Pixar’s animated films feature magical characters like Sully, the furry 1,000-pound beast from Monsters University. Building those computer-animated characters takes years of work, but studio engineers showed how they streamlined that process with the latest high-end graphics computers at Nvidia’s GPU Technology conference in San Jose, Calif.
Pixar’s Dirk Van Gelder on storyboarding animation
In a keynote talk on Wednesday, Pixar engineer lead Dirk Van Gelder and technical director Danny Nahmias showed some of the most complex scenes from the film Monsters University and how much more difficult they were to create than the scenes from Monsters, Inc. a dozen years earlier. The talk showed how animation is pushing the high-end of the computing business in order to produce the entertainment that is enjoyed by hundreds of millions of fans. It highlighted more technical, super-geek details than we covered in our series on the making of Monsters University last year.
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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