Thomas Neff

I am a VR/Graphics/Vision/ML/Game dev with a passion for games, music and anything programming related. I'm currently a University Assistant and PhD Student at Graz University of Technology, researching modern real-time methods for VR. Check out our research projects below for more details. In my spare time, I like to develop games and modify existing ones by reverse engineering their code or dynamically patching it during runtime. Finally, I enjoy speedrunning (= completing video games as fast as possible) both as a viewer and as a casual runner, and have contributed several tools to the community.

Biography

Thomas Neff is a University Assistant and PhD Student at Graz University of Technology, Austria, teaching and researching as a part of the GPU Computing group at the Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision. He has (co-)authored several papers in the domains of real-time texture-space shading (TOG'19, TOG'21), neural rendering (CGF'21) and medical image analysis (MICCAI'18), including a best paper award (OAGM'17). His main research interests include texture-space shading and the intersection between computer graphics and deep learning to advance the state of the art of real-time rendering and streaming via novel neural rendering methods.

Publications

Research Projects

DONeRF: Depth Oracle Neural Radiance Fields

By predicting discrete depth values along each ray, we can reduce the required number of samples for neural raymarching by 24-64x without sacrificing quality or compactness.

AdaNeRF: Adaptive Sampling for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields

We use a student-teacher distillation scheme to train a sampling network for efficient rendering of raymarching-based neural radiance fields.

Temporally Adaptive Shading Reuse (TAS)

Texture-space temporal reuse of full shading information, saving more than 57% of all shader invocations in VR without noticable loss in quality.

Shading Atlas Streaming (SAS)

Efficient texture-space shading for virtual reality, allowing for high latencies compared to conventional streaming approaches.

Data Augmentation using Generative Adversarial Networks

Experiments with Wasserstein GANs to automatically generate medical image data for deep learning.

GitHub Projects

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Game Development

CoreWars

Procedurally generated Roguelike set in an engineering environment using Unity.

Greeney's Run

Colorful endless runner written in C for the Pebble Smartwatch.


Super 1x1

Educational platformer with the intent to teach simple mathematics written in Objective C.

TileGame v3

Third iteration of TileGame, also written in C#. Has metroidvania-style rooms and powerups to progress.

TileGame v2

Second iteration of TileGame, also written in C#. Has scrolling levels, level editor, and better physics.

TileGame v1

My first 2D platformer project, written in C#.

Music

I love listening to music (mostly progressive metal and video game music) as well as composing own songs. I've been playing the guitar for a long time now, and I'm familiar with basic Audio Engineering and production methods. Guitars:

Schecter BlackJack ATX C-1 ABS
Ibanez RGA7

Monitors:

Yamaha HS7
Audio-Technica ATH-M50 Headphones

Interface:

Focusrite Scarlett 2i2

Get In Touch

Graz, Austria

thomasneff93@gmail.com