appleseedhq / appleseed

These are the release notes for appleseed 1.3.0-beta.

The following people contributed code for this release: François Beaune, Alexey Dokuchaev, Koji Nakamaru, Esteban Tovagliari.

Special thanks to Toshiya Hachisuka and Jeppe Revall Frisvad for the fruitful conversations.

appleseed

Major Changes

The major new feature of this release is full support for state of the art, raytraced subsurface scattering.

We implemented most of the diffuse scattering models available today:

• A simple Gaussian profile
• The Standard and "Better" Dipoles (for the "gummy" look common in animation)
• The newly published Directional Dipole
• And Pixar's new Normalized Diffusion profile for highly accurate subsurface scattering

Here are a few renders:

Digital Emily 2 from the Wikihuman Project:

A LEGO® character based on a free 3D model found on TurboSquid:

A rather creepy and disgusting flower made of raw chicken-like material (!) using an OpenShadingLanguage shader that combines three diffusion profiles with different depth and color parameters. The 3D model for this scene comes from the Keenan Crane's 3D Model Repository:

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Thanks to the great work of Alexey Dokuchaev (a.k.a. danfe in the FreeBSD community), appleseed is now available in the FreeBSD Ports Collection (x86/x64 only for now).

appleseed is also back on OS X (10.10 and later).

Finally, OpenShadingLanguage was updated to version 1.6.8.

Minor Changes

• Fixed the Oren-Nayar BRDF.
• Added support for OSL matrix shader arguments.
• Added ray differentials for secondary rays and a new ray spread diagnostic mode.
• Fixed regression in SPPM photon tracing.
• Fixed crash when using BSDFMix or BSDFBlend with DisneyBRDF.
• Warn when a project file follows a format revision that is posterior to the current format revision.
• Improved reporting of invalid pixel samples.
• Fixed wrong IBL computations in some cases when using more than 1 sample.
• The Max Ray Intensity feature now works in more cases.
• Increase default texture store from 256 MB to 1 GB.
• Fixed a regression where OSL textures where flipped on the v axis.

appleseed.studio

• Fixed rare crash when stopping a render.
• Autosaving of images is now off by default.
• Added support for optional user settings files: on Linux and FreeBSD appleseed.studio will look for settings files in $HOME/.appleseed/settings/. This allows installing appleseed in system (read-only) directories.
• Fixed some edge cases around entity deletion.

appleseed.cli

• The --threads (-t) option now accepts value auto.
• Autosaving of images is now off by default.
• Added support for optional user settings files: on Linux and FreeBSD appleseed.studio will look for settings files in $HOME/.appleseed/settings/. This allows installing appleseed in system (read-only) directories.