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  • Published 19 Dec 2020

Scriptable inputs

Along with drivers, it would be really nice to be able to add simple python scripts to value inputs.

While it's possible to add a global script that animates things programmatically, it can get messy when you have multiple values in a scene that you want animated, and it also requires a lot of boilerplate to register and unregister things like frame event bindings.

It would be great to have an easy Right Click > Add Python Driver option on any value, where a small window would appear that would allow you to add in simple python code.

Things could be simplified by automatically:

  • Importing bpy
  • binding to frame change and scene update
  • allowing the use of simple, scene scope variables such as "frame," and "object," (for current object).
  • Automatically detecting "simple," vs "return," scripts.
    • Simple Script EX: frame % 5 . No return value, and it's very easy to interpret what the return value would be
    • Return Script: Multi-line script, automatically treated as function definition and used for more complicated scripting and calculations. User must specify return X in order for it to know which value is the important one.

I love using Blender for my 2D animations and ditched After Effects entirely, but the one thing I really miss is how easy it was to add expressions to values, and this would be a good solution to that issue.

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Development Status: Open

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zhixson.xbdi
19 Dec 2020

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