We are excited to share that Ken Museth, founder of OpenVDB and Chair of the OpenVDB Technical Steering Committee, has been recognized with the 2023 ACM SIGGRAPH Practitioner Award for the creation and continued development of OpenVDB!
The SIGGRAPH Practitioner Award recognizes outstanding contributions to the practice and advancement of Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. The foundation of OpenVDB is its efficient data structure, dubbed VDB, which Ken first published in 2013 in a technical SIGGRAPH paper. Ken has spent the last decade expanding OpenVDB and developing a robust community to support it. He is actively involved in the project as the Chair of the Technical Steering Committee and dedicates time to presenting courses at SIGGRAPH, leading sessions for our Academy Software Foundation events, and being available to help artists and users understand the concepts and best practices.
Contributed to the Academy Software Foundation by DreamWorks in 2018, OpenVDB is an industry standard library for manipulating sparse dynamic volumes, which are used by VFX studios for creating realistic volumetric images such as water/liquid simulations and environmental effects like clouds and ice. It has been adopted by Houdini 3D Animation Tools, Pixar’s RenderMan, Solid Angle’s Arnold, and RealFlow, among many other visual effects and animation technologies.
“There are many individuals, companies and foundations to thank for the success of OpenVDB, but I’m proud to be recognized for my ongoing role over the past ten years,” said Ken Museth, Senior Director of High-Fidelity Physics Simulations in Omniverse at NVIDIA and the creator of OpenVDB. “Helping OpenVDB evolve into an industry standard for practitioners in such a diverse range of fields, including VFX, real-time games, robotics, machine learning, medical imaging, super-computing, scientific visualization, topology optimization, physics simulations, rocket engine design, and of course computer graphics, where it all started, has been an incredible journey.”
Congrats, Ken!
