Welcome to the course and thanks for joining me on this exploration of addon development in Blender. By the end of this course, you will have built your own structural analysis addon, but, to be honest, that’s not really the goal of this course.
The main aim is to help you get to a point where you’re comfortable building your own addons in Blender - not just recreating the one we build in the course. Your addons can be simple little tools that shave 30 seconds off an operation you do regularly or they can be big feature-rich chunks of additional functionality that you bolt onto Blender.
You can build addons for your own personal use or you can distribute them for free or as paid assets. Blender is a huge platform with a rapidly growing userbase - so being proficient as a developer in this space can open doors for you, depending on how seriously you take it.
Addon development is really just software development for a specific platform - Blender in this case.
So, use this course as your jumpstart into mastering this new skillset - there’s no telling where it might lead you.
As part of this course, you also get ongoing access to the latest version of the StructureWorks addon that I've continued to develop after completing the course.
To download the latest version, just head over to the StructureWorks page, and hit the download button. If you're logged in, you'll be able to download the addon directly from the page.
You'll also get email updates whenever I release a new version of the addon.
Python and Node-based development
The last thing I want to touch on here is the question of whether or not you need to be comfortable with Python before taking this course. Strictly speaking, no you don’t. However, it will be an advantage if you have some familiarity with scripting in Python.
We’ll be using a combination of visual node-based programming and traditional Python scripting to build this addon. Now, that said - we won’t be doing anything too complicated with Python - in the vast majority of cases we’ll just be performing quite basic data manipulations or making calls directly to Blender’s Python API - which simply means invoking commands as they’re prescribed by the API.
From time-to-time in this course, you'll see me make calls to Blender's API - and you might wonder how I know what to call.
The answer is that I just look it up in the API documentation - this is your go-to guidebook any time you want to interact programmatically with Blender. It's well worth getting familiar with it. You can find the API documentation here.
And of course, you also have ChatGPT to help you out - the Blender docs are openly available on the web so the LLM's have gobbled these up along with everything else! So, they're a good source to go to aswell - as always though, keep your wits about you when it comes to using generative AI.
So, with a little patience, even if you don’t have Python under your belt coming into the course - it shouldn’t stop you from successfully completing the course.
If anything, this course will actually be a good opportunity to learn Python as a by-product of building something really interesting! That’s a far better way to learn Python than following vanilla Python tutorials.
If you do want a primer on Python before you get started - there are plenty of free Python mini-projects on EngineeringSkills.com. If you’re apprehensive about your lack of Python, why not complete one of these free projects before getting started on this course.
If you have any questions, even at this early stage, don't hesitate to reach out to me in the comments below.
Thanks again and welcome!
