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Maaaan I had absolutely no clue you were creating a movie! I would have definitely donated. This AI in-between looks suuuuper useful, thanks for bringing it to light! I've been working on my own 60 minute animation for nearly 5 years now. This is gonna be a game changer

Grateful! Thank you!

This is actually kind of awesome especially since it’s only helping you with the in-betweens. Though the result almost comes off like cell-shaded animation because the sense of 3D and volume is almost too perfect. Still though, opens up possibilities. Keep going!!

This is the kind of shit I was hoping for!!! This method will save money. It’s not perfect but skill is needed

This is the best example of integrating AI into animation I've seen. Literally game changing.

Is Cal modeled after Pete cause the first couple seconds instantly gave me a Cal vibe

Hey, good news! Since the posting of the posting of the posting of the video, Runway now allows 4k output. It's getting expensive :/

I just saw the original undergrads show for the first time tonight, and I love it! I was on TikTok engaging with the fanbase, and they refereed me to this channel! I can’t wait to see the movie very soon, this show deserved another season and I am glad to see you giving it the continuation it deserved! One suggestion I’d love to make it to make a Patreon. You could give early access to update videos, exclusive behind the scenes sneak peaks, and more in-depth video tutorials, along with merch to make the subscription worth while. That way the project could also gain income/possibly be able to hire people to take the load and stress off. Just a suggestion :) excited for the future!

51, and I finally got myself in a mental space to TRY and bring the cartoon characters that's been in my head since I was a teenager. I had them since a kid, but my life was a constant struggle from dealing with my narcissistic, angry, alcohol, etc dad. To later in life, becoming an alcoholic myself (to hell and back) so on and so on. Anddddd for the past 5 years figuring out life with sober eyes.... I tend to babble 😂. But I thought about taking my childhood fun (characters) and animating my life through them. Plus, put it online to see how many laughs I can create 😂.

1st time to your channel Back in the 80s, it took a team and 6 months to create a 30-minute Saturday morning cartoon. So, I can only imagine what's involved doing this on the side by yourself. Wheeww

Appreciate the dedication to this project, and thanks for taking the time to provide an update. Hopefully this AI tool works better than whatever they used to "remaster" Interstella 5555! Also getting wintergarten/marble machine vibes from this project.

As someone who is STRONGLY OPPOSED to A.I. tech this feels like a natural evolution to Tweening which I use for my own animation pipeline... That's a lot coming from me and I'm glad I took the time to see the method in which you made use of this. Hopefully in time this tweening method can become implemented in animation software but not become a standard / crutch for wanna be artists that have no love for the powerful medium(s) that is art and animation.

Bro I can not fucking believe that you are so dedicatedly plugging away at this. I don't follow these types of projects due to almost certain disappointment. But you're STILL GOING AND I WILL FOLLOW IT UNTIL THE END. And if you make this movie... you'll have done so much of the hardwork necessary to just...make another season? I'm here for whatever you do

Not trying to comment on your level/comprehension of animation here, but once one really learns about animation, they realize that the in-betweens are actually an extremely important part of what gives a shot it's specific and particular feel, rather than just a means of getting from point A to point B in the most economical way. Frame-By-frame through any old Looney Tunes short, for example. The magic is in the in-betweens!!! That said, I'm impressed by this technology, but I hope it doesn't dissuade people from learning how to draw, animate and bring that magic to life.

Holy shit you are so right about this being very useful for background characters.

I would suggest investigating Comfyui with a image 2 video pipeline instead of runway. You will be able to make a tool that is more specific to your uses, like being able to choose an exact number of frames etc. It is more complex and will be a bitch to work with at first, but once you learn it you will have way more control.

I’d rather have AI inbetweens than the industry standard of Asian slave labor inbetweens.

Comments section is full of a bunch of whining toddlers who activate their 50 iq sleeper agents when they hear the word AI. Beware.

WOW I used to love this show when it was on!! I didn't even know a movie was a thing! I thought that show was lost to the ages! Looking at some of your videos and how your using 3d animation to make suedo frame drawn animation makes me realize that since you have so many models and the ability to make them you could EASILY make PC-VR or even an Oculus Quest game much like how the Rick and Morty guys made Trover saves the universe. Believe me as a game developer myself, I know how it could easily be done and what potential you have there! You could make Undergrads : The Game. Just some food for thought on when you get this movie finished.

2D animators finally getting something that 3D animators have had for decades :p

This is pretty cool. Some of what you're doing here, we're also doing with Love is a Championship. Instead of attaching mixamo to a rigged model directly in C4D, I'd recommend looking at Reallusion AccuRig and iClone as a go-between. That's what we're doing. We're ending in C4D as well, but iClone can handle mixamo in a way that's much easier to edit, and you can mix and match with other motion capture sources as well as adding in facial capture as well. There's just a lot of options between fully custom animation and off-the-shelf animation that you can't really do as easily directly in C4D. We're showing some of this on our youTube channel. Here's a preview of what I'm talking about: th-cam.com/video/_4XzgkHjsEI/w-d-xo.html

there is a lot of software out there already does tweening.. like Harmoney and Moho

Also, I’ve never met a tweener that didn’t dreamed about becoming an animator, they’re mostly trainees, juniors or aspiring animators anyway !

Love your videos and your content. Long time fan of Undergrads.

It's amazing and scary tho 😬

fascinating

Wow -- I've had ZERO luck getting Runway to generate a successful 2d animation from one image to the next.

There are other AI that will color your animation from a single frame reference. I can't remember what it's called but I know it's open-source.

