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White version of a product visualisation loosing reflections

I'm working on a visualisation of a black and a white object. Everything looks fine when the product is black. But the closer I come to white the more flat the product appears and the reflections seem to disappear.
I could increase the specular- or metallic-value for the white object to bring back the reflections but that doesn't make sense because it's not a different material compared to the black object. It's just an other color.
Or I could render out a glossy-pass and compose it over my original rendering but this deserves extra work especially with more renderings.
Also I could create another HDRI with increased lights for the white object. But this is extra work again and makes it impossible to have both objects in the scene when they only look good with one certain HDRI.
What I aim for is a consistent look for the black and the white object where I only have to change the color and no other value of the material. I don't understand why it's not working as expected.

Thanks for the helpful links and explanations. I have the real objects in front of me. I can indeed shoot a photo and see the reflections of both objects in a well-balanced way. Because they share the same environment and material, just the color is different. https://i.imgur.com/EP8QNWa.jpg As you can see, the reflection of the white object is still visible and not as flat as my digital recreation. But if you say that fiddling the materials eventhough it's just another color is normal, than I have to deal with it.

White non-metallic surfaces have less shiny reflectivity than black ones of the same smoothness, because white surfaces disperse more light (in multiple directions). Combined with that is the optical illusion that light on a dark object is more visible to the eye than light on a light object. If you already have a white object and you try to make it more white, it's not going to increase as much in visual brightness.
This is how it works in the real world as it works in blender. To force this look with the material you want you can do two things:

You can make the material more metallic by increasing the metallic slider. As you can see that your expected material looks more like aluminium than plastic.
You can increase the specular slider to increase the amount of reflection directly. This slider is there for artistic use like what you seem to be trying.

If you are not at all happy with the workings of the principled shader you can make your own node system by mixing the glossy shader with the diffuse shader and using fresnel (in case of a non metallic object)
Another solution for you might also to increase the contrast of the HDRI by using a gamma node which should make the reflections appear brighter, or use color management to increase the overall gamma of the image.


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Hexagonal Voronoi texture
The Voronoi texture uses a square grid, which is apparent at lower values of randomness. However, is it possible to use a hexagonal grid instead? Adding the right linear transformation could make the points' locations align with a hexagonal grid, but the circles around each point would distort into ellipses in doing so. More precisely, I would like to reproduce the below image (not made in Blender).

Related: How To Do UV Indexing in hexagonal pattern?

@JachymMichal The remaining problem: random-point-in-hexagon. Or triangle. Which boils down, one way or another, to random-point-in-parallelogram (Sheared cartesian Voronoi x 3 ?). Even then, you have to check against 6 neighbours, AFAIK

I will make a video on how you can achieve this. I will upload it in a few hours. Is that okay? Because this is a long process and I am getting tired writinggg!

I've got as far as random-point-per-hex.. by dividing each hex into 3 parallelograms, randomly selecting one of them. bit pushed for time..next step: check neighbours. will happily share if you'd like to crit. my math.

@Kifayat .. are you checking neighbours? If so, have you found an optimisation?

Yes! Exactly! I am checking neighbors. That's the only solution in my opinion. I'll share my video so you can see more.

I used the length node to create circles in each hexagon tile and then I will have to check the neighbors . Oh I also randomized the circles so they exceed their tiles.

@Kifayat Ahh, OK, I'm being a bit strict about trying to achieve full coverage of the hexagonal area with an even random distribution of points. Which, given the difficulty with repeatable noise, is a bit tricky. The nice thing, though, is that with hexes, you have fewer neighbours to check than with squares! I'm sure being less purist about the math will do no harm.. the look won't be noticeably different.

Im keen to see your result! That's a good idea!

@Kifayat   Sorry for delay .. done the basics, results like this.. will write up as answer when I can.. still unsure how best to get back from distance-to-feature-point to color per Voronoi cell, etc.

Wow! This is amazing!

@RobinBetts: Chapeau!!!!!!

Hexagonal Voronoi
A Voronoi texture works by dividing the texture-space into cells, defining a pseudo-random 'feature point' in each cell, which is a function of the cell's location. Then each shading-point looks up the the feature-point in its own and neighbouring cells, returning the distance to the closest feature-point.
Blender's Voronoi works on the basis of rectangular cells. The ask, here, is to base a Voronoi on hexagonal cells.
1. Create a hexagonal grid
That's dealt with at the bottom of this answer. One of the outputs is '2D Index' which is the coordinate in the current texture-space of the centre of each cell.
2. Create a feature-point in each cell
To obtain random points, evenly distributed in a hexagon, the hexagon is divided into 3 rhombuses as shown below. One of those is randomly selected using the X of 3D White Noise. Then random 0-1 multiples,(using Y and Z of the noise) of the U and V vectors for that rhombus yield evenly distributed points inside it. The  result is shown on the right:

The nodes for this:

A driven 'Randomness' mix is included to blend between cell-centers and random offsets of them. This should be wired in, but none of this tree is optimized.
3. For each cell, return the coordinates of its own, and its neighbour's centers

(above). '0' is the cell itself, '1' is the cell to the right, and the others are obtained by rotating '1' through multiples of 60 degrees. Again, to optimise, the rotations should be avoided: the resulting vectors should be hard-coded. In this version, I'm avoiding spaghetti at the cost of efficiency.
4. For each shading-point, find the nearest feature point
A small helper-group returns the closer of the points A and B to P:

which is daisy-chained to ...
5. Yield the coordinate of the closest feature-point to the shading point

... when used with the combinations already described.
None of this is optimised for speed. Rotations are used instead of hard-coding, distances are repeatedly calculated instead of being passed on.. and so on. The White Noise is very sensitive to floating-point errors in input values around -1, it seems? So a large number has been added to the input vectors, when it's used, here.
This .gif shows 'Distance', 'Position', and 'Color' outputs of the whole kaboodle, with 'Randomness' being swiped from 0-1:

Settings for your ref: about .7 'Randomness', and a color-ramp:

Hi there! Hope u are doing great! I was able to create distance to edge of  the  hexagons (using ur file) but the problem is that subtracting doesn't really give the distance and it doesn't work nicely (causes some artifacts) at higher randomness. Is there any way we can achieve precise borders?

Hi @anonymous !  You mean d2e of regular hexagons, or d2e of this Voronoi?

of this voronoi

@anonymous this crossed my mind, too ... I wonder if this could be implemented without everything grinding to a halt? Worth a look, I think...

i know that article but i dont understand it at all, id like to do that with nodes

@anonymous  I'll give it a shot.. it involves a second round of neighbour-searches, looking around the cell containing the feature-point found, the first time round, to be closest to the shading point. Can't promise rapid progress :)

ok bro, thnku so mch

Voronoi noise is made by tiling circles in a square fashion and randomising the positions of all circles. Since the circles are limited to their tile's size, when you randomly change the position, they exceed their tile size and start to form seams. To eliminate that, we check the neighboring tiles i.e left, right, up, down, etc. This is how the usual voronoi is made.
In the case of hexagonal voronoi, we only need to change one thing. We need to tile circles using hexagonal tiles / hexagonal coordinates. You can see how to make them here How To Do UV Indexing in hexagonal pattern? OR you can use the "hextiles" nodegroup in the blend file below.  I have made a video how I made this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbH3_d9j7ro

Here is the blend:

To make the circles expand like in the original picture in the question, add a map range node and set it to smoother step.

Also a very good answer and much work put in! Too bad they don't let you accept two answers at once.

Thank you so much!

@anonymous Hmm, just spotted I should strictly  be searching another ring of neighbours .. very unusual, but the closest feature point  could just be 2 cells away :( it would be a hell of a coincidence....

what do u mean bro?

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Even Thickness in object
I am designing a implant and i want the thickness of it to be 1 mm evenly. I use the solidify modifier for that.
But i noticed that when i am modelling it the thickness is not applied uniformly.  I have attached the photos. Can some one help ?
In flat surfce have 1 mm thickness.
When i change the angly the thickness decreased and then totally disappears in the last.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/7298/why-is-it-important-to-apply-transformation-to-an-objects-data/7349#7349

Make sure you've applied the scale of your object (ctrlA in Object mode), and in the modifier enable the Even Thickness option.

Thanks a lot. @moonboots

Also toggling ON High quality normals is a good idea usually.

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


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Problem - Mesh won't move with armature
I'm new to blender.

I am creating this batman sculpture, and wanted to pose him before going further with the sculpt. I created the armature, then selected the mesh, shift selected the armature, then hit ctrl+P and deformed with automatic weights. I then applied an "armature" modifier to the mesh, and selected the armature object.
However, when I select the armature and go to pose mode, moving the bones does not cause the mesh to move along with them. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong, especially because I have done this exact same process once before, and the character mesh moves with the armature.
If anyone could please help me out, that'd me amazing!

what do you mean when you say that you applied an armature modifier? Once you've parented it creates an Armature modifier but you're not supposed to click the Apply button if this is what you mean. If this is not your problem it can be others like flipped normals or else. Maybe share your file (modify it a bit if you don't want it to be stolen)? https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/

I didn't apply the armature modifier. I had actually looked back at my other working project and saw that there was an armature modifier, so I went and added one to the batman mesh to see if it would solve the problem. I didn't know that the modifier appeared naturally once I parented the armature to the mesh. Either way, it didn't solve anything. ---- I hope noone steals this, but I'm pretty desperate at this point. The file was too large for blend-exchange.com, so I uploaded to my google drive: https://drive.google.com/open?id=15SlZknhTK-zb2H-LCrfdRtvfj6z9YtCq

Ok so maybe share your file   ;)

I accidentally hit enter while I was writing the response, was about to share the file. ;P

The mesh is super-heavy, I don't know if that's the problem, but do you have any good reason not to retopologize it to a low-poly version? It would make the things much easier...

