[Bf-python] Interactive console + extension module.

[Joe Garfield]

About 2.  I really agree.  I had a choice of first finishing my graphics 
engine or start immediately on my research with Blender, and I chose to use 
Blender.  Unfortunately I ran into some difficulties that would have been 
better addressed by point 2, which as it turns out would allow for the use of 
the pdb module (which would have been extremely helpful!).  As it is, any 
time I made a change to the code I would have to restart Blender in order for
the changes to take effect.  I would like to add a request to have Blender 
reset/restart the python sub-process every time the user does ALT+P (The 
reload directive didn't help at all in my experience).  This would definitely 
have sped up development time (and maybe even let me finish the research on 
time).  Jonathan, it's interesting to hear that somebody else is using 
Blender to simulate kinematics.  I'm tackling the bipedal problem myself, 
hopefully using a still-unique algorithm to do it (at least it hasn't been 
given any serious thought in the 10 papers that I've read).

Joe Garfield

On Wednesday 14 May 2003 05:03 am, j.merritt at pgrad.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I have lots of Python suggestions, but I agree with current sentiments that
> a stable API is the most important goal.  However, there are a couple of
> things that I see as parallel to this:
>
> 1.
> Are there any (current) plans to integrate an interactive Python console
> into Blender?  This is useful, for example, when new people are
> experimenting with the API.  To view the docstrings attached to various
> objects, it's much easier to have a console and use either help(obj) or
> print obj.__doc__ than to put these in a script and keep re-running it. 
> It's also a more Python-esque way of doing things, I believe (I'll stand
> corrected if anyone has good counter-examples! :-).
>
> 2.
> How difficult would it be to somehow set up the whole of Blender to run as
> an extension module for Python?  So, for example, a script could be
> executed from the command line and open up a Blender window to do things. 
> This has immediate application for me.  I'm working in the area of equine
> biomechanics and would love to use Blender as a kind of pre-built high
> level graphics engine to display kinematic data in real-time.  Of course, I
> can do this from within Blender, but it turns out that it would be much
> neater to access Blender externally.  When I'm developing in Python, I tend
> to have bits lying around all over the place in many different files, some
> of which have nothing to do with Blender.  It would be much neater to have
> everything Python-centric rather than Blender-centric.
>
> Jonathan Merritt.
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-- 
Joe Garfield
NSSL, University of Oklahoma/CIMMS