SOFTWARE REVIEW
PRICE Free | COMPANY DreamWorks Animation | WEBSITE openmoonray.org
MoonRay has been on quite a journey these past few years. What originally began as an in-house renderer at DreamWorks Animation has now gone fully open source.
The company is no stranger to opening up its technology to the public, but MoonRay feels different. Maybe that’s because it’s a production-ready renderer, or the fact it’s been used on a number of high-profile films, including How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World and The Bad Guys. Whatever the reason, the 3D community is better off because of it.
MoonRay’s source code has been in the public domain since March 2023 and undergone a number of updates since. Now at version 1.5, we’ll take a look at what improvements have been made and what the renderer is capable of now. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For those who don’t know what MoonRay is, let’s start with the basics.
It’s a high-performance Monte Carlo ray tracer that’s capable of both DreamWorks’ trademark stylised look and photorealism. Production renderers are mostly focused solely on photorealism, and have limited tools for more bespoke rendering styles. MoonRay is able to deliver outstanding results in both fields, something that will make it particularly appealing to larger studios that work on a wider variety of projects.
This versatile renderer is ideal for VFX workflows and has all the required features for that setup, including Arbitrary Output Variables (AOVs), which allow data from a shader or renderer to be output during rendering to aid compositing. Additionally, Deep Output and Cryptomatte are supported, streamlining things perfectly for VFX artists. These features are unlikely to be helpful for solo and indie artists, but are immensely helpful for studios and projects that need added compositing features.
One of the strengths of this relatively new renderer is its denoising capabilities. With support for OptiX 7.6 and GPU render denoising with Open Image Denoise 2, MoonRay is able to deliver particularly impressive results, especially when working interactively. Artists can
