Is it possible to update link to a renamed armature?

So the best solution I discovered was to copy the animation data from one object to another. Since the missing armature proxy still held all the frames (and all the bones had the same name), it was a simple process. Just had to select both objects in the correct order for data transfer, then hit object > make links > animation data.


What is the difference between an Active animated rigid body and a Passive rigid body?

Active objects are the core part of the physics simulation, with dynamic movement, gravity, etc. By checking Active, you are essentially telling the Physics simulator that those objects should experience forces, and it has to figure out where they go over the course of the simulation.

Passive objects, on the other hand, are fixed in place--are static. For the purposes of the simulation, they essentially act as rigid-bodied, static, collision objects. The Animated option allows you to control its motion with keyframes, but it still does not experience the forces modeled on Active objects.

For example, if you're making a simulation of a ball falling onto a table, the ball would be an Active object, since it is affected by gravity, whereas the table would be Passive, since it is fixed in place.


Extremely Grainy Renders - Render settings help

I have also had trouble reducing graininess. I use Blender to model buildings and graininess (noise) is always worse on interior scenes.

I don't believe there is one simple answer.

Certainly increasing the number of samples (to say, 1000) will help.
If your scene includes glass you should ensure you are modelling it correctly (so that Shadow rays see a pure transparent shader).

I have always found graininess to be most severe when modelling an interior lit from outside (through apertures). My intuitive understanding of what is going on (which might not be correct) is that the randomly chosen light paths 'bouncing' off diffuse materials have trouble 'finding' the light sources. One pixel will find a light source, a neighbouring pixel might not. Increasing the number of samples gradually smooths this out.

There are other things you can do also (caustics, clamping, portals) but I am afraid I don't know enough to advise you reliably on those


Can someone explain how to fix this visibility issue

It sounds like you have switched on 'In Front' for the blue object.

That's located on the right column (Properties Editor), on the Object Context tab (orange square icon) in the 'Viewport Display' category. There is a checkbox option for 'In Front'.


You can use the Noise Modifier: just increase a lot the strenght of the noise and the add a Limits Modifier, to clip the values between 0 and your maximum desired value

This is the quick and easy way. If you want more control you could use nodes (I am thinking of a noise modifier applied to the value of the strenght of the an Emission shader, using Greater Than and Less Than nodes), but you would need to use a mesh instead of a light object


Can I import Autodesk Inventor 2016 models?

Between Inventor and Blender you can use the .STL file format. There are also paid addons for Inventor to export in .OBJ or other types (some have free Trial).

Note that a parametric mesh from any 3D cad app will not be best suited for game engines, because the mesh will be relatively high-poly and non-optimized. You will get better results building the mesh in Blender from scratch, because you have direct control over the polygons and vertices (as opposed in CAD you have parametric control over the surfaces).

To export assemblies or parts go to File > Export > CAD Format. Choose the .STL format and under options select the polygon resolution (dicing rate) and the units the object will be exported in. You can choose either binary or ASCII file (both work).

In Blender import with File > Import > .Stl. If the option is not there, head into preferences and enable the import Stl addon which comes standard with Blender. In import options select the Y up axis. After you import the model it is good to inspect it and remove duplicite vertices -> go into edit mode (Tab), select whole mesh (A), (W) > Remove doubles.

Here is an assembly imported into Blender:


How to disable field overlays of particles in Blender 2.8?

If you go to the properties bar, under data, there is a display option which gives you the option of changing the size of the field outline.  You can set it down as far as .01, which is almost invisible.  It will at least make it far less annoying.

I found this using version 2.79, but hopefully that option is still available in 2.8


Subdivided plane's faces have inconsistent indexes. How can I order them sequentially?

Blender offers a way to sort mesh elements, which you can find in the Mesh menu. This is available as bpy.ops.mesh.sort_elements in python.

The obvious choice of sorting by view X Axis probably won't give you the result you expect at first. Sorting a grid by x axis values gives you multiple rows with the same x location, these tend to get sorted out of order. The trick is to rotate the mesh slightly, say 0.2, then sort the elements, and rotate by -0.2 to align it back again, this gets a nice predictable sorting. Note that the sorting is on the "View Axis", so you can also rotate the view slightly (easier in camera view) before sorting, only what is selected is sorted and the selection type also effects what is sorted, so if you are in vertex select then only the selected vertices are sorted, enable each selection type to sort all elements.


Model & Textures Loaded In - Textures Not Visible on Model

So I found the button. Bottom left of center, the one circled in the screenshot, selected texture, rendered as desired. It was just a simple "where's the button?"


Depends what you mean when you say timer. If you want a timer during your animation your best bet is to just calculate the corresponding keyframe. If you mean just a generic timer, the easiest way from within python is with threading.

import threading

def foo():
    print("times up")

timer = threading.Timer(7*60, foo)
timer.start()

see https://docs.python.org/3/library/threading.html#timer-objects for more details


Why the 'Simple Deform' modifier bending my object on the wrong axis?

By default, with the Simple Deform modifier, in Bend mode, the object will bend on its Z axis. So if your object bends in a unexpected way, it must be because you have rotated it in Object mode, and its Z axis is not aligned on the global Z axis anymore. In that case you may want to apply the rotation with a ctrlA.

If you give the Simple Deform an other Axis Origin, like for example an empty, the object will bend according to this second object Z axis. So same thing, if your object bends in a unexpected way, rotate your empty the way you want.


How can i make my material more prominent?

Consider reflective glossy surfaces as dominates the NASA spacecraft.  Which is making me hungry for Jiffy Pop.
Viewer visible light fixtures are an option.  Viewer means the person seeing your image. You must judge the technical and artistic merit.
Viewer invisible lights are an option.  Plane with EMISSION material.  Diffuse materials are to complement. Specular at your own risk. Consider parenting the light plane to the spacecraft.  To make them invisible to the user set the object option ... Visibility Panel ...  [Camera] to unchecked false.
Consider scaling the diffuse component.
Consider light groups for Blender Render.


What is the most efficient way to model this kind of wrought-iron shape?

This is no shortcut. But you will have detailed control over your model.

I would start with a highres UVsphere and then add geometry with snap and shrinkwrap to follow the spheres surface.

Then add a solidify modifier followed by a subsurface modifier:

You can apply the solidify modifier and fiddle with the geometry if you want to make it beveled or such.


Its not a shadow.Its scene or camera's clipping value that you need to adjust. To change scene's clip value,increase the value circled in the below pic:

And to change camera's clip value,increase the value circled in the below pic:


Blender Grabbing Vertices Duplicates Them

you must have duplicated your mesh, you can try 2 different things:

Select and delete the duplication: put your mouse on the mesh and press L to select the duplication, then G to move it away and X to delete.
Merge the overlapping vertices: Select the whole mesh with A and press AltM > Merge By Distance, you can see how many vertices have been deleted on the top horizontal bar, meaning there were overlapping vertices, maybe you'll have to play with the Merge Distance parameter in the operator box on the bottom left of the 3D viewport window.


How to restrict vertex weights to no more than N number of Bones?

In weight paint mode, select the Weight Tools panel in the toolbar, and run Limit Total, This removes vertex groups with lowest weights.

This defaults to 4 which is a common limit for game-engines.

You can also choose which vertex groups are effected when using an armature (Only selected bones for example).

And if you want to only apply this to specific vertices, You can use vertex-select (VKey).


Through the use of locking vertex groups and the "normalize all" operation.
In weight paint mode, select all vertices for which you'd like to do this.  In properties/object data/vertex groups, select your head group, make sure your weight is set to 1.0 (the default), and click "assign" to assign all selected verts to your head group.
Next, using the dropdown to the right of the list of vertex groups, use a "lock all" vertex groups operation, then unlock your head group, so that it is the only unlocked group.  (You've already done this, but future readers need to understand that this is an important part of the process).
Now, in the 3D viewport, use a "normalize all" operation (from the searchbar or weights menu.)  In its operator panel, uncheck "Lock Active".
The normalize all operation will calculate proper, normalized values for all vertex groups, for each vertex.  Because all vertex groups except head are locked, only the head group will be normalized, and it will be normalized around the existing weights-- ie, the head group for each vertex will become equal to 1 - current (non-head) weight.


libGLU.so.1 error loading shared library

I had the same issue. Running the libglu1 installation addressed this. I'm running Blender 2.79 on Ubuntu 16.04

sudo apt-get install libglu1


Selecting faces not covered by other objects

As @lemon has commented, an alternative method for generating the raw texture might be to temporarily disable all your lighting, replace with a Sun lamp pointing vertically down in Z, and (using Cycles) bake a shadow map, as shown on the left.

If you set the angle of the lamp wide, to get a soft shadow map, you can have some control over the margin between the buildings and the trees, by putting the texture through a color ramp, and out into an Emission shader. You can then re-bake the resulting Emission.

Optionally, retouching can all be done inside Blender, using Texture Paint.


Yes, by using the Clamp setting.

Access by holding Alt, or toggle with C. This allows you to slide past the (0-1) limit and also prevents switching to slide along other edges then the ones currently selected.

This information is available in the header text during vertex slide.


Loop selection if Vertices have less or more then 4 faces

Actually it selects the edge all around and by underneath, if you cut an edge on the bottom you'll see that it won't work any more.


Creating a Stereoscopic video from a Movie Clip using Blender Compositor

Ok with a few modifications finally have the frames displaying correctly but cant find a way to output directly to the video file. The still images are not of high quality especially with HD cameras alot of screen tearing. MP4 work better.VLC media player does a much better job extracting stills but cant get this outputting every single frame.


What do you have the smoke set to?  It could be that his is set to smoke+fire when yours is set only to fire.  This setting is under the domain settings, the first setting on the right


I saw your .blend file and found the solution to your problem:
your scene is stuck at initialising that is because you have paused your viewport render you can start viewport render by clicking on the play button on the top right corner of the 3d view. Also your object is too large it might disappear when you zoom out so dont forget to change the clipping from 1000m to a 10000m


Why does cloth sewing not work correctly on this imported SVG?

