DreamWorks Animation releases MoonRay 2.40
DreamWorks Animation has updated MoonRay, its in-house production renderer, now available open-source.
MoonRay 2.40 extends the new light path visualizer for debugging renders, and introduces a prototype for a new user interface.
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 2.40: updates to the light path visualizer and new GUI prototype
MoonRay 2.40 extends the new light path visualizer introduced in the previous release to help debug renders.
The main change is to introduce support for Arras, but there is also a new opacity control for hidden lines.
The release also comes with a prototype of a new user interface, moonray_gui_v2.
The GitHub repository doesn’t feature any images of it, but it brings “usability improvements including pixel inspection, snapshots, status bar, and improved path visualizer drawing”.
The new UI is based on Dear ImGui rather than Qt, the interface framework currently specified in the VFX Reference Platform standard.
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 2.40 in the online release notes
(Includes download links for the source code)
Read more about MoonRay on the product website
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