Tag Archives: script

Batch Renamer

batch_rename_screenshot2

batch_rename_screenshot

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I’ve had this one for a while now, but it’s been a mess of slightly working code until recently – but now I like to think it’s unbreakable! (yes, that’s a challenge)

It’s a simple renaming tool meant for a bunch of similar objects. All it will do is rename them to something consistent with incrementing numbers (name_01, name_02, name_03…)

You have control over the starting number and the sorting of the objects, and that’s about all you need really. I have considered doing something more complicated with bones and left/right versions and whatever, but I seldom need such a thing anyway.

Here’s an explanation of each item in the interface:

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Get base-name: (first icon-button at the top left) Sets the base-name to that of the active object (stripping it of any numbering it already has)

Base-name: What to name the objects as (base_name_01, base_name_02….)

Rename: The big button to do the renaming

Advanced: Show all the options and controls

Separator: How to separate the base name and the numbers (name_01, name.01, name-01 or any separator of your choice, doesn’t have to be a single letter)

Padding: The number of digits in the numbering, adding trailing zeros to fill the space (name_01, name_001 or name_0001…) – Auto mode will figure out how many objects are selected and thus how much padding is needed. Manual mode will allow you to choose how much padding you want, but will increase it automatically if it’s not enough. None mode will not add any trailing zeroes.

Start Number: Begin naming the objects with number starting from here.

Continued Numbering: (ellipse icon just to the right of the start number) Increase the start number every time you rename objects such that you can carry on numbering from where you left off last. I suggest you use Manual padding for this one, since if the total number of objects renamed goes above the next level of padding (above 100 for example) then there will be inconsistent padding (name_05, name_89, name_134 – different amount of digits)

Sorting: How to sort the objects, by location, scale or dimensions. Dimensions is useful to use as a “visual” scale – think 1000 rocks of different sizes but all with 1.0 scaling.

Sorting Axis: In which direction to sort them – on one of the axes or on the average of them (‘All’)?

Reverse: Flip the order of the sorting, E.g: go right-to-left instead of left-to-right

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And that’s it!

Please rip it to shreds. Find any bugs, suggest any features. And if you feel like it, I’d appreciate a code-review too.

Metropolis

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I worked on this for a good couple days… it’s not finished, but I suppose it’s slightly usable.

There aren’t many city generators available for blender… in fact I only know of one, which is great but not very versatile. You kinda get what you get. What I wanted was a city generator that was so customizable that you could create any shape city of any layout of any scale on any planet… yeah. Obviously if it demands such vast possibilities, it can’t all be automated.

The plan was to have the user give it a set of buildings, a few images for scale/height maps and terrain stuffs, and even give it the street layout. The automation part is simply the placement of buildings along the streets. Simple. Yeah.

It’s probably the most complex stuff I’ve ever coded, not the hardest, just a lot going on to keep track of and integrate, while still keeping everything very customizable. It’s about 600 lines, which I suppose isn’t all that much to a seasoned coder, but for me it’s much more than anything I’ve done before :P

Placing buildings mostly evenly spaced and along a street is pretty easy, the challenging bit was preventing buildings from being created in the middle of an intersection, and along many curves at once without overlaps.

The solution was to increase the curve’s resolution a lot, convert them to meshes and join them all into one object. Then do a Remove Doubles to weld vertices that are close together. Why? Because this will join the lines together, making a vertex at each intersection that connects to both/all streets. Which means a simple search for verts with more than 2 edges connected will give us the position of the intersections!

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Deleting these intersection verts, separating the object by loose parts and converting it back to curves will give us the perfect set of curves to but the buildings on to make sure no buildings sit in the middle of an intersection.

imageAnd that’s pretty much as far as I got. So it’s functional… just not really useful.

When I next feel like working on this, I’ve got a long list of todo’s… so probably not for a while.

The end goal would be to include a building generator and stuff like that too. I seriously considered turning this into a kickstarter, but at the moment I don’t really have the experience nor the time for something as epic as this.