pixeldestrukt

work prototype

Blender Art-Net bake

Blender as a lighting engine for an LED panel. Cycles bakes the light falling on a surface into the panel's pixel grid, and a script sends it out as Art-Net.

Status
prototype
Year
2026
Stack
Python, Blender, Cycles, Art-Net
Repo
github.com/pixeldestrukt/blender-artnet-textures

What it does

A plane in a Blender scene stands in for a physical LED panel, and its UV map matches the panel's pixel grid. Lights in the scene light the plane like any other object. The script then:

  1. Bakes all incident light on the plane with Cycles (bake(type='COMBINED')) into a texture the size of the panel, 64×64 by default. Direct and indirect light, shadows and material response are all in it.
  2. Reads the pixels back as a numpy array and converts them to 8-bit RGB.
  3. Sends Art-Net, packing the pixels into 512-byte universes (about 24 for a 64×64 panel) over UDP.

UV baking needs no camera. Cycles evaluates the light at each point on the surface, so the output is what the surface sees, not what a viewport sees.

What didn't work

It isn't realtime. A Cycles bake is a full render pass, and even at 16 samples it's too slow to loop. The bake also blocks Blender's main thread, so the UI freezes on every pass and you can't drag a light and watch the panel follow. EEVEE or OpenGL baking, or a separate background Blender process, are the obvious next things to try.

Pixel order is plain linear, so serpentine-wired panels would need a remapping step.