I know it's heavy, but I'm not finished sculpting, so I'll need the topology to continue... I think I should have posed him much earlier :/

I would say continue the sculpt, once you're good retopologize to create a low-poly version, bake the normals, rig the low-poly... but maybe someone has a better idea  ;)

You were right! It was the mesh density! Thank you so much for your help, I'm truly greatful! - I applied a decimate modifier set to collapse at a ratio of 0.2. That took my face count down from 2.2 mil to around 400k. Then I parented the mesh to the armature, and it now moves perfectly! In order to keep the detail, I'm going to pose it while it is low poly, then I'll paint over the details with a high resolution simplify brush in sculpt mode!

also when you parent the mesh to the armature make sure you've applied the mesh scale and that there is no flipped normals


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Having trouble getting 2.80 on Linux
I just installed Blender and noticed my screen looked a little different from the tutorial video, so I checked my version and the Linux discovery page had grabbed me 2.79...  Okay, so I tried downloading straight from Blender's site instead.  But when I went to open the install file, it kept telling me that Ark could not open the file.  I am like, a total Linux noob and having trouble Googling this.  Can someone help me figure out what plugin I need or otherwise explain why my window looks so different from the one in the tutorial???

What distribution?

Before you install Blender 2.80 verify that your system meets the minimum requirements.
Since you're unfamiliar with Linux, I'd suggest you download the archive version. First check if you're using a 64 bit or 32 bit operating system. In case you don't know, either take a look at the system information in the system settings or open a terminal and run:
uname -m

If it returns x86_64 you're running a 64 bit OS, 32 bit otherwise.
Then download the appropriate version and extract the archive:

Blender 2.80 Linux 64 bit
Blender 2.80 Linux 32 bit

Navigate into the extracted directory and find the file named blender. That is the program you need to run. An alternative to the archive version is to install Blender through Steam.
In case these instruction aren't detailed enough, please leave a comment which states what Linux distribution you're using.

Someone in meatspace ended up helping me use a PPA to download the latest Blender.  I appreciate the help anyways.

You're welcome. Would've made step by step instructions with screenshots otherwise.


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How to initialize modifiers after loading an object using 'bpy.data.libraries.load'?
I'm working on a script that assembles assets from various blend files using the bpy.data.libraries.load context.
I'm trying to load an object that has various Vertex Weight modifiers, including Proximity to another object.
I have to process the Vertex Weight values after the libraries.load call, but, in this case, I find all values set to 1.0.
If I use the UI to append the same object, and then run the same script, I get my proper Vertex Weight values.
I have the impression that modifiers are not "ready" (evaluated yet) after the libraries.load call.
Is there any way to instruct Blender to properly setup the modifiers after a call to libraries.load?

The modifiers are evaluated by the Depsgraph.
AFAIK, the Python API only provides access to the Depsgraph of visible objects.
After the load, the objects must be added to the bpy.context.scene, in a way that makes them visible.
Then, their modifiers are properly evaluated when accessed in Python.
I've been testing with the following script.
import bpy

# Load the asset

blendPath = r"C:\temp\plane_vertex_proximity_modifier.blend"
with bpy.data.libraries.load(blendPath, link=False, relative=True) as (data_from, data_to):

    data_to.objects = data_from.objects[:]

# Put the objects loaded in a *visible* collection
# visible is IMPORTANT, so that modifiers are evaluated

my_collection = bpy.data.collections.new('__assets__')
bpy.context.scene.collection.children.link(my_collection)
layer_collection = bpy.context.view_layer.layer_collection.children[my_collection.name]
layer_collection.exclude = False
for obj in data_to.objects:
    my_collection.objects.link(obj)

# Query vertex group values

obj = bpy.context.scene.objects['Plane']

depsgraph = bpy.context.evaluated_depsgraph_get()
eo = obj.evaluated_get(depsgraph)
mesh = eo.to_mesh(preserve_all_data_layers=True, depsgraph=depsgraph)

vg = eo.vertex_groups['dist']
vg_index = vg.index

class NoGroup:
    weight = 0.0

v_weights = [ 0.0 ] * len(mesh.vertices)
for v in mesh.vertices:
    group = NoGroup
    # IMPORTANT(nll) v.groups can be in any order, or incomplete...
    for g in v.groups:
        if g.group == vg_index:
            group = g
            break
    v_weights[v.index] = group.weight

# values are '1.0' if modifiers are not evaluated
# values are '0.2828...' if modifiers are ok
print("v_weight", v_weights)

# After the evaluation, we can exclude the layer collection

layer_collection.exclude = True


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How can I achieve a crystalline glaze material procedurally?
As practice, I've been modelling a pot. I wanted to recreate the crystalline glaze of the pot as a material, but since I'm fairly new to materials, I've been having trouble. I figures a noise texture would be a perfect place to start, but I'm not sure how to put it into use. I could make blue splotches easy enough, but I couldn't figure out an interesting way to give them some texture. They tended to look flat and boring. Attached is a picture of what I'm trying to achieve.

A favorite trick of mine is to mix a bit of noise into the coordinate vector.

You can use object coordinates here, it's not really important as long as you can make the masks you need.
What I ended up doing is generating several noise masks, some of them share the same nodes, I'm just using a Color Ramp to isolate different parts:

And used Math nodes to add and subtract them rather randomly:

And then I used a Math node set to Greater Than and played with the value until I found something I liked.

Using this as the factor input for a Mix Shader you can create the top and bottom materials to your liking.
My favorite detail of handmade objects like this is that they are rarely perfect.  We often model these objects to (float) precision, perfect all the way around.  So to add an almost imperceptible bit of realism I take a very lumpy Noise Texture and do just a tad of displacement.

Here is a render using these methods.  HDRI environment is Cayley Interior from HDRIHaven.  I'm using only Noise Textures for the base color layers.


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Duplicate Material Displayed
I have applied a single material as a texture to an object in Blender 2.8. In the UV map the duplicated element is only displayed in the correct area however it is being duplicated. Please see attached photos for more detail. Any help would be great.

You've scaled your UV in the UV editor and we can see that it is larger than your image, by default the image will be repeated on the segments that are out of the image. If you don't want this to happen, choose the Clip option instead of Repeat in the Texture Image, but it will display a black color where no image is available, it might not be what you want?

Hello, I've fixed the issue. I used the knife tool to cut the area I wanted the mesh to the dimensions that I wanted. That fixed the issue and the object is displaying as I want. Thank you.


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How to highligth faces in object mode with python
I want to highlight certain faces via script while in object mode (I am running a modal operator to get the face index of the face under the cursor via raycast, now i want to highlight it).
Are there other ways than using bgl?
If not, does someone know a good tutorial to bring me on course with this task (never done something with OpenGL before)?

Could add a highlight material to all mesh objects, assign  highlight material to the face raycast hits best_obj.data.polygons[face_index] = highlight_material_index.  Would need to keep some reference to prior material index for face to reset, and remove material to clean up.

Oh, that idea is nice, will try it and report back.

I tried it with raycast modal operator template,  using  face index when "best obj" is set.  A hassle is it  needs to be  in material view mode.

@batFINGER I have it, thx :). That it does only work in material view mode is no problem: One can set the material viewport color of the highlight material to get a result in solid view mode and texture view mode, too (i will later learn a bit OpenGL to make a bgl solution but for further development this is at least adequate). If you like, post your comment as answer, so that i can confirm it.

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


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Can i hide the mini axis per 3D View (instead of globally via preferences)
I know I can i hide the mini axis globally for all 3D views in the preferences, but i would like to just hide it for 2 of 3 3D views in my screen layout. Is it possible?

No, it's not possible. I don't know much about inner workings of Blender as I have taken only a very beginner course on Python coding. Maybe you can achieve it by coding, but by just messing with Blender's settings you can't do it.
Hope it answers your question.

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


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How to use "bmesh.ops.subdivide_edges" on selected edges
I need to cut an edge into equal parts via script.
Using the standart subdivide is out of question because i will need more then 100 cuts (und using subdivide several times to achieve this is not possible with certain numbers.. e.g. prime numbers).
bmesh.ops.subdivide_edges has no max for the number of cuts but i have problems finding out how to use it only with selected edges. (I am only able to use it an all edges at once)
The only workaround i coul imagine would be to extrude a vertex many times (i am not sure if floating point precision would become an issue tho). I feel lost (and the 100 cut cap of subdivide feels a bit like a bad joke).
Hope somebody can help.

I assume you are doing edit operations
Make sure you are using bmesh.from_edit _mesh to get the selected edge information. When doing from_mesh all edges will be selected.
bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(my_mesh)
selected_edges = [edge for edge in bm.edges if edge.select]
bmesh.ops.subdivide_edges(bm, edges=selected_edges, cuts=100)
bmesh.update_edit_mesh(my_mesh)

Note that .faces has an .active helper property what does this for faces. A similar API for edges is not available, hence you need to use the list comprehension.

Thx, that does work... :)


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How to ignore backfaces when doing a raycast?
I am using a raycast (just like in the template "operator_modal_view3d_raycast.py") to get a face index. The object the ray is cast on is a cube with inverted faces (directing inwards). Unfortunately the ray returns the index of the first face it hits although it is a backface. How can i make the raycast ignore backfaces so it returns the index of the first frontface it hits?

I think the way to go is: determine if backface or frontface was hit (compare ray vector with normal vector?) and then, if backface was hit, start another ray from hit point. Had the hope there would be a more simple solution for coding greenhorns like me.

Did it. I did not even bother if front or backface was hit because the first hit is always backface, so i just added a small offset to the hit vector (depending on view vector) and used it as new origin for a second raycast.
ray_origin_offset = mathutils.Vector((0, 0, 0))
if view_vector[0] < 0:
    ray_origin_offset[0] = -0.0001
else:
    ray_origin_offset[0] = +0.0001
if view_vector[1] < 0:
    ray_origin_offset[1] = -0.0001
else:
    ray_origin_offset[1] = +0.0001
if view_vector[2] < 0:
    ray_origin_offset[2] = -0.0001
else:
    ray_origin_offset[2] = +0.0001
ray_origin = hit + ray_origin_offset
ray_target = ray_origin + view_vector
hit, normal, face_index = obj_ray_cast(obj, matrix)

Not sure why you are adding component-wise to the offset vector. If  dir is a unit direction vector then calling  ray_cast(origin, dir) and get a hit, then  ray_cast(hit + 0.001 * dir, dir), until no hit,  would be my take on coding.

@batFINGER Because i am a very bad coder (this is, still, my first project) so ALL my code is most likely quite verbose and circuitous. That might be a bad thing from the perspective of an experienced programmer but not only am i hardly able to make it better (atm... i will learn it over time maybe) but it also helps me to understand my own code (even when picking it up after an adjournment). Maybe i will make a disclaimer from now on when posting code: "Warning, the code is noob-level"^^ (nevertheless i am quite proud how far my project has progressed so far and how stable and fast it runs).

No disclaimers necessary. It's not a matter of code, more a matter of method Is what I was alluding to.  BTW it's kudos, and upvotes from me on both q&a because you have nutted it out yourself.

@batFINGER thx g.. I was not offended (hope i did not sound like i was), just told the truth of why i did it that way. I realy appreciate your answer(s) and learn a lot by doing research on what you write. :) (sadly i cannot upvote comments)


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Rigid body go through soft body(not supposed to happen)
I want to clarify that I am really beginner with blender.
I modeled a fairly simple .blend with balls that are supposed to be retrieved by a robot. At first I tried with a ball made with "rigid body" but it slipped in all directions. So I tried with ball "soft body". The ball is therefore much "catchable" but the problem is that the arms of the robot pass through (see image).
What's bizarre is that when I roll on it with the robot, it does not pass through but climbs and crushes the ball.
If you have any idea how to solve this problem, I would be grateful


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All options are greyed out and inaccessible in the node editor
If I go to the Node editor and press Shift+A every action is grey and I can´t click anything. I started to model a waffle(I'm at the very beginning of modelling) and wanted to make a material for it in the node editor but every action in Shift+A is grey and unclickable. Even returning to factory settings doesn´t help. Here is the project:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/fdqqbnyq57cgwng/Waffel.blend?dl=0
I hope somebody can help me.

did you enable "Use Nodes"?

Hi. Please use https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/ for more permanent blend file hosting. Also, uploading a blend file should be secondary to a clear description of the problem (which you have done) and preferably some images to illustrate your point. Ideally, we want to try and answer the question without having to rely on a file to be downloaded.

I have solved the problem myself

@Abraskus Then please post an answer below in the answer box.

You found one more way to make node adding menu greyed out which wasn't outlined in this answer, which is trying to add nodes to object when it doesn't have any material. Object must have a material for nodes

The solution was just changing a few things and switching from Blender Render to Cycles Render.

I am having the same issue, only I cannot at all find where I can select new material in the bottom bar location, however, in the right side tool menu, I have already added a new material and messed around with that and nothing seems to be working. I cannot find a way to make this work.

You need to add a new material.
Press "New" in the bar below the node-editor window.

make sure the "use nodes" is ticked.

Would be good if you showed the screenshot before you pressed 'New'. It might be hard for a user to understand where they would see the 'New' button going by your screenshot.

the new shows on the screenshot of Abraskus. At least that was my train of thought. i wanted to show the use node checkbox. - added it anyways.


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How not to cast a shadow on an object?

I don't want to see the shadow cast on the wall like the circled one with red pen the picture. How can I cancel such light effect?
I found an answer that said to go the "word" and "surface" to remove it. I am not sure that it's the same thing (link: How do I turn off environment/world lighting in Blender Cycles?)
but I did not see the "surface" option in my "world" column.
Thank you for helping me, I really appreciate it

That's not a shadow, It's probably related to camera clipping, which means that your object is too big. You can either make the object smaller or increase the camera's clipping distance

Its not a shadow.Its scene or camera's clipping value that you need to adjust. To change scene's clip value,increase the value circled in the below pic:
And to change camera's clip value,increase the value circled in the below pic:


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Joining Meshes to Curves
HELP! I need to know how to join Bezier curves to a mesh. I am trying to make a car with curved rims and the easiest way was to use a Bezier curve and then to bevel it but I need to join it all together in order to put it in my mod.

You can do so by converting the curves to meshes then joining all the meshes together. Beware that this is a destructive process and will prevent you from making any further edits to the Bezier profile.
To convert the curves to meshes, select each one, set the preferred resolutions from the Object Data (Curve) panel, these will affect how many polygons your mesh will be made of, then do Alt+C > Mesh from Curve.
Under Blender 2.8+ this is now found under the 3D View header menu Object > Convert > Mesh.
Then, select all the meshes (possibly the car as the latest) and do Ctrl+J to join them.
Please note that this only assigns all the vertices/edges/faces to a single mesh object, but doesn't make smooth intersections or such.
For those use a boolean operation instead.

Would add that another way to fuse the meshes after conversion would be touse the boolean modifier if you want to get rid of intersecting geometry, and make them a single solid object. If the two parts has no intersections or if you dont care of intersectiong geometry, join is just fine.


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How do I simulate "filling water" in Game Engine
I'd like to make a mini game where the player would have a water tank being filled and it has an outflow where he controls. He will be able of increase or decrease the amount of water coming out of the tank. How can I do it?
I'm new in Blender and I made a water simulation of this tank being filled as animation, but I couldn't apply this to the game engine.
If you, guys, could give me a light, I'll be thankful.

You can't do a fluid sim in real time: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/75/how-can-i-make-a-fluid-simulation-in-game-engine

Possible duplicate of this post. What you're trying to do is something not currently possible in vanilla Blender at runtime.
My advise is to fake it with different planes, particles, etc. but you have to learn Python to do this, and it will require a lot of work. Realtime simulations are demanding on your system, so even if you pull off full water simulation in Blender, 99% of everyone with a personal computer won't be able to run it.
So make a plane as your water surface, apply an animated texture to it, and animate the mesh itself. This way you'll at least have a water surface. For the inflow/outflow, make properties stating the water level. Animate this with two keyframes and let it cycle the values between 1 and 0 to make the water rise and fall. Animate some cylinders with the same process as the water surface so it looks like it's pouring out of something.
Remember, with any and every game, keep your polycount as low as you can. Running a water simulation at runtime will blow your polycount to the roof, and lag, or even crash on most systems.
Hope this helps.


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Weird Blender Subsurface glitch

For some reason, when I add the Subdvision Surface modifier, I'm getting this. Does anyone know what might be causing this?

Subdivision surface only works well with quads, and from the looks of it your model isn't constructed in the most clean way. There are a few things you can try short of remodelling the mesh:

Remove doubles
Recalculate Normals
Add a bevel modifier, which might be able to clean up the edges for you so you can apply a subsurface modifier.
Add 2 edge loops around the perimeter of the object so that subdivision works better.

I've done the model with vertices(Drawing around a reference image) and then filled the edges to create a single face on top and on bottom, after that I extruded the face. I believe this might be the problem, how would you model it, with a cube? (I'm only a student so I have the time to remodel it all). Thanks in advance.
Edit: And it's a single model too, would you recomend separating it in different models?

Bevel modifier or adding edge loops(Ctrl+R) is probably the easiest way to fix it.

Neither one worked, so I'm going to remodel it as a cube. I think my problem is that the top part only has one face

My recomendation: Remodel it. Start from scratch and make sure that you are using squares to build it. Then, when the subdiv is applied it will look much cleaner and will be much easier to control.
Alternatively, you can try sculpting with Dynotopo enabled (Dynamic topology). This will allow you to add exactly as much detail as you need, or even more detail than you need (which you can reduce later with a decimate modifier).
Hope this helps.

Yeah man, that's what I'm going to do, I thought I could do it with vertices but I couldn't. Thanks


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Meshes not visible in render and render is super grainy with black dots
I´ve been trying to fix this now for two days and it seems as being new with blender I´m totally lost. I have this scene with green screen where five snakes(made out of cubes) are slithering through the view done with simple curve modifier. The snakes are visible in rendered view, but when I render a picture it only shows a supergrainy green screen and no snakes, that should be in the middle of the picture.
There´s only one camera and its activated, the right layer is selected and the snakes are not hidden (the camera icon and eye icon are selected). Thanks for any help!

Omg, as I started to clear other layers to simplify the file so I can send it here I found out there was a not visible green screen in front of the snakes that was rendering, but not visible in the work view. I deleted it and the render works fine. I feel super dumb as I should. But it fixed the problem, sorry for taking your time!

@Lcreature Glad you’ve found the problem - often just explaining a problem can help you resolve it. Please add an answer to your own problem and mark it as the ‘accepted’ answer (the ‘tick’ button). This way it will be marked as answered so others can know it’s been resolved.

I added an answer, but as I´m a new user here I can accept my own answer only after two days.

A mesh, hidden in the work view but visible in the render, was in front of the camera. Stupid mistake, but the problem is solved. :J


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why does the subsurface modifier create such a harsh edge here
I have tried various fixes like removing doubles, altering the mesh, the problem persists.
Here's the .blend:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1OwhsqAuXHCTySSfbciQxV9f1igz4xLQ1

It looks like it's a problem of normals, select all and ShiftN to recalculate and it will fix it.

I don't know why it's not visible though, I'm not very familiar with 2.8 yet    ;)

I’m quite sure it’s because you have seven edges converging into one vertex.
From what I understand, the Subsurf Modifier is approximating vertex relationships not the vertexes themselves i.e. it will not move that vertex to round things off because it is rounding the space/edges between vertexes.
To have a stray vertex will definitely cause issues like this especially when tris/multiple edges are involved.
Solution: Fix the topology. Maybe use a knife tool or go in and delete some data? Basically, you should almost never have seven edges going into one vertex like that. Addressing that will probably fix your issue.
John


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I can't append node groups
For some reason the node groups i try to append do not show up. what am i doing wrong? I linked a short clip of the group im trying to append and my problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRgEJPOx2Ec&feature=youtu.be

You have appended the node group to the .blend file, however you are in the compositing editor, whereas your group is a material node group.
To switch to the Material Editor simply select an object in the scene, click this icon at the bottom of the window (see below), try adding it again and you should see your node group in the expected place (you might need to select the Use nodes checkbox again).


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Is there a way to make the raycast node use individual ray directions for every vertex, so that the projection looks like my annotated lines?

