Gary Yost | |
|---|---|
 Yost on Mt. Tamalpais, 2024 | |
| Born | Gary Steven Yost |
| Occupation(s) | Filmmaker, Software Design |
| Spouse | Sondra Davies-Yost |
| Children | Ruby Yost |
| Website | www.garyyost.com |
Gary Yost (born 1959) is an American filmmaker, musician and software designer, best known for leading the team that created Autodesk 3ds Max.
Yost created the Antic Software publishing unit for Antic Magazine in 1984 after Jack Tramiel bought Atari Computer from Warner Communications and shut down the Atari Program Exchange. [1]
Yost met Tom Hudson at the Fall 1985 Comdex trade show and they began planning a suite of 3D animation tools for the Atari ST line of microcomputers, which became the Cyber Studio suite of animation products, beginning with CAD-3D 1.0, released autumn 1986. [2] Stereo CAD-3D 2.0, released in late 1987, was built on an open-architecture framework and incorporated support for creating stereoscopic animations using the Tektronix “StereoTek” liquid crystal shutter 3D display. [3] [4] The StereoTek display was the first low-cost mass-market 3D display for microcomputers. [5]
In 1988 Yost left Antic Software to form “The Yost Group” when Autodesk offered him a software licensing agreement to create a suite of affordable animation tools for the IBM PC, beginning with Autodesk 3D Studio and Autodesk Animator, [6] which was a 2D cel animation tool written by Jim Kent for The Yost Group. An obscure fact about Yost in 1988 is that, along with Computer Graphics pioneer Jim Blinn, he played percussion on the Todd Rundgren album "Nearly Human," which was recorded at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, California. [7] [8]
Working with Tom Hudson, Jack Powell, Dan Silva, Rolf Berteig and Gus Grubba, Yost led the team that created Autodesk 3D Studio versions 1-4 for the MS-DOS platform. Don Brittain, former VP of Research for Wavefront Technologies, was brought into the Yost Group to help create the re-designed 3D animation program called Autodesk 3ds Max, based on the Microsoft Windows NT platform and it was first shown at the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles in 1995 [9] before its 1996 release.
Yost and his engineering team applied for and received eight US patents for the technology they invented for Autodesk 3ds Max and in 1997 they sold their rights to the source code and inventions to Autodesk, ending Yost’s involvement with the product.
In 2004 Yost joined Berlin-based mental images, GmbH & Co. as Executive Vice President of their US-based operation. [10] Yost and mental images’ founder Rolf Herken had formed a relationship when Yost licensed the mental ray rendering library and other software components from mental images for Autodesk 3ds Max. [10] [11] mental images was acquired by NVIDIA, [12] and Yost’s involvement wound down by 2011.
In 2013, Yost joined Rolf Herken’s Mine Innovation as an engineering advisor. [13] [14]
In 2020, Yost was interviewed about his life's experience in CGI on the 300th episode of the CG Garage VFX podcast. [15]
Yost has been a photographer for over 50 years [16] and began pursuing photography more seriously in 2012 when he created the viral video “A Day in the Life of a Fire Lookout,” about the Gardner Fire Lookout on Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, California. That video won a Vimeo Staff Pick award. [17] [18] [19] [20]
He spent seven years working with the Marin Municipal Water District and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy on a trilogy of films about Ground Equipment Facility J-33, the abandoned Mill Valley Air Force Station on the West Peak of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California. [21] [22] [23] Yost's Mt. Tamalpais film series [24] [25] covers a wide range of topics, including a short doc about artist Zio Ziegler and his Mill Valley mural that was inspired by the Sitting Bull monument on Mt. Tam. [26]
The first film in the trilogy, “The Invisible Peak” [27] was created by Yost with help from Peter Coyote and George Daly. It has been a selection at 16 film festivals, and has won awards for Best Documentary, Best of Show, and Outstanding Environmental Vision. [28] The most-recent work in Yost's Mt. Tamalpais film series is "The Way it's Supposed to Be" [29] featuring performances by Marin County musicians Bob Weir, Maria Muldaur, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Matt Jaffe
In addition to the filmmaking work he has accomplished on Mt. Tamalpais, Yost has been working on films that document the cultural life of Fijians in 2015. [30] [31] [32]
His other videos include a project with Puddles the Clown, which has garnered over 8 million views on YouTube [33] and an innovative use of infrared cinematography [34] [35] for a project with the YASSOU band, [36] featuring synchronized swimmers from LA-based Aqualillies. [37] [38] Yost has been actively promoting the use of time-lapse to tell stories, [39] and was a judge for the LA-based 2016 Timelapse Film Festival [40] along with Godfrey Reggio, the producer of the seminal time-lapse film Koyaanisqatsi.
