someone tell me which way is better (1 or 2)?
1.
2.
2nd is after using a limited disolve

There is not an absolute "right" or "wrong" way. It depends on your project needs and teh workflow you are going to follow. What are they?

more optimized, but unwrappable (or easier to unwrap), less shading glitches prefered (dont want to use auto smooth)

Better for what?  The only thing that matters is the outcome.  If either model does everything you want, then either model is the correct one.
You don't need to ask anybody which of two models you have made is better.  Just hit F12.
I will say that there are probably a few issues with these models.  But the issues depend on how you're going to use them.  Are they supposed to be smooth shaded?  Auto-smooth?  Are you going to have UV mapped textures, vertex color?  Are they going to deform?  Are you going to share the models for others to edit, or are they just for animation?  Are they for use in Blender or in a different engine?
If you are using Blender to render, and you are using sharp edges /autosmooth / flat shading, and you are using split vertices for all potentially interpolated values like vertex color and UV, and you are done with the mesh and do not plan to deform it or use it to deform any other mesh, or to use it for any physics, and you're not going to use Catmull-Clark subdivision, (whew I'm out of breath), then there is nothing wrong with either model.  But the second shouldn't be seen as superior to the first model, just adequate.
Because both models have ngons, the biggest difference between the two is that the second has a concave face, which will give you problems with use with some modifiers.
If any of that long list of things I mentioned doesn't apply, then you've got issues with both models.  Use more control loops or practice your topology, avoid ngons.

what if i use a model in a game engine like unity? whats more optimized? having an ngon being converted to a bunch of triangles in that game engine, or converting that ngon to a bunch of quads in blender and then using it in unity?

Converting an ngon in Blender is vastly preferable to letting Unity do it, because then you know what you get, and you can control what you get.  You can easily slap a triangulate modifier on an object to see how Blender will triangulate it for you.  I would recommend doing this as a matter of course for anyone doing game engine work.

Look, I advise the most optimized model. Why slow down the rendering time and get the same result. If this model is for games, the model that has less polygons would be better.


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Why does this plane's UVs distort when there is exactly one Subsurf subdivision level set?

Why does the texture skew when you subdivide the plane once?

If you look carefully the texture is also deformed with 2 subdivisions compared to the original square plane. The original square plane has each or its 4 vertices mapped to 4 corners of the UV space. When you use the subdivision modifier level 1 its adding 4 more vertices to the square plane forming an octagon shape in the 3D viewport. This octagon has all of its vertices still mapped to the outer edges of the UV space (square). This causes the image to be deformed. 2 edges of the octagon are mapped to a single edge of the UV square. Apply the modifier then UV unwrap (map) the mesh again.

Interesting. Coincidentally recently linked this https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/93180/15543 to an answer.  Seeing the subd edges might shed more light.  Nevermind moony has done that.

Each quad face is always made of 2 triangles in 3D softwares. I guess the result you see has to do with the way Blender will triangulate each of the 4 faces it creates when it subdivides.
Here I use a grid as image texture to make it more understandable. On the left, the original object, on the right, subdivided once. Here is how Blender triangulates:

If I select my original object, cut edges the same way to make only triangles, and turn the outline into a circle, I'll have the same result:

It would work better that way:

With a higher subdivision, the problem tends to be less noticeable.


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Why do I get a "can't edit this property from a linked data block" message when trying to edit an appended object?
I'm trying to append a model from one file to the other but every time I try it's acting like it's linked but I cant even move it or scale it.
If I try to I get the message "can't edit this property from a linked data block"
What's going on?

Never mind, found it. Had to go to out-liner and delete the linked data from there, works like a charm now.

Can you explain this further? Having the same issue and I'm not sure what exactly you mean.

Deleting the offending collection and going to File > Clean Up > Purge All will remove the linked data blocks, you can then re append the collection. This happens every time that you link a collection prior to appending it.


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How can I make water follow a path?
How can I make water follow a path?

Have a look at the blender manual here.
You can also simply use SPH particles and move the emitter :

the particle settings can be improved to look more like a fluid but that's the basics.
Here's the Blend file :

Underrated answer. Cool effect, that looks awesome.

How did you make that @chameleonScales ?

Well, download the blend file and you'll see.
But not with 2.8. This is an old post.


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Setting up a rooftile system with controllers
I'd like to make a reusable rooftile system very similar to the one below, but I don't know how you can make those kind of controllers which affect modifiers and rotation (well, I assume that's what it does).

(found it here: http://visperfect.com/en/model?&id=61&cid=50)
Cany anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks!

"The model is ready to use with the Asset managment addon. The model can be used for commercial purposes." And it's only 2,-. Don't you want to support the author who provided you with this nice idea? [The answer is drivers.]

I would, which is why I contacted the site (you can't "just buy" anymore it seems). But what i'm most interested in is learning how to do this myself so i can apply it to a greater variety of custom rooftiles etc.

That's a shame. In that case, some pointers: Create an array modifiers and right click on the Amount input and choose Add Driver. Then in the drivers panel choose your control object as a variables transformation input.

Though I'm not an expert, I tried for fun a (very) simple driver setup that you could try to adapt-
I created two shapes roughly resembling yours above, here shown with two different materials to help visualization.

(Note that I locked all "manual" rotation and location transform for those shapes, because I wished to hide the transform tools when they were selected!)
the top brown cylindrical has an array that allows for X replication (fixed count), and has a driver using the X location of a "controlling" mesh (a blue cube, named cube.001, here hidden in another layer)

the side yellow square shape had two array modifiers, allowing replication (fixed count) on its X and Y local axis, with a driver for each (always to the blue controlling cube, on its X and Z), and also a driver that allows for the rotation on its X, based on the X rotation (limited by constraints) of the blue cube.

You can add those drivers right clicking on the "count" property, and choosing this menu voice:

You'll find (for a selected object) this new driver settings in the "graph" editor, selecting "drivers" mode, instead of the default "f-curve"
Here is the overall setup:

Now, revealing the blue cube (separate layer) allows for "roof tiles" editing: the cube is in  its initial position

grabbing it along its X, allows for the roof X "expansion"

then, grabbing the blue cube down on its Z, expands the roof tiles on their Y direction:

and finally, rotating the blue cube on its X axis allows the roof tile to rotate in the same way, as needed:

here is an animation showing how it works, and how you can reset it using clear location (altG) and clear rotation (altG)

and here is the file I used (just a simple example)

Note: drivers need to automatically run python scripts, so you need to load the file using the "trusted source"

Thanks! I'm gonna give this a good look when I have some time :)


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How do I get blender to leverage all the memory I have?
There are probably so many noob-facets to this question that it's not even funny. Basically I've never fully understood memory usage, despite being a professional digital artist for many years.
In this case, I'm trying to make sure that Blender is using as much memory as I can give it. My computer has an absurdly large amount of RAM, well over 64 gigs. I've gotten the impression that this is "overkill", but I definitely find Blender slowing down when I do high-poly sculpting, or when I apply complex modifiers.
I've set the Memory Cache Limit to the maximum, 32768 mb, but I'm wondering if there's some other obvious thing I should be doing to leverage the massive amount of memory that I have available. Or maybe the things I'm trying to do are more dependent on the CPU or other factors? I'm running Windows 10, if that matters, and I've got a 64-bit version of Blender.

What are the specs on your graphics card? If it doesn't have enough memory, it won't be able to update the screen fast enough to avoid lagging.

Also memory is not the only meter for performance of your computer, there are other components responsible, namely the graphics card (for drawing and screen updates) like Scott mentioned, and the processor speed. For sculpting the processor is likely to be the larger bottleneck. There are also software limitations and inefficiencies to consider, no matter how fast your computer may be, the software can only go as fast as the programmers are able code it to.


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Cycles Planet - Trouble with Atmosphere
I've been trying to add some kind of atmosphere to a planet I'm making with Cycles in Blender for a few hours now and every time, I get the same problem. The atmosphere goes beyond the boundary where the sun (Light) I'm using goes. I'm also trying to figure this out without using the shadow terminator. Thank you for your help!
Here are a few images : Planet Render, Atmosphere Material and Full Scene.

In reality, the atmosphere would be a different sphere than the surface of the planet. Try one with no shaders for the surface and  volume scattering and some volume absorption.

Try using the search box at the top of the page for similar questions. This topic has been asked and answered many times over: https://blender.stackexchange.com/search?q=atmosphere and https://blender.stackexchange.com/search?q=planet+atmosphere and https://blender.stackexchange.com/search?q=planet+volume

Related : https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/92327/29586


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3D 360 VR Image seems off
Im working on an 3d archiviz project but ran into some issus.
I tried to render a 3d 360 image to view it on the ocuclus quest.
The bathroom is finished (Blender 2.9) and I set the camera with this settings.
Als soon as I import it into 3D vista and view it on the Quest the scale seems off, especially on the bottom and top.
It doesnt look like the real scale. Here is the blend and some rendered images.
Hope someone could tell me how to fix this.
Thanks in advance

I've never actually done VR stuff before, but I would think that you would need quite a bit more than two spherical images to get the stereoscopic effect to look right since your head can be rotated to any orientation. With only two cameras, the views would only be correctly aligned when looking straight ahead or straight back.

Linking a couple of q&a that might helve you solve it. https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/52231/rendering-a-stereoscopic-image-in-blender-2-77 https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/46132/any-way-to-create-a-360-stereoscopic-video-for-playback-in-vr


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Texture Exporting Problem
I have the Problem, that when I export my project as Fbx, the Textures don't come with it. I tried changing the Method used to reference paths to copy and activate embed Textures but it didn't work. I also tried to unpack all into files but nothing. Any suggestions?

1. Do you have any procedural textures (nodes)?
If so, bake them to image textures. Lot's of stuff about baking on YouTube.
2. What is your aim with exporting it?
Is there some way of importing those textures into where ever you want the model?
If so, the UV's should be there whether or not the textures are.
3. Are there any other formats that you could use?
4. Relative paths?
Have you tried moving your textures into the same folder as your blender file, but not packing it all into the blend file?
5. And of course restarting Blender.


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My collision object eats my cloth simulation
Some of my collision objects are literally eating up my cloth simulation and yet some of them aren't. Any idea on why this is happening? Thanks in advance.

did you bake?..

Apply all scales and check your normals.

Baking it seemed to have no effect, but applying scales and overlooking my normals helped only to a certain degree as the issue still persists the pipe itself is no longer doing it but curved objects seemed to have this effect where they let the cloth trough and then hold the cloth behind them


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Best way to color only the faces that are not debossed
I apologize if this is a simple question but for the life of me I cannot figure the best way to color this "warning label" I am working with a .wrl file so I just have reference to work with no materials. I know I could UV map it but don't have the exact sticker or label either. I figured there might be a way to select all of the faces that are the plate and non of the deeper faces that are inside the letters then color those faces. I'm sure someone has a much better idea than myself.
Thank you for any help you can provide!

