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Featured Artist: Josh Meister, Burbank, USA

 
Josh Meister 2024

 

 
Josh Meister, FX Artist
 

Josh Meister is a recent graduate of IUPUI's Computer Graphics Technology program with a lifelong passion for visual effects. He has honed his skills in industry-standard tools like Houdini, Nuke, and Maya. In this interview, he shares insights into his Black Hole Rendering Engine project.

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What sparked your interest in visual effects?
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I have loved movies for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I used to wonder how movies were filmed with such imaginative and impossible spectacle. Eventually, I started watching more and more behind-the-scenes content for films like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Transformers, and others. As I learned more about visual effects and animation, I grew increasingly interested in and passionate about the topic. 

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Josh Meister, FX artist photo

Throughout middle school and high school, I learned as much as I could about the industry and began using tools like Blender and After Effects. Around this time, I was also gaining an increasing interest in math, physics, and astronomy. As I learned more about the universe around us, my artistic studies began leaning more and more into this newfound passion for the sciences.

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How did you get started with learning Houdini?​​

 

While at Purdue University, Indianapolis, I studied in their Computer Graphics Technology program. The CGT program gave me a lot of room to explore different specialties and determine where my skills fit best within the 3D pipeline. Though FX was not taught at my campus, I was encouraged by my friends and mentors to look into Houdini, due to my technical-leaning skill set. I started learning the software through YouTube courses and whatever else I could find on the internet, and I immediately fell in love with the software and the workflows involved in FX. To me, it felt like a perfect intersection between math, science, and art that I had never known existed in such a neat box. From that point on, I spent as much of my time as I could learning FX and continuing along my path of artistically exploring scientific concepts.

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Could you share some insights about your professional career as an artist?​​

 

​Throughout my time in college, I continued honing my skills and learning all I could through every resource I could find. As I progressed, I began pursuing more opportunities to learn from professionals in the industry beyond my college studies. In my sophomore year, I joined the Psyche Inspired internship program with Arizona State University and NASA. This was a remote internship in which I got to interact with and learn from professionals in the scientific community, as well as create artwork to inspire the public about the mission to visit 16 Psyche and the asteroid’s theorized origins. Later in college, I had the chance to be a part the Pixar Undergraduate Program, where I not only learned from amazingly talented artists from several departments throughout the studio, but I also made lifelong friends and learned just how much community there is to be found in this industry.
 

After graduation, I joined Disney Animation Studios as an FX Apprentice. During the apprenticeship, I completed shots and created tools for Moana 2, as well as learned from talented and experienced artists in the FX department. Overall, it was an amazing experience, and I learned a ton during my time at the studio. I’m excited and honored to have a Disney film as my first credit, and I am looking forward to seeing where my career takes me in the future.
 

00 Hero Render - Still.jpg

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Could you share details about any special or interesting shots from your projects that stand out to you?​​

 

Of the projects that I am currently able to share, my proudest achievement is probably the black hole I created and rendered with VEX in Houdini. This was a project which began early in my Houdini journey, and has been an ongoing topic of exploration and experimentation throughout my career as my technical skills grow. Black holes have always fascinated me, and, in many ways, they represent everything that I love about bridging the gap between art and mathematics.
 

In its current state, this VEX-based rendering engine supports alpha-driven multisampling, texture filtering, and an artist-controlled Doppler shift effect. Slightly-modified classical mechanics are used to approximate null geodesics for gravitational lensing. Some improvements I am exploring for future iterations include: porting the ray-marcher to OpenCL, physically-based spectral rendering, and point-star sampling among others.

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Final render of the black hole, with a procedural accretion disk and texture-sampled star field.
 

1 -  Orbit without Accretion Disk

Gravitational lensing of a star field, rendered from an orbiting camera.

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3 -  2D Demonstration

A 2D demonstration of the gravitational lensing calculations used within the ray-marcher, and how various aspects of the black hole image are formed.

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2 -  Accretion Disk Turntable

Turntable of the black hole accretion disk, demonstrating the Doppler shift effect from various angles.

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4 -  Demonstration - Sample Space Warping

A 3D demonstration of rays being traced from the camera into the scene.

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Which tools did you use?​​

 

  • Houdini

  • Nuke
     

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Where do you draw your inspiration from?​​

 

Aside from my passion for space and the beauty of the world around us, I am inspired every day by the work I see from my friends and acquaintances in this industry. This field has so many creative and talented people from all over the world; it’s hard not to be inspired when there is so much creativity everywhere you look.

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How has GridMarkets contributed to your success?​​

 

As I have continued pushing my simulations further and further, I have begun to find myself limited by my hardware at home. After asking around and doing some research online, I discovered GridMarkets and their computing services. I have since found it to be an invaluable resource for running heavy simulations or caching/rendering large sequences in parallel. GridMarkets has drastically improved my iteration time, as well as raised the bar of what I can accomplish in my FX work.

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05 2D Demonstration B (1).jpg

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Would you like to share any final thoughts with the community?​​

 

First off, I want to give a million thanks to all of my mentors, who have taught me so much about FX and about this industry as a whole: Felege Gebru, Jeremy Paton, Bruce Wright, Chris Carignan, Ben Fiske, Tom Sirinaruemarn, among so many others who have given me guidance throughout this exciting journey.​

 

To any young artists who are still trying to figure out what field or specialization you might want to dive into, just explore! If it hadn’t been suggested to me, I might never have even attempted to learn FX. Sometimes your biggest passion might be something you haven’t even tried yet, so go out and try things!

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By: GridMarkets marketing

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