Author: OneMinuteVideoTutorials

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Batch rename objects in Blender

Today, we will tackle an essential aspect of 3D modeling in Blender – object naming.

It’s easy to lose track of your objects’ names, especially when you’re working on a complex project. All too often, we find ourselves with a sea of objects, each bearing an unhelpful name like ‘cube’, which doesn’t do much to tell us about their function or importance in the scene.

However, fear not! Blender offers a convenient tool for mass renaming of objects, allowing you to maintain order and clarity in your work. Let’s walk through the steps.

Firstly, you need to select the objects you want to rename. If your objects are neatly organized in a collection, simply right-click on the collection and choose ‘Select Objects’. Alternatively, if you’re dealing with individual objects, click on the first object, hold down ‘Shift’, then click on the last object. This selects those two objects and all others in between.

With your objects selected, hit ‘Control’ and ‘F2’. This brings up the ‘Batch Rename’ dialogue box. Here, you’ll specify the current name string you want to change – in this case, ‘cube’ – and what you’d like to replace it with. Click ‘OK’, and voila! All your selected objects are now renamed, saving you from any future confusion.

If you ever forget the shortcut, remember that you can always find the ‘Batch Rename’ option under the ‘Edit’ menu.

That wraps up today’s tutorial! We hope you found this helpful in managing your 3D workspace. Thanks for watching and remember to subscribe for more quick and easy Blender tips. Until next time, this is One Minute Video Tutorials.com, making your Blender journey a breeze, one minute at a time.

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Remove weird box characters from pasted text in VS Code

Today, we’ll be discussing a common issue you might encounter when copying and pasting text from other programs into Visual Studio Code.
At times, you may notice strange boxes appearing in your pasted text. These boxes represent unrecognized characters in VS Code. They usually occur due to discrepancies between character encoding standards across different programs.

If you’re looking for a quick fix to eliminate these, here’s a simple process you can follow:

First, select and copy one of these unknown box characters. Next, open up the ‘Replace’ dialog box. Paste the copied box character into the ‘Find’ field of the dialog box. Then, leave the ‘Replace’ field blank. Upon clicking ‘Replace All’, VS Code will replace all instances of this unrecognized character with nothing, essentially removing them from your text.

And there you have it! Your pasted text is now free of any unknown characters.

Thank you so much for watching and see you next time on OneMinuteVideoTutorials.com

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How to concatenate strings and variable values in GDevelop

I’m currently studying the relatively new open source “code free” game engine GDevelop, so I will write some tips and tricks regarding it here.

One basic thing you should learn to do in any game engine is mixing strings and variable values together. The way to do this varies in different game engine.

In GDevelop, you can do this:

"Score is " + GlobalVariableString(myVar)
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Render a folder full of STL files to PNG images

I wanted to create images out of all the STL-files I had 3D-printed so far. Here is a script that automates the process using Blender.

import bpy
import os
import math
from bpy_extras.object_utils import world_to_camera_view

def clear_scene():
    bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='SELECT')
    bpy.ops.object.delete()

def setup_camera_light():
    bpy.ops.object.camera_add(location=(0, -10, 5))
    camera = bpy.context.active_object
    camera.rotation_euler = (1.0, 0, 0)
    bpy.context.scene.camera = camera

    bpy.ops.object.light_add(type='SUN', align='WORLD', location=(0, 0, 10))
    light = bpy.context.active_object
    light.rotation_euler = (1.0, 0, 0)

def create_red_material():
    red_material = bpy.data.materials.new(name="RedMaterial")
    red_material.use_nodes = True
    red_material.node_tree.nodes["Principled BSDF"].inputs["Base Color"].default_value = (1, 0, 0, 1)
    return red_material



from mathutils import Vector

def set_camera_position(camera, obj):
    bound_box = obj.bound_box
    min_x, max_x = min(v[0] for v in bound_box), max(v[0] for v in bound_box)
    min_y, max_y = min(v[1] for v in bound_box), max(v[1] for v in bound_box)
    min_z, max_z = min(v[2] for v in bound_box), max(v[2] for v in bound_box)
    
    # Calculate object dimensions
    width = max_x - min_x
    height = max_y - min_y
    depth = max_z - min_z

    # Calculate object center
    center_x = min_x + (width / 2)
    center_y = min_y + (height / 2)
    center_z = min_z + (depth / 2)

    # Calculate distance from camera to object center
    distance = max(width, height, depth) * 2.5  # Increase the multiplier from 2 to 2.5

    # Set camera location and rotation
    camera.location = (center_x, center_y - distance, center_z + (distance / 2))
    camera.rotation_euler = (math.radians(60), 0, 0)




def import_stl_and_render(input_path, output_path):
    clear_scene()
    setup_camera_light()

    bpy.ops.import_mesh.stl(filepath=input_path)
    obj = bpy.context.selected_objects[0]

    # Set camera position based on object bounding box
    camera = bpy.context.scene.objects['Camera']
    set_camera_position(camera, obj)
    
    # Apply red material to the object
    red_material = create_red_material()
    if len(obj.data.materials) == 0:
        obj.data.materials.append(red_material)
    else:
        obj.data.materials[0] = red_material

