Right after submitting to I3D in December of 2021, I started applying for industry research internships. Remember, this was still around peak COVID, and offices hadn’t really opened up.

I had good interviews with Chris Wyman in NVIDIA and almost interviewd with Intel (Christoph Peters). The former didn’t work out, and I belive the primary reason to be that their office was closed, which meant remote work, and its really difficilt for an India - US collaboration.

Right about this time, I got an email from Meta – for an research internship with RLR Pittsburgh. The enitre process was very quick, and I loved speaking with Giljoo and Stephen. They decided to hire me.

Our aim at Meta, consisting of Giljoo and other hard core rendering researchers, was to build a real-time and photorealistic hair renderer. We thus started with an OptiX implementation right off the bat.

Anyway, the “real time” aspect is extremely difficult as it turns out. We got pretty close (atleast that’s what it felt like) in our many explorations. What we ended up with is just one of the explorations and is still a good renderer, which is the EGSR 2023 paper.

As a side note, I hope to be back at Meta again, to push the “pretty close” explorations to the finish line.