Appleseed – open-source, physically-based global illumination rendering engine | Hacker News Reader

Appleseed – open-source, physically-based global illumination rendering engine

appleseedhq.net

107 pointspabs315 comments

While cool, this hasn't seen a release since 2019, and GitHub hasn't seen any updates since February 2022.

There are people who look at my portfolio and say that the work done at Appleseed is the best of all.

And I completely agree with them, this rendering engine is a direct competitor not only to Luxcore in terms of "delicacy", it not only significantly outperforms Octane, V-ray, RedShift, but also outperforms Corona. I think Luxcore and Appleseed are two of the best rendering engines out there. Unfortunately, they are both on the verge of extinction. Appleseed is good because it renders quickly, although it uses only the processor. Minimum settings, very simple. The most responsive interactive rendering in Blender, even faster than Cycles! Seriously, stopping the development of this project is the biggest blow to the rendering engines available in Blender. Seriously, with its support for modern versions of Blender, with Bevel-shader and CryptoMate, I am ready to use it on a paid basis, paying around $200 annually - this render is so good! So much better than Octane even free. So much better than Cycles. I hope Appleseed gets a revival one day https://cdn.freelance.ru/img/portfolio/pics/00/40/66/4220552...

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?

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

Every widely used renderer now uses 'physically based rendering', which is essentially normalized BRDFs and lights with area.

My go-to for a pbrt-type renderer is 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/

Lux is lit, it's absolutely my go-to engine. If anyone is looking for a FOSS project to contribute to we could really use a bevel shader.

In terms of accurately rendering participating media and caustics no other open source project holds a candela to lux. ;)

Mitsuba doesn't count as it's too slow to be of practical use.

(all that being said I would love to see Appleseed dev pick up again, it would be really nice to have a production focused spectral renderer around again)

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.

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.

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.

Anyone know much about how this compares to Filament by Google?

https://github.com/google/filament

Filament is a real-time renderer, appleseed is an offline renderer.

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...

It's a dead project, but still interesting.

the only thing that is not a good day I trust that is the best of my resume

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