About
Hi! I'm Zheng, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at UC Santa Barbara, working with Prof. Lingqi Yan. I earned my Master's and Bachelor's degrees from Shandong University, working with Professors Lu Wang, Yanning Xu, and remotely with Prof. Beibei Wang.
I've interned at NVIDIA with Edward Liu and at Adobe with Miloš Hašan, Valentin Deschaintre, Iliyan Georgiev, Yannick Hold-Geoffroy, Yiwei Hu, and Fujun Luan.
My research focuses on achieving real-time photorealic rendering, exploring new geometric representations, efficient sampling methods, aggreated complex appearance, dynamic global illumination solutions, software ray tracing solutions, and post-processing techniques.
I also study emerging technologies to enhance real-time photorealic rendering, such as compact neural networks to compress/bake code and data for efficiency and generative models for photorealism.
Publications
Project Page Paper Slides Supplemental video DOI Code (coming soon)
Misc
I enjoy optimizing my research workflow. Tools I find useful:
- Read papers, make sense of research, and develop intuition: Heptabase.
- My path on note-taking system: markdown + git → Notion → Obsidian → Logseq → Roam Research → Heptabase.
- My personal opinion: note-taking is all about spatial (across different projects) and temporal (from past and for future) knowledge reuse.
- Find related papers: Connected Papers.
I collect research self-development resources in teach-yourself-research. Things I find insightful:
- The Importance of Deconstruction - Kilian Q. Weinberger
- The Craft of Writing Effectively - Larry McEnerney
Here are two renderings I made while I was taking Wei Dai’s online course; I started my rendering journey since then on.

My interests and favorites:

- J-pop: songs from 家入レオ (推し), Official Hige Dandism, Back Number, Milet, Creepy Nuts, Tokyo Jihen, Laika, m-flo
- Hi-Fi: my setup: Sennheiser HD 660S2, Sony MDR-MV1, Sony MDR-M1, Yulong DA-ART Aurora, FiiO K17, Shanling EC Mini, Shanling UA6, Onix Overture XM5
- Manzai (漫才): from Non style, 令和ロマン, Sandwichman, Miki, Knights, Tom Brown
- Films and TV series: 猫の恩返し, 千と千尋の神隠し, Interstellar, The Lord of the Rings series, Ready Player One, リトル・フォレスト, ゴールデンスランバー, Look Back, 三国演义 (1994), 古畑任三郎, ブラッシュアップライフ, 重版出来, 白い巨塔, La Grande Maison Tokyo
- Video games: Diablo II, Starcraft II, Warcraft III, Dota 2, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, Grim Dawn, Age of Empires IV
- Anime: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, シロバコ
- Tokusatsu (特撮), Manga, Photography

Quotes:
- “目指して欲しいのは、人が見ていたら努力だと思うけど、本人はそう思っていない状態。私にとっては普通の事なのに、なんか周りは評価してくれる、だったらすごくいい状態。” - 鈴木 一朗
- “やってみて「ダメだ」と、わかった事とはじめから「ダメだ」と、言われたことは、違います。” - 鈴木 一朗
- “世の中の大事なことって、たいてい面倒くさいんだよ。” - 宮崎駿
- “Research is to see what everybody has seen and think what nobody has thought.” – Albert Szent-Györgyi paraphrasing Schopenhauer
- “It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.” - Paul Graham
- “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” - Thomas Henry Huxley
- “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” - Albert Einstein