How do i made a vertex group for all objects

your question for "how do I attach a vertex group to a bone" is answered by how-to-assign-vertex-group-to-single-bone, although you can assign to more than one group in succession, I believe (and then perhaps need to adjust weights if >1 group).  Here I took a sphere and parented it (Armature Envelope weights), which generally would parent it mostly to the right arm and spine area.   I then put the sphere in edit mode, selected some vertices , created and assigned to a new "group1" (just I could select them later if needed), but ALSO assigned them to the automatically created group "hand.L" (left hand).  As you can see when I posed the Armature to swing the Left arm upwards, my selected vertices of the sphere tracked with the left hand position.   Here's my blend example:


I would keep the displace modifier but start from a single vertex that way it doesn't deform the meshes.
Start with a single vertex and add 2 Array modifiers

Add a Displace modifier, setup a cloud texture, direction to Z, and set the coordinates to object, and add an Empty in the scene.

Add 2 Screw modifiers along X and Y, set the steps to 1 and the angle to 0°

Add a new vertex group to the object

Add a Solidify modifier. Set the thickness to 0, the rim material to 1 and the output vertex group to the group you just created.

Add a very large plane in your scene, set it to not render and set the viewport display to Bounds

Add a Shrinkwrap modifier, target the large plane, set the wrap method to Project along Negative Z, and limit it only to the vertex group. I also added a Bevel modifier.

Add 2 Materials, one for the Top & Bottom, and one for the Sides.

Move the empty :


How to do a script that could output my 3d files with the required color/lighting and angle versions

A great amount of automation is possible in Blender via Python scripting. Mostly any repetitive tasks can be automated and since it is scripting it is even more flexible and powerful than Photoshop's actions or batch processing scripts.
You can find more information on Blender's Python API in the documentation.
Be aware that the subject is quite complex and requires a lot of effort to master, so no single answer here on Blender Stack Exchange or other forums on the web will teach you to use this, however if you ask specific clear, well formed questions about specific issues you face while learning, Blender Stack Exchange can be a lot of help. You should attempt to use correct terminology, be specific and make the titles of your questions informative and reflecting the actual question. Best to form them as a question as well. See: How do I ask a good question?
When learning Blender's Python API, you can get a lot by studying the script examples that come with Blender:

As well as any add-ons that you can find in [Blender's install directory]\[version number]\scripts\addons\.
Blender's Python Console has a priceless autocomplete function as well, that shows you possible options when you start typing something if you hit Tab(previously Ctrl+Space) while still hovering the mouse over the area of Python Console:

Oh, and I almost forgot - you need to know how to use Python obviously. You can find all about it at not a very surprising web address: www.python.org. The website is amazing and really has everything you might need. This is also ridiculously good: www.w3schools.com/python/ .


Having trouble building a navigation mesh getting an empty navmesh

Guess I needed to scale a bit more the object I was using to generate the navegation mesh, everything is working now.


The infamous answer to this question is:
It depends
The 256 x 256 recommendation that is given many times is a very good starting point. In general it will lead to decent render times and sufficcient image update cycles while you're waiting for the render to complete. But as with any renderer, tuning this setting can indeed lead to speed-ups, depending on

the final render pixel size
the complexity of the scene
the tracing engine used
the GPU you're running the render on
how many pixels are irrelevant (because they don't sample anything, as there are no objects hit by the rays)
likely many more factors

The most important one is the final render pixel size. If you render super high res, having a smaller number of tiles to be computed in total can speed up the rendering. At a resolution of 1280 x 720, you won't see much of a difference. At 8.000 x 6.000 you very likely will. When rendering on our TitanX rigs, we tend to go to 512 x 512, sometimes 1.024 x 1.024 tiles with such resolutions to cut render time. Less complex scenes also tend to support bigger tiles better, but again, no general rule here.
The GPU merely matters in terms of what generation it is (Fermi, Maxwell, Pascal, etc), the number of cores, and the amount of memory present. Maxwell GPUs can to my knowledge benefit from bigger tiles, with the others I have no personal experience.
The tracing engine I only mention because of a "feature" in Windows: TDR Delay. If you Google that, you'll find heated discussions plus a Microsoft support page on how to set it. Basically, when you render, a work package is sent to your GPU (the tile), and the system waits for the results to come back from the GPU (the resulting sampled image at a certain number of samples). If Windows does not hear back from the GPU after 2 seconds (the TDR delay), it restarts the graphics driver - and kills the rendering while at it. Especially when using Branched Path Tracing, the answer time for the GPU increases by A LOT. That causes renders to fail. Reducing the tile size is one fix to this, setting a higher TDR delay value another.
Auto Tile size
An Add-on called "Auto Tile Size" is bundled with Blender, which makes setting the tile size more convenient. When enabling it, you'll however notice that it actually doesn't set the render tile size to 256 x 256. Istead, it tries to choose values which are close to this, but round them up or down, so that the image is split up into tiles of all equal size. See this example:

The Render Dimensions are set to 1280 x 720 pixels, the tile size is set to 256 x 240. Why? Because that gives the GPU 5 x 3 = 15 tiles of equal size to process. If you keep the tile size at 256 x 256, the last row of tiles will have a height of 208 pixels, as 720 cannot be divided evenly by 256. This is potentially, but not necessarily, inefficient.


If you give your object a Metallic value of 1 with a Roughness of 0.5 then Bake Type > Glossy, you'll have this kind of result:


This should work for the latest release of 2.80 beta.

For one thing, your original curve is not periodic--this means that if you try to link them end-to-end, the ends aren't going to match up. I would create a new curly object so that it will connect end-to-end with itself without having to perform additional rotations.

After this is done, make sure that the origins for the curly and and path are centered to geometric means and that their rotations and scale transformations have been applied.

Apply an array modifier to the curly object. choose "Fit Curve" as the "Fit Type:" and select the path object as the "Curve:".

Next apply the curve modifier and select the same path as the curve you are fitting to.

Using the X Axis as the "Deformation Axis:" tends to work best for the curve modifier but experiment with other axes if the curly's aren't arranged end-to-end. Here's something you might not have tried that I needed to do (although probably not since your path is closed): You can move and rotate the curly object to fine-tune its position on the path. I had to do this when I made these balusters follow a path that was curved like the banister:

Turn on "Merge" in the array modifier. Keeping the "Relative Offset:" value at "1.00" should string the curly end-to-end but you can adjust it if you have to. If you are close but the ends don't meet up, convert the whole thing to a mesh under the Object -> Convert To menu and move the vertices manually.

Comment if you have additional problems or questions.

Don't overthink "periodic", we are just talking about a repeating pattern. Here is a piece of the sin(x) wave function that repeats, for example:

Any piece of this function that is this long will repeat end-to-end.

HOW TO CREATE PERIODIC CURVE THE EASY WAY:

1) Create a Path object (Nurbs path or Bezier, doesn't matter, just make sure it is straight). Rotate the object so that it is oriented parallel to the z axis. Offset it from the z axis by 1 unit and move the object's origin to the world origin, as shown:

I decided to scale the path in the z-direction by half (personal choice):

Now add a SimpleDeform modifier. Make sure the option is set to Twist, the axis is set to X and the angle is set to 360 degrees (which is a complete revolution). Now your path is periodic.

Top view:

yet another view:

Now you can give the curve some bevel depth and convert it to a mesh (Object -> Convert To).


Enable the keyframe box, and then set the range of keyframes you want to use for solving in the boxes below (keyframe A and Keyframe B).

Blender will solve the frames it can solve, meaning the frames for which there is a reasonable amount of information to estimate placement in the 3d world (or a low error).  The slected range is used to determine the camera intrinsics and placement.  Blender will then try solve the whole shot as marked in the beginning and end frame of the scene, but using the information gathered in the marked section of the shot.
For more information on motion tracking read this post:
How can I get better results when doing camera motion tracking?


It looks like you're trying to cut holes in a quarter sphere (well, kind of). Maybe beginning with a UV Sphere (i.e. concentric circles) is not the best way. Here is a try, beginning with a cube:


For a shader only solution, one way is a simple material such as the following:

Click to enlarge
Blackbody Node is used for color.
See kelvin color temperature for some examples of values to start with. You can adjust these values up and down until you get something you like.
The layer weight node is used for a mixing factor between the two blackbody nodes creating a result like below:

An approach like this should keep resources low and be fairly manageable. Note that also, the flame object is a quad-sphere modeled to a flame and not a flat plane.


Weird Tears in terrain mesh in Render View only

The problem is caused by the fact that although the terrain origin is at (0,0,0), the real mesh is still very far from it.

So it seems you have to use a very large clipping range (1000000 in your case), which allows you to see objects, but reduces the depth precision. This is a known limitation of all softwares using OpenGL.

To fix it, you can:

Increase the start clipping.
Decrease the end clipping.

However, you may also have to scale the objects to see it again. (And, in your case, I would suggest you select the terrain then ShiftCtrlAltC > Origin to Geometry, to relocate the origin from afar. Then move them back to the world center.)


Not sure if I understand your question about the other property windows, what you may be looking for is the shader editor.  You can access it by going to the shading workspace at the top, and you'll find the bottom window is already set up for editing materials.

This MAY be related to what you're wanting, because you can access UV coordinates here, etc.


how would one go about creating an epic animated landscape?

To operate with high polycounts you should make sure that your scene preview subsurface levels are as low as possible when you aren't working on them(so split up your scene into smaller sections). Also, you can put sections you aren't working on in wireframe view(this does help). Splitting stuff up into different scenes also helps.

When I do high polycount scenes I work on them section by section on different layers then put them all together but only leave the center in solid mode.

So yes, Blender can work with high polycounts on a lower machine but you'll probably have to jump through some hoops to do it.


Different materials on different sides of a mesh

Finally found the answer - backfacing on the Geometry node doesn't work when there's a Solidify modifier in play.  A bit more hair torn out but I got there!


You set the "Clamp Direct and Clamp Indirect" to a very small number.

Here is a screenshot with,

Clamp Direct = 1, Clamp Indirect = 10, Sun lamp strength = 2.

