His first Academy Award was awarded for developing techniques that enabled many technically sophisticated adaptations including the visual effects in 21st century movies in the Star Wars, Harry Potter, Terminator, and Pirates of the Caribbeanfranchises. Fedkiw has designed a platform that has been used to create many of the movie world's most advanced special effects since it was first used on the T-X character in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. His second Academy Award was awarded for computer graphics techniques for special effects for large scale destruction. Although he has won an Oscar for his work, he does not design the visual effects that use his technique. Instead, he has developed a system that other award-winning technicians and engineers have used to create visual effects for some of the world's most expensive and highest-grossing movies.
Fedkiw began working in the movie industry in 1998, working for a company that produced 3-D water simulations. The algorithms they used were known as Navier-Stokes equations.[3]
On February 9, 2008, in the Academy Scientific and Technical Award ceremony at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, Fedkiw was awarded an 80th Academy Award for Technical Achievement for the development of the Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) fluid simulation system.[11][12] He shared the award with Nick Rasmussen and Frank Losasso Petterson.[3] Fedkiw does physics-based simulation that enable better water effects. Previous representations had varying levels of success. They often did well at surface representation, but were less efficient at smaller particles such as breaking waves. Fedkiw's team's innovative "particle level set method" allows both smooth surfaces and water breakdown renderings including water spray.[9] Fedkiw has worked with Industrial Light & Magic, Pixar Animation Studios, Intel Corporation, Honda and Sony Pictures Imageworks.[5] Fedkiw commented that when he was informed that he would be presented his award by Jessica Alba he was quoted by the Associated Press as follows: "They said I got 60 seconds so I might just spend the last 15 realizing I'm 10 feet away from the most beautiful woman on the planet . . . and no restraining order this time.".[12] On February 7, 2015, he received a second Academy Scientific and Technical Award for the development of the ILM PhysBAM Destruction System.[13]
Fedkiw and his colleagues have designed a C++ code library for Physics Based Modelling (PhysBAM http://physbam.stanford.edu) that facilitates the creation of better special effects for movies, including water, smoke, fire, cloth, rigid bodies and deformable bodies. Fedkiw often receives screen credit for consulting with special effects engineers, technicians and movie executives. His research has focused on the design of new computational algorithms that can be used for many purposes, including computational fluid dynamics and soft-body dynamics, computer graphics, computer vision and computational biomechanics. In fact, the system can also be used for a range of applications from motion capture to rendering, but Fedkiw's main emphasis is on physics-basedsimulation.[9]
Fedkiw has described his work as follows:
It is an exhaustive task to prescribe the motion of every degree of freedom in a piece of clothing or a crashing wave. . .Since these motions are governed by physical processes, it can be difficult to make these phenomena appear natural. Thus, physically based simulation has become quite popular in the special effects industry. The same class of tools useful for computational fluid dynamics is also useful for sinking a ship on the big screen.[5]
Awards
Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers
The Level-set method (LSM) is a conceptual framework for using level sets as a tool for numerical analysis of surfaces and shapes. LSM can perform numerical computations involving curves and surfaces on a fixed Cartesian grid without having to parameterize these objects. LSM makes it easier to perform computations on shapes with sharp corners and shapes that change topology. These characteristics make LSM effective for modeling objects that vary in time, such as an airbag inflating or a drop of oil floating in water.
A physics engine is computer software that provides an approximate simulation of certain physical systems, such as rigid body dynamics, soft body dynamics, and fluid dynamics, of use in the domains of computer graphics, video games and film (CGI). Their main uses are in video games, in which case the simulations are in real-time. The term is sometimes used more generally to describe any software system for simulating physical phenomena, such as high-performance scientific simulation.
Petro Vlahos was an American engineer and inventor, considered to be one of the pioneering scientific and technical innovators of the motion picture and television industries. He is remembered in particular for creating the Ultimatte process, which refined the colour process known as chroma keying. In recognition of his contributions, he was awarded multiple Oscars, as well as an Emmy Award.
Stanley Osher is an American mathematician, known for his many contributions in shock capturing, level-set methods, and PDE-based methods in computer vision and image processing. Osher is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Director of Special Projects in the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) and member of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA.
Parviz Moin is a fluid dynamicist. He is the Franklin P. and Caroline M. Johnson Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. Moin has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited author in engineering.
James Albert Sethian is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley and the head of the Mathematics Group at the United States Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Fluid animation refers to computer graphics techniques for generating realistic animations of fluids such as water and smoke. Fluid animations are typically focused on emulating the qualitative visual behavior of a fluid, with less emphasis placed on rigorously correct physical results, although they often still rely on approximate solutions to the Euler equations or Navier–Stokes equations that govern real fluid physics. Fluid animation can be performed with different levels of complexity, ranging from time-consuming, high-quality animations for films, or visual effects, to simple and fast animations for real-time animations like computer games.
The William O. Baker Award for Initiatives in Research, previously the NAS Award for Initiatives in Research, is awarded annually by the National Academy of Sciences "to recognize innovative young scientists and to encourage research likely to lead toward new capabilities for human benefit. The award is to be given to a citizen of the United States, preferably no older than 35 years of age. The field of presentation rotates among the physical sciences, engineering, and mathematics."
