ig Hero 6, slated for release November 7 in the United States, is Walt Disney Animation Studios’ 54th film and the first to really be grounded in, and celebrate, tech culture. Following Disney’s acquisition of Marvel, the characters are drawn from the original comic book series of the same title (though, because this is Disney, they’re now younger, sweeter, and, well, less anatomically mature). PC Magazine was invited to the Big Hero 6 Tech Day at the Roy E. Disney Animation Building, in Burbank, California, to learn more about the film—and the technology that made it possible.
INVENTING HYPERION
[…] Behind the screen, Big Hero 6 is four times more complex than Frozen in the scale of its animation, so Disney needed to ramp up massively. This is the first feature to utilize Hyperion, new state-of-the-art rendering software created by Walt Disney Animation Studios’ technology team, in collaboration with production artists. Hyperion has been in development since 2011 but draws on multiple research projects on multi-bounce complex global illumination carried out at Disney’s Zurich research lab. Animators can now create frames containing highly accurate simulations of ten billion simultaneous rays of light as Hyperion calculates the illumination, bounce, shadows, and redirection of every single beam—something that would have been computationally impossible before Hyperion. It is able to do this efficiently even within massively complex scenes by using a novel streaming data architecture.
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