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 Elevator add-on

Now that we know how to transform objects in Python, we can write a new add-on that contains a transformation operator.

This add-on allows us to move all selected objects above a certain height. It can be useful whenever we want to set a minimum height, that is, a floor, for our scene. As we did in Chapter 3, we start with a basic implementation, and we will then proceed to refine it. As usual, we start our work by setting a folder for the code of the chapter.

Setting the environment

As we did at the beginning of Chapter 3, we create a folder for Chapter 4 in our VS Code project; then, from Blender’s menu bar, we can access the Blender Preferences window and then File Paths to set the ch4 folder as the Scripts folder:

Figure 4.7: System folder for Chapter 4

Figure 4.7: System folder for Chapter 4

Now it’s time to add a new file to our project:

  1. Select PythonScriptingBlender/ch4/addons in VS Code.
  2. Create a new file by clicking the...