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.
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.
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'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.
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!
I have no experience with moonray, but it being a render, the answer would be.. No.
The renderer is only one piece of the entire animated movie production pipeline.
Modeling -> Texturing ~ rigging /Animation -> post processing effects -> rendering - > video editing
That's a simplified view of the visual part of producing a short or long cgi film
It is a lot of knowledge to aquire so a production team is likely made of specialists and sub specialists (lighting?) working to a degree together.
The best achieving software, especially given its affordability is likely Blender. Other tools lile cinema4d, Maya and of course 3d smax are also pretty good all in one products that cover the whole pileline, although pricey.
Start with modeling, then texturing, then animation. Etc. Then dive into the slice that attracts you the most. Realistically you aren't going to ship a professional grade film so you may as well just learn what you love, and who knows perhaps one day become a professional and appear in the long credit name list at the end of a Disney/Pixar, Dreamworks hit.
I'd guess that the volume rendering in MoonRay is pretty top notch considering Dreamworks was also responsible for creating OpenVDB. Furthermore, while their characters and environments are often stylized, watch a few minutes of How To Train Your Dragon 3 and you'll see their volumetric rendering is stunningly believable.
Which Disney films use Unreal for final render? Disney has two separate path tracing renderers that are in active development and aren’t in danger of being replaced by Unreal.
These renderers are comparable in use case & audience to MoonRay, which is why I don’t think you’re correct that MoonRay needs external contribution to survive.
“Used unreal” for on-set rendering is hand-wavy and not what you claimed. Final render is the goal post.
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.
The tool may be good, but the output visuals are only as good as the artists that use said tools. They can open source the tools all they want and try to hire all the talent that can use it. :)
Yes, I have to second this. While there is some edge to technology in the render sphere, no one went to see Moana or Sea Beasts due to the amazing water effects. They went because of word of mouth or advertising and were subsequently awed by said effects.
You can have the most advanced visual effects and still make a terrible movie. And you can make a great movie with slightly outdated effects and still wow people (Mitchels vs The Machines is a great example).
Dreamwork, being in the business of movie-making and not technology as a service, only benefits from an open renderer atmosphere. Pretrained talent, open source collaboration and contributions to improving their software and PR wins.
Major animated movies take years to develop, and they don’t like to change the build process during. I used to cover a major animation studio for a major Linux vendor and they did in fact use very old shit.
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'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).
Thanks for laying that out. It's very interesting. Maybe it's on the Blender roadmap to become attractive to movie studios, but I haven't checked.
A question on pipelines: are those different from what's mentioned on Blender's Pipeline page? [1]
> Finally, the major studios like to have support contracts to expedite fixes to blocking issues.
It seems like blender has something along those lines provided by the Blender Institute [2]
>> Co-Development with Blender Institute
>> If your company or studio has specific development targets or needs, you can contact the Blender Institute to discuss options.
>> We will hire or involve the developers for topics that align well with the Blender roadmap and benefit the contractor well. Such agreements can have milestones and deliverables. Co-development will especially work well when aligned to other projects that run in Blender Institute. Only projects that involve multiple months of work will be taken in consideration.
Ok this is way fun and drags me back to the days I was diligently trying to build a 3D rendering engine from first principles (sort of, I had Glide to put stuff on the screen).
The renderer is perceptually better than the one that is included in my CAD package (TurboCAD) for pretty much all materials. So I'm guessing they will snarf it and dump the proprietary renderer and replace it with this stuff if they can.
But the really interesting idea that popped into my head was this; could Google offer 'rendering as a service'?
Specifically they have a zillion machines, many of which are doing nothing important, and they have this rendering package, and they have a scheduler that can put things on any machine. Imagine a service where you sent them a suitably detailed model description, and a set of lights, could they send you back a rendered image? Could you parameterize changes to the model description over time so that they could send you images in time based on your models? Could they do say 480 renders 'free' per month and then maybe $0.19/render over 480 in a single month?
Could you create a studio of modellers who would design models, and animators that would animate those models over time, and a director who would compose those animations into scenes? This is basically Pixar without the expensive renderfarm. Does that enable new studios to bring their own vision to life? Does it offer a cost effective service to places like Pixar which allows Google to make money on otherwise idle resources? Curious minds want to know :-)
DreamWorks has a lot of nice tech; they released OpenVDB 1.0 which is a voxel library earlier this year which is rather great. They've done a lot of raytracing.
Tintin was raytraced from what I understand, using PentaRay (Weta's own raytracer.)
Pixar waiting this long to incorporate more raytracing probably has little to do with their abilities and more to do with historical reasons. Renderman traditionally did stuff a certain way and it has worked great so far for them. There's algorithms invented by Pixar people in most 3D-apps, so their technological contribution has been huge.
In the end, how you achieve the result is not important. Only the visual results. VFX & animation is all smoke and mirrors :)
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