The documentation for these settings is here https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/settings/scene/render/integrator.html

Clamp direct will make all light values larger than the set value be ignored (or clamped), so if you set clamp at 0.03 for example, all light values will be considered up to 0.03, even if your light is brighter than brightest star in the universe.


Water animation works in viewport but renders differently (cycles)

The answer is that in the tutorial i was trying to follow the guy dosent bake the Dynamic paint where as in newer versions of Blender you need to open up the cache section of Dynamic Paint and click on the bake dynamics button


File Search (File Browse) through all Sub-Folders

I don't think there's a way to search all sub-folders in the file browser, but you can search 3 levels deep by changing the Recursion Level drop-down box in the file browser header from None to Three Levels:

What this actually does is show  all the sub-folders in the file browser, which in turn allows them to be included in the search results.


How can I make the waveform in sequencer bigger?

From official manual:

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.80/editors/vse/sequencer/navigating.html

  Use these shortcuts to adjust the sequence area of the VSE:

  Scale View, Ctrl-MMB and drag up/down (vertical scale) or left/right    (horizontal scale).
  Scale View Vertically, drag on the circles on the vertical scroll bar.
  Scale View Horizontally, drag on the circles on the horizontal scroll bar.


Object not showing up in Blender 2.8 render

Make sure "show emitter" is checked in the render section of your particle settings


Blender API (2.6), UI list of loaded images

Adding a "real" datablock widget won't quite work and it's not possible (or at least not easy) to have a dynamically populated EnumProperty object. Fortunately, there is the prop_search() UILayout function. You can use that to assign the name of a datablock to a StringProperty variable. So, you should have something along the lines of this for that StringProperty:

bpy.types.Object.textureName = bpy.props.StringProperty(name="Texture")

With that done, all objects now have a new string property called textureName that defaults to an empty string. Now, in your panel, add something akin to the following in the draw() function:

def draw(self, context):
    ob = context.active_object

    layout = self.layout
    layout.prop_search(ob, "textureName", bpy.data, "images")

Of course, this only assigns the name of the texture to that StringProperty variable. You still need to write code that does something with this property.


is it possible to cycle only some keyframes in the graph editor?

No, not in the graph editor, you should use NLA editor for this.

in the graph editor you can setup repeating all bunch of keyframes, not part of it.

First, set up cycles in action editor, each cycle in different action:

Then use Push Down in action editor or Shift+A in NLA Editor to add actions in NLA:

Then in NLA editor's N-panel (properties panel) you can set up any count of cycles using repeat property:


Im struggling to work the camera in a small space

You need to adjust your camera's Focal Length.
The tutorial uses 18mm.

Go to Camera > Lens > Focal Length (it's 50mm by default)


Documentation for CollectionProperty (CRUD methods)

You are right about the documentation. The Python Console is your friend here. It offers autocomplete "intellisense" when you hit CtrlSpace after a . or a (:

You get the methods documentation from the source if there is one. In CollectionProperty case there is none:

The traceback error gives another hint:

If this does not help you search google, this site, blenderartists or your favorite blender python blogs for the functions you are interested in for more info or code examples. Since you now know what is available and what you are after, this should give better results than searching just for documentation.

If that still fails, chances are that you are after something only couple of people in the world know. You can look into the source code where you find bpy_props.c and then you dig. If you don't get too far the best bet in this case is to contact developers on official channels (mail, IRC) and ask there.


You can scale them in edit mode with Ctrl + Alt + S


OS-X - Fly Mode won't respond to mouse movements

The mouse's movements can't be read in Fly Mode when the menu is like the example in red.

For this to work I also have to hide the right side of the menu like

so: http://puu.sh/k2Bl3.png


Use the operator size after you add a mesh in Blender 2.79

Blender 2.79b

Use the operator size after you add a mesh in Blender 2.79 in the Add Cube panel

Blender 2.81


How to smooth shade an object while retaining hard edges?

There are a few ways to do this but the quickest and most efficient (in your case here) is to just smooth it the same way, using Shade Smooth and then adding an Edge Split modifier to the mesh.

From the wiki

  The EdgeSplit modifier splits edges within a mesh. The edges to split
  can be determined from the edge angle (i.e. angle between faces
  forming this edge), and/or edges marked as sharp.

  Splitting an edge affects vertex normal generation at that edge,
  making the edge appear sharp. Hence, this modifier can be used to
  achieve the same effect as the Autosmooth button, making edges appear
  sharp when their angle is above a certain threshold. It can also be
  used for manual control of the smoothing process, where the user
  defines which edges should appear smooth or sharp

Here it is as you have it above..

With the modifier added

Additionally, you can see some more tips here for getting good quality on hard surface models. BlenderCookie has a tutorial (archived) on getting nice sharp edges.


Armature with automatic weights problem. Object not following the bone properly

When Blender automatically generated the weight for the bones it must have not completely covered the area of the bone.  What you need to do is select the mesh and go into weight paint mode.  Select the vertex group for the bone that is having problems, set the weight to 1.000, and paint the area around the bone.  That should fix your problem.  Painting may be needed on more bones than just one.


Drag the signs at the corner of each window in following directions.It will help you close all the windows.


Import the SVG file into blender and apply it to the bottle with a Shrinkwrap modifier in Project mode and with the bottle as Target. You might need to play with the offset value to separate the label from the surface.

Make sure this option is turned on:

make sure you read: Why won't Blender let me import .svg files?

and

Why can't I import a SVG file from Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape?


The problem is that your texture does not have any mapping defined.

To fix this, you can either UV unwrap your object, or use the Texture coordinates node.

To UV unwrap a UV sphere, all you need to do is:

Select your sphere and enter Edit Mode (Tab)
Select all (A)
Press U>Sphere projection while in side view.

For more info on UV unwrapping, see this post.

There are also ways to map images without UV unwrapping, such as Blended Box Mapping:

The Mapping node is used to scale up the texture.


How do I make my obj import operator preset the default option?

TL;DR: Editing this file works:
C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 2.83\2.83\scripts\addons\io_scene_obj\__init__.py
Long version: How to edit the file:
This file is a text description of the UI elements a user sees when selecting file > import > wavefront (.obj).
If you look through the file, you will see class ImportOBJ and within that class, several blocks of text called "BoolProperty" or "StringProperty" or "EnumProperty".
Each of these blocks of text corresponds to an element you see in the "Blender File View" window operator presets panel:

In my case, I was looking to alter the default value for "split/keep vert order" (because changing vert order on import is very unwise, as it's destructive), which was "ON" (split) in my distro (2.83.10).  I changed it to "OFF" (Keep Vert Order):
    split_mode: EnumProperty(
        name="Split",
        items=(('ON', "Split", "Split geometry, omits unused verts"),
               ('OFF', "Keep Vert Order", "Keep vertex order from file"),
               ),
        default='OFF',
        )

You can use this technique to change the way the UI appears in many ways.  This is just one small example, specific to this question.


Eevee Render is brighter than 3d viewport display

Your scene seems to be all properly set (same sampling, no Simplify, no hidden objects etc), so the "issue" seems to be with Blender, not with you overlooking some settings. In other words, you probably have to live with it for now.
Just to be sure there weren't any hidden settings or objects in your scene that were interfering, I was also able to reproduce the behaviour with a entirely new scene (although in my case the render seems dimmer).
It looks like the feature that originates the difference is Eevee's "Bloom". Without Bloom, the world color matches perfectly.
I'm not sure whether this is a bug or one of the unavoidable differences between "Render" and "Rendered Viewport" (like, for example, anything that has to do with the concept of screen space), and therefore if it should be reported to the developers or not.

I've also checked whether you're affected by a known bug of Blender 2.83 with viewport color management: https://developer.blender.org/T77909, but even with Blender 2.82 (unaffected by the bug) your scene seems to suffer a mismatch.


How to clump hair particles from its root?

Choose Clump -1 as explained by the manual: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/physics/particles/emitter/children.html


How to add a game object to another scene at a specific position?

The add object function works by adding the new object (the first parameter) at the location of another game object (the second parameter).

With these two lines you are specifying that it adds the player the at location of the object your script is on (probably your camera).

ob =bge.logic.getCurrentController().owner
ob1=scene.addObject("player",ob)

Here is how to fix it.

Add a new empty, parent it to your camera if you need the player always spawning relative to the camera. If you want the player to always spawn in one spot, then do not parent the empty.

Now use the new empty as the location for where you add the player.

empty = scene.objects['Empty']
ob1 = scene.addObject(player, empty)


Have found solution. it's simpler to create another animation and play it on any surface, but it can be difficult to synchronize video on phone screen and environment, if you wanna simulate phone camera effect in movement.


There was a problem with the objects assigned meshes, like they were visible in designer but not in code behind. So I just erase all planes of my second gauge and copied the first one gauge's planes and assigned the proper value to be used. All work fine now.


There's are 2 things that affect overall lighting in the scene

lights
world

The Look Dev viewport shading allows you to see what your objects would look like in predefined lighting conditions.  This is configurable to allow standard studio lighting setups which can be useful when modeling and animating.

You can override both the scene lights and the scene world to use the lighting from your scene.

In the general case, and unless you know what you are doing you should leave both boxes unchecked (as shown in the screenshot below).

Now, there is one other thing which may cause a problem.  If this is very small then the amount of ambient light will be low and you will have a dark Look Dev setup. Make sure that the world strength setting is something sensible (probably 1.0)

I hope this helps, there's a lot of learning in blender, but also a lot of fun too.


How can i add stylized cracks on my sculpture?

Most artists are dragging an alpha of a stylized crack on their sculpture, you can find a set of popular alpha on the Gumroad page of Michael Vicente aka Orb here: https://gumroad.com/l/nOkHw
You will also need an high polycount to apply the alpha's details.

But the best way to apply cracks is by creating a mesh that you will use to cut your mesh with boolean, you will get more realistic cuts and non-destructive (with Modifiers and BoolTool brushes). You can use the BoolTool to work faster, you will have to select your crack mesh (completely closed) first then the mesh to cut and use the Difference operation.

