CoSTAR Live Lab is a brand new R&D facility based at Production Park near Wakefield. Live Lab is part of the £75m government-funded CoSTAR Network, and supports innovation in immersive, multisensory and interactive technologies to transform audience experience, shaping next-generation live experiences for screen, stage and into the metaverse.

We are excited to welcome Zahra Montazeri for an inspiring public talk as part of our CoSTAR Live Lab Presents series on Recent Advances in Realistic Cloth Rendering.

Zahra is a lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of Manchester in the department of Computer Science. Her field of research is physics-based computer graphics with a focus on photorealistic rendering and appearance modeling for complex materials such as cloth, hair, and fur. She worked as a research consultant at Disney Research and collaborates with WetaDigital on joint research projects. She received Star Wars movie credit for The Mandalorian and her research paper was used in the production of Avatar, The Way of Water. Before joining academia, she was in Research and Development at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). She holds a PhD in Computer Science from University of California, Irvine (UCI), advised by Shuang Zhao, and worked under the supervision of Professor Henrik Wann Jensen. During her studies, she interned at Pixar Animation Studios, DreamWorks Animation, and for two years at Luxion (makers of KeyShot). She received her M.Sc. in Computer Science from UCI in 2017 and her B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the Sharif University of Technology in 2015, Iran.

Zahra’s talk will present her recent, cutting-edge research advances in realistic cloth rendering. Ray tracing and the rendering of detailed geometries, especially in dynamic scenes like cloth rendering, are computationally demanding. To balance performance with visual fidelity, geometry simplification is often employed. This involves reducing the complexity of 3D models while trying to maintain an appearance that is as close as possible to the original. The trade-off between the level of geometry simplification and the resulting appearance is crucial, as excessive simplification can lead to a loss of realism, particularly in how materials and light interact. In her talk, Zahra will highlight the challenges and considerations in achieving both efficient and visually compelling results for cloth rendering by balancing the geometry.

Tickets: CoSTAR Live Lab Presents: Zahra Montazeri Tickets, Thu, Jul 3, 2025 at 2:00 PM | Eventbrite