Engineering Blockbusters

By Candi Clevenger

A giant blue monster with silky fur. An enormous tower of water that floods New York City and pulverizes skyscrapers. A conflicted villain made of sand who disappears and reappears like magic.

These scenes might sound like a nightmare in the making, but they’re just a few of the design challenges faced by Jeff Wolverton, Doug Roble and Steve May— three Ohio State Engineering alumni who work in the film industry.

As a visual effects artist, Jeff Wolverton (’91, ’94 MS CIS) represents the more artistic side of the animation industry. He got his start in computer graphics at The Ohio State University where he created animations for the old, dot matrix scoreboards in Ohio Stadium and St. John Arena.

The idea that experience in computer graphics could lead to a career in movies was a revelation. "I wanted to work in movies, but for some reason it didn’t occur to me that you could do computer stuff and work in movies until a guy named Doug Roble, who is also an Ohio State graduate, came back and gave a talk," says Wolverton. "I was like, ‘Holy cow! You can work on movies with a computer engineering degree?’ That is what started me on the path to doing it."

Wolverton’s work as a scoreboard animator provided fodder for a demo reel and led to a job at Walt Disney Feature Animation, where he was a digital artist on "Hercules" and "Tarzan."

Since then, Wolverton has worked as a visual effects artist for numerous films, including six that were nominated for Academy Awards in visual effects.

The challenge of finding solutions for new problems with each film is what helps keep the job fresh, says Wolverton, who just finished work on "The Amazing Spider-Man" and is now busy with "Iron Man 3."

"Even things we do the same are different every time. This is the third Spider-Man movie I worked on, but the way we do Spider-Man’s webs is different than every other movie," says Wolverton. "That happens a lot, actually, because [studios] usually don’t want something you’ve seen before." 

The man who inspired Wolverton to consider the movie industry, Doug Roble (’87 MS, ’92 PhD CIS), works on the technical end of the animation spectrum, creating the tools artists use. He is creative director of software at Digital Domain, a visual effects studio located in Venice, Calif. One of Roble’s first projects after joining the studio in 1993 was to create a 3D tracking/scene reconstruction program that involved concepts from his PhD thesis.

"[It] is a program that allows people to figure out where the camera was when a photograph was taken or where things are in the scene," says Roble. "That makes it a lot easier to integrate computer graphics with a picture that was taken by a film camera."

That program, called "track," earned Roble a Scientific and Technical Achievement Academy Award in 1999. Next, he created Digital Domain’s first fluid simulation, which was used on "Lord of the Rings," and received a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award in 2007 for that work.

"It’s fun playing with the physics and the mathematics behind how liquids move," says Roble.

As chief technology officer and supervising technical director at Pixar Animation Studios, Steve May’s work spans the gap between art and technology. May (’90, ’92 MS, ’98 PhD CIS) was drawn to the field of computer animation out of a love of art and science, and an article in Science magazine in 1984 that highlighted, among others, Charles Csuri, an Ohio State professor emeritus who is considered to be the first computer artist. Ohio State’s reputation as a computer graphics powerhouse helped solidify May’s decision to attend the university. His education provided a solid understanding of the field of computer graphics, something he says he uses daily.

"As we make decisions about how to animate the films at Pixar, we’re always challenging ourselves to find either something we’ve never animated before like, in the case of "‘Monsters, Inc." we had never animated fur, and in our new movie, called "Brave," we had never animated a character with really long, curly hair. Actually, it turns out that is really hard," explains May. "We have a continuous number of new animation challenges and all of those things rely on computer graphics."

Since joining Pixar in 1993, May has worked directly on five films. He is perhaps best known for his work as simulation and effects sequence supervisor for "Monsters, Inc.," where he helped pioneer the fur technology and overall look for the character "Sully."

May, Roble and Wolverton all agree that the best parts of their jobs are the ever-changing challenges with each film, working on projects the whole world sees and working in an industry they love.

"When you’re sitting in the back of a movie theater and something that you’ve worked on comes on the screen and the audience reacts in the appropriate way, whether they’re startled or they laugh, that is a huge thrill," says Roble. "That is an amazing feedback loop where you go ‘Wow, they like what I did.’ It’s fun."