VAST at SIGGRAPH 2026: Chinese 3D Startup Gives Keynote Alongside NVIDIA and Disney

China's VAST, the maker of the Tripo series of generative 3D models, became one of the central figures at SIGGRAPH 2026, the world's largest computer graphics conference, held July 19–23, 2026 in Los Angeles. VAST Chief Scientist Yan-Pei Cao gave a keynote on the main stage alongside Disney, NVIDIA and Bolt Graphics, and the company's team won the top award at the Real-Time Live! competition: Best in Show.

Who is VAST and what did it show?

VAST is a Chinese generative 3D AI company best known for its Tripo line of models, which create three-dimensional objects from text or an image. At SIGGRAPH 2026, VAST was one of the most prominent Chinese teams: a main-stage keynote, a Real-Time Live! win and five accepted research papers in a single year.

Key facts (according to Jiqizhixin and SIGGRAPH 2026 materials):

• The conference ran July 19–23, 2026 in Los Angeles and drew about 10,000 attendees from 69 countries
• Yan-Pei Cao's keynote was one of the conference's four main talks (alongside Disney, NVIDIA and Bolt Graphics)
• VAST won Real-Time Live! (Best in Show) with the project "Create Interactive 3D Assets in Seconds!"
• Five papers were accepted to the main Technical Papers track
• The Tripo P1.0 model generates a topologically "clean" 3D model in about 2 seconds

What was in the talk

Cao's talk reframed a classic computer graphics benchmark: the Utah Teapot of 1975. It used to test how to show a scene; in the era of generative AI, the speaker argued, it tests how to make one.

"The Teapot Test: First It Tested Showing.

Now It Tests Making" is the title of the keynote by Yan-Pei Cao, VAST's Chief Scientist (in Russian: «Тест чайника: раньше он проверял, как показать. Теперь — как создать»).

Five papers in Technical Papers

VAST had five papers in the main SIGGRAPH 2026 research track. According to Jiqizhixin, they cover almost the entire 3D content creation pipeline. Each paper is tied to a company product:

• Nexus: native polygon mesh generation via diffusion; the basis of Tripo P1.0
• DeG: generative 3D Gaussians with learnable density control; it spawned the open-source project TripoSplat, which trended on HuggingFace
• PixTex: consistent 3D texturing via multi-view diffusion in pixel space
• AniGen: unified S³ fields for generating animatable 3D objects
• TopoCap: learning topology-invariant motion priors for animation from monocular video

Why it matters

VAST's place at center stage at SIGGRAPH 2026 shows that Chinese teams have reached the frontier of generative 3D, a field that is converging with world models. Beyond the research program, VAST ran the "Worlds in Action" hackathon with World Labs on July 18–19, 2026 (more than 500 participants), and an industry mixer for about 200 guests on July 20; discussion partners included World Labs, Sony, Meta*, Legendary Entertainment and the NBA.

What this means

Generative 3D is no longer niche research: at a single SIGGRAPH, VAST landed a keynote, the show's top award and five papers, and its Tripo models already generate ready-to-use 3D assets in seconds. For the gaming, film and simulation industries, this is a signal that "making" a three-dimensional world may soon be as fast as "showing" it.

Frequently asked questions

What are VAST and the Tripo models?

VAST is a Chinese generative 3D AI company with headquarters in Beijing and Shanghai; its investors include Alibaba. Its flagship is the Tripo series of 3D models (P1.0, H3.1), which create three-dimensional objects from text or an image.

What did VAST win Best in Show for at SIGGRAPH 2026?

VAST won the top award at the Real-Time Live! competition for the project "Create Interactive 3D Assets in Seconds!", a demonstration of real-time generation of interactive 3D objects. The award was presented at the conference in Los Angeles in July 2026.

Who represented VAST on the main stage?

VAST Chief Scientist Yan-Pei Cao gave the keynote, one of the four main speakers at SIGGRAPH 2026 alongside Disney, NVIDIA and Bolt Graphics. On July 25, 2026, he was also named to MIT Technology Review's TR35 China list.

*Meta is designated an extremist organization and banned in Russia.