Version management is painful with ComfyUI. It is an open source project with lots of different people contributing different custom nodes and models you can add to your installation, which is both fantastic (so much is out there!) and painful because as people make changes they are not always backwards compatible. This means when someone … More Taming ComfyUI Custom Nodes Version Hell
Can you, by yourself, use all the recent advancements in AI to create your own TV series on YouTube, starting with say 5 minute episodes? That is the challenge I have set myself to explore, writing blogs of my findings as I progress. My background: I have been text-based AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc) with … More Solo Production using Generative AI for Video
Can AI write formulaic screenplays as well as humans? There are many formulaic structures around: Save the Cat, the Three Act structure, and the heroic journey, to name just a few. These predefined templates have a recommended structure to follow based on previous experience of what has worked well. As a result, the structures are … More Can AI ‘Save the Cat’? Exploring Predictability in Scriptwriting
NVIDIA had a number of announcements at the recent CES 2025 and the OpenUSD team at NVIDIA had a great round up of announcements relevant to 3D aficionados. While my personal interest is more into animation, technologies related to 3D modeling always interest me due to their potential application. For example, can robot animation techniques … More NVIDIA and OpenUSD at CES 2025
Film and TV production has a rich history and culture. Personally I am trying to use AI to speed up the creation of a simple computer animated series: insert a screenplay and out the other end comes a simple animated video. I have not been to film school, but I do think there is value … More From Beats to Shooting Scripts
3D product experiences can be useful on ecommerce sites. They are not needed on every site (yet), but just like zooming in on a product image can be useful, so can a 3D representation of a product. You can look at a product from all angles, possibly animating it to show it in use (functional … More Is OpenUSD useful for Ecommerce?
SyncTwin.ai has a cool feature where you can take a PowerPoint visual and an Excel spreadsheet to assemble a factory scene in OpenUSD. Very nice! I was wondering how to create something similar using Adobe Illustrator. I thought Illustrator might make it easier to do larger floor plans without worrying about the size of a … More OpenUSD Floor Design using Adobe Illustrator and NVIDIA Omniverse
How to do a Digital Clock (or other counter) inside an NVIDIA Omniverse scene? There are UI widgets, but they are painted on the viewport as an overlay. They are not a part of the 3D scene. Unfortunately there is no “3D text” in OpenUSD, so how to do a digital clock in a 3D … More An Omniverse Digital Clock
Omniverse have announced Omniverse Cloud, “a fully managed platform-as-a-service offering for developing generative AI-enabled OpenUSD applications.” While full details are yet to be published, browsing the Omniverse documentation, they describe how to build microservices using Omniverse Kit (their application building framework) with support for cross service API calls and a message bus. Omniverse Enterprise is … More Designing Enterprise Applications leveraging OpenUSD
I have been exploring using Generative AI (LLMs specifically) to assist with going from a screenplay to an animated video, learning about relevant technologies along the way. (No, I have not got that far, but it’s fun trying and learning!) For example, at the recent GTC 2024 there were some interesting sessions on Robotics from Google and Disney. It reminded me of an older paper on Voyager – getting AI to play Minecraft. The GTC videos are just being published now, so I also just got to view Jim Fan’s presentation on “Generally Capable Agents in Open-Ended Worlds”, which also mentioned Voyager. This blog summarizes the highlights from this work that interest me. … More AI Agents, Animation, and Minecraft
Extra Ordinary, the Series 