Benjamin Beilharz

GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation GitHub will be part of Microsoft’s AI engineering team

GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft, as CEO Thomas Dohmke resigns. GitHub is now moving to Microsoft's AI engineering team, CoreAI, with a new structure for GitHub's leadership team. Details 👇 www.theverge.com/news/757461/...

I wanted to contribute to Mitsuba for some time already, so this is a start. Please test the API and file any issues for problems you encounter. Happy to take feedback! This is the first time I am writing a generator, so the sky is the limit for potential optimizations. @wjakob.bsky.social

The generation is still rough around the edges. I parse the parameters from the tables in the reference. Sometimes plugins can appear twice in the extraction (TODO: will be removed with post-processing steps). The generator currently targets Mitsuba 3.7.0, but can produce the API for any version.

A minimal example of how to build your scene with MSD to render: 昇る太陽

GitHub - pixelsandpointers/mitsuba-scene-description: An automatically generated Pythonic API for Mitsuba plugins. An automatically generated Pythonic API for Mitsuba plugins. - pixelsandpointers/mitsuba-scene-description

G'day and happy SIGGRAPH! :)

Are you working with Mitsuba and want to build your
scenes programmatically?

I developed a tool that scrapes the plugin reference and generates a Python API for the plugins, so you can now build your scenes in a more Pythonic way without touching XML or dicts.

YouTube video by Game Industry Conference Physically Based Rendering: Putting Pieces Together - Paweł Stolecki || CD Projekt Red ||

Nice overview of PBR:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwyM...

YouTube video by Houdini Houdini 21 Sneak Peek

@sidefx.bsky.social introduces Houdini 21, packed with a ton of new exciting features :)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq7J...

Not sure how many will affect this, but I assume this will kill a lot of the rebuttals. #neurips

@wetafxofficial.bsky.social and James Cameron bring us the next sequel of #Avatar to the theatres coming this December 19th! Get ready to experience the Ash people.

Also there is: eurips.cc

Interesting move: blog.neurips.cc/2025/07/16/n...

#NeurIPS now pilots a second location for people having trouble entering the US.

To whom it may concern

Do it, it’s still one of the best stories I have ever seen.

Just avoid media, because spoilers can really ruin your experience 🥲

All projects accepted for Blender's GSOC:
summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/202...

Happy to work with everyone involved :)

a silhouette of a person falling into a blue space ALT: a silhouette of a person falling into a blue space

Made it to #GSOC for @blender.org 🎉

Happy to contribute to the Compositor over the summer so you all can create amazing comps!

Also, thanks for reminding me again @gintszilbalodis.bsky.social why Blender needs to thrive; Flow was an outstanding movie.

summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/202...

First @blender.org contribution merged into main! 🥳
It's a minor one, but a start for many more to come!

First day of being a PhD candidate in PBR & vision science ✅

最後，我開始了我的博士學習，感覺有些不真實。第一天結束了。我會繼續學中文，但在博士學位期間，也需要提升日語水平。也許有一天，我能去中國或日本當訪問博士生。

ついに博士課程の勉強が始まりました。とても現実味がありません。初日が終わりました。日本で訪問博士生になれるかもしれないので、日本語を上達させなければなりません。

a person is talking on a telephone with a dog in the background and the words hello above it ALT: a person is talking on a telephone with a dog in the background and the words hello above it

G'day! 👋 I'm Ben, a PhD candidate working on physically based rendering. I'm working in the context of vision science, investigating new ways to understand human visual perception.

I like photography, VFX, animation, languages, traveling, working on my renderer, and contributing to Blender/ASWF.

Mate that is a whole lotta weight 🧐 🤯

It’s not that I am giving up in any way, but while other universities have some nice CG and rendering courses I only took an optics course during my time at NTU in Taiwan to do a deep dive on light scattering and propagation.

Two of my favorite slide decks are about the Wēta in-house engines:

Manuka: enginearchitecture.org/downloads/re...

Gazebo: enginearchitecture.org/downloads/re...

Manuka is especially interesting because of its “shade before hit” paradigm.

Thanks for shedding some light on this cool stuff!

Hope to not miss it this year. Seems like a fun get together 😬

I just found that there is a conference tailored to rendering engine architecture:
enginearchitecture.org

Some talks are uploaded to their YouTube channel:
www.youtube.com/@renderingen...

Diamond OA now! Support Diamond OA Journals in your field by reviewing and submitting papers!

The White House report on memory-safe languages from last year is now offline; this link no longer works:
www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

C++ is so back baby.

I retract the statement of niceties. The only nice thing is that the adoption of the Transformer architecture apparently fixed temporal smudging. 😱

Still, why do we need this in the first place? I feel like Nvidia is heading towards Jensen's goal of no one having to be an engineer anymore.

Let's hope this will turn out as good as the story in the game.

The whole announcement from Zuck is 1000x worse than the individual snippets.
It's not just "kissing the ring" but spreading the buttocks - his and ours.

I'm sorry, friends at Meta, but you know the whole ruse "Zuck has changed and wants good for the world" always sounded 100% idiotic to me.

What the duck, Zuck?

NVIDIA RTX Neural Rendering Introduces Next Era of AI-Powered Graphics Innovation | NVIDIA Technical Blog NVIDIA today unveiled next-generation hardware for gamers, creators, and developers—the GeForce RTX 50 Series desktop and laptop GPUs. Alongside these GPUs, NVIDIA introduced NVIDIA RTX Kit…

And a bunch of other niceties: developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-...