4 ms·
> For graphic artists... perhaps also exciting, but not necessarily in a good way. I think you're missing an important aspect of art - style. The CG industry
by esperent 4y ago
> For graphic artists... perhaps also exciting, but not necessarily in a good way.
I think you're missing an important aspect of art - style.
The CG industry has been chasing photorealism for decades and we've been slowly inching closer. Photogrammetry is an important step that will provide a big boost in that goal.
But what happens when we get there? Once it's (relatively) cheap to make a AAA game that's virtually indistinguishable from reality, what happens next?
Everyone will love it for a few years but then they'll start to demand something new, and that might be non-photorealistic styles. Or it might be off world or impossible environments. Photogrammetry won't help much with a game set in space in the distant future, populated with non Earth creatures, plants, and architecture. Although it will help a bit, of course. There will still be a place for ultra realistic environments (war games, spy games, romance games etc.) but it will become just one style amongst many.
If anything this might lead to a revival in making real world models and then scanning them. Imagine a Dark Crystal style world except you are the player. All the characters and models were crafted by hand and then scanned into a 3d world where they are indistinguishable from their real world counterparts when viewed in VR/AR or on screen. That would be cool.
As for artists, perhaps they should be worried about AI stealing their jobs. But not photogrammetry, that'll just remove some of the tedious stuff like modeling furniture.
- _carbyau_ 4y agoI second the "style" aspect. For a games example, Call Of Duty vs Borderlands - both FPS but the visual styles are worlds apart. This could provide a new tool, and maybe remove some jobs. But it will make new jobs related to this new tool.
- jiggawatts 4y agoNeural nets can do style transfer. It might be as simple as making photorealistic models and then transferring a style from a handful of non-realistic samples.
- hypertele-Xii 4y agoAnd artist are still needed to create new styles.
- adrianN 4y agoBut you only need a couple of artists to create a style and replace the army of artists copying the style to all game assets with AI.
- hypertele-Xii 4y agoFor one place of work, yes, just like you only need a couple of actual engineers to design a product and then an army of robots actually builds it. This doesn't diminish the supply of jobs much though, as it lowers barrier to entry, many startups appear to compete, each needing its own artists to feed their AI with new and interesting styles. And a new category of artists will emergence, one that is expert in specifically crafting styles amenable to AI transfer.
- psyc 4y agoI've been both a game programmer, and a computer graphicist coveting photorealism, for ~30 years. In my opinion, this is exactly right. Photorealism is and was never going to put artists out of a job. But other algorithms... might. I can't rule it out, but the older I get the less certain I am of where so-called 'AI' is going.
- dougabug 4y agoRather than putting significant numbers of artists out of work, I anticipate AI tools will act as a powerful productivity amplifier for everybody, but especially artists. As the cost of capturing, creating, and altering 3D content declines exponentially, I predict an explosion in the amount of such content being generated. Individuals and small teams will be able to take on projects that historically have required much larger teams of people working over several years.
- taylorius 4y agoI agree. I'm also a long time CGI algorithms guy ~30 years. I can definitely see computer graphics getting swallowed by machine learning / AI in the next few years. The main things standing in the way as far as I can see, are the fine grained control of what the AI algorithm produces, and the resource requirements. But those barriers will fall, or be gradually lowered for sure.