@cnoellert get a copy of “More Everything Forever” by Adam Becker if you haven’t already. I think you’d dig it. That and “In the Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshanna Zuboff have been my two favorite non-fiction reads this year.
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Yeah im not expecting this to wipe many of us out just yet but its only a matter of time before they sort out the quality and lengths. The bell has rang unfortunately and if this works out to be alot cheaper then paying artists then its game over for so many.
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studios like lionsgate will not consider US$200,000/month a big deal, more likely they will be dumping US$2,000,000/month or possibly even $20,000,000/month, and they have a back catalog of training material…
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I feel like people are missing a bit of a trick here.
There’s an absolute ton of work coming in AI, and Flame Artists are perfectly placed to take advantage of it. Any AI content built to a proper client brief — with revisions, feedback, and approvals — is essentially a very complex VFX shot. And right now, there’s a massive demand for that skill set.
If you want to take advantage of it you should be furiously learning Comfy UI
It’s basically the cutting edge of the biggest VFX revolution in our lifetime.
I’ve been chatting with a director on a large-scale AI-heavy project, and he lamented the lack of department heads in these projects. Right now, the AI artist ends up doing everything — set design, DoP, art direction. But long term, that’s not how high-end work should run. You want those individual departments feeding into the pipeline, and a dedicated AI/VFX artist bringing it all together. You don’t want some grizzled old VFX artist designing hair and makeup do you? You want a proper stylist offering ideas and that being fed in to the eventual end product.
That central role — managing and integrating all those creative inputs — is the new online artist.
I’ve currently got three major AI/VFX projects on the go, and the work is some of the most creatively rich and technically interesting stuff I’ve done. Honestly you should be getting stuck in.
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Great insight @RufusBlackwell but you need to remember that collaboration has always been difficult for the fearful.
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Yeah it’s pretty incredible how perfectly positioned we are. We sit in front of the greatest image manipulator on the planet, powered by workstation class Nvidia hardware, at the end of a very specific image manufacturing pipeline, and happen to be the best problem solvers and creative minds in post.
It’s like what….3 lines of code to install Comfy? 2 lines in a terminal to setup a venv? 7 clicks to download and move Flux Dev into /models?
Fuck, even the workflows under the Browse Templates is enough to move the needle forward as a compositor’s companion.
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I appreciate that sentiment, and it has a lot of weight, no less because you have demonstrated and showed it in action.
What makes this a bit harder to do is the overall debate on AI and the way most companies, the investors, the CEO class and everyone out there is approaching AI.
If AI were just the latest cool tech (like the iPhone, the Mac, or even some aspects of social media - lets say LinkedIn to stay away from controversies of IG), then it would be a lot easier to embrace with open arms. We’ve all done this so many times in our careers. With every new generation of compute power, newer versions of Flame or your favorite app, our workflows and opportunities have changed, usually for the better.
But on the background where AI is hyped into mega bubble territory by the Silicon Valley crowd, claiming that it will solve all the world’s problems by tomorrow, when clearly this is far from the case (in a CMU study performance of AI bots on basic tasks was somewhere between 7-26%, and the rest was hallucinations and other apologetic crap); and then the big companies salivating over eliminating as many jobs as possible (already no one is filling entry level positions, and Altman is claiming that AI is replacing lawyers and doctors); not to speak of the daily does of ‘here is the latest video AI has barfed out that didn’t take a human to make it’.
It’s emotionally very hard to reconcile that and embrace the opportunity even if we absolutely should. How can we say that on a human level we find this all repulsive, yet on a professional level we can’t wait to exploit this to keep putting food on the table? That’s somewhat incongruent.
Technological innovation in the past has displaced people in existing roles, but at the same time always provide new roles and everyone who was flexible enough had a seat at the table. The farmers became factory workers, and their children became knowledge workers. But generally there was enough work to go around.
The AI wave is built on the premise to replace humans en masse without explaining what the humans should do instead to earn a living. It’s an inhumane endeavor by the few entitled ones without regard for humanity. That cannot be ignored. Some things, however popular they maybe, one should not get on board or normalize just because it’s convenient.
To be clear, AI inherently is not a bad technology. The new models and tools are fantastic productivity enhancers if used correctly and responsibly. There are a lot of great use cases for AI tools, some of which you have shown. And I do embrace these tools in those scenarios.
