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Just render shadows and reflections
What I want basically want to create is this

Therefore I good some spheres on a plane and some lighting.
My problem is, that I want to have all the shadows and the reflections of the plane on the spheres, but I want the complete plane to be one color. So the plane shouldn't be affected by the light.
I think there should be two solutions, which I both don't know how to do them:

Render a complete white plane which is not affected by light
Render a transparent plane which is should receive shadows and affect the reflections of the spheres.

Has anyone an idea how to do one of this? (Number 2 would be better for me)

you could add an ambient occlusion shader to the plane

Sorry, but it seems that it doesn't work how I want. If I add a plane above the spheres (for the reflections on the spheres) the planes is also affected by this plane. And then again it has no more solid color. Also the color of the plane is not completely white.

I am comprising an answer. But I am also very busy

I've uploaded an image: http://www.pasteall.org/pic/67870

are you using an HDR or a lamp as your light source? Also is this cycles?

Yes this is in cycles. Now I don't use an HDR Image. I want to use a plane for the reflections on the sphere and an area light for the shadows.

I just tried the whole thing with and HDR and I think I will use this now, because this works better. But everything still in cycles

so you have gotten rid of the lamps?

No just the plane above the spheres. There is still an area light.

what are you using the HDR and the AREA for?

I use the want to use the HDR for the Reflections on the top of the sphere and the area for the shadows on the plane. The problem if I would use a plane instead of an HDR is, that i don't know how to make the plane completely white. So the reflections on the sphere should also be completely white.

this seems to be quite complicated, getting a shadow pass alone seems to be an adeventure

Hm, I thought it is an easy step and I simply don't know how to do it.

http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/8888/the-renderfarm

You could use an Ambient Occlusion Shader for the plane. This will give the plane a constant color while still giving you the desired ambient shadows without the shadows from the light source. By default the Ambient Occlusion is pretty weak. We can use the compositor to make the Ambient Occlusion more prominent.

Add an Ambient Occlusion Shader to the plane
Enable the AO render pass

In the compositor:

use the RGB Curves or a similar node to make the AO pass darker
Invert: needed to properly control the factor input
Use the Multiply node to control the strength of the darkening
Subtract: this is a Color -> Mix node. This is the final output

NOTE: you can use the Distance parameter in the World Panel to change the proximity in which Ambient Occlusion is shown.

AO before vs. after compositing

First of all thanks. But what is this Subtract node. Where did you get that from? It isn't a math node is it? And did you used an HDR for the reflections on the spheres?

Subtract is form Colors -> Mix. And yes, I am using an HDR

no problem. I am sure are other ways to do this in the compositor as well


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pointInsideFrustum not working correctly
I've been working with bge and specifically the KX_Camera class to check if points are within the viewing frustum, but even when points are clearly in the camera frustum, it returns false. I'm aware of the issue where the projection matrix of the KX_Camera object are not updated on the first logic tick, so I had the associated Script Controller start with a delay of a few ticks. Even then, the points don't get detected correctly. Upon further inspection, the projection matrix doesn't seem to change. I've been beating my head against the wall trying to figure out why, but to no avail.
Here are some more details about what I'm doing to give some more insight:

I'm not actually rendering anything with this code, I'm using bge and bpy to do some processing regarding points visible from certain poses in a model
As the API states, I'm assuming the provided points are to be in the global coordinate system
The delay in the Script Controller corresponds to logic ticks, as I've read from multiple places
The camera frustum on the display is the same geometry/orientation/position as the the one on the 3D viewer
The point (0,0,0) returns true, even though it is not in the camera frustum. The camera, as it is positioned now, is near the origin, but the frustum does not contain it.

I'd appreciate any help you can give.

I may have fixed the problem. It seems that no matter how long you delay, it doesn't initialize until the first bit of code has been executed. I made a script controller that runs some dummy code to initialize on the first logic tick, and then delayed my main script by a few ticks and things work now.

Glad you solved it. I wonder if you can achieve the same thing by calling pointInsdieFrustum as a scene.post_draw function. This way, the camera should be guaranteed to be setup.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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How to create this wavy animation in Blender?
The following animation was created in Cinema 4D. How to do this in Blender?

Plane -> Subsurf modifier + wave modifier (Y-constrained) + wave modifier (X-constrained)
Tweak values to your liking.

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


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Simple Collision Simulation issue
I am very new to blender.
I am trying to make a rigid body and hair to collide, but they don`t, the hairs are just passing through.
When i googled it I could not find wrong i am doing. only one solution i got is to use force field. buts not what i want.
I am attaching my blender file, please find me what is wrong.

Sort of duplication to this one.

force field around a human body would be ridiculous...... i think

After checking the file, you need to tweak a few key options to make this work:

Set Collider Friction to a higher Value (maximum 1.000);
The cube (the active rigid body object) have to be subdivided to a higher resolution, the higher, the better, but slower.

Demo File

still didn't work

OK, see the updated demo file.

@rakeshmalik91 Btw, I wonder which version or build you were using for creating this file.

build i used is Blender 2.6.9

Would you please try this file with your current version to see if that problem still occurs? Because it seems to be a bug. Btw, Did you solve the problem in this answer? Try do it with the latest offcial build.

Well, if you are sure that it still didn't work even following my suggestion, just upload the adjusted file here. This is the simplest way to figure out what's left.


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How to create realistic plastic effect in packaging

How to render realistic plastic packaging with wrinkles same with the image attached

I'd duplicate the base object and use sculpting to add the wrinkles, then give it a transparent + glossy shader

For the following cloth simulation, the ground plane is set to be a collision object and the box has the 'leather' cloth preset applied.
There is a Sub-Division modifier in the stack below the Cloth Sim modifier, you can place the Sub-D higher up the stack for more detail however this greatly increases the time needed for the calculations to run.
Once the simulation is run, you should have a series of frames to choose from.  Select the one you prefer and Apply the modifier so that the mesh becomes frozen in that shape.

Go into sculpt mode and enable Dyntopo and try to create the affect with some of the brushes. You may want to make a second model for this so that you can create a normal map or bump map.


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How to display the normal values of a face?
I want to know the orientation of a certain face by knowing the z vector(direction vector) of its normal. How do I let Blender display the values of the normal of a face?

You can toggle the on in the Mesh Display panel:


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Texture (from texture paint mode) not showing up in object or edit modes
I'm fairly new to Blender, so forgive me if I'm asking a simple question. I've followed tutorial after tutorial and no one seems to have this problem.
I unwrapped my model, painted it (poorly), and everything is hunky-dory as far as viewing it in texture paint mode. However, when I switch to object mode, the model doesn't show the texture. What am I doing wrong? I know that if I need it to render properly I need to set a material and everything, but shouldn't it show in the object view?
Texture Paint Mode:

Object Mode (note: "Textured Solid" under Shading is enabled)

Even if I set the dropdown menu at the bottom to "Texture" it doesn't display a texture.
What dumb mistake am I making here? Thanks in advance!

You need a material to display the texture, if you were creating a texture in paint mode it would add the texture node automatically in your material.

I did use paint mode, but I must have done something wrong because it didn't do anything like that automatically. Is there a good tutorial for how to set that up manually, I wonder?

Nevermind, just figured it out. I feel silly. In all the tutorials I watch it does seem to be creating it automatically. I wonder what I did differently. Thanks for the help!!

What happened is you were in solid shading mode, not texture mode

Naw, what happened is that the texture and material weren't generated automatically when I did texture painting, so I had to go in and create them myself from the image.


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Fluid Simulation: an object set as outflow doesn't remove all the "water" mesh
I've set up a simple scene with an inflow source and an outflow object that the simulated mesh hits perfectly.
Here's a pic of my domain settings:
As you can see I'm using Fluid Particles setting but without any particle system outside this option. It gives me a more interesting and realistic result. The problem is this, however the Fluid Particle option gives me the desirable result in mesh definition, it also creates the secondary particle-mesh that doesn't get removed when it hits my outflow mesh and just goes through.
Here's the illustration:
 I even created an additional plane, you can see the black outline (it's solid, just set to wireframe render) and made it outflow, thinking that maybe my main mesh has some problems... didn't help.  What do you think is that a bug or I just missed something?

Are you sure this doesnt work? I tried recreating your problem and it seems to work with particles as long as the outflow initialization is set to "both" (shell+volume).
The default setting is volume, and the plane will never work as an outflow because it has no volume, its 2D.
Can you paste the blend so we can test with your setup? (preferably with included fluid cache so we dont need to recalculate)

Nevermind, i should have let the thing bake entirely, it misses the particles.

Does this still happen when viewing at full resolution? It could be an artefact of low resolution preview.

It's a confirmed bug. Here's a link to the Blender's bug tracker.
https://developer.blender.org/T51759  There's also a patch. According to the patch commit page it's in master, so it should be fixed for the 2.79 release.

It does seem to be a bug and should be reported. Though it seems that there is currently no one maintaining the elbeem fluid sim code.
A possible work around would be to use a boolean modifier.
http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=46863
Note that you'll need to bake first. I left the boolean modifier off (eye icon not checked) to illustrate that the boolean modifier removes the resultant fluid mesh, so you may need to tweak the boolean object to catch any particles/mesh that happen to move above the boolean object later in the animation.
Also, using a boolean modifier with a fluid sim mesh will likely really drag down the UI responsiveness.

Unfortunately that workaround doesn't work, or at least, doesn't provide a solution to the problem. Yes, the simulated mesh gets removed while it's in the cube but, when the fluid is past that cube, it reappears. In your example the boolean cube and the domain are at the same floor level so you don't realize that it just masks the fluid (you can raise the bottom face of the cube and see for yourself). Anyway, I appreciate the effort, it's a really non-trivial problem.


