Mitsuba

Mitsuba is a GPLv3 research-oriented rendering system in the style of physically-based rendering technology. It is written in C++, implements unbiased as well as biased techniques, and contains heavy optimizations targeted towards current CPU architectures.

It is experimental by its own mission statement, so it may not be a rendering engine you want to use exclusively, but its code has been used as a basis for some very important engines, and the render results speak for themselves.

Installing Luxrender broadly requires, like other renderers, the installation of the Luxrender base package, and then the plugin that will make it useful in your application of choice (probably blender).

To get the basic Luxrender package installed, first install its dependencies; all of them are available from http://slackbuilds.org but some (like OpenCL) are optional.

Once the dependencies are installed, install Luxrender from http://slackbuilds.org. This also installs the Blender package.

To compile without OpenCL support:

$ OPENCL=no ./luxrender.SlackBuild

or

$ OPENCL=no sport i luxrender

If you do not know what OpenCL is, you probably do not need it. If you do know what it is and want to use it, then you must follow the instructions in the OpenCL SlackBuild to ensure that OpenCL is enabled on your system.

LuxRender has several entry points. It can be launched as a shell application:

$ luxconsole /path/to/file.lxs

It has a stand-alone GUI frontend, which you can launch from the K Menu or from a shell:

$ luxrender&

And finally, the Blender plugin, which can be activated and used the same as any other Blender plugin:

• Activate the Blender plugin in the User Preferences panel → Render. (There is no need to install the plugin as you might other Blender addons, because the LuxRender installer from SlackBuilds has already installed it for you.)
• Make it your active renderer in the Info panel