AniBot Roadmap - cost breakdown

We have come up with a preliminary roadmap for the future of AniBot. Without my time, we appear to be able to get this done with about $20K, which is frankly, astounding. Of course, these are rough estimates but since we have done this before, we are confident in our ability to deliver.

AB Roadmap

Cost breakdown

Proposed

Goal Time required (hrs) Rate Cost

Hire Business dev person 40 25 $1,000

Prototype producing output 20 25 $500

Import CM rigs and auto map 20 35 $700

Hire artists to create meshes 50 20 $1,000

Create music parser 30 35 $1,050

Create interface/dev Shot Sheet 30 25 $750

Add: Camera tracking 5 25 $125

Add: Camera movement 5 25 $125

Add: Complex destruction 30 35 $1,050

Add: Smoke, explosions, fire 20 35 $700

Add: .CSV data vis parser 30 30 $900

Add: Set pieces 40 30 $1,200

Create shot templates 60 25 $1,500

Create Mobile apps 200 30 $6,000

Create lighting rigs 30 35 $1,050

Create mass art asset import 30 25 $750

3D Art asset previews on UI 20 25 $500

Projects Total $18,900 Jason working full time (6 months) $30,000

Variety ad, PR releases, social media marketing/PR $3,000 Total Cost $51,900

Note:

With Jason full time and managing the team, most of these tasks can run concurrently.

Total calendar time to complete the above (without new mobile app): 3 months

With Jason part time and managing the team, tasks may have to be synchronized and work will go much slower. Total calendar time to complete (without mobile app): 6 months

Project task breakdowns:

Hire Business dev person

The purpose of this person is to set up meetings with investors, videogame companies, animation studios, and musicians to see if they want to use our services, how, and potential investors. List of targets:

Bethesda Studios

Ubisoft

EA

Activision

Pixar

Disney

Illumination

Sony Animation

Prototype producing output

The prototype is up and running but is not sending the output to a Google Drive/Youtube channel. We need to investigate why and fix. Also we will be doing a series of end to end tests to verify it’s working fully and account creation, etc. is working.

Import CM rigs and auto map to mesh

We will import Carnegie Mellon’s extensive public animation library and rig these animations to meshes. This has been done many times in videogames and should be fairly straightforward, we just need to find someone who has done it before.

Hire 5 different artists to create meshes for rigging

We need to have various meshes created (all simple/low poly) in order to test the auto mesh mapping and have some art assets ready to go as examples before mass import. Target meshes include:

Godzilla

Mechagodzilla

King Kong

Mecha King Kong

Mickey Mouse (to be used after 2024 expiration)

Astronaut

Helicopters

Jets

Tanks

City buildings

Army men (plastic green toys)

Hector/Achilles/Diomedes/Odysseus

Athena/Aphrodite/Apollo/Ares/Zeus

Wolf Boy/hot Dog/other Max characters

Create music parser

One major first feature of AniBot will be the ability to take any piece of music (or sound file) and create a video from it automatically. We need to build the actual parser (probably based on an existing python library) that will timestamp “interesting features” of the sound file and create a shot sheet automatically. The second part of this will be based on the “Dream Mode” that is currently complete. We also need to add the UI to StoryMaker or the AniBot server somewhere.

Create interface/dev flow for new Shot Sheet features

When we capture VFX’s artists scripts and new features to add to the shot sheet, we need a process that uses the server UI to upload scripts and assign them names and add them to the functionality of storymaker, the shot sheets, and the Animation Brain. This project will encompass all of this functionality to set it up for scaling once we have many artists uploading. This work will enable all of the “Add:” projects below.

Add: Camera tracking

We need to add various types of camera tracking to Animation Brain and Storymaker. This exists already on the shot sheet and has some Animation Brain but it needs to be added to and tested.

Add: Camera movement

We need to add camera movement, not just tracking. This would be zooms, lateral moves, pans, etc.

Add: Complex destruction

Add more complex destruction to the VFX library. This will take the form of several scripts from probably different artists. It will certainly include mesh deformation, collisions, physics, particle effects, simulations, etc. We can test this with the Godzilla models.

Add: Smoke, explosions, fire

We have some smoke and fire effects already, we need to add to these and test them. Explosions will be more complex and involve aspects of the destruction simulations above.

Add: .CSV data vis parser

Data visualization should be an early easy feature to add. We will add the ability to upload a .CSV, identify column labels, object classes to represent the data, X/Y/Z calculations, camera movement, etc. Once this is complete anyone with data that is in a .CSV format (or possibly just typed into an interface) can produce top quality data viz.

Add: Set pieces

This is already a feature of Asset Manager, but we need to import some sets and place objects/actors on them and test the process. When this is complete we will be able to import sets/maps and place actors on them. This may require some pathfinding eventually, but just placing actors on a set instead of generating the layered background will save a lot of time.

Create shot templates

We need many shot templates to greatly speed up the creations process and also train the Dream Mode/shot sheet creator.

Create Mobile apps

Once we have the prototype working well and know what we are doing, and have the backend and delivery tested, we should create a more user friendly App that can be published to the App Store/Play store. This is a nice to have stretch goal and will likely go hand in hand with a redesign and be subject to lessons learned from the other projects.

Create Lighting Rigs

Since we are capturing mood, we need to create rigs that go along with the moods, as well as additional lighting rigs for things like sunsets, traffic going by a window, eerie shadows, etc.

Create mass art asset import/verification

Superseding the existing mass art asset import, we need to create a secure process to add any clients art assets to the Asset Manager. This may come with some new work, such as security protocols and IP control, pointing the asset manager to a secure cloud host (the connection to which could be severed by a client), or even local files. This project will provide art asset protection and comfort to clients. We also need to figure out if there is an automated way to make sure that art assets are coming in the the AniBot standards in place, or a methodology to verify this.

3D Art asset previews on UI

We already have the ability to see images, videos and music, but we need to add the ability to preview art assets when in Asset Manager or StoryMaker.