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Keyframe a driver / Triggering scripted expression with a keyframe
I want to keyframe a driver. I have a driver on the X rotation that is driven based on the Y position. So it rotates along the X when it moves along the Y. However, i don't need it to rotate all the time when it moves along that axis but only at a certain time. So, for example: don't evaluate the driver until you're on frame 32 or beyond. (If frame >= 32 then evaluate driver's expression)
I want to go from this:

To this:

The desirable effect is achieved by baking down the animation and just tweaking the keyframes in the Dope Sheet... but, as you can understand, it removes all the procedural data, which is not desirable.
And, i don't know if it deserves a separate question, how do i calculate a delta with python? If there is a way to keyframe a driver, then i don't want just to grab the current value from the position and use it to calculate rotation; i want it to be like that: (If frame >= 32 then PositionOnFrame32 - PositionOnCurrentFrame). And i think i need it to put in the modulus (absolute value) function so to eliminate negative values.

Let's say the gear is traveling along theY axis. I would drive rotation when gear.y is within strip.y to strip.y +  strip.dimensions.y rather than use a certain frame

@batFINGER In this case the trigger is a position in 3d space rather than a frame. But still, how do u turn a driver on and off with a trigger? (whatever the trigger may be)

Using a driver on parent empty to drive gears

Firstly I've set up my rack and pinion like so.

Named the pinion "Pinion" (as long as it starts with "Pinion") and placed the pinion above the left edge of rack, by its radius.
Similarly named the rack "Rack" and set the origin of the rack to the centre of the pinion.
Added an empty at that location.
Made the empty the parent of the rack and pinion.  Now when the pinion is at pinion.location.y = 0 it's directly above the left end of rack, and other end when its y location is rack.dimensions.y.  Our driver method will use this to determine if the pinions in the rack.

Added a custom property to the Empty and given it a driver. Checked the "use self" checkbox, and passed self via the  driver expression rackandpinion(self).  Simply returns 1 if in gear, else 0.
  The driver indirectly drives the pinion.
Defined the driver expression.  Make sure "use self" is checked. Might need to update dependencies if it shows an error.

The script.  Checks for rack and pinion children of the empty.  If the pinion is over the rack, it uses arc length formula to rotate its delta rotation about the x axix.  Adding a method / variable to the bpy.app.driver_namespace dictionary makes it available to driver expressions.  (just as are a lot of math and other methods and vars)
import bpy

def rackandpinion(self):
    def get_gear(name):
        gears = [o for o in self.children
                if o.name.startswith(name)]
        return None if not gears else gears[0]

    rack = get_gear("Rack")
    pinion = get_gear("Pinion")
    if not (rack or pinion):
        return 0

    # on the pinion if 0 <= pinion.y >= rack_len
    racklength = rack.dimensions.y
    geared = 0 <= pinion.location.y <= racklength
    pinion_radius = pinion.dimensions.y / 2
    if geared:
        pinion.delta_rotation_euler.x = -1 * pinion.location.y / pinion_radius
    return 1

# add to driver namespace
bpy.app.driver_namespace["rackandpinion"] = rackandpinion

This is very similar to using a frame change handler.  The driver expression, with use self,  gives us the ability to pass the object.
Possibly a more object oriented approach would be for the empty to set custom properties for calculated rotation, and have driver expressions on the pinion using this as a driver variable. (Could produce cyclic redundancy by getting and setting in a loop in drivers)

So just i understand it correctly: u create an empty and reference a method (rackandpinion) in its driver expression, and u define that method/function with a simple python code with the name rackandpinion and then register that method/function in the Blender's namespace, so that u can write any elaborate code in the comfort of a text editor rather than cramming it into a one-line expression field. Am i somewhat correct? :)

https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/34120/15543  Suggest typing in the text editor and copy / paste into driver expression (if using long expressions)  In hindsight could have passed the names of the rack, pinion.  btw didn't use frame in expression, if you want it at start of rack keyframe in y loc = 0 at frame N.

You can use Python's ternary if-else operator:
function_of(y_location) if frame >= 32 else 0

You can nest these.
If you need to evaluate some object's position at given frame, you have to use PyDriver.
Like batFINGER suggested, binding this to the start and end position of the teeth rack (or to 2 empties) would work well also. That would look like this:
(rot_fce(y_loc) if y_loc < end_loc else rot_fce(end_loc)) if y_loc >= start_loc else 0

I've done some reading on PyDriver. Isn't PyDriver a relic of Blender < 2.5 versions; so u could load ur expressions at loadtime from a script file... Do i understand it correctly? Or PyDrive is just a codeword for the Scripted Expression in the Drivers tab?

@BlenderSpot It's not a relic. It's just a name we give a driver that uses custom scripted functions that have to be added to the driver namespace.


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Cyan origin dot mystery
I've got this blend file (got it from here).
So the mystery is that the origin point's color is cyan. Checked the options in theme colors, "Active Object" entry is set to orange (as it expected) and when I change it, it only changes the outline color of the object. Newly created objects have their origin point colors orange and the "Active Object" entry controls an outline color and an origin point color but not for the objects that were already in the scene.

Objects that are used in multiple scenes will have their object origins displayed as cyan.
The file that you linked to contains 2 scenes, 'bottom' and 'side', as shown in the 3D header:

The object 'body' for example has a blue origin because it is used in both scenes. This means if you move the object in one scene the position of the same object in the other scene will also update to match it. You can see how many scenes an object is being used in by looking on the 'Object' panel of the object and noting the number of 'users'. In the case of 'body' it is being used in 2 scenes:

You can separate the object in one scene from the other by clicking the '2'. Instead of one object linked between two scenes you would now end up with two independent objects, which are no longer linked.
Also see 'Copying and linking objects between scenes' and 'Linking to a scene' in the Blender Wiki Manual.
If the outline of the object and the object origin were blue it would be because the file was linked from another file.

Doc links are wrong, here are the right ones: https://www.blender.org/manual/editors/3dview/object/transform/duplication.html#copying-linking-objects-between-scenes and https://www.blender.org/manual/data_system/scenes/introduction.html#linking-to-a-scene.


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Baking error with multi-tiled UV map
While searching for examples in baking I found this question Export "Project from view" texture as uv texture . On that page one responder provided a blend file. I downloaded it, tried to follow the steps and encountered a problem.
The model is unwrapped in such a way that it spreads across 4 different tiles: (I understand why and I also do this in my own projects, so it's a lot easy to manage)
The problem is:
When I bake the texture on the left to the layout on the right, the resulting texture is just a fraction of the tile (0,0).

But when I cram those 4 tiles into just 1 tile it bakes correctly:
Even when I tried to UVs -> Export UV Layout to use for pics in this question, Blender exported only the tile (0.0).

How to make Blender respect multi-tiled UV maps and how to make this particular example work (without collapsing all into 1 tile)?

Notes:
renderer used is Cycles
different UV tiles doesn't mean different UV maps
I have no idea where exactly the original asker got that model from

Huh... I'd always believed that anything outside the UV tile <1,1> just wouldn't bake/map properly. I have a hard time understanding how something like this would work...

Always layout UVs up and right from 0,0. Otherwise this will happen. Never go left and down.

Can you elaborate on this? I for one am having a hard time understanding what you are trying to say.


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Achieving Motion Blur on a still image
After reading many tutorials and watching videos, I don't fully understand how to get it to render for a still image. I have a car scene I'd like to have the wheels rotating for in the shot. Can someone explain the steps to doing it?

Fastest way to achieve such effect is to animate the object and use the tools Blender is already providing.
First of all your objects need to have some kind of animation in your scene, even if you are rendering a still. Motion blur/Sampled motion blur need to acquire the pixel's velocity vector from the scene and sample from there the blur effect.
In the provided example, Suzanne's Y rotation has been keyframed.

Pick a frame where the object is in motion (e.g not frame zero, where Suzanne is still, but something like the fifth).
The things you'll have to enable change their names a bit between the two built-in render engines:
Cycles:
Enable Motion Blur checkbox

Blender Internal:
Enable Sampled Motion Blur checkbox  and set an approriate value for the number of samples you would like to render (more samples cause longer render times but increase the effect quality)

In both cases you should set an appropriate Shutter frequency value(low values make stronger blur).

There is also a Compositor node if you prefer to add the effect during post-production. It can be found in the Filters menu. You should in this case enable the Speed/Vector pass, connect the relative sockets and tweak the parameters to your taste.


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Rigging a Robot Character
It's my first time getting into rigging and I'm trying to follow a tutorial on rigging using a robot character I designed. I'm at the part where I'm trying to set the armature with the body parenting using the automatic weights feature but it won't seem to work right off the bat like in the video. All the pieces of the robot are still separate. I tried joining them and doing it again and still no luck. The armature moves but no movement from the robot itself. What could I be doing wrong?

have you seen some kind of error message (on the top of the screen) after you tried to parent the mesh with the armature ?

hey lemon i haven't. As far as I know it acted as normal. It processed for a few seconds and then stopped as if it worked. I can try again and look for one. Maybe I'm missing a setting? Or the robot meshing is too complex?

The point is that the selected mesh in the screen capture has no vertex group... so it is not rigged. That's why I asked if the parenting succeed

I understand. Sorry Im still learning blender. As far as I know it didn't succeed. Let me try creating the vertex group.

No, Lee. The parenting may create it for you. You have probably an error while parenting. Common causes : doubled vertices or mirroring/symmetry problem.

Ok I see. Let me investigate this and I'll be sure to follow up.

Let us continue this discussion in chat.


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How to add brushes in scuplting mode or a texture?
So how do you go about adding brushes or a texture to a brush to create certain strokes?
I've made 10 different textures and it seems when I use them, I feel it doesn't recognize them.

Welcome to site! So you ask how to create new sculpt brushes ? Or how to use texture for determining the effect of the brush ? Also please include info (text, screenshots) about what have you tried with those 10 textures and what didn't work. Thanks.

http://i.imgur.com/ix7J57P.png What i've tried is adding it in the brush textures on the toolbar and added it to the texture drop down in the sculpt mode.  http://i.imgur.com/rNx2pzp.png

What I see is that it only leaves a spot on the area and doesn't follow the brush. Here is the results trying to paint on the model. http://i.imgur.com/pmXccdX.png

Figured it out. Was using f brush instead of f sculpt draw..... Thanks for the help!!!


