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

Chapter 9. Expanding your Toolset

This chapter is less about rendering and more about making life easier for the day-to-day use of Blender by extending its functionality. It uses some external libraries that need to be installed, and at some point the Python scripting used is perhaps a little bit harder to read for a novice. Also, from an artist's point of view, it might be a little less visually pleasing as these scripts don't lend themselves to pretty illustrations. Nevertheless, these scripts do add genuine useful functionality, especially for a script developer, so please read on.

In this chapter, we will learn how to:

  • List and archive assets such as image maps

  • Publish a rendered image automatically with FTP

  • Extend the functionality of the built-in editor with regular expression searches

  • Speed up computations by using Psyco—a just-in-time compiler

  • Add version control to your scripts with Subversion