GameWorks: Better Materials & Textures

NVIDIA is working on a ‘magical’ toolset, which helps to enchains textures, generate maps and creates organic variations of materials.

The technology is currently in beta, but you can sign-up to get an early look. The toolset is specifically targeted at 3d artists, who want to harness the full power of Deep Learning and NVIDIA CUDA. NVIDIA’s Developer Technologies & NVIDIA Research worked closely to develop tools which enhance games and graphics whilst speeding development times. This project has been going on for years now.

These tools allow developers and artists to use AI to automatically expand the variation of textures in their game; improve the image quality in games, and automatically generate textures and matching materials properties for real world objects from photographs.

When we showed these off, the highlight was a stunning demo that makes clear how machine learning can help accelerate the field of photogrammetry, in which DSLR photos are combined to create richly detailed 3D models of real-world objects.

It’s a case study of how GPUs — and the CUDA parallel computing platform and programming model — are powering machine learning applications for artists and engineers working across industries to create amazing experiences.

NVIDIA

Technically this new technology could greatly improve the whole workflow and help you create realistic textures very fast. The technology could be used in a couple of ways right now. 

Texture Multiplier

Takes a texture or photo as input and provides the user with an organic variation.

So far we have very little details. Let’s hope we’ll be able to have a better look at this solution in the nearest future. Kind of reminds me a lot of the stuff Artomatix is doing right now. Looks absolutely amazing.