VRay for Blender building instructions

1. Get Blender SDK repo

1. Clone the repository: Blender Libraries.
2. Check out the branch blender-v4.5-release (or the respective branch for version 4.4 or 5.0).

2. Build ZMQ

1. Clone the repository: ZeroMQ Library.
2. Check out the tag v4.3.4.
3. Build the library by following the instructions provided in the repository.
4. Create a folder named zmq_build and organize the output files into the following structure:

zmq_build   
│
└───bin
│   └───libzmq-v142-mt-4_3_4.dll
|
└───include
│   └───zmq.h
│   └───zmq_utils.h
│   
└───lib/Release/v142
│   └───libzmq-v142-mt-4_3_4.lib

3. Get 3-rd party libraries

3.1 Boost

Get boost v 1.82. It can be obtained from the blender-v4.3-release branch of Windows Blender Libraries or MacOS Blender Libraries

3.2 Nanobind

Clone Nanobind v 2.11 from https://github.com/wjakob/nanobind (tag v.2.11.0)

4. Create the install folder

Create the folder passed as the ADDON_PATH parameter to cmake in the next step.

5. Build

• The BLENDER_VER parameter specifies the Blender version (currently 4.4, 4.5 and 5.0 are supported) for which this build is intended.
• The path passed in 'ADDON_PATH' parameter must exist before the command is run

5.1 Windows

Generate a Visual Studio project with the following command:

cmake -S ./vray_for_blender_addon \
      -B ./build \
      -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" \
      -A x64 -DWITH_TESTS=0 \
      -DADDON_PATH="./install" \
      -DBOOST_LIBDIR="path/to/boost" \
      -DZMQ_LIBDIR="path/to/zmq_build" \
      -DNANOBIND_LIBDIR="path/to/nanobind" \
      -DBLENDER_SDK_ROOT="path/to/lib-windows_x64" \
      -DBLENDER_VER="4.5"

Build the plugin

• Open build/VRayForBlender.sln solution in Visual Studio
• Build the ALL_BUILD project to produce the addon binaries
• Build the INSTALL project to copy the addon files to the install location

5.2 MacOS

cmake -S . \
     -B ./build \
     -G Ninja \
     -DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES="arm64" \
     -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \  # or NoOpt
     -DWITH_TESTS=0 \
     -DADDON_PATH="./install" \
     -DBOOST_LIBDIR="path/to/boost" \
     -DNANOBIND_LIBDIR="path/to/nanobind" \
     -DBLENDER_SDK_ROOT="path/to/lib-macos_arm64" \
     -DBLENDER_VER=4.5 
         
ninja install

Contributing

At the moment, we’re not able to accept external contributions. However, if you have any questions or would like to explore potential collaboration, feel free to reach out to us.

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or(at your option) any later version. See the LICENSE file for details.