Installation

Requirements

  • Blender 5.1.0+
  • Bundled Python wheels target Python 3.13 (the interpreter shipped with Blender 5.1.x).
  • Supported platforms: Linux x64, Windows x64, macOS ARM64 (Apple Silicon).
  • Internet access is required for geospatial features (geocoding, OSM networks, maps, DEM) and SQL database connections.

All third-party dependencies are bundled as wheels — no manual pip install is needed. Key dependencies include networkx, igraph, rustworkx, osmnx, city2graph, overturemaps, geopandas, shapely, pyproj, momepy, libpysal, scikit-learn, scipy, pandas, pyarrow, duckdb, pillow, and requests.

Install from a release

  1. Download the platform zip for your system from the GitHub releases / Actions artifacts.
  2. Open Blender, then go to Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Add-ons.
  3. Select Install from Disk, then choose the downloaded zip.
  4. Enable the SciGraphs add-on if it is not already active.

Install the development version

  1. Open GitHub Actions.
  2. Select the latest successful workflow run.
  3. Download the artifact for your platform.
  4. Extract the downloaded zip to obtain the actual extension zip file.
  5. Install it manually following the steps above.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/SciBlend/SciGraphs.git
cd SciGraphs
./scripts/fetch_wheels.sh   # download bundled dependency wheels for all platforms
./build_extension.sh        # build per-platform zips and install for your OS

The bundled dependency wheels are not tracked in git, so scripts/fetch_wheels.sh must be run first to populate the wheels/ directory (it downloads the Python 3.13 wheels for every platform from the constraints/ files). Then build_extension.sh uses Blender’s extension build --split-platforms command to produce per-platform zips in dist/ and installs the one matching your operating system.

Opening the panels

After enabling the add-on, open the 3D Viewport sidebar with N, then look for the SciGraphs tabs:

  • SciGraphs — the core combinatorial workflow (Data, Layout, Algorithms, Analysis, Visualization, Export, Reproducibility).
  • OSMnx — street-network download and analysis.
  • City2Graph — urban morphology, transport, and heterogeneous graphs.
Tip

If the tabs do not appear, confirm the add-on is enabled and that you are in the 3D Viewport (View3D) editor. The sidebar tab labels are docked vertically along the right edge of the viewport.

Native bindings

Two native bindings are built and maintained by the project author:

  • scigraphs-utils powers the Graphviz layouts (dot, neato, fdp, sfdp, twopi, circo, osage, patchwork), including native 3D variants.
  • pysurprise provides the SurpriseMe community-detection algorithms and the Surprise quality metric.

Both are bundled as platform-specific wheels in the extension.

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