Jes­sica Bar­on is vis­it­ing RGL as part of a pres­ti­gi­ous Ful­bright fel­low­ship to meas­ure and mod­el the com­plex ap­pear­ance of bird feath­ers. Wel­come, Jes­sica!

Wen­zel Jakob's UNRAVEL pro­ject re­ceived fund­ing by the European Re­search Com­mis­sion. This up­com­ing pro­ject tar­gets the de­vel­op­ment and ap­plic­a­tion of tech­niques for dif­fer­en­ti­able ren­der­ing and re­ceived some cov­er­age on the EPFL news.

Bap­tiste Nicolet joins RGL as an EDIC fel­low—wel­come, Bap­tiste!

Wen­zel Jakob de­livered a key­note speech titled Dif­fer­en­ti­able Sim­u­la­tion of Light: Why it is Im­port­ant, and What Makes it Hard! at High Per­form­ance Graph­ics (HPG 2020). A re­cord­ing of the event is avail­able here.

In­stant Meshes re­ceived the 2020 SGP Soft­ware Award! It is the open source im­ple­ment­a­tion of an al­gorithm for field-aligned remesh­ing by Wen­zel Jakob, Marco Tar­ini, Daniele Panozzo, and Olga Sork­ine-Hornung.

Our pa­per on Ra­di­at­ive Back­propaga­tion (with Mer­lin Ni­mi­er-Dav­id, Sé­bas­tien Speier­er, and Ben­oît Ruiz) is now on­line. It re-casts the propaga­tion of gradi­ents through a ren­der­ing al­gorithm as an­oth­er kind of ren­der­ing prob­lem, fix­ing the “memory ex­plo­sion” prob­lem of cur­rent dif­fer­en­ti­able ren­der­ing ap­proaches that dif­fer­en­ti­ate sim­u­la­tions by re­cord­ing a com­pu­ta­tion graph.

The second pro­ject on Spec­u­lar Man­i­fold Sampling (with Tiz­ian Zelt­ner and Iliy­an Geor­giev) pro­poses a simple and gen­er­al scheme for find­ing spec­u­lar light paths in­volving com­plex geo­metry. It handles ren­der­ing of glints and caustics with­in a uni­fied frame­work and can be used in stand­ard Monte Carlo path tracers.

The third is a col­lab­or­a­tion with KAIST & MSRA in­volving Seung-Hwan Baek, Tiz­ian Zelt­ner, Hy­un Jin Ku, In­seung Hwang, Xin Tong, and Min Kim. We’ve put to­geth­er the first com­pre­hens­ive data­base of BRDF meas­ure­ments that cap­tures changes in po­lar­iz­a­tion state of light. Polarization reveals a wealth of information about an object's material/geometry, and this datasets improves our understanding of the behavior of real-world materials.

Three of our pa­pers were ac­cep­ted to SIGGRAPH 2020: one on dif­fer­en­ti­able ren­der­ing, one on glints & caustics, and one on po­lar­ized ma­ter­i­al ac­quis­i­tion. More de­tails will be re­leased soon!

Mer­lin Ni­mi­er-Dav­id was awar­ded a pres­ti­gi­ous Face­book fel­low­ship! Con­grat­u­la­tions, Mer­lin!

Fol­low­ing more than three years of de­vel­op­ment, we have re­leased Mit­suba 2, a new gen­er­a­tion of our phys­ic­ally-based ren­der­er. Mit­suba 2 en­ables a mul­ti­tude of new ap­plic­a­tions build­ing its sup­port for in­verse and dif­fer­en­ti­able ren­der­ing, GPU ray tra­cing, and spec­tro-po­lar­i­met­ric sim­u­la­tion.

Sé­bas­tien Speier­er joins RGL as a Re­search En­gin­eer. Sé­bas­tien will work on the ClearSpace 1 mis­sion and will lead Mit­suba 2 de­vel­op­ment re­lated to this pro­ject.

RGL will present two pa­pers at SIGGRAPH Asia 2019 that to­geth­er make up Mit­suba 2, our new fully dif­fer­en­ti­able, vec­tor­ized, spec­tral, and po­lar­ized ren­der­er. The first pa­per (with Mer­lin Ni­mi­er-Dav­id, De­lio Vi­cini, Tiz­ian Zelt­ner, and Wen­zel Jakob) ex­plains the sys­tem, which be­gins to look more and more like a com­piler. See “Mit­suba 2: A Re­tar­get­able For­ward and In­verse Ren­der­er” for de­tails.

..the second (with Guil­laume Loubet, Nic­olas Holz­schuch, and Wen­zel Jakob) in­tro­duces a new way of dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing vis­ib­il­ity-in­duced dis­con­tinu­it­ies. This is a cru­cial com­pon­ent when op­tim­iz­ing shapes us­ing a dif­fer­en­ti­able ren­der­er. See “Re­para­met­er­iz­ing dis­con­tinu­ous in­teg­rands for dif­fer­en­ti­able ren­der­ing” for de­tails.

EPFL cre­ated a video about our on­go­ing work to cap­ture the world of ma­ter­i­als. Check it out here.

Wen­zel Jakob re­ceived the Sig­ni­fic­ant New Re­search­er Award at this year's SIGGRAPH con­fer­ence.

Our pa­per on learn­ing shape-ad­apt­ive sub­sur­face scat­ter­ing dis­tri­bu­tions (aka BSS­RD­Fs) was ac­cep­ted to SIGGRAPH 2019. Joint work with De­lio Vi­cini, Vladlen Koltun, and Wen­zel Jakob.

RGL wel­comes Ibón Guillén from the Uni­versity of Za­r­agoza, who is vis­it­ing for a three-month stay.

Two of our pa­pers were con­di­tion­ally ac­cep­ted to EG 2019: A Low-Di­men­sion­al Func­tion Space for Ef­fi­cient Spec­tral Up­sampling by Wen­zel Jakob and Jo­hannes Hanika, and Neur­al BTF Com­pres­sion and In­ter­pol­a­tion by Gilles Rain­er, Wen­zel Jakob, Ab­hijeet Ghosh, and Tim Weyrich.

We've cre­ated an in­ter­act­ive webpage that provides ac­cess to a com­pre­hens­ive ma­ter­i­al data­base ac­quired as part of the pro­ject An Ad­apt­ive Para­met­er­iz­a­tion for Ef­fi­cient Ma­ter­i­al Ac­quis­i­tion and Ren­der­ing by Jonath­an Dupuy and Wen­zel Jakob.

Guil­laume Loubet joined RGL today with a pres­ti­gi­ous EPFL-INRIA postdoc fel­low­ship. Wel­come, Guil­laume!

We've just re­leased a free on­line edi­tion of the Phys­ic­ally Based Ren­der­ing book! It fea­tures hy­per­linked cross-ref­er­en­cing, beau­ti­ful SVG fig­ures and equa­tions as well as in­ter­act­ive im­age com­par­is­ons. The de­tails of how all of this came to be are ex­plained in the pre­face to the on­line edi­tion.

Jonath­an Dupuy's and Wen­zel Jakob's pro­ject on ad­apt­ive para­met­er­iz­a­tions for ma­ter­i­al ac­quis­i­tion and ren­der­ing was con­di­tion­ally ac­cep­ted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2018. More de­tails will be pos­ted on the pro­ject site in the com­ing weeks.

Hannes Her­geth won this year's Ad­vanced Com­puter Graph­ics (CS440) com­pet­i­tion with a beau­ti­ful ren­der­ing of a ter­rari­um. Con­grat­u­la­tion, Hannes! See all sub­mis­sions on this page.

Tiz­ian Zelt­ner and Wen­zel Jakob's pro­ject on mod­el­ing and ren­der­ing an­iso­trop­ic lay­ers was ac­cep­ted to SIGGRAPH 2018. Get it here!

Wen­zel Jakob will present some of RGL's on­go­ing work on ma­ter­i­al mod­el­ing at FMX 2018.

EDIC Fel­lows Mer­lin Ni­mi­er-Dav­id and De­lio Vi­cini join RGL for semester pro­jects.

Since ver­sion 10.2, Modo uses our In­stant Meshes al­gorithm to im­ple­ment its auto­mat­ic re­to­po­logy fea­ture! The Foundry just re­leased an in­ter­view with Wen­zel Jakob (PDF) about this tech­nique and oth­er re­cent pro­jects in this area.

Dav­id Körner, PhD stu­dent at VISUS Stut­tgart, is join­ing RGL for pro­ject this Sum­mer & Fall. Wel­come, Dav­id!

Wen­zel Jakob will give a key­note talk at EPFL's 2017 Re­search Day Fron­ti­ers of Visu­al Com­put­ing on June 8.

This semester, a new ver­sion of the course CS 440: Ad­vanced Com­puter Graph­ics is offered for the first time.

The third edi­tion of Phys­ic­ally Based Ren­der­ing: From The­ory to Im­ple­ment­a­tion by Matt Pharr, Wen­zel Jakob, and Greg Humphreys is hot off the press and should be avail­able in stores mid-Novem­ber. El­sevi­er and Amazon's stores have di­git­al PDF & Kindle edi­tions that are avail­able as of now.

Chaos Group has re­leased a new ver­sion of their V-Ray ren­der­er, which for the first time in­cludes a Stochast­ic Mi­cro­flake re­flect­ance mod­el for ren­der­ing glit­ter and sparkle ef­fects. Their al­gorithm is based on the pa­per Dis­crete Stochast­ic Mi­cro­fa­cet Mod­els by Wen­zel Jakob, Mi­loš Hašan, Ling-Qi Yan, Jason Lawrence, Ravi Ramamoorthi, and Steve Marschner.

The course CS 328: Nu­mer­ic­al Meth­ods for Visu­al Com­put­ing is offered for the first time.

Call for present­a­tions: please get in touch to present in the Fall 2016 edi­tion of the Visu­al Com­put­ing Sem­in­ar.

EDIC Fel­lows Tiz­ian Zelt­ner, Michalina Pachol­ska, and An­dreas Finke join RGL for semester pro­jects.

Wen­zel Jakob re­ceives the Euro­graph­ics Young Re­search­er Award.

Wen­zel Jakob joins EPFL's School of Com­puter and Com­mu­nic­a­tion Sci­ences as a Ten­ure-Track As­sist­ant Pro­fess­or.