I am a PhD student at ETH Zurich with Prof. Bernd Bickel. Before moving to Zurich, I spent one year as an intern at IST Austria with Bernd, and also briefly enrolled at EPFL. I graduated from CUHK with a BSc. in Computer Science (first class honors) in 2021.

I enjoy exploring colors, shapes, structures in both physical and virtual worlds (and in their intersection). Check my resume for more information.

github/desmondlzy linkedin/desmondlzy [email protected]

News:

• A short talk about our embroidery project is on youtube now!

Publications

I also publish under the name Liu Zhenyuan.

BiGS: Bidirectional Gaussian Primitives for Relightable 3D Gaussian Splatting

Liu Zhenyuan, Yu Guo, Xinyuan Li, Bernd Bickel, Ran Zhang

3DV 2025

Project page | Paper

💡 3D objects illuminated with dancing lights and HDRI images

Directionality-Aware Design of Embroidery Patterns

Liu Zhenyuan, Michal Piovarči, Christian Hafner, Raphaël Charrondière, Bernd Bickel

Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics 2023)

Project page | Paper | Code

🪡 Transform images to beautiful patterns ready for an embroidery machine to sew

Worst-Case Rigidity Analysis and Optimization for Assemblies with Mechanical Joints

Zhenyuan Liu, Jingyu Hu, Hao Xu, Peng Song, Ran Zhang, Bernd Bickel, Chi-Wing Fu

Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics 2022)

Project page | Paper

🧱 LEGO models (and more assemblies) made structurally rigid

Research Experience

Prior to the start of my PhD, I also had great chances to explore various topics in computer science.

During my internship at IST Austria, I was working on an algorithm that transform images into embroidery patterns in real life via a programmable embroidery machine.

Starting from my final year at CUHK, I worked with Prof. Fu Chi Wing on my graduation project. We studied the design and optimization of the structural rigidity of assembly structures. The project was later extended to a paper published at Eurographics 2022.

I also worked on a few other short-term research projects before I stepped into the world of graphics, including exploring computationally efficient neural networks with Prof. Anand Sarwate at Rutgers, funded by Professor Charles K. Kao Scholarship; generating adversarial samples in natural language processing with Prof. Michael Lyu; and a project about information theory with Prof. Sidharth Jaggi.

Side Projects

I like to get my hands on new technologies and do something fun with them. Here are a few of them I think you might like:

• Bloggraph: A Hugo theme that powers this website; click here for a quick start guide.
• TimeWalk: A coding metric tracker I use everyday, extensible, private, totally local. VSCode plugin available.
• Slurmmy: Scripts that automate slurm jobs submission, maximize your slurm cluster usage.

• Change: See white light dispersed through glass into colorful spectrum; the winning entry of the rendering competition of Advanced Computer Graphics 2023 at EPFL.

Hobbies

When I’m not scratching my head in the lab, I enjoy playing with my camera. I’ve been slowly and painstakingly organizing my photos into my photo website.

I also like playing guitar, boardgames and making cocktails (and drinking them).