This repository holds 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, by Matt Pharr, Wenzel Jakob, and Greg Humphreys. As before, the code is available under the BSD license.

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.

Over 6GB of example scenes are available for download. (Many are new and weren't available with previous versions of pbrt.) We're trying an experiment and making them available via git. Run:

$ git clone git://git.pbrt.org/pbrt-v3-scenes

to get them. We will update this repository as more scenes become available. (See the README.md.html file in the scene distribution for more information about the scenes and preview images.)

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

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 -j4, and pbrt, the obj2pbrt and imgtool utilities, and an executable that runs pbrt's unit tests 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.

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.

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 lne, 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.

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;

Again, don't forget to recompile after making this change.