Quick question, is there a way to make the raycast node use individual ray directions for every vertex, so that the projection looks like my annotated lines? What's wrong with my node setup?

could you please elaborate a bit more what you are trying to achieve? what is your end goal? yes, it is possible by using e.g. the position node....

@Valentin Heinz: can you share the full working solution? Thanks!

@igmar Well I honestly don't know if any of this info is still up to date, since geo nodes have been reworked like a dozen times over the past 2 years. I dont have that specific file anymore, but I still have the file I was working on that I needed this for. I made a video on it here: https://youtu.be/tvAZCfXsWAs and the .blend file can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1D_0uClj5_l4RDwVLrkNwVfmNEsFn5jWy

In case anyone wanted to know how Valentin Heinz managed to raycast omnidirectionally from a point origin instead of parallel lines, here his node-setup in his .blend:


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Armature pose position is different orientation from initial layout in edit mode, and automatic weighting problem
So I've been trying to fix my bone axes so that my arms are bending correctly and I've been running into a lot of pitfalls. This is my third rig for this mesh so far so I'm hoping that somebody can help me.
I essentially have two problems that are going on. The first is that my hand is rotating to a weird position when I go from edit mode to pose mode and enable the pose position.

I've tried changing the main hand bone's axis positions but there seems to be no luck with that, as well as no way to apply the rest position to the pose position. This problem may extend further up the arm, but I would like to keep my arm's axis positions so that they can bend correctly.
The second problem I'm having, which is further up the arm, is that the upper arm bone is creating a deformation when automatic weighting is applied.

I think this is based on the axis orientation again, but like I said I need the axes on the arms to be Global Z Positive.
It's worth noting here that axes seem to be different when switching from edit mode to pose mode. I'm posting a link to my blend file so you can see what I'm talking about.
http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=50168
I would really appreciate it if someone could help me, I'm a beginner still and just want to move past this part as it has become a nightmare to fix.

In the IK constraint of your lower arm, you have to correct your Pole Angle to something like -180°. You often have to make this kind of correction after you've parented. I see you already changed to -90° but this was not enough.
I guess there are some other corrections to do. Personnaly I would parent the hand to the handle, and deparent the pole target from the handle, and make something simpler for the foot, etc... but maybe I miss something   ;)

Thank you! this was the correct answer and it even fixed my second problem after a bit of experimenting and replicating on the other arm.


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Join, apply texture to and then re-separate objects in Blender?
I have an imported model with 4 objects. Each color(see below: blue, red, yellow, and orange) is one object. I want to apply the same texture across all these objects in a uniform fashion but have them be the same 4 separate objects. I figured one way to do this would be to join them, apply the UV map and separate them, but I'm not sure how to go about doing that or if it is possible and couldn't find an appropriate solution anywhere. Any suggestions would be deeply appreciated! Thanks in advance.


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Video clip on plane EEVEE
I'm french (sorry for my poor english), i'm a new on blender 2.8 and older...
So, I have a question about planes nd video clip.
I put a video on a plane. I gave the frames information but I can't see the movement on the render movie.
Someone can explain me I can I do?
Thanks,
Fred

Working fine here. (current build, 2.80.2)
Check your "Image Texture" Settings:
Frames: 1000
Start Frame: 3000
Maybe this is confuning blender. ;)

Thank you. Yes you have right for this detail but, I modified my settings after and I can't render with the video film, just one fixed picture..

Cegaton, thanks. The only way for me, with EEVEE, is to genarate frame per frame!

Also: The movie is not updating if you play the timeline. In final render it will, but in preview you have to scrub thru the timeline by mouse or keyboard.


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Trying to reduce polygons (decimate) is not an option
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/191625599176015873/415621667432300545/unknown.png This is my current model for a health charger in Garry's Mod however the poly count for it is Verts:833,385| Faces: 831,002| Tris:1,662832 its too big to import into the source engine with all those polys (I get a crowbar error). The reason why I cant use decimate is because the mesh screws up before getting a reasonable poly count

the link to the picture is broken. please only upload pictures through SE built in image upload button.


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Loopcut symmetrically among two pieces

I'm trying to loop cut on both arms symmetrically at the wrists so that they are equidistant from the chest. how can i do that automatically?

Mirror modifier is useful when needing symmetry in models.

As said, the best way to model symmetrically is to use a mirror modifier, but that also means that you'll have all the model symmetrical...
If your model is not symmetrical overall, but you need to have some part modeled symmetrically, you can use an alternative approach, although there are limits to what you can do...
So, this could easily not fit to your needs, but hopefully it could give you just another idea:

here I "duplicated linked" the somewhat asymmetrical model, then I rotated it over Z 180° so to have one side aligned "to the other side".
Being a linked copy, the second object shares the same exact copy of the first object's mesh. But here it is somewhat "mirrored". And you see that the new edge loop positioning is replicated in real time (of course, it's the same mesh!).
Then on the first copy, I used loop cut on "one side", and placed the edge loop where needed. The same cut and position should be achieved o the other side...
To replicate the same cut on the other side, I activated snap tools (vertices), and after cutting, to create the needed geometry, I moved the new edge loop precisely to the position of the "other side" edge loop, using a suitable viewing angle.
It is just regular modeling, of course, but this gives you the chance to refer and snap to "the other side" of the same mesh (although "seen" through two different objects).
Hth.

The mirror modifier has already been mentioned which is probably the best way but if you do not want to use that you can put a loop cut on each arm and then immediately pressing Esc so it stays in the middle. Then select both loops and scale by X so they move the same distance in both directions.


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How can i make vertices that are along an edge but not part of it cut into the edge and do it for many vertices?
https://webm.red/L9JA.webm
you can see the problem here through the webm and i want to fix it for the entire mesh and not just a few vertices.

I'm not sure there's any simple solution, I guess you have to create a new vertice on the edge and merge it with the other vertice

Well you could write a python script that checks for every edge whether there is a vertice in it and if that is the case you could delete that edge, connect the original vertices of the edge with the new vertice and fill the faces

You can try to select them via Select Similar menu; select one mentioned vertex and press Shift+G > Amount of Connected Edges or Amount of Adjacent Faces. Note to keep track of other areas of the mesh if the selection doesn't interfere with something important (and selects more than required). Once selected use X > Dissolve Vertices

You can use Degenerate Disolve function with all selected(a) in edit mode(Tab) for that. You can access it from the space search menu or from Mesh -> Clean Up -> Degenerate Disolve :

It dissolves zero area faces and zero length edges.


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How do i break these legs apart?
So i trying to separate these two legs made from blocks. I want them to be able to move separately but NOT make them independent pieces. I tried using the rip tool but it told me that was an error. Here is a video of me trying to break them. https://webmshare.com/LPOVe

Try selecting the vertices along the middle part using shift, left click and then rip them using v, make sure to select both the back and front vertices

i already did that and it told me there was an error like i said in my original post

Make sure the all the faces were filled

i did. did you watch the webm?

reddit helped me https://www.reddit.com/r/blenderhelp/comments/7z5nrw/how_do_i_break_these_legs_apart/
Delete the faces in the middle then rip them. Hide vertices for one side at a time. then creates inside faces for each leg.


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Why is this driver expression not working?
as you can see here the strength of the light's property shoulds always be => 0 but the expression isn't working.

This is probably related to this question.

And as far as I know, the graph in the graph editor doesn't reflect the real value of a channel if a driver is involved. So the graph not flattening out isn't an indicator of the driver not working.


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Is it possible to give the procedural checkers more than 2 colors?
This is my first stack exchange post so my sincere apologies if i made a mistake.
I'm a really big fan of procedural textures and love to mess around with it and get different patterns. One of my favorites is the checkers texture. One thing that has always slightly bothered me is that i can only choose two colors, and that they're always in a checker pattern. I'd love to make some materials that give those old school pixel vibes.
Is it possible for me to make the procedural checker texture more randomized in hue, saturation and value? Thank you in advance.
Kind regards,
Dylan.

I think you want to proceduraly pixelate anything: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/24008/how-to-pixelate-a-texture-in-cycles/24012#24012

Brick texture can be tweaked to resemble pixels, It can be combined with a colorramp to get different colors in a randomized pattern.

Thank you, i wasn't aware of this! While it's not 100% what i was looking for this will definitely help me a lot.

Instead of relying on the checker node, we can make our own pseudo-checkers with randomized values between zero and one, then feed the result into a color ramp node, with constant interpolation.
Here it is, broken into a few steps:

Scaling up the texture coordinates, round them to integers, and scale them back down to the original range (I'm pretty sure this can be done with vector math, rather than splitting to scalars).

From here, we can combine these bars to a "stepped" coordinate space, and feed it into a noise texture (I feel that my math can be improved on; the stuff that I stuck in frowny frames shouldn't be necessary).

Here's the whole setup:

There's lots of room for improvement, but hopefully it gives you/other some ideas!

i like the randomness in your approach. all our previous ideas had certain patterns. nice!!

Woah, that's incredible!

This simple setup lets you choose your colors in one color ramp (with constant interpolation).
You can double the setup to get from 4 custom colors to 8, 16, 32...

EDIT
The 10-color checker teture with custom colors

A simple method not mentioned in the previous answers is to use a Voronoi Texture node with the randomness set to zero.
The following example uses a horizontal plane, so that it’s easy to use a 2D Voronoi texture, rather than the slower 3D one.
Shader node setup (for Cycles or Eevee):

Resulting render:

The colours produced by the Voronoi Texture node are random, but you can, for example, feed the output through a ColorRamp to control which colours you get.

Was looking for something similar and building off of the previous answers found a very simple node arrangement for random noise, using pre-selected colors. That last part was important to me. I was trying to make a randomized lego-like sculpture.

This allows you to pick preselected colors in the ColorRamp by eye dropping them from your RGB nodes. You have control over how many and how much of each you want to show up.
In this case I wanted a lego-like look so I applied the Remesh modifier, added a displacement for the top surface and unwrapped the model using Lightmap Pack. I scaled each UV island down to .1% using their individual origins, this insured that each face only showed one color. It isn't perfect, but it did what I needed it to do. Hope it helps.


