Building appleseed on Windows

This page will guide you through the steps required to build appleseed and all its dependencies on Windows using Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 (internally version 11.0).

Important: if you are using a newer version of Visual Studio, make sure to adapt the commands to match that version.

Important: when asked to open a Visual Studio command prompt, make sure to open an x64 command prompt.

Building Qt (4.8 or later in the 4.x series)

Important: appleseed will not build using Qt 5.x or later, you do need a 4.x version of Qt.

1. Download the source code for Qt libraries 4.8.x from qt-project.org/downloads:
2. Unzip the source code in the directory of your choice.
3. Open a Visual Studio command prompt in that directory and type:

configure -platform win32-msvc2012 -opensource
nmake

Note about building Qt for 64-bit Windows: out of the box, some early versions of Qt 4.8 (such as 4.8.0, Qt 4.8.1 and possibly even newer versions) fail to build properly on 64-bit Windows. This blog post explains how to fix this.

Building Boost C++ Libraries (1.47.0 or later)

1. Download the latest stable version of the Boost libraries from www.boost.org/users/download/:
2. Unzip the libraries in the directory of your choice.
3. Open a Visual Studio command prompt in that directory and type:

bootstrap
b2 address-model=64 toolset=msvc-11.0

Downloading third party library sources

1. Locate the latest release of the dependency package in https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed-deps/releases.
2. Download the sources:
3. Extract the 3rdparty directory (not its contents!) of the source archive into your appleseed source directory.

Your appleseed directory should look like that:

<root>
    3rdparty
        alembic
        hdf5
        libpng
        openexr
        xerces-c
        zlib
    resources
    sandbox
    scripts
    src

Building zlib

1. Open the solution file in 3rdparty\zlib\contrib\vstudio\vc11.appleseed\.
2. Go to Build → Batch Build...
3. Check all the project configurations for the x64 platform then click Rebuild.

Building libpng

1. Open the solution file in 3rdparty\libpng\projects\vstudio11.appleseed\.
2. Go to Build → Batch Build...
3. Check all the project configurations for the x64 platform then click Rebuild.

Building OpenEXR

1. Open the solution file in 3rdparty\openexr\vc\vc11.appleseed\.
2. Go to Build → Batch Build...
3. Check all the project configurations for the x64 platform then click Rebuild.

Building HDF5

1. Open a command prompt and navigate to the 3rdparty\hdf5\ directory of your appleseed installation.
2. Type mkdir build followed by cd build.
3. Type

cmake -G "Visual Studio 11 Win64"
    -DHDF5_BUILD_HL_LIB=1
    -DCMAKE_ARCHIVE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY=..\..\..\build\win-vs110\hdf5
    ..

4. Open the solution file 3rdparty\hdf5\build\HDF5.sln.
5. Go to Build → Batch Build...
6. Click Select All then uncheck all the configurations for the INSTALL and PACKAGE projects.
7. Click Rebuild.

Building Alembic

1. Open a command prompt and navigate to the 3rdparty\alembic\ directory of your appleseed installation.
2. Type mkdir build followed by cd build.
3. Type cmake -G "Visual Studio 11 Win64" -DBOOST_ROOT=<absolute-path-to-boost> ..
4. Open the solution file 3rdparty\alembic\build\alembic.sln.
5. Go to Build → Batch Build...
6. Click Select All then Rebuild.

Building Xerces-C++

1. Open the solution file in 3rdparty\xerces-c\Projects\Win32\VC11.appleseed\xerces-all\.
2. Go to Build → Batch Build...
3. Check the following two configurations for the x64 platform:
   • Project All, Configuration Static Debug
   • Project All, Configuration Static Release
4. Click Build, not Rebuild. If you accidentally clicked Rebuild or Clean, you'll first need to regenerate the Xerces_autoconf_config.hpp file. To do this, in the XercesLib project, locate the util/Win32/Xerces_autoconf_config.msvc.hpp file in the solution, right-click on it and select Compile.

Building appleseed

1. Open a command prompt and navigate to the build\ directory of your appleseed installation.
2. Type

cmake -G "Visual Studio 11 Win64"
    -DBOOST_ROOT=<absolute-path-to-boost>
    -DQT_QMAKE_EXECUTABLE=<absolute-path-to-qmake-executable>
    ..

3. Open the solution file build\appleseed.sln.
4. Go to Build and select Rebuild Solution.

Configuring the Visual Studio solution

In order to run appleseed.cli or appleseed.studio from within the Visual Studio solution, some things need to be adjusted:

1. Select both the appleseed.cli and appleseed.studio projects in the Solution Explorer.
2. Right-click on one of them, and select Properties.
3. Select All Configurations.
4. In Configuration Properties -> Debugging: set Command to $(SolutionDir)..\sandbox\bin\$(Configuration)\$(TargetFileName) set Working Directory to $(SolutionDir)..\sandbox\. You should have something like this:
5. Click OK to close the Property Pages window.
6. Select appleseed.studio as the startup project (right-click on appleseed.studio in the Solution Explorer and select Set as StartUp Project).
7. Press F5 to start appleseed.studio.