OpenSequencePlayer, aka Duke, is a basic opensource high resolution image sequence player dedicated to visual effects and post-production companies.

Duke relies on a plug-in system for input formats (some are provided by OpenImageIO, others are dedicated plug-ins like JPEG or DPX), so it covers most of the image sequences needed by everyday VFX checking on Linux®, Windows® and Mac OSX® platforms.
Other components are based on generic libraries and proven technologies like OpenGL, Cg and Protocol Buffer.

Duke’s built-in lookahead file cache ensures stable playback for either direct from disk or RAM sources.
Duke’s modular engine enables color corrections and playlist management facilities as well as a timeline, or forthcoming features like 3D stereo, split screen, …

Home Page: http://opensource.mikrosimage.eu/duke.html
Project Page: https://github.com/mikrosimage/duke
Language: c++
Platform: Linux Windows OSX
License: Modified BSD
Sponsor: Mikrosimage

TuttleOFX is an open source image sequences processing frameworkmade up of :

• a set of plugins to read and write professional VFX image formats and to perform various image processings (color corrections, filters, video compression, …)
• a set of command line tools called Sam to browse, copy, move, delete and batch process the aforementioned plugins.

OpenFX Architecture

• The aim of TuttleOFX is to help post-production facilities to deal with large-scale everyday image processing tasks. Compared with other programming libraries and image processing tools, TuttleOFX is based on some extended OpenFX plugins architecture, combined with optimised selection bit-depth processing.

Support For Numerous Processes

• In addition of standard process features, TuttleOFX also addresses requested VFX processes like lens-distort corrections or movie compression and even some more specific color treatments like Color Transform Language and OpenColorIO nodes.

Support For 3rd Party Applications

• Thanks to their OpenFX nature, TuttleOFX plugins can be used either in the Sam command line tool or by other applications such as Nuke® (The Foundry), Scratch® (Assimilate), Baselight® (FilmLight), Mistika® (SGO). Similarly, commercial OpenFX plugins (Sapphire, Furnace, Keylight, …) can be used within Sam command line.

Home Page: http://opensource.mikrosimage.eu/tuttle.html
Project Page: https://github.com/tuttleofx/TuttleOFX
Language: c++ python
Platform: Linux Windows OSX
License: Modified BSD
Sponsor: Mikrosimage

OpenRenderManagement, aka Puli,  is an open-source render management project.

The Core project is called Puli and is entirely written in python.

PuliUI is a GWT project that provides a simple web interface for OpenDispatcher.

• Python APIPuli is an open-source render management solution entirely written in Python. It provides a job submission API that can be used directly within Maya® (Autodesk) or Nuke® (The Foundry) – amongst others.
• Job TypesSeveral action scripts are also provided to enable jobs submission for Maya® (Autodesk), Mental Ray® (NVidia), Nuke® (The Foundry) but you can easily write your own scripts to support your in-house rendering engine or any other 3rd party solution.
• Render StatisticsJobs informations and metadatas can be stored in a database (and therefore providing persistence) and can then be used to provide rendering statistics.

• Global RenderingPuli is able to seamlessly manage rendering on both local and distant networks.
  For example, you can mix your renderfarm between local render nodes and a 3rd party cloud solution.
• More Noteworthy Features• Priority management
  • Jobs dependencies
  • Rendering software license availability
  • Minimum hardware requirements for a job (CPU, memory, …)
  • Workstations and renderfarm management (render nodes pools)
  • Local user denial for his workstation to be used as a render node

Home Page: http://opensource.mikrosimage.eu/puli.html
Project Page: https://github.com/mikrosimage/openrendermanagement
Language: python
Platform: All
License: Modified BSD
Sponsor: Mikrosimage

The suite is composed of three tools :
- ColorHealer : a calibration and measurement application
- ColorKeeper : a color correction loader with helpful tools as screen detection, warning and email when correction is obsolete, gamma slider, printer lights, custom 2D LUTs loader (custom LUT is applied over the correction LUT), etc…
- ColorChief : a calib request management web app. For now, only a very simple mail feature has been implemented to allow calibrators to know when a station is un-calibrated.

