DreamWorks open-sources its MoonRay renderer
Wednesday, March fifteenth, 2023 | Posted by Jim Thacker
Initially posted on 6 August 2022. Scroll down for information of the ultimate launch.
DreamWorks Animation is to make MoonRay, its in-house manufacturing renderer, out there open-source.
The ray tracing renderer, used on animated options like The Unhealthy Guys and the upcoming Puss in Boots: The Final Want, might be publicly out there later this 12 months, together with Arras, its distributed rendering framework.
A high-performance Monte Carlo ray tracer able to photorealistic and stylised output
Though DreamWorks has made particular person in-house applied sciences out there to the general public earlier than – it open-sourced sparse volumetric knowledge format OpenVDB in 2012 – MoonRay is a beast of a special scale.
Developed to interchange Moonlight, the studio’s outdated rasterisation renderer – this 2017 Siggraph presentation explores its origins – MoonRay is a high-performance Monte Carlo ray tracer.
It was designed with the goal of retaining “all of the vector lanes of all of the cores of all of the machines busy on a regular basis”, and has an hybrid GPU/CPU rendering mode able to “100% output matching” with CPU rendering.
In addition to DreamWorks’ trademark stylised animation, MoonRay is able to photorealistic output, and has the key options you’d anticipate of a VFX renderer, together with AOVs/LPEs, deep output and Cryptomatte.
It also needs to play properly in an ordinary manufacturing pipeline: within the Siggraph presentation linked above, DreamWorks describes it as integrating with Maya and MotionBuilder in addition to its personal lighting instruments.
MoonRay additionally comes with a Hydra render delegate, hdMoonRay, which can make it potential to combine as an interative viewport renderer in DCC software program that helps Hydra delegates, like Houdini and Katana.
Arras framework distributed final-quality, interactive and multi-context rendering
Together with the core renderer, DreamWorks is open-sourcing Arras, its distributed computation framework.
In addition to final-quality output, it may be used to speed up interactive rendering, and for ‘multi-context rendering’ throughout look dev, visualising a number of lighting or materials variants throughout pictures and sequences.
Up to date 22 August 2022: DreamWorks Animation has posted new on-line FAQs about MoonRay.
The FAQs present studios concerned about working with MoonRay extra details about utilizing the renderer inside a manufacturing pipeline, and about integrating it with DCC purposes.
Based mostly on DreamWorks’ personal RDL scene description format relatively than USD
MoonRay makes use of its personal proprietary scene description format, RDL (Render Information Layer), with hdMoonRay – the “canonical means” of rendering through MoonRay in DCC apps – translating from the extra acquainted USD to RDL.
RDL is at present required for batch rendering from the command line, together with final-quality rendering on a render farm, however hdMoonRay is finally supposed to assist batch in addition to interactive rendering.
Hair and supplies from different DCC software program would require conversion
DreamWorks’ personal in-house instruments export hair curves to MoonRay through a RDL procedural, so MoonRay doesn’t instantly assist business hair instruments, though hdMoonRay helps USD curves.
As well as, MoonRay doesn’t at present assist the open customary materials codecs OSL and MaterialX, so some customized improvement might be wanted to assist supplies generated in different DCC purposes.
The renderer might be launched with a set of layerable supplies, together with dielectrics, pores and skin, hair and materials, with a shading API for growing new shaders.
Up to date 15 March 2023: DreamWorks has launched the supply code of MoonRay.
You’ll be able to learn the announcment of the MoonRay 1.0 launch right here, discover the supply code on GitHub, and ask for technical assist through GitHub Discussions.
Licensing, system necessities and launch dates
MoonRay is offered below an open-source Apache 2.0 licence.
It may be compiled from supply on CentOS 7 Linux. You’ll find a listing of dependencies and construct directions within the on-line documentation: on the time of writing, there are not any compiled binaries out there.
It requires a x86-64 CPU with assist for AVX2, so it ought to run on any latest AMD or Intel CPU. GPU acceleration relies on CUDA and OptiX and requires a Nvdia GPU.
Learn extra concerning the open-source launch of MoonRay on the OpenMoonRay web site
Learn extra about MoonRay within the on-line documentation
Obtain the supply code for MoonRay from GitHub
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