Yes, I did find solution. It was under my nose all this time. While in pose mode Under tools section we have an option to switch to IK bones. Ik bones does help making things easy.


How to scale properly HDRI image, to be used in ASC-CDL HDR render?

I'm quoting here "
Clamps are dangerous creatures." @troy_s
The problem was that I had value in the clamp direct and indirect under Render>Sampling, so what happened is that Cycles was clamping all values above 1, while I was trying to get the sun brighter with no luck!! Lesson learned the hard way.
But wait, this is only part of the issue, this solved the high value absence puzzle, but not the absence of gradation.
Long Answer short, this is how it was solved, no need to say that the following parameters are obviously not a magic number to go with for every HDRI, since every HDRimage, good and bad ones, has it's own unique values and light conditions:
1- HDRI map strength: 18, yes I know it's crazy, but we're dealing with High Dynamic Range, we need a bed big enough for all the values of the HDRI to fit in. Just like the story, this is the Mushroom that made Alice grow to her size.
2- Slope value in Color Balance node in the compositor: 0.18, yes even more crazy, this is the mushroom that made Alice small enough to fit in the display reference door, remember that the mushroom made Alice shrink, proportionally, it didn't chop her off to pieces.
3- Power value in Color Balance node: 1.8, convex f-curve to distribute the values from high to low in a way that gives enough space for gradation.And here's the result.No LookFake Colors Look

Of course these values would work for this particular HDR image, not necessarily a rule, but as a rule of thumb, I guess I'll be using high value for HDR image, and crank it down using the slope value, and expand the curve using a power value higher than 1, in order to make a concave easing out curve.

Finally, I'm not a tech person, and I know my description above sounds funny, on the other hand, the values still need some tweaking because there are still some white spots, which refer to over exposed areas, but at least I'm very close to achieve a good result. If you check the answer in this link is way more descriptive of this case, and in much better way. Following the instructions in this link, 14.5 is more accurate range for a standard case, for a standard HDR image.  Furthermore, here are some experiments I did with other HDRimages:


Figured it out - you have to drag with right mouse button, not left.


rigid body simulation - unwated spaces between objects

Firstly, check your scale. A stack of 5m tall blocks of wood will behave vastly different to a stack of 5cm tall blocks of wood - with forces that are orders of magnitude more powerful, causing more ‘bounce’ and inaccuracies in the simulation.

Secondly, expect some gaps and a certain amount of ‘settling’ at the start of the animation. It is very difficult to avoid all gaps without causing overlapping surfaces which can generate huge repulsive forces at the start of your animation. I suspect the scale of your model is simply resulting in the forces being so large as to cause collapse.

Thirdly, tune the Rigid Body properties. The defaults (60 steps per second with 10 iterations) provide for a very crude simulation. Increase your steps and iterations (eg, steps 600 and iterations 300 - or even higher if required) until you get a stable simulation without causing too much CPU overhead (more steps and iterations require more computation time).


Randomly switch camera and start animation with Python

Something to get started:

import random
import bge

cont = bge.logic.getCurrentController()
own = cont.owner

if not own.isPlayingAction():
    # create radom number between 0..3
    x = int(random.uniform(0,4))
    print(x)

    scene = bge.logic.getCurrentScene()
    # set active camera
    cam_name = 'Camera.00'+str(x)
    camera = scene.objects[cam_name]
    scene.active_camera = camera

    # play action
    own.playAction('CubeAction', 0, 20, play_mode=bge.logic.KX_ACTION_MODE_PLAY)

The script above can be used from a Python controller

Note that this plays the Action for the attached object, if the camera views don't overlap this could already work for you.


List of selected faces after shortest_path_select()

Unclear what the issue is.
Will mention that when a mesh is put into edit mode, the edit mode mesh is a "snapshot" of the data when mode toggled.  It is not written back to the mesh datablock until mode is toggled back. (Or other methods are called to implicitly save edit mode changes)
>>> C.object.update_from_editmode(
update_from_editmode()
Object.update_from_editmode()
Load the objects edit-mode data into the object data

Hence looking at bpy.data.meshes["Foo"] data while "Foo" is being edited will not show updates.
Little test script.
import bpy
import bmesh

ob = bpy.context.edit_object
me = ob.data
bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)

def print_selection(element_type):
    selection = [e.index for e in getattr(bm, element_type)
                 if e.select]
    print(f"{len(selection)} {element_type} selected")
    if selection:
        print(f"    {selection}")

print("Before")
for sel in ("verts", "edges", "faces"):
    print_selection(sel)
bpy.ops.mesh.shortest_path_select()
#bmesh.update_edit_mesh(me) # Not required.
print("After")
for sel in ("verts", "edges", "faces"):
    print_selection(sel)

Run on default grid.

Output to console
Before
8 verts selected
    [11, 12, 21, 22, 77, 78, 87, 88]
8 edges selected
    [6, 29, 31, 32, 139, 155, 157, 158]
2 faces selected
    [10, 70]
After
28 verts selected
    [11, 12, 21, 22, 23, 31, 32, 33, 42, 43, 52, 53, 54, 55, 62, 63, 64, 65, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88]
40 edges selected
    [6, 29, 31, 32, 34, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 69, 71, 72, 88, 90, 91, 93, 95, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 130, 132, 133, 135, 137, 139, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158]
13 faces selected
    [10, 19, 20, 29, 38, 47, 48, 49, 58, 67, 68, 69, 70]

Again with two initial verts selected

Before
2 verts selected
    [11, 88]
0 edges selected
0 faces selected
After
15 verts selected
    [11, 12, 13, 14, 24, 34, 44, 45, 46, 56, 66, 76, 86, 87, 88]
14 edges selected
    [6, 9, 12, 35, 54, 73, 76, 78, 96, 115, 134, 153, 156, 158]
0 faces selected

And again, but modifying to also show the mesh selection, deselect all verts, toggle into object mode and back to edit mode, select two verts and  run script
def print_selection(element_type):
    lut = {"verts" : me.vertices,
           "edges" : me.edges,
           "faces" : me.polygons,
           }
    selection = [e.index for e in getattr(bm, element_type)
                 if e.select]
    print(f"{len(selection)} {element_type} selected")
    if selection:
        print(f"    {selection}")

        print([lut[element_type][i].select for i in selection])

Result.
Before
2 verts selected
    [11, 88]
[False, False]
0 edges selected
0 faces selected
After
15 verts selected
    [11, 12, 13, 14, 24, 34, 44, 45, 46, 56, 66, 76, 86, 87, 88]
[False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False]
14 edges selected
    [6, 9, 12, 35, 54, 73, 76, 78, 96, 115, 134, 153, 156, 158]
[False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False, False]
0 faces selected

What is the bmesh equivalent to bpy.ops.mesh.shortest_path_select()?


How to convert an object's location to another's rotation

What you need to do is to copy the distance (or absolute position) of the "belt" to the cylinder's rotation, and if necessary, multiply by a factor. To achieve this you can use Animation Drivers.

To do this, select the object you want to rotate, press N and right click over the Z rotation filed and select Add Single Drivers (or if you want to select Add Drivers to add the drivers to the three of them).

Then, go to the Graph Editor (Ctrl + Left Arrow twice, from the default view), change the type to Drivers, like so:

Then select the Driver on the left, press N, scroll down and on the Drivers part, and use this settings:

Where the plane is the "belt"; If you need to, in the Expression field you can change the factor to suit your needs.


I'm certainly no expert, but I had a 95% CPU usage whilst rendering, even though I had chosen GPU Compute from the Render section.  What I didn't realise, was that I also need to select CUDA in User Preferences/System too.  After that I re-did the same Render and the CPU then hovered around 15% as expected.  V 2.79 if that makes any difference.  Will be interesting in the forthcoming version of Windows which supposedly will show the GPU usage in the Task Manager.


How to make colored backgrounds not influence the color of an object

When you are using any color (or image) as background in the world settings you have to imagine a shpere that completely surrounds the scene and that is emitting colored light from every point.

There are a few alternatives.

One is to have two different shaders for the background, and control them using a light path node, so that difuse rays are a neutral color and the rest are green.

You can use a neutral color (or no background at all) for the background and enable transparency (film transparent), and then add the background color in the compositor using alpha over.

I hope you are not putting green behind the object with the idea of using a chroma key later on to take away the background. If that is the case then just render with a transparent background and save in a format that can handle an alpha channel (EXR or TIFF).


Model a single segment of the wire and razor.

Create a curve object with the spiral shape you need (use the Add Curve: Extra Objects addon to create spirals)

Add an array modifier to the wire/razor object

and then add a curve modifier that uses the spiraled curve as object for the array. Then set the array modifier to use the curve.

The original object and the curve remain editable, so you can shape them to fit your needs.

Here's the example file:


Character deforming with rigging and adding automatic weights

Select the armature, go to pose mode, select all bones, Ctrl A: "Apply pose as rest pose". Then you can parent your mesh to the armature. It's a good habit to apply rotation and scale (Ctrl A) to both mesh and armature also. You will have to tweak the pole angle of your IK leg ion order to get the right deforming direction of the legs. Search for Nathan Vegdahl free rigging course for advanced rigging techinques.


Under your characters physics settings select "actor" as physics type. Then there should appear an option step height. Increase or decrease this value as you like.


How do I set up a Follow Path constraint and also control its influence?

Following code worked for me:
import bpy

ob = bpy.context.object
curve_ob = bpy.data.objects["Plane"]

con = ob.constraints.new('FOLLOW_PATH')
con.target = curve_ob

curve_ob.data.use_path = True
anim = curve_ob.data.animation_data_create()
anim.action = bpy.data.actions.new("%sAction" % curve_ob.data.name)

fcu = anim.action.fcurves.new("eval_time")
mod = fcu.modifiers.new('GENERATOR')
mod.use_restricted_range = True

mod.frame_start = 1
mod.frame_end = 100


How do I add keyframes to a newly created action with no associated objects?

The key concepts are as follows

animations are composed of fcurves
each fcurve has a data_path and maybe an index
each fcurve has multiple keyframe_points
each keyframe_point has a .co (coordinate), a .handle_left, a .handle_right, and an .interpolation.

