text:
Snapping mesh together by a point without stretching the object
I'm trying to snap two mesh together. One is a cylinder and the other is half a sphere. I aligned the 3d cursor to the bottom center of the cylinder where I want the sphere to attach to. I don't know how to move/snap the flat side of the half sphere to the 3d cursor without stretching the object. If I select the entire sphere the center of the sphere snaps to the 3d cursor, and If i select just the flat face/flat face vertex, the shape gets stretch.
Any advice on how to do this?

unless there's something particularly special about the hemisphere, why not extrude the tube to its final extent and then bevel/fillet the outer edge : see this answer http://blender.stackexchange.com/a/38866/47

As @Mr Zak suggest, if you're editing a single mesh, you can use Snap to vertices

Select all the vertices you want to move
The very last vertex you select will be "Active" (in your case, it could be the vertex at center of the circle)
Toggle Snap Mode to Vertex and Target to Active

Drag + Ctrl to snap

Remove doubles if needed...


text:
How does the simple deform modifier work?
This question starts with this previous question How can I create spherical topology from a 2D image?.
Testing around the solution (given by Cegaton and previously given by LeonCheung) made me try to test a bit around the bending behavior of the simple deform modifier.
The idea behing all that : this bending makes interesting things, but it is hard to predict how to do them.
An example, before the question. Using the same technics you can obtain a tire shape from a flat surface.

But first the approach gives something that I feel counter intuitive. If we start from the result of the question quoted above, go to edit mode and rotate the shape 90° (so the object own rotations stay 0), we don't obtain a similar result. Testing that I was expecting an ovoid shape but this is not the case.

After that I did a little test, without the empties, just bending the shape. I started with a square 1x1. Playing with the deform angle, we obtain a fan (convergence of the top vertices) at an angle of 114.592°. And, it seems that 360 / 114.592 = 3.14158 (PI). And we can also notice that this value is linearly proportional to the Y dimension of the shape (if the plane is 2m in Y, the angle is 57,28°)

If we continue to 360° (for the deform angle), we found that the shape rotates around a point at Y=0.1591575m. And PI x this number if 5 (very very nearly).

And as the angle can vary from -360 to 360, this last limit point varies 10 / PI around the center.
We can also notice that the diameter of the 'circle' is 1.318311m from (in Y) -0.5 to +0.818311. Which is 1 + (2 x 0.1591575) (the value mentioned above).
The inner circle is nearly (but not so exactly) half of the outer.
Clearly there are some clever rules and calculations behind all that.
But what are they ? What is to be understood in order to "predict" how use the modifier well ?
Which "patterns" are interesting to use ? (by pattern, I mean for instance the one of the initial question : using two deforms (180 and 360) and two empties (90,0,0) and (90, 0, 90))

Re pi and angles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radian#History ...Torus:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torus.

@batFINGER, thanks ! I had no idea of what was behing a torus before that... ok, so for instance, the pattern (-360, 360) + ((90, 0, 0), (90,0,90)) gives a torus !!

Give animating the values a go.  That punctured torus animation on wiki page is hypnotic.  Make a good q.

yes, translating the empties along axis is strange too

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
How to set a camera to catch the exact same configuration as the 3D viewport?
I have seen this answer, Is there a Way to Align Camera to View and Fit the View?.
But to me it does not do the job : what I want to do is to capture the exact 3D view as I see it (with its aspect ratio and ortho or perspective) in a camera.
Imagine it as some kind of screen capture of what can be obtained in render mode, but into a camera view so that you can apply the render process.

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


text:
How to make a simple one image + music mp4 video?
so, what I want to do is very simple : I'm a music maker/composer (industrial and dark ambient)and I want to upload a track on Youtube.
So, what I have to do is this : have an audio track, and a picture that lasts the time of the track, and export it in a video format (mp4, AVi, whatever). This was extremely easy to do with Windows Movie Maker, but the thing is, there is no Windows Movie Maker on Windows 10. So, I downloaded Blender as it seems to be the best open-source video-editing software around. But, I don't get how am I supposed to do a task that should be so simple :
I go into the video editing screen, I add my track, I add the image, but then what? I don't find how to set the dimension of the image, nor of the video, and have no idea on how to export it as, let's say, a mp4 file.
Any simple tutorial on how to do such a basic thing?
Thanks

Blender is meant for video creation, not video editing. It can do video editing as well, but you are simply better off using a different program. Google for "free video editing software".

@Ezra adding on to this, you can get Movie maker on Windows 10, just Google "Windows Live essential pack".

You can do that even with Blender, although it will not be extremely simple for a program novice. Here is something you need to know:

you have to create a "sequence", composed by sound track, and an image that is shown for all the sound track length.
then you have to "render" it, as an "animation" to a video+audio output format
blender sequences are created as frames, not "seconds": the binding between frames and duration depends on the "animation" frame rate you decide, eg: setting it to 25 f/s would mean that you need

25 f/s * 60 s/minute * 3 minutes = 4500 frames of Blender animation to get a "video" 3 minutes long. You need to tell Blender how many frames your animation needs to be. Later on this.
You can show seconds instead of frames in the "timeline" changing  this setting:

The output format of an animation can be everything from an image sequence (1 every frame) to a video file container like an .avi, with many codec (as supported by th bundled FFmpeg libraries, so many formats available).

you set start and end frame in render setting > "frame range"
you set the frame rate in render settings > "frame rate"
every frame size will be what you decide in render settings  > "resolution"

you set the output folder, filename, container file, video and audio codec in render settings > "output" and "encoding"

You will need some practice with all this.
I would do:

setup desired resolution, frame rate, output and encoding settings
switch to video layout and load the audio in a strip, position it so that it starts from frame 1
Note its length (eg: 4446 frames) in the right-side edit strip that appears when you select the imported audio strip. You need to tell Blender that your animation will be 4446 frames long
set this value in as resolution > frame range > end frame (start frame should be 1 of course), but also in the bottom timeline. This resizes "working area" from the default 250 frames to enough frames to contain all your sound file.

Now add another strip, with the image you choose. This will result in a little strip (a few frames long, just enough to allow you to select it)
You need to position the image strip so that's starting at 1 and then extend its end until it reaches last frame of the animation (4446 in the example above). To do this right select the whole little strip, and in the right-side edit strip change its end frame from what it is (eg: 26) to the same last frame of the animation (4446 in the example)

more or less it should be done: you will end with something like this ( I also show here how you can display the waveform - hint: you could also edit its levels...)

you just need to tell Blender to "render the animation", that for you will mean "create the video".

It will be slow, compared to similar specialized softwares, but it should work well (this slowness is a small price you have to pay but Blender can - .in the future - allow you, apart this basic video editing usage, more possibilities that only a few expensive other programs can allow you).

I also suggest you to start with shorter frame range (eg enough for a 30 seconds video) to practice.
To be honest, although it could be simpler than it looks, it will need a bit of practice with standard Blender basic commands like grab, zoom. But it is well worth imho, and if you like the workflow, and the possibilities, there is a lot more you can do, it's just a sort of a "primer".
Hth.

A possible alternative way of describing it...
-=====================-
Lay the audio track into the VSE from frame 1.
Lay the image file in another track. (strip)
Highlite the right hand handle at the end of the image strip.
Press G to grab the handle and move the mouse to the right so it stretches the strip at least to the end of the audio strip. Click the mouse when it's the right length.

Press CtrlA to run it.  It should start playing with the image showing in the top window.
Go up to the top left of the main VSE window, click on "Render" and select "Render Animation"
This will render it out using Blender's Internal render to whatever format you've set it up for at the extreme right. (see attached pic.)


text:
Why is the dribbling icing inside of Donut instead of being on the top?
I'm following the Blender Guru tutorial and I've done everything as described in the tutorial, but as I pressed E to add the dribbles for the icing two issues happened:
1) It seems way more sharp than it did for the guru
2) (Important) The dribbles are always inside the donut instead of on top

I ran into the same problem, but I've solved it and will share it with you.
Modifier - Note the value of "Offset" in the "Solidify" option.
The result is different in the negative direction and the positive direction.
In the blender guru, it is set to positive.
This option determines whether the surface will be thicker on the front or the back side. It is important to note that the snapping feature is not for the solidified look, but rather the surface is snapped.

Seeing how you've enabled face snapping, the issue is with how you've extruded the edge. If you took a cross-section of the donut shown below, your icing is cutting into the donut, represented by the highlighted line. Since you've also got a very thin solidify modifier, the icing isn't thick enough to push outside of the donut.

Rather than just extruding once, consider splitting it into multiple segments, so it follows the surface of the donut more closely. Notice how parts of the icing wireframe end up going beneath the donut mesh, but its close enough so that the solidify modifier (which was hidden so you could see the wireframe) could push the icing above the donut's surface.

this makes my icing look a bit awkward from the side (image: http://puu.sh/EW18q/e38c00c48c.jpg )
any clue why it doesn't work the way it does in the blender guru tutorial?

It would be helpful if I could see how you made it, but try pushing in the original edge that you extruded the dribble from inwards.

Ok old thread but I think I figured something out:
The snapping of the icing to the donut's surface works just fine. The meshgrid vertices are perfectly aligned with the donut surface. However, if I check how they looked like before I applied the dragging to it, I can see that the vertices are actually a fair bit ABOVE the donut.
The clipping through the donut only appears after the icing vertices are snapped onto the surface of the donut.
The problem is the following: The thickness of your mesh extends from the surface downward. So if you snap your icing onto your donut, the thickness will always be below the donut's surface, because that's the starting point of the thickness. What you need is for the thickness to grow in the opposite direction, so a negative thickness:
Observe the gap between the icing and the donut before dragging:

This is the clipping at the same place in object mode

If you use a negative thickness for your icing, the thickness will grow upward instead of downward, so the icing will no longer dissapear into your donut because it extends from the donuts surface upwards:

It looks to me as if you are extruding the icing in the Z axis (up/down) only, so that it is going down into the donut.
As I recall, he pulls the dribbles out sideways as well. to make them follow the surface of the donut.

how exactly do i do that?