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Overlay PNG image as overlay in camera view in BGE
Is there a way to put a PNG image as overlay in the camera view? I want the cross hairs to show in the camera view in Blender Game Engine.
Blender camera view:

PNG image with overlay:

End product:

If I got it, you could parent a plane that uses the image as texture (textured using alpha), like this:

start enabling the "import images as planes" addon (bundled by default), and import your overlay image

then enable alpha for the texture if needed, and transparency for the material

then look at the camera rotation transforms

and copy those values to the plane, and then move it towards the camera (translating on its local Z), to get:

in the end, here is an example of the camera rotating around a target object, and the view looking through the camera:

That is exactly what I am looking for. How did you insert the image to the scene? Did you apply it to a plane?

@fonsi you need to activate the "import images as planes" addon, in user preferences, then import your image and set transparency to mayerial/texture. Then, you need to "parent" the plane to the camera, and set its same rotation values, and place the plane right in front of it.  I'll add detailed steps, later, if needed.

@fonsi see the updated answer

Thank you @m.ardito. It worked. I had to adjust the material and texture properties but got it working. Thanks!

Good! If it solved your issue, please consider marking my answer as "accepted"...


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Moving objects create wind
I'm looking for a way to make moving objects generate some sort of wind that affects particle systems and/or rigid body simulations.
What I mean is that the moving object should not only interact with objects and particles it collides with, but also surrounding objects due to 'wind' being generated.

Could you point some real world example?

If you have a piece of paper thats a bit bent taped on only the top, and then swing your arm quickly in front of it, it should be affected by the 'wind'.

And particles will be?

related http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/58582/animation-of-falling-paper-in-cycles

You can use Drivers to automatically apply a Wind force around the object and to vary its intensity as the object moves. This can be achieved as follows.
Firstly, enable 'Autorun Python Scripts' in the File preferences window. This will allow you to run scripts in Driver expressions.

Create an empty to follow behind the moving object. This will be the 'source' of the wind and its distance from the moving object will dictate the magnitude of the forces. In the Empty's properties panel, right-click on one of its location properties and select 'Add drivers' - you should see the X, Y, Z properties turn purple to indicate  a driver is present.

To get the Empty to follow the moving object you can set its location to a running average of itself and the target object's location. This will result in it closing in on the target on each successive frame. To do this, select the Empty in the 3D window, open a Graph Editor window and change the context from F-Curve to Drivers and you should see the newly created drivers.

Select 'X Location' and set up 2 variables - both as 'Transform Channel' - one for the Empty's X Location and the other for the target object's X Location (named 'emptyX' and 'targetX'. Set the Driver value to be a Scripted Expression as '(emptyX + targetX) / 2'. This will result in the Empty moving halfway towards the target on each frame. Adjust this expression for a more gentle motion towards the target - eg, '(emptyX * 4 + targetX)/5' will cause the distance to close by 1/5th each frame.

Repeat the above for the Y and Z channels and you should have an Empty that follows behind the target object as it moves.

Create a Wind force at the same point as the Empty (select the Empty, Shift-S for 'Snap'menu , Cursor to Selected, Add/Force/Wind) and parent it to the Empty. Add a constraint to the Empty to 'Track To' the target object. Move the target away from the Empty and check that the direction of the Wind is correct - rotate it to point it towards the target object if it is incorrect.
Select the target object and go to its Object properties and create a Custom Property named 'WindMultiplier' and set its value to '35.0' (or similar). This will be used to control the strength of the wind.
Select the Wind force object and go to its Physics properties. Right-click the Strength property and Add Driver. Configure the rest of the force as required -- probably change the shape to 'Point', set the Falloff to Sphere and power to around 2 or slightly higher.
Go back to the Graph Editor window and select the new driver on the Wind force. Create a variable named 'distance' of type 'Distance' and set one object to the target object (in World space) and the other to the Empty. Create another variable named 'multiplier' as a Single Property, set the object to the target object and the path to '["WindMultiplier"]'. Set the Scripted Expression to 'distance * multiplier'.
You should now find that as the target object animates that the empty follows closely behind with the wind force varying based on its speed. You can repeat the above 'Wind' steps to create multiple forces - for example, a Turbulance force, vortex forces, etc., parenting each to the Empty and rotating it as required, affecting your particle system dynamically based on the motion. Tweak the force properties and multipliers as required.
You'll get strange results if you run the frame sequence in reverse or jump to points in the animation so it's best to play it forwards all the way through to make sure it's working as expected and then to Bake the animation and then disable the drivers until you need them again if you change the motion of the target object.
Here's an example using a Wind force and Turbulence force - there is no object collision involved. You could get more effective results by adding Vortex fields (as above) to simulate eddy currents in the air flow.

Note : You may find that Blender doesn't detect changes to your scene when adjusting the Driver properties (such as 'WindMultiplier' mentioned above) and will not refresh the particle system automatically. If this occurs you can simply go into the Particle System properties and re-bake the particle system. The other potential issue with the set up described above is that the initial state at frame zero will not be consistent - the Empty used to direct the forces may not necessarily be in the same place at the start of the animation. The driver Scripted Expressions could be adjusted to allow for this if required but I excluded this for clarity (eg,  something like 'emptyX * 4 + targetX)/5 if frame = 0 else targetX' should give the desired effect.

What you could do is to parent a Wind force field to your objects that you intend to move. This way the animated movement will look like it's affecting the oject that is blow by the wind. Of course you will have to adjust the force field to your scene.


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Blocking 3D audio in Blender Game Engine
Is there a way to 'block' or stop 3D audio so that in one room I can hear it but in another besides it I can't without ending it?

There is no inbuilt way, but with python you could easily script a visibility check between the source and camera and use that to fade the volume.

One problem with this is that I need the sound to spread across many connected rooms and be blocked by a ceiling, so the visibility check wouldn't really work.

Have your ceiling have a specific game property and use a raycast with X-ray enabled.


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Render glass distortion and not background
I am doing a simple scene in Cycles with glass shards. I added a plane with the image I want as a background. However, I need to render only the glass shards, and their distortion of the background, and not the background it self.
How could this be done?

Does this do what you want?

Not excatly. I've figured out transparent, but my background is either a background image (in the right menu) or a plane with the image, and they need to influence my glass shards while not rendering.

There's an easier way.
Select the background plane, go to its object settings, then scroll down to Cycles Settings. Uncheck 'Camera'.

That's it!
Here's the 3D view and the rendered view to demonstrate the effect:

I figured it out myself :P
I needed to put the shards on layer 1, and background on layer 2. Then I shift-click both layers, so they are both visible. Then, I opened up render-layers and set the scene to layer 1 and layer 2 if they were not showing, and I selected only layer 1 under the "Layer" tab.


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Smooth shader not working | pdb addon loaded molecule
Maybe someone can help me with this. I am in Blender 2.80 and I used the pdb loader add-on. Now I have some problems with getting a smooth shader on the bonds of my molecule. That was never an issue in 2.79 (and older). Does anyone know how I could solve that? Any help or input on how to solve that would be greatly appreciated!
Verena

Have you enabled the Smooth option for the sticks / bonds in the import settings?

Yes I have, but there no difference in the outcome... However, I might have figured out how to deal with it. Increasing the number in the "sector" section (in the import settings) to something like 500 works perfectly fine. Maybe not the most elegant way, but it serves the purpose :)

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


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how do i add mp4 files to edit?
I have a sony handycam which is HD and I've been trying to edit some videos using Blender video editor but its not registering my video files anywhere. I saved them from my camcorder to my computer (on my desktop) but when I click open, they aren't there. I have files in avchd (which are apparently standard on this camcorder) and in mp4 formats. I have done the settings for mp files but its still not there. Please help me so I can edit my movies from my camcorder.
Thank you

This might be a bug, the files may be corrupted, or any number things. How did you get the files from AVCHD to mp4?

Did you open the movie file via file --> open?  Or did you open the movie file in the video sequence editor add --> movie? The last option should work and the first one doesn't.

You need to open the AVCHD file as if it were a folder (it is). In Mac: Right click, then "Show contents". You will see another folder, do the same with it. Then you'll find the *.MTS files. Those you can open and work with in Blender.
You can even change the extension "mts" to "mpg", but that's not necessary in Blender.


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how do i bend a custom object
how do i bend the object in the image according the direction of the blue arrow? i tried to add a curve modifier attached to a bezier but not work

Any help?

there is a modifier, called "simple deform" where you have four different deform options. As well as bend, as far as I remember.
Maybe you have to add some more geometry to your model, to achieve a better result

You had the right idea with the Curve modifier and Bezier Curve. It looks to me like it's not working because the origin points of both objects are off in some arbitrary location. Set the origin point of your Curve to be at the start of the curve path. Set the origin point of your mesh object to be on the edge of your mesh. Then add the Curve modifier. You may need to fiddle with the axes depending on the rotation of your objects (it's easier if both the Curve and Mesh are oriented in the same direction from the start). Once the modifier is on, you can just grab the mesh along the applicable axis and it will slide along the curve. You may need to have a SubSurf modifier preceding your Curve modifier in your stack in order for it to have enough mesh density to deform well. I my screen shot note the position of the 3D cursor - this is also the origin point of both of my objects. Since I'm in Edit Mode you can see that the wireframe represents the original location of the mesh object, and the bent version is the position after the modifier is added.

Another way is to select some vertex of the edges of the mesh, in edit mode, and enable proportional editing, set sharp, G Z to move upward, scroll mouse wheel to set the influence of proportional editing. the mesh must be well subdivided, in my example I've got smooth shading enabled, as well as subdivision surface set to 2.


