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