Creating model objects fails [Blender 2.69 backcompat issue]

[JEphron]

Our lab is using Blender 2.69 with Cellblender v1.0
I ran into an issue today when trying to create a model object. Got an error saying that ngon_method='BEAUTY' was not a valid kwarg. Traced it to this line:
https://github.com/mcellteam/cellblender/blob/master/cellblender_operators.py#L3484

According to the Blender API docs for 2.69, a different set of kwargs are used:

My solution was to swap out that line for the following:

bpy.ops.mesh.quads_convert_to_tris(use_beauty=True)

[cnlbob]

Thanks for the comment. It's always great to get a solution posted along with a problem. : )

From what you've posted, it looks like you're using an older version of Blender (2.69) that's not fully supported by that newer version of CellBlender.

I've been working on CellBlender since Blender was at 2.64, so I can pull up older versions of CellBlender that were contemporary with most older versions of Blender.

In my own version history, the last version of CellBlender that I had used with 2.69 is identified as:

CellBlender ID:   4828da5d3d7bbad49c2726a8b1487a959bd5f108
GIT Commit:   988bd98938575bb41fe5630f75111b901162af27

That version was committed to the repository on August 6th, 2014. I just tested that version with Blender 2.69 and it still works. There may be newer versions of CellBlender that still work with 2.69, but we generally do most of our testing with the current version of Blender. We find that since Blender is under active development, we benefit from their recent changes by keeping up to date. So we haven't kept careful track of which versions of CellBlender work with which older versions of Blender.

As a side note, Blender 2.70 introduced a new tabbed panel that we've used to greatly improve the CellBlender interface. Earlier versions of CellBlender installed the CellBlender panels under the "Scene" properties panel where it competed for space with a number of other panels. Later versions create their own tabbed panel which makes the interface much nicer. So there are many good reasons to upgrade to newer versions of Blender ... if you can.

[cnlbob]

I am going to leave this issue open because we could do a better job of tracking which versions of CellBlender work with which versions of Blender. In CellBlender v1.0 (referenced in this issue), the init.py file does list Blender 2.72 as the Blender version in the bl_info file. However, this isn't clearly communicated to someone installing that version of CellBlender in an older version of Blender. Since we're very close to releasing a new version, I don't recommend that we change v1.0, but do a better job in the next master release.