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Vertex paint and bake color id?
Hi i always bake color id with use material and color diffuse, but now i do my model option brush in blender. I use vertex paint for this :

It is possible to bake color id with this ?

You can use Input > Attribute node to feed Vertex Colors to Diffuse node and than Bake Diffuse Color as usual.


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Create height/ displacement map from texture?
i must add for my model a lot of hard details. I have a lot of references photo 4k, it is possible to genereate height map from picture, like this :

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Emision light - problem with burning of?
Hi i render this image in 300 sample and use denosing, in my scene i use emision ligt in my lamp and normal spot loght. I have problem with this :

in my scene look like this :

Seems like artifacts from Denoising. Picture is to small to be sure.

When i render at close range is look ok ;/

Maybe try to change denoising settings. I can't tell you how though without your blend file.

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


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UV map is not straight
I tried to unwrap simply cube with bevel. I made a seam and my UV looks like this (vertex are curves):

It is ok ? Must I use a special addon (Misc) to repair?

Related https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/14524/non-uniform-scaling-during-uv-unwrap-what-is-this

Right after clicking on Unwrap press F6 and try to change unwrap method.


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UV mapping, some models on one layout?
I have problem with UV layout :
I try this 3 UV models place on 1 layout uv :

This models have the same material, but when i select 3 beams my house i have only one.
I expects this result :

How i can do this ?

Try using a Texture Atlas add on: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/68877/how-do-i-uv-unwrap-multiple-objects-to-one-uv-map and https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/15676/how-to-unwrap-multiple-objects

Only one object at a time can be UV-unwrapped (except when using an add-on like Texture Atlas). When this is done, the mesh datablock for that object gets a UV Map assigned to it.
If you want to UV map that whole structure together, you can first select and join the multiple mesh objects (CtrlJ).
When you do this the mesh pieces will all become one object, and take the name of the object that was selected last. This last-select object is called the Active Object, and notice how its selection color is a little bit different from the other selected objects.
You might consider leaving the door as its own separate object, since it may move, or you can have it all as one mesh and still animate the door by rigging it. But you haven't mentioned animation so I'm getting ahead of myself. Anyway, the idea is to organize your mesh data into larger, easier to manage objects.


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Fireflies in my bake texture
Hi I wan't to bake my texture, but I have a lot of fireflies:

It was baked in 4k and 500 samples. Can you help me?

In Addition to Ryan's answer, You may also want to check Denoising in the Render Layers Tab, that tends to get rid of fireflies. Also, use bigger light sources, that is the #1 cause of fireflies.

Increasing clamp indirect (found next to samples) reduces fireflies.


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how to simulate cloth dragging on collision surface in blender 2.8
I am new to blender (in fact, I am new to the whole 3D rendering), I was watching a tutorial on youtube ([2.8] Blender Tutorial: Cloth Animation in EEVEE) on how to simulate a cloth and tried following along. everything worked out fine as  I followed along.
the animation is something like this:
1- cloth is initially hovering as a plane in the z-axis
2- it will start to fall and collide with a plane
3- pin groups are moving along the x-axix
4- cloth is colliding with a bowl
however, when I watched the rendered images, I noticed that there is a crease/wrinkle that is formed when the cloth falls to the plane and that crease/wrinkle remain unchanged as the cloth is dragged on the surface.

how can I smooth out the crease/wrinkle as the cloth getting dragged?
I tried adding stickiness and friction on the plane but it remained the same.

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


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Adding a texture to one face in Blender 2.8
How do you add a texture to one face of a cube in 2.8?
I get stuck on the instructions below when it tells you to "Go to the texture header" in the materials context. In my version there is no texture header in the materials context.
How do i add material/textures to only one face of an object?

select the face, go in the Properties editor > Material tab, create a new slot with the + button, give it a new material, click on the Assign button

That assigns a material to the face but I want that face to have a texture.

Assign the texture to the material. You can't just add a texture without using a material.

That was where I was originally stuck!

OK I figured this out.
After adding a material slot and clicking new:
Click the small dot next to 'base material' and select 'Image Texture' that then allows you to load a texture for the material and can be assigned to the face.

Or do it in the Shader editor which makes thingd more understandable in my opinion

why don't you select your answer as accepted (click the check mark next the answer) so everyone knows you found an answer?

Doing it in the shader editor was where I ended up after about 3 hours of messing about!

I can't mark my own answer as correct until 24 hours have passed.

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


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What's the best way to create textures for an overlay system?
I am trying to create a system where I can customise the look of a character by overlaying textures on top of a base body texture. For example, I can choose different eyes, mouths, scars, makeup, tattoos, etc. The way I am doing it now is by painting stencils of 2048x2048 images with high interpolation onto 2048x2048 textures so that I can get enough resolution in the areas of the texture that I am actually using, but it's a lot of wasted space and it uses too many resources if I want to overlay, say, 20 textures on top of each other.
My other idea to do this was to use multiple uv maps (one for the face, each arm, legs, etc.) so that I could get around the same quality while being able to use much smaller texture sizes, but it also makes it more difficult to work with and harder to create textures that run across multiple uv maps (like a tattoo that goes across the arm and torso uv map). I also had problems with textures mapping to the wrong spots because I couldn't figure out how to get rid of the parts of the uv map that I wasn't using other than shrinking them and moving them into a corner.
Just in case this has any importance, I am using three.js and glsl to implement the actual system.
I would really like to know the best way to go about this so that it isn't too computationally intensive to use. I also apologise if I've overlooked anything or gotten anything wrong, I have never done anything like this before and it has been a fairly large learning curve to even get a basic version of it working how I want.


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Is there hidden data in this .blend file? Trying to minimize the file size
I have this .blend file of a beard, and I'm trying to minimize the file size. I reduced the number of vertices from 30,718 to 88, but the file size only went from ~18MB to ~10MB. I can't figure out what the other data might be.
I have other files with more vertices/objects/materials that are only about 1MB, so it sure seems like something is hidden (at least from my inadequate eyes).
The file:

Yes. There are three packed jpg files.
Go to UV editor, select the first one, then click on the X button near its name, while holding the shift key.
Repeat this for the second and the third one, then save this file again.
A "0" will appear near the deleted images.

Alternatively File> External Data> Unpack All Into Files to at least unpack them.

Wonderful, thank you. To maximize my learning, did you just think to look here through experience? Or was there some systematic way you found where data was being stored?

If you open a new Blender, then click on File>Append and browse in your file, you will see what it contains.

In addition to what FFeller said, you can look in the Outliner, where at the top it says All Scenes; change it to Blender File and you'll see what's in it.


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Can't add segments to plane
I have been trying to add segments to a plane, and I am not given the option. I have tried typing F6 or T before adding it, and I am still not given the option to add more segments. This appears to be the case with other objects as well. What am I doing wrong? I am new to blender, so I can imagine the answer is very simple.

If you mean subdivide or extrude or else, you need to select your object and go in Edit mode (Tab)

Hi. What has led you to believe that there should be an option appearing to add more segments when adding planes?

Two possibilities for similar effects:

You have a plane
Press TAB to enter edit mode
Press Ctrl+R to make a Loop Cut
Use mouse scroll wheel to adjust number of cuts
Left click to apply number of cuts
Right click to apply the loop cuts in perfect center of plane
Repeat is second direction

You have a plane
Press TAB to enter edit mode
Press A to select everything
Right click to show menu
Use "Subdivide" Tool

I think all other 3d applications have ability to add more segments for basic primitives. I don't think it's unjustified to assume that would be the case in Blender as well.
Unfortunately I don't have good solution for this, nor any other primitives if you have already created it.
However if you create a Grid it's plane with segment options when you create it. When creating a grid look left lower corner and you'll find this.

But only when creating it. After clicking somewhere it's gone forever.

It's not gone forever! There is one more chance. You can press F9 to bring it back the lost menu!


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Flipping the direction of bezier curve path for a crown molding
I am trying to make a crown molding with bezier curves where I make a path along the wall, and then in Bevel object, selecting a profile of the molding that I made with another bezier curve. When I do this, it works, but is in the wrong direction. I need the molding to be facing outwards, away from the wall, rather than inwards.

For the bevel object in •[edit]• mode, see yellow arrow in image below,

Try rotating in X or Y or Z axis to see result in the final mesh.
Try 90 degrees and -90 degrees.

That worked! Much appreciated!


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Compositing a swarm of insects on video footage
I'm trying to make a series of shots for a video where there are swarms of insects crawling on my hand and face like this bit from the Dalí/Buñuel film Un Chien Andalou where ants are crawling on the hand.
Ideas on the best way to go about this would be greatly appreciated.

You mention "composite", so ....
you could use the alpha-over composite node where your ants (represented here by small cubes, but if in motion you'd want a video of the bugs moving) appears on top of your rendering (could also be a video of your moving hand):

It would look as awful as one of those cheap 1950's movies or as laughable as the spider crawling up James Bond's arm in Dr No:

If you want realism, you'd have to do some modeling in blender and then perhaps some form of Particle System rendered as objects that are modeled as crawling ants -- might look better.

That sounds great. I do not want realism. The James Bond reference is exactly the direction I'm going in. Thanks!

@Vincent -- okay, but I'll roll my eyes with your video, exactly as I do every time when I see this scene in the Bond movie, LOL ;)


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Jump cut editing in the Video Sequence Editor
I would like to edit a long video, deleting parts of it. I think this type of editing is called jump cut. What would be an efficient way to do it in Blender? Just soft/hard cutting the video and sound strips on two different frames, deleting the middle strip and moving together the remaining parts? Or is there a better way?
I found an add-on called "Jump to Cut", but I'm not sure if I understand how it works and if it could be useful for this purpose.
Thanks!

IIRC I think that was just a UI addon to skip to the next edit point after you've added cuts.

The Jump to Cut Addon assembles various important tools, which can be found in the Blender Sequencer, but has no premade method to create jump cuts.
The manual way is already rather fast.

