AI Animation Tutorial ｜ Psychedelic Morphing with Ganbreeder)

I'm going to show you how to quickly and easily make these types of animations using GANbreeder and GANtools. This is GANbreeder.app, the best place on the internet to make your own psychedelic AI monstrosities. It's a collaborative art project by Joel Simon where, as he describes, images are bred by having children mixing with other images and being shared via their URL. GANbreeder presents you with a series of images that other users have bred. Each one is a combination of different elements that the network has been trained to replicate, like dog, burger, jellyfish, building, and they call those elements genes. And each image is a kind of Frankenstein using many of those genes. Let's take a closer look at this one. Underneath it are three children made from that image. They contain similar genes to the parent, but in slightly different ratios, like a random mutation. We can click on a child and it will create a new generation based on that child's traits. If we keep clicking, we can see certain traits becoming more or less prominent based on our selection, much like how natural selection works. If we keep clicking on one to look more like a cat, it will start to look more and more like a cat and less like that flower. We can also select how similar or different the children are going to be. If we make it really similar, the children are going to look fairly close to the parent. But if we bump the difference all the way up, they're going to start to look more different. If you're going to edit genes, we can see what elements this image is made from. So this one looks like it's part Pomeranian, part Siamese cat, and part daisy. With the maturity of its genes being from a Siamese cat. We can adjust these ratios and make a specific child with those traits. So let's increase the amount of daisy slightly and just decrease the amount of Siamese cat and see how that looks. Alright, that's looking more and more like a flower and less and less like a cat. And we can also add in extra genes. So let's go to select a new gene, let's add a food, and let's scroll down, let's add some cauliflower. And let's see what this looks like with more cauliflower. You know, can't argue with that, that's much more like a cauliflower. Let's make it even more like a cauliflower. There we are, hardly looks like a cat at all now. And if we go to the crossbreed tab, we can also crossbreed the other images from Ganbreeder. So we can either enter the URL from another Ganbreeder image or select an image to mix that I've already favorited. I like the burger, so let's mix it more with the burger. And now we can see additional images of this cat slowly turning into a burger. And the beauty with this type of morph is that each of these in between isn't just a random mash of pixels. They all stand alone as an image that makes sense, kind of, even if it's quite strange and disturbing. You can also see the lineage of an image by clicking this button up here. Now if we scroll down, we can see back through all the generations, where we clicked and to where it got started. It's great fun to just play around on Ganbreeder, see what other people have made and see what you can add to it. Now these images are only 512 pixels by 512 pixels wide. You can save a higher resolution image, but you only get 50 of those before you have to upgrade. Which does only cost $5 for unlimited downloads. So how do we animate all of this? Now I started by doing it manually. So I'd go to an image, right click, save that image as, and in a new folder call it 01. Then I would edit the genes very slightly, make a new child, save that image as 02, adjust that image's genes, and repeat this until I had enough images to make a decent sequence. I tried for at least 20. Then I would go into After Effects, go to file, import, find where those images were, and make sure that I clicked import as JPEG or image sequence. Then I import, and you'd end up with this. And this one's only 5 images long, so that's why it's so short. Here are my first experiments using that method. This is the first one I did, which is just a bubble changing shape, not too interesting. This one started as this sort of beautiful looking, sort of cabbage-y looking butterfly, flower thing. And slowly devolved into this furry, colourful mass. It kind of looked like stop motion though, so I think this is kind of interesting. This one is where it started to get really interesting. This is the panda burger. So I got this image, which was half panda, half burger at the start, and then I slowly increased the amount of panda, and then I decreased the amount of panda, and increased the amount of burger. And this one I thought was really fun. Then I tried this one, which is more abstract and a bit more random. The images are pretty different to each other, so it does look a bit more hectic, and less smooth, and morphing and evolving. This one had the traits of a cat and a tarantula. So I kind of just mixed between going from cat, and then going back to tarantula. This sort of in-between mash, where it's just a ball of fur and spidering legs, very unsettling. And then this is one where I kind of just morphed smoothly between a lot of things. And this is what I really liked. Especially where everything is kind of centered, and you just see the middle and the background morph, and there's not much movement. That had a cool effect. Now these definitely were very cool, but manually saving each one took a lot of time. And I promised a quick and easy solution at the start of the video, so here's how we automate that process. I came across this program called Gantools, which is made by VEE9AHD1, which