James Ring

MFA Computer Arts Application Portfolio

Projects:

  • Houdini.School Science Visualization R&D

  • Pix Dith Pal Blender Add-on

  • Houdini.School Data Visualization Class

  • v60 Technique Short Film

  • Lavatorio Short Film

  • Cyanotype Animation

  • Canter In Twilight Short Film

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Houdini.School Science Visualization R&D

In the Spring of 2024 I was hired by Debra Isaac of Houdini.School to assist her in developing a curriculum for science visualization in animation. The curriculum is currently used at USC for Isaac’s course Visualizing Science Production.

I have selected here a few projects I was in charge of that I created full renders for and that capture key ideas from the curriculum.

For visualizing red shifting in astronomical objects I was able to introduce simple VEX concepts for controlling particle simulations.

This jellyfish project was much more complicated, and focused heavily on proceduralism. Allowing for the quick adjustment of the geometry to match different features of real jellyfish. The main concept taught here was the use of CHOPs in Houdini, which allowed the motion of the jellyfish to be driven by a the motion of an animated profile curve.

This project also explored different ways of using soft body simulation to mimic flesh and skin, without the need for bespoke CFX solvers.

Another aspect of the jellyfish project that ended up being cut because of the complexity was using the Copernicus context in Houdini replicate the underwater color fall off. To do this I used OpenCL to compare each pixel’s depth to the cut off levels of red, green, and blue light light in water. Then removing that fraction of light from the original color values gives a linear fall off. This is not completely physically accurate but as an approximation it works well.

In my demo shown below I paired it with a streak blur/depth lightening effect to mimic volumetric lighting.

Pix Dith Pal Blender Add-on

Original Render

Processed and Downscaled (Pixelated)

Black oak tree textures and model. One of 9 different species of trees I painted and generated in SpeedTree.

Pix Dith Pal is an Add-on I made for a client that converts renders to pixel art with user’s choice of imported color palettes in the Blender compositing context. The Add-on implements ordered dithering (Bayer 4x4) and provides users with many parameters for dialing in their ideal look for renders or images. The Add-on’s other primary feature is the palette importing which converts .HEX files to color ramps that can be automatically swapped into the generated compositing tree to color the user’s images.

I have provided some demo renders featuring another student project of mine titled Nuclear Monument which was a model I made for a 3D printed installation based on the work Nuclear Energy by Henry Moore.

Houdini.School Data Visualization Class

Dithered

The Nebula Visualization was both a way to introduce methods in layering simulations to the students, along with mimicking real world phenomena with simulation. In this case the fluid simulation acts as a mirror to the real life flows of massive interstellar gas clouds that make up Nebulae.

Final Composite Colored with Imported Color Palette

The main demo of the class surrounded bringing in UFO sighting data as a CSV. Then animating and visualizing the data with python, vex, and standard Houdini nodes.

We also covered other technical tasks such as alternate map projections, consolidating attributes into arrays, and bringing time based data into CHOPs.

Student short film. This was my first short film and I was focusing on using traditional 2D animation techniques. This manifested as pose to pose hand drawn animation, primarily on 2s and 3s.

I kept the style simple both to keep the project doable as a solo artist and to capture the simplicity and beauty in the act of making coffee. I was also interested in blending tutorial elements with a dream like atmosphere to show the ritualistic elements of making coffee this way and how that turns into a meditative experience.

The animation was done in Toon Boom Harmony and the backgrounds and design materials were drawn in Clip Studio Paint. The project took 4 months to complete and ended up being 1 minute and 40 seconds long.

Rigged and animated grease pencil characters. This is one of the many technical and design challenges I faced during this project.

The Horses were made by drawing stacks contour lines with grease pencil that then were sculpted and painted to better fit the 3D form of a horse. I used the Rigify horse armature and applied it with painted vertex weights as you would normal geometry. For the animation I followed Richard William’s method closely in combination with live horse footage.

This meant that all traditional outlining methods for geometry would not work (convex hull, freestyle, grease pencil outline modifier, etc.). If I approached this problem now I would try to solve this in the compositor with something more procedural, however at the time my lesser knowledge and fearsome thesis deadline led to choosing the brute force solution of drawing every outline by hand on a plane slightly offset camera facing plane.

My v60 Technique

I was given the opportunity to teach a course at Houdini.School on using Houdini for Data Visualization.

A Canter in Twilight

Undergraduate Capstone Project. An exploration into hybrid 2D and 3D techniques and looks while paying homage to the folk tale narratives of original Disney pictures.

This project was a year long thesis work and featured a wide range of techniques and software. The majority of the work was done in Blender. The majority of the 2D animation was done in Blender with Grease Pencil, but for certain sequences I used Toon Boom Harmony and Photoshop. The film came out to be 3 minutes and 40 seconds long and was presented as a studio installation at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City. The film won the second place award for best thesis project in my class.

I have included images of the initial design and thumbnails, animatic, rigging and modeling process, and a few frames from the final work.

Lavatorio

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Student short film. This was made in Cinema 4D and Redshift. The film stemmed from an assignment to make an environment based on a dream, so I fabricated a dream by modeling 5 different bathrooms from my life and linked them together in a loop. For the technical side of this project I was interested in working with PBR textures and Redshift’s built in post processing effects to get a feeling of realism. I paired this with an ambient track I put together based on field recordings, bathroom room tone, amp feedback, and synthesizer.

Cyanotype Animation

Experimental animation done with cyanotype paper.

The cyanotypes recorded the shadow of an abstract subject. With each frame the light source was moved which changed the exposed shadow. This was a student project during my undergraduate studies. The focus was experimental photography.