Hi! I'm a computer graphics senior software engineer at Walt Disney Animation Studios working on Disney's in-house production physically based renderer, Hyperion. As part of the Hyperion team, I worked on the animated films Zootopia (Spring 2016), Moana (Fall 2016), Olaf's Frozen Adventure (Fall 2017), Ralph Breaks the Internet (Fall 2018), Frozen 2 (Fall 2019), Raya and the Last Dragon (Spring 2021), Encanto (Fall 2021), Strange World (Fall 2022), Wish (Fall 2023), and Moana 2 (Fall 2024), and on the animated series Baymax! (Summer 2022) and Zootopia+ (Late 2022). I am currently working on the upcoming film Zootopia 2 (Fall 2025) and on unannounced projects beyond 2025.

My main areas of research interest are in global illumination lighting and rendering, GPU algorithms, and physically based simulation. My computer graphics work can be found at my technical blog, "Code and Visuals", and on Github I'm betajippity.

I previously was a part of Cornell University's Program of Computer Graphics. I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania and contributed to CG@Penn as a TA and researcher.

I interned twice at Pixar Animation Studios (summer 2011 and summer 2013), and interned at Dreamworks Animation in summer 2012.

Email: karl (at) omjii (dot) com

Mastodon: @yiningkarlli@mastodon.gamedev.place

Bluesky: @yiningkarlli.bsky.social

Twitter: @yiningkarlli

Over the years, I've had the enormous good fortune of meeting a number of brilliant, inspiring friends, colleagues, peers, and sources of inspiration across the field, and many of them have excellent blogs, websites, and Twitters! If you like my blog and my website and want more similar stuff, I'd highly recommend checking out these links (presented in no particular order):

Harmony Li, Joseph T. Kider Jr., Peter Kutz, Josh Filstrup, Mark Lee, Wei-Feng Wayne Huang, Joe Schutte, Patrick Kelly, Andrew Selle, Greg Nichols, Alexey Stomakhin, Matt Pharr, Physically Based Rendering, Benedikt Bitterli, Tizian Zeltner, Thomas Müller, Alain Galvan, Nop Jiarathanakul, Dan Knowlton, Jeremy Newlin, Nathan Zeichner, Tiantian Liu, Laura Lediaev, Marios Papas, Jan Novák, Wenzel Jakob, Jaroslav Křivánek, Johannes Hanika, Wojciech Jarosz, Toshiya Hachisuka, Iliyan Georgiev, Tomáš Davidovič, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Patrick Cozzi, Cesium, Mariano Merchante, Mike Acton, Stephen Hill, Naty Hoffman, Eric Haines, Real-Time Rendering, Sébastien Lagarde, Steve McAuley, Iñigo Quilez, Shadertoy, Philip Rideout, Brandon Wang, Julian Fong, Max Liani, Christophe Hery, Ryusuke Villemin, Mark Meyer, Tony DeRose, Per H. Christensen, Magnus Wrenninge, Rob Pieké, Pete Shirley, Ladislav Kavan, Norm Badler, Doug James, Robert Bridson, Christopher Batty, Steve Marschner, Kavita Bala, Donald P. Greenberg, Bertrand Benoit, Peter Guthrie, Technology at Disney Animation, Technology at Pixar, Technology at Blue Sky Studios, Technology at Dreamworks Animation, Technology at Weta Digital, Technology at ILM, OptiX, RenderMan, Solid Angle, Corona Renderer, Chaos Group