Yining Karl Li

Just a reminder: I've set up shop over on the new place now (and I'm still on the gamedev Mastodon too). The new place is great; there's a critical mass of graphics/gamedev people over there now and it honestly feels a lot like how this place was before it all went to crap.

Woah Blender has started up a project to build a new iPad UI for Blender: code.blender.org/2025/07/beyond…

I think it’s funny that folks are citing Steven Universe as the defining example of “the Calarts animation style” without knowing that Rebecca Sugar went to SVA, not Calarts. Meanwhile the lead character designer for Spiderman Into the Spiderverse, Shiyoon Kim, did go to Calarts.

The We Bare Bears guy is making a Pixar movie about a girl who transplants her mind into a robot hamster. It looks absolutely batsh*t and I'm super excited for it; this is the most excited I've been for a Pixar film in a while: youtube.com/watch?v=hJnAHz…

Sony suddenly reviving the RX1R line with the new RX1R III is really cool. But.. the RX1R III is $2000 more than the RX1R II, and at that price, I don't know what the appeal is over the medium-format Fujifilm GFX100RF, other than faster lens I guess. theverge.com/news/707589/so…

I didn't have high expectations for Jesús Luzardo at the start of the season and I am very pleased to report that I was absolutely totally wrong.

At SIGGRAPH 2025, Intel, Disney, and Chaos are doing a course on the nitty gritty details of implementing path guiding methods in 3 production renderers: Cycles, Hyperion, and Corona. I helped write the course notes: 80 pages of great stuff! Coming soon. s2025.conference-schedule.org/presentation/?…

Wow I’m super excited for this. Milt Kahl’s work is my favorite of the nine old men; I love how angular he pushes forms. His work on 101 Dalmatians, Sword in the Stone, and Jungle Book in particular is IMO among the best hand drawn character animation ever made.

Got my hobby renderer compiled and up and running (slowly) on the silly little handheld Raspberry Pi CM5 cyberdeck thingy that I ordered on a whim recently. Is this a particularly practical productive device? No! But it sure is fun! The keyboard is better than I expected.

"in 2025 we will have flying cars" 😂😂😂

Here's a really cool, well made video about a startup working on generating power from ocean waves. For every hardware startup like this there are a zillion AI calendar app startups or whatever. We should be aiming for that ratio to go the other way. youtube.com/watch?v=Q7Pmgq…

Greatest of all time.

manifesting... 🕯 🕯 🕯 🕯 🕯 12-inch 🕯 MacBook 🕯 🕯 🕯 🕯 🕯 🕯

Denis Villeneuve is the most perfect choice to direct the next Bond movie that there is and I’m super excited for it, but there is one name that I would be even more excited to see direct a Bond movie… HIDEO KOJIMA. It would be weird as heck and I’d 100% be there for it.

Pretty sure I recognize Hideo Kojima’s camera body as a Sony alpha a6400 (and I think a6400 not a6700 due to where the lugs are); great choice! Not sure what the lens is though.