Duplicating Objects with Rigid Body Settings

Kudos to Jacques Lucke for actually providing the solution in the comments above.
There are two conditions for an object to be considered in rigid body simulations:
A) Settings
The object has to include the actual settings for physics, accessible in the Physics tab of the Property area.
If you use Animation Nodes' Object Instancer to duplicate an object which already is set up for rigid body physics, then these settings will only be duplicated if Copy Full Object is selected.

B) Group
Blender does only simulate objects which are in a special group called Rigid Body World. Enabling rigid body physics on an object in Blender's native interface does automatically create such a group, assign it to the scene (visible in the Scene tab of the Properties area) and add the object to that group.
Duplicating an object with Animation Nodes however does not copy that group information. Instanced objects have to be manually added, e.g. with the Object Group Operation node.
To add all instances of an object:

Press Shift+A in the Node Editor and select Subprograms > Loop to add a Loop Input node
Click on New Iterator and type Object List Enter
Press Shift+A again to add the Object > Group Operations node.
In this node, click on the empty field of the first input node and choose the Rigid Body World group, named RigidBodyWorld by default.
(If this group doesn't exist yet then you have to assign physics to some object first.)
Connect the Object output of the Loop Input node with the matching input socket of the Object Group Operations node.
(The Linked checkbox has to be enabled to add the objects to the group, but it should be by default.)

Press Shift+A again, select Subprograms > Invoke Subprogram > My Loop (or however you might have called it) to actually use the loop.
Connect the Objects output socket of your existing Object Instancer node with the Object List input socket of the Invoke Subprogram node.


inconsistent AttributeError when modifying frame_current

Here is an approach using the modal timer operator template.  The modal timer will wait 30 seconds, take screenshot bpy.ops.screen.screenshot() (increment frame).  Stop it with Esc or with a right click.  Change to suit.

import bpy

class ModalTimerOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    """Operator which runs its self from a timer"""
    bl_idname = "wm.modal_timer_operator"
    bl_label = "Modal Timer Operator"

    _timer = None
    # make delay a scene property can be changed in UI
    delay = 30 # wait 30 between screenshots
    count = 0
    frame = 1

    def modal(self, context, event):
        scene = context.scene
        if event.type in {'RIGHTMOUSE', 'ESC'}:
            self.cancel(context)
            return {'CANCELLED'}

        if event.type == 'TIMER':
            if self.count == 0:
                scene.frame_set(self.frame)
                self.frame += 1
                self.count = 1
            elif self.count < self.delay:
                self.count += 1
            else:
                self.count = 0
                print("rendering /tmp/%04d.png" % scene.frame_current)
                bpy.ops.screen.screenshot(filepath="/tmp/%04d.png" % scene.frame_current)
        return {'PASS_THROUGH'}

    def execute(self, context):
        scene = context.scene
        self.frame = scene.frame_current
        # for all in range
        #scene.frame_set(scene.frame_start)
        wm = context.window_manager
        # make the timer tick every second
        self._timer = wm.event_timer_add(1, context.window)
        wm.modal_handler_add(self)
        return {'RUNNING_MODAL'}

    def cancel(self, context):
        wm = context.window_manager
        wm.event_timer_remove(self._timer)

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

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

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

    # test call
    bpy.ops.wm.modal_timer_operator()

Pretty much emulating bpy.ops.screen.screencast(...).


edge slide CTRL E does not work in this usage case, because of the topology. besides the solution provided by Gandalf3, here is a somewhat more complicated alternative which i just keep here as a sidenote:

Select the Face along which you want to move the edge:

Set the 3D Manipulator widget's Transform orientatin to "View"

View -> Align View -> Align View to Active -> Top

Select Edge Select Mode

Select the edges that you want to slide

now you can slide the edges upwards and be sure they slide along the face that you selected in 1. above


Is there any way to disable the mirror modifier temporarily?

Modifiers have a few switches to control them:

The Camera icon enables or disables rendering using the modifier.

The Eye icon toggles visibility on the 3D viewport.

The Dotted Square (or Box) toggles visibility in Edit mode.

The Triangle, when enabled,  will show the final modified geometry in Edit Mode and can be edited directly. (This last option can only be used when visibility in Edit mode has been enabled)

To learn about all of the other options for modifiers please read:

https://www.blender.org/manual/modeling/modifiers/introduction.html#interface

Note that the mirror modifier will affect all of the mesh when enabled. The elements that you don't need to mirror will need to be a separate mesh. There is no way to mark elements of the same mesh not to be affected by the modifier.

You might want to separate the asymmetrical features from the original mesh, then
Apply the modifier to make the symmetric mesh a permanent one, and re-join the two meshes back together.


While DaurteFarrajotaRamos's answer is correct that there is no viewer node by default, Greg Zaal's Node Wrangler addon (which comes bundled with Blender) does implement a veiwer node of sorts in the node editor.

With Node Wrangler on, when you Shift+click a node it will connect it to the Material Output node, making it visible on the object and in the preview rollout pane.  It will connect surface shaders directly to the Surface output, volume shaders directly to the Volume output, and all other datatypes (colors, vectors, and values) will be sent through an emission shader plugged inot the Surface output.


Blender Internal. How do I add a texture for part of the object, while keeping the rest of the texture

One way you could do this is the following:

Add a new material for your object.
Assign the new material to the eyes.
Create a new texture.
In the Shading workspace, add your texture to the new material you created using a Image Texture node.

If you want more in-depth instructions, let me know.


The bones layers are different from the mesh layers. To find your bone layers, you select your armature from the outliner then under the skeleton menu under the properties panel you will find the bones layers there.


How should I link objects from external .blend if they have modifiers?

Usually the approach is to put all the related objects into a group, and then link that group.


Well, I eventually figured it out.

Not quite sure what I was doing wrong, but I'll say what I did and post the .blend file.

Here's the image I ended up with.

It's not perfect, mainly the lighting I think, but I'm pretty happy. It matches the 'cartoony' cloud style I was going for.

I started out just making a simple cloud-shape out of metaballs.

I then more or less copied the node setup above, what I actually used being below:

I then added a subsurf modifier, set to 3, and two displacement modifiers, shown below.

For both displacements, I used an empty called iCloud to control the coordinates. The first texture was a Voronoi, shown below.

The second was a Clouds texture, /.

I then had two suns, one with a strength of 8, and a very slight warm colour. The second was mildly blue, with a strength of 2. They are both pointing down, slighty angled from different sides.

This was my final scene before rendering.

And that's how I ended up with my render! Might be a bit of a drawn out answer, but I know how long I spent desperately trying to find answers, so I wanted to help out anyone else as much as I could.

EDIT: Here is the .blend file.


You are trying to use a brush texture as a displacement texture. That does not work.
If you want to use a texture to displace the object, you need to create one by clicking the "New" Button in the Displace Modifier and then change the settings in the texture menu. Easy to reach with the button to the right.

THERE you can change the texture. This does NOT work with nodes.
Keep in mind: The Texture system in Blender is End-Of-Life and will be replaced at some point with a node based approach. (afaik)


Curving an edge of a polygonal mesh in blender

Is it possible you've simply got too many polygons at too early a stage to get smooth curvatures easily?

This illustration may not be exactly what you're looking for, but shows the kind of variation you can get from a Bevel modifier and subdivision:

Shows the mesh. A 2-segment  Bevel modifier is assigned, by weight. The weights on various edges are adjusted to increase/decrease the intensity of the crease after subdivision (The lower the weight, the sharper the crease, relative to the base bevel width set in the modifier)
Shows the Bevel modifier applied: what it's actally done
4,5 Show the result after 2x Catmull-Clark Subdivision.

I haven't gone all the way here - you could apply the Bevel, and go in to tweak the topology to remove any residual pinching, etc.


I have received your scene and have found the problems. There are some issues with your scene. I will send you the modified files via mail.
Here is a first screenshot for the audience with the solutions for your problem.

You are not using any dilation in your images. (This is not a real problem, but would be better). Dilations can be done with tools like xNormal.
Your normal map is strange and produce extreme curved borders. Together with the dilation problem it produces the main issues to your result. I guess you used a filter to produce your maps like normals, depth etc. This is not really a good way. You should use a better filter for such things or better color templates.
Your mesh need some editing. You are using "custom splits normals data" in your mesh. Remove this data and smooth the mesh. Add an own smoothing value to the mesh then. For example a smoothing of 20 degrees. This makes nice architectual shapes and helps to remove the smooth edges too.


Seeing odd texture artifacts while rendering on a EC2 machine with GPUs

While I solved the problem by removing the displacement map from the PBR material, I'm not 100% certain why the issue wasn't affecting the rendering output when done using a CPU alone.
My understanding so far for why this worked:
Each wall is represented using a few triangles whereas the displacement map needs a finely divided mesh to cause micro displacements to make the surface looks like the material. With only a few large triangles to adjust, the algorithm is unable to do it correctly and the error manifests itself in the form fo this jagged surface.
Please feel free to comment if you know what might be happening here.


How do I iterate over keyframes in python?

On some further investigation, and looking at other threads, I solved my issue by using the following method to update the scene.

bpy.context.scene.frame_set(bpy.context.scene.frame_current)

So now I'm thinking there is a bug in how bpy.ops.screen.keyframe_jump() is implemented. The line I added should theoretically do nothing (ie. setting the current frame to the current frame should be a no op). The strange thing is that my original implementation worked in the interactive console, but not when I put it in a text/export file and run it from there.


Lightmap Pack is non-uniformly scaling my geometry?

The purpose of Lightmap Pack command is to utilize as much UV space as possible by storing each face (individually) in the UV space bounds.

I must admit that I can't tell you how exactly the algorithm works, but if you consider two similar objects that differ only from the lenght of a face (8.0 vs 8.1) you'll see different results of the lightmap pack command.

In the shortest parallelogram, each face is not "enough" different from the average face size of the object, so they are all stored with the same size in the UV. The proportion are not preserved. They are stretched to fill the boundaries.

In longest parallelogram, Blender sees instead that some faces are much longer than other (they just get over the alghorithm thereshold), so it is aware that they should need more space.

