From BlenderWiki

Building Blender

Operating system specific instructions for creating a blender build from scratch.

Blender 2.5x or newer

• on Linux
• on Mac
• on Windows
• on FreeBSD

Blender 2.4x

• on Linux
• on Mac
• on Windows
• on Solaris

General Steps

Building blender can be thought of as following a number of steps. The details of these are explained in the guides above.

1. Choosing a build configuration

   Before building, you need to determine your operating system, the build system, the compiler and related development tools, and dependencies to use.

2. Install development tools
3. Install required dependencies

   Some dependencies may need to be installed manually, others may be available along with the blender source code. Dependencies generally consist of header files and libraries.

4. Download the source code, usually through svn (subversion) to get the latest version
5. Try to build and resolve build failures (see next section)
6. Successful build!

Resolving Build Failures

Most building problems are not actually errors in the tree, although you can never fully rule out that possibility. Most likely, the problem is one or more missing dependencies.

Missing dependencies cause two types of compiler errors. No such file errors mean a header (.h) file is missing, while unresolved symbol errors when linking mean a library is missing. This is usually because either a path to the dependency was not set correctly in the build system, the dependency was not installed, or a wrong version of the dependency was used.

Finding out which dependencies are broken may sometimes be difficult. Searching online for the missing filenames or symbols will often give a quick answer. On systems with package managers, the headers and libraries are usually in a separate development package, called for example foo-dev or foo-devel.

Build Systems

Blender has two build system, SCons and CMake. Which one to use is a personal preference, and generally they can both build the same features, it's mostly a matter of personal preference. Besides that you must also choose a compiler to install, and choose if you want to build a 32bit or 64bit Blender.

SCons

• Customization
  • blender/user-config.py (configuration file)
  • blender/build_files/scons/config/<platform>-config.py (for hints and documentation, don't edit these!)
• Documentation
  • blender/doc/blender-scons.txt
• Build Files
  • SConscript throughout the source tree.
  • blender/SConstruct
  • blender/build_files/scons/*
• Output
  • install/<platform>/ by default, configurable with BF_INSTALLDIR=<dir>

CMake

• Customization
  • Using cmake GUI, ccmake or editing build/CMakeCache.txt
  • Be sure to generate the build files in a directory other than blender/, e.g. build/
• Documentation
  • blender/doc/build-systems/cmake.txt
• Build Files
  • CMakeLists.txt throughout the source tree.
  • blender/build_files/cmake/*
• Output
  • build/bin, or the project directory for the given generator (CMake -G <generator>).