Areas of Interest

I am interested in research involving photorealistic rendering topics such as camera simulation, appearance modeling, and global illumination. I am also interested in software architecture topics pertaining to rendering engine design. I have been commercially active in graphic art and design for many years, and enjoy developing tools for creatives. I am passionate about user interfaces and usability issues, and I hold in great esteem the sciences of typography and legible font rendering.

Projects

I am currently working on my masters thesis in computer graphics, but in the past my work has spanned a few major areas:

Rhea Rendering System
Inspired by the many great rendering engines of our time, such as Dali, Brazil, RenderMan, and Mental Ray, I have been developing Rhea, my own rendering engine in my spare time and as a platform for my research. It currently runs on MacOS, and is written using C++, Objective-C, and Cocoa Frameworks.

Grid Computing
Of course, grid computing comes in handy almost universally in rendering applications, and exploiting parallelism is simple (and fun) to do. I've written this tutorial for users of the UCSD FW-Grid.

Rendering Weathering Effects
I developed a curious method of simulating paint wear on the edges of weathered objects with Henrik Wann Jensen using a ray tracing approach to find highly-exposed regions where paint wear and chipping was likely to occur.

Rendering Plant Tissue
I developed geometry and textures for research on sub-surface scattering of light within plant leaves, and these assets were used in a Siggraph paper.

2003 UCSD Rendering Competition
I developed my first rendering engine for the UCSD Rendering Competition. I implemented a wide variety of features, modeled a scene and character, and rendered an image for the competition.

Publications

Alas, I do not presently have any academic publications. I would like this to change someday soon!

Teaching

I have always enjoyed the opportunity to participate in the learning process, and I have been fortunate to have had the chance to TA a handful of courses of various levels at UCSD:

Fall 2007 - CSE 8A: Introduction to Computer Science: Java
Winter 2007 - CSE 169: Computer Animation
Fall 2006 - CSE 167: Computer Graphics

Hobbies

In my spare time I enjoy cooking, photography, 3d modeling, tennis, and hiking. I would love to learn how to draw like this, this, and this and spend quite some time trying. I am also an avid connoisseur of San Diego's burrito joints.

Links

Arash Keshmirian Studio - My personal website.

The Finishing Touches - My blog.

Henrik Wann Jensen - My advisor.
Wojciech Jarosz - Creator of RenderBitch [now Tungsten?]. An inspiration and fellow researcher.

Brazil R/S - The Brazil Rendering System. One of the first photorealistic rendering engines I played with, and perhaps one of the major catalysts of my interest in the field.
FinalRender - Another neat rendering system.
Indigo - A very capable (and free) rendering engine.

TopMod - The fun way to quickly generate test meshes!