[beeswax]

That's pretty cool. Might speed up asset creation for games by orders of magnitude: Train with concept art, generate the variations via these networks; adds consistency to the output and helps loosen the asset bottleneck / content treadmill esp for smaller studios/individuals.

[logicrook]

No, it's a gross misunderstanding of what is concept art. A concept art piece is about the idea, not the style; if you take a famous protagonist, say batman, you can have it drawn in a medieval, realistic, sci-fi version, drawn in a stylized, realistic, cartoon way; in each case you will recognize him because the idea, the shape language, have nothing to do with the style of the drawing.

Even for illustrative work, where it can give you a good base, it still sucks, because for actual painters this step (thumbnailing) is actually the quickest; most of the time-consuming painting process is 'finishing', or 'detailing' the rough.

However, where it's great is in giving the ability to inexperienced people to paint well. The hard part of the painting is getting the lightning, color scheme, perspective right, but the finishing process is quite mechanical. So it could ease the outsourcing of some art assets creation.

[beeswax]

yeah you are right in terms of concept art; I figured that unfortunately more often than not the lines between concept, mood, detailing etc tend to be blurred depending on who looks at it; Also this is not going to replace individual character design or other specific assets, but might remove scalability issues w/ project that require a huge number of different backgrounds, texture variations.

Of course the originial craft to producing high quality output is still needed - and just one image is not going to be sufficient anyway.

As you mentioned, I can also think of giving lesser experienced folks the ability to tinker with scene setup, dimensions, ratios etc and get faster 'final' results, although the 'old school' approach to getting those right before actually detailing something is quite important.

[logicrook]

>yeah you are right in terms of concept art; I figured that unfortunately more often than not the lines between concept, mood, detailing etc tend to be blurred depending on who looks at it; Also this is not going to replace individual character design or other specific assets, but might remove scalability issues w/ project that require a huge number of different backgrounds, texture variations.

You can already do that in 3D if the overall concepts have been decided and some basic assets are there. Just switching the textures, lightning conditions, and some predefined building blocks do basically the same thing as this algorithm, except it's already part of the pipeline, and it gives you much more since it's 3D.

The other thing is that these algorithms look indecently good when you see a thumbnail, but very bad if you're looking at it too closely. These cool 'concept art' pieces that look good are 90% of what people see, but they do not represent 10% of the concept art work; most of it are boring details of joints, how the blade is strapped to the costume, how windows open, unsexy stuff as can be (that you can't do with such algorithms).

[Aperson4321]

beginner artist/programmer combo here, I am sure this type of tools can be very powerfull for prototyping the moods of 2d games, if not parts of 3d games, as for its limitations this method do get the general scene mood rather well. Anyway far better than that shitty programmer art placeholders. The process could let game devs be many times faster and better at finding the right mood in a game, just swapping out the images the program learns from to find a new mood theme for the game got an level of intuitive logic to it, that I am sure can make it very accessible to non technicals. A well made tool of this type would be very good in the early prototyping pipe line for 2d games and more. Would not make even really bad artists jobless, but in the case of specific jobs it would be a powerful tool.

[sprobertson]

Not directly related, but here are some results from a similar algorithm[1] combining the Starcraft map Python with various Google Maps screenshots: http://i.imgur.com/EgFpqRA.jpg

[1] CNNMRF, Neural Style plus Markov Random Fields: https://github.com/chuanli11/CNNMRF