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True relationship between bones/armature and rigginh
Is it true that the armature/bone structure really only depends on the Head of a bone, in particular with regards to rigging/skinning a model?
I am using niftools to import models into Blender, but several of the bones are pointing in the wrong direction. The location/rotation of the head of the bone is fine, it's just the tail is positioned incorrectly. However, when the model is used in-game (Morrowind), everything appears to be functioning properly.

Vertex movements are referred to the head bone, tail position is important only in case of automatic weighting or bone heat weighting, and - of course - in case of IK chain or other connected bones.
After weighting is done, if your bone isn't parent connected with another bone, you can freely move the tail in edit mode (i.e. to align axes with world axes) without affecting the behaviour of the rig.


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I've created extruded objects and they don't seem to behave correctly
I've just started picking up blender for some projects at work, and am hitting a stumbling block. I'm building a fairly mechanical object and as such have been creating it in layers, using extrusions from paths. All this seems to have worked fine however when I'm now trying to use a boolean to "cut" holes into them, it leaves open holes into the object. Attached are some images to try and illustrate what I mean.

My overall Object/project
Here you can see me selecting my boolean modifier
Here we have the result. Weirdly, it seems to add it
So I go ahead and delete the extra faces, and I've got holes aplenty

You can see on the front of the first image a boolean that I used to cut away a cruve from a block that worked fine, so I'm stumped.
I wonder if it has something to do with my objects being blue rather than grey, but I don't know if this even means anything.

Okay, I managed to figure it out. Basically all the faces were facing the wrong way on these extruded objects. So, opening them in edit mode, selecting all the faces then hitting Ctrl-N cleared it up, and the booleans are now working properly!

As, have been said above normals are the direction a certain face is facing in, and sometimes the are facing the wrong way so by pressing (Ctrl + N) you will flip the normals the way the should be,(facing outwards).


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How to get hard edges when using subsurf modifier?
I am rather new at modeling but I am working on a nicer Porsche 944 model. I have a solid looking hood but there is a part of the hood where it drops a little and with the sub surf modifier I am having issues modeling it. I have tried extruding and then re-merging half the hood as well as just putting a loop cut in and moving half the hood down. Both of these are not producing crisp edges like seen in the photograph. Any ideas?

Couple ways to do it. One is to use an Edge Split modifier, adjust the angle at which you want an edge to be sharp, or mark specific edges sharp as needed. The other is to add additional edge loops on either side of where you want the sharp edge.
For example, here's three cylinders:

In the middle is a 32-sided cylinder with the Subsurf modifier set for 3 subdivisions. On the right is the same cylinder with the Edge Split modifier turned on. On the left, is the same cylinder with additional edge loops above and below the edge that needs to be sharp.

Same cylinders, showing the vertices on the left cylinder so you can see the two extra loops. Both approaches work. The slightly beveled edge resulting from adding more loops will arguably give you a more realistic edge, since the real car likely doesn't have a perfectly sharp edge there (few things IRL do).

This is what edge Crease is for. Crease the edges with a value of 1 to ignore subsurf's smoothing and create a hard edge.


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How do you rename a workspace
I duplicated my "Layout" workspace and it created a workspace called "Layout.001".  I would like to rename this to "Default", but I don't see how to do this.  I tried right-clicking on the name and I get several options, none of which is "rename".  Any suggestions?

I finally figured it out.  Double-click on the workspace name to rename it.

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


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BGE - Stop ApplyRotation
I'm using 'ApplyRotation' but the object does not stop spinning.
import bge
from bge import logic

cont = logic.getCurrentController()
owner = cont.owner

for i in ranger(0, 100)
    owner.applyRotation([0,.02, 0], 1)

What sensor to you have running the script? It will run every time the sensor triggers it.

applyRotation is (like most operations in Python) a one time operation.
It applies the provided turn exactly once at the moment of calling.
When you discover a continuous turning it means you execute this operation multiple time.
When you can see the turning (=animation) you do apply the turns at different frames resulting in a turning animation (one frame = one step).
Your code applies a lot of small turns (steps) in one frame. This means you will only see the final orientation. As there should not be a problem in calculating this final operation your code is very inefficient and is wasting processing time.
Keep in mind:

Your code describes the behavior within a single frame.

To get the animated turning you execute the code at each frame when you want a turn step.

I'm using 'ApplyRotation' but the object does not stop spinning.

This sounds like you execute the code at each single frame (see sensor settings).


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How to change the scene layout?
I can change the scene and the layout of the object.
I want to know if Game Logic allows me to change the layout of the scene....
Suggestions?

imho "the layout of the scene" is an editor (blender program) setting, I doubt that game logic can operate on the editor settings...


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Game Logic - Change Mesh
Searching a little, I discovered that it is possible to change mesh in game logic.
Problem: When the course is over the object it continually changes the mesh as if it were unconfigured.
Any suggestion?

I test your logic and it works!... i test it with a cube and other objects in a inactive layer, blender version 2.79.

Solved. Thanks a lot!
I only understood logic now.


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Question - Scale Animation Error?
Could someone explain to me why this happened?
Create an animation using 'Scale' and put the animation on the other object on the left and look what happened.

Please explain what the result you're seeing is (it's hard to tell from images what the animation is doing) and then explain how it differs from the intended result.

Is this really blender game engine related?

I created an animation in a 'plane.001' and did the configuration in 'Logic Bricks'.
Then I created another object 'plane.002' and in the settings in 'Logic Bricks' I used the same animation as 'plane.001'. When I run the 'game' the animation of plane.002 gets irregular. It imitates the point of origin of the plane.001 ...

"the animation of plane.002 gets irregular. It imitates the point of origin of the plane.001", if im not wrong, i think its relate to the origin of the animation, when you animate something it has to be in the center of the scene, when you animate something that is not in the center it works only for the first animated object, and the others objects just get on the wrong place.

Could you guide me to solve it? Do I need to put the object in the center of the scene and then create the animation? Thank you!


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How to import .bobj files in Blender?
I received a set of *.bobj files. Those files were not created with Blender, they were generated by an external fluid simulator. I am not familiar with the physics engine of blender and I don't need it. I only need to read the mesh for rendering purposes. Using Blender 2.68a.
How to import those files in Blender?

A Bobj file sounds like it could be a Binary OBJ file, However i believe this is not a specific standard of file.
Blender's Fluid simulator outputs bobj.gz as a format in binary, and compressed.
Edited:
bobj files are used in the fluid tab of the physics settings.
Make sure the bobj.gz files are in a directory of their own, and then goto that directory in the highlighted field.
Make sure you only have the directory name in the field, and not the file name of the fluid cache.
You also need to make sure the file names do not change from fluidsurface_final_xxxx.bobj
and set the viewport Display to Final.

Actually it is a .bobj.gz  (Binary OBJ), I decompressed it because I thought it was compressed only for e-mail sending purposes, didn't know it was actually part of the file logic. If that is the file, any idea how to import it?

i have edited my original answer

Would appreciate if you could resize this screenshot, it is unnecessarily big.

That made the trick...thank you very much.


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Cycles - Skybox using 6 projected images
I have generated 6 images that are of a sky projected onto the faces of a cube from the viewpoint of the centre of the cube (ie. a hopefully seamless skybox).
However I am having issues adding this texture to the world material. I have tried adding the images to the background via an Environment Texture but am unable to get anything even remotely close to looking correct.
Here are my problems:

The world material seems to be applied to a sphere but I want it to be a box (the program I am using to generate the sky generates a box)
I don't know how to stitch my images together for use in the world material
I'm not sure I'm even going about this the right way

I have searched and searched trying different things for most of the day so far but am coming up blank.

possible duplicate of Exporting Cycles Sky to skybox images

Cycles's environment object does not support skybox textures. Your best bet is to place the scene inside a large cube object with your texture mapped to it.

@poor Not the same question in my opinion. One has 6 images and wants to use them, one has sky and wants to export to 6 images: http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/questions/549/duplicate-answer-vs-duplicate-question

@RayMairlot ok, you are right. retracted.

Blender's environment texture in Cycles only supports Mirror Ball and Equirectangular image map types. You cannot use a skybox texture directly.
Some of your options are:

Convert the skybox image to one of the other 2 formats in a third party image convertor.
Set Blender native environment to pure black. Create a large cube object that surrounds your scene, UV unwrap and add the skybox image texture to that object.
Find a new sky image in Equirectangular or Mirrorball format and use that instead

Blender's internal render engine (BI) does seem to support additional mapping types (Object, Tube, Sphere, Global). Perhaps you could use the Object mode to base the mapping on a cube object but displayed as the world environment. I've not tried or tested that technique though.

Thanks for the info. I was coming to the conclusion that it was not directly possible but needed confirmation. I do not know of any software that can convert my images... apart from blender xD I think I will apply it to a cube in another scene and generate the environment map from that then use that generated one in my original scene (hopefully I won't lose too much detail, but I can generate higher resolution images of my skybox as it is procedurally generated so I have a workaround). This should work and shouldn't take too long.


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Change focus on mist pass for getting DOF in composition
I'm trying to get DOF in Compositing from an OpenEXR image with Combined/Alpha/Mist passes. This is the combined pass:

I can get DOF by a defocus node using the Mist pass (after a ColorRamp to define better), but I can't set which part of the image is focused and unfocused. (I want the character with the knife to be focused, and not the other character).

If I invert the Mist image I can achieve this but the borders aren't unfocused:

Is there any better way to achieve this? FYI I have an alpha pass
Thank you!

why not unsing Z pass? See: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/8126/blender-cycles-manual-dof, may be also interesting: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/7395/2d-vs-3d-depth-of-field?

Thank you! I didn't see those questions. Solved :D

Glad I could help :)

You can try inserting an add node between the mist pass and the color ramp, to "offset" the focused value. Tweaking the values, positive or negative, you should be able to set the knife pixels as focused and the rest unfocused. If you can post an image of your mist pass i can be more accurate on the answer.


