MoonRay is DreamWorks’ open-source, award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer, which has been used on the following feature films:
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
Abominable
The Croods: A New Age
Trolls World Tour
The Boss Baby: Family Business
The Bad Guys
Puss In Boots: The Last Wish
MoonRay was developed at DreamWorks and is in continuous active development and includes an extensive library of production-tested, physically based materials, a USD Hydra render delegate, multi-machine and cloud rendering via the Arras distributed computation framework.
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Recent Releases
2.40.0.106 Feb 2026 03:15
minor feature:
lt;h2 gt;What's New lt;/h2 gt;.
lt;p gt;We introduced a prototype of a new gui, lt;a href="https://github.com/dreamworksanimation/moonray_gui/tree/main/cmd/moonray_gui_v2" gt;moonray_gui_v2 lt;/a gt; (ImGui-based), with usability improvements including pixel inspection, snapshots, status bar, and improved path visualizer drawing. We also added lt;a href="https://docs.openmoonray.org/user-reference/tools/light-path-visualizer/" rel="nofollow" gt;light path visualizer lt;/a gt; support to lt;a href="https://docs.openmoonray.org/user-reference/tools/arras_render/" rel="nofollow" gt;arras_render lt;/a gt;, and added new controls and stability to the light path visualizer in moonray_gui. lt;/p gt;.
lt;h3 gt;Features lt;/h3 gt;.
lt;ul gt;.
lt;li gt;Added light path visualizer support for arras_render lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;Added hidden line opacity control to the light path visualizer lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;Added moonray and moonray_gui lt;code gt;-print_bsdf lt;/code gt; command-line option for deging BSDF configuration lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;Added a prototype gui tool, lt;strong gt;moonray_gui_v2 lt;/strong gt;, that uses lt;em gt;Dear ImGui lt;/em gt; instead of QT and contains a number of new features. Note that, for now, ImGui is simply included as a submodule in the moonray_gui repository, but that may change in the future. lt;/li gt;.
lt;/ul gt;.
lt;h3 gt; lt;/h3 gt;.
lt;ul gt;.
lt;li gt; lt;code gt;DiskLight lt;/code gt; bounding box calculation lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;a crash in importance light sampling caused by uncleared memory lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;importance light sampling crash related to inconsistent bounding box calculation lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;a light path visualizer crash caused by a display filter buffer overflow lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;in lt;code gt;IntensityLightFilter lt;/code gt; behavior with volumes lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;reflection stretching at extreme grazing angles lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;Worley noise behavior when lt;code gt;jitter lt;/code gt; is be
2.34.0.102 Feb 2026 03:15
minor feature:
lt;h2 gt;What's New lt;/h2 gt;.
lt;p gt;moonray_gui now adds a lt;a href="https://docs.openmoonray.org/user-reference/tools/light-path-visualizer/#light-path-visualizer" rel="nofollow" gt;path visualizer lt;/a gt;. This enables users to better understand the path of rays through the scene and their interaction with light sources and materials. It is also useful for deging with material/light source appearance and sampling. lt;/p gt;.
lt;p gt;OpenMoonRay can now be built on MacOS Tahoe. MacOS Sonoma and MacOS Sequoia are still supported. lt;/p gt;.
lt;p gt;Several dependency updates and header include were made to simplify building on a wider range of Linux distributions. lt;/p gt;.
lt;h3 gt;Features lt;/h3 gt;.
lt;ul gt;.
lt;li gt;Add a light path visualizer to moonray_gui lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;Improved documentation for SceneVariables' image size attributes lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;Share CPU/memory affinity info with other MoonRay processes via shared memory lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;Support per-lobe lightsets in vector and XPU modes lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;Allow selection of lights and cameras for object space transformations in map shaders lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;Make "scale" and "offset" attribute bindable on ImageMap and ImageNormalMap lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;More efficient RDTSC-based timing measurements for NUMA systems lt;/li gt;.
lt;/ul gt;.
lt;h3 gt; lt;/h3 gt;.
lt;ul gt;.
lt;li gt;a mesh tessellation when using tiled renders with FisheyeCamera lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;DwaTwoSidedMaterial introduced by previous lobe lightset work lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;crash when maximum BSDF lobes exceeded and adds error message lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;crash when loading a MeshLight which is too large, a warning instead lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;OIIO 2.4.8 crash when outputting image cache stats if no images have been opened lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;an adaptive light sampling crash lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;bounce contribution on volumes not working with cutout/ray switch material lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;recent mem
2.15.0.116 Jul 2025 03:15
minor feature:
lt;h2 gt;What's new lt;/h2 gt;.
lt;h6 gt;We've changed openmoonray's versioning scheme to align with how we version our internal repositories, which is typically a minor version bump with weekly internal releases and a major version bump when one of our productions locks off on a particular version, to ensure stability for the remainder of that production. lt;/h6 gt;.
lt;h3 gt;Features lt;/h3 gt;.
lt;ul gt;.
lt;li gt;New developer lt;a href="https://github.com/dreamworksanimation/rats" gt;regression suite (RATS) lt;/a gt;. Includes release of 400 tests, and automated canonical image generation. lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;Added NUMA architecture support. Includes affinity controls for CPU / Memory to achieve better performance on NUMA architecture machines. lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;New lt;a href="https://docs.openmoonray.org/user-reference/tools/rdla_gui/" rel="nofollow" gt; lt;code gt;rdla_gui lt;/code gt; lt;/a gt; program that creates a GUI from rdla objects and parameters and updates a delta.rdla file for real time control when rendering with lt;code gt;moonray_gui lt;/code gt; lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;New per-BSDF lobe lightsets lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;Added an FOV attribute to the FisheyeCamera lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;New lt;a href="https://docs.openmoonray.org/user-reference/scene-objects/maps/TwoSidedMap/" rel="nofollow" gt;TwoSidedMap lt;/a gt; lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;Allow ImageMap rotation to work with UDIM images, which will rotate from their center lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;Support multiple BSSRDFs in a single material lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;Added scene_rdl2 functions and improvements to support hdMoonray lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;Added tmp directory management for signal-based checkpointing lt;/li gt;.
lt;/ul gt;.
lt;h3 gt; lt;/h3 gt;.
lt;ul gt;.
lt;li gt;and optimized file output logic for signal-based checkpointing lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;weight scaling of ToonBRDF in scalar lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;OCIO not being built into moonray_gui lt;/li gt;.
lt;li gt;SwitchNormalMap choice attribu
1.7.0.031 Dec 2024 17:39
major feature:
Features
Improved Rocky9 and MacOS build instructions and CMake presets for hdMoonray in Houdini
XPU mode now accelerates both regular rays and occlusion rays for NVIDIA GPUs
XPU mode now supports more than two (up to 16) motion blur steps/samples for meshes
Adds FOV controls to spherical camera to allow rendering onto a partial sphere
Improvements to rdla_filter - splits long lines
Adds -threads option to moonray_bake
Makes all parameters (except clamp values) of RemapMap bindable
Adds a "ramp_input_scale" parameter for diffuse to the DwaBase material
Adds a PortalLight
Supports distant lights referenced by a PortalLight
IntensityLightFilter can now distinguish between direct/indirect paths
Offset and scale are now bindable for UVTransformMap
Supports indirect illumination on volumes
Adds scene variable "slerp_xforms" which fixes scaling when camera shutter is outside motion steps range
Improved ray-sphere intersection precision
Avoids BVH rebuilds if geometry hasn't changed in update
Adds support for min_shadow_distance
Adds stochastic presence optimization
Adds Cryptomatte support to hdMoonRay
Adds reflected cryptomatte data support
Adds screen space radius controls for curves and points
Adds support for "primary aov", allow users to specify an aov as the "primary" output
Includes light filter luminance in the visibility aov
render_profile_viewer now uses OpenImageIO to display test result images
Added new guide for understanding shadow ray manipulation attributes
Shared memory framebuffer interface for sending framebuffer data between processes
New commandline tool: shmFbTool: test and analyze shared memory framebuffer data
New commandline tool: shmFbDump: example code to access shared memory framebuffer without using OpenMoonRay lib
Bug Fixes
Fix flickering shadows in successive rendered frames
Fix crash with volumes
Fix depth aov on Sp
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