Best Animated Feature Oscar winner 'Big Hero 6' was rendered using an in-house software and a supercomputer

Animation movie Big Hero 6 won the award for the Best Animated Feature film at the Oscars on 22nd February. This movie coming out of the Walt Disney Animation Studios, which made over $500 million at the box office, was rendered on a 55,000-core super computer. This feat is a first for any animation movie so far. Also the movie was made using a program developed in-house called Hyperion. The movie revolves around a boy and his soft robot who along with the boy’s friends form a superhero group to fight a masked villain. It is set in the mythical city of San Fransokyo - a mash up of San Francisco and Tokyo. In order to get the lighting and the reflections spot on with the movie, Disney decided that it would make its own software for this specific purpose. This software would be used in tandem with three dozen other software tools. The process of rendering light is tedious, as each ray of light has its own trajectory which needs to be tracked. Now within a single frame of animation, there could be multiple light sources and there can be equally complex number of reflecting surfaces. This makes calculating individual light pathways a challenge, computationally speaking. According to Disney researchers, there wasn’t a software readily available that could ease the process. This led the technology team at Disney Animation studios to develop Hyperion. Taking two and half years to make, Hyperion, a global-illumination software, was developed completely in-house by 12 developers. The idea behind the software was to organise large groups of light rays into bundles which could be more efficiently handled by the computer systems. This allowed the Walt Disney director of lighting to add on more light sources and more realism to the animated movie. It bypassed the need for animators to manually animate a single bounce, indirect lighting to 10-20 bounces simultaneously. So Hyperion basically tracked how each of the light rays bounced off multiple surfaces within an environment, before this light was visible to the human eye. Also thanks to one of the characters - the soft robot called Baymax - appearing translucent, the animators needed multiple bounces of reflected light, else Baymax would seem like hard plastic. In order to render Big Hero 6, Disney Animation studio built four rendering farms. There were three in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco. These four farms when combined gave one supercomputer having 4,600 computers running 55,000-cores. To add some context, Frozen, which won the Best Animated movie award at last years Oscars, was rendered using 26,000 cores. The information flowing between the rendering farm was managed by another of Disney’s software called Coda. What’s even more interesting is the fact that the movie was being made along side the Hyperion software. According to Disney’s chief technology officer Andy Hendrickson, they were exploring art and algorithm simultaneously, building the renderer at the same time as the animation was happening. According to Hendrickson, Hyperion will always be in beta, as Disney wants it to be continuously evolving.