Previous discussion [1].

    My adventures getting Disney’s Moana island scene to render well with Pbrt (pharr.org)
    463 points by dsr12 3 months ago | cached | hide | past | web | favorite | 46 comments

Another series on this mammoth dataset:

1. https://schuttejoe.github.io/post/disneybsdf/

2. https://schuttejoe.github.io/post/disneypostmortem/

Render pipeline work appears to be 75% engineering and 25% intuition based on analyzing the output. The sheer number of files in this one scene makes the benefit of multiple threads really clear.