Experience with using AI to generate texture packs?

[Thorfinn]

Has anyone tried this? Or know of games companies that have? Do they have to do a lot of final edits, or is it some slight retouching?

[Teh Pizza Lady]

I have tried it and it was... okay. the AI doesn't understand that the textures need to be able to be tiled so the final product was lacking.

[LadyWYT]

I don't recall hearing about any game companies trying it just for textures. The most controversy I can recall is Wizards of the Coast(I think it was) getting caught using AI images in their DnD materials. Likewise, I believe Adobe also got caught using AI images to promote their digital art supplies. I think a few game companies have been accused of relying on AI to animate, write, or produce images, but I'm not sure anything's ever been proven.

As for my take...I mean, I'm an artist, so I have a definite bias toward AI and how it's being used in creative fields. My guess is it could be used to generate some textures more easily than others(like dirt textures for the ground), but the results will still need to be checked and edited in order to ensure a polished, cohesive finished product. However, AI isn't something I would rely on, as the best results it can output are just...mediocre...and I daresay a good chunk of that is due to the human mind comprehending reasoning and nuances that a computer literally can't.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

19 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

My guess is it could be used to generate some textures more easily than others(like dirt textures for the ground), but the results will still need to be checked and edited in order to ensure a polished, cohesive finished product. However, AI isn't something I would rely on, as the best results it can output are just...mediocre...and I daresay a good chunk of that is due to the human mind comprehending reasoning and nuances that a computer literally can't.

You are exactly right. Even with the latest versions of Flux, the model struggles to produce any meaningful output that's recognizable as what it's supposed to be. Maybe something like Midjourney could figure it out, but at that point, you're going to run into issues with the textures not aligning with the same theme, the quality being different and the colorspace being off from texture to texture of the same material like oak chairs not having the same color as oak boards for example. By the time you got it all correct, you could have just taken art classes and drawn the textures yourself.

[Thorfinn]

Figured it wouldn't be very good, but I didn't expect it to be that bad. Answers my next question: is it worthwhile to generate then retouch?

If an artist were drawing in her favorite style, whatever that is, how long would it take to generate, say, 5k 32x32 images? Each edge tilable on the other three edges. Are we talking weeks? Months? Years?

Edited July 6, 2025 by Thorfinn

[QueerCoded]

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

Is it worthwhile to generate then retouch?

Depends on what your goal is. If you just want a texture, maybe. If you want something good, definitely not.

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

If an artist were drawing in her favorite style, whatever that is, how long would it take to generate, say, 5k 32x32 images?

Artists don't generate, they create. Creation takes time. There are a lot of factors that determine how much time. I can give you 5000 32x32 images right now, but they would all be black squares.

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, QueerCoded said:

Artists don't generate, they create.

And that's why people usually avoid artists if at all possible. Engineers, programmers, scientists, etc., generally don't get touchy if you use the wrong word to describe what they do. They just give an estimate, maybe padding the estimate a bit to make up for being offended. It's not like anyone is holding you to it, and everyone expects it to really take at least 3 times as long but without it, you can't even get order of magnitude guesses. And we decide AI is probably good enough.

Seriously, you don't think that if I just wanted a bunch of black squares, I could have figured out how to do that? Maybe 30 seconds for the first one, and a few milliseconds for each one thereafter?

Edited July 6, 2025 by Thorfinn

[QueerCoded]

I'm not an artist, I'm actually a developer.

You are talking about a creative endeavor as if its a numbers game. My point was that looking at it that way omits the importance of quality and how time taken increases with quality. If you are making something you intend for others to use, quality over quantity is important for finding an actual audience. Why would someone use a hastily made ai texture pack when Vintage Story already has beautiful textures.

I'll admit I was abrasive.

