We compiled and tested PicoGKRuntime on Windows 64 bit and MacOS 14 Sonoma on Mac computers running Apple Silicon. Since macOS is our primary work environment, we have tested it on Mac significantly more than on Windows. There is, however, nothing fundamentally platform-specific about PicoGK. The main platform dependencies are well-established libraries like OpenVDB. CorrieVS has forked PicoGK and made a docker environment for LINUX, check it out here.
Our code is very straightforward and mostly header-only C++ code.
On Windows, you need Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition (or higher) with C++ support installed (bare bones C++ is enough).
On Mac, you need the latest version of XCode with C++ support, and the XCode command line tools.
In addition you need a current version of CMake (Download at https://cmake.org/) and Git (Download at https://git-scm.com/downloads) — install both with the default settings.
On Windows you need to restart so that Git can be found when using the command line.
First clone the PicoGKRuntime repository to your machine. The Git path is:
https://github.com/leap71/PicoGKRuntime
Make sure to initialize the submodules, so that the OpenVDB submodule is properly initialized.
git submodule update --init --recursive --remote
PicoGKRuntime has no dependencies besides OpenVDB and GLFW (which is fetched automatically), but those libraries have plenty of dependencies (boost, blosc, etc).
To facilitate the installation of these dependencies, we have provided you with two scripts that download and install everything needed.
On Mac, please run PicoGKRuntime/Install_Dependencies/Mac.sh
On Windows, please run PicoGKRuntime/Install_Dependencies/Win.bat
The installation of the dependencies may take a while, especially on Windows.
After you have done this, you can move onto compiling the PicoGK Runtime.
Start the CMake GUI client and specify the path to the PicoGKRuntime repository in "Where is the source code".
Specify the Build subfolder under "Where to build the libraries". It should like this
Hit Configure and accept all defaults. After Configure has run without errors, click Generate.
Note: On Mac, we advise to use "Unix Makefiles" as target. If you target XCode, you will get an error in the OpenVDB CMake setup. We have reached out to the OpenVDB team why this happens. You can safely comment out the offending lines in the OpenVDB CMake files, but this should not happen and it seems like an issue on their side.
Now you can compile PicoGKRuntime on your system.
On Mac, go to the Build subdirectory in Terminal and type make [enter] to run the make tool. The build process should start and you will get the compiled picogk.version.dylib in the Dist subfolder of PicoGKRuntime.
On Windows, open the resulting project in Visual Studio and compile (use the release version).
You either copy the resulting library to /usr/local/lib on Mac or the System32 folder on Windows (or any other folder that is in your system path).
If you don't want to copy to your system folders, you can adjust the path that PicoGK loads it from in the PicoGK/PicoGK__Config.cs file in your PicoGK submodule:
public const string strPicoGKLib = "picogk.1.1"; // dll or dylibYou can change this constant to load it from a specific location. However make sure to include the .dylib or .dll extension, as otherwise it will not work:
public const string strPicoGKLib = "/Users/myuser/GitHub/PicoGKRuntime/Dist/picogk.1.1.0.dylib";On Windows, make sure all the DLLs from the OpenVDB dependencies are also in the same folder as the picogk.version.dll (or in Windows/System32). At this time these are blosc.dll and lz4.dll. You will find them in Install_Dependencies\vcpkg\installed\x64-windows\bin. These files were created when you ran Win.bat before you built PicoGKRuntime.
One last thing — on Mac, you may have to sign the library using the codesign tool. Otherwise the library may not load.
The necessary command line is codesign -s LEAP71 picogk.version.dylib — you need to have a valid code signing certificate for this (we used one we named LEAP71 — you can self issue this certificate, but it's a few steps).
Here is a relevant Apple article how to create self-signed certificates: https://support.apple.com/en-ae/guide/keychain-access/kyca8916/mac
You may have to adjust your security settings as described here.