2009 - The Coons Award (SIGGRAPH 2009) This year's award is presented to Rob Cook (Vice President of Advanced Technology, Pixar Animation Studios) for his foundational contributions to physically-based reflectance models and distribution ray tracing and his enduring work on behalf of the SIGGRAPH community.Sawyer Award The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Ed Catmull with the Gordon E.Sawyer Award, for a lifetime of technical contributions and leadership in the field of computer graphics for the motion picture industry, including his work with Pixar's RenderMan. Much faster than previous ray-traced methods, this computer graphics technique has enabled color bleeding effects and realistic shadows for complex scenes in motion pictures. 2010 - Scientific & Engineering Award To Per Christensen, Christophe Hery, and Michael Bunnell for the development of point-based rendering for indirect illumination and ambient occlusion, and featured in Pixar's RenderMan.'Now there'll be action figures.' Listen to a complete interview with David Laur discussing Pixar's Alfred at the Pixar Podcast At the award ceremony, David Laur pondered the possible effects of Academy recognition, 'It's certainly true that nobody grows up to say 'I want to be a queuing systems engineer,'' he told the audience. A total of six developers were honored for their work on various queueing systems which have allowed studios to process the large amounts of data required for 3D animation and visual effects. 2011 - Scientific & Engineering Award David Laur was honored for his work with Pixar's Alfred render queue management system.

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