Blender Add-on - Import CSV as Attributes

Warning: this add-on is no longer maintained and not compatible latest Blender releases.

Import CSV as Attributes is an add-on for Blender that allows loading tabular data in delimited plain text format, such as CSV files, into a new mesh object. The data is then available as attributes in the mesh, and can be used for further data processing and visualization using Geometry Nodes and Shader Nodes. The import tool optionally creates a Geometry Nodes modifier with the attributes as inputs for convenience.

Features:

• Accepts multiple data formats and any user-specified delimiter character
• Allows automatic creation of Geometry Nodes modifier with the Attributes as inputs
• Automatically detects multidimensional gridded index columns and optionally adds this information in the Geometry Nodes input. This is convenient for easy grid creation with correct dimensions.

Example use-case:

I have a dataset of significant earthquake records from year 1800, and I want to make a visualization to see the areas in the world with higher seismic activity.

Step 1: Importing the data

The import button is available in File>Import menu. The data file has a first row for the column names, and the data starts from the second row. I will also ignore the first column, as I don't need the earthquake ID. The delimiter is a coma, and I want to create a GeoNodes group with the attributes available as inputs. Note that some data fields are missing in the CSV file, I will replace those by zeros. I can configure all these parameters in the import settings panel:

This creates a new mesh object with as many vertices as data records. The data is stored as attributes and readily available in a Geometry Nodes modifier.

Step 2: Moving the points to the Earth's surface and instancing Icospheres

In the Geometry Nodes group, I can use spherical to carthesian transformation to construct position vectors for each vertex in the mesh, based on their Latitude and Longitude attributes. I can then instance an icosphere primitive to each of these points, and set its scale based on another attribute: the earthquake magnitude.

Step 3: Using color to visualize the year

Finally, in the Shader editor I use an Attribute input to call the year of the earthquake to drive its color.

This is a very basic example, the possibilities are endless! Check my demo projects for other examples.

Documentation

https://github.com/RT-studios/import_CSV_as_Attributes

Version History

v0.0.8

• Fixed bug where the add-on was not unregistering correctly.
• The Delimiter parameter now accepts integers for fixed width tabulated data.

v0.0.5

• Initial beta release