Another Open Source Days is in the books! Our annual flagship event — the biggest gathering dedicated to advancing open source in VFX, animation, and digital content creation — just wrapped in Los Angeles, and it was a big one.
Since we kicked things off back in 2019, Open Source Days keeps growing. Held alongside SIGGRAPH in LA, we packed the room this year with 500+ in-person attendees — plus even more tuning in via livestream.
Day one kicked off by a keynote from DreamWorks Animation CTO Bill Ballew on MoonRay’s evolution from an in-house studio tool to open source. The conversation kept going with additional talks and a World Cup viewing over lunch, and then concluded with a couple hundred of our closest friends at the nearby Prank Bar for a lively Beers of a Feather gathering. Day two included two concurrent tracks of Birds of a Feather sessions, with presentations from many of the Academy Software Foundation’s hosted projects and Working Groups.
Talks we can’t stop thinking about
A few sessions that stood out:
- Scott Geffert from The Metropolitan Museum of Art on why color fidelity matters when digitizing artwork
- Collin Dutter, Griptape by Foundry, on building AI-enabled artist workflows with studio-level security considerations
- Rebecca Bever, Walt Disney Animation Studios, on how the Zootopia 2 team vetted and used open source tools to bring their creative vision to life
All of the recordings from Open Source Days 2026 are now available on our YouTube channel for your viewing pleasure!
The big announcements
At Open Source Days, we also shared some exciting announcements impacting the future of the Foundation, and our broader industry.
- StEM3-VP is now available through DPEL
Together with the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), we announced that StEM3-VP, is available for download through the ASWF Digital Production Example Library (DPEL). StEM3-VP was designed specifically for in-camera visual effects workflows, and enables cinematographers to evaluate and validate LED volumes for virtual production. This initiative aims to provide the motion picture industry with assets to stress-test and evaluate technology prior to production.
- MoonRay just got way easier to install.
DreamWorks Animation and Canonical, both ASWF members, teamed up to launch a new Snap installer for MoonRay, which makes MoonRay more easily accessible to a wider range of Linux users. The initial release works on the 40+ Linux distributions that have the snapd daemon enabled, including Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Arch Linux, and others.
- Three new members joined the Foundation.
We’re excited to welcome CIQ as a Premier Member, Evercast as a General Member, and Rochester Institute of Technology as an Associate Member.
Coming up next on the calendar: join us for Dev Days on September 17. Learn more and register here – new contributors welcome!
