MoonRay for Modo 0.3.51

Native Windows experimental release for Modo 16.1v9. Download the kit and the windows-runtime ZIPs and follow INSTALLATION.md. The content ZIP is optional: it adds MoonRay's ten example scenes to the asset library. All three unpack to a MoonRayForModo folder; merge them into one. The kit finds its bundled runtime folder by itself, so no paths or environment variables need setting.

The full list of changes, with pictures, is in What's new in 0.3.51.

New since 0.3.50.2

The preview window

• Draft: the scene as clean outlines, with nothing rendered until you press Region and drag; then only that part is rendered, among the lines.
• Region is a button you drag with; R, G, B, A channel buttons; a colour probe under the pointer; EV and Gamma with one-click resets; Export AOVs as Images.
• The tick that keeps the preview following the scene is now called Live.

Rendering with MoonRay

• Safe Denoising: stop a MoonRay render at any time and keep it, with all its buffers, denoised. Continue then takes a stopped preview up where it stood.
• Bake Selected Mesh to Texture, deep EXR output, more render settings and one-click outputs, light path presets with checking as you type.
• Mesh lights are seen glowing; MoonRay light items can be linked; an object can cast no shadow onto chosen objects; Subsurface Neighbours on a material.

The MoonLightIPR preview (the GPU preview engine, shown as "MoonLight" in 0.3.50; the name echoes DreamWorks' earlier rasterizer MoonLight)

• Hair, skin and curves shaded with MoonRay's own materials; fog and VDB clouds with their glow; volume bounces.
• Rod, barn door, cookie and VDB light filters; textures on every kind of light; render regions.

Materials and scenes

• Modo's Fur material grows fur, with its curls, clumps, kink, frizz, strays and weight maps.
• Blinn and Ashikhmin highlights match Modo's from a roughness of about 0.2 up; smooth GTR highlights are closer; a material's smoothing angle is followed.
• MoonRay's materials are in the Shader Tree's Add Layer list under Custom Materials; a material can go on selected polygons; OpenPBR and glTF surfaces import from MaterialX.
• Imported MoonRay scenes keep their light, shadow and shadow receiver sets, and show progress while they open.

Working with the plugin

• The asset library shows pictures of things to use, each with one button for what it is for.
• MoonRay Content: MoonRay's ten example scenes (CC0 and CC-BY, each with its licence), as the content ZIP.
• A MoonRay page in Modo's Preferences, including having the M key open MoonRay's Assign Material.
• Dense hair grows and re-renders several times faster.

Known limits

Windows and Modo 16.1v9 only; XPU and MoonLightIPR need an NVIDIA GPU and have been run on an RTX 3090 only. MoonLightIPR is an approximation of MoonRay. Very smooth highlights are still dimmer than Modo's, and Principled diffuse does not brighten with roughness as Modo's does. A glowing VDB volume, or a light with a cookie filter, renders in MoonRay's slower scalar mode. Safe Denoising and Continue are for MoonRay with Live off. Fur guides and the fur vector and width maps are not read. Open issues are in the issue tracker.

What was checked

The packaged kit and runtime ZIPs were unpacked into an empty folder and, with a bare environment, MoonRay rendered from there in XPU and CPU modes, the scene reader, VDB reader, hair grower and MoonLightIPR session started, and a mesh with a volume on one part rendered (tools/check_release_package.py). The content ZIP was checked for its layout and integrity, not installed from. The new features were each driven by script in a separate test copy of Modo on one machine; several were not looked at on screen, as the per-feature notes in the repository say. No clean-machine install, other GPU or other driver was tried.