Physically Based Rendering, 2nd Edition

B Scene Description Interface

This appendix describes the application programming interface (API) that is used to describe the scene to be rendered to pbrt. Users of the renderer typically don’t call the functions in this interface directly, but instead describe their scenes using the text file format described in the file docs/fileformat.pdf in the pbrt distribution. The statements in these text files have a direct correspondence to the API functions described here.

The need for such an interface to the renderer is clear: there must be a convenient way in which all of the properties of the scene to be rendered can be communicated to the renderer. The interface should be well defined and general purpose, so that future extensions to the system ...