Impressive Gameplay Character Models of Current Gen [XO, PS4, Switch]

Warchild

Newcomer
Goal of the thread is to accurately represent the character visuals you will be seeing for the majority of your playthrough.

Rules:

- No photo mode. I've noticed this sometimes adds extra graphical improvements in games, most notably with Uncharted 4 making the image look more supersampled and the last of us 2 which adds subsurface scattering (in places where it's disabled) and a cleaner image not representative of gameplay visuals.

- No cutscene shots obviously

For the really close up shots you'll have to get creative, sometimes the game will not let you get super close and even blur the character if you get close enough.
 
Ellie in The Last of us part 2

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Pretty interesting video on characters improved by AI:

The future?
Does it matter if we want this or not?
Do we want this? Some of us?
How would artists feel about their work never shown as is and intended? Will there even be some artists left?

I'm unsure, but extremely skeptical. Attempting to make gfx more realistic is one thing, but altering characters somehow goes too far to me.
Likely a problem we should not ignore when looking towards neural rendering. If we go that route, likely we can't prevent issues and lacking control regarding character alternation.
I mean, no more 6 finger hands, and they will improve this further. But probably i'll never accept this.
However, i still have the Atari 2600 in the basement. So i'm well prepared for the future. : /
 
Pretty interesting video on characters improved by AI:

The future?
Does it matter if we want this or not?
Do we want this? Some of us?
How would artists feel about their work never shown as is and intended? Will there even be some artists left?

I'm unsure, but extremely skeptical. Attempting to make gfx more realistic is one thing, but altering characters somehow goes too far to me.
Likely a problem we should not ignore when looking towards neural rendering. If we go that route, likely we can't prevent issues and lacking control regarding character alternation.
I mean, no more 6 finger hands, and they will improve this further. But probably i'll never accept this.
However, i still have the Atari 2600 in the basement. So i'm well prepared for the future. : /

If the aim is photo real humans, or at least naturalistic ones, I don't see how achieve that without at least a layer of ML post processing. It's a shame they didn't say how close to real-time the model they used was (unless I missed that)
 
If the aim is photo real humans, or at least naturalistic ones, I don't see how achieve that without at least a layer of ML post processing.
Let's say i agree and photorealism in all details (hair, complex materials, etc.) is not possible.
But why do you think we can make it possible using AI? AI can only make a guess on what's more realistic, and why should such guess be enough to make it look consistently real?

So let's assume using AI still leaves us with imperfect, uncanny images. It often looks more real, but it also has artifacts, temporal instability, etc. And sometimes it fails, looking even worse than not using it.
Then i'm not convinced it gives an advantage at all, and i might prefer the original image. I may see it's computer generated, but i may prefer this impression over the artificial and alien impression AI gives me.
I argue the former feels more natural than the latter, even when i need to look closer on the latter to notice it's not real.
And currently i wonder if this remains a signature property of AI methods, or if it can be solved along future progress.

That said about a practical future i expect for real.
The video above aims to generate 'better but different' characters, i would say. It's an experiment and interesting, but not sure the games industry will go that far in general.
Only time will tell, but i wonder what expectations people have right now already.
I found the video on Kotaku, skipped the text, but surely they rant as usual against AI. It seems the majority of people does not want AI in games, for now at least.
But games industry is part of tech industry, and tech industry does not innovate to give people what they want. They innovate to do new stuff, whatever it is, and then they make products and claim 'that's what you need and want, people!'
However - this time i think many people won't buy it. They will keep resistant against AI, and they will look for games with a 'No AI' sticker on it.
So beside questionable improvements from expensive high end HW, we have another reason to fragment the industry, and it's a big one.

Btw, this is a bad thread to discuss this. I remembered a thread with many pages, including cutscene content, which would have been better.
 
