thom@indiana.edu wrote:
I don't need to automate Art. I just need a power tool for spewing interesting shapes, forms, and textures. Looking at clouds is 'artistic', for chrissakes. Strikes me as a much easier problem than spewing story components. Visual Art really doesn't need semantic parsing, your brain will do it for you. It just has to "look interesting."Quoting "Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@indiegamedesign.com>:
I think I'd rather have my AIs generate art assets, ala procedural modeling. If an AI could do it decently, then the results are "known to be saleable." Seems like visual art generation would be a lot easier than story generation. Crap just has to look interesting.
This is a pretty silly statement since the quest for automated art is about as long and successful as the quest for automated story or the quest for automated music.
Glassner in his Interactive Storytelling book points out the responsibilities of the author and reader and points out that interactive storytelling violates these responsibilities by asking people without real training as writers and storytellers to take on the roles of writers and storytellers. You can substitute artist and viewer above and apply this thought to visual art or musician and listener for music as well.I'm not interested in *users* creating the visual art. Although I suppose if I devised a "spew tool," no reason they couldn't use it as well.
Art of any sort is difficult and often takes decades to master before one can actually create 'art' of any sort.Baloney. I was an ok artist even in the 7th grade. I don't remember having any formal instruction before then. I do remember drawing quite a bit for 5 years previously. I was creating art "of a sort" as early as age 10. Mostly I imitated the forms of other art I had seen, like Tolkien maps of Middle Earth and such. As an adult I've seen the art of 12 year olds, who simply had more training than I did, that is of a caliber almost suitable for publication in commercial games. The visual arts are not that tough to get started in. We weren't all a bunch of prodigies. I had friends in childhood who drew better than I did. The best of 'em went on to do matte paintings for Star Wars, as it turns out. I haven't caught up with him, because I'm jealous! He beat me in the bookmark contest too, that bastard.
Cheers, www.indiegamedesign.com Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA