Computer graphics software maker Alias|Wavefront was awarded a special Oscar for scientific and technical achievement at a March 1, 2003 ceremony in Beverly Hills, California. The Award of Merit recognizes how Alias|Wavefront's state-of-the-art Maya 3-dimensional character animation and modeling software has transformed the film industry.

CG forum.org is an independent news, information and education organization focused on the art, science and business of computer graphics (CG).

To contact or sponsor CG Forum, please send an email message to info@cgforum.org

Thank you for visiting CG Forum! We hope to see you again soon.

Kate introduces Maya to Oscar: Actress Kate Hudson and Alias|Wavefront's Maya engineering general manager, Kevin Tureski pose with the Oscar statuette for Scientific and Technical Achievement.

Alias|Wavefront's Maya wins an Oscar

Toronto-based Alias|Wavefront, which won an Academy Award for its contribution to the advancement of film-making, believes the honor will help spur a boom in creative work in film, video games, education and medicine.

Computer graphics software maker Alias|Wavefront was awarded a special Oscar for scientific and technical achievement at a March 1 ceremony in Beverly Hills, California. The Award of Merit recognizes how Alias|Wavefront's state-of-the-art Maya 3-dimensional character animation and modeling software has transformed the film industry.

"It's like winning the Stanley Cup," said Kevin Tureski, general manager for Maya engineering, who led a 30-person Alias|Wavefront delegation and accepted the award with company president Doug Walker from actress Kate Hudson.

In fact, the award is much rarer. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has awarded just 38 of the gold statues for scientific and technical achievement in its 75-year history. Over 2,000 Oscars have been granted in the acting and directing categories. The last Canadian company to win the special award was IMAX in 1996.

Maya has become a linchpin of high-tech movie-making. Most of the computer-generated characters, monsters and creatures that have appeared in Hollywood movies over the last five years were created with Maya. Examples include Spider-man, Gollum and other characters in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and Star Wars Episode II: Attack Of The Clones.

Beyond the film industry, the company is looking to the video game industry, which outstrips annual Hollywood box office sales, as a major user of Maya. Several games that are nominated for the Developer's Choice awards at this week's Game Developer's Conference in San Jose, California used Maya to create characters and environments. The games include Metroid Prime for the Gamecube, Ratchet and Clank and The Getaway for the Playstation 2.

"Games have become extremely complicated to build," said Geoff Foulds, Alias|Wavefront games marketing manager. Where it used to take 10 people to build a top-level game, it now takes as many as 50, and you have to constantly improve the visual quality of the game, unlike film, Foulds said. To address the challenges, Maya automates tasks, letting users complete work in seconds that would take hours to do manually.

But Maya's applications are not just limited to entertainment. Makers of educational software, children's book illustrators, architects and medical research companies use Maya. New York's CyberFiber company has used the Maya software to create a 3-D rendition of the human heart that could be used by NYU Medical Center to train cardiac surgeons.

The software is also in the hands of gamers who own a copy of the popular first-person shooter Unreal Tournament 2003 by Digital Extremes of London, Ont. The company and its U.S. partner, Epic Games, bundled the software to let players customize the look of the game and its characters by creating their own "skins" for characters as well as objects and textures - such as stone or wood - for game levels.

For people interested in computer animation, Alias|Wavefront offers a free personal edition of Maya, which some 300,000 people have downloaded since it was released.

computer graphics 3d digital animation computer graphics visual effects compositing illustration modeling rendering visualization simulation film sgi silicon graphics alias maya studiotools pixar lightwave discreet 3ds 3d studio max softimage autodesk newtek nvidia ati weta ilm industrial light and magic sony imageworks mainframe entertainment reboot gatecrashers opengl cel shading bump mapping nurbs ray tracing anisotropic filtering entertainment tv television games news information education CGforum computers networks conferences events industry seminars workshops

 Copyright © CG Forum^TM 1999-2003. All Rights Reserved.
 The CG Forum logo, "CG Forum", "cgforum.org" and "CGForum" are trademarks of CG Forum and its proprietors.