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Game prototype using AI assisted graphics

348 points by smusamashah 4y ago

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sabertoothed 4y ago
Very cool. This is clearly where we're heading.
somenameforme 4y ago
I am extremely skeptical, because this looks so good. To my eyes the images produced look orders of magnitude better than what current software is capable of producing. Let alone from multiple perspectives with absolutely perfect coherence. What tool was used? Stuff like Dall-e is still far from producing anything like that. Those are absolutely perfect idealized/stylized human proportions with minimal weirdness. The only thing that even hints at neural network generation (at a glance at least) are the eyes in the second model sheet, but even that could be reasonably argued to be style. I could fully believe this is from a specialized art tool akin to some sort of a 2D version of Metahumans [1] but I'd be floored if this was actually generated from a generic neural network style tool. [1] - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman
- klntsky 4y ago
  > Stuff like Dall-e is still far from producing anything like that It is not, you just have to try many times and post-process a lot.
- thom 4y ago
  We’ll see how this turns out, but if we’re in the “this is clearly a lie” phase of AI progress then that seems pretty big.
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  - TillE 4y ago
    I believe that an AI can generate this sort of thing, it's just odd that a brief prompt to a general-purpose art AI can consistently generate an extremely specific model sheet like this.
    - lm28469 4y ago
      > it's just odd that a brief prompt to a general-purpose art AI can consistently generate an extremely specific model sheet like this. Well it's trained on thousands of character sheets so it's not so surprising after all, it still generates a lot of garbage too
    - coffeebeqn 4y ago
      This is mid journey which is trained specifically for game like things unlike a general model like dalle. I’ve seen people make incredible concept art with it
    - CuriouslyC 4y ago
      I wouldn't say consistently, for a given prompt a lot of seeds will be total garbage. It's not uncommon even when you're very good at prompting and tuning the model to need to generate 20+ images with the same prompt to find something that's close to what you want.
  - cableshaft 4y ago
    An artist recently was banned from the r/art subreddit[1] because the moderator thought it was A.I. art when it wasn't. So yeah, we are at that point. [1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3p9yg/artist-banned-from-art-reddit https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3p9yg/artist-banned-from-ar...
    - dagmx 4y ago
      We’ve always been at that point because art is a spectrum with no defined boundaries. There is no single metric for quality, and there’s been tons of artists who put out generic work in the past that have been mistaken for plagiarism in a similar vein. Art is not a Boolean, therefore neither are comparisons
- lm28469 4y ago
  You can definitely do that right now in midjourney 4, go on their discord and search for "character sheet" or "character design" and you'll find high quality examples with coherent front/side/back view Once you know what tokens trigger the right answers it's relatively easy to get where you want, as usual with these tool you should be flexible when it comes to details, but the overall design can be defined
  - Sakos 4y ago
    So, uh, is every artist going to be out of the job in the next 5 years?
    - lm28469 4y ago
      I personally don't think so, it made incredible progress very fast but it stagnates now. The more precise design you want the less likely you'll be able to generate it. It's usually very nice looking at first but once you look at the details it completely breaks apart, it's a bit like in a dream.
    - idopmstuff 4y ago
      Honestly, I expect the number of art roles at gaming companies to drop precipitously over the next couple of years. Right now you have a creative director who defines the style of art and a bunch of early-to-mid-career artists/designers who then create all the assets you need (and there are a lot of assets, so there's plenty of work to go around). Soon that'll be a creative director defining the style, AI producing most of the assets, and a few designers cleaning up what the AI produces. In a few years, those few designers probably won't be needed. I think a lot of artists who take commercial art/design type jobs to pay the bills are going to be out of work soon, and that's a serious problem that we should be looking to get ahead of as a society. On the plus side, this will be a huge boon for indie game devs - they'll be able to create AAA-level assets for their games at extremely low cost. For better or worse (for better and worse, really), the times, they are a-changin'.
      - simion314 4y ago
- siraben 4y ago
  Based on the prompt information we have, "–v 4 –ar 3:2" are options that are provided to Midjourney. -v 4 indicates version 4 of their model (which produces very aesthetically pleasing output) and -ar 3:2 specifies an aspect ratio of 3 by 2.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  I had the same reaction when I tried midjourney but this looks very believable. https://www.midjourney.com/app/feed/all/ https://www.midjourney.com/app/feed/all/ I don't think generic AIs are the right approach anyway, I think we're better off with precise procedural models with a lot of knobs and some knowledge of rules (eg. metahumans). Maybe you can put an AI in front of it to generate what you want using the procedural models, but pixel output is just not good enough for games.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    > but pixel output is just not good enough for games. I've been using https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN to increase AI renders resolution, it works very very well on some styles, you can easily x4 or x8 the resolution if you know what you're doing and have some photoshop knowledge for the cleanup
- chillfox 4y ago
  Midjourney will do that easily if you get good at doing the prompts. Getting good takes reading the manual and spending a few hours working on 2-3 designs.
- furyofantares 4y ago
  Midjourney produces this quality now with very little tinkering. If you use --v 4 --q 2 to get version 4 at highest quality it takes surprisingly little prompt work to get amazing images.
- IAmGraydon 4y ago
  Midjourney is eons beyond its next best competitor (probably Dall-e 2). This quality is easily achievable.
- liuliu 4y ago
  It is possible. You even have textual inversion trained to do exactly this: https://civitai.com/models/3036/charturner-character-turnaround-helper https://civitai.com/models/3036/charturner-character-turnaro... Consistent character creation is a big topic the community interested in and there are many tricks people use for that purpose.
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- smusamashah 4y ago
  I have played with SD enough and have been following its subreddit. It's definitely doable with Stable Diffusion too. Does need some prompt engineering and other things but doable.
101008 4y ago
I am working on a game proof of concept as well (to share a gameplay on YouTube to see if it attracts enough interest) and I have been using IA as well to generate the images and so far it has been a wonderful experience. I feel really bad for artists because unless you need something very specific or a big studio, you are going to be replaced sadly.
- yrgulation 4y ago
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- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  a) 90 perecent of an AI's success is in a large and well-curated training dataset. b) Training datasets can only be made by humans. c) A paid tier of Stable Diffusion is obviously coming. It will be differentiated by a better (and more custom) training dataset. d) No serious developer would be caught dead using the stock free tier Stable Diffusion. e) Big studios will most certainly hire closely-guarded artists to curate and expand their proprietary training datasets.
  - 101008 4y ago
    I pay for MidJourney, $10 per month. So far has been a great experience.
  - coffeebeqn 4y ago
    Sure but then you need one senior artist to curate rather than hundreds (including outsourced) artists that the current workflow uses
    - otabdeveloper4 4y ago
      You'd need both, of course. And huge teams of artists churning out proprietary dataset updates constantly. The current situation where you'd download billions of free images off the Internet only works once, and only if you somehow justify it as a research endeavour. Once this thing is monetized intellectual property laws will kick in.
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
AI assisted graphics have the potential of allowing small teams of developers (3-10) to create beautiful indie games without breaking the bank and letting them focus more on the story and gameplay mechanics. We already have 2D masterpieces like Hollow Night made by 3 people, I would love if this tech lead to more decentralization in game publishing so instead of 100 people making a single game we had 5 teams of 20 people making 5 equally good games
- fhd2 4y ago
  ... which leads to further saturation, which means you need a sizable marketing budget and/or a lot of luck for anyone to discover and pay for your game. If it was up to me, I'd rather pay for art than ad space. But using a Red Dead Redemption quote: "You can't fight change".
