I do wonder if we need to stop relying on meshes entirely. NeRFs and splats have potentially much richer representations of material and lighting response. Current hardware is very focused on triangles and bitmaps but GPUs are versatile beasts.
I don’t think the engines will switch their happy-paths to splats until artists have the proper tools to create assets with splats. As cool as generating splats with AI is, the assets in a AAA game must fit the art directors vision, which means having artists in the loop.
I feel like the visual style of games will change as a result of generative AI to be whatever style those AI models have a hard time generating. Essentially the games that will stand out will be truly original, art wise.
I suspect a lot of game/film artists would be very happy to go back to sculpting physical objects and taking a few photographs as opposed to building the models from scratch in the computer.
I don’t think the engines will switch their happy-paths to splats until artists have the proper tools to create assets with splats.
Oh - I agree and it's a bit chicken and egg. I'm not expecting this shift to be quick (or even universal). But I do feel the need to put the idea out there that meshes might not be the be-all and end-all for games and other spatial media.
But only because we generally are starting with a mesh and creating a low-res collision mesh from that reuses existing tooling. Mesh colliders aren't terribly ideal. You need a lot of triangles. SDFs can be a better choice in some cases.
Collisions could be handles separately (they already are - you don't use the render mesh for collisions). Maybe a separate mesh, maybe an SDF or similar.
UV mapping is a mesh thing. That's Stockholm Syndrome talking. ;-)
Comments
I do wonder if we need to stop relying on meshes entirely. NeRFs and splats have potentially much richer representations of material and lighting response. Current hardware is very focused on triangles and bitmaps but GPUs are versatile beasts.
I don’t think the engines will switch their happy-paths to splats until artists have the proper tools to create assets with splats. As cool as generating splats with AI is, the assets in a AAA game must fit the art directors vision, which means having artists in the loop.
I feel like the visual style of games will change as a result of generative AI to be whatever style those AI models have a hard time generating. Essentially the games that will stand out will be truly original, art wise.
I suspect a lot of game/film artists would be very happy to go back to sculpting physical objects and taking a few photographs as opposed to building the models from scratch in the computer.
Oh - I agree and it's a bit chicken and egg. I'm not expecting this shift to be quick (or even universal). But I do feel the need to put the idea out there that meshes might not be the be-all and end-all for games and other spatial media.
Collision geometry is also generally triangles or other primitives.
But only because we generally are starting with a mesh and creating a low-res collision mesh from that reuses existing tooling. Mesh colliders aren't terribly ideal. You need a lot of triangles. SDFs can be a better choice in some cases.
How hard it is to generate splats from meshes?
How do you do collisions and shadowing? How is UV mapping done?
Collisions could be handles separately (they already are - you don't use the render mesh for collisions). Maybe a separate mesh, maybe an SDF or similar.
UV mapping is a mesh thing. That's Stockholm Syndrome talking. ;-)