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How can I make objects behave as if they were solid?
If I start blender, I see the default scene, with a cube, a lamb, and a camera. If I add a new cube, and the cursor is in or near the center, it goes on top of the original cube, or floats around roughly where the original cube is located, passing through it as if neither object were really solid.
But say I want to make the cubes behave as if they were both solid? How can I make blender treat objects as if they were solid?


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Simple Python for loop causes Blender to suddenly hog 75% of all ram
If I create a plane, and want to subdivide it, I can issue the Python command:
>>> bpy.ops.mesh.subdivide()

But if I want to subdivide 20 times, using:
>>> for i in range(20):
...   bpy.ops.mesh.subdivide()

this causes Blender to get stuck in an infinite loop, eventually taking up 75% of all available RAM.
Why would this happen, and how can I execute said loop?

Well, one problem I can think of is that you're asking blender to subdivide a mesh  by cutting everything in half 20 times in a row.  That's 2**20 = around 1 million cuts on every edge, meaning a square face would be cut into 1 trillion faces.
If this is really what you want, you can do it in a single step using a single
bpy.ops.mesh.subdivide(number_cuts=1048576)

My suspicion is that this is not really what you want to do.  Mostly because I can't think of any machines that can stash the vertices and face loops for several trillion faces.

Try subdividing a plane 20 times manually by successively hitting W ->Subdivide. You won't get past iteration 9 (or 10, 11.. maybe 12) before your machine starts to break out in a sweat. This isn't so much a Python problem as misunderstanding about what subdivide does.
The default single cut per subdivide turns each face into 4 faces. here a short snippet to print out the numbers involved.
prev = [1]

for i in range(20):
    last = prev[-1] * 4
    print(i+1, prev[-1], '->', last)
    prev.append(last)

outputs (here -> means subdivide):
1 1 -> 4
2 4 -> 16
3 16 -> 64
4 64 -> 256
5 256 -> 1024
6 1024 -> 4096
7 4096 -> 16384
8 16384 -> 65536
9 65536 -> 262144
10 262144 -> 1048576
11 1048576 -> 4194304
12 4194304 -> 16777216
13 16777216 -> 67108864
14 67108864 -> 268435456
15 268435456 -> 1073741824
16 1073741824 -> 4294967296
17 4294967296 -> 17179869184
18 17179869184 -> 68719476736
19 68719476736 -> 274877906944
20 274877906944 -> 1099511627776

after 20 iterations you would have 1 099 511 627 776 faces.

As the other answers mention, you are subidiving a progressively subdivided mesh over and over, which makes polycount grow exponentially. If you want to subdivide 20 times, the proper code would be:
bpy.ops.mesh.subdivide(number_cuts=20)


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Conflicting faces rendering as black
In my blend file here, I'm trying to write a shader that uses a gradient to mix between transparency and the surface material.
So far, I've managed that. But when transparent, the object shows black faces in some areas, and only from certain angles.
It is important to note that these are not gradually black, or grey, faces. They are jet black and unshaded. This model was ripped via RenderDoc and was imported as a CSV.
Removing doubles does work, but it massively deteriorates my mesh, so unless I can select doubles, it's not an option.
It's nothing to do with the shaders themselves - setting the mesh to be exclusively a transparent shader still shows it.
Flipping/Recalculating normals has absolutely no effect.
Clearing custom split normal data does not have any effect.
I can only conclude that it's an issue with Z-Fighting.
Can anyone tell me how to absolve this? Or at least how to circumvent this and use a different method for gradually revealing / masking an object?

It's really easy to solve. There are just not enough transparency bounces in your settings.
Just crank up the max. number of Transparency Bounces to say 18 and the problem is gone. EDIT: 18 works for this view. From an other viewing angle you probably need a lot more. This might result in bad render times...
The problem occurs at places, where the ray has to bounce more. Because the max. number of bounces is to low, it draws an black pixel.

Transparency set to 18 or higher solves the issue

Haha, thankyou! That makes a lot of sense, although with 100% transparency that shouldn't have appeared, but it would when it was transitioning so nevertheless, thanks!

That happens also with 100% transparency, because it is still an physical object. And every ray has to pass it and this counts as an bounce.
You can easyily test that yourself. Create a thin plane, use an array, apply a pure transparent material and position the camera in front and then lower the number of max. bounces for transparency: One plane after the other will become black.

Is there a way to default otherwise untraced faces to transparent?

In your question lies your answer: It will not work, because they are traced. They are visible to the camera...

What do you wanz to achieve? A stealth effect like klingon ships have in Star Trek? If yes, to do it in post using render layers and passes will be more effective...


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Freestyle animation has delay in cycles
When rendering my scene as an animation, on particular frames (in this instance, 17), I often get a delay in the outlining, like it's trying to outline the next/previous frame.
This doesn't happen when rendering the frame normally - as in not an animation.
It looks like this:
When animated

When rendered normally

It's like the actual render is delayed by a frame, but only when animated.
Is this a known bug?

Sounds like a bug, probably should be reported in the tracker if the issue still happens with the most recent builds

So........ bug?

I have had this freestyle "delay" happen when rendering with Motion Blur settings turned on. Is this the case for your project?

Motion blur was part of the issue, I think

Similar question: https://blender.stackexchange.com/q/29266/28015

Try to bake your animation with the same framerate as your render. This should fix your issue.

I found using cycles and freestyle so slow (like minutes) that its easier to clone the project file, then replace all the cycle materials for a simple diffuse transparent BI material and run it with BI.  Then composite the frames with the other rendered frames. Of course, I have thousands of polys so it may not help if the model is low poly.

Can you please elaborate on your solution? You render only the freestyle part in BI (on a separate render layer?) then composite these frames with the one coming from cycles (without freestyle)?

Sort of.   I render the blender freestyle with transparent background as .png, then the cycles render completely independent  and composite them in After Effects.  I'm sure you can use Blender to composite them post (I wouldn't know how to tell you where to begin, and I don't think you can render BI, and Cycles simultaneously)

You can immedeatly combine Internal and Cycles (with compositing). https://urchn.org/post/combining-blender-internal-and-cycles-in-one-render


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Can't flip pose properly blender
Pose reverse fails, tried to rename some bones to check if there's a problem but it didn't change anything. Here's a gif:

are the bones IK? it looks like they are. whats the target?

I'm not sure but I don't see any key frames in the animation sequence.

When you paste a mirrored pose, blender does the the following:

Mirror each bone's transformation in local space across the the YZ plane, this means that say a movement of 1 on the X axis will become a movement of -1 in the X axis.
Apply the mirrored translation of all bones that match the mirror naming convention or the original bones

Step 1 is probably the bit that is catching you out here, if the initial positions/rotations of the mirror bones are not a mirror, then the copied pose will not create a proper mirror.
In order to fix this, you need to go into edit mode and make sure each mirror bone is in the correct mirror position. The easiest way to do this is to enable X-Axis Mirror in the options section of the 'T' panel and then select one half of your armature, and press G then Enter to apply a translation of 0 to them. The mirror option you enabled will then snap the other bones to the correct mirror positions.


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How not to lose quality of image with brush
I'm using texture material on the brush and the quality is way worse than I would like.Original
Painted with a brush

Maybe you could provide the "original" as it is (not only the example)

When creating your texture that you are going to paint to, increase this number. (smaller is lower resolution, larger will allow for more detail) It is a good idea to keep powers of 2, such as 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192 Etc.

In your case, when you already have an image made, you can adjust the size of your image in the tools panel of the UV/Image Editor

I've already did that, it's 4096x4096

well, depending on how big your giraffe is, you may need it really big.

think of it this way, if your texture is 500 pixels by 500 pixels, and you have it repeat 27 times, that is 13,500 pixels by 13,400 pixels (to avoid losing resolution)

So, since he seems to want an alternative, is there an LOD setup for textures?

I wouldn't think so, unless you have multiple objects with different textures. Unless this is for the game engine (or merely to speed up render time) I'd say there is no point to use LOD to reduce texture size.


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Texture repeating problem
I have a texture on my model and the problem is that when I made any changes on one side it appears on the other. I believe the reason of that is that while unwrapping my parts of model doesn't fit on the texture. One way I could think of is to increase the dimensions of texture but to make it as big as I wan't would make the size of picture around 20GB. The other is to reduce dimensions of my model parts but that way I would lose quality and it won't look how I want. So I need that the texture would repeat independently

"...made any changes on one side it appears on the other..." If you're making your changes on the main texture which you use as a diffuse map, they all will be repeated all along the texture, thus affecting every island of the UV map.

All those islands should be in the 0-1 space. There are some reasons to move things out of that area, as an example, if you want the texture to repeat or if you want to exclude part of a model from a texture bake operation.
For what you are doing there, I think it's best that you do what is shown in the following image.  While in Edit mode, move all the UV islands into the light grey area that is displayed with the grid.
The dark grey zone is out of bounds.


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Weight painting deforms an object
When I weight paint my object deforms.How to fix that?

clear all rotation/location on the armature before painting

The reason this happens is because you have animation information on the armature that you are painting to, the mesh updates to that information once it is painted to a certain bone.
This can be desirable if you have a certain pose that you do not know how it will deform the mesh, and you can weight paint until the mesh looks fine in the tricky position. However, this isn't the case, and we'll need to solve it.
Switch into pose mode. (Ctrl+Tab) now, hit A once or twice (depending) to select all of the bones. Alt+R will clear all rotation data, and likewise, Alt+G will clear translation data.
You may now weight paint without any mesh deformation.


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Rigid body simulation is not rendered
I've made a simple rigid body simulation and when I try to render it, it does not work. It gives the same results as if there was no camera, however I replaced a camera with the new one but the problems remains. Here is the picture:

Not the case, I have way more objects than you can see here, those are enabled, even if they were disabled it would render a dark scene instead of something what has been rendered in 0 seconds

I have solved the same issue baking the simulation in the scene properties


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Modify .wrl color in Cycles
I'm importing .wrl data from FEA simulation, setting attribute to Col for rendering in Cycles Blender and see vertex color. I wisk to use Blender to better visulations results and animations. Is there any possibility to smoothing interfacing between color? Thanks.
My color render using Blender.

My idea of render.


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How to extract multiple layouts?
In Blender I looked for ways to extract the layout of all objects at once but I could not. The best I could do was to put together all the objects and extract a single layout.
Suggestions?

Can you get some screenshots or mockups of what you mean here?

I have 45 individual objects and I need to export each object of this layout (UV Map). Is it possible to export only one layout at a time?


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How to change texture of all objects at the same time?
I have an object that has been divided into 3 parts and joined by a 'Plain Axes'.
How do I change the texture of the 3 parts of the object at the same time?
Thanks!

Try applying the same materials on those parts if they are just using the same texture. have them UV unwrapped uniformly so they will have the same amount and look of the texture as you adjust the material.


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GE. Have sound continue on different scenes
I'm trying to do the following.
When I click on the cube object it goes to the 002 scene.
But when I tighten the cube in the scene 002 there are two songs to can...
I used the 'Add Overlay Scene' so the song continues to run between scenes.

Please please please next time
explain better,
It seems that you grabbed some words from your brain and vomited them here.

Apparently the sound actuator dont persist between scenes so you need to use AUD Basic Sound Playback in order to persist between scenes.
To make it persisten save the handle in an attribute of module bge.logic as shown in the example TEXTURE Basic Video Playback
This python script will try to play the sound when enter to scene "Scene" if not already playing (will play until end and is needed to load scene "Scene" in order to play again)
"""https://docs.blender.org/api/current/aud.html"""
import aud
from bge import logic

# the creation of the handle must be done once per sound: save the
# handle in an attribute of bge.logic module makes it persistent
if not hasattr(logic,'handle'):

    device = aud.device()
    # load sound file (it can be a video file with audio)
    factory = aud.Factory(logic.expandPath('//spring moon.mp3'))

    # play the audio, this return a handle to control play/pause
    logic.handle = device.play(factory)

if logic.handle.status:
    print('playing sound', logic.handle.status)
else:
    delattr(logic, 'handle')

Also you can use that logic in all cameras so when set any scene will try to play if not already playing.
Finally you can change the scene actuators to jus set scene:

The non-coding solution is to have a central, main scene that plays the sound.
That way the main scene will still persist, even when other scenes are being changed/removed.


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Blender 2.8: Using `parent_type` = `ARMATURE` (instead of the modifier) seems to not deform the mesh in the viewport
We have a blocking issue preventing us from upgrading to Blender 2.8:
Using parent_type = ARMATURE (instead of the modifier) seems to not deform the mesh in the viewport.
It works fine in renders though.
Changing the parent_type to object and using the Armature modifier solves the issue. However, our custom exporter heavily relies on and only supports the parent_type version. So if there's a way to enable the deform preview in the viewport it would safe us a lot of work. Maybe the issue is even a bug?

It seems that obj.data.update() updates...

thanks, I will forward you insight to the bug report:  https://developer.blender.org/T69326


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I am having issues with the subdivision surface modifier. When I don't add loop cuts it rounds when I do it makes a ridge.
I am making a basic model of a Porsche 944 as my first car model and I am having issues around the fenders. I have made the hood already and am now working on the part of the car just below the hood. I have duplicated all the edges around the perimeter of the hood and made into a new object (fenders). That in theory means that all of my edges along the hood line up but the problem I am having is I work best with the subdivision surface modifier so as a result it is rounding my edges and I am getting a gap between the fenders and hood. I know the trick of using loop cuts to give it a hard edge but that worked on only 3 of the 4 edges. On the fourth edge which is where the mirror modifier becomes present I can add the loop cut and it solves the issue of the gap but I then get a ridge down the middle of my car that I can not work out with shading. I have attached some pictures so you can see the problem.Hopefully some one has a solution to this madness and any advice helps.The first picture is of the gap I have between the fenders and hood,  it can be seen where the cursor is. The second is of the loop cut I add which fixes the gap. I can not post three pictures but the result of the loop cut sis the gap is gone but a ridge appears right on the center line. Note I have mirror modifier on and I am not getting ridges anywhere else.

Why do you want that fourth edge loop, the picture with it missing looked fine to me? where is this gap?

Sorry I was not more specific. In the first picture just above the cursor you can see a crack along the two objects that slowly fades as it gets farther away from the center. In the second picture the fourth edge loop gets rid of the gap but it leaves a ridge along the center line. Unfortunately I can not include another picture to show.

Have you tried sub surfing both objects?

Now that you mention it, the hood of my car is not sub surfed. I will try that. Thank you very much for that suggestion.

Note to any others reading this, that did solve my problem


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Weight Paint not going away where needed
I am modeling a zebra but am running into the issue of the ear has some of the mane selected with the weight paint. I try to use the F Subtract brush but it is not producing the desired results as the main weight paint is not changing and it is also unselecting part of the ear. Any ideas?
Before Stroke

After Stroke

It's easier to paint weights if you mask your selection. In Edit Mode select the vertices you wish to work on, and then in Weight Paint Mode press M...

Back in Edit Mode you can also check the Vertex groups and manually remove unwanted vertices...


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Completely hide the menu bar in 2.8
Is it possible in 2.8 to completely collapse the menu bar as it was possible in 2.79?

left: 2.79, right: 2.8
I tried hiding the menu, deleting all workspace tabs individually, entering full screen mode,
but I still can't get rid of the top bar. Is there a reason it is handled this way in 2.8?

Hello :). I believe in 2.79 the 'menu' worked like any other editor, so it could be moved and closed. In 2.8, it is a separate UI element.

No, it is not possible, unfortunately.You cannot hide the top bar completely in Blender versions starting from 2.8.
I know it's far from perfect solution, but if you create a new window, it will not have the top bar:

But you will still have to have the main window with the top bar somewhere.

Okay, 'new window' is an okay workaround when in a pinch (laptop). With the statusbar gone in 2.8 und moved to statistics for the active window it would be nice to have another option to save screen space.


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Rigging Help. Need help understanding some basics
So I really haven't tried to play with rigging much besides on weapons and have run into some trouble when trying to rig a full character.  The main problem I am having is that the mesh does not line up exactly with the bones even though the weight is 100%.
Here is a picture of the rigging in T-Pose:

And this is what happens when I try to pose it:

The second issue is that the upper leg and the lower leg become disconnected when moving.  Not sure if this is a product of the first problem or not. But in general I can't angle the upper leg without the lower leg getting out of alignment.
Any tips would be appreciated!
Thanks!

Uploading a .blend file to Stack Exchange would be a real help in diagnosing this prob :)

I am new to posting in stack exchange, where do I upload and link to a file?  Couldn't I just do it through dropBox also?


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Black Lines Along UV Mapped Model
I am new to blender and am trying to model an object and export it to unity.
However I am having a problem. Black line are forming along several edges of the model when viewed from a distance.
Some screenshots
Close Up

From A Distance

In Unity

Texture

It might help to post the texture with the UV islands overlaid to see how it's unwrapped.

Looks like you need a larger margin around the outside of the UVs

Either remap your UVs with smart UV project and set island margin to an appropriate value (Experiment, 0.02 works for me), or manually increase the size of the margin around each island by a few pixels. You can easily do this by hand with a photo-editing tool.
The black lines are from the mipmapping used in realtime graphics pipelines, including Blender's editor and Unity. The mipmapping works fine at full resolution (eg: when close to the model) but when the camera is far away, adjacent colours tend to blend together. On your texture, coloured islands are adjacent to black areas, so you have black lines.
This Gamedev.SE answer is wonderful and explains the mipmap bleed effect very well.

Source: My own problems with mipmapping and colour bleeding (unrelated to Blender) and my fix translated to Blender terms, as well as the wonderful link at the end of my answer. You can search for information regarding "Mipmap texture bleeding" if you want more of the gory details from various people on the 'net.


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How to expand and contract the current selection in Edit mode?
I watched a video of somebody selecting more vertices/edges/faces using the < and > signs in edit mode. He would select one face then using the > sign it would select more connected faces.
The problem is I'm on a Mac and those two keys are under the , and . that will also no work using the the shift key.
Is there another shortcut to do this?

@SixthOfFour Yes it does exactly what the ctrl + and - do. Thanks! That answered my question.


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How do I hide this top panel and where did my menu bar go?
Please tell me how to hide the top panel. Dragging any of the corner handles up on the other panels does not work.

The trick in this scenario is you have to collapse all the lower panels so that you have 2 horizontal panels, then join them to one and then start out again to create the layout you want.

Haha, got the same problem recently. It took me about 30 mins to figure it out :D.

Somebody should make a puzzle game out it. Sort of like a Rubic's cube puzzle, but with Blender panels.

Brilliant idea Todd! I've just designed the first stage of the game :D. Check it out: https://imageshack.com/i/pdFHQOF6j

@Gonzou Too easy. Probably wouldn't make me think very hard.

This was just a warm up ;). Here's the harder level: https://imageshack.com/i/exFMFI8Pj


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How to duplicate object with it's animation then relocate/rotate
I want to duplicate an object along with it's animation but I want to use the duplicated object(s) somewhere else in the scene. Is this possible? I guess I would need to maintain the animation locally to the duplicated object but not sure how that works.
For example a ball rolling on it's x-axis is duplicated with it's animation. I want to move that duplicated ball so that it is the same animation but rolling on the y-axis.

sloppy way would be to apply location...

One way is with a DupliGroup:

Group your object(s) with ⎈ CtrlG
Add a dupligroup with ⇧ ShiftA> Group Instance > name of your group.
This will create an empty which represents the origin point (0,0,0) of the space in which the duplicated group resides. By transforming this empty, you can transform the dupligroup:

Dupliobjects use instancing, which means this will also be very memory efficient.

