With the annual CG confab SIGGRAPH set to begin Monday in Vancouver, DreamWorks Animation has announced its intention to release its proprietary MoonRay renderer as open source software later this year. The Hollywood Reporter reports: MoonRay has been used in feature films such as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Croods: A New Era, Bad Guys, and the upcoming Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. MoonRay uses DreamWorks’ distributed computing system, Arras, which will also be included in the open source database.
“We are very excited to share with the industry more than 10 years of innovation and development of MoonRay’s vector, streaming, parallel and distributed codebase,” said Andrew Pearce, DWA’s vice president of global technology. “The appetite for rendering at scale is growing every year, and MoonRay is going to meet that need. We expect the code base to grow stronger with community input as DreamWorks continues to demonstrate its commitment to open source.”
