BMRT Visual Studio Install Guide - Veebs.com

Installing Blue Moon Render Tool for Windows

Background

The Blue Moon Render Tool, most commonly refered to as BMRT, is a RenderMan compliant renderer. The main component of BMRT is the renderer which converts RenderMan Interface Bytestream (RIB) files. In addition the package contains header and lib files so you can develop C programs which generate RIB files.

BMRT was developed by Larry Gritz in the early 90s. The last version developed was 2.6Beta which you can download from my graphics home page.

Introduction

This document will help you set up BMRT in a windows environment using Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express. You can use almost the same method for other Windows based C compilers.

Downloading

Start off by downloading the various components needed to set up the software. Firstly check out my Graphics home page where you will find the Blue Moon Render Tool as well as various libraries and tools you will need. Save these files in a temporary folder somewhere.

Next you need to get a copy of Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express from their MSDN download site. It is free to download and use, I do recommend registering your copy as it gives you access to some usefull programming resources and updates.

Installing

Go through the Visual C++ 2005 Express installer first, I highly recommend installing MSDN library at this time. It does increase the download size but it is worth doing and once completed it is out of the way.

Blue Moon Render Tools

Now extract the files from the BMRT package it will create a directory called BMRT2.6. Here is the content of the directory.

There are two ways of setting up the include and lib files with Visual C. I prefer copying the BMRT lib and header files to the Visual C include and lib directories. By doing this using the command prompt compiler is much easier. The alternative is to set the directories up in Visual Studio. I'll show you both.

Method 1 (my preference)

Copy the files in the include directory to the Visual C include directory. There should not be a file conflict. If you prefer create a new directory in the Visual C include directory but remember when you write your include you must include the subdirectory #include <bmrt/ri.h>.

Now copy the BMRT2.6 directory from the zip file to your program files

Alternative Method

Copy the BMRT2.6 directory from the temporary location to your program files directory, or any other location you prefer (program files seems sensible). Start up Visual C++ Express 2005 and go to tools -> options.

using the show directories for dropdown select include files and use the new folder icon to create a new include location. Type in the location of yoru BMRT directory, don't forget to add include to the end.

Do the same for the library files adding lib to the end.

With this setup you can still build your code in the IDE but you will need to add extra details to your make files if you want to compile programs from the command line.

Environmental Variable

To use the rendrib.exe renderer and the rgl.exe OpenGL realtime preview renderer we need to add two values to the environmental variables. Right click on my computer and click properties. Select the Advanced tab and click on the Environment Variables button. Add the BMRT2.6/bin directory to the path variable.

Now create a new variable called BMRTHOME and set this to your bmrt2.6 directory. Note you must use dos safe naming so in the example below you see the naming if the directory is stored in the Program files directory.

Success!

At this stage you have fully set up the Blue Moon Render Tool and you should be able to render the example rib files bu running the following command.

Configuring Make files

To build projects using the microsoft nmake program you need to create a make file. Here is the file listing of lamp.mak (which you can download from my graphics home page)

When you try to compile from the command line it is important that you open a command prompt from the Visual Studio Tools menu on the start bar. This ensures the compiler settings are all correct. DON'T JUST RUN CMD FROM THE RUN MENU.

The books above are very good references for RenderMan 'stuff'. The book below is great for the shader stuff, important to make things look nice.