since way back artificially intelligent machines were generally portrayed in movies as scary and
evil and that terminator looks terrible but anyway in general the habit has been to portray ai as the
enemy and not to be trusted however the irony is that in order to produce most modern day movies
vfx artists are actually using ai and machine learning tools to help them out and with robots
getting a lot more advanced it raises the question will ai replace actors well maybe not with robots
or at least not just yet but in many modern movies there are actually occasions where
you've been watching ai generated material and not even realized you see little by little ai has been
creeping into the visual effects workflow and it now forms part of a variety of different tools
adobe after effects roto brush 2 uses adobe sensei machine learning to predict the movements of the
foreground to allow you to easily cut it out from the background without spending hours and hours of
tedious work nuke 13 also uses a machine learning toolset and maya has neural network capabilities
oh and by the way if you'd like to learn how to use adobe after effects from scratch
in just two hours stay tuned until the end of the video machine learning is basically this compiling
a library full of data that the tool can then use as learning data so it can then study this data to
identify patterns similarities or differences so how do vfx companies take advantage of this well
frame store did a research project with software developers weight shift to combine
ragdoll simulation keyframe animations and machine learning to take care of the more
menial and repetitive tasks like for example this man riding a horse his body appears to be
animated but actually it isn't his body movement is being generated by a ragdoll simulation that
is reacting to the horse's animation this then allows animators to focus more on the artistic
elements of the shot like for example having him turn around to see who's behind him while all
the rest of his movement has been automatically taken care of you can see this technology being
used in the tv series his dark materials on things like for example this monkey's tail
wetter digital uses deep learning in its facial pipeline and also the face
system that can capture subtle details of the actor's performance and figure out which
muscles have moved and how and then it maps those movements onto the digital characters
digital domain also used their own machine learning software charlatan with their proprietary
tool masquerade in their real-time cloth simulation tool elbow and for the facial capture
with their real-time live drive system as the use of ain tools and the tools themselves expand
and evolve it seems that the only thing that limits their capabilities and effectivity is the
amount of learning data they have access to when digital domain had to do a digital pickup shot for
channing tatum for free guy they were very limited with the amount of quality data they had access to
from the machine learning even so their results were impressive but with access to more learning
data they could be even better considering every vfx house has its own ai software
and its own learning database we asked digital domains vfx supervisor nicoscolixidis whether a
shared centralized machine learning database could be a future possibility he told us that vfx houses
could collaborate and share large data sets without exchanging them via federated learning
this would allow each vfx house's tools to learn from data another company has uploaded without
actually having access to or copying it kind of like the difference between watching a film
through your neighbour's window instead of them just handing you a copy what does this mean for
the future well the possibilities of what could be accomplished with the help of deep learning and ai
are immense some people are looking to implement it to enable audio files to drive a rig for the
initial facial animation this would give animators the basic facial expressions and lip syncing
just from the actor's audio file freeing them up to work on the more artistic side of things it
could also be used for large-scale environment generators texture shading to speed up render
times extracting mattes adding or removing noise grain and texture and 2d and 3d compositing
processes like de-aging and frame interpolation time and money are the two most limiting aspects
of visual effects deep learning and ai could speed up vfx work thus allowing film producers
to get good v effects faster and cheaper or for vfx artists to spend more time on the details
of an effect thus allowing the film producers to get higher quality vfx for the same money
let's just hope film producers pick up the latter option similar to what
happened when robots first began to appear on the industrial factory floor many feel that ai
may be taking over jobs that humans can do and this may be true but the jobs the ai is taking
are the grunt work jobs the manual labor that humans find boring and repetitive and by taking
those jobs they are freeing the artists from the mundane and allowing them to be artistic
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