[HN Gopher] Appleseed - open-source, physically-based global ill...
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Appleseed - open-source, physically-based global illumination
rendering engine
Author : pabs3
Score : 51 points
Date : 2023-04-15 07:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (appleseedhq.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (appleseedhq.net)
| einpoklum wrote:
| Can someone explain what is special about this engine, as opposed
| to what you would use otherwise? I mean, rendering 3D scenes is
| something people have been doing for decades. Is it speed? Is it
| support for formats popular with animators? Is it the fact that
| it's FOSS?
| Y_Y wrote:
| My go-to for a pbrt-type renderer Lux[0] which ticks all the
| same boxes. If you're willing to go closed source then the
| standard used to be Maxwell Render, but I don't know if that's
| changed in the last couple of years.
|
| [0] https://luxcorerender.org/
| omoikane wrote:
| According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13569538
| appleseed is one of the few open source renderers designed for
| production rendering and targeted at animation and VFX. In
| addition to fully programmable shading via OpenShadingLanguage,
| strong support for motion blur and many other specific
| features, it supports accurate spectral rendering, which is
| quite a unique combination.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| I don't think anyone actually used this renderer heavily on a
| production. It looks like it integrates some open standard
| libraries. Motion blur should be in basically any renderer,
| the difficulty is making it not slow and noisy. Spectral
| rendering is not necessary and is extremely niche for any
| sort of production animation.
| zokier wrote:
| FOSS is big aspect here. There aren't that many production-
| ready FOSS rendering engines out there. You have Cycles which
| is very tightly coupled to Blender, Mitsuba which is purely
| academic, and LuxCore which is probably closest competitor for
| Appleseed. Just recently DreamWorks released their MoonRay, but
| it is still so new that it remains to be seen where it falls.
|
| Looking at the feature list, Appleseed seems very full-
| featured. One thing that struck out to me is having spectral
| rendering support, which is still relatively rare feature.
| Otherwise they seem to have strong emphasis on OSL, so that
| might be nice?
|
| I guess the lack of differentiation/big killer features is why
| Appleseed didn't catch on, which is bit of a shame considering
| how it still seems like solid good project.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I think[0] it's that it simulates how light moves and reflects
| very realistically.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physically_based_rendering
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Every widely used renderer now uses 'physically based
| rendering', which is essentially normalized BRDFs and lights
| with area.
| mdaniel wrote:
| for more reading, the submission from 2017:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567594
|
| It is MIT:
| https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed/blob/master/LICENSE...
| erichocean wrote:
| It's a dead project, but still interesting.
| jdboyd wrote:
| While cool, this hasn't seen a release since 2019, and GitHub
| hasn't seen any updates since February 2022.
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(page generated 2023-04-16 23:00 UTC)