Standard ways to create xml scenes for research purposes I am a newbie in computer graphics and just started working on physically based rendering engines such as Mitsuba.

I found it difficult to create my own scenes, that are xml files. To create one, there are three ways as I know so far:


Build a scene in Blender and export it to a xml file using prasers, e.g. https://www.mitsuba-renderer.org/plugins.html.
Download free xml scenes, e.g. from https://benedikt-bitterli.me/resources/.
Hand-write an xml scene with Python from scratch, e.g. this example http://www.djmannion.net/psych_programming/vision/mitsuba/mitsuba.html. 


However, I am suffering from following issues:


It takes long time for me to create a scene via 1 and 3, yet not customizable via 2.
I do not know where to get free meshes (and license issues?)


Questions


Are there any better ways to create an xml scene?
What is the canonical way to create delicate scenes, e.g. the ones in SIGGRAPH papers?
(In case someone encounters similar issue)

I end-up in Way 1, and it seems the standard way in academia.

Once I am familar with Blender, the scene creation becomes less challenging; still, it takes some time to create a simple scene. Fortunately for academic papers the number of scenes are a few (&lt; 10).

Unfortunately the old Mitsuba parser does not work for the latest Blender version. So I wrote a custom 2.8x Blender add-on for Mitsuba, as well as creating new, custom material nodes for my own renderer.