Notice that also in this case, despite what could it seem, proportions are not mantained. The Face is 2:8.1, while the UV is more 2:4. That's because Blender look for the best way to fill all the UV space, regardless proportion. This is a uv layout for Baking textures efficently.

If you are interested in keeping the proportions, Lightmap pack is not the right UV unwrapping method.

In the brought example I would separate each face by extruding them individually by a 0 factor, than Crtl+i to invert seelction and Canc to delete unwanted faces.

Than a simple Unwrap or Smart unwrap, should pack all the faces preserving their proportions in the UV map.


You have a texture but blender can't guess what coordinates to use for the texture mapping. To fix try this: In your wood floor object a texture coordinate node. Connect the object coordinates to the vector connector on your image texture node.


Before 2.8 there was addons to convert Blender Internal materials into Cycles materials.
But in 2.8 none of those addons have been upgraded to the new addon API changes yet. You could wait until one is upgraded.

In the meantime, you can simply make yourself a separate installation of Blender 2.79 and use its integrated Material Utils addon to convert your Internal materials into Cycles.
Then append the Cycles material into your 2.8 scene. Cycles materials are mostly compatible with Eevee, so there shouldn't be much issues switching from Cycles to Eevee.


How can I set the sample rate for Audio?

The control for audio Sample Rate is in Scene settings>Audio>Rate:


Python exporter set armature to rest pose while exporting meshes

I got armature.data.pose_position change to work
After changing to REST I had to call context.scene.update() and it calculates positions in rest pose. I change it once to pose when exporting keyframes and it is working as well.


How to start a cycle at frame 100 using modifiers?

Consider the Cycles Modifier ... with the setting [Before Cycles] as -1.
Move the left most keyframe to 100.  Of course you can move multiple keyframes at once.


Why does my mesh have a dark outline on one of the edges?

Try following these steps:

Go in Edit Mode Tab, Vertex select 1

Select all A
Press Alt+M and select "by Distance"

With all selected still press Shift+N to recalculate the Normals

This should fix most issues.
You can check if the normals are ok by activating the "Face Orientation" here:

One other thing i believe you may have in your object is one or more faces inside the object, those you could find by selecting some of the outside faces, then pressing H to hide them. Allowing you to look inside the object you then can select and delete the faces inside the object with X, "Faces". Afterwards just press Alt+H to unhide all again.

Should there be still issues, please leave a comment and eventually update the question with a picture pointing it out.


Empties have no rest position. It is privilege of bones.
Bones can be used as Hooks targets.
All you have to do is replacing empties in your rig by bones and use them in pose mode.


Why is this rigid-body constraint allowing the object to be partially pushed away?

Heh, I got a little tired of debugging this vehicle of yours, so I remade it.
I stripped out parenting (because the physics engine does not respond to parenting correctly when things have to actuate), and replaced all of it with constraints.

The result:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17630723/Blends/gandalfmobile.blend

As to why the joint is acting weak, it is because it is parented to an object that is 'static' (if things are parented, the physics engine treats them as static), and thus has infinite mass. So by making the target of the constaint into a valid rigid-body (by using a constraint rather than a parent on the tail), this problem was avoided.

Creating constraints using python also provides the ability to control things like the springiness, the angle and the rotation speed of the constraint, things that aren't available through the UI.

On a side note, development of something is better suited to the forum style of reponse as opposed to multiple stack-exchange questions. I would have preffered for the development of this vehicle to be a blenderartists.org thread.


The more direct fix is to make your outer material have a mask between the metallic label, and the glass or whatever sub-material it lays upon. This also lets you skip the Shrinkwrap modifier because it uses the UV coordinates to wrap the texture around the object.

For example:

This will blend the Metallic and Color Principled shaders depending on the strength of your mask. In my case, I had a zig zag pattern lying around:

This way you have less geometry, you have very sharp control over the position & pattern using the same image texture as before, and you can make changes on the same material graph.


Can object parameters be set from data file?

Using a data file to control position and rotation can be done using the animation nodes add-on.
If this is not installed, then install it from the Git repository

To install the animation nodes, see http://animation-nodes-manual.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user_guide/install/install.html

Tested in Blender 2.77

To start, create a simple scene with a sphere and a plane. Add a material to the sphere so rotation can easily be seen.

Open the node editor, switch to the animation node mode, then create a new animation node network.

Add the 'Compose Matrix' and 'Object Matrix Output' nodes. Connect the matrix output to the matrix input. In the 'Object Matrix Output' node, set the object to the sphere is the scene.

At this point, if you change any of the values in the 'Compose Matrix' you should see the sphere move, rotate, or scale.

Add a 'Combine Vector' node and a 'Combine Euler' node. This will expose scalar values that can be used set. In the 'Combine Euler' node set the 'Use Degree' check box.

Once again, changing these values will move and rotate the sphere.

The next couple of steps will add the logic to convert a string into a vector. Add a 'String Input' node, a 'Split Text' node, a 'Get List Element' node, and a 'Parse Number' node as shown. Also 'Debug' nodes can be added to see what values flow through the node network. The 'Split By:' value should be set to ',' (a comma).

Now changing the inputs string, which is CSV separated, will change the location of the sphere.

Create the input file for location and rotation. It should look something like the following. Save it to 'sphere-1.csv' in the current directory.

The next steps will replace the string with the input from a file. Delete the 'String Input' node. Add a 'Text File Reader', a 'Split Text' node, and a 'Get List Element' node. Change the 'Split Text' to use 'Lines' to separate the text file.

This will set the x position of the sphere to the value of the 1st line in the 'sphere-1.csv' file. To animate this, add a 'Time Info' and 'to Integer (floor)' node.

To see this animation work, open a timeline panel and set the start to 0 and the end as 12. This will then only animation the first 13 lines in the data file.

If animated, the result will be the following:

At this point, all of the pieces are in place to translate and rotate an object. The next step is to hook up all of the information from the file to the object. Extend the previous network into this one.

The result of this network should be the following animation.

To animate multiple spheres, the animation logic is converted into a 'group' which has a file name and object as the input.

Add a group to the network. Connect the output of the group to the path and to the object. Then add a group instance. This will behave just like the previous example. The difference is that that group instance passes the path name and the object to the group. This group can be reused.

Add three spheres to the scene and create the three more data files with location and rotation like 'sphere-1.csv'.

Add a 'Create String List' node and populate it with the files names with the data for each sphere. Add a 'Create Object List' node and populate it with the name of each sphere. Add two 'Get List Element' nodes. Add a 'Loop Input' node. Connect all of this so the 'Loop Input' is used to specify the 'Index' of the object and data file for each iteration of the loop. Finally, add a 'Invoke Subprogram' that points to the loop and has 4 iterations. The part of the network is shown below.

The entire network is shown here:

By adding more data to the input files and setting the last frame in the animation larger, an animation like the following is generated.

This blend file can be downloaded here:


Objects Disappear on Camera View - Pressing "0" Key

Try to decrease the "Start" value and/or increase the "End" value in Clipping section of your camera settings.


Using partial normal maps for character wrinkles

You can animate shader values like any other property in Blender.  Just right click and insert a keyframe.  Or, for better control, add a driver based on an animated control.


How do I adjust for overexposure using physically based lighting?

Use the false colour look in combination with a CDL node (What is the the ASC-CDL node?) to bring your values within the range of the color transform.

See also this related post: How to scale properly HDRI image, to be used in ASC-CDL HDR render?

and this one (somehow outadted, but should give you an idea): Using the False Color look in combination with the CDL Node to work on Wide Dynamic Range scenes


Why does pressing a transform hotkey not display the axes on the selected object?

That is by design. When you are using shortcuts you can restrict the movement to a single axis by pressing G followed by X, Y or Z. Alternatively to restrict the motion to only two you can use SHIFT + the axis you don't want any movement on. Therefore there is no need for the gizmo in that context.

If you want to enable the move version with the gizmo press SHIFT+SPACEBAR+G or you can right click on the icon in the toolbar and assign your own shortcut. Just make sure it doesn't conflict with any existing shortcuts.

The gizmos for translate, rotate and scale can be permanently enabled in the Viewport Gizmos.


Texture problem two sides of a face after a solidify

Create your second texture:

In the Solidify modifier > Materials > Material Offset choose the slot where the material is, 0 is for material #1, 1 for material #2, etc. You can also choose the rim material:


why aren't the inside sides of the shape showing when I export it as a .STL file

Maybe the normals of you model are wrong. If the normal of a face is pointing inside the mesh, it may not be displayed by some renderers. When in edit mode, you can display the normals of the model using the right pane in the 3D view (section Mesh Display > normals). Try to call Make Normals Consistent (Ctrl+N) when editing your mesh.


A curve is defined by a number of points and the connection between each point is then calculated. Any deform modifier on a curve can only move the points that define the curve, it cannot distort the curve in-between two curve points.

To get the benefits of a mesh deform modifier on a curve you need to be sure that the areas of the mesh that are deformed by shapekeys are surrounding a point in the curve.


How to stop smooth shading/sub surface distorting render

Subsurf is probably not what you want. You don't smother out flat edges, you use smooth shading. Enable Auto Smooth in the Object Data Settings (marked below). Select all faces and mark them as smooth. Select the edges you want to be sharp and mark them as Sharp.


How to inset faces down to edges rather than faces

If you're just wanting to make an edge in the middle:

Simple process: i >> 1 >> Enter >> W >> Remove Doubles:


Change "Local Space" to "World Space". Local Space does not work with objects that are parented.


Are weird shading artifacts normal with the subdivision modifier in edit mode?

It is completely normal that the subdivided surface crosses the original mesh's edges when they make a concave geometry, and this shouldn't be considered an issue with the mesh. This becomes evident in Edit Mode because, together with your subdivided mesh, you also see the un-subdivided wireframe:

That "artifact" is just the subdivided mesh "coming out" from the cage of the un-subdivided mesh. Nothing to worry about. This effect doesn't appear in Object Mode since, in that mode, you don't see the underlying un-subdivided geometry.

However, you have the option to see the effect of Subdivision Surface also on the Edit Mode's wireframe. There is a button () in the modifier panel for this:


Unique and invariable ID (within the session) for an object?

