[Bf-cycles] Status Open Shading Language

[Thomas Dinges]

Hi everyone,
here some information about the current status of the Open Shading 
Language (OSL) backend in Cycles.

I did some fixes in the OSL backend yesterday to bring it up to speed in 
terms of our procedural textures and I found it quite interesting.

1) What is OSL?
OSL is a shading language which affected Cycles quite a lot (see things 
like Closures, Ray Visibility...) , it's one of the 2 shader backends 
available.
The other shader backend we are using atm is SVM (Shader Virtual 
Machine) and this is running on CPU and GPU.
OSL on the other hand is only running on the CPU, porting that to the 
GPU would be a major task and this is nothing that will happen in the 
near future.

OSL website: http://opensource.imageworks.com/?p=osl
Code Repository: https://github.com/imageworks/OpenShadingLanguage/

2) Status of OSL in Cycles
Each shader and each node has to be implemented in both shader backends, 
SVM and OSL. The nodes which have been added over the last couple of 
months were only done for SVM, not for OSL. So a lot of Nodes need to be 
written in OSL still to have this working and on par with SVM. To name a 
few: Color Ramp, Light Fallof, Object Info Node... Also existing code 
needs to be double checked.

3) Benefits of OSL
OSL code is highly optimized and large shader networks probably aare 
executed a bit faster on the CPU. Also it will be interesting when we 
will be able to write our own custom OSL shader (with some kind of OSL 
script node, where we can put in custom shader code).

OSL was and still is one of the major pros in Cycles, I was already 
impressed when hearing about it the first time. OSL is already used in 
the industry, mainly by Sony Pictures Imageworks, who use OSL in 
combination with the Arnold Renderer for film productions. It's 
definitely a direction we should proceed, and having a OSL renderer 
available in Open Source might also attract more user and devs.

4) Proposal
I realize this is not an immediate and urgent task but I want to propose 
the following integration process for OSL in Cycles:

a) Build a stable library of OSL (OSL 1.1 at this time) for Linux (then 
Windows, Mac) which works with our other libraries.
b) Fix possible issues and get Cycles to compile with the OSL libs.
c) Port over remaining nodes/shaders to OSL and check existing OSL code.
d) Write support for custom OSL shaders, by adding a OSL node or 
something similar.

It would be good to at least have "a" and "b" done, and keep it working 
on "b" level. Any other work then can be done step by step and when 
resources are available.

I would like to hear your opinion (especially yours Brecht) on that, 
could that work?
I guess I can do some more work and fixes, but until now I was not able 
to build the OSL libraries myself, so it's a bit guessing if the code 
works or not.

Best regards,
Thomas


-- 
Thomas Dinges
Blender Developer, Artist and Musician

www.dingto.org