Blender Bridge

Showcade Bridge is a Blender extension that exports your current selection to GLB and uploads it to a showcade asset catalog. Once it’s there, you bind it to a table device from the object editor — nothing in the browser needs changing on that path.

Re-export and send again and the binding follows the new bytes. The extension keeps a stable identity on the Blender collection, so showcade always resolves whichever version you sent last.

What you need

• Blender 4.2 or newer. It’s a 4.2+ extension, not a legacy add-on.
• No third-party Python packages — it uses the standard library only.
• A showcade deployment you’re allowed to write to, and a credential for it. That’s Configuring the Bridge.

The extension is open source under GPL-3.0-or-later, and lives at github.com/caderuntime/blender-bridge.

Install

From the extension repository — the way that gets updates

Go to Preferences ▸ Get Extensions ▸ Repositories ▸ + ▸ Add Remote Repository and paste:

https://extensions.cade.run/index.json

Then find Showcade Bridge in the extension list and install it. That’s the whole setup: Blender re-reads that URL from then on, so a new version shows up as an available update rather than as something you have to go looking for.

The repository is one static listing, and the zips it points at live in the project’s releases, built by public CI from public source on the release tag. Installing this way tells us nothing about you — Blender fetches a listing and a zip, and neither request carries an identity.

From a zip

Take the .zip from the latest release, then in Blender go to Preferences ▸ Add-ons ▸ Install from Disk and pick it.

Same extension — you’ll just need to come back yourself when there’s a newer version, where the extension repository above would have told you about it.

From source

Clone the repository and build the zip:

python3 package.py build          # → dist/showcade_bridge-<version>.zip

Then Install from Disk as above. The zip is byte-for-byte deterministic, so a build from a release tag is directly comparable with the one attached to that release — you can verify what you installed.

If you’re changing the extension itself, symlink the working tree into Blender’s extensions directory instead of re-packaging after every edit, and restart Blender to pick up a change:

python3 package.py link                          # newest installed Blender
python3 package.py link --blender-version 5.2    # …or a specific one

After installing

Blender 4.2’s extension model denies network access unless the extension asks for it, and Showcade Bridge asks. If you ever see a permission error on a send, check that the extension is enabled as an extension rather than dropped in as a loose folder — the symptom reads like a network fault, but the cause is the missing permission.

Where to go next

If you’re building a client of your own rather than using this one, the catalog’s upload behaviour — dedupe, tags, limits, status codes — is published as Assets HTTP API. This section deliberately doesn’t restate it.