CGFX shaders won’t cut it in this context. We’re thinking more along the lines of OSL.
Cheers,
Franz
@ Franz : thanks for this clarifying answer ! I understand the purpose of Appleseed (a beautiful name by the way) quite a lot better now.
If i could sum it up in few words, could we say that it is meant to be what Blender Internal ought to be ?
Anyway: good luck with your project !
I see, I guess that CGFX is more for games and such and not so useful for realistic rendering, time to learn OSL it seems, thanks 
Franz, this is all music to my ears… But ive been hurt before. 
Your roadmap is great, but it seems like you have a long road to haul (so does cycles). Not only that, but the blender api seems like its limiting as well. Hair children, for example, cant be exported it seems, and even if they could, it would be very inefficient to export hair geometry. You would need some kind of hair shader that generates at rendertime.
About how close are you to achieving 3d motion blur with your renderer? Im highly interested in that!
I look forward to following your progress. Thanks for the efforts.
Hey Fahr,
Thanks for your interest.
We hope to have 3D motion blur at a demo-level for mid-December this year. Stay tuned.
We would like to have curve rendering implemented within the first half of next year, at which point we’ll probably reconsider how to best integrate appleseed with Blender. Hopefully by then appleseed will have generated enough interest for the Blender community to jump in and help with the Blender-appleseed integration.
Cheers,
Franz
A quick note to let you know that we just released appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-9. The two major features of this release are support for point lights (both in appleseed and in Blenderseed, the Blender-to-appleseed exporter) and, more importantly, preliminary support for the new Alembic geometry interchange file format. Let us know what you think and how it works for you.
In other news, we’ll be present at SIGGRAPH ASIA in Hong Kong this December and we’d love to meet and get in touch if you happen to be there too!
Cheers,
Franz
Hi franz,
You had me at alembic.
Is there a chance that this support could be implemented in blender as well?
Hi Fahr,
There’s certainly nothing preventing Blender from supporting Alembic, as a matter of fact I’ve seen this topic being discussed several times on BlenderArtists and on http://code.blender.org/. It will most likely need to be implemented either as a C++ plugin or directly in Blender.
Note that we’re in no way involved in the development of Blender so you might want to direct your question to the Blender coders instead
Cheers,
Franz
A couple of new renders inspired by recent Blender+Cycles scenes:
- Bedroom: http://appleseedhq.net/images/bedroom
- Nuts & Bolts: http://appleseedhq.net/images/nuts-bolts
Cheers,
Franz
Theres an Open Source Social Network Web platform named AppleSeed too lol 
I thought you might be interested in this news: appleseed becomes Jupiter Jazz’s appleseed.
Cheers,
Franz
Congratulations François!
It’s good to see the project receiving funding, and the animation quality is very nice too!
Slightly off-topic, but I think I’d much prefer to use an engine like this over Cycles or any of the other offerings, if it is in fact like the Blender internal in that’s possible to do all kinds of cheats, then it’d be right up my street.
Looks like we’ve lost some posts in this topic…
A quick post to let you know we just released appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-10. This is the biggest release to date, featuring amongst other things:
- Camera motion blur with arbitrarily many transformations.
- Render layers: the contributions of lights, environment, objects, assemblies and individual instances can now be stored in distinct named framebuffers.
- New Kelemen BRDF model.
- Native 64-bit build for Mac OS X.
- And, of lesser interest to the Blender community: the introduction of Mayaseed, a solid Maya-to-appleseed exporter.
The full list of changes is available here.
Cheers,
Franz
I’ve been testing Appleseed out with a small scene, exporting from Blender via the Appleseed exporter.
So far all of the diagnostic passes render out fine, yet the final render image render looks like something is very wrong, I’m assuming that it has something to do with using Blenders internal materials?
Here are a few screen shots;
What is the best work flow for Appleseed, is it to export geometry with UV coordinates and so on, and then create the material set-ups inside Appleseed, along with assigning texture maps?
