Problem with Intersect (knife) - making extra cuts in mesh

Looks like you forgot to move in the face that is used for creating the screw object; you can see that it is moved in slightly in the first GIF of your link, intersecting with the cylinder. If you don't do so, the screw object is on the same face level as the cylinder, which will cause the problem you encountered.


How to make a BGUI widget always focused/active?

I think I have managed to solve this by doing the following:

co = bge.logic.getCurrentController()

keyboard = co.sensors["textinputkeyboard"]

    for key,status in keyboard.events:
        if status == bge.logic.KX_INPUT_JUST_ACTIVATED:
            co.owner['sys'].layout.input._handle_key(key,False) #text will always be lower case
            if key == bge.events.ENTERKEY: #This is so the enter callback still works
                 co.owner['sys'].layout.on_input_enter(co.owner['sys'].layout.input)

The above will work so long as the mouse doesn't make the text input active, in which case every character will be typed twice. In order to avoid this I commented out line 472 of bgui/widget.py:

widget._handle_key(key, is_shifted)

I realized this is a bit messy, but it works! If anybody has a cleaner way of doing this (I'm certain there is!) hmu.

I found a clean solution to this:
First, remove the if statement:

if self._hover:

from the _handle_key() method in bgui/widget.py.

Then include:

    co.owner['sys'].layout.input.system.focused_widget = co.owner['sys'].layout.input

So that the textinput widget is always focused


How can I show "output change path" in a custom panel?

Put the property in your layout
def draw(self, context):
    layout = self.layout
    scene = context.scene
    layout.prop(scene.render, "filepath")

If you enable developer extras in preferences, can right click on any (just about) and "View Source".


Lower resolution of rendered viewport whilst maintaining size on 4k monitor

there is a setting under performance that does that, it's called viewport resolution.
2x means half the resolution, 4x means a fourth etc.

Blender 2.8:

Blender 2.7:


Problem with array modifier, incorrect orientation and deformation

You need to apply the scale of your bezier circle with CtrlA. Once done don't forget to correct the vertices radius, given that applying scale will change the vertices radius up to the former scale value (go into Edit mode, select the bezier vertices and in the N panel bring back the Mean Radius to 1):

But anyway, Array + Curve modifiers always deform your object at least a bit, if you don't want it to be deformed you need to use another method like instances on vertices or particles. In the latest versions the Geometry Node Editor is even more flexible.


In the linked file I can't see the same thing as you, but for example you have this artifact:

It's because you have ngons, face with more than 5 vertices, which tends to create artifacts, especially on non-flat surfaces (it stretches the triangles):

Here is a way to fix it, there might be a better but it's just to show you how to keep quads:

Also, you use crease and Bevel modifier, if you begin in modeling perhaps you should bevel "manually" instead, and avoid crease and Bevel modifier, they are tricks and you won't always be able to use them, but it's only my opinion...


In case you haven't appied the modifiers,  you can just remove the modifiers. See if it works or not. If it doesn't then just apply all modifiers and add a remesh modifier.  In the remesh modifier panel try either smooth or voxel. Try to turn on wireframe on to see the geometry.  Don't go crazy with the remesh settings otherwise it will drastically increase polycount and blender will crash. Hope that helps.


Why does my model look "patchy" after I enable smooth shading on it?

The normals appear to be inverted in those areas. In edit mode, select the whole mesh (A key) and then recalculate the normals by pressing Ctrl + N (or using the menus: Mesh > Normals > Recalculate Outside).


Mesh of vertices shown in viewport but not in render: how to render?

I think I have an idea. Are the vertices joined together? What I mean is, are they considered one whole object? If so, you may be able to go to the properties panel, and scroll around in object context tab. There's an area there called "visibility". It has a checkbox that lets it be shown in renders. Perhaps it is unchecked by default? I hope this helps.


How can I prevent blender from exporting fbx with-90 rotation on the x axis to unity?

If you don't want to use scripts, here is another workflow:

Select every object that will be exported, but no child-objects of these, even if they will be exported too
Rotate them by -90 degrees in the x-axis
Apply the rotation of every object that will be exported (the child-objects included)
Select the objects from (1) again and rotate them back by 90 degrees in the x-axis

Make sure that the pivot point for each rotation is the same (e.g. individual origins), so that the objects will end up in their original position and make sure that you apply the rotation of every object in one action, or else the rotation of the child-objects changes again.


How to change restpose of armature while still preserving animation data?

was able to achieve the required result with Blender MoCap tools. I used the T-Pose BVH file and applied rotation scale and location to the TPOSE and set it as restpose.. then i imported gallop BVH file and using mocap tools i mapped the rotations to the first armature.. I was then able to retarget to my Custom RIgify rig with usual workflow.


Switching from World Space to Local has no effect on rotation tool

It seems that it doesn't have an effect if one uses the shortcut R.
However, when one presses the rotation tool, it actually changes and displays it as well:


Blender Sapling Add-on Leaves not Showing up

Leaf scale is too small, I increased it. I now see the leaves.


How to render the fire and smoke as different passes?

Yes.

Just do it as you normally would. Select both the domain and the smoke emitter and change their "pass index".

(in the illustration, the sphere is your smoke domain. It also shows how to get it on another pass in the compositor.)

Or you can change their layer, and render them on a different render layer.


What are some 3rd party rendering engines available for Blender?

A few open source engines which come to mind immediately:

Luxrender
Yafaray
TheBounty, a fork of YafaRay
POV-Ray (exporter)
Aqsis
Jot (exporter)
Mitsuba implement biased and unbiased rendering techniques (Exporter)

Some non-open source engines:

Octane, fast GPU renderer integrated into blender (Commercial)
Vray, production proven render engine. (Commercial)

Also see the answer on the resources post for even more.


changing the intensity falloff of light sources using Cycles nodes

Use the "light falloff" node to control the strength of the emitter.

quadratic

linear

constant


Is it possible for 2 objects to be attached together but both objects are animated differently?

Thats actually really simple. Just Parent your flag to your pole with Ctrl+P. Use pinning in the cloth settings and use Rigid Bodies for the pole or just animate it.


How can I solidify a 2d shape so that the rim isn't solidified and the center is solidified the most ? (Think creating a dome from a sphere)

A way to do that using a modifier is to shrinkwrap the jewel to a plane, using a weighted vertex group (the plane here is displayed in wireframe mode):

Select the vertices you want to move (all except the borders).

Go to weight paint.

Validate 'vertex selection masking'

Enable X mirror

Then paint (add) the wanted vertices.

Once done, smooth the result.

After that, you can tune the influence in the modifier :

Following the comment, in order to use more easily a mirror, start from a circle, extrude inside then grid fill the inner part. That will allow you to have an edge loop or more around the jewel, so that you can connect easily the main part to the mirror center. Here is the kind of start that can be good for that :


Array object offset to make a trapezium like shape

Assuming you want all your diamonds the same size, a simple approach would be to use Vertex Instancing, one way or another.
More Destructive:

Create a plane, scaled in Edit Mode to your 1x3 dimensions
CtrlE > Edge menu > Subdivide the horizontal edges with 5 cuts, and the vertical edges with 19 cuts
In the plane's Object tab > Instancing panel, set instancing to Vertices..
.. and CtrlP parent your gem to the plane.

You should now have a gem at every vertex.

You can now give the plane a Simple Deform > Taper modifier, down its long axis.
You can X Delete > Only Faces the plane, leaving you with a non-rendering wireframe.

Less Destructive:

Instead of using a plane, Create a Single Vertex at the origin.
You may have to enable the shipped  Add Mesh: Extra Objects add-on, (or just borrow a vertex from another object)

Give it Constant-Offset Array modifier, in X, count 4, and another in Y, count 21

Give it a Mirror modifier across X, ensuring 'Merge' is checked.

The rest is as above, using Vertex Instancing, and a Taper modifier.

The second method leaves your arrays live, so you can change the count/spacing at a later stage, if you want to, but single verts can be a bit more fiddly to work with in the viewport.
If you needed your gems to get bigger towards the bottom, you could consider a particle-system emitted by vertex instead, and use a gradient texture to control their size.


No, you can not use environment variables in the Output File field, because it doesn't support drivers (and key-framing also).

You would have to write a python script that would change this field every time you open the file (with Run Python Scripts enabled in Preferences). In the script you can for sure use python environment variables:

import bpy
import os

user = os.environ['USERNAME']
bpy.context.scene.render.filepath = "C:\\Users\\" + user + "\\GoogleDrive\\file_name"

The best thing to do is to put the .blend file also in the Google Drive folder and use relative paths just like: //rendered\file_name(this saves to folder "rendered" next to the .blend file).


How to display triangle count of visible meshes in scene?

There is no way to show tris count of only visible objects in Blender, however, you can use Python for that.

If you paste this into a new text block in the text editor and hit Run Script, you will have an operator that you can call from the Space menu if you start typing 'Tris Count For Visible Objects'. You can also copy it into a new text file using any text editor that supports UTF-8 encoding, save it to a .py file and install it as an add-on. It checks all objects in the scene and if they are not hidden in the 3d View and are mesh objects, it counts their triangles and then displays the results as info message in the header of the info panel briefly and in the logs of the info panel:

Here is the code:

bl_info = {
    "name": "Tris Count",
    "author": "Martynas Žiemys",
    "version": (1, 0),
    "blender": (2, 79, 0),
    "location": "Space menu > Tris Count For Visible Objects",
    "description": "Counts tris",
    "warning": "",
    "wiki_url": "",
    "category": "Mesh",
    }

import bpy

class TrisCount(bpy.types.Operator):
    """Tris Count"""
    bl_idname = "scene.tris_count"
    bl_label = "Tris Count For Visible Objects"

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

    def execute(self, context):
        tris_count = 0
        for o in bpy.context.scene.objects:
            if o.type == 'MESH' and not o.hide:
                for p in o.data.polygons:
                    if len(p.vertices) > 3:
                        tris_count = tris_count + len(p.vertices) - 2
                    else:
                        tris_count = tris_count +1
                    pass
        self.report({'INFO'}, 'Tris: ' + str(tris_count))
        return {'FINISHED'}

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

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

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()


Most likely you have overlapping vertices. That means two or more vertices share the exact same position in 3D space. When you click on one of them, you are actually selecting a vertex, but it doesn't appear like it since one or more are overlapping.

