Installation

We provide the package via PyPI. Latest release: PyPI version.

To install mitransient you need to run:

pip install mitransient

which will also install the mitsuba Python package as a dependency. With this, you should be able to import mitsuba and mitransient in your Python code.

import mitsuba as mi
mi.set_variant('llvm_ad_rgb')  # Need to set variant before importing mitransient
import mitransient as mitr     # Registers all necessary mitransient plugins

And you are ready to go! Feel free to take a look at our tutorials on the sidebar of this website. If this is your first time, the transient rendering section will be especially useful.

Using your own compiled Mitsuba: mitransient and mitsuba have different variants that specify the number of channels (RGB image, monochromatic, etc.), hardware acceleration (execution in CPU, GPU, etc.). If you install mitransient/mitsuba via pip, you will have access to the following variants specified in this website. There are more variants available, but you will have to compile Mitsuba 3 yourself. For more information on using a custom Mitsuba 3 compilation, see “If you use your own Mitsuba” below.

Requirements

  • Python >= 3.8

  • mitsuba >= 3.6.0

  • (optional) For computation on the GPU: Nvidia driver >= 495.89

  • (optional) For vectorized / parallel computation on the CPU: LLVM >= 11.1

After installation

At this point, you should be able to import mitsuba and import mitransient in your Python code (careful about setting the correct PYTHONPATH environment variable if you have compiled Mitsuba 3 yourself, see the section below).

For NLOS data capture simulations, see https://github.com/diegoroyo/tal. tal is a toolkit that allows you to create and simulate NLOS scenes with an easier shell interface instead of directly from Python.

If you use your own Mitsuba 3

If you have opted for using a custom (non-default installation through pip) Mitsuba 3, you have several options for it. The idea here is to be able to control which version of Mitsuba will be loaded on demand.

  • One solution is to directly execute setpath.sh provided after the compilation of the Mitsuba 3 repo (More info). This shell script will modify the PATH and PYTHONPATH variables to load first this version of Mitsuba.

  • Another solution following the previous one is to directly set yourself the PYTHONPATH environment variable as you wish.

  • Another solution for having a custom version globally available is by using pip install . --editable. This will create a symlink copy of the package files inside the corresponding site-packages folder and will be listed as a package installed of pip and will be available as other packages installed. If you recompile them, you will still have the newest version directly to use. Please follow these instructions: * Go to <mitsuba-path>/mitsuba3/build/python/drjit and execute pip install . --editable. * Go to <mitsuba-path>/mitsuba3/build/python/mitsuba and execute pip install . --editable.

  • If you are a user of Jupyter Notebooks, the easiest solution will be to add the following snippet of code to modify the notebook’s PYTHONPATH:

import sys
sys.path.insert(0, '<mitsuba-path>/mitsuba3/build/python')
import mitsuba as mi