I’m part of those kids who’s grown up with a pull-string cowboy doll in one hand, a space ranger in the other and been scared/amazed by the TRex of Jurassic Park (read: born in the early 80s). As reconstructing dinosaur DNA from some fossilized mosquitos looks harder than I expected, I studied 3D Computer Science at ENSIMAG (Grenoble, France) instead of molecular biology, hoping that one day, the animation & VFX industry will 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 colleagues from the lab. During the first years we mainly worked on improving our core technologies and, in 2011, we released Golaem Crowd, a crowd simulation plugin for Maya. The goal of the plugin is basically to allow any VFX studio (from freelance to TD teams) to make realistic crowd shots quickly and easily either for long feature movies, TV series or commercials. Our plugin has been used in hundreds of shows including Game Of Thrones, Independance Day 2 Resurgence or the upcoming Pirates of The Carribean.
