DreamWorks Animation's MoonRay Renderer Will be Released as Open-Sourced Software This Year

DreamWorks Animation announced it will make its proprietary MoonRay ray-tracing production renderer available as open source software later this year.

DreamWorks had used MoonRay in the animated movies "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World," "Croods: A New Age," and "The Bad Guys," as well as the forthcoming release "Puss In Boots: The Last Wish."

DreamWorks 'Thrilled' to Share MoonRay as Open Source

Andrew Pearce, DreamWorks vice-president for global technoiogy, said the film studio was "thrilled to share with the industry over 10 years of innovation and development on MoonRay's vectorized, threaded, parallel and distributed code base." MoonRay is apt for open source consumption, because "the appetite for rendering at scale grows each year," he added, emphasizing that "MoonRay was set to meet this need." Pearce said the company expects the code base to grow stronger with community participation as he reiterated DreamWorks' "commitment to open source."

With soon-to-be open sourced renderer, animation hobbyists can create animation that reaches the visual quality of major animation films from a top studio, such as DreamWorks produces still remains to be seen, but at least they will have another helpful tool to use. If you're interested, you can ask to be considered for early access to MoonRay or sign up for updates.

To those interested in accessing the renderer, you make inquiries for early access at the Open MoonRay site.

All About Moonray

MoonRay was developed by DreamWorks' engineers, and includes an comprehensive library of production -tested, physically based materials, a USD Hydra render delegate, multi-machine and cloud rendering via Arras. DreamWorks will also offer Arras in the open source code base.

DreamWorks' in-house Monte Carlo Ray Tracer, MoonRay, was developed to focus on efficiency and scalability, and "keep all the vector lanes of all the cores of all the machines busy all the time with meaningful work", and offer modern features for full artistic expression, DreamWorks said.

MoonRay can deliver a wide range of images from photorealistic to strongly stylized. MoonRay is created on highly scalable architecture without any prior legacy code, permitting quick, feature-film quality artistic iteration utilizing familiar animation tools.

Such high- performance features include distributed rendering support, pixel-matching XPU mode, which provides enhanced performance by processing bundles of rays on the CPU and the GPU, ray processing through Intel Embree, shader vectorization using Intel ISPC compilation, and bundled path tracing. MoonRay includes a USD Hydra render delegate for integration into content creation tools that support the standard.

MoonRay's features like hair and fur rendering were developed in collaboration with Intel. The resulting enhancements are ipart of Intel Embree's ray tracing kernel library and show how using open software benefits the entire ecosystem. By adopting Intel ISPC, MoonRay offers vector instruction parallelism for dramatic performance improvements. Intel seeks new opportunities for applying oneAPI cross-architecture, cross-vendor support to this open source project.

MoonRay utilizes DreamWorks' distributed computation framework, Arras, also to be included in the open source code base, to provide innovative multi-machine and multi-context support.

Multi-machine rendering quickens the interactive display for the animator, decouples rendering from the interactive tool which strengthens interactive robustness. While using MoonRay and Arr in a multi-context mode, the animator can visualize multiple lighting conditions, varying material properties, multiple times in a shot or sequence, or even multiple locations in an environment simultaneously.