Chris Evans

Frustrating how organizations like @washingtonpost can send me a mail full of ads, with links to articles, I follow one and land on another page full of ads, and then they pay gate the actual story. You got me! Cha-ching! Why is everything today just a scam?

Tomorrow, I start a new full-time position as VP Digital Human Research at Epic Games. (And no, this isn’t an April Fools’ joke.) Today, I’m taking early retirement from Max Planck and will become an Emeritus Director. As an Emeritus Director, I will continue to supervise my remaining students, oversee ongoing projects, and wind down my department over the next couple of years, which is a normal process when a director retires. Being a Max Planck director is the best academic job in the world and it has been my great honor to co-found and help build the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. I love the institute deeply. But my statutory retirement age was looming and I’m not done yet. I’ve been working on capturing and modeling human movement for 30 years and it has gone from a fringe topic to something that works robustly and has immense potential. With AI today, scale matters, and achieving that scale increasingly requires industry. In particular, digital humans are moving from research prototypes to foundational technology across industries. At this point in my career, I want to get this technology into the hands of millions of users, while pushing the frontier of digital humans. I know that this is a challenging time for the games industry. Such times are precisely when people get creative, the industry is open to change, and real innovation can take root. Epic Games is the ideal place for this. The talent is deep, there is a compelling vision for how games will evolve, and the commitment is clear. I’m excited to join them and the rest of the Meshcapade team. There is no good way to express on social media the depth of my gratitude to the Max Planck Society, my co-directors, students, post docs, and staff. It has been an amazing 15-year journey because of you. Thank you.

In the coming days, employers will see a stream of resumes of once-in-a-lifetime quality folks. An important thing to understand is that Epic never lowered our hiring standards as we grew, and the layoff wasn't a performance-based "rightsizing" as companies call it nowadays. It's a sound bet that anyone with Epic Games on their resume is in the top few percent of their discipline.

These are so great, and they don't even touch on the news surrounding OpenAI wanting rotalties on things you make with ChatGPT.

@maxescu you dont show the image inputs or prompts, so it's unclear how you want us to evaluate?

Head-to-head: Kling 2.6 vs Runway Gen-4.5 What do you guys think?

@pcgamer What digital characters are in big budget films where final pixels are from Unreal? I am not sure he could point to any.. I just don't think he fundamentally understands how directors use Unreal in a pipeline, which is a shame. I look up to the dude, he's a legend.

Director Gore Verbinski says Unreal Engine is 'the greatest slip backwards' for movie CGI pcgamer.com/movies-tv/dire…

@claudeai For context, my kids are 4, and yes, I have a rigging/animation background. That said, it won’t be long before AI is selecting the best features from existing tools and pooling proven patterns from software it’s already generated.

While playing Arc Raiders I conversationally created an app with @claudeai to debug some skel generation ML papers it was testing for me. We aren't ready for this. My kids will not buy software like Photoshop, software will be ephemeral. Invoked on demand for the task at hand.

@IsThisA3DModel @kiaran_ritchie How long do you think before AI does all the things you're mentioning? In the US, capitalism is like nuclear fuel for AI. There are tons of companies listening to feedback like yours and racing to make the AI better to "add shareholder value". (layoff humans) It's depressing.

Do you genuinely not recognize how this took the intention of your painting and turned it to slop? It completely misinterpreted the snake head. It put a hole through the entire mouth. It also made the forms entirely flat. If a 3D artist sculpted this they would have intentionally added dimension so the character looked good from every angle. They would know what you were trying to go for. Instead you got an algorithm making arbitrary decisions that decimated your creative intent and spit out something stiff, boring and soulless. And as we said taking this and trying to make it better is starting from the point of polishing a turd. If you blocked in some basic primitive shapes you would be miles ahead on making something better.

Nope. It's because visuals don't create emotional impact on their own. It's the story in combination with good acting, editing, pacing, lighting and direction. AI hasn't changed the fundamentals of filmmaking at all. Not one bit.

@techartonline I am getting similar results with #UniRig. It leaves limbs with no joints, it maybe adds a few joints in one tentacle. The skinning also has a ton of artifacts. It's not as solid as non ML approaches, I was expecting more. And it took a full day to get it running on Windows.

UniRigテスト。さすがにこの子はいい感じにスケルトンは入らなかった...。Houdiniでglbで出力してBiharmonicCaptureでウェイト付けの方が綺麗だなぁ。

This is easily one of the best looking VR games out there

Looking great!

Working with #Claude at times feels like onboarding a junior. "Are you sure you checked your work like we discussed?" :D

@EHuanglu But the Ai facial expressions and acting are a lot different. The brow is furrowed a lot more. It's less the acting transfer but more how it thinks the other actress would act it. And this is the original voice, not a synthesized voice, right?

we are so cooked AI now can replace actor from any film.. talking, acting, emotion and any subtle details can be copied perfectly.. its over for Hollywood here's how to do in 5 mins:

Welcome! Why does my local airport, which gets tens of millions in tax subsidies, charge families and the infirm 7 dollars to use a luggage cart? @RDUAirport this is heartless capitalism at its best.

@elmonx_official @bnrealwithu @jacobelmon @thekidarcade @MA_Deadline @VeVeMagic @MrMC1_eth @DrPhygital @claritzhalatina @Namecoast @Anonh4Life @Fro_Clover I hear you, but Bridgeman Images doesn't own the works, they lost a lawsuit specifically about this, right? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman….

We create verified digital references, working directly with artists, estates, and Bridgeman Images. With Munch’s The Scream lithograph, we even worked with pieces not on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, capturing high-quality scans and angles most reproductions don’t show. Even if the museums themselves did some of this work, it would not matter in your case it is about curation, provenance, and a reference version collectors can actually trust. Take it as you will 😱

I just spent a moment viewing the Sistine Chapel ceiling via the @elmonx_official app & I’m genuinely in awe. 🤯🤩 The resolution and detail are extraordinary. It feels less like viewing and more like being there. This is something every digital collector needs to experience.

@elmonx_official @bnrealwithu @jacobelmon @thekidarcade @MA_Deadline @VeVeMagic @MrMC1_eth @DrPhygital @claritzhalatina @Namecoast @Anonh4Life @Fro_Clover Just to make sure I understand. Not trying to be rude. I could also sell identical works on the block chain, how is this canonical verifiable ownership? Is it the ownership of a numeric hash that is attached to a jpg you have that's different than a hash of the same jpg I have?

@elmonx_official @bnrealwithu @jacobelmon @thekidarcade @MA_Deadline @VeVeMagic @MrMC1_eth @DrPhygital @claritzhalatina @Namecoast @Anonh4Life @Fro_Clover Lol. This sounds like AI word salad. You can't canonically own something in the public domain. Another company could put an image of michelangelo's same work up as an nft. So someone is selling pub domain jpgs? At least digital trading cards are copywriten.

@BrianRoemmele I've seen this all day. Does anyone have a link ro the source? Just seems weird to keep seeing it sans any info about who made it and how.

I’m sorry. Doing my best to prepare you for what I have seen ahead.

@VRCinDC That's a weird project to brag about. They destroyed all of Michelangelo's a secco painting. They literally wiped eyeballs off of figures leaving hollow sockets.

Here is the successful restoration of the Sistine Chapel in the 1980s. Centuries of smoke exposure, animal wax, and other contaminants made the fine details of Michelangelo’s frescos much harder to see. It required the collaboration of art historians, scientists, and artists.

nytimes.com/2025/08/12/wor… via @nytimes This is just the latest of botched restorations, especially in Spain, where is much need for better regulations on art restorations