ASWF’s Open Source Days bring together software engineers, developers and anyone else who touches open source software, for two days of presentations, collaboration and networking. 

Hosted annually by the Academy Software Foundation, Open Source Days is the leading event dedicated to open source software for visual effects, animation, and digital content creation. This year’s event will take place in Los Angeles, coinciding with the SIGGRAPH 2026 Conference.  

This year’s Open Source Days takes place July 19-20, 2026 at the J.W. Marriott L.A. Live hotel, and the Academy Software Foundation has now announced that registration is open, and shared the lineup. Open Source Days consists of two main components:  

• July 19: Open Source Days main program in-person in Los Angeles
• July 20: A full day of open source Birds of a Feature sessions within SIGGRAPH 

ASWF shared the information that in this year’s Open Source Days keynote, Bill Ballew,  CTO of DreamWorks Animation, will discuss the evolution of MoonRay as it transitioned from a proprietary DreamWorks tool to a cornerstone of open-source rendering. The talk will cover the technical challenges of “breaking out” of the studio, the strategy and lessons learned on building a sustainable community, and why ASWF is the vital next chapter for the project. 

Moonray, Dreamworks animation’s open source production renderer, joined the Academy Software Foundation last May. Moonray is an open source path-tracing renderer that has been used on every dreamworks animation feature film since 2019 including How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Bad Guys, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Kung Fu Panda 4, The Wild Robot, and The Bad Guys 2. 

MoonRay is a path-tracing renderer built from the ground up with no legacy code, designed for efficiency and scalability. It supports distributed rendering, an XPU mode that processes rays on both GPU and CPU, bundled path tracing, and a USD Hydra render delegate. It can produce looks ranging from photorealistic to highly stylized directly from the renderer.

MoonRay is  free and open source software released under the Apache 2.0 license, which permits commercial use, modification, and distribution. It is available at no cost through the Academy Software Foundation. MoonRay joins 20+ existing ASWF projects, including OpenColorIO, OpenEXR, OpenVDB, OpenTimelineIO, and Open Shading Language. 

Additional presentations during the event include: 

• Adopting Open Standards: Blender’s Journey on Supporting OpenPBR – Sebastian Herholz and Francesco Siddi, Blender
• ASC StEM3-VP – Virtual Production Evaluation Assets Joining DPEL – Jim Geduldick, Spaceboy Labs and Jay Holben, Independent Director and Producer
• On Color Fidelity: Applying 2D Scene-Referred Color Reproduction Standards to 3D Artwork Reproduction – Scott Geffert, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Building Studio-safe AI Open Source Workflows – Collin Dutter, Griptape by Foundry
• Bringing Arbitrary MaterialX BSDF Networks To RenderMan XPU – Francisco Gonzalez, Pixar Animation Studios and Jonathan Stone, Lucasfilm
• OpenUSD Proposals Across Domains: Challenges and Methodology – Aaron Luk, NVIDIA and Nick Porcino, Pixar

 Follow the link to see the full schedule. 

Registration is only $50 for the main program on July 19 and includes: keynotes and presentations, coffee breaks + snacks, lunch, event t-shirt, and our popular Beers of a Feather social mixer at Prank Bar from 5:30-8:30 PM. 

Employees of ASWF member companies and their subsidiaries are eligible to receive complimentary registration before July 1, 2026 as part of your company’s membership.

As part of the SIGGRAPH conference, ASWF will host a full day of in-person Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions on Monday, July 20, at the J.W. Marriott. Attendees must be registered for SIGGRAPH at the “Full Conference” or “Experience” levels in order to attend the BoF sessions. The full schedule of BoFs will be posted soon on the SIGGRAPH website and at this link: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-days/program/schedule/ .