Blender

These are some notes about Blender, the 3D modelling and rendering software.

General usage

Scripting

Resources

Non-interactive scripting

The aim here is to script blender to create and render a scene for you, so that it can be done non-interactively; eg. the creation of spinning text given the string to render.

Issue: Commandline arguments

I'd like to be able to pass arguments to a script, such as the String to render, animation speed etc. However, this does not seem to be reliable. A script such as the following: 

import sys
import Blender as B

print sys.argv

B.Quit()

Produces the following output: 

conrad@chichai:~/src/blender-scripts$ blender -P args-test.py pants
Using Python version 2.4
['blender-bin', '-P', 'args-test.py', 'pants']

Blender quit

So, the arguments are visible, but mixed in with blender arguments. Perhaps this is ok after -P ?

Issue: Background modelling

Blender provides a background rendering mode, which works by feeding it a constructed .blend file:

blender -b scene.blend

This allows an animator to create a scene description file, and then pass the resulting .blend file on to a renderfarm to actually render.

However, there is no way to programatically construct a scene in the background. Hence, a non-interactive modelling script will bring up an X window, and cannot be run in -b mode.

Issue: Running as an executable script (with #!blender)

Blender doesn't let you feed it python code on stdin, ie:

cat script.py | blender -P -

If it did, then you could use it in executable #! scripts as: 

#!/usr/bin/env blender -P -

import Blender
...