Discover how Miguel Ortega uses Dell Pro Max to push animated horror films beyond limits.
Miguel Ortega’s Animation Breakthrough
In the world of animation, Miguel Ortega crafts animated horror films so unsettling that studios hesitate to release them—and that’s exactly his intention. Instead of embracing a whimsical or playful animation style, he draws inspiration from the raw intensity of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
“We want the horror elements to be real horror and to not sugarcoat anything.”
To achieve his vision, Ortega relies on the high-performance of Dell Pro Max PC* and NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPUs to significantly accelerate his production pipeline. Working alongside creative partner Tran Ma, Ortega creates dark, cinematic stories that push animation into new territories. Major studios have taken notice. Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions, Luma Pictures, and Park County now collaborate with Ortega, recognizing the power of his bold artistic vision.
From VFX to Animation: Breaking Free of Constraints
After twenty years in visual effects, Ortega shifted to animation to tell deeper stories. “Being able to make our own worlds is much more interesting than building a single model for a project,” he explains.
When COVID halted his Victorian-era film, Ortega and Tran used Dell Pro Max configured with NVIDIA RTX professional GPUs to complete the Unreal Engine Fellowship. With the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada graphics cards, the RT cores deliver massive speedups for ray tracing workloads, decreasing rendering times for faster results. Their project Voice in the Hollow, a Swahili horror film, went on to win SIGGRAPH’s 2023 Jury Award and earned a 3D World magazine cover.
“When you’re doing low budget live action, you really have to constrain yourself creatively. For example, you can’t just say, ‘let’s have fabric people fighting moths with real actors,’ it would end up looking like an elementary school play.”
Animation eliminates location, budget, and practical constraints. Whether creating a scene in a living room or atop the Himalayas, the cost remains the same in the digital realm. This creative freedom has enabled Ortega to pursue more ambitious worlds from the fabric creatures to the Old Testament horror of his Luma Pictures collaboration.
The Threadlings: Horror Born from Real Life
Ortega’s current project with Park County, “Threadlings,” grew from a unique question: “Do Muppets know they’re made of fabric?” The concept was inspired when moths destroyed his expensive Persian rug after the Victorian-era film project collapse. This personal experience evolved into a horror story where fabric creatures are terrorized by massive moths.
In the story, two outcasts witness their colony’s prophesied messiah being killed by a moth. Drawing inspiration from vampire mythology, Ortega says, “These things are like demons. They come at night. You can only kill them with fire or lavender water, which is like holy water. Instead of a stake through the heart, you have to kill them with cedar wood.”
The voice acting features an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old performing alongside a 90-year-old actor. Having them act together created something incredible. Productions typically cast adults to play children. Ortega’s method captured a genuine childhood innocence.
Simulating fabric dynamics, modeling moth behavior and compositing layers of styled horror animation demand immense compute power. After switching to a Dell Pro Max configured with NVIDIA RTX PRO GPUs, Ortega cut complex render times by 85 percent. Tasks that once took 20 hours finished in only 3. Per-frame render times dropped from 300 seconds to 45 seconds, yielding consistently smooth results with no additional technical delays.
The Technical Foundation: Dell + NVIDIA Power
Ortega’s animation pipeline includes Maya for modeling, Substance 3D for texturing, Unreal Engine for real-time rendering, and Nuke for final compositing. These are all resource-intensive tools that require exceptional hardware. Now, Ortega previews scenes instantly in real time with NVIDIA accelerated computing that powers real-time lighting and ray tracing.
“We could not open any of our Unreal projects on our old computers,” Ortega explained, “Dell workstations with dual 48GB NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPUs process these massive files without hesitation.”
With the right infrastructure from Dell and NVIDIA, Ortega can focus entirely on creativity. His hardware keeps pace with his most complex ideas. Watch how the lighting effects were crafted for ‘Voice in the Hollow’, showcasing the powerful combination of technical expertise and artistic vision.
While Ortega has used various workstations over the years, he consistently returns to Dell and NVIDIA and gains the added bonus of their outstanding technical support. He values that Dell Pro Max PCs arrive perfectly calibrated and reliable out of the box.
“If any problem happens, [Dell] sends a technician to the house to change the motherboard. They showed up and it’s worked perfectly ever since. That’s what I want.”
Beyond raw performance, Ortega emphasizes that dependability is what keeps his pipeline moving:
“They’re the hot rod of computers. They’re super–fast. You can build something in real time, but it’s that reliability that is also huge.”
Passing Knowledge to the Next Generation
In addition to his own projects, Ortega teaches at Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Los Angeles, where he’s been an instructor for ten years. The school is equipped with Dell Pro Max desktops using NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs to deliver students an experience with professional-grade performance for demanding visualization, animation, and VFX pipelines.
As an instructor at Gnomon, Ortega creates a practical learning environment that mirrors real production workflows in his Demo Reel class. In this class, students gain real-world experience by participating in a simulated employee-employer relationship where they submit work and receive professional feedback, that prepares them for the collaborative nature of industry work.
Limitless Creativity, Powered by Dell + NVIDIA
From haunted fabrics to ancient biblical horror, Miguel Ortega uses Dell Pro Max workstations and NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs to bring unconventional animated stories to life without being held back by technical bottlenecks.
To learn how Dell Pro Max PCs engineered for unmatched performance and configured with NVIDIA RTX PRO GPUs supports animation and visual storytelling, click here.
*Dell Pro Max, previously referred to as Dell Precision workstations
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