Select all the vertices with the shortcut  A  (in edit mode) then right click > Merge vertices > By distance.


I already had a graphics card driver problem with Blender. The developers helped me out to find out whether the problem is one with the driver.

You should use the opengl32.dll from http://download.blender.org/ftp/sergey/softwaregl/ and place it next to your blender.exe as described by sergey to find out if the problem is your driver. Beware, that Blender might be very slow while using this wrapper dll as everything is done on CPU only without using your graphics card. If it's working this way you know it's a problem with your driver/graphics card.


Extruding a cylinder unwards and subdividing

The bevel modifier you're using is causing some bad and overlapping geometry that's making the subsurface modifier mess up. You can see this if you apply the modifier and then poke around at the mesh:

You can also see that if you enable the "adjust edit cage to modifier result" option, the lines that it creates are very unhappy:

One of the key things to understand when working with subsurface meshes is that the more source/control polygons you have affecting a area, the sharper the curvature in that area becomes. So, the primary method of shaping corners on these meshes is adding new edgeloops.

Here's an example of sharpening up this mesh using only edgeloops. The very first thing I did was loop select, extrude, scale the top edge of the cylinder because with with subsurf, if you have something coming together at a point like a cylinder it works much better if you have a final loop of perfectly planar quads; inside that you can usually fill the remaining flat hole with a n-gon or triangle fan or whatever and not have it come out lumpy or strange. Every other thing I did was just single ctrl-r loop cuts.

I did this quick and sloppy without much care for symmetry and it still doesn't look far off. If I wanted good symmetry I'd probably use a mirror modifier, and if I wanted more accuracy I'd work on the un-modified edit cage, though I do recommend working with the modified edit cage when you can because it helps get a feel for how the subsurf works. (Though do be careful of putting edges directly on top of each other, because they won't look like it in that mode.)

You can also use the manual bevel tool in some cases to add sharpening geometry, and sometimes you can get the right effect with the crease tool, though i've never had much luck with the latter.

If you need a model much more sharp and precise than this, I'd suggest learning some non-subsurf modeling techniques instead; you can make good looking curved pieces with just shade-smooth and an edgesplit modifier in many cases. That's also where you'll want to use the bevel modifier, because in plain modeling unbeveled edges tend to stand out and look bad.


Is it possible to make the animation preview smoother without reducing the frame rate?

Viewport speed is usually limited by the CPU performance, since a lot of processing has to be done before the GPU can display the image.

Dependency Graph:
Having large number of objects, or objects with complex constraints, can slow down the viewport because every object has to be evaluated every frame. So if you do have a huge scene, try to use layers to reduce the amount of visible geometry in the window.

Modifiers:
Many animated modifiers have to to be evaluated every frame. One way to optimize these is to make sure the modifier stack is arranged in the most efficient way possible. This means armature animation comes before subdiv surface, for example.

Also, make use of OpenSubDiv when possible, it's a lot faster than the Blender subdiv code, especially when its compute mode is set to GPU in User Preferences.

Simulations: Ocean Modifier, cloth sim, softbody, rigidbody and particles are all very demanding. It's best to bake these to their respective cache before attempting to playback the animation with Ctrl+A.

Simplify: Blender comes with tools to simplify the scene temporarily. One of them is the Simplify Panel in Scenes. Use it to reduce the complexity of your scene globally.

Also, make use of the Maximum Draw Type setting in the object panel to simplify the display of background objects.

Display: Finally, we can reduce the complexity of the scene further by turning on Only Render in the 3D viewport, this disables drawing of invisible objects and wireframes, which can speed up the viewport significantly in certain cases.

Some people reports increased performance when using matcaps, so you can try that as well, but your mileage may vary.

Playblast/OpenGL Preview:
Ultimately, for a large production, it's not unusual for the file to be so heavy that playback at 24fps is not possible. If that's the case, you can use the OpenGL render feature in to render a quick preview movie to get a perfectly smooth playback.


Problem solved,

Copying the scene also copied the ANL tracks from the original scene. By deleting them from the List window, the keyframes can now be worked on properly. I still need to understand some basic Blender functions which, when I start directly with the video editor, I still don't control.

Thanks leander and Greetings


bone heat weighting failed to find solution for one or more bones

You need to " set origin to geometry" for the mesh.

The button is located in the (t)toolshelf-->Edit-->SetOrigin


Colomanagement Workflow - how to achieve requested target RGB Values?

CMYK and RGB are relative colour spaces, and as a result, individual values mean nothing. In RGB's case, it means the intensity of three lights, a white point colour, and a transfer function which are not specified by the values alone[1]. In CMYK's case, it means four (or more) arbitrary ink colours as well as paper stock and illuminant.

Taken in isolation with no additional metadata, RGB values and CMYK values mean nothing, and there is no method to convert them.

In order to specify a distinct colour, values would need to be offered using another colour encoding model such as xyY, along with some additional context, or, optionally, in RGB with a clearly defined colour space. Same would go for offset work, via an associated printing colour space encoded into an ICC format.

It should also be noted that when dealing with shaders, you should not match sRGB values, for example, but rather match how the physical object reflects light relative to the lights used in the renderer's reference space. This is likely the subject of another post however.

  I take my guitar, plane the note "c", this note i will record using a digital microphone. Then i take the recording on my computer, burn it on CD, put the CD into my hiFi system and play it.

It is closer to the idea of a guitar tablature; you don't know the guitar tuning, so playing the particular fret position is essentially meaningless without knowing the guitar tuning.

In much the same way, RGB values purely are intensities. What isn't communicated via an intensity value is:

What the colour of each light is for each red, green, and blue intensity. Is the red a purple colour, the green a yellowy tone, the blue a cyany?
What arbitrary scale the intensity is mapped to. Is it a physical ratio, a non-linear scale of one of the infinite out there, or some perceptual scientific ratio?
What the achromatic value is intended to be. What colour are we using as the adapted achromatic colour for our notions of white?

Hence, according to the ISO, we must answer all three of these questions before we can use the term colour space.

Given an RGB colour space and the values, we can get an absolute device independent notion of what the colour in question is, and convert it to any other domain accurately.

[1] http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=37161


To delete a part of a mesh by its material, you have at least two options.
For both to work you'll have to first enter edit mode (press Tab).
First option is to select by material. Here you can see where to find this command:

After running this command, you can press Del key, and select delete faces from popup menu.
Another option is to use separate by material. You can find it here (or press P in edit mode):

When you have separated part of your mesh into another object, you can do whatever you want to it, like delete it.


Hair rendering issue - the steps are low in the render

Try modifying (in the har particle system properties)the values of resolution or the other properties that may have some resemblance to subdivisions or vert count. I'm sorry that I may of not of conveyed this answer the best but good luck :)


Not showing full model in rendered view and camera view after a certain distance

You probably have two different settings for your view port clipping and your rendering camera clipping.

To check the one in your view port (in Blender 2.8+): press
N , select View and you have Clip Start and Clip
End.
To check the one used by your camera select the camera object, go to
green Object Data Properties and in the panel Lens.

By default, they do not have the same value


Please see minimum Blender requirements:

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

Your spec does not pass them. There you can also find the optimal/recommended configuration.


is it possible to distort a voronoi texture like the wave textures distortion slider?

Use another texture to distort a texture. Depending on the value you affect you'll get different results:

Endless Fun!


Rendering Transparent objects with the Cell Fracture addon?

Take advantage of the node compositor and render layers. If you put the original (non-fractured) object on a separate render layer, you can smooth out the transition. Basically, the idea would be to reduce the opacity of the original object's render layer over the span of a few frames rather than use the hard swap that you currently have. Stretching that transition over more than a couple frames will make the change less apparent.

This can also be done from the VSE, but you'd need to either use separate scene strips or render the animation twice (once with the original object and once with the fractured object).


Clear the scale of all the objects and scale in edit mode
Object's transformations are a powerful tool that allow animators to give variance to their meshes without affecting the basemesh itself and take advantage of instancings greater performance.
Usually intanced objects have different rotation, position and scale, so applying one of these would only mess up your scene. If you don't trust me , you can try duplicating the object, apllying the scale and use the resulting mesh data as input for the instanced object.
If, as in your case, you didn't change the scale of your instanced objects, you can simply Clear the scale of all the instances with ALT+S and then scale one of the object in edit mode back to the previous value.


MultiFile Add-on with single python file

Please see the included add-ons that come with Blender as examples. If you are on Windows, that will most likely be C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender [version number]\[version number]\scripts\addons\
If you go to any of the folders there, you will see what would be in the zip file if it was a zipped addon:

The main addon file is __init__.py, you have to have one like that.


How to use transmissive voxels with color gradients?

You don't need volumetric shading to do this -  you just need to return where surfaces intersect a 3D texture space.

To make a solid color cube:

The Geometry node returns the 3D coordinates of the point being shaded in World space, measured in Blender units from World 0,0,0. As a first shot, all we have to do is plug the X, Y and Z values straight into the R,G and B values of the color of a diffuse shader. (The elements cast automatically from position XYZ to color RGB in the range 0 - 1, and clamp outside the range.)
But it would be nice to have  our X, Y and Z  measured from the origin of the cube, not the world, whatever translation, scale or rotation the cube is subjected to. The Vector Transform derives the (cube) object space coordinate from the world space coordinate, so you can move the cube around, and the color sticks to it. (The cube was made 1x1x1, with its origin at its minimum XYZ, when untransformed.)
The Math > Power nodes roughly map the linear coordinates to sRGB to display OK with my color management settings. 0 and 1 remain where they were, the curve between them is altered.. (gamma correction).
Cycles bounces light around the scene from one surface to another. Scattering of color between faces wasn't helpful, so the Light Path and Mix nodes make the material black, as far as the diffuse bounces are concerned (but not to the camera).

