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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know the Pi ships with the Blender Foundation's awesome animated cartoon Big Buck Bunny (http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/) on the SD card. Cool! It makes me wonder how well it would actually run Blender though, and if there are ARM binaries available?

The latest builds listing at http://builder.blender.org/download/ doesn't include any.

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There are blender packages in the ARM debian repository, so you should be able to get it to build on Fedora, too. Another issue is whether it'll run: I think Blender uses OpenGL/GLX for rendering, and I don't know if that works on the RPi. OpenGL ES 2.0 is supposedly supported by the hardware, but I don't know if and how that is supported in Linux userspace, particularly as OpenGL ES is mostly a subset of OpenGL. Software rendering might suffice though.

> "Software rendering might suffice though."

If I understand correctly, if it's using Mesa it should software render what it has to and hardware render the rest, without needing to change the program itself?

Yes, unless it makes specific demands on the OpenGL implementation which Mesa's software renderer can't meet. By "suffice" I was mainly thinking of performance. I don't know if Mesa is optimised for ARMv6 at all, and how demanding Blender is in this regard.

See the very impressive work on BlenderPocket by Salvatore Russo a number of years ago http://www.blender.org/community/blender-conference/blender-...

That's proof it can be done! I did drop him an email to see if he was still active in this area and interested in updating his work for the Pi. He sadly doesn't have time, but is happy to give advice or pointers as he is able to. I also see there's a GSoC project regarding blender and GL ES, but I think it's targeted at the game engine rather than the actual creation tools.

If you know anyone interested, do get in touch.

D'oh! I had forgotten about BlenderPocket, thanks for reminding me.

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