[HN Gopher] Personal thoughts/notes from working on Zootopia 2
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Personal thoughts/notes from working on Zootopia 2
Author : pantalaimon
Score : 274 points
Date : 2026-01-07 12:29 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.yiningkarlli.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.yiningkarlli.com)
| xfour wrote:
| This is so cool, I'm glad the company allowed the author to
| release this to the public. People like myself with knowledge of
| some of the art and technology involved but that stand outside
| the industry can get a little bit of a sense how the SOTA of
| animation evolves.
|
| Secondly the bit about the evolution catching the unnamed studio,
| likely Pixar in production capability as of the first Zootopia
| certainly shows up on screen.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Yeah, I often cite Big Hero 6 (from 2014) as the place where as
| an animation fan I felt Hyperion (Disney's renderer) very
| _visibly_ in the end product out-paced Renderman (Pixar 's more
| mature renderer). Big Hero 6's wide shots get truly wide and
| the scale of its San Fransokyo is almost palpable in many
| sequences, showing off especially Hyperion's focus on being
| able to do dynamic crowd work and large crowd scenes and plenty
| of architecture surrounding that. (Zootopia in 2016 further
| cemented that Hyperion was great at crowd work.) It was one of
| my complaints with Pixar's Soul in 2020 that its New Orleans
| felt almost claustrophobic and isolated, no truly wide
| establishing shots, no real crowds to speak of, mostly just
| shots of one or two characters in close up on city streets that
| in the real world New Orleans would be bustling and busy. Real
| New Orleans has a different kind of claustrophia from big
| crowds and never feels isolating or as lonely. Some of that may
| have been the intended vibe for that particular movie, but some
| of that seems technical at this point from the different
| focuses Hyperion and Renderman have been given and how much I
| think Hyperion shows technical improvement and mastery of
| somethings that Renderman cannot seem to do.
|
| It somewhat suggests that Disney is correct in having the two
| studios compete in renderers rather than share one (even as
| they unify other parts of the process, such as this article
| mentions moving to Pixar's Presto tool as one of the things
| that happened in Zootopia 2's production).
| ykl wrote:
| Hi! Original post author here.
|
| When I first started at Disney Animation, at one point I
| asked Ed Catmull what the rationale was for staffing two
| separate rendering teams, and he had an interesting answer.
| His answer was that it turns out that even when Disney
| Animation was using RenderMan, the high end needs of the
| studio still required enough rendering developers/TDs that in
| terms of cost it was essentially no different than staffing a
| team to build an in-house renderer, and from that perspective
| he liked the idea of having two separate teams with different
| focuses/perspectives so that for hard problems the wider
| company got two attempts at coming up with good solutions
| instead of one.
|
| To this day the Hyperion and RenderMan teams work pretty
| closely together and share a lot of learnings/tech/R&D. The
| focuses are pretty different between the two renderers, and
| that's actually been pretty beneficial to both.
|
| The story with Presto is both a bit different and kind of
| similar. The two studios are now unified in using Presto, but
| Disney Animation now has an in-house Presto development team
| that co-develops Presto with Pixar. The two dev teams focus
| on the needs of their respective studios but move Presto
| forward together.
| dswalter wrote:
| What I like about this piece is how it shows the technical
| prowess underpinning the visual outputs in a film like what
| Disney puts out.
|
| I only wish it went further! There are a ton of lessons those of
| us outside films/games could learn from working in that kind of
| deadline-consttrained innovative landscape. Tell about how you
| fought against the rendering deadlines and sped up the snowscape
| frames by 30% to get it in under the wire!
| bzzzt wrote:
| There have been quite a few publications about Disney's
| renderer called 'Hyperion', for instance
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3182159
| ykl wrote:
| Hi! Author of the original post here. Please see:
|
| https://disneyanimation.com/publications/
|
| Or, for a continuously updated list of publications
| specifically about Disney's Hyperion Renderer:
|
| https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2019/07/hyperion-papers.html
| Scaevolus wrote:
| Most companies doing CGI work, both in games and movies, are
| quite open about their technical details. The whole industry
| relies on pooled research and development. While the actual
| code is typically confidential, publishing information serves
| multiple purposes for the work's publicity, the advancement of
| the field, the happiness of employees, and company prestige for
| recruiting people.
| lvspiff wrote:
| Hair, water, and wind - its crazy how those elements are the
| things that continue to have levels of improvement for these
| animated films yet for my eyes i keep thinking "well thats looks
| pretty solid to me" only to be outdone by the next movie and go
| "oh yeah that looks better somehow".
