Blender On Android With OpenGL ES Now Works

One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects this year was bringing OpenGL ES 2.0 support to the Blender Game Engine and also at the same time to port the game engine for this open-source modelling software to Android.

Alexandr Kuznetsov is the student developer that took on this GLES / Android porting for a GSoC 2012 project, which for the most part turned out to be a success. His stated targets were making the OpenGL portion of the Blender game engine compatible with OpenGL ES, extending the Android support, and making a small game chooser / packager. He also carries a long-term goal of making all of Blender compatible with OpenGL ES.

For those interested in this Blender project work, he blogged weekly progress reports for the status of the project to this Blender Wiki page.

Kuznetsov's accomplishments for Blender this summer included getting OpenGL ES 2.0 on Linux to work, SDL input support, various GLSL (GL Shading Language) feats like lighting and texture support, an Android release, VBO support, Python GLSL work, Android support for the accelerometer and gyroscope, porting all of Blender and the game engine to the soft matrix stack, code cleaning, initial support for built-in shaders with the GLES implementation, and some code re-arrangements to support OpenGL 30+ with soft-switch in the future.

While GSoC 2012 is now over, the student plans to continue hacking on this project on the weekends from university. Below is a screenshot of Blender running on Android from a Samsung device.

Again, see the Blender Wiki page for all of the details.

There were also some other interesting GSoC 2012 projects as mentioned on the Blender GSoC overview page -- most of those projects have weekly progress reports on the Wiki too, like a multi-touch framework.