Wonder Dynamics has made a strong foray into AI-enhanced visual effects, offering tools that animators and filmmakers actually find useful — and winning the startup a prompt acquisition by Autodesk. Their latest tool further automates the animation process, allowing you to put in virtually any video and get a fully editable 3D scene, characters and all.

The feature combines the company’s existing actor replacement, where you can easily replace a person with a 3D animated character adapted to their movements, with a full-scale 3D background of your choice.

To be clear, as with all of the company’s previous features, this is not intended to provide a finished product, just a base layer to build upon. Animation is labor intensive and location shooting is difficult and expensive – if you can film two friends walking down a hall and turn it into robots walking down a futuristic street, that’s very useful for previewing, story flow and other early stages of production.

“The idea is that you can shoot and edit your video in your living room, with the desired camera performance, cropping and framing as you would like to see in your animation,” said Wonder Dynamics co-founder Nikola Todorovic. “This process will give you fast preview and most importantly 3D scenes to edit each individual element in either Blender, Maya or Unreal.”

Impressively, you can use multiple cameras to film the same scene, as you might normally do with human actors, and the 3D video stream will place them in the same scene as the virtual cameras, following the original motion, estimating the leg travel, and other values. . Again, useful for the beginning of the process when camera work is being discouraged – not something you want to decide on the day of the shoot!

You can see it in action here: