Appleseed supports amongst other features
- fully programmable shading via Sony Pictures Imageworks’ Open Shading Language (OSL)
- RGB/spectral/mixed rendering
- fast and robust transformation and deformation motion blur
- state-of-the-art ray traced subsurface scattering
- exhaustive Python and C++ APIs
- and many other production-oriented features.
Along with the core renderer, the team is actively developing high quality integrations
- appleseed for Autodesk® Maya® → appleseed-maya
- appleseed for Autodesk® 3ds Max® → appleseed-max
- appleseed for Blender® → blenderseed
appleseed is also the default rendering engine of Image Engine’s Gaffer.
- Lambertian BRDF (purely diffuse)
- Specular BRDF (perfect mirror)
- Specular BSDF
- Diffuse BTDF
- Oren-Nayar Microfacet BRDF
- Ward Microfacet BRDF
- Blinn Microfacet BRDF
- Microfacet BRDF with GGX, GTR, Student’s t-MDF
- Disney’s principled BRDF
- Ashikhmin-Shirley BRDF
- Kelemen BRDF
- Glossy BRDF
- Conductor Fresnel metal BRDF
- Stacked plastic BRDF
- Glass BSDF with absorption
- Sheen BRDF
- Arbitrary mixtures of BRDFs
- Energy compensation in microfacet BxDFs.
appleseed provides state-of-the art raytraced, animation-friendly subsurface scattering, fully exposed to OSL. There is no precomputation and it’s available in interactive rendering. SSS sets are also supported.
The following subsurface scattering profiles are available
- Better Dipole
- Directional Dipole
- Gaussian
- Normalized Diffusion
- Standard Dipole
- Random Walk
- Single scattering
- Multiple scattering
- Homogeneous media
- Isotropic phase function
- Henyey-Greenstein phase function
- Pinhole camera
- Spherical camera
- Thin lens camera (depth of field)
- Polygonal diaphragm shapes
- Full control over the bokeh via image-based diaphragm shapes
- Camera motion blur
- Transformation motion blur
- Deformation motion blur
- Arbitrary number of motion steps
- Point light
- Spot light
- Gobos
- Directional/parallel light
- Mesh light
- Purely diffuse emission profile
- Cone-shaped emission profile
- Image-based lighting
- Latitude-longitude environment maps
- Mirror-ball environment maps
- Preetham physically-based day sky model
- Hosek & Wilkie physically-based day sky model
- Physically-based Sun
- Environment transforms
Besides the extensive list of features mentioned, appleseed provides
- Open Shading Language support (OSL)
- A production oriented OSL shader library
- OpenColorIO support
- Disney SeExpr expressions
- AOVs
- Hierarchical instancing
- Per-instance visibility flags
- Alpha mapping
- Automatic color space conversions
- Ray differentials
- Ray bias
- Light Near Start
- Low light threshold
- Max ray intensity
- Bounce limits per scatterint types
- Nested dielectrics
- Automatic tracking of indices of refraction
- Packed, single-file scenes for easy transport
- Search paths for external assets
- Dozens of diagnostic modes
- Windows, Linux and macOS (64-bit)
- OBJ geometry files
- OpenEXR, TIFF, HDR, PNG, JPEG, PSD…
- Full Open Shading Language support
- Integration with 3rd party applications via connection plugins
- Multithreaded, scalable
- SSE, SSE2, SSE4.2 vectorization
- Memory-bounded texture cache
- Multiple Importance Sampling
- Efficient handling of alpha maps
- Advanced many-light sampling
- Full featured graphical tool for scene editing (appleseed.studio)
- Command line renderer
- Dropbox-based render farm tools
- OSL compiler and tools
- Texture processor (OIIO)
- 100% open source, MIT license
- Exceptionally clean, fully reviewed code
- Full featured C++ API
- Full extensibility via external C++ plugins
- Full featured Python 2.x/3.x API
- Embedded Python scripting
- More than 1300 built-in unit tests
- Hundreds of built-in performance tests
- Rich, automatic functional test suite
Footnotes
| [1] | UDPT for short |
| [2] | SPPM for short |
References
