The folder named PhotonBlend is a Blender add-on for Photon. We support only Blender 2.92 and higher. Please follow standard Blender add-on installation procedure to install it.

Features

Export scenes to Photon's scene description format
Manipulate Photon materials with shader nodes
Physically meaningful input parameters
Preview and perform final render directly in Blender

Development

It can be useful to have fake bpy modules around so that import bpy and its equivalent no longer trigger errors in your IDE (and autocomplete is now possible).
By enabling Edit > Preferences > Interface > Developer Extras and Python Tooltips, you gain more information for developer from Blender's UI.
To avoid opening Blender console manually everytime on startup, pass -con to the Blender executable.

Enum Property

When defining enum entries for bpy.types.EnumProperty, you must specify a number for it. The numbers are unique value used as the identifier for the entry (stored in file data). If you do not do this, the original .blend file will break (by using wrong or invalid value) when entries are added/reordered/renamed. The following is a wrong example:

items = [
    ('entry', "Entry", "Hello entry!"),
    ('entry2', "Entry 2", "Hello entry 2!"),
]

Please always use the following form (numbers are specified in the end, and should not be changed to keep the integrity of old .blend files):

items = [
    ('entry', "Entry", "Hello entry!", 0),
    ('entry2', "Entry 2", "Hello entry 2!", 1),
]

Troubleshooting

Exported scene is different or missing some data.
- If you are exporting via File -> Export -> Photon Scene (.p2), try using the Render to .p2 render engine to export instead. Unfortunately Blender currently does not support getting a depsgraph with depsgraph.mode == 'RENDER' (except the one passed to bpy.types.RenderEngine by Blender). This will cause the exporter to export in VIEWPORT mode, and many settings such as subdivision modifiers will not apply their RENDER mode settings. The exporter still attempts to enhance this part by trying to automatically adjust object settings to match the one used for final rendering (or what the user specifies), but chances are that some parts are still missing/different. The Render to .p2 render engine export scenes in RENDER mode by default. See Get "Render" dependency graph for a related discussion.
The render is completely black.
- Go to Window -> Toggle System Console and see if there is message like "Warning: reading render result: expected channel "XXX" not found". If so, then it is due to we are not fully supporting Blender's layer system yet. Please change the view layer's name to its default (ViewLayer) for now.
Camera view does not match what I see from the viewport.
- Select the camera, set the property Camera -> Sensor Fit to Horizontal and see if that works for you. When the rendering has lower aspect ratio (e.g., height > width), Auto sensor fit seems to interpolating between vertical and horizontal sensor size/FoV. I have yet figured out how the actual interpolation is done.

Known Issues

Blender 3.6.5

File -> Export -> Photon Scene (.p2) may omit a newly created material's node tree, resulting in a fallback material being used. Using fake user for the material or saving and reopening the .blend file seem to work. A better alternative is to use the Render to .p2 render engine to export. This seems to have something to do with the depsgraph VIEWPORT & RENDER mode issue, VIEWPORT depsgraph does not evaluate a newly created material's node tree.
Render to .p2 output empty (black) frames to output folder (Output Properties -> Output -> Output Path, defaults to /tmp/) no matter the render engine setting (bl_use_image_save = False). You may want to manually remove those files from time to time.