Appleseed Versions Save

These are the release notes for appleseed 1.5.0-beta.

The following people contributed code for this release: François Beaune, Ramon Blanquer, John Haddon, Esteban Tovagliari.

(appleseed render by François Gilliot, inspired by ferronne's amazing Revolution glassware collection.)

appleseed

• Massive scaling, responsiveness and speed improvements during interactive rendering.
• Added support for parametric surface generation (plane, sphere and torus are currently implemented).
• Diffuse Mean Free Path inputs in BSSRDFs are now colors instead of scalars.
• Improved handling of asset files referenced by projects. In particular, textures referenced by SeExpr expressions are now properly tracked as project dependencies (https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed/issues/575).
• Improved UV diagnostic surface shader.
• Added facing ratio diagnostic shader.
• Added background environment shader to shade the background with a solid color or a texture.
• Fixed default range for IOR inputs.
• Allow negative number of rendering threads (https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed/issues/774).
• Added optional automatic computation of smooth normals and tangents on mesh objects at loading time.
• Added support for environment transforms.
• Fixed wrong background color for colored messages in console on Windows (https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed/issues/1037).
• BSSRDFs now benefit from automatic IOR tracking; replaced Inside/Outside IOR with a single IOR value.
• Print more rendering settings when rendering starts.
• Changed default tile ordering to spiral.
• Changed default reconstruction filter to 1.5-pixel Blackman-Harris.
• Emit proper error messages when texture files referenced in SeExpr expressions cannot be loaded.
• Emit proper error messages when failing to write project files to disk.
• Fixed crash at exit time in appleseed.cli in benchmark mode.
• Fixed several problems with the glass BSDF.
• Fixed crash when loading deforming meshes without normals.
• Fixed bug when path tracing a scene with specular BSDFs and a limited number of bounces.
• Improved reporting and handling of invalid pixel samples.
• Reduced startup time and memory usage in scenes with multiple lat-long environment EDFs.
• Print full paths of entities instead of just entity names in log messages.

OSL

• Improved the as_subsurface_surface shader.
• Added Mari-style UDIM support to texture shaders.
• Allows negative values of anisotropy in the Disney closure.

appleseed.studio

• Improved the way entities bound to inputs are shown and behave.
• Fixed crash when rendering the current project, after loading another project failed.
• Persist the state of geometry of windows, dialogs and dockable panels.
• No longer print camera settings every time the camera changes.
• Fixed the file picker in entity edtor: file changes were not applied unless Enter was pressed.

Others

• Expose methods to set and retrieve the frame's crop window in appleseed.python.
• Command line tools now load their settings from settings/appleseed.tools.xml.
• Message verbosity of all tools can now be set in settings files. Default verbosity is Info.

These are the release notes for appleseed 1.4.0-beta.

The following people contributed code for this release: François Beaune, Alexey Dokuchaev, Esteban Tovagliari.

appleseed

Major Changes

The highlights of this release revolve around improving our support of dielectrics:

• Support for arbitrarily nested dielectrics with user-specified priorities
• Automatic tracking of indices of refraction

Here is a render using these new facilities (download this test scene):

And here are a couple examples of how dielectrics priorities affect rendering:

We also added new BSDFs: sheen, glossy, metal, and glass. They are based on recent research and have user-friendly parameters.

OSL support was improved in this release. We made the new BSDFs available as closures. The new closures make it easier to write shaders. They compute internally many terms that previously had to be computed on the shaders and they benefit from automatic tracking of indices of refraction.

In addition, it's now possible to write view-independent shaders that will work correctly with bidirectional rendering methods, a direction we would like to explore in future appleseed releases.

We also revamped the OSL shader library to use the new closures, added a new subsurface shader and improved the quality of the code in general.

Finally, we replaced all the icons in appleseed.studio by a new set of modern icons. Big thanks to François Gilliot for the great work!

Minor Changes

• Fixed artifacts that start to appear after 4 billions pixel samples.
• The Oren-Nayar BRDF now matches the Lambertian BRDF when roughness is set to 0.
• Added new sheen BRDF (extracted from the Disney BRDF).
• Fixed position of orthographic cameras.
• Added 3ds Max-compatible Omni and Spot light source models.
• Added exposure controls to lights and lat-long environment EDF.
• Fixed occasional crash when interrupting rendering.
• BSDFs now support anisotropy in the V direction. The anisotropy parameter range is now [-1, 1]: values from 0 to 1 stretch the specular highlights in the U direction while values from 0 to -1 stretch them in the V direction.
• The specular BTDF now supports absorption based on Beer's law.

OSL

• New as_sheen, as_glossy, as_metal and as_glass closures.
• Removed reflection, refraction and microfacet closures.
• Added smooth tangents and bitangents to OSL.
• Fixed orientation of tangents in OSL.
• OSL closure parameters have now better names.
• Abort rendering if there are OSL errors.
• Fixed wrong OSL subsurface closure weight in the presence of multiple subsurface closures.
• Updated the OSL shader library.

appleseed.studio

• appleseed.studio now remembers the position/dimensions of its main window.
• appleseed.studio now loads all its icons from disk, making it easy for anyone to tweak or replace them.
• Added Reload and Rendering Settings toolbar buttons.
• Use alternating colors in Project Explorer.
• Miscellaneous UI cleanups and improvements.

appleseed.python

• Allow creating OSL and Disney materials from Python.
• Added Python bindings for vector operators (dot and cross products, norm, normalize).
• Exposed 4D vectors in Python bindings.
• Exposed 3D orthonormal basis (Basis3d) in Python Bindings.
• Added insert_path() and remove_path() Python methods to Configuration class.
• Execute any pending Python tile callbacks when rendering terminates.
• Added PauseRendering enumeration value to IRenderControllerStatus.
• It is no longer necessary to override all methods of ITileCallback when only some are necessary.

These are the release notes for appleseed 1.3.0-beta.

The following people contributed code for this release: François Beaune, Alexey Dokuchaev, Koji Nakamaru, Esteban Tovagliari.

Special thanks to Toshiya Hachisuka and Jeppe Revall Frisvad for the fruitful conversations.

appleseed

Major Changes

The major new feature of this release is full support for state of the art, raytraced subsurface scattering.

We implemented most of the diffuse scattering models available today:

• A simple Gaussian profile
• The Standard and "Better" Dipoles (for the "gummy" look common in animation)
• The newly published Directional Dipole
• And Pixar's new Normalized Diffusion profile for highly accurate subsurface scattering

Here are a few renders:

Digital Emily 2 from the Wikihuman Project:

A LEGO® character based on a free 3D model found on TurboSquid:

A rather creepy and disgusting flower made of raw chicken-like material (!) using an OpenShadingLanguage shader that combines three diffusion profiles with different depth and color parameters. The 3D model for this scene comes from the Keenan Crane's 3D Model Repository:

)

Thanks to the great work of Alexey Dokuchaev (a.k.a. danfe in the FreeBSD community), appleseed is now available in the FreeBSD Ports Collection (x86/x64 only for now).

appleseed is also back on OS X (10.10 and later).

Finally, OpenShadingLanguage was updated to version 1.6.8.

Minor Changes

• Fixed the Oren-Nayar BRDF.
• Added support for OSL matrix shader arguments.
• Added ray differentials for secondary rays and a new ray spread diagnostic mode.
• Fixed regression in SPPM photon tracing.
• Fixed crash when using BSDFMix or BSDFBlend with DisneyBRDF.
• Warn when a project file follows a format revision that is posterior to the current format revision.
• Improved reporting of invalid pixel samples.
• Fixed wrong IBL computations in some cases when using more than 1 sample.
• The Max Ray Intensity feature now works in more cases.
• Increase default texture store from 256 MB to 1 GB.
• Fixed a regression where OSL textures where flipped on the v axis.

appleseed.studio

• Fixed rare crash when stopping a render.
• Autosaving of images is now off by default.
• Added support for optional user settings files: on Linux and FreeBSD appleseed.studio will look for settings files in $HOME/.appleseed/settings/. This allows installing appleseed in system (read-only) directories.
• Fixed some edge cases around entity deletion.

appleseed.cli

• The --threads (-t) option now accepts value auto.
• Autosaving of images is now off by default.
• Added support for optional user settings files: on Linux and FreeBSD appleseed.studio will look for settings files in $HOME/.appleseed/settings/. This allows installing appleseed in system (read-only) directories.

Summary

These are the release notes for appleseed 1.2.0-beta.

