How to iterate through all vertices of an object that contains multiple meshes?

A mesh may consist of loose parts the following script will export all vertices and faces. The length is determined by pythons len() you would need to change the print statements to writing into a file.

Uncomment the dump method # dump(obj.data) to find out more on available properties you're interested in.

If you need also to get the edges of the mesh you could have a look at Python script to determine XYZ of tip of cone.

import bpy

def dump(obj, level=0):
   for attr in dir(obj):
       if hasattr( obj, "attr" ):
           print( "obj.%s = %s" % (attr, getattr(obj, attr)))
       else:
           print( attr )

#obj = bpy.data.objects["Cube"]  # particular object by name
obj = bpy.context.scene.objects.active # active object

# dump(obj.data)
mesh = obj.data
print("# of vertices=%d" % len(mesh.vertices))
for vert in mesh.vertices:
    print( 'v %f %f %f\n' % (vert.co.x, vert.co.y, vert.co.z) )

print("# of faces=%d" % len(mesh.polygons))

for face in mesh.polygons:
    print('face')
    #dump(face)
    for vert in face.vertices:
        print(vert)

Output format:

# of vertices=8
v 1.000000 1.000000 -1.000000
v 1.000000 -1.000000 -1.000000
v -1.000000 -1.000000 -1.000000
v -1.000000 1.000000 -1.000000
v 1.000000 0.999999 1.000000
v 0.999999 -1.000001 1.000000
v -1.000000 -1.000000 1.000000
v -1.000000 1.000000 1.000000
# of faces=6
face
0
1
2
3
face
4
7
6
5
face
0
4
5
1
face
1
5
6
2
face
2
6
7
3
face
4
0
3
7


OK, so all I did was to change a bit topology of model in spots where I wanted edges of clothes to be, next I selected faces on model and clicked shift+d and next right mouse button and separate by selection. I got new object, slightly alt+s it, solidyfy and change material. I got something like that:


It seems like you possibly are trying to use the same blender download file for both Ubuntu and Windows, in which case you would need to download the windows file for blender 2.8: https://builder.blender.org/download/, although with the level of detail you have provided it is rather hard to tell. Could you state what machine you are using, where you downloaded the blender file from, and anything else that is non-orthodox about your setup.


BGE How do I get a objects location/Rot/velocity into a property?

With python a python script u can pass the values to a object game engine property to work arround logic nodes (i suppose).

from bge import logic
def main(cont):# cont = currentController
    x,y,z = cont.owner.worldPosition # owner = your ship
    cont.owner["Xpos"] = x # Xpos = object game property
    cont.owner["Ypos"] = y # Ypos = object game property
    cont.owner["Xpos"] = z


There is currently no setting for this. You can see in the Interface tab of the user preferences menu that there's a 'hotspot' distance for the handles of manipulators and similar settings for Pie menus. This is probably where you'd expect to find such a setting and it isn't exposed there.

Maybe more substantially, in this mirror of the Blender source code on line 446 a comment mentions that the below function uses a hardcoded value (line 392) of 5px for unselected vertices. This isn't necessarily the only way to select vertices in Blender but it seems to be the default.


What's the easiest format to use to create a mesh object?

For a dollar sign there are quite a few options.

1.- create a text object, modify it on edit mode to be a dollar sign using the font of your choice. You can then extrude and bevel.

2.- Import a SVG vectorial object and set some extrusion
 and bevel to it.

3.- Using your image as background you can trace the shape manually as a curve object.


How to make arc with many faces looks smooth with subdivision modifier?

Here are 2 ways (destructive and not) to do it:


How to make a VSE scene strip render with the openGL render?

In Blender 2.76 or later you can render a Scene Strip in the VSE using OpenGL by hitting one of the two Buttons next to "Use Backdrop". The left one will render a single frame, the right one the entire animation.

In case you want to have transparency for the VSE OpenGL render, it seems you have to set the alpha mode of the OpenGL render options to transparent before adding the scene to the VSE when using 2.79 (Render -> OpenGL Render Options -> Alpha Mode -> Transparent).


For Tails consider a Armature a Spline Constraint, employing curves, which can provide the smooth visuals.  That is just a starter.
Armatures are suggested for Wings.  Thus you have control over the flapping motion. I assume you will need that control.
You stated [I can't seem to remember how ..].  Consider a video website for tutorials. You may want to search .. Blender Tutorial Spline Constraint.
Once some of the basics are there you can consider hundreds of subtleties.


Weird line following my cursor when sculpting

That's smooth stroke, it is intended to smooth out mouse/pen movement, you might have heard of it under a different name: lazy mouse.

Imagine it as tough your cursor is pulling the actual brush.

To disable go into sculpt mode -> tools -> stroke -> disable smooth stroke.


Trying to make the earth - don't see the Mapping sub-menu

Following the advice of @bortran I started watching Blender 2.7 Tutorial #12 : Image Textures & Bump Maps #b3d and within minutes I made the earth.

Generated coordinates and just select Sphere in the Image Texture.


FBX Export: What does Forward / Up assignment do?

Each software handle axis names/orientation differently. That doesn't change anything while your working into a soft, but can be problematic when you export models and animations.

Z Up / Y Up

In Blender, the vertical axis is called Z (so X and Y define the floor plane). In many other software like Unity, the vertical axis is called Y (so X and Z define the floor plane).

Y Forward / -Y Forward

Once you know which axis means vertical, you need to determine how the two other axis are oriented.

In Blender if you turn the view so the Z axis points up, and the X Axis points right, then the Y axis points backward ; in other terms, the -Y axis points forward.

Sometime this kind of orientation is called "left-handed coordinates" :

Of course it opposes to right-handed coordinates where the "Y-finger" would point forward.

Blender / Unity

Blender is Z Up / -Y Forward

Unity is Y Up / - Z Forward

Other cases

It's quite conventional that the vertical axis points up (not down), and the X axis points right (not left). However, that's not universal, so the fbx exporter allow every valid Up/Forward combination. (an invalid combination would be something paradoxal like : Z Up, Z Forward).


How to get more control over Freestyle external contour lines

you have to go into Edit Mode > Select all Edges > Edge > Mark Freestyle Edge
Now you have to go into the "View Layer Properties" and untick everything besides "Edge Mark" under the "Edge Types" Option.
This should do the Trick.


How come ambient occlusion shadows not showing in Blender Render-Render?

The viewport AO feature is fairly new, and has extra options that allow it to be overdriven and produce extra high ao for the the edges between the cube and the plane. An open 90 degree corner like that should not really produce much ambient occlusion because it's too open for much occlusion to happen. The older AO feature in the World panel is actually working more accurately than the viewport tool.

You can actually drive the AO value high by manually typing in a value higher than 1.0.

In my example I've added an inset edge in the middle of the cube. You can now see more clearly the difference between the Env light only shadow and the addition of the AO shadow. Note that the surface does not get brigher with the AO set to Multiply.


How to add vertices loops around holes in a mesh

this might work for you... select the egde loops with alt right click  press F to create a face press ctrl t to triangulate  press alt j to untriangulate  and then delete those front faces there that you have created (the 3 quads in this case) that you wont need. spam: a model in progress lol https://gamebanana.com/wips/49759


(Internal) Depth of Field Not Getting Right Spot

I suggest you don't use the defocus node. You can just select the camera, go to its settings, hit the high quality button and set the f-stop level down to like 0.4 to see very precise where you are focusing. Then, set a random focus distance in the box next to the f-stop setting. Go in the 3d view, hit 'N' and check the 'Depth of field' box under 'Shading'. Now you can see the focus distance in the viewport as it is going to be rendered. Now start playing with the distance in the camera settings. Also, you can set the F-stop back to your preference after you are sure of the distance.


The output socket of your normal map node should be plugged in the normal input of the upper Diffuse BSDF. The second Diffuse BSDF is completely unuseful, as the displacement input of the material output node expects a greyscale value (the socket is grey) and not a shader value (green sockets). For a better result you could also modulate a mix of diffuse and glossy shader, both with a reflections texture and the Fresnel effect, which gives you more reflections on the borders of your material (according to the angles of light reflections). At the end of this process you can decide if it's necessary to subdivide your mesh and add some displacement maps, augmenting the poly-count.


This was an wild hunting ... uf :)
The issue comes from N-gon faces generated by the boolean operation.
When model consists from quad or tris faces it works fine.
Solution is to add a Triangulate Modifier at the end of modifier stack like so:


How would I make an Iridescent Yellow Chromate material?

Here's my approach to materials like this.
I stumbled across this method a little on accident.

The key to my approach:

Fresnel and Velvet, tend to act as polar opposites of each other which really help the extra control I look for. The trick is to use the velvet shader as a mix factor.

Fresnel tends to highlight places that are Z+, while velvet tends to highlight Z-. This gives us basic highlight(Fresnel)/mid (The rest of your material)/shadow control (Velvet).

The biggest help though is the Layer Weight Input Node, this one provides the gradual view transition, Fresnel and Velvet play on this one. Another plus on this one, is that it takes your point of view into account.

And last but not least Anisotropic is an almost guaranteed node for anything metal, not always though...

Here's the total Setup, and result.

Hope it helps, Kind Regards,

RRiggs

So after reading the answer, that was already given in the other post, and seeing that there was definitely a lot of scientific effort to get it correct, I decided to append this answer to help you out specifically with your desired color scheme while trying less to trick it with my method. After all it gave me an excuse to learn something new, so here it goes. Hope it gets you on your way.


Timeline keyframe not showing when changing to different transform rotation representation

The quaternion, euler and axis angle rotations are stored as three different properties, the rotation_mode is used to determine which property is used for rotation.

Yes you will need to re-create the keyframes if you want to use a different rotation mode. You can choose the quaternion rotation mode, move to a keyframe and then change to euler and add a keyframe to the euler values as they will then match the values of the quaternion, then repeat for each keyframe of the rotation. If you have a lot of animation to do then a python script could be used to automate this.


How to control which edges are selected after beveling operation is complete?

That video was made with an older version of blender (2.64). You can now do pretty much the same thing faster by beveling (⎈ CtrlB) and then using the scroll wheel or the numbers on the keyboard to set the number of cuts:

Or you could deselect the edge rings with ⎈ Ctrl⇧ Shift⎇ Alt RMB:

Not exactly an optimal solution, but I don't think this is possible without using an older version of blender..


