Want to read an insanely great story about how digital artist Christopher Horvath made his career in VFX? Then go over to the CGSociety and read their article! It’s really incredible. And it all started with him riding a skateboard.

LINK: Artist, Inventor, ILM’s Christopher Horvath’s career has taken him from canvas to calculus

That title is ‘digital artist,’ but mad scientist better suits this CG artist, programmer, compositor, Birkham yoga instructor, painter, and breaks/electrohouse DJ. Take, for example, the two feature films released this year that he worked on: ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’ and ‘Harry Potter: The Half-Blood Prince.’

For ‘Transformers,’ he developed a GPU-based rigid body dynamics system that churned the top of a great pyramid into flying bricks and rubble when Devastator smashed into it.

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.