The Research Unit of Computer Graphics wishes you a Merry Christmas with this brilliantly illuminated Christmas tree. Its temperature field is simulated using GPU-accelerated photon tracing [1, 2]: millions of perfectly traced rays contributing to a radiative transport operator driving a non-linear Newton-Raphson solver. In this season of light, let us celebrate the beauty that emerges when physics meets festive geometry, Monte Carlo convergence brings tidings of joy, and your RTX card finally earns its keep doing something other than training yet another diffusion model. Wishing you low RMSE in your experiments, convergence in your solvers, and just enough noise to make the magic feel real.
Merry Christmas and a radiantly rendered New Year!
Your Computer Graphics Team,
Eduard Gröller
Renata Raidou
Manuela Waldner
Michael Wimmer
PS: Find our older Christmas Cards here:
https://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/gallery/xmas
