There are new videos available in the video series on Blender add-on developments for beginners:
It is completely free and has a GitHub repository with code .
The new videos are about rigging a curve, that is, creating an armature with bones for every control point in a Bézier curve and then adding hook modifiers to let the curve follow the armature. This setup creates very flexible pose options for things like tentacles and cables etc. and is tedious to do by hand. The add-on solution is not quite obvious, so I also show how to discover some things about curve and splines from the Python console and where to find stuff in the Blender API documentation.
The serie is for beginner add-on developers, but it is still coding of course, so you need to know a bit of Python already. I have tried to keep the Python code simple and readable, and we avoid nerdy stuff as much as possible.
The videos demonstrate how to build working add-ons from scratch. They are not necessarily very useful in and of themselves, but they show all kinds of relevant concepts and building blocks that are needed in any add-on, and that can be used in your own add-ons. By the end of the first module you should already be able to create an add-on that creates a functional menu item that performs an action on the active object. And even better, you will see that this requires only a few lines of code because Blender's Python API is very well thought out and very powerful: everything you can do as a user can be done in Python as well (and more!), and links to relevant parts of the docs are provided in the video descriptions.
If you like the series and can afford it, consider leaving me a tip on Ko-Fi. Feedback and suggestions are just as welcome, so leave any remarks or ideas in the video comments and/or create an issue in the repository. The idea is to use this feedback to create more videos in the future.
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