If you use the Brush Boolean menu in the booltool you will be able to edit the cracks. Add an edge split modifier with a 30 degree angle to display your cracks correctly, sometimes the smoothing appears badly arround booleans.


There are some great resources out there (non-specific to Blender) about how to solve these kinds of problems. I'd recommend looking for some facial modeling tutes that talk about topology specifically.

To answer your question, though, you will have to have a tri or a 5-point vertex :-/ It's a veritable law of facial modeling and there's great debate (apparently) on where the unavoidable tris and 5's should go.

In this case, you'll probably want to make a face out of those three vertices you have circled, to make a tri. This will give you an edge loop that goes around the mouth, which is highly desirable. The debate usually surrounds how far away from the lips that tri should be. It's usually helpful to put the tri somewhere that it will mostly be flat, and won't distort very much. If it's small enough, it might not matter.


Masks are used to mix other things. Mask is usually a grayscale image that controls how much of one thing you can see through another. You can use masks to mix different textures, colors, shaders and you can even mask effects you apply to something with them so it's really hard to tell what this was originally supposed to be used for. You could try to see what feature it matches on the material and see if it might be useful to you for anything, but it may also be that it is included by mistake and is not needed for anything in this particular case.


Actually you've created a icosphere which, by default, is not created symmetrical on the X axis but on the Y axis, so just rotate it 90° in the Z axis in Edit mode and you're good.


Imported character from ROBLOX as .obj doesn't show up

Whenever models don't import correctly I usually try different formats, different programs or try converting them in Noesis (Handy model conversion program).
If I can't get the model this way then I usually figure the file is completely broken and should obtain it from elsewhere.


What is the fastest way to texture bake a full scene?

Depending on your intended volume either by doing it manually or making a script that handles the bake.

You will need to manage at least the following:

texture resolution for each baked mesh object
which objects to bake (you probably don't want to bake glass / transparent objects / illuminating surfaces / gfx like light halos etc
setting up lightmap bake UV layer (most likely you have the default UV used for getting the texture itself tiling correctly)
setting up an image texture node for every material in the object being baked and make a new image for it and make the node selected
saving the texture on disk with naming convention that allows you to read the images into a new, realtime baked materials that correspond to the mesh objects when you start BGE

If you plan on making more than 1 or 2 levels, to me it definitely calls for script assistance.


Python script: Give every scene a unique number

You have added a property called mhfc_uuid1 to the Scene class and set the default value to the pre-calculated value of p_uuid1. Every scene will then get this same value when it is created.

You may want to set the default to zero and then before using it check if it is zero and then set it to a generated value.

class MyOperator(bpy.types.Operator):

    def execute(self, context):
        if context.scene.mhfc_uuid1 == 0:
            context.scene.mhfc_uuid1 = generateuuid()
        do_interesting_stuff()
        return {'FINISHED'}

You could setup existing scenes as your addon is enabled by adding something like this after you add the properties.

for sc in bpy.data.scenes:
    sc.mhfc_uuid1 = generateuuid()


vertex groups created from rigging do not work

When making a rig make sure that every part of the model has an Armature Modifier applied. This is easy when you Merge (CtrlJ in Object Mode) all of the objects you want to rig into one "big" object which means that you only have to apply the Armature Modifier once.

Another "feature" of Blender that comes to mind when thinking about rigging with custom weights is that the weigths are assigned with a vertex group. The vertex group's name has to be the same as the Bone's you want to bind the group to. You can always try to get away with automated weights or use them as a base for your own weightpaint, it gives a decent result most of the time.


How to texture a DEM data with satellite imagery on Blender ?

First, you need to find the satellite image that corresponds to the exact same coordinates of the DEM and is generated using same projection.

Load the image from the satellite image in the UV/Image editor.

Go to top orthogonal view, select your model.

Enter edit mode Tab.

Press A to select all. Press U to UV unwrap and choose Project form view bounds.

Still in edit mode create a material that uses the image as part of the texture and set the coordinates to use the UVs.

Assign then the material to the mesh.


You changed the aspect ratio when you shouldn't have. Change it back to the default setting (X: 1.0, Y: 1.0) and the render will turn out like the preview. Think of the setting as the aspect ratio of the individual pixels, not of the entire image.


Menu position for skin modifier resizing (Ctrl + A)

As far as I know there isn't, but you can access the x and y sizes from the Tool panel > Transform > Radius X/Y. You have to be in edit mode, in vertex select mode and you have to select at least one vertex.

You can't use the proportional editing that way though.


Cross section using Camera Clipping Distance results in very dark model interior

Make sure light can reach the interior. Use boolean modifier(s) to effectively cut away portions of your model, thus giving a true cross-section.

Example:

Create a new mesh (e.g. cube).
Add a boolean modifier to object which you want to cut away. Set
mode "Difference". Don't hit apply.
Make the new mesh (1.) the target for the modifier.
Move the mesh into desired position. Where the mesh overlaps the
object will be cut away.


Making a precision pipe with 30 deg bends

To create a precision model suitable for 3D printing here is how I finally solved the puzzle that enabled me to enter the exact dimensions and angles needed for the part. If you know all the key strokes, you only need to read the first sentence in each item. The remainder are just step by step keystrokes for those not familiar with navigating around Blender

Add mesh cylinder – and set the following

A)   Vertices = 100 B)   Radius = 29.2142
C)   Depth = 60 mm
D)  Fill Type    = Nothing
E)   After other setting
are made scale it.
Ctrl + A > Scale

Add 30 loop cuts (one for each degree) for bending the pipe as follows

A)    Tab into edit mode
B)    Ctrl + R, Left Click, Right Click
C)    Enter 30 in Number of Cuts

Add Solidify modifier to cylinder wall

A)    Switch to top view press Numpad 7
B)    Click the modify tab “wrench icon”
C)    Click Add Modifier and select Solidify
D)    Change Thickness to 1.63mm
E)    Check Even Thickness and High Quality Normals (note - picture does not show these two checked, but it is needed to make both inside and outside walls even)
F)    To add to inside wall leave offset at -1. To add to outside wall change to 1
G)  Click Apply

Add an empty to use as an axis point for bending the pipe

A)    Shift + A – add empty, use type with arrows easier to see orientation of empty.
B)    Scale it up a bit so it is easier to see
C)    Move it on the Y axis about 40 mm
D)    Both the cylinder origin and the empty should be on the Y baseline

Add Simple Deform modifier to cylinder

A)    Select cylinder
B)    Click Add Modifier and select Simple Deform
C)    Select Bend
D)    In Axis, Origin select the empty you added in step 4
E)    Change angle to 30 degrees
F)    Click Apply (Important for the next step)

Change origin of pipe to the bottom

A)    Tab into edit mode
B)    Change to Edge Select mode
C)    Select either inner or outer bottom edge. Hold cursor over edge and press Shift + Alt to select the complete circle
D)    Move cursor to selected by pressing Shift + S and choose Cursor to Selected
E)    Tab into object mode
F)    Click Object and select Set Origin / Origin to 3D Cursor
G)    Move cursor to World Origin, Shift + S to World Origin
H)    Then move pipe to 3D Cursor, Shift + S Selection to Cursor

Set pipe flat on base line

A)    Change view to Right Orthographic view by clicking numpad 3 pad
B)    Turn on Snapping, make sure Increment is selected and the magnet icon is highlighted. Or with cursor in viewport open the property settings menu and type N
C)    Rotate the pipe on the X axis -15 deg.  Either typing -15 in Rotation X or in the viewport, type R then rotate pipe with mouse until it snaps to the y axis

Extrude top faces of pipe 20mm

A)    Tab to Edit mode
B)    Change view to solid mode
C)    Select Face mode
D)    With cursor over a top face select all with Shift-Click
E)    With top faces selected type E to extrude and 20 for 20mm

Duplicate pipe and rotate

A)    Tab to object mode
B)    Change to wireframe and X-ray mode
C)    Switch to Right Orthographic view, click Numpad 3
D)    Duplicate pipe with Shit+D and Enter
E)    The new pipe needs to be rotated 180 deg on X axis, BUT it is already sitting at a -15 deg angle. You can either enter -195 in the items property settings or with snap to grid still activated hold down Ctrl while rotating pipe with mouse until it snaps in place so both pipe sections match up exactly.

Prepare both pipes to be joined into one object by removing bottom faces from both pipes before joining

Switch to solid mode

Press H to hide bottom pipe temporarily

Select top pipe and Tab into edit mode

Select bottom faces as described earlier

Press X and select Delete Faces

Tab back into Object mode

Press Alt+H to reveal bottom pipe

Make sure only the top pipe is selected press H to hide

Then repeat these steps for the bottom pipe for the edge that will be joined to the top pipe

Next join both pipes with a simple Join Ctrl+J

A)    Switch to wireframe and X-ray mode
B)    Select both pipes
C)    Click Ctrl+J to join the two pipes.

Verify the final pipe can be 3D printed. This can most easily be done if the 3D-Print add-on has been installed in preferences. The main thing is the final object cannot have non-manifolded edges.  But since The posted questions really does not speak to this issue, I will not cover it in detail other than to say since the final object has to be printed, the dimensions have to be accurate or else the part would be useless


You could use this:

bpy.context.scene.ray_cast(viewLayer, origin, direction)
viewLayer = the view layer you are operating on
origin = the Vector origin of the ray
direction = the normalised Vector direction

If you are just using the default view layer you can just grab it via:
viewL = bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].view_layers["View Layer"]
origin would be the Vector position of V1
direction would be a normalised Vector, so (0,-1,0) for a negative Y axis direction

result = bpy.context.scene.ray_cast(viewL, (V1.x, V1.y, V1.z), (0,-1,0))

result contains a tuple, with the second item containing the location of the hit point on the mesh

So then you just want to calculate the distance between the two vectors so it would be:

import math

viewL = bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].view_layers["View Layer"]
result = bpy.context.scene.ray_cast(viewL, (V1.x, V1.y, V1.z), (0,-1,0))
hit = result[1]
distance = math.sqrt((V1.x - hit[0])² + (V1.y - hit[1])² + (V1.z - hit[2])²)


How can I make objects transparent but thick at the same time

"Transparent but thick" would sometimes mean "translucent", I suppose. However, the casino royale gunbarrel sequence effect on YouTube seems not. I think you are trying to make things like this:

Or something more controllable:


so, i found out the best way to do it. increase the roughness, but also increase the threshold as well. the roughness makes it more shaggy so it's not combed to a point, but the threshold makes sure that there are some combed hairs as ll


Bending with Curve Modifier doesn't follow curve

More info in comments. Just for you before closing your question and because seeing my answer with A letter I was a bit confused with orientation again ... :)
Here all rotations zero ... just orient your object in local Y axis in edit mode.

