How much of this is AI automating? That drawing of the car design, the storyboarding... isn't generative AI aiming to do away with most of it?
I've been seeing some of the lengthier AI films on X (i.e. the one about badgers vs. rats that looks like Lord of the Rings), and there is certainly a lot of work put into them. However the type of work that goes into them is substantially different than what is shown in this article about Zootopia. There are a lot less decisions made by humans. AI is driving a lot of the creative decisions. In the end you get something good, but is it still riding on the decisions of the training data that came from humans like the ones who made Zootopia by hand crafting every element of it? I think this is an interesting question.
I remember seeing a Pixar documentary a really long time ago where someone talked about attention to detail. The designers would fully texture out the inside of a dresser draw that will never be shown in the film. The idea was imagine how much attention to detail and time is spent on the things that will be seen. Pure craftsmanship.
> The designers would fully texture out the inside of a dresser draw that will never be showing in the film. The idea was imagine how much attention to detail
Hehe, as an ex FX animator/TD, this sounds kinda funny to me, there’s likely more to the story. If they knew for sure the textures weren’t going to be shown, it’s a waste of time, not craftsmanship or attention to detail. But it’s plausible because often modeling & surfacing departments have to start work before the shots & camera are fully planned. And sometimes there are camera changes late in the production. It could be that someone’s shot that saw the inside of the dresser drawers got cut, that surfacing expected the drawers to be open in a shot, or that a scene inside the drawer was in storyboards but didn’t make it to layout, stuff like that happens a lot. But no productions are having artists work on stuff that they know will never be shown in the film.
That's interesting. So, filling in details on demand with something like Gaussian splats and then backfilling them later on could save a lot of "wasted" time.
You're thinking of Steve Jobs and his attention to detail on the inside of Apple computers; a trait he learned from his father as detailed in the book about him by Walter Isaacson
Quite the opposite. Texturing something they know will never be seen was (at least in those days) time not spent paying attention to detail on the things that will be.
I do understand it from an artistic perspective, and who knows when and how an asset will be used in the future; but the premise doesn't appear to hold water under scrutiny.
Now go watch "Kono Express". Disney laid off an animator from the Star Wars factory, and he's cranking out stuff about as good as Disney Animation all by himself. With Unreal Engine and AI tools, of course.
It's been a long time since there was an ink and paint department.
I opened this with an open mind, but it felt dead and AI immediately to me. Neural Viz, however, had succeeded in making things I find watchable all by himself[0] by working around some of the current weaknesses and by having stellar human writing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seems he got burnt out from doing it all alone so it's been a while since the last upload. The Remo Green one is my favorite[1].
Neural Viz had really good consistency and really good scripts, also importantly knew to write the story around the limitations in what AI could do, including using non-human characters to avoid that uncanny valley that I immediately see in the Kono Express video. Truly a master at his craft, it's a shame he hung it up!
Some people are making absolute banger content with AI. It's all in who's at the helm and what their storytelling capabilities and taste/aesthetics are.
I think another important point that AI is revealing is how diverse the population's preferences are. Legacy entertainment is nowhere as precisely tailored, because it tries to appeal to a wide audience.
Personally, all the Harry Potter AI shorts recently have been rather amusing, although they also vary significantly in detail and wit.
> Legacy entertainment is nowhere as precisely tailored
In some instances, it's even engineered to be broadly appealing. See Disney and Marvel.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have niche-specific creators who appeal to specific genre fans and can package their own tone and taste. That's actually really cool.
It's kind of like what happened to music. Electronic music, the DAW, and home recording opened the avenue for indie artists and all of the various genres.
Dreamworks used Renderman(Pixar’s Renderman) along with several other commercial package for a Shark Tale. When Dreamworks acquired PDI, who made Shrek under contract for DWA, there was essentially a war between the two pipelines and PDI won. I was on the PDI side of the company, but there was a lot of positive things about the Renderman pipeline.
Hey I was on the PDI side as well, ahoy, nice to see you here! I had forgotten about Shark Tale using RenderMan, but I will say to the degree there was competition and to the degree that PDI won any pipeline battles, DWA eventually won the war. :P ;) There was plenty of cooperation as well, it just takes time for two companies to integrate, and plenty of people on both sides were quite attached to the cool tools they made. (I was certainly guilty!)
PDI’s toolset was pure magic for it’s time. When I joined, I was in heaven with how easy it was to make procedural animation, build new effects that crossed pipeline stages, render anything you could imagine… I wished I could share it with researchers and hobbyists.
We all had to imagine making our next show using each others pipeline and that was fun. In the end, I think Richard, Jono and other PDI folks ended up having a bit more influence because Shrek was so darn successful.
Custom vs. commercial was a constant issue. Were you around for the whole NextGen effort? DWA spent a fortune on some custom tools that only were used on a show, or maybe just a few sequences, before they were replaced with commercial tools.
Oh definitely - custom vs commercial. I remember the R&D team having to write a yearly report to justify the development expenditure, explain repeatedly why we were writing custom tools & renderer when these things were available off the shelf. I heard a few strong rants here and there about how the suits just didn’t understand. I remember the term “NextGen” being thrown around but I don’t remember if I lived through it or it was just getting started when I left (before S3). Jono I and tried for a while to stop having our shaders rewritten in C++ (without otherwise changing them nor adding any features). We eventually gave up and just kept building new things, but that was a fairly successful strategy to nudge the IP, tech, and support southward. Possibly the right strategy in retrospect, but felt a little rough at the time.
