It’s been five years since Chris Bramble, Emmy Award winner and founder of animation company Base Media, first encouered artificial ielligence. At an industry exhibition held in 2018, he witnessed a demonstration of software that could turn the smoke effect in images io a 5-second animation. This made him think to himself that an amazing technology was emerging and it didn’t seem like it could be avoided.
Artificial ielligence-based image generation tools have experienced significa progress over the past years and are developing at a staggering pace. Although these tools are still in the initial stages of design and construction and have not yet seriously opened their feet to the cinema industry; But from now on, you can see the traces of this technology in many graphic illustrations. It doesn’t seem like we need to spend a lot of time to see images created by artificial ielligence in movies and animations; Because many animation studios, including Base Media, have started using this technology in their products.
This studio has worked on blockbuster Hollywood films and series, including Black Paher: Wakanda Forever and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and has the Chinese film The Wandering Earth in its portfolio. The collection currely has a mission to focus on the poteial of artificial ielligence in the construction of 3D places. Designing 3D environmes is one of the most difficult and expensive stages of creating an animation, and a large part of the developme team’s time and money is spe on designing such spaces. Now, if a studio can erust the task of creating animation environmes to image generating algorithms based on artificial ielligence, developers can focus on technical and artistic matters so that the animation creation process can be followed more simply and optimally.
Igor Lodiro, visual effects supervisor of Base Media studio, says: “To understand the importance of environme design in animation, imagine the character of Aladdin who is going to his castle from one corner of the city. Along the way, all the scenery including the birds, the townspeople, the winding alleys and even the individual storefros must be designed and built. “Typically, 30% of the developme process of an animation is dedicated to creating 3D locations and environmes.”
To test the capabilities of its artificial ielligence, the studio put a 90-second script of a girl looking for her friend in the city on its agenda to test whether the artificial ielligence is able to design the urban environme in a believable way or not. . The artificial ielligence model used by Base Media tries to recreate the environme with the same space by ideifying the appearance and graphic style of the animation.
The animation developme team designed the main character and placed gray cubes in his background. Then, by eering related keywords, they designed the desired environme. The animation developme process in this way took only 3 weeks, while the same process takes up to 8 times longer by human designers.
It is extremely difficult for viewers to recognize images created by artificial ielligence, and it is not easy to recognize that the animated urban environme was created without the ierveion of a designer. Meanwhile, the use of artificial ielligence in the design of animation environme is at the beginning of its path and is still going through its research and developme stages. It can be expected that due to the high speed of developme of machines equipped with artificial ielligence, many animation studios will soon start using this technology.
What do you think about this? Can animations developed with the help of artificial ielligence bring the same quality as animations designed by humans? Share your opinion with us.
