Yining Karl Li

@yiningkarlli.bsky.social

1479 Followers 381 Following

Rendering Engineer at Disney Animation working on Disney's Hyperion Renderer. Previously at Pixar, Dreamworks, Cornell, Penn. Views here are my own. https://www.yiningkarlli.com https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@yiningkarlli

Screenshot of the first page of a computer graphics research paper titled “On the Accuracy of Surface Scattering Theories,” by Matthew Avolio, Eugene D’Eon, and Shlomi Steinberg from the University of Waterloo and Nvidia. The page uses a standard academic layout with a large centered title, author names below, and a wide comparison figure occupying most of the page. The main figure compares real photographs of reflective metal surfaces with rendered predictions from two surface scattering models. Five vertical panels, labeled 1 through 5, each show checkerboard reflections on glossy metal viewed at grazing angles. Within each panel are image strips labeled “photo,” “GGX,” and “SSA,” allowing direct comparison between measured appearance and rendered results. The surfaces range from blurry and diffuse on the left to sharper and more mirror-like on the right. Above each panel are colored line graphs representing measured surface profile data, and along the right edge are small blue-green 3D visualizations of microscopic surface geometry. The figure caption explains that the paper compares photographs to GGX microfacet and smooth-surface generalized Harvey-Shack predictions derived from measured surface geometry using AFM and profilometer scans. Below the figure is the abstract, which states that the paper evaluates how accurately surface scattering theories predict appearance directly from measured geometry instead of fitting reflectance data. The authors conclude that existing models fail at some viewing angles, especially grazing angles, and suggest that the characteristic “GGX look” may result from wave-optical effects on Gaussian surfaces rather than non-Gaussian geometry.
A side-by-side comparison of the spoken and ASL versions of "We Don't Talk About Bruno" from Disney's Encanto.