Last year at SIGGRAPH 2025, the Hyperion team from Disney Animation and the rendering research group at DisneyResearch|Studios presented our work developing Hyperion’s second-generation path guiding system for surfaces and volumes [Reichardt et al 2025] , built on top of OpenPGL [Herholz and Dittebrandt 2022] . At SIGGRAPH 2026, we have a talk that serves as a followup to last year’s course; our…
At SIGGRAPH 2026, my teammate Andrew Bauer and I have a talk about the hybrid BVH structure we use in Disney Animation’s in-house real-time GPU ray tracing previsualization renderer 1 . Our hybrid BVH structure is specifically designed around optimizing for 24 fps or better animation playback in large, complex production scenes. I think the cool thing about this talk is that it’s not really about…
Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Dark Mode 3. Sidebar Table of Contents 4. HDR Support 5. Knuth-Plass Style Justified Text Layout 6. Conclusion 7. References Introduction I recently implemented several fun new features on my site: dark mode support, a sidebar table of contents when the browser window is sufficiently wide, HDR support, and justified text layout using a custom high-performance…
Table of Contents 1. Making Zootopia 2 2. Frames from the Film 3. References Disney Animation’s movie for 2025 is Zootopia 2 , which is the studio’s 64th animated feature film. Zootopia 2 picks up where the first film left off, taking us deeper into the wonderful and wild animal world of the city. One of the really fun things about Zootopia projects is that each one expands the world further. The…
This year at SIGGRAPH 2025, Sebastian Herholz from Intel organized a followup to 2019’s Path Guiding in Production Course [Vorba et al. 2019] . This year’s edition of the course includes presentations by Sebastian on Intel’s Open Path Guiding library and on general advice for integrating path guiding techniques into a unidirectional path tracing renderer, a presentation by Martin Šik on how…
This year at SIGGRAPH 2025, Mark Lee, Nathan Zeichner, and I have a talk about a GPU texture streaming system we’ve been working on for Disney Animation’s in-house real-time GPU ray tracing previsualization renderer. Of course, GPU texture streaming systems are not exactly something novel; pretty much every game engine and every GPU-based production renderer out there has one. However, because…
The inside of Disney Animation’s Burbank building is basically one gigantic museum-quality art gallery that happens to have an animation studio embedded within, and one really cool thing that the studio does from time to time is to put on an internal art show with work from various Disney Animation employees. The latest show is a photography show, and I got to be a part of it and show some of my…
Over the past month or so, I’ve undertaken another overhaul of my blog and website, this time to address a bunch of niggling things that have annoyed me for a long time. In terms of pure technical change, this round’s changes are not as extensive as the ones I had to make to implement a responsive layout a few years ago. Most of this round was polishing and tweaking and refining things, but enough…
Table of Contents 1. Making Moana 2 2. Frames from the Film 3. References This fall marked the release of Moana 2 , Walt Disney Animation’s 63rd animated feature and the 10th feature film rendered entirely using Disney’s Hyperion Renderer. Moana 2 brings us back to the beautiful world of Moana, but this time on a larger adventure with a larger canoe, a crew to join our heroine, bigger songs, and…
This year at DigiPro 2024, we had a conference paper that presents a deep dive into Hyperion’s unique solution to the many-light sampling problem; we call this system “cache points”. DigiPro is one of my favorite computer graphics conferences precisely because of the emphasis the conference places on sharing how ideas work in the real world of production, and with this paper we’ve tried to combine…
Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. OpenGL on arm64 Windows 11 3. Building Embree on arm64 Windows 11 4. Running x86-64 code on arm64 Windows 11 5. Conclusion 6. References Introduction A few years ago I ported Takua Renderer to build and run on arm64 systems. Porting to arm64 proved to be a major effort (see Parts 1 , 2 , 3 , and 4 ) which wound up paying off in spades; I learned a lot, found…
Table of Contents 1. Making Once Upon a Studio 2. Frames from the Short 3. References Once Upon a Studio is Disney Animation’s newest short, which accompanied Wish ’s theatrical release last fall. Together, Wish and Once Upon a Studio celebrate 100 years of Disney Animation; while Wish tells a new story inspired by themes from across the past century of Disney animated films, Once Upon a Studio…
Table of Contents 1. Making Wish 2. Frames from the Film 3. References Disney Animation’s fall 2023 release is Wish , which is the studio’s 62nd animated feature and also the studio’s film celebrating the 100th anniversary of Disney Animation and The Walt Disney Company. Wish is a brand new story but is also steeped in the past century of Disney storytelling; while Asha and Star and Valentino’s…
This year at SIGGRAPH 2023, we have a conference-track technical paper in collaboration with Zackary Misso and Wojciech Jarosz from Dartmouth College! The paper is titled “ Progressive Null-tracking for Volumetric Rendering ” and is the result of work that Zackary did while he was a summer intern with the Hyperion development team last summer. On the Disney Animation side, Brent Burley, Dan Teece,…
Table of Contents 1. Making Zootopia+ 2. Frames from the Series 3. References The second of Disney Animation’s two short-form television series in 2022 is Zootopia+ , which was released in November of last year. Zootopia+ is comprised of six episodes set during Zootopia (2016) , showing us events that are interwoven with the events of the original movie. Much like how Baymax! was made, Zootopia+…
Table of Contents 1. Making Strange World 2. Frames from the Film 3. References Disney Animation’s fall 2022 release is Strange World , which is the studio’s 61st animated feature, and third original story in as many years. Strange World takes us to the land of Avalonia, a realm surrounded by impenetrable mountains and home to a society that blends elements of early 20th century pulp fiction,…
This year at SIGGRAPH 2022, Corey Butler, Brent Burley, Wei-Feng Wayne Huang, Benjamin Huang, and I have a talk that presents the technical and artistic challenges and solutions that went into creating the holographic look for Bruno’s visions in Encanto . In Encanto , Bruno is a character who has a magical gift of being able to see into the future, and the visions he sees of the future get…
Table of Contents 1. Making Baymax! 2. Frames from the Series 3. References Disney Animation has two short-form television series lined up for release in 2022 on Disney+, and the first of the two series is Baymax! , which is comprised of six episodes set after the events of Big Hero 6 and follows Baymax around San Fransokyo as he helps various people. Baymax! notably is the first time Disney…
Table of Contents 1. Making Far from the Tree 2. Frames from the Short 3. References Along with Encanto ’s release last fall, Disney Animation also released Far from the Tree , which is the studio’s newest short film. Far from the Tree was made in parallel with our last short, Us Again , but the two shorts have completely different visual styles. Both shorts were rendered using Disney’s Hyperion…
Table of Contents 1. Making Encanto 2. Frames from the Film 3. References For the first time since 2016, Walt Disney Animation Studios is releasing not just one animated feature in a year, but two! The second Disney Animation release of 2021 is Encanto , which marks a major milestone as Disney Animation’s 60th animated feature film. Encanto is a musical set in Colombia about a girl named Mirabel…
Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Disclaimers 3. The M1 Max Chip 4. Application to Ray Tracing 5. Results 6. Conclusion 7. Bonus Images and Acknowledgements Introduction Over the past year, I ported my hobby renderer, Takua Renderer, to 64-bit ARM. I wrote up the entire process and everything I learned as a three-part blog post series covering topics ranging from assembly-level comparison…
Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. 4-Wide Ray Bounding Box Intersection 3. Test Program Setup 4. Shared SSE/Neon Structs 5. Scalar Implementations 6. SSE Implementation 7. Neon Implementation 8. Auto-Vectorized Implementation 9. ISPC Implementation 10. Final Results and Conclusions 11. Addenda 12. References Introduction I recently wrote a big two-part series about a ton of things that I learned…
This year at SIGGRAPH 2021, Wei-Feng Wayne Huang, Peter Kutz, Matt Jen-Yuan Chiang, and I have a talk that presents a pair of new distance-sampling techniques for improving emission and scattering importance sampling for volume path tracing cases where low-order heterogeneous scattering dominates. These techniques were developed as part of our ongoing development on Disney’s Hyperion Renderer and…
Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Porting to arm64 macOS 3. Universal Binaries 4. Rosetta 2: Running x86-64 on Apple Silicon 5. TSO Memory Ordering on the M1 Processor 6. Embree on arm64 using sse2neon 7. (More) Differences in arm64 versus x86-64 8. (More) Performance Testing 9. Conclusion to Part 2 10. Acknowledgements 11. References Introduction This post is the second half of my two-part…
Table of Contents 1. Making Us Again 2. Frames from the Short 3. References Raya and the Last Dragon ’s release earlier this spring was accompanied Us Again , Disney Animation’s newest short film. Us Again is also included on the Blu-ray for Raya and the Last Dragon , and now that the Blu-ray is out, here are some brief notes about interesting rendering details from Us Again . Us Again is, of…
Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Motivation 3. Porting to arm64 Linux 4. Floating Point Consistency (or lack thereof) on Different Systems 5. Weak Memory Ordering in arm64 and Atomic Bugs in Takua 6. A Deep Dive on x86-64 versus arm64 Through the Lens of Compiling std::atomic::compare_exchange_weak() 7. Performance Testing 8. Conclusion to Part 1 9. Acknowledgements 10. References Introduction…
I recently noticed that my blog and personal website’s layout looked really bad on mobile devices and in smaller browser windows. When I originally created the current layout for this blog and for my personal website back in 2013, I didn’t really design the layout with mobile in mind whatsoever. Back in 2013, responsive web design had only just started to take off, and being focused entirely on…
Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Character Explorations 3. Skin Shading and Subsurface Scattering 4. Clothes and Fuzz 5. Layout, Framing, and Building the Shop 6. So Many Props! 7. Signs and Records and Books 8. Putting Everything Together 9. Conclusion 10. References Introduction Last fall, I participated in my third Pixar’s RenderMan Art Challenge, “Magic Shop”! I wasn’t initially planning…
## Table of Contents 1. Making Raya and the Last Dragon 2. Frames from the Film 3. References After a break in 2020, Walt Disney Animation Studios has two films lined up for release in 2021! The first of these is Raya and the Last Dragon , which is simultaneously out in theaters and available on Disney+ Premiere Access on the day this post is being released. I’ve been working on Raya and the Last…
Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Initial Blocking 3. Forest Floor 4. Making Moss 5. Filling out the Clearing 6. Mist and Atmospherics 7. Final Lighting 8. Conclusion 9. References 10. Footnotes Introduction I recently did a small personal art exercise to experiment with building out a detailed forest type of environment. I have worked with a detailed forest scene before, when I used one while…
Table of Contents 1. Making Once Upon a Snowman 2. Frames from the Short 3. References For the holiday season this year, Walt Disney Animation Studios has a small surprise release! Last month the studio announced the release of Once Upon a Snowman , which is now out on Disney+ as of last week. Once Upon a Snowman is a short film that takes place during the events of Frozen (2014) and follows Olaf…
Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Initial Explorations 3. Layout and Framing 4. UV Unwrapping 5. Texturing the Ship 6. Shading the Ship 7. Shading and Texturing the Robots 8. The Wet Shader 9. Additional Props and Elements 10. Rain FX 11. Lighting and Compositing 12. Conclusion 13. References Introduction Last year, I participated in one of Pixar’s RenderMan Art Challenges as a way to learn…
I recently implemented two techniques in Takua for solving the harsh shadow terminator problem; I implemented both the Disney Animation solution [Chiang et al. 2019] that we published at SIGGRAPH 2019, and the Sony Imageworks technique [Estevez et al. 2019] published in Ray Tracing Gems. We didn’t show too many comparisons between the two techniques (which I’ll refer to as the Chiang and Estevez…
Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Layout and Framing 3. UVs and Geometry 4. Texturing and Shading 5. Set Dressing the Treehouse 6. Building the Background Forest 7. Lighting and Compositing 8. Conclusion Introduction Every once in a while, I make a point of spending some significant personal time working on a personal project that uses tools outside of the stuff I’m used to working on…
Table of Contents 1. Making Frozen 2 2. Frames from the Film 3. References The 2019 film from Walt Disney Animation Studios is, of course, Frozen 2 , which really does not need any additional introduction. Instead, here is a brief personal anecdote. I remember seeing the first Frozen in theaters the day it came out, and at some point halfway through the movie, it dawned on me that what was…
This year at SIGGRAPH 2019, Matt Jen-Yuan Chiang, Brent Burley, and I had a talk that presents a technique for smoothing out the harsh shadow terminator problem that often arises when high-frequency bump or normal mapping is used in ray tracing. We developed this technique as part general development on Disney’s Hyperion Renderer for the production of Frozen 2 . This work is mostly Matt’s; Matt…
Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Publications 3. Additional Resources 4. Contributors 5. Made with Hyperion Introduction Every year at SIGGRAPH (and sometimes at other points in the year), members of the Hyperion team inevitably get asked if there is any publicly available information about Disney’s Hyperion Renderer . The answer is: yes, there is actually a lot of publicly available…
Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Problems with only Interface Tracking 3. Priority-Based Nested Dielectrics 4. References Introduction A few years ago, I wrote a post about attenuated transmission and what I called “deep attenuation” at the time- refraction and transmission through multiple mediums embedded inside of each other, a.k.a. what is usually called nested dielectrics. What I called…
Table of Contents 1. Making Ralph Breaks the Internet 2. Frames from the Film 3. References The Walt Disney Animation Studios film for 2018 is Ralph Breaks the Internet , which is the sequel to 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph . Over the past two years, I’ve been fortunate enough to work on a number of improvements to Disney’s Hyperion Renderer for Ralph Breaks the Internet ; collectively, these improvements…
Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Texture Caches and Mipmaps 3. Mipmap Level Selection and Ray Differentials 4. Ray Differentials and Path Tracing 5. Ray Differentials and Bidirectional Techniques 6. Camera-Based Mipmap Level Selection 7. Results 8. Additional Renders 9. References Introduction One major feature that differentiates production-capable renderers from hobby or research renderers…
The August 2018 issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics (Volume 37 Issue 3) is partially a special issue on production rendering, featuring five systems papers describing notable, major production renderers in use today. I got to contribute to one of these papers as part of the Hyperion team at Walt Disney Animation Studios! Our paper, titled “The Design and Evolution of Disney’s Hyperion Renderer”,…
Today at EGSR 2018 , Walt Disney Animation Studios announced the release of two large, production quality/scale data sets for rendering research purposes. The data sets are available on a new data sets page on the official Disney Animation website . The first data set is the Cloud Data Set, which contains a large and highly detailed volumetric cloud data set that we used for our “ Spectral and…
Almost three years ago, I rendered a small room interior scene to test an indoor, interior illumination scenario. Since then, a lot has changed in Takua, so I thought I’d revisit an interior illumination test with a much more complex, difficult scene. I don’t have much time to model stuff anymore these days, so instead I bought Evermotion’s Archinteriors Volume 48 collection, which is labeled as…
A long time ago, I made some posts that featured a cool Lamborghini Aventador model. Recently, I revisited that model and made some new renders using the current version of Takua, mostly just for fun. To me, one of the most important parts of writing a renderer has always been being able to actually use the renderer to make fun images. The last time I rendered this model was something like four…
Table of Contents 1. Making Olaf's Frozen Adventure 2. Frames from the Film 3. References After an amazing 2016, Walt Disney Animation Studios is having a bit of a break year this year. Disney Animation doesn’t have a feature film this year; instead, we made a half-hour featurette called Olaf’s Frozen Adventure , which will be released in front of Pixar’s Coco during Thanksgiving. I think this is…
This year at SIGGRAPH 2017, Luca Fascione and Johannes Hanika from Weta Digital organized a Path Tracing in Production course. The course was split into two halves: a first half about production renderers, and a second half about using production renderers to make movies. Brent Burley presented our recent work on Disney’s Hyperion Renderer as part of the first half of the course. To support…
Some recent work I was part of at Walt Disney Animation Studios has been published in the July 2017 issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics as part of SIGGRAPH 2017! The paper is titled “ Spectral and Decomposition Tracking for Rendering Heterogeneous Volumes ”, and the project was a collaboration between the Hyperion development team at Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS) and the rendering group…
Two standard features that every modern production renderer supports are subdivision surfaces and some form of displacement mapping . As we’ll discuss a bit later in this post, these two features are usually very closely linked to each other in both usage and implementation. Subdivision and displacement are crucial tools for representing detail in computer graphics; from both a technical and…
Table of Contents 1. Making Inner Workings 2. Frames from the Short 3. References Along with Moana ’s theatrical release last fall, Disney Animation also released a short film titled Inner Workings , which is also rendered using Disney’s Hyperion Renderer. The Blu-ray release for Moana is out today, and Inner Workings is included with the Blu-ray and digital releases. I didn’t work on Inner…
Table of Contents 1. Making Moana 2. Frames from the Film 3. Addenda 4. References 2016 is the first year ever that Walt Disney Animation Studios is releasing two CG animated films. We released Zootopia back in March, and next week, we will be releasing our newest film, Moana . I’ve spent the bulk of the last year and a half working as part of Disney’s Hyperion Renderer team on a long list of…