appleseedhq/appleseed

A modern open source rendering engine for animation and visual effects

appleseed

Overview

appleseed is an open source, physically-based global illumination rendering engine primarily designed for animation and visual effects.

appleseed is actively developed by a small, international team of talented volunteers from the animation and VFX industry. Its core mission is to provide individuals and small studios with a complete, reliable, fully open rendering package.

Over the years appleseed has been used on several projects including TV documentaries, ads, promotional videos and an animation short.

appleseed is available as a portable C++ library with C++ and Python APIs, as a set of standalone applications for Windows, Linux and macOS, and as native plugins for content creation applications. Downloads →

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On the Web

• Home: appleseedhq.net
• Twitter: twitter.com/appleseedhq
• Vimeo: vimeo.com/appleseedhq
• Discord: discord.gg/dNCE5J8
• Forum: forum.appleseedhq.net

Contributing

• How to build appleseed from source
• Coding philosophy and guidelines
• Detailed projects ideas
• Developer and contributor wiki

Citing

appleseed releases have DOIs for scientific citation: https://zenodo.org/record/3456967.

Related Projects

• appleseed for Autodesk® Maya®
• appleseed for Autodesk® 3ds Max®
• appleseed for Blender
• Image Engine's Gaffer (into which appleseed is integrated)

License

appleseed and its accompanying software is released under the MIT license.

© 2010-2019 The appleseedhq Organization

appleseed's Issues

Make access cache two-staged (direct mapping + LRU)

Print better error messages when loading a texture fails

Create a new build configuration called 'Safe' with assertions and floating-point exceptions enabled

Migrate the unit tests in foundation/meta/tests/test_anyarray.cpp to the new unit testing framework

Replace renderer::Frame by an implementation of the renderer::IFilm interface

Find a more elegant way to handle evaluation of uniform inputs

Migrate the unit tests in foundation/meta/tests/test_distance.cpp to the new unit testing framework

Initialize the Shading Override menu according to the scene settings when loading a scene from disk

Don't initialize Xerces-C each time a project is loaded

Unify APPLESEED_FOUNDATION_EXPORTS and APPLESEED_RENDERER_EXPORTS, and move their definition to a dedicated header file

In progress: http://appleseedhq.net/wiki/ongoing-cleanups-and-refactorings

Add support for thread exclusion lists in foundation::Logger

It should be possible to tell foundation::Logger to ignore messages coming from certain threads (identified by the thread ID as provided by Boost?).

Remember the current directory in file dialogs

Initialize RNG per-tile, based on tile coordinates

Increase flexibility of parameters definition in project files

What about changing

<parameter name="x" value="42" />

to the cleaner and more generic

<parameter name="x">42</parameter>

This would allow storing XML fragments in parameters...

Implement writing of texture files in project file writer

Experiment with Ordered Depth-First Layouts for Ray Tracing

Paper: http://msl.yonsei.ac.kr/pdf/odfl.pdf

Use the _BitScanReverse intrinsic in foundation/math/scalar.h to implement foundation::log2() and foundation::next_pow2()

Consider moving all external libraries into a new src/3rdparty subdirectory

Make sure objects tagged with __declspec(dllexport) present only POD types in their interface

Perform SAH binning over all three axis at once

Add a button "Check All Failed" to the Tests window

Implement 64-bit radical inverse functions

Make foundation::Dictionary ordered

It would be nice if foundation::Dictionary would preserve the order in which items were inserted.

Support drag and drop of project files to the main window

Add support for PNG textures

Remove blanks around identifiers, and check identifier validity during project file parsing

Fix non-virtual base class problems in diamond-shaped inheritance patterns

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_problem.

Move Frame::write() and Frame::archive() to separate classes

For instance renderer::FrameWriter and renderer::FrameArchiver.

Speed up foundation::radical_inverse() and permuted_radical_inverse() by using lookup tables for modulo operations

Add texture transforms

Vertical flipping in particular.

Enclose all the code into the 'appleseed' namespace

Already done for appleseed.cli and appleseed.studio.

Use set_target_property with DEFINE_SYMBOL to define APPLESEED_EXPORTS and APPLESEED_SHARED_EXPORTS

APPLESEED_EXPORTS is the result of the unification of APPLESEED_FOUNDATION_EXPORTS and APPLESEED_RENDERER_EXPORTS, see issue #9.

Implement a mechanism to check that objects are always allocated and deallocated using the same memory subsystem

Define the renderer::IFilm interface

Rename renderer::ParamArray to renderer::Parameters

Add functionalities to the unit benchmark component to clear the CPU caches before running a benchmark

Write unit tests and unit benchmarks for foundation/math/fastmath.h

The goal is to measure the accuracy and performance of these approximate functions.

When saving a project to a directory that already contains mesh files, if the project references a mesh file that is already present on disk, the mesh file doesn't get overwritten, and the old and possibly mismatching mesh file is used

Non-copyability is not enforced by foundation::NonCopyable for DLL-exported classes

Add attributes (date, time, build version) to benchmark logs

Rename APPLESEED_FOUNDATION_USE_SSE to APPLESEED_USE_SSE

Most classes should really inherit (publicly) from foundation::NonCopyable

Fix foundation::sample_hemisphere_cosine() (and all similar functions) as it might return vectors with y == 0.0

Once fixed, remove checks for y == 0.0 everywhere (in particular in LambertianBRDFImpl::sample()). Also remove assertions like assert(y >= 0.0) as this is obviously always true.

Reimplement foundation::BufferedFile using unbuffered platform I/O functions

Editing the project while rendering results in a crash

Split foundation::System into multiple classes

For instance: foundation::CPU, foundation::PhysicalMemory, etc.

Move foundation/math/samplingcontext.h to renderer/kernel/sampling/

Implement parallel building of acceleration structures

Fix passing of parameters to components

Fix passing of parameters: renderer::ParamArray should only be used for the public interface of appleseed.renderer. in all other cases, plain function arguments should be used.

Add unit tests for EDF, BSDF