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THIS WIKI IS CURRENTLY ON MAINTENANCE!

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PearRay is an experimental high accurate ray tracing application framework to create physical plausible, photo realistic or artistic single images or animation sequences. It's in active development, but still misses some of the 'required' features to be fully production ready.

See the Road Map for more information about the current status of the project.

Features (Upcoming)

• High quality images based on Spectral Rendering and Multiple Importance Sampling.
• Different integrators. (Distributed Raytracing, Bidirectional Raytracing, Progressive Photon Mapping and VCM( Not implemented ))
• Shaders based on OSL with Displacement Mapping. (TODO)
• Resource Caching
• Radiometric (limited to visible spectrum), photometric or color based simulation.
• multi core and GPU-supported rendering.

Resources

• Road Map
• Gallery
• Examples
• Tutorials
• Trello Board

Installing

The PearRay build system uses CMake (>= 2.8.7) and is buildable on Windows and Linux systems. MacOS is not tested.

Requirements

You need at least the following libraries to compile PearRay from source:

• Boost (>= 1.36)
• OpenImageIO

Following libraries are optional:

• OpenCL (>= 1.1; Optional, but highly recommended!)
• Qt (>= 5.0; Only needed if GUI interface is desired)
• OSL (for shader support)

Compile

• Linux

  Just run cmake and make to compile the source (on the root directory)

    mkdir ./build
    cd ./build
    cmake ../
    make
  

• Windows

  For Windows builds we recommend using CMake GUI and the VisualStudio option.

Available CMake options

Make sure to activate Advanced Options when using CMake GUI

Option	Description	Default
PR_ONLY_LIBRARY	Will only compile the main and utility library.	OFF
PR_WITH_GPU	Enables GPU support provided by OpenCL. Will be set automatically to Off when OpenCL is not found.	ON
PR_WITH_NETWORK	Enables experimental Network support provided by Boost. (CURRENTLY DISABLED)	ON
PR_WITH_ASSERTS	Build with asserts. Disable for production code.	ON
PR_USE_TRIANGLE_WATERTIGHT	Use Watertight triangle intersection algorithm instead of Trombore.	OFF
PR_BUILD_VIEWER	Builds the Qt based PearRay viewer. Will be set automatically to Off when Qt is not found.	ON
PR_BUILD_TESTS	Build additional tests.	ON
PR_BUILD_PROFILE	Build additional profiling information to be used by internal profiler. Only for development!	OFF
PM_USE_SIMD	Use SIMD (min. SSE1 & SSE2) implementation of PearMath, if supported.	ON
PM_FORCE_SSE3	Force SSE3 support even when detection fails.	OFF
PM_FORCE_SSSE3	Force SSSE3 support even when detection fails.	OFF
PM_FORCE_SSE4	Force SSE4 support even when detection fails.	OFF

Run

Just run the PearRay Viewer or the CLI version.

rayview
pearray

For more information about the both interfaces and their command line arguments see their respective pages:

• RayView
• PearRay CLI