Blender to Arnold Export - Part I: The Addon

Wouldn't it be great if you could just download the latest Blender release, install it, run it, click on the Release Notes of the splash screen, download the Blender scene being used (to create the splash screen), load the scene into Blender, and render it there via Cycles, just to get a feeling for how long things would take to render such an image?

Well, you can do that, but what about other renderers, like Arnold?

I already had a project Arnold on Codeberg, so I added a sub-folder called blender/io_scene_ass, and you currently just need to create a softlink to make Blender find the addon:

$ pwd
/usr/local/blender-3.5.1-linux-x64/3.5/scripts/addons
$ ls -lag io_scene_ass
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 57 Mai  5 19:11 io_scene_ass -> /media/datadisk3/git/codeberg/Arnold/blender/io_scene_ass

It contains currently only two files, __init__.py, and export_ass.py, but before we discuss Python code, let's just explain how to install the addon (for now). Open the Blender Preferences windows and activate the addon there:

After that you should have a new entry in File->Export:

This blog post is more about making you aware of this addon than using it or showing the first images. But there will be more blog posts about this topic ...