Building Alembic on macOS

[Willem Kokke]

I'm looking to decouple a bunch of mesh processing pipelines from Maya, and want to build a stand-alone PyAlembic for macOS and windows.

I'm struggling to find a combination of dependencies that work for building PyAlembic 

I started on macOS Sonoma with recent version of things

cmake 3.29.3

python 3.11.9 (from python standalone builds)

boost 1.85.0

Imath 3.1.11

alembic 1.8.6

I could get almost everything to build, but when it comes to linking PyAlembic I get the following error:

CMake Error at python/PyAlembic/CMakeLists.txt:158 (TARGET_LINK_LIBRARIES):

  Target "alembic" links to:

    Imath::imath_Python3

  but the target was not found.  Possible reasons include:

    * There is a typo in the target name.

    * A find_package call is missing for an IMPORTED target.

    * An ALIAS target is missing.

It still continues compiling, and finally failed with:

ld: library 'Imath::imath_Python3' not found

clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)

make[2]: *** [python/PyAlembic/alembic.so] Error 1

math.so and imathnumpy.so have been build and can be used

Searching for the solution I stumbled on this mailing list and various GitHub issues that mention that imath_python3 is currently not exported as a target from make.

The issue is explained and being worked on: https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/Imath/pull/400

Looking through the history back until the split from OpenEXR I never see that target exported anywhere.

What version of Imath (if any) can be used to build PyAlembic? Or do I have to go down the IlmBase from OpenEXR route?

Or is there something else I'm not getting yet?

Cheers!

Willem

 

[Lucas Miller]

Try Imath 3.1.9 OR you can try bringing back this EXPORT:

https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/Imath/pull/397

This might work okay for MacOS, and it worked for Linux.

Lucas