Artificial intelligence has many more uses than creating images or chatting with a chatbot. The proof of this is the use of Pixar to address one of the film’s major shortcomings. elementary. The animation studio confirmed that used AI bring to life the hair of one of the main characters, which is literally a blazing fire, because each character is made from a different material.
It’s weird to think that Pixar used AI to create something as simple as fire. In fact, this is an element that we have seen in a lot of films made by the aforementioned animation studio. However, Pixar ran into a slightly different problem here, as noted in Wired: The blazing fire is present throughout most of the film. Well, we repeat, the hair of one of the main characters is made of the same material. AND So far, Pixar has simply handled fire differently; not in character.
Research in particular had trouble adapting fire to facial expressions the main character and they had to avoid, except that Ember – that’s the name of the character – looked like a ghost or something like that. “It can look intimidating if it’s too realistic, like you actually have a human figure made out of real pyrotechnics,” says Paul Buzzard, Pixar’s technical lead. Also, just in case they fix this problem, Pixar had to do what they call FX transfer on every frame that Amber appeared in, a process that is costly and requires a lot more work than AI.
Pixar used artificial intelligence to animate fiery hair
As a solution, Buzzard put into practice what he had learned since 2005, when he was involved in the animation of several films and tried to improve some elements of the image. He realized that many improvements could be made using machine learning methods. After doing research, Buzzard decided to use neural style transfer (NST)an artificial intelligence-based method that allows you to create motion in 3D pixels.
Buzzard hired a Pixar designer to make draw the shape of the flame that should have been on the character’s head. Subsequently, this drawing went through the AI, which generated the movement. The Pixar team just needed to tweak a few details. “Once you apply style transfer to natural fire, you can then start guiding that style and start putting an artist’s stamp on something you can’t otherwise touch,” says Jeremy Talbot, Studio Co-Head of Characters.
Pixar, yes, sometimes had problems using NST on Amber’s hair. AI required a lot of GPUs, and Pixar, to animate any character associated with fire, even if it was a minor one. “We ended up with a 20x improvement in speed from start to finish, taking advantage of the GPUs that everyone at Pixar has on PCs,” says Buzzard. The team also figured out how to virtualize the GPU to use it at night to reduce rendering times.
Source: Hiper Textual
