
Disney’s New Production Renderer ‘Hyperion’ - mineral_or_veg
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/disneys-new-production-renderer-hyperion-yes-disney/
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rustyconover
Whenever I read about new renderers I think I'm completely intellectually
inept even with what I think is a reasonably well-rounded computer science
education. It is like reading about string theory in a way. Sure, I can grasp
the concepts, but the details and minutia are fascinating and admittedly a
little beyond my immediate comprehension. I remember when POV-RAY was amazing
when it ran all night to produce just one image with some reflection on a 486.

How time and Moore's law flies...

~~~
reedlaw
I suggest taking a look at Physically Based Rendering [1]. It goes through an
advanced rendering system in a literate coding style. That is, the physical
explanations are interspersed with the code of an open source renderer [2].
I'm not sure how it compares with this Disney renderer, but it should go a
long way towards demystifying how these things work.

1\. [http://www.amazon.com/Physically-Based-Rendering-Second-
Edit...](http://www.amazon.com/Physically-Based-Rendering-Second-
Edition/dp/0123750792)

2\. [http://www.pbrt.org/](http://www.pbrt.org/)

~~~
berkut
PBRT's an excellent book if you want to play with / build / understand
raytracing renderers.

Some of the knowledge is not-quite state of the art any more, but everything's
still relevant. And there's a third edition coming soon.

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boulos
Brent and the team at Disney Feature Animation have always pushed complexity
like crazy. Most people keep telling them to just think procedurally or reuse
elements, but Brent prefers to let the artists do whatever they want and the
system should handle it. Since cores are cheaper than humans this is a good
long-term tradeoff, but YMMV since very few studios would bother doing so much
explicit detail (as opposed to procedurally tweaked variations).

~~~
frozenport
>> Since cores are cheaper than humans

I don't want to be a sourpuss, but there is a limit beyond which MPI stops
scaling, when you look at the program runtime 60% of time is spent in
MPI_Wait. Past 80k nodes you can't go much faster no matter how much money you
got, I believe this is precisely the problem they address by intelligently
grouping similar rays.

~~~
z-e-r-o
You forget that rendering a movie is almost infinitely scalable. Imagine, even
when using only single-threaded code, you could scale for 130,000 nodes as
there are about this many frames in a 90 minute movie at 24 fps. This is not
totally true of course, for example you might want to do light or particle
system calculation which persist across frames, but the general rendering bit
is extremely scalable.

~~~
berkut
Bandwidth allowing of course - that's often the bottleneck when you're
rendering production scenes with +300GB of textures :)

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highCs
The paper is here: [https://disney-
animation.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/production...](https://disney-
animation.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/production/publication_asset/70/asset/Sorted_Deferred_Shading_For_Production_Path_Tracing.pdf)

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Rodeoclash
Clicked thinking it was a Disney adaptation of the novel with the same name.
In retrospect, it would be an unlikely adaptation for Disney to undertake ;)

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DerekL
Walt Disney Studios was once located at 2719 Hyperion Avenue in Los Angeles.
It's surely named after that. The Walt Disney Company also used the name for
other things, like the publishing company Hyperion Books, and the Hyperion
Theater at California Adventure.

[http://blog.wdwinfo.com/2013/07/28/the-walt-disney-
hyperion-...](http://blog.wdwinfo.com/2013/07/28/the-walt-disney-hyperion-
studios-1929-1939-the-foundation-of-an-empire/)

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jwatte
Quote: Disney pioneered the use of special camera rigs that would render the
foreground with one ‘stereo camera’ or solution, while rendering the
background with another.

I saw that, and my brain hated it. I even tweeted about what I thought it was
at the time. This is an absolutely terrible effed, and I don't understand why
they do it.

~~~
sjwright
The article explains why they do it.

 _" Since a hero character close to camera felt attractive with a stereo
convergence, that would mean the background in the same shot would be too
extreme and unpleasing on the eye. Instead of dialing down the stereo effect
overall, Disney pioneered the use of special camera rigs that would render the
foreground with one ‘stereo camera’ or solution, while rendering the
background with another. Thus the foreground character would appear round and
with more fullness, but their background would appear more relaxed, less
stereo pronounced."_

~~~
ianlevesque
Yep. It's also worth remembering that different people respond physiologically
to 3D movies very differently [1]. Disney thought the effect was useful enough
to patent and use for more films, so it's unlikely everyone responds that
negatively.

1\.
[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%253Adoi%252F10.1371%252F...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%253Adoi%252F10.1371%252Fjournal.pone.0056160)