Duplicate the object in question and then use Delta Transform in the object panel. This will displace the object in any axis wanted and retain the original animation.

Relocate an animated object is very easy:
Suppose that you want to offset the position by 3 Blender units on the Z axis:
select it, go to the graph editor, select the blue z location channel, turn on the arrow near to the little phantom in the header (view only selected curve keyframes), toggle A to select all keyframes, G Y 3 Enter.
About setting an x-axis movement transformed in an y-axis movement, you should cut the keyframes from the x location channel, and paste them in the y location channell: I don't think there is this kind of option, you should have a little Python script.
Anyway, selecting both channels, it's very easy to do the job by hand.
AFAIK the location keyframes are always referred to the world, not local.


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Rigid body objects intersecting
I have a box with a mesh active rigid body applied to it sitting on top of a character that has the same settings. The box will not act like a solid object and continues to intersect with the characters body. What is going on?
In the image you see his arm poking out the side of the box instead of the box sitting on top of his arm.

possible duplicate of Objects don't touch when they collide?

In Rigid Body Collision change the Shape from Convex Hull to Mesh

@Denis no that's not it. The character changed to mesh only causes more issues. The box already has mesh applied as stated in the question.

From the screenshot I was assuming that it was Convex Hull, can you add the blend file?


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Rotate objects around irregular shape
I have these flap things rotating around a very irregular shaped track. While I was able to rotate each flap from a center point perfectly, I was not able to rotate them around this irregular track perfectly. So I had to translate them along Z and simply eye them to their correct spot right along the track. The problem with this is that not all of them are equally protruding from the track.
Is it possible to translate the objects perfectly around the track equidistant from one another?

Would you like to rotate around the global x-axis or around their 'length'-axis? :)

I want to essentially rotate around an oval, like the track you see in the photo.

So actually you want to snap the bottom of the meshes to the normal of the track

Yeah I guess that's what I want.

@Michael, if you used the techniques in the youtube tutorial, attaching your "flap things" to the parts of the track, would that give you the result you are looking for?

@brasshat that would not work because it rotates the objects around the track while also rotating the objects to orient the track, so they are not all facing outward but all facing with the track. I tried it exactly as he said and the results did not work.

you can use the path constraint to do exactly this.

Select all the objects you want to follow the curve, and the curve last.
Press ctrl +   P  to bring up the parent menu. (see pic 1 )
Select path constraint. Follow path is the old way of doing this, but the path constraint is easy to change settings.
In the constraint panel, change the XYZ axis to match your objects rotation. (see pic 2)
You may need to clear the location and rotation of the blades ,depending on the location and any other parents the object has.

ALT  + G  (clear location)
ALT  + R  (clear rotation)
and/or ALT + O (clear origin)

You can then use the offset on each item to change the position around the curve.
To change the speed, in the curve options you can change the frames (see pic 3), or the evaluation time in the curve editor.

Awesome, this looks like it's gonna do it but I'm getting all of the items rotating perpendicular to the curve instead of right along the curve. Like this: http://i.imgur.com/hTM72ut.png And messing with the object constraint axis' only make the objects fly to the center of the grid or do nothing at all.

it looks like you have not cleared your location with ALT+G

I did clear everything, that's no it. Can  you please do a simple example of this in action? I've tried it in a new document with same results. Why is the path not aligned to the objects?

http://www.pasteall.org/blend/36694 simple blend file of the follow path constraint. maybe check your object scale and rotation. also i normally put the origin of the object at the part you want to make contact with the path, as you will see in the blend file. hard to tell you what the problem with your file is with out seeing the .blend

please take a look! http://www.pasteall.org/blend/36696 It would help me so much to know exactly what I did wrong as I am just now learning this program. Also one thing I find unpleasant about this setup is the appearance of all the items shown in the scenes panel instead of being grouped as a hierarchy

i have edited my original answer. you need to clear the location and rotation of the blades, not the curve its self. and then change the offset of each blade to the appropriate value. http://www.pasteall.org/blend/36699


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Move forward in orthographic view?
How can I move the 3d view "forward" in orthographic mode? I don't want to magnify the image, I want to zoom like in perspective mode, so that the parts of the mesh that are near me disappear behind the camera, allowing me to see hidden parts of the mesh. In perspective I would simply zoom, but how can I do this in orthographic?

I think the answer might be that you can't

You can change the "Clipping" distances  to adjust the camera's frustum as you described. In you case you should vary the "Start" parameter Related: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/7185/why-can-i-see-through-my-objects/7188

Thanks for pointing it out @cegaton. I didn't get we were talking about the Viewport Camera. Sorry, I was thinking of a Camera in the 3d-view.

It seems that to do this you need to be looking from the Camera View and adjust the Camera settings.
Set your Camera to Orthographic Mode

The clipping Start and End will be controlled from these Camera settings, not the Viewport clipping settings.
Align Camera to View
CtrlAltNum 0
Rotating the view
Enable "Lock Camera to View"

(It's in your Properties Panel)
This lets you look around without popping out of Camera View.
Zooming the view
To zoom in and out you will probably need to move the Camera along its local Z axis by grabbing it. [If anyone knows a better way, please chime in in the comments] To do this, select the Camera, Grab G, then press ZZ and adjust using your mouse. Left Click to accept the position.
Note: Your Camera must be on a selected Layer in order for it to be grabbed.
Demonstration:

Some thoughts on workflow
If you will be spending a lot of time working like this you might want to keep an Outliner window up that always shows your "Camera" object so you can select it again any time you need to. You can do this by simply typing "Camera" into the search field and leaving it that way. You can still use the Outliner for other tasks in a separate window space.

If you find selecting and grabbing the Camera cumbersome, it may be worth considering whether you can see what you need to see by using another approach, such as hiding objects or masking part of objects using the Mask Modifier.

definitely a hacky workaround instead of the answer I was looking for, but I'm guessing this is the closest thing there is

@Markasoftware Yep, I'm guessing that too, so take it or leave it. I can only answer the question; I don't know how to change Blender's code.

wish there was an addon for this, but I don't know any python

I found that a bug report was submitted for this a long time ago, but it was closed. Campbell stated that it is the intended behavior for Ortho. I don't think they've considered a use case such as yours. The Tool Tip for Viewport Clip Start reads: "3D View near clipping distance (perspective view only)"

The short answer is that ortho cameras don't work like that.
The reason perspective cams are able to go between objects is because the focal point is at a particular point in space. An ortho camera works on an entirely different principle. Orthos are essentially view planes in space, not points with field of view. You zoom into the plane, not through it.
You can kinda hack what you see with the clip distance, but I wouldn't consider that a solution. You should just be hiding objects you don't want to see.

thanks, but not really an answer, just saying that it can't be done...and I can't just hide the objects that I don't want to see, I want part of a mesh to be visible and part of it not to be


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Rigify locks custom DEF- bones
So I have this old rig I want to merge with a Rigify rig. As suggested in the docs, I parented them and labeled them all as raw_copy. The next thing I'm supposed to do is rename them DEF- (and painstakingly rename the vertex groups I guess, but I have a script for that), but here is where I run into trouble.
If I don't name them DEF-, then "deform" isn't enabled and I have to manually enable it for each bone.
If  I do name them DEF-, then deform is enabled, but all transforms are locked and I have to manually unlock them. Also, now the bones are in a hidden layer by default.
Why are the DEF- bones getting locked? Is there something I'm missing? As it is, it's easier to forgo the naming convention altogether and just use a script to enable deform. I'm using Blender 3.6.0, if that helps, but I had this problem in 3.5.1. as well.
Note: Super_copy works (though I still have to rename my old vertex groups), but that's no good if I need to keep my constraints.


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Image is fuzzy or noisy when rendered in cycles
When I rendered this image it became really fuzzy and pixelated. I have tried to fix this but it doesn't seem to be working.

File Here

The image is not displayed at 1:1, hence the pixelation, go to the "View" menu and select "Zoom 1:1".
Strongly saturated and bright light sources (in you case objects with emission shaders applied) often results in noisy renders, so try to lower the emission strength and use less saturated colors.
You can also try to increase the number of samples in your rendered image to get less noise.

The whole design principle behind Cycles is to get an image that is complex and realistic, at the expense of either cleanliness or time. It's more for photorealistic levels of detail. For something this simple, I would recommend the Blender Render Engine.
If Cycles is absolutely necessary here, though, there are quite a few steps you can take to make the render time far less painful: http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/4-easy-ways-to-speed-up-cycles/


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Boeing 787. Creating the windshield. How would you approach it? Help
So I'm modeling a Boeing 787-8 commercial jet and I've gotten to the very sleek and flush windshield section. I've cut a beautiful set of window frames but now Im stuck with this situation of creating the windows into the frame, while maintaining the natural curve of the nose. I know it's a bit of a complex curve especially
Joining the vertices closes the gap, but it looks absolutely terrible and neglects that curvature that needs to be there. How would you go about creating this or approaching this? Thanks in advance. I've included pictures of the situation, a reference and what the rest of the model looks like so far.

Your window cannot be a single face otherwise it will not follow the contour of the plain. I'm assuming you have a number of edge loops that were originally passing through that area from the plane body. You'll need to recreate and connect all those edge loops so that you end up with a window area that looks like a grid. Then if you need to you can gently pull out the middle of the window with proportional editing to precisely match the contour of the body.


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How to save NLA action but don't use it?
I'm animating something that I made using armatures. I made a very basic walk cycle, and turned it into an NLA action. However, in the current scene of the animation I'm making, I don't actually need it to walk. However, when i remove the action from the nla editor, it seems to be gone forever, and I can't find a way to get it back (apart from simply undoing the removal).
Is there any way that I can create an NLA action and save it for use later without using it? This must be a noob question...

Do you want to save the action data or the NLA track?

