Blender - 3D modeller (Xenial & newer)

Fresh builds of Blender 2.91.0 (and Blender 2.92.0 Alpha) for Xenial & newer.

Update (15 Oct 2020): Upstream changes allow both CUDA 10 and 11 tools to be specified, meaning that CUDA kernels for SM_30 through SM_8x architectures are now buildable with the one pass. Thus, the latest 2.91.0 Alpha build has a more complete set of CUDA kernels than any previous version uploaded here.

Update (29 Sep 2020): New builds of Blender 2.91.0 Alpha are now available, built with USD (Universal Scene Description) support and pre-compiled CUDA 11.1 kernels. For Xenial systems CUDA 11.1 requires Linux kernel 4.5 or newer for bug-free functionality, just as for numerous newer than Xenial display drivers and graphics programs. See the table here about CUDA 11 requirements:

https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-installation-guide-linux/index.html

Also see the PPA https://launchpad.net/~savoury1/+archive/ubuntu/display for additional discussion about requiring kernel > 4.4 for newer display drivers.

* Note that both blender and blender-git versions can be co-installed on the same system. Achieved by packaging various blender* files as blender-git* such that there are no file conflicts with the two packages, plus they also use distinct config paths (~/.config/blender/2.91 & ~/.config/blender/2.92).

These are fresh builds with as many features enabled as possible. Making use of work by Irie Shinsuke [1] and Thomas Schiex [2] plus the Debian multimedia packaging team (thank you all!) and developing that work further this is now a fairly complete and up-to-date build of Blender. Packages found at this PPA that are not in default Debian or Ubuntu repos: Alembic, Open Image Denoise, Open Shading Language, Ptex, and now also Universal Scene Description (USD).

  *** Donate to support this Launchpad site: https://ko-fi.com/savoury1 ***

If you find this PPA useful then please consider a donation (above link). It will help me continue the efforts maintaining an up-to-date Blender for all!

+===========================================================================+
                    Blender - fresh build (Xenial & newer)
+===========================================================================+

alembic-io (1.7.16), blender (2.91.0), blender-git (2.92.0 Alpha 20201212), collada-dom (2.5.0), embree (3.12.1), libde265 (1.0.7), libheif (1.9.1), libraw (0.20.0), libsdl2 (2.0.12), opencollada (1.6.68), openimagedenoise (1.2.4), openimageio (2.2.8.0), openscenegraph (3.6.5), openshadinglanguage (1.11.9.0), opensubdiv (3.4.3), openvdb (7.1.0), ptex (2.3.2), robin-map (0.6.3), usd (20.08)

Focal only: pyside2 (5.14.0+really5.13.2 downgrade from default, due various use cases being broken by pyside2 5.14 with Qt 5.12, eg. missing pyside2-uic)

Xenial & Bionic only: armadillo, boost1.71, cfitsio, charls, coin3 (4.0.0), curl, dcmtk, collada2gltf, fftw3, fontconfig, freetype, gdal, gdcm, geos, hwloc, icu (66.1), ilmbase, jemalloc (5.2.1), json-c4, lapack, libdap, libevent, libgeotiff, libidn2, libpng1.6, libpsl5, libzstd, mpich, netcdf, ogdi, opencolorio (1.1.1), opencv (4.2.0), openexr, openjpeg2, openssl, poppler, pmix, proj, pugixml, pysimplesoap, python-{boto,httplib2,imaplib2} (compat with new openssl), python3.8 (3.8.6), superlu, tbb (2020.1), tesseract, tiff, xerces-c, xz-utils, yaml-cpp (0.6.2), zlib1g

Xenial only: hdf5, icu60, icu-le-hb, infinipath-psm, libfabric, libkml, libsquish, libwebp, nghttp2, rdma-core

Note: Many of the above deps for Xenial & Bionic are interconnected with each other and have been copied here from other PPAs at this Launchpad site for an easier installation of Blender on older series without needing too many PPAs.

+===========================================================================+

*** Install ***

Note for Focal (28 Sep 2020): Oops! Missed the libsdl2-2.0-0 (>= 2.0.12) dep from ppa:savoury1/multimedia and it is now copied here so that Blender can be installed from this PPA alone. Please let me know of any other install issue.