RealFlow is a fluid and dynamics simulation tool for the 3D and visual effects industry, developed by Next Limit Technologies in Madrid, Spain. This stand-alone application can be used in conjunction with other 3D programs to simulate fluids, water surfaces, fluid-solid interactions, rigid bodies, soft bodies and meshes. In 2008, Next Limit Technologies was awarded a Technical Achievement Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for their development of the RealFlow software and its contribution to the production of motion pictures. In 2015, Next Limit Technologies announced the release of RealFlow Core for Cinema 4D.
James F. O'Brien is a computer graphics researcher and professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also co-founder and chief science officer at Avametric, a company developing software for virtual clothing try on. In 2015, he received an award for Scientific and Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
Computer graphics is a sub-field of computer science which studies methods for digitally synthesizing and manipulating visual content. Although the term often refers to the study of three-dimensional computer graphics, it also encompasses two-dimensional graphics and image processing.
Gretar Tryggvason is Department Head of Mechanical Engineering and Charles A. Miller Jr. Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He is known for developing the front tracking method to simulate multiphase flows and free surface flows. Tryggvason was the editor-in-chief of Journal of Computational Physics from 2002–2015.
Next Limit Technologies is a computer software company headquartered in Madrid, Spain. Founded in 1998 by engineers Victor Gonzalez and Ignacio Vargas the firm develops technologies in the field of digital simulation and visualization. In December 2016, the XFlow division was acquired by Dassault Systèmes.
James P. Crutchfield is an American mathematician and physicist. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in physics and mathematics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1979 and his Ph.D. in physics there in 1983. He is currently a professor of physics at the University of California, Davis, where he is director of the Complexity Sciences Center—a new research and graduate program in complex systems. Prior to this, he was research professor at the Santa Fe Institute for many years, where he ran the Dynamics of Learning Group and SFI's Network Dynamics Program. From 1985 to 1997, he was a research physicist in the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a visiting research professor at the Sloan Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, University of California, San Francisco; a postdoctoral fellow of the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UCB; a UCB physics department IBM postdoctoral fellow in condensed matter physics; a distinguished visiting research professor of the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and a Bernard Osher Fellow at the San Francisco Exploratorium.
Physically based animation is an area of interest within computer graphics concerned with the simulation of physically plausible behaviors at interactive rates. Advances in physically based animation are often motivated by the need to include complex, physically inspired behaviors in video games, interactive simulations, and movies. Although off-line simulation methods exist to solve most all of the problems studied in physically-based animation, these methods are intended for applications that necessitate physical accuracy and slow, detailed computations. In contrast to methods common in offline simulation, techniques in physically based animation are concerned with physical plausibility, numerical stability, and visual appeal over physical accuracy. Physically based animation is often limited to loose approximations of physical behaviors because of the strict time constraints imposed by interactive applications. The target frame rate for interactive applications such as games and simulations is often 25-60 hertz, with only a small fraction of the time allotted to an individual frame remaining for physical simulation. Simplified models of physical behaviors are generally preferred if they are more efficient, easier to accelerate, or satisfy desirable mathematical properties. Fine details are not important when the overriding goal of a visualization is aesthetic appeal or the maintenance of player immersion since these details are often difficult for humans to notice or are otherwise impossible to distinguish at human scales.
Markus Gross is a Professor of Computer science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH), head of its Computer Graphics Laboratory, and the director of Disney Research, Zurich. His research interests include physically based modeling, computer animation, immersive displays, and video technology. He has published more than 430 scientific papers on algorithms and methods in the field of computer graphics and computer vision, and holds more than 30 patents. He has graduated more than 60 Ph.D. students.
Dimitris Drikakis, PhD, FRAeS, CEng, is a Greek-British applied scientist, engineer and university professor. His research is multidisciplinary. It covers fluid dynamics, computational fluid dynamics, acoustics, heat transfer, computational science from molecular to macro scale, materials, machine learning, and emerging technologies. He has applied his research to diverse fields such as Aerospace & Defence, Biomedical, and Energy and Environment Sectors. He received The William Penney Fellowship Award by the Atomic Weapons Establishment to recognise his contributions to compressible fluid dynamics. He was also the winner of NEF's Innovator of the Year Award by the UK's Institute of Innovation and Knowledge Exchange for a new generation carbon capture nanotechnology that uses carbon nanotubes for filtering out carbon dioxide and other gases.
Dimitris Metaxas is a distinguished professor and the chair of the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University, where he directs the Center for Computational Biomedicine Imaging and Modeling (CBIM).
Charles Meneveau is a French-Chilean born American fluid dynamicist, known for his work on turbulence, including turbulence modeling and computational fluid dynamics.
Joseph M. Teran is an American professor of applied mathematics at the University of California, Davis. His research considers numerical methods for partial differential equations based on classical physics. His work spans applications in virtual surgery and movie special effects. Former students of Teran have taken roles including as associate professors at University of California, Los Angeles and software engineers at Disney.
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