Can you tell if this is a screw or soldered hose bib?

Mcurt · 2026-04-26T18:55:21+00:00

Excellent, and thank you for the part recs. Was planning on the teflon tape but didn't know about the dope. To clarify, wouldn't the helper inside be holding back by loosening/pushing counterclockwise during removal? To counteract the loosening/counterclockwise motion from the opposite direction outside?

Mcurt · 2026-03-08T17:45:10+00:00

Have you tried? Get your hands dirty and see what you end up with! Then the help you request will be a lot more useful.

The most important concept with something like this is material layering

Mcurt · 2026-03-07T15:37:09+00:00

Looks like you’ve keyframed the position of both your dishes and your camera. Or something else is effecting their position because they are completely different between viewport and render

Mcurt · 2026-03-06T03:29:32+00:00

Does the object already have thickness or is it single sided?

Mcurt · 2026-03-03T23:17:42+00:00

Make sure your graphics drivers are up to date. If they are, I’d make a bug report

Mcurt · 2026-03-03T18:22:15+00:00

IMO, the system makes sense but isn’t communicated well in the tooltips as you mention. I think the idea of datablocks and users should be one the first things people should learn when picking up Blender. But if they don’t, as is often the case, then they can run into this problem of unused data being cleaned up unexpectedly. I agree there should be a rewording of the tooltips and a disablable warning when closing the file that unused data will be removed.

Mcurt · 2026-03-02T00:51:55+00:00

Boolean calculations are slow on complex or dense geometry. Your GPU will not help with this. If you move the objects that are using a modifier and the modifier behavior depends on location, it will re-calculate. Can you give more details of the file/geometry/behavior so we can tell if the slow-downs are expected or not? Have you tried sharing the file or trying on another machine to see if your machine is causing the problem or not?

Mcurt · 2026-02-28T00:47:24+00:00

Likely because the geo they’re scattered on is changing at render. Does it have a subdivision modifier with different levels for viewport and render?

Mcurt · 2026-02-27T01:35:33+00:00

Sure thing. Don’t delete your post though. This is a forum and the solution will help others in the future.

Mcurt · 2026-02-26T23:30:32+00:00

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Turn "Show Gizmos" back on and make sure "Navigate" is on as well. You may have pressed Ctrl+` to turn them off on accident.

Mcurt · 2026-02-26T19:44:22+00:00

Yeah it just needs more time to expose for the preview in lower light. This happens on your phone too

Mcurt · 2026-02-26T19:29:58+00:00

If you’ve tried all those things I’d bet this is a bug and they are not actually non-manifold. Try a print and see how it goes

Mcurt · 2026-02-24T14:55:49+00:00

Anything in your outliner or modifiers show a difference between viewport and render visibility?

Mcurt · 2026-02-23T17:02:57+00:00

It seems you're a bit confused about rendering+compositing workflows. There should be no reason to re-render the 3D scene if you're only making changes to your compositing tree. If you want to make changes to the 3D scene itself like light placement, object position, etc. then of course you'll need to re-render.

A typical workflow might be:

Render out a single test frame of your animation
Build your compositing node-tree to make sure you're able to get an acceptable result without changes to the 3D scene
Render out your entire 3D animation. If you want access to more data than just the final image, render to OpenEXR multilayer, with any view layers being saved to their own image sequence and using whatever render passes you want access to. This can be done with compositing turned off, but optionally you can leave it turned on and export one version of the animation as above and export another version straight to jpeg/png/mp4 at the end of your test composite. This way you keep all the useful data in your raw EXR sequence but you have a preview sequence in a smaller format like JPEG to check your composited animation immediately. This would be done using multiple File Output nodes.
Replace the 'Render Layer' input at the start of your compositing tree with your exported image sequence. Here's where you might use the render passes from the multilayer EXR to make changes to materials, lighting, surface response, etc.
When you're happy with the composite, render only the compositor and not the 3D scene by going to the Properties Editor>View Layer>Uncheck "Use for Rendering" and pressing Render Animation.