Animation is really the big difference in character model believability these days. And if some day soon we can achieve both AI asset production and AI animation that looks better than we have now on average, we should cheer for it. People will lose jobs and we should cheer for it. I'm being serious. Artists make the bulk of the 'bloat' of game development costs and time these days. Being able to cut that down is extremely crucial to making this industry more sustainable.

It doesn't mean all these people will go jobless and homeless, it can actually mean that we can support more studios making games, cuz suddenly studios can actually compete on some level without needing giant team sizes. And real artists and whatnot will still be needed, it doesn't just cut them ALL out, but if it can reduce the amount of people needed per studio/project, that's a good thing.
 
I pretty much agree with that. Games should be cheaper to make, which means lesser people working on it no matter what.
But...
And if some day soon we can achieve both AI asset production and AI animation that looks better than we have now on average, we should cheer for it.
I'm unsure about this. Maybe humans have to create characters, so they feel human. AI will never know how it feels to be human, so AI may never get it right.

Here's a video that has impressed me. I would say that's a 'good' example of 'AI art':

The characters are still too alien, even though they have chosen an alien setting to reduce the problem. I do not mean the morphing effects, but this alien / uncanny effect, which seems to be the 'signature artifact' of AI generated art in general. I doubt it will go away. And if it persists, people won't like AI generated characters, and they won't get used to it over time either.

To me, the main application of AI generated art is obvious: Environments. AI can do it well, and there is no alien effect. It does not look too strange.
So i really wonder why the current focus with AI art is mostly characters.

Another, similar morphing video:
That's cool stuff. Like fractals, but this time actually usable. I'd like to explore such environments in games. But AI characters put me off.
 
This AI discussions seems to be off topic but -
Does it matter if we want this or not?
Do we want this? Some of us?
How would artists feel about their work never shown as is and intended? Will there even be some artists left?

Do artists like it if the game is modded? It's mixed isn't it?

If look at one subset of data with Bethesda games, well mods that change the visuals (especially character related) are quite popular among the user base at least.

I found the video on Kotaku, skipped the text, but surely they rant as usual against AI. It seems the majority of people does not want AI in games, for now at least.

Is there data supporting this? Especially if you filter out the issue of the current shovel ware nature of the majority of AI content?

AI generated content isn't really inherently different than the non AI procedurally generated content used in games. Gamer's seem to accept that, and games that heavily use it are quite popular.

So i really wonder why the current focus with AI art is mostly characters.

If you look at the demographics involved it shouldn't be surprising. Characters can be attractive females. There's always been that argument that porn has been a strong driver behind technology and adoption.
 
Do artists like it if the game is modded? It's mixed isn't it?
Yeah, personally i don't like modding all too much. I prefer the game in its original state. Visual 'improvements' made by modders often rape over original intentions.
But modding is optional. Anybody decides for himself, and every gamer first sees the original art.

If we get such AI post processing to alter artworks, the original art would be never seen by anybody else then the artists. That's a different situation.
Artists have less art control without doubt. They may even need to author their stuff mainly so it works well with AI, no longer so it creates the intended expression directly.
So the machine rules over the artist. Under such conditions, true art is not possible at all. And true art generated by machines isn't possible anyway.
As a consequence, we devalue our medium. It's nothing worth if it's generated by machine, so we can't request 80$ for that. Games would simply become worthless, eventually.

AI generated content isn't really inherently different than the non AI procedurally generated content used in games.
Yes. That's exactly where i see proper AI application. Procedural content. Stuff where quantity is the problem, not quality. Backgrounds, textures and materials, terrains, castles, etc.
I think AI can do great for that. It can look great, save costs, and everybody is happy.

But i would not use it for characters appearance, dialogue text, speech synthesis, or procedural stories. That's human territory, so the content should be created by humans.

That's at least how my ideology has shaped up til yet. Not sure about anything. This situation is so new and different, it's already hard to figure out what think about it personally.
For example, i think the limitation of dialogue and stories having to be just static content felt impossible to overcome. And this sucks, because i want to lift all limitations i can. So i can do new things, which are exciting because we did not have them before.
And now, out of a sudden, we could lift those limitations using AI. And we want to try it out. We can come closer to our dream of a simulated reality this way, so why not?

