Mid-2024, Autodesk unveiled its latest advances in generative AI and cloud-enabled workflows designed to help artists focus on creativity and empower teams to be more efficient. Delivering on a longstanding commitment to provide creatives with innovative, time-saving solutions, Autodesk released its Flow Generative Scheduling ability along with a host of new AI capabilities in Maya and Flame. 

Flow Generative Scheduling accelerates the creation of production schedules with constantly shifting project variables like deadlines, budgets, and team availability. Powered by Autodesk AI, Flow Generative Scheduling was designed to help keep projects running smoothly. In a fraction of the time previously required, teams are able to compare multiple schedule scenarios, evaluate tradeoffs, and create resource-optimized and balanced schedules for even the most complex projects.

Whether planning for an upcoming show or responding to changes in real time, Flow Generative Scheduling enables teams to make critical decisions faster and gives creatives the freedom and insights to deliver their best work on time and on budget. Flow Generative Scheduling can be accessed via Flow Production Tracking (formerly ShotGrid) for a tightly integrated collaborative workflow. Being able to evaluate different scenarios without impacting a live project, and then publishing a revised schedule directly into Flow Production Tracking was a game changer for creative teams.

Boosting creative workflows for artists

To help creatives address the challenges presented by today’s dynamic production environment—from growing complexity to ever-shifting deadlines and audience expectations—Autodesk explored the power of AI to accelerate and augment artist workflows. These features, available to Maya and Flame, have arrived on the heels of Autodesk’s recent acquisition of Wonder Dynamics (Wonder Dynamics, an Autodesk company), the company behind Autodesk Flow Studio (formerly Wonder Studio). Flow Studio is a solution which combines AI with established tools to help artists more easily animate, light, and compose 3D characters within live-action scenes.

An artist’s time has always been their most valuable resource, so being able to bring them AI tools to augment their creative process unlocked a host of new possibilities, such as spending more time iterating on their creative ideas, and less time on repetitive, noncreative tasks.

Maya’s ML Deformer enables artists to work with complex characters for animation, VFX, and games projects. The tool processes complex deformation systems and represents them with a fast, machine-learned approximation. For example, if you have a character with a complex deformation system that runs slowly, Maya can be trained to represent that deformation system using ML Deformer. Artists can then use this fast representation to work more interactively and switch back to the original for final polish or render.

Flame’s AI toolset continued to grow with ML Timewarp, a mode that generates an intermediate frame between two frames in a shot for retiming of clips. Users benefit not only from high-quality renders, but also from a fully integrated tool that maximizes their workstation’s hardware, eliminating costly file transfer workflows across multiple tools. For the most demanding workloads, this mode can also be queued to render with remote systems via Autodesk Burn. In addition to these features, the latest versions of Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max, offers increased support for open standards and improved modeling, animation, simulation, look development, and enhanced rendering capabilities. 

Header photo courtesy of Shangyu Wang. All other photos courtesy of Autodesk.

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