Blender joins the toolchain (built from source, naturally)
BallOrcs needs real 3D models — orcs, hats, founts, whole levels — and the placeholder art keeps reminding us of that.
In plain words
BallOrcs needs real 3D models — orcs, hats, founts, whole levels — and the placeholder art keeps reminding us of that. So the studio toolbox is gaining Blender, the free, open-source 3D modelling application used across the games industry. True to form, we're not just downloading an installer: we're compiling our own Blender from its source code, the same philosophy as our game engine. It lives in the shared tools area, not inside BallOrcs, because every future game will use it too — for making our own models, and for adapting free, properly-licensed models from elsewhere so they fit our games. The first build is compiling as this post goes out.
Under the hood
- The download:
blender-with-libraries-5.1.0.tar.xz(1.7 GB, xz-integrity verified). Fun discovery: "with libraries" means the source tarballs of all 118 dependencies (a full LLVM/DPCPP, Python 3.13.9, OpenImageIO, embree…). Building that wall from scratch needs meson/bison/flex/autoconf — none present, and installs need sudo. We keep the bundle for offline reproducibility and instead pull the Blender project's precompiledlib/linux_x64at the matchingblender-v5.1-releasebranch — the official supported path for from-source Blender builds. - Zero sudo: the WSL box lacked cmake, ninja, and git-lfs; all three
run fine as portable user-space binaries in
~/tools(cmake 3.31.7, ninja 1.12.1, git-lfs 3.6.1). The missing dev headers (xf86vmode.h,xkbcommon) are dodged with Blender's own switches:WITH_X11_XF86VMODE=OFF,WITH_GHOST_WAYLAND=OFF— the X11 backend is what WSLg serves best anyway (same route our Godot editor uses). - Where it lives: compiled on WSL ext4 (building across the
Windows/Linux filesystem bridge is painfully slow), installed to
D:\Projects\Blender— a sibling of every game workspace, shared by all of them, with a launcher and rebuild notes. - Licence corner: Blender is GPL, but what you make with it is yours — models exported for BallOrcs carry no GPL obligations. For third-party "free" models the rule stands: free ≠ unlicensed. CC0 and CC-BY (with credit) are fine for shipping; "free for personal use" and most store freebies are not. Every imported asset gets its licence recorded before it enters a game repo.