An Inside Look At Disney's Bleeding-Edge Rendering Software "Hyperion"

Were you blown away by the level of lighting in Big Hero 6? Disney's newest rendering software, Hyperion, was what made much of that possible.

Hyperion handles several million light rays at a time by sorting and bundling them together according to their directions. When the rays are grouped in this way, many of the rays in a bundle hit the same object in the same region of space. This similarity of ray hits allows us---and the computer---to optimize the calculations for the objects hit.