Assignment 1

PBRT Build/Installation

I compiled PBRT both on Myth1 as well as on my own machine in Visual Studio 2005. While the linux build was completed fairly quickly (except some typos in getting the environment setting right), the Visual Studio 2005 build took a bit longer.

First, Visual Studio give many warnings about outdated/unsafe function calls and type conversions, but I assume these can be ignored. Further, getting the include paths to OpenEXR right was a pain, because just changing "vs2003" to "vs2005" does not work. You have to type in the full absolute path, it does not accept a relative one. I also assume that the included tools cannot be compiled under Windows.

Rendering Process

In order to speed up the test renderings, I ran most runs at a resolution of 200x200 and 1 sample per pixel. Also lowering the area light samples compared to the final image significantly decreased rendering time. I rendered the scenes on my own windows PC and viewed the images simultaneously in Photoshop instead of using the Myth machines.

Experimentation / Other Cool stuff

I included the spot::condedeltaangle parameter to create a more desired spot cone fall-off for some spotlights.