Abstract

Walt Disney Animation Studios’ "Zootopia 2" was the first film to make extensive use of Disney’s Hyperion Renderer’s [Burley et al. 2018] second-generation path guiding system, built on top of OpenPGL [Herholz and Dittebrandt 2022]. Jumping from initial implementation to at-scale production usage required us to solve additional practical problems on top of what we previously described in Reichardt et al. [2025]. We introduce two new methods: one for estimating the efficiency improvement path guiding gives over path tracing without the need for multiple long comparison renders, and one for allowing path guided results to match sources of bias common in production rendering introduced by common practical variance-reduction techniques. We also describe improvements to our radiance recorder mechanism. Finally, we will examine how our path guiding system was used on "Zootopia 2", including artist experiences, complex and difficult scenes that path guiding enabled more efficient renders and better workflows on, and general lessons learned.

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Text Reference

Yining Karl Li, Lea Reichardt, Marco Manzi, Alexander Rath, Brian Green, and Neelima Karanam. Path Guiding in Disney's "Zootopia 2". ACM SIGGRAPH 2026 Talks. Article 56, Jul 2026.

Bibtex Reference

@inproceedings{Li2026PathGuidingZootopia2,
	author = {Li, Yining Karl and Reichardt, Lea and Manzi, Marco and Rath, Alexander and 
	          Green, Brian and Karanam, Neelima},
	title = {Path Guiding in Disney's "Zootopia 2"},
	booktitle = {ACM SIGGRAPH 2026 Talks},
	month = jul,
	year = {2026},
	articleno = {56},
	doi = {10.1145/3799818.3812093},
}

Acknowledgements

We thank Marios Papas from DisneyResearch|Studios and Daniel Teece and Mackenzie Thompson from Disney Animation for their leadership, support, and guidance on this project. We also thank Zootopia 2’s show leadership and artists for partnering with us and being willing to take a chance on this project.

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© The Author(s) / ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The Definitive Version of Record is available at doi.acm.org.