If you have a jailbroken M1/M2 iPad, you can now run honest to goodness full-blown modern macOS on it. Only catch is that it only works with iPadOS 16. 🤯 github.com/nfzerox/Virt...

GitHub - nfzerox/VirtualMacOniPad: People have dreamed of running macOS on iPad for more than a decade. Today, that dream comes true. With Virtual Mac, iPad finally breaks free from iPadOS, enabling p...

People have dreamed of running macOS on iPad for more than a decade. Today, that dream comes true. With Virtual Mac, iPad finally breaks free from iPadOS, enabling pro apps like Xcode and Terminal ...

github.com

They’re going to build a statue of Andrew Friedman in front of Dodger Stadium some day, and when they do it should be this pose.

Another recent Animation Obsessive article that I really like: this one about Hayao Miyazaki's gorgeous image boards. Miyazaki's image boards aren't storyboards, but they're not fleshed out concept art either; they kind of sit somewhere in between. animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-image-...

A huge part of the problem with big tech is that at the highest levels it's almost entirely run by people who would rather do this than just talk to their kids.

I wish Apple would make an option to pay to add additional seats to an iCloud Family Sharing plan beyond the max 6 members. That would make it so much easier for when you're the designated family person managing accounts across 3 generations of family or if you have a big family. I'd pay for this.

Being a parent to a toddler has given me strong opinions about children's TV shows: * No TV at all: best option if possible * Mr Rogers: the gold standard * Bluey: very very good * Ms Rachel: acceptable * Coco Melon: from the depths of hell. Letting kids watch this is borderline child abuse.

I feel like at least 85% of why I want to get Halo: Campaign Evolved is for the sheer novelty of playing a Halo game on a PlayStation. Hell hath frozen over solid indeed.

Oh well that's easy for me. I think I've seen Back to the Future like at least two dozen times. Back to the Future is pretty much as close to a perfect film as there is.

Don[ny]ovan@dgschell.bsky.social · 7d ago

Film you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, Marvel, Disney, or Ghibli.

This week's issue of Animation Obsessive features a wonderful article about Studio Ghibli's color designer, Michiyo Yasuda. Her work was just gorgeous; I really admire how Ghibli films keep a more toned down natural palette without going muddy/murky. animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-artist...

The Artist Who Colored Ghibli

Plus: news.

animationobsessive.substack.com

Another SIGGRAPH/DigiPro thing I liked: Weta's new fire solver from Avatar 3. As usual for Alexey Stomakhin's work, this was astoundingly cool. Neat trick: to make the fire tornado spin, regular forces didn't work well, so they... spun the world instead. dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10....

I’m confused by all of the people who are like “data oriented design means use struct of arrays and use so-and-so patterns”. I thought the whole point of DoD was to understand your data transformations first and tailor your solution accordingly, not just blindly apply patterns.

Here’s a cool-looking indie game with a 2D embroidery art style. At first I thought “wow that’s a nice embroidery shader! I wonder how that shader works.” Then I got to the last 12 seconds of the trailer and my mind was thoroughly blown. Boy every guess I had was wrong. youtu.be/0AlNT7rtnMY?...

Scarlet Deer Inn - Launch Trailer

YouTube video by Attu Games

youtu.be

A talk I really liked at SIGGRAPH 2026: Dreamworks presented the stylized volumetrics they used on Bad Guys 2. There's no actual volumes at all! It's all handdrawn inspired stuff: some 2D, some projected onto 3D geo. Really cool/clever stylization work! dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

My favorite paper from SIGGRAPH this year was "Taming Optimization Variance in Compact Neural Shading Networks" by Bitterli et al; I think this paper will be seen as a really influential paper over the next several years. (1/3) research.nvidia.com/labs/rtr/pub...

Taming optimization variance in compact neural shading networks | NVIDIA Real-Time Graphics Research

<p>We present a training algorithm to mitigate optimization instabilities in small neural networks, like those used in real-time neural shading applications. While large, overparameterized models exhi...

research.nvidia.com

Over the past few years, it’s become clear to me that there were three graphics papers in the past few years that truly revolutionized their subfields: 3D Gaussian Splatting by Kerbl et al 2023, Monte Carlo Geometry Processing by Sawhney/Crane 2020, and ReSTIR by Bitterli et al 2020.

Red hot take: not only should open source AI models/weights be allowed, there should be a law so that if a model is trained on data that the lab doesn’t own (i.e. by scraping the internet), then the model is legally mandated to be both open source/weights and freely distillable.