You can see an example of an animation built using core python APIs at http://web.purplefrog.com/~thoth/blender/python-cookbook/animate-random-spin.html

I include an excerpt of the most relevant code:

def rig_quaternion_channel(action, channel, period, a, b):
    """
    This is heavy-duty voodoo to figure out what keyframes to use with sinusoidal easing
    to reconstruct a curve of the form
     a*cos(theta) + b*sin(theta)
     by converting it to the form
     c*sin(theta+phi)
    """
    c = sqrt(a * a + b * b)
    phi = -atan2(a, b)
    fc = action.fcurves.new(data_path="rotation_quaternion", index=channel)
    fc.keyframe_points.add(5)
    vals = [0, 1, 0, -1, 0]
    for j in range(5):
        kp = fc.keyframe_points[j]
        frame = 1 + ( phi / (2 * pi) + j / 4.0) * 2 * period
        kp.co = ( frame, c * vals[j])
        kp.interpolation = 'SINE'
        if 0 == j % 2:
            kp.easing = 'EASE_OUT'
        else:
            kp.easing = 'EASE_IN'
    fc.modifiers.new('CYCLES')

Mostly you care about stuff like action.fcurves.new , fc.keyframe_points.add, and kp.co= (frame,value)


Increase font sizes for property names and values

To stop loaded files from changing your preferences, go to User Preferences under Edit > Preferences and under the Save & Load category, look for the Load UI checkbox. Uncheck it.

Then, while still in Preferences, go to the Interface category and click in the Resolution Scale text field. Enter a new value for the scale. You will want it to be some value greater than 1.


How to send picture to the background so i can see the plane?

The fastest way is to add a Background image.

Add->Image->Background
This will keep your image always in the back.

Even when it's physically in front.

Bonus:
You can change these settings for every image in your viewport.
You can also set your image to only appear in orthographic mode, make it transparent... etc.

Properties panel->Object Data
These settings are available for every image.


Add movie as separate audio/video track?

OK this is weird. I installed this same Blender version 2.76 on another machine also running LM 18 directly from the Software Manager and it behaves as expected. The movie clip is added as separate video and audio lines.
Thinking the "troubled" machine had a corrupt Blender install, I uninstalled and reinstalled Blender, also directly from the Software Manager, and I get the same wonky results where the audio and video files appear to be superimposed on the same line.
If I add the same video without closing the project, the second time it loads as separate video and audio tracks.
solved:
Reset to Factory Defaults then CtrlU to save and all works now as expected.


i could not find encoding and audio codec in my properties panel

That might be the reason. Probably you did (and could) not set any audio properties. Follow these steps:

Go onto the render page in properties window:

Scroll down to the output-tab and select a movie format as output format. Be sure that this format supports more encoding properties. Means: once selected directly under the output-tab a tab called "Encoding" should appear. If I can give you an advice choose H.264 as output format.

In encoding tab, choose your preferred Movie format. In the bottom part of the tab, choose an Audio codec different from "None". For example MP3 (if an average quality of the audio is sufficient).

Hope these steps and advices worked well :)

Greets
Jaspa


Mesh seems to still be proportionally editing even though it is turned off

You have the Subsurf modifier on your object, that is why your model appears so smooth and you have set it to show the cage or its active effect while editing. The modifier might have been accidentally added as the shortcut is simply Ctrl 0 - 5 for each smoothing level (higher number being more subdivisions). If you want to disable this, delete it from the object or if you want to stop the "proportional editing effect", untick the triangle icon on the modifier.

When doing organic modeling, having the cage on is often useful to see the changes in realtime when tweaking loops or filling faces as opposed to tabbing in and out of edit mode and object mode to the the updates.

Since you have the cage enabled, it will show how the subsurf modifier is deforming the mesh as you work with it, if you are in the early stages of modeling and inexperienced, it's probably a good idea to keep this off until you have the general shape of your model in place and work with the flat "boxy" mesh. Reason being the modifier can produce exaggerated results that differ from when you look at the smoothed and unsmoothed model. The subsurf modifier will effectively "shrink/round" the mesh as it tries to create smoothed surfaces.

To see what I mean, add a cube and press Ctrl1 to add a subsurf modifier with 1 subdivison level. Play with the object with the cage on and then disable the modifier to see how it has changed the underlying structure of your object.


You can do it manually, but it is tedious:

change the plane's 3D origin to the bottom right of the plane, so that all of the planes local coordinates are equal or above 0, like your UV coordinates

now click on each vertex of the plane and in the top part of the Proprieties panel press "Local", change Y to 0 then change X and Z to your UV coordinates

to know which vertex in UV space belongs to which vertex in 3D space , click
"Keep UV and edit mode mesh selection in sync"


looks like the thumb(all 3 bones) is not parented(connected) to the palm bone,so the thumb won't move but the other finger should move looking at the rig.
give me more details on how are you trying to move the finger tip and other bones


For the 3D view go to:

User preferences > System.
Then under the OpenGL sub header, you will find "MipMaps" make sure that box is unchecked.

For Blender-Internal go to:

Texture Buttons.
Image Sampling Panel.
Toggle MIP Map button.

Update

As of blender 2.71 texture nodes now have an option to change the interpolation method:

Using Closest will keep the pixels sharp.

Old Answer

For cycles, this is a needed feature. Here's a workaround (32 is the size of the texture) :


In one system I use different architectures:

GTX 660 Ti - Kepler
GTX 980 -  Maxwell

this does not prove that it will work with all combinations, but as long the drivers support  CUDA (true for both GPUs you listed) it should work fine.


Make vertices of a mesh "match" an adjacent mesh

An approximation to this could be achieved using the Shrinkwrap modifier.
Select al the vertices on the border you want to move, press Ctrl + G, and choose Assign to New Group.
Then put a Shrinkwrap modifier on the object. For the Vertex Group choose the newly made group, and as a Target choose the object you want the border to move towards. As the mode for this case it is probably best to choose Nearest Surface Point or Nearest Vertex, though both probably do not give an optimal result.

The result varies for different shapes of a border curve. As you can see from this keyshape animation two vertices of the vertex group moved to the same vertex on the target object, leaving a slight gap next to it. (So if it works for you depends on the specific meshes you work with and the amount of manually fixing you're willing to do.)


Rendering panoramic images is possible with the Cycles render engine. Open the Render Properties and set the Render Engine to Cycles.

Switch to the Output Properties and set the render resolution for X and Y. Ensure that they have a 2:1 ratio.

Select the active Camera in your scene and open the Object Data Properties. Set the Type to Panoramic and choose Equirectangular for the Panorama Type.


Is there a "Volume Select" equivalent in Blender?

Animation Nodes can be used here. The Find Nearest Surface Point node is used to compute the distance between every element and its closest surface point, the distance is then used as the scale of the elements as following:

Evaluating the distance at an interpolation gives you fine control over its rate of change:


Get current scene on Blender 2.74 using python

The issue with creating an object is where you are doing it, the scene's list of objects doesn't allow you to create new objects, only to link objects to the scene. To create a new object you use bpy.data.objects.new()

An example of manually creating a mesh object would be -

import bpy

# get the current scene
scn = bpy.context.scene

# create a mesh data block
mymesh = bpy.data.meshes.new('mymesh')

# define some vertices
verts = [Vector((-1,  1, 0)),
         Vector(( 1,  1, 0)),
         Vector(( 1, -1, 0)),
         Vector((-1, -1, 0)),
        ]

edges = []
faces = [[0, 1, 2, 3]]
# add the vertices to the mesh
mymesh.from_pydata(verts, edges, faces)

# create an object that uses the mesh data
myobj = bpy.data.objects.new('myobject', mymesh)

# link the object to the scene
scn.objects.link(myobj)


Yes, you can.  You will simply click the X beside the Render % or press Esc to cancel the render.  Then press F3 as usual and it will save the rendered portion to your desired format/location.  The unrendered part will be black if saved as a JPEG and transparent if saved as an Alpha PNG.

Just to prove it ;) here you go:

Here's the canceled render of the default scene saved as a JPEG:

EDIT: As was mentioned, Render Border can be useful in certain circumstances.  The problem is it's always rectangular (so it wouldn't have helped in this situation with a circular object) and it's usefulness is relegated to instances where you use multiple render layers.  Otherwise, you can simply crop the render dimensions as close to the edges of your scene as possible which does the same thing.


How to set a specific edge length numerically?

This feature is now in an included addon in Blender 2.79 called Mesh: Edit Tools 2. You have to enable the addon in the User Preferences.

Go to Add-ons
Search "edit"
Click the box for Mesh: Edit Tools 2
Save User Settings

While in Edit Mode, press W for the Specials Menu

Edit Tools > Set Edge Length
Input a target length and click OK.

Hope this helps! I searched forever to find the answer. Shoutout to Danyang Yi for providing the link to a previous version of this addon prior to it being included in Blender.


How to get keyframes and related information?

I think it's something like that :

import bpy

for ob in bpy.context.scene.objects :
    if ob.type in ['MESH','ARMATURE'] and ob.animation_data:
        for fc in ob.animation_data.action.fcurves :
            if fc.data_path.endswith(('location','rotation_euler','rotation_quaternion','scale')):
                for key in fc.keyframe_points :
                    print('frame:',key.co[0],'value:',key.co[1])

Keyframe in blender are not store in one place. It's store on action related to object. You can look throw all keyframe on your blend file in bpy.data.actions. To filter by object type you have to look throw objects in your scene and find the related action


How to add a triangulate modifier and apply it?

The list doesn’t contain the newly added triangulate modifier (if there is one). Also, it seems necessary to apply by name, not by type. The following works for me:

import bpy

obj = bpy.context.object

modif_types = [ modifier.type for modifier in obj.modifiers ]

if 'TRIANGULATE' not in modif_types:
    bpy.ops.object.modifier_add(type='TRIANGULATE')

modif_names = [ modifier.name for modifier in obj.modifiers ]

for modif in modif_names:
    bpy.ops.object.modifier_apply(apply_as='DATA', modifier=modif)


Not able to use Boolean modifier on concentric cylinder and torus (normals seem ok)

Boolean operators are known to have issues when dealing with complex interactions. Thus, it is advised to prep your meshes to minimize issues from the Boolean operator. This simply means giving the Boolean operator easy places to make cuts.

