pbrv

January 2026

Physically Based Rendering Viewer (pbrv) is a small PBR 3D Viewer in CLI powered by ModernGL. Github

I wanted to go through learnopengl.com and a little beyond with by coding this Python PBR viewer.

Features/Specs

• Interactive window

  • Trackball camera (with path indepedance)
  • Lclick: rotate
  • Rclick: pan
  • Dblclick: focus
  • Ctrl+Lclick: rotate object
  • Shift+Lclick: rotate environment
  • Alt+Lclick: rotate directional light

• Deferred Shading

• Metal/roughness workflow

• Normal mapping (tangent space)

• SSAO (if no AO map)

• Image based lighting

  • Cubemaps
  • Equirectangular panoramas (converted to cubemap)
  • Cubemap prefiltering
    • Irradiance (Cosine)
    • Specular (GGX)

• 1 Directional light

• 1 Point light

• Procedural Environment

  • Sun (sunrise/dusk)
  • Based on directional light direction
  • Stars at night

Examples