Technology startup Absentia launches the inaugural module of its state-of-the-art animation tool Norah AI. Built on the vision of AI-based game design, Norah AI is able to generate interactive content ranging from animations and textures, to mobile games. The first module of the system will primarily focus on animation. Users will be able to choose from a large repository of pre-existing animations, or create entirely new ones by blending and tweaking different animations together.
Technology startup Absentia funded by Exfinity Ventures launches a revolutionary system Norah AI. Norah is a brainchild of a small but highly skilled and energetic team that started a project with a vision of an AI empowered ecosystem for interactive content creation. The outcome of their efforts is a high-end system which is able to create a wide array of interactive objects ranging from animations to entire games, all with the minimal human input. Norah AI revolutionizes the game development process by enabling quick creation and incorporation of all game elements, including 3D models and their animations, game geometry, story weaving, and texturing. With its advanced AI technology, Norah will become the end-to-end solution for animation and game development.
In the inaugural module, Absentia is unveiling Norah’s animation capabilities that promise to make animating 3D characters a piece of cake. Powered by auto-encoders and pre-trained AI, Norah generates unique real-time animations that add to the fast-growing animation repository. The AI system that combines auto-rigging, facial expression and locomotion generation with the possibility to blend and mix existing animations explores new avenues in animation and game design.
According to Vrushali Prasade, the CTO of Absentia, “Norah AI will change the way we think and go about game creation. What takes months, will soon take minutes. “Man-hours” will be replaced by “machine-seconds”. In coming months, Absentia will roll out a series of modules to add to Norah’s current capabilities, enabling it to create fully playable games with a minimal human input.
Here is a list of features for inaugural launch of Norah AI.
Auto-Rigging of 3D Models
Adding a full skeleton and skinning weights to a 3D mesh is a cumbersome process if done manually from scratch. Even in the most sophisticated tools, rigging requires a manual definition of a skeleton and placing bone markers. Norah’s AutoRig tool uses deep learning to produce a full skeleton and a wide variety of movements without any manual effort. All that user needs to do is, upload a 3D model into AutoRig tool and get the rigged model back in the fraction of seconds. Automation of the rigging process frees up time for other mission-critical tasks and guarantees flexibility which is hard to attain via manual rigging.
Animation Style Transfer
AI-powered style transfer endows 3D models with aesthetic versatility and richness unattainable in hand-made animations. Norah AI, after studying millions of animation frames, is able to combine two animation styles to produce unexpected and stunning results. A Hip-hop dance combined with Bharatanatyam, zombie walking with a flavor of swarm behavior, are just a few examples of a plethora of new opportunities far surpassing limits, a human brain could possibly imagine.