

To workaround this issue, before building Blender (after make update) you must build OpenEXR. Because of this, OpenEXR.dll from Blender's library repository will not work. When OpenEXR is built targetting Windows 8 or newer it will use CreateFile2, which is not present on Windows 7, instead of CreateFile. Starting with version 3.5 some static libraries were switched to shared as described in Library changes for Blender 3.5. 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.

Stable releases, compiled from the same commit as the official releases, are available on the Releases page. 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. 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. Windows 7 support for Blender 3.x Description
