Tired of all the guessing and checking work associated with creating a clean GUI to your script? I was too, so I wrote a Windows app (sorry Linux and OSX users) that makes it as simple as designing a Visual Basic form!
If you’re looking for a way to create GUIs, but don’t have windows or the .NET platform installed, The_Nerd has created a platform-independant python script that you can use to design GUIs right inside of blender! It can be found at https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28395
The list of supported Blender Objects in BPG:- Label
Textbox
Slider
Number
Button
Toggle
Menu
Rectangle
Noise Box (new in version 1.1)
Image Display(new in version 1.2)
Combine this with easily editable properties and a customizable sized layout grid, and you can create interfaces in literally seconds!
The code generation automatically creates event handlers for the objects you choose to make the tweaking easy! And, new in version 1.3, you can now save your projects and come back to them later.
A little background: I needed a way to easily create a GUI for Fiber 2.5 - including complex controls such as Color Selectors and Tabbed Controls. In the end, it will take me less time to develop this app AND create the interface through it than to simply code the GUI by hand all the way through. Hopefully this will cut the development time for anyone looking to write a script for Blender.
Unfortunately it does need the .NET framework. I have VB6 somewhere, but so much of the code would need to be completely redone…
I hadn’t seen this before, but I couldn’t get it to work with Blender 2.33. I would have liked to create this inside of Blender itself, but Python (inside Blender) just doesn’t have the event handlers to create a good design environment.
Looks OK, but then, I’m not a coder (not much of an artist either…). Too bad it’s not portable code…
I know I’m way out of my league here, but would it be possible to take something like that a step further and “somehow” incorporate the blender engine into an external front-end like that?
Let me explain…
We’re starting to get fantastic scripts in the Blender community. Somehow, I feel that some of those scripts would merit their ‘own’ program. Take makehuman for instance. If a ‘Makehuman’ python ‘program’ could be created where the whole GUI would be geared to the creation of your human, couldn’t this GUI then be made a lot more powerfull than that offered by the current, ‘limited’ python development environment in Blender itself? These new application would of course be ale to load and save Blender’s format.
I wouldn’t mind seeing Shell factory, MakeHuman, LSystem, Tesselate etc programs like that.
Then again, maybe it’s just me…
Blender downloading with the best scripts in one package would be good but where do you draw the line in terms of external Python modules? I suppose everything that can run with a standard Python installation could be included. There would have to be warning with the download telling users they need a full Python installation.
The Beast, Makehuman, L-system, Advanced array and all the other great python scripts all ready to run from script menu! That WOULD be nice.
The sourcecode is freely downloadable on my website. The problem is I wrote it in VB.NET and not C++ which would make it compatable with most compilers.
Gambas does look interesting, but as they say on http://gambas.sourceforge.net/, I want to clear up any misunderstanding immediately. Gambas does not try to be compatible with Visual Basic, and will never be. There’s no easy way to port this code other than a complete rewrite in C++ or Java…
This is a failure on my part (mostly due to the fact that the only C++ I know is in console programming). I’m also sorry about it requiring an installation of the .NET framework- I know this can be a pain. However, the code is totally open to anyone who wants a peek and it would make me very happy if someone was to take my work and transform it into a platform-independant variant. I’m not in it for any gain other than to make great scripts for Blender possible (Other than a kind donation through my website ;)).
the python env (regarding to guis) in blender is everything else but limited
since it exposes nearly all opengl functions, you could do nearly any gui you want. it’s a bit low-level but python is especially good at wrapping this stuff.
the only thing i really stumble over is that blender’s gui widgets (toggle etc) are always drawn on top.
apart from that i see your point and i ack. from my pov blender is a very good 3d programming environment (not for realtime, except the game engine): it exposes a lot of 3d functionallity and a low-level gui api, it reminds me a bit of eclipse but for 3d graphics.
