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Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

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Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#51

Can someone Explain Like I'm Five: "Physically-based rendering"? As opposed to...?

Non-physically based rendering :)

Kidding aside, as I understand it (I'm certainly no expert), the terms most often used are biased versus unbiased rendering, were biased has artificial limitations, while unbiased employs 'real world' calculations.

So why use biased renderers ?

Well they can typically create a very good result using much less time compared to a unbiased renderer, on the other hand they typically also require that you mess around with a lot of knobs in order to get good results, meanwhile with a unbiased renderer you can just set up a 'real world' scene and it will render as such (albeit more slowly).

My guess is that Renderman is the most widely used biased renderer today, with Arnold being the most used unbiased.

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#52
post #43

2015 Interview with the lead developer: http://blenderdiplom.com/en/interviews/607-interview-francoi... Seems like it's in around the same place, although the plugins are getting better and the renderer is starting to support complex scene features (not quite there yet). Overall though there are 100's of ray-tracers and scene renderers (seemingly all in C++), so it's not clear if it has any compelling advantages.

I think the most powerful feature of C++ is templating. Templating makes it very easy to write high-performance math code (no dynamic function calls, everything unrolled by the compiler...). Just have a look at the state of the art math libraries in rust and compare it to something like Eigen or Cgal. The C++ code is way more flexible and expressive than the rust code. If you don't believe me, check how the rust libr…

This will get better once we have type level integers. It's just not there yet. You're totally right that it's a weak point st the moment.

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#53
Hierarchical instancing YEAAHHH!!!!

Thanks guys; I no longer need to go write my own path tracer.

(I say this because I really like the idea of things like Chunky (the pathtracer for Minecraft), but I'd rather be able to simply export data to a more mature, full-featured renderer. Hierarchical instancing means you can do things like make bricks out of grains of sand, make brick blocks out of bricks, etc, without /necessarily/ blowing your memory budget when rendering a large map.)

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#54
post #51

Can someone Explain Like I'm Five: "Physically-based rendering"? As opposed to...?

Non-physically based rendering :) Kidding aside, as I understand it (I'm certainly no expert), the terms most often used are biased versus unbiased rendering, were biased has artificial limitations, while unbiased employs 'real world' calculations. So why use biased renderers ? Well they can typically create a very good result using much less time compared to a unbiased renderer, on the other hand they typically also…

That's not really what 'biased' and 'unbiased' mean - unfortunately the terms have been miss-used quite a bit, and are actually open to interpretation to a degree anyway.

You can have biased physically-based rendering and you can have unbiased 'not quite physically-based' rendering - in the latter case for example, it's possible to render direct lighting only (so no secondary bounces, or global illumination), which while obviously not the correct real result in physical terms, to the extent that you're evaluating direct lighting only the result is technically unbiased in terms of light transport. Similarly, it's possibly to have a spectral renderer (which in theory should be more accurate) which is biased, and a non-spectral renderer (RGB only) which is unbiased.

Biased can mean things like taking short-cuts or approximations - e.g. irradiance caches for diffuse results, or caching occlusion in order to slightly bias which light to sample per vertex in order to sample lights more efficiently: Both of these biased techniques generally give faster less noisy renders, but it's possible you might not notice they are biased in terms of the effect they have on the render - it all depends on the scene, materials and the lighting. For simple scenes you probably won't notice, for more complex scenes with nested medium materials with glossy/pure specular responses or with refractive caustics, it's very likely you will notice the effects biased rendering has compared to unbiased rendering.

Renderman RIS can be set up to be unbiased (but with default settings - radiance clamps) it's not. Similarly Arnold's default settings of having a light threshold (under which it won't sample a light) is also biased, but obviously this setting can be changed. Arnold can also cache diffuse contributions on hair, which is also biased.

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#55
post #39

Hello, founder of appleseed here! Being the top story on Hacker News tonight was completely unexpected, but it's a good surprise and definitely appreciated publicity! appleseed has been in active development since june of 2009. It predates a number of other open source renderers by quite a few years, including Cycles (another fantastic project!). I'm a production rendering engineer (e-on software, mental images, NVID…

Can you list the top five Influential research papers that have inspired you while working on Appleseed?

I have ACM library account so if they are ACM or Siggraph papers that is fine.

--edit

And thank you for making your project open source.

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#56
post #54
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-physically based rendering :) Kidding aside, as I understand it (I'm certainly no expert), the terms most often used are biased versus unbiased rendering, were biased has artificial limitations, while unbiased employs 'real world' calculations. So why use biased renderers ? Well they can typically create a very good result using much less time compared to a unbiased renderer, on the other hand they typically also…

That's not really what 'biased' and 'unbiased' mean - unfortunately the terms have been miss-used quite a bit, and are actually open to interpretation to a degree anyway. You can have biased physically-based rendering and you can have unbiased 'not quite physically-based' rendering - in the latter case for example, it's possible to render direct lighting only (so no secondary bounces, or global illumination), which w…

Thanks for the correction!

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#57
post #39

Hello, founder of appleseed here! Being the top story on Hacker News tonight was completely unexpected, but it's a good surprise and definitely appreciated publicity! appleseed has been in active development since june of 2009. It predates a number of other open source renderers by quite a few years, including Cycles (another fantastic project!). I'm a production rendering engineer (e-on software, mental images, NVID…

I'm not in the industry, but I would like to say that I am highly encouraged by the way you described your offering.

You express a level of care, consideration, and diplomacy that is sadly lacking just about everywhere.

The product itself looks amazing; I love seeing this high bar for open source.

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because the point of the comparison is not to compare with other renderers, it's to check feature correctness. Mitsuba is widely used for that purpose. Almost no one uses LuxRender or Cycles commercially to the best of my knowledge (or appleseed for that matter). Hobbyists use them, which is cool. I'm in Los Angeles and work in the industry. Here, people use Renderman, Arnold, and in-house stuff mostly. I don'…

> Here, people use Renderman, Arnold, and in-house stuff mostly. Disney has Hyperion and Weta has Manuka, although I'm not sure if they license them out to other shops.

> I'm not sure if they license them out to other shops

Not that I know of. Many houses also have specialized in-house renders for voxels and occasionally, fluids.

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here, people use Renderman, Arnold, and in-house stuff mostly. Disney has Hyperion and Weta has Manuka, although I'm not sure if they license them out to other shops.

> I'm not sure if they license them out to other shops Not that I know of. Many houses also have specialized in-house renders for voxels and occasionally, fluids.

> Many houses also have specialized in-house renders for voxels and occasionally, fluids

Hella cool! Who is rolling their own outside of Weta?

DD? Animal Logic? Double Negative? Blue Sky is super proprietary, I'm curious what they are up to...

Re: Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure if they license them out to other shops Not that I know of. Many houses also have specialized in-house renders for voxels and occasionally, fluids.

> Many houses also have specialized in-house renders for voxels and occasionally, fluids Hella cool! Who is rolling their own outside of Weta? DD? Animal Logic? Double Negative? Blue Sky is super proprietary, I'm curious what they are up to...

A lot of studios used to have their own fluid / volume renderers, but it's less common these days as the main renderers can do volumes/implicits fairly well these days.

But more studios have their own full renderers these days:

Weta has Manuka

Disney has Hyperion

Animal Logic has Glimpse

Framestore has Van Damme

Sony has their fork of Arnold

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