In your example, all you need to do is to add another torus with the same number of segments as the cylinder. This aligns all the torus edges to that of your cylinder, which eliminates the issue from the Boolean modifier.

Note how the wire-frames don't line up nicely in your torus, so the Boolean modifier will need to make a ton of cuts to try to modify the geometry.

I've added another torus below, this time matching the number of segments to the cylinder, and the boolean modifier works fine.

Another thing to note: having an excessive amount of vertices in close proximity to one another can also cause problems with the Boolean modifier, but that's easily fixed by scaling/moving one of the objects slightly.


You can only track one object at any given time, so you'll need to define a set of priorities by which a single target can be selected from a group of valid candidates (objects with the relevant property).

For example, if you wanted to track the closest object with the relevant property, you could do it with this function:

# track.py

def target_prop(cont):
    self = cont.owner
    objects = self.scene.objects

    tracked = [o for o in objects if self["target_prop"] in o]
    tracked.sort(key=lambda o: self.getDistanceTo(o))

    target, *_ = tracked

    act_track, *_ = cont.actuators
    act_track.object = target

    for act in cont.actuators:
        cont.activate(act)

Example: track_to_prop.blend

As you can see, you can specify the target property via a property on the tracking object (target_prop in this case). Also, you can set the always sensor to "true level triggering" (aka: "pulse mode"), to constantly re-evaluate the closest target, if that's required.


It is possible to tag vertices with the bmesh module:

bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(obj.data)
#or
bm = bmesh.new()
bm.from_mesh(obj.data)

#create custom data layers
my_id = bm.verts.layers.int.new('id')

#get the custom data layer by its name
my_id = bm.verts.layers.int['id']

#access
bm.verts[0][my_id] = 42

#apply the changes
bmesh.update_edit_mesh(obj.data)
#or
bm.to_mesh(obj.data)


The primitive objects box isn't displayed in the tool shelf

The object primitive options are located in the tool shelf in the 3D viewport. You can toggle the tool shelf's visibility with the hotkey 'T'.

You can also press "F6" after creating an object to get the same options in a pop-up menu located at the mouse cursor.


i don't know how to make smoke particles in blender render

You click on the header bar then click on object(note: object, not object mode). Go to quick effects then quick smoke


converted particles on top of one another instead of simulation position (warning: contains bacon)

I ended up trying to use hair particles on the container and after a ton of fiddling with the settings, got the bacon on the layout I wanted. things were awkward with the hair particles, as they were displaced on some kind of natural vortex (i say natural because there was no force field applied, and the bacon-hair was growing on a spiral pattern. then i copied one of the sides of the container and applied hair on it, so the sides wouldn't be emitting bacon.
after some more fiddling, i could convert all the particles to meshes. a ton of meshes, btw, 5k+. so i did some cleaning, and some more cleaning, and some more, and was happy with around 600 pieces.
then, i joined 'em all, shrinkwrapped my container on it, gave it some offset, applied the label on a set of the container duplicated faces and voilà!


It is most likely that the view mode of 3d viewport is set to solid shading, and should be set to Textured shading instead.


How well does Blender Rigid Body physics translate to real life

Blender rigid body physics is great for flat surfaces or for single point of contact collisions (eg, a coin falling onto a surface or a cube bouncing) but struggles with curved sufaces in full contact with other curved surfaces - such as an axle through a close fitting hole in a wheel. This is mostly due to the way in which the meshes are modelled - instead of being defined at an atomic scale they are simplified into vertices and faces that result in no ‘exact fit’. Also, the simulation is broken down into a series of short ‘steps’, but nothing compared to the (potentially) infinitely small number of steps in the real world. This means that closely fitting meshes quickly become unstable with overlapping meshes that the rigid body engine being unable to find a solution - so they start to pass through each other and jostle about as it tries to find the best solution in a situation that could not exist in the real world (real objects never get to the point where they physically intersect).

Theoretically, if you could model the surfaces using a high enough precision (unfeasibly high) and set the ‘steps per second’ to a high enough value (unfeasibly high) then you could get a reasonable simulation - but it would take far more time and computing resources than would be available.

Using Rigid Body Constraints allows you to simplify this by enforcing any relationships (such as a wheel moving around its axis) without having to rely on the microscopic interactions of the surfaces. This can generally produce a ‘good enough’ simulation for your needs.


In the properties panel N, of the Video Sequence Editor there are some setting for the active strip. Scroll down to the Filter heading and there are two check boxes to flip the strip on the X and the Y axes.

Your other option is to add a transform strip, then use that to rotate your clip.

With the clip you want to rotate selected add a new transform strip by either going to the Video Sequence Editor header Add > Effect Strip > Transform, or by pressing ShiftA.

Then in the same properties panel as in the first part, you will find the settings for the transform strip.


It appears that you cannot open FBX directly in Blender just by double clicking from with the Unity Editor, you must use the import function (File -> Import -> FBX). I was able to open the model:


Blender crashes switching from curve editor to 3D view

You could try limiting the texture size temporarily until you can get the issue worked out. This may help avoid large amounts of memory being reserved, and causing Blender to crash.

Press ctrl + alt + u to open the "User Preferences".

Switch to the "System" tab and change your Texture Size Limit.

This should limit the size of the textures, speeding up the viewport.

I recommend NOT clicking "Save User Settings" if you don't want this limit on your future Blend files.


Blender Internal Noise Texture not showing in Normal channel

You will get different results with the Influence/Bump Mapping/Space setting


You can use majic79's Blender-AC3D addon. It is a port of the one that existed for Blender 2.49 and the author seems to update it every now and then.

  What is it?
  It's a few python scripts to import/export AC3D data into and out of Blender 2.63+. For earlier Blender 2.6x versions you need an older revision of the plugin (https://github.com/majic79/Blender-AC3D/tree/BL2.62)

  Known Issues:

  Exporter:

  Export packed .blend images is untested...
  It will either export everything, or everything that's selected. Default
  behaviour is to export everything, if you want to only export those items
  that you can see (ie, in the render scene), then select all those items and
  check the "Selection Only" option on the export dialog.
  There's an option "Export Render Layer" - ie, only export what's currently
  visible - this doesn't work, but is in the plan

  Importer:

  No ngons yet.


How to create a "suspension" for fast moving objects?

This is not too surprising behaviour, and the solution is to not have things rubbing at high speed. In real life, your car would grind the bottom off completely.
Probably the most useful solution is to suggest using BGE's vehicle wrapper.


Why I got a bad result image background shadow?

It appears that the problem is due to the Alpha Threshold of the Render Layer affecting the Object Index.

The Alpha Threshold controls whether transparent objects in the scene register on certain passes of the render layer.

Anything greater than or equal to the Alpha Threshold will be included in that pass, anything less than the threshold will not. In your example scene the Alpha Threshold is set to 0.5 and this results in the Object Index pass from not being consistently present. By reducing the threshold (ie, to 0.2 in the screenshot below), the Object Index is included correctly and the compositor is able to process the index correctly.


I don't know if you can do that, but you shouldn't need to. Try simply exporting the MIDI to a sound file, and using the Video Sequence Editor (I think) to align it with your animation.


Rotating skirt effect, possible with cloth simulation?

Think of the geometry of the image you uploaded:

You need more subdivisions on the fabric. Faces don't curve, bend or twist. The edges will always be straight. To create any kind of curvature you need subdivisions. The extra geometry will allow you to create the transitions and facilitate the different folds and twists of the fabric that you show in the reference image.

An example of possible topology to play with:

Step by step

Make a Vertex Group and assign it to the top loop.

Add a Hook > Hook to New Object. A new empty is created, and the vertex group is now controlled by it. The idea is that only the pinned vertices move independently than the rest of the fabric, and they pull the rest of the surfaces as they move. By moving the empty you can do that now.

Add a Cloth modifier to the object, and make the vertex group the Pin Group.

(note that the order of the modifiers matters here.)

For a softer surface you might want to add a subsurf modifier at the bottom of the stack.

Animate the rotation of the empty (or parent the empty to the body of the dancer)

The quality of the simulation depends largely on the quality steps. Play with the weight, stiffness, damping, tension and shear of the fabric until you are happy ever after.


The issue is caused by Smoke High Res. It was fixed by applying the scale of the smoke domain (Ctrl+A)


As far as I know this is not possible with fluid simulation itself. The fluid sim does not do sticking itself to a surface as a feature (sometimes you get it as a bug).

Workarounds i can think of:

Stop the fluid sim at the point where it should stick and apply the modifier making the mesh solid.
Use dynamic paint modifier with the fluid sim mesh as a brush. Use the resulting paint output with a bump map to give it some texture.


Physical simulation- how to create anti-gravity in objects like hot-air balloons

What kind of object?
Rigid body
An individual rigid body cannot be made anti-gravity, however you can make the entire scene gravity point upwards by changing Z=-9.8 to a positive number in the Scene Gravity settings:

"Gravity" is a property that can be keyframed, i.e. you can make it change at a given frame.
Cloth or soft body
For cloths and soft bodies you can choose what Gravity each object is feeling. There is a "Field Weight" panel in the Physics settings. There you can change Gravity to a negative number (assuming that you don't change the Gravity scene settings!). The slider won't allow you to do that, but you can just type something like -0.5.

Again, this can be keyframed.
Instead of keyframing
To reverse gravity at a given location rather than time, you can add a Wind force field (ShiftA > Force Field > Wind), make it point downwards, and changing its falloff type to Tube and falloff Power to something between 1 and 2.

Here is a scene with a Soft Body hot air balloon, with its Gravity Field Weight set to -0.3 (Scene Gravity is untouched), and with a Wind Force Field at a given altitude (also a Turbolence Force Field for more wiggling):

Here's the blend if you want to look at how it's done


Can Blender import videos with transparent background?

Solved.
However I found some transparent format that Blender supports for transparency, it should be reencoded like this:
ffmpeg -i in.webm -vcodec prores_ks -pix_fmt yuva444p10le -profile:v 4444 out.mov

"Blend"-option should be set to "Alpha Over" in the N-panel of the strip.


