And the Oscar goes to . . .

Scientific and Technical Award (Scientific and Engineering Award). To Jeff Lait, Mark Tucker, Cristin Barghiel and John Lynch for their contributions to the design and architecture of the Houdini visual effects and animation system. Houdini’s dynamics framework and workflow management tools have helped it become the industry standard for bringing natural phenomena, destruction and other digital effects to the screen.

Scientific and Technical Award (Technical Achievement Award). To Jeff Lait, Dan Bailey 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.