appleseed is an open source, physically-based global illumination rendering engine primarily designed for animation and visual effects.
appleseed is actively developed since 2012 by a small, international team of talented volunteers from the animation and VFX industry. Its core mission is to provide individuals and small studios with a complete, reliable, fully open rendering package.
Over the years appleseed has been used on several projects including TV documentaries, ads, promotional videos and an animation short.
appleseed implements a modern workflow based on path tracing that enables artifact-free, single pass rendering with very little technical tuning. It is simultaneously capable of strictly unbiased rendering when total accuracy matters, and biased rendering when artistic freedom and shorter rendering time are paramount.
appleseed supports fully programmable shading via Sony Pictures Imageworks' Open Shading Language, RGB and spectral rendering, fast and robust transformation and deformation motion blur, state-of-the-art ray traced subsurface scattering, exhaustive Python and C++ APIs and many other production-oriented features.
Along with the core renderer, the team is actively developing high quality integrations into Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max and Blender. appleseed is also the default rendering engine of Image Engine’s Gaffer.
- Twitter: # Skills
appleseed is a large project that spans a variety of disciplines such as graphics and system programming, user interface design or applied physics. You can make meaningful contributions without being a rendering expert.
However, appleseed and related applications are all written primarily in portable C++, consequently fluency with C++ is a requirement for all projects.
- Join Slack. Feel free to choose any nickname but please fill in your real first and last names.
- Join the #gsoc-general channel and introduce yourself. Tell us about projects you have been working on in your spare (if any), your past involvement with open source communities (if any), why you chose appleseed, and the project(s) you are interested in.
- You will also need to build appleseed on your machine. Please follow the build instructions. Please reach out on Slack in #help if you need help.
- Finally, you will need to submit a small patch to appleseed or choose and complete a small development task from our issue tracker, preferably one tagged as Good First Issue. Please reach out on #help or #gsoc-general if you need help to find the right task. The goal is to get a feeling for how collaboration would work between you and the rest of the team.
Since participating in an open source project is all about engagement with the community, we will value curious and highly motivated students.
Our community is a safe, welcoming place to everyone. Please be respectful and relaxed :)