Live-Coding Blender with Hy
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Live-Coding Blender with Hy
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Re: Live-Coding Blender with Hy
#2Blender is fucking amazing. I recently rediscovered it.
You probably know it as a 3D editor / renderer. What it actually is is a fully programmable environment. You can program EVERYTHING in Blender. You can run it in a command-line mode, while still being able to program everything.
Give it a try. A new version just came out a couple of days ago.
Re: Live-Coding Blender with Hy
#3Imho Blender is one of the best examples of good software.
On almost all elements in the GUI you will see the API-path on mouseOver so it's very easy to discover the possibilities.
The separation between the view and logic is great. So you can also run Blender command line only and everything is still working. Trow a script at it and you can do whatever you like.
This video is another great example of it's power.
Re: Live-Coding Blender with Hy
#4I had an urge today morning to try my hands at 3D modeling and rediscovered Blender and began using it just today. Quite a coincidence that HN front page has a post on Blender.
I've got a huge learning curve ahead of me, though.
Re: Live-Coding Blender with Hy
#5Imho Blender is one of the best examples of good software. On almost all elements in the GUI you will see the API-path on mouseOver so it's very easy to discover the possibilities. The separation between the view and logic is great. So you can also run Blender command line only and everything is still working. Trow a script at it and you can do whatever you like. This video is another great example of it's power.
I learned a bunch of it last year and was continually amazed at how good it is and how many features it has.
Not just modelling, but compositing, animation, video editing...
Re: Live-Coding Blender with Hy
#6I had an urge today morning to try my hands at 3D modeling and rediscovered Blender and began using it just today. Quite a coincidence that HN front page has a post on Blender. I've got a huge learning curve ahead of me, though.
A word of advice: I found Blender really hard to understand (I think they based it on GIMP :).) Something that helped a lot was figuring out how 3D graphics work first. Specifically vertices, faces, and meshes, then coordinate systems, vectors, and transforms, then lighting and cameras, and lastly textures and UV coordinates. I did that using three.js to display things in a browser with a bit of javascript. Once I'd figured that out and had a much better understanding of what 3D engines actually do I found it a lot easier to work out how Blender lets you control those things in it's interface.
Re: Live-Coding Blender with Hy
#7I had an urge today morning to try my hands at 3D modeling and rediscovered Blender and began using it just today. Quite a coincidence that HN front page has a post on Blender. I've got a huge learning curve ahead of me, though.
Here are a couple of great Blender resources.
Re: Live-Coding Blender with Hy
#8I had an urge today morning to try my hands at 3D modeling and rediscovered Blender and began using it just today. Quite a coincidence that HN front page has a post on Blender. I've got a huge learning curve ahead of me, though.
I didn't really 'get' the interface until I realised that Blender is to 3D modeling as vim is to text editing.
Re: Live-Coding Blender with Hy
#9Imho Blender is one of the best examples of good software. On almost all elements in the GUI you will see the API-path on mouseOver so it's very easy to discover the possibilities. The separation between the view and logic is great. So you can also run Blender command line only and everything is still working. Trow a script at it and you can do whatever you like. This video is another great example of it's power.
> On almost all elements in the GUI you will see the API-path on mouseOver
This is such a great thing, I wish more apps would adopt it -- it's such a joy to use I keep looking for excuses to use it when I don't even have a need to...
And what's more, the tooltips aren't just examples, they dynamically update to be /exactly/ what you'd type into the console or a script to get that effect. Eg when you have multiple scenes, the docs for how to change scene settings will reference the actual scene you're looking at: http://shishnet.org/ufufuf/blender-tips.png
Re: Live-Coding Blender with Hy
#10Imho Blender is one of the best examples of good software. On almost all elements in the GUI you will see the API-path on mouseOver so it's very easy to discover the possibilities. The separation between the view and logic is great. So you can also run Blender command line only and everything is still working. Trow a script at it and you can do whatever you like. This video is another great example of it's power.
And it is fascinating to see how it has evolved to become this. When it was first created as an in-house tool at NaN, the interface was just about the opposite. After a hundred hours of use, the 'one hand on keyboard, one on mouse' philosophy started to make sense, but the shortcuts and keys still seemed arbitrary; you just sorta memorized the whole interface. Heck, just discovering how to add a cube was sort of a personal coup for early-high school me since I had never used any real 3d modeling anything before.
But it was functional, and had some really great ideas, and it was free (which I needed on my nonexistent allowance)! I just assumed that the real cost was just a brutal learning curve. Then the really cool open source movement started for it when NaN went under, and people spent the next decade working to make it better.
It's always been a program for enthusiasts and passionate people, and it really shows. After half a decade I went back to it and was dismayed to realize I had no idea how to use it any more. And then 15 minutes later I was right at home. The learning curve's still there, but there are guideposts everywhere in the application, and the documentation exists! That you can throw Hy on top of it and live code it is just one more spiffy example of it working as intended. I would go so far to say that it's a core idea, since the blending engine made so many cool things easy (and possible) way back when it had an inscrutable interface.
TL;DR: I agree wholeheartedly.