Unblend

A small command-line program that explodes Blender files (.blend) into their various parts and writes them out as an archive.

Features

• Accepts a blend-file, either as file-path or thru STDIN (using - as file).

• Parses the blocks the file is made out of.

  • The block-code is used as directory.
  • The block-address is used as file-name.
  • Block-data is written to <CODE>/<ADDR>.bin
  • Respective metadata to <CODE>/<ADDR>.txt

• Almost fully decodes the DNA1 block.

  • See the resulting DNA1.tsv and DNA1/*.txt files.

• Outputs an archive in either *.zip or *.tar format.

  • Format is selected via the outputs file-extension.
  • Output can go to STDOUT via - (but only as *.tar).

• Excluding data from the archive being written, via -x <GLOB>.

Installation

• Have cargo & rust installed.
• Run cargo install unblend.

Usage

In general: unblend <FILE> <OUT>

• FILE is the blend-files path.
• OUT is the output path and extension for the archive.

Detailed help is available via unblend --help.

References

• https://www.atmind.nl/blender/blender-sdna-256.html
• https://fossies.org/linux/blender/doc/blender_file_format/mystery_of_the_blend.html
• https://harlepengren.com/blender-dna-unraveling-the-internal-structure/
• https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Source/Architecture/RNA
• https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/src/branch/main/source/blender/blenkernel/BKE_main.h