Blog – DAE Research

Een gesprek voeren in het Vlaams

Intussen zijn er alweer nieuwe technologische doorbraken en zoomt onze blogpost vandaag in op de vooruitgang in spraaktechnologie – met een extra focus op Vlaamse stemmen! Ook geven we een blik achter de schermen van Pipecat, de “ruggengraat” die toelaat om de verschillende AI-bouwstenen te combineren tot virtuele gesprekspartners die kunnen luisteren én spreken.

AI Video Revolution

The AI video revolution is not coming—it has arrived. The question for creative professionals is no longer whether to engage with these tools, but how to do so in ways that enhance rather than replace human creativity, maintain professional standards, and navigate the complex landscape of capabilities, limitations, and evolving possibilities that define this transformative moment in visual media creation.

From ideas to visuals: Exploring AI tools for images, video and 3d models

At the start of any project, it’s important to communicate ideas clearly. Creating visualizations is an effective way to convey concepts more precisely than words alone. This blog post explores various tools that help transform ideas into visuals.

Generative AI: The struggle for control

“How do I get it to do what I need it to do? How do we control it?”. Generating images with text-to-image models is cool, but how do I get it to generate what’s in my mind?

Photogrammetry research by our interns.

During her internship in our research team, Hanne Yperman, a 3th year DAE student, was tasked to experiment with scanning in a person using our photogrammetry setup and documenting the process. Along with some fellow interns, she made this video explaining her findings.

Procedural 3D: SOTA

During the project we collected all interesting sources and papers in a Trello board. You can find this here.

DAE-R @ Houdini Hive Education Edition

DAE-Research presented a talk called “DAE-Research and it’s Ecosystem” on the Houdini Hive Education Edition on November 30, 2021. You could follow this live performance on the Houdini SideFX YouTube channel.

Code synthesis with LLM

Good news for people without programming experience. You can now put together a game without even typing a letter code. We can now indeed automatically generate code with language models. This is done using simple commands, or the model simply supplements existing code. And for beginners: a language model can check your code for syntax errors and also optimize them automatically. Even for more experienced programmers, there is sometimes still rehearsal or research work. Especially when juggling between different languages. In this blog post we see how programming is now easier than ever before.

Automating Unit tests

Within this experiment a generic open-source model for generating code was created to avoid the repetitiveness of writing unit tests manually. This makes this use case ideal for automation. In the first example two methods for generating unit tests are presented. We will provide one full example and write down the name of the second method that we expect you to supplemented.

Overview: Speech Synthesis and Conversational AI

Over the past year, we’ve noticed a number of recent innovations around speech synthesis and conversational AI. So far, the state of the art in this area is not yet at the point where it can be realistically applied immediately in a game or VFX pipeline. That said, innovation never stops, and new techniques and interesting innovations emerge regularly within this field. In this blog post we bundle these for you.

Overview: Video Motion Capture Solutions

Although Motion Capture is now the international standard for animations of humanoid characters, it is often too expensive for smaller companies. We regularly hear smaller companies in the game development industry ask the question: couldn’t we just do MOCAP with a camera or webcam, using AI? The images we have already seen of AI that recognizes people on video images look promising. On top of that, a skeleton is recognized that matches the location and pose of the people in the image. Within this overview we look at the state of the art of MOCAP systems that only use a webcam or video camera. We discuss how much potential for improvement there is and whether it is worth it for you.

Overview: Automatic Rotoscoping

Automatic rotoscoping could speed up a very labor-intensive part of a production. It is therefore interesting to look at where people are so far in research into algorithms that can make this happen. In this blog we look at 4 different, recent techniques and programs that strive for (semi-)automatic rotoscoping.

Overview: Automatic Rigging

To date, creating a rig for a model and assigning the correct blending weights has been a manual process. This rig is required to further animate your model, and is therefore a crucial step in the animation pipeline. In this overview we look at whether it is possible to automate this phase, which would be a big step forward in accelerating the animation pipeline.

Overview: Reinforcement learning in games

In this blog post we give a brief introduction to Reinforcement Learning (RL) and look at a number of applications within the gaming world. The goal is to stimulate your ideas, and also to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an AI expert to get started with these technologies. We look forward to questions or ideas arising from this blog post and are happy to take all input into account in preparation for the planned workshops.

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