Windows 7 support for Blender 3.x and newer
This repository contains a compatibility DLL for running Blender 3.x on Windows 7 and a patch to modify the Blender source to use it. It does this by prepending bcompat7 to the list of libraries so it uses the entry points in it instead of those in the system libraries.
In order for addons that require numpy to work, you need to install the Windows 7 May 2016 rollup (KB3125574).
Stable releases, compiled from the same commit as the official releases, are available on the Releases page.
More recent builds, including pre-release versions, are provided by Loriem: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/eufffe60fvtr9mz/AAA0YtogOoJTKggWtgAXRyXJa?dl=0
- Reverted https://developer.blender.org/T97828 due to rendering issues on AMD Polaris GPUs (issues #18, #19)
Starting with version 3.5 some static libraries were switched to shared. For version 4.1, two libraries need to be rebuilt: OpenEXR and OpenUSD. Both of them use CreateFile2 which is not present on Windows 7.
Before building Blender (after make update) you must build them. Clone their repositories, apply the patch found in this repo and run build.cmd.
The patches were made against version 3.2.2 of OpenEXR and version 24.03 of OpenUSD.
Build Blender following these instructions: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Building_Blender/Windows with a small change.
Before running make update, copy bcompat7.patch into the blender source tree and run git apply bcompat7.patch (there will be some warnings about whitespace, they can be ignored) then continue with the guide.
To use the your own build of this compatibility DLL, overwrite the files in the lib/win64_vc15/bcompat7 directory created after running make update.
In addition to this DLL, api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll is required to run Blender because of Python. A version of this library for Windows 7 can be found here: https://github.com/nalexandru/api-ms-win-core-path-HACK