Blender

Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.

Availability and Restrictions

Versions

The following versions of Blender are available on OSC systems:

Version	Pitzer	Ascend	Cardinal
2.91	X*
3.6.3	X
4.2	X	X	X

* Current default version

You can use module spider blender to view available modules for a given machine. Feel free to contact OSC Help if you need other versions for your work.

Note: Blender 4.2 on Pitzer is hardware accelerated for increased performance and is recommended.

Access

Blender is available to all OSC users. If you have any questions, please contact OSC Help.

Publisher/Vendor/Repository and License Type

Blender Foundation, Open source

Usage

Set-up for Blender 4.2

module load blender/4.2

Using Blender 4.2

Preferred: Select Blender from OnDemand interactive apps and choose version 4.2 from the drop-down menu.

Alternative: Open a Pitzer desktop, selecting 'vis' node. Load the module and run

blender

from the command line.

Set-up for Blender 3.6.3

module load blender/3.6.3

Using Blender 3.6.3

To run software-accelerated Blender, run either of the following equivalent commands:

apptainer exec $BLENDER_IMG blender

apptainer exec $BLENDER_IMG blender-softwaregl

Set-up for Blender 2.X

On Pitzer Desktop 'vis' or 'any' node type, run the following command:

module load blender

Using Blender 2.X

To run hardware-rendering version of blender, connect to OSC OnDemand and luanch a virtual desktop, either a Lightweight Desktop or an Interactive HPC 'vis' type Desktop, and in desktop open a terminal and run blender with VirtualGL:

module load virtualgl
vglrun blender

You can also run software-rendering version of blender on any type Desktop:

blender-softwaregl