This shows the color cube with a Boolean modifier .. another (unrendered) cutting cube is taking a chunk out of it. You may see artifacts from the Boolean in the preview, but they don't appear in the final render.

A 'Voxel' representation ..

An applied array , 10x10x10, of small cubes in a 1x1x1 volume, whose origin is at minimum X,Y,Z.
Most of the details as above, but this time, to get per-voxel-cube  shading, using an Object Info node, which can return the world coordinates, not of the shading point, but of the origin of the currently shaded object. When that is plugged into RGB, each voxel-cube  is colored with the XYZ of its origin.
I can't think of a brief, general, way to measure those locations in another object's space. So as it stands, this one is sensitive to being moved about. You could obviously tweak by hand to deal with changing scale, other transformations, but.., I'll be posting this as a question myself. Suggestions welcome in the comments.


Each curve vertex has a radius. When you scale your curve in Object mode, the radius doesn't change, but if you apply the scale, the radius will change to the curve object scale before applying, and it will affect the objects that are parented to the curve, like your cube.
You can check the vertices radius in the N panel > Item > Radius (or Mean Radius if you've selected several vertices). You can bring back the value to 1. You can also right click (Contexte Menu) > Set Curve Radius, type the value you want and press Enter.


Why does my mesh not move with the bones parented to it?

In Object Mode select all objects but the armature. Press Ctrl-J (join) .

Parenting with Automatic weights fails due to duplicated vertices.
With the mesh selected enter Edit Mode select all A then press the Remove Doubles button from the left panel this removes > 3700 vertices.

You probably need to manually edit the middle part of the body because it is not connected. Or try to increase the limit when removing the doubles.

Note that this could also be done with a Mirror Modifier set to clipping.

After parenting with automatic weights your model requires weight painting. In your case I wouldn't recommend to use automatic weights because it adds much weights you only need to remove. Better paint it all manually from scratch.


Compositing and motion tracking the object is bright but see through

In a properly encoded RGBA buffer, the RGB represents the quantity of emission of a given pixel "window", and the A represents the degree of occlusion of the geometry.

The proper approach here is to simply take your rendered image and apply an Alpha Over your background, at a "full" 1.0 factor.


"Bake" all Particle systems into their object

You can turn particles into real objects with the convert button in the particles modifier panel.

In this case I think what you may be looking for is BVH caching. Under Render Properties there is a Performance panel. There you will find an option to cache BVH. Blender internal has some different options.

From the 2.62 Release notes -

  For renders where only the camera or materials are changing, while meshes stay fixed, it is now possible to skip the sometimes slow BVH step, by enabling BVH Cache in the Performance panel. This will store the BVH on disk for subsequent (animation) renders of the same scene. Note that if the scene does change in the animation, enabling this option will make rendering somewhat slower.

From your sample animation this may not help as the mesh objects in the scene appears to be changing, unless you are making the materials transparent. If you do have this enabled then maybe disabling it will help.

One possibility may be to render the background animation and then composite the shed animation onto it. Another is to animate material transparency instead of object visibility.


Transparent part of my image shows up black

Works just fine with the provided images.
Perhaps you forgot to connect the alpha channel?


Liquids flows to weird direction. (It flows toward one area of the domain object)

Okay I found what was the problem.
I found that the Wind Force Field I had at the outside the domain was affecting the whole scene! This is the first time I'm using the Force field and I didn't know it could affect the whole scene.


How to bulk rename objects within a target collection?

Iterate over collection objects.

This example is a reasonably simple introduction into scripting blender's python API.

import bpy

wcol = bpy.data.collections.get("Water")
if wcol:
    for i, o in enumerate(wcol.objects):
        o.name = "Water%d" % i

To ensure they keep their previous name order, and to have "Water1" first rather than "Water0"

import bpy

wcol = bpy.data.collections.get("Water")
if wcol:
    for i, o in enumerate(sorted(wcol.objects[:], key=lambda o: o.name)):
        o.name = "Water%d" % (i + 1) # to start from 1


how to manipulate objects using Seed button in real time

You will need to define some properties, and then make a panel to display it them. I've cut and pasted from the templates in Blender's Text Editor(look here for many more examples).

First make an update function that will run every the properties change:

def update_function(self, context):
    myfloat = context.scene.myfloat
    myint = context.scene.myint
    for ob in context.scene.objects:
        #your code would go here
        print((myfloat, myint))

Then define some properties with your function as the update. More information on properties here.

bpy.types.Scene.myfloat = bpy.props.FloatProperty(name="My Float", update=update_function)
bpy.types.Scene.myint = bpy.props.IntProperty(name="My Int", update=update_function)

Then the panel:

class MyPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    """Creates a Panel in the Object properties window"""
    bl_label = "My Panel"
    bl_idname = "OBJECT_PT_mypanel"
    bl_space_type = 'VIEW_3D'
    bl_region_type = 'UI'
    bl_context = "object"

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        obj = context.object
        row = layout.row()
        row.prop(context.scene, "myfloat")
        row.prop(context.scene, "myint")

Now we put it all together and register the panel and properties:

import bpy

def update_function(self, context):
    myfloat = context.scene.myfloat
    myint = context.scene.myint
    for ob in context.scene.objects:
        #your code would go here
        print((myfloat, myint))

class MyPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    """Creates a Panel in the Object properties window"""
    bl_label = "My Panel"
    bl_idname = "OBJECT_PT_mypanel"
    bl_space_type = 'VIEW_3D'
    bl_region_type = 'UI'
    bl_context = "object"

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        obj = context.object
        row = layout.row()
        row.prop(context.scene, "myfloat")
        row.prop(context.scene, "myint")

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_module(__name__) #registers all the classes
    bpy.types.Scene.myfloat = bpy.props.FloatProperty(name="My Float", update=update_function)
    bpy.types.Scene.myint = bpy.props.IntProperty(name="My Int", update=update_function)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_module(__name__)
    del bpy.types.Scene.myfloat
    del bpy.types.Scene.myint

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()


The Solidify modifier could be useful here. Go and check it out.

If you want to do buildings I would highly recommend that you "build" the house, instead of trying to carve it out of a block.

It would be a lot easier to build everything in pieces. Not everything has to be done in one piece in Blender. And you can always merge the Geometry later.

Build walls, cut windows into them. Add the window frames. Etc.

Build the house, dont try and carve it out.


How To Append a Node group from another Blend file Using Python Script

I finally got the answer of this problem
this scipt worked for me
 -

import bpy
path = "/Users/Rakesh\Desktop/wallpapers/FIRE SHADER/Fire Shader Advanced.blend\\Material\\"
material_name = "domain"
bpy.ops.wm.append( filename = material_name, directory = path)


Create a new transform-orientation based on sub-object (component) geometry, like edges. The Z-axis will point in the direction of the cross-product of any two edges selected.

If you are not familiar with that term, the cross product is the vector that is normal to 2 other vectors. Keep the following in mind as examples:

The Z-axis is the cross-product of the X and Y-axes;

The X-axis is the cross-product of the Y and Z-axes;

the Y-axis is the cross-product of the X and Z-axes;

(You can also look up "cross-product" or "Right Hand Rule" for a way to visualize general cross-product vectors. It is not necessary to know the math to visualize a cross-product)

The cross-product of 2 vectors is perpendicular (in 3d we say "orthogonal" or "normal") to the plane the 2 vectors are in:

Say I wanted to create this fan shape so that it was oriented to the curvature of the bookshelf. The shape is a quarter-circle in the plane that I could have made a few ways, but I did it by rotating duplicates of edge components about this corner (the cursor is placed there and transformations are oriented about the cursor). To do that, I first had to get my transform orientation right. I did that by selecting the 2 orthogonal corner edges shown here, then creating a new transform orientation from that, as shown below:

This is the result:

Notice that the transform orientation is still usable even after returning to object-mode:

Now I was able to rotate edge duplicates about the corner, in a plane that is normal to the bookcase. Rotations are done about the new Z-axis in this orientation.  Big-picture:


Method to specify the Solidify thickness based on another surface

You could add a driver to the Thickness value.

In this example, I've used the property dimension.x (it corresponds to the diameter).

If you need the value to change only at certain steps, you can set the interpolation mode to constant:

When you duplicate the sphere (alt +d), the driver will automatically update and it will mantain the reference to the proper diameter.

NOTE:
Remember to apply the scale transformation after scaling, otherwise the Thickness value will scale too.


I personally think there are two things going on here:

CG technical. There is a noisy reflection of the ground-plane. That can be improved by Denoising, and the other considerations for reducing noise. You might also consider discriminating between rays: sampling at different levels according to the Light Paths the renderer is evaluating, if you find you are having to push the overall sampling rate too high.
Perceptual. I think this is more important, actually, here. This all depends on what kind of shot you want: an idealized product or pack-shot, or the glass in a more fully-realized scene. At the moment, in the absence of context, the eye interprets the reflection of the floor, noisy or not, as a feature of the surface of the glass, rather than a reflection of its environment.

For a product-shot, you could, for example, make a full soft box, (an emissive  rounded cube containing the scene)  you can subdivide its faces, delete some, color some, whatever you like, and it can be visible in lighting, refractions, and reflections without being visible to the camera. Your best references probably come from real-world commercial photography. Other devices available to you are depth-of-field, to soften reflections from a distance and emphasise the scale of your object, flags / gobos  for detailed shadows.. reflective or emissive 'cards' to punch up the glow in the liquid ... the list is endless.
At its crudest, the more fully realised scene is less work: put the glass and the floor into an HDRI environment. This is no great shakes, but it took no time.


is there a way to add foam around an island?

I achieved the following result.  Apologies for the "before" shot, it's the only thing I have:

I have this "gulf" scene where my beaches are just planes sticking into the "ocean".  That's a plane with a big Ocean modifier and a 20m Solidify modifier.

What I found was that in your ocean's node tree you can use an Ambient Occlusion node set to Inside and that appears to make it aware of intersections through the final mesh after all the modifiers are calculated.

I used various methods to add noise to this and used it as the factor of a Mix Shader for the surface material.


