As the leading manufacturer and service provider of compressed air equipment, Atlas Copco wants to empower its people to deliver service excellence. To help achieve this, all IT tools supporting the service process are now integrated into a new service platform.
What that means for the day-to-day activities of a service planner or service engineer, is explained with the help of 3D character animation.
Sounds like a familiar approach? Not quite, because we developed the video through a hybrid creative process. The 3D models were designed with our traditional 3D tool set, so that we kept maximum control over the characters, objects and environments. But after feeding these models into our AI tools, the actual animated sequences were generated based on prompting.
It took skilled manoeuvring and (a lot of) patience to steer clear of inconsistencies, as shown in the ‘blooper video’ below. These glitches aside, the AI workflow enabled us to tell the story in an engaging way while achieving greater animation efficiency.
It seems so easy... but is it?
Generative AI for video comes with its own quirks and challenges. Even the best tools sometimes get lost and start to hallucinate visually.
To give an idea of how simple scenes can drive AI craftsmen to despair, this 'blooper video' shows some of the unusable output that was generated in the course of this video production.
Virtual toolboxes can suddenly do magic tricks. Opening the door of a service van is straightforward, you'd say... not for AI. A compressor comes alive in weird ways or shows inside components that no mechanical engineer has ever heard of. And when it decides to push the service technician aside, the guy knows that he has to take a few steps back. That is, as long as his feet haven't disappeared. But the customer seems happy!
In short, it may look funny, but AI generation is not for the faint of heart!
