With annual CG confab SIGGRAPH slated to start Monday in Vancouver, DreamWorks Animation announced its intent to release its proprietary renderer, MoonRay, as open-source software later this year.
MoonRay has been used on feature films such as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Croods: A New Age, The Bad Guys and upcoming Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.
“We are thrilled to share with the industry over 10 years of innovation and development on MoonRay’s vectorized, threaded, parallel, and distributed code base,” said Andrew Pearce, DWA’s vp of global technology. “The appetite for rendering at scale grows each year, and MoonRay is set to meet that need. We expect to see the code base grow stronger with community involvement as DreamWorks continues to demonstrate our commitment to open source”.
MoonRay uses DreamWorks’ distributed computation framework, Arras, also to be included in the open-source code base.