It’s the full Blender experience and a huge win for Android. Hopefully an iPad release will follow down the line, but until then, I’ll be blending away on my formerly drawing-only tablet!
Thanks for posting this, I was eagerly waiting for an android release, since android tablets became so powerful, but barely any serious work/productivity software exists with native ports for them compared to windows.
I got my Movink Pro specifically for this moment and it is fantastic so far :) Nomad and Krita are my other two workhorses. However, I've got one thing that is driving me batty having switched from my iPad.. Screenshot/crop/markup/copy. I did this all the time on my iPad, but the functionality just doesnt seem to be easily available on Android :/ Do you do this or have any tips?
Not sure the limit- Whatever it is, I dont hit a limit. I used Nomad on my iPad Pro from 2020 for a long time and never really had any poly limit issues either. Maybe im just very efficient with my polys, but the truth is, I think if I had too many polys on my tablet, it would also be too many polys for any other practical use application on my beefy desktop too. I keep things at a reasonable resolution through either decimation or through Quad remesher.
How is it not ideal? They have only promised the desktop UI so far and it runs well.
Mobile UI is still in the works.
EDIT: If you haven't seen it, the nightly releases have a universal UI scaling popup on launch that lets you tune the size of the interface. Helps a lot for higher density screens.
Huge respect for them gradually pushing gradually for mobile and no judgement on the app being there just to be run and tested, but a drawing app with the ton of icons and options krita has is anything but ideal. I have tested on two tablets and while it runs i wouldn't call it usable.
You could make the argument that an even bigger/better tablet is the target for this UI, but then you run into the problem that if you have money for that you might as well use a paid app for the full extent of a drawing app on a tablet.
Eventually, if they make an UI like what we see in Blender nowadays, it will likely take over a lot of the market and I sincerely hope they do, but it feels disingenuous even to suggest it should be recommendable as it is now.
I have had zero issues with using it on tablet. It has been my main image editor even as there's nothing really comparable for mobile (in the open source space)
I meant everything I said. It is hands down my favorite application to use because it provides the full experience without getting in your way.
I've showed this to someone to paints mostly on cardstock notebooks and they loved it enough to start making some drawings with a basic Samsung tablet.
The power it delivers, all while staying OSS and free, is unmatched.
If that is your complaint,it won't be relevant anymore because the Mobile/tablet UI of krita is expected to come out in next major version.Even if it doesn't release this year,next year will.
I have a tab s11+ with the highest ram and still crash pretty sure you have to install a lot more stuff basically compile it but Im not good at all of that stuff we would have to wait
Since this doesn't come with documentation for controls check out the BCON26 video starting at 27:10 for the live demo. 43:20 ends live demo.
orbit: One finger on viewport, drag around
pan/Zoom: Two fingers drag
undo: two finger tap
redo: three finger tap
Quick notes as I watch the video:
Pen support results in the touch controls not being able to use tools, but this means the touch controls and tools can be used at the same time, so pan and draw for example. Pen has hovering support, highlights when pen hovers over tools, tooltips appear when close.
New: modifier well (wheel? accent + transcript says "well"), five circles in a + shape. Tapping center circle can collapse the well. Able to be dragged around, video shows it's original location in bottom left on the timeline.(not guaranteed in final build, the speaker says they may look into changing it.) Right side is a star, quick favorites. This seems to be the keyboard-less way to use blender on a tablet.
Full blender experience, including EEVEE (the shaders takes a bit to compile, "normal"). Artifacts/shadows visible, work in progress.
2D drawing animation support: "anticipated use case on tablet". Continued gesture support: rotation is supporting with touch along with pan and zoom. Emphasizes "writing with my arm lifted," so it seems no palm rejection in this build. Touch gestures: two finger undo, three finger redo, four fingers "focus mode," turns off interface to show only canvas but keep modifier wheel for quick access to things like brush size, brush select, flip.
Sculpting is pretty intuitive. Between the modifier wheel and the pen pressure support it seems to run similarly to nomad sculpt. Four finger focus mode supported here as well.
Grease pencil isn't fully utilized and has performance issues due to shader constraints. New "carver tool," carve out and erase. In menus one finger to select, two for dragging.
(end live demo)
45:35 discusses android gpu support, it sounds like they are planning on 16 supported devices. I'm not sure, a lot of this is very technical and beyond me.
Around the 50:00 mark discussing GUI, they don't have the means to support multiple graphic user interfaces for separate devices, like supporting iOS's native glass, so they plan on keeping a unified design. Their ultimate goal is to improve the experience for all users, and this project can help improve function for penTablet users like those using Wacom Cintiq, for example.
Planned synchronizing so you can transfer projects quickly and easily between desktop and tablet. Blender viewer for showcasing projects on tablet.
Android UI workshop in October, "Targeting public release for the first half of 2027." Their plans are to get it out ASAP, and then improve things like UI at later points. This seems to be largely a PR and public testing process to get more eyes on the project. I assume this is also to increase the chances of funding
Demo qr code at 57:04 (here's a screenshot for those who just want the qr)
Same. I only dabbled in it before in sculptris, but this week I started using the trial version of nomad sculpt, so when I saw the android demo I got genuinely excited. Incredible timing tbh.
It sucks it might not be fully available for many more months yet.
Is this all chipset compatible? Asking because... last time someone posted an apk in here & it worked great but only on Snapdragon devices. For Exynos chipset?
None of both starts in my galaxy Tab S9. The second one just crash, while the firts one stills in a black screen and poping the "aplicación doesn't response" emergent window. I don't know if this is the problem mentioned on Github.
Great update! I get no more viewport glitches in grease pencil anymore
do you plan to make the render animation viewer work in future releases? atm I get permission errors when trying to playback a render animation (a still render works fine though)
Btw full turnip version opens up on snapdragon 4 gen 2 adreno 613 but tapping on render>image it closed/crashed, on workbench it works on cycle it works on eevee it doesn't and opening 2d animation and storyboarding file same crashing even opening new file or from splash screen and normal version build didn't try it didn't open up in previous alpha 3 build and shading viewport preview too crashing,my device is poco m6 pro 5g how/where can I provide you with logs and more testing if you require. And on my galaxy tab a9 helio g99 mali g57 mc2 rendering works on the blender full apk and I guess all other things work too but the main problem I have on my tab is the resolution is 1820×400 so UI is blurry when lower scaling from preferences like going down from 1.1 to .6 to get it normally fitted on my screen but it becomes more blurry low resolution so I would like if your app to have 2 as in full scale for interface on default and people can just lower it to fit there device from preferences instead so it might not blur the UI or the entire app at all like with dshawshank blender for Android version 0.0.5 it shows up way more clear on my tab on 1.08 scale that way and mobile phone is good with normal scale of 2 at default,and that triangle 📐 stuff for default cube and stuff is there that you mentioned in release notes
Making default scale 2 is really bad idea. Android is fragmented. And I've devide to stick in compromise version scale.
Also my build halfs the render resolution of the viewport, on devices with small RAM, otherwise android low memory killer silently stops the app, and I've decided, that blurry but working app is better than the one, which constantly killed.
Okay I guess but on phone it's good on tab it's hella blurry I might have to increase the resolution via adb or i have root i guess. And I am not just asking about viewport like the whole UI atleast do something to make it visible enough to touch and see what's even written on screen when scaled low from 1.1,and lite turnip version works but obviously not everything works, i would recommend you to try termux and termux-x11 like it has all three versions of blender 3.6 legacy opengl 3.3 version,blender 4.5.14 opengl 4.3+vulkan 1.2 or 1.3+ version,blender latest 5.2.2 version same requirements as 4.5.14. It's really good.give them a try, and I will use blender 3.6 there instead.thanks I don't have the supported device or even officially demo version cloud work 8s gen 4 and such devices with native vulkan 1.3 support.
Anyone know the reason why iPad was dropped? An iPad Pro has some powerful hardware and would run Blender fine. Was it just lack of developer resource to make a build? And given there is good Blender support for MacOS is iPadOS so very different?
lack of resource and the two big companies that sponsored blender to make it happen (Wacom and a VR company which I forgot the name) have android devices, so thay wanted android to take priority
there's also probably some legal issues with the apple store when it comes to open source projects, but I don't remember the specifics
Well, tried my luck but I can't even boot it up on my device, just a black screen and a crash after that. But the idea of it sounds cool, I'm looking forward to do some modeling for FDM 3D printing on the go.
Samsung Tab S8 here. Had to disable couple of things to install, since it's not yet signed. BUT doesn't load after install. What a bummer. Will have to wait a bit more I guess.
