develop and improve the source code of blender?

Coding Beginning Blender Code and Development
21
  1. yes.
  2. dunno, I skipped python and went straight to C.
  3. xcode which you get for free with OSX is really good. but what I find the best, and cross platform is QtSDK.
22

i think it would be really great if in the future it were possible to also do stuff like interactive tools and modifiers with python. even if python is too slow for many things it still would be very useful for prototyping/experimenting and converting to c later.

23

this was a great read ideasman, iā€™ve always wanted to at least dabble blender development but never knew where to even begin. thanks for all the improvements to blender too

i agree with whoever thought this should be a sticky, it prob should be

24

@dyf, from what I hear XCode is a good IDE for blender so best stick with it for OSX.

You mention rebuilding, this isnā€™t so bad since rebuilding again checks only to rebuild modified files.

However CMake is significantly faster for rebuilds then SCons, CMake also has good XCode project file creation so if you build blender frequently its wort looking into.

For Windows MSVC/CMake seems the most popular choice.

For Linux I highly recommend QtCreator, I wrote up a howto for setting up QtCreator with blender (this is basically my development environment).
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Ideasman42/CMakeQTCreatorLinux

Before this I used Eclipse which had some nice features but found it incredible slow.

@kakapo, while I agree prototyping modifiers in python would be useful, this would require integration APIā€™s which we would need to maintain/support.

Possibly we could have some testing modifier thats only built in debug mode which can simply point to a script file and only handles basic vertex/edge/faces data.

For all this effort to create a prototyping api, you know you can write a script which takes a mesh as input and creates a new one :), know its not nice to use but this works fine for testing - Solidify for eg was a script like this in 2.4x first.

For interactive tools. this already works fairly well in 2.5x, you can make interactive tools that draw in the 3D view, take mouse events, draw header textā€¦ checkout the script templates for modal operators.

25

Check this out: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-fall-2008/

26

OMFGā€¦ Awesome, thanks for sharing :smiley:

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Thatā€™s cool, I should join it.

28

Thanks for the reminder! :slight_smile:
Great stuff from MIT, IMHO the best IT/CS school there is. :slight_smile:

29

thanks aermartin & ideasman42,
i followed the same procedure to set up qtcreator on mac osx and it worked beautifullyā€¦ iā€™ll use both xcode and qtcreator and see which one i like bestā€¦ :slight_smile:

30

Iā€™ve watched the first two lectures, and while he hasnā€™t gotten into anything advanced yet, heā€™s also covered all the basic stuff in a very intelligent way. So, I am looking forward to the rest of the term It should be very educational.

31

dyf, let me know if you can set up a decent Qt project with the blender source, I failed :smiley: thus I find it easier to just browse the files with finder, and open with xcode.

but I really like the qtcreator. itā€™s minimalistic. I might give it another go, and try and hook up cmake so I can build from within Qt and not use python/SCons.

32

How many people are there that are interested in learning programming for Blender development? I am, and I think it would be more interesting to do it as a group, with a thread and/or IRC channel, for example #blendercoders or our own.

33

Even though I have 0 programming skills, I would like to start developing areas of Blender that are lacking. I have a bit of free time to devote to learning, but I donā€™t know what small part I should start with. I would eventually like to get into the rendering engine or mesh tools in the future.

34

@dsavi

Iā€™m interested, send me a message. If youā€™re serious.

35

sounds like a good idea, it takes a while to get the filestructure.

36

interested in the group let me know the details

37

Count me in for learning as a group. Iā€™m learning Blenders source as I go while writing an add-on.

38

I also would be interested in learning with a group.

39

I believe that thereā€™s a guide how to do that. Just find it.

40

I created an openstudy group for blender code learning. http://openstudy.com/channels/Blender+Noob+Coders.