[Newark] Scripted blender

[Tom French]

First off, Blender can export in formats Shapeways accepts, that's a plus.
On the other hand, Blender is - as you say - primarily designed to be
GUI-driven. It really depends on what you want to make as to whether
Blender's Python support will be much use to you. I've never used POVray,
but I understand a lot of it is (or can be) done with constructive solid
geometry, which is not something Blender really supports (it can sort of
emulate it with boolean modifiers on polygon objects, but it creates
somewhat messy meshes, I'm not sure if that would be a problem). I presume
these shape printers mainly use polygon data anyway, so something scripted
with CSG in POVray would still need converting to b-rep before printing.

It is possible to model precisely in Blender's GUI, but if you don't want to
use it then it doesn't much help me telling you that. It kind of depends
what you want to make,you can certainly 'write' a scene with a Python
script, creating and positioning primitives. Doing more fine-grained stuff
like modifying the vertices is of course possible, but it gets rather
complex. Something you might do if you were programming a mathematical solid
to print, or something else like that. As I say, depends what you're after.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Python_Scripting is the page about
it on the Wiki and there're links to the API at the bottom of that page. Do
you have much experience with Python? I don't suppose you need all that much
to just list API calls which is basically what this is.

Anyway, I hope some of that helps.
Tom

2009/2/25 Chris Burton <Chris at 7of9b.org>

> Hi,
>  I know there are a few on here who use blender and I've been meaning to
> post this for a while and keep getting distracted and forget - yes I know
> you keep reminding me ChrisH ;)
>
> I'm wanting to create a 3d object with the intentions of getting it made by
> someone like shapeways (http://www.shapeways.com/). The problem is Blender
> seems to be more focused on being creative via the GUI and not through
> scripting. I'm more interested in positioning objects exactly where I want
> them rather than battling with a GUI to get things where I want them. So I
> was wondering if there's a way I can script objects to be positioned at a
> specific location/size/orientation/etc to make it a little more like povray
> scene files?
>
>
> ChrisB.
>
>
>
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