And the Oscar goes to . . .

Scientific and Technical Award (Technical Achievement Award). To Ken Museth, Peter Cucka and Mihai Alden for the creation of OpenVDB. OpenVDB is a widely adopted, sparse hierarchical data structure that provides a fast and efficient mechanism for storing and manipulating voxels.

Scientific and Technical Award (Scientific and Engineering Award). To Ken Museth, Peter Cucka and Mihai Aldén for the creation of OpenVDB and its ongoing impact within the motion picture industry. For over a decade, OpenVDB’s core voxel data structures, programming interface, file format and rich tools for data manipulation continue to be the standard for efficiently representing complex volumetric effects, such as water, fire and smoke.