alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
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).