Hong Kong / Annecy, France — /*jupiter jazz*/ is proud to announce it has entered into a long-term technology licensing agreement with rendering software architect François Beaune resulting in the acquisition of the appleseed open source renderer.

appleseed is a modern physically-based rendering platform with a strong focus on quality, correctness and precision. At its core is a deterministic, spectral path tracer built on top of a robust ray tracing kernel. Built from scratch with the hindsight of years of production rendering experience, it features a very clean and modular code base ideal for long-term collaborative development and rendering innovation.

/*jupiter jazz*/ is committed to keep appleseed a true open source project and will continue using the very permissive MIT license for all source code releases. François will continue as founder and lead architect of the project.

The ‘Wreck’

To celebrate this historical moment a short animation entitled “Wreck” has been produced in Annecy:

Some interesting facts about appleseed

• appleseed was built from the ground up to handle true spectral rendering, multithreading, mixing of physically-based and non-physically-based shaders, and limited texture and geometry memory budgets.
• appleseed.studio is a Qt-based application that allows to compose scenes by importing geometry and textures, to create and assign physically-based materials, to render scenes using progressive rendering and to navigate into them using interactive rendering.
• appleseed.cli is a command-line version of the renderer suited for batch rendering on render farms.
• The “foundation” code on which appleseed is built is available as a separate open source library called appleseed.foundation. This library also provides full low-overhead interoperability with ILM’s Imath classes to facilitate adoption in production environments. appleseed.foundation is used extensively by /*jupiter jazz*/ for its production tools and commercial software.
• appleseed and all the associated tools are available on 64-bit Linux, 32-bit Mac and 32-bit Windows platforms. Support for 64-bit Mac and 64-bit Windows is in the planned.

Quick Links

appleseed’s headquarters: http://appleseedhq.net/

Watch appleseed on GitHub:

About appleseed & François Beaune

appleseed was started in 2009 by François Beaune, a rendering software engineer that works on commercial production renderers and custom production tools since 2001. Originally a research platform, appleseed is now evolving into a robust, full-featured renderer that aims to “not suck”.

About /*jupiter jazz*/

/*jupiter jazz*/ is a collective of visual researchers & software developers pushing the intersection of art, technology, science and beer. We synthesize innovative products that kick ass yet respect the canons of simplicity, ease-of-use and the beauty of design. Our focus is film visual effects, broadcast and motion graphics.