And we also have to separate the contributions and progress made by AI researchers to the field, and the advancement by companies like NVidia to provide compute power to support these advances. The problem entirely lies with the commercial exploitation of this AI research and progress in unsavory ways, beyond the research and engineering.
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Just tried Runway’s Aleph for the first time. 
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What did you do with it?
i think you are having some selective memory here with how new technology sometimes arrives at out doorsteps…
i dont say to assess blame or who is the worse offender, etc. that is a much longer discussion. These changes just happen.
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to add a poignant indicator of how deep we are in our own shit, the linked guardian article is surrounded by advertisements for life insurance.
special.
tell your parents.
add it to your reel.
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really ? where do I find this, are the instructions here ? you mean this thread ? How to implement ComfyUI as an Plugin for Autodesk Flame? - #103 by Xteve , and this ComfyUI VFX Integration Plugin for Autodesk Flame 2025.x/ 2026.x (EXR) | Patreon, ….any good? is this the only resource?, …..thanks
Are you on Mac or Linux? Pinokio is probably the simplest implementation and runs on all 3 platforms:
Also has a bunch of other AI tools that are quite interesting.
On a MAC you can learn Comfy, but it is quite slow because it’s all optimised for Nvidia. Right now I’m Running Flame on a Mac then using Mimic PC to rent a workstation thats running Comfy. Bit of a weird setup, but I move round a lot and it essentially allows me to be running 2 fat systems simultaneously.
There are loads of different implementations of Comfy, and it can be quite fiddly, but it’s a really interesting learn.
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both, thanks will take a look.
The links above are for Mac only and are a forum member’s way of accessing Comfy from within Flame.
it’s not applicable to my operating system or use case so can’t speak to that.
Comfy is one of the most well documented AI apps on the planet and there’s thousands of Discords, classes, YouTube videos, and Medium articles going through it in detail.
starting at the GitHub is a good place to start.
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Not really. I have it running on RL9.3 flame. Give it a try.
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Welp, we have 2 prominent clients who insist on using AI to do some VFX on their spots. Here we go!
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Good luck! It’s fun, but it’ll take longer than you think. I done tons of it, any issues, hit me up, happy to help out.
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Just an anecdote, I’m in a hotel room in Chicago. I’m running Flame and Blender on my laptop and Safari’s logged into linux hardware back in LA. Currently it’s running 80 iterations of a Flux in-paint Comfy setup at 20 samples which I’ll prune-down to 5 selects.
The Comfy output directory is linked back into Lucid which means as each iteration completes I immediately have access to access to them here in the hotel room. Once I’m back from Lollapalooza with my daughter (Bleachers and The Dare yesterday!!!) I’ll throw my 5 selects back for higher samples (the output pngs contain the setup and seed for for the job) and then into Runway or something else to breathe some life into them, comp them back into the plate, post and sleep.
I’m not a pro like @RufusBlackwell but I get it and ultimately you can’t ignore the wave we’re being forced to ride. It’s a hideous dialectical feeling of being both emboldened and empowered while simultaneously feeling fucking awful and truly scared for whateverthefuck is going to happen tomorrow.
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I have the same feelings @cnoellert Ive been figuring my way around generating depth and normals because those are just cool things and I love the idea of generating aovs from 2d footage. Or building meshes out for either proxy geometry or geo for projections just from a few frames. Very helpful in terms of quality, not necessarily quantity.
In terms of complicated paint there’s a lot of stuff that seems really time intensive for stuff that can just get sent to India and have someone do a great job and just not worry about it. The outsourced work is no less an ethical quandary though. Some of those places are hellscapes. Shadow misery mechanical Turk kind of stuff. So we’ve just shut eyes and ears to that because of ‘necessity’ and the nasty world of ever-shrinking margins. The AI robot doesn’t eliminate that suffering though. Just transposes it. Even if it’s not someone working in a roto and paint sweatshop, there’s someone in Kenya helping to train and scale models by looking at the most disturbing imagery imaginable and trying to decide if it’s a kid or not in there.
The neoliberal nightmare never really diminishes, no matter what hurdles it may appear to be stumbling on, it just changes shape and form and ends up in the shadows where it’s nice and shady and cool. We’re all just trying to get our shots out and pay the rent. Hard to know where lines are in a fuzzy fuzzy world.
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