American Cinematographer - May 2014 - 67

Left: Don Rogers (right) presents the John A. Bonner Medal of Commendation to friend and colleague
Charles "Tad" Marburg. Right: Marburg addresses the audience.

The other awards presented over
the course of the ceremony were:

Technical Achievement Awards
(Academy Certificates):
To Olivier Maury, Ian Sachs and
Dan Piponi, for the creation of the
Industrial Light & Magic Plume
system, which simulates and renders fire,
smoke and explosions for motionpicture visual effects. The unique
construction of this system combines
fluid solving and final image rendering
on the GPU hardware without needing
an intermediate step involving the CPU.
This innovation reduces turnaround
time, resulting in significant efficiency
gains at ILM.
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 multithreading 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 (concept

and design) and to Csaba Kohegyi and
Imre Major (implementation), for
Mudbox software. Mudbox gives 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
lighting pipeline pre-computes and
reuses a smooth approximation of timeconsuming 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 Awardwinning visual-effects toolsets at ILM.
To Peter Huang and Chris
Perry (architectural contributions) and
to Hans Rijpkema and Joe Mancewicz
(core engineering), for the Voodoo
application framework. For more than a
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decade, Voodoo's unique design
concepts have facilitated the development of a broad range of characteranimation toolsets 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. This
has transformed CG 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 Peter Hillman, for the longterm development and continued
advancement of innovative, robust and
complete toolsets for deep compositing.
Hillman's ongoing contributions to
standardized techniques and a common
deep-image file format have enabled
advanced compositing workflows across
the industry.
➣
May 2014

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American Cinematographer - May 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - May 2014