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In the latest 2.79 daily build, is it possible to convert the Bevel node's RGB normal maps to BW edge highlighters?

On the left is the normal map generated by the Bevel node. On the right is an unbeveled cube with the Bevel node in action. I wish to convert this to a BW map where The edges/gradients are highlighted and the rest isn't. Does anyone know if this can be achieved with more nodes?

Final result and node setup:

After many tryouts with complicated setups it seems that this effect could be easily achieved by using Vector Math > Cross Product from Bevel > Normal output and Texture Coordinates > Normals.
After this the most efficient way is to use Color Ramp to change softness/sharpness of the edges.

Here's a digital hug, please accept it.

Where is the Cross Product Node? I cannot find it

@MicroMachine I believe that would be a variant of the Vector Math node.


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Combine all color passes
So i'm trying to merge 4 color passes (DiffuseColor, GlossyColor, TranslucentColor and SubsurfceColor) so i can get 1 Combined color map. Is this possible? If so, how cand i do it?
Thanks!


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How to unlink two objects in the same group?

The cube I was messing with somehow "coupled" to the bottle and now i can't select them individually. What happened? Doing Alt+P and Clear Parent doens't do anything.

You must have joined them into one unique object with a ctrl J, so select it, go in Edit mode, select one of the 2 meshes with L and press P (Separate) > Selection


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How do I join seamlessly two identical components?
Scenario in the pictures. I've been trying to join the four selected faces into one long rod, but I fail to do so seamlessly. I tried to (F)ill the faces and merge the vertices, but it creates other unconnected edges that mess up the shading and everything.

Use right click (Context menu) > Bridge Faces. It will automatically delete the inner faces.

Wait, what does W do? For me it enables Circle select.

Sorry, W was for 2.79, it looks like it's right click for 2.8


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Simulate character melting but retaining some volume
I'm trying to recreate this gif of vaporeon melting ( https://c.tenor.com/TAB--fTTrwQAAAAC/pokemon-vaporeon.gif ) with a model of my own character. However, when using soft body physics, the mesh crumples too much and doesn't maintain a more soft rounded shape.

the closest i've gotten is after adding extra geometry "struts" inside of their body, but even then it looks a little too crumpled

for reference, here's the original model, and the settings i used for the soft body physics.

Try increasing the bending. Of course it depends on other values as well and on your model.
I tried with this model:

and with self collision checked and a bending of 10 i got this:

and this is the result of just using the default cloth modifier with checked pressure:

and this with pressure of 5 (you could even animate the pressure and lower it over time)


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image texture unaligned on uv map
i exported my uv map as an image, and painted onto the shapes in fire alpaca. when i tried to apply the texture back into blender by dragging it onto my uv map, it was off to the side and only partly overlapping onto my uv map, and the part that was over lapping did not appear in the render.

Exporting UV layout from Blender works fine and there are no options for the export procedure that could result in a shift of UVs so it is extremely unlikely the problem happens when exporting the UV layout.
As the UV layout is exported in a simple picture format any digital image processing software will most likely be able to read it correctly because that is a very basic operation as far as digital image processing goes so it is extremely unlikely the problem is there as well.
We are left with a few very likely possibilities - you either accidentally moved the UV map or you accidentally moved the image or the image of the UV layout. There is really little mystery here - it is very easy to accidentally click and drag an image.
You can select all the UVs (a) and hit g to move them to their correct position. You can zoom in to be precise and also use shift during the operation to increase precision.


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Need help with a clean Normal map for a character in Blender
First of all thank you for your time reading this.
I am new to Blender and I managed to make my very first character.
my low poly mesh has been created and I sculpt one for more defined details.

But the problem is, I can not seem to fix the baking process to get a nice blue normal map, and I am not experienced enough to know how to fix this.

Some of these parts are inside the mouth, so can I just remove them?
Since I will be using textures for the teeth and tongue and mouth in general.
I think my main problem is with overlapping meshes.
Does any more experienced blender artists know how to deal with this?
And can take a look at my file:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ecoxbtog60wwc6h/Ossy.blend?dl=0
This character will be used in animation so maybe this isn't all necessarily.
Thank you all for your time and I hope to hear from anyone soon.

Baking a Normal map? Try Ray Distance, down here in the answer! This will may help.

Hello Jayem14, I have try'd the ray distance many times, the issue's are between the toes where the ray intersect I believe  so even with a low setting it does not work sadly, thank you for the help.
I think that my low poly mesh is sometimes bigger then the detailed one and vice versa.

This happens when people try mistakes.

Check out this video, around 7.30 he addresses the issue, which is that it is baking the wrong side of the faces. It can often be fixed with the "ray distance" settings, under the bake menu. Try changing this to 0.1 or 0.2 to see if it fixes the problem.

Hello sorenfrostsaal,
Thank you for the help, but the Ray distance is not the issue sadly, I try with different distances, 0.05 got the best results for me.
I think the Issue has more to do with overlapping meshes since I sculpted some stuff inwards the low poly mesh.

Okay, how about scaling the low poly mesh to be a tad smaller, and then apply the scale. CTRL+A. and re-bake?

I shall give it a try, if that doesn't work, I shall try the explosion option.

Most likely, the overlapping geometry is rendered in the baking process, there's a method called explosion when you do baking, which consider you taking apart each element of your mesh. Here's a example:

Since your model is simple, you can do this manually, by duplicating your model, and separating each mesh element, you can do this easily by pressing L on edit mode, which will select entire elements, and move them apart. After you done this, test to bake it again and see if you get the clear results you're after.
After you have your map baked, you can delete the exploded mesh and return to the original one, finally applying the normal map.
Would recommend you to Apply Rot & Scale (CTRL+A+Apply Rot & Scale in object mode), and make Normals Consistent (CTRL+N in edit mode) before your baking process, generally many problems can be fixed with this.
Cheers,

Thanks, I shall give it a try!
Do I apply explosion on the high detail mesh, or on the low poly mesh?

Both of them, so you can bake the high poly onto the lowpoly. You can offset them by giving for example, +10 in X or -5 in Z, to put the together easily.

I found a solution, the baking did work but glitches out by some small parts, I am just going to clean up those parts in photoshop. I am not gonna use the mouth so i dont need that in the normal map, plush i adjusted some seams so it would fold flat better, thanks again for the advice!


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Can I divide mesh to perfect squares?

I want to divide/retopo mesh to perfect squares. Is there an addon or script or something to help me with this?
I don't care if the very boundaries of the mesh woul be cut short, but all internal polygons need to have square shape. Small change in the overal shape doesn't matter at all.

May I ask why you want it?

To minimize stretching when using tissue addon. For example using some wicker or similar pattern on this type of topology will result in some ugly stretching.

If you convert all that to squares you'll get, well, a cylinder. Which you can easily add from the menu

In your case, I would keep just the top and bottom edge loops and delete everything in the middle. To select the edge loops ShiftAltRMB on the top and bottom, then Invert I and Delete X.
Then use Bridge Edge Loops (which can be found in the Specials menu W).

You can adjust the parameters until you get edge spacing that is much closer to squares.
As Duarte Farrajota Ramos pointed out, you cannot get each face to be a perfect square, or you end up with a cylinder. But you can get even mesh density this way, which I'm guessing is what you are after.


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Accessing Vector Pass Data in python in background mode
Background: We are building an automated pipeline to extract motion (i.e. vector pass output) from animated blends by running scripts using blender's python API. We are able to programmatically set up nodes and run rendering. We need access to full precision x,y motion components, and the only way we found of accessing that was via bpy.data.images['Viewer Node'].pixels. This gives correct output when running with GUI.
Problem: We need to run blender in background mode on many examples, and in background mode bpy.data.images['Viewer Node'].pixels has a) wrong resolution (does not respect scene.render.resolution_x), b) wrong info (everything is zero).
Existing solutions: We know that it is possible to modify blender source code to fix this, but we want to open source our pipeline, and creating a custom blender build to run it might be too much of an impediment for people. We'd like to make this work with a standard blender version.
Questions:

Is it possible to access vector pass data in some other way, without using the Viewer Node, so that rendering can be done in the background?
Or, is there a way to force Viewer Node to output correct data in background mode?

Can you give a bit more detail about what the viewer node is connected to? Is it just the standard vector pass or are you doing some processing in the compositor?

@RayMairlot, we simply connect the Viewer Node to the vector output in render layers; no compositing.

Did you take a look at this link before? It seems that there is a way to enable back-dropping using Python but I have not been able to figure out how as Blender's documentation is a bit unclear. It would be great if you can understand what the documentation is saying and enable backdropping using Python. If you did, could you please take a look at my question here and post an answer?

@Amir, we haven't worked with backdropping

Another option to evaluate would be to store the result in MultilayerEXR
When writing a MultiLayerEXR file as output. this vector pass is also stored inside the generated EXR file:
render = scene.render
render.layers[0].use_pass_vector = True
render.image_settings.file_format = "OPEN_EXR_MULTILAYER"
# after rendering the open exr file
bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True).

After rendering all layers in blender (before and after compositing are written inside the create OpenEXR file. No fiddling needed in the compositor.
There is currently no API available to read the Render Result directly from the renderer.

This is probably the best answer if you are only looking for vector pass output, which is what my question is about. In our case, we use nodes to process some of the other outputs in addition so my answer worked well for us.

In the end the solution was to use multilayer EXR output by constructing a simple node graph automatically in python (Blender 2.78).
bpy.context.scene.use_nodes = True
bpy.context.scene.render.layers[0].use_pass_combined = True
bpy.context.scene.render.layers[0].use_pass_vector = True

tree = bpy.context.scene.node_tree
rl = tree.nodes.new('CompositorNodeRLayers')
rl.location = 0, 200

output = tree.nodes.new('CompositorNodeOutputFile')
output.location = 200, 200
output.format.file_format = 'OPEN_EXR_MULTILAYER'
output.base_path = output_folder

links = tree.links
links.new(rl.outputs['Speed'], output.inputs[0])

This works, but if vector pass output is the only thing needed, better to skip the nodes and use answer from J. Bakker.


