The CSS errors on the website should now be fixed. A few style errors were also corrected on Firefox and Internet Explorer. Thanks for reporting anything unusual or regressions on your browser.
Thanks for the tips Franz! Gave it another shot, still couldn’t get the mesh light to work. A single point lamp on my first test model did give me this:
Not sure what is up with the band at the top of the display, and materials appear to have no affect as far as color goes, should be black with chrome bezel. So tried a more simple test with one simple subject, simple material, and 2 point lights:
The display in appleseed isn’t as bright and it saves the image as an .exr, which I loaded into blender where it appeared much brighter and saved it out as a .png. Yes it’s grainy, but it was rendered in 1 min 14 secs.
Randy
I managed to get it working. The interface seems like it’s off to a good start.
I found the ‘open file’ window a little slow though, it seemed to take several seconds for each folder to open.
Also when opening one of the fastSSS scenes (the green one) hitting interactive and/ or final render caused appleseed to crash out.
The interactive render crashes instantly, where as the final render managed to get a few buckets processed before crashing out.
I’m on Ubuntu 64-bit 11.04 (Q6600, GTX260).
Here’s a tip to debug rendering errors, black objects and so on: in appleseed.studio, you can enable a variety of debug modes from the Diagnostics menu. These debug modes allow to visualize normals, UV coordinates, etc. I suggest you give it a try to figure out what’s this band at the top of the display (isn’t it just the phone’s screen reflecting the hemisphere you enclosed the scene in?)
In any case, don’t hesitate to send us your Blender file (by mail: [email protected]) if you find a bug or things don’t work as expected.
The Open Project dialog is actually the native file browser of your platform, so in principle this issue is not related to appleseed. Can you try with a different Qt-based application?
Thanks for reporting this issue. There was indeed a bug (on all platforms). We also found two other related bugs: the smoke surface shader was broken as well, and alpha cutouts were no longer working properly with the Physical surface shader. All three bugs have been fixed and the fixes will be made available with the next alpha release, which should be out of the door within a week.
I’ve just tried Ramen, which I believe is QT based, QT-4.7, and I don’t have the issues with the file browsers or any menus, no delays at any stage.
I’ve just been playing around with Appleseed again and it seems to be just the first few seconds of having the file browser open. Clicking the file menu, and opening the file browser for the first time are the only places where the issue seems to happen. Same thing for the first file I click on, there is a small delay (3/4 seconds), then after that it’s fine. It’ll do the same thing if I close down Appleseed and restart it.
I guess it’s not that much of a problem really, but just thought I’d mention it.
Thanks for the report, we’ll investigate this issue more closely and report back our findings here.
I fixed several major issues in Blenderseed, the Blender to appleseed export script.
The latest development version of Blenderseed can be found here. To install it, download the blenderseed.py file and install it as any Blender add-on. Check out this tutorial to install Blenderseed and get started.
Here is a render made with appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-7 of a free Blender interior scene found here:
The materials were automatically translated by Blenderseed and were not altered afterward. I only added an environment map in appleseed.studio.
There are many issues with this image, such as missing triangles (modeling problem), low quality tessellation (wrong settings used during export), etc. The goal is merely to illustrate the kind of results that can be obtained with Blenderseed.
Mmm… nice. I like the “tone” of the image overall though it is a little noisy. I might have to try this out.
We just posted a couple of tutorials to help get you started with Blenderseed, the Blender to appleseed exporter.
The first tutorial details the installation procedure of the script, while the second one goes in details over the export options. We hope you find them useful. If there’s anything you’d like to see covered about Blenderseed, let us know here or on appleseedhq’s forums.
Keep rocking!
A quick note to let you know that we just released appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-8. This is a maintenance release with several important bug fixes and a couple of small features both in appleseed and in Blenderseed, the Blender-to-appleseed export script. The full changelog is in the release notes.
I just want to ask something there, that will probably destroy the good mood of that thread ! Please don’t take any offense, i am just being curious…
I just wonder why we keep seing new renderers every now and again. I am not a Blender or 3D Pro, but i could name quite a few renderers that have crossed my path: there was Sunflow (dead?), Kerkithea, Yafray (dead and re-born as Yafaray), we had Indigo too, before it was dismissed when Lux became the next big thing, then Mitsuba came, and Cycles, and now Appleseed.
