Gary Yost

• Name — Gary Yost • Birth Name — Gary Steven Yost • Occupation — Filmmaker, Software Design • Spouse — Sondra Davies-Yost • Children — Ruby Yost • Website — www.garyyost.com

Raised in Closter, New Jersey, Yost attended Northern Valley Regional High School. At the age of 14 he won a photo competition in The Record for a black and white picture he took of a church being demolished on 42nd Street in New York City. This photo went on to win in the black and white category of the Kodak International Newspaper Photo competition.

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. 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. 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. The StereoTek display was the first low-cost mass-market 3D display for microcomputers.

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, 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. 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 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. 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. mental images was acquired by NVIDIA, and Yost’s involvement wound down by 2011. In 2013, Yost joined Rolf Herken’s Mine Innovation as an engineering advisor. In 2020, Yost was interviewed about his life's experience in CGI on the 300th episode of the CG Garage VFX podcast.

Yost launched the nonprofit WisdomVR Project as a 501(c)(3) with strategic partnership support from Oculus VR and the Long Now Foundation in early 2019. 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, 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. 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, 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 and was selected to be featured in the 2021 SIGGRAPH VR Theater.

Described by the Marin Independent Journal as a "handpan virtuoso," Yost released a series of devotional original musical videos dedicated to Mt. Tamalpais entitled “Songs from the Last Place” 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.