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(Last updated: 28th May 2010)
My educational background has always teetered on the edge of the sciences, art and computers, so it only made sense to futher those interests into a career. After some fairly good A-levels at school, I went to the University of Hertfordshire and studied for a degree in Mathematics. I obtained a First Class Honours in 1997, but stayed on at the same university to do some research in numerical optimization and to do some lecturing. I also took this opportunity to learn some programming languages which I had left out during my degree. Unfortunately, my interests did not lie in numerical optimization - and I found myself persuing ideas in computer graphics. I'd always had an interest in graphics and games, and after winning a programming competition in a magazine (and getting £ 50 for it), I realized I could probably make a career out of a hobby.
In early 2000, I quit the university, and joined a small games developer and publisher in Barking in London called Online games. Here, I had my first hands-on experience of developing the toolset and real-time game code, and all the joys and woes that go with it. I found I was more and more interested in the technology behind games rather than a specific game itself. In March 2001, I moved on from Online and joined Criterion to work on the RenderWare middleware product.
I joined Criterion at a time when RenderWare was just starting out on it's third incarnation, named RenderWare 3 unsurprisingly. I took on the role of handling the OpenGL versions of the engine, but gradually got involved with more and more aspects, including documentation, audio tools, build systems, and art tools. I prefer to see my role as knowing a little about everything, rather than focusing on one particular area. However, graphics is still my main area of interest, so that is the group in which I work.
RenderWare has progressed onto version 4 now, in which I took on the Direct3D9 implementation, but still dabble in all areas whenever possible. More recently, Criterion were purchased by Electronic Arts from Canon. RenderWare 4 was developed for next generation (as of 2005) consoles, and I was one of the lucky few to work on the very first PlayStation3 prototypes. I lead the graphics development on that platform, and in collaboration with a team in Vancouver, created a real-time interactive demonstration for Fight Night that was shown at the launch of the PlayStation3 console at E3 2005.
Unfortunately, RenderWare4 was not perceived well within the EA game teams, and we (the old Criterion team) have gone on to co-develop another graphics technology with EA teams called RenderEngine, and also develop the existing RenderWare physics technology into a package to rival Havok and PhysX. In addition to being responsible for the RenderEngine technology, I have travelled to game teams not using our technology to help them finish their own next gen games. Titles that I have my name in the credits for are Fight Night Round 3, Burnout Paradise, Skate 1, Skate 2, Skate It, Mirror's Edge, Dragon Age Origins.
From December 2009 to May 2010, I am on a secondment to Criterion Games, to enhance their rendering solution to truly Next Generation, using multiple threads/CPUs on Xbox360 and PlayStation3. One of my tasks also included redesigning rendering structures to improve the memory footprint on PlayStation3.
In June 2010, I started a new position at The Foundry, initially working on the Windows port of their 3D painting application called Mari. I have recent completed the first stage of Ptex (per face texturing) support in Mari, a technology made Open Source by Disney Animation Studios that no longer requires modellers to UV map a model, and provides a unique texture for each face of the model.