3D plots using Blender as a backend

Plots

2D	3D

Animations

slerps_workbench.mp4

bezier_SE3.mp4

Docker Image

Prebuilt Images

ignamonte/bpy

Build from Dockerfile

Since a specefic version of python is required it is recomended to build and use the docker images.

./docker_builder.py

This will build blender 3.1 with python 3.10 as in an image called bpy-3.10:3.1.

To see the full list of build options use the --help flag.

Launch a docker container with access to gpu and display

docker run -t -d \
    --gpus all \
    --net host \
    -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
    -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \
    --name belnder-plot-dev \
    bpy-3.10:3.1

Notes

• blender 2.83 is not compiling correctly at the moment.
• you can copy the compiled module from the cotainer to the host machine if you have the basic dependencies and same python version

docker cp belnder-plot-dev:/home/docker/blender_tmp/build_linux_bpy/bin/bpy.so <path-to-python3.10-packages>
docker cp -r belnder-plot-dev:/home/docker/blender_tmp/build_linux_bpy/bin/3.1 <path-to-python3.10-packages>

• compiling blender uses all the cores and is prone to run out of memory if you do not have enough RAM. Use the --builder_cpus N flag in the builder program to set the number of cores to use.

• FFMPEG support is not correcly set. Animations can be saved as .avi and then converted to .mp4 using the ffmpeg cli tools.

• At the end of every script bpy.ops.wm.quit_blender() must be called to exit blender. Failings to do so will result in blender running in the background consuming a lot of processor time. If the computer starts to feel slow check top to look fo any processes with 100% CPU usage.

See also - Additional Resources

• Blender CLI Rendering - A repo containing scripts and utils to render scenes using the bpy module.

• Blender BPY Python3.7 - Blender as Python module in a Docker container. Working with Blender 2.93 and python 3.7.

• blenderpy - See the release page for precompiled python wheels for easy installation. Limited to Blender 2.91 and python 3.7.

• Manim - A comunity mantained math plotting framework created by 3Blue1Brown from which this library is inspired