For the past 16 years, NVIDIA technologies have been working behind the scenes of every Academy Award-nominated film for Best Visual Effects.
This year, three NVIDIA researchers — Essex Edwards, Fabrice Rousselle and Timo Aila — have been honored with Scientific and Technical Awards by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for their groundbreaking contributions to the film industry. Their innovations in simulation, denoising and rendering are helping shape the future of visual storytelling, empowering filmmakers to create even more breathtaking and immersive worlds.
Ziva VFX: Bringing Digital Characters to Life
Essex Edwards received a Technical Achievement Award, alongside James Jacobs, Jernej Barbic, Crawford Doran and Andrew van Straten, for his design and development of Ziva VFX. 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.
Providing a robust solver and an artist-friendly interface, Ziva VFX transformed the ways studios bring photorealistic and animated characters to the big screen and beyond.
Award-winning visuals effect and animation studio DNEG is continuing to develop Ziva VFX to further enhance its creature pipeline.
“Ziva VFX was the result of a team of artists and engineers coming together and making thousands of really good small design decisions over and over for years,” said Edwards.
Disney’s ML Denoiser: Revolutionizing Rendering
Fabrice Rousselle was honored with a Scientific and Engineering Award, alongside Thijs Vogels, David Adler, Gerhard Röthlin and Mark Meyer, for his work on Disney’s ML Denoiser. 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. It helps remove noise, sharpens images and speeds up rendering, allowing artists to work faster while achieving higher quality.
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.”
The denoiser was developed by Disney Research, ILM, Pixar and Walt Disney Animation — the result of a massive cross-studio effort helping to push the boundaries of visual storytelling for studios across the industry.
In this extreme example of four samples average per pixel, Disney’s ML Denoiser does a remarkable job. Inside Out 2 © Disney/Pixar
Intel Open Image Denoise: Advancing AI-Powered Image Processing
Timo Aila received a Technical Achievement Award, alongside Attila T. Áfra, for his pioneering contributions to AI image denoising. 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.
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.
“Path tracing has an inherent noise problem, and in the early days of deep learning, we started looking for architectures that could help,” Aila said. “We turned to denoising autoencoders, and the pivotal moment was when we introduced skip connections. Everything began to work, from fixing JPEG compression artifacts to eliminating the kind of Monte Carlo noise that occurs in path-traced computer graphics. This breakthrough led to the production of cleaner, more realistic images in rendering pipelines.”
Pushing the Boundaries of Visual Storytelling
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 art and science of motion pictures through cutting-edge research in AI, simulation and real-time rendering.
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. Register now to join a conference track dedicated to media and entertainment.
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