When Blender is installed, it creates its own copy of Python 3.x. However, I prefer to code in Python 2.x. This makes it difficult for me to work with newer versions of Blender. I would like to know what to do so that Blender will instead use an external installation of Python 2.x, which I already have installed on my computer.
How do I make Blender recognize the other version of Python?
In summary - you can't.
Since Blender 2.5 we've moved on to Python 3.x This means it is not possible to use Python 2.x for scripting in Blender.
Now it's impossible to build against Python 2.x, and even if you did manage by editing the source-code, you'd probably run into problems running Blender, since Blender's own scripts are coded in Python 3.
Setting PYTHONPATH to a non Python 3.3 installation like Python 2.7 will cause Blender to crash and die horribly. (So always make sure you don't have PYTHONPATH set to a non-compatible Python version. But you can use it to point to an external Python 3.3 installation that has extra modules installed that don't come bundled with Blender).
Note: with current Blender pointing to Python 3.1 or Python 3.2 will also fail. So make always sure you point your PYTHONPATH to same version as used in Blender, should you need the external one.
In the long run you'll be better off getting used to Python 3. Also here is the proposal for the switch.
You can also use the Python lib2to3 package to automatically convert code directly from Python 2.x to Python 3.x. That way, it is possible to write your code in 2.x, then convert it to a format Blender understands (3.x).
This package comes installed with newer forms of Python under the Tools/scripts directory. You can use it to convert a single file by typing $ 2to3 example.py at the command prompt.
There are a variety of different options built in with this package to make this a quite powerful package. It is described in full, glorious detail at http://docs.python.org/2/library/2to3.html, for those who are interested in learning more.
Technically Blender has one originally math-python modules now ported to C++ therefore built-in subroutines, so you can't make the imports even if you replace the working python version as i did next. so you wouldn't import numpy for example in the first attempts.
so i tried really hard and i did. used PYTHONPATH and also the following then blender did run the alternative python but would not load BPY
import sys
addons=r"C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.67\scripts\addons"
modules=r"C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.67\scripts\modules"
startup=r"C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.67\scripts\startup"
lib=r"C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.67\python\lib"<br/>
DLLs=r"c:\\Program Files\\Blender Foundation\\Blender\\2.67\\python\\DLLs"
packages=r"C:\\Program Files\\Blender Foundation\\Blender\\2.67\\python\\lib\\site-packages"
python=r"C:\\Program Files\\Blender Foundation\\Blender\\2.67\\python"
sys.path.append(addons)
sys.path.append(modules)
sys.path.append(startup)
sys.path.append(lib)
sys.path.append(DLLs)
sys.path.append(packages)
sys.path.append(python)
so i copied BPY.so like this
Linux:
cp ./bin/bpy.so /usr/lib/python3.3/site-packages/
cp --recursive ./bin/2.65 /usr/lib/python3.3/site-packages/
Windows:
copy bin\bpy.pyd C:\Python33\Lib\site-packages\
copy bin\*.dll C:\Python33\Lib\site-packages\
del C:\Python32\Lib\site-packages\python33.dll
xcopy /E bin\2.65 C:\Python33\
and still nothing for import bpy
You can't use python 2 in blender anymore but you can make it use you system python but compiling blender from source. This is especially useful on OSX if you need to use the Framework version of python to prevent it from crashing when do anything with the native Mac GUI.
