Mitsuba Renderer
Mitsuba is a new and promising new physics based, open source (GPL) renderer. It already has an impressive list of features and as of the latest release a Blender plugin is available as well. Mitsuba is available for Windows, Linux and OSX.
Please give it a try and let us know what you think!
A feature overview:
- Spectral rendering, black body radiation and dispersion
- Customizable image reconstruction filters
- High dynamic-range input/output using the OpenEXR format
- Deterministic Quasi-Monte Carlo sampling
- Adaptive integration
- Depth of field
- Direct illumination
- Monte-Carlo path tracer which solves the full Radiative Transfer Equation
- Photon mapper with irradiance gradients
And some stuff that I wish I understood ;-)
- Adjoint particle tracer
- Instant Radiosity (hardware-accelerated)
- Progressive Photon Mapper
- Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapper
- Veach-style Bidirectional Path Tracer
- Kelemen-style Metropolis Light Transport
- Veach-style Metropolis Light Transport
Links
Mitsuba Introduction video
Like a lot of people have said, Mitsuba looks very promising.
Keep in mind, however, that Mitsuba is a research project, and therefore doesn’t have features that are required for production renderers like bump mapping. According to the developer, Mitsuba is more of a reference implementation of the latest algorithms and acceleration, uh, things.
While I’m at it though, this will knock your socks off: http://www.mitsuba-renderer.org/images/gallery/scarf-flakes.png
I’m happy what I have- thanks.
Another renderer that miss motion blur. :(
Seriously? No way, that scarf has to be a photo!
Looks great, but why does the preview consistently look nicer than the final result? Why not simply use OpenGL / OpenCL to render the final image? Judging from this video it doesn’t make sense to do a CPU render(slower, worse quality, more setup time), but I guess there could be cases where the OpenGL version is insufficient?
@ Umxprime
Motion blur is in Mitsuba, have you tried it yet,before giving your opinion??
Everyone really should try this renderer. It just has something extra about it. It really seems worked through all the way. :) Nice work Wenzel.
I downloaded it, but when I tried to run it on Win7 it says, “mtsgui.exe – System Error” … “libiomp5md.dll is missing from your computer.”
@Terrachild :
I haven’t tried Mitsuba, but when you encounter such a trouble with a software, just do a Google search. In most cases, you can find easily the missing dll to fix the problem :
http://www.filerepair.ca/downloads/l/li/libiomp5md.dll-DLL-EXE-Download-libiomp5md.dll.html
Really good.
ah It’s open source. Waiting for the first kid to say “we have to put this in Blender” :/
@Roubal: I’d be EXTREMELY careful with just installing DLLs from sites like that unless you know the website.
@William:
GPU/OpenCL rendering is not the holy grail. while it’s perfect for brute force pathtracing it does have some flaws too! like limited amount of memory for textures or the fact that renderfarms hardly have good GPUs built-in for example.
a well network-distributed threaded CPU render is still a very good solution and will be for quite a while imho.
Well I installed Mitsuba’s C++ redist located next to the main install. Now the program works fine. Odd, I’m up to date I thought on my installs. I do a lot of coding. Bart you are right, never ever download a .dll from untrusted sources. Running a .dll is like running an .exe file. It can trash your computer if it’s infected!
Seeing the video, I can only say some people dream of rendering the preview-output to a file…
If someone want Blender, Mitsuba and Mitsuba Exporter packed in one and ready to use for Windows 32bit/64bit I posted here:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=202840
Cheers,
Gabriele
It has Motion blur!
And a fast one!
looks very very promising! got to try it.
i hope he wont give up this project soon. let get some more details about mitsuba. i think i would even support him with some donation…
go jakob go jakob
found this @ ba:
mitsuba bundeled with blender 2.5:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=202840
i tried it. seems to be real fast and flexible.
awsome!! got try more:)
Pfew! The project Homepage is VERY elegant! Not only the interface but everything in the project is so polished!
Thank you so much for the Article Bart! Awesome video BTW.
Do we need another raytracer? I can point to some other raytracers that looked promising at first and are agonising now, if not dead. The internet is plenty of one-shot raytracers like Mitsuba. But we have so few projects with a real long-term commitment to the Blender community, apart from Blender itself.
I hope Blender users don’t get used again for quick growth and cheap beta testing, with little or no long-term return at all. Anyway, good luck with Mitsuba and happy rendering!
@megasoft87: Would you be so kind to tell if the preview-output(like the video) can be written? I have enough quality with a good dedicated opengl-renderengine, it seems that the preview comes close to this with the benefits of a (path-)raytracer.
@required: If you like to save the preview output you need just need to change in blender the rendering mode to Mitsuba GUI and when you press F12 Blender will run the scene in Mitsuba GUI.
At this point when you like what you see go to the menu File -> Export Image and you’ll save the preview.
Cheers,
Gabriele
niiice!
i wanna try it!
another news from another promising raytracer equals another rant from the yafaray guy… he doesn’t realize the only ones allowed to rant are the povray guys…
How about an animated output from the preview. This needs to be automated without user input after a set number of samples per pixel. Is this possible?
Pretty nice. However… i have already tried to use it with blender but with any success. I am on MacOS X.
I have downloaded renderer and mtsblend. My blender 2.55Beta is from official blender site. Is there a way to do that?
This DOES look promising. Very promising.
I’d like to know how fast it’s being developed in comparison to, say, LuxRender, and a comparison of the two.
I figured it out. If you select Mitsuba CLI as the Rendering Mode it renders internal in Blender and renders for the requested number of samples per pixel.