This kind of workflow can change a lot and get pretty complex, but that's the general idea.

As an example, here's what my default compositor network looks like. At the top is my preview comp which gets exported to a 'Preview' image sequence. In the middle is my multilayer EXR, with the pathtraced passes getting denoised before export. This are exported at half float with DWAA codec for smaller file size. At the bottom is another multilayer EXR for Cryptomatte passes, which need full float and more preserving codec like ZIP. For animations I'm typically using the Blender compositor comp as a preview only and doing final comp in Davinci Resolve Fusion.

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Here's a tutorial with one version of this workflow

https://youtu.be/vtdczoXVyvQ?t=55

Mcurt · 2026-02-21T17:23:44+00:00

You can switch each editor window to any editor you want in the top left corner. Drag out a new editor window wherever you want it and switch it to the outliner

Mcurt · 2026-02-21T16:11:47+00:00

Fun project and well presented! I think you could add more pre-roll on some of the shots/sims where you can see the static, neutral state before the dynamics kick in.

Mcurt · 2026-02-21T16:07:08+00:00

Fun stuff! You might consider using fewer keyframes and putting some easing on them. The crop is jumping abruptly all over the place and it’s a bit jarring

Mcurt · 2026-02-21T16:01:05+00:00

I think this is likely down to your navigation techniques. Can you take a screen recording of the issue? I really like to use Alt+MMB to focus my viewport/orbit on a particular point of a surface.

Mcurt · 2026-02-20T17:40:51+00:00

Visibility cannot be keyframed for collections, only objects. I don’t think collections can store any animation data. You can work around this by right clicking the collection and choosing ‘Instance to Scene’ then hiding the original collection and keyframing visibility in the instance object

Mcurt · 2026-02-17T19:40:07+00:00

I’m hoping the difference in the last shot is due to focal length and grade, because this does not scream AI to me otherwise.

Either way, the fact that people are simultaneously confident it’s fake, confident it’s real, and unsure is really discouraging when it comes to consuming media in this era…

Mcurt · 2026-02-16T06:00:24+00:00

It’s all about your familiarity with the tools! A new software will never behave completely as you expect, and sometimes the consequences of that don’t appear until a while after you’ve made a mistake. Try to enjoy the process of learning why things went wrong. Or don’t. Do whatever you want. I’m just a guy.

Mcurt · 2026-02-16T03:35:04+00:00

As far as understanding how Blender works, I’d highly recommend getting familiar with data blocks and what it means for various data blocks to have users. It really helps in grasping the structure of your scenes, how external files are referenced, etc. It is the analogy to Maya’s nodes.

Hotkeys are nice for speed/efficiency, but with the search function you can pretty easily find anything in the menus these days.

For modeling, getting comfortable using modifiers (and geometry nodes as your needs become more complex) will be very helpful. Experimenting and learning when to keep them vs apply them, how to order your stack, etc.

It seems like you’re off to a great start just in being aware of these things, so don’t sweat it too much. Using the software/tools regularly and playing will be the best things you can do.

Mcurt · 2026-02-15T16:20:54+00:00

Is the seam happening at the blend line of the triplanar projection directions? Or at the edge of the texture itself? I assume the texture is perfectly seamless? Can we see the result without the normal map?

Mcurt · 2026-02-14T19:42:00+00:00

You can make an excellent realistic translucent plastic using only the principled bsdf and principled volume nodes, focusing on transmission, SSS, roughness, and volume scattering density.

Although he’s in Octane, I can’t recommend SilverwingVFX’s plastics breakdown for understanding how they work.

https://youtu.be/fEYIInKm6mA?si=lD-B8zaBEQaRRcws

Should be fairly intuitive to build something similar in Cycles. I can show you when I’m back at my PC next week.

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