The main concept to learn is that faces do not bend unless they are subdivided.
The first image shows that the object has no vertical subdivisions. How do you expect to bend it?
Rambling answer:
SVGs are converted to curves when imported to blender. When you convert curves (or text) to mesh the resulting geometry is usually triangulated or quite irregular, useless for the most part.
A workaround is not to fill the shape and fill it yourself. To do that, just import the SVG but before converting to mesh, set the fill on the curve to None, so that you only keep the outline.
Proceed to convert curve to mesh and you will be left with some vertices connected with edges outlining the object.
In Edit Mode select those edges and do "Grid Fill" and play with the settings for grid fill until you get an evenly divided mesh comprised of quad faces.
The resulting object should bend the way you need it to.
Here is an example borrowed from a different answer:

Note that for grid fill to work you need an Even number of vertices on the outline.
Also, in the shape you show on the question, you will need more subdivisions at the bottom, on the straight line.


Lock to Camera to View moves camera position

I think you are locking it in the properties tab, you need to lock it with the camera SELECTED, in the camera tab, then you shouldn't have that problem.


Just find one of the corners in the view port, and click and drag it inwards. Then change the editor to "Properties".


You shouldn't combine image and noise texture that way.
If you need a non-smooth surface, just use it as a Bump map.

Connect image texture into Base Color input
Use Noise texture with the Bump node and connect it into Height
Connect the Bump node into Normal input

Other observations:

avoid n-gons, they cause bad shading and prevent loopcuts, proper beveling, etc.
use linked duplicates - similar buttons can share the same mesh yet be independently moved/rotated
the main area has 3.74° tilt. Make sure your buttons are tilted consistently.
don't plug Noise texture node into the Specular input, if you're going for realism.
Avoid extreme values in the Noise texture. Use White Noise for fine grain.

Use quads (and tris) when possible.


Here is UV Map Node which can be used to access to uv maps

Also Attribute node with Vector output and vu map name can be used


How do I create realistic lighting emiting from a bulb from a lamp

With a "point" light as lamp and a fabric texture with translucent shader for the lampshade.

The point light is just a light (as suggested by OldMan in the comments):

The lampshade is composed of a fabric texture and a translucent shader:

"No more"... if you try replacing the point lamp by a sphere, this is working too, but the render is slower and more noisy.


Render scene with background jpg in python

I tried the same thing above, but didn't work. What worked for me is with the textures. In this case, I think you also have to take care of the Texture fields.

bpy.data.textures['Texture.001'].image=bg_img

It works if you need to Change just background

Also add this,

bpy.context.scene.world.use_sky_paper = True
Set also influence, horizontal

Sorry, I dont have enough credits to comment!


I have an issue on selections (outlines do not appear anymore)

click on this button "show overlays" - then it works like before.

Tip: never "try out" shortcuts if you don't know them. This prevents lot's of trouble :)


Im going through same tutorial and have same issue. After couple hours I think I found solution. It has nothing to do with a light. U r using volume material for flat mesh, so the effect is strange. Just add another modifier - SOLIDIFY, and set thickness for about 5 or more. This way u will get simmilar effect as Andrew. I guess the diffrece is Andrew was using older blender version.


Is there a way to know camera information from an image (visually, without Exif data)?

You can get the angle of view with the Blam add-on

You can get them both (sensor size and focal length) at one time, but only the common factor of the equation.

With the mentioned add-on, that you can freely download, you are able to match the camera look starting from a bunch of grease pencil layers. If your photo has three vanishing points as the one below, you should provide three different layers, one per axis.

After that you can start the camera calibration with the button on the left, and you'll get the focal length value automatically applied to the active camera.

You can see from this quick modeling that the geometry is following the correct perspective deformation.

And even the length of the edges results in more or less the same as you expect from a cube.

Now comes the hardest part, as there is no uniform relation between the focal length of a lens and the angle of view, since the size of the camera sensor also determines the angle of view.

So in order to get the right value showed in the Exif data of the camera's focal length you must at least know the size of its sensor... (I may be wrong; there are a lots of things to consider. I hope someone who has more knowledge can help here. A related question is https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/21616/how-can-i-calculate-focal-length-from-a-photograph).

Here's the scene after feeding the fields with the camera's real sensor size and focal length: the camera has to be slightly moved away from the subject to match the previous result.

Sorry, the properties panel is in my own language, anyway it's saying:

Camera Model NIKON D32000
Focal length = 38 mm
Focal length 35 mm = 57 mm
....

Image credits to Miguel Á. Padriñán, you can download it here.


Why is the current scene linked to the Screen view?

In 'User Preferences', under 'Interface', check the box next to 'Global Scene' which forces the current scene to be shown in all windows.


I would add a text object, turn it to mesh with ALT+C ,knife project it onto the ship and give material. But since you need to do it twenty times, with a different name each time I guess, you could use a macro/python script doing just this. NB. To knife project the right way your model must be in ortho view.


blank white square appears only when rendering

When part of an image is transparent, a checker board pattern is shown.

With the background set as transparent, you will see this in the render, This can also be visible in the viewport when it is set to render preview.

In evee and cycles, the transparent background setting can be found in the film panel of the render properties.

It is also possible to get the same effect for a single object. For this you need to use a holdout shader for the object, or setup compositing nodes to cut it out.


The example of the custom PyNode tree includes information about how to add nodes to the menus via NodeCategory so i'm going to assume you've got menus working.

(if not: see TextEditor > Templates > Python > Custom Nodes )

If you want to add a node via python, it's the same as with shader trees or compositor trees, except you use data.node_groups.

ng = bpy.data.node_groups['MyNodeTree']
new_node = ng.nodes.new(your_nodes_bl_idname)
new_node.location = (20, 40)


How can I blend / flllet two objects of different shape?

Increase vertex density and Loop Tools Circle, Bridge

Various Stages of Editing.

Cube in Edit mode, Loop Cut on twice in X and Y Planes.  Delete Middle Squares of vertices
Think about vertex count of target Cylinder
Select Perimeter of hole and Loop Tools Circle in Tool Panel
Extrude in Z Axis
Loop Cut and Shape with Proportional Edit
The result is compatible with another Cylinder with same vertex count.
The Cylinder is not shown above, [Join] two separate objects if necessary
Use Bridge Tool to connect to perimeter of Cylinder
Bridge examples can be found by searching here at BSE


Normal maps baking crashes blender 2.90. Exact same blender file as in blender 2.83 where bake doesn't crash

my solution
install blender v2.91 experimental build as of 15_09_2020
installed not on c drive
did not take set up from v2.90

additionally
make sure hires and low rez have render flag on if off fails
set bake to an actual folder path not c\tmp prefarably not on c drive
save as rgb 16 bit no alpha
set samples to 1 1
make sure bake extrusion big size here 2m, but if overlapping geo smaller size.
create new texture for normal map alpha off 32 bit on,will save as 16 bit later
assign mat to lowres, then image map load your new empty normal map button left
set to non colour
DO NOT  link up node till baked
sel hirez geo then ctrl sel lowres geo, sel image map
BAKE used def tile size 32 32https://www.flickr.com/photos/93465359@N03/50343650117


how to unwrap a mesh made in front of the texture

Try unwrapping with U>Project from view while in the view with the background image.

Then use S (scale), R (rotate), and G (grab/translate) to manipulate the entire UV layout (you can toggle selecting it with A).

If you want to unwrap it exactly how it appears in the viewport:

Set the render resolution to the resolution of the image/texture
Wit the camera selected, set it to be Orthographic in Properties > Object data > Lens (you can add another camera with ShiftA and make it active with CtrlNumpad 0 if you don't want to disturb the existing one)
Position the camera and tweak the Orthographic scale, again in Properties > Object Data > Lens. With the background image allowed to display in camera view, you can line it up based on how you want the image to project on your mesh.
Select your object and enter edit mode (Tab), then press U>Project from view (still in camera view).


Using a non-animated image as a logo/overlay in an external program is generally pretty simple. From blender, all you should need to do it render it as an image with a transparent background. It should then be easy to add it to your program of choice. For example in OBS i found this: https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/inserting-a-logo-while-recording-a-video.19133/

For more info on rendering a transparent background see: Can Blender render pngs with the background transparent?


Why is "create snapshot (ghosts)" disabled? (baked sound F-Curves in Graph Editor)

The button you are after I believe is on the left of the ghost button.

Graph editor with 16 channels baked to sound to custom properties AA0 - AA15

Click on the cursor button (show_only_selected = False)  and it wont matter if the object you have baked the fcurves onto is selected or not.

Lastly I've added AA9 to the search field, and filtered to only show Speaker animations.  Now that is all this graph editor will display. If I used "AA1" as the filter string it would show AA1, AA10 ... AA15.

The BGL overlay is from my Sound Drivers Addon and can be drawn on top of graph editor, 3D view and timeline.


How can I scale multiple objects around their own origin in 2.80?

Just set pivot point to Individual Origins.
Then each object will use it's own origin point.


Automatically show the texture of selected node (or selected material)

solution: select required material, eventually required texture node in node editor, after that switch to "Texture paint" mode, relavant texture will be displayed in UV/image editor automatically


Where can I find the source code of sculpt mode?

Sculpt mode isn't developed in Python, it's in C. It can be found that in \source\blender\editors\sculpt_paint.


Sculpted object turns into a cube when I enter edit mode

You more than likely have a Multiresoultion modifier on your object. You can switch to the Modifiers tab and press Apply on the modifier to apply this and see how your object looks in edit mode but if you apply it now, you will lose the ability to adjust any settings on the modifier and you might be left with a really high poly object which is undesirable if you decide to tweak the sculpt later (reduce view levels etc to reduce the load on the viewport).

If you still decide to apply the modifier, I would recommend making a copy of the sculpt just in case.

To keep the modifier and export the sculpt, when using the Collada exporter, look in the properties to the left and tick Apply modifiers.


The problem is you didn't actually assign the vertices to the vertex group. Once you create the vertex group, you click the Assign button to assign the selected vertices to the vertex group.

