BookGen | Addon for generating books

Hi there,

i just released the alpha version of my new addon for generating books in Blender. The basic functionality is there, but there are things that wanna be tweaked.

A quick demo:

You can find the download link and more information on my website: here

Download


I’m looking forward to your feedback.

oliver

9 Likes

You should get together with Antoniya. The author of Archimesh the archvis tool for blender this would be a perfect addition for intergration into that.

Hi @oliverweissbarth,

Sorry but your link don’t run! The zip file is corrupted.
Bye

Spirou4D Oh yeah. I’m sorry. I just fixed it.

Great work. It’s well be cool to add groups to mix different setup. Extra options to rotation books?

Thanks for your comment. Could you please explain what you mean by

add groups to mix different setup
. I don’t really get it.

I will add more feature in the future.

These are the thing that i already have in mind:

  • stacking of books with random z-axis-rotation
  • distributing books along a custom axis
  • control the alignment of books (e.g. align backs)
  • allow leaning of books

If you got other things that you would like to see added please post it here.

best wishes

oliver

of course. Setup = Group of books

Dammit :slight_smile:
Two weeks ago I had to make a shelf of accounting ledgers for a projected backdrop for a stage show.
This would have saved me a ton of work!
Now I need to decide if it’s worth the time to go back and do them again with this, as this looks better!

Neat Idea with some potential.

Have you thought about using Images for the Books? (Like back/front/Thin Part. Thin Part= No idea how to spell it in any language i know, maybe “Buchrücken” :wink:

Something like: User specifies Folder that contains Images per Book Like:

Steppenwolf_back.png
Steppenwolf_front.png
Steppenwolf_thin.png

Blender’s non existent Manual_back.png
Blender’s non existent Manual_front.png
Blender’s non existent Manual_thin.png

it also can use the relative Size’s of the Images Front/Back/thin for the Books size.

I’ve noticed that the UV Map is not consistent across all books. How hard would it be to make all the book use the same UV layout so I can make a bunch of book covers separately and apply them to multiple books?

Cool addon! I can definitely see myself using this a lot in the future :slight_smile:

Thanks for your feedback. That would be interesting. I definitely want to make texturing a lot easier. I’m also thinking about some kind of “auto-texturing”. Well, i will see how far i can push it.

I’ve noticed that the UV Map is not consistent across all books. How hard would it be to make all the book use the same UV layout so I can make a bunch of book covers separately and apply them to multiple books?

The problem is that books have different proportions and making them all the same uv-layout would cause texture-stretching.

I also noticed a problem with the uv-map of the textblock. That will be fixed in the next version coming out some time in the next week.

If you wanna stay up-to-date you can follow me on twitter www.twitter.com/oweissbarth .

best wishes

oliver

best wishes

Thanks for that Addon, it helps a bit to create the Books.

But the most boring work is to distribute Books randomly on shelfs.
This is where the Bookmanager for 3DS Max is a very timesaving Script:
http://www.modelplusmodel.com/scripts/bookmanager.html

Wouldn’t it make sence to expand your Script by this functions ?

Kind regards
Alain

Hi Alain,

Thank you for your suggestion. I put that on my roadmap. Hopefully i’ll find time to further develope this addon soon.

oliver

Hello
I just tried to download bookgen but the link seems to be broken …
thanks for you help and your work

phil

http://oweissbarth.de/downloads/bookGen/

Cool, I hope you find time to make it production ready to prevent another half finished Blender-Script.
Else we have to find another solution making it production ready.

Kind regards
Alain

You can find it here:
http://oweissbarth.de/downloads/bookGen/

Anan

Thank you for reporting. I just fixed that.

oliver

Hello Oliver,

I’ve just tried your BookGen addon with the current Blender 2.73 RC1, on a Windows 7 Pro 64bit environment, and when I create a new book from the Add\Mesh\Add Book the book is created but without UV mapping and the following error message is being displayed in the console:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “C:\Users[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.73\scripts\addons_extern\bookGen_init_.py”, line 104, in invoke
self.run()
File “C:\Users[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.73\scripts\addons_extern\bookGen_init_.py”, line 170, in run
unwrap = self.unwrap)
File “C:\Users[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.73\scripts\addons_extern\bookGen\utils.py”, line 427, in create_book
bm.edges[i].seam= True
IndexError: BMElemSeq[index]: outdated internal index table, run ensure_lookup_table() first

Thanks