MoonRay – DreamWorks’ open-source MCRT renderer | Hacker News Reader

MoonRay – DreamWorks’ open-source MCRT renderer

openmoonray.org

71 pointsColinWright8 comments

"I wrote the RDL2 library for Moonray when I worked at DWA about 8-9 years ago..."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177574

USD, MaterialX. Hydra. Probably NVidia's dominant position is driving MDL. Blender3d Cycles should support many state of the art geometry and materials node functions out of the box. Without needing to purchase commercial renderers like OTOY Octane or Chaos V-Ray. Integrating Moonray with Blender? Sounds like a lot of fun. GPU Summer, baby ;)

Previous discussion from when it was announced that they were open sourcing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32357470 (109 comments)

Blender post regarding it from back in March: https://devtalk.blender.org/t/moonray-and-cycles/28436

First bullet point:

> Many will be asking for MoonRay integration into Blender, and the path to that is through Hydra. Blender support for Hydra is being worked on, and the MoonRay developers have indicated they are following this development and also see it as the way to go. The Blender Hydra implementation will need to mature, and renderer add-ons need to do additional work to integrate nicely besides what is offered by the Hydra API. So expect this to take some time.

Hydra, for rendering Pixar's Universal Sceen Description (USD). https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/BlenderUSDHydraA...

Demo video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgVbXwfCy3w

The GitHub repo looks pretty inactive. Not quite dead, but doesn't really seem maintained?

https://github.com/dreamworksanimation/openmoonray

Maybe they intend to do periodic source drops from their internal version, rather than developing in the open? That's not ideal but it's still more open than any other heavy duty renderer.

They might be worried about having to dance on eggshells to avoid accidentally revealing anything about their upcoming films, if the public could see every single commit they make.

That's a fair point. :)

It should really be mentioned prominently on the front page README then though, so people don't get the wrong idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com