 RMB select the movie strip.
Position the cursor at the beginning of the jump cut.
Soft Cut with K.
 RMBSelect the start handle of the 2nd part of the
strip.
Move it forward a  number of frames. Assuming you want to jump forwards a second in 24 fps the shortcuts would be GX24⏎ Enter.
Remove the gap. ⟵ Backspace or Strip > Remove Gaps.

You could also just add cuts to a strip the Slide the contents of each one.

If you're asking this question because manually editing with jump cuts takes too much time, there is software to automate it. TimeBolt is a desktop software for Mac/PC to remove dead air and silence with jump cuts.
The software is helpful for creators who want to release shows on a consistent schedule and want to save time editing video or audio.
See TimeBolt

Not sure 3rd party software fits the "What would be an efficient way to do it in Blender?" part of the question.

I posted a solution to a problem Blender (nor any other software) currently solves. And yes, TimeBolt is my software.


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Symmetrize Vertex Group on object with armature
I have an object with an armature and I want the limbs on both sides to be symmetrical.
I rigged the object using Mixamo's autorigger because it performs much better than blender could. However the Vertex weights are not symmetrical. In fact: on the left limbs I can see some vertex distortions and the limbs on the left side are bending a bit differently than the right limbs.
I know it's due to the Vertex weight because I can clearly see it in "Weight Paint" mode. The limbs on the right side are perfect! Is there a way how I can copy all vertex groups which define the weightings on the right side and apply them to the left side of the limbs (with their own vertex group name for the left limbs)?
Don't worry, the object is symmetrical and the bones that were created by Mixamo are also symmetrical so I just need to make the weights also symmetrical.

A google search: https://www.google.com/search?q=Blender+Symmetrize+Vertex+Group leads to first result: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/21350/mirror-vertex-groups which leads to this: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/16504/is-there-any-way-to-copy-the-weight-of-one-bone-over-to-anotherforgot-to-use-x.

Sorry, my bad. I was searching for this but I guess I wasn't searching right. You can flag this as a duplicate. I promise that I won't do that again. Anyway thank you for the help.

No harm done, duplicates are fine, they help people who ask the problem differently. By writing this you created another path to solution, I am sure it will help someone. I showed how I got to the answer and what query I used, the pattern is similar for other searches and usually gives me what I want. By reading it back I realize I should have phrase it with some words around to be not as instructional, it leaves an impression you did something bad.


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Unusual lines coming up in normal map!
I'm pretty much new to Blender. Currently, I have been following Andrew Price's Anvil series and I have come across this problem of lines popping up in my normal. It is kind of frustrating since it is showing up in the render as well. Could use some help here! Thanks

Could you point out which are the unusual line?

Did you enable smooth shading for the lowpoly?

@MrZak No. Should I?

See https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/42048/1245

@MrZak Thanks a lot! The smooth shading helped. Also for the high poly I used the smooth brush kind because the problem seemed to arise from there. Sorry for the trouble


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Why is transparency not working on this transparent image texture
My image texture looks like this:

And yet when I try to add a transparent BSDF shader it doesn't work properly, and the result looks like this:
I've tried many things; changing the BSDF color to black, adding the image texture to the fac, adding the image alpha to the fac, removing the normal map, changing the BSDF settings, and a lot more, but to no avail.
Here's my node setup at the moment:

How would I go about removing the black void around it while not making the metal itself transparent as it is now? Thanks.

Plug the alpha out into the fac of your mix shader

Try this setup.  Under User Preferences, under the Add-Ons tab, one option is Import Images as Planes.  This is based on the default setup, but with a metallic shader.  This should work, but only if you use Cycles Render.
Also, I see what you're trying to do with the image, and I know a way you can make the images look 3D from any angle through microdisplacement.  To do this, link the image to the displacement input of the Material Output node.  It is best to use a bump map for the purpose.  If you got the image online, there may be one already made.  Otherwise, use this tutorial at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9Q6E59hVpU to create your own off of the original image using your own image editing software.  Tell us how it worked.
Anonymous

I've tried that exact setup as I alluded to in the original post (Clearly I should have made this more obvious, as all 3 replies seem to think I did not.) and it still doesn't work.


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How do you make an SSS texture (Using Principled BSDF) only affect part of a mesh? (Image/gif inside)
(Albedo texture on left and SSS texture on right just for reference) https://i.sstatic.net/veTGy.png
I've been trying to figure out how to have an SSS shader apply only to certain parts of the mesh it's attached to (The skin, usually) with little luck.
It's not making the entire mesh look like a tomato, but it gives all parts of the texture that aren't skin a strange artifacting(?) effect that makes all parts of the model that aren't skin look terrible. Shown here: https://i.sstatic.net/L4sRZ.jpg (Note that the Subsurface intensity starts at 0.1 in this gif, then goes to 0 (disabled), and ends on 1.)
Strangely enough, even if the entire texture is transparent other than the skin itself this weird effect still happens ("Use Alpha" was enabled on the texture too, I checked.)
Any tips on how to solve this issue? I might be going at this totally wrong, so any responses would be greatly appreciated!

The best way I can think of is to have Image Texture for Subsurface value which will behave as a SSS intensity control. Where black color = 0 and white = 1.
In my example I've used such setting with two textures, one for SSS color and another one (black and white) for SSS intensity. This way you can control where SSS will be visible (and how intense).

Thanks for the quick reply! Seems to be working! Just hooked the black and white texture I made up to a gamma node and I've got an intensity slider :)


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Is there a way to 'drive' lamps, similar to how you can 'drive' and control a camera in first person?
In particular, I find the first person perspective and use of WASD very intuitive for when I'm positioning my camera in the scene.
I would like to know if there's a way to control lamps that same way in Blender?
I've used other software where you're able to control a light in the exact same way as you can the camera in blender and find it far easier and more intuitive to use then trying to move a light around in my scene by hand using the manipulators and rotation.

A quirk of Blender is that you can actually set any object to be the 'camera' and use the WASD movement controls while in Fly mode.

Select the object (e.g. a lamp) and press Ctrl+Numpad 0 to set it to be the camera. You will now be looking through the object like you would a camera object.
Press Shift+F to enter Fly mode and navigate freely.

The downside of this is that you will then have to reassign the actual camera as the scene's active camera afterwards (if you intend to render anything) either by selecting it and pressing Ctrl+Numpad 0 or by selecting it in the Scene panel in the Scene tab of the Properties Editor:

Thanks for the reply! When I look for the Point light in the Scene panel in the drop down for the Camera, the only option is the camera however. And when I Ctrl + 0 the Point light itself blender gives me an "Modifiers cannot be added to object: Point" error.

The zero has to be the zero on the numpad, otherwise blender will try to add a subsurf modifier to the light. I've updated the answer to reflect that.

That did it. Working like a charm!


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Model appears to have visible polygons rather than being smooth?

In the image, you can see how parts of the models don't look very smooth, in fact it looks more like a model  when you set the shading to flat.
This is after subdividing and converting tris to quads.
Any advice on how I can get the model to look smooth without using a modifier?

maybe it's because you subdivided with a simple Subdivide rather than Subdivide Smooth... hard to say in Solid mode... but did you save a previous version of your object?

There could be more than one reason for this . to get a more complete answer, perhaps give us another illustration, with the wireframe showing - also with 'sharp' edges displayed

If you subdivide an object, it won't automatically appear rounder. It can create angles and ugly surfaces. For example if I have a sphere and decide to W > Subdivide it, as it will create edge loops in the strict middle of existing edges, it will tend to create flat surfaces.
If I W > Subdivide Smooth, though, I won't have this problem as it will try to respect the existing shape.
That said, you don't always get benefit from subdividing an object, except if you need to export for games or other 3D softwares I guess, can't you leave it as it is, keep a simple mesh and don't apply your Subsurf?


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Keep rig feet flat on the ground (IK Rig)
So I have an IK rig setup; however, when I move the pelvis down to make the character squat the feet fall through the ground. e.g.
How can I set it up so that when I move the pelvis down the feet stay flat and do not rotate beneath the surface of the ground?

One simple solution is to select the foot bones and uncheck the "Inherit Rotation" option.

Another interesting foot behaviour can be achieved parenting the Foot bone to the LegIK bone instead of Shin (and leaving the "Inherit Rotation" Checked).
Anyway the foot rigging is one of the most complex situation in human rigging; so, to improve your leg, you can type "How to rig a leg" on Google and find tutorials like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U3NjTvwdWI.

This works. However, the armour no longer moves with the foot. The heel pushes through the armour when moving the pelvis down

If I apply the same thing to the heels it works, cheers :)


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Make blender viewer look like 3D Builder
So ignoring the measurements and the reflective grid floor is there any way to make blenders viewport look like that of 3D Builder? Having shadows cast real time and the mesh being that nice perfect white?
3D Builder:

Blender:

And I have already tried using a matcap and ambient to emulate the look; however, it is not the look that I'm trying to achieve.

Unless of course, you can change the strength of the matcap to make the white on it much stronger, or even create a custom matcap.

Creating custom matcap is possible but it's not related to the shadows from the object. New engine in Blender 2.8 called Eevee allows to preview rendered object with shadows casted real time, maybe that's the nearest thing to what you want. Note that Eevee is in develorment currently

Yeah I was hoping to steer clear of EEVEE, just do to it being in development. Don’t want to have to deal with all the bugs and glitches with it. But thanks anyway. Could you possibly point me in the right direction as to where I could learn to make a custom matcap?

It should still work as explained before. There are resources for other already created matcaps.

