9 Scientific And Technical Achievements To Be Honored with Academy Awards

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced that 19 scientific and technical achievements represented by 52 individual award recipients will be honored at its annual Scientific and Technical Awards Presentation on Saturday, February 15, at The Beverly Hills Hotel.

In addition, visual effects supervisor and director of photography Peter W. Anderson, ASC will receive the Gordon E. Sawyer Award (an Oscar statuette) for technological contributions that have brought credit to the industry. Post-production and distribution executive Charles Tad Marburg will receive the John A. Bonner Medal of Commendation for outstanding service and dedication in upholding the high standards of the Academy.

For the first time in the history of the Scientific and Technical Awards, a large number of individuals, collectively, will be recognized with an Academy Award of Merit (an Oscar statuette). The award is dedicated to all those who built and operated film laboratories, for over a century of service to the motion picture industry.

This year's honorees have in a myriad of ways enabled today's moviegoing experience, said Richard Edlund, Academy Award-winning visual effects artist and Scientific and Technical Awards Committee Chair. Their efforts have advanced not only the art and science of motion pictures, but the work of countless global industries.

Unlike other Academy Awards to be presented this year, achievements receiving Scientific and Technical Awards need not have been developed and introduced during 2013. Rather, the achievements must demonstrate a proven record of contributing significant value to the process of making motion pictures.

The Academy Awards for scientific and technical achievements are:

TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS (ACADEMY CERTIFICATES)

To Olivier Maury, Ian Sachs and Dan Piponi for the creation of the ILM Plume system that simulates and renders fire, smoke and explosions for motion picture visual effects.

The unique construction of this system combines fluid solving and final image rendering on the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) hardware without needing an intermediate step involving the CPU. This innovation reduces turnaround time, resulting in significant efficiency gains for the ILM effects department.

To Ronald D. Henderson for the development of the FLUX gas simulation system.

The use of the Fast Fourier Transform for solving partial differential equations allows FLUX a greater level of algorithmic efficiency when multi-threading on modern hardware. This innovation enables the creation of very high-resolution fluid effects while maintaining fast turnaround times.

To Andrew Camenisch, David Cardwell and Tibor Madjar for the concept and design, and to Csaba Kohegyi and Imre Major for the implementation of the Mudbox software.

Mudbox provides artists powerful new design capabilities that significantly advance the state of the art in multi-resolution digital sculpting for film production.

To Martin Hill, Jon Allitt and Nick McKenzie for the creation of the spherical harmonics-based efficient lighting system at Weta Digital.

The spherical harmonics lighting pipeline precomputes and reuses a smooth approximation of time-consuming visibility calculations. This enables artists to quickly see the results of changing lights, materials and set layouts in scenes with extremely complex geometry.

To Florian Kainz, Jeffery Yost, Philip Hubbard and Jim Hourihan for the architecture and development of the Zeno application framework.

For more than a decade, Zeno's flexible and robust design has allowed the creation of a broad range of Academy Award-winning visual effects toolsets at ILM.

To Peter Huang and Chris Perry for their architectural contributions to, and to Hans Rijpkema and Joe Mancewicz for the core engineering of, the Voodoo application framework.

For more than a decade, Voodoo's unique design concepts have enabled a broad range of character animation toolsets to be developed at Rhythm & Hues.

To Matt Pharr, Greg Humphreys and Pat Hanrahan for their formalization and reference implementation of the concepts behind physically based rendering, as shared in their book Physically Based Rendering.

Physically based rendering has transformed computer graphics lighting by more accurately simulating materials and lights, allowing digital artists to focus on cinematography rather than the intricacies of rendering. First published in 2004, Physically Based Rendering is both a textbook and a complete source-code implementation that has provided a widely adopted practical roadmap for most physically based shading and lighting systems used in film production.

To Dr. Peter Hillman for the long-term development and continued advancement of innovative, robust and complete toolsets for deep compositing.

Dr. Hillman's ongoing contributions to standardized techniques and a common deep image file format have enabled advanced compositing workflows across the digital filmmaking industry.

To Colin Doncaster, Johannes Saam, Areito Echevarria, Janne Kontkanen and Chris Cooper for the development, prototyping and promotion of technologies and workflows for deep compositing.

Their contributions include early advancements in key deep compositing features such as layer and holdout-order independence, spatial and intra-element color correction, post-render depth of field, and precise blending of complex layer edges.

To Thomas Lokovic and Eric Veach for their influential research and publication of the fundamental concepts of deep shadowing technology.

Providing a functional and efficient model for the storage of deep opacity information, this technology was widely adopted as the foundation of early deep compositing pipelines.

To Gifford Hooper and Philip George of HoverCam for the continuing development of the Helicam miniature heli

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