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Cult Of Games XLBS: Is A.I Going To Transform Game Art Forever?
July 17, 2022 by lloyd
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Happy Sunday!
AI art? I’m flat out finding a computer game that doesn’t do stupid stuff. So stupid it makes my tactics look sound and reasonable!
Btw both project links go to the same project (East African Germans), and I love Saga!
Well done John with the Sons of Horus! The best legion with the greatest of Primarchs. Only the Thousand Sons come close.
Just on the 30K weapons, there’s a great line in one of the 30K books where Space Wolves use Xenos weapons against the xenos themselves. They rationalise that armies build weapons that would work best against their own defences rather than their enemies, thus Space Marines carry weapons that would best kill Space Marines.
It’s the XLBS SHow…………..Happy Sunday Fellow CoGs!
Happy Sunday,
Good Cheers on Christ’s day. on this day above all others you should watch a movie which show how to live your life, I speak of course of the greatest movie ever made! i had to type this several times as i am a bit tipsy right now and cannot see the screen clearly, but God would have it no other way.
@johnlyons Are you just going to be using the Battle Brother’s list from OPR?
if I end up disliking how heresy works with its own rules, yes
Or one page rules?
Happy Sunday!
My algorithms have scanned 42,582 similar posts on this site and determined that was the right thing to say!
lol
In art class at school we once had to draw a few random lines on paper … and then use them to create an image.
As such I’d consider “AI art” to be more a starting point and less like art that can be used ‘as is’, unless you get really really lucky with the result.
btw : I really hate how ‘AI’ is used. There is nothing ‘intelligent’ about the process at all.
Also : this can never ever create new art.
It will always be existing material. Whatever creativity it has is sourced from the human giving it the command.
“As such I’d consider “AI art” to be more a starting point and less like art that can be used ‘as is’, unless you get really really lucky with the result.”
I would agree it’s less than perfect but really could jumpstart an art piece with rapped idea testing’s and then painting over and combining assets too, but the speed of deployment in this field is staggering and only getting faster. It won’t be long before we are at a level that is completely accepted by most people.
“Also : this can never ever create new art.”
Never say never, this wasn’t even on the radar of most people (outside of research teams) until last year, now I trip over it all over the internet.
“It will always be existing material. Whatever creativity it has is sourced from the human giving it the command.”
For a game designer this is exactly what they need. At the very least they can mock up the art for their whole project before going to an artist to develop the project further and the a designer for layout.
People (and especially investors/managers) are very visually driven.
It is much easier to tell people it is ‘placeholder art’ when it looks like actual ‘placeholder’ art.
With AI generated art you run the risk of having to endlessly tweak the input just to please the twats doing the testing as they don’t understand that it is not meant to be final.
Even at the current stage that ‘AI’ art looks ‘good enough’ to fool most non artists anyway.
I also am reminded of the experiment where someone took a painting made by a monkey to a museum and fooled people into thinking it was ‘real’ art …
oh … and speaking of monkeys. There’s that selfie made by a monkey. The copyright/ownership discussion may have some relations with these AI art generators too.
@lloyd – have you actually *tried* the AI art generator? A friend and I had access to the early release of three different AI-art systems (including DALL-E). I wanted to generate a few Blood Bowl players. The results were dreadful. The images you see on their websites are (obviously) the very best of the many, many results. The sites are fun to play with and you can create some interesting “in the style of” artwork that looks kooky and fun. But for realistic, usable game art? There’s still a long way to go!
“have you actually *tried* the AI art generator”
Isn’t that what we are doing on the show 🙂
“I wanted to generate a few Blood Bowl players.”
This is a very specific task but I wouldn’t be surprised to see an AI doing it in the near future once these AIs are more publicly used and exposed to a lot more requests and data.
“The images you see on their websites are (obviously) the very best of the many, many results.”
Maybe, but it proves it can be done. Humans can be hit an miss in the creative industries too, sometimes something will just flow and at others the result isn’t what you hoped for. But a big defence here is that in the future as this develops to a level people deem acceptable if you don’t like the result you can click a button and get more alternatives in a few moments rather than hours working with a person.
“But for realistic, usable game art? There’s still a long way to go!”
I think people will be taken by surprise at how fast we get to that point.
Yeah, sorry. What I meant was “used it to create artwork to a specific brief?”
