Deep AI Walk - Creature

Overview

This document describes how to use the new experimental feature called Deep AI Walk to quickly generate human biped walk cycles. Currently this feature is only available for Creature Pro on Windows.

Deep Learning for Walk Cycles

Deep Learning is a new field of AI (Artifical Intelligence) Research that has proven useful to solve a variety of real-world problems. These include: self-driving cars, human-level speech recognition, object/facial identification and more.

Now you too can harness the power of Deep Learning in the realm of character animation using this cutting-edge feature in the Creature Animation Tool! Deep AI Walk, part of Creature Pro, enables you to quickly generate human biped walk cycles from just 3 leg poses. The AI system will determine the best walk cycle to fit your specified 3 leg poses.

Video Tutorials

Character Art: David Revoy, CC BY 3.0

Deep AI Walk is constantly evolving technology, a new enchanced version with automated hand + leg motion is now available.

Please watch the video tutorial for this new version here

Step 1: Download Deep AI Walk Model Data

The first step involves downloading the model of the AI before you can start using Deep AI Walk.

Download a model that has been trained on human walking here.

Step 2: Start Deep AI Walk

In Animate Mode, go to Animate -> Deep AI Walk to bring up the Deep AI Walk window.

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Step 3: Setup Deep AI Walk Model

With the model file downloaded from Step 1, point Deep AI Walk to use that filename:

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Click close and Deep AI Walk will start running.

Step 4: Using Deep AI Walk

You should see a walk cycle running in progress:

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Start This is the starting limb pose
Middle This is the middle limb pose
End This is the ending limb pose

Use your mouse to drag/move the poses. Everytime you change a limb pose, Deep AI Walk will recompute and give you a new walk cycle based on the 3 poses.

Step 5: Setting up Character for Deep AI Walk

Now is the time to connect up the limbs of your character to the Deep AI Walk system. You will need 3 bones each for 2 legs since this works on bipeds.

Select the 3 bones of each leg, then click on Set to setup the connection for the appropriate leg. Do this for each leg. Make sure a FK Motor is installed on all the relevant bones

Finally, select a single root bone of your character and Set that as well:

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Step 6: Tweaking Deep AI Walk Options

There are a couple of options available to change the walking style from Deep AI Walk.

Flip Direction This flips/mirrors the direction of the walk
Bounce How much vertical bounce there is for a simulated walk. Set this to 0 if you want to add your own bounce later on
Bounce Speed How quickly the walking bounce gait is perceived by the system.
Speed The overall walking speed of the 2 limbs
Phase How much to offset the starting pose of the walk cycle

Step 7: Transfer Walk Motion back into Character

Once you are happy with the results, click on Apply to apply the results back into a set of Animation Knots and Splines of your character.

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Because the final results are written into Animation Knots and Splines, you and further tweak the motion to your hearts content after you have closed out the Deep AI Walk system.