Requirements
Blender
Section titled “Blender”- Blender 5.0 or newer. The extension declares support for 5.0 up to (not including) 6.0, and was verified on 5.0 through 5.2.
- Blender 5.0 is the minimum because the liquid surface is streamed through Geometry Nodes’ Import PLY node and built with the volume grid (SDF) nodes. Both arrived in Blender 5.0.
Simulation runs on the GPU through Taichi. BLUX tries the backends in this order:
- CUDA (NVIDIA)
- Vulkan (AMD, Intel or NVIDIA)
- CPU
CPU works on any machine but is slow enough that it is only useful for checking that an install works. On an AMD or Intel GPU, choose Vulkan in the Backend preference.
Video memory limits the size of a scene. The sidebar’s diagnostics panel estimates VRAM use for the current scene and flags it as safe, a warning, or critical before you run. See Diagnostics.
Python for the solver
Section titled “Python for the solver”The solver worker needs its own Python, separate from the one inside Blender:
- Python 3.11 or newer. Taichi 1.7.4 publishes builds for Python 3.9 to 3.13, so Python 3.11, 3.12 or 3.13 all work.
- These packages installed in it:
| Package | Version | Needed for |
|---|---|---|
taichi |
1.7.4 | all solvers (required) |
numpy |
1.24 or newer | all solvers (required) |
scipy |
any recent | Impact: finding neighbouring fracture chunks and bonding them |
pysplashsurf |
0.14.1.0 | the Production liquid surface mesher |
Without pysplashsurf, BLUX falls back to the Geometry Nodes liquid mesher, which needs no extra install. scipy is also used on Blender’s side for fracture authoring, where the preferences offer a one-click install. See Dependencies.
Disk and memory
Section titled “Disk and memory”- Disk. Baked frames go to the cache folder. The default disk budget is 8 GB, and liquid surfaces have their own 20 GB budget. Both can be changed in the cache preferences.
- RAM. The in-memory frame cache defaults to 25% of physical RAM.
Operating system
Section titled “Operating system”BLUX is built and measured on 64-bit Windows, and that is the supported platform. Other operating systems are not officially supported at this time.
Network and file access
Section titled “Network and file access”The extension asks Blender for two permissions, shown at install time:
- Network: to talk to the local solver and surface mesher on
127.0.0.1. BLUX does not connect to the internet. - Files: to cache frames, export meshes and spritesheets, and save graph presets.