Book Image

Blender 2.49 Scripting

By : Michel J. Anders
Book Image

Blender 2.49 Scripting

By: Michel J. Anders

Overview of this book

<p>Blender 3D is a popular, open source modeling package that can produce photo-realistic 3D images and animations. Automating tasks and extending the functionality of an extensive application like Blender will streamline your workflow and make the impossible possible. However, implementing scripts may be daunting.<br /><br />This book takes a practical step-by-step approach to implementing Python scripts that cover almost all areas of Blender. It clearly outlines each problem and focuses on straightforward, easy-to-understand code, highlighting the common pitfalls and Blender idiosyncrasies. It guides you from the installation process and the creation of a simple object to elaborate, fully rigged models with vertex groups and materials all the way to extending Blender's built-in editor. It also teaches how to implement a simple web server inside Blender to serve rendered images. This book will take you from a clear problem description to a fully functional program. The focus is on finding your way in Blender's vast array of possibilities and getting things done without losing too much time on programming details. Each script is carefully explained to provide insight that can be reused in other projects.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Blender 2.49 Scripting
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Future Developments
Index

Extending the editor—searching with regular expressions


The editor already provides basic search and replace functionality but if you are used to other editors you might miss the possibility to search using regular expressions. This plug-in provides this functionality.

Regular expressions are very powerful and many programmers love their versatility (and many others loathe their poor readability). Whether you love or hate them, they are very expressive: matching any decimal number can simply be expressed as \d+ for example (one or more digits). If you are looking for a word that is spelled differently in British or American English, such as colour/color, you can match any of them with the expression colou?r (color with an optional u).

The following code will show that Blender's built-in editor can be equipped with this useful search tool with just a few lines of code. The script provided should be installed in Blender's scripts directory and can then be invoked from the text editor menu as...