appleseed renderer (now with experimental Blender exporter!)

Hi everyone,

A quick heads-up to inform you that we just released appleseed version 1.1.0 alpha-7. appleseed is an open source physically-based renderer that runs on the CPU. It started as a research and experimentation platform several years ago and, since the first public release in July 2010, it’s evolving into a rendering tool that aims to be usable by a wider audience.

appleseed is very similar in spirit to the awesome Mitsuba and LuxRender renderers, although it still misses many essential features to be truly competitive (hence the alpha status). That being said, progress is very steady and we hope for a first beta release later this year or early next year.

The major highlight of this seventh alpha release is a new experimental exporter for Blender 2.58 and later. The exporter creates complete appleseed projects from unmodified Blender scenes, including the automatic translation of Blender materials to appleseed materials (as far as this is possible). This is the first public release of the Blender exporter so rough edges are to be expected, but we more than welcome feedback and advices from the community on how the exporter should look, behave and integrate into Blender.

You can find more info about appleseed on the official site.

Keep rocking!

Franz

This looks very nice.

I shall try it out when I get some spare time.

I’m surprised this is the first I’ve heard of this engine as it already looks quite capable and of good quality.

Thanks!

The reason you never heard of appleseed is that we never made any public announcement (until today!). As stated above, for many years appleseed has been a private rendering R&D platform, and as a common code base for many commercial products from the Jupiter Jazz VFX consulting group. It only became public on July 2010 with the first alpha release.

You can find lots more info about appleseed on this page of the Jupiter Jazz website.

Franz, cool man. I think I saw your website some time ago, but I thought project was dead. Good to hear it is still on, and with blender plugin.
Could you describe what works for now with blender plugin? I mean : textures, gi, particles hair, supported lamps etc.

The text you use for the title of the image and tutorial pages are way too big, I know you might be expecting someone to use one of their monitor’s HD resolutions, but I still think the font could be smaller.

Anyway, it seems most of what you got so far is standard for unbiased rendering (with the exception of the approximated methods which look quite promising and could tackle situations difficult for traditional pathtracers), so while it seems run of the mill, it has some techniques not seen much before in unbiased rendering.

I do wonder though if it would be able to handle non-physical effects used for production tricks like already seen in the Cycles engine (truly invisible lights, shadeless materials, invisible materials that still cast shadows, ect…), Luxrender for example can’t do those things because its shading back-end is rather strict on following physical-shading paradigms, so as to allow them would mean some major code changes.

Hey, thanks for the kind words!

Here are the features currently supported by the Blender plugin:

  • All surface types are exported after tessellation, so dupli objects, displacement etc. will be correctly rendered by appleseed.
  • Blender native materials (including diffuse, specular, glossy and transparency components) are translated to appleseed materials, within what’s possible.
  • Blender materials with Emit > 0 can be exported as mesh lights, either globally via a checkbox in the exporter, or selectively via an ‘appleseed_arealight’ property on materials that should be considered as light-emitting (*).
  • Textures are not yet exported, although they are supported by appleseed.
  • Point lights are currently exported as small invisible spherical lights since point lights are not yet natively supported by appleseed. The other light types aren’t supported either.
  • The camera is exported, but depth of field is not yet supported by the exporter (although it is supported by appleseed).
  • The horizon color (scene.world.horizon_color) is exported.
  • Direct illumination and Global illumination are supported.

Hair, particles, motion blur and render-time displacement are on the todo list but are not yet implemented in appleseed and so are not exposed by the Blender plugin.

Hopefully this answers your question. As you can see, there are a lot of areas in which appleseed is lacking. We’ll be addressing the question of textures and non-physical lights (point lights, cone lights, etc.) in priority, probably followed by high quality 3D transformation and deformation motion blur.

(*) We will release some documentation for the Blender plugin in the following days, please stay tuned.

I think you’re hitting a CSS bug. The problem should disappear if you refresh the page. We’ll look into this issue, thanks for reporting it.

Indeed, you’re absolutely correct. Right now appleseed is a fairly standard spectral path tracer (although it also include other integrators like a light tracer and a distribution ray tracer). We experimented with approximate methods in the past, including fast voxel-based ambient occlusion. We also implemented a very fast, non-physically correct volume renderer that is only partially exposed in the UI. Additionally, appleseed supports mixing in the same render physically-based surface shaders (that merely invoke the BSDF-based pipeline) and non-physically-based shaders that can be arbitrary. You can see a good example of this on these images.

We definitely plan to provide extra flexibility outside the realm of physically-based rendering. Support for ray flags (allowing invisible objects, objects that only cast shadows, etc.) is already built into the engine, it is just not exposed yet.

The team behind appleseed is a bunch of VFX and production rendering guys that worked on several commercial production renderers and rendering tools over a decade, and as such we’re well aware of the extreme flexibility required by the VFX folks and the show they work on. With appleseed, we plan to progressively shift the focus to production rendering, building on a solid path tracing core.

On the longer term we have plans to integrate a shading language, be it OSL or some form of limited RSL, maybe even powered by a commercial virtual machine like the one of 3Delight. But there are some more fundamental issues that first need to be addressed, like fast & high quality motion blur, fast & high quality displacement, and support for very large scenes.

