In Remembrance: Bill Kovacs

     Bill Kovacs, whose work as a computer animator earned him an Academy Award, has passed away on May 30, 2006 in Camarillo, CA. He was 56.

     Born October 25, 1949, Kovacs received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 1971 and a Masters of Environmental Design from Yale the following year.

     In 1978, Kovacs joined the early computer animation company Robert Abel and Associates as a Vice-President of Research & Development, where he helped develop computer animation software that was used in the 1982 Disney film Tron. In 1984, he became one of the co-founders of Wavefront Technologies. The company produced an off-the-shelf software package which allowed for ease in creating digital animation, which was adopted by several companies.

     Kovacs received with Roy Hall, with whom he worked with at Robert Abel and Associates, a scientific and engineering Academy Award in 1997 for digital engineering for their work in developing Wavefront’s Advanced Visualizer computer graphics system.