If you want something quick and dirty, you could create a mask based on the axis co-ordinates of the faces of your "lettering" (I used X axis in my example). An unfortunate side effect, however, is that it leaves a black stripe around the edge of the object at the same X-position:

If instead, you want to select the letter faces and assign them a different material (ie: you just need a quick way to select all the faces at a certain "depth"), select one of the faces at that depth and then select > similar > co-planar. You can then assign a different material to the selected faces:

Thank you! I ended up doing something much less sophisticated and selecting the faces from top down view in wire mode. It worked for the timeline I had. Thank you for your help, I'll definitely use your technique in the future!


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Don't see the cube under layout instead i see key frames. How can i get back the layout screen in 2.9
This is my 3rd day in Blender 2.9. When I go to the blender Layout tab I see the keyframes. When I tried to pull it down by holding the corner I get more layers of keyframes. How do I get back to the default screen that shows the cube? Here is the image.

Click on the little clock icon in the top left corner of Blender's window (arrowed below).

That will bring up the window selector and you can click on 3D Viewport to bring back your editing window:

Awesome thank you @John Eason


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blender 2.91.2 bevel node doesn't work properly
bevel node doesn't work properly in rendered mode with cycles, it darken the edges rather than soften it

You need to lower the radius in the bevel node.
If your cube is 2 units wide and the bevel radius is 1 m, it means the normals are interpolated right to the middle of each face, generating artifacts. Try the default (0.05).
Examples of the effect of the radius field :


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Is there a way to make edited Studio Lights the default setting in Blender 3.0?
I'm in the process of transitioning from Blender 2.79 to Blender 3.0, and I've been messing with the Studio Lights (Preferences > Lights > Studio Lights) and made it as close to 2.79 as I possibly could. The problem is, every time I relaunch Blender 3.0, my changes are disabled, and I have to reenable them every launch. So, is there a way to make my changes permanent? Whether it's overriding the default files or just making it stay enabled, I'm all ears. Thank you in advance!

Set everything up to your liking and then use File > Defaults > Save Startup File. On reflection they should have been saved automatically if you have Automatically save Preferences checked under the bottom-left hamburger icon on the Preferences dialog.


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Using an object/curve as a stencil or mask of sorts for texture paint
I'm currently trying to retexture a Spider-Man model I made, and the webbing on his suit are proving to be difficult. I modeled them first, and have been trying to use different methods of baking for them, none of which have really come out great. So now, I'm resorting to trying out texture paint, and simply tracing the webs isn't quite working out all that well. So I'm curious, is there any way I could use his 3D modeled webs as a mask of sorts while texture painting onto the suit model? Like, a way I could be in texture paint mode on the suit model, and if my brush went over a part of the webbing's model, it wouldn't paint onto the suit. Sorry if I didn't explain that quite right, thanks in advance!

You could bake an ambient occlusion pass to a texture that would give you black where the web intersects or touches the suit mesh.


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Blender error "exception_access_violation"
System: Windows 64-bit, 32gb RAM, Intel Core i7-9700 CPU, NVIDIA Quadro K2000 graphics card
Latest Blender doesn't open, it just gives the error message "EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION" I really have no idea what's going on.
I tried downgrading to 2.7 and even 2.0 but those didn't work either. I also tried the Steam version, and each time made sure there was only 1 version installed at a time.

Is it just me or are there a lot of similar questions like this all of a sudden... is there some update going around messing with peoples blender?

Hello, which version of windows are you using ?

I heard updating your driver might be a quick fix.


text:
Hooks, Events, Handlers, Listeners in 2.8?
I wanted to ask how about the current Blender 2.82.7 in 2020 and the status for the long running questions in have experienced and seen often in my brief explorations of Blender coding in the past about the state of affairs regarding Hooks, Events, Handlers, Listeners, or something similar in the API to allow proper unlimited access to everything going on in an efficient way (meaning not just timers polling endlessly etc.).
Let's say you want to know when the "Sculpting Mode" is switched 'on' in any window, so you can call a function to make sure you have Dyntopo enabled. [There would also be less direct things to inject a hook into like the switching to the Sculpting window tab, which you would also have to do since that window would already be in Sculpting Mode, but switching to another window like Modeling forces back to Edit mode and breaks the Dyntopo Mode.]
Of course you don't want to be prompted about it and so this function (below) you can track down in the Info Viewer using the UI, alas it is maybe not the actual command that would be best.
bpy.ops.sculpt.dynamic_topology_toggle()

Sometimes I see a message there
Dynamic Topology found: face data, disabled
which I suppose is another story.
Anyway if you call the command in a Console you do not get prompted (asked via a popup) to confirm so that's good.
Anyway in this scenario you want to call that function when Sculpting Mode is switched to (or a 3DViewer in that mode is made active).
I have gotten a bit lost looking again in 2020 at the newer 2.8(?) API
Although maybe if you monitored a property change of a 3DViewer AreaSpace becoming active that might be the time to call it (if it is in Sculpting mode?) so that is where you would want to put your 'Hook' or in this case have a custom python script function (aka Handler) is to be called to itself call the dynamic_topology_toggle function 'on' but of course you really want to know what the actual property is and set it to True (or toggle based on it's value/state.
https://docs.blender.org/api/blender2.8/bpy.types.AreaSpaces.html#bpy.types.AreaSpaces.active
I suppose the question can be answered in anyway you deem related but ideally the example helps understand what I fear is still missing proper attention in the Current Blender API.
Right so again the questions this example boils down to are can you monitor a system property like Dyntopo and/or put a hook/handler into the API like active window did change or something similar yet?

