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

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

Learning Radio Environments by Differentiable Ray Tracing

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

arXiv preprint, 2023

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