[Bf-committers] Porting of Blender on Android

[Alexandr Kuznetsov]

Hi.

I'm the student who is working on Android port. We already have ported Game
Engine to usable state, but we still need to port the rest of Blender. It
is a huge task, but I'm looking forward to it.  Jason Wilkins's project
made it a much easier task.

Blender is written primarily in C with a little python. Therefore, we were
able to compile and run it on Android without user interface few month ago.
The main problem is that Blender uses OpenGL for UI and 3D view, but
Android (and other mobile devices) have only OpenGL ES (subset of OpenGL)
support. Blender uses a lot of OpenGL functions not available in OpenGL ES.
Therefore Jason Wilkins and my project are focused on refactoring drawing
calls and implementing OpenGL ES.
I use OpenGL ES 2.0 for the port, therefore it should be supported by
device.
We are probably at least six month away from having good support for
Android. (As current, Blender UI doesn't work at all on Android except Game
Engine).   Sadly, starting September, I won't be able to work full time on
this project.

Best,
Alexandr Kuznetsov


On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 11:21 AM, Tom M <letterrip at gmail.com> wrote:

> That is wonderful to hear.  Blender is actually primarily C with some
> libraries and the game engine in C++, and the interface and scripting in
> python.
>
> As mentioned by another respondent, a google summer of code participant
> has ported the game engine of blender to android which includes most of the
> critical library dependencies.  Another student is working on multitouch
> support, and a third student is updating our opengl calls so that the
> blender core will only use modern opengl calls.  All of these should make
> the porting effort feasible, but user interface work will be needed to make
> it useable.
>
> LetterRip
>
> Srikant <u.srikant.patnaik at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >Dear Blender team,
> >
> >I'm writing this mail on behalf of
> >Aakash<http://www.iitb.ac.in/AK/Aakash.htm>team, India. The Aakash
> >tablet will be made available to students of India
> >for approximately less than 25$. This is an Government of India initiative
> >and it will benefit millions of students in coming years.
> >We are looking forward to port Blender editor on Aakash tablet. So far we
> >have succeeded in porting C, Cpp, Python & Scilab on Android 2.3+. Details
> >can be found here <https://github.com/androportal/documentation>. As
> >Blender is written in Python so we are optimistic about its port.
> >Please suggest, is there any present development on Native port of Blender
> >editor, or any work in simplifying UI for Android.
> >
> >Thanks in advance.
> >I've marked this mail to Prof. Kannan Moudgalya, Prof. D.B Phatak and
> Prof.
> >Pradeep Varma. Also I've included my team mate Sachin Patil.
> >
> >Srikant
> >R.A, IIT Bombay
> >India
> >_______________________________________________
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