DreamWorks has made some of its technologies publicly available over the past few years, and now the animation division is gearing up to join the Open Source initiative, with MoonRay’s proprietary ray-traced rendering system to be added to the open source list by the end of 2022 .
The authors have already launched a separate site , and they plan to publish the code later on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. As noted by The Hollywood Reporter, along with the MoonRay code, DreamWorks will also make the Arras framework, which is used to organize distributed rendering, publicly available.
“We are excited to share with the industry more than 10 years of innovation and development from the MoonRay codebase with vectorized, multi-threaded, parallel and distributed rendering technologies.
The demand for rendering on a global scale is growing every year and MoonRay is going to meet these needs. We expect the codebase to get stronger with community input as DreamWorks continues to showcase its support for Open Source.”
Andrew Pearce,
DreamWorks VP of Global Technology
DreamWorks has used MoonRay in films such as How to Train Your Dragon 3: The Hidden World, The Croods 2: Housewarming and The Bad Ones, as well as the upcoming cartoon Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.
When this or that proprietary software becomes available to the general public, this is always good news. Whether dedicated hobbyists will be able to create animation at the level of DreamWorks visual quality remains to be seen, but at least they will have another useful tool for this. Those interested can apply for early access to MoonRay or subscribe to an update on the project website.
