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With Wonder Dynamics you can now go straight from multi-camera video to fully animated 3D scenes

Wonder Dynamics made a strong start to AI-powered visual effects, providing tools that animators and filmmakers actually find useful – and earned the startup a prompt acquisition by Autodesk. Their latest tool further automates the animation process, allowing you to insert virtually any video and get a fully editable 3D scene with all the characters.

The feature combines the company's existing drop-in actor replacement, where you can easily replace a person with an animated 3D character tailored to their movements, with a full-scale 3D background of your choice.

To be clear, as with all of the company's previous features, this is not intended to provide a finished product, just a base layer to build upon. Animation is labor intensive and filming on location is difficult and expensive. If you can film two friends walking down the hallway and convert the whole thing into robots running down a futuristic street, that's extremely useful for pre-visualization, storyline, and other early stages of production.

“The idea is that you can record and edit your video in your living room, with the performances, cuts and camera angles you want to see in your animation,” said Nikola Todorovic, co-founder of Wonder Dynamics. “This process would provide you with quick previews and, most importantly, 3D scenes to edit each individual element in either Blender, Maya or Unreal.”

What's impressive is that you can use multiple cameras to capture the same scene as you normally would with human actors, and the video-to-3D flow places them in the same scene as virtual cameras that follow the original movement by They estimate walking distance and other metrics. This is also helpful at the beginning of the process when the camera work is being roughly clarified – you don't want to make this decision on the day of the shoot!

You can see it in action here:

Unlike some generative models and text-to-video (or video-to-video) models, the Wonder Animation tool's output consists entirely of industry-standard 3D assets. Once you've shot it, it's no longer fixed – you can drag and drop the cameras and tweak the character's movements, or completely recompose and light the scene. Some of this was possible in the original Wonder Studio, but the emphasis here is on fully animated scenes rather than, say, replacing an actor with a CG character.

Anyone using Wonder Studio should be able to access the animation feature today, although it's technically in beta and will likely see improvements as feedback is submitted.

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