As shown below:


Correct syntax for "mirror" pie operator in UV Editor as one operator

The description of the operator can be found here.

bpy.types.UILayout.operator returns an bpy.types.OperatorProperties object.

So if you need to assign multiple presets, assign it to a local variable first

op_props = pie.operator("transform.mirror", text="Mirror")
op_props.constraint_axis = True, False, True
#...

When the operator's invoke method is called the operator may use user input to set its properties or run modal, before finally running its execute method.

To skip the invocation you might try:

#...
pie.operator_context = "EXEC_DEFAULT"
pie.operator("transform.mirror").constraint_axis = True, False, True

pie.operator_context = "INVOKE_DEFAULT"
#...

See UILayout.operator_context for the available options


It appears you need to grab the code from here https://github.com/CGCookie/retopology-lib and put the source files (ie __init__.py, common_utilities.py, common_drawing.py, common_classes.py)  into the empty retopology-polystrips-master/lib folder


Blender Cycles render-> Different result between screen image and saved jpg file

I have changed my Preferences/Screen to sRGB color profile. So, Blender and OS X use same color profile


Boolean difference between Cylinder and Torus

Not really a direct answer, but in this case it may be easier not to use a Boolean? Create a torus...

Select desired loops,V rip those edges,
Hover - L select unwanted faces and delete
Select boundary edge loops, E extrude, right-click to drop in place
SZ scale the extrusions up and down
F fill the top and bottom faces

Assign a Bevel modifier by angle. AltN, if necessary, to recalculate normals to face outwards.


Nevermind, I figured out the problem, I had another material on that was affecting it.


Center viewport key in Blender breaks the viewport

I had this problem like this early on.  It's because you're in perspective instead of ortho mode and in perspective the viewport behaves differently, it never goes in close to the object you're zooming, in ortho mode this doesn't happen.  Perhaps I'm over simplifying; but it behaves as you're saying on the 'when I move closer, I don't get any closer" I don't know about Maya.  If this is the issue, simply hit the number '5' on the number keypad in Blender key layout to switch between Ortho and Perspective, you want Ortho. if User Preferences are organized the same in Maya as in Blender, this would be under user settings: Input/3D View/3D View (Global)/View Persp/Ortho if you need to change user settings for Maya, or see what they are.


Some times vector passes like depth or motion can't be displayed directly because they are 'out of range' of displayable values (I think , not really sure)

Anyway all you need to do is to bring these values within range by using a Vector > Normalize node

Have in mind that to actually use the vector pass the original 'non displayable' values are sometimes the correct ones that will produce the desirable outcome even if they can't be displayed correctly directly.


Creating an Object Matrix in Blender 2.82

To get something that looks like this;

You can use a modifier stack that looks like this;

An array only goes in one direction at a time.


How to setup character outlines to facilitate better topology?

This is a natural limitation to flat-plane 3-D (the current technology). Basically, one will end up with a few awkward quads or even tris, but this is normal. I recommend you look at others' models of similar characters, and check out the topology. You will need to start connecting things here, so think about "if this mesh were to deform, what parts of it would need to be bendable?" as you create the joining topology.
Beautify Faces might be useful for cleaning up and standardizing the topology once you're finished. :-)


How to trigger LMB click events to activate a specific View node and update contents of 'Viewer Node' image data block using Python?

Very good question. But The answer at this moment is you can’t. The python interpreter needs to be finished in order to start the compositor recalculation. This is a background job and after it is finished you know for certain that the new image has been updated.

If we would have a possibility in the API to find out if the background job of the compositor is running we would be able to start a python thread or modal window to wait for this to happen and then continue the task you want to do.

Perhaps best solution ATM is to use the file output node to always store those all outputs and when needed read them back.


Changing ChildOf constraint influence to 0, but keeping the position it had as a child

The trick to unparenting is to animate the constraint and the objects location. On one frame you keyframe the objects location using Insert visual locrotscale, the visual keying options will keyframe values after modifiers and constraints are applied. You also key the constraint influence as 1.0 on this frame. Then move one frame and keyframe the childof influence as 0.0.

After you keyframe the visual location and change the constraint to 0.0 the object will snap back to it's original position. Once you keyframe the influence go back a frame and it will go back to where the keyframes put it.

You may also have two constraints, one parenting to the sheath and another parenting to the hand. You just have one at 0.0 influence and the other at 1.0 influence on one frame and swap them around the next frame.

Sample blend


This is because the glossy metal material will appear different from different camera angles. So it's impossible to bake it to a single static image and have it look like it should from any given camera angle.

There was a patch which allowed for glossy materials to be baked as if they were being viewed from a single pre-defined point, however it was removed from master shortly after it was added.


How to find and identify keyboard shortcuts?

In User Preferences, (menu entry Edit> Preferences> Keymap) you'll see an exhaustive list of the currently set keyboard shortcuts.
There is also a handy search bar in there to search through them. You can search by name (default) or change it to search by key binding by clicking on the little dropdown to the left of the search bar.
You can find more info about it at the Blender Manual.


I came up with a very simple (and somewhat obvious) solution to my problem - Use a property collection list to contain the single "conditional" property group. It has all of the qualities of a dynamically allocated object (property group) which only exists when you need it to:

class XYZ: # your object properties group or whatever

    list : bpy.props.CollectionProperty( type = ConditionalPropGroup )

    def IsNull(self):
        return len( self.list ) == 0

    def Create(self):
        if self.IsNull():
            self.list.add()
        return self.list[0]

    def Destroy(self):
        if not self.IsNull():
            self.list.remove(0)

So I just have to add the collection property to all scene element classes, then I can assign the property group itself to specific elements, leaving the rest empty.


Camera background image not visible through transparent cloth

Turns out this is simply a viewport issue in the rendering its perfectly translucent with the image visible.


What are these called in the User Preferences?

There are a few settings that control the tool shelf theme, such as Region Background, Region Text, Tab Active, Tab Background, etc. Note that each editor got its own tool shelf theme setting.


What is the weighted normal modifier for?

Left without - right with Weighted Normal Modifier

Let's first explain what Weighted Normal Modifier is doing:

  Face weighted normals (FWN) is a technique to improve shading for 3d
  models. Shading can be improved by adding bevels and altering the
  vertex normals to be perpendicular on the larger flat polygons. This
  forces the shading to be blended across the smaller bevel faces,
  rather than across the entire model.
  http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Face_weighted_normals

To visualise this let's look at our example:

You can see here how vertex normals were calculated and gave flat surfaces and nice smooth bevels. Most important thing here is that Bevel has only 1 segment.

Where to use this technique?

Most commonly it is used for low/medium poly assets - games.

Read here about how it was used in Star Citizen: https://polycount.com/discussion/155894/decal-technique-from-star-citizen

I'm personally heavy using it for arch design. Where you can have whole building with bevels, not so good topography and still results are nice and smooth.

Using it with high poly assets sometimes also could be beneficial especially when topology is really messed up.

  Weighted vertex normals improve the appearance of virtually all
  geometry, and is generally superior to the traditional non-weighted
  average. It works because the undesired shading artifacts are
  displaced from large (highly visible) polygons to their smaller
  neighbors (less visible), and thereby guarantees improved visuals in
  virtually all common situations.
  https://www.bytehazard.com/articles/vertnorm.html

Check also this question with comments: Is it possible to get automatic smooth edges with flat faces without adding geometry?

Bevel modifier:

You can also utilize this method by using Harden Normals in Bevel modifier - AutoSmooth need to be turned on also.


How to hide these lines so i can see only grass texture?

Deselect the Wireframe option in object properties panel perhaps?

Also in viewport overlay option:


Are the focal length, aperture, and sensor width attributes tied together?

I presume you mean a 35mm lens on the first paragraph. Yes?

The lens would be the same lens as with the aps-c camera with the same aperture. if you use a sensor width 23.6mm:  aperture at f4, length 35mm. That would give you the same field of view and the same depth of field.


There should be an option within the render settings to display as either Multitexture or GLSL. To change this option, while your mouse is over the 3D viewport, press the "N" key. In the sidebar that appears, open one of the drop down menus (I believe it's the one labeled Display) and you will find an option that toggles between the Multitexture and GLSL rendering systems. Click GLSL if it's not already selected and you should see your textures appear.


How to make a Portal Bridge material in Cycles?

Basically you can just mix between some emission shaders and transparent shaders based on some textures (click for larger image):

This uses a tile able image to create the sine-wave effects. I used a procedural gradient texture and a color ramp node to create the bright edges, and a noise texture to give some basic variations.

Note that a separate emission shader is used for illuminating other objects, in order to make illuminate other objects better without over exposing the object itself.

The image texture I used was this rather poorly hand painted wave. It's probably possible to procedurally generate such a wave with some math, but I'm not sure how..

In order to create a glow/bloom effect, I would use the compositor. You can either use a quick glare node, or manually blur and add the result back to the base image. For good measure I also mixed in some ambient occlusion and some fog/depth glowy stuff.

Result:

Example .blend


Ugly deformation for wrist and shoulder with IK

Similar to L0Locks answer an alternative is to add a copy rotation modifier with 50% influence to the next bone up the chain. By setting the influence to 50% the rotation will blend with the rotated target bone providing a smoother transition. Definitely not perfect but good for a quick fix. Note: you may have to play with the axis invert setting depending on your rigs orientation.


Step 1)  Make a plane then enter Edit mode.

Step 2)  Use Alt + m to merge the points of the plane to a single point.

Step 3)  Use Ctrl + mouse-click to extrude points out.(Which mouse button depends on whether you have right or left click as default... I think...)

Step 4)  Add a sphere to a different layer

Step 5)  Add a particle system to the lines using the settings that I've circled in the following image.  The image also shows what an OpenGL render will look like using the default settings.

(remember to right-click any images that are difficult to see and choose -> 'View Image' to see the larger version)

Now add a skin modifier and using default settings, enter Edit mode and select all the points.  Now scale all the points using Ctrl + A, so far as I know this is the only tool that uses Ctrl + A.  Normally scaling is done with s or by normals using alt+s.

