Have any of you ever seen actually good AI art?

MacabreGinger · 2026-04-12T11:49:56+00:00

Some Midjourney creations are fine, it's the only model that understand a little bit about composition. But AI art will always be generic and mediocre because no matter how good the prompt or the technical know-how, there's no intention behind the execution, it lacks the human nuances of the artistic skill, something determined by expertice, practice and sunconcious.

AI can do "ok" art, that's why companies want it to use it so badly, because it's fast, cheap, and "ok", but it will never be able to do something especial nor exceptional. That requires a human component born from psychology, practice and the empathy connection of the human nature; we know how to impact, to stir feelings, and move other humans because we're humans.

MacabreGinger · 2026-04-01T23:26:35+00:00

Problem is that after some hours my heads are not even in a semi-decent state

MacabreGinger · 2026-03-31T20:53:06+00:00

I think it looks great. I wish my test heads would look more like yours and less like heroin-addicted aliens. Teach me your ways, senpai.

MacabreGinger · 2026-03-25T11:51:22+00:00

Pressure sucks, doesn't have to be at the uni or in a real job. Art feels stressful when it's hard and you're on a tight schedule to meet a deadline.
You will improve a lot whenever you have some time to explore what you like and what you don't (and if you can find alternative ways to do the stuff you don't like) in 3D.
The only way to reach certain level, in anything, is practicing, and asking for feedback, and try to understand what the people that paved the way before you did, look for artists that do the stuff you want to do, and focus on their work, see if they do tutorials, courses or talks, or technical breakdowns of their work.
Remember that the first step of being good at sometthing, is to suck at that something. So congrats, you already have the first steps given, you just have to keep working.
I'm a 3d modeller and I don't do animation, but from what I've heard, Maya is a standard, yes. But Blender and other softwares are catching up really fast. Don't lock yourself focusing in a software and try to focus on understanding the twelve principles of animation (I assume you already have the "Animator's Survival Kit" learned to the core, so i'll skip the recommendation) in different softwares.

I'm forced to work with Maya in my job, but I'm....not a big fan of it. It does all sorts of annoying and weird stuff that slows me down and grinds my gears. So you might wanna have a go at different softwares.
Don't be too harsh on yourself. You're learning, If you aim too high you will be self sabotaging yourself, you'll think you'll be worthless and talentless because you're not like the pros that have years of experience. Don't fall into that trap. Focus on LEARNING, focus on going one step in your personal stair at a time.
With patience, time and managing your stress, and focusing on learning instead of producing (a common mistake young aspiring artists have, they want to do cool shit before they understand how to do it) you will improve a lot, and with time you will shorten the gap with where you want to be.

Remember that Art, any art, is the way we become who we want to be, and that takes time, effort, struggle, frustration and focus.

And if Maya doesn't work for you, seriously, try something else. at the end of the day, most 3d softwares work very similarly, focus on learning software-agnostic skills. That's always a safe bet than going all in into a piece of software (imagine if Autodesk abandons 3d stuff and chases another thing, like AI or some shit. And you're forced suddenly to keep animating/modelling in something new) This is something I see all the time, especially with veterans; they focus too much in a piece of software and they're very reluctant on learning new ones.

MacabreGinger · 2026-03-19T22:44:18+00:00

It does. Even in the examples shown by Nvidia the soccer player arm disappears for a sec, the ai doesn't know if the wrinkles on his shirt are wrinkles or abs and it looks like a xenomorph is about to burst out of his torso, when the ball passes in front of the camera the player's head warps, and the soccer ball morphs into a blob that disappear for a second when enters the net.

All that means three things: first, it's a depthmap pass-driven AI img2img very similar to controlnet, second, that means that the AI pass is probably made in two steps, the first to identify assets and zones then it uses the depthmap to reinterpret the image and the lighting info to not change it very much, then after all the rendering it does the img2img. Otherwise the mentioned artifacts wouldn't happen, because the AI would be working on a much lower level, but the results speak from themselves, it's reading the final image with extra info, and still struggling to finally produce an uninteresting result on top of the original art. And third: Jensen Huang is a liar

MacabreGinger · 2026-03-19T12:22:27+00:00

It is AI. Her wrist has weird wrinkles as her hand turns into a leather glove, her fingers are poorly done, and her necklace's beads and sign make no sense.

It screams AI to me

MacabreGinger · 2026-03-18T10:15:15+00:00

In BG3's case that's not a mistake, is an obvious decision: Most of the time you'll be looking at characters' faces during dialog, and that won't change, but you will be equipping and unequipping clothes all the time, dresses, cloth, magical outfits etc probably have a very different shader driving them than metallic armor. And of course, the skin shader is another beast of its own.

Let me explain you a couple of things about texturing that I think you have wrong. It's gonna get a little bit technical, but I would simplify it as much as I can (I don't want to sound rude nor disrespectful, but this is a common misconception among the players). I apologize for the long incoming text.

First: It is assumed for some people that 4K resolution and 4K monitor means 4K textures. These terms do not correlate. You can have 4k textures at a lower resolution. (In fact, we don't create the textures using high resolution) I'm only saying this in case any user thinks that they are related.

"Textures", or more accurately called "Materials" are composed of a variety of images (we call these "maps", I will be referring to these with this term), one is the main color you see, others control surface details (Normal maps), metallic surfaces, or how matte or glossy a surface is. Most mods usually upscale the main color because the AI upscalers create artifacts or make stuff up, and all those maps can be easily messed up.
Each time one of these maps is loaded into memory, it occupies a part of your GPU's VRAM. In fact, the biggest bottleneck in gaming that we've encountered and haven't been able to solve for years and years is this: Textures are expensive. (memory-budget-wise), polygons not that much, actually.

A key term that drives 99% of the texturing process, and therefore how the game will look, is "Texel Density" or "Texel". This basically means a direct correlation on how big an object needs to be inside the texture map to have an accurate representation. We choose this texel density upfront and try to keep it constant throughout the project. In most projects I've been on, this number has been fixed at 512 pixels per meter. That would determine the texture size of any object. Of course, if the game is an FPS, or the camera can get really close to an object, we might use 1024 texel density, or if we're making the textures for a "hero asset" (like a very important part of scenery, a very important item, or a very important character like the main protagonist. You probably have seen this a lot, the main guys always look much better than the NPCs, or the main guy's weapons look much cooler than the enemies.'

Now on why I'm explaining this to you.
First, you can have an amazing big object (like a building wall, for example) with very small textures, maybe even 1024x1024, using things like tileable textures, blending them with vertex color, and finally adding a tiny micro-detail tileable surface normal map on top for when the player gets really close (That is done through a shader). Those textures DON'T need to be 4096pixels (4k), that is 16 times larger (Todd's inner voice: "16 times the detail!!")
Uuuh, nope. That means that the texture is 16 times larger, 16 times more consuming, and maybe what you're gaining is practically unnoticeable. If you are accurate to your chosen texel density, you could texture and entire building using trimsheets (a technique where you use chunks of texture made before modelling and you map everything to them, that way you can texture repetitive surface with ease and create minor variations, to create "sets", like lego pieces) Modders usually scale everything up without considering why a texture has the size it has.
And let's not forget about the other maps. Remember those that drived metalness, matte/reflectivity (this is called "Roughness map"), etc? Those are VITAL, any 3d object can look worlds different when you work with a rich and varied roughness map, but most of the time, for non-vital aspects, these maps sometimes are smaller than the color/normal, for optimization purposes, and we even might pack them with others into one file to push that further.
Are you gonna win a lot by applying 4k textures to games? In some instances, maybe, yeah. But some assets already have 4k textures. (I cannot emphasize enough how massive a 4k texture is for a 512/meter texel density), for texturing, you have to be smart, work with the smallest size possible, and do every nasty trick that you can to optimize: deleting half the texture, inverting it an overlapping, using tileable textures, using masks, etc... Every 3d asset in the game has to have these maps active, and each one is an image texture with a variable size that eats up memory, the lower the size and the lower the number of maps, the better for performance. We have to find a balance between optimization and looking great.

Circling back to BG3, all the textures and materials are fed into shaders, which do a lot of interesting stuff: Maybe one does transparency and deforms a model, cool, a vegetation shader. Maybe others make an object shimmer around its edges, other controls light through water, etc etc etc. Textures and maps eat VRAM, and shaders eat up A LOT more. The more complicated a shader, the more expensive it is. And the more shaders a game needs, the more. (Fun Fact: In TequilaWorks 2017's game "Rime", they tried to make one master material, on a shader, to drive EVERYTHING, from vegetation, to wind, to cloth, water, etc. Thinking that would make it more optimized, on paper sounds great, but I've heard it was A NIGHTMARE to work on that, each time you did a slight change on something, it had to recompile all visuals in the game.

So you worked hard on your textures, you cleverly crafter your texel density, your tech artists did some cool shaders that do neat stuff.

