DreamWorks and Canonical Develop Snap Installer for MoonRay – ASWF
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DreamWorks and Canonical Develop Snap Installer for MoonRay
By Academy Software FoundationJuly 15, 2026No Comments
Curves, Copyright 2026 DreamWorks Animation. All rights reserved. Rendered with MoonRay.
Fresh on the heels of MoonRay joining the Academy Software Foundation as a hosted project, two of the Foundation’s member companies – DreamWorks and Canonical – have collaborated to introduce a new Snap installer for MoonRay, which makes MoonRay more easily accessible to a wide range of Linux users.
MoonRay is a high-performance, open source production path-tracing renderer originally developed by DreamWorks Animation and used on all of the studio’s feature films since 2019. Snaps are applications bundled with their dependencies, able to work across a wide range of Linux distributions. In its initial release, the Snap installer for MoonRay works on the 40+ Linux distributions that have the snapd daemon enabled, including Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Arch Linux, and others.
“This new Snap installer is a fast and easy way to get MoonRay up and running on Linux systems, whereas previously, if you wanted to try out MoonRay you’d have to have the software expertise to build from source code across 20+ repositories and integrate multiple library versions,” said Randy Packer, Senior Manager at DreamWorks. “Having a Snap installer is a huge time-saver and makes MoonRay much more accessible to all graphics professionals and enthusiasts, regardless of their programming know-how.”
Glass of Water, by aXel, from "Rendering Resources", curated by Benedikt Bitterli. Rendered with MoonRay.
The Academy Software Foundation will be hosting its annual Open Source Days conference this week, with DreamWorks Animation CTO Bill Ballew set to deliver the keynote. Ballew’s talk, “How to Train Your Renderer: MoonRay’s Journey from DreamWorks’ Dragons to the ASWF,” will explore the evolution of MoonRay from a proprietary DreamWorks tool to a cornerstone of open source rendering. Ballew will cover the technical challenges of “breaking out” of the studio, the strategy and lessons learned on building a sustainable community, and why the Academy Software Foundation is vital for the project and its path forward.
Additionally, the Foundation is hosting a MoonRay Birds of a Feather session at SIGGRAPH. Join us on Monday, July 20 at 11:00 AM Pacific at the J.W. Marriott, Gold Ballroom 4, to learn more about MoonRay and get involved with its ongoing development.
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