This summer I will be working on improving Blender with OpenCL, specifically integrating and improving particles inside the Game Engine. The first step of course is getting the source code and compiling it. I’m building on two systems, my MacBook with Snow Leopard (10.6) in 32bit (Intel core 2 duo and intel integrated graphics) and on an Ubuntu 9.10 workstation with 4 64bit CPUs and 4GB of memory and a GeForce 8800 GTX.

I followed the build instructions on Blender’s website, but of course nothing is ever that straightforward.

Ubuntu

Lets start with the Ubuntu build:

I followed these instructions to build Blender 2.5 and these to build Blender 2.49b, as well as building Python3.1 from source:

I copied blender/config/linux2-config.py to blender/user-config.py (for scons). I modified a few lines:

BF_PYTHON=’/opt/py31′

WITH_BF_STATICPYTHON=True

This means I statically linked Python 3.1 (I couldn’t get it to work with shared libs, scons complained about undefined symbols: http://pastebin.com/iKGMDpk2 )

Note: I’ve since installed python3-all-dev and now dynamic linking of python3 works, and I avoided having to build python3.1 myself.

to run just do

blender-svn/install/linux2/blender

A note about the necessary dev packages, make sure you have them! If you are getting “file not found” errors while building its probably because you don’t have the dev package you need. These are the ones I used:

sudo apt-get install subversion build-essential gettext \

libxi-dev libsndfile1-dev \

libpng12-dev libfftw3-dev \

libopenexr-dev libopenjpeg-dev \

libopenal-dev libalut-dev libvorbis-dev\

libglu1-mesa-dev libsdl-dev libfreetype6-dev \

libtiff4-dev libsamplerate0-dev libavdevice-dev \

libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libavcodec-dev libjack-dev \

libswscale-dev libx264-dev libmp3lame-dev \

libsdl1.2-dev libopenal-dev \

python3-all-dev

Mac

For the Mac build I used the CMake instructions (scons gave me problems):

I have XCode and developer tools installed for 10.6 (default options). I also followed these instructions and installed ffmpeg through MacPorts

I configured cmake with the GUI. Here is a screenshot of most of the options.

Note: I configured it WITHOUT blender player or quicktime, having either of these enabled caused problems. I also built for i386 (32bit) as I had problems with 64bit when using scons.

Things aren’t perfect, and 2.5 is only in alpha so we don’t expect it to be! This is just the first baby step getting into Blender’s guts, I hope to have a better understanding of the whole process soon!