@ianjolin
Here we are - two images of the corner of a room in the house I am designing - one with plain glass and the other with frosted glass with two different degrees of roughness. One of the human models has a problem but it is confined to that model so I am not taking that as a negative but an issue with the model.
As before these images have been converted from png to jpg and compressed by mediafire so not as good as what I see on my screen when looking at the originals.
First the plain glass, in terms of realism I am pleased to see the dappled shadows from the leaves on trees outside, the faint reflection of the chair window left and the reflection of someone's legs top right.
Then the version with very rough frosted glass window left and less rough frosted glass window right.
These were produced as indicated in an earlier post by editing the Mitsuba import file as produced by the Mitsuba OBJ file import plugin.
The edit involved a text string search and copy paste a few lines from the Mitsuba pdf doc - 5 minutes at the most.
Overall ease or difficulty?
On windows its not that difficult to get Mitsuba up and running - folks with hybrid graphics cards may encounter one known issue, I would be happy to help. It must be remembered that Mitsuba was developed as an academic research tool but it has been maintained over the years by the developers.
On Linux Ubuntu - Mitsuba install can be complicated, if people like the renderer I would be happy to document the process I used - its all down to graphics card issues and supporting libraries.
Once the GUI version of Mitsuba is running ok then importing a very large OBJ export from Sweethome is easy - the rendering is also easy although I would offer recommendations for choices and pre-sets in the rendering engines and settings used.
Editing the scene file produced by Mitsuba so you can mess around with materials is not much more than a bit of easy detective work and use of materials given as examples in the Mitsuba pdf doc.
I will happily put together concrete tutorials if people are interested and want to get it working quickly.
I am on Linux and yes it took me time to get Mitsuba working properly on my machine ( unlucky on graphics card drivers ) but it was worth the hassle for me because I want to get a feel for the emotion of the spaces I am designing - how they affect me and my family.
People can walk into a fantastic designed house but feel oddly cold about it. I feel for us really realistic and honest renderings are the key and past experience has shown that Mitsuba is great at giving an honest appraisal of materials and lighting - I have tried renderers such as Kerkythea ( a long time ago ) and Luxrender but always felt that Mitsuba is a lot faster, accurate and faithful to materials.
I will try and help any who are interested, perhaps on a new thread?
