Using Blender for Scene Creation

WARNING: This is more of a call for participation than giving you all the details on how to use Blender or the related add-ons.

How can I create my own scenes for the rs-pbrt renderer?

In a previous blog post, called Getting Started, I mentioned a repository on GitLab, where I collect scene files and hopefully you have rendered a couple of them already.

I should probably mention another potential source for .pbrt scenes (see description), which can be cloned from git.pbrt.org:

git clone git://git.pbrt.org/pbrt-v3-scenes

Unfortunately the rs_pbrt executable is not 100% compatible to the C++ counter part (yet), which means that only some of those scenes will work as they are.

This blog post is about creating such scene descriptions yourself by using an Open Source 3D creation tool called Blender.

Get Blender

First download Blender, then follow the steps for your operating system.

Exporting data from Blender

After having installed Blender there are a couple of choices to export data from Blender.

Using the File->Export Menu

Using a renderer-specific Add-On

Giulio Jiang has developed a Blender exporter for the C++ version of pbrt-v3. Currently I have one of his scenes in the GitLab repository, but let's ignore this option for now.

Back to the File->Export Menu

The last two entries in the File->Export menu (see screenshot above) are Python scripts I wrote myself, and therefore I control how well they work. So bug reports are welcome and hopefully I can fix them for future releases.

io_scene_multi

The purpose of this Blender add-on (see last entry in screenshot, called Multiple Renderers) is basically to export a Blender scene in more than one scene description for multiple renderers. I will not go into further details how to install and use the add-on, but basically a lot of the scenes found in the download section of my personal web site were created using this add-on. If anybody has questions about it, please email me (see Imprint for a valid email address).

io_scene_pbrt

The second to last entry in the screenshot above, called PBRT Renderer is the one add-on I want to talk about. It's very early on in development, but that gives you the chance to participate in development, if you can code in Python, or you can report issues (on Codeberg) for bug reports or feature requests. Don't expect too much for now, but I use this add-on to work on simple test scenes for missing features in rs-pbrt. See for examples of such features in the closed issues section.

Conclusion

This is more of a call for participation than giving you all the details on how to use Blender or the related add-ons. Feel free to contact me by email (see Imprint for a valid email address) in case you have questions, or open issues in one of the repositories mentioned above (I guess you have to register there first).