docker-blender

Dockerfile for building blender.

References:

• Building Blender
• Building Blender as a Python Module

Windows

Build Image

• By default, the image is for building Blender 3.4.0 (with Blender 3.4 release branch).
• See Diagnosing install failures if error occurred while installing Visual Studio Build Tools.
• Took more than 1 hour (me 1h44m) to build this image due to the size of the Blender libraries (16GB+).
• Final image size is 22.55GB.

docker build --memory 2GB -t blender-windows:3.4 -f "blender-windows.Dockerfile" .

Run Container

• The container should be ready to build Blender.
• Default shell is CMD.
• At some point, the compiler consumes a lot of memory. (25.1GB in my build, is this normal?)
• Also, do give as many CPU as possible to speed things up.
• You may get fatal error C1060: compiler is out of heap space if container memory is not enough.

docker run --memory 30GB --cpus 24 --name blender-build -it blender-windows:3.4

Test Container

To check memory size, run this powershell command

systeminfo | select-string 'Total Physical Memory'

To check CPU process count, run this powershell command

Get-WmiObject -class Win32_processor | Format-Table Name,NumberOfCores,NumberOfLogicalProcessors

And yes, the default shell is CMD, so you might want to call powershell to run them and then exit back to CMD.

Text Editor

Thanks to Git, we can use nano when needed.

Build Blender

For example, building Blender as Python module

make.bat 2019b bpy

Note that 2019b means Visual Studio 2019 Build Tools. We have to provide that or the script won't run.

Harvest

After build complete, stop the container and copy files out.

docker cp blender-build:{path-to-build-dir} {dst}

For example

docker cp blender-build:C:/blender-build/build_windows_Bpy_x64_vc16_Release/bin/Release/bpy bpy