MoonRay GUI Viewer

The moonray_gui executable is the interactive rendering counterpart to moonray. It displays the render in-progress in a graphical window, and enables you to navigate the camera using the keyboard and mouse. You can also view individual color channels and any RenderOutputs that are defined in your scene.

This tool was meant to be used primarily as a developer tool rather than for production artists. It is especially useful during testing and when working directly with RDLA files via a text editor.

When the render is complete the resulting beauty render is written to disk, as well as any additional images that are specified via RenderOutputs

Command-line options

Most of the command-line options are the same as the moonray executable, with a few exceptions, so we won’t list them all here.

Use the -h flag to display the full list of command-line options.

$ moonray_gui -h

One key difference with moonray_gui is that the input RDL2 files are automatically “watched” for changes, and the render updates/restarts to reflect any changes to any of the input files.

Deltas

While similar to the RDL2 input files specified with the -in command-line argument, delta files are RDL2 input files specified with the -deltas command-line argument. Deltas are handled differently, and expected to contain only small updates to the existing scene.

During interactive renders with moonray_gui the delta files are also watched for changes, and the render is updated immediately to reflect those changes.

Examples include changing the color or position of a light, moving the camera, or changing the color of a material.

$ moonray_gui -in scene.rdla -deltas my_updates.rdla

Depending on the nature of the changes specified in a delta file the renderer may essentially restart.

Camera modes

There are two supported modes of navigation: orbit and free_cam

Orbit is the default mode, but you can change this on the command-line by specifying -free_cam, or by using the o key to toggle between modes at run-time.

Hotkeys (common to both modes)

Hotkeys (Orbit mode)

In this mode (the default), the camera orbits around a fixed point in the scene. You can choose a new pivot using Crtl+LMB, but note that it doesn’t currently work when clicking on curves or points.

Hotkeys (Freecam mode)

This mode is modeled around the wasd scheme common in first person shooters. The mouse control differs from the orbit mode in that LMB rotates the camera around the current camera position, rather than that of some world space location. The result is that it feels like how you would look around in a typical FPS game. Used in conjunction with the translation keys, this allow you to “fly” around the scene.

Denoising in moonray_gui

Denoising is controlled by several hotkeys that may be used any tine during interactive rendering:

The OptiX denoiser is preferred for interactive rendering because it has higher performance (i.e. less lag) than the CPU-based Intel Open Image Denoise. This is mostly because the Intel denoiser competes with the rendering for CPU resources, while the OptiX GPU-based denoiser runs completely on the GPU and is able to run unimpeded.

The denoiser can use auxiliary buffers to improve the denoising quality. These buffers contain the normals and/or albedo data. These need to be specifically set up in the RDLA RenderOutputs so the denoiser knows which AOVs to use. E.g.

RenderOutput("/output/diffuse_albedo") {
   ["file name"] = "albedo.exr",
   ["result"] = 7, -- material aov
   ["material aov"] = "D.albedo", 
   ["denoiser_input"] = "as albedo",
}

RenderOutput("/output/result/normal") {
   ["file name"] = "normal.exr",
   ["result"] = 3, -- state variable
   ["state variable"] = 2, -- "N"
   ["channel format"] = 0,
   ["channel_suffix_mode"] = "rgb",
   ["denoiser_input"] = "as normal",
}

The denoiser_input attr defaults to “not an input”.

The filenames can be different than shown here, i.e. the albedo output doesn’t need to be “albedo.exr” and the RenderOutput doesn’t need to be named “/output/diffuse_albedo”. The denoiser will find any render outputs that are tagged with the denoiser_input attribute, thus the names are not important.

OpenColorIO

moonray_gui supports OpenColorIO-v2 for refplat v2021 and above.

Usage

Users may supply one .ocio config file to specify the transformation from scene-referred linear space to ACES or some other color space. By specifying an OCIO file via the $OCIO environment variable, users can specify which .ocio config to use. If no config file is provided (or if the file path is bad), a raw config file is created (basically a no-op). The hotkey z can be used to toggle between the previous method of color grading and the new method using OCIO. 

If the -apply_lut command-line option is used (or if you aren’t using refplat v2021 or above), OCIO support will be disabled

Color Grading Transformation Order

1. Apply exposure
2. Apply user gamma
3. Channel Filtering (RGB, RED, GREEN, BLUE, ALPHA, or LUMINANCE)
4. Apply display/view transform specified in config OR apply 1.0/2.2 gamma
5. Clamp [0, 1]