Building Blender/Dependencies

= Library Dependencies =

Blender depends on many libraries. The complete list and the versions in official releases can be found in the Blender repository:

build_files/build_environment/cmake/versions.cmake

Precompiled Libraries
Precompiled libraries are available for Windows, macOS and Linux in an SVN repository. These are the easiest and most reliable way to get a feature complete Blender build. Blender builds with these libraries are portable and can be run on other computers.

For Windows and macOS, precompiled libraries are automatically downloaded when running make update. Building library dependencies on these platforms is normally only done by platform maintainers.

For Linux, precompiled libraries must be downloaded once manually as per the build instructions, and can then be updated with make update.

System Packages
On Linux, the system package manager can also be used to install many dependencies. See the Linux build instructions for details.

The resulting builds will not be portable, but libraries can be shared with other software on the system.

make deps
The Blender repository has a CMake based system to build all library dependencies from source. This is the system used to generate precompiled libraries for Windows, macOS and Linux.

The make deps command performs the cmake setup and build. It is mainly used by platform maintainers and is not tested to work on many different operating system installs. A successful build may require some manual configuration or edits to the code. Minimal instructions on how to use it can be found in build_files/build_environment/CMakeLists.txt. There's also documentation for a Linux virtual machine to build these libraries at Building_Blender/Linux/CentOS7ReleaseEnvironment.