SciTech
Meander's innovative curve-rendering method faithfully captures the artist's intent, resulting in a significant improvement in creative communication throughout the production pipeline.
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.
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.
The Viper camera enabled frame-based logarithmic encoding, which provided uncompressed camera output suitable for importing into existing digital intermediate workflows.
Digital Imaging Technology
With an extensive plugin API and comprehensive facility integration including editorial functions, Itview provides an intuitive and flexible creative review environment that can be deployed globally for highly efficient collaboration.
Digital Imaging Technology
This consistent, integrated, production database-backed review system enables a recordable workflow and an efficient, collaborative content review process across multiple sites and time zones.
Digital Imaging Technology
Over its nearly two decades of development, this pioneering system enabled desktop and digital theater review. It continues to provide artist-driven, integrated, consistent and highly scalable studio-wide playback and interactive reviews.
Digital Imaging Technology
RV's multi-platform toolset for review and playback, with comprehensive APIs, has allowed studios of all sizes to take advantage of a state-of-the-art workflow and has achieved widespread adoption in the motion picture industry.
Digital Imaging Technology
Geometry Tracker facilitates convincing interaction of digital and live-action elements within a scene. Its precise results and tight integration with other ILM animation technologies solve a wider range of match-animation challenges than was previously possible.
Digital Apparatuses Technology
The PRM's pioneering and innovative design allows the stable, accurate representation of images with the entire luminance range and color gamut used in contemporary theatrical feature presentation.
Stage Operations
This system of modular inflatable panels can be erected on location, at lengths reaching hundreds of feet, with exceptional speed and safety. When used to support blue or green screens, the Airwall permits composite shots of unprecedented scale.
Special Photographic
The Image Shaker was unique and superior to alternatives in use when it was invented two decades ago, and it continues to be used today.
Digital Imaging Technology
OpenVDB is a widely adopted, sparse hierarchical data structure that provides a fast and efficient mechanism for storing and manipulating voxels.
Digital Imaging Technology
Robert Bridson's pioneering work on voxel data structures and its subsequent validation in fluid simulation tools have had a significant impact on the design of volumetric tools throughout the visual effects industry.
Digital Imaging Technology
Field3D provides a flexible and open framework for storing and accessing voxel data efficiently. This allows interchange between previously incompatible modeling, simulation and rendering software.
Digital Imaging Technology
The combined innovations in Kali and DMM provide artists with an intuitive, art-directable system for the creation of scalable and realistic fracture and deformation simulations. These tools established finite element methods as a new reference point for believable on-screen destruction.
Digital Imaging Technology
This system incorporates innovative research on many algorithms that provide accurate methods for resolving contact, collision and stacking into a mature, robust and extensible production toolset. The PhysBAM Destruction System was one of the earliest toolsets capable of depicting large-scale destruction with a high degree of design control.
Digital Imaging Technology
These pioneering systems demonstrated that large numbers of constrained rigid bodies could be used to animate visually complex, believable destruction effects with minimal simulation time.
Digital Imaging Technology
This toolset has a hierarchical spline system, a core data format and an artist-driven modeling tool, which have been instrumental in creating art-directed vegetation in animated films for nearly two decades.
Digital Imaging Technology
This software substantially improves an artist's ability to create specifically designed trees and vegetation by combining a procedural building process with the flexibility of intuitive, direct manipulation of every detail.
Digital Imaging Technology
Barbershop's unique architecture allows direct manipulation of full-density hair using an intuitive, interactive and procedural toolset, resulting in greatly enhanced productivity with finer-grained artistic control than is possible with other existing systems.
Digital Imaging Technology
The Universal Capture system broke new ground in the creation of realistic human facial animation. This technology produced an animated, high-resolution, textured mesh driven by an actor's performance.
Digital Imaging Technology
The MOVA system provides a robust way to capture highly detailed, topologically consistent, animated meshes of a deforming object. This technology is fundamental to the facial pipeline at many visual effects companies. It allows artists to create character animation of extremely high quality.
