Responsible for some of the stunning special effects seen in blockbuster films including The Lord of the Rings, 300 and Ice Age 2, Victor Gonzalez, Ignacio Vargas and Angel Tena of Trolltech® customer Next Limit® have been granted a 2007 Technical Achievement Award by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the creation of the RealFlow® software application.
Major film studios including Walt Disney® and Warner Bros.® have used Next Limit’s RealFlow system to simulate the realistic movement of liquids in their films. With a user interface built using Trolltech’s cross-platform development framework, Qt®, RealFlow can create a huge variety of effects – a rainstorm, a glass filling up with water, huge waves, blood gushing from a wound, smog, gasses and even fire.
In announcing the award, the Academy’s Scientific and Technical Committee hailed RealFlow as “the first widely-adopted, commercially-available, easy-to-use system for the simulation of realistic liquids in motion picture visual effects.” Next Limit picked up its award during a ceremony at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles on 9 February.
Trolltech and the movies
More than 20 of the world’s leading film animation and digital studios use Trolltech’s Qt in the development of visual effects. One recent customer is Industrial Light & Magic®, the visual effects company founded by George Lucas. ILM effects have graced many of the film industry’s biggest blockbusters, such as Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter. The company is using Qt to develop a new cross-platform user interface for its digital effects software.
About Trolltech
Trolltech provides cross-platform software development frameworks and application platforms. Trolltech’s Qt is used in popular software such as Skype®, Google Earth, Adobe® Photoshop® Elements, Lucasfilm® and by more than 5000 customers worldwide. Trolltech’s Qtopia® has enabled a new generation of exciting consumer devices such as mobile handsets, video-phones, set-top boxes and media players. Trolltech’s software has shipped in more than 10 million devices.
Trolltech’s products enable companies to easily build and deploy software across a wide range of operating systems and electronic devices. The company serves desktop and embedded application providers, as well as consumer electronics and mobile vendors, who face challenges in delivering user-friendly and differentiated software. Trolltech enables customers to accelerate innovation, shorten time to market and increase revenues. Trolltech’s software improves the user experience by increasing the appeal and quality of customer's applications on desktop and devices. The future proof Qt software allows developers to code less, create more and deploy anywhere.
Trolltech supports open source and commercial customers. The company has offices in California, U.S.A.; Brisbane, Australia; Beijing, China; Berlin and Munich, Germany; Oslo, Norway. It is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol TROLL. For more information about Trolltech, please visit www.trolltech.com.
About Next Limit Technologies
The mission of Next Limit Technologies is to provide cutting edge simulation technologies for a broad range of applications in Computer Graphics, Science and Engineering. Next Limit boasts a young, multidisciplinary team with expertise in physics, mathematics, computer graphics, engineering and visualization. They all share a common vision for the creation of new products that connect science, simulation and visualization using novel paradigms and innovative methodologies.
Next Limit’s champion product RealFlow® is a comprehensive toolkit for fluid and dynamics simulation that makes it easy to experiment with, control and visualize the behaviour of fluids and their interaction with a surrounding environment. RealFlow was the first, and remains, the definitive tool for creating dramatic, accurate and realistic fluid simulation effects in the Computer Graphics market, notably in feature films and television commercials.
Next Limit’s research and development continues to explore and improve simulation techniques, advanced mathematical models and programming methodologies. Projects are emerging in the area of fluid and particle simulation for engineering, science and architecture, including a novel particle simulation technology called Xflow that looks at particle’s interaction with structures in a more accurate way than existing CFD tools. For more information about Next Limit and its products, please visit www.nextlimit.com