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The Coraline shots I describe below. The Wild shots demonstrate many uses of the feather shaders I developed for that show.

I worked on the zombie skin shaders in A.D. Teaser Trailer.

Coraline (10/2007-11/2008)

I developed several CG effects and composited for the stop motion feature Coraline. I also developed pipeline tools and provided technical support for the VFX department.

Here is a writeup based on an interview for my work on Coraline by Side Effects Software.

[comp]
[comp]
In these two shots I made several CG elements for the transition effect, trees, and lighting in Houdini and composited them with the captured elements. The house and ground geometry were modeled by other artists. The transition itself is a reused hand animated plate from a different shot. The trees are composed of a still frame projected onto animated unrolling shapes.
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[pineapple]
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In this shot (and the two after it) I created the train smoke and several other elements in Houdini. I also composited the CG elements with the pineapple (note that the pineapple element to the left is not the actual one used in the comp but it is very close to it) and with some practical candle flames. The ground and shadow underneath the pineapple are also CG elements.
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[comp]
I made the dust and sawdust in these two shots in Houdini and comped them with the animation plate.
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[foreground]
I made animated fragments and composited this shot. I made similar fragments for two shots later.
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For the world destruction shots, I designed a system in Houdini for generating correctly shaped particles based on a crack pattern, and have the particles automatically fly away when the crack reached it. I handed the system off to another Houdini artist and we split the shots between us.

The Wild (2/2004-12/2005)

My biggest contribution to the movie The Wild was the shaders for feathers and feathered characters. The following shots demonstrate some of the uses of the feather shaders.
[hires still] [movie]
The most visible procedural element of the feather shader was the "ruffles" component. This was a transparency function that broke up the edges of the feathers making them look more like fluffy feathers and less like sharp razor cards. The long deep ruffles in the breast and body feathers and the short and tight ruffles along the wing feathers are well displayed in this shot.
[hires still] [movie]
This shot shows the really simple but effective feather irridescence function.
[hires still] [movie]
The fake feather shader was a displacement shader that procedurally generated feather shapes and fed that fake geometry into the normal feather surface shader (it didn't actually do any displacement). This enabled use of the same surface shader as the real feathers. Normally the fake feather shader was not visible and was only present to allow for a sparse set of real feathers. In a few cases it was difficult to tell when feathers were missing because of the fake feathers. This is a finaled shot where the left vulture is missing body feathers and the fake feather shader is easily seen.
[hires still] [movie]
[hires still] [movie]
A couple more shots of some of the birds in the movie.

School Work

[geometry] [color] [displacement]
"Left Behind"
This picture demonstrates the complexity achievable through use of procedural surface and displacement shaders. The geometry in the scene consists solely of spheres and planes. The only painted image is used to control the distribution of the pebbles. Original shaders include barnacles, pebbles, rock, starfish, and sand (displacement).
Modeler: Maya 4.5
Renderer: PRMan 11
Other Shaders: RAT (clay, spotlight)
Pebble Control: Photoshop
Creation Time: 1 week (5/2003)
[hue] [scale]
Pebbles
This procedural surface and displacement shader bombs pebbles in layers that are controlled with an image. The hue and scale parameters are animated in this section.
Modeler: Maya 4.5
Renderer: PRMan 11
Other Shaders: RAT (spotlight)
Pebble Control: Photoshop
Creation Time: 4 days (4/2003)
[ridges] [distribution] [construction]
Barnacle
Surface and displacement shader that bombs barnacles on a surface according to a controllable noisy distribution. Several parameters of the barnacle shape and distribution are shown, as well as the process used to create a barnacle.
Renderer: Houdini Apprentice, 3Delight
Creation Time: 3 days (11/2002)
[1] [2] [3] [brushed]
Ashikhmin-Shirley
Implementation of the BRDF described in the paper "An Anisotropic Phong Light Reflection Model." An environment map is importance sampled to get more accurate reflections. In addition, the direction of anisotropy is spatially varied with the circular brushed metal shader.
Modeler: Maya 4.5
Renderer: PRMan 11
Other Shaders: RAT (spotlight)
Creation Time: 3 days (5/2003)
[raytracer] [SIMD] [reyes] [radiosity] [scanline 1] [scanline 2]
Software
Custom graphics software developed for school and for fun. The rendering algorithms implemented include ray tracing, scan-line, REYES (with radiosity), and a SIMD virtual machine for RenderMan shaders (pacman shader rendered here).
Modeler: Animation: Master
Textures: DarkTree, Photoshop
REYES co-author: Tathagata Ray
Creation Time:
ray tracer6 months (5/2003)
SIMD2 months (3/2002)
REYES2 months (3/2002)
scanline4 months (3/2002)
[Rock] [Yorick] [Riverbed]
Miscellaneous Artwork
Computer generated and traditional artwork done over the years.
Media: Maya 4.5, Gouache, Pencil

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