An open source, physically-based global illumination rendering engine from a small team primarily designed for animation and visual effects.

Take a look at appleseed, an open source, physically-based global illumination rendering engine primarily designed for animation and visual effects. The tool is being developed by a small, international team of talented volunteers from the animation and VFX industry.

appleseed is said to implement a modern workflow based on path tracing that enables artifact-free, single pass rendering with very little technical tuning. The toolkit is simultaneously capable of strictly unbiased rendering when total accuracy matters, and biased rendering when artistic freedom and shorter rendering time are paramount.

The engine supports fully programmable shading via Sony Pictures Imageworks’ Open Shading Language (OSL), RGB/spectral/mixed rendering, fast and robust transformation and deformation motion blur, ray traced subsurface scattering, Python and C++ APIs and many other production-oriented features.

The team is also working on adapting appleseed for Maya and 3ds Max. Follow the links to learn more on Github. 

The team has recently released appleseed 1.7.0-beta, the seventh release of their beta program and the 30th release overall. Check out the release notes for download links and the full list of changes.