In 2017 Yost was the recipient of the Mill Valley Creative Achievement "Milley" award from the Mill Valley, California Arts Commission, joining previous recipients including Dan Hicks (singer), John Korty, Joyce Maynard, Sammy Hagar, Jane Hirshfield and Bob Weir. [41] [42] [43]
In both 2018 and 2019 Yost won the Best Indie Filmmaker reader's choice award in Marin County, California from the Pacific Sun (newspaper) [44] and he began working in the field of immersive cinema. He was the director of photography for "Circle of Dreams," a virtual reality project with the legendary SF-based art collective The Residents. [45] [46]
Yost launched the nonprofit WisdomVR Project [47] as a 501(c)(3) with strategic partnership support from Oculus VR and the Long Now Foundation in early 2019. [48] [49] As of September 2019, WisdomVR participants include Ram Dass, Betty Reid Soskin, Gavin de Becker, Peter Coyote, Shelton Johnson, Gaelynn Lea, L. Frank Manriquez, Anna Halprin, Todd Rundgren, Wavy Gravy, Joan Jeanrenaud, Malcolm Margolin, Reuben Heyday Margolin, John Law (artist), Stanislav Grof, Huey Johnson and Pearl E. Gates from Pearl Harbor and the Explosions.
In late 2020 the 501(c)(3) WisdomVR Project launched the stereoscopic 360° documentary Inside COVID19, [50] funded by Oculus (brand), which told the story of an American ER doctor who nearly died from the novel coronavirus and featured over 10 minutes of 360° stereoscopic molecular animation designed by Andrew Murdock and created in Autodesk 3ds Max. [51] [52] [53] [54] [55] Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar, stated “WisdomVR's 'Inside COVID19' production was excellent and the interviews felt more intimate than normal (hence showing off VR in an unexpected way). The computer graphics were stunning, and the best explanation I’ve seen of COVID at work. It shows what really can be done in this new medium.” and John Carmack, founding CTO of Oculus tweeted "Inside COVID19 is a high production value documentary that just happens to be done in stereo 360, rather than a tentative exploration of a new medium. Things are maturing.” The Inside COVID19 VR documentary was nominated for the 2021 Emmy Awards in the Outstanding Interactive Program category, [56] [57] [58] won the Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories "People's Choice" award for best immersive video in February 2021, is a 2021 Webby Awards Honoree [59] and was selected to be featured in the 2021 SIGGRAPH VR Theater.
Yost released a series of 39 original musical videos about Mt. Tamalpais entitled “Songs from the Last Place” [60] in August 2024, inspired by the beat poet Lew Welch’s “The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings.” The project's foundational video was featured at the Bolinas Film Festival in September 2024.
Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that provides software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and has offices worldwide. Its U.S. offices are located in the states of California, Oregon, Colorado, Texas, Michigan, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Its Canada offices are located in the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, and Alberta.
Autodesk 3ds Max, formerly 3D Studio and 3D Studio Max, is a professional 3D computer graphics program for making 3D animations, models, games and images. It is developed and produced by Autodesk Media and Entertainment. It has modeling capabilities and a flexible plugin architecture and must be used on the Microsoft Windows platform. It is frequently used by video game developers, many TV commercial studios, and architectural visualization studios. It is also used for movie effects and movie pre-visualization. 3ds Max features shaders, dynamic simulation, particle systems, radiosity, normal map creation and rendering, global illumination, a customizable user interface, and its own scripting language.
Mount Tamalpais, known locally as Mount Tam, is a peak in Marin County, California, United States, often considered symbolic of Marin County. Much of Mount Tamalpais is protected within public lands such as Mount Tamalpais State Park, the Marin Municipal Water District watershed, and National Park Service land, such as Muir Woods.
Autodesk Animator is a 2D computer animation and painting program published in 1989 for MS-DOS. It was considered groundbreaking when initially released.
Autodesk Media and Entertainment is a division of Autodesk which offers animation and visual effects products, and was formed by the combination of multiple acquisitions. In 2018, the company began operating as a single operating segment and reporting unit.
Antic Software was a software company associated with Antic, a magazine for Atari 8-bit computers. Bound into issues of the magazine, the Antic Software catalog initially sold Atari 8-bit games, applications, and utilities from the recently defunct Atari Program Exchange. Original submissions were later added, as well as public domain collections, with all software provided on self-documented disk. When the Atari ST was released, it became a mixture of Atari 8-bit and Atari ST software and sold some major Atari ST titles such as CAD-3D. The magazine insert changed names several times, eventually being branded as The Catalog.
