pyvista-blender¶

Render PyVista plotter scenes through Blender (bpy) for photoreal figures, animations, and .blend handoff without changing how you build the scene.

Install View on GitHub Browse examples

Build the scene once in PyVista. Choose VTK's preview while you work, then send the same live plotter to Blender's Cycles or Eevee Next for the final render.

Showcase¶

These structural mechanics examples start as normal PyVista scenes. pyvista-blender translates the live plotter into Blender data-blocks and renders through Cycles.

The shape of the API¶

import pyvista as pv

pl = pv.Plotter(off_screen=True, window_size=(1920, 1080))
pl.add_mesh(pv.read("data.vtu"), scalars="von_mises", cmap="viridis", pbr=True)
pl.add_light(pv.Light(position=(5, -5, 5), light_type="scene light"))
pl.camera_position = "iso"

# No `import pyvista_blender` needed, installing the package registers
# the `bpy` namespace via PyVista 0.48's plotter-component registry.
pl.blender.render("frame.png", samples=128)

For an interactive rendered viewport, pl.blender.show() replaces PyVista's VTK preview with Cycles output in the same window:

pl.blender.show()   # single window, mouse-driven, real-time Cycles

Why try it?¶

• Keep authoring in PyVista, including cameras, lights, scalars, glyphs, subplots, HUD overlays, and animations.
• Render publication-quality stills or videos through Blender without an intermediate file export.
• Export a .blend when you want to finish materials, lighting, or animation timing directly in Blender.
• Use pl.blender.show() as a rendered viewport for desktop, browser, or Jupyter workflows.

Features¶

• Materials: PBR (Principled BSDF), Phong with Walter et al. roughness fit, unlit, double-sided. (recipe)
• Styles: surface, wireframe, edge overlay, points, Gaussian splats as native bpy.types.PointCloud. (recipe)
• Lights: SUN / POINT / SPOT / HEADLIGHT / CAMERA_LIGHT, the default vtkLightKit, custom rigs. (recipe)
• Backgrounds: solid, gradient, HDRI / image-based lighting. (recipe)
• Datasets: PolyData, UnstructuredGrid, MultiBlock, high-order cells. Point and cell scalars with colormaps and clim.
• Volume rendering: closed-cube + Cycles Volume Principled atlas, no OpenVDB. (recipe)
• Glyphs: Geometry-Nodes instancer (N + V verts, not N * V). (recipe)
• HUD: scalar bars, text, axes triad, bounds box composited over Cycles. (recipe)
• Subplots: per-tile camera / lights / HUD, PIL composited. (recipe)
• Cameras: perspective + orthographic, user_matrix, orbit updater.
• Animation: pl.blender.animate(...) to gif / mp4 / webm; pl.blender.export_animation_blend(...) bakes camera, deformation (MDD or shape keys), scalars, lights, transforms, materials, volumes, and glyphs into a .blend that plays natively on open. (recipe)
• Interactive: pl.blender.show() for desktop, pl.blender.show(backend="web") for browser, with three sample tiers and idle-promotion. (recipe)
• Jupyter: pv.set_jupyter_backend("blender") returns an inline IPython.display.Image. (recipe)
• Authoring: pl.blender.export_blend(path) to finish the scene in Blender. (recipe)

GPU auto-detection walks OptiX, CUDA, HIP, Metal, oneAPI, CPU. Engine and device strings resolve in three tiers: per-call kwarg, component attribute (pl.blender.engine = ...), module default (pyvista_blender.config.*). The identity-keyed Level-1 cache reuses bpy.types.Mesh and material data-blocks across renders on the same plotter.

Where next¶

• Getting started for install and a first render.
• Cookbook for one recipe per feature branch.
• Gallery for the runnable examples under examples/.
• Architecture for the translation pipeline and cache strategy.
• GitHub for source, issues, and releases.