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Yining Karl Li

@yiningkarlli.bsky.social

1.2K followers 350 following 400 posts

Rendering Engineer at Disney Animation working on Disney's Hyperion Renderer. Previously at Pixar, Dreamworks, Cornell, Penn. Views here are my own. https://www.yiningkarlli.com https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@yiningkarlli

www.yiningkarlli.com

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · Oct 30

Hello everyone! If you already know me, good to see you here!

If you don't know me: I'm a rendering engineer at Disney Animation working on our Hyperion Renderer. I've worked on every Disney Animation film since Zootopia. I post mostly about cool computer graphics and programming stuff.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 11h

It blows my mind that in the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty five, with computers with like 128 CPU cores and half a TB of RAM, you can still have a Nuke file with like 4 nodes and click on something and see the viewer update one scanline at a time slow enough to count.

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Reposted by Yining Karl Li

Josh Bainbridge @joshbainbridge.bsky.social · 21h

I’m thrilled to share that OpenQMC, a key part of the technology stack behind Framestore’s feature film VFX, is now open source and part of the Academy Software Foundation!

www.aswf.io/blog/openqmc...

OpenQMC is a library for sampling high quality Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) points...

OpenQMC Becomes an Academy Software Foundation Project - ASWF

Developed by Framestore, OpenQMC has improved the fidelity and speed of rendering Hollywood blockbusters such as Barbie, Superman, Wicked, F1 the Movie and How to Train Your Dragon LOS ANGELES, CA, Oc...

www.aswf.io

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 1d

AI bros sending someone unwanted AI generated videos of her dead dad is just absolutely yikes.

variety.com/2025/film/ne...

Robin Williams’ Daughter Tells Fans to ‘Stop Sending Me AI Videos of Dad’: It’s ‘Gross’ and ‘Not What He’d Want’

Zelda Williams tells fans not to send her AI recreations of father Robin Williams, calling them "gross."

variety.com

Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 1d

Roki Sasaki suddenly returning as an absolute lights out postseason closer and the road it took him to get here is one of the best stories in all of baseball this season. He’s been absolutely incredible in the NLDS.

www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/...

Inside how the Dodgers fixed Roki Sasaki -- and possibly saved their World Series repeat hopes

After a disastrous MLB debut, L.A.'s new ninth-inning man has unleashed jaw-dropping stuff in October. Here's what fueled the sudden turnaround.

www.espn.com

Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 2d

Yooo I remember Bryce 3D; this program ruled back in the day.

Retro Tech Dreams @retrotechdreams.bsky.social · 2d

Tonight will be the biggest and brightest moon of the year. We'll see the Harvest Supermoon peak at 11:47 PM eastern time tonight. Here's a recreation in Bryce 3D.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 5d

Earlier this year an AI guy told me with great confidence that his self-fine-tuned sports LLM had predicted that the Yankees and the Red Sox would face each other in the World Series this year. I didn’t have the heart to tell him… 🤣

Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 5d

Nice link- I hadn't read this before! I think the observation about how the game's biggest challenge was in the powers-of-ten idea is very astute- that's a really hard target to do well, and off the top of my head the only recent game I can think of that does it well is maybe Universal Paperclips.

Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 6d

Something something Spore crawled so that No Man's Sky could fly.

Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 6d

In light of EA's upcoming change of ownership... here's your annual reminder that Will Wright's original GDC 2005 demo of Spore was one of the most incredible game demos every presented, before the game was utterly and totally ruined by EA's meddling.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofA6...

Will Wright GDC 2005 Spore (The Future of Content) Remastered

YouTube video by Zeusmonomon

www.youtube.com

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 8d

It is time for what is IMO the greatest sport ever invented: October postseason baseball. Regular baseball is my second most favorite sport; October baseball is my favorite sport.

Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 8d

Any military can kill people if it has equipment in the right place, but few can deliver a box of any cargo you want anywhere on the planet with a moments notice. Battles are won by tactics, wars are won by logistics, etc.

Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 8d

I think it’s worth remembering that the greatest capability of the US military isn’t killing people; that’s relatively easy. Its greatest ability is being able to establish a fully working Burger King anywhere on Earth within 24 hours, which betrays its unmatched logistics might.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 8d

The fact that different apps can have different corner radii is wild. It feels like when I’m on Linux with a mix of Gnome 2, Gnome 3, and KDE apps. Or on Windows when some apps are using the modern UI and some are still using Vista/7 UI.

Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 8d

I previously wrote that I don’t really feel strongly about Liquid Glass either way on iPhone/iPad, but I finally updated my daily driver Mac to Tahoe and… woof Liquid Glass on macOS is _rough_. I feel like this is the most inconsistent macOS has felt since… gosh, Kodiak?

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 9d

Final trailer for Zootopia 2! This is a bit of a spoilery trailer, but boy does it have pretty visuals. Part of the fun and challenge of making Zootopia movies is the sheer amount of stuff that we cram into every frame. All rendered using Hyperion, of course.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Awt...

Zootopia 2 | Final Trailer

YouTube video by Walt Disney Animation Studios

www.youtube.com

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 11d

I’ve been thinking recently re:RFK about how amazed I am that the USA is doing its own Lysenko, but it turns out we’ve been doing our own Lysenko for decades now in our public education systems.

Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 11d

California spent decades sabotaging its students’ ability to read, and it turns out that if a student can’t read, then education outcomes across the board are going to be bad. I know CA is into equitable education outcomes, but this wasn’t equitable, it was just stupid.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 11d

California is only now working to dismantle the whole word approach and re-adopt phonics, but in the meantime there are forces in the state that want to ban teaching Algebra before high school. Just complete insanity.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 11d

Interesting read: Mississippi turned around their literacy rates by switching back to science-based phonics reading. Meanwhile for years California has used “whole word” reading, which has been thoroughly debunked and is a big driver of abysmal literacy rates.

www.theargumentmag.com/p/illiteracy...

Illiteracy is a policy choice

Why aren’t we gathering behind Mississippi’s banner?

www.theargumentmag.com

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 12d

So my favorite two MLB teams are NL teams, but every year on the AL side I hope for the Mariners. They're the weirdest, most interesting team in all of sports, and at long last it might just be their year.

Good time to repost the epic Jon Bois doc:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIgK...

The History of the Seattle Mariners: Supercut Edition

YouTube video by Secret Base

www.youtube.com

Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 13d

I feel like over the past few years, the last weeks of the MLB season has tended to be not very exciting since the playoff positions are pretty much already locked, but this year is something else. There are so many insanely tight desperate races right now; it's fantastic.

Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 15d

I know more than a few current and former VR system/platform devs who worked at the couple of major VR players and who do not use or even own VR devices at home.

Anton @antonhand.bsky.social · 15d

One of the problems with VR is that no one involved uses VR like customers.

- Influencers focus on VR that makes good video.
- Press use VR like very specific dorks that aren't the audience.
- VR devs just play their own game.
- VR platform people basically don't use it at all.

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 15d

Criterion Collection edition of Flow is now out. This one is def on my list to pick up. 👀

Also yeah that's a film 100% made with Blender now with a Criterion Collection release. Pretty cool!

www.criterion.com/films/34685-...

Flow

A thrilling tale of friendship and survival that took indie animation to ecstatic new heights of ambition and imagination, this Academy Award–winning international sensation follows a courageous cat a...

www.criterion.com

Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 19d

This isn't an official Disney Animation project, but it was in fact rendered using Hyperion btw. 😉

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L2T...

'Forevergreen' Exclusive Clip

YouTube video by CartoonBrew.com Official

www.youtube.com

Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 20d

Nvidia buys a $5 billion stake in Intel, will jointly develop a x86-RTX SoC. This is a huge hell-hath-frozen-over deal.

I hope this doesn’t spell the end of Intel Arc, which is single handedly applying downward price pressure for consumers right now.

www.tomshardware.com/pc-component...

Nvidia and Intel announce jointly developed 'Intel x86 RTX SOCs' for PCs with Nvidia graphics, also custom Nvidia data center x86 processors — Nvidia buys $5 billion in Intel stock in seismic deal

Cats and Dogs, living together!