heightfield 1.0

Introduction

heightfield is a simple tool to generate a heightfield from a texture and make images like the ones below. The tool generates a complete standalone appleseed scene.

appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-22-preview-3 or later is required to render the generated scene. You can find releases of appleseed in the Releases page on GitHub.

Instructions

1. Unzip the package somewhere.
2. Place a PNG image called heightfield.png into the data directory.
3. Run heightfield (on Windows, simply double-click on heightfield.exe from the Explorer).
4. Start appleseed.studio.
5. Open the heightfield.appleseed scene from the output directory.

The package comes with a sample heightfield.png image, so to get started you can simply run the tool, open the scene in appleseed.studio and start rendering in seconds.

Please post your renders to the appleseed forum!

Examples

appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-22 Preview 3

This is a preview version of appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-22 with several bug fixes and improvements in the Unidirectional Path Tracer and SPPM lighting engines.

appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-22 Preview 2

This is a preview version of appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-22 with improved support for Bézier curves raytracing, and the new makefluffy tool. Work-in-progress!

appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-22 Preview 1

This is a preview version of appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-22 with preliminary support for Bézier curves raytracing. Heavily work-in-progress!

appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-21

Summary

These are the release notes for appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-21.

The following people contributed code for this release (in alphabetical order): Marius Avram, Luis Barrancos, François Beaune, Chris Camargo, Freddy Chaleur, Vidar Nelson, Srinath Ravichandran, Liisa Sailaranta, Jonathan Topf, Esteban Tovagliari, Garvit Verma, Davis Wen, Rémi Weng, Nicholas Yue, Xin Zhao.

We would also like to acknowledge the amazing work of Jonathan Topf (mayaseed), Hans Hoogenboom (houseed) and Thomas Arthus (appleseed website).

appleseed

Major Changes

Open Shading Language

appleseed now supports a large subset of Open Shading Language (OSL).

Note that OSL support is at pre-alpha level and is not yet ready for general usage. It is thus disabled in release packages. Adventurous users are however welcome to try the experimental OSL package for Linux, or build appleseed with OSL in and give it a spin.

Oren-Nayar BRDF

We added support for the Oren-Nayar BRDF.

New Rule-Based Render Layer Mechanism

This new system allows to assign render layers to scene entities via a series of rules. The only rule currently available is based on Perl regular expressions. Rules are normal scene entities and as such can be added/edited/removed from appleseed.studio. Projects using the old render layer system are automatically migrated to the new one.

Important Changes

• Added support for light-emitting geometry in nested assemblies.
• AOVs now have alpha channels.
• Added support for arbitrary linear texture transforms.
• Added Light Near Start support to Emission Distribution Functions (EDFs).
• Print total and process virtual memory in log messages.
• Intersection filters are now cached across renders.
• Bug fix: some caustics-generating paths were still followed even when caustics were disabled.

Minor Changes

• Implemented spiral tile ordering.
• Added Shade Alpha Cutouts boolean parameter on materials.
• Most surface shaders should not override alpha, and no longer do.
• Added World Space Position diagnostic mode.
• Changed Physical Surface Shader's thin translucency to be a color instead of a scalar.
• The scene entity may now have parameters.
• Fixed invalid texture and assembly binding rules.
• Added search paths support in project files.
• Support aborting during scene preparation.
• Improved handling of assets when writing project files to disk.
• Prune redundant transforms in transform sequences.
• Improved robustness of ray tracer in presence of degenerate static or moving triangles.
• Improved adaptive rendering mode.
• Removed experimental surface shaders.
• The color space of the default project is now linear RGB instead of sRGB.
• By default, caustics are now disabled for the unidirectional path tracer.
• Changed default autofocus target from top-left corner of the image to center of the image.
• Print camera and frame settings when rendering starts.
• Project files with multiple entities of the same type and name in a given scope are invalid.
• Base alpha value for surface shaders in a collection is now the same as for the collection surface shader itself.
• Improved several log messages.
• Add ability to assign materials to both sides of an object instance at once with side="both" attributes on <assign_material> elements.
• Set default thin translucency value to 0.0 instead of empty in the Physical Surface Shader.
• The Uniform Pixel Renderer now uses the actual number of samples requested when decorrelation is enabled.
• Added transparency threshold to SPPM parameters.
• Allow negative sample and pixel values.
• The version string now states whether QMC is enabled.

