swatch-grid

Swatch Grid

A runnable example that renders a 3×2 grid of spheres — one material per cell — to a single PNG. It demonstrates the procedural-materials-and-shaders patterns end to end:

• Principled BSDF metals (gold, copper: high metallic, low roughness) and dielectrics (red/blue plastic, white rough), configured with string socket lookups and 4-tuple colors.
• The emission pattern (an emissive orange swatch).
• The cross-version set_specular shim (Specular → Specular IOR Level, renamed in Blender 4.0).

It doubles as a live proof of the EEVEE engine-id behavior: the version-branch helper resolves BLENDER_EEVEE on Blender 5.x and BLENDER_EEVEE_NEXT on 4.2–4.5, and the check witnesses the inversion for real — the other era's id must be rejected by the running build (assignment raises TypeError) and the helper's id accepted — so a regression in that mapping fails the example, not just the docs.

Run

# Cheap correctness check (materials + engine-id witness, no render):
blender --background --python swatch_grid.py --

# Render and pixel-verify with the build's EEVEE engine (needs a GPU/display):
blender --background --python swatch_grid.py -- --output swatch.png

# GPU-less / CI hosts: render the pixels with Cycles (CPU). The EEVEE id is still
# asserted; only the final pixels use Cycles.
blender --background --python swatch_grid.py -- --output swatch.png --engine cycles --samples 16 --width 960

The script is deterministic and dependency-light (fixed camera and layout, no HDRI, no network). It exits non-zero on any failure, including a render that comes out uniformly black or without the expected six distinct swatch regions — the same honest check the CI smoke gate runs on both Blender 4.5 LTS and 5.1.

Verified

Runs headless on Blender 4.5.10 LTS and 5.1.1; exercised on both by the blender-smoke workflow on every PR and weekly schedule. The --output render path additionally measures framing against the Layer 1 band via examples/gallery_framing.py (exit 10 on violation) before writing the still.