Use a pointer property
Can set up a pointer to any blender ID type objects, in this case bpy.types.Object instances of which can be found in bpy.data.objects collection.
Assign the property to class
import bpy
from bpy.types import Object, Scene
from bpy.props import PointerProperty

Scene.target_obj = PointerProperty(type=Object)

Test.
>>> C.object
bpy.data.objects['Cube']

>>> bpy.ops.object.duplicate()
{'FINISHED'}

>>> C.object
bpy.data.objects['Cube.001']

>>> C.scene.target_obj = C.object
>>> C.object.name = "Foo"
>>> C.scene.target_obj
bpy.data.objects['Foo']


You can define a mask to control where different textures etc are to be applied. A mask is usually a black and white image were black equals zero and white equals one. Connecting the mask into a mix shader node lets you choose between two different shaders, connected to a mix RGB node will choose between two colours.

Using a gradient texture to generate a mask.

With your example you can also connect the mask to the roughness input of your principled BSDF node.

For more control you can use texture painting to draw a mask on your model, then connect an image texture node in place of the above colour ramp.


Animation object position..origin point, proper pivot

This might be a long way of doing it, but you can type the exact position of the xyz locations and rotations for each object.
As these are in a straight line, technically two of the locations should be identical for each object, and the rotation should be the same for all of them.
So find one that's in the correct position, then copy paste the location and rotation to all the others. You'd only then need to alter the x or y (not sure from the screenshot) of each to space them out.
That's how I'd do it but maybe there's a better more efficient way.


How do I convert a triangle mesh to a quads one?

While in Edit Mode, select the parts of your mesh you want to convert and use Alt + J or from the Faces special menu with Ctrl + F > Tris to Quads to convert tris to quads or via the 3d view header, use, Mesh > Faces > Tris to Quads.

This tool converts the selected triangles into quads by taking adjacent tris and removes the shared edge to create a quad, based on a threshold.
To create a quad, this tool needs at least two adjacent triangles. If you have an even number of selected triangles, it is also possible not to obtain only quads. In fact, this tool tries to create "squarest" quads as possible from the given triangles, which means some triangles could remain.


How can I make two molecular particle systems collide? (Using the molecular addon)

Thankfully I was able to find the solution myself.

To make particle systems interact with other particle systems:

Go to the particle tab
Scroll down to "Collision:"
Check the box that says "Activate Collision with others"


Slide two edge loops away from each other

For two existing edgeloops the only way I know of is through scaling.
Scale the two edgeloops with S and constraint to the relevant axis with X, Y or Z.

Of course this only works with axis aligned loops, and with evenly sized geometry on both sides, otherwise it will create distortions.

If you don't mind creating new edgeloops then beveling does the trick.
Just create a new edge loop with Ctrl + R, then Right Click to leave it in place. Select the newly created edge loop and bevel it with Ctrl + B.

This works even on skewed or twisted geometry, non axis aligned loops, and has the added benefit of allowing absolute dimensions for distance, as opposed to only percentage factors with true edge sliding.


Model weirdly stretches and deforms after rigging

Check if the face orientation is right. Press Alt + V and check Face Orientation.
The outer surface should be blue. It could also be a scaling problem. Your model and rig should have the scale value 1.000. To do this press Ctrl + A when object is selected and click on Scale.


Active camera have a short view distance,how do I increase it?

Select the camera, then increase the Clipping End value in the Camera's properties panel.


How to have an object follow the surface of another object?

You can use a Particle System. Use your terrain as the emitter and the people as either an Object or a Group (Set their Origin to the bottom).

Set the Start and End time to 1.

Under Velocity change "Normal" to zero.

Choose either Object or Group (You'll need to separate your planes in Edit Mode press "P" and select Loose Parts). "Object" would be choosing one plane/person as the particle. With "Group" you could choose any number of planes/people for more variety (Select the planes in Object Mode and press CTRL +"G" to Group them).

Additionally you can have control over the Particle Systems density by Weight Painting and a Vertex Group. With your Emitter selected go into Weight Paint Mode and select an Add Brush (There also is a Subtract Brush).

Preform your Weight Painting. Blue represents the most density and red the least. Colors in between vary the density. This creates a Vertex Group with the default name "Group".

Go back to the Particle Emitter and under Vertex Groups > Density select or enter the name "Group".


The problem is, that you have a lot of long, stretched out faces on the top of the model. Not something you want to have, in general. Consequently, some edges of the top surface run parallel and very close to the (bevel)edge. When you add the bevel, you'll end up with overlapping geometry.
You should try to redo the geometry at the top and generate a more grid-like result.
You can achieve this by deleting all top faces in edit mode. Then, select the edge and press F to create a face. - Then press I to inset the face. Make sure to inset far enough to leave space for the bevel. (While insetting is active, you can toggle the Boundary option by pressing B. This prevents the extra face at the boundary of the mirror modifier.)
Inset once more for good measure.
This is what it should look like:
Then, (IMPORTANT) - Apply the scale of the model, or the bevel will look off. In object mode, press CTRL + A -> Scale.
Edit:
In order to have the Subdivision Modifier behave well, you'll want to add another holding edge on the side part. In edit mode, press CTRL + R to get something like this:


How to add an image in a specific area of the object in Cycles Render?

Idle Chit-chat

Your title says "Cycles Render," but your screenshots are from Blender Internal. Also, in your last screenshot, you need to select 3D Viewport > Toolshelf > Edit > Shading: > Smooth for the eye to not be pixelated in the viewport render.

However, if you are going for realism, I would suggest switching to Cycles Render (much faster, newer, better, AND built for photorealism). So, this tutorial is for Cycles. This will be the final result:

Materials

I will use a sphere to represent the eye (smooth shading), and the following eye texture from Google (full size linked) in my demonstration.

With the sphere selected, go to the Materials tab in the Properties panel. + New a material to the sphere. Go into the Node editor, and use the setup shown.

Now, go to the sphere in the 3D Viewport. Tab into edit mode, Numpad 1 to front view, and Numpad 5 to orthographic view. Enter Face Select Mode. Select these faces:

Press U and select Project from View (Bounds). Split the screen into a 3D Viewport and a UV Image Editor by dragging the marks in the top-right corner to the left. Make sure you are still in edit mode. Open the image of the eye through the toolbar at the bottom of the UV Image Editor. The orange should already be aligned over the eye.

Final Notes

I added the nodes at the bottom to create red veins in the eye. It's more realistic.

Here is the finished .blend file:


Continuous rotation in AN with certain control behavior? (Speed)

To be able to properly animate in Blender, it is important that frames can be evaluated indepedently without the need for a previous frame or start frame. (Sometimes you want to change the start frame, but frame X should still show the same content.)

Create an empty object, which controls the speed. I added and empty circle and keyframed its X-axis. Grab that Fcurve with Animation nodes.

The position on a frame is merely the accumulation of the speed-value on all previous frames.

To simplify the matter

I use a starting position of 0
interpret the input speed value [from the fcurve] as speed per frame
ignore the subframes (no differential equations) and pretend the speed to be constant for the duration of a frame

but you can easily add the first and second bullet points.

This means we have to get a list of speed values up to the current frame. For that, I use a loop with as many iterations as the current frame number and evaluate the speed-fcurve's value. The resulting list must be summed to get the actual value. I use it to control the X position of a cuboid.

With movement on multiple axis this actually the same.

Final note, do not go the math routes. Although I don't know your context, integrals are most likely overkill.


This can be achieved by combining multiple Subsurface Scattering shader nodes to 'cancel out' part of the scatter at short distances. This allows the scatter profiles to be manipulated as desired.

As explained in your question, standard Subsurface Scattering shader only provides control of the 'radius' of the scatter in each of the channels - ie, how far each of the colors is scattered within the surface with falloff over distance - with no control over when the scattering actually starts. This means that close to the point of illumination all colors are scattered equally and each drops off at it's own rate as the distance increases.

Using the default 'Cubic' sub-surface scatter mode, the distribution follows the Cubic distribution function :

y = e ^ -((x^3)/(a^3))

For Quadratic, the distribution is very similar :

y = e ^ -((x^2)/(a^2))

Online tools are available to graph these functions so that they can be easily manipulated - for example, https://www.desmos.com/calculator, which allows you to instantly see the result of changes to the function.

Cubic :
Quadratic :

To control the scattering we need to be able to manipulate the profile of those graphs and this can be achieved by combining multiple scatters, each with different properties. For example, by adding two shaders together we can produce a more interesting distribution :

In order to block the scattering at 'short' distances we would need to subtract one distribution from the other.  eg, 'y = (e ^-((x^3)/(a^3)) - e^-((x^3)/(b^3)))*c' with carefully selected values for 'a', 'b', 'c' (a controls one Cubic, b controls the other Cubic, c scales the result).

(https://www.desmos.com/calculator/fnixk2lkqv)

Under normal circumstances it's not possible to subtract the effect of one shader from another - since we only have an 'Add' shader and a 'Mix' shader but no 'Subtract'. However, there is a trick we can use to subtract the effect of a shader by using 'negative' color values. The color of a surface is represented by a Vector of 3 values - Red, Green, Blue. These values are usually in the range of 0.0 to 1.0 but are equally valid to be outside of that range. For values greater than 1.0, the surface will have the effect of amplifying any incoming light rays. However, values less than 0.0 result in any incoming 'positive' light rays being converted into "negative" light. Combining such negative rays with the output of another shader using the Add shader will result in the negative light being subtracted from the positive light. Care should be taken to ensure that the overall effect does not result in negative light escaping the system - this can cause some unexpected effects - but this can be used to 'cancel out' the effect of one shader with that of another.

The Subsurface Scattering Shader consists of two elements - effectively a 'Diffuse' element to handle the surface interaction and the 'Subsurface' element for the below-surface scattering. Subtracting one Subsurface Scattering shader from another will remove the 'Diffuse' element, so we need to add it in again - so we need 3 shaders : one for the 'base' subsurface (which should have Radius set to 0,0,0 to disable scattering), one for the 'positive' subsurface scatter and another for the 'negative' subsurface scatter.

