A New AI-Assisted Dawn for 3D Animation | Cascadeur

have you guys heard about cascadeur? it was a  little bit of a new experience for me I like   to be in complete control and I had to let go of  the reigns a little bit since it uses AI assisted   animation and automatic physics and secondary  motion but I am also a huge fan of efficiency   and this is meant to really speed up your workflow  and increase your efficiency so I had to check it   out for myself I'd love to hear in the comments if  anyone else has used it and what you thought about   it but in the meantime here's my experience and if  I think it genuinely will help with 3D animation   so it looks pretty cool it actually started as an  internal animation tool for Niki a games publisher   and they recently made it public you can use it  to pose your characters with the rest of the body   automatically moving into a natural position as  you do it and animate with automatic physics and   secondary motion so you should in theory be able  to do pretty complex animations really quickly I   can see this being super useful especially for  game animators with all their action sequences   and Loops if it is as cool and easy to use as it  claims and as all the other videos I've seen about   it claim one of the things I like most about it is  that the logo seems to be a simplified wireframe   cat head and anything to do with cats is a okay  by me anyway let's be serious to start off with   you need a model with a rig to animate with so I  generated a 3D model with an Armature very quickly   and for free with Ready Player Me downloaded the  fbx and imported that into cascad with zero issues   I must note that it seems to only import fbx  or colada files you can also use these default   models that it comes with so when you import your  model you'll get this popup asking if you want to   enter rig mode to rig the model so that it can  actually be used in cascader so of course I say   hell yeah for humanoid characters it's best to  use the quick rigging tool but you can rig and   anime characters that are not humanoid so let that  allay your fears in that respect so I'm going to   click okay here where it's giving me another  helpful tip to click on ADD rig elements since   my character was successfully recognized since it  used a rig that cascader recognizes the setup and   hierarchy of and you can see it's Place joints  at the correct places there is a certain degree   of editability here where you can remove or add  joints as well or change with joints are allocated   to a spot but I don't need to change anything so  I'm going to just say okay in the case where you   use a rig with cascad doesn't recognize it like  say you used a rigify rig or something you'll have   to do this manually dragging the bones or joints  across to here since it won't recognize the rig   automatically if you are trying to use a complex  custom rig like a riger fire rig which I did test   out there are a few extra steps you'll need to  take to First simplify your rig and basically   make it like a game engine rig and to do that I  used a really useful blender add-on called game   rig tools which I'll link to in the description  then you bring that rigged model as an fbx into   cascad re- rig it with the quick rigging tool  then carry on as you would animate it then when   you bring it back into blender you can retarget  the animation to your rigify rig then you can   have a control rig that you can still adjust  the animation on in blender after retargeting   I found a video from a Creator named Aaron neth  who actually has a lot of really useful content   about cascader and getting it to work for you  particularly with blender and he has a tutorial   on using a rigify rig he manually simplified the  rig and blender first so he didn't use the game   rig tools add-on like I did when I was trying  it out but the rest of the process is the same   so check that out if you want I'll link to that  video in my description so anyway with this basic   rig I now have it in here and check the shit out  I can move it around it's rigged and when I pose   her you can see with AI assistance it moves the  rest of the body and tries to predict a realistic   pose if I move her arm back it swivels the rest of  the body the upper body more than the hips because   that's how body mechanics naturally work if I  undo this and I'll lift her leg her Center of   mass shifts to the other leg and her arms go up as  they would in real life to maintain her balance so   this all looks pretty dope you know this should  make the life of a 3D animator much easier when   I did this little test where she jump from one  leg to the other it was cool and after adding the   physics and secondary motion it was even better  it's really nice not to have to worry about that   and have it automatically done for you and you can  tweak the severity of the effects really easily I   ended up having a pretty nice little animation  loop with not very much effort at all obviously   I could have spent a little more time tweaking  things but I was impatient to try out some other   things and see how it did with something a little  more complex so I did what most animators hate the   walk cycle maybe it's just me but walk Cycles not  my fave so you'll see here while this is assisted   animation where the body responds to what you're  doing with the rest of it and it tries to predict   what you're trying to do with the pose you still  need to lay down the key poses yourself you still   need to have some knowledge of how to animate  and it doesn't do the timing for you either so   key poses timing spacing that's still up to you  if you're somebody who does not have the foggiest   idea how to animate this app is not a magical  Panacea that's going to do it for you but I   like that cuz if it did well I'd be out of a job  so I'm glad I still have my uses and it's really   cool that this just gives us some help along the  way but it's still up to you to give it a base to   work off of and adjust what's looking whack once I  applied the physics to the walk cycle you can see   it still needed adjusting but after a few tweaks I  got a possible walk cycle in quite a short amount   of time obviously I could have spent more time  perfecting it there are still some issues and   I had some struggles particularly with the arms  and the automatic adjustments that the rig wanted   to make when I did stuff to the arms but for the  amount of time I spent on this it's pretty okay   I tried some other stuff with my own model that  I quickly rigged with mixo I'm not actually done   with making this model yet but I just wanted to  try it out with my own character obviously it's   not perfect there were some issues particularly  with the arms again but there are a lot of Handy   tools here that you can use to tweak and finess  like seeing the trajectories and being able to   edit them and there's a tween machine which if  you've ever used tween machine in mea you'll know   how helpful that can be there's even video moap  where you can import a reference video and it'll   take the poses from that and apply the poses from  that reference to your model this is a new feature   that they only recently added I think in like  may but when I tried it out it wasn't too bad and   obviously it depends on the quality of the refence  video and how clear the poses are and stuff you   can still adjust it after it's done processing I  have to say cascader is awesome but it does have   a bit of a learning curve to understand how things  work and some things are a little frustrating when   you're new to it at first it'll take you quite  a while to animate things as you get the hang of   how everything works and at times it kind of feels  like you're fighting against what the AI is trying   when you're trying to do something really specific  but I'm sure these issues also get less the more   used to the program you get because obviously  while I've animated some stuff in here I'm by   no means a pro or super experienced with the yid  so those are just my observations as someone who's   quite new to the program it would be awesome if it  supported facial Rigs and fortunately it doesn't   yet but that does seem to be in the pipeline and  I also hope that at some point they'll make it   easier to use with other types of rigs as well  as to support audio cuz sometimes you got to   animate audio right Apparently that is something  they're working on for the next version otherwise   it's a really great piece of software and it  genuinely does help to speed up workflow and   make some parts of animating a bit easier it's  like having your own little Junior assistant   doing your interpolation and inets for you it's  got most of the things you'd need to be able to   create nice animations you can import reference  videos there are ghosting tools different types   of interpolation you can change between FK and ik  while you're animating there's this cool thingy   that shows you the center of mass which is also  really helpful and that's just scratching the   surface there is so much more to this program  than I would be able to cover in just this video   get the video a like if you found it useful and  informative subscribe if you want to keep up to   date with my other videos and let me know in the  comments if this is something that you think you   could use in your pipeline or if it's something  you've used before and what you thought about it   thank you so much to my patrons for your support  and the chats I really appreciate you guys okay bye

Channel: RobynO

Views: 8,708

Keywords: ai animation, ai tools, cascadeur, game animation, 3d animation tools, ai animation software, 3d ai animation, use ai for animation, automatic 3d animation, 3d animation software, ai assisted animation, physics based animation, improve animation efficiency, become a 3d animator, blender ai animation, easy 3d animation, use ai to animate, artificial intelligence, automatic animation, ai animation generator, ai animation video, ai animate 3d, 3d animation software free

Id: pdEOGt_i4ck

Length: 7min 14sec (434 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 05 2023