Nicolas Chaverou

Background

About Nicolas Chaverou

I'm one of those kids who grew up with a pull-string cowboy doll in one hand, a space ranger in the other, and was scared/amazed by the TRex of Jurassic Park. Seeing as reconstructing dinosaur DNA from some fossilized bloodsuckers looked harder than I expected, I studied 3D Computer Science of molecular biology, hoping that one day, the animation & VFX industry would welcome me in spite of my poor artistic skills. After 3 years as an R&D engineer at the INRIA (French National Research Institute in Computer Science), working on state-of-the-art human AI and procedural animation, we co-founded a company called Golaem with some other folks from the lab. In 2011, we released Golaem Crowd, a crowd simulation and layout tool suite for VFX and 3D animation. Our customers include Digital Domain, ScanlineVFX, Dreamworks, RodeoFX, Digic Pictures amongst many others. In 2019, we were honored with a Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award for Crowd Simulation Tools, with an Innovation Cesar from the French Academy of Cinema in 2020 and with an Outstanding Engineering Emmy Awards in 2021. In 2024, Golaem IP & team was acquired by Autodesk to strenghten their animation capabilities