Utility launcher, COLLADA import & documentation

When working on a larger project, one often needs to implement various utility programs that perform simple tasks, such as applying a filter to an image or processing a matrix stored in a file. In a framework like Mitsuba, this unfortunately involves a significant coding overhead in initializing the necessary APIs on all supported platforms. To reduce this tedious work on the side of the programmer, the Mitsuba repository now contains a utility launcher called mtsutil.

This binary loads simple “utility plugins”, which can now be as small as a few lines of code. Because mtsutil takes care of initializing the whole framework (including network connections to remote compute nodes), they provide a convenient solution to parallelize non-rendering workloads over many machines. The documentation contains a code example on how to do this.

Other changes in the repository are a much-improved COLLADA importer and import capabilities from within the GUI. At this point, it should be able to handle most scenes exported by Maya or Blender (I haven’t tested other programs yet).

7 comments

  1. Being able to import scenes from other packages will boost voluntars testers activities! Hurrà!
    btw, the ones like me that can’t build from sources will have to wait the next build, right?

  2. yes, you’ll have to build it at the moment. A new version will be available soon though.

  3. Hi,

    Do you have plans to add CMake build system ?

  4. I am really impressed with what I have seen so far with the test scenes you have provided. How far in the future will it be before there is import GUI interface?

  5. I’m pretty happy with scons at the moment, so very likely not in the foreseeable time.

  6. The repository contains a basic one right now, if you want to compile it yourself. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait for a few more days.

  7. alright, i’ll stay tuned :)

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