Development environment

General

You will need extra python packages to develop. What you can do is to use the python environment which comes with blender and install them there.

Install using: pip install -r requirements.txt

We recommend you to use Microsoft Visual Studio Code

It offers you the possibility to use the following extensions:

Note

VSCode also lets you to choose a custom python interpreter, which can be handy.

Thus you can tell VSCode to use the python version which comes with blender for linting, etc.

• Blender Development

  Tools to simplify Blender development

• autoDocstring - Python Docstring Generator

  Generates python docstrings automatically (we use the google format)

• reStructuredText

  reStructuredText language support (RST/ReST linter, preview, IntelliSense and more)

You can also setup the autopep8 tool which will automatically format your code.

We use the following autopep8 arguments:

"python.formatting.autopep8Args": [
    "--max-line-length",
    "120",
    "--aggressive",
    "--ignore",
    "E402"
],

Instructions for 'ADVANCED' installation configuration

Note

In order to use the OpenVDB-volume-related features, you need to manually install an extra python package. Here are some instructions.

• Install pyopenvdb. There is no "simple" way for the moment. We are waiting for this PR to be merged. This should make the process a lot easier.

  For now, you have to install it by your own means. You probably will have to install boost and tbb.

  Here are some steps to help you install it manually:

  • Download latest release of OpenVDB

  • Run: cd openvdb && mkdir build && cd build

  • Run: cmake -DOPENVDB_BUILD_PYTHON_MODULE=ON -DUSE_NUMPY=ON -DPython_EXECUTABLE=path/to/python/bin/python3.X ..

  • Run: sudo make -j 8 && sudo make install

Unit tests

In order to make sure new features do not break what already work, we try to maintain a high testing rate. We use the blender-addon-tester python package along with pytest to make our unit tests.

Usage

Every script that concern unit testing are under the scripts folder. The run_tests.py script can run all the tests for a given version of Blender.

• Arguments for run_tests.py

  • -b (str, optional, defaults to "3.0.0")

    Blender version to test

So type the following command to run tests for a given version of Blender: python -m scripts.run_tests.py -b "x.x.x"

Write new tests

Please write new tests in the tests folder. You can either write tests in existing files (if they correspond to the theme of the file) or create a new file. If you need to add data for your tests, you can place it in the data folder.

Important

Please make sure test data are lightweight as possible, no need to have samples with hundreds of time steps and thousands of vertices.

Testing pipeline

Here is how the unit testing pipeline is working