Text Version Stamp

A runnable example that builds a beveled 3D stamp of the running Blender version — a TextCurve (bpy.data.curves.new(type='FONT')) whose body is the live bpy.app.version_string, so every render self-documents which Blender produced it. CI artifacts made this way are self-labeling.

What it witnesses: the TextCurve data-API contract. curves.new(type='FONT') returns a Curve subclass, the built-in font ("Bfont Regular") is always loaded even headless, body is plain assignable text that regenerates geometry on edit (more characters → strictly wider evaluated mesh), and extrude / bevel_depth produce exactly predictable solids: the evaluated mesh z-extent equals 2 × (extrude + bevel_depth) and the round bevel pushes the upright leading digit out by exactly bevel_depth. The trailing edge only gets a band (bevel_depth to 1.1 × bevel_depth): it is the release-cycle suffix, and a curved last glyph overshoots ("5.2.3 Release Candidate" ends in "e" and grows 0.0208 for a 0.02 bevel, #505). Flat text (no extrude, no bevel) is already filled — faces exist — but strictly planar. The check also witnesses the depsgraph lifetime hazard: after to_mesh_clear() the returned Mesh reference is dead and any access raises ReferenceError.

Version divergence: the string format itself differs — "5.1.2" on 5.x but "4.5.11 LTS" on 4.5 (the suffix is part of version_string). The check therefore asserts the contract that holds on both: version_string starts with the dotted bpy.app.version tuple. Code that parses version_string as a bare semver breaks on every LTS build; branch on the bpy.app.version tuple instead.

Staging#

The polished gold numerals stand on a two-tier chamfered plinth of dark honed stone. A brushed-steel nameplate on its front face carries the BLENDER caption, so gold is reserved for the version and steel for the plate. A card light behind the camera gives the gold faces something to mirror. The still renders under the Standard view transform on the house stage.

The render sets the stamp in Inter, which Blender ships at datafiles/fonts/Inter.woff2 on 4.5 LTS and 5.x alike (found through bpy.utils.system_resource('DATAFILES')). The built-in Bfont's "1" is a bare stem, so the old still read "5.2.I LTS". The check still asserts the built-in Bfont: the font swap happens on the render path only, after every check has passed, and the checked text body and its extents are unchanged.

Run#

# Cheap correctness check (no render) — the CI check:
blender --background --python text_version_stamp.py --

# Falsifier: body is not version_string. Must exit non-zero.
blender --background --python text_version_stamp.py -- --wrong-body

# Also render a still (EEVEE on a GPU host; use --engine cycles on GPU-less hosts):
blender --background --python text_version_stamp.py -- --output stamp.png
blender --background --python text_version_stamp.py -- --output stamp.png --engine cycles

The render scales the stamp to a constant width, so the frame holds for any version-string length.

Exit codes#

Per-script sequential checks. 9 is a valid check code; there is no rule against it. 10 is the shared framing helper.

The blender-smoke workflow runs the check on Blender 5.2 LTS and 4.5 LTS (5.1 on the weekly cron, the needs-5.1 PR label, or manual dispatch). Smoke does not pass --output. Its catalog falsifier is --wrong-body (expects exit 4).