Result with Curve modifier deformed on Y axis


Say I irreversibly deleted my camera in my scene. Could I solve for its position, given a prior 2d render of the scene?

Well you can import the previous render as a reference image and add a new camera, flatten them both out using (ctrl+R and then ctrl+G), then hop inside of your camera and raise it above your image until it fills out the camera borders correctly, and then lastly parent the image to the camera and turn down it's opacity.

All you would need to do from there is fly around a bit with shift+` and find your previous location. It would basically serve as an overlay guide to help you find your old position.


It seems like enabling Split Impulse in the Rigid Body World tab under the Scene tab just solved this issue. Increasing the Steps Per Second to 300 almost solves the bouncing 100%.


I replicated your setup and I think the answer is simply that, no it is not possible.

The closest you might get in my opinion would be disabling shadows for CASTER and/or BLOCKER by unchecking traceable in material options. And it fakes the desired effect but won't hold true in general - it is not "shadow blocking"

Using light groups you can achieve a similar effect, in that you might have two similar lights, one affecting CASTING and BLOCKER (but not RECEIVER), the other exclusively lighting the receiver. But this is not shadow blocking either.

What I understand is that you want it so that...
- if a backward ray (from RECEIVER to the light) hits blocker first, RECEIVER is illuminated regardless of anything else in between light and the receiver.
- if a backward ray doesn't hit blocker first, process shadows normally.

As far as I know, options to cast shadows without raytracing have been removed from Blender (no shadow maps anymore). I'm not sure what you might achieve with an older version (maybe pre-2.5x if my memory is correct).
This is relevant to your problem in that, in raytracing shadows are simply a by product of not receiving light. So I'm not saying that it's impossible with raytracing, but they would have to implement "shadow blocking" as a specific feature for this to work.


Update all materials, but keep their color and textures

import bpy
for material in bpy.data.materials:
    if (material.use_nodes):
        nodes = material.node_tree.nodes
        links = material.node_tree.links
        for node in nodes:
            if (node.name=='Material Output'):
                out = node
            elif  (node.name=='Image Texture'):
                img = node
            elif: (node.name=='Diffuse BSDF'):
                diff = node
                # if diffuse node is not linked,then save it's colorvalue
                if not(node.inputs[0].is_linked):
                    color = node.inputs[0].default_value
                else:
                # else we should set color to None, and be aware
                    color = None
            else:
                nodes.remove(node)

        hold = nodes.new('ShaderNodeHoldout')
        geo = nodes.new('ShaderNodeNewGeometry')
        mix = nodes.new('ShaderNodeMixShader')
        RGB = nodes.new('ShaderNodeRGB')
        if (color==None):
            if (img==None):
                #No image and diffuse was not empty, set color to grey
                RGB.outputs[0].default_value = (0.7,0.7,0.7)
                img = RGB
        else:
            RGB.outputs[0].default_value = color
            img = RGB

        links.new(out.inputs[0],mix.outputs[0])
        links.new(mix.inputs[0],geo.outputs[6])
        links.new(mix.inputs[1],diff.outputs[0])
        links.new(mix.inputs[2],hold.outputs[0])
        links.new(diff.inputs[0],img.outputs[0])

This code does almost what you want.
It saves one image texture node, one material output node, and deletes everything else, and then adds emission and holdout node and connects them via backfacing. As for part of your own shader, i think you can save it as a node group and append it into node setup via python too


Select vertices, which are affected by a shape key

I think a shape key stores the coordinates of any vertex of the mesh, regardless of whether the position has been changed or not. So it seems as if the only way to select vertices affected by the shape key is to individually compare whether the position of the vertices is the same for different shape keys.

import bpy
tolerance = 1e-5
obj = bpy.context.active_object
shape_keys = obj.data.shape_keys.key_blocks
sk1_data = shape_keys['Key 1'].data
skb_data = shape_keys['Basis'].data

bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode="EDIT")
bpy.ops.mesh.select_all(action="DESELECT")
bpy.ops.mesh.select_mode(type="VERT")
bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode="OBJECT")

for i, (x, y) in enumerate(zip(sk1_data, skb_data)):
    if (x.co - y.co).length > tolerance:
        obj.data.vertices[i].select = True

bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode="EDIT")

EDIT: As per batFINGER's suggestion, replaced comparison based on equality with a tolerance based approach.


All i want to do is scale an image vertically

If you introduce a reference using the 'Background Image' mechanism, I'm fairly sure you can't scale it non-uniformly, or about a chosen origin.

You can, though, by introducing the image as an object, either by creating an  'Image' Empty, or by importing 'Images as Planes'. In both cases you could snap the cursor to your desired stationary point on the model (Edit Mode, ShiftS, > Cursor to Selected), then switch to the image, and, say, SY, with the Pivot Center set to the cursor.


If each object is setup with a different material, each using a different image texture, you can join them together and each part will paint to the corresponding image.

I would suggest making a copy of the blend file and joining them in the second file, this way you don't have to separate them when you are finished. After you have finished painting and saving the image textures, go back to the old file and it can read your painted images.

This would be easier than constantly changing the active object as you paint the vehicle.


How to create faces between parent objects?

Instead of parenting the object, you need to join them if you're going to connect them, select both and press Ctrl + J, doing so will make them two objects with separate meshes, you can now press Tab to go to Edit mode and work on vertices, edges and faces of both meshes.
You can still create separate textures, assign separate UVs to the same mesh.


I don't know if you could do it properly with the Screw modifier, anyway, when you are in Edit mode, there's a Screw tool available on the T menu that works perfectly:

Draw your profile, keep in mind that the origin point will be the centre of the rotation and that the angle between the top and the bottom vertices will determine the slope of the screw. Stay in an orthogonal view so that Blender knows how it has to rotate, then click on Screw and play with the parameters on the bottom of the N menu.

In 2.8 it looks like you need to find the tool by the search menu (F3), and the parameters are in the Operator box (bottom left of your 3D view).


In Blender 2.7 or 2.8 how can you slice off parts of a 2D grease pencil drawing and move it to its own layer?

Begin editing the GP strokes. In 2.80 you select the GP objects and go into edit mode, while in 2.79 you need to select Edit Strokes in the mode menu.
Select the curve points that you want to move to another layer.
Press M and either choose an existing layer or New Layer.


UV unwrapping: Blender always selects an edge ring as a "seam"

This is often happening when the mesh of your model is not all connected.

To merge vertices placed in the same position:

Go into Edit Mode Tab
Select all A
Open Specials menu W, select Remove Doubles

Unwrap the model again


You can use the Fog Glow in the compositor to produce a nice glare for the bright sun as follows :

I've used two levels of the glare node which isn't ideal (as it's not the most efficient method) but it provided a simple means of filtering out the 'bright' elements of your original image (since it's a JPG is doesn't include brightness values > 1.0 - in your actual scene you could use an emission material with, say, emission strength of 20 or so - this way the threshold on a single Glare node can do the job!) to be multiplied up by the 'Divide' node (by dividing by a small value - eg, divide by 0.05 to multiply it by 20).

The final Glare node then adds the actual glare on those elements picked out by that first stage to produce something like the following :

To include this in the render pipeline my preference would be to enable the Emit pass in the Render Layer. This provides you with an additional output from the Render Layers node for the emission materials only. You then only need to use a single Glare node for the emission before adding it into the rest of your render.

You can vary the glow by adjusting the Divide node and/or the Glare node or by varying the brightness of any emissive material in the scene. If you want to exclude certain emissive materials from the 'glare' then you can use the Glare node's Threshold to filter those out - ie, setting it to, say, 5 will result in any emission at a strength of less than 5 not being subject to glare while any greater than 5 being subject to the glare.

An alternative is to apply the glow directly to the rendered Image and to rely on the emission strength to provide the glow. This makes for a simpler compositing set up but you lose the ability to easily adjust the glow effect - you would need to adjust the actual emission strength rather than being able to simply adjust the "multiplier" (Divide node in the previous example).


How to reverse direction of object along path

The animated path has a parameter called "Evaluation Time". This shows in percents where is the constrained object along the path. When you click on "Animate Path" button (at the constraints menu, you already did it) the curve gets an animation modifier what you can find in the graph editor. After you delete it, you can animate the Evaluation time as any other parameter. So you can increase or decrease its value by inserting keyframes at the appropriate frame.


Make Blender recalculate non-faceweighted normals?

From your comment it seems you wish something that the solidify modifier maybe can do easily:

which after enabling viewport display gets:

You can use vertex group to partially apply.

Surely your project is more complicated and different, but since not much of it was shown above...


Export from Blender to Photoshop with same camera angle

Photoshop has its own camera. We cannot import the Blender camera position.

But, you made me think of a solution:

Select the object and so the camera. Make a parentCtrl+P.

Select just the camera.

Go to front view 1.

Now go to View > Align View > Align Active Camera to View.

The camera now has the same position as Photoshop camera and the object has the same view because it is parented to the camera.

Once exported, the object can be opened in Photoshop as you see it in Blender. More or less.

Remember to undo the changes you made in Blender.


Problem using Bevel and Subdivision Workflow

You probably need more topology, like this (use a Shrinkwrap to make it stick to a cylinder shape):

The pinching is almost not noticeable:

If you want a better result I guess you need to add more topology:


Dark Blender is a modified Blender Build specifically for Game Asset Creation. You can find it's download link and BlenderArtists thread here.


