Install Blender

Go to this webpage and download blender-2.79b-windows64.zip for windows.

NOTE: It is important that you download the version 2.79b and not 2.79 or 2.79a.

Unzip the .zip in any location you want. Check if blender works by simply double-clicking the blender.exe within the unzipped folder.

Install Pybullet

NOTE: Installing Pybullet is only necessary if you want to use the physics part of the PTR image generation. If you don't want to use that you can continue with Installing pip

1. Download the Windows x86-64 executable installer. This needs to be done because the standard blender python version does not come with the necessary header files attached.

2. Rename your python folder within the blender installation path, e.g. within ..\blender-2.79b-windows64\blender-2.79b-windows64\2.79 should be located a folder named python. Simply rename it to python_bak

3. Execute the Python executable that you downloaded in step 1.

   1. Uncheck add to path and check install pip click on next
   2. Check only install precompiled standard libaries
   3. IMPORTANT: do not choose the default location, but rather modify the installation path to be within your blender/2.79/ folder, e.g. ..\blender-2.79b-windows64\blender-2.79b-windows64\2.79\python (you need to create the python folder by yourself). This enables us to use that python version within blender.

4. Move to the installation python folder, there you should find a python.exe. Run the following command:

python.exe -m pip install numpy pybullet pillow

5. If you get no error -> good. If you get an error follow step 6.
6. If your error has something to do with C++ versions, please install the correct version through Visual Studio Installer
7. If you get an error rc.exe not found you need to go to the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits and search in all folders for the rc.exe
8. Add the folder with the rc.exe to your path and restart the console
9. You should be good to go and can install also numpy and pillow with the above command.

Install pip

NOTE: If you have already done the steps in Install Pybullet pip should already be installed in the bleder python version and you can continue with Install dependencies.

Blender 2.79x does come with a Python 3.5 interpreter which will invoke the scripts that are used in this project. One of the pitfalls is that the interpreter does not come with pip which makes installing third party libraries impossible.

To install pip navigate to the unzipped folder under ..blender-2.79b-windows64\2.79\python\bin in your terminal. After that execute the python.exe that you find in that directory and pass the get-pip.py script, that you can find in this project root directory by typing:

./python.exe /path/to/get-pip.py

NOTE: if you use powershell or cmd you need to adjust the path to windows paths, i.e. path\to\get-pip.py. Furthermore it is possible that you need to omit the ./ infront of python.exe

Install dependencies

After successfull installation of pip you can install pillow which is required by render_images_partnet.py by typing

NOTE: you need to be located in the same directory as in the previous example where we installed pip!

./python.exe -m pip install pillow numpy pybullet

Add blender to path

To make the blender command available in your system you need to add the unzipped folder path (up until you can see the blender.exe) to your system path (environment variable).

Download Datasets

To make the project run you need to download Partnet Dataset (you need an account) and Partnet Mobility Dataset (you need an account too).

NOTE: The first data set is quite large, i.e. the zip to download is around 100 GB and the unzipped data set is around 322 GB. The second data set is only ~10 GB.

Unzip both dataset in any location that is convenient.

Run render_images_partnet.py

To run render_images_partnet.py you need to navigate to the location of the script first.

NOTE: I have adjusted some paths and it should work from anywhere, but to be completely sure navigation to the image_generation folder is advised.

To generate images use the following command:

blender --python render_images_partnet.py --background -- --data_dir /path/to/unzipped/partnet --mobility_dir /path/to/unzipped/partnet/mobility --use_gpu 1

The last flag --use_gpu 1 enables blender to run on your gpu. This only works if you have a NVIDIA Gpu and CUDA installed. Otherwise you can use --use_gpu 0 or omit the flag.

python generate_questions_partnet.py --input_scene_files ../output/scenes/ --output_dir out/ --output_questions_file out/PARTNET_questions.json

Install git-bash

Install Git and add Git directory to PATH environment variable

Data stream usage

python data_stream_wrapper_partnet.py --data_dir B:/PartNetData/partnet --mobility_dir B:/PartNetData/mobility --use_gpu 1