PBRT Help

Please email cs348b-spr0506-staff@lists.stanford.edu if you are having problems building or running PBRT using your preferred environment. The following instructions might help you out though (big thanks to Lee Hendrickson for taking good notes as he went through the trouble).

Building pbrt on Linux (the 'myth' machines in Sweet Hall)

The public release of pbrt 1.02 available on www.pbrt.org requires modification to build on Stanford's 'myth' machines. We have placed a myth-specific tar file online at /afs/ir/class/cs348b/pbrt/pbrt1.02.cs348b.tar.gz. This archive contains two subdirectories:

After unzipping this archive to %%MY_LOCAL_DIR%% in your home directory, you will need to add the following directories to your environment's library search path.

For example, assume I unzipped the archive to /afs/ir/stanford/users/k/a/kayvonf/src. Then in csh I'd set my LD_LIBRARY_PATH to:

setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /afs/ir/stanford/users/k/a/kayvonf/src/pbrt/bin:/afs/ir/stanford/users/k/a/kayvonf/src/cs348b_extras/lib

So the entire process to compile PBRT on a myth machine is:

  1. extract /afs/ir/class/cs348b/pbrt/pbrt1.02.cs348b.tar.gz into your local AFS space.

  2. set the appropriate LD_LIBRARY_PATH (probably a good idea to add this to your .login)
  3. build pbrt by typing 'make' from the /pbrt directory
  4. build the tools by typing 'make' from the /pbrt/tools directory
  5. Before running pbrt, you will need to add PBRT_SEARCHPATH=%%FULL_PATH_TO_MY_LOCAL_DIR%%/pbrt/bin to your environment.

Building pbrt on Windows Using Visual Studio 2003

The build of pbrt using Visual Studio 2003 is pretty much straight out of the box, and following the instructions in the pbrt book should get you all the way there. A couple notes:

Building pbrt on Windows Using Visual Studio 2005

Unfortunately, pbrt doesn't build straight out of the box using Visual Studio 2005. I'll get instructions up on how to do this shortly. Shout loudly if you need this immediately.

Building pbrt on Gentoo Linux (and possibly other distros)

Installing PBRT:

1. emerge openexr

2. edit Makefile, changing to:

3. edit core/pbrtlex.l, changing to:

4. edit tools/Makefile, changing to:

5. make

6. cd tools && make

Setting Environment Variables:

1. edit ~/.bashrc or similar, adding:

2. source ~/.bashrc

Good to go! Just type pbrt $FILE to run the program.