Andrew Willmott

Work

From 2001 to the end of 2012 I worked for the 'Sim' game studio, Maxis, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, located in the Bay Area. (Initially at Walnut Creek, then Redwood Shores, and then Emeryville, and then remotely from London for a few years.) I'm currently working on a still-cloaked mobile project.

The major games I've worked on are:

	SimCity (2013) Lead Architect Website Wikipedia
	Spore Lead project and lead 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 -- snow at Christmas.

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.

R & D

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.

Some publications and other output:

Fast Generation of Directional Occlusion Volumes, Siggraph 2012

"Inside GlassBox", GDC 2012.

"Rapid Simplification of Multi-Attribute Meshes", presented at HPG 2011. AKA, how to simplify meshes in 10ms, AKA, how to make vertex clustering work well on meshes with attributes.

Technical sketches at SIGGRAPH 2007. Procedural Texturing! Planets! Distribution! Rigblocks!

"Face Cluster Radiosity", Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, June 1999.