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

Packaging and installing add-ons

We learned how to install single .py add-ons in the Installing our add-ons section of Chapter 3. To distribute an add-on that consists of more files, we must create a .zip archive of it. Most of you will be familiar with how a .zip file is a compressed archive that can contain more files or folders.

Blender can install folders from a standard .zip archive, but there are two requirements:

  • The .zip file must contain the add-on as a first-level folder
  • The name of the first-level folder must not contain any dot (.) as it won’t work with Python’s import system

There are third-party tools, such as 7-Zip, that provide a wide array of options, but it is possible to create .zip files using the file utilities of your operating system. In this section, we will learn how to compress an add-on folder on Windows OSX, and Ubuntu systems.

Cleaning up bytecode

If the structured_addon.zip\structured_addon folder contains a subfolder...