blendPBRTv3 - PBRTv3 Blender Exporter Plugin

A simple and minimal exporter for Blender 2.79 for PBRTv3.

Installation guide: InstallBlenderExporterOnly

Compatibility

Tested on Ubuntu Linux 18.04 and Blender 2.79.

Known issues

• You must save your blend project before rendering. This is due to a bug in the Blender OBJ exporter attempting to update the mouse cursor during rendering.
• Camera FOV calculations are not precise in the exporter scene. You’ll need some experimentation.
• Material names that include spaces and other special characters may not work. It is recommended to use material names with only standard letters.

PBRT example scenes

plankgrid

Download: https://dl.jstudios.ovh/2018/07/plankgrid.tgz

Notes

In Blender, you can set the PBRT binaries directory, which should point point to the directory that contains the pbrt and obj2pbrt executables. The user-set directory overrides any internal variables and included PBRT distributions.

The exporter is also able to use pbrt if it is present in the PATH.

Exporter supported features

General features

• Film resolution and resolution scale
• Perspective camera
• UV-mapped image textures
• Standard 3D mesh

Materials

Almost all configurable channels in materials can be assigned an image texture instead. When an image texture is linked, the constant value is overridden.

• Matte - Diffuse
• Emission - Emission
• Plastic - Diffuse, Specular
• Glass - Transmission, Reflectivity, IOR, U Roughness, V Roughness
• Mirror - Reflectivity
• Mix - We signal errors in Mix configuration by rendering a purple material. Try to re-choose the mixed sub-materials. It can solve the issue as the plugin listens for update events.

Environment

Environment lighting is supported as a constant color or a light probe image in .PNG or .EXR formats. The light probe image values are multiplied by both the magnitude and the fixed color, so make sure both are non-black.

Integrators

• Path
• DRC (Requires a modified version of PBRTv3)
• Bidirectional