Animator vs The Machine

Cat's Out of The Box or Was It A Bag?The Intersection of Art and AI in 3D Animation with Rodrigo Braga

• Alex • Season 1 • Episode 5

Share episode

Ready to step into a new dimension of animation? Join me as I traverse the vibrant world of 3D animation with Rodrigo Broga, a technical tinker in this new field. We shed light on the remarkable evolution from traditional to 3D animation, and the influential role of AI in shaping this transformation. Rodrigo opens the door to his creative process, revealing how innovative AI tools like Mid Journey, Chat GPT, and Kaiber empower him to take the reins of his artistry. Prepare for an eye-opening journey as we debunk fears and misconceptions about AI replacing human creativity and celebrate the endless possibilities this technology brings to the animation table.

As we venture deeper, Rodrigo and I dissect the cutting-edge tools that are rewriting the rules of 3D animation. We delve  deeper into the thrilling potential of AI in how it can reshape animations, from applying frames,to  creating content and even swift restyling on animation. In an industry that might soon see a wave of AI-generated clones, we explore the challenges and strategies to stand out and maintain a unique artistic identity. More than just a tool, AI emerges as a playground for experimentation, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in animation. Rodrigo, with his infectious enthusiasm, prompts us all to embrace the fun and curiosity inherent in this evolving landscape, reminding us that despite the technological revolution, the heart of animation will always be creativity and individuality.

Alex:

The sky is falling. The sky is falling Not so much, but there's definitely something coming. Can you feel it? The last six months alone, we've had this big boom of technology, from chat, gpt to stable diffusion, dreamy eye and about a hundred other things. However, probably a big leap forward made me wonder could AI animate? I mean traditionally animate, with all 12 principles, animate and treaty in two.

Alex:

My first thoughts of this topic were yeah, probably maybe. The more I look into it, the more questions I had. So, as an average animator who's overweight, has bags under his eyes and has a stick to his caffeine, I decided to try to find out With a basic knowledge of AI. I want to talk to people in the field of animation and get to know what people thought and what they believed could happen in the near future. Then talk to some experts in AI and see if these concerns or theories had any validity to them.

Alex:

My name is Alex Plant. Your assets in front of your screen. Turn those ears on and let's find out. Is this the boogeyman crawling up our beds or just silly trying to say hi? Is this a strange model of time before us or a new tool to bring about a human revolution? Is this a friend or a foe? Is it judgment day? Or did we just fall asleep in front of the TV again? I don't know. Let's find out together in Animator vs the Machine. Oh, today we got Rodrigo Broga, or Rod as he likes to be known. Hi, rod, introduce everyone to yourself, hi.

Rodrigo Braga:

Alex, Nice to meet you and it's a pleasure to be here. Perfect.

Alex:

So tell everyone a little bit about yourself. What do you do?

Rodrigo Braga:

I'm a technical 3D animator. I'm working for a company called Sonadine that specializes in sound engineering for underwater or subaquatic technology.

Rodrigo Braga:

So I've been working there for the last two years, but I started as a traditional 3D animator back in 2009, for no long. So I've been jumping around as a motion graphic artist, 3d animation, visual artist, real-time engine as well. So I jump a little bit of game technology like Unreal Unity, this kind of stuff. So, yeah, I've been jumping loads of companies. Now the latest job that I'm working on is Sonadine. That is an engineering company.

Alex:

Cool. So for other phantom listeners out there who might be animators, what is the difference between technical animation and, say, cartoon animation?

Rodrigo Braga:

Well, we can talk about the difference between 3D and 2D traditional animation. So, yeah, 2d animation is what you see in the classics of Disney, like Fantasia or I don't know. Remember the classic Disney stuff. And then it's still there. So we still have some loads of talented people that still focus on 2D animation and do beautiful stuff. I think back in 2000s did you hear that the 3D technologies started to take over of the animation universe, so loads of artists came from there. So I believe it started to be interesting in 3D animation when I saw you probably remember that when you watch the Jurassic Park and you see this gigantic monster on the screen.

Rodrigo Braga:

Yeah, and it's like how do they do that? So yeah, it's a mix of a lot of practical stuff and 3D stuff. I say how do they do that? And they learn a little bit, and that's why I decide to jump on the 3D animation stuff and the visual effects as well. Yeah, that's the difference. The difference is, using technology to create animation Doesn't mean that 2D traditional doesn't use it, but it's more pen the hands and doing stuff manually instead of just moving camera, moving characters and everything Okay cool.

Alex:

So the reason we're talking today is because you've actually used AI as an experiment, correct?

Rodrigo Braga:

I did, I did, I did.

Alex:

So tell us about it.

Rodrigo Braga:

Yeah, I start to heard about AI because of the fear mongering among artists right now. So we're gonna lose our jobs, oh my God. And I said let me see what it's about. And I dig a little bit and obviously I end up on me journey. That's the most common AI tool, that most people use it. I saw amazing images generated from there and I start to talk with my fellow artists what it's about. What it's about? Oh man, it's crazy. They never tell me hey look, this is what it's about. They just explain the fear about what's gonna happen in the future. And I start digging myself and I end up experimenting me journey.

Rodrigo Braga:

First I didn't like the me journey because it's a great tool. I think they're gonna work on that, but it seems like you. You not put your hands on anything. You just put some words and boom, something happened and that changed since then. But in other tools, the conversation was altering about what it generates. On the AI have some people do and make a lot of money on AI using me journey. They say they print things on internet and take ownership of everything that they're doing. But I understand that is a feed for a massive data that we feed from you know image or internet and it was scary. Once when I tried me journey as well, I saw like a watermark printing there from a shutter stock. Was it much? But you noticeably see that was shutter stock image in there. You can even still make it out.

Alex:

Yeah.

Rodrigo Braga:

Yeah, and I say that's not for me and I drop me journey for a while and I obviously experiment chatting BT to create some scripts and everything. And then I discover another tools that actually put a hand on something. So you need to feed with your own stuff to create something. One of them is a kyber, so essentially you can film everything that you want. You can you create your own content and you feed this machine to stylize for you. Okay, and I love that because you can actually direct what you want to see before you upload and decide what style you're going for.

Rodrigo Braga:

I think that's a tool for me. That's more interesting to me because I can. It's like I remember the conversation back in the days was a traditional artist say, oh my God, this guy is cheating because he used a 3D to create perspective? Yeah, but the artist there it's not just about the tool, it's about the guy have a skills to mix that up. I think artists have both mixed that up and that's what I'm looking for A tool that can mix my skills with technology. That's it.

Alex:

Right Cause even people I've talked to they have the same fear like oh yeah, he's going to take us over or they're going to take our jobs, and all this.

Rodrigo Braga:

And I'm like yeah, but it's just like yeah, it's the same thing that you're saying.

Alex:

Like the guy who used a 3D asset to get his perspective, it's just like it's just using a tool to make things faster.

Rodrigo Braga:

As time is money the end of the day. Exactly that's where I see. I see is a tool, I see a potential tool obviously has a lot of talk of legislation about how we're going to use the responsibility, ownership altering as the laws of talk, but we put the wall of fear in front of us and not talking about it. It's not going to take it anywhere and that's how I fell from a fellow artist. They don't want to talk about it, just push that away, but it's a wave. You're not going to stop a wave. They come in anyway. So it's better to talk right now Than later.

Alex:

Exactly.

Rodrigo Braga:

Yeah, you can't ignore it. It's going to happen Sometimes. We'll learn about it. And figure it out and it took my surprise.

Alex:

Really.

Rodrigo Braga:

Oh, it's in the top right. It took my surprise because everybody said that it's a big deal was a metaverse. Remember that Everybody said it's a metaverse.

Alex:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rodrigo Braga:

Yeah, it's going to be the future, but actually this came from nothing. It just hey, EI is there and metaverse just kind of disappeared.

