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drawtonomy vs Blender Driving Scenario Creator

The Blender Driving Scenario Creator (BDSC) by Johannes Schmitz is an open-source Blender add-on for creating OpenDRIVE and OpenSCENARIO scenarios, including 3D models.

What BDSC covers, per its README:

  • Road geometry tools with clothoid / Hermite solvers.
  • Junction tooling: a junction area tool and a junction connection tool, plus direct junctions for on-ramps and off-ramps.
  • OpenDRIVE export using analytical road primitives.
  • OpenSCENARIO export for scenarios laid on the map.
  • 3D mesh export to .fbx, .gltf, and .osgb.
  • Runs inside Blender, so the 3D viewport, scene graph, asset library, and rendering are available.
  • Licensed under GPL-3.0.

If your work already involves Blender, BDSC offers analytical OpenDRIVE geometry and full 3D authoring in one place.

drawtonomy is a 2D browser whiteboard. It does not do analytical road geometry, does not emit OpenDRIVE junction primitives, and has no 3D viewport. Per its exporter roadmap, proper junctions and signs are planned but not implemented.

A few small things drawtonomy can add alongside BDSC:

  • Browser-only, no install — useful for quick figures from a machine that doesn’t have Blender installed.
  • 2D top-down view that paper / slide figures often want directly, without going through a 3D viewport.
  • .drawtonomy.svg as a re-editable figure source for documentation.

The two tools occupy different positions: BDSC for 3D scenario authoring with proper road geometry; drawtonomy for 2D napkin sketches and figures.

BDSC and drawtonomy both target ASAM OpenDRIVE and OpenSCENARIO, and both can produce output for esmini. The open-source ASAM tooling community is small, and BDSC is one of its more substantial contributions. drawtonomy is a much smaller contribution in the same ecosystem — neither tool exists in isolation, and both benefit from the broader work happening in OpenSCENARIO / OpenDRIVE tooling.