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Ben Houston:
Personal Website
email: me @ benhouston3d.com
phone: 1 (613) 762-4113
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Home / Gallery ►► Resume ►► LinkedIn
This is my old personal website (last updated in 2008).
You may find my current projects more interesting:
Clara.io: The online 3D editor. ThreeKit: Online 3D Product Configurators.
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Software Product:
Direct3D.NET-based Poker Game Engine
 
Images
Copyright 2006 StacksPoker
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 Software
Product: Deadline - render farm management system
The
Deadline - is a hassle free method to both administer and render on
Microsoft Windows-based computer clusters of all sizes.
Ben
Houston led the development, marketing and sales of Deadline while at Frantic
Films. Deadline is a ultra-robust render farm management
system. Deadline has been used by Frantic Films on the movies
Paycheck, Scooby Doo 2, Catwoman, X-Men 3, and Superman Returns, by
Blizzard Entertainment on World of Warcraft, and by dozens of other VFX
production houses around the world. Acquired by Amazon in 2017.
"Deadline made our network
rendering problems a thing of the past."
- Blizzard Entertainment
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  Software
Tool: Flood - fluid dynamics
Flood is a state-of-the-art level set-based fluid
dynamics simulation system for the high end VFX and CG communities. Ben
Houston led the research and development of the core fluid simulation
technology employed by Flood as well as being responsible for its
overall software architecture.
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 Innovation:
Gigantic, +1 Billion Voxel, Level Sets
The Hierarchical
RLE Level Set (also known briefly as the Compact RLE level set)combines
the benefits of the two previously presented sparse regular level set
representations: the versatile RLE Sparse Level
Set (of Houston et al. [2004]) and the near-optimally
efficient DT-Grid
(of Nielsen and Museth 2005]).
Houston, B, Nielsen, M, Batty C, Nilsson, O
& K Museth. (2005) Gigantic Deformable Surfaces. Proceedings of
the SIGGRAPH 2005 Conference on Sketches & Applications. ACM Press.
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  Research
Result: RLE Sparse Level Sets
The RLE
(run-length encoded) sparse level set is a novel scalable level set
representation. This compact level set representation, and it's
ability to represent animated characters, was used in the creation of the
"Tar Monster."
Houston, B., Wiebe, M. & C. Batty.
(2004) RLE Sparse Level Sets. Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH 2004
Conference on Sketches & Applications. ACM Press.
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Research Result: Modeling Complex Occlusions
in Level Set-Based Fluid Simulations
Our
contribution consists of two parts. The first part involves representing
the occlusions via an augmented level set instead of the usual
polygon based representations. The second aspect of our contribution
consists of a technique called constrained velocity extrapolation,
which uses the occlusions level set representation to better capture the
subtle effects the occlusions have on the behavior of surrounding fluid.
In addition to just more accurate fluid-occlusion interactions the above
techniques allow for our arbitrarily shaped, moving occlusions (such as the
two blue cups belong) to act as containers for the fluid.
This
method has since been adopted by Industrial Light & Magic to animate
the semi-liquid nature of the Terminatrix villain of Terminator 3.
Houston, B.,
Bond, C., & M. Wiebe. (2003) A unified approach for modeling complex
occlusions in fluid simulations. Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH 2003
Conference on Sketches & Applications. ACM Press.
  
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  Application:
Tar Monster in "Scooby Doo 2"
Creating
the Tar Monster presented a unique challenge, because the desired effect of
a continually flowing textured character with expressive features had never
been done before.
Wiebe, M.
& B. Houston. (2004) The Tar Monster: Creating a Character with
Fluid Simulation. Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH 2004 Conference on
Sketches & Applications. ACM Press
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Application:
Realistic Wispy Smoke for "Cursed"
For
several scenes in Cursed, Wes
Craven's latest film, Frantic Films
was required, during post-production, to insert wispy smoke whenever the
werewolves touched silver. We describe our implementation of a
flexible, artist-friendly smoke simulator capable of producing realistic
wispy smoke for a production environment.
Batty, C and
B. Houston. (2005) The Visual Simulation of Wispy Smoke. Proceedings
of the SIGGRAPH 2005 Conference on Sketches & Applications. ACM Press.
 
Image Copyright 2005 Dimension Films
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 Software Prototype: 3D Game
Engine
Written
while interning at Sir-Tech Ltd, a local Ottawa games company, while
attending high school.
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 Software Prototype: Real-time 2D
Sprite Shader
This
program will shade a 2D sprite as if it was a 3D object. Written while
interning at Sir-Tech Ltd, a local Ottawa games company, while
attending high school.
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 Demo scene: Real-time 3D
rendering of complex shaders
This 16
bit DOS application implements, via a x86 assembler shader routine, both
Phong illumination, Phong shading, texture mapping, bump mapping and
environment mapping. Performance is acceptable on a 486dx 50 MHz and
memory usage is below 550kB.
Download binaries and source (DOS, 159
kB)
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 Demo scene: Real-time 2D Phong
bump-mapping
An
original method for real-time 2D Phong bump-mapping. The code is included.
Written as part of the Azure demo group.
Download binaries and source (DOS, 110
kB)
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 Demo scene: Real-time 3D
rendering of a spinning duck
A
real-time Phong illuminated, flat shaded duck. Written as part of the Azure
demo group.
Download binaries only (DOS, 55kB)
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 Experiment: The Classic Bezier
Teapot
Everyone
has to render the classic Utah Bezier teapot at some point.
Download binaries and source (Dos,
100kB)
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 Experiment: Analog Signal
Interference and Multiplexing Simulator
A
custom GUI based simulator which allows a person to explore the interaction
of simple sine waves. Written in grade 10 using Microsoft Quick C.
Download binaries only (DOS, 56 kB)
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 Experiment: Digital Logic
Analyzer
A
digital logic circuit construction and simulation tool. Written in
grade 10 using Microsoft Quick C.
Download binaries only (DOS, 56 kB)
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 Contest Winner: Fireworks Screensaver
This
graphical simulation of fireworks exploding and subsequently fading won a
programming contest held by Nibble Magazine in June 1990.
Scan of the original page from Nibble
Magazine
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