Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Things You Can Do with Python and POV-Ray

zulko.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 26 posts

Re: Things You Can Do with Python and POV-Ray

#11

Post by rcarmo »

lotsofmangos wrote: post #8
agentultra wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As linked by the OP: https://developer.blender.org/T22328 I think that's kind of silly. What if I am a Blender user and want to do some batch-manipulations using an external script?

It would be pretty easy to make a blender plugin that pipes stuff to blender's internal python console.

Using pyzmq comes to mind. It might even work with IPython.

Re: Things You Can Do with Python and POV-Ray

#13

Post by ticviking »

zeeshanm wrote: post #9

POV-ray is cool. I remember first using it back in high school when one of my friends introduced me to it. Back in the day, it was a total blessing for me as using a 3D modeling software would COMPLETELY slow down my Intel Celeron powered PC. :-) Now, this tutorial gives me a good excuse to try out POV-ray once again...

You had a celeron, sounds like you were spoiled. :P I had my dads old 486 to play with POV-ray on. I remember getting up at 5 am to work on a scene and come back from school to see if it had rendered right. Do homework tweak and hit render just before bed. If I was lucky I'd finish something cool once a month or so.

Re: Things You Can Do with Python and POV-Ray

#15

Post by GrantS »

dirkk0 wrote: post #6

It is interesting to hear that the author would prefer Blender over POV-ray in some way, and there are links in the comments to make that work (in terms of running Blender in a headless-like way). I wonder if there are good resources to create Blender scenes in Python with the full rendering step.

I have experience running blender in a completely scripted manner, from geometry creation, to camera motion, to rendering. These links may help:

(1) Blender 2.6, Python Manual with full API and Tutorials

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Extensions/...

(2) Run python scripts through blender from command line:

blender -b -P script.py

blender -b --python-console (for interactive console)

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Comm...

Re: Things You Can Do with Python and POV-Ray

#16

Post by GrantS »

GrantS wrote: post #15
dirkk0 wrote: post #6

It is interesting to hear that the author would prefer Blender over POV-ray in some way, and there are links in the comments to make that work (in terms of running Blender in a headless-like way). I wonder if there are good resources to create Blender scenes in Python with the full rendering step.

I have experience running blender in a completely scripted manner, from geometry creation, to camera motion, to rendering. These links may help: (1) Blender 2.6, Python Manual with full API and Tutorials http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Extensions/... (2) Run python scripts through blender from command line: blender -b -P script.py blender -b --python-console (for interactive console) http://wiki.blen…

To follow up with a working example of python via headless blender on the command line, the following 4 lines interactively get me an image of a sphere saved to /tmp/.png

./blender -b --python-console

>>> import bpy

>>> bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_uv_sphere_add(size=3.0,location=(0,0,0))

>>> bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True)

Re: Things You Can Do with Python and POV-Ray

#17

Post by eudox »

While I love the way POV-Ray (And OpenSCAD, for that matter) does things, it bothers me that its language is more about specifying rendering than describing the objects in the scene. That is, the textual commands directly used for rendering, you can't use POV-Ray's language to define a scene and then export it to some 3D file format, to the best of my knowledge, which can then be rendered somewhere else.

Re: Things You Can Do with Python and POV-Ray

#18

Post by luchak »

You might check out Mitsuba (http://www.mitsuba-renderer.org/) and LuxRender (http://www.luxrender.net/). Both are more modern open-source renderers with Python APIs, and I know that Mitsuba is quite popular in the graphics research community (in part because that's where it comes from).

Re: Things You Can Do with Python and POV-Ray

#19

Post by jdboyd »

virtualritz wrote: post #14

"It may not be as good as Cinema4D or Pixar’s RenderMan, but POV-Ray is free, open-source, and cross-platform." Why not use Aqsis or Pixie or, if you like free but don't mind closed source, 3Delight? All are RenderMan compliant.

The Python library cgkit already supports Aqsis, Pixie, and 3Delight, by the way.

Cycles is also free, open source, and cross-platform, and Cycles seems to be both further ahead than either Aqsis or Pixie and moving faster. However, it could use someone to make a Python interface for it.

Re: Things You Can Do with Python and POV-Ray

#20

Post by dirkk0 »

GrantS wrote: post #16
GrantS wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have experience running blender in a completely scripted manner, from geometry creation, to camera motion, to rendering. These links may help: (1) Blender 2.6, Python Manual with full API and Tutorials http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Extensions/... (2) Run python scripts through blender from command line: blender -b -P script.py blender -b --python-console (for interactive console) http://wiki.blen…

To follow up with a working example of python via headless blender on the command line, the following 4 lines interactively get me an image of a sphere saved to /tmp/.png ./blender -b --python-console >>> import bpy >>> bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_uv_sphere_add(size=3.0,location=(0,0,0)) >>> bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True)

Great, thanks!

Does this work on a Mac and/or Linux?

Post reply on HN