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Getting Started

1-2-3, and you're ready to go!

  1. Install blender: Check out the official Blender downloads.
  2. Install uv: Check out the official uv installation guide.
  3. Install blext: Just run uv tool install blext.

First Extension

cd to your favorite folder and run:

blext init first-extensionSomething something it worked

Now, enter the new extension folder 

cd first-extension
and run it in Blender: 1 
blext run

Configuring the Extension

TODO

Adding PyPi Dependencies

Tip

At this point, we strongly suggest familiarizing yourself with the basics of the uv package manager.

  • All blext projects are also uv projects, which can be managed using uv.
  • blext doesn't "wrap" functionality of uv that already works well.

blext and uv were designed to be used together, especially when it comes to Python dependencies.

Say you forgot the speed of light. Luckily, scipy has your back! All you need to do is:

import scipy
print(scipy.constants.speed_of_light)

To make import scipy work inside of your extension, just run: 

uv add scipy

That's it! You can now import scipy anywhere in your extension code, across platforms.

Analyzing Dependencies

To see which "wheels" in particular are pulled in, run: 1

blext show deps┏━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Name ┃ Version ┃ Platforms ┃ Py|ABI ┃ Size ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ numpy │ 1.24.4 │ macosx_11_0_arm… │ cp311|cp311 │ 13.8 MB │
│ numpy │ 1.24.4 │ manylinux_2_17_… │ cp311|cp311 │ 17.3 MB │
│ numpy │ 1.24.4 │ win_amd64 │ cp311|cp311 │ 14.8 MB │
│ scipy │ 1.15.2 │ macosx_12_0_arm… │ cp311|cp311 │ 30.1 MB │
│ scipy │ 1.15.2 │ manylinux_2_17_… │ cp311|cp311 │ 37.6 MB │
│ scipy │ 1.15.2 │ win_amd64 │ cp311|cp311 │ 41.2 MB │
├───────────┼─────────┼──────────────────┼─────────────┼───────────┤
│ =6 wheels │ │ macos-arm64, │ │ =154.9 MB │
│ │ │ windows-x64, │ │ │
│ │ │ linux-x64 │ │ │
└───────────┴─────────┴──────────────────┴─────────────┴───────────┘

  1. When a dependency eg. numpy is defined in the VFX Reference Platform, blext won't download or include it in extensions, or show it in the dependency overview.

    Instead, blext will enforce that incompatible version of eg. numpy are never asked for, even if that makes it impossible to install a requested dependency. ↩↩