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\section{Introduction}
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\textbf{Disclaimer:} This is manual is currently a work in progress---please
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bear with me while things are coming together.
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\subsection{About Mitsuba}
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Mitsuba is an extensible rendering framework written in portable C++. It implements unbiased
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as well as biased techniques and contains heavy optimizations targeted towards current CPU
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architectures.
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In comparison to other open source renderers, Mitsuba places a strong emphasis on recent research-oriented
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rendering techniques, such as path-based formulations of Metropolis Light Transport and volumetric
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modeling approaches.
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\paragraph{Performance:}
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One important goal of Mitsuba is to provide optimized implementations of the most commonly
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used rendering algorithms. By virtue of running on a shared foundation, comparisons between them can
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better highlight the merits and limitations of different approaches. This is in contrast to, say,
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comparing two completely different rendering products, where technical information on the underlying
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implementation is often intentionally not provided.
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\paragraph{Robustness:}
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In many cases, physically-based rendering packages force the user to model scenes with the underlying
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algorithm (specifically: its convergence behavior) in mind. For instance, glass windows are routinely
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replaced with light portals, photons must be manually guided to the relevant parts of a scene, and
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interactions with complex materials are taboo, since they cannot be importance sampled exactly.
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One focus of Mitsuba will be to develop path-space light transport algorithms, which handle such
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cases more gracefully.
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\paragraph{Scalability:} Mitsuba instances can be merged into large clusters, which transparently distribute and
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jointly execute tasks assigned to them using only node-to-node communcation. It has successfully
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scaled to large-scale renderings that involved 1024 cores working on a single image.
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Most algorithms in Mitsuba are written using a generic parallelization layer, which can tap
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into this cluster-wide parallelism. The principle is that if any component of the renderer produces
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work that takes longer than a second or so, it at least ought to use all of the processing power
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it can get.
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The renderer also tries to be very conservative in its use of memory, which lets it handle
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large scenes (>30 million triangles) and multi-gigabyte heterogeneous volumes on consumer hardware.
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\paragraph{Usability:}
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Mitsuba comes with a graphical user interface to interactively explore scenes. Once a suitable
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viewpoint has been found, it is straightforward to perform renderings using any of the
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implemented rendering techniques, while tweaking their parameters to find the most suitable
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settings. Experimental integration into Blender 2.5 is also available.
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\subsection{License}
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Mitsuba is free software and can be redistributed and modified under the terms of the GNU General
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Public License (Version 3) as provided by the Free Software Foundation.
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