SayMotion: A Game-Changer in 3D Animation Production Pipelines

Creating 3D animation has traditionally been a complex and time-consuming process, dominated by techniques like keyframing, motion capture, and the use of stock libraries. As innovative technologies advance and evolve this part of production pipelines has continued to become more efficient and accessible.

SayMotion provides a new option for 3D animation creation. This new generative text-to-motion platform allows creators to direct digital characters with words, resulting in 3D animation files for quick download and easy integrations into their creative platforms. Having just launched into Open Beta, the team at DeepMotion wanted to see just how this new tool could impact animation pipelines. 

The Challenge

Recently, a talented member of the DeepMotion’s Content Partner Program embarked on an ambitious project: to craft a 1-2 minute cinematic in 1 week using only animations from SayMotion.

The creator set out to produce a complete short film as a single person production pipeline, covering all aspects of production—scriptwriting, character design, rendering, sound design and… animation. Traditionally, this is a monumental task that could stretch over several weeks to months.. However, by leveraging SayMotion's text-to-motion, the entire process took just one week.

SayMotion Assassin Cinematic

The SayMotion Advantage

1. Time and Resource Savings: The key advantage of using SayMotion was the dramatic reduction in time and resources needed. 

• Keyframing: The traditional method of creating frame-by-frame animations is time consuming and not accessible by the everyday creator, as explained by the creator - “It would have taken weeks if not months if I had to keyframe all the animation.”
• Motion Capture requires expensive equipment, significant space, actors to do the motions you need (particularly difficult if you need specialized motions), not to mention the subsequent cleanup. The creator compared SayMotion to Motion Capture - “Motion Capture gives amazing results, but requires an expensive suit and space to perform, then still requires additional cleanup. SayMotion is much faster and more affordable.”

2. Overcoming Stock Limitations: While stock libraries offer an array of options, they often come with high costs and still lack specific, niche animations needed for a project. SayMotion's extensive and versatile Gen-AI animation model filled this gap, offering animations that are typically hard to find or absent in conventional libraries - “Stock libraries are great, but they can get expensive quickly to purchase everything you need. Then still you might struggle to find very specific animations you need, that they might not have.”

Key Features and Benefits

• Accessibility and Affordability: The accessibility and affordability of SayMotion stood out, enabling rapid iterations and experiments without the financial burden often associated with high-quality animations.

• Speed of Iteration: The ability to quickly adjust and refine animations allowed for a dynamic creative process, which is often stifled in traditional settings due to time constraints and the cumbersome nature of manual adjustments.

SayMotion Assassin Cinematic - Behind the Scenes

Room for Improvement

Despite the overwhelming advantages, there were areas the creator hoped to see enhancements:

• Prompt Engineering Challenge: Understanding the correct way to phrase prompts was a key challenge to producing better animations. Elevation changes required knowing the correct Foot Locking settings and how to instruct the character so they started in the air. 
• Clipping and Smoothing: There were some issues with clipping and overall a need for a way to produce smoother transitions between generated animation segments.

SayMotion is currently in a Beta and has a lot of upcoming improvements and changes including expanding the already expansive motion model, adding more robust AI tools for merging animations together for smoother storytelling and much more!

The Verdict

SayMotion empowers creators to produce high-quality content swiftly and affordably, breaking down the barriers that traditionally hinder independent and small-scale creators. As technologies like SayMotion continue to evolve, the potential for creative innovation expands, promising a future where the only limit is one's imagination.