Has anyone tried installing blender on a Raspberry Pi 3 or do you know which version of blender will be supported on Pi3? If I get just the 3d view running for modeling, that'll be great.
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As of June 16 2018, the current Blender version available for Raspian Stretch via apt-get is 2.78a. This is behind the current Blender 2.79c for other platforms.
You can install it with:
sudo apt-get install blender
It runs fine with full functionality, though it is slow. On a Pi 3 B+ it takes about one minute and 56 seconds to render the default scene (just the cube) in Cycles (using about 170MB of memory), so I wouldn't be planning to build a render-farm out of them lol.
It does use all four CPU cores while rendering in Cycles.
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$\begingroup$ It's great news! Thank you, I will try it in next few days. $\endgroup$– iowaqasCommented Jul 9, 2018 at 10:06
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$\begingroup$ has anyone tried it with the latte panda? $\endgroup$ Commented Dec 28, 2018 at 6:32
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$\begingroup$ Outch! The default cube takes about 3 seconds to render on any normal (even weak laptop) System, so that means that you can't render anything worth a damn on the Pi. Which is obvious, as it was never made to be powerful, it has a very poor and slow ARM CPU. But for modelling it might work. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 4, 2020 at 1:14
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The biggest hurdle to getting Blender running on the Raspberry Pi is the fact that the Pi has an ARM processor rather than one that uses the x86 instruction set, which means software has to be specifically compiled for it. Currently the Blender Foundation does not provide these builds at the moment, but there are a number of builds floating around produced by 3rd parties that should work fine. Many of them mention use on the Pi since it is probably the most common normal linux ARM platform, the fact it runs full linux makes this much easier.
As you are relying on third party builds, many will be a bit out of date compared to the latest builds (certainly buildbot, and they may take a bit to catch up). That said on arch at least its up to date: https://archlinuxarm.org/packages?search=blender. However in the debian jesse repo, it is a fair bit out of date (https://packages.debian.org/jessie/blender). As fair as I'm aware the default Pi os (Raspbian) is based on jessie, so the blender you get there will be somewhat out of date. See @Zoots answer for more recent builds.
As Nathan Osman mentions in the comments, you should be able to install blender with: sudo apt-get install blender
For 2.8 and later, openGL 3.3 is required, making builds impossible. see https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/145057/26345
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1$\begingroup$ And I have the Blender source code, and wanna build targeting arm, how to? $\endgroup$– KhoPhiCommented Aug 15, 2017 at 23:34
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$\begingroup$ I'm also interested in this, especially as the RPi team are now promoting blender $\endgroup$– plukeCommented Feb 23, 2018 at 13:22
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$\begingroup$ You can run blender 2.8 on the pi, period. Just not very fast. $\endgroup$ Commented Dec 4, 2020 at 22:00
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I’m running the latest Blender 2.83.4 on a Raspberry Pi 3 B using Archlinux ARM AArch64.
I’m only running it headless, so I don’t know the usability of it with the UI.
I’m able to render images with Cycles as well as with Eevee or Workbench renderer with the help of xvfb.
You can also run Blender 2.82 in the official Raspberry Pi OS (64 bits) beta. You will need to add the buster-backports to the apt sources.list and then do:
sudo apt-get -t buster-backports install blender
sudo apt-get install blendershould do the trick. $\endgroup$