Introduction

Blendify is a lightweight Python framework that provides a high-level API for creating and rendering scenes with Blender. Developed with a focus on 3D computer vision visualization, Blendify simplifies access to selected Blender functions and objects.

Key features of Blendify:

1. Simple interface: Blendify provides a user-friendly interface for performing common visualization tasks without having to dive into the complicated Blender API.

2. Easy integration: Blendify seamlessly integrates with development scripts, implementing commonly used routines and functions:

   • native support of point clouds, meshes, and primitives;

   • support of per-vertex colors and textures;

   • advanced shadows with shadow catcher objects;

   • video rendering with smooth camera trajectories;

   • support for common camera models;

   • import and export of .blend files for deeper integration with Blender.

3. Quick start: Blendify is easy to get started with and does not require a standalone Blender installation. All you need to do is run pip install blendify.

Blendify simplifies interaction with Blender, allowing you to focus on developing your application. The following example shows the simplicity of visualizing with Blendify in comparison to the native Blender API:

Installation instructions

Install from pip

pip install blendify

Optional requirements

pip install blendify[utils / examples / docs / all]

Running examples 4 and 5 requires PyTorch with PyTorch3D.

Running example 5 requires SMPL model files, please refer to the installation instructions in README.

Quick Start

# Script to render cube
from blendify import scene
from blendify.materials import PrincipledBSDFMaterial
from blendify.colors import UniformColors
# Add light
scene.lights.add_point(strength=1000, translation=(4, -2, 4))
# Add camera
scene.set_perspective_camera((512, 512), fov_x=0.7, quaternion=(0.82, 0.42, 0.18, 0.34), translation=(5, -5, 5))
# Create material
material = PrincipledBSDFMaterial()
# Create color
color = UniformColors((0.0, 1.0, 0.0))
# Add cube mesh
scene.renderables.add_cube_mesh(1.0, material, color)
# Render scene
scene.render(filepath="cube.png")

Examples

Cornell Box	Color, albedo and depth	Mesh with texture
Camera colored point cloud	SMPL movement	NURBS trajectory

Works that use blendify

• V. Lazova, E. Insafutdinov, G. Pons-Moll: 360-Degree Textures of People in Clothing from a Single Image in 3DV’19

• B.L. Bhatnagar, X. Xie, I. Petrov, C. Sminchisescu, C. Theobalt, G. Pons-Moll: BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactions, in CVPR’22

• X. Zhang, B.L. Bhatnagar, V. Guzov, S. Starke, G. Pons-Moll: COUCH: Towards Controllable Human-Chair Interactions, in ECCV’22

• G. Tiwari, D. Antic, J. E. Lenssen, N. Sarafianos, T. Tung, G. Pons-Moll: Pose-NDF: Modeling Human Pose Manifolds with Neural Distance Fields, in ECCV’22

• I. Petrov, R. Marin, J. Chibane, G. Pons-Moll: Object pop-up: Can we infer 3D objects and their poses from human interactions alone?, in CVPR’23

Contributors

Blendify is written and maintained by Vladimir Guzov and Ilya Petrov.

Acknowledgments

We thank Verica Lazova for providing her Blender rendering scripts. Our code for processing point clouds is mostly based on the amazing Blender-Photogrammetry-Importer addon.

License

The code is released under the GNU General Public License v3.

The Python logo is trademark of Python Software Foundation. The Blender logo is a registered property of Blender Foundation. Blender-Photogrammetry-Importer is distributed under the MIT License. Blender is released under the GNU General Public License v3.