html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd" The 2019 Ziva VFX customer reel. The creators of the soft tissue simulation system will receive Scientific and Technical Awards – the Oscars of the tech world – later today. The developers of soft tissue simulation system Ziva VFX and of render denoising technologies including Open Image Denoise have won Academy Scientific and Technical Awards.The award ceremony, originally scheduled for February, but postponed in the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires, will be presented at a ceremony in Hollywood later today. Recognition for soft-tissue simulation tech Ziva VFX Ziva VFX becomes the latest CG tool to be recognized at the Scientific and Technical Awards.The Maya muscle and tissue simulation plugin, originally released in 2016, was used in high-profile VFX projects including Dune, many recent Marvel movies, and Game of Thrones. The Academy citation praised its “artist-friendly interface” and “robust, physically accurate solver”, enabling “a broad range of studios to bring visually rich creatures to life”. The Technical Achievement Award goes to five former staff of original developer Ziva Dynamics, including R&D Lead Essex Edwards, and co-founders James Jacobs and Jernej Barbič. Jacobs, formerly Creature Supervisor at Weta Digital, had previously won a Scientific and Engineering Award for his work developing Weta’s in-house tissue simulation system. Ziva Dynamics was acquired by Unity in 2022, and Ziva VFX itself was sadly discontinued as a commercial product in 2024 following Unity’s then-ongoing series of layoffs. However, VFX firm DNEG, which used Ziva in production, acquired an exclusive license to the toolset, along with key staff including Sci-Tech Award-winner Crawford Doran. Further awards for open-source and proprietary denoising tools Further awards go to the developers of key render denoising technologies.Denoising is now widely used in VFX production pipelines based around ray tracing, in which renders are initially noisy, but resolve progressively towards a noise-free image. Stopping a render early, then using denoising software to remove the remaining noise, often results in a usable-quality image more quickly than allowing the render to resolve fully. Intel Principal Engineer Attila Áfra wins a Technical Achievement Award for his work on the open-source Open Image Denoise (OIDN) library. Originally released in 2019 for CPU denoising, and later extended to support GPU denoising, OIDN is now used in production renderers including Arnold and V-Ray. The Academy citation notes its “elegant API” and support for “diverse hardware”, leading to broad industry adoption. The award goes jointly to NVIDIA Senior Research Scientist Timo Aila, for his work developing the U-Net AI denoising architecture implemented in OIDN and NVIDIA’s own OptiX denoiser. Another Technical Achievement Award goes to Wētā FX CTO Kimball Thurston and Senior Rendering Researcher Javor Kalojanov for their work on the VFX studio’s ML Denoiser. The Academy praised its “novel training strategies [that] allow its machine learning algorithms to denoise computer-generated imagery to the most exacting standards”. Five current and former Disney staff share a Scientific and Engineering Achievement Award for their work on Disney’s own ML Denoiser, used in production at Pixar and ILM, and now integrated into RenderMan. Other awards range from audio post to burn gels for fire stunts Other 2025 Sci-Tech awards go to audio post-production tools, and to captioning and camera stabilization tech – although for once, not all are for digital, or even mechanical, technologies.Three further awards go to the developers of modern burn gels used in fire stunts, including the naked burn gel developed for the tanning bed death sequence in Final Destination 3. Read the full list of winners for 2025’s Scientific and Technical Academy Awards Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.