I'm not making definitive statements on how good/bad AI effects will be on artist employment in the game industry.
But what I can say is that most people would be HORRIFIED at the amount of work making game art actually takes if humans just do it raw. It's nearly incomprehensible until you witness it. Even with generative AI I don't think art teams are in serious danger of being mass unemployed.
@RustyCrab I don't think generative AI could ever create usable art on its own. You need somebody to turn that mash of pixels into a usable 2D spritesheet or 3D model.
Not to mention the finger fuckups on image generators will become invalid faces that crash progeams and horrific broken geometry if they happen to a 3D model, so for any game that needs 3D models, you need an artist somehow.
almost everything in the media industry seems like it takes 10x longer than it should and costs 10x what it should. I've worked on very few projects that didn't go over budget.
@sepples programmers can't do it themselves. Cave story has always been a shining example of a one man team. It took him something like 6 years and that is likely the upper limit of what one man can do.
@RustyCrab I saw stats a few years ago, saying roughly 90% of a modern game's budget and man hours was spent on creating art assets. This is probably skewed by game engines and level editors becoming ubiquitous, so you don't have to roll your own physics engines any more. But also the complexity and detail needed to "look good" shot way up.
@PunishedD this figure is also true for teams with proprietary engines. The imbalance right now is staggering and the art team is a 200 participant bonfire that just burns up millions of dollars on grunt labor. The weight of the art team is so monumental that it almost doesn't matter what the engineers do.
@RustyCrab The engineers just mark all their tickets as "known issue in the engine" and shuffle it on to the 3 devs autistic enough to care about working on physics engines. The artists bumble around until an executive walks in and asks the art director "why do all the character models suck?"
@RustyCrab@PunishedD Sounds like there's still a huge need for tech artists. I had an adjunct professor from one of those video game colleges try to recruit me to be one because I showed a modicum of competency in using programming to create art. He said they always struggled to have enough so that every student project got even just one.
@deprecated_ii@PunishedD maybe but it manifests as like this visceral hatred and shame. The only thing they will use from other people is brush patterns and sometimes stock textures as a sample base.
@deprecated_ii@PunishedD@RustyCrab Photorealism is easier because you can just use a photo as a texture, and you have infinite reference materials, and everything will be in the same style. Making stylized stuff is harder, especially when you have to consider resolution of meshes and textures. This is why a lot of stuff use pixelshit graphics or photorealistic stuff, its just easier to make.
@deprecated_ii@PunishedD@RustyCrab Thats the #1 weirdest thing I don't get about the industry.
Imagine if GTA5's assets or hell even the whole map was resused for some other project. How much money and time would that save?
I'm playing through Portal Revolutions right now and it's amazing what can be done if one doesn't have to create everything from scratch.
Every modern open world game map has like the potential for 5 new games reusing those assets. But it's never done. Why??
@Pawlicker@PunishedD@RustyCrab@deprecated_ii and far cry blood dragon, fall out new vegas, every source game ever. But still, it seeeems like it isn't happening a lot. Maybe thats a marketing thing? Maybe devs don't want to admit that their new game is 50% old stuff?
Dunno.
@RustyCrab anything that gets easier with technology is good for the mankind. Simply because it means that I can do something for fun that was previously impossible. New ways to make a living always come up, we already have some of the most horrifying jobs, how bad can it get? I say let it happen, let them lose their jobs. If AI meant I lose my java job tomorrow, I should find more challenging work, that's just motivation for me
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