The following people contributed code for this release: François Beaune, John Haddon, Hans Hoogenboom, Esteban Tovagliari.

appleseed

Major Changes

Added ray differentials for primary rays, screen-space derivatives and texture filtering for OSL shaders:

---

OSL bump mapping is now supported:

---

Added a new Velvet BRDF:

---

Added support for photon targets. Photon targets are used by the SPPM engine to shoot photons toward volumes of interests (such as a window in a wall).

A photon target can be defined by adding a "photon_target" parameter with value "true" to an object instance:

<object_instance name="window_inst" object="window">
    <parameter name="photon_target" value="true" />
    ...
</object_instance>

---

We now ship the beginnings of an OSL node library.

---

Surface shaders in materials are now optional. If a material doesn't have a surface shader assigned to it, it will use the scene's default surface shader (which is a physical surface shader with all inputs set to their default values).

---

• The sampling mode (RNG, QMC) can now be switched at runtime. The default is RNG.
• Implemented an orthographic camera model.
• Added support for motion-blurred vertex normals and vertex tangents.

Minor Changes

• Added "Color" diagnostic mode.
• Added support for OSL background closures.
• Added compile-time and run-time appleseed version information for OSL shaders.
• Default tile ordering is now 'spiral' instead of 'hilbert'.
• Use barycentric coordinates when UV coordinates are not available.
• Don't trace environment photons if IBL is disabled.
• Fixed crash with OSL materials without shaders.
• Fixed Disney BRDF bug when all component weights are zero.
• Fixed crash in SPPM lighting engine with large number of photons + Disney BRDFs.
• Properly handle empty scenes in SPPM lighting engine.
• Make sure OIIO texture files get closed when rendering terminates.
• Fixed bug in Blinn microfacet sampling code.
• Take into account shutter times when doing deformation motion blur.
• Fixed crash when rendering triangles with more than one motion segment.
• Fixed OIIO texture cache size.
• Improved OIIO/OSL-related log output.
• The geometric normal is now always front-facing in the absence of per-vertex normals.
• Threads are now named.
• Fixed non-determinism in rendered images in progressive rendering mode with a limited max number of samples.
• Implemented surfacearea() OSL function.
• Fixed bump/normal mapping for Disney material.
• Fixed alpha mapping for Disney material.
• Removed redundant 'alpha' and 'color' parameters in <color> entities.
• Fixed crash when a curve object has a light-emitting material.

appleseed.studio

• Right-clicking in the render widget will now bring the context menu of the entity underneath the mouse cursor.
• The camera pivot point can now be set by clicking on an object and pressing 'f'.
• Preserve outside pixels when setting a render region.
• Improved responsiveness of appleseed.studio during interactive rendering.
• Added a way to assign new Disney materials to multiple object instances at once.
• When creating a new assembly, automatically create an instance of that assembly.
• Always expand top-level Assemblies and Assembly Instances items, and if there's a single assembly item, expand it as well.
• Print world coordinates of picking point.
• Display supported file formats (by OIIO) when picking texture file to use in Disney material.
• Remember last directory and filter string in all file dialogs.
• Increased number of recently opened project files from 5 to 15.
• Prevent appleseed.studio from closing when a project is being loaded.
• Fixed an occasional crash with the pixel tracker (that prints RGBA values of the pixel under the mouse cursor).
• When importing a Disney material, rename it if there is already a material with the same name.
• Apply changes after assigning texture to color input of Disney material via texture file picker in Attribute Editor.
• Changed type of horizontal FOV inputs from text to numeric.
• Don't adjust range of slider when input value is empty.
• After importing a Disney material, select it.
• Only show the Attribute Editor if a single entity is selected.
• Started adding help strings to entity inputs.

appleseed.python

• Fixed possible crash when an appleseed.MasterRenderer instance is garbage collected.
• Added appleseed.Project.get_metadata() to retrieve configurations metadata.
• Added get_model_metadata() methods to all appleseed entities.

Tools

• oslextractmeta.py is a new Python script to extract metadata from OSL shaders.
• rfmdisneypresets2appleseed.py is a new Python script to convert RenderMan-for-Maya Disney BRDF presets to appleseed materials.
• Removed maketiledexr. Use the provided maketx tool instead.

Summary

These are the release notes for appleseed 1.1.0-beta.

