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Startup company Wonder Dynamics has unveiled “an AI tool that automatically animates, lights and composes CG characters into a live-action scene”: at least, that’s the promise behind their upcoming tool, Wonder Studio.
Here is the video presentation, followed by more information:

Wonder Studio: a bold pitch

The video presentation is, let’s face it, quite impressive. Behind the scenes, Wonder Studio can be used thanks to a web interface. This tool can automatically animate a CG character by replacing an actor/actress from a plate (in other words, a live-action shot). Furthermore, the software also handles lighting and color correction. All of this, thanks to AI.

A tool to help artists, not replace them

Even better: Wonder Studio is not a black box that will give you a video, but no way to adjust something if things go wrong. Even though Wonder Dynamics wants their product to be used by a wide audience (which is why you can use it with a simple drag and drop), the idea is to give studios and artists the tools they need to expand on the work done by the AI.
In other words, Wonder Studio will give you access to the motion capture data (including hands and face), the cleaned plate, the 3D scene. You can export CG data as FBX files, and import them in Maya, Blender, Unreal, Unity or similar DCC tools. In a nutshell, the goal is to automate some of the work done by artists, who will then use this data and spend more time refining the scene if needed. According to Wonder Dynamics, this tool could “automate 80-90% of the objective VFX work and leaves them with the subjective work”. A bold claim that we will of course have to check when the tool is released.

What about the training data?

As usual when a new AI tool is released, we must ask ourselves how the AI model was trained. In this case, Wonder Dynamics explained to Techcrunch that they did not rely on pre-existing data scrapped without asking anyone involved. In other words, Wonder Dynamics wants to stay away from the ethical and legal issues faced by o