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Open source 3D rendering solution adhering to the RenderMan standard

Aqsis for Mac OS X is a cross-platform photorealistic 3D rendering solution, adhering to the RenderMan interface standard defined by Pixar Animation Studios.

Focusing on stability and production usage, features include constructive solid geometry, depth-of-field, extensible shading engine (DSOs), instancing, level-of-detail, motion blur, NURBS, procedural plugins, programmable shading, subdivision surfaces, subpixel displacements and more.

The Aqsis tools provide a comprehensive list of features that are considered necessary for production use, the following list details some of the important high level capabilities.

* Programmable Shading
* High Level Primitive Support
* Sub-Pixel Displacement
* Motion Blur (MB)
* Depth of Field (DoF)
* Shadow Mapped Ambient Occlusion
* Arbitrary Output Variables (AOV)
* Subdivision Surfaces (SDS)
* High quality texture mapping
* Level of Detal (LOD)
* High Dynamic Range (HDR) Output
* Extensible through plugins (DSO/Procedurals)

Features:

The Aqsis tools provide a comprehensive list of features that are considered necessary for production use, the following list details some of the important high level capabilities.

* Programmable Shading - Aqsis supports the 'RenderMan Shading Language'. Shaders written in RSL can be used for surface shading, lightsources, displacement, volumetric shading (interior/exterior) and imaging. This feature provides artists with complete freedom to describe surfaces, lights and other parts of the rendering pipeline, in any way they require, providing much more flexibility and control than more restricted procedural material systems.

* High Level Primitive Support - Aqsis uses the REYES rendering approach, which means all primitives are broken down into sub-pixel micropolygons (MP's) during rendering. This means that Aqsis only needs the high level surface descriptions to render from, reducing the data passed to the renderer, while ensuring a perfectly smooth silhouette edge. Some other renderers would require, for instance NURBS geometry to be polygonised before rendering. Aqsis will render a NURBS surface directly, while ensuring that it is rendered at a sufficiently high rate to prevent artifacts on silhouette edges. Effectively, the REYES approach provides automatic, adaptive subdivision at render time, ensuring that the surface is subdivided enough to produce an accurate representation of curved surfaces in areas that need it, while not over subdividing in areas that don't need it. Many polygon based renderers would require a high level curved surface to be pre-subdivided, meaning the surface is likely to be subdivided too much in some areas, or not enough in others, often a user choice, this results in large amounts of data being sent to the renderer in order to avoid silhouette artifacts.

* Sub-Pixel Displacement - The REYES approach allows Aqsis to provide true displacements at the sub-pixel level. Where some other renderers would need densely subdivided geometry to be passed into the rendering pipeline to achieve similar functionality, Aqsis provides this for all primitive types, with no requirement to alter the geometry before it is passed to the renderer.