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Manual - Blender 2.4x

[edit] Installing the Binaries

Blender is available both as a binary executable and as source code on the Foundation site (http://www.blender.org/). At the main page click on the 'Downloads' section.

For the online manual hosted at the wiki, you can generally use the most recent version of Blender located at the Blender Foundation website (although all of the features from the newest release version may not be fully updated). If you are using a published version of this manual it is recommended that you use the Blender version included on the Guide CD-ROM. In the following text, whenever "download" is mentioned, those using the book should instead retrieve Blender from the CD-ROM.

[edit] Downloading and installing the binary distribution

The binary distributions are provided for primary operating system families. Some unofficial distributions may exist for other operating systems, but they're not supported by the Blender Foundation, you should report directly to their maintainers:

• Windows
• Linux
• MacOSX
• FreeBSD, Irix, Solaris
• MorphOS (not supported by Blender Foundation)

Binaries for the Linux operating systems are provided for two different hardware architectures x86 (Intel and AMD processors) and PowerPC, and the choice between statically linked or dynamically loaded libraries.

The difference between the dynamic and the static binaries is important. The static binaries have the OpenGL libraries compiled in. This makes Blender run on your system without using hardware accelerated graphics. Use the static version if the dynamic version fails! OpenGL is used in Blender for all drawing, including menus and buttons. For this, you will need OpenGL installed on your system. This dependency makes a proper and compliant OpenGL installation at your system a requirement. Generally speaking integrated graphics chips and older low end graphics cards will perform poorly or not at all with Blender due to their poor support for OpenGL. (It is often possible to work around the poor OpenGL support of such cards by using software based OpenGL solutions such as by turning down or off hardware acceleration on Windows, or using software MESA 3D on Linux). Running Blender using the blender-softwaregl script in the distribution may help in this case.

Rendering is done by the Blender rendering engine in core memory and by the main CPU of your machine, so an unsupported graphics card will not have an impact if you use the machine only for rendering (as would be the case for a rendering farm).

The installer will create files and several folders in two locations on your computer: one set of folders is for Blender itself, and the other is a user set of folders for your user data. You must have administrator authorization to create these. The folders are:

• .blender - configuration information (mostly prompts in your native language)
• blendcache_.B - temporary space for physics simulation information (softbodies, cloth, fluids)
• plugins - added functionality for textures and sequencing
• scripts - python scripts that extend Blender functionality
• tmp - temporary output, intermediate renders

[edit] Hardware Support

Blender supports 64-bit hardware platforms running a 64-bit unix operating system, removing the 2Gig addressable memory limit. Work is underway to support a Windows 64-bit OS (call for developer help!)

Blender supports multi-CPU chips, like the Intel Core-Duo and AMD X2 chips by providing a Threads: setting when rendering to work both cores in parallel when rendering an image.

Blender supports a wide variety of pen-based tablets on all major operating systems, in particular OS X, Windows XP, and Linux OSes.

Tips on making Blender run faster and render swifter can be found here.

[edit] Developers platforms

This is the list of systems in use and supported by active Blender developers:

[edit] Compiling the Source

There are presently four build systems for making a binary for the different operating systems supported. See this web page for more information about compiling a custom installation binary for your machine. This link is in wiki format and provides more information as well.

[edit] Compiling the Plugins

Plugins are dynamically loaded routines that augment functionality in either texture generation or sequencing (image manipution). See this thread for more information.

Manual

[edit] Subpages

1. Configuration
2. Linux
3. Mac
4. Other OSs
5. Python
6. Windows