How do I build Assimp with MinGW?

Question

How can I build Assimp with cMake and MinGW?

I tried, but I don't get a functioning library...

---

Details of my attempt:

I am trying to build the Open Asset Import Library (Assimp) but I have been running into problems. The assimp documentation is really poor and expects you to know exactly what you are doing. The developers haven't been particularly helpful either. I hope someone here has successfully built assimp and can let me know where I am going wrong. I suspect that I have several problems that are contributing to my failure. I am using 64 bit Windows 8.1 pro and using MinGW version 4.8.1.

The first thing I tried was downloading assimp 3.1.1 and boost 1.57. I extracted both folders and tried to use cMake to generate the makefile for MinGW. I haven't used cMake before and the assimp instructions are use cMake as you normally would, so I have no idea if I configured it right. I pointed BOOST_ROOT to the boost folder I extracted from the download, set it to build static libraries and generated the makefile.

I then tried running the makefile and got a number of errors. The first was

IFCReaderGen.cpp.obj: too many sections and was too big.

After some googling, I found a workaround was to set CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE to release. That seemed to work and it finished the build but I only got the files assimp32.dll and libassimp.dll.a, which I thought was odd because I was expecting lib/relese/libassimp.a to be generated as per the details on the assimp website. Though the website might also be wrong or out of date.

I linked with -lassimp.dll and that allowed me to build my program. However it crashed upon start-up - the error that appeared immediately at start-up was

Program has stopped working

(There was no additional info.) I guessed that this was a dll problem—which was odd because I had (tried) to build the static libraries through cMake. I copied assimp32.dll into my executable folder. This time, the program wouldn't crash but the screen would be blank. I'm guessing that there was something wrong with the library I build that was causing it to link incorrectly.

At this point, I deleted everything to try a fresh start. I tried to follow this article:

1. I downloaded assimp 3.1.1 and boost 1.57 and extracted them.

2. I opened cmd, changed to the boost root directory and ran

   bootstrap.bat mingw
   

3. I then ran

   b2 --build-dir="C:/Libraries/boost/" variant=release link=static address-model=32 toolset=gcc
   

   The result of this was

   598 targets updates, 3 targets skipped, 2 targets failed.
   

   I now have a folder C:\Libraries\boost\boost\bin.v2 with two folders libs and standalone, but I'm not certain what my BOOST_ROOT directory is anymore.

4. I opened cMake, selected the assimp folder I had extracted, and configured the following:

   BOOST_ROOT = "C:/Libraries/boost/boost/"
   ASSIMP_BUILD_STATIC_LIB = TRUE
   ASSIMP_BUILD_TESTS = FALSE
   ASSIMP_ENABLE_BOOST_WORKAROUND = FALSE
   BUILD_SHARED_LIBS = FALSE
   

5. I then pressed configure and got the error that the boost libraries were not found.

I'm only guessing what these cMake settings do, as I can't find any documentation for assimp. I'd like to build some version of assimp that I can then link to and use in a simple test program. At some point I will go back and build the shared libraries, but first I just want to get something working and understand how to do it again.

Can someone see what has gone wrong?

Answer 1

I don't know how to exactly configure Assimp to build it with MinGW, but I have successfully build this library (as static lib) from source code of the OpenGL Tutorial's examples. You can use it as well. Just download the source code (I was using exactly this version) and do standard CMake build:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" ../
# or 
# cmake -G "MSYS Makefiles" ../
make

If compilation will succeed you will have generated:

build/external/assimp-3.0.1270/code/libassimp.a

You could also inspect CMake files of the Assimp libarary to see how it is configured.

Answer 2

Try turning off Boost: http://assimp.sourceforge.net/FAQ.html

ENABLE_BOOST_WORKAROUND = ON

As explained there its not really required, and its big. When we build Boost for Qt3D 1.0 we didn't use Boost because of compile issues.