Moray documentation
Moray is a production path tracer for Blender 5.2, built on DreamWorks' OpenMoonRay. It installs as a Blender extension and renders Blender's own scene data: Cycles materials, lights, worlds, hair, volumes and motion blur are translated straight into MoonRay's scene format (RDL2). Rendering runs in a separate worker process, so a renderer crash does not take Blender down with it.
These guides match Moray 0.9.0.
How Moray plugs into Blender
Moray is a Blender render engine (engine id MORAY), chosen in Render Properties > Render
Engine. It is not a Hydra render delegate: it does not go through Blender's Hydra / USD
render path. It reads the Blender scene directly, so Blender materials, lights and the World work
without conversion to USD first.
Guides
| Guide | Topic |
|---|---|
| Installation | System requirements, installing the extension, updating and removing |
| Licensing | Trial, activation, deactivation, seats and offline use |
| Getting started | First render, CPU or GPU, sampling, denoising, output files |
| Lights and contributions | Blender and Moray lights, contribution weights, linking |
| HDRI and world | Environment lighting, Sky textures, portals, alpha |
| AOVs and light groups | AOV browser, presets, LPEs, light groups, EXR layout |
| Shadow catcher | Passes, plate lights, holdouts, Nuke recipes |
| Farm rendering | Package export, render.sh / render.bat, licences on nodes |
| Known limitations | What differs from Cycles, platform limits |
| Troubleshooting | Common problems and what to check |
Highlights
- CPU and GPU. CPU vectorized rendering on every platform. On NVIDIA GPUs (CUDA / OptiX), XPU runs direct lighting, shading and the bounce loop on the GPU; anything the GPU cannot shade goes back to the CPU for that hit only. On Apple Silicon (Metal), XPU traces rays on the GPU and shades on the CPU.
- Production AOVs. Arnold-style light AOVs and light path expressions, light groups, Cryptomatte, deep EXR, data passes, and a shadow catcher with the passes a compositor expects. The renderer writes raw scene-linear EXRs itself; no compositor nodes are needed.
- Arnold-style light controls. Per-light and World contribution weights, Cast Shadows and Max Bounces.
- Farm packages. Export a self-contained scene folder and render it on nodes without Blender.
Product page and purchase: Moray.