Interview request: The future of AI in Games art & VFX?

khosi

I have a huge interest in technology and recently I have been into AI and the possibilities it could have in the media industry as a whole. I have done some research into some and even tried the art breeder with some of my sculpts to see how it would turn out.

I had a simple sculpt with little reffrence to see how I can get a style I want.

 

I used the produced image from Artbreeder and the original sculpt to morph and blend between them to get something I liked. The AI did keep a lot of the work but it also game a lot of control to change to my liking.

 

I sculpted the final design I stuck with and I could still see some of my initial ideas I had but with a lot more definition.

I am interested in what people think the future hold for AI and what they would love to be taken over by AI in the current fields. The game and VFX industry is a fast moving field and new tools are always being introduced and improved on. AI has a recent rise in quality and scope of what it can do.

gnoop

So far my impression of AI in content creation is kind of disappointing.   It's  mostly stupid like robot vacuum cleaners .       Namely AI selection in Photoshop  that couldn't select anything beyond  what is already one click select-able without it .     Same with Sympligon .

A company I work for had been subscribed for Artomatix for a while , It was cool  and somewhat helpful but  anyway I ended up doing perfectly same just in Photoshop  with patch tool and content aware move .  Turned out it's still more convenient and controllable there especially after they added pattern preview.  

I tried to use Nvidia   AI denoiser  and it was totally useless just   smearing a render a lot.         Tried  Alchemist  AI depth reconstruction  and de-lighitng  and both was quite so-so  .    De-lighting looked like slightly improved hi-pass.

The only thing I impressed so far is Octane AI denoiser.    Among  all the countless useless toys like Artbreeder   it's  only thing  that really helps.

   

poopipe

It's coming, it's not entirely useful yet

over the next year or two we will start to see machine learning handle complex sims (cloth, fluid etc) at runtime -because it's faster than performing the calculations - and we will see more influence in terms of procedural generation.
As a guess its somewhat likely we'll see ML based style-transfer applied to rendering by the next console generation. 

We are likely to see a 3d art equivalent of Kite (an ML based code completion tool)  work its way into tools in the future (leading to intelligent context menus, predictive macros  etc.) but beyond that I dont' see any real effect on the life of the jobbing 3d artist..   

ask yourself what problems an AI could solve you when you're making your model.. 

oglu

For vfx AI does work already fine. They do blendshape work and skindetail with it. And it does work really good.