Installation PBRT & inital implementation

Since my last post I have, with no significant problems, installed the latest version of PBRT (1.03) on both Windows & Linux. The installation on the Ludit HPC (cluster) required some more attempts but I eventually got it to work by recompiling the OpenEXR library.
After my first meeting with my couselor earlier this week, I started today with the implementation of the Lightcuts algorithm. Even though I currently do not have a working implementation, I have already progressed quite a bit. The major components that are still missing are: building the light tree & calculation of most of the material/light bounds.

Introduction & study of literature

On this blog you will be able to follow the progress of my master thesis "Advanced Global Illumination using Lightcuts" throughout the year. The goal of this thesis is to implement the Lightcuts algorithm as a plugin for PBRT and compare and evaluate the algorithm.
During the summer holidays I have read the following papers for my study of literature:

• Direct Lighting Calculation by Monte Carlo Integration - Shirley P. & Wang C. (1991)
  
• Monte Carlo Techniques for Direct lighting Calculations - Shirley P., Wang C. & Zimmerman K. (1996)
  
• Adaptive Shadow Testing for Ray Tracing - Ward G. (1994)
• A Light Hiërarchy for Fast Rendering of Scenes with Many Lights - Paquette E., Poulin P. & Drettakis G. (1998)
  
• Instant Radiosity - Keller A. (1997)
  
• Interactive Global Illumination using Fast Ray Tracing - Wald I., Kollig T., Keller A. & Slusallek P. (2002)
  
• A Scalable Approach to Interactive Global Illumination - Benethin C., Wald I. & Slusallek P. (2003)
  
• Instant Global Illumination - Pharr M. (2004)
  
• Interactive Global Illumination in Complex and Highly Occluded Environments - Wald I., Benethin C. & Slusallek P. (2003)
  
• Matrix Row-Column Sampling for the Many-Light Problem - Hasan M., Pellacini F. & Bala K. (2007)
  
• Lightcuts: A Scalable Approach to Illumination - Walter B., Fernandez S., Arbree A., Bala K., Donikian M. & Greenberg D. (2005)
  
• Implementing Lightcuts - Walter B., Fernandez S., Arbree A., Bala K., Donikian M. & Greenberg D. (2005)
• Notes on the Ward BRDF - Walter B. (2005)
• Implementing Lightcuts - Miksik M. (2007)
  
• Multidimensional Lightcuts - Walter B., Arbree A., Bala K. & Greenberg D. (2006)