DreamWorks Shares Its In-House ‘MoonRay’ Animation Renderer For Free
Photo 176589204 © Info849943 | Dreamstime.com
DreamWorks’ magic is no longer Far Far Away. The famed animation studio has made a dragon-sized announcement for budding and veteran filmmakers alike: its production renderer ‘MoonRay’, developed in-house, is now free to use.
The company has released the “award-winning, state-of-the-art” software under the Apache 2 open-source license, and you can find it here.
The animation giant didn’t just create the rendering tool itself, but it also uses the very same program. MoonRay has helped create movies like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Trolls World Tour, The Bad Guys, and other titles that haven’t reached the silver screen.
The software “brings a state-of-the-art production renderer to the hands of artists, content creators, and practitioners,” shares Anton Kaplanyan, VP Graphics Research at Intel, one of MoonRay’s collaborators.
Andrew Pearce, VP of Global Technology at DreamWorks Animation, chimes in: “Like DreamWorks, MoonRay was born at the intersection of art and science. We are eager to see what the wider artist and developer community will do with MoonRay,” Andrew Pearce, VP of Global Technology at DreamWorks Animation, chimes in.
MoonRay is powered by DreamWorks’ own distributed computation framework Arras to enable support for multiple machines and contexts.
“Using MoonRay and Arras in a multi-context mode, the artist can simultaneously visualize multiple lighting conditions, varying material properties, multiple times in a shot or sequence, or even multiple locations in an environment,” DreamWorks explains in a press release.
The tool also supports distributed rendering and photorealistic ray tracing acceleration via Intel Embree.
All told, this isn’t a simple app you just install and open. DreamWorks has only released MoonRay as a source code as of now, which means you’ll need to run it alongside tools like Blender or Cinema 4D, reports No Film School.
You can find out more about the newly open-sourced tool here.
[via No Film School and Animation Magazine, cover photo 176589204 © Info849943 | Dreamstime.com]
