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Ben Houston: Personal Website
email: ben @ exocortex.org
phone: 1 (613) 762-4113
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Recent
News:
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The redesigned corporate website for my company,
Exocortex Technologies, Inc., is now up.
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I'll be in Waterloo, Ontario on November 30, 2006 to give an "Applied
Math"/"Computational Mathematics" seminar on "Level
set methods, surface representation and Scooby-Doo."
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The preprint of the long-awaited "Hierarchical
RLE Level Set" paper is available as of February 2006 from the
ACM Transactions on Graphics website.
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The February 2005 presentation to
the Winnipeg .NET Users Group is now
online:
Introduction to 3D Computer Graphics
using Direct3D and .NET (3.3MB PowerPoint file)
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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.
"Deadline™ made our network
rendering problems a thing of the past."
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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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Software
Prototype: DARPA Battlefield Visualization
Software
Prototype: NetViz Document Visualization
Software
Prototype: AutoViz Autonomy Search Visualization
Software
Tool: Deconvolution
and Analysis of Non-Confocal Optical Sectioning Microscopy
Open
Source Project: Exocortex.DSP
Experiment: Real-time Audio Spectrograph
Experiment: Real-time
3D Rendering: OpenGL Free Form Deformation