With the same vertices that you extruded selected, rotate the view of the donut so that you are looking sideways on, and then drag the vertices sideways, away from the donut.
It might be useful to switch to X-ray mode or Wireframe mode so that you can see exactly what you are doing.
I'm fairly sure that he adjusts the icing like this in the tutorial videos.  If you missed it, go back and watch again.  That's the advantage of videos.

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


text:
Donut Icing doesn't seem to clip correctly
I've been following the Blender Beginner Tutorial, but when I've reached the donut icing, there are weird darker pixels on it. Putting the Clip Start lower as he did in the tutorial only seems to make it worse, putting it higher only makes it limitedly better.

Scale the icing to be larger.  If you used the solidify modifier, it's now intersecting with the donut.
Or move the icing up.
Or the solidify modifier wasn't 'thick' enough and it's intersecting with itself.
"Start clip" has nothing to do with anything, that's just the camera clipping, not the objects.

@Mike this helped, thank you!

Since it solved the problem, I added it as an "answer".  Please "accept as answer", if it is correct.  ^_^

Scale the icing to be larger. If you used the solidify modifier, it's now intersecting with the donut. Or move the icing up. Or the solidify modifier wasn't 'thick' enough and it's intersecting with itself.

You could try pressing alt s to make the icing thicker/thinner.
Before alt s

After alt s

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


text:
How to convert 3D pose sequences to the bvh format?
I am very new to animation and rendering softwares, so please let me know if I need to provide more information about this. I have a sequence of 3D positions of human joints (basically mocap data), representing different kinds of walking. I have managed to visualize the sequence using python, as I have shown in this video. Each data I have is a numpy array of size TxJx3, where T is the number of frames, J is the number of joints (21 in my case), and 3 represents the 3 co-ordinate values. So my question is, how can I convert these 3D positions into a BVH file, that I can load into blender? Or convert them to any other format so that I can load these data in blender?

Consult the code of the bvh importer / exporter.

Do you happen to know where I can find the code?

Is it this one? https://github.com/20tab/bvh-python

I went through the repo, but I didn't find a way to compute the 3D positions of the joints. For reference, I want to know how to recover the 'head' attribute of the PoseBone data structure in this link https://docs.blender.org/api/blender_python_api_2_77_1/bpy.types.PoseBone.html

OK, found the solution myself. Posting here in case anyone else finds this useful. In the BVH format, the following relationship holds between the joints:
$$pos_j = R_{P(j)}offset_j + pos_{P(j)}$$
where $pos_j$ indicates the 3D position of joint $j$, $P(j)$ returns the parent of joint $j$ in whatever DAG the positions are modeled in (generally the DAG starts at the root and points towards the end-effectors) $offset_j$ indicates the offset of joint $j$ relative to its parent $P(j)$ (aka the connecting limb), and $R_{P(j)}$ is the 3D rotation that determines how much should $offset_j$ be rotated from an initial pose (generally a T-pose). In the BVH format, for each parent $P(j)$, we need to store $R_{P(j)}^{-1}R_j$.
The main trouble I had then was working with joints that had multiple children, for example, the root joint, which has connections to both legs as well as the spine. I eventually came across this repo and digging through their function forward_kinematics inside skeleton.py, realized what to do. Basically, for joints with multiple children, I had to make copies with $offset=0$, and assign those as parents of the corresponding chains. Thus I made 3 copies of the root: one became the parent for the left leg chain, one for the right leg chain, and one for the spine. And similarly for the other parents with multiple children. And yes, the visualization works great!

How to calculate the rotation matrix?

Since I assumed the forward kinematics setup, the rotation matrix is part of my input, i.e., known apriori.


text:
How do I simplify the polygons of a 3D scanned model?
So I'm totally new at Blender. I have a drone-scanned image of a city that I need to simplify. I need the poly count really low but still keep the high-res imagery. What I would like and need is to turn the mesh into a single poly like I highlighted in the image. I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this but is there a simple way to do that?

One way to simplify geometry would be to use the Decimate Modifier.
Add the Decimate modifier set to Collapse, and turn down the ratio.
Click Apply, if you want to edit your geometry manually after.

If you want to see the polygons like in my gif, enable Wireframe in the Overlay menu.

Then just manually select and join faces into one.
Vertex > New Edges/Faces from Vertices
Shortcut: F

There are also other ways to simplify geometry, I didn't want to overwhelm you.

Thanks Jachym! I'll give it a try.


text:
How can I create instances of PropertyGroups with independently editable variables?
I'm currently making an addon to randomize path variables, and need lots of groups of variables that I can independently edit. I've been trying to get Property Groups working with this but can't figure out how to make instances of the Property Groups and still be able to edit the variables inside them.
Here's what I have:
the main PropertyGroup
class PathNode(PropertyGroup):
    path: StringProperty()
    minvar: FloatProperty()
    maxvar: FloatProperty()
    randomize: BoolProperty()

this is how I've been trying to make multiple instances of it, with "pathsam" as an IntProperty
bpy.types.Object.pathsam = CollectionProperty(type=PathNode)

Does anyone know how to either fix this, or know how to create multiple instances of the main path variable where the variables can still be independently accessed and edited?

For scripting / python / addon questions using those tags can alert people to your specific needs more readily.

Doesn't answer here https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/160738/15543 cover this?

...  puts in   context this question re  the suggestion of adding to collection  a per object basis rather than having the "global" scene property.  (See new edit.). IMO Could have been addressed via a comment under that answer.

In general adding property groups to object types can be done with
import bpy

class PathNode(bpy.types.PropertyGroup):
    path: bpy.props.StringProperty()
    minvar: bpy.props.FloatProperty()
    maxvar: bpy.props.FloatProperty()
    randomize: bpy.props.BoolProperty()

classes = [PathNode, ]

def register():
    for cls in classes:
        bpy.utils.register_class(cls)
    bpy.types.Object.pathsam = bpy.props.PointerProperty(
            type=PathNode)

def unregister():
    for cls in classes:
        bpy.utils.unregister_class(cls)
    del bpy.types.Object.pathsam

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

The problem is that when I do that, I am no longer able to edit the variable that controls the amount of path nodes there are (pathsam), and get an unsupported operand type(s) for +=: 'PathNode' and 'int' error. Is there any way to fix this?


text:
Can't weight paint in Blender 2.92.0 (Rigify)
I've been wracking my brain around this watching tons of tutorials and trying different ways of getting weight painting to work. I've done Pose Mode or Edit Mode > Weight Paint when clicking my armature rig then my mesh, but no weights appear and can't click on any bones or joints in this mode. Nothing seems to work.
Does anyone know what the issue is? https://drive.google.com/file/d/16PFcQZZeyKn1FO2DkxGzlCQIG-J-938M/view?usp=sharing this is a link to my blender project if that helps at all if my setup is wrong.
Thanks for any help!

You have selected the Select Box tool It's highlighted in Blue on your toolbar.
Select the top tool, the brush.
But you have also selected Paint Mask It's highlighted in blue in the header. Deselect it and you'll be able to paint

Ahhhh thanks so much! Saved me a massive headache haha.


text:
How to hide mesh associated with bone?
I have a singular object and it is rigged with an armature:

but when I hide the forearm bone it doesn't hide the object mesh with it like it should:

where as this should what it look like after hiding the bone:

How do I achieve this?

this is not how it is intended to work. And the question is: how should blender react if just parts of a mesh are used? and "normally" there is weight painting...so values from 0 to 1 are used for the mesh. Until which value Blender should hide the mesh? The only case is would make sense (for me) is if you have parented the mesh to bone.

@Chris I was thinking there was a customizable solution for what weight values should be hidden on hiding the bone, also is it possible to parent specific mesh segments to specific bones so that when u hide the bone the mesh gets hidden too?

you can't automatically hide the mesh when you hide the bone, you can just select the vertex group that is controlled by the bone and hide it with H

does this answer your question? https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/267162/how-to-connect-visibility-of-object-with-visibility-of-bone

@HarryMcKenzie look again I'm the one who asked that question xD

oh why are u asking the same question again? i had a hunch the same person asked it but i forgot to recheck the author XD but this might help to connect the question as duplicate.

@HarryMcKenzie I actually changed my approach, in this question there's a singular object connected to an armature & in the other question there are multiple objects connected to an armature so no they arn't the same question

fair enough. but still they are related so it can help others in the community.


text:
How to get number of keyframes from summary via script?
I'm trying to get the number of keyframes from the summary:

How do I achieve this? or a similar way of counting number of non empty columns via scripting?

I don't see any built-in command to count keyframes in Blender. But, you can do it in Python.
The downside is that you have to launch blender from a terminal (because that's the only place where the Python interpreter can print something). EDIT: Look at @Kirbinator comment: The situation seems to depend on whether you are on Linux or Windows. The whole procedure seems simpler on Windows.

Launch Blender from terminal and open your blend file

Open a text window (Shift-F11) and paste the following code:
 import bpy
 # Go to first frame:
 bpy.ops.screen.frame_jump(end=False)
 n_forw=0

 # Counting forward:
 while True:
     ret=bpy.ops.screen.keyframe_jump(next=True)
     if ret!={'FINISHED'}:
         break
     else:
         n_forw+=1

 # Go to last frame:
 bpy.ops.screen.frame_jump(end=True)
 n_back=0

 # Counting backward:
 while True:
     ret=bpy.ops.screen.keyframe_jump(next=False)
     if ret!={'FINISHED'}:
         break
     else:
         n_back+=1

 # Max of forward and backward:
 N_keyframes=max(n_forw,n_back)

 # Print the result in the terminal window:
 print('Nb. of keyframes: ',N_keyframes)

Select your object, run the code (the "Run script"/"left arrow"/"triangle") and read the answer printed in the terminal window.

On Windows you can open the console from Blender (Window (on the same bar as "File, Edit...") -> "Toggle System Console")

@Kirbinator Interesting... I don't see it on Linux. A feature that I would welcome.

@S_Bersier you need to state that you want Blender to launch with the setting, "Run in terminal." https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/advanced/command_line/launch/linux.html#details


text:
Bone hide_viewport keyframe not showing in Action Editor
I have an Action like this:

frame 0: Bone visible
frame 1: Bone hidden
frame 2: Bone visible

I hide the bone by animating the hide_viewport (TV icon):

but as you can clearly see the keyframes are not showing in the action editor:

So how exactly do I view/edit them?

