From BlenderWiki

Here you find information about how to build Blender on modern machines and distributions.

To have latest Blender successfully running on Linux system you follow few simple steps.

This is not as hard as most people would think if you follow these instructions.

1. Install needed package dependencies
2. Download Blender source
3. Compile Blender

Install the dependencies

zypper install mc subversion gcc-c++

Then, get the sources and run install_deps.sh as explained below.

If you still want to use the “manual” way, you’ll need to install those packages:

Install Packman repository

zypper addrepo http://packman.jacobs-university.de/suse/11.3/ packman

or use Yast to install Packman repository.

Then install the dependencies:

zypper install mc subversion gcc-c++ libSDL-devel \
  openal-soft-devel libffmpeg-devel \
  libpng-devel libjpeg-devel python3-devel libtiff-devel OpenEXR-devel

As a final note, here are the key libraries that you may want to use with Blender:

Python (3.3)

Nearly mandatory!

Boost (min 1.49)

Necessary for Cycles, OSL, Audaspace, Internationalization…

OpenColorIO (min 1.0)

Necessary to handle color spaces.

OpenImageIO

Necessary for Cycles and OSL (min 1.1 in this case).

LLVM (min 3.0)

Necessary for OSL.

OpenShadingLanguage

Enable custom shaders under Cycles.

FFMEPG

For handling most video formats/codecs… Please note that the so-called ffmpeg package of official Debian (& co) repositories is actually the libav fork, which is not supported by Blender!

Get the source

The first step is to get the latest Blender source code from blender.org's SVN repository.

Copy and paste the following instructions into a terminal window. This creates a blender-svn folder in your home directory by downloading the latest source code commonly referred to as 'trunk'. An Internet connection is needed.

cd ~
mkdir blender-svn
cd blender-svn
svn co https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/blender

NOTE: If you have never used SVN before you may get the error

Certificate verification error: signed using insecure algorithm (https://svn.blender.org)

To get around this problem, you need to add the following line to the bottom of your ~/.subversion/servers file:

ssl-trust-default-ca = no

If you want to update your svn checkout to the latest source (in ~/blender-svn/blender/)...

svn up

Automatic dependencies installation

To build with FFMPEG and Cycles enabled, various libraries are needed. These can be…

• Installed through your distributions repositories.
• Built manually.
• Skipped (many dependencies are optional).
• Managed by a script which checks for missing dependencies and installs them or compiles from sources.

The later solution is now the preferred one! Simply run:

cd ~/blender-svn
./blender/build_files/build_environment/install_deps.sh

This script works for Debian/Redhat/SuSE based distributions, both 32 and 64 bits.

This scripts accepts some optional command lines arguments (use --help one to get an exhaustive list), among which:

--source <path>

Where to store downloaded sources for libraries we have to build (defaults to ~/src/blender-deps).

--install <path>

Where to install the libraries we have to build (defaults to /opt/lib).

--with-osl

Try to build OpenShadingLanguage. Note that this is still considered as experimental!

Some commands in this script requires sudo, so you'll be likely asked couple of times for your password.

When the script finish installing/building all the packages, it'll print which parameters for CMake and SCons you should use to use compiled libraries.

echo "/opt/lib/boost/lib" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/boost.conf
ldconfig

Compile Blender with CMake

Installing CMake

From within your package manager, install:

• cmake
• a cmake's configuration tool like
  • ccmake (text based interface) or,
  • cmake-gui (GUI configuration tool).

Automatic CMake Setup

If you're not interested in manually setting up CMake build directory, configuring, building and installing in separate steps, we provide a convenience makefile in blenders source directory which sets up cmake for you.

cd ~/blender-svn/blender
make

Updating blender is as simple as:

cd ~/blender-svn/blender
svn up
make

Once the build finishes you'll get a message like..

blender installed, run from: /home/me/blender-svn/build/linux/bin/blender

There are some pre-defined build targets such as "make debug" or "make lite" - for a fast, small binary. For a full list of the optional targets type...

make help

Manual CMake Setup

If you want to have more control over your build and have configuration, building and installation as separate steps or have multiple build directories for a single source dir. You can follow these steps.

Preparing CMake's directory

Let's suppose that you've checked out Blender's source in the folder ~/blender-svn/blender.

Please note that in some cases the "blender" directory may have a different name. Some branches are modified copies of the trunk/blender directory and are named e.g. soc-2009-name_of_participant.

Now you have to choose a location for CMake build files. In CMake you could do an "in-source" build or an "out-of-source" build, but currently in-source builds in Blender are not allowed.

Out-of-source build

By doing an "out-of-source" build you create a CMake's folder aside from ~/blender-svn/blender, for example ~/blender-svn/build:

mkdir ~/blender-svn/build
cd ~/blender-svn/build
cmake ../blender

This will generate makefiles in the build folder (~/blender-svn/build).

Warning As said above, in-source-builds where you build blender from the source code directory are not supported. If CMake finds a CMakeCache.txt in the source code directory, it uses that instead of using ~/blender-svn/build/CMakeCache.txt. If you have tried to do an in-source build, you should remove any CMakeCache.txt from the source code directory before actually running the out-of-source build: rm -f ~/blender-svn/blender/CMakeCache.txt

Editing CMake's Parameters

Note that CMake should detect correct parameters so you shouldn't need change defaults to simply to compile blender, this is only if you want to change defaults, make a debug build, disable features etc,
so you may want to skip this section for now and come back to it later if you want to make adjustments.

You can modify the build parameters in different ways:

• editing ~/blender-svn/build/CMakeCache.txt file in a text editor
• using cmake-gui if your distro supports it

cmake-gui ../blender

Opens a graphical interface where you can easily change parameters and re-configure things.

• using ccmake tool, with

ccmake ../blender

Opens a text interface where you can easily change parameters and re-configure things.

• cmake parameters can also be easily set on the command line, for eg.

cmake ../blender \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/blender \
    -DWITH_INSTALL_PORTABLE=OFF \
    -DWITH_BUILDINFO=OFF \
    -DWITH_GAMEENGINE=OFF

These commands are exactly those found in ~/blender-svn/build/CMakeCache.txt so you can copy commands from there and use them in the command line without running ccmake.

Screenshot from cmake-gui, qt based gui for cmake

Screenshot from ccmake, curse-based gui for cmake

Building Blender

After changes have been done and you have generated the makefiles, you can compile using the make command inside the build folder:

cd ~/blender-svn/build
make
make install

Parallel Builds

For multi-core / multi processor systems you can build much faster by passing the jobs argument to make: -j(1+number_of_cores). For example put "-j3" if you have a dual-core or "-j5" if you have a quad-core. For Shell-scripts use GNU-Syntax: expr `nproc` + 1 or Bash-Syntax: $((`nproc`+1)) If it's still not using all your CPU power, leave out the number: "-j" to spawn as many as possible build processes (usually 64). Note that it may build faster, but make your system lag in the meanwhile.

Also notice the install target is used, this will copy scripts and documentation into ~/blender-svn/build/bin

For future builds you can simply update svn and re-run make.

cd ~/blender-svn/build; svn up ../blender; make; make install

Notice Both portable & system installations are supported. Portable installation is default where scripts and data files will be copied into the build '~/blender-svn/build/bin' directory and can be moved to other systems easily. Disable WITH_INSTALL_PORTABLE to install into CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX which uses a typical Unix FHS layout: bin/, share/blender/, man/ etc.

Static Linking

If you want to share your build with others (for example through graphicall), you should statically link against as much libraries as possible.

If you are using install_deps.sh

Enable ALL_STATIC install_deps.sh

Set ALL_STATIC=true in build_files/build_environment/install_deps.sh script, delete built libs if any, and rerun the script. It will give you necessary CMake options to get an as-much-as-possible statically linked blender.

Else

Enable general static linking

Set WITH_STATIC_LIBS to ON, so that CMake will try to make blender link against static libs, when available. Though not perfect, this should reduce quite nicely needed shared libs.

ffmpeg

Set the FFMPEG_LIBRARIES var to full paths of all needed libs (xvid, x264, etc.).

boost

Set (or create) Boost_USE_STATIC_LIBS to true. If you are using boost automatically built by the install_deps.sh script, you should not need to do anything else.

But if you are using your own distro's boost package, you most likely will have to set (or create) Boost_USE_ICU to true too (and install the relevant libicu development package), to get blender linking.

TODO: other libs?

See also

CMake

• Introduction to Cmake
• Bill Hoffman presents CMake at GoogleEdu (starts at 7:41, relevant to cmake until 31:18)

IDE setups with CMake

• How to compile Blender using CMake with QTCreator on Linux