Blender-Brussels november report

We’ve passed more than a year since the first free *cough* monthly *cough* Blender workshop organized by François Zajega and I. And since I put myself into taking notes during the the last one, here’s a quick report of what was discussed and achieved.

Morning time is for coffee and “show and tell”. Since François and David had both attended the #BConf for the first time, we took the opportunity to get their feedback on this major event in the Blender community. Here’s what they had to say.

With an overall positive feeling about the conference, they pinpointed the fact that it was about only one software, without any discussion about the operating system it runs on, and that it was also about finding solutions, methodology and good practices and how everyone runs Blender to achieve their goal. They also were surprised by the variety of profiles attending the event. From university researchers to 3D professionals or amateurs and even sales representatives, the main crowd although mainly revolved around education. And as with any free software conference, feeling part of a community is a great source for motivation boost.

On the downside, they were a bit deceived by the inequalities between the different panels, asking themselves if there was any screening at all. They were also a bit skeptic about the location of the event. More rooms with a focus on topics is on their wish-list.

To end this conversation, I asked if they had to remember only one presentation, which one would it be:

François chose Shitego Maeda’s “Generative Modelling Project”.

And David: Helmut Satzger’s “How to render a Blender movie on a supercomputer”

After that and for the rest of the day, we jumped into some Blender manipulation. For those who don’t know about our workshop yet, we focus on Blender from a coding/scripting perspective. This time, we wanted to explore Blender from the command-line with the goal of finding a way to extract useful elements out of a .blend file (without opening the Blender interface).

$: man blender is your friend, of course.

$: blender --background --python myscript.py is the way to start a chrome-less Blender with some custom python script filled with bpy api goodies.

With this still, it took us about a frustrating 2 hours to figure out what is clearly written at the end of the manual: “Arguments are executed in the order they are given.” Which means, you have to call your .blend file BEFORE the python script that will act upon it.

After that it was just a matter of reading the api docs to come with a ~40 lines of code script that does the extracting trick well enough to call it a successful workshop.

You can download it, test it and fill some issues if you find any on our code repository. The script will extract, in separate folders, any text, python script, image and/or mesh as .obj and .stl file from any packed .blend file you supply. Put it to good use.

If you liked this, share it and come to our next workshop. Announcement will be made on the BBUG