Aqsis

Aqsis is a free rendering suite compliant with the RenderMan standard. It is available under the BSD, previously under GPL. Its main author and project manager is Paul Gregory.

Aqsis

Aqsis render of the Utah teapot with a displacement shader
Developer(s)	Paul Gregory
Stable release	1.8.2 / August 24, 2012
Repository	git.code.sf.net/p/aqsis/code
Operating system	Windows, Linux, Mac OS X
License	BSD
Website	www.aqsis.org

Constructive solid geometry example rendered with Aqsis

A procedural image rendered with Aqsis

The Aqsis project consists of a renderer, shader compiler and a few other supporting components. Like the original PRMan from Pixar, it is an implementation of the Reyes rendering algorithm, which is famous for its high speed and efficiency in handling even very large scenes, and has good support for displacement shaders. Like many other open source projects, Aqsis is hosted on SourceForge and is in continuous and active development.

Because of its Reyes heritage, Aqsis lacks some advanced global illumination features like ray tracing, although active efforts are underway to support some such features. Its current stable version is 1.8.2.

The MakeHuman project uses Aqsis to produce realistic renderings of the human body.[1]