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Save Point V8 demo

Nate North

Nate North


CLICK THE COG BUTTON AND SELECT 1080p

This is a demo of the version 8.0 (or 80% complete) of the save point production pipeline. Upgrades can be seen sporadically throughout the reel and include:

Nuanced facial expressions
Hair blowing and wind
Color matching
New lip sync engine
Consistent characters
Automated foliage sway
Automated character blinking
Hybrid human/AI soundtrack music
climbing
etc.

Notes-

While only about 80 per cent complete at this point I feel like the pipeline is capable of producing saleable works.

Not all improvements are present in all scenes. A few shots here and there actually use the save .8 .1 and 8.2 pipelines.

The opening minute or two is the opening of the film death March in its current alpha state.

By the time the film reaches completion we are expected to have the technology ready to translate voice and lip sync, Allowing the film to be viewed in the top eight languages, with characters speaking the language on screen with matching mouth movements. That may or may not happen but it's looking fairly likely that it will.

Directing actors during line Delivery is finally working correctly, But has only been functional in the system for around a week so examples are limited within the reel.

The bottom line is that the system is essentially production ready. There is significant room for improvement and that will certainly happen as time passes, But as of last week It's possible to create an animated film on par with many existing professional release products.

The one issue slowing things down right now is maintaining even stylization across all scenes. It's not bad, and works most of the time but currently requires a lot of extra cutting specifically because of the delicate balance we're striking between Western Animation style and realism.
 
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Thanks everyone! I'm actually pretty happy with how this looks now. That having been said, I've made 2 significant upgrades in the last week. When I get a chance, I'll post a comparison clip here showing the change.

I think I've got all the technical stuff under control at this point, and my focus now is on developing believable acting performances. I feel like it's very very close now to where a few scenes actually hit the mark for the first time. In example, the "Nobody ever dies on their first mission" or "Sarge says we've only got 10 clicks to go" clips, feel to me like a par acting performances.

For me, this reel was the one where I felt like the characters began to feel alive, less like puppets and more like animated film characters.
 

There's forking versions now and have been for awhile, This short video was done as a test of one of the 8.1 forks. I'm in the middle of testing the 8.2 version right now, But I thought I would throw this up here just in case anyone was interested. This is just a small art piece "Clothworld III".
 
Thanks!

The difference you're seeing is in the mentality I'm approaching it with. Most see it as a toy but I see it as a tool. To be fair most of the implementations of AI available to the public are essentially toys, so I understand why people think of it that way.

Consider a musician that plugs a guitar into an amplifier and plays live vs wedding dj that plugs an MP3 player into an amplifier. In one case the person makes the music and the device amplifies it, In the other case the device makes the music. Same device, different method.

To me AI is only leverage and not at all a replacement for creativity. It lets me spend more of my time on the creative aspects, and less on expensive or repetitive tasks. In example, I wouldn't say there's a ton of artistic genius involved in deciding that ocean waves should lap up on the shore, literally any person in the world would automatically make that decision, so there's really no artistic talent involved in deciding that water should move on screen. And yet through manual methods it would consume potentially months of my time to animate a single scene by hand drawing each frame of a wave crashing onto a shoreline. That time can now be spent on legitimately creative tasks such as plot, pacing, and world building.
 

Here's what I think will be the final visual upgrade for awhile. I've just run the two main graphics cards in series allowing the pipeline to fill in about twice as much coherent small detail. When I get a minute I'll publish some before and after frames. I'm not sure if people can easily tell if this is a big upgrade, But if you look at before and after pictures closely, It's a big upgrade.

This 8.2 version essentially marks the completion of the original design spec from years ago. I have since moved the goal post quite a bit and there's a bunch of things that I want to accomplish with it in the future, Such as automating foley, Automating recreation of old films, etc, but at this point I have completed and delivered the original pipeline as promised.

So in short this video marks the completion of the original save point pipeline project.

I'm going to make this scifi movie Death March, Probably rebuild the Cat Labyrinth in record speed with the finished technology, Then begin building out the actual Save point game.
 
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I'm going to use that hackneyed phrase about the journey almost being more important than the destination, but it seems to me that your journey with this project has been one of great leaps which paradoxically moved forward at a slow pace. It's amazing to me how far you've come with this pipeline and these techniques.
[Edit] Sorry if that sounds kind of flaky, lol.
 
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Rusty Bolt said:
I'm going to use that hackneyed phrase about the journey almost being more important than the destination, but it seems to me that your journey with this project has been one of great leaps which paradoxically moved forward at a slow pace. It's amazing to me how far you've come with this pipeline and these techniques.
[Edit] Sorry if that sounds kind of flaky, lol.
Click to expand...
It felt like an eternity along the way, But it's been a genuinely interesting journey and more fun than most. The tech was moving so fast during the development. That there has always been some intriguing new possibility around the corner every step of the way so it's really kept me going especially the last couple of years. I think this would have been much harder to finish if I didn't have some new development to get excited about all over again every few months.

I feel pretty good about where things are at now mainly because the real journey is just beginning, since my destination these last three or four years was actually just the starting line of the race. Now it's finally time to do the thing I'm most excited about, make some new films and games!
 
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