Added parameters to texture store to enable tracking messages. The new parameters are:

texture_store.track_tile_loading    (boolean, default is false)
texture_store.track_tile_unloading  (boolean, default is false)
texture_store.track_store_size      (boolean, default is false)

appleseed.studio

Major Changes

User Interface Overhaul

The user interface of appleseed.studio has been overhauled and cleaned up:

Attribute Editor

Added an attribute editor to appleseed.studio.

Known issue: when editing an entity through the Entity Editor dialog (by double-clicking on the entity), the Attribute Editor is not updated with the new values after the Entity Editor dialog is closed.

Important Changes

• Added RGBA readout.
• Added a pixel inspector tool under the mouse with a button to toggle on/off that provide NDC, RGBA and pixel position information.
• Added project file watcher to automatically reload project files when they have changed on disk.
• Added tile ordering option in the Render Settings dialog.
• It is now possible to filter entities (using regular expressions) in the Entity Browser dialog.
• Improved camera handling when zoomed in/out.
• The state of the user interface is now preserved across launches.
• Dockable widgets can now be hidden or made visible from the status bar; all dockable widgets can be toggled at once using F11.
• CTRL+Enter will apply the changes and close the Entity Editor.
• Implemented preview of spectral colors in the entity editor.
• SPPM settings are no longer available in interactive configurations since this combination is not supported by the renderer.
• Image plane sampling settings are irrelevant for interactive configurations: hide them.
• Allow assigning materials to instances of objects without material slots.
• Fixed crash when picking an object instance without a material.
• Sliders for numeric inputs now adapt their range when entering out-of-range values.
• It is now possible to instantiate objects from the Project Explorer.
• Project files can now be dragged-and-dropped into appleseed.studio's main window.

Improved the behavior of the log panel in appleseed.studio:

• Fix a bug where message coloring broke completely when text was selected.
• Don't scroll to the bottom of the log panel if text is selected.
• Maintain scroll position if not fully scrolled to the bottom.

Minor Changes

• Only compute the final average luminance if the print_final_average_luminance setting is set to true (false by default).
• Many small bug fixes.
• Print a log message when copying the render to the clipboard.
• The Quicksave All AOVs button now generates both numbered and unnumbered image files.
• Fixed minor visual glitch: the render widget was not repainted if rendering failed early.
• The Import Objects file dialog now show *.binarymesh files.
• Bug fix: don't enable File -> Reload Project if the project has no path.
• Fixed Qt runtime warning.
• Changed the type of the IOR inputs of the Specular BTDF from text to numeric.
• Added toolbar button to reset zoom to 100%.
• Removed unimplemented user interface elements.
• Added a toolbar button to clear the frame to black.
• Bug fix: the Clear Filter button in the Project Explorer was not always properly disabled.
• The Project Explorer filter is cleared when an entity is picked.

appleseed.cli

• Clarified the description of the --window command line argument.
• Added syntax for --configuration <name> command line argument.
• Added support for Houdini's mplay.

rendernode.py 1.18

• Tweaked timestamps formatting.
• Added --print-missing-deps flag.
• Fixed label in message headers.
• Improved error handling.

rendermanager.py 2.9

From-scratch rewrite fixing speed and robustness problems of the 1.x series.

• Dependency tracking is now much more robust.
• Dependencies are now incrementally updated instead of being calculated from scratch at every step.
• Missing dependencies will now be detected and re-uploaded at any time.
• Support for tracking multiple shots concurrently in the same target directory.
• Print ping times.
• The render manager can now be terminated (by pressing CTRL-C) during updates of the dependency databases.

Other Tools

• Tweaked output of rendermany.py.
• rendermany.py: allow to forward additional arguments to appleseed, and to select the output format.
• On Windows, the appleseed Python module now has the .pyd extension.
• mayaseed no longer ships with appleseed.
• Demo scenes no longer ship with appleseed.
• All command line tools now understand the --message-verbosity <level> argument. Level can be: debug, info, warning, error, fatal.
• Missing positional arguments are now a fatal error for all command line tools.
• The devkit sample now starts by printing appleseed's version string.
• For all command line tools on Linux and OS X, disable console coloring if stderr is not bound to a terminal.

appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-21 Preview 2

This is a preview version of appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-21.

appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-21 Preview 1

This is a preview version of appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-21.