AI is revolutionizing game development, enabling the quick and affordable creation of 3D assets and animations. It’s democratizing content creation and transforming the gaming industry, says Henri Mirande, co-founder and CTO at Kinetix.
Despite appearing to explode into mainstream consciousness over the past six months, artificial intelligence (AI) has been bubbling under the surface for a while now. The seeds of modern AI were planted by philosophers who attempted to capture human thinking as a mechanical process that can be replicated. At the same time, the term “artificial intelligence” was coined by MIT’s John McCarthy in 1955. Knowingly or unknowingly, most of us are impacted by AI technology in the products and services we use every day.
While it’s practical applications and ethical dilemmas have largely been the work of science fiction, advancements in generative AI and accessible tools for text and image creation mean AI is now capturing people’s imagination like never before. These developments have been made possible by the emergence of large-scale language models and sophisticated neural network architectures that have significantly improved the ability of machines to understand and create art, write content, and converse realistically with people.
Integrating AI into the workflow has led to vital advancements in every industry, and my industry – the games industry – is no different. Thanks to AI, we’re on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how video games are made and who makes them.
The New Era of 3D Content Creation
The building blocks of a video game or virtual world are a collection of 3D items or “assets” which populate the environment. Creating these assets is one of the most arduous and time-consuming parts of the game development process, requiring talented 3D modelers and artists who build a 3D model and add textures and effects. In some cases, such as AAA games studios, they may specialize in modeling a specific type of asset, for example, the environment, characters, or vehicles.
That’s why everyone from Unity to Minecraft offers vast libraries of premade assets for developers and creators that don’t have this level of resource. But with generative AI, game-makers can access 3D content for their games with relative ease and make vast amounts of unique items quickly and cheaply. Using simple text-based prompts and a tool like Midjourney, Scenario, DallE, or Stable Diffusion, anyone can create a set of unique in-game assets in seconds, such as a set of magic potions or even characters.
The quality and ease of use of these tools will only improve further. Training AI models on vast amounts of existing game assets means they can learn to generate assets that fit a particular style or genre. This allows game developers to quickly and efficiently generate assets without manual creation or outsourcing and opens up 3D content creation far more widely. While a proliferation of low and no-code tools on platforms such as Roblox and Fortnite Creative have already fuelled a massive creator economy in user-generated 3D content (UGC), this will democratize content creation even more. We’re not that far away from seeing two-person teams creating games that compete with AAA studios’; not necessarily in pure production quality, but in the engagement levels and enjoyment their experiences deliver.
See More: 5 Ways Outsourcing Content Creation Can Drive ROI
Democratizing the 3D Animation Process
Creating the fabric of a beautiful virtual world and exciting set of characters is vital, but all that work is effectively hollow without animation. Red Dead Redemption 2, one of the most visually stunning games ever produced, also features more than 1,000 non-playable characters, each humanized with animation and its personality. It also cost $500 million and took eight years to build.
Even more so than 3D asset creation, 3D animation has been an expensive and time-consuming process involving trained 3D experts and specialist software and hardware such as Blender or even professional motion capture. Enter generative AI.
AI-powered platforms and no-code editing tools are enabling developers to create and edit animated 3D content in seconds, extending to millions of smaller studios and individuals a skill set previously limited to a few thousand trained artists and animators. Furthermore, this emerging technology tackles the challenge of limited self-expression in gaming and metaverse worlds.
See More: What Is 3D Printing? Working, Software, and Applications
AI and User-generated Content
As gamers demand more immersive experiences and ways to express themselves, publishers and platforms are working hard to keep up. In the case of Flight Simulator, Microsoft partnered with blackshark.ai and trained an AI to generate a photorealistic 3D world from 2D satellite images. Ubisoft has just announced an in-house tool that generates the first draft of non-playable character “barks” – the phrases or sounds made by NPCs when players interact with the game world.
It’s not just publishers aiming to streamline 3D content creation for professional game devs: there’s a fundamental shift happening in who makes games thanks to scalable UGC. Roblox is testing a new AI-driven tool that will enable its millions of creators to instantly create and edit the appearance of their in-game avatars and items, such as vehicles, from a simple written prompt. Fortnite recently launched Creative 2.0, with a massively enhanced set of creator tools for UGC.
All of this is huge for democratizing 3D content creation and streamlining various time-consuming and expensive tasks. It allows professional game developers to focus their attention elsewhere and tens of millions of creators to build things that go far beyond their technical skill sets. This creates a virtuous cycle where everyone becomes a creator while providing an endless stream of fresh user-generated content for developers, publishers, and platforms.
This is still just the leading edge of the generative AI journey. It will expand beyond 3D assets and animation to eventually embrace tasks such as, perhaps, even creating full feature-length films from a written script in the distant future. The level of potential disruption across a huge variety of areas is vast and unpredictable, but nowhere can it be seen more clearly than in gaming.
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