DreamWorks Plans to Open-Source Its MoonRay Renderer

DreamWorks Animation decided to make its in-house production renderer MoonRay available open-source. The ray tracing renderer was previously used on different animation projects including The Bad Guys and the upcoming Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. The project will be made open-source along with Arras, its distributed rendering framework.

The renderer was originally built to replace Moonlight, the studio’s old rasterization renderer. The original goal was to keep all the vector lanes of all the cores of all the machines busy all the time. The renderer has a hybrid GPU/CPU rendering mode capable of 100% output matching with CPU rendering.

MoonRay can generate both stylized and photorealistic results providing several core features for different needs. The open-source renderer will have a Hydra render delegate, meaning it can be integrated as a viewport renderer in DCC tools that support Hydra delegates, including Houdini and Katana.

MoonRay is set to be released under an open-source Apache 2.0 license later this year. In the meantime, you can check out the official page here. Don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.