Assuming you got something like that by spinning a cube (Alt-R):

You could simply use a plane for spinning to avoid the issues:

Note: Use Shift-D to remove duplicates and spin operator was invoked  in Edit Mode (Top Ortho View)


Is it possible to animate the opacity of a grease pencil layer?

This appears to have been a bug in blender 2.81. The example above behaves as expected in blender 2.82.


How do I combine/join/merge all vertices at the same location?

You are looking for remove doubles. It can be found in the 3D view tool shelf while in edit mode.


Calvin reporting.
I figured it out why.
Under Children > Interpolated.
The Display Amount and Render Amount must be of the same value.
:)


How to make this Mouse Cursor Script work in Blender 2.74? (BGE)

This works for me. I changed it as little as possible. The red plane called "png" is the plane of your cursor. In the ground plane I put a mouse-over sensor called "mouse". I also activated true pulse trigger so that the script will run constantly when your cursor is over something.


Matt's answer covers the theory of it, but to provide a visual comparison:

Area lamp, 100 samples, 11.08 seconds. MIS (Multiple Importance Sample) on

Plane, 100 samples, 12.10 seconds. MIS on

So the plane is slightly slower, but it has slightly less noise as well.

But now lets try with three lamps instead of only one:

Area lamps, 100 samples, 11.31 seconds, MIS off for all lamps (turning MIS on gave the same result with an extra 2 seconds on the render time)

Planes, 100 samples, 12.83 seconds, MIS on for all planes

Planes, 150 samples, 11.19 seconds, MIS off for all planes

Planes, 100 samples, 12.46 seconds, MIS on for two smaller planes, off for large one

So it appears that when you have multiple lights and manage which emission planes have MIS turned on, the result can me similar to area lamps, although still a bit slower and slightly more noisy. It's the other way around when you have only one emission plane, but the difference is subtle. MIS for area lamps doesn't seem to make any difference to the diffuse, except increase the render time a bit.

This only compares noise level of shadows and diffuse shading, for Glossy shaders you usually want to keep MIS on for the lamps you wish to create specular highlights. (See page 5 of this paper):

(From the above mentioned paper)

Now for arguement's sake, lets take a look at a point lamp vs a spherical mesh:

Point Lamp, 100 samples, 12.30 seconds, MIS on

Sphere, 100 samples, 13.86 seconds, MIS on

The sphere is clearly the loser here, very noisy and slightly slower. Turning MIS off makes it much worse.

To conclude - it all depends on your situation. Mesh lights are more flexible and probably more accurate, but require some understanding of importance sampling and playing around.

All these tests were done with the Path Tracing integrator. Using the Branched Path Tracing integrator, Area and Point lamp renders were much cleaner, and mesh lamp renders were much noisier (for various samples but the same render time).

Download this .blend file if you'd like to play with it.


Error AL lib: UpdateDeviceParams: Failed to set 44100hz, got 48000hz instead. What can I do?

While this is a harmless error, this is how you can fix it:

Open user preferences with
Ctrl+Alt+U and go to the System tab
In the sound settings  below, change the sample rate to 48000 kHz and
save user settings
Restart Blender


Ok, here's my first draft of an answer. I'll revise it as we talk this out more. If this seems to be going in the right direction, I can add further coding samples.

The key to being able to distribute your render jobs between many render nodes is being able to easily tell the render node what scenes to render.

Currently, from what you've described you would have to add some sort of input argument value to tell the script what scene to load and then render out one frame.

I think if you could modify your script to run on a per frame basis, then map the frame number to scene number, that would make it easier to distribute the job to many machines without having to worry about input values for the scene number.

So the file arrangement would be:

GenScene.blend file blank file ready for scene setup
Startup python script ("GenSceneFrame.py") would be run once for every frame of the animation. Let's assume we have 100 scene's to render, we'll set the animation range to 1-100
SceneData.csv file that contains object setup data for each scene

These 3 files would be packaged together in one folder (or with subfolders if you want but you'd have to be vigilant about paths).

You would have initate the render job from the command line so that you can get it run the python script on startup which is where the frame handler will be created.

It would look something like this:

blender -b GenScene.blend -s 1 -e 100 -a -P GenSceneFrame.py

Let's say for convenience sake that you're going to use a commercial render farm service. They would need to be able to launch your render job with the ability to pipe in the startup python script reference.

You would upload the folder as a Zip file, set the render job for frames 1-100. Then the animation job would be distributed between however many render nodes the service uses, or however many you opt to pay for.

Each frame render runs the internal script and sets up the scene for the current frame number and renders out one frame image. At the end of the job you should have 100 rendered images, one for each scene.


Output .obj or other format once per line

My default cube exports to obj just as you wish...

it has just a LF, though not CR+LF (being on linux) maybe your text editor expects CR+LF to recognize new lines: try to see if it supports unix line endings (just LF), or replace LF with CR+LF somehow...


Path Bevel With Different Thickness Along the Vertices

You can use Alt+S to Shrink/Flatten a selected curve point while in edit mode for the curve:

This option is also available from the Toolshelf (T)


I'm new to blender and having a lot of trouble simulating because of bad subdivisions (importing my objects from rhino as OBJs)

The subdivision surface modifier is optimized for meshes that are entirely (for the most part) constructed of quads. Your CAD imports have a lot of uneven topology and tris. This is inevitable when you are working in CAD programs with NURBS and then are forced to convert them to polygons so you can open in Blender (or other mesh based modeling tools). It's why you are getting ugly results with the subsurf modifier.
Here is how cloth simulation works "under the hood" (Straight from the blender docs):

As you can see from the above, accurate simulations depend on even topology so it can compute springs properly.
Unfortunately there is no magic button or export option that will fix your problem. Blender can't natively import NURBS - at some point in the pipeline you are converting from parametric data to polygons and horrible topology is inevitable.
The closest thing to an "easy fix" would be to import your model into ZBrush, and use ZRemesher.
Beyond that, your only other option is to remodel/retopologize the cloth you want to simulate using traditional subd modeling techniques.
Hope this helps.


How can I rename the list of button operators

Docs: https://docs.blender.org/api/current/bpy.types.UILayout.html#bpy.types.UILayout.operator
row.operator("addonname.myop_operator", text=str(x + 1))


How can I use bpy as a module in an IDE?

The blender as a module build is not officially supported which means the blender foundation won't make it available as part of the normal blender releases, which means compiling blender yourself is currently the only way to get a copy of blender as a module.

Graphicall.org is a site that makes custom builds of development and experimental versions of blender available. It could be worth commenting on one of the builds for your system to see if the builder might be persuaded to make a module build available.


Where is Grease Pencil stroke snap mode in UI?

Thank you for posting your question very clearly.
This is the reason why SNAP FIRST and SNAP LAST and LOOSE SNAP exist.
This was recently implemented.
When you START a drawing using the circle snap your drawing will conform to the first and last stroke point when you let go of the draw. If you draw and CLOSE the shape the snap will conform to first point to snap. And obviously if you don´t do any of these, you´ll have LOOSE snap.

I´m glad that you´re reading into this inside the API.
Thank you for your vote for this answer if you find what you were looking for

BFCT_Schiller


Attempting to export as a .OBJ with .mtl, but the resultant .mtl file lacks an actual map

The problem is that the .obj exporter requires a material setup using the Principled Shader in order to write an .mtl with the map_ attributes. Unfortunately the documentation is still work in progress for Blender 2.8, that's why this wasn't previously documented.

The fix for your problems should be to replace the current shader nodes with the Principled Shader and to plug your texture in the base color socket.

Alternatively you can also add the texture by hand. This requires the following line in the .mtl if your texture is in the same directory and called pc2.dds as shown in your screenshot:

map_Kd pc2.dds


Alternative to python list methods for bpy_prop_collection instances? Most interested in sorting

The blender python API is an API over Blender's internal structure. These structures are designed for performance, hence it cannot be influenced directly.

But the developers have made it quite easy, as you can easily create a local list to do more python stuff. But it is not easy to transfer the results back into blender's database.

spline_collection = list(obj.data.splines)
spline_collection.sort(key = lambda x: get_spline_length(x), reverse = True)

Ps same reason why deepcopy does not work as these objects are not fully python. Most objects have a .copy method you can use.


It's generally very unusual to have a non-square UV map, and it's also pretty unusual to have a UV map that isn't based on powers of two. I don't know how you've come up with those numbers but you're almost certainly best off sticking to 128x128 if that's the rough size of texture you're looking at.

The non-square UV map is the reason you're having this problem, and if you really need it, there is a quick fix:

Select everything on the UV map and scale it by the ratio of the map itself. So in your case, S to scale, Y to constrain to the Y-axis, and then type 0.75 (102/136) as the amount and it will correct the distortion.


Object particles fly up, move in the wrong direction

Well, I figured out what caused it. I don't know why (I'm a noob, sorry), but the gravity effector under cloth field weights on the object which I used as a particle caused this. I changed it to 0 and now it works just like I wanted.

Noice. Anyway, sorry for my stupid question.


How to install the latest version of Blender

I don't have any experience the terminal, but you might be able to achieve the same effect by using Steam. Blender can be downloaded for linux on Steam, which should setup a desktop icon as well.

I hope this helps, my experience with linux is rather limited (:


Understanding BMLoops: Does every loop enclose a face?

I believe the problem was that I was adding geometry while I was running the function and it right away included the additional loops that were being created in the background.


Shift + two finger scroll around. You don't need a three-button mouse, as Blender has excellent multi-touch trackpad* support. (You can two-finger scroll to orbit around, and pinch to zoom, too! It even supports horizontal scrolling of header regions/tab bars.)

*Or a Magic Mouse, which is basically a mouse with a trackpad on top. Never actually tried one with Blender, though.


Use Mix Shaders. To the First slot add a Velvet Shader with an almost black color. To the second slot add another Mix Shader. To the second mix shaders First slot add simply an almost black Diffuse shader. To the second mix shaders second slot add a brighter colored Glossy Shader with a high roughness. The second mix shaders Fac value should be low. Experiment with the two Fac values.


You also can just parent them together. Select all Objects you want to group and than press Ctrl + P. All selected objects will now follow the object which was active during the Parenting process.


According to the wiki the family of a meta is defined by its name. Since the names of objects in Blender are automatically generated when duplicating them I don't think it is possible to copy metas into a new family.

There might however be a workaround for what you are trying to do: Select all your metas and copy them to a buffer by pressing [Ctrl+C]. Then convert the metas to a mesh. If you now press [Ctrl+V] the previous metas will be pasted from the buffer and you have your mesh and your metas.


In the view preferences (N), under Display, checking "Box" should do the trick:


You have made two different meshes but they are still parts of the same object. To make a new object, go back in Edit mode, select the separate mesh with L, then press P > Selection, this part will be a new object.

By the way, to create a separate object you don't have to separate the part of the mesh with Y or V, you can just select the part of the mesh you want to separate, then P (separate) > Selection.


Why don't I see an object in UV Editing?

Simply turn on both layers, now only 1 is active.


Click on the top triangle to apply the modifier, or use Ctrl+A.
Remember, you need to be in Object Mode to apply modifiers.


Is it possible to achive classic Z depth type fog or mist in the viewport (3D-view) in Blender 2.8?

Since you're asking about the viewport, looks like volumetrics is the only option for now. It's very fast though and easy if you attach the volume scatter to the world shader.

World tab, check "use nodes"
Shader (Node) editor, select world instead of object
Add volume scatter (try density between 0.01 and 0.1) and plug into volume world node.

Doesn't require volumetrics to be enabled in eevee tab; works better viewing with camera. A super-fast hack in the compositor, at least fast in terms of cpu time, using z buffer (z render output -> divide by a two to  four digit number, add a number between 0 and 1, mix with image render output using lighten or screen) doesn't affect the viewport and doesn't work with DOF.

Good luck!


Rigid body settings to a group as a whole

Join objects together. Select objects you want to join then press Ctrl+J.


Donut tutorial : Unexpected lighting behavior

It looks as though your wall is looking the wrong way. Have you tried rotating it by 180 degrees?
For future reference, read up on the topic "normals"
Edit:
Ok, I got it now, sorry for the false lead earlier:
You plugged the texture for the brick wall relief directly into the normal port of your shader.
You need to put a "Bump"-Node (Add-> Vector -> Bump) in between, like so:


How to fix the bone influencing other meshes

In Edit mode, select the vertex, open the N panel, you'll see if the vertex is part of a vertex group it is not supposed to be part of, you can remove if from this group if you press the X button.

Blue doesn't mean the selected bone or group has no influence on these vertices, it might be a very low influence, to check the real zero influence in Weight Paint mode you need to display the Zero Weight option of the Viewport Overlays.


Exported model from Blender has holes when imported in Unity

Unity does Backface culling by default whereas Blender only does it on request. The issue is that the normals are flipped. If you want to turn on Backface culling in Blender it is in the Properties panel.

Here I have removed a face from the default cube.

and now with Backface culling enabled.

You can see through the faces that are facing outwards. To fix this, i.e. making a room, you can flip the normals so the faces face inwards.


Cannot see Texture and Shader option in Compositor

The texture and shader options are only available in the shader node editor, whereas you are in the compositing editor:


How to make "Weight Paint" affect all vertices, even those with zero weight?

A smooth deformation of a bunch of vertices is always due to a balancing between 2 or more different weight assignements: if a vertex is weighted to a vertex group only, it will move with its relative bone rigidly and exactly, even if the weight is 0.00000001. Instead, if it has some weight relatively to two (or more) vertex groups, the movement is calculated making a comparision between the two values, with an automatic normalization; normalisation means that if one value is 0.001 and the other is 0.009, they are treated as 0.1 and 0.9 and their sum will be treated as 1.0.

So it's importany to analyze all weights, in your case not only head bone but neck bone also. If you select a weighted vertex in edit mode, you will find in the "N" properties panel a "vertex weights" tab in which you can inspect all weights and have a better understanding of the behaviour.

To solve your problem you will have to give some weight to the neck vertex group, so that vertices near the neck will be pushed to two different actions: the head bone will try to move them while the neck bone will try to make them stay in place.

Image is 2.79 but 2.81 is the same.


Under the assumption of right angles somewhere in the structure you can rotate a cube to match the angles on the picture and work from there. You should make yourself familiar with the "local" axis of an object.


Cycles Render Lighting Glitch While Using Transparent Normals Map

From what I'm seeing in other discussions about this around the web (1, 2), Substance Designer embeds a height map in the alpha channel of the normal map PNG. In other words, the way Allegorithmic is using it in their normal maps "alpha" means height/bump, not transparency.

Theoretically this is convenient because only one PNG needs to be loaded into memory to provide both height and normal data. In practice some render engines, including Cycles will be confused by this, as Cycles quietly passes the alpha channel along with the RGB data. Cycles does not anticipate RGBA data being fed into a normal input socket - it expects RGB only.

The way to strip that out is by using a Separate RGB node, followed by a Combine RGB node. Then you can connect that RGB normal data as usual.

If you will be doing this often you might want to Group these nodes together and save that group in your startup .blend.

Now what about that alpha channel containing the height data? Let's not let it go to waste. Here's how to use both height and normal data together in Cycles.

Remember to specify that the image texture is of the type "Non-Color Data".


Quick answer: move your solidify modifier above your subdivision modifier, and give the soldify modifier an edge crease:

Bottom layer: your original.  Selected: my recommendation.  Top: Your object without any modifiers, but with a wireframe.
So the problem here isn't really with your solidify, but with your subdivision, and how it interacts with the shapes you've given it.  It's the subdivision that's pinching, and the solidify is only making that pinch much more apparent.  If you look at the problem area, you're going to see that it's getting screwed up by a quad that is almost degenerate (three verts lie on a line, ie a 180 degree corner), and the only thing making it not degenerate is that it's out of plane with the rest of the quad.  It looks like you're trying to force quad topology onto something without thinking about other characteristics of good topology, and you're paying the price for that.  (This is pretty normal in my experience; the first thing people learn about topology is "Quads!" before they can even say why, and it takes a while to learn anything else.)
What would good topo be for this?  Maybe something like this:

By changing the edge flow, I can maintain quad topology, without any degenerate quads, at the price of a nearly-planar 3-pole.  And we lose that pinch.


What does the fourth parameter that 'diffuse_color' takes in Blender 2.9 do?

Diffuse_color take 4 parameters as RGBA
red, green, blue, alpha
mat.diffuse_color = (red_v, grn_v, blu_v, alpha_v)  # viewport color


Cloth simulation for game engine doesn't get animated despite Shape Keys have been created

Maybe Unity is importing the .fbx from the .blend in wrong ways (Unity imports .blend files as .fbx under the hood).
I downloaded your .blend file, exported manually to .fbx and I can see the cloth waving in Unity3D.

I'm using Blender 2.79 and Unity3D 2017.3.0f2.

Try as follows:

In Object mode select both mesh and armature

Select File -> Export -> FBX
Disable Add Leaf Bones

Import the .fbx file into Unity

Animations in action


Go to File Format and choose FFmpeg vid – this opens the proper encoding options.


Answering my own question after the issue went away without any intended action.
The bug tracking tool at https://developer.blender.org/ is a better source of information for such issues: a search for "blenderkit" reveals that other users had similar issues (not working, not displayed, even crashed), but many of these trouble tickets were then abandoned by the reporter.
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Process/Bug_Reports and https://youtu.be/JTD0OJq_rF4 are great sources on what to consider while debugging/reporting.


Cannot Render in Cycles - "No Render Output Node In Scene" error

As others said, it seems you tried compositing nodes, but then deleted them. But, you probably forgot to uncheck "use nodes"!

If you "use nodes", you need to have an output node!

You could just disable this setting, and leave "compositing" enabled. It should work.


Inverse fuction to "Rip Region" to heal disconected faces

There is the Weld modifier (since 2.82) for non-destructive workflow.

You can use a vertex group to limit it's influence.


Can you keyframe effects in grease pencil? If so how?

There are dots beside most of the fields in effects, just like in modifiers. Clicking on the dot will insert a keyframe for that property.
Also hovering over the field and pressing I also inserts a keyframe for the value. This works in shaders too.


"Adjust edit cage to modifier result " what does this do (with Mirror Modifier)?

WRT to Mirror modifier in 2.8 beta

In modelling I was using this feature with respect to the "MIRROR" modifier. Turning on "adjust edit cage to modifier result" basically Makes vertices and edges appear on the other side(instead of a plane surface) and also turns on the Selected part on the Mirroring side as well . Eg: If you select a vertex on the right side of the Symmetry, this feature will also highlight the Vertex on the Mirroring side.


BGE: unwanted patterns in ground texture from repeated, seamless image

It is the nature of a grid to repeat the same pattern in a recognizable way. What you need is something that breaks the pattern.

Adding variations to the size does not really help as our brain can easily handle different scales.

Changing rotation can help more as long as the rotation is good enough. But this usually breaks the "seamless".

You can add variations by using more than one tile type. When you have 5+ with random order the repetition is much less noticeable.

Another option is to combine different tiles. This means you mix different tiles to confuse our brain. The repetition of the different "layers" should have a different scale. This way you can get easily a large field with just a few texture tiles that does not look repetitive (like dirt on the ground).

These are just a few ideas.


How can I hide part of a mesh in edit mode and let it hidden in object mode?

To hide vertices of one object both in Object and Edit modes and to be able to hide / unhide other ones while working I think you shold use Mask modifier.

From manual:

  The Mask modifier allows vertices of an object to be hidden dynamically based on vertex groups.

Create a vertex group, assign desired vertices to it, and choose it in modifier's options. You can add multiple modifiers to the mesh to dynamically manage hidden parts.
Don't apply the modifier as the hidden geometry won't be unhidden after that.

Note that to see effect of modifier in Edit mode you have to turn on Adjust edit cage to modifier's result button in the modifier's panel.

If you have different objects located one near another you can use Local View:

  Local view isolates the selected object or objects, so that they are the only ones visible in the viewport. This is useful for working on objects that are obscured by other ones, or have heavy geometry.

To enter / exit Local View press Numpad Slash. Note that when in Local View other objects won't be seen / selectable.