Active rigid body objects fall through other passive rigid body objects

Try to compose the collision of simpler collision shapes like spheres and cubes. Mesh collisions are expensive and unreliable. You can also try to increase the Rigid Body World to have more Steps Per Second. Sometimes you need to remove and recreate the Rigid Body on the problematic objects.


Is there a way to create a copy of the default keymap configuration?

Holy smokes, this was miserable to figure out but this appears to work:

        import bpy

        wm = bpy.context.window_manager
        CopiedMap = wm.keyconfigs.new("CopiedMap")

        #Get list of default keymap items
        keymaps = wm.keyconfigs.default.keymaps.items()
        for i in keymaps:

            #Put default values in to new keymaps
            CopiedMap.keymaps.new(i[1].name, space_type= i[1].space_type,
                                  region_type=i[1].region_type)

            #Get list of default keymap_items contained
            #within the keymap
            keymap_items = i[1].keymap_items.items()
            for j in keymap_items:

                #Put values in to new keymap_items
                CopiedMap.keymaps[i[1].name].keymap_items.new(j[1].idname, j[1].type, j[1].value, any=j[1].any,
                                                              shift=j[1].shift, ctrl=j[1].ctrl, alt=j[1].alt,
                                                              oskey=j[1].oskey, key_modifier=j[1].key_modifier)

I'm not a very good scripter so this is probably not a very good answer, but maybe it'll get you by until somebody better at this comes along. :)


Blender Internal texture not influencing geometry

You are probably missing a UV map. I did a simple "standard cube" setup to help you better debug what is missing or not working (here I used blender render for a quick setup):

After creating the texture as you said in question, I also got rendered a flat standard cube, but then I created a simple "smart UV project" umap, using all defaults, and just this made the influence to appear in rendering results.

A UV map is needed because your texture must be "mapped" to the mesh surface, and the UV map is how you tell about your desired surface mapping.

hth


How do I halve the width of a mesh while keeping it parallel to other edges (locking to an axis doesn't work)?

You can change dimensions of a mesh by going to the Transform panel and input values directly into the fields under 'Scale'.

If you input 0.5 in the fields, assuming your mesh was already at Scale 1 for X, Y and Z, then it will be halved in all three dimensions while retaining it's current rectangular shape, it's position and alignment to other object and everything else. It will just become smaller.

You can also just change one or two of the dimensions and keep the other ones intact if you wish.


How to fix Horizontal particles in plane?

You need to set in Velocity tab Normal to 0 (if it's to straight try higher values) and Emitter Object > Z to 1.

If my answer was good enough, consider accepting it or/and upvoting.


Can I record unrendered scene/animation?

Try selecting Render > Render OpenGL Animation.  That should give you the results you want.


Where is the render display mode setting in 2.8x?

You can access the settings related to displaying the render in the Preferences now (Interface > Editors > Temporary Windows > Render In):

To get to the Preferences you can hit F4 followed by P or go to Edit menu on the Topbar and choose Preferences:


Why are there holes in my exported meshes?

The faces on the sides of the knife seem to be N-gons.
Try triangulating the mesh before exporting it:

In edit mode (Tab), select everything (A) or just the ngons by pressing 3D view > Header > Select > Faces by sides, then setting the type to greater than in the redo panel (F6):

Triangulate the faces by pressing CtrlT:

If you want more control over the triangulation, you might try using the triangulate modifier.


Texture/material mapping changes from viewport to render (p)

In response to Monster's comment I have tweaked some settings regarding UV. I found out that when I unwrapped the floors of all three types of pieces and I set the texture coordinate to UV that it looks the same for all floorpieces and also the same in the 3D view and the rendered view.
Why it only went wrong with 1 type I still do not know (because I had not unwrapped any of the pieces earlier) but luckily the problem is solved now.


Blender 2.8 create viewport similar to startup user perspective

If I've understood you correctly...
Start blender with no file loaded.
Arrange your viewport.
Then click on File->Defaults->Save Startup File

To return to certain viewport setups while working with blender try the following addon (here: Blender 2.80):


Is there a way to automatically add faces in proper places to this mesh?

Use a boolean modifier

Add a Cube scaled to flat in the desired location without hole. You may not even need to be precise because your edges may be intended to be hidden in frame. Or use F as you mentioned above. Assume name window01.
Create a sphere named  Sphere01.  Sphere01 will be the hole cutter.
Add a boolean modifier [difference]  to window01.  Sphere01 is target of modifier .
Position Sphere01 where the desired hole should be.  You may hide the sphere to view easily ,  or view in wireframe mode.  You can use multiple spheres or other deformations of the sphere.  You determine placement.
Press apply button for the boolean modifier.
Reshape hole produced by the boolean modifier on window01. You might enjoy proportional editing in edit mode for this.
Duplicate window01 to new locations or repeat process for each new window.


If a cube is rigged on all it's edges. How can I animate it so it tumbles forward forever?

For anyone who is interested in the future. I found a simple solution. Just add an 'empty' and make it a child of the cube (which behaves as a child to the armature). Make sure the empty is in the same location as the parent's bone head.
Give your parent's bone 2 constrains; 'Copy Rotation' + 'Copy Location' and make the target: the Empty.


Samples:
What you want is the number of Samples.
A Sample refers to cycles firing a "ray" into the scene and returning information based on the color and other properties of objects it interacts with.
E.g. If a ray bounces off a red object and then hits a light source, the corresponding pixel will get a red color.
Also see Why can't cycles cast one ray per image pixel, instead of rendering progressively to infinity?
You can change the number of samples taken per pixel in Render settings > Sampling > Samples > Render:

Increase this value to take more samples and reduce noise. See the manual:

There are two integrator modes that can be used: path tracing and branched path tracing. The path tracing integrator is a pure path tracer; at each hit it will bounce light in one direction and pick one light to receive lighting from. This makes each individual sample faster to compute, but will typically require more samples to clean up the noise.

Progressive refine:
Progressive refine does not change the number of samples, it disables tiled rendering. With tiled rendering each tile is rendered to the full number of samples before starting the next. Disabling this is useful for rendering the entire image all at once, so the user can manually stop the render and get a finished image.
Note that the render will still stop at the number of samples defined in Sampling > Samples > Render using this setting, and rendering the entire image this way is much slower than rendering with tiles.


How to use blender for reinforcement learning? How to control camera movement and save the rendered images that the camera captured?

Welcome to Blender.SE Tianqi Wang, please take the tour to find out how to use this site. Your question may get closed because it contains multiple questions, is partially opinion based, very broad and not quite limited to Blender. In future you can post as many questions as you want, but please limit yourself to a single question per post.
Cycles baking
Yes, for a more naturalistic look of your images, you could bake diffuse lighting onto textures which are mapped to the objects of the scene. This won't work with transparent or reflective material components, but I guess may be optional in your setup. You will probably want to match the surface properties of your realworld environment; for an easier start, you could choose a diffuse realworld environment for testing with little reflections (this will likely be easier to the NN as well). Note, that you have to rebake your lighting/textures if you reconfigure your set as the shadows cast by objects will no longer be correct.
Even though not physically based the renderers Blender Internal (2.79) or EEVEE (2.8) could also be used to create the texture maps, using tricks like environment lighting/ambient occlusion. The images in the paper look as if they were realtime renders with none of the enhancement (ao, light baking), so maybe this step adds unnecessary complexity.

No visual enhancements here. Looks like a 2000's game.
Camera Movement
Your image feed doesn't have to be realtime since the calculations can be split into discreet steps. I'd advise you not to use Blender's game engine. (If you think a game engine is necessary, I'd suggest Unity. It is free for personal use, has a good connection with Blender and support automatic light baking as well.)
I think, setting the camera's properties directly in code should be fine.
import bpy
import mathutils

camera = bpy.context.scene.camera
# set the camera's rotation mode to quaternion once (or do it through the GUI)
camera.rotation_mode = 'QUATERNION'

# get the camera's position and orientation
camera_location = tuple(camera.location)
camera_orientation = tuple(camera.rotation_quaternion)

# set the camera's position
camera.location = mathutils.Vector((0, 0, 0))
camera.rotation_quaternion = mathutils.Quaternion((0, 0, 0, 0))

If you are using constraints or other dependencies in your scene, you have to call bpy.context.scene.update() after setting new coordinates for your camera.
Save images from the viewport
The functionality of saving images with CtrlF3 is not exposed to the API (in 2.79).
I have documented two workarounds here.
The 2nd method uses an OpenGl render, but you will have to save and read the image to and from disk on each frame.


How to align the camera in a solved motion tracked scene?

When doing motion tracking you can set the origin of the scene on the Solve Tab's Orientation. Select a marker you want and press on Set Origin.

When you setup the tracking scene that particular tracker will be placed at the origin of your 3D scene. (to make the trackers into empties press on Link Empty to Track)

Those empties will be visible if you enable the Motion tracking box on the 3D view.

All of the tracking information is linked to the camera, so can move the camera and the empties will follow, or you can select any of the empties and move it where you want and the rest will follow as well.

To rotate the camera around a particular point. Select an emtpy, press ShiftS and select cursor to selected. Then set your Pivot Point to 3D cursor.


Another approach:

Just to tidy up, select all edges, CtrlE > Edge Data > 'Clear Sharp'
Assign a Subdivision Surface modifier with the 'Simple' option (1 or 2 levels)
Assign a Cast modifier, 'Sphere' option, Factor: 1

You can apply the modifiers to bake them into the mesh, if/when you need to, (in order, top to bottom)..

You can assign an 'Edge Split' modifier above the others, if you need to split out the surface tiles,
and apply it followed by  P > separate by Loose Parts if you need the tiles to be separate objects


Can somebody explain me why I see this black thing everytime I try to viewport shading?

You have Image Texture nodes, but in those no texture selected. Thus resulting in the shaded view showing a black object.

