How to render background footage with refractions and reflections?

It is not possible to render the viewport background, I've tried, and failed.

What I ended up doing is just adding in the background in post-processing, like using After Effects (Though this is possible with Blender)

If your scene uses refraction like glass or glossy layers, it might be a good idea to create a plane as the background.

So, for example purposes, I composed a scene with shards of glass, a camera, and a light.

The first thing you should do is create a plane. Then rotate the plane so that it is parallel with the camera, then move it backwards so it is behind everything else.

Then, go into the Camera by pressing 0 and go into edit mode by pressing Tab.

Then, you'll move each of the edge vertices of the plane as accurately into the corners of the camera scene as possible.

So you should end up with something like this:

Then go to the Materials tab for the plane, and add (+) a material. Change it from Diffuse BSDF to Emission. Then Press the Circle next to Color and change it to Image Texture You should get something similar to this:

If the texture appears out of scale, try changing Flat to Box.

You'll notice there is gray in the refraction of the glass. This is because it is picking up light (Or should I say, a lack of light) from the rest of the scene outside of the textured file. To fix this...

Create a sphere and scale it up so that it overlaps the entire scene. Then, add the Emission texture to it the same as with the plane. You'll notice the texture doesn't show up properly, probably is just a solid color. This is because you haven't UV unwrapped it.

To unwrap it, go into edit mode with Tab Select a ring that goes through the center of the sphere.

Then hit CTRL+E and choose mark seam. Then hit U and choose Unwrap.

Then switch the panel to the UV image editor

It should look like two ovals.

Now you'll want to scale these up and down with s. If you open 3D View and do Shift+Z to do a makeshift realtime render, you can see as you scale up and down that the texture formatting on the sphere changes. Scale it so that a single texture on the sphere is around the size of the plane, then you can close the UV editor, like this:

Click here for image, it was too big to upload

Then if we go back to the camera and render, you will see that there are no more gray spots.

This works because the aphere is providing the refraction textures. Sure, it might not be exactly realistic, but it's good use of what you have available to you.

If there are any problems, I'm willing to help. Sorry if this answer seems unorganized. I'm still new to Stack-Exchange and am currently trying to find an answer format I like.


Middle-mouse-button (to move the screen) does not work anymore

Do you use Photoshop Elements in parallel to Blender? I once ran into such a problem and it is a known issue of PE that the right mouse kind of redirected. For me, it helped to stop PE.


How to copy movements from one object to another?

Give a look here.
Basically you can link some properties (one of them is animation) from an object to some other object by selecting all the object (the object that has the animation needs to be the active, so select it at last), then pressing CTRL+L.
A dropdown menu will appear. There you can select which property to link from the active object to all the selected (but not active) objects.


Blender can't find GPU on Quadro 4000 and Quadro 2000M

The Quadro 4000 supports CUDA compute capability v2.0 as seen here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Quadro#Quadro

Blender 2.79 supports NVIDIA cards with CUDA compute capability v2.0-v6.1 as seen here
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.79/render/cycles/gpu_rendering.html#cuda

Blender 2.8 supports NVIDIA cards with CUDA compute capability v3.0 onwards as seen here
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.80/render/cycles/gpu_rendering.html#nvidia-cuda

I believe the latest CUDA toolkit to still include support for the Quadro 4000 is v8.0 GA2 which can be found here
https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-archive
or here https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-80-ga2-download-archive


You are in look 'dev mode'. Change it to 'rendered'.

Or activate 'Scene world' here:


At the end of the thread posted in your comment  Campbell Barton clearly states that you need to enable auto-execution.
You find the option in the User Preferences Dialog


Character stick to bottom of ground static objects. How do I fix this?

I found a solution that works well enough for me. Basically, I made the ground cube skinnier and added planes that extend to the death plane (the plane that restarts the scene when you fall off the edge and die).

Unfortunately, this doesn't explain why it happens, so I can't find a more reasonable solution. But maybe someone can explain that to me.


How to create a Blender camera to follow real camera in video?

Yes, what you want to do is called camera tracking, or matchmoving.  Read the related post that Scott Milner included in his comment, and I also recommend this video from BlenderGuru to help you get started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVPcT0dJmoY
If you don't get your Blender camera to move exactly the same as your real camera, your Blender objects will never "sit" properly in your video.
EDIT: I replaced the video link; apparently the old link didn't work anymore - not surprising since I posted this 3 years ago!


How do I fix flickering in rendered view mode?

That is because you use to few samples. As you increase the samples count in the render properties, below sampling, your image will get smoother. Also, it is a good idea to turn on denoising  in the layer properties all the way at the bottom. Now just press f12 to enjoy your render :)
Hope this helps


Why does "render layers" selection not influence the rendered scene in this blend file?

The reason that your point lamp has no effect is that the plane below it is 100% glossy. Lamps will not appear in reflections if they do not have multiple importance sampling enabled. Also see How do you make a lamp light up glossy surfaces?

The other objects have emission materials, which will appear shadeless (will not be affected by light sources).


How to apply subdivision surface to this geometry?

If you don't want to use Bevel modifier then change ngonal face of your mesh to quads, like in the image below. Then you won't have any troubles with subdivision.


Is there any clear definition of game-ready models?

Game-ready is a very vague definition. But across the industry it usually means being very aware of the performance impact of polygons and textures and use them as efficiently as possible:

Geometry:

Mesh is all triangles or quads(which can be easily converted to triangles), depending on engine. No ngons for sure.  Avoid high valence vertex.
Smart use of triangle budget to ensure optimal performance.
A lot can be done with shaders and textures these days, so the geometry is likely going to be quite simple.

Textures:

Maximize use of UV space, wasted texture space is wasted memory.
Textures in power of 2 (1024x1024, 4096x4096)
Use texture size that's appropriate for the size of the object on the screen.
Usually a single object has a single material and single textureset(1 albedo, 1 normal, 1 roughtness map for a typical PBR workflow). This ensures that the object can be drawn with one drawcall for optimal performance.

Workflow:

Note most of these requirements only apply to the end result, as you are creating your models, you can use multiple textures, multiple modifiers, even ngons temporarily, until you are ready to export the final model.
Most game models benefits from having a detailed normal map, which uses a low-poly mesh combined with a normal map to represent additional surface bumps. So often you'd have to model the geometry twice, once as a high poly model, and once more as a low poly model, in order to create a baked normal map.


This is not possible in a direct and interactive way.

Firstly, Blender can connect to a URL and retrieve the raw html in text form. However, Blender cannot render this html into a visual format and then use it as an image texture. There may be online web services that render an html document into an image (like a screenshot), but Blender would then have to download that image before importing and applying it as a texture.

Secondly, images or videos that are sourced through a URL cannot be directly set as the texture source for a material. The files would have to be downloaded via python and then loaded via a local filepath value. This is possible but would require some steps with scripting, and would not be immediately interactive.

The same goes for a video file or a sequence of images. They would all have to be downloaded from the remote URL location before being able to be loaded into blender as textures.


No Camera Found in Scene error message, when clearly there is a camera. Why?

Solved the issue. I had created a second scene where I added a separate HDRI to use in the compositor for some fun effects. Apparently all your scenes require a camera no matter which scene you wish to render.

So once I added a camera to the second scene, the camera in Main Scene finally worked.


Link an object from a different Blender file and be able to move it around while retaining its modifiers

Place the object in a group (fine for it to be a group of one) in the first file (the one with the object you want to link in) and link that group (instead of the object itself) in the second file.  You will be able to move the object around in the second file right away, the un-applied modifiers it had in the first file will still be there, and changes made to the object in the first file later will update in the second file.


Worm/Tentacle/Tail/Spine Animation with ease

Consider using a Spline IK on the armature.

In the animation above the influence of the constraint is keyframed.

Animate the curve as part of your animation.
Animate influence of Spline IK constraint as part of your animation.
Your bones will flow fluidly under the control of the curve.
Save poses.  Many options.

Attach this in pose mode.

Bones in yellow conforming to a curve.  Influence is 1.0 full strength.  The image above.

No bone stretching is depicted here to have length constant.  You are the artist. You can change the setting.

The target curve of the constraint beveled in blue. The image above.

Constraint influence set to 0.0.  No strength.  Bone are [parallel] to XY plane [ground].  Image above.

In the image above you see the curve in edit mode and the bevel for visibility.  You need not render the curve.

In the image above we see only the final bone positions.  The last bone was selected for the IK Spline Constraint.  The chain length specifies how many previous bones are included.

Animation data in graph editor for the Spline IK Constraint Influence.


Particles disappear if I modify any parameters

Every time you change parameters for particles, the cache for the simulation needs to be updated (re-cached).

For Blender 2.79

Press Alt+A to run the simulation again.

In Blender 2.8

Move to the first frame of the timeline (or the first frame of the simulation) and press the space bar


Don't understand why holes needs to be connected to edge

There's evidently some critical conditions that an ngon can't exist under.
If you take an example with only one hole, you'll see you are completely unable to dissolve these edges.

When I cut two holes I got a different result from you, and I was unable to dissolve any edges.

Until I added a new edge in the center like you have, and then you are able to dissolve a couple.  I get one less edge than yours.

But each of these remains a shape with a definite inside and outside, and that allows a face to be constructed from it.
I'm unaware of the exact limits placed on ngons, but my best guess is that these are very close to the simplest shapes possible that still allow you to draw triangles without drawing through an area where the mesh shouldn't have a face.

(I kind of misplaced the X here, maybe)
You can use a Triangulate modifier in Wireframe view to visualize.


The templates files are only meant to be used as starting points, you don't need to replace any of them.

In blenders text editor choose the Templates->Python->Operator File Import, modify the contents in the text editor and save it to a file using Text->Save As. The best place to save the file would be in your config folder. You could save it to your desktop and use the Install Addon From File button.

Once you have saved it into your configs addon folder, you can enable the addon in your preferences and use your import addon.


Why can I not move bones in pose mode with mouse?

Maybe you enabled auto key only for location: the image shows the correct combination for inserting location, rotation and scale keyframes every time you move a bone in a frame.


What specs are required, and what software do I need to make a Render Farm?

Hardware:
(pictures from the blender website) https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/

Since you are running a "Render Farm," you do not need the monitors, mice, or graphics tablets.
I would recommend buying good graphics cards for your nodes, as GPUs seem to increase render speed by quite a lot.

Software:

All you need is linux, windows, or MacOS and blender (https://www.blender.org/)


Controlling the amount of fire by keyframing the Flame Rate works for me:

However it doesn't affect the smoke.

To affect the smoke as well, you could try animating the Volume Factor:


Set the Pivot Point to 3D Cursor and the 3D Cursor to the end that should not move while scaling.

For an exact position you may want to snap the 3D Cursor to the selection (Mesh -> Snap -> Cursor to Selection).


Is it possible to make a modifier with a python addon?

No, the modifier API is currently not exposed via Python.

Arguably, Python is too slow to do realtime operations on mesh data which can have millions of faces.

Though there is some possibility of something faster using Python, NumPy for example or maybe eventually even PyPy.


How to make a material transparent but not its texture (Blender Render)

In the texture tab, scroll down to Influence section and enable Alpha.


way to customize face colors with the overlay face orientation

Yes, you can change it in the preferences in "themes" part for the 3d viewport:


So the eventual answere to your problem is microdisplacements
It is a concept that if you have enough uniform geometry in your mesh , you can displace you mesh in different directions to form some interesting patters or designs , to use it , you can
Add a plane and subdive to get upto 10k faces
Add a displace modifier and select add texture
In the texture tab (bellow materials tab)
open your added texture(in modifier) and change it from image to cloud(for example)
Now your mesh has alot of bumps nd valleys , this is a simple example of micro displacements
Ususally this displacement is controlled by a image texture (in this case the cloud texture is a procedurally produced image texture) where darker areas result in deeper displacement and lighter result in higher
In your case a displacement map of wires can help , wher u can find , that can be solved by u
For more detailed informstion visit https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/modifiers/deform/displace.html


Is there a way to drive "Mute a node" or Toggle "Auto Refresh" in the Image Texture Node in Movie / Sequence Image Mode

Those properties are not animatable. You can't add a driver to them. Although they can be used to drive other properties, as you noticed.
However as stated in the comments you can use a Mix RGB node and drive the factor field, to be 0 or 1 for True or False.

Use the first Fac to be driven by the Auto Refresh custom property, and the second Fac to be driven by the Mute property. I set it to black but you can also use a Mix shader with a transparent shader like so depending on what you want to achieve.


Quick and dirty:
when the render looks fine when zoomed out just double the resolution and it should look good when displayed in screensize.


Select your rock, in edit mode clear all seams, mark another set of seams different from the previous set, create a new UV map (name it "target"), unwrap the mesh, in the image editor create a new blank image and save it to the HD.

Go to the render tab, Bake tab: Bake Textures.
This procedure creates a 2D image - with visible seams - that can be doctored with a 2D image editor and then used as texture with the "target" UV map.
Make sure not to touch the borders of your new image while doctoring, or you'll create new visible seams.


Searching for text in the properties panel

Some of the way there.

Here is a script that looks at all the panel classes in the 'PROPERTIES' ui area.  Technically I've looked at all modules in bl_ui having a name beginning with "properties_".  Conveniently each of these modules will have a classes list.

Alternateively could have looked for panel types in bpy.types and checked if the bl_space_type == 'PROPERTIES'

If the panel's label doesn't contain the word (lower case check) then it is unregistered

Result of running search on "collections"

import bpy
from importlib import import_module

def search_mark(self, context):
    layout = self.layout
    layout.label(text="FOUND", icon='INFO')

search_str = "mist"

import bl_ui
pmods = [m for m in dir(bl_ui) if m.startswith("properties_")]
for pm in pmods:
    mod = import_module("bl_ui.%s" % pm)
    for cls in mod.classes:
        if cls.__name__.find("_PT_") == -1:
            continue
        if getattr(cls, "bl_label", "").lower().find(search_str) > -1:
            cls.prepend(search_mark)
            print(cls.__name__, cls.bl_label)
        else:
            bpy.utils.unregister_class(cls)

the output searching for "mist"

EEVEE_WORLD_PT_mist Mist Pass

there is a mist pass panel, somewhere I have no idea where lol.

To UNDO this, type the following  command into python console

bpy.ops.script.reload()

to reinstate all panels.

Result on searching for "vertex"

DATA_PT_gpencil_vertexpanel Vertex Groups
DATA_PT_vertex_groups Vertex Groups
DATA_PT_vertex_colors Vertex Colors
PARTICLE_PT_vertexgroups Vertex Groups

for these could grab the lhs of name, eg 'DATA' and for a properties space, set the context tab via

space.context = 'DATA'

or via a py console example, will set one of the properties area's context to 'DATA'

>>> for a in C.screen.areas:
...     if a.type == 'PROPERTIES':
...         break
...
>>> a.spaces.active.context = 'DATA'

Finally adding a panel with a search string input and a reload button would finish this off.  Apart from hacking the icons, I'm not aware of any method to highlight the tabs.


Is there a way to render single frame using network rendering in Cycles?

I'm not sure if a render farm currently exists to do this, but theoretically it's easy. Simply use a method called Image Stacking, where you render the same image multiple times with different seeds and then mix them together to average out the noise.

The first two images would mix 50/50, the third would mix into that by 33.3%, the fourth 25%, 5th 20%... basically 1/n where n is the number of images in the mix.

This is the method that renderfarm.fi uses, but I believe they have a minimum animation length so you can't use it to render a single still image.


What file format should I use for rendering?

Animation

It's generally good practice to render to an image sequence first, then combine all the images into a video format after the render is complete. This allows for the render to stop (whether the result of a crash or just canceling the render to use the computer for something else) and still be able to resume by setting the Start frame to the frame after the last rendered and restarting the render.

See my answer here for details.

Stills

As a personal preference I use PNG as a kind of default, but each format has it's advantages. The format you use will also depend on what kind of data you need to keep and how much disk space you can spare.

See the wiki for descriptions and a list of supported image formats:

  BMP    Bit-Mapped Paint loss-less format used by early paint programs.
  Iris  The standard Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI) format used on some Unix OS machines.
  PNG    Portable Network Graphics, a standard    meant to replace old GIF inasmuch as it is loss-less, but supports    full true color
  images. Supports Alpha channel.

  Enable the RGBA button to save the Alpha channel.

The RGBA option is in Properties > Render settings > Output:

  Jpeg  Joint Picture Expert Group (name of the consortium which    defined it), an open format that supports very good compression with
  little loss of quality. Only saves RGB values. Re-saving images
  results in more and more compression and loss of quality.
  Jpeg 2000
    Uses the Jpeg 2000 codec.
  TARGA and Targa raw    Truevision Advanced    Raster Graphics Adapter is a simple raster graphics format
  established in 1984 and used by the original IBM PCs. Supports Alpha
  Channel.

  Enable the RGBA button to save the Alpha channel.
  Cineon    format produced by a Kodak Cineon camera and used in high-end    graphics software and more directed toward digital film.
  DPX    Digital    Moving-Picture eXchange format; an open professional
  format (close to    Cineon) that also contains metainformation about
  the picture; 16-bit    uncompressed bitmap (huge file size). Used in
  preservation.
  MultiLayer    an OpenEXR format that supports storing multiple layers    of images together in one file. Each layer stores a render
  pass, such    as shadow, specularity, color, etc. You can specify the
  encoding used    to save the MultiLayer file using the codec selector
  (ZIP (loss-less)    is shown and used by default).
  OpenEXR    an open and non-proprietary    extended and highly dynamic range (HDR) image format, saving both    Alpha and Z-depth buffer
  information.    Enable the Half button to use the 16-bit format;
  otherwise 32-bit floating point precision color depth will be used.
  Enable the Zbuf button to save the Z-buffer (distance from camera)
  info.
         Choose a compression/decompression CODEC (ZIP by default) to save disk space.
         Enable the RGBA button to save the Alpha channel.
         Because OpenEXR is so new and previews are generally not supported by Operating Systems, enable Preview to save a JPG image
  along with the EXR image so you can quickly and easily see what the
  basic image looks like.
  Radiance HDR  a High Dynamic Range image format that can store images    in floating point (with light brighter than 1.0) - 32bits
  per    channel.
  TIFF   Often used for teletype and facsimile (FAX) images.

Some further notes on a few formats:

PNG: PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a lossless format, meaning that the data can be reconstructed exactly as it was before being compressed. PNG supports true color color depth. Blender also supports 16 bit PNG, which gives a larger range of possible colors.

Because PNG is lossless, the Compression slider in Render settings > Output only affects the file size (AFAIK, the only disadvantage to setting it to 100 is it might take more CPU time to compress/decompress)

As an example, I saved two pngs, one with 100% compression and one with 0% (Uncompressed). The uncompressed png is 2MB, and the fully compressed png is 18.7KB. The images are identical.
JPEG: JPEG is a lossy format, which means that data can not be reconstructed exactly as it was before being compressed. (see a comparison to PNG here) However, as a result JPEG takes up a lot less file size.

Instead of a Compression slider there is a Quality slider when JPEG is selected as the output format. This refers to how closely the decompressed image resembles the original uncompressed image.

Here is an example. The left most image is a fully compressed PNG (36.3KB), the middle image is 100% quality JPEG (20.3KB), and the right most image is a 0% quality JPEG (8.5KB). At 1:1 they seem pretty much the same, but when scaled up the differences are more noticeable:

OpenEXR: EXR Is a format for HDR (High Dynamic Range) floating point images, and is capable of storing deep color depth of 32 bits per channel. Blender supports Half precision (16 bits per channel) and full precision color depth EXR images (32 bits per channel). As a result, these files can get quite large, especially when using Multilayer EXR). For example, a 201x167 image saved with lossless ZIP compression is 199.1KB

These images are good for keeping every bit of data around (including render passes in the case of Multilayer), which can be useful for compositing.

Note that when rendering a still, the image is stored uncompressed in memory, so you can render an image then save it multiple times in different formats (with different compression ratios).


How to select objects by collection from selected objects in the scene with Python?

Sample script based on your collection name.

import bpy

sel_objs = bpy.context.selected_objects

#identify and choose collection union
col = bpy.data.collections["Abete massiccio"]

# create a list requiring both objects selected and in chosen collection
objs_in_col = [obj for obj in col.objects if obj in sel_objs]

for obj in objs_in_col:
    print("Object name: %s \t Collection: %s" %(obj.name, col.name))


How to animate an object so it follows the slope (normal) of another object?

I got it to work using a second mesh and the shrink wrap modifier (not the constraint).

First thing you need to do is add a single triangle mesh object.

Then place your cone object so it is sitting on top of the triangle.

Select the cone object, then  shift  select the triangle.  Now tab into edit mode.

In edit mode select all three vertices and press ctrl+P, then choose make vertex parent.

Back in object mode add a Shrink Wrap modifier to the triangle object.  Set the target as the ground plane and set the mode to project.  Make sure to select the right axis.

The cone should automatically adopt the z-y coordinates of the triangle, and the z height and normal of the ground above or below the triangle.  If the triangle doesn't follow the ground properly try checking both the Positive and Negative options in the shrink wrap modifier.


Yes you can't is the simple answer. You have to upload your textures and apply them in world. As for selecting faces, in Blender you need to assign a "material" to the parts you want to call a "face" in Second Life. If I can attach a photo you will see an object created in Blender, material slots applied (Black,red, green, yellow, blue) and, each of those are faces 0-5 on the object in SL.


Gradient material separate z axis and x axis

Texture Coordinates then Mapping node connected to your gradient texture. Just play with the rotation and you'll be all set.


Ignoring a channel when removing gaps in the VSE

I think I've found a solution. I don't know if it's the best solution, but it does appear to be a solution.

Place the playhead in the gap. Select all strips to the right. This won't select the audio overlay because it doesn't start to the right of the playhead, but it will select everything else. Then Grab, and manually move left so it overlaps the strips to the left of the gap. On confirmation, the two strips to the right will have been moved so that there's no gap, and every other strip will have been removed the appropriate amount.

If, however, I come back in ten minutes discovering that everything's been garbled because all my carefully placed overlays and crossfades have been rearranged, I will scream here, and you'll know it didn't actually work.


Why parented to bone object has offset in local space?

To remove offset from relation:

Clear origin for child object, ALT O (translation only) or clear parent inverse, ALT P (translation+rotation)
In bone's options enable Relative Parenting


Simulating piece of cloth between two moving points

OKay. Got it working. What I was missing was adding a weight map for each hook, instead of only having the pin group as a weight map. Doh!


I would suggest checking out ShapeDo, which is like github for 3D cad files.

It suppoorts blender files and tracks changes much better since it "understands" 3D files and doesn't just compare the raw text or binary file content. Also supports previews for collaborations, and is still free as far as I know.


Black and white images can be used as a Mask in the texture paint mode, setting them up in the Slots panel.
The cool thing is that you can use that image you have there as a mask, and invert it to paint outside that area as well.
video on mask use with mask tool and stencil mask


How can I do fog that is denser at the bottom?

This is a cheat as well as  faster render. Place a textured plane in front of the horizon with transparent at the top and sky horizon color at the bottom. Use a linear gradient to alter the Fac value of the Mix Shader.


iterate over edge indices list and remove the non unique pairs

Here is the node tree:
The tricky part for me was the "recursion" which AN does with this reassign parameter.

and here is the result in action:
https://youtu.be/9Fdx1kxaJgE


Cycles option to turn off texture tiling?

Cycles node system is very flexible and allows you to manipulate the UVs in pretty much any way you like.

The UV channel can be used as if it were just an image where U and V correspond to red and green channels.
These can be separated and manipulated using math nodes to create a mask you can use to clip the texture.
Here's a screenshot of a node setup doing that:

This uses the clip mask group to mix the texture to black. You could also use it in a mix material node to mix with a transparent shader or the like.

While making such node groups is a relatively long process, you can append or link the node group whenever necessary after you've made it once.


Basically you want to use the 'Snap with Active' part of the snap feature. The active element is highlighted white by default instead of orange, and it is the individual vertex/edge/face you most recently interacted with. If you need to set your active vertex to something new, deselect and reselect that vertex.

Then it's just a simple matter of selecting the correct active vertex and snapping your mesh into place.


How to reset the GUI - without using the menu...?

Approach 1 (recommended)
Open the directory where Blender is installed and type cmd in the address bar and press enter. Then run the following command to start Blender and set the Resolution Scale to its default value.
.\blender.exe --python-expr "import bpy; bpy.context.preferences.view.ui_scale = 1.0"

If auto-saving for the preferences is disabled, you need to manually save them.

Open the preferences (Edit > Preferences).
Click on the hamburger icon in the lower left corner.
Select Save Preferences.

Approach 2
This will completely reset Blender to its factory default settings.
Open the directory where Blender is installed and type cmd in the address bar and press enter. Then run the following command to start Blender with the factory settings.
.\blender.exe --factory-startup

Next you need to manually save the settings.

Open the preferences (Edit > Preferences).
Click on the hamburger icon in the lower left corner.
Select Save Preferences.


Python 2.8 - eliminating shadow by adding emission shader to background plane/image

I suggest that you learn how to do this manually first.

To create any material you will need a material output and link the emissive shader to that.
Use the Shader Editor to review your result.

import bpy

bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT')
bpy.data.objects['Sky'].select_set(True)

obj = bpy.data.objects['Sky']

skymaterial = bpy.data.materials.new('SkyMat')
obj.active_material = skymaterial  #UNWANTED RESULTS START HERE
skymaterial.use_nodes = True
nodes = skymaterial.node_tree.nodes
nodes.clear()

# Create needed Nodes
nodeOut = nodes.new(type='ShaderNodeOutputMaterial')
nodeEmission = nodes.new(type='ShaderNodeEmission')
nodeTexture = nodes.new(type='ShaderNodeTexImage')

# Link them together
links = skymaterial.node_tree.links
linkOut = links.new(nodeEmission.outputs[0], nodeOut.inputs[0])
linkTexture = links.new(nodeTexture.outputs[0], nodeEmission.inputs[0])

# Configure Texture node
img = bpy.data.images.load('//test.png')
img.name = 'Test'
nodeTexture.image = img


Following the question, its comments and the answer from the OP, my though is this is not the axis mirror which leads to the situation (or please @BenMora explain a bit more).

Here is a setting with an operator derived from the script templates.

It's showing in blue the faces index, in green edges index and in red the index of vertices. We are here in face selection mode, but the same occurs whatever the mode is.

Element's index is a way to identify it in the mesh. To be simple, it is an integer designing the element (in a separated range for vertices, edges and faces).

What is happening here (experimental conclusions):

In wireframe mode, Blender draws following the index. So bigger index is drawn over the smaller one.

And this is visibly the same for armatures.

To tell the truth, before this question, I've never noticed it... but thinking about it, I'm quite sure this is a wanted behavior for performance reason... maybe.

Please comment if this is to report to the Foundation in the bug tracker.


The first method would be to use Array / Object Offset:

Create your cube, go in Edit mode, move it away from its origin:

Create an empty at the exact same point as the cube origin:

Give your cube an Array modifier, choose a Count of 12, deactivate Relative Offset, enable Object Offset and choose the empty as Object:

Rotate the empty 30° on the Z axis, the cube instances rotate around:

You can select the cube again and, in Edit mode, move/edit it. Use the Array Merge option if you want the instances to stick to each other.

The second method would be to use Instancing:

Create a 12 vertex circle, extrude inwards, give it Instancing > Faces:

Create your cube, parent it to the circle, it will repeat circularly:


Do I need to apply a mirror modifier before exporting to Unity?

In exporting options, you may see that in many cases there is Apply modifiers option, and often it is ticked by default:

Example is for .ply, the same behaviour is in case of exporting to .fbx, .obj, .x3d. Note: default options of Blender itself also may be changed.
In this case your exported objects/s will be actually mirrored without your action.
With that option unticked you will notice difference because if not applied, modifiers change how the object is displayed and rendered, but not actual geometry.


Pull clip info from crossfades/fades via python

You can hover over an Effect strips Input boxes and get the Python variable:

So you just need to call .input_1 on the effect strip to access the first effected strip. Then you can access its attributes like normal (e.g. .filepath) as it's just a reference to the original strip.

The best help is your autocompletion (Ctrl+Space) in an interactive Python console view. So just write the complete bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].sequence_editor.sequences_all['Cross'].input_1 into one and hit the . (dot), then call the autocompletion and it will print you any possible accessible attributes of this strip.


Blender saves the files correctly.
Ngons have nothing to do with this (always search for the meaning of words before using them).
Different applications support different formats of 3d objects and object attributes. No single application is compatible with the many different formats that exist.
To open the files in a different app, then you have to export in a format that the other app can deal with.
When you convert an object to another format, not all attributes (textures, animations, constraints, modifiers, armatures or simulations) will be saved a s part of a format that does not support such attributes.


Why are there dark patches in my rendered drop diamonds?

It would be easy if you uploaded the blend file, or drawed where are the dark patches, because I can't see them in your image, but I simply think that the "Dark Patches" you mentioned are simply reflections from the area around your scene that has not a background. Think about it, the left and right portion of your scene doesn't have anything for the ring to reflect, if you are not using a HDRI, which I think you're not, then the dark patches are simply reflections of empty areas.

As for the shader you have, I don't know why you have 4 different colored glass shaders adding on top of each other, might be something to do with that, it should be easier to reacreate the same material with a Principled BSDF shader.

Also your top image is a rendered one, in which engine you are rendering? Cycles or Internal? That might change things as well, your rendering options like bounces can affect that kind of thing too, that's why it's much easier if you uploaded your blend file.

But I hope this answer helped you,


How can I extrude an edge along the local axis?

This is because the Extrude and Move operator seems to always use Normal orientation.

To use the selected orientation (in this case Local), cancel the operator (Esc or  RMB), then press GZZ in order to use the normal Move operator:


How to unwrap grid-topology mesh without stretches?

Since unwrapping is mapping a 3d surface onto a 2d plane, there are a limited number of ways to avoid stretching.

In general the more you avoid stretching, the more seams you will get.
Note that stretching is not necessarily so bad as to attempt to avoid it entirely, while good to avoid extreme cases - baking, texture painting - etc, will compensate for subtle stretching so that its not such a problem. Unless you're painting onto the 2D image directly.

In the example of a 'vase' like object, (lathed 2d shape), you're likely be better off accepting some so pixels are aligned with the UV's (the third one, in your question). ... and not diagonally shared across faces which may look odd at low resolution/mipmaps).

UV unwrapping for games/realtime-engines is typically a trade-off between:

number of seams
distortion
maximum texture usage
avoid bleeding with low mipmaps
... and the time it takes you to create.

Whats good or not depends on your project.

Some ways to avoid stretching include:

Use Blenders Unwrap tool (and do some manual pinning of UV's).
Create a mesh out of flat surfaces and project each surface separately,see: Smart Project which automates this.
For quad-dominant meshes a grid can unwrap neatly to UV space.See Blender's Grid Unwrap tool (called Follow Active Quads in Blender).The amount of stretching depends on how regular the surface is.
Unfold the mesh into UV-space (think of unfolding a paper-model), See the addon referenced here.Note that unfolding may only be of limited use for UV-mapping since it tends to create a lot of seams and overlapping regions.Its best suited to low-poly meshes.


Is there a way to Move a VSE Strip without moving its Keyframes?

In the NLA Editor you can do one of the following:

Created a NLA-Strip by clicking the  next to your action.
Temporarily unlink the the datablock in the Animation Data panel while you preforming the transformation.


Normal direction screwing up rendering in blender/UE4 but not keyshot?

The solution is to recalculate the normals and then export it as a .dae.

When reopening it, it renders correctly.


How to scale one face of a skewed cube in the same skewed axis

Change Pivot Point - Individual Origins
Select skewed (side) edges only
Scale

To move this selection in the skew direction change Transform Orientation > Normal
and move G in Y axis.

(Thanks Robin Betts for extension.)


Blender Scripting: ERROR: too much data in this layer, compared to elements in mesh, skipping!

This error handling was originally introduced in commit rBAde7d0111100f as a fix for T43718. This issue appears to be that the file contains more entries in the FBX layer data than there are elements of e.g. vertices, edges, polygons or polyloops. If the handling of the FBX importer is correct, then this is an improperly written FBX file. Blender will try to skip the wrongly formatted data.
You should check if CLO has released an update that fixes the issue and if not, export to a different format. If they provide a way to report bugs I would suggest you contact them so that they are aware of the issue.


2.80 is not finished yet. If you are afraid of something broken, you should not use experimental builds. There are broken things in them - that's a fact. So you should not do anything about 2.80, but you can if you want to and you can download it every day if you wish - you would get some updates daily because they are built pretty much every day(see the build dates at the download page). 2.79b version is stable and complete and you should use it for work that you cannot afford to get broken at some point.

If you wish to keep up to date with the development, you can see links on this page: https://www.blender.org/get-involved/developers/. You can find Blender Developers Blog there, you can even see developer Weekly Meeting Notes. There is also this guy doing Blender Today Live streams on YouTube. You will also find many discussions some unavoidably about 2.80 on BlenderArtists.org forums


How can I do a render of the 3D Viewport, in Python, so it uses the shading style I've selected?

The render.opengl() operator is working fine for all modes. But notice that it takes a screenshot of the first viewport found, quoting the docs: "Take a snapshot of the active viewport". So in case you have multiple 3d viewports open at the same time it takes the first one in the area list of your screen (Screen.Areas).

Obviously the simplest option is to close all 3d viewports except one, set the shading mode, call the operator and pass write_still=True to take the screenshot as well as saving the file into the default Output directory:
>>> bpy.ops.render.opengl(write_still=True)

In case you have multiple viewports open and you'd like to specify the area for the screenshot, you can override the context when calling render.opengl() operator. See the following demo on how to find the first 3d viewport set to 'WIREFRAME' and take a screenshot:
import bpy

C = bpy.context

for area in C.screen.areas:
    if area.type=='VIEW_3D':
        # Check for WIREFRAME, SOLID, RENDERED, MATERIAL
        # area.spaces.active.shading.type
        if area.spaces.active.shading.type == 'WIREFRAME':
            override = C.copy()
            override['area'] = area
            bpy.ops.render.opengl(override)
            break

In order to set the filename, just temporary assign your path to the RenderSettings.filepath property. Demo on how to take a screenshot of the first viewport found set to 'WIREFRAME' and save the result to the directory of the current blend file:
file_path = bpy.path.abspath("//screenshot")

for area in C.screen.areas:
    if area.type=='VIEW_3D':
        if area.spaces.active.shading.type == 'WIREFRAME':
            # Store the current output path and set it
            temp = C.scene.render.filepath
            C.scene.render.filepath = file_path

            override = C.copy()
            override['area'] = area
            bpy.ops.render.opengl(override, write_still=True)

            # Restore the output path
            C.scene.render.filepath = temp
            break

print (file_path)


Actually a linked duplication of your object would be simpler than any solution: Duplicate your object with AtlD, flip it on the Y axis with SY-1 and move it so that the 2 objects cross each others.
But other than that I was able to do it with the Array modifier. It looks like you can't shift the object with the Mirror modifier(?).

Create an empty close to your object.

Give your object an Array modifier, disable Relative Offset, enable Object Offset with the empty as Object.

Select your empty, flip it on the Y axis with SY-1. The object is mirrored on the Y axis.

Move the empty so that the objects cross the way you want.


does anyone knows how to make spiral clouds (hurricane) for a planet?

You can use material nodes to create this spiral-like pattern on curved geometry. With cycles you can make use true displacement, which is important with light from acute angles.

Unwrap your object or use object coordinates if possible. With a distance node, we can create a gradient, starting at $0$ in the center and increasing outward. If we use this value as the angle for a Z rotation (with a mapping node) you can twist the texture coordinates into spiral.

These spiral mapping coordinates can be used as the input for any texture, for example a noise texture. I will use it to color a diffuse BSDF.

You can also use the diffuse texture to create a displacement of the surface by connecting it to a displacement node. Use a colorramp or rgbCurves node to shape the ridges and valleys of the displacement.

The reference seems to have some ridges and noise in its outer areas. We can replicate that with a radial stripe texture. Create a radial gradient first with the gradient node. Then multiply it by a whole number and use the fraction node. The result is a radial-symmetric gradient which goes from black to white any number of times. Use a colorramp or RGBcurves to shape the gradient and make it goes from black to white to black again. Hence, we get a seamless transition. I use a noise texture to create some variation for the initial texture coordinates.

There seems to be less noise in the center of the spiral. Add another distance node using the same input coordinates and shift its black-white transition outwards with a mutliply-add math node. I checked clamp to limit the highest number to one. Multiply the result with the previous stripe pattern and we get the stripe pattern, but with black in the center.

This is good, because we don't want to add noise to the center.

For the alpha channel, I used a duplicate of my original spiral noise with slightly different settings. Then I shifted the distance gradient and subtract it, making the alpha fade to black further from the center.

The complete node setup looks like this.


Is it possible to have a node value correspond to how much light is hitting that pixel?

I think you need to bake diffuse indirect/direct to a texture and then use that as a source for incoming light. IFAIK it would be hard to know in forehand how much light ended up hitting a particular point on a surface before everything is calculated.

Another way would to do this in compositing where you could render the globe with a white material and use the inverted image as a mask where to let the light show.


Extrude the outside of a cylinder using a grayscale image

You have the right idea! Adding "bump" doesn't change the geometry, it only gives the illusion of surface detail. So instead we need to use a Displace Modifier.

As others have stated, you need a sufficiently subdivided mesh and a carefully prepared displacement texture. I will go into some of the details of setting this up.

Here is an example result:

Type your text

You can create the text in whichever software you are most comfortable with. If you want to do this in Blender, the steps are as follows:

Add a Text Object, Tab into it, and type your message.

Set the Extrude value to give the text some Z depth.

You can add Bevel to your text if you want, but adding some Blur later when compositing gives a similar result while requiring much less geometry.

Place your camera facing the text and set it to Orthographic mode. Set the Orthographic Scale to fit the text, with some extra padding.

Add a plane just behind your text that will represent the Z depth of 0 (flat).

Prepare a noise texture

This can be done in Blender, of course. Or you can use an image editor.

Composite the noise into your text

This also could be done in an image editor, but why not use Blender?

Here is an example. The Normalize and Invert nodes are a standard setup for grabbing Z depth with black as farthest and white as closest. The blur node is being used to round off the text edges. The color ramp partially flattens the noise to create parts of the text that won't be worn. Multiply is subtracting the dark parts of the noise from the already light text. This creates the indentation we want in the displacement map.

Create a part of your mesh with dense, even geometry

Here is a grid of quads in the cylinder. Only add density to the region where the displacement is to be applied, otherwise you'll be looking at much larger file sizes and slowed Viewport performance.

UV unwrap the dense region of your mesh

When UV unwrapping you will want to Hide all other geometry and use Follow Active Quads (Length mode). Scale the UV layout as needed, but keep it square in proportion to match your grid of quads.

Displace!

Here is what such a Modifier Stack might look like:

Notice that Subdivisions for the View are set to a low value to keep the Viewport manageable, while for the Render they are set high. When your model is all done and ready to export, you will want to set the View Subdivisions to something high like 5 or 6 for maximum detail in your geometry and then Apply the Modifiers. (When Applied, Modifiers use the setting of the View, not the Render.)

In this example the displacement relies on a UV map to get the texture coordinates, so in the Displace Modifier the Texture Coordinates should be set to "UV". If you only have one UV map on your mesh you don't need to specify the UV Map name, but it never hurts to do so.

The value for "Midlevel" should be set to 0 in this sort of use case, because the black areas are considered "flat" - not displaced at all. The white areas on the other hand represent the areas of maximum displacement.

How far out should the maximum be? That is controlled by the Strength slider.

If this is for 3D printing you will want to keep your object's shading Flat while you work so that you can see all the imperfections and address those issues before you print. If it is for rendering you can go ahead and use Smooth shading for better render results.

Below is a link to a .blend that contains Scenes for:

Rendering the noise texture
Compositing a displacement map from the noise and text
Displacing a cylinder using that displacement texture


After a couple of attempts, I figured it out.

In View Layer > Freestyle Line Set > Selection By. You must check "Visibility".
This will enable the Visibility: Visible.

See the image below.


Spine and Stomach deformation in Humanoïd character

I've managed to improve, but not solve, the deformation problem that I had by doing the following:

1: I slightly changed the mesh, making the stomach portrude more and making a nicer back bend. That enables me to bend the back less to achieve the illusion of a bend.

2: I divided the lower spine in 3 bones instead of 4 and shifted the whole spine and chest more to the centre of the mesh.

I think it looks significantly better and the side bends (wich I will not show) look pleasant.

I will still work on it and try to add strech bones. Maybe it will help. Or maybe, as someone has suggested, this is the limit of the blender rigging system and I will have to rely on shape keys.


How can I paint on a model to create embossed details?

In the video he is painting to a texture that is then used to control a Displace Modifier which changes the mesh. This method will work on any mesh provided you have a good even UV unwrap and enough face density on your mesh. You will also need to add a subdivision modifier above the displace on the modifier stack to make sure there is enough detail to displace. If your painted strokes do not match the topology of the mesh very well, you may get some jagged edges/artifacts, but these can be solved by retopologising at the end (which you should do anyway).

Towards the end of the video there are subtitles explaining a lot of what he is doing.


Changing object origin to arbitrary point without origin_set()?

you could do something like this in Edit mode.

obj.data.transform(mathutils.Matrix.Translation(-new_origin))
obj.location += new_origin

I use it in this addon which sets the origin to the selected vertex, or median.

or as CoDEmanX points out

obj.data.transform(mathutils.Matrix.Translation(-new_origin))
obj.matrix_world.translation += new_origin


How to make constraint permanent once disabled?

Disable and Keep Transform

Hit the X to the right of influence slider. It "applies" the constraint and sets influence to 0

Script Equivalent, copy the transform, ie the world matrix, set the constraint influence to zero (disable) and reset the matrix world.

import bpy

ob = bpy.context.object
constraint = ob.constraints.get("Copy Location")
if constraint:
    mw = ob.matrix_world.copy()
    constraint.influence = 0
    ob.matrix_world = mw


Normal maps not working in blender internal in 2.78 update

Ok so I was able to 'fix' this problem. For some reason now in 2.78 your mesh requires a uvmap regardless of whether or not it is using said uvmap (global... genereated .etc.) for normals to work as intended. diffuse spec all work fine without it. So to fix this problem with the normal map not working, all that had to be done was just create a uvmap. Weird but... there you have it.


If low poly count is important then I would suggest you modify your workflow a little to something like the following:

First create your outer walls with window and door openings, then optimize this by merging vertices that are not doing anything to the ones that are.

Next to create the inner walls use the solidify modifier.

Apply this and then add the floor.

Just realized that you said that you are only modeling interiors, so no need for solidify modifier.


Matrix math to translate, rotate, scale with respect to a pivot point in Object mode

Object mode global rotation / scale around global axis thru scene cursor.
To rotate or scale about a non origin pivot point we need to change the space of our object such that its origin is the pivot point.
Can do both the scale and the rotation in one fell swoop. To just rotate set scale_factor to 1, or to just scale set the angle to zero, for either case the matrix becomes Identity.
Notice the way M is made in the reverse order, ie translates by negative pivot point to move pivot point to origin, then rotates, scales (its uniform scale), then moves the pivot point back.
import bpy
from mathutils import Matrix
from math import radians

context = bpy.context
scale_factor = 1.1
angle = 45
axis = (0, 0, 1)

scene = context.scene
pivot = scene.cursor.location

for ob in context.selected_objects:
    M = (
        Matrix.Translation(pivot) @
        Matrix.Diagonal((scale_factor,) * 3).to_4x4() @
        Matrix.Rotation(radians(angle), 4, axis) @
        Matrix.Translation(-pivot)
        )
    ob.matrix_world = M @ ob.matrix_world


Can you view two Render-Slots at the same time in blender?

You cannot view different render slots simultaneously within Blender :-( There are some ways you could "hack" it, like saving it out and loading it into the image editor. But it'd just be a hack.


It is an eyelash question when importing SFM(Source Filmmaker) characters into Blender

You should use the "Hair1" texture and this node set.


Is it possible to set the vertex shader without overriding the fragment shader?

While I was digging through the docs one day, I stumbled upon the gpu.export_shader(scene, material) function, which seems to allow exporting the shader code of blenders internal materials. Note that this call eats non BGE types. Here is an example which extracts the code for a simple material on a lovely blue cube (*.blend below)

It should be possible to combine this extracted fragment shader with your own vertex shader (e.g. copy from console and paste in your BGE script).


Humanoid Rigify help: I tried everything but still getting: Warning: Bone Heat Weighting

I am not sure what is problem but I face this issue mostly when object has non uniform symmetry  while applying automatic weights so if u can make your object symmetrical your problem may solve


How to read the contents of a text file?

pathlib.Path

Recommend for paths, using pathlib module.

For the most part this is a generic python question. The blender specific part is making the path absolute if given as a blender relative path, prefixed with "//"

Relative chosen when setting path property in file browser

import bpy
from pathlib import Path

#path = some_object.filepath # as declared by props
path = "//tmp/foo/bar.txt"  # a blender relative path

f = Path(bpy.path.abspath(path)) # make a path object of abs path

if f.exists():
    print(f.read_text()) # read and print.

The site https://medium.com has some great articles on pathlib and its usage:

https://medium.com/@ageitgey/python-3-quick-tip-the-easy-way-to-deal-with-file-paths-on-windows-mac-and-linux-11a072b58d5f
https://medium.com/@webology/pathlib-is-wonderful-9d25919469d3
https://medium.com/swlh/five-most-useful-pathlib-operations-77f9c96790b3


Pretty simple. Start off by taking a look at the below screenshot:

Add a mix node and two diffuse node.
Put your texture (MUST have a transparent background) into one of the diffuse nodes and plug both into the mix node. (Don't mind my texture, it was the first one I found with a transparent background)
Make sure the diffuse node with your texture is at the bottom, you'll see why if you don't.

Thats really all there is to it. If you want to do the same thing on glass just replace the diffuse node without the texture with a glass node. Hope this helps!

If you want to have a glossy material on both the text and the background part you can't just use a glossy material, you will need to go a little bit deeper to get a realistic material. Have a look at this setup (to see it in full size just click the image, or right click it and choose open in new tab):


Render Blender's object with size defined in pixels

I don't know if I get what you want, but this setup seems to get something like that: I put some colored cubes (each has one of three shadeless materials) on the diagonal of a a 10px x 10 px square.

The camera is ortho and its orthographic scale matches the output size. Antialiasing is obviously off.

This is the output (tiny 10px by 10px image):

setting resolution to 100x 100 and ortho scale to 100 you get this somewhat bigger image, but still each BU is a pixel:

Obviously you can change the aspect ratio, but keep the ortho scale equal to the bigger X/Y pixel value, like this:

Maybe this can work for you...


Texture Painting not working on some parts

Its because your mesh is not unwrapped correctly. Check out this link to know how to unwrap a mesh -->  Painting a dog with texture paint, TOTAL NOOB

I've tried unwrapping your mesh but the sword shell mesh was not good, its mesh was overlapping. So i've just unwrapped blade and handle.

1st mark the seam using Ctrl+E and then U and Select Unwrap.

This is how a mesh is unwrapped. It should not be overlapped, unless you want same texture on it.

I'm not a teacher but here are some Remarks after seeing the mesh :
Try making different objects in this case eg., sword,shell,handle etc.,then and after its texturing is done (or) applying the materials, join the objects into single object using Ctrl+J. Don't make everything in same object from the start.
Hope your problem is solved.


Rigid bodies not colliding when going fast

Try scaling up your entire simulation.

You could also try changing the hitbox type of your coins from mesh to cylinder or cube.

The manual page about soft body collisions may help you.

It explains how the collision system works, and why your objects do not collide with the ground material.


Unable to select bones in pose mode (Blender 2.8)

Try to disable "In Front" in Viewport Display in the Armature Tab - that worked for me


If you do have this issue go to your user preferences and change your camera controls mine was interfering with the left click select so I set it back to the normal middle mouse click


Most of my water simulation scene disappears when viewed through the camera

It is almost as if your camera is clipping. Maybe your scene is so large as to exceed the default 1000m end clip? Go to the Camera Object Properties and change the Clip End to suit your scene better. Here is an example of camera end clipping.

Not in camera view:

Same scene in camera view:


Why is this black line appearing on my mesh when I render?

I just had to check normals with Ctrl+N in Edit mode


How to correctly use the mirror modifier?

It is indeed possible :).

1) Choose the right axis
There are three axis to mirror around.
Trial and error will get you there fast enough :).

2) Don't move the object, move the mesh.
The mirroring center is your object's origin point.
So instead of moving your object, switch to Edit Mode and move your mesh farther from the origin point.

3) Apply rotation
Object's local rotation can mess with modifiers.
Go to Object->Apply->Rotation.

Further Reading:
Mirror Modifier page in Blender Manual


Animation Nodes, how to add additional outputs? Missing outputs

You can use 'Mesh Info' node (Add -> Mesh -> Mesh info).


You may achieve this effect fast using Noise Modifier of the Graph Editor.

Keyframe the lamp's strenght (in my case 1.000) at the desired frame on a timeline with I. Go to the next frame and keyframe it again (light strenght may be the same, since the modifier will do the job).