Your IK foot bones are not named properly that's why blender doesn't know how to mirror your pose.
Give them IDENTICAL name with Left and Right prefixes (LeftFootIK, RightFootIK)


High poly blade sculpted axe with Notches in it baked to low poly model with that has no notches in its mesh

No it isn't possible.

Baking a normal map only affects the shading of an object's surface to give the appearance of detail that would normally be created with extra geometry. A normal map cannot alter the outline of a mesh. You will need to have the notches in the outline of your low poly object.

While a displacement map can be used to move existing geometry, I don't expect it to fit into your usage. It would also mean having the geometry to displace.

Creating a transparency map would not get the result you are after. The material transparency can be restricted to certain areas but that area would be transparent from every angle, leaving the axe with a hole through it when looking towards the blade.


How do I bake multiple texture maps into 1 UV, In Blender Cycles?

I found an alternate solution that's been working well with my tests.

Instead of baking my texture with my Diffuse, Gloss, and Normal maps linking to a principled shader leading to the material output for all the materials being used on 1 object as shown in the image during my question, I am now using individual texture types for each material and saving each bake as a diffuse, then adding those 3 diffuse maps directly into their appropriate fields in Unity, Diffuse, Specular, and Normal.

Example:

UV unwrap the object to a new image
Wood Floor material > only has Diffuse texture node linked
Spackle Material > only has Diffuse texture node linked
Brick Material > only has Diffuse texture node linked
Add the above materials to the desired object faces
Bake texture as Diffuse with direct and indirect
lighting disabled and save the new image

This will be the full Diffuse map for the entire object

Swap out the above mentioned diffuse textures on every material with:

Wood Floor material > only has Normal texture node linked
Spackle Material > only has Normal texture node linked
Brick Material > only has Normal texture node linked
Create a new UV image for the bake to save to
Bake the new unwrapped texture, still as Diffuse with direct and indirect lighting disabled

Even though it's saved as diffuse, this will act as our normal map that we can simply drag and drop onto the objects material once it's in Unity.

Swap out the above mentioned diffuse textures on every material with:

Wood Floor material > only has Gloss texture node linked
Spackle Material > only has Gloss texture node linked
Brick Material > only has Gloss texture node linked
Create a new UV image for the bake to save to
Bake the new unwrapped texture, still as Diffuse with direct and indirect lighting disabled

Even though it's saved as diffuse, this will act as our gloss map that we can simply drag and drop onto the objects material once it's in Unity.

Repeat this process for any additional map types you want your finished mesh to have.


How do I toggle to visibility of each object in my scene one by one using animation nodes?

It is very easy to do this effect in Animation Nodes (AN). I have divided this effect into two parts,

Setting up the pass index of the individual objects in AN.
Setting up shader and controlling it with object's pass index.

Part-1: First, I have arranged the objects (cubes in this example) in a linear distribution for simplicity but this may be different in your case.

Then, we have to create a float list (using Float Range Node) which should have the same length as the number of objects (10 in this example), and we will use this list to set the pass index of objects. You want "Each object goes from hidden to visible with a one-second gap before the next". So, we are going to use Delay Falloff with both delay and duration option is set to 24 frames (i.e., 1 second) (see the Float Node in green color). Now, we have to evaluate the Delay Falloff on each object location i.e., what is the value of falloff for an object at a certain time (see the result in the Viewer Node).

Next, we are going to make the pass index zero for completely hidden objects and 10000 (a larger number to get a smooth transition in the shader from hidden to visible) for full visible objects. So to do this, we have to multiply the float list with the evaluated falloff values (see the result in the Viewer Node), then set this as the pass index for each object using Object Attribute Output Node.

Part-2: We need only one Shader for all objects. First, get the pass index of the object using the Object Info Node, then divide it by the same value (i.e., 10000) we used for full visible objects in the float list. Then, use this value to control the Mix Shader Node or visibility of objects,

Final Node tree, Shader Nodes, and Blend File:


Your question covers a lot of ground.
For starters, I recommend you set up 4 separate cameras. This is easier than having your camera move to the different desired positions.

switching between cameras requires a spot of code (at least the way I've done it.)
however if you wish to display your separate views simultaneously, a tutorial to check into is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TtTBGSOii4.

as far as seeing through your own head: make sure your render settings are set to 'Blender Game' and turn to the material properties of your object. Click the check mark next to Backface culling. This should allow you to view the world though your own head.


How can I enable shading in texture mode?

I've asked this question on a discord server where I got a one-line answer that solved the problem within 20 minutes.

Solution: Disable any overlays in the 3D viewport. When you take a closer look at some of the problem pictures, you'll find the overlays enabled. Here's what it looks like when they are turned off:


Blender can't get extrude to lock in odd position again

By default extrude will lock along the normal of the selected faces. The normal is perpendicular to the plane of the face. In other words, the direction the face is facing.

To unlock it, press Z after extruding.

To re-lock it, set the transform orientation to normal in the header of the 3D view. Then press ZZ after extruding and unlocking (or GZZ if you cancelled/completed the extrude/transform operator)

Also see:

Extrude Faces along Local Normals

How can faces be rotated around their individual normals?


How to get a single input property of a node to draw in the UI panel directly in the panel?

UILayout.prop index argument

Use the index property for single array elements.

layout.prop(map.inputs[1], "default_value", text="Position X", index=0)

Would point out that this is used in my answer https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/139620/15543 to link posted in your question?

FWIW. For pep8 formatting put a space after a comma in arguments list.

It is recommended in blender to use double quotes for strings, and single quotes for enums.


Please check the BUILD modifier (you can also apply it to lines).
BUILD modified let you animate the generation of a line and on the line/path you can control easily the radius/thickness.

Make 2 curves: one path (the line), one circle or square
one the line apply a GEOMETRY > BEVEL > OBJECT > choose the circle or the square
Edit the size of the path with ALT+S (you can "inflate" a node of the path)
apply the BUILD modifier to the line.
animate and have fun


Why will my rigid body objects not come to a rest after landing in a bowl?

The solution is quite simple! you need to enable deactivation on the chip meshes.

If they don't settle down fast enough, raise the linear and angular velocities. I'd especially recommenced the angular velocity (amount of rotation).

How this option works is that when the rigid body gets still enough, it is deactivated and stops moving.

For you particular simulation, values around 2.6 seemed to work well.

Here is a working .blend


Create a desired shape from 2D curves, below is an example, and close it enabling cyclic option. Model the plane to shape, convert to mesh and knife project it onto the terrain. Then invert the selection and delete it. Or, having knife projected, separate the selection and delete or keep the portion that's left. NB: to knife project correctly you need to be in ortho view.


why there is no difference in render after denoise is on?

Let me give you a subtle hint of one possibility why this might happen:

What you may have noticed in the picture is that there are different sampling settings for the render and the viewport.

...but what could be the reason for having the same result with "denoising"on and off?

This might be when you take a clean image rendered with enough samples for it not to have much noise and try to denoise it. The difference is minimal in that case because the denoiser does not have much noise to remove. In your specific case the difference is there and I would not even call it that small. Let's actually look for the difference in the images you have provided for a minute:


How do I make a control blend file that can link to other blend files and save changes from the control to the external blend files?

The answer I was looking for was Make Proxy. After linking an object, on that object, It's Object > Make Proxy or Ctl+Alt+P.


The problem you're experiencing is that the Texture space coordinates are in the range 0 to 1 on the X and Y axes and the scaling takes place from the origin - ie, 0,0. To address this you need to shift the coordinates so that the origin is in the centre of the image (0.5,0.5) before scaling. You can achieve this by splitting the Vector into its separate elements using a Separate XYZ node, manipulating the coordinates using Math nodes and re-combining as shown :

The Subtract node re-maps the range from 0 to 1 into -0.5 to 0.5 so the origin (0) is in the centre of the image. The Multiply can be adjusted to get the desired scaling (highlighted in the image). The Add re-maps the range back to 0 to 1.

Setting the Multiply nodes to '2' will give you a half-sized image. Swapping the Multiply for a Divide or using '0.5' will give the opposite effect.

EDIT : My expectation was that the above method would be quite efficient - since the nodes are performing mathematically simple calculations.
However, in my particular test case this was adding 10% onto render times.

There are other methods to create the same effect. The most efficient method I have found so far is to use Mapping nodes in place of the Subtract, Multiply and Add - this also removes the need for the Separate and Combine operations :

The Mapping nodes perform the same operations as before - offset by 0.5, scale, offset back by 0.5. This does improve efficiency.

Additionally, since the Mapping node performs the Offset, Rotation, Scale as separate operations in turn, the first two Mapping nodes can actually be combined into the following :

ie, Offset by 0.5 and Scale, offset back by 0.5.

In my test case this was only 2-3% less efficient than no scaling - a significant improvement over using separate Math nodes.


I used cylinder projection on this cylinder, but now there is a noticeable seam when i apply any texture, How can I make it seamless?

You can't make a non-seamless texture seamless, but you can find workarounds by using photoshop, or another program to make the texture seamless. I would either find a new texture, or use another program to make it seamless. There aren't too many other options, but finding a truly seamless texture should be pretty easy.


Use a Rigid Body Constraint to fix the pendulum to the pivot as a hinge instead of relying on the geometry (select the pendulum and thr pivot, in the physics toolbox panel select ‘Connect’ and set as ‘hinge’ - you might then need to re-orient the hinge so it swings on the correct axis (it will rotate around the Z-axis of the constraint)).

Finally, you need to move the origin of the pendulum to its centre of mass (currently it appears to be at the pivot) - select the pendulum, click Set Origin and select ‘Center of Mass’.

See also https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/109136/29586 - it doesn’t include a pendulum but does explain the Rigid Body Constraints. Also https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/101880/29586 for an explanation as to why to use constraints for pivots and axles rather than mesh surface interactions.


Why don't my constraints and rig update when the target moves?

Use the arrow keys to go one frame forward and one frame backward.  This will cause a reposition and repaint.

Currently that is the least burdening user action I have.

Also you have a Circular Reference.

Check your [Console Window] to see a troubling circular reference. Remove the circular reference.