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bisect_plane not clearing in python API
Here is my bisect plane command, which does infact produce new verticies along the bisected plane (Blender 2.90):
print('Nverts0',len(bm.verts), len([v for v in bm.verts if v.is_valid]))
bmesh.ops.bisect_plane(bm, geom=bm.edges, dist=0.0001, plane_co=point, use_snap_center=False, clear_outer=True, clear_inner=False)
print('Nverts1',len(bm.verts), len([v for v in bm.verts if v.is_valid]))

However, niether the clear_outer nor clear_inner option has an effect on the geometry or on how many vertices are there are (the printouts). And the v.is_valid flags aren't set false either. Why aren't clear_outer and clear_inner working?

Set the normal
The default values of cutting plane coordinate and normal are (0, 0, 0).  A zero length normal is invalid and quite likely does nothing.
Test script
Here is a minimal working example of a script, adds a cube, runs the operator with plane coordinate at origin and its normal as the x axis. Recommend setting up a little script like below when asking questions
import bmesh
import bpy
from bpy import context

bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cube_add()
ob = context.object
me = ob.data
bm = bmesh.new()
bm.from_mesh(me)

print('Nverts0',len(bm.verts), len([v for v in bm.verts if v.is_valid]))
bmesh.ops.bisect_plane(
    bm,
    geom=bm.edges,
    dist=0.0001,
    plane_co=(0, 0, 0),
    plane_no=(1, 0, 0),
    use_snap_center=False,
    clear_outer=True,
    clear_inner=False,
    )
print('Nverts1',len(bm.verts), len([v for v in bm.verts if v.is_valid]))
bm.to_mesh(me)

Result
Nverts0 8 8
Nverts1 12 12

Effectively bisecting all x axis aligned edges, creating 4 ngons with 6 verts.  Nothing to clear as faces are not "ripped".
Input geometry
For clear to work on a mesh that has faces, we are going to need to add the faces and verts to the geometry input of the operator.  Recommend with geom giving all geometry of a region of interest will make all options work as expected.
    geom=bm.verts[:] + bm.edges[:] + bm.faces[:],

making this change an running again
Nverts0 8 8
Nverts1 8 8

Has bisected cube, same vert count one less face.  The "outer" is cleared, ie all resultant geometry on the input normal's side of cutting plane.

Return Dictionary
Bmesh operators return information in a dictionary.
ret = bmesh.ops.foo.bar(blah)

in the case of bisect plane it has members "geom_cut" the edges and verts of the cut and "geom".
Some Examples of using bmesh bisect plane operator.
Python: Bisect mesh into n parts, without separate 'LOOSE'
using bisect but still failing
Slice up terrain mesh into chunks
How to get part of a mesh with Python API, which requires breaking down some faces?
Cutting a mesh in half
How to extract side-view outline (e.g. top view) of a 3D object to 2D surface?
Transform cylinder to flat plane - cylinder maze map


text:
Texturing: Texture not covering complete face
Can somebody please help me again? I am trying to put a texture on an apple model. I cut the apple in 2 halves and want to add a texture in the cut face.
Unfortunately the applied texture does not cover the whole face. Near the corner of the face the Textur does get stretched in a weird way.
I created the UV map with "Project from View". I saw this behaviour already in a different Project from me.

The problem could arise from the fact that the face you are trying to uvmap is an ngon, a polygon with greater than 4 sides. Try pressing CTRL+F and select triangulate faces and then project again. Also make sure that your apple has no non-uniform scale.

Thanks Matthew. This has cured the situation on the boundries of the textures. Now I have some distortions in the middle. I try to improve them after work. :-)


text:
How to select and scale same time
help how I can make this scale on selection at the same time

do you mean like this? https://youtu.be/kyB7eoT8ky8

oh shoot comments here are so small didn't notice no I didn't extrude

https://imgur.com/a/DjMXmp1 i mean this do this

Selecting just the outer edges doesn't work in this case, this is how I would do it:

In Edit Mode use Face Select, select all the inner faces of those grooves.
Make sure you have set the Transform Pivot Point set to Individual Origins.
Hit S and then Z to scale them on the Z axis as far as you want the outer edges to be.
Then hit Ctrl+Numpad Minus to reduce the selection of the inner faces.
Scale them back again on the Z axis with S and Z.

Hmmm never thought actually that way thanks

You're welcome... you might consider upvoting or accepting this answer.


text:
Geometry Nodes Atribute Math
I am making Building and i am trying to Change the Window Corner into WallCorner

you could use the index to do this. if you provide your blend file, i will show you.

https://we.tl/t-8fBmc0unNX blend file

thank you. what blender version are u using?

This is NOT the complete solution, just a "push" to the right direction. If you still have question, ask in the comments.

You already had the right idea with the "Point Separate" node.
You put in there your value WallCorner.
I just filled that with some "useful" value.
So i got your px and pz value and compared these to some "fixed" values, put that in two other values (WallMask1 +2) and then i multiplied these two values.
Because the Attribute Compare nodes outputs a true(1) or false(0) we can multiply both values to get a logical AND result for the WallCorner. If both conditions are true, the Mask will be True  and so it works:

So this is the principle.

NOTE: Of course you shouldn't compare to fixed values, but to computed
values in relation to your grid length and width!

Here the modified blend file:

Thank you but how achieved legacy nodes in blender 3.0 also now blender 2.93.7 cant read those nodes

i got point i just didn't knew that was possible way to make it


text:
Sculpt Remesh Jags Edges
Doesn't matter how high I set voxel size edges are jagged
I have to increase the size of the voxel (around 0.002) to look good after sculpting but my setup can't handle


text:
Is anybody else accidentally hiding collections in blender 2.8?
often i forget i'm not in edit mode and i will press 1, 2, or 3. If you're in object mode it will hide all the collections i'm working with. Alt+H doesn't seem to unhide them and i have to manually make them visible again in the outliner. Is there another efficient way to work to avoid this problem?

You could try having a look at the shortcuts? Possibly disabling them, or changing them to something else. Although I can't seem to replicate what yo're doing...

as much as I preferred 2.7's shortcuts, I'm trying to adapt to 2.8's default shortcuts as much as possible. So when you're in object mode and you have multiple custom-named collections, hitting 1,2, or 3 doesn't hide all those collections? Is it just me?

With 2.8 shortcuts 1, 2, 3 don't do anything I can notice.

nevermind, i found my answer here:
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/150996/how-to-show-collections-in-blender-2-8
thanks anyways


text:
How realistic is the physics engine?
I've been working on making a bowling animation where a character throws a bowling ball and it hits bowling pins (obviously). I showed brother my WIP and he said the only thing he didn't like about it was that the ball seems to get thrown quite far despite being heavy. I changed the mass of the ball and saw no effect but then realized that mass shouldn't effect it as such but more so the drag, I think?
Is drag automatically calculated? I tried to add a drag force but I don't know how to make it match real world physics. Assuming there's no drag being calculated then the bowling simulation I'm doing acts as if it's in a vacuum? Can someone clarify how it all works and what I can do to get more realistic results?

Like most functions in Blender, if the results don't suit, try and try again with a new method or approach.  Blender is so darned versatile there's not a lot you can't emulate in one form or another. As for it's physics, on the whole it's pretty good but there are occasions where it just plain won't do the obvious and you have to switch over to manual keyframing.  Thanks to the graph editor you can do a pretty good job of it.

Continued... In your case, the bowling ball can be switched to a duplicate and that animated or constrained to a path, any way you wish.  The original whilst invisible can be forced back into the correct trajectory for the strike. It's organized to match the duplicate at the strike frame and switched to visible again.  This is also a lot easier when there's no course pattern on the ball such as found in soccer.


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How to get shading to show in different tabs?
First time using Blender. I've followed a tutorial for creating a simple animation and I'd like to save it as a video or image sequence, but I'm not sure how to do this. My work shows in the "shading" tab, but not in any other tab.
What am I missing? Also, I was working on this in the animation tab yesterday and it was visible. Today, I can't see it there.
Thanks!

Everything is saved in your project, you're just in solid mode instead of the look dev mode for the Viewport Shading. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/3dview/controls/shading.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/3dview/introduction.html#display-shading

For saving as video: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/150388/how-do-i-save-a-blender-file-as-a-mp4-in-2-80-video-editing

Thanks! This helped.


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Realistic character emotions
Blender has a wide suite of character making tools, but I have been having trouble finding an emotion-to-facial-expression "conversion tool".
Make Human is very realistic and has a wide variety of options that control genetic facial traits. However, emotions have to be manually encoded in the riggings (this is my understanding at least). Doing so in a convincing way isn't trivial.
Is there any tool that "renders" emotions? Namely, you input emotional descriptions or parameters of some sort and it will adjust the rigging of a make-human mesh or a even just it's own stock character?
Ideally such a tool would allow complex mixtures of emotions and animations. For example it would be amazing if you could specify “character is startled (a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10) from an event that occurs at a relative azimuth of 30 degrees. The startle shifts to grief over a period of [a default value that reduces the guesswork, but can be changed].” This is probably pipe-dreaming, but even a basic tool would be very helpful.

Try Blender's Pose Library. If you create a pose you like manually, you can select the bones that correspond with it and press the "+" button in the Pose Library to create a preset. Now when you want that emotion, all you have to do is go in (select your bones first) and click the magnifying glass icon to assign the pose to a given frame.
Additionally, assuming your various characters use a standardized bone layout/naming system, you should be able to use one library with multiple characters with minimal tweaks.
Please note this does require a lot of manual work on your part to set up initially, so if that defeats the purpose of your question, try looking around for preexisting facial expression pose libraries online. (I would recommend making your own, though, as a third-party library may not use the exact bone/rig naming setup and cause some major issues.)

Are there any particular such libraries that you would recommend? I am thinking it would be easier to manually adjust the rigging rather than reinvent the wheel. The former task may be tedious but it at least has a clear end-point and is also a mostly one-time task.

As I recall, the old CG Cookie Flex Rig had a pose library of predefined facial expressions. You could potentially look at that, see if it would work at all. Alternatively, perhaps doing that same process, but from a visual reference (either from pictures or screenshots of someone's animated demo reel).


