The hope is 2025 is the year AI tools become actually useful, and a new Adobe model called TransPixar could be one of the year's hottest new AI tools you may not have heard of, and it follows Adobe's plan to make AI tools that have a use.
Quietly released by a team from Adobe Research and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, this TransPixar is an AI technology that could change how VFX is made for films and video games, for studios and individuals alike.
TransPixar does one thing really well, it adds the ability to create transparent backgrounds for AI-generated videos. This results in the easy creation of see-through elements such as smoke as well as accurate reflections and ethereal effects, which all blend and animation naturally in a scene.
Currently AI apps and models can only generate solid images, which restricts how the data and scenes being generated can be used. TransPixar has just changed the way AI generates effects and scenes, and could be truly a significant release.
In the white paper Yijun Li, project leader at Adobe Research, wrote: "Alpha channels are crucial for visual effects, allowing transparent elements like smoke and reflections to blend seamlessly into scenes. However, generating RGBA video, which includes alpha channels for transparency, remains a challenge due to limited datasets and the difficulty of adapting existing models."
As development costs in film and video games increase to wild proportions AI could be the way studios cut costs, and do so without reducing staff numbers. The hope is AI like TransPixar can make life easier for VFX artists, not replace them, while helping smaller studios and solo developers compete.
In the demos released with the open source code, Adobe's team showed how TransPixar can deliver impressive results, including a varied mix of effects, from simple text prompts. The demos include emerging smoke clouds, an electrical portal and a swirling asteroid belt. The AI model can even animate still images with transparent effects.
The Adobe team has released the code, making it available on GitHub for developers to test and advance, as well as a demo on Hugging Face. TransPixar is in its early stages but I'd love to see how this is developed, perhaps as an After Effects plugin or Cinema 4D plugin.
