MoonRay Powers Every DreamWorks Animation Feature Film Since 2019

MoonRay has become the standard production renderer for DreamWorks Animation, having been utilized in every feature film produced by the studio since 2019. The state-of-the-art multi-award-winning MCRT renderer was most recently used in the production of The Wild Robot and The Bad Guys 2.

Developed in-house and maintained by DreamWorks Animation for its feature film productions, MoonRay provides an extensive library of physically based materials that have been tested in a production environment. The software is written in C++17 and is compatible with Linux and macOS operating systems.

The renderer’s technical architecture includes a Universal Scene Description (USD) Hydra render delegate. To handle the scale of feature film production, MoonRay supports cloud rendering and multi-machine rendering through the Arras distributed computation framework.

DreamWorks Animation first deployed the renderer for the 2018 short film Bilby. It made its debut in feature-length cinema with the 2019 release of How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.

Following an announcement at SIGGRAPH 2022 regarding the studio’s intention to make the tool available to the public, DreamWorks Animation officially released the MoonRay source code on GitHub on March 15, 2023. The software was released under the Apache 2.0 License.

Since its feature debut in 2019, MoonRay has been the rendering foundation for a wide array of theatrical releases, including:

• How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019)
• Abominable (2019)
• Trolls World Tour (2020)
• The Croods: A New Age (2020)
• The Boss Baby: Family Business (2021)
• The Bad Guys (2022)
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)
• Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken (2023)
• Trolls Band Together (2023)
• Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024)
• The Wild Robot (2024)
• The Bad Guys 2 (2025)

The software remains under continuous active development. The most recent stable release, version 3.6.0.1, was issued on April 24, 2026.