APOLLO Blender: A Robotics Library for Visualization and Animation in Blender
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866909978569211904 |
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| author | Messina, Peter Rakita, Daniel |
| author_facet | Messina, Peter Rakita, Daniel |
| contents | High-quality visualizations are an essential part of robotics research, enabling clear communication of results through figures, animations, and demonstration videos. While Blender is a powerful and freely available 3D graphics platform, its steep learning curve and lack of robotics-focused integrations make it difficult and time-consuming for researchers to use effectively. In this work, we introduce a lightweight software library that bridges this gap by providing simple scripting interfaces for common robotics visualization tasks. The library offers three primary capabilities: (1) importing robots and environments directly from standardized descriptions such as URDF; (2) Python-based scripting tools for keyframing robot states and visual attributes; and (3) convenient generation of primitive 3D shapes for schematic figures and animations. Together, these features allow robotics researchers to rapidly create publication-ready images, animations, and explanatory schematics without needing extensive Blender expertise. We demonstrate the library through a series of proof-of-concept examples and conclude with a discussion of current limitations and opportunities for future extensions. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_23103 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | APOLLO Blender: A Robotics Library for Visualization and Animation in Blender Messina, Peter Rakita, Daniel Robotics High-quality visualizations are an essential part of robotics research, enabling clear communication of results through figures, animations, and demonstration videos. While Blender is a powerful and freely available 3D graphics platform, its steep learning curve and lack of robotics-focused integrations make it difficult and time-consuming for researchers to use effectively. In this work, we introduce a lightweight software library that bridges this gap by providing simple scripting interfaces for common robotics visualization tasks. The library offers three primary capabilities: (1) importing robots and environments directly from standardized descriptions such as URDF; (2) Python-based scripting tools for keyframing robot states and visual attributes; and (3) convenient generation of primitive 3D shapes for schematic figures and animations. Together, these features allow robotics researchers to rapidly create publication-ready images, animations, and explanatory schematics without needing extensive Blender expertise. We demonstrate the library through a series of proof-of-concept examples and conclude with a discussion of current limitations and opportunities for future extensions. |
| title | APOLLO Blender: A Robotics Library for Visualization and Animation in Blender |
| topic | Robotics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23103 |