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Digital Molecular Matter (DMM) is a proprietary middleware physics engine developed by Pixelux for generating realistic destruction and deformation effects. The offline version can support high-resolution simulations for use in film special effects. The real-time version is designed for video games, and other simulation needs by attempting to simulate physical real-world systems. Unlike traditional real-time simulation engines, which tend to be based on rigid body kinematics, the use of finite element analysis (FEA) allows DMM to simulate a large set of physical properties. Developers can assign physical properties to a given object or portion of an object, which allow the object to behave as it would in the real world. In addition, the properties of objects or parts of objects can be changed at runtime, allowing for additional interesting effects.
MotionBuilder is a 3D character animation software produced by Autodesk. It is used for virtual cinematography, motion capture, and traditional keyframe animation. It was originally named Filmbox when it was first created by Canadian company Kaydara, later acquired by Alias and renamed to MotionBuilder. Alias in turn was acquired by Autodesk.
Cyber Studio CAD-3D is a 3D modeling and animation package developed by Tom Hudson for the Atari ST computer and published by Antic Software. The package is a precursor to 3D Studio Max.
Simplygon is 3D computer graphics software for automatic 3D optimization, based on proprietary methods for creating levels of detail (LODs) through Polygon mesh reduction and other optimization techniques.
Oculus Rift is a discontinued line of virtual reality headsets developed and manufactured by Oculus VR, a virtual reality company founded by Palmer Luckey that is widely credited with reviving the virtual reality industry. It was the first virtual reality headset to provide a realistic experience at an accessible price, utilizing novel technology to increase quality and reduce cost by orders of magnitude compared to earlier systems. The first headset in the line was the Oculus Rift DK1, released on March 28, 2013. The last was the Oculus Rift S, discontinued in April 2021.
Sketchfab is a 3D asset website used to publish, share, discover, buy and sell 3D, VR and AR content. It provides a viewer based on the WebGL and WebXR technologies that allows users to display 3D models on the web, to be viewed on any mobile browser, desktop browser or Virtual Reality headset.
Flare3D is a framework for developing interactive three-dimensional (3D) graphics within Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Substance and Adobe AIR, written in ActionScript 3. Flare3D includes a 3D object editor and a 3D graphics engine for rendering 3D graphics. Flare3D runs on current web browsers utilizing the Adobe Flash Player, and uses Stage3D for GPU-accelerated rendering. Flare3D has not been under active development since late 2014.
Autodesk Stingray, formerly known as Bitsquid, is a discontinued 3D game engine with support for Linux, Windows, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox Series X and Series S, Xbox 360, Android and iOS. It uses the Lua scripting language.
Tom Hudson is an American programmer best known for co-creating the 3D modeling and animation package 3D Studio as well as creating its precursor, CAD-3D for the Atari ST.
glTF is a standard file format for three-dimensional scenes and models. A glTF file uses one of two possible file extensions: .gltf (JSON/ASCII) or .glb (binary). Both .gltf and .glb files may reference external binary and texture resources. Alternatively, both formats may be self-contained by directly embedding binary data buffers. An open standard developed and maintained by the Khronos Group, it supports 3D model geometry, appearance, scene graph hierarchy, and animation. It is intended to be a streamlined, interoperable format for the delivery of 3D assets, while minimizing file size and runtime processing by apps. As such, its creators have described it as the "JPEG of 3D."
Yassou is an American art pop band founded in Hudson, New York in 2010. Residing in Mill Valley, California, the group consists of Lilie Hoy, James Jackson, Alan Krumholz, (guitar), Van Jackson Weaver (guitar), Thelonious Quimby (keyboards) and Patrick Aguirre (drums). Julian Muller (cello) is also a founding member. Yassou uses film to portray themes of destruction, love, power, nostalgia and urban/rural isolation. In 2016, they collaborated with the Louisville Ballet in the world premiere of "How They Fade".
Verge3D is a real-time renderer and a toolkit used for creating interactive 3D experiences running on websites.
Facebook 3D Posts was a feature on the social networking website Facebook. It was first enabled on October 11, 2017 by introducing a new native 3D media type in Facebook News Feed. Initially the users could only post 3D objects from Oculus Medium and marker drawings from Spaces directly to Facebook as fully interactive 3D objects. The feature was available for desktops and mobile phones that support the underlying WebGL API.