The first images of the animation designed by artificial intelligence

It’s been five years since Chris Bramble, Emmy Award winner and founder of animation company Base Media, first encountered artificial intelligence. At an industry exhibition held in 2018, he witnessed a demonstration of software that could turn the smoke effect in images into 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 intelligence-based image generation tools have experienced significant 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 intelligence 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 Panther: Wakanda Forever and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and has the Chinese film The Wandering Earth in its portfolio. The collection currently has a mission to focus on the potential of artificial intelligence in the construction of 3D places. Designing 3D environments is one of the most difficult and expensive stages of creating an animation, and a large part of the development team’s time and money is spent on designing such spaces. Now, if a studio can entrust the task of creating animation environments to image generating algorithms based on artificial intelligence, 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 environment 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 storefronts must be designed and built. “Typically, 30% of the development process of an animation is dedicated to creating 3D locations and environments.”

To test the capabilities of its artificial intelligence, 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 intelligence is able to design the urban environment in a believable way or not. . The artificial intelligence model used by Base Media tries to recreate the environment with the same space by identifying the appearance and graphic style of the animation.

The animation development team designed the main character and placed gray cubes in his background. Then, by entering related keywords, they designed the desired environment. The animation development 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 intelligence, and it is not easy to recognize that the animated urban environment was created without the intervention of a designer. Meanwhile, the use of artificial intelligence in the design of animation environment is at the beginning of its path and is still going through its research and development stages. It can be expected that due to the high speed of development of machines equipped with artificial intelligence, many animation studios will soon start using this technology.

What do you think about this? Can animations developed with the help of artificial intelligence bring the same quality as animations designed by humans? Share your opinion with us.