The state of AI for hand-drawn animation inbetweening
There are many potential ways to use AI1 (and computers in general) for 2D animation. I’m currently interested in a seemingly conservative goal: to improve the productivity of a traditional hand-drawn full animation workflow by AI assuming responsibilities similar to those of a human assistant.
As a “sub-goal” of that larger goal, we’ll take a look at two recently published papers on animation “inbetweening” – the automatic generation of intermediate frames between given keyframes. AFAIK these papers represent the current state of the art. We’ll see how these papers and a commercial frame interpolation tool perform on some test sequences. We’ll then briefly discuss the future of the broad family of techniques in these papers versus some substantially different emerging approaches.
There’s a lot of other relevant research to look into, which I’m trying to do - this is just the start. I should say that I’m not “an AI guy” - or rather I am if you’re building an inference chip, but not if you’re training a neural net. I’m interested in this as a programmer who could incorporate the latest tech into an animation program, and as an animator who could use that program. But I’m no expert on this, and so I’ll be very happy to get feedback/suggestions through email or comments.
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