Animating a 3D character from scratch is generally laborious and expensive, requiring the use of complex software and motion capture tools. Wheel wheel it wants to make basic animation as simple as describing it, creating basic movement with AI and letting creators focus on more expressive tasks.
“There hasn’t been much new in animation since I started doing it,” said Jonathan Jarvis, the startup’s co-founder and CEO and an animator himself. “There is a big ‘blank screen’ problem where there are millions of buttons and options. Sometimes you spend hours working on something before you even see what it looks like.”
Cartwheel is meant to skip that first step, going from scratch to basic movement, so animators who want to create a scene or character don’t have to spend so much time on rudimentary movements like taking a step, throwing a fly or sit.
“We help create a motion that you would get from a motion capture setup or typing [i.e. animating via keyframe] yourself, much faster. There is great value in getting it out of your mind quickly and moving it along. Then you can take it and modify it,” Jarvis said.
The interface is deliberately simple, just one character and a text box. You can write almost anything in there and in a minute or two you’ll have a basic but fluid animation that you can then export to any regular 3D editing suite.
You can also see live 3D examples on their website, such as that of boxing or a little dude doing a solo waltz.
The model they built is completely original, said co-founder Andrew Carr, also the company’s chief scientist.
“We have multiple sources of data, all ethical sources, and our own taggers that flag these movements,” he explained. “Motion is represented as a matrix – this is known in the literature – a matrix with poses, time, speed and so on. So you associate the motion matrix with a textual description of the motion and do fairly standard training on motion language pairs, the same way you create images or videos.”
The animations you get are “on average about 80% of the way there,” Carr estimated. Jarvis said it can produce impressive professional-level results, “and sometimes it’s unfortunate.” But it’s much faster and simpler than a traditional animation workflow, especially in environments where there are multiple artists working on a process and even small tweaks need to move up and down the line.
The models they use aren’t even that big, meaning they’re cheaper to run and could potentially be hosted locally.
“Actually, that’s pretty cool,” Carr said. “For a video model, you’re predicting 2,000×2,000 pixels, each frame for 60 frames per second… that’s such a huge thing to wrangle. What we envision is an order of magnitude or greater. it can run on the CPU or on older GPUs and we can train the models faster.”
Jarvis even suggested that they may eventually be able to render new or modified animations on the fly, a holy grail for interactivity in games where characters are generally limited to a set of canned movements and lines of dialogue. Things like camera movements and angles can also be described intuitively, and non-human characters are also in the spotlight — though the launch is focusing on human animations first, as they’re by far the most frequently requested.
It’s kind of reminiscent of how Wonder Dynamics greatly simplified the process of importing 3D characters, with an emphasis not on replacing animators or artists, but on bypassing the repetitive drudgery of elemental animation. The industry as a whole has embraced AI-adjacent tools as time savers that allow their creatives to focus more on creating. Autodesk certainly has, in any case, as its acquisition of Wonder Dynamics two weeks ago showed.
It might be a little inappropriate to speculate on the ultimate fate of a startup as it takes off, but Cartwheel could follow the same path: it was incorporated as a promising and powerful feature that could prove to be an advantage over competitors. But it could also be built as a platform-agnostic tool and offer a growing suite of services to professional animators.
Either way, it has secured its first round of funding, a $5.6 million seed round led by Accel, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Human Ventures, Heretic VC, MVP Ventures, Correlation Ventures and Pelion VC — and a handful of angels , as is tradition.
For now, Cartwheel is happy to serve as one of the many prosumer apps that animators rely on to get their work done. You can try it yourself if you do sign up for the beta.
“There’s this idea that artificial intelligence is replacing creative work, and as someone who does creative work, it’s like, no! That leads to more animation, more movement, one person doing more,” Jarvis said. “And that will eventually go up the stack to the big studios doing incredible things that we haven’t even thought of. But between the Pixars and the people playing on their phones, there’s a whole bunch of levels, and that’s where a lot of the creative work really goes on.”
