Happy Saturday Hollywood tech nerds!

We’ve expanded our scope from Hollywood AI to Hollywood Tech Nerds.

In this issue, you’ll learn:

• How NVIDIA’s chips power Hollywood’s Oscar Winners

• How a Hollywood nerd is helping the US military

• Kernels — 3 links worth making popcorn for

NVIDIA 🤝 The Oscars

NVIDIA, the chip manufacturing behemoth, recently revealed an incredible statistic. For the 15th year in a row, NVIDIA technologies worked behind the scenes of every film nominated for Best Visual Effects at the Oscars.

This year, that meant:

• All Quiet on the West Front

• Avatar: The Way of Water

• The Batman

• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

• Top Gun: Maverick

NVIDIA’s tech is transforming advanced capabilities in graphics like real-time ray tracing, simulation, AI, and virtual production.

Water on Other Planets

For example, on Avatar: The Way of Water, the VFX studio Wētā FX created 3,240 shots (98% of the total shots in the film). More than 2/3 of which featured water—which is one of the biggest challenges for VFX artists. For this film, Wētā developed and implemented a new water toolset that helped them with simulation, rendering, and more.

“The team started with pre-production and performance capture using a real-time, GPU-based ocean spectrum deformer, which served as a consistent, physically based starting point for water on set,” explained the NVIDIA blog. “From there, Wētā created a new suite of water solvers — many of them within Loki, the studio’s in-house multiphysics simulation framework. Loki allows coupling of multiple solvers in any configuration. For example, hair, cloth, air and water can all be simulated together.”

Other big innovations thanks to NVIDIA tech focused on both dry and wet performance capture, new deep learning models to process stereo camera images and generate depth maps for compositing, and neural networks to assist with facial animation and muscle systems.

Car Chases Through Gotham

Wētā also worked on the highway chase scene between Batman and the Penguin. As they race through Gotham, the Penguin sets off a sequence of car crashes and explosion.

The team put the car chase scene together through heavily enhanced live action and completely CG shots. To add to the complexity, they had to render the proper lighting, simulate realistic raindrops colliding with multiple surfaces, make hydroplaning and wheel spray look real, and illuminate the rain through highlights and streetlights. NVIDIA’s tech powered all of that.

Why does this matter?

With the AI boom, NVIDIA’s been all over the news. They’re the #1 choice for chips across the globe. Barron’s even recently said NVIDIA was “cannabilizing” their competitors.

if you work on VFX or want to understand the magic behind movies, you need to know about NVIDIA. To learn more about how NVIDIA helps the entertainment industry, check out these cool videos:

• Advancing 3D Avatar Generation for the Next Generation of Creators (link)

• Runway Optimizing AI Image and Video Generation Tools Using CV-CUDA (link)

• Accelerate the Virtual Production Pipeline to Produce an Award-Winning Sci-Fi Short Film (link)

How a Hollywood VFX Nerd is Transforming Military Vehicles

From The Avengers to protecting the country. That’s the story of Jayse Hansen, a Hollywood user interface designer.

Hansen was a digital designer on The Hunger Games, The Avengers, Iron Man, Spiderman, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Star Wars. It was his work on The Avengers that got the attention of the US military.

Hansen is now using his visual design talent and software like Cinema 4D to help the armed forces develop spatial holographic user interfaces. These systems will let soldiers interact with 3D space using AR, giving them more mental bandwidth on the battlefield. You can easily imagine a soldier wearing an AR headset like an Apple Vision Pro and getting information on his surroundings, vehicles, or even enemies.

Hansen explained that one place the army is hoping to use these is inside of vehicles. “You’re very cramped and your displays are very small,” Hansen told Popular Mechanics, meaning that AR would “allow us to space out all these displays and have them all around you.” He continued, “If you can spatially arrange the info, you multiply it, because you could have four, on your left, or on your right; four in the center; four up top, and you can keep going." It sounds like something right out of Iron Man or Tron.

You can have everything you need, right around you, almost like the most perfectly designed workshop you can imagine,” says Hansen. Or should we call him the real-life Tony Stark?

Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)

Here’s a round-up of cool links about Hollywood and technology:

Christopher Nolan is weird (but it’s part of his brilliance). Listen to this podcast covering Nolan’s lifestory and eccentricities. (link)

What’s the future of Hollywood according to WIRED? Check out this week’s episode of Gadget Lab. (link)

What would it be like if AI was a script writer? Casey Neistat used GPT to write a vlog script—and then filmed it exactly how it was written. (link)