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

Wuthering heights—a slope-dependent material


In Blender it is quite simple to generate a fractal terrain (just add a plane, go to edit mode, select all, and then subdivide fractal a few times W → 3). If you want something more elaborate a few excellent scripts exist to help you (see for example http://sites.google.com/site/androcto/Home/python-scripts/ANTLandscape_104b_249.py). But how would you apply textures to such a terrain? In this example, we will examine a method to choose between different material inputs based on the slope of the surface that we're shading. This will allow us to create the effect that very steep slopes are generally devoid of greenery even though they might be well below the tree line. Combined with a height-dependent material we should be able to shade a mountainous terrain in a pretty convincing way.

Note

Reducing computation time:

Pynodes are computationally intensive as they are called for every visible pixel. Clever coding can sometimes reduce the amount of...