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DreamWorks Animation announced plans to release their proprietary production renderer later this year, as open source software.
This renderer, MoonRay, has been used on feature films such as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Croods: A New Age, The Bad Guys, and the upcoming Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (don’t forget to subscribe to our Youtube Channel, by the way: we’ll soon publish an interview with the team of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish!).
On the technical side, MoonRay is a Monte Carlo Ray Tracer. It includes “a library of production-tested, physically based materials, a USD Hydra render delegate, multi-machine and cloud rendering via Arras”, explains the studio. Furthermore, Moonray can be used both for photorealistic and stylized rendering, and provides a pixel matching XPU mode: in other words, bundles of rays can be processed both on the GPU and the CPU. Moonray relies on several Intel technologies such as Embree’s ray tracing kernel library, Intel ISPC (Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler). Hair and fur rendering also benefit from Intel, since they were developed in collaboration with this company.
MoonRay will be available under the Apache 2.0 license on a dedicated website. We will keep you updated: in the meantime, you can watch this Sizzle reel showcasing some of the features of this renderer:
