By Siobhán Hofma and Simon Woeginger
IKINEMA has been involved in an exciting three year EU Research and Innovation project named SAUCE (mart Assets for re-Use in Creative Environments) launched in 2018. We’ve been working in collaboration with ten technology specialist companies and research institutes to develop the future runway to re-use and re-purpose existing digital animation assets for the benefit of creative industry companies producing future projects within film, TV and games.

HOW IKINEMA IS MAKING MACHINE LEARNING EVEN SMARTER
Although IKINEMA are experts in real-time inverse kinematics (IK) which produces high quality procedural animation, we additionally have been exploring Machine Learning to synthesize character animation. With our active developments within the SAUCE consortium, the R&D will exploit usability of our technology even further. Within the EU funded project IKINEMA is the industrial leader of Work Package 6, centered around the development and demonstration of control systems and tools that can be used for authoring ‘Smart Assets’. The IKINEMA R&D team are primarily tasked to develop innovative cutting-edge techniques to generate and drive these Smart Assets or virtual characters in a live production scenario. This involves taking traditional assets such as an animation clip and boosting the assets IQ by implementing the planned technology, resulting in Smart Assets that are designed to bolster users with a highly efficient animation pipeline.