The company has secured its first round of funding, a $5.6 million seed led by Accel, with participation from several other ventures. The models used by Cartwheel are small and inexpensive to run, potentially allowing for local hosting. The startup is currently focusing on human animations, but plans to expand to non-human characters in the future. Jarvis suggested that the technology could eventually be used to render new or modified animations on the fly, a significant advancement for interactivity in games.
Key takeaways:
- Cartwheel, a startup co-founded by Jonathan Jarvis and Andrew Carr, aims to simplify the process of animating 3D characters by generating basic movements with AI, allowing creators to focus on more expressive tasks.
- The interface is simple, consisting of a character and a text box where users can describe the desired movement. The system then generates a basic but fluid animation that can be exported to any normal 3D editing suite.
- The models used by Cartwheel are relatively small, making them cheaper to run and potentially suitable for local hosting. The system can even run on older CPUs and GPUs, and can train models faster.
- Cartwheel has secured its first round of funding, a $5.6 million seed led by Accel, with participation from several other venture capital firms and angel investors. The startup is currently offering a beta version of its service for testing.