Learning to render with mitsuba

Lately I’m trying to study how to render with mitsuba renderer but the main issue I get is that there are not many tutorials or guides to learn from.
in many ways it is simple the documentation is great but the blender implementation is a little complicated
I can’t find how to do simple things like setting an image as background or using the blender light system and not just objects with light material(although in the documentation it looks like it’s supposed to support this kind of system)
do you have any good learning sources?
for now I’m extremely impressed with the engine’s capabilities and I don’t mind making some tutorials as soon as I’ll understand how to use it.

Mistuba is great, I love it and wish there was more interest. As for adding an image plane here are some screenshots to do it. You can also use IBL (HDRI Lighting) by adding a hemi lamp (like Lux) and changing the type from ‘Constant background source’ to 'HDRI environment map.

How to make an Image plane (image texture) in mitusba: You can use the same technique for a uv mapped image texure on any complex mesh.


thank you for your reply it helped a lot!
do you know of any good tutorials/books/any kind of information source?
do you have some tips for using it?

Mitsuba is an academic renderer, so aside from the wiki, you’re probably not going to find a lot of information. It’s more of a learning tool for Wenzel that he happens to share publicly. I wouldn’t rely on it too much for serious work.

Yeah, unfortunately m9105826 is right, mitsuba doesn’t look like it will be worked on much. There are a few bugs with the exporter, and there are many things I haven’t been able to do that would severly limit it’s use. That being said for smallish scenes with plastic and glass I find it lightening fast (as a path tracer), and just super intuitive and awesome.

It’s really a shame as I just feel that the GUI is so thoughtfully designed, and easy to use, with things like short explanations of the options, I just instantly loved it, which is something I can’t say for lux.

I read through almost all of the manual, although the majority of it is low level technical stuff not really applicable to blender, but interesting none the less.

The tutorial was my first taste of mitsuba, and produced a really nice result.

I really wish that Mitsuba could become an actively developed external render engine . As of right now it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen though.

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I do mostly architecture renderings and I think I can get it to do a good job with some practice
at least I hope I can, worth a try anyway…

Well feel free to ask any specific questions, I’m pretty handy with it. One general tip, save and save as often. Mitsuba can be fussy and start throwing errors about materials, and they can take awhile to track down. If things are looking good, save, save as… A previous version of a scene can save you from much frustration.

I want to delete this post, but don’t see the delete button in edit mode, sorry.