Unleash Your Creative Power with MoonRay: DreamWorks Animation's Open Source Renderer

Lightspeed Graphics, a leading 3D animation company, is excited to share the news that DreamWorks Animation has announced the release of their production renderer, MoonRay, as open source software. MoonRay is now available for general access and can be found at OpenMoonRay.org under the Apache 2 open source license.

The announcement of MoonRay's open source release generated thousands of requests for information since its announcement at SIGGRAPH 2022. DreamWorks Animation has worked tirelessly to improve the code base, documentation, and interface with pre-release partners to ensure that MoonRay can be built outside of the DreamWorks studio.

MoonRay is designed with a focus on efficiency and scalability, providing interactive artistic exploration using all cores or GPUs provided. It delivers a broad range of images from photorealistic to strongly stylized and is built on a leading-edge, highly-scalable architecture that allows for quick, feature-film quality artistic iteration using familiar tools. Additionally, MoonRay includes support for distributed rendering, a pixel matching XPU mode, and photo-realistic ray tracing acceleration via Intel Embree, including Open Image Denoise, and other aspects of oneAPI.

The release of MoonRay brings a state-of-the-art production renderer to the hands of artists, content creators, and practitioners in realistic simulation empowering community innovation. Anton Kaplanyan, vice president of graphics research at Intel, states that "as part of this release and in collaboration with DreamWorks, MoonRay users have access to Intel technologies, Intel Embree, and oneAPI tools, as building blocks for an open and performant rendering ecosystem."

Lightspeed Graphics is thrilled to see DreamWorks' continued commitment to open source with the contribution of MoonRay. helping smaller animation companies like ours to make us create stronger 3D Animation, and we look forward to the continued collaboration on MoonRay.

Documentation, code access, online forums, demonstration videos, and other information are available now at OpenMoonRay.org. We encourage artists, content creators, and practitioners to take advantage of this opportunity to innovate and explore the possibilities of MoonRay.

The release of MoonRay as open source software is a significant step towards democratizing high-end 3D animation tools. By making this software available to the wider community, DreamWorks Animation has opened the door to a new wave of creativity, collaboration, and innovation.

For Lightspeed Graphics, the availability of MoonRay is an exciting development. As a 3D animation company, we are always on the lookout for the latest and most advanced tools to help us deliver high-quality work to our clients. MoonRay's powerful rendering capabilities and scalability make it an excellent addition to our workflow, and we look forward to exploring its full potential.

Moreover, the collaboration with Intel to include their technologies such as Intel Embree and oneAPI tools as building blocks for an open and performant rendering ecosystem is a great initiative that will benefit artists and content creators.

DreamWorks Animation's continued commitment to open source is also a significant win for the animation industry. Open-source software has become a vital part of many creative workflows, and it has contributed to the development of some of the most innovative tools in the industry. By contributing MoonRay to the open-source community, DreamWorks Animation has shown their dedication to pushing the boundaries of what is possible in 3D animation and promoting collaboration and innovation.

In conclusion, the release of MoonRay as open source software is a game-changer for the animation industry. Lightspeed Graphics is excited to see how this powerful tool will be used to create stunning works of art and advance the state of the art in 3D animation. We applaud DreamWorks Animation for their commitment to open source and look forward to seeing what the future holds for MoonRay and the community of artists and content creators who will use it.

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