Aspherical elements in camera

[panwangjun]

How to add aspherical lens in camera?

[pbrt4bounty]

Hi.. you meant add spherical lens or directly use a Spherical camera??

Example scene.. Spherical_Camera.zip

[pbrt4bounty]

To add lens, you can create a 'Realistic' camera type and add a predefined lenses file, as is explained in the guide: https://pbrt.org/fileformat-v4

Camera "realistic"
    "float shutterclose" [ 1.0 ]
    "float shutteropen" [ 0.0 ]
    "string lensfile" "fisheye.10mm.dat"
    "float aperturediameter" [ 3.0 ]
    "float focusdistance" [ 1.0 ]
    "string aperture" "gaussian"

[mmp]

For aspherical lens elements, you would need to:

• extend the lens system specification syntax to allow specifying them (corresponding to some geometric representation)
• modify the code to trace rays through lenses to handle the new lens shape
• fix all of the places in the RealisticCamera that make implicit assumptions that the lens system is symmetric about the axis, of which there are many (exit pupil computations, etc...)

In general, you should thoroughly understand the current RealisticCamera implementation, at which point hopefully it will be evident what needs to be done.