Blender Texture Sharing: Syphon, Spout and NDI

Media Sharing
1

Texture sharing addon V7.0.1 for Blender 4.2.2 (beginig at 3.x) upwards

Blender addon that allows to share in realtime camera-outputs of Blender scenes as a liveperforming media & instrument

https://github.com/maybites/blender-texture-sharing

Blender addon that allows to share textures via Syphon, Spout or NDI from and to Blender.

This works for current Windows (Spout & NDI), Linux (NDI) and OSX (Syphon & NDI).

:warning: This library is still in development.

**Please follow github repo notes on installation and steps to make it run.
& for Blender 4.2.2 and above Blenderversions my Tips (for pluginibstalling in the newer Blenderversions of thus days) I gat this infos by a call with the plugindeveloper self **

TIP’s for installing the Plugin in Blender 4.2.2 and above by bennoH.:

First of all, a big compliment to Martin Fröhlich from Zurich/Switzerland​:heart::green_heart::blue_heart:, the plugin developer and with my warmest thanks :pray::pray::fist: for his great plugin and even bigger thanks for his generous telephone support for me regarding the following:
Since the Blender update to 4.2.2, the “Install button” is now missing in the Blender preferences/add-ons", so that at first you can only install checked add-ons from the corresponding Blender add-ons repository directly via this preferences menu.

Since this “TextureSharing” add-on has not yet been included in the Blender add-on repository (like many useful and useful ones), there is still a simple and generally sensible way to install (such) this top add-on.

  • 1.) Download the add-on as a zip file from github.com/maybites/TextureSharing.
    • 2.) Unzip the zip file.
    • 3.) Create a folder (on Windows) called “scripts” somewhere of your interest.
    • 4.) Open Blender / open the Preferences in Blender under “Edit” (last menu entry) / go to the bottom left to “File Paths” and then scroll down to the bottom left to “Script Directories”. There you enter (or select) the directory you created in point 3, save the preferences (bottom left in the Preferences menu, the icon with the 3 lines), close the Preferences menu and then close Blender again for now.
    • 5.) Create a new subfolder called “addons” in the “scripts” folder created under point 3.
      1. Copy or move the unpacked zip file of the “TextureSharing” add-on into the “addons” subfolder you just created. There should now be a folder called “TextureSharing-master” which contains 3 subfolders and 8 files (Windows).
      1. Start Blender again and open the Preferences again, select “Add-ons” on the left and look for “TextureSharing” in the list on the right and tick the box to activate it.
      1. (this step is only necessary if you are not using Spout or Syphon? with any other program, i.e. certain system routines are not yet installed on your computer) open the “TextureSharing” plugin in the Preferences/Add-ons menu, respectively its preferences and search for SpoutGL, there you will find a button to download the corresponding Spout/Syphon? system files and have them installed automatically (the same applies to NDI, although an additional installation of the NDI Blender extension for the add-on is always necessary here).
    • 9.) Save the Blender Preferences again.
    • 10.) Now open any scene of yours for testing in Blender which contains at least one camera (you can only transfer the camera window via this add-on!).
      1. Select a camera in the scene and click on the green camera symbol (on the far right) in the properties. The item “Share Texture” should now be included in these camera properties.
    • 12.) select the transfer type “Spout/Syphon or NDI”, give this spout channel a unique name, e.g. “Blender-Cam 01 Test”, you may also want to tick “Flip texture” (necessary for spout to Resolume-Arena, for example), set the desired dimension of the transfer, e.g. 1920x1080 for FHD and then tick the box at the top to activate and confirm everything (note: if you make any adjustments afterwards, e.g. to the transfer dimension, you must first deselect the activation checkbox in the camera properties and then set it again once you have made the adjustments and first delete/deactivate the spout receiver in the receiving program and then recreate it at the end so that the changes take effect). And now you can, for example, start Resolume Arena, go to “Surces” and you will find a spout “Blender-Cam 01 Test” that you can pull onto a free clip and then U gat the Blender output in Arena (but only the camera output is posibly by that blender-plugin)! :heart_eyes: SOO COOL :ok_hand::grin:

:dizzy::sparkles::star2::star::star:
This plugin has been really helpful since the “GeometryNode” was introduced in Blender and can now be used to create extremely ideal animations for live visuals such as 3D Mandelbulbers etc. In addition to ISF shaders etc., what is a very elegant way of replacing rigid and memory-consuming video loops with live controllable Blender animations. I can therefore highly recommend this add-on by “Martin Fröhlich”, a lecturer at the Zurich University of the Arts and 3D artist.

:volcano::volcano: :partying_face: In the upcoming update of Blender to 3.4, the EEvEE sourcecodepart will be completely rewritten for Vulkan​:volcano: the new shadingstandart and renew of OpenGL, which can be used as “experimental” in the render properties for the time being, and I/we have been waiting since 2016 hard for that since the first edition of Vulkan at 2016, for such GPU-friendly adjustments in the program source codes of the programs we use in real-time videos as VJ Pro’s. This means that with an “Nvidia RTX 3080 Desktop” GPU or higher, you can expect to be able to generate real-time outputs and live controls in Blender in a meaningful way, as Vulkan gives a significant GPU performance boost and the real-time performance of EEvEE under Blender-V4.3 is also generally optimized somewhat.

:sneezing_face::brain::tornado:Of course, you have to make compromises, such as keeping the samples (photorealistic) of the render engine under Viewport in Blender (what is transferred here with this plugin) very low between 24 and 56 in order to still get a reasonable flowing output and foregoing complex lighting or particle systems in the Blender animation for the time being, but the way away from rigid video-loops and packs is wide open, simple music-DJs or video-operators should buy and use this shydi video-loop stuff in the future, but we VJs and video artists will go into the future and use new, more exciting and optimal but above all more flexible media generation becuse we are the Pro’s in the higher visual-area scene!

A general great Blender tip
In general, you can put all your beloved Blender plugins in the “scripts\addons” folder using the method described (point 2, 4 & 6)) and then, with a new version of Blender, simply restore/set the path to the “scripts” folder in the new Blender versions preferences. This way, you will have all of your previously owned plugins available again in no time after reinstalling a new Blender version.

I haven’t used Apple devices for a long time and could therefore only show the way for Windows users, but for Mac and Linux the steps could probably be roughly derived from this description.

Cheers, yours bennoH.:panda_face: + :chipmunk:&:chipmunk: from the mountainous Switzerland