They are in the different animation block, open the Dope Sheet:

so I can't have multiple hide bone animations?


text:
How to set Z transparency in Blender nodes using the Blender's Render?
The context is like this: If you are using the Blender internal (Blender Render Machine) and you are also using nodes, and want to fine tune the transparency by using the Z Transparency value how should you proceed to achieve such setup?

you can use the alpha input on the output node.

Hi! Thank you but it doesn't work for me. Maybe because of my hardware? Could you provide a .blend?


text:
How to access character (physics type) via python to update it's jump force in real time?
I would like to know if it's possible to access the jump speed via python to set different values for it. (.game.jump_speed / GameObjectSettings.jump_speed).
Is there a python script sample somewhere?
Here is a practical example to illustrate this question:
Let's say you have two types of platforms: Red and Blue.
When one collides with the red platform this event triggers a jump force of 10.00 (ten).
When one collides with the blue platform this event triggers a jump force of 20.00 (twenty).

There is a .blend for prototyping here (google drive, saved in Blender version 2.78c):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byr4NYScNOlRMkkwWGx5VG5ETEk/view?usp=sharing
(Controls: WASD to move the character).

Physics pannel:

Current api (2.78c) GameObjectSettings.jump_speed
GameObjectSettings is part of bpy which only work inside of blender and only in Blender, this means that your game using bpy and bge only will work inside Blender because bpy will not work in standalone and you dont want that if you are making a game but if you are makin sortsof simulation and you will be using always blender then you can use bge and bpy.
You can access jump_speed:
from bpy import data

data.objects["Cube"].game.jump_speed = 50
print(data.objects["Cube"].game.jump_speed)

As soon as you run the script 50 will be the value for jump force in physics property panel:

here you can found some (old) good bge python tutorials
If you want in game dinamically change the jump speed you can use the next script portion was extracted from one of the tutorials, thanks to Goran Milovanovic
script
from bge import logic
from mathutils import Vector
import math

class MoveWSAD:
    """
    Goran's 2.6x FPS base-frame

    2011 - Goran Milovanvic - nilunder.com

    """
    def __init__(self, cont, own):
        self.cont = cont
        self.body = own
        self.sen_key_w = self.cont.sensors["W"]
        self.sen_key_s = self.cont.sensors["S"]
        self.sen_key_a = self.cont.sensors["A"]
        self.sen_key_d = self.cont.sensors["D"]
        self.sen_key_space = self.cont.sensors["space"]
        self.sen_col_onground = self.cont.sensors["onground"]
        self.speed_ground = 4
        self.speed_jump = self.speed_ground * 0.8
        self.main = self._inAir

    def _getMoveVec(self):
        forward_back = self.sen_key_w.positive - self.sen_key_s.positive
        left_right = self.sen_key_d.positive - self.sen_key_a.positive
        velocity = Vector((left_right, forward_back, 0))
        return velocity

    def _onGround(self):
        vec_velocity = self._getMoveVec()
        vec_velocity.magnitude = self.speed_ground
        if self.sen_key_space.positive:
            vec_velocity.z = self.speed_jump
        self.body.setLinearVelocity(vec_velocity, 1)
        if not self.sen_col_onground.positive:
            self.main = self._inAir

    def _inAir(self):
        if self.sen_col_onground.positive:
            self.main = self._onGround

"""Strapicarus 2017"""
class Player:
    def __init__(self, cont, body):
        self.body = body
        self.move_wsad = MoveWSAD(cont, body)
        self.main = self.walking

    def walking(self):
        if self.move_wsad.sen_key_space.positive:
             self.change_speed(1)
        self.move_wsad.main()

    def change_speed(self, speed):
        if self.move_wsad.speed_jump < 20:
            self.move_wsad.speed_jump += speed
        else:
            self.move_wsad.speed_jump = self.move_wsad.speed_ground * 0.8
        return

def main(cont):
    if not 'init' in cont.owner.getPropertyNames():
        cont.owner['player'] = Player(cont, cont.owner)
        cont.owner['init'] = True
    cont.owner['player'].main()

main(logic.getCurrentController())

LogicBricks

Physics panel

EDIT ADDED
Well a just download your blend and you put the right blend this time (i forgot to mention that before answer), and i test
¿if i change the loc z in motion actuator the character will jump higher? and YES it works.
So you just need increase the loc z value to set the jump speed for that motion actuator:

And if you want a python way here is to:
jump.py
from bge import logic

def main(cont):
    jumpact = cont.actuators['jumpSpeed']
    colsen = cont.sensors['Blue']
    if not 'init' in cont.owner.getPropertyNames():
        cont.owner['init'] = True
        cont.owner['_onair'] = False
        cont.owner['jumpSpeed'] = 0.0
        print('init...')
        return

    if not cont.owner['_onair'] and colsen.positive:
        if  cont.owner['jumpSpeed'] < 10.0:
            cont.owner['jumpSpeed'] += 1
            jumpact.dLoc = (0,0,cont.owner['jumpSpeed'])
            print('adding jump speed')
            print(jumpact.dLoc.z)
        else:
            cont.owner['jumpSpeed'] = 0.0
        cont.activate(jumpact)
        cont.owner['_onair'] = True
        return
    else:
        cont.deactivate(jumpact)
        cont.owner['_onair'] = False
        return
#    print(dir(jumpact))
#    print(jumpact.force)
#    print(jumpact.linV)
#    print(jumpact.torque)
#    print(jumpact.dLoc) #FOUND IT ! xD

main(logic.getCurrentController())

Logic editor

Blend file

Dear Strapicarus, Thank you very much for your reply. But in my case I need a solution that works inside the Blender Game Engine (real time update) and with the "charachter" physics type. I also don't need other movements other than jump. The bounty prize is yours because of the effort. But I still consider this question without solution ;) Greetings! Ortiz

I think i found a solution check it in the edit.

Hi Strapicarus!
I tested your file in Blender 2.78c, but the jump is behaving like I'm using a simple motion value applied to a dynamic actor. The jump is not behaving like the charachter physics yet.
Thank you!

I believe what you are asking for is not possible in Blender 2.78b.  We will need to recreate the jump functionality.
The jump pads will require a float property called ['jumpSpeed'] and collision enabled in its physics tab.  Static physics type should work.
The rest is explained below.
#if we put the python controler in modual mode,
#then it can pass the currentController as the first argument
def input(cont):
    #if you have problems with floating after a jump, then increse Max Fall Speed
    own = cont.owner

    #if were going to use the Characture Wrapper, then we need to get it first
    import bge
    pysOwn = bge.constraints.getCharacter(own)

    #this is how i handle keybinds
    clicked = bge.logic.keyboard.active_events
    click = {bge.logic.KX_INPUT_JUST_ACTIVATED, bge.logic.KX_INPUT_ACTIVE}

    #if the KEY is not in active_events then dict.get() will return None
    forward = clicked.get(bge.events.WKEY)
    backward = clicked.get(bge.events.SKEY)
    leftward = clicked.get(bge.events.AKEY)
    rightward = clicked.get(bge.events.DKEY)
    spaceward = clicked.get(bge.events.SPACEKEY)

    #if the jump count is less then the max jumps then we can jump
    if spaceward == bge.logic.KX_INPUT_JUST_ACTIVATED and own['jumpCount'] < pysOwn.maxJumps:
        #we can get a sensor even if its not connected to the current controller
        #it may have to be connected to at least one controller
        #if the collision sensor hits at least one object with the jumpSpeed property then we get it,
        #otherwise this get None
        hitObj = own.sensors['Collision'].hitObject
        #if theres a hitObj, then we use the jumpSpeed provided by that object,
        #otherwise we use the default on the char
        if hitObj:
            jumpSpeed = hitObj['jumpSpeed']
        else:
            jumpSpeed = own['jumpSpeed']

        #we move the char along the z axis by the jumpSpeed
        x = pysOwn.walkDirection.x
        y = pysOwn.walkDirection.y
        z = pysOwn.walkDirection.z + jumpSpeed
        pysOwn.walkDirection = (x,y,z)

        #this will trigger the property sensor, so we know when to stop jumping
        own['jumping'] = True
        #this sets the number of times we've jumped scence landind
        own['jumpCount'] += 1

    #if the char is on the ground or has the walkAir ablity then it can move, otherwise it can't
    if pysOwn.onGround or own['walkAir']:

        #we'r going to replace the current walkDirection with a new one
        x = 0
        y = 0
        z = pysOwn.walkDirection.z

        speed = own['walkSpeed']

        if forward in click:
            y += speed
        if backward in click:
            y -= speed
        if leftward in click:
            x -= speed
        if rightward in click:
            x += speed

        #this converts our local vector into a world vector
        from mathutils import Vector
        vec = Vector((x,y,z))
        vec = own.worldOrientation * vec

        #apply the walkDirection
        pysOwn.walkDirection = vec

def stopJump(cont):
    #this function asumes it will only be run if own['jumping'] == True
    own = cont.owner
    import bge
    pysOwn = bge.constraints.getCharacter(own)

    #if the char is on the ground, stop jumping and reset
    if pysOwn.onGround:
        pysOwn.walkDirection = (0,0,0)
        own['jumping'] = False
        own['jumpCount'] = 0

Hello Otto!
Thank you for your time. I tried to apply your jump setup withouth sucess. I hosted my attempt here [link]https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byr4NYScNOlRWFdibHJPTWZ6R2c/view?usp=sharing I don't know how I should trigger the jump. I confess that your python script is too advanced for me :)

from bge import constraints

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

character = constraints.getCharacter(owner)

# When colliding use:
character.gravity = value float

# Set a different value for each platform you want to change the height of the jump


text:
Where display normals is located in Blender 2.80?
I would like Blender 2.80 to display face normals in edit mode.
Where this option is located inside the GUI in Blender 2.8?

If by "draw the normals" you mean "display vertex/face normals", it's been moved to the Overlay section in the menu bar. Check out the first image in my answer here.

