Nov 3 – 5, 2023
Riga, Latvia
Europe/Riga timezone

From origins to open source: The journey of DreamWorks Animation's production path tracer, MoonRay

Nov 3, 2023, 3:00 PM
50m
Omega 2 – Plenary (Radisson Blu Latvija)

Omega 2 – Plenary

Radisson Blu Latvija

5
Talk (50 Minutes) Community

Speaker

Randy Packer
DreamWorks Animation

Description

MoonRay is DreamWorks Animation's recently open-sourced production rendering engine, used to create memorable imagery from movies such as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Bad Guys, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the upcoming Trolls Band Together and future titles.

We’ll talk about MoonRay’s origins as an experiment and its foundation for rendering-as-a-service in animated and non-animated content, stylized and photoreal, to its current use as the core production renderer for the feature film studio pipeline at DreamWorks Animation.

After diving into MoonRay’s use at the studio, we’ll continue along the path to open-sourcing MoonRay, the goals and challenges to launch that, what it means for DreamWorks, and where we see the potential for the open source community to embrace it and its future in animation, vfx, simulation, visualization, and more.

Session author's bio

Randy is sr. manager of rendering, shading and machine learning teams at DreamWorks, having started in 2015 as his first foray into the animation and the film industry. Randy's led the efforts of advancing MoonRay and it's feature set and related technologies since prior to it's usage on the first feature, How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World in 2017, through open-sourcing it in early 2023. He enjoys tool-building and seeing artists push the capabilities beyond expectations.

Level of Difficulty Beginner

Presentation materials

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