This is a quick DIY electronics project I set for myself so I could brush up on my circuit design and some building techniques. I bought a couple copper lanterns off ebay and fitted them with a circuit similar to the outdoor solar lights you can buy at for your yard. Much of the circuit design is based on one of the simple designs on Evil Mad Scientist. That’s a great page to get started with.

I modified the circuit so that the lanterns could operate indoors near a window. Most solar lights, including the one on Evil Mad Scientist, are designed to be kept outdoors. So the solar panel gets a lot more light than one that’s kept indoors. If you use a 3V solar panel to match up with the 2.4V battery, the panel needs to get direct sunlight to charge the battery, and the light will turn on well before it gets dark. I decided to use a 6V solar panel. This way it charges the battery with only indirect light through a window. One potential issue is that a 6V solar panel under direct sunlight could overcharge the 2.4V batteries. I’ve been running this circuit for a few months without any problems.

Assembly is pretty straight forward. You can see how I built it in the montage video at the bottom of this post. If you want the light to run outside, you’ll need to take extra precautions for waterproofing.

Here’s the parts list:

• 6V Solar Cell (16-100ma is fine)
• 2x rechargeable AAA batteries and a battery holder
• 1N914 Diode
• 4K Ohm Resistor
• 50 Ohm Resistor
• On/Off Switch
• PNP 3906 Transistor
• 2x flickering LED’s
• a small circuit board for mounting components

Here’s a quick montage of how it was constructed:

On March of 2008 early shading and lighting td’s were being picked up by Weta, so I fired off my demo reel and cv and waited to hear back. After a very long 3 months, I got a phone interview and then an offer to work as a Lighting Technical Director.

I started in October 2008 and got assigned a lead position quickly. Working with my friends and Weta’s open atmosphere allowed me to pick up as much responsibility as I could handle.

My first sequence, which was almost solely lit by ex Framestore TD’s, was the wake up scene. This is the only scene in the movie where Jake and Norm’s avatars appear on a previously filmed plate. That is, the background is not computer generated. The most rewarding aspect of this scene is that it allowed for traditional visual effects lighting and compositing. I had done this for years in London, so it was an exciting test. Weta’s lighting tools were up to the job, and we achieved a realistic look without much revision.

My second sequences is where Jake bursts out of the door into the yard. This sequence involved a lot of shader palette and look development. The primary shading team was busy working on plants (a lot of them), so hard surface work was left up to the sequence leads. Pipeline changes also threw a spanner into the works. We got it done though, and I was especially proud of the sequence’s uniquely challenging shots; Jake eating the fruit and scrunching his toes in the dirt.

Next was the “love scene”. I wasn’t the primary lead on this, but was able to run the opening one-off shots on my own. These involved the swimming scene, and lots of bioluminescence. Lighting the night time biolum shots was a really unique experience. No key, rim or fill direction needed to make sense. It was just a beautiful rave club light show.

My final sequence was where the humans were being paraded back onto the shuttle to leave. I really pushed the golden hour look but orange light and blue skin doen’t get along well, so it was a balancing act. The biggest challenge of this sequence was the sheer number of animated characters on the screen. One of the shots had over 100 characters + props which all had to be version managed. Managing shadow data with all of the moving models into the distance was also a challenge.

If you saw the movie, I hope you enjoyed it. Check out the trailer here:
http://www.avatarmovie.com/

Check out the trailer here on apple.

Here’s a 7min clip.

Once those were final I took over lighting and look development for the Dryad, a woman made of flower petals. The greatest challenge of this character was to convey facial feature and shaping with a semitransparent and heavily backlit cloud of petals. Sidefx’s Houdini saved the day once again with its attribute transfer node. Using this we were simply able to transfer the surface normal of a modeled face onto the instanced flower petals as they flowed over the surface. This was faded in and out based on areas on interest (her face). The second half of the problem was to light her mass so that it showed the backlit beauty of flower petals and also the shaping of the outside of the cloud. Otherwise she would appear like hard plastic flakes, an amorphous blob, or flower petals. It was a tricky balance.

The “magic door” (a tree which rotates into a portal at the end of the film) was my next major project. I ran this sequence in parallel to the dryad. My primary responsibility was overseeing the shading, lighting, and compositing of the tree. Modeling was a combination of polygons and skinned L-systems (go Houdini!). Animation was a combination of key framing and simulations though Houdini’s wire solver. Texturing and shading was pretty standard, but some closeups involved some very careful ndc mapping. The real technical challenge was modeling the overall leaf bag shape to art direction, and rendering the sheer amount of polygons. It was all worth it when Quint from Aint it Cool News gave points for the “magical vagina tree at the end of the movie”.

Check out the trailer here.

Fawkes was a big challenge and a very interesting project. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Fawkes was a combination of cg and animatronic. Because of this, the cg character was designed to match the animatronic. Unfortunately, the anamatronic was a large turkey shaped robot, filled with motors and servos. So the cg Fawkes for the Chamber of Secrets wasn’t an elegant creature. She was chubby. For the Order of the Phoenix, cgi was confidently accepted as a superior technique to anamtronics, and we no longer had to worry about matching any live action elements. I started from scratch from the original water color concept art, but was aware of not going too far from the Chamber of Secrets bird. We had to maintain some continuity after all. I helped develop a feather system in houdini and did all of the grooming, shader writing, and lighting. I also acted as a bit of a sequence lead, and directed the modeler and rigger to make the skin of the bird compatible with my feathers. The big challenge of Fawkes was juggling my time between developing and debugging the feather groom, and making artistic changes for review. It really was two jobs in one. In the end, it was one of the most rewarding projects of my career. Rarely do we get to feel complete ownership over an effect.

Halfway through production, we were awarded Kreature and the lead shader writer on the show moved to look developing this character. I took over the Centaurs and re-wrote all of their shaders to be more pipelined for lighting. The original shader setup ran all of the ray occlusion and blurred environment reflection at render time. This made lighting impossibly slow. I broke all of these stages out into point cloud bakes and also developed an AOV build for the compositors. It was a lot of work, but it brought me up to speed with modern renderman ptc baking and the dos and don’ts of building beauty out of AOV’s.

I developed one of the primary effects, which I called multi release. It’s the streaming smokey trails that come off of the characters as they transform. To accomplish this I made a copy of the digital double for every frame that the effect took place. I then peeled each copy back into a softbody/velocity field simulation in Houdini. I offset each copy by one frame. So essentially there’s a floppy skin that peels off the characters at every frame. I developed a shader that added up each layer of polygons to generate a fire like affect. Some hue shifts and glows in shake finished it off. In the end, all of our work was art directed to look like a fancy glow and cross fade, but we did our best to make it pretty.

Click for larger image

This is my old neighborhood. Spared.

Click for larger image.

UPDATE 1: There’s another map at www.digitalglobe.com. Download it here . It’s pretty close to the one I made above but is excluding any flooding in the west part of the city (Metairie and Kenner). I’m not which is more accurate.

UPDATE 2: This is a pretty good resource for finding out the damage in certain areas: http://www.scipionus.com/

UPDATE 3: Thanks to Tom for pointing out this site:

http://ngs.woc.noaa.gov/katrina/KATRINA0000.HTM It allows you click on an area and see a relatively up to date satellite image.

UPDATE 4: A map is available with water depths: cctechnol.com