Physics-Based Differentiable and Inverse Rendering

This website provides a comprehensive introduction---with detailed examples and codes---on recent advances in physics-based differentiable and inverse rendering.

Accessing the website

The deployed version of this website is hosted at diff-render.org.

Developing/building the website

To clone this repository, use git clone --recursive to also pull the hugo-book submodule.

This website is developed using Hugo. To build it, you will need to install Hugo by running, for example, brew install hugo under MacOS and sudo snap install hugo under Ubuntu.

With Hugo installed, running hugo sever under the ./hugo directory will start a local web server listening on 127.0.0.1:1313. For the server to also include draft pages, use hugo server -D instead.

To build a persistent version of the website (without including any draft pages), run hugo --minify under ./hugo. The resulting static pages will be stored at ./hugo/public.

Writing math

This website uses MathJax to support both inline and display math (using TeX/LaTeX). To enable MathJax on a page, set the page-level parameter mathjax: true.

Mitigating Processor Conflicts

There is a known issue between Hugo's Markdown processor and MathJax: TeX symbols like _ (for subscripts) may be conflicted with Hugo's Markdown processor Goldmark (for italic fonts), causing math equations to break. To mitigate this issue, we use this trick that requires inline math to use `$ ... $` and display math to use

<div>
$$
...
$$
</div>

or

<div>
\begin{equation}
...
\end{equation}
</div>

Defining TeX/LaTeX Macros

TeX/LaTeX macros can be defined in Javascript like

<script>
  window.MathJax.tex.macros = {
    real: "\\mathbb{R}"
  };
</script>

Although one can directly include <script> blocks in individual pages, doing so is highly discouraged. Instead, it is recommended to utilize Hugo's shortcodes functionality by storing macro-containing <script> blocks in HTML files under hugo/layouts/shortcodes/. To include, for example, the file latex_macros_basic.html in a page, use {{< latex_macros_basic >}} (perferably after the title).