Notes for Xenial & Bionic: Blender is demanding software and recent versions require many newer system libraries than shipped with older series. Packages at this PPA are built against various other PPAs at this Launchpad site (see "Build" section below) and so require various newer packages from those PPAs to successfully install. This includes requiring GCC 9.3.0 (default GCC for Focal) as Blender packages here are built with a minimum of this GCC version.

Thus, installing Blender here requires these steps for Xenial & Bionic (many dependencies from the backports & graphics PPAs have now been copied here so those PPAs should not need to be added now -- if you find that a dependency is still missing even after doing the below steps then please let me know!):

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:savoury1/gcc-defaults-9
  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:savoury1/ffmpeg4
  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:savoury1/display
  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:savoury1/blender
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
  sudo apt-get install blender

Understand that this will bring in many upgrades including to GCC 9.3.0 which will be made the system default GCC version. As always, please remember that it is wise to backup first before such a major upgrade process is undertaken!

If running nVidia hardware please see the display PPA for further information about nVidia drivers: https://launchpad.net/~savoury1/+archive/ubuntu/display

*** Note about Numpy: Due Blender 2.90+ requiring Python 3.7+ (Xenial default is Python 3.5 and Bionic is 3.6) Blender at this PPA is built with Python 3.8 (Focal default) for all series to keep the build simpler and consistent. Thus Numpy installed from python3-numpy (to /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages) will _not_ work for Xenial or Bionic with Python 3.8 as used by Blender. A simple workaround for this is to install Numpy through pip for Xenial or Bionic and then add the user site-packages path to sys.path such that Numpy can be used.

An updated Blender package for Xenial & Bionic now has dependencies on both python3.8 and python3.8-distutils so that a more complete Python 3.8 install is available. Use Python 3.8 pip to install a compatible Python Numpy package (bootstrap.pypa.io is hosted by the Python Packaging Authority or PyPA and so it is a trusted site in terms of downloading get-pip.py code to install pip):

  cd ~
  curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py | python3.8
  python3.8 -m pip install --target=.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages numpy

Then a startup script can be added for Blender in the standard path for user configuration files. So use "~/.config/blender/2.91/scripts/startup" for 2.91 and create a file such as usercustomize.py (change "USER" in the below to the appropriate username on your system) with contents such as these two lines:

  import sys
  sys.path.insert(0, '/home/USER/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages')

The result will be that "import numpy" works fine after loading Blender on an older series (ie. Xenial or Bionic) making all Numpy functionality available.

*** Build ***

This PPA has build dependencies on:

  ppa:savoury1/build-tools
  ppa:savoury1/backports
  ppa:savoury1/graphics
  ppa:savoury1/multimedia
  ppa:savoury1/ffmpeg4

Additionally, required by Xenial & Bionic:

  ppa:savoury1/haskell-build
  ppa:savoury1/tex-2019
  ppa:savoury1/python
  ppa:savoury1/display
  ppa:savoury1/gcc-defaults-9
  ppa:savoury1/llvm-defaults-10
  ppa:savoury1/boost-defaults1.71

Note about i386: Blender is not a good match for i386 architecture and 2.90+ fails to build on i386 even after carefully removing all amd64 only configs and dependencies. The Blender packages built here will thus be amd64 only, as that is clearly the only target architecture for all features. Bye bye i386!

*** Credits ***

- Creators of Blender: The Blender Foundation and Blender Institute
  https://www.blender.org/about/

- Package code for Blender: Debian Multimedia Maintainers
  https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/blender

- Python 3.8 packages: Felix Krull and the "deadsnakes" team
  https://launchpad.net/~deadsnakes

- Package code for Alembic and Open Image Denoise: Irie Shinsuke

- Package code for Open Shading Language: Irie Shinsuke & Thomas Schiex

[1] https://launchpad.net/~irie/+archive/ubuntu/blender-builddep

[2] https://launchpad.net/~thomas-schiex/+archive/ubuntu/blender