pbrt, Version 3

This repository holds the source code to the version of pbrt that is described in the third edition of Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation, by Matt Pharr, Wenzel Jakob, and Greg Humphreys. As before, the code is available under the BSD license.

The pbrt website has general information about both the Physically Based Rendering book as well as many other resources for pbrt.

Example scenes

Over 8GB of example scenes are available for download. (Many are new and weren't available with previous versions of pbrt.) See the pbrt-v3 scenes page on the pbrt website for information about how to download them.

After downloading them, see the README.md.html file in the scene distribution for more information about the scenes and preview images.

Additional resources

There is a pbrt Google Groups mailing list that can be a helpful resource.
Please see the User's Guide for more information about how to check out and build the system as well as various additional information about working with pbrt.
Should you find a bug in pbrt, please report it in the bug tracker.
Please report any errors you find in the Physically Based Rendering book to authors@pbrt.org.

Note: we tend to let bug reports and book errata emails pile up for a few months for processing them in batches. Don't think we don't appreciate them. :-)

Building pbrt

To check out pbrt together with all dependencies, be sure to use the --recursive flag when cloning the repository, i.e.

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/mmp/pbrt-v3/

If you accidentally already cloned pbrt without this flag (or to update an pbrt source tree after a new submodule has been added, run the following command to also fetch the dependencies:

$ git submodule update --init --recursive

pbrt uses cmake for its build system. On Linux and OS X, cmake is available via most package management systems. For Windows, or to build it from source, see the cmake downloads page.

For command-line builds on Linux and OS X, once you have cmake installed, create a new directory for the build, change to that directory, and run cmake [path to pbrt-v3]. A Makefile will be created in that current directory. Run make -j8, to build pbrt, the obj2pbrt and imgtool utilities, and an executable that runs pbrt's unit tests.
To make an XCode project file on OS X, run cmake -G Xcode [path to pbrt-v3].
Finally, on Windows, the cmake GUI will create MSVC solution files that you can load in MSVC.

If you plan to edit the lexer and parser for pbrt's input files (src/core/pbrtlex.ll and src/core/pbrtparase.y), you'll also want to have bison and flex installed. On OS X, note that the version of flex that ships with the developer tools is extremely old and is unable to process pbrtlex.ll; you'll need to install a more recent version of flex in this case.

Debug and Release Builds

By default, the build files that are created that will compile an optimized release build of pbrt. These builds give the highest performance when rendering, but many runtime checks are disabled in these builds and optimized builds are generally difficult to trace in a debugger.

To build a debug version of pbrt, set the CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE flag to Debug when you run cmake to create build files to make a debug build. For example, when running cmake from the command line, provide it with the argument -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug. Then build pbrt using the resulting build files. (You may want to keep two build directories, one for release builds and one for debug builds, so that you don't need to switch back and forth.)

Debug versions of the system run much more slowly than release builds. Therefore, in order to avoid surprisingly slow renders when debugging support isn't desired, debug versions of pbrt print a banner message indicating that they were built for debugging at startup time.

Build Configurations

There are two configuration settings that must be set at compile time. The first controls whether pbrt uses 32-bit or 64-bit values for floating-point computation, and the second controls whether tristimulus RGB values or sampled spectral values are used for rendering. (Both of these aren't amenable to being chosen at runtime, but must be determined at compile time for efficiency).

To change them from their defaults (respectively, 32-bit and RGB.), edit the file src/core/pbrt.h.

To select 64-bit floating point values, remove the comment symbol before the line:

//#define PBRT_FLOAT_AS_DOUBLE

and recompile the system.

To select full-spectral rendering, comment out the first of these two typedefs and remove the comment from the second one:

typedef RGBSpectrum Spectrum;
// typedef SampledSpectrum Spectrum;