Creative GenerationVerified

Reviewed and published by trentmaziarz, May 11, 2026. Discovered and drafted by our automated research pipeline.

DreamWorks Animation deployed MoonRay, its in-house production renderer, across all of its recent feature films including How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Kung Fu Panda 4, The Wild Robot, and The Bad Guys 2. MoonRay includes AI-powered denoising that cleans up visual noise in rendered images, allowing artists to see near-final quality results faster during production.

Details

MoonRay is a Monte Carlo ray-tracing renderer developed internally at DreamWorks and used on all recent feature films. It incorporates GPU render denoising via Intel's Open Image Denoise, an AI-based image processing tool that removes noise artifacts from partially rendered frames, allowing artists to work with lower sample counts and faster iteration times. MoonRay was first used on the short film Bilby in 2018, made its feature debut on How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World in 2019, and was open-sourced by DreamWorks in March 2023 under an Apache 2.0 license. It remains in active internal use at DreamWorks and was used on The Wild Robot (2024) and The Bad Guys 2.

Products affected

DreamWorks Animation feature filmsMoonRay (open-source)

Sources & Evidence

News Article

DreamWorks Animation releases MoonRay 2.40

CG Channel·Feb 2026

https://www.cgchannel.com/2026/02/dreamworks-animation-releases-moonray-2-40/

News Article

MoonRay

Wikipedia·Mar 2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoonRay

Company Disclosure

MoonRay Production Renderer

OpenMoonRay.org (DreamWorks Animation)·Mar 2023

https://openmoonray.org/

Company Disclosure

DreamWorks Animation Announces the Release of MoonRay as Open Source Software

DreamWorks Animation·Mar 2023

https://openmoonray.org/MoonRay_Open_Source_Launch_Press_Release.pdf

Cite this record

Trace Foundation. (2026). DreamWorks Animation: DreamWorks Animation deployed MoonRay, its in-house production renderer, across all of its recent feature films including How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Kung Fu Panda 4, The Wild Robot, and The Bad Guys 2. MoonRay includes AI-powered denoising that cleans up visual noise in rendered images, allowing artists to see near-final quality results faster during production (data as of 2026-05-11) [Data set record]. AI Trace. https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/3fa4b137-744e-4a3a-8f08-2ed25bff5a33. Accessed October 5, 2026.

Stable link: https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/3fa4b137-744e-4a3a-8f08-2ed25bff5a33
Data as of: May 11, 2026
Last verified: Not recorded

How to cite AI Trace

Other practices by DreamWorks Animation

Creative GenDreamWorks Animation used AI for crowd simulation and character motion retargeting in Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024), allowing the studio to reuse complex movement data from earlier films and apply it to thousands of background characters with varied visual appearances in densely populated city scenes.ProductivityDreamWorks Animation deployed an internal machine learning model server called ForestFlow to manage the deployment and lifecycle of ML models used in its animation production pipeline, particularly for scheduling and optimizing rendering jobs. DreamWorks open-sourced ForestFlow in 2020 through the Linux Foundation AI project.ProductivityDreamWorks Animation uses an AI and machine learning system to automatically monitor its animation production infrastructure, detect anomalies, and send alerts to engineers before problems disrupt film production. The system is powered by NetApp Active IQ and runs continuously across the studio's internal IT environment.

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