Adobe And HKUST Build TransPixar AI, An AI-Powered Transparent Visual Effects Generator

Since the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, the world of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has exploded.

Businesses are finding novel ways to use the technology and enhance how the world works.

From boosting productivity to streamlining operations, from simplifying coding to revolutionizing the entertainment industry, GenAI is ensuring the execution of processes can be made easier, more efficient, and increasingly effective. This becomes even more useful for content creators when such tools are open-source or can be used for free.

Now, researchers from Adobe and HKUST (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) have announced a revolutionary new tool that could further help content creators.

Meet TransPixarAI, an AI-powered transparent visual effects generation system.

This tool allows users to create videos with transparent backgrounds and transparent effects that can be imposed onto other videos without the hassle of having to crop them out—all with simple text-based prompts.

Up until now, users could generate videos using prompts, however, they would come as solid images. This means that users would have to use specialized tools to crop out the parts they want and then add even more effects to stitch it into the video where it will be used.

With the new method, they can simply generate RGBA videos with alpha channels and add the output to their video using basic editing skills.

RGBA stands for Red + Green + Blue (color model) + Alpha, which is a fourth channel that stores transparency and opacity information.

“Developed through a collaborative effort between Adobe and HKUST researchers, TransPixar AI addresses long-standing challenges in the VFX industry,” reads TransPixar AI’s website.

“The system's ability to generate transparent elements with unprecedented accuracy and consistency makes it an invaluable tool for content creators, film studios, and digital artists worldwide.”

Also, on its website sits a video that showcases the transparent video generator’s capabilities, an option for visitors to try out the tool, and a link to the research paper published by the group.


TransPixar AI utilizes a state-of-the-art diffusion transformer architecture, employs Low-Rank Adaptation for consistent RGB and alpha channel generation, produces high quality output videos that enable the seamless integration of transparent elements, and is available as open-source software on GitHub. The research team also made available a demo version on Hugging Face.

The generator can produce high quality outputs despite working on limited training data, which was accomplished by the researchers taking a new approach—instead of building an AI model from scratch, they extended existing video AI models.

As per Luozhou Wang, the lead author and a researcher at HKUST, “We introduce new tokens for alpha channel generation, reinitializing their positional embeddings, and adding a zero-initialized domain embedding to distinguish them from RGB tokens. Using a LoRA-based fine-tuning scheme, we project alpha tokens into the qkv space while preserving RGB quality.”


As for its capabilities, the generator can create a wide range of transparent visual effects that meet the requirements of professional content creators.

It can be used to generate realistic smoke effects, reflections that enhance scene depth, glass effects with accurate light distortion, complex particle effects such as asteroids, and more, all with perfect transparency and natural movement.

TransPixar AI offers a variety of applications across film production, game development, advertising, marketing, storytelling, education, and other industries.

Overall, the generator offers numerous benefits, including reducing the time required to create complex transparent VFX (visual effects), reducing costs, ensuring consistent quality, and providing creative freedom to creators, artists, and designers.

Additionally, it helps address long-standing challenges in the VFX industry.


Have you worked with PNG images where the background is transparent? This tool helps generate video versions of the same style. The difference, however, is that users can generate specific videos based on their requirements, using text-based prompts.

While stock videos with transparent backgrounds currently exist, this tool will allow them to generate pretty much anything they want.

What do you think about Adobe and HKUST’s transparent visual effects generation system? Do you think this tool will be able to revolutionize the entertainment industry further?

Let us know in the comments below!