SciTech
Freefly Systems' introduction of handheld stabilized gimbals provides single-person or collaborative remote camera operation with various controllers, enabling previously difficult shots without dolly or crane-supported stabilized heads.
Utilizing three-axis stabilization through multiple sensors, the DJI Ronin 2 has achieved broad adoption. It is controllable from a diverse set of input devices, enabling filmmakers to create complex, dynamic camera moves.
The NACMO series of modular motion bases enables filmmakers to dynamically control simulated actions, providing precise movements, enhancing special effects, and enriching the visual experience for audiences worldwide.
Open Image Denoise is an open-source library that provides an elegant API and runs on diverse hardware, leading to broad industry adoption. Its core technology is provided by the widely adopted U-Net architecture that improves efficiency and preserves detail, raising the quality of CG imagery across the industry.
Fire for Hire's gel first publicly demonstrated a \"naked burn,\" where fire appears directly on the skin, enabling a new form of safe fire stunts in motion pictures.
This widely available gel allows longer targeted burns directly on the skin, broadening the range of fire stunts performed across the industry.
This denoiser prioritizes temporal filtering using innovative optical flow techniques to preserve crucial details. Novel training strategies allow its machine learning algorithms to denoise computer-generated imagery to the most exacting standards.
Ziva VFX is a system for constructing and simulating muscles, fat, fascia, and skin for digital characters. An artist-friendly interface that emphasizes easily understood physical metaphors, coupled with a robust, physically accurate solver, has enabled a broad range of studios to bring visually rich creatures to life.
Alembic's algorithms for storing and retrieving baked, time-sampled data enable high-efficiency caching across the digital production pipeline and sharing of scenes between facilities. As an open-source interchange library, Alembic has seen widespread adoption by major software vendors and production studios.
Atlas's scene description and evaluation framework enables integration of multiple digital content creation tools into a coherent production pipeline. Its plug-in architecture and efficient evaluation engine provide a consistent representation from virtual production through to lighting.
Core engineering developments contributed by OpenVDB's open-source community have led to its ongoing success as an enabling platform for representing and manipulating volumetric data for natural phenomena. These additions have helped solidify OpenVDB as an industry standard that drives continued innovation in visual effects.
The HDE codec allows productions to leverage familiar and proven camera raw workflows more efficiently by reducing the storage and bandwidth needed for the increased amounts of data from high-photosite-count cameras.
The unique and resilient design of this suite of pyrotechnic cable cutters has made them the preferred method for safe, precise and reliable release of suspension cables for over three decades in motion picture production.
The roof pod improves the safety, speed and range of stunt driving, extending the options for camera placement while acquiring picture car footage with talent in the vehicle, leading to rapid adoption across the industry.
Yoshitaka Nakatsu, Yoji Nagao, Tsuyoshi Hirao, Tomonori Morizumi and Kazuma Kozuru collaborated closely with cinema professionals and manufacturers while at Nichia Corporation Laser Diode Division, leading to the development and industry-wide adoption of blue and green laser modules producing wavelengths and power levels matching the specific needs of the cinema market.
At Novalux and Necsel, Gregory T. Niven demonstrated and refined specifications for laser light sources for theatrical exhibition, leading the industry's transition to laser cinema projection technology.
Bill Beck's advocacy and education to the cinema industry while at Laser Light Engines contributed to the transition to laser projection in theatrical exhibition.
Fizt2 provides a high-performance solver with novel and stable implicit physics and robust collision detection. The design of this system enables artist workflows to easily apply soft-body dynamics to a broad range of interacting animated characters and objects.
Adobe Substance 3D Designer provides artists with a flexible and efficient procedural workflow for designing complex textures. Its sophisticated and art-directable pattern generators, intuitive design, and renderer-agnostic architecture have led to widespread adoption in motion picture visual effects and animation.
These design contributions have resulted in robust, versatile, extensible and highly scalable render farm management systems that have supported substantial growth in computational complexity at Sony Pictures Imageworks and Weta Digital.
FQ’s highly efficient scheduler and sophisticated prioritization algorithms reflect a deep understanding of render farm management. With an architecture that has remained largely unchanged for more than a decade, FQ continues to support substantial growth in computational complexity at Framestore.
The Rain Bars provide a portable system for the creation of realistic, large-scale, adjustable, practical rain for motion pictures. Their rapid setup and relocation capabilities enable the efficient production of effects ranging from misting drizzles to torrential downpours.
An extensible, web-based, flexible and scalable system, Shotgun has enabled the efficient management of highly complex visual effects and animation post-production workflows. By facilitating deep integration into a wide variety of facility pipelines, Shotgun has successfully productized the tracking of complex production data on large-scale motion pictures.
An extensible, efficient and intuitive post-production tracking software system, ftrack Studio has enabled small and large studios alike to efficiently schedule and manage complex digital motion picture animation and visual effects.
Originated by company founder Carl Countryman (1946-2006), these meticulously crafted subminiature microphones are easily concealed. Their spectral response-shaping filters, cable mounting and capsule design contribute to their wide adoption by motion picture production sound mixers.