😮

With AI in-betweening it looks too much like Flash/3D animation. Do you consider using lower framerates?

yeah, thats a good way to use AI

lol oh” Mr. DNA, where did you come from?” Lol

Assuming this AI tool really does work as intended -- or you're able to go back in and clean things up/fix fine details without it being too much extra work -- I think this is really promising and provides a real use case for AI in animation that is actually promising. As soon as Pete mentioned generative AI I got super nervous, but after he showed how he was using it and explained his thinking around how he wanted to implement it, I felt relieved. Ideally there is no place for AI tools when creating any kind of art, in my personal opinion, but for situations like this where the amount of work that needs to be done in order to produce something is prohibitively tedious, simply too much for one person, or both, then I think there's a good argument to be made for leveraging AI as a tool -- the key word here being "tool." If using an AI tool like this to minimize the tedious parts of production helps enable smaller or individual creators to get their work out there, without compromising on the quality of the animation, then I think it's a net good. If AI is gonna be used for anything, it should be for helping creators focus on creating, not doing the creating for them. The big networks and studios that are currently trying to find ways to use AI to do everything from writing to animation end-to-end are being incredibly dumb and greedy. I really hope this helps Pete succeed, mainly because I'd love to see this movie finally realized. But if it also helps provide a reasonable use case for AI in animation that helps people keep their jobs and end this ridiculous attempt by studios to use it in everything, that'd also be pretty cool.

5 years ago just before this whole AI thing blew up my studio started AI inbetweening with DAIN, which is the exact same core model that all of these paid tools use to interpolate frames, and oddly enough this was the exact week that we finally realized it was a complete and total dead end. I spent a lot of time refining batch scripts to get it dialed in and usually it works well enough but on some animations it just generates too many artifacts to be useful. The problem with our animations that lead us to aim for 24fps all the time was stiffness, and artificially inflating the frame rate only indirectly solved the issue. In every single instance a lower framerate with a better use of smear frames and timing was the same amount of workload or less for the artist and yielded a way better result. Looking at your animations in this video I see the exact same issue that we had when we started using 3d and mocap as reference images, every frame reads as a good individual picture with realistic anatomy and timing, you're underutilizing squash and stretch and other fundamental 2d animation specific techniques. I suggest saving yourself a lot of time, and apparently money too if you're using one of these paid platforms and not the direct models themselves which are free btw, and just spend some time refreshing yourself on the basic principles of 2d animation. Planning the timing of your keyframes better and using exaggerated and unrealistic frames to get more fluid motion when animating on twos or threes is what you should be aiming for. That said the AI interpolation can still be useful outside of character animation, specifically for things like animating fluids depending on the look you're going for, otherwise it'll hamstring your char animations in the same way that mocap can. I suggest looking up an old GDC video here on TH-cam from the lead animator of the game Skullgirls called Making Fluid and Powerful Animations, she has a great talk about animation in general that illustrates the kinds of 2d specific techniques that can be lost when using these kinds of tools. Our next project won't use AI inbetweens at all, but if like us you live in the real world and need to keep your current animation pipeline for consistency you should at least look into DainApp 1.0 which is a front end for DAIN that used to cost money on Itch but was released into the public domain and is now free on GitHub. There's also an app on Itch called FlowFrames that's also free and uses both of the major interpolation models (DAIN and RIFE). Both have front ends that will give you better control over the same exact model that you're paying to use now. DainApp in particular lets you set a depth awareness mode to cartoon/anime and will work better for 2d stuff. Also you can toggle between loops and linear animations. RIFE lets you interpolate line art with alpha channels though. Either way don't pay for these cloud based tools. I wish you knew how this whole grift works, these pay sites are just a lazy front end with less functionality and a monthly fee slapped on top of public domain AI model that some researchers published years ago. Just cut out the middle man and run the actual models on your own computer, you'll save money and get a better result.

Love you are using AI the way I was wondering if it would help for in betweens. Looks mostly successful. This is how I see animators taking advantage of this tool.

Is there any way to animate lip sync “on top of animations”? I use MOHO and after effects etc

Oh and Tooncrafter A.I. can do the inbetween frames ws kind of designed for this kind of thing I think and is free unlike runway th-cam.com/video/E89R5_hQ5bQ/w-d-xo.htmlsi=Kek22d3Td_W9LLmL

You can use a.i. to colourise the animation too as well here is one that will do it buy I think there's an even newer model too th-cam.com/video/D7Qor0rYbLA/w-d-xo.htmlsi=qRRCcaPQvLp598sl

Stellar.

Why not just use Grease Pencil in Blender to do this? The interpolation function does this exactly but doesn't add funny movements. And you get to control the outcome . Not type in prompts and hope you get what you want. just to have to clean up frames anyway.

I wish there was an AI to specifically help artists and cartoon animations. I have tried so many that are promising but fail to give me the results or control I need. You waste a lot of time and credits for stuff that varies between sorta works and nightmare fuel. I love the hand drawn look of animation, but I have a life and a job. I want to create what's in my head at the quality I want.

Try LumaLabs for creating inbetweens - it's better at keeping color consistancy

My experience of Runway was this. I paid, I did some generations and then my credits were at zero with absolutely nothing generated that could be used. Im sure it will be great for some and one day an essential tool. For me, it was absolute shite..

While I think using AI is pretty unethical by nature of where all the data came from, I need to ask if you've heard of Cadmium for filling in the color. It claims to be AI but it's not the same kind of unethical generative images as something like runway. Since you seem to already be using something to get the line art frames tweened, Cadmium could help with the coloring

How did you motion cap your face?

Your art style reminds me so much of old Nickelodeon animations. When this is eventually done, upload it in 4:3 and intentionally degrade the footage just a bit.

Rip inbetweeners. I hope in the industry honors human work.

AI is a TOOL - end of story to all you purists out there.

Insane that A.I. video tech is only a bit less than a year old. (As of writing.) Very excited to see where this tech goes with another year or two of development

way to be resourceful undergrads guy!