We need to support this guy if necessary. This is very promising!
Alvaro,
he does this as a research project to investigate code improvements.
I highly respect your experience and views but you start sounding like
a crying child now.
Where is yafaray currently? Stable, feature complete and usable? No.
In case it would be way more people would use it such myself.
But since I cannot code, and can only use a software people offer me
I as a user have to just go with what can do the job.
Wenzel himself stated that this is NOT for production rendering.
So why do you attack him?
Maybe this is the time to hock up with Ton and work on a Yafaray
and Blender combination because both projects lack but maybe with
combined forces this could work out.
Ton wants to get GI into Blender – he more then once expressed that
as a need.
I would love to see the file that generated the “scarf-flakes” image.
Opensource and multi-platform — I’m liking the sound of this. :-)
wow, i especially like the opengl preview. has anyone tried if it flickers a lot for animation?
it also would be awesome for game development if the opengl renderer could be used for light map baking.
Look promising. Keep up the good work. And that scarf on the website was amazing!
@megasoft78, thanks for the response, it seems I kinda presumed we both tagged animation to the conversation… I don’t intent to save each frame by hand.. :)
Claas, namekuseijin
I think I’m making legitimate questions. Other raytracer that looked very promising at first was ‘Sunflow’, so promising that in fact his developer got inmediately hired by Sony IW, and the project stalled as a result. The very same happened with Toxic some years ago, when his main developer was hired by Mental Images and the project subsequently stalled. Late
About the Blender community being used for quick grow and cheap outreach and betatesting, we have had several examples of that in the past years: I can name Kerkythea and Indigo out of my head. Both went commercial after the Blender community did its service.
Dispersion of efforts has been always the norm in the raytracing field anyway. It seems easier getting to write a new raytracer than collaborating with any of the existing FOSS raytracing projects. The result is a cascade of open source raytracing projects that die a long death after a couple of years of active developement and community growth.
The result is as well that we don’t have any real strong alternative to commercial raytracers, because no project is able to get together a development team like the Blender project is doing. Not only Yafaray is far away from being production-ready nor a real alternative, the same can be said about every and each open source raytracer available out there.
I don’t think there is any rule against posting negative comments on Blendernation news; the other day my beloved GIMP got bashed here with no reason. If you don’t like reading negative comments, don’t use the internet.
promising that in fact his developer got inmediately hired by Sony IW, and the project stalled as a result. The very same happened with Toxic some years ago, when his main developer was hired by Mental Images and the project subsequently stalled. Late
About the Blender community being used for quick grow and cheap outreach and betatesting, we have had several examples of that in the past years: I can name Kerkythea and Indigo out of my head. Both went commercial after the Blender community did its service.
Dispersion of efforts has been always the norm in the raytracing field anyway. It seems easier getting to write a new raytracer than collaborating with any of the existing FOSS raytracing projects. The result is a cascade of open source raytracing projects that die a long death after a couple of years of active developement and community growth.
The result is as well that we don’t have any real strong alternative to commercial raytracers, because no project is able to get together a development team like the Blender project is doing. Not only Yafaray is far away from being production-ready nor a real alternative, the same can be said about every and each open source raytracer available out there.
I don’t think there is any rule against posting negative comments on Blendernation news; the other day my beloved GIMP got bashed here with no reason. If you don’t like reading negative comments, don’t use the internet.
Claas, namekuseijin
Dispersion of efforts has been always the norm in the raytracing field anyway. It seems easier getting to write a new raytracer than collaborating with any of the existing FOSS raytracing projects. The result is a cascade of open source raytracing projects that die a long death after a couple of years of active developement and community growth.
The result is as well that we don’t have any real strong alternative to commercial raytracers, because no project is able to get together a development team like the Blender project is doing. Not only Yafaray is far away from being production-ready nor a real alternative, the same can be said about every and each open source raytracer available out there.
I don’t think there is any rule against posting negative comments on Blendernation news; the other day my beloved GIMP got bashed here with no reason. If you don’t like reading negative comments, don’t use the internet.
This looks supergreat! At last a fast integrated renderer is developing. Keep up the good work!
I merged Mitsuba with the last version from LuxRender forum ( http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1964) and I got some errors once I switched back to LuxRender , the material types weren’t available.
I’m using MAC OSX 10.6
Any ideas ?
Wrong Link for Blender Version
http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=4247
Does not work on Windows Vista 64 bit
@Alvaro,
I get your point.
get your point.
your point.
As far as I have understood this, this is mostly research code, not really productive renderer ;) Also note that one of the most impressive features of Mitsuba is it’s unbiased volume rendering for anisotropic materials and it’s micro flake model. This was also a very sound and promising siggrah paper this year, basically the implementation mentioned there is Mitsuba: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/diffusion-sg10/
wow
For a second I thought he was using OpenCL.
I like how it looks like! A good integration in Blender will be perfect!!! Thanx a lot!!!
[quote=”Alvaro”]Not only Yafaray is far away from being production-ready nor a real alternative[/quote]
What you mean pal ?
I am myself a faithfull user of yafaray for still an movies purposes.
I have tried many other external render-ers (Currently explosring renderman through ribMosaic, these guys are awesome) and I cannot see why you’d be so negative against yafaray :\
it’s not that bad.
…it’s pretty good actually.
just take a look : http://www.yafaray.org/gallery?g2_itemId=39
…but I admit we’re still very far of the “make it looks pretty” simple button hehheehhe.