Rajiv

Blender 2.5 has been hailed as an coming of age of opensource production ready software.

With 2.5 blender achieves the same status as Firefox, OpenOffice and others that are hailed as the powerhouse of opensource products.

Why would someone want to compile an alpha build. The reasons are simple. There are considerable changes in the user interface especially the animation engine. If this reason itself is not compelling, then think about the new Smoke module. Its just fun to play with it for hours. Think of what’s in store and you get to try your hand first on what’s coming. Now think of Bmesh (ngon’s), new particle playground, improved non-linear video editor, node based materials and compositing power, 3d sculpt enhancements, and seamless 3d painting. All in all you want to know how this marvellous piece of magic box ticks when its ready for prime time production.

Here are simple steps that will get you going on Fedora 10

Follow the steps 1 to 3 from already posted in “Compiling production ready Blender 3D and Cinelerra nonlinear video editor in Fedora”

Now do the following (as blender2.5 requires pythom 3.1). Go to the python site and download the source 3.1 tar.bz2 or tar.gz file to the download folder.

Navigate to the download folder in the terminal

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cd /home/your-user-name/Download

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type

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tar -zxvf Python-3.1.tar.gz2

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or if you have downloaded the other

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tar -xjvf Python-3.1.tar.bz2

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It will create a directory Python-3.1 with the necessary files.

cd into the folder Python-3.1

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cd Python-3.1

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Now its time to compile, so just type

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./configure

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It will create a make file. Once done type

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make

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And if everything went as expected, you can now install by typing

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sudo make install

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or

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su (give your password when asked and)

make install

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Thats it

Step4

Open a new terminal and create a folder ‘Blender2.5’ in the default home directory by typing

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mkdir Blender2.5

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To enter the folder

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cd Blender2.5

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Step5

Once inside the folder copy and paste these and then press enter

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svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/branches/blender2.5/blender

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It will now create a folder ‘blender’ inside your newly created ‘Blender2.5” directory and copy the latest (daily alpha development builds) into that folder

Step6

next type

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cd blender

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This will take you into the (daily build) blender directory.

Now do the following: Create a “user-config.py” in a text editor and place the file in the blender directory (same place where SConstruct resides), that is the /home/your-user-name/Blender2.5/blender/
and paste these in the ‘user-config.py’ and save

BF_NUMJOBS = ‘4′
WITH_BF_OPENMP = ‘true’
WITH_BF_SNDFILE = ‘true’
WITH_BF_OPENAL = ‘true’
WITH_BF_JACK = ‘true’
WITH_BF_SDL = ‘true’
WITH_BF_OPENEXR = ‘true’
WITH_BF_DDS = ‘true’
WITH_BF_JPEG = ‘true’
WITH_BF_PNG = ‘true’
WITH_BF_ZLIB = ‘true’
WITH_BF_BULLET = ‘true’
WITH_BF_OGG = ‘true’
WITH_BF_FFTW3 = ‘true’
WITH_BF_OPENJPEG = ‘true’
WITH_BF_REDCODE = ‘true’
WITH_BF_OPENGL = ‘true’
BF_OPENGL=’/usr/lib64′
BF_OPENGL_LIBPATH = ‘/usr/lib64′
BF_OPENGL_LIBPATH = ‘${BF_OPENGL}/usr/lib64′
#This is important
BF_PYTHON=’/usr/local’
#BF_PYTHON_LIBPATH = “${BF_PYTHON}/lib/python3.1′
BF_PYTHON_LIBPATH = ‘${BF_PYTHON}/lib’
BF_PYTHON_VERSION = ‘3.1′
WITH_BF_STATICPYTHON = False
BF_PYTHON_INC = ‘${BF_PYTHON}/include/python${BF_PYTHON_VERSION}’
BF_PYTHON_BINARY = ‘${BF_PYTHON}/bin/python${BF_PYTHON_VERSION}’
BF_PYTHON_LIB = ‘python${BF_PYTHON_VERSION}’ #BF_PYTHON+’/lib/python’+BF_PYTHON_VERSION+’/config/libpython’+BF_PYTHON_VERSION+’.a’
BF_PYTHON_LINKFLAGS = ['-Xlinker', '-export-dynamic']
BF_PYTHON_LIB_STATIC = ‘${BF_PYTHON}/lib/libpython${BF_PYTHON_VERSION}.a’
#you may leave this part for the beta
CCFLAGS = ['-pipe','-fPIC','-march=athlon64','-msse','-msse2','-msse3','-mssse3','-mmmx','-mfpmath=sse','-funsigned-char','-fno-strict-aliasing']
CXXFLAGS = ['-pipe','-fPIC','-march=athlon64','-msse','-msse2','-msse3','-mssse3','-mmmx','-mfpmath=sse','-funsigned-char','-fno-strict-aliasing']
REL_CFLAGS = ['-O2','-fomit-frame-pointer','-funroll-loops']
REL_CCFLAGS = ['-O2','-fomit-frame-pointer','-funroll-loops']

You can now type ‘scons‘ and it should start compiling your own blender2.5.

Once the compilation is over, it will create two folders in the Blender directory. ‘build’ and  ‘install’. So now you have three folders there ‘blender’ ‘build’ and ‘install’

Your new blender will be in the ‘install’ folder.

Step7

To navigate to this folder do this

Type cd ~/Blender2.5

and then cd /install/linux2/

This will take you to the newly blender build

To run blender type ./blender

There, now you can play with Smoke and other goodies to your heart content.

Also report any bugs that you encounter and file a bug report.