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MoonRay Renderer joins ASWF as hosted project

Jürgen Firsching
20.05.2026
MoonRay lands at ASWF as a hosted project, keeps DreamWorks engineering support, and gets a July Open Source Days keynote slot in Los Angeles.
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For those who don’t know the tool: MoonRay is a production path tracer with a USD Hydra render delegate for tools using OpenUSD, positioned in rendering and lookdev next to ASWF staples like OpenColorIO.

The Academy Software Foundation has added MoonRay as a hosted project, keeping the renderer under foundation governance while opening contributions to a broader community. DreamWorks Animation developed MoonRay as an open source production path tracing renderer and has used it on every one of its feature films since 2019, including The Wild Robot and The Bad Guys 2. The project uses the Apache 2.0 license and is developed in C++.

A serene forest scene bathed in dappled sunlight filtering through tall trees. Lush greenery and vibrant wildflowers bloom on the forest floor, while soft shadows play among the large, smooth stones. The atmosphere is tranquil, inviting quiet reflection.

MoonRay includes support for distributed rendering and a pixel matching XPU mode that processes bundles of rays on the GPU as well as the CPU. It also includes bundled path tracing and a USD Hydra render delegate for integration into content creation tools that support the OpenUSD standard, which should make interactive preview workflows less of a custom science project in teh average pipeline.

The ASWF angle

MoonRay now sits alongside other hosted efforts in the ASWF roster, including OpenEXR, OpenVDB, OpenTimelineIO, and Open Shading Language. If your facility already treats OpenColorIO as plumbing, this is the same neighborhood.

For contributors, the project points developers to openmoonray.org and to the ASWF Slack workspace for a MoonRay channel at slack.aswf.io. Documentation is published at docs.openmoonray.org, and the source repository lives under the OpenMoonRay organization on GitHub.

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Keynote season meets SIGGRAPH season

ASWF Open Source Days runs in Los Angeles on July 19 to 20, 2026, and the schedule aligns with SIGGRAPH 2026 timing. The keynote comes from DreamWorks Animation CTO Bill Ballew, with a talk titled How to Train Your Renderer: MoonRay’s Journey from DreamWorks’ Dragons to the ASWF.

The event listing describes July 19 as the main program day in Los Angeles, followed by July 20 as a full day of open source Birds of a Feather sessions within SIGGRAPH. The Call for Proposals remains open through May 24, 2026, via the Open Source Days event site.

As always, test new tools and new governance setups before you bet a production schedule on them, even when the feautres list looks exactly like what your render wranglers asked for.


https://openmoonray.org/

https://www.aswf.io/

Jürgen Firsching Author