And the Oscar goes to . . .

Scientific and Technical Award (Technical Achievement Award). To Greg Hermanovic, Kim Davidson, Mark Elendt and Paul H. Breslin for the development of the procedural modeling and animation components of the Prisms software package.

Scientific and Technical Award (Scientific and Engineering Award). To Mark Elendt, Paul H. Breslin, Greg Hermanovic and Kim Davidson for their continued development of the procedural modeling and animation components of their Prisms program, as exemplified in the Houdini software package. Through a procedural building-block process, the Houdini software is used to simulate natural phenomena using particle effects and complex three-dimensional models.

Scientific and Technical Award (Technical Achievement Award). To Andrew Clinton and Mark Elendt for the invention and integration of micro-voxels in the Mantra software. This work allowed, for the first time, unified and efficient rendering of volumetric effects such as smoke and clouds, together with other computer graphics objects, in a micro-polygon imaging pipeline.

Scientific and Technical Award (Academy Award of Merit). To Mark Elendt and Side Effects Software for the creation and development of the Houdini visual effects and animation system. With more than twenty years of continual innovation, Houdini has delivered the power of procedural methods to visual effects artists, making it the industry standard for bringing natural phenomena, destruction and other digital effects to the screen.