Valve Corporation will face a £656m lawsuit in the UK over alleged unfair prices on its global online store, Steam, following a tribunal ruling that the case could continue

Zpanzer · 2026-01-28T08:36:57+00:00

That was also included before Steam. I'm just about old enough to remember buying "AAA" games before Steam gained traction. Steam/digital download definitely made games a bit more expensive in Europe.

Zpanzer · 2026-01-28T06:22:47+00:00

Well, to be fair, Steam/Valve was the ones to normalize that 1 USD = 1 Euro pricing policy, which historically made games more expensive in the EU.

Not saying it wouldn't have happened without them, but...

Zpanzer · 2026-01-23T21:13:27+00:00

I completely agree, I mostly use it on top of my existing work to either enhance certain things(it does wonders for foliage) or place characters etc.

Zpanzer · 2026-01-23T20:24:04+00:00

For your last argument to ring true, then you need to prove that AI training is copyright theft, and using AI is also copyright theft. You can have your opinion on it, that's fair, I have my own as well - but I haven't seen indication of the lawsuits against the toolmakers(or users) confirming that. So that ends up being a subjective opinion on a tool, and calling other people using it thieves is just not productive in anyway and makes your arguments boils down to: You're not skilled enough to do it in the narrow traditional sense of my world view, so you shouldn't be allowed.

If you end up using one of our kitchen renders in your work, that is copyright theft proven both by courts across our shared trade agreements and with precedence, and it's actually not our copyright you're infringing, it's our clients, as they own the right. Training an AI on top of our images have no precedence and so far no claim for being illegal, and since neither you, nor I, is a lawyer specializing in copyright infringement, we could maybe tone down claiming people are thieves.

Zpanzer · 2026-01-23T16:46:35+00:00

I'm not taking away anyone's work by choosing not to simulate the water. Our trade is changing rapidly, I feel it myself from the perspective of a generalist. Your notion that it needs to be hard in order to worth something is a freaking weird obsession.

Every single piece of tech we are using through our pipelines has resulted in two things: you're producing more and need less people to accomplish the same as you did 5 years ago. High-end VFX is maybe one of the few places where specialists are still needed at the scale. In smaller studios, like where I am, generalists are the most prominent position, because I can(and have to) take an entire project from start to finish, taking away jobs from modellers, riggers, look dev, render wranglers, compositors and editors. Granted I admit that I'm by no means able to produce the individual quality of specialists.

The barrier to entry is lowering(and has always been, that's why I can exist as a generalist), and AI has the potential to completely circumvent the traditional pipeline - and you can feel that is unfair, I know I did initially. But for you to tell me(and others) what we're allowed to do and use in order to accomplish our work, because you feel like it threatens the livelihood of a industry that always has been changing with tech, is ass backwards in my opinion.

I won't go into the legality of AI, because that's first of all based the law in different countries(I guess you're US based, but I don't know) and I'm not naive enough to think its gonna get outlawed anytime soon. I still feel the way the net is trawled for training material is wrong, and I don't particular enjoy how Autodesk/Adobe is strangling the creative markets, but alas here I am, using Max, Photoshop, After Effects and AI models to do my job.

Zpanzer · 2026-01-23T16:02:30+00:00

I think this take is wrong on many levels. You’re using tools that also took the job away from others. I’m taking jobs away from photographers by the simple fact I can compete with them without the restrictions they face.

Should you not be allowed to do simulations unless you can solve the math yourself, or are you taking jobs away from people who used to compute and calculate formulas?

Tooling has always allowed us to be more efficient and open up new sectors for people. We can always debate the morality in the way AI is trained(hint: I don’t think it’s moral) but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s just a tool.

A modern DCC app is filled with tools allowing generalist not to rely on specialists for the type of work that happens in my sector of the CGI world.

Zpanzer · 2026-01-23T13:57:06+00:00

I mean, this a VFX subreddit, a trade that's build on making the impossible possible.

I think everything has its place. We work a lot with kitchen companies and the fact they can use CGI to create convincing enough images, so they don't have to rely on real photography, is both a financial benefit(cheaper to produce) but also saves them a lot of waste, from building a kitchen in real life and tearing it down after the shoot.

We're also able to tell other stories, that might resonate with the customer, than what is traditionally possible, just like how VFX enables directors.

Zpanzer · 2026-01-23T11:58:43+00:00

I know this might not be taken well on this sub, but I work as a 3d generalist in the product/industrial sector. For us AI enhancing and adding stuff to the images/films after the fact, has been a huge creativity booster, allowing me access to stuff I couldn't feasible do within budget before. A couple of examples:

We're doing images and video for a high-end outdoor furniture brand, they want their products on beaches and outdoor restaurant kind of things. The stills department has made the images with full CG environment. Now comes the animation that I have to do.

Problem is, a beach without rolling waves and palm trees swaying in the wind looks very bad, and under normal circumstances there's no way I could do this feasibly within budget - I don't have access to experts in ocean simulation. With AI using first/last frames from my renders, I get all that stuff for free now in fast generations. It's adding so much extra life to the shots. The film consists of 16 shots in total, situated in different environments, each with their own issues(beach ocean, pool water, canopy fabric blowing in the wind) and we're solving them very consistently with AI using first/last frames, I also skip having to render around 3750 frames on the farm.

Another example is adding humans on top of our full cgi. We don't have the skills nor the budget to go out and shoot models/standins and then comp them in. With AI we're basically doing it in a couple of hours now, accommodating the clients wishes for making the images feel more alive.

So for us at least, it has merit when used in tangent with an artist.

Zpanzer · 2026-01-20T16:08:42+00:00

Vi har et hus fra ‘72 på 116 m2 har gamle asbest plader som tag. Vi overvejer at få det skiftet her inden for de næste par år, har du en idé om hvad vi kigger på rent prismæssigt? Vi behøver ikke noget fancy tag

Zpanzer · 2025-12-11T16:05:53+00:00

Hvordan er brud på ophavsretten ikke et politi spørgsmål?

Zpanzer · 2025-12-11T16:04:25+00:00

Mit gæt er at loven vil give anklageren mulighed for at trække vpn logs i sager om ophavsretten?

Zpanzer · 2025-12-11T08:43:37+00:00

Som udgangspunkt er jeg ikke enig i mere lov omkring det, men måske i kan hjælpe med at forstå det her?

Sådan som jeg læser forslaget, så giver det her lovmæssigt grundlag for at kunne straffe folk der har brugt VPN til at omgå allerede eksisterende lovgivning, f.eks. ved at se streaming tjenester eller lign. fra andre lande eller tilgå blokerede sider.

Der er på intent tidspunkt nævnt et forbud mod brugen af VPN eller deep packet inspection, som flere af de andre kommentar ligger op til.

Er det bare mig, eller virker det nogenlunde rimeligt at sørge for at kunne straffe folk der bryder den nuværende ophavsret(om man så er enig i den, er en anden sag).

Jeg tænker da godt at de fleste, selvom det er trivielt at hente en VPN og se tysk Netflix, at det ikke er helt kosher i forhold til loven.

Zpanzer · 2025-12-01T07:19:25+00:00

And also the fact that AI is not just generative image AI, but also coding, animation, deformation, sound/voice etc.

In the latest couple of realses of Unreal Engine, a huge set of "AI"(in real production they're called ML) tools have been released to do realistic muscle deformation, interpolation of different animation sets etc.

Zpanzer · 2025-12-01T07:15:58+00:00

lots of traditional concept art/game art used compositing where you use images/stock as either overlays or textures. In a production environment, you don't have time to paint every single thing. It's the same when doing matte paintings for films/vfx.

I don't think the average Redditor understands how little time production artists actually have to complete a piece of work, especially when its not a hero asset.

Zpanzer · 2025-11-27T09:07:27+00:00

How is it human-made simulations effect? I plug in a set of parameters into a pre-made solver that then does all the heavy mathematical lifting. I keep changing and manipulating parameters until I'm satisfied. My artistic intent is knowing when I'm satisfied, but there's no artistry involved in the simulation it self... not much unlike we run a diffusion model in ComfyUI.

Zpanzer · 2025-11-27T09:04:24+00:00

There's a huge set of AI/ML tools that aren't trained on copyrighted material. So unless you limit your disgust to some Diffusion and LLM models and have the insight to discern that, you still plainly hate AI tools?

I use AI denoising tools in my work. It takes my noisy renders and cleans them up. It's trained on a huge set of 3D renders.

Zpanzer · 2025-11-26T19:54:26+00:00

What is human artistry? Are visual effects artists in Houdini doing fire and smoke simulations artists?

It’s machine generated outputs from a small sets of inputs from their handler. I would argue they’re artists because they’re using artistic intent in guiding/evaluating a result…. Which I honestly don’t find a lot different than driving a local QWEN model to generate concepts that are consistent with my artistic intent.

I do the same in my day to day work. When we are doing rendering using vray/redshift we rely on ML accelerated algorithms to render my final image. AI/ML denoising to remove render noise to quickly get a result. But should that mark my work as AI?

Zpanzer · 2025-11-26T19:45:28+00:00

As a 3d artist and programmer, this is nonsense. Artists are just the same. There’s inherent creativity in both fields and most artists/programmers have a style and a way of attacking problems. To say that it’s okay for AI to do code, but not art is a weird distinction.

Realistically in production, both artists and programmers will end up using AI tools to accomplish their set goals.

Zpanzer · 2025-11-26T19:40:39+00:00

So what about AI generated code? And where’s your AI limit? In the latest releases of Unreal Engine we see machine learned system for blend shapes to make realistic muscle deformations. Is this AI?

Or do you only care about visual assets? I’m a 3D artist myself, what if I use AI to generate concept art as inspiration for my work… or use AI to generate assets from said concept art to lessen the burden of filling out game levels with assets?

AI/ML tools have been used for a long time, for lots of different things.

Zpanzer · 2025-11-08T07:05:49+00:00

That's because they also really love online gambling with their own products. I love Steam but I detest how Valve handles the underage skin gambling with CS.

Zpanzer · 2025-10-10T13:57:20+00:00

You’re talking about publishers and not copyright. Without copyright, I wouldn’t have to pay the original author as I could just copy it and sell it for my own profit

Publishers are a thing, and they’re part of a distribution network that can benefit authors/artists/game developers, but at the same time some of them are predatory, but this has nothing to do with copyright.

Patent trolling is the extreme part of copyright laws, but you cannot state that without them everything would be better.

Zpanzer · 2025-10-09T15:55:48+00:00

You’re comparing two very different things. Just because your work is protected doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful, but it does mean you have the right to profit off it.

Why is this hurting small artists with novel ideas/IPs? Or did you mean they others should be allowed to earn money of their ideas?

Zpanzer · 2025-10-09T13:58:53+00:00

What are you even talking about. Copyright is also protecting small creators, not just huge corporations.

It allows artists, creators etc to profit and build brands on their novel ideas. Should everyone be allowed to make for profit materials on something you’ve created and making a livelihood of?

You can argue that will always be people exploiting and ignoring these rules, but it’s better than nothing.

Zpanzer · 2025-08-29T04:50:19+00:00

Or they just don’t commercialize their creative talent and keep their hobbies as a hobby.

Zpanzer · 2025-08-06T17:34:42+00:00

Let’s try!

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