Merlin Nimier-David

I am a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA. Previously, I was a PhD student at EPFL's Realistic Graphics Lab, supervised by Wenzel Jakob. My research focuses on physically based differentiable rendering and its applications.

Publications

Sionna RT: Technical Report

  • Fayçal Aït Aoudia
    • ,
  • Jakob Hoydis
    • ,
  • Merlin Nimier-David
    • ,
  • Sebastian Cammerer
    • ,
  • Alexander Keller

arXiv pre-print, 2025

GEN3C: 3D-Informed World-Consistent Video Generation with Precise Camera Control

  • Xuanchi Ren*,
  • Tianchang Shen*,
  • Jiahui Huang,
  • Huan Ling,
  • Yifan Lu,
  • Merlin Nimier-David,
  • Thomas Müller,
  • Alexander Keller,
  • Sanja Fidler,
  • Jun Gao,
*Equal contribution.

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025

Learning Radio Environments by Differentiable Ray Tracing

  • Jakob Hoydis
    • ,
  • Fayçal Aït Aoudia
    • ,
  • Sebastian Cammerer
    • ,
  • Florian Euchner
    • ,
  • Merlin Nimier-David
    • ,
  • Stephan ten Brink
    • ,
  • Alexander Keller

IEEE Transactions on Machine Learning in Communications and Networking, 2024

Photorealistic Object Insertion With Diffusion-Guided Inverse Rendering

  • Ruofan Liang,
  • Zan Gojcic,
  • Merlin Nimier-David,
  • David Acuna,
  • Nandita Vijaykumar,
  • Sanja Fidler,
  • Zian Wang

In European Conference on Computer Vision (2024)

Adaptive Shells for Efficient Neural Radiance Field Rendering

  • Zian Wang*,
  • Tianchang Shen*,
  • Merlin Nimier-David*,
  • Nicholas Sharp,
  • Jun Gao,
  • Alexander Keller,
  • Sanja Fidler,
  • Thomas Müller,
  • Zan Gojcic
*Equal contribution.

In ACM Transactions on Graphics (proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia 2023)
★ Best paper award

Compact Neural Graphics Primitives with Learned Hash Probing

  • Towaki Takikawa,
  • Thomas Müller,
  • Merlin Nimier-David,
  • Alex Evans,
  • Sanja Fidler,
  • Alec Jacobson,
  • Alexander Keller

In SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Conference Papers

Sionna RT: Differentiable Ray Tracing for Radio Propagation Modeling

  • Jakob Hoydis
    • ,
  • Fayçal Aït
    • Aoudia,
  • Sebastian Cammerer
    • ,
  • Merlin Nimier-David
    • ,
  • Nikolaus Binder
    • ,
  • Guillermo Marcus
    • ,
  • Alexander Keller

arXiv preprint, 2023

Differentiable Physically Based Rendering:
Algorithms, Systems and Applications

  • Merlin Nimier-David

PhD thesis, advised by Prof. Wenzel Jakob.
Thesis committee: professors Martin Jaggi, Tzu-Mao Li, Mark Pauly, and Shuang Zhao.

Unbiased Inverse Volume Rendering with Differential Trackers

  • Merlin Nimier-David,
  • Thomas Müller,
  • Alexander Keller,
  • Wenzel Jakob

In Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2022)

Material and Lighting Reconstruction for Complex Indoor Scenes with Texture-space Differentiable Rendering

  • Merlin Nimier-David,
  • Zhao Dong,
  • Wenzel Jakob,
  • Anton Kaplanyan

In Proceedings of Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2021 (DL-only Track)
★ Best presentation award

Radiative Backpropagation: an Adjoint Method for Lightning-Fast Differentiable Rendering

  • Merlin Nimier-David,
  • Sébastien Speierer,
  • Benoît Ruiz,
  • Wenzel Jakob

In Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2020)

Mitsuba 2: A Retargetable Forward and Inverse Renderer

  • Merlin Nimier-David*,
  • Delio Vicini*,
  • Tizian Zeltner,
  • Wenzel Jakob

(*joint first authors)

In Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia 2019)

Building and Animating User-Specific Volumetric Face Rigs

  • Alexandru-Eugen Ichim,
  • Ladislav Kavan,
  • Merlin Nimier-David,
  • Mark Pauly

In Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA), 2016

Master thesis

Rendering Procedural Microstructure using Adaptive Gaussian Processes

  • Merlin Nimier-David

Supervised by Steve Marschner, Bruce Walter and Wenzel Jakob
Research conducted at Cornell University, 2017