DreamWorks Animation Announces the Release ofMoonRay as Open Source Software
Glendale, Calif. - March 15, 2023 - DreamWorks Animation is pleased to announce MoonRay,
their production renderer, is now available as open source for general access. The company
announced their intent to make this move at SIGGRAPH 2022 generating thousands ofrequests for information. Since then, DreamWorks has worked diligently on the code base,improved documentation, and interface with prerelease partners to demonstrate MoonRay canbe built outside of the DreamWorks studio. The code base is now available at
OpenMoonRay.org under the Apache 2 open source license.
“I am tremendously proud of the MoonRay team that carefully engineered the renderer with astrict adherence to core multi-processing principles. MoonRay delivers interactive artistic
exploration using all cores or GPUs provided”, said Andrew Pearce, VP of Global Technology atDreamWorks Animation. “Like DreamWorks, MoonRay was born at the intersection of art andscience. We are eager to see what the wider artist and developer community will do with
MoonRay”.
DreamWorks’ in-house Monte Carlo Ray Tracer, MoonRay, was designed with a focus onefficiency and scalability. The developers’ mantra is to “...keep all the vector lanes of all thecores of all the machines busy all the time with meaningful work”, and additionally provide
modern features for full artistic expression. It delivers a broad range of images fromphotorealistic to strongly stylized. MoonRay is built on a leading-edge, highly-scalablearchitecture, allowing quick, feature-film quality artistic iteration using familiar tools. Additional
high-performance features include support for distributed rendering, a pixel matching XPU mode,
photo-realistic ray tracing acceleration via Intel® Embree, including Open Image Denoise, andother aspects of oneAPI. MoonRay includes a USD Hydra render delegate for integration intocontent creation tools supporting that standard.
Since announcing the intended release in August of 2022, the MoonRay team has worked witha small set of beta testers to adapt the code base so that it can be built and run outside ofDreamWorks’ pipeline environment. Conversion of the build system to an industry standard

CMake environment was completed, a new documentation website was built, librariesrestructured, dependencies reduced, and referenced open source packages were brought up tocurrent release versions, in addition to the enhancements and features delivered forDreamWorks’ productions along the way.
“The open source release of MoonRay brings a state-of-the-art production renderer to the handsof artists, content creators, and practitioners in realistic simulation empowering communityinnovation. As part of this release and in collaboration with DreamWorks, MoonRay users haveaccess to Intel technologies, Intel ®Embree and oneAPI tools, as building blocks for an openand performant rendering ecosystem.” says Anton Kaplanyan, vice president, graphics researchat Intel.
“We’re delighted to demonstrate DreamWorks’ continued commitment to open source with thecontribution of MoonRay. Our involvement with the community has made us stronger and welook forward to that continued collaboration”, said Bill Ballew, Chief Technology Officer at
DreamWorks Animation.
Documentation, code access, online forums, demonstration videos, and other information areavailable now at OpenMoonRay.org.
-DreamWorks Animation (DWA), a division of the Universal Filmed EntertainmentGroup, within NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation, is a global family
entertainment company with feature film and television brands. The company’s
deep portfolio of intellectual property is supported by a robust, worldwide consumer
products practice, which includes licensing, and location-based entertainment
venues around the world. DWA’s feature film heritage includes many of the world’s
most beloved characters and franchises, including Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu
Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, Spirit, Trolls, The Boss Baby and 2022’s The Bad
Guys and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish have amassed more than $15 billion inglobal box office receipts. DreamWorks Animation’s television studio is one of theworld’s leading producers of high-quality, animated family programming, reachingconsumers in more than 190 countries with a diverse array of award-winningoriginal content through streaming and linear broadcasters.
MoonRay & Arras © DreamWorks Animation LLC.
USD, and Hydra are trademarks of Pixar Animation Studios.
Intel® Embree is a high-performance ray tracing library, also part of the Intel® oneAPIRendering Toolkit.