Wenzel Jakob has just released a new version of Mitsuba, a free physically correct renderer that explores various new interesting ideas.

This version was released somewhat later than expected, but comes with all kinds of interesting changes, both internal and user-visible.

In the spirit of sliding on the bleeding edge of science it features first batch if changes from Tom Kazimiers who wrote a paper (in German) on realistic snow rendering and extended Mitsuba by implementing various new features. Of all them Preetham sun/sky model and Hanrahan-Krueger BSDF (a combination of bidirectional reflectance distribution function and bidirectional transmission distribution function) was merged for this release and further enhanced by Marios Papas. The other changes will be merged in later versions of Mitsuba.

For developers the new version has a better API documentation now available at http://www.mitsuba-renderer.org/api/, as well as Python bindings. While not covering all of API, they already allow controlling the renderer and constructing scenes.

Some of the important fixes bring back integrators such as photon mapping variants, irradiance caching, subsurface integrators.

Finally, documentation has been greatly improved.

The builds are available for:

• Windows (x86 and x86_64)
• Mac OS 10.6+ (universal binary for x86 and x86_64)
• Ubuntu 10.10 — maverick (x86_64)
• Ubuntu 11.04 — natty (x86_64)
• Debian 6.0 — squeeze (x86_64)
• Fedora Core 15 (x86_64)
• Arch Linux (x86_64)

You can download them here. Wenzel is also planning to switch to LGPL at some point in the future to somewhat "relax" the licensing terms. Read the official announcement for more details.

More on this topic:

• 3Delight exporter for Blender updated to feature new global illumination method
• CGRU v1.5 released with more sophisticated support for Houdini
• LuxRender 0.8 released with new features and GPU rendering
• New "Secret Spaces" competition from LuxRender
• CGRU gets 3D Studio MAX support