[kaveh808]

I think there is an opportunity to rethink a system for computer animation. Existing DCC packages are stuck in the late-80's mindset of animation consisting of interpolated values between keyframes. I wrote two such systems in that timeframe: Neo-Visuals and Softimage.

As far as I've seen, neither Unity nor Unreal have moved in this direction. Their "sequencer" solutions are IMHO unwieldy kludges that don't take advantage of new higher levels of abstraction for producing computer animation.

[markus_zhang]

Clicked profile and saw MIT math and the rest. That's impressive.

[forrestthewoods]

What do you think is the future beyond interpolated key frames?

[kaveh808]

We have moved the artists up in part from animation to puppeteering (mocap). The next step is to move up to directing.

Allow the artist to interact with scene objects/characters as a director would. This requires what I used to refer to as "intelligent objects" back in the 80's. You would give directions and the object would figure out what it needed to do and how it would move.

So there would be a higher level of conversation with the 3D entities than "Set rotation keyframe."

[forrestthewoods]

Hrmmmm.

Mocap requires a pretty significant amount of manual cleanup. The VFX industry is not a fan of Andy Serkis's bragging, to say the least. =P

I was extremely impressed with this motion matching presentation from GDC 2016. It blew folks away at the time. That said it hasn't really taken off everywhere AFAIK. Although it's definitely used in places (sports games!) https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023280/Motion-Matching-and-Th...

I guess I like the idea of "directing". But in terms of pure practicality I'm very skeptical. What does the directing toolset look like assuming we don't have full blown AGI? That's tough. And I'm not super bullish on AI for this type of thing. Although I've been consistently surprised by ML capabilities over the last year. So in 3 years I'll probably say "oh yeah it was obvious that ML could do that..."

[kaveh808]

I see this as a long-term approach which will improve over time. Mocap can play a part, as can AI -- though I'm no expert in it, it's hard to argue with the results produced by tools such as Midjourney -- and other techniques.

The key point is tackling the animation "problem" from a new vantage point, as opposed to having an interface based on numerical interpolation as the final solution.

[Cthulhu_]

That makes sense in a video game sense; games like Fifa (or whatever it was called recently) have pushed dynamic animations forward by a lot, first by being able to transition seamlessly from one animation to the next, most recent one with volumetric caputure, so they can make 3d animated characters just from multi angle video footage.

But in that one, the player pushes a button and the character moves accordingly, picking natural movements and combining / merging them into something that looks pretty natural. I don't think that'll be useful in close-ups, but can be for e.g. crowds or wider angle shots.

[kaveh808]

The idea would be to cherry pick simpler cases, such as crowds and "background" actors. Hero shots and closeups would evolve over time as the techniques improved.

One advantage of authoring cinematics as opposed to games is the lack of a requirement for real-time interaction. The cinematic sequence can take a few seconds and analyze/plan accordingly.

[Jare]

Westworld season 4 portrays how a system like this could be used. Sci fi tech at this point, but "something like that" would be the goal/vision.

[readyplayernull]

> I wrote two such systems in that timeframe: Neo-Visuals and Softimage.

Interested in knowing more :)

[kaveh808]

I wrote up some recollections.

Neo-Visuals:

https://kaveh808.medium.com/10-17-000-polygons-should-be-eno...

Softimage:

https://kaveh808.medium.com/17-the-softimage-siggraph-sprint...

These were both 3D systems running on SGI boxes, which allowed interactive editing of animation curves. Softimage was used for "Jurassic Park" among other films.