Recently, /*jupiter jazz*/ has announced entering into a long term technology licensing agreement with rendering software architect François Beaune resulting in the acquisition of the appleseed open source renderer. Jupiter Jazz notes that it is commited to keeping appleseed a true open source project, where appleseed creator François Beaune will continue to lead the project. For more information, on Jupiter Jazz Acquires Appleseed Physically Based Rendering Platform check the jupiter jazz site here.

appleseed is a modern physically-based rendering platform with a strong focus on quality, correctness and precision. At its core is a deterministic, spectral path tracer built on top of a robust ray tracing kernel. Built from scratch with the hindsight of years of production rendering experience, it features a very clean and modular code base ideal for long-term collaborative development and rendering innovation.

Some interesting facts about appleseed

  • appleseed was built from the ground up to handle true spectral rendering, multithreading, mixing of physically-based and non-physically-based shaders, and limited texture and geometry memory budgets.
  • appleseed.studio is a Qt-based application that allows to compose scenes by importing geometry and textures, to create and assign physically-based materials, to render scenes using progressive rendering and to navigate into them using interactive rendering.
  • appleseed.cli is a command-line version of the renderer suited for batch rendering on render farms.
  • The “foundation” code on which appleseed is built is available as a separate open source library called appleseed.foundation. This library also provides full low-overhead interoperability with ILM’s Imath classes to facilitate adoption in production environments. appleseed.foundation is used extensively by /*jupiter jazz*/ for its production tools and commercial software.
  • appleseed and all the associated tools are available on 64-bit Linux, 32-bit Mac and 32-bit Windows platforms. Support for 64-bit Mac and 64-bit Windows is in the planned.