Most digital animation done by hand isn’t done in the stop motion/frame-by-frame way, It’s done with key frames that are interpolated between. That’s not to say it isn’t still super time consuming (especially when done well).
Yes! You nailed it
A lot of motions still need to be scrubbed frame by frame and adjusted if any of the key frames dont interpolate cleanly
It’s one of those menial tasks that AI could actually specialize and hugely assist in for simple repetitive animations. Or imagine have a custom animation that the SI uniquely generates the key frames on the fly. Talking distant future but every animation could be potentially be entirely unique everytime you see it
I could see a system where you very loosely define a handful of keyframes, give it some kind of description for what your looking for, and then the model fills in the rest for you. It almost certainly would still require some tweaking on the artists part, but I think a huge benefit is that AI can be non-deterministic. If you don’t like what you got you can just run it again without changing inputs. Maybe save multiple runs and manually combine all the best elements. Lots of opportunity.
