I tried to submit it to two conferences, twice rejected. Had to leave academia after funding ran out (did get my Phd). Moved the manuscript to a journal and jus

I tried to submit it to two conferences, twice rejected. Had to leave academia after funding ran out (did get my Phd). Moved the manuscript to a journal and just last week got a really bad review (saying this had been done in the nineties already) and it will probably be rejected again. All of this is not encouraging my old research group to continue in this direction. So, the paper and code will likely end up in the garbage bin of academia. And Theano quitting was also not exactly helping indeed. Next directions are exactly what these people do with their ray tracing. The equations of all of these things are rather simple and almost always differentiable. Someone just needs to code them up and start experimenting with what is achievable when you have these exact gradients. If someone is looking for a technical area for a Phd/startup: such a physics engine with a focus on optimization (so both system identification, system control and system optimization with gradient descent, making all internals of your engine differentiable) is worth millions.