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, Otoy's Octane Render, V-Ray 3, Redshift, and the Cycles render engine in Blender. 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.