Blender/Python API Docs

Over the last week I have worked on our Python API docs, since there were many undocumented areas which are not easily understood by reading existing scripts.

The API Intro is written in the style of a quick-start without giving much depth.

Here are the new pages which I hope makes blenders python API easier to learn.

if something is unclear or you have suggestions, feel free to reply on the post.

– Campbell

10 comments
  1. yes, that’s really helpful! thanks!

    but i liked the old bright wiki and docs a lot more. i think the dark style is a lot harder to read.

  2. One thing i just found out which is of great help (especially to me as i’m just beginning to learn python) is the API navigator add-on by Dany Lebel. It’s great to just see what kind of stuff lives where and what can you do with it. It gives me a much better idea of the ‘spacial’ relationship of everything.

    Bigups to everyone!

  3. Matt’s suggestion sounds quite good! Sometimes even if you are following commit logs, you can miss one, or not have time to deal with it till you’ve forgotten..

    Kudos on the documentation (and the api in general). the 2.5 api (as opposed to the old one) has been an absolute joy to work with. We might grumble a bit as you change things from now till release time, but the level of consistency is really nice.

  4. Hi!
    I’ve been using Blender for a while and have now convinced my girlfriend to give it a try, especially because of vswarm :-) she’s tried to get her projects working in blender (she had made them in cinema4d) but it seems that this is very complicated … so here’s my feature suggestion: how about implementing a function to import c4d files including textures (she’s an architect, so that’s important as well…) ? i’ll keep convincing her to use blender for new projects in any case but this would be really awesome!! Thank you in advance!

  5. Thats cool, congratulations. Maybe we will see any day a way to get the generated GLSL shaders for each material through python? Thanks

  6. This is really helpful. Thanks a lot.

  7. I still wonder what happened to the various noise functions, i have seen them within scripts in blender 2.5 but did not found any documentation about them, though they seem pretty close to the 2.49 ones.

  8. Edit: that should be “blender 2.5” above, not 2.4.

  9. Hi Cam, thanks for that, it’s great.

    Could I ask for one more thing though – would it be possible to write somewhere (even just a wiki page) a log of every time the API gets changed in a way that breaks scripts? There have been a few of these lately, and especially if you aren’t following and thoroughly reading every commit log message, it’s easy for them to pass by, only to have a script mysteriously stop working.

    I’ve done some blender 2.4 py scripting work on contract, and lately I’ve spent a lot of my own unpaid time updating it for changes to the API. I understand this is the nature of ‘beta’ (though i thought it was supposed to be getting stabler by now…) but it’s been quite a drain on time and effort.

    I’ve had to read back through commit logs, trying to match the python error I’m getting and guess what commit caused it, then inspect logs of when other scripts were updated, and see if those changes can translate to what I’m doing. It’s quite an exhausting process for someone like me who doesn’t know the internal details of the bpy api and of python itself as intimately as someone like yourself.

    It would be an *enormous* help, if each time a commit was made that breaks the API, if a simple paragraph could be appended to a page somewhere, with the date, an explanation of what was changed and why, and instructions on how to update scripts to work again.

    This wouldn’t take very long to write, (not much longer than the commit log itself I’m sure), but it would save a tremendous amount of time for people like me, and perhaps ease tensions on mailing lists etc too. If I could just scroll down the list of API-breaking-changes and fix each one as I see them since my script was last edited, it would make life so much easier.

    Now, to find several hours to figure out what happened in my render engine addon…..

    thanks

    Matt

  10. This is awesome! Been wondering why custom Panels within an embedded script wouldn’t show up. One of your entries now states that it actually needs to get registered so I assume that’s the one.

    Cheers man

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