AI materials. any progress recently?

gnoop · Jun 16 2024

Does anyone know if anything cool appeared in AI textures/ materials field? Ai normal and height map from photo?

I tried recent Sampler and see no difference , still same blurry , soft, unspecific normal maps . Any better alternatives recently? I sort of lost my hope and stopped to invest my time but still wonder if anyone follow it up closely.

I have an impression some texture providers started to use Sampler instead of actual hi-res phtoscanning and you figure it out only after buying.

Alex_J · Jun 16 2024

Not AI, but did you know about this: Bounding Box Software - Materialize

gnoop · Jun 16 2024

Alex_J said:

Not AI, but did you know about this: Bounding Box Software - Materialize

Based on unspecific , rounded bricks image on their front page it looks no better than same old crazy bump where ugly normal maps are instantly revealed at any tangent light angle . Isn't Unity bought some AI company few years ago and develops its own AI tools as integrated something? Have anyone worked with them?

Anything new for materials in recent Photoshops , beta Photoshop maybe? I stopped follow and even hit update button while still paying my subscribtion. Last one was sbs support in photoshop . Totally useless.

Alex_J · Jun 16 2024

it says on the page the tool was developed and used for uncharted games and now is open source, haven't used it myself though

gnoop · Jun 16 2024

Well . People in gamedev used crazybump a lot too till jobs rivalry and new visual standards for realistic graphics gradually weeded it out . I still do same in Zbrush although when an image resembles height/ depth info.

zetheros · Jun 16 2024

you can try Xnormal

gnoop · Jun 17 2024

zetheros said:

you can try Xnormal

Anyything AI in xnormal? Anything new at all?

ZacD · Jun 17 2024

Those generate normal map from image tools are pretty much bumpy noise generators (which sometimes is all you really need). You'd think this is something AI image generation would be good at, and there's a ton of training material out there.

Eric Chadwick · Jun 23 2024

There are certainly tools out there using Stable DIffusion and the like to use neural networks to generate normal maps from photos.

The problem is they mostly rely on illegally-scraped datasets. If you're OK with the ethical and legal issues of that (I'm very much not cool with it) then have at it.
https://pypi.org/project/imaginairy-normal-map/
https://github.com/brycedrennan/imaginAIry?tab=readme-ov-file#depth-map-control

There are ethically sourced apps though, for example
https://hugotini.github.io/deepbump

SnowInChina · Jun 23 2024

not sure, from what i have seen until now, every tool had massive problems to distinguish form from texture

you can see this in erics post on the reflections in the windows

every tool i've seen until now had the same problems with normalmaps and roughness

and i'm not really sure if the training argument counts for this kind of training? i may be wrong, but if they train the ai for stuff like normalmap generation from fotos, you're not really creating something out of the work from others, you just teach it what is what

if yoiu create materials with it, that would be a different story ? i'm not a legal expert but this is my opinion

gnoop · Jun 23 2024

All the examples I saw so far looks like havin a sort of a bloom added to normal map making it looking blurry on actual material . Except only bricks maybe.

Eric Chadwick · Jun 24 2024

SnowInChina said:

…
and i'm not really sure if the training argument counts for this kind of training? i may be wrong, but if they train the ai for stuff like normalmap generation from fotos, you're not really creating something out of the work from others, you just teach it what is what
if yoiu create materials with it, that would be a different story ? i'm not a legal expert but this is my opinion

Internet-scraped data is an infringement on copyright. I posted some info previously: https://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2785084/#Comment_2785084

AI materials. any progress recently?

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