Craig W. Reynolds

Academy Award

Winner of a Scientific And Engineering Award presented by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for pioneering contributions to the development of three dimensional computer animation for motion picture production at the Scientific and Technical Awards of the 70th Academy Awards® held in 1998.

Professional Experience

1998 to present

Sony Computer Entertainment America
Member of SCE US Research and Development. Investigating autonomous character technology for games and other interactive entertainment applications on PLAYSTATION®3 and future Sony platforms. Projects include Pigeons in the Park, OpenSteer and PSCrowd.

1997 to 1998

DreamWorks Animation
Member of Long Term Software Development staff, in the Feature Animation division of DreamWorks SKG. Developed behavioral animation tools.

1994 to 1996

Silicon Studio [at archive.org]
Member of FireWalker team. Developed tools for authoring improvisational behavior in multimedia.

1992 to 1994

Electronic Arts
Designed and implemented real-time reactive behavioral models for use in video games. Created behaviors used in John Madden Football for 3DO, and for an unreleased hockey game.

1982 to 1991

Symbolics Inc. (Symbolics Graphics Division)
Design, implement, and maintain a 2d paint system (S-Paint). Design, implement, and maintain an interactive 3d animation scripting system (S-Dynamics). Conduct program in advanced graphics research: produced a behavior model of bird flocking and a geometrical model of surfaces in nonlinear flow.

1979 to 1982

Information International Inc. (Motion Picture Project / Digital Scene Simulation)
Lead animator (technical director) on computer animated scenes for TV commercials and feature film special effects. Developed graphics and animation tools.

1978

Ramtek Corporation

1975 to 1976

ComputerVision Corporation

Education

1978

Master of Science, thesis on procedural animation (Computer Animation in the World of Actors and Scripts), The Architecture Machine Group (now part of The Media Lab), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

1975

Bachelor of Science, thesis on procedural animation ("A Multiprocessing Approach to Computer Animation") Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Won the William L. Stewart, Jr. Award for founding MITV student television.

Film credits

• Feature films:
  • Looker, 1981, The Ladd Company
  • TRON, 1982, Walt Disney Studios
  • Batman Returns, 1992, Warner Brothers
• Short films:
  • The Juggler, 1981, Information International Inc. (theme animation from triple-I's Sample Reel)
  • (Stanley and Stella in) Breaking the Ice, 1987, Symbolics and Whitney/Demos
  • Behave, 1988, Rebecca Allen
  • Ductile Flow, 1990, Symbolics (SVR Issue 61, item 12)
  • Virtually Yours, 1991, Symbolics (Matt Elson)
    

Editorial Boards

• Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds: member of the editorial board since the journal's launch (as JV&CA) in 1990.
• Artificial Life: member of the editorial board since 2001.
• Computers in Entertainment: member of the editorial board since journal's launch in 2003.
  
• Former member of editorial board of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines from the journal's launch in 2000 until 2003.
  

Technical publications

• Reynolds, C. W. (1982) Computer Animation with Scripts and Actors, in Computer Graphics, 16(3) (SIGGRAPH '82 Conference Proceedings) pages 289-296.
  
  
• Reynolds, C. W. (1987) Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model, in Computer Graphics, 21(4) (SIGGRAPH '87 Conference Proceedings) pages 25-34.
  
  This paper was selected for republication in 1998 in ACM SIGGRAPH's Seminal Graphics: Pioneering Efforts That Shaped The Field see also this article about the selection process.
  
  
• Reynolds, C. W. (1993) An Evolved, Vision-Based Behavioral Model of Coordinated Group Motion, in From Animals to Animats 2: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB92), Meyer, Roitblat and Wilson editors, ISBN 0-262-63149-0, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pages 384-392.
  
  
• Reynolds, C. W. (1993) An Evolved, Vision-Based Model of Obstacle Avoidance Behavior, in Artificial Life III (held in 1992), Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proceedings Volume XVI, C. Langton, Editor, ISBN 0-201-62494-X, Addison-Wesley, Redwood City, California, pages 327-346.
  
  
• Reynolds, C. W. (1994) Evolution of Obstacle Avoidance Behavior: Using Noise to Promote Robust Solutions, in Advances in Genetic Programming, K. E. Kinnear, Jr., Ed., ISBN 0-262-11188-8, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pages 221-242.
  
  
• Reynolds, C. W. (1994) The Difficulty of Roving Eyes, in Computational Intelligence: Imitating Life (Proceedings of the 1994 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence) Orlando, Florida, USA, June 27-29, ISBN 0-7803-1104-3, IEEE Press, pages 262-267.
  
  
• Reynolds, C. W. (1994) Evolution of Corridor Following Behavior in a Noisy World, in From Animals to Animats 3: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB94), D. Cliff, P. Husbands, J-A Meyer, and S. Wilson, Editors, ISBN 0-262-53122-4, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pages 402-410.
  
  
• Reynolds, C. W. (1994) Competition, Coevolution and the Game of Tag, in the proceedings of Artificial Life IV, R. Brooks and P. Maes, Editors, ISBN 0-262-52190-3, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pages 59-69.
  
  
• Reynolds, C. (2006) Big Fast Crowds on PS3. In Proceedings of Sandbox (an ACM Video Games Symposium), Boston, Massachusetts, July 2006, pages ?-?.
  

• Reynolds, C. (1977) Filling Polygons, in Architecture Machinations, newsletter of the Architecture Machine Group, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 3(17), May 3, 1977 pages 3-8. (Early description of trapezoidal decomposition of polygons.)
  
  
• Reynolds, C. W. (1985) Description and Control of Time and Dynamics in Computer Animation, in the notes for the SIGGRAPH '85 course Advanced Computer Animation, published by ACM SIGGRAPH.
  
  
• Reynolds, C. W. (1988) Not Bumping Into Things, in the notes for the SIGGRAPH '88 course Developments in Physically-Based Modeling, pages G1-G13, published by ACM SIGGRAPH.
  
  
• Reynolds, C. W. (1992) Adaptive Polyhedral Resampling for Vertex Flow Animation, unpublished.
  
  
• Reynolds, C. W. (1999) Steering Behaviors For Autonomous Characters, in the proceedings of Game Developers Conference 1999, Miller Freeman Game Group, San Francisco, California, pages 763-782.
  
  
• Reynolds, C. W. (2000) Interaction with Groups of Autonomous Characters, in the proceedings of Game Developers Conference 2000, CMP Game Media Group (formerly: Miller Freeman Game Group), San Francisco, California, pages 449-460.

Presentations

• 1982, February 3: Hewlett Packard, Palo Alto, Computer Colloquium Series: Computer Graphics and Animation for Commercial Art.
  
  
• 1983, October 31: Asilomar Conference on Circuits, Systems and Computers invited talk Computer Graphics and Animation for Commercial Art.
  
  
• 1984, January 27, Optics in Entertainment II, SPIE Volume 462, Los Angeles, High powered graphical work stations for one or fewer users. (Described Symbolics graphics systems and the notion of distributing computations across unused personal computers, as we used back then for rendering and as used today for Folding@home and similar projects. Many thinks to Michael Naimark for remembering these details in 2007!)
  
  
• 1987: SIGGRAPH 87 panel Tool Kits: A Product of Their Environments with Ken Perlin, Jim Blinn, Tom Duff, Bill Lorensen and Craig Reynolds.
  
  
• 1989: SIGGRAPH 89 Special Session Bloopers, Outtakes, and Horror Stories of SIGGRAPH Films along with: John Lasseter, Bill Reeves, Philippe Bergeron, Eben Ostby, Chris Wedge, Bill Kroyer, Jim Blinn, Loren Carpenter, Ralph Winter and Craig Reynolds.
  
  
• 1992: SIGGRAPH 92 panel Artificial Life, along with Chair Steven Levy and other panelists: Chris Langton, Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, Karl Sims, Larry Yaeger and Craig Reynolds.
  
  
• 1995: lecture on Authoring Autonomous Characters at the Distinguished Lecture Series of the Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center at Georgia Institute of Technology.
  
  
• 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1998: spoke on Behavioral Animation for Movies and Multimedia at the SIGGRAPH course Artificial Life for Graphics, Animation, Multimedia, and Virtual Reality.
  
  
• 1998: panelist at the SIGGRAPH 98 panel on Behavioral Modeling and Animation: Past, Present, and Future
  
  
• 1999: speaker at EVALife's first international workshop on Interdisciplinary Concepts for the Analysis of Complex Systems
  
  
• 2000: Artificial Life for Computer Games tutorial at Game developers Conference 2000, organized by John Funge with Bruce Blumberg, Demetri Terzopoulos and Craig Reynolds.
  
  
• 2000: speaker and co-organizer (with Chris Hecker) of the SIGGRAPH 2000 course Games Research: the Science of Interactive Entertainment.
  
  
• 2000: lecture on Reactive Autonomous Characters in the Fall 2000 Distinguished Lecture Series on Computer Games presented by the University of Michigan's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
  
  
• 2001: Artificial Life for Computer Games tutorial at Game developers Conference 2001, organized by John Funge with Bruce Blumberg, Demetri Terzopoulos and Craig Reynolds.
  
  
• 2006: Crowd Simulation on PS3 [slides] lecture at Game Developers Conference 2006.
  
  
• 2006: High Performance Multi-Processor Crowd Simulation invited talk at AIIDE 2006.
  
  
• 2006: Columbus College of Art & Design invited talk in the Visiting Artist program: Steering Behaviors for Autonomous Characters in Games and Animation.
  

Send comments to Craig Reynolds <cwr@red3d.com>
Last update: December 20, 2007