Assimp  v4.1. (December 2018)
Installation

Using the pre-built libraries with Visual C++ 8/9

If you develop at Visual Studio 2015 or 2017, you can simply use the pre-built linker libraries provided in the distribution. Extract all files to a place of your choice. A directory called "assimp" will be created there. Add the assimp/include path to your include paths (Menu->Extras->Options->Projects and Solutions->VC++ Directories->Include files) and the assimp/lib/<Compiler> path to your linker paths (Menu->Extras->Options->Projects and Solutions->VC++ Directories->Library files). This is necessary only once to setup all paths inside you IDE.

To use the library in your C++ project you can simply generate a project file via cmake. One way is to add the assimp-folder as a subdirectory via the cmake-command

addsubdiectory(assimp)

Now just add the assimp-dependency to your application:

TARGET_LINK_LIBRARIES(my_game assimp)

If done correctly you should now be able to compile, link, run and use the application.

Building the library from scratch

First you need to install cmake. Now just get the code from github or download the latest version from the webside. to build the library just open a command-prompt / bash, navigate into the repo-folder and run cmake via:

cmake CMakeLists.txt

A project-file of your default make-system ( like gnu-make on linux or Visual-Studio on Windows ) will be generated. Run the build and you are done. You can find the libs at assimp/lib and the dll's / so's at bin.

Windows DLL Build

The Assimp-package can be built as DLL. You just need to run the default cmake run.

static lib

The Assimp-package can be build as a static library as well. Do do so just set the configuration variable BUILD_SHARED_LIBS to off during the cmake run.