DreamWorks animation studio has announced the release of open-source texts of the Moonray project that uses the Trace Of Rays Based On Numerical Integration By The Method (MCRT) for rendering animation films. The new product has been used in the creation of several DreamWorks films, including “How to tame a dragon 3,” “CRUDS family 2: Housewarming,” “Bad guys,” “Trolls. World Tour,” “Boss-miller 2,” “Everest,” and “Cat in boots 2: Last desire.”
The code was published under the Apache 2.0 license and will continue to be developed as an open-source project as part of the OpenmoonRay. The system has been designed from scratch, and it is not dependent on outdated code. It can create professional work at the level of full-length films, with the primary attention paid to ensuring high efficiency and scalability.
The Moonray project includes multi-heater rendering, dispute operations, the use of vector instructions (SIMD), realistic lighting simulation, processing rays on the GPU or CPU side, realistic simulation of lighting, the rendering of volumetric structures such as fog, fire, and clouds, among other features.
The project also uses the Arras framework to organize distributed rendering; this allows for carrying out calculations for several servers or cloud environments. The Arras code will be opened with the main code base of Moonray. To optimize the calculation of lighting in a distributed environment, the rays tracer library intel embree can also be used, along with the compiler Intel ISPC to perform vectorization of shaders.
The Moonray project offers a powerful open-source tool for creating professional-level animation films, with an emphasis on high efficiency and scalability. The open-source nature of the project also encourages collaboration and innovation within the animation industry.