31–40 of 82 posts
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Tensorflow is also managed by the most influential tech company in the world.
Right; Tensorflow is managed well, and working on it might lead to a job, while appleseed seems like yet another open-source time sink with few prospects. Obviously money isn't everything, so maybe there's a better criteria for judging projects, but at least on the "lasting impact on the world" front appleseed seems to fall short...
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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…
If you're disappointed with the state of the art, maybe you don't really understand the state nor the art?
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- I've never heard of Tungsten. - Mitsuba is a mainly-academic renderer by Wenzel Jakob (I say mainly because I haven't seen its widespread use in non-academic setting). The two important open source renderers that are missing in comparison: - Cycles (comes with Blender; produces great results although it is said that it only recently has started doing a "PBR workflow") - Luxrender (very popular with artists on devia…
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 are some render comparisons for the curious: http://appleseedhq.net/stuff/renderers-comparison/index.html
How am I supposed to compare these three on the top as a non-expert in this area? The middle one looks noisier than the other two. I notice the one on the left has darker color in dresser which may be an advantage of correct, color handing but might be incorrect with one on right being brighter due to the correct handing of window's light on it. And what's up with the graininess of all of them? Just a few things that…
In practice, every renderer has different features and settings, so the actual scenes will only be approximately the same.
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How am I supposed to compare these three on the top as a non-expert in this area? The middle one looks noisier than the other two. I notice the one on the left has darker color in dresser which may be an advantage of correct, color handing but might be incorrect with one on right being brighter due to the correct handing of window's light on it. And what's up with the graininess of all of them? Just a few things that…
The color differences are from different "tone mapping" implementations after the render is stopped and can be ignored. The point of that page is to evaluate renderer correctness (think of them as visual unit tests), not to really compare "which one looks better". For example, some of the images show appleseed with hard shadows, when they should be soft. If you want to know which one is "right", Mitsuba is the one to…
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Right; Tensorflow is managed well, and working on it might lead to a job, while appleseed seems like yet another open-source time sink with few prospects. Obviously money isn't everything, so maybe there's a better criteria for judging projects, but at least on the "lasting impact on the world" front appleseed seems to fall short...
>Right; Tensorflow is managed well, and working on it might lead to a job Tensorflow's management is not relevant to its popularity. It's been well demonstrated that companies are tripping all over themselves to use anything put out by Google and/or Facebook, regardless of its applicability to the company's actual problem space or the quality of the product as compared to competitors. There are a lot of people out th…
Sure, but I was counting commits and contributors, which I don't think can be attributed solely to shallow business decisions.
> Look at an independent guy's project. It's not even as active as some of Google's projects, and they're just one of the biggest companies in the world! Hah!" is really, really unfair, and doesn't say anything about anything.
They're not that big, only 60,000 people or so AFAICT, compared to e.g. Wal-mart's 2.1 million. And then it's only ~50 people who worked on Tensorflow directly: https://research.google.com/people/BrainTeam.html. Compared to Appleseed's 12: http://appleseedhq.net/about.html.
Is it really that unfair to compare a 12-person MIT-licensed C++ project on GitHub to a 50-person Apache-licensed C++ project on GitHub? Or to remind everyone that 98% of open source projects fail?
> KDE's Konqueror began as a custom web browser for their desktop environment and easily could've been classified "yet another open-source timesink". But its engine, KHTML, became the foundation for WebKit.
KDE started in 1996, they wrote an HTML library, they didn't like it, they wrote a second version with a better architecture and ~10 developers. Appleseed doesn't seem to have that reactionary style of development or even that much thought on its design. I think it's easy to distinguish the two cases.
> If someone is interested in making something interesting, there's no reason to begrudge it.
Right. But I do begrudge them calling it "modern", when they have "no formal roadmap" (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/appleseed-dev/wMA4oW...) and a long list of features to get to where SIGGRAPH was 5-10 years ago. If they took that one word out I wouldn't have such a problem.
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Right; Tensorflow is managed well, and working on it might lead to a job, while appleseed seems like yet another open-source time sink with few prospects. Obviously money isn't everything, so maybe there's a better criteria for judging projects, but at least on the "lasting impact on the world" front appleseed seems to fall short...
>Right; Tensorflow is managed well, and working on it might lead to a job Tensorflow's management is not relevant to its popularity. It's been well demonstrated that companies are tripping all over themselves to use anything put out by Google and/or Facebook, regardless of its applicability to the company's actual problem space or the quality of the product as compared to competitors. There are a lot of people out th…
Angular being the quintessential example.
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, NVIDIA, Jupiter Jazz...). I've started this project out of personal interest for rendering, and as a platform for learning (there's always tons of new stuff to learn), research and experiments. All other team members are professionals currently working in the industry.
appleseed is one of the few open source renderers designed for production rendering and targeted at animation and VFX. In addition to fully programmable shading via OpenShadingLanguage, strong support for motion blur and many other specific features, it supports accurate spectral rendering, which is quite a unique combination.
We still have a ton of work ahead to make it a truly competitive renderer but we're making regular progress: we're improving the core renderer every day, and lately we've been putting massive efforts in improving our integration with DCC apps and in achieving a comfortable workflow for artists. Loads left to do !
Let me finally add that I'm blessed to work with such a great team. Top quality work, persistently. We're a small but welcoming community, and contributions are most welcome!
Feel free to ask me anything!
The name clashes with a well known anime movie, which also uses CGI. Maybe change the name of this engine?