| maherbeg wrote:
| I totally agree. I love watching a small set of animated films
| over the holidays in time order to really see the technical
| progress. It's especially fun to go from something nostalgic I
| loved as a kid, to something I can really see the technical
| underpinnings of today.
| bicepjai wrote:
| Learning about these improvements gives incredible respect and
| appreciation for our eyes evolved over millennia.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| It doesn't seem to matter much for my enjoyment of the films
| though. Makes you wonder why we are investing in it.
| gpderetta wrote:
| For the art I suppose.
| al_borland wrote:
| 20 years ago I was saying this about video games. However,
| when I go back and look at video games from 20 years ago, I
| now see why they kept pushing things forward. Graphics were
| serviceable, but they're so much better now. That said, the
| game (or movie) still needs to be the most important thing.
| When a studio tries to lean on graphics as the selling point,
| it always ends up poorly.
| Loughla wrote:
| >That said, the game (or movie) still needs to be the most
| important thing. When a studio tries to lean on graphics as
| the selling point, it always ends up poorly.
|
| Counterpoint: Avatar. I have never heard someone say they
| loved that movie because of the amazing story. They like it
| because it's very, very, very pretty to look at.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I really didn't enjoy the latest movie, but I'd see the
| next just because it is visually quite interesting
| al_borland wrote:
| I've never seen Avatar for this reason. It seemed like
| all 3D hype. However, after 3 movies and 2 more planned,
| with the 3D hype long dead, are the visuals going to
| carry a 5 movie franchise from a director with over 20
| Academy Awards under his belt?
|
| I've been debating watching the movies now that there a
| few of them out, thinking there must be something there.
| However, I've never heard anyone actually talk about
| these movies in real life, which is still a concern.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| Is that true though? Most quality animated features included
| quality animation. The visuals of the beautifully hand
| painted early Disney movies were part of the art form. Toy
| story looks basic to us now but it being the first totally
| computer animated movie and the visual style that came with
| that was part of it. Movies are a visual medium, so I guess
| saying that the visual part of the movie doesn't matter much
| to you is like saying that the words a writer uses doesn't
| matter much to your enjoyment of a book.
| cubefox wrote:
| It helps looking at CGI with a known reference point, like
| human characters. Every flaw is much more visible than in a
| "cartoon" like Zootopia.
| cyberax wrote:
| Try watching the first Shrek movie to see how far we've
| progressed!
| marzchipane wrote:
| Very interesting and so many throwaway lines that could easily be
| entire blog posts by themselves!
|
| I wonder how hamstrung Disney is by their chosen animation style
| (wide-eyed cutesy characters, rounded edges, bright colours).
| Given the technical prowess on display here, what could they
| create if they gave their artists free rein to experiment like in
| _Love, Death, and Robots_? Or is it more that these constraints
| provide structure to work inside?
| Fazebooking wrote:
| People are already working for years on Zootopia 2 and every
| one of their technolical advances were driven by that movie.
|
| These inventions are represented at Siggraph and are often also
| research paper and land in the whole ecosystem (in software
| like hudini).
|
| LDR live from their ideas and stories and experiments with
| styles. I don't think its relevant for technology it would just
| be a tech demo.
| gpderetta wrote:
| constraints breed creativity.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Always love it when a company can have strong technical chops
| even when their main product/industry isn't necessarily the tech
| itself.
| Fazebooking wrote:
| I always say "most companies today are IT companies, they just
| don't know it".
|
| I would argue that Disney is definitily a big IT company and
| relies a lot on that tech.
|
| Perfect storytelling might need flaweless execution to not
| distract. cirque du soleil for example are also experts in
| every single aspect relevant to their show/business. Check out
| the YT video from their sound manager " Inside the Sound of
| Cirque du Soleil: Drawn to Life" this is so crazy but it
| explains so much especially how they control the audiance
| clapping.
| al_borland wrote:
| For me, being an "IT Company" or "Tech Company" means the
| tech is what drives the business decisions.
|
| Where I work, it's a b2b service company. We've had CIOs get
| up and say we're a tech company, but when push comes to
| shove, the IT org always loses to "the business". The
| business solutions are what are being sold, they really don't
| care what the tech is under the hood... even if the tech
| enables every product to exist at this point.
