How AI is Changing Animation, Games & VFX

 Potion by Simeon Fenton with Midjourney

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing the face of the creative industries.  

This image on the left of a fantasy potion bottle was created by Simon Fenton, our Dean of Interactive and Real Time, using Midjourney.

The brief was to create a potion bottle that had "an angelic and/or demonic feel to it".

The whole process, including multiple iterations of the potion bottle, took just a tiny fraction of the time that a traditional concept artist would take using digital tools - let alone old school pens and brushes.

 

AI is changing the face of the creative industries, but how should artists respond to the challenge? 

Potion Bottle Project

Potion bottle iterations

According to Simon Fenton, our Dean of Interactive and Real Time: 

"This was an exploration of Midjourney and Dall-E to generate iterations based upon some key word prompts.  

It's exciting (and not a little unnerving) being able to produce so many iterations at such a pace.  When it comes to image generation, the fine artist in me loves a happy accident.  I would be interested defining specific datasets for use, and train the AI based upon my

own reference choices.  #ai #gameart #midjourney #conceptart #aiart #gamedevelopment

Law and Copyright 

However, if you want to use something created in Midjourney you would need to be a bit careful as it is potentially a legal minefield in terms of copyright and intellectual property ownership.  As you can see with the prompts below, I did not specify anything in terms a person or style that could be taken from existing artists whose work would be under copyright protection. 

Keyword Prompts

Potion Bottle - early iterations

The prompt was something along these lines (see below), I was as much being led by the results as guiding them, you take a result and create a variant, upscale it and then you can add words and redo it as many times as you have credits.

portrait of a whole elegant ornate Potion bottle, faceted crystal, decorative angel carving stoper, gold sculpted detailing of winged demon around the centre in a shield , Bronze carved frame at the bottom that has animal feet , emeralds, poison gas twisted horned ornate obsidian handles, 3d render, cinematic, photoreal, hyper realism, volumetric lighting, smoky background, high quality, extreme detail , wide angle".

--- Simon Fenton

Potion Bottle at Artstation

You can find Simon's Potion Bottle at Artstation here.

Runway AI Official Site

https://runwayml.com/

Editor's Note - IP Ownership

One of the big questions about AI is this: who owns it, or the work created by it? AI tends to incorporate the work of existing artists, so do they have a claim on work created by an AI bot?  Or is the work owned by the AI creator?  This is an area of law which is uncertain, and currently developing.  To see a discussion of the challenges facing AI generated art, see this article in the New York Times.

Artists spamming Artstation: "No AI!"

Artstation Rebellion

Today at Artstation, artists are rebelling against the onward march of AI, threatening to boycott the site, or spamming the AI bots. Is this a legitimate cry of anguish from artists whose work is being traduced by unfeeling machines, or are they the modern equivalent of the handloom weavers who smashed machine looms in the early 19th Century?

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