I finally got Blender to run on iPhone / iPad !

As some of you know I have been traveling for a while now, and while still enjoying the great landscapes of Argentina and Chile I did take my MacBook with me and found some time between the different buses to play around with my iPhone and Blender.

I shouldn’t say it too loud but I have a jailbreaked iPhone, and as it is running unix based I thought i will try to use the XCode tools and Apple Iphone SDK tools to compile a svn version of the blender trunk sources to run on iphoneOS. Imagine how hard it was typing a command like:

gcc -ansi -Opengl E/S -O3 -o blender blendergl.c -lglut

on the tiny touchy iphone keyboard. Well after a while I had the idea to d/l a ssh server on the iphone and so connecting through SSH helps a lot as i could use the mac keyboard to type all the needed commands

But it was nevertheless not an easy job at all! A looooots of libraries were missing, had to be specially compiled for the iPhone. One of the hardest to get was iphone-glu which is an opengl utility library used for some polygon tesselation functions. But luckily there is always google and some geeks at the #compile-blender chans on freenode, thanks to them for helping me.

Viewing a 3d Scene in the bus

As you can see the size of the screen doesn’t allow much working on it, but it is ok to view 3D scenes, although I only managed to orbit the camera around, not to zoom, zoom would immediately crash

Well that it for now, I think now we just have to wait to see a jailbreaked ipad for having bigger resolutions. Blender in multitouch can be fun !! It is really a great day

EDIT : this post was written on april 1.st 2010 . It is thus an April’s fool, but hopefully someone will port blender or some part of it to android…maybe for viewing, or sculpting.