Latest news with #Cartwheel
Fast Company
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
Cartwheel uses AI to make 3D animation 100 times faster for creators and studios
After years of AI disrupting industries and streamlining repetitive workflows, the technology is now poised to transform animation. In 2024, director and writer Tom Paton's AiMation Studios released Where the Robots Grow, a fully AI-animated feature film. Everything from animation and voice acting to music was generated using AI, at a cost of just $8,000 per minute—totaling around $700,000 for the 87-minute production. While IMDB reviewers criticized the film as 'soulless and uninspired,' it proved that AI can deliver full-length animated features at a fraction of traditional budgets. But it's not just filmmakers driving this shift. Indie game developers want to prototype characters and worlds in hours, not weeks. TikTok and social media creators are looking to animate original characters without studio resources. Major brands, too, seek emotionally resonant storytelling without monthslong timelines or ballooning 3D animation costs. The challenge: most 3D animation tools are still slow, technical, and expensive. Hoping to remove these barriers, a team of developers from OpenAI, Google, Pixar, and Riot Games launched Cartwheel, an AI-powered 3D animation platform. Cartwheel promises to make high-quality 3D character animation 100 times faster, simpler, and more affordable. Users can record motion with a smartphone, describe a scene with a text prompt, or pull from a library of expressive 3D movements. The platform's AI transforms input into production-ready animations. Artists can refine them in Cartwheel or export into tools like Unity, Unreal Engine, Maya, or Blender—without disrupting their pipeline. The startup was cofounded by Andrew Carr, a former OpenAI scientist who helped develop Codex and ChatGPT's code generation, and Jonathan Jarvis, former creative director at Google Creative Lab and founder of the animation studio Universal Patterns. The two met after OpenAI, intrigued by Jarvis's concept for a generative animation tool, introduced him to Carr, who had just left the company to explore how AI could make animation more accessible. 'I had a unique job, where I used animation to share complex research concepts clearly within Google, and make prototypes that couldn't yet be built by software. Andrew always wanted to animate, and later invented a way to 'talk' to Blender, a popular open-source 3D software, with computer code,' says Jarvis. 'We always wanted to build tools to help others get ideas moving and sensed the potential to animate in new ways using gen AI, that it would be centered around creative control.' After two years in stealth, Cartwheel is gaining traction. The company recently closed a $10 million funding round led by Craft Ventures, with support from WndrCo (Jeffrey Katzenberg), Khosla Ventures, Accel, Runway, and Tirta Ventures (Ben Feder), bringing total funding to $15.6 million. Over 60,000 animators, developers, and storytellers joined Cartwheel's wait-list during stealth. Early adopters from DreamWorks, Duolingo, and Roblox are already using the platform. 'All of our AI models are developed in-house. Behind the scenes, we've employed careful software engineering to ensure that all the pieces of our system work together in a way that can be plugged into existing animation pipelines,' Carr says. 'Ensuring that the generated animation is properly scaled, moves naturally, and remains consistent throughout has been one of our biggest challenges.' A Creator-First AI Animation Tool While the generative AI field is increasingly crowded, Cartwheel positions itself differently: not as a replacement for artists, but as a tool that amplifies their creativity. 'Animators and creatives don't care if motion is generated, done by hand, motion-captured, or drawn from a library. They just want it to move to tell their story, make their game, or get their job done,' Jarvis says. 'Our motion models can generate a lot of useful animation quickly, but they can't do everything. That's why we love a hybrid approach. Computers are great at finding patterns, but it's the artist who brings the soul.' A key differentiator for Cartwheel is its team. Carr and Jarvis are joined by industry veterans with experience in film, games, and interactive design. Catherine 'Cat' Hicks, former Pixar animation director on Coco, Inside Out, and Toy Story 3, serves as head of Animation Innovation. Neil Helm, head of Interactive Animation, worked on crowd systems at Pixar for Turning Red, Lightyear, Up, and Inside Out 2. The platform's design is shaped by Steven Ziadie, former Sony and Riot designer, while production is led by Buthaina Mahmud, who helped define Unity's real-time animation workflows and developed shaders used in the Spider-Verse films. 'We reached out, and some reached out to us. Over time, we realized we all shared the goal to make storytelling faster, easier, and more powerful,' Carr and Jarvis tell Fast Company. 'Culture is being shaped in increasingly dynamic, interactive, and immersive spaces like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox —all animation-driven experiences. We're building tools for where animation is headed, and that's resonating with industry veterans.' User feedback has helped shape Cartwheel's interface. 'We began with a focus on text to animation. In beta, we learned that while that's compelling in many situations, often folks want to browse motions for inspiration, use video reference, or act out the motion themselves—so we've moved to a multimodal interface,' Carr says. What's Next for Cartwheel? High-quality animation data remains scarce, with most data sets proprietary or lacking in diversity and detail. To address this, Cartwheel is using synthetic data—AI-generated animations that mimic real-world motion—to train and refine its models. 'The next generation of AI companies has to find and curate the hard data types, and do the hard work to refine it and make it useful to people in that field. That's where the value is,' Carr says. 'While at OpenAI, I worked on the science of data quality and was able to generate millions of dollars of model improvements with just a few lines of code. We are following the same path at Cartwheel to ensure we produce the styles, qualities, and delightfulness in our motion data that artists need.' With fresh funding, Cartwheel plans to deepen R&D, grow its team, and bring its platform to broader markets. 'Over the next 12 months, we aim to be a catalyst, enabling both large and small animation projects to flourish,' Jarvis says. 'Ensuring ethically sourced data that empowers artists is fundamental to our approach. We are a team of artists building tools for artists.'
