DreamWorks' Renderer MoonRay Joins Academy Software Foundation
MoonRay has been used on every DreamWorks Animation feature film since 2019, including most recently The Wild Robot and The Bad Guys 2.
DreamWorks Animation
The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) was established in 2018 to support and advance open-source technologies for image creation, visual effects, animation, and audio. You might know it for projects like OpenPBR, MaterialX, OpenVDB, and Open Shading Language, among many others.
Today, the foundation announced that MoonRay, the open-source production path-tracing renderer developed by DreamWorks Animation, has officially joined ASWF as a hosted project. Since 2019, MoonRay has been used to render every DreamWorks Animation feature film, including How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Bad Guys, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Kung Fu Panda 4, The Wild Robot, and The Bad Guys 2.
DreamWorks Animation
DreamWorks Animation
"MoonRay has been integral to helping us achieve the full scope of our creative ambitions at DreamWorks. By facilitating stylization directly out of the renderer, it provides filmmakers with the freedom to achieve diverse art styles – from graphic novel and ornate fantasy to a loose painterly aesthetic or digital futurism – without being limited to existing looks.
We are excited to get MoonRay into the hands of the rest of the industry and hope our work inspires future filmmakers," said Jeff Budsberg, Visual Effects Supervisor on The Wild Robot at DreamWorks Animation.
From now on, MoonRay will be maintained and further developed under the Academy Software Foundation, with DreamWorks Animation continuing to provide active support and resources. Developers interested in contributing to or learning more about MoonRay can visit openmoonray.org and join the project's Slack community through the ASWF Slack workspace.
Additionally, ASWF has announced that DreamWorks Animation CTO Bill Ballew will deliver a keynote at the Open Source Days event in Los Angeles on July 19-20. His talk, titled How to Train Your Renderer: MoonRay's Journey from DreamWorks' Dragons to the ASWF, will explore how MoonRay evolved from an internal DreamWorks tool into a key open-source renderer. He will also discuss the technical challenges of moving it outside the studio, the lessons learned in building a community, and why ASWF plays an important role in supporting its future.
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