Newbie here. I am looking for tools to help me build 3d GUIs for virtual instrument and effect plugins. What I have in mind is using Blender to build a 3d model of a control panel, apply textures, lighting, etc. and generate a set of pngs for old school toggle switches, dials, in the full range of states. Is Blender the right tool for this? Overkill perhaps?
Hi and welcome. I am not too familiar with VST, but from what you said, it sems you want to build a completely 3D VST environment using the blender game engine, and use that to interact with your program. It’s possible but i wouldn’t recommand it, you are better off just using a 2D API.
…just my opinion 
What is VST ?
Unless you talking about doing a walking around with a camera in 3D
Can you upload a picture of this type of panel
What size is it ?
How many controls ?
Tanks & Salutations
Salutations
Here is a pretty good example (not mine):
http://www.admiralquality.com/products/Poly-Ana/
VST is a C++ API that is used to create virtual instrument and effect processors.
My thought is that the ability to model lighting effects from leds, illuminated VU meters, etc using Blender makes it well suited to do high quality simulations of instrument panels. Before deployment, I’d iterate somehow through all relevant states the simulated panel could be in and generated the bitmaps to be used by my actual plugin software.
Yeah, it’d probably be a great idea. :] You could model and texture the panel with relative ease–blender is well suited to renderings of the sort you’re looking for–and you could use the ‘border’ tool to just render specific parts at a time, like ‘switch on, switch off’, ‘dial up an eighth, dial down an eighth’.