Andrew Willmott

Development

Since 2001 I've been working for Maxis, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, located in the Bay Area. (Initially at Walnut Creek, then Redwood Shores, and then Emeryville.) I'm currently working remotely for the Emeryville studio from Highgate, London, having moved there in late 2008.

The primary games I've worked on are:


Spore

Lead project and graphics engineer

Website, Sporepedia -- 160 million+ player-created models here.

Wikipedia

 

The Sims 2

Graphics engineer

Website

Wikipedia

 

 

SimCity 4

Graphics engineer

Website

Wikipedia

My easter egg.


On the graphics side I've dealt with visual effects, lighting, shadows, material systems, LOD, mesh animation, terrain, and procedural generation systems. On the systems side... well, a bit of everything really. Technology I've worked on has shipped as part of several other games, e.g My Sims, Sims 3, Darkspore.

Research

Some publications and other output:

See also my full list of publications.

Before joining Maxis I was working in the area of global illumination. In particular, most of my research work was on hierarchical methods for ray-tracing and radiosity. At CMU I worked on a comparison of radiosity algorithms, various ray-tracing projects, wavelets for triangular elements, and hierarchical radiosity using multiresolution models, which led to the development of face clustering algorithms. My PhD advisor was Paul Heckbert.

These days I'm still very interested in illumination, surface modelling, and now dynamic systems, but my focus has moved to GPU-based systems, multi-core, and particularly the heterogeneous systems that appear likely to dominate in the future.

Personal

I'm from Auckland, New Zealand. I'm married to Alma Whitten.  

Education: Auckland Grammar School. BSc. in Physics, MSc. in Computer Science, University of Auckland. PhD., Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science in Pittsburgh, advised by Paul Heckbert.

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