DreamWorks Animation has donated its MoonRay rendering engine to the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF). This path tracing tool, used in all of the studio's films since 2019, including recent titles like The Wild Robot and The Bad Guys 2, joins projects such as OpenColorIO and OpenEXR. Bill Ballew, DreamWorks' chief technology officer, stated that this move is a natural step for the evolution of the software.
Open Architecture for Path Tracing 🚀
MoonRay is a production renderer that uses a path tracing approach to generate global illumination and realistic shadows. Its scalable architecture is designed to handle complex scenes with thousands of lights and objects. By integrating into the ASWF, the codebase will benefit from external contributions, enabling optimizations in areas such as adaptive sampling and memory management. For developers, this means access to a system proven in animated feature films.
Now to Render on Your Neighbor's Computer 😅
With MoonRay in the hands of the community, anyone can have the same engine that lit up Shrek, though perhaps not the same hardware budget. DreamWorks donates it, but doesn't warn that your old GPU might request early retirement when trying a frame with 50 million polygons. The idea is that collective innovation will work miracles, but in the meantime, make sure your tower's fan is secure.