 

[Omega Haxors]

gAI is useless at everything it users could hope to accomplish. Even if you were to succeed through tons of personal effort (more than if you had just done it yourself) it would be on the backs of millions of plagiarized works. There's only two legitimate uses for it and that's for fulfilling whatever personal desires one may have, and making hilarious political propaganda like that guy who did a Pixar parody of 9/11 and made it impossible to ignore the clear IP violations made trivial through its use. Every other case it just people trying to force it where it doesn't belong. Their intentions? I do not care, but they're never any good. Oh, and I guess its main purpose which was to fabricate a justification for burning a crap ton of oiI for a dying industry just like with Crypto and NFTs before it, but that's not a topic that's necessary to get into here when there's so many better angles to hit from.

There's two fundamental flaws that makes it unusable:
1) It is incapable of creating new material, only stealing
2) It only tells you what it thinks you want to hear

Creativity can never come from such an environment. This isn't coming from a place of hatred, but rather of practicality, as someone who gave it a shot and very quickly saw it for what it was. You do not play with AI, it plays you. The tech behind it is very cool and I look forward to seeing where it evolves, but as it stands now? I'm not buying it.

Edited July 6, 2025 by Omega Haxors

[Omega Haxors]

3 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

And that's why people usually avoid artists if at all possible. Engineers, programmers, scientists, etc., generally don't get touchy if you use the wrong word to describe what they do. They just give an estimate, maybe padding the estimate a bit to make up for being offended. It's not like anyone is holding you to it, and everyone expects it to really take at least 3 times as long but without it, you can't even get order of magnitude guesses. And we decide AI is probably good enough.

Seriously, you don't think that if I just wanted a bunch of black squares, I could have figured out how to do that? Maybe 30 seconds for the first one, and a few milliseconds for each one thereafter?

Your contempt is clear here. Nothing we say is going to convince you because you've already made up your mind.

[-Glue-]

8 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

And that's why people usually avoid artists if at all possible. Engineers, programmers, scientists, etc., generally don't get touchy if you use the wrong word to describe what they do. They just give an estimate, maybe padding the estimate a bit to make up for being offended. It's not like anyone is holding you to it, and everyone expects it to really take at least 3 times as long but without it, you can't even get order of magnitude guesses. And we decide AI is probably good enough.

First off. That's just incorrect. I have seen plenty of programmers and engineers get touchy over proper vocabulary.
Second. Its not being touchy if they are simply correcting your terminology. You're the one being touchy in this instance tbh.
Third. Of course terminology is touchy when discussing AI and artists. The creative space is in a really bad place right now because of it. People generating art and lying about it. Artists being falsely accused of using AI, and being bullied over it. Big artists straight up having entire AI models based on their specific art. It sucks.

Anyways, I agree with @Omega Haxors, your bias is pretty obvious. I feel like there is little reason to attempt a meaningful conversation, as its unlikely anything would come of it. I get the feeling you just want validation for the usage/viability of AI. I'm an artist myself. So I obviously have my own bias in the conversation.

Also. @QueerCoded is correct, even if you could get a half decent generated texture pack, what would the point even be? Very few people would be interested when artists could make something more visually pleasing. Would it take longer? Sure. But I would rather have something good later, than something bad now. The effort taken to edit and fix generated assets also sounds extremely tedious, whereas actually creating it could be fun.

[Thorfinn]

7 hours ago, QueerCoded said:

You are talking about a creative endeavor as if its a numbers game. My point was that looking at it that way omits the importance of quality and how time taken increases with quality.

I'm aware of that. The same is true of computer code and engineering designs, yet most of them are not prima donnas. Most are more like Scottie from Star Trek. It's just a different attitude. I don't have the patience to deal with it, so when I owned my own company, I hired a guy to handle them while I dealt directly with the engineers and programmers.

[Thorfinn]

6 hours ago, Omega Haxors said:

You do not play with AI, it plays you. The tech behind it is very cool and I look forward to seeing where it evolves, but as it stands now? I'm not buying it.

Thanks. That was my impression, too. I couldn't see how the code could be greater than the coder, but I had not kept up on it, and thought it was possible. You can already program it to create a texture. It would not be that hard to code a requirement that a texture be tilable. What there is not is an algorithm that the code can use to determine if this one is any good.