  - garblegarble 4y ago
    Alternatively you rely on curators to surface that quality work. We have plenty of books in the world, and curation and personal recommendations (as well as an author's reputation over multiple books) seem to work quite well there. Also since you can realise your artistic vision for a lower budget, you don't need to make back a gigantic outlay so you're not needing to take a huge risk that needs to have a massive reach on the launch week
  - dqpb 4y ago
    Why can Netflix and Spotify figure it out but the game industry can't?
  - hacker_9 4y ago
    Not at all. This means we are no long tying production quality of a game to how much money the developers have access to. It enables real creativity. Right now do you not think the AAA market is satured with yet another first person shooter etc? Creativity has lost out to capitalism, this will bring it back.
makz 4y ago
Why whenever there’s an article like this they never say the name of the AI took they used?
- chillfox 4y ago
  It's Midjourney (you can tell from the way weights and parameters in the prompts are done). But yes, would be nice if they said it.
- fritzo 4y ago
  Why whenever there's generated art like this they never credit artists who generated the training data?
  - dandellion 4y ago
    They never credit the developers that wrote the libraries either, nor the researchers that came up with the algorithm, or von Neumann...
  - kleer001 4y ago
    Because that would be a series of tortuously long encyclopedias that nobody would read.
  - garblegarble 4y ago
    Is this really that fundamentally different from a human artist? Indeed, the person generating the art has what they want in their head, just as any other artist does, they're building prompts seeking to realise that vision on the screen (with tooling, just like a traditional artist would). Yes this is a new tool that requires far less technical proficiency with traditional techniques - people have constantly criticised new tooling (e.g. the criticisms sometimes still levelled at digital artists) Further, even if you totally discount the human agency in this process & view it as a machine doing everything: we don't expect human artists to add a credit on each of their works to all the artworks they have viewed in their life and the experiences that came together to form an artwork or even their particular style. I'd argue the networks are clearly transformative (since the network weights aren't large enough to contain the actual input artworks). It may not be as transformative as a human learning process (although then again, what is the learning 'storage' capacity of a human compared to a 4GB weights file?)
stefantalpalaru 4y ago
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smusamashah 4y ago
Author of this article has responded in this reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/105ozmw/experimental_25d_point_and_click_adventure_game/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/105ozmw/ex...
TheCaptain4815 4y ago
How long until we have blender output “action LLMs”?
tshadley 4y ago
Dreamfusion -- text-to-3d seems like it might be useful here eventually: https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/ https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/ (once successfully opensourced, see https://github.com/ashawkey/stable-dreamfusion https://github.com/ashawkey/stable-dreamfusion) Rigging also looks like it could have a decent AI/DNN solution: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.00559.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.00559.pdf
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  Once there is a good 3D model generator I’ll probably have to quit my job and start making games again. That’s incredibly time consuming to create even low poly models for someone who is not very good at it. I remember trying to make a moose and after a few weeks of time it was somewhat passable but with no animation or rigging
  - petermcneeley 4y ago
    You can just pay an artist. Afaik Jon Blow did not make any of the art for Braid.
    - buildbot 4y ago
      Not everyone can or wants to- maybe they want to be the artist through AI
    - coffeebeqn 4y ago
      That’s the problem - I don’t have the money to pay someone to work full time for a year or two
    - nmfisher 4y ago
      Finding an artist who is (1) capable, (2) reliable and (3) available is no mean feat. I can totally understand why someone would prefer to spend hours (if not days) using an AI tool.
  - ummonk 4y ago
    You gotta use sculpting tools like ZBrush / Substance Painter or 3d Coat to do make models like a low poly mouse.
snvzz 4y ago
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atum47 4y ago
This looks great. How long did it took you?
kleiba 4y ago
Back in the 80's, some of the defining games of the decade were made by a single person, and dev teams hardly consisted of more than two or three people. With the progress in computer hardware, with better resolutions and 3D cards, games developed too, into a space where the best games on the market required teams of 200+ people to design, develop, produce, market, and sell them. Then, in the 2000's, the indie scene started to gain traction in the public eye. Not because they could compete with AAA studios on their game courts, but because they found clever and novel ways to make games that piqued gamer's interest who were perhaps a bit bored with the increasingly formulaic output they saw from major game developers. But indie games also had to retract to such alternative game ideas because producing top of the line games had just gone way too far out of reach for a small team with a small budget - let alone a one-man studio. I think we're at the beginning of new dawn in independent game development. The tools available, even if you just look at open source tools, has never been so rich as they today. Now, with AI entering the scene, the dependence on very large teams will likely go down more and more, at least when combined with clever game design. Will one person be able to create a solo project that challenges the AAA games of the top-selling studios any time soon? Of course not. But I think we're on the verge of another indie game revolution. AI threatens entire professions in a way that was previously thought impossible. Even a couple of years ago, hardly anyone would have imagined that jobs that typically require years of practice, training and skill could become equally under pressure as the traditional labour jobs that have been replaced by robots. We cannot even begin to imagine the the long-term effect on the economy at large. On the upside, for gaming, the consumer will likely benefit from this development as new avenues and opportunies are opened to indie developers. Creating a character sheet automatically is just the beginning. This trend will continue, and it is absolutely foreseeable that further parts of the design process will be automated. Music and game sound generation will also be perfected by AI in the very near future. Actually, that is probably true for all game assets, it's just a matter of time. Even storytelling - if future games even need predesigned narratives (why not let an enticing story develop on the fly, thanks to AI, that really takes every user action into account and puts it into a coherent context?). We're living in the future.
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_spduchamp 4y ago
I'm curious to see more cases of game engine in a neural network like this... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32749988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32749988
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quadcore 4y ago
Never occurred to me until now that a capable artist may just have a lot more jobs available to him once the AI-to-image revolution will be fully rolling. E.g. some kid will create a video game with AI art, sell tons of it and then need artists to make the updates. In other words, AI facilitates entry to the digital art world which leads to the need of artists. It's like free samples.
- ketzo 4y ago
  I think this is a good and optimistic take, but you have to imagine AI art will only get better from here — how long until it closes the loop?
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- kukx 4y ago
  The best artists will thrive, I am not so sure about the rest. It seems very likely that the simple graphic jobs will be taken over by AI.
- DrewADesign 4y ago
  I'd love to believe this was true but I absolutely can't imagine that it is. If the art doesn't need to be created by a person, which is what people are shooting for, here, the only artist you'd need is an art director. The world simply doesn't need a zillion art directors. Until we figure out how to treat people as intrinsically worthwhile and not not punish them for being made redundant by automation, it will always be a catastrophe for everyone targeted. It was true for auto manufacturing, it will be true for artists, and it will be true for workaday software developers. Just the way it is.
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  - kukx 4y ago
    Actually we may need a lot more "art directors" than we have today, especially if they are to direct AI. At least temporarily, until they get AIed as well.
DustinBrett 4y ago
Who needs open world when you can have imagined world. Walk into any door and have the AI make up the room. Very exciting future.
- modeless 4y ago
  The possibilities of AI generated dialogue, story, voice acting, music, etc are very exciting too. None of this is close to working yet but there's a clear path from where we are now. It's only a matter of time. Entertainment will never be the same.