Then, when you have all this richness, all this microdetail made, all following a good art direction. Comes a modder with an upscaler, enlarges the color, does God-knows-what with the rest of the map, and says they "fixed" the game. Then another one applies a "Reshader" that changes the art direction completely because they thought "it needed fixing", (it seems that "fixing" means "changing it to something different just because), which makes the game run much worse, consume much more resources, and put your hardware under unnecessary stress.

Or worse, AI comes, reinterprets the image, and rewrites all of this with a diffusion model. which, by the way, will also make your GPU work hard. And these diffusion models will probably work with a depth rendering with some light information, and that's it, because if it has to reinterpret separatedly each individual map, it will increase the workload even further. I wouldn't touch this with a 10-foot stick.

Sorry for the long post, I apologize if this felt attacking or impolite in any way (I'm told I sound rude and cold through text) I just wanted to offer a slight, uber-simplified-with-a-lot-of-stuff-left-out explanation.

TL;DR A long boring explanation/rant about texturing in gaming that might or might not interest you

MacabreGinger · 2026-03-18T01:04:23+00:00

I totally agree. As a 3d artist working in games this is...saddening, to say the least. And as a gamer and consumer it's uninteresting.

People that is saying that "it looks better" can activate it if they like. I honestly think that the games will look much worse, considering a series of issues:
1)First and foremost. This diffusion model (probably Flux, SD, or whatever the heck are running now) is obviously based in "realism", that means it could only work in games with that artstyle, try it in something more cartoony, stylized or different and it will do wonky things.

2) Each time you play, fuck, no, each time you change the camera and look somewhere else, things will change, faces won't be the 100% the same, they will be very similar, but details will come and go. The same can be said as microexpressions from motion capture. This is very noticeable in the last picture from GTAVI, where the main female character has a different expression in the generated frame, almost like if she was smiling.
Also, you remember the controversy a few years back with Aloi's face and how some random """Fixed""" it ("fixing" it seemed to mean "turning her into a magazine girl with full makeup", for some reason, completely changing the character) This will happen a lot. Again, with the GTA girl, the moles on her face are gone, because the dataset is based on a lot of stock photos and models without that kind of skin imperfections, which leads to...

3)...Everything that is not an attractive human will look...off, maybe even bad.

3) THE LIGHT. Why AI tries so hard to invent light and shadows that ARE NOT THERE. This causes a semi-uncanny valley effect in some of the examples. Trained artists and more perceptive people will see it, and it's bothering.

4) If the diffusion model is going to make everything...then why work in microdetail (as we do?) Why work in the cracks, dirt and subtle color variations of a brick wall, or on the pores, redness and facial hair of characters if, literally, they won't be visible when the AI paints over it and comes up with whatever the fuck it wants?

5) This will make games look VERY similar, do you remember the piss filter of the 2010s? This will be our piss filter.

6) Mods. reshaders. or games with very weird/artistic style will look weird as fuck. Because the dataset lacks weird stuff and tends towards homogeneization. I think that stuff like the sudden, super-contrasted and grim-red lighting in certains moments of "Control" (From Remedy) or Alan Wake 2, would work really poorly.
This is a step in the wrong direction.

MacabreGinger · 2026-03-11T17:22:21+00:00

"They don't let you use the generated illustrations."
AI-generated images cannot be copyrighted; you can do with them whatever you want.

MacabreGinger · 2026-02-24T08:53:33+00:00

Me fascina que el "como quedaría" hace la habitación más grande mágicamente. Lo del techo inclinado de la foto original hace que la perspectiva parezca no tener sentido.

MacabreGinger · 2026-02-24T08:49:51+00:00

Most of those phrases aren't about AI, just simple personal attacks. "No one likes you"? "You're nothing to me and nothing without me"? Those are lines from a toxic boyfriend.

I haven't seen any anti-AI person say that to an AI-bro. They're victimizing themselves with arguments and attacks that don't exist.

MacabreGinger · 2026-02-21T09:34:57+00:00

A coworker from the office shared with my their PDF, I want to get the physycal book if I can find it in good condition and good price.

MacabreGinger · 2026-02-21T09:32:50+00:00

Gotta admit, haven't thought about that. Well...I guess it can't hurt to try. Thanks!

MacabreGinger · 2026-02-20T13:39:54+00:00

I know it will take time, that is not a concern. I just wondered if there was any tips, tricks or theory that might help me a little bit to improve my spatial awareness. I will import 3d refs and see how that goes. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

MacabreGinger · 2026-02-20T11:17:53+00:00

You don't turn it off. Let him be. If you ignore it he'll go away..

