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Getting started

This page takes you from installing Moray to a first F12 render and its EXR files.

Install and activate

  1. In Blender 5.2: Edit > Preferences > Get Extensions, drop-down menu at the top right > Install from Disk..., and pick moray_blender_5.2_<platform>_<version>.zip.
  2. Optional: paste your licence key in Preferences > Add-ons > Moray and click Activate License. Without a key Moray runs as a trial: renders are watermarked, and Cryptomatte and deep EXR are locked.

System requirements are on the Installation page.

First render

  1. Render Properties > Render Engine > Moray.
  2. Switch the viewport to Rendered shading for interactive rendering. Moray's viewport updates in place for most edits (moving objects and lights, material values); structural changes reload the scene.
  3. Press F12 for a final render.

Your existing Blender scene is used as it is: Cycles materials, Blender lights, the World, hair, volumes, motion blur and the camera's depth of field are translated. The first time a Cycles-tuned scene switches to Moray, Moray copies its bounces, clamps and Reflective Caustics setting once; after that, Moray's own settings stand.

Moray is not a 1:1 Cycles clone. Each export prints to the console (Window > Toggle System Console on Windows; the terminal Blender was started from on macOS and Linux) anything it approximated or skipped ("Moray export: ...", for example an untranslated node or a missing texture), and the renderer prints anything it ran on the CPU instead of the GPU ("Moray render engine: ..."). Copy those lines into a bug report.

CPU or GPU

Render Properties > Sampling > Execution Mode:

ModeWhat it does
Auto (GPU when available)The GPU when this machine has a supported one, otherwise CPU Vectorized. The default.
CPU VectorizedThe CPU path tracer. Every feature, every platform.
CPU ScalarA slower CPU mode, for debugging.
GPU (OptiX XPU)Windows and Linux, NVIDIA. Direct lighting, shading and bounces run on the GPU.
GPU (Metal XPU)macOS. Rays are traced on the GPU, shading runs on the CPU.

The viewport and F12 each have this setting. If F12 is on Auto and the viewport is on GPU, F12 uses the GPU too. Images match between CPU and GPU within noise; only speed differs.

Sampling and quality

  • Sampling: Adaptive (default) keeps sampling only where the image is still noisy: Min / Max Adaptive Samples (16 / 1024) and Adaptive Error (32; lower is cleaner and slower). Uniform uses Pixel Samples, the square root of the samples per pixel (8 gives 64).
  • Light Paths: Max Depth (12) and per-type depths. The viewport caps Max Depth at 8. Clamp Direct and Clamp Indirect remove fireflies at the cost of some energy. Filter Glossy and Reflective Caustics work as in Cycles.
  • Light Paths > Volumes, Alpha & Noise > Glass Lets Light Through (on): light and bounce light pass through glass and water, tinted, so rooms behind windows and pool floors are lit without tracing caustics.

Denoising

Render Properties > Performance:

  • Final Render: Engine (MoonRay) denoises the beauty with OpenImageDenoise after F12 (default); Compositor leaves it noisy for Blender's Denoise node; Off.
  • Stop When Denoised (on, Engine only): ends the frame once the denoised image stops changing.
  • Denoise Light AOVs: denoise the light AOVs too (each row has its own toggle). Depth, IDs, Cryptomatte, deep and data passes are never denoised.
  • Viewport denoising, with Start After and Denoise Interval.

Output files

At the end of every F12 render the renderer writes the beauty and every AOV of the view layer to EXR itself. No compositor nodes are needed. Settings are in Render Properties > Cryptomatte & Deep EXR > EXR:

  • File: //render/{scene}_{view_layer}.####.exr by default. #### is the frame; {scene}, {view_layer} and {camera} are replaced.
  • Layout: Multi-Layer (one file per frame) or Per AOV.
  • Data in Own File (on): Cryptomatte, depth, normals and other data go to a separate _data EXR, lossless 32-bit float. The beauty and light AOVs are half float.
  • Compression: ZIP (default), ZIPS or PIZ, all lossless; DWAA / DWAB (lossy) apply to the beauty and light AOVs only.
  • Metadata: camera matrices, frame, render settings and each AOV's definition go into the EXR header.

Files are raw scene-linear for Nuke: the view transform is not baked in. Switching to Moray sets the output format to EXR but leaves colour management alone. Moray menu (top bar) > Apply ACEScg Color Defaults switches the working space to ACEScg and the view to ACES, if you want that setup. Cycles' Film Exposure is not applied to Moray's beauty.

AOVs and light groups are covered in AOVs and light groups.

Textures

Moray renders tiled, mip-mapped .tx textures. It converts every texture the frame uses automatically, into a moonray_tx/ folder next to the source image, or into a per-user cache when that folder is read-only. Conversions are reused until the source changes. Moray menu > Convert Textures to .tx converts ahead of time; Force Rebuild .tx redoes them. A texture that is missing or cannot be converted renders magenta, as in Cycles, and is printed to the console.

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