The reason maybe is that AI is not a proper simulation. It does not understand how things work. It only observes those things and then generates new but similar content out of those observations.
The devs also do not understand how AI precisely works, so they lack control. They do trial and error on picking from various ML algorithms, and they select the content used for training. That's all they can do.
It's all fuzzy and uncertain. Can we design good games under those conditions? Or does the game design as well become a process dictated and constrained by AI properties we neither understand nor can control precisely?

But what matters even more is end user experience.
For now that was a lot of issues. Characters clipping through walls, running in circles, or not moving at all although we shoot at them. Lot's of visual glitches on top. We totally failed at simulating natural characters.
What the user sees is labeled as 'computer bugs'. But that's not what it is. It is human error. The human player sees the inability of the human dev to create the illusion of intelligent life.
It's not great, but it is acceptable. Human error is unavoidable, and it is natural to all of us.

But it seems AI error is not as natural. It is alien, feels totally off, and unintendedly strange. It may be rare and subtle, but we may always spot it. Most humans might never accept AI characters. Neither visually, nor about their behavior.
Ongoing progress on the technical side to improve this may be compensated by increasing social resistance against the 'competing AI species' as well, making it a risky investment.

Personally i remain very curious but doubtful about real AI used in games. There surely is a lot of opportunities, but there also is a huge risk to just piss people off in the long run, it seems.
But i'm uncertain due to age. I realize i became a retro gamer already. I may be just too old to accept new things, and fail myself to figure out what people want.
 
If you look at the demographics involved it shouldn't be surprising. Characters can be attractive females. There's always been that argument that porn has been a strong driver behind technology and adoption.
That's really a good remark. Kept me thinking for some extra time.
Basically i could rephrase my question to 'Do you like AI porn?'.
If it's a yes, you'll like AI games too. It's probably that simple.

Now i know we have AI influencers on instagram and twitch, but do we already have AI pornstars?
Never heard about one, which could be in parts because current tools often have built in censorship.
But yeah - observing porn industry is likely the best clue to observe trends regarding AI acceptance. :D
 
Now i know we have AI influencers on instagram and twitch, but do we already have AI pornstars?

AI porn ... basically nude figures so AI human art in general is currently really bad unless you are good at ignoring details. Out of 1000 AI versions of a given figure, 1 or 2 might have correct anatomy (proportions, fingers, body parts, etc.). But most will have things that aren't "right". Like 4 fingers instead of 5. Fingers and/or toes that aren't bending the correct way. Random "extra" body parts. Arms and/or legs that are different lengths or different proportions. Body parts that melt into other body parts. Extend that to basically everthing, eyes, nose, mouth, hair, head shape, arm shape, etc.

It's really rare that AI manages to get it all correctly proportioned with the correct number of parts and even just the correct parts. And that doesn't even get into clothing just sort of blending into the skin/hair/body/etc. Or for porn purposes, the parts of the body associated with sexual acts generally tend to be a horror show of "wrongness" if you look at them closely or not even closely often times.

So, yes, some people on Patreon (a lot of Chinese and S. Koreans), Steam, etc. have started to release AI porn and it's generally subtly horrific in a Cthulhu-esque way if you don't know what you are looking at. However, once you know the things that AI generally gets horribly wrong, you pretty much almost always see/find it in every AI generated human figure. The people that generate thousands of images in order to pick 1 or 2 "good" ones will generally look "better" but there will generally still be things that are just "wrong" with the AI generated human figure.

Regards,
SB
 
AI influencers are crazy realistic and we don't know which are fake and which aren't anymore. It's getting there.
It's scary. With fake propaganda videos of actual events, at some point we won't know what's real and what's not.
Our behaviors will be guided fully by AI and we won't even know it. We could be under a dictatorship that manipulates us and we won't be able to know
 
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