Path tracing at Walt Disney Animation Studios began with the Hyperion renderer, first used in production on Big Hero 6. Hyperion is a custom, modern path tracer using a unique architecture designed to efficiently handle complexity, while also providing artistic controllability and efficiency.

The concept of physically based shading at Disney Animation predates the Hyperion renderer. Our history with physically based shading significantly influenced the development of Hyperion, and since then, the development of Hyperion has in turn influenced our philosophy towards physically based shading.

These course notes were jointly prepared by various members of the Hyperion development team; the course presentation was solely prepared and presented by Brent Burley.

Brent Burley, David Adler, Matt Jen-Yuan Chiang, Ralf Habel, Patrick Kelly, Peter Kutz, Yining Karl Li, and Daniel Teece. Recent Advances in Disney's Hyperion Renderer. Path Tracing in Production Part 1, ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Course Notes. July 2017.

@article{Burley2017Hyperion,
    author = {Burley, Brent and Adler, David and Chiang, Matt Jen-Yuan and Habel, Ralf and Kelly, Patrick and
              Kutz, Peter and Li, Yining Karl and Teece, Daniel},
    title = {Recent Advances in Disney's Hyperion Renderer},
    journal = {Path Tracing in Production Part 1, ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Course Notes},
    month = jul,
    year = {2017},
    articleno = {13},
    pages = {26-34},
    doi = {10.1145/3084873.3084904},
}

These course notes summarize and showcase the work of numerous artists and engineers at Walt Disney Animation Studios. We thank everyone who has supported the Hyperion Renderer project through the years. We also thank Luca Fascione and Johannes Hanika for their tireless work in organizing the Path Tracing in Production course. All images were rendered using Disney’s Hyperion Renderer.

© The Author(s) / ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The Definitive Version of Record is available at doi.acm.org.