Walt Disney Animation Studios Datasets

Re:Walt Disney Animation Studios Datasets by tomvbussel on Saturday July 07, 2018 @11:28AM (#17478900)

Some context: During a panel on production renderers at SIGGRAPH [0] it was mentioned that most rendering research was not really usable for production rendering, as those algorithms are unable to handle the complexity of production scenes. Matt Pharr (one of the authors of pbrt [1]) asked the panelists to release production datasets for research purposes. Walt Disney Animation Studios is now following up on his request by releasing these two datasets. Yining Karl Li of Disney [2] and the readme for the Moana dataset [3] have some more info.

It's absolutely amazing that Disney is doing this, especially as the license is quite permissive and also allows the usage for non-research purposes.

[0] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2927384

[1] http://pbrt.org/

[2] https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2018/07/disney-animation-datas...

[3] https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/assets.disneyanimation.co...

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Re:Walt Disney Animation Studios Datasets by boulos on Saturday July 07, 2018 @02:57PM (#17479909)

As an amusing aside, Brent and Rasmus got us a scene from "Meet the Robinsons" back in late 2006 that led to our first real on-the-fly subdivision work. Working with Brent and Dylan at Disney, it ultimately led me to support correct subdivision in Arnold.

At Stanford, this fed into our micropolygon/subdivision work, though we couldn't use the Disney scenes as that was only for me, Dylan and Utah. Luckily, Marcos at Solid Angle put me in touch with the folks from Zinkia Entertainment, which was much more challenging than anything we would have created by hand. But we couldn't share that with anyone else either.

That this dataset is actually publicly available may easily push forward the subdivision/rendering community. Modern subdivision research folks (Loop, Niessner, etc.) have blazed past traditional evaluation with some amazing approximation work, including sharpness. Production renderers still don't those except for previewing though, because it's not that big of a win and because researchers haven't had access to scenes like this.

I'm super excited to see this scene (or portions thereof) replace Big Guy :).

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Re:Walt Disney Animation Studios Datasets by tango24 on Saturday July 07, 2018 @12:17PM (#17479160)

Thanks for providing that context. It really sets the scene on why Disney decided to do this, and it’s peaked my interest. Didn’t realize how challenging this was..

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