Žiga Kovačič

Undergraduate Student

Cornell University

Email | Google Scholar | GitHub | Resume

About Me

I currently pursing my B.A. in Mathematics and CS, through the College Scholars program at Cornell University. At Cornell I'm fortunate to work with Kevin Ellis. I previously worked with Abe Davis on time-lapse generation and modal analysis for resimulation.

Research Interests. I'm broadly interested in the intersection of physical simulation, machine learning, and computer graphics. Currently I'm focusing on refactoring and code generation for physical simulation. Previously I dabbled in physically plausible re-simulations.

I'm also a co-president of Cornell University Artificial Intelligence (CUAI).

I've recenly started writing summaries of my readings on physical simulation here.

Publications

* indicates equal contributions. See my Google Scholar page for an up-to-date list.

Pocket Time-Lapse

Eric M. Chen, Žiga Kovačič, Madhav Agrawal, Abe Davis

SIGGRAPH 2025 Project Page Paper Code

Projects

Here are some of my research and engineering projects, or at least the ones that are not being prepped for publications...

Image Space Modal Basis in JS and Python

Implements the 2015 paper "Image-Space Modal Bases for Plausible Manipulation of Objects in Video" by Davis et al., extending the original work with modal warping. Developed modal analysis pipeline in Python and custom JavaScript rasterizer for real-time rendering.

GitHub (Coming Soon)

Obstruction Removal - SliceSplatting

Modifies Gaussian Splatting to remove obstructions blocking the view of objects of interest in 3D scene reconstruction.

GitHub (Coming Soon)

Pen-2-Graph

Automates generation of node-edge graph programs from hand-drawn sketches using vision-language models and differential evolution. CS 6172 Final project.

GitHub Page Class Page

Path Tracing in OCaml

Implementation of path tracer in OCaml. Includes volumetric elements, refraction, BVH, lights, etc.

GitHub (Coming Soon)

MelodyMesh

3D music visualizer that deforms meshes based on audio frequencies. CS 6682 Final project.

GitHub Video

Gaussian Splatting Format Converter

Conversion script for .ply based viewers from Inria's 3DGS implementation params.npz format.

GitHub

Experience

Recursion and Learning Lab

Undergraduate Researcher

Mar. 2025 – Present

Cornell University

Graphics & Vision Lab

Undergraduate Researcher

May 2023 - Mar 2023

Cornell University

Personal

In my free time I enjoy cooking, climbing, and playing the guitar.

Personal websites of some friends/acquaintances you might find interesting: