DreamWorks Animation to make its MoonRay rendering engine open source

DreamWorks will make its MoonRay rendering engine open source. Simple ray tracing for your animations. Early access available upon request.

DreamWorks has made a number of its technologies open source in recent years, and now its animation division is gearing up to make more of its tools free. Indeed, DreamWorks Animation is announcing that it will offer its open-source MoonRay ray-traced rendering engine before the end of the year. As The Hollywood Reporter points out, DreamWorks is also integrating Arras’ cloud rendering infrastructure.

DreamWorks to make its MoonRay rendering engine open source

“We are thrilled to share at least 10 years of MoonRay source code innovation and development experience with the industry, whether vectorized, multithreaded, parallel or distributed,” said Andrew Pierce, vice president of technology at DreamWorks. in a press release. “The appetite for rendering at scale continues to grow every year, and MoonRay has been designed to meet that need. We expect this source code to evolve significantly with community input and that DreamWorks will continue to demonstrate its commitment to the open source world.”

Simple ray tracing for your animations

DreamWorks has used MoonRay in films such as Dragons 3: The Hidden World, Family 2: New Era, Bad Boys, and the long-awaited Puss in Boots 2: The Last Quest. It’s always good for users to see proprietary software open to everyone in this way. It is not known whether this will allow animation lovers to create visual effects of the same quality that DreamWorks offers year after year, but they will at least have a very useful additional tool for this.

Early access available upon request

If you are interested, you can register to request early access to MoonRay or receive project updates.