iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

More fun old CineFex finds: this amazing ad in the June 1997 issue from Blue Sky Studios looking for interested applicants. I think this must have been in the middle of production on their "Bunny" demo short, well before the first Ice Age went into production.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

So I'm working on a small sideproject to convert all of the old CineFex iOS app digital issues into nice, high-res, print-layout-accurate, OCR'd/searchable PDF files. More on that later. Along the way I found this ad from the April 1981 issue. What a wild time that was!

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I finally saw The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX. What an astounding piece of filmmaking. I think it's easily Nolan's best film to date. I can't reiterate enough just how amazing the 1.43:1 70mm film IMAX GT experience is. (Pic is from the BFI IMAX screen, but I saw it at Citywalk in LA)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Here's a neat free procedural rock generator tool that got released earlier this week. This is very cool and very handy! Especially since I just happen to be modeling something at the moment for a hobby project that requires a lot of rocks. tools.kogus.dev/rockstone/

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Update on this: I (somewhat irresponsibly) bought a Nikon F4 and I got it with the optional waist-level viewfinder module, and now I totally get it. This is super fun to use, and the F4's focus assist / autofocus makes it actually practical.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I thought this was a pretty funny take:

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Not going to lie I kind of super admire this and this sounds like I’m really going to like it. There’s something fun and wild about a museum that is just one guy’s voice and it’s just the stuff that he likes, damn whatever the critics think. Disclaimer: I have a Lucas Museum founding membership.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

So on one hand I love the idea of waist-level viewfinders on film SLRs, but on the other hand... on a 35mm SLR, how does one get anywhere near to accurate manual focus with a waist-level viewfinder? Itseems too small to judge focus well unless you just shoot f/22 all day?

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

M6 has not two but three CPU core types: super, perf, and efficiency cores. Hopefully that finally clears things up for folks who were under the misconception that super cores were just a rename from perf cores when they're really a different design. www.apple.com/newsroom/202...

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

They’re going to build a statue of Andrew Friedman in front of Dodger Stadium some day, and when they do it should be this pose.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Another recent Animation Obsessive article that I really like: this one about Hayao Miyazaki's gorgeous image boards. Miyazaki's image boards aren't storyboards, but they're not fleshed out concept art either; they kind of sit somewhere in between. animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-image-...

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

A huge part of the problem with big tech is that at the highest levels it's almost entirely run by people who would rather do this than just talk to their kids.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Oh well that's easy for me. I think I've seen Back to the Future like at least two dozen times. Back to the Future is pretty much as close to a perfect film as there is.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Another SIGGRAPH/DigiPro thing I liked: Weta's new fire solver from Avatar 3. As usual for Alexey Stomakhin's work, this was astoundingly cool. Neat trick: to make the fire tornado spin, regular forces didn't work well, so they... spun the world instead. dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10....

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

A talk I really liked at SIGGRAPH 2026: Dreamworks presented the stylized volumetrics they used on Bad Guys 2. There's no actual volumes at all! It's all handdrawn inspired stuff: some 2D, some projected onto 3D geo. Really cool/clever stylization work! dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

At this year's RenderMan Art & Science Fair, I gave a Stupid RenderMan Trick talk about hacking black hole gravitational lensing into RenderMan. The project was inspired by Oliver James and Kip Thorne's work for Interstellar, and after the talk... I got to meet Oliver James! This was so cool!

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Our last talk of the day and for SIGGRAPH 2026 is "A Short Among the Stars: Pipeline Adaptation when Everything is a Volume in Disney's Versa". Earlier this year Disney Animation released a new short, Versa, that has a world and characters made entirely out of volumes. (8/10)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Third talk of the day: "A Hybrid BVH Structure for Interactive GPU Ray Tracing". We have an internal GPU interactive path tracing Hydra render delegate used for early lighting work. Supporting 24 fps animation playback but also massive scale geo in a ray tracer is hard... (6/10)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Next up, my teammate Lea Reichardt and I will be presenting "Path Guiding in Disney's Zootopia 2". This talk is joint work between the Hyperion dev team and DisneyResearch|Studios. Last year Lea presented a course about how our next-generation path guiding system works... (4/10)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

The first talk is "Creating the Scales for Gary De'Snake in Disney's Zootopia 2", presented by members of our lookdev department. Are Gary's scales textures, or are they geometry? The answer is... it depends! This will be at 9:40am in 515A. (2/10)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Software ray tracer in one weekend isn't cool anymore. You know what's cool? Hardware ray tracer in one weekend.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Next: at 9:30AM in Hall K, Zootopia 2's leadership team will be presenting "Chasing De’Snake! - Developing the Worlds and Characters of Disney’s Zootopia 2". This is a behind-the-scenes whirlwind tour of the artistic and technical challenges behind making Zootopia 2. (4/8)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Finally for this thread, yesterday our Pipeline Infrastructure team presented a talk about a new service-based pipeline framework that saw first use on Zootopia 2. Making Disney Animation films requires creating and processing vast amounts of data... (8/10)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Second talk on Monday: "A Scalable UsdSkel Instancer for Crowds". This is another talk about crowds on Zootopia 2; this movie had the largest crowds we've ever attempted, and USD's existing support for crowds pipelines just could not scale to handle what we needed. (5/10)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