This can be implemented with the following nodes :

The material consists of three Subsurface Scattering nodes. The top one has its Radius set to 0,0,0 so that it does not perform any scattering - it acts effectively as a Diffuse shader (and, in fact, it could be replaced by one - although my tests seem to show that it's not actually more efficient that way) to provide the surface interaction. The next Subsurface Scattering node provides the 'positive' element of the scattering. Its Radius is fed from a Combine XYZ node which can be set to the desired scattering parameters. The final Subsurface Scattering node provides the 'negative' element of the scattering and it also has a Combine XYZ to provide the scattering parameters. A Vector Subtract node generates the 'negative' color from the input RGB node by subtracting from 0,0,0. The Color is also multiplied by an additional Combine XYZ node to provide scaling to adjust each channel. The outputs from the three Subsurface Scattering shaders are combined using Add shader nodes to provide the final output - ie, 'surface' + 'positive' - 'negative'.

I used the same online graphing tool mentioned above to adjust the parameters until I was happy with the parameters for each channel. The values of a,b,c can be simply plugged into the 3 Combine XYZ nodes in the above material - 'a' into the Radius input of the 'positive' shader, 'b' into the 'negative' shader, 'c' into the multiplier for the Color input.

An interactive version of this should be available here : https://www.desmos.com/calculator/jp3nbgellf.

To see how Quadratic would affect the distribution, see here : https://www.desmos.com/calculator/zycoycntdl

To demonstrate on a back-lit wedge :

Blend file attached


Here is the extrusion part filled in:

import bpy, bmesh
from math import *
from mathutils import Vector

NUMVERTS = 1000
Dphi = 2*pi/NUMVERTS
# calculate x,y coordinate pairs
coords = [(cos(i*Dphi),sin(i*Dphi),0) for i in range(NUMVERTS)]

bm = bmesh.new()
for v in coords:
    bm.verts.new(v)

# think of this new vertices as bottom of the extruded shape
bottom = bm.faces.new(bm.verts)

# next we create top via extrude operator, note it doesn't move the new face
# we make our 1 face into a list so it can be accepted to geom
top = bmesh.ops.extrude_face_region(bm, geom=[bottom])

# here we move all vertices returned by the previous extrusion
# filter the "geom" list for vertices using list constructor
bmesh.ops.translate(bm, vec=Vector((0,0,1)), verts=[v for v in top["geom"] if isinstance(v,bmesh.types.BMVert)])

bm.normal_update()

me = bpy.data.meshes.new("circle")
bm.to_mesh(me)
# add bmesh to scene
ob = bpy.data.objects.new("circle",me)
bpy.context.scene.objects.link(ob)
bpy.context.scene.update()

The hard part is grasping the habit of having this dictionary return type from the operations. It's a dictionary containing definition for "geom" that contains a single list where all the verts, edges and faces are listed one after another. You are then supposed to make a list of the verts, edges or faces with python list construction where you check for the element type using isinstance(), depending on what you need for each operation.


Try this tutorial, hope you have success https://youtu.be/DcfPH4psKX4


Why is my PNG texture messed up after I import it?

Found out the reason was because when selecting the image there is an import options box on the bottom-left corner of the window which contains an option labeled "Use Alpha" which must be checked in order for the image to be imported properly.


I would agree with HATMAN - Possibly inverted Normals or doubles. Go into Edit mode, Press W - Remove doubles (also available from the tool menu on the LH side). Along the bottom menu, you can also recalculate normals by going to mesh> normals>recalculate outside . They should help.

When you do these, take note of the top bar (where it says the amount of tris etc), and it will tell you if it had to remove doubles etc..


Blender live-action footage and Grease Pencil animation

The grease pencil works only in the 3D viewport, you can't use it on the VSE or in the Movie Clip Editor.
Here are a couple of options:
1. Use video as background for the camera. Select the camera object and, in the camera option tab, check Background image -> Add image -> Movie, then select your video file there.
This way you will see the video through the camera view (Numpad 0 ).

Note that the background image will not render unless you use it in the compositor, and mix your render layer using Alpha over.
Make sure that Film is set to transparent and the view transform for color management is set to Standard.

Change the resolution in the Output tab for the project so that it matches the dimensions, and the frame rate of the original video. Also remember to render at 100% of the resolution.

2. Alternatively, use the video as texture on the world.
Set the color to use the image texture, and select the video there. Set the vector coordinates to Window. and the extrapolation to Clip
In this case you need to disable the film transparent settings to make the background renderable. No need to use the compositor in this case.
To view the background enable Scene World and Scene Lights


Animating ZBrush models with Blender for unity

Yes, you can.

I would recommend to export a low poly version of your character from zbrush and a normal map of the high poly model. Then you import in blender the low poly mesh, rig it, animate it, etc... Then import in unity the blend file and the high poly normal map that you assign on the character's material.


How to prevent Blender from disabling dyntopo when exiting/entering sculpt mode?

This problem has finally been noticed by Blender developers and included in 2.78 release.

"Enable dyntopo re-entering sculpt mode"
https://developer.blender.org/D2059

Dynamic topology will be re-enabled automatically when entering sculpt mode, but only if uv's, vertex colors or triangulating won't be affected.


Shape key deforms edit mode / object mode after editing basis

Once Basis is deleted or edited, you will have to append an earlier saved version of the model and Join as Shapes.

Hopefully, you are doing incremental saves?

The only other option I can think of is to manually match the vertex positions, but using the 3d cursor for precision:

Select the body object > Edit Mode
Select the vertex Shift+S > Cursor to Selected, tab to Object mode
Select the head object > Edit Mode
Select the matching vertex Shift+S > Selection to Cursor
Repeat


I can't draw good lines with the UV texture brush

You can set the brush parameters in the UV/Image Editor tools panel (T to display).

If you want a continuous line you should use the Space stroke method (you can also press E in the image window to switch form a stroke to another).

Make sure that the Spacing value is low enough so that the line is not broken.

To make the line sharp, change its curve (you can add or remove points to give the curve the shape you want), if you select the second one it is pretty sharp.

To save the brush you've created, on the top of the panel, on the right of the brush name, click on the "+" button.

Also good to know, in the image window, F to increase the Radius, shiftF to increase the Strength, X.


Lazy and right-to-left evaluation in the node tree

When executing shaders, a special optimization is applied to Mix Shader nodes. If Factor evaluates to 0 or 1, any nodes that are only reachable via the unused branch of the mix are not evaluated.

Taken from this page:

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/optimizations/nodes.html

This page also describes how the node tree is evaluated.


How to save as an OBJ and import to Element 3D

You can run the command from the File >> Export menu

Or press the spacebar to activate the "Search command" function and start typing his name (Export OBJ)

After that, you will see the file browser where you can choose the exporting folder. On the left, at the bottom of the sidebar there are the exporting options.


All of your issues are the result of the same problem: the subsurf modifier will give you unpredictable, and mostly ugly, results when using ngons (polygons with more than 4 vertices).

1 Delete this Ngon and reconnect the vertices forming quads.

2 Other ngon... add loop cuts to keep the topology consistent using quads.

3 Yet another ngon!:

4 You have vertices that are going past the axis of symmetry used by the mirror modifier. That's bound to cause you more errors down the line.

Scale them to 0 in the Z axis (SZ0)


the culprit is in the rendered layer settings;
(View Layer Properties tab)
you will need to use the "Use for Rendering setting".
The Render Single Layer setting is ignored in command line rendering, and it’s only used in rendering from Blender interface.
Once you use this setting, you should get the correct output rendered from the farm


As a textblock

One way to do this is to add functions.py as a Text block. Make sure the Text block has a .py extension and you can import it directly using import functions. Described here: python-is-it-possible-to-import-another-text-block

As a module

Otherwise, add functions.py to scripts/modules/some_name/functions.py, then

from some_name import functions

A slight hack

  There's probably an elegant way to do this, but if your stuck...

The render.py could load functions.py from a given path into a text block named the same:

# render.py #

import bpy

fp = '/home/zeffii/Desktop/functions.py'

def make_functions_local(fp):
    texts = bpy.data.texts
    t = texts.get('functions.py')
    if not t:
        t = texts.new('functions.py')

    with open(fp) as module_file:
        t.from_string(module_file.read())

# trigger it
make_functions_local(fp)

import functions

# your stuff


Extrude curve given by mathematical equation

Okay, the problem seems to be that you need to turn off "u-wrap" and "v-wrap," in the function menu.
I also turned off show wireframe.


How can I use a curve node to shape the edge of this node texture?

Bump maps can be tricky but the distance on yours is way too high.  Basically no matter how you ramp the color it's trying to give it the appearance of jutting way out.

I decreased to .008 and then I was able to get finer control out of the curve node.


This is less about casting a shadow and more about how the plane is emitting directionally. Specifically, there is no emission coming from the infinitely thing plane along the bottom. That missing illumination is what is causing the missing result.

A mesh lamp with a degree of thickness should alleviate that phenomena. Otherwise one would need to craft additional illumination or a gobo to hide the peculiar result.


blender 2.8: where is the "axes" tool for moving vertices visually?

The 3D manipulator widget can be enabled from the toolshelf (left of the 3D viewport) using this "arrows" button:

In addition to the "move along X,Y,Z" action, this manipulator also enables the "move on the XY, XZ or YZ plane" (see the little squares between the axes).

There are also other kinds of manipulators in the tool shelf that you can choose from: move, rotate, scale and all the three things combined.


What causes these black streaks along certain (concave?) edges?

You need to recalculate the normals of your mesh.
go in edit mode with TAB
select all with A 1 time, or 2 times, or 3 times (depending on if something is selected and if you're using 2.79 or 2.8)
- If you're using 2.79 or earlier, use Ctrl+N (recalculate outside) or Shift+Ctrl+N (recalculate inside)
- If you're using 2.8, Shift+N (recalculate outside) or Shift+Ctrl+N (recalculate inside)


Why is the work top clipping out when i got to camera view?

I would guess it would be the camera clipping “end” isn’t set to a high enough value try changing it from 100.000 to 200.000 see if that works, under camera properties.


How do I hide the red lines of the path following in the game engine?

In the top of the Blender window there should be a menu bar (called the Info Bar) with the drop-down menus for File, Game, Window, etc.

