SIGGRAPH 2024 updates include new plugins for application integration, developer tooling enhancements, and a comprehensive conformance testing framework

ANARI™ is the industry’s open standard, cross-platform 3D rendering engine API developed by the Khronos Group to provide portable access to sophisticated 3D functionality including ray tracing and global illumination. ANARI is already widely used by scientific visualization applications and is implemented over multiple rendering engines, including AMD’s RadeonProRender, Intel’s OSPRay, and NVIDIA’s VisRTX, among others. ANARI is developed with full public access to the specification and has recently incorporated significant community feedback, including improvements to the object interface, better error handling through guaranteed API stream robustness, revamped runtime feature queries, directly mapped array parameters, improved volume shading, and compatibility with the Khronos glTF™ Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) materials.

ANARI SDK Updates

Khronos is pleased to announce significant upgrades to the open source ANARI Software Development Kit (SDK), marking an exciting period of development and innovation since SIGGRAPH 2023. Recent updates include new components to integrate ANARI with a widening diversity of 3D applications, such as:

• OpenUSD Hydra Plugin “hdAnari”: enables the use of ANARI-based renderers within Hydra-enabled applications. OpenUSD has quickly become an industry standard for defining large 3D worlds collaboratively, where Hydra is its subsystem for connecting OpenUSD’s scene graph to a renderer. hdAnari broadens the breadth of applications that can use ANARI, for more versatile and integrated workflows. While still a prototype, the plugin is already usable in OpenUSD applications such as USDView.
• Blender Add-On: ANARI now offers an experimental add-on for Blender, enabling users to leverage ANARI implementations for both interactive viewport rendering and final-frame rendering. This add-on is implemented entirely with ANARI's Python bindings, demonstrating the ANARI SDK's flexibility and extensibility.

SDK Enhancements for Developers

The latest ANARI upgrades also bring numerous enhancements to existing SDK components, for a smoother and more productive developer experience:

• Application Debug Layer: Significant improvements have been made to enhance the debugging process for developers using the ANARI API, such as making it easier to use by adding a way to enable it without modifying any application code.
• “Helium” Back End Helper Library: The “Helium” library that can reduce the effort needed to successfully implement the ANARI API has received new features and bug fixes, further streamlining development and expanding the capabilities of ANARI implementations that rely on it.
• “Helide” Sample Implementation: The “Helide” ANARI sample implementation, which combines Helium and Embree ray tracing kernel library, has been updated with new features and various bug fixes. It now offers a more comprehensive and reliable reference for developers working with ANARI.

Looking Forward

The ANARI SDK streamlines the exploration and use of the ANARI API. These updates reflect Khronos's commitment to keep advancing the ANARI standard, providing developers with the tools they need to create high-quality, cross-platform applications. As the open source ANARI SDK evolves, we invite developers to explore these new features and contribute to the growing ANARI ecosystem.

ANARI 1.0 Adopter Program

Khronos is also excited to announce the release of the ANARI 1.0 Adopter Program, enabling implementations to become officially conformant with the latest ANARI specification. This milestone supports the reliable and widespread adoption of ANARI across diverse platforms.

As part of this program, the ANARI Working Group has unveiled an updated open source Conformance Test Suite (CTS), now available as part of the ANARI SDK. This initiative encourages broad industry participation in implementation testing, ensuring that ANARI remains a robust and reliable standard for application developers.

The Importance of Conformance Testing

Conformance testing is crucial for any cross-platform standard. It ensures that application developers can rely on consistent implementation and access the full range of features and improvements the specification offers. The ANARI 1.0 Adopter Program emphasizes this by providing a rigorous testing framework.

Join the ANARI Adopter Program

Khronos invites all companies implementing ANARI to join the ANARI Adopter Program, whether or not they are Khronos members. Adopters can submit their conformance test results for review and approval by the ANARI Working Group. Successful implementations that meet the conformance criteria can use the ANARI trademark and benefit from the royalty-free patent licensing protection offered under the Khronos Intellectual Property Framework. For more information on Khronos Adopters Programs, click here.

Feedback Welcome!

We would love to hear your feedback on how ANARI and the ANARI SDK are working for you! If you find any issues or identify features and samples that you would like to see added, we encourage you to open an issue or submit a pull request at the ANARI SDK GitHub repo—your contributions help us evolve the SDK to best meet the needs of the ANARI developer community. We also welcome feedback on the ANARI Adopter Program and CTS. Please connect with us on the ANARI-Registry GitHub project. 

ANARI at SIGGRAPH 2024 

ANARI Working Group Chair Jeff Amstutz will present on ANARI at the Khronos BOF Day at SIGGRAPH 2024 in Denver, CO. He will share ANARI updates and best practices in the BOF, titled: “Exploring ANARI: Making the Future of 3D Rendering Available to Everyone,” on July 31, 2024 from 10-11AM. Learn more on the SIGGRAPH program website.

About ANARI

ANARI is an open, cross-platform, 3D rendering engine standard that provides a high-level, cross-vendor API to significantly simplify the development of visualization applications that leverage the power of accelerated 3D rendering. The ANARI 1.0 API specification and SDK were released in August 2023. ANARI enables developers to build an in-memory scene representation that can be rendered without the need to program to low-level graphics APIs or libraries. ANARI provides rendering engines the semantics to expose innovation through extensions, access asynchronous scene updates, and zero-copy data arrays for low frame latency, and ultimately create beautifully rendered imagery without proprietary APIs, all while enabling the interactivity necessary for a wide range of applications.

Khronos welcomes feedback from the graphics development community at the ANARI GitHub.

Khronos® is a registered trademark, and ANARI™ and glTF™ are trademarks owned by The Khronos Group Inc. All other product names, trademarks, and company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.