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
AI Animation Firm Cartwheel Emerges From Beta; Pixar Alums In Exec Ranks, Jeffrey Katzenberg's WndrCo Among Backers
EXCLUSIVE: AI firm Cartwheel has emerged from closed beta, promising to help make the 3D animation process smoother and accessible to a wider range of creative workers. The company was co-founded by Jonathan Jarvis and Andrew Carr. Jarvis, who is CEO, spent nearly seven years at Google and also runs animation and gaming studio Universal Patterns. Carr, who is Chief Scientist, interned at Google and later worked at OpenAI. More from Deadline Generative AI Studio Promise Wins Backing From Google; Peter Chernin's North Road Company Also Ups Investment Conan O'Brien Joins 'Toy Story 5' SAG-AFTRA Responds To Fortnite's AI-Generated Darth Vader Feature With Unfair Labor Complaint Staffers at the company include Pixar alums Catherine Hicks and Neil Helm, along with veterans of Riot Games and Sony's Spiderverse franchise. Along with its emergence from beta, the company revealed $10 million in new funding led by David Sacks' VC firm Craft Ventures, bringing its total funding to $15.6 million. Participants in the latest funding round include existing investors like Katzenberg's WndrCo, Ben Feder's Tirta, Accel, Khosla Ventures, Human Ventures and established AI firm Runway. Cartwheel focuses on 3D animation, in particular aiding the process of how animated characters move, and says 60,000 people have signed up for the waitlist to gain access to its set of tools. During the closed beta, the company's tools were used by creatives at companies including DreamWorks, Duolingo, Sony and Roblox. The company says it can turn video, text and large motion libraries into production-ready 3D character animations that can be moved, edited and downloaded directly into current workflows. Along with prototyping ideas or refining their work, animators can also tap Cartwheel's library for a motion to fit or inspire their scene. Even non-pros can use Cartwheel to generate video clips, and designers and developers can turn their character animations into files to be added to apps or websites. The co-founders compared their company's impact on the field of animation to that of the iPhone on photography. 'We've developed a new way to simplify the animation process, putting creatives in the drivers' seat as they dramatically accelerate their workflows, eliminate tedious tasks, free up budget for more creative exploration, and enhance control over their final products,' they said. The company's impact will be felt across animated films, anime, gaming, advertising and storyboarding, social media and other areas, they said. At Pixar, Hicks was animation director and worked on more than 15 movies, including the Oscar-winning Inside Out, Coco and Toy Story 3. She is Cartwheel's head of animation innovation. Helm, who is the head of interactive animation at Cartwheel, focused on motion and crowd elements at Pixar, working on Inside Out 2, Turning Red, Lightyear, and the third and fourth Toy Story installments. 'Cartwheel has changed the entire paradigm of animation by introducing a new toolset that builds on the artistry of animation, making productions more efficient so more stories can be told,' Feder, Managing Partner at Tirta Ventures. 'Where concepts could take days, weeks, or months to visualize, Cartwheel's technology makes the process virtually instant, unleashing an entirely new world of storytelling possibilities.' Best of Deadline Sean 'Diddy' Combs Sex-Trafficking Trial Updates: Cassie Ventura's Testimony, $10M Hotel Settlement, Drugs, Violence, & The Feds All The 'Mission: Impossible' Movies In Order - See Tom Cruise's 30-Year Journey As Ethan Hunt Denzel Washington's Career In Pictures: From 'Carbon Copy' To 'The Equalizer 3' Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
Forbes
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
AI Startup Cartwheel, Led By OpenAI And Google Veterans, Raises $10 Million To Simplify 3D Animation
