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  Here's a super hot take of mine. If you've been in graphics long enough, you know I'm right though. (Just to be clear: don't take this too seriously; it's a joke 😉)

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  My favorite paper from SIGGRAPH this year was "Taming Optimization Variance in Compact Neural Shading Networks" by Bitterli et al; I think this paper will be seen as a really influential paper over the next several years. (1/3) https://research.nvidia.com/labs/rtr/publication/bitterli2026taming/

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  A talk I really liked at SIGGRAPH 2026: Dreamworks presented the stylized volumetrics they used on Bad Guys 2. There's no actual volumes at all! It's all handdrawn inspired stuff: some 2D, some projected onto 3D geo. Really cool/clever stylization work! https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3799818.3812084

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  I’m confused by all of the people who are like “data oriented design means use struct of arrays and use so-and-so patterns”. I thought the whole point of DoD was to understand your data transformations first and tailor your solution accordingly, not just blindly apply patterns. If a SoA layout doesn’t actually match your data access pattern, then just blindly applying SoA is not DoD; it’s actually the opposite of it!

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  Another SIGGRAPH/DigiPro thing I liked: Weta's new fire solver from Avatar 3. As usual for Alexey Stomakhin's work, this was astoundingly cool. Neat trick: to make the fire tornado spin, regular forces didn't work well, so they... spun the world instead. https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3819990.3820026

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  This week's issue of Animation Obsessive features a wonderful article about Studio Ghibli's color designer, Michiyo Yasuda. Her work was just gorgeous; I really admire how Ghibli films keep a more toned down natural palette without going muddy/murky. A lot of modern animation just reaches immediately for the brightest loudest primary colors you can find. Lots and lots and lots to learn from here! https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-artist-who-colored-ghibli

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  Here’s a cool-looking indie game with a neat 2D animation art style where everything looks embroidered. At first I thought “wow that’s a nice embroidery shader! I wonder how that shader works.” Then I got to the last 12 seconds of the trailer and my mind was thoroughly blown. Boy every guess I had about the embroidery effect was wrong. https://youtu.be/0AlNT7rtnMY?is=Au4_EonRO-eagx8J

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  Over the past few years, it’s become clear to me that there were 3 graphics papers in the past few years that truly revolutionized their subfields: 3D Gaussian Splatting by Kerbl et al 2023 which revolutionized 3D reconstruction, Monte Carlo Geometry Processing by Sawhney/Crane 2020 which revolutionized computational geometry, and ReSTIR by Bitterli et al 2020, which revolutionized path tracing and real-time rendering.

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  PSA: High Performance Graphics 2026 is being livestreamed on Youtube, so even if you aren't able to make the conference in person, you can still see all of the presentations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2V8YyfKCVs I'm not able to go in person this year, so I'm super thankful that the conference decided to do this!

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  I feel like model distillation is by far the funniest thing in all of AI/ML. It’s hilarious that it works at all, it’s hilarious that people are actually doing it at scale in the real world, and it’s hilarious that people get mad about it.

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  There's a thread blowing up over on the bird site where someone posted what they say is an AI generated painting in the style of Monet, and people absolutely ripped it apart, quickly identifying everything wrong with it. The troll plot twist: it's actually a real Monet painting. You can go see it in the Neue Pinakothek museum in Munich (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nympheas_71293_3.jpg). I'm a strong no on AI art, but I think this thread says a lot more about...

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  Here's an awesome new blog post by Maxime Heckel on rendering realistic skies and atmospheres. There's a ton of really cool interactive widgets illustrating each of the steps; I highly recommend giving it a read and giving the interactive widgets a try! https://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/on-rendering-the-sky-sunsets-and-planets/

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  I thought of another one of these memes. No debate needed on this one; this one simply is 100% objectively correct.

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  TIL that the rich HOA next to Seattle Children’s Hospital somehow forces medevac flights to land a mile away and drive the rest of the way to the hospital. If a patient ever dies because of this, the HOA ghouls should be charged with and convicted for first degree murder. https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2026/05/04/hurst-donut

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  For 300K years, humans ran on calorie rationing. Getting food was expensive, so we rationed it carefully. This created a habit: the No Don’t Gorge habit. The No Don’t Gorge habit was valuable for 300K years. Every “no” saved real calories. Modern food is the end of calorie rationing. Calories are cheap now. And while the No Don’t Gorge eater is practicing moderation, the Yes eater already weighs 468 pounds. If you’re a Yes eater, the next cardiac arrest is yours.

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  To be honest, I vastly prefer this to the name that something like POSIX would give, which would be something cryptic like "afRepReIfDFDENE2()" with an input type of void* and output type of int. At least with really long names you can easily figure out what it does.

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  I feel like @siracusa might have gotten the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State mixed up in this week’s @atpfm episode when he was making the point about John Ternus not having gone to a great school and still succeeding. If not, then the take on the show was basically“You don’t need a great school to succeed, for example, John Ternus went to a top 10 ranked Ivy League school and he did fine!”, which is… a bit of a strange take.

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  Every once in a while I receive spam emails to my work account that are addressed not to me, but to "Walt". As in "Walt Disney". Stuff like "Hey Walt, sign up for our CRM to find new customers". I don't know why but I find it super hilarious every time it happens.

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  Here’s a cool talk from GPC 2025 on the architecture of Blender’s Cycles renderer. There is no one right answer to designing a renderer; as a rendering engineer, I really like seeing how different renderers choose different tradeoffs to meet user needs: https://youtu.be/etGMk9wYwNs

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  @i3d is one of the coolest graphics conferences every year in terms of content, but this year there’s an added cool factor: this year it’s being hosted at Lucasfilm’s campus in the Presidio! Obv go for the content, not the location, but the location sure is cool! The papers list just got posted: https://i3dsymposium.org/2026/papers.html

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  Adam Savage did an incredible behind-the-scenes video at IMAX on how they scan 1570 film to digital and print digital back to 1570 film. It's amazing stuff, but the amount of one-of-a-kind irreplaceable super-old hardware involved is frankly terrifying. Like, no joke, the entire process is at any given moment basically one CRT tube or one tension spring or one drive motor away from completely failing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYkAWTmpTBc

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  Here's a neat article about how govenment GPU subsidies are impacting AI company costs and valuations in India. But the interesting thing about this post isn't the AI aspect- it's the general lesson about evaluating business models in the presence of market-distorting subsidies. (1/3) https://timlig.com/posts/cheapest-gpus-in-the-world/

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  Gaussian splats are really cool tech, but I don’t understand why people classify it as AI. It’s point clouds with a ML optimizer; all pretty “classical” stuff. Very cool clever stuff (especially the optimizer), but arguably even less AI than Neural Radiance Fields are, which at least need a neural network to run. Sure, genAI can generate Gaussian splat clouds now, but that’d be like saying JPG and TXT files are AI tech because genAI can make JPGs and text too.

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  3D Gaussian Splats is fast to rasterize but bad for ray tracing, Radiant Foam is great for ray tracing but not good to rasterize; this paper promises a differentiable representation good for both. I haven't read the paper yet, but it's going straight to the top of the to-read pile! https://powerfoam.github.io

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  BTW if you are either an adamant "AI is 100% evil always; nobody who uses AI is smart/good", or if you are a "Just trust the AI it will solve everything" type AI bro: I hear you, but this thread is not really for you. You're probably not going to get much from or contribute much to the discourse. (1.2/5)

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  Apple posted a fun behind the scenes for their MacBook Neo intro video. There’s so much cool creative stuff! Some of it was CG VFX, some was practical, there’s a surprising amount of old school stop motion, and a lot was a blend of all of the above. This looks like it must have been a ton of fun to make! https://youtube.com/shorts/y4DnsCzJTRQ

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  So it turns out I've misunderstood and therefore sometimes been misusing ISO on my cameras for the entire time I've been using cameras, and since how I was taught is very common, I'm willing to bet there's a good chance you misunderstand too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWSvHBG7X0w

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  RE: https://flipboard.com/@independent/videos-5mje1kpkz/-/a-ViSeYjJVTKC2ArJYj0AUFA%3Aa%3A1855170754-%2F0 My car can do a half-marathon even faster, and a fighter jet can do it faster still, and an orbiting spacecraft can do it in like 3 seconds. The impressive thing about half marathon times isn’t the time, it’s that a human did it.

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  BTW, just in case it wasn't clear: the Disney ASL song remakes were not AI generated or anything like that. Just a ton of hard work from a dedicated team of artists and TDs who cared deeply about doing this properly, with ASL choreography by the Deaf West Theatre. My wife was one of the TDs who worked on this! Believe you me, things got weird with resurrecting the 8+ year old Frozen 2 pipeline; we're not even on the same OS as back then. (Behind-the-scenes video is from Cartoon Brew)

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  Disney Animation remade three songs for ASL. For these, we resurrected the original data and pipeline version (which took a ton of work), reanimated (from near scratch in some places), relit where needed, and re-rendered. Probably the hardest way to do this, but definitely the right way to do it, so that's what we did! No AI shortcuts or anything, just doing it properly all the way.