About
Hi! I'm Zheng, currently a fourth-year Ph.D. student at UC Santa Barbara, working with Prof. Lingqi Yan. I hold both a Master's and a Bachelor's degree from Shandong University, where I had the opportunity to work with Professors Lu Wang and Yanning Xu. Additionally, I am honored to have collaborated remotely with Professor Beibei Wang during my master's program.
I did my first internship at NVIDIA, worked with Edward Liu. My second internship is at Adobe, where I was working with Miloš Hašan, Valentin Deschaintre, Iliyan Georgiev, Yannick Hold-Geoffroy, Yiwei Hu, and Fujun Luan.
My research focus is real-time Path Tracing with ultimate photorealism -- encompassing geometric representations, sampling methods, complex appearance, dynamic global illumination solutions, software ray tracing solutions, and post-processing techniques.
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.
Here are two renderings I created while I was taking Wei Dai’s online course, using Mental Ray; I started my rendering research 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, Yorushika (ヨルシカ)
- Manzai (漫才): from Non style, 令和ロマン, Sandwichman, Miki, Knights
- Tokusatsu (特撮): Ultraman series (especially the Ultraman Gaia), Kamen rider series, Godzilla series
- Films: 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
- TV series: 三国演义 (1994), ブラッシュアップライフ, 重版出来, 白い巨塔, 古畑任三郎
- Video games: Diablo II, Dota 2, Starcraft II, Grim Dawn
- Anime: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, The Adventures of Tintin, Look Back
- 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。” - Ichiro Suzuki
- “Research is to see what everybody has seen and think what nobody has thought.” – Albert Szent-Györgyi paraphrasing Schopenhauer
- “可能很多年轻人会觉得坚持很难，但我觉得，坚持应该是自然而然的，而不是刻意的。本质上，只要你想坚持，你就能坚持。如果真的有梦想，那就不要轻易放弃，一旦放弃了，可能就会抱憾终身。” - 张益唐