DreamWorks Animation releases MoonRay 1.7
DreamWorks Animation has updated MoonRay, its in-house production renderer, now available open-source.
MoonRay 1.7 adds a new portal light type, and support for the Cryptomatte ID matte generation system within hdMoonRay, the MoonRay Hydra render delegate.
The previous update, MoonRay 1.6, added a Fisheye camera and introduced native support for Apple Silicon processors.
A high-performance Monte Carlo ray tracer, used on all recent DreamWorks movies
Open-sourced last year, along with Arras, DreamWorks’ in-house cloud rendering framework, MoonRay is a high-performance Monte Carlo ray tracer.
It was designed with the aim of keeping “all the cores of all the machines busy all the time”, and has an hybrid GPU/CPU mode with that matches the output of CPU rendering.
MoonRay is capable of both stylized and photorealistic output, and has the key features you would expect of a VFX renderer, including AOVs/LPEs and deep output.
It comes with a Hydra delegate, hdMoonRay, making it possible to integrate MoonRay as a viewport renderer in DCC apps that support Hydra delegates, like Houdini and Katana.
The renderer is still in active development at DreamWorks Animation, and was used on the studio’s recent movies, including Kung-Fu Panda 4 and The Wild Robot.
MoonRay 1.7: portal lights and Cryptomatte support in hdMoonRay
New features in MoonRay 1.7 include a new PortalLight light type.
The online documentation only lists its control attributes, but in other renderers, portal lights are rectangular area lights used to improve Global Illumination in indoor scenes.
In addition, hdMoonRay now supports the Cryptomatte ID matte-generation system.
XPU mode, MoonRay’s hybrid CPU/GPU render mode, now accelerates both regular rays and occlusion rays for NVIDIA GPUs
MoonRay 1.6: initial support for Apple Silicon Macs
Other new features since we last wrote about MoonRay include initial support for macOS as well as Linux.
MoonRay 1.6, released in July, made it possible to build and run the software on current M-Series Macs with Apple Silicon processors, running macOS 14+.
Mac builds support XPU mode, denoising via Open Image Denoise, and hdMoonRay.
The update also added a new fisheye camera, and usd_mipmap_images, a command-line tool to prepare USD scenes with non-tiled, non-mipmapped textures for rendering.
Licensing, system requirements and release dates
MoonRay is available under an open-source Apache 2.0 licence.
The software can be compiled from source on Linux and macOS: it is tested on Rocky Linux 9 and macOS 14.3. You can find build information in the online documentation.
XPU mode requires a NVIDIA GPU that supports CUDA and OptiX on Linux, and an Apple Silicon processor on macOS.
Read a full list of new features in MoonRay 1.7 in the online release notes
(Includes download links for the source code)
Read more about MoonRay on the product website
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