automates almost that entire process. This works on Mac and PC, probably Linux as well, and all links are in the description. And fair warning, figuring out how to install and launch this pushed my animator's brain to its limit. I gave up twice during the process. I'll give you a rundown of the installation, but there are detailed instructions on this GitLab that is linked below. I got it to work eventually, following these instructions exactly, but I honestly didn't know what I was doing for most of that part, so I don't think I can help much with troubleshooting. So here's how you install it. First you have to install the latest version of Python, and make sure that it is a 64-bit release, and you can get that from, you know, python.org. Then you need to install the latest version of Git, which you can get from here. And then you need to install Gantools itself, which you do from your computer's command line. So you do feel a bit like a hacker doing it. You can open your command line by pressing your Windows key and R at the same time on your keyboard, and then clicking OK to open command.exe. And if you're on a Mac, just run terminal from your application's utilities directory. And then install it by pasting this bit of code from the GitLab into your command line. Now once Gantool is installed, it is smooth sailing, I promise. From here, we simply copy this code into the command line. The areas I've highlighted in red are what you should change. The username and password are the ones you use to log in on GANbreeder, nframes is the number of frames that you would like it to export, and these keys here are the keyframes that we're going to use to morph between. And those codes come from the last section of the URL over here in GANbreeder. So let's pick four images to morph between. We've got this lovely flowery-looking shape here, we've got this derpy-looking cougar which looks like it's been poorly taxidermied, then we've got another colourful flower shape, and then finally we'll morph back into this concerned dog. So let's copy their codes and paste that into this code here. And let's make the number of frames 160. I like to write this in a separate text editing app and copy it into the command line because writing directly into the command line scares me, and here I can see if I've missed a space or made some sort of other error here. So let's copy this, and let's paste that into our command line. We press enter, and it will start to do its thing. It will blend between those images and download them as an image sequence. Into your user folder, you can add any number of images as keyframes. Just make sure to increase the nframes number if you want it to be longer. Now the render time is pretty darn quick. It's taking about one second per frame, so it doesn't take long at all. Once it's finished, it'll say done, and you can check that it's written all the images to that folder. I'm going to copy all of those and place them somewhere more appropriate. Then when we import that as an image sequence into After Effects, you get this. Pretty crazy. I really like how the dog sort of expands up then shrinks down. And it looks very bizarre. And here are some of my other experiments I did. This one was using jellyfish and flower genes, and this one kind of looks like it's rendered in a 3D animation software. And I kind of like that look. This one is the longest morph one I did. And this one is pretty hypnotizing, I think. Especially this morph between the mushroom and the frog. I think this one's pretty cool. And this is a cauliflower dog burger as well, which I think looks really interesting. Especially as these sort of eyes come in and out of this little section here. Here's one I tried that had a person in it, and this one looked very horrifying. This one looks really weird when there's a person in there. So if you want weirdness, add a person in. This is another abstract one, and this might be my favourite. I love all the colours in this one, and how all the shapes seem to morph and breathe into each other. And this one is probably most similar to high-intensity psychedelic visuals. Here's another fun one of a monkey morphing into a pug, and then into a cup of coffee. This one had a more painterly kind of look, which is pretty interesting. And this one just kind of looks like this sea creature morphing through a whole bunch of different environments. Which I think is pretty neat. This one looks pretty terrifying, and is probably too intense even if you are sober. This one is just another mash of some random images I found. And this one is pretty cool. I especially like this sort of explosion of red that you get near the start here. Right here. This one builds and morphs really nicely, and I kind of like how this one evolves towards the back half here. It almost looks like an intense time-lapse of maybe an undersea piece of coral or plant or something. And one last dog burger, because I think that dogs and burgers work really well, and it's just funny. And Gambreeder is getting an update soon, and it will soon be called Artbreeder. Now this is going to automate a lot of these processes that I've been through, including more models to work with, as well as style transfer and uploading your own images, and animation. So animating these might get much, much easier. You might not even have to install Gantt tools. I have signed up for the beta, so I will be making a video about that and sharing more AI madness as soon as I can. I've made a short playlist of some related videos that I think you'll enjoy if you've made it this far. I'll see you in the next video, and please consider subscribing if you'd like more of these videos every week.