| zipy124 wrote:
| Yes, when people talk down on big corporations, it is stuff
| like this that gives me hope and I wish people could give them
| more credit for what they give back to society. People always
| ask "where is the modern Bell Labs" and I think the answer is
| simple: all around us.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I mean not many private corps are publishing unbiased
| scientific research papers these days. I think that's what
| people are referring to, an entire research division which is
| mainly or at least often working in the public good.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| I get the frustration of not seeing eg the next laser or
| transistor from a modern Bell Labs - but for a few hundred
| dollars an Indian teenager can build an app which could be
| used by a billion people using only free and open source
| technologies. There are _so many_ little inventions and
| contributions that needed to happen for that (and many other
| miracles) to be possible. The physical hardware frontier has
| definitely matured since Bell was at their peak but we
| continue to make rapid progress on the software /digital
| front.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| The showcase of frames at the end really broke something through
| for me. It's easy to simply sit in a theater or on your couch and
| watch the movie as a movie. But while the theater screen is
| large, you don't get to pause it. So nearly all of the incredible
| detail gets blurred in a way that makes it easy to be immersed in
| the movement and story, but also forget the art of visuals.
| Seeing those specific frames laid out, each one of those would be
| an incredible art piece on their own! They would all be extremely
| difficult to create for an individual and take so so much time. I
| always wondered what those 1000+ people in the credits were
| actually doing, now i know! I never realized the incredibly depth
| and thought and time and art that goes into every frame of an
| animated movie.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| For me it's also the style of animation.
|
| For some reason, if I don't think about it, instinctually I
| would always describe Overwatch (to take a gaming example) and
| Zootopia as "simple" graphics. My mind recalls big swathes of
| primary colours in relatively flat yet cheerful lighting,
| rounded/smoothed shapes, relatively little complex texturing or
| surface detail.
|
| It's when I pause overwatch that I start realizing 1. how much
| detail there is, and 2. How quickly and flawlessly it's
| rendered on relatively slow computers. And then I start truly
| appreciating the relentless optimizing work to make it "seem
| simple and fast" :).
|
| Same thing with Zootopia - I've enjoyed the movies (doesn't
| hurt that I have two young kids), but they would not come to
| mind if I were asked to name breakthrough or particularly well
| animated movies. Yet the detail and work is clearly there once
| you pause and examine :)
| munificent wrote:
| _> I would always describe Overwatch (to take a gaming
| example) and Zootopia as "simple" graphics._
|
| I think an art director would describe them as "readable".
| When there's a lot of detail and quick motion, it's important
| that the audience can very quickly recognize what they're
| looking at and what's happen. Otherwise, it just turns into a
| big jumble of chaos that the viewer can't follow, like in
| Michael Bay's Transformer movies.
|
| A big part of the art of movie making is telegraphic a sense
| of rich realism and complexity while still having everything
| clearly visually parsable. Doing that when cuts and action
| are fast is quite difficult.
|
| Doing it well affects every level of the production: the
| colors assigned to characters so they are separated from the
| background, wardrobe choices to also keep characters
| distinct, lighting, set design, texture, animation, focus,
| the way the camera moves. It all works together to produce
| one coherent readable scene.
| a_e_k wrote:
| A nice example of this is shown in Figure 2 of the paper
| "Illustrative Rendering in _Team Fortress 2_ " [1] from
| Valve. It shows how they tried to make the silhouettes of
| each character class distinct and readable. (And the paper
| also discusses the choices that went into the color
| palette.)
|
| [1] https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/NPAR07_
| Illus...
| orbital-decay wrote:
| In case of games, that's pretty much optional. Many games
| (e.g. Battlefield) take the opposite approach where
| spotting the enemy in the chaos is intentionally hard and
| a skill to master. I'm sure there are also intentionally
| less readable movies or at least scenes, although no
| immediate example comes to mind.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| There's an old, semi-retired YouTube video essay channel called
| "Every Frame a Painting". I disagreed with several of its
| essays, enjoyed many of them, but the biggest
| takeaway/agreement I got from that channel was that core spirit
| in the title itself. It is something I still find very useful
| reminder when thinking about films and/or criticizing them. The
| medium of a movie (or a TV show) is 12 or 24 (or more rarely
| 60) frames per second. We don't always reflect on how everyone
| of them in (even a "bad" movie) is essentially a painting. Art
| was involved to get that shot, that frame of the shot. Often
| art by lots of people, very few of them are the people you see
| _on_ that screen, yet their fingerprints and hard work still
| shows through. "Every frame a painting" is a good sentiment to
| remember, I think. Especially for animation, but for any movie.
| digestives wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this - it reminds of the film adaption
| of "The Peasants" novel which uses a painted animation
| technique made up of thousands and thousands of paintings.
| Quite literally, nearly "Every Frame [is] a Painting".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peasants_(2023_film)#Produ.
| ..
| kayson wrote:
| Such a great channel. I think it's fully retired now
| (again?).
