Blender and Tablets

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Blender and Tablets

Hi,

I’ve just published a blogpost about the Beyond Mouse and Keyboard project:

Early Blender build on iPad tablet.

It goes over the future tablet design paradigm and specifically about a new development branch for building on the iOS (iPad) platform. The platform specific development tasks are tracked via the platform/ios tag.

The blog doesn’t have comments open, so I’m creating this thread to share any needed clarification regarding this project. I will try to answser any questions people may have while keeping the FAQ up-to-date.

I would like to invite everyone to read the post, and let me know if you have any questions.

FAQ

How do I get Blender on my iPad?

At the moment the only way of getting it is by building it yourself. We will share building instructions once they are simpler.

I would love to test and give feedback, how can I help?

Thanks for your interest, let’s talk about this in a few weeks!

I’m a designer, how can I help?

If you are a skilled designer with experience on tablet and multitouch development, please reach out to: [email protected].

What about Android tablets?

There is an on-going Android project by a community contributor. The plan is to look at this more closely in a couple of months.

What about add-ons?

Depending on the distribution platform, installing and running add-ons might work in a different way that it does currently. For the time being we are focusing on core Blender workflows, and add-ons are not a priority.

What is the distribution plan for the end product?

The plan is to be able to distribute on the official App Store. In the unlikely event where this won’t be possible, we will explore other venues.

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Is there a plan about how to deal with add-ons that change UI or add elements to it? At the first glance it seems like add-ons shouldn’t be allowed, because UI is very curated and easy to break, but I don’t think users will be happy about that.

If we’re allowing add-ons on tablet builds, more UI questions arise, for example:
In mockups it seems very “icon-centric” approach is taken, which looks nice but is perhaps more difficult to maintain. For example, I can see icons for default “Item” and “View” sidebar tabs, but what happens when users add their own tab, which is what probably more half of the add-ons do?

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Is there a plan about how to deal with add-ons that change UI or add elements to it? At the first glance it seems like add-ons shouldn’t be allowed, because UI is very curated and easy to break, but I don’t think users will be happy about that.

No plans yet.

Related to this, I added a new entry on the FAQ about add-ons. Basically we are not looking at add-ons at the moment.

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Hello,
what about freedom?

This way of thinking is authoritarian, micro managing users is not a good solution. It will only but bring more work to developers and managers.

If you let users free, they will naturally pick addons more suited for tablets.
If you let addon developers leave a “tablet friendly” tag in their addon, users will naturally flow toward tablet friendly experience.

Micro managing everything is highly energy consuming. Let users and a free market do its job!

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How final are those mockups? Can’t quite tell which parts are loose ideas and which ones are intentional design choices, which makes it hard to give meaningful feedback.

In general, though, I don’t think an application template is the way to go. App templates fine for testing, and they’re usable in studio environments where the pipeline can force the matter, but hobbyists and solo artists are not going to like a UI mode that can’t be trivially toggled on and off in their current working file.

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I’m so happy this is finally happening! I got my iPad Pro couple months ago and been making 3D on it almost everyday. I’ll happily buy a Mac Mini to build and test iPad version. :slight_smile: My 2 eurocents:

There is surprising amount of very polished sculpting iPad apps to choose from. 6 worth checking out. On the other hand there is not much in regards of regular poly modeling. There are few apps for that but they lack basic features, are buggy or UI is too complicated. I don’t think blender could take any inspirations here. Perhaps CAD apps may provide us with better ideas?

Everyone loves to sculpt but you can’t sculpt everything. Demand for good poly modeling app is huge. People crave and ask for it everyday in iPad artists communities. Blender could shine there. I think this is great opportunity to create a lot of new blender users.

Wheel menus doesn’t work on tablets. We hold tablets with one hand and interact with the screens with the other. The larger the tablet and the longer we work on it, the less this solution makes sense. Just look at the photo on the blog post and see how Hjalti holds the iPad. Same with Dalai on the twitter video. :wink:
This could be a bonus feature but for ergonomic work we need toggles that changes UI states. A lot of toggles like in other iPad apps.

I think there is a big value in providing any alpha version to the users without ability to build an app on their own. This can be done with TestFlight external tests, right?

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Blender is a professional software, I have an iPad Pro that I never use beside sketching and rough sculpts. Blender on iPad will have limits and will be tough to have a feature parity between the two versions.

In the end, what’s the point? Who is the target? Will generate money or the money of the donators will be used to develop this, or you’ll do a fundraising aimed to people that are actually interest in this?

I’ll be way more interested in a Blender viewer with only certain parameters defined by the user are editable. But again, time consuming, not really needed. (imo)

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iPadOS 26 introduces a handful of pretty big features for the iPad that bring it closer to a desktop environment. The one that caught my attention most is a dedicated top menu bar for any application that chooses to utilize it. Just like macOS or Windows. If you haven’t already I’d suggest taking a look at how that could potentially help save some space with the UI.

Really exciting development!

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This comes unexpected but I ike it. Even if ultimately it only means that some workflows and inputs might get overhauled to be more touch/pen friendly, overall. That’s something all versions benefit from, as 3D applications are notoriously shortcut heavy. And if this also means that blender “only” gets the sculpt, draw, video edit and maybe retopo toolset over on mobile plattforms. That’s still a win and an astounding achievement.

I’m happy to see this and very curious where or how far it’s going. :slight_smile:

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For add-ons you could look into how the Delta app, which is the top emulator on the App Store, allows for ROMs to be installed after downloading them from the web. It has a plus icon to load those files and interact with them directly from the files icon on an iPad.
No need for developers to publish their add-on into the App Store. And no need for developers to convert their add-ons for the iPad (minus the changes that the Blender iPad app needs for them to work with the new UI) as ROMs aren’t converted for iPads, they are the original ROMs that work across all platforms.

‎Delta - Game Emulator on the App Store

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(Sorry in advance if this is the wrong place for this thread)
How would porting to iOS work? Blender is GPL-2 and I thought GPL is incompatible with iOS.
See: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9500/is-apple-allowed-to-distribute-gplv3-licensed-software-through-its-ios-app-store

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The iPad Pro has been mentioned a few times, will it only run on the pros? Or any new m chip version will be able to run it? If not can you elaborate on what’s the limiting factors?

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The iPad Pro has been mentioned a few times, will it only run on the pros?

It runs in the mini as well. However the small amount of memory severely limits which files you can open there.

Also, the small screen size is not the primary target for this project. (More in terms of priority than of what may be possible in the future).

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Ah great I was more considering the new air 13 with m2/3. But for extra memory u need the 1tb pro, making it a big investment

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How would porting to iOS work? Blender is GPL-2 and I thought GPL is incompatible with iOS.

Hi, Blender is actually distributed under GPL3.0+, and does not have specific incompatibilities with iOS libraries, similar to any other OS.

There might be other challenges related to distribution, but they are not considered an obstacle for this project. And while I did spend some time investigating the implications for this project, this is not the thread to discuss this - for any legal concern, please email Blender Foundation directly.

Thanks!

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Could be nice for the new storyboard tools or grease pencil but thats probably it. For sculpting there are other apps more optimized for that.

Your use case is nice and probably plays into these start up configurations they had years ago (the idea). I think it was blender 101?

Edit: Tablet controls on a tablet connected to the pc is also great. Would make sculpting nicer.

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For touch/gesture support, would it be worthwhile to maintain loose parity between iOS and MacOS in the early phases? The UIKit and AppKit APIs aren’t identical, but they’re similar enough that iterating on touch handling through both of them wouldn’t be too bad, and it would make user testing a lot easier.

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For touch/gesture support, would it be worthwhile to maintain loose parity between iOS and MacOS in the early phases?

Unless I’m misunderstanding you, AppKit (and macOS / Mac screens in general) does not have touch support, apart from legacy Touch Bar hardware. Moreover, while the two frameworks may look similar API wise (especially regarding class names and concepts), they are quite fundamentally different to use and implement in practice.

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They’re closer to each other than either of them are to the Windows touch APIs. Yes, you’ll have to subclass NSGestureRecognizer in a few instances for full parity, but there’s enough prior art from the folks using Mac Catalyst that you won’t be treading new ground.

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Yes, you’ll have to subclass NSGestureRecognizer in a few instances for full parity, but there’s enough prior art from the folks using Mac Catalyst that you won’t be treading new ground

I’m still not sure I follow you. Mac Catalyst is a separate integration layer that can be used to bring an iPad / UIKit application to macOS, which is unrelated to what we’re doing here.

Similarly, AppKit NSGestureRecognizer is used to recognize mouse and trackpad gesture (Pan, Rotate, etc…) and has relatively little in common with UIKit’s UIGestureRecognizer which is used to recognize touch input. There is no parity between the two APIs, they serve different purposes and are not interchangeable.