Tools that are radically changing the 3d industry
wonder AI is a new tool on the market that you can use to replace people in a video with a 3d animated character, the Ai does a lot of things here that i should breakdown just to show how impressive this is and how many jobs are on the line if this works out as promised, and what is more scary is with the current trend of Ai, it seems like each new Ai delivers more than we expected and each new Ai leads to clones or other related versions of that Ai which are better or with different features.
for example, Midjourney vs stable diffusion, chart gpt vs Google Bard the list goes on and on.
previously if you wanted to replace a character with a 3d model these are the steps you had to do the following steps
- you first need the footage with the actor you want to replace
- rotoscope or create a mask to cut them out of the video, the mask would have to be animated as the person is in motion and so is everything around them
- then clean up the background since when you cut or mask the person out from the footage you leave empty pixels behind them, those pixels would need to be replaced to match what is in the background, photoshop can do this easily but since this is video you need to do more work, aftereffects would accomplish this but it can take hours to do well
- then bring in the 3d model you created
- the 3d model will have to be animated to match the actor’s movement in the video
- you will need to do motion tracking to make sure the 3d characters you have added to the scene do not just slide over the video, but are tracked in like all the other objects
- match the color
- match the lighting
- then render
this is what you have to do and each step takes hours if not days depending on the complexity of the scene, wonder Ai promises to reduce all these time consuming tasks into a drag and drop operation that can be done in a few seconds.
this is exciting and scary at the same time, but as artists we are resilient creatures and we will survive this like pencil and paper artists survived the digital error, by adopting.
Adopt to changing times and workflows and you wont have to worry about the next wave of Ai and there are many to come, don’t wait for Ai to get better and be replaced start adopting your workflow today.
there are tools that can help speed up your workflow, products like procedural alley that you can use to generate cities or a block of buildings in seconds, your client has a deadline and wont care how you created the building in the background but will care if its not there because you had no time to create a super realistic building with shops, different designs, perfect textures, street lights, escape ladders and more. the advantage we have over Ai is that most clients dont know what they want, they want you to guide them towards what they want, they want options though Ai can give them those options, it gives them too many, so chosing become a job in its self., you can cater directly to your clients better than Ai all you need it to speed up your workflow everytime you get a chance.
another example, say your client wants a camera flying through clouds, no need to create cloud vbs on your own bpproductions have 100s of clouds to choose from just grab them and add to your project it will save you hours of stress.