Open Shading Language should not be confused with OpenGL Shading Language.
| Open Shading Language (OSL) | |
| Logo Alt: | Open Shading Language logo |
| Developer: | Academy Software Foundation |
| Latest Release Version: | 1.12.13.0 |
| Latest Release Date: | [1] |
| Genre: | Shading language |
| License: | BSD license 3-clause |
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.
Larry Gritz explain origin of Open Shading Language:
Many movies made in 2012 or later have used OSL,[10] including: