Odyssey

From the end of 2023 I've been working at the startup Odyssey, which is applying ML-based approaches to movie VFX and games production. The goal is to provide talented artists with creative tools that amplify the amazing things they can do, rather than replacing them with a text prompt.

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 contributed a lot of the core tech in our C++ codebase.

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 shipped across five platforms (while dealing with a 20-year-old codebase) was quite the 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.) I started fresh out of graduate school as a junior engineer, and ended at the top of the technical career ladder, so it was a formative experience, one that I'm very grateful for.

The major Maxis games I worked on were:

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.

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.

Born and mostly grew up in Auckland, New Zealand,  but I've lived a variety of places, including Jakarta in Indonesia, and Pittsburgh and the Bay Area in the U.S.A. These days I'm living in the UK, splitting my time between London and mid-Wales. (The closest you can get to NZ scenery over here.)

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.