I'm guessing it's a combination of genuine goodwill (Dreamworks has a history of open-sourcing stuff) and wanting to be able to hire people who already have experience with their renderer instead of having to train every new hire. Not to mention the improvements that will surely be made to it once anyone can contribute a pull request. Whatever their reasoning, I'm hyped because it seems like an unconditional win-win -- artists get a great new render engine, Dreamworks gets kudos + free development + market/mind share.
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?
I disagree. Dreamworks doesn't make their money because of their rendering engine, they make it because of their movies. The engine is a necessary and integral tool for making those movies, but the engine alone is not the beating heart of Dreamworks. Open sourcing MoonRay is a smart move because it means they can start hiring people who already have prior experience with it, as well as benefit from the free optimizations and improvements the OSS community will surely make!
Having a rendering engine that's really good is useless unless you have the talent to use it to make a movie, and Dreamworks is going to maintain their branding and reputation for a long time regardless of whether their tech is open source or not.
They aren't "giving away the key" because the render engine is not the key. It's a complement, and they're simply commoditizing their complement.
While I agree that high quality art is going to become completely commonplace over the next decade or two, I really don't think it's tied in any way to one company releasing their internal render engine to the public.
There is a lot of staffing churn in the film world and many films are built by farming out work to dozens of separate VFX studios.
I speculate that having this open source increases its popularity, which makes more likely that any given potential hire or VFX company will have experience with it, which makes it easier for DreamWorks to ramp up new hires or contract out to third party companies.
When I was at EA, we switched from a proprietary UI tool (which was quite well suited for consoles) to Flash (which wasn't) entirely because it eased staffing problems even though the technology itself was a worse fit. The best tool is often the one that people you can hire already know.
Yeah. They've open sourced OpenVDB and other smaller things before, and have contributed things to Embree and OpenSubDiv, but those were libraries/storage formats, not entire production-capable renderers.
At the same time however, does their renderer give them that many advantages? As someone who works on a (sort of) competing proprietary renderer, it's a lot of work and effort to do it and support it, and maybe they want to build a community around that from smaller studios and compete with Renderman a bit for mindshare?
I can imagine a few reasons why they'd do this, but some of it may just be 'why not'. Studio Ghibli has done the same thing with their animation software and it hasn't turned into a disaster for them. Making movies, especially movies that people will pay to watch is hard, and any serious competitors already have their own solutions. If people use moonray and that becomes a popular approach, competitors who don't use it are at a disadvantage from a hiring perspective. Also, DreamWorks controls the main repo of what may become a popular piece of tooling. There's soft power to be had there.
This won't be their entire pipeline though. People will have to use the open source version in vanilla DCCs without all of Dreamworks' integrations, so will only be exposed to a bit of it in terms of configuring the renderer's options.
I'm not really sure if they are competing with Unreal. Large studios will probably never use real time rendering for the final render unless it achieves the same quality. Dreamworks have built a renderer specifically for render farms (little use of GPUs, for example) which means they are not targeting small studios at all, rather something like Illumination Entertainment or Sony (think Angry Birds movie).
It's all cool and awesome, but why put all those resources into new renderer, when one could contribute to Blender and such, which are way more mature?
I disagree -- a large part of the lookdev process at animation studios involves single artists working on single workstations with single GPUs while they work on their part of the pipeline. I'd wager that Dreamworks almost certainly does big distributed renders for the final frames of the movie, but a large number of the in-between steps and still-frame test renders probably happen in individual employee's machines -- not to mention that having an engine that can preview the render in near-realtime is a staple of modern 3D pipelines now that we have such beefy graphics cards.
Even small companies can create competitive high-end renderers today so it's not much of a differentiator. Filmmaking is about human talent mostly, not technology. (Same thing happened in live-action filmmaking, anyone can afford the equipment today.)
But there's a huge advantage to being the first high-end renderer to go open source, so lots of small studios will adopt it if it's as solid as it looks.
It'll become available in Blender.
Maintenance will then get extended to the community, including (most likely) support for alternate shading schemes (Material X/Lama has decent momentum right now, converging with Sony's OpenShadingLanguage).
Apache 2.0 is an ideal license for this kind of project.
> surely having exclusive access to a parallel renderer of this quality is a competitive advantage to other studios?
The renderer is an important of the VFX toolkit, but there are more than a few production-quality renderers out there, some of them are even FOSS. A studio or film's competitive advantage is more around storytelling and art design.
That’s neat. Does anyone know why they are targeting a 3D animation workload, specifically? Is there software for rendering ran on Linux machines that’s used in industry?
I won't really complain if there are just 2 render engines out there in the market, given that both are open source. It will make work hell lot easier for so many developers and the competition and development will stay healthy.
Maybe they intend to do periodic source drops from their internal version, rather than developing in the open? That's not ideal but it's still more open than any other heavy duty renderer.
They might be worried about having to dance on eggshells to avoid accidentally revealing anything about their upcoming films, if the public could see every single commit they make.
This looks absolutely fantastic. If you're interested in the technical details currently available, check out the about page[0] on the official MoonRay site, or this presentation from SIGGRAPH 2017[1]. I'm particularly excited for the HeatMap render pass, seems like a really practical way to identify what's bogging your scene down. Not to mention the gorgeous volumetric rendering this engine is capable of (see How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden Realm[2]).
Really impressed that Dreamworks is making this move. They've made some of my favorite films of all time (the Dragons franchise genuinely changed my life and is a major part of why I love filmmaking, film scores, and 3D rendering) and I'm glad to see they're doing this. I can't wait to try MoonRay in Blender once a community integration exists!
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