Build Vaa3d in Windows using CMake - Vaa3D/Vaa3D_Wiki GitHub Wiki

Here are the step-by-step instructions (thanks to Mark) to build **the main GUI (v3d program) of vaa3d **: (To build the plugins in vaa3d_tools, please use qmake.)

1.CMake needs to be installed and in your path ( cmake version after 2.8.x series should work)
2.Visual Studio 2009/2010/2013 (community/free version) [download] (https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs). (Those are tested VS versions, other version might work too)
3.A pre-compiled 64-bit version of Qt 4.7.x/4.8.x that are consistent with your Visual Studio Version (Qt 5 is not well tested with Vaa3D)

You can download the pre-built QT version here: * VS2008 x64 (coming soon) * VS2010 x64 (coming soon) * Here is an example instructions on how to build qt 4.8.6 with vs2013: https://dootaini.wordpress.com/2014/12/11/building-qt-4-8-6-x64-on-windows-with-vs2013-so-that-it-works-on-win7/
4.A bare minimum minGW install (the default plus msys, no compilers are necessary)
5.In your VS 20** x64 native compile command shell:

    cd c:\MinGW\MSYS\1.0
    msys.bat

This opens a MinGW shell.

1. in the mingw shell, add qt path to system path variable:

   export PATH=C:/Qt/<your qt version>/bin:$PATH

1. Download the source code into your local machine If you have cygwin installed, you can do:

    cd c:/work/src
    git clone --recursive  https://github.com/Vaa3D/v3d_external.git
    cd v3d_external

Or you could install git desktop and download git repo via the GUI.

** Note that the path to the v3d_external folder needs to be short to avoid too-long-path errors.**

8.Start to generate the VS solution file ( take VS 2010 for example):

 ./build_VS2010.cmake -platform windows-x86_64 install

Your Visual Studio will automatically start up and it's recommended to change the configuration type from "Debug" to "Release" to optimize run time speed. Then build your vaa3d in VS. Add -h5j before the install command if you want to build the HDF5 container containing FFMPEG compressed stacks.

9.It’ll print “Done” when finished. If it fails, there will be an “all_build.txt” file in build_windows-x86_64 directory that shows the compile output.