Glare effect in compositing on one object in Blender 2.8

If I were you, I would find a way to render just the object you want to have glare on. I learned something like this was possible from InLightVFX's videos. Then, you could render the rest of the scene and composite the two renders on top of each other.


Smoke simulation not working in Blender 2.77a

Smoke starts after it has gone through all keyframes, you have yours at 10000, that will take a long time. Set the max to 100, press play and wait for it to start, then change it back to your desired amount. Oh, the top panel of your mesh behind the sphere's normal is inverted. :)

EDIT: And, as cegaton said, the domain has to be a domain object.


I'm trying to add a script as an addon and it does not seem to work

The script you link to is written for Blender 2.36, easily identified by looking for registration info.

#!BPY

""" Registration info for Blender menus:
Name: 'OGRE (.mesh.xml)...'
Blender: 236
Group: 'Import'
Tip: 'Import an Ogre-Mesh (.mesh.xml) file.'
"""

Blender versions above 2.5 won't be able to load this particular script, because internally and externally Blender has changed a lot in the years between Blender 2.36 and the present 2.7+ series.

Your options are:

Find an Ogre I/O addon compatible with Blender 2.5 onwards.
https://bitbucket.org/iboshkov/blender2ogre (compatible with 2.7! )
This addon seems to be in active development at the time of this writing, that's a good sign.
Use an old version of blender, available from here


You've activated the local view of your selected object. Press Numpad / button to return to the scene view, with the all objects visible.
This option is very useful, when you've got many objects in scene and want to edit the concrete one. You can easily check out if you are in local view. The view type is displayed in the upper left corner of a 3D window.


Bake without shadows or influence from individual lights

Change the Bake Type from Combined to Diffuse. This will output a shadeless texture that you can use as the Albedo map.

Repeat this process by changing the Bake Type to "Normal" if you want to bake a normal map.


The AV-Sync option changes how the timeline runs the animation - so that instead of always processing each frame, instead it will skip frames where necessary to ensure that the playback matches the 'actual' expected frame rate. This is to allow the animation to be syncronised with another time-bound source such as an audio track - where slowing down the video rate would result in the audio and video becoming out of step.

So, in order to prevent the video from lagging behind, Blender skips video frames where it has been unable to keep up - to get it back 'in step'. This does, however, mean that Blender is unable to complete the Rigid Body (and other simulation) processing for each frame and since the simulation for each frame is dependent on the immediately preceeding frame this means that the simulation cannot be completed if any frames are skipped - so the animation will stop as soon as an unbaked or uncached frame is skipped.

This means that when using the AV-Sync mode you should always use the Bake option of the Rigid Body (or other simulation) cache to ensure the simulation is fully calculated before you run the animation on the timeline.


Facial / body topology of this hunchbacked cartoon model?

Unfortunately, this site does not allow for me to give you specific tutorial-like instructions, but I will try my best to give tips and address some of the problems that will pop up.

Okay, for one, you are incorrect when you say

  This means that the traditional "start with the face, then work your way back to the neck" style of facial modelling doesn't work effectively.

starting on the head will work effectively, it just needs to be adapted to fit your needs. The mesh primitive you'll need is the cube.

Subdivide it twice in edit mode with "smoothness" turned up to 1.00.

I don't know why my image is skewed, but that's (almost)what it will look like.

You can use "Import images as planes" addon to put in your concept art.

By modelling the head separate from the body, all you will have to worry about is connections. Snap to vertex will be optimal for joining them.

another of your favorite tools, especially on joints and such, will be Ctrl + V > smooth vertex. this gets rid of nasty sharp angles.

Remember that when you model limbs, you will want to extrude the selected faces all the way to the end, and afterwards add loopcuts for detail.

The hands will be the hardest, just make sure to turn proportional editing to "Connected", to avoid screwing up the other fingers.

I used a mirror modifier for all of the modelling until the end when I applied the modifier and extruded an eye.

I wasn't trying to do the work for you!! but in questions like this, unless you state specific problems you run into, it's very hard to answer without going through it yourself. Heres the base-mesh I made if you want it.

Honestly, kudos for trying, but modelling your wrappings as part of the mesh is a no-go. You can either use brasshats idea of extruding a plane, or you can sculpt them on using Clay strips, Crease, and Flatten brushes. In order to do these wraps, you have several practical options.

Heres the best way i was able to find while making wraps.
Turn on face snapping (Shift+Tab).

Left click on the model to place the cursor there, now add a plane. delete all but one of its edges. you will now need to extrude the remaining edge around the head in the place that you want the wrap to be. Don't worry if it looks like crap and won't stay on the outside of the mesh right now! We're gonna fix it!

The modifier stack you'll be creating today will look like this.

The subdivision mod adds more vertexes for the others to work with. The Shirkwrap mods target is set to the mummy, and causes the wraps to follow it closer, just like ceram-wrap in the microwave. Lastly, the solidify modifier adds thickness to the wraps.

You can now go back into edit mode to fix problems. Any parts where the mummies head is poking through can be fixed by adding a loopcut Ctrl+R.

Now you are ready to add more wraps. repeat the process with varying thickness on the solidify in order to swaddle your mummy.


Objects in entire project can no longer be edited


Assigning separate materials to a view port is not possible ( as far I know )

Alternative:
With the Node Wrangler plugin you can press Ctrl + Shift + Click on a node, and it will change it to that specific node. So you can just add an image texture to your node an swap between them.

See: http://gregzaal.github.io/node-wrangler/ ( Emission Viewer )


How to make rig that reacts to gravity or seem to behave physically correct?

How to make a cloth sim rig

The trick is getting the bones of your armature to follow the vertices of your cloth mesh. This can be achieved by parenting Empties to the verts and then setting those Empties as IK targets.

1. Make a mesh and give it a Vertex Group for cloth Pinning

The mesh is extremely simple - just a chain of edges, made in the shape you want your armature to be in its rest position.

Assign a vertex weight of 1 to the base vertex because the cap needs to stay pinned on the head and not fall off. Assign less and less vertex weight as the vertices get further from the base and closer to the tip. My cloth object has only three edges and four verts, so I assigned weights of 1, 0.5, 0.33, 0.15 (from base to tip). Pinning the cloth object with weights allows the hat to be more cloth-like in some areas (the tip) and more rigid in others (the base).

Add a Cloth Simulation to this mesh object.

In the Cloth Sim settings enable Pinning and choose your "Pinning" vertex group.

Play your scene's animation to check that the movement of this skeletal "cloth" is alright. Grab and rotate the object while animation is playing to see the effect.

2. Add Empties and parent them to the cloth's vertices

Add an Empty for each vertex except the base one. Use Snapping (ShiftS) to position them exactly where the vertices are (while in their rest position, frame 1).

If you want to change the Display Size of your Empties this can be done from the Empties Context.

First select an Empty, then Shift-select the cloth object, Tab into Edit Mode, select only the vertex that is to be the parent, and press CtrlP to make it a Vertex Parent. Repeat this process for each Empty. The location of the vertices now determines the location of the Empties.

3. Add an armature

Create a bone for each Edge of the cloth object's mesh. Snap the roots and tips of each bone to the vertices of the cloth object.

4. Add an IK Constraint to each bone

In Pose Mode select a bone and then click the Add Bone Constraint drop-down button to choose Inverse Kinematics. Set the Target for the IK Constraint to be the Empty which lies at the tip of that bone. Set the Chain Length to 1. Repeat this process for each bone.

Test your animation again and make sure the bones of the armature are moving with the cloth object.

You should have a rig that looks something like this:

5. Model the hat if you haven't already, and do some parenting

Parent the hat object to the Armature and choose Automatic Weights.

Parent the Armature and the cloth object to the character's head so that they will move with it.

Adjust the hat's vertex weights in the Weight Paint Editor if necessary.

End result:


adding vertex custom data for game engine shaders

I was aware of using vertex colors and I have used them in the past for vertex animations.
But as there was a need for 3 different data properties I didn't know how to represent the extra detail in the vertex.

I started looking for my answer from the perspective of the shader instead of blender + custom vertex data.

fortnite procedural animation

What this developer did was use a additional UV channel instead.


Specify the inheritance of location, rotation, scale when parenting objects

Copy Location Constraint

Blender has a copy location, rotation and scale constraint, as well as a copy transform constraint (ie copy all three_)  Adding all of location, rotation and scale, or copy transform with influence 1 and using world space is the equivalent of parenting.

For question example consider adding just  a copy location constraint on A targeting B

Example default Cube at location of default Camera. With offset unchecked is at exact global location. With it checked will behave similarly to a child, and be offset from parent based on its location

Leaving above the same: If we add another copy location constraint, targeting the Light, with influence 1, the cube will be at location of Light. With influence 0.5 will be half way between Camera and Light.


Resetting my transforms but I can't do an even bevel

Select your object in object mode and hit Ctrl+A and then Apply "Scale"

or

Scale your object in "Edit mode" rather than Object mode, then Ctrl+B "Bevel Edges" in will be even.


It is possible to use painting layers just like in photoshop?

You can use a layer stack for texture painting if you've got the render engine set to Blender Internal, but there are plenty of caveats to be aware of and it's perhaps not as comparable to Photoshop as you might like, although it is workable.

First, set up your interface like this:

Stuff in brackets are knobs that need to be turned or fiddled with to have things working correctly. The UV/Image Editor should be set to Paint mode in the bottom bar, the viewport shading mode in the 3D View should be set to Material in the bottom bar, you should have the T panel open in the 3D View and set to the Tools tab, and you should have the Properties editor on the Textures tab, and then the Material Textures tab below that.

You can add layers in area 3 and change their blending modes. To "solo" a texture on the model, set the slot painting mode to Image and switch the 3D View view mode to Texture, then pick the layer of choice from the list. (The 3D View must be set to Multitexture in the N panel for this to work correctly.) Additionally, there's a button to save all of the layers that have changes, but that button will fail unless you've already saved out each new layer to your disk somewhere. Use area 4 to do that (and save them somewhere where you can remember where you put them) before using the Save All Images button or you'll get an error.