I believe you're looking for the currently undocumented msgbus. I don't really understand your criticism regarding "types". What exactly doesn't work as expected and can you elaborate what the "fundamental logic in coding issue" is supposed to be? Checking equality doesn't require getters/setters and since Blender is implemented in C and C++ it uses the concepts that these languages offer. Also keep in mind that you're just working with the Python API that abstracts a lot of things that are happening behind the scenes.

If you want to know how exactly an operator works (e.g. what other functions it calls) you will have to look at the source code. The Info area is not meant to display the entire call stack. There are some API functions that allow to set the state directly instead of toggling.The functions that only allow toggling can be sometimes be annoying, but there are usually ways to infer the current state. For dynamic_topology_toggle take a look at this answer.

Please note that StackExchange is a Q&A website, not a forum. Other websites, such as blenderartists.org, should be used for an open-ended discussion. For the future please limit yourself to one question at a time.

bpy.msgbus is not documented but only three functions and the doc can be easily obtained from the Python console (@RobertGützkow).

@lemon I know. The source code can be found here. However, unless you know you're looking for msgbus, it's not that easy to find.

Thanks for the feedback. Robert's comments I found useful and followed up at the link with a similar question. Still I wonder is there a proper place for those kinds of Event Handlers yet? 'Window' has become active event and a View3D's property changed to 'Sculpt Mode' to avoid timers firing endlessly. 'msgbus' needs docs to followup on and finding what the actual properties are that are effected by the toogle functions. Unfortunately bpy.ops.sculpt.sculptmode_toggle() is also not a property like bpy.ops.sculpt.dynamic_topology_toggle() so doing property change listeners is extra challenging.

Hunting around the source I found this https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/B/browse/master/source/blender/blenkernel/intern/crazyspace.c$388 so the Object has a mode OB_MODE_SCULPT meaning you can't watch for this for the window anyway I guess?

Next I started looking for some kind of active Window event here https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/B/browse/master/source/blender/blenkernel/intern/lib_query.c$1211 but it seemed way off target (and revoked my thoughts and concerns about type issues) and noticed comments like "this is bad and needs to be changed" etc. continuing this discussion https://devtalk.blender.org/t/is-there-any-way-to-detect-an-active-modal-operation/7184/4 also shows deep issues and furthers my concerns while extending some understanding of the modal loop.

Anyway it leads to this link https://blenderartists.org/t/detect-if-modal-operator-is-running/1204971/2 and talk about 2.83 (currently I am looking at 2.82.7) and I was noticing "workspace_hook" in there too?!


text:
bone heat weighting: failed to find solution for one or more bones error message
Here it goes again, the rigging error. I have a model that has a mirror modifier already applied and a subsurface and displace modifier (not applied) in my model. So when I try to parent my model to my armature it gets the bone heat error message, but before I applied the mirror modifier it worked, although the bones only work on the left side and the right side didn't work at all.
Solutions I have tried:

Remove doubles (doesn't work)
Recalculate (doesn't work either)
Remove all modifiers (no luck)
Place the root bone at the center of the model (still get the error)
Apply the subsurface modifier and parent them (no result)
Apply the decimate planar modifier (this works, but the decimate modifier destroys my seam marked on my model, which causes my displace modifier to not function well because I baked my displace map with another model that has a multiresolution level of four).

blender file:
I have the unapplied mirror modifier model in layer 3 and applied mirror modifier model in layer 1.

Words like topology error (and the like) don't mean a lot to me - if at all (I don't need the stress and headaches). For me, I do a lot of saving (my current project is at 50). When I got this error, I went back to a previously saved file and tried it there; if I got that error again I go back further until it works - once I find that file I delete the higher numbered ones and go from there. In a review of Mastering Blender, I named it Being Told How the Clock Works When All You Wanted Was the Time. At some point a user like myself just wants to accomplish a certain project without enduring a

Your trouble shooting is pretty good already. Other useful steps for the future are:

Append the armature datablock and the mesh datablock into a new file. Then create new armature and mesh object and select (link) the appended datablocks. Try it with these clean objects again.
Remove all vertices groups. (There was a group left called "group".)
Remove the UV data.
Remove the constraints on the armature.

None of these get us any further in your case.I also tried to reproduce the problem in a controled environment and failed.
Since it works with the decimate modifier applied, we know it must be a topology error.
As batFINGER suggested you can find non manifold geometry with Select Non Manifold operation (Ctrl+AltShift+M). This will select the the non manifold geometry.
There is non manifold geometry in the tip of the tail.
Most of it doesn't cause any errors though except two vertices.
As you can see in the image, there are to vertices which are connected to overlapping faces. Delete the vertices and Parent > Armature Deform with automatic weights will work.
(Click to enlarge.)

what causes the non manifold vertices to happen ? is that my mirror modifier ? and if there're two vertices connected to overlapping faces , then the remove doubles operation should have worked

Remove doubles only removes vertices with the same location. Non manifold edges / faces are something different http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/7910/what-is-non-manifold-geometry. Removing the UV data would have simply been a test to narrow down the cause of the problem, after this big step we would have analyzed different parts of the UV or things connected to it. Appending is described here https://www.blender.org/manual/de/data_system/linked_libraries.html. If this is still unclear, I guess you should ask a new question, since that would transcend this question.

