A year has gone by, and we are being bludgeoned by a plethora of AI-driven technology. Or tools that say they are using AI but basically are just a front end for ChatGPT. Since this is the year-end column, let’s take a look around and see if we can pick out some cool stuff among the sea of AI offerings:
Perplexity. This highly specialized search engine is designed to provide answers to questions with an emphasis on accuracy … and citations included. Searches can be put into collections, and you can customize answers as a whole by using guiding prompts to steer Perplexity’s responses toward a specified tone and focus. There is a limited free version, but the pro version allows for many more daily searches and also has support for uploaded images.
Dimensionalizing in Illustrator. Adobe revealed some super cool new tools in Illustrator for dimensionalizing and modifying line art. The new Dimension tool automatically measures and plots dimensions, such as distances, angles and radii in your work.
MegaLights. In Unreal 5.5, there are new lights for creating realistic, direct illumination with accurate shadows and volumetric lighting. They are also highly optimized to allow for many, many lights in your scene.
Unreal NVidia Branch. These are specific RTX builds to help game developers working in Unreal Engine. They’re made to streamline and optimize the development.
InstaMAT. This is a serious suite of 3D texturing, surfacing and asset-management tools, providing a great alternative for those who aren’t working in the Adobe/Substance ecosystem. They get extra points for the affordable pricing and options for perpetual licenses.
Wonder Animation. Wonder Studio was already darn cool. Earlier this year, Autodesk brought Wonder Studio under its umbrella and then unveiled Wonder Animation. The tool takes video input of actors and creates CG character animation along with an environment. In contrast to GenAI (Generative Artificial Intelligence) tools, these create editable assets to be refined by humans.
Motion Prompting. Currently, this is just a white paper, but the idea of this tech is to train a conditioned model from a moving video. Then, the user can manipulate the image or other images in a variety of different ways, in which the prompt is derived from user input (like a mouse move), creating a motion prompt leading to animation of the new images. This is a loose translation of the tech, but you can read up on it at motion-prompting.github.io.
Lightcraft. This is a handy system working on an iOS device for visualizing 3D sets in the camera. You can add more devices such as a timecode generator, extra storage, a cooling fan, some mounting brackets, and you’ll have an affordable tracking and live viz system, which also supports USDZ models. You can map lens distortion from an external camera, compared to the iPhone lens. The calibration between the two means you can use the tracking data for final pixel rendering on top of the live feedback.
Runway Gen-3 Alpha. In the sea of GenAI, Runway seems to be percolating to the top, and Gen-3 Alpha is pushing those edges further. The developers have been working on breathing tools for finer-grain control. so you can edit the videos you are creating: tools such as a motion brush, camera controls, structure and style. It still has “a look,” and I don’t see it as a viable production tool (yet), but it is good for concepts, prototyping ideas and deriving inspiration.
Runway Act-One. As an extension of Gen-3 Alpha, Act-One learns from video footage of an actor and can apply lip sync and expressions to animated characters (and a variety of styles) and photorealistic characters that you’ve generated in Runway. The idea is to streamline facial animation. However, like my caveat for Gen-3, this is good for working through ideas, but without the tools for humans to refine the output, we’ve got a way to democratize the creative process (if everyone plays nice!).
Todd Sheridan Perry is an award-winning VFX supervisor and digital artist whose recent credits include I’m a Virgo, For All Mankind and Black Panther. He can be reached at todd@teaspoonfx.com.