Click on Game, then make sure the option Show Physics Virtualization is unchecked. (If you are using the UPBGE fork, go to Game, then click the Show Debug option to open another submenu where the option is there.)

This may be the culprit. It can be easy to turn on by accident.


How to randomly assign color to objects in an array

I was in Eevee, changed to Cycles and it worked. There was no need to apply the array modifiers, so they are still available.

Further reading: Randomized color with array modifier


(Blender 2.8) Imported .obj files are translucent

Confused--are you talking about: 1) the helmets? 2) the graininess of the scene in the viewport? 3) the fact that thr controller-guy in the background has no legs?

If 1):
Preview mode is never as robust a's an actual render but I can tell by looking at it that the material assigned to the helmets is either not a realistic glass material or you need to give the helmets thickness to use it correctly (as with Blender''s Glass and PBR materials with glass settings.

Assuming the helmets have no thickness, first make sure the portion that is supposed to be glass is its own mesh. Once that is done, give it a Solidify modifier so that the surface has thickness. You may need to adjust the thickness or direction settings. You may need to flip the surface's normals in the Mesh dropdown menu whIle in edit mode (check if you need to do this before using the Solidify modifier).

2)
Preview render for Cycles is always grainy, but fast computers can mitigate that. You can preview in Look-Dev mode for a less CPU intensive studio lit preview.

3)
Check the material assigned to the guy in the background's legs. See if any connections or files are missing. If you just need him to have black legs, select all the faces in the legs and Assign whareverse matrial is on the astronaughts' legs. Or make and assign your own. Materials with textures will not look correct (although shouldn't be invisible) if the model does not have UV coordinates.


I think your meshes are a bit too complicated, too many vertices etc... For example, if I simplify the MeshDeform modifier cage, it works correctly:


Isolate object with / numpad key Blender 2.8

The / key is generating a Local (isolated) view of only the selected object, while that in a sense hides other objects, it is more like a isolation chamber rather then hiding all else and then later making things visible again (in the outliner you will see that the other objects are not being hidden).
In Blender 2.7, using Background images managed in the Properties panel opened with N, found at the bottom, it was possible to have the references still visible in Local mode, as those were not managed as objects, but bound to the view.

Blender 2.8+ deals with Background images now by using empties to hold the pictures. That makes them objects, which in turn if not selected will be locked out when you have another object selected and go in Local mode by pressing /.

Solution:
Keeping the background images visible is possible by simply selecting the images, or their corresponding empties, as well as the object you want to go in Local mode with. All selected objects will be taken in Local mode and the images will stay visible.


Blender-osm addon is free now. Get it here.

All source code of the blender-osm addon is hosted on Github. The addon documentation is also available at Github.


From http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.6/Source/Modeling/BMesh/Design:

  Loops store several handy pointers:

  v - pointer to the vertex at the start of the edge (where "start" is defined by CCW order)

this means that CCW indexing can be assumed if I don't get it wrong. Also note that the loop-list on the face is circular according to this:

  Faces link to a loop in the loop cycle, the circular linked list of loops defining the boundary of the face.


If your only concern is animating the visibility of the object, you can do this easily by keyframing the Restrict Viewport Visibility toggle for the object in the Outliner.


Answering myself as I found a solution. It seems that the process posted here...

Another portal Q&A

...can be made to work in 2.8. It needs to be in cycles mode and some of the checks in steps are in slightly different places but it works.

I would still be interested to know if there is an eevee solution for this.


how to solve dark edges image area when using transparency in eevee

There is a setting under Screen Space Reflections on the Render Settings tab called Edge Fading. Just turn that to zero.


Your question is rather difficult to understand so this may be incorrect, but are you looking for bridge edge loops? Using bridge edge loops you can take two of your faces and bridge the gap between them (It finds the nearest vertex). It works by taking two selected edge loops as input. In the example below there are two identical planes with one rotated.

Before bridge edge loop:

After bridge edge loop:


Cannot place the forearm on the correct low position while I'm playing with the armature

Select your one of your arm-bones while in pose mode, and press R. You can then rotate that bone using the mouse. The bone rotates according to your screen, so go to front/back(numpad 1/ctrl + numpad 1) view to get straight rotation.

To go from the images you posted to what I posted, you need to rotate the upper arm and the lower arm =)

Image I posted:


Leave 'Rig / Animation Type' on 'Generic'
Switch to 'Animations', deactivate both 'Resample Curves' and 'Anim. Compression'-checkboxes
Switch back to 'Rig / Animation Type', select 'Legacy'
Click 'Apply'
Check the Animation-Preview - no stuttering!
Drag the FBX onto the scene-view-window
IMPORTANT: click 'Revert' rather than 'Apply' when asked whether unapplied import settings should be applied

Downsides:

No 'loop / ping-pong' etc. functionalities (I'll try to create a script-based-solution as a workaround)


Is there any way to get rid of too many polygons in mesh?

There are two main ways that I know of:

Using the Decimate modifier. It combines near faces that are similar.
Un-subdivide works for me, but you could also use collapse or planar depending on your situations. On Unsubdivide, more iteration means less faces.

You could also do a manual re-topology. That's where you go through and manually combine faces.
I'm not a master at this, so I can't tell you much, but I'm sure there are some great tutorials online about it.


Colour difference between Windows and Linux Renders in 2.79

Solved, the Ubuntu system automatically changed the colour space to an apple display instead of leaving it as sRGB for some strange reason.


how to write API code to render background image in blender 2.8

Background image means any jpg or png file to be used as background. Let's say I have an object in the scene with an jpg as a background image. How can my render output contains both the object and the scene?


This looks like the effect you get when you have 2 UVs in the exact same location.
If you're using the exact same UV on the other side, the bake gets info from both sides, giving these kinds of issues.
To fix this and still use the same UV, temporarily move 1 of the UVs of to the side of the UV-grid, bake your mesh, and move it back.


Clamp Overlap option prevent two bevels overlap each other. Basically it clamps bevel width by the shortest distance between two beveling edges:

If disabling Clamp Overlap reveals bevels, try to remove vertexes that's close to each other.
Select all - press M ⇾ By distance may help


The general mechanism to solve UI thread safety issues is to pass data from the worker thread to the main thread and then update the UI in the main thread using that data.

In this case you would create a modal operator that gets called regularly with a timer, see Text Editor > Templates > Python > Operator Modal Timer for an example. Each time the operator modal function is called, you would check if the data has changed and update the UI accordingly.

How you pass the data between threads depends on the multithreading mechanism you are using. In Python there are a queue and multiprocessing.Queue modules that can be used with the threading and multiprocessing modules respectively. You put data in the queue in the worker thread and then get it out in the main thread.


Alright, lets go over this.

Firstoff, the surface albedo (color). You got that one, just straight into the color.

Onto the roughness. Roughness maps are black and white. You've already set your image texture to "Non Color Data", however I'd recommend feeding it through a color ramp. This does not only allow you more control over the actual texture but also elminiates any residual color. Personally I don't know if blender converts the greyscale-map into data before moving ahead or if it preserves color, since normal maps are colored based.

I'd remove the "Invert" node, it does weird things to the values (I've not once used to great success). You can achieve the same result with a color ramp, with more control over it.

So, the normal map. Let me go on a bit of tangent here about bump maps as well, since you used a bump node.

A bump map is a very simple way of non-destructive displacement in which a greyscale map controls light behavior. It is based on a few tricks of human perception. However it does not include any actual data on simulated geometry.

This is where normal maps come into play. It gives a more detailed description of how the light is supposed to interact with the surface, which is why it is that nifty shade of pink. Different colors correspond to different geometry directions.

We could move on to vector displacement maps here, but that's quite a way ahead.

Back to your node setup then! With the theory covered, how does one implement that? You've nearly got the implementation down here. Since a normal map uses colors and not a greyscale you're going to need the normal-map node (as you have rightly done). Connect it to the Normal input of the Principled BSDF shader and there you go! Don't forget to set the normal maps texture node to "Non Color Data" for it to work properly! This is because you're not taking color data from the texutre map, but rather geometry data.

Just as a heads-up, specular differes from roughness. You can use the it as a roughness map here, which is great, however specular is a different kind of workflow compared to roughness.


Change resolution of the video sequencer preview window

You can change the scale of the video preview display by selecting a different zoom level in the view menu. You can also use the mouse wheel to zoom in/out. This may not speed up the video display though as the same video still needs to be read and decoded.

To speed up video editing blender uses a proxy system, which you can find in the VSE properties region (press N). Creating a proxy will generate a set of reduced resolution images that will be used for the video preview. When it comes to the final render the full resolution source will be used.


Metal material with glass and gloss node?

Glossy shader alone doesn't indicate metal - it indicates reflection. So it is very common in shader node groups because every material is reflective one way or another (except of some vantablack, emissive materials, etc.)

However the shader you presented is not physically correct - thus it is an example how not to construct shaders.

You don't want to mix in glossy node through mix-node with constant mixing factor - you need to mix in glossy through fresnel:

How do I create a reflective white material?

When you have a rough surface you need a specially constructed Fresnel node that accounts for the roughness (image borrowed from blenderguru but original credit goes to cynicatpro):

So if you add a glossy node correctly to any material (shader), you are just adding another layer of reflection - basically you are adding a clear coat - you are layering.

On some materials this makes little to no sense - like on glass. It makes a look of heavier glass - this can be achieved with IOR better.

If you need a metal shader, you are good to go with one glossy shader. Metals don't have any diffuse component:

This is as complicated as you will probably ever need. It has a metal rim color control and metal IOR control which you can unplug and remove for simplicity.


How can I fade out a strip that requires an Alpha Under effect?

All you need to do is:

Remove Alpha under effect strip
Set Image with text and alpha channel above jpg.
In N-menu set Blend type to Alpha Over.
Animate Opacity of text layer to create fade out effect


As you already mentioned (Edit 2) the hiccup is caused by 2 (or more) frames that are very similar when you move the master bone. A solution might be to shorten the walk cycle by one frame as described here: How to create a seamless animation loop in Blender?
In addition, the motion of the body does not appear to be constant over time. In some frames, when the legs are apart, the body has a fast forward motion. While it barely moves forward when the other leg passes the standing leg. This creates that "striding like at a wedding" effect. Maybe you can fix it by re-arranging the keyframes/poses.

I am not an expert on animation but I think you can create an action for the walk cycle and repeat this action in the NLA editor. So you don't have to animate it over and over again. Have a look here:  How should an animated character be moved while repeating a walk cycle?


This simplest I have found is to assign separate material to them; one white emissive and one with black emissive, and then bake a texture with the Bake Type set to Emit.

You can also bake it from Diffuse if you already have black/white materials on them. You should then bake it from Color only.

Yet another way of doing this is to remove any backplanes, bake a Combined map (or any map BUT normal) and use the Alpha output of the baked texture as mask.

If you need to use the Compositing Editor to get the final image extracted from the image, you can use this setup:

Open the Compositing Editor
Add an Image node and select your baked texture
Add a View node
Connect the Image Alpha to the Color of the View node.
Open the Image Editor and select the View Node as texture
Save the image from the Image Editor.


Making all points meet in the middle using inset

You want to use the Merge at Center operator.  You can find it on the menu, or by pressing Alt+M or search for it using Space.  You will see more options.


Modify properties in the .blend file (command line)

The following command line will do the job (-P will run the given python script before rendering):

blender -b OG1.blend  -P ChangeColor.py -o Render.png -f 0

ChangeColor.py:

import bpy

bpy.data.materials["NameOfMaterial"].diffuse_color = (0, 1.0, 0)

The value ranges for the color channels are [0 to 1.0].

Thank you for your help, poor! Blender ist just too awesome! <3


Material Editor: Generate mask from color ID texture

Two independent node groups for creating a mask based on a color and a texture :

material setup :

the first node group outputs boolean 1/0  ( all comparisions are "less than "):

the second node group outputs grayscale :

adjust the sensitivity/clipping to get a good result "sensitivity is added to overcome  errors due to rounding the numbers"


Blender Edit mode not working correctly with OBS

Do not tick multi-adapter compatibility. A friend helped me solve it.
Hope this helps guys.


If (and only if) both rigs have the same structure, with same bones naming, so you can:

Select the first animated rig.
In the dope sheet window, choose Action Editor context, in drop-down menu at the bottom:

Just to the right, there is an Action browser that allows you to choose the current animation of the selected object. Here you can name your action properly, to find it easily later.

Select the second rig, then in click on the left button of this Action browser to display all existing actions, and select in the list the one you named before.

And that's it! Your second rig should have exactly the same animation as the first one.

Be aware that if you change something in the first rig's animation, it will also change the second's one, since they share the same action. To avoid this, you can click on the "2" button (or any number that shows the number of users you have for the action) to make a single-user copy of the action and have two independent actions:


Blender how to show in outliner only the objects that are on the layer selected in the layers box?

By selecting "Visible Layers" from the drop down menu at the top of the outliner, and selecting the layer(s) you want to see in the outliner.


When rendering animation in Mpeg 4 with H.264 codec, the final product looks like garbage

Just figured it out guys. Turns out that I'm just stupid and VLC media player doesn't have h.264 codec turned on by default or something.
The video plays fine when imported into lightworks so problem solved, yeah baby


ply file imported.  Scaled as indicated in image below.


To do an animation of this (without using Rigid Body physics) you would simply need to constrain the Box (object being acted upon) to the Clamp of the Robot.
The problem happens when you sit it back down.  You must somehow apply the new transformation but as far as I know, you can't animate Apply (I haven't found a way).

The solution is somewhat fiddly and inelegant and there may be a better way (apart from rigid body), but it works.

1.) Add a Copy Transform Constraint to the Box and select the Clamp as the Object of influence.

2.) For this demo, I set the Clamp's Origin to the location of where I want the Box to be when "clamped".  This is basic so I won't go into detail.  (Ctrl + Shift + Alt + C)

3.) I animated the Clamp to descend onto the box to that point (Shift+S

4.) (gif anim frame 49) At this same frame, keyframe the Constraint Influence to be 0.00 by pressing I.  You could also keyframe the "Eyeball" instead (enable/disable constraint).

5.) (gif anim frame 50) On the very next frame, keyframe an Influence of 1.00.

6.) (gif anim frame 202) Animate the Clamp however you want and sit the box back down, keyframe the Influence to 1.00 on this frame.  Also, with the box selected, press I and select LocRot.

7.) (gif anim frame 203) On the very next frame, select the box, then Shift Select the Clamp.  Right-Click on both the Rotation and Location Transform menus and choose "Copy All to Selected".  Select the box only in 3D View and press I and select LocRot.  Keyframe the Influence back to 0.00.

This sounds more complicated than it is, I just wanted to get everything in here in case you weren't clear on something.


If all you need to do is save space to transfer the file, you can try a couple things.

Compress the blend file with textures (zip, xz, etc)
Create a tarball with your textures, and use compression across multiple files. This takes advantage of the fact that textures contain very redundant information.

If you need to save space and still want everything to work normally, your only option is to really use lower-res textures. Although you could probably use a lossy format like jpeg as opposed to png another lossless compression algorithm if you're okay with some quality loss.


Method one:
SY0
This flattens the handles on the Y axis (scaling by 0), however it will distort the rotated handle a little bit:

Method two:
VV, then  VL
This sets the handle type to vector (which makes connected control vertices straight) and the back to aligned (the default).


Try setting the Relative Offset  Z value to zero.


Show both material and texture at the same time

I got the above result by:

"Applying" the image to the eye faces
Unwrapping the appropriate faces (U)
Switching to material shaded view.

Make sure there is a light source to be able to view the materials in the material shaded view.


Only last text block out put in Animation Nodes loop

At the moment all three text objects use the same underlaying data block. So when you change one, you are changing all.

There are two main ways to fix it:

Enable Deep Copy in the Object Instancer node.
Turn off Copy from Source and switch the created object type to "Text".


Hi, I'm having trouble with the mesh on this mug handle

What you're seeing there are faces with the normals (the vectors orthogonal to the surfaces of the faces) pointing into the mesh as opposed to out of it. Unlike reality, 3D modeling is all smoke and mirrors. In many environments faces are only visible from one side. Blender lets you see backfaces, but they appear darker because they face away from the "light" for viewport shading.

To fix the problem, go into edit mode, select your whole mesh with A, and hit CTRL+N to recalculate normals. With a simple shape like that Blender will be able to figure out which way they need to be pointing.

Otherwise, you can select the affected faces, and W > Flip Normals to manually flip them the other way around.


Blender 2.9 Extrude by 3ft Manually Problem

Doing a transform from a numeric input is still possible. After pressing G, just type the number directly into the viewport and press ⏎ Enter. Or for better control, lock it to an axis first: press G for the transform, then (X, Y, or Z) to select that axis, then type the number and press ⏎ Enter.
This also will work directly from the extrude. i.e: press E to extrude, then (X, Y, or Z) for the axis, and then type a number and press ⏎ Enter.


Animation Nodes - how to remove with python command

You should be able to do it like so:

bpy.data.node_groups.remove(bpy.data.node_groups["tree name"])


Wind Field freeze at frame 250. Where can it be changed?

I pressume you are using cloth simulation for the flag. Go to the Cloth cache and modify the end to the number of frames you need.


Is there a simple way to cut a face or add an edge to an existing face?

Select the 2 edges and use the subdivide tool. you will have a new edge so you can then bevel it to have more of them and do whatever you want.


Discrepancy in Rendering from original model

I would guess (can't tell for definite without a blend file) that you have a Subsurf Modifier set to be off in the 3D view but on for rendering.

Go to the modifiers panel by clicking the blue spanner/wrench and then see if you have any modifiers.

If the modifier is set to be off in the 3D view then the 'eye' icon will be disabled. Disable the 'Show in render' button (camera icon) to disable the modifier or press the 'x' button to remove it.


Particle emission from a verts fixed locations over time

Instead of trying to get one particle system to emit in the right places you can add a new red sphere in the place and animate the visibility of it. The particle system on each sphere can also be set to emit at a specific frame. You can then add one curve object with a hook to animate the line linking each node together.

You can automate this task with a python script, with a list of data setup at the start you can easily adjust where the points are created. The script I created is a bit longer than expected so I will leave the whole thing available on gist.github.

The key points in the script are starting with a list of data for each point

mainpoints = [
    [  1,  8, (-2.605,  0.796,  2.531)],
    [ 29, 10, (-1.228, -1.007, -0.235)],
    [ 58,  8, ( 1.917,  0.060,  1.495)],
    [ 75,  8, ( 3.430, -2.621,  1.495)],
    [ 92, 10, ( 1.296, -6.226,  2.644)],
    [110,  8, (-2.013, -4.600,  0.311)],
]

Each line is an array containing the frame, number of particles and location of each red sphere you want to generate. This can easily be altered or expanded for each project you do.

Next we setup a few variables that define what object gets replicated at each point and used for particles, then some particles options that you may want to adjust each time.

The rest of the script simply loops through each item in the mainpoints array and creates each item and adds the particle systems for each one. Then it creates a curve and animates the hook to travel to the next location. Along the way locations are keyframed so things are in the right position when they need to be.

Any settings for the particle system can be added to the script and some variables can be set at the top of the script as I have done for easy adjustment.

Edit:

I just revised the script. In revision 3 the script scans objects with a name starting with 'data-' and then takes two numbers from the name, the first is the frame to show and the second is the number of particles to emit. This replaces the rigid list of data and allows a visual placement of each point. The earlier revision can be accessed at the above link if it is desired.


How can I make permanent changes to the mesh after the shape keys have been applied?

As long as you don't add or remove faces, you can always go back and select the base shape key and make modifications to your mesh. The important part is that you select the base shape key before you enter edit mode.
But if you do major changes to your topology, then, as mentioned by cegaton in the comment, you'll have to redo your shape keys.


How to read pixels of a video from python API?

