Photon-v2 comes with an application called PhotonCLI, which is a command-line interface of the render engine. Command-line interface can come in handy if you are batch rendering or using it on a remote server. It also, in theory, offers slightly better performance in terms of render time. This is a documentation of available options and some examples. Check out PhotonStudio if you are more interested in using a GUI.

Available Options

Options	Effects
`-s <path>`	Specify path to scene file. To render an image series, you can specify `"myScene.p2"` as `<path>` where `` is a wildcard for any string (`--series` is required in this case). (default path: `"./scene.p2"`)
`-o <path>`	Specify image output path. This should be a filename for single image and a directory for image series. (default path: `"./rendered_scene.png"`)
`-of <format>`	Specify the format of output image. Supported formats are: `png`, `jpg`, `bmp`, `tga`, `hdr`, `exr`. If this option is omitted, format is deduced from filename extension.
`-t <number>`	Set number of threads used for rendering. (default: `1`, single thread)
`-p <number>`	Output an intermediate image whenever the render has progressed `<number>`%. (default: never output intermediate image)
`--raw`	Do not perform any post-processing. (default: perform post-processing)
`--help`	Print help message then exit.
`--series`	Render an image series. The order for rendering will be lexicographical order of the wildcarded string. Currently only .png is supported.
`--start <*>`	Render image series starting from a specific wildcarded string.
`--finish <*>`	Render image series until a specific wildcarded string is matched. (inclusive)

Examples

All following commands are expected to be executed from the build/install directory.

Rendering a scene file named ./ocean.p2 using 4 threads and save the rendered image as ./my_image.jpg:

./bin/PhotonCLI -s "./ocean.p2" -o "./my_image.jpg" -t 4

For animations, assuming there is a folder gif_animation containing scene files for a 3-frame animation: pose1.p2, pose2.p2, pose3.p2, to render and save the images (.png) to a folder gif_images, you can specify:

./bin/PhotonCLI -s "./gif_animation/pose*.p2" --series --start "1" --finish "3" -o "./gif_images/" -t 4

Note that in the above example, the rendered image will be named by the wildcarded string, namely they are stored as ./gif_images/1.png, ./gif_images/2.png, and ./gif_images/3.png.

An important note is that by default, post effects including tone-mapping is performed. If saving the rendered image in high dynamic range is desired, --raw should be specified manually as PhotonCLI will NOT automatically turn off post-processing by detecting image format.