Hello,
I have a question: for some generator script, I want to
include subobjects (screw heads in this case).
I have modeled the screw heads in blender and found
that I need to set
the vertices
the faces (of course)
edge creases
some faces to be smooth, others not
Such subobjects would need to be scaled, translated
and rotated depending on the script’s input parameters.
Currently I do not care about materials and textures.
I want to avoid to explicitly call “me.verts.append” etc.
around one hundred times, so I’m thinking of some
list to be initialized, then calling a library function to just
create this for me (like embedding a file of .obj format
or similar into the Python script)
Is there some standard utility function, or do I need to create my own?
you pretty much need to use either 1 mesh or many objects.
Dupliverts verts are good but in this case you probably want to give it a direction. (Duplifaces would be nice here)
Dupliframes could do this, by having 1 frame at each location, but could be very messy to work with after creating if you wanted to move a screw head.
In your case, 1 object for the screw head may result in too many objects scattered over the scene which can slow down general operations when working with the scene (10000 objects+ result in a noticible slowdown)
Id suggest make 1 screw head, and then many objects, but add them to a group using Blender.Group module, then you can have 1 object as a group instance for the group that contains all teh screw heads
and your scene wont slowdown,.
code that may even work
make a list of new objects, dont think they need to be in a scene
screw_heads = gen_screws()
grp= Blender.Group.New()
grp.objects= screw_heads
instance= Object.New(‘Empty’)
scn= Scene.GetCurrent()
scn.link(instance)
instance.group= grp
instance.enableDupGroup = True # need to turn it on as well as assign a group.
Now you shoud see the screw objects from the instance empty
