Book Image

Python Scripting in Blender

By : Paolo Acampora
5 (1)
Book Image

Python Scripting in Blender

5 (1)
By: Paolo Acampora

Overview of this book

Blender, a powerful open source 3D software, can be extended and powered up using the Python programming language. This book teaches you how to automate laborious operations using scripts, and expand the set of available commands, graphic interfaces, tools, and event responses, which will enable you to add custom features to meet your needs and bring your creative ideas to life. The book begins by covering essential Python concepts and showing you how to create a basic add-on. You’ll then gain a solid understanding of the entities that affect the look of Blender’s objects such as modifiers, constraints, and materials. As you advance, you’ll get to grips with the animation system in Blender and learn how to set up its behavior using Python. The examples, tools, patterns, and best practices present throughout the book will familiarize you with the Python API and build your knowledge base, along with enabling you to produce valuable code that empowers the users and is ready for publishing or production. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to successfully design add-ons that integrate seamlessly with the software and its ecosystem.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction to Python
7
Part 2: Interactive Tools and Animation
13
Part 3: Delivering Output

Writing the “PunchClock” add-on

Some tools can require the current date and time from the operating system clock. In Python, we can use the datetime module to get them in our scripts, generally for versioning or logging purposes. There are no Blender properties designed specifically for time units, but an hour and a minute can be stored as two separate integer properties of an operator.

We know how to use the default argument to declare the initial value of a property, but what if that value is not always the same? For example, the current hour and minute change during the day, but default only sets static values.

But since invoke is executed before all the other methods, we can set our default values programmatically in there.

To demonstrate that, we will create an add-on to create a time format text in the current scene. By default, the text displays the current time of the day, but the user can change that.

Creating the add-on script

Let’s create...