In area 1 you can reorder the layers with the up and down buttons, and delete the layers with the X button on the texture datablock just below.

In area 2 you can adjust the opacity of the layers. I recommend dragging this section of the properties up to the top using the little handle with eight dots on the upper right hand corner of each section.

I recommend using the baker to merge layers together. Make a new image and set it as the active image (easiest way to do this is by changing the painting mode to Image in area 3 and making a new image.) This image will hold the merged layers. Then, in your Properties editor in area 1 enable all of the texture layers that will contribute to the merged layer and disable all of the other texture layers. Go to the render settings tab of the Properties panel (it's the leftmost tab), go down to Bake, and set the bake mode to Textures. Make sure Selected to Active is unchecked, then press Bake, wait for the bake to happen, and save out the merged layer from the UV/Image editor. Go back to the Texture Properties tab and remove the texture slots that you have enabled and replace them with a new texture slot that uses the image you baked out.

A similar method can be used to convert procedural noises to something you can paint on.

The traditional blending modes work correctly with all color channels including diffuse and specular color. They don't work with scalar channels such as specular hardness, specular intensity, diffuse intensity, alpha, and emit, which use the DVar for blending instead.

If you just want to paint diffuse textures, you can safely ignore all of this DVar stuff.

First, for scalar channels, check RGB to Intensity for the texture slot so that you can paint with the regular old brushes.

The way that the DVar works is that Blender compares the value of DVar with the value of the scalar channel in the material properties. Then, if DVar is greater than that value, the texture slot will increase the value. But if DVar is less than that value, the texture slot will decrease the value. The more difference there is between the DVar and the value in the material, the more of a difference the texture makes, and if the texture is 100% white at a texel, the value of the scalar channel will be equal to that of the DVar.

It can be confusing, so let's use alpha transparency as an example. Most alpha maps are going to have white represent 100% opacity and black represent 100% transparency. To set this up with DVar, you first put the value that black represents in the material settings, which means on the Properties for that material you would enable Z Transparency and set Alpha and Specular Transparency (aka SpecTra in a few other places) to zero. Then, you would set the DVar to the value that white represents on your texture. In this case, where the texture is white it should have an alpha of one, so you should set the DVar to one. Here's the result of this setup:

The only scalar channel that's an exception to the rule is the specular hardness channel. For specular hardness, a DVar of 1.00 maps to a specular hardness of 255 and a DVar of 0.00 maps to a specular hardness of 1. So, if you're painting a texture for, say, a Dota 2 item and you want to be able to see the specular hardness map working as it would in the Source Engine, you would need to figure out the maximum specular hardness that's going to be used in your .vmt material file, and multiply it by 4 for compatibility between Blender and Source's Phong shader. So, if I'm painting an item for Faceless Void and I want the maximum Source specular hardness to be 20, the maximum specular hardness for Blender's Phong shader would be 80. You would then divide that by 255 to get the DVar you need to accurately depict the Dota 2 shader in Blender, so in this case I'd use 80/255=0.314 for the DVar for specular hardness and then on my specular hardness map black would map to a specular hardness of 1 (which I would set in the Material properties) and white would map to a specular hardness of 80.

If you want a texture to decrease a scalar value where it's white and leave it alone where it's black, you can do that by setting the material value to 1 and the DVar to 0.


Rabbit creature's facial features are not moving with the face

When you create your rig and set it as the parent of your model, you have to choose, how the weight for the bones are created. This determines, what parts of your model are affected by which bone.
If your model is one object with several parts, all you need to do is to add all the parts you want to be affected to the vertex group. You can find that under Properties -> Object Data Properties -> Vertex Groups. You can either go to edit mode and set all the verticies you want to be affected as part of the vertec gropu coresponding to your bone, or you can go to Wight paint mode and do int there. In weight paint mode, you can also see the poses. For more complex models you would use weight paint mode, but for your model, i think manualy adding all the verticies in edit mode might work fine.
If your model is split into several objects, you need to set the armature as parent for each object. Then you can adjust the vertex groups and weights the same way.


Can not read "image texture" permission denied in windows 10 pro

Finally I found how to solve the problem.

I have downloaded blender in the C drive, in which I have windows instaled.
I have downloaded in the folder Users / user (me).
I installed it and click right mouse button, repair option.
Then I restarted the computer and solved problem.


How to make topology smooth in Blender for rounded object (helmet modeling)

Have you tried shade smoothing the whole object? If you start having problems with the normals go to: Object Data Properties > Normals > Autosmooth.


What do the Smoke Flow Advanced settings do?

These are mapping adjustments for the emission texture (specified just above them in the panel). Size adjust the scale of the texture coordinates, offset translates the coordinates. Depending on your texture, you may find it useful to animate these to give your flame a more realistic patchy/"licking" appearance.


How do I reset the 3d cursor rotation in 2.80?

You can control the behaviour of the 3D Cursor orientation via the Cursor tool - in early 2.8 builds this was found at the top of the workspace :

Enabling the Cursor tool gives you options to set whether the cursor is projected to the clicked surface and how the Orientation should be updated.

The default option is for 'View' - so the cursor is always oriented to the current view. In order to prevent the cursor from being reoriented at all, select 'None' - if you do this before moving the cursor from its initial default orientation then the cursor will remain aligned with the 3D world coordinates.

If your cursor is already skewed then you can reset it back to its default orientation by selecting 'Transform' orientation mode and then clicking anywhere in the scene not on a mesh - this will reset the orientation to the world. Once you have done this you can change the orientation setting to 'None' so that the 3D cursor remains in that orientation.

In order to set a custom orientation, you can orient a surface in the direction you want to set the 3D cursor, set the Orientation mode to 'Geometry' and click the surface to move the 3D cursor to that surface, settings its orientation.

Update

In the final release of Blender 2.8 the tools options can be found in the 'Active Tool and Workspace' panel on the right side :


Textures not showing up on objects unless selected in UV editor

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but when you say "without having to switch window layouts for every object" it sounds like you're changing window layouts, just to do the UV Mapping, which is not necessary. I'm guessing that you're using the Default layout for unwrapping and the UV Editing layout for assigning the image, and you're right to guess that there's an easier way. (this will help)

In the header of every window, there is a button all the way on the left which will let you change the window type. What you probably want is to change one window to the UV/Image Editor and another to the 3D viewport, but in the same layout. This will let you see both at the same time. (All of the layout is totally customizable; the various layouts that have names are just presets, you can even change those or add custom layouts). In fact, I usually use the Default layout and I'll change the top-right window (which is usually an outliner) to a small 3D view, and then just change the big main window to whatever I'm doing at the moment, even another 3D view.

Another problem that you might be encountering is that Blender decouples the viewport texturing from rendered texturing. The render will use the image in the material settings, but the viewport will use the image that's selected in the UV/Image Editor for that UV set. (You can have multiple UV sets on a single object, but each UV set can only have one image). This means that you can see one texture in the viewport, and a completely different one in the render. This also means that if you haven't chosen an image in the UV/Image editor, then it won't show up in the viewport, even though it will render.

Hope that helps!


Point Lamp cannot be rotated - Need confirmation

Point lamp in Blender is an object that emits light from a single point to all directions. It is impossible to rotate a single point - it remains the same. You can rotate it around some other pivot like for example around the 3d Cursor, however it will only effect the location of the point light. It makes sense for it to have rotation properties, because the type of Lamp can be changed so if another type of lamp is rotated and then changed to a Point lamp it would loose the rotation information otherwise, while right now the information is kept and it can be changed back to any of the directional types pointing at the same direction.


Compositing: Get mask of glass/ transparent materials

You need to set Alpha Threshold to 0, then all materials will be equally solid as ID Masks. Don't know what you're after with the set alpha nodes, but they don't do anything in this node setup so you can skip them.


Terminator effect, only way to make it work is using more geometry.


How to add a datetime object as custom property to a blender object

import bpy

from datetime import datetime
obj = bpy.context.active_object
obj['somedate'] = str(datetime.strptime('1900-01-01', '%Y-%m-%d'))


I can't provide explanations of all the steps, but I can explain a few and do some research of my own.

BVH:

BVH stands for Bounding Volume Hierarchy.  It is a method of grouping up the parts of your scene into bounding volumes so that Cycles only has to be concerned with objects within a BV that the current ray intersects.  This speeds up render times by eliminating unnecessary collision checking.  It does add a very small amount of extra time at the beginning of the render though to build
the BVH (i.e. split up the objects).

For more on BVH check out this answer.

Path [Ray] Tracing:

Ray tracing is the actual rendering, all the previous steps are simply getting the scene ready to render.  Ray tracing is the process of calculating the paths of light photons (called rays or sometimes paths) through the scene.

Cycles is what is called a backwards ray tracing engine.  This is because instead of tracing the rays trough the scene starting a the light source, cycles traces the rays backwards starting from the camera.  This eliminates having to waste time calculating rays that never hit the camera.

To visualize how this works say we are rendering a 16 x 9 px image.  Now imagine that a 16 x 9 pixel grid is overlaid over the camera view.  The way cycles computes the final render is by shooting a ray at the center of each pixel.

The path of this ray is then traced through the scene, interacting with the surfaces or volumes of the objects in the scene according to their shaders.

The path will stop when either 1. the ray has hit a lamp or emission shader, 2. the ray will not hit any more objects on it's current trajectory, or 3. the ray has completed a maximum number of bounces.  Cycles will then compute the color of that pixel based on the emission strength and color of the final medium it hit, the colors of the mediums it interacted with along the way, and the length of the ray.

However, if cycles only shot one ray per pixel you would end up with a pretty terrible looking result.  After all, if a surface is 50% diffuse and 50% glossy, that one ray can't act both ways, it has to choose one.  Not to mention more complicated shader node trees, or even the fact that many shaders (like diffuse) introduce a random element to the bounce of a ray.  This is solved by sending multiple rays per pixel and averaging the RGB values of each ray.  You can change the number of rays cycles shoots per pixel by changing the number of samples.


Getting Error: The Encoder Timebase is not set when trying to render finished Video sequence

It was the frame rate i used screen capture for the video file uploaded to Blender and got the message
 "the encoder timebase is not set" Error, when I checked the frame rate it was Custom 30.06 FPS I changed it to 30 FPS and everything worked perfectly.


