Open Shading Language
Open Shading Language (OSL) is a shading language developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks for use in its Arnold Renderer. It is also supported by Illumination Research's 3Delight renderer, Otoy's Octane Render, V-Ray 3, Redshift (from April 2021), and the Cycles render engine in Blender (starting with Blender 2.65). 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.
| Developer(s) | Academy Software Foundation |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 1.12.13.0
/ 1 July 2023 |
| Repository | |
| Type | Shading language |
| License | BSD license 3-clause |
| Website | github/OpenShadingLanguage |
In RenderMan, OSL is also an important module. It is modified there for better AVX2 and AVX-512 instruction set support with doubled performance.
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. 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.