Physical systems ranging from elastic bodies to kinematic linkages are defined on a high-dimensional configuration spaces, yet their typical low-energy configurations are concentrated on much lower-dimensional subspaces. This work addresses the challenge of identifying such subspaces automatically: given as input an energy function for a high-dimensional system, we produce a low-dimensional map whose image parameterizes a diverse yet low-energy submanifold of configurations.

We present a parallelized optimization method based on fast Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) for estimating 6-DoF target poses. Given a single observed RGB image of the target, we can predict the translation and rotation of the camera by minimizing the residual between pixels rendered from a fastNeRF model and pixels in the observed image. We integrate a momentum-based camera extrinsic optimization procedure intoInstant Neural Graphics Primitives, a recent exceptionally fastNeRF implementation.

The continuous advancement of photorealism in rendering is accompanied by a growth in texture data and, consequently, increasing storage and memory demands. To address this issue, we propose a novel neural compression technique specifically designed for material textures. We unlock two more levels of detail, i.e., 16× more texels, using low bitrate compression, with image quality that is better than advanced image compression techniques, such as AVIF and JPEG XL.

Grid-free Monte Carlo methods based on the walk on spheres (WoS) algorithm solve fundamental partial differential equations (PDEs) like the Poisson equation without discretizing the problem domain, nor approximating functions a finite basis. Such methods hence avoid aliasing in the solution, and evade the many challenges of mesh generation. Yet for problems with complex geometry, practical grid-free methods have been largely limited to basic Dirichlet boundary conditions.

In this work, we present a system that uses adversarial imitation learning and reinforcement learning to train physically-simulated characters that perform scene interaction tasks in a natural and life-like manner. Our method learns scene interaction behaviors from large unstructured motion datasets, without manual annotation of the motion data. These scene interactions are learned using an adversarial discriminator that evaluates the realism of a motion within the context of a scene.

We devise a local–global solver dedicated to the simulation of Discrete Elastic Rods (DER) with Coulomb friction that can fully leverage the massively parallel compute capabilities of moderns GPUs. We verify that our simulator can reproduce analytical results on recently published cantilever, bend–twist, and stick–slip experiments, while drastically decreasing iteration times for high-resolution hair simulations.

This paper introduces a novel method for simulating large bodies of water as a height field. At the start of each time step,we partition the waves into a bulk flow (which approximately satisfies the assumptions of the shallow water equations) and surface waves (which approximately satisfy the assumptions of Airy wave theory). We then solve the two wave regimes separately using appropriate state-of-the-art techniques, and re-combine the resulting wave velocities at the end of each step.

Grid-free Monte Carlo methods such as walk on spheres can be used to solve elliptic partial differential equations without mesh generation or global solves. However, such methods independently estimate the solution at every point, and hence do not take advantage of the high spatial regularity of solutions to elliptic problems. We propose a fast caching strategy which first estimates solution values and derivatives at randomly sampled points along the boundary of the domain (or a local region of interest).

Micro-meshes (𝜇-meshes) are a new structured graphics primitive supporting a large increase in geometric fidelity without commensurate memory and run-time processing costs, consisting of a base mesh enriched by a displacement map. A new generation of GPUs support this structure with native hardware 𝜇-mesh ray-tracing, which leverages a self-bounding, compressed displacement mapping scheme to achieve these efficiencies.

Inverse rendering methods that account for global illumination are becoming more popular, but current methods require evaluating and automatically differentiating millions of path integrals by tracing multiple light bounces, which remains expensive and prone to noise. Instead, this paper proposes a radiometric prior as a simple alternative to building complete path integrals in a traditional differentiable path tracer, while still correctly accounting for global illumination.