There’s plenty of caution and mistrust around the idea of artificial intelligence intruding on animation production. There’s fear it will steal or otherwise make redundant many animation production jobs, putting hundreds, if not thousands of artists out of work.

But Dade Orgeron, VP of 3D Innovation at Shutterstock, believes AI can work for animators, not against them, and even make their lives easier.

“I did 3D production for 15 years and, let’s face it, that involved a lot of late nights,” says Orgeron. “Ideally, generative AI should at the very least help you to get home on time. Let’s get through those design decisions and focus on the hero content. Let’s get you doing the things that you really like to do and absorb the tedious tasks on the generative AI side. That’s been our philosophy from the get-go.”

Back in March, Shutterstock – a creative platform for high-quality assets, tools and services – announced its partnership with NVIDIA, famous for, among a myriad of things, creating applications for accelerated computing, in order to create a text-to-3D modeler. Soon to be made available from Shutterstock for commercial use, NVIDIA Edify-3D models will be trained with images and video from Shutterstock and 3D assets from its subsidiary TurboSquid (acquired in 2021), the world’s largest marketplace for 3D content. Once models are trained with Shutterstock’s data, its service will use NVIDIA Picasso, a foundry for custom generative AI models. Users will be able to use the Shutterstock service to convert text prompts into high-fidelity 3D assets based initially on the Universal Scene Description (USD) file framework.

Though the technology has only been made available to select clientele, the general public will be granted access early this fall. In the meantime, anyone can test out the modeler for themselves here: https://build.nvidia.com/shutterstock/edify-3d

Read more at Animation World Network.