Open Shading Language

Open Shading Language (OSL) is a small but rich language for programmable shading in advanced renderers and other applications, ideal for describing materials, lights, displacement, and pattern generation. OSL was originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks for use in its in- house renderer used for feature film animation and visual effects, released as open source so it could be used by other visual effects and animation studios and rendering software vendors. Now it's the de facto standard shading language for VFX and animated features, used across the industry in many commercial and studio- proprietary renderers. Because of this, the work on OSL received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 2017. OSL is robust and production-proven, and has been used in films as diverse as "The Amazing Spider-Man," "Hotel Transylvania," "Edge of Tomorrow", "Ant Man", "Finding Dory," and many more. OSL support is in most leading renderers used for high-end VFX and animation work. For a full list of films and products, see the filmography. OSL has syntax similar to C, as well as other shading languages. However, it is specifically designed for advanced rendering algorithms and has features such as radiance closures, BSDFs, and deferred ray tracing as first-class concepts. OSL has several unique characteristics not found in other shading languages (certainly not all together). Here are some things you will find are different in OSL compared to other languages: OSL's surface and volume shaders compute an explicit symbolic description, called a "closure", of the way a surface or volume scatters light, in units of radiance. These radiance closures may be evaluated in particular directions, sampled to find important directions, or saved for later evaluation and re-evaluation. This new approach is ideal for a physically-based renderer that supports ray tracing and global illumination. In contrast, other shading languages usually compute just a surface color as visible from a particular direction. These old shaders are "black boxes" that a renderer can do little with but execute to find this one piece of information (for example, there is no effective way to discover from them which directions are important to sample). Furthermore, the physical units of lights and surfaces are often underspecified, making it very difficult to ensure that shaders are behaving in a physically correct manner. Surface and volume shaders do not loop over lights or shoot rays. There are no "light loops" or explicitly traced illumination rays in OSL surface shaders. Instead, surface shaders compute a radiance closure describing how the surface scatters light, and a part of the renderer called an "integrator" evaluates the closures for a particular set of light sources and determines in which directions rays should be traced. Effects that would ordinarily require explicit ray tracing, such as reflection and refraction, are simply part of the radiance closure and look like any other BSDF. Advantages of this approach include that integration and sampling may be batched or re-ordered to increase ray coherence; a "ray budget" can be allocated to optimally sample the BSDF; the closures may be used by for bidirectional ray tracing or Metropolis light transport; and the closures may be rapidly re-evaluated with new lighting without having to re-run the shaders. OSL does not have a separate kind of shader for light sources. Lights are simply surfaces that are emissive, and all lights are area lights. You don't need to explicitly set transparency/opacity variables in the shader. Transparency is just another way for light to interact with a surface, and is included in the main radiance closure computed by a surface shader. Sometimes it is desirable to output images containing individual lighting components such as specular, diffuse, reflection, individual lights, etc. In other languages, this is usually accomplished by adding a plethora of "output variables"