Ubisoft shows off ZooBuilder, a prototype AI designed to animate animals

Ubisoft has shown off its ZooBuilder AI tool, a project that the publisher has mentioned before in its early stages. It is essentially software that can be fed video footage of animals, which it will then analyse frame-by-frame, before constructing animated skeletons from the visual data. This thing builds lions. Kinda.

« It all started when we did not find a volunteer to setup the mocap suit on a bear, » tweeted the Ubisoft La Forge account. But the ZooBuilder project has been going on in the background of the publishing giant for many years, first publicly mentioned in 2020 when it was presented at a specialist animation symposium. The project began at Ubisoft China’s AI & Data Lab but is now being developed at Ubisoft La Forge, which is a Canadian studio dedicated to building technical prototypes based on the latest academic research.