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I want to visualize some scientific data, which is, at the moment, only an animation of some spheres with different colours and sizes.

I already created a script within Mathematica which creates the input for POV-Ray.

My problem is, that I'm not satisfied with the quality of POV-Ray's results and wanted to write a Python script, which could set up the corresponding blender scenes and render them. An important constraint is, that I want to render on a headless machine, so I can't use Blender's internal console.

My question: Is it possible to use Blender's api from an external console to get POV-Ray-like behaviour?

After reading George Profenza's answer I did further research and found Don’t Use Blender! in Blender's documentation.

In contrast to my thoughts, one has to create a python script which is executed by blender in background mode.

./blender --background --python myscript.py

Answers

As far as I remember you can run Blender from the command line without opening the interface/windowing system, which I hope works for your setup. Not only you can tell Blender to render a document, but you can also run a script that generates that document/populates the scene with geometry, lights, etc.

Alternatively you could generate content straight for a renderer (and skip a 3D Editor/Blender completely). There are quite a few free renderers out there like:

1. Yafaray
2. Sunflow
3. Mitsuba
4. LuxRender
5. Pixie

yafaray

sunflow

luxRender

pixie