DreamWorks Animation releases MoonRay 2.34
DreamWorks Animation has updated MoonRay, its in-house production renderer, now available open-source.
Key changes in MoonRay 2.34 include a light path visualizer for debugging renders, and support for VFX Reference Platform 2024 and 2025.
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.
MoonRay 2.34: new light path visualizer to help debug renders
The main new feature in MoonRay 2.34 is the light path visualizer.
It shows the light path tree for the pixel selected in a rendered image: the paths taken through the 3D scene by the rays contributing to the appearance of that pixel.
Rays are color-coded by type, including diffuse rays, specular rays, rays created by sampling a light or material BSDF, and camera rays.
DreamWorks describes the visualizer as a tool to help users understand the path of rays through the scene, and to debug issues with the way lights and materials appear in renders.
The simulation method it uses isn’t guaranteed to match the full render, but is fast enough to update in real time when parameters are changed.
Compatible with the latest VFX Reference Platform spec
MoonRay 2.34 also makes the software compatible with the CY2024 and CY2025 specs for VFX Reference Platform, and introduces support for building it on macOS 26 (Tahoe).
There are also a number of smaller changes: you can find a full list in the release notes.
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 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 2.34 in the online release notes
(Includes download links for the source code)
Read more about MoonRay on the product website
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