pbrt news

The Second Edition of The Book Is Now Available

Mon, 12 July 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Amazon is now shipping copies of the book and Barnes and Noble reports that it is available as well (and is presumably shipping it). We expect that it will be widely available shortly, if not already.

The Second Edition of The Book is at the Printers

Mon, 31 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The second edition of the Physically Based Rendering book is now at the printers; it should be available in bookstores at the end of July. The new version represents a substantial revision of the book; it's now over 1,200 pages long.

There are a number of major additions to the book, including coverage of bounding volume hierarchy acceleration structures, full-spectral rendering, motion blur with interpolated transformations, rendering with measured BRDF data, Metropolis light transport, subsurface scattering, the "instant global illumination" algorithm, and an entire chapter on precomputed light transport algorithms. Many other parts of the book have been substantially revised, including the coverage of photon mapping and irradiance caching. Finally, the system is implemented as a task-parallel system, making it possible to discuss a variety of issues related to parallel programming in the book.

See http://pbrt.org/contents.php for the full updated table of contents. Chapter 4 of the second edition, covering acceleration structures--grids, BVHs, and kd-trees--is available for download from the pbrt website.

The book can be pre-ordered from Amazon. (It will, of course, be available from all of the usual other sources as well.)

pbrt-v2 Release

Mon, 31 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The pbrt source code corresponding to the system described in the forthcoming second edition of the book is now available. (We'll call it pbrt-v2 to distinguish it from the system described in the first edition of the book, pbrt-v1.) In addition to all of the new features that the second edition of the book introduces, this version of the code is more efficient and has many small improvements over pbrt-v1. The distribution now includes a number of exporters to the pbrt format, covering 3ds max, Blender, Mathematica, and Structure Synth.

We'd especially like to thank Kevin Egan, John Danks, Asbjørn Heid, Volodymyr Kachurovskyi, Sebastian Mach, Jiawen Kevin Chen, Guillermo M. Leal Llaguno, "Viznut", Solomon Boulos, and Xiong "Tomwindcloud" Wei for their contributions to this release.

Information about how to download pbrt-v2 is available from the pbrt downloads page. We'd be happy to hear feedback or bug reports from your experiences with pbrt-v2.

Example Scenes

Mon, 31 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

We've put together a collection of 55 example scenes for use with pbrt-v2. Thanks to the contributions of a number of talented artists, we are able to make available a number of interesting and complex scenes to render, including the spectacular "San Miguel" scene created by Guillermo M. Leal Llaguno. (A rendering of this image is featured on the cover of the second edition of the book.)

A description of all of the scenes and rendered images of them can be previewed on the website. The total amount of data for the scenes' geometry and textures is approximately 2GB but compresses down to a 618MB zip file. Information about how to download the scenes is available on the scenes page; please use BitTorrent to download them (and seed afterward!) if at all possible--the bandwidth costs to us for distributing a 618MB file hundreds or thousands of times are substantial.

pbrt 1.05 released

Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

pbrt 1.05 has been released: this will almost certainly be the final version of the pbrt 1.0 source code distribution. It can be downloaded from the downloads page or via the git SCM system from the pbrt 1.0 github page. The pbrt 2.0 code base, a substantially updated and improved version of the system and which which will accompany the forthcoming release of the second edition of the Physically Based Rendering will be the focus of future development.

Alpha Release of pbrt 2.0

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

An alpha release of pbrt version 2.0 has been released. This version of the system corresponds to the version that will be described in the second edition of the book, which is expected to be available in August 2010. The system can be downloaded from the pbrt github page, either by clicking the "download" button or by using the git SCM system.