Autodesk expands AI features in Maya and Flame

Autodesk has unveiled a series of creatively-focused AI updates to Maya and Flame that “accelerate and augment artist workflows”.

The new features follow Autodesk’s recent acquisition of Wonder Dynamics, makers of Wonder Studio, which combines AI with established tools to help artists more easily animate, light, and compose 3D characters within live-action scenes.

The updates have added an ML Deformer to Maya, which enables artists to work with complex characters for animation, VFX, and games projects. The tool processes complex deformation systems and represents them with a fast, machine-learned approximation.

So, if you have a character with a complex deformation system that runs slowly, Maya can be trained to represent that deformation system using ML Deformer.

Artists can then use this fast representation to work more interactively and switch back to the original for the final polish or render.

Meanwhile, Flame has a new AI tool called ML Timewarp. This is a new mode that generates an intermediate frame between two frames in a shot for retiming of clips. Users get high-quality renders from an integrated tool that maximises their workstation’s hardware.

Autodesk says this eliminates “costly file transfer workflows” across multiple tools.

For the most demanding workloads, this new mode can also be queued to render with remote systems via Autodesk Burn.

Eric Bourque, VP content creation, media and entertainment at Autodesk, said: “Artist’s time is the most valuable resource for our customers. Being able to bring them AI tools to augment their creative process unlocks a host of new possibilities. They can spend more time iterating on their creative ideas, and less time on repetitive tasks.”