Nicolas Chaverou

#KNOW ALL & HOW  Speaker  at CGA Belgrade 2025

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 was acquired by Autodesk where we plan to bring crowds to everybody.