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Hello, founder of appleseed here! Being the top story on Hacker News tonight was completely unexpected, but it's a good surprise and definitely appreciated pub
by franzb 10y ago
Hello, founder of appleseed here!
Being the top story on Hacker News tonight was completely unexpected, but it's a good surprise and definitely appreciated publicity!
appleseed has been in active development since june of 2009. It predates a number of other open source renderers by quite a few years, including Cycles (another fantastic project!).
I'm a production rendering engineer (e-on software, mental images, NVIDIA, Jupiter Jazz...). I've started this project out of personal interest for rendering, and as a platform for learning (there's always tons of new stuff to learn), research and experiments. All other team members are professionals currently working in the industry.
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.
We still have a ton of work ahead to make it a truly competitive renderer but we're making regular progress: we're improving the core renderer every day, and lately we've been putting massive efforts in improving our integration with DCC apps and in achieving a comfortable workflow for artists. Loads left to do !
Let me finally add that I'm blessed to work with such a great team. Top quality work, persistently. We're a small but welcoming community, and contributions are most welcome!
Feel free to ask me anything!
- generic_user 10y agoCan you list the top five Influential research papers that have inspired you while working on Appleseed? I have ACM library account so if they are ACM or Siggraph papers that is fine. --edit And thank you for making your project open source.
- franzb 10y agoA very interesting question! It's not a research paper, but for learning purposes there's nothing better than the Physically-Based Rendering (PBRT) book by Matt Pharr, Greg Humphreys and Wenzel Jakob, already mentioned by others in this thread: http://www.pbrt.org/ http://www.pbrt.org/ One of the foundational paper is definitely The Rendering Equation, by James Kajiya: https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs294-13/fa09/lectures/p143-kajiya.pdf https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs294-13/fa09/lectures/p143-... Another highly influencial research paper is certainly Eric Veach's PhD thesis, Robust Monte Carlo Methods For Light Transport Simulation (a.k.a. "The Bible"): http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/veach_thesis/thesis.pdf http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/veach_thesis/thesis.pdf A few other paper stand out: Understanding the Masking-Shadowing Function in Microfacet-Based BRDFs, by Eric Heitz: http://jcgt.org/published/0003/02/03/ http://jcgt.org/published/0003/02/03/. A somewhat difficult read, but an important paper. Microfacet Models for Refraction through Rough Surfaces: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~srm/publications/EGSR07-btdf.pdf http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~srm/publications/EGSR07-btdf.pdf Physically-Based Shading at Disney: https://disney-animation.s3.amazonaws.com/library/s2012_pbs_disney_brdf_notes_v2.pdf https://disney-animation.s3.amazonaws.com/library/s2012_pbs_... A Practical Model for Subsurface Light Transport, by Henrik Wann Jensen: https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/bssrdf/bssrdf.pdf https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/bssrdf/bssrdf.pdf Light Transport Simulation with Vertex Connection and Merging: http://cgg.mff.cuni.cz/~jaroslav/papers/2012-vcm/ http://cgg.mff.cuni.cz/~jaroslav/papers/2012-vcm/ Finally, for learning, there's a nice lecture by John Carmack at QuakeCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyUgHPs86XM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyUgHPs86XM
- generic_user 10y agoExcellent list, I had not seen some of these. Time to fire up Mathematica and get some coffee I suppose. And I'm sure the list is helpful for many others also.
- jnem 10y agoI'm not in the industry, but I would like to say that I am highly encouraged by the way you described your offering. You express a level of care, consideration, and diplomacy that is sadly lacking just about everywhere. The product itself looks amazing; I love seeing this high bar for open source.
- franzb 10y agoThank you for the lovely words! We certainly do put a lot of care and efforts into producing a high quality software product that is not only open source with a liberal license (MIT) but which is also developed in the open (we're happy to invite anyone to our Slack team at https://appleseedhq.slack.com https://appleseedhq.slack.com where all development discussions and decisions take place).
- sdwisely 10y agotaking a quick look at it now, reminds me a lot of Maxwell. Appleseed is quite an impressive renderer already!
- franzb 10y agoThanks! You're right, Maxwell and appleseed have a lot in common: both are (or can be) unbiased spectral renderers with animation rendering capabilities. They also both have a "studio" GUI application for scene composition, inspection and rendering.