Blender

Motivation

Blender is quite possibly the most popular 3D modelling appplication available, definitely the most popular free one. Enabling it would give considerably better performance on ARM64 platforms for Windows.

To run it, you need latest version of Adreno GPU driver: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/pcs-and-tablets/snapdragon-8-series-mobile-compute-platforms/snapdragon-8cx-gen-3-compute-platform#Software

Status

WIP - PR to blender ongoing for full release builds.

Dependencies

All are enabled except OpenPGL, DPCPP, and OIDN2.

A full list can be seen here: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/src/branch/main/build_files/build_environment/cmake/versions.cmake

Todo

Engage with upstream for PR.

Known Limitations

Only 8cx Gen3 and above devices work. OIDN does not wor, and must be unchecked for cycles renders to complete successfully.

Compiling notes

This must be done on a WoA machine - cross-compiling is not supported.

Compiling via build script

There is a build script written, which takes care of many of the interim steps required to build and run the semi-release version of Blender, available here: https://gitlab.com/Linaro/windowsonarm/packages/blender/-/tree/master/

It currently pulls our internal fork of blender, which has patches applied that are required to compile/run Blender.

To use:

• Set up arm64 wenv: https://gitlab.com/Linaro/windowsonarm/wenv/

• Clone repo

• Execute ./recipe.sh origin/woa out_dir from a wenv bash terminal - ie, not a vcvarsall/plain CMD instance!

• Wait for build to complete

Contributing changes to internal fork

If you wish to contribute changes to our internal fork, you may do so by making a merge request for your changes here: https://gitlab.com/Linaro/windowsonarm/forks/blender/

The build script automatically clones this repo into a folder named “blender”.

If you have any questions, queries, or concerns, contact Anthony Roberts

Running

Download the artifacts produced from our nightly build of blender: https://woastorage.blob.core.windows.net/packages/blender/blender_woa.zip