ColorTribe enables post-production facilities to maintain a coherent fleet of displays, whatever the platforms or the devices are.

Home Page: http://opensource.mikrosimage.eu/colortribe.html
Project Page: https://github.com/mikrosimage/OpenDisplayCalib
Language: C Java
Platform: Linux Windows OSX
License: Modified BSD
Sponsor: Mikrosimage

• Securely Store Assets in a Highly Scalable, Central Repository
• Find Assets, Tasks and Notes with Powerful Search Tools
• Automate Your Project’s File Structure
• Version Control Assets and Notes
• Rollback to Previous Asset Versions
• “In-Place” Checkins for Large Files
• Automate Naming Conventions
• Package and Deliver Files with Ease
• Import/Export CSV Data
• Check Files In and Out of the Database Easily

Home Page: http://www.southpawtech.com/tactic/
Language: Python
Platform: Linux, OS X, Windows
License: Eclipse Public License
Sponsor: Southpaw Technology

The source code for OpenSubdiv is located on github and is now in open beta.

Home Page: http://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv
Project Page: https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/OpenSubdiv
Language: C++, glsl, OpenCL, CUDA
Platform: Linux, OS X, Windows
License: Microsoft Public License
Sponsor: Disney

Home Page: http://www.openvdb.org/
Project Page: http://www.openvdb.org/
Language: C++
License: Mozilla Public License Version 2.0
Sponsor: DreamWorks Animation

Project Page: https://github.com/nerdvegas/vfxgal
Language: C++, python
Platform: Linux, OSX
License: GNU LGPL

It includes a cmake-based build system which is integrated into the package resolution system, and a deployment system for releasing packages to a central location, and updating the repository.

Home Page: http://code.google.com/p/rez-config/
Project Page: http://github.com/nerdvegas/rez
Language: Python
Platform: Linux
License: GNU Lesser GPL

Alembic is focused on efficiently storing the computed results of complex procedural geometric constructions. It is very specifically NOT concerned with storing the complex dependency graph of procedural tools used to create the computed results. For example, Alembic will efficiently store the animated vertex positions and animated transforms that result from an arbitrarily complex animation and simulation process which could involve enveloping, corrective shapes, volume-preserving simulations, cloth and flesh simulations, and so on. Alembic will not attempt to store a representation of the network of computations (rigs, basically) which are required to produce the final, animated vertex positions and animated transforms.

The production ready version of Alembic 1.0 was announced at Siggraph 2011 and released on August 9th, 2011 by Lucasfilm and Sony Pictures Imageworks with support from major vendors including Autodesk, Side Effects Software, The Foundry, Luxology, Pixar’s Renderman and NVidia.

Home Page: http://alembic.io/
Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/alembic/
Language: C++, Python
Platform: Linux, OSX, Windows
License: New BSD License
Sponsor: Sony Pictures Imageworks, Lucasfilm

Pimath binds the Imath API as closely as possible. Each hpp file contains a comment block at the top, highlighting cases where the bindings differ and why. Common reasons include:

Making a function signature more Pythonic;
Removing slightly optimised functions (where the overhead of python itself would vastly outweigh the optimisation);
Removing API redundancy;
Changing misleading Imath function names (rare).
Nice things about pimath:

It provides integral template instantiations where possible – eg V3i;
It provides ‘half’ template instantiations where possible – eg M33h;
It provides to- and from-python conversion for the Imath ‘half’ type;
It spreads type instantiation over several cpp files for quick multithreaded compiling.
It’s organised as a mirror image of Imath – it has corresponding headers, and a free function in Imath is a free function in pimath. If you know Imath, you know pimath.

Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/pimath/
Language: C++, python
Platform: All
License: New BSD Licence
Sponsor: Dr. D. Studios

History

At Disney there have been various expression languages. SeExpr started as a language for our procedural geometry instancing tool, XGen. Work was done to generalize it into something that could be used in other contexts. Later it was integrated into paint3d, our texture painting facility, which opened the door to procedural synthesis. More recently, we have integrated it as a way of defining procedural controls to physical dynamical simulations and render time particle instancing.

Expressions can be seen as a way of allowing customization of inner loops. This is contrast to scripting which is mostly aimed at gluing large parts of code base together. So in this sense, C++ forms the center of your application, python could be used to put pieces of it together, and SeExpr is used to customize tight inner loops.

Major Features

• Arithmetic expression of scalar/vector types
• Large library of builtin functions
• Extensible variables and functions (including with DSOs)
• Simple to embed in any program

Home Page: http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/seexpr.html
Project Page: http://github.com/wdas/seexpr/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, OSX, Windows
License: New BSD
Sponsor: Walt Disney Animation Studios

Afanasy provides render farm monitoring. It is very important to watch computers resources during the render process. You can see what kind of resource (CPU, memory, network etc.) is needed to render. It is very useful to know what your farm hosts are doing.

The Afanasy engine simply runs different command lines on hosts and controls running processes. You can use Afanasy to parallel calculate anything you can describe (split) through command lines.

Home Page: http://cgru.sourceforge.net/afanasy/doc/afanasy.html
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cgru/
Language: C++, python
Platform: All
License: GPL

Home Page: http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/partio.html
Project Page: https://github.com/wdas/partio
Language: C++ Python
Platform: Linux, OSX, Windows
License: New BSD
Sponsor: Walt Disney Animation Studios

OpenColorIO has been used on dozens of feature films including Alice in Wonderland, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, Spiderman(s), Surf’s Up, and Watchmen.

Home Page: http://opencolorio.org/
Project Page: https://github.com/imageworks/OpenColorIO
Language: C++, Python
Platform: Linux, OSX, Windows
License: Open BSD
Sponsor: Sony Pictures Imageworks

Home Page: http://opensource.imageworks.com/?p=osl
Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/openshadinglanguage/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, OSX, Windows
License: New BSD
Sponsor: Sony Pictures Imageworks

The core is written in C++ using Qt, and PyQt is used to extend Python interfaces. There are GUI tools to manage the queue, custom submitters for some packages, and a generic Python API for others.

Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/arsenalsuite/
Language: C++ Python
Platform: Windows, Linux
License: GNU GPL v2
Sponsor: Blur Studio

At the moment this project features the following shaders:

• Jupiter SGI Skin

Jupiter Spherical Gradient Illumination Skin is a 3Delight RenderMan shader that reads scanned RGB world space normal maps for 3 different wavelengths (red, green, blue), and a fourth normal map to be used in the specular term.

This technique, presented at:

http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/FaceScanning/

allows the user to re-create the appear of the subtle subsurface effects of skin, together with self-shadowing and inter-reflections.

Once the texture are acquired:

• The three normal maps for the Lambertian diffuse term contain increasing detail as the light wavelength decreases.
• The normal map for the blue wavelength contains more detail than the normal map for the green wavelength, which in turn contains more detail than the red wavelength map.
• The specular normal map is used to drive the specular contribution (and the reflections), with the specular term being comprised of two specular lobes based on the Torrance-Sparrow model.

The user has the possibility of selecting between two microfacet distribution functions used:

• the Beckmann microfacet distribution, as suggested in the publication by Robert L. Cook and Kenneth E. Torrance, “A reflectance model for computer graphics”

• a Gaussian distribution, which is cheaper to compute and produces slightly softer results.

The weight of each of the specular lobe’s contribution can also be controlled directly by the user, or it can be made automatically via the extracted data in the specular intensity image.

Notice also that this shader provides optionally a full two pass (point cloud based)subsurface term as well for greater flexibility.

