I've come up with the following to post to Blender 3D communities, probably starting with reddit. Please let me know your thoughts or any improvements you might suggest. The goal of this is to introduce the community to AniBot and start a discussion and an eventual round table, centered around how it would be monetized for artists.
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Hello everyone,
My name is Jason Rowoldt and I used to be a professional stop motion animator, having now transitioned to 3D. Growing up I was a huge fan of Ray Harryhausen and loved the charm of stop motion. I founded the website brickfilms.com back in 2001 and grew the site to be the largest filmmaking community that’s ever been on the internet. In 2003 I moved on and have had a career since mostly in full stack development, tech, tech management, etc. Sadly Brickfilms kind of petered out.
I have a patent pending technology that I hope will revolutionize the animation and streaming content world and would like to share it with you and gather some thoughts and feedback about how to use it and most importantly, the vision I see to finally have indie 3D artists make money off their work. I also hope to leverage it to finally have the end consumer choose what content they want to watch instead of browsing endlessly on streaming services for something that clicks with them.
The end goal of this project is to license this patented technology to someone like Netflix or build an app that charges for the service of creating one’s own movies, without having to learn or use tools like Blender. If all goes well, a year or so from now, I foresee either an app or a new section of streaming services that lets audiences create custom stories starring their favorite characters, or new characters, favorite settings, themes, tone, music, everything. Along with all of this, I am figuring out a way for artists to get paid for their work on a large scale.
First, let’s address the content watching landscape. In my opinion the reason that TikTok and Twitch took off is because people want a more personal approach to what they watch. The same with Youtube and the endless content people create that people watch. People are searching for something that resonates with them rather than browsing, browsing, browsing endlessly. Take, for instance, my own kids. They love corporate sponsored shows like Bluey (which is a great show) but for them they burn through new seasons like wildfire. What they end up watching is very easy to create content without stories, such as older kids/teens playing Minecraft and Plants vs Zombies, or whatever they are interested in that week. What I wish they watched are more story driven and narrative shows like Bluey, but customized to their interests. Shows that take talent and effort to create and whose creators are then rewarded financially. Heck, I’d even take a bunch of videos where Godzilla and friends wreck various cities. The point is everyone is unique and likes different things. Imagine hand making a toy character for your kid, having a 3D object made from it, and them watching shows based on stories you come with together in play. Or, if you don’t have kids, literally any story and characters you want. Only imagination limits this.
Now let’s look at the animation content career landscape right now, it’s pretty uneven in my opinion. If you want to be a professional at animating, modeling, texturing, visual effects, scripting, or anything of the sort, there are multiple paths, none of which I find too appealing as a creative. You can “hang your shingle” so to speak and maybe get a few objects, rigs or animations sold on a place like Turbosquid. The problem with Turbosquid is that it’s a huge repository of objects and animations with no place to use them. In order to use them, one has to know how to use a tool like Blender, become an expert in it, and then go through the time consuming process of creating the animation yourself. The vast majority of people do not know how to do that, so even if they spend say, $50 or $100 on a character and some objects, there is still a giant mountain to climb to actually make a finished animation. Even for my this is intimidating and I can only produce content very slowly. So in my opinion (and the opinion of many artists I have talked to), selling content online piecemeal like that is not effective at all. The other path, of course, is to be hired by a game studio or animation studio and work on what they want you to work on. This work is wholly feast or famine, as you may get a full time job or long term contract to fulfill the vision of a studio, but then the studio folds after the project is complete, or lays off workers, etc. What I’m getting at is, as fun as this profession (or hobby) is, it’s really tough to make it work full time and make a lot of money doing it.
If you’re reading this so far, and have opinions on my opinions, I’d sure love to hear them. It’s incredibly hard to find statistics and metrics on this career path other than how much an animator may make full time at a big studio through sites like Glassdoor. I’d love to hear your stories and any numbers you want to throw my way.
Now on to the new tech, which I call AniBot.
AniBot takes control of the APIs of various technologies like Blender and other tools and automates the process of making animated digital content. As I’m sure you scripters out there know, you can run Blender (and other tools, like Unity and Unreal) from a command line and use their APIs to do pretty much anything you need, from creating new shots to placing cameras, backgrounds, foreground and background objects, sets, tracking, particle effects, physics collisions, mesh deformation, you name it. AniBot uses a library of objects, music, sounds, animations, scripts, etc. and gives a user without any knowledge of animation the ability to produce complete animations, rendered and delivered to their Google Drive, Youtube channel, etc. It can be delivered publicly or privately, to be enjoyed alone, with family, or monetized if they wish.
We have built a prototype of this tech in the form of a website that has a UI that interacts with the “Animation Brain” as I call it, that is, the patent pending tech that produces the animations. Right now the Animation Brain is geared around Blender 3D, but it’s straightforward to port it elsewhere, the UI is irrespective of tools.
I’d like to brainstorm with this group how to monetize the content you would create for the art asset repository. I have some ideas but would like to bounce them off this community. There are a few things that I consider starting points:
The rights to anything you create (with some exceptions, such as if you paid upfront for it) would be yours forever.
We need to figure out what monetization looks like vs. the time it takes to create something. So for instance, a super simple tree made up of a green cone and a brown cylinder might take 30 seconds to create versus a very complex, rigged character with particle fur and realistic skin textures that takes many hours or weeks would need to pay out more. In general I think we would create some kind of complexity rating such that a main character used over and over in closeup would be more complex and pay more, and the simpler object that may be used in the background, out of camera focus, would pay less. The same for simple backgrounds vs. extremely detailed backgrounds, etc. This is the most complex problem facing us and requires the most discussion.
We have figured out how to protect copying of the objects, animations, etc. but need to figure out the delineation of things that are paid for and used by the end user and things that an artist no longer wishes to monetize. I.e. We don’t want to break someone’s animation if they paid for it and need to re render it.
We have an existing method (called the “Asset Manager”) to upload art such as objects, pictures, video, music, sounds, animations, rigged characters, etc. However complex things such as a script that makes fire and smoke out of particle effects right now requires a manual process to copy scripts with variables that can be manipulated into libraries. I hope to create a section of Asset Manager on the site for uploading these (it might be as straightforward as a .blend file). We also need to think about how to protect these scripts so again, you retain rights to them and they can’t be copied.
Finally, after some discussion, I would like to have an online meeting to discuss all of this with as many artists as possible in real time, where I can answer questions, capture notes, and brainstorm. I would also like to invite you to check out the site and make suggestions on how a new interface might work. It’s a simple drop down box, text field type interface right now, but I’d love to hear ideas on how to improve, such as prerendering character and object thumbnails that could be dragged and dropped or automatically synching animation with sound and music. We have a lot of ideas like this on my team but I’d like to discuss how to implement them with the larger artist community.
At this point I require no action from anyone, no money, no email addresses, nothing. The prototype uses email as login but it’s all stored in a database simply for login/account recovery purposes and to tie your account to your work. You’d also obviously be able to mess around with the existing UI and create stories to your heart’s content. Right now we are calling this Story Maker.
Please share your thoughts and tell me what you think of the current artistic landscape, what you think about how to monetize, and any other questions or thoughts. I humbly and eagerly await a discussion.
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