This menu selection opens the console. Image above.

Often software needs to determine a work order by sorting dependencies of Constraints.  Precedence sorting.  Topological Sorting.  For explanation simplicity allow G->D to mean G depends on D. Clear chain of command is easier to understand.  Clear example A->B->C.  Unclear example A->B and B->A

Desired Situation

Your empty constraint should refer to another bone prior to the current one, or the armature itself, or some other created object.

Current Situation Undesirable

Your bone has a constraint that refers to the empty.  The empty has a constraint that refers to the bone.  A->B  and B->A.  Circular Reference.


Positional keyframes are always relative to the parent. When you add an object via AddObject it has no parent. Therefore it plays relative to the scene's origin -> it jumps away.

Solution

Add an empty to the hidden layer.
Parent your object to the empty.
AddObject the empty rather than your object.

Effect

This will add the empty with all of it's children, including your object. Your object will play the animation relative to it's parent, which is the  empty. The empty gets the position from the adding object.

I hope it helps


You could begin with this setup, a Noise plugged into a ColorRamp, glossiness, and a bit of Bump:


Fixed it by dissolving some of the edges.


Tab into Edit mode, if you're not already there.
Then either
1. Select only the horizontal edges, then subdivide.
or
2. For each of the three sections, press CtrlR and hover the mouse near a horizontal edge, then LMB or Enter followed by RMB or Esc.


Adding a Procedural Crater to a Terrain Created by ANT Landscapes

That can be this kind of settings.

What is happening in the nodes shown in the question is "displacement" node is going along the faces normals, and they should go down.
(this issue does not occur in the video tutorial as he uses a flat plane)
So I've used a "vector displacement" that allows to displace along the wanted vector (0, 0, 1).
(the other parts of the node tree is on the same base as yours)


Operator Panel, values/tweek options don't show up

Operator options show up in the Redo Panel after the operator has been executed.

If the operator is cancelled instead of confirmed, no options will appear as no operator has been run (even though an operator was started).

Your screenshot shows the operator is running, but not yet finished/confirmed.


You can totally duplicate your circle in Edit Mode on the Bevel Object. The origin of the Bevel Object is the point which follows the curve. you can Tilt the curve with CTRL + T to control its rotation.


Why can I not see the rest of the lamp panel and/or how can I find it?

So, I believe it's because you are working in a blender render engine.  You can switch it to Cycles on the top of the window


How to make layout panel for addon in the render properties window visible only for EEVEE?

Mix in class

Following on from  your answer,
 can also create a mix in class.  An example below.

The EeveeBasePanel mix in class will make any panel inheriting it be in properties, render context, default closed and poll when the render engine is eevee.

This comes in handy if you are going to register other panels. For example I have put a test panel in the scene context, that will also be in properties,  default hidden and only poll if the render engine is eevee.

Seeing as it seems to be eevee based didn't worry about having compat engines list, or setting the category (tabbed by context rather than category in properties)

import bpy

class MyEeveeAddon(bpy.types.PropertyGroup):

    use_myeevee_addon: bpy.props.BoolProperty(
        name="",
        description="Enable My Eevee Addon",
        default=False
    )
    mea_int_property: bpy.props.IntProperty(
        name="Quality",
        description="Increase My Eevee Addon quality",
        default=8,
        min=0,
        max=128
    )

class EeveeBasePanel:
    bl_space_type = 'PROPERTIES'
    bl_region_type = 'WINDOW'
    bl_context = "render"
    bl_options = {'DEFAULT_CLOSED'}

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls, context):
        return (context.engine == 'BLENDER_EEVEE')

class RENDER_PT_my_eevee_addon(EeveeBasePanel, bpy.types.Panel):
    """Creates a Panel in the render properties window"""
    bl_label = "My Eevee Addon"
    bl_idname = "RENDER_PT_true_mb"

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

        col = layout.column(align=True)
        col.prop(scene.me_addon, "mea_int_property")
        col.active = scene.me_addon.use_myeevee_addon

    def draw_header(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        scene = context.scene

        col = layout.column(align=True)
        col.prop(scene.me_addon, "use_myeevee_addon")

class SCENE_PT_test(EeveeBasePanel, bpy.types.Panel):
    bl_label = "My Eevee Scene Test"
    bl_context = "scene"

    def draw(self, context):
        self.layout.label(text="Test")

classes = (MyEeveeAddon,
           RENDER_PT_my_eevee_addon,
           SCENE_PT_test)

def register():
    for cls in classes:
        bpy.utils.register_class(cls)
    bpy.types.Scene.me_addon = bpy.props.PointerProperty(type=MyEeveeAddon)

def unregister():
    for cls in revrersed(classes):
        bpy.utils.register_class(cls)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()


Face Mesh Disappears when I bind it to a Facial Rig

The disappearing of your mesh is actually most probably just a huge difference in scale.
Faceit scales the mesh and armature during binding. Older versions of Faceit applied the scale after binding. This is not happening anymore. By upgrading the Faceit add-on to a more recent version, you should be able to bind again.
By the way: What you are trying to do is binding a mesh that is already bound to an armature to a new armature (the Faceit armature). Faceit will overwrite the weights. You should work on a duplicate, as described here: https://faceit-doc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/workaround/


Exporting character with multiple equipable armor parts and animations from blender to unity (Blender 2.78)

Finally got it fixed (the animations importing part, at least). In FBX export options, had to change the version from FBX 7.4 binary to FBX 6.1 ASCII.

ARGGHH.


How do I list all the files used in a .blend file?

You could use http://web.purplefrog.com/~thoth/blender/python-cookbook/list-referenced-files.html as a starting point:

import bpy
import os

def debug_print(msg):
    print(msg)

def list_referenced_images():
    rval = set()
    for img in bpy.data.images:
        if img.filepath is not None:
            debug_print ("IMAGE %s"%img.filepath)
            rval.add(bpy.path.abspath(img.filepath))
    return rval

def paths_for_vse_strip(strip):
    if hasattr(strip, "filepath"):
        return [ strip.filepath ]
    if hasattr(strip, "directory"):
        return [ strip.directory+elt.filename for elt in strip.elements ]
    return []

def list_vse_references():
    rval = set()
    for scn in bpy.data.scenes:
        if scn.sequence_editor is not None:
            for strip in scn.sequence_editor.sequences_all:
                for path in paths_for_vse_strip(strip):
                    debug_print("VSE %s"%path)
                    rval.add(bpy.path.abspath(path))
    return rval

def file_is_used(f, used):
    if f in used:
        return True

    # OMG, windows.  WTF?
    for f2 in used:
        if os.path.samefile(f2, f):
            return True

    return False

def mission1():
    used  = set()
    used.update( list_referenced_images() )
    used.update( list_vse_references() )

    dir = "/var/tmp/blender"
    for f in sorted(os.listdir(dir)):
        f2 = os.path.join(dir, f)
        if file_is_used(f2, used):
            print("USED\t%s"%f2)
        else:
            print("UNUSED\t%s"%f2)

mission1()

There is a good chance there are other external references somewhere in the data model, but those were the two that popped into my head (images and VSE).


The answer is actually pretty simple, subdividing creates more edges which causes it to need better hardware. Blender simply lags because your computer is not able to handle the smoothing.


Some funky stretching going on in character animation

Problem fixed... False alarm!!!, I double even triple checked my mesh weights, (but only in my main mesh, since the stretching looks gray), and I have the eyes and shoes as a separate mesh, all these three parented to my armature, finally I double-checked the eyes and they were parented to the armature with an orangy tone, not totally red, after I weight painted them in full red the problem is fixed... Anyway, the weird thing is that I was not able to see the stretching in the viewports, maybe that would have given me a clue of where the problem was.


Selecting objects with the same property values (without Python)

I don't think there is a way to do this without some Python. It is not very complicated though.

You can type C.object. and hit Ctrl+Space in the Python Console to see all the properties. Also they might be in C.object.data.. Once you know the property you wish to select your objects based on, you can run:

import bpy

for obj in bpy.context.scene.objects:
    # Note that floats may not be equal because of binary rounding errors so:
    if (obj.location[2] - 1.0694) < 0.0001 and (obj.location[2] - 1.0694) >= 0 :
        obj.select = True
        bpy.context.scene.objects.active = obj #to make the last selected object active
    else:
        obj.select = False

Obviously you would change (obj.location[2] - 1.0694) < 0.0001 and (obj.location[2] - 1.0694) >= 0 to whatever statement comparing properties to your wanted values.


Make object follow curve without rotating/deforming

This answer will describe the creation of a single "tile" of the escalator.

Add a bone with a follow path constraint with Follow Curve checked. I also checked Fixed Position and animated the offset value.

Add a smaller bone (OrientationBone) beneath it and parent it to the original bone. When the bone is ascending the OrientationBone will be beneath it, and when it is ascending it will be above it.

Because bone > bone driver relation create a cyclic dependency error in 2.79, I added an empty.

I used a copy location and a copy rotation constraint from the bone to the empty.

Next, add a limit rotation constraint to the empty with all values at 0 and all axes checked. Add a driver to that constraints influence. Use the Y Location of the Bone as a driver variable. Whenever the Y Location is between 0 and 6 (orange in the gif below) in my case, the bone is ascending and the driver should return the value 1 to enable the limit rotation constraint and stop the empty from rotation during the ascent. I achieved this with constant keyframes of the driver.

I added another driver for the descend, which will first check if the bone is descending with the help of the orientation bone. If the Y Location of the OrientationBone is smaller than the Y Location of the Bone, the bone is descending, otherwise the driver should return 0.


Blender Texture working differently when Imported to Unity

Could it be that the normals of mirrored side of the dragon are facing the wrong way?

If you enable Backface Culling  you will see your model as it will appear in Unity.

If you notice a difference in your mesh when Backface Culling is enabled then you probably do have inverted normals.

To fix this, in Edit mode, with all of the dragon selected open the Tools panel and then the Shading/UV tab > Normals > Recalculate Normals.


