Reviving this website has been quite an adventure—it’s been six years since my last post. In that time, I joined Wētā, moved to New Zealand, lived through a pandemic, and eventually moved back to Malta after waiting two years for the border to reopen. Then, in September 2022, I scaled down my Wētā hours and returned to academia to kick off my PhD in Prague.

Pretty much everyone I know has asked me the same question: “Why are you doing your PhD now?”

It’s a fair question, so let me rewind a bit.

Starting in graphics

I first got interested in ray tracing in 2013, after taking a basic graphics course. I asked my professor where I could learn more about how movies are made, and he pointed me towards PBRT. Unfortunately, I struggled a lot—I had almost no math background and zero knowledge of C++. But I stuck with it. I did my final year project in offline rendering, started reading papers, pursued a master’s degree (also rendering-related), and thought I’d continue further. Sadly, at the time there weren’t any opportunities in Malta. Things changed in 2015 when I went to SIGGRAPH as a student volunteer. By a lucky chain of events, in August 2017 I joined MPC Film in London. I met a lot of wonderful people and engineers, but there wasn’t much of a rendering research community there, apart from the shader developers. I did get pulled into a rendering project, which was a great experience, but I was often the one most excited about rendering papers and research, without many peers to share that with.

By the summer of 2019, I was interviewing at Wētā while also speaking with the late Jaroslav Křivánek about possibly starting a PhD with his group in Prague, focusing on path guiding. The first thing he asked me was:

“You’re already working in the industry—why do you want to do a PhD? You’ve already got the job in rendering!”

It was a valid point. But what I was realizing was how different production and research really are. In production, you rarely get the time to dive deep into a problem—priorities shift constantly depending on the needs of artists. I wanted the space to properly educate myself in light transport and to dig into problems deeply enough to offer real solutions.

Joining Wētā

When I got the Wētā offer as a Researcher, Jaroslav actually encouraged me to take it—he said there wouldn’t be a better education than being in the thick of things at Wētā’s rendering department. So I moved to New Zealand. Two months later, the pandemic hit, borders closed, and my partner couldn’t join me. I spent two years waiting for the borders to open. In the meantime, I’d met some incredible people in Wellington and learnt heaps from all the people at Wētā. It truly is a brilliant place to work at. But, as I waited for the borders I realized I was getting the yearning for doing a PhD again and it didn’t look like my partner was going to be able to come to New Zealand. So, I decided to move back to Malta, and after discussions with colleagues and department heads, the plan became: I’d work remotely for Wētā for a while, then start a PhD in September 2022, focusing on a long-standing research problem we’d encountered in production. The pull towards a PhD came from the same reasons as before. At Wētā, I noticed how people who had done research early in their careers as grad students seemed to operate on a different wavelength. To be trusted with a research project in industry, you usually need to have gone through that training yourself, which I hadn’t.

PhD Life

It’s now been three years since I started my PhD. The first year was rocky, filled with classes and lots of experimentation. In the second year, I hit the ground running with our Dwivedi project and submitted it to SIGGRAPH Asia. We got rejected, but the feedback was valuable. I spent the next nine months refining it before resubmitting to EGSR, where it was accepted at Computer Graphics Forum. Here’s me presenting the paper this year in Copenhagen:

So why am I doing a PhD?

Because I love rendering and want to learn it as deeply as possible. I don’t just want to implement other people’s work - I want to do novel research and explore ideas no one has tried before. I noticed that researchers have a different way of thinking about a problem - and there is a certain methodical way of approaching a problem that you only really learn when you need to do proper science.

Another funny anecdote is during one of my classes, the professor would tell me “You’re thinking like an engineer, you need to think like a mathematician”. There’s nothing wrong with thinking like an engineer obviously - but having a different way of thinking about a problem, from first principles and rigorously, does offer a different tool in one’s toolbox.

And that’s really the gist. Now I’m back in production (temporarily) to get my paper into production and then I’ll be heading into my next project and finishing up the PhD with a 2nd publication!