Animation studio Dreamworks has open-sourced the MoonRay rendering engine that uses Monte Carlo Numerical Integration Ray Tracing (MCRT). The product was used to render the animated films How to Train Your Dragon 3, The Croods 2: Housewarming, Bad Boys, Trolls. World Tour, Boss Baby 2, Everest, and Puss in Boots 2: The Last Wish. The code is published under the Apache 2.0 license and will be further developed as an open product within the OpenMoonRay project.
The system is designed from the ground up, free from dependency on legacy code, and ready to produce professional, feature-length work. The initial design focus was on high performance and scalability, including support for multi-threaded rendering, parallelization of operations, use of vector instructions (SIMD), realistic lighting simulation, ray processing on the GPU or CPU side, realistic lighting simulation based on path tracing, rendering volumetric structures (fog, fire, clouds).
To organize distributed rendering, Arras' own framework is used, which allows you to distribute calculations to several servers or cloud environments. The Arras code will be open-sourced alongside the main MoonRay codebase. To optimize the calculation of lighting in distributed environments, the Intel Embree ray tracing library can be used, and the Intel ISPC compiler can be used to vectorize shaders. It is possible to stop rendering at an arbitrary moment and resume operations from the interrupted position.
The package also includes a large library of Physically Based Rendering (PBR) materials tested in production projects, and a USD Hydra Render Delegates layer for integration with familiar USD-enabled content creation systems. It is possible to use various image generation modes, from photorealistic to highly stylized. With support for distributed rendering, animators can monitor the result interactively and simultaneously render multiple versions of the scene with different lighting conditions, different material properties and from different points of view.
Source: opennet.ru