Feature List

Fetch Render

Light Transport

  • Unidirectional Path Tracing
  • Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapping
  • Light Tracing

Rendering Modes

  • Single-pass rendering
  • Multi-pass rendering
  • Progressive rendering
  • Time-limited progressive rendering
  • Interactive rendering
  • Scene editing during interactive rendering
  • Spectral rendering (31 bands in 400-700 nm)
  • RGB rendering

Subsurface Scattering

  • Raytraced Subsurface Scattering
  • Animation-friendly
  • No precomputation or storage
  • Available in interactive rendering
  • Exposed to OSL shaders
  • Support for SSS sets

Subsurface Scattering Profiles

  • Gaussian
  • Standard Dipole
  • Better Dipole
  • Directional Dipole
  • Normalized Diffusion
  • Random Walk (path traced)

Reflection Models

  • Lambertian BRDF (purely diffuse)
  • Specular BRDF (perfect mirror)
  • Specular BSDF (clear transparency)
  • Diffuse BTDF (diffuse transparency)
  • Oren-Nayar Microfacet BRDF
  • Ward Microfacet BRDF
  • Blinn Microfacet BRDF
  • GGX Microfacet BRDF
  • Disney's principled, layered BRDF
  • Anisotropic Ashikhmin-Shirley BRDF
  • Kelemen BRDF
  • Glossy BRDF
  • Physically-based metal BRDF
  • Physically-based plastic BRDF
  • Physically-based glass BSDF
  • Sheen BRDF
  • Arbitrary mixtures of BRDFs
  • Energy compensation in microfacet models

Volume Rendering

  • Single scattering
  • Multiple scattering
  • Homogeneous media
  • Isotropic phase function
  • Henyey-Greenstein phase function

Non-Photorealistic Rendering

  • Toon shading (OSL shader)
  • Ray traced contours (OSL shader)
Fluffy Cornell Box Render

Camera Models

  • Pinhole camera
  • Orthographic camera
  • Spherical camera
  • Fisheye lens camera with multiple projections
  • Thin lens camera (depth of field)
  • Polygonal diaphragm shapes
  • Image-based diaphragm shapes
  • Camera shift

Light Source Models

  • Point light
  • Spot light
  • Gobos
  • Directional/parallel light
  • Mesh light
  • Purely diffuse emission profile
  • Cone-shaped emission profile
  • Image-based lighting
  • Latitude-longitude environment maps
  • Mirror-ball environment maps
  • Preetham physically-based day sky
  • Hosek & Wilkie physically-based day sky
  • Physically-based sun
  • Environment transforms

Visualization Tools

  • Low-overhead capture of light paths
  • Interactive exploration of light paths
  • Efficient binary light paths file format
  • False colors mapping
  • MATLAB's Jet color map
  • Perceptually uniform color maps
  • Relative luminance (Rec. 709) isolines

Motion Blur

  • Camera motion blur
  • Transformation motion blur
  • Deformation motion blur
  • Arbitrarily number of motion steps
  • Shutter opening/closing curves

Production Features

  • Open Shading Language (OSL) support
  • OSL shader library
  • OSL implementation of Maya shading nodes
  • On-the-fly compilation of OSL shaders
  • OpenColorIO support
  • Built-in BCD denoiser
  • Command line tool for offline denoising
  • Disney's SeExpr expressions
  • AOVs
  • Cryptomatte support
  • Adaptive sampling
  • Paintable mask-based sampling
  • Hierarchical instancing
  • Per-instance visibility flags
  • Alpha mapping
  • Matte support
  • Automatic color space conversions
  • Fixed or varying sampling patterns per frame
  • Ray differentials
  • Ray Bias
  • Light Near Start
  • Low Light Threshold
  • Max Ray Intensity
  • Roughness Clamping
  • Bounce limits per scattering types
  • Automatic tracking of indices of refraction
  • Nested dielectrics
  • Packed, single-file scenes for easy transport
  • Render stamps
  • Render checkpointing (resumable renders)
  • Search paths for external assets
  • Dozens of diagnostic modes
  • Pausable rendering
Fetch Render

Interoperability

  • Windows, Linux and macOS (64-bit)
  • OBJ geometry files
  • OpenEXR, TIFF, HDR, PNG, JPEG, PSD...
  • Open Shading Language support
  • OpenColorIO support
  • Native Image Engine's Gaffer integration
  • Native Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2017+ plugin
  • Native Autodesk® Maya® 2018+ plugin
  • Blender 2.79 and Blender 2.80+ plugins
  • Substance Painter-compatible OSL shader

Hackability

  • 100% open source, MIT license
  • Exceptionally clean, fully reviewed code
  • Full featured C++ API
  • Full featured Python 2.x/3.x API
  • Full extensibility via external C++ plugins
  • Embedded Python scripting
  • More than 1500 built-in unit tests
  • Hundreds of built-in performance tests
  • Rich, automatic functional test suite

Performance

  • Multithreaded, scalable
  • SSE / SSE2 / SSE 4.2 vectorization
  • Memory-bounded texture cache
  • Filter Importance Sampling
  • Multiple Importance Sampling
  • Efficient handling of alpha maps
  • Advanced many-light sampling
  • Experimental Intel® Embree backend

Tools

  • Advanced graphical tool for scene inspection and rendering
  • Command line renderer
  • Command line denoiser
  • Dropbox-based render farm tools
  • OSL compiler and tools

Infrastructure

  • Git for source control
  • GitHub for repositories hosting, issue tracking, wikis
  • CMake build system
  • Continuous integration (Travis CI, AppVeyor)
  • Discord server
  • Discourse forum
  • appleseedhq.net email addresses