Combined with Mask modifier, this approach may speed up modeling objects placed next to each other.


Why does one of the faces show dotted in editmode?

The last selected faces is known as the Active Face and draws with a Stipple overlay (dots),

This is used to determine which texture to show in the image window, since its possible to UV map multiple images from a single mesh.


Specific view difference between 2.79 and 2.8

You are using the Blender Internal rendering engine, which doesn't exist in 2.80. Therefore the viewport in 2.80 can't render any of the materials you gave the object. In order to render it in 2.80 you have to convert the materials to cycles/eevee materials (both of which are essentially congruent, so there is no difference).


how can I use a brush CUSTOM re-topology?

Strenght Brush = 0 with Constant Detail

I usually take advantage of the Constant Detail dynotopology mode for this task. Basically the detail size does not depend anymore on the brush size on the screen, but it's a function of the Resolution parameter field.

Given that we can set up a brush that deoes nothing (set the Strenght to 0) but modify the topology with the set resolution. With the eyedropper we can easily pick up the resolution of the nearby faces like shown in the image sequence below.

You can restrict the action of the brush to Subdivide only or Collpase only if wanted. There's even the "Detail Flood Fill" button to automatically spread the same amount of resolution across the whole model.


How to compose/ transform 2D object views (front, back, L/R sides, top & bottom) into a single 3D image

I don't think there's any automatic way to do it. You can use your image as a blueprint, create the 3 shapes (top, front and side):

Then extrude them:

Boolean the front and side (Intersect mode):
*
Use top and bottom faces to model the top and bottom of your mesh:


Fudge it via the draw system.

Emulating the frames of an animated gif by using the 4 triangle icons. The simple panel template has been edited to add this "animated" icon to a label.  The icon will step thru its list when the draw is called and panel updated. Mousing over the area, scrolling the area etc will tick the animation.

import bpy

class LayoutDemoPanel(bpy.types.Panel):
    """Creates a Panel in the scene context of the properties editor"""
    bl_label = "Layout Demo"
    bl_idname = "SCENE_PT_layout"
    bl_space_type = 'PROPERTIES'
    bl_region_type = 'WINDOW'
    bl_context = "scene"
    i = 0
    icons = ['TRIA_RIGHT',
             'TRIA_DOWN',
             'TRIA_LEFT',
             'TRIA_UP']

    @classmethod
    def icon(cls):
        cls.i += 1
        if cls.i >= len(cls.icons):
            cls.i = 0
        return cls.icons[cls.i]

    def draw(self, context):
        layout = self.layout
        layout.label("Anim %d" % self.i, icon=self.icon())

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

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

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

Ok that's not too impressive, need some way to tie it to time better.  As an example  redraw the properties area on a frame change. Run code and start an animation to see effect.

import bpy

def redraw_props(scene):
    for a in bpy.context.screen.areas:
        if a.type == 'PROPERTIES':
            a.tag_redraw()

bpy.app.handlers.frame_change_post.append(redraw_props)


Why do CG artists often sculpt the head first?

The head is usually the focal point of a character and is therefore the most detailed part.

The head is often sculpted separately to allow for higher subdivision/detail when sculpting, before retopologising, although with dyntopo this isn't so necessary. Many artists may also want to focus on the head to get a good feel for the character/get the character right before continuing with the body.

It is worth noting that this isn't always the case, from what I observe its usually personal preference. If I start with just a head its usually because I was doing a quick bust and decided to turn it into a full character because I liked where it was going.


How can I rig telescopic parts to move one at a time?

It's actually rather simple to achieve this with Transformation constraints. The key is that your reference of where to get the target transformations from is not a helper bone, but the end bone (the last element) of your telescope. You can check out this blend file here:

Move the bone Segment.1 along the Y axis (I've locked the other axes anyways) to see the effect. It should be exactly what you can see in this little animation here:

Please note that I've made the size of each segment slightly different, so you can see what you're doing when the rig is fully compressed. The transformations I'm referring to however are in this example always constant distances of 0.3. You'll see soon that you're absolutely free as of what distances each segment has though.

Start with creating the armature, and then the segment bones in Edit Mode. Make sure that all segment bones are within the same location, that means you're 'modelling' the compressed state of your rig now. Then parent each segment to a main bone to be able to move the rig around later. Do not create parent/child relationships between the segments themselves.

The rig at this point looks something like this (without constraints yet, we add them in the next step):

Now, select the 'tip' bone (the one which you will transform when animating the rig), in my case that's Segment.1, and then Shift select the first bone that should follow with a delay, that's Segment.2, and press Ctrl + Shift + C to bring up the Constrains menu. Choose Transformation from there. On the child bone, You should see something like this now in the bone constraints tab:

You have a Source section, a Destination section, and a Transform Space section. Transform Space needs to be local in this example, so we want to read and set the bone channels in their own local space. Important are now the Source and Destination fields. On the source and the destination, we tell Blender to check for a Location. Then, we fill in the field for the Y-axis. Min and Max that is. We do the same for the destination. The values in the screenshot now tell Blender the following:

  If the user moves the tip bone, and the local Y value of the tip bone is inbetween 0.3 and 1.2, move the destination bone inbetween 0.0 and 0.9.

That means, you need to translate the source bone to local 0.3 in Y first, before the Transformation constraint does anything at all. Then, while inbetween 0.3 and 1.2, it translates the child bone from 0.0 to 0.9. Why these values? Each segment has a length of 0.3. So that's the lower travel boundary for the first bone. The target value for the second segment therefore has to be TranslationMaxOfTip - LengthOfBone. For the next segment, the constraint is the same (we stil reference the tip bone), but we have to move the bone only if the tip is inbetween 0.6 and 1.2, and from 0.0 to 0.6. Do this for all succeeding bones, same constraint, just altering the limits.

Your values will be different, but the concept is the same.


Can the scale tool show me the real size of the object instead of a 1 - 0 scale?

Are you looking for the Dimensions in 3D view > Tool shelf (N)?

You can also change the units these values are represented in. By default they are displayed in "blender units" (BU), which are equal to meters. To do this, adjust the settings in Properties > Scene > Units:

I should also point out that the Scale of an object is not limited to 0-1. For example:

A scale of 1 = no distortion
A scale of 2 = twice as large
A scale of -1 = inverted

The Scale object property is really factor by which you can non-destructively shrink or stretch the object in any given axis without modifying the mesh.

It's useful to know this, as it can result in some unexpected results if you are unaware of what scale is actually doing. See my answer here for more detail.


How can I copy or print errors from the console?

As of version 2.77 there is a new built-in 'Reports to Text Block' operator, which basically copies all entries of the Report Console into a newly created text block per execution:

However, saving errors to a text file automatically is might be too complex for a tester to setup (IMO). I'd suggest ask the developer for implementing a debug system. Otherwise you can copy errors and warnings from the terminal output with ease by running Blender via command line.

Linux

1. Run Blender via Command Line

Open a Terminal (Ctl+Alt+T), navigate to the directory where Blender is installed, and run Blender.

cd <blender installation directory>
./blender

This will run Blender with the Terminal window:

Depending on your Window Manager (Gnome, Unity, KDE etc.) you can edit your Launcher or Starter to open up Blender with the command line automatically by setting the 'Terminal flag' to true:

blender.desktop (Ubuntu, Unity)

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Blender
Exec=/opt/blender-2.77a/blender %F
Icon=/opt/blender-2.77a/icons/scalable/apps/blender.svg
MimeType=application/x-blender
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=true
Type=Application
...

2. Copy the Output, Errors or Warnings

Switch to the Terminal, select the text, then RMB and select 'Copy':

Alternatively you can also redirect the output to a text file when using the command line:

./<blender installation directory>/blender &> ~/mylogfile.txt

Windows

1. Run Blender via Command Prompt

Open the Command Prompt (click Start or hit Win on the keyboard and then type cmd), navigate to the directory where Blender is installed, and then run Blender:

cd c:\<blender installation directory>
blender.exe

This will run Blender with the Terminal window:

You can create a batch file, this opens up Blender via Command Prompt automatically:

  A batch file is a kind of script file in DOS, OS/2 and Windows. It consists of a series of commands to be executed by the command line interpreter, stored in a plain text file

blender.bat

"c:\<blender installation directory>\blender.exe"

2. Copy the Output, Errors or Warnings

Switch to the Command Prompt. RMB > Mark to enable text selection, hit Enter to copy:

Alternatively you can  you can also redirect the output to a text file when using the command line:

c:\<blender installation directory>\blender.exe > %homepath%\mylogfile.txt

Further reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command-line_interface
https://www.codecademy.com/articles/command-line-commands


How to exactly flip an object along an axis?

To flip an object on an axis, select the mesh, press s for scaling, and then press the axis you want to flip on (x, y, z). Type -1 to flip.


How to generate a deformed mesh based on applied texture

You can use a Displace Modifier to do this.

From the wiki:

  The Displace modifier displaces vertices in a mesh based on the intensity of a texture. Either procedural or image textures can be used. The displacement can be along a particular local axis, along the vertex normal, or the separate RGB components of the texture can be used to displace vertices in the local X, Y and Z directions simultaneously.

For example:


Viewport background images disappeared when .blend file closed and opened

Some things to check for that would impact the visibility of your background images, besides being in the proper type of view (orthographic, as distinguished from perspective view) include the following.

If you used the background images panel in the properties shelf of the 3D viewport, are the background image files still on your computer in the same place as they were when you loaded them?

If the images are in the same location, is the background images panel activated in the new instance of Blender into which you loaded your previously saved file?

Are you looking at the right view in the 3D viewport? An image is only visible if Blender thinks it is looking at the same view, so that if you used the facility to rotate the image in any direction from one of the six background image views, even if you rotate it back to the original view, Blender will still think it's in a user view, and the image will not be visible. Try pressing the numpad keys for the view for which you have background images located: for example, if you have a top view, press the  Numpad-7 key; a left view, press CTRL-Numpad-3 .

It might expedite getting an answer if you upload your blend file to blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com, and edit your question to provide a link to the blend file.


Why does my bathroom mirror distort so much?

Reflective and refractive surfaces are very dependent on the surface Normal. Make sure the Normal is pointing in the right direction (outwards) and that the surface is set to Smooth or Flat shading as appropriate (in this case it should be Flat).


