Videos

1: Introduction & copy-pasting

16th August 2017

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Author

Sybren A. Stüvel

After introducing himself and this training course, Sybren shows how to start scripting Blender.

  • Introduction
  • Computers are stupid
  • Using the Python console
  • Copying stuff from Blender's user interface
  • Changing properties of objects
  • Sources of information

Links from the video

  • Blender's Python API documentation. This link is for daily builds, so it may be for a newer version of Blender than you're currently using. If you want the documentation for your version of Blender, go to Help → Python API Reference in Blender itself.
  • Python Standard Library. Here you can find lots of information about Python itself.

The Slides

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31 Comments

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mclifeisagame

9th February 2020 - 09:07

For those using it for 2.81, UV Sphere now uses the radius key instead of size

bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_uv_sphere_add(radius=0.1, location=(1, 1, 1))

Luis Felipe Peredo Noguez

11th February 2021 - 20:19

@mclifeisagame Thank you

Jimmy Gunawan

22nd August 2017 - 13:19

Copy paste while hovering on command is handy indeed. Cool~

Neil Brown

7th May 2020 - 23:43

Using Blender version 2.82 out of the box the python code doesn't show, I had to tick Python Tooltips in menu Edit > Preferences > Interface

dangnhattoan

18th May 2020 - 07:56

*@Neil Brown* Thanks.

Luciano Muñoz

21st August 2017 - 19:13

Really great, i also love that you put the slides!, it makes easy to go back and check stuff for reference!, good job sir!

luke Martin

29th August 2017 - 09:24

I just love this series of video. It's just technical enough not to be boring and still the examples are simple enough to be understandable. Great job. I'm already using all that in my latest project. I'm Done with monkey business !

Sybren A. Stüvel

29th August 2017 - 10:31

@luke.video: Thanks!

Konrad Welz

8th October 2017 - 12:33

This is so excellent! Great delivery and graphics. Already worth my monthly subscription. More tutorials like this are always welcome. Thank you.

Gemma María Rull

9th November 2018 - 16:28

Great!

李杰

26th November 2019 - 06:26

great!!!

<deleted>

16th September 2020 - 09:07

Very nice indeed. Especially copying from Blender into the search of (Api)the documemtation, is what I did not know , a feature I will use probably a lot.

And congratulations Sybren to your way to giving lessons: Introduction what you will talk about, the talk, AND a recapulation of what has been shown. Great!

delete Delete

Jenae Renee Jordan

16th September 2020 - 14:52

Thank you so very much for this course, Mr. Stuvel.

Julian Darley

5th November 2020 - 19:12

at 4.20: auto-completion now uses tab rather than control space (in B2.90 - not sure about B2.8)

Ludwig Heijden

24th December 2020 - 17:29

You made me buy a cloud account. Grrrrrr Sybren!

(thank you)

Johan Tri Handoyo

21st August 2017 - 21:25

copy and paste doesn't work for me. I'm using Blender 2.78c 64 bit in Ubuntu 16.04. Any idea why?

Sybren A. Stüvel

22nd August 2017 - 11:21

@johantri: What are you doing exactly? Which buttons are you pressing? Where is your mouse cursor when you press them?

Pete Robie

23rd December 2017 - 06:54

Hi Sybren. I've been trying to create a selection box with a file browser and I've had no luck as of yet. I know it's a little more advanced, but would you mind pointing me in the right direction?

Sybren A. Stüvel

24th December 2017 - 15:01

@Pete Robie: The importance here is to think from the data perspective, and not from the GUI perspective. If you want to have a file selector, the property to store the selected file should have subtype='FILE_PATH'. Blender will draw an appropriate interface for you then.

Pete Robie

24th December 2017 - 18:10

@Sybren A. Stüvel: Thank you.

PlumpMath

3rd February 2018 - 00:43

Transcript please. (no subtitle)

Björn Strandberg

21st November 2018 - 19:39

I get this error:

>>> bpy.data.objects("Cube").location.x Traceback (most recent call last): File "<blender_console>", line 1, in <module> TypeError: 'bpy_prop_collection' object is not callable

>>> bpy.data.objects("Cube").location[0] Traceback (most recent call last): File "<blender_console>", line 1, in <module> TypeError: 'bpy_prop_collection' object is not callable

what am i missing? Blender 2.79b MAC

Sybren A. Stüvel

22nd November 2018 - 11:49

@Björn Strandberg: You're writing a function call objects(...) instead of trying to index a collection objects[...] -- note the use of parentheses for the former, and brackets for the latter.

Björn Strandberg

25th November 2018 - 18:21

Thanks a bunch!@Sybren A. Stüvel:

Arnar Ómarsson

8th March 2019 - 22:42

Should all of this (and the rest of this course) apply to Blender 2.8 Beta (2019-03-03)? Or should I wait for the official release?

Sybren A. Stüvel

12th March 2019 - 09:49

*@Arnar Ómarsson* Much of these techniques will work on 2.8 beta, but there have been significant API changes. With that link you should be able to get quite far, though. Soon I'll start preparing to update things for Blender 2.80; not sure in which form or when that will be available on the Cloud though.

Yule Mayevsky

12th January 2020 - 01:49

i am copying exactly like you. and i get an IndentationError: unexpected indent

Sybren A. Stüvel

27th September 2020 - 17:14

*@Yule Mayevsky* Python is whitespace-sensitive, so make sure that the indentation is correct and that you're not mixing tabs and spaces.

jamesrossbond

4th November 2020 - 22:18

I have blender 2.9.01. is this course something I can do with it?

Julian Darley

5th November 2020 - 19:11

at around 4 minutes, manipulating the scale: is it correct that scale multiplication is always done with respect to the original object? in other words, with this example command bpy.data.objects['Cube'].scale = (0.5, 0.3, 0.2) will it always make the cube the same size, rather than shrinking it from whatever size it is at the moment of executing the command?

Julian Darley

5th November 2020 - 21:34

at 6.17, in the Help Menu one can see an Operator Cheat Sheet. clicking on it seems to do nothing, but in fact, a text file has been created and it can be viewed by selecting it in the Text Editor window under the text dropdown (see the text doc icon). if you keep clicking it (as i did before discovering what was happening), you will create more and more copies of the cheat sheet.