Hi @methapor_set ! Exactly! I was looking for "display vertex/face normals". Thank you!


text:
solid scene gets transparent on render in Blender internal
I have a scene with transparent background without transparent objects. But while rendering all the scene gets half-transparent.
Please, help to fix that!

Do you want the text to show? I'm not sure why the stars are transparent . . . the compositor seems to have no effect

The text is ok, I need stars not to be transparent, I did not told them to do so.

It seems to be result of alpha premultiply, render settings or something of that sort, but I don't know what to change.

I didn't see anything obvious. I normally use Cycles though, so maybe someone else will be able to spot it for you.

There are some options set up in a wrong way in your .blend, some aren't set at all.
(To be honest, I couldn't see anything on your render in the beginning)

There aren't options for rendering sky at all, because 2 Render
Layers you have in Compositor mixed have Sky unckecked. Third
one which has Sky checked (I assume it was created intentionally for
sky rendering) isn't presented in Compositor. I enabled this layer
(it's called "main") in Render Layers tab and disabled everything
there except for the Sky option.

In Particles settings > Render scroll Emitter option hasn't
been turned on, so you shouldn't see anything except for the stars,
as text mesh is emitter for them and it wasn't told to be rendered.

Nodes. To see background and get rid of transparency eating final
image one should add third layer (called  "main") and mix it with
those present there already.

I turned off backdrop here so it doesn't mess up nodes settings. I
also changed background color so to see stars and text effects
better.
The final result:

Update
To make everything untransparent with except for background you might want to  manipulate with alpha, using nodes setup as is shown on the next image:

Thus you'll have text and stars solid, and transparent background. At the  same  time I think you won't get any glare on the final image because of alpha  affecting on it.

Thank you, Mr Zak. I unchecked background layer to get scene with transparent alpha and then to combine it with a video. For demonstration I plased only stars just to show undesired transparency. I know that when having a background, scene renders without any surprised transparency, but I wanted to get the scene with non-transparent elements and transparent background. Finally I used cycles, but I still want to know what was that problem like, as internal works faster.

Well, this absolutely wasn't clear from your question. I think you wouldn't be able to achieve untransparent stars with glare and transparent background because glare won't have where to be rendered and thus be shown. For more details see my answer update. Also I didn't get why Cycles is mentioned - your scene is in BI thus I used BI.

Sorry for unclear post, Mr Zak.
You and I don't see any ways to render the scene with transparency for desired elements in BI, so I used cycles with its different settings and abilities and had success. It looks different a bit, but fits well.
Thank you for help!

It's ok. I'd like to add that if the last screenshot in my anwer isn't what you were searching for then you're right, I completely misunderstood the topic.

It's my fault - I gave you very few explanation and filled my blend with extensive information.
Finally the problem is bypassed, thank you for help! :)


text:
smart uv unwrap creates duplicate (not overlapping) uv mesh segments
I scan a bust of someone and get an xxx.obj file and a texture file. The mesh is too dense and also needs repair so I make a separate obj file to repair. During the repair it loses the texture.
I bring in the original mesh and the new mesh, align them (ether in meshlab or visually in Blender). I remove duplicates in both meshes. Then I unwrap the new mesh using smart UV unwrap. Then I bake the original texture to the new mesh.
Besides finding overlapping UV meshes (fixable), the issue is that there are more than one UV face for certain areas. I get duplicate individual faces and duplicate multi-face areas in the uv map.
The resulting model has bits of the shirt color in the face and vice-versa.
When I select the troubled faces in the editor view, multiple separate areas in the UV image map light up. When I paint the face, the shirt gets bits of the skin color, etc. I can't seem to delete the bad duplicate faces in the UV mesh.
Is this a problem with Blender 2.72 or am I doing something wrong - and how to I fix this?
Thanks for your help.
B
UPDATE: I've uploaded a blend file at  . I've created  completely black testuv.png file an as soon as you open the blend file, you'll see the mesh and the UV editor panel.
Notice that two faces are selected on the mesh edit panel and on the left two completely separate pairs of UV faces are highlighted.  This occurs many times after doing an unwrap using Smart UV Project..
Notice that I painted the face area red and see how many red triangles there are in other parts of the mesh.
I do see areas of overlapping mesh but I can fix those manually. I can't seem to separate the duplicate UV meshes or delete them.
You can re-do the unwrap and recreate the problem.
Thanks.

That's very odd.. I've never seen anything like that before. Is it possible you could upload the .blend?

As soon as I figure out how to upload a blend file, I'll send an example. Since it is a person's likeness, I am painting over the texture but it will highlight the problem. Thanks.

These are not not duplicate face they are vertices shared between these faces and are highlighted on both of them and that's because you are using vertex select mode if you switch to face select it will be clear

something to note about UV mapping :
each vertex has a general index obj.data.vertices[index] and loop indecies (one or more ) obj.data.loops[loop_index] which is used in the UV mapping so each vertex can have more than one UV coordinates in the UV map. UV coordinates are obj.data.uv_layers[UVmap_index].data[loop_index]
in a nutshell when UV mapping you are dealing with faces not vertices

UPADATE:
The problem is with UV unwrapping which is producing scattered face from different regions  and the low resolution texture image you are painting on ,after using texture paint on the face only :

you can see that the paint spreads to different regions and that's because of :

UV unwrapping ( small spacing , and scattered faces )
Texture low resolution (compared to the mesh density )

what you can do is :

unwrap again with larger margin
use higher resolution texture

OR:

try another unwrapping method

Note :

you may want get ride of the extra vertices using Remove Doubles ,
you can paint texture directly on the mesh with Texture paint mode

Thanks very much Chebhou, I did notice that I could select single faces and not get duplicate selections on the UV map, however that still does not explain why I can't paint the textures without messing up another area. The original problem manifests itself in the colors from one area showing up on another area. It's like chasing your tail. Fix one, the other goes to the wrong color - fix that one and you're back to fixing the first one.  If I were painting vertex colors,I could see how it happens, but I'm painting directly onto the texture map image file.  I hope this describes the issue.

Awesome description! I understand exactly what is happening. I tried the smart UV Project again with Island Margins set to .001 and it makes a big difference. Still have some faces getting painted over. Remove Doubles said "0 vertices removed" but when I selected ALL, 4700 vertices removed! Unwrapping now provides better UV mesh. Still overlap here and there but it worked.better. Painting on the UV image is more precise than the mesh. If there is a distant face then  painting on the mesh makes a color line thru the UV map to get there.Thanks so much for the help.


text:
Making intersecting parts of objects turn the combined colour? (red+blue=purple)
I want to make the intersecting parts of the objects (they are two different objects converted from text) turn the combined colour (a kind of purple, I guess). How could I easily do this, without having to use the knife tool? Could I use materials to do this?
Also, do I have to assign what the combined colour would be, or is there any way to calculate it in Blender?
I tried using the boolean modifier, but it acts very weird, I don't get the desired effect.
I was thinking if there would be a way to separate the intersecting parts from the objects to create new objects where they intersect so that I could turn the new objects the required colour.
The image is from the view port.

is this animated?

No, I don't intend to animate it and it is not animated. It's just a still. If animating would help, however, I am open to doing it.

I'm not 100% sure but I don't think there's a way of achieving this effect via material nodes, etc, (unless there's something funky you could try with dynamic paint?) so I reckon your best bet would be using booleans (sorry)  to break up your mesh into seperate objects, and colouring them accordingly. Try changing the boolean type to union to leave only the purple part visible, and ensure your mesh is as clean as you can make it, as I know text meshes can take up a lot of unnecessary geometry :)

Related: http://blender.stackexchange.com/a/5338/599

You can use Boolean modifiers if you want to have full
   control of the intersecting material.
Starting situation:

These objects must not be touched, as they are the "basis" for the modifiers. So the first step consist in copy the left (or the right) object) and hide all the other. We'll call this "Left copy intersect right"

Add to this object a Boolan modifier, set to "Intersect" an than point to the right object.

Here we have the first part of three... we can assign a purple material to this object.
Copy again the left object, assign boolean modifier an this time set boolean operation to "Difference" and point to right object.

Finish with the last part. Copy Right object, add boolean modifier, set to difference, to left the object.

Assign material to the three object as you wish

You can use Volume absorbtion shader if you want that the two materials blend themselves for real

Create a material based for example on a glass shader for the surface and a volume absorbtion shader based on wanted color for the volume output.
Notice that these are the "origninal" right and left objects, so you don't need other operations, but you have some limitation on the material... they must have a transparent component.
Also notice (in the 3D view on the top) that you have to move the geometry a bit, to avoid overlapping faces that may cause artifacts.
Here's another possible material and the blendfile:

Thanks! My main problem was that I forgot to remove doubles and got weird intersections. After removing the doubles, it worked as intended.


text:
How can I have drivers active in only certain frames?
Driver active for certain frames
I have a character playing a saxophone. His fingers are driven by drivers which
get they input from the keys of the saxophone. At the end of the music I would
like the hands to be moved freely, for the character to wave at the audience for example.
How can I disable the action of the drivers after or before a certain frame?
Thanks for any help.
Daniel
Hi atomicbezierslinger, thanks for your reply. First my background: I am a retired computer hardware technician with programming knowledge in Turbo Pascal and VB. I am new to Blender, this is my first project and have very little knowledge in Python.
The project: three frogs made of bits of metal, plastic tubes, springs and hands made of rubber gloves are playing three instruments, a vibraphone, a guitar and a saxophone. Picture 1

Picture 1 ........................................................... Picture 2
For the vibraphone I have a cube that I have keyed frame  using
a CSV file in order to have a reference for the music. All the poses were then entered manually one by one. For the guitar as the right hand only needed three different poses and the left one five, I also used the cube key frames to know where to copy the poses.
But for the saxophone (picture 2) I am using a very different approach. Only seven fingers are used to play the instrument so by using CSV files, seven bones are animated. They move in the Y location from 7 to 8 according to the musical notes. Bones are named SCtrl.Bone.1  to 7, starting at the top of the picture.
. Every key on the saxophone as well as every valve have a single driver assigned to its Z rotation. This is the mechanical part of the saxophone.
Picture 3 - key pressed - valve closed
Picture 4 - key released - valve open
The fingers of the character are animated with the same technique. The Z rotation of the second bone, starting at the finger tip, is modified by a driver using the Y position of the bones SCtrl.Bone.1 to 7.
Picture 5 - driver settings
After your reply I have noticed that I could add a modifier, bottom part of picture 5, in the driver panel with ‘Restrict Frame Range’ and ‘Use Influence’ but no luck. I found on the internet that this was reported as a bug in October 2013 Blender 2.67. But apparently it is not yet fixed or I am not using this correctly. What can I do to have the driver only working at certain frames. I was thinking of entering the frame range in the expression but this would not disable the driver. Any idea ?
NB: I could not place the pictures where I wanted as I am only allowed two pictures. Sorry for that.

