Forget 'man hours', it's 'machine seconds'   now to create animation
Bangalore, August 23 2017: An Indian startup  co-founded by three  engineering dropouts  has created a suite of solutions that will come as a blessing for animation and  game developers  everywhere.    They have harnessed Artificial Intelligence to power  an animation tool  that  will significantly reduce manual work involved in creating 3-D animated figures starting with skeletons and  imbibing them with  shape, form and  complex movement.
The  tool,  Norah.AI is the work of  Vrushali Prasade, Shubham Mishra & Harikrishna Valiyath  (all  three coincidentally aged 23  at the time),who quit BITS Pilani Goa in 2015 and co-founded Absentia in Bangalore.  Norah  is claimed to be India’s first game workflow( that is the process of creating a game or an animation from story line to end product),  that is driven by Neural Networks, Deep Learning & Artificial Intelligence.
The first module in the Norah AI suite concentrates on animation. Users can choose from a large repository of pre-existing animations, or create entirely new ones by blending and tweaking different animations together.
It features to simplify the following tasks:
Auto-Rigging of 3D Models: This is the cumbersome process of adding a full skeleton and skinning weights to a 3D mesh.  Norah can produce  full skeleton, adding skin and
Animation Style Transfer: After studying millions of animation frames, Norah AI  is able to combine two animation styles to produce unexpected and stunning results. A Hip-hop dance combined with Bharatanatyam? No problem!
Facial Expression Generator: Thanks to  Machine Learning algorithms trained on thousands of face animation frames, Norah AI is able to generate an infinite number of subtle and versatile facial emotions
Endless AI Created Repository: AI can generate a  library with  a wide variety of locomotion styles (crawling, walking in rough terrain etc), detailed and complex dance forms, and combat animations  for  event-based requirements
Promises  Absentia CTO, Vrushali Prasade:  “Norah AI will change the way we think and go about game creation. What takes months, will soon take minutes. “Man-hours” will be replaced by “machine-seconds”.
In coming months, Absentia  plans to  roll out a series of modules which will enable  developers to  create fully playable games with a minimal human input.