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mmp
pbrt-v3
C++2015–2024
mmp / pbrt-v3

pbrt-v3

Source code for pbrt, the renderer described in the third edition of "Physically Based Rendering: From Theory To Implementation", by Matt Pharr, Wenzel Jakob, and Greg Humphreys.

Creative & Media
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
6Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
5.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Source code for pbrt, the renderer described in the third edition of "Physically Based Rendering: From Theory To Implementation", by Matt Pharr, Wenzel Jakob, and Greg Humphreys.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year6 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-08-02 14:40:06 UTC to 2024-07-11 03:03:59 UTC.

012015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

6 sources
rychco·Sep 14, 2022
Once you finish the main book, there's a few free bonus chapters provided [1] that help you implement soft area lights, bounding boxes (AABB in this case), and texture mapping. Beyond that, you might be interested in the "One Weekend" series [2], which is all C++ but is mostly general enough for other languages. There's also PBRT [3] which is an open source textbook/documentation for the pbrt-v3 renderer [4], but this is beyond the scope of "small exercise" territory. Good luck! [1] http://www.raytracerchallenge.com/#bonus [2] https://raytracing.github.io/ [3] https://pbr-book.org/3ed-2018/contents [4] https://github.com/mmp/pbrt-v3
In Ask HN: What is the coding exercise you use to explore a new language?
fsloth·Oct 28, 2020
This codebase won an Oscar: https://pbrt.org/ https://github.com/mmp/pbrt-v3 That said, IMHO, there is no "clean" C++ code. There are C++ codebases that use different styles, and their "quality" more or less is context sensitive. Personally I felt the best tutorial to C++ were actually two other programming languages - Scheme and F#. Scheme drove in the concept that it's totally fine to model things based on the shape of the data and that you don't need to create type based abstractions around every thing. F# then demonstrated how a language with type system is supposed to work. The problem with C++ is that the language is so verbose that unless you have an abbreviated model in your head how a type based language can be used to solve problems in best way, you will get lost in trivial C++ minutiae. So, personally, I generally think "Am I s
Read the rest
olving a Scheme like problem or Standard ML like problem" and then try to apply C++ as simply as possible. Several academics have created a career of how to patch C++/Java/C# with concepts that make them less fragile in a collaborative context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns https://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Obj... In my opinion design patterns are not a fundamental concept, but rather provide common syntax for collaboration purposes for various patterns that are parts of language and more or less invisible in e.g. Scheme or F#. But if one is diving into C++ it's probably convenient to be familiar with these concepts.
In Ask HN: Good C++ code bases to read?

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