Appleseed 1.8.0-beta Released

Source: https://appleseedhq.net/news.html


Modern interpretation of Eric Haines’ Sphereflake, here with subsurface scattering

We’re proud to announce the release of appleseed 1.8.0-beta, the eighth release of our beta program and the 31th release since the first alpha in July 2010.
Please head over to the release notes for the full illustrated story!
appleseed 1.8.0-beta release notes
appleseed-maya 1.0.0-beta release notes
appleseed-max 0.4.6-beta release notes
blenderseed 0.4.0 release notes
appleseed’s development team continues to expand and the speed of development increases. We are now able to tackle many large developments at once. The result is that appleseed 1.8.0-beta is an enormous release.
appleseed itself received many core improvements and extensions, including partial support for participating media, a completely rewritten AOV subsystem, a faster and more precise color pipeline, support for procedural objects, procedural assemblies and archive assemblies, and a lot more.
appleseed.studio also received a great deal of attention with OpenColorIO support for applying output transforms to renders, a new Python console allowing scripting right from appleseed.studio with immediate feedback on the scene, and support for Python plugins. The next release will see many enhancements and refinements in this area, in particular the ability for Python plugins to extend appleseed.studio’s user interface.
This release also introduces a brand new Autodesk® Maya® plugin with support for nearly all Maya’s Hypershade nodes, Disney and glass materials, appleseed’s new Standard Surface material and many other features.
With new team members came a renewed motivation to dust off, fix and update our Blender plugin. We’re thrilled to officially support Blender again!
Last but not least, our Autodesk® 3ds Max® plugin also received its share of improvements, including limited support for Activeshade rendering, Physical Camera support, a new mode to use native 3ds Max maps with appleseed and several other refinements and fixes.
This is the first official release of appleseed featuring the amazing work of our Google Summer of Code 2017 students Petra, Gleb and Artem. We’d like to congratulate them once more for the incredible work they produced throughout the summer and we’re looking forward to their future contributions to the project.
Writing a production renderer from scratch is a wonderful hobby, but a truly herculean team effort. We hope that you’ll like what we built and that you’ll give it a try. We welcome all forms of feedback, positive or negative. Feel free to reach out to us on our users forum or via Twitter.
Eight years in, and undoubtedly many more to go!

1 Like

Looks pretty interesting (no GPU rendering though).

Some things I noticed:
Connecting the Disney BRDF to the material output makes the renderer not work at all (doesn’t start rendering).
Some values like light intensity are capped at 9999 which makes it impossible to use with custom scene units (like 0.01 metric).

Amazing as renderer, I love so much this 3d rendering ! Every next version gets better and better, ya team keep it up !

There are four renderer i love : Cycles of course, appleseed, luxrender and yafaray… all I study source code, hope I will contribute or better create my own renderer :slight_smile: maybe !

Thanks for sharing, it is good news.

Hi @Cyaoeu, thanks for the feedback, we’ll fix these issues.

We appreciate bug reports, it’s the only way for us to fix them if we didn’t discover them ourselves :slight_smile: You can either use GitHub’s issue tracker [1] or our users forum [2].

[1] https://github.com/appleseedhq/blenderseed/issues
[2] https://forum.appleseedhq.net/

Thanks @threedslider for the kind words!

It would also be nice if there were sample demo scenes in the .blend format so you could just open something and see it render (along with created node networks and on).

@Cyaoeu Working on it! Here’s a preview of the scene we’re about to release:


The scene will be available as CC BY-SA 4.0.

nice to see an update

it could be more better if an non-built-in render supplies some sence files which present the features that cycles/bi can not render or can not render easily/perfect.

Here’s the test scene shown above:
https://github.com/appleseedhq/blenderseed/releases/download/v0.4.0/red_interior_demo_scene_1.0.zip

It’s a sample scene. We’ll provide more elaborate ones in not too long.

You need to have blenderseed 0.4.0 installed, and pointed to the bin directory of appleseed 1.8.0-beta.

Instructions:

  1. Open the scene in Blender.
  2. Unpack the textures with File -> External Data -> Unpack All Into Files.
  3. In the Render panel, set the Project Folder to an existing folder where the scene will be exported.
  4. Hit Render.

This is the first release of our “new” blenderseed so please let us know if something’s not right, we’ll be happy to look into it.

Who-hoo, another osl-based renderer. Neat!
Especially interested in procedural geometry generation on-demand, assembies. Are they already supported? Did`nt find api docs to try, this sounds promising

Awesome! Looking forward to this cool VFX render engine

Thanks for sharing scene Franz, i hate to test.

Seems that none of the BRDF nodes work!?

I can’t get it to render the demo scene. I installed the plugin (works), and pointed it to the appleseed bin folder. But I don’t see anything rendered in the render view.

^look at post #8

2. Unpack the textures with File -> External Data -> Unpack All Into Files.

BTW, it also needs some kind of announce/report/hint/tip system to prevent errors and observing stats (ie. once you start a render you have no clue where it’s at & how much longer till it ends.
:wink:

Also:
Buckets (frame) visibility would be of much help.

IPv6: Docs about procedural objects (procedural geometry) and procedural assemblies are sorely lacking, however we do have examples in samples/cpp/: infiniteplaneobject, sphereobject and distancefieldobject are examples of purely procedural geometry, and sphereflake is an example of a procedural assembly.

burnin:
“Seems that none of the BRDF nodes work!?” -> What are the symptoms exactly? Which version of Blender?
“Buckets (frame) visibility would be of much help.” -> Definitely. Created a ticket, will be fixed.
“it also needs some kind of announce/report/hint/tip system to prevent errors and observing stats” -> Not exactly sure to understand, but we know that the progress indicator isn’t updating, it’s a bug and there’s already a ticket in our bug tracker.

Herbert123: Sorry to hear that it doesn’t work, several people tested all of this before the release… Which version of Blender are you using? Is the plugin working otherwise? Do you see material previews?

There are plans to add all the shaders and features that are missing right? I don’t see any SSS BSSDFs, nested dielectrics, Appleseed Standard Material, or separate bounce limits for diffuse/specular paths.

@jdent02: Yes, absolutely.

We welcome help from anyone comfy with Python, by the way! We’re a super friendly community and would gladly help you get started working on blenderseed (or any other project of the ecosystem).

When any BRDF node is plugged in material output (nodes) it stops working. /// Tested on W7 with Blender 2.79 official.
eg

“Buckets (frame) visibility would be of much help.” -> Definitely. Created a ticket, will be fixed.

Thanks.

“it also needs some kind of announce/report/hint/tip system to prevent errors and observing stats” -> Not exactly sure to understand, but we know that the progress indicator isn’t updating, it’s a bug and there’s already a ticket in our bug tracker.

For now even looking at the console gives no info on what’s going on. How to debug?

i.e. After playing for a while i broke the scene & am not able to fix it anymore. This one: RedSInterior.7z just doesn’t render anymore.

Thanks for everything.

BTW:
Was mostly interested in the New Light Sampling Algorithm (work-in-progress)


Looks like the plugin cannot write to the file C:\Users\py\AppData\Local\Temp\mat_preview\mat_preview.appleseed.

Does the directory C:\Users\py\AppData\Local\Temp\mat_preview exist? If not, could you create it manually just to check if this is the problem? Of course the plugin should create the directory, but maybe there’s a problem there.

Can you also check that you have enough disk space? Unlikely to be that, but just ruling this out…

Regarding your broken Red Interior scene: the .blend file you provided no longer has the textures packed in it. If you have unpacked them before, you should have a textures directory next to the .blend file. If you don’t have that directory, just grab the original file again and unpack the textures.

Yup, directory is there. All files are in. Only when using nodes it doesn’t work. Tested also with Blender 2.78 (same, doesn’t work).
I assume it reads/writes just fine, cuz’ the timestamp changes. But the preview simply stays black until the node tree gets disconnected.

Can you also check that you have enough disk space? Unlikely to be that, but just ruling this out…

~ 20GB free

Regarding your broken Red Interior scene: the .blend file you provided no longer has the textures packed in it. If you have unpacked them before, you should have a textures directory next to the .blend file. If you don’t have that directory, just grab the original file again and unpack the textures.

Yup, did such tests also. Moved the whole directory to other locations, synced paths… no go :frowning:

BTW.
Scene file is just packed without textures for easier transfer :wink: Otherwise, does it renders on your side?

Later Edit:
Restructured the scene from the original again and this one works.
Oh, i remembered might be something else - i switched engine to cycles to lux and then back, had also added some other lamps Hemi (IBL) then removed, before it broke. Tried selected/partial/all export… cleaned caches, directories… nothing worked.