DreamWorks Animation To Open-Source MoonRay Renderer

[phoronix]

Phoronix: DreamWorks Animation To Open-Source MoonRay Renderer

DreamWorks Animation announced today that they intend to release their MoonRay production renderer as open-source softwate later in 2022. DreamWorks' MoonRay renderer has been used for films such as How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Bad Guys, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, and other animated films...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/DreamWorks-MoonRay-Open-Source

[sarmad]

What does "renderer" mean in this context? Is it a stand alone software, or a plugin for some other software?

[mroche]

What does "renderer" mean in this context? Is it a stand alone software, or a plugin for some other software?

In CG, a renderer (or render engine) is the tool that takes in the scene model data, texture resources, etc, and computes the final frame image. Most renderers have tools to allow you to pass a properly formatted scene directly to the render to output a frame, but from an end-user's perspective is usually used via a plugin to a DCC (Digital Content Creation tool) such as Maya, Houdini, Katana, etc for interactive sessions.

Coming from animation studios myself, I would be surprised if MoonRay didn't have both standalone CLI tools and plugins to the major DCC tools DreamWorks uses. Some engines also provide their own lookdev applications separate from DCCs (Maxwell Render, Octane, and Appleseed for example), which would be cool to see.

MoonRay is comparable to RenderMan, Arnold, VRay, Redshift, Octane, Cycles, and the smattering of other render engines available or proprietary (like Weta's Manuka, Framestore's Freak, and Disney's Hyperion).

Cheers,
Mike

[ssokolow]

What does "renderer" mean in this context? Is it a stand alone software, or a plugin for some other software?

It'll probably be similar to POV-Ray but with more support for being run in a "render farm" configuration across a network of computers.

[tildearrow]

Typo:

Phoronix: DreamWorks Animation To Open-Source MoonRay Renderer

DreamWorks Animation announced today that they intend to release their MoonRay production renderer as open-source softwate later in 2022. DreamWorks' MoonRay renderer has been used for films such as How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Bad Guys, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, and other animated films...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/DreamW...ay-Open-Source

[direc85]

Yay! I guess...

[cj.wijtmans]

Did they run out of money to maintain it?

[CommunityMember]

Did they run out of money to maintain it?

The studio's have finally admitted the obvious, that the value (of their production) is not the software and tooling itself, but the creative processes (the story, the characters), and there is no advantage in keeping the tooling locked up behind some proprietary wall.

If some other studio/production company else decides to use or contribute to the code base, all the better. And sharing good ideas between (say) RenderMan and MoonRay lifts all boats.

[Linuxxx]

The studio's have finally admitted the obvious, that the value (of their production) is not the software and tooling itself, but the creative processes (the story, the characters), and there is no advantage in keeping the tooling locked up behind some proprietary wall.

If some other studio/production company else decides to use or contribute to the code base, all the better. And sharing good ideas between (say) RenderMan and MoonRay lifts all boats.

If this were true, then why doesn't Disney or Weta Digital open-source their in-house renderers?

Hint:
Because they are at the cutting-edge of their craft and therefore have no reason to do so, quite similar to nVidia's state-of-the-art proprietary driver components...

[ssokolow]

nVidia's state-of-the-art proprietary driver components...

Good one. More like "drivers using IP licensed from someone else, so they'd have to rewrite parts and that's a hard sell with execs".