From my experience, the following steps solved all my armature heat problems I had so far (considering one mesh, where all vertices and edges form exactly one connected graph):

Remove doubles
Recalculate normals
Remove all modifiers from the object
reset pose from the armature, if any
decimate mesh using planar
decimate mesh using un subdivision

The last 2 points are the best ways to overcome the problem.
If none of it works, just increase degrees on the decimate up to point where armature deform will succeed.
Then you can find optimal decimation to lose as less data as possible. However, if you sculpt it, later on, dealing with decimated topo from planar decimation is not such a big deal.


text:
Cycles to external renderer
I have a model in Cycles, I am trying to use Mitsuba Renderer and just about everything goes wrong so far. I can give more precise problems I get, but there are just so many of them. Does it work out-of-the-box for you or is there some typical pipeline I should follow? Or do you just create all materials and things in the another renderer and never use the conversion?
I also tried LuxRenderer, but it says it couldn't load pylux and pyluxcore. It still works somehow, but "Convert Cycles Scene" also spits out a load of warning and errors. So it doesn't look like it is doing to work unless I redefine just about everything in my scene.

@Supahfly, I installed a dev build now and it imports pylux and pycore. However, I get black background instead of enviroment, no bump mapping, no light (even though I have a sun lamp), a crash exporting the material (ERROR: Export aborted: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'bl_idname') and loads of Warnings like WARNING: Unsupported node type LIGHT_PATH, RBG, MATH, MIX_RGB and BRIGHTCONTRAST. Is this situation normal? Do you them spend time tuning all of this in Lux, creating new materials, adding new lamps, etc or does it just work?

Since there are no further answers: no, this doesn't work out of the box. Converter misses many nodes and some Nodes like "Light Path" are not possible to keep, if you want to use bidirectional path tracing. Node editor in Lux shows a warning sign near the nodes which were not correctly converted. To keep track of the conversion, one should run Blender in Terminal, as errors and warnings will be printed there.
Apart from that, many things can go wrong. The textures packed in .blend won't be loaded, multiple render layers are likely to be a problem.

It would be great if you could report your issues in the LuxRender forum so we can fix them. Some of them sound like bugs, packed textures should work for example.
The warning sign in the node editor is not related to Cycles scene conversion, but to the Lux API you are using. The converter creates nodetrees for the new LuxCore API, and they are not always compatible with the old Classic API.
See more about this here.


text:
Height map to cube
I have an textured object that looks approximately like this.

It is one-sided, like  a height map. I want to make sort of a cube out of it.  And I want to keep the texture.
How could I do it?
I tried to add Boolean Modifier, and got "didn't manage to link up hole!" error, I think I am doing something wrong.
EDIT:
I think the easiest way to explain it:I want this sort of thing to seat on top of the cube. But if I just put it on top there will be holes at the sides.

I don't get it. Can't you make a Cube, UV unwrap it and apply this texure on it?

It's not clear exactly what you are asking. Is your textured object a plane, and you want to convert it to a modeled relief? If so, one approach would be to extrude the four corners of your plane to the back, and create the back face.

Can you show a print screen of what you currently have?

@brasshat, no, no, my object is not a plane, it is already a height map, or probably it is more common to call it relief.   OK, I think I could choose 4 corners and extrude. Although they don't lie on a plane, because they have different height.  But how do I close the sides?

@LukeD it is because I have a height map, not a plane. or a landscape, a relief. I'm not sure how 3D modeling community calls it.

Could you provide blend file? It's hard to understand for me what is your goal.

@LukeD I can't really, because it is not my model. But I added an image, maybe it is more clear now what I mean?

Put that "thing" on top of the cube, select the border loop, and bridge it with top loop of the cube ?

@MrZak yes, that's essentially what I want to do! The problem is, I also I need to crop it, just like one would crop the image. I also tried to select the border, but it is  not trivial, because mesh is very irregular. So it is because of this two things, that I thought boolean might solve it

@MrZak, to be precise, I struggle to select the border, because I can't get the damn thing into orthogonal view. I tried to do it (see my previous post on which you also commented), but I think orientation computed just on one face was't good enough for the whole mesh.

In general, you don't need to have thing aligned in ortographic view to select border loop; you can use selection tools like Alt with clicking (loops) or Ctrl with click (shortest path). Some complex cases can of course make this task tedious; you could mix it with hiding part of mesh etc.

@MrZak OK, so I can select shortest path between vertices? Amazing, thanks a lot!  But how would you go around cropping then? because I thought that cube will do the thing.

My favourite approach to this is using Knife project. It is a little involved, but so are the other methods. Let's say we have this piece of art here to 'cubify':

Start off with adding a plane underneath:

In Top view, scale this plane so it is just inside the geometry you want to cubify:

Now in Object Mode, select the plane, and Shift select the object you want to cut. Now tab into Edit Mode. Select all polygons using A and execute the Knife Project function. It will cut your selection with the other object you had selected before you went into Edit Mode (the plane):

the result is:

invert the selection using Ctrl + I:

Now delete these faces to get this result:

If you check this in Textured View, you'll see the textures are still intact. Next, select all faces again, and run the Select Boundary Loop operator from the menu:

Extrude this loop downwards, and set the 3D cursor as the Pivot Center as the next step:

Scale this down on the Z-Axis by activating S, then type in 0 and hit Enter. You should see this:

To close the hole in a reasonable fashion, you can either hit F if you have the F2 Addon enabled, or use Grid Fill alternatively. To use Grid Fill, select two opposite sides of the open square first:

Now hit Spacebar, and search for Grid Fill. After Execution, you should have a closed volume:

What could be the reason that only a small subset of faces gets selected after knife project? I used orthoview.

@Noidea It uses the view Vector, but you might be looking down the model with 'Perspective' turned on. Make sure you are in 'Orthographic' mode, hit NumPad 5 to toggle between the two. On one of my screenshots it ready 'Top Ortho', that's what it should be.