That's pretty much it except that I did apply the Particle System in the modifier tab and since there may be overlapping spheres at some of the 'tree' vertices, you may want to join all the spheres then enter Edit mode, select everything using a and then use the Remove Doubles tool to clear up any overlapping vertices.


To create a new scene with the same nodes, click on 'plus' icon and choose the Link Object Data option.

If you have two different scenes, you can copy the nodes from one to another. Select them and copy with Ctrl+C, then paste to the new scene.

In every scene you have the access to the all created material nodes. Just click on material browser and choose the desired material.


How to make a semi-realistic metalic texture/material

There are many ways to do this.  Here's one that requires very little work, but gives you very little control:

Either find a photograph on line that you like or create one of your own.  You can use it as the basic image texture and, by processing its colors, to create the other maps.  There are a lot of things you can do, but here is a simple example node group, using a texture I grabbed from textures.com. Note that I deliberately exaggerated the effects so they would be obvious. I also used an HDR from sIBL.

The basic idea is that you turn the image into a black and white image and use the black and white image as the map you want.  Here I simply used color ramps to enhance the contrast.

EDIT: (I forgot this paragraph) The first three photographs are quick renders of just the image, the image + fake roughness map, the image + roughness and bump maps.

A second approach is to do the same thing, but to use tools outside Blender to create the other maps.  Crazy Bump has been mentioned.  You can also use your favorite photo editing program.

A third approach is to create your own textures procedurally. It would take an

The second and third approach require that you climb learning curves, but in the long run, both give you a lot of control over your own maps.

Finally, some of the commercial texture sites offer all of the necessary maps and provide free versions of some of them as an enticement.


Where can I find the "Film" Option in Blender 2.80?

You can find it in the Render Tab of the Properties panel.


How to lock texture tile size while painting?

I found a partial answer. If you want to keep the tile size same while texture painting, you should paint textures only inside of the UV editor.

Unwrap your mesh.
Change your view to the "UV/Image editor".
Select "View" and change it to the "Paint".
Then go back to the "3D View" and select the "Texture Paint".
Go back to the "UV/Image editor" and now you could paint textures directly to the texture atlas.

You could control the tile size by adjusting the Brush Radius.


Cycles - Rendering with RTX 2060 CUDA Error

You can also use the 2.79 version from the latest builds. It works with the 20 series as well.


File > Import > FBX (.fbx)

Then browse for the file on the next screen, select it, and click Import FBX. The model should then be loaded into the scene.

If you can't find the option to import FBX files in the file menu, you may need to activate the addon. Go to User Preferences > Add-ons then search for "fbx" and activate the relevant extension.


UV Mapping looks messed up after unwrapping

The red UVs you can see in the UV editor are pinned. You must have accidentally pressed p with UVs selected. This means that they will be kept in place unmoved when you perform unwrap. To remove pining you need to select pinned UVs(or just all UVS with a)and hit Alt+P in the UV Editor. Once you do that Unwrap will work as you would expect.

Pinning is very useful if you for example wanted to manually define the border of some UV island or straighten some lines and then recalculate UV unwrap based on the UVs staying in place and shape you pinned them to.


In the Outliner (top right-hand corner), you've got a collection named "Donut" containing a "Donut" object. You've also got the "Donut.001" object outside of that collection that you're editing. I reckon that the "Donut" collection is a backup of the donut prior to applying modifiers?

Anyways, unchecking the "Donut" collection should fix it. That will hide the backup collection from renders (which you definitely want) and from the viewport.

Edit

The issue is that when you originally tried to duplicate part of the Torus to create the icing, you did it in Edit Mode. What this did was it created two meshes that are not linked (or joined) to each other but are part of the same object. To fix this, select the Donut object in Object Mode Tab into edit mode, select any part of the top duplicate mesh, then press Ctrl+L.

That will select all of the mesh that is linked to what you had selected. Then, you can press X and delete vertices.


Help! Can not increase the text size in the Python Console

Go to user preferences

Look at the DPI setting in system, under general

Change the resolution


Python - putting operator in another operator draw()

Let me first say I'm not really sure if this is the way to go.

A registered operator (ie options={'REGISTER', 'UNDO'}) keeps its state, that's why calling a method from another appears to have no effect.  The registered operator also needs to have an execute method for 'REDO' to work.  For example without the flag in code below a registered op will auto rename whenever the new_name field is changed.

A registered operator when run will be context.active_operator and a history of operators is kept in the context.window_manager.operators list.

Here is one take on what you want to do.  Rather than calling a method of the original op from the other, it sets a flag, that if set will rename the object.  Once again notice how changing a prop of the reg'd operator prompts a call to execute().

import bpy
from bpy.props import StringProperty, BoolProperty

class MineExecuteOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "mine.execute_operator"
    bl_label = "Execute operator"

    def execute(self, context):
        print ("Current Operator: " ,context.active_operator)
        context.active_operator.rename = True
        return {'FINISHED'}

class MineTestClass(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "mine.test_class"
    bl_label = "Test Class"
    bl_options = {'REGISTER', 'UNDO'}

    new_name = StringProperty()
    # a flag to rename when set.
    rename = BoolProperty(default=False, options={'SKIP_SAVE'})

    def execute_function(self, context):
        obj = context.object
        obj.name = self.new_name

    def invoke(self, context, event):
        # operator invoked
        return {"FINISHED"}

    # without an execute this wont work with REDO
    def execute(self, context):
        print("EXECUTE")
        if self.rename:
            self.execute_function(context)
            self.rename = False
        return {'FINISHED'}

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        box = layout.box()
        box.prop(self, 'new_name', expand=True, text="Name")
        box.operator("mine.execute_operator", text="Run")

def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(MineExecuteOperator)
    bpy.utils.register_class(MineTestClass)

def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(MineExecuteOperator)
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(MineTestClass)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()


Sphere renders look imperfect in Blender 2.79

You should use a "subdivision surface" modifier to add more geometry.
Check that the level of subdivision surface is the same between "viewport and render".


Your first command adds a new property to bpy.types.Object as in your altering the base class used for all objects. The next steps you are trying to remove a custom property from an individual object instance.

To add and remove a property from all objects -

bpy.types.Object.thing = bpy.props.BoolProperty()
del bpy.types.Object.thing


How to get an IntProperty to update a function?

Code Fix

Made some changes to get this running.  Pretty sure the HORRIBLE register_module is being phased out, wrote a register and unregister method with no parameters. This is what an addon expects to see, and is called when an addon is enabled.

The update method is defined on the property update=method without the braces, ie it's the function definition, not the result of the called method (method()).  The update method has two parameters, self and context.  The self in this case will the the scene instance, since the property is defined on the Scene class.

Lastly it's standard to use xxx_yyy for method and property names, and XxxYyy for class names.

import bpy
from bpy.props import IntProperty

class UIPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    bl_label = "Export EDL"
    bl_space_type = "SEQUENCE_EDITOR"

    bl_region_type = "UI"

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        scn = context.scene
        layout.label(text=" Select Video Channel: ")
        layout.prop(scn, "my_int", icon='BLENDER', toggle=True)

def change_channel(self, context):

    active_channel = self.my_int
    print("Active Channel: "+str(active_channel))

    sed = self.sequence_editor
    # if active strip isn't in active_channel set to None.
    if getattr(sed.active_strip, "channel", -1) != active_channel:
        sed.active_strip = None

    sequences = sed.sequences_all
    # select all strips in active channel
    for strip in sequences:
        strip.select = strip.channel == active_channel

#    Registration
def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(UIPanel)
    bpy.types.Scene.my_int = IntProperty(
        name = "Channel",
        description = "Select Channel for Video Export",
        min=1,
        max=32,
        default=1,
        update=change_channel)
def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(UIPanel)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()


Plane is visible despite blend mode set to alpha blend

So I found the issue had to do with Volumetric lighting in the render properties. I had changed the light clamping to 0.050 and now the planes are no longer visible like the picture. The annoying thing is changes in the light or volumetric scatter setup has me needing to adjust the clamp to lower numbers. I decided to use cycles instead, longer render times but this issue is no longer present.


Texture showing differently on 2 Objects

Normal maps usually need to use Non-Color color space.
When set to sRGB they give unexpected results.


What is the most accurate way to get the data path for a value?

I prefer to use the outliner to find the data paths of variables. If you set the outliner type to 'Datablocks' you can see the whole RNA structure of the current Blender file. If you hover with your mouse over a property Blender will show you how you can access it using the python API:


How do I make weight painting not a living torment?

Retopologize your mesh. Once you´re done, then you can assign weights using armature.
Also: Select your mesh, use the modifier: DECIMATE: Choose 50%. Check if your model is ok for you in shape. If it is and you´ve reduced the polycount to half, please reconsider retopologize. Basically you can´t work with an armature on a very dense mesh.

Thank you for your consideration to vote me as the answer by clicking to the left :the icon with a check mark and upvote this answer.

BFCT_Schiller


Overlapping structure when beveling (SVG) curve

You can do this quite easy with help from TinyCAD add-on and some modifiers.

Steps:

After importing SVG convert it to a mesh - Alt+C > Mesh from Curve/Meta/Surf/Text.
Enable TinyCAD add-on.
In Edit Mode select two crossing edges and W > TinyCAD > VTX Auto.

  Important! You should have only two edges. Sometimes a little clean up
  could be needed as in example below. Use X > Dissolve Vertices to do this.

Add Skin and Subdivision (use level as needed) modifiers.
In Edit Mode after selecting all vertices scale them with Ctrl+A and tweak Branch Smoothing in Skin modifier as needed.


Camera Perspective in Layout mode broken - Blender 2.81

You appear zoomed-in. Even though you have selected the camera view, it will retain the last zoom selected. Each workspace will retain it's own zoom levels. Just zoom out and hopefully that will resolve it. Oh and turn off Lock Camera To View as this sometimes confuses things. Once re-orientated, you can turn it back on.