Note: we now switched to plain simple semantic versioning.

The following people contributed code for this release: François Beaune, Esteban Tovagliari.

appleseed

This is the first release that can be used with Image Engine's Gaffer:

Major Changes

appleseed's internal color pipeline will now remain in pure RGB mode for as long as possible, and will automatically switch to spectral mode when necessary. This results in better color fidelity when using RGB colors only.

Object and assembly instances now support visibility flags:

By default, all flags are set, i.e. we have:

<object_instance name="myInstance" object="myObject">
    <parameters name="visibility">
        <parameter name="camera" value="true" />
        <parameter name="light" value="true" />
        <parameter name="shadow" value="true" />
        <parameter name="transparency" value="true" />
        <parameter name="probe" value="true" />
        <parameter name="diffuse" value="true" />
        <parameter name="glossy" value="true" />
        <parameter name="specular" value="true" />
    </parameters>
</object_instance>

The physical sun light model is now fully functional.

The sampling of microfacet BSDF has been improved. Scenes using those BSDFs will render with less noise with the same number of samples:

Minor Changes

• Added Ashikhmin-Shirley and Phong OSL closures.
• Fixed a regression in the way bump mapping is computed.
• Fixed directional light when instantiated in scaled assemblies.
• Fixed possible artifacts with directional lights.
• Fixed multiple instancing of point, spot, directional and sun lights.
• Fixed automatic updated of project files from revision 7 to revision 8.
• Fixed a crash when an OSL shader cannot be found.
• Fixed a crash when vertex normals of a triangle are absent.
• Fixed horizontal/vertical shifting in latitude-longitude environment EDF.
• The bump offset is now adjustable via the bump_offset material parameter. The default value is 2 (texels).
• Don't replace spaces by underscores in AOV file names.
• Search paths may now be added using the APPLESEED_SEARCHPATH environment variable (paths must be separated with :).
• Project file parsing errors now include approximate line and column numbers.
• Renamed inputs of point, spot, directional and sun lights according to the actual physical quantities they represent. As always, projects will be automatically updated, project files remain fully backward-compatible.
• Fixed installation of appleseed.python on OSX.
• Added a version header in renderer/api that can be used by clients of the C++ API.

appleseed.studio

Minor Changes

• Fixed crashes and user interface issues in the Disney material editor.
• Fixed bug: the entity browser would not show colors and textures from parent assemblies or from the scene.
• Fixed intermittent rendering interruptions during live scene edition.
• Fixed crash after deleting an assembly from a scene that had already been rendered.
• Automatic adjustment of sliders range now works with negative values.

appleseed.python

• Exposed previously missing methods in Assembly, Object and Texture entities.

Tools

• New command line tool dumpmetadata to dump entity metadata as XML or Markdown.
• Added a --passes command line option to appleseed.cli.
• If an output_filename parameter is present in the frame, appleseed.cli will now write the main output image to disk. If an output_aovs parameter is also present, it will also write the AOVs to disk.

This is a preview version of appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-24.

Summary

These are the release notes for appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-23.

The following people contributed code for this release (in alphabetical order): François Beaune, Srinath Ravichandran, Esteban Tovagliari.

appleseed

Major Changes

• Added support for OSL emission.
• Exposed the Disney BRDF as an OSL closure.
• Added support for degree-1 (linear) curves.
• Added support for external display drivers (as shared libraries / DLLs).
• Implemented monochromatic photons in SPPM lighting engine (~5x memory reduction).
• Added support for smooth tangent vectors.

OSL emission:

A variant of the Cornell Box scene rendered using SPPM with monochromatic photons:

Smooth tangent vectors (on the foot):

Minor Changes

• The Tangent and Bitangent modes of the diagnostic surface shader are now based on the actual tangent vectors instead of dP/du and dP/dv.
• Added support for OSL camera coordinate system.
• Added support for OSL dtime and dPdtime.
• Fixed hierarchical instancing of assemblies.

appleseed.studio

Experimental Changes

• Experimental "Frozen Display" mode when manipulating the camera during interactive rendering.

Frozen Display mode:

Minor Changes

• Scene picking now prints the depth at the picking point.
• Fixed bug: slider can no longer be moved after having set the value to exactly 0.

Description

This is the first iteration of appleseed's material tester.

