Jonathan Franklin

Campus VFX - Lost Boys Montreal

Providing teaching and mentoring to FX students on topics including, but not limited to procedural modeling, particle simulation, pyro, FLIP, vellum, rigidbody destruction, rendering, and introductory lessons on Hscript and Python scripting. Conducting daily reviews of student work to achieve goals. Also providing technical support including handling hardware upgrades, maintaining lab software, servers, and our render farm. Operating systems include Ubuntu, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux. Also, updating and adding new scripts and services to maintain our in-house pipeline and administering user accounts.

The Collected Works

I was a Houdini TD for the creation of a video for Dropbox showing off their newly redesigned interface. I built procedural vellum tools for automated constraint setup, and used those to inflate balloons of Dropbox icons based on the camera-space expansion of a curvy balloon. Also created helper tools to assist in asset layout and color matching. Helped set up Houdini pipeline to integrate with their existing project management workflows in Windows.

Theory Visuals

Produced procedural environmental assets, mainly architectural in nature. Took hair curves from Maya and generated final hair in Houdini. Assisted with some dust and destruction VFX.

Utah Valley University

I worked as a digital media tutor, mainly specializing in Houdini, but also providing assistance in other relevant programs, such as Photoshop, After Effects, Maya, and Unity.

UVU Senior Film

In this film I handled grooming and hair dynamics, environment generation, including procedural building systems, terrain, water, and sky elements. I helped set up rendering, as well as managed most inter-software pipeline, including managing file structure, building python utilities to more easily handle alembic exports. I also managed Houdini scene setup, built a digital asset workflow for maximum efficiency across scene files, and created optimization utilities in Houdini such as a camera-based culler to maximize rendering potential on memory limited hardware.