How Game Developers are Leveraging AI to Create Stunning Game Art?
AI is not limited to game designing and enabling amazing game features; AI is becoming far better day by day and enabling developers to create much more than the last decades. Nowadays, AIs are bridging the gap between Art & Science by enabling developers to create stunning graphics and game assets through a combination of machine learning and the right sets of parameters.
Game art is no more time taking tasks with AI, as AIs are now capable of creating unique characters, environments, and items automatically or helping developers in ideation, rendering, and even conceptualization about game art. Some game development studios have already created history using these technologies in their games, like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, No Man's Sky, Horizon Zero Dawn, and much more.
Well, this blog is not around these two games: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and No Man's Sky. There are many more piles of information gathered in this blog like we are going to discuss AI that enables you to create immersive games by creating unique game art for your game and the importance of AI-based game art usage in development.
Usage of Procedural Content Generator in Game Development
Let's learn the use cases of AI in game art designing and creation then we will learn about productive AIs. These two games, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and No Man's Sky, used Procedural content generation to create vast landscapes and offer personalized experiences to players using sophisticated algorithms and machine learning.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
We know you must have read articles on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and are amazed at its realistic environments and immersive game worlds, but do you know that AI creates those amazing and stunning graphics? Indeed, AI played a big role and did a great job of various artists in this game.
Procedural content generation AI tools helped developers in creating the game with a small team of six artists only, while the game has a vast landscape with various environmental features.
How did it come in seen? Maybe you would ask the same question. How is it possible to create such a vast landscape in open-world games?
So, here's your answer, the process of designing a landscape starts with a small team of artists, as mentioned above. Those artists created a set of rules for the game world.
- What will be the locations of towns and cities?
- How will the terrain look in different areas? Where will be trees and other vegetation found?
- Set different parameters to create different and dynamic art sets.
- AI algorithm used Perlin noise to generate realistic environmental patterns, including rivers, mountains, valleys, and ridges.
No Man's Sky
No Man's Sky is not just famous for its gameplay but game art, which was created with the help of AI. Some game research says, "No Man's Sky has taken procedural generation and usage of AI in the game to the next level. The game has an interesting expansive universe with billions of planets to explore, which is generated through procedural algorithms. The right combination of algorithms and procedural generation techniques helped developers to create unique planets, flora, and fauna for each player.
No Man's Sky developers used AI to create random and unpredictable planets that feel real. And used mechanisms like in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion to create different landscapes using different sets of pre-defined art, environmental backgrounds, and game art assets. However, No Man's Sky's AI system also enables the game to learn from player interactions and create a dynamic and ever-changing game world that can be different for each player.
The impact of AI on game development goes beyond just generating game assets by using procedural content generation. AI has revolutionized the entire development process, allowing game studios to create more immersive and engaging games with fewer resources and less time. We will mention those pointers and how the gaming industry is being revolutionized with AI. Also, in the next paragraph, how game developers are getting help from AI in Art creation.
Revolutionizing Game Art Creation: AI Makes it as Easy as a Click
Procedural content generation (PCG) has indeed been a longstanding technique being used in the gaming industry. PCG refers to using algorithms and AI to generate game content, such as levels, textures, characters, and other elements, instead of manually creating them; this technique helps developers create vast landscapes in less time while giving a personalized gaming experience.
However, the gaming industry has seen the emergence of new AI-powered tools and platforms that are specially designed for game art creation. Mid Journey, Make Logo AI, and DALL-E are some tools loaded with amazing features. These tools can help artists and developers rapidly and easily create a range of game art in different game styles rapidly and easily.
Mid Journey (Game art Creation AI)
Mid Journey is another trending topic, just like Chat GPT and is free-open source AI that helps in image creation. It is also an AI-powered platform designed to empower artists and game developers to create futuristic game characters, generate high-quality textures, and more by entering keywords. The tool helps developers and artists to create and generate high-quality textures, lighting, and other effects automatically using machine learning algorithms.
Mid Journey has a drag-and-drop interface with hundreds of exciting and auxiliary game art development features, allowing creation from sketch design to implementing art style or conceptualization before starting a new game.
Midjourney can upscale AI-generated images to their maximum resolution, while other AI image creation tools and softwares are currently limited to 1024 x 1024 resolution.
DALL-E (Image Creation AI by OpenAI)
OpenAI developed an advanced AI model named DALL-E for image creation that can create almost every type of surreal and imaginative game art. The name derives from a combination of the surrealist artist Salvador Dali and Pixar's animated character WALL-E. The model is capable of generating a vast range of imaginative and surreal images, which is reflected in its name.
DALL-E has undergone training using a neural network to analyze textual inputs and produce corresponding images based on the input text and by input image, as the AI has an image upload option for better results. Similar to Mid Journey and other AI tools for game art creation, DALL-E has been trained on a massive dataset of images and text descriptions. A further notable feature of DALL-E is its ability to comprehend and generate images based on abstract concepts like "loneliness" or "curiosity" and more.
NVIDIA GauGAN (Game Environment Creation AI)
Image Credit: Z D Net
NVIDIA GauGAN is a product of NVIDIA Groups named after Paul Gauguin. It is an AI-powered tool that empowers developers and artists to create photo-realistic images from simple sketches. The tool features help artists create high-quality digital art through a deep-learning neural network trained on millions of images to recognize patterns and features in natural landscapes.
Furthermore, NVIDIA GauGAN includes advanced tools to adjust lighting and perspective and help developers add special effects like fog and reflections in the game art and other game assets. The tool is highly intuitive and easy to use, even for those unfamiliar with traditional digital art tools.
Wrapping up:
The integration of AI has brought a significant transformation in the gaming industry, now with various AI platforms like ** Mid Journey ** facilitating game developers and artists new ways to create amazing games with fewer resources and in less time.
In a decade, the gaming industry has been transformed by various new technologies; however, game art creation is beyond all. Looking ahead, AI has the potential to continue transforming the gaming industry, offering players an unparalleled gaming experience.
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