Installing HyperBlend

There is not a real installation process for HyperBlend. You can just clone the repository and run it with your favourite IDE or using a console. For running the simulations, you will also need Blender 3.6.X. We look at how to get everything working on Windows or Linux. MacOS is not supported.

Cloning the project

This is very simple: start by creating a directory for the project, open a terminal to that directory and use command

git clone <the.address.from.where.to.clone.from>

to clone the Github repository of HyperBend in that location. Let’s assume that is now <your path>/HyperBlend/ and call it the project root. You can now find the source code from root/src/, for example.

Setting up Conda environment

HyperBlend relies on a bunch of external libraries that are specified in root/hb_env.yml file. To install these, you should use a Python package handler such as MiniConda anaconda.com or Mamba github.com/mamba-org/mamba. Both are free to use but Mamba may be faster to run in many cases.

You can test that your installation was successful by running

conda --version

or

mamba --version

in your command prompt. (For Windows, this would be the Anaconda command prompt, not the default one and not Powershell.)

Once that is done, run:

conda env create -n hb --file hb_env.yml

which will create a new virtual Python environment called hb. Naturally, replace word conda with mamba if you are using mamba.

Installing Blender

One final thing before running HyperBlend is the installation of Blender 3D-modeling and rendering software. Blender is open-source software available at https://www.blender.org/. HyperBlend works only with Blender version 3.6.XX, which you can download from download.blender.org/release/Blender3.6. There are installers for Windows (windows-x64.msi) and Linux (linux-x64.tar.xz).

Note

You have to install Blender 3.6 even if you have another version already installed if you want to run any simulations.

Follow the installation wizard and take note on where you installed this specific Blender version as we need that path next.

HyperBlend needs to know which Blender to call. For that reason, open file root/src/constants.py (with your favourite text editor, for example) and depending on your operating system, replace the content of variable blender_executable_path_win or ‘blender_executable_path_linux’ with your installation path. On Windows, HyperBlend tries to find the correct Blender version automatically, so it may work even without the specified path.

What then?

The rest of the documentation assumes you have some sort of IDE to run Python software. The examples assume PyCharm but any will do. Of course, you can also run Python from command line, but you have to figure out how to do that by yourself.

Now we are ready to test run HyperBlend. Move to the beginner tutorial.