AnimHost

AnimHost connects animation generators to Digital Content Creation applications, on-set tools like VPET or Game Engines in general. It explores enhanced XR production processes for animated films, utilising machine learning with a “fair use of data” and an “artists in the loop” approach.

AninHost web site: https://research.animationsinstitut.de/animhost

Run Instructions

Training Character Animation Models

AnimHost can train AI-powered character animation models on motion capture data using deep learning techniques (Periodic Autoencoder + Gated Neural Network [Starke et al. 2022]).

Quick Start for End Users:

1. Download the latest release
2. Follow the complete training workflow in TRAINING.md

The guide covers:

• Downloading the AI4Animation framework and mocap datasets
• Preprocessing motion capture data
• Training neural network models
• Troubleshooting common issues

[Starke et al. 2022] Sebastian Starke, Ian Mason, and Taku Komura. 2022. DeepPhase: periodic autoencoders for learning motion phase manifolds. ACM Trans. Graph. 41, 4, Article 136 (July 2022), 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3528223.3530178

Build Instructions

Follow these steps to set up the project on your local machine:

1. Clone the repository You can clone the repository and it's submodules by running the following command in your terminal:

   git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/FilmakademieRnd/AnimHost.git
   

2. Navigate to the project directory - Change your current directory to the project directory:

   cd AnimHost
   

3. Create a build directory - Create a new directory named build in the project directory:

   mkdir build
   

4. Navigate to the build directory - Change your current directory to the build directory:

   cd build
   

5. Run CMake - Run CMake to generate the build files, specifying Visual Studio as the generator. This project uses vcpkg for third-party dependencies, so this step might take some time. Replace ../AnimHost with the path to the source code if it's not in the parent directory:

   cmake -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" ../AnimHost
   

6. Build the project - Finally, you can build the project using the generated build files. You can specify the configuration (Debug, Release, etc.) with the --config option:

   cmake --build . --config Release
   

About

         

AnimHost is a development by Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg, Animationsinstitut R&D Labs in the scope of the EU funded project MAX-R (101070072).

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No 101070072 MAX-R.

License

AnimHost is a open-source development by Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg's Animationsinstitut. The framework is licensed under MIT. See License info file for more details.