Juan Raúl Padrón Griffe

Epale! I am a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow of the EU Project PRIME and a PhD candidate at the Graphics and Imaging Lab (Universidad de Zaragoza). My PhD thesis under the supervision of Prof. Adolfo Muñoz and Adrian Jarabo focuses on developing theory and methods for accurate and efficient rendering of complex volumetric appearances. Previously, I obtained my Bachelor degree in Computer Science (2015) at the Central University of Venezuela. Later, I received my Master degree in Informatics (2020) at the Technical University of Munich. During my Master studies I focused mostly on the Computer Graphics and Vision subjects, where I was fortunate enough to be advised by Prof. Matthias Niessner and Dr. Justus Thies at the Visual Computing lab to conduct my research on 3D Scanning and Neural Rendering.

I am a computer scientist enthusiastic about the intersection of realistic image synthesis, graphics-based vision and machine learning for the digital acquisition, representation and understanding of the visual world. I am currently interested in pushing the state of the art on physically-based rendering of complex multi-scale materials like biological tissues. In my research, I rely on powerful tools like Monte Carlo simulation and gradient-based optimization. In the long term, I believe the combination of powerful forward models (simulation algorithms) and inverse models (gradient-based models) could be impactful in other interesting domains too like computational biology.

Projects

Snake Skin Rendering (CEIG 2023)

2023, Jul 06    

This project started as a bachelor thesis of a talented student (Diego Bielsa) that I supervised together with Adolfo Muñoz at the Graphics and Imaging Lab and later it was presented at the Spanish Computer Graphics Conference (CEIG 2023, Palma de Mallorca) under the title “A Biologically-Inspired Appearance Model for Snake Skin”. The implementation consists of a multi-layered material implemented inside the physically-based renderer Mitsuba 0.6 using the Position-Free Monte Carlo formulation. The top layer is a thin layer responsible for the specular iridescent reflection using a practical iridescent microfacet model, while the bottom layer is a diffuse highly-absorbing layer designed to reproduce the dark diffuse appearance that highlight the iridescent colors of the snake skin. If you would like to know more about this project, then please visit the official project website Snake Appearance Model. Below you can see a beautiful rendering of a snake 3D model using our practical snake skin reflectance model roughly matching the general appearance of a Xenopeltis Unicolor!

Rendering Xenopeltis Unicolor

Team Members: Juan Raul Padron Griffe, Diego Bielsa

Github repository(Coming soon)

If you are interested in reptiles and their beautiful skin colours (pigmentary and structural) and skin colour patterns, then I would strongly encourage you to visit the official website of the Laboratory of Artificial & Natural Evolution at the University of Geneva!

Twitter
# Appearance Modeling # Rendering