Fedkiw began working in the movie industry in 1998, working for a company that produced 3-D water simulations. The algorithms they used were known as Navier-Stokes equations. Fedkiw is now a full professor in the department of
computer science at Stanford where he researches
computational physics. Fedkiw serves on the editorial boards of
Journal of Computational Physics and the
Journal of Scientific Computing. He has published
Level Set Methods and Dynamic Implicit Surfaces (Springer 2002, ) along with
Stanley Osher. Since 2000, Fedkiw has been a consultant with
Industrial Light & Magic receiving
screen credits for work on
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,
Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith and
Poseidon. In addition, he has worked on all three Pirates of the Caribbean and some Harry Potter movies. Fedkiw's techniques have made possible the renderings of the sea in the Pirates movies and the dragon's flaming breath in
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. They have also made possible the rushing floodwaters in
Evan Almighty and were first used with T-X in
Terminator 3. Fedkiw feels the best result of the use of his techniques was the sinking ship shots in
Poseidon. Among the applications that Fedkiw's math engine is responsible for is the
tentacles of
Davy Jones (pictured left) in the Academy Award-winning ''Dead Man's Chest''. He shared the award with
Nick Rasmussen and
Frank Losasso Petterson. Fedkiw has worked with
Industrial Light & Magic,
Pixar Animation Studios,
Intel Corporation,
Honda and
Sony Pictures Imageworks. Fedkiw and his colleagues have designed a C++ code library for Physics Based Modelling (PhysBAM http://physbam.stanford.edu) that facilitates the creation of better special effects for movies, including water, smoke, fire, cloth, rigid bodies and deformable bodies. Fedkiw often receives screen credit for consulting with special effects engineers, technicians and movie executives. His research has focused on the design of new computational
algorithms that can be used for many purposes, including
computational fluid dynamics and
soft-body dynamics,
computer graphics,
computer vision and computational
biomechanics. In fact, the system can also be used for a range of applications from
motion capture to
rendering, but Fedkiw's main emphasis is on
physics-based simulation. Fedkiw has described his work as follows: It is an exhaustive task to prescribe the motion of every degree of freedom in a piece of clothing or a crashing wave. . .Since these motions are governed by physical processes, it can be difficult to make these phenomena appear natural. Thus, physically based simulation has become quite popular in the special effects industry. The same class of tools useful for computational fluid dynamics is also useful for sinking a ship on the big screen. == Awards ==