DreamWorks Animation to Release MoonRay as Open Source

https://www.awn.com/news/dreamworks-animation-release-moonray-open-source

https://openmoonray.org/

MoonRay is DreamWorks’ open-source, award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer, which has been used on feature films such as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Trolls World Tour, The Bad Guys, the upcoming Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, as well as future titles. MoonRay was developed at DreamWorks and is in continuous active development and includes an extensive library of production-tested, physically based materials, a USD Hydra render delegate, multi-machine and cloud rendering via the Arras distributed computation framework.

Note: it does not support osl and usd handling is limited. Cycles may still be a fair alternative.

EDIT

MoonRay review: DreamWorks Animations’ superb rendering software is free for all

A high-performance Monte Carlo ray tracer that’s capable of both DreamWorks’ trademark stylised look and photorealism.

It has all the required features for that setup, including Arbitrary Output Variables (AOVs), which allow data from a shader or renderer to be output during rendering to aid compositing. Additionally, Deep Output and Cryptomatte are supported.

With support for OptiX 7.6 and GPU render denoising with Open Image Denoise 2, MoonRay is able to deliver particularly impressive results, especially when working interactively.

MoonRay has moved to a hybrid CPU and GPU rendering mode for its default state. It’s called XPU, and in many ways combines the best of both types of rendering workflow.

VFX Reference Platform 2023 is probably the biggest addition because it enables the use of MoonRay directly in Nuke 15.

MoonRay has already achieved great success with an array of feature films. Now the renderer is open source, the CG world can expect to see a whole new swathe of MoonRay-powered animations.