staging environment
MoonRay

Changelog

Every release, newest first. Each one passes the add-on's tests, the comparisons with Cycles and an install, render, update and uninstall test before it ships.

0.1.2627 October 2026Latest
  • Small suns in HDRI skies light correctly. MoonRay's light sampling is fixed: a sun a few texels across lit scenes up to 71× too bright.
  • Light and world images are looked up as their node interpolates them.
  • Ellipse area lights light the scene, and area-light Spread keeps the light's power as in Cycles.
  • Concave n-gons render as Blender splits them.
  • Particle hair reads the emitter's UV maps and colours by name.
0.1.2526 October 2026
  • Lights whose node trees fade them by Ray Length render; they baked black before.
0.1.2426 October 2026
  • Faster renders of heavy scenes: the render loop of Blender's barbershop demo went from 19.9 to 14.6 seconds.
0.1.2326 October 2026
  • Faster shading: Voronoi, Noise, Gabor, Mapping, Ramp and the colour nodes run in MoonRay's vector code.
  • Constant shader nodes are folded as Cycles folds them, and node results are reused at each shading point.
0.1.2225 October 2026
  • OpenImageDenoise 2.5.1, with a Denoise Quality setting.
  • Path guiding with Intel Open PGL, and blue-noise sampling.
  • Faster node shading: Mix, Math and Vector Math eight at a time, and faster sRGB texture decoding.
0.1.2125 October 2026
  • The setup checks the processor for AVX2 and says why it can't install without it.
  • Leave Out of Scene Caustics, for materials the caustics should pass by.
0.1.2024 October 2026
  • A Caustics panel: path-traced refractive and reflective caustics, shadow caustics' controls, and each light's caustics intensity.
  • Simplify › Culling for all objects outside the camera.
  • Caustics through rough glass fixed.
0.1.1924 October 2026
  • Shadow Terminator Fix set to Cycles' behaviour for new scenes, including on subdivided and instanced meshes.
0.1.1824 October 2026
  • Selected to Active bakes render once for all the selected objects.
  • Coloured smoke scatters each colour on its own path: red smoke at 16 bounces went from 18× too bright to within 1.3% of its reference.
0.1.1724 October 2026
  • Blender 4.5 LTS support.
  • A quality pass across the add-on and MoonRay: dozens of fixes, each reproduced first and covered by a test.
0.1.1624 October 2026
  • Cycles portals, and Cycles' settings without the Cycles add-on enabled.
  • Each 3D view gets its own render pass, world and light previews.
  • Baking: Combined contributions, Cage Object, no camera needed.
  • Point Density and OSL Script nodes; 360° stereo and the stereo viewport.
  • Motion steps, moving mesh lights and particle hair motion blur.
0.1.1523 October 2026
  • The material library: 188 MoonRay materials, 31 node groups, fog worlds and a catch-light rig in the Asset Browser.
  • Textured density on Volume objects no longer crashes MoonRay.
0.1.1423 October 2026
  • A faster texture converter of our own, and world bakes that run beside the scene export.
  • Picking lights inside volumes 6.6× faster in haze.
0.1.1322 October 2026
  • Faster shadows through cut-outs: rays stop at the first surface that is surely opaque.
0.1.1222 October 2026
  • MoonRay brought up to date with upstream.
0.1.1122 October 2026
  • Faster first renders of textured scenes, and fixes for a crash and for mesh lights.
0.1.1021 October 2026
  • Faster export of very large scenes: repeated instances, hair and many objects.
0.1.921 October 2026
  • A slideshow while the setup installs.
0.1.821 October 2026
  • Render presets: Draft, Preview, Production, Final, Interior, Volumes, Hair and Fur, and MoonRay Default.
  • Faster volumes.
0.1.720 October 2026
  • Light Tree: Automatic, MoonRay's light tree with Cycles' distance weighting.
  • Embree's own instancing and faster volume lookups.
0.1.620 October 2026
  • Lights drawn and dragged in the viewport, the asset shelf, presets, and the lights list with Solo.
  • Ray portals and Filter Glossy in MoonRay.