Introduction¶
This chapter will present a lot of information on getting data into Blender through importing. It will describe the overall approach, available file formats and their relative strengths/weaknesses and look closer into handling specific types of data, specifically point data and volumetric data.
Most of this chapter consists of the video presentation below, which covers quite a few subjects. After you are done viewing the video there is a first exercise on vertex colors, which uses data we provide. While the second exercise is more of a guideline for when you want to import your own data.
As mentioned in the presentation the PDF slides for this chapter contain some more reference material on getting data from ParaView, VisIt and VTK.
Point cloud primitive (3.1+)
As shown in the video, one way to render point data is to use instancing for placing a simple primitive like a sphere at each point location. Working with such instanced geometry is somewhat limited, as it introduces a hit on performance and memory usage, both for interactive work in the user interface, as well as rendering in Cycles.
Starting with Blender 3.1 Cycles now has dedicated support for rendering large numbers (millions) of points as spheres directly. However, there is currently in 3.1 no way to directly create a point cloud primitive by importing a file, and the only alternative is using Geometry Nodes to generate a point cloud primitive from a vertex-only mesh. But Geometry Nodes are not a topic in this Basics part of the course.
Availability of importers/exporters (Linux distributions)
When using the official Blender binaries from https://www.blender.org all supported importers and exporters will be included.
But especially when using a Linux distribution's Blender package some features might not be available, usually to libraries not being enabled when the package was built. For example, currently (May 2022) on Arch Linux the USD import/export support is not available in the Arch Blender package.
If you run into such issues, please download and use the official binaries instead.
Drag-and-drop for import (4.1+)
Since Blender 4.1 you can drag-and-drop a file to import on the 3D Viewport (or Outliner). This will then show the import dialog for the specific file format being imported. Currently supported file formats are Alembic, Collada, Grease Pencil SVG, OBJ, OpenUSD, PLY, and STL.
Importing even works when dropping multiple files (of the same file type).