Founders Andrew Carr (L) and Jeffrey Jarvis (R) Cartwheel Cartwheel, a new 3D animation company founded by OpenAI scientist Andrew Carr and former Google creative director Jonathan Jarvis, has come out of stealth with a browser-based animation platform designed to dramatically accelerate the creation of character animation for games, films, advertising, and social content. The company also announced a $10 million funding round led by Craft Ventures, bringing its total raised to $15.6 million. Cartwheel's tools allow users to generate rigged 3D character animations from text, video, or motion library prompts. The platform supports professional workflows, including exports to Maya and Unreal, but also includes a simplified interface designed to let less technical users build animated scenes and characters directly in the browser. Cartwheel's technology reduces the time required for common animation tasks from hours or days to minutes, enabling creators to experiment, iterate, and deploy animation assets at production scale. 'There's this core frustration animators face with today's software,' Carr told me. 'You need huge teams and weeks of effort to do things that should be fast. We wanted to solve that.' Carr previously worked at OpenAI on code generation tools and saw the potential for language models to unlock animation workflows. Jarvis, a designer who helped launch Google Creative Lab and later led the animation-focused studio Universal Pattern. He and Carr started the company together in 2023. The platform supports text-to-motion generation, motion remixing, and in-browser character rigging. Users can search from a curated library of animations or type prompts such as 'cast a wizard spell' or 'do a silly dance,' and receive rigged motion sequences that can be applied to custom or generated characters. Animations are fully editable and exportable, and the system is being designed to integrate into industry-standard environments like Unity and Unreal. Cartwheel's team includes veterans from Pixar, Riot Games, Sony, and Unity. Animation director Catherine Hicks, whose credits include Coco, Toy Story 3, and Inside Out, has joined as head of animation innovation. Neil Helm, known for leading crowd animation on Inside Out 2, Turning Red, and Up, has been named head of interactive animation. They are helping refine Cartwheel's tools and rigging systems from an animator's perspective. The company's early access program attracted more than 8,000 beta users, including creatives from DreamWorks, Roblox, Duolingo, and Take-Two. Many of those users, according to Carr, were exploring how Cartwheel could accelerate background and crowd animation, rapid prototyping, or previsualization tasks traditionally bogged down by time and cost. 'Animation software hasn't really changed in 20 years,' Carr said. 'There's no reason the same rigging or blocking task should take three hours every time.' Cartwheel also includes a character generator trained on licensed 3D assets. Users can upload sketches or models and receive rigged characters in return. The founders were adamant about the importance of training on paid, ethically sourced data, especially as legal scrutiny mounts around AI training practices. Cartwheel enters a growing field that includes Anything World and Wonder Dynamics. Anything World focuses on auto-rigging and animating 3D assets for game engines like Unity and Unreal, offering a large asset library and developer-friendly tools. Wonder Dynamics, now part of Autodesk, enables filmmakers to insert CG characters into live-action footage without traditional motion capture. All are focused on professional animators working primarily on video games, and background characters in commercial animation. Cartwheel's backers include WndrCo, Khosla Ventures, Accel, Tirta, Human Ventures, and Runway, the AI video company. Investors see the technology as applicable beyond media and entertainment, with potential for marketing, education, and e-commerce. The startup's next steps include an API, planned for release later this year, that would allow developers to integrate Cartwheel directly into games or other interactive environments. For now, anyone can sign up and begin animating in the browser at 'The tools of storytelling should be in more hands,' said Carr. 'That's what we're building for.'
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Hotline TNT Announce New Album Raspberry Moon, Share Single: Stream
The post Hotline TNT Announce New Album Raspberry Moon, Share Single: Stream appeared first on Consequence. Hotline TNT have announced their third album, Raspberry Moon. The follow-up to 2023's Cartwheel is out June 20th via Third Man Records, and they've shared lead single 'Julia's War' as an early preview. Watch the accompanying Full Metal Jacket-esque music video below, which features cameos from They Are Gutting A Body of Water, NYC comedian Dan Licata, and more. Raspberry Moon mark's Hotline TNT's first album as a four-piece and was produced with Tenement's Amos Pitsch. Frontman Will Anderson created his previous two records as Hotline TNT with just one producer, and this time his touring band (guitarist Lucky Hunter, bassist Haylen Trammel, and drummer Mike Ralston) joined in on the fun. Get Hotline TNT Tickets Here 'Julia's War' takes its title from TAGABOW's record label, and is complete with a succinct chorus of 'na na nas' not too unlike a sing-a-long at your local pub. 'In a world of half-hearted hooks, and buried-in-the-mix vocals, we had to muster the courage to do what the rest of the shoe gaze community could not… We looked out to the stadium and reassured the audience: Our voices, together, will be heard,' Anderson said in press materials. He continued: 'You've never heard a TNT chorus this straightforward — when we stress-tested it during the writing process, the 'try not to sing along challenge' came back with a 100% fail rate.' Hotline TNT will also head out on a North American tour starting May 1st, playing mostly opening slots for Hippo Campus. Select headline shows will take place in St. Louis, Buffalo, plus, Slow Pulp will join the band at a special Milwaukee stint (get tickets here). Check out Raspberry Moon's album art, tracklist, and Hotline TNT's spring schedule below. Raspberry Moon Artwork: Raspberry Moon Tracklist: 01. Was I Wrong? 02. Transition Lens 03. The Scene 04. Julia's War 05. Letter to Heaven 06. Break Right 07. If Time Flies 08. Candle 09. Dance the Night Away 10. Lawnmower 11. Where U Been? Hotline TNT 2025 Tour Dates: 05/01 — Louisville, KY @ Mag Bar 05/02 — Urbana, IL @ Rose Bowl Tavern 05/03 — St. Louis, MO @ Sinkhole 05/04 — Columbia, MO @ Rose Music Hall 05/06 — Colorado Springs, CO @ Vultures 05/08 — Boise, ID @ The Shredder 05/09 — Portland, OR @ Roseland # 05/10 — Portland, OR @ Roseland # 05/12 — Seattle, WA @ Showbox # 05/13 — Seattle, WA @ Showbox # 05/14 — Vancouver, BC @ Vogue # 05/16 — Sacramento, CA @ Channel 24 # 05/17 — Las Vegas, NV @ Brooklyn Bowl # 05/18 — Phoenix, AZ @ The Van Buren # 05/20 — San Antonio, TX @ Aztec # 05/21 — Austin, TX @ Moody Theater # 05/22 — Dallas, TX @ Bomb Factory # 05/24 — Oklahoma City, OK @ Jones Assembly # 05/25 — Bentonville, AR @ The Momentary # 05/27 — Columbus, OH @ Kemba Live # 05/29 — Grand Rapids, MI @ GLC Live at 20 Monroe # 05/30 — Chicago, IL @ The Salt Shed # 05/31 — Minneapolis, MN @ Surly Brewing # 06/01 — Milwaukee, WI @ Cactus Club + (early and late shows) 06/03 — Buffalo, NY @ Rec Room # = w/ Hippo Campus + = w/ Slow Pulp Hotline TNT Announce New Album Raspberry Moon, Share Single: Stream Jaeden Pinder Popular Posts Kanye West Says Wife Bianca Censori Left Him After Trying to Get Him Committed South Park Tackles Diddy, Ketamine, and Canada in Trailer for Season 27: Watch Bill Burr Confronted Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder at SNL50: "I Hated Your Band" Liam Neeson Lets It All Hang Out in New Trailer for The Naked Gun Reboot: Watch Mariah Carey Mortifies Teenage Son By Crashing His Twitch Stream Brand New's Jesse Lacey Faces New Grooming Allegations Subscribe to Consequence's email digest and get the latest breaking news in music, film, and television, tour updates, access to exclusive giveaways, and more straight to your inbox.
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Tom Horne endorses mental health program for rural schools in Arizona
The Arizona Department of Education has partnered with a provider of remote mental health services to expand access to care for students in rural schools. "Mental health is an essential component of comprehensive school safety, and youth mental health needs have gone up significantly over the past few years in Arizona," state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said in a statement. "We have heard from schools, students, and families that finding timely support has been an ongoing challenge, particularly in rural counties." Interested school districts and charter schools can sign up for the program through Cartwheel, the telehealth company that has contracted with the Department of Education. The program will be available in all of Arizona's rural counties: Apache, Cochise, Coconino, Gila, Graham, Greenlee, La Paz, Mohave, Navajo, Pinal, Santa Cruz, Yavapai and Yuma. There are 250 school districts and charter schools and 200,000 students throughout those counties. Almost 90% of Arizona's communities have a shortage of mental health providers, according to Phoenix Children's Hospital. Globally, one in seven children between the ages of 10 and 19 has a mental disorder, according to the World Health Organization, and in Arizona, the rate of hospitalization for depression and suicidal ideation has increased significantly in recent years, according to Arizona Department of Health Services data. The Cartwheel telehealth program can address mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression and sleep issues. Parental consent is required, and families will be involved throughout the process, which typically involves two to six months of weekly sessions. Longer care is also available. Cartwheel will accept all insurance. The contract between the Department of Education and Cartwheel also ensures funding for uninsured students. Honored: Clarendon Elementary School principal wins $25,000 Milken Educator Award Reach the reporter at ahardle@ or by phone at 480-708-1633. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @AlexandraHardle. This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Tom Horne endorses mental health program for rural Arizona schools