Go to Graph Editor, press N to open the properties shelf and add a Noise Modifier. Play with its settings for the different results.


Your problem is very simple to fix. your normals are reversed.

You can easily see which faces are pointing inward by enabling Backface Culling. This enables you to see though the back of faces like you do when you press P.

You could also enter edit mode on that object, and enable the normals visualization.

On high-polly models such as this one, this may or may not help much.

to fix this you could manually go though and select each face that is pointing the wrong way, and flip the normals by pressing the  Flip Normals  button.

You Could also select all of your faces and press the  Recalculate  button, to recalculate the normals. This sometimes works, and sometimes it makes it worse. It is a good idea to try this first, because there is always Ctrl+Z for the times when it does not work.

In this case, it made all of the normals point the same way, but then they were all pointing the wrong direction. Simply flipping all of them could fix this easily enough. Sometimes more complex objects can confuse blender and recalculate them quite wrong.

For your sky object, see  this question


best way to select edge to use bmesh.ops.bevel

I tried thes Lines:

import bmesh
from bpy import context as C

m = C.active_object.data
bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(m)

indices = [0,1]
for e in bm.edges:
    if e.verts[0].index in indices and e.verts[1].index in indices:
        e.select = True
        break

The selection doesn't show up in edge select mode, but if you go to vert select, and back to edge, the edge will be correctly displayed as selected.
How to continue from there with the operator, I have not tested.


equal vertices spacing when using displacement modifier

When converting a color (RGB) value to a scalar (just one value), you want to set all three channels of the RGB trio to the same value. Here, I think you changed the Value of the HSV trio describing the color. the exact conversion equation may vary from software to software, but here it should work like that.
For instance, a color of (R:0.2,G:0.2,B:0.2) can also be noted as (H:0,S:0,V:0.485). So the value is not linearly correlated to the mean of the RGB values.

The displacement using levels of 0.2 on the RGB channels instead of HSV :

How to convert rgb to hsv :

Source


If you want to increase grid density, open N-panel in 3D View, reduce scale and increase line count:


How can I replicate an object over the surface of another?

One way to go about this would be to use DupliFaces.

  Duplication Faces or DupliFaces is the capability to replicate an
  object on each face of a parent object.

You would model your nail then parent it to the cactus object with Ctrl + P. You then select the cactus object and in the Object panel under Duplication and choose Faces.

This is not perfect and the outcome of this depends a lot on the topology of your parent object (the cactus) and how your child object (the nail) is scaled and or rotated etc. It can work with some tweaking however…

Another way would be to use a particle system, set the type to Hair and under Render, select the nail object. This is a bit harder to tweak if you don't have much experience with it etc. but can give you alot more control and variation as to how things can be placed.


If you look at the leaves.blend you'll see that most of the leaves are just planes indeed

In order keep the polygon count as small as possible, they didn't model every leaf. They used an image with an alpha channel as mask on the materials to create the actual leaf shape instead.

To make this:

Look like that:

The depth map is created with the actual geometry of the objects in space, so it will not take into account "faked" sapes.


Simply select the object and in quick effects apply quick smoke in blender


as moonboots suggested keyframing a bone generated a new action strip


I'm just posting this so I can post the pics - if it ends up being no good, i'll delete this answer. Here are a just a couple of things you can try.
Firstly, make sure both Reflective and Refractive Caustics are enabled in the Render Properties tab:

Also, in Material Properties (for each material used), make sure "Multiple importance" is selected, and "Homogeneous" is disabled.

Lastly, if you're using a denoiser, try turning it down by about half and see if that's what's causing it.


Using Sound Drivers Addon

Some images of a quick sample.

Install Addon.  Drag the sound_drivers folder into one of your addons folders.  It can be found under Testing Support Level Animation Category.

Add speaker to scene, associate music file, then bake to 1000 splits of frequency range. (Make a cuppa while it bakes)  These are baked to custom properties AA0 to AA999 on the speaker.

Add a torus (or group of objects) to the scene.  Set up a sounddriver using channel 0 (AA0 in this case). Multiple drivers can be used with multiple bakes.  Select all objects you want as a "unit".  As a simple example I've added one sounddriver using channel AA0 to drive the z scale of the torus.  Any object being driven by channel 0 (eg AA0, AB0, ) will be converted to approp channel.

From the 3d toolbar SoundDrive panel, choose  visualiser type grid and the size you desire, I've chosen 25 rows x 40 columns,  a grid is created with each unit being driven by the assoc. sound bake.  Use the Offset sliders to arrange, much like the array modifier.

Each unit is parented to an empty and all to a master empty "ST_Handle". Which can be moved / scaled to suit. Reorganizing can be achieved using a simple script.


Separating one face into two with an edge

I'm guessing you created the edge with F? Try using the Connect Path tool instead (J):


Wrapping flat artwork onto a sphere with no distortion to create a football

Yes, you can model and texture a football in Blender with any shape you like.
The 32 panel standard ball is probably the easiest to accomplish, since there's a standard primitive (the Icosphere) that pretty much resembles it's shape.
Here is a tutorial explaining how to do it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYC69tt-KMI

Other shapes can also be accomplished too, but it's process can be more or less involved depending on the complexity of the shape.

About texturing, as mentioned by Mr Zak what you need is probably UV Unwrapping, this can also be accomplished inside Blender. It is the process of "unfolding" or "flattening" an 3D geometry into a 2D shape so that an image texture can be mapped over it's surface as desired with minimal distortion.

Depending on how big your design is, or how much of the ball it covers unwrapping could be a very simple process. For a simple logo that sits only on a side of a ball a simple view-based direct projection could be enough. For designs that cover the whole ball it could be a more complex process.

Either way you could probably model a few different predefined football geometries with the most commonly used shapes, and unwrap them in the most convenient way to simplify the surface design. You could then use that UV layout as a template save it as an image or even export as vector using the SVG export addon (if you work on vector graphics design software) and reuse it whenever you need to design a ball for a specific geometry.
All you need to do then is import that layout into your graphic design application (Inkscape, GIMP, Photoshop, Illustrator, whatever) and draw over it so the parts of the design match the desired corresponding area in the ball surface.

The base 3D models can also be reused as asset libraries to easily render your designs whenever you need. You can even have a set of predefined files with your scene (grass, field, product studio, etc), material, and lighting setup all ready to render, and all you need to do is apply your new surface image texture to it and render your design. You only need to set it up once.


One thing you can do is make the material invisible only after it goes through two layers of transparency, rather than just one, by adding a greater than node:

The transparent depth output is incremented each time the ray goes through a transparent surface.

With your current setup, it is used to mix between a partially transparent shader and a completely transparent shader based on the number of transparent surfaces the ray has passed through. The partially transparent shader is used if no transparent faces have been encountered, and the completely transparent shader is used if more than 0 transparent surfaces.
For example, the logic looks something like this:

if transparent_depth >= 1:
    use_transparency()
else:
    use_shader()

Since you put another transparent surface in front of the sphere, you need to allow for that by only making the shader completely transparent after at least two transparent surfaces have been encountered.

By using a greater than node like in the setup above, the logic should look more like this:

if transparent_depth >= 2:
    use_transparency()
else:
    use_shader()


How to make 2 objects not intersect each other?

If you're trying to animate a character that is to behave as normal, I don't think you want to try to use physics to solve problems with floor interaction. I personally don't know such an approach to be a recommended workflow in any 3D package. Floor collision difficulties are just something you are going to have to learn to deal with. One way to do it is by taking care when animating. If you simply ensure that all your foot keyframes are in the right position, and set in the correct order, no drifting through the floor plane will ever happen. For example, if you set the extreme forward and extreme back positions for an IK foot in a walk cycle, and do this before setting any other keyframes, then the foot has no choice but to slide straight back and forth between these two positions, and could be counted on to perform absolutely no movement along the vertical axis. Such an approach can be an essential foundation for all the keyframes which follow, as these two will ensure that no movement below the floor plane takes place.
Alternatively, you can use location constraints to help ensure that undesired behaviors never become possible, instead of relying on keyframes alone. But even here, care will have to be taken, particularly while setting up the character itself, so as to ensure that the bone positions of the armature properly meet with the floor plane at the same time that the character's foot geometry meets it.
Physics is a resource intensive operation. It is slow, prone to bugs, and not at all ideal for the purpose of general character rigging, in my opinion. It's certainly not a one-button alternative to planning your rig.


Smoke not appearing when rendering animation

You didn't checked Density on the Influence panel of the Voxel Data texture for you bottom domain.


New 2.9 Feature - Sky Texture (Nishita) is Changing my Sun Elevation and Generally Misbehaving

This is a common problem caused by the Sun Position add-on, which takes control over these properties. Try to disable it and you should be able to change the values. The issue has been previously report on the bug tracker in ticket T78618.


How do uninstall every single trace of Blender?

I don't know the exact answer you are looking for but I ave an idea.Have you tried loading a different version of blender i.e. if you were using 2.79b try going back to plain old 2.79. It might help as the version you are 'reinstalling' maybe be running into artefacts within the kernel.


Separating parts of a 3D object for isolated functions in Unity

Unity imports work just like the Blender inspector shows. If you have a Blender scene named Shapes and it has a cube and sphere, when you take it into Unity you will see a empty named Shapes that has children called cube and sphere. The whole scene can be moved by selecting the Shapes empty or you can do it individually with the children. You can do whatever you want (components, materials, textures) on an individual child or scene wide level. If an object is parented, lets say cone is parented to cube, it will show up as a child in Unity.


I believe what's happening here is that it is rendering the wrong UV layout. So just select the right one.


Eevee - Crashes on render if render size too big

From the Limitations page:

Memory Management
As of now Eevee uses OpenGL, and GPU Memory management is done by the OpenGL driver. In theory, only the needed textures and meshes (now referred as “the resources”) for a single draw call (i.e. one object) needs to fit into the GPU memory.
In practice, using too much GPU memory can make the GPU driver crash, freeze, or kill the application. So be careful of what you ask.

It is possible the EEVEE crashed on the VRAM size, if the single draw call need more RAM than the VRAM actually have.
The sharing from system main RAM is kind of storage, while the shader program (OpenGL) need all the resources stored in your GPU RAM to run that program. Like a warehouse(RAM) and workshop(VRAM), you can't directly use the thing stored in warehouse.
And the 512 MB is quite small for nowayday OpenGL application, Blender may not focus on these light weight devices support for now, nor does full feature OpenGL. So try to limit some setting in EEVEE to make it fit to 512MB.


Is There A Way To Join Meshes and Get Rid Of Excess Mesh?

If the excess vertices are unconnected:

In edit mode, hover your cursor over each part of the robot and press L. This will select all vertices linked to the mesh you want to save. Then Ctrl + I to inverse the selection and only select the loose mesh; press X + Enter to then delete.

If the excess vertices are connected:

In edit mode, press A to select all. Then press P and choose "separate by loose parts". The pieces will detach as you had them before as joined meshes do not necessarily join vertices (this needs to be done manually). You can then delete excess mesh before joining again. Isolating each piece by selecting it and entering local view (/) will make it easier.

If you've only just made the mistake of joining the meshes and "undo" isn't helping, look for the .blend2 file. By default, Blender saves a back-up of the last time each file was saved (for these very circumstances). You can also access the .blend2 in Info> Revert (it'll be as if you saved the file before making the mistake).


I think the reason you don't see your UV map, is blender doesn't preview image textures unless you change the view mode.

If you look at your 3D window on the right... at the bottom toolbar... next to the words "edit mode" is a little box with a white ball. This is where you change the view mode. Right now it's in "solid" mode, so no textures, just solid mesh shape.

Click it and choose "Material" mode. Then you'll see your image textures applied to the mesh. You could also go into rendered view by pressing shift+Z, and you can exit rendered mode with shift+Z again. Rendered view will also show your image textures. But it might not show anything if you haven't added lights and positioned your camera yet. So first try material view.


How can I avoid seeing the inside faces of a semitransparent object in the game engine?

In the material editor (cycles) add a geometry node and look at the "Backfacing" output. Plug it into the fac of a new mix shader where one input is what you already have and the other is a completely white Transparent shader. You haven't uploaded a .blend file so I can't know what  exactly you are doing but I hope this helps.


How to remove this black spots in texture

You UV mapping is mapping a transparent part of your texture.

You can shift it a bit or map it a different way. You can also use another texture for that part of the mesh. There are lot of options to fix it.


In need of node displacement on z axis only

The "Displacement" node displaces geometry along the local normal. If you want to push the geometry along a definite axis, you can use the "Vector Displacement" node and only populate the Z input field.
Don't forget to set the matrix to "World space" in the node though.


You may create a procedural b&w mask and use it as a factor for mixing different shaders. It requires some experimenting to do it right but give you the full control over the dots' shape and sharpness. You may also create a b&w mask via Texture Paint mode.

PROCEDURAL MASK

Set up the material nodes as pictured below. Set up the texture coordinates to Object and play with the Mapping node settings to place the dot where you want. Set the Gradient Texture's mode to Quadratic Sphere. Use Color Ramp node to set its blurriness.

Now duplicate the nodes with Shift+D and mix them using MixRGB color node (Multiply).

Play with the settings of the duplicated Mapping node to place the dot on the top part/other side of the object.

By repeating the process you'll get a b&w mask for mixing the two shaders.

PAINTED MASK

Unwrap the sphere (I marked a seam along the vertical edge loop and then unwrapped). Go to Texture Paint mode and add a new Diffuse Color paint slot. Set the image color to pure white. In painting tools set the brush color to black and set the curve's type to line e.g. In Options bookmark uncheck the Occlude, Cull and Normal checkboxes to paint through the mesh. Paint the dots and save your image. Use it as a mask as in the procedural example above.

Here's the .blend:


I was stumped by this issue as well. I was able to fix it by selecting the text, going under the "Object Data" property, and making sure the "Size" (under the Font menu) isn't set too low. In my case, anything less than .01 caused the problem.
If you set it too low, some letters go black. Raise it back up, they go back to normal. She falls down a well, eyes go crossed. She gets kicked by a mule, they go back to normal. I don't know.

If you need to get the text down past the point of the darkness setting in, just scale it instead of changing the size value.


Why is the rendered picture not the same as in rendered mode?

One possibility is if you use a modifier that has separate settings for viewport and render like in Subdivision Surface modifier:

Also possible is to set simplification of the scene for animation while rendering at full settings:


How to map a texture to a distorted quad?

If you distort the quad, the UV-map must be distorted the same way to keep the texture undistorted. I suspect you will not like this answer. :)

UV is distorted same as quad.

Distort texture in image editor. Or bake from the subdivided mesh to the lowpoly.


Problem solved, I had to press CTRL+Tab in order to enter pose mode and now I can use the controls finally.


How can I align the handles of control points from a curve?

What you need to do is scale along a single axis, in this case the Y axis. Select the vertices you want to have in a straight line, and press S-Y-0.

Instead of this:

You will now have this:

This works best for the Vector handle type, but can be used in many cases for the other types as well.


How can I use the same material at another slot and change it independently?

Click the New Material button - to add a new material based on your current one.
Then change the new material.


How can I track a moving board and superimpose a video on top of it?

What you want is called Plane Tracking. The idea is that you associate 4 trackers to the vertices of a plane or an image.
Track the elements and select Create Plane Track.

In the compositor you use the tracking information to deform an image.
For more detail read the following links:
Can't choose Plane Track in Plane Track Deform node while compositing
Is it possible to take a mask clip and 'connect' it to a specific point on a moving object?
And yes, it would be easier to use a green (or blue) screen on the card you film, otherwise you will need to create masks over the fingers and other elements that occlude the card. Such process is called rotoscoping, it is more complicated and tedious than dealing with green screen.


What do you think of this picture?
I tryed to make it. just you need little more dark blue.


Move/rotate object depending on another object

A driver is a way of calculating the value to use based on other values in the scene, any python expression can be used in a driver. A constraint is basically a visual way of representing a driver. For the most control, you can define a python function to calculate a value used in a driver.

As an example, a driver can calculate the x rotation as 1/4 of the x rotation of the empty. The variable named var is set to get the x rotation of the Empty and is then used in the python expression to get the final value.

Then you can set cube2 to rotate three times the rotation of the first cube

Now let's say we want cube two to have it's rotation a constant offset from the first cube's rotation, we can use a custom property to hold the offset amount (and animate it if we want some variation) and use that in the driver.

You can also add your own function into the driver namespace -

import bpy

def mydriverfunc(val):
    return val * .75

bpy.app.driver_namespace['myfunc'] = mydriverfunc

and then use that in the driver expression, passing any gui configured variables as paramaters.

Note that drivers are python code and might get disabled based on the auto-run python settings.

You can create a driver using python

d = obj.driver_add('rotation_euler', 1)
d.driver.type = 'SCRIPTED'
v = d.driver.variables.new()
v.name = 'var'
v.type = 'TRANSFORMS'
v.targets[0].id = bpy.data.objects['Empty']
v.targets[0].transform_type = 'ROT_X'
d.driver.expression = 'var * .25'


Follow Path and Track To constraints together

With the following constraints the camera follows the path, with the influence of the Track To the camera can be directed to the target object. The influence can be keyframed by hovering and press I.

Demo blend


Not showing texture after uv maping and importing png image?

I had to reload your image texture from disk to get it to show up. Once I did that I just changed the viewport mode from Solid to Textured and the textures appeared.


Wrong model appearing in UV editing mode

Fixed it - was the local view toggle in UV editing mode, - (the / hotkey)
glad I got out of that rabbithole  :P driving me nuts


Assign texture in texture paint - Cycles render

In texture paint, try using the "slots" tab on the toolbar.  Here, you can change painting mode from material to image, then specify a particular image and UV map you'd like to use.

Be aware that this isn't the same thing as assigning a texture to a material for rendering purposes.


This is just a half-answer.
Causes
As I looked closely into the difference of your meshes ...

Some of the wrinkle in your sculpting is more in the diagonal direction of the edge than the tutorial.

Your brush seem to adjust only in Normal direction of the mesh, but tutorial brush seems to also pull nearby vertices close together to keep up with the deep detail.

Workarounds
There are 2 different approaches I can think of.

This one is more of the macro level.      I googled and found 2 links. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYzS94fPo1w, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLUnfE4FcOY)
They use cloth simulation to (automatically) generate wrinkle and pull vertices to the location that needed.    Thus the artifact become less.

However, I believe the main problem is the sculpting brush type.
The correct brushes should have pinch attribute e.g. pinch-brush itself (but has no add/subtract mode, sadly), or crease-brush.
The pinch (search for the word in https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.82/sculpt_paint/sculpting/tools.html) means to will pull vertices together when sculpting.
If there are enough vertices, just the crease-brush should be enough. (as I found in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbUJVzBBlVY )

Here is the setting of crease-brush. Not every brush type has this pinch feature.

Here is my attempt to reduce the artifact.  I used pinch-brush after normal sculpting.    After the process, it is noticeable that the result become better.  I didn't use crease-brush though.


It is most likely an issue with the normals of your faces (the way that blender thinks the faces are pointing). You also appear to have some duplicate vertices that are throwing things off.

I would do these steps (starting from before you extruded the faces shown in the image):

-Select everything with A

-Press W and select Remove Doubles

-With everything still selected press Ctrl+N which will force blender to recalculate the normals of the faces.

-Select the faces you need again and extrude with E and it should work.

Duplicated vertices are often caused when you extrude a face and then cancel the extrusion with right click. Despite it appearing that the extrusion has been cancelled, extra vertices will have been created that are in the exact same location as other vertices. This can get Blender confused about which way is out for some faces.


Dynamic paint does not work on canvas in paint mode

I had this same problem, then stumbled on the solution after watching ~10 tutorial videos.
Solution: The "+" button needs to be pressed, next to "Paintmap Layer" item, under "Physics > Dynamic Paint > Output" menu.
Before:

After:

Also make sure that you have an "Attribute" node feeding into "Base Color" in the Shader node tree for your canvas object, with the name of the the "Paintmap Layer", like so:


Trim Sheets are they possible in blender?

