Yining Karl Li

Hello everyone! If you already know me, good to see you here! If you don't know me: I'm a rendering engineer at Disney Animation working on our Hyperion Renderer. I've worked on every Disney Animation film since Zootopia. I post mostly about cool computer graphics and programming stuff.

Nobody loves the Brewers more than Brandon Woodruff, but he was out injured since July, had to beg to be on the World Series roster, and then tonight in a fever dream game he closed G3 and put them one win away from winning it all. How can you not be romantic about baseball?

The Brewers scored 8 runs in one inning and then had Brandon Woodruff close the game. Brewers fans must feel like they’re living in a fever dream!

In this World Series, I’m rooting for Game 7 and extra innings, and then may the best team win. Just imagine how memorable it is going to be for whichever team wins to win their very first ring in a Game 7.

Someone made a Blender plugin that makes Blender look/behave exactly like Maya, and holy cow it really does look/behave exactly like Maya. This is awesome for people like me who have like 15+ years of Maya baked into muscle memory. 5hyuns.github.io/maya-workflo...

I realized that the original English voice cast in Bluey now sounds weird to me because my daughter watches Bluey almost entirely in Cantonese and Mandarin, so I’ve gotten used to those voices instead of the original Queensland voices.

Just to be clear: in this case, this is actually not a rendering blooper. This is a super intentional joke that ties to other stuff in the story; we did this on purpose here. But it looks a lot like a common type of rendering blooper, which I think makes it extra fun!

The new airport near where I live was completed on time, on budget, to the exact spec that we voted for, and the whole project went from groundbreaking to open in about 2 years. By US standards this is already amazing, but I live in California, so this is straight up a miracle.

Final trailer for our new movie, Hexed, only in theaters in November! It's a magic movie, which from a technical graphics perspective means a ton of fun wacky FX and rendering hijinks! www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXO2...

Oh cool the RenderMan 28 beta comes with native Apple Silicon support! Finally! 🥳

All remaining games in all four Division Series matchups are now elimination games. October baseball is the best sport ever, and this is October baseball at its best.

Just once, in a regular season game where the Dodgers have a huge lead and it doesn’t matter, I want to see Dave Roberts let Kiké Hernandez play catcher for like one at-bat.

Pet peeve of mine: when tech people who should know better name a thing an "operating system" when it is, in fact, not an operating system. "This is our new operating system for [insert thing here]." -> turns out to actually be an electron app running on iOS or whatever.

October baseball really is the best sport ever invented.

On one hand, magic isn't real, but on the other hand, we now routinely use special light to carve runes onto rocks and then course lightning through them to make them into thinking talking rocks. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA7W...

More fun old CineFex finds: this amazing ad in the June 1997 issue from Blue Sky Studios looking for interested applicants. I think this must have been in the middle of production on their "Bunny" demo short, well before the first Ice Age went into production.

So I'm working on a small sideproject to convert all of the old CineFex iOS app digital issues into nice, high-res, print-layout-accurate, OCR'd/searchable PDF files. More on that later. Along the way I found this ad from the April 1981 issue. What a wild time that was!

Apple TV has a new show where Awkwafina has to learn to cook as she endeavors to reopen her grandfather's Chinese restaurant. Probably not for everyone, but as a Chinese-American who loves to cook... this might be the most targeted at me show ever? www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCAZ...

B&H recently posted a new listing for Kodak Ektachrome E100 in 120 format coming soon. I had read rumors that Kodak was spinning up production on another batch of Ektachrome, and it's looking like those rumors may be true. 👀 www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/19...

In this video, Ben Krasnow builds a doohickey that reacts sodium and water without them exploding by drawing electricity out of the reaction, which... 1. Wat 2. This is my favorite kind of science video. I learned many an interesting thing! 3. Excitement guaranteed! www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0qq...

I own Factorio in my Steam library but have studiously and diligently avoided ever installing it or even downloading it and I am determined to never play it, because I know myself well enough to know that the moment I try it, I will disappear for like 3 months into that game.

The Phillies stave off elimination for one more day, on an Alec Bohm (of all people!) 10th inning opposite field home run. BRB, have to go fill out my Alec Bohm apology form...

I think that if I were operating an in-demand restaurant, I would start prioritizing reservations not made using agents and put agent reservations at the bottom of the queue always, even below walk-ins. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if restaurants really started doing this.

I'm surprised that World Labs is exiting this soon and at this price. The results from Atlas are super impressive and are ahead of anyone else doing 3D-native models; I would have expected an acquisition by a frontier lab or maybe a merger with Yann Lecun's lab. www.theverge.com/tech/1001749...

Never thought we’d get an official new dimension in vanilla Minecraft before GTA VI.

Every once in a while I think about how the Oakley Sunglasses guy sold his company for billions, but then instead of going into politics or whatevs, he did the irrational but utterly awesome thing of starting his own digital cinema camera company from scratch, which was RED.

No EVF is a huge mistake with this one. If it had a rangefinder-style corner EVF, this would have been an instant-buy for me. Instead, it has both no EVF and a worse LCD than the regular Z5II. For me it's back to considering the Fuji X-E5 or the Sony a7C II again. petapixel.com/2026/09/23/n...