Google's New Model for Automatic 3D Creature Creation

Google's Chimera Painter can create 3D models based on user-supplied outlines.

Google presented Chimera Painter – a machine learning model that automatically creates 3D renders from a user-supplied creature outline. The program adds features and textures to a creature outline, which is divided into body part labels, such as "wings", "claws", or "horns".

Chimera Painter can be used for different purposes, mostly to make artists' lives easier as the program allows them not to spend too much time on designing and fleshing out their creations.

To test the model, the developers created a "digital card game prototype around the concept of combining creatures into new hybrids that can then battle each other. In this game, a player would begin with cards of real-world animals and could make them more powerful by combining them."

The creators experimented with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which is a class of machine learning frameworks where two neural networks contest with each other in a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is another agent's loss. The idea of a GAN is based on the training through the discriminator, another neural network that is able to tell how realistic an input is. This means that the generator is trained to fool the discriminator to create realistic images.

To train the GANs, Chimera Painter developers created a dataset of images with single-species creature outlines adapted from 3D creature models. The creature outlines characterized the shape and size of each creature and provided a segmentation map that identified body parts. After model training, the model needed to generate multi-species chimeras, based on outlines provided by artists. The best-performing model was then incorporated into Chimera Painter.

Chimera Painter is available as a demo. Users can also upload a creature outline created in an external program, like Photoshop. Read about the program's creation here and don't forget to join our new Reddit pageour new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.

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