DreamWorks Animation announced today that it plans to open source the MoonRay production renderer later in 2022. Using this MoonRay renderer, DreamWorks has produced “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World,” “Bad Ass League,” “Puss in Boots 2” and other animated films.
MoonRay is a proven, physics-based, material multi-computer renderer. By open sourcing MoonRay, DreamWorks hopes to make it a more competitive renderer. MoonRay supports the use of DreamWorks’ Arras distributed computing framework and uses a number of Intel software components, such as Embree and ISPC.
MoonRay will be open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license and is currently being reviewed/cleared for code release, which is expected to be signed later this year. The open-source site is OpenMoonRay.org, but for now it’s just a press release from DreamWorks Animation.