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://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 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)

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

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

Features :

• Object instancing / delayed primitives
• Displacements
• Programmable shading (using RenderMan Shading Language)
• High quality texture/shadow/environment mapping
• High dynamic range input/output
• Scalable, multi-resolution raytracing using ray
  • Pixie now has a new raytracing engine that automatically tesselates surfaces on the fly to a desired accuracy determined using the ray differentials. This means rays tracing blurry reflections or computing global illumination are faster to trace and sharp reflections and shadows are more accurate. Pixie also contains a memory manager that keeps the memory that is used to keep these tesselations around under control. Similar to texture caching, Pixie will maintain a set of active surfaces and only those surfaces will consume raytracing memory.
• Motion blur
• Depth of field
• Level of detail (LOD)
• Reyes style rendering (very fast)
• Occlusion culling
• Network parallel rendering
• DSO shaders
• Global illumination
  • Pixie supports global illumination thru photon mapping and irradiance caching — The same machinery described in the latest RenderMan interface.
• Automatically raytraced smooth reflections / shadows
• Caching/baking computation with LOD (bake3d / texture3d)
  • Using this functionality, you can save any value you compute in a shader to a file that you can later re-use. This allows you to perform expensive shading computations at a lower resolution and re-use these computations in the beauty passes. This functionality will also enable exporting shading data from Pixie into your own applications.
• Scalable, multi-threaded rendering
  • Pixie rendering core has been first completely reorganized/optimized and then multi-threaded. We are very proud of this change. You will see significant speed improvements over the Pixie v1.
• Arbirtaty output values
  • Pixie can save arbitrary variables (built in ones such as N, P as well as arbitrary, user defined variables) just like rgb values into images. Using this machinery, you can generate multiple outputs from a single pass and combine them as a post process.
• 64 bit compatibility
• Inline archives
• Conditional execution
• Named resources

Home Page: http://www.renderpixie.com/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pixie/
Language: C, C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, all POSIX OSes
License: LGPL

Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/affogato/
Language: c++
Platform: Linux, Windows
License: LGPL
Sponsor: Rising Sun Pictures

Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/liquidmaya/
Language: C++, MEL
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: Mozilla Public License
Sponsor: Weta

The library was initially developed at Sony Pictures Imageworks as a replacement for the three different in-house file formats already used to store voxel data. It is the foundation for Imageworks’ in-house simulation framework and volume rendering software and is actively being used in production.

Home Page: http://opensource.imageworks.com/?p=field3d
Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/field3d/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License:

BSD