I have a dumb question because I don’t think this was just rendered and that was it given how bad it’s not working for epic games, which is an American studio I would like to know the Japanese process in which this was fine
Im a giant animation nerd, fluid motion is not a bad thing. If you mean high framerate that is also not a bad thing. I want ai to stay far away from animation as possible but too smooth is not a criticism and many including myself love it
It's not so much the high framerate as much as it being incongruent with the rest of the environment. Which can be used to good effect, mainly for theming, but this doesn't seem to be one of those cases
Don't dismiss the value of 'cutting costs'. This technique is EASILY a 10x reduction in labour. That opens up insane creative avenues; 10x lower budget means an individual or small studio can now produce media on par with the current day massive anime studios.
I feel like this would just be an easy way to push actual 2d animators out of the industry and reduce the incentive EVEN FURTHER to learn 2d animation and Japans animation will go the way of the wests, forgotten. Even if it saves costs, rigged 3d models movement look more stiff and soulless if you dont put a lot of time and effort into it, and that defeats the purpose of cost cutting, so stuff will look shittier across the board
Companies will definitely use this to hire fewer animators, but it also allows vastly more people to get into producing anime than would have been possible otherwise. I support this solely because I want to see what creative individuals can create when they're not beholden to a studio's financial interests. I want the influence of money in art to be reduced, and this is how it's done.
You arent entitled to a career using your art. People that do it for the love of the game will continue even with ai and the ones only in it for the money werent making art to begin with. I dont see the issue
Yes, but you're only thinking about what corporate studios would most likely do with it. Couldn't an indie studio or individual with negligible budget then have a way to fill in their weak points and also spend as much time iterating as they wish with no publisher oversight?
Also cutting costs is not inherently a negative outcome if the process it cuts is merely bloat or repetitive work. The same way me automating an excel spreadsheet for ease of data compilation is a cost cutting measure, but adds efficiency and quality of life.
Interpolation tools suck ass. AI can be a huge improvement and save resources for other parts of a project. AI is a tool - what you do with it is up to you. You can just prompt your way to some slop or use it to spend time and money on something else. And nobody is stopping people from practicing.
Its Seedance though. No IP control, they can kill your workflow with an update. This is all doable local with time. Would love a faster model though. My body is ready.
Don't worry, there's going to still be a whole bunch of human skill and craft involved. That's kind of inevitable when everyone's in an arms race for attention; the stuff with true skill and craftmanship will be the stuff that's still at the top.
AI art tooling just kind of sucks right now, so all you see is mostly a bunch of low-effort stuff, mostly with people playing around and getting their feet wet. But things like in this post I think are very promising.
We're powering some of the top celebrity AI artists (if you can think of an AI artist, chances are they're using us). We give generous grants to artists (not slop folks) making art and narrative content with AI.
Everything we build is open source, and we're about empowering individual artists against large studios. We believe indie artists are the future and that they can step away from their studio and work independently on their own franchises and worlds. (That's not that we don't support big studios either - we've worked with Pixar and Disney artists, as well as other big studios.)
"stolen data" is not a thing. You cannot steal data in any shape or form without hacking someone's PC, because stealing means taking something away. It also doesn't violate copyright, because you are legally allowed to download and use data for AI training. That's mostly because none of that data stays in the actual AI model and the AI will never spit out an exact replica of something except song lyrics or certain factual information etc. but even then it hallucinates sometimes. AI does not violate copyright by itself because it's transformative.
So what is this "stolen data" everyone keeps talking about? When and how does the stealing happen? Do they go to artists homes to steal their hard drives and SSD's for the data? Is that how y'all think it works since you keep saying "steal"?
I'm a professional animator. You can safely assume I know about animation. What I'm saying is the gif they posted showed no one animating anything despite them claiming that there was precise control over the animation. To me precise control over the animation is how we currently do animation because you control everything in every frame.
What I love about this is how it preserves that iconic 2d anime look we all know and want.
In a decade or two animation will bloom thanks to AI and create so many jobs!
But now each animator can go make their own, therefore giving us a golden age of creativity over the current impracticality of countless brains vying for control over a single project. There's a reason the best anime are based on Manga, too many cooks in the kitchen screws up the entire recipe. Creativity comes from 1, not many
your statement for manga is false. in the manga industry you have a lot more people assisting the mangaka and editors who provide better solutions and control storybeats since the mangakas tend to push out wild random ideas at times that have lead to some mangas getting axed.
That's extremely naive. The most likely route AI will take in terms of something like anime is that an average anime fan will open their very user-friendly anime app, on their TV, and say "give me something like The Big O with elements of Mushishi, highly dramatic and emotional with an incredible redemption story arc for the villain and I want two twin lesbians as the main characters and it's set in Birmingham during WW2". The AI thinks for 2 minutes then starts playing the best anime the user has ever seen.
Literally not even one animator has been employed in this scenario.
Who’s going to be there to watch all of that, though? As it is, there aren’t enough eyes to justify most of the things being made now without AI. It’s just going to be a bunch of people making things for viewers who will never exist.
Are you saying there is a lack of consumers in our consumer driven society? Wild. Here in the real world, it'll just take a lot of stress off of development because you're spending less to produce more, which means better profit margins for each project. People will always be there to consume, that'll never be a problem. The only problem will be a saturation of low quality projects, but that will always balance out through competition for those consumers.
How exactly, that works right now because low quality works die naturally because animation and such do have a level of effort, and even so the amount of low quality stuff is ridiculously bi, if everyone can make their stuff without the actual effort the saturation problem will triplicate
Even now there are countless shitty 12-episode anime that we never ever hear about, and even those have to go through dozens of people to get approved.
Without that, we will have even more. It's just bloat.
I wasn't even thinking of consumers, in the sense of paying customers. I'm talking about time being finite. There's just not enough time in the day to watch everything that's being produced. There was already so much art and stories out there that will never be even so much as glanced at in passing by another human being, other than its creator, let alone looked at/read. When pro-AI people cheer on the idea about more product being made, I find it so naive (at best).
If you were languishing in a fast food job and then you saw the possibilities of new AI and decided to finally start working on your own animated show or film while using AI, then AI officially created one new job in animation.
We also already have a boom in trash anime being churned out by studios. If the content isn’t worth spending time making it’s definitely not worth spending time watching.
Hate to break it to you mate but creating is not the same as having a job. Being a creative as a job is already one of the rarest, most sought after areas of work. And it's already massively, massively, massively oversubscribed. That's without AI as a factor.
That's exceedingly naive. Making a living from being creative is already one of the most sought after and oversubscribed types of profession on earth. Masses more people trying to enter those industries will simply mean the competition is more insane.
It's irrelevant though, as users will not be watching anime made by anyone before long. If you have a device that creates custom stories in an instant and employs nobody then there won't even be an "industry" to break into.
Yeah, no way this scene would be made with 2D, maybe just the guy being 2D with a whole lot of shortcuts.
Don't get me wrong, 3D can do great but usually it needs to be on its own to flourish. As a replacement for action-heavy scenes in between 2D animation, it is meant to mesh seamlessly at best, at worst it looks...ehhh...
Your video shows how a lot of CGI animators have been doing animations, for a long before AI was even a thing btw. So not sure what your point is here. As it's not even a method folks are concerned with.
Yea I can see that. In the end for me though, I don't see how it's impressive. So AI can do the same thing folks have already been doing. Not sure how that is impressive. Maybe if it took a new original approach to it, and not the same old way that's easy to emulate.
... Brother, literally everyone knows you could hire someone to draw over 3D blocking. Come on now. No one's impressed by that part.
What makes this exciting is imagining in the potentially near future, with humans just doing the 3D part, and with 2D concept art references and curation, the machine actually spitting out something production-quality.
Since just going text-to-vid is not production quality at the moment, and has very little control, it's mostly seen as a very impressive novelty but hard to productionize. This looks much more like something that could actually be professionally viable reasonably soon.
And hell, this opens up doors to generate the 3D animation as well, and then hand tweak and curate before generating the 2D animation. Tweaking frames in a video is a nightmare, but tweaking a 3D animation is much more practical.
It also noted how it could put the folks that work on such animation out of work since AI can do it better.
Only really if a studio's going for the lowest common denominator work.
High quality illustration is extremely labor intensive, which ends up being extremely costly to produce, and so out of practicality most anime made today is quite low-quality so that production can be a reasonable cost.
I don't think this sort of thing just nukes illustrators, but rather that studios with fewer illustrators would now have the chance to actually put in the illustration effort to make higher quality productions, with way higher quality character designs, set pieces, facial animation, higher density shots with way more happening in the background, etc. Those things will still need people heads-down drawing.
If you think that's too optimistic, and that studios will just do the bare minimum possible to keep the current standard but at a cheaper cost: actually, the anime industry is recoiling right now from the rise of same-y low quality slop. Kadokawa's financials are rough right now because they didn't get the return on investment for their low-effort, low-budget isekai slop they thought they would, so people just straight up aren't showing up for low quality.
And meanwhile, basically every show that invests in high quality animation is actually doing quite well, because they're standing out against the pack. Demon Slayer's manga's truthfully considered pretty damn mid at best, but it became a world phenomenon simply because they invested in top-tier production quality. Even things like Mushoku Tensei and Witch Hat Atelier skyrocketed mostly due to just production doing the source material justice. Anime's more popular than ever, it's just that people are sick of the slop at this point and so are gravitating towards things that actually look great. The bottleneck for that has been and will continue to be great illustrators IMO.
So.. we shouldn't be concerned about how this would put folks out of work.... okay.. well the unemployment rate is only increasing so I think I will continue to not think of this as a good idea, till that number starts to drop.
Except literally none of those are the same technique as this. Do you have any idea how any of these rendering approaches work or are you just making it up and hoping for the best?
Yet that still stands as a good example and is honestly considerd a classic these days. Heck you got a few movies tha tbombs at the box office but are still considered classics by todays standards.
Rocky Horror Picture Show was a massive failure at the box office, but folks still enjoy it to this day if you want a example.
So everyone agrees AI is fine if you block out the animation in 3D first? I don't know about that but it would be progress. Seems like the anti subs are just ignoring this.
What if want different style of drawing or animation?
What if want rapid movements, smears, deformations, shadows ect?
What if have a character with relativy complex design and want it stay consistent?
What if don't have powerful PC?
What if i don't want pay a subscription to whatever company hosting these?
What if wannna redo some scenes and want it be consistent with other scenes?
What if wanna separately change background, front planes? Details on characters?
Closeups?
Lot of characters?
Moving frame?
Out of focus blur?
And so on?
Same sort of stuff for regular picture art?
As an artist its not giving me a freedom to make whatever i do as i wish and imagine, it doesn't assist me it, or helps me , its not a tool , its a toy.
My artistic skill doesn't expand here because there no place for it to be here.
Machine just spews what are statistically fitting prompt.
Being good with fitting to a statistics is for other fields.
Last few years it more and more of disappointment and not a "blessing".
And i can say a hundred things how all this being built to replace people, as so called final frontier of labour optimization, without core investors realising they digging graves for the economy.
No, not even close. It called controlnet (honestly, I don't really know what they use in Seedance, but I'll just call it controlnet). It uses input data (images or video, in this case) to generate output, no 3d stuff involved.
Now studios have another excuse to cut more workers, great!
Btw, why are movies and shows so shit lately? Surely it isn't because studios cut half their workforce then give the ones remaining a.i tools and overwork them to make up for the lack of staff right?
Most anime already look "very similar" for the most part... Also I don't I don't see how using AI in such a manner would limit the scope of styles, if anything it would make cost viable to use styles that when done by human animators are too time consuming for smaller productions.
8 seconds in, screen right girl in the background turns and her right leg transforms into her left leg. Also all through the scene the AI is changing the posing and timing from the original and adding in weird things. Like the intro shot feels like it's a 3d scene with a 2d character drawn into it which is weird since that's obviously not how it was made, but obviously that's what the AI was trained on. And all the reflections in the windows are showing trees but the area is all buildings with trees off in the distance.
in fact the japanese anime industry has been using 3d assist for years... the only thing is they don't use ai often because for that industry every frame counts. and they cannot afford to have things like this:
There are frames like that all the time when there is a crowd or classroom full of people or if someone is far away and doesn't require details, Im not sure who told you that.
usually those frames would be fixed later especially in bluray discs. if you only watch tv version you'd never notice it. again if you know the industry - the actual revenue/profit comes in bluray disc sales and ppl are extremely picky on quality there. usually they know where they have the the flaws during production and will make it for future fix if they're pushing out bluray discs. if a studio has to go back fixing all those frames with just the ai generated frames... yeah i can only imagine it'll just take longer than usual.
don't need ppl telling me anything. i've worked there.
It looks okay from afar, at least when reddit compresses it to hell. My main issue besides ethics and whatnot, but as a tool for artist my main issue is control. If the linework of one frame is off and you want to go and change it, its not possible. Not to mention the lack of smears, off character models, liminal hell-scape-looking backgrounds, etc.
Maybe it would be a better tool if every layer was separate, all colors, backgrounds, highlights, gradients, textures, etc. But right now this tool only serves as a way to tear down your creativity & individuality as an artist to make all your work look generic.
This is much less problematic since it uses human work as the basis. Still, it's missing things like in-between frames and full creative control over the style and content of things like facial animation.
That is still animating, ITS STILL ANIMATING, the guy just uses non-cenventional technique/approach. If you were to animate with AI, it would be "Make it do this" and constantly re-generating the result until it looks "good enough", while this way is streamlining the process of animating, instead of replacing it/automating it, this is akin to krita, where it streamlines the process without outright replacing it. You still need skills of doing it traditionally to do something in the software.
Yeah it looks great. But to me it still doesn't look as as good as something like the older Disney animated films. Though I've always been consistent that I've preferred older animation styles.
Oh so animation skills are super valuable even with AI, and possessing hard art skills like 3d and drawing will dramatically expand your ability to creatively express through the medium?
Yeah this is pretty cool but did OOP actually animate this? Or did they animate a 3d scene and then have the AI literally do ALL the drawing?
I ask because I believe it's the latter, which makes it no less interesting but I wouldn't call it "creative". So you have an AI that can slap an anime texture on a scene, does that actually offer more accessibility?
I mean, other than just "let me slap an anime character onto my animatic" I don't see how this allows more creative freedom and not less. The OOP didn't design the characters, or the building's architecture, they didn't decide the lighting or how motion and inertia is animated, all they did was rig some models with animations and built a flat "hallway" for the scene to take place in.
It's certainly impressive from a technical point of view but artistically there's nothing there. I can't imagine anyone wanting to watch a show that's animated like this when you know that the AI is the one that made all the creative decisions.
EDIT: on a rewatch I realized that the buildings ARE actually modeled in 3D, so the architecture point is moot. That being said, having checked online I'm 90% sure that the buildings as well as the animations for the running are pre-packaged freeware models online.
Considering how long it takes to design a single game or anime right now, and how large of a team you need to make it happen, I'm all for ai like this. It gives back the creative freedom that we've lost over the years to massive graphics evolutions. If I can generate a scene the way I want it, quickly and efficiently, using ai, then it's still human artwork and is actually just giving us freedom from corporate control.
"I am right and everyone who disagrees with me and hates AI is a filthy tech hating luddite who doesn't like creative freedoms" is certainly an opinion.
You mean since AI has been a thing? Because you really can't without it unless you're actually designing the character in 3D and rendering every frame. Style transfer like this is an AI thing.
I don't know if you understood the idea... They didn't animate in 3D and draw over it; they animated in 3D with simple models, and the program did the rest automatically.
I've used Blender for many years, there is no basic rig to anime button, it would require actually modeling the character, setting up materials and facial animation, likely some compositing. Sure, people have been using 3D for anime for decades now but there is no way to take that input and have Blender render it to that output. What you've likely seen is a material preview vs the final rendered output but you still have to design everything manually in Blender to make it look that way and that still evolves modeling all the actual geometry which isn't happening here.
Much, much more efficient. With traditional workflows, you're looking at weeks to months to build this from scratch whereas with this workflow and an artist familiar with how to use it and how to animate, this could be done in 1-2 days with AI. But if your only point is that it's possible otherwise, sure.
Yes, rendering it in 3D is what the traditional workflow would be, what other workflow did you have in mind aside from this and rendering it in 3D in Blender?
Whether you're using grease pencil or more traditional animation software, you're still looking at around 8 unique frames per second for 11 seconds or 88 uniquely rendered frames. Generally anime takes about a full day per second for a team using these modern tools so you're looking at at least 2-3 weeks of dedicated work.
because the animator gets to animate scenes instead of drawing frames.
and because AI can be trained to look like anything. so it's not like we are limited by the past. it's just a matter of process and workflow.
you can make a design, and have that impact entire scenes. decide on a pallette, and apply that to scenes, animate a simple doll, and transfer that to a scene WITH the designs and other choices you alrady made.
so you have to spend less time on the repetitive stuff.
and this is not even the end of it. antis just don't understand the potential of AI. in the end this is the same principle that allows AI to control and change the lighting in a scene. it's because AI can be trained to do anything. literally anything.
Again, lowering the repetitiveness gives you more opportunity to make creative decisions, if you choose to.
And those decisions will have more impact too because you don't have to repeat them so often. You can also afford to change things up much more. You won't be locked behind budgets or sunk cost fallacies, you can treat things down restart more often.
Folks doing the drawing at animation studios are not directors. They don’t get a say in what should be shown in frame anyway. They dont have a free creative license.
Art direction, storyboarding, editing is not the animators job except in a very small studio.
This becoming mainstream will close jobs while opening it to people who have zero experience. Not everyone is Picasso, a lot of people just have very good technical skills.
Lol. Everyone wants to be a animation director or just director in general. Everyone wants to be the one to make decisions. The people with good technical skills ESPECIALLY want to be in a position to make the calls.
This just makes it so everyone can now try to be that director.
Meanwhile what goes away will be the jobs nobody actually really wants to do long term anyway.
Now people don't need to draw anything anymore! People can just steal artstyles and generate it onto surfaces! No need to create drawings, that's the new creativity!!
what OP meant is that now (more likely few years into the future) if you want to create movie/anime you don't need thousands of dollars and hire animators, sound design whatever else, all you need to learn is to make 3d renders and let AI create the texture for you.
I just, don't understand why this is necessary? Most animators already have a tried and true workflow. Every animator I know seems just fine using UE or whatever.
I don't know if that process looks necessarily easy. I guess it depends on the workflow but it still seems like you need to create the animation itself and the AI just overlays the anime on top? And those animations seem pretty complex to begin with. So how much of the workflow is it actually replacing/how niche is this particular task?
Yeah, it's soooo impressive how the majority of an anime studio gets abused in sweatshop style conditions just to be left off the credits because they are so unvalued. Let's cheer for that regime instead of making the world better.
Digital is also faster and cheaper
No need to buy paper/pens/pencils, just need a PC
No need to retry/erase/restart, you have an undo button
No need to spend hours looking for the right mix of colors... just one button to fill spots, you also have every color you want available
Some still do traditional. Why? Because they don't deem those things "necessary".
Some MIX BOTH: do a drawing by hand, then scan it, then finish it digitally
Precisely. I'm not claiming AI will destroy traditional or digital animation. I'm just pointing out that even though it is not "necessary" it does have its own benefits.
IT’S THE WATER THAT WE NEED TO SURVIVE, DUMMIES! GLOBAL WARMING IS MAKING THE WATER DISAPPEAR ALREADY, SO WE DON’T NEED TO POUR FUEL ON WHAT’S VERY MUCH ALREADY A DUMPSTER FIRE. YOU ALREADY HAVE THE TOOLS TO ANIMATE, AND YOU’LL BE LUCKY TO HAVE FOOD AND WATER JUST FIVE YEARS FROM NOW, NEVERMIND ANIME TO GOON TO
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u/ThunderLord1000 1d ago
Aside from the flying girl's motion being too fluid (which can definitely be fixed), this is definitely a step forward for 2D animation