Hi,
I’m the author of Mitsuba – I just found this thread after investigating where all the traffic on my Mercurial server came from 
To answer a few questions on this thread: Mitsuba is currently a “researchy” renderer. The main focus, at least for my part, is to create something that can render extremely difficult scenes where other techniques fail (due to fireflies, noise, …). I’m thinking of things like interior scenes with complex lighting, specular + highly glossy materials and volumetric interactions. The whole codebase is available in a decentralized repository and I’m happy to work with collaborators, so it is difficult to say how it will actually evolve in the future.
I’ve worked on this renderer for several years by now, and although this is of course a “students project”, I’m way to invested in it to even think of dropping it. So, it’s definitely here to stay for a while :). I’ve made it available at this point mainly so that other people working in computer graphics can use it as a shared foundation to develop, test and compare rendering techniques. My (perhaps a bit naive) vision is that as a new rendering technique is published (say, at SIGGRAPH), the authors also release a Mitsuba plugin so that others can more easily understand the merits and limitations compared to existing approaches.
While a community like blenderartists.org hasn’t exactly been on my radar so far, I’d be excited if the program was also useful to you. At the moment, things are still very rough regarding documentation, so I apologize if people had problems getting the program to run. An incomplete documentation draft can be found here for those who are interested: http://www.mitsuba-renderer.org/documentation.pdf
One general big obstacles is getting a scene from a program like Blender into the renderer. To minimize the pain in writing tons of exporters for every program in the world, I thought that it might be better to instead create a DAE importer for Mitsuba which (as far as I am aware of) most 3D packages can export these days. The “mtsimport” utility included with Mitsuba was only used with Maya so far, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it totally breaks down when given a DAE file exported from Blender.
That also brings me to a request: if you have Blender scenes which cannot be imported, which crash the renderer or otherwise cause problems (e.g. very slow convergence), I’d be grateful if you could send me a copy so that I can go bug-hunting.
In addition to that, I’m very interested in getting access to difficult-to-render-scenes where the author would also permit its use as an example in an academic research publication (with attribution of course). That way, the work involved in improving the renderer to handle it well would pay off to both involved parties.
I should add that one of the biggest pieces of this renderer is actually not available yet, since it currently still unpublished research. So if the program doesn’t render your scenes well enough, remember to check back in a few months.
Wenzel
Same error.
