 Source: ACM SIGGRAPH Citation Lingqi Yan’s dissertation presents a unified comprehensive view ofvisual appearance modeling for computer graphics rendering. Each chapter could be a Ph.D. thesis in itsown right. The work has produced stunning new visual imagery that has been the highlightof recent SIGGRAPH conferences, and has already led to significant, practicalimpact and adoption in industry. Yan’s dissertation includes a record-breaking7 first-authored SIGGRAPH and ACM Transactions on Graphics papers. The dissertation provides breakthrough contributions in threeareas: the modeling of specular microstructure or glints, fur reflectance, andfast Monte Carlo rendering. The section on glints, based on papers from 2014,2016, and 2018, describes how to analytically evaluate specular reflections,and how to perform full wave-optics simulations of light transport, ideas thathave been adopted in commercial products such as AutoDesk Fusion360 and Rise ofthe Tomb Raider 2016. The next section develops a model of animal fur, testedwith measurements and simulations, that was used in Weta Digital’s “War for thePlanet of the Apes,” and then both simplifies and generalizes the model, andshows how to perform global illumination computations with it. The thirdsection, on global illumination, exhibits a major breakthrough in denoising ofMonte Carlo renderings, and other filtering-based improvements in rendering. These and other related developments have inspired modernMonte-Carlo sampling and denoising pipelines, including NVIDIA’s latestsoftware (Optix5, 2017) and hardware (RTX GPUs, 2018), which have madereal-time raytracing a practical reality for the first time. Yan has done far more than solving open problems in the field;instead he has taken computer graphics in entirely new directions, beyond therealm of what was generally believed to be possible. In the process, he has opened new sub-fields,revolutionized our current thinking about rendering and visual appearance, andproduced novel, striking imagery. He hasalready authored more than ten SIGGRAPH and Transactions on Graphics papers,including the seven in his dissertation. The SIGGRAPH community recognizes Lingqi Yan for these extraordinaryachievements with the 2019 ACM SIGGRAPH Doctoral Dissertation Award, and looksforward to even more impressive results in the years to come. |
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