Was initially brought on to supervise a film project but due to production timetables shifted to setting up the VR services at Milk. Supervised their first few projects and took them through the initial talks with clients and investors on various strategies and solutions for various project types. The first few projects I looked after
Author: Sylvan Dieckmann
Lead R&D Engineer – Site Rendering Technology
Was the lead (and often sole) R&D developer for all core Houdini lighting and shading at the company for the last two years. Part of core R&D department working on rendering technology, shader library development and artist tools for Houdini and Mantra for use on all shows. Wrote and maintained all of the light rig
Building interstellar’s black hole: the gravitational renderer
Published in ACM SIGGRAPH 2015 Building interstellar’s black hole: the gravitational renderer Interstellar is the first feature film to attempt depicting a black hole as it would actually be seen by somebody nearby. A close collaboration between the production’s Scientific Advisor and the Visual Effects team led to the development of a new renderer, DNGR (Double
R&D Engineer – VR/AR Research
Designed a VR solution for viewing content based on capture and playback of a mix of light field and deep rendered data. Unfortunately due to the secretive nature of the work I can’t say too much about it. The implementation is similar to Paul Debevec’s Light Field work with OToy found here.. Light Field Capture
Rendering R&D – In The Heart Of The Sea
Was the core lead R&D shader and lighting developer for the show, responsible for : Ocean surface and close water shader development Light shaders and tools development Surface displace and FX blending tools A custom pathtracer written for high water shot volume A rigid body and FX interaction toolset and masking framework.
Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar
Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar Kip Thorne submitted this paper to the Cornell University Library at arXiv.org concerning the work on Interstellar. Just an acknowledgement for contribution to the project, nice to contributing to science though, especially the field of astrophysics. This is what the paper is about :
Rendering R&D – Interstellar
Was the core lead Houdini R&D developer for the show, responsible for : DNGR Team Renderer development, part of the team for integration of Kip Thorne’s wormhole mathematics to create a relativistic pathtracer. Light shaders and tools development Volume shaders with a novel level set rendering method for massive geometry data sets A custom pathtracer
Wild and Beautiful Nature : Kosmos Journal
Published in Kosmos Journal, Spring/Summer Edition 2014 Kosmos Journal I was very happy to be invited to publish my work in the spring/summer edition of Kosmos Journal. The Kosmos Associates are a group dedicated to global policy change for the betterment of humanity as part of the United Nations and do good work.
Senior Lighting TD – Thor : The Dark World
Came onto the show as a senior lighting TD but ended up taking on a number of roles. Shot a 32bit texture pipe on location and painted all the textures for the Greenwich ship to water touchdown sequence. Fluid FX for for some shots (whitewater sims) Developed a POP based whitewater solver to avoid DOP
Lighting TD – The Hobbit : An Unexpected Journey
Joined Weta to help finish off the Hobbit, was a lovely crew to work with! Lit a number of shots around the destruction of Erebor and the town of Dale Did a bunch of environmental layout and design for the above Creating lighting rigs for other lighters to use for lighting the town of Dale