appleseedhq / appleseed

These are the release notes for appleseed 1.5.0-beta.

The following people contributed code for this release: François Beaune, Ramon Blanquer, John Haddon, Esteban Tovagliari.

(appleseed render by François Gilliot, inspired by ferronne's amazing Revolution glassware collection.)

appleseed

• Massive scaling, responsiveness and speed improvements during interactive rendering.
• Added support for parametric surface generation (plane, sphere and torus are currently implemented).
• Diffuse Mean Free Path inputs in BSSRDFs are now colors instead of scalars.
• Improved handling of asset files referenced by projects. In particular, textures referenced by SeExpr expressions are now properly tracked as project dependencies (#575).
• Improved UV diagnostic surface shader.
• Added facing ratio diagnostic shader.
• Added background environment shader to shade the background with a solid color or a texture.
• Fixed default range for IOR inputs.
• Allow negative number of rendering threads (#774).
• Added optional automatic computation of smooth normals and tangents on mesh objects at loading time.
• Added support for environment transforms.
• Fixed wrong background color for colored messages in console on Windows (#1037).
• BSSRDFs now benefit from automatic IOR tracking; replaced Inside/Outside IOR with a single IOR value.
• Print more rendering settings when rendering starts.
• Changed default tile ordering to spiral.
• Changed default reconstruction filter to 1.5-pixel Blackman-Harris.
• Emit proper error messages when texture files referenced in SeExpr expressions cannot be loaded.
• Emit proper error messages when failing to write project files to disk.
• Fixed crash at exit time in appleseed.cli in benchmark mode.
• Fixed several problems with the glass BSDF.
• Fixed crash when loading deforming meshes without normals.
• Fixed bug when path tracing a scene with specular BSDFs and a limited number of bounces.
• Improved reporting and handling of invalid pixel samples.
• Reduced startup time and memory usage in scenes with multiple lat-long environment EDFs.
• Print full paths of entities instead of just entity names in log messages.

OSL

• Improved the as_subsurface_surface shader.
• Added Mari-style UDIM support to texture shaders.
• Allows negative values of anisotropy in the Disney closure.

appleseed.studio

• Improved the way entities bound to inputs are shown and behave.
• Fixed crash when rendering the current project, after loading another project failed.
• Persist the state of geometry of windows, dialogs and dockable panels.
• No longer print camera settings every time the camera changes.
• Fixed the file picker in entity edtor: file changes were not applied unless Enter was pressed.

Others

• Expose methods to set and retrieve the frame's crop window in appleseed.python.
• Command line tools now load their settings from settings/appleseed.tools.xml.
• Message verbosity of all tools can now be set in settings files. Default verbosity is Info.