Script to remove faces with significantly different normals

A script to select verts based on the angle between normal and radial vector.

An alternative script than the one shown in question link.

In the case where the object is spherical, , after changing the object origin to the centre of the base ring if hemisphere (or where sphere centre would be), can then check the angle between vert  normal and vert coordinate (since vert.co is  also the vector from (0, 0, 0) origin). If it was a perfect sphere, all these angles would be zero.

Test script to run in edit mode. (In vertex selection mode) Change the 90 degree value of angle_check = radians(90) to suit.  The script only selects verts with an angle of norm to radial outside angle_check.

import bpy
import bmesh
from math import radians
context = bpy.context
obj = context.edit_object
me = obj.data
bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)
angle_check = radians(90)
for v in bm.verts:
    v.select = v.normal.angle(v.co) > angle_check

'''
# or by faces
for f in bm.faces:
    f.select = f.normal.angle(f.calc_center_median()) > angle_check

'''
bm.select_flush(False)
me.update()


How to put an Image Texture over a material in Cycles

So I appreciate the related links. I was able to tinker around with my setup and get the image texture to appear over my material below.

I needed to:

Add another Mix Shader Node
Plug the result of the material shader to its shader slot
Then I added a text coordinate connected the UV slot to an Image Texture
Opened my Uvimage in the image text. node
Added a Diffuse BSDF and connected Image Text to that
Then connected Diffuse BSDF to the new Mix shader
Then connected the alpha slot of the Image Text to Fac slot on the new Mix Shader (to take into account the png image's transparent background)


How can I disable the info pop up in Blender?

Preferences > Interface

You'll see a checkbox in the Display section labeled "Tooltips". Uncheck it.

By the way, even with Tooltips disabled, you can still view them on an as-needed basis by holding Alt before hovering over an interface item.


Select the armature, go to properties/armature/bone layers and shift click on every layer to search all the bones of the skeleton. Uncheck the "shapes" option to turn off custom shapes.


How to orbit previously weight painted vertices in Blender?

You are looking at this operation here :

Weight Paint mode

Go to Navigation panel on the 3d View
Go to View Section.
Turn on lock to cursor.
I suggest installing the "Enhanced 3d Cursor" add-on so you can snap the cursor to the mesh surfaces.
Now your viewport camera is locked to the location of the 3d Cursor.

In Edit Mode

Go to View Menu on your 3d View Panel
Look for "View Selected"
Now your viewport perspective/orthographic view will rotate around the selected object.


It's right there for me in 2.72:

For the squigglyness, try changing the length option in the redo panel (F6):


Is it possible to do this kind of wavy texture procedurally?

This node setup (be careful on second mapping node scale)

create this wave on plane.

You can use scale, distortion and detail on noise and musgrave nodes to get desired waves shape. Amplitude frame, multiply node factor change wave scale.


Combining Generated Textures for Displacement Modifier on Plane

I don't think you can use textures through the compositor or materials for displacement. But, the effect you're trying achieve by just using two displacement modifiers, one for each texture. There are other ways, but they require using the Cycles engine.


It is quite simple. In the Fluid Obstacle settings, check Export Animated Mesh.

Also, make sure the obstacle is not set as Volume, or concave areas won't work as expected.


CPU vs CUDA performance differ in render and rendered display

If you are rendering with a CPU smaller tile values like 16x16 ( keep them square ) will be fastest. With a GPU larger ones like 256x256 work better. This is due to the way they make calculations. So just ticking the box and set it to GPU without changing this value will make it slower than it can be. Since viewport render is the whole screen the GPU will be faster because the "tile" is bigger


Short version: Render it out and make a Sprite Animation.
Long version:
Click on the Faces, where you draw the with your animation, of your Object.
Say "Object by selected". Now you have a extra Object.
Take the Camera and fix it to your Animation.
Render the whole GreasePencil Animation out. Just the GreasePencil. Use the Transparent Shader.
Create a Sprite Image, based on your rendered images.
Import your everything in Unity.
Give your Mesh the normal Materials and the FaceObject is a Sprite Image.
I learned it here.
https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-28-game-character-creation/learn/lecture/14405776#notes
I hope that helped:)


You can use the NewTek MDD and PC2 formats (though you may have to enable their separate addons in the user preferences to get those import/export formats to appear).

This can be used in conjunction with the 'Mesh Cache' modifier to play back a sequence of external meshes:

There also appears to be a script to import .obj sequences as well, which tends to be a more common format, found here at BlenderArtists, but I am not  sure of any potential limitations it may have.


Which deform modifier, if any, would do this?

There is more of an indirect approach using the curve deform modifier.

Suppose I want o apply it a jagged circular line,I don't model it as a circular line,I model it as a normal line then deform it on a circle to become circular.

Here is the original object:

Select the circle(curve) and the object as the circle the active.
Press Ctrl+P then Curve deform
Now you have the circular shape (you can make it taller to completely fit).

To the main answer of the question:

All you have to do is changing the tilt of the curve.

Note:If the rotation of the object is nor deformed right,you have yo change the axis of deformation from the curve deform modifier.


Blender rna_xml serialize node_trees and import

After studying the source code of that module I realized that it is unable to create new Node objects since it only assigns attributes to pre-existing structures.

I decided to get around that problem by having a collection of materials in another scene in the same .blend file. Hacky as hell but it works.


Have light cast on an object visible, but the the object to be invisible

I know you want it in Cycles, though you can do it using Eevee:

The node setting:

The key point is to use "diffuse" and "shader to rgb" (the left part). This is some kind of preshading that allow to test the light intensity. This result is then tuned through a colorramp to mix between the lighted and transparent parts.


2D Animation: Drawing new strokes makes the existing layer disappear?

lol i figured it out. my lines and fills were locked.


can you supply an image?  I made one with Gimp, that is png with alpha and had no problem.  Not sure it is png24 or not.

Yes, I'm using the 'Import as images' addon.
That one worked too.


Increasing size of uv map within blender

As Mr Zak mentioned, the UV map represents points in Texture Space that range from 0.0 to 1.0 and this cannot be changed. However, from your question it appears that you have a UV mapping that relates to an existing image and you want to make some additional space - presumably to add additional faces.

If this is the case then you can resize the image in an external application (for example, in Gimp you could use the Canvas Size option to increase the canvas to 200% in each direction, leaving the original unchanged and some 'blank' space to the right, top and top-right.

When you re-import this image back into Blender the 'islands' obviously no longer match up - since they are still positioned in the original locations in the 0.0 to 1.0 UV texture space but the image is now twice as large (and so the relevant parts of the image are half the size in relating to the mapping).

To address this you simply need to accurately resize the UV mapping (rather than trying to line it up by hand) and you can use the editing tools to achieve this.

Select all faces in the 3D view in Edit mode (Tab). Then in the UV Editor window, select all with A. Open the Properties panel with N and set the Cursor Location to the corner of the UV map relating to where you've positioned your original image (eg, top-left (0.0,1.0), top-right (1.0,1.0), bottom-left (0.0,0.0), bottom-right (1.0,0.0)).

Next set the Rotation/Scaling pivot point (in the toolbar at the bottom of the UV Editor window) to 2d Cursor - this will make the scaling relative to the Cursor Location you have just set.

Next, to accurately rescale your UV map to your 200% rescaled image you need to resize it to 50% - so press S, type '0.5', press Enter.

Since the image was rescaled to 200% and the UV map coordinates are scaled to 50% the UV mapping and the image islands should match up - as they were before rescaling.


How to delete or hide reflections, bounces and refractions from a geometry on render?

To prevent an object from appearing as a reflection on other objects, uncheck  Glossy  under Ray Visibility in the Object tab:


Glow effect invisible on transparent background

There is a fundamental problem with glows. Glow cannot be merged into a composite with alpha, because such layer is then composited using the 'mix/normal' color operation. What you need is having the glow separate and combine it with add/dodge. Here is the explanation:

If the Glow layer (foreground) is lighter than Background, the Normal/Mix color operation with alpha will not be as bright as original Add operation with alpha. If the Background is lighter than the glow (a color glow on white) - the end result will be darker than Background leaving unwanted effect!

That's why you never ever ever composite color glows into a single merged layer with alpha that's supposed to be overlayed with Mix/Normal mode over some other than complete black background.

Now let's say you have object with a color glow on black background and you need to make this background transparent. Here is how you correctly do it:

You break down the image into channels and use each channel as alpha for a solid red green and blue - what this is is separating the background per channel. As it is black the alpha of the background is 0. You then add the colored channels with alpha together to reconstruct the image. Simple.

With nodes when adding the channels together turn Include alpha of second input on:


How do I bake both the paint texture and sculpted effects into one normal?

if i understood you, i think you have to bake both as normal maps separately, and then save the images that you got and then open a image editor like photoshop or gimp and then set to overlay mode the first layer and then join them and export it to png or other image format, and then setup the normal in your node editor.


Restrict HDRI Lighting to affecting certain places

Found the answer, For Cycles this node setup using the geometry node is to be used for making the object transparent on one side and completely opaque/diffused on the other, flipping the normals will help switch the sides and determine which side has which shader


Having a photorealistic earth in the background of an animation

First, know that the physical phenomenons that come in place in the Earth's atmosphere (including those that come at the edge between day and night) are rather complicated. So if you want to do realistic "GRAVITY-style" CGI, you have a lot of work, certainly much more than what you did with your satellite.
If for some reason you don't want to simply use a single high-res photo of a low orbit view as the background and want to make it with as much CG as possible here's what you can start with :

the Earth's texture has to be focused on a particular area, or else you will waste a ton of memory or simply have a pixelated result.
I suggest using OpenTopography to generate color and heightmap, because at this zoom level you should also see the displacement of the mountains.
for the clouds layer I don't know of a better way than using an image like this, although it will not give very realistic results, since again at this zoom level you should see them in 3D and very sharp. You could even see the projection of their shadow in the atmosphere itself, which if you want to do that using volume scattering will explode your render time.
for the day-night shift, you'd have to simulate the red twilight in some way.
Unfortunately I don't think there's any tutorial on that but if you know your nodes you can get something close.


