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 Scons

Do I need to install Scons?

No, currently scons is embedded in Blenders' source code.

How do I configure Scons?

By default, Scons will pickup the right configuration file depending on your operating system (Linux, Mac, Windows, etc...) and architecture (32/64bit, etc). In the Blender source (see #Get the source above) these files are located in blender/build_files/scons/config/:

aix4-config.py
darwin-config.py
irix6-config.py
linux2-config.py
linuxcross-config.py
openbsd3-config.py
sunos5-config.py
win32-mingw-config.py
win32-vc-config.py
win64-vc-config.py

For example, if you are working on a 32bit machine with Linux, Scons will pickup linux2-config.py to setup the Blender build.

If all the parameters in that file work for you, just start building Blender (see below).

If you don't know what to put in user-config.py, please have a look at Scons default options to see their meaning.

In general, you have to copy some line from the default config file (in our example, linux2-config.py) and change the parameters that you want to override.

Building Blender

Note: since you intend to use Blender, you probably have a modern multi-core computer, so you should use the parallel build option to speed up the build. If you have a 2-core machine without hyperthreading, append -j 2 to the scons command. If you have a quad-core machine with hyperthreading, append -j 8 to the scons command.

cd ~/blender-svn/blender
python scons/scons.py

At the end of the build process you will have a blender binary and a message...

Install file: "/home/myname/blender-svn/blender/build/linux2/bin/blender" as
 "/home/myname/blender-svn/blender/install/linux2/blender"
scons: done building targets.
*** Success ***

to run blender from the root path "~/blender-svn/blender" you can create a symlink to the binary here... (the following example assumes you want the linux2 version)

cd ~/blender-svn/blender
ln -s ../install/linux2/blender ./blender

Now you can run by typing (in ~/blender-svn/blender)...

 ./blender

Rebuild after changing any files (in ~/blender-svn/blender/ )...

 python scons/scons.py

If you have a multi-core CPU you can compile with multi-threading using the following:

 python scons/scons.py -j 2

The number stands for the number of jobs, so if you have a quad-core CPU you could put "-j 4".

Scons options

For completeness, please check these scons options.