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Entries for tag "blender", ordered from most recent. Entry count: 1.
# Blender 2.5 - Programming Export Plugin
Fri
22
Oct 2010
Today I've been familiarizing myself with Blender 2.5. This new version is still in Beta stage, but as far as I can see everything is aleady in place and the program works OK. I only had to solve one problem at the beginning - my Blender was crashing at startup, because it was looking for PYTHONPATH environmental variable and thus trying to use old version of Python language that I had installed, while new Blender needs Python 3.1. The solution is to clear this environmental variable so Blender can use its bundled Python distribution. I've created a batch script to do this, called "Run Blender.bat":
set PYTHONPATH=
"c:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\blender.exe"
Many changes have been made in new new Blender version. Fundamental concepts stay the same, so we still have Object Mode, Edit Mode, select objects with right mouse button, grab with G, rotate with R and scale with S. User interface is still nonstandard with all its non-overlapping and non-modal philosophy. But they introduced some new features and made quite big changes to the interface, so it took me some time to play around and discover where is everything now and how it works. Readings on this topic I'd recommend are the new manual for Blender 2.5 and especially Blender 2.5 Changes - a document that highlights what's new.
The function that I've spend much time searching for was showing normals, so in case you also need this and can't find it: 1. You must be in Edit Mode 2. Click on the small (+) symbol in the right-top corner of the 3D View to expand a panel with some parameters 3. In this panel, look for Mesh Display / Normals section and select the checkboxes you want.
When it comes to writing plugins, Python API has been completely redesigned. Information about it can be found in Introduction, Manual and finally Reference. I couldn't find any article about writing export plugin for Blender 2.5, but basing on the information I could find and the source code of the existing plugins I've managed to code one. Here it is: io_export_json.py. It exports some of the data (scenes, objects, meshes, vertices, faces, edges, normals, texture coordinates, vertex colors) in JSON format.
BTW do you know any good program to view JSON documents as a tree? The best I've found so far is JSON Viewer, but it's not ideal. For example, it can't open files so the document has to be pasted via the clipboard.
Blender keeps Python plugins in the user's directory. In my Windows 7 it is C:\Users\%MY_LOGIN%\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.54\scripts\addons. To start using new plugin, you have to: