
The Oscars just did a little segment on their Scientific and Technical Awards. Among the the winners of the Technical Achievement Award this year was Rhythm & Hues for its proprietary Voodoo software. The Academy presented the award to Peter Huang and Chris Perry for their architectural contributions to the application framework of Voodoo, and to Hans Rijpkema and Joe Mancewicz for the core engineering of the software.
So what exactly is Voodoo? Rhythm & Hues recently posted this incredible video on their website that gives a sense of the robust character animation toolset they’ve developed since the mid-1990s. As explained in the video, one of Voodoo’s unique attributes is its tools that streamline artists’ workflows and enable work to happen across departmants in parallel.
Rhythm & Hues has always placed great value on creating its own tools and workflows. When they declared bankruptcy last year, a list of all their proprietary software applications was made public in court documents. Here is that list: