Interstellar

Sylvan's contribution to the "Interstellar" project at Double Negative is a testament to his visual effects expertise. As part of the R&D team, he played a crucial role in delivering wormhole shots for the film, a pivotal element in bringing the film's groundbreaking visualizations to life. This involved rewriting the Houdini path tracer, Mantra, to work with the DNEG renderer, allowing for seamless integration of 'relativistic raytracing' with standard pipelines.

The team's work was not just a cinematic achievement but also a scientific one. In collaboration with renowned physicist Kip Thorne and the Dneg team, including lead Oliver James, Sylvan helped create renderings capable of simulating a black hole with unprecedented accuracy. Their efforts led to a paper published in the scientific journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, highlighting the significant crossover between visual effects in cinema and scientific discovery.

During his time at Dneg, Sylvan's responsibilities extended well beyond "Interstellar." He was the Lead Engineer overseeing all Houdini lighting and shading core tools, which contributed to many films and included improving physically-based rendering (PBR) solutions and other physics-based techniques for fluid mechanics tools. His expertise in the PBR domain was honed all the way back to his previous experience at MPC in 2006, where he developed and rolled out the first PBR shading pipeline at MPC for the movie "Poseidon."

You can read the research paper about the team's work on ArXiv here