At this year's RenderMan Art & Science Fair, I gave a Stupid RenderMan Trick talk about hacking black hole gravitational lensing into RenderMan. The project was inspired by Oliver James and Kip Thorne's work for Interstellar, and after the talk... I got to meet Oliver James! This was so cool!

I forgot to post links to the 3-page extended abstracts for these on the ACM DL. Here are the links; there's a lot of additional details/info in the 3-pagers. Check them out! dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Creating the Scales for Gary De'Snake in Disney's “Zootopia 2” | Proceedings of the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference Talks

dl.acm.org

Yining Karl Li@yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 2w ago

Today at #siggraph2026, Disney Animation has four more talks! Here's a mini-thread about our four talks today, including three from the Hyperion rendering team about Disney Animation rendering tech: (1/10) disneyanimation.com/events/?draw...

Today at #siggraph2026, Disney Animation has four more talks! Here's a mini-thread about our four talks today, including three from the Hyperion rendering team about Disney Animation rendering tech: (1/10) disneyanimation.com/events/?draw...

Walt Disney Animation Studios - Events

The official site of Walt Disney Animation Studios.

disneyanimation.com

Software ray tracer in one weekend isn't cool anymore. You know what's cool? Hardware ray tracer in one weekend.

Today (Tuesday), Disney Animation folks will be presenting two courses and a production session at #SIGGRAPH2026. Here's a thread about today's presentations: (1/8)

Yining Karl Li@yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 2w ago

Disney Animation has a bunch of talks at #SIGGRAPH2026; each day I'll post a thread about our talks for the day! In total my coworkers and I are presenting a total of 10 talks. Here are the talks my coworkers are presenting Sunday/Monday: (1/10) disneyanimation.com/events/?draw...

I actually lit this shot with the 50k crowd characters ! Huge shoutout to everyone involved in this, from crowd artists to developers and productions, it actually made the experience very much enjoyable ! Anyone that have worked with huge, high quality crowds will know that it is a big achievement !

Disney Animation has a bunch of talks at #SIGGRAPH2026; each day I'll post a thread about our talks for the day! In total my coworkers and I are presenting a total of 10 talks. Here are the talks my coworkers are presenting Sunday/Monday: (1/10) disneyanimation.com/events/?draw...

Walt Disney Animation Studios - Events

The official site of Walt Disney Animation Studios.

disneyanimation.com

PSA: HPG 2026 is being livestreamed on Youtube, so even if you aren't able to make the conference in person, you can still see all of the presentations: www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2V8... I'm not able to go in person this year, so I'm super thankful that the conference decided to do this!

HPG 2026: Day 1 - July 17th

YouTube video by High-Performance Graphics

youtube.com

I feel like the first day of SIGGRAPH overlapping with the World Cup Final is a really unfortunate bit of scheduling. I think an awful lot of us conference attendees are not going to have particularly good info retention from, oh, say, roughly noon to 2/3pm-ish that day. 😅

Woah, almost all of EGSR 2026 was recorded, and they posted it all to Youtube. Wow! Big props to the conference organizers for doing this! www.youtube.com/@egsr2026/pl...

EGSR 2026

The 37th Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR 2026), Bordeaux (France).

youtube.com

We already had the best HDR-capable image format ever invented in EXR and then everybody had to go invent their own weirdo gain-map based HDR image formats.

Todd Vaziri@tvaziri.com · 3w ago

favorite and least favorite file formats: favorite: EXR least favorite: a 16-color GIF that has been converted to an EXR I will not be taking any further questions at this time.

I feel like model distillation is by far the funniest thing in all of AI/ML. It’s hilarious that it works at all, it’s hilarious that people are doing it at scale in the real world, and it’s hilarious that people get mad about it.

Here's a cool new video about specular reflection tailoff on metal materials. Really nice observations and explanations! In the video, Christophe Hery makes an appearance. I had the privilege of working with Christophe when I interned at Pixar... (1/6) www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3bk...

Forgotten Metal Knowledge | Vray, Cycles, Arnold..

YouTube video by Lucas

youtube.com

Reading the Apple vs OpenAI trade secret theft filing... this reminds me a lot of the Google vs Uber case. If the Apple-OpenAI case goes anything like the Google-Uber case: 1. I would really not want to be OpenAI in this suit 2. Get your popcorn out for discovery