How Much GB Is Required To Install Blender?

If you have dabbled in the various creative applications that are currently on the market, then you will have realized that many of these applications require a lot of space on your hard drive, or hopefully your solid state drive, to install.

Blender typically requires 200MB to install the stable release of the software. This value often varies by + – 50MB depending on the version and usually is slightly higher than 200MB. This means only 0.2GB of disk space is required to begin installing and using Blender.

Many applications require a lot more storage space than Blender, that’s for certain, but some options require less disk space or even no disk space at all for the application. There are also experimental builds of the Blender software that can require more space or older versions that require fewer than 200.

Why Does Blender Require 200MB Of Storage?

The amount of storage that Blender requires may be a lot or nothing at all, depending on who you are. Different applications are responsible for completing different tasks, and these tasks will range in terms of their complexity.

Blender is primarily used as a 3D modeling suite that allows artists to create visual representations of objects in the field of 3D modeling.

The software offers the user various workflows to create these 3D objects and scenes and does so by employing hundreds of different tools and functions.

Every tool, every hotkey, and every line of code adds to the amount of storage that will be required to install Blender, and there is an incredible amount of depth to the 3D modeling suite. Yet despite this depth, the amount of space required is minimal compared to other 3D modeling applications.

Should I Use An SSD Instead Of A HDD?

If you play video games, you may have heard of the argument about whether or not you should use a solid-state drive (SSD) or a hard disk drive (HHD) to run your games. The answer is always the SSD, where possible, as games can be booted much faster using the technology.

Does the same apply to a 3D modeling application such as Blender? The difference in booting up the application is noticeable but never takes too long if you start a new project.

The difference between an SSD and an HDD becomes more significant when your loaded projects are more complex.

If a project is using texture maps, you need to consider that each time you load up the project, those texture maps need to be re-loaded as they are part of separate files that have been imported into the main project.

It is perhaps just as important to have all of your assets and files stored on the same storage device as it is to choose an SSD over an HDD. When loading these external files that are part of our project, we see the clearest difference between the two types of storage.

Why Do I Need More Than 200MB Of Storage Space?

While the application itself requires a fixed amount of storage space, you also need to consider the amount of storage required for the various aspects of your projects.

For the best results, you should store everything onto the same storage device, whether that be projects, textures, add-ons, etc., to minimize any latency when loading in the various assets of your projects.

You may end up creating 100’s projects in Blender, and as these projects are stored using the .blend file extension, they can only be used in their current state in Blender.

In addition to this, we also have external files that can be used to bolster our projects. These can include MP4 files if we are bringing in videos as a part of our scene or PNG files that can act as texture maps. For example, a 4K texture map can require significant storage space.

How Much Storage Do My Projects Require?

The amount of storage space that a specific .blend project may require depends on that project’s complexity. How many objects and geometry is present in the scene? What materials are being used? How is the lighting calculated? Are you creating static objects or full animations?

These are just some of the queries that can change the amount of storage space your project requires.

And again, the storage space needed is not restricted to just the .blend file, as that is just the center point of the project.

The project involves all of the assets used, including the various texture maps applied to materials or the animation file rendered after completing the project.

The simplest of projects can require less than a single megabyte of storage space. The highest we have ever gotten in terms of storage requirements for a single project was 400 megabytes. However, this was an extremely large project and well beyond the normal limitations of what you would expect from a single project.

On average, expect your projects to range anywhere from 1 to 4 megabytes in storage space required. This does not include external files such as texture maps.

Do You Want To Learn More About Blender?

Thanks for taking the time to read through the article, and we hope you are now confident with Blender’s storage requirements. If you want to learn more about the Blender software, look at some of our articles below.

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