schlegelp / cloudblender

Blender wrapper for cloud-volume

cloudblender [WIP]

Blender wrapper for cloud-volume

The basic idea is to let you import image data, skeletons and meshes from any data source that cloud-volume understands.

• import image data as planes/cubes
• import segmentation data as planes/cubes
• import meshes
• import skeletons

Installation

First you need to install cloud-volume for Blender's Python: open Blender and in "scripting" use below code to find the executable for Python

>>> import sys
>>> sys.executable
'/Applications/Blender.app/Contents/Resources/3.0/python/bin/python3.9'

Next, open a terminal and run this:

$ /Applications/Blender.app/Contents/Resources/3.0/python/bin/python3.9 -m pip install cloud-volume

In an ideal world the install will just work but that's hardly ever the case. Some issues I encountered:

• pip not installed: this is actually easy enough to fix (just Google it).
• cloud-volume dependencies need to be compiled from source and that fails: this is a pain in the a** in particular because Blender ships Python without the header files. I had the most success by building wheels for the missing dependencies on my system's Python (must be same version) and then use those wheels with Blender's Python.

Finally: download cloudblender.py, fire up Blender, go to "Edit" -> "Preferences" -> "Add-ons" -> "Install" and select the file. Make sure to activate the add-on.

cloudblender's Issues

Volumetric data with filmstrips?

Would be happy to share some source files if you think this sort of approach would be a useful addition!

This uses volumetric OR surface shaders to produce a dense volume. Obvious bottleneck here is the size of the texture... but I was able to get pretty hefty sizes in before I started noticing problems!