Solution:

Either disconnect the "Image Texture" node and set a color, or
Click on the little icon left to the "New" button on the "Image Texture" node and select a texture already loaded in Blender, or if there is none yet,
Click on the "Open" button and navigate to the texture you want to use to then load it. Dragging a picture(texture) from the system explorer into the node area will also generate a "Image Texture" node.
Last but not least, if you want to paint a texture yourself, you can click on "New" and create a new texture with some parameters to be created and selected in the node. This means though, that you will most likely need to paint or work on that texture otherwise before you have some results.

That said, i believe the most likely case is that you may want to use a texture and just did not yet load it, so in that case you may want to go with option 3.


GTX 1070 8gbs Rendering In Cycles Out Of Memory

Once you have an ambitious project that goes beyond what the hardware can do... well you will run out of resources. Even 8 gigs of vRAM is not a lot (some of the resources are also not available since the card is also being used for the images on the monitor or monitors)

Every element in your scene uses some memory. Once you add it all up, the demand for resources can easily push beyond what your GPU can handle.

Multiple Particles systems for grass, leaves and such will eat up a lot of vRAM in no time. Large textures and multiple subsurf modifiers among many other things can also use a lot of resources.

You have many non exclusive options:

Simplify your scene (reduce the number of vertices, particles and subdivisions, use smaller textures, bake complex shaders into simpler materials, etc). Can you get rid on unseen elements? How much detail do you really need in the final rendered scene?
Split the scene in different components that are manageable by your system and composite them later into a single image.
Render on CPU, probably slower, but you are not limited by the amount of memory on the GPU anymore, and even if you run out of RAM the system can probably use some form of Disk Cache...

Part of the art of 3D is dealing with the reality of your computing power. Time- Low cost-Quality... choose any two at the expense of the third one.

In an ideal world we want to render using all of the best settings with unlimited detail... but for all of us with a limited budget and limited lifetimes, we have to learn to optimize.


You need to turn up your "saturation" and "value", otherwise it's mostly white glass and light. Add that to the extra emission from lamps and other objects and the cars just appear white at times.


Creating a torus with more than 256 segments with nearly 1km radius?

Start by adding a circle, with 360 vertices, a radius of 50, and the Fill Type set to Nothing.

In edit mode rotate the circle along the Y axis by 90°. Then move the circle 900 along the Y axis.

Last add a Screw modifier, with Steps and  Render Steps set to 1800. Leave all other modifier settings to default.

You now have a torus with 648,000 vertices and faces; 1800 major segments and 360 minor segments.


How can I animate the rotation quaternion of an object with just one driver?

A suggestion is to cooperate with Blender and simply use 3 drivers on the XYZ.  So far you do not have a strong case for fighting against this.   This does not appear to be a significant inconvenience and there are other issues you have yet to encounter.

If your were to state you have many objects such as 888 objects then another approach would be warranted.

You may also use Copy [Location,et cetera] Constraint to copy values from another object.

You can search [registering a function] but I would recommend against that until you state your level of experience with Blender and Python.


I encounter this Error: Multiple different uvs per loop at single vertex. when trying to export the model into mod3

Hello fellow MHW modder!

I hope you have latest add-on build, support for 2.8 isn't ready yet (as of post)
https://www.nexusmods.com/monsterhunterworld/mods/969?tab=files

You want to select your seams and break them from the model.
For some reason the MT Framework engine (or add-on) doesn't like edge loops.
I'm still struggling with some of the other stuff.

Basically on your mesh,
(first make sure you have triangulated faces, add-on will break and show an error)
Use the edge select, select your seam, press "V" to break (island) it off the mesh.

Here's more about this if you still need help:
https://github.com/Ezekial711/MonsterHunterWorldModding/wiki/How-to-Fix-UVs-for-Objects-Sharing-Seams


Hi if by freeze layer you mean can you freeze the particles in their current place and stop them from further emitting, then yes.
You can select the particle system
under the modifier tab,
you have the option to convert the particles to a static mesh.


Why does my model deform so badly when I'm trying to animate it?

For a leg :

You have the leg itself, and a cloth, and the thickness of the cloth. Your problem lies in the inside part of the cloth that is not well vertex-weighted, and then not following the bone's movement.

cloth thickness

Cloth partially deformed

vertex weight of the cloth (1 bone selected)

What I suggest : Delete non-visible vertices (leg hidden by cloth, inside of cloth). As they won't be needed for render anyway, they're useless.

What you can do if you need to keep everything like that : Paint vertex weights (in weight paint mode) or at least assign the parts that need to move to the good vertex group

Weight paint mode

manually assign vertices to a vertex group


Yes you can combine images created with two different renderer engines. These are optimistic scenarios.

Different Scenes can have different render Engines. Cycles or Blender Internal.
The [Compositor] can invoke and combine images from different Scenes.  The Render Layer Node names the scene and Render Layer.  In the nodes above the text [Blender] was rendered Blender Internal Render and the word [Cycles] was rendered with Cycles Render.  Note the transparent background for the Cycles render.
If your desired result can be composed in visual layers fine.  Only you can determine that.
Cycles has a different approach to Blender render so only you can determine what compromises you can tolerate for a coarse translation.  Just create a new material for the appropriate render engine and assign it to the faces and judge that result.
The VSE can also combine images with transparent backgrounds for the layered composition effect.


"Limit selection to visible" Toggle NOT working with Weight Painting

UPDATE: Clean reinstall of Blender seems to have fixed the issue. Not sure what caused it in the first place.


How Can I Fix This Gap In My Fluid Domain?

Increase the resolution to reduce the gap.

The "glitch" you are experiencing is indeed an artifact of the low-resolution simulation.

The fluid simulation is computed on a grid of N × N × N small cubes, N being your "Final" resolution setting. Every detail of the 3D world, like the boundary location or an obstacle, that is smaller than the diameter of these cubes may be ignored by the simulation. Therefore, you should always expect gaps that are as large as one N-th of the edge of the simulation box.

In your example, you are simulating at N = 65 and visualizing the "Preview" mode at N = 45. Since your gap is around 1/45-th of the box size, it shouldn't be considered a glitch.

Increase your "Final" simulation resolution to ~150 and switch the "Viewport display" to "Final" to see the difference it makes.

Your file simualted at Final = 300 and Viewport display = Final


If I understand the question, this is fairly easy to do.  In Blender 2.79-2.81 you need three different types of features for water.  These are all selectable in the physics tab under the fluid button.  You need the Domain of the problem which limits where the blender physics engine calculates the water interactions.  This needs to be a rectangular block.  Then you need your water (the ocean in your case) which can be larger than the domain, but only that part in the domain will be animated.  Then you need a fluid obstacle which in your case are the tectonic plates.  When you run the simulation by hitting 'bake' the water will not flow out of the domain unless you put a drain or an outflow in it. You can put an outflow between the plates and set it to drain only when the plates pull apart.

Hope this helps.


Background

"Rays" are a method to detect if an imaginary line crosses one or more faces. That leads to the question: What faces?

In the BGE there are two kinds of faces:

visible faces (display mesh) and
collision faces (physics mesh).

These face types can but do not need to match. (Often it is better when there are less collision meshes than display meshes for faster processing).

Rays are part of the physics aspect. Therefore faces the physics would collide with are considered for hit detection.

Conclusion

I guess after this (hopefully understandable) explanation, you come to the conclusion that the ray will hit the shape defined by the objects Physics/Collision Bounds/Bounds

If it is set to Box, the physics mesh is a box where the display mesh fits in.
If it is set to convex hull, the physics mesh will span a convex triangle mesh around the display mesh (faster than triangle mesh processing)
if it is set to triangle mesh, the physics mesh will match the display mesh (creates the most processing overhead)

Be aware: quads are broken into two triangles. The triangles might not match the triangles of the display mesh as there are two ways to break a quad.

You can see the current physics mesh by enabling Main menu/Game/Show Physics Visualization (the green mesh when resting otherwise white lines).
Attention: The visualization on a convex hull is not necessarily correct. I guess it is simpler to detect collisions than drawing a convex hull.

Answer

The ray detects the collision bounds your explicitly set up.


The material isn't deleted with the object; the former will only have 0 users and hence will be deleted on reopening the file. To avoid that use Fake User option:

  Gives the material a ‘fake user’, to keep the material data-block saved in the blend-file, even if it has no real users.

More info on datablocks and fake user - What does "users" means in term of datablocks ?


If you are using cycles render engine (and blender 2.7+)

You actually want to create two different spheres, one for the smoke and one for the glass.  The reason for this is because you don't want the sphere to be solid, but the smoke should be, i.e. you don't want smoke inside the thickness of the wall of the sphere but within the sphere.

So I simply created a sphere, duplicated it in place, and gave one of the spheres a solidify modifier with a thickness of -1/8in.  The "thickened" sphere simply has a glass shader.  The other sphere will contain the smoke and has the following node tree.

It is primarily a volume scatter shader with a little volume absorption added in.  The scatter is given a variable density with a procedural noise texture.  The color ramp node makes the noise more distinct and the multiply node controls the overall density.

Here is the final render:

A couple of notes:

This is for cycles, I do not do much (anything) with BI, but I would recommend using cycles for this since you are going for photorealism.

You must be using blender 2.7+, previous versions of cycles do not support volumetrics.

You need to knock up the volume bounces under properties editor > render > light paths.


How to utilize material (or object) index behind a refractive material in cycle?

I don't think it's possible to utilize material (or object) index behind a refractive material as it is.

Blender is correctly showing the mask of the object that form the camera point of view truly has the material assigned. The squared piece is made of glass, the fact that is somehow showing what's behind doesn't change the material which is made of.

We can try to mask the "perception" of the material, but we'll have to use the rendered image itself, because only there the optic calculation occurs. Think about a deforming glass as the one show below:

The refraction, the dimming of the bounced light, the bending of the geometry, the fact that on the short side of the box you cannot see the torus... are all effects that strictly depends on the characteristic of the material (ior for example) and of the geometry.

What I'm trying to say is that you can't get the mask without actually render the image, beacause is in the simulation that all effects take place.

Maybe one day someone will implement a object id pass capable of taking optics into account, but for the moment I would switch all the lights off, add an emission shader to the interested object and use the rendered image as a mask.

It's certenly not an optimal solution as you'll probably have to set up a parallel blendfiles just for this task.


You have a second model just hidden, you need to disable it in the render too.

To do so press the camera icon that I marked in the image.


How to pass an bpy.data.objects bpt.data.materials etc to an operator, from layout?

Add  context members for your op to use.
Would assume you tried
    object: PointerProperty(type=bpy.types.Object)

only to get the error message saying you can't assign datablock pointers to an operator.... possibly explains why you never see this used in any operator. The idea is to use the operator / context paradigm and use context to reference objects
UILayout.context_pointer_set
Consider using context for this. Instead of passing it as an operator variable set a context member, in this case "foo" and use that in your operator.
Simple example that adds a row with button for each scene object. Each row has the context pointer "foo" set to respective object.
import bpy
from bpy.props import StringProperty, PointerProperty

class SimpleOperator(bpy.types.Operator):

    bl_idname = "object.simple_operator"
    bl_label = "Simple Object Operator"

    # This throws an error, because cannot save datablock ref to operator.
    #object: PointerProperty(type=bpy.types.Object)

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls, context):
        return getattr(context, "foo", False)

    def execute(self, context):

        #I can find the object like this:
        ob = context.foo
        print(ob)

        return {'FINISHED'}

class HelloWorldPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    """Creates a Panel in the Object properties window"""
    bl_label = "Hello World Panel"
    bl_idname = "OBJECT_PT_hello"
    bl_space_type = 'PROPERTIES'
    bl_region_type = 'WINDOW'
    bl_context = "object"

    def draw(self, context):
        ob = context.object

        layout = self.layout
        for ob in context.scene.objects:
            row = layout.row()
            row.context_pointer_set(name="foo", data=ob)
            row.operator("object.simple_operator", text=ob.name)

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(SimpleOperator)
    bpy.utils.register_class(HelloWorldPanel)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(SimpleOperator)
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(HelloWorldPanel)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

Have used context.foo by way of example, because it is not a standard context member would recommend using
ob = getattr(context, "foo", None)

to give a null value when not set. have polled against it to disable operator if "foo" is not set.


Instead using bones, try to use hooks. It hasn't normalization at all.


What is the difference between Sobol and Correlated Multi-Jitter sampling patterns?

In 2013 there was a long debate in a blenderartists thread, where some argued that for some scenes Correlated Multi-Jitter is better than Sobol, while others saw no real difference.

Cycles creator Brecht van Lommel was initially skeptic, he wrote:

  These correlated multi-jitter vs. Sobol comparisons so far seem to confirm my own findings, which is that neither sampler is consistently better or particularly different even (...). Conclusion seems to be that the sampler sequence we have now is about as good as it's going to get, though it's nice to have a second good quality sampler implemented in the code as a sanity check for me.

But later he was convinced, and wrote:

  Ah, I missed those comparisons. It seems indeed correlated multi-jitter is handling BSDF x mesh light source sampling better. Maybe that's something that can be fixed in Sobol, need to investigate.

One of the scenes where Correlated Multi-Jitter was better, was a diamond scene from BlendSwap. I wanted to see if the Sobol improved since 2013, so now (December 2016) I repeated the test with Blender 2.78a, but I still see a large advantage for Correlated Multi-Jitter.

100 samples, Sobol:

100 samples, Correlated Multi-Jitter:

The rendering time with Correlated Multi-Jitter was 6% longer than with Sobol, but there is considerably less noise in the image. There are some  fireflies, but they should be easy to filter in post, because their color so drastically differs from the surrounding pixels. Here's the Correlated Multi-Jitter post-processed with a very simple image filter that only removes single-pixel noise:

On the other hand I saw no examples where Sobol was considerably better than Correlated Multi-Jitter, so in general it might be a good idea to change the default setting.

Also note that there is some work going on in the sampling area, for example Blue noised dithered sampling and Micro jitttered sampling. These are planned for 2017.


Start with a bezier circle.  In edit mode, scale along Y-axis so that it is squashed.  Add an extrude factor to form the main part of the bow.  Add another circle for the centre part of the bow and a bezier curve for the bottom strands.

Convert all three objects to a mesh with ALT+C.  In Edit mode, add some loops lengthwise to all three objects to support the deformations.

For the main bow, add a simple deform set to Twist to give it a more realistic look.  Create a new Lattice at the origin and add a lattice modifier to the bow.  Modify the lattice in edit mode to create the distinctive bow shape.

Add a subdivision surface, solidify and bevel modifier to the object to give it some thickness.

Repeat the process for the other parts of the bow.  You may need to tweak the modifiers to avoid any intersecting faces.


Boolean operation between a form and a spiral

What you need to do :

Select your spiral cube object, delete 2 faces so that it won't generate inner faces, apply both the Array and Curve modifier, press Alt > Merge By Distance:

Fill each tip with F :

The topology of you shell is messy, go in Edit mode and press Alt > Merge By Distance, in the Operator box choose a Merge Distance of 0,001 :

But you also need to delete inner faces, overlapping faces, and you need to recalculate the normals (AltN), especially if you plan to print in 3D.

Once everything done, you can merge all the faces of your shell surface, where the boolean is supposed to happen:

The Boolean will work fine:


How to create a script that connects points in an animation?

import bpy
from mathutils import Vector

w = 1 # weight
cList = [Vector((0,0,0)),Vector((1,0,0)),Vector((2,0,0)),Vector((2,3,0)),Vector((0,2,1))]

curvedata = bpy.data.curves.new(name='Curve', type='CURVE')
curvedata.dimensions = '3D'

# Line thickness:
curvedata.bevel_depth = 0.05
curvedata.fill_mode = "FULL"

# Point size
point_size = 0.1

# Line colour:
line_mat = bpy.data.materials.new("Red")
line_mat.diffuse_color = (1, 0, 0)
curvedata.materials.append(line_mat)

# Point colour
point_mat = bpy.data.materials.new("Green")
point_mat.diffuse_color = (0, 1, 0)

objectdata = bpy.data.objects.new("ObjCurve", curvedata)
objectdata.location = (0,0,0) #object origin
bpy.context.scene.objects.link(objectdata)

polyline = curvedata.splines.new('POLY')
polyline.points.add(len(cList)-1)
for num in range(len(cList)):
    x, y, z = cList[num]
    polyline.points[num].co = (x, y, z, w)
    bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_uv_sphere_add(location=(x, y, z), size=0.1)
    bpy.context.object.data.materials.append(point_mat)

Base on this blog post.


Strange problem with Cycles Normal Map baking

You need to activate smooth shading for your low-poly model.

Select your model, go to "Tool Shelf - Tools - Edit - Shading" and hit the "Smooth" button.


In order to get an exact isometric perspective you shoud actually set as folllows:

Here's a comparison between (60,0,45) and (54.736,0,45) rotation:

Thanks to blender3darchitect.com: How to create a true isometric camera for architecture?


You have to add a collision to the pants as well, so the shirt knows, that it should collide with the pants and not go through. That should do the trick.
All the best Marco


Is there a way to view from the lights perspective like in Daz?

You can:

Select the light, press Ctrl0, and in the N panel > View > View Lock > enable Camera to View:

You can also select the light in the Properties panel > Scene > Camera:


How can I make an object that is already animated follow a path correctly?

Your object is not parented to the path and doesn't have any constraint. To make it move along the path, you can simply parent it to the path, then select the path, in the Graph Editor > N panel > Modifiers, delete the Generator, then in Properties panel > Data > Path Animation, give some Frames, like for example 100, then play with the Evaluation Time and put some keyframes to move your object along the path at the speed you want.


Noise Texture does not work with my mesh

Hello I was just googling the same issue with donut turning up pink and posted about it here and someone very wise informed me Material previews are only in EEVEE and not Cycles: https://www.reddit.com/r/blenderhelp/comments/mne2lf/displacement_bumps_not_displaying_properly_while/
I notice you might have the same problem as me - change your top right Viewport shading from Material Preview to Rendered. That is what Andrew had in his tutorial and I simply overlooked it.
it solved the issue for me, hopefully for you too!


Curve bevel, both built in and using another curve not uniform in thickness

You must have scaled it on the Z axis. Select your curve and ctrl A > Apply Scale


Difference between FINISHED and CANCELLED as return values

AFAIK it's so that you can check in a script whether an operator executed properly or not, by inspecting its return value. For Blender itself it doesn't matter, but it starts to become relevant when you use one operator from another.

For example:

result = bpy.ops.object.delete()

if result == {'FINISHED'}:  # Can also do: `if 'FINISHED' in result:`
    print ("Successfully deleted object")
else:
    print ("Could not delete object")


How do you import a rigged character from one blender file to another?

You can copy and paste models from one running instance of Blender to another using the same Copy and Paste keyboard shortcuts that work for the majority of software. Ctrl+c and then Ctrl+v.

The Mac version for these shortcuts is Command+c then Ctrl+v but Blender was programed to also recognize the windows version so usually you can use either for OS X Blender.

Anyways, open the rigged model in a second instance of Blender and select the Object that you want to transfer over to the other scene.  Copy the model using the appropriate shortcut and then move over to the other scene and paste it in.  The rigging should be pulled over with the objects that are parented to it.  The materials will also transfer over with the model.

Here's how it looks.


How do I create vertices that form square faces on a rectangle?

I'm curious about how come you have to start from this topology?

In this particular case though, you could:

Select a vertical edge, and ShiftG > Select Similar > Direction
CtrlI (Select Inverse)
X > Limited Dissolve the now selected edges


No, currently pack is based on the selection only. It could be handy to have a way to select only unpinned UV islands so you could use them as a way to lock islands for other tools.


How to control particle's direction by animation node?

