[Bf-python] blender/gimp/astronomy-programs

[Chris Want]

Gottfried Zojer wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I m new to blender in some aspect.Is there anybody working on a integration
> of blender and gimp to use it it also for scientific visualizations like
> in astronomy etc. Thanks for any feedback.

Hi Gottfried,

I don't think anybody is really formally working on
integrating blender and gimp.

I use both blender and gimp for scientific visualization,
(for animations and stills, not realtime) but not at all
in an integrated manner. I use the VTK library to create
geometry (vtkPolyData), which I read into blender using
a python script (if you don't care about color, the STL
file format can be used to pass data easily between VTK
and blender). Anyways, this is the kind of result I'm
getting:

http://bebop.cns.ualberta.ca/~cwant/batsun.jpg

In theory, blender's python engine could also be
used to interface VTK directly through it's python
wrappers. I use gimp-perl to post-process the output
frames, adding annotations, tiling orthographic views,
compositing, etc. I wrote some scripts a while ago that
were supposed to show off some of gimp-perl's post-
processing capabilities, but they are a bit out of date
(work with gimp 1.2.x, need to be updated for gimp 2.x):

http://www.ualberta.ca/~cwant/gimp/postprocess.html

If nothing else, they make a nice skeleton for writing
other scripts.

I hope this helps,
Chris