There are a wide range of approaches to achieving 3D computer animation, each with its own pros and cons. In this blog I summarize many of the common approaches, and then talk about how you may combine the different approaches into a real project. As a hobbyist, I personally to focus on free solutions that … More 3D Animation Technical Styles
I love the progress Meta are making (https://dulucas.github.io/agrol/) on animating the lower body from just a VR headset and hand controllers. Personally I would love to use this as a poor man’s option for mocap (Motion Capture), to create custom animation clips for characters. There are a number of camera based mocap solutions around these … More AGRoL, Avatars GRow Legs at Meta
From the NVIDIA website, “NVIDIA Omniverse™ is a computing platform that enables individuals and teams to develop Universal Scene Description-based 3D workflows and applications.” It is based on USD, the file format originally developed by Pixar for their animation projects. For my purposes, it is similar to Unreal Engine and Unity for rendering 3D scenes and … More NVIDIA Omniverse Unity Connector
Just as generative AI has been stirring things up with 2D images, people are also looking hard at 3D models too. One great little video I stumbled across lists a number of platforms, some of which I had not heard of before. First, the video: Some of the sites mentioned: Some of the platforms tackle … More AI 3D Model Creation
NVIDIA Omniverse includes Canvas, a cool little tool for creating 360 background images with minimal effort. You draw color patches where you want trees or bushes, and it uses generative AI to create photo realistic artwork. For free. … More NVIDIA Canvas
Will video from Generative AI kill 3D CG animation? I don’t think so. I think it will have its place, but I think better quality will be achieved using AI tools to help with 3D model creation and animation. … More Generative AI Video vs CG Animation
USD (Universal Scene Description) is an file format originally developed by Pixar for describing 3D scenes. A scene can include a collection of sets, characters, and props. In this blog I give a quick introduction, including how it is used to compose a hierarchy of sequences and shots similar to the Sequences package in Unity. … More Universal Scene Description (USD) format from Pixar
There is a lot of buzz going on around AI generative artwork. Rather than art generation, I am personally interested in AI tools to speed up boring (non-creative) workflow tasks. For example, in this post I explore some work that has been done on how to create a 3D background for a film or cartoon … More 2D to 3D Background Artwork
6:15 PM I am exploring assembling scenes for computer animation from text based on AI. This is partly because I would like to speed up my workflow, and partly as a learning exercise to understand the challenges of applying AI to real life problems. This time I am looking at GPT to see how it … More Entity Extraction for Screenplays with ChatGPT
I have a number of assets from the Unity Asset Store – some paid, some free. I hunt around in them for various models that I can use in scenes for my animations, such as trees and bushes. Some use the Unity Tree Editor, which have given me problems after upgrading to HDRP. Here are … More Unity Tree Editor and Shader Graphs
Extra Ordinary, the Series 