ASWF and DreamWorks Animation release MoonRay 2026.29
The Academy Software Foundation has updated MoonRay, DreamWorks Animation’s in-house production renderer, now available open-source.
MoonRay 2026.29 introduces initial support for rendering MaterialX shader graphs.
A high-performance Monte Carlo ray tracer, used on all recent DreamWorks movies
Open-sourced in 2023, 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 The Wild Robot and The Bad Guys 2.
The first major update since becoming an official ASWF project
MoonRay 2026.29 is the first major update to MoonRay since it became an Academy Software Foundation-hosted project earlier this year.
MoonRay became a Sandbox project of the movie industry open standards body, joining technologies like OpenPGL, the path guiding library used in Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Hyperion renderer.
Future development of MoonRay is now being maintained by the ASWF, although DreamWorks Animation continues to provide “support and dedicated engineering resources”.
The update also moves MoonRay to a new version numbering system.
Version numbers now indicate the year and week of the year in which an update was released, whereas previous releases followed the version numbers used in-house at DreamWorks.
MoonRay 2026.29: early support for rendering MaterialX graphs inside MoonRay
The MoonRay 2026.29 release begins the process of implementing support for open material standard – and fellow ASWF hosted project – MaterialX inside the renderer.
The release notes describe it as a “work in progress”, with the initial update mainly making under-the-hood changes needed to support the shader input and output types required.
There is also now a separate repository of MoonRay MaterialX shaders.
It currently only includes map shaders, since support for other MaterialX shader types, like BSDF, EDF, VDF and the MaterialX Surface Shader, is still in progress.
Other changes include support for motion blur in MoonRay’s Rdl geometry procedurals and for toon ramp controls in shadow zones, and updates to the developer tools.
License and system requirements
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 11 and macOS 14+. 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 2026.29 in the online release notes
(Includes download links for the source code)
Read more about MoonRay on the product website
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