We provide two packages:

1. A "source" package with the original Autodesk 3ds Max scene and an Adobe Photoshop file for the grid texture.
2. A "scene" package with the appleseed scenes corresponding to the renders below.

Renders

Summary

These are the release notes for appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-22.

The following people contributed code for this release (in alphabetical order): Marius Avram, François Beaune, Srinath Ravichandran, Esteban Tovagliari, Zhaotian Wang, Nicholas Yue.

I would particularly like to acknowledge the amazing work done by Esteban, and by our Google Summer of Code students Marius and Srinath. Congrats!

appleseed

Major Changes

Open Shading Language

We now ship appleseed with OpenShadingLanguage (OSL) support on all platforms, including Windows. We're still missing a few important functionalities such as light emission, but we're getting close to full support. Check out the OSL Support Status page for a more detailed overview of what's supported.

Disney Material

We have added a new multi-layer material based on Disney's principled BRDF model.

Teapot using a multi-layer, expression-driven Disney material:

Curve Rendering (Hair, Fur)

We now support direct rendering of cubic Bézier curves with per-vertex width, without pre-tessellation (GSoC 2014 project).

Fluffy Cornell Box:

Important Changes

• New microfacet BTDF (rough glass) closure, accessible from OSL.
• Fixed major bug in specular BTDF.
• It is now possible to use an image to define the shape of the thin lens camera diaphragm.
• Multiple assemblies with the exact same geometry will now share a single triangle tree.
• Bug fix in SPPM Lighting Engine: incorrect illumination scaling when using different numbers of photons for lights and environment.
• Bug fix in SPPM Lighting Engine: caustics from the environment were missing when IBL was disabled.
• Bug fix: Max Ray Intensity wasn't honored for secondary rays hitting the environment in Unidirectional Path Tracing engine.
• Major performance improvements for photon maps with large differences in density, when using the SPPM lighting engine.

OSL shader based on the new microfacet BRDF (rough glass) closure:

Minor Changes

• Emit a warning if an object instance has alpha transparency on one side but not on the other.
• Reduced wire thickness in screen-space wireframe diagnostic surface shader.
• Normalize flux when viewing the photons directly (for debugging) in SPPM lighting engine.
• Fixed logging of focal distance when thin-lens camera's autofocus cannot find a target.

appleseed.studio

Major Changes

Disney Material Editor

We have created a powerful, user-friendly material editor for materials based on the Disney multi-layer material. In addition, we support Disney's SeExpr expressions for all inputs (GSoC 2014 project).

In addition, Disney materials can now be exported / imported, allowing to create material libraries and to reuse them in other projects.

Check it out on action:

Minor Changes

• Added an application icon on Windows.
• Fixed sporadic crashes when exiting appleseed.studio.
• Adjusted step sizes for integer inputs in Render Settings dialog.
• Allow two decimals for alpha parameter in SPPM radiance estimation settings.
• Changed Max Ray Intensity step from 0.5 to 0.1 in Render Settings dialog.
• Fixed styling of radio buttons in appleseed.studio.
• Respect user / system settings regarding font sizes in the user interface.
• In newly created projects, frame resolution is now 1024x576 (quarter 2K, 1.78 aspect ratio) and film dimensions are 10.24mm x 5.76mm.
• Tweaked default SPPM settings: changed direct lighting method from SPPM to Ray Traced, and increased light and environment photon counts from 100,000 to 1,000,000.
• Bug fix: the color of object instance items would not always change after assigning materials to the object instances.
• Textures imported from appleseed.studio now default to 'wrap' addressing mode.

appleseed.cli

• Improved command line parsing and reporting of errors and warnings.

Other Tools and Miscellaneous Changes

• New makefluffy tool to grow hair on any appleseed scene.
• Added a new devkit sample called heightfield that is so fun to play with that we released it as a standalone tool.
• All appleseed tools can now load built-in projects (e.g. builtin:cornell_box).
• We no longer ship the old blenderseed exporter. Blenderseed is now being developed independently by Joel Daniels and is hosted in its own appleseedhq repository: https://github.com/appleseedhq/blenderseed.
• Improved the organization of the Linux and OS X packages to better reflect the conventions of these platforms.

Sample works by Thomas Arthus and François Beaune, made with heightfield:

This is a preview version of appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-22 with an important bug fix in the specular BTDF.