Blender on Raspberry Pi

In a hot weather with multiple laptops running in the same room, the last thing I wanted to do was render, which I did and instantly the cooling fans turned on, result, the room turned uncomfortably warm.

Raspberry Pi 3 Blender Render Benchmark

Raspberry Pi 2 Blender Render Benchmark

Ten minutes later, I gave up on the render process as I did not want to sit in this oven and decided to fire up my Raspberry Pi 2, and checked to see if a build of Blender is available in the repository, turns out there is a built not the latest built but has everything I need for the render.

I highly recommend doing this on a Raspberry Pi 2 or higher, as it has enough RAM for decent render and CPU that can handle BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) duplication without any issues.

Announcement: I will be publishing the result of the benchmark once they have been completed, you can subscribe via email to get notified or leave a comment.

Installing it is like another application.

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S blender

Raspbian

sudo apt-get install blenderCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

The good thing about Blender is it has CLI support, which lets you render without firing up the GUI.

blender -b file.blend -o /render/frame_##### -F PNG -f -2Code language: PHP (php)

Let’s break down the flags used above.

-b (render in background without GUI)

file.blend (location of the blend file to be rendered)

-o (Location to where the render will be saved)

-F (Override the image format specified in the blend-file and save to an PNG image.)

-f (Frame)

To learn more about the command line you can visit the official documentation. If the older links don’t work or give an error, try this link out.

Preview render in Blender