Cycles mist pass does not appear in reflection

The mist pass is not going to get the results you are looking for. It will only output the distance from your geometry to the camera and won’t respect your shaders’ reflectiveness.  That’s why it renders so much faster than the right way to get this look, the volumetric shader for the world.


I had met this problem.   And googled about this matter, but nothing helpful.
Eventually and suddenly when I applied the "subdivision surface" modifier to the rigid bodies (Remember: not the "armatures") surprisingly it done.
So to fix this first keep in mind to be sure to apply any Modifiers relate to the rigid bodies then look after other specifics in the (game logic bricks) if needed some works.
I added this information to my mind and hope to help others.. Thank you.


First, Select the object in object mode and apply rotation and scale. Second check your model for any connected polygons that will stretch the final map. Think about it like origami, where ever you would bend your model to make a paper version, that's where you put the seams. Generally you want to keep square polygons as a square shape in the uvmap. If you have a uneven polygon attached to a square polygon the uv map will stretch the square polygon's normals to match the uneven polygon. Just something to think about.


Instance a number of empty objects on the locations of particles and copy the mesh data from an object list composed of LOD objects sampled based on the distance from the active camera:

In most of the cases, the distance have to be remapped, I simply divided by 4, but other remapping procedures can be done, even non linear ones like evaluating the distance at an interpolation:


Ok a long hard battle with my very limited math knowledge I think I came to an approximate solution.

It is not at all mathematically perfect, meaning the cube will be slightly floating at times, and will appear to slide or drift slightly, but it is as far as I could go.

I would ask anyone with a better math knowledge to improve on this solution.

You will need to set up drivers for it's rotation in such way that say rotation along Y axis will equal pi*locationX

For the tricky part, the Z height will be driver by something like:

0.5+(abs(cos(2*roty-pi/2))*(sqrt((sl**2)+(sl**2))))

Where roty is the rotation along the Y axis and sl will be the length of the side of the cube.

If you want it to react to rotation in two axis jus add the equation above to itself
0.5+(abs(cos(2*roty-pi/2))*(sqrt((sl**2)+(sl**2))))  +  (abs(cos(2*roty-pi/2))*(sqrt((sl**2)+(sl**2))))

For my case with a 1 x 1 unit cube you would get
0.5+(abs(cos(2*roty-pi/2))*(sqrt(.25**2)))+(abs(cos(2*rotx-pi/2))*(sqrt(.25**2)))


How do I model and animate a twinkling star?

Blender allows you to generate a Noise modifier for animations. This could give you a "twinkling" effect if you apply the noise to a material's value such as Emission, Intensity, Transparency, etc.

First, mouse-over the value you want to apply noise to. In this example I'm using Diffuse Intensity.

Then press I to add a keyframe. If it works, you'll see the button turn yellow.

Open the Graph Editor and click on the channel used for controlling the Intensity.

In the Graph Editor, open the Properties panel by either pressing N or selecting View >> Properties. Under Modifiers, click Noise. This will give you a set of controls to manipulate the pseudo-randomization of the Intensity. This works on any value that can be animated, including colors.


Animating plane with position, rotation and scale from data inside a text file

Thanks for the help, i ended up using animation nodes to do that. Very easy to setup and work with the nodes. This thread also helped (it was basically what i wanted to do): Answer from [Can object parameters be set from data file?]


Alt + H  in Edit Mode before apply modifier and you can solve this problem.


How to write a script to copy one key frame at the time from one armature to another?

Here's an old brute force script of mine to convert euler kfps to quaternion.  Note it will add full wxyz keyframes for any frame that has any x, y or z euler rot keyframe point.

import bpy
context = bpy.context
scene = context.scene
arm_obj = context.active_object
#arm_obj = scene.objects.get("ArmatureName") # None if doesn't exist
# all pose bones
for pb in arm_obj.pose.bones:
    if pb.rotation_mode == 'QUATERNION':
        continue
    frames = []
    fcurves = []
    dp = 'pose.bones["%s"].rotation_euler' % pb.name
    for index in [0, 1, 2]:
        # search for rotation euler kfps
        fc = arm_obj.animation_data.action.fcurves.find(dp, index=index)
        # make a list of frames that have euler rot keyframes
        if fc:
            frames.extend([kfp.co[0] for kfp in fc.keyframe_points])
            fcurves.append(fc)
    # run thru and keyframe in
    for f in set(frames):
        scene.frame_set(f)
        pb.rotation_quaternion = pb.matrix_channel.to_quaternion()
        pb.keyframe_insert("rotation_quaternion", frame=f)

    # clean up by removing euler fcurves (will coexist ok)
    '''
    for fc in fcurves:
        arm_obj.animation_data.fcurves.remove(fc)
    pb.rotation_mode = 'QUATERNION'
    '''


I think I've found the answer. U (UV mapping) > S (Smart UV Project). Then with a bit of adjustment I get this, which seems to be what I want. Plus can export to SVG, using UVs>Export UV layout, which can then be imported as a mesh too.


2.8 Rotate multiple objects around the origin in edit mode?

here's the version I had to use in my script to set the pivot point to work in blender 2.80.   by setting the transform to rotatate around the cursor, all objects will rotate around that locations and you can use shift+s to place the cursor.

context.scene.tool_settings.transform_pivot_point = 'CURSOR'


Diffuse (cos(theta) or Random) Scattering of Particle Collisions

Rough Surface
You could add some roughness to your collision object or to your particles. Fist Subdivide it. Next give it a Displace modifier with some texture. Cloud texture seems to work just fine. Then enable physics for Collision. The order of your Modifier stack is important. Collisions has to be last and Subdivisions has to be first.

Force Field Turbulence
Another option would be to add a Turbulence Force Field next to the wall.
Strength of 100 and Max Distance of 100 cm seem to work well for me.


Multiply object and place at vertices with specific orientation

You could use Dupliverts to add one copy of the object to each vertex, and then use a Constraint to orient them correctly.

Parent the rounded cylinder object to the vertex object by pressing CtrlP:

Enable Dupliverts in Properties > Object > Duplication with the vertex object selected and scale the rounded cylinder object down (S):

Select the rounded cylinder object and snap the 3D cursor to it with ShiftS:

Add an empty (ShiftA> Empty > Plain Axes), it should appear at the center of the rounded cylinder object (where the 3D cursor is). Then select the vertex object and press CtrlShiftA to make the dupliface objects real:

With one of the rounded cylinder objects selected, add a Track To constraint in Properties > Constraints and tweak the axes settings:

With the same rounded cylinder object selected, press ShiftL> Object Data to select all the other rounded cylinder objects, then copy the constraints by pressing 3D View > Header > Object > Constraints > Copy Constraints to Selected Objects:

If you then snap the vertex object to the 3D cursor, and then delete the two center rounded cylinder objects, you get this:

Removing the constraints
To "apply" the constraints to the object transforms, select all the rounded cylinder objects again:

Select one of them and press ShiftL> Object Data

Press CtrlA> Apply Visual Transform make their actual rotation the same as the constrained rotation.

Then remove the constraints:

Remove the constraint from one by pressing the X on the constraint in Properties > Constraints.

Copy it to the others with 3D View > Header > Object > Constraints > Copy Constraints to Selected Objects.


Mesh Has Different Shape in Object and Edit Modes

Your mesh might have a shape key. If you have shape keys all of the edits you make in edit mode could be stored in the shape key. Removing the shape key if you don't need it would be the easiest solution.


Texture coordinates are an array of three values for X,Y and Z.

Colour is an array of three (or four with alpha) values for R,G and B.

While we are taught to only connect matching sockets in a node tree, some differing sockets are interchangeable, colour and vector are one of these interchangeable types.

What this means is that we can connect a noise texture and texture coordinates into a mixRGB node and then connect that to the vector input of another node. This distorts the texture coordinates in a way that can give results like what you are after. You can then add another mixRGB to combine a second texture, and third...

The SpaceVFX tutorial explains this in more detail, including using it to also make solid planets by defining water and land then add some mountains and rivers to the land.


i hope, i understood problem (not sure), For toggling eyes / face etc.

you can create a simple property to control, which elements (meshes) you wanted to show / toggle.
i.e > add a property on a control bone. assuming default name is 'prop'
now, for example, you want face side (v1) when prop is 1 and face front (v2) when prop is 0.
in blender 2.8 setting up drivers is pretty fast / easy.

right click on property and copy as new driver
select face side , in object viewport display setting, right click paste as driver
select face front, do same as above step 2.
try changing property value, both objects will hide or unhide (don't panic)
select one of them, edit driver, change 'average or sum' to 'scripted' and replace expression '0 if prop==1 else 1'

select ground plane and change prop value in side bar (to test). i hope this helps.
SAMPLE FILE:


When you are planning to make those kinds of particle systems, you should use a Hair system instead of an Emitter one.

In your system the particles are being thrown from the faces and, despite you have the system freezed at frame 0 (I think Blender don't use negative frames in any simulation), it looks like some particles had enough velocity to be outside of the faces.

So the best approach to achieve your work is using a Hair Particle System. It's very simple for your purpose:

Create a Particle System and set it to Hair. The Hair strands are perpendicular to the surface, just what you want.
Change the Number of particles. The Hair Length is not necessary for you.
Under the Render properties of the particle system, select object and then set Dupli Object to your tree. Then change the size at your will.
Maybe you need to re-orient your tree in Edit Mode to align the vertical axis.

Additionally, you can create a group of a few different trees and set the Render particles to Group. The particle system is going to randomly select the trees for every strand.

Regarding to your actual situation, maybe if you set the Normal Velocity to 0, those trees would not float. But the Hair System is the best choice in this case.


Mirror vertex group (topology) isn't mirroring properly!

Suggestions

Inspect and Correct armature names. Make sure your armature has names such as

Hand.R and Hand.L  .

Copy the file for archive purposes, or duplicate scene. 3 minutes or less.
Edit to half body. Use Mirror Modifier Mesh. Make Perfect.
Apply Mirror Modifier. Full Body is result.  This may be viewed a common workflow.
Make no further changes to Body Mesh.
Perform quick and massive paint tests to see if new Body is weight paint friendly.


