Standalone Pulsar renderer

  • 16th Jun 2025
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  • Tags: 
  • 3d

Pulsar is an early differentiable renderer. It has been part of PyTorch 3D for a long time. I used it for a CLIP-guided 3D shape generation project in summer 2022.

The recommended methods for installing PyTorch 3D are, in order:

  1. Using pip wheels... For torch 1.x
  2. Installing a conda package
  3. Compiling from source Each of those has self-evident flaws. The installation process does not need to be this way if one only wants to use Pulsar: the renderer is just a few CUDA files and self-contained C++ bindings.

I copied the source files and set up a build process for them. The result is a pip installable git repo: git+github.com/neverix/pulsar.