Blender

Motivation

Blender is quite possibly the most popular 3D modelling appplication available, definitely the most popular free one.

Status

Official builds available since 4.3 from: https://www.blender.org/download/ (note, it may be required to to use the drop down for the ARM64 version on that page if you use firefox, as architecture detection does not work correctly)

Nightlies available from blender via https://builder.blender.org/download/daily/

To run it on an 8cx Gen3 device, 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

NOTE: Temporarily, due to a driver bug, it is also required to follow the steps in this comment to allow Blender to run on an 8cx Gen3 device: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/142229#issuecomment-1638499

Dependencies

All are enabled except DPCPP (no SyCL support on Qualcomm devices right now).

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

Todo

Ongoing maintainence

Known Limitations

Only 8cx Gen3 and above devices work.

Compiling notes

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

Compiling blender

As blender now has pre-builts available for Windows ARM64, the standard blender build instructions can be followed for a normal build of blender (note, only VS2022 works for ARM64, and clang is the default compiler): https://developer.blender.org/docs/handbook/building_blender/windows/

Compiling via build script (outdated)

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/

To use:

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

• Clone repo

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

• Wait for build to complete

Contributing changes

If you wish to contribute changes to Blender, you may do so by making a merge request for your changes to blender’s main repo here: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender

Any changes or issues relating to Windows ARM64 will be directed to @Anthony Roberts by the blender triaging team - if you have bigger changes to discuss, please reach out to Anthony directly at anthony.roberts@linaro.org.

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

Running

Blender should run as normal. You may find better performance if you use the Vulkan backend instead of the OpenGL one.