This is a tool that builds open source libraries commonly used in games, film, and vfx.

It is more like npm, and less like brew. It knows about dependencies, and fetches what it needs. It builds as correctly and completely as it can, in some cases by working around difficulties or inconsistencies in a library's build system.

It expects to run in a directory in which there will be a directory called local. If local doesn't exist, it will make one. If you run in /usr, it will populate /usr/local/lib, /usr/local/include, /usr/local/bin, and so on.

The more interesting thing it will do is populate minimal local dependencies. If you are making a project that needs only OpenSubdiv, running

 mkvfx OpenSubdiv

in your project directory will give you the strict local dependencies to have a working copy of OpenSubdiv, and nothing extraneous. This makes it very easy to quarantine a project. If you also need OpenEXR in that same project, subsequently running

 mkvfx OpenEXR

will add the bits that were not already there for OpenSubdiv.

At the moment there are many recipes for OSX, and several Windows. The recipe system allows building on other platforms. Pull requests are welcome of course.

It would be nice if the script also knows about configurations. At the moment, it pulls top of tree of a specific branch (by default master), but a little sugar in the recipes file for configurations could allow for doing a build that conforms to something specific such as vfxplatform.com's "Current - VFX Platform CY2015".

The OSX SDK contains some conflicting libraries, such as libpng. Traditionally, one sets the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to point at your own runtime environment. This will cause OSX system frameworks to fail though, because OSX will prefer the mkvfx version of those libraries instead of the SDK versions, and then frameworks like ImageIO won't load. It's best therefore to leave the environment undisturbed, and instead contrive that your runtime has another way to find the dynamic libraries.

mkvfx installs symlinks to the runtime libraries in the local bin folder so that tools and utilities in the local bin can run properly without the need to modify the global runtime environment. You can do the same, install your applications into bin, or, you can install the necessary dylibs into your own build directory, or you can invoke link magic to tell the loader where to look, or you can prefer static versions of the libraries, if they can be built that way.

On OSX, mkvfx expects to run in a bash or zsh environment.

On Windows, mkvfx expects to run in a Visual Studio command prompt.

node.js, minimally 0.11.14. Installation using nvm is a straightforward way to do it. You'll also get npm with it.

npm, installed as a side effect of installing node.js

Python, grunt requires Python 2.7.x to run, so make sure Python is installed and available from the command line.

On Windows, make sure that both node and python can be invoked from the Visual Studio command prompt. The Python installer doesn't modify the PATH variable, so do that in the environment settings panel.

 npm install -g grunt-cli

clone this repo. Install the dependencies using npm.

 npm install

on Windows, if using VS2015 use this instead:

 npm install --msvs_version=2015

Now type mkvfx, and all will be revealed.

On OSX you will see a message like -

 mkvfx knows how to build:
Alembic
assimp
autoconf
bgfx
boost
boost-build-club
bullet
bx
c-blosc
glew
glfw
glm
hdf5
IlmBase
jsoncpp
LabText
libjpeg
libpng
libtiff
llvm
nanovg
OpenColorIO
OpenEXR
OpenImageIO
OpenShadingLanguage-WIP
OpenSubdiv
OpenVDB
partio
ptex
PyIlmBase
python
qt
qt4
qt5
sqlite
stb
tbb


 mkvfx [options] [packages]
 --help           this message
 --install        install previously built package if possible
 --nofetch        skip fetching, default is fetch
 --nobuild        skip build, default is build
 --nodependencies skip dependencies
 -nfd             skip fetch and dependencies
 [packages]       to build, default is nothing


 Note that git repos are shallow cloned.

Copyright (c) 2014 Nick Porcino Licensed under the MIT license.