TLDR: Render Disney’s Moana scene in less than 10.000 lines of Swift code.

After Walt Disney Animation Studios released the scene description of the island in Moana some efforts were started to render it besides Disneys Hyperion. I am aware of the following render engines:

• Hyperion (naturally)
• Renderman
• PBRT
• Embree/OSPRay
• A hobby renderer from Joe Schutte (using Embree)
• Moana on RTX (using Optix)
• GPU-Mononui (using Optix)

Here I present another one, the Gonzales renderer, written by me. It is heavily inspired by PBRT and written in Swift (with a few lines in C++ to call OpenEXR and Ptex). It is optimized only as far as to be able to render it in a reasonable amount of time on a free Google Cloud instance (8 vCPUS, 64GB RAM). As far as I know this is the only renderer able to render Moana not written in C/C++. I wrote it with vi and command line Swift on Ubuntu Linux and Xcode on macOS so it should be relatively painless to get it compiled on these platforms.

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.