Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 15, 2015. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
This year, ILM, MOVA, Weta Digital, and DreamWorks Animation, among others, were able to pick up a Technical Oscar.
SpeedTree
For the modelling design and implementation in SpeedTree Cinema, Michael Sechrest received a Technical Achievement Award; Chris King received one for real-time engineering and Greg Croft for user-interface design and its implementation. SpeedTree is software specialising in the visualisation of vegetation and trees. In the appendix you will find two workshop PDFs on SpeedTree in game development from our issues DP 06/12 and DP 01/13.
OpenVDB
When we met chief developer Ken Museth at FMX 2014 in Stuttgart for an interview about the advantages and disadvantages of the open-source OpenVDB approach, nobody yet knew that he was a future Technical Oscar winner. But together with Peter Cucka and Mihai Alden, he will receive this award for its development. OpenVDB is a widely used hierarchical data structure that provides a fast and efficient mechanism for storing and manipulating voxels. More information about OpenVDB can be found in our article PDF in the appendix from DP issue 05/14.
Hardware
In the hardware field, Peter Braun will also receive a Technical Achievement Award for the concept and development of the portable MAT-Towercam Twin Pee, Robert Nagle and Allan Padelford for The Biscuit Jr. mobile camera platform, and Harold Milligan, Steven Krycho, and Reiner Doetzkies for the Texas Instruments DLP Cinema Digital Projection technology.
Software
Cary Phillips, Nico Popravka, Philip Peterson, and Colette Mullenhoff will accept the award for their ILM Shape Sculpting System; Tim Cotter, Roger van der Laan, Ken Pearce, and Greg LaSalle for the MOVA Facial Performance Capture System; and Dan Piponi, Kim Libreri, and George Borshukov for their pioneering work developing Universal Capture at ESC Entertainment. A second award goes to ILM for the PhysBAM Destruction System by Brice Criswell and Ron Fedkiw.
At Weta Digital, there is an award for CG hair: Marco Revelant, Alasdair Coull, and Shane Cooper will receive it for the Barbershop Hair Grooming System at Weta Digital. Without these three developers, the "Planet of the Apes" CG performers might not look nearly as good in their fur. (see also DP issue 06/14)
Scott Peterson, Jeff Budsberg, and Jonathan Gibbs will be honoured for the DreamWorks Animation Foliage System, and the contributions of Erwin Coumans, Nafees Bin Zafar, and Stephen Marshall to the Bullet Physics Library will also receive the award.
Ben Cole will receive the award for his design of the Kali Destruction System, Eric Parker will receive it for the development of the Digital Molecular Matter Toolkits, and James O’Brien for his research work on these toolkits.
Further awards go to Magnus Wrenninge for Field3D and to Robert Bridson for his work on voxel data structures.
All prizewinners of the Scientific and Engineering Awards:
- lain Neil and Andre de Winter for the Leica Summilux C-Series lenses
- Brad Walker, D. Scott Dewald, Bill Werner, Greg Pettitt, and Frank Poradish for DLP Cinema Projection technology
- Ichiro Tsutsui, Masahiro Take, Mitsuyasu Tamura and Mitsuru Asano for the OLED Master Monitor
- John Frederick, Bob Myers, Karl Rasche and Tom Lianza for the HP DreamColor LP2480zx Professional Display
The Special Plaque goes to: Steven Tiffen, Jeff Cohen, and Michael Fecik for the development of the dye filters that prevent IR contamination when using neutral density filters.
The "Academy Award of Merit" – in other words, a real Oscar statuette and not just a paper certificate – will be taken home by Dr. Larry Hornbeck for the invention of digital micromirror technology used in DLP Cinema projectors. Likewise sound engineer David W. Gray from Dolby, who will receive the lifetime-achievement Oscar – the "Gordon E. Sawyer Award".
All further information about the presentation of the Technical Oscar awards on February 7 at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills can be found here.
Remember to download the free PDF articles in the appendix.
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