Why cant blender do any sort of smoke simulation on linux?

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
1

I have noticed that in order to do any smoke simulation baking, I have to go into windows and do it there. Altering options or baking in linux is enough to instantly make it quit. I first noticed when trying to calculate a flame+smoke sim that would crash every time of baking right away, because there was a “turbulence” in the scene.

Is there no way to make smoke sim work in ubuntu blender?

2

This is just a problem with your setup, smoke works just fine on Mint (based on Ubuntu) here.

3

Is your Linux version of Blender one you got from a Linux repository, or an offical release downloaded directly from blender.org? Repository versions are not maintained by the Blender Foundation and are notoriously full of weird crashy behavior.

4

OK, well after posting, it now seems to work in a brand new scene, but it just wont bake in my scene.

As my MAIN scene is pretty large and complex, I appended the relevant elements out to a fresh file (attached below). It just wont bake. If you press the bake button, blender quits straight away. Whats going on with it?

s005_icelands_smoke.blend (556 KB)

btw, im using blender 2.66a

5

It bakes just fine on OpenSuSE with Blender 2.68 and 2.69… But I didn’t get to the end of the 1250 frames. :eyebrowlift:

6

2.66a also makes this sound suspiciously like a repository version. Every time in the last few months when I’ve had a Linux user with a crash problem, they were using 2.66 or 2.66a and it was from a repository. Can you confirm whether or not you actually downloaded this directly from blender.org? For that matter, can you upgrade to the current version on blender.org and test again?

7

OK just to confirm, the blender version I had was 2.68a from the ubuntu software centre. It doesnt have any later version than that on there. I have got 2.68a now from the site and that is working ok so far! Should i just keep checking the site every now and then and manuyally get the latest versions?

8

Yeah, don’t get blender from any ubuntu source ever again. Just get it directly from blender.org. The release schedule is pretty regular, so it shouldn’t be hard to keep up.