Is the driver modifying a value of a armature modifier?  Please provide more screen images and a more detailed description.

Hi, I have modified my question.

Assuming modifiers are used.
You can keyframe animate the [influence].
Above the [Copy Rotation] modifier has an influence value which is keyframed.
Influence can range between 0 and 1 as a floating point value.
0 is no strength. 1 is full strength.  .5 is middle strength.
The incomplete [IK] modifier has an influence value as well.
The frame number can be known from a driver.  The single value is #frame.
Keyframes are a common way of animating influence because they can be seen in the Graph Editor.  The graph editor is visual and you can easily express [ease in] and [ease out] by the  [influence] value thus achieving smooth transitions of movements.
Objects and Data can have a [custom property] value in the range 0 to 1 as well.  So a copied driver for multiple objects can refer to that property.

Secondary because we do not have details on the question.
You might have some pseudo python statement
if frame > 22 and frame < 88 do something
//pseudo less manageable less esirable
Something better might be
if mycustompropertyinfluence > 0 do something(mycustompropertyinfluence)
//pseudo and more visually manageable more desirable
If Blender can express this via user interface no new python might be desirable.


text:
Is there a way Blender can export to PDF(.U3D)?
I'd like to export my 3D models in Blender to .U3D file format so that I can place them inside PDFs. I could use this at work when I send reports to clients, in my resume, etc. There is an old plugin that does this, but it doesn't work anymore. Has anyone out there made a plugin/fixed the old one?

True. I changed the wording to reflect what I originally was looking for, to see if anyone had already made one/fixed the old one. I'll head over to the forum you linked next.

Also, this isn't a duplicate as I'm asking for an export to a specific file format (.u3d) that can be imported into a PDF. The other user seems to be looking for a "export screenshot of GUI to PDF" function.

I cannot see it in the the list of Import/Export. However, you can convert to another format, and use an additional tool. These formats can be read/written by Meshlab: PLY, STL, OFF, OBJ, 3DS, VRML 2.0, U3D, X3D and COLLADA. Export as one one of the highlighted formats, import it into Meshlab, and export to U3D.

That's exactly what I was able to do. Thanks for actually reading my question and taking the time to answer it, unlike the users that marked my question as a duplicate.


text:
Blender Cycles - Crash while synchronizing objects, Not even close to running out of memory
I am trying to render a scene with 265,189 faces, using 4K textures. Half the time I try and render a frame, blender will suddenly close without an error message or crash log. I am rendering on GPU, but this error occurs on CPU as well.
Blender will close while "synchronizing objects"
here is what my task manager says while rendering:

Specs:
8 Gigabytes of ram
GTX 970 graphics card
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
EDIT: Here is what my command prompt says. This was after it successfully rendered 2 frames.

It is clear that there is something wrong but it doesn't seem to be enough information to troubleshoot. Try to run Blender from command line to see error it writes into console after crash. Edit the question with error text and screenshot afterwards.

Using GPU-Z, I am looking at using around 50% of my Vram.

I managed to solve the problem by un-installing "jiggle armature 2" addon. I just completed a 250+ frame render with no crashes.

you should let the addon's author know about the issue.


text:
Irrelevant Baked texture maps
So I built procedural textures along with actual textures.
Every thing is properly UV unwrapped too!

However, when I bake the diffuse texture, it looks messed up like this
What am I possibly messing up with?
Requested Blend file
Blender file

PS: There are three slots used up for the material, for the concrete, for bricks, and interior walls, assigned to the respective faces of the polygon

Edit details directly into question.

Some simplified (one problematic face) blend file would be helpful, screens does not tell so much here. https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com

[link]https://drive.google.com/open?id=17ijDsU-znC-XKJOF70NQkXyBl7Hi10LQ this is the blend file

Do you guys think it could be something related to the mapping node i used to scale up the UV textures?

Welcome to the Blender SE forums :)
You have three materials mapped to same UV space, so before you bake you need to tell Blender to bake each of those materials to the same image. (3 materials all baked to the same image).
To do that ......
1: In the UV editor Create a new image to bake to. In the screenshots below I named this image 3 material bake. save this Image to your hard drive.
2: Select one of the three materials.
In the Node Editor add a new Image Texture.
In this new node load up the image that was create in the UV editor. Leave this new node unconnected but selected! (Very important to leave it selected).
Select the second material and repeat (Add new Image Texture and load up same image to bake to as was done for the first material and leave it selected).
Repeat for third material.

3: In the 3D editor, Object mode select the model.
   Hit that Bake button.
All three materials should now be baked correctly    to the image that was created in step 1.

IT WORKED! Thanks a lot mate. So that's what I was missing. I had to add the image texture to all the other slots as well. Really solved my issue. Thanks a lot, it saved me 6 hours worth of work


text:
Rotation along one axis does not work
Sorry if this question already exists, but I didn't find the answer to my problem.
(BLENDER v2.78)
I recently had the idea to animate a toon-style Rubik's Cube. I used Blender Render. I added 26 Cubes to the scene and added assigned simple materials for each color.
For scrambling it I selected manually the 9 cubes I wanted to move, rotated them and set the keyframe. Everything worked perfectly and I got this result:

Then I wanted to animate a whole solving process with the same file.
I deleted all the keyframes and scrambled the cube with selecting all the 9 cubes of one side and pressing e.g. R + X.
After scrambeling I've set the keyframes just the same way like I did during scrambeling and got this result just in the middle of the scrambled postion and the "1st move keyframe" (Only one 90 degrees rotation along the global x-axis after scrambeling it):

I regarded the Location of the strange tiles and saw that also the y and z coordinated have been modified.
Can someone please help me.
I don't know what happened and how I can fix it.
The File:
Rubiks Cube.blend

can you provide the .blend file?

Looks like your new keyframes are interacting with some old (remaining) keyframes.  In the Dope sheet, it's not hard to have some animation strips hidden.  This can be due to a setting somewhere that is excluding a particular object. e.g. an  'eye' button in the Outliner panel hiding object keyframe strips in the Dope Sheet.  You think you've cleared all animation when it's just possible that you may not have.  (I've fallen for that trap more than once)

Your problem is related to this question.

As binweg found in another post, the problem has been the Euler Rotation.
I changed the rotation of every cube to Quaternion and everything worked as it was meant to be.


text:
Export menu problem in blender
When I want to import projects I click import button, then opens import menu, but when I press again for example folder to select in import menu then import menu changes in to export menu. Also when I just press for example 3d model cube in editor then export menu opens even thought I haven't pressed export button. Is it bug or I need just change things in settings?


text:
Scopes graticules intensity
How can you adjust the intensity of the scopes graticule in the image viewer ?
I did not find an adjustment in the preferences.


text:
Particles render at origin every other frame when they shouldn't
I was curious if anyone else had run into this or knows what could cause this.  So basically I have a scene and in the middle of the render some particles are created.  However, during the part with the particles, every other frame shows them at the base plane they exude from instead of where they should be.  So when it's finally rendered it looks like its flashing, going back between how it should function and being stuck to the plane. Any help is appreciated. Thanks guys! I'm using the Cycles render engine.

Try to bake them: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/165640/31447 Seems there are some caching issues in latest versions.

Perfect! Seems to be working so far.. If you want to submit this as an answer Ill give you the credit


