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DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

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Re: DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

#21
post #10

i'm curious: what is the incentive for dreamworks to open-source this? surely having exclusive access to a parallel renderer of this quality is a competitive advantage to other studios?

They mentioned in this video[0] that they expect others, mainly other studios, to contribute to the project.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozd4JqquG3k&t=117

Re: DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even still, what's the incentive to open-source? So the community can bootstrap a better solution than Pixar?

By showing they care about open source, there's a chance they'll attract developers and animators who care about that.

Seems targeted at CentOS7, support for which is sunset in little over a year. Smells a bit like abandonware, hoping for adoption by unpaid volunteers.

Still, dumping it into FOSS community is not the worst graveyard for commercial software...

Re: DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

#26
post #4

For anyone that is curious, this is the paper that describes the core vectorized path tracing architecture in Moonray: http://www.tabellion.org/et/paper17/MoonRay.pdf Extracting sufficient coherency from path tracing in order to be able to get good SIMD utilization is a surprisingly difficult problem that much research effort has been poured into, and Moonray has a really interesting solution!

> Extracting sufficient coherency from path tracing in order to be able to get good SIMD utilization is a surprisingly difficult problem

Huh, I'd have assumed SIMD would just be exploited to improve quality without a perf hit, by turning individual paths into ever so slightly dispersed path-packets likely to still intersect the same objects. More samples per path traced...

Re: DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

#27
post #10

i'm curious: what is the incentive for dreamworks to open-source this? surely having exclusive access to a parallel renderer of this quality is a competitive advantage to other studios?

The competitive advantage is in storytelling, not necessarily visual fidelity. People will watch a somewhat worse looking movie with a better story than a better looking movie with a worse story. And honestly, can anyone really tell slightly worse graphical quality these days when so many animated movies already look good?

The exception, of course, is James Cameron and his Avatar series. People will absolutely watch something that looks 10x better because the visual fidelity itself is the draw, it's the main attraction over the story. This is usually not the case in most movies however.

Re: DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

#28
post #25

Wonder how it fares against the monopoly of Pixar’s Renderman.

I don't think there is a monopoly renderer.

There isn't even a monopoly within Disney, they acquired Pixar 17 years ago but Disney Animation Studios still develop their own Hyperion renderer completely independently of Pixar/Renderman.

Re: DreamWorks releases OpenMoonRay source code

#29

Anybody has a success with build & run it under Linux? (Debian 11.x/Ubuntu 22.04.x)

The docs are for centos but from the looks of it I don't see any major roadblocks for Debian based distros?

https://docs.openmoonray.org/getting-started/installation/bu...

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