Yes, strange... I am trying it in ortho mode. Using boundary loop I also get all sharp edges on the surface selected. I expected only the outer edges will be selected. Do you have an idea why this happens?

Actually not even sharp, just any edge with angle > 0 between faces.

@Noidea the only explanation for that would be that the mesh on the inside contains open areas, i.e. vertices which are not merged. In other words, holes. It depends on the mesh if it is simpler to box-deselect the inner region, or alternatively use shortest path select (was mentioned in comments before)

@Noidea Try 'remove doubles' as well, maybe the mesh isn't merged together at all?

Thanks a lot. It had plenty of doubles! I have far fewer edges considered as the boundary now, but many are still there, mostly of one orientation. And knife project now works much better, picking up a lot more faces. But I still have about 15 holes in the knife project selection. This mesh is nuts. Maybe I wasn't able to delete all duplicates?

You can Try to raise The threshold for removing doubles. Press F6 right after running The operator, then enter a higher tolerance value. Be careful not to raise it too far

Oh, that's useful. I was able to delete more. I raised the threshold quite high in the end, so the mesh started to collapse badly, but many edges are still boundary! I don't see visually, how they can be as far from each other as the threshold I used.

Ok, I also had non-manifold geometry, this was causing it.  Thanks again.


text:
Reflection artifacts when rendering
Sometimes I get these weird white reflections, that don't look real at all. I have a white sunlamp in the scene. Is there something I can do to stop this?

EDIT:
10x smaller sunlamp, added glare (perfect ad for a washing up liquid).

Try changing the emit color of the lamp and see if the reflection changes as well. This would help narrow down the problem at lease.

@JoshSilveous  yes, when I change it to green they are green.

Try Selecting the light object, then navigating to the object panel. Under that, find "Ray visibility". Under that, deselect the "Camera" box. In theory, this should cause the light to render but not the light source itself. I would provide images but I am not currently at my workstation.

@JoshSilveous "Camera" ray visibility had no effect. It disappears when I  switched off "Glossy" ray, but of course so do all other glossy reflection of this light, e.g. the one in the middle at the bottom of the picture.

The only thing I can think of currently is moving the light source around until it is out of the reflection, but that does have consequences. Another thing you can do, if you are only trying to render a single frame, is maybe use Photoshop to remove the reflection, or have someone do it for you (I'd be willing to try if you wanted to go at it that way) Also, upload your .BLEND file so we can experiment with it. This website provides an easy and permanent way to upload files: http://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/

@JoshSilveous thanks for the offer! I have an animation. So this is basically a "normal" behaviour?

Which render engine are you using?

@Dontwalk I use cycles

@Noidea You might try using the Light Path Node (in the input drop down) and adjusting "is Reflection Length" with your lamp. Sorry I don't have much experience with this node to guide you further. Generally you want some reflections in glass. If you lit your scene with an HDRi instead you would yield much more realistic/flattering results.

@Noidea yes it is normal behavior for the engine, though I think it would look better if the white spots were blurred (feathered) rather than sharp. Try increasing the roughness panel on the material you used for the glass.

@Dontwalk, thanks, I will try to do something with it.. I have many reflections of the glass, but this is the area where the sky reflects.

@Noidea Here is a link to some free "Garage" like HDRi's that might work really well http://www.mrbluesummers.com/category/downloads/downloads-textures-materials and one of many tutorials out there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4IN4V1SM-A

That is the reflection of the sun lamp.  The size is related to the size property of the lamp.  If you change it to 0, it will disappear.  You will also have perfectly crisp shadows.
The sun lamp reflection looks unnatural because cycles produces a perfect reflection, instead of the soft edged sun were used to seeing because of the atmosphere.  And there is no bloom that happens in your eyes or in cameras to bright objects.  More info
So instead, You can add the bloom as a post process.
Or, use HDR an illumination map instead of a sun lamp.
Or, on the lamp, uncheck the box for "Multiple Importance".  If the glossy shaders have no roughness, or set to "Sharp", the glint with disappear...
More info on multiple importance: 1 2

Thanks, so as far as I see every solution to these problem has its downsides, e.g. unchecking multiple importance leads to noisy render. I'll try the composer.

Also, your sun reflection seems very large, You may also consider also reducing the size... perhaps from the default .1 to .01. if not lower...  as well as adding a bloom.  But again, the point is that cycle's sun does not work like the sun we're used to.   I'd look into HDRI.

yes, I had 0.1 sun, reduced it and the highlight is much smaller now. HDR is good, but I find it hard to get the sun in the right direction. And I  need to show some different background, because rotated HDR looks weird.


text:
Non-emitting background in cycles
How can one set up a non-emitting environment map in cycles? If I set strength to 0, it is black. I tried doing something with Light Path node, but didn't succeed so far.

You can disable the 'diffuse' ray visibility in the world panel.

The above answer is way more complicated than it needs to be, just use compositing.
Just in render settings set Film to transparent and Color Management > View Transform to standard
Then in the compositing tab, use nodes and put an "Alpha Over" node between the two default nodes.
This video explains it perfectly: https://youtu.be/aegiN7XeLow?t=50


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Mirror object wrt. certain face
I want to mirror object using it's face as a mirroring plane. For the example, I want to use the selected face on the cube as a mirror plane.

I created a custom transform orientation using that face, but is not the one which gets used by mirror modifier. I also positioned a 3D cursor at that face and then transformed origin to it, but then rotation is wrong (from local axis). I also see I can set mirror object, but my face is not an object. I added an empty, but it's orientation is not aligned to the face either.
I am out of ideas now. I think best way is to set local axis to that custom transform. I will be happy to do it anyway, because local axis are completely off and the object is hard to work with.
EDIT:
Result using the method suggested by MrZak and lemon:

You can separate that face into separate object and use that in the Mirror mod. You can align empty with the normal of that face using snapping and use empty with modifier. Also you could provide screenshot of the problem for clarifying.

@MrZak  Thanks! I have a feeling it is now the end of it, I need to somehow attach that empty to the face so that it doesn't get lost when I rotate my object, am I right? I also added a picture, but it is not very exciting.

In complement to @MrZak answer, yes, you can parent the empty to your mesh so that it stays "stuck" to the wanted face. But 2 things : this face is not necessarily plane (that can be 2 tris) and the empty wont follow if you change the mesh (the face) in edit mode

@lemon, thanks, this is important information.  I added empty, in the snap tool I chose "Align rotation with the snapping target",  which worked, but location doesn't snap. I chose "Face/Closest" in the settings.

What do you mean by "doesn't snap" ?

@lemon, well I though "snap" means it will jump onto that face once I move the empty close enough. Is that not the case?

Yes it is the case. In your situation, you have to setup three things : snapping (the little magnet button), snap to face (closest or center), align rotation with snapping target

@lemon, yeah, that's what I do... that's weird,  it now snaps to new objects I added, but not to this one, and still only to a vertex or an edge, but never to a face.

@lemon ok, no, it works:) just the snapping circle is not displayed and the empty center has to stay on the surface in the viewport.

I found a workflow for this task in Blender 2.79 that does not involve any snapping or creating empties:

Make sure your "Transformation Orientation" is set to "Normal" (usually on the toolbar just below the 3D view, next to the translate/rotate/scale buttons). Also make sure your "Pivot Center" (the selector just to the left of these same buttons) is set to "Active Element."
In 3D view object mode, select the object you want to mirror.
Assuming you want to end up with the original and the mirrored copy, as shown in the question's screenshots, duplicate the object (e.g., Shift-D then return). You can skip this step to just flip the object through a face, not leaving behind the original.
With the duplicated object still selected, enter Mesh Mode (Tab).
Select the face through which you want to mirror.
Now we want to select that whole mesh, leaving that face as the active face. Hitting "A" twice should accomplish this.
Now it is time to mirror. We need to mirror in the local z-axis, set by the normal orientation of the active face. What works for me is to hit "Control-M" for mirror, followed by Space (don't know why that's needed). Then in the panel to the left, a bunch of Mirror options come up, and I click on Z.
Note that the newly mirrored copy will have its normals pointing in the opposite directions of the original. If you want them pointing in the same directions, now is a good point at which to flip them. (For projects in which I am doing a lot of reflecting through faces, I bind the "Flip Normals" Mesh action to a key for this.)

That's it, you should now have your mesh reflected through the selected face; you can Tab back to object mode and repeat the process if you want to reflect again through another face.

Just had occasion to use this process again in Blender 3.4.1. Essentially the same workflow still works well, although I found for step 6 that simply executing "Select All" (once) left the face selected in step 5 as the active face; and that executing "Interactive Mirror", hitting "Z", and then the Enter key worked well for step 7.


text:
pose.bones.matrix does not update after frame change via script
I write an exporter to retrieve the pose bone matrix for every frame.
The concept looks like this, the code is called from an exporter class via an operation button in the tool shelf:
for action in actions:
    for frame in range(action.frame_range[1]):
        bpy.context.scene.frame_set(frame)
        context.scene.update()

        for poseBone in armature.pose.bones:
            exportMatrix = poseBone.matrix

However, the exported poseBone.matrix values all have the same values from one frame.
I checked in the pyhton console if the values change when i manually change the current frame and they do.
What am I missing to update the pose bone matrix after a frame change?

you're not setting the armature's active action to "action", and "context.scene.update" should probably be "bpy.context.scene.update"

To summerize, I needed to perform these changes:
for action in bpy.data.actions:
    bpy.context.object.animation_data.action = action # sets active action
    for frame in range(numberOfFrames):
        bpy.context.scene.frame_set(frame)
        bpy.context.scene.update()
        for bone in bpy.context.object.data.bones: # instead of armature.pose.bones
            poseBone = armature.pose.bones[bone.name]

Update on the accepted answer for Blender 3+ you would have to go
...
bpy.context.scene.frame_set(frame)
bpy.context.view_layer.update()
...

since bpy.context.scene.update() was removed.
More on the change on this post.


text:
Video Sequence Editor: playback lag after stripchange
I got some footage from a band who played playback on a stage for a music video. Now I am putting it all together in VSE with the audiofile (studio recording) they used for playback.
My machine is usually quite capable of handling FullHD video (GTX 970, 32 GB Ram, i7 4790K), but this time the video playback during editing starts to lag as hell when the current frame enters a new strip. That's quite annoying, since these transitions are the parts I am most interested in.
Here an example - to the left of the green marker: smooth 25 FPS playback. Once entering the second stip - image stops for more than 1 second and continues stuttering (not very helpful) playback afterwards. It basically skips the middle strip completely during playback.