Correcting Non-Manifold Edges in Blender 3D Model for 3D Print

One part of the problem is that you have internal faces which you should delete (see the first picture)
The problem at the circles can be solved with merge by distance
(previously called "remove doubles"). You might also try to recalculate normals (Ctrl+N)
The other pictures show that the borders of some faces are not
connected properly and how you can solve this.
When you see faces which are flickering ("face fighting") when you rotate view, you have two faces that are overlapping and sould delete one of them.

Happy Blending! :)


highlighting both armature and using Ctrl+J would work


How to make a logo cycle (or loop) on top of a clip in movie editing mode?

Seems like there is no option to make an image sequence loop in within the VSE.

A workaround is loading your image sequence in the compositor, making sure you have the cyclic option enabled:
(in this example is an image sequence of 11 frames with alpha channel)

Then add a Scene strip to the VSE, make it alpha over, and disable OpenGL preview in the Scene Preview/Render, so you get the image sequence from the compositor. The 11 frames will play repeatedly the duration of the scene strip.


Can custom properties be allowed to go to infinity?

Going off this answer, you can just input 1e39 to get inf, since Blender will clip it off to float_info.max.  Likewise, you can use -1e39 to get -inf.  (If those don't get you inf values, just raise the exponent after the e until they do.)


I am trying to cut one Object plane using another object plane

You might want to do the "Knife Project" option. Here's a breakdown from Blender:
I tried it in a quick project that I set up similar to yours and it worked well for me. Let me know if you need more help! The Knife Project option can be found in edit mode under the "Mesh" menu.


How do I split up geometry without any gaps?

Make sure you disable any Smooth modifier on your objects. It will effectively "shrink" the borders of the mesh, creating gaps in disconnected islands.


How to use the array modifier with imperial units

You can readily use inches by entering the inches value you need into the offset distance box, as "16 inch". It will automatically convert it to be the corresponding meter value. Or you could go ahead and change the unit system that Blender is currently using.

Refer to the Blender Documentation for more info about the Array modifier.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/modifiers/generate/array.html


Get the transformed value from given frame to initial frame

Slapped together a quick test script from Panel template. A custom property '["frame"]' on the object is used to hold the other frame, calculated against movement from current frame.

Script simply queries the location fcurves of the object, and uses fcurve.evaluate(frame) to retrieve the value at obj["frame"].

import bpy

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

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls, context):
        obj = context.object
        if "frame" not in obj.keys():
            return False
        if not hasattr(obj, "animation_data"):
            return False
        if not obj.animation_data.action:
            return False
        return True

    def draw(self, context):
        obj = context.object
        scene = context.scene
        layout = self.layout
        # get current frame location
        loc_current = obj.location.copy()
        row = layout.row()
        col = row.column()
        col.prop(scene, "frame_current")
        col.prop(obj, "location")
        loc = loc_current.copy()

        # using fcurves
        frame = obj["frame"]
        action = obj.animation_data.action
        col = layout.column()

        col.label("Moved")
        col.prop(obj, '["frame"]', text="From Frame")
        row = layout.row()
        for index in [0, 1, 2]:
            fcurve = action.fcurves.find('location', index)
            if fcurve:
                loc[index] = fcurve.evaluate(frame)
            row.label("%7.4f" % (loc - loc_current)[index])

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

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

if __name__ == "__main__":
    bpy.context.object["frame"] = 33 # set another frame in custom prop
    register()


You can work around it with the shrinkwrap modifier. Make a vertex group with the part that you want your other object to touch. Add shrinkwrap. Set your other object as target. Select your vertex group. Apply. Sculpt the seam to make it not deformed.


How can I composite Eevee and Cycles together in one animation sequence?

Organize your outliner like this:

Add a scene and select Linked Copy.

I'm calling mine Eevee.
Set up Eevee scene's outliner like this:

In the Eevee scene, set up the shaders of the objects in the Cycles collection like so:

Be sure to set the Blend Mode to Alpha Clip (unless otherwise necessary).

Back in the Cycles scene, set up the compositing something like this:

And be sure to enable transparency in the film settings:

When you press F12, both scenes will render automatically.


Transform cylinder to flat plane - cylinder maze map

This might work..
It's a script which gets as close as I can to inverting the Simple Deform > Bend modifer
It's not very general, and makes some assumptions

The Cylindrical version is circular in XY, up in Z
That it has a cut gap at min Y around X=0. If there are coincident vertices where the gap is, in the illustration, the result can be usable, but untidy. (The script doesn't know the difference between 0 and 360 degrees)
The object has all its transforms applied, and its origin is at its XY center
The cylinder's minimum radius is < 100000 BUnits

Select the object in Object Mode, and run this:
import bpy
from math import atan2,sqrt

cyl = bpy.context.object
if cyl:
    flt = cyl.copy()
    me = flt.data.copy()
    flt.data = me

    bpy.context.collection.objects.link(flt)

min_r = 100000

for v in me.vertices:
    [x,y,z] = v.co
    r =  v.co.xy.length
    theta = atan2(x,y)
    v.co = (theta,r,z)
    min_r = min([r,min_r])

for v in me.vertices:
    v.co.x *= min_r
    v.co.y -= min_r

flt.location.y += min_r

Which should produce a straightened version (green, derived from blue,) scaled and located ready to be bent back by Simple Deform > Bend

The Bend modifier uses the bounding box of the straightened object. Because of the gap,the required bend is not quite 360 degrees. In the example .blend, the match is reached at about 356 degrees.

Lurking Pythonistas / bpyists are welcome to improve or correct the style of this script.


Rigging issues- specifically errors when weight painting

I suspect you are trying to assign from Object Mode. Try again from Pose Mode?

First make sure the bones you are wanting to work on are visible and selected in Pose Mode. To make things clearer I usually hide what I am not working on. Select the Mesh Object and then the Armature - still in Pose Mode - and press CTRLP and select Armature deform. Select the Mesh Object and go into Weight Paint....

Under the Weight Menu select Assign Automatic from Bones


Where do these hair artifacts come from?

I guess you are using curve segments as primitives for your hair. In this case Blender interpolates the segments between the simulated hair particles using cardinal splines. However it can only approximate the spline using linear, tube-like segments.
It looks like Blender does not close the gaps between the tubes properly. You can reduce the effect by increasing the Curve subdivisions in the Cycles Hair Rendering settings:

This will however hurt performance since more geometry is created.

Here is a comparison of Curve subdivisions set to 2 (top) versus Curve subdivisions set to 4 (bottom):

In the bottom image the white lines are gone, however you can still see that the curves are only approximated by straight tubular pieces (see the edge of the hair in the bottom left corner and the shading of the hairs in the bottom right corner).


Why are keyframes in global coords, instead of local coords? (Blender 2.70a)

Sometimes this problem can be "solved" by choosing a different Rotation Mode.  "XYZ Euler" is popular (because it is the default), but sometimes people pick a different one, either to avoid gimbal lock, or to achieve a particular animation effect.

However, the general purpose solution is to use parenting, either the genuine object parent field, or a Child Of constraint.  You tilt the "parent" such that one of its axes is what you want to rotate around (lined up with the spindle of the record player), then animate the rotation of the record around a single axis.  As you can see from the many comments, there are a couple of different ways to accomplish the effect you want, and each one has its pros and cons.

The Humane Rigging series has a few videos that might expand your understanding, the one I'd start with is Humane Rigging Chapter 3 part 3 although you will probably want to watch part 2 and 4 when you have some spare time.


Properly export COLLADA for use in SceneKit

Until I can get a tutorial made I will give a couple pointers.

Solve Blender "z" up axis

Create a folder on your desktop and give it an extension of ".scnassets"
Put your collada(.dae) file along with any textures you will be using
Drag the folder into your project and save as copy like usual.
Click on your scnassets folder and you will see a checked box (if not check it) for converting to a "y" up axis.

Using textures with Blender collada

Click on your collada(.dae) file inside your project in xcode.
You should see your scene and on its left side a list of cameras, lights, materials, and such.
Open the materials tab and click on one of your materials.
On the right hand side in the inspection window click on the ball shaped icon to view the diffuse, specularity, and such of that one material.
Click on the diffuse tab and when it opens you should have an option of colors and your textures within your project.  Select the texture you used on your model within Blender.  As long as you UV unwrapped them properly in blender they should apply instantly within your scene view.

NOTE
Blender will not export the texture for you. No need to check on that tab inside of the collada exporter window.

ANOTHER NOTE
If you want to add to or delete something from your scnassets folder, navigate to your project folder to do so and not xcode. This took me a while to figure out so thought I would save everyone the trouble.


How can I rig a cylinder so that when it's rotated its end cap will not penetrate the floor?

There is no need for complicated trigonometry or drivers. You can do this with constraints.
Constraints are faster than drivers and have no security problems (manual).

The Cylinder Rig

Create the following bones. (Side view. Note, that the orientations of the bones are all the same.)

CTRL_cylinder has no parent or child. The other bones are in the following hierarchy:
floorRotation > orientation > DEF_cylinder > Cylinder (object)

Add a Copy Rotation constraint from CTRL_cylinder to DEF_cylinder.
Add a Copy Rotation constraint from CTRL_cylinder to orientation.

Add a Locked Track constraint to orientation. The Target is CTRL_cylinder, with Head/Tail at 1. Set the To field to -Z and Lock Y.

Add a Copy Location constraint from CTRL_cylinder to floorRotation.
Add a Locked Track constraint from CTRL_cylinder to floorRotation.
Yet again, Head/Tail is at 1. Set the To field to Y and Lock Z.

I suggest the rotation order YZX for CTRL_cylinder. Add a crazy control shape for CTRL_cylinder and set it to be displayed At DEF_cylinder. The animator can move, rotate and roll the cylinder. Optionally, the Y axis can be locked, if no twisting is desired.

BONUS CONTENT

Two Axis (Rocker) Setup

This is useful for objects with two or more pivots, like feet, chairs, ... or a cube.

Create the following setup. The CTRL_cube is not in the hierarchy. The other bones are parented as such:
y_copy > frontPivot > backPivot > DEF_cube > Cube (object)

The rotation order of CTRL_cube is XYZ with Z locked.

