Aqsis

Aqsis 1.4
Maintainer	Paul Gregory
Latest Version	July 2008
Website	{{{urlname}}}
Forum Link	CGTalk Forum

Aqsis is a RenderMan-compliant renderer based on the REYES algorithm. Aqsis has been in steady development since 2001 (when it was registered on SourceForge).

The current build of Aqsis was released in the summer of 2008, however there is the ability to download regular 'unstable' builds to test out bug fixes or new features. Like all open source software, is under development on a constant basis, but at it's current state the 'stable' build is production ready.

1 Open Source
2 Supported platforms
3 Supported Features
4 External links
5 Film Credits

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Open Source

Aqsis is an Open Source project. The development is hosted on SourceForge, however the homesite is used more often. Because it is open source there is also the ability to compile the source for an operating system other than Windows, Linux or OSX.

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Supported platforms

Windows
OSX (currently only 0.9.1 is available)
Linux

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Supported Features

All RenderMan 3.2 primitives
- Quadrics: Sphere, Disk, Cone, Paraboloid, Hyperboloid, Cylinder, Toroid
- Parametrics: Bilinear/Bicubic patches, NURBS
- Subdivision Surfaces including crease/hole/interpolateboundary tags
- Points
- Curves
- Convex / Concave polygons with or without holes and their meshes
Object instancing / delayed primitives
Displacements
Volume Shading
Programmable shading (RenderMan Shading Language)
High quality texture/shadow/environment mapping
High dynamic range input/output
Motion blur
Depth of field
Level Of Detail
Shadow Mapped Ambient Occlusion
Arbitrary Output Variables (AOV)
REYES style rendering
Occlusion culling
Network parallel rendering
DSO shaders
Solid Modeling
Layered Shaders (currently the ONLY RenderMan compliant renderer that supports this)

It is worth mentioning that Aqsis allows all shader types, including imager shaders to be written in SL, a feature that is still unsupported by most commercial renderers, including Pixar’s PRMan.

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