Pre - Post, Digital Art, & AI, Part 3

I will admit that at this point, based on what I just finished talking about in my last blog, I was getting a little excited about the possibilities. The idea that I could actually start creating assets that would be more than just supporting roles, but could be fully realized, animated characters with lip-sync, was so tantalizing. I needed to see how far I could take this.

I decided to take some original artwork I created, along with some early 3D art my brother David made, and see what it can do with it. The first image I took was of a group of my monsters that I had created for the FranknSon project, and I simply plugged it in to see what would happen. I wanted to see what it would do with the characters themselves with very little prompting. This is what occurred.

I was surprised by what happened. I didn't expect it to take the entire team and have a sort of walk-dance toward the camera. This was very cool, and I decided to test an original watercolor artwork I'd done a million years ago to see what would happen.

I love the stylized animation. It almost works. Now, I took an artwork by my brother, David Rivera, of a Roman army, and this is what happened next.

I kept getting surprised by how good it was. It had some things that needed to be corrected, but I just kept going. I decided to try a digital painting I created in Photoshop to see what it would do. This is the outcome.

All this was intriguing, and while less than perfect, it showed the possibilities. But I needed to know: could I actually animate a character just focusing on having it do something interesting? So, for the next test, I took my FranknSon image and tried to make it perform some interesting movements, like running in place. This was the output.

Far from perfect, but it almost worked. And now some of the animations are getting their own sound effects, like his feet as he runs in place. This was a lot of fun and also a lot of work, because you always need to regenerate when it misses the mark. which could often happen. There were many failed attempts. But this was getting intriguing, and I needed to know more. Could I actually control the animation? Could I have actual lip sync and animation together? The idea of being able to pull these basic animation elements together was going to be the next big test. We'll read more about it in the next blog. Can I animate and lip sync these characters?