Mitsuba

Mitsuba is a research-oriented rendering system for forward and inverse light transport simulation. It consists of a core library and a set of plugins that implement functionality ranging from materials and light sources to complete rendering algorithms.

Main Features

• Retargetable: this means that the underlying implementations and data structures can transform to accomplish various different tasks.
• Differentiation: Mitsuba is a differentiable renderer, meaning that it can compute derivatives of the entire simulation with respect to input parameters such as camera pose, geometry, BSDFs, textures, and volumes.
• Spectral & Polarization: Mitsuba can be used as a monochromatic renderer, RGB-based renderer, or spectral renderer. Each variant can optionally account for the effects of polarization if desired.
• High performance: The underlying Dr.Jit compiler fuses rendering code into kernels that achieve state-of-the-art performance using an LLVM backend targeting the CPU and a CUDA/OptiX backend targeting NVIDIA GPUs with ray tracing hardware acceleration.
• Python first: Mitsuba is deeply integrated with Python. Materials, textures, and even full rendering algorithms can be developed in Python, which the system JIT-compiles (and optionally differentiates) on the fly. This enables the experimentation needed for research in computer graphics and other disciplines.
• Cross-platform: Mitsuba has been tested on Linux (x86_64), macOS (aarch64, x86_64), and Windows (x86_64).