|
| https://youtube.com/@everyframeapainting
| elAhmo wrote:
| Makes you wonder why the need for the incredible detail if we
| are just fine with blurry details.
| jerf wrote:
| We are "just fine" with blurry details, on some level... but
| a lot of processing a movie holistically comes from that
| level of detail being present. Even if few people walking out
| of the theater could put their finger on why the world felt
| vibrant, it'll come down to the fact those details were
| there.
|
| So much of movie making is like that. No normal person comes
| out of a theater saying "wow, the color grading on that movie
| really helped the drive the main themes along, I particularly
| appreciated the way it was used to amplify the alienation the
| main character felt at being betrayed by his life-long
| friend, and the lighting in that scene really sent that point
| home". That's all film nerd stuff. But it's the lighting, the
| color grading, the camera shots, all this subtle stuff that
| the casual consumer will never cite as their reason for
| liking or disliking the movie that results in the feelings
| that were experienced.
|
| They aren't necessary. People still connect with the original
| Snow White, and while it may have been an absolute technical
| breakthrough masterstroke for the time, by modern standards
| it is simple. But used well the details we can muster for a
| modern production can still go into the general tone of the
| film; compare the two next to each other while looking for
| this effect and you may be able to "feel" what I'm talking
| about.
| wat10000 wrote:
| We were fine watching movies on VHS tapes and small CRT TVs,
| but watching a high-quality encoding on a 4k TV is much
| better.
| moritonal wrote:
| I recently put together a system that trained a model to
| identify "background worthy frames" of TV shows. Animated shows
| scored often quite highly with a many frames being valid, I
| suppose an essayist would be able to explain why.
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| I wonder if there's any collaboration between the technical side
| and writing side?
|
| Specifically, I see incredible effort and time getting tiny
| details right on the technical side, but the storyline and dialog
| seems to not have had the same level of effort applied to it.
| nadis wrote:
| This article is full of so many interesting details. E.g. I found
| this passage on the technological progress in rendering snow from
| Frozen (2013) to Zootopia 2 fascinating:
|
| "To give an example of the amazing amount of detail in Zootopia
| 2: at one point during production, our rendering team noticed
| some shots that had incredibly detailed snow with tons of tiny
| glints, so out of curiosity we opened up the shots to see how the
| artists had shaded the snow, and we found that they had
| constructed the snow out of zillions upon zillions of individual
| ice crystals. We were completely blown away; constructing snow
| this way was an idea that Disney Research had explored shortly
| after the first Frozen movie was made in 2013, but at the time it
| was purely a theoretical research idea, and a decade later our
| artists were just going ahead and actually doing it. The result
| in the final film looks absolutely amazing, and on top of that,
| instead of needing a specialized technology solution to make this
| approach feasible, in the past decade both our renderer and
| computers in general have gotten so much faster and our artists
| have improved their workflows so much that a brute-force solution
| was good enough to achieve this effect without much trouble at
| all."
| mroche wrote:
| A similar approach was taken by Pixar when making the beach
| environment for the Piper short that was previewed with Finding
| Dory. It was absolutely mind-blowing.
|
| https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-tech-of-pixar-part-1-...
|
| Related but unlinked Part 2 on other aspects of Finding Dory:
|
| https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-tech-of-pixar-part-2-...
| a_e_k wrote:
| I was on the RenderMan team at the top and remember thinking
| it really neat that our system could stand up to that.
|
| I remember find it mind blowing when I learned that in Brave,
| the artists weren't just using a texture/displacement mapped
| surface for the clothing and armor. They were using tori
| primitives for the chain mail, and curve primitives for the
| clothing. (I.e., the clothing actually woven out of curve
| primitives for the threads.)
| soperj wrote:
| The technology is amazing, but rendering lifelike animation
| seems such an antithesis to what the medium allows. You
| literally can do anything and for some reason the choice is to
| constrain it to reality.
|
| The things that Don Hertzfeldt did with line drawings and a
| vacuum cleaner embrace the medium so much more.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| This here sums up modern day America. A bunch of brilliant people
| working day and night to churn out absolute slop.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| Did you see the movie and not like it or are you just trying
| for some edgy hot take?
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Not watching a movie under 8 on imdb
| 542354234235 wrote:
| Half of the last 4 Best Picture Oscar winners are below 8
| on IMDB. So edgy hot take, got it.
| mrkpdl wrote:
| You are missing out on a lot of good movies
| MisterTea wrote:
| I like how you are trying to appear sophisticated by
| hanging your film taste off someone else's opinions. What
| other great things have people told you to like?
| DrawTR wrote:
| I liked the film.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Sometimes I miss working in the animation industry. This was
| already one of those mornings.
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