Top all-time · #4103
Yining Karlli
Personal blog · blog.yiningkarlli.comprogrammingdesign
Yining Karlli writes Code & Visuals, a personal blog at blog.yiningkarlli.com about programming and design. Since 2017, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “Disney Animation data sets (2018)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-23, and you can follow it by feed.
The home of Code & Visuals
Most-linked posts?
- /2019/05/nested-dielectrics.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-10-22
- Disney Animation data sets (2018)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-07-07
- Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-10-25
- Porting Takua Renderer to 64-bit ARM2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-03
What Hacker News says?
When I viewed Figure 5 [link] at full resolution, the pine tree bark felt to me like a poorly-done bump-mapping tech demo. I think it lacks sharp contrast between the raised and recessed regions (instead having a gradient), and I think the outline/silhouette of the branches are perfectly smooth and unaffected by the bark, and too uniform and slender to look like real trees. [link]: https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/cont…
Comment linking /content/images/2021/Oct/takua-on-m1-max/forest.cam1.0.jpg
on “Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip”Submitted Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip as a story · 365 points
HN discussionAlso coming into play during Moana is the hyperion rendering engine, which was first showcased in Big Hero 6: https://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/innovations/hyper... Also, here's an article containing some stills from the movie: http://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2016/11/moana.html
Comment linking /2016/11/moana.html
on “Mathematicians bring ocean to life for Disney's 'Moana'”Submitted Disney Animation data sets (2018) as a story · 67 points
HN discussion> The M1 Max uses 120W when stressing GPU and CPU. The GPU by itself uses around 60W. The article clearly states that it is 120W on the wall. The SoC goes up to 92W. Nowhere it says that the GPU itself uses 60W. You have also glossed over the fact that the article asserts that the MacBook runs at half of the wattage of an Intel system with a RTX 3080, 120W v. 256W. > The M1 Max GPU does use 60W and so do many 3060 M…
Comment linking /2021/10/takua-on-m1-max.html
on “Apple Neural Engine Internal: From ML Algorithm to HW Registers”Submitted Shipshape RenderMan Art Challenge as a story · 55 points
HN discussionTSO has a performance cost, on M1 this is 10-15% [1] loss from enabling TSO on native arm64 code (not emulated). [1]: https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2021/07/porting-takua-to-arm-p...
Comment linking /2021/07/porting-takua-to-arm-pt2.html
on “The x86 architecture is the weirdo (2004)”Submitted Moana 2 as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSome context: During a panel on production renderers at SIGGRAPH [0] it was mentioned that most rendering research was not really usable for production rendering, as those algorithms are unable to handle the complexity of production scenes. Matt Pharr (one of the authors of pbrt [1]) asked the panelists to release production datasets for research purposes. Walt Disney Animation Studios is now following up on his req…
Comment linking /2018/07/disney-animation-datasets.html
on “Walt Disney Animation Studios Datasets”Submitted Personal thoughts/notes from working on Zootopia 2 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere is a way to model this type of situation for watertight dielectrics with interface tracking: you assign each material a priority value, and a transition between materials occurs when entering that material only if it has a higher priority than your current material. Yining Karl Li has a great article about it: https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2019/05/nested-dielectrics.htm... that inspired me to add the feature t…
Comment linking /2019/05/nested-dielectrics.html
on “Distributed Ray-Tracing”Submitted Porting Takua Renderer to Windows on Arm as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe last point (reflection by front glass versus mechanism access so no front glass) is the only issue I see with it. Other than that I can easily visualize an image that satisfies the prompt. I think that the general idea is a good one because it's satisfable while having multiple competing requirements that impose geometric constraints on the scene without providing an immediate solution to said constraints as wel…
Comment linking /2019/05/nested-dielectrics.html
on “OpenAI Livestream”Submitted Porting Takua Renderer to 64-bit ARM- Part 1 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHi! 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
Comment linking /2019/07/hyperion-papers.html
on “Personal thoughts/notes from working on Zootopia 2”Submitted Porting Takua Renderer to 64-bit ARM as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://blog.yiningkarlli.com Writing about computer graphics. Long detailed posts every few months. It's been on a slight pause over the past year, but new stuff coming soon.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted Porting Takua Renderer to Windows on Arm as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOk. Did you see this: https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2019/05/nested-dielectrics.htm... And I'm curious how you solve it.
Comment linking /2019/05/nested-dielectrics.html
on “Show HN: A physically-based GPU ray tracer written in Julia”Submitted Porting Takua Renderer to Windows on Arm as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Disney Animation Data Sets as a story · 1 points
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