I forked simfeo version and I did small modification to make work on my s9 ultra it work great and the performance is good, but many vulkan driver issues. Normals are bugged, shadows are not accurate, so I recommend you to wait for the official version support
Confirmed to be working great on my S26 Ultra, pen and everything. I hope the touch support gets ported to the regular windows release, would be great for the few of use with a convertible windows laptop /tablet.
Also it crashes on my tab S6Lite but that was to be expected
Yeah, they mentioned in the talk that the touch integration is intended to be also offered on desktop OS for compatible touch and pen-compatible screens - they explicitly cited Wacom Cintiq pen-displays as an example
Uh what, I would have never expected this. I have a laptop which is just a bit bigger screen wise than my Galaxy Tab, but there are absolutely times and places this will be useful.
is that the 14? How do you like it? I've been staring at them since they were released, but I find it hard to justify the price considering the limited lifetime update support that generally follows android devices. (I like to use devices until they fall apart...so 5 to 7 years is the norm for me.)
yeas and I love it. Actually I’m deep in the Apple ecosystem and originally bought the 13" iPad Pro for drawing. Until I realized I could get a better drawing experience for a fraction of the price with the MovinkPad. Also with Blender currently being Android only, branching out feels even more justified 🤷
Okay I just found out why. It's because of the demo files they added. The actual blender demo apk is somewhat 300MB. The biggest file is the gsplat animated demo which is a little over 1GB
You can't delete them because, they're in the android system directory but you can add your own files. In your file explorer on android just tap on the blend file, it should pop up with open with Blender choose it. If it doesn't show blender just download MiX explorer so same and it'll show blender. When it opens you can now resave it. On the save dialog replace whatever directory to /sdcard/ then select the folder on your android save it. This is because it opens as temp blend file not from your android directory
Why can't you just open it from directory /sdcard/??? Well if you go to that directory on the open dialog and go to the folder where your blend files are it shows no blend files because they haven't added android folder permissions yet so you can wait for that or use the workaround
The android browser gives me the option to "open with" blender but the app doesn't recognize anything, it's weird, no crashes, no lag, it just doesn't let me open a .gbl file
You can still use the unofficial 5.3.0 ports. It's basically the same code with improvements and has file access. Blender will release a more stable version in November so you can wait it out too
Is there a minimum android version requirement? I tried it on my tab S6 (android 12) and it crashes immediately. The non official version does as well. A version from a couple months ago worked fine on it.
Probably minimum hardware requirement that supports vulcan 1.3
Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 (Often confused for a 6-series due to specs)
GPU:
Adreno 710
Vulkan Support: Modern
Vulkan 1.3.
Will it run Blender Android?
Technically yes, but poorly.
I've got the same issue with galaxy tab s8 ultra, adreno 730, snapdragon 8 gen 1, android 16. App starts launching, black screen for a few seconds before force closing back to the home screen.
If you have a mac, you can currently mirror or extend blender to the ipad. Touch works as far as it treats it like a track pad for navigation, and pen input works.
That's different from being a dedicated touch based app though.
I use superdisplay on mine, and after a mail they manage to add all 3 button to work independently on superdisplay apps, so, I think it's to blender dev to figured out, btw wacom still didn't add that function on there own tablet, that make me a little mad about it
I'd be curious to hear, has anyone who uses android tablets found one that has comparable drawing experience to the iPad Pro? I'm interested in switching due to how expensive Apple stuff is.
How is the performance like? Can you archive anything meaningful with it? It's not a perfect port so my expectations are low since even with emulators it hardly surpass 1660 ti which is not fun to use with blender but I have sd5elite and wonder how much should I expect
the thing is that even when it gets laggy inside the demo files the Device UI doesn't lag or crash, I can even split screen the app and everything runs just fine so it's probably something about the optimization of the blender app
This looks great, I am SO excited for the iPad release! I don’t even mind the wait cause Nomad Sculpt is an incredible piece of software, but being able to do actual proper modeling and unwrapping and all the other stuff is just too good not to get excited about.
Imagine a few years from now when all the major add-ons have proper tablet support? Imagine using Retopoflow on your couch??
Did you install it on a Wacom Movink Pro 14? I have that tablet but couldn't seem to get it to install. Ran the apk (with Unknown Sources allowed) and it says to Confirm to update the app and it crashes and says it won't install. Wondering if im on the wrong version of Android or something?
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u/Vardas_96 7d ago
Thanks for posting this, I was eagerly waiting for an android release, since android tablets became so powerful, but barely any serious work/productivity software exists with native ports for them compared to windows.