I received an offer to begin using AI Studio. My question is what render engine are they using to create such photorealism? I am talking particularly in regard to the Camila clips they show. Are they porting it over to another platform for rendering and if so what because rendering in iClone does not produce such realistic results. I have even tried to render in Maya with Arnold and have not gotten results like that. Thanks.
Best,
Mike
They use AI rendering. Can’t type on my phone so more later.
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To continue my explanation, the process is as follows (simplified):
The first step is a render in iClone of the scene with characters, surroundings, etc. This results in an image.
The next step is to use this render as input for a specific AI model. This part is difficult to explain. The model takes the input and transforms it to something else according to a text prompt. So you can specific things like “render cinematic” or “render in cartoon style” and the result will be what you specified. This is for an image model such as Nano Banana.
One step further is to create a video clip. I will take a render of a girl at a bar holding a glass of wine and refer to it as “Image”. Now you could use the prompt: “Young woman is sitting at a bar. She is holding a glass of wine as in Image. She has a serious expression. She is taking a sip of wine and then puts the glass down and smiles. Subdued lighting, realistic”. You can also add camera directions, such as the camera zooming in.
There is a learning curve. I have been experimenting for 6 months and have made mistakes (unclear prompts for example), so that is something to be prepared for. It’s a tool that needs the be mastered.
The following post has a longer explanation and visual examples:
Thanks for the quick response animagic, and for the link to your work and others. It is a lot to take in. Things have changed since I was in the game sitting in screening rooms with the likes of Kathleen Kennedy and Ron Howard watching them scan my shot with their laser pointers and asking later in notes to change this by 2% and that by 1%. I still wonder how much has changed between old school and new AI school as far as a pipeline goes. I suspect the “Volume” is using it.
There were not many examples of photoreal rendering to look at that you provided, and even with them the look was inconsistent. There is something unreal in the realism if you know what I mean. Luke Skywalker looks photoreal but in a forced, doesn’t quite fit in the BG plate way, and the alien rat looks like bad CGI by comparison. I do applaud Reallusion for developing tools that I wish Maya would consider. I have not upgraded to Maya 2026, but Maya 2025 has very little innovations over previous versions. The only thing that keeps me using it is their cheap $280/yr subscription fee for independent contractors.
If I do decide to jump into AI Studio, are there minimum system requirements? I know when they dumped their own render engine, Iray, in favor of porting over to NVIDIA Omniverse for rendering, I was unable to do so because my graphics card was (and still is) inferior. Thanks.
Best,
mike