10 Technical Achievements To Be Honored with Academy Awards

The recipients of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science annual Scientific & Technical Awards have been named, and it’s some well deserving projects.  Just some of the awards:

To Dr. Mark Sagar for his early and continuing development of influential facial motion retargeting solutions.

Dr. Sagar’s work led to a method for transforming facial motion capture data into an expression-based, editable character animation system that has been used in motion pictures with a high volume of digital characters.

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To Tim Drnec, Ben Britten Smith and Matt Davis for the development of the Spydercam 3D volumetric suspended cable camera technologies.

The evolution of the Spydercam technology has made it possible to move a camera safely and accurately anywhere through a three-dimensional space.

But most surprisingly, 4 awards to render queue technology in use in Render Farms:

To Greg Ercolano for the design and engineering of a series of software systems culminating in the Rush render queue management system.

Mr. Ercolano’s work has been influential across the industry, and has enabled scalable render farms at numerous studios.

To David M. Laur for the development of the Alfred render queue management system.

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.

To Chris Allen, Gautham Krishnamurti, Mark A. Brown and Lance Kimes for the development of Queue, a robust, scalable approach to render queue management.

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.

To Florian Kainz for the design and development of the robust, highly scalable distributed architecture of the ObaQ render queue management system.

ObaQ has scaled from managing a few hundred processors in 1997 to many thousands today, with minimal changes to the original design.

10 Scientific and Technical Achievements To Be Honored with Academy Awards® | HollywoodNews.com.