Christopher Horvath from Industrial Light & Magic has an impressive history in the VFX world, working at Weta on ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘King Kong’, but had to go in a different direction for the latest work with Harry Potter.
For ‘Harry Potter: The Half-Blood Prince,’ he torched bits and bytes into an amazing 100-foot-tall wall of swirling fire that surrounded Dumbledore, again using the GPU. The system was such hot stuff that SIGGRAPH accepted a technical paper that he wrote with ILM’s Willi Geiger describing the calculus that fueled the fire. It was one of 78 papers accepted from 439 submitted.
