SIGGRAPH 2026 Talk- Path Guiding in Disney's "Zootopia 2"

Last year at SIGGRAPH 2025, the Hyperion team from Disney Animation and the rendering research group at DisneyResearch|Studios presented our work developing Hyperion’s second-generation path guiding system for surfaces and volumes [Reichardt et al 2025], built on top of OpenPGL [Herholz and Dittebrandt 2022]. At SIGGRAPH 2026, we have a talk that serves as a followup to last year’s course; our talk this year is about how we used our second-generation path guiding system for the first time on Zootopia 2. This talk contains several additional production-motivated improvements on top of what we presented last year, and goes through some concrete examples and data from Zootopia 2. Lea Reichardt and I are presenting the talk together at SIGGRAPH 2026 in Los Angeles as part of the “Rendering and Volumes” session on Thursday, July 23rd. Here is the paper abstract: Walt Disney Animation Studios’ “Zootopia 2” was the first film to make extensive use of Disney’s Hyperion Renderer’s [Burley et…