What this blogpost is all about
When looking into different methods of 2D and 3D character animation – be it with the goal to create a short scene or to create a responsive, engaging character – and possible workflows of character creation – the following video came up:
Video showcasing an AI-assisted keyframe-based animation workflow using Cascadeur
Thus, the idea of using AI to assist in different steps of an animation workflow was born. Hereby, the goal was to look for tools that do not completely automate the animation process, but rather that support the artist in a variety of subtle ways by automating some of the most time consuming or tedious processes of an animation workflow. The found results and software solutions will be shown in this blogpost.
AI and MoCap
It rapidly became apparent, that one of the most common applications of AI currently is in the automation of Motion Capture. Be it by using videos as a basis, employing MoCap suits for tracking or even live-tracking a movement via camera, a wide variety of softwares already use AI to automate the motion capture process and provide fully animated and rigged models at the same time or transfer the captured movement to a pre-existing model.
Radical – Real-time 3D human virtualization for everyone, everywhere.
Deepmotion – Create 3D Animations From Video Using AI
https://www.deepmotion.com/animate-3d
Plask Motion – AI powered MoCap animation tool
Now, while these softwares certainly differ in a small variety of ways, such as Radical promoting their seamless integration into a wide variety of existing 3D software, Deepmotion advertising the possibility of refinement via a rotoscope editor and their big community and Plask even offering additional outsorcing service for certain tasks, their overall purpose largely remains the same – namely, to capture a real life motion and automate its transfer into a digital environment, thus cutting this part of the workflow short. Given the wide variety of tools available, the question remains, however, on how to proceed from there or how to create new animations from scratch without using motion capture?
AI assisting in animation
Cascadeur – AI assisted keyframe animation software
Cascadeur aims to ease the process of keyframe-animating already rigged characters by using AI to simulate existing physical forces that may influence a characters movement, such as gravity and momentum. It does so by automatically calculating the appropriate movement of all the different nodes within the rigged model in response to the movement of a single other node. The following tutorial video more accurately demonstrates, how this works:
Next steps
- More research into different character-animation-workflows
- Try out different workflows to see the advantages and disadvantages
- Model a character, rig it and creat a small clip using the learned tools