Lua Blender

Author:		Nathaniel Meyer
		nate@nutty.ca

Copyright:	Nutty Productions
		http://www.nutty.ca
		See license for more details.

Version:	1.0

Date:		Jan. 30, 2008


1) Description
Lua Blender is a sequencer plugin that exports logic to Lua scripts. In doing so, you can create and edit Lua script filters without having to compile C/C++ code. Unfortunately you cannot interact directly with the Lua scripts via Blender's interface, so you will be required to use a text editor to manipulate your scripts configuration.

Please note that in using Lua scripts, the processing performance will drop a bit due to the overhead involved. A trade-off for flexibility.


2) Installation
If you download either the Windows or Linux packages, you need only extract them to your blender folder.

The basic Lua scripts and one template to get you started are installed in a folder called "lua", located in your Blender's root folder.


3) How-To
The plugin is very simple. When you load it for the first time, it will scan the "lua" folder for a set of scripts and assign each one an ID number (in alphabetical order). Have a look in your Blender console window to see a list of files the plugin detected.

In the Sequence Editor in Blender, add the plugin to your desired sequences and hit the 'N' key to pop-up the interface. From here, you specify the Script Number that you want to apply to the sequences. The next time you shift the timeline over the plugin, Blender will update the frame with the results.


4) Compiling
If you download the source code, I have added a batch file for Windows to compile with Visual Studio and I also included a makefile for compiling in Linux using g++.

1) In Windows, just run make.bat.
2) In Linux, just type in "make".

Compiling the source code requires Lua, which I have included a stripped down version (version 5.1.3) in the zip file to make your life easier. It is already compiled as a static lib and it is ready to go, but you are free to compile your own Lua library if you want.