WARNING: Google have (surprise!) deprecated their old Sites product in favour of some new PM-promotion-savvy hotness, and, in doing so, disabled the old site such that a new migrated version had to be published, and various DNS shennanigans sorted. (As opposed to, say, just leaving the old site there until the next time you wanted to edit it.)
Hence this is all a bit of a mess until I either fix it up, or, more likely, migrate off Google Apps to avoid having to do the same thing in another five years. Sorry!
Work
Wayve
From 2019 through 2023 I worked on Autonomous Vehicles at the startup Wayve, which is tackling the "moon shot" of applying end-to-end Deep Learning to this problem area, with a particular focus on the challenging driving conditions in London. I primarily worked on the Wayve Infinity Simulator , but also on mapping for model direction, and various other bits of core technology.
Sports Interactive
From 2014 through 2018 I worked at Sports Interactive (Sega) on Football Manager, a game with a culture entirely its own. Working on a yearly title that ships across five platforms (while dealing with a 20-year-old codebase) was an interesting experience.
Maxis
From 2001 through 2013 I worked for the canonical 'Sim' game studio, Maxis, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, located in the San Francisco Bay Area. (Initially at Walnut Creek, then Redwood Shores, and then Emeryville, and then remotely from London for a few years.)
The major Maxis games I worked on were:
Spore
Lead project and lead graphics engineer
Website, Sporepedia (190 million+ player-created models here), Wikipedia
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, a little bit of everything. Technology I've worked on has shipped as part of several other games, e.g., My Sims, Sims 3, Darkspore.
Some of the systems behind the games I've worked on are covered on my talks page.
Graphics R & D
Before joining Maxis I was doing research work in the area of global illumination, in particular 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 the face clustering algorithm. My PhD advisor was Paul Heckbert.
Since then a lot of my work has involved R & D in the area of real-time rendering. Some publications and other output:
From AAA to Indie: Graphics R&D, TP CG '13
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 production meshes with attributes.
Technical sketches at SIGGRAPH 2007. Procedural Texturing! Planets! Distribution! Rigblocks!
See my papers, talks, and tech notes pages for a complete overview.
Until recently I was on the editorial board for JCGT, an open-access journal with a practical focus that I can highly recommend.
Personal
Born and mostly grew up in Auckland, New Zealand, but I've lived a variety of places, including Jakarta, Indonesia, and Pittsburgh and the Bay Area in the U.S.A. These days I'm UK based, splitting my time between London and Wales.
Education: Auckland Grammar School. BSc. in Physics, MSc. in Computer Science, University of Auckland. PhD., Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, advised by Paul Heckbert.