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Building Blender

Instructions

Steps to build Blender from scratch for each operating system.

Resolving Build Failures

Most building problems are not actually errors in Blender's source code, although you can never fully rule out that possibility. See troubleshooting page for possible causes and where to get help.

Build System

Blender uses the CMake build system.

make wrapper

For quick setup, the make wrapper takes care of setting up CMake automatically, and has quick commands for various tasks. It must be run from the Blender repository root directory. The most important commands are:

make help    # List all available commands.
make update  # Update source code, add-ons and libraries to latest versions.
make         # Build Blender.
make test    # Run automated tests.

Output

By default, make outputs the build and project files to to ../build_<platform>. The Blender executable will be located in ../build_<platform>/bin.

To change this location, see make help or manually run cmake. Be sure to generate the build files in a directory other than the source directory.

Customization

Many CMake options can be set to customize the build. See Build Options for how to configure them.

Setup for Developers

For efficient development of the Blender C/C++ code, install and set up an Editor or IDE to navigate and edit the source code.

For efficient debugging and faster builds, see Build Options for Developers.

Compiler Versions

Compiler Official Release Version Minimum Supported Version
Linux GCC: 11.2.1 11.0.0
Linux Clang: - 8.0
macOS Xcode: 15.0 12.0
Windows Visual Studio: 2019 (16.11.26) 2019 (16.9.16)