Using Blender for plotting

Anurag Sharma
2 min readMar 20, 2022

Recently I have been using blender a lot. Blender, if you do not know, is an open source 3D modeling software. For most of my work, I used to make random abstract art. I am not a skilled design person but I like to draw abstract art in general as a hobby.

Some of my old projects

I still haven’t mastered Blender and I think I keep learning new methods and features every time I take on a hobby project. So recently I found out that you can easily run Python scripts on Blender and there is amazing well defined Python API from Blender. This means you can easily generate new mesh designs or curves programmatically. I know this might be very trivial for some folks out there but I usually geek out when I get know about such features.

So to draw something, I can now use scripts. This opens up a lot of new design opportunities. To try this out I recently rendered “Lorenz Attractor”, which is a representation of the butterfly effect from Chaos Theory. You can easily find implementations of the Lorenz Attractor online and it is very simple to create as well because it only involves three ODEs. The implementation that I used can be found here.

Transform and create sets of (x, y, z) which can then be fed into Blender to create a NURBS curve.

And after little bit of lighting and material editing -

Lorenz Attractor

You can download the full blender file from here. Also check out my other drawings on Behance.

Thanks!

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