Unable to determine boost version while making blender build with source code and libraries

Building Blender
1

I wanted to make blender from source code. So,

  1. downloaded Blender + Libraries from blender download page.
  2. i extracted all the zips.
  3. i extracted all the zips in packages folder in the zip in to lib\win64_vc15.
  4. i ran the make command in blender source folder.
  5. there were some errors about git. so init git in the blender source folder.
  6. run make again.

this is the error i am getting of “unable to determine boost version”
this is cmd log :

No explicit msvc version requested, autodetecting version.

** Visual Studio 2019 Developer Command Prompt v16.10.3
** Copyright (c) 2021 Microsoft Corporation

[vcvarsall.bat] Environment initialized for: ‘x64’
Compiler Detection successful, detected VS2019
Building blender with VS2019 for x64 in C:\Blender_Source\blender-2.93.0…\build_windows_x64_vc16_Release
Checking out sub-modules
– Selecting Windows SDK version 10.0.19041.0 to target Windows 10.0.19043.
– 64 bit compiler detected.
– Visual Studio 2019 detected.
CMake Error at build_files/cmake/platform/platform_win32.cmake:505 (message):
Unable to determine Boost version
Call Stack (most recent call first):
CMakeLists.txt:936 (include)

I checked in the lib\win64_vc15 there is a boost folder with version.hpp and all that so i don’t know what am i doing wrong.
Is this how I should use the blender source + libraries that is given in the blender download page to compile blender?
Also, otherwise making blender from 6gb of “make update” is sort of impossible for me. bad internet. 600 mb of the this(blender + library) is manageable for me. Please help. How do i compile from just that?

2

You grabbed the source code for all libraries and put them in the Win64_vc15 folder, blender expects the pre-built libraries (binaries) there, while you could technically build every dependency from source with the package you downloaded, it’s going to be “not fun” and not something i’d recommend doing.

If you insist there is a build script inside build_files\build_environment to help you on your travels but i cannot stress this enough, I do not recommend doing this and help on it is going to be very limited.

3

in the build_environemnt\windows folder i ran the build_deps.cmd
output is just this :

C:\Blender_Source\blender-2.93.0\build_files\build_environment\windows>build_deps.cmd
Usage build_deps 2013/2015/2017 x64/x86
.

was that the script?

4

Correct, but be warned, this will still download a ton of stuff, not everything builds with MSVC so a complete mingw and perl distribution will be grabbed, unsure about the exact download size but the on disk footprint is about a gigabyte.

5

On Debian and derivatives, “apt-get build-dep blender” gets you about 90% of what you need (including Boost). Does Windows have an equivalent?

6

We provide prebuilt libraries in svn for all platforms identical to the ones we use to make the official blender.org builds, supporting devs building 40+ dependencies on their own was just too much of a time investment, a lot of things have got to go right for all that to build without issues across all platforms we support.

While building all deps from source is certainly possible, it’s just not something we recommend doing nor can assist too much with, the resources required for such an endeavor are better spend elsewhere.

The libs compress nicely though, the current set of libs for master on windows compresses down to about 440MB, we can look into providing the libraries used for all future releases in zipped form.

7

There are some things you can do when building for yourself from source that you cannot get from prebuilt binaries. For example, in my FFmpeg builds, I can specify both --enable-gpl and --enable-nonfree, which means the result is described as “unredistributable”. This is not something anybody can provide for you, you have to do it yourself.