pbrt, Version 3

This repository holds the current snapshot of the source code to the new version of pbrt that will be described in the forthcoming third edition of Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation. As before, the code is available under the BSD license.

Although the new version of the book won't be released until mid-2016, we're making the source code available now so that interested users can look at the code, try out the system, and possibly help us out. (See how you can help for more information about contributing.) The initial release of the source code doesn't include updated documentation (and the book isn't out yet!), so you should only try it out if you're comfortable digging into source code.

Some example scenes are available for download.

The pbrt website has general information about both Physically Based Rendering as well as pbrt-v2, the previous version of the system.

Significant Changes

The system has seen many changes since the second edition. To figure out how to use the new features, you may want to look at the example scene files in the scenes/ directory and read through the source code to figure out the parameters and details of the following. (Better documentation will come once everything is finalized.)

• Bidirectional path tracing: Integrator "bdpt" does proper bidirectional path tracing with multiple importance sampling.
• Metropolis sampling: Integrator "mlt" uses the bidirectional path tracer with Hachisuka et al.'s "Multiplexed Metropolis Light Transport" technique.
• Improved numerical robustness for intersection calculations: epsilons are small and provably conservative. Section draft
• Subsurface scattering: all new implementation, integrated into the path tracing integrator. See the scenes/head example scene.
• Curve shape: thin ribbons described by bicubic Bezier curves. Great for hair, fur, and grass.
• PLY mesh support: meshes in PLY format can be used directly: Shape "plymesh" "string filename" "mesh.ply"
• Realistic camera model: tracing rays through lenses to make images! See the scenes/dragons example scene.
• Participating media: the boundaries of shapes are now used to delineate the extent of regions of participating media in the scene. See the scenes/medium-sphere example scene.
• New samplers: a much-improved Halton sampler, and an all-new Sobol' sampler are both quite effective for path tracing and bidirectional path tracing.
• Fourier representation of measured materials: an implementation of Jakob et al's A Comprehensive Framework for Rendering Layered Materials. (See an example in the scenes/dragons example scene).
  • New versions of the BSDF files it uses can be generated with a visual layer editor provided in a special branch of the Mitsuba renderer. To compile this branch, install PyQt (matching your system’s Python Version) and compile Mitsuba with the -DDOUBLE_PRECISION flag (see the documentation for details on building Mitsuba). After sourcing the ’setpath.sh’ script on a terminal, enter the ‘editor’ directory and run ‘main.py’ to launch the visual layer editor.
• Improved microfacet models: specular transmission through microfacets, and Heitz's improved importance sampling.
• No external dependencies: thanks to Syoyo Fujita's tinyexr, Sean Barrett's stb_image_write.h, Diego Nehab's rply, and Emil Mikulic's TARGA library, no external libraries need to be compiled to build pbrt.

Many other small things have been improved (parallelization scheme, image updates, statistics system, overall cleanliness of interfaces); see the source code for details.

Building The System

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 -j4, and pbrt and some additional tools will be built.
• 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.

File Format Changes

We've tried to keep the scene description file format as unchanged as possible. However, progress in other parts of the system required changes to the scene description format.

First, the "Renderer", "SurfaceIntegrator", and "VolumeIntegrator" directives have all been unified under "Integrator"; only a single integrator now needs to be specified.

The following specific implementations were removed:

• Accelerator "grid"
  • Use "bvh" or "kdtree" instead.
• Material "measured", "shinymetal"
  • The new "fourier" material should now be used for measured BRDFs.
  • Use "uber" in place of "shinymetal".
• VolumeRegion: all
  • Use the new participating media representation described above
• SurfaceIntegrator: photonmap, irradiancecache, igi, dipolesubsurface, ambientocclusion, useprobes, diffuseprt, glossyprt
  • Use "sppm" for the "photonmap".
  • The "path" integrator now handles subsurface scattering directly.
  • The others aren't as good as path tracing anyway. :-)
• VolumeIntegrator: single, emission
  • Use the "volpath" path tracing integrator.
• Sampler: bestcandidate
  • Use any other sampler.
• Renderer: all
  • Use "Integrator", as described above.

How You Can Help

pbrt has benefited immensely both from its users who have extended it in interesting ways and found bugs as well as from the many sharp-eyed readers of the book over the years. If you're interested in helping out with the third edition, some areas where we'd appreciate help are below. We'll happily acknowledge contributors in the book's preface; we'll send a signed copy of the book to folks who make significant contributions.

• Finding bugs: though we've tried to test thoroughly, there are certainly bugs in the code, and we'd like to find them before they are published in the book! The pbrt-v3 issue tracker is the best place to report anything suspicious you find. Useful things to do include:
  • Running various scenes through the renderer and checking the results.
  • Using static code analysis tools (e.g. MSVC's /analyze) on the code
  • Using dynamic tools like valgrind, Address Sanitizer, Thread Sanitizer, etc. when rendering various scenes.
• Portability: the system has been developed on Linux and OS X using x86 CPUs. It should be widely portable to other OSes and CPUs, but the only way to get those details right is for people to try it and let us know which targets don't currently work.
• Images and figures: we'd like to refresh many of the figures in the book, but probably won't have time to get to all of them. If you can spend some time on making a nice scene or two that we can use for figures, that'd be a huge help. Specific areas of interest include:
  • Subsurface scattering: a human face, biological objects, ...
  • Showing off complex light transport using bidirectional path tracing.
  • Illustrating materials: something to replace all the usage of the killeroo in Chapters 8 and 9...
  • Showing the capabilities of the new curves primitive: hair, fur, fields of grass, ...
  • It would be great to have the Digital Emily model available in pbrt.