Art and technology at Pixar, from toy story to today

Pixar’s Hydra is a real-time render engine designed for the assets and workflows used in the production of animated feature films. Hydra delivers high performance with the scalability to support interactive animation of fully rigged characters as well as the pre-cached data sets used for large crowds, detailed set dressing, and dynamic special effects. The implementation takes full advantage of the latest GPU techniques including multi-threaded data preparation, GPU compute, and instanced, indirect drawing. Hydra incorporates OpenSubdiv and an extensible shading system to support the high-fidelity needed to allow production artists to work with confidence and in context. Topics include: • architecture details • OpenSubdiv and Universal Scene Description (USD) integration • GPU parallel instancing and frustum culling • use in Presto and 3rd party DCC tools