The Story in One Sentence

I joined Frantic Films in 2002 and started solving hard rendering and simulation problems.
One of those problems was rendering massive animated point clouds for Doc Bailey's SPORE imagery.
The custom renderer I built for that work became the foundation of Krakatoa.
It later grew into one of the most recognizable particle renderers in VFX.

The Original Problem: Rendering SPORE

In early 2004, we needed to render Doc Bailey's luminous SPORE imagery for the film Stay.
The images had to hold up at high resolution with clean anti-aliasing, matte-object cutouts, and camera fly-throughs.
They also needed to be animated, which meant generating many frames efficiently.
Existing tools could make the images, but they could not scale to the production requirements we had.