appleseed

What appleseed is

appleseed is a free, open-source rendering engine for animation and visual effects, built around physically based global illumination. It is intended to give individuals and small studios a complete rendering package. Its rendering methods include unidirectional path tracing, stochastic progressive photon mapping, light tracing, progressive rendering, interactive rendering, and spectral rendering. For shading, it supports Open Shading Language and on-the-fly shader compilation. Production features include motion blur, AOVs, Cryptomatte, adaptive sampling, denoising, and checkpoints that allow rendering to resume. Native integrations are listed for Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, Blender, and Gaffer. It supports OBJ geometry and image formats including OpenEXR, TIFF, HDR, PNG, JPEG, and PSD. Developers can use C++ and Python APIs or extend it with external C++ plugins. appleseed runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS. The project is developed by a small international volunteer team from animation and VFX. Its download page lists version 2.1.0-beta, released September 21, 2019. For help, the project recommends its Discord server or user forum; private email may receive a slower response.