appleseed 1.8.0-beta Released

We’re proud to announce the release of appleseed 1.8.0-beta, the eighth release of our beta program and the 31st release since the first alpha in July 2010.

Please head over to the release notes for the full illustrated story!

appleseed 1.8.0-beta release notes
appleseed-maya 1.0.0-beta release notes
appleseed-max 0.4.6-beta release notes
blenderseed 0.4.0 release notes

appleseed’s development team continues to expand and the speed of development increases. We are now able to tackle many large developments at once. The result is that appleseed 1.8.0-beta is an enormous release.

appleseed itself received many core improvements and extensions, including partial support for participating media, a completely rewritten AOV subsystem, a faster and more precise color pipeline, support for procedural objects, procedural assemblies and archive assemblies, and a lot more.

appleseed.studio also received a great deal of attention with OpenColorIO support for applying output transforms to renders, a new Python console allowing scripting right from appleseed.studio with immediate feedback on the scene, and support for Python plugins. The next release will see many enhancements and refinements in this area, in particular the ability for Python plugins to extend appleseed.studio’s user interface.

This release also introduces a brand new Autodesk® Maya® plugin with support for nearly all Maya’s Hypershade nodes, Disney and glass materials, appleseed’s new Standard Surface material and many other features.

With new team members came a renewed motivation to dust off, fix and update our Blender plugin. We’re thrilled to officially support Blender again!

Last but not least, our Autodesk® 3ds Max® plugin also received its share of improvements, including limited support for Activeshade rendering, Physical Camera support, a new mode to use native 3ds Max maps with appleseed and several other refinements and fixes.

This is the first official release of appleseed featuring the amazing work of our Google Summer of Code 2017 students Petra, Gleb and Artem. We’d like to congratulate them once more for the incredible work they produced throughout the summer and we’re looking forward to their future contributions to the project.

Writing a production renderer from scratch is a wonderful hobby, but a truly herculean team effort. We hope that you’ll like what we built and that you’ll give it a try. We welcome all forms of feedback, positive or negative. Feel free to reach out to us on our users forum or via Twitter.

Eight years in, and undoubtedly many more to go!