EDIT: Ah! I am looking over the quick start guide for Blenderseed, I’ll try out a few things and see if I can get my scene to render.
Hey,
Right now the workflow is very rough, partly because Blenderseed, the Blender-to-appleseed translator, is still very much in its infancy.
First of all, since the alpha-10 version of appleseed which supports distinct materials on the front and back sides of surfaces, there’s a slight incompatibility between Blenderseed and appleseed which I will address shortly (today). This is the cause of all the pink you see in your final image: pink means “lack of material”, and due to interpolated normals we sometimes see the back face of surfaces (on the object outlines, in particular). The current version of Blenderseed only applies materials to the front side of objects, hence the pink spots.
The workflow I’ve been using so far is to create and apply Blender materials inside Blender, then export to appleseed and tweak the materials there if necessary. The downside of this approach is that the tweaks you did in appleseed.studio will be lost if you re-export the scene from Blender, so this workflow is far from satisfactory.
How is your lighting setup? I recommend the following approach: in Blenderseed, make sure “Export Emitting Objects As Mesh Lights” is unchecked (it’s off by default). Then create a “appleseed_arealight” property on the Blender material that should really emit light and set this property to 1. All objects using this material will now effectively emit light.
If you want your (gray) sky to contribute to the lighting, check “Enable Image Based Lighting”.
Finally, you might want to check out the Blenderseed’s export settings tutorial for a more thorough description of the available export options and their effect on the final image.
A lot of work remains to be done in Blenderseed before appleseed really gets usable with Blender; we’re committed to improve Blenderseed in the near future and bring it to the point it is usable, however our focus for the next release (around March) is on the renderer’s internals and on Mayaseed, the Maya-to-appleseed translator.
Cheers,
Franz
Could you not have a way of storing the tweaked materials separately and then have an option to not export materials, like there is with objects?
I followed your suggestions and the rendering now works, I had thought that I needed to enable ‘Export Emitting Objects…’, I still have a few issues, mainly around the character / slayer area, a lot of noise is present, but perhaps that’s because the material is glossy…
The gray sky has a texture assigned to it in Blender, but it doesn’t get exported. I’m assuming I would need to assign a texture to the material inside Appleseed.
I look forward to seeing the Mayaseed exporter, will it be similar to Blenderseed, or a more deeper integration?
Thanks,
Dan.
Yes, we’re thinking of supporting this by allowing inclusion of .appleseed files into other .appleseed files, and having Blenderseed export the geometry and the materials in distinct files.
That could be. Don’t hesitate to post your questions and renders either here (if appropriate) or directly in appleseed’s forums, we’ll be glad to help figuring out the workflow and setting up your scenes.
Textures are not exported yet. This will be supported in the next release of Blenderseed.
The first version of Mayaseed is available right now in extras/maya/. This version is a classic translator (much more thorough and flexible than Blenderseed). The next version, due very soon, is a deeper integration with Maya’s node system. In the relatively near future the integration of Mayaseed in Maya will get even tighter with integrated appleseed renders in Maya viewports.
Cheers,
Franz
Hi franz, great work, as always. I have a more general question concerning blenderseed. I know your focus is on maya for the time being, but do you forsee blenderseed having the same level of integration as maya? What (if anything) about the blender render api could hold you back from achieving this? I ask because a lot of work seems to be going into improving the render api and im wondering if its opening things up for renderer developers like yourself.
Thanks!
Hey Fahr, thanks for the kind words!
If there’s one thing holding us back on the Blender integration front, it’s time and resources. We simply don’t have enough of them to progress on all fronts simultaneously are condemned to make choices and prioritize development tasks aggressively. Our focus for the next few releases is to make great strides on the difficult aspects of production rendering, in particular deformation motion blur.
I’m afraid we won’t have much constructive criticism about Blender’s render API until we actually try it out. I’m confident the work being done with Cycles and the efforts with opening up the render API will eventually benefit appleseed and allow a tighter integration of appleseed (and other renderers) into Blender.
Of course, any help with improving Blenderseed or building a better integration would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Franz