The DPA 4061 and 4071 lavalier microphones exemplify creative design, precise manufacture and meticulous quality control, resulting in consistent performance and exceptional on-set motion picture audio recording.
The Synapse Hair Simulation System is a robust, predictable and highly scalable position-based dynamics system with a novel inverse parameter solver. It has helped Weta Digital artists create a wide range of photorealistic digital characters and digital stunt doubles.
The WDAS Hair Simulation System is a robust, predictable, fast and highly art-directable system built on the mathematics of discrete elastic rods. This has provided Disney artists the flexibility to manipulate hair in hyper-realistic ways to create the strong silhouettes required for character animation and has enabled a wide range of complex hairstyles in animated feature films.
The ILM HairCraft Dynamics System has a physically robust hair-dynamics model that simulates hair by embedding curves in tetrahedral mesh volumes. Its unique spring-based control system has helped ILM artists create a wide range of photorealistic digital characters and digital stunt doubles.
Taz is a robust, predictable and efficient mass-spring hair simulation system with novel formulations of hair shape, bending springs and hair-to-hair collisions. It has enabled Pixar artists to bring to life animated digital characters with a wide variety of stylized hair, from straight to wavy to curly.
For the past decade, the Intel Embree Ray Tracing Library has provided a high-performance, industry-leading, CPU-based ray-geometry intersection framework through well-engineered open source code, supported by a comprehensive set of research publications. It has become an indispensable resource for motion picture production rendering.
The Standard Deviation head-mounted camera system provides a robust method of accurate camera synchronization to the house clock. Combined with practical innovations for usability, it enables multiple head-mounted camera systems to be used in large capture volumes, resulting in adoption by numerous motion picture productions.
The Technoprops head-mounted camera system, with its modular and production-proven construction, supports consistent face alignment with improved actor comfort, while at the same time permitting quick reconfiguration and minimizing downtime. This system enables repeatable, accurate and unobstructed capture of an actor's facial movements.
EIZO auto-calibrating SDR monitors increase artists' confidence in facility-wide image reproduction accuracy and reduce disruptions to the creative process and production workflows. They have become indispensable for many major motion picture animation and effects facilities.
Loop's 1987 master's thesis, \"Smooth Subdivision Surfaces Based on Triangles,\" together with his subsequent research and publications, extended the theory of subdivision surfaces and inspired further development of methods that transformed the way digital artists represent 3D geometry throughout the motion picture industry.
Medusa captures exceptionally dense animated meshes without markers or makeup, pushing the boundaries of visual fidelity and productivity for character facial performances in motion pictures.
Polarized Spherical Gradient Illumination was a breakthrough in facial capture technology allowing shape and reflectance capture of an actor's face with sub-millimeter detail, enabling the faithful recreation of hero character faces. The Light Stage X structure was the foundation for all subsequent innovation and has been the keystone of the method's evolution into a production system.
Silhouette provides a comprehensive solution for painting, rotoscoping and image manipulation of high-resolution image sequences. Its fast, scalable and extensible architecture has resulted in wide adoption in motion picture post-production.
MoGraph provides a fast, non-destructive and intuitive workflow for motion designers to create animated 3D graphics, as used for title design and fictional user interfaces in motion pictures.
PIX System's robust approach to secure media access has enabled wide adoption of their remotely collaborative dailies-review system by the motion picture industry.
Premo’s speed and simplicity enable animators to pose full-resolution characters in representative shot context, significantly increasing their productivity.
BlockParty streamlines the rigging process through a comprehensive connection framework, a novel graphical user interface, and volumetric rig transfer, which has enabled ILM to build richly detailed and unique creatures while greatly improving artist productivity.
This toolset provides a novel approach to character rigging that features topological independence, continuously editable rigs and deformation workflows with shape-preserving surface relaxation, enabling fifteen years of improvements to production efficiency and animation quality.
Presto allows artists to work interactively in scene context with full-resolution geometric models and sophisticated rig controls, and has significantly increased the productivity of character animators at Pixar.
Meander's innovative curve-rendering method faithfully captures the artist's intent, resulting in a significant improvement in creative communication throughout the production pipeline.
The Viper camera enabled frame-based logarithmic encoding, which provided uncompressed camera output suitable for importing into existing digital intermediate workflows.
OSL is a highly optimized runtime architecture and language for programmable shading and texturing that has become a de facto industry standard. It enables artists at all levels of technical proficiency to create physically plausible materials for efficient production rendering.
CGI Studio's groundbreaking ray-tracing and adaptive sampling techniques, coupled with streamlined artist controls, demonstrated the feasibility of ray-traced rendering for feature film production.
The Animatronic Horse Puppet provides increased actor safety, close integration with live action, and improved realism for filmmakers.
The Lectrosonics system has advanced the state of wireless microphone technology by means of an innovative digital predictive algorithm to realize full fidelity audio transmission over a conventional analog FM radio link, by reducing transmitter size, and by increasing power efficiency.