Welcome to the fun world of open-source. This file is to help you get started using the source and will hopefully answer most questions. If you do have any problems with these instructions, post a message to the Forums on www.blender.org, or visit us at #blendersauce on irc.freenode.net Here are some links to external packages you may or may not need: openssl: http://www.openssl.org python: http://www.python.org mxtexttools:http://www.egenix.com/files/python/mxTextTools.html (python lib) libjpeg: http://www.ijg.org/ libpng: http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/ zlib: http://www.gzip.org/zlib/ ode: http://opende.sourceforge.net/ openal: http://www.openal.org/home/ (for linux/windows) sdl: http://www.libsdl.org/index.php (for openal) smpeg: http://www.lokigames.com/development/smpeg.php3 (for openal) fmod: http://www.fmod.org/ mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org/ nspr: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/nspr/releases (side note: on debian linux you will need mozilla-dev and libnspr-dev) glut: http://www.opengl.org/developers/documentation/glut.html If you do not have GL you will also need mesa: mesa: http://www.mesa3d.org ********************************************************************* ********************************************************************* We are in the process of moving things over to automake/autoconf The old makefiles are still in place and will work. If you want to get a working blender skip down to the next section and use this readme as a guide. If you want to play with the new autoconf environment take a look at doc/autoconfig.txt ********************************************************************* ********************************************************************* --Notes on compiling mxTextTools---------------------------------------------- To get the latest version to compile on my machine I had to edit mxSetup.py and remove /usr/include from INCLPATH for it to build properly. (after doing this you need to edit blender/source/Makefile and fix the pointer to it I'm still working on automating this) --------------Basic Makefile TIPS--------------------------------------- Edit source/nan_definitions.mk to fit your environment, be sure to edit the block matching your OS. You will want to change variables like NAN_OPENSSL, NAN_JPEG, NAN_PNG etc. to point to where you have those installed. If you want to integrate the game-engine in Blender, you might want to uncomment the following line in nan_compile.mk: #CFLAGS += -DGAMEBLENDER=1 The define is disabled by default because there are still some problems with this at the moment. After adjusting things for your environment run 'make' (or use the nice hmake script at blender/source/tools/hmake/hmake) ----------------------WINDOWS TIPS-------------------------------------- When building Blender on Windows you have three choices: METHOD 1. Build using the old NaN Makefiles. METHOD 2. Build using the new automake/autoconf files METHOD 3. Use Microsoft Visual Studio project files These directions are for method 3. Method 1 was used in Nan in combination with Cygwin. I don't know if somebody ever tried method 2. EXTERNAL LIBARIES All external libraries that Blender depends on are found in CVS in precompiled form. If you did not already do so, check out blender/lib/windows from CVS. If you prefer to build or download those libraries yourself, there are some directions below. INTERN LIBRARIES: The first thing you need to do is to build the Blender "intern" libraries. You need to have Python installed on your machine. Open the workspace in the $NANBLENDERHOME/intern/make/msvc_6_0 directory. Build the "build_install_all" project. This will build all the intern libraries and installs them in the $NANBLENDERHOME/lib/windows directory. If the post build step (copying the libraries to their destinations) fails, this is probably due to the fact that MSVC can't find the XCOPY command as happened to me on an XP system. MSVC has it's own PATH that you can set through the options. Open options from the menu: Tools->Options. Go to the directories tab and select "Executable files" from the drop down menu. Now add you SYSTEM32 directory. The last project build is the python_freeze project that will freeze python code for compilation and linking with Blender's C code. At the moment, this should be automatic except that batch file probably does not find Python. If this is the case, follow the same procedure as was mentioned above for the XCOPY command to add Python to your path. BUILDING BLENDER Open the workspace $NANBLENDERHOME/projectfiles/blender/blender.dsw This contains the following three main projects: blender Builds the main executable GP_ghost Builds the stand-alone game player GP_axctl Builds the ActiveX control Choose the project you want to build and hit F7. If all is well it should build with a lot of warnings but no errors. BUILDING/DOWNLOADING EXTERNAL LIBRARIES If you don't want to use the precompiled libraries you can download and/or build them yourself. Here are some directions. JPEG: BINARY LIBRARY: Go to sourceforge.net, navigate to the GnuWin32 project and download libjpeg-6b-lib.zip. Rename the unzipped directory "jpeg" and copy it to the $NANBLENDERHOME/lib/windows directory. FROM SOURCES: Download the jpeg sources from http://www.ijg.org/. Go into the source directory and copy the file jconfig.vc to jconfig.h. Now start a command box and run nmake /f makefile.vc (assuming nmake is in your path, if not run the vcvars32.bat batch file located in the VC98/Bin directory of the MSVC installation directory first). Copy these include files: jconfig.h, jerror.h, jmorecfg.h, jpeglib.h from the build directory to the lib tree in this directory: $NANBLENDERHOME/lib/windows/jpeg/include The file libjpeg.lib should be copied to: $NANBLENDERHOME/lib/windows/jpeg/lib PNG: Go to sourceforge.net, navigate to the GnuWin32 project and download libpng-1.2.4-1-lib.zip. Rename the unzipped directory "png" and copy it to the $NANBLENDERHOME/lib/windows directory. ZLIB: Go to sourceforge.net, navigate to the GnuWin32 project and download zlib-1.1.4-lib.zip. Rename the unzipped directory "zlib" and copy it to the $NANBLENDERHOME/lib/windows directory. ----------------------Mac OSX TIPS-------------------------------------- When building Blender on OSX you have three choices: METHOD 1. Build using the old NaN Makefiles. METHOD 2. Build using the new automake/autoconf files METHOD 3. Use the Project Builder project METHOD 1 and 3 The first 4 steps are th same for methods 1 and 3. Only the actual Blender build step number 5 is different. Step1: If you want to follow method 1 and 3, follow the instructions above to set the environment variables. You don't need to edit the Makefiles. They should work out of the box in combinations with some external libraries that should be on your system in a fixed location. Step 2: You can use the package installer fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net/) for some of the external libraries: 1. openssl (fink install openssl) 2. openssl-dev (fink install openssl-dev) 3. jpeg (fink install libjpeg) 4. png (fink install libpng) 5. cvs (fixes some bugs in the shipped cvs: fink install cvs) 6. python22 ((addes the static lib for python) fink install python22) You will probably want to select python22-nox-shlibs when it asks you. After you have done this you should install the mx lib from: http://www.egenix.com/files/python/mxTextTools.html Step 3: The rest of the external libraries are present in CVS in binary format so you don't have to download them. Precompiled libraries are found in CVS in directory: $NANBLENDERHOME/lib/darwin-6.1-powerpc If you are not running on a darwing kernel 6.1 (which is likely if you auto- update your system, you might want to add a symbolic link in the $NANBLENDERHOME/lib/ directory. For example, if you work on a 6.2 kernel: ln -s darwin-6.1-powerpc darwin-6.2-powerpc Step 4: Start the build process by building Blender's "intern" libraries. Navigate to $NANBLENDERHOME/intern and type make. This will build the intern libaries which will be installed into the $NANBLENDERHOME/lib/darwin-6.1-powerpc (thanks to the symbolic link). Now you can choose how to build Blender itself; using the Makefiles or the Project Builder project. Step 5 METHOD 1: Navigate to $NANBLENDERHOME/source and type make. Step 5 METHOD 3: The project Builder project can be found in the directory: $NANBLENDERHOME/projectfiles/pb_2_0_1 Start Project Builder open the blender.pbproj project, choose a target (blender or player) and build. Step 6: Although the Makefiles in the intern directory run ranlib on the libraries built, the gcc linker complains about ranlib not being run. Until there is a solution, you will need to run ranlib by hand once in a while when the make breaks. Luckily, the error message lists the full path of the file to run ranlib on... Anybody out there with a real solution? I guess the problem arises from copying the files from one location to the other... BUILDING EXTERNAL LIBRARIES If you don't want to use the precompiled libraries you can download and/or build them yourself. Here are some directions. PYTHON: Mac OSX 10.2 (Jaguar) now comes with Python (2.2.1) pre-installed. This is fine for producing the "frozen" Python code found in the intern directory. However, the installation does not contain the python library to link against (at least I could not find it). You could use fink to install Python but that Python installation depends on X being installed and that is a large installation. If you prefer the easy way: download Python 2.2.2 from http://www.python.org. Follow the instructions to in the documentation to install it on your box. If you run OSX 10.2 it should install just fine. Basically a configure and a "make" will do the job. The result is a Python library that should be copied to the library tree together with the associated header files. Create the following directories: $NANBLENDERHOME/lib/darwin-6.1-powerpc/python/include/python2.2 $NANBLENDERHOME/lib/darwin-6.1-powerpc/python/lib/python2.2/config Now copy the include files and the libpython2.2.a library to those locations. ODE: Ode is currently included in the source tree of Blender. This might change in the close future. But for now you don't need to download Ode. If you want to build ODE yourself, you'll have to edit a config file of ODE first. go to $NANBLENDERHOME/extern/ode/dist/config and edit the file "user-settings" so that platform is equal to osx (PLATFORM=osx).