Mitsuba renderer 0.4.0 released!

It’s very weird nobody has posted the news here (Even Wenzel himself)…

http://www.mitsuba-renderer.org/devblog/?p=473

Mitsuba 0.4.0 sports an insane amount of improvements and new options to experiment!.. I’d love to see a mature Blender plugin in the near-mid future.

In the following days I’ll do some serious experimenting… It seems like Cycles has some real competition ;).

Greets.
tuqueque.

I’ve been playing with it and reading the (astoundingly thorough) documentation. Wow. VERY impressive. This is a huge upgrade over the old version. The SSS shader is definitely the model against which physically-based SSS shaders should be compared.

Thanks for the post. I was quite eager to test the SSS, but I got nothing but errors.
The scarf scene complained about envmap.dll not found and a model of my own it said bitmap.dll not found, even if I dont use a texture. So bottom line, two tests no results, what did I do wrong?
I’m running Mitsuba on windows 7, 64 bit. The files are there, but in the log it says \mitsuba/bitmap.dll Maybe the second slash should be a backslash too?

cool! :smiley: SSS looks good an as always it’s fun to read the documentation even if most of the stuf goes in one ear & out the other…
there’s something about mitsuba renders and the shadows that doesn’t really look photo-real for me.

on the otherhand most of the stuff looks absolute stunning.

Oh yes! Indeed! It is a pity that the render API is still not mature enough to update navigation in view…
But yes the love WJ + others have put into this engine and the documentation is astounding!

Very impressive feature set, I tested the 0.3x version a few weeks ago, that worked well.
Congratulations to Wenzel Jakob! :slight_smile:

anyone else had dll problems with the windows version?

It writes there are missing dll. Don’t work for me. (win)

Yep - having problems here as well, Win64 - can’t find envmap.dll even though its there (in the plugins folder). Perhaps a path error?

I’m also getting it, it happens with quite a few of the plugins

problem with dll also for me (win64) and I’d like to test it inside blender but I can’t find an updated exporter for mitsuba that works with the latest blender RC2… anyone have found it?

Thanks in advance.

VERY impressive work !
I just had a look to the documentation.

I have an Error while loading a demofile:
Something like “envmap.dll module could not be found”.
But it’s there, maybe something is wrong with the path to “envmap.dll” ?
Using Win 7, 64 Bit.

Kind regards
Alain

i get this just trying to render the default cube…

http://i50.tinypic.com/34go6zr.png

Very nice renderer, thanks WJ!

It works for me on Linux (F17 64bit). Don’t know much about Windows, but it sounds like you have a problem with a missing environment variable?

The SSS and participating media support is cool, but takes a bit of time pre-processing on my machine. Look forward to see how this will be handled in Cycles.

As for the Blender plugin, I’m hacking a bit on this one from here trying to get it to work on RC2/SVN. What I did so far:
In core/init.py comment out colormanagement stuff (line 112 + 113)
The “matpreview” scene needs to be the one from Mitsuba 0.4.0 and in the xml change film-type from ‘hdrfilm’ to ‘ldrfilm’ (preview expects a png file not exr). I don’t get errors anymore but material preview still doesn’t work / show up…
I need to compile Blender with Collada support <-- where I’m at now

Great stuff.

I knew Brecht were looking for some new Sample generation method: (from Cycles status blog post)

Better sampling patterns. I’ve been testing a few different ones but they couldn’t beat the Sobol patterns we use yet when using many samples (> 16), still hope we can find something here.

In Mitsuba 0.4.0 page Wenzel J. mention this:

This summer, I had the fortune of working for Weta Digital. Leo Grünschloß from the rendering R&D group quickly had me convinced about all of the benefits of Quasi Monte-Carlo point sets. Since he makes his sample generation code available, there was really no excuse not to include this as plugins in the new release. Thanks, Leo!

  • sobol: A fast random-access Sobol sequence generator using the direction numbers by Joe and Kuo.
  • halton & hammersley: These implement the classic Halton and Hammersley sequences with various types of scrambling (including Faure permutations)

Apart from producing renderings with less noise, these can also used to make a rendering process completely deterministic. When used together with tiling-based rendering techniques (such as the path tracer), these plugins use an enumeration technique (Enumerating Quasi-Monte Carlo Point Sequences in Elementary Intervals by Grünschloß et al.) to find the points within each tile.

If anyone is subscribed to the Cycles mailing list he might find this interesting since the source code is released. Hope it’s useful.

I found it interesting to read that in tests, Sobol is noticeably slower if the number of samples isn’t a power of 2.

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/561637_774195389331_557723951_n.jpgJust a quick test of the SSS shader. It wasn’t nearly this dark during the render though, I’ll see what I can do. The Buddha has the SkimMilk preset, and the dragon has the Skin1.

Just bumping this thread to notify everyone that the DLL-loading issue has been fixed.

Another amazing release, Wenzel is a genius! :slight_smile:

m9105826: I’m sure gamma wasn’t baked on the file…

I wonder how Wenzel manages to do what he does…

i emailed Bartosz (JoseConseco on the BA forums) back and forth a few times about his exporter, i don’t think he’s working on it much right now. he did say that if anyone wanted to improve or even rewrite the exporter, he was all for it.

the major limitations with exporting COLLADA scenes for Mitsuba are that deform modifiers aren’t being applied correctly, or at all in the case of the exporter. so if someone could find a way to rewrite the exporter for .obj, or get modifiers working with COLLADA export, we could be seeing some awesome animations done in Mitsuba! :smiley: