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Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engine

appleseedhq.net

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

#61

Post by santaclaus »

berkut wrote: post #60
santaclaus wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Sick! Any idea what ILM is up to, or are they all Renderman all the time now?

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

#62

Post by berkut »

santaclaus wrote: post #61
berkut wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sick! Any idea what ILM is up to, or are they all Renderman all the time now?

Mostly Renderman RIS now from what I've heard, although there's still a bit of Arnold being used, and the VRay stuff DMP were using is mostly Clarisse now.

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

#63

Post by sdwisely »

horse3d wrote: post #33
erichocean wrote: post #12

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'…

Few people use Blender professionally, but those that do almost certainly will use Cycles. It's very capable now, quite similar to Arnold, but not as fast.

It's still desirable enough that it's getting commercial plugins (cycles4d).

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

#64

Post by sdwisely »

franzb wrote: 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…

taking a quick look at it now, reminds me a lot of Maxwell. Appleseed is quite an impressive renderer already!

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

#65

Post by franzb »

jnem wrote: post #57
franzb wrote: 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.

Thank you for the lovely words!

We certainly do put a lot of care and efforts into producing a high quality software product that is not only open source with a liberal license (MIT) but which is also developed in the open (we're happy to invite anyone to our Slack team at https://appleseedhq.slack.com where all development discussions and decisions take place).

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

#66

Post by franzb »

sdwisely wrote: post #64
franzb wrote: 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…

taking a quick look at it now, reminds me a lot of Maxwell. Appleseed is quite an impressive renderer already!

Thanks! You're right, Maxwell and appleseed have a lot in common: both are (or can be) unbiased spectral renderers with animation rendering capabilities. They also both have a "studio" GUI application for scene composition, inspection and rendering.

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

#67

Post by franzb »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #4

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.

Indeed, there is no shortage of open source ray tracers and renderers. That said, there are very few open source renderers with full OSL (https://github.com/imageworks/OpenShadingLanguage) support and the required features for animation and VFX works. I actually know only two (both actively developed): Cycles and appleseed.

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

#68

Post by franzb »

generic_user wrote: post #10
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #4

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.

There has been quite a lot of work done. You can check the release notes to see precisely what has been improved. https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed/tags

Thanks! Our target is about one release roughly every three months. We've somehow managed to maintain this cadence for nearly 8 years now.

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

#69

Post by franzb »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #15
erichocean wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm easier to please. The article your linked to was publish in October 2015. Just this year they've added code[0] to support alSurface[1], which I consider to be a significant (and unexpected) feature improvement. Their news page[2] (to me) shows significant improvements since late 2015 as well, and it looks like the 1.7.x beta is just around the corner[3]. [0] https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed/commit…

Yeah, there's some progress. But it's slow, compared to other projects. E.g. Tensorflow was released November 2015 and already has 1.7x as many commits and 25x as many committers, and companies like IBM are adding support for it to their toolkits: https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/ibm-adds-support-for-googl... (roughly like what Maya did for Arnold, although Autodesk just bought the whole company: https://www.youtube…

It's an honor to even be compared to Tensorflow :)

Keep in mind that we all have day jobs and that appleseed is developed by a handful of volunteers in their free time. That probably explains, at least partly, why our progress is "slow".

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

#70

Post by franzb »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #50
digler999 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so all software sucks unless it can land you a job ?

All software sucks, period ( http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ ). And occasionally I open HN and write a meandering description of why the current top software sucks. Apparently this is not taken well, so I guess I'll stop.

To some extent, I agree with you! appleseed is surely no exception. We're just trying our best to make it suck as little as possible :)
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