57 minutes ago, -Glue- said:

I have seen plenty of programmers and engineers get touchy over proper vocabulary.

If they are good enough to get away with it, good on them. I generally just fired them, as most weren't half as good as they thought they were. And a workforce that's walking on eggshells afraid of offending someone is not a happy workforce. Better off getting rid of the easily offended.

57 minutes ago, -Glue- said:

I agree with @Omega Haxors, your bias is pretty obvious.

Of course it is. So is yours. Or didn't you realize that?

Edited July 6, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Thorfinn]

Incidentally, notice anything? Not a single WAG yet. Lots of righteous indignation, but not a single guesstimate. Not a single, "Well, I could probably put together a high quality granite gravel texture in 8 hours."

[ifoz]

One way to make "realistic" textures is to just take photos. Grab a camera, photograph some gravel, then just change the colours around and touch it up so it tiles right.
That's how a lot of textures were done in older games.

[Thorfinn]

Yeah, I was thinking a more surreal aesthetic. But I've kind of lost interest. Remembering now why I sold off my company.

[Myo]

As a programmer and seeing the work (and damage) AI does to my field, i feel i might be a little biased too, but all the same i feel like i have a good insight in what you can and cannot use an AI for. Its very very very good at low skill menial tasks. For my work this would be anything a junior dev would be doing, the glorified boilerplate code, the milliont re-implementation of a common libary, the copy paste JSON entries, the... i could go on really. But as soon you demand more of it, you're spending more time fixing its code than you would have spent just writing it yourself. So i figure, if you're trying to make invidual images and dress up a game with them, that might work quite well. With a fair bit of work you can get it to look somewhat consistent too. I've seen VNs pull it off. But if you're trying to make block textures, that tile, rotate etc without causing seams or looking bad at a distance... I fear you might be shit out of luck trying to use AI. For how simple these textures often look, there are a lot of considerations and demands upon it, that make them work... That AI currently (and maybe forever) is incapable of understanding.

[Omega Haxors]

I will have to admit, it's refreshing to see an AI proponent take the criticism on the chin rather than using it as an excuse to speedrun a crashout session 
It might be a good idea to reconsider your neo-aristocratic view of the world before it causes substantial damage to your public image. Nobody likes a snob.

2 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

 so when I owned my own company

Ah... a capitalist. Then I'm afraid your material conditions will alienate yourself everyone here. I would encourage everyone to cease dialogue before things get messy.

Edited July 6, 2025 by Omega Haxors

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, Omega Haxors said:

I will have to admit, it's refreshing to see an AI proponent take the criticism on the chin rather than using it as an excuse to speedrun a crashout session 

I don't have any idea what that means. But, really, I'm an AI skeptic. You don't have to read very carefully to realize I doubted it could do a good job, but I was open-minded enough to consider it, and figured someone here would know.

 

1 hour ago, Omega Haxors said:

Ah... a capitalist. Then I'm afraid your material conditions will alienate yourself everyone here. I would encourage everyone to cease dialogue before things get messy.

Yeah, or you could try being open-minded enough to think of me as a person. Yeah, I know, class struggle and all that crap, but you could at least pretend to be tolerant while you haul me off to the camps.

Incidentally, while there still is not an answer, I got one in about 10 minutes on fiverr.com. I'll see starting 24 hours from now what a half-dozen artists think looks sufficiently surreal for what I'm looking for. Couple hundred dollars is all. Should have done that right off the bat, I guess. The gig economy has never let me down.

[Omega Haxors]

45 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Yeah, or you could try being open-minded enough to think of me as a person. Yeah, I know, class struggle and all that crap, but you could at least pretend to be tolerant while you haul me off to the camps.