Add a Copy Location constraint from CTRL_cube to y_copy.
Add a Copy Rotation constraint from CTRL_cube to y_copy with only Y checked and Local Space for Target and Owner.

Add a Copy Rotation constraint from the CTRL_cube to frontPivot.
Add a Copy Rotation constraint from the CTRL_cube to backPivot.

Finally, limit the rotation of the frontPivot, to prevent the cube from going under the floor.

Add a Limit Rotation constraint to the frontPivot in Local Space, For Transform and with the X Limits 0 and 90.

The result can be moved rotated and rocked from front to back. With additional pivots and their respective Limit Rotation constraints any number of edges can be available for rocking.

Added a stylisch Bone Shape for CTRL_cube At DEF_Cube.


Do an action automatically every n minutes with Python?

According to Application Timers documentation for Blender 2.80 it quite simple:

def in_1_seconds(obj):
    if obj.location.y > 0.5:
        return None
    else:
        obj.location += Vector((0.0, 0.1, 0.0))
        return 1

bpy.app.timers.register(functools.partial(in_1_seconds, bpy.context.active_object))

functools used to anchor active object to timer

timer function returns a float with seconds to next delay which may be changed dynamically

return None to stop function execution in test purpose it can be Keyboard Interrupted


Modifier Properties don't show up for a collection

There is no way to make the Modifiers Properties Panel show up when you have a Collection selected.
While an object like a cube, curve and such (objects like cameras and lights can't have modifiers either) can have a modifier that affects its mesh data or other data like UVs, Collections are only a placeholder with functionality (like an empty, but without origin).
They them self do not contain data that could be affected by modifiers.
The idea of using a collection to apply modifiers to all its children, is itself not bad, and I believe used in other software, but in Blender you need to add a modifier to one of the child objects and then copy the modifier to all other children in the collection/selection.
Solution:

Add the modifier(s) to one object.
Select all objects you want to get the same modifier(s). If they are all children of a collection, you can RMB to Select Objects in the Collection and all its children will be selected.
Make sure the object with the modifiers is the last selected/active one (visible by having a brighter outline in the 3D View).
Press Ctrl+C and choose Copy Modifiers, as shown below:

Now all the selected objects have the same modifiers.
Happy Blending


Deformation of the grid with the falloff

Falloffs in Animation Nodes are mostly hard-coded, that is, you need to write cython/python code to create a custom falloff. So it is much easier to compute the effect you are after manually. A simple implementation of grid deformation is as follows:

Want to transform it based on an empty? Simply subtract the location of the empty from the x and y of your equations:

Want to scale it? Similarly multiply the scale of the empty to the x and y of the equation.


Alt + left-click not working anymore in Blender 2.8?

If you are using Linux Mint this will be an issue as Alt is used for moving and resizing windows.
Go to System Settings > Windows & then go to Behavior tab. Inside there you'll see Special key to move and resize windows and set it to Super and Alt + LMB will work just as fine.


Importing from SolidWorks and then using subdivision in blender

Having worked quite a bit with SolidWorks models myself, I understand your pain. There isn't a single quick fix, but there are some things I have learned that have helped me mitigate the poor topology.

The first thing you should do is merge triangle pairs into quads: In Edit Mode, press Alt + J.

Next, turn on Smooth Shading and Auto Smooth:

I have found these two will often smooth out the appearance enough that I don't need further subdivision.

In the case of the model I used as an example, though, I spent hours and hours reworking the topology in Edit mode to get it to the quality I wanted. As @Duarte said in the comments, the best thing is just to have good topology, which SolidWorks doesn't provide.


Can't select Edge loop (Alt + RMB is failing )

Try to turn off "Emulate 3 Button Mouse"

You can find it at:

-> File

-> User Preferences(Ctrl + Alt + U)

-> Input

-> Mouse: Emulate 3 Button Mouse(OFF)

-> Press "Save user Settings"


The render layer is not connected to any nodes in the compositor!

Disconnected nodes have no effect on the render image.


See-Saw With Hinge - Rigid Body Physics Simulation Not Working Properly

The Solution to the above and just about all catapult/see-saw type physics simulations lies in two important steps :

Properly Set up the physics :

a.) Set the falling object/cube as "Active" Rigid body.

b.) Set the Catapult (or see-saw object) as "Active" Rigid body. Do NOT Set this as "animated" unless you want this simulation to be controlled through the animation system or key frames.

c.) Set the Hinge as a "PASSIVE" Rigid body.

Set up Of the Catapult & Hinge constraint :

a.) Select The Hinge first, then shift select the catapult. This Will create an "empty object like Axis" which is the constraint. Set This constraint type to "Hinge". This can be selected on the Left Panels Menu by pressing "N" or under the "Constraint" Physics menu.

b). Set Up Proper Axis For The Hinge Constraint. An easy way to do this is to set all rotations of this constraint to zero. Then based on your object's orientation, select the proper axis for it to work. Trial & error may be required but with the above suggestions it should take not take more than a minute or two.

-- Thanks to @m.ardito for always trying to help and provide hints. Thanks To @Rich Sedman for providing a useful explanation. Thanks To @Mr Zak & @cegaton for providing help on question editor image tool.


how to make a realistic sugar cube material?

Here's what i have come up with after a few minutes of playing around.

The entire shader is based on cell voronoi textures.  Voronoi works well for this kind of thing because it gives nice pixel-like results.  The actual geometry is just a massively subdivided cube with a displace modifier using a small voronoi texture.

Here are the shader nodes:

Click to enlarge

It's basically a huge mix of diffuse, gloss, SSS, glass, and translucency; with a small amount of volume scattering (to simulate the light bouncing around on the sugar grains inside the cube).  Everything uses a single voronoi texture as a normal map, each shader uses a different level of bump though.  It could definitely use some tweaking, but it's a pretty good start.

A note on speed/noise:

First of all you have to realize that things like rough gloss, SSS and translucency will all generate a good deal of noise, meaning you need more samples.  I would suggest at least 500 samples for rendering many of these.  That said, there are a couple things that you can do to cut render times, and less render time means you can afford more samples.

First of all you can probably get away with nixing the volumetrics.  Though accurate it isn't essential to use the volume scatter, this alone cut my render time almost in half.

Second you can add these nodes at the end:

What this is doing is only making it compute all those complicated shaders for glossy and camera rays (the add node works like a logical OR), for all other rays it just computes diffuse.  I use this trick all the time in indoor scenes especially.


Here are the 4 viewport shading modes: Wireframe / Solid / Material / Rendered. Use the shortcut Z to switch from a mode to another.

Wireframe to see the topology of your object, Solid to see the same but with a basic grey shade, these 2 first modes are ideal to work and move your objects, use AtlZ to enable transparency. Material to work on your materials, it won't take into account the lightings, so it won't give a good idea of your render. And at last, the Rendered mode, which is how you'll see your objects when rendered.


Basing creative decisions on scientific measurements

It is only possible to base your creative process and guesses on some scientific measurements while the results are never 'physically accurate' or 'correct' in CG. They should not be. Nobody actually needs this accuracy. It is OK to aim for a nice image that would be aesthetically pleasing and not to pursue physical accuracy that is most often impossible to achieve. Think of it this way - do you know the wavelengths of the primary colors of the monitor you are going to view the images on? I didn't think so. So let's not pretend anything about the images we create is even close to physically accurate.

If you wanted to use the data at https://refractiveindex.info to approximate the reflectance for the shader, you would need to know what the primary RGB color wavelengths you need are. I don't know what they should be, so let's just think that this random calculator that I just Googled gives us somewhat correct goals of what the ideal primary wavelengths for sRGB should be. It says red is around 610nm, green is around 550nm and blue is somewhere around 460nm. We can get the graphs for similar wavelengths at refractiveindex.info if we input the lengths here(in micrometers instead of nanometers though):

Only then you can take three different graphs like this one for all the primary wavelengths and replicate them using RGB Curves.

You should also ignore green and red lines representing different polarization, because in CG, we do not care about polarization at all. So only green lines for wavelengths representing red, green and blue colors.

But wait, what now? What should control our RGB Curves node? - you may ask.
And that would be a wonderful question. Whatever it is - it is clear that it certainly is not some UV coordinates! We have the graphs from refractiveindex.info for Reflectance and Angle of Incidence in degrees that go from 0° to 90° linearly. Nothing in Blender actually gives us that.

Layer Weight and Fresnel nodes do not give us brightness depending on the angle of incidence from 0° to 90° linearly.

We have to actually make it by taking the arc-sine of the dot product of incoming and normal vectors and divide it by half of pi and then inverting it by subtracting it from 1:

(Sorry for added confusion - I use Bump Map node to get the normal vector because I want a way to plug normal or bump maps to this whole thing later.) Obviously it is better to have this as a node group.

So now let's just assume there is some micro-roughness effect visible because of the way the gold is polished(no reason other than that it looks nice on metals) and add roughness variation depending on the facing angle of the surface and we have something similar to what gold might look. Obviously it needs to be lit nicely as well and have some environment to reflect:

To make rose gold you would mix that with something like 25% of copper.

Is this process worth it?

I am not so sure it is for every situation. It is time consuming and it is also questionable if the extra effort is better noticeable than just working with some good reference photos. If you googled 'Gold' and compared it to my render you would find all kinds of different colors. That is normal and to be expected. They are all lit differently in different environments therefore reflecting different things, taken with different cameras and also all post processed differently. I think it makes a lot of sense to better invest more time into presentation, the models and especially the lighting and composition of the renders to make an impact on the viewer. These things can ruin all the effort of inputting loads of measured numerical values if not done correctly. It is not about physics, it is about visual communication. And this is just roughly based on some measurements. The rendering process is not physically accurate by any measure. I do however think it can be a strong base on which one could build an image if one has the time to play with this.


Is it possible to stream an animation in real time as it is being rendered?

differently from still images, where you need to save the render result intentionally, an animation is always "saved" by blender, either as image sequence or a movie file (if you didn't specify anything, by default is a png image sequence in /tmp folder).

So, to "stream" an animation you need to choose how you would "stream" a (predictable) amount of still frames or a (constantly changing, while frames are rendered) single movie file...