Understanding official blender documentation - reset button in an Addon example

In Blender 2.64 there was indeed a "Reset" button. If you download blender 2.64 and do the same tutorial you will find the Reset button. Blender added this button automatically right under your operation panel.

In a later version the Reset button has been removed hence you don't see it anymore.


A simple way is to use a global variable, although I don't recommend to make use of the global keyword on a dict directly. I suggest to use a class instead:

class G:
    pass

class OperatorA(...): ...
    G.your_dict = {"foo": "bar"}

class OperatorB(...): ...
    print(G.your_dict)

You may replace pass with class variable declarations if B might try to access it before A sets it:

class G:
    your_dict = {"default": None}

If the data is really related to let's say OperatorA, you may also use that class instead of G. Inside of a method in OperatorA, you can either refer to the class via the explicit name, or via self.__class__.


Why does Extrude and Inset not use the same measuring units?

As Jachym Michal pointed out my object didn't have uniform scale.
Object > Apply > Scale fixed it for me!


Select your arrow.
Tap on Tab to go to edit mode.
Tap A to select all.
Tap R X -90 to rotate.
Done.


can't undertand what is wrong weight paint fingers

i solved reworking on the topology of the fingers, I didn't understand what happened but ok


You can't doing logic operation when defining class attribute in python. To customize the layout of redo panel—the dialog box that usually came out when you call operator—is using draw method.
Say you want to certain property is hidden when you change another property, first you define property to toggle the change, with EnumProperty
options: EnumProperty(
        name="Options",
        default=0,
        items = [
            # identifier    name       description   number
            ('option_a', "Option A", "Active Button", 0),
            ('option_b', "Option B", "Show a Slider", 1)]
        )

items is a sequence of enum items, list of tuples. You can read the documentation here. Then you define the layout in method draw.
def draw(self, context):
    layout = self.layout
    layout.prop(self, "options")

    if self.options == "option_a":
        layout.prop(self, "prop_A")
    elif self.options == "option_b":
        layout.prop(self, "prop_B")
    else:
        ...

Make sure to draw the layout for enum property as well, unless it will not show you anything on the panel. When you define draw, blender will not automatically draw the layout for all defined properties so you have to do it manually.
Complete code:
import bpy

from bpy.props import EnumProperty, BoolProperty, FloatProperty

class PUPA_OT_FitArmature(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "view3d.fit_armature"
    bl_label = "Fit Armature"
    bl_options = {'REGISTER', 'UNDO'}

    options: EnumProperty(
        name="Options",
        default=0,
        items = [
            ('option_a', "Option A", "Active Button", 0),
            ('option_b', "Option B", "Show a Slider", 1)]
        )

    test_checkbox: BoolProperty(
        name="Test Checkbox ",
        description="Test Checkbox",
        default= False
    )

    slider: FloatProperty(
        name="Slider",
        description="Allow Change Some Size",
        default= 0.1,
        min =0.01,
        max = 2
    )

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout

        layout.prop(self, "options")

        if self.options == "option_a":
            layout.prop(self, "test_checkbox")
        elif self.options == "option_b":
            layout.prop(self, "slider")

    def testM(self, context):
        print("test")

    def execute(self, context):
        self.testM(bpy.context)

        return {"FINISHED"}

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(PUPA_OT_FitArmature)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(PUPA_OT_FitArmature)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

Result:


How can I smooth the edges of these modelled letters?

For this type of illustration work you may want to consider using bezier curve objects instead, they allow fine grained control over the curvature of your objects. And you wont have to worry about triangulation or tessellation of the top and bottom faces.

They allow easier control of curvature and guarantee smoothness, and also allow easy non destructive beveling too.

Perhaps even draw them in a dedicated illustration program like Inkscape and import them as SVG into Blender

Inkscape Drawing

Imported into Blender

Be mindful about very tight or sharp corners inside the the meeting point of the K arms they may cause trouble with beveling

Also have in mind that they have downsides and will be more limited in other aspects if you later want to do more processing. They wont work well with subdivision surface, they have more limited texturing and material capabilities. Some of these limitations can be lessened by duplicating the objects and converting the copy to a mesh later.


OK so in my case putting
bpy.ops.wm.redraw( type="DRAW_WUN_SWAP", iterations=1) worked... Before I took the screen shot in code.
Got the info from here Update viewport while running script


Errors in baking normals. I'm either doing something super dumb or I'm not using normals the way they're supposed to be used. Please help

The baking works fine, the problem is that all your details are completely parallel or perpendicular to the low poly faces normals. Baking the normals will only be able to scan the faces normals that are not parallel or perpendicular to the rays, bake normals save the faces normals direction, not the faces height.
Here, no bake possible:

Here, the oblique faces are not perpendicular or parallel to the ray so they will be baked:

If your high-poly ever go through the surface of your low-poly, tweak the Ray Distance value so that it nows begin a bit before the low-poly surface (you may also need to tweak the Extrusion value):

In your case, if I scale down one of your details and bake, as the normals are now oblique it will be saved on the normal map, the other ones won't:


Tips on making materials fewer in numbers?

Try to bake materials so you can use just one material map instead of all of it. google for 'bake materials in blender' and you will find some tutorials for sure.


You can get an outline in the viewport with a simple hack that involves a solidify modifier and a second black material.

The image contains all the setup you need. To summarize, what we are doing is:

Add a second material to the mesh you want to have the outline one, set color to black.
Add a solidify modifier with the above settings, which creates an inverted normal shell around the original mesh. Assign it the outline material using Material Index Offset.
Turn on 'Backface Culling' in the viewport so that the backface of the black outline is not visible.
To make this setup work in Blender Render and Cycles, check this answer.


How to create a slice effect on a Cylinder mesh

Here is a way to do it, but it's not mesh. I used a bezier circle and a curve.
I lined them up as shown in the first picture and pressed Control A and selected Rotation and Scale, to apply rotation and scale.

Then I had to make a break in the circle and as you can see in the second picture, I didn't line up the last control point with the first control point - left it carelessly placed so you can see it's not a proper circle.

To make the break in the circle, I went to Edit Mode, selected two adjacent control points and pressed Delete, then chose Segment.  Now with just one of those control points selected, I pressed Control and clicked with the Left Mouse button near the other vertex at the other end of the "missing segment".  Now you need to place the control point carefully and straighten the handles so they're perfectly horizontal or vertical.

Select the circle, go to Bevel, click on the eyedropper and then on the curve.
Then you can play with the Start and End sliders to open this cylinder along it's long axis.

You can assign a Solidify modifier at the end.

EDIT:
I've thought of a way of doing it with mesh using a Plane or flattened Cube (with enough segments to bend on the axis you need, and a Bezier Circle. With a Curve Modifier on the Plane, and the Bezier Circle selected as Object, and the appropriate Deformation Axis chosen, you can scale the Plane to make it fill out the Circle, and scale it back again to make it open up.


How to run a Python script without locking Blender?

For a process like baking a number of frequencies from an audio file, I use the modal timer operator.  Eg If I have a long audio file and it takes 5mins to bake one frequency out of a set of 16, I bake one then have a small wait time to allow the handler to catch an escape key which throws up a  menu to cancel (and clean up)  or continue, rather than have to wait 16x5 or kill blender.  It doesn't however let me cancel amid a bake.

For convenience I have used the BakeSoundPanel Panel class to store data on the status of the bake.

class SD_ContinueBakeOperator(Operator):
    """Continue Baking"""
    bl_idname = "sounddrivers.continue_baking"
    bl_label = "Continue"

    def execute(self, context):
        BakeSoundPanel.wait = 2
        BakeSoundPanel.cancel_baking = False
        return {'FINISHED'}

class SD_CancelBakeOperator(Operator):
    """Cancel Baking"""
    bl_idname = "sounddrivers.cancel_baking"
    bl_label = "Cancel"

    def execute(self, context):
        BakeSoundPanel.cancel_baking = True
        return {'FINISHED'}

class ModalTimerOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    """Operator which runs its self from a timer"""
    bl_idname = "wm.modal_timer_operator"
    bl_label = "Modal Timer Operator"

    _timer = None

    def modal(self, context, event):

        def confirm_cancel(self, context):
            layout = self.layout
            layout.operator("sounddrivers.cancel_baking")
            layout.operator("sounddrivers.continue_baking")

        if BakeSoundPanel.cancel_baking:
            self.clean()
            return self.cancel(context)

        if event.type == 'ESC' or not BakeSoundPanel.baking:
            context.window_manager.popup_menu(confirm_cancel, title="Baking", icon='SOUND')
            BakeSoundPanel.wait = 1000000
            return {'PASS_THROUGH'}
            self.clean()
            return self.cancel(context)

        if BakeSoundPanel.wait > 0:
            BakeSoundPanel.wait -= 1
            return {'PASS_THROUGH'}

        if event.type == 'TIMER':
            BakeSoundPanel.baking = True
            # bake a sound, when finished set self.wait to some "wait time"
            # to enable a cancel

        return {'PASS_THROUGH'}


How to find out which objects share the same color?

You can use the outliner to filter the scene collection by name.

So you can use it in order to search using the material name.

Once done select all the filtered objects using A in the outliner.


if you subdivide a plane, unwrap it, and paint a MASK as the one you can see here, you will be able to use it with a displace modifier, also use it to control the particles emission, and finally to split two materials with a mix slot.So that the object is one. Cheers.


If I'm not mistaken: based on what you're saying, you need to change a setting in your bone menu so that this deformation doesn't happen. Un-tick the box that controls this function; moreover, it's highly important that bones are not only correctly placed, but have the right mesh parts parented to them. An example of such is if the model is rotated without updating the bones themselves to accommodate this change (which then comes down to parenting). Such will result in distortion (e.g., a bone is assigned to the other arm instead of the arm it sits on).
For more on the topic of bone deformation see here: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/rigging/armatures/bones/properties/deform.html
And refer to this image for the deformation box:


If I understand your question, you want to save on your hard drive a texture from a Blender project: open a window as UV image editor window, select the texture from the drop down menu (which contains all the images in the project) and choose "Image - Save as image".


How do I hide the properties panel in the Graph Editor?