This work has been sponsored by Srinivas M. Mohan (Indian Artists Computer Graphics Pvt. Ltd.) for the movie *Endhiran*, and it is based on:

• “Rapid Acquisition of Specular and Diffuse Normal Maps from Polarized Spherical Gradient Illumination”.
 By Wan Chun Ma, Tim Hawkins, Pieter Peers, Charles-Felix Chabert, Malte Weiss, Paul Debevec. 
University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies.
 Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2007.
• “Estimating Specular Roughness and Anisotropy from Second Order Spherical Gradient Illumination”.
 By Abhijeet Ghosh , Tongbo Chen, Pieters Peers, Cyrus A. Wilson, Paul Debevec.
 University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies.
 Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2009.

Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/jupiterskin/
Language: Renderman Shading Language
Platform: Linux, OSX, Windows
License: New BSD License
Sponsor: Jupiter Jazz

The core aims of OpenFX were established early on, these are…

• to develop a standard for writing visual effects plug-ins,
• to develop that standard with a broad consensus within the industry,
• have that standard be vendor and operating system neutral,
• have that standard be sufficiently flexible that it supports a wide range of visual effects systems, from editors to compositors.

Subsidiary aims are,

• have the standard be expandable to other areas in the future, for example sound plug-ins or image i/o plug-ins,
• have any expansion of the standard be done in such a manner so that hosts can easily support plug-ins using differerent versions of the API,
• have plug-ins written to the standard be tunable to the host system they are running on,
• allow hosts to provide extra custom functionality to plugins that wish to use it.

Home Page: http://openfx.sourceforge.net/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openfx/
Language: c++
Platform: Linux, OS X, Windows
License: BSD
Sponsor: The Foundry, Autodesk, Gen-Arts, FilmLight, Assimilate, Re-Vision Effects

This is a C++ library that allows caching files in remote (network) locations onto the local client to speed up future accesses to these files. This reduces network traffic, but also, more importantly disk access, on the server. Modern network infrastructures are rarely the problem, but a server’s disks often don’t cope well when hundreds of clients read large files, often repeatedly, by querying small pieces of data, all at the same time.

It comes with a SWIG interface to be easily accessible through scripting languages (e.g Python) without the need to use a C++ compiler.

RSL shadeop implementation, modeled after the automatic network cache in DNA research’s 3Delight. It allows caching files like textures, point clouds or other heavy data, on a render farm client, automatically, by simply specifying the cache location with an environment variable, or in the RIB (with an option). In your shaders you can use the cacheFile() shadeop. It should work with any renderer that has an RSL shadeop API but was tested & used in production with Pixar’s PhotoRealistic RenderMan.

Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/jupiterfilecache
Language: C++ Python
Platform: Linux, OS X, Windows
License: Creative Commons 3.0 BY-SA
Sponsor: Jupiter Jazz

Features of the rmanPtc SOP include:

• Independent control for limiting the number of points loaded and displayed.
• Geometry output for all point attributes in the cloud.
• OpenGL display preview for attributes as point or disk primitives.
• Ability to cull points based on a reference bounding box.

Home Page: http://danbethell.github.com/rmanptcsop/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: New BSD License

This code is a reference implementation of our paper Wavelet Turbulence for Fluid Simulation. The code is intended as a pedagogical example, so clarity has been given preference over performance. Optimizations that inhibit readability have been removed, so the running times experienced will be longer than those reported in the paper.

Home Page: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~tedkim/WTURB
Project Page: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~tedkim/WTURB/source.html
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: GNU Public License
Sponsor: Cornell University

All programs in the package exchange image data using unix pipes and a simple generic HDR image format – pfs. pfs in not just another format for storing HDR images (and there are already quite a few of them), but is rather an attempt to integrate the existing HDR image formats by providing a simple interface for exchanging data between applications.

pfstools is a base set of tools and more advanced functionality can be found in related packages, such as pfstmo (tone-mapping) or pfscalibration (recovery of camera response curve and merging multi-exposure LDR image). If you are not comfortable with a command line interface or you want to save yourself compilation problems, you may want to check Qtpfsgui, which packages some functionality of pfstmo and pfscalibration in a nice GUI interface.

Home Page: http://pfstools.sourceforge.net/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pfstools/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, OS X, Windows
License: GNU Library or Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

Like other GUI front-ends, hugin provides an easy-to-use unified point-and-click interface to a whole range of other command-line tools including:

• autopano-sift, autopano-sift-C, panomatic or autopano for automatic creation of control points.
• nona for remapping input images and rendering output images.
• enblend and enfuse for seamless blending of output images.

The Hugin project’s mission is not only to provide a powerful GUI, but also to provide opensource replacements for the small number of closed source components of Panorama tools, especially PTStitcher. A PTStitcher replacement, called nona has been developed, supporting its most important features.

Among the many flexible Hugin workflow options, it is possible to correct exposure, Vignetting and White balance between photos; generate HDR or exposure blended output from bracketed photos; or use 16bit and HDR input data natively.

Home Page: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hugin/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, OS X, Windows
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

• creation of DCP from source files
• support for multi-reel DCPs with several audio and subtitle tracks
• development of an intuitive, multi-lingual user interface

Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/opencinematools/
Language: C++
Platform: Windows, Linux
License: New BSD License

• No UV assignment is required! Ptex applies a separate texture to each face of a subdivision or polygon mesh.
• The Ptex file format can efficiently store hundreds of thousands of texture images in a single file.
• The Ptex API provides cached file I/O and high-quality filtering – everything that is needed to easily add Ptex support to a production-quality renderer or texture authoring application.

Home Page: http://ptex.us/
Project Page: http://github.com/wdas/ptex/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, OS X, Windows
License: New BSD
Sponsor: Walt Disney Animation Studios

Home Page: http://kickstand.tv/openpipeline/openpipeline-information/
Project Page: http://openpipeline.cc/
Language: MEL
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: Common Public License 1.0

Earth is initially focused on managing the explosion of data that occurs in digital visual effects work.

Project Page: http://open.rsp.com.au/projects/earth
Language: Ruby
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, etc
License: The GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2
Sponsor: Rising Sun Pictures

The generic service DrQueue provides allows the distribution, monitoring and management of tasks across a network of computing nodes. A queue of jobs composing of a number of tasks are spread over the computing nodes and processed in parallel.

DrQueue started as an application to provide distributed render queueing and management services for rendering animations.
The generic service DrQueue provides allows the distribution, monitoring and management of tasks across a network of computing nodes. A queue of jobs composing of a number of tasks are spread over the computing nodes and processed in parallel.

Supported Renderers and Batch Processors

So far DrQueue supports 3Delight, 3DSMax, After Effects, Aqsis, Blender, BMRT, Cinema 4D, Lightwave, Luxrender, Mantra, Maya, Mental Ray, Nuke, Pixie, Shake, Terragen, Turtle, V-Ray and XSI.

Python bindings

Ruby bindings

Home Page: http://www.drqueue.org
Project Page: https://ssl.drqueue.org/project
Language: c++
Platform: Linux, Mac OSX, Irix, FreeBSD and Windows
License: GNU GPL Version 3

• Support for 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit color channels of deep paint.
• High fidelity image file types such as DPX, OpenEXR and 16-bit TIFF.
• High Dynamic Range.
• Onion-skinning.
• Flipbook. Movie playback of short sequences of images in RAM.
• Color Management System. CinePaint uses LittleCMS.
• Gallery-quality printing. B&W photographs have only one color channel and degrade quickly when manipulated as 8-bit images. CinePaint has higher fidelity and offers a 16-bit printing path to the print-head using GutenPrint.

Home Page: http://www.cinepaint.org/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cinepaint/
Language: C
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, BSD
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Processing is also used in VFX read more

Home Page: http://processing.org/
Project Page: http://dev.processing.org/
Language: processing, java
Platform: Linux, OSX, Windows
License: GPL, LGPL

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 Detail (LOD)
• High Dynamic Range (HDR) Output
• Extensible through plugins (DSO/Procedurals)

Home Page: http://www.aqsis.org/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/aqsis/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Tracksperanto allows you to track once in a program of your choice and then export the resulting features to all suppoorted 3D solving apps. Once there, it’s a 15 minute job to configure the camera and see if the solve comes out well or not. This method tends to yield very good results since you track at least one of the many 3D solvers on the market will give a correct computation.

Tracksperanto assists in translating 2D tracks between many formats so that you can move your 2D tracks from one application into all of the others, and the translation is multidirectional – most of the formats are supported both for reading and writing.

Format support

The following formats are supported, both for reading and writing:

• Nuke scripts
• Shake tracker export (many trackers in one file), also supported by 2d3d Boujou
• SynthEyes tracker export
• PFTrack .2dt tracker (both for PFTrack 4 and 5)
• MatchMover Pro .rz2 files
• 3DEqualizer V4 and V3 curve exports
• MayaLive exports

The following formats are supported for reading only

• Flame/Smoke .stabilizer file (also exported by Combustion)
• Shake script file

For all formats that record the tracker correlation (how sure the algorithm was about the precision of this particular keyframe) the correlation data gets translated as well

Intermediate processing

Tracksperanto can assist in transforming the tracks in various ways, namely

• Slip all the tracked keyframes a number of frames forwards or backwards
• Scale your tracks proportionally or non proportionally, or to a specific pixel size (track on proxies, apply to 2K! – or the other way around)
• Prefix tracker names
• and some more…

Home Page: http://guerilla-di.org/tracksperanto/
Project Page: http://github.com/guerilla-di/tracksperanto
Language: pure ruby (no compilation required)
Platform: Windows, OSX, Linux
License: MIT

Project Goals

Home Page: http://code.google.com/p/pymel/
Language: python
Platform: windows, osx, linux
License: New BSD License
Sponsor: Luma Pictures

Home Page: http://danbethell.github.com/rmanconnect/
Project Page: http://github.com/danbethell/rmanconnect
License: New BSD

Aimed world-wide at media professionals and artists, Blender can be used to create 3D visualizations, stills as well as broadcast and cinema quality videos, while the incorporation of a real-time 3D engine allows for the creation of 3D interactive content for stand-alone playback.

Originally developed by the company ‘Not a Number’ (NaN), Blender now is continued as ‘Free Software’, with the source code available under the GNU GPL license. It now continues development by the Blender Foundation in the Netherlands.

Key Features include:

• Fully integrated creation suite, offering a broad range of essential tools for the creation of 3D content, including modeling, uv-mapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animation, particle and other simulation, scripting, rendering, compositing, post-production, and game creation
• High quality 3D architecture enabling fast and efficient creation work-flow
• User community support by forums for questions, answers, and critique at http://BlenderArtists.org and news services at http://BlenderNation.com
• Small executable size, easy distribution

Home Page: http://www.blender.org/
Project Page: http://www.blender.org/development/
Language: C, Python
Platform: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD 5.4 (i386), Sun Solaris 2.8 (sparc)
License: GNU GPL

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions.

Key features include:

• Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
• Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
• Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
• Supports custom brushes and patterns
• Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
• Layers and channels
• Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
• Editable text layers
• File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
• SVG path import/export

Home Page: http://www.gimp.org/
Project Page: http://developer.gimp.org/
Language: C
Platform: Windows, Linux, OSX
License: GPL

Imagemagick provides a rich feature set including:

• Format conversion: convert an image from one format to another (e.g. PNG to JPEG).
• Transform: resize, rotate, crop, flip or trim an image.
• Transparency: render portions of an image invisible.
• Draw: add shapes or text to an image.
• Decorate: add a border or frame to an image.
• Special effects: blur, sharpen, threshold, or tint an image.
• Animation: create a GIF animation sequence from a group of images.
• Text & comments: insert descriptive or artistic text in an image.
• Image identification: describe the format and properties of an image.
• Composite: overlap one image over another.
• Montage: juxtapose image thumbnails on an image canvas.
• Motion picture support: read and write the common image formats used in digital film work.
• Image calculator: apply a mathematical expression to an image or image channels.
• Discrete Fourier transform: implements the forward and inverse DFT.
• High dynamic-range images: accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from the brightest direct sunlight to the deepest darkest shadows.
• Encipher or decipher an image: convert ordinary images into unintelligible gibberish and back again.
• Virtual pixel support: convenient access to pixels outside the image region.
• Large image support: read, process, or write mega-, giga-, or tera-pixel image sizes.
• Threads of execution support: ImageMagick is thread safe and most internal algorithms are OpenMP-enabled to take advantage of speed-ups offered by the dual and quad-core processor technologies.
• Heterogeneous distributed processing: certain algorithms are OpenCL-enabled to take advantage of speed-ups offered by executing in concert across heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, and other processors.

Home Page: http://www.imagemagick.org/
Language: C with API's provided for C++ and Perl
Platform: Windows, Linux, OSX
License: Custom open source license that requires attribution. Free for commercial use. GPL compatible.

Home Page: http://pyode.sourceforge.net/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyode/
Language: C++
Platform: Windows, Linux, OSX
License: GNU Lesser General Public License or BSD-style license.

Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/houdini-ocean-toolkit/
Language: C++, VEX
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: GNU General Public License v2

In the nearest neighbor problem a set of data points in d-dimensional space is given. These points are preprocessed into a data structure, so that given any query point q, the nearest or generally k nearest points of P to q can be reported efficiently. The distance between two points can be defined in many ways. ANN assumes that distances are measured using any class of distance functions called Minkowski metrics. These include the well known Euclidean distance, Manhattan distance, and max distance.

Based on our own experience, ANN performs quite efficiently for point sets ranging in size from thousands to hundreds of thousands, and in dimensions as high as 20.
(For applications in significantly higher dimensions, the results are rather spotty, but you might try it anyway.)

The library implements a number of different data structures, based on kd-trees and box-decomposition trees, and employs a couple of different search strategies.

The library also comes with test programs for measuring the quality of performance of ANN on any particular data sets, as well as programs for visualizing the structure of the geometric data structures.

Project Page: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~mount/ANN/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: LGPL

The code is written entirely in C with an object-oriented approach based mostly on the design of GTK+. Careful attention is paid to performance related issues as the initial goal of GTS is to provide a simple and efficient library to scientists dealing with 3D computational surface meshes.

A brief summary of its main features:

• Simple object-oriented structure giving easy access to topological properties.
• 2D dynamic Delaunay and constrained Delaunay triangulations.
• Robust geometric predicates (orientation, in circle) using fast adaptive floating point arithmetic (adapted from the fine work of Jonathan R. Shewchuk).
• Robust set operations on surfaces (union, intersection, difference).
• Surface refinement and coarsening (multiresolution models).
• Dynamic view-independent continuous level-of-detail.
• Preliminary support for view-dependent level-of-detail.
• Bounding-boxes trees and Kd-trees for efficient point location and collision/intersection detection.
• Graph operations: traversal, graph partitioning.
• Metric operations (area, volume, curvature …).
• Triangle strips generation for fast rendering.

Home Page: http://gts.sourceforge.net/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gts/
Language: C
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: LGPL

• Policy based allocation of distributed resources (CPU time, software licenses, etc.)
• Batch queuing & scheduling
• Support diverse server hardware, OS and architectures
• Load balancing & remote job execution
• Detailed job accounting statistics
• Fine-grained user specifiable resources
• Suspend/resume/migrate jobs
• Tools for reporting Job/Host/Cluster status
• Job Arrays
• Integration & control of parallel jobs
• Python bindings

Home Page: http://gridengine.sunsource.net/
Language: C++, Python
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, Solaris
License: SISSL

Main features include:

• Extremely simple but powerful ImageInput and ImageOutput APIs for reading and writing 2D images that are format agnostic — that is, a “client app” doesn’t need to know the details about any particular image file formats. Specific formats are implemented by DLL/DSO plugins.
• Format plugins for TIFF, JPEG/JFIF, OpenEXR, PNG, HDR/RGBE, Targa, JPEG-2000, FITS, BMP, and ICO formats. More coming! The plugins are really good at understanding all the strange corners of the image formats, and are very careful about preserving image metadata (including Exif, GPS, and IPTC data).
• An ImageCache class that transparently manages a cache so that it can access truly vast amounts of image data (thousands of image files totaling hundreds of GB) very efficiently using only a tiny amount (tens of megabytes at most) of runtime memory. Additionally, a TextureSystem class provides filtered MIP-map texture lookups, atop the nice caching behavior of ImageCache.
• Several image tools based on these classes, including iinfo (print detailed info about images including metadata), iconvert (convert among formats, data types, or modify metadata), idiff (compare images with statistics), igrep (search images for matching metadata), iv (an image viewer). Because these tools are based on ImageInput/ImageOutput, they work with any image formats for which ImageIO plugins are available.

Home Page: http://www.openimageio.org
Project Page: http://www.openimageio.org
Language: C++ (Python bindings under development)
Platform: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows
License: New BSD

• Multi-Platform
• Playback both image sequences and movie files
• Support for industry standard file formats including Cineon, DPX, OpenEXR, and QuickTime
• Includes command line utilities for batch image processing

Home Page: http://djv.sourceforge.net/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/djv/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, Solaris
License: BSD

• Used by many game companies in AAA titles on Playstation 3, XBox 360, Nintendo Wii, PC and iPhone
• Modular extendible C++ design with hot-swap of most components
• Optimized back-ends for pthreads/Win32 Threads multi-threading and PS3 Cell SPU
• Preparation for OpenCL data parallel optimizations for upcoming Bullet 3.x
• Discrete and continuous collision detection (CCD)
• Swept collision queries
• Ray casting with custom collision filtering
• Generic convex support (using GJK), capsule, cylinder, cone, sphere, box and non-convex triangle meshes.

• Rigid body dynamics including constraint solvers, generic constraints, ragdolls, hinge, ball-socket
• Support for constraint limits and motors
• Soft body support including cloth, rope and deformable
• Bullet is integrated into Cinema 4D, Lightwave and Blender, and a Houdini and Maya Plugin is available
• Supports import and export into COLLADA 1.4 Physics format
• Support for dynamic deformation of non-convex triangle meshes, by refitting the acceleration structures

Home Page: http://bulletphysics.org/
Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/bullet/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: ZLib License, free for commercial use.

Home Page: http://www.cgal.org/
Project Page: http://www.cgal.org/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows
License: LGPL or QPL (if used for open source projects, or proprietary projects that are internal to the studio), or a commercial license (if distributed in a commercial product).

Home Page: http://www.ode.org/
Project Page: http://www.ode.org/
Language: C/C++ (the public APIs are all C)
Platform: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows
License: New BSD or LGPL (your choice)

Home Page: http://opensource.imageworks.com
Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/pystring/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, etc
License: New BSD License
Sponsor: Sony Imageworks

The value of predefined parameters can be displayed in selectable areas, such as the camera focal length and name, current aspect ratio; frame number, name of the show and shot, Maya scene file name, current user name, etc. Finally, arbitrary textural information can be displayed as well.

Home Page: http://opensource.imageworks.com/?p=mayareticle
Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/imageworks-maya-reticle/
Language: C++, MEL
Platform: Windows, Linux, OSX
License: New BSD License
Sponsor: Sony Imageworks