Blender + cortex-vfx

Est777 · September 14, 2011, 7:01am

Hi, all

I’ve been developing a small python module
to integrate Blender 2.5 and Cortex libraries,
and I thought it was interesting to share.

Right now, there is a minimal IECoreBlender module
and and addon with exporters for cortex objects and attribute caches ( vertex caches).
They work only for meshes (for now). I could import the resulting
files in Houdini without problems.

The code is in github. I also included a 64 bits
linux package ready to run, that also has Matt’s
3Delight addon and Disney’s partio python module.

Thanks!

Est.

ibkanat · September 14, 2011, 10:26pm

Thanks looking into this…

doublebishop · September 21, 2011, 3:41pm

Thanks heaps for building this!

kroopson · January 25, 2012, 2:56am

Sorry for digging up this thread but I’ve got a question. Correct me if I’m wrong but do I need to build Blender from source, with dynamic linking to use IECore module?
I’m getting “No module named _IECore” error every time, even if the _IECore.so is placed in PATH. I’ve figured out that the blender distributed via blender.org is being staticly linked. Am I right? :>

Est777 · January 25, 2012, 4:09am

Yes, you need to build Blender with python dynamic linked. In some linux distros, python is not correctly build.
If you build your own python, pass --enable-shared to configure when building.

Cortex uses python 2.x. If you want to build a newer version, there’s a diff for python 3 support
here: https://github.com/est77/IECoreBlender. Patch cortex and build as usual.

I wanted to update the build and IECoreBlender to the latest cortex, 3delight, …
versions, but I didn’t have the time yet. I’m also hitting the Graphical 50 mb limit.

kroopson · January 27, 2012, 5:12am

Hi. Thanks for the reply.

I’ve managed to build python3.2 with --enable-shared option, then I’ve built boost-1.42 using linking to this custom built python. After that I’ve successfully built blender 2.61 with dynamicly linked python, when that happend I’ve moved to building cortex-6.0.0.
Compilation ended well but when I’ve tried to import IECore module I’ve got this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1, in &lt;module&gt;
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.2/site-packages/IECore/__init__.py", line 47, in &lt;module&gt;
    from _IECore import *
ImportError: No module named _IECore

_IECore.so is placed in the IECore module directory, I’ve been trying to put it in PATH and in LD_LIBRARY_PATH, none of it worked. What am I doing wrong

JTA · February 4, 2014, 3:48pm

I want to keep this thread alive. Some of us SoCal Blender users are looking at Cortex again for use in Los Angeles studios. I will be taking a closer look at the git repo and post here any thoughts.

Thanks, JTa

JTA · February 4, 2014, 3:51pm

Hey Est777 your repo is down. Any way I can see the code just to take a look at how you integrated it even though the codebase it is for is old?

Thanks, JTa

JTA · February 4, 2014, 4:24pm

Hmmm…Image Engine just make a commit June 2013 so it looks like it is still being used in house.

JTA · February 4, 2014, 4:47pm

This download link on graphicall has some good info in addition to the Linux 2.60 build.

It looks like Cortex has a code commit July 2013 and its companion Gaffer from Image Engine has a commit recently.
Nice…

JTA · September 10, 2014, 7:45am

Cortex was mentioned in dev chat again. Also there was a Gaffer BoF at SIGGRAPH. There is still also activity on the googol code pages. So this project is not dead it looks like. The crowd engine still seems like a fun integration to me if it can be made to work with Blender. Just thinking…