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Blender would give Maya a real run for its money if it had an API.
by graphicsRat 7y ago
Blender would give Maya a real run for its money if it had an API.
- mattmar96 7y agohttps://docs.blender.org/api/current/ https://docs.blender.org/api/current/
- Asooka 7y agoThat's just for scripting. A proper C API is needed for plugins that do more than the simplest edition operations. At one point I wanted to write a plugin that let you model distance field fractals and would make meshes from them, but there's no way I'll write something that computationally intensive in python. And if I do it in C with a python bridge, it would have meant copying mesh data to and from blender over python. That's not even going into stuff like custom intersectable primitives. Blender would really benefit from exposing its inner data structures in a way that lets people write high performance plugins.
- UncleEntity 7y ago...or you could do a C to python bridge and use the C++ API like cycles does. I worked a bit on a "proper" API but there was zero interest from anyone so found something better to do with my time.
- snuxoll 7y ago> Blender would really benefit from exposing its inner data structures in a way that lets people write high performance plugins. Not that I want to dismiss the benefit of plugins, but why not just work on getting the new features merged in instead if the Python API isn't sufficient for the task? Unless you have something the maintainers really don't want to deal with long-term there's little benefit to keeping your functionality out-of-tree.
- yuhe00 7y agoYou do have the C API in the form of source code. You just can't distribute your changes as a plug-in.
- ur-whale 7y agoNot sure why you think it doesn't have an API ... The entire thing is accessible via Python. If that's not an API, I'm not sure what you mean.