An early Blender add-on for drone-show design. The current prototype creates takeoff grids and changes drone LED colors. Animation, transition planning, flight-constraint checks, and export are planned.
Status: Alpha — under active development. See project-plan.md for the full roadmap.
The long-term goal is to design, animate, check, and export drone shows inside Blender. The current code is a grid-and-color prototype; it cannot yet produce or validate flight files.
Planned (MVP)
- Scalable swarm representation (Point Cloud + instances) for 1,000+ drones
- Takeoff grid / launchpad generation
- Formation generation from any mesh, curve, text, or logo with density and spacing control
- Per-drone and group LED color animation on the timeline
- Automatic formation-to-formation transitions (optimal slot assignment + velocity-profiled motion)
- Collision and feasibility validation (spacing, speed, acceleration, geofence, altitude) with live viewport feedback
- Multi-format export with coordinate-frame and sample-rate conversion
Implemented
- Parametric takeoff grid generation
- Per-drone LED color and emission control
The roadmap separates algorithms from Blender integration:
- Core — bpy-free data model and algorithms (assignment, collision, feasibility, interpolation, coordinate conversion)
- Blender adapter — thin
bpyintegration (swarm object, Geometry Nodes, handlers, viewport drawing via thegpumodule) - Exporters — format-agnostic trajectory sampler with one writer per target format
- UI — sidebar panels, operators, property groups
The target representation is a single Point Cloud with instanced proxies and a shared LED material. The current grid operator creates a separate mesh object and material for each drone; the core and exporter packages are placeholders.
- Blender 4.5 LTS or newer
- Use the Python runtime bundled with Blender; this add-on imports
bpy.
- Build a source package from the repository root with
blender --command extension build. No release ZIP is currently published. See the Blender extension build documentation. - In Blender, open Edit → Preferences → Get Extensions → Install from disk and select the
.zip. - Enable Sirius.
| Format | Type | Target stack |
|---|---|---|
| CSV | Trajectory data | Generic |
| Vimdrones raw | Control-format target | Vimdrones GCS |
| UgCS PATH / PATH3 | Control-format target | SPH Engineering Drone Show Software |
| VVIZ | Visualization/interchange | Verge Aero, Finale3D, Depence, FWSim |
| Depence | Visualization | Syncronorm Depence |
None of these exporters is implemented yet. Format output and model-based constraint checks will require validation against the target control software and aircraft before operational use.
The plan is phased around a minimum end-to-end MVP (create → animate → transition → validate → export), followed by accelerators and polish.
- Phase 0 — Stabilize, restructure, scalable foundation
- Phase 1 — Launchpad and formation generation
- Phase 2 — Animation and LED
- Phase 3 — Transitions and assignment
- Phase 4 — Collision and feasibility validation
- Phase 5 — Export engine
- Phase 6 — Accelerators (geo-referencing, pyro, music sync, flocking, import round-trip) — post-MVP
- Phase 7 — Polish and release
Full details, including proposed Blender API choices and the test strategy, are in project-plan.md.
Contributions are welcome. Pick an open issue labeled phase-N or good first issue, and read project-plan.md for architecture and conventions before starting. The planned core algorithms and exporters should be testable without Blender; their implementation and tests are still to be written.