Yes, there is nothing limiting to a particular modelling program with that workflow. Sure, there are differences how you would do different things but if you have good knowledge in Blender these steps could easily be transferred.


Select the light you're using to light the scene, click the lightbulb on the properties panel, and go down to where it says "Shadow". Under that section, check the box that says "contact shadows"


Yes it has. As explained in April 15th's developer meeting notes:

  Transform gizmos can now be enabled in the 3D viewport independent of
  active tools, from a popover menu in the header. The same popover also
  has controls for display of other gizmos. The Transform tool was
  removed as it is now redundant. (Campbell Barton)


How to make separate Lips control the mouth (Cavity) animation?

As described in this answer: How can I make two objects share the same vertex?, you can use Hooks to drive the deformation.

In Edit mode select a vertex on the mesh.

Press the Space Bar, type "hook" and select "Hook to new object"
This will create an empty that controls that specific vertex.

Exit edit mode.

Select the Newly created Empty, and while pressing Shift select the curve to make it the active object.

Enter edit mode and select a control point in the curve that matches the vertex you want to control.

Press the Space Bar and type "vertex", select "Make Vertex Parent" (or Pres Ctrl+ P)
Now the control point in the curve moves the empty, and that in turn controls the vertex on the mesh.

Repeat the process for the rest of the vertices in the mesh so that you can control them with the curve.


UV map slightly distorted for some reason

About your distorted UV map:

it comes from the fact that your beam is actually enlarging on its top, so the faces are not perpendicular. The consequence is that it will stretch the UV map in the UV Editor: Blender just tries to find an average arrangement between faces, it doesn't know that it needs to give priority to perpendicular angles. I've made a second test with perpendicular faces and as you see it works fine.

What you could do though is making the UV map orthogonal with some addons, or: first unwrap the top part, then the bottom, then in the UV Editor, make the bottom faces stick to the top faces with the help of the snap.

About your Bake problem:

There might be several reasons, it really depends on your problem. I guess one of your problems is that your object is made of 90° perpendicular angles. In that case you need to know that, as the ray of the baking follows a direction that is perpendicular to the face normal, it won't be able to record any of the faces that are completely parallel or perpendicular... the baking will be completely "blank". Whereas if you slightly tilt those parallel faces the ray will hurt them and therefore they will be seen (the perpendicular face won't be seen but it doesn't matter, the parallel faces will give the illusion of deepness).


You could technically do this in the compositor, but you would have to make sure to save each of your renders out as images, and then be diligent to add them all back into the node editor. Then you could use (overlay, add, multiply, Mix, etc...) nodes to see the backdrop change.

It may be a very good way to learn the "Gut Feel" of what your parameters are truly affecting.


To model it I would add a cylinder, tab for edit mode, remove the caps of the cylinder.

Then in add and apply a solidify modifier.

You possibly should also create a simplified pipe with smaller amount of vertices to work as a collision mesh for a  mesh collider, because higher poly pipe might require quite a bit of collision calculations.


How to find and change material for certain faces?

Materials are assigned to faces.

Enter edit mode;
change your selection mode to face mode;
select the face of interest and its material should become highlighted in the material list.

To go the other way (figure out which faces are used by a material);
change your selection mode to face mode;
deselect all faces;
choose the material of interest;
use the Select button beneath the material list (which only appears in edit mode) to select those faces.


Align Object to Face & then Center to that Face

@Stphnl329 has answered your question, but there's an alternative route to making your holes, which is quicker than punching them out, and less destructive. (You can continue making adjustments up to a later stage)
Supposing you want to make 24 holes..

Start with a cylinder with 4 * 24 segments, and select a slice 4 segments across on the Y axis, delete the rest.

On your slice,

CtrlX dissolve the edges around the center
Poke the cleared face
CtrlShiftB bevel out the middle vertex
GG ease the surrounding vertices out a bit. (You can do this symmetrically by numerically entering the slide factor). Don't scale. That would disrupt the curvature. For perfection, you would rotate.
(Shipped Add-On) Loop Tools > Circle ensure the central face is circular, and delete it.

Recreate the cylinder with an object-offset Array modifier, based on an Empty at the origin, rotated by 360/24 degrees in Z. Ensure 'Merge' and 'First and Last' are checked.

Assign Solidify, Bevel (by angle), and Subdivision Surface modifiers.


How to apply a material to a selection in Text using Python

The following script will cycle through all text objects and for each word (separated by space) assign a material slot index to the word incrementing the material slot through all available slots resetting to index 0 if there are more words than material slots.
Written & tested on blender 2.79

import bpy

texts = [obj for obj in bpy.data.objects if obj.type == 'FONT']

bpy.ops.mode_select
for txt in texts:
    me = txt.data.body
    mats = txt.material_slots
    ind = 0
    bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='EDIT')
    bpy.ops.font.move(type='LINE_BEGIN')
    for word in me.split():
        bpy.ops.font.move_select(type='NEXT_WORD')
        bpy.context.object.active_material_index = ind
        bpy.ops.object.material_slot_assign()
        if ind < len(mats):
            ind += 1
        else:
            ind = 0
        bpy.ops.font.move(type='NEXT_CHARACTER')
    bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='OBJECT')


What CTRL does is determined in the very center of the top of your screen. It's a snapping tool and what it snaps to can be selected next to the magnet icon. ATM you're snapping to the closest face. You may want to set that to Edge Perpendicular.


I think you need to approach this in two ways:
1. Box-model tufts for subdivision:

Make sure to turn on "Adjust edit cage to modifier result" in your Subdivision Surface modifier so you can model the final result directly, instead of having to guess how it's going to look like.

Start with a box, subdivided once. You'll have a single center vertex to define your tip, as well as an edge loop with 3-corner vertices around that vertex to sharpen that tip:

With that single vertex (that you can Shrink/Fatten) and that ending edge loop (that you can Edge Slide), you can create a sharp tip, and then add and manipulate other edge loops along the length of that blob so you can shape the body of the tuft of fur by using all tools available (grab brush, smoothing vertices, scaling & rotating, anything):

2. Make an appealing mesh fur for your character:

Don't model "blind". That is, always have a piece of concept art or design for the character you're trying to model. Always work from these images, otherwise you're just gonna waste your time and fail.
Model the tufts clumping together. Have bigger tufts, with smaller tufts "growing out" of them -- this is done as simply as extruding those blob shapes of step #1 out of the bigger tufts, then working on them so they look good:


Combining image texture and brick texture

LazyDodo's Cycles Brick Tricks

In the linked Blender artis thread of the title, Lazy Dodo is presenting a collection of complex nodegroups themed around the procedurale Brick texture. In practice is reconstructing them node by node with the built in function.

In addition to the usual parameters, their nodes outputs provide several useful function, like the UV of each tile present in the "brick_wall_basic" nodegroup you can find in the blendfile provided by the author or use the add-on:

We can easily use this texture to repat a pattern by simply using the UV output as a Texture Coordinate of our images.

Give those two pattern, in order to overlap them, we'll use the original Brick texture Color output as a mask for a nice procedural variation:

Sincronize the input values between the two procedural textures to ensure a correct overlap between them as long as possible (Brick Texture has no input for the Frequency or the Squash, you'll have to update manually or implement the mask in the nodegrup):


VSE: How to Speed up the Preview of Image Strips?

You could increase the memory cache (1GB by default) to your available physical memory and increase the number of prefetch frames.

This is done in Menu: File / User Preferences in the System-tab. Ctrl-Alt-U


The problem was that you set the Plane as a local camera here. So every time you pressed 0 key it, blender showed you the local camera set as the plane and thus you were seeing the inside of the washing machine.

Just deselect the "Use Local Camera" checkbox, that would allow you to change the Local Camera. Select the camera of you scene using the eye dropper tool or by the list.

and now when you press the 0 key, it will show what you camera is looking at.


How to create a bridge loop without selecting face?

I believe the right question would be how to fill the gaps/holes.

While vertex selection does not work here to do it in one go, each side can be done without a problem, edge selection also works and in some situations avoids the unwanted face selection as well.

I made a video with what i believe you were looking for:

The Bridge loops tool would create new faces that would overlap 2 faces, the one mentioned in the question and one in the back. Even if you only bridge the top and front, you would close in the face mentioned in the picture, then it would be better to delete the face and bridge from the back to the front, spanning over the 3 edges in the back to the front 3 edges.

Like so:


Slope of geometry as `fac` input for cycles material

You can easily blend different shaders based on the angle of an object's face.

You can get the face's angle using the Normal output of the Geometry node. Separate out the axis you need (in my case the Z axis) using a Separate XYZ node. Then I use the ColorRamp node to fine tune the range I want the transition to happen in. Do note a RGB Curves node would work just as well, it is just up to which you prefer.

Here is what those nodes look like rendered.


How to replace mesh data in linked object by another object's linked data?

Select the object whose mesh you want to replace, then go to the "Object Data" tab in the properties panel (the one with the triangle standing on one of its vertices). The topmost dropdown menu lets you select the mesh linked to your object. Just select MeshData1 here.

The little number on the right also tells you how many users your mesh has (to how many objects it is linked).


Why do weird edge lines appear connecting vertices that are not corrected the same way in Blender show up after render?

I was able to fix it by doing research on the topics you gave and found that triangulating the objects fixed it by adding more geometry. The steps were to select the object/mesh, go to edit mode, and press CTRL+T.


you have to append the files of the brushes that are in brush folder of that blend file that contains it. and if you want to use them every time,open a new blender file and do what i told above and then go to file, save startup file and you are done. happy sculpting!.


Color Shift when saving rendered image/video

did you try to set "view transform" to standard?


Blender 2.80_Is there a way to make Blender File Browser remember it's settings?

As of April 14 2019 commit  Blender 2.80 builds should have builtin ability to remember last used file browser display options globally per file type, as stated in D4479.