Viewing profile — hjessmith

Hi HN, A few years ago I created a popular open source repo for animating children's drawings. Recently, I decided to try turning it into a polished user experience. It doesn't use…

I like doodling, and I like character animation. I made a little tool that can animate your hand drawn characters and put them into an animated meme. It's free, there's no login ne…

I'm working on a web app that animates hand drawn human characters. You try it here without any login or anything: http://doodlemate.com It doesn't use generative AI, instead it au…

Thank you! It’s a web app, but we designed it to be mobile first. You can absolutely visit the website, take a picture, and show the animation to your daughter all on your phone. I…

That's the plan! Glad to hear DoodleMate brought a smile to your face.

That's a good question. I would say that the two approaches are quite different and bring different strengths to the table. The major strength of genAI is that it is open-ended. Bu…

I hope she likes! Please let me know how it goes and if there's any functionality she/you would want.

That's a good question. The distinction is between generative AI (which takes in a prompt or image and generates every pixel of a new video) and non-generative AI models (e.g. clas…

Hi HN! I made an app that takes a photo of a paper drawing and, in a handful of seconds, creates a fully rigged character that can be used in an animation or little story. It doesn…

I'm a student of good animation myself (know the 12 principles of animation by heart, got a copy of The Illusion of Life right next to my desk, etc.) and have great respect for wha…

Yeah, I think that'll happen. I think it's already happening. And if someone wraps it in a terrible app with ads, makes millions of dollars, and I never see any of the money, yes I…

I’m curious to learn more.

Sounds awesome! Let’s do it.

Love the idea. Feel free to reach out if you think there’s room for collaboration.

You're the first stranger to ever compliment my coding style. I feel all warm and fuzzy now.

Yes. I did most of this as a postdoc at FAIR, Meta's AI research group.

It’s not metadata, you would see that when you upload the photo at the beginning. I’m guessing that the nose key point is located below the shoulders in your child’s drawing? That’…

If you post your creation to social media, please use #FAIRAnimatedDrawings. I'd love to see what you create!

As written now, it expects 3D motion data. Extending it to support 2D motion data is doable, but will take time. Feel free to open a github issue requesting it if you'd like me to …

It currently only outputs .mp4 and .gif files. You could probably use these as game assets, but I don't think it would be optimal. The rendering code utilizes an MVC framework. If …

You might check out the technical paper, the background section lists some relevant related works on non-photorealistic pose estimation. One work that seems particularly pertinent …

Glad to hear it was easy for you to get up and running, but where did come across the repo? It's been in 'stealth release' mode for a few months now, but nothing was publicly annou…

It's equally important to stretch before coding and stretch before dancing.

I don't know who would speak out against it. The MIT license certainly allows for it, and I don't actually own it... I just wrote it :)

Glad you got it working. And glad you appreciate my sick dance moves :)