pyvista-blender

Warning

Very early development. APIs, defaults, and module layout will change without notice until the first stable release. Bug reports, missing-feature requests, and PRs are all very welcome — please open an issue if something doesn't work or behaves surprisingly.

Render PyVista plotter scenes through Blender (bpy) — photoreal output, full animation export, no file round-trip.

Build the scene once in PyVista. Pick VTK's preview or Blender's Cycles / Eevee Next for the final render. Export entire deforming, colour-evolving, lit animations to a single .blend that plays natively in Blender with no Python script inside.

Showcase

These structural mechanics examples start as PyVista scenes and use Blender for the final render. The transparent animated WebP previews link to the transparent VP9 WebM files.

I-beam bending Fedoo stress animation with support and load geometry.	Gyroid compression Metallic gyroid material revealed through a stress-alpha overlay.

Status

Initial public release (0.1.0). The offline render path, the desktop and browser interactive viewports, the Jupyter inline backend, and the full animation export to .blend are implemented and tested. The full ruff (select = ["ALL"]) + ty + format gate is clean. See the features list in the docs for the full surface and the architecture page for the translation pipeline.

Install

pip install pyvista-blender
# or
uv add pyvista-blender

For the Jupyter inline backend and the Trame-served browser viewport (pl.blender.show(backend="web")), install pyvista[jupyter] alongside; the bridge reuses pyvista's Trame stack rather than shipping its own extras.

pip install pyvista-blender 'pyvista[jupyter]'

Requires Python 3.11 (Blender 4.5 LTS via bpy>=4.5,<5) or 3.13 (Blender 5.x via bpy>=5.0,<6). Python 3.10, 3.12, and 3.14 have no matching bpy wheel on PyPI; requires-python blocks them.

Quick start

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"

# Offline render via Cycles + OptiX denoise. No `import pyvista_blender`
# needed — the namespace registers itself on install through PyVista
# 0.48's plotter-component entry point.
pl.blender.render("frame.png", samples=128)

# Interactive hybrid viewport: VTK 60 fps during drag, Cycles render
# on mouse release. One window, mouse-driven, no auto-exec prompts.
pl.blender.show()

API surface

Entry point	What it does
pl.blender.render(path, ...)	Render a single frame to PNG via Cycles or Eevee Next.
pl.blender.animate(path, updater, frames, fps=...)	Render an animation as gif / mp4 / webm / mov / mkv via imageio + imageio-ffmpeg.
pl.blender.show()	Hybrid VTK / Cycles interactive viewport — VTK during drag, settled Cycles on release.
pl.blender.add_glyph(source, geom, *, orient, scale, factor)	Geometry-Nodes-instanced glyphs; memory cost scales N + V instead of N · V.
pl.blender.export_blend(path)	Save the live PyVista scene as a .blend for finishing in Blender.
pl.blender.export_animation_blend(path, updater, frames, fps, **bake)	Bake a full animation into a .blend that plays natively on file open.
pl.blender.orbit_camera(n_frames=...)	Build an updater for animate / export_animation_blend.

Three-tier config resolution everywhere: per-call kwarg → component attribute (pl.blender.engine = ...) → module default (pyvista_blender.config.*).

Animation export to .blend

export_animation_blend bakes each animation channel through its own opt-in kwarg. Every backend plays back natively when the file is opened in Blender — no Python in the .blend, no auto-execution prompt, no need to "Run Scripts" on load.

Kwarg	Mechanism	File layout
bake_camera=True (default)	Keyframes on scene.camera.location + rotation_quaternion per frame	inside .blend
bake_deformation="shape_keys"	One Shape Key per frame, value-keyframed with linear interpolation	inside .blend
bake_deformation="mdd" (= True)	Lightwave MDD sidecar + MESH_CACHE modifier	.blend + __<mesh>.mdd
bake_scalars=True	Packed PNG (rows = frames, columns = vertices / cells) + Geometry Nodes graph; works for point-data and cell-data scalars	inside .blend
bake_lights=True	Per-light keyframes on location, rotation, energy, color	inside .blend

Example: full multi-channel animation in one self-contained file.

import numpy as np
import pyvista as pv

pl = pv.Plotter(off_screen=True, window_size=(1280, 720))
plane = pv.Plane(i_resolution=60, j_resolution=60)
plane.cell_data["heat"] = np.zeros(plane.n_cells, dtype=np.float32)
pl.add_mesh(plane, scalars="heat", cmap="inferno", clim=[-1.0, 1.0])

light = pv.Light(position=(5, 0, 4), light_type="scene light", intensity=1.0)
pl.add_light(light)

n_frames = 60
orbit = pl.blender.orbit_camera(n_frames=n_frames)
centers_xy = plane.cell_centers().points[:, :2]


def update(frame: int) -> None:
    orbit(frame)
    angle = -frame * (2.0 * np.pi / n_frames)
    light.position = (5.0 * np.cos(angle), 5.0 * np.sin(angle), 5.0)
    light.intensity = 0.4 + 0.6 * (0.5 + 0.5 * np.sin(frame * 0.3))
    r = np.linalg.norm(centers_xy, axis=1)
    plane.cell_data["heat"] = np.sin(2.0 * r - frame * 0.2).astype(np.float32)


pl.blender.export_animation_blend(
    "scene.blend",
    update,
    frames=range(n_frames),
    fps=30,
    bake_camera=True,
    bake_lights=True,
    bake_scalars=True,
)
pl.close()

Open scene.blend in Blender 4.5+ / 5.x and press Space: camera orbits, the explicit light orbits in the opposite direction while pulsing, the heat field travels as a radial wave with flat per- cell shading. One file, ~500 KB, nothing to ship alongside.

Development

uv sync --group dev --no-install-package bpy  # fast local sync (no 200 MB bpy wheel)
uvx prek install                              # install pre-commit hooks
uv run pytest                                 # ~10 s with bpy installed
uv run ruff check src/ tests/
uv run ruff format --check src/ tests/
uv run ty check

Real bpy is only needed for the @pytest.mark.bpy tests. CI runs the full suite against the live wheel.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. Forced by bpy's license; every source file carries an SPDX header. See LICENSE.