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

Areas, regions, and panels

The Blender window is split into areas. Each area can contain an editor of a different type, such as the viewport for 3D objects or the sequencer for editing videos. Each editor, or space, can contain one or more regions. The number and type of regions vary across different types of editors: for instance, some editors, such as the Preferences window, have a navigation sidebar, while others don’t.

The Blender manual explains the interface in detail: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/3.1/interface/index.html.

What we need to know for now is that regions can contain panels, and panels are the basic containers of graphical elements such as text, editable values, and buttons.

We can create new panels with Python, which makes it possible to customize any region with ease. A panel must contain information about the area and region to which it belongs:

Figure 5.1: Areas, regions, and the panel in the Blender interface

Figure 5.1: Areas, regions, and the panel in the Blender interface

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