Though not officially possible (https://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=37216&group_id=9&atid=498), I found a dirty workaround:

import bpy

frameStart = 1
frameEnd = 155
frameStep = 50
viewer_area = None
viewer_space = None

for area_search in bpy.context.screen.areas:
    if viewer_area == None and area_search.type == 'IMAGE_EDITOR':
        viewer_area = area_search
        break

if viewer_area == None:
    viewer_area = bpy.context.screen.areas[0]
    viewer_area.type = "IMAGE_EDITOR"

for space in viewer_area.spaces:
    if space.type == "IMAGE_EDITOR":
        viewer_space = space

path = 'H:\\Data\\_blender\\Fluid\\Video_Edit.mov'
img = bpy.data.images.load(path)
w = img.size[0]
h = img.size[1]
viewer_space.image = img

frame = 1
for frame in range(frameStart, frameEnd, frameStep):
    viewer_space.image_user.frame_offset = frame
    #switch back and forth to force refresh
    viewer_space.draw_channels = 'COLOR_ALPHA'
    viewer_space.draw_channels = 'COLOR'
    pixels = list(viewer_space.image.pixels)
    tmp = bpy.data.images.new(name="sample"+str(frame), width=w, height=h, alpha=False, float_buffer=False)
    tmp.pixels = pixels

img.user_clear()
bpy.data.images.remove(img)


Remove pointlight in reflection (Cycles selective lighting)

Here's the solution. I must confess it wasn't easy to find out...

So basically you make a list of render layers.

RenderLayer : all objects (not important in this case)
Ball: the ball alone
Ref all: all reflections (the light and ball reflections)
Ref lamp: reflection of the lamp only
Ref ball: reflection of the ball only (not required in this case)
Plane: only the ground plane

Use a ToonBSDF -glossy (cfr image below) for the ground plane material. Size: 0.001, Smooth: 0.

In the Render Layers nodes

The green box uses all reflections and lamp reflection together in order to substract lamp reflection from all reflections with the Difference key.

We combine the plane alone with the content of those green boxes with Alpha Over.

The last green box is used to go through a Blur in order to "simulate" the ground plane's roughness. It cannot be done any other way for the roughness as the input reflection needs to be very sharp in order to substract the lamp from it.

If you slide the Size of the blur down you will have a very glossy plane. If you need a higher roughness for the ground plane, duplicate the blur and add its duplication to its output node.


Can I connect a Diffuse BSFD to the Principled BSDF's roughness input?

No you can't connect a shader's output to a the input of another shader. Different kind inputs should not be mixed. Green goes with green, purple with purple, Yellow and Grey can be mixed if you know what you are doing.

Refer to these links to understand what each color socket is for:

What is the meaning of the color of the node sockets in the node editor?

and

Cycles - (Shader) Nodes - inputs outputs - What are the exact data types?

Normal maps and roughness maps are different kind of information and each of them can be connected to their corresponding input.

Normal map would go to the normal input socket.

Roughness to roughness input on the same principled BDSF node.


How to "letterbox" a video to a wider aspect ratio?

Set the render dimensions to what you want the output video to be, for example 1920x1080.

In the VSE, add an Effect Strip of type Color as channel 1, and adjust its length to match the video (you can go back and adjust this after adding the video, in the next step)

Add the video to channel 2, and set Blend to Alpha Over. Enable Image Offset and adjust the offset until the video is properly placed. The cropping that you're also doing, works well together with the offsetting, just remember to use the cropped size, not the original size, when you work out the offset.


Keep specific UV layer and remove the rest

Based on @batFINGER answer
The following allows for passing either a single string of a uv_map name to keep or a list of names to keep.
Since the function rem_uvs takes a parameter reference of the object a check is made to ensure the object is a mesh type (which may have uv_maps). Attempts to iterate through objects that do not include data.uv_layers would cause AttributeError and the script would fail.
In order to avoid errors caused when modifying a loop control all items that are intended to be removed are 1st added to their own list. That list is then used to remove the uv_maps from the object.
Be sure to only use one of the 2 function calls at a time or include the single name in the list of names.
import bpy

def rem_uvs(uvs_to_keep, ob):
    uvs_to_rem = []
    if type(uvs_to_keep) == 'str':
        uvs_to_keep = list(uvs_to_keep)
    if ob.type != 'MESH':
        return
    for uv in ob.data.uv_layers:
        if uv.name in uvs_to_keep:
            continue
        uvs_to_rem.append(uv)
    while uvs_to_rem:
        ob.data.uv_layers.remove(uvs_to_rem.pop())

# providing single name to keep
rem_uvs("baked", bpy.context.object)

# providing list of names to keep
names = [
    "AO",
    "Combined",
    "Normal",
    ]
#rem_uvs(names, bpy.context.object)


How create a ramp with angle with python script

Add cube, resize, subdivide, move edge.

Image showing 3 test runs as in listed in code below
There are many ways to skin this cat, thought I would add a method to
Add a unit cube, scale to desired width x depth x height, and translate such that origin is as in question. (Could IMO use COG as origin and translate later)
The 4 vertical edges of cube are always the same index, will subdivide these, Insert new vertices into face using pyhton & bmesh  Notice that the subdivide percent of each edge needs to be flipped depending on vert 0 of edge.
Finally the 11th original edge of cube is moved using Pythagoras (tangent)
import bpy
import bmesh
from mathutils import Matrix
from math import radians, tan

context = bpy.context

def add_ramp(x, y, z, ramp, angle):
    bm = bmesh.new()
    bmesh.ops.create_cube(
            bm,
            size=1,
            matrix=(
                Matrix.Diagonal((x, y, z, 1)) @
                Matrix.Translation((.5, .5, .5))
                )
            )
    pc = ramp / z
    bm.edges.ensure_lookup_table()
    edge = bm.edges[11]
    edges = [bm.edges[i] for i in (1, 3, 6, 9)]
    bmesh.ops.subdivide_edges(
            bm,
            edges=edges,
            edge_percents={
                e : (pc if e.verts[1].co.z > e.verts[0].co.z else 1 - pc)
                 for e in edges},
            use_grid_fill=True,
            cuts=1,
            )
    bmesh.ops.translate(
            bm,
            verts=edge.verts,
            vec=(0, (z - ramp) * tan(angle), 0),
            )
    me = bpy.data.meshes.new("Shape")
    bm.to_mesh(me)
    ob = bpy.data.objects.new("Shape",me)
    bpy.context.collection.objects.link(ob)

add_ramp(4, 8, 10, 5, radians(30))
add_ramp(4, 8, 10, 6, radians(45))
add_ramp(4, 8, 10, 5, radians(-30))


How to see polygon's local axis in Animation Nodes?

While the local axis of a polygon is not exactly defined, one can generate a possible transformation for the polygon using the Extract Polygon Transforms node:


Are you using Subsurf? If you are, do you have Subdivide UVs checked? Apparently this can cause seams to be exposed.
https://developer.blender.org/T26426
Try unchecking Subdivide UVs and see if it helps.

Also adding loops at the edges might help: https://blenderartists.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-343226.html


you can get the result you want by plugging the generated texture coordinates from the vertex positions of your cube in the Texture Coordinate node instead of the Geometry node.
Here's the result :


Properties-->Render-->Audio and select the format in the windows (mp3 / flac ...) make sure properties-->Render-->post processing--> sequencer" is enable (if sequencer is the audio input)


Editmesh: Toggle between all edge-loop boundaries when selecting?

It selects connected edge loops which are not connected to anything else (boundary edges):

This only affects cases where the loop is on the edge of a non-closed part of the mesh. For example, if you try this on an extruded grid (with thickness), nothing will happen as there are no boundary edges on a manifold mesh.

It should also be noted that this doesn't seem to work with Shift.


Importing webm video with transparency to the VSE removes the transparency

You can also convert the png sequence to a MPEG-4 container with a PNG codec. This will keep the transparency. The file size seems to be a little larger than the webm-codec.
The problem stays also when you convert the png sequence directly with FFMPEG (what Blender uses internally). According to this post that shouldn't be the case. However, importing that video back into Blender doesn't show - as you mentioned- the transparency.


Can't texture a plane created using BMesh API

Add a UV layer.
Speculating that the issue here is having no UV map when assigning image texture. The blue colour seen in question is likely pixel (0, 0) of your image, since without a UV layer will use default UV value of (0, 0) for all
By default most faced add primitive operators create UV's by default
bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_plane_add(calc_uvs=True)

if creating with bmesh as in question code will need to create the UV map, either as below by adding as a bmesh loop uv layer
import bmesh
import bpy
from bpy import context

me = bpy.data.meshes.new("Foo")
bm = bmesh.new()
bm.loops.layers.uv.new("Foo")
bmesh.ops.create_grid(
    bm,
    size=1,
    x_segments=1,
    y_segments=1,
    calc_uvs=True,
    )
bm.to_mesh(me)

context.collection.objects.link(
    bpy.data.objects.new("Foo", me)
    )

or by adding a UV to the mesh when created
>>> C.object.data.uv_layers.new(name="Foo")
bpy.data.meshes['Foo'].uv_layers["Foo"]


Adding simple details to a model symmetrically

In the 3D window, mesh menu, there is a "Symmetrize" function that you can activate. Another method is to delete half of the mesh, then add a mirror modifier (and eventually apply it) checking its "clipping" option to set a threshold in which central vertices will be merged.


Best way to round off the edges in a rectangle

If i understood the question

Shift+A Add Plane

Go to edit mode and make the shape rectangular

Come out of the edit mode and Press Ctrl+A Apply rotation & scale

Go to edit mode with the verts selected Press Ctrl+Shift+B Bevel it and scroll to add segments

With the rectangular rounded shape selected. Press I to offset the face

Now select the edge and extrude it and delete the top face. Select the bottom edge and Press F to fill the face


Blender > Unity Animation Export (Missing Actions)

Have you tried to bring the blender file itself into unity instead of exporting as fbx or just save it to the assets folder i think it works the same way


Merge objects with intersecting co-planar faces?

In this specific situation you can ...

Add Remesh modifier (Octree 3), Apply
Select all vertices and X Limited Disolve
W Merge by Distance
Select two vertices of hole and X Disolve Vertices

For some reason I lost two corner edges in N-gon (probably to much disolving :) ).  To fix it ...

Select all vertices Triangulate Ctrl+T
Select all vertices and X Limited Disolve again


Camera switching in blender game engine 2.72

OK!
I found an answer:
This logic does not work, if 2 Keyboard sensors are connected to one And controller. Making different And controllers for each of buttons(C and F3) fixed this thing. Now it works for me!:)


I want a double layered material, with the outer layer being glass, how can I achive that?

