LOS ANGELES - The Academy Software Foundation (www.aswf.io), the open-source foundation for advancing open-source software in motion pictures, visual effects and animation, has announced that MoonRay, the open source production path-tracing renderer developed by DreamWorks Animation, has joined the Foundation as a hosted project. MoonRay has rendered every DreamWorks Animation feature film since 2019, including How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World,
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,
The Bad Guys (1 &
2),
Kung Fu Panda 4 and
The Wild Robot.
MoonRay was designed for efficiency and scalability, with modern features for full artistic expression. It can deliver a broad range of looks, from photorealistic to strongly stylized, and enables users to take advantage of an extensive library of production-tested, physically-based materials. It is built on a highly-scalable architecture with no prior legacy code, allowing for quick, feature-film quality artistic iteration using familiar tools.
“Some of the most beautiful animated movies of our time have been rendered with MoonRay,” notes David Morin, executive director of the Academy Software Foundation. “We are grateful to DreamWorks Animation for contributing MoonRay to the open source community, and honored to provide the platform for its collaborative development moving forward.”
Additional high-performance features in MoonRay include an Apache 2.0 license, support for distributed rendering, a pixel matching XPU mode that offers improved performance by processing bundles of rays on the GPU as well as the CPU, and bundled path tracing. MoonRay also includes a USD Hydra Render Delegate for integration into content creation tools that support the OpenUSD standard. Moving forward, MoonRay will be maintained and developed under the Academy Software Foundation, with DreamWorks Animation continuing to provide ongoing support and dedicated engineering resources.