First, many days were wasted in figuring out why during linking of the first library of OpenCOLLADA the build process would go in an eternal loop, issueing linking commands for the same library over and over again. After having tried different SCons versions, and several futile hacks of the SCons-files of the project, I took a harder look at my own environment.

We have had some talk about having ie. gstreamer as a replacement for FFMPEG. This means some new dependencies that traditionally are pretty hard to build on Windows (ignore FFMPEG here, it’s even harder). I found the OAH project. I decided to give it a spin – after some fiddling around, no good luck. I forgot about it. So yesterday I finally looked at my environment and noticed that the OAH linker would always somehow be used. After uninstalling the thing, I finally got through to linking and beyond! Then it was just a matter of doing some small fixes and picking the right settings for the libraries.

Last night I uploaded all libraries and their headers, necessary for Blender 2.5 to build with COLLADA support on Windows (32bit). I have uploaded the binary release of my build on Graphicall.org as build 1159.

Give the build a spin and report any problems with it to our bug tracker.

At least it now imports Sketchup-files (note: get the COLLADA format, not .skp)! For instance, below a model from Google 3D Warehouse:

New Compound model from Google 3D Warehouse

/Nathan

To use, extract the .exe somewhere, open a cmd.exe and cd your way to where you extracted the binaries, ie: ‘cd C:\freestyle\befree-win32′ if you extracted to C:\freestyle. Then set the FREESTYLE_BLENDER_DIR as follows:

set FREESTYLE_BLENDER_DIR=”C:\freestyle\befree-win32\.blender\scripts”

After that start blender: blender.exe and choose Freestyle as renderer in the render settings. A new panel in render settings appears, here you can choose different freestyle module to render with. Hit F12 and enjoy!