Description

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.

**Software Category:** vis

For detailed information, visit the Blender
website.

Available Versions

The current installation of Blender
incorporates the most popular packages. To find the available versions and learn how to load them, run:

module spider blender

The output of the command shows the available Blender
module versions.

For detailed information about a particular Blender
module, including how to load the module, run the module spider command with the module’s full version label. For example:

module spider blender/3.2.1

Module	Version	Module Load Command
blender	3.2.1	module load blender/3.2.1
blender	3.4.1	module load blender/3.4.1

Interactive Sessions through Open Ondemand

Interactive sessions of Blender
can be launched through the HPC system’s web portal, Open OnDemand.
To launch an instance of Blender
, you will begin by connecting to our Open OnDemand portal. Your Blender
session will run on a Rivanna/Afton GPU node. In addition, you need to specify required resources, e.g. time, your HPC allocation, etc. If you are new to HPC, you may want to read the Getting Started Guide to learn more about the partitions.

Starting an Interactive Session

1. Open a web browser and go to URL: https://ood.hpc.virginia.edu.
2. Use your Netbadge credentials to log in. This will open the Open OnDemand web portal.
3. On the top banner of the Open OnDemand dashboard, click on Interactive Apps.
4. In the drop-down box, click on Blender.
5. After connecting to Blender
   through Open OnDemand, a form will appear where you can fill in the resources for Blender
   . Blender
   supports GPUs and should be run in the GPU partition.
6. When done filling in the resources, click on the blue Launch button at the bottom of the form. Do not click the button multiple times.
7. It may take a few minutes for the system to gather the resources for your instance of Blender
   . When the resources are ready a Launch Blender button will appear. Click on the button to start Blender
   .

Using Blender

When Blender
opens in your web browser, it will appear just like the Blender
that you have on your laptop or desktop.

Closing the Interactive Session

When you are done, quit the Blender
application. The interactive session will be closed and the allocated resources will be released.