Image Kitchen was founded in August 2024 as a fully remote studio with artists based in the greater Los Angeles area.
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Suzi Little is an accomplished artistic supervisor, 3D generalist and character effects specialist who has worked on blockbusters, television, games and commercials.
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Cherie Rye brings both artistic and technical chops to the table, having served in various positions as effects lead, 3d generalist and pipeline developer for both large and small studios.
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Collaboration
While at Ericsson, Suzi and Cherie were tasked with creating a series of portraits for our machine learning research team. Moreover, they needed to create a set of components that could be auto-combined to produce a set of unique portraits, like a digital version of "Mr. Potato-Head." The "portraits" also included facial landmark data for both machine learning training and checking. The three guiding principles for this endeavour were:
- Variety
- Flexibility
- Volume
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Our dynamic duo introduced variety into the portraits by changing the following:
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Flexibility came in the form of a system for controlling aspects for a set of portraits. For example, if a researcher specifies brown eyes, all the portaits will have some shade of brown for their eyes. If, for example, the researcher wants to control hair color instead, then eye color will be random within a sufficiently realistic range.
Regarding volume, since the data was intended for machine learning purposes, we needed to be able to generate thousands of these portraits. The quality needed to be good enough for the machines to "recognize" a face.
The system itself was created using Python and the Blender API, with a rendering options controller in json format.