Compiling 2.79b with CUDA support

Building Blender
1

Hello, I am working on a short film that was done on blender 2.79 and I am in the render stage. I got access to a machine with RTX 6000 GPUs, but I do not want to use Blender 2.80 yet as the whole project was done on 2.79… So I am trying to compile Blender 2.79b with CUDA 10(.1) RTX support. But when I follow the instructions here:

and compile I get the 2.80 version. I know next to nothing about compiling software, can anybody give me the steps to get and compile 2.79b with CUDA? And does it make any difference for the build when I compile on a machine that does not have the RTX cards (but does have the CUDA 10.1 toolkit installed)

I think it should just be an extra command to set the version I want with git, and somehow specifying the versions in these steps:

cd C:\blender-git

svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/lib/win64_vc14 lib/win64_vc14

cd C:\blender-git

git clone git://git.blender.org/blender.git

cd blender

git submodule update --init --recursive

git submodule foreach git checkout master

git submodule foreach git pull --rebase origin master

cd C:\blender-git\blender

make full

2

We haven’t tried building 2.79b specifically with CUDA 10.1 or for RTX cards, it requires some configuration and likely code changes to work. The latest blender2.7 branch does compile with it though, and is on builder.blender.org. Do you need 2.79b specifically?

Building with CUDA support can be done with make release instead of make full.

3

Hi Brecht,

Thank you for your help. As per your suggestion I have just tried compiling using ‘make release’ instead of ‘make full’, the problem is it will compile the 2.80 version which is the latest on Github I guess. I don’t specifically need 2.79b, I guess any 2.79 will do. (I’m in the middle of a project and don’t want to start converting everything to 2.80 files right now)

I don’t know how to change the process to compile a 2.79(x) version, I honestly am just running the commands without really knowing what the specifics of each command are. I did find this somewhere:

git checkout v2.79

but don’t know where in the process I would use that and if that is enough.
any advice will be helpful !

4

The commands would be:

git checkout blender2.7
make update
make release
1 Like
5

Yes it worked ! Thanks so much Brecht !

6

Thanks I seems finally understand way to up-date and compile for different branches
with one git-local of PC.:smile:

7

mm, I could change branch to blender 2.7, and make update and release for 2.7branch,
by “git checkout blender2.7”,

Then how can I return to master branch (2.8) to make update and release of 2.8?

I rename the /bin parent directory as “blender27_Release” (which generated by make release for 2.7) to avoid overwritten . then

cd c:\blender-git \blender
git checkout master

but it cause problem (error), when I make update and make release for 2.8(master)
then I could not resume it :cry:

I could clone again from scratch,so not problem. but is there easy way, use only one git-local,then exchange and make each brach of blender for up-date and compile?
(I rename about each compile directory, when up-date)

I hope to know clear work-flow, can someone dicribe it?