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Known limitations

Moray translates Blender scenes into MoonRay. Most scenes render close to Cycles, but it is a different renderer with its own defaults. Each render prints to the console (Window > Toggle System Console on Windows; the terminal Blender was started from on macOS and Linux) what was approximated or skipped and what ran on the CPU instead of the GPU.

Look and features

  • Materials. Principled and classic Cycles node graphs are translated to MoonRay materials (with OSL for pattern nodes) as closely as possible, not 1:1. Untranslated nodes are printed to the console.
  • Caustics are approximate and optional. Glass and water let light through, tinted, instead of tracing refracted caustics (Glass Lets Light Through, on by default). Reflective Caustics keeps glossy reflections of bounce light, softened by Filter Glossy and the clamps. Sharp caustic patterns are not a goal.
  • Light Path worlds collapse to one light. A world that shows the camera something different from what lights the scene (a Mix Shader driven by Light Path) renders its lighting branch for every ray. Use the World's Camera contribution weight to change only the background. See HDRI and world.
  • Sky Texture: Multiple Scattering is not supported (it renders as a flat colour). Single Scattering, Preetham and Hosek / Wilkie are.
  • World Volume (fog on the World) is not rendered; use a volume object.
  • Emissive meshes cannot be light-linked. Light linking and shadow linking work on lights; an emissive mesh with its own linking renders unlinked, with a warning.
  • Spot lights with an elliptical cone (non-uniformly scaled spots) render a round cone, with a warning.
  • Camera: the anamorphic aperture Ratio is not applied (warning).
  • Cycles Film Exposure is not applied. Moray's beauty is unscaled scene-linear; apply exposure in comp or in the view transform.
  • View layer filters Surfaces, Curves, Volumes and Motion Blur are not exported (warning); Environment is.
  • Film Transparent has no checkbox in Moray's render properties yet. Set it while the scene is on Cycles or EEVEE, or with bpy.context.scene.render.film_transparent = True.
  • Pref (rest position AOV) does not cover meshes with a Subdivision Surface yet.
  • Shadow catcher Indirect Shadows cover one bounce off a catcher surface and do not pass through partly transparent surfaces, volumes or subsurface objects.
  • Farm denoising needs the Per AOV EXR layout.
  • Toon shading has been removed.
  • USD: large USD production scenes imported through Blender's USD importer are not validated yet.

GPU

  • NVIDIA (Windows, Linux): direct lighting, shading and the bounce loop run on the GPU. Anything the GPU cannot shade goes back to the CPU for that hit only, never for the whole frame.
  • NVIDIA architectures: Turing and newer. Native code covers compute capability 7.5, 8.6 and 8.9; newer GPUs (RTX 50, H100) compile the included PTX on first use, so their first render starts more slowly. A100 / A30 (compute 8.0) and pre-Turing GPUs (GTX 10 series and older) are not supported and render on the CPU.
  • Apple Silicon (Metal): the GPU traces rays and the CPU shades. The full GPU route (GPU lighting, shading and bounce loop) is off by default on Metal, so Mac GPU renders gain less than NVIDIA ones.

Platforms

  • Linux needs glibc 2.34 or newer (built on Rocky Linux 9). RHEL / Rocky / Alma 8 and Ubuntu 20.04 are not supported.
  • x86-64 CPUs need AVX2 (Windows and Linux).
  • macOS: Apple Silicon only.
  • Blender: 5.2 or newer.

Licensing

  • Trial renders are watermarked; Cryptomatte, deep EXR and Windows farm renders (render.bat) need a paid licence.
  • An activation is tied to one machine and user account. Offline, Moray stays licensed for 7 days after its last successful check.