Welcome to this week’s edition of Architecture Insights.

RunwayML is an AI-powered tool that allows users to add motion effects to images and create short videos. In just a few minutes of using it, you can have renderings turned into videos or images that have movement in certain parts.

As always, here is this week’s latest news in the AI world that impacts architects and designers.

News & Updates

1. Adobe releases more AI features to assist with PDFs.

These upgrades are intended to improve the AI’s ability to analyze, summarize, and answer questions you may have about the PDF. Another feature is creating content from the PDF’s context such as emails, and key takeaways.

2. StabilityAI announces and previews Stable Diffusion 3.

This is big news for the open-source world of image generators. It will also mean an upgrade to models such as ControlNet. StabilityAI claims “greatly improved performance in multi-subject prompts, image quality, and spelling abilities” for SB3.

Runway

Setting up Runway is quick and easy and its free version is sufficient for low to frequent use.

Make sure to use "Gen2" to access these features right from their website.

Like most other AI tools you will be given space to make a prompt. This can be in the form of text or, as we will do, an existing image can be uploaded.

There are 2 ways to edit your image.

1. Camera Motion

The camera motion feature creates a video by transitioning between selected points. On our end, all we need to do is set our own settings that dictate in which directions the video will be made.

Horizontal, Vertical, Pan, Tilt, Roll, Zoom.

The image below was our test subject.

These were the settings for the camera motion.

Here is the result.

Although it may not maintain every detail of the building and landscape as it moves around, it still provides a unique perspective of the image and it only took around 2 minutes to upload our image and finish the video.

It's important to note that we attached the videos in this email as a GIF to avoid the need for you to download them. As a result, the quality may not be as good as the original videos. However, Runway's videos are of higher quality than what you see here.

OpenAI's announcement of the most promising AI video tool (Sora) to date was just last week, so these results for Runway are great for now.

2. Motion Brush

Instead of moving the entire image, you can use the motion brush to select a specific area for creating movement while leaving the rest untouched.

In the following image, we brushed over the pool to create a wave-like motion.

Another great result that adds a positive effect to the image.

Other ideas for using the motion tool may be on trees, vehicles, pedestrians, lights, and clouds.

Let us know what you think of Runway and if you are using it in practice or academia.

AI Image of the week

Thank you for reading this week’s issue, check past issues here. Share this newsletter with colleagues, friends, or anyone interested in the combined world of architecture and artificial intelligence.

Until next Friday,

A.I.