<story><title>Disney&apos;s Hyperion Renderer</title><url>http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/innovations/hyperion</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>couchand</author><text>I saw Greg Nichols give a talk about this at the UICC [0] this year.  It was a very entertaining talk covering the business and technical aspects of this project.&lt;p&gt;From the start the art team on Big Hero 6 wanted to make a really big movie.  They envisioned those big sweeping shots of San Fransokyo that made the technical folks shudder.  They have a massive rendering farm at their disposal but still probably wouldn&amp;#x27;t be able to render all the shots in time for the release; for one reason, because the art folks kept making changes, and for another, because they contain so many entities.  A handful of folks on the rendering team built a proof-of-concept renderer with support for the global-illumination look they wanted while also being able to handle the massive scale.&lt;p&gt;As the linked article mentions, the solution was to optimize a massively-parallel algorithm by finding coherent rays that can be efficiently calculated together.  It&amp;#x27;s a batch method: start casting a bunch of rays, identify similar rays and group them, calculate collisions for each group, cast reflected rays, identify similar rays and group them, etc.  What I like about it conceptually is that in a way it treats light as a field rather than as individual directed rays.&lt;p&gt;Their initial tests were rendering an infinite plane of generated buildings.  The dystopian metropolis was mesmerizing, and I think Disney would be wise to come up with some dark plot line to set there.  Anyway, someone way at the top (the director or art director I think) saw the proof-of-concept renderings and decided that it was the perfect tool to attain their vision of this movie, which, by the way, has a hard release date something like three months away.&lt;p&gt;So they proceeded to turn the proof-of-concept into a production-grade renderer in time to render all the frames and save the movie.  And somehow they pulled it off, they released a really beautiful movie, and they wrote a paper about it, too.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.acm.uiowa.edu&amp;#x2F;uicc&amp;#x2F;speakers.html#nichols&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.acm.uiowa.edu&amp;#x2F;uicc&amp;#x2F;speakers.html#nichols&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Disney&apos;s Hyperion Renderer</title><url>http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/innovations/hyperion</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>shocks</author><text>The Pixar online library is a really great resource.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;graphics.pixar.com&amp;#x2F;library&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;graphics.pixar.com&amp;#x2F;library&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>