SpeckleBlender

Speckle add-on for Blender 2.8

⚠️ IMPORTANT ⚠️

Speckle v1 has reached EOL and is no longer mainatined. Check out our brand new 👉 Speckle v2! Read more about the announcemnt here and check out or new website.

Notice

Important update: SpeckleBlender now checks for the speckle dependency and installs it if necessary, using pip. If pip is not found, it tries installing that too.

Note: when activating the add-on, the Blender UI will freeze for a bit while it installs all the necessary dependencies. This is to be expected.

The Speckle UI can be found in the 3d viewport toolbar (N), under the Speckle tab.

Disclaimer

This code is WIP and as such should be used with extreme caution, on non-sensitive projects.

Installation

1. Place bpy_speckle folder in your addons folder. On Windows this is typically %APPDATA%/Blender Foundation/Blender/2.80/scripts/addons.
2. Go to Edit->Preferences (Ctrl + Alt + U)
3. Go to the Add-ons tab
4. Find and enable SpeckleBlender in the Scene category. If enabling for the first time, expect the UI to freeze for bit while it silently installs all the dependencies.
5. The Speckle UI can be found in the 3d viewport toolbar (N), under the Speckle tab.

Usage

• Click on Load Accounts to load all available local Speckle user profiles. This will populate the Streams list with available streams for the selected user.
• Click on Add Account to login and add a user profile to the local Speckle database.
• Click on Download Objects to download the objects from the active stream. You can filter the stream by entering a query into the Filter field (i.e. properties.weight>10 or type="Mesh"). The stream objects will be loaded into a Blender Collection, named SpeckleStream_<STREAM_NAME>_<STREAM_ID>.
• Click on Delete Stream to delete a stream. This will ask you to confirm the deletion, and also offer the option of deleting the accompanying Blender Collection if it exists.
• Click on View stream data (API) and View stream objects (API) to view the stream and stream objects in your web browser. -The Cache section provides some operators to manipulate the local Speckle database. For now it is just possible to clear the object and stream caches, and clear all user profiles from the database. Use with care.

Caveats

• Mesh objects are supported. Breps are imported as meshes using their displayValue data.
• Curves have limited support: Polylines are supported; NurbsCurves are supported, though they are not guaranteed to look the same; Lines are supported; Arcs are not supported, though they are very roughly approximated; PolyCurves are supported for linear / polyline segments and very approximate arc segments.

Custom properties

• SpeckleBlender will look for a texture_coordinates property and use that to create a UV layer for the imported object. These texture coordinates are a space-separated list of floats ([u v u v u v etc...]) that is encoded as a base64 blob.
• If a material property is found, SpeckleBlender will create a material named using the sub-property material.name. If a material with that name already exists in Blender, SpeckleBlender will just assign that existing material to the object. This allows geometry to be updated without having to re-assign and re-create materials.
• Vertex colors are supported. The colors list from Speckle meshes is translated to a vertex color layer.
• Speckle properties will be imported as custom properties on Blender objects. Nested dictionaries are expanded to individual properties by flattening their key hierarchy. I.e. propA:{'propB': {'propC':10, 'propD':'foobar'}} is flattened to propA.propB.propC = 10 and propA.propB.propD = "foobar".

Notes

SpeckleBlender is written and maintained by Tom Svilans (Github).