Assignment 1
PBRT Installation
I compiled PBRT on VS2005 at home. There were alot of warnings about risky casts and deprecated C-lib stuff. OpenEXR paths needed to be absolute instead of relative.
One really annoying thing that took me a while to understand: I was trying to invoke pbrt from within cygwin and set PBRT_SEARCHPATH with a unix style path. Since pbrt uses win32 file open mechanisms it fails when given unix paths. So to get it work you have to do alot of escaping to get a win32 style path into a cygwin environment variable.
Rendering
I rendered most images in miniture (200x200) with only 2 samples for area light sources.
Experimentation
No special experiments, just played around alot with the basics of transformation matrices and ways to provide location and orientation info for shapes.