Comments on: Mitsuba 0.5.0 released

By: Leo

Leo — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 15:09:25 +0000

Hi, there,

I want to know how to render depth map.

Cheers,
L

By: JON

JON — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 14:52:33 +0000

I gotta tell you. I love Mitsuba. Super fast, and I use it a ton with Sketchup. I know you are a busy fellow, but are there plans in the near future to fully develop the Sketchup export plugin (ie the material editor)?

Thanks again for all of your amazing work. Mitsuba is truly something special!

By: MG

MG — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 19:09:05 +0000

Hi Wenzel, any plans for further development of Mitsuba or is kind of discontinued? What about more “mainstream” features like rendertime displacement?

Thanks, regards.

By: Bob Geller

Bob Geller — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 11:59:20 +0000

Thanks Wenzel. Will have a look. Any plans to add any hair scattering models to Mitsuba?

By: Philemo

Philemo — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:18:18 +0000

Hi Charles,

For now, I’m mainly stuck with technical problems. The integration works now, but it’s not stable yet (too many crashes). On that front, I need a experimented C++ developer more than anything else :-(.

But there is other fronts where help would be most welcome :
– alpha testing (probably by the end of January) on a windows platform.
– Experimenting with Mitsuba BSDF and media to improve the translation from Carrara to Mitsuba. You can now export an OBJ or a DAE version of your scene, import it in the Mitsuba GUI and alter the generated XML (it’s what I’ve been doing for some time now). It’s tedious (hence the plugin) but doable. And this is a crucial point for this kind of plugin : allow non experimented user to produce nice render from a shader that already produces nice results with the Carrara renderer, hence reducing the learning curve.

If you want to contact me, here is my (Rot13 encoded) email address : cuvyvccr.puvrhk@zntarenzn.se

By: Wenzel Jakob

Wenzel Jakob — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 00:38:04 +0000

You can look at some of the existing BSDFs in Mitsuba :). E.g. ‘diffuse’, which is as simple as it gets.

By: Bob Geller

Bob Geller — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 00:00:25 +0000

How can I start writing my own bsdfs/shaders for Mitsuba? Any tips?

By: Mehman Jamalov

Mehman Jamalov — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 17:51:03 +0000

Hi, I t is a nice news, I wanted to test the Mitsuba 0.5.0. I made a lot of tests but could not achieve Glass material. I used dieslectric material type. And i think whole Mitsuba community needs tutorial serias about how to use it, at least well-educated wiki page for Mitsuba renderer. I use Blender, and I hope Developers will do it the best integrater to Blender soon. I really do not want to use Cycles in my commercial works, because of noise, Mitsuba can achieve perfect render I think and that ‘s why I need tutorials. Thank you a lot thinking about 3D artists

By: Charles

Charles — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 06:47:16 +0000

Hi Philemo,

I found this blog while also looking into doing a Carrara integration. Mitsuba looks amazing. I’m glad I read this becuase I would call myself a novice C++ code (but a good web developer). The XML part made me think it would be easy but it sounds like I would be biting off way more than I could chew so I am really happy to hear that you are taking this on. I would be happy to help in whatever way I can.

By: Philemo

Philemo — Fri, 17 Oct 2014 07:04:12 +0000

Hi Wenzel,
The initial POC is not going very well.
First, I had an conflict between Carrara SDK and Mitsuba SDK. Both are using the same typedef (TVectorn, assert…) and Carrara SDK doesn’t have namespace. I solved it by isolating call to each SDK in different libraries and having them communicate through neutral parameters.
Now, I have the Plugin Manager freezing after loading the first plugin. I have the message in the log stating it is loaded and nothing afterwards. If I understood correctly your code, it’s stuck somewhere between the loading and the instancing…

By: Cesar_Rojas

Cesar_Rojas — Thu, 16 Oct 2014 04:32:48 +0000

Hello, I hope all is well.
I just want to ask.
You may mitsuba render in fire and smoke created in Blender?
Is there any tutorial that can help me?
They are greatly appreciate it, as I am interested to use Mitsuba professional project and I would also like to contribute financially to Mitsuba.

I would like to know your comments, greetings.

By: Philemo

Philemo — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 07:34:04 +0000

Hi Wenzel,
I was afraid of that. Carrara is now mainly a hobbyist tool and a plugin won’t be used if you have to respecify all the shading before even thinking of rendering. I’m convinced it’s vital to use Mitsuba bsdf, but allowance must be made for ease of use. I’ve made some experiments and I think the lambertian part of Carrara shader (diffuse and specular) can be emulated easily enough using the Ward plugin.

I will set up a development blog as soon as the proof of concept is set up. I have yet to work on the integration of Mitsuba renderer into Carrara rendering system before completing this part.

Anyway, the more I experiment with Mitsuba, the more I like it. You’ve done a great job and I’m so impressed with it I really want to say it

By: hsvb

hsvb — Sun, 12 Oct 2014 23:16:10 +0000

Yes. Unfortunatly 3dsMax’s python api doesn’t expose any pointers directly. I need to build a custom renderer plugin for 3dsmax to get direct access to geometry data.
I’ll give it a try sometime soon and let you know about my progress on it.

Thank you,

Hugo

By: Wenzel Jakob

Wenzel Jakob — Sat, 11 Oct 2014 19:36:30 +0000

right — the fromBlender() function assumes a specific internal memory layout used in Blender. That will be completely different in 3ds max, plus you will need to find a way to extract the pointers from it.

By: Wenzel Jakob

Wenzel Jakob — Sat, 11 Oct 2014 19:01:37 +0000

Hi Philemo,

that sounds great! Converting materials is really tricky, and I don’t think there is any perfect way to go about it (different systems follow very different material design principles, and Mitsuba is no exception in that regard).

Is there some webpage where you are tracking your progress so that other people using Daz could follow?

Best,
Wenzel

By: Philemo

Philemo — Thu, 09 Oct 2014 07:43:08 +0000

Hi,
I’ve just started to work on integrating Mitsuba into Carrara (from Daz3D). It should feature an exporter and also be integrated as a renderer.
Exporting lights, camera, shapes is easy enough and my proof of concept works like a charm.
I’m working on shader now. I will implement specification for all BSDF, subsurface and participating media, but I also need an automatic convertor that will try to get a BSDF as close as possible to the original Carrara shader (based on Lambert shading).
If you have any clue or experience on how to properly implement this, any help will be welcomed
If the POC continues to go well, Il will release it open sourced.

By: hsvb

hsvb — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 12:53:06 +0000

Thanks Wenzel. That was very helpful.

I suppose I would have to write my own fromMax function in 0rder to transfer mesh data directly from 3dsMax.
I was hoping I could use fromBlender to do that but I can’t pass pointers directly from python.

By: Wenzel Jakob

Wenzel Jakob — Sun, 05 Oct 2014 09:39:19 +0000

Here is a Python snippet that uses this function to efficiently export all meshes in a Blender scene into a combined .serialized file: https://gist.github.com/wjakob/e00fe4afad83a2447ffe
In the meantime, this function has been improved twice so I can’t guarantee that the snippet still works without minor modifications.

Note that Francesc Juhé has already integrated this and other cool features into his branch of the Mitsuba Blender plugin. It’s still unstable but should be become part of the official branch in the future.

By: hsvb

hsvb — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 22:45:18 +0000

Wenzel, could you please provide some usage example of the function TriMesh.fromBlender in python?

Function expects a long type value for the face and vertex pointers which i don’t quite understand.

Wish you could provide some simple code on how to use this.

Thanks in advance.
Hugo

By: Wenzel Jakob

Wenzel Jakob — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 13:22:08 +0000

In that case please report these bugs to them — there is nothing I can do here to fix these issues.