Panda3D is a game engine, a framework for 3D rendering and game development for Python and C++ programs. Panda3D is open-source and free for any purpose, including commercial ventures, thanks to its liberal license. To learn more about Panda3D's capabilities, visit the gallery and the feature list. To learn how to use Panda3D, check the documentation resources. If you get stuck, ask for help from our active community.

Panda3D is licensed under the Modified BSD License. See the LICENSE file for more details.

We currently build using the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 compiler. You do not need Microsoft Visual Studio to build Panda3D, though - the relevant compilers are included as part of the Windows 7.1 SDK.

You will also need to have the third-party dependency libraries available for the build scripts to use. These are available from here: https://www.panda3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=16346

After acquiring these dependencies, you may simply build Panda3D from the command prompt using the following command:

makepanda\makepanda.bat --everything --installer

When the build succeeds, it will produce an .exe file that you can use to install Panda3D on your system.

Building Panda3D on Linux is easy. All you need is to invoke the makepanda script using the version of Python that you want Panda3D to be built against.

Run makepanda.py with the --help option to see which options are available. Usually, you will want to specify the --everything option (which builds with support for all features for which it detects the prerequisite dependencies) and the --installer option (which produces an installable .deb or .rpm file for you to install, depending on your distribution).

The following command illustrates how to build Panda3D with some common options:

python2.7 makepanda/makepanda.py --everything --installer --no-egl --no-gles --no-gles2

You will probably see some warnings saying that it's unable to find several dependency packages. You should determine which ones you want to include in your build and install the respective development packages. You may visit this manual page for an overview of the various dependencies.

If you are on Ubuntu, this command should cover the most frequently used third-party packages:

sudo apt-get install python-dev libpng-dev zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libx11-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libxrandr-dev libxxf86dga-dev libxcursor-dev bison flex libfreetype6-dev libvorbis-dev libjpeg-dev libeigen3-dev libopenal-dev libode-dev libbullet-dev nvidia-cg-toolkit

Once Panda3D has built, you can either install the .deb or .rpm package that it produced (if relevant to your platform, and you added --installer). On other systems, you will need to use the installpanda script to install it onto your system. Careful: it is not easy to uninstall Panda3D in this way!

python2.7 makepanda/installpanda.py --prefix=/usr/local