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tombert 4y ago
Related, I have been experimenting with using Stable Diffusion (SD) to generate game textures for a project I've been working on. The results its been giving me for cobblestone and grass have been generally "good enough", though I've not found a good way to force SD to generate textures that easily tesselate with each other, forcing me to modify the generated stuff a bit before I actually use them. Still, that's only like another 10-30 minutes of additional work on my end for a texture, and it means I get a unique texture without having to be terribly artistically inclined. I think AI art is really going to make lives easier for indie game devs.
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- spyder 4y ago
  Another cool demo generating textures with stable diffusion directly in blender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG7B29FBZKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG7B29FBZKU
votu 4y ago
Ncsoft( a big game studio) is doing this with unreal engine 5 for a new mmo looter shooter. https://about.ncsoft.com/en/news/article/lll-interview-221114 https://about.ncsoft.com/en/news/article/lll-interview-22111...
1659447091 4y ago
Is there a trick to get output like this? I have been trying out the different models/sites/oss setups when they show up here and I get _nothing_ like this. I dont even get the images others use as examples. I felt like I am obviously doing it wrong. I try example prompts and prompts people suggest they used and I still get images that are as bad as if I tried to make them myself. To me this is crazy and almost unbelievable that it was generated, mostly because my experience has been completely opposite. Im on the fence about the artiest debate, but seeing this, I think its more the ones that keep their jobs are the ones who gain a new skill as prompt artiest*. To me that seems like a very valuable and real skill going forward. [*] kinda like early 'web designers' that needed to learn javascript
- smusamashah 4y ago
  I would recommend you to lurk around /r/StableDiffusion
- rashkov 4y ago
  I had this experience with midjourney until I found out there were certain keywords I had to include to enable their newer engines
- fab1an 4y ago
  What exactly are you struggling with? The main challenge with Midjourney is to open up a broader style pallete, while the out of the box vanilla results are usually amazing in v4.
  - 1659447091 4y ago
    Had not tried Midjourney, probably as I dont usually bother with discord. Just tried it out and while the results are probably better than anything I had before, there are a lot of weird things going on (per my usual experience) that dont seem to appear in examples other peoples use and def not in the topic post; distorted faces, extra body parts, weird 'deformities', proportions etc... Here are both variations and upscales of the same prompt (-> which is probably my issue?). This was without reading the 'tips' or looking through /r/StableDiffusion yet. It still really seems like prompting is an art form and skill that really needs to be learned, or atleast have the skills to touch-up the images. ::a happy family in the middle of a nucular wasteland:: (I just realized I spelt nuclear wrong, does that matter?) [original] https://cdn.midjourney.com/2685df56-6e1a-4828-9bd5-2960271d2bf5/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/2685df56-6e1a-4828-9bd5-2960271d2... [upscaled] https://cdn.midjourney.com/b7363830-0a77-4362-86bb-a1bc30ff7fef/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/b7363830-0a77-4362-86bb-a1bc30ff7... [variation] https://cdn.midjourney.com/cf9d990b-0745-4ef5-b977-31cbd0efc757/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/cf9d990b-0745-4ef5-b977-31cbd0efc... [variations] https://cdn.midjourney.com/7337ed7f-041b-43d0-8626-2b3992fbd453/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/7337ed7f-041b-43d0-8626-2b3992fbd... [upscaled] https://cdn.midjourney.com/a29c53da-e9cf-4192-88cd-d56d4e2d3bab/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/a29c53da-e9cf-4192-88cd-d56d4e2d3... [variations]https://cdn.midjourney.com/497b5044-605c-42f8-b285-868515211aa2/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/497b5044-605c-42f8-b285-868515211... [upscaled] https://cdn.midjourney.com/dcdc1eb6-c5a0-4df9-9cc9-93fa8cf129e5/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/dcdc1eb6-c5a0-4df9-9cc9-93fa8cf12... [variations] https://cdn.midjourney.com/46822f7a-b90f-4119-9cee-4f3967dc30a1/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/46822f7a-b90f-4119-9cee-4f3967dc3...
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dukeofdoom 4y ago
Making my first 2d game using some ai art from midjourney. It's like having an assistant that works for me. But I still have to tell it what I want and fix mistakes and do the animations. Using midjourney and chat.open.ai to help. In my case it hasn't killed jobs as I would not have a budget to hire anyone anyway. However I'm able to fulfill my vision for the game, just getting ai help the low level stuff. So it's making things easier and I can make something better with my time. And I think ai will boost productivity while reducing time and effort. So a huge boost, in bring up people with low skills to make something useful. Most people don't want to make things from scratch.
Beaver117 4y ago
With new breakthroughs like this I try to be extremely open minded. The potential is endless. We could have entire AI generated AR/VR worlds in just a decade or two that we couldn't really believe was possible a decade ago. And obviously that will need many many more jobs to sustain, so the k only downside is some people will have to get more education/training/skills to qualify because basic drawing won't be useful enough anymore.
- BizarroLand 4y ago
  I'm looking forward to a skyrim-eqsue massively multiplayer open world AI enhanced RPG where the entire game continuously generates more content (that isn't simple fetch quests) and that has ongoing stories that interconnect and weave together to tell stories that build on previous stories. I'd gladly pay a monthly subscription for that if it could work, but I'm guessing we're at least a decade away from even an alpha version of that, possibly more.
  - fennecfoxy 4y ago
    I actually tried to get chatGPT to do this just after it came out: https://imgur.io/a/vvPjB2s https://imgur.io/a/vvPjB2s. Atm it's quite hard to work with it because of all the safety blockers they added to prevent it from pretending to be someone, but it almost gets the idea. I just love "in order to seek revenge for the death of his husband" as well as the chatGPT's suggestions that follow - if connected right it would play out in a very convincing way. Imagine killing an NPC right at the start of the game bc other games don't do anything about it. Then later in the game you're ambushed by a group of strong NPCs who internally traded/organised/bartered/trained their way into having nice armour/weapons, mercenaries with them, all with the sole purpose of seeking revenge, coming up to you and telling you just how much they hate you for what you did and try to kill you. Hell, with enough integration between various game systems it would even be possible, at that point, to try to redeem yourself through some dialogue, depending on the internal character traits involved (how persuasive you are, how distraught/determined they are). A another big thing is that NPCs in games atm don't really do much when you're not around. Some games make them walk from place to place, but it would be so cool for them to have different motivations in a not statically-programmed way where you might find a rural NPC decides to move to the city because there are better opportunities there. Or that the price of iron bars has gone up because a group of NPCs have formed a successful weapons guild and you as a player now have to pay more for your weapons unless you, say, choose to assassinate key individuals within that organisation. With a custom tailored version I feel it would be super easy to have something like chatGPT spin out the literary parts of the game, then feed say character descriptions into art/sound generation and everything else to get the game together. Would definitely be prone to utter weirdness now & then but would be so cool to see.
epaulson 4y ago
Maybe it's because I don't know the workflow to do game character design, but it looks like the only AI used in the character creation here was the initial character design? Like, before in a normal process you'd get a human artist to draw you a character on that "model" sheet, giving you a front/side/back view of the character, and then take that 2d drawing and hand it off to a 3d modeler who would turn it into a 3D mesh and start taking the 2d drawings and turn them into textures, and then rigging them for animation controls. It seems like all of that 2d->3d conversion is still being done by a human in this workflow, and so the "only" part that's being done is the 2d drawings. Now, my drawing skills would put me in the lower half of an average 4th grade class, so it's more than I could do, but it still seems like we're quite a ways from going from a couple of prompts to get a 2d design sheet, then a mesh and textures that match that 2d design, and then a rigged mesh, and then motion data to attach to that rigged mesh to give some basic animations. So, while this is super-cool, it still feels like we're a long way from saying "I want a plumber with a thick mustache wearing blue overalls, a red shirt, and red cap. And now I want him to be able to jump and squat coming down." and start putting that into my game asset library.