All that is nice !
But is it really serving the point of open-source software to have a myriad of parallel projects ? (Indigo was not open-source in fact)
I always tend to think that joined forces would do wonders here. I dream about a fully integrated rock-solid BI with all the capabilities of a scanline renderer and an unbiased alternative that could well challenge Maxwell. I think that as a programmer (what i am not) i would rather join an existing project and bring it forward than start from scratch another renderer…
What do you think ? Is it naive from me to think that way ?
we had Indigo too, before it was dismissed when Lux became the next big thing, then Mitsuba came, and Cycles, and now Appleseed.
Appleseed is a lot older than Cycles, Lux, etc.
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.
Same here. I really want to try this render engine, but it keeps telling me it needs some library or package that doesn’t even exist.
Is it asking for “libicu42”?
Yes, that is the package. If you use Ubuntu 11.04 you need to install this:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/amd64/libicu42/4.2.1-3 (64-bit)
You concerns are legitimate. Let me explain.
We’re not trying to write yet another “unbiased, physically-based renderer”. LuxRender and Mitsuba are two very well written, fully featured open source renderers that already fill this spot perfectly. Cycles seems to aim at a slightly different target, sacrificing some accuracy and flexibility for speed in order to allow instant previsualization and fully interactive rendering.
Our goal with appleseed is different. We’re building an open source ray tracing-based renderer that we hope will eventually reach a point where it’s VFX/production-capable.
VFX is a market with very specific needs and requirements, and as it happens, we’re well aware of them. Stellar support for deformation motion blur with arbitrary many motion steps. Rock solid render-time displacement. Aliasing-free texture filtering. Render passes and layers. Object flags (to allow e.g. objects that don’t cast shadows, objects that only cast shadows, invisible objects, etc.) Support for industry standards (OpenEXR, Alembic, etc.) Fully programmable shading. Support for massive amounts of textures and geometry per frame, even if they don’t fit into RAM. Predictable memory usage. Solid, flexible and open exporters.
Aqsis is one of the very few open source renderers (together with Blender’s internal renderer) that has what it takes to target this market. It’s based on Pixar’s REYES algorithm and it implements a large part of the RenderMan standard. This brings a huge lot of benefits and makes it a potentially well equiped renderer for VFX work. But being based on REYES, it carries with it the usual legacy and complications: having to render in many passes, having to bake point clouds and (deep) shadow maps before beauty rendering can even start, etc. Pixar’s PRMan is evolving a lot but Aqsis lacks behind, understandably.
We believe in a more modern, simpler approach to final frame rendering based on ray tracing and in particular path tracing. This is a route pioneered by Arnold, a path tracer that’s been used on many of Sony Pictures Imageworks’ movies these last few years.
appleseed still has a long way to go feature and maturity-wise. But we’re making steady progress and we have good reasons to think the project will get to the next level not too long from now.
Cheers,
Franz
Failed to compile on fedora 15 with
appleseed/src/xerces-c/src/xercesc/util/Xerces_autoconf_config.hpp:44:21: fatal error: basetsd.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
Found out that basetsd.h belongs to Microsoft® Windows®. When i configure xerces-c beforehand i get
appleseed/src/appleseed/foundation/utility/xercesc.cpp:153:15: error: ‘const class xercesc_3_1::SAXParseException’ has no member named ‘getOriginalExceptionCode’
Giving up for now…
From the first error, it looks like you didn’t do configure + make in the src/xerces-c/ directory. From the second error, it appears you’re trying to build appleseed using a different Xerces-C distribution than the one shipping with appleseed. The getOriginalExceptionCode() is an addition we had to do to Xerces-C.
Did you follow the compilation guide? http://appleseedhq.net/wiki/building-appleseed-linux-using-gcc-4
We’re very interested in getting appleseed to build on Fedora and I’m willing to guide you until it does. There might be a few small details to solve though and maybe this isn’t so appropriate to discuss build problems in this thread. Shall we take this discussion to the appleseed forums?
Cheers,
Franz
Programmable shaders sounds ace but what language would you write them in? I am highly interested in learning to write shaders in CGFX, would it be possible to write shaders for appleseed using that?