The 2024 Oscars are set to be a memorable night for any number of reasons, but for the visual effects teams of ILM around the globe it could be eternally memorable. Of the five film nominated, four feature visual effects from ILM with only Godzilla Minus One not boasting ILM VFX.
ILM has recieved 15 Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects and 34 Academy Awards for Scientific and Technical Achievements. Speaking of which, ILM have also been awarded a Special Technical Award, the 35th awarded to the company since the mid 1970’s.
Former ILM engineers Christopher Horvath and Joe Ardent are being recognized alongside Lucas Miller and Steve LaVietes for the Alembic Caching and Interchange system. Alembic began as a collaborative effort between ILM and Sony Pictures Imageworks to solve the problem of algorithms for storing and retrieving baked, time-sampled data enable high-efficiency caching across the digital production pipeline and sharing of scenes between facilities. The two companies would open-source the project and interchange library in 2011. Since then, Alembic has seen widespread adoption by major software vendors and production studios.
ILM’s Dan Bailey joins Jeff Lait, and Nick Avramoussis for the continued evolution and expansion of the feature set of OpenVDB. 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.
