Building the add-on

Grabbing dependencies

The add-on depends on Embree, Intel Threading Building Blocks and pybind11. The first two are already dependencies of Blender itself and can be grabbed from Blender’s 3rd party repository server. There’s a predefined script to download them. Since they are stored on a subversion server, the svn command needs to be available in the system’s path:

python scripts/download_blender_dependencies.py <blender-version>

This will install precompiled libraries in build/dependencies

pybind11 is a header only library and can be fetched by updating the repository’s submodules

git submodules update --init

Compiling

The add-on will be compiled through python’s setup-tools. To ensure the right python version, the dependencies download script also downloads the right python version from blender’s subversion server. However there’s no unified structure on the python framework. Depending on the platform and Blender version, the path to the interpreter changes a bit:

Now this command will build the add-on

<python-path-to-interpreter> setup.py build --build-lib=build/out/

The C++ code will be compiles (assuming the system has a C++ compiler installed) and the python sources are being copied together with the native module into build/out/painticle. It’s possible to load the add-on from this location, e.g. by specifying this directory in the visual studio blender add-on. This is predefined in the project settings and should work out of the box.

Alternatively there’s a Visual Studio Code tasks definition file in the repository, which can be used after specifying a suitable python interpreter as the common python path to the application.

Packaging

To create an installable zip, use the deploy script and pass in the source directory and a target zip file:

scripts/deploy.sh -s build/out/painticle -t PAINTicle.zip

The deployment script not only bundles the add-on and license information into the zip, but also creates a version information file deployment-version.txt, which is used to show the add-on version in blender’s preferences dialog.