Setting Up Your Project
This page details the global changes that you must make to the build settings and configuration of your own project in order for your application to invoke the Beast API.
Includes
You must direct your compiler to look for include files in the include directory within your Beast installation directory.
Your application headers and source code files should therefore be able to include Beast headers as follows:
#include "beastapi/beastmanager.h"
For the most part, the overview topics in this documentation do not specify which header files you must include in your code in order to make use of the various functions in the API. You should consult the API Reference to determine which Beast header file you need to include in your project in order to call each API function.
Libraries
You must direct your linker to link against the following libraries within your Beast installation directory:
- For 32-bit Windows builds: lib\beast32.lib.
- For 64-bit Windows builds: lib\beast64.lib.
Dynamically linked library
When your application invokes the Beast API, it will need access to a DLL file included in the Beast package at the following locations:
- For 32-bit Windows builds: bin\beast32.dll.
- For 64-bit Windows builds: bin\beast64.dll.
You can give your application access to the DLL it needs using any of the following approaches:
- Putting the DLL in the same directory as the executable for your application.
- Putting the path to the DLL in the %PATH% environment variable maintained by your operating system.
- Putting the DLL in the Windows\system32 directory. This approach has the benefit of ensuring that all builds of your application will be able to access the DLL, but has the disadvantage of making it difficult to use multiple different Beast versions on the same machine.
Depending on the approach you choose, you may need to adjust the build process for your application to make sure that the correct version of the DLL ends up copied to the appropriate location.
Other Beast executables
Depending on how you use the Beast API, your application may need to invoke other executable files included in the bin directory within the Beast installation directory. In order to permit this, you need to make these executables available to your application using one of the following approaches:
- When you initialize the Beast API in your application code, you can specify the location of the Beast executables it should use. For details, see Initializing and Terminating Beast.
- If you do not specify the directory in your code, the Beast API will look for executables in the %BEAST_ROOT%\bin directory.
- If the executables still cannot be found, the Beast API will look for them in the same directory from which it loaded the DLL.
In any case, you may need to adjust the build process for your application to make sure that the correct executables end up copied to the appropriate location.
License
Use of the Beast API is protected by a license key. The validity of hte license key is checked before each rendering job. The license key must be included as a text string argument when a Beast SDK Manager is created using ILBCreateManager(). It may be more practical to store the license key in an environment variable, or external file, to prevent it from being compiled. The Beast SDK samples, Maya plug-in, and UDK integration all look for the license key in the BEAST_LICENSE environment variable.
Additional licensing information can be found in Licensing.
Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please see the Autodesk Creative Commons FAQ for more information.