San Francisco’s Fog

2022   ·   The New York Times   ·   Data-Visualization   Film   Houdini   Maps   Physics-Simulation   Python   Shaders

A collaboration between The New York Times newsroom graphics team and R&D. We built a data-driven simulation of San Francisco’s fog to create the lead animation for an interactive web article published by The New York Times. We created a model of the Bay Area from elevation data, drove a Houdini fluid simulation over that model using wind direction and speed data, constrained the system to the visible boundaries of fog in a day’s worth of satellite imagery, then used noise patterns to style the simulation with turbulence at higher resolutions than satellites could provide.

👤 Role: Software Engineer