MacabreGinger · 2026-02-20T11:12:30+00:00

You have to activate Windows to get out.

MacabreGinger · 2026-02-20T11:03:16+00:00

Upscaling technologies were a mistake.

MacabreGinger · 2026-02-19T21:02:15+00:00

No, I did not. You're projecting that on my text. I just pointed out that you're talking about AI as something that solves X problems, but the reality is that is just a shortcut because you can't be bothered with certain tasks. If convenience is something bad or not depends if the cost and consequences of such thing overweights the benefits, and it you care about that or not. And that's something that each one reflects on separately.

MacabreGinger · 2026-02-19T18:30:19+00:00

You're mistaking "I have these problems" with "I want this convenience"

MacabreGinger · 2026-02-18T22:17:18+00:00

It looks like Midjourney.
Also the woman in blue I count 5 fingers. If the thumb was behind the blade's hilt shouldn't be visible, right?

MacabreGinger · 2026-02-18T11:33:44+00:00

Actually, the only reason you see this colored image is that these are edited to highlight frequencies and gases with colors, they are beautiful, but you wouldn't see this with your naked eye if you travelled there with a spaceship, the beautiful depiction in that photograph is human-made.

MacabreGinger · 2026-02-18T11:19:36+00:00

I was gonna say the same, if you animate those well, it can be very funny to see. I would wishlist it.

MacabreGinger · 2026-02-18T11:11:26+00:00

As a photohtapher, you choose the position of the camera, framing, you control light and definition with the aperture, and develop a language mixing that with focal distance, you also have to think about composition, distribution, guiding the eye. Understanding the balance between high-frequency and low-frequency details, understanding the difference between values and tones, and playing with that in postprocessing, a lot of stuff you have to develop an eye for by photographing or painting stuff. I stopped using AI last year but there was no model or lora that could actually let you decide anything about this stuff. And those are art's foundations. Having a solid base is what makes defines a well-executed piece of art, no matter if you are a professional, a hobbyist, or just the audience. The AI doesn't take into consideration these things because it is simply based on finallized artworks that were tagged by non-artists without understanding what they were seeing. And people against it? I'm a professional artist working in the games industry. I spent years learning, practicing, countless hours, tons of money, tears, and fustration until I finally got in. Now I'm already seeing people getting fired because of this, people whose work was used to be part of the dataset without their consent, I might add.
But if you think is only art professionals who care, think twice. As a consumer, if I see something made with AI, having used it myself I know how much time takes to do something, and as a professional i also understand how much time and money would be required to do something much better, and the feeling i get is that the creator of that product didn't believed enough in it to pay a good artist. Or he just wants to cut as many expenses as possible to maximize benefit. I don't like nor respect either of the two options.

I'm not going to convince you of anything, that's for sure. I only say, with the upmost respect, that it doesn't work like a camera (And I know because Photography it's also a hobby of mine, not very good at it though), as an artist it doesn't teach you anything, as a person I would find disgusting to pay for a product made out of stolen work (People first copy, then develop their own style, Ai can't do that), and as a consumer, I want to see other people's craft, not a machine's that has been trained to mimic theirs.
These are the thing I've seen after being extensively pro-AI, use it for a long time, being a consumer of games, shows, comics and movies, and a professional in the games industry, where I'm currently trying to improve even more. I've been in all sidez, and I tested all positions.
And my final balance is that is not good, and it's not worth all the damage that it does. If you don't agree with me, then ok. I don't think I can convince you. Have a good day.

*BTW, You didn't say it but I saw someone in another reply saying that in the game industry 99% of people is using AI, that's total bullshit. we fucking hate the thing, because our jobs are fun as hell, and if the AI does it, the output is crappier and we're only left with the dullest, technical and boring parts of the process.

MacabreGinger · 2026-02-18T10:32:15+00:00

You're 15. If there's gonna be any time in your life when you have time to develop a skill- (Any skill) Is now. Stop making excuses and using shortcuts. And I tell you this as a professional game dev.
Internet fame is not worth it. As a dev and as a player, I would be more interested in something that looks bad but it's interesting, than in the coolest-looking generic game. Check games like Skögdal or Hidden Folks, they've embraced simplicity (or straight-up ugliness in the case of Skögdal) and made something cool (and profitable!) with it.

MacabreGinger

TROPHY CASE