[z3phyr]

Slightly offtopic: Is there a way to do create meshes and animate them directly inside blender, pragmatically? Sort of like shadertoy, but instead of drawing, sculpting and rigging manually, I write some code that generates meshes and run shaders on them for effect?

[zipy124]

Yes, all of blender is extensible with python, and last time I used it in a project in university it was surpisingly easy to do too.

[DonHopkins]

Blender's deeply extensible and largely written in Python, but it also has full blown visual node programming language for procedurally modifying and generating textures, shaders, 3d geometry and meshes and parametric objects, etc!

Actually Blender has an abstract base "Node" set of Python classes and user interfaces that you can subclass and tailor for different domains, to create all kinds of different domain of application specific visual programming languages.

So visually programming 2d video filters, GPU shaders, 3D geometry, animations, constraints, state machines, simulations, procedural city generators, etc, and each can have their own compilation/execution model, tailored user interface, node libraries, and connection types. Geometry nodes have the visual programming language equivalent of lambdas, functions you can pass to other functions that parameterize and apply them repeatedly, iterating over 3d geometry, texture pixels, etc.

Blender extensions can add nodes to the existing languages and even define their own new visual programming languages. So you can use a bunch of integrated tightly focused domain specific visual programming languages together, instead of trying to use one giant general purpose but huge incoherent "uber" language (cough cough Max/MSP/Jitter cough).

https://docs.blender.org/manual/nb/2.79/render/blender_rende...

What are Geometry Nodes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMDB7c0ZiKA

Geometry Nodes From Scratch:

https://studio.blender.org/training/geometry-nodes-from-scra...

Free blender City Generator Addon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nLsew8I7KM

Here's a paid product, an incredibly detailed and customizable city generator (and traffic simulator!) that shows off what you can do with Geometry Nodes, well worth the price just to play with as a video game, and learning geometry nodes:

Using The City Generator 2.0 in Blender | Tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRHkGoTQKM8

How to Create Procedural Buildings | Blender Geometry Nodes | Procedural City:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGgAEp-n0uk

[cmrx64]

To help OP further, I don’t do any fancy manipulation but the boilerplate is present to grab geometry and futz with it:

https://github.com/emberian/blender-graphify

Maybe this can inspire some dabbling