Toggle on / off with N or via View / Properties


blender 2.78 problem with bridge edge loop

It appears to me that if you select all of the vertices of the hole you are trying to cut, and rotate them 180 degrees on the y (green) axis, you will solve your problem.


Select Non-Manifold Ctrl-Shift-Alt-M and delete vertices X.

Add two loop cuts Ctrl-R to ear-ring
Add an additional edge F (selected in the image)
Subdivide the new added edge W subdivide

This should look like:

Remove some loop cuts from half torus Alt-RMB , X loop-cut until the number of edges matches the other part.

Select two open ends and search for Bridge/Loft Space


How do I make a randomized order of the array modifier?

You can achieve this by using a Particle System. Simply add in a plane, go to the Particles tab, and follow the directions:

With the plane selected, add a new particle system by pressing New
Set the number of particles to something lower, like 10
Set the End frame to 1 (make sure the Start frame is also 1)

Picture Representation 1/3:

Further down the settings:

Under the Physics tab, select No. This will turn off gravity.
Under the Render tab, set the emitter to Object, then by clicking the box, select the object you want to array/duplicate (in your case, the bubbles)

Picture Representation 2/3:

Optional:

If you don't like the randomization of the particles, set the Seed
to a different number.

Picture Representation 3/3:

You can hide the plane by putting it on a separate Render Layer or by assigning it an invisible material.

EDIT: You can also put the particles on a line by scaling down the plane on the Y axis. If you want it on a different axis, you can just rotate the plane. And finally, if you want it on a curve, simply just replace the plane with a curve.


How to fix issues with the "Back to Black" theme?

For some reason the devs of Blender have added this theme few versions earlier but haven't noticed that indeed edges in wire edit mode, grease pencil, empties,cameras and some other visible things in the 3d view are set to black, while the background color of the 3d view is black itself, which makes these objects impossible to see if not intersecting with the visible 3d grid if they are not selected (the ones which can be selected that is).

Solution is changing their colors in the User Preferences->Themes menu and then pressing "Save User Settings" so your own colors will remain when you restart Blender.
Blender devs should be notified of this. It's a good theme for people working at night but annoying and also difficult to newbies to fix yourself to make it usable.


Object with a particle system doesn't show in render

You're using the body as an emitter for the eyebrow particle system, and you've accidentally unchecked Emitter in the Render panel of the Particle Settings. Re-check that box, and you should be good to go:


How to set origin to selected vertex for 2D shapes (fast) ? (blender 2.8 +)

You can activate the "3D Viewport Pie Menus" vanilla addon,
there is a checkbox to enable "Origin Pie Menu" in its preferences.
Once activated, you can select a vertex/edge/face in Edit mode and with the shortcut choose to move origin to selection.

For curve objects: when you are in Edit mode, select a vertex, then in the Search menu search for the Origin to selection.


How to make each scene keep its viewport position?

You can use local camera in each scene/viewport.
It works reasonably well.

Choose a camera and set it as Local Camera.
And then check Lock Camera to View

Set the View panel like in this gif.
Note that I use a different local camera in each scene/viewport.


first add you blend file here to see whats going on there. https://blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/
i think this has something to do with parenting or bone contraints settings, there is a bone constraint called "child of" its works for moving a bone with another one but without parenting those bones, i think you are looking for moving the hand bone with the weapon.


How to build a Low Poly on a High Poly while being able to see both?

Lowpoly occluded wire with Highpoly surface

X-Ray disabled
Lowpoly Viewport Display

In Front enabled
Display As Wire

Standard X-Ray with occlusion

The lowpoly wires stay visible even if the surface is not visible.

Notable options to combine:

Overlays > Shading > Hidden Wire
Viewport Shading > Outline (off)


Seeing as you are using cycles, You need to create a new material and head over to the node page. SHIFT_A and add an image texture. Find your image texture and make sure you assign your object through edit mode to the material you have chosen. NOw in edit mode press u and then click Smart UV Unwrap. If that looks funny just do U and unwrap.
Gl


No, you're not doing anything wrong.
The Z-Pass is one of just a few, when not even the only pass that doesn't have a range from 0 to 1. It goes from almost Zero to infinity. Every pixels gets assigned a value that shows how far away it is compared to the camera.
If a pixel is 75 Blender Units away it gets assigned the value of 75.
If you output the Z-Pass through the viewer it will only show values between 0 and 1. Everything above 1, which is probably everything in your scene, will be shown as white.

If you are using nodes like Z-Combine it will work perfectly fine.
For other compositing purposes you'll want to use the Map-Range node:

Input the Z-Pass into the "Value". Than change the "From max" value to the object furthest away from your camera. You'll see the effect by cranking up the value.
For visualisation purposes only I recommend the Normalize-Node:

This node will take all values and shrink them down to a range between 0 and 1.
For Still images this probably is the easiest way, for animations use the method shown above.


Python- Adding menu button to add duplicate of active object at 3D cursor

For UI layout layout.operator you only need the names after bpy.ops, in your case

        row.operator("object.duplicate")

Always check the system console for error messages if something isn't working

row.operator(bpy.ops.object.duplicate())

will write to system console

Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "/Text", line 32, in draw
 File "/home/batfinger/src/BlenderGIT/qtcreator_build/bin/2.77/scripts/modules/bpy/ops.py", line 189, in __call__
 ret = op_call(self.idname_py(), None, kw)
RuntimeError: Calling operator "bpy.ops.object.duplicate" error, can't modify blend data in this state (drawing/rendering)

If you don't want the panel to show when there is no active_object add a poll method

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls, context):
        return context.active_object is not None

or not as the operator will display as disabled when there is no active object.


Image offset only applies to single frame and not to metastrip

You will need to activate a Sequencer addon, that comes included with the official Blender download.
Extra Sequencer Actions https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Sequencer/Extra_Sequencer_Actions

Change one image to the Offset value you want, then select all the other images and include the changed image last, eg. shift right-click to make this last one active.

Go down to the Strip Menu in the VSE timeline and select Copy Properties > Input - Image Offset

Now all of the other images will inherit the setting from the active strip.


How to make a way to interact with a 3D model in different ways? (Make it rotate and light up)

The Blend4Web extension should be able to do a lot of the work for you. In a few steps you can have a live web display of your model allowing you to rotate, pan, zoom. Adding interactivity such as lighting up is possible too, but requires more work.

https://www.blend4web.com/en/demo/


This is happening because you clipping value is very low. To fix it press the ‘N’ key to open the property bar. In that there is something called ‘clip’ and under that there is start and end values. Increase the end value for something like 10m or 100m. If I am right (99.99%) this solution should work. Thank you


There is no open street map in my user preferences

Probably it is not part of the standard addons packaged with Blender. You can always install new addons by clicking "Install from file" and selecting the zip or py file containing the addon. In your case the blender-osm addon.


You can use the STEP importer Addon, that was released for Blender 2.8x on January 27, 2020. It's an paid Addon, but not expansive and worth every cent.
You may visit the support thread on Blenderartists. There you'll find the link to get the Addon, too:
https://blenderartists.org/t/step-import/1203804


I could not see compsiting,scene in blender

The top header I can see in your screenshot belongs to a second 3D view window. Turn it to an Info window ("i" icon) and you will find what you're looking for.


How to remove Triangulation faces in Rendermode, problem with Edge split

In any 3D software every face is actually made of triangles. If a face is too twisted, in Render mode you begin to see the triangles within. To avoid this artefact you can use the Auto-Smooth option, if your object is not smooth shaded (like in your case) it will kill the artefact within every face. In the case of a smooth shaded object it will also smooth the angles between faces, depending on the angle chosen.


How to store variable and use it as property in panel?

Using both a pointer, property group setup. The tile width,   scene.iso_render.tile_width, is passed to the operator.  You could bypass defining and using the operator property entirely and just use context.scene.iso_render.tile_width (and other settings) directly in the operator.

import bpy
from bpy.props import IntProperty, PointerProperty
from bpy.types import PropertyGroup, Operator, Panel
from bpy.utils import register_class, unregister_class

bl_info = {
    "name":     "Render ISO",
    "category": "Render"  # perhaps wrong
}

class RenderIsoOperator(Operator):
    ''' An example operator for addon '''
    bl_idname = "render.render_iso"
    bl_label  = "Render ISO"
    bl_options = {'REGISTER'}

    tile_width = IntProperty(
        name="Tile width",
        min=0,
        max=1000
    )

    def execute(self, context):
        obj = context.scene.objects.active
        # Do the rendering here
        return {"FINISHED"}

class RenderIsoPanel(Panel):
    bl_idname = "RENDER_PT_render_iso"
    bl_label = "Render ISO"
    bl_space_type = 'PROPERTIES'
    bl_region_type = 'WINDOW'
    bl_context = "render"
    bl_options = {'DEFAULT_CLOSED'}

    def draw(self, context):
        scene = context.scene
        layout = self.layout
        op = layout.operator(RenderIsoOperator.bl_idname)
        op.tile_width = scene.iso_render.tile_width
        layout.prop(scene.iso_render, "tile_width")

class IsoRenderSettings(PropertyGroup):
    tile_width = IntProperty(
        name="Tile width",
        min=0,
        max=1000
    )
def register():
    register_class(IsoRenderSettings)

    bpy.types.Scene.iso_render = PointerProperty(type=IsoRenderSettings)
    register_class(RenderIsoOperator)
    register_class(RenderIsoPanel)

def unregister():
    unregister_class(IsoRenderSettings)
    unregister_class(RenderIsoOperator)
    unregister_class(RenderIsoPanel)
    del(bpy.types.Scene.iso_render)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()


How to change the stopwatch settings to get a “clean” counting time?

Using an external program to measure the execution time for each thread, while taking CPU scheduling, context switches, interrupts etc. into account would require an advanced profiling tool and an API for the operating system that allows to perform such detailed measurements. This is not something that can be covered in a single answer and is off-topic for Blender's StackExchange.

I think the whole premise of your question is going in a wrong direction though, since the mentioned render engines use different conceptual approaches for the rendering. Comparing the render time of LuxCore and Cycles is like comparing the speed of a race car with a cruise ship. While they both transport people from one place to another, they serve a different purpose and therefore function differently. For instance LuxCore is able to simulate certain physical properties of light, like dispersion through a prism, which Cycles cannot do. Therefore Cycles would render such as scene much faster, but the results would be less physically accurate. In conclusion the execution time is not a helpful metric for this comparison.

