CS348b2007

PBRT Help

Please email cs348b-spr0607-staff@lists.stanford.edu if you are having problems building or running PBRT using your preferred environment. Before emailing, read over the following notes on common issues with getting PBRT up and running on your system.

Building pbrt on Linux (the 'myth' machines in Gates B08)

Exrtotiff is a simple utility provided with pbrt to convert high dynamic range (HDR) image files (.EXR) produced by a pbrt render into tiff files (.TIF) that can be displayed by most image programs. exrtotiff src is located in the PBRTSRC_ROOT/tools directory. Typing make from this directory will build exrtotiff.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH PBRT_SEARCHPATH

Building pbrt on Windows Using Visual Studio 2003

The build of pbrt using Visual Studio 2003 is pretty much straight out of the box.

  1. Download the PBRT 1.02 distribution from: http://www.pbrt.org/src/pbrt-src-1.02.zip

  2. Unzip the source archive, I'll refer to the directory YOUR_LOCAL_PATH/src-1.02 as PBRTSRC_ROOT. You will find VS2003 solution file in PBRTSRC_ROOT/win32/pbrt.sln

  3. To build pbrt, you will need a minimal installation of cygwin (for flex and bison). Note that if you install cygwin into the default c:\cygwin directory, no modifications to the Visual Studio build are necessary. If cygwin is not installed into this directory, you will need to do change the custom build step for the files {pbrtlex.l} and {pbrtparse.y} in the 'parser files' directory of the 'core' project. Right click on these files to bring up the property page, and change the command line for the custom build step to correctly call the cygwin flex and bison executables on your system.

  4. Build the entire pbrt solution. A Debug mode build will place binaries in PBRTSRC_ROOT/win32/Projects/Debug. A Release mode build will place binaries in PBRTSRC_ROOT/win32/Projects/Release.

  5. Set the PBRT_SEARCHPATH. Pbrt compiles each of its modules as dynamically linked libraries and uses PBRT_SEARCHPATH to find these libraries when running. Create a system environment variable called PBRT_SEARCHPATH and set its value to either PBRTSRC_ROOT/win32/Projects/Debug or PBRTSRC_ROOT/win32/Projects/Release, depending on whether you are developing using a debug or release build of the program. You may also find it convenient to add one of these directories to your system path.

Building Exrtotiff on Windows

Exrtotiff is a simple utility provided with pbrt to convert high dynamic range (HDR) image files (.EXR) produced by a pbrt render into tiff files (.TIF) that can be displayed by most image programs. exrtotiff src is located in the PBRTSRC_ROOT/tools directory. The pbrt archive does not include a Visual Studio project file to build exrtotiff on Windows. We will attempt to provide one shortly. For now, you can download a compiled Win32 binary here.

Building pbrt on Windows Using Visual Studio 2005

COMING SOON

Viewing and converting EXR Images

To view .EXR images produces by pbrt, you can either convert them to .TIF files using exrtotiff or view them directly using an imaging program that supports them.

The most common usage of exrtotiff is simply converting from an .exr file to a .tif.

exrtotiff srcfilename.exr outputfilename.tif

Other Programs that can display EXR images

last edited 2007-04-09 04:23:31 by KayvonFatahalian