Building OpenFX

The first step is to get the source. To compile OpenFX, you will need to have the Microsoft Visual C compiler installed and at least 800Mb free disk space. Extract the source to your working directory using an unzip utility such as WinZip. You can also download the source from our SVN erver.

The main development of OpenFX took place using Visual Studio 2003.NET (Compiler version 7). As the project consists of a few .EXE files and many .DLLs each module of the package has its own SLN file. The main modules are in the ANIMATE DESIGN RENDER2 and UTILITIES folders. In each of these folders there is a SLN file and associated .VCPROG files. Using these wil build most of the package. Only a few of the DLLs need to be loaded at application run time so if the additional EFFECTS PLUGINS etc. are not built the applications will still run.

In addition to the individual .SLN files for eack part of the project there is a single SLN file OPENFX.SLN in the main folder that can be used to build the whole project.

Since 2014 the OpenFX build is done using Visual Studio 2010 and PROJECT and SOLUTION files are provided for Visual Studio 2008 (Compiler verson 9) Visual Studio 2010 (Compiler version 10) Visual Studio 2013 (Compiler version 12). To build using these tools the SLN and project files are in subfolders VC9 VC10 and VC12 in each of the projects folders. There are also whole project build files for Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2013 in the project's main folder.

If you have any problems building OpenFX, you can mail the developers.

 Use of Other Libraries

A few of the components of OpenFX rely on 3rd party libraries. These are a few of the Designer plugins use the the Visualisation toolkit. The 3DS importer relies on the 3DSFTK from the developers of 3D Studion and other 3D model formats are imported using the ASSIMP package. All these packages are available in source form and subject to non-commercial licensing (if you do not wish to agree to their license conditions you do not need to build these components of OpenFX and can delete the associated OpenFX solution items. To make the use of these components easier for OFX development you can download ZIP files containing our builds for these project.

Some use is made of Microsoft DirectX components (Direct Show) and these will have to be obtained and put in the "\program files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows" folder. Depending on the compiler you have you will need version 6.0 6.0A 6.1. You will also need the Direct X 9 SDK (August 2006) (June 2008) or (June 2010) these can be obtained from Microsoft.

In all of the projects we have used relative paths whenever possible but some absolute paths are needed (mostly to the external libraries and Windows components.) Our build is done from folder C:\OPENFX with the external libraries placed in C:\PROGRAMS (ofr assimp) and in C:\PROGRAMS\LIBRARY-BUILDS for the other libraries. The Microssoft SDKs are assumed to be in "C:\PROGRAM FILES" If you are using a 64 bit OS then it is likely that these tools are located in "C:\PROGRAM FILES (X86)" so you may need to adjust the HEADER INCLUDE and LIBRARY INCLUDE paths. (We just copied all the necessary libraries from "C:\PROGRAM FILES X86" to "C:\PROGRAM FILES" in these cases.