Open Moonlighting – Dreamworks Open-sources Moonray production MCRT renderer

[Lightwreather]

Summary

After the studio announced its intent at SIGGRAPH 2022, DreamWorks has finally open-sourced and released its in-house Monte Carlo Ray Tracer, MoonRay to the general public under an Apache 2 licence. The production renderer is now ready, with a new documentation website, reorganized libraries, fewer dependencies, referenced open source packages, and Intel OneAPI and Embree integration in a standard CMake environment.

It is worth noting that the renderer was used in several of Dreamworks' recent animated movies, including Puss-in-boots: The Last Wish, The Bad Guys, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, etc. However, it is just a renderer not a full fledged animation suite, according to my understanding. Correct me if I'm wrong

Documentation, code access, online forums, demonstration videos, and other information are available at OpenMoonRay.org.

Quotes

Quote

Since announcing the intended release in August of 2022, the MoonRay team has worked with a small set of beta testers to adapt the code base to be built and run outside of DreamWorks’ pipeline environment. Conversion of the build system to an industry standard CMake environment is complete. It includes a new documentation website, restructured libraries, reduced dependencies, and referenced open source packages. All are current release versions with additional enhancements and features delivered for DreamWorks’ productions.

“The open source release of MoonRay brings a state-of-the-art production renderer to the hands of artists, content creators, and practitioners in realistic simulation empowering community innovation,” noted Anton Kaplanyan, vice president, graphics research at Intel. “As part of this release and in collaboration with DreamWorks, MoonRay users have access to Intel technologies, Intel Embree, and oneAPI tools as building blocks for an open and performant rendering ecosystem.”

 

My thoughts

This is neat, and it is interesting to see companies start to open-source their stuff. However, I do not know how this performs in relation to other renderers, and again from my understanding it is just another renderer. It will be interesting to see some 3rd party performance data to go along with it but unfortunately we do not have that atm (we do have some 1st party data, but I can't really interpret that). Hopefully this is the beginning of DreamWorks open-sourcing more stuff and hopefully, we see other companies follow suit.

 

Sources

AnimationWorldNews

OpenMoonRay

PressRelease [openmoonray.org]

 

[Salv8 (sam)]

i was quite surprised to see the video use scenes from bad guys as examples to what the renderer can do.

to be honest i kinda want them to show some more behind the scenes of other movies that the renderer help make.

 

[Kisai]

So between Blender, Pixar and Dreamworks, there is enough open source tools out there to produce a theatrical raytraced film.

 

Like Blender has always put out tech demo videos, but they've been short, feature-showcases.

 

Like you can do Blender -> Pixar USD -> Dreamworks MoonRay

 

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

4 hours ago, Kisai said:

So between Blender, Pixar and Dreamworks, there is enough open source tools out there to produce a theatrical raytraced film.

 

Like Blender has always put out tech demo videos, but they've been short, feature-showcases.

 

Like you can do Blender -> Pixar USD -> Dreamworks MoonRay

 

 

Blender & the Cycles engine have been used in production and movie for sometime now but not as long as some of the other renderers. Next Gen is an animated full length movie made entirely in blender and cycles. 

 

Issue with blender till this day is that most studios have really mature pipelines and workflows with addons that work for them. Blender for now still lacks certain functions for the whole pipeline to be 100% blender. Its usually a part of the pipeline. 

 

SSS still looks pretty weird in the cycles engine so the more choices we have the better.