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Roadster event livestream xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1yKAPwNgg…
Maxon just added AI-powered relighting directly inside After Effects.
Scene Light generates depth and normal maps, then lets you place actual lights into existing footage.
No regenerating the shot. No sending it to another AI video service.
Just editable lighting inside your comp.
This is much closer to the kind of AI I actually want in creative software.
This is the kind of creative work I love seeing.
Dardo Studios built an entire animated short inside Unreal Engine.
Then added 60+ hand-painted frames and traditional 2D effects to give it a gorgeous illustrated look.
All that technology underneath, but the art direction is what makes it special.
After a lot of hard work, we are so proud to finally share Ghost Stride, an original animated short made by the team at Dardo Studios.
What started as a quick animation test grew into a full short film built in Unreal Engine from rigging to final render. Every character was rigged with Control Rig and animated directly in Sequencer, with the final cameras, lighting and shaders in front of us the whole time. Cameras were blocked out alongside the animation inside the final environments so every discipline could work in the same scene and see changes almost instantly.
On top of that realtime foundation, we pushed the painterly look as far as we could. We projected more than 60 hand painted images back onto the 3D so the brushstrokes feel alive in motion and finished it off with hand animated 2DFX, like Shadow's hair and environmental VFX.
Ghost Stride was made in the gaps between client projects and it pushed us beyond our usual boundaries. It is a story about facing your fears and moving forward anyway, which turned out to be a pretty honest reflection of what making it felt like.
Huge thanks to the incredible team at Dardo Studios and our audio partner, Moonsailor Audio.
We will be sharing more about how we solved the trickiest parts of the film in our upcoming Problem Solving Series so stay tuned.
We hope you enjoy watching Ghost Stride as much as we enjoyed making it.
Check out the new Backrooms VFX breakdown. Its pretty interesting.
cgchannel.com/2026/10/check-…
Ben Affleck says he used AI throughout postproduction on his new Netflix movie, Animals, but doesn't want to reveal exactly where.
Which raises an interesting question.
If AI is being used to clean up shots, remove objects, adjust lighting, or handle other routine VFX work...
Can you spot where it's being used?
imdb.com/title/tt31049299/
Been looking at @CaddisApp, a new motion design app that combines an After Effects-style timeline with node-based workflows.
Their latest update adds particles, procedural layouts, loops, and a bunch of other interesting stuff.
$129. No subscription. Free for 7 days
Not suggesting anyone cancel After Effects just yet, but I love seeing smaller developers take a swing at this space.
caddis.app/
Microsoft and NVIDIA just announced a laptop with up to 128GB of unified memory.
Which sounds fantastic for running local AI models.
The real question is whether I can run ComfyUI, After Effects, and Cinema 4D without discovering some horrifying compatibility issue halfway through a project.
Someone please benchmark this thing properly.
blogs.windows.com/devices/20…
Google just launched Playground, it lets you create playable games using AI prompts.
Having spent a few years helping build one, I'm genuinely curious how far this gets before everything falls apart.
I guess it's only natural to try and build Dapper Dash
Whelp boys it's been a good ride.
This was created in Opus 5.5, it took about 30 secs.
Prompt is below, I left it intentionally vague to see what would happen.
Is the animation perfect? No, but this is the worst it's going to be.
Prompt: Create a 5 sec motion graphics animation of a simple dot, bouncing into the center of the screen, it expands to a search bar and then text fills the box: "I'm a motion designer, what should my next career be?" The animation should be be fluid, ease keyframes in and out, transition the search bar into a full white frame. a matte will open inside to the start of the animation and create a loop
Took a selfie, asked Dreamina to create full-body character reference, then used Seedance 2.5 to turn myself into a giant climbing out of the Hudson.
~1500 credits later, this is the result. Still needs some work.
I just spent today in ComfyUI wiring up a pipeline that combines a reference image, turns it into video, and then adds lip sync and audio. Getting everything to play nice took way longer than expected.
I cloned my voice with @ElevenLabs today.
Took about 30 seconds.
Which is cool.
Unless I just made a terrible mistake and the Matrix is quietly building a virtual twin of me.
Kling 4.0 got announced this week. 30-second native generations, 10 keyframes per clip, up to 15 reference images and videos per shot, 4K in 10-bit HDR, stereo audio.
And 15 multimodal references (10 images, 5 clips, 7 persistent subjects) is the real control surface. The question is whether keyframed control takes a matte from 90% to 100%. That is where these tools live or die.