appleseed

What is appleseed?

appleseed is an open source renderer with a focus on quality and correctness. It started as a platform for rendering research but the end goal has always been to develop a high-end renderer for a wider audience.

What can it do?

It can render pretty images:

  • progressively (the longer you let it render, the higher the image quality),
  • interactively (you can navigate in the scene while rendering),
  • using physically-based models (you get a realistic and predictable image),
  • in an unbiased manner (at no time will the output image contain artifacts, beside some noise, so you can stop rendering as soon as you're happy with the amount of noise left),
  • using spectra for color computations (any input color can be a full spectrum, instead of just a RGB triplet).

What can't it do?

For the moment there are certain kinds of scenes that won't result in nice images, regardless of the time spent rendering. For instance, a scene lit by a light bulb, where the only emitting object is the light filament, will mostly result in a black image. This limitation will be at least partially lifted when more sophisticated renderers will be implemented (bidirectional path tracing, stochastic progressive photon mapping, Metropolis light transport, etc.)

appleseed is not yet production ready. It doesn't support motion blur, displacement, higher order surfaces or programmable shading. However we definitely plan to address these limitations in the future.

Whom is it targeted to?

At the moment, appleseed is mostly targeted to rendering enthusiasts, developers, and people willing to test what's implemented and report what's broken.

Keep in mind that appleseed is still very young and lacks many essential features, in particular there is limited integration with content creation software (there is an exporter for Blender, but integrations with Maya and 3ds Max are still missing) so scenes will have to be composed in appleseed.studio using imported geometry and textures. And since many settings are not exposed in the user interface, manual tweaking of the project files might be required.

What's interesting about appleseed?

  • appleseed is developed with a strong emphasis on quality and on Doing Things Right, without taking shortcuts. The code is covered by more than 800 unit tests, dozens of unit benchmarks, and dozens of test scenes.
  • It has a very clean code base. Go check it out by yourself.
  • It has a solid and fast ray tracing core.
  • It is precise: geometric computations are performed in double precision, and lighting is computed using spectra in linear space.

Is appleseed better than, say, LuxRender or Kerkythea?

appleseed is still too young to even compare to these fully featured renderers, but on the long run we're looking to compete with them.

Is it free?

Yes, it is. appleseed is released under the very permissive MIT license. That means that not only can you get it, use it, share it, bundle it or redistribute it as you please, but the project is also open source: you can access the entire source code, modify it, fork it (make your own derivative of appleseed), link to it in any way you want, with any application, regardless of its license (including commercially licensed software).

What does it look like?

Check out the screenshots gallery to get an idea.

I have more questions...

Check out the FAQ, we're answering more questions there. If your question is not answered in the FAQ, please ask it in the forums.