It’s been a long time since I made an update here on the blog. The blog has moved from its old home to this page hosted on GitHub, and has received a new theme. As I’m getting closer to finishing up my Master’s thesis, I’ll have more time to work on hobby projects. My plan is to start working on a CPU-based renderer using some solid frameworks such as Embree and TBB at it’s core, allowing me to play around with fluid, smoke and fire simulations, rendering algorithms and some reinforcement learning stuff I’ve been interested in lately.

I’ve spent the year of 2017 working mostly on the thesis which is supervised by Jaakko Lehtinen. The thesis work is related to the very exciting field of gradient-domain light transport, and I’ve been working specifically with the gradient-domain path tracing method. Markus Kettunen, the main author of the paper, has been advising me for the thesis project. It’s truly been a blessing to work close to these two brilliant researchers as well as others in the Aalto graphics team.

In the fall semester of 2016 leading up to my Erasmus exchange at Aalto university I was spending most of my time finishing math classes, but my good friend Martin Biel and I did take a summer course at PDC Center for High Performance Computing in which we got to do a project in parallel programming. We decided to build a GPU BVH builder in CUDA which I will write about in my next blog post.