I'm driving the tank to your house to appropriate your toothbrush and other private property as we speak 

Edited July 6, 2025 by Omega Haxors

[Yakkob]

On 7/5/2025 at 7:46 PM, LadyWYT said:

I don't recall hearing about any game companies trying it just for textures. The most controversy I can recall is Wizards of the Coast(I think it was) getting caught using AI images in their DnD materials. Likewise, I believe Adobe also got caught using AI images to promote their digital art supplies. I think a few game companies have been accused of relying on AI to animate, write, or produce images, but I'm not sure anything's ever been proven.

As for my take...I mean, I'm an artist, so I have a definite bias toward AI and how it's being used in creative fields. My guess is it could be used to generate some textures more easily than others(like dirt textures for the ground), but the results will still need to be checked and edited in order to ensure a polished, cohesive finished product. However, AI isn't something I would rely on, as the best results it can output are just...mediocre...and I daresay a good chunk of that is due to the human mind comprehending reasoning and nuances that a computer literally can't.

literally half of CoD BO6 is either direct AI or AI that's been cleaned up by a real artist... oh and these are $20 and $30 paid cosmetics in a $70 "AAAA" shopfront "game" made by a $900 billion dollar corporation... this is also the same company that is still charging $60 for games that have had full blown RCE exploits for years and gets sued for s3xual harassment often enough that they have an entire dedicated legal team for it... 

[Dilan Rona]

Using ai to generate it is ok, I suppose. But personally I would prefer something that was made by an actual human. Might look crappy, but least then it will be real and genuine.

[Yakkob]

On 7/6/2025 at 10:03 AM, Thorfinn said:

If they are good enough to get away with it, good on them. I generally just fired them, as most weren't half as good as they thought they were. And a workforce that's walking on eggshells afraid of offending someone is not a happy workforce. Better off getting rid of the easily offended.

ok I like you already! I remember when one of my friends was just getting his construction company off the ground some crybully karen nearly ruined him financially... she tried sueing the daylights out of him for expecting her to actually do her effing job instead of just sitting in the truck for literally the whole entire day... when that failed the karen tried accusing him of SA... that also failed, why? because when the alleged SA took place he was over 300 miles away and she was livestreaming on her tik tok... the same audience she also used to review bomb his company... 

[hstone32]

On 7/6/2025 at 10:25 AM, Omega Haxors said:

Ah... a capitalist. Then I'm afraid your material conditions will alienate yourself everyone here.

You don't speak for us.

[Bummed_Machinist]

On 7/6/2025 at 4:25 PM, Omega Haxors said:

Ah... a capitalist. Then I'm afraid your material conditions will alienate yourself everyone here. I would encourage everyone to cease dialogue before things get messy.

You make a caricature of those politics and come off as bizarre and out of touch. That language might be understandable in whatever group you run in but people here don't talk like that. You will not win people over with that silliness. You have to remember we live in the material world. I have met many genuinely nice people of the "Capitalist class" and many assholes of the working class- Class isn't primarily a moral issue, it's just that the former are economically unnecessary, and their interests generally (but not always) contradict with, and are parasitic to the general interests of working class people. Talking solely from the moral lens at the mere mention of a person's class alienates you from actual industrial workers, who often don't see class as such an intense moral situation, just an economic reality we are resigned to. 

To talk in Marxist language to you; Class consciousness alone does not guarantee revolutionary principles. Just because you read "correct theory" in a book does not make your interpretation of that theory accurate (Dogmatism.) Avoid mechanical thinking and do not assume the masses are on the same page as you and will accept your lead/ideas (Think Dialectically, avoid Adventurism). Investigate things or you are bound to talk nonsense (Marx and co. had hundreds of people supplying them with accurate statistics of the day so they could properly form their theory, doing the 'intellectual practical work'. If you really want to understand the world accurately you have to do that same work. If you don't want to do that type of work to supplement your understanding of the theory you read then do not speak. Your yapping will do more damage than good.)

Thank you,

-A random industrial worker

Edited August 13, 2025 by Bummed_Machinist
spelling, wrong word.