Developed by Framestore, OpenQMC has improved the fidelity and speed of rendering Hollywood blockbusters such as Barbie, Superman, Wicked, F1 the Movie and How to Train Your Dragon
LOS ANGELES, CA, October 7, 2025 – The Academy Software Foundation, the motion picture industry’s premier organization for advancing open source software development, has announced its newest project: OpenQMC. Contributed by Academy Award winning visual effects studio Framestore, OpenQMC aims to improve the fidelity and efficiency of rendering photoreal, moving images for film, TV, gaming and advertising.
A huge part of visual effects involves rendering complex 3D scenes, characters, and environments to create photorealistic or stylized imagery. This rendering process often relies heavily on techniques like ray tracing which simulates light paths by randomly sampling directions, light sources, and surfaces. Which random samples to choose is critical for render performance and are selected using Monte Carlo techniques.
Lincoln Wallen, Chief Technology Officer at Framestore Company 3 Group gives the background to the challenge: “While powerful, traditional Monte Carlo methods produce a lot of ‘noise’ or ‘grain’ in the image, particularly with fewer samples. For a clean image, we often need to render for a very long time, which is not only costly and time consuming, but limits the number of iterations we can feasibly do, hampering creative exploration and decision making.”
Josh Bainbridge, Head of Rendering at Framestore and lead designer of OpenQMC explains: “OpenQMC gets us better pixels faster; whether that is selecting from thousands of physical lights or sampling advanced volumetric effects. An index of samplers and techniques, OpenQMC gets the most out of the maths that underpin the library to improve the quality of the rendered image for less compute cost.”
Developed alongside Framestore’s in-house renderer Freak, OpenQMC improves the fidelity and realism of the final image, enhancing intricate effects like soft shadows, depth of field, motion blur, and indirect lighting. The results of this powerful combination can be seen in the projects that have passed through Framestore’s global studios in the last three years, including Paddington in Peru, Thunderbolts*, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Civil War and Mickey 17.
OpenQMC features include:
- C++ library for sampling Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) points for reduced compute.
- Supports different architectures across both the CPU and GPU.
- Simple API for integration into production graphics applications.
- Solutions for different sampling use cases such as physically based lighting.
- Tools and statistical testing for development and analysis.
“Our friends at Framestore have demonstrated artistry and technical innovation through countless award-winning projects in motion pictures, commercials, and episodic content. We are grateful that they decided to contribute openQMC to the Foundation, and we look forward to its further adoption and development in our open source community,” shared David Morin, Executive Director of the Academy Software Foundation.
Get involved with OpenQMC by joining the Academy Software Foundation’s #openqmc Slack channel and the openqmc-discussion mailing list.
About Academy Software Foundation
Developed in partnership by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Linux Foundation, the Academy Software Foundation was created to provide a world-class home for open source software developers in the motion picture and broader media industries to share resources and collaborate on technologies for image creation, visual effects, animation and sound. The Academy Software Foundation is home to 19 projects and four working groups. For more information about the Academy Software Foundation, visit https://www.aswf.io/.
About Framestore
Framestore is a multi Academy Award-winning creative studio that combines talent and technology to reframe the possible in film, content, advertising and immersive experiences. Framestore is home to over 3,000 storytellers and innovators united by a mission to bring life to everything they create. Founded in the UK in 1986, Framestore has studios in New York, LA, Chicago, Montreal, London, Melbourne and Mumbai.
The company’s ambitious slate of recent and upcoming projects includes Paddington in Peru, Mickey 17, Gladiator II, Wicked, How to Train Your Dragon, F1 the Movie, Superman, Thunderbolts*, Together, Fantastic Four: First Steps, Mortal Kombat 2, Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age, Wicked: For Good, Avengers Doomsday and Project Hail Mary.
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