SayMotion 2.0 turns stories into sequences of animations
AI motion-capture firm DeepMotion has rolled out SayMotion 2.0, the latest version of its browser-based text-to-animation generative AI service.
The platform generates full-body animations in FBX, GLB and BVH format, for use in games, AR, VR, animation or motion graphics projects.
As well as individual text prompts, the new Prompt Craft system in SayMotion 2.0 makes it possible to turn entire ‘stories’ into matching sequences of animations.
Generate detailed animations of human characters by chaining up text promts
Released earlier this year in open beta, SayMotion is a generative AI system that creates animation clips matching a user’s text descriptions.
The result can be refined an ‘inpainting’ system, which lets users extend, modify or blend animations with additional text prompts.
It works with characters from stock model sites like Mixamo, Sketchfab and TurboSquid, and the animated character can then be exported in FBX, GLB or BVH formats, for use in DCC apps like Blender or Maya and game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine.
SayMotion 2.0: generate series of animations matching entire stories
SayMotion 2.0 introduces a new Prompt Enhancer system, which translates a user’s text prompt into one more likely to get the desired results from the AI model.
A new Prompt Craft system does a similar thing for longer passages of text, creating an ordered series of prompts from ‘stories’ up to 512 words in length.
The prompts can then be used to generate a continuous series of animations matching what the character is doing in the original, unstructured source text.
You can see the workflow at the start of the video at the top of the story, and compare its output to the original text towards the end of the video.
New options for merging and editing animations
The update also introduces a new Generative Merge feature for merging two animation clips together, with the option to use a text prompt to guide the transiton.
In addition, the inpainting system, which could previously only be used on clips up to 10 seconds in length, has been expanded to support longer clips.
Although the blog post announcing SayMotion 2.0 describes it as still being in open beta, DeepMotion has now introduced commercial pricing for the service.
Price and system requirements
SayMotion is browser-based. It should work with any standard desktop web browser.
Pricing is credit-based, costing a credit to generate 10 seconds of animation, or to perform an editing operation, like inpainting or merging animations.
Free accounts, which are now limited to non-commercial use, get 25 credits per month.
Paid commercial accounts cost between $15/month or $108/year for 50 credits per month, and $300/month or $996/year for 1,000 credits per month.
Read an overview of the new features in SayMotion 2.0 on DeepMotion’s blog
Visit the SayMotion product webpage
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