Appleseed Renderer

http://appleseedhq.net/about/appleseed

한창 개발이 진행중인 새 렌더러 Appleseed 입니다.
관심을 가지게 된 이유는 순전히 예쁜 이름 때문만은 아닙니다.

렌더링 연구를 위한 목적으로 시작된 오픈 소스 렌더러로서
Physical 기반의 Unbiased Progressive 렌더러입니다.
초기 버전 답지않게 생각보다 많은 기능을 제공하고 있습니다.
Maya 및 Blender(실험버전)에서 export할 수 있는 툴을 제공한다고 합니다.

Features

Stable Features

Rendering

• Fully spectral rendering pipeline (31 equidistant channels in the 400-700nm range, configurable at compile-time)
• Distribution ray tracing
• Backward path tracing with or without next event estimation (explicit direct lighting)
• Forward path tracing (light tracing) with or without next event estimation
• Progressive, interactive rendering (show me)
• Multiple sampling frameworks available, configurable at compile-time:
• Pure Monte Carlo sampling (unbiased)
• Fully deterministic, low discrepancy sampling (consistent)
• Multiple importance sampling
• Camera motion blur with arbitrarily many transforms (show me, show me more)
• Ray traced deformation motion blur with arbitrary many motion segments per object (show me)
• Render layers
• Ability to use arbitrarily large textures in constant memory budget (user-settable at runtime)
• Fully automatic, transparent color space conversions at runtime
• Fully automatic, transparent gamma / inverse-gamma correction of textures and output frames
• Highly scalable multithreaded rendering

Modeling

• Pinhole camera
• Thin-lens camera (depth of field)
• Perfectly diffuse, perfectly specular, Ashikhmin-Shirley and Kelemen BRDF
• Perfectly specular BTDF with Fresnel reflection (show me)
• Perfectly diffuse EDF
• Support for CIE XYZ, linear RGB, sRGB and spectral color spaces
• Mesh lights (any geometry can emit light)
• Image-based lighting, with importance sampling of latitude-longitude maps
• Support for geometry instancing (with per-instance materials)
• Support for non-physical surface shaders, and for mixing them with BSDF and EDF-based rendering
• Possibility to add cameras, BSDF, EDF, lights, shaders without touching the core

Input/Output

• Supported image formats: PNG, OpenEXR.
• Supported geometry formats: Wavefront OBJ, Alembic

Infrastructure

• XML project and settings files, validated at runtime via XML Schema, using industrial-strength Apache Xerces-Cparser & validator
• Clean, modern, portable C++ code with extreme emphasis on correctness, speed and readability
• 1000+ unit tests, using a modern C++ unit testing framework (show me)
• Fully automatic, highly stable and cycle-accurate unit benchmarking framework with automatic historization and visualization of performance history
• CMake-based build system
• Fully cross-platform, available on 32-bit and 64-bit variants of Mac OS X, Windows, Linux...

Applications

• Command-line interface with optional coloring (show me)
• Qt-based GUI application for interactive rendering and scene composition (show me)
• Experimental Blender-to-appleseed translator (Blenderseed)
• Maya-to-appleseed translator (Mayaseed)

Experimental Features

• Support for geometry that doesn't fit in memory
• Fast voxel-based ambient occlusion
• Fast voxel-based volumetric smoke shader