Orientation-wise, I guess it would make sense to see a parallel with SolidAngle’s / Sony ImageWorks’ Arnold renderer.

I haven’t tried it out yet but reading the feature list and the future plans I can say that this looks awesome ^^

If you continue with the Blender-support I can definitely see this becoming a commonly used renderer for Blender users in the future.

EDIT: I had something else here but I failed tor read that development of this engine actually precedes Cycles by a number of months, still I would think it would be a neat thing to see some of these newer, much faster techniques eventually find its way into Cycles whether or not it involves the team members of this project if only to really put an open source render-engine in a very competitive position against the likes of V-ray and Maxwell.

So, will this mean you have/will implement render passes/layers?

If not yet, then sometime in the future, pwetty pwease?

(^Click thumbn. for original puppy-eyed sketch by IniaLynn @sketchfu) :3

Didn’t he state that the project started “years ago” and the first public release was in 2010??? :slight_smile:

With that logic, wouldn’t be logic to ask Brecht why he started his own engine instead to contribute to the more mature and established projects? :stuck_out_tongue:

Just saying :stuck_out_tongue: (and :wink: )

And yes, i also came across the site some time ago, but also thought that the project was dead. Good to know is kicking around, and with Blender exporter also. Will test later. (and yes, the appleseed forum fonts are HUGE)

D’oh, why I miss basic things like that when reading I don’t know at times, but I do know that’s something I need to be on better lookout for. :wink:

I’ve tried running the Linux version of AppleSeed on Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit, but I’m running into a problem.

Firstly ‘run-appleseed.sh’ gives me the option to run the script, but nothing happens when I do so, and clicking on appleseed.studio does nothing. When I try running appleseed.studio from the terminal I get this error. “error while loading shared libraries: libicuuc.so.42: cannot open shared object or file…”

I’m not sure where to get this library from, I’ve searched synaptic and google to no avail.

Also I’ve been reading around on the website, and your posts and I like the sound of where this engine is going. I think there is a lack of visual effects orientated engines out there in the open-source comminuty, a lot of the time a new render engine comes along and it’s good for doing simple scenes or tests, and even when it can be used in production it’s for arch-viz type of work. Which is a shame I think.

Anyway, if I can’t get this working on Linux I may try running it through Wine. Either way I’ll be keeping a close eye on the development of this engine.

did you try installing libicu42 from Synaptic?

Havent tried it yet coz my net is too slow to download even 40 mb :stuck_out_tongue: but anyways looks very nice.
I have a little feature request if you would like to address that in future. Can you guys please code a Bake to lightmap feature so that we can use it to bake light, caustic,GI etc and use it it in BGE? It would be awesooooome! :slight_smile:

Gave appleseed renderer a shot. Yes, first it’s a 40 meg download, seems a bit large for a renderer, but anyhow. On windows xp the one test file, a cornell box, worked just fine. So I find the add-on for blender and install it. (it’s in the extras folder). First thought was to look at the render add-ons, it’s not there, it’s under import/export. Load up a model in blender, and use the appleseed exporter, I get a .obj file for every mesh object and a .applseed file. Loading the .appleseed file in appleseed renderer worked and the renderer worked to a point. It rendered a great image, without lighting,

See here: http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=17891

There is a plane above the camera (twice the size of the phone) with a material set to emit, and the scene is dark. I’m not sure that I am even using this render’s light setup correctly…

According to the docs, I thought that would be enough lighting, but maybe I missed something…

Randy

That’s an excellent question. With the plethora of quality open source renderers alive out there–Cycles, LuxRender, Mitsuba (formerly Ubiquaque), YafaRay, Aqsis–one would like to see cooperation rather than dispersion of the efforts, as is so common in the open source landscape.

However the fact is, appleseed actually predates all of these renderers, by a large margin (with the notable exception of Aqsis which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, or is about to do so).

However, since appleseed wasn’t made public until the first alpha release in July 2010 (and there wasn’t even a website until 2009!), no external contributions were possible.

We have plans to support object layers and later some form of object passes using Light Path Expressions. This certainly won’t be coming before the first beta though, as there is a number of fundamental features that will require our efforts until then.

I’m afraid baking to light maps isn’t on the near-to-medium future roadmap, although we definitely welcome code contributions in this area.

The archive is large for a variety of reasons. First, keep in mind this is an alpha build, and as such the package contains a lot of test data (test scenes, but also input data for the unit tests and unit benchmarks). These test data are not strictly required by the renderer. A lot of them will probably be stripped out from the “end user package” when we reach the beta status. Another contributing factor is the large size of the Qt libraries.

Sorry for the guesswork. We will provide some documentation in the following days to clarify the installation process. As for the location of the Blender plugin, it might indeed make more sense to place it under Render rather than Import-Export. Thanks for the tip.

By default, materials with Emit > 0 are not exported as light-emitting materials, unless they are tagged with an ‘appleseed_arealight’ property set to 1. However, you can enable exporting all emitting materials as mesh lights by checking the “Export Emitting Objects As Mesh Lights” in the exporter panel.

You might also want to enclose the whole scene in a somewhat reflective environment to make sure light bounces around instead of escaping.

We realize that both the renderer and the Blender exporter are in relatively early stages of development and certainly lack features and maturity. We most definitely appreciate and value early testing and feedback such as yours.