Autodesk Congratulates the 2020 VFX and Animated Feature Oscar Nominees

For 25 straight years, Autodesk’s Media & Entertainment tools for artists have played a leading role in the creation of Academy Award-nominated films in the visual effects and animation categories. From galactic space adventures to photoreal African savannahs and epic journeys to the Himalayas, Autodesk 3ds Max, Arnold, Flame, Lustre, Maya and Shotgun have helped teams around the world collaborate and create standout visuals for this year’s top VFX and animated films nominated for Oscars, BAFTAs, Golden Globes, Annies and VES Awards.

“For over 25 years, Autodesk tools have helped artists create the most spectacular worlds, characters, and effects, and bring dazzling cinematic masterpieces to life for global audiences,” said Jocelyn Moffatt, Entertainment Industry Marketing Manager, Autodesk. “We are committed to providing creative teams with the most innovative VFX, animation, and collaboration tools, so they can tackle any creative challenge that comes through their door.”

Autodesk M&E software tools are being used by the world’s leading VFX facilities who worked on all five Best Visual Effects Academy Award nominees -- 1917, Avengers: Endgame, The Irishman, The Lion King and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker -- as well as many of the nominees in the Animated Feature Film category, including How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Klaus, Missing Link and Toy Story 4.

Across the 2020 awards season, Autodesk M&E customers have been recognized for outstanding achievement in VFX and animation, such as LAIKA, and their Golden Globe-winning animated feature, Missing Link, one of many BAFTA, Annie and VES Award nominees.

The craft and precision involved in making Missing Link is remarkable; the team at LAIKA pioneered a unique CGI-to-3D printing workflow to bring its signature handcrafted stop-motion look to the screen. According to Brian McLean, the studio’s director of Rapid Prototyping, “For Missing Link, characters’ facial performances were rigged and animated in Maya, and each facial expression was exported as an OBJ, voxelized, sliced for print using Cuttlefish from Fraunhofer IGD to ensure color accuracy and detail, and then sent to a Stratasys color 3D printer. Over 106,000 unique faces were printed for the production of the film. Sometimes 24 unique faces were needed for one second of film - Lionel alone had more than 39,000 and Link had 27,000.”

All of these assets had to be meticulously managed and tracked. “All shot assignments, schedules, plate information, and reference materials were published to and organized using Shotgun Software, which we’ve used at LAIKA on all of our productions since ParaNorman,” Steve Emerson, visual effects supervisor at LAIKA, added.

Congratulations to all of the Autodesk M&E customers whose work has been recognized among these nominees and winners including: Animal Logic, Cinesite, Company 3, Digital Domain, DreamWorks Animation, Framestore, ILM, LAIKA, Method Studios, MPC, Sony Pictures Imageworks, SPA Studios, Walt Disney Animation Studios and Weta Digital.

For more information on Autodesk’s Media & Entertainment Collection, visit: https://www.autodesk.com/collections/media-entertainment/

Source: Autodesk

Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.