In recent years, neural networks have started to find their way into many areas of rendering. While antialiasing and upscaling are probably the most well‑known uses, they’re far from the only ones—texture compression, material representation, and indirect lighting are all active areas of research and development. I recently started tinkering with neural networks, experimenting with…

Interplay of Light is a blog or publication focused on photography, visual arts, and creative expression through light and imagery. Through articles, tutorials, and showcases of photography, Interplay of Light explores various aspects of photography techniques, composition, and storytelling. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced photographer, Interplay of Light offers inspiration, tips, and resources to enhance your skills and creativity in capturing captivating images.

Interplay of Light

A graphics programmer explores using small multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) to encode rendering data like radiance, irradiance, depth, ambient occlusion, and BRDF. The experiments compare MLP-based encoding against traditional methods like Spherical Harmonics, finding that MLPs can encode radiance efficiently with fewer parameters than L2 SH, but struggle with irradiance and specular BRDF representation. The Rusinkiewicz parameterization significantly improves BRDF encoding. While MLPs show promise for signal encoding in rendering, training time and inference costs remain significant challenges for real-time applications.

Adventures in Neural Rendering