There is a Muted checkbox in action strip properties. While in NLA editor hit N and open Active strip scroll (see wiki for more info).

This exactly strip will no longer play while in animation.
Note that when Muted is turned on, it pauses on the current action of animation. So you might want to start animation again to make character return to his beginning position.
As another way it's possible to turn on Animated option in Evaluation scroll and set its value to 0.

The advantage is that the current position of character will be automatically set to beginning position when Alt+A pressed.


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Keep texture and change UVs?
I was creating a simple terrain texture, and just used the create simple uvs button. The UV's it created were pretty ugly, but I didn't care, because I was only going to be texture painting directly onto the 3d mesh, and regardless of how nice my UV unwrap was, it still looked fine. For all I cared, it could make each face separate from each other (and that's nearly what it did, even though my object was basically just a plane with a few verts moved around for hills). Now, I want to clean up the UV map a little bit, but I don't want to repaint the texture that I spent an hour or two creating.
Is there any way for me to fix up the UV map while moving the texture along with it, so that the final result looks the same, but it just has a better map?

Yes, check this answer: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/28902/sort-out-a-complex-uv-map-for-a-complex-mesh/28914


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High start clipping causing dashed edges in 3d view?
I read up that issues sometimes occur with a too low start clipping distance, and since the model I'm working on is pretty huge, I set the start clipping to 1 blender unit. However, I noticed that the edges in edit mode became dashed after doing this:

However, from straight down instead of a grazing angle, it looks normal, even with the high start clipping:

And, just for comparison, here's what it looks like with a start clipping of 0.01:

I'm completely fine just using the lowered start clipping, since I can't see any artifacts, but I'm still curious as to why this happens?

its because Graphic cards Render the depth to a 16 - 32 Bit Depth Buffer where the start Clipping is 0 and the end Clipping is the max Value. But that Depth Buffers are only 32 Bit and 1e-40 is equal to 2e-40 there because its rounded.
And when that happens the Graphics card can't figure out whats in the front and whats behind. You can also see this if you add 2 Planes is the exact same spot and then color them differently. You can even experiment with the distance between that planes and the clipping.


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How to create an edge loop including an existing edge?
Lets say I have something like this:

How could I create an edge loop around the model that includes the circled edge?

That wouldn't be an edge loop, also by doing so you create triangular faces. To do that, you make an edge loop cut like you usually do. And then you merge vertices of your unwanted edge to the existing edge. By properly selecting "merge to last" or "merge to first", your existing edge will stay where it was.


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How to create two edges out of an edge?
I'm having trouble modeling a somewhat simple shape. What I currently have is this:

And what I'm trying to get is this:

What would be a way to do this? I can't just extrude the bottom faces, because I want them to stay connected to the main body of what I'm modeling. I'd like to do this without any ngons or hacky tricks, it seems like something that should be fairly easy to do.

There can be many ways to model this; if original shape should be preserved, the steps may be as follows.

Select bottom edge which you'd like to make 2 from. Press Alt+D to extend vertices.

Select 2 resulting Ngons, press Ctrl+T to triangulate them, and then Alt+J to get rid of tris and convert them to quads.

Add loopcut to refine model, dissolve resulting and not needed edges.

What I would do
[]
add edgeloop CTRL+R

scale face down

move the edge upward

The problem is that I can't create an edgeloop in that location because of the way my geometry is. Look carefully at the edges in my original pictures


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Alpha in Render Layer Without Combined Pass?
I have a render layer. I need to be able to access the alpha of this render layer in the compositor. I know I can access the alpha by enabling the Combined pass, but I don't need to have a combined render, I just need shadows and alpha. Is there any way to do this? Or some workaround that lets me get the areas where nothing is in the compositor?

@cegaton when I disable the combined pass there's no alpha socket. film->transparent is enabled. Even after rendering: http://i.imgur.com/0YquQ5J.png

@cegaton I have often wanted to optimise animations by skipping the combined pass as I am only interested in saving the alpha channel. Even an optimised combined pass takes time to render, skipping it would be useful.

@cegaton the only reason I'm trying to skip it is because I assume that it would slow down the render a lot

Have you checked whether it actually renders faster with the combined pass deactivated? iirc shadow passes are calculated by rendering the scene twice, with and without lights and pulling a difference.
If I'm right, then the full render is still done no matter what passes you turn on/off, so you won't see a benefit in speed by turning the composite off.
Try both (with and without composite) and compare the rendering time.
If there's no much difference, you'd probably want to try @Georges' idea (a material override for the whole scene).

In case the reason behind this is saving time, I was researching the same thing and found "accidentally" a semi-solution. Combined pass still renders, but I assigned a material in the Render Layers, this overrides the objects assigned materials, assigning a simple diffuse shader this way, will make the Combined pass render much faster, specially when you have lots of reflections, refraction and light emitting objects in the scene, and it's a non destructive process, since you simply need to click the X icon next to the assigned material in the Render Layers tab to go back to your original scene materials. I know this is not the perfect solution, but at least it will save render time in most cases.


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Create a plane from empties / tracks?
I'm doing some motion tracking, and I'm trying to reconstruct (if that's the right word) a house as a mask. I don't want to use the mask editor and set mask keyframes and all that because it seems like it's a lot of work, and I'd rather just create a mesh that more or less matches the shape of the house. I have a few tracks on the house, is there any way for me to create a plane that goes through them? Like, to select three tracks, and then somehow create a plane that intersects all of them?

@cegaton, thanks for those! However, none of them exactly answer my question...the first one is about using masks, while I actually want to create a mesh, and the second one is about plane track, but I don't want to do plane track because the house is staying still. That first one might be helpful, at this point I'm just starting to do the old-fashioned masking thing


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Smooth Zooming?
I just got a Logitech G502 Proteus Core mouse (yay!). It has a mode where you can set the scroll wheel to be smooth instead of having "clicks" like usual scroll wheels. However, when it is set to smooth mode, blender still pretends as if there are "clicks" when I am zooming in. Is there any way to fix this?

Related: http://blender.stackexchange.com/a/19757/599

It's actualy the other way around. Blender doesn't pretend there are clicks, because there really are clicks. Smooth scrolling is a software trick and the mouse is just pretending there are no clicks. Off-topic: also you should have gotten Roccat Tyon, had both and the roccat is better for almost same money.

@Jerryno Thanks, I get it now. Also, the roccat tyon is not better. I considered it, but: the sensor is significantly worse, I've heard some of the buttons are very hard to reach comfortably, and it does not have the smooth scrolling feature. Additionally, the tyon is not available at Best Buy, and I had a few gift cards for Best Buy.

Yes, the sensor is worse but on a pad which I consider a must there is no difference. Some buttons are hard to reach true, but that takes just getting used to and I use many of them instead some shortcuts in blender. I don't like the smooth scrolling, and roccat has the best clicking scroll wheel I had. I see you did your research and made an informed decision. Still love the Tyon but the G502 is hell of a mouse too.

As a side note, you can hold "Ctrl" + "MiddleMouseBtn" and drag in the viewport for smooth zoom.
Search for zoom in shortcut preferences.


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Linked objects with a rotation offset?
I have 2 linked objects, and I want them to retain the same mesh data, but, on the object level, I want one to have a rotation different than that of the other one. e.g, I want object 1 to have no rotation (at the object level, at least), and I want the second one to be rotated 45 degrees on the z axis. Also, I want it so that when I rotate object 1, object 2 also gets rotated. So, if I rotate object 1 10 degrees on the z axis, then object 2 should be rotated 55 degrees. Is there any way to do this?

This can easily be accomplished with a Copy Rotation constraint.
Create your first object, and Apply location and rotation. Then ALTD to make a linked duplicate. Then, in Object mode, rotate your second object on the Z axis.
Now, add a Copy Rotation constraint to the second object, targetting the first object. The trick is to map the World space of the first object to the Local space of the second object.

In 2.8x, you can apply a Copy Rotation constraint and change the Mix option to Add. This will allow you to apply an offset rotation on the object who has the constraint applied.


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Particle system doesn't affect part of mesh?
I'm trying to create a grass effect on a small landscape I've created. My current approach is to use a hair particle system, and style the hairs to look like grass. I've got a simple particle system added, and adjusted a few settings (note: I haven't made the grass green yet. It's just grey for now), but for some reason the particles don't go on certain parts of the mesh:

You can see that to the left of the "lake" there is a lot of missing particles, in triangular areas. Although this screenshot was taken in rendered 3d view, it also has the same issue when I press the render button and do a "true" render. Here's some of the geometry:

Any ideas why it isn't completely covered with particles?

Do you have any modifiers on the object.

Subdivision surface and particle

Did you check use modifier stack under the particle settings?

facepalm wow, I didn't see that option. This is the first time I've ever used particle systems, so I didn't really have any idea what I was doing. Thank you! It works after enabling that option. If you post that as an answer I'll accept it

No worries!  You are definitely not the first person to overlook that setting.

Make sure use modifier stack is checked under the emission rollout of the particle settings.

Please do not copy paste entire answers. Just mark it as a duplicate.

@David  Sorry, I actually just used the same screenshot.  I wrote the answer without a screenshot and then remembered my old answer and decided to use the same picture.


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Clear the sequencer memory cache?
I'm doing some motion tracking, and to quickly edit things I preload the frames into the memory. However, this fills up my ram, and sometimes (e.g when I'm not working with the footage) I want to clear it out of memory. Can this be done?

It should be done automatically. Old stuff won't be hold as you can see when you lower your used RAM amount in the System settings to a few MB. Only the last few frames would be hold in your RAM. Watch it in the Movie Clip Editor as you play your footage.

I'm asking how to clear it. I know it will automatically get rid of it if it needs to use it for something else, but I'm talking about how to do it manually

How should I know what you already know? But it might help out to know it's not necessary to clear it manually. If it won't help you out might help out others. This site is about knowledge transfer ;-)