Running Blender python script outside of blender

Question

I want to visualize some scientific data, which is, at the moment, only an animation of some spheres with different colours and sizes.

I already created a script within Mathematica which creates the input for POV-Ray.

My problem is, that I'm not satisfied with the quality of POV-Ray's results and wanted to write a Python script, which could set up the corresponding blender scenes and render them. An important constraint is, that I want to render on a headless machine, so I can't use Blender's internal console.

My question: Is it possible to use Blender's api from an external console to get POV-Ray-like behaviour?

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After reading George Profenza's answer I did further research and found Don’t Use Blender! in Blender's documentation.

In contrast to my thoughts, one has to create a python script which is executed by blender in background mode.

./blender --background --python myscript.py

Answer 1

As far as I remember you can run Blender from the command line without opening the interface/windowing system, which I hope works for your setup. Not only you can tell Blender to render a document, but you can also run a script that generates that document/populates the scene with geometry, lights, etc.

Alternatively you could generate content straight for a renderer (and skip a 3D Editor/Blender completely). There are quite a few free renderers out there like:

1. Yafaray
2. Sunflow
3. Mitsuba
4. LuxRender
5. Pixie

yafaray

sunflow

luxRender

pixie

Answer 2

There are two options,

• The first which you have come across is which is to run Blender in background mode,
• The second, which is very experimental, using Blender as a python module - BlenderAsPyModule

In both cases this should be a simple operation to import the Mathematica scene - bpy.ops.import_scene.* Then render the scene bpy.ops.render.render

Answer 3

Blender can be run "headless" inside a Docker container. Check the Dockerfile here

In case you are not familiar with Docker, download the Dockerfile and run:

docker build -t blender .
docker run -it -v your_folder/:/scripts bash

Now you can run your scripts inside a headless Blender