Digital Event Horizon
NVIDIA researchers have been honored with Scientific and Technical Awards by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for their groundbreaking contributions to film industry. Essex Edwards, Fabrice Rousselle, and Timo Aila received awards for their innovative work on Ziva VFX and Disney's ML Denoiser, pushing the boundaries of visual storytelling and advancing the art and science of filmmaking.
NVIDIA has been honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with Scientific and Technical Awards for its contributions to simulation, denoising, and rendering in the film industry. Edwards' Ziva VFX system revolutionized digital character animation with an intuitive, physics-based approach. Rousselle's ML Denoiser advanced the field of rendering with a pioneering kernel-predicting convolutional network. Aila's AI image denoising contributions have improved real-time and offline rendering across the industry.
NVIDIA has once again solidified its position as a leader in the field of computer graphics, having been honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with Scientific and Technical Awards. For the past 16 years, NVIDIA technologies have been instrumental in shaping the future of visual storytelling across the film industry.
Three NVIDIA researchers, Essex Edwards, Fabrice Rousselle, and Timo Aila, received these prestigious awards for their groundbreaking contributions to simulation, denoising, and rendering. Their innovations are transforming the way filmmakers create breathtaking and immersive worlds that captivate audiences worldwide.
Edwards' work on Ziva VFX has been instrumental in revolutionizing the field of digital character animation. This cutting-edge system allows artists to construct and simulate human muscles, fat, fascia, and skin for digital characters with an intuitive, physics-based approach. The design and development of Ziva VFX was a result of a team of artists and engineers coming together over thousands of small design decisions over several years.
The Ziva VFX system provided a robust solver and an artist-friendly interface, enabling studios to bring photorealistic and animated characters to the big screen with unprecedented fidelity. Award-winning visual effects and animation studio DNEG is continuing to develop Ziva VFX to further enhance its creature pipeline.
Rousselle's work on Disney's ML Denoiser has been instrumental in advancing the field of rendering. This advanced machine learning denoiser introduced a pioneering kernel-predicting convolutional network, ensuring temporal stability in rendered images for higher-quality graphics. Originally developed to enhance the quality of animated films, this breakthrough technology has since become an essential tool in live-action visual effects and high-end rendering workflows.
The denoiser was developed by Disney Research, ILM, Pixar, and Walt Disney Animation – the result of a massive cross-studio effort that helped push the boundaries of visual storytelling for studios across the industry. Since 2018, Disney's state-of-the-art denoiser powered by machine learning (ML) has been used in over 100 films, including "Toy Story 4," "Ralph Breaks the Internet," and "Avengers: Endgame."
Aila's contributions to AI image denoising have been instrumental in advancing the field of rendering. By preserving fine details while significantly reducing noise, Intel Open Image Denoise has become a vital component in real-time and offline rendering across the industry. Aila's early work at NVIDIA focused on the U-Net architecture, which Áfra used in Intel Open Image Denoise – an open-source library that provides an efficient, high-quality solution for AI-driven denoising in rendering.
Aila stated, "Path tracing has an inherent noise problem, and in the early days of deep learning, we started looking for architectures that could help." The introduction of skip connections in denoising autoencoders marked a pivotal moment in this journey. This breakthrough led to the production of cleaner, more realistic images in rendering pipelines.
This achievement is a testament to NVIDIA's commitment to advancing the art and science of filmmaking through cutting-edge research in AI, simulation, and real-time rendering. With these latest honors, Edwards, Rousselle, and Aila join the many NVIDIA researchers who have been recognized by the Academy for their pioneering contributions to filmmaking.
Over the years, 14 additional NVIDIA researchers have received Scientific and Technical Awards, reflecting NVIDIA's significant contributions to the film industry. This group includes Christian Rouet, Runa Loeber, and NVIDIA's advanced rendering team, Michael Kass, Jos Stam, Jonathan Cohen, Michael Kowalski, Matt Pharr, Joe Mancewicz, Ken Museth, Charles Loop, Ingo Wald, Dirk Van Gelder, Gilles Daviet, Luca Fascione, and Christopher Jon Horvath.
The awards ceremony will take place on Tuesday, April 29, at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Learn more about NVIDIA Research, AI, simulation, and rendering at NVIDIA GTC, a global AI conference taking place March 17-21 at the San Jose Convention Center and online.
Related Information:
https://www.digitaleventhorizon.com/articles/Oscars-Gold-NVIDIA-Researchers-Honored-for-Advancing-the-Art-and-Science-of-Filmmaking-deh.shtml
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/academy-award-scientific-technical-film-2025/
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nvidians-win-academy-awards-for-achievements-in-filmmaking/
Published: Thu Mar 6 15:04:55 2025 by llama3.2 3B Q4_K_M
