Section 2 Introduction

• Welcome to the project section.
• What you'll learn.
• Share your vision with fellow students.

Project Setup & GitHub

No Such Thing As Plain Text

• There’s no such thing as plain text
• Using Python’s codecs library
• Reading a CSV file in a cross-platform manner.

Iterators and csv.reader()

• The with keyword establishes a context
• ...useful for managing file access & scope
• The yield keyword is subtle and beautiful
• The combination dict(zip(header, row))
• Reading and printing our CSV header.

Rendering Text To Images

• Using the Pillow library
• This is a fork of the Python Image Library (PIL)
• How to use Image, ImageDraw and ImageFont
• Rendering text to an image file in Python.

Rendering 1000s Of Images

• Adjusting our image size
• Making the filename variable
• Iterating to quickly create 1000s of image files.

Using raise For Exceptions

• Reading about exception handling in Python
• How the raise keyword works
• It’s a bit like return but if not handled in caller…
• … then eventually the program will quit and error
• Also using bpy.context.selected_objects

Placing Text On Our Object

• Learn how to place our text image onto a model.
• We are going to use Blender Render.
• We’ll have a prototype ready to repeat a few times!

Duplicating Objects

• How to select objects in Python
• Using bpy.ops.object.duplicate_move() to duplicate objects, with a fixed offset.

Calculating Object Offsets

• How to use Docstrings to comment your code
• How the % operator works in Python
• Remember the // integer division operator
• Calculating offset from our prototype.

Using enumerate In Loops

• Our csv file already has “backer numbers”
• However, we shouldn’t rely on this data
• How about if it doesn’t start at 0?
• How about if there are duplicates or gaps?
• Let’s use Python’s enumerate to take charge.

Refactoring and Integrating

• Changing our file naming
• Refactoring our code structure.

Blender Render Material Data

• Each object can have multiple material slots
• Each material slot may have a material
• Materials have texture slots
• Each texture slot can have a texture
• Textures image names and paths.

Finishing Our Code

• How to open an image in Blender Python
• How to assign a new texture with Blender render
• Copying materials and textures.

Setting Up Our Names

• Define the spacing of the names
• Render out all our names
• Setup the camera
• Key your animation ready for the final scene.

Compositing The Final Credits

• Using the compositor to finalise our scene
• Make it have an interesting background.

Setting The Material For Cycles

• Configure 1 Material for Blender Render and Cycles.
• Test render our final scene.
• Then we’ll be ready to adjust our script to work.

Cycles Material Data

• The data structure for Cycles starts similar to Blender Render
• However rather than looking at texture slots, we need to investigate the node_tree
• From there we look at nodes[name].image

Section 2 Wrap-Up

Please share what you have created with other students.