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Getting the scene an object is in (blender 2.9)
It's fairly easy to get the objects that are in a scene:
dict(myScene.collection.all_objects) # mapping from name to object.

But how to go the other way?
scene = magic_get_linked_scenes(myOb)

One could iterate through all scenes:
linked_scenes = []
for scene_name, scene in dict(bpy.data.scenes):
  for ob_name, ob in dict(scene.collection.all_objects):
     if ob.name == name:
         linked_scenes.append(scene) # checking object equality should also work.

But this is clumsy and slow if there are a very large number of objects. Is there a better way?

Best practice is to get all objects of the scene in context: list(bpy.context.scene.objects)

object.users_scene seems to show the scenes using the object.
Blender's Python Console is very useful when finding this stuff out. If you start typing and hit Tab Auto Complete shows you all the options you have:


text:
How to merge two faces of different normals to create a corner?
I want to merge the faces and make sure the vertices match up.

Had you tried to extrude some of the faces and try manually to fit with the other one without merging?, tried to recreate your model and merge but it looks like blender cannot do it, therefore, you could try to extrude one of the face and try to fit with the other, i hope this could be useful for you

Install this Destructive Extrude Addon
In Edit mode Select the Face and Press Alt+E and select the Destructive Extrude option.
Now you can extrude and if need to snap to face press Ctrl key.
It never creates extra faces and no doubles.

In this way you leave two internal faces, which is wrong

yes, first delete the 2 faces

sorry correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't "Remove doubles" take care of the internal faces?

Also, thank you for answering. This solved my problem.

No, even with this edited "extrude face" version, an internal face is left, and "remove double" won't get rid of it. Delete the opposite face before extruding the other.

@m.ardito plz check the edited answer


text:
How do I merge all of these objects into one, and only using one material and texture to apply colors using a UV color grid?
I was wondering on how I'm able to join all of these separate objects into one, and be able to apply one material using a UV texture with a color grid? is there any tutorials on youtube? Im only used to maya UV texturing. thanks.

https://i.imgur.com/sLgEuoX.png

To join the objects, select them and then press CTRL + J.
but I imagine you only need a color grid material for all the objects in the scene and not really having them joined.
the easiest and fastest way to achieve this requires using and external addon.
http://renderhjs.net/textools/blender/
Once you have the addon installed you can just select all the objects in the scene (no need to join them) and assuming you already UV unwrap them, then in the UV window under the TexTools tab just press Checker Map. if you keep pressing Checker Map it will scroll between various grids

the blender way is a bit more laborious and involves more steps (creating a material, uploading texture from the proprietes tab, assign the material and so on) so if that is want you want you should search some beginner tutorials on youtube. BlenderGuru is a good start

In order to accomplish this, the easiest way is through the 'Texture Atlas' add-on.

Open user preferences Ctrl + Alt + U. Go to 'Addons' tab on the top bar. Search for 'Texture Atlas' and check the box to enable it.

Once you have it enabled you should see a section for Texture Atlas under render settings tab of the properties panel. Create a new texture atlas (in the image below its named 'cannon'), select all the objects that you want to make a UV texture for and click 'Add selected'

Next, click on either 'Auto unwrap' (to let the program create the UV layout) or 'StartManualUnwrap' (to do it yourself manually).
Once the unwrapping is done, don't forget to click 'FinishManualUnwrap'. When you do this, the objects will still be separate but share the same UV layout.
If you want all the objects to share the same material, you can select all of them and press Ctrl + L. You will get an option to link materials When you click on materials, all the objects will have the same material of the last selected object (shown in light orange)


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Problem Mesh Renderer in Unity
I have a simple Object and one armature (1 bones).

In Unity, object have a Mesh renderer like this :

WIth a Ctrl/P, I set the object's parenting to armature

In Unity, a black zone appears and a Skinned mesh renderer
replaces the Mesh Renderer.

are you sure there are not two copies of the object in Unity? Looks like a second copy overlaying the first.

I realized that object and armature did not have the same origin. When I set same origin two both, texture's back to normal. Thanks for your answer.


text:
Procedural lines/scrabbles
In order to make procedural scratches texture, I wanted to make some random lines scrabbles like on picture (scratches might be more accurate name but it reminds me of just random scrabbles).
Is that possible, if yes, how?


text:
Braided hose modeling
HoW could I make braided hose like this, I know I have to use array but I have troubles making piece that should be arrayed.

Here is higher res but I don't need those single threads to be show but just single like in image above.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/58959/how-to-model-braided-nylon-sleeve

@DuarteFarrajotaRamos I saw this But couldn't use it for my model

i read this title as "braindead horse modelling" and was somewhat disappointed when i clicked on it

It seems so flat that you could probably get same results with a simple tube + bump map texture. But that is probably not a modeling answer.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/282515/how-to-make-braided-tubing

Here a more accurate answer.
And here is a simpler solution for the first picture (but you can use this kind of solution to fake the second one):

Create 2 bricks (front view), the proportion is 2 x 1 units, subdivide a bit, rotate them 45° and stick them together.

Use a first Array modifier to duplicate them on the X axis. Find the good Relative Offset value.

Use a second Array modifier to duplicate them on the Z axis. Again, find the good Relative Offset value.

Add a Simple Deform modifier / Bend mode, find the good Deform Angle value (more than 360°).

Add a Subdivision Surface modifier and press Smooth Shading.
To make it follow a curve, use a Curve modifier.


text:
Blender 2.8 image texture node and color space
As of release of Blender 2.8 version the Image texture node has changed, before we had only "Color Data" and "Non color data".
Now we have that drop down menu titled "Color space" and various types to choose from.
My question is when we use which type of color data (do we still use "Non color" for normal maps, roughness etc or do we choose one of new ones)?

I've run a few quick tests by setting up two Image Texture nodes fed by the same image and passing through a Vector Subtract node. By varying each of the Image Texture Color Space settings this can be used to compare the different modes. Initial tests seem to indicate that 'Raw' and 'Non-color' are identical but each of the others produce different output. I can't find any up to date documentation but I'd be very interested to learn the differences between these modes.

You can find some informations in the (updated) 2.80 manual about Color Management

@RichSedman I just have noticed when using .exr environment texture it automatically uses Linear type color space, Raw has same as well as non color while sRGB is a lot lot darker and others are making colors appear a lot different or would be mostly black, Using Linear ACES has some cool effect on env, I don't know what maybe oversaturation it is hard to tell because env was whole 'gray' vibe, it is some old industrial hall.

It’s not “oversaturation”, but a broken transform. That ACES transform isn’t ACES, and needs to be removed. It’s confusing garbage at this point. The TL;DR is use the select box to inform the software how your buffer / file encoding is encoded. If it isn’t encoded as per the selection, don’t use it.

In short:

Use "non-color" for inputs that are supposed to be spatial (3D) vectors or simple factor values.
Use one of the others (depending on your needs) for what is effectively a color.

More details:
I've dig a bit into Blender code and into OpenColorIO (OCIO) documentation and my (very young and superficial) understanding is the following.
Blender uses a processor component to handle image data. This processor can be based on OCIO or be a 'fall back' one if OCIO is not present (I don't know why it could be absent... maybe to allow Blender to run on some low level hardware?).
The main goal of OCIO is to allow to transform image data into device rendered image data which fits the best to human eyes perspective as (for instance) our perception of light intensity is not linear (so intensity can be coded or manipulated linearly, as it is, but rendered differently). But more globally, OCIO can process image data transformation 'the way you want'.
OpenColorIO is a set of libraries (programs) that are provided OCIO organisation and these libraries are open source.
From that, when an image is processed (in our case for texture nodes) it is given to OCIO to do it. And OCIO is based on a configuration that can be found in 'Your installation path\2.8\2.80\datafiles\colormanagement'.
In this directory, we can find a file called 'config.ocio' (describing the possible configurations) and two subdirectories 'filmic' and 'lut' (containing data tables used by these configurations).
LUT stands for 'look up table'. For image calibration it has been defined by Academy Color Encoding Specification (ACES). Linear ACES is one of the possible option for the texture node.
Filmic is another calibration approach. The best is to read this answer from troy_s to know more.
The general principle of OCIO configuration seems to be giving a range to the input data and apply a transformation table to it. Transformations can be direct or reverse.
Concretely, what about 'XYZ', 'sRGB', 'Raw', 'Non-color', 'Linear ACES', 'Linear' and 'Filmic-Log'?
XYZ
'XYZ' is not 3D vector (x, y, z).
CIE XYZ is a calibration and its result is analogous to the LMS color space which corresponds to the cones response of the human eyes.
Y is the luminance. Z is nearly the blue. X is a mixing factor. The response value for them is defined in the OCIO configuration.
This is a transformed data.
sRGB
Stands for Standard RGB and is the "default color space for byte image" as defined in 'config.ocio'. It also has a transformation table defined in it.
This is a transformed data.
Raw
'Raw' is the image encoded data as it is. There is no transformations for it.
This is not a transformed data.
Non-color
This is similar to 'raw' from the calculation point of view. But it is semantically different as it is for things we know to be 'non color'. The comment in config.ocio says "color space used for images which contains non-color data (i,e, normal maps)".
This is not a transformed data.
Linear ACES
It is transformed by OCIO. The configuration is linear (as said in it name) and is done from a table giving parameters of this operation for each color channel.
This is a transformed data.
Linear
Correspond to Rec. 709 (Full Range) and is commented as 'Blender native linear space'.
This is a transformed data.
Filmic-Log
Again please refer to this answer. It is commented as 'Log based filmic shaper with 16.5 stops of latitude, and 25 stops of dynamic range'.
This is a transformed data.
A link to OCIO configuration in the Blender repository.
Note:
When using an image texture node, the color space information is given by or set to the image texture itself. This is not a node property. So that, if you set the color space in one material, this will affect all the others that are using the same texture.

Thanks for the detailed answer - that's a really good explanation of the different settings and just what I was looking for.

Could you confirm that basicly "non-color" IS "raw" ? (just new name, but no new mathematical operation different from raw?

