Viewing scenes and making sense of them is something people do effortlessly every day. Whether it’s sussing out objects’ colors or gauging their distances apart, it doesn’t take much conscious effort to recognize items’ attributes and apply knowledge to answer questions about them.
That’s patently untrue of most AI systems, which tend to reason rather poorly. But emerging techniques in visual recognition, language understanding, and symbolic program execution promise to imbue them with the ability to generalize to new examples, much like humans. Read More
Tag Archives: VFX
How Steve Jobs Saved Pixar from Bankruptcy
How the new 'Lion King' came to life
When I was told that I’d be visiting the production of Disney’s new “Lion King,” I had a hazy idea of what to expect — sets recreating the iconic landscapes of the animated film, maybe some actors in costumes or motion capture suits.
Instead, if you’ve seen the movie (which came out on July 19), you probably won’t be surprised to hear that there wasn’t a single set or costume in sight. After all, even though the film looks like a live action remake of “The Lion King,” every shot except for the first was created on a computer. Read More
A Deep Generative Model for Graph Layout
Different layouts can characterize different aspects of the same graph. Finding a “good” layout of a graph is thus animportant task for graph visualization. In practice, users often visualize a graph in multiple layouts by using different methods andvarying parameter settings until they find a layout that best suits the purpose of the visualization. However, this trial-and-error processis often haphazard and time-consuming. To provide users with an intuitive way to navigate the layout design space, we presenta technique to systematically visualize a graph in diverse layouts using deep generative models. We design an encoder-decoderarchitecture to learn a model from a collection of example layouts, where the encoder represents training examples in a latent spaceand the decoder produces layouts from the latent space. In particular, we train the model to construct a two-dimensional latent spacefor users to easily explore and generate various layouts. We demonstrate our approach through quantitative and qualitative evaluationsof the generated layouts. The results of our evaluations show that our model is capable of learning and generalizing abstract conceptsof graph layouts, not just memorizing the training examples. In summary, this paper presents a fundamentally new approach to graphvisualization where a machine learning model learns to visualize a graph from examples without manually-defined heuristics. Read More
Runway ML puts AI tools in the hands of creators everywhere
Machine learning can be a fantastic tool for creators, but integrating AI into your workflow is a challenge for those who can’t code. A new program called Runway ML aims to make this process easier by providing artists, designers, filmmakers, and others with an “app store” of machine learning applications that can be activated with a few clicks.
Say you’re an animator on a budget who wants to turn a video of a human actor into a 3D model. Instead of hiring expensive motion capture equipment, you could use Runway to apply a neural network called “PosetNet” to your footage, creating wireframe models of your actor that can then be exported for animation. Read More
They will do more of the mundane tasks so humans don’t have to.
The next time you sit down to watch a movie, the algorithm behind your streaming service might recommend a blockbuster that was written by AI, performed by robots, and animated and rendered by a deep learning algorithm. An AI algorithm may have even read the script and suggested the studio buy the rights. Read More
‘A.I.’ for VFX at SIGGRAPH Part 1
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to change the way VFX is approached and produced. At this year’s SIGGRAPH there are a series of key talks, papers and panels discussing applications of various forms of AI to VFX, by many of the biggest names in the Industry.
Doug Roble, Digital Domain’s senior director of software R&D, personally shares his thoughts on FUTURE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND DEEP LEARNING TOOLS FOR VFX. Read More
Tomorrow’s VFX artists might not be human.
The new Artificial Intelligence frontier of VFX
If there’s a buzz phrase right now in visual effects, it’s “machine learning.” In fact, there are three: machine learning, deep learning and artificial intelligence (A.I.). Each phrase tends to be used interchangeably to mean the new wave of smart software solutions in VFX, computer graphics and animation that lean on A.I. techniques.
Already, research in machine and deep learning has helped introduce both automation and more physically-based results in computer graphics, mostly in areas such as camera tracking, simulations, rendering, motion capture, character animation, image processing, rotoscoping and compositing. Read More
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