mastodon 4.7.3Rendering Engineer at Disney Animation, working on Disney’s Hyperion Renderer and more. Previously at Pixar, Dreamworks, Cornell, Penn. Views here are my own.
My favorite paper from SIGGRAPH this year was "Taming Optimization Variance in Compact Neural Shading Networks" by Bitterli et al; I think this paper will be seen as a really influential paper over the next several years.
(1/3)
https://research.nvidia.com/labs/rtr/publication/bitterli2026taming/
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!
Here's an awesome new blog post by Maxime Heckel on rendering realistic skies and atmospheres. There's a ton of really cool interactive widgets illustrating each of the steps; I highly recommend giving it a read and giving the interactive widgets a try!
https://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/on-rendering-the-sky-sunsets-and-planets/
This week's issue of Animation Obsessive features a wonderful article about Studio Ghibli's color designer, Michiyo Yasuda. Her work was just gorgeous; I really admire how Ghibli films keep a more toned down natural palette without going muddy/murky. A lot of modern animation just reaches immediately for the brightest loudest primary colors you can find.
Lots and lots and lots to learn from here!
https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-artist-who-colored-ghibli
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.
I thought of another one of these memes. No debate needed on this one; this one simply is 100% objectively correct.
Gaussian splats are really cool tech, but I don’t understand why people classify it as AI. It’s point clouds with a ML optimizer; all pretty “classical” stuff. Very cool clever stuff (especially the optimizer), but arguably even less AI than Neural Radiance Fields are, which at least need a neural network to run.
Sure, genAI can generate Gaussian splat clouds now, but that’d be like saying JPG and TXT files are AI tech because genAI can make JPGs and text too.
There's a thread blowing up over on the bird site where someone posted what they say is an AI generated painting in the style of Monet, and people absolutely ripped it apart, quickly identifying everything wrong with it.
The troll plot twist: it's actually a real Monet painting. You can go see it in the Neue Pinakothek museum in Munich (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nympheas_71293_3.jpg).
I'm a strong no on AI art, but I think this thread says a lot more about people than it does about AI art.
Here’s a cool talk from GPC 2025 on the architecture of Blender’s Cycles renderer. There is no one right answer to designing a renderer; as a rendering engineer, I really like seeing how different renderers choose different tradeoffs to meet user needs:
RE: @independent@flipboard.com
My car can do a half-marathon even faster, and a fighter jet can do it faster still, and an orbiting spacecraft can do it in like 3 seconds.
The impressive thing about half marathon times isn’t the time, it’s that a human did it.
Adam Savage did an incredible behind-the-scenes video at IMAX on how they scan 1570 film to digital and print digital back to 1570 film. It's amazing stuff, but the amount of one-of-a-kind irreplaceable super-old hardware involved is frankly terrifying. Like, no joke, the entire process is at any given moment basically one CRT tube or one tension spring or one drive motor away from completely failing.
3D Gaussian Splats is fast to rasterize but bad for ray tracing, Radiant Foam is great for ray tracing but not good to rasterize; this paper promises a differentiable representation good for both.
I haven't read the paper yet, but it's going straight to the top of the to-read pile!
To be honest, I vastly prefer this to the name that something like POSIX would give, which would be something cryptic like "afRepReIfDFDENE2()" with an input type of void* and output type of int. At least with really long names you can easily figure out what it does.
Apple posted a fun behind the scenes for their MacBook Neo intro video. There’s so much cool creative stuff! Some of it was CG VFX, some was practical, there’s a surprising amount of old school stop motion, and a lot was a blend of all of the above. This looks like it must have been a ton of fun to make!
Every once in a while I receive spam emails to my work account that are addressed not to me, but to "Walt". As in "Walt Disney". Stuff like "Hey Walt, sign up for our CRM to find new customers".
I don't know why but I find it super hilarious every time it happens.
@i3d is one of the coolest graphics conferences every year in terms of content, but this year there’s an added cool factor: this year it’s being hosted at Lucasfilm’s campus in the Presidio! Obv go for the content, not the location, but the location sure is cool!
The papers list just got posted: https://i3dsymposium.org/2026/papers.html
I feel like @siracusa@mastodon.social might have gotten the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State mixed up in this week’s @atpfm@mastodon.social episode when he was making the point about John Ternus not having gone to a great school and still succeeding.
If not, then the take on the show was basically“You don’t need a great school to succeed, for example, John Ternus went to a top 10 ranked Ivy League school and he did fine!”, which is… a bit of a strange take.
Sure Sony/Canon/Leica/Fuji/Hasselblad are cool, but Nikon? Nikon cameras are NASA’s go-to _for space_.
There’s a Z9 on Artemis II. I use a Z8, which is identical to the Z9 minus a bottom grip, and if it’s good enough for NASA, it’s good enough for me!
I have one major bone to pick with baseball at the Olympics: they got the name wrong. The name of the final shouldn’t be “Men’s Baseball Final (Medal)” or whatever it is; it should be “Olympic Baseball Classic”.