PBRT Setup

(By Richard Sharp for last year's CSE 782 class) This document should help you get PBRT built and set up for CSE 782. The PBRT homepage is located at www.pbrt.org.

Linux setup

According to the authors, gcc version 3.3 or later is required to compile PBRT. However if you are attempting to compile PBRT on the SOC lab's lcc##e servers (Linux compute servers) you'll notice that only gcc v2.96 is installed. To get PBRT to compile you'll need to reference this document by Steven Bergner for modifications to make to various PBRT source files.

Carefully following the instructions in Steven's document I was able to get PBRT to compile although I ended up not having enough disk quota to render any images (took up about 333 Mb).

If you choose to set up PBRT on your Linux environment at home and run into problems please email me and I'll post them here (hopefully with solutions).

Windows setup

Personally, I built the system on Windows. If you do the same, make sure you have Cygwin installed (along with bison and flex in the Cygwin package) from www.cygwin.com. It is convenient if you install this package to c:\cygwin. Secondly you must have Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 installed (you can get a copy from the SOC lab if you don't have it).

Once your system meets these prerequisites you can install by following these steps: