Ive been a blender user for around 4 months and Im loving it. Im currently working on a project with a number of friends of mine and Im looking for a way to build a custom setup of blender into an installer so tha tI can give it to my friends so were all devleoping on teh same setup.
the main thing is that i want ot add another exporter to the “default” list, as well as a custom DataBlock (I think its name is DataBlock (“Animation”, “Modeling”, “Material” etc). and stuff liek that. Id also like eventually to be able to bundle a few python scripts into the installation etc. as well.
I know its easy to manually setup export/import scripts etc, however I thought that It woudl be fantastic ot be abel to customise its installation. * Also as a learnign experience with blender.
I know that blender dosent write any application settings… it works “out of the box” as such… so does that mean that once ive set my installation at eg: C:\blender246… can I copy blender246 to my friends computer and theyll be able to run it directly as i had it? or is it not as simple as that?
If all your files are contained within Blender’s directory, and you have the same directory structure (same volume label and location of installation (I think you can do Relative Paths, but I’m not sure)), then copying it to their computer should work fine. You probably need to make sure they have Python installed and PYTHONPATH set if you want to use some of the more elaborate scripts.
and what you called DataBlocks, are actually called Screens (think of them as virtual desktops if you have any familiarity with X)
basically, set up your blender the way you want it (remember Ctrl+U to set defaults) and then just send them your blender folder and it should work straight off.
Im currently looking into teh NSIS option - however somethign did raise a question.
PYTHONPATH - Im assuming that Python would have to be installed first, and does that setup teh PYTHONPATH variable itself? or do i have to set it manually in blender (or does the installer do it?
you can use your own python without touching/using the systems python. just set the PYTHONPATH to one that you bundle with blender, you can rip out a lot of stuff thats not used - like tickle.
On linux its as simple as
cd $BLENDER
PYTHONPATH="$BLENDER/mypython ./blender
assuming you define $BLENDER and have python in ./mypython
Used this for bigBuckBunny so we could use python 2.5 on the sun renderfarm which only had py 2.2
Im a python programmer as a hobby so ive gothe latest anyway ( Im not overly familiar with the PYTHONPATH variable thats all).
So teh virtual screens. Im setting them up so that ive got one that is meant for the export script etc etc. However I wanted to see if theres a way to lock the 3D veiw on one.
what I mean by that is that i can set the screen to be divided into 4 3Dviews, and each one have side, front, top and camera views - and lock it so that someone cannot zoom or move around the scene. I would only want this enabled for one virtual screen ie, like a blender presentation mode.
( I know, this would be much easier just to render thost viewsas jpegs or whatever and Ill think thats what ill do - but it would be interesting to see if thats possible to do)???
thanks for all these fantastic replies.
*** in reply to the answer abotu the scons nsis - how on windows would i acheive this, and if im building fromsource, is there a way( is it easy etc), that the installer woudl use a custom .blender directory instead of the one from teh source code?
When building from sources, instead of having a different dir from the .blender one, put in the scripts you want and remove those you don’t want. The rest then goes automatically. Scripts are located in the release/scripts directory of a SVN checkout.
