Dreamworks Animation has announced its intentions to open source its MoonRay renderer.
The MoonRay renderer has been used in a number of animated hits, including How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Croods: A New Age, The Bad Guys, and the upcoming Puss In Boots: The Last Wish. While MoonRay is currently proprietary software, DreamWorks plans to open source, making it available to everyone.
“We are thrilled to share with the industry over 10 years of innovation and development on MoonRay’s vectorized, threaded, parallel, and distributed code base,” said Andrew Pearce, Vice President of Global Technology at DreamWorks. “The appetite for rendering at scale grows each year, and MoonRay is set to meet that need. We expect to see the code base grow stronger with community involvement as DreamWorks continues to demonstrate our commitment to open source.”
The announcement is good news for the creative and open source community and will give animators of all skill levels access to an industrial-strength rendering platform.