    # Set render settings
    bpy.context.scene.render.image_settings.file_format = 'PNG'
    bpy.context.scene.render.filepath = output_path
    bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True)
    
     # Set transparent background
    bpy.context.scene.render.film_transparent = True

    # Set render settings
    bpy.context.scene.render.image_settings.file_format = 'PNG'
    bpy.context.scene.render.filepath = output_path
    bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True)

def render_stl_images(input_folder, output_folder):
    for root, _, files in os.walk(input_folder):
        for file in files:
            if file.lower().endswith(".stl"):
                input_path = os.path.join(root, file)
                output_file = os.path.splitext(file)[0] + ".png"
                output_path = os.path.join(output_folder, output_file)

                import_stl_and_render(input_path, output_path)

if __name__ == "__main__":

    if __name__ == "__main__":
        input_folder = "3D Prints"
        output_folder = "/outputSTL"

    if not os.path.exists(output_folder):
        os.makedirs(output_folder)

    try:
        render_stl_images(input_folder, output_folder)
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error: {e}")

How to use:

Save the script in a python file. You can call it for example renderSTL.py. Change the input and output folders in the script to fit your situation.

Make sure you have Blender in PATH so that you can run it by simply typing “Blender” in a command prompt. If you don’t have it in PATH, open “enviroments variables” and edit the “PATH” variable under “system”. Add the path to your Blender installation as a new path.

Open up a command line in the folder which has the proper path to your STL root folder and paste this command in:
blender –background –factory-startup –python renderSTL.py

Blender should now render images out of all your STL files in the background and save them into the output folder.

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The New Pose Library Workflow in Blender

Here’s how to work with the Blender 3.4 pose library and assets browser:

Create the pose you need in pose mode. Select the bones that are required for the pose.

Save poses (still in pose mode) from the right side toolbar’s “animation” tab by clicking “Create Pose Asset”:

You can name the pose from the F9 operator dialogue.

You only need one pose for each side, since the poses can be flipped with “Flip Pose”.

Simply click on a pose thumbnail to apply it.

You can also right click on a thumbnail to select all the pose bones.

You can click and drag on a pose thumbnail to mix between to poses.

The thumbnail from the pose is rendered from the active camera. You can later change it from the Asset Browser window if needed from the “generate preview” button:

If you want to create a global “user library”, save the .blend file in the Assets directory. By default it’s in Windows: C:\Users\myusername\Documents\Blender\Assets\

It should now show up under “user library” in the assets browser, also for any new .blend files that you create.

You can save as many files as you need to the Assets folder, and each one of them will show up in the Assets panel under “user assets”

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Priority system for console.log()

When developing websites and applications with JavaScript we often write console.log() messages between our lines of code.

Things can get a little bit annoying when your console starts to fill up with a lot of these messages and you might feel like you want to focus just on a certain part of the program.

I have wished many times that there would be an easy way to temporarily turn off messages that I don’t need, but commenting them out one by one feels a little bit too tedious. That’s why I decided to develop a custom console log function that will only log I messages that have the highest priority number that way I can basically shut off all other messages by giving one of my messages up higher priority value. This lets me really focus on the message that I need to focus on . So here is a custom myLog() function that I’m now calling instead of console log and it takes two arguments:

the thing to log

and a priority number

If I set the priority number of one of my calls to be high higher than the others then only that message will be shown. So for example if other priorities are number one but I do a new console log that has a priority of two, then only that log message with the highest priority will be shown .

let priority = 0;
let lastLog;

function myLog(message, logPriority) {
    if (logPriority >= priority) {
        lastLog = message;
        priority = logPriority;
    }
    console.log(lastLog);
}
//use like this
myLog(`my log message and variable ${myvar}`, 1)

One downside with this method is that unlike regular console logs it doesn’t automatically show you the file and line of code that produced the console log. We can remedy this by writing a little helper function that will use the error logging capabilities in order to also include the file and the line information together with the console log. The fileInfo is now an optional third argument that you can use:

let priority = 0;
let lastLog;

function myLog(message, logPriority, fileInfo) {
    if (logPriority >= priority) {
        lastLog = message;
        priority = logPriority;
    }
    console.log(lastLog);

    if (fileInfo){ //check that it's not undefined
        console.log(`Current file: ${fileInfo.filename}, line number: ${fileInfo.lineNumber}`);

    }

}

//for getting line number and file name


function getFileInfo() {
    const err = new Error();
    const stackTrace = err.stack.split('\n')[2].trim();
    const matchResult = /\((.*):(\d+):\d+\)/.exec(stackTrace);
    const absoluteFilename = matchResult[1];
    const lineNumber = matchResult[2];

    const currentDir = window.location.href.split('/').slice(0, -1).join('/');
    const relativeFilename = absoluteFilename.replace(currentDir, '');

    return {
        filename: relativeFilename,
        lineNumber: lineNumber
    };
}

//use like this:
    myLog(`dialogueIDSent: ${dialogueIDSent}`, 1, fileInfo = getFileInfo());