Top all-time · #15550
Shlomi Steinberg
Personal blog · ssteinberg.xyzscienceprogramming
Shlomi Steinberg's personal blog at ssteinberg.xyz covers science and programming. Since 2021, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times, most often “A Generalized Ray Formulation for Wave-Optics Rendering”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-11, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its rendering research, especially work pushing physically based rendering toward wave-optical phenomena. One commenter calls the author's work in this area extremely impressive.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Shlomi Steinberg — computer graphics, computational optics, and physical light transport research at the University of Waterloo.
Most-linked posts?
- A Generalized Ray Formulation for Wave-Optics Rendering3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-04-04
What Hacker News says?
I'd imagine there is fairly wide gap between having a simulation engine core and an useful engineering application From academic side, I've found the work of Steinberg in this area extremely impressive. They are pushing the frontier to include more wave-optical phenomenon in the rendering. E.g. https://ssteinberg.xyz/2023/03/27/rtplt/
Comment linking /2023/03/27/rtplt/
on “Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation”Submitted A Free-Space Diffraction BSDF as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt is baffling just how well RGB rendering works despite it being such a huge hack; many real-world scenes are practically indistinguishable between rgb and spectral rendering. But still I find the physically based rendering pretty disingenuous considering the huge gap still remaining between real-world and standard pbr although I accept that it is just a domain-specific term that shouldn't be taken too literally. J…
Comment linking /2023/03/27/rtplt/
on “The Apparent Simplicity of RGB Rendering”Submitted A Generalized Ray Formulation for Wave-Optics Rendering as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat’s what I remember from QED, the integrals all collapse to something that looks like a small finite-width Dirac impulse around the mirror direction. So the derivation is interesting and would be hard to simulate, but we can approximate the outcome computationally with extremely simple shortcuts. I just googled and there’s a ton of different papers on doing diffraction in the last 20 years, more that I expected.…
Comment linking /2023/03/27/rtplt/
on “Simulating Fluids, Fire, and Smoke in Real-Time”Submitted A Generic Framework for Physical Light Transport as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBtw there is some movement towards including wave-optics into graphics instead of traditional ray-optics: https://ssteinberg.xyz/2023/03/27/rtplt/
Comment linking /2023/03/27/rtplt/
on “Simulating Fluids, Fire, and Smoke in Real-Time”