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Fun facts: Marc will be giving the talk in real-time from Wellington, New Zealand, where he works at Weta Digital and where the local time will be June 2, 12:30 pm. Weta Digital is the company that created the visual effects in many movies, including Avatar: the Way of the Water (scheduled to be released in December 2022). 

Talk Abstract:  The use of path-tracing techniques has become an indispensable tool in movie production to render images of highest realism very reliably and accurately. In visual effects a wide range of natural phenomena are of critical visual importance, some of which quickly incur a prohibitively high rendering cost with classic brute-force path-tracing especially when they interact with each other and irregular distributions occur. This includes effects such as fast moving highlights, depth-of-field, caustics, rain droplets, occlusion and highly anisotropic participating media, such as fog and clouds. We will discuss the nature of these problems and give an overview of our groups research that has been dedicated to make the accurate rendering of these effects viable in practice.

Speaker Biography:  Marc Droske is the Head of Rendering Research at Weta Digital / Unity. He received his PhD in Applied Mathematics in the institute for Numerical Simulation, Duisburg with research interest on differential geometry, inverse problems, variational methods and PDEs. After a PostDoc in the groups of Andrea Bertozzi and Stanley Osher at UCLA,  he joined Mental Images (later NVIDIA ARC) where he worked on geometry processing algorithms and later on GPU accelerated rendering algorithms. He joined Weta in 2014 to work on their in-house spectral production renderer, Manuka, where he developed rendering algorithms and designed and wrote large parts of the path sampling framework used in final-frame rendering.