AI generated art as a solution to quicker generation of new content?

[Vrizz]

In short:

1) I like how the game develops

2) Assumption: I believe it takes a lot of time to create new art

3) Assumption: we can use AI's support to have BF-styled new beautiful content

 

My steps:

1) Installed some local AI tools and I am starting to learn - atm 1%, a lot of knowledge to acquire, models and other shits I dont understand yet 😉 - same for creating good prompts

2) Just as a starting point - I am sharing some first-attempts for BF faction emblems/crystals or whatever (for unknown purpose xd). They can get a lot better in later time, but I wanted to hear some opinions if there is a point of me to learn the stuff.

 

What do you think about this step? To have more icons, player emblems, achievement icons, ability icons and so on?

It's far beyond my abiltiies, but it is also possible to generate 3D models so maybe we can have easier way to push the game forwards?

 

[zz_tophat]

Personally, I do not mind at all but the issue is so divisive, last time I mentioned AI art in a community I got a lot of backlash so... brace yourself for a lot of misinformed hate.

I don't think there would be any problem with using AI art as a place holder, although I am sure someone finds even that opinion controversial.

[Vrizz]

I see, thanks for sharing!

 

I felt bad with quality of some shadow/fire/frost so made some more samples.

 

Ofc AI doesnt have to fully do the images, it can be a starting point, refined by professional artist.

[Kubik]

AI generated images have a lot of issues, for example do you have legal rights to distribute them?
How 3rd parties may came and claim rights for the image, because the AI was trained from their work?
Can EA use it as reason to shut the project down?

While textures and images will not take much time to convert to format BF would understand, I am not sure I heard about AI that could generate models in the format BF uses.

Also have you considered memory usage, BF is 32 bit process, so it is impossible to address more than 4 GB of memory, so having too many options, that look almost identical would only waste memory.

[Vrizz]

8 hours ago, Kubik said:

AI generated images have a lot of issues, for example do you have legal rights to distribute them?
How 3rd parties may came and claim rights for the image, because the AI was trained from their work?
Can EA use it as reason to shut the project down?

While textures and images will not take much time to convert to format BF would understand, I am not sure I heard about AI that could generate models in the format BF uses.

Also have you considered memory usage, BF is 32 bit process, so it is impossible to address more than 4 GB of memory, so having too many options, that look almost identical would only waste memory.

Depends on the model files used, I believe the ARE open source safe ones.

Also I think it is safer in terms of legal rights to use local AI engines aka Stable Diffusion, not internet generators.

With proper care (using safe models + retouching them by human artists) has negligible risk of anything. Billions of graphics are generated globally - EA didnt have resources to keep BF alive, do they have resource to scan if AI-inspired 32x32 pixel icon was trained on copyrighted material...? 

I don't know anything about 3D modelling. What format does BF use?

Hmmm, I am not sure, Kubik, I understood what does 32bit process has to do with 4 GB of memory in AI context - you use AI to generate output, then its a flat image or a 3D model. That's all the use of memory. Could you elaborate?

[Kubik]

Last time I heard, there are no "safe" AI models to generate images.

EA for did have enough resources to keep BF alive.

As far As I know, no one from EA ever publicly said how is that 3D format called, so no one here knows.

Each additional image increases memory cunsumption of the game, and there is only limited amount of memory the game can use.
32 bits is quite significant limit on what CPU features are accesible, the biggest one being ability to address whole system memory, so does not mater if you PC have 8 GB of RAM, or 128 GB of RAM, the game can not see it all.

[WindHunter]

We have considered using AI artworks before and have had less than satisfactory results. While our artists sometimes still use it for the concepting phase, the actual quality is far below our art standards. As an example, I have included 4 artworks from SR-team released cards below. Which ones do you think were drawn using an AI base and which ones do you think were hand drawn?

Also regarding the examples here, the gems look like mobile game icons to me. While I think AI art might eventually be decent enough to use assuming we can train it on existing BattleForge artwork, I do not think the public-facing tools are quite there yet, particularly when you consider that we do not have any budget to use for high-end tools.

[Vrizz]

9 hours ago, Kubik said:

Last time I heard, there are no "safe" AI models to generate images.

EA for did have enough resources to keep BF alive.

As far As I know, no one from EA ever publicly said how is that 3D format called, so no one here knows.

Each additional image increases memory cunsumption of the game, and there is only limited amount of memory the game can use.
32 bits is quite significant limit on what CPU features are accesible, the biggest one being ability to address whole system memory, so does not mater if you PC have 8 GB of RAM, or 128 GB of RAM, the game can not see it all.

Thanks for explaining, I see now.

 

 

7 hours ago, WindHunter said:

We have considered using AI artworks before and have had less than satisfactory results. While our artists sometimes still use it for the concepting phase, the actual quality is far below our art standards. As an example, I have included 4 artworks from SR-team released cards below. Which ones do you think were drawn using an AI base and which ones do you think were hand drawn?

Also regarding the examples here, the gems look like mobile game icons to me. While I think AI art might eventually be decent enough to use assuming we can train it on existing BattleForge artwork, I do not think the public-facing tools are quite there yet, particularly when you consider that we do not have any budget to use for high-end tools.

"Which ones do you think were drawn using an AI base and which ones do you think were hand drawn?" Haha I am too far from being an artist to correctly answer this one. 😞 After seeing so much stuff on https://civitai.com/ (is this really below our standards?) I believe any could have been generated and any could have been drawn.

The gems - well, as mentioned, those were my first 3h with AI image generation ever, so I didnt try to make something "ready for BF". People train their models with what they want. Also I was doing those gems with inspiration in mind regarding my suggestion to add more symbols to player frame (like we have title, icon, border, color), so my idea was to create something like 32x32 pixels. I think noone would notice they are mobile or not.

 

All in all, if you have considered it, there's nothing more to add. I will report if I notice something that may change the situation. Thanks for explanation.

[Chibiterasu]

AI art is great for non-artists who want to create something good-looking without spending much time or knowledge on it. But if you use AI to get something high-quality, you need to put a lot more effort into it. Sure, it's definitely possible to use AI to create art that looks just as good as the results our artists come up with. (And there shouldn't be any legal problems either, but not 100% sure about this one.) But what I'm sure about is that such high-quality AI art won't even save that much time compared to drawing them by hand. And to recognize what result looks good, you need to know stuff about art anyway.

[Cocofang]

Main issue is the style. BattleForge has a very particular artstyle with rough strokes, rough textures, cloudy/foggy backgrounds that serve as high contrast canvas for the actual subject of the picture. Even the subject itself is often partially fading into this background fog, empathizing anything in the foreground even further.

And even then there are unfortunately a few artworks that stick out with a different style or a hacky paint-over of the low poly 3D model.

If an AI was trained on the core artstyle it could be worth looking into. But otherwise the AI results might require too much touch-up work.