[shabbatt]

holy cow! this is insane. should be possible to create a mesh, get stable fusion to generate a UV texture map too!

later we should be able to use prompts to generate 3d meshes with full uv texture map as photogammetry picks up pace.

first they came for 2D, then they will come for 3D.

[JamesBarney]

Yeah, I'm excited about what this means for indie games.

[zactato]

Aren't indie games already dangerously close to the commodity space? Steam is overwhelming these days. There are dozens of games I can build bridges in or new interesting strategy games. How is any one developer supposed to capture enough market share to make any money of their work? I am worried that tools like this will just lower the barrier even more.

Maybe its a good thing because it will allow indie devs to spend less time/money on art.

[myth_drannon]

I don't think indie devs are in for the money. That ship sailed a decade ago (90's were the shareware era, 00's were the indie devs era).

[somenameforme]

Yip. I think a large motivation for many games is not to make money but to make something that you personally want that isn't already out there that, where the money is just a nice perk.

"UnReal World", for the most extreme example I know of, was released and has been in development for more than 3 decades. It's still receiving regular updates, with the dev kind of mixing game and life. It's a game about surviving in the Finnish wilds, by a dev who lives out in the middle of the Finnish wilds.

[postsantum]

And 10's were the saas era

[wongarsu]

The barrier of entry has been on the floor ever since Steam discontinued Greenlight and started just allowing everyone on the platform. But at the same time they invested a lot in better content discovery: personalized recommendations, the discovery queue, curators you can follow, etc.

If you're building the next rehash-of-popular-concept, this asset generator at best saves you a couple minutes shopping the Unity Asset Store, and selecting the right store-bought texture in blender. But it will raise the bar of what's possible with new, innovative settings, which I'm really looking forward to.

[JellyBeanThief]

> How is any one developer supposed to capture enough market share to make any money of their work? I am worried that tools like this will just lower the barrier even more.

In an ideal society, everyone has time, energy, and resources to create art themselves just because it makes them happy, as opposed to having to turn a profit.

[moogly]

Maybe finally the pretending-my-programmer-art-is-a-super-opinionated-stylistic-choice-to-go-with-retro-pixel-art-and-not-just-because-it's-so-much-easier-not-to-hire-an-artist fad can be — if not laid to rest — perhaps toned down a bit.

[badsectoracula]

These tools wont replace artists or needing some sort of artistic sense - there are several indie games that had professional artists working on the assets but the developers behind them completely massacred their art.

As an example check out Frayed Knights on Steam - i really like the game and think it is both very fun and a very competent freeform blobber RPG, but despite the author having help from artists (and he even worked in some beloved PS1 games himself so he wasn't an amateur at it), the visuals are downright ugly - the UI even looks worse than the default Torque theme! The fact that the game was shipped with what it looks like a rough placeholder made in MS paint for the inventory background, tells me that the only reason for that is that the developer (whom, do not get me wrong, i otherwise respect, just not when it comes to visuals) is blind when it comes to aesthetics (which is a shame because the actual game is both very humorous and has an actually deep character system - but due to the visuals it was largely ignored).

This wont be solved by AI, at the end of the day someone will have to decide that something looks good and someone will have to integrate whatever output the AI creates with the game.

What will actually happen is that people with some artistic skills will be able to do things faster than they were able before - it will improve several types of games (i.e. those whose art styles fit whatever the AI creates), but it wont let someone without artistic skills suddenly make high quality art assets.

[spyder]

Yep:

https://github.com/NasirKhalid24/CLIP-Mesh