Viewing-Angle Based Solution
This setup works well for curvy objects.

But on a cube, for example, it is far less convincing.

I'm sure that with some serious noding you could get much closer, but it may not be worth the effort.

Node Explanation
Inner Material
The Diffuse BSDF node is the plug'n'play part of the node tree. Whatever shader is put in its place will look like it is coated in glass.
The normals of this part are slightly warped by the Reflection coordinates to approximate the refraction of the glass coating.

Glass Mix Factor
This part creates a mask at grazing viewing angles that is either black or white.
To keep the glass bright, all back faces are added to the mask. If this is not done, the glass will often look dark.

Clearcoat Mix Factor
Once the glass has been mixed in, there is no reflection above the inner material. To add this only where the glass is not already part of the shader, subtract the glass' mix factor from the Fresnel (which should have the same IOR as the Glass BSDF).


At this time it's not possible to import the shaders directly into Cycles.

Currently Element3D can only export OBJ files, which doesn't help even if you applied a Pro Shader to a model in E3D because OBJ materials don't really map to Cycles material nodetrees. They doe import the UV coords as well as image textures if there is a .MTL material file included with the OBJ file.

If E3D could export to FBX format, you would be able to import a shader tree that was more Cycles compatible.

At this point, I think your only option would be to import the image texture(s) used in the Pro Shader you want (if you can find them in ProShader folder in your file system), and then try to recreate the shader in Cycles.


How to distort still image or gif animation

For this effect, you have to first install the Animation Nodes + Extra Nodes because we need UV Map Data Output node (learn more).

Idea: Distortion of image/movie coordinates in the material.

Step-1: Add image/movie as plane using Images as Planes option of the Blender. Then, setup the material like this in the image (please note that the Generated and UV coordinates are added together),

Step-2: Then subdivide the image (or movie) plane few times,

Step-3: I have created a 2D Noise group-node from two Vector Noise nodes which will use in the next step to set the UV coordinates for the plane,

Step-4: Now, compute the 2D Noise based on the vertices of the plane then use that noise as UV coordinates in the UV Map Data Output node and adjust the parameters of 2D Noise group-node based upon your requirement,

Step-5: Then you can also animate the z-value of Offset of 2D Noise group-node,

Final Node-Tree:

Blend File:


Well, I compared with another file, setting-for-setting, until I found the answer. It turns out that in the 3d-view header (in edit mode) there is a button for "Proportional Editing Mode", and when I set that to "disabled" then snapping started working again. I have no idea what I did to enable that (probably accidentally pressed some obscure key combo). I searched all over the Interweb for this issue and although I found a bunch of folks with the problem, nobody offered this "solution". I hope this helps the next poor soul that has this issue.


Bullet doesn't fire towards expected direction

You can easily fix this problem by checking one button.

very simply, your bullet is always firing along one axis. When the "Local" box is clicked (the little square L) your bullet will fire along the local axis of the object that is emitting it.


how to select a mesh with multiple faces quickly?

Usually Ctrl+L selects all linked vertices. From the image you posted it looks like this should be the case in your mesh. So, if that doesn't work it could be that your mesh has some issues. What I usually do in these cases is to select everything and then hit W  for the Specials Menu and then choose "Remove Doubles" in order to delete double vertices, which can occur if you have accidentally split or duplicated some faces. If you are lucky that fixes your mesh so that you can try the "Select Linked Vertices" again.

Another thing you can try is "Select More": Ctrl+NumPad +.


OptiX™ is for RTX series graphic cards that include a ray trace (RT) core. For example, RTX 2080Ti.
Nvidia provides some API to let a program best use this GPU hardware for best results and also benefit from the original paper published in 2010. If your GPU is not Nvidia or it is not RTX (for example,  GTX series), OptiX won't work. There is a Blender development blog post to explain it more.
And for OpenCL, it is for an AMD GPU to utilize the hardware since AMD doesn't support CUDA at all.
It is all listed in the user manual:

CUDA
If the system has a compatible NVIDIA CUDA device, it will show up an option for rendering with Cycles.
OpenCL
If the system has a compatible AMD OpenCL device, it will show up an option for rendering with Cycles.


Don't know if relevant anymore but custom sapling addons are saved on

C:\Users\YourUsername\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.79\scripts\presets\operator\add_curve_sapling

Hope this helps.


You may also find it useful to change the general size of font.  In Blender User Preferences change the DPI to 108 as indicated above. This will make the font bigger than the default. Suit to your personal needs.


Show only certain curves of multiple layers in graph editor

That is exactly what the Search tool is used for.

Tip: You can also filter channels by data types with the Filter tool nearby on the same header, if you need to.


How can I rotate a mesh about another object using animation node in blender

You can use the Transform Mesh Node where the matrix is a multiplication of three matrices, translation such that the target object becomes at the origin, rotation then translating back.


Blender 2.8 alt f (focus on object) not working

In 2.79, ⎇ AltF focussed on the mouse position by default while the Shortcut for view selected is NumpadPeriod.

In 2.8 they shortcuts are

View Select NumpadPeriod (unchanged)
Center View to Mouse ⎇ Alt MMB

You can change the mapping in the User Preferences.


Problem with bluring a light which is behind another object

Finally I could fix the problem by using index pass as factor for mixing the image in the compositiing nodes. I used the original image itself and its blurred version as the inputs for the mixing.


How to render separate monochrome layers?

Actually, monochrome effect can be easily done by ColorRamp node:

To your question:

As you mentioned, it seems that the only problem now is the tilt/side area on the text. I suggest to consider taking the advantage of Material Index here:

To do so:

First, convert the Text objects to mesh (Shortcut is AltC. You may want to remove doubles and correct normal directions after that);
Select all sided faces, then assign a new material to the selection (even can be the exact duplication as the original one, if necessary);
Set a different Pass Index value in setting of this material;
Toggle Material Index passes in Render Layer setting for outputting. You can then use it to separate the tilt/side area and have it controlled separately.

If you don't want to do it for compositing use, using plain materials with Shadelss toggled can also be an easier way:

UPDATE:

Inspired by gandalf3's cool answer, here is the option for outlined result, also with more control by ColorRamp.

You may also consider to generate outlines by FreeStyle, though relatively inefficient and less flexible in this case.


In Blender 2.8 how do I mirror my weight painting?

Here it is as well, select the object with weights attached ( after automatic weight addition, the standard way - - Then click here, it's not under ' Symmetry ' but, under options, in this menu - -


particles in particle system rendering on the same place

I found out what was wrong.
I needed to check use modifier stack under particle properties>>>emissione>>>sorce>>>use modifier stack


how to connect two nodes to one displacement output?

Use a MixRGB node (more control) or a math node and select how you want to combine them.

Use clamp option if the values get to high (for example if you add them and you get higher values than 1).


Display values of a normal of a selected face

Here's a little hack to add the normal vector to the Data tab in Properties Editor. Copy, paste and run from the Text Editor (will stay until you restart Blender):

import bpy
import bmesh
from mathutils import Vector

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

    me = context.object.data

    if me.is_editmode:
        bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(me)
        if bm.faces.active is not None:
            row = layout.row()
            col = row.column()
            col.prop(context.window_manager, "active_face_normal", text="", expand=True)
            row.prop(context.window_manager, "active_face_normal", text="")

            if context.window_manager.active_face_normal != bm.faces.active.normal:
                context.window_manager.active_face_normal = bm.faces.active.normal

    else:
        p = me.polygons
        if p.active is not None:
            row = layout.row()
            col = row.column()
            col.prop(p[p.active], "normal", text="", expand=True)
            row.prop(p[p.active], "normal", text="")

def upd_normal(self, context):
    bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(context.object.data)
    bm.faces.active.normal = self.active_face_normal.normalized()

def register():
    bpy.types.DATA_PT_normals.prepend(draw_func)
    bpy.types.WindowManager.active_face_normal = bpy.props.FloatVectorProperty(subtype='DIRECTION', precision=3, update=upd_normal)

def unregister():
    bpy.types.DATA_PT_normals.remove(draw_func)
    del bpy.types.WindowManager.active_face_normal

if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

The normals are actually read-only, but I made it so you can edit the normals in edit mode. Note that they will reset as you leave the mode to e.g. object mode!

If I'm not mistaken, there is a Normal edit addon, which should be similar to what I created. But AFAIK it remembers the normals per face, only used for exports however.


UV coordinates scale with changes in object scale?

You can try to use Vertex Slide instead of scaling.
Select the vertices / edge you want to transform and hit 2 x G or Shift+V to Vertex Slide. Move it to desired location and make sure you have Correct UVs checked in the options (left T panel).
You can use keyboard to set the exact value while sliding (I set -3 in the video).

If you need to extend the vertices outside, start sliding and keep Alt pressed.


Connecting two separate objects physically without moving them

It's mainly a question of booleans, if I understand your request well.

you have your three geometries, sphere, cylinder and plane. Remove the desired faces on sphere and cylinder
image 1: boolean modifier applied on the plane, difference mode, select the cylinder in the Object drop-down menu, and click Apply
image 2 : once boolean intersected is applied, now show the sphere
image 3: then a new boolean modifier applied on the same plane, this time intersect mode, and select the sphere as Object you want to intersect to, apply the modifier

In short, the solidity of the 3d print depends of various factors, the thickness of the model, the surface of the different contact zones, if the object is full or hollow...

P.S.: I feel a Death Star inspiration here, lol


Problem parenting with Automatic Weights

In edit mode select all vertices, then press delete doubles in the tool panel (shortcut T). Then, in object mode, apply your mirror modifier, then apply rotation and scale of your model (ctrl A).

Then try parenting with automatic weights; if failing, you will have to weight it by hand, i.e. with the weight painting function.


How can I make a material that merges from one object onto another?

As @Serge has commented, you can get the position of the shading-point in measured in World Space by using the Position output of the 'Geometry' input node.

You can also get the point measured in any other object's space (carrying that object's transform,) by using the Object output of 'Texture Coordinate' node, and referring to the other object in the slot provided at the bottom of the node.