Some notes, which may help encircle the problem:

I remember a "Prefetch Frames" setting, which should preload a certain number of frames into memory. For some reason, this has vanished in 2.79.
The Memory Cache Limit in User Preferences -> System is set to 16000, so I don't expect this to be a problem.
I guessed that blender is trying to load something from harddisk - but when I look at the Windows Resource Monitor and filter for "blender.exe", it shows no hard disk activities.
The files I am working with are quite long (4-5 Min), and I only am interested in sub-sequences in the second half. Maybe this is some codec-video seeking issue!?
Speaking of codecs: I have files with .mov and .mp4 endings. According to the tool MediaInfo, the .mov is a MPEG-4 (Quicktime) Container with an AVC (High@L4.1)(CABAC/2 Ref Frames) video stream and the .mp4 files are MPEG-4 (Base Media) containers with AVC (High@L5.1)(CABAC/16 Ref Frames) video streams.
I am using soft cuts (K and not shift-K).
In the movie clip editor, there is a purple stipe at the bottom of the screen, which shows how much frames are loaded already. At least I understood it like that. Example below. Probably this is what's happening in the VSE in my case - not loaded frames. But there is no similar visual feedback for the user in the VSE. Right?!

Any suggestions to ensure smooth playback WITHOUT using proxies are highly appreciated. I would like to avoid the overhead of generating temporary files or re-converting the footage to other codecs.

Encode your video files with post-production codec.
First thing you should look at is what a video codec you use. Every codec has a different use. In fact, most codecs that compress the video stream are only for linear playback.
So when you try to use codec what designed just for playing in videoplayer, it can be slow in non-linear playback. If you need fast workflow, use a special post-production codec. In blender good variant is a Avid DNxHD codec. Also you can try Apple ProRes
Unlike other programs, in the blender you must process the source material  manually (if necessary). If you use another application, you will see, that most other programs will re-encode the video before adding it to the editing line. In this there are pluses and minuses, but this is so.
Therefore, you still need to transcode the video, but next time you will encode into the right format. If you use files, that are not optimized to work in the video editor, there are no ways to make the workflow fast.

Thanks for your feedback. But well, I had like 30 GB of footage and no choice of the codec. I had to scale down some 4K footage to FullHD before starting to edit, this took 5 to 6 hours. Passing the whole thing through whatever converter is no option for me, this would take a whole day I guess.

Thanks for the hint. Frame dropping is no option, I want to see every single frame in sync with the audio - that's crucial. I always enjoyed the lightweight style of the VSE. Most of the time I just do simple cuts, transitions and some audio synching with the drawform visualisation. As a hobbyist, that has been totally fine so far.
However, I will certainly take a look at Resolve! Looks top-notch.

If you use another application, you will see, that most other programs will re-encode the video before adding it to the editing line. Therefore, you still need to transcode the video, but next time you will encode into the right format

This is pretty much what the proxy tool is for, yes its re-encoding but at least its guaranteed to play right.


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Can I measure the UI font size with Python in order split text into multiple lines?
Is there any way to get the size of UI text, such as when using layout.label(text="message")?
I'm trying to create a simple message box popup that displays variable text, but the string is cut in the usual Blender way: "start...end". Which is really cool - its great for condensing UI controls into small spaces. But I'm just wanting to break the lines of text to fit into the box space.
There is a similar question here:
Wrap text within a panel but no answers other than hard-coding the font size. And that is my primary question - how to obtain the text or font size? Or how to size the window around it?
I would really like to avoid hard-coding the glyph/text size. I'm assuming Blender does not use exactly the same font size on every display size? And there are also options for the user to set a different font for the interface. So guessing the size would break down pretty easily.
How is making a textbox usually done? Do we have to manually insert line breaks at every so many characters based on the window size? It's hard to imagine Blender implementing such a cool text condensing feature and then not including a simple one like text wrap? Maybe there is some other label() like function?
If not, has anyone managed to write your own text wrap type function that is reliable across different displays and user settings?

Possible duplicate of Wrap text within a panel

I found that after posting. It's useful, but he's hard-coding the glyph size to 9 pixels. This seems like a really bad idea. Especially these days, where a screen twice as small can have twice as many pixels.

I understand that may not be the answer you want, but as far as I understand that is still the best solution. Also related: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/16197/ui-text-box-with-multiple-lines

Apparently, 5 years ago, even tool-tips didn't auto-wrap. Glad that's over. Hopefully someone out there knows some clever way to get the size of text. Personally, I don't think hard coding the text size is reliable enough to be a solution.

In that case I would suggest editing the question to move away from the 'message box' topic and focus more closely on the 'font size' topic. I appreciate you do mention this on the first line, but I think the changing of the title and the focusing on the information you added as an edit would help.

I can do that. I used that title because I assumed most add-on developers would want a decent message box setup to show the user variable-width text messages. I was wondering how it is usually done. But there are other answers that would work for me. For example, if someone knows how to auto-size the window itself, the text could be roughly broken up with a function, then the window sized to fit around it.

That's true, it's just important to focus the question on what you're actually asking. If you want the general answers on how to create a message box, then I think this is a duplicate, if you want more specific answers on font size, then focus on that.

A solution to that post would have likely resolved my problem. If that makes it a duplicate, then it is. But it doesn't look like there actually is a solution. Or at least not an easy or obvious one. It seems strange to leave this type of feature out, given how dynamic and flexible Blender's UI system is at adapting to resizing. I guess it's something that isn't needed all that often. I might try to find the source code that deals with tool-tips to see if I can figure out anything useful.


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Add-On Dev: Is there a way to detect when my panel is open?
Is there a way to execute code when the side panel of my add-on is expanded and collapsed? Or any way to detect changes in visibility of the body of the side panel?
I would like to use a modal operator to catch user events, but I don't want it to run continuously unless the user is actively managing the scene with my add-on. Would there be a way to only run a modal operator while my side panel is visible?