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Using GANs to Create Fantastical Creatures
- camdenlock 6y agoSo not only will we not have any meaningful local hardware in the future, but games themselves will simply be custom-generated to satisfy the player’s exact desires? Sounds like it would become pretty dull. Art and experiences are interesting because they are unexpected. Experiencing someone else’s unique and surprising artistic voice is what I love most about good games / art experiences.
- Larrikin 6y agoThis seems like a similar comment that would have been made about drum machines. Creative people will always find a way to push the limits of a new technology that makes something difficult suddenly trivial.
- qayxc 6y ago> This seems like a similar comment that would have been made about drum machines I doubt that. Simplified and (semi-)automated instruments have been around for a long time since there is legitimate interest in such tools from musicians. The difference here is that people have a tendency to regard machine generated output as more "correct" (whatever that means). The same psychological mechanisms that make Level 3 autonomy in cars and aeroplanes so dangerous can lead to a future where a closed loop automated content generation (e.g. train the next gen GAN on output from the previous gen GAN) kills all creativity and conditions us to prefer the generated aesthetic.
- randmeerkat 6y agoI’m not sure why you’re being downvoted, it’s a fair concern. I would say any sufficiently advanced system that you’re describing would detect your desire for something unexpected and create something that fit that for you. Ironically you wouldn’t know that it was tailored specifically to you, because it was so precise in evaluating your tastes.
- trevyn 6y agoNo, games and art will be custom-generated to satisfy the designer's exact desires as they do their work, allowing them to more rapidly explore the space of possible expression. Don't worry, it's still dystopian -- games will become exceedingly good and compelling; you won't want to do anything else.
- sgift 6y agoGood and compelling games do not even make my top100 when thinking about dystopia. Or is this some kind of "amusing ourselves to death while the world burns around us" comment?
- danielbarla 6y agoOne way to look at it is that only humans can have a unique and surprising artistic voice, and leave it at that. However, some games can have _extremely_ interesting emerging content, e.g. as seen in Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld. Since much of the content is procedurally generated, at the moment we are left with text descriptions of things. I can easily see a future where the game worlds are automatically fleshed using these types of techniques, and it would be for the better. Also, on a purely economic scale, automating some aspects of art asset creation for games would be a complete game changer. It would probably up the art capabilities of indie game developers quite a bit, although it's hard to predict these types of things (in the sense that it might benefit AAA developers even more - who knows).
- blt 6y agoIt is very much not working for me. I get a mostly-transparent creature. The opaque parts seem to follow the brushstrokes of my drawing. Maybe it is because it was trained on finely detailed material, whereas my drawing was a coarse doodle.
- lopmotr 6y agoYou have to draw solid regions, not an outline.
- n3k5 6y agoI did that and also got inexplicable holes: https://i.paste.pics/8bed0cd17629f0e9c852a24162bf381e.png https://i.paste.pics/8bed0cd17629f0e9c852a24162bf381e.png Otherwise my clumsy, misshapen caricature turned out surprisingly nice. (I mean, relative to how nonsensical its anatomy is.) The shapes are followed very precisely, so yes, blobby input begets blobby output.
- the_only_law 6y agoI get the same issue. I know I'm not even close to a decent artist, but come on, why are my legs transparent: https://imgur.com/a/kb0gWI2 https://imgur.com/a/kb0gWI2
- blt 6y agoI did draw solid regions.
- 1123581321 6y agoCan we look forward to a Netrunner card generator? :) GAN-generated art, name and flavor text, a perhaps more structured rules engine for the card type and behavior, and AlphaZero to play the card in a deck against itself a few thousand times to tune the balance.
- jldugger 6y agoMan, I was really hoping to be the first to pull the trigger on that. But if I'm being honest with myself: I ain't gonna be putting in the time to learn to tensorflow.
- qayxc 6y agoTensorflow (or PyTorch, or any other framework) aren't the problem, though. It's choosing a suitable net architecture, loss function, and training methodology all of which require in-depth knowledge and lots of experimentation. Even after that you're only half way there, because now the fun and exploration is over and the pain begins: finding (and worse even - annotating!) and validating training data. Once this herculean task has been finished, it's time to get your credit card ready and shell out hundreds of dollars/pounds/euros for days of GPU time to train the basic model. With that out of the way, it's time for a little fun to return and finetune your model(s), which usually can be done using even a mediocre desktop PC or laptop. There's a reason you can make serious money with even a comparatively simple and straight forward idea that uses ML and AI to get quality results. It's much, much more involved than just "learning some tensorflow".
