Aqsis is a free

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 rendering suite compliant with the RenderMan

RenderMan Interface Specification

The RenderMan Interface Specification, or RISpec in short, is an open API developed by Pixar Animation Studios to describe three-dimensional scenes and turn them into digital photorealistic images...

 standard. It is available under the GPL

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

, with some parts under the LGPL

GNU Lesser General Public License

The GNU Lesser General Public License or LGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation . It was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License or GPL and permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License...

. Its main author and project manager is Paul Gregory.

The Aqsis project consists of a renderer

Rendering (computer graphics)

Rendering is the process of generating an image from a model , by means of computer programs. A scene file contains objects in a strictly defined language or data structure; it would contain geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting, and shading information as a description of the virtual scene...

, shader compiler and a few other supporting components. Like the original PRMan from Pixar, it is an implementation of the Reyes rendering

Reyes rendering

Reyes rendering is a computer software architecture used in 3D computer graphics to render photo-realistic images. It was developed in the mid-1980s by Loren Carpenter and Robert L. Cook at Lucasfilm's Computer Graphics Research Group, which is now Pixar. It was first used in 1982 to render images...

algorithm, which is famous for its high speed and efficiency in handling even very large scenes, and has good support for displacement shaders. Like many other open source projects, Aqsis is hosted on SourceForge

SourceForge

SourceForge Enterprise Edition is a collaborative revision control and software development management system. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of free software / open source software applications .While originally itself...

 and is in continuous and active development.

Because of its Reyes heritage, Aqsis lacks some advanced global illumination features like ray tracing, although active efforts are underway to support some such features. Its current stable version is 1.6.

The MakeHuman

MakeHuman

MakeHuman is an Open Source software application that generates 3D humanoids.Features that make this software unique include a new, highly intuitive GUI and a high quality mesh, optimized to work in subdivision surface mode ....

project uses Aqsis to produce realistic renderings of the human body.

External links

• Home page
• wiki.aqsis.org - Aqsis wiki