Installing what you need

There are three things that you need to install on your computer before you can make sculpties in Blender:

Blender 3d 2.49b
The Python software
The Primstar sculptie scripts

Installation is… fairly straightforward if you do it right, but unfortunately, there are two steps that are easy to mess up, and can make things very difficult, so I had to write up this short tutorial.

Go figure.

Installing Blender

Download Blender 3d 2.49b from here.  For now, Primstar does not work with Blender 2.5x.  The people at Machanimatrix are working on a new version of the scripts, but for now, we’ll have to stick to the older version of Blender.

Installing Blender is fairly easy. For the most part just follow the instructions. However, there is ONE thing that Windows XP users will have to change

There is a point during installation that asks you where you want to store the user data files. By default, the ‘Application Folder’ is selected. Switch this to the “Installation Directory. This will save you some hassle in a bit.

After that, just wrap up the installation as normal.

Python

Download Python 2.6.6 from here.

For the current stable version of Blender (2.49) you’ll want to download the latest 2.6 build of Python. Do NOT download 3.1 or 2.7. Install normally.

Domino’s Primstar Scripts

Download the scripts from here.

Installing the Primstar scripts is probably the most troublesome of the three. Go into your file explorer, and navigate to the Blender data directory. You’re looking for the .blender/scripts folder.

.blender is a “hidden folder.” If you can’t see it, you may need to change your settings to show hidden files and folders.

In the Windows file explorer, go to Tools > Folder Options, and in the View tab check “show hidden files and folders.

In the Mac OSX, type the following in the Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

Try looking for the folder in the following directories:
Linux: ~/.blender/scripts
Mac: /Applications/blender/blender.app/Contents/MacOS/.blender/scripts/
Windows XP: c:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts
Windows Vista: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts

Once you’ve found the scripts directory, find the folder called “primstar” inside the zip file you downloaded and copy the whole folder into the blender scripts directory. If you’ve installed Domino’s scripts previously, you might have to find the old ones and delete them manually. Now you’re ready to start Blender.