And the Oscar goes to . . .

Visual Effects. Prometheus, 20th Century Fox Production; 20th Century Fox. (USA, UK) Richard Stammers, Trevor Wood, Charley Henley and Martin Hill.

Scientific and Technical Award (Technical Achievement Award). To Martin Hill, Jon Allitt and Nick McKenzie for the creation of the spherical harmonics-based efficient lighting system at Weta Digital. The spherical harmonics lighting pipeline precomputes and reuses a smooth approximation of time-consuming visibility calculations. This enables artists to quickly see the results of changing lights, materials and set layouts in scenes with extremely complex geometry.