Alex:

Yeah, it was like the metaverse was like Google Glass. When it first came out, You're like, oh my god, Google Glass is going to be a thing and then it just nothing happened. No, not a thing, and metaverse same thing, same thing, but AI, but AI. And I'm like, oh, this is, this is going to stay. Yeah, so the thing you showed me how did you do that Was that through stable diffusion, or Kyber, or whoever was?

Rodrigo Braga:

I heard that stable diffusion is capable to do a video as well, but I found the pipeline is a bit more complicated. So Kyber is literally you film something or you can download a footage that you want, upload it, create your prompt yeah. And then you can mix around, because sometimes you get stuck up what a prompt? And go how to feed? How good my prompt could be to feed this machine.

Alex:

Yeah.

Rodrigo Braga:

And has another tool that I use a lot called prompt to hero, so essentially has loads of options of prompts, how you can combine and how some artists combine prompts to get certain results, and it's a great tool and actually can use chat tpt as well to create a prompt to prompt for you if you get stuck. Oh really, yeah, you can ask chat tpt to create a prompt for you if you get stuck in your mind. I don't know exactly what you want. Chat tpt could help with that. So that's what I did. I just created one shot. I feel I film a guy and I want this like magical, stylized, ultra realistic or hyper realistic galaxy born from this guy on the background and boom, I just press the button. Wait, literally. That depends. They use the power of your machine, so depends on how powerful your machine is, but my machine is fairly beefy, so it was quite. Took me about 10, 15 minutes generate that shot and I think is it, you know is a great tool and I'm going to use it in a few years as well.

Alex:

So then did you have to personally go in and touch some things up, or was it like 15 minutes gone?

Rodrigo Braga:

Sometimes you don't like the look, so you can oh, let me change the prompt a little bit. Or you can change an option because like it. Give you like three or two options what kind of how they look like in the future. Give it like a little frames, not the full video, not a preview, but give a few frames how they're going to look. You can pick one, or you can go on a prompt again and work on your prompt and generate again from that. Yeah, and generating, going to stage off, generate the frames again and if you like how they look, you proceed to the final render. Oh, yeah, so does this render out as a? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Does it render out as like a, as a movie file?

Alex:

or is it like a like?

Rodrigo Braga:

tips or cargoes, or they give you a 4k movie file. Yeah, yeah, the capability is a max 4k. No, no, no, it's the one you got, unless you want to do something else and compose it. That's a great thing. You can mix it up with traditional stuff, like you go on After Effects and add more stuff. Yeah, that's a. That's a fantastic thing, you know you can make it cool.

Alex:

Yeah, yeah. So with playing around with it, can you see it possibly being used somewhere in an animation pipeline, or is it just too experimental right now?

Rodrigo Braga:

Well, I see I discovered yesterday. You remember the feature that I sent you a guy walking around and change the shots just when they click the finger, so I figure out which tool this guy use. It is a tool called oh, ok yeah, the tool called runway, so I haven't changed yet. I haven't changed to use it because you need to pay for it.

Alex:

Yeah.

Rodrigo Braga:

It's not that bad. It's about the same price that he was on the Caliber. I'm probably going to experiment that afterwards. But essentially you, you pick a style, like imagine you want to pick a frame like a Pixar frame and you feel yourself walking around in your home doing your daily stuff and you choose OK, I want this replicate by this frame. So they're going to literally apply the style, that frame that you choose, on your footage.

Rodrigo Braga:

So imagine if you want a Johnny Bravo kind of style cartoon and you're gonna walk around and you have a film of you walking around your home and you're gonna convert that you as a Johnny Bravo kind of stuff and it's great, looks great. So I think that's the guy that sent you the video. That's what he do. They use this runway thing. It's pretty cool. Yeah, they have all the tools as well as like frame interpolation. They have like an infinite image tool that, essentially, if you imagine, if you have like a flower, right, you have an image, you have a. It took a picture of a flower, but you have a more contest around and he generate the contest for you. You know what I mean. Imagine if you have like a picture of you take like a close-up of a flower and you want contests.

Rodrigo Braga:

These two generate contests for you. They generate like a wall, here a person, there, a guard in the background. They generate that for you. Huh, that's to do that in a Photoshop. How long gonna take.

Alex:

Yeah, that's gonna take a while, it's just yeah yeah, it's so many tools popping out.

Rodrigo Braga:

I've been taking it all. It's so many tools doing different things and, like I say, this is a wave, it's not gonna stop.

Alex:

No, it's just gonna get more and more fine as it goes further. Yeah, so then my question is, with this new form of, with this AI that you can, like you know, film live-action footage and interpolate a style over top of your footage?

Rodrigo Braga:

Mm-hmm.

Alex:

Is this with this? Like it's not, it's not quite animation.

Rodrigo Braga:

Like, not by the traditional sense. No, no, it's not, it's not a traditional sense. What you could do, what you could do, is animate yourself. You can create like you have a rig of character, or if you have animation that you did, you can render that out Mm-hmm and re-stylize. Use these tools, right, because, if you remember, it's like I'm watching another day Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse Fantastic film, so stylized, yeah, it's so many details in there. So, and it took years, because they paint over frames Like the, the, the depth of field, it's not, the background is not blurry. They actually paint the background to be blurred, to look like oh interesting.

Rodrigo Braga:

So it's all handwork in there and took years and years to do that. Imagine if you can upload your animation and apply okay, I want this animation. Looks like a Spider-Man, look Mm-hmm, and boom, you have it. So it's pretty cool. Maybe it's not going to be like well, the next year is going to be production, production level, but maybe three, four years, maybe that I just want a style, pixel style, and upload your animation, boom, you have pixel style.

Alex:

Sure, you know, the only, the only concern I see with that is that you might have, you know, like you have this like huge wave of just clones, of like all right, everyone's gonna let's all do Pixar style and it's like it's just massive wave of everyone doing the same thing and you're like, oh crap, you know what I mean. They're like oh no.

Rodrigo Braga:

But the only option to stand out, but the only option to stand out is create something different off the wave, right? Yeah, I think that's why Spider-Man to the Spider-Verse stand out, because they didn't follow the superhero thing that everybody's followed or no animation style that everybody's followed. I know personally some people that work on Spider-Man to Spider-Verse and they look as they. What they're looking for is differentiation or something out the box that you haven't seen around. I think these tools, ei tools you need to find your own way to stand out, essentially. You know, obviously it's going to be, it's going to have a wave of. It's like when a mid-journey come out, loads of people put a print out there and overuse, overuse mid-journey, sure, but you need to find your way to differentiate from this and stand out.

Alex:

Right, there's always going to be people that misuse a new technology or use it for the quickest path to success or whatever it is.

Rodrigo Braga:

There's always going to be clones.

Alex:

But yeah, obviously yeah, it's never going to stop it. But using this tech, have you found what's some cool things you've learned? Are there any drawbacks to using this type of software that you found? Is there any limitations?

Rodrigo Braga:

Yes, so the limitation is control.

Rodrigo Braga:

I think, so okay Is what you see is what you got. So there's no control on the tools itself. It's like one thing that is struggle with is keep faces intact. I think the Kyber did a pretty good job for the footage that I did to keep the face without Recognizable. I still recognize the faces in there because sometimes it smells, sometimes the eyes Change or shift or you know always, yeah, struggle like this, but actually could be a style. It's like if you have you, if you're watching. Now it's another fear mongering or cancellation thing. Wave on internet is the latest Marvel show.

Alex:

Secret, oh, secret invite.

Rodrigo Braga:

Yeah yeah, I'm about to talk about that, yeah yeah so the title sequence the title sequence he completely created and generate AI. So an artist straight away. Oh, cancel the show. Cancel the show, fridge, come on chill. Yeah, maybe the decision. You know, people saw he's ugly. Maybe it's supposed to be like that. Maybe it's a decision, yeah, well, I read an article with the.

Alex:

The director of the studio was talking about it. He's like, yeah, like we, we we got direction being like we were. We wanted to try out the AI software because it was new. It was like just came out and they hired a broker and broke. They gave him keywords and they like typed it in prompts and they're like, oh, it's kind of cool. It's like shape shifts, kind of like how the scroll shape shift, and it's like, oh, it's kind of neat. And they're like, oh, this fits with the theme of the show.

Alex:

And then Cancel it because it's all a yeah, it's like no, that works, for what it needs to work, what it needs to do. Is that supposed to be like? This is a weird abstract, like you don't know who's what or what is what you're looking at Really it to be honest, looks human.

Rodrigo Braga:

I watch it and I enjoyed it. I'll watch the, the open title. I mean watch the show yet. Yeah, but looks great.

Alex:

Yeah, like I watched this, I watched shows ago. Yeah, this fits really well.

Rodrigo Braga:

And no problem. 100%, 100%. Sure, the pipeline was like the carbon pipeline, so you're funeral stuff. You have a direction up behind that, you have a script, you have the entire pipeline and in the end I want this kind of style you upload your footage and put your prompt to that and you have it.

Alex:

Yeah, so then the question I've been talking to other anyways, about when I have mentioned, like you know, state of fusion, mid-journey, all that stuff, like I would have to worry because it can't draw hands. Do you think it'll solve that problem anytime soon? Yeah, I think.

Rodrigo Braga:

I Watched a podcast this morning with the chat Tpt guy the head of chat Tpt, I forgot his name. Yeah, he was talking about Back then how poor chatty deal with stuff and now the difference Well, I think all tools gonna go.

Alex:

I think I remember the first version of the car and I think you the French use.

Rodrigo Braga:

Yes, he was around water, paint come to connect, but the subject Industry. So everything's gonna find out together. These tools, don't forget, gonna hand out and it's gonna give you like a direction Off you what you want to do. Obviously, it's gonna take a lot of problems. Not gonna take that one problems gonna be next year.

Alex:

No, you know oh yeah, what's I'm gonna tell people it's just like this is just gen one of the public, exactly in such a this thing once it's the gen two that are like oh, it's hands, no problem.

Rodrigo Braga:

Yeah, and we're talking about the aspect of AI using art, right. Yes, yeah so many other aspects to explore oh and if, security legislation, democracy, everything so we need a long talk. So if you push that away, you're not gonna be part of it. So I prefer to be part of the conversation, then put a wall and say, no, I don't want this, this is gonna took my job.

Alex:

Yeah you know, yeah, I don't want to fear, I don't want to stop you from learning something.

Rodrigo Braga:

Yeah, don't get the fear into fear.

Alex:

That's it People say yeah, so as a one last thing, what's something you recommend animators should take away from AI, like what? What should they look at AI and learn from it, if any?

Rodrigo Braga:

Well, I can say on a treaty on the perspective of 3d animator. So has a loads of tools. So chatty PT, for instance, because every 3d animator know how hard it is to learn like a language, like a Python or MyScript or anything. And this is in your power, of your hands. Just go on chattpt, ask for write a script in Python for you. If you don't want, if you don't have time to learn Python yourself, I didn't say hey, please don't need to learn Python anymore, because chattpt is going to do it for you. I didn't say that it's because you have the basis. But to write the script for you, to create tools for you, is a great opportunity. You know, experiment as well.

Rodrigo Braga:

Create your own renders of your own animation, upload your footage on a stable diffusion or the kyber tool that I mentioned here. Try to get a different style. Maybe you have fun. For now, have fun. That's the most important part. It's not, you know, not going to sell the work because it's not production ready yet, but it's a great place for you to have fun. Enjoy what you're doing. Experiment. That's what I see in the meters.

Alex:

Yeah, just experiment with it, Don't be afraid of it, experiment and have fun.

Rodrigo Braga:

That's it.

Alex:

Yeah, perfect. Well, thanks for taking the time to talk to me, rod.

Rodrigo Braga:

Oh, it's a pleasure, Alex, Anytime Well that's it.

Alex:

I want to thank our guests for contributing on our journey so far and I want to thank you, the phantom listeners, for hearing us ramble around the water pool. Come check in next time as we talk more about the subject of AI in the animation industry. Let's find out together. Don't forget, keep your eyes on the horizon. Goodbye the 40 Transmission.