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Pierre Mézières

Post-doctoral fellow at INRIA, Bordeaux, in the MANAO team.

Research interest : My research develops along a coherent trajectory centered on the representation, computation, and reliability of radiative transfer. It is guided by a clear objective: designing efficient yet physically meaningful representations of light transport. This work has naturally evolved across application contexts, from real-time rendering, appearance acquisition from measured data, and physically-constrained optical simulation.

Keywords : material acquisition, rendering, optical simulation, efficiency, spherical harmonics


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CV (french)
Email: pierre.mezieres1@gmail.com

profile photo
Representative publications
On the real-time rendering side, my contributions such as Recursive analytic spherical harmonics gradient for spherical lights (↓) and Harmonics Virtual Lights : fast projection of luminance field on spherical harmonics for efficient rendering  (↓) investigate how spherical harmonics can be exploited analytically and efficiently to simulate direct and indirect illumination under strong performance constraints. These works focus on compact frequency-domain representations of radiance and on structuring light transport computations to remain compatible with interactive and GPU-based pipelines.

This line of research was later extended toward the confrontation of rendering models with measured data. In La Coupole: A SVBRDF measurement device for large and non-planar objects  (↓), I explore the acquisition and reconstruction of spatially varying reflectance from large-scale measurement campaigns, raising fundamental questions about calibration, uncertainty, and model–measurement compatibility. This shift toward metrologically-grounded modeling reinforced my interest in bias analysis and in the rigorous characterization of approximations.

Overall, my current research aims at bridging computer graphics and optical science by structuring accelerated rendering techniques into predictive, radiometrically reliable simulation tools, paving the way toward physically-controlled digital twins of optical systems.

Publications

coupolePNG La Coupole: A SVBRDF measurement device for large and non-planar objects
Antoine Lucat†, Pierre Mézières†, François Margall, Louis De Oliveira, Marjorie Paillet, Arnaud Tizon, Pierre Bénard, Romain Pacanowski
† Joint first authors
Preprint : pdf  
Supplemental : pdf  
Communication at xDDiff, 2025 : pdf
thesisPNG PhD thesis: Real spherical harmonics for lighting simulation and real-time rendering
Pierre Mézières
Université Toulouse 3 - Paul Sabatier, 2022-11-29
pdf   thèses.fr

SHseparableBrdf Recursive analytic spherical harmonics gradient for spherical lights
Pierre Mézières, Nicolas Mellado, Loïc Barthe, Mathias Paulin
Eurographics, 2022
HAL   Wiley   Code   Website

SHseparableBrdf Harmonics Virtual Lights : fast projection of luminance field on spherical harmonics for efficient rendering
Pierre Mézières, François Desrichard, David Vanderhaeghe, Mathias Paulin
Computer Graphics Forum, 2022
HAL   Wiley   arXiv   Website
SHseparableBrdf Efficient spherical harmonic shading for separable BRDF
Pierre Mézières, Mathias Paulin
SIGGRAPH Asia - technical communication, 2021
HAL   ACM   Website
SHseparableBrdf Projection efficace de lumières sphériques sur les harmoniques sphériques
Pierre Mézières, Mathias Paulin
Journées Françaises d’Informatique Graphique (JFIG 2020). Prix du meilleur papier
HAL

Rogue
rogue Rogue (Render Object Graphic Useless Engine)
This 3D engine is oriented for fast real-time rendering prototyping. All the work published during my PhD thesis was implemented in Rogue. The last public version made was released before I started my thesis.
Click here for more details on the engine features !  Code
rogue

Professional experience
  • 2023 - now
    Postdoctoral researcher
    - Postdoctoral position at INRIA Bordeaux (team MANAO) with Romain Pacanowski.

    Work package 1 — Acquisition & appearance reconstruction (La Coupole) - since 2023
    - Work on La Coupole: reconstruction of SV-BRDF (Spatially Varying Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) from many photos (several terabytes) to reproduce the appearance of complex materials.
    - Focus on efficient processing, calibration-aware pipelines, and visualization of large-scale measured data.

    Work package 2 — Optical material simulation (xDDiff) - since 2025
    - Extension toward predictive simulation of material appearance (e.g., BRDF, BTDF, BSSRDF) in the context of the European project xDDiff.
    - Goal: connect simulation to measurements, study model validity, and support physically reliable workflows for appearance analysis.

    - Cross-cutting challenge: building scalable tools and representations that make acquisition–simulation–validation loops more fluid.

Education
  • 2019 - 2022
    PhD thesis
    Before doing a thesis in the STORM team, I joined IRIT (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse) in March 2019 for a six-month internship. My thesis subject Real spherical harmonics for lighting simulation and real-time rendering is quite general, however my work particularly focuses on the use of spherical harmonics, greatly exploited for rendering in Computer Graphics.
    Advisor: Mathias Paulin
    Affiliation: IRIT, Université de Toulouse, CNRS, INPT, UPS, UT1C, UT2J, France
  • 2017 - 2019
    Master Degree
    I graduated from Paul Sab University - Toulouse III where I studied computer graphics and image analysis (IGAI - Informatique Graphique et Analyse d'Images).
    Major in both years of the master's degree.
    I received the CIMI excellence scholarships for both years.
  • 2014 - 2017
    Licence Degree
    I graduated from Paul Sab University - Toulouse III where I studied computer science.
    Major in the second and third year of the licence.

Portfolio
photogrammetry Photogrammetry project (under work)
  • Creation of an autonomous acquisition device.
  • Processing with common software.
  • PeRF (Photos extraction of Reflectance Field) C++ code to extract the reflectance field from a set of sparse photos.
MBR Moment Based Rendering
Re-implementation and comparison of six methods to compute shadows and transparency in real-time: PCF , VSM and MSM for shadows; OIT , WBOIT and MBOIT for transparency.
Graduation project realized with Alban Odot, Baptiste Delos, Jean-Baptiste Sarazin and Mehdi Djemai.
Code available on last Rogue public version
locateVideo Locating moving objects in 2D video and adding a 3D audio simulation
Teaching project realized with Charles Beaudonnet.
Code
locateImage Locating objects in 2D images
Teaching project realized with Anna Laporte and Suzanne Sorli.
Code
solarsim SolarSim
3D simulator of false solar systems.
Code
gameoflife Game of life
The famous game of life in C with SDL library.
Code

Initial template: Jon Barron