- jldugger 6y ago> It's choosing a suitable net architecture, loss function, and training methodology all of which require in-depth knowledge and lots of experimentation. Yes, things have progressed since my time in undergrad studying NNs and such. Presumably the work done on MtG transfers. > Even after that you're only half way there, because now the fun and exploration is over and the pain begins: finding (and worse even - annotating!) and validating training data. Well, for A:NR there's already multiple databases and a thousand cards. That's your training set. Throw in the online league cards if you require more. > It's much, much more involved "learning some tensorflow". I already work in SRE for a huge AI you've heard of, but thanks for the lecture.
- trevyn 6y agoAh, they figured out how to brand the nightmare generator! Example context: "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas run through Google's Deep Dream neural network is pure nightmare fuel" https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/fear-loathing-run-through-google-s-deep-dream-neural-network-pure-nightmare-fuel-10371063.html https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- smcameron 6y agoDo "Manny Manimal, Man of Many Animals!"
- sillysaurusx 6y agoDoes anyone know of work towards automatic 3D model generation and, ideally, rigging for animation? It seems like the future, but it also seems like it’s not getting the attention it should.
- eliaspro 6y agoCheck out https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation
- wbrbr 6y agoThis might interest you: https://dcgi.fel.cvut.cz/home/sykorad/monster_mash https://dcgi.fel.cvut.cz/home/sykorad/monster_mash
- afkqs 6y agoI've been looking for that for the last couple of days and couldn't find much. Great resources linked as comments. I had found that one myself: https://github.com/mishig25/3d-posenet https://github.com/mishig25/3d-posenet
- timavr 6y agoThere are a lot of moving parts. Sculpting, UV Mapping, Rigging, Skinning, Animation, LODs, Baking, Texturing, engine import, lighting, materials. A lot of things can be done procedurally, but going from 2d concept to actual working 3D Character in video game is a long jump. On top of that every game will have very different asset and gameplay requirements.
- sillysaurusx 6y agoI think it might take the form of artist augmentation rather than replacement. Think of it like a new sort of power tool. And it's true there are a lot of steps for triple-A engines, but most gamedevs (like myself, once) simply don't have any art assets, and need them greatly; a tool similar to MSPaint for models might enable the next Notch to emerge more easily. On the other side of it, from the triple-A point of view, automating even one of the steps you mention will be a huge time saver. Artists tend to worry about machines replacing them, but I think it will only unlock more, better art. You'll be able to do so much. So there is a big financial incentive to get this right; the first one to capture the market will be in a strong position.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- drusepth 6y agoTried to draw Patrick Starr. Got a horrible, horrible monster [1]. 10/10, will definitely be drawing more. [1] https://i.imgur.com/yBDW2gd.png https://i.imgur.com/yBDW2gd.png
- watwut 6y agonailed it
- tarruda 6y agoUpon looking at the image, I immediately hear him talking in my head.
- anvi_8 6y agoFantastic
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- anonymfus 6y agoI wonder if you enjoy The Bikini Bottom Horror fanfic
- rirarobo 6y agoActually, not bad for a monster,it looks a lot like the "Oogie Boogie" character from "The Nightmare Before Christmas" [1]. [1] https://i.imgur.com/md9P1lk.png https://i.imgur.com/md9P1lk.png
- Geminidog 6y agoIn the future GANs will replace all of human creativity so much so that humans will spend all of their creative outlets on training GANs and using GANs to do the creation for them.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoA lot of AI/ML technology is (inherently?) self-reinforcing (think product recommendations), so your prediction is not wrong.
- friendlybus 6y agoGANs and computers are mirrors of the engineer's mind. You can only get out some combination of the trained data set and user input. Huamns can produce novel artworks that a computer cannot, usually with more control over the intagibles like creativity and the fundamentals like drawing and perceiving the world.
- Geminidog 6y agoYes, in some point in the future though the amount of output data from GANs trained on Human Data will surpass the amount of output data from humans directly. When that happens people will start training GANs with GAN data. It will become a self feeding loop with humans only curating data. Of course even the curating of the data is ripe for automation via ML.
- CuriouslyC 6y agoYou talk as if a combination of the training space and user input can't be novel. There are a finite number of colors and textures, so if your data set has good coverage (and your model splits hue and luminosity) you could conceivably cover nearly the entire space. That would leave the shape as the differentiator of novelty.
- klmadfejno 6y ago> You can only get out some combination of the trained data set and user input. The same could be said of humans. A lot of humans would say a random piece of quality GAN-generated art is a creative work. They may not say so if they first looked at every piece of training data that went into it. But then, they might not do the same if they looked at every piece of art produced and viewed by a given human artist previously. As a thought experiment, if the line in the sand is whether a computer can generate a piece of art that people think is creative, even with full knowledge of every piece of training data- I think that's not at all difficult to overcome long term. Possibly even with current models.
- teapourer 6y agoIt seems like the drawing has to be very well drawn in order to get decent results.
- felixr 6y agoI agree, my attempt did not yield results anywhere near the examples: https://i.imgur.com/cZUBWzH.png https://i.imgur.com/cZUBWzH.png
- Madzen__ 6y agoStarted as a human, but i got lost along the way https://i.imgur.com/xEgmY0y.png https://i.imgur.com/xEgmY0y.png
- kickling 6y agoI think I drew Satan https://i.imgur.com/FHrP8La.jpg https://i.imgur.com/FHrP8La.jpg
- xiphias2 6y agoI’m not sure which picture is more scary...
- kriro 6y agoDevelopments in this area will help (indy) game developers to prototype more quickly. I like it. Seems to be a couple of iterations from being usable but it'll get there. I'm also envisioning a Ready Player One type of online escape world where content is generated from social media images/films.
- baq 6y agothe 'clear' button doesn't work on firefox :(
- pdjstone 6y agoNone of the brushes seem to work in Firefox either.
- skytreader 6y agoChrome 86 on Ubuntu. Not working either. :(
- NalNezumi 6y agoSurely I can't be the only one that tried to paint a penis to see how it went.
- tracer4201 6y agoTruly a man of culture.
- justinclift 6y agoDoesn't seem to be very well suited to that particular task. ;) eg: https://ded.ninja/gan-monster1.png https://ded.ninja/gan-monster1.png
- bogwog 6y agoI think mine came out pretty great: https://imgur.com/kNlSAbX https://imgur.com/kNlSAbX
- justinclift 6y agoYep, yours definitely wins. :)
- harias 6y agoReminds me of this: Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among men: * Penis * Gay * WTF * Dunno * Baige https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
- datameta 6y agoFascinating! I was suprised to see that 6% of users had CRTs and promptly noticed "2010" in the URL. It seems to me his style of writing has changed in a decade - can't point out exactly how though.
- liopleurodon 6y agoit was the first thing I did
- yenwodyah 6y ago"Using GANs to create textures for already drawn fantastical creatures" would be a more accurate title. It's impressive, but not nearly as impressive as the title would suggest.
- matsemann 6y agoI feel like I just get the same texture stretched over whatever figures I draw.
- TaupeRanger 6y ago"Using GANs to apply textures to color-coded hand-drawn figures". That doesn't catch headlines though.
- bogwog 6y agoThat's actually a pretty awesome thing to have for concept art, although it seems like all of the textures seem very similar in style (and not to mention low-res)
- elcomet 6y agoHere's the URL to test it : https://storage.googleapis.com/chimera-painter/index.html https://storage.googleapis.com/chimera-painter/index.html
- euske 6y agoShouldn't they be called... gantastical creatures?
- doodpants 6y agoOr perhaps the article should have been titled "Gantastic Beasts and How to Draw Them".
- habosa 6y agoHas anyone managed to get good results from this thing? I can only get wood-textured junk.
- lnyan 6y agoWe got a Cthulhu image generator https://i.imgur.com/F95uksf.png https://i.imgur.com/F95uksf.png
- daniellarusso 6y agoThe depth in your generated image is very interesting.
- rahidz 6y agoWhy is everything brown-ish?
- tirthapatel 6y agoIt just keeps putting the same texture over all the drawings. Maybe, in the color space, it has collapsed or just overfitted.
- 7373737373 6y agoReminds me of the RTS game "Impossible Creatures" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_qjgr-JM9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_qjgr-JM9U
- debbiedowner 6y agoSee also the old GauGAN: http://nvidia-research-mingyuliu.com/gaugan/ http://nvidia-research-mingyuliu.com/gaugan/ In that one you couldn't get much control like drawing letter clouds in the sky
- JHonaker 6y agoThe future is truly now [1]. The detail on this. [1]: https://imgur.com/a/VwuLdbi https://imgur.com/a/VwuLdbi
- nabeards 6y agoThis reminds me of Matthew Rayfield's GPT work to generate Pokémon: https://matthewrayfield.com/articles/ai-generated-pokemon-sprites-with-gpt-2/ https://matthewrayfield.com/articles/ai-generated-pokemon-sp... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25152764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25152764