Mitsuba 2: A Retargetable Forward and Inverse Renderer

Amazing work! Mitsuba has long been a staple of the rendering research world, and the new architecture that Mitsuba 2 brings is nothing short of revolutionary in many aspects.

Mitubsa 2 allows for essentially writing complex path tracing code once and automatically being able to generate a traditional CPU-based scalar path tracer, an NVIDIA RTX accelerated path tracer, a vectorized path tracer, and fully differentiable path tracer, etc. A lot of the underlying heavy lifting for this capability can be found in a separate library by the same authors [1].

You may be familiar with pybind11 [1]; this is from the same author and uses pybind11 extensively. A lot of people don't know that the author of pybind11 is actually one of the top rendering researchers in the world.

There's been an enormous amount of buzz about Mitsuba 2 in the rendering world since the paper [3] came out last year. I for one am pretty excited about diving into the code.

[1] https://github.com/mitsuba-renderer/enoki [2] https://github.com/pybind/pybind11 [3] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3355089.3356498