Add to that the fact that each frame usually needs seconds to days to render, depending on computing power and scene complexity, and I guess you can't count to stream a realtime animation while you are rendering it...

Of course you could use a video capture system to "stream" the rendering result window as a video stream to receivers, so that they could remotely see the progress of the rendering (in rendering realtime, not animation realtime)...

Maybe if you specify better what you need, a better answer can be given.


Lock Front/Top/Left views from entering User view when dragging mouse

Well. it turns out there is an add-on for this already that lets you lock/unlock any 3D view (top/bottom, left/right, front/back views.. and also the user view.. in orthographic or perspective modes). The add-on is available on Blender Market:
https://blendermarket.com/products/wlock-pro---an-addon-which-allows-to-lock-3d-view-rotation


You can setup your material like that :

The texture coordinate node control the position of the effect. I centered it on Circle.005 but you can create a new Empty if you want to fine tune the position.

The mapping node control the size (area of influence) of the effect.

The color ramp control the transition between fully transparent (black on the ramp) and fully emissive (white on the ramp).


How to update/overwrite an existing rig with Rigify

Looks like I've found my own answer right after posting this question :)

I had moved my metarig to another layer and when pressing 'Generate Rig' the layer with the rig itself was not active. So make sure to have both the metarig and the rig active when pressing 'Generate Rig'.

'Generate rig' now correctly overwrites my existing rig, keeping the parenting and skinning intact. Only my pose position gets reset, but that's not a problem.


Check that you have a strength value for the brush, a zero strength will do nothing. A strong autosmooth with a low strength can also negate the effect of some brushes.

Each brush can be set to use a different colour to outline the brush, by default inflate uses a grey while other brushes use red, green or yellow.


Combining different meshes, and UV's of a character?

You can tile the individual textures inside one file by using GIMP or similar and scale the UVs in Blender, because they are relative to the image size. If you have only a few meshes, this is done rather quickly.
Baking all textures together will be a problem if the UVs overlap.


Paint an Object (I know this sounds ridiculous)

First, you want to go to the texture paint tab. Press new image and name it something so you could recognize it.
Go to the shading tab and assign an image texture to base color. In the dropdown, select your created paint image.

Now the image is assigned to the object. It should be black by default. Go back to the texture paint tab and you should be able to paint now. Press n to change color, size, and strength. Hope this helps!


With the default Blender Keymap you can cycle the active selection tool with the W key by default, between Tweak Tool, Select Box, Select Circle and Select Lasso.


I believe you may have a deactivated auto-save option.

In the Blender Preferences bottom left side you have the options, opening these you should see that yours are not hooked on the "Auto-Save Preferences". Hook that option and click "Save Preferences" or make some changes afterwards to trigger the auto-save function.

Should this not be the solution, and it's add-on specific, then i believe that the add-on might not be able to save it's preferences when it get's deactivated.
This could be depending on the code of the add-on, or if that is the case with all add-ons be Blender code related.
In any case, could you please add some examples as to allow trying to replicate the problem.


Why is this weird line in appearing in Glass material?

It just occurred to me that this is probably a case of reversed normals seeing as the entire shading of the coffee is off. A Normal is a line that comes off perpendicular to a plane. Blender uses these to calculate lighting off the various faces of a mesh, but if they're facing the wrong way (inside rather than outside), then the shading of the object will not look right.

To check if the normals are facing the correct direction, open the Viewport Overlays drop-down menu, and check Face Orientation. If the normals are facing the right way (as in facing in the direction the object is meant to be viewed), than the object will appear blue. If not, it will be red.

If this is the case, Tab into edit mode with the coffee selected, and press Shift+N to recalculate normals.


How to define a RGB color and specular color in Blender 2.74 using Python

There's a couple of loose-ends in your script, but they aren't a problem for answering the question. The code you are trying to run uses attributes that no longer exist in Blender 2.5 and upwards. In the name of progress they have been replaced.

A few things i'd like to mention:

When you do material.copy() it already appends the new material to bpy.data.materials, you don't need to.

If you are using the old-school 'Blender Internal' render engine then you can set specular and diffuse for materials using:

material_reference.diffuse_color
material_reference.specular_color

code reduced looks like this

import bpy
from math import *

Name = 'Dimi'
bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cylinder_add(radius = 0.5, depth = 1)
scj = bpy.context.scene
ob = bpy.context.object
ob.name = Name

ma0 = bpy.data.materials.get("furniture")
ma = ma0.copy()
ma.name = 'furniture_' + Name

ma.diffuse_color = (0.3, 0.9, 0.7)
ma.specular_color = (1,1,1)

ob.active_material = ma

If you want to script Cycles materials, have a good look at the search results for scripting cycles materials


How to merge around 300+ duplicate materials?

I have only tested this on Blender 2.82
This solution only works if you are trying to get rid of duplicates like mat.001, mat.002 … (etc.)
You should save your work before running the script in case it doesn't produce the results you want
Copy/Paste the code into the Text Editor and run the script
Once it has finished running, all of the duplicate materials (mat.001, mat.002 …) will be replaced with a single material which will be named mat.
import bpy

def replace_material(bad_mat, good_mat):
    bad_mat.user_remap(good_mat)
    bpy.data.materials.remove(bad_mat)

def get_duplicate_materials(og_material):

    common_name = og_material.name

    if common_name[-3:].isnumeric():
        common_name = common_name[:-4]

    duplicate_materials = []

    for material in bpy.data.materials:
        if material is not og_material:
            name = material.name
            if name[-3:].isnumeric() and name[-4] == ".":
                name = name[:-4]

            if name == common_name:
                duplicate_materials.append(material)

    text = "{} duplicate materials found"
    print(text.format(len(duplicate_materials)))

    return duplicate_materials

def remove_all_duplicate_materials():
    i = 0
    while i < len(bpy.data.materials):

        og_material = bpy.data.materials[i]

        print("og material: " + og_material.name)

        # get duplicate materials
        duplicate_materials = get_duplicate_materials(og_material)

        # replace all duplicates
        for duplicate_material in duplicate_materials:
            replace_material(duplicate_material, og_material)

        # adjust name to no trailing numbers
        if og_material.name[-3:].isnumeric() and og_material.name[-4] == ".":
            og_material.name = og_material.name[:-4]

