Wonder Dynamics puts a full-service CG character studio on the web platform.

Modern tools Cinema is becoming more accessible to independent and even amateur filmmakers, but realistic CG characters (like them or not) have remained the province of big budget projects. Wonder Dynamics aims to change that, allowing creators to accurately drag and drop a CG character into any scene, professionally designed and edited.

Yes, it sounds a bit promising. Your skepticism is warranted, but as a skeptic myself, I have to say I’m very impressed with the launch of Wonder Studio, the company’s web-based editor. This isn’t a toy like an AR filter—it’s a full-fledged tool, and one that co-founders Nikola Todorovic and Ty Sheridan longed for themselves. And most importantly, to make artists’ jobs easier, not to replace them entirely.

“The goal all along was to make a tool. b Artists, to encourage them. “A person with big dreams doesn’t always have the resources to realize them,” said Sheridan, who many have seen in Spielberg’s film adaptation. Ready player one – So familiarity with the complexity of CG-assisted production and motion capture is in its own hands.

Todorovich and Sheridan have known each other and worked together for years and hit this wall time and time again: “Me and Ty would write movies that we couldn’t afford to make,” Todorovich says. His so far underground company has raised $2.5 million in seed funding in early 2021 and $10 million more in the same year.

The bottom line is that although software for creating, editing, manipulating, and coloring 3D models (among other steps in the filmmaking process) is now very easy to buy and use, the process of putting a CG character into a scene is still very complicated. .

Say you want to include a robot companion for a scene in your sci-fi movie. An artist model and making textures and such is only the first step. Unless you want to animate it by hand (not recommended!), you’ll need a motion capture studio or set of gear, glow balls, green screens and all. Of those, motion primitives must be applied to the CG skeleton, and the character instead of the actor. But then the 3D model has to match the direction and color of the light, the texture and grain of the film, and more. Hopefully you’ve hired people to capture and identify those.

Unless you happen to be an expert all of them Because of these individual pre- and post-production processes, and they often have a hell of a time on their hands, it’s simply out of scope and budget for most filmmakers. At the end of the day you could be looking at up to $20,000 per second for a major VFX job, adding something like a dragon or a superhero, not to mention days worth of technical labor. So indie films never have popular VFX let alone fully animated characters.

Wonder Studio is a platform that makes this process as easy as choosing a filter or brush in Photoshop. It sounds too good to be true, but Sheridan and Todorovic have been working on it for three years now and the results are showing. “We wanted to build something fundamental — that’s why it took so long,” Sheridan said.

“We’ve built something that automates this whole process, it’s live animation, frame by frame, no mockup required. Automatically detects actors based on a single camera. It does camera movement, lighting, color, it completely replaces the actor with CG,” explains Todorovic.

But crucially, he doesn’t just do this live in camera by posting a la Tik Tok, or spitting out a questionable “final” product. All the actual parts that VFX artists normally create or interact with are still created. And he’s careful to point out that none of them are trained in the artists’ existing work.

“You get a mockup, a clean plate, masks, a mixing scene, it checks for noise and grain,” he continued. That is: animation and motion data (including hands and faces), footage without the actor or surrogate, a list of characters and objects per frame, 3D representation of the environment with terrain and other features. And it’s all automatically matched to shooting qualities – or footage, as it can track actors from multiple angles across the scene.

See how the process works in action:

Many more examples and details can be seen on the company’s site.

Most of this stuff is rote work, most of it is drudgery, it’s done the same way over and over again as part of the overall VFX process. These “non-innovative” tasks – so called because they are technical needs rather than tangible results – definitely fall into the “boring” category of “dirty, stupid and dangerous”: the three D’s of automation.

“You cannot replace artists with AI, we are there to enhance and empower them. This does not hinder what they do; It automates 80-90% of the VFX work, leaving them with the subject work,” explains Todorovic. “The beauty of AI is taking something very complicated and making it simple.”

Don’t worry if this puts a lot of people out of business, it probably won’t. The VFX industry is positively swamped with work, especially since companies like Marvel and Netflix insist on regularly releasing incredibly demanding CG work that must be done by dozens of VFX houses. One does cap, another explosion, another digital makeup, another disabled surfaces. And all of them have been held for years. Sure, you’re paying the bills, but since you’re spending half the time specifying the target actor on each frame, if you can take twice as much work, you’ll probably do it in seconds.

It all depends on the quality of the results, of course, and the automation of these processes is where it tends to fail. In fact, you can find a tool that automatically detects motion in a selected actor and renders a rough animation for a model. But you have to tell which actor is in each shot, and once you have all this, it won’t magically be a CG character; He should move on to the next group that knows what to do with concatenated coordinates and Bezier curves.

Sheridan and Todorovic wanted Wonder Studio to be a system that would be easy for a kid to use but powerful enough for a VFX professional – so raw data output if you will, but functionality out of the box.

Wonder Studio comes with a number of sample models out of the box, but no one is expected to use these exclusively in their movie – it’s a collection of CG character archetypes you’ll likely see in action: a Pixar-style father and daughter, a pair of robots of varying weight, a suspiciously golem-like figure. “Sam” (Little Outsider) and others.

“We want artists to create their own. You get your FBX [a common 3D media format] And your textures and they’re assembled on stage, just like you put them in Blender or Realism or whatever,” Todorovic said. Models can be offered for purchase on the platform.

Even these basics can be sufficient for sound, tight cuts or previews, although the latter is usually done by stunt crews without any VFX. Wouldn’t it be great to see what a Wolverine suit or slimy sewer monster would look like in a fight tune story you’re pitching, not just on the storyboard? How about a fantasy village with real bird people instead of bad makeup? Or a short science fiction film that only needs a robot cashier or a dynamic street sweeper to give it a modern futuristic feel – that’s not even an option these days. Entry-level CG characters unlock all genres locked behind big budgets.

Additional features are planned, from CG environments that can be composed of characters, to capturing camera movements of any medium that can be modeled, studied, edited and reused.

“This is a big first step, but the big picture is that we want to have a platform where any kid can sit down and sit on their computer and direct movies,” Sheridan said. A free tier is offered for anyone to try, and advanced features are available in various paid plans for professionals and heavy users. Plan to work directly with VFX houses to create and improve mixes and workflows.

Their hope is that this will begin to bridge the gap between low-budget filmmaking and flights of fancy that only someone with James Cameron’s wealth can understand.

The platform is currently in beta form, but is being used by acclaimed action directors the Russo brothers for an upcoming Netflix film starring Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt. No word on who will replace what, but it’s strong support nonetheless.

“I may be biased, but making a movie has to be one of the best things you can do,” Sheridan said of Wonder Studio’s debut release. “We’re storytellers at heart, and we’re building technology to help us tell better stories. AI offers a huge opportunity for more movies to be made and more voices to be heard.