Blender Game Engine
While waiting for EVEE, Clay Engine and other things that are currently under development, this should be somehow possible with the good old Blender Game Engine. Here's a possible result:

First step is to switch the Engine in the Info bar (usually is on the top of the screen).
Real time shadow
Add a Sun lamp to the scene and go to the Properties editor and open the Object Data tab (sun icon). You'll see options that differ from the ones exposed in Blender Internal. If you enable Shadow, you should immediately see the cast shadow in the viewport once you have set it to Material Shading mode.
Here's a summary of the fields you'll have to work with:

You can now tweak the parameters of the rendering of the shadow (color, resolution, algorithm,..) to fit your needs.
In my example I parented the light to the camera (notice the dotted line in the previous image) in order to make it move accordingly to the view and not fixed with the scene. So light always comes from top left regardless the point of view as it happens in 3D Builder.
White material
For the whiteness of the materials, it's now just a matter of picking the right shade of white as diffuse color, bump up the intensity, and if you are not satisfied, also adding some Emission (called Emit in the material editor).

I have been using blender for a while now, and to my knowledge, no, you cannot. The only way to do so currently is to preview in rendered mode, which is obviously not real-time. As previously mentioned, the closest you can get is with matcaps. At worst you can try using the BGE with spotlights to get shadows, but that will most likely be a real pain to setup and use (if it even yields satisfactory results).
The reason for this is that blender does not have a good real-time raster based render engine... YET. However, as we speak, there is one in development. It is called EEVEE, and if you are willing to try a slow and buggy version of an uncompleted blender, you can get it in blender 2.8 builds here https://builder.blender.org/download/. It attempts to solve this very issue. Be warned however, this is not a faithful representation of the experience expected from the completed 2.8.
If you are feeling even more adventurous, you can try to download another render engine for blender like armory http://armory3d.org/, however, I can not guaranty that it will be much better than eevee (and they often cost money).

Cheers, but I was hoping to steer clear of EEVEE due to its buggy nature

Cant blame you for that! Indeed, it is probably wisest to do so. I guess you could try to use the BGE, but it will most likely be a real pain to setup and use.

It's actually not hard to set it up with the BGE using textured view in the viewport. Simply use a sun lamp pointing straight down with a strength of 2 and shadow enabled and the buffer type set to variance, and also add a hemi pointing straight up with a strength of .5. Then set your material to be completely white with full intensity. You can also enable ambient occlusion on the viewport in the shading tab of the properties panel to make it look a bit better too.


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Animate an object along the z-axis in a sin wave
So I wanted to make an animation of an object where it bobs up and down along the z-axis, like a sin wave on a graph.
I understand one way of doing this with drivers, by which I add a driver to the z-axis of the object I want to move and then assign a scale, location or rotation to the empty driving the movement of the object (that was a bit convoluted I know, but it'll be better illustrated by the gif below).
Is there a different method that I can use to achieve the same animation, but not require the use of a driver (something that I have to move or scale)? I want to be able to control the intensity of the waves through the use of some simple maths. For example: Sin(x) (the red line) and sin(5x) (the blue line) have a different frequency in waves.
I want to be able to control the animation through using similar principles in Blender.

Related: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/40556/sine-wave-function-as-an-input-value

You can use the Graph Editor for this by adding Modifiers.
Simply add a single keyframe to your object's Z-Coordinate (right-click the property in the Property panel (N) and select 'Insert Single Keyframe') and then swap to the Graph Editor.
In the Modifiers properties panel add a Built-in Function, select 'Sine', and adjust the properties (Amplitude, Phase Multiplier, etc.).


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Is the Glass BSDF shader in Blender PBR accurate?
So I was wondering whether or not the glass shader present within Blender is already PBR accurate. The only reason this sparks my attention is that I'm working on a watch at the moment in Blender, and I just want to ensure that the glass for the watch is PBR accurate.
Any information about this would be greatly appreciated.

It isn't pbr accurate. I don't know exactly why, it's because it doesn't have Fresnel built in or something. The free pbr shader at http://remingtongraphics.net/pbr-shader/  has a pretty good glass shader if you're intrested

No, but you can get true PBR using the new Principled BSDF, which is available in the 2.79 RC 2 build.
To learn how to use the Principled BSDF I recommend watching this video by Blender Guru.

I don't understand why this was downvoted. OP asked essentially a yes/no question. I clearly answered that the Glass BSDF is not PBR accurate. I then explained that 2.79 would enable OP to achieve PBR glass, and linked to the best tutorial I know of on how to use the Principled BSDF. A downvote with no feedback doesn't help.

The glass BSDF is not any less "PBR accurate" than the Principled BSDF. The "less accurate" complaints about other shaders vs the Principled BSDF dealt with how diffuse and glossy components were blended when roughness is non-zero. Glass does not involve this mixing, so it does not have any limitations compared to the Principled BSDF. For a simple glass surface, it really doesn't matter which of the two shaders you use. Most of the code being run under the hood is the actually the same.

@JtheNinja If you add any roughness to the glass you will see that there is in fact a big difference. Give it a try. Accurate calculation of roughness is required for PBR. If you're arguing that glass doesn't need roughness, I disagree. You can do an image search for "rough glass" or "frosted glass" to see all sorts of glass materials that demonstrate why roughness matters.

I am unable to see any difference between the two shaders with any roughness value. Are you sure you used the same microfacet model (glass uses beckman instead of GGX by default) and matched the roughness value? (until recent nightlies, glass BSDF did not use squared roughness)


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Does the Principled shader alleviate the need for custom PBR setups?
A couple of months ago I took Blender Guru's PBR tutorials to create the dielectric, metallic and uber shader. I find that these work really well, and I know of other PBR setups such as Remington's shader. However, with the release of the Principled shader, I was intrigued to know whether it would replace the need for all of these custom made PBR setups. Any knowledge over this would be greatly appreciated.

Imho, the new "principled shader" could work better (or not) of your custom nodes, but its setup could be perhaps easier. Of course its inner working cannot be changed, user side, apart setting its various values. Anyway, you could listen the same "guru" evaluating this new shader... https://www.blendernation.com/2017/06/25/use-blenders-new-ultimate-shader-principled-bsdf/ and then maybe try and decide yourself which one to use (and when).

Yes - and no.
For most 'real world' materials, the Principled shader should be able to produce very good results. However, it is not perfect and cannot deal with every situation - otherwise it would have far more parameters, inputs and sliders than would be practical.
The existing principled shader should be fine for pretty much all 'simple' materials - those where the visible effect is due to the material and surface properties alone - or where there is a single layer of 'clearcoat' that is within the capabilities of the 'clearcoat' parameters.
This should be sufficient for, say, 99 percent of materials (or more!). However, there are feasible situations where the principled shader is insufficient - and under those situations you would again need to combine multiple shaders. For example, a surface with multiple 'clearcoat' layers  with different properties of each layer, or a surface where the micro-detail has a significant effect on the appearance (such as the fine structure of butterfly wing scales or the irridescence of beetle wingcases).


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Convert any 3D Game mesh to OBJ for use in blender
There are few games that deliver it's own Development Kit so you can decompile and modify the game assets in this case the geometry of the models by converting them to a general geometry file format that almost every 3D modeling software can use like Wavefront OBJ.
However, there are lots of games that don't deliver tools for unpacking the assets and some games even restrict it by encrypting the packages that contain the assets with proprietary encryption tools which you can't find anywhere on the internet to decrypt the packages.
My idea: Every 3D Game, no matter what engine it runs on and how well the asset encryption is, have one thing in common: they use geometry, meshes that has to be rendered by the graphics card.
Is there a way you can get in between the game and the graphics card to take the geometry that has been sent by the game to the graphics card and convert it into a obj file so you can use it in blender?

Nevermind! I just found a program that lets you get the geometry of any 3D game.
It's called NinjaRipper made by blackninja. It simply takes all meshes that are currently loaded in the system memory or the graphics memory (I don't really know where the model files go when a game is loading) and saves them.
However, it doesn't output the meshes directly .obj files, but it comes with a Blender add-on (along with add-ons for other 3D modeling software) that lets you import the .rip files. It also takes the textures of the models and saves them as .dds files.
So far NinjaRipper is the only program that is capable of "snapshotting" meshes along with their textures in almost every game. I haven't found a competitive program on the entire internet yet that does the same. I hope that the development of this awesome program continues in the future.


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How to generate texture uv using Python
I start with a plane, subdivide it into many small tiles, raise the vertices to create a terrain. I also have a vertical gradient texture: the bottom edge of the texture is blue (sea), the top edge is white (snow), the middle levels are shades of green and brown. The terrain is assigned the texture.
The question is how to do the UV programmatically? I want a Python script that can assign each vertices' v equal to its normalized z.
Ideally, I can shape the terrain (move mesh vertices) in 3D view, and run the script anytime. Then the terrain will have a height-dependent texture.
It seems all I need is to do is:

Run through all vertices in the mesh to find zMin and zMax
Run through all vertices and set u=0.5, v=(z-zMin)/(zMax-zMin)

But I don't know how to do it in Blender with Python, Can anyone please help?

You should be able to do this in Material Nodes. Add an Output Geometry node and feed the Position into a Vector Mapping node. Rotate the Point X to 90 and feed that into a Converter Color Ramp where the colour stops are White through Green/Brown and Blue. You can set the Type to Constant to get a hard line.

Just found this https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/67142/cycles-material-with-color-based-on-height-and-backside-in-different-colors/67145 very detailed look at setting material based on location in Cycles.

Thanks for the suggestions. I will look at the node based approach. I am looking for a Python script because I want to control the uv mapping and terrain programmatically. I am very comfortable with programming in general and want to experiment with different algorithms. I just need some help getting started with reading/writing uv in Blender.

How to find zMin and zMax using nodes?  I need to normalize z-coord of a vertex's position,


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How do I smooth only the outside edges of a complex object?
I would like to convert the edges on this object to a perfect circle and leave all other edges undisturbed.  What is the easiest way to do this?

You can't "smooth edges" you need subdivisions for a smoother result. You will have a hard time doing it in your model due to poor topology choice. You should aim for a quad based topology if you wish to use subdivision surface modelling

I agree with the quad based topology would be the answer on this. Please see my suggestion: I have added the blend. file for this as well.


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How to 3D model a shirt (from an image - man wearing a shirt)? Need to put the shirt on a different 3D character in Blender. New to blender
Problem statement - I want to show in 3D (superimpose) how a piece of cloth (say shirt) from a 2D image will look like on a 3D character of another person. How can I import just the shirt on blender and add to the 3D character? Very new to Blender. Tried researching a lot with no background in this field but couldn't find anything.
Many thanks
Pankaj

This is a rather large question actually. If you need a full 3d solution, you will have to post some time in learning Blender, as You will need to model the clothes, UV unwrap the clothes and create textures from images taken of original product, and create materials from these.
You can then apply something like the cloth simulator
But it is a large task. If You are looking for a 3D gimmick to a webshop or the like, it is a lot of work. So please consider if it is worth it.

Thanks for your comment and guidance. At least now I know that it is possible. Will dig deep into it. I think it will not be very big an effort if I can get the 3D model file from the apparel designer; if they do that for every garment.


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Multiple volume scatter objects - smoke and fog
Hello I have a problem in which my smoke simulation is inside the giant box which has volume scatter and absorption shaders. During rendering the smoke domain is visible as shady object around the chimney as seen in picture.

I'd like to overcome this problem because I want to make an animation, also I cannot move the fog domain under the smoke, because then there is a visible border - as seen on top of picture.
Thanks in advance!


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Making ventilation holes in a hockey mask style model
I have searched tutorial videos and google for the answer to this but maybe I haven't been searching for the right thing, I basically want to make a grid of evenly spaced circles that can be wrapped over the surface of my model so that I can cut evenly spaced holes out of the mouth area for ventilation like a hockey mask. I want the circles when cut out to be perpendicular to the curved surface they will be set on, rather than all the holes cutting in the exact same direction. Is there a better way than making a grid of circles and manually warping them to a close enough curvature? I have found the circles to end up warping too much out of shape when doing this for my liking so wondered if there is a way to do this whilst keeping the perfect circular shape completely or almost intact. I have added a screenshot from a tutorial for modo with the orientation I want to achieve with my own ventilation holes.

If your mesh is clean and subdivided enough you can make as many holes as you need with the following method. If it has not enough edge loops you can add some with W > Subdivide Smooth or add and apply a Subdivision Surface modifier.

Select four faces, press i to inset, and scale down the inset.
Press W > LoopTools > Circle
Delete the inner faces of your circle
Now you have a hole
Add a Solidify modifier to give thickness to your shape
Add an edge loop around your circle if you want a sharper edge

If you want a low-poly mesh you can create a low-poly version of your mask, bake your high-poly version, and, in the low-poly material, recreate fake holes with Normal or Bump maps.


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Creating a "bubble" shape lense for goggles
I have made these spiderman styled goggle frames for a project I am working on, after modelling the frames I duplicated the inner edge of the goggle frames, split to a new layer and then inset this selection a few times and adjusted each inset edge loop to create a more pronounced curve shape for the lense. My question is if there is a way of making the bubble effect a little more pronounced, clean and even in curvature? I first attempted to add a sphere and distort to fit the shape of the frame but this looked worse than my current attempt which is the one I have attached.

If you have a nice number of vertices in the perimeter ( I think you do.. 12 on each side of the triangle?)
Then:

One inset
Delete inner face, and select new perimeter
CtrlF (Face Menu) > 'Grid Fill'..

.. can give you a nice topology, in which you can select a central vertex, and
 O Proportionally Edit it. Set the Transform Orientation to 'Normal', and GZZ bulge the vertices outwards.
If you need to conform to existing geometry, you can hide the outer edge-ring (blue in the picture) while you're doing the proportional edit.
If when you unhide the outer ring the transition is too sharp, you can select  all but the vertices on the perimeter and  CtrlV > 'Vertex Smooth' them.

I seem to be getting an error when attempting this, when I go to move the vertices whether normally or using proportional editing it throws a lot of the vertices in another direction, any idea why this is occurring? https://imgur.com/a/S0xg0BQ

Very hard to say ..  The only things I can think that can make vertices move in more than one direction under simple translation (G)  are modifiers like Mirror or Array left on, or GG sliding verts down edges.  Maybe a  snap setting is switched on? Proportional Editing has a 'Random' setting which could do it ('Smooth' works  quite nicely, here)


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How to add a control bone to my rig?
I already have my character rigged but I am wondering how to add a control bone to control the same thing because in the NLA editor I cannot make my character walk and animate at the same time.
Here is my file http://www.filedropper.com/rigtest_1

link to the file with my rig http://www.filedropper.com/rigtest_1

what do you mean by "control the same thing"?

authors: Виктория Хромова


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Active camera not working on blender game
I have a feeling this is a small mistake but I can't trace a solution for it myself. Basically I made a small Resident Evil style room with multiple cameras. I also set up an actuator system to trigger the activation of each camera as active as the character moves in it's respective area. But when I press P for the scene preview it just shows the viewport view instead of the camera views. I'm losing my mind, can someone tell me what is going wrong here?

I think I saw this before... Are you sure your cameras are at the same layer as the rest of your level, and not in hidden layers?

Yeah, everything is in the same layer

Add a example file, as I can't figure out what's going on.

http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=51092 Thanks for the quick answer, here it is

Currently I'm going to my job right now, so probably I'll only be able to check the file tomorrow, I hope you don't mind waiting.

its ok, im working on other parts of the game for now, thank you for agreeing to help out!

There's several issues on you file...
Character Structure
Try to read the BGE Guide To Character Setup, you will understand that an armature should not be the physics object of your character: make an physics object with physics type Capsule and parent the armature to it. Also, make sure to check the Actor checkbox, so your player can be detected by the zones.

Zones Physics
Static objects can't detect collisions, so you have to change your zones physics types to Sensor and enable Detect actors. Also, disable the pulse mode on the collision sensors, it takes a lot of memory.

A Silly Mistake...
Your collision sensors are looking for an object with the property Player, but your player does not have this property! Add it to your player and the sensors should detect it.

Conclusion
Also, there's a lot of optimization you could do, especially disabling the physics on objects that don't need it (paintings, lamps, statue, etc). Try to read these guides to learn a bit more about logic, structure and project management.
Your file with some of the issues corrected:

Wow! Thank you so much! Your explanations are very simple and very to the point and I feel so dumb because of the Property thing haha, I put a property on the mesh but not on the armature. I'm reading the guides you linked and applying the project management logic in the other parts of the game.

Glad it helped you. ;)

Let me ask you something... Where you from? The file you sent, 'Jaguatirica Ambiente'... Are you brazilian?

Yes, I'm Brazilian haha. This project is a music video i`m making for a song called Jaguatirica by an indie band called Moblins

Cool! Join the WhatsApp group of BGE for brazilians, you are welcome. ;) https://chat.whatsapp.com/FIglrhkRtUdAFzn2oKdvZj


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BGE Character is invisible when press play
So I am making a pretty basic game where you just collect keys to open doors. And I came across an issue. My game was working perfectly fine before and I haven't even touched my character in days. But all of a sudden I can't see the character when I press play. The mesh for the character is there but the mesh with the amateur is not.
Here is what I already tried or know.

The normals are all okay
It is not invisible in the render camera
It is not invisible on the layer
I haven't touched it at all in the past days so it is weird that it is happening in the first place
While I am editing the game the character is there
When I play the game first thing it just isn't there. It doesn't move fast or go anywhere that I can see
Even if I play the game without looking through a camera it does the same thing. Or even if I look through both cameras available it still does it.
It seems to be the only thing missing. Everything else is still there
I have it set that the actual character is no collision. While there is a box around around it that is invisible that plays as the character (moves for it and has the collision)

Please let me know if you have had this issue or you think you might know what is wrong.
Thank you in advance. :)


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Grass High Polly to low poly for Unreal Engine?
i have question aboud create grass.
Now i have high poly model like this :

How Can I do this in blender :

I am afraid there is no easy method for that. Your vegetation is a real and detailed 3D model while the example below uses the efficient billboard technique - each model consists of several polygons textured by semi-transparent images / photos.
Because both approaches are really different, you cannot simply get the second one by reducing the mesh detail or any other automatic method.
If you want to use your 3D vegetation to create a billboard one, you can render you 3D vegetation from different angles to png textures (with the transparency). Then create simple models for each flower / grass cluster etc (like in the example) and apply png textures you have rendered on them.

So i have question for you, what a method is te best for creating grass for games engine ?

There is no definite answer for that as it depends on many factors. If you are going to make a mobile game, you need as simple models as possible while for a first-person PC shooter game it can me much more detailed of course. I would just try to see how the vegetation is made in a project similar to yours (using the same graphics engine) and then find out how is it made, whether you can obtain some vegetation assets packs etc.
This can be useful for you? https://forums.unrealengine.com/community/community-content-tools-and-tutorials/30694-free-foliage-starter-kit

Yes, thank you for your help :) I have last question, i want to create models for PC Games, yes i know i must to use more detailed models, but i can't use this grass : http://prntscr.com/go3rn9 because my PC can not stand it? I must use like this : http://prntscr.com/go3s3w
of course transparent e.t.c. I'm right?

The second (billboard) method is sufficient for the most cases so it shouldn't be problem :)


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Audio Problem: In Blender video editor and the rendered file having audio but once I uploaded it to twitter the audio doesn't work
I was doing video editing on Blender. The frame rate syncs with the audio and I set the audio to be in .mp3 file. In the Blender's video editing the audio works. I also played the rendered file with VLC and it also played the audio too. I dunno the root of the cause but I think it probably has to do with how I setted up the audio :/

I would try saving it as MP4 instead of AVI.  If that doesn't work, try uploading it to another service such as youtube or Facebook to make sure it's not just Twitter.  If that works, write it as the answer below so others can benefit.

thanks! But the video I uploaded WAS on .mp4 format. Can Xvid work?

Oh ok, sorry, your screenshot says AVI.  I've uploaded multiple MP4's with MP3 audio, 192Kb/s and 384 to youtube.  You might see if you can upload it there and link to it.  No idea why it's not working.

Alright, I'll try that

I uploaded it to youtube and it works. I'll link it to twitter now to test it

IT WORKED!!! Okay, I guess directly uploading it won't work so I'll have to link it instead. Thank you so much!

You're very welcome, glad to hear it's working


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Extra Sparkles / Missing Light Reflections
Its been about 1 week of non stop tutorial watching and I'm so close to finishing my project, but I need some help before I reach the finish line. I have 2 questions and I have a feeling that they're linked so here it goes. I added a youtube link. In the video there's 2 video clips sequences. In the first one, in blender, when I look at the side of the red cone (bowl) in render mode, you can see a nice black kind of shading that isnt centered which makes it look "more real", same with the side of the blue piece with the spikes. As the camera pans up in blender render mode, theres a black shading which I feel looks cool as it makes it "realer"as the camera goes up. However, once I render it, both of them are gone. The bottom and the top piece with the spikes looks reflective and nice, but not the outer piece or cone. Why does it appear in my render mode but not the final render?
And in the second clip, as the camera pans into the center of the spikes, you see all this extra glossy "stationary" noise on the surface that doesn't really move with the rotation of the object along with excessive sparkling gloss on the inner outer wall near the spikes. Any help in making this look smoother or more reflectively real would greatly be appreciated as I learn this program better. Thanks guys

https://youtu.be/mXfKCoDAOeg

For the first issue, I'm 99% that Plane.002 is part of the lightbox that you've built.  You have it restricted from the viewport so that when you preview it, it casts a dark reflection on the object.  But when you render it, it's there. Try Restricting it from Rendering and see what you think.

For "stationary" noise or non-randomized noise, just use a random seed for each frame by checking this button:

Thank you so much for the response. Yes, this seems to have been the issue. I forgot that I have to click the camera icon so it doesn't actually render it. Thank you so much. Ill update here with the results when its done. I'm loving this community :)

You're most welcome


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How does one render an Open Gl Rendered animation to a video file?
I'm just trying to render a small animation to video as the open gl render, but I can't find a way to save the animation to my desktop. When I click open gl render animation, it just plays the video inside blender and wont't let me save it to my desktop. Any help is appreciated.

If it's playing he animation, chances are it's recording it somewhere as well. - Have you set the output to where it's supposed to go?  At right under the render properties, go down to the "Output" tab to see the path and video file type.


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Creating a space dome? Is that how that works?
I'm currently working on a storyboard type music video where most of the shots take place in space. I've been getting away with creating that illusion of space using after effects with certain backgrounds and I believe I've got decent results give the drawing type styled nature of it. But there's a few upcoming shots where the camera is suppose to pan beyond what I'm able to recreate in after effects.
I figured that my best possible bet to improve that would be to create a "space playground" in blender where I would indeed be able to move the camera in any direction I wish. What would be the best way to go about this? One thing that comes to mind is that menu screen from Halo 1 for PC. Where its apparent that the camera is inside a "dome" / Sphere looking around and there's stars in every direction. All the YouTube tutorials that I've seen barely cover what I'm talking about. They mainly show how to create a space "picture" using the particle system. I want to be able to pan that cam in any direction like the movie Gravity. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Blender no longer has a star field generator to paint the world/sky with. that is why people suggest that you use particles. But you could render  a particle system of stars as a panoramic image. Then take that image as a texture into another scene and apply it to the World.

You can make a star field by shooting a panorama in one scene, then using the resulting image in another scene as a world texture. You won't have to render the particles all the time and you can pan anywhere.

Make a cube with only static particles
Place the camera at the center of the particle cube (emitter) and
remember to turn off the emitter object (so that it doesn't render).

Use a simple icosphere as the star object and hide it on another
layer.

Set the camera to the center and make it Equirectangular Panoramic.

Make sure that the scene you render is high resolution and square. In this case 3000 x 3000 pixels. I have set the samples very low to render faster. As all the stars use emission materials there is no noise.

Nb. I have accidentaly left the particle object on the same layer and you can see it as the largest star in the sky (bottom left corner).

Make a new Scene with only a camera in it. Then make a World material using the star field that you just created.

You will be able to pan or tilt anywhere in this world, even fly towards the stars but never reach them.
Usefully you could also write names in the stars as modified particles and have them display in your world as well.

You can also create a star field with a noise texture.
With these nodes you vary the size of the stars with the Noise Scale value. Then the density of the stars with the ramp and the brightness with the contrast.

This method can make a noisy render however.


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How to add edge loop parallel to an axis rather than relative to mesh
How can I add edge loop parallel to x axis rather than relative to mesh, I want to add edge loop so that it is similar to the grill in the reference image beside it, But when I try to do that blender adds edge loop relative to mesh which is slanted. How can I achieve that?

I don't know if I get it correctly.
Would the "edge loop", being parallel to X on the slanted part, not cut through the part? Basically you want a grid going perfectly vertical/horizontal to fill the inner part?
Maybe "knife" tool or model frame and add the grid as a second mesh part?


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How to remove jagged shadows in cycles
I have these jagged shadows on the edges of the spiral I have added a subdivision surface modifier with 3 subdivisions, and set smooth shading even then I'm getting these jagged shadows on the edges in cycles, How can I fix this?

What happens if you increase the subdivision to 4 levels? Have you tried applying 1-2 levels of subdivision, then smoothing the mesh?

i changed increased the levels, It is decerasing the jaggedness but wouldn't it increase render time?

It will take longer to create the BVH, but you'll get smoother reflections. Render times shouldn't go up too much.


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How to add horizontal cylinder at end of cube
I have this cube which has the basic shape of an escalator but I want to add a horizontal cylinder at the end of the cube like an escalator how can I do that

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/127754/make-object-follow-curve-without-rotating-deforming/127767#127767

You could select the last top and bottom edges and create bevels, then extrude inwards and merge.

Should I always extrude inwards and merge when creating bevels? For example in a cube with just small bevelled corners?

no you don't always have to, but to keep quads and tris you'll need to use join and knife


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Exporting Scenes from Unreal Engine to Blender
I am new to Blender and have used Lightwave 3d as my main animation software. I am debating switching and would like to know if there is a plugin or easy way to export scenes from Unreal Engine into blender?
Most software exports into Unreal Engine but I am interested in the ability to export a scene to blender. Doing it all one piece by one piece is what I have had to do in Lightwave so it would be amazing if you could export an entire scene to blender and have surfaces be somewhat correct. Thanks


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How to use root motion with inverse kinematics?
I have created a simple attack animation using inverse kinematics to animate the arms and legs of a character. Now, I want the animation to use root motion to export it to Unreal Engine 4.
I have watched multiple tutorials that explain how to do this with a Mixamo animation. I understand that I have to copy the location keyframes of the hips to my root bone and then remove them from the hips.
This would work perfectly if not for the fact that I am using inverse kinematics. If my IK bones have no parents, the animation looks great, but I can't export the fbx since Unreal will detect multiple root bones. However, if I parent the IK bones to the root bone, it will offset the limbs' positions and mess up the animation.
I'm wondering if there is a way to remove the IK bones without affecting the position of the limbs, so I can export the animation correctly.

You can bake your action into a new action clearing all constarints, so the animation will act the same movements without the need of IK.
To do so, select in pose mode all deforming bones, and go to the menu:"Pose - Animation - Bake Action".

This is exactly what I needed! Thank you so much, I was losing my mind over this.


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Make plane fold in curve (arc) while conserving its length
I want to fold a plane such that it forms an arc (curved plane). I initially used bevel modifier, but the problem is the plane length is not conserved.

You can see that the length is shorten after beveling. I want to fold the plane such that the plane length is conserved.

When you say length should be "conserved," do you mean this in an approximate sense or a mathematically strict sense?  Doing it in a strict sense might be more difficult.
I am a little confused when you are talking about using a bevel modifier but you're showing the use of an armature.  You could certainly use them together, but why not simply parent the plane to the bones of your armature with weight paints to control the influence of each bone in a graduated/curved fashion?

For this example I used linear gradient weight paints for each bone:

I am sure you could tweak the gradients to get the curvature more to your liking.
But maybe this isn't what you had in mind?


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UV Mapping to Imported svg Problems
I'm having a very difficult time properly texturing a tile floor mesh that I created from an imported SVG file.
There are several points in the mesh where there appears to be a seam where there shouldn't be one. I've created seams along the perimeter of the mesh and it appears correct in the image/uv editor so I don't know why this is happening. I'm relatively new to Blender so I'm hoping there is an easy solution I'm not aware of.
When the .svg was imported the mesh was a complete disaster so I deleted all edges aside from the perimeter and created quads manually by selecting 4 vertices and making a face "F". But for some reason selecting the edge loops of the perimeter only selects a small portion of the edges. Not sure if that is related to my problem.

What does your UV map look like?

"When the .svg was imported the mesh was a complete disaster" SVGs import as bezier curve objects, you should have left it as one. All you had to do was use Generated or Object texture coordinates. You now have a hard to edit mesh with NGons and bad topology. Don't needlessly convert to mesh unless strictly needed to.

Thanks guys! @cegaton, this method worked great, I assumed if I had a defined seam it would work by just using the "unwrap" method. Thanks!


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Bad Shading on Imported Mesh
I have imported a mesh (AutoCad DXF) and I'm experiencing strange shading behavior. I've done the following to try and address the problem with no luck:
Recalculate Normals
Remove Doubles
Delete Loose Geometry
Cleared Seam, Sharp, and Bevel Weights
There are no modifiers on the mesh.
The original imported mesh looks fine in smooth shading but I need the mesh to be in quads which causes the shading to mess up as shown in photo. I can add my .blend file but I'm not sure how to do that.

yes please share your file: https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/

This is generally caused by custom normal data.
Under the Properties Window > Object Data > Geometry Data press Clear Custom Split Normals to get rid of it.


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Rings in Smoke Render - Cycles
I'm building an animated logo where some text punches through the logo. However there are weird turbulence rings in the smoke that I can't get rid of. I have smoke domains on different layers (for each smoke color). All domains are set up identically other than the node color.
I also have a section of smoke that is hidden diagonally which makes no sense to me.
Any idea how I can solve these issues? I've tried baking the simulation and freeing the bake with no difference in how it is rendered.

It turns out that the rings in the smoke were caused due to the fact that I had my 3 smoke domains positioned at exactly the same location and were the same size. I changed the size of each domain and their locations slightly which resulted in good smoke. I'm still not sure what caused the smoke to be hidden diagonally but that seemed to go away as well.


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Object selection in 3D view not working correctly
I've been using Blender for a while now and have had no issues with object selection in 3D view. I just got a new computer (Mac Pro) and now object selection in 3D view will sometimes become unresponsive.
Some objects are selectable while others cannot be selected unless selecting them from the Outliner panel. I've tried changing system settings and input settings in Blender preferences to no avail.
If I restart Blender and reopen the file I was working on it will behave normally for a while but will inevitably revert to this broken selection state. I'm a little worried that it has something to do with my new computer because it's a work computer and I'm stuck with it so any insight on how to fix this is greatly appreciated.
I've added a snapshot of my current Blender System setup as well as the specs of my Mac.

I believe the cause of this was due setting the clipping field too low. I don't remember experiencing this issue before but if I keep my clipping settings high (above an inch) object selection works fine.


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3D model looks black in render
I'm trying to take a screenshot of a 3D model and it looks good in the viewport but when I go to take a render it looks way different. I was wondering if someone could help me figure out what's going on.
This is more or less the code I'm using to set up the screenshot
# add camera to scene
camera_data = bpy.data.cameras.new(name='Camera')
camera_object = bpy.data.objects.new('Camera', camera_data)
bpy.context.scene.collection.objects.link(camera_object)

camera_object.location = (-3.7271888256073, -6.519496917724609, 1.7946083545684814)
camera_object.rotation_euler.x = 1.335000991821289
camera_object.rotation_euler.y = -0.014755947515368462
camera_object.rotation_euler.z = -0.45238134264945984

# add light source to scene
lamp_data = bpy.data.lights.new(name="New Lamp", type='SUN')
lamp_object = bpy.data.objects.new(name="New Lamp", object_data=lamp_data)
bpy.context.scene.collection.objects.link(lamp_object)
lamp_object.location = (0, -2.0, 2.0)
lamp_object.rotation_euler.x = 0.7458062767982483

# take screenshot with camera
bpy.context.scene.camera = camera_object
print('Set camera %s' % camera_object.name )
file = os.path.join(rimg.replace(".png","_render") )
bpy.context.scene.render.filepath = file
bpy.ops.render.render( write_still=True )

It's difficult to tell, but it looks like your render settings and render preview are using different lights.  In particular, your render looks like the film settings are high contrast.

Hm, there is some emission on the material of the glasses, which is why I think the color shows up. The frame material should otherwise be reflective.

a screenshot of the outliner with everything expanded and another of the render properties with the film panel expanded might help.

are you using compositing by any chance?

Thank you both for the suggestions. I was able to fix it by setting up an environment / adding an hdri to the scene.

I downloaded an example HDRI here: https://polyhaven.com/hdris
Added to the world like in the image and the renders come out like in the viewport


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2.8 UI missing all menus, cannot interact with Blender at all
I'm on Win10 at work, purged everything Blender related from my PC, all files, cache, settings, registry, everything. Updated Nvidia drivers. Still getting this weird issue on a fresh 2.8 (official) install that 90% of my UI is not there and I cannot interact with the program at all. Any ideas what could possibly cause this? A few days ago this was still working fine :\

Have you checked if your hardware fulfills the minimum requirements to run Blender 2.8 (https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/)? In case it does, open Blender's installation directory and double click on blender_factory_startup.cmd. Does that make any difference?

thanks for your tips, I found the solution and posted an answer

Ok so apparently something got messed up with the PYTHONPATH environment variable and Blender wasn't able to properly locate the python modules it needs to run. After fixing the environment variables, Blender is running fine again. Crazy stuff

Hi, would be good if you could add information as to what you actually did to fix the environment variables, just for people who may have the same problem in future.

This is caused by the PYTHONPATH environment variable being set to something outside the scope of blender it seems. If you make a bat file with:
set PYTHONPATH=
blender

Place this in the same place as the blender.exe and then run it.
This will bypass the system environment variable and should load as intended.


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Particle System - Towel render
I want to render towel in blender using hair particle.
I have selected object in Particle Render instead of path, but want same color on particle as on towel. Issue is that particle-(object) is using different shader. Is there any way to render particle object in same way as path gets render. Hope attached image will clear what i am asking for.
thanks


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Can I do more than ctrl z/ go back very far into my model?
I really messed up with subdivisions and this is probably the fifth time restarting my model. I am very new to blender. I tried ctrl z but that could only go back a few times. Is there a way to either go back several times with undo or reload an older version of that file?
If it matters, my issue is that at first I had too many subdivisions, so I used ctrl e to unsubdivide, but it changed my squares to triangles and other shapes that are not sqaures.

If there is a way to manually fix this error, please tell too.

You can increase the number of available undo steps in User Preferences > Editing > Steps, but this obviously wont work after the fact. Only other option is checking the .blend1 backup file, but if you already saved more than once it won't help you much either.

Blender saves one (by default) backup version of the file when you save it. You can look in it (it's named whatever.blend1) to see if it has the version you want.
Also, Blender also saves a backup file as you work, every 2 minutes by default. You can use File > Recover Auto Save... to restore this and see if it has the version you want.
If neither of these work, you are probably out of luck this time. There are a few things you can do to keep it from happening again, though:

Increase the Undo Levels in Editing preferences, so you can go back farther. I use 256 myself, but you may want to try less if it makes you run out of memory.
Increase the number of .blendX backup files Blender makes, in File preferences. I use 32, but this may be too many for you.

After changing any settings, remember to press the Save User Settings button! Otherwise, your changes will not be saved.


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Is it possible to bake texture exactly as they appear in 3D view port?
I am new to Blender, and I just figure out a way to let textures display correctly as how I imagine on my model. I add two source texture images directly in the UV editor, and the textured model looks fine in 3D View Port.

However, when I try to bake my textures, by selecting "Texture" in Bake Mode and clicking "Bake", the textures disappear and turn to white:

I don't know which step I did wrong. Is there anyway to bake textures exactly as how they appear in 3D View port? I've been doing research about this online for two full days and I cannot get it to work. The purpose of my model is to be exported as a game asset to Unity. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
(BTW: The original .blend file is included in the comment to this post in case anyone needs to look at it. Thanks.)

(I include the .blend file in case anyone needs to look at it: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1ebtj35GSpoRDUyMkdNU01ZUEU/view?usp=sharing)

Probably you baked texture over itself (output image for baking was set the same as the one used as the input), although it would become black in that case. See https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/13479/how-to-generate-final-texture-image-for-complete-designed-scene for baking in BI; the way to bake there is to assign image to bake to in the UV editor with all faces selected; to choose image to bake from add it as a material texture.


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Can I use the distance between two objects to animate a property?
I would like to make the value of a node, say a blur node, influenced by the distance between two objects (say a camera and a cube) with blender render engine.
How would you achieve that?

Related: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/43078/essentially-what-are-drivers

Yes, with Drivers
You can animate a property with a combination of values of other chosen properties.
To set up a Driver, just right click in the parameter field and choose "Add Driver"->"Manually create later" from the pop up menù. In the following example I added a "value" node and linked and added a driver to control it's value (the purple one), but I might have directly controlled the Size parameter of the Blur node itself:

In the Graph editor, under the Driver editor type, you can easily set up a Distance Driver Type and pick the two objects (camera and cube in the following example):

Here's the result:

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much!


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Grease pencil fill materials does not render while stroke does
I have a problem with a file where the Grease Pencil fill materials won't render while the stroke ones will.
I tried the following : appending object in another file, switching sequencer in the Output > Post Processing panel, rendering using the compositing output.
I have another file with the same materials that works, so I think it might be a bug.
Here is a screenshot of my scene :

And Here is the rendered image. As you can see only the stroke appears.

Here is a link with the blend file, and here is a link to a working file (The files are a bit heavy due to packed textures).
Thanks for your time.

I think I fixed it by resetting this value to "ViewLayer" for the fill object. Seems like it was attached to an outdated or deleted view layer called "Perso". It seems to render fine with that done.

Thank you so much! You  saved my day! :D


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how to setup blender for Surface Pro 4
Using blender on Surface Pro 4.
I've set the virtual pixel mode to "double" and it's great for the display UI. But I can't manipulate anything with the rotate tool using either the pen or a mouse.
I've tried playing with the manipulator size and handle size, but that doesn't help.
I also can't navigate/move the view using the pen.
Anyone have any setup suggestions to get me going?

You should have Emulate 3 Button mouse enabled - you can find that under Input in the Preferences. This might be helpful https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/75288/3d-view-with-a-touchscreen-in-windows-10-surface-pro-4-how-to-zoom-rotate-p/75389#75389

Thanks @Patdog, Emulate 3 Button mouse let me use the pen.

The Emulate 3 Button Mouse setting let me use the pen to interact with objects and the scene.
The problem I was having with the rotate manipulator turned out to be a separate issue, and was fixed by changing the selection mode under User Preferences>System from automatic to OpenGL Occlusion Queries.


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Cut hole in volume generated from bezier curve
New to blender and I am having difficulty subtracting two objects from each other.
I have made a surface from a bezier curve which I extruded (using 2D under the geometry tab) and filled both ends. Now I want to cut a hole in both ends. So I made a cylinder with the correct diameter hoping that I could use boolean subtraction to remove the holes.
However when I select Add Modifier, Boolean doesn't even show up as an option.
Any thoughts on why that is/other ideas to try?

You can't add Boolean modifiers to curve objects directly, only to meshes, you would have to convert it first. Also a word of warning before it is too late: don't go down the Boolean road while modelling, learn proper modelling techniques or you will invariably regret it down the line for a multitude of reasons.

In the curve object's edit mode you can add new primitive curve shapes that will act in a subtractive/additive manner


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time cursor shifted in frames in VSE
The time cursor in Video Sequence Editor (VSE) or Timeline is shifted to the right when I right click somewhere in the timeline. The time cursor does not move to the position of the mouse cursor. The shift in frames depends on the position (0 on frame 0, +400 on frame 20000).
Load Factory Settings does not fix it. But a new project does not show this.
Any idea?

did you play with time remapping before?

Right to the point! It is exactly my issue, I mistakenly changed the time remapping to 102/100. Changing to 100/100 fixed my issue. I'm so grateful, thank you!

that happened to me too, before :) although resetting time mapping reverts the weird (and unusable) behaviour, it is perhaps a bug, since imho it makes impossible to work with time remapping AND timeline cursor positioning...


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smoothing a curved glass to avoid a black rendering
I'm getting a common black rendering for a curved window. Using a subsurf helps a lot to fix it but I'm loosing then the sharp edges on the periphery.
Any suggestion to smooth the glass with no distortion on the outer edges?
Thanks.

Add supporting loops near the edges of the glass? (when using a subsurf)

If I understood your question right, I also think a loopcut near the edges would help and work the best (crtl + r)

You're perfectly right, thanks. Adding edge loops near the outer edges solved this issue (even without the subsurf). I still wonder why.


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Geometry Node Pattern Help?
I am trying to make a pattern using Geometry nodes.
I attached a screenshot of the pattern I am trying to create, and my viewport and workspace attempts thus far.
As you will see I need help with making the pattern, as well as merging the mesh together once it's made. The core element of the pattern I've already modeled as seen in the screenshot. Thanks in advance for your help!

Another approach, you would plug in your objects using the Object Info node and use a Checker texture.

(Blender 4.40)

this was enormously helpful, thank you so much for providing this and the project file!!

Just make two grids, one smaller than the other in the right proportion, and you have all the locations:

File

Hints
If you make your base shape having sides = 1 (X and Y), you can automatically set the scale for X and Y as equal to the spacing, and use a "factor" as input scale instead of an absolute scale as I did.

Joke answer

Imgur mirror (SE image hosting has problems)

Imgur mirror
Real answer: after booleans, apply the modifier, clean up the geometry (or create new one from scratch, but you now understand the dimensions and topology it needs to have), and recreate the geonodes after booleans.

Of course if you don't need the detail of smoothed connections like here: https://i.imgur.com/EuQ6o5N.gif then you can get with simple overlapping instancing as in other answers.

I was just coming to the conclusion that if it is a 3D printing job, the answer is different.


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Rendered image different from camera view
I have done a lot of research into the problem I’m having and I think its tied to the way anamorphic video squeezes pixels, but no matter what I do my anamorphic video clip I’m animating, renders into a standard version of the same aspect ratio.
The image should be 5162 x 2560 at what I think is 1.333 as the pixel ratio. The clip looks fine and the correct width/ height when I am animating it, but when it renders its just a normal image size.
Any help would be greatly greatly appreciated as I have changed so many settings (even at random) and nothing seems to affect the rendering AT ALL.
Thank you.

What happens when you set the X Aspect Ratio to 1.0?

@JeffLange when it's set to 1.0 it comes out the same way. I think its exporting as the aspect ratio not desqueezed, which is how anamorphic footage generally works, but when I desqueeze it, a lot of quality is lost so it makes me think that isn't correct at the same time.


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Creating clear gel pill having translucency issues
I am trying to make a clear gel pill capsule and there is this weird wireframe effect as seen in the photo. Is it a result of the lights or do you think its the wireframe mesh? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Also any ideas on how to make the background lighting more compelling is appreciated. I still want it to feel very clean. Thanks for your time.

hard to say, maybe share your file: https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/

This looks like a case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-fighting.
Does your capsule have an inner section whose outer wall intersects with the inner wall of the outer section? If so, maybe scale the inner section just a bit smaller and see what happens!

Apologies for what will now be a question others may not have, my issue was that I had a mirror modifier on both halves of the pill so I am assuming the problem is similar to the Z-Fighting @haarigertroll shared but not positive. I removed the mirror modifier and the issue is gone. Thanks to all who gave input.


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How to make a line an exact size without changing the size of the whole object
I want to make the selected line an exact number long, however, I don't see any way to do this. I have tried using the measure tool however its imprecise, and hard to work with. I have also tried looking in the transform menu however it only shows the measurements of the whole object

In your pictured example I would select the end vertex, grab it and use vertex snapping to put it on top of the next vertex to the right.
Without changing my selection I would now grab it again, lock movement to the Y axis and type in how long I want it to be (you may need to use a negative value if you are moving towards -Y).

Can I accept your answer so that you can get reputationpoints?


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Blender mesh becomes messed up after importing
Alright, so I have this X wing model that was created in a separate game file, and I want to move it to a main game file with other models where I plan on making a game.  The thing is when I move it, it looks normal enough.  However, when I hit key "p" to play the game as a game render, everything on it looks messed up as far as placement goes.
So this is what it looks like after importing it into the game--as it should

But this happens after entering the game, pressing "p"

As you can tell, normal perspective is all messed up.
I am really confused as to what's going on and have played around with import settings, with no luck.  I would really appreciate it if someone could help me out.
Thanks

Can you make sure, that all your normals are pointing outward?

Yes, recalculating normals did nothing and flipping direction didn't change anything.  Worth a shot though.

@Leander I also tried separating all the loose parts of the model and after recalculating mesh separately, joined them again, and it still doesn't work.

It figured it out. It was all in the textures and I had to delete them all and then and add them back into the game.  When you import a obj into a game sometimes the textures and materials get messed up.  I just deleted all the material slots and recreated the material and uploaded the same image to be mapped on it.

Please elaborate a bit and then accept the answer by clicking the check mark on the left, so others having this issue have a fully fleshed out answer to follow.


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Trouble making an Xwing aim with a crosshair and sight
I have been working on a flight simulator game for a while now, and have run across a problem I can't figure out.  The spaceship is an x wing and I have all the logic with shooting and all that, but I wanted to make it a little more realistic.
I have a set up where the ship is fixed to a cross hair that shows where it is pointing and a circle that shows where the mouse is pointing and it rotates around the ship as you move it. both the circle and the cross hair are the same distance from the ship and rotate around from the center easily because there origin is in the center of the ship and grid.
--This is when it first starts.

--You can move the circle around by moving mouse around.

--You can see the distance these are from the ship and their origin.

My problem is that I want the cross-hair (where the ship is pointing and is parent to the ship) and to move slowly like War Thunder simulation towards wherever the circle (where the mouse is pointing) is. This would create a realistic flying experience. The cross-hair needs to stay the same distance from the ship but I can't get it to rotate on its origin in the center to the circle only travel by location. I should add also I do not know python and have lasted this far on logic bricks in blender.  I have tried different actuators and nothing has worked.
Well, that's the question I've been stumped on for quite a while.  Please help me if you know a way to do it.
Thank you so much!
John


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Finger control in BlenRig has been deleted! Ups!
I just downloaded the character "Vincent" from the Blender Cloud and BlenRig. I have accidentally deleted the finger controller (The stroke that opens and closes the finger). I tried to undo everything with "cmd, Z" (on the Mac) but the controller is still gone. Would be cool if you could help;)
Eyal

Found it on my own. i just clicked on "Alt H" to unhide the controllers


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How do I make a surface look like a polished one in Blender?
I am making some spheres like these . Hence I need a surface similar to this.

very similar: How do I create a reflective white material?

Thanks  to everyone for helping me out. My problem is solved.

This polished look can be achieved with a black diffuse shader and a white glossy shader (roughness = 0), letting a fresnel node set the mix between them using a mix shader.

First, you need a dense geometry.  A mesh with a lot of faces to blend the reflections smoothly.
Second, about the sharp reflection, you have to use a shader with gloss/roughness settings.  Set the roughness to very low, and you will have very sharp reflections.

You don't really need that many faces. Just make sure you mark them as smooth.

I don't even need to set anything to smooth if I only have 1 single face, and if I wanted a straight mirror.

Sure, but for the ball....

Use Cycles nodes, like Glass shader, and give high IOR, like 50, for the reflections

As the result aiming to in the question most likely is intended to be realistic this won't work as IOR can't be on that value

@Mr Zak Is that so? When I give it, Blender accepts it. Try it. The default IOR is too low

The fact that Blender accepts it doesn't mean it's correct way to do this


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Increase object size/dimension across two axies, while keeping proportions
I am wondering if there is some easy way of quickly scaling an object across two axies (X, Y) while keeping the proportions of the object intact. It's hard to describe so I'll try using some pictures.
This is the object I want to scale:

When I scale it along the X and Y axies, this is the result:

Now, what I want to achieve is the walls of the object being spread out more, giving it a larger center area, but retaining the proportions of the walls, like this:

I created the final picture by tediously having to scale all the individual edge loops to get it looking somewhat right. So I was wondering if there is a better way of achieving this, a good workflow? I hope the question is clear. Cheers.

Close, but only in this case
Select these vertices/edges (you can select one group of the 8, then do Shift+G --> select similar length:

Scale along the two axes that you want in bounding box pivot mode. Then switch to individual origins and scale in the opposite direction with only these vertices selected.
Python Script
It looks like you are only wanting to move each vertex a constant distance from the center. With normal scaling from a point p, a vertex 2 meters from p will move twice as much distance as a vertex 1 meter from p. This small snippet of Python code will not do this, but rather move each vertex a constant addend, not factor, of the radius.
Note: This script scales from the object's origin. Also, you should be in object mode to run it.
import bpy
import bmesh
from math import sqrt

scale = 2  # scale variable

# prepare bmesh
mesh = bpy.context.object.data
bm = bmesh.new()
bm.from_mesh(mesh)

for v in bm.verts:
    pos = v.co.xyz

    # r = sqrt(x^2 + y^2 + z^2)
    radius = sqrt(
        pow(pos.x, 2) +
        pow(pos.y, 2) +
        pow(pos.z, 2))

    a = (radius + scale) / radius

    # modify the two axes you want
    pos.x *= a
    pos.y *= a

    # apply new position
    v.co.xyz = pos

# make the bmesh the object's mesh
bm.to_mesh(mesh)
bm.free()

The first suggestion of your answer worked wonderfully! Thank you very much.

CtrlAltU > Add-ons, enable the 'Offset Edges' Add-on.
Select all the circumferential edges.
In the 'Offset Edges' panel, select the 'Move' option.

I would think if you go into Edit mode, just select the bottom polygons, then turn on Proportional editing - you'd get your desired effect.
Once you scale, scroll the middle mouse up or down, to dial in the exact level of influence on the outer walls.

I figure if Mathias' got a good enough eye to manage with edge-loops, then this might suit his needs.  I leave it up to him to decide.


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Unusual artefacts in volume render
I am using Blender 2.82a (Cycles) to create a fuzzy ball. However I am getting this strange ring of artefacts in the rendered image, where the alpha channel shows through - I am not getting the smooth rendering that I expect. How can I fix this?

I have looked at Cause of Alpha or Black Artefacts in Render (2.79 - could not find the relevant setting in 2.82a. Also I am using volume scatter, not surface material)

At a first glance you just have to up the sample to at least 2000 or/and use intels denoiser in the compositor.

I had a look at the suggestion from @brockmann. My first attempt was to simply up the samples. The following image is using 2000 samples.

As you can see - all that has really happened is that the artefacts have moved ever so slightly to the centre.
I looked into the intel denoising. This is a feature that has been added in 2.81. I used the following settings (compositing nodes):

Quite simple really. At 500 samples, the following image was the result:

And this is at 2000 samples (same denoising setup):


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When I work with materials and shading, suddenly the app closes
When I work with materials and shading the app suddenly closes. Is there something wrong with my pc
or blender?

Most likely your hardware (issue with your graphics card), see https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/ and I'd suggest update your driver.

thank you for it. I will check that.


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Background Image for fire simulation
I created a fire simulation and i want to add a background clip , but when i add it , it dosen't show the fire and smoke.


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Fluid simulation not generating fluid
I have a scene set up where the fluid generates from a "fluid" type. (not inflow or outflow, etc.) The fluid does not generate, it just makes a thin sheet at the top and corners of the spawner. It is pretty hard to describe the issue, so please refer to the screenshots and .blend file. I have already checked that everything is inside the domain, and nothing is intersecting with anything else. Thanks in advance!

For its Domain, tweak the value for "Final Resolution", I have tried other values and it works fine (For some reason 300 didn't work on my computer too). Choose another values and bake the fluid simulation again.


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Black lines around alpha cutoff in Cycles?
I have a node setup that applies a png texture to a character's face for the eyelids, but there is a black line around the alpha cutoff. I obviously don't want them there. Take a look at the images. (On the eyelid mask, I made the background white so you can see it better. Original image is transparent.)

hello, maybe, if it's not a problem for you, share your file with the images packed inside: https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/

@moonboots Actually I already found a solution to the problem! I simply added a greater than node on the image alpha>mix factor connection.

I found the soultion, it was to add a greater-then node to the image-alpha>mix-factor connection.

Hi :). Don't forget to 'accept' your answer. Question keeps popping up as unanswered ;)


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Distorted displacement on UV Sphere
So i'm following CGMatter's tutorial on procedural lava, but when I put the displacement on the sphere, the top is weirdly twisted, and also the rest of the displacement is pointed in one direction, not uniform. I have adaptive subduvisions enabled for the sphere.

plug the color output into the vector instead of the factor output.

The same twisting effect occurs with color.

UV sphere might not be the best shape to try this on, as it has two poles at the top and bottom, connected to triangles. Try to use a quad based primitive like a cube with a subsurf modifier.

Yes, or a subdivided cube, and it should work better in object space rather than tangent space. The color output should fix the displacement going only in one direction though.


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Simple way to create a curved tunnel between two planes
I'm a newbie in Blender and I was trying to model a tunnel representing a wormhole embedding as the one in the picture, with no success.

I tried to make a cilinder between to planes and subdivide it in sections but that made the tunnel look piece-wise and not smooth as I want. And I would like to know how to "erase" the sections of both planes corresponding to the throat.
Thank you!

It's a topo thing.  Try making a torus and deleting the outside, then scaling up the border edges along individual origins.  Don't know what you mean re: erase, if you "erase" what you have labelled the throat, all you have are two planes with holes in them.

Create a mesh circle, in Edit Mode rotate it $90º$ in the X axis.
Erase three quarters of it and move the remaining vertex along the X axis to the side.
Add a Screw modifier and adjust the axis and Steps parameters accordingly (multiples of 4 are advised). Apply the modifier or convert (a copy of) the object to mesh afterwards.

Add a new plane mesh, scale it as desired then erase all faces leaving only the edges. Subdivide them to match the previously chosen value for Steps in the screw modifier.
Follow the formula $\frac{Steps}{4}-1$ for the subdivision value. In my case I set $64$ Steps so $\frac {64}{4} - 1 = 15$ .
Join the plane to the circle at the correct height with Ctrl + J, then bridge the gaping edge loops with the Bridge Edge loops operator.
Now add a Mirror modifier along the $Z$ axis to complete the symmetry.

If you need an even mesh density you may optionally add a few edge loops to the bridged faces.

Modifier Stack.
In an approach very similar to @Duarte's, Going to start with a simple 2 point bezier curve. Very easy to edit into a wormhole-ish hypotenuse shape by pulling on the handles.  The spin modifier can be used as a visual guide.

The simple bezier curve in edit mode. Copies left and right with screw modifier. Adjust the resolution, if desired, before converting to mesh
1. Screw
Convert the curve to mesh. Object > Convert To > Mesh Add a screw modifier . Make sure that steps is a multiple of 4, (will give us nice corners).

Next add a "Mouth" vertex group, select the last vert on the outer rim  and assign it to "Mouth" with weight 1.

2. Cast
Now add the cast modifier, as outlined in How can I morph a flat plane to be a flat cirlce? .  (Please Note, I cheated a bit here and moved the mesh such that the origin is the centre of the hole.  Otherwise would need to add an object (empty) at wormhole plane centre point, and assign to control object)
Only need to cast in x, y directions, ie, the surface of the plane.

3. Subsurf
Now for some subdivision. Add a subsurf modifier, and move it above the cast. (With subsurf can set the screw steps to 4)

LHS screw-sub2-cast  MIDDLE screw-sub1-cast RHS sub2-screw-cast
Very reminiscent of the square to circle (and vice-versa) mappings here
4. MIrror
Next in our modifier stack is the mirror modifier. An empty is used this time as the mirror point at the base of the trumpet

5. Curve

Moving the curve used by the modifier produces some cool results
Adjust the steps (by multiples of 4) and the subdivision and cast parameters to see the effects. This shuuld be my flashy animated GIF bit, ... I think you get the picture
The whole set up can be reproduced very quickly from the 2 point curve.  Joined as shapes to animate the opening of hole for example sake.

That's better. Non-destructive, animatable, and quick, too.

Here's a more sub-d approach - all in Edit Mode unless otherwise stated:

Create a plane with orthogonal holding edges and an a central octagonal face
a. Start with a subdivision
b. Bevel (Ctrl B) the crosshairs, with 2 segments
c. X > Dissolve the central vertex; Alt P poke the now plain face; Ctrl Shift B Bevel the re-introduced central vertex.

Set up the solid
a. X Delete the octagonal face;  ShiftD duplicate the rest; CtrlF > Flip the duplicate's normals.
b. in Object Mode, set shading to 'Smooth' and introduce a subdivision modifier

Back in Edit Mode:

Bridge
Select the hole edges, and CtrlE > Bridge Edge Loops

In the tool region, adjust the number of cuts - I would suggest an odd number - (here, 5), set interpolation to 'Blend Surface', choose a Profile Shape, and adjust its Smoothness and Factor to your liking.

This isn't very non-destructive, but still very tweakable - in Edit Mode you can scale the whole thing in its height, and with Proportional Editing set to 'Connected', you can scale the central loop of the bridge in its own plane.

Create a symmetrical curve, NURBS is best for it, and snap it to grid
Alt C > Convert to mesh
Spin the converted curve around the Z axis, your pivot being the 3D cursor, that's a bit off the curve, snapped to grid. Snapping to grid makes the cursor and the curve co-planar

Done


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Is it possible to run multiple scenes in blender while only keeping one visible?
I was wondering if it were at all possible to run a scene in blender game engine while being able to selectively toggle visibility? In other words, have a scene running physics, but only displaying it when a player selects it from a menu?

Sure, you see what the camera sees.
Ensure the camera of the "hidden scene" does not show anything.

Some good methods for "not displaying anything" include facing the wrong way, and setting really short clipping distances


text:
Is it possible to use local and nonlocal forces simultaneously using bge?
I'm working on a space simulator and I am currently using the .applyForce() method to move objects. Is it possible to set both a local force (thust) and a global force (3d gravity) to act on an object at the same time? If so, is there a built in function for converting the orientation of a given force?

You can do multiple applyForce() calls per frame, some local, some global and blender works everything out - summing them together to apply a correct total amount of force in the correct direction.
Example:
obj = cont.owner
obj.applyForce([0, 0, -9.8], False)  # Global gravity
obj.applyForce([0, 10, 0], True) # Accelearte locally

Or you can do the coordinate conversions manually using the worldOrientation matrix.

Thanks. Just discovered this accidentally when searching for a work around. Found that while thrusting, the psuedo-gravity  I was using was somehow still fully active. This was unexpected, but extremely relieving to find out.