Two years ago DreamWorks Animation made the exciting decision that they would open-source their MoonRay renderer that's been used in production for a variety of animated feature films. That initial open-source drop took place last year as OpenMoonRay and since then it has continued to be improved as an open-source project.

OpenMoonRay 1.6 is out today as the newest update to this open-source production MCRT renderer. The OpenMoonRay 1.6 release adds initial support for Apple Silicon processors, including acceleration using Apple's Metal API. The OpenMoonRay tools are all working now on Apple Silicon M1/M2/M3/M4 along with the Hydra render plug-in and other functionality.

Some new features with OpenMoonRay 1.6 include adaptive light sampling, Intel's Open Image Denoise (OIDN) engine is added to the hdMoonray denoiser, multi-threaded GPU access, improved CPU affinity control, and a variety of other rendering enhancements.

OpenMoonRay 1.6 also brings build system improvements, cgroups support is now treated as optional, and there are many bug fixes.

Downloads and more details on the OpenMoonRay 1.6 release via GitHub .