There is no way to alter the velocity or acceleration of particles of particle systems, the Blender python API doesn't allow it. However, if you want to control the general direction of particles, you can instance force fields and control their orientation and strength as suggested by  Jaroslav Jerryno. As an example, lets create a spiral spline in Animation Node and enable Curve Guide Force Field and Path Animation for it:

Or perhaps by animating a wind force field:


Is this the in UV Image Editor? If is try disabling Sticky Selection in the Image Editor header bar
That will force automatic selection of vertex sharing the same UV coordinate.


why boolean not work on solidfy modifier

Select the Plane
Add a boolean modifier.
Set the Object property to the Cube.
Set the Operation property to Difference.


What is a way to sculpt/model clothes that aren't stuck to the body?

You should give some details about the style of cape, if it is supposed to be animated, etc... There are several approaches, like modeling it, sculpting it, or using cloth simulation.
You can sculpt it:

Prepare a vertical plane, subdivide it a bit:

Use brushes like the Draw brush to dig or bump the shape (press Ctrl to dig, you can also try the Crease brush for more sharp details):

You can also use the Grab brush to deform the shape. There should be even more convenient brushes in next Blender that will easily allow to bend the mesh:

Or you can begin with a Cloth simulation:

Create a plane, give it a group at its top edge. Give it a Cloth physics, with for example the silk settings, in the Physics panel > Shape choose the group as the Pin Group. Select the body (here a simple cylinder) and give it a Physics > Collision:

Play the animation. Stop it when you're glad with the result, and in the modifiers, apply the Cloth. Now you can edit it the way you want.


How to create feather wings and attach them on sphere?

Using your reference image, here is a quick solution:
Under the Properties panel in the 3D viewport, enable Background Images, then click Add Image. Pressing Open will bring you to a file browser; here, select your winged ball image.

Switch to orthographic view (5 on the numpad), than press (on the numpad) 7.
Add a plane, then go into edit mode. Select all of the points but one and delete them. Move the point to the edge of the wing in the picture. Then, pressing E (for extrude) make a line around the wing. After getting to the end, select both end points and press F to fill in a line.

The line is finished along the whole wing:

Now that the whole outline is created, press F to fill the area with a face.
Exit "Top Orthographic" view. Press E while the whole outline is selected to extrude the outline and add depth to the wing.
Here is the finished wing:

Here is what I made with this:

Hope this helps!


Video editing. Audio and Video strip have different length

The number at the end of the name of the strip indicates the length of the strip in frames. If those numbers are not the same it means that the frame rate of your project and that of the video don't match. So video and audio will not be synchronized.

In other words, the audio will always play at the correct speed a second of audio will play in a second regardless of frame rate. But the video is not altered, it is not interpolated to accommodate for the desired frame rate. For example 300 frames will play in 10 seconds at a frame rate of 30fps, but will play in 12.5 seconds if the frame rate is 24fps.

To fix, open a Properties Window, and in the Dimensions section, set the frame rate of your project to match that of the video.

If you look at the following example you'll see that the final length of the video and audio are different The audio strip is 57 frames long and the video only 45.

In this case the video was shot at 23.98 fps and the project was set to 29.97fps.

Once you set the framerate, the length of the strips should change automatically. At the correct frame rate audio and video will have the same length, and play in sync.


The alpha build should have an EXE file, if you downloaded it to a Windows computer.
If you used a different OS to download it, the website may have selected a different binary format. Alpha and beta builds should always be able to be run simultaneously.


It will be hard to have perfect circles on your ladybug this way. You could do it several other ways, but here are 3 ways to do it:

1) DIRECT PAINTING

Unwrap your semi-sphere in Blender.
Prepare a red image texture in the UV/Image Editor
Plug the Image Texture node with your image in a Diffuse (and plug the Diffuse in the Output).
In the 3D View window, switch to Texture Paint mode and paint your black dots with a very steep curve brush.

2) PAINT A MASK

Unwrap your semi-sphere in Blender.
Create a 100% white texture and plug it in a Diffuse (and plug the Diffuse in the Output).
In the 3D View window, switch to Texture Paint mode and paint your black dots with a very steep curve brush.
Now change your node organization and use your texture as a factor in a mix between 2 Diffuse nodes: one black and one red.

3) TRANSFORM A PLANE INTO A SPHERE

You could also create a plane, map your pattern on it, transform it into a sphere with some Simple Deform modifiers / Bend mode, then cut the sphere in half: How to animate morphing a rectangular plane into a sphere


My take on this

  the aim is to reorient all selected mesh objects to have their local x
  axis along their longest edges. Every object receives different
  rotation

Get all the meshes of selected objects, could be anything from 1 (all
share same mesh) to having a mesh each.
Find the longest edge of each, rotate mesh about origin such that x
axis aligns.  Keep the inverse transform of this rotation.
For each selected object transform by inverse. (ie rotate back to orginal global orientation with new local axis)
Used rotation difference of two vectors. Using rotation difference of
two tracking quats would help with aligning up axis too.
Assumes all meshes have at least one edge, used bmesh purely for
BMEdge.calc_length() could use mesh data directly.

Test script.

import bpy
import bmesh
from mathutils import Vector

context = bpy.context
ob = context.object
meshes = set(o.data for o in context.selected_objects if o.type == 'MESH')

bm = bmesh.new()
lut = {}
for me in meshes:
    bm.from_mesh(me)
    le = sorted(bm.edges, key=lambda e: e.calc_length()).pop()
    axis = (le.verts[1].co - le.verts[0].co).normalized()
    q = axis.rotation_difference(Vector((1, 0, 0)))
    R =  q.to_matrix()
    me.transform(R.to_4x4())
    lut[me] = R.inverted().to_4x4()
    bm.clear()

for o in (o for o in context.selected_objects if o.type == 'MESH'):
    o.matrix_world @= lut[o.data]


Sockets

In the Blender manual's page about Node parts it is said that Sockets is the name for the ...

  ...input and output values from the node.

  They appear as little colored circles on either side of the node. [...].

  Each socket is color-coded depending on what type of data it handles.


How can I manipulate shapes in order to have similar results as in this 3D max scene?

I guess what you need is the Mesh Deform modifier:

Create an object A and give it an Array modifier.
Create a cube B and change its mesh so that it contains your object A like a cage
In the Properties panel > Object > Display > Maximum Draw Type, choose Wire so that this cube B stays transparent in Solid mode. And in the Properties panel > Object > Cycles Settings > Ray Visibility, disable all the options so that it will be invisible in Rendered mode.
Give your object A a Mesh Deform modifier. Choose B as the Object. Click Bind.

Now, if you want to animate:

Select your object B and in the Properties panel > Data > Shape Keys, create one first shape key to save the basic shape of B, then create a second shape key and keep this second shape key selected.
In Edit mode play with the shape of the B mesh. You can see that it deforms A.
Now back in Object mode, play with the Value under the Shape Keys to change the shape of A.

And if you don't want to animate:

Just change the shape of your object B in Edit mode, it will deform object A.


Sharpen egdes using the SubSurf Modifier - floodlight

It appears you already tried a Crease factor on those edges using shift-e

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/modeling/meshes/editing/edges.html

  This edge property, a value between (0.0 to 1.0), is used by the
  Subdivision Surface Modifier to control the sharpness of the edges in
  the subdivided mesh. This operator enters an interactive mode (a bit
  like transform tools), where by moving the mouse (or typing a value
  with the keyboard) you can set the (average) crease value of selected
  edges. A negative value will subtract from the actual crease value, if
  present. To clear the crease edge property, enter a value of -1.

It turns out creasing just the edges of the opening is not enough.  You also have to crease the diagonal edges that have a vertex on the opening:


If you start from a logo, you first need to import it in SVG format. Keep in mind that it will be very small in the center of your scene so you may not see it at first and you'll have to scale it a lot.
If you start from your own text, you can type it in Blender: Press shiftA > Text, go in Edit mode, type your text, if necessary choose the font in the Properties panel > Data > Font, and press on the Load a new font from file button to browse into your own fonts.
Then convert it to a mesh with an altC.
Simplify it in Edit mode with X > Limited Dissolve.
Extrude it on the Z axis: E.
Create your parallelepiped, put your text on it.
Give your parallelepiped a Boolean modifier / Difference mode and choose the text as Object.
You can keep the text and make it transparent in the Properties panel > Object > Display > Maximum Draw Type > Wire and, for the render, in the Properties panel > Object > Cycle Settings settings (deactivate all the options), or you can apply the modifier.

Is it what you want?


Freestyle Line Style noise modifier not working

Well, I found the solution. If anyone encounters the same problem, try installing Blender v. 2.82. I was using 2.81a, it seems it was a bug.


What's the difference between Bias and Distance?

Distance is the distance between the High poly object and the low poly object (in blender unit).

Note that the distance is only taken into account on the Z axis , and the low poly mesh must be directly under the high poly mesh.
if you do any of the above wrong, the result will be an empty baked image.

Setting the distance too low will make your details not appear on your final baked image since the rays will die halfway before they reach the low poly mesh.

The bias is only related to the high poly object, it controls how much of the geometry is preserved , anything after the bias is cut off.

The black lines are where the rays start being fired down to the low poly object, the rays start from lowest vertex of the high poly object.The rays' length is determined by the distance value.

The red line is the bias distance,it also starts from the lowest vertext of the high poly object, but is fired to the opposite direction(upward).

The details between the black line and the red line are preserved and will appear on the resulting baked image.

The details after the red line (greater than the bias, shown in blue) are lost , and will appear on the baked image as if that area was a flat surface.

Setting the bias value correctly is important when the high poly mesh has curved,round surfaces.

Please feel free to edit this answer and correct it.


With the vertices selected, press ShiftV to ensure that you are vertex sliding, not edge sliding. Pressing GG automatically picks between the two operators based on the selection, and you cannot edge slide geometry past adjacent edge loops (you can with vertex slide though).

Once you are in the vertex slide operator, press C to disable clamp (or hold Alt).

Note that disabling clamp locks the selected vertices to the edges which they are sliding on when you press C or Alt.

However in this particular situation I think GZ is a faster method, as mentioned by G.Rassovsky.