Open Shading Language

Not to be confused with OpenGL Shading Language.
Open Shading Language (OSL)
Developer(s)Academy Software Foundation
Stable release
1.12.13.0 / 1 July 2023; 16 months ago (2023-07-01)[1]
Repository
TypeShading language
LicenseBSD license 3-clause
Websitegithub/OpenShadingLanguage

Open Shading Language (OSL) is a shading language developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks, a Canadian visual effects and computer animation studio headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia and Montreal, Quebec, with an additional office on the Sony Pictures Studios lot in Culver City, California, a unit of Sony Pictures Entertainment's Motion Picture Group, which through an intermediate holding company called Sony Film Holding Inc., it is operated as a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment Inc., which is itself a subsidiary of the Japanese multinational technology and media conglomerate Sony Group Corporation, for use in its Arnold Renderer. It is also supported by Illumination Research's 3Delight renderer,[2] Otoy's Octane Render,[3] V-Ray 3,[4] Redshift (from April 2021),[5] and the Cycles render engine in Blender (starting with Blender 2.65).[6] OSL's surface and volume shaders define how surfaces or volumes scatter light in a way that allows for importance sampling; thus, it is well suited for physically based renderers that support ray tracing and global illumination.

In RenderMan, OSL is also an important module. It is modified there for better AVX2 and AVX-512 instruction set support with doubled performance.[7][8]

Release 1.12 supports C++14 as default, but also newer C++17 and C++20. OpenImageIO support will be dropped for 2.0 with support of 2.2. Minimum OpenEXR Version changes up to 2.3. SIMD Batch shader Mode and OptiX support are in development and experimental. CUDA 11 and OptiX 7.1 are here supported levels.[9] 1.12.6 is supported in Blender 3.4. 1.12.6.2 is the first new release of the 1.12 series with a stable API. 1.12.13 is the current version.

  1. ^ "OpenShadingLanguage Releases". GitHub.
  2. ^ "OSLin 3Delight". www.3delight.com. Retrieved 2020-01-26.
  3. ^ "Octane Render OSL Support". home.otoy.com. Retrieved 2019-12-27.
  4. ^ "V-Ray OSL Support". docs.chaosgroup.com. Retrieved 2016-09-13.
  5. ^ "Latest Redshift Release Features Support for OpenColorIO 2.0.1". Retrieved 2022-04-27.
  6. ^ "Blender 2.65: Cycles". Retrieved 2020-02-09.
  7. ^ "RenderMan*: The Role of Open Shading Language (OSL) with Intel® Advan…". 12 August 2019.
  8. ^ "Technical Articles and How-Tos".
  9. ^ "Open Shading Language". GitHub. 7 April 2022.