Digital Imaging Technology
This comprehensive system allows artists to quickly enhance and modify character animation and simulation performances. It has become a crucial part of ILM's production workflow over the past decade.
Digital Apparatuses Technology
Texas Instruments' color-accurate, high-resolution, high-quality digital projection system has replaced most film-based projection systems in the theatrical environment.
Camera Cranes
The Biscuit Jr.'s unique chassis and portable driver pod enables traveling photography from a greater range of camera positions than previously possible, while keeping actors safe and the rig out of frame.
Camera Cranes
This small cross-section system from Mad About Technology can operate from above or below the camera, achieving nearly impossible shots with repeatable movements through openings no larger than the camera itself.
Digital Imaging Technology
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.
Digital Imaging Technology
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.
Digital Imaging Technology
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.
Digital Imaging Technology
Mudbox provides artists powerful new design capabilities that significantly advance the state of the art in multi-resolution digital sculpting for film production.
Digital Imaging Technology
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.
Digital Imaging Technology
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.
Digital Imaging Technology
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.
Digital Imaging Technology
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.
Digital Imaging Technology
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.
Digital Imaging 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.
Photography
The current Helicam system is a high-speed, extremely maneuverable, turbine-engine, radio-controlled miniature helicopter that supports professional film and digital cinema cameras. Helicam provides a wide range of stabilized, remotely operated pan, tilt and roll capabilities, achieving shots impossible for full-size helicopters.
Stage Operations
This self-contained high-pressure pneumatic device safely launches a stationary full-sized car on a predetermined trajectory. The precision of operation enhances the safety of performers, and the physical design allows a rapid setup and strike.
Systems
The ASC CDL unifies color correction principles for use on- and off-set, providing for the faithful reproduction of color values across a variety of color correction devices. This technology provides basic image-processing mathematics that translate the lift, gamma and gain settings to a set of common color values to help preserve the cinematographer's intent throughout production.
Digital Imaging Technology
OpenColorIO, developed at Sony Pictures Imageworks, is an open source framework that enables consistent color visualization of motion picture imagery across multiple facilities and numerous software applications.
Digital Imaging Technology
Virtually unchanged from its original incarnation over 15 years ago, Light is still in continuous use due to its emphasis on interactive responsiveness, final-quality interactive render preview, scalable architecture and powerful user-configurable spreadsheet interface.
Digital Imaging Technology
Pose Space Deformation (PSD) introduced the use of novel sparse data interpolation techniques to the task of shape interpolation. The controllability and ease of achieving artistic intent have led to PSD being a foundational technique in the creation of computer-generated characters.
Digital Imaging Technology
Katana's unique design, featuring a deferred evaluation procedural node-graph, provides a highly efficient lighting and rendering workflow. It allows artists to non-destructively edit scenes too complex to fit into computer memory, at scales ranging from a single object up to an entire detailed city.
Digital Imaging Technology
This technique allowed for fast, art-directable creation of highly detailed gas simulation, making it easier for the artist to control the appearance of these effects in the final image.
Stage Operations
Highly sophisticated and well-engineered, the Max Menace Arm is a safe and adjustable device that allows rapid, precise positioning of lighting fixtures, cameras or accessories. On-set or on location, this compact and highly portable structure is often used where access is limited due to restrictions on attaching equipment to existing surfaces.
Digital Imaging Technology
This work allowed, for the first time, unified and efficient rendering of volumetric effects such as smoke and clouds, together with other computer graphics objects, in a micro-polygon imaging pipeline.
Digital Imaging Technology
Mr. Ercolano's work has been influential across the industry, and has enabled scalable render farms at numerous studios.
Digital Imaging Technology
This system was the first robust, scalable, widely adopted commercial solution for queue management in the motion picture industry. Its user interface and support for multi-machine assignment influenced the design of modern day queue management tools.
Digital Imaging Technology
Queue was one of the first systems that allowed for statistical analysis and process introspection, providing a framework for the efficient use of render farms.