Release builds for artists and non-developers

[Ekozmaster]

Hey, congratulations on your release. This project is totally a must in the industry!

Any chances we could get release builds for artists and non-developers?

I tried to build myself yesterday but fell into a dependency hell with cmake not finding libraries one step at a time, I eventually had to give up.

I work with NVIDIA RTX Remix projects and would be more than happy to contribute myself once that gets out of the way.
Also, you guys should consider building a Discord community around this tool!

Thank you for your work. This is truly marvelous!

[xeash]

Hi @Ekozmaster, thank you so much for the kind words and support!

We're definitely thinking about how to improve the experience around dependencies — it's a top priority for us. We're actively exploring ways to simplify the build process, whether through helper scripts or even providing prebuilt libraries to help avoid the “dependency hell” you mentioned.

We’re also considering releasing prebuilt builds for non-developers and artists — so stay tuned!

In the meantime, you might be interested to know that OpenDCC shares a lot of code with ShapeFX Loki — in fact, Loki is built on top of the OpenDCC codebase. It’s freely available to download and try out today via shapefx.app.

We don’t yet have a Discord for OpenDCC (thanks for the great idea!), but you can find a link to the Loki Discord community on the same site.

Thanks again — really appreciate your enthusiasm and your offer to contribute!

[DaneBettis]

@xeash I think it's worth considering how the Academy Software Foundation is packaging the software they maintain.
They provide docker images for many of their projects.

OpenDCC could release a docker image built upon one of their VFX Reference Platform images.

This will be very much in keeping with OpenDCCs adherence to the VFX Reference Platform.

This will greatly ease adoption.

I also recommend you consider eventually including scripts/manifests for rez and spk, which would further enhance the in-studio dependability of OpenDCC.

I am open to helping implement these ideas, if that is the direction you/ShapeFX wants to take this.

[olihey]

While docker images can be a good solution for Linux, a cross platform approach would be more beneficial for wider adoption in my opinion.

A script-based build process, like for example OpenUSD's build_usd.py, offers an easy way of creating consistent builds without big hassle.

In our pipeline we have to support all three major OSes, and after struggling for a long time we have switched to vcpkg for handlining third party dependencies in all our C++ tools, USD plugins & Python modules. Just a suggestion 😄

Can wait to get to build OpenDCC. Thanks for the effort

[xeash]

Sorry for the late reply, and thanks again for all the input. Really appreciated.

@DaneBettis , good call on the ASWF packaging. We've actually done quite a bit of internal testing against the ASWF Docker builds and ended up pretty well aligned with them. That said, we had to modify a lot for our in-house setup. I think there's definitely value in testing parts of OpenDCC's feature set using the stock ASWF images. It's something we're actively thinking about.

Also, really appreciate your offer to help implement these ideas. Any contributions are much appreciated.

@olihey, this project was designed to be cross-platform from the start, so getting that right is a priority. I’ve looked at build_usd.py and vcpkg. Both are solid, but I’m aiming for something that's easier to hack on and contribute to without too much tooling overhead.

Right now the plan for handling dependencies looks like this:

1. A separate repo with a super simple, cross-platform CMake superbuild using ExternalProject
2. Linux builds run inside a Docker image
3. Artifacts released via GitHub Releases
4. Main repo script that pulls the right package from GitHub
5. Use CMake presets to wire everything up cleanly

I've been borrowing ideas from open source projects like Blender, OpenRV, Gaffer, and OpenMoonray. Each does things a bit differently, but there is a lot of good inspiration in how they manage builds and dependencies.

Appreciate both of your input. Any thoughts about this are appreciated.