Open Shading Language¶
What is it?¶
Open Shading Language (OSL) is a small, customized computer language intended specifically for writing shaders in a physically plausible rendering engine. While it was originally designed at Sony Pictures Imageworks for their Arnold renderer, it has since been integrated into appleseed and several other renderer engines (such as RenderMan and Cycles).
How does it work with appleseed?¶
Since the beginning appleseed has had its own native shading system (henceforth the ‘internal’ system). While this system works well enough, it was limited to defining material surfaces and optionally assigning UV mapped textures to them. That was it. It couldn’t do any kind of procedural patterns, coordinate manipulation, fancy BSDF mixing, or any of the other utility functions that were needed for a production renderer. Instead of expanding the BIS system with these features, the decision was made to integrate OSL instead, as it is fully capable of all these features and is developed and hosted by a major visual effects company.
How do I use it in blenderseed?¶
OSL is available in conjunction with the node editor in Blender. You can add nodes from the different appleseed categories to build up your material, but always make sure the final node is an as_closure2surface node, as that is required to export the material properly.
Where does the OSL shading system get the nodes from?¶
The OSL shaders are found in the “shaders” directory of the appleseed folder. When blenderseed starts up, it scans this directory and builds the nodes dynamically based on the parameters contained inside the .oso files. When the scene is rendered the output file will point to those shaders and describe the connections between them. The shaders themselves are not copied or moved unless the scene is exported. In this case the shaders are copied to the export directory.
Textures with OSL¶
OSL can directly load most image formats (JPEG, PNG, TIFF). However, this is not the best practice for using it. Full sized textures take up a lot of memory in the render, and in many cases objects will not be sufficiently large enough in the output frame to justify the memory space used for high resolution, detailed images. The solution is to create a .tx file using OSL’s built in texture converter. This will take an input image and produce a tiled, mipmapped version that is far more efficient when used with OSL. This is due to a few different features: for one the tiling allows appleseed to only load the sections of the image that are visible. Second the mipmapping allows appleseed to load in the appropriate resolution of the texture depending on how large the object is in the output frame. These two features not only reduce the memory requirement for textures, they also speed up the render.
How do I convert textures?¶
Textures can be converted to .tx files using the texture converter panel in the World tab.
Can I use OSL shaders from third parties?¶
Yes, with a few exceptions. OSL shaders transfer their results to the host renderer BSDF’s by using an item called a ‘closure’. While OSL suggests a limited set of generic closures, many renderers don’t implement all of them and many add their own closures to the list. OSL shaders that use closure calls may or may not work with a different renderer. If the OSL shader is being used for pattern generation or processing, it will usually work just fine with another renderer. The only drawback is that third party shaders may not have the metadata that blenderseed uses to construct its node UI.
Can I write my own shaders?¶
Absolutely. There are two ways to use custom OSL shaders in blenderseed: parsing a pre-compiled OSL shader (the same thing that happens to the included appleseed shaders), or typing the code into a Blender text block and then having that block dynamically compiled at render time. If you choose to use a pre-compiled shader, it can be parsed by Blender using three different methods:
- Add the shader to the existing ‘shader’ directory in the blenderseed folder.
- Add the shader directory to the ‘APPLESEED_SEARCH_PATH’ environment variable.
- Add the shader directory to the searchpaths in blenderseed’s preferences panel.
If you choose to write your own OSL shader, there are several formatting rules and metadata tags that should be used in order to properly build the node’s UI and category.