Your first render with Cinder

Cinder uses an easy to understand and write YAML format for project and scene serialization. You can go through all the scenes used in this documentation in the Cinder/Projects folder.

We will be rendering the Cornell Box in this introduction to the Cinder CLI Tool.

Cinder Projects and Scenes

To render something with Cinder, you need to have two things: a project, and a scene. The two are closely related, but both have different uses.

Projects

A project is used to setup how you want Cinder to render scenes. It decides what type of renderer to use, and what kind of images to output. It also contains a list of scenes to be rendered, and the output image of each of them.

Scenes

A scene is exactly what the name suggests. It consists of a camera, objects, their consisting geometry, materials, and lights.

Rendering the Cornell Box

The Cornell Box is a famous test which determines the accuracy of rendering software, as it is a real place, and has all the relevant data captured. You can check the data out at Cornell.

Rendering the Cornell Box with Cinder is a fairly simple task.

Our first step is to find the Cinder binaries. If you used the Python build script, you should find the Binaries in Build/{Config}/Binaries, where {Config} is the configuration you chose while building (this is Release by default). If you built it directly with CMake, they will be in {BuildDir}/Binaries, where {BuildDir} is the CMake output directory.

Warning

If you’re on Windows and decide to move the Cinder executable outside the directory, ensure that you also move CinderAPI.dll along with it, and keep them both in the same folder. On Linux, ensure you do not delete or move libCinder.so out of Build/{Config}/Libraries

Assuming the binaries are in their default directory, you just need to run the following command in a terminal to begin rendering. Ensure that the terminal’s working directory is the root of the Cinder project.

Build/Release/Binaries/cinder Projects/CornellBox/Project.yaml

Note

You will have to replace all the path separators (‘/’) with ‘\’ on Windows.

After the render is complete, you should see a file CornellBox.png in Projects/CornellBox/.