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

Materials


Materials are what give an object its outward appearance. In Blender, materials are extremely versatile and because of that rather complex. Almost any aspect of the way light behaves when reflecting from an object may be controlled and that not only by simple parameters, but by image maps and node networks as well.

Up to 16 materials can be associated with an object and, within an object, individual parts can refer to one of these 16 materials. In Text3d objects, each individual character may refer to a different material and in curves this is true for each control point.

From a developer's point of view, assigning materials to objects is a two-step process. First, we have to define a new material, and then we have to assign a material or materials to an object. The first step may be omitted if we can refer to already existing materials.

If an object like a mesh already has faces defined we then still have to assign a material to each face. Newly created faces will have the active...