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Glad you brought up scripting! I'm 2 years in my Blender journey. I remember downloading it before YouTube existed, took hours to compile the FreeBSD port, laun

Glad you brought up scripting! I'm 2 years in my Blender journey. I remember downloading it before YouTube existed, took hours to compile the FreeBSD port, launched and got overwhelmed by the complexity, it ended there. My goal with Blender is to animate explainers and screencasts, how feasible is to have a procedural pipeline where I could just launch Python scripts changing basic properties like text, position? Basically I want to generate animations where I have a bunch of re-useable objects but change their properties via code, is this something Python bindings could help me?

tusharsadhwani 5y ago
not very related, but you might want to check out manim: https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim
daenz 5y ago
Funny you should ask! Yes, it can be done. I've built something like this recently...my goal was to make programmatic videos of chat conversations. Here's an example[0]. This was rendered totally headless (no launching blender UI) and the input file was a json document that was generated programmatically. I'm in the process of containerizing it so it can be run serverless in the cloud, driven by a job queue. 0. https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/arwmoffat.com/hn.mp4 https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/arwmoffat.com/hn.mp4
- karolist 5y ago
  You've just blown my mind! Wow, this is something I'll spend my next 3 months before summer definitely. Thanks for the inspiration and showing the possibilities, the headless part is just icing on top.
  - daenz 5y ago
    Cool! You will love it. If you get really jammed up on a problem, find my contact info in my profile and I may be able to unblock you.
- armagon 5y ago
  You did that in Blender? Wow. How on earth did you do that?
  - daenz 5y ago
    Each text bubble is duplicated from a rigged template speech bubble. The rig controls the dimensions of the bubble based on the size of the text it contains. Drivers are heavily used on the bones to coordinate them with other bones and movement. Each bubble is parented to a screen object which scrolls upwards, but the parenting is dynamic, so that it only engages when the message has been "sent". The "typewriter effect" of each bubble is not keyframed (unsupported) but handled by a frame update callback. The typing is determined in advance with random jitters to emulate a person typing. Hope that explains it! I have considered sharing the framework, but I know I will get a lot of requests that I'm not prepared to handle unless I was receiving donations.
    - james_in_the_uk 5y ago
      Calvary by Scene Group is also good for this type of animation and can be scripted or load files in from csv / Google docs. Here’s an example I made https://vimeo.com/497222609 https://vimeo.com/497222609
- doctoboggan 5y ago
  I currently run blender in a docker container headless on google cloud run. I generate 3D model and render animations of them. Here is one I did today: https://storage.googleapis.com/lulim-api-file-storage-prod/Render/ae60cffb-6295-445d-a1d9-918d6bed3f33.mp4 https://storage.googleapis.com/lulim-api-file-storage-prod/R...

tusharsadhwani 5y ago

not very related, but you might want to check out manim: https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim

daenz 5y ago

Funny you should ask! Yes, it can be done. I've built something like this recently...my goal was to make programmatic videos of chat conversations. Here's an example[0]. This was rendered totally headless (no launching blender UI) and the input file was a json document that was generated programmatically. I'm in the process of containerizing it so it can be run serverless in the cloud, driven by a job queue. 0. https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/arwmoffat.com/hn.mp4 https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/arwmoffat.com/hn.mp4

karolist 5y ago
You've just blown my mind! Wow, this is something I'll spend my next 3 months before summer definitely. Thanks for the inspiration and showing the possibilities, the headless part is just icing on top.
- daenz 5y ago
  Cool! You will love it. If you get really jammed up on a problem, find my contact info in my profile and I may be able to unblock you.
armagon 5y ago
You did that in Blender? Wow. How on earth did you do that?
- daenz 5y ago
  Each text bubble is duplicated from a rigged template speech bubble. The rig controls the dimensions of the bubble based on the size of the text it contains. Drivers are heavily used on the bones to coordinate them with other bones and movement. Each bubble is parented to a screen object which scrolls upwards, but the parenting is dynamic, so that it only engages when the message has been "sent". The "typewriter effect" of each bubble is not keyframed (unsupported) but handled by a frame update callback. The typing is determined in advance with random jitters to emulate a person typing. Hope that explains it! I have considered sharing the framework, but I know I will get a lot of requests that I'm not prepared to handle unless I was receiving donations.
  - james_in_the_uk 5y ago
    Calvary by Scene Group is also good for this type of animation and can be scripted or load files in from csv / Google docs. Here’s an example I made https://vimeo.com/497222609 https://vimeo.com/497222609
doctoboggan 5y ago
I currently run blender in a docker container headless on google cloud run. I generate 3D model and render animations of them. Here is one I did today: https://storage.googleapis.com/lulim-api-file-storage-prod/Render/ae60cffb-6295-445d-a1d9-918d6bed3f33.mp4 https://storage.googleapis.com/lulim-api-file-storage-prod/R...