First up: "Disney’s Zootopia 2 Crowds: Bringing the Desert Festival to Life". This talk is about how our crowds team created the giant Desert Festival sequence in Zootopia 2, which had crowds with tens of thousands of animals. (2/10)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Not sure when this happened, but Pixar recently did a nice redesign of their publications page. All of their SIGGRAPH stuff for Hoppers and Toy Story 5 is up now. Lots of cool work there: painterly/pastel stylization, feathers, stylized fire and more! research.pixar.com

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Third paper: "Illumination-Aware Spatial Subdivision for Path Guiding" by Zheng et al. Path guiding is a technique where renderers learn indirect illumination distributions during a render and use that learned representation to continuously improve sampling... (12/17)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

...carry out fitting between arbitrarily complex source appearance models and a simple two-Disney BSDF model. Impressively, the neural approach used only requires on-off class training and then can do zero-shot online parameter estimation fast enough to even run on CPU. (9/17)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Second paper: "Neural Material Adapter: Transforming Complex Materials into Efficient Analytic BSDFs" by Sharma et al. Complex materials such as scanned BRDFs or complex layered models look amazing, but can be expensive to evaluate/sample at render time... (7/17)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

A fun added property of this approach is that it can be used to make a non-differentiable production renderer differentiable, which enables various cool inverse rendering based artist workflows such as painting in lighting effects and then solving for light parameters. (4/17)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

The neural net can then simulate how the effects of editing/moving/adding/removing lights and materials will propagate through the scene, without needing to re-run the full path tracer. This enables fast interactive relighting that closely predicts final quality renders. (3/17)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

First paper: "Neural Render Proxies for Interactive and Differentiable Lighting" by Sancho et al. The idea is: run a path tracer and record all of the paths, and then use the paths to train a scene-specific lightweight neural net that learns light transport in the scene. (2/17)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

In this thread: three cool rendering papers that DisneyResearch|Studios is publishing at EGSR this week. The authors of these papers are peers that I get the privilege of working closely with frequently, and these are projects I've been excited to watch develop! (1/17)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

From a technical angle, the nifty thing about this short is that it's a mix of hand-drawn 2D animation and 2D-styled CG animation rendered using Disney's Hyperion Renderer, but you can't tell at all which is which. Our artists knocked it out of the park; it's completely seamless.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

One kinda obscure feature in macOS/iOS/iPadOS/visionOS 27 that I'm really excited for is vastly improved RAW image processing. Apple hasn't upgraded their built-in RAW pipeline in a while, but the new ML-enhanced version looks pretty amazing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaFk...

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

A while ago the Nikon Rumors site made a fantasy mockup of what a rangefinder-style Nikon Z SP could look like. Basically a Nikon Zf but in a Fuji X100VI/X-E4 or Leica M style body (or alternatively: a retro Nikon ZR with an EVF). I would order this immediately if it was real.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Top of the ninth, two outs, Nats up 8-6… and then the Phillies went on to win this game by 5 runs lmfao The Phillies are the most entertaining team in all of baseball right now.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

The program for DigiPro 2026 has been posted! There's a lot of great talks this year; I'm really looking forward to Alexey Stomakhin's talk on WetaFX's new fire solver/system. If you're familiar with Alexey's work, you already know it's going to be mind-blowing. digiproconf.org/program/

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

One of my favorite things to do during production is to step through new shots coming out of the animation dept frame-by-frame, just to see what kind of goofy stuff the animators have done. This shot in particular has a lot of great blink-and-you'll-miss-it squash and stretch:

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

I'm not a big fan of phone cameras getting more and more AI generation features lately; I like photos that are actually real photos. To that end, earlier this year I started daily-carrying an old Fujifilm X-M1, and I really prefer it now to using my phone. (1/6)

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

On macOS 27 Golden Gate, all windows have the same corner radius again, the sidebar goes all the way to the edges again, and sidebar icons have color again. At last, our long national nightmare is over.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

I recently implemented Knuth-Plass style justified text layout using Pretext for my site. Here's a blog post with a lightly cleaned up version of my dev notes for this and a few other features; read only if you want to see me muddle through web stuff: (1/3) blog.yiningkarlli.com/2026/05/new-...

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

The Wikipedia article for Project Excalibur has an all-timer caption for this figure:

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Microsoft announced a NVIDIA RTX Spark based dev box, and I love that they went for a really out-there design instead of just aping the Mac Studio. The question comes down to price again though. $2K is an instantly interesting Mac Studio rival. $4K and up is dead on arrival.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Hey now, that's an unfair characterization, I never even tried to be a musician. Instead, I became a software engineer because I was bad at drawing.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

The new Jony Ive designed electric Ferrari.... looks kinda like a Prius? All of that effort and they made a dressed up Prius? I mean, I think the latest gen Prius actually kicks ass, but I never would have imagined Ferrari of all folks aping the Prius.

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