- dagmx 4y ago
  There are ways to go from this art directly to 3D models and I’m sure tons of people will post links to them. But I want to point out quality and artistic knowledge. The poster is clearly a talented artist. They knew how to direct the images to what they wanted and likely rejected many iterations before they got to this point. They knew how to then take that image and translate it to 3D , and make it come together. They knew how to make a topology flow that makes sense for their prototype etc… I think a lot of people see “good output” and forget about the process and knowledge+experience required to make something good. I take photography as an example. Every one with the means likely has a camera today. It still takes a brilliant eye to take an amazing photo. You could take two brilliant photographers and someone without expertise to a gorgeous location. The two experienced photographers will have a higher likelihood to come out with amazing but very different images. The layperson could maybe take a good photo but the chances are much lower because they likely don’t have the experience to think about composition or story telling. I liken these advancements in AI to that. Yeah, some people will put out pretty images, but there’s so much more that goes into making something great out of it that people underestimate
pronlover723 4y ago
I'm curious how they went from character sheet to fully rigged model. It sounds like they hand created the model, and hand rigged it, and the entire process took 18 hours (entire meaning from 0 to game proto) so building the model, applying UVs, and rigging, was some sub-portion of that 18 hours Does that fit other people's experience of how long it generally takes someone to model, UV map, and rig a character? edit: If it's not clear, it sounds like it took 4-6 hours to model, map, rig. Since they still had to spend time generating the character sheet, generating the city and alley, and turning it all into a playable prototype in that same 18 hours
- hacker_9 4y ago
  It does, once you have the character sheet, you put these together in blender and use them as reference for the 3d model, so everything comes out in proportion and its just grind really to place the vertices. The rigging + animation is done by mixamo's AI so just touch up after. He had to do a UV unwrap and then align the textures to this, this is time consuming just because it requires thinking about where to split the 3d model, to place the seams, then to fit it all in a texture, where you have to think about how much space to give each texture (more space = more quality). And then map the texture into this space too. This is a known pain in the 3d modelling for decades and no doubt AI will solve this in the next decade.
- nineteen999 4y ago
  By skipping straight to a low-poly model rather than sculpting a high-poly model and then retopologizing, the author saved an immense amount of time. UV mapping I expect they wouldn't have saved much time. The AI texture maps (complete with baked in shadows and lighting that wouldn't work in all lighting conditions) saved them an immense amount of time, but doesn't include the normal mapping step that would usually occur with the high/poly low workflow. Of course there are some artifacts there but the end result is really good for a prototype for a low budget indie game. Using Mixamo once again saves an huge amount of time over hand rigging the mesh and instantly gives you access to a large library of animations that can be projected onto the Mixamo rig. This is a very clever use of the available tools by very experienced character artist in my opinion. Your average HN reader is not going to be able to achieve this in 4, 18 hours or otherwise due to simply not having the required skillset to get from one end of the workflow to the other. Kudos to the author.
groar 4y ago
It would have been fun to see how AI generated voice (like https://www.enginn.tech https://www.enginn.tech ) could be integrated as well (and have an estimate of how much time it saves)
- fennecfoxy 4y ago
  Eh they're forcing people to use a plugin which uses their servers/magic. The real revolution will happen (eventually) with open source models that either run on the player's machine or tools that are used to generate at build time.
Kukumber 4y ago
I'm not interested in games made using/helped an/by AI Hopefully a tag will appear on steam to filter out that junk It devaluates what art, creativity and passion are It'll take down that civilization faster than a pandemic or a social media algorithm
- MacsHeadroom 4y ago
  Those tags won't appear and nobody will be collecting the data that would be necessary for them anyway. AI generation will be more pervasive than Photoshop and all your favorite art and artists will be using AI. You will change your mind.
paulryanrogers 4y ago
> As these images are created by an AI, no one has a claim to their copyright. Debatable. There have been instances where artist signatures have appeared in the AI output. And if there is a profit motive then case for fair use is weaker.
- Popeyes 4y ago
  Wasn't there a ruling where an AI art couldn't be copyrighted because it had no creator. So sucks if you make a game and then all your art assets get ripped for some other game.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    The law is in flux. So until the legislature weighs in or a case reaches the higher courts that is a very real risk. Imagine a hugely popular game found to have clearly unlicensed copyrighted works, even in only fragments. It could become expensive legally and in reputation. (Especially for big publishers and devs who may be seen to profit from unlicensed copies of work from starving artists.)
- GaggiX 4y ago
  Signatures generated from scratch like the rest of the image, I think is an important aspect to specify.
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slowhadoken 4y ago
“A.I. art” is neither A.I. nor art. After you make a neural network the first thing that occurs to you is that it’s useless without tons of data. In this instance our data is art made my people. Using assets without permission or a licensing agreement is theft. To make things worse corporations are charging for this theft. Basically “A.I. art” is another way to say “theft as a service (TaaS).”
- GaggiX 4y ago
  Copyright infringement is not theft because you are not depriving the rightful owner of something. AI art is not copyright infringement because the results are transformative (really transformative), so you would have to explain how AI art directly became theft. Also, neural networks are not "useless", there is virtually an infinite number of permutations that can be achieved with generative models.
  - slowhadoken 4y ago
    The algorithm has no agency so it's not making art, art is made by humans. It's data theft. The art is data. You could also think of it in terms of counterfeiting too.
    - GaggiX 4y ago
      Art is made by a human using the tool to create the image, such as a photographer using a machine called a "camera", a digital artist using a computer, or a traditional artist using a paintbrush, also you seem to have completely ignored the part where I state how absurd it is to call it "theft."
      - slowhadoken 4y ago
        A human who pushes a button on a counterfeiting machine isn't a machinist, economist, or artist.
        4y ago
NicoleJO 4y ago
All the images here were stolen from artists who were not credited nor paid for their graphics.
- yazzku 4y ago
  And he blatantly makes the statement: > As these images are created by an AI, no one has a claim to their copyright. [...] At least this is how I feel about AI art. Perhaps he needs an AI to create some empathy.
palisade 4y ago
He could probably have sped it up a little bit further with the headshot plugin for character creator. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/sponsored-by-reallusion/how-to-generating-a-3d-animated-gollum-from-a-single-photo-186652.html https://www.cartoonbrew.com/sponsored-by-reallusion/how-to-g... They also have ActorCore AutoRig for free now that'll quickly rig any model. And, they sell anims for a couple of bucks per anim on there as well. https://actorcore.reallusion.com/auto-rig https://actorcore.reallusion.com/auto-rig https://courses.reallusion.com/home/actorcore/accurig?v=actorcore-tutorial-getting-started-with-accurig https://courses.reallusion.com/home/actorcore/accurig?v=acto... Though, if you use the steps in the golum tutorial I linked above you don't even have to bother with the autorigger because you'd be mapping directly onto the CC body which is already rigged. But, if you wanted to modo/zbrush your own body and then autorig it you can. Then you can morph it to fit what you need and attach any hair, weapons and clothing items you purchased or created. Another technique is to export a CC body from character creator and convert to ZTL and hand that to a zbrush artist. Then, you can GoZ the ztl back to Character Creator already rigged and fully animatable. Note: I don't work for the company, I just really like their tools.
yazzku 4y ago
> As these images are created by an AI, no one has a claim to their copyright. This is currently being disputed over several lawsuits and is blatantly disrespectful towards all artists who have published works under various _copyright licenses_ and now have all of it stolen and bastardized by a model. The demo was cool but the lack of empathy towards the people who unknowingly put their work into it is gross.