That being said you can get precise time measurements, compared to manually operating a stopwatch, by using a simple Python script. This does not measure the execution time per thread though.

The script gets all the available render engines in Blender and renders the scene with them. The rendering is repeated measurements_per_engine times to get multiple data points, since the systems load will impact the measurements. In the end some basics statistics are calculated and printed to the console. The console can be toggled through Window > Toggle System Console if you're using Windows, otherwise you'd have to start Blender from the command line. Alternatively you could modify the script and write the measurements to a file. Be aware that the script currently freezes the UI, but since you're trying to benchmark the render engines you shouldn't be using Blender during the rendering anyway since this would impact the timings.

import bpy
import time
import statistics

render_engines = ['BLENDER_WORKBENCH', 'BLENDER_EEVEE']

# Get the render engines registered through Python
registered_engine_types = bpy.types.RenderEngine.__subclasses__()

for engine_type in registered_engine_types:
    render_engines.append(engine_type.bl_idname)

# The number of renders per engine for which we measure the render time
measurements_per_engine = 2
render_times = {}

for render_engine in render_engines:
    render_times[render_engine] = []

for i in range(measurements_per_engine):
    for render_engine in render_engines:
        bpy.context.scene.render.engine = render_engine
        start = time.perf_counter()
        bpy.ops.render.render()
        end = time.perf_counter()
        render_times[render_engine].append(end - start)

for render_engine in render_engines:
    timings = render_times[render_engine]
    min_time = min(timings)
    max_time = max(timings)
    mean_time = statistics.mean(timings)
    stdev_time = statistics.stdev(timings)
    print(f'{render_engine}\n min: {min_time}s\n max: {max_time}s\n mean: {mean_time}s\n stdev: {stdev_time}s\n')


How to copy paste parts of Themes Setups from one theme to another?

Well as far as I know there is no builtin mechanism to do this, at least not directly through the blender UI or in a graphical manner.

You can copy individual colors from one theme to another, by hovering your mouse cursor over a color box and pressing Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V, but I don't think this is what you expect.

Other than than, Blender themes are simple XML files, you can edit them externally using any regular plain text editor.

You can theoretically copy and paste at will between them. If you use some sort of programmer's text editor with syntax highlighting for XML files and possibly code folding for easier navigation it should make the job somewhat easier.


How do I fill an area with vertices lined up in a grid over a complex surface?

Bridge egde loops and/or F2 addon can do the job here. But i dont think any tool can automatically do it all in "one click" for you here.

Bridge edge loops : select two opposite edges parts (with same accound of vertices in each) then ctrl+E and validate "bridge edge loops" :

F2 is an addon to easily make faces (mesh_f2.py). A tutorial and download link here :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImSNOuvkKsw

https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Modeling/F2


It's actually possible with just 4 verts. Select the corner verts.

Extrude them down with EZ.

Scale them to the same height if needed using SZ0RETURN

Turn them into a face using F.

Select everything with AA and hit F again.

The fill tool is smart enough to fill the holes separately and only generates 4 more ngons.

While my mesh was fine, you can play it safe and hit CTRLN to recalculate the normals. Make sure to give kheetor's comment an upvote.


How to simulate lowpoly hair motion in wind

For low poly hairs object ...

go to Weight Paint mode and draw Gradient (from red on top)
Physics Properties enable Cloth

add Wind effector Strength 1000

select Head go to Physics Properties enable Collision
(better result with Self Collision enabled)


Why can't I see my animation through camera in BGE?

If you could upload the blend, I'm sure someone might spot the answer right away.

All I can think is maybe the animation is at x,y,z location and your camera, even though it is set to look at the animation in the editor, is actually looking at a,b,c location in-game.

Make sure your animations are starting at home (0,0,0) and not offset somewhere else. After you confirm the animation, then you can move it somewhere else.

It also occurs to me maybe you have it on a hidden layer. Check the camera and object layers are visible and try again.
OOORRR the object render option is deselected from the outliner view / object's physics tab. Check that as well.


"Dimensions" not shown under "Transform" panel

Dimensions do not show in "Edit mode" only in "Object mode"


It looks to me that certain marked edges get altered with your Multires/Catmull-Clark modifier: the "new" faces created by that seem to be misplaced to the white areas of the texture that you are using.

I would suggest that first you check for the split edges. I might be terribly wrong, but it looks like you have them on your sleeve... and body too.

It's very easy to miss and set *Mark Sharp" instead of Mark Seam, for instance, and then as you set multires or subsurf modifiers, edges marked sharp are getting split, which, among other things, means that integrity of the UV is violated.

Also kindly check doubles (Edit Mode > W > Remove Doubles).

I would also suggest that after you have done it you could try applying your multires modifier for testing purposes and check the exact position of UV for the "white" faces on the hands. Blender now allows both selecting faces in the 3D Viewport and seeing them on your UV in the UV/Image editor, but vice versa too. There is a button "Keep UV and edit mode mesh selection in sync".

Hopefully this would help.


Moved folders, now PNGs are pink, how do I restore?

Select File -> External Data -> Find Missing Files.

The file browser will open, find folder with missing files here. Repeat this with all folders with textures.


You can either rotate the view so the vert is easily selected, or you can disable the gizmo while you select the vert.

In 2.79 the shortcut is ⎈ CtrlSpace or you can turn it on/off in the header.

In 2.80 the shortcut is ⎈ Ctrl` and is also available in the header.


Blend4Web can do most of the work for you. It exports Blender models correctly and also sets up the WebGL page. It's free and open source.

https://www.blend4web.com/en/


How to make light shine through a prism?

It was the "indirect light" in the "clamping" section of the "scene" properties tab.  It needs to be set to 0 for light to go through the prism.  I do not understand why it is so dark that that happens though.


you may have disconnected or deleted something on your meta-rig before creating it. Retry with a fresh meta-rig and hit the "generate" button to check if it works. You can still delete the rig object and re-generate another from time to time to check everything works... until your meta-rig is perfectly placed !


Leaves not appearing when making a particle system of trees

Without knowing your file I would say you're already on the right path... I guess the leaves are a particle system of the tree, not a collection? The problem is, the trees you are using in the particle system for the landscape cannot have their own particle system to be displayed - you have to convert and apply it. CG Geek doesn't make this really clear in his tutorial, he's just mentioning when creating the dead tree without leaves, that this one has not yet its particle system applied (implying that it is applied on the other tree).
So, what you have to do:

Go to Modifiers section of the tree.
On the Particle System modifier, hit Convert. This creates single meshes from the leaves so you have a bunch of new objects.

Now you can remove the Particle System modifier by applying it or deleting the Particle System.
Select all leaves objects via Box Select B and the tree object at last with Shift+LMB so that it's highlighted as active object (brighter outline than the leaves).
Hit J to join all meshes into one object.

Now your trees distributed over the landscape should have leaves.


You could use camera distance instead, that way it dynamically adjusts transparency relative to camera position dynamically.

Just use the Input > Camera Data node instead. Some math nodes to adjst the factor may be needed.


List of Menu bl_idnames? INFO_MT_file_export, etc

Mousing over the base of a menu gives you the bl_idname.

If you right click and select edit source it will open up the code for that space in the text editor

In this file you will find

class INFO_MT_file_export(Menu):
    bl_idname = "INFO_MT_file_export"
    bl_label = "Export"

    def draw(self, context):
        if bpy.app.build_options.collada:
            self.layout.operator("wm.collada_export", text="Collada (Default) (.dae)")
        if bpy.app.build_options.alembic:
            self.layout.operator("wm.alembic_export", text="Alembic (.abc)")

which affirms that it is a Menu class.  The naming convention used by blender for operators and menus is <SPACE>_<TYPE>_<name> where in this case it's the INFO space, is menu type MT and named file_export.

When a blender menu (or operator) is registered it becomes known to bpy.types.  If the naming convention is followed, we can find all menus in the info space, simply by using auto-complete  in the python console.

>>> bpy.types.INFO_MT_
                      add(
                      armature_add(
                      ...
                      file(
                      file_export(
                      file_external_data(
                      file_import(
                      file_previews(
                      ...
                      window(

To get a complete list of all menus, you can use python's built-in dir() function:

base_type = bpy.types.Menu
for typename in dir(bpy.types):
    bl_type = getattr(bpy.types, typename)
    if issubclass(bl_type, base_type):
        print (bl_type)


Use your StringProperty to save the image.name,
then load it by accessing the image through bpy.data.images:

imageNameStringProp = bpy.context.object.active_material.node_tree.nodes['Image Texture'].image.name

someOtherObject.active_material.node_tree.nodes['Image Texture'].image = bpy.data.images[ imageNameStringProp ]


You fluid simulation inflow has a

inflow velocity

this value can be animated with keyframes. You can increase or decrease velocity.

As well you may turn off the inflow with the enabled value.


The Elbeem fluid simulator in Blender (fluid sim for 2.79 and earlier) doesn't support force fields.

You can use a particle system with Fluid physics and force fields but the challenge is getting a good surface.

Metaballs is one approach - see Is there a way to render particles as if they were a single liquid?
The Cubesurfer addon (example here) was looking pretty good a few years ago but the development doesn't seem to have moved on from Beta.

If you need to stay with the Elbeem simulator another option is to use dynamic paint to displace the surface by turning the fluid domain into a "canvas" and rig a object as a "brush" to follow the movement of the helicopter. I've made a very quick proof of concept and you can see it here. Note - very rough just to prove it could be done.

Finally, it looks like Mantaflow (the new Fluid simulator being developed) does support force fields. There are custom Mantaflow Blender builds for versions 2.79 and 2.8 that you can download. My experience from a small amount of playing with 2.79 is that Mantaflow was not very stable. I haven't tried the 2.8 version yet... use at own risk!


bpy.props.EnumProperty can be of static nature (as in your example) or dynamic.

bpy.props.EnumProperty(items, name="", description="", default=None, options={'ANIMATABLE'}, update=None, get=None, set=None)

A dynamic enum is one whose items are calculated when clicked on, for example.

def items_file(self, context):
    items = []
    # open file
    # construct a tuple
    # append to items
    return items

Now whenever you click the enum property in the Panel, the items will be fetched from the callback.

