What if we have a Blender official launcher?
Hi all! I had fun creating a design mockup concept using Penpot for a Blender Launcher concept. The launcher is not 100% done, there are lacking information and features that can be added. Maybe we can have something like this in the future.
That’s cool ! I think there is already some tools that allows to launch different blender versions…
The thing is we probably have different ways of seeing these kind of tools. Kind of pipeline integrations in studios, they all do similar things but yet there isn’t a one fit for all solution and everyone do their own with small variants depending on what and how they’re working…
To make something a bit more useful, trying to see what different people would need could make something a bit more versatile.
Or you build your own and probably some people will adopt it, and some other will make their own take on the subject …
I like the look of it, although for my use of Blender I don’t think I would really use it.
I like my existing config of folders for each project and subfolders for references and backups.
I find the existing Blender launcher (https://github.com/Victor-IX/Blender-Launcher-V2) does everything I need it to, allowing me to easily manage multiple versions of Blender easily.
Thanks.The launcher that you use simple, straight forward and easy to use. The main goal of that launcher is to manage different versions of blender which is nice.
When I designed the concept of the launcher, I also think how can this blender launcher spread awareness for blender so I included a news section, developers for contribution and support section for communities.
I might also use the launcher that you’re using, I also test different blender builds from beta and alpha so I think it’s useful.
Thank you.
I agree, Building something like a launcher need some research and survey to know if it provides meaningful benefits to users.
Yeah, I think something super simple to manage blender versions can be useful.
Or it’s a bit more than that, but then it can become complex.
At studios they use a launcher to manage software and versions, internal tools and access projects, so it’s a central part of the pipeline and your hub to work.
But it asks a lot of questions when it comes to do something like that for a single workstation.
Not sure projects should be part of it, or maybe you can link a project with a blender version, probably that will make even more sense when blender will integrate the notion of project… Sounds like a design challenge anyway…
I am currently writing a script that does this, actually. I plan to release it for free when it is done.
Working main screenshot:
DARK MODE
LIGHT MODE
It can be run from the command line and from your system’s file explorer.
It matches a .blend file to an appropriate version of Blender on your system and gives you the option how to open it. You can configure various levels of automatic opening vs asking before opening.
If you do not provide a filename (either by specifying it at the terminal prompt or by drag-n-drop or by double-clicking a .blend file in your file explorer) then it just presents you with the menu so that you can choose which version of Blender to start.
It is programmed in Python using Tk for the GUI and has only very basic (and standard) dependencies. I expect it to work on any system that Blender works on.
Alas, it is still in development. Due to my health I have not touched it for about half a year, but was planning to get back to it sometime soon.
WOW, I like the design too!
This feature is very helpful, so from my understanding if I open a blender file that I created using 3.6 then the launcher pops up and point to the blender version to launch. Nice!
Yes, exactly, or whichever version of Blender you have that is closest to 3.6 without going under.
I had not considered a “donate” button like you have, but I think it is a good idea too — it would end up in the configuration window (accessed via the gear icon in the lower-left corner). I assume that https://fund.blender.org/ is the best link to target?
edit: The main difference I see from your mockup is that my program does not try to organize Blender files or projects or anything. I just kind of figured that the existing user directory structure could be used for that and hook the OS/wm file association for launch, which is pretty easy to do on most systems.
The program knows how to install and uninstall itself as well.
Give me a few minutes to give you screenshots — gotta get my kid to school first.
Okay, sorry to take so long. I don’t have much experience with ffmpeg, and the screenrecorder → mkv → gif conversion produced a horribly quantized video (plus a file that was eight times larger than it needed to be). So I cobbled this together from screenshots and some old images of Windows cursors I have lying around. It’s not as smooth, but it isn’t ugly, at least…
The uninstall is pretty straight-forward:
In all cases things work according to proper permissions (meaning you can always install/uninstall in your local user account, or system-wide if you have the permissions to do so).
If there is enough interest in this I can open a github repo with the code. (I’ll probably do this anyway when I release it.)
The UI is custom for the project (eschewing Ttk, which I consider a disaster regardless, but primarily because it blits badly when windows are drag-resized, etc).
The main holdup right now is making a file browser widget — the Tk fsdialog package seems to be standard include in python3 systems, but even so it has resisted my efforts to manage it nicely and clashes with the app horribly. And it turns out that a file dialog is rather more complicated than it seems at first glance.