In object mode select the rig, press L
(make local) and choose "All".


parent with autmatic weights giving wierd reults

This is a "think outside the box" kind of approach, but consider giving it a try, just to see what happens. No guarantees, of course (and truly, I'm sorry that I wasn't able to address the specifics of your problem more directly). Consider taking the source file, and NOT exporting anything. Start with that file, and instead of trying to extract anything from it, consider using it as is, BUT import your preferred model INTO that file. Once your model is in the source file, with the source file model selected, go into the object data tab in the Properties Panel and change the mesh data block to the one from your newly imported mesh. It MAY replace the source file's mesh with your desired mesh. If it does, then you would essentially have what you want, without doing a lot of work. You could then hide or delete your imported version of the mesh. Please let me know if this works. If not, maybe someone could tell us both why, and how to do what I'm suggesting properly.


Does Blender support dual-GPU rendering if the two GPUs aren't the same?

You can, as long they are from the same brand (AMD, or NVidia) you should be able to use them simultaneously to render in Blender Cycles.
If you keep them out of any proprietary GPU pairing technologies setup like SLI or Crossfire, the operating system detects them as two discrete GPUs and see both graphics cards, Blender should be able to see them as discreet GPUs in the user preferences.
This will virtually decrease render times linearly, proportionally to each additional compute device performance, as opposed to pairing technologies which have significant performance penalties and lose efficiency with each additional GPU unit.
You can then prior to rendering select which one to use, or both simultaneously, if you want. You can also have each instance of Blender use its own GPU independently, although you will likely experience performance penalties caused by bottlenecks anywhere else in your system, namely available memory, and CPU resources for pre-processing your scene.
Under User Preferences > System > Cycles Render Device you can activate CUDA processing and pick from the list of available devices below to chose which ones to use for each running session. From the Properties Window > Render Properties you can then set the device to GPU while Cycles is set as active render engine.
Have in mind that when using multiple GPUs for rendering a single scene you will always be bound by the available memory on the card with the least VRAM amount. Since GPUs still can't share memory access, a copy if the whole scene must be fully loaded into each individual graphics card memory, so it must completely fit into the available RAM of every single GPU, failing any of them will abort rendering.
Having two GPUs from very far apart generations may eventually cause problems in the long term. As each generation ages it is eventually phased out, and becomes deprecated. At a certain point newer drivers stop supporting them and one last driver version compatible with the older model is launched, and you will essentially be stuck at that release if you wish to keep using your older GPU.
Even if newer drivers support your newest graphics card, since you can't have two different driver versions installed or running side by side, you still be forced to keep that older release while you plant to use the older generation. Some newer software (like games) may some times not work properly on older drivers, or require newer versions to even launch, forcing you to either update and lose use of the older card, or not update and miss out on the benefits of newer drivers.


Is there a way to make a ball roll using rigid body physics?

I show how to do this with Blender V2.79b and also with V2.80 Beta just to complete the exercise.

In Blender V2.79b do the following:

As a test create a plank from a cube and place a sphere above the plank as in the image.
Select the Sphere
In the Tools click the Physics tab and click Add Active button while the sphere is selected, see below

Select the plank.
In the Physics tab click Add Passive button, while the plank is selected, see below

Switch to Cycles Render and add any material you wish to the plank and the ball to see the ball rolling. This step is not necessary but it was part of the question, hence the inclusion.
Click the play button and you will see the ball dropping on the plank and start rolling down.

Make sure the plank is steep enough, otherwise it may not roll.

See result below.

In Blender 2.80 you can create the same. In this example for the plank and the ball I just assigned a random colour material with some noise node.

For the sphere set Physics, see below.

For the plank you set Physics as below

The result is below


This looks like denoising artifacts. Denoising is active by default in newer versions of Blender, and a quite powerful tool. It smoothes the noise that you get when rendering, and can save some render times, but results in some "washed out colours" if rendering with too few samples. Try increasing your render samples, and try deactivating Denoising for testing purposes to see the difference.


How to make a fabric with a solidify modifier doesn't pass through itself?

Don't apply the solidify modifier , put it the last  here is an example setup :

the mesh is subdivided before :
the subsurf modifier is added to smooth the mesh after simulation then we add the solidify modifier.

Solid view :


When I use the Subdivision Surface modifier on a basic cylinder, it turns into a weird-shaped sphere

Two things;

Edge Crease

If you would like to tighten up the edges of a cylinder, you can look at the second and third meshes below;

The first one is unmodified (other than making it taller than a default cylinder, which is why yours is more of a sphere).

The second one was created by selecting the edges and using shift+e, which adjusts what blender calls the "edge crease".

The third adds two edge loops near the top and bottom (which can be added with ctrl+r)

Poor subdivisions and ngons

But what do we do about the odd tops? These are poorly subdivided because the top is a non-regular face (called an ngon, which is any face with more than 4 edges). The simplest fix for this is extruding the face, then merging all the faces into the center;

Extrude the face with e;

Right click to drop it back in place;

Then hit alt+m and select "At Center";

Roughly the same process can be applied to the edge loop version. You'll notice that the results are a lot cleaner in rendered view;

Note: I didn't fix the bottom of the cylinders in these examples


non-linear scaling of STL-files along the Z-Axis

You would need to import the file first. If this is only about different sized separate objects, that would not be very difficult. You would just need to loop through all the objects in your scene, check their size and scale them accordingly. Could look something like this:

import bpy
from mathutils import Vector

for o in bpy.context.scene.objects: #bpy.context.view_layer.objects in 2.80
    if o.dimensions[2] >= 1: # change the 1 to anything (dimensions[2] is Z)
        scale = Vector((2,2,2)) # change the scale to anything
        o.scale = [a*b for a,b in zip(o.scale, scale)]
    else:
        scale = Vector((3,3,3)) # change the scale to anything
        o.scale = [a*b for a,b in zip(o.scale, scale)]


That's because there are no lights in your scene so it would be dark because lighting information is saved in baked textures when baking using the combined bake type.


This could all be done with curves.

Starting with a circle curve

Then add another curve for the vertical elements, give it some extrusion.

Make an array and use a curve modefier to guide the array around the circle curve.

Create another circle, subdivide it and weave it around the verical elements.

Duplicate that curve and rotate it to create the torch.


Is it possible to stick vertices, and for them not to be affect by proportional editing

Was enlightened.

I select the object
Edit mode
Select the vertices that I want to stick
Press 'H' to hide
Make my adjustment
Those vertices that are hidden will not be affected
Press 'alt-H' to unhide.


tissue addon how to create pattern on sphere

I'm the developer of Tissue. In order to create a symmetrical cylinder I suggest to use FAN mode, using instead of the full plane+cylinder component, just a third of it, like a single petal.

Anyway, it will not be perfectly cylindrical.

Alessandro


How can I convert a hair-particle system into 3D, editable objects?

In the modifier panel click the convert button.

That should do the trick.

Two things to note:

If you're using an object, the objects will be linked when converted.
The original emitter will continue to emit particles. Make sure to either delete the emitter, or delete the particle system.

By the way, CGCookie has a tutorial (archive) on creating a feather if you're interested.


How to combine a blurred emit pass with rest of render?

I would use add here.
When you set the glare nodes to a mix of 1, then they only output the glare, without the original image.

As for the order of the glare nodes, I would apply them all at once.
By applying them one after the other, the next one includes the effect of the previous one in it's calculation, making the result brighter than it should be (and potentially doing things like putting starbursts on the ghost images..).

Instead apply then all to the same source with a mix of 1, then add them together:

Result:


I suspect that each part of your desk which articulates relative to any other part of the desk will need to be a separate object, and parented to some other appropriate part of the desk. But having written that , the exact method of associating the various parts of your desk so that they articulate as you expect in UE4 will be determined by the design of the UE4 game engine. I suggest that when you have completed all of the constituent parts of your desk that you ask about animating them on a forum devoted to UE4 topics.


Multiple objects or multiple meshes per object

There is no definitive answer for this, it is mostly a matter of opinion with some consideration of making some steps easier and how blender performs.

While you are modeling a complex model, there are advantages to working with multiple objects :-

You can make linked duplicates of an object so that they all use the same mesh data, this lets you model one window and duplicate it, then changing one window changes all windows to match.
Modifiers can be used to create a piece of a larger model, this might only be a temporary object that can be combined once the modifiers are applied.
You can quickly go into local view of just the selected objects (press / on the numpad) so that everything else is hidden.
You can find objects by name (if you name them as you go) and hide multiple objects to make working on one part of your model easier. While you can hide parts of a single mesh, you need to manually select each part of the mesh to hide or select what you want to see and invert the selection and hide it.

When a model is complete, having 135 separate objects to represent a single spaceship can make it awkward to select and move around as one, so there is an advantage to combining the multiple objects into one, once the modeling is complete. This is quickly done by selecting them and pressing ⎈ CtrlJ.

Performance wise using larger scenes, blender will perform better with one object that has one million vertices than with 1000 objects that have 1000 vertices each. This answer might give more insight.


Two textures in the same object (not using assign)

If your logo texture is a png image, you might use the transparancy channel, to drive a  color mix node in cycles. The yellow input connections of the mix node have to be connected to the two textures. The alpha output of the logo texture has to be connected to the gray factor input of the mix node.
The transparency will be the trigger to mix the one or the other texture.


There's a button in the header bar (three dots with a left-right arrow under it) that when switched on means that your transformations will only apply to the centre points of the selected objects. Using that tool and pivoting by active element will allow you to scale two objects, keeping one in place, moving the other away or towards the active object and leaving the scale of the actual objects themselves untouched.

Setting the absolute distance between two objects could be done with a "Limit Distance" constraint set to a Clamp Region of "On Surface", which you could then key the distance value for.


Please make sure that your:

Drivers are up to date (GPU especially).
The installation ran without problems.
Python is correctly installed and is the latest version (3.6.4 or 3.6.5).

Something else you can try is starting up cmd.exe (on Windows 10 you can just type that in the Start Menu and it will show up) and then from the console you can run Blender.

For example, assuming Blender is located on your C: drive and the path is "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\blender.exe", you'd type this line into your command window:

C:\Users\USER_NAME>"C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\blender.exe"

EDIT: I think it's better I put this in my answer than a comment.

I looked up that error code which then led me to Blender's Web Manual. There are a list of commandline options to choose from, but for I suggest you run the following in cmd (single line):

"C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\blender.exe" --debug-memory --debug-gpumem --debug-all > results.txt.

Please upload the results to any upload service and provide the link in your question, also check what output it gives specifically to memory


What He does is add a sub surf modifier(Ctrl-2), as well as enable smooth shading Tab to enter edit mode, A to select every thing, W>Shade Smooth, and Tab to exit edit mode.


How to extrude faces inward and outward sphere together

Use "separate objects" when in edit mode and you have the window panes selected. Put them in a separate grouping. Then tab out of edit mode, use solidify on the frame, and not on the panes group.  Parent the panes to the frame for scale adjustments as "parent object" in object mode, select panes-object first, shift+click frame and apply parenting (right click or menu etc).  The panes will have the thin non-solidified thickness and the frame will still have a solidify you apply, adjust as required.


Fire Domain color ramp affects whole scene

Your material lights up the entire Smoke / Fire domain instead of just the flame part.

Put the Fac output of the Attribute "flame"-node into the Strength input of the Emission node. You might need to insert a Math node between those and multiply the value to get a brighter flame.


Fluid object going through obstale, changing size and shape

The container looks like it's doubled-walled, and is probably too thin for the fluid collision detection to work with. I would suggest making a thicker pot just for the simulation and swap in the current model for rendering.

You can make the pot thicker by adding a displacement modifier on top of the fluid sim modifier, which will push out the geometry along the normals.


how to use random.choice with transform.resize?

You need to make two small changes to make your script run - add import random and the call to random.choice you have the function brackets and array brackets back to front.

import bpy
import random
...
...
...
scale = random.choice([0,0.33,0.66])
bpy.ops.transform.resize(value=(1, 1, 1*scale))

Also I think the end result may not be what you are after, I expect you want to move the random size into the column creation to make each column a different size.


Blender keeps on saying "Not responding"

I was having this same problem yesterday. I use an older system (AMD Phenom 9850 with 8GB Ram, Windows 10 x64 Pro) and I was using the video editing functions, but things were horribly unstable. When working with Blender, I close every application I can to reduce the CPU/Memory load, and this helps tremendously, but yesterday it didn't help. Every few clicks and things would stop responding. Add a clip, not responding. Remove a clip, not responding. Save the project, not responding. It was terribly frustrating. I "solved" this by turning off Malwarebytes (malware protection) and pausing ESET (virus protection.) I hate that as a "solution", but it worked for me.


UPDATE: Starting with blender 2.79 the encoding options are available only if you enable FFmpeg Video.

A new section for Encoding is available then to choose the video container, codec and also the bitrate .

To manually input Bitrate settings the output quality must be set to

None, use constant bit-rate

For older versions of blender:

Bitrate is found under the encoding tab. Make sure you are on a video format so that the tab is visible.

The image contains some sample settings. Adjust them to fit your needs.


2.81 - Key frames not working? Shader emission settings?

By default, the items in the Dope Sheet are filtered to only show the selected keys.

To change this you can uncheck Only Selected in the Dope Sheet filter as shown:


Use the object info node connected to a separate xyz node:


how to prevent arm from twisting with rig

Your issue is likely with blender's strange weighting system. Every vertex on a mesh is given a weight value (0-1, decimal based) of how much influence a particular bone has over that vertex. Your arm bone, of some farther down the arm, likely have weighting bleed over into the chest which is causing that twisting. Simply go into weight painting mode and adjust the weighting so anywhere not associated with the given bone is solid dark blue. This should take care of any unwanted twisting, unless you also have the same issue I do, where the armature seems to have applied it's self to the arms sideways, so they roll forwards and the elbow bends sideways. (I managed to get the IK and poll targets working too so this is really infuriating...)


You could do it this way, create a cubic shape, select the vertical edges:

Bevel:

Bevel the top and bottom edges:

Give it a Subdivision Surface modifier, it should work without artifacts:


Is it possible to have a variable increase using the game logic editor?

You might be happy by looking at the Physics tab/Physics panel.

There are two Velocity parameters: Minimum and Maximum. You can set the maximum and apply any force you like = speed is capped. It caps any speed of that object.

(Do not ask me why there is a minimum.)

The downside is, this counts for all motions.


Is it possible to access just part of a data path with Python?

The script below gets the data path, converts it to a string. Then does the manipulation on it to get the desired part.

I split the string on "sequence_editor." because everything after that (except for the closing bracket) is what you want, a period would also work.

After splitting the string (string[-1]) that line gets the last item in the list.
Using your data path the list would look like this:

["[bpy.data.scenes['Scene'].", 'sequences_all["Image0001.png"]]']

The last item in the list sequences_all["Image0001.png"]] only needs to have the trailing bracket removed (last line of the script.)

import bpy

path = bpy.context.selected_sequences
string = str(path) #convert data path to string
string = string.split("sequence_editor.") #split string in to a list
string = string[-1] # get last piece
string = string[:-1] # remove last character
print(string)

Your problem was you were trying to get the first part of the path x = n[0] before turning it in to a string and then splitting it into a list.


Position your cursor at the point you want your object to rotate around and snap the objects origin to the cursor.


Technically this is off-topic for blender.stackexchange but I expect several people will be interested and have trouble getting this addon working so I will add this info here.

Cube surfer is written in cython not python. The cython project is a kind of hybrid between C code and python code. You need to convert the .pyx file in CubeSurfer to a c file then compile it into a shared library. You will need to install cython and a compiler if you don't have them already.

There is a setup64.py to build it included with CubeSurfer, it is only setup for windows, for other platforms you will need to make some changes.

If you have trouble building this you will need to ask for help on irc or stack.overflow or the CubeSurfer developer

It could be possible that builders may offer this addon pre-compiled with graphicall builds - there don't appear to be any yet.


wrap mesh around other meshes (like a skin)

Blender does not have automated skinning tools to make a wrapped mesh around other (intersecting/non-manifold/etc..) meshes.

You want to voxelize such meshes, add all the volumes together and turn the volume back to a mesh. You will find this functionality in programs like Zbrush or Houdini.

In Blender there are 2 workarounds:

use metaballs as dupliverts for the mesh vertices. This will create an inflated representation of the mesh (based on the metaball size) that is a single water-tight surface (if the metaballs are big enough so there are no holes). The denser the geometry, the smaller the metaballs can be and the smaller the inflation. Convert metaballs to mesh and then you can shrink the mesh to maintain the original volume. However this results in the surface being smoothed.
use CubeSurfer addon - similar functionality as metaballs. Since metaballs were optimized performance-wise, this is in most cases slower to compute.

There is also the possibility to manually retopologize all the meshes together. A shrinkwrap modifier can help with wrapping this created skin mesh around surfaces.

You can also edit all the pieces to be water-tight and manifold and then use Blender's booleans to unify them together.


Can only add a single bone in object mode

This is expected behaviour. You can also just add one cube at a time. It is one object.

Depending of what you want to do, you could parent the first armature to the second armature.

There are several parenting methods available in the object menu. You could parent the whole armature as one object. Or to the bone of the second armature.

To be able to do parenting, first select the first armature (this will be the child), then hold down shift and select the second armature ( this will be the parent). That way both objects are selected. Then choose your parent method.


Using H  to hide, and Alt + H  to unhide you can effectively mask off parts you don't want proportionally edited.

I don't personally know a more precise way but hopefully someone posts one.


Cycles Render on GT750 GPU (MacBook Pro) 2GB Graphics - 2.79 Blender

OpenCL does not work (yet?) for Blender on MBP with NVidia. It worked with CUDA for me on mid 2014 MBP with GT750M 2GB Nvidia but I had to install the latest NVidia drivers and CUDA, however the result was extremely disappointing, pretty much the equivalent of single core CPU rendering instead of 8-core! Don't waste your time with this with the GT750M.

Since the NVidia GEForce drivers are not stamped by Apple, they are hard to find even on the NVidia website. I used this site as source of the NVidia link! https://www.tonymacx86.com/forums/graphics.13/

At the time of this post, the latest drivers are http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/130460/en-us

... which also includes the link to download CUDA...


The freeze frame at either the start or end of a strip only occurs when you reach the limit of the source media. You can fake this by adding a Hard Cut using shift-k. Then drag the strip end as usual but now it will be shaded grey and show only a still frame. If it flickers then click the Refresh Sequencer button at the bottom of the timeline.


Good way to add a backside to a grid (3D printing)

To fill the back face, first make sure you don't have any inner face, so select the face loop with alt right click and delete. Then with the same alt right click select the edges loops and fill the faces with F. Is it what you want?


You could try this:

import bge

scene = bge.logic.getCurrentScene()
owner = bge.logic.getCurrentController().owner
cam = scene.addObject("Camera.001", owner , 0)

Note that the camera object needs to be on an inactive layer.

To set the active camera in the BGE:

bge.logic.getCurrentScene().active_camera = cam


Is it possible to make nanometers or angstrom a default unit to work with?

See: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/data_system/scenes/properties.html?#units

That is the official explanation of units in blender and how to change them.


You need to triangulate the mesh. Select the mesh you wish to export and add a Triangulate Modifier to it. Then in the .stl export dialogue enable Apply Modifiers.

.stl imported to slic3r

GIF


'Toolbar tabs' were implemented in 2.70. You can recalculate the normals from the 'Shading/UVs' tab of the tool shelf (revealed with T), or you can do it by a short cut by Ctrl+N


In the tutorial, the side 'rails' down which the edge is moving are parallel, so a translation (GY, for example) is equivalent to a slide (GG). On a triangle, that's not the case.

You can make a numerical entry for the distance of a translation, because all affected components move by the same amount. But you can't, by distance, for a slide, because vertices in a sliding loop will move different distances, depending on the location of adjacent vertices on the rails.

Instead, a numerical entry for a slide represents the fraction of the distance to adjacent vertices, where 0 is the current position, and distances to adjacent vertices are mapped to  1 and -1.

