Installation
This document aims to provide an instruction to set up Blender and install the Phobos add-on.
On Linux, Blender can be installed via package manager. In Ubuntu, sudo apt-get install Blender does the trick. However, you may want to check the default version of Blender for your linux version, as these can sometimes be quite outdated. Phobos has been developed for Blender versions >= 2.69 and works best with >= 2.71. As some functionality might not work properly on earlier versions, it might be necessary that you get the latest Blender version yourself, either as a tarball from Blender's website or from a custom package repository with the latest Blender build if available.
Please notice that you have to have glibc 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, you can download a zip file.
In order to install Phobos successfully on your system, please follow these instructions word by word.
As Blender uses Python 3, this means that if you want it to use the most current package version, you need to install python3. The installation is pretty straightforward. A guide for 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.
Run these commands from the commandline to install both pip and yaml.
sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip3 install PyYaml
For Windows pip installation follow the instructions here.
Afterwards, use this command in the commandline to install yaml:
pip3 install PyYaml
To get Phobos, you can clone its git repository by running:
git clone https://github.com/rock-simulation/phobos.git
Then checkout the release version you want to use (in this example version 0.7.*):
git checkout release-0.7
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. Do so by using these commands from a commandline:
python3 setup.py
Under 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.
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 installconfig.txt, installing Phobos to a different Blender version requires changing or deleting said file.
To activate Phobos in Blender, go to Files->User Preferences->Addons and search for 'Phobos' (it's 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 next time Blender starts, Phobos won't be loaded. 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
If everything worked fine you can now find the Phobos toolbar as a tab in the left toolbar panel if you're running Blender >= 2.71, otherwise the Blender GUI elements will be added to the toolbar itself. If you don't see the panel, hit T.
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
However, it might be, that you are using a release which is not maintained anymore, which will not receive bugfixes or updates. In that case updating will not change anything. Consider switching to a different release then.
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. 0.7 or 1.1):
git fetch
git checkout release-NEWERVERSION
After you switched to the different release follow the instructions in updating.
Go to ~/.config/blender/BLENDERVERSION/scripts/addons/phobos/ and delete the file yamlpath.conf. Then you can re-run the install script and everything should work.
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