Installation
Development of Phobos takes place on the master branch. While we try to keep
it stable, please be aware that this is a bleeding edge version of Phobos,
which we do not recommend for production use. If you need the latest features
and want to use master, we kindly ask you to submit
issues if you encounter
problems. If you prefer a stable version, choose the latest release version,
which we continue to support with bug fixes.
The basic structure of the Phobos repository.
As of release 0.8 of Phobos, we only support Blender 2.79. This means it will not function properly any more for older Blender versions and might not function with later versions; Blender 2.8 is expected to include major changes that will not be compatible with Phobos.
On Linux, Blender can be installed via apt-get:
$ sudo apt-get install blender
However, this only works if your Linux distribution provides the correct version of Blender that is required for Phobos. If your system's default is outdated, you can add a custom ppa by Thomas Schiex:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thomas-schiex/blender
$ sudo apt-get update
If none of the above methods work to acquire the correct version of Blender, it is easy install it locally. This is also a viable solution if you wish to avoid custom repositories, keep a system installation with a different version or install several versions of Blender in parallel. To do so, simply download a tarball from Blender's website.
Please note that glibc needs to be installed on your system to run Blender
properly.
Installing Blender on Windows is as simple as downloading the installer from Blender's website and run it. Alternatively and similarly to Linux, you can download a zipped binary and directly run the unzipped executable.
Please note that Phobos has not been extensively tested on Windows. If you happen to find any bugs, please open an issue.
Simply download the zipped version of Blender from Blender's website and run the unzipped executable.
Blender ships with its own Python 3 environment and different versions of Blender use different versions of Python. However, it does not include a number of libraries Phobos requires, which is why Phobos extends Blender's Python path with the system dist-packages. For compatibility, as Blender 2.79 ships with either Python 3.5 or 3.6, you will need to have one of them installed on your system.
To find out which version of Python is running in Blender, switch to the scripting environment:
and check the Python version in the console:
Note that you can install the required version alongside your existing one (make sure your python or python3 command afterwards still points to the version you might need in other contexts). A guide for installing Python on different platforms can be found here.
Phobos uses the YAML language for some of its output
formats and therefore needs the python module yaml, The easiest way to
install is using pip. With multiple Python
versions installed on your system, you need to make sure to run the correct
variant of pip, which might be referred to on your system as pip3, pip-3.5
or some other expression, depending on your platform.
The following works if the latest version of Python3 is compatible with the version shipped with Blender.
Run these commands from the commandline to install both pip and yaml.
$ sudo apt-get install python-pip
$ pip3 install PyYaml
For Windows pip installation follow the instructions here.
Afterwards, use this command in the commandline to install yaml:
$ pip3 install PyYaml
Use your favorite package manager or pip to install python-yaml.
After installing pip (see the section above) you can use it to
install the numpy package.
$ pip3 install numpy
After installing pip (see the section above) you can use it to
install the numpy package.
$ pip3 install numpy
Use your favorite package manager or pip to install the numpy package.
To get Phobos, clone its git repository on GitHub:
$ git clone https://github.com/dfki-ric/phobos.git
Then checkout the release version you want to use (in this example version 1.0):
$ git checkout release-1.0
In case you want to switch to a different release version use the same syntax to switch to the respective release branch. Alternatively, you can download the individual release version as a zip file from GitHub.
After downloading (and eventually uncompressing the archive file) to a local
folder on your computer, you need to run the Python file setup.py in the top
level directory:
Please note: The install script will ask you to enter the version of Blender you'd like to use Phobos with. This is important as you might have several versions installed on your system (e.g. for backwards-compatibility) and they use different folders for add-ons. As your answers are saved in a file called
python_dist_packages.conf, installing Phobos to a different Blender version requires changing or deleting this file (prior to a reinstall).
$ python3 setup.py
or, depending on your system's Python configuration:
$ python3.5 setup.py
On Windows you need to make sure that you run Python version 3. py -3 setup.py should work. Otherwise, check this
ressource.
The installation file will automatically check the required yaml installation
and configure the Phobos installation.
As an alternative, you can use GNU make to install Phobos:
make initandmake installThis has not yet been tested thoroughly and uses thepython3command to runsetup.py, so make sure it worked properly.
We also recommend to install our Phobos GUI preset which contains only the most
important Blender screens at startup, so you can get startet way faster. Install
it with the additional parameter for setup.py:
$ python3 setup.py --startup-preset
This might overwrite an existing custom preset, so make sure you keep a backup if you customized Blender earlier.
To activate Phobos in Blender, go to Files -> User Preferences -> Addons and search for 'Phobos' (it should be in the 'Development' category). Then tick its checkbox to activate Phobos and save your user settings in the lower left corner (if you don't save, Phobos won't be loaded for the next Blender startup). If Blender displays any errors at this point, you might want to check if you got the above steps right.
Find Phobos in Blender's user preferences
This is also a good moment to configure Phobos properly. Follow the steps here , to setup the folders, logging etc.
If everything worked fine you can now find the Phobos toolbar as a tab in the left toolbar panel. If you don't see the panel, hit T.
The Phobos tab in the toolbar of Blender
To update your current installation you just need to pull changes for the release you are working on and run the installation script again:
git pull
python3 setup.py
This method only works, however, if you are using a release that is still maintained, i.e. receives bugfixes or updates. If this is not the case and you have no specific reason to keep your current release, consider switching to a different release.
To switch to a new release, you need to first update your local copy of Phobos
and then checkout the respective release branch (NEWERVERSION, eg. 1.0):
git fetch
git checkout release-NEWERVERSION
python3 setup.py
After you switched to the different release follow the instructions in updating.
Depending on the severeness of the new changes for the release it might be necessary to completely reset the Phobos folders. To do this, delete the Phobos installation from your Blender addon folder, as well as the configuration folder of Phobos. Make sure you keep backups of your custom definitions and resources before doing so.
Back to top.
