Site update

Perhaps a bit late, but I finally found the time to update my website. No change in the lay-out, but there are some changes in the structure. It now has a clear division between scripts for Blender 2.4 and scripts for Blender 2.5. I've also written an instruction page on how to use Add-Ons in 2.5.

Besides this structural change I've also created pages for two of the scripts I've written in the past months. The first is Index Visualizer, which I discussed in the previous post.
The second script is Icon Display, which shows all the icons that are available in Blender. The code behind this functionality is interesting in that it calls the source-file in which all icons are defined. It then parses this file and displays the icons using the names in the file. Further point of interest is the dynamic creation of operators. This might look pretty easy, but actually has some restrictions. You can't use setattr() and can't create them from within the register() function. I've written a full explanation of this, including sample code, on the blender wiki.

For normal Blender users the Icon Display script is of course not very interesting, but for script-developers looking for a usable icon (or the name of a specific one) it can be pretty useful.

Index Visualiser for Blender 2.5

A little over a year ago I write a convenient little code snippet to display the indices of vertices, edges and faces in the 3d-view of Blender. This is a big help in developing script that create or alter mesh topology, as you can now get visual feedback on what you're doing.

It was pretty clear to me that I had to port it to Blender 2.5 before I could do any serious work on scripts like LoopTools. So after a commit made it possible to draw in the 3d viewport using python, I ported it right away.

That was two months ago, so what's new? The script has been added to Blender Contrib. This means that it is kept up to date with all changes in Blender and can even be automatically included when you build Blender yourself. There have also been various changes to the blender api, for instance Mathutils to mathutils, and Vector() to Vector((),xyz) The script has been updated to reflect those changes. Big thanks to all the people at the Blender extensions project who helped with this.

Let me end with some links:

• Snippet at my website
• Direct download link of script (automatically gives you the most recent version)
• Wiki documentation
• Discussion thread at BlenderArtists