AWS Terrain Blender Add-on

Mon 25 April 2022

I started looking into Blender add-ons this weekend (tutorial). On the face of it, it's pretty easy to create an installable add-on: it can be as simple as a *.py file, which builds UI components (e.g. panels, menus, etc.) and executes code with Operators.

I quickly found that passing values between UI components and contexts was somewhat difficult.

Hot take: making even the simplest UI with properties in Blender is unnecessarily complex

— Darren Wiens (@dkwiens) April 24, 2022

The trick seems to be to manage values in a more global sense through a PropertyGroup, which is fine, though feels unwieldy to me.

I made an example add-on here, which:

• creates a series of panels in the Tools tab of the 3D View
• accepts either geographic coordinates or tile coordinates
• fetches the corresponding AWS Terrain tile
• styles the tile as an ImageTexture in a Principled BSDF Material
• leverages elevation data through a Displace modifier
• displays the styled tile in the 3D View

To use, you must include morecantile in Blender's environment¹. Then, download the gist and import to Blender through Preferences -> Add-ons -> Install...

The result is like this:

Carving away at an AWS Terrain tiles #b3d addon 🏔️ pic.twitter.com/A44ELwALwV

— Darren Wiens (@dkwiens) April 25, 2022

That's it. Get in touch with me on Twitter if you want to know more!

1: It can be tricky to install Python modules into the Blender environment. I followed a YouTube tutorial that I cannot find at the moment, but in short I created a conda env and symlinked it to the Blender environment.

Tags:

• python
• blender