This touches on some ideas I toyed with in the past around switching DEs to an integral representation and throwing optimization / energy minimization at them.

This touches on some ideas I toyed with in the past around switching DEs to an integral representation and throwing optimization / energy minimization at them. Combining this with Monte Carlo integration is a nut I thought about, but never really cracked, but it's interesting to see that this type of thing is already done in in modern rendering approaches. Will definitely be spending some time this weekend looking at this.