DreamWorks Animation has released MoonRay 1.5, the latest update to the open-source version of its in-house production renderer.
This ray tracing renderer, utilized in animated features like The Bad Guys and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, has been updated to support VFX Reference Platform 2023.
A High-Performance Monte Carlo Ray Tracer
Open-sourced last year, MoonRay is a high-performance Monte Carlo ray tracer.
It was designed to maximize the utilization of all available processing cores and features a hybrid GPU/CPU rendering mode with complete output matching to CPU rendering.
MoonRay is capable of both stylized and photorealistic output, and boasts all the key features expected of a VFX renderer. These include AOVs/LPEs, deep output, and Cryptomatte.
It includes a Hydra render delegate, hdMoonRay, making it possible to integrate MoonRay as a viewport renderer in DCC applications that support Hydra delegates, such as Houdini and Katana.
MoonRay 1.5: Support for VFX Reference Platform 2023
MoonRay 1.5 introduces support for the CY2023 specification of VFX Reference Platform and for Rocky Linux 9, which MoonRay can now be built on, alongside CentOS.
According to the release notes, CY2023 support enables the use of hdMoonRay in Nuke 15, the current version of Foundry’s compositing software.
The update also incorporates an initial implementation of a new adaptive light sampling scheme.
MoonRay 1.1 to 1.4: GPU Denoising and Initial Support for VR Rendering
Other new features since the release of MoonRay 1.0 include a new ramp control for volumes, and a telemetry overlay system.
The software also supports GPU render denoising via Open Image Denoise 2, and XPU mode – hybrid CPU/GPU rendering – is now MoonRay’s default render mode.
In addition, there is now a separate development branch of MoonRay with support for VR rendering via the PresenZ volumetric format.
Licensing, System Requirements, and Release Dates
MoonRay is available under an open-source Apache 2.0 license.
The software can be compiled from source on Linux only. Detailed dependencies and build instructions can be found within the online documentation.
It necessitates a x86-64 CPU with support for AVX2, which generally means it will work with any recent AMD or Intel CPU. GPU acceleration is dependent on CUDA and OptiX and necessitates an Nvidia GPU.
A comprehensive overview of the new features introduced in MoonRay 1.5 is available in the online release notes.