Mitsuba renderer

[CoolColJ]

http://www.mitsuba-renderer.org/devblog ... ent_id=359

Mitsuba was used to render the results and illustrations in several technical papers that have just received their final acceptance to SIGGRAPH 2012. The ones that I know of are listed below (if I missed yours, please let me know!)

 Manifold Exploration: A Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique for rendering scenes with difficult specular transport (by Wenzel Jakob and Steve Marschner)
Abstract: It is a long-standing problem in unbiased Monte Carlo methods for rendering that certain difficult types of light transport paths, particularly those involving viewing and illumination along paths containing specular or glossy surfaces, cause unusably slow convergence. In this paper we introduce Manifold Exploration, a new way of handling specular paths in rendering. It is based on the idea that sets of paths contributing to the image naturally form manifolds in path space, which can be explored locally by a simple equation-solving iteration. This paper shows how to formulate and solve the required equations using only geometric information that is already generally available in ray tracing systems, and how to use this method in in two different Markov Chain Monte Carlo frameworks to accurately compute illumination from general families of paths. The resulting rendering algorithms handle specular, near-specular, glossy, and diffuse surface interactions as well as isotropic or highly anisotropic volume scattering interactions, all using the same fundamental algorithm. An implementation is demonstrated on a range of challenging scenes and evaluated against previous methods.

[CoolColJ]

BTW I like the implementation of SPPM in Mitsuba better than the Luxrender version. It progressively updates like it's on a GPU
And the start radius can be auto set to scene size

[guibou]

BTW I like the implementation of SPPM in Mitsuba better than the Luxrender version. It progressively updates like it's on a GPU
And the start radius can be auto set to scene size

I don't really understand the "progressive update" thing. What do you mean exactly ?

About the starting radius, it is something I should definitely work on.

[SATtva]

I don't really understand the "progressive update" thing. What do you mean exactly ?

I guess it just updates an image in the GUI more often similar to how SLG does that on the initial stage of rendering.

[CoolColJ]

yes and the way the photon size changes and fills the scene seems different too - more robust perhaps

But it doesn't do the other stuff as well as SPPM in Luxrender, with glass and what not

[guibou]

yes and the way the photon size changes and fills the scene seems different too - more robust perhaps

Could you detail that *feeling* or should I take a look at mitsuba code ?

[zsolnai]

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

[SATtva]

Wow, that's an impressive list of updates.

[CoolColJ]

Whoohoo MLT FTW

And ERPT - hoping it's not broken

[CoolColJ]

Ahh ERPT is not progressive....


the 2 MLT renderers can be made progressive by setting a very large sample number
The Veach MLT is much faster than the other simple Kelman one that most renderers use, like Lux?