You might be able to use that fraction, with a bit of mental arithmetic, but usually, for accuracy, I find myself G translating single vertices down edges using Custom Orientations derived from them where necessary, and as far as possible thinking like a carpenter.. finding ways to transfer measurements from one part of a model to another.


Unwanted deformation by changing the pose of armature

Okay, so we have no idea what you did to this to get it this whacked out, but first of all, I went to the object menu, and cleared the armature from the table's parent.

Notice that the table flies across the entire world after doing this.

IN OBJECT MODE with no weight paints, or anything else going on, get the table and the armature in generally the same spot as each other using G (translate).

Next, select the table, and then the armature. Hit Ctrl+P > with automatic weights. This fixes most of the problems.

You may need to do some veeery minor weight painting, but don't go overboard 'cause it's real easy to mess up with the weight paint.


How do I get a particle system to generate meshes for polygon hair?

I've been playing around and it looks like my previous thoughts were taking me to the right direction, except I forgot to do something.

Like Gliderman said, creating a group out of multiple hair textures works, and even if you just add them as an object.

By doing this, and the reason why I was so unsure in my steps is because when you add them you get something like this, instead of the nice hair.

What you have to do this, play around with the velocity (ye right, this is so trivial, but somehow so managable to not be cared of..).

After turning up velocity's Emitter Object's values, you get closer to your desired results:


It is fairly simple, but it does utilize the obscure Rip tool (V). Here are the steps:

Tab into Edit Mode.
Key Ctrl + R and move the cursor around until the pink suggested loop cut is dividing the cube in half in the manner that you want it to (X, Y, or Z).
 LMB, then immediately  RMB to add the loop to the actual mesh. Make sure it remains selected; nothing else should be selected.
Key V to rip the vertices (opposite of Alt + M / W > Remove Doubles) and once again immediately  RMB. You should now have two identical copies of the loop cut that you previously added in the same place and one of them selected.
Key Ctrl + L to select the rest of one half of the cube.
Key P to open the Separate menu and select By Selection.
Tab out of Edit Mode. You should now have two identical halves of a cube.

The Procedure:

Edit (Optional Steps 6.5, 8, 9, and 10):

  6.5. Use Alt +  RMB to select the loop cut on the remaining half of the cube and key F to create a face.

  8. Select the other cuboid half and Tab into Edit Mode.

  9. Use Alt +  RMB to select the loop cut on the remaining half of the cube and key F to create a face.

  10. Tab out of Edit Mode.

Steps 6.5-10:


There are multiple thing that contribute to it looking unrealistic.

The lighting is very harsh. It seems like the light is coming from below, which results in the shadows being cast in an upward direction.
The bricks seem extraordinarily large if the camera is supposed to be at eye height.
The walls are extreme in both length and height, which doesn't positively contribute to realism either.

I'd suggest to develop the look of your brick material in a daytime lighting on a small plane. That way you know the material looks right, independent of scale, placement and lighting in the final scene. If the results looks good to you, apply it to your nighttime scene.


Determine if object is bezier circle curve?

this will return the curve type

bpy.data.curves['curve'].splines[0].type

the output is in  [‘POLY’, ‘BEZIER’, ‘BSPLINE’, ‘CARDINAL’, ‘NURBS’]
for more info Spline


Look at the type.
Sometimes the tooltips can be screwy as shown in question the overlay is not a property of screen.
On the bpy.types.View3DOverlay help page linked go to the bottom to references.
WIll see a link to SpaceView3D.overlay
which is the space assigned to the 3d view.
In the python console
>>> for i, a in enumerate(C.screen.areas):
...     i, a.type
...
(0, 'PROPERTIES')
(1, 'CONSOLE')
(2, 'OUTLINER')
(3, 'VIEW_3D')

>>>
>>> space = C.screen.areas[3].spaces.active
>>> space.overlay.show_stats
True

>>> type(space)
<class 'bpy.types.SpaceView3D'>

>>> type(space.overlay)
<class 'bpy.types.View3DOverlay'>

If a script is run within the context of the 3Dview area, a panel draw, menu shortcut etc, then
space = context.space_data

The blender screen is split into areas. When you change the area type in UI, the active space used is associated with that type.  When you see the type SpaceFoo you know its the space of the "Foo" area.  eg "SpaceProperties", "SpaceConsole"


Looks like a bad BIOS setting. SATA drive RAID Mode was "IDE" not "RAID".
 Reinstalled "Winders 10". Everything much more stable.


How do I create a two sided plane with subsurface scattering for modelling leaves and foliage?

You don't :).
Leaves have no Subsurface Scattering (which needs greater thickness), they only have Translucency (also called Diffuse Scattering).
The linked devtalk post already offers a setup for correct backface reflections.
To use different texture for Frontface/Backface, split the node-tree into two branches.

Result with a small light underneath to show translucency

For convenience, I packed the whole setup into a nodegroup called Principled Leaves BSDF.
You can download it below. Both front/back images are packed in the file.


Is it possible to render frames out of order?

I would do this via scripting.  Here I modified an existing script that would do your remapping of frame# into file index#.  You would adjust firstBreak to 60 and lastFrame to 168.
import bpy

filepathFmt="//render/frame {0:04d}.png"

firstBreak=8
lastFrame=11

###
### for list of shape types, N loops, create a set of objects, render and save, and clean up:
###
fp=""
outFileIdx=1

### render from firstBreak to lastFrame:
for frameIdx in range(firstBreak, lastFrame+1, 1):

    bpy.context.scene.frame_set(frame=frameIdx)
    print("frame=" + str(frameIdx))
    # format filename string using different index
    fp = filepathFmt.format( outFileIdx )
    print(outFileIdx)
    print( fp )
    bpy.context.scene.render.filepath = fp
    bpy.ops.render.render( write_still=True )
    outFileIdx+=1

print("remap")

### render from frame 1 to firstBreak-1:
for frameIdx in range(1, firstBreak, 1):

    bpy.context.scene.frame_set(frame=frameIdx)
    print("frame=" + str(frameIdx))

    ### render and save:
    # format filename string using different index
    fp = filepathFmt.format( outFileIdx )
    print(outFileIdx)
    print( fp )
    bpy.context.scene.render.filepath = fp
    bpy.ops.render.render( write_still=True )
    outFileIdx+=1
```


Increasing clamp indirect (found next to samples) reduces fireflies.


indexerror: bpy_prop_collection[index]: index 0 out of range, size 0

Your assumption is that there is at least one group (groups[0]) that can be accessed, but it's not the case if the vertex isn't assigned to any group. It's independent of the existing vertex groups of the object.

If you want a list of all vertex group names, use this instead:

labels = [vgroup.name for vgroup in mesh_obj.vertex_groups]

For a list of all vertex groups the current vertex is part of, use:

# Create a lookup dictionary once
vgroup_mapping = {i: vgroup.name for i, vgroup in enumerate(mesh_obj.vertex_groups)}

# Look up the vgroup names for a certain vertex (could also iterate over all vertices here)
vert = mesh.vertices[0]
labels = [vgroup_mapping[group.group] for group in vert.groups]
print(labels)


Emission material won't work while another emission in my scene is on

It's an issue with object size, basically it seems like Blender can't find your lamp filament.

Actually the emission is still working, only it's influence is being disregarded because it can't be found easily. In theory with an unpractical amount of samples it would eventually become visible. If you increase the number of preview samples to an insane amount the light will actually start to become visible in the form of very spaced fireflies.

The Cycles rendering algorithm is having trouble finding your very tiny light source (lamp filament) when there is a comparatively very big and bright light source around (neon sign).

My advice to you is that it's not recommended to use such small light sources, hidden away behind so many layers of glass, as actual means of lighting up your scene.

Fake the light coming from the filament, and add an actual lamp object in its place instead to actually light up your scene.

Also see https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/65171/19307


How to group objects, But only make into a Single big "Mesh"

To do this:

Select one of the objects (mesh)
Press Shift+Right mouse click to select the rest of the objects
Hit Ctrl+J to join them all into one big mesh
List the big mesh then Shift+right click on the armature
Hit Ctrl+P to parent the mesh to the armature
Select Automatic Weighting


Hole at the edge leaves empty faces (boolean difference)

Boolean will break if there are intersecting edges at the cut. In this case there are the edges on both sides of the cylinder and edges of the object you are cutting. They are intersecting and Blender doesn't know what to do with them.

You can fix it by moving the cylinder by a small amount so there are no intersecting edges. If you want exactly half of the cylinder you can rotate the cylinder around z axis by a tiny amount.

It would be create it the boolean modifier was smart enough to reroute the intersecting edges. Maybe it will come sometime in the future but at the moment there will be many cases where you have to fix bad booleans by hand.


Blender 2.77 - glass shader looks like glossy shader

I cannot confirm this. Glass looks totally normal in 2.77, GPU and CPU.

Some things to check for you:

Do you use a 2.77 release, not a beta or rc version?
Do you maybe use Feature set: Experimental?
If it's on GPU, got all the latest drivers?


How do I apply textures to imported .obj?

Since you have Blender Internal selected, I'll assume you want to use GLSL shading.

To see textures in the viewport, first select GLSL shading, and make sure the viewport is set to textured mode.

Now, In order to have a texture, your object first needs a material. Add one, and name it whatever you want. (When I did it before, I named it "paint" - but the material name isn't important.

Now that you have a material, you'll need to add a texture to that material. Add a texture on that material, and then open your image for that texture.

I added some better lighting to the scene, and already it is working.

(In this case, the OBJ already had a UV map - all I had to do was use the default unwrap option, to use the map already with the OBJ)

But lets say that you wanted to also add an emissive texture, to create glowing bits. In this case, I'm using a black and white texture, and it can be simply layered on top.

On your same material as before, add a new texture (just as with the first one). Add your emissive texture as the image, and there will only be one setting that you need to change to make it work: change the blend mode from "mix" to "screen."

Instead of being all black (except the white bits), this texture should layer on top of the first texture, with the white parts displaying properly.