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

PyConstraints


Where pydrivers may be used to bypass limitations in the built-in possibilities to drive IPO channels, PyConstraints allow us to conquer difficulties in situations where the built-in constraints will not suffice. For example, it is not possible to restrict the position of an object to the surface of another object with holes in it. The built-in constraints offer ways to limit the position to a location not lower than another object (the floor constraint). But if we would like it to be possible for our object to drop below the surface at locations where there is a hole, we would have to program such a constraint ourselves. As we will see, PyConstraints allow us to do just that.

With all these introductory remarks behind us we can finally turn to programming again in the next section.