Blender Python: Where do I get an Image with all the indices for the edges and faces of a cube?

Blender doesn't normally display the indices information but it does have a debugging feature that can display them. To enable debugging you type bpy.app.debug = True into blender's python console. Once enabled you will find an indices option in the mesh display panel of the properties region (press N to show the region) while in edit mode. Only the indices of selected items will be shown and your selection mode will define whether vertex, edge or face info will be displayed.


Rotate a group of 6 objects to align 3 points (each on a different object) on a plane

Select all blocks and enter edit mode (TAB), change pivot point to active element.

then enter vertex select mode (number one on horizontal numbers on keyboard above Q)
Select all verts and click on one of the bottom verts so you have that one as active. Press 1 on number pad (right numbers). Use move tool (G) and right after press Z to move blocks down to where you want. Now while still in front view (that you set by pressing 1 on number pad) press R to rotate your blocks until one of the other 2 verts are aligned with the plain. Then switch to side view (number 3 on your number pad) and rotate again until 3rd vert is aligned


Why isn't the Loop tool add-on turning the selection into a circle?

Currently the Influence is set to 0%. If you increase it to 100% the selected vertices will form a circle.


Import the classes, use their draw method.

If you enable developer tools in preferences you can right click in the UI and choose view source.  Doing this for the cycles render panels you will see the classes are defined in ui.pyof the cycles addon.  Can import them with

from cycles.ui import CYCLES_RENDER_PT_sampling, CYCLES_RENDER_PT_sampling_advanced

Note: some areas have their own context members.  Eg PROPERTIES might use context.speaker for the data panel of a speaker object. This may lead to errors using the method outlined here.

Test run in text editor

Test code.

import bpy
from cycles.ui import CYCLES_RENDER_PT_sampling, CYCLES_RENDER_PT_sampling_advanced

class TEST_OT_popup(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = 'test.popup'
    bl_description = 'test'
    bl_label = 'test'
    bl_options = {'UNDO'}

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls, context):
        return CYCLES_RENDER_PT_sampling.poll(context)

    def invoke(self, context, event):
        return context.window_manager.invoke_props_dialog(self, width=250)

    def execute(self, context):
        return {'FINISHED'}

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

        CYCLES_RENDER_PT_sampling.draw(self, context)
        layout.label(text="Advanced")
        CYCLES_RENDER_PT_sampling_advanced.draw(self, context)

# for testing
def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(TEST_OT_popup)

register()
bpy.ops.test.popup('INVOKE_DEFAULT')


Using VSE. Rendered video and now nothing is showing up.

In order for overlays to actually overlay existing video, you need to add an effects strip to tell Blender how to mix it. Generally I use the alpha over strip, but there are other options like alpha under, add, subtract, etc).

Otherwise, the VSE takes the top most strip and uses that. Without the effect strip all you'll see is the overlay and nothing but black.

Now if you had some B-roll or stock footage or images that will cover the whole screen, then you wont need a effect strip. Just make sure it's in a higher channel than any other video channel.


Set origin point to the center of circle?

If you select the circle and then press shift-s then a pie menu comes up. You can then press cursor to selection. This should put the 3d cursor in the center. If not, then your circle's origin is in the wrong spot. You can fix this bye, in object mode, press object with the circle selected. The object button is towards the top right. After you press this a dropdown will appear and you can hover over set origin, and then press origin to geometry. This will set the origin to the center of the object. Then you can repeat the step to set the 3d cursor to the selection and then the 3d cursor should be in the center of your circle. Hope this helps!


How to make semi-glossy emissions material?

I think this should be what you are looking for:

Its pretty much self explanatory: You use the facing node to add shadows and glossy reflections. If you need the gloss to be face-on, you just have to invert the ramp.


When removing doubles from the imported mesh the normals split in a custom way aren't preserved, making some dark patches to appear. Probably some of split normals were saved while others weren't because removing doubles doesn't choose to preserve given vertex just because it stores some custom data.

In anyway if removing doubles make sure to remove imported normals as well. That will make model lose its look as it was done before exported though.

If the lost shading is important and irretrievable possible solutions can be to manually join double vertices to control which vertex goes where (long way) or recreating shading as it was before removing normals (may be even longer).

Another way would be to duplicate the object before removing custom split normals, remove doubles,  work with it and once done use Data Transfer modifier to copy normals from one mesh to another.

Adding another layer of custom normals with "Add Custom Split Normals  Data" in the Geometry rollout can eliminate the problem but this solution doesn't seem to be stable as it works somehow differently for different objects.


Problem rendering at the end of rigid body animation with script

I assume you are using Blender 2.79, it may not work.
But in Blender 2.80, this is how I would do:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    bpy.ops.screen.animation_play()
    write_image()

Does the issue persist with Blender 2.80?


How do we use Stereo audio with the AAC codec?

It turns out the problem was not with Blender, but with the player I was using to view my videos (JetAudio) which didn't employ the AAC codec correctly. When testing with VLC, the videos and audio work correctly so, in this case, Blender was not at fault.


How to connect two different Textures on the same faces with a transparent background?

You should not add shaders in this situation. If you add shaders, one reflects all the light according to it's properties, but then everything that another one reflects according to its properties gets added to the result. In reality, that does not happen with a material that only has a few different colors. You should use the Mix Shader node in this case, or if it is only a color, you should only mix the color of the shader, instead of a copy of that exact same shader with a different color.

How you mix everything depends on what you want to achieve.

It would make a whole lot more sense to have the triangles on the right color and in one texture in the first place, but let's just say only for learning purposes the task is to add two triangles one on top another and for some unknown, but very important reason they need to be on black backgrounds in the textures, but the color of the material needs to be white.

You would need to make a black and white mask for each of the triangles to separate them from the background. Let's use Math node set to Greater Than mode with a small value for this, so we make all brighter than the small value colors show white. Both triangles need to be mixed on top of your desired color using Mix RGB node. Note that one Mix RGB node has white in it that is the new white background:

Edit:
I just noticed you have one shader with different metallic value. It would make more sense to have the colors in one texture and just a grey-scale map for that single metallic property that is different.

There is nothing mysterious about using grey-scale map for something. Think of it like using a single value, like you are now, just for different parts of the material defined by the texture file. You have metallic value 0 and 1.0 so you only need completely black and completely white in the map. What will be the most convenient way for you to make it depends on how you make the textures. If it is in some external painting software like Krita or Photoshop, or Gimp, you would just make sure you make one image with white instead of the yellow line and black instead of everything else. Then you would just drag and drop the image into the nodes of the material and plug it into the Metallic input.


It sounds to me like you're using the modifier but not applying it. If you click "Apply" on the subdivision surface modifier, it'll apply the modifier to the mesh and you should be able to see the difference in edit mode; after


I have a seam in 'Shade Smooth' mode that I can't fix

Its caused by the subdivision modifier being used before the mirror modifier. Click and hold on the 6 dots by the top right of the modifier and drag the mirror modifier above the subdivision mod.
I am not 100% sure why having them in the wrong order makes that line appear, but changing the order fixed it for me. Also, it appears the line gets more pronounced the more subdivisions you have.


Every emission object is darker than it should be

In your render settings check your clamping (set direct and indirect to 0) also check exposure, should be 1.


How to add View-port colour and View-port specular to object in cycle render.?

what you have is this:

what you want is something like this:

what you miss is two things:

There is no light source in the scene. You can have lamps like in the following screenshot, ore use an image in the world background (yours is monochrome), or combine both.

the material setup only has a diffuse shader to it. This shader will only return diffuse color information, so specular lights won't show up anyways, no matter what you try. Mix the shader with for example a Glossy shader, which catches some reflection:

from here you can take it to however sophisticated you want. Add fresnel, maps, vertex colors, whatnot, but without proper material setup and proper lighting, no scene can look cool  :)


Move/Scale/Rotate Edge to Create New Faces?

After pressing E to Extrude, immediately press S to Scale or R to Rotate. Moving/Grabbing along the face normal is the default behavior after extruding, as you probably know. Scaling and rotation happens relative to whatever Pivot method you are currently using.

Also, you might benefit from knowing about click-extrusion. To do this hold Ctrl and LClick where you want the vertex, edge, or face to be extruded to. The angle of the originally selected geometry gets repositioned to make the extrusion smoother.


If you add two shape keys without the new shape key from mix option, you can animate them separately. It is Important is that you keyframe the 2nd part of the animation with influence 0 for the duration of the first part. This way the 2nd part does not start before it is supposed to do.

Editing the shape for extrusion: In Edit Mode a loopcut is added at the top of the extruded cube to create the geometry required for the second part of the animation.


Is there a quick way to copy the Object Name to the Mesh Data Name?

My answer is a tip rather than a true solution, but it may save your time a bit. Instead of copying and pasting you may just click on the object's icon and drag it to the mesh datablock window.


How to move bone to the object position?

You should be able to:

Switch to object mode
Select the sphere
Object -> Snap -> Cursor to Selected
Select the bone/armature
Object -> Snap -> Selection to Cursor

This will move the entire armature so its origin is at the center of the sphere.

If you want to move the bone without affecting the armature origin (or if you have a multi-bone armature and only want to move one bone), then:

As above, set the cursor to the sphere's origin.
After selecting the armature, switch to edit mode and select the target bone.
If there are multiple bones in armature, make sure the target bone is disconnected (AltP -> Disconnect Bone)
Armature -> Snap -> Selection to Cursor


This is not a clipping issue. Clipping error would make it look like you had sliced off the front or back of the mesh in a plane perfectly parallel with the screen, not making things look like they were in front of other things.
The node setup is incorrect:

The texture coordinates for that hair thing should NEVER be reflection. Disconnect that, and leave it (it will default to the UV map, which is what you want). Reflection texture coronets make it look as if the mesh is reflecting whatever the texture is.
Emission has nothing to do with things being shaped differently, which is why I think you connected to it. Emission is for things that glow.
You have an extra copy of the Head’s diffuse color texture, which can be deleted.

It also looks as if you may be using alpha blend for your material alpha settings. Use alpha hashed instead, as alpha blend can have sorting issues which would make things appear in front of other things arbitrarily.