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Compiling Blender 2.45 on Windows...The easy way

Alternate guide: Compiling Blender 2.45 on Windows. Advanced Guide.

Please follow the guide precisely. The guide also assumes all software installations use the default path

1. Acquire Blender source code and libraries

- Download and install tortoisesvn from: tortoisesvn.tigris.org
-created a folder named "blender" under c:\build, select the folder and click on SVN checkout, and use the following location:
https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/blender
-created a folder named "windows" under c:\build\lib, select the folder and click on SVN checkout, and use the following location:
https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/lib/windows

2. Acquire compiling softwares

- Download and install Python 2.5.1 (9MB) from www.python.org
- Download Mingw 5.1.3 (~10MB) from www.mingw.org . Run the installer, Pick any mirror, Select Current and install packages MinGW BASETOOLS and G++ COMPILER.
- Download and install SCons 0.97 Windows (300KB) from www.scons.org

3. Environment setup

- Go to Start Menu >> Control Panel >> System >> Advanced (Tab) >> Environment Variables (button) >> System Variables scroll area double click on the PATH item
- Add the following line to the end: ;C:\Python25;C:\mingw\bin
- Copy libpython25.a from C:\Python25\libs to C:\build\lib\windows\python\lib
- If you are running Windows Vista: add also ;C:\MinGW\libexec\gcc\mingw32\MinGW-Version where MinGW-Version is the Version of MinGW you are using.

4. Compile!

Before you start, this is how the everything should look like: (Ignore user-config.py for now, that is covered in the advanced guide)



- Open a command prompt window by click on Start >> Run >> type in "cmd" and hit OK.


- Navigate to where the Blender source code is by typing this into the command prompt cd C:\build\blender


- Start the building process by:
scons BF_BUILDDIR=c:\install -j2


- The above command should take about 5-10 minutes to process, and it helps if you have a dual-core processor!


- When it finishes, (Hopefully without error), you can navigate to C:\install\win32-mingw\ and find a complete Blender installation ready to be zipped up and distributed!

Where to go from here?

You might want to rid the blender.exe of extra useless debug data by entering the following command into the command line:
strip C:\install\win32-mingw\blender.exe
This will reduce the size of the executable by 8mb or so without having any negative impact


scons clean BF_BUILDDIR=C:\install
can be used to clean the build data and getting ready for a new build


Once you have successfully compiled Blender, you can try more customization by following the Advanced Guide.

Acknowledgement: A big thanks goes to Nathan Letwory(jesterKing), lukep, Jonathan Jacobs and Johnny Matthews for the BlenderDev/SconsRefactoring article at mediawiki.blender.org; and jmk for pointing me to the python25.a solution.