Overview of biased light transport and light source minimization techniques

Kevin Streicher wrote an excellent tech report as a seminar work in computer graphics. Congratulations!

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Extending Separable Subsurface Scattering to Arbitrary Materials

Christian Freude, my first Master’s student has graduated with flying colors. Not many can say that their Master’s thesis work is featured in the news. His thesis is available below, and you can find out more about the project here (code, paper and more). Congratulations Christian!

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Separable Subsurface Scattering headlined

Our paper, Separable Subsurface Scattering seems to enjoy quite a bit of publicity from all over the world:

Kotaku (EN),
– DSOGaming (EN),
EurekAlert! (EN),
Geeks3D (EN),
Scientific Computing (EN),
All of Nothing (EN),
PC Games Hardware (DE),
Game Zone (DE),
Game Contrast (DE),
Medizin & Technik (DE),
Area Games (DE),
TU Wien Press (DE),
TU Austria (DE),
Nickles (DE),
Updatemi (DE),
hi!tech (DE),
Doope! (JP),
Gamer Sky (CN),
Huanqiu (CN),
XXKCW (CN),
Junmii (CN),
Youxizh (CN),
3DM Game (CN),
Danji 100 (AF),
Gametech (RU),
Shazoo (RU),
BME-VIK (HU),
– index (HU)headlined

There also seems to be a bit of buzz on twitter (mirror). I am delighted over the fact that so many people enjoy the beauty in the work we all love so much – the thing I want to do every single day of my life. Let me know if you see more!

Happy 2015!

I wish you a Happy New Year for 2015, preferably one that is rich in scientific discoveries, joy and personal growth (I’m on the right)!

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Pixel Vienna 9

I recently had the chance to hold a talk at the Austrian Academy of Sciences for the Pixel Vienna 9 conference. One rarely has the chance to speak to such a great audience at such a wonderful venue. Here’s the applause at the very end of the talk. Thank you! 🙂

Ps: this, alongside with the recent talk of Fields medalist Cédric Villani is a good example of the vibrant scientific atmosphere of nowadays in Vienna that I love so much.

Fluid Control

Control of Newtonian Fluids With Minimum Force Impact Using the Navier-Stokes Equations

Patrick Fürst‘s Bachelor thesis is now available! It is about controlling fluids in real time and the technique is now implemented in Blender. Congratulations, good job! The code is also available. For the thesis, click below.

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Transient Rendering and Femto-Photography

There are some really cool advancements in light transport research: first, a technique that enables us to capture the propagation of light as an electromagnetic wave as it illuminates our world. There is a never-before-seen example I am really fond of: strictly speaking, if you stand in front of a mirror, there is a moment while you’re already standing there, but your image in the mirror is not visible yet. This phenomenon exists due to the finite propagation speed of electromagnetic waves and only lasts for a few nanoseconds, and is now caught on tape (around the one minute mark). I never thought this would be possible in my lifetime! Recently, Adrián Jarabo and colleagues built a rendering algorithm that replicates this behavior. It takes quite a bit to get my jaw dropped with novel research works, and it never ceases to amaze me that it still happens all the time.

Banding artifacts at EGSR 2014

The conference and the venue was second to none, with lots of fellow scientists who are very enthusiastic about rendering research. However, it seems that the shadows during the event suffered from severe quantization artifacts. Quite ironic, isn’t it? 🙂

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Any Questions?

Silvana Podaras won both the #1 best presentation and #2 best paper awards at the Central European Seminar on Computer Graphics for students (2014) out of more than 20 submissions and talks (link). People went absolutely crazy after the talk and we got pinned down for questions and discussions until very late in the night.

All this as a Bachelor student. This is the proudest day of my life.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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The applause after her talk (it’s loud!):

 

Automated Lighting Design For Photorealistic Rendering

Silvana Podaras, my Bachelor student had her paper accepted to CESCG 2014! It is implemented as a LuxRender module and is available here. Be sure to read the attached readme. Congratulations! 🙂

We’re continuing this work, so if you decided to pick this up and improve it in any way, let us know!

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