AI and Animation

[from:http://marionettestudio.com/top-5-animation-blogs-to-learn-from/%5D

We have all seen an animated film at least once in our lives. Not only is it common in movies and tv shows, but it is used in various media sources such as tv ads and such. These films are created by using animated images, which are made by rendering systems that compute thousands of light rays to achieve the needed color and texture, resulting in a frame that will be used for the film. It is a very labor-intensive and time-consuming process, and if it is made with a few light rays instead of thousands, it would indeed take less time and effort, but it would create a relatively low-quality image with flaws and inaccuracies called “noise”.

UC Santa Barbara electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. student Steve Bako and his advisor, Pradeep Sen have been researching a solution to this problem. Both have experience within the animation industry as they have worked at Disney and Pixar over the past few years. What they have been working on is an alternative rendering system using Artificial Intelligence and deep learning to minimize and eliminate noise while producing images in a shorter amount of time; they are trying to maximize efficiency of the rendering process.

“The team tested the software by using millions of examples from the film “Finding Dory” to train a deep-learning model known as a convolutional neural network. Through this process, the system learned to transform noisy images into noise-free versions that resemble those computed with significantly more light rays. Once trained, the system successfully removed the noise on test images from entirely different films, such as Pixar’s latest release, “Cars 3,” and their upcoming feature “Coco,” even though they had completely disparate styles and color palettes.”

“The work presents a significant step forward over previous state-of-the-art denoising methods, which often left artifacts or residual noise that required artists to either render more light rays or to tweak the denoising filter to improve the quality of a specific image. Disney and Pixar plan to incorporate the technology in their production pipelines to accelerate the movie-making process.”

 

References

Badham, James. “Intelligent Animation-engineers Collaborate to Incorporate AI into a Computer-based Rendering System.” Phys.org – News and Articles on Science and Technology. N.p., 26 July 2017. Web. 27 July 2017.