Imagine being able to animate a 3D character from scratch without the laborious and expensive processes usually required. This is the vision of Cartwheel, a startup using AI to generate basic animations based on a simple description, freeing creators to focus on more expressive tasks. Co-founder and CEO, Jonathan Jarvis, himself an animator, explains, “There hasn’t been a lot of new stuff in animation since I started doing it. There’s a big ‘blank screen’ problem, where there’s a million buttons and options. Sometimes you’ll spend hours working on something before you even see what it looks like.”
“There hasn’t been a lot of new stuff in animation since I started doing it.” – Jonathan Jarvis
Cartwheel aims to solve this problem by skipping the initial step and using AI to generate basic movements quickly. This allows animators to spend less time on elementary motions like walking, swatting, or sitting, and more time on the creative aspects of their work.
The interface is deliberately simple, with just a character and a text box. You can write any description of a motion and within minutes, a basic animation will be generated. This can then be exported to any 3D editing suite for further tweaking.
To see how this works in action, you can check out live 3D examples on their site, such as a boxing match or a character doing a solo waltz.
Co-founder Andrew Carr, who also serves as Chief Scientist, explains that their model is completely original, with ethically sourced data and their own labelers. “Motion is represented as a matrix – this is well known in the literature – a matrix with poses, time, velocity, and so on. So you associate the motion matrix with a text description of the motion, and do pretty standard training on motion-language pairs, the same way you’d generate images or video.”
Image Credits: Cartwheel
On average, the animations produced are about 80% complete, according to Carr. Jarvis adds that while the results can be impressive and professional-level, they do sometimes miss the mark. However, the process is still much faster and simpler than traditional animation methods, especially when working in team environments where changes need to be passed back and forth.
The models used by Cartwheel are not only time-efficient, but also cheaper to run and could potentially be locally hosted. Carr mentions, “For a video model, you’re predicting 2000×2000 pixels, every frame for 60 frames per second…that’s just such a massive thing it has to wrangle. What we’re predicting is an order of magnitude or more smaller – it can run on the CPU, or older GPUs, and we can train models faster.”
“We’re predicting an order of magnitude or more smaller – it can run on the CPU, or older GPUs, and we can train models faster.” – Andrew Carr
Though the focus is currently on human animations, the team is also working on incorporating non-human characters in the future. They hope to eventually be able to render new or modified animations on the fly, which would be a game-changer for interactive media like video games.
While some may speculate on the potential for a buyout, similar to the recent acquisition of Wonder Dynamics by Autodesk, the team is currently focused on building their platform-agnostic tool and expanding their suite of services for professional animators.
Regardless, Cartwheel has already secured its first round of funding, a $5.6 million seed led by Accel, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Human Ventures, Heretic VC, MVP Ventures, Correlation Ventures, and Pelion VC, as well as a handful of angels.
If you’re interested, you can sign up for the beta and test Cartwheel’s capabilities for yourself.
“This leads to more animation, more motion, one person doing more… that’s where a lot of the creative work really gets done.” – Jonathan Jarvis
Jarvis believes that rather than replacing creative work, AI has the potential to enhance and expedite the animation process, leading to even more impressive and imaginative creations. So between the Pixar-level animation and the simpler, more accessible animations on our phones, Cartwheel is carving out a space for the creative work that happens in between.
Image Credits: Cartwheel
