Overview

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.

Features

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.