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.
RenderMan has limited OSL support that is used only for patterns; i.e. without any material closure (shading) functionality. 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.
Origin Larry Gritz explains the origin of Open Shading Language:
Movies
Many movies made in 2012 or later have used OSL, including:
Men in Black 3 (2012) The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) Hotel Transylvania (2012) Edge of Tomorrow (2014) Ant-Man (2015) Finding Dory (2016)
2017
The Lego Batman Movie The Great Wall A Cure for Wellness Logan Power Rangers Life Smurfs: The Lost Village The Fate of the Furious Alien Covenant Guardians of the Galaxy 2 The Mummy Wonder Woman Cars 3 Baby Driver Spider-Man: Homecoming Dunkirk The Emoji Movie Detroit Kingsman: The Golden Circle The Lego Ninjago Movie Blade Runner 2049 Geostorm Coco Justice League Thor: Ragnarok
2018
Peter Rabbit Black Panther Annihilation Red Sparrow Pacific Rim Uprising Avengers Infinity War Deadpool 2 Incredibles 2 Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation Ant Man and the Wasp Skyscraper Mission Impossible: Fallout The Meg Kin Smallfoot Alpha Venom First Man Bad Times at the El Royale Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald Bohemian Rhapsody Holmes and Watson Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
2019
The Kid Who Would Be King Alita: Battle Angel Lego Movie 2 "Lucky 13" (an episode of Love, Death & Robots) Captain Marvel Triple Frontier Avengers: Endgame Pokémon Detective Pikachu Godzilla: King of Monsters Rim of the World John Wick 3 Parabellum Men in Black International Toy Story 4 Spider-Man: Far From Home Hobbs & Shaw Angry Birds 2 The Art of Racing in the Rain Secret Life of Pets The Mandalorian (S1) The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance The King Jumanji: The Next Level Richard Jewell Game of Thrones (S8) Lost in Space (S1) Togo
2020
Underwater Birds of Prey Onward Bloodshot Greyhound The Old Guard Mulan Tenet The New Mutants Artemis Fowl The Eight Hundred Over the Moon Wonder Woman 1984 Soul The Mandalorian (S2)
2021
Chaos Walking Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Secret Magic Control Agency Zack Snyder's Justice League The Mitchells vs the Machines Jupiter's Legacy Luca F9
See also Shading language 3Delight Arnold Render Engine Blender Octane Render RenderMan
References
External links