text:
After installing, Addon should be upgraded to 2.8x
I have zero knowledge of programming. The problem I am facing is when installing addon it is showing to upgrade to 2.8x version.
Here's the part of the code. where one of the warnings is showed.
def register():
    bpy.utils.register_module(__name__)
    bpy.types.INFO_MT_file_import.append(import_bob_menu)
    bpy.types.INFO_MT_file_export.append(export_bob_menu)
    bpy.types.INFO_MT_file_import.append(import_cob_menu)
    bpy.types.INFO_MT_file_export.append(export_cob_menu)
    bpy.types.INFO_MT_file_import.append(import_leveldefs)
    bpy.types.INFO_MT_file_export.append(export_leveldefs)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_module(__name__)
    bpy.types.INFO_MT_file_import.remove(import_bob_menu)
    bpy.types.INFO_MT_file_export.remove(export_bob_menu)
    bpy.types.INFO_MT_file_import.remove(import_cob_menu)
    bpy.types.INFO_MT_file_export.remove(export_cob_menu)
    bpy.types.INFO_MT_file_import.remove(import_leveldefs)
    bpy.types.INFO_MT_file_export.remove(export_leveldefs)
```

Maybe an old addon for 2.7? Some of the addons werent updated by their designers for 2.8. You have to install addon that is made for the new 2.8 version... There is no direct update in blender if I know.

Yes, I know so I am sharing the code and trying if anyone can fix it.


text:
Can anyone tell me why the icing isn't producing an "ooze" effect?

I have an image showing all of my selected options, which I think are correct? Except, when I try and select a vertex and use "g" to grab and drag to pull the icing down, it clips into the donut instead of sliding down the surface as I believe it should.
I'm a noob here, but any help would be great, thanks!


text:
My object keeps rotating on the X axis when playing the animation

What is the solution for this object to stay in its rotation while playing?

Does it still rotate when you click on the little lock on the right of the field ?

I got it fixed though. But the lock isn’t working

could you elaborate on how you did it ?

I just manually put the right orientation in in the dope sheet. Every single second.


text:
How to make a dice logic in UPBGE 0.3?
I'm trying to restore a dice created in the Blender Game Engine so it can work in UPBGE 0.3.
The last time I saved this file was in Blender 2.79b.
I tried to purge the elements but there is some problems with the inherited textures. The path to the textures and their dependencies looks to be broken (probably due this file being made on Blender 2.49b or even older BGE versions. However the dice still works in Blender 2.79b.
Maybe it's possible to simplify and use text instead of textures?
Any help is appreciated.
The links bellow hosts the same .blend file "Dice279bCPACK.blend" (Last save in Blender 2.79b) in two different services:

Blend-Exchange:

Google drive:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YiF8zEVRIIQ5woRbDcr8p0v-xQ4vgPYC/view?usp=share_link

Blender doesn't have a game engine nowadays. Try asking in one of the UPBGE forums here: https://upbge.org/#/community.

Hi, chic.. sorry..  BGE is no longer part of the Blender release, so is no longer on-topic on Blender SE.  @JohnEason has pointed you to the right place to ask.

Hi Guys!
The UPBGE community link is redirecting to here.
UPGE 0.3 is Blender 3.0 plus the Game Engine.

Hi, @chicOritz.. (really want to help, here)... To answer your problem, would we have to install UPBGE? This forum is about vanilla Blender and its shipped add-ons. If we can't answer from a standard install, that's very tricky, on this SE.  I'm not sure UPBGE should be directing here, I'm thinking of contacting them, but am open to correction.  Just in case I've got the wrong end of the stick,  what are your thoughts, before we do?

@chicOrtiz After discussion with other mods.. glad to say, we are accepting UPBGE questions. I'm  sorry for any inconvenience my closure has caused.  and  I hope you will find users here with enough experience to help you. If more UPGE users are being sent here, then chances will improve, over time.

Hello Robin Betts! Thank you so much for opening this question again! This gesture means a lot to me.

Here is a temporary solution using just text instead of texture (Saved in UPBGE 0.30):
DiceTextUPBGE030A.blend Links:
Blend-Exchange:
Google drive:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RHCV5PhJdmVotNoaZzicxYz1s-0JYruk/view?usp=sharing

Thank you very much for your contribution! However, an answer should never be given only with a link to an external file and without further detailed explanation. In the long run, such an answer has no value for this platform because external links to proprietary clouds can be lost. Please try to show the solution in detail and always use https://blend-exchange.com/ to share a blend file. Thank you for your understanding!


text:
Installing blender in ubuntu libopenimageio2.1 problem
I'm trying to install blender via sudo apt install blender
but it gives the following error

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 blender : Depends: libopenimageio2.1 (>= 2.1.10.1~dfsg0) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I ran sudo apt search libopenimageio2.1 and it outputs:

libopenimageio2.1/focal 2.1.12.0~dfsg0-1 amd64
  Library for reading and writing images - runtime

How do I fix this?

I fixed it by recursively installing the sudo apt install libopenimageio2.1
and the all it's dependent packages


text:
How to get euler/quaternion rotation from matrix?
I have 2 bones and I want to copy the rotation of one bone to another
using only rotation_quaternion or rotation_euler to assign the rotation
something like this:
Bone1 = armature.pose.bones["Bone1"]
Bone2 = armature.pose.bones["Bone2"]

Bone1_loc, Bone1_rot, Bone1_scale = Bone1.matrix.decompose()

orig_rot_mat = Bone1_rot.to_matrix().to_4x4()

Bone2.rotation_quaternion = orig_rot_mat.to_quaternion()
#or Bone2.rotation_euler = orig_rot_mat.to_euler()

but this doesn't seem to work and I have no idea why
Note:
I'm NOT trying to assign rotation using Bone2.matrix so please do not post a solution like this:
Bone1 = armature.pose.bones["Bone1"]
Bone2 = armature.pose.bones["Bone2"]

Bone1_loc, Bone1_rot, Bone1_scale = Bone1.matrix.decompose()
Bone2_loc, Bone2_rot, Bone2_scale = Bone2.matrix.decompose()

orig_loc_mat = Matrix.Translation(Bone2_loc)
orig_rot_mat = Bone1_rot.to_matrix().to_4x4()
orig_scale_mat = Matrix.Scale(Bone2_scale[0],4,(1,0,0)) * Matrix.Scale(Bone2_scale[1],4,(0,1,0)) @ Matrix.Scale(Bone2_scale[2],4,(0,0,1))

# assemble the new matrix
Bone2.matrix = orig_loc_mat  @ orig_rot_mat @ orig_scale_mat


text:
save image as RGBA using python?
I'm using save() and I want the save color to be RGBA but by default it's set to RGB
I tried ImageFormatSetting.color_mode='RGBA' from python tooltip and I also tried
 bpy.context.scene.render.image_settings.color_mode ='RGBA'

from this answer, but neither seem to be working,
what am I doing wrong?

This technically isn't the right answer, more of a work around
I was using bpy.data.images.new() to create the image, all I had to do was add alpha=True
bpy.data.images.new("color_buffer_copy" , 32, 32, float_buffer=True,alpha=True)

so now whenever I did use save() it would automatically set Color as RGBA and save it


text:
Feet dipping during walk cycle animation with IK rig
I'm trying to animate a simple walk cycle based on this tutorial, However one of my foot dips for some reason and the other moves perfectly along y axis. How do I fix this?

Well, there already is an answer but if I were you I would have simply compared the keys of the correct leg bones to the incorrect bones on their corresponding frames where they are in the similar position and check which differences there are. Or just copied the flipped animation from the correct leg to the other...

@GordonBrinkmann I actually did try flipping and pasting the animations from the correct key frames but I still got the same error, so I posted here to maybe get the root cause of this problem :)

It would appear that there is a slight dip in the FootBoneIK.L curve as seen in the Graph Editor. When I adjust the Z location keyframe at frame 20.0 and increase it slightly (or delete it), the foot no longer descends goes below the 0.0 elevation.

Thank you this work! However I can't figure out why this happened in the first place and will this be a reoccurring issue?

You asked how this happened, well to answer that we needed to know how you created the walk cycle in the first place and how you copied one pose to the other. But at the very end I will make a guess how it happened and what you could have done differently.
Now just as an illustration and alternative solution, instead of slightly adjusting the Z location or deleting the keyframe, there is something quite simple how to get both legs move the same - exactly, not somehow.
As I said in my comment, I would simply look at the curves and see in which way they are different. Only the Z location seems to be the problem here, so I take a look at them on both feet:

Both have two local extrema, a maximum and a minimum, they are both at the same height and the same distance apart. But the blue curve of the correct cycle starts and ends with keyframes which are building a saddle point between the cycles, i.e. they have horizontal tangents, resulting in a saddle point 10 frames behind the peak. But the purple, incorrect walk cycle curve does not have a saddle point behind the peak.
If I now repeat the curves like in a walk cycle and match them on top of each other, the difference becomes obvious: where the blue curve "rests" a while in a certain Z location, the purple curve comes in later and goes immediately further down - and this is where it is dipping below the ground.

The keyframe in question is the one 10 frames behind the peak, so if I compare the one from the correct walk cycle to the one of the dipping walk cycle, you can see the correct one has horizontal handles.
The correct walk cycle (I just show the end keyframe, but the one at the start has horizontal handles as well):

And the dipping walk cycle with the tilted handles:

But so much for the explanation why you theoretically can immediately see on the curves where the problem lies. As I said in the beginning, there is a very simple solution to this and the result is not less accurate then the other answer (even more, it is exactly accurate as I will show afterwards, but this might be coincidence depending on how these handle placements came to be in the first place).
The solution is: select the keyframe, press S Y 0 to scale it vertically down to 0 and that is it.

And why is this the exactly accurate method in this case? In the images above where you can see the values of the Active Keyframe in the sidepanel, you see one is on frame 20, the other on 40 (the X location, so to speak) and both have a value of 36.8 (the Y location).
If I now set the locations of the keyframes as the respective origin (0, 0) on their individual coordinate system, I can set the handle positions relative to those:

Obviously they are both the same distance away from their center in X direction, while the tilted handles are offset up and down in Y direction, but to the same amount so they are still centered on the keyframe. And so scaling them to 0 in Y direction makes them perfectly horizontal and exactly the same as the others from the correct walk cycle. Although as I said, this could be coincidence, if any handle would have been changed manually they might not be exactly the same.
A possible reason why this happened and what you could have done differently: I would guess, you might have copied the start or end keyframe of the correct curve and pasted it at its according position after the peak keyframe on the other curve.
Now the Handle Type is set to Auto Clamped. This type will keep the offset from the keyframe in X direction when you paste it, but might change the Y position to get a smoother interpolation between the previous and the next keyframe.
And therefore when you paste it between the peak and the valley, it will not have horizontal handles, but tilted to better match the sloping curve between peak and valley. That is the why the X offsets are still the same like the original horizontal handles, but the Y offsets are not.
To avoid this automatic interpolation and keep the original handles you have to do the following:

Select the correct keyframe which you want to copy.
Change the handle type by pressing V and choose Free or Aligned (sometimes Free works better).
Copy the keyframe with Ctrl+C.
Select the other foot bone and the Z location curve and go to the frame where you want to paste the keyframe.
Paste it with Ctrl+V.

After pasting the keyframe you could switch the handle type again if you do not want it to be Free (which means the handles could be moved independently), but do not use Auto Clamped as it will change them again to the incorrect tilted state. Use the Aligned interpolation instead.


text:
Can I download and install Blender outside of Steam?
I currently have a falling out with Steam over a customer service issue. As a Blender subscriber (gold member), can I download and install outside of the Steam universe?

Iam not sure if I understand your questions, but do you ask if you can download blender somewhere else than on Steam? Yes, for example on official site blender.com

https://www.blender.org/download/

Iam not sure if I understand your questions, but do you ask if you can download blender somewhere else than on Steam? Yes, for example on official site blender.com – Fowl 2 days ago. Yes. This is what I'm asking. Thank You.


text:
Can I export Quick Favorites from 2.82 to 2.83
With all the back and forth between 2.82 and 2.83 daily releases, I was wondering if there was a way to export your 2.82 quick favorites menus to use them in the 2.83 beta?

Quick Favorites are part of user preferences and saved along them in the preferences file.
Copying this file from one installation to another should bring Quick Favorites with it.
Beware that this file saves most Blender settings along with it, so overwriting with an older one may unintentionally change other preferences you may have already configured. It may also cause unforeseen issues when things change between Blender versions, so use with caution and take care to make backups beforehand.
This file is usually saved under C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\<VersionNumber>\config for Windows OS. After installing a new version you should have two different <VersionNumber>, so copy it from the relevant one to the new one.


text:
Ping Pong Math node - what does it do?
Reading through the math node docs, I came across a math function named "ping-pong".
The docs state that ping-pong does the following

The output value is moved between 0.0 and the Scale based on the input value.

What in the world does that mean?  Can anyone tell me what the actual ping-pong function is?  What input values lead to an output of 0, and what input values lead to an output of "scale"?

It's a positive symmetrical triangle-wave, amplitude Scale, period  2 * Scale, 0 at 0.

Here's the function illustrated with 'Scale' (from the bottom up) set to 1, 0.5, and 0.333.
These planes are 8 units across, and 2 up, 0 at center.
You could roll your own like this:
PingPong(Value) = Scale - abs( (abs(Value) % (2*Scale)) - Scale)

..but someone else might come up with a neater way.. :)
edit: Indeed they have :) thanks to @Nikolai for:
Scale - abs(Value % (2*Scale) - Scale )

You could wrap up the node like this to give more intuitive inputs?

great illustrative answer, thank you.  Glad I asked, because that's not at all what I imagined it would be.  I expected a square-wave type function.

@rothloup Thanks!  .. Keep the graphing trick in your back pocket.. you can visualise the other functions, and your own combinations.

..but someone else might come up with a neater way.. :)

You can remove the inner abs:
Start with abs(input), then flip it with a negative sign: -abs(input)
Then add scale to move it up: scale - abs(input)
Then get it in range: scale - abs(input%2*scale)
Finally shift the peak so that it sits at scale: scale - abs(input%(2*scale)-scale)

@Nickolai hehe .. I love it when that happens :) Will insert with a credit, and leave the challenge up, when tested.


text:
Connecting a texture node to a material node via the Blender Python API for Blender 2.82
I am a newbie in Blender Python scripting. I am trying to write a simple script to link a texture node to a material node in Blender 2.82. I tried something close to the procedure described in How can I connect a texture node to a material with Python?
import os, bpy

bpy.context.scene.render.engine = 'CYCLES'

# new material
mat = bpy.data.materials.new('mat')
mat.use_nodes = True
matnodes = mat.node_tree.nodes

#new texture
tex = matnodes.new('ShaderNodeTexImage')
img = bpy.data.images.load(<file-path-on-disk>)
tex.image = img

# assign texture to material's displacement
disp = matnodes['Material Output'].inputs[2]
mat.node_tree.links.new(disp, tex.outputs[0])

The script runs with no error reported on the console. Yet the texture node does not show on the 'Shading' panel. Can anybody give me a clue as to what may be the problem?

The script works, however you don't assign the newly created material to any object. Therefore you're seeing the old material, that was previously assigned to the active object, in the Material Properties or the Shader Editor.
If you want to assign the material to the currently active material slot of the active object, you can use
bpy.context.view_layer.objects.active.active_material = mat

where mat is the material you've created in your script. Alternatively you can also assign the material to a specific material slot, e.g. the first one in the following example:
bpy.context.view_layer.objects.active.material_slots[0].material = mat

When you're performing multiple operations with the active object, you can store it in a variable. It's not necessary to access it through bpy.context all the time.

One problem with your script is that it creates a node setup which doesn't properly use displacement. Usually you'd want to add a Displacement node and control the height through the texture. You may also want to add a Texture Coordinate node to use the active UV map for the displacement texture.
import bpy

# Create a material
material = bpy.data.materials.new(name="Example_Material")
material.use_nodes = True
nodes = material.node_tree.nodes
links = material.node_tree.links

# Reuse the material output node that is created by default
material_output = nodes.get("Material Output")

# Create Image Texture node and load the displacement texture.
# You need to add the actual path to the texture.
displacement_tex = nodes.new("ShaderNodeTexImage")
displacement_tex.image = bpy.data.images.load("/path/to/your/texture")
displacement_tex.image.colorspace_settings.name = "Non-Color"

# Create the Displacement node
displacement = nodes.new("ShaderNodeDisplacement")

# Create the Texture Coordinate node
tex_coordinate = nodes.new("ShaderNodeTexCoord")

# Connect the Texture Coordinate node to the displacement texture.
# This uses the active UV map of the object.
links.new(displacement_tex.inputs["Vector"], tex_coordinate.outputs["UV"])

# Connect the displacement texture to the Displacement node
links.new(displacement.inputs["Height"], displacement_tex.outputs["Color"])

# Connect the Displacement node to the Material Output node
links.new(material_output.inputs["Displacement"], displacement.outputs["Displacement"])

# Get the active object
active_obj = bpy.context.view_layer.objects.active

# Check if the active object has a material slot, create one if it doesn't.
# Assign the material to the first slot for the active object.
if active_obj.material_slots:
    active_obj.material_slots[0].material = material
else:
    active_obj.material_slots.append(material)

For Adaptive Displacement you will also have to set the Feature Set to experimental
bpy.context.scene.cycles.feature_set = 'EXPERIMENTAL'

and enable the Adaptive option in the Subdivision Surface modifier. You may have to adjust the Subdivision options in the Render Properties as well, in order to get the desired amount detail for the displacement.

Thanks a million!

@user89301 If my answer solved your problem, please consider marking it as accepted by clicking on the checkmark next to it.

Thanks a million!


text:
How do you select a vertex loop without a scroll wheel or middle mouse button?
I am having trouble with selecting an edge loop in blender 2.82. I do not have current access to a scroll wheel or a middle mouse button! Please help. I'm stuck on a big project with a tight deadline.

Hello and welcome :). Edge loops are selected with Alt+LMB. No scroll wheel needed.

Need to check 'Emulate 3 buttons mouse' in the input tab of the preferences to make Alt+LMB work.

Suggestion get a low cost USB mouse with a scroll wheel by any means. USB mouse devices are common place and available online, from your professional colleagues, drug stores, discount stores , junk drawers, and Walmart. I am not endorsing any particular store or assuming any geographical location. The cost of a laptop is hundreds of times the cost of a mouse. [Big projects and Tight Deadlines] have budgets for such low cost items. Translated to American dollars I have a usable USB mouse for $3. You need the tools for your future projects. Which comes first ? The laptop or the mouse?  .


text:
How to sharpen edges on part of a cylinder
So I'm trying to make the edges of that little rectangle sharp, something like how it is in this screenshot. This was using edge loops but the 4 loops that run the length of the cyclinder create weird lines as you can see in the picture. I tried dissolved all the edges in the loops except the ones around that area but it didn't seem to work.

This one was done with creases all around but those 2 highlighted edges were jutting out instead of following the curve of the cylinder which doesn't look very good.
I uploaded the blend file to google drive, not sure if you guys will be able to access it: blend file
Any tips would be appreciated.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/123617/how-to-avoid-pinching-on-concave-shapes-with-the-bevel-modifier-and-subsurf https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/81596/how-can-i-make-a-rounded-indentation-on-a-cylinder/81605#81605

Subdivision surface modifier is our great friend here.
But it has rules: when angles are high we need regular, quad geometry. But for flat surface all is ok for it.
So I propose a solution that has low impact of the other parts of the mesh.
Here is the final result, containing ngons, tris and quads:

The starting point is to add knife cuts on all the selected parts here, as this is the edges we want to harden:

The aim of these cuts is to delimitate the straight angles we want, cutting the less possible, even is we so create non quad faces.
For the bottom part, we can make an edge loop going along the corner shape, but creating a tri (which will be well handled by the subsufr).

So far we have this with a subdiv of 2:

But the top part has irregularities... so we need to modify it.
Again use the knife tool to add this:

And link these parts (still using knife tool):

So far, we have this:

Which can be improved with:

Here is the blend file (only the part you'll see when opening it is 'finished'). But for this part of the model, you can use a mirror modifier.

This solves the mis-shapen area's but the model was started with two faces instead of one so that may be where the trouble came from as there is an extra loop-centre-cut that is not on the other model.  The recess is also a different width showing this.

@dave44 I don't know what you mean by "other model". I started from the model given by the OP.

Normally when I get that sort of image issue, it's a normals issue = CTRL+N = recalculate normals in edit mode.


text:
Using Blender on a windows 10 tablet with no keyboard?
Is there any software (in exception of Tablet Pro, which is quite expensive and overfeatured) to create some virtual buttons or shortcuts on the screen to use blender in non-keyboard mode?
Or maybe some lightweight wireless hardware, like a mini-keyboard with a dozen of keys?
I'd like to use my Surface 2017 for sculpting and drawing, but it is almost unusable without some vital shortcuts.

Hardware shopping questions are off-topic for this site, I believe. As for a virtual keyboard, there surely are options. Have you considered the one built into Windows?

@JohnDvorak Yep, that was what i started with, but it has too many keys and you can't keep it on the screen because it takes a half of it. All i need are 4-5 basic shortcuts located somewhere by the left edge, easily accessible

The viewport in 2.8 offers quite a few icons in the toolbar. Would that suffice for you?

You could buy a mouse with multiple keys and assign those shortcuts to them.

Thanks for your replies, folks. I decided to stay on TabletPro with the only ArtistPad feature activated. It seems to be a good option despite it's quite complicated customization.


text:
Weird face after Boolean..?
I used the Boolean modifier to make a hole in my gun and it looks like a shadery face covering up the hole. It's a bit hard to see and it isn't really a face. The hole i made goes through 3 meshes.
(You need to click on the pic to see the shady face)

Any solution?

Faces of one object are overlapping with faces of another object. They're in the same position. Push them away a bit.

It's because the 3 meshes' faces are overlapping. Move the faces of 2 of your 3 objects a tiny bit away (along normals or X/Y/Z).

It's known as Z-fIghting


text:
Best way to make a Ghillie suit in Blender?
So I have a basic T pose female character that I'm using for a sniper game I am creating with a friend. I'd love to have a ghillie suit on her, as It's going to be very stealthy game, and we'd like to make use of the camouflage.
The problem I'm having is actually creating the grass and/or leaves/branches. I'm not entirely sure the best way to tackle it, and being very new to blender, I was hoping someone with a bit more experience could point me in the right direction and give me a few tips. As I'm stuck for what to do, your help would be extremely invaluable.
Thank you in advance.
Edit: Thanks for the replies, brasshat. The engine will be/is Unreal Engine 4 (version 4.8.3 specifically) and we intend to just have a static ghillie suit for now, so we can get the basic look going to aid us in camouflage, etc. The eventual plan could probably be give it a few basic physics like swaying and such. But that is months down the line. I'm aware of the online courses, but any chance you could share a few ways that'd be suitable for this? that way I can focus on what I need to learn specifically

Particle system?

Wow, I looked up the 'particle system' as you suggested and that's looking very promising so far. Thank you so much!

Welcome to Blender, Chris. Learning to use a platform like Blender always involves pushing the envelope of one's skill set, but in my experience it's common for people in some platforms and applications of those platforms, to push parts of the envelope too much. A question which includes some analogue of "what's the best way" in one of the things that tell me that the questioner is probably pushing the envelope too much. I suggest that you look at question 15355, and take one of the on-line courses under "learning".

I was not previously familiar with a "Ghillie suit" so I looked it up on on Wikipedia. Off the top of my head, I can think of several ways to use Blender to represent them, but the exact way will depend upon knowing exactly how you intend for the suit to function in game, and what game engine is to be used. For me, there is not enough information to answer what the best way is. As written, I consider the question too broad, but I am not voting to close it.

That reminds me, I tried the particle system and it seemed like a great Idea, but the more I looked into it the more I heard that It is terrible for use in a game. So I scrapped that Idea.


text:
Can't select a vertex group in this hook modifier
I have this silly problem. See image. I want to stretch this cylinder with the right icosphere. I selected the vertices on the right end of the cylinder and added them to a vertex group with weight 1. Then on the right icosphere I add a hook modifier, I select the cylinder as object, and the vertex group list is empty. But the vertex group is there, but it doesn't show up, I can't select it in the hook modifier. How to make it show?

Aha, I put the hook modifier on the cylinder, not the icosphere. This works, though the vertex group is pulled to the top of the sphere, instead of the center, where the origin is. How to pull it to the center of the icosphere?
Also, is there a way to preserve the relative distance between the pulled vertices, so the end cap of the cylinder is pulled but not deformed.

It is working the opposite way: set the hook modifier on the cylinder, not on the sphere

All is on top of the sphere, because either the sphere or the cylinder is rotated: so apply rotation for both.

The hook modifier have to be set on the hooked object not on the hooker (well... not totally sure this is the good term in English).

Concerning the stretch on top of the sphere: this is due to a rotation.
The hook is influenced by all objects transformations. So these transformations needs to be coherent at the moment the hook modifier is set.


text:
Making Emission Object Invisible with Volume Scatter
I am desperately trying to animate a 'tour' through an interior space and am having trouble getting enough light in the space. I have added emission to mesh shapes to light the various areas and even though i turned off their visibility to the camera they are still visible to some extent. I believe this is doe to the fact that I have Volume scatter on the main light source. I have tried enabling/disabling VS in the Cycles Setting under the Object button but it does not help. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

I think when you just make them invisible for the camera, it will still render them, but if you say, it should not be rendered, it won't render the light too.

Related: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/35541/is-there-a-way-to-determine-if-a-ray-is-coming-from-a-volume.

Any particular reason you have volume scattering on the light source?

You have to go to the object tab under cycle setings, ray visibility and deselect the camera. It should not be rendered anymore.
You may have to set the surface to emission, not the volume.

thanks for the reply, unfortunately both of your suggestions are currently the case.


text:
Setup an inverted pendulum simulation with BGE
I'm very new to Blender. I'd like to setup a very simple rigid body physics system using the game engine. The system is simply a pole hinged in the middle of a block, which can move horizontally on a plane with friction, and walls to prevent it flying off the plane. It responds to a horizontal force that acts on the block, at every frame/timestep.

It's well known in engineering as the 2D cart/pole problem, aka inverted pendulum, and the rigid body equations are well known, but in Blender we don't need them! A simulation would start with the pole upright, and then apply random forces/impulses, (actuate it), horizontally on the block. When the pole falls below horizontal, its physically impossible for it to get back to vertical, and the simulation can end.
Setting this up procedurally would be a really nice/helpful introduction to rigid bodies and actuators in the BGE. I think in terms of the BGE/Physics the only scripting needed is to use a random, applyForce(...) or applyImpulse(...), on the block at each frame/timestep.
I'm not really sure that the game engine is needed for this simulation, only physics, as there is no user interaction? The output is just the sequence of rendered images, for a small time step/frames per second, and the value of the actuator/force applied at each timestep/frame.
Perhaps a the easiest place to start is from the [domino's tutotrial][4]
The things I'm stick on are,

How to hinge the rod to the block, I think I need a constraint, OR Maybe I should use a single armature bone ?
To apply a random force or impulse at each keyframe, I think I need something like bpy.ops.anim.keyframe_insert ?

Just in case it helps anyone this reference Making the default cube move, using physics from the docs is really useful :)

I made a simple example in the game engine of a mouse controlled inverted pendulum. It answers only your question about the hinge, but maybe you can go from there.
The body block has a rigid body constraint, type hinge, target is the pole. The weight at the top is parented to the pole.
I'm sure it's not physically correct, but I had to change translation and rotation damping in the physics properties of the pole to have a chance at controlling the pendulum. I also reduced the mass of the pole.
If you'd like to have a look, here's the blend file:

Hi Sanne, thanks a bunch for your help !!! I'm trying to do the simulation in Bullet Physics right now, because that's a bit easier for me to understand, and get working. Your blend file was really helpful, and I'll try to use it when I have the simulations ready for rendering from Bullet Physics. Best, Aj

You're welcome, Ajay T, glad I could help a bit. Good luck with your project!


text:
Is it possible to alternate between the two colors in the Brick Node without any in-between shades?
How can I use the Brick node to generate only bricks of color A or B without any in-between shades, and alternate between the two, right-to-left and top-to-bottom.

I assume it requires manipulation of the Bias value in some way or other, but I haven't been able to figure out what to use where it will have the desired effect.

Rather than connecting the brick texture to the colour input of your shader, you can use it to define the mix factor of different colours. With this approach you can use a colour ramp node to adjust the shading of the brick texture so you get less variation in the colour.
By connecting the fac of the brick node into a colour ramp you easily get a choice between brick and mortar (assuming you have a mortar size)
Then connect the colour output to a colour ramp that is set to constant interpolation and adjust the positions until you get a variation you are happy with.
Connecting the black and white colour from the colour ramps into the fac of the mix nodes lets you choose which colour is used.

Which leaves you with two brick colours and a mortar colour.

Tha is for your reply! That’s part of the way there and takes care of the A-or-B-only part, but not the alternating, unfortunately. That’s my fault for not explaining it more fully. By "alternating", I mean even bricks would be red, odd bricks would be brown, counting from left to right, top to bottom. I'll update my post above to better reflect what I’m going for.

*Thanks, not "tha is". Stupid auto-correct...

This is exactly what I was looking for, I am also wondering if you could add a 3rd solid colored brick

@NickSieben yes add more stops to the colour ramp after the brick texture. Ask as a question to get more info.


text:
How to use video preview as video output?
I currently have a problem with the video output file that Blender creates when rendering. Rendering the animation in a video file or in images files creates something different from the preview in the video sequence editor and from the temporarily rendered preview images. This leads to problems like that the rendered audio and scene are out-of-sync with the rendered video, whereas this looked fine in the preview.
How do I make sure the image/video preview is accurate to the final video output, or could I also use the preview as video output instead?

I have tried turning AV-Sync on and off, using speed controls for each imported clip, and even changing the framerate of the video output, but nothing seems to be really accurate to the preview.

This may be more of a codec issue, for the player app you are using? Try playing back with BlenderPlayer and with VLC and any other media players you may have.

This may not be exactly what you're asking but have you tried rendering
from the Drop down menu at the top left of the 3D window.  It's called "render" strangely enough and gives you access to the "OPenGL Render."
I use this almost always and find it outputs (usually) what I see in the 3D window, or through the camera.  On the few occasions it doesn't, the problem is always a setting or two, (or three, to almost infinity)
A large factor in it's favour is it's rendering speed.


text:
Blank render in cycles
Hello can anyone tell me why this is happening.... here is my scene in the viewport shader with render ticked in object mode.
However, when I render the image in cycles blender I get this.....
[![enter image description here][2]][2]
Help.
Now it looks like this....

Where is your camera and where is it pointing?

Hello guys and thank you. I unchecked "Sequencer" in the post processing  render section. Now the scene objects are all black....

Camera is pointing towards a background that should have a lamp.

GOT IT... LOOKS LIKE MY LAYERS WERE OFF.....


text:
IK show bones Degrees of Freedom
I rigged a human and now want to set the limits. I have a blue / red ring that visualizes the limits on the x and z axis but not on the y axis ( I just found out that I can deactivate them by unchecking "relationship lines")
I only found this visualization of limits:
https://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_Dokumentation:_Constraint:_IK_Solver#/media/File:Blender3D_IK_chain_limit.jpg
But I cant find the option to activate this in 2.78.
Thanks in advance.

To show this you need to go under the Bone properties tab and then Under the Inverse Kinematics you can set the rotation limits of the bones as shown below:

Note: Only X and Z limits will be represented in the 3d view as rotation around Y is rolling the bone around it's axis so it can't be visualised

Thanks that worked! Can I set the maximum limit to a negative value? Because I want to limit it from -180 ° to -170° on the y axis and it wont let me set the max to -170° or + 190°

@AlexanderWeller I recommend asking another separate question for this.