I played around with some of the AI generators months ago (in early beta) and even the “better” ones (like Dall-e) struggled to create useable stuff to a brief. For abstract, generic art, they created some really interesting (and often amusing) results. Additive, generic requests work well, especially absurd stuff (a duck floating in a bowl of soup in the style of Quentin Blake).
But if you say “I want x but not y” they struggled.
The art is also often created with “fuzzy edges” making it ok for general ideas, but it’s still not there for “game art” (which I guess is what I was hoping for). Since it’s not just lifting elements and making a composite but actually creating imagery from a massive number of “nodes” or “points” and building it up, nice, clearly defined edges to the image elements are something it struggles with.
Sure, we’ve come a long way, relatively quickly.
But since a lot of these generators are based on similar (if not forks of the same) open source algorithm (I think Dall-e2 and DeepDream are proprietary but things like Craiyon and DeepAI are based on the same open source code) lots of parallel code effort got us here, but it feels like it’s slowing down – the classic coder adage of the last 10% taking up 90% of the time budget.
Still – it’s interesting to keep an eye on. The future is going to be exciting/terrifying* (delete as appropriate)
Happy XLBS Show day.
Fantastic work John.
We have seen the enemy and he’s is us.
Yay Wall-E’s brother.
Is their not AI song artists in Japan or I’m getting confused with a book I’ve read.?
You are referring to ‘Vocaloid’ … they even had a concert with a hologram ‘performing’ the songs.
https://youtu.be/jhl5afLEKdo
Yes that could be the one never seen any video reminds me of a Final Fantasy character.
That’s a Ukrainian Boris Johnson it’s done?
Ooh Conan the retired?
Lloyd John Ben That may be good for aircraft/army banner logo’s?
Maybe they could be 🙂
Ooh nice congrats on the gold buttons folk’s.
Lovein the show team.
Happy Sunday.
I’ve been playing with Dall.e mini for the last hour. It’s pretty addictive. Lots of goblins and dragons. The tree man gives interesting and sometimes realistic results.
Sunday B*tches!
00:00 Way to In Synch!
01:00 bad @lloyd, bad!
01:30 “caved in” … like anybody expected anything else *g*
02:30 “Never played bad guys” – Like Spaz Marinez are the good ones…
04:50 It contrasts… with contrasts! 8)
08:45 There is milk in that coffee @lloyd WHY?
11:20 primark? Weird terrain choice.
12:30 “die by the dozens” – so 30k is Space Orks? oO
13:00 Way to much G’Wullu in this XLBS
14:00 @brennon betrays the badgers!
14:45 John has better lighting.
16:15 Terrain is great. Terrain never hurts you
17:20 4ground and 3D printed… so terrain nobody can ever recreate! DAMN IT!
18:00 That’s a Battle Kiwi Star Wars Bunker in the background!
20:00 John Battletech live stream! Get on with it!
21:40 CONFIRMED!
26:00 even ignoring potential (C) problems: will the AI be able to recreate the same are style often and consistently enough so that it won’t look like someone nicked random pictures from the internet?
30:00 That’s not the droids we’re looking for
36:00 copyright lawyers will have a field day with this.
43:00 Boom boom Boris?! XD
46:00 I’m not sleeping tonight
51:30 this will be baaaaaad
57:00 Lloyd is not responding. End task?
1:05:00 We’re dooooomed
1:12:00 tiny picketers to not stress the poor project system
1:18:30 When did that happen?
1:20:00 Best button ev0r! Blow them horns! No make the main page as fast. And the project system 😉
1:23:00 Biscuit trains
Winning golden button… seems like to be a lot of work.
You’ve read the books a marine can run up a corridor full of orks an kill the lot with just chips and grazes on the armour.
Jump to the game an he can step out of a landraider a be killed by a grechin with a penknife.
All propaganda!
Ha Lol you have played the game?
What game exactly?
The Game of Game’s Lol.
Gerrys favourite one!?!
“36:00 copyright lawyers will have a field day with this.”
Yeah they will love it 🙂
Hurray! John is playing Battletech Saturday.
@lloyd yeah, German Naval Landing parties had a white uniform for tropical climates. Didn’t stay white long, but there you go. Cut off from supplies and living in the bush, the uniforms rapidly became less uniform. At some point they’d either be dyed with whatever they could find or swapped out with captured uniforms or civilian clothes.
@johnlyons I agree, Alpha Strike is the way to go for videos.While I really love classic, it’s so much easier to integrate infantry, conventional vehicles and aerial support in Alpha Strike. Everybody loves mechs but conventional equipment has a real role in the BT universe and they’re worth checking out.
“@lloyd yeah, German Naval Landing parties had a white uniform for tropical climates. Didn’t stay white long, but there you go. Cut off from supplies and living in the bush, the uniforms rapidly became less uniform. At some point they’d either be dyed with whatever they could find or swapped out with captured uniforms or civilian clothes.”
Good to know. If it was me, my uniform would be dirty before I made it of the ship. I’d probably rub up against something oily on board 🙂
Amazing work on the Sons of Horus, John. Those look incredible!
Great show as always.
For this weeks presentation I find myself in the Luddite camp. The concept of AI utilizing deep learning algorithms to manifest results to near human products based on search terms is worthy of applause to the creative people designing the software. The human active element of functional production using our minds to do the same without input, other than what we’ve seen, is lost. The functional portion of the human mind which performs this task and holds the “random value generator” we call creativity is dulled into nothjngness. This is the same kind of mind dulling that Grammarly promotes with language skill. Don’t give people the mental crutch or cerebral jet engine to even out a playing field that will kill off skill and capability. Look at the overall CG art of MtG and you have the gist. Rant over.
@johnlyons That is very swank blending on the marines. The overall color is awesome and I look forward to the finished result.
@brennon Thinking about the color of your paints and the effect, would you set up a camera to catch the overall effect with balanced lighting and do a 360 video of a couple figures to feature on your YouTube channel as addition to your project?
@lloyd Pulling from last week and looking to the future, with Saga, when will we see more of your armies painted? The Pagan Rus aren’t painting themselves.
“The Pagan Rus aren’t painting themselves.”
Maybe we will have AI painters soon 🙂
Whenever I smack the “Random” button when I generate a Sims 4 character, I’m using an algorithm and the computer is generating the art, so no big deal. The next step is for the computer to “learn” something from which random character I choose. Microsoft, Apple, and web sites are constantly collecting data on *you* so have plenty of data to sift through for their computers to “learn”. By correlating target demographics and artwork (or anything else), companies can tailor whatever to your tastes, usually for their own nefarious purposes.
Myself, I ArtBreeder, for portraits for characters in miniature skirmish games, and can use it for NPC’s in RPG’s. I don’t see it too different than a photo taken by a human, though, other than the portraits are consistent in the head size and angle towards the viewer, making them more suitable for a group of adventurers. : https://www.artbreeder.com/beta/browse
artbreeder.com is another great option.
I’d looked at it a couple of years back but I don’t think at that time I could get access to a version to try and then totally forgot about it.
Thanks so much for the reminder @ced1106
Here’s a quick bash at a stat card chucked together in photoshop using almost all AI generated Assets (forest, dwarf & paper texture) in 30min. It’s rough but think of it as rapid prototyping ?
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=5509004592495979&set=a.266697730060051
Good to know!
I used Artbreeder the old fashioned way — screencap a portrait, print it out, and glue stick it onto an index card. (: The portraits are under 3×3, and the rest of the card I glue a printout of their character stats made on a spreadsheet. Takes up much less room than a character sheet, and has space to put tokens on to track wounds, etc.
https://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/75960-department-of-acquisitions-and-enablement-the-second/page/757/#comments
Never heard of Dall.e before. It is amazing and terrifying at the same time.
yes it is.
I did watch some space ships being designed by AI just the other week on youtube…I did think wow at the time. Myself I
m using a design artist in Germany hes putting together the “look” of my own game, that`s gameboard, cards layout and the art for them and for the box and rules etc.. total bill (not much art, more layout and design) around £5,000 I think it be in the end. But its a good feeling when you work together on getting that right feel… Time will tell when I get closer to my first kickstarter early next year…?Yes at this point it’s hard to replace the Human but AI can alloy you to some rapid prototyping. Have a look at this.
A quick bash at a stat card chucked together in photoshop using almost all AI generated Assets (forest, dwarf & paper texture) in 30min. It’s rough but think of it as rapid prototyping ?
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=5509004592495979&set=a.266697730060051
@lloyd Looks like Riotminds have embraced the AI art trend with their new Kickstarter.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/riotminds/art-of-the-order-of-the-tormented-souls
Well there you go, it didn’t take long for AI art to be used in a paid for product.
If people will buy it as an Art book it won’t be to long before we see it making it’s way into game dev.
Cheers for the link @spankytaz