Schedule#

The following is a tentative schedule that is subject to change.

Date Topic
Jan 20 Introduction & course logistics
Part 1: Preliminaries
Jan 22 Monte Carlo integration
Jan 27 Sampling from PDFs & variance reduction
Part 2: Physics-based rendering essentials
Jan 29 Radiometry & direct illumination
Feb 3 Rendering equation & path tracing
Feb 5 Multiple importance sampling
Feb 10 Operator formulation of light transport
Feb 12 Path integrals
Part 3: Volume rendering
Feb 17 Radiative transfer & volume path tracing
Feb 19 Diffusion approximation & similarity relations
Part 4: Advanced topics
Feb 24 Bidirectional path tracing
Feb 26 Bidirectional path tracing (cont'd)
Mar 3 Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) rendering
Mar 5 Paper presentations:
  • Multiplexed Metropolis light transport (SIGGRAPH 2014, author's version)
  • Reversible jump Metropolis light transport using inverse mappings (TOG 2017, author's version)
Mar 10 Reservoir-based spatiotemporal reuse (ReSTIR)
Mar 12 Paper presentations:
  • Generalized resampled importance sampling (SIGGRAPH 2022, author's version)
  • Area ReSTIR: resampling for real-time defocus and antialiasing (SIGGRAPH 2024, author's version)
Mar 17 No class: spring break
Mar 19 No class: spring break
Mar 24 Transmittance estimation
Mar 26 No class
Mar 31 Paper presentations:
  • Residual ratio tracking for estimating attenuation in participating media (SIGGRAPH Asia 2014, author's version)
  • An unbiased ray-marching transmittance estimator (SIGGRAPH 2021, author's version)
Apr 2 Estimating variance & variance-aware techniques
Apr 7 Advanced appearance models
Apr 9 Paper presentations:
  • A realistic multi-scale surface-based cloth appearance model (SIGGRAPH 2024, author's version)
  • Real-time neural appearance models (TOG 2024, author's version)
Apr 14 Differentiable rendering
Apr 16 Differentiable rendering (cont'd)
Apr 21 Paper presentations:
  • Projective sampling for differentiable rendering of geometry (SIGGRAPH 2023, author's version)
  • Importance sampling BRDF derivatives (TOG 2024, author's version)
Part 5: Specialized topics
Apr 23 Neural radiance fields (NeRF)
Apr 28 Paper presentations:
  • Instant neural graphics primitives with a multi-resolution hash encoding (SIGGRAPH 2022, author's version)
  • PermutoSDF: fast multi-view reconstruction with implicit surfaces using permutohedral lattices (CVPR 2023, official version)
Apr 30 Gaussian splatting
May 5 Paper presentations:
Coursework Forward