Speaker: Lingqi Yan (闫令琪) at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB)

Time: 10:00-12:00 a.m., June 9, 2023, GMT+8

Venue: Room 2736, Science Building #2 (Yanyuan Campus)

Abstract:

With the rapid advancement of rendering in computer graphics, people nowadays expect "stunning graphics" everywhere, from video games and virtual reality to animations and movies. And we have every reason to believe that the bar of aesthetics will be raised even higher -- we are getting closer to the age when computer generated imagery (CGI) has to be as realistic as real photos (a.k.a. "photorealistic").

However, the pace of improvement in rendered realism seems to be slowed down in recent years. Today's CGI can still be immediately told apart from the real world, just like what it was several years ago. Why is photorealism so difficult? Are there still fundamental issues that have not been solved yet, preventing rendering from getting photorealistic?

In this talk, I will tentatively present my understanding of the difficulties towards photorealistic rendering, and provide initial solutions based on recent work in my research group. I will focus on challenges and opportunities in both offline rendering and real-time rendering. Meanwhile, I will discuss how (classic) mathematics and (modern) neural networks contribute to both aspects. Finally, I will provide open problems in rendering that may be of interest to both academia and the industry.

Biography:

Dr. Lingqi Yan is an Assistant Professor at UC Santa Barbara. He obtained his Ph.D. degree at UC Berkeley in 2018 and his Bachelor's degree at Tsinghua University in 2013. His research is rendering in computer graphics, mainly aimed at creating photorealistic visual appearance at real-world complexity, and revealing the principles of the visual world. Dr. Yan is devoted to bringing original research topics to rendering, such as detailed appearance modeling, physical light transport, spatiotemporal frame generation, and level-of-detail rendering of large-scale scenes. His contributions have been recognized through various accolades, including the SIGGRAPH 2019 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award and a SIGGRAPH 2022 Best Paper Honorable Mention. Dr. Yan's work has also stimulated the invention of real-time ray tracing, and has been adopted by video games, 3D modeling software and the Oskar-nominated movies "War for the planet of the apes" and "the lion king (HD)".

Source: School of Computer Sciences