        i = i+1

remove_all_duplicate_materials()

```


Is blender capable enough to model this?

I'm assuming you want to do this dynamically.

Add a rigid body to your underlying object, add a cloth simulation to your outer pipe and enable self collision.

Now it's just a matter of adjusting the cloth simulation settings to get what you want.


..Hard to reverse-engineer what you've done, but there are a couple of clues in your picture:

The edges in the top surface look a little thick? There are possibly some doubled faces / vertices there. Try X deleting, or H hiding some of the faces, to see if there are more hidden underneath. It's a feature of Blender's extrude, that if you cancel by right-clicking, you don't cancel the extrusion. You cancel the move, so the generated faces remain, exactly over the originals.
The Gizmo indicates that something is being operated on, halfway down the bottle. AltZ go into X-Ray mode, and see if there's a face there, which is the one being extruded, out of sight.


How to cut walls along the pitches of the roof

In this case, there should be no difficulty using Knife Project.

Select the roof, then the building
Put the (active) building into Edit Mode.
In an Orthographic view, looking straight down the roof ridge, hit 'Knife Project' in the Tool Region, Tools tab, Add section.
In the Knife Project tool's own panel, check 'Cut through'.
V Rip the newly created edges
Hovering over the unwanted faces, L select all linked, and delete them.


How can I use bmesh vert index as vertex color index?

Vertex colors are not stored on a vertex, they are stored on a loop (loop = corner of a poly). This means one vertex can have different vertex colors for each poly it is part of. So you would need to index into mesh.vertex_colors["Col"].data using the loop index.
However, if you're using a bmesh, you can set the vertex color for a loop with loop[layer] = (r, g, b, a) where layer is your_bmesh.loops.layers.color[your_layer_name].
Try this:
import bpy
import bmesh

bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode = 'OBJECT')

current_mesh = bpy.context.active_object.data

current_bm = bmesh.new()
current_bm.from_mesh(current_mesh)
current_bm.faces.ensure_lookup_table()

# TODO: get absolute position
# get location of face (atm it relative to object origin)
# bpy.context.object.matrix_world for world position left muli

# Get first color layer (create if needed)
if not current_bm.loops.layers.color:
    current_bm.loops.layers.color.new('Col')
layer = current_bm.loops.layers.color[0]

for face in current_bm.faces:
    # Current face center coord
    face_center_coord = face.calc_center_median()

    for loop in face.loops:
        # get vert coord
        current_vert_coord = loop.vert.co

        x = face_center_coord.x*0.5+0.5
        y = face_center_coord.y*0.5+0.5
        z = current_vert_coord.z

        # Unity use y for up direction, left hand axis
        loop[layer] = (x, z, y, 1.0)

# current_bmesh back to mesh
current_bm.to_mesh(current_mesh)
current_bm.free()

Tested with Blender 2.90.


Set you colorspace for the normalmap to non-color.


materials won't properly add to faces in blender 2.81

Try it in an older version of blender. This could happen because the graphic card might not have supported the new version of the blender.

Update of driver might work.


Using the View Transform orientation from the 3D View header pulldown menu.

Then scale the vertex to zero in the view direction by pressing S then pressing Z,Z twice to transform along view direction local Z axis.


How to create text on a semi-transparent overlay with Cycles?

You can create a text object and a plane that is translucent/transparent.

Add a copy rotation constraint using the camera as target (so that both objects are parallel to the camera).

Material for the plane:

Material for the text:

If you have a lot of titles you might need to create the titles as a separate scene and render each one as a PNG file to composite later.


How can I create text with a neat quad topology for deformation?

Didn't realize this was a duplicate.

To expand on MrZak's comment.

A similiar geometry can be created with the help of the Remesh modifier.

Raise the Extrude property of the text to > 0.
Add a remesh modifier. Uncheck Remove Disconnected Pieces. Raise the octree depth untill the result becomes acceptable.
In the 3D view, press ⎇ AltC and choose convert to mesh. (You now have polygon geometry.)
In edit mode, remove half of the text to make a flat solid again.


Blender's /tmp/ folder is suddenly empty

Do not render to a tmp folder!

Set a proper folder to render your files.

tmp folder is... For temp files... When the computer restarts it gets rid of temp files. This is not an issue with blender but the operating system.


How to maximize any of the views in quad view?

The quad view exists so that you can see all the views at once.

Instead of thinking of it like maximizing one of the quad view windows, think of it like aligning the user controlled view to an axis.

Numpad 1 snaps user controlled view to front view
Numpad 3 snaps user controlled view to side view
Numpad 7 snaps user controlled view to top view

Holding ⎈ Ctrl will snap to the opposite direction of the axis, so ⎈ CtrlNumpad 7 snaps to bottom view.

Numpad 5 toggles perspective/orthographic view.

Also see the wiki for more information on navigating the 3D view.


In Edit Mode select the bottom edge by Alt+LMB.
Press F to make a face.


Why can't the Data Transfer Modifier be applied?

The reason is it is influencing normals in a way that Blender does not support by default. So when you apply it the altered normal data is lost.

For Blender to display and store custom normals data Auto Smooth must be enabled with some Custom Split Normals Data:

After you do this you can apply your modifier and it will write the data into the Custom Split Normals Data datablock.

This can be considered as a consistency bug because the Normal Edit modifier does this all for you when you apply it. Feel free to report your findings.

The Object Data or New Shape option of Apply operator is only relevant to modifiers that deform the object mesh (this operator operates for all modifires when you apply them). The deformation is then not written to the objects data but as a new Shapekey.


How to Apply An Animation to Different Meshes?

I found the answer! :-D

This YouTube Video Clears it All Up:
Creating and Editing Actions for Re-Use in Animations and Games


EEVEE 2.80 toggling render visibility based on camera view

For EEVEE is useless, because all effects like reflections, AO, etc are rendered in screen space, no object that left camera frustum is calculated at all. For Cycles this option called "Camera Culling", and located in Simplify settings:

And in Object properties:


One technique that might be useful is to turn the motion of a single plank into an NLA strip that repeats in a track.  Then you put that same action into a repeating NLA strip into a track on each other plank, but offset in time, so it follows the same path, but a second or so later than the plank in front of it.

I optimized my workflow by setting up the repeating strip before duplicating the object with Alt-D.  Then all I had to do was grab the strip in the NLA and G X -10


I would convert the curve to a mesh object with Alt+C> Mesh from curve/meta/ surf/ text.

Next,  Tab into edit mode and enable proportional editing with O.

Finally, select just the top few edge loops of the new object and scale while adjusting the proportional edit radius of influence with your mouse wheel until satisfied with the result.


Rendering with a Luminous Outline on Transparent Background

Since your render is black&white you can use this:

Set object material with Emission shader.
In Properties Editor > Render Tab > Film > enable Transparent

Eevee
—
Enable Properties Editor > Render Properties > Bloom.
To control blooming you can do it here or in compositor with RGB Curve node (or ColorRamp) to make effect stronger or lighter.

Cycles
—
In compositor add Filter > Glare node type Ghosts try with Treshold = 0

Output format - I had to switch into OpenEXR file format to keep glowing, glaring, blooming what ever to call this in saved render.

Important

There is an issue with inconsistency of viewport render vs Render (F12) for years.
But also viewport is not showing the glowing here, but the only one thing that you have to do is to plug output also into Alpha socket. Or add Set Alpha node for the same effect.

Output format - PNG (RGBA) is OK here

For full colour render combined with glow or emissive materials (like fire) on transparent background see https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/164940/2214

For effect of coloured glow (like in your reference image) add ColorRamp node.


Bevel Modifier: apply before or after UV unwrapping and texturing (especially on Substance Painter)?

I believe, the bezel modifier will change the shape of your faces and add more (when applied), thereby changing the way the faces align with your UVMap. You may get lucky and find it works, but the more complicated the model and textures, the more change the bevel makes and the more likely you will need to adjust the UVMapping if not the source image. When you tediously mark seems, look up how to "Select more faces" and "Loop selection", you may also consider saving specific vertex groups so you can select one point and then "Object Properties" > "Vertext Groups" > [Pick your Group] > Click "Select". Ok, now the best part, once the Vertex Group is created, before you bevel, the bevel operation will include all the new vertex in the Vertex Group and you have a way to select all by Vertext Group ;) Now, UVMap and texture and if you have to edit the texture/vertex again, you only had to do the tedious part once


Blender recalculate Vertex Position so no Group Transform Matrices are needed

Blender always has to have geometry wrapped in an Object datablock.  So the best way to achieve your Group X >> Geometry xx zeroed out is to parent Geometry xx to Group X Object, and then do an Apply location to Group X.  Without seeing a blend or a screenshot, I can't be anymore specific.


2 Objects have the same Particle system setup

You need to click the number button next to the particle selection.


Try the Shrink/Fatten tool in edit mode with proportional editing turned on.
To use Shrink/Fatten press Alt+S
To enable proportional editing press O
Example of this method used on part a sphere:


Create a default plane (2x2 BU), assign your material; in object mode, material tab, click on the number near the material name to create a copy of it, delete the diffuse shader and put an emission shader instead, take the displacer input and put it on the color input; select the camera, Alt G, Alt R, to reset its trasform values, move it up in z axis a little, set it to orthographic mode, orthographic scale 2 and 2048 x 2048 dimension (or whatever you need).

F12 with no lights.


Trying to see the 3D Manipulator Widget on selected objects

Is the 3D widget active? Does it show the three icons for move, rotate and scale beside it? If not click on it, or press ⎈ CtrlSpace to toggle it on.

If the widget still doesn't appear on the selected object, it may be that the object's  Origin is somewhere else in the scene. The manipulator will be placed over the origin. If this is the case, go to the Tools tab of the Tools box (press T if the tools box isn't there). You do this in Object mode. About half way down, click on Set Origin, and then Origin to Geometry.

Link to Manual's description of the 3D  manipulator widget.


How do I move an object using a csv file?

Assuming you need only the first 3 columns of each row and you need to iterate over, one way of doing could be this. you need to have your object selected

"""
Example csv:
1.1, 1.3, 1.1
2.2, 2,1, 2.3
"""
import bpy
import csv

csv_path = "path_to_your_csv"

with open(csv_path) as file:
    csv = csv.reader(file, delimiter=",")
    # iterate over each rows assuming you need only
    # the the first 3 columns (if there are more)
    for row in csv:
        # row is a list with strings elements so must be converted in float
        x, y, z, *_ = [float(value) for value in row]
        bpy.ops.transform.translate(value=(x, y, z))


You are getting the TypeError because of passing a string argument to the reload function. reload function expects a module object as its argument.

You could create a mapping of the modules you want reloaded and then pass the mapping's value to reload.

You can refer to an example from Blender's UI module for a thorough example.

scripts/startup/bl_ui/init.py


Go ahead and navigate to your Blender install folder (usually located under C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender). From here you can click on the navigation bar

and type cmd; this should open up a new command prompt at this folders location. From there in the console type blender.exe. It will laugh like regular, but the console will stay open. This way if your blender crashes you can read the console. If you are unable to solve the problem from there, go ahead and update your post with the error information.


Dimensions - is a vector value. You can get vector value from 3 different floats by using combine vector node:


Automatic weights deformation on character mesh

That is the IK-Chain's doing. If you switch from Pose Position to Rest Position, you can tell, that your mesh is still ok.

This is however a very easy fix: All you need to do is adjust the roll of the bone that has the IK-Constraint on it. You do by selecting the bone in Pose Mode and the going to the Properties Window and Bone Constraints Tab.


Grass using hair system stops working when I come to render, it just flattens

I am stupid and had a modifier that was turned off in viewport but on for render, I for some very irritating reason didn't check until now.


Applied a subdivision modifier and imported in Substance Painter 2, the result is horrible

You should get all the faces that are meant to be flat together as one face. The bottom face on the cylinder in your case should look like a flat face, but because it's made out of a lot of faces, it doesn't.
Select one of the bottom faces:

press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+F to select all the faces that are on a 0 degree angle of it:

Now hit X and choose 'Dissolve faces'. Now you have erased the unnecessary vertices:


Use Mesh Extra Object addon to create gears.

Gears and extra objects are added from Shift+A menu

The Addon adds the following;

Gears ,
Worms ,
Diamond ,
Gem ,
Star ,
Polysphere ,
Torus Knot
and many More.

Here is a simple usage gif.


Barkest has the answer, I believe. The "bogus" faces have surrounding real faces whose medium centers just happen to be over a hole, giving the false impression that there is a face where a hole exists.


Help with limiting rotation of an armature

I replicated exactly your setup and noticed that you have the "For Transform" box un-checked, That will help to maintain the values in transformations relative to the ones in the constrain modifier. 2 more things that will make it feel better is to set the "transform Orientation" to local, which I think you do, and use the 3D Gizmo.

Hope that helps.


Set the origin of your armature object.

Don't have unity to test atm, (not since I quit windows for ubuntu)  but IIRC the origin is the origin of the armature object.

2.8 example, cube is parented to armature as though it was body mesh

Select the armature in object mode, set the 3D cursor to where you wish the origin to be.  In image example it's simply cursor to origin ShiftC.  Select origin to 3D cursor from the set origin menu. (In 2.7x Object > Transform > Origin to 3D Cursor)

Now this is going to mess up the location of all children. In the case above I have selected the cube (it's the "body" of the armature for example sake) and clear the parent inverse to move it back. AltP Ckear Parent Inverse.

This however may depend on how the mesh objects were positioned as children to the armature. in which case selecting and translating is another option.

Also to move all meshes as well to have new origin as origin follow @FFeller's answer for meshes and clear parent inverse.

Hmmm, beginning to recall might actually be the root bone location. In which case, in bone edit mode, add a new bone at (0, 0, 0) and make it the parent bone of what is current root bone (probably hips)