Physically-based Rendering

Rendering 3D scenes physically-based through Path Tracing. Interaction of light with surfaces is evaluated through bi-directional reflection distribution functions (BRDF). — Master Thesis 2013/14

Acceleration structure: BVH

• Stackless traversal.
• 1 or 2 faces per leaf node.
• Code for use of spatial splits in build process exists, but seems faulty. Should not be used.

Requirements

• OS: Linux
  Though it should be possible to built and run it on other platforms as well. I just never tried it.
• Hardware: GPU with OpenCL 1.1 and OpenGL 3.1 capabilities
  Tested only with NVIDIA.

Libraries/headers

• freeglut3-dev
• libboost-dev
• libdevil-dev
• libglew-dev
• libglm-dev
• libqt5core5a
• libxi-dev
• libxmu-dev
• opencl-headers

NVIDIA and OpenCL

If there are problems to get NVIDIA hardware to work with OpenCL (which is very likely in my experience), here is some trouble shooting:

• Check if you have this file: /etc/OpenCL/vendors/nvidia.icd
  The name doesn't really matter, but there has to be a file with the name or path of the NVIDIA OpenCL lib, e.g.: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnvidia-opencl.so.346.82 or just libnvidia-opencl.so.1
  Check which library files you have with locate libnvidia-opencl.so.

• I have the following installed and it works:

    libcg
    libcggl
    libcuda1-361-updates
    nvidia-cg-dev
    nvidia-cg-toolkit
    nvidia-361-updates
    nvidia-common
    nvidia-modprobe
    nvidia-prime
    nvidia-opencl-icd-361-updates
    nvidia-settings
    ocl-icd-libopencl1
    opencl-headers
  

Build and execute

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release CMakeLists.txt
make
./PBR

Notes

• NVIDIA only supports OpenCL 1.1. OpenCL 1.2 support seems unlikely at the moment.