Sony Pictures Imageworks, the visual effects and digital character animation unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions, has reported said that its Open Shading Language source code’s alpha version is now available for the development community.

 

According to the company, Open Shading Language is a small, but rich language for programmable shading in advanced renderers and other applications. OSL is similar to C, as well as other shading languages; however, it is specifically designed for advanced rendering algorithms with features such as radiance closures, BRDFs, and deferred ray tracing as first-class concepts.

 

The language was developed by Sony Imageworks to be used as an in-house renderer in the making of animated and feature films. The language specification released now for the developer community was developed with input by other visual effects and animation studios, who also wish to use it.

 

OSL is licensed under a 'production friendly' open source license. Imageworks is optimistic that OSL will be adopted broadly by those needing a modern shading language for production needs.

 

Rob Bredow, chief technology officer of Imageworks, said that the company is excited to share OSL with the world. The firm’s goal is to follow the model of the most successful open source software by making their development public. This provides the very best opportunities for collaboration and adoption. Even though it's in its early stages, there is a lot of sophisticated groundwork already laid in OSL. They are waiting for the feedbacks from the computer graphics community.

 

The OSL project includes a complete language specification, a compiler from OSL to an intermediate assembly-like bytecode, an interpreter that executes OSL shaders on collections of points in a SIMD manner, and extensive standard shader function library. The source code for OSL can be easily integrated into other renderers, compositing packages, image processing tools and other applications. Additionally, the source code can be easily customized to allow for renderer-specific extensions or alterations, or custom back-ends to translate to GPUs or other special hardware.