A New Tool Aimed at Solving Synthetic Filmmaking Is Being Unwrapped at Autodesk

A shot from an AI film after Autodesk Flow Studios' new 3D tool has been deployed. Autodesk Flow Studio

One of the Hollywood’s preferred AI studios is launching a set of tools it says can give directors a new level of control over shots in AI. L.A.-based Autodesk Flow Studio is unveiling a program Tuesday that adds 3D shooting and editing to prompt-based images. The product, a combo package called 3D Editor + Canvas, essentially combines typical AI generation (which tends to happen in 2D) with the more advanced CG world (which tends to happen in 3D). The system breaks down into two parts. Canvas employs a broad set of AI models in the way tools from Luma, OpenArt and Runway do. 3D editor, though, adds an element reserved for postproduction tools like Unreal Engine, which typically is used by highly specialized CG professionals and isn’t feasible for many AI filmmakers. In practical terms, this means that rather than trying to prompt a scene and crossing their fingers elements like point-of-view and depth align with their mental vision, an AI filmmaker can go in and manipulate the images in a 360-degree way as they would real actors on a set. “We’ve seen a lot of these AI models get better, but they’re really focused on 2D, and as filmmakers we want to control things in 3D — we want to be precise,” said Nikola Todorovic, the company’s co-founder, which was previously known as Wonder Dynamics. The program seeks to solve one of the main problems with AI filmmaking, which seeks to create 3D scenes, including in live action, without ever breaking out from the 2D confines of a laptop. Todorovic showed off a number of use cases in an online demo, including dropping an AI-generated character into an existing world and manipulating the character accordingly and, on the other hand, taking an existing character and shaping an environment around them. He envisions actors moving around an empty space that then can easily be dropped into far-flung settings where they interact with other elements and characters, a process that is beginning to be known by some as “performance transfer.” (You can see a before here and the after above).

A demonstration of Autodesk’s new program.

AI filmmaking has been inhibited by a number of challenges, from the roulette-like nature of shots — regenerating scenes over and over again until they approximate what a director has in their minds is a crude, 1.0 solution to a problem that doesn’t exist with physical filmmaking — to an uncanny valley of some facial expressions and movements. If you were trying to generate five minutes of say, The Odyssey, “you could sit and say this looks great but then you want to get a camera tight on Frame 10 and an actor looking up on Frame 20, and these are the details where it breaks down now,” Todorovic says. “We think we can help solve that.” The company makes its tools available in enterprise packages or studios and a lower tier for social media and other content creators. Most studios are using AI for various scenes in the films and TV shows; Netflix recently revealed it had used generative AI in 300 projects, likely with the help of March acquisition Interpositive as well as Autodesk Flow Studio, which worked on the streamer’s 2025 Russo Bros. movie The Electric State. The company has deals with many studios as well, as filmmakers try to generate more extravagant shots at lower costs. How much studios can push the bounds of what consumers will accept from these AI shots, however, is an open question. In this light, tech advancements like Tuesday’s announcement represent an attempt to limit the differentiation from traditional filmmaking — and consumer fallout in the process.