Omni Animation - AI Generated High Fidelity Animations

We're excited to announce our latest development – a cutting-edge AI generation technique capable of producing high fidelity 3D humanoid animations. Omni animation uses advanced algorithms and deep learning to generate animations with realistic movement, detail, and depth.

Interested in learning more about our new service? Sign up at OmniAnimation.ai to receive updates, get exclusive discounts, and to be the first to know when we launch and change the way animations are created in games, film, and architectural visualization.

 

We launched the OmniAnimation.ai last week without much description and by now I'm sure you're wondering what exactly is Omni Animation.

Omni Animation is a deep learning network capable of producing high fidelity animations. It is designed to speed up your animation workflow and as a result, save you a bunch of time in creating new animations. Omni Animation is perfect for personalized hero characters, NPCs, crowds, and motion matching.

Omni Animation does all of this by using an deep learning autoregressive model. This model produces an output based on the previous state. That output is then fed in as input to the next time step. When this process is repeated it produces a set of frames over a period of time, resulting in the generated animation. One of the things that has taken a very long time to research is how to do this without having any artifacts. The animations produced will be production quality animations without any necessary cleanup.

We understand that you may have some questions about how our service works. We have a series of articles lined up to guide you through the features of Omni Animation. Among other topics you'll learn about:

• Our process of converting raw mocap animations to generated animations.
• The bulk downloads feature designed for NPCs and motion matching.
• The IK features that allow for fine-grain adjustments.
• How styles can completely change the look of your animation.

At launch, we will have both AI generated and non-AI generated animations for you to choose from. We will be regularly releasing new animations as we continue to grow.

 

One of our original goals of Omni Animation has been to produce high fidelity animations that can be used in your project without any cleanup. We started developing Omni Animation in late 2020 and progress throughout this time has not been linear. There are some weeks when work is being done but the results are not tangible. There are other weeks when it seems like we are moving at light speed.

We thought it would be interesting to show an example of the type of results that we see throughout development. Taking a look at the walk cycle, some of our very first AI generated walk animations came out looking like this…

We’d inadvertently developed a spider animation! After some more research the animation started to resemble an actual walking animation:

Later the walking animation became much smoother, albeit had some foot sliding issues:

This sliding was fixed with a post processing technique that ensures the character moves the correct distance based on the feet movement. The end result is a walking animation that you can use without any cleanup:

It’s neat to think that the entire animation was generated using AI. It’s also fun to look back and see the first crazy results.

We should have some more news soon on the features and animations that Omni Animation will have when we first release the beta. The website is getting close to being done and the machine learning developers are continuously improving the deep learning model.

 

Fantastic results! Is the AI able to generate animations at runtime or only in the editor?

 

Thanks!

Right now it's completely outside of Unity. The workflow is similar to other animation websites where you download the animation file (we'll support fbx and bvh initially) and then import into the program that you want to use it in. This means that it can work with Unity, Unreal, Godot, etc.

In Unity I did a proof of concept which allows users to define their animations based on a set of parameters and then import those generated animations using the addressables system at runtime. We won't have the API fleshed out for this when we first release but I can definitely see adding it later this year.

Runtime animation generation would also be very cool, but that's a completely different scope and we will want to get everything working well on the server first

 

wow that's fantastic! You guys should advertise it more! I can't wait to use it! When do you guys plan to release?

 

Cheers! We will be releasing the beta this summer - we have a booth at devcom so definitely need to be out by then If you haven't signed up for the newsletter make sure you do so as those who are signed up will be the first to have access to it.

I am working on the marketing material for the next couple of months but as we get closer to release there will be more and more about it. We're getting close!

 

The goal for Omni Animation from the very start has been to generate high fidelity animations. We want to generate animations that do not require any cleanup and can be generated quickly without many iterations in order to get it just right.

After a lot of thought we decided that a series of sliders and drop downs is the best approach in order to achieve these goals. These parameters allow for complete control over the generated result so you are not guessing what value should be used in order to generate a good result.

Lets take a look at an example. Below is a screenshot of the website with the run animation.



In this image you can see the generated animation in the scene view and the available parameters on the right pane. By default the character is a male character that runs at a decent speed with a normal step size. For our example lets say that we now have a character that is female who has a smaller step size and slightly less velocity with her run so it's more of a jog. Using the parameter pane we can make these adjustments and generate a new animation:

As you can see with these parameters you are guaranteed to get good results no matter what combination of values you use. Lets take this one step further and change the style of the animation. The default animation uses the Generic style but we want the animation to more reflect a zombie style. With the change of the drop down we can easily generate that.

The rest of the parameters are still used so in this situation we have a female jogging zombie with a small step size.

One advantage of the parameter approach is that it makes for a really intuitive API. We have a prototype of a Unity SDK where we can load in new animations at runtime. This opens up a lot of use cases and we'll show more in the next newsletter.