MoonRay test conclusions

[BrianHanke]

I've had a few weeks now to play around with MoonRay and I wanted to do a quick write-up summarizing the good and the bad. (There is no ugly!) First, the positives:

1. Once you get building/installation figured out, MoonRay runs well on Linux and in Solaris. It's very stable and fast enough to be useable by indie/solo artists.
2. There are lots of great tools and materials and settings are easy to understand. MoonRay feels designed specifically to be artist-friendly.

That being said, in its current state MoonRay is not ready for general use. It's close, though! In my view there are a few things that have to happen:

1. Top priority should be a Windows build. Trying to get something like this working in multiple Linux distros is painful. I imagine building on Windows is going to be very difficult. Hopefully some pro developers will take an interest and make it happen before long.
2. Houdini integration is missing some key workflow elements. For example, there is no native way to save to RDL. You either have to use the (very underwhelming) export feature in the Solaris viewport or export to USD and translate to RDL. The latter barely works and needs lots of manual tweaking. Render Geometry Settings nodes are currently empty, but DreamWorks is aware and probably will fix soon. Rendering to disk directly from Solaris seems to be broken in some (most?) Houdini builds. I haven't had a chance to test if it indeed works in the recommended, very recent, builds.

I love MoonRay's potential. A world-class, artist-friendly, battle-tested renderer released at no cost and open source is AMAZING. Huge thanks to DreamWorks for making this happen and for being so active and helpful on GitHub.

I think with some hard work on the part of the community MoonRay will be one of the top picks for artists of all levels looking for a great renderer. I'm excited to follow the project and contribute where I can.

[bodibod]

Thank you Brian !
I am running the install on RL9.1, I will let you know how it goes but seems pretty cool via apptainer.