If the little ones dragged you to the movies to see films like The Bad Guys or How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, you should know that they have two things in common: both belong to DreamWorks Animation, and they were made with the MoonRay renderer. The news is that DreamWorks recently confirmed the opening of its code, inviting enthusiasts and professionals from around the world to use this technology.
Despite the huge number of options on the market, many studios bet on in-house development to get tools tailored to their needs. One of those studios is DreamWorks Animation, which dropped a real bomb during the 2022 edition of the SIGGRAPH conference: its production renderer MoonRay would leave its proprietary profile to become open source.
After thousands of requests and a few months of waiting, DreamWorks fulfilled its promise, and the MoonRay code is already available on GitHub for anyone who wants to play with it. We are talking about the software used in animated films such as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Bad Guys, and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
DreamWorks MoonRay is now open source
Distributed rendering, XPU mode, ray tracing processing via Intel Embree, and shader vectorization using Intel ISPC are some of the support features we find in MoonRay. One of the design priorities is that all cores of all machines stay busy doing some kind of useful work. Artists have the ability to visualize multiple lighting conditions and different material properties in all kinds of scenes and environments.
Now, if you're thinking about downloading a binary and installing it locally… the answer is no. The official site includes all the instructions for its compilation process, dependency list, and other relevant technical details. From the start, it's clear that MoonRay is not software for beginners, but the opening of its code will surely enable new options and combinations.
Official site: Click here
Source: Cartoon Brew