@softyodayoann, I'm not aware of a change for that since this answer has been written.

I just wanted to confirm, since they removed "RAW"

I believe this is a duplicate, but likely bears answering.
If the thing in question refers to a colour, it should be an appropriate colour based transform. Data, such as depth, height, etc. should be a non-colour transform, which currently in Blender is only a single transform.
Think of the colour transform selector as a means for you, the pixel pusher, to describe to the software how your file is encoded and what it’s purpose is. It relies on the person guiding the software to understand how the encoding is formatted. Is it encoded nonlinearly with sRGB’s OETF and primaries and requires it to be linearised? Is the encoding an EXR and the image buffer requires changing the light emissions from the encoded state to your working reference light assumptions?
That box is how one describes the file encoding to the software.
Updating answer to specifically address Rich’s question:

Initial tests seem to indicate that 'Raw' and 'Non-color' are identical but each of the others produce different output. I can't find any up to date documentation but I'd be very interested to learn the differences between these modes.

Once you realize that the entire pipeline is dealing with data, it becomes more clear. We can further break down data into two distinct classes, being colour and non-colour.

Both colour and non-colour data could cover arbitrary ranges of numerical code values.
Both colour and non-colour data could be nonlinearly or linearly encoded

So what’s the difference?
Identifying a block of code values as non-colour data means that the data will remain untransformed from the buffer encoding, typically suited for treating data "as is". If the code values represent a colour, in all instances the code values must be subject to a complex transform chain and be flagged as colour data.
So what is the difference between “raw” and “non-colour”?
Within Blender, if you open up the default configuration, you’ll see that both “Raw” and “Non-Color” are in fact both isdata: true definitions. As such, they are identical, and more fuel for when I say that the default configuration is still a dumpster fire. Brecht has done some good work recently cleaning it up, but it has a long ways to go. Here are the stanzas in question, with the relevant sections isolated for clarity:
  - !<ColorSpace>
    name: Non-Color
    [...]
    bitdepth: 32f
    isdata: true
    allocation: uniform
    allocationvars: [0, 1]

  - !<ColorSpace>
    name: Raw
    [...]
    bitdepth: 32f
    isdata: true
    allocation: uniform
    allocationvars: [0, 1]

See? Both are identical!
In this case, the patchwork nature of the configuration has led to duplication. Sometimes this can be helpful for clarity. In this case, with the newer and more appropriate colour transform work being exposed, it has become somewhat less clear and more confusing.

Ok, but then when do we use other types, I thought maybe we should use xyz color space, it makes sense, at least to me. Mind sharing thread that you think is duplicate?

The colour space describes the encoding of the image. The image isn’t likely encoded as XYZ, and frankly, I have no idea why the developers insist on cluttering up the configuration with edge-case transforms.

Well they are trying to make it more appealing to industry standards I guess, and someone might need to use that. So we should stick to sRGB and non-color if we don't have some special snowflake image to be used?

There are plenty of encodings out there that a typical person might run into. The reason XYZ prevails is simply cluelessness really.

These new options are the result of Blender's keeping up to date. One example thereof is ACES, which, as Wikipedia says

supports both high dynamic range (HDR) and wide color gamut (WCG).

So it's used i.a. for HDR images that are quite common now.
Non-color means the same it did.

Acording to the manual, filmic log is used when you want to export the image to a color grading program.  It might also be useful when color grading on blender. I did notice that it enhances the colors dramatically, which would be useful when trying to seperate them. you want to use sRGB for diffuse image textures, and non-Color for bump maps.  The other uses are mainly used in the scene color space.


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Block like surface when painting bump map
So I painted bump map started with grey color with rgb values .5, and I painted with not full black color and I decreased strength to ~.15 when I took a look of what object look with bump map, it was ugly as I have low resolution image I tried all sizes for 1k to 4k and they give me same results, I tried saving as 16 bit it gave same results, tried plugging it in displacement input still no difference, how to overcome/fix this so it becomes smooth, and yes node is set to non color data.
p.s. on images strength of bump map is decreased to ~.2

Check node's interpolation type: should be Linear or Cubic

Well, that was on linear, as it comes by default.

When you generate a new bump texture image, be sure to tick the option 'Float Buffer' so that you use 32 bit instead of 8 bit or 16 bit image depth.

Wow, I thought it was brainfart because I couldn't find 32 bit option and I heard people talking about it, thanks!


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Subdividing part of spherical object without getting weird bumps
Ok so I use cube with level 4 subsurf modifier and 'to sphere' in edit mode so it becomes sphere, now I want to create some circles engraved into it so I need to create more topology there but when I subdivide few faces or subdivide smooth it creates weird bumps which are more notable under subsurf modifier. What would be good approach to do that. Here is what am I going for but I'm far away right now, I mean on these little circles on on three prong thingy, any thoughts?

Assuming a couple of levels of subdivision below those already applied, a fairly conventional method to insert features like this into curved surfaces is to use a topology something like this:

Retain an intact,featureless, more subdivided copy of the sphere in the same place, and assign a Shrinkwrap modifier to your model with the intact sphere as target. (You can hide the target sphere, or put it on another layer)
Make a vertex group in your model, of all the vertices you want to conform to the target surface, (for example, excluding the ones shaded blue in the picture) and aim the Shrinkwrap at that group.
The result:

Matcap - showing Srinkwrap off:

Matcap - showing Srinkwrap on:

Wow thanks man this looks promising! Thanks a lot.

I have one more question when I apply subsurf (4) on cube and round it using cast or to sphere it is fine it has some bumps but I want model to be relatively low-poly so I add level 2 subsurf to make it look better on render it creates artifacts on place where where corners of cube were, that s unless I use cast modifier. Would model like that be ok for selling online?

Is it OK when you Apply the Cast modifier? That would be fine.. but if it has to be subdivided before casting, I don't think you can advertise it as lo-poly. Having said that, I've never sold on the open market.. only privately where that sort of thing can be discussed.  depending on your features, there are other typologies which may be smoother with fewer polys.. e.g. a once Cat-Clark subdivided (all quad) icosphere .. which can be hard to work with.. your ref. is a cube, though...

When I first subsurfed cube than I used cast than I put subsurf again and I had to add cast/shrinkwrap to get rid of artifacts. Well icosphere would be hard to work with especially when uv-unwraping. So in your opinion what would be OK poly-count for this model?

Your ref looks like 20-40K? I really don't know, unless I know who/what it's for .. sorry not to be of more help...

ref is 240k but I think it's not displayed correctly on image. Let's say it will be used in game what about then? (I'm not going to do so I just trying to figure out whereabouts I know for games it should be relatively low-poly but I need some reference number) Well you were of help much, thank you!

Not my area, you'll have to ask around, but I think for games even now, it has to be a lot lower than that for the final.. although tje hi-poly could be the basis for textures, normals etc...


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Combing hair extends it
OK so I'm trying to make a feather by using scaled cube as a base, and i use 2 edges as a vertex group for particles, now when i try to comb it it either rises towards me or on the very top when I try to comb it - it extends ridiculously (see images)
after some combing here i already had to cut off top because it went too much

after I try to fix the top a little bit

keep lenghts and root are checked, any advice?

You may need to apply scale in Object mode (CtrlA > Scale).
The hair length will be affected and probably all the combing already done will be damaged, so I'd suggest starting with a fresh particle system after applying scale.

Oh yes, that was an issue I forgot I asked this here otherwise I would answer it.


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How do you scale about local axis, x in this case?
I would like to scale these down width wise, but even with Transformation Orientation set to Local and Pivot Center for Rotation and Scaling set to Individual Origins, scaling on x or Y turns them all according to the World Axis.

Did you try using ALT+S -> X to scale along the face normals?
Edit - Hmm. I should have tested this first. I'm sure it used to be useful :/

If that's the result you're after:

Try scaling around individual origins and hit SHIFTZ to exclude the Z axis while you're at it.

Thank you.  I had the origins set correctly, but I was trying to scale on the x or y.  Shift+Z worked.  Thank you.

@eyeclick If the answer is correct, could you accept it?

Sorry, took me a while to figure out how to.

I won't complain. Happy blending


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Change the order or remove custom properties with Verge3D

When I use a material created to render cycle I can not convert them for Verge3d. How to do ? Remove API cycle ?

You just need to do this step by step:

Delete all cycles nodes in the material
Click on Use Shader Nodes on the material to disable it
Switch to Verge3D engine
Enable Node Material on the Material tab and use Verge3D Nodes only.

Thank you for your answer, what are you think when your have multiple custom on each other ? Everything is kept in memory.


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rotation is reset when I playback animation
 Rotation of a propeller, impossible to change the axis

It would help if you would clarify your question and setup and maybe even post your blend file.  However at a guess you have keyframed the rotation of your propeller, when you change the axis you are not updating the keyframes, so it returns to the keyframed values when you hit play.

Thank you for your help, I understand, the movement of the propeller don't know the orientation of the plane. How I do for fix the orientation of the propeller and keep his movement.

How I do for update keyframe ?

@Vincent One way would be to use another empty.  I assume you have parented your propeller to the empty and keyframed the rotation of the empty.  You could create Empty 2 and parent Empty 1 to Empty 2.  Rotate  Empty 2 to change the axis.

Thank you for the way, it's a little bit strange, but It's true.Thank you for answer @risingfall

Looking at the image above., the animation is recorded on the Empty. I assume but cannot tell for certain that all 3 rotations are animated. you only need a single rotation to be animated.
You can remove the other 2 keyframes from the axis you don't need to be animated and it will fix the issue.

The yellow color means that there are keyframes present for these properties.
You should remove them. For example I assume that the rotation around the X-axis is the one you want to keep.
Press other mouse button on the Y and click on Clear Single Keyframes. Do the same for the Z.

This will remove the keyframed animation on the Y-rotation and the Z-rotation.

If you see the plane there is the rotation of the propeller (360°) I have no problem with this mouvement. But the propreller have a angle with the plane. I can use my keyframe in a normal way XYZ in global.

2 Empty is the solution one for 360° and a second for match the plane with her.