DreamWorks Animation delivers on its promise, announcing that its production renderer, MoonRay, is now available in Officially open source under the Apache-2.0 license (formerlyScheduled for end of 2022).“We’re excited to demonstrate DreamWorks’ commitment to open source with MoonRay’s contribution. Our engagement with the community makes us stronger, and we look forward to this continued collaboration.”

Interested users canVisit OpenMoonRay.org to use.

MoonRay is an MCRT renderer developed by DreamWorks Animation. It can be used to make story animations. It has been used in How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (How to Train Your Dragon 3), Trolls World Tour (Trolls 2) , The Bad Guys (Bad Guys Alliance), the upcoming Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (Puss in Boots 2) and other films.

According to the introduction, the design of the MoonRay renderer follows the core multiprocessing principles, with the design focus on efficiency and scalability. The developer’s mantra is “…to keep all the vector lanes of all the cores of all machines busy with meaningful work all the time” and modernize the functionality for full artistic expression. It can provide a wide range of images, from realistic to strongly stylized.

MoonRay is built on a highly scalable architecture that allows for rapid, feature film-quality artistic iterations using familiar tools. Additional high-performance features include support for distributed rendering, pixel-matching XPU modes, photorealistic ray tracing acceleration through Intel Embree, including open image denoising, and other aspects of oneAPI. MoonRay includes a USD Hydra render delegate for integration into content authoring tools that support the standard.

DreamWorks released the open source statement in August last year, and since then The MoonRay team works with a small group of testers,Progressed successivelyImprovements to the code base, improved documentation, and integration with pre-release partners have allowed MoonRay to build and run outside of the DreamWorks pipeline environment.finishedConverted the build system to an industry standard CMake environment, set up a new documentation site, reorganized the library, reduced dependencies, and brought referenced open source packages to the current release.

“The open-source release of MoonRay brings a state-of-the-art production renderer to artists, content creators, and reality simulation practitioners, empowering community innovation,” said Anton Kaplanyan, vice president of graphics research at Intel. As part of this launch, and Partnering with DreamWorks, MoonRay users will have access to Intel technology, Intel Embree, and oneAPI tools as building blocks for an open and high-performance rendering ecosystem.”