Peter Claes

Work History

• 

  Expert Technical Artist

  Infinity Ward

  March 2020 - Present

  Los Angeles, California, US
• 

  Houdini instructor

  Gnomon School of Visual Effects

  January 2016 - Present

  1015 N Cahuenga Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90038

  Teaching Houdini - Advanced visual effects course. A 10 week advanced Houdini course.
• 

  Fx Supervisor / Vfx Lead Artist

  The Mill

  August 2016 - March 2020

  Los Angeles

  Supervising a team of fx artists, helping them solve artistic and technical issues whilst guiding them towards great final results.
  
  Working together with the visual effects supervisor, producer, coordinators and other sequence and department supervisors to integrate all aspects of the effects elements on time and at a high level of quality.
  
  Attract, mentor and interview industry talent, help scheduling and advise on technology roadmaps.
  
  Research and development of visual effects and visual effects tools in commercials, using mainly Houdini. Devising workflows and strategies to tackle complex visual effects sequences.
  
  Commercials
  *) Undisclosed project (2 months): development of macro fx tool, lookdev, volumes, particles, render setups in Arnold
  *) Honda Clarity - Thinking About Tomorrow: development and supervision of fx tools for swirling electrons. This consisted of particles, a trail, a volumetric core, volumetric rotating shells and wispy lines of smoke, fx rendered in mantra.
  *) Intel 360: freeze frame splash of gatorade simulation.
  *) The North Face - Apex Flex: development and supervision of fx setups for a jacket made out of water, including reveal timing, liquid sims, droplets and rivulets and weaving patterns.
  *) Marines: fracturing setup for deforming thin shell fracturing of a human.
  *) Samsung Soundbar: sound driven rbd sims, cloth sims, particle sims, folding and displacement patterns.
  *) Hayday 360: developed solution for drool on camera, water ripples and splashes.
  *) Final Fantasy XV game cinematics (advertising campaign of 15 spots spanning 7 months) : clouds, destruction, magical effects, disintegration, lightning, sparks, clustered impact volumes, warp/teleport effect, water burst, magical shields forming and breaking, missiles firing and impacting.
  *) various pitches:
  - deforming car models, rippling and twisting the surface, simulating ferro liquid.
  - clouds, advection through clouds, vapor trails, condensation
  - ghostly trails
• 

  Cg Supervisor

  Method Studios

  September 2015 - August 2016

  Los Angeles

  Supervising multiple teams of artists, helping them solve artistic and technical issues whilst guiding them towards great final results.
  
  Working together with the visual effects supervisor, producer, coordinators and other sequence and department supervisors to integrate all aspects of the cg elements on time and at a high level of quality.
  
  Features:
  *) Guardians of The Galaxy 2
  *) Captain America 3

• CG Supervisor

  Captain America 3

  September 2015 - April 2016

  Supervising multiple teams of artists, helping them solve artistic and technical issues whilst guiding them towards great final results.
  
  Working together with the visual effects supervisor, producer, coordinators and other sequence and department supervisors to integrate all aspects of the cg elements on time and at a high level of quality.
  
  Attract, mentor and interview industry talent, help scheduling and advise on technology roadmaps.
  
  Research and development of visual effects and visual effects tools.
• 

  Houdini Guest Lecturer

  Gnomon School of Visual Effects

  May 2014 - April 2016

  Los Angeles

  I taught several intermediate to advanced classes at Gnomon on Houdini effects over a 6 week timespan.
  
  Week 1: Flocking system, sopsolving, substepping, vector math, pointcloud lookups, dot product, fuzzy logic, blending behaviors, controlling animation caches.
  
  Week 2: Rain system: pops in dops, replicator, modifying digital assets, sdf sampling for better collisions and cling force, wetmap creation, pointclouds, wetmap in shader.
  
  Week 3: Solution for interacting pyro sims. Fracturing setup with classic rbd objects versus packed primitives, understand
• 

  Effects Supervisor

  Method Studios

  September 2014 - August 2015

  Los Angeles

  Supervising a team of fx artists, helping them solve artistic and technical issues whilst guiding them towards great final results.
  Working together with the visual effects supervisor, producer, coordinators and other sequence and department supervisors to integrate all aspects of the effects elements on time and at a high level of quality.
  
  Features:
  *) Ant Man: supervising a team of artists and developing the setup for swarming and procedurally walking ants. Scheduling artists and resources.

  

  
• 

  Lead Fx Artist

  Method Studios

  August 2013 - September 2014

  Los Angeles

  Research and development of visual effects and visual effects tools in feature films and commercials, using mainly Houdini. Supervising a team of fx artists, helping them solve artistic and technical issues whilst guiding them towards great final results.
  
  Features:
  *) Guardians of The Galaxy: liquids, disintegration, planetary destruction, holograms, flocking, aggregation.
  *) Divergent: Grass tool, debris and collapsed buildings.
  *) Thor: The Dark World: Lightning bolts & sparks, fluid shard trails, dust trails.
  
  Commercials:
  *) Acura: wind tunnel smoke

  

  

  

  
• 

  Mentor

  Side Effects Software

  January 2013 - August 2013

  Santa Monica

  Review and critique of interns progress on a sequence of shots. Recommend different approaches to solving visual effects problems. Also developing some assets and training material.
• 

  Lead Fx Artist

  Method Studios

  August 2011 - August 2013

  Los Angeles, USA

  Research and development of visual effects and visual effects tools in feature films and commercials, using mainly Houdini.
  
  Features:
  *) Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters: created black lightning bolts portal, wispy cigarette-like smoke trails, growing roots & grass.
  *) Iron Man 3: Created falling ashes, embers, debris and destruction of a chair.
  *) Oz: The Great and Powerful: Creating droplets for wetmaps to make the main actors face appear wet.
  *) Last Stand: Sparks and dust added when a car grinds over a rail of a bridge.
  *) Cloud Atlas: Futuristic flui

  

  
• 

  3D Effects Technical Director

  Cinesite

  October 2009 - July 2011

  London, United Kingdom

  Research and development of visual effects and visual effects tools in feature films, using mainly Houdini for John Carter.
  Researched, developed and supported a highly technical, large scale, magical effect (Thern) used in over 100 shots on John Carter of Mars (Oscar nominated). This involved our own lighting pipeline, a complicated shader, massively parallel processing systems, Houdini plugins, vegetation growth algorithms, path-finding algorithms, procedural modeling, procedural animation, building effects tools and custom software for processing and managing huge data sets.

  

• Demonstrator in Computer Animation

  NCCA, Bournemouth University

  2008 - October 2009

  Helping out and assisting undergraduate students during workshops with: C, C++, OpenGL programming, linux, principles of computer systems (PCS), operating system techniques (OST).

• Visual Effects Instructor - Houdini

  3dbuzz

  October 2007 - December 2007

  Author of the Houdini Technical Effects dvd.
  For this dvd I created various visual effects in Houdini and explained how to create them from scratch, step by step. Effects include: procedural trails, a particle wave, vectors & volumes, particle goals, fracturing. I am the instructor for the dvd, sales are managed by 3dbuzz.
• 

  Junior Fx Technical Director

  Framestore

  July 2007 - September 2007

  I was part of the commercials department. I worked on:
  Chemical Brothers - Salmon Dance (particles in maya)
  Herbalescense - shampoo commercial (maya: hair & mel)
  Rexona - bear, wolves and rhino (rendering and lighting - renderman and houdini)

  

• effects technical director

  Rits

  2004 - 2004

  Helping film students with various effects for their graduation projects. This involved mostly effects work in 3dsmax and some compositing with Shake.