348 points by smusamashah 4y ago

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sabertoothed 4y ago

Very cool. This is clearly where we're heading.

somenameforme 4y ago

I am extremely skeptical, because this looks so good. To my eyes the images produced look orders of magnitude better than what current software is capable of producing. Let alone from multiple perspectives with absolutely perfect coherence. What tool was used? Stuff like Dall-e is still far from producing anything like that. Those are absolutely perfect idealized/stylized human proportions with minimal weirdness. The only thing that even hints at neural network generation (at a glance at least) are the eyes in the second model sheet, but even that could be reasonably argued to be style. I could fully believe this is from a specialized art tool akin to some sort of a 2D version of Metahumans [1] but I'd be floored if this was actually generated from a generic neural network style tool. [1] - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman

klntsky 4y ago
> Stuff like Dall-e is still far from producing anything like that It is not, you just have to try many times and post-process a lot.
thom 4y ago
We’ll see how this turns out, but if we’re in the “this is clearly a lie” phase of AI progress then that seems pretty big.
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- TillE 4y ago
  I believe that an AI can generate this sort of thing, it's just odd that a brief prompt to a general-purpose art AI can consistently generate an extremely specific model sheet like this.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    > it's just odd that a brief prompt to a general-purpose art AI can consistently generate an extremely specific model sheet like this. Well it's trained on thousands of character sheets so it's not so surprising after all, it still generates a lot of garbage too
  - coffeebeqn 4y ago
    This is mid journey which is trained specifically for game like things unlike a general model like dalle. I’ve seen people make incredible concept art with it
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago
    I wouldn't say consistently, for a given prompt a lot of seeds will be total garbage. It's not uncommon even when you're very good at prompting and tuning the model to need to generate 20+ images with the same prompt to find something that's close to what you want.
- cableshaft 4y ago
  An artist recently was banned from the r/art subreddit[1] because the moderator thought it was A.I. art when it wasn't. So yeah, we are at that point. [1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3p9yg/artist-banned-from-art-reddit https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3p9yg/artist-banned-from-ar...
  - dagmx 4y ago
    We’ve always been at that point because art is a spectrum with no defined boundaries. There is no single metric for quality, and there’s been tons of artists who put out generic work in the past that have been mistaken for plagiarism in a similar vein. Art is not a Boolean, therefore neither are comparisons
lm28469 4y ago
You can definitely do that right now in midjourney 4, go on their discord and search for "character sheet" or "character design" and you'll find high quality examples with coherent front/side/back view Once you know what tokens trigger the right answers it's relatively easy to get where you want, as usual with these tool you should be flexible when it comes to details, but the overall design can be defined
- Sakos 4y ago
  So, uh, is every artist going to be out of the job in the next 5 years?
  - lm28469 4y ago
    I personally don't think so, it made incredible progress very fast but it stagnates now. The more precise design you want the less likely you'll be able to generate it. It's usually very nice looking at first but once you look at the details it completely breaks apart, it's a bit like in a dream.
  - idopmstuff 4y ago
    Honestly, I expect the number of art roles at gaming companies to drop precipitously over the next couple of years. Right now you have a creative director who defines the style of art and a bunch of early-to-mid-career artists/designers who then create all the assets you need (and there are a lot of assets, so there's plenty of work to go around). Soon that'll be a creative director defining the style, AI producing most of the assets, and a few designers cleaning up what the AI produces. In a few years, those few designers probably won't be needed. I think a lot of artists who take commercial art/design type jobs to pay the bills are going to be out of work soon, and that's a serious problem that we should be looking to get ahead of as a society. On the plus side, this will be a huge boon for indie game devs - they'll be able to create AAA-level assets for their games at extremely low cost. For better or worse (for better and worse, really), the times, they are a-changin'.
    - simion314 4y ago
siraben 4y ago
Based on the prompt information we have, "–v 4 –ar 3:2" are options that are provided to Midjourney. -v 4 indicates version 4 of their model (which produces very aesthetically pleasing output) and -ar 3:2 specifies an aspect ratio of 3 by 2.
jokethrowaway 4y ago
I had the same reaction when I tried midjourney but this looks very believable. https://www.midjourney.com/app/feed/all/ https://www.midjourney.com/app/feed/all/ I don't think generic AIs are the right approach anyway, I think we're better off with precise procedural models with a lot of knobs and some knowledge of rules (eg. metahumans). Maybe you can put an AI in front of it to generate what you want using the procedural models, but pixel output is just not good enough for games.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > but pixel output is just not good enough for games. I've been using https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN to increase AI renders resolution, it works very very well on some styles, you can easily x4 or x8 the resolution if you know what you're doing and have some photoshop knowledge for the cleanup
chillfox 4y ago
Midjourney will do that easily if you get good at doing the prompts. Getting good takes reading the manual and spending a few hours working on 2-3 designs.
furyofantares 4y ago
Midjourney produces this quality now with very little tinkering. If you use --v 4 --q 2 to get version 4 at highest quality it takes surprisingly little prompt work to get amazing images.
IAmGraydon 4y ago
Midjourney is eons beyond its next best competitor (probably Dall-e 2). This quality is easily achievable.
liuliu 4y ago
It is possible. You even have textual inversion trained to do exactly this: https://civitai.com/models/3036/charturner-character-turnaround-helper https://civitai.com/models/3036/charturner-character-turnaro... Consistent character creation is a big topic the community interested in and there are many tricks people use for that purpose.
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smusamashah 4y ago
I have played with SD enough and have been following its subreddit. It's definitely doable with Stable Diffusion too. Does need some prompt engineering and other things but doable.

101008 4y ago

I am working on a game proof of concept as well (to share a gameplay on YouTube to see if it attracts enough interest) and I have been using IA as well to generate the images and so far it has been a wonderful experience. I feel really bad for artists because unless you need something very specific or a big studio, you are going to be replaced sadly.

yrgulation 4y ago
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otabdeveloper4 4y ago
a) 90 perecent of an AI's success is in a large and well-curated training dataset. b) Training datasets can only be made by humans. c) A paid tier of Stable Diffusion is obviously coming. It will be differentiated by a better (and more custom) training dataset. d) No serious developer would be caught dead using the stock free tier Stable Diffusion. e) Big studios will most certainly hire closely-guarded artists to curate and expand their proprietary training datasets.
- 101008 4y ago
  I pay for MidJourney, $10 per month. So far has been a great experience.
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  Sure but then you need one senior artist to curate rather than hundreds (including outsourced) artists that the current workflow uses
  - otabdeveloper4 4y ago
    You'd need both, of course. And huge teams of artists churning out proprietary dataset updates constantly. The current situation where you'd download billions of free images off the Internet only works once, and only if you somehow justify it as a research endeavour. Once this thing is monetized intellectual property laws will kick in.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago

AI assisted graphics have the potential of allowing small teams of developers (3-10) to create beautiful indie games without breaking the bank and letting them focus more on the story and gameplay mechanics. We already have 2D masterpieces like Hollow Night made by 3 people, I would love if this tech lead to more decentralization in game publishing so instead of 100 people making a single game we had 5 teams of 20 people making 5 equally good games

fhd2 4y ago
... which leads to further saturation, which means you need a sizable marketing budget and/or a lot of luck for anyone to discover and pay for your game. If it was up to me, I'd rather pay for art than ad space. But using a Red Dead Redemption quote: "You can't fight change".
- garblegarble 4y ago
  Alternatively you rely on curators to surface that quality work. We have plenty of books in the world, and curation and personal recommendations (as well as an author's reputation over multiple books) seem to work quite well there. Also since you can realise your artistic vision for a lower budget, you don't need to make back a gigantic outlay so you're not needing to take a huge risk that needs to have a massive reach on the launch week
- dqpb 4y ago
  Why can Netflix and Spotify figure it out but the game industry can't?
- hacker_9 4y ago
  Not at all. This means we are no long tying production quality of a game to how much money the developers have access to. It enables real creativity. Right now do you not think the AAA market is satured with yet another first person shooter etc? Creativity has lost out to capitalism, this will bring it back.

makz 4y ago

Why whenever there’s an article like this they never say the name of the AI took they used?

chillfox 4y ago
It's Midjourney (you can tell from the way weights and parameters in the prompts are done). But yes, would be nice if they said it.
fritzo 4y ago
Why whenever there's generated art like this they never credit artists who generated the training data?
- dandellion 4y ago
  They never credit the developers that wrote the libraries either, nor the researchers that came up with the algorithm, or von Neumann...
- kleer001 4y ago
  Because that would be a series of tortuously long encyclopedias that nobody would read.
- garblegarble 4y ago
  Is this really that fundamentally different from a human artist? Indeed, the person generating the art has what they want in their head, just as any other artist does, they're building prompts seeking to realise that vision on the screen (with tooling, just like a traditional artist would). Yes this is a new tool that requires far less technical proficiency with traditional techniques - people have constantly criticised new tooling (e.g. the criticisms sometimes still levelled at digital artists) Further, even if you totally discount the human agency in this process & view it as a machine doing everything: we don't expect human artists to add a credit on each of their works to all the artworks they have viewed in their life and the experiences that came together to form an artwork or even their particular style. I'd argue the networks are clearly transformative (since the network weights aren't large enough to contain the actual input artworks). It may not be as transformative as a human learning process (although then again, what is the learning 'storage' capacity of a human compared to a 4GB weights file?)

stefantalpalaru 4y ago

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smusamashah 4y ago

Author of this article has responded in this reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/105ozmw/experimental_25d_point_and_click_adventure_game/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/105ozmw/ex...

TheCaptain4815 4y ago

How long until we have blender output “action LLMs”?

tshadley 4y ago

Dreamfusion -- text-to-3d seems like it might be useful here eventually: https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/ https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/ (once successfully opensourced, see https://github.com/ashawkey/stable-dreamfusion https://github.com/ashawkey/stable-dreamfusion) Rigging also looks like it could have a decent AI/DNN solution: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.00559.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.00559.pdf

coffeebeqn 4y ago
Once there is a good 3D model generator I’ll probably have to quit my job and start making games again. That’s incredibly time consuming to create even low poly models for someone who is not very good at it. I remember trying to make a moose and after a few weeks of time it was somewhat passable but with no animation or rigging
- petermcneeley 4y ago
  You can just pay an artist. Afaik Jon Blow did not make any of the art for Braid.
  - buildbot 4y ago
    Not everyone can or wants to- maybe they want to be the artist through AI
  - coffeebeqn 4y ago
    That’s the problem - I don’t have the money to pay someone to work full time for a year or two
  - nmfisher 4y ago
    Finding an artist who is (1) capable, (2) reliable and (3) available is no mean feat. I can totally understand why someone would prefer to spend hours (if not days) using an AI tool.
- ummonk 4y ago
  You gotta use sculpting tools like ZBrush / Substance Painter or 3d Coat to do make models like a low poly mouse.

snvzz 4y ago

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atum47 4y ago

This looks great. How long did it took you?

kleiba 4y ago

Back in the 80's, some of the defining games of the decade were made by a single person, and dev teams hardly consisted of more than two or three people. With the progress in computer hardware, with better resolutions and 3D cards, games developed too, into a space where the best games on the market required teams of 200+ people to design, develop, produce, market, and sell them. Then, in the 2000's, the indie scene started to gain traction in the public eye. Not because they could compete with AAA studios on their game courts, but because they found clever and novel ways to make games that piqued gamer's interest who were perhaps a bit bored with the increasingly formulaic output they saw from major game developers. But indie games also had to retract to such alternative game ideas because producing top of the line games had just gone way too far out of reach for a small team with a small budget - let alone a one-man studio. I think we're at the beginning of new dawn in independent game development. The tools available, even if you just look at open source tools, has never been so rich as they today. Now, with AI entering the scene, the dependence on very large teams will likely go down more and more, at least when combined with clever game design. Will one person be able to create a solo project that challenges the AAA games of the top-selling studios any time soon? Of course not. But I think we're on the verge of another indie game revolution. AI threatens entire professions in a way that was previously thought impossible. Even a couple of years ago, hardly anyone would have imagined that jobs that typically require years of practice, training and skill could become equally under pressure as the traditional labour jobs that have been replaced by robots. We cannot even begin to imagine the the long-term effect on the economy at large. On the upside, for gaming, the consumer will likely benefit from this development as new avenues and opportunies are opened to indie developers. Creating a character sheet automatically is just the beginning. This trend will continue, and it is absolutely foreseeable that further parts of the design process will be automated. Music and game sound generation will also be perfected by AI in the very near future. Actually, that is probably true for all game assets, it's just a matter of time. Even storytelling - if future games even need predesigned narratives (why not let an enticing story develop on the fly, thanks to AI, that really takes every user action into account and puts it into a coherent context?). We're living in the future.

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_spduchamp 4y ago

I'm curious to see more cases of game engine in a neural network like this... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32749988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32749988

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quadcore 4y ago

Never occurred to me until now that a capable artist may just have a lot more jobs available to him once the AI-to-image revolution will be fully rolling. E.g. some kid will create a video game with AI art, sell tons of it and then need artists to make the updates. In other words, AI facilitates entry to the digital art world which leads to the need of artists. It's like free samples.

ketzo 4y ago
I think this is a good and optimistic take, but you have to imagine AI art will only get better from here — how long until it closes the loop?
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kukx 4y ago
The best artists will thrive, I am not so sure about the rest. It seems very likely that the simple graphic jobs will be taken over by AI.
DrewADesign 4y ago
I'd love to believe this was true but I absolutely can't imagine that it is. If the art doesn't need to be created by a person, which is what people are shooting for, here, the only artist you'd need is an art director. The world simply doesn't need a zillion art directors. Until we figure out how to treat people as intrinsically worthwhile and not not punish them for being made redundant by automation, it will always be a catastrophe for everyone targeted. It was true for auto manufacturing, it will be true for artists, and it will be true for workaday software developers. Just the way it is.
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- kukx 4y ago
  Actually we may need a lot more "art directors" than we have today, especially if they are to direct AI. At least temporarily, until they get AIed as well.

DustinBrett 4y ago

Who needs open world when you can have imagined world. Walk into any door and have the AI make up the room. Very exciting future.

modeless 4y ago
The possibilities of AI generated dialogue, story, voice acting, music, etc are very exciting too. None of this is close to working yet but there's a clear path from where we are now. It's only a matter of time. Entertainment will never be the same.
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tombert 4y ago

Related, I have been experimenting with using Stable Diffusion (SD) to generate game textures for a project I've been working on. The results its been giving me for cobblestone and grass have been generally "good enough", though I've not found a good way to force SD to generate textures that easily tesselate with each other, forcing me to modify the generated stuff a bit before I actually use them. Still, that's only like another 10-30 minutes of additional work on my end for a texture, and it means I get a unique texture without having to be terribly artistically inclined. I think AI art is really going to make lives easier for indie game devs.