Note:

The default parameter must be None for dynamic enum
In the callback, the items must always be assigned to a local variable, populated and then returned (to avoid crash: and this is a documented bug)

https://docs.blender.org/api/current/bpy.props.html


Scale following the location of another object

You have to drive one object's scale factor in the Z axis, by the other object's location in the Z axis. This is how you would implement it.

If object A is to be scaled based on object B's z coordinate:

Animate object B's z location by inserting keyframe points appropriately.
With object A selected, in the object properties (or the transform toolbox, press 'N' in the 3D View window), hover over the scale Z box and right-click: select add driver.
Configure the driver menu as follows:

Driver Settings -> Type = Scripted Expression
Expression is the scale value. In the example shown in the screenshot, we add to var (location Z coordinate) 1.0.
Under Add Input Variable, on the drop-down menu, select Transform Channel; Object should be your object B; under Type, select Z Location; finally, set the coordinate system (in the example below is the world space).

Now, object A's scale factor on the Z axis will be equal to object B's location in the global Z axis plus one (expression = var + 1.0) .


Why does the shape differ when importing an SVG file?

To increase the resolution of the Curve Object see this panel. There's a setting for Preview and Render resolution.

The SVG itself is also stretched in the width, internally it's showing a non-proportional viewbox property. Each coordinate is transformed according to the viewbox ratio.

viewBox="0 0 1 1.41379"

save it again from CorelDraw with proportional dimensions (can't help you with that) or edit the .svg manually (easy). Look for the line with viewBox="0 0 1 1.41379" and change it to viewBox="0 0 1.41379 1.41379", or "0 0 1 1"


How to make continuous movement of a windshield wiper with Logic Bricks?

Animate your windshield wipers moving back and forth, just one complete cycle.

Then add an Action actuator to play it. Make sure to set the EndFrame to match the length of your animation. Change the Action Playback Type from Play to Loop Stop, and choose the name of the action (by default is is named "Object name + Action")

The trick here is you want the keyboard sensor triggering a Property actuator, not the action actuator, then the property will trigger the action.
Add a game property, a boolean named "wipers" leave it false by default (blank checkbox).

Connect the keyboard sensor to a Property actuator, set it's mode to Toggle and choose the property you just created (wipers).

Now back on the sensor side, add a Property sensor, connect it to the action actuator. Set like so: Evaluation Type to be Equal, Property to be your game property (wipers), and the Value to be "True".

The full logic setup looks like this.


Why is my texture appearing differently in texture mode compared to render display mode?

My guess would be that you haven't saved the image after texture painting and/or reloaded it so Cycles isn't seeing the updated texture yet.

If you are in texture paint mode you can choose 'Save All Images' from the 'Slots' tab of the toolbar to save any edited images to disk:

You can then reload the image node in the node editor by selecting the image node and from the 'Properties' panel (Press N while in the node editor) and choose the 'Reload' button:

Note: I have sometimes found the need to switch from rendered view to another view and then back to rendered view for the image texture to update.


Shadow only plane isn't working. Keeps sending me the ground as being pitch black, and I have compared it to a working file

Any questions on this solution I came up with, just ask. Sorry for the late reply. Hope this helps the rest of you! You can use an HDRI with this BTW!


The Vector Math 'Dot Product' node takes two vectors and returns a Value based on the magnitudes of those vectors and the angle between them. If you pass this node the Normal and Incoming vectors then the result will be larger if the ray is along the normal and approach zero as it becomes more of a glancing blow. Specifically,

Dot Product = MagnitudeA x MagnitudeB x cos(angle)

So if the two vectors are Normalized (which can be ensured by passing them through a Vector Math 'Normalize' node) then the Value output by the Dot Product will simply be the Cosine of the angle between them.

This can be used to mimic the Layer Weight 'Facing' node as follows :

Or you can emulate a Fresnel effect by including a Power Math node :

Varying the inputs or manipulating the Vectors can achieve effects not normally possible with the standard 'Fresnel' and 'Layer Weight' input nodes.


Which node use in Cycle to know if 2 colors are equal?

One way is to split the color in components and compare them:

This sets the material output to green if the input colors match exactly otherwise red.

Easier but works also:

Note that the larger than node has a value > 0 (I assume this is required due to rounding errors 0.001 should also work)


What does "three tracks with bundles are needed to orient the floor" mean?

In order to create the floor you have to solve the clip first. bundles are basically solve data for the track. Your error is probably caused by unsolved/incorrectly solved tracks.

From the wiki:

  Bundles makes sense after solving the movie clip, and it works in the following way: the solved position of each track gets projected
  back to the movie clip and displayed as a small point. The color of
  the point depends on the distance between the projected coordinate and
  the original coordinate: if they are close enough, the point is green,
  otherwise it'll be red. This helps to find tracks which weren't solved
  nicely and need to be tweaked.


Why is the result of this GLSL shader asymetric when rendering with stereo "Side-By-Side"?

Moguri answered my question on the forums by posting this patch that fixes the Filter 2D issue in Blender.

The patch:

diff --git blender/source/gameengine/Rasterizer/RAS_2DFilterManager.cpp blender/source/gameengine/Rasterizer/RAS_2DFilterManager.cpp index 79ce853..1781852 100644
--- blender/source/gameengine/Rasterizer/RAS_2DFilterManager.cpp
+++ blender/source/gameengine/Rasterizer/RAS_2DFilterManager.cpp @@ -429,6 +429,9 @@ void RAS_2DFilterManager::RenderFilters(RAS_ICanvas* canvas)
        glActiveTextureARB(GL_TEXTURE0);
        canvas->SetViewPort(0, 0, rect_width-1, rect_height-1);
+       RAS_Rect scissor_rect = canvas->GetDisplayArea();
+       glScissor(scissor_rect.GetLeft()+viewport[0], scissor_rect.GetBottom()+viewport[1], scissor_rect.GetWidth()+1, scissor_rect.GetHeight()+1);
+
        glDisable(GL_DEPTH_TEST);
        // in case the previous material was wire
        glPolygonMode(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_FILL);

Note: This patch is already included in the trunk, verified at 08/25/2013


As an extension of Keavon's answer, Blender does not write still renders to the hard drive by default in the GUI. Command line renders are written to the hard drive automatically, and there is an addon which adds this functionality in the GUI. (see this post).

There are a few ways to work around this:

Render a one frame animation as in Keavon's answer.
Save the image manually from the UV/Image editor after the render is complete (press F3 with the cursor in the image editor, or select the option from the header):

For 2.8 Use the Image Editor, and select Image > Save As (or press Shift+S)

You will be taken to the File Browser with options to set the format and location of the saved image:

Render by running bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True) in the Python Console. The render will be written to the output path.
Use a File Output node as mentioned by Matt:

This will create a file /tmp/test.png. Note that the File output node has format and output path settings in the Properties region (N) which are separate from the scene settings.


Cycles not rendering Principled Volume emission smoothly

I think you probably have to use the density as an input for the emission strength to achieve that. If you need the volume to have a higher emssion value then just pop a math node in between the density and the emission strength and multiply it.
Here's my setup:
before:

and after:


ShiftD duplicating an edge will not cut an edge into the face. The duplicated edge will just hover there, unconnected to the rest of the object. Probably what you want is?...

Select the edge you want to slide along, and CtrlAltSpace create a Custom Orientation from it. (Check 'Use After Creation').
Create the edge you want to slide, in the face, any old how, eg.  K cut it with the Knife tool, not worrying about accuracy
GG slide it down all the way to the end of the face, where it will be stopped by the end vertices
GYYYour Number move the edge back again, to the required distance from the end, parallel to the orientation edge.

.. but this method will work just as well with a duplicated edge, if that's what you want.


How would you reproduce 70's style Sci fi Lighting in cycles

I would install Filmic-Blender for the epic contrast:
https://github.com/sobotka/filmic-blender

Then either model my own spaceship by extruding parts of a mesh,
or randomly generate one with a script, then edit it however you like:
https://github.com/a1studmuffin/SpaceshipGenerator

You can apply a Decimate modifier to reduce geometry at this point,
for a quicker render, if you prefer.

Once model looks OK, duplicate it.  Use Wireframe modifier on the copy,
and paint that version with a mix of Glass and Emission shaders.

Then you get that nice sci-fi Tron glow.  Play with settings to achieve desired results.
Thickness of wireframe, turn the mix Factor to more glass, less emission...

Here's the quick settings I used just to illustrate the idea:

Edit:  You can put a tangent into the Emission shader Strength input,
to get more spaceship, less glow, as it appears in your goal.


What is the format for object names in Blender and are there any limitations?

Any ID name (objects, but also materials, textures, etc.) are limited to 63 bytes - since they are encoded with utf-8, it means 63 chars for basic latin alphabet, but any special character (fancy diacritics, non-latin alphabets) will use two bytes or more.

So to answer your specific points:

No, you can use any char you want.
At best, your name can be 63 char length, less if you use fancy chars.
No, each name must be unique in a given ID type (i.e. if you have a Cube object and try to name another one the same, it will be automatically changed to Cube.001). However, you may have e.g. a material, object and texture with the same names.


Snap object to the center of another object face

Three Steps

Make origin of Cylinder at it's bottom face.
Place 3D Cursor on the top face of the Cube.
Move Cylinder (Selection) to 3D Cursor.


I saw on blender-today, yesterday, someone brought this question up with curved surface low poly artefacts.  Adjust the angle or shape of the poly faces with rotation or sub-divide to see if that helps.


It looks to me like 3 has a bevel, but the others do not have the same bevel.
Try selecting the 90 degree edges and applying a bevel (ctrl B).


You have to realize that the reference is from side in orthographic view and from front in perspective. Try to check your model how it looks in perspective. You have to adapt some changes and model it by your guess to make it real, this reference inst good for modeling by exact shape from both views.


Lots of Intersecting faces when using 3d printing, how to fix them in batch?

I hacked around this by:

Selecting all intersectng faces
Deleting only faces
Using Make Manifold

This reduced the number from 45 to 3, and I repeated the same strategy above on those 3 until there were 0.