Dear Imgui for Blender

Use the infamous Dear ImGui library directly in your Blender scripts! This means custom GUI drawing in your operators:

Normally custom UI drawing in Blender is done using the binding of OpenGL from the bgl module as well as shader-related objects from the gpu module, but this is really low-level. Dear ImGui is a now traditional tool used for quick debugging UIs that provides a much more comfortable API.

This repository provides backend code and examples to run Dear ImGui within Blender. This may be used for constant overlays or interactively during modal operators.

Installation

Prior to using the code from this repository, we will install Dear ImGui's Python binding. Beware that it must be installed in Blender's Python, not in system's Python so you must call pip through Blender's python like so:

REM An example on Windows
cd "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 2.91\2.91\python\bin"
.\python.exe -m pip install imgui
# An example on linux
cd /usr/lib/blender/2.91/python/bin
./python3.7m -m pip install imgui

If this fails, start over using a cmd in administrator mode. You may have to adapt the path after "cd".

Examples

To quickly try out examples download ImguiExamples.zip from the last release, don't unzip it and install it as an add-on.

overlay-switch

To go further, hack on operators.py and overlays.py and check out pyimgui's documentation!

To embed this into your add-on, you just have to include blender_imgui.py in your add-on's directory.

GitHub