Blender 2.8 Request

I would like to install Blender 2.8 on my Jetson Nano. Please either make 2.8 available in your repo or, even better, enable us to upgrade to ubuntu 19.10 (this link suggests that that might still remain risky/untested: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1051952/jetson-nano/jetson-nano-ubuntu-19-04/ )

NVIDIA is not the publisher of Blender (http://blender.org is). However, since I see they do publish a 2.79 version for arm64 Linux with Ubuntu 18.04, there may be a possibility you could download the Blender source of 2.81 and either cross compile it or natively compile it on the Nano (in reality 2.80 is more likely to have fewer problems in cross compile). I’ve built Blender from scratch before on a PC (2.79), and I must warn you that the build and build requirements are not trivial. Once you add in cross compile to arm64 things will get even more complicated.

As good as the Nano is, Blender itself can consume a lot of resources. Blender is quite good in this respect, but Blender also does so many things that even with efficiency I have doubts that running on a Nano would work out well (especially with so little RAM, and that RAM being shared by the GPU).

I’m using my nano as a headless server. I was hoping to offload stuff like blender rendering since it’s a cpu-heavy, time-consuming load on my laptop, and I’d much prefer the freedom to be able to spin such jobs off onto a server.

I have an rpi4 with ubuntu 19.10, and I’ve had no problem installing blender 2.80 from an eoan repo. Sure, it takes a bit longer than my laptop, but it does the job fine. I’m actually quite surprised that I seem to be among the first to ask for blender 2.8 on the nano. I’d have thought that this would be just the sort of thing the nano would be good for.

Anyhow, I’ve heard elsewhere the nano is not ready/tested for 19.10, so I guess I’m stuck unless either someone figures out how to build blender 2.8 with 18.04 libraries, or until you enable stable upgrades to 19.10 :(

These instructions should work: Building Blender/Linux/Ubuntu - Blender Developer Wiki

I am not sure how much will be hardware accelerated on Tegra, however. You can try and see what works. Which renderer were you planning on using?

Assuming this works for install (and this probably would work since other arm64 builds work), then the one issue I see is that often GPU assist requires a PCIe function to detect and set up for GPU assist. The integrated GPU driver is not PCI, and so the functions for query of PCI do not exist. You would get hardware acceleration for something like OpenGL, but if this version of Blender wants CUDA through the standard mechanisms, it may not even know that CUDA is available.

What @linuxdev said. Cycles might not work with CUDA. Eevee probably has a better chance of working since it doesn’t use CUDA, but I wouldn’t bet on it being bug free since I don’t think many people are testing such a setup. Software has a better chance of working fine but it’s probably not going to perform very well on embedded arm. In the end it depends on what look you want and what compromises you are willing to make.

You may not need “real” path tracing, for example if you can fake it acceptably with Eevee, and/or bake your diffuse lighting with Cycles. Blender supports dynamically calculating environment maps as well if you want to fake reflections without raytracing, but it might require some compositing if you want to mix renderers. Caustics and refractions generally can’t be faked well, however. so you’ll likely have to render such elements using Cycles no matter what. For example, if you have a glass teapot, you would want to render just that teapot with Cycles, and the rest of the scene with something else. Then you composite the teapot on top of the rest of the scene.