“Better” is a loaded word. When you write your own renderer, you have a lot more control and a lot more support. Renderers at the time had not all converged on the same algorithms, so you could have a competitive advantage by writing a good one. PDI’s shader system was different than RenderMan’s and had some real advantages — compiled shaders, geometry & light shaders (not just materials), particles & particle shadowing, compositor integration, etc.. The renderer also needs to integrate into the pipeline deeply, so PDI’s renderer fits the PDI/DW pipeline better, whereas with RenderMan you have to try to mold the pipeline to fit the renderer in.
It wasn’t the renderer as much as the pipeline. The renderer is just one process in a stunning amount of complexity that must be managed. We may even agree that Renderman was better than the PDI renderer but there was so much much more.
Both companies each had their own renderer & rendering development team before the acquisition. And their own pipelines. A couple decades later, that’s still true.
This reminds me of a very similar Disney exhibition at Miraikan in Tokyo back in 2017 that showed what went into making an animated film. It was a fascinating exhibition, that focused a lot on Moana but had a range of other films on show that they explained the process behind. The fact we have so many people dedicated to one short movie is amazing and in my eyes always worth the effort.
> The fact we have so many people dedicated to one short movie is amazing and in my eyes always worth the effort.
i’m convinced this is where much of the magic comes from.
it’s the same as why often music written and played by an group of musicians who specialize in their instrument is often so much better than the music from a solo who records each instrument themselves.
Everything is. Including this comment. And yours. But if that's the thought upon looking at that post that you need to share, you might need to touch grass, as they say.
The earliest mention I could find for the page is from Feb 2022, which predates ChatGPT, so it wasn't made for that purpose.
Very relevant, here is an animated film I just worked on.
Coming from software development, I had to learn everthing on my own and studied Disney and Pixar quiet a bit, so this was very helpful.
It was very fun and hard to learn, would love your thoughts :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcZ-nGvkg0U
I've been seeing some of the lengthier AI films on X (i.e. the one about badgers vs. rats that looks like Lord of the Rings), and there is certainly a lot of work put into them. However the type of work that goes into them is substantially different than what is shown in this article about Zootopia. There are a lot less decisions made by humans. AI is driving a lot of the creative decisions. In the end you get something good, but is it still riding on the decisions of the training data that came from humans like the ones who made Zootopia by hand crafting every element of it? I think this is an interesting question.
Hehe, as an ex FX animator/TD, this sounds kinda funny to me, there’s likely more to the story. If they knew for sure the textures weren’t going to be shown, it’s a waste of time, not craftsmanship or attention to detail. But it’s plausible because often modeling & surfacing departments have to start work before the shots & camera are fully planned. And sometimes there are camera changes late in the production. It could be that someone’s shot that saw the inside of the dresser drawers got cut, that surfacing expected the drawers to be open in a shot, or that a scene inside the drawer was in storyboards but didn’t make it to layout, stuff like that happens a lot. But no productions are having artists work on stuff that they know will never be shown in the film.
I do understand it from an artistic perspective, and who knows when and how an asset will be used in the future; but the premise doesn't appear to hold water under scrutiny.
It's been a long time since there was an ink and paint department.
[0]https://www.wired.com/story/the-future-of-ai-media-parody-of...
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bYA2Rv2CQ8
Episode 1 is. He's getting better at this. By episode 3, the characters have come alive and the scenery is really good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikm5lP0zsi0
Yeah... no. Not at all. It's just classic AI slop.
A lot of AI content is better than human slop.
Gossip Goblin is fantastic.
Some people are making absolute banger content with AI. It's all in who's at the helm and what their storytelling capabilities and taste/aesthetics are.
Personally, all the Harry Potter AI shorts recently have been rather amusing, although they also vary significantly in detail and wit.
In some instances, it's even engineered to be broadly appealing. See Disney and Marvel.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have niche-specific creators who appeal to specific genre fans and can package their own tone and taste. That's actually really cool.
It's kind of like what happened to music. Electronic music, the DAW, and home recording opened the avenue for indie artists and all of the various genres.
PDI’s toolset was pure magic for it’s time. When I joined, I was in heaven with how easy it was to make procedural animation, build new effects that crossed pipeline stages, render anything you could imagine… I wished I could share it with researchers and hobbyists.
Custom vs. commercial was a constant issue. Were you around for the whole NextGen effort? DWA spent a fortune on some custom tools that only were used on a show, or maybe just a few sequences, before they were replaced with commercial tools.
2022 (276 points, 167 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30241966
2024 (118 points, 22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41204228
i’m convinced this is where much of the magic comes from.
it’s the same as why often music written and played by an group of musicians who specialize in their instrument is often so much better than the music from a solo who records each instrument themselves.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/wildwood-review-laika-...
https://www.laika.com/our-films
Is this training material for LLMs?
This comment (c) copyright by amelius, not for training AI.
The earliest mention I could find for the page is from Feb 2022, which predates ChatGPT, so it wasn't made for that purpose.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/slfb1q/disne...