Physically Based Rendering

Gallery of Images

All of the images on this page were rendered by pbrt. Click on any image for a higher-resolution version. Do you have a cool rendering you think should be on this page? Send mail to authors@pbrt.org!

	For their prizewinning final project in Stanford's CS348 rendering competition, Tom Brow and Ranjitha Kumar rendered this spectacular image of lily pads as seen from underwater.
	Asbjørn Heid implemented a realistic metal material to render this very realistic buddha model.
	Asbjørn Heid also rendered these photorealistic spheres with the metal modal.
	The authors of the 2006 SIGGRAPH Paper, A Compact Factored Representation of Heterogeneous Subsurface Scattering, modified pbrt to render translucent objects with heterogeneous scattering properties. This is one of the images they created.
	Nils Thuerey rendered this animation of flowing water with pbrt. The water was simulated using the Lattice Boltzmann method over an adaptive grid.
	Realistic jellyfish rendered by Kayvon Fatahalian and Tim Foley to win Stanford's 2004 cs348b Rendering Competition. Kayvon and Tim modeled the jellyfish body and motion with splines, developed a shading model for the jellyfish surface that approximates subsurface scattering, and rendered the water with volumetric photon mapping.
	Juan Sepulveda and Meng Yu implemented a number of complex material models, including subsurface scattering to render photorealistic donuts for their entry in Stanford's 2005 cs348b rendering competition.
	Matt Wang procedurally modeled scales and implemented a BRDF that simulated iridescence in order to render this realistic image of the sunbeam snake (Xenopeltis unicolor).
	Josh Wiseman modified pbrt to account for wavelength-dependent reflection and refraction and rendered very realistic diamonds. See his writeup page for additional information.
	Beech tree forest, by Ares Lagae and Karl vom Berge. Trees are distributed using the technique described ind Lagae and Dutre's paper A Procedural Object Distribution Function, to appear in ACM Transactions on Graphics.
	Night-time scene on a snowy night, by Pramod Kumar Sharma and Guillaume Poncin. Pramod and Guillaume extended pbrt, adding meta-ball and L-system primitives, an improved photon mapping algorithm, and subsurface scattering to render the snow, to win Stanford's cs348b 2003 Rendering Competition with this image.
	Eric Lee won an honorable mention in Stanford's cs348b 2003 Rendering Competition with this image of two cars illuminated by a real skylight distribution, composited into an image of the Stanford Quad.
	This image shows off the EnvironmentCamera described in Section 6.3 of Physically Based Rendering; the image incorporates illumination arriving from all directions at a point in the scene. Sibenik cathedral model courtesy Marko Dabrovic, RNA Studios.
	Three teapots, primarily illuminated by indirect light reflecting from the back wall of the room. This scene was used to demonstrate the improvements to the basic photon mapping algorithm described in Section 16.5 of Physically Based Rendering that were implemented in the improved photon mapping integrator available from the links page.
	This furry dog (on a shag carpet) was rendered by Michael Turitzin and Jared Jacobs, who extended pbrt with an implementation of Kajiya and Kay's texel-based fur algorithm, winning an honorable mention in Stanford's cs348b 2003 Rendering Competition.
	The effect of single-scattering in an inhomogeneous volume density, rendered with pbrt's SingleScattering integrator. Volume dataset courtesy Duc Nguyen and Ron Fedkiw.
	Audi TT model illuminated by a physically-based skylight model of the noontime sun. Car model courtesy Marko Dabrovic and Mihovil Odak at RNA Studios.
	Outdoor stream scene, illuminated by a realistic skylight model. This scene is comprised of over 20 million triangles, but can still be rendered efficiently, thanks to object instancing reducing the memory requirements to represent the scene.
	Stream scene with fog. The single-scattering volume integrator was used for rendering this scene, giving the beams of light and volumetric shadows cast by the trees.
	Sponza atrium model, rendered with path tracing for global illumination and the single-scattering integrator, to give the beams of light. Sponza model courtesy Marko Dabrovic at RNA Studios.
	Glass and mirrored ball, on a plane with a high-frequency texture map. Because ray differentials are used for anti-aliasing textures seen reflected and refracted by the balls, the texture can be filtered properly, so that it is neither to blurry nor aliased.
	Row of dragons, rendered with extreme depth of field.
	Rui Wang won the rendering competition in UVA's 2003 CS447/647 image synthesis class by extending pbrt to include subsurface scattering and rendering this realistic image of a jade dragon.