Assimp Tutorial

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Installation Steps
• Project Use
• References

Introduction

This is a short tutorial on how to build Assimp from source on Windows on VS Code and then use it within a project without installing it directly on your system.

You can also install using vcpkg but make sure you run the .bat files of the same name

Installation Steps

• Download the latest source code release from the GitHub Repo (2)

• Extract to a directory of the same name from here on referred to as {extracted base folder}

• cd into the new directory

• create a new build directory

• cd into the build directory

• run "cmake .."

• open the resultant .sln file in the build directory

• Build the "ALL_BUILD" solution

• The resultant build files consist of a .lib and a .dll file. They can be found at the following locations:

  1. {extracted base folder}\build\lib\Debug\assimp-vc143-mtd.lib
  2. {extracted base folder}\build\bin\Debug\assimp-vc143-mtd.dll

• To use within a project, you will also need to copy the "include" folder in the {extracted base folder}

Project Use

To demonstrate how to use Assimp within a project, we will build a model loader & viewer. This project is based on an example from the learn-opengl book (3). A huge thank you to Joey De Vries(https://joeydevries.com/#home).

To run the example:

1. Ensure you have Visual Studio installed
2. Navigate to Model Loading/ and run the build_run_project.bat file

References

1. Build Instructions - https://github.com/assimp/assimp/blob/master/Build.md

2. Github Repo - https://github.com/assimp/assimp/tree/master

3. Learn OpenGL Book - https://learnopengl.com/