VFX Pro
Jos Stam is standing on a pearl-white beach under a cloudless sky. He is visiting his parents, who are vacationing in Faro, a medieval town on Portugal's Algarve coast. Stam, a 41-year-old computer scientist specializing in 3-D graphics, doesn't look at the world the way the rest of us do. Reality is a binary riddle to be cracked, a series of fleeting images best appreciated after they've been rendered into 1s and 0s. Even here, watching the waves hit a beach in Portugal, his thoughts drift, as they always do, toward numbers. He begins scribbling in a small black notebook filled with mathematical interpretations of everything he sees.
Stam is a Nordic Goliath, a neck-craning 6'8", with blond hair, pale green eyes, a deeply cleft chin, and hands the size of bear paws. He wrote the software behind many of the visual effects in modern Hollywood films — he is one of the few programmers to have won an Oscar — yet he's all too aware that no software can re-create the aquatic spectacle before him. Computers can simulate simple fluid motion, but on their own they still can't reproduce the complexity of a breaking wave.
Sure, Titanic and The Perfect Storm had digitally created oceans. But those effects depended on the tedious melding of multiple rudimentary computer simulations. Ten years later, no software can produce believable effects that don't also require untold hours of manual tweaking — and any time additional components are layered in by hand, the finished effect is less realistic. Stam calls the creation of a believable crashing wave, in all its multidimensional complexity, "the holy grail of computer animation." And he may be closer than anyone to finding it.
Click here to read the rest of the article by Michael Behar at Wired.com.
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