Feature List
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)
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
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
was designed by Paolo Berto (@pberto)