John Hughes - Showreel

Sony Imageworks, Los Angeles.

Some very short shots of current work for Spider-man 3 taken from the first trailer. I am using Houdini to do particle effects work. Shaders are developed in RenderMan and Vex/VOPs. Compositing is done using Sony's in-house compositor, Bonsai. Examples seen here are thruster effects and web effects.

QuickTime Sorenson v3: 360x240

DivX AVI: 720x480

CineSite, London.

Various scenes showing the magical transition of Harry's map. The map was tracked and modelled in CG so that the animation was exactly matched to the deforming surface. Maya and MatchMover.

CORE Feature Animation, Toronto.

Example shots showcasing the lighting of characters. All character lighting was carried out using productivity tools that I developed. See the next section for details.

CineSite, London.

Camera-solving and matchmoving for background replacement. camera tracking was carried out with MatchMover, Boujou and 3D-Equalizer.

CORE Feature Animation, Toronto.

A short deleted scene from The Wild where I was the lead lighting tools developer. Tools were created to increase productivity by supporting re-use and automating complex tasks. Tools were largely created in Houdini as Digital Assets for ease of use and management. The role also invloved a great deal of scripting using hscript, shell scripts, Perl and Python. Amongst many tools was a detailed Lighting Rig and an Interactive Lighting Tool. The Light Rig greatly increased throughput and helped prevent user-error. Lighting set ups could be copied from one character to another at the touch of a button and could be easily re-used in similar shots. An Interactive Lighting Tool allowed rapid tweaking of lighting without having to re-render saving time and greatly reducing render cycles.

Personal work.

In the first shot, where a dragon-tattoo 'comes alive', a toon-like shader is applied to a CG model so that it initially resembles a tattoo. The shader and the model morph to bring the tattoo to life. The second shot shows the CG dragon composited in to a live action backplate that has a day-for-night treatment. The environment has been modelled in CG so that an interactive light pass can be calculated. The third shot shows the procedurally-animated dragon with a fire shader applied to its skin. Lastly, there are two Vex shader tests. The first is spreading lava with a hot burning edge and the second is a molten material that cools from a liquid state to a hot ash. This work was carried out using Houdini, Vex/VOPs, Halo, Shake and Mantra.

CineSite, London.

In the original plate the flying machine had white canvas sails and unpainted wood. I carried out every 3D task to create the painted surfaces. I used MatchMover to track the shot and then used Maya and RenderMan (Slim) to model, texture and light the replacement CG model. There is animation applied to the replacement surfaces so they stay fixed to the sails which are moving gently in the breeze.