Aakash KT

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Custom Silicon | GPU Architecture | Physics Simulation & Rendering

Hi there! Welcome to my personal page. I love working with practical computer graphics, physics simulations, light transport physics and GPU hardware architectures.

I hold a PhD in real-time rendering from IIIT Hyderabad, supervised by Dr. P. J. Narayanan.

Chronological set of organisations I have been a part of:

  • Senior Graphics Researcher, Huawei Ireland Research Center, Dec 2025 - May 2025
  • Senior Graphics Research Engineer, Qualcomm, Jun 2024 - Oct 2025
  • Research Scientist Intern, Meta Reality Labs Pittsburgh, Aug 2022 - Jan 2023

Resume / Email / Google Scholar / Github / LinkedIn


News

May 18, 2026 A budget cut at Huawei led to my contract termination, a common theme in the world as of 2026. Oh well, time for yet another break!
Nov 6, 2025 I will soon join Huawei Ireland Research Center (IRC) in Tobias Alexander Franke's graphics research group. I will be working remotely from The Netherlands! But, time for a quick break before that! new
Feb 13, 2025 The final work of my PhD has been accepted at Eurographics 2025!
Apr 16, 2024 I will soon join the Graphics Research Team at Qualcomm! Looking forward to coupled research in software and hardware to make real-time physically based rendering a reality.
Apr 1, 2024 I am taking a few guest lectures for the Computer Graphics course at IIT Jodhpur. These lectures will be on physically based rendering with ray tracing - following our course at IIIT Hyderabad. Many thanks to Prof. Avinash for the invitation!
Jan 2, 2024 I am teaching Introduction to Computer Graphics course at IIIT Hyderabad with Prof. PJN. We have revamped this course to teach Physically Based Rendering, following the excellent reference PBRT-v3 and Prof. Wojciech Jarosz's rendering course at Darthmouth.
Sep 26, 2023 Our paper on combining RIS with projected solid angle sampling was accepted at SIGGRAPH Asia Technical Communications!
Sep 6, 2023 I will present a summary of my PhD thesis at the Doctoral Consortium of SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 in Sydney, Australia.
May 26, 2023 Our work during my internship at Meta Reality Labs, Pittsburgh has been accepted to EGSR 2023, and will also be published in CGF Journal!
May 5, 2022 We received the best paper award at I3D for our paper "Bringing Linearly Transformed Cosines to Anisotropic GGX"! NVIDIA was generous to gift us a RTX 3090 for this. Thank you!
Mar 29, 2022 I will be joining Meta Reality Labs, Pittsburgh (formerly Facebook Reality Labs) as a Research Scientist Intern in August. I will be working in Yaser Sheikh's team, with Giljoo Nam. Looking forward to some exciting work on Photorealistic Telepresence!
Mar 10, 2022 Our paper "Bringing Linearly Transformed Cosines to Anisotropic GGX" has been accepted to I3D 2022! This work was in collaboration with Eric Heitz and Jonathan Dupuy from Unity Research Grenoble.
Mar 4, 2022 Our work "Precomputed Radiance Transfer Using Transfer Textures" has been accepted as a poster to EG 2022.
Jun 5, 2021 Our paper "Fast Analytic Soft Shadows from Area Lights" has been accepted to EGSR 2021!
Aug 1, 2020 I have joined as a Ph.D student at CVIT, IIIT Hyderabad, supervised by Dr. P. J. Narayanan. My Ph.D is funded by the KCIS fellowship.
Feb 1, 2020 I was to join the GraphDeco research group @ Inria (Sophia Antipolis, France), as a pre-doctoral candidate from September 2020, supervised by Dr. George Drettakis and Dr. Adrien Bousseau. This was unfortunately rescinded due to COVID.

Projects at a glance


Pre-silicon modeling, research & development
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Custom ASIC design
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Genshin Impact: Neural Transparency (Huawei)
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Complex Appearance
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Volume Rendering
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Many-light ray-tracing
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Hair Rendering
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Selected Publications

  1. EG 2025

    Linearly Transformed Spherical Distributions for Interactive Single Scattering with Area Lights

    Aakash KT, Ishaan Shah, and P. J. Narayanan
    Eurographics 2025, Computer Graphics Forum (CGF)
    [PDF] [Code] [Supp]

    Linearly Transformed Spherical Distributions (LTSDs), a superset of the commonly known Linearly Transformed Cosines (LTCs) for analytic area light rendering, applied in the context of analytic area light rendering with participating media.


  2. SIGGRAPH Asia 2023

    Combining Resampled Importance and Projected Solid Angle Samplings for Many Area Light Rendering

    Ishaan Shah*, Aakash KT*, and P. J. Narayanan
    ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2023, Technical Communications (Formerly Technical Briefs)
    [PDF] [Code]

    We identify the core issue for the high run-times of a naive combination of RIS and projected solid angle sampling. We then reformulate RIS for a better integration with projected solid angle sampling, achieving the state-of-the-art in many area light rendering.


  3. SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 DC

    Analytical & Neural approaches to Physically Based Rendering

    Aakash KT
    ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2023, Doctoral Consortium
    [PDF]

    Summary of my PhD thesis, including two extensions to LTCs and the extension of NRC for efficient hair rendering.


  4. EGSR 2023

    Accelerating Hair Rendering by Learning High-Order Scattered Radiance

    Aakash KT, Adrian Jarabo, Carlos Aliaga, Matt Jen-Yuan Chiang, Olivier Maury, Christophe Hery, P. J. Narayanan, and Giljoo Nam
    Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) 2023, Computer Graphics Forum (CGF) Vol. 42, No. 4
    [PDF] [Code]

    Efficiently and accurately rendering hair accounting for multiple scattering is a challenging open problem. We present a technique to infer the higher order scattering in hair in constant time within the path tracing framework, while achieving better computational efficiency.


  5. I3D 2022

    Bringing Linearly Transformed Cosines to Anisotropic GGX

    Aakash KT, Eric Heitz, Jonathan Dupuy, and P. J. Narayanan
    ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D) 2022, PACM-CGIT, Best Paper Award
    [PDF] [Supp] [Code]

    We present an extension to LTCs for anisotropic GGX, in the context of real-time analytic area light shading. Our approach robustly fits LTC matrices to anisotropic GGX and ensures artefact free rendering. The end result is a 84 LUT parameterized by the elevation and azimuth of view vector and the roughness in x and y directions.


  6. EGSR 2021

    Fast Analytic Soft Shadows from Area Lights

    Aakash KT, Parikshit Sakurikar, and P. J. Narayanan
    Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) 2021, DL-only track
    [PDF] [Code]

    We present an analytical solution for soft shadows from area lights, which naturally produces noise-free renderings as compared to equivalent stochastic methods. A structured approach to analytically compute soft shadows from spherical projections of lights and occluders with any 3D shape and efficiently for convex 3D shapes.


  7. SIGGRAPH Asia 2019

    A Flexible Neural Renderer for Material Visualization

    Aakash KT, Parikshit Sakurikar, Saurabh Saini, and P. J. Narayanan
    ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2019, Technical Briefs
    [PDF] [arXiv] [Code]

    Photo realism in computer generated imagery is crucially dependent on how well an artist is able to recreate real-world materials in the scene. We propose a convolutional neural network based workflow which generates high-quality ray traced material visualizations on a shaderball, in real-time.


  8. IIIT-H

    Exploring Data Driven Graphics for Interactivity

    Aakash KT and P. J. Narayanan
    IIIT-H, Master's Thesis
    [PDF]