Idem cubiculum.
— THE SAME ROOM —
Benedikt Bitterli · ETH Zürich · Disney Research · NVIDIA
FIRST RELEASE 2014 · MIT LICENSE · STILL CITED · STILL RENDERED
Most renderers are remembered for their algorithms. Tungsten is remembered for what came in the scenes folder — eight rooms that became the field's shared test corpus. Open any rendering paper since 2015 and the figures are these rooms. Different renderer. Same room. The author wrote a path tracer for his master's thesis and the rendering community kept the furniture.
The renderer is unmaintained now. The author moved to Disney, then to NVIDIA, then to other questions.
But every SIGGRAPH paper since 2015 has rendered his living room. The corpus outlived the code.
benedikt-bitterli.metungsten/scenes/*.json~5 GB · 8 rooms · open| 1985 | Cornell University publishes the original Cornell Box. The first standardized rendering test scene. |
| 1997 | Eric Veach's PhD introduces the Veach Door as a hard-light test for Metropolis Light Transport. |
| 2012 | Bitterli releases the Living Room. First widely-shared modern interior in PBRT-compatible format. |
| 2014 | Tungsten 1.0. Master's thesis. Kitchen, Bathroom, Bedroom join the catalog. |
| 2015 | Bitterli Resources website published. The corpus becomes public infrastructure for the field. |
| 2016 | Author joins Disney Research. Renderer slows; corpus accelerates. |
| 2018 | Author joins NVIDIA Research. Tungsten code paused — the scenes circulate everywhere. |
| ∞ | Every Mitsuba 3 paper, every PBRT v4 figure, every real-time path-tracing demo — the same eight rooms. |
The renderer is unmaintained. The room is forever.