About the project
MoonRay for Blender is a very small team's work to bring a film studio's renderer to Windows and into Blender, so that a modest computer can render scenes it couldn't before.
Why it exists
MoonRay is the renderer DreamWorks Animation makes its films with. It was released as open source, but only for Linux and macOS, and not for Blender. Running it natively on Windows, on top of Milan Jaros's community port, then matching it to Blender's materials, lights and nodes one by one, is what this project is.
The reason is the hardware most artists have. GPU renderers are fast until the scene no longer fits in the graphics card's memory; then the answer is usually a bigger card. MoonRay renders on the CPU, so a scene has your computer's memory to work with, and it streams textures from disk, so they can be larger than that memory.
What that means on an ordinary computer
- 239 MB
- for eight 4K float textures in MoonRay's texture cache. Cycles needed 1,054 MB for the same scene.
- 424 MB
- MoonRay's peak for two million triangles, down from 885 MB before the memory work in this project.
- No GPU
- needed. Any Intel Core from 2013 on, or any AMD Ryzen, renders with it.
Next is the graphics card you already have: it holds the part of the scene that fits, and the CPU renders the rest, so a card helps without having to hold everything. That work is in development now.
What your support pays for
Every payment goes into keeping this going. In order, that is:
- GPU rendering on Windows with NVIDIA cards, including scenes larger than the card's memory.
- The macOS and Linux versions.
- Keeping up with every new release of MoonRay and of Blender.
- Fixes, and closing the remaining differences from Cycles.
Who makes it
Emmanuel Okafor, Creative Director of Nocklay Studio. Before this, I modelled characters for animated films, series and games, at studios including Netflix Animation, Animal Logic, Amazon Studios and Ubisoft, and wrote Python tools for Maya and Blender along the way. MoonRay for Blender is where those two halves meet.
Contact
Questions, studio licensing, bug reports or press:
Students
If you're a student, email luwizart@gmail.com for a free copy.