A Spooky MoonRay October Update!

Here is the October update on the progress towards open sourcing MoonRay.  Much of the update is continuation of work already in progress, and the ongoing testing and validation of that work in the MoonRay environment.
 

The MoonRay Team is still aiming for late this year for opening the GitHub repo and making the source code available. They’re currently working with a few pre-release partners to ensure the Linux build process is a stable and robust experience.

• The build system generator has been migrated to CMake, and work is underway to ensure that this build of MoonRay is used internally as well as for the external releases and for all future development.  This work is just past the halfway point.
• Hydra delegate testing has been expanded to include the McUsd scene, to help validate the USDPreviewSurface material and associated utility nodes.
• The last remaining internal dependency is being removed, which will allow for building and running MoonRay both with and without a Docker container.
• Improvements have been made to multi-machine rendering and with some significant gains in efficiency improvements.
• Beta testing is being carefully expanded with select partners to help test MoonRay in environments outside of DreamWorks.
• The MoonRay documentation effort is progressing well, standing up Doxygen for API and iterating on end-user documentation.
• Aside from the work to open sourcing MoonRay, features continue to be added as part of the continuous support of DreamWorks productions and pushing the look and capabilities of movies being rendered with MoonRay.

Ongoing work

• Documentation, focused first on the end-user.
• Responding to beta issues in more diverse environments than our internal environment
• Working to get a workflow to accept external contributions and publish back to the community

MoonRay thanks you for your interest and patience as they work towards a sustainable initial release.

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