Before you start

This page describes the Coin3D Autoconf/Automake build system on Unix environments.

If you want to use Coin3D on a Windows platform, please refer to the Coin3D/Windows information page for installation instructions.

For information on using Coin3D on Mac OS X, please refer to the Coin3D/Mac information page

Download the sourcecode (either from Mercurial or as tar archives) and install the prerequisites on your system (if necessary, for instance OpenGL, Qt, ...)

Building Coin3D

1. decide on where you want to install the header files and binary library files. This directory will be referred to as installdir in the following instructions.
2. set up directories where you want to build the libraries:

               $ cd [builddir]
               $ mkdir simage
               $ mkdir Coin-2
               $ mkdir SoWin
               $ mkdir SoGuiExamples-SoWin
               [...]
   

3. enter the build directory for simage, then configure, build and install. You might have to run make install as root, depending on the install directory you choose. Note to Mac users: You can run a command as root by prepending the commandline with sudo, such as sudo make install and entering an administrator's password when prompted.:

               $ cd [builddir]/simage
               $ [srcdir]/simage/configure --prefix=[installdir]
               $ make install
   

4. enter the build directory for Coin, then configure, build and install by doing:

               $ cd [builddir]/Coin-2
               $ [srcdir]/Coin-2/configure --prefix=[installdir]
               $ make install
   

5. enter the build directory for the GUI binding library you will use, then configure, build and install by doing (as examplified with SoWin here):

               $ cd [builddir]/SoWin
               $ [srcdir]/SoWin/configure --prefix=[installdir]
               $ make install
   

Compiling the example programs (optional)

The SoGuiExamples module contains generic source code that can be compiled against any of the GUI toolkits, by specifying the toolkit like "--with-sowin" or "--with-soqt" for instance when running configure.

If you want to take a look at some of the example programs we've written, build the SoGuiExamples module like this:

                  $ export PATH=[installdir]/bin:$PATH
                  $ cd [builddir]/SoGuiExamples-SoWin
                  $ [srcdir]/SoGuiExamples/configure --with-sowin
                  $ make

The examples will not be installed, so you need to execute them from the build directories.

Hint

Try running the configure scripts with --help first to see if there are any other options which are relevant for you on the system you want to build and install Coin.

Problems

If something bombed out during the build process of any of the Coin3D components, please let us know what happened and on what platform you tried to build Coin.