Getting Started with Blender Scripting

Installation

Blender, like many applications, requires that it be downloaded and installed. Easy enough. The latest version is always freely available at www.blender.org. Just follow the links. While installing Blender, be sure to note the installation folder so that you can add it to the system path later.

Add Blender's folder to your PATH variable

Once you have downloaded and installed Blender, you will need to add it to your environmental path. I found perfectly useful instructions for Windows here. Add the installation folder for Blender here.

Test the installation

Once you have done this, open up a command prompt and change directory to your Documents folder. This will usually be as easy as cd Documents.

Enter the command blender -b -P dummy.py Be sure that -b is lower case and that -P is upper case. If this results in an error that the file dummy.py could not be found, everything is working correctly and you can go on to the next article. If you get any other error you have probably set the path variable incorrectly; go back and double-check everything.

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