Building LuxCoreRender with Visual Studio 2019
==============================================

Basic procedure to compile LuxCoreRender for Windows 64bit
----------------------------------------------------------
1) Install Visual Studio 2019 from:
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/
VS2019 is the only supported version, even if VS2017 should work too.
Community Edition works perfectly.
If you don't want the full IDE you can also install the "Build Tools for Visual Studio";

2) Install cmake v3.11.2 or better
(https://cmake.org/ or install the CMake tools included in Visual Studio);

3) Create a "luxcorerender" directory;

4) Clone the following repositories inside the "luxcorerender" directory:
- https://github.com/LuxCoreRender/LuxCore
- https://github.com/LuxCoreRender/WindowsCompile

The build script will download the required deps if no WindowsCompileDeps directory is found.

5) Open the Visual Studio "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt" (one of the others will not work),
navigate to the "WindowsCompile" folder and simply invoke the cmake-build-x64.bat file:

cd /d C:\Path\to\luxcorerender\WindowsCompile\
.\cmake-build-x64.bat

(You can copy the filepath from an explorer window and 
paste it in the command prompt via right click -> paste)

The first run of the build process will take around 15 minutes 
(depending on your CPU) and the linking process may consume a lot of RAM.

The compiled binaries are in Build_CMake\LuxCore\bin\Release\
The pyluxcore.pyd binary is in Build_CMake\LuxCore\lib\Release
You can run the script collect-compiled-binaries.bat to collect them.

OpenCL and CUDA
---------------
You don't need to install OpenCL or CUDA SDK anymore. The binaries will check at
run time if OpenCL and/or CUDA are available and enable/disable the support
accordingly.

Packaging a release
-------------------
In order to create an official release, you need also to install the following:
- Python v3.9
- PyInstaller (with a "pip install pyinstaller")
- PySide2 (with a "pip install PySide2")
- NumPy (with a "pip install numpy==1.19.5")

You can then package the release archive running the create-standalone.bat script.

In order to build the SDK version, just run:

cd /d C:\Path\to\luxcorerender\WindowsCompile\
.\cmake-build-x64.bat /dll
create-sdk.bat

NOTE: default build will use Python 3.9, the version embedded in Blender 2.93 LTS and following.
If needed, you can specify the preferred version among from 3.6 to 3.10, e.g.:
.\cmake-build-x64.bat /python36

NOTE: normally you never need to build dependencies in order to build LuxCore.
The getdeps.bat and build-deps-x64.bat scripts are used mainly as a reference 
for developers and are not guaranteed to be always up-to-date.

Optional: compiling LuxMark
---------------------------
1) Clone LuxMark repository alongside the other ones in the "luxcorerender" 
directory:
- https://github.com/LuxCoreRender/LuxMark

2) Open the "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt" (one of the others will not work),
navigate to the "WindowsCompile" folder and simply invoke the cmake-build-x64.bat file:

cd C:\Path\to\luxcorerender\WindowsCompile\
.\cmake-build-x64.bat

LuxCore is a prerequisite and will be built first, if necessary, 
then LuxMark build will start.