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spyder 4y ago
Another cool demo generating textures with stable diffusion directly in blender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG7B29FBZKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG7B29FBZKU

votu 4y ago

Ncsoft( a big game studio) is doing this with unreal engine 5 for a new mmo looter shooter. https://about.ncsoft.com/en/news/article/lll-interview-221114 https://about.ncsoft.com/en/news/article/lll-interview-22111...

1659447091 4y ago

Is there a trick to get output like this? I have been trying out the different models/sites/oss setups when they show up here and I get _nothing_ like this. I dont even get the images others use as examples. I felt like I am obviously doing it wrong. I try example prompts and prompts people suggest they used and I still get images that are as bad as if I tried to make them myself. To me this is crazy and almost unbelievable that it was generated, mostly because my experience has been completely opposite. Im on the fence about the artiest debate, but seeing this, I think its more the ones that keep their jobs are the ones who gain a new skill as prompt artiest*. To me that seems like a very valuable and real skill going forward. [*] kinda like early 'web designers' that needed to learn javascript

smusamashah 4y ago
I would recommend you to lurk around /r/StableDiffusion
rashkov 4y ago
I had this experience with midjourney until I found out there were certain keywords I had to include to enable their newer engines
fab1an 4y ago
What exactly are you struggling with? The main challenge with Midjourney is to open up a broader style pallete, while the out of the box vanilla results are usually amazing in v4.
- 1659447091 4y ago
  Had not tried Midjourney, probably as I dont usually bother with discord. Just tried it out and while the results are probably better than anything I had before, there are a lot of weird things going on (per my usual experience) that dont seem to appear in examples other peoples use and def not in the topic post; distorted faces, extra body parts, weird 'deformities', proportions etc... Here are both variations and upscales of the same prompt (-> which is probably my issue?). This was without reading the 'tips' or looking through /r/StableDiffusion yet. It still really seems like prompting is an art form and skill that really needs to be learned, or atleast have the skills to touch-up the images. ::a happy family in the middle of a nucular wasteland:: (I just realized I spelt nuclear wrong, does that matter?) [original] https://cdn.midjourney.com/2685df56-6e1a-4828-9bd5-2960271d2bf5/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/2685df56-6e1a-4828-9bd5-2960271d2... [upscaled] https://cdn.midjourney.com/b7363830-0a77-4362-86bb-a1bc30ff7fef/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/b7363830-0a77-4362-86bb-a1bc30ff7... [variation] https://cdn.midjourney.com/cf9d990b-0745-4ef5-b977-31cbd0efc757/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/cf9d990b-0745-4ef5-b977-31cbd0efc... [variations] https://cdn.midjourney.com/7337ed7f-041b-43d0-8626-2b3992fbd453/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/7337ed7f-041b-43d0-8626-2b3992fbd... [upscaled] https://cdn.midjourney.com/a29c53da-e9cf-4192-88cd-d56d4e2d3bab/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/a29c53da-e9cf-4192-88cd-d56d4e2d3... [variations]https://cdn.midjourney.com/497b5044-605c-42f8-b285-868515211aa2/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/497b5044-605c-42f8-b285-868515211... [upscaled] https://cdn.midjourney.com/dcdc1eb6-c5a0-4df9-9cc9-93fa8cf129e5/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/dcdc1eb6-c5a0-4df9-9cc9-93fa8cf12... [variations] https://cdn.midjourney.com/46822f7a-b90f-4119-9cee-4f3967dc30a1/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/46822f7a-b90f-4119-9cee-4f3967dc3...

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dukeofdoom 4y ago

Making my first 2d game using some ai art from midjourney. It's like having an assistant that works for me. But I still have to tell it what I want and fix mistakes and do the animations. Using midjourney and chat.open.ai to help. In my case it hasn't killed jobs as I would not have a budget to hire anyone anyway. However I'm able to fulfill my vision for the game, just getting ai help the low level stuff. So it's making things easier and I can make something better with my time. And I think ai will boost productivity while reducing time and effort. So a huge boost, in bring up people with low skills to make something useful. Most people don't want to make things from scratch.

Beaver117 4y ago

With new breakthroughs like this I try to be extremely open minded. The potential is endless. We could have entire AI generated AR/VR worlds in just a decade or two that we couldn't really believe was possible a decade ago. And obviously that will need many many more jobs to sustain, so the k only downside is some people will have to get more education/training/skills to qualify because basic drawing won't be useful enough anymore.

BizarroLand 4y ago
I'm looking forward to a skyrim-eqsue massively multiplayer open world AI enhanced RPG where the entire game continuously generates more content (that isn't simple fetch quests) and that has ongoing stories that interconnect and weave together to tell stories that build on previous stories. I'd gladly pay a monthly subscription for that if it could work, but I'm guessing we're at least a decade away from even an alpha version of that, possibly more.
- fennecfoxy 4y ago
  I actually tried to get chatGPT to do this just after it came out: https://imgur.io/a/vvPjB2s https://imgur.io/a/vvPjB2s. Atm it's quite hard to work with it because of all the safety blockers they added to prevent it from pretending to be someone, but it almost gets the idea. I just love "in order to seek revenge for the death of his husband" as well as the chatGPT's suggestions that follow - if connected right it would play out in a very convincing way. Imagine killing an NPC right at the start of the game bc other games don't do anything about it. Then later in the game you're ambushed by a group of strong NPCs who internally traded/organised/bartered/trained their way into having nice armour/weapons, mercenaries with them, all with the sole purpose of seeking revenge, coming up to you and telling you just how much they hate you for what you did and try to kill you. Hell, with enough integration between various game systems it would even be possible, at that point, to try to redeem yourself through some dialogue, depending on the internal character traits involved (how persuasive you are, how distraught/determined they are). A another big thing is that NPCs in games atm don't really do much when you're not around. Some games make them walk from place to place, but it would be so cool for them to have different motivations in a not statically-programmed way where you might find a rural NPC decides to move to the city because there are better opportunities there. Or that the price of iron bars has gone up because a group of NPCs have formed a successful weapons guild and you as a player now have to pay more for your weapons unless you, say, choose to assassinate key individuals within that organisation. With a custom tailored version I feel it would be super easy to have something like chatGPT spin out the literary parts of the game, then feed say character descriptions into art/sound generation and everything else to get the game together. Would definitely be prone to utter weirdness now & then but would be so cool to see.

epaulson 4y ago

Maybe it's because I don't know the workflow to do game character design, but it looks like the only AI used in the character creation here was the initial character design? Like, before in a normal process you'd get a human artist to draw you a character on that "model" sheet, giving you a front/side/back view of the character, and then take that 2d drawing and hand it off to a 3d modeler who would turn it into a 3D mesh and start taking the 2d drawings and turn them into textures, and then rigging them for animation controls. It seems like all of that 2d->3d conversion is still being done by a human in this workflow, and so the "only" part that's being done is the 2d drawings. Now, my drawing skills would put me in the lower half of an average 4th grade class, so it's more than I could do, but it still seems like we're quite a ways from going from a couple of prompts to get a 2d design sheet, then a mesh and textures that match that 2d design, and then a rigged mesh, and then motion data to attach to that rigged mesh to give some basic animations. So, while this is super-cool, it still feels like we're a long way from saying "I want a plumber with a thick mustache wearing blue overalls, a red shirt, and red cap. And now I want him to be able to jump and squat coming down." and start putting that into my game asset library.

dagmx 4y ago
There are ways to go from this art directly to 3D models and I’m sure tons of people will post links to them. But I want to point out quality and artistic knowledge. The poster is clearly a talented artist. They knew how to direct the images to what they wanted and likely rejected many iterations before they got to this point. They knew how to then take that image and translate it to 3D , and make it come together. They knew how to make a topology flow that makes sense for their prototype etc… I think a lot of people see “good output” and forget about the process and knowledge+experience required to make something good. I take photography as an example. Every one with the means likely has a camera today. It still takes a brilliant eye to take an amazing photo. You could take two brilliant photographers and someone without expertise to a gorgeous location. The two experienced photographers will have a higher likelihood to come out with amazing but very different images. The layperson could maybe take a good photo but the chances are much lower because they likely don’t have the experience to think about composition or story telling. I liken these advancements in AI to that. Yeah, some people will put out pretty images, but there’s so much more that goes into making something great out of it that people underestimate

pronlover723 4y ago

I'm curious how they went from character sheet to fully rigged model. It sounds like they hand created the model, and hand rigged it, and the entire process took 18 hours (entire meaning from 0 to game proto) so building the model, applying UVs, and rigging, was some sub-portion of that 18 hours Does that fit other people's experience of how long it generally takes someone to model, UV map, and rig a character? edit: If it's not clear, it sounds like it took 4-6 hours to model, map, rig. Since they still had to spend time generating the character sheet, generating the city and alley, and turning it all into a playable prototype in that same 18 hours

hacker_9 4y ago
It does, once you have the character sheet, you put these together in blender and use them as reference for the 3d model, so everything comes out in proportion and its just grind really to place the vertices. The rigging + animation is done by mixamo's AI so just touch up after. He had to do a UV unwrap and then align the textures to this, this is time consuming just because it requires thinking about where to split the 3d model, to place the seams, then to fit it all in a texture, where you have to think about how much space to give each texture (more space = more quality). And then map the texture into this space too. This is a known pain in the 3d modelling for decades and no doubt AI will solve this in the next decade.
nineteen999 4y ago
By skipping straight to a low-poly model rather than sculpting a high-poly model and then retopologizing, the author saved an immense amount of time. UV mapping I expect they wouldn't have saved much time. The AI texture maps (complete with baked in shadows and lighting that wouldn't work in all lighting conditions) saved them an immense amount of time, but doesn't include the normal mapping step that would usually occur with the high/poly low workflow. Of course there are some artifacts there but the end result is really good for a prototype for a low budget indie game. Using Mixamo once again saves an huge amount of time over hand rigging the mesh and instantly gives you access to a large library of animations that can be projected onto the Mixamo rig. This is a very clever use of the available tools by very experienced character artist in my opinion. Your average HN reader is not going to be able to achieve this in 4, 18 hours or otherwise due to simply not having the required skillset to get from one end of the workflow to the other. Kudos to the author.

groar 4y ago

It would have been fun to see how AI generated voice (like https://www.enginn.tech https://www.enginn.tech ) could be integrated as well (and have an estimate of how much time it saves)

fennecfoxy 4y ago
Eh they're forcing people to use a plugin which uses their servers/magic. The real revolution will happen (eventually) with open source models that either run on the player's machine or tools that are used to generate at build time.

Kukumber 4y ago

I'm not interested in games made using/helped an/by AI Hopefully a tag will appear on steam to filter out that junk It devaluates what art, creativity and passion are It'll take down that civilization faster than a pandemic or a social media algorithm

MacsHeadroom 4y ago
Those tags won't appear and nobody will be collecting the data that would be necessary for them anyway. AI generation will be more pervasive than Photoshop and all your favorite art and artists will be using AI. You will change your mind.

paulryanrogers 4y ago

> As these images are created by an AI, no one has a claim to their copyright. Debatable. There have been instances where artist signatures have appeared in the AI output. And if there is a profit motive then case for fair use is weaker.

Popeyes 4y ago
Wasn't there a ruling where an AI art couldn't be copyrighted because it had no creator. So sucks if you make a game and then all your art assets get ripped for some other game.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  The law is in flux. So until the legislature weighs in or a case reaches the higher courts that is a very real risk. Imagine a hugely popular game found to have clearly unlicensed copyrighted works, even in only fragments. It could become expensive legally and in reputation. (Especially for big publishers and devs who may be seen to profit from unlicensed copies of work from starving artists.)
GaggiX 4y ago
Signatures generated from scratch like the rest of the image, I think is an important aspect to specify.

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slowhadoken 4y ago

“A.I. art” is neither A.I. nor art. After you make a neural network the first thing that occurs to you is that it’s useless without tons of data. In this instance our data is art made my people. Using assets without permission or a licensing agreement is theft. To make things worse corporations are charging for this theft. Basically “A.I. art” is another way to say “theft as a service (TaaS).”

GaggiX 4y ago
Copyright infringement is not theft because you are not depriving the rightful owner of something. AI art is not copyright infringement because the results are transformative (really transformative), so you would have to explain how AI art directly became theft. Also, neural networks are not "useless", there is virtually an infinite number of permutations that can be achieved with generative models.
- slowhadoken 4y ago
  The algorithm has no agency so it's not making art, art is made by humans. It's data theft. The art is data. You could also think of it in terms of counterfeiting too.
  - GaggiX 4y ago
    Art is made by a human using the tool to create the image, such as a photographer using a machine called a "camera", a digital artist using a computer, or a traditional artist using a paintbrush, also you seem to have completely ignored the part where I state how absurd it is to call it "theft."
    - slowhadoken 4y ago
      A human who pushes a button on a counterfeiting machine isn't a machinist, economist, or artist.
      - 4y ago

NicoleJO 4y ago

All the images here were stolen from artists who were not credited nor paid for their graphics.

yazzku 4y ago
And he blatantly makes the statement: > As these images are created by an AI, no one has a claim to their copyright. [...] At least this is how I feel about AI art. Perhaps he needs an AI to create some empathy.

palisade 4y ago

He could probably have sped it up a little bit further with the headshot plugin for character creator. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/sponsored-by-reallusion/how-to-generating-a-3d-animated-gollum-from-a-single-photo-186652.html https://www.cartoonbrew.com/sponsored-by-reallusion/how-to-g... They also have ActorCore AutoRig for free now that'll quickly rig any model. And, they sell anims for a couple of bucks per anim on there as well. https://actorcore.reallusion.com/auto-rig https://actorcore.reallusion.com/auto-rig https://courses.reallusion.com/home/actorcore/accurig?v=actorcore-tutorial-getting-started-with-accurig https://courses.reallusion.com/home/actorcore/accurig?v=acto... Though, if you use the steps in the golum tutorial I linked above you don't even have to bother with the autorigger because you'd be mapping directly onto the CC body which is already rigged. But, if you wanted to modo/zbrush your own body and then autorig it you can. Then you can morph it to fit what you need and attach any hair, weapons and clothing items you purchased or created. Another technique is to export a CC body from character creator and convert to ZTL and hand that to a zbrush artist. Then, you can GoZ the ztl back to Character Creator already rigged and fully animatable. Note: I don't work for the company, I just really like their tools.

yazzku 4y ago

> As these images are created by an AI, no one has a claim to their copyright. This is currently being disputed over several lawsuits and is blatantly disrespectful towards all artists who have published works under various _copyright licenses_ and now have all of it stolen and bastardized by a model. The demo was cool but the lack of empathy towards the people who unknowingly put their work into it is gross.