If the little ones in the house dragged you to the cinema to see movies like The Bad Guys either How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden Worldyou should know that they have two things in common: Both belong to DreamWorks Animationand they were made with the renderer MoonRay. The news is that DreamWorks recently confirmed opening your codeinviting enthusiasts and professionals from all over the world to use this technology.
Despite the enormous number of options that exist on the market, many studies are committed to the development “en casa” for custom tools. One of those studies is DreamWorks Animationwhich dropped a real bombshell during the 2022 edition of the SIGGRAPH conference: Your Production Renderer MoonRay would abandon its proprietary profile to become open source.
After thousands of requests and a few months of waiting, DreamWorks kept its promiseand the MoonRay code is now available on GitHub for anyone who wants to play with it. We are talking about the software used in animated movies like How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Bad Guysand Puss in Boots: The Last Wishwhich was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
DreamWorks MoonRay is now open source
Distributed Rendering, XPU Mode, Processing ray tracing via Intel Embree and shader vectorization using Intel ISPC are some of the support features found in MoonRay. One of the priorities in its design is that all the cores on all the computers are kept busy doing some kind of useful work. Artists have the ability to visualize multiple lighting conditions, and different material properties in all kinds of settings and environments.
Now, if you’re thinking of downloading a binary and installing it locally… the answer is no. The official site includes all the instructions for your build process